Big Technology Podcast - AI Scandals Rock Newsrooms, Uber’s Road to Profitability, NVIDIA’s Underappreciated Weakness

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Alex’s meeting with Sam Altman 2) Publishers using AI to rip off other articles and getting caught 3) The impressive performance of Anthropic’s Claude 4) SI fires execs after AI scandal 5) Is Generative AI good for news? 6) Did Twitter destroy news? 7) Uber finds profitability by squeezing drivers 8) Uber drivers trying to circumvent the system 9) Why can’t Lyft capitalize on Uber’s practices 10) Tesla’s autopilot recall 11) Why we need a new word for recall 12) Epic’s win vs. Google 13) Apple’s increasing service fees 14) Timeshare presentation at Vegas 15) The Sphere! 16) NVIDIA’s rich employees don’t want to work as hard 17) NVIDIA’s competitive threats  --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

AI scandals are rocking newsrooms. Uber's intriguing road to profitability. Millions of Teslas are recalled. An NVIDIA's surprising competitive challenge. All that and more coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Ron John Roy is here with us.

We've got a huge week of news to break down. We're going to talk about all these big AI scandals in the news everywhere, some stuff about Uber, the Tesla recall, and then a little bit more about chips. Ron John, great to see you. Welcome to the show. Yep, and I'm really here. This is not an AI clone of me. I think our newsroom has still remained human only. Exactly. We'll see what happens on the holidays. Maybe when we take our little break, there's going to be robot Alex and robot Ranjan. But people will just have to tune in to our Christmas and New Year's time shows to find out. That's your incentive.

But not yet. We're still here. We're still here. still here. Speaking of real authentic humans and not AI, I have a fun story to tell. I met Sam Altman this week. I was at the time person of the year gala and Sam was being honored as the CEO of the year. And I was like, all right, I heard he's walking around. Let me see if I could find him. And I saw him at the bar on his own without any handlers and just went up and said hi and had you know a really nice about five minute conversation with him the contents of which i'm not going to reveal today because i'm hoping you know we spoke i was like listen let's talk off the record i got some questions for you and my hope is that he'll come on the show at some point but it was very interesting

getting a chance to meet him right after all this stuff happened but you were at the time person of the year gala and you did not meet taylor swift so taylor did not show but sam did really wait taylor swift is so big she won time person of the year and did not show up at the gala not only that she was apparently walking around new york city at the time and didn't come into the plaza meanwhile and by the way i'm just going to this is how dedicated i am to the big technology podcast crew if you have sam standing on one side of the room and taylor on the other i'm going to sam for you guys and he did speak actually he did speak for you are listeners for you are listeners give up taylor swift i would no doubt about it. And there were some interesting things that he said on stage because he spoke on

stage. And they asked him what happened at Open AI. And he said this really interesting thing. As we get closer to superintelligence, everybody involved gets more stressed and more anxious. And we realize the stakes are higher and higher. So like he said that he prefaced that to say like to be a little empathetic in the beginning. But clearly he's kind of winking at the idea that there was something safety or some super intelligence related thing that freaked people out. QSTAR, we still, there's more to that story, I'm sure, that's going to come out. He also spoke about open AI governance, and this was interesting. He said, so they asked him about the governance there, and he said, we have to make changes.

We always said that we didn't want AGI to be controlled by a small set of people. We wanted it to be democratized, and we clearly got that wrong. So I think if we don't improve our governance structure, if we don't improve the way that we interact with the world, people shouldn't, we're very motivated to work on those changes. I mean, that was also interesting. So, I mean, they're obviously expanding the board, but it seems like, you know, maybe they're thinking about other changes to the governance that we still don't know. I mean, it's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out. Yep. Wait, he's sorry.

They said they had originally wanted artificial general intelligence democratized. Or, like, controlled? The control of it democratized. Okay. I did have somebody who quote tweeted or posted on my LinkedIn or something talking about how, like, the word democratized has totally been ruined. But that's not a story that we're going to tackle today. Instead, let's talk about something else that seems to be ruined. And that's the news.

