Big Technology Podcast - Hamas vs. Israel Rewrites Social Media Norms, Live At The SBF Trial, OpenAI's New Values

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

Reed Albergotti is the tech editor at Semafor. He joins Big Technology Podcast to break down the week's news. We cover: 1) Whether social media is useful during times of crisis. 2) Cancel culture "switcheroo" 3) The value of free speech in conflict 4) Is social media a moderating force after all? 5) Do we actually want news on Threads? 6) NPR leaves Twitter and finds it didn't matter 7) Reflections from the SBF trial 8) Is Apple building a search engine 9) OpenAI puts building human-level intelligence at the top of its value list 10) Wait, did we already reach AGI? 11) The impact of the AI 'pause' letter, six months later.

Is the Israel-Hamas war rewriting some of the norms of social media? Will Apple build a search engine to compete with Google? We have the latest from the SBF trial and a big new change from open AI that's focusing on achieving human-level intelligence. All that and more coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're here on Friday to break down the news in our traditional format. And joining us is a special guest all the way from Semaphore.

for Reid Albuquerque is here. Reed, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for being here. So you're the technology editor at Semaphore. We quote your work all the time in the big technology newsletter. It's great to have you here to talk about a very eventful week of news. Ron John Roy is out this week.

And so let's start with the big story, which is, of course, a terrible conflict between Israel and Hamas right now. You know, if you're listening, I'm sure you know the details. any civilian life is a disaster when it's lost, especially in the name of political ends. And what we're seeing play out on social media is quite fascinating. This has first been a moment where people are starting to point to what's going on on Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, and saying that it's a disaster and filled with misinformation that's coming from every angle and, you know, basically there's nothing that you can trust.

I do want to put out an alternative perspective on that, which is that, yes, Twitter or X has is a mess. It's always been a mess. I think people are getting hip to the idea that it's filled with misinformation. And I personally think that they can sift out decently well. What is actually happening by going into this stuff with a better BS filter than we give the average person credit for. To me, it seems like you go on to these platforms, you know you're going to see chaos and then you go to secondary sources that you trust. like the Times or the journal or whatever, the BBC, whatever you read, and then people end up putting a, you know, a more broad picture of what's going on as opposed to just saying, oh, I saw that on social media and I just believe it. And so to me, this concept of like the fact that they're filled with misinformation and poisoning the discourse is starting to become outdated. Read, I'm curious, I mean, it's kind of a controversial position, but I'm curious what you think about that.

I actually, it's funny, I wish I could debate you on this, but I actually have very similar views. I mean, I, I, I said in my, I mean, I basically said the same thing in our newsletter this week, which is, I think it's sort of ironic that you see a lot of the sort of opinion leaders in the media and the tech media who are sort of lamenting the fact that Twitter is not the same old Twitter and that they would sort of be glued to Twitter normally during a big world event like this and they're not. And why can't threads become that, right? I think we saw some commentary like that. And I think it's really ironic to me. I mean, the same people who were sort of raking Facebook over the coals for how they handled news and, you know, those public information

are now asking the same company to come back and, and replace Twitter and become this place for news. I think it would be great if the technology industry got out of the news business and really focused on actual technology and not just user-generated content. yeah i agree another controversial no i mean we're going to talk about that too because i'm getting raked over the coals about that for a controversial thread that i posted and i promised that i was going to cover it on the pod today so we're going to get to that but just to keep you know peeling this thread apart i mean oh god that was a pun i was on twitter really you know in the primary primary source information and there were things that i saw that were you know videos taken from

uh video games for instance and i think that like you know you can take a look at what's going on on social media take a look at the reports like nobody's just on twitter and they're not you know if you're just on twitter of course you're you're going to be going to places like the wester journal the times seven four and and actually checking what happened and so to think that like people are just convinced of one narrative or the other because they saw one thing on social media that was fake to me it's just it's almost disrespectful to the users themselves and it really has a small it's doesn't mean that social media can't shift an opinion. But this idea that, you know, one fake

video or a few fake videos is going to really change, you know, a person's mind to me sounds ridiculous. No, that's totally right. And, you know, apologies for getting ahead of you here on this. But yeah, I think that's right, too. We're seeing, we've seen so many studies that have come out since Cambridge Analytica that have basically backed up that point of view, which is like, you know, even though there's tons of information on so disinformation on social media, people are not really ultimately swayed by that or elections are not really swayed. What really happens is people go on social media and some people look for information that supports their worldview and they don't really care if it's accurate or not. They kind of just want to read the most salacious content.

