Big Technology Podcast - OpenAI's Big Week, The Pin Is Here, Cruise's Major Recall

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Big Technology Podcast hits 1 million downloads 2) OpenAI's developer feels looks like Apple 3) Building GPT bots with no code 4) OpenAI promises to pay for legal defense of copyright lawsuits 5) Andreessen Horowitz says copyrighted material is key to billions in value 6) Is "The Pin" the next smartphone? 7) Wait, are we buying the Pin? 8) The Pin's cool features 9) Elon Musk's AI is out 10) Is Microsoft's close knit relationship with OpenAI a bigger strength than realized? 11) Cruise recalls 950 robotaxis 12) Have we reached Peak subscription? 13) Ranjan's lessons about subscription at the FT 14) Our new idea for podcasts on the PIN -- You can subscribe to Big Technology Premium for 25% off at https://bit.ly/bigtechnology 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]

Open AI hosts its developer day, narrows GPT use cases, and promises to defend copyright claims. Cruise does a major recall. Have we reached peak subscription? And the PIN is here. 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. We have a great show for you today. A quick show on a Friday. We're joined as always by Ron John Roy, Ron John, welcome. I'm ready to make my own GPT. Let's go. It's time, finally.

Okay, I'm excited to hear what you think, whether this is actually going to be a real thing or not, and how this actually changes Open AI's competitive position after we talked about all the problems they might have last week. But first, I want to make a quick announcement. I'm pleased to announce the Big Technology podcast after three and a half years of being on the market. Has finally hit one million downloads. So I want to say thank you to all of you, the listeners who come here a week after week and tune into us. One million is a major milestone started this podcast in 2020, effectively as an excuse to speak with interesting people. And because you've been here week after week, we've just gotten better and better in terms of the access.

And hopefully it feels more like a real show now, now that we're so deep into it. We have lots of really great CEO and other executive interviews coming up in the next few weeks. maybe we'll tease them at some point the show. But again, this couldn't happen without you, the listeners. And not only have we reached the million download mark, but we had a gathering last night,

a small gathering at the home of Campbell Brown who's leaving Meta, along with her and Joe Marquesia, VC, who's been on this show before helped us host it. We had about 50 people joining us to celebrate. And it was amazing, and we made a small announcement. It took three years to hit

a million downloads, and we're to celebrate that. But I can announce that as of, well, as of the last month, we're now on track to do a million every year, which is so exciting. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, that announcement is that not only have we hit the million listener or million download, Mark, but we're now on schedule to do a million downloads, if not more, every year. And again, couldn't happen without you. So I want to say thanks to all of you, the listeners. And also, a big thank you to Ranjan. Ranjan, you've been a major, major part of this. And it's great to be able to speak with you week after week about everything going on in the tech world. So thank you.

Million downloads. This is exciting. Definitely exciting. Okay, let's get into the news. So first of all, OpenAI held its first developer day this week. Sam Altman came on stage, was doing the whole Steve Jobs thing with all the Apple stuff, Apple seeming stuff in the background. I'm curious if you saw the parallel. But the major news of the day, and this is coming from CNET, And it's actually, it's quite pertinent from seeing it. OpenAI looks for its iPhone moment with custom GPT chatbot apps. Basically, what OpenAI introduced was the ability to build chatbot apps with effectively natural language where you say you're now a bot that's going to, you know, the example Sam Altman gave was you're going to give advice to startups in the mode of Sam Altman and just like loaded a bunch of his speech transcripts in there. Next thing you know, it sounds like him. and it can be done without any programming, and this is how CNET put it.