Story after story show that newsrooms are not only embracing AI, but basically using it to plagiarize other articles or just, Um, it's, it's amazing to me how many AI robot reporters there are already here at the end of 2023. Here's a story from Semaphore. Um, they're one of the high, most highly traffic financial news websites in the world is creating AI generated stories that bear an uncanny resemblance to stories published just hours earlier, earlier by competitors. Investing.com, a Tel Aviv based site owned by Joffrey Capital is a financial news and an information hub that provides a mix of markets, data and investing tips and trends. But increasingly, the site has been relying on AI to create its stories, which often appear to be thinly veiled copies of human written stories written elsewhere.

I mean, this happened to me earlier in the year when I had someone rip off my work by remixing it with AI, publishing it as their own, and then showing up on the front page of Hacker News. I just thought that would be something that's sort of done by like these freelancer piracy. and not by some of the most highly trafficked sites that exist. What's going on? This is such a tough problem because, again, the domain value of a site like investing.com clearly is the, you know, why it receives so much traffic. It's been built up over years.

But it is so easy to simply rewrite any original article in your own voice, take all the information and just rewrite it. And there's no reason that's not going to keep happening. So I feel this is a tough one to solve. The only thing I could think that does potentially help kind of regulate this is reputation and context that because this stuff is getting reported, because people, like next time you go and read on investing.com, the idea that you're going to be reading an AI recycled article could at least denigrate the idea that you're going to be getting in any investing advice. from it but but this is tough because this is going to keep going there's what to stop this correct and it's only going to get better and better right so we'll see these models improved there'll be less hallucination and then right now like it seems somewhat easy to suss out but in the future might not

be that easy yeah and this is where i've thought a lot about this like the having i hate the word personal brand, but I think the personal branding of specific journalists, it becomes that much more important. And I feel the New York Times has been like on the, I mean, others as well, some for as well, like really leading on this kind of thing. Because at a certain point, it becomes less about the content and more about the voice and knowledge and trust of a specific person or voice. And otherwise, from a pure content standpoint, so much of it is going to be recycled or unidentifiable that it has to become that level of trust. By the way, it's a good moment to give you a shout-out

because I've been using a bot that you recommended, Claude, the Anthropic bot. I didn't realize when you mentioned it that you could just upload documents and then have it do things with them. And it's really fantastic, Ron John. It's really amazing. I mean, it kind of makes me nervous

what's going to happen to information. But this bot is pretty damn good. Well, yeah, this is where, I mean, commoditization across all these different products, you see it, that chat GPT, Claude from Anthropic is just as good. It can even, I think it's now, better in some cases. Yeah, and now it's on par in terms of originally Claude could basically ingest an entire book's worth of content based on its token limit. Now, chat, or GPD4 kind of matched it. But yeah, all these things. Maybe Bard, Bart will start to get there. Maybe. But, uh, yeah, I

think like seeing how good and how fast more and more of these chatbots are it's it's good it's something to see so i uh signed up to claude pro so i'm now using the juiced up version and i like pasted my entire article about invidia in there today before i hit publish and just had it play with different iterations and basically review the writing and the arguments and even the lead the lead is it's about to get hot in invidia's kitchen and i was like does this sound right and then i said to claude hey listen um can you just rewrite this entire article as a cooking article with invidia metaphors as opposed to an invidia article with cooking metaphors and it did a freaking fantastic job like it was one of the more amusing things i've done with technology this year wait have

you do you have access to grok yet grok is available if you use the $16 a month Twitter blue, and I'm not really going to go that far. I'm at $8 a month. I'm not paying sent more. So I'll wait until it rolls out to us mid-level Twitter bluers. Twitter bluer's. X-blue. Is it even called X-blue?

Now it's called X-Premium. I have not paid attention to that in a while. Wait, actually, yeah, so it is X premium now? I think so. Okay. And there's premium plus. Obviously, the branding is really going well over there. but okay getting back to our topic though i know we've gone astray there there's a good thing happening

and that's that some publishers are actually uh looking at this and saying and maybe this goes back to the reputation thing that you mentioned and they're saying if the editorial folks want to use a i and not do their job we're going to fire them and that happened with uh sports illustrated where the company fired a number okay two topics okay so the company that owns sports Illustrated is from Futurism, the arena group, it fired two top executives. It said that their departures had nothing to do with the fact that potentially the company had fake personas writing AI stories. And then a week later, they announced that the CEO of Sports Illustrated is leaving