And, you know, I think the Pizza Gate controversy was like a good example of that. Do we really think that, you know, that independent voters went on and read about Pizza Gate and were swayed to to vote Republican, it ultimately doesn't have as big of an impact as I think people fear. And I think, you know, you're right. I mean, people can ultimately, like, you know, the people who sort of, I think, are the ones that we want to reach, right? Those, those, like, conscientious voters, they can sort of tell the difference. And I read an interesting column in Haaret's this week that sort of lamented the fact that

you know the television news like the broadcast news was sort of too slow to get information out and then you know twitter was was doing it quickly but there was tons of information and it just sort of made me think i mean this is when you're trying to get real-time information about a situation like this whether it's this or ukraine or whatever the faster the information comes out the more flawed it's going to be and i think people just need to sort of accept that if you want if you want to read only information, you know, only articles that have been like fully reported and every single fact is nailed down, then you kind of just need to wait and not be, you know, on the socials 24-7.

Exactly. And I personally, like, if you feel like you have even a modicum of news literacy and the ability to make sense of these ideals, and maybe I'm overestimating this because I am a professional journalist, but like you could, I found X to be extremely useful actually in the early hours just to figure out what's going on, however horrible it was. Now, there has been an interesting shifting of norms, which I want to talk to you about, which is that the right has long come after the left for cancel culture, basically holding up things that people might have said at one time and, you know, contacting their employer or making it public and making sure that there's enough

scorn that these people's lives are ruined. And now there's actually been a almost, I think, Marshall Kosloff, who's a host of the realignment, calls this, you know, a reverse or cancel culture or a cancel culture flip-a-roo switcheroo. And what we've seen, actually, is there have been members of the left that have come out and they have praised Hamas's actions on this past weekend, right, where they killed all the innocent civilians. I mean, we're talking about a death toll of like around 1,300, maybe 200 of them. were military and and what's happened is the right has has basically elevated the people who have you know came out in praise of Hamas and caused the same situation happen to them so there is this for instance this NYU law bar association president her name was sorry their name is rhino workman who said that the attack was necessary sort of a necessary outcome and in need

for resistance and they were working they were had a job offer from this firm Winston and Strawn and was ranked over the coals to the point where Winston and Strawn cancelled her letter of employment or their letter of employment so I'm curious what you make of this is this sort of like the end of this like sort of debate over cancel culture I mean to me it seems like you know this whole this whole thing might have been silly like basically like if you say dumb things and do dumb things there's going to be consequences no matter who you are or what side of the aisle you sit on yeah i it's a really interesting way of putting it the cancel culture flip a rue there's so much hypocrisy on on

every side of that right as you as you pointed out i mean it's the same thing with the free speech debate right everybody everybody wants free speech until their speech they don't like and then they want to silence it right and you know i i i think we should take a step back and look at this and say look I mean I think it's horrible that people would come out and praise Hamas I mean just I could not disagree more I think it's there's probably a lot of anti-Semitism behind that just also a certain level of callousness after you see so many like families murdered together and you know there's the context notwithstanding no matter what happens family gets murdered together whether they're in Israel or Gaza or wherever to come out and

praise the people who did that is craven and it's sick yeah i completely agree with that i mean it's it's it's horrible and you know i am i am jewish and you know it's it's it's very painful to watch i mean i think there's we're still sort of all in the the grieving period right now and but i think you know i still sort of it still kind of makes me uncomfortable that this person would would lose their job or that the thing that really was bad i thought was that i think it was that i think it was, I think it was Ackman, right, who was Bill Ackon, who was calling for like a list of names of people to, you know, who, like, signed on to these letters at universities. And I don't know. I mean, people do dumb things. They say dumb things when they're in college. Their views

change. I think, I think, you know, we should be, like, somewhat understanding about words. And that goes, I think, across the political spectrum. I think they can't, there. early cancel culture, which came from the left, where people were being, like, sort of having their lives ruined for callous or, you know, kind of dumb things they said on Twitter. I mean, that made me uncomfortable. You know, I think people just need to sometimes have a little more, just be a little more understanding, give people a little bit more leeway, and maybe try to persuade them or like change their worldview if you don't agree with it rather than just try to silence it. Yeah, it's a good point. So I personally saw there's a truck that was driving around

Harvard this week, which had like the names and faces, I believe, of some of the people in these student organizations that had signed on a letter condemning Israel in the face of the Hamas attacks. That to me felt overboard. The Rina Workman thing is a little bit more complicated. I mean, to have somebody come out full-throated and support of a terror group that just lit up, you know, 1,400 people and took a bunch of hostages. I mean, to me, I think it's well within the rights of an employer to say, listen, you're going to be working next to people. And I don't think the people in our law firm are going to want someone that supports a terrorist group with them.