It'll let you build special purpose AI apps using its technology, and with a new app store coming that'll let you find or share these GPTs, as the company is calling these customized artificial intelligence tools, OpenAI looks like it's hoping to have something of an iPhone moment. Ranjan, what was your perspective watching this? Do you think that this is starting to alleviate some of the concerns we've had about OpenAI, or does it bring up new ones? What was your reaction? All right. So the first thing, when we say it was Apple-like, my favorite part of this week's keynote was this was Apple-like, but the old Apple. Because for anyone who's watched

any recent Apple event, nowadays, they're pre-recorded, super high gloss. That kind of developer community energy of people in a room excited is completely gone. They've purposely taken it away. This felt like one of those old events. This felt like, Everyone in the room genuinely excited live demos that actually worked and were cool. So all of those things, I think, really good for Open AI, really interesting, good for technology in general. Specific to the announcement around these custom GPTs, I think this is a pretty big deal because being able to create narrow sets of information that solve narrow problems is actually one of the biggest limitations, chat GPT or other generalized tools have had. far. And then you get into, whenever you have, whenever you're trying to solve the entire universe of information, that's when it leads to hallucinations. That's when it leads to other

problems. Now the idea that anyone can easily just upload some information, and from that body of information, there can be a chat bot that only queries that body of information. That can be potentially huge. This is something that I've done manually and built tools and products myself and it's really time consuming and difficult and you need developers. Now anyone can go in and do this. So I think this is pretty big and pretty exciting. These things are going to be extremely easy to build. I think the real question here is, is anybody actually going to want to use them? Like, why would I go use a Sam Altman startup bot? Or why would I go use a Canva bot, for instance, to create some graphic design material? If I could just go watch the Sam Altman talk on

YouTube or just go to Canva and build exactly what I need with the broader menu of things. What's the use case? Yes. So this is, from a technology perspective, I think this is really interesting. From a consumer and business standpoint, I'm a little confused. And that's because right now, I think every business has this problem, that they have all this information. So the idea of being able to just query only that information, avoid hallucinations, I think that's actually a huge opportunity, this idea of a consumer-facing app store where I will create my own GPT and then put it out in this market and someone will use it, I'm not 100% sure exactly what the use cases are, but I still think the flip side of that is it will potentially unleash

a whole new wave of creativity and people doing cool ideas and creating these use cases. Because, again, I remember the first app I ever downloaded on the App Store was a thing that made it like you were drinking beer. Do you remember this app in the iPhone? No, I don't. You would hold your iPhone. I might have drank too much in this app and just forgotten. No, no, no. Seriously, you would hold your iPhone up and it would use the accelerometer.

And as you turned the iPhone around, it would look like the beer was disappearing. The most ridiculous thing. So the idea that that would lead to a multi-billion dollar business and transform tech. technology clearly wasn't easy to forecast. So I think this idea of opening this up, making the, and again, the other thing Open AI is so good at, separate from the underlying models and big technology products that they build is their great at user interface and experience. That's why ChatchipT was the revolution it was. It's just easy to use. It's good. It's nice to use. It's delightful. So I think if they can do that and really let anyone,

experiment and play and come up with these use cases, I think it gets pretty interesting. Okay, so here's the real question. Well, one of the main questions I came away thinking about, which was that there's been this long debate of whether it even made sense to build a startup in AI because effectively what you were was this thin wrapper on top of OpenAI software. And people said, well, if you're a thin wrapper on Amazon Web Services, you can build at a pretty effective SaaS company, right? and so that was the argument to say go and build away on these platforms but the thing is open AI just seems like it has an interest in getting more and more deep into what people are using

its software to build trying to get deeper into their territory and something like this really makes it easy for you know more competitors to come and compete with the startups that are out there today and okay maybe that creates more companies but like let me just give you this example right there's this company character AI that I like to pick on a lot because it seems like it's the least defensible business in the entire AI world. And it was like, you know, given a $1 billion evaluation led by Andreessen Horowitz, of course. And you can like talk to historical figures, right? So if you want to go to speak to Abe Lincoln, you can go into Character AI and speak with him. I bet with this new GPT creator, you can just upload like, you know,

all the open Abraham Lincoln speeches, and you can make an amazing Abraham Lincoln bot. And what are you going to go to character AI? You could probably be able to better Abraham Lincoln through this stuff. So what do you think? Does this sort of settle the question of like whether thin wrapper startups are actually valuable and tell us, no, they are not? Thin wrapper startups are dead.