two. And they say, effective immediately, Ross Levinson, who by the way is a big media name, will be leaving the company and his role as CEO. And they go, this follows the recent departures of three senior executives. last week. And they sent the press release out to the newswires. It is very interesting. Like some people that I know in my circles are like, well, it seems like a pretty big price to pay for him. And it's like, no, you don't want to be known as a publisher that does not have humans writing for you. Right move? What do you think? I see, this is a difference. Like sports articles to me, at least recaps of games,

there's no reason that should not be AI driven. Like the idea that understanding what are the key things to talk about, key stats from the game, key plays to link a highlight to, any of that should be totally AI generated and just pushed out quickly and easily. And then commentary analysis, all of these kind of things should be humans. But I think this is where the newsrooms that really figure out how to balance the two are going to be the ones that do well and maintain trust with their readers and are able to actually just function better because the idea that people are not going to use any generative AI in their entire journalism process is crazy to me. But the worst thing you can do if any publishers are out there right now is do not create a fake persona,

pretend it's a human and try to pass that off. That not only yeah. Not only that. You know what Sports Illustrated was doing? So I just clicked into the story. The stories that they were talking about we're recommending products. Play like a pro with the best full-size volleyball. And they recommend the Wilson softball volleyball. So there's affiliate links as well in here. Yeah, there's Amazon links in there. Okay, okay.

That's why you get fired. Honestly, not you, not you, but the person who did that, using some generative AI, that's okay. Do not do what Ross Levinson's people did. You will be fired. Terrible. So, and, but the thing is that this is going to be effective. life inside every newsroom because this week the New York Times hired courts co-founder Zach Seward

to work on AI in the newsroom and this is from a quote that they gave to the Wall Street Journal they said about Seward that he shares our firm belief that Times journalism will always be reported written and edited by our expert journalists but they said he will be establishing principle for how we do and do not use generative AI. Note how it's not whether or not we use generative AI. It's how we do and do not. All right. So this I am very interested and excited by, and I think I'm going to make a bold prediction at the end of this. But one thing to note for non-media news industry junkies Quartz, which was, he co-founded, I think it was like 2012, 2012, 2013. One of the really interesting things they did was, I mean, they really pushed on the front of data visualization and data driven journalism is they made their charting tools that they built available to anyone. And I actually used them for a lot of different projects. And they would create beautiful graphs in different ways and you could feed in CSVs. And it was just like this little tool that they built in the newsroom that they released to the public. I think,

the New York Times is going to get into that type of innovation and imagine whether they release their own chat GPT competitor, whether they release their own, and like help every college student write with the trust of the New York Times behind them rather than using some other random chatbot. Like I think it's a huge opportunity for them. They have the brand. They have their own unique data set that no one else has. and the way Quartz actually innovated within media and news,

I think the New York Times is very well positioned. So you've heard it here. Well, I reached out to, I know Zach actually from a bunch of meetups that I used to go to back in the day in New York City and asked him, you know, what he's planning to do and how this could impact publishers. I just did it like five minutes ago. So we'll see if he responds maybe sometime during the show.

But if it's afterward, I'll definitely read it. to readers. Overall, do you think generative AI is going to be good or bad for news? Good. Great. Great. I think it's going to reshape the news industry. The biggest thing being any content farm that creates those like crappy articles that are recycled. Like if you think about the famous What Time is the Super Bowl, everyone would try to answer that question, make that the headline because everyone was Googling it. That whole industry dies with generative search. And that's good. And I'm very happy about that. So I think it's going to reshape the news industry, but again, it makes it so much easier for more people to do journalism. Right. So I think it'll be good and do better journalism and

get information more quickly and understand what's correct and what's not correct. So I think it's good. I'm into it also. And, you know, I've started to think maybe I can do a side business where I write cooking articles, you know, with tech motifs. And I think that might be of interest to some percentage of our audience. So speaking of news and journalism, I just want to hit this one very quickly. So the Verge did a series of stories about how Twitter's dead. And look, I'm going to say personally, I don't think Twitter's dead. The numbers are definitely off. But it's not dead. It felt pretty vibrant, actually, during the Sam Altman moment. And the argument is that Nilai Patel made, and I think Neelai is very good, and I like his writing. He made this argument that

Twitter broke the news. And let me just read a bit. He says, step back now and you can see exactly how destructive the situation was for journalism. Reporters around the world provided Twitter with real-time news and commentary for free, increasingly learning to shape stories for the algorithm instead of their actual readers. Meanwhile, the media companies they worked for faced an exodus of their bigger advertising clients to social platforms with better, more integrated ad products, a direct connection to audience, and no pesky editorial ethics policies.