You made a mistake. It's a consequence for a mistake. I don't think there's anything to do with cancel culture or whatever it is. Simply a matter of fact that you have to have values in a company. And when it comes down to it, if they don't want to have that person working at their firm, I think they're within their rights. Yeah, and I'm sure. No, and I'm sure they have policies about social media

and sort of saying things that could embarrass the firm. I mean, every company does. You can only imagine their mentions and like the phone, the voicemails of the partners after they, I mean, they saw that happen. Oh, yeah. And of, yeah, and of course, I mean, you're talking about, you know, a firm in New York who probably has many, many Jews working there and, you know, we're still, I mean, it's, it actually kind of shows a real lack of judgment

to do that and I think that's that may be the bigger issue or the more pertinent issue right where you're talking about employing someone at a you know very prestigious law firm like that yeah do you I mean it's kind of this thing bubbled up on social media this week it's worth bringing up that I'm curious what you think about these folks that are like all into like social activism all throughout college and then they just go ahead and take a job at a corporate law firm it's like it feels so incongruous to me but right Well, I think everybody's a little bit hypocritical. That's my, that's my, my worldview as I, as I get older.

I mean, we all, we all are hypocritical. We all, you know, like I talk about climate change and drive a, you know, an SUV around the Bay Area. And it's, it's, it's, you know, you can't escape that. So I've tried not to judge people as much these days, but I do agree. It's ironic. Sometimes it's, it's hard. So one more thing about this, which is, you mentioned. it, but the free speech debate. So we heard so much about from the right, especially about the right to free speech. And it's sort of interesting because this whole free speech movement started on the left. Like if you think about like the big protests in Berkeley back in the 70s, this was all about free speech and the right to say anything on campus. And obviously it seems like things have shifted. But one thing I am particularly uncomfortable with is the prevention of so even supporters of.

of Hamas to be able to go and march and show their support. Now, obviously, you know, I don't agree with it, but I do think that, like, the right to free expression is fundamental. And you're not going to win a debate by shutting down speech. You'll win a debate by allowing the marketplace of ideas to end up. I mean, if you can't win a debate against the idea of killing civilians, then you really need to reshape not only your ideas, but your actions. So let's talk about this, because there's,

So France has banned pro-Palestine protests and other countries have done similar things. There's videos of riot police in France trying to break this stuff up. Obviously, Germany has plenty of rules against anti-Semitism as well. And you have Dave Rubin, you know, who does the Rubin report, conservative voice, says maybe the West has a chance. And to me, it's just like, I mean, again, it can't state about how fundamentally I disagree with everything that Hamas has said about this situation. and in general, they are existence. But to prevent free speech of anybody in the West, to me, is just going to sounds counterproductive.

Maybe I'm missing something. They say, what do they say, two Jews, three opinions. We have two Jews here. Yeah. But I wish I could disagree with you. I actually think you're right. I mean, that is the fundamental. I mean, some of the most important, you know, free speech cases in the U.S., right,

revolved around the rights of neon. Nazis to go to go March and just the people saying the absolute most abhorrent things have a right to do that and that's something in this country that you know we we hold so dear I think we I think we all do you know fundamentally what happens on social media is maybe a slightly more complicated question but yeah I mean I I agree and other countries have different values you know around that right I mean Germany has obviously a different situation and France, you know, they have maybe their reasons for doing this. But, yeah, I mean, I particularly feel a lot of pride living in a country that allows people

to kind of just say whatever they want, even if it's insane. There was an amazing, yeah, there was an amazing post from Ben Sass, who is the president of former, former senator president of Florida University, he basically said, listen we believe in free speech in this country we're going to allow anybody i think his words were to make an idiot of themselves in public however the second that crosses from speech to something else speech to violence we'll we will be prepared to respond in the fullest degree and i i think that personally is that that's the right approach yeah i i completely agree with that and i i i sense that you know we've the pendulum is kind of swinging back from i think a place where you know i think

people people were maybe a little bit hysterical and I think everyone's certain you know we had we had you know the election of Donald Trump we had the pandemic all of these things kind of really were a test of of all of these norms and ideology that we have around around speech and I think we're I think we're coming back I hear more and more people kind of expressing these sentiments on both sides of the political spectrum. It's not just people on the right calling for, you know, a bit of a more level-headed view on speech, right? It's also people on the left. And I think, you know, and you and I sort of agreeing on this, you know, and feeling comfortable talking about it is I think a sign of that as well. Yeah. Okay. So I said, I said last thing, but I have one more

part of this that I think we really should dig into, which is, as I've been watching this unfold, I'm curious whether, in social media, no doubt, is a place where extreme viewpoints are posted to get a reaction. And one of the things I've been curious about as I've seen this unfold is whether social media is actually a moderating force or a force that's making things more extreme. I'll give you two examples. So there was a tweet from BLM Chicago that had a caption on it that says, that is all. That is it. And there was a photo that said something like Free Palestine that was lionizing with an image of somebody coming in on a parachute, which is how Hamas attacked the festival in southern Israel.