That's, that's it. I mean, I think they, Sam Altman even said that, you know, this is just the best way to build the technology and to scale overall consumer utilization. So, I mean, it's whether they want to or not, this is the way the industry is going to go. And I would say for a while, there has been that feeling in the entire market that these thin wrapper startups will die. And yeah, we can go make our A Blinken bot right away.

We can take all the big technology transcripts and make Alex bot pretty quickly. And yeah, I think the, but that's the big question that this was, I thought, I thought, I thought made this announcement really exciting. We have talked a lot about what are the business models around generative AI. There's so much excitement and so many high valuations, but it's still so unclear around what's going to be a sustainable business model. And I think this was a big moment in defining what the next few years are going to look like. And to all the Thin Rapper startups, I say good riddance, let more people build with this stuff.

But the question is going to be how they're going to build. And that leads us to the second core part of this announcement, which is that OpenAI has effectively guaranteed to take on your defense costs if you get sued for copyright while building with some of its tools. So this is from TechCrunch. OpenAI promises to defend business customers against copyright claims. As part of a new program called Copyright Shield, OpenAI says that it'll pay legal costs incurred by customers, specifically of its developer platform and ChatGPT Enterprise, who face lawsuits over IP claims against work generated by an open AI tool. I mean, doesn't that just incentivize people to just go steal reams of copyrighted content and then train these custom GPs or anything effectively using open AI software and not give a damn about the fact that, you know, you're using material that has been protected legally from being stolen. So I'm curious what you think about this.

It's sort of concerning to me to see that this program is just not only that it exists, but that's marketed as a way to get people to build an open AI software. I'm going to say yes to all of the above because I do think it does create that incentive and I think it's going to create some really complex, convoluted, murky copyright situations. One of the use cases that I already had been playing with before it was this easy was if you upload a bunch of analyst reports around specific companies from different banks and then try to query them, you know, that's something very personally useful. But am I allowed to build something like that if these are, you know, am I allowed to take all the knowledge these other entities create and then just create this layer that other people can use and then potentially monetize it if I'm putting it on the GPT store?

I think this stuff is going to be really problematic. And I think they come out with this announcement today because Adobe had come out with a similar announcement. I believe Microsoft itself had. I think they're just doing this, assuming they're going to potentially have to assume some cost here, but otherwise people don't build in here. And then it never takes off. So they're just hoping that the GPT store becomes so big that they can just pay whatever they need to on the side. And hopefully it won't be enough to actually disrupt the business. This is one of those things that they announce and like when the rubber meets the road.

We're really going to find out. It's not like one of those things that's like, that was a nice feature. Like they're going to have to use this. And one thing I'll say is, they've raised a lot of money, but you can't pay lawyers in Azure credits, at least not in my part of the world. Maybe. Maybe that's the next thing, paying lawyers and Azure credits, paying all of your vendors and Azure credits. And by the way, this is a broader thing that's happening across the tech world right now. We have not only this, but there was a headline this week from Andreessen Horowitz, who apparently made this submission to the U.S. copyright agencies saying that

billions of dollars in AI investments could be worth a lot less if companies developing the technology are forced to pay for the copyrighted data that make it work. This is from Insider. And this is from the A16 writing that's quoted in the story. The bottom line is this. Imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models would either kill or significantly hamper their development. Now listen, I like using this technology. I've generally been totally okay with them using my work to train and as this industry has gotten bigger it just seems to me that like for them to come out and say we would lose billion potentially billions in value if we paid copyright it's totally shifting my opinion on this because it means that the copyrighted

material is providing billions of value and if that is the case there should be a deal don't you think i thought this was this is one of the most interesting communication strategies that I think we're going to be able to look back at and think about, was it the right one or not? Because they're obviously trying to take the toe the line that this industry, this technology will not develop if they're hampered by copyright. But in doing so, you're right. They are making the admission that so much of the value created is based on copyrighted material. They're saying it out loud. So I think this was pretty clumsy. I think trying to scare us into thinking we're not going to get the technological development and promise because of