Look, I don't think that Twitter's had an altogether good impact on news. In fact, I think it's probably been negative. I think that the idea that people write for algorithms is true and bad. But I wouldn't go as far as to say that it broke the news. And I think that, like, the amount of different stories that you can find as a journalist there, the amount of different people you can connect with there, the amount of ideas you can expose to there, you can get exposed to there, can be. good as long as you find a way to not sort of be drawn in by the sort of pull negative pull

of the site that can play to play to outrage and sort of rage baiting that a lot of Twitter and news became although it seems like those the rage baiting era of news is maybe not coming to an end but less prominent than it was in the middle of the last decade what do you think Geron John. Well, on the last point, we have not entered the election 2024 cycle in full swing. So I think rage baiting might be making a comeback. But to me, one of the biggest issues around how Twitter broke the news is how even among very established credible news organizations, suddenly you started seeing the same people who were really good at Twitter being sourced as experts for every single possible story. And it kind of like, again, made the overall news world smaller because

everyone was looking at the same thing. You saw this especially during COVID. It was the same few viral doctors, like doctors that went viral, that were cited in absolutely everything. So I think that to me, getting journalists to break out of that and going back to like finding sources who are experts and not necessarily the Twitter famous ones. That I think is the most important thing. I mean, this is why I like LinkedIn, but that's a story for another day. Why don't we take a break? We have so many more stories to cover, including Uber's business, the way that it's been able to achieve profitability.

We also have Tesla's recall, the epic win, and Invidia. Oh, man, a lot. Okay, we'll be back right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news.

Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Ron John Roy of Margins. So, Ron John, let's talk about Uber. Let's talk about Uber.

Let's talk about Uber. Because for listeners, I'm pretty sure everyone has felt that Uber rides have gotten ridiculously expensive. You're not just feeling it. I took Uber from first and 23rd in Manhattan to Midtown West, and it was $52 for longtime New Yorkers. Like, the prices have gotten insane. And basically, there's this really good analysis in Forbes from the, Columbia professor, Len Sherman, around how Uber they're doing it all. I can never say his name, CEO, Derrick Krosherzawi.

Kosovo. He has raised prices on consumers, lower driver pay, which has actually made Uber a profitable, if not profitable, at least cash flow positive business after Uber for years was losing billions of dollars. And basically, this is a thing that, especially from the anti-monopoly side, the worry was always, Uber, their pitch and the pitch of the door dashes of the world and so many others was, you know, completely dominate the market by undercutting on price and then you raise prices. And that's what's happening. And they're doing it on both sides of the marketplace to consumers and to drivers because even driver pay is more opaque. But it's been, there's analysis from Yipit data that shows. showed that Uber's take rate has increased to 40% that was up from 34% before. And the way they did it is they change, one of the big things they did a couple of years ago is for drivers to accept a ride. They now get an upfront price, whereas in the past,

the price was calculated as the ride took place. And that upfront price is done, it's given to them by an opaque algorithm. So basically it just kind of turns into this race to the bottom that's gamified for the drivers. And overall, everyone is miserable, but at least finally Uber has learned that it can turn a profit. Exactly. And it is, it's kind of crazy.

It almost seemed like this is always what it was going to come to for Uber to become profitable. Like there was only so much it could squeeze riders and because it would lose demand to lift. And like the driver pay was the place where it was going to get those margins or it was going to be unprofitable forever. And, you know, it's sort of the, not to use a car

cliche, but it's the rubber meeting the road here, and it's a pretty unfortunate turn of events, especially as people have made Uber their number one job. But, and if you think about it, it was done as Lyft was already basically getting decimated. Like, like, and it was, I mean, from like a pure

business case study standpoint, it's been masterful. But from a societal and consumer standpoint, it's just, it's troubling because this is, this is the exact, when we all talk about monopoly, this is it, this is it. It's that, you know, we're 13 years later since Uber was launched and finally now you're seeing what it always should have cost from the beginning, but if it costs that at the beginning, then no one would have taken it. Yeah, it is interesting asking drivers like what they're getting paid when you know the fare that you're making. And I've had a moment where our driver's like, hey, what did you pay for that? Why didn't you pay me in cash?