So then there were also messages from the Israeli side that were dehumanizing people in Gaza and saying that they were animals or human animals. And in each of those instances, I saw loads of. people quote tweeting those messages and talking about how awful they were and I felt shifting the conversation more towards the moderation and more towards the center I suppose I mean this is kind of a crazy thing to say because I'm not sure it's true maybe it's easier to be moderate when like extreme involves killing people but I did I did find some optimism there I don't yeah I I mean, I think it's the latter. I think in this kind of a situation when people post things that are so incendiary like that,

the natural reaction is for people to kind of like pull back and say, wait a minute, that's going too far. I think if you take a step back and you look at social media, you know, its influence on society over the last, you know, whatever it is, 20 years, 15 years. I think it's, I don't think you can say it's been, it's had a moderating effect. Right. But I do think it's less, but I think it's less important than people think. I think people put so much emphasis on what is said by, you know, anonymous trolls on Twitter.

You know, they, you know, it's, if you make people anonymous and give them a platform to say things on social media, they will just say the craziest things. And you see, like, you know, companies reacting to these sort of like mobs on social media. and I really think that's a mistake. I mean, I think, you know, I view Twitter and social media as not the real world, as a sort of alternate world. It's almost like society's kind of like the back of their mind or like a really dark part of society's mind that, you know, it's like that part of your brain that you sort of, sometimes these thoughts bubble up that you wish you didn't have and you sort of push them

back and sort of move on. People are like, damn, I'm going to tweet that. Right. I think that is the kind of, that is how people should view social media. And I, I think that's also changing. I think people are actually sort of discounting a little, a little bit more rightly so, what is said on, on these platforms. Okay.

So that brings us to our real second segment, which is a perfect lead and read. So thank you for that, which is, I'm getting absolutely destroyed on threads today. Which is, seems like that happens to me. often. It's so funny. People on threads are very sensitive about threads. But I am being lambasted for a thread I put up there talking about, hey, maybe we shouldn't have news and social media so blended. And the context of this is that Adam O'Sary, who runs threads, has said that they're not going to ban news, but they're not going to do anything to promote it. And there's been this movement of journalists that really puzzles me, that have been like, we need news on

threads it's the best thing that you can do and it look it certainly would be good for the engagement of threads the fact that threads doesn't have news i'm sure is actually hurting its adoption and that meta is being careful to bring news on the platform to me is good it seems to me that when we bring news onto social media nothing good happens right we end up giving every every bit of news legitimacy on there and of course the more extreme views are are elevated diminishing the mainstream. And so much of the conversation happens on the social platforms. And so you end up having the businesses of these actual news organizations suffer because

people are hanging out, consuming their stuff on Twitter or Facebook and not on their sites and not on their streams. And they're, you know, so, so I said news and social don't mix. The red would be much, would have much better engagement if it promoted news, but there would be consequences. Meta isn't falling into that trap and the news industry shouldn't, encourage it. And then came the backlash. So you're welcome to disagree here, but I'm curious what you think. I mean, I wish I could, I would love to hear a debate on this. My view is every single

journalist knows that Twitter has never driven traffic to stories. It is so much about just ego, right? And the fact that, you know, journalists or important people are reading your work. And And certainly, like, it's influential, but, like, it, like, journalists on Twitter was a niche on a niche platform. Like, Twitter was never a huge platform to begin with, right? I mean, Facebook always drove more traffic. That's obviously, you know, changed now. Now it's, like, Apple News. Apple News is, like, really a huge driver of traffic for the big news sites, like, you know, Washington Post, right? So, again, I think this is where, like, we are all in our media bubble. And we think it's so important to have, like, you know, these platforms

where every news story is shared and we can just keep, you know, keep track of this up to the minute. It's like our own private newswire. And ultimately, like, it really doesn't matter outside of this bubble all that much, what is said. And I agree, I don't like the fact. I never liked the fact from day one, the fact that, you know, news organizations and reporters really more specifically, we're so willing to basically take their work, their hard work, and sort of give it away for free and move everything onto these social media platforms, really for the benefit of these huge companies, or what eventually became these huge companies, I think it was a bad idea. And it weakened journalistic institutions that, you know, I think if we could turn back

the clock, we will probably do things differently. I mean, that's been my view on this. Yeah. Not only that, it warps the incentives and the pursuit of stories in journalists' minds. They begin to write for the Twitter audience. And the things that do well on Twitter are outraged. Same with threads. And here's an interesting story. So the Neiman Lab, which comes out of Harvard, just wrote this story about how NPR left Twitter because of a dispute with Elon Musk. and it says the headline is six months ago MPR left Twitter the effects have been negligible the numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected that Twitter wasn't worth the effort at least in terms of traffic and to see what happened I mean it's an obvious situation

to see what happened that NPR is basically unharmed by leaving what many of you is the most important platform for news you know and this this push to try to get all the news organizations on threads and to have threads incentivized news to me it's just like what are we doing here people like what what possible motive do you have and I think maybe ego is it maybe it's ego I totally agree there's a lot of ego when it comes to Twitter not discounting its importance in terms of just like influencing the opinion leaders like the elite and things like that I mean, I agree that it's kind of like, it does serve that function. But I remember, like, when I worked at the Wall Street Journal, before Twitter, this is,