copyright and liability, but then admitting it, I think this was pretty clumsy. So I think it's going to be, yeah, this is going to be one of the most, the legal side. If you're a lawyer, get involved in this stuff right now. Start learning about it because honestly, this is going to be the most interesting space in all of law for the next few years. So I will make a quick plug that I just got off the another recording with kathy edwards who's the VP of search at google and we talked about them training on copyrighted material and whether publisher should opt in or opt out so that's going to drop on monday we talked a lot about generative search with that which i know that we like to discuss ronjohn i won't give it away but we definitely got into the nitty gritty on that stuff and

we also talked about the uh the big SEO article that the verge had i think that here's i still have it up it's an article is the people who ruined the internet about SEO folks. It was fun to ask Google about a story with that type of headline. So as we keep going on this, there was another AI story that caught your attention, which is there's this thing called the PIN, and the PIN is effectively an AI phone. It's from a company called You Main. And this is a headline, Silicon Valley's big, bold, sci-fi bet on the device that comes after the smartphone. This is what the time says.

Humane is billing the pin as the first artificially intelligent device. It can be controlled by speaking aloud, tapping a touchpad, or projecting a laser display onto the palm of a hand. In an instant, the device's virtual assistant can send a text message, play a song, snap a photo, make a call, or translate a real-time conversation into another language. I mean, wow, you kind of just like wear it on your, like a lapel pin, but it can do all these things. Ronan, talk a little bit about your perspective on this device, whether you think it's cool. Are you going to buy one? What's your perspective? I have so many conflicting feelings on this right now. This is one, I think this is going to be one of the more interesting stories in consumer technology.

Because on one side, I have been hoping that the form factor of a phone changes because I think over the last number of years, I actually remember I am now an Apple Eco ecosystem locked in person. But for a brief period I had, I think it was the first pixel and the pixel buds. And Google Assistant is light years ahead of Siri, which Siri somehow still is absolutely terrible. And I remember I had the pixel bud earphones and it actually works so well where you can call up the right song on Spotify. You can actually do things and take actions just with voice without pulling your phone out. So I started thinking, I remember at the time, like a voice only phone not having to carry around your phone this could totally change the way like right now i feel the idea that we're all walking around with this block of tech in our hand is not going to be how

things look in 10 years or 15 i hope it's not how they look in 10 or 15 years so what is that next form factor is it glasses which people have tried so the pin idea is definitely a new one um so yeah I am overall very excited about someone pushing very hard on changing what a mobile phone is and means in our mobile computing device. I just want to say I cannot wait for the butt here. The what? But the butt is here. The butt is here.

The whole time you were talking that up. I'm like, there's a butt coming. There's a butt. There's a butt. The founders of Humane, AI. And again, Humane has raised two. $230 million before even launching this first product. They raised from the likes of Tiger Global and others.

So, you know, like the who's who of big money fundraising. And the launch video, it's this 10-minute video, was the weirdest thing I've ever. Speaking of, Keynotes or Apple-like launching and Open AI and Sam Altman capturing the spirit of Apple. This was like whatever Apple ever did right in the past, take the opposite of that it's the two founders are very like somberly and weirdly in front of the camera and then they start holding up the pin they don't even say what you're going to use it for they go right into the color ways of the pin they start talking about how you can get a battery

add on for the pin already indicating that the battery life is going to suck like rather than just telling you why the hell would i wear a pin and i again they start to touch on the use cases. There's a shorter one minute kind of promotional video that gets into it a little better where again, you're like walking around instantly translating conversations. You can take a video or a photo, but just by telling it to you can play music. Like basically again, you can take actions that you normally would on your phone and just do it in this totally different form factor. But I strongly recommend people to go watch at least some of the 10 minute video. You don't have to watch the whole thing because you will be bored to tears. But I just don't.

understand. You've been, they've been working on this for five years. They've raised hundreds of millions of dollars and just the video they came up with was the most energy sapping thing imaginable. There was a meme of the guy in the video, the founder, co-founder tapping the pin and saying, make me look more excited. But it, Ron, it's so like you to be like, listen, like, you know, the product looks cool, but let's take a little deeper look into the marketing to show, basically take a look into the mental space of this company. and see whether we think it's going to be successful or not, because I think that actually matters.