And I'll take like $5 off. Have you had a moment like that? Yeah, yeah. So that's interesting you say that because I had never had that brought up by a driver. And then I think it was like a year or two ago that it started happening more and more where they would, they would initiate that conversation with you. And it makes sense now that you learn about this upfront pricing change and that it becomes algorithmic and it becomes more confusing. And in that confusion, they can pay them less. So, yeah, that has definitely happened. So let me ask you this, though.

Don't you think that this gives Lyft an opportunity now because Lyft can sort of pay more and win more drivers over? This is the problem with marketplaces and a dominant player is that without the rider demand, you're not going to get drivers on the platform. And especially, I mean, in cities like New York, if you open Lyft, it's so much harder to find a ride. So then you just start defaulting to Uber and then Uber has definitely established that dominance in New York.

I mean, honestly, I tried using the Lyft app. Have you had this? There has to be some kind of class action lawsuit at some point about how they communicate, how far away the driver is or when you have a ride. Because it will, the app will do everything in its power to make you feel like the driver is right around the corner. here's a visual we're finding a driver and then suddenly delay after delay change after change yes i've had that it's a problem it's a problem it's a problem it's a problem so they have monopoly so exactly well shout out to first of all lenn sherman who is a big technology podcast listener who wrote that story in forbes and uh and our friend sergio from the uh the ride hell guy podcast

Sergio Ovidian, who made sure that I saw this story and has also been texting me about the fact that Cruz just cut 24% of its workforce. He was a little bit less optimistic than me about Cruz and basically pointed out the fact that this was happening at Uber. It's taking a little victory lap. So speaking of ride hailing or the fact that we might not need to hail rides anymore, Tesla's autopilot, we're called more than two million. vehicles over autopilot safety concerns this week.

Now, the recall, this is according to the Wall Street Journal, covers Tesla models 3SX and Y sold in the U.S. between 2012 and 2023. They're basically saying that these autopilot systems don't have sufficient safety controls in place, and basically it could be misused by drivers. Now, I saw this and I said recall. That means Tesla is bringing all these cars back and going to have to give refunds and issue new cars. It's, I think, the most unbelievably misplaced use of the word recall,

because when you get down to it, what really happened is Tesla pushed a software update to ensure that these autopilot features would be a little bit more safe than they would have otherwise. And I was like, why are you calling this a recall? Don't you think that that is a problem? Yes, I do. But, and I say that with hesitation, because we need a new word.

We need a new word. because again, in the same story, it's like the NHTSA, they reviewed 956 crashes related to the autopilot that they wanted fixed based on this safety update. If you were to tell me there was nearly a thousand car crashes and we need a manufacturer to change a bolt on the door or something like that, which is the kind of thing they would have had to do in the past before cars became so software driven, obviously that is a recall. And it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, communicates there is a safety defect that needs to be fixed. So it's not just a software over-the-air update

because that could be like a Tesla gets a new fart noise or something like that. This is actually, I mean, this is a real, there's a safety concern and it needs to be fixed and it happens to be that it gets fixed via a software update. So I think that's to me that we need a new word. That's simple. just call it a patch why can't you just call it a patch it has to be scarier is that what it is

it has to be scarier it's not just even a patch is like apple actually maybe patch could work because when apple has some new vulnerability they do call it a patch in the updates so all right it's a patch it's a patch i can work with that you know speaking of stories that might not be exactly what they look like on the surface. There was another big story this week where Epic, the maker of Fortnite, won in a case against Google that it had an illegal monopoly in the app store. So this is something that Epic had been pushing against Apple, against Google. It kind of won a tiny little part of its case against Apple, but it won on every count against Google. There was a jury this time. And so on its face, it's like, oh, this might revolutionize the way that the

App Store works. However, it doesn't seem like that's the case yet because though Epic has won, we still don't even know what the remedy is going to be, effectively what the court is going to rule to make things right. And the judge has already been starting to rule different things out. So like Epic had asked it to, you know, ask the judge to make some ruling to make sure that Google couldn't reintroduce some of the same things. And the judge goes, we don't don't break the law injunctions. If you have a problem, you come back. So it's like maybe in this one specific area,

they're going to fix it, but they might be, they might open themselves up to other vulnerabilities. And of course Google's going to appeal. I mean, Wilson White, the VP of Government Affairs and Public Policy, at Google said they plan to challenge the verdict. And they go, Android and Google Play provide more choice

and openness than any other major mobile platform. And it does look a little weird that Apple could get away with it, Google, which allows you to side load ads and run different app stores is the one that ends up losing the case because it has a lot of these side deals with different manufacturers that effectively don't allow that that prevent some of this stuff. I'm not saying it's great. What I am saying is that we still aren't at the end of this yet. And a lot of folks play this up as this like revolutionary moment where it might just be, you know, the remedy might end up being quite weak. What do you think? I think it's a big deal. And I think it's because