now I sound like super old, but, like, before Twitter, the thing that, like, drove so much traffic was, was Yahoo News. And that was because, like, so many computers, like, the default home page was Yahoo News. And that's sort of what's happening with Apple News now, like, people just get it. and those are the stories they see like that's how people consume news it's like this sort of like passive thing i wish they sat down and like opened up the paper and read it you know but it's it's not it's not that like people are not most people are not like glued to to twitter i also want to make this point i mean i thought um if you if you've ever read amusing

ourselves to death um by uh neil postman he's written in 1984 and he's talks about like how television and you could just substitute television for social media but he's talking about how television has kind of become this dumbing down the fact you know it's had this dumbing down effect and his point I thought this is such a good point he's like the problem is not like mindless entertainment like it's not the gong show or whatever the show of the time was it's 60 minutes it's like because he at the time there was like the iran hostage crisis was going on and he was like everyone all of a sudden had an opinion a very strong opinion about this country they had never heard of before you know and I think that's like that was so smart and

poignant like everyone is not an expert on Ukraine everyone is not an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict and they don't really like for their daily lives it's nice to be sort of informed but like for your daily lives like you do not need to be to know what's happening like every minute of these of these conflicts absolutely and so first of all no need to apologize about the yahoo reference we're big yahoo fans here and uh we're gonna have our yahoo episode coming was more that before twitter right exactly well yahoo lives read that's my i know they're still there it's still important yeah and then there's like a couple of good counter arguments to me i mean for the sake of nuance one is that there's going to be news anywhere anyway on these platforms

might as well have some level-headed and well-reported stuff. But to me, I would say my rebuttal of that is it's a balance because the more you enable the conversation to be there versus building your audience and having your own properties that people go to, the more power you're actually going to lose an aggregate. And the other thing that I heard is that, you know, it's, you know, it's easy to say if you're like a built-up news ecosystem, but if you're like, you know, an insurgent trying to get an audience,

then, you know, don't tell me I can't use social. media and that sounds reasonable to me you can don't you can totally use it but you're not going to gain that much traffic from twitter that's right that's all yeah news industry social media it turns out email is pretty good codependent email's amazing we both love email don't be codependent you know appreciate each other participate whatever but this whole reliance on news and even public infrastructure like to have like the canadian uh uh you know parks associations not not be able to get wildfire information out because they're blocked on Facebook. It's like you double,

you didn't need to double down on Facebook. You did, and you made that a behavior. And every, this is a two-sided thing here, folks, it's two-sided. All right, let's take a break. And we're going to talk about some, some real technology stuff when we come back. We're here with Rita Albergotti. He's the technology editor at Semphor. The other side of this break, we're going to talk about Apple, potentially building a search engine.

Oh, God, we have so, so much to get to so little time at the SBF trial. well maybe we'll skip that and then of course a little bit more about open AI 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 two 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 Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one

you're using right now. And we're back here, a big technology podcast with Reid Alba Gotti. He is the technology editor at Semaphore. Oh, man, Reed. I wanted to talk about the SBF trial with you last week. Well, let's do it quickly. I mean, last week I said, listen, I'm going to go to the, go to the courthouse and see if I get in. I did watch two days of the trial this week. folks who are listening, we have Molly Wood, who's a big crypto critic coming on next Wednesday. We're going to go spend an hour just talking about the case. But I just want to bring up one thing that I found interesting about it. And I'm curious what your perspective is.

There's this narrative that has existed about Sam Bankman-Fried being likable and, you know, kind of clumsy and oops, he just, you know, potentially just didn't see where that $8 billion went. And that was so careless of him, by golly. But it was an honest mistake. And I sat in court this week and watched Caroline Ellis and his former top lieutenant and ex-girlfriend very precisely go through all the different spreadsheets showing how they had amassed more than $10 billion in Alameda Research, which was the investment house that they did investments and bought influence in more than 10 billion of FTX customer deposits. And it just kept growing and growing as like the net asset value inside FDX went down to the point where like the Alameda liability. He's exceeded the FDX asset value, and then that's how you lose $8 billion. And these spreadsheets were shared with Sam periodically, and he was in the know. He made these decisions.

So to me, it was interesting that that narrative came crumbling down. Read, I'm curious, like, from your perspective, why do people still believe that narrative about Sam? I mean, we see it with Michael Lewis. It really is astonishing to me. Yeah, I don't know how many people really do believe that. I mean, I'm not sure. Like, I, most of the people I hear talking about Michael Lewis's book are kind of like, yeah, they sort of think that's like a ridiculous, you know, ridiculous view. And I think you're right.

Like, the testimony has really shown that that's not the case. It's a sad situation. I think, I mean, it's interesting your one point on that and I'll be just like really fast on it. It's like, it's kind of a side point on this and this is like my takeaway. It's like you're having Molly Wood on and she's this, you know, she's done amazing work, you know, just talking about all these crypto scans and, you know, the most well-known critic of crypto. But like, I also don't think FTCS is really about crypto. Like, and I have people say this. I'm not the first person to say this, but it's like it's just a, it's just somebody who, you know, took a bunch of money and deposits and took the money and put it somewhere else and lost it. And, you know, it really, and it was centralized.

Like, it's not, it really has nothing to do with crypto other than the fact that FTCS happened to be, you know, a crypto exchange. I mean, do you not agree? So I agree, but there's one point where I'm going to nitpick on. And I think it's kind of important. And Molly and I will get into it in more depth. But the through line between FTCS and the whole Web3 movement was there was this new system sold to so many people. about improving the world and a better internet and a better financial system and one you could believe in and one that would operate in your best interest and you didn't have to trust them

it was just de facto good web 3 was improving the world and ftx had sam out there trying to save the rainforest and it was all i it was all grift and i think that's the kind of my takeaway is that you know maybe we might have some decent use cases of crypto in the future but we should really be much more skeptical of people who are coming and telling us they're reinventing the way that things used to be in building a better system and trust us with all, trust them with all of our money because it's a huge freaking red flag and it was not heated to me in the heyday of crypto. I, well, you know, by most people. I mean, I always thought most of crypto is sort of, most of crypto was just not a scam, but it's just another thing to gamble on, right?

People need some sort of instrument of a number that goes up and down and they can make money off of it. And that's really all it was at the sort of application layer, right? There were no use cases other than sort of a financial instrument to make money. But I also think at the same time, like there are well-meaning people who are and were trying to build that sort of decentralized system, a decentralized internet. Ironically, like, I think you see some of that happening now. Like, some, there are, like, you know, we just saw J.P. Morgan announced something. There's some money transfer stuff happening, like, using blockchain technology.

I think they don't even call it blockchain anymore because it's like, it's so unpopular. It's like this. Arnished. Thurred rail. But, like, that actual idea is now starting to come into practice. So, like, I don't, I think you're completely right. I just think there are mixed in there. There were, in the tiny minority of people who were, like, involved in that,

who were actually, like, well-meaning in trying to build technology, and a lot of them are still at it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I do agree that there is going to be something that's going to come out of this crypto movement that's going to actually improve things. And I've talked about some of the use cases, having spent so much time and South America and seeing not only the problems with inflation, although I don't know if crypto can solve that, but certainly remittances. And just to have, work so hard and have 25% of your money

or whatever it is taken by a company like Western Union is pretty gross. So maybe it can solve with that. Apple, okay, so this is an interesting story that Mark German wrote about in his power on newsletter that Apple is considering not necessarily building a search engine, but it's building the technology that's going to allow it to do it if it wants to. And it has, it's head of AI is a guy John G. Andrea who came from Google. And it's been developing better and better search technology. And it sees that this is a moment of disruption for AI. And it knows that the search real estate that it gives to Google is really, really freaking valuable. And to the point where it's been paid billions of dollars every year by Google to keep Google as the default there.

and you know that's sort of the basis of the justice department going after google right now to withhold maintain its monopoly i mean talk about monopoly if apple gets into search it's a whole different ballgame have you been following this what's your read on it yeah wouldn't it be yes wouldn't it be ironic and i read that story if if the result of the of the of this antitrust trial was like apple just just like brings search under its umbrella and now it has an even bigger monopoly on you know it's it's it's users i think you know it that story was talking about Google sort of considering building a search engine years ago and probably the reason they didn't do it is that Apple thinking about Apple yeah Apple sorry did I just

say Google yeah Google has a search engine um sorry the reason I think that that story um that story you know it was about Apple thinking about building the search engine years ago and they and they decided against it and I think sort of wisely so because if you're Apple and you building a search engine is pretty complicated and pretty hard I mean look at Microsoft's port a lot of money and a lot of resources into into Bing and it's still not quite as good as as Google search I mean even if Apple made their search engine the default I mean certainly that's powerful and important like there's a lot of people who might still switch back to Google because that's what they like and it's better. So like you run the risk and Apple has a spotty track record. Look at Apple Maps,

right? Of like trying to do this. Which are apparently good now. Which they say it's good and I still am terrified every time I turn on. I'm a Google Map person. Yeah. So like they come out with a search engine. Apple comes out with a search engine and it's it has a bad start and it gets a lot of bad press and all of a sudden people are you know switching over like they do with Chrome with Google Maps to this other service, they've basically lost out on that revenue. And now they might make less revenue because it's not as popular. And they have to put a ton of time resources into supporting Apple search now. And look at search on the app store. That's another point. Like search in the app store still is bad. I mean, that should tell you something about like the challenge there. So I just think it's wise