We don't know what the remedy is, but Google has an illegal monopoly in its app store. That was made clear. That was like, you know, that was the result of the jury. They understood that. And we have not seen any win like that in that clear explanation. And exactly what you said, Apple is probably much worse, in my opinion, around how they utilize the app store to maintain some kind of market power and dominance. And I think this is definitely going to move over to Apple at a certain point. And it sets precedent in a way that has not been set before in any context.

So I think, and even one of the big parts around the lawsuit is that to have access to Google's billing system, you have to go through their app store, which means you have to pay the overall app store tax. And those two things should be separated because there's no reason that they are completely connected in the way they are. and now this kind of stuff all starts to change. And you see it could open up so many new ways of gaming and news or any other, any kind of app ecosystem could have its own app store, could work in different ways. And we haven't been able to see that for years because of this, the way these stores were built.

Yeah, that's true. I think that for the Apple thing, we're going to see, right? Because Apple's already won this case. one of the things that people have said is that Apple didn't write down what Google did. Apparently they're a lot more careful about antitrust stuff. So TBD on that. Yeah. I think and honestly, I have to say Apple as someone who's entire life is built around Apple products, still it's starting to get more frustrating the way. I mean, prices are like Apple TV plus Apple, I cloud prices. Everything just goes up now. They just like, it's the ultimate show.

again of get you hooked, get you into the ecosystem, you can't get out, and then start raising prices. I don't even know what my monthly bills are for, because they just kind of keep going up. And the receipt they send you doesn't even tell you what you're paying for via email because they don't want Google to see, to scrape what people are actually buying. So you just get a dollar amount in your receipt in your email. So you have to manually go into the app store to see what you subscribe to. I think I'm getting a little more frustrated with Apple in terms of the hold they have over me.

Just don't raise your prices. A lot of this, it kind of reminds me of this timeshare presentation I saw. Did I tell you I did this timeshare presentation in Vegas when I was out there? No. In Vegas, too. Yeah.

So my wife and I walked into the Golden Nugget and there's a group of people standing there with Hilton badges on and they say, hey, have you received your welcome gift yet? and we said no and they're like well look like we'll get you and it seriously was tickets to a next game free cruise and a two-night stay and a Hilton and a meal voucher to go and watch this two-hour presentation about their Hilton timeshare so we went to the timeshare presentation the next day and we sat through this presentation and you basically put the money

down and then they give you a certain amount of nights a year that you can stay at the property But there's this maintenance fee. And they're like, listen, your points will always be worth the same amount through the years. But there's an annual maintenance fee that they have. And no such promises were made on that one. And that thing can go up, you know, year over year. It starts at $1,600. But next thing you know, you could be looking at it, and it's $3,000.

And then what do you do? You just put all this money down to get the timeshare. So you're stuck with these maintenance fees. I guess that's my long-winded analogy of saying when you're staying at the hotel Apple, right, you end up paying these fees just to keep using your devices. And those fees, you paid your, whatever it was, for your iPhone 15 or something,

with those fees keep going up. I'm still fascinated by the idea of a timeshare presentation at the Golden Nugget is like, feels like it's from like some Americana film road trips type scenario. and I want to do it. I will totally say I want to go do one of these timeshare presentations. But yeah, I think Apple has a hold on us and they can just keep raising fees and we barely notice. Yeah, I mean, the timeshare presentation, it was amazing, man.

I loved it. Just the ferocity with which these people tried to sell you, the raw, raw presentation, to try to get you stoked about the idea of vacations and just the math that made absolutely Were they the most amazing salespeople ever? Incredible salespeople. I wanted to hire every one of them. I was like, I don't want a timeshare, but come sell ads for big technology. You'd be amazing.

I think timeshares must be so lucrative because I've been to one timeshare presentation. And again, I was in awe of this was like the Wolf of Wall Street style level of like selling. And I'm like, yeah. And I was like, wait, go to go to. or something and just sell some like really expensive cloud package. I don't understand how lucrative is this really. Yeah, it was a perfect solution sale. Anyway, we walked out. We did not buy the timeshare, but we did walk out with the cruise, the tickets, the hotel stay, and the voucher. So can't wait to use those. All right. Job well done. Thank you. You won in Vegas.

well we do on that on that front we won on some other tables was not were not as gave it all back elsewhere yeah but we did we also did this uh we went to this casino on the border of Vegas and Utah this is my travel tip for our listeners and um they they sign you up for the you can sign up for the player rewards card which is effectively like this loyalty card and it gave you five dollars of free free gaming just to sign up for this thing. And my wife and I sat down at the penny slots with $5 a credit. That's 500 pulls of the lever. And they just kept bringing us drinks for free as we're playing the penny slots. We ended up walking away with like three drinks a piece and we ended up with like $12

total winnings and got to watch some live music that night. It was amazing. I love Vegas. The big technology podcast is pivoting to becoming the points guy. Oh, my God. Yeah, that was a pretty cool trip. We also saw you two at the sphere, which was pretty special. Oh, wait, you actually saw that? Yeah, that was why we went. We wanted to see you too.

Is the sphere, does the sphere, is it so impressive that it makes you think positively about James Dolan? Yes. Wow. No doubt. There's like, for non-New York listeners, the owner of the Madison Square Garden and the Knicks. James Dolan is not the most revered personality and does things like, I think it was like via facial recognition, not allowing enemies of his into Madison Square Garden, does stuff like that. But then the sphere in Vegas is, my God, the videos and stuff I've seen of that, it looks like it's just something you've never seen before, right? Yeah.

So first of all, like, I got to be careful about the way that I speak about Dolan because he does have facial recognition that prevents enemies. from going into his properties. And I would like to go to the sphere again. And we did just get the next tickets from the timeshare that we're going to use in January. So I'm going to hold my James Dolan thoughts for the next show. But Ron John, I have to tell you that this sphere is pretty special, especially like the last half hour of the show where like the visuals are out of control cool. And I think my biggest regret is like not walking into that venue with some sort of hallucigen in my system.

so maybe next time travel tips from Alex none of this was on the agenda by the way folks so this is all bonus content okay let's round the corner and talk about invidia um so invidia of course is the big chip maker that's been powering the AI revolution and um it's basically it's h100 chips are the thing that you use to train your AI models on i have a story about it in big technology but before we talk about the competitive areas that NVIDIA might be, might be trying to, or having to deal with in the future, there's an amazing story. So this stock has gone up, I think this is business insider,

the stock has gone up by 12,000 percent over the past five years and 230 something percent this year. Its market cap went from in the 300 billion range to 1.19 trillion as of today. And what's that doing it's making invidia's mid-level employees and long-time employees so rich that they're kind of not even trying on the job and they're they're almost like half retired this is from the story many invidia employees have become incredibly rich after the company stock rose one unexpected byproduct of that success has been the growing tension between employees where some staffers feel the old-timers are simply not pulling their weight and it's possible that's the newly minted stock-rich millionaires at NVIDIA are less motivated to work hard.

The brewing discord among NVIDIA's corporate ranks could one day become a serious risk as the company faces intensifying regulatory pressure and competition from rival chip makers, AMD, and Intel, as well as other big firms like Amazon and Microsoft. So the CEO basically had to write a letter. That's like, do your damn job to these employees. I mean, it's one of those wild, secondary, not thought of risks that as your stock goes so high that your employees might be like already like thinking about what to do with the money i'm curious what you think ron like um this almost has kind of like a meme stock feel to it some

of our early discussions in 2022 and like what does a cfo do when the story when the stock rises by like 500% in a week like maybe that's a similar thing with invidia and its employee base in these you know quote unquote half retirements yeah i think well always question number one in these situations is who is actually selling because I know like especially during the meme stock craze like I know people who worked at some of those companies even let and some of them sold near the top and their life is forever changed and then some of them held and it lost 90 plus percent of what they thought they would be worth so I think uh even in an invidia like where is this going to end up is it on the AI hype cycle it's up a lot but

are people selling and those do who do sell do they stay motivated i think it is every big company again like somehow an apple stays motivated enough to be able to extract so much value and money out of each and every single one of us um so some of these companies you can see the ones that somehow have figured out how to keep people motivated but yeah i think this is something any company whose stock goes up that much it it introduces a whole whole new set of challenges. I'm not going to call them problems for them. Yeah. I mean, they're not problems yet, but they might be. But I'm sure they'll find motivated people like they have the money to hire motivated people and distribute it to them. It is interesting.