that they never did that. And I sort of doubt they ever will, unless they have nothing to lose, and the DOJ takes away this ability for them to collect rent from Google or whoever. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a natural resource curse, and maybe it's like a great, they're really sitting on this pile of oil

where Google is just paying these billions and billions of dollars, and it's worth every freaking penny to Google. And Apple's like, well, that's sort of like, they're doing the hard work for us, making a ton of money it's all margin it's completely margin yeah 100% margin products like I just don't see what yeah it's software product of your dreams it's it's such a great deal I mean you know if it turns out it's illegal which I I kind of doubt that it will but if turns out it's illegal then maybe maybe we'll see that'll be interesting we'll see something

happen there yeah all right let's move on to AI to round out the show first of all some before I have to give you guys credit your AI coverage has been spectacular and another really interesting story that your team just put out is that open AI changed its core values and so it's you know six core values for employees and they were I mean these are hilarious audacious thoughtful unpretentious impact driven collaborative and growth oriented not that those are bad things to pursue but they just feel like they were you know like something that like a consultant would like basically fart out and you would put on your website um now there are five values in aGI focus is the first so anything that doesn't help with that is out of scope

base aGI is artificial general intelligence or as we call it human level intelligence um and it is interesting how i guess what's happened with chat GPT or in their research that we don't even know about at the moment has so fully shifted them to the point where they feel like AGI focus is the North Star for them. I'm curious what you make of it. Obviously, your team ran the story, wrote the story. Are we that close that it's worth listing as a value? And, yeah, it's pretty bold, don't you think?

It is bold. I, yeah, Louise wrote that story, Louise Metzakis. And it was, I think she has a sharp eye. She saw the change and is, you know, keeping an eye on that. We have a feature in the newsletter where we just look at it, like, we call it release notes. We look at stuff like that. The AI ones and the papers that come out, really interesting. I mean, it's funny because, like, if you look at the AI industry right now at large,

like the real trend is actually kind of the opposite, which is everyone trying to build these super small models that can run on your phone or your home computer. So I think you have this sort of, like, you know, this dichotomy where you have. What's practical right now is small, you know, customized models that, you know, companies are building. But what, but then like the big companies, I mean, the way they are going to stay ahead is if these foundation models like GPT just keep getting bigger and more powerful. So I see it as like opening eye really has no choice but to go that route. Whether or not AGI is possible, if you think about it, like the small open source models are going to get closer and closer to the point where they may get better than GPT4, right? So that would destroy, I mean, Open AI would have no business. I mean, it's, so they have no choice. The only way

Open AI will, you know, is worth the, it's valuation and keeps getting, you know, bigger and more powerful. And therefore, you know, whatever, Microsoft too, which will own almost half the company is if they just keep, you know, they keep coming out with breakthroughs. And that's what they're working on right now. They're trying to figure out, like, what is the next, you know, the transformer model paper attention is all you need? Like, that was the big breakthrough that led to these large language models. Like, what's the next one of those? Like, they need, they are trying to write that next paper, which they probably won't publish publicly if they do. No, they certainly will not. Yeah. I don't know. Do you disagree? They are open AI. No, I do agree. I think that we'll see

if they're capable. I'll put it that way. I mean, obviously, they have a lot of talent there. But if you think about it, their biggest innovations built off of Google research. And so Dolly is also built off of staple diffusion, which is pretty sure it didn't come from them. Are they capable of doing the research, or are they just going to continue to build mass adopted demos on top of other people's research? That's the big question facing them. And I think it's a big open one. Does that sound right? I totally agree. And I totally agree. And I don't have the answer like I don't I don't doubt them I but I have no idea I mean it's because how can you predict what you're talking about is like is kind of like breakthroughs or like

many breakthroughs which like how do you predict that it's it's it's you know it's just these are things that like these complete genius polymaths you know who who think up this stuff like this stuff just comes to them at one point like there's no there's no science behind that this isn't Moore's law where you can predict like the trajectory of what you'll be able to fit into a device. It's just, it's really hard. Yes. And speaking of AGI, I mean, Google says, or at least one of the top AI scientists

that Google says, we're already here. So, and so Blaise Aguera Iarchas and Peter Norvig, both of whom I interviewed at the World Summit AI last year, very interesting, very good, good people, at least for my interactions with them have a paper out in or an article out in this publication called Noemma and it's artificial general intelligence is already here and they say today's frontier models perform competently even on novel tasks they were not trained for crossing a threshold that previous generations of AI and supervised deep learning systems never managed and they say frontier language models can perform competently at pretty much any information task that can be done by humans can be posed in

answered using natural language and has quantifiable performance. Effectively, what they're saying is we've trained these large language models. I guess they're calling them frontier language models because they want to sound fancy. And they're able to handle a variety of different tasks, which is general intelligence. It's kind of a big boast to say that AGI is here, though. I think we tend to think of AGI as being really on par with human level. intelligence, not below, even if it can handle a bunch of different tasks. Curious what you make of this bold statement from Blaze and Peter.

I mean, I, you know, I would sort of disagree, but then how you, it's just all about how you define it, right? I mean, that's what it comes down to. And, like, I like, I sort of subscribe to the theory that artificial intelligence is anything a computer can't do yet, that, that's that popular saying. It's like, you know, every time one of these, like, like, transform models, in large language walls, it's the same thing. Like, it blew everyone's mind.

And now, you know, you hear a lot of people just saying, well, you know, they're really just prediction engines. They just predict the next word prediction. It's not really anything special. Right. Obviously, I think it's, it's incredible technology. It's very useful. And I think it's going to change.

We're really only at the very beginning of this because like open AI, which is crazy, we'll probably, you'll probably bring this up. But like their revenue is, is, you know, pretty high for a startup but they are like turning business away I mean they don't have enough GPUs to satisfy the demand so

and that's sort of across the industry so I think like just the fact that and their model like GPT4 when you it's something like 1.7 trillion parameters which is like the number of calculations and you know you don't they've like they've found a creative way

to reduce the number of parameters that it actually calculated on each letter, each token. So, like, you can't even actually, like, fully utilize GPT4. And just, if you think about that, like, we haven't really even explored what these, what these things are capable of. We haven't unleashed that into, like, the universe and allowed the creative minds of individuals just come up with stuff.

And, you know, so they might actually have some, they might have some sense of, like, how powerful these things really are. So they might be seeing something we're not. But I think, and I'll finish with this, like the one thing they can't do is understand causality, right? They don't have the ability to know, like, cause and effect. And I think that's like this really important component of intelligence. And I sort of think, I subscribe to the theory that that,

which who knows if it will ever come, is like the missing piece to AGI. Exactly. Yeah, I think that it's so interesting that that phrase that artificial intelligence is anything that a computer can't do because it feels like when we get AI on par with human level intelligence, like, we won't even know or it will just be able. It's not like there's like a, you know, a flag that goes up and be like, we did it. Like, you know, people be like, this thing sucks. And this thing doesn't do what I wanted to do. You know, it's slow. They'll just start ordering it around. and you know yeah exactly or we'll nuke us all that's another possibility can you do another uh five minutes sure okay so um one well yeah one last thing i wanted to talk to you about was you spoke with the person who put together that whole like we need to pause AI or things are going to go go to hell and uh and obviously nobody paused AI and you know things are good uh And what was their reaction?

Did they admit that they had been a little bit panicky? And ultimately, that whole panic was unnecessary. No, I mean, his view, if you read the interview, it was that he never actually was really expecting a pause. Like that wasn't really the goal. And it was really just to draw attention. And it did draw attention. It did create this, this huge debate and, you know, and therefore it was a success.

I mean, I think that's the takeaway. I also think, I kind of think there's a risk in all of this because people are impatient, right? And if you say, like, you know, the killer computers are coming, they're kind of thinking that's going to happen in the next six months. if it or a year let's say but if it doesn't happen in three years five years i mean i think people will will start sort of like tuning out all these warnings so i think that sort of yeah there's a boy who cried wolf sort of issue yeah exactly exactly so that's kind of my that's kind of my take on on that you know i love that you went i love that you went and interviewed him because it's like that's one of those things that would typically just been like, you know, this flash in the pan

and nobody checks in and people make a joke about it every now and again. And the instinct to be like, hey, let's go speak to the Pledge guy and talk about what's happened. So it's pretty cool. Thanks. Okay, Reid. Thank you for being here. Definitely tough week of news. But I think that I hope we did it justice and to everybody who's listened. I want to say thank you. So thanks again, Reed. Yeah. Love your podcast. Happy to be on. Thank you. And where can people find your stuff? I really do recommend the semaphore technology. Yeah, we have a semifor technology landing page. So if you Google, you know, S-E-M-A-F-O-R technology, you'll see that. I am on X slash Twitter and the and the socials.

Got to separate the news from social media. No, I'm kidding. I also. No, no, shout out your handle. Yeah, just at my name, Reid Albergotti. And, you know, our newsletter is free. So sign up for the newsletter. We love getting reader feedback. You know, we're brand new. So, you know, we know we're not perfect.

So just it's a, it's really like, I love kind of building this community of readers. And we would love to have you join us. All right, Reed. Thanks again. Thank you, everybody for listening. Stay safe. Hopefully it's a calm weekend. And once again, appreciate you listening to us where we won't shy away from the tough topics and won't get it right every time.

But we will talk about them and we'll try to do our best to analyze them. So thanks again for being here. Have a great weekend. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. Thank you.