Like, would you sell, if you had a Nvidia stock, like, would you be selling now? It's such a tough one because like you think about like if you're an Apple employee at any number of times in the last 12, 14 years, it would have made sense likely to sell. Obviously, if you need, like are buying a house or something, then you're going to sell, but like sell some. But, but, you know, it's tough because, but you're also living amidst one of the great hype cycles and you happen to be at the exact company at the exact middle of it. So chances that it's actually going to realize the value people are ascribing to it and are still not certain. So, yeah, I think I would sell.

Yeah, at a certain point, it doesn't make sense to have so much of your wealth in one company. However, you do, you know, potentially miss a lot of the upside. You sold at the beginning of this year. If you were at Nvidia, you're like, oh, if this company's worth $380 billion, you'll look up, and it's now worth a trillion. Yeah. The greatest lesson, though, I ever learned was when I was in trading was you can never allow yourself to stress about the money you didn't make only look at the money you did make and and it because it

the second you start thinking and everyone goes there your mind always goes there but everyone who does focuses too much on i could have made x i could have made y when you did already actually make some money or good money uh then you know then it just makes you a much worse investor exactly you can't play the fomo fears. No, no fomo. So another thing Nvidia does have that is a challenge is the fact that so many companies are now competing with it. We might have mentioned it last week, but Google Gemini was trained entirely on Google's TPUs, not NVIDIA chips. You also have Amazon getting involved. Anthropic is going to train its models on Amazon's AWS chips, and Microsoft is powering some of its AI services on its own chips. And then we had Intel CEO,

Pat Gelsinger on this week talking about how they're making moves this week they introduced this Gowdy 3 chip that they say is competitive with the Nvidia H100 and AMD made a similar announcement last week. I'm curious

what you think and I have much more about this on big technology so if you go to big technology.com you can read more about it but Ron John just very high level you know is is Nvidia going to have this you know lead forever or where's where's this going to lead

effectively. No, I think AMD and Intel and even big technology companies internally, yeah, I think there's going to be competition and it's good and it's exciting and I think on the hardware front we're certainly seeing it on the software front, you using Claude, you know, like in it and it's good. I think this is, that's

actually to me one of the most exciting parts of this is it feels like not only is this, the whole generative AI space, not only is it something that genuinely has a ton of potential for use cases, for businesses, for consumers. But it also just feels like it's the most competitive space in a long time. And I don't think it's necessarily all the Amazon's and Microsoft and stuff are going to own it. I think, or Nvidia has a guaranteed seat on the throne. I think we have no idea how this plays out in the next five years, and that's fun.

That's right. And I'll just like cite another good one from Chimov, who's been on a role lately, Chimoth Polyapitia, the VC from Social Capital. He said, and former, you know, Spack God, he said, the great LLM wars will be written about as one of the most important deflationary cycles in the history of technology. And I think that's spot on. The moment of commoditization where our prices come down everywhere and everything sort of evens out is definitely taking place right now. I think so. Again, I think I will agree with Chimath on this one.

Wow. We got two weeks in a row of Ron John and Jamat coming together. We agree with Chmath. Yep. This is big. All right, Ron John. Thanks so much. We're going to see you next time on December 29th.

So have a nice holiday break for now. And we'll talk about what's going to happen next year. I'll see you in a couple weeks. Yeah, we have some. great stuff on top for folks. And even though we are about to go into the holidays, we have some great shows coming up for you over the next few weeks. Casey Newton's going to be on to do some predictions with me about 2024. Meredith Whitaker, the CEO of Signal is going to come on to talk about the state of AI. We also have a report about the war in Ukraine and the different

technology that Palantir and Clearview AI are using. And then next week I'm sitting down with Brian Peterson, actually, the CEO of Flexport. So we're going to talk a little bit about what happened in his leadership, docee do, and what the future of that company is looking like. That will be our first show of the new year. Thanks again for listening. Thanks for being here, Ron John.

Always great to have you all here. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.