You know, if you're not able to get that across, it generally indicates that there's something else going on there. And it is interesting to, you know, if this is the natural successor to the smartphone, it does the exact, and you're right, it does the exact opposite of the, it starts with why approach that Apple has always used with Simon Seneck has pointed out

that if you're getting a marketing message, you always talk about why, not what. And they talked about what before why, and I don't think they even mentioned the why. no and the original iPhone aside from my beer app which i think you all should look up and go see this this classic history of technology moment um again i remember steve jobs it was like some of the elements where it's it's not like the internet it is the internet it was showing that web browsing could be possible on the phone taking a new york times article and actually make showing that it's

possible to read it comfortably on the phone the snap to zoom pinch to zoom showing this like thing that just you can instantly magically enlarge a photo and zoom in on it these were all the why exactly the why and they made you want it and it made it look cool whereas whereas like if i were to just read text about this pin i probably was more interested until i saw them not be excited about it at all and then yeah now it's it's definitely not going to be my main phone. I don't even know if I'm going to buy it. It's $699, by the way, $699 and $24 a month for the service that's, I think, routed through T-Mobile. But there were a few cool things that I liked, for instance, this screen that you can project on your hand, just like basically you

hold your hand out and this like laser thing projects a screen on your hand, which, you know, you tilt your finger one way or the other, and it allows you to answer a phone call or scroll through different music, which is cool. I just think maybe. be wearing a pin like that is a little bit doofy. I don't know if that's exactly what I want to be doing. That's the other problem. That's the other problem too. It's again, as you started this conversation, you said lapel pin. Who wears a lapel pin other than a politician during a primary series of like the American flag? So it's so different that it really is going to require people to be so excited about it that they're willing to put their coolness and reputation on the line to

wander around with this thing. So yeah, I think I'm so, I'm just so confused. But again, the projector thing, if it works, it looks very cool. Yeah, this is the future. This is the future I want. This is what, like, I'm ready for some massive transformation in consumer technology. It's been a while. But, yeah, I, I cannot definitive. say yet whether I will buy it or not. I might wait to see one, hopefully, from someone else, but I might buy it. I might buy it. I'm not decided yet. I might, I'm not, I don't think I'm going to buy it. It's, it's expensive, $6.99, and I just bought the new iPhone. So, but I do think that just like, I don't know, if they sent me a demo, I would absolutely try it out. I'll put

it that way. Yeah, I think the only thing I was thinking about is I got the Apple Watch Ultra recently, and it was the first time I actually got the, with T-Mobile, it's like five bucks a month, actual service, sell service on the watch. And I actually will leave the house now sometimes without my phone and only the watch. And in a way, maybe the Apple Watch Ultra kind of is like the pin, because you can do things with it, you can talk to it, you can play music on it. So, so, and which is good, which is, which reminded me that there is a future after the phone, but maybe it is the pin. Maybe it's the pin. I think it's the brain chip. Obviously, it's the brain chip. All right. Brain chip. So speaking of Elon Musk and technological breakthroughs,

the long-awaited GROC AI, which is the AI that Musk has been developing, came out or is in limited preview right now. And the major criticism of it is that it's a bit cringy and has lots of boomer humor and is not actually funny, though it tries to be. And Sam Altman, open AI CEO, decided to do two things at once. First of all, he tried to demo his new GPT bot builder and two try to take down his, uh, for the former, the co-founder of the company that he is now CEO of, aka Elon Musk. So he does this, uh, tweet that says GPTs can save a lot of effort. And he puts this instruction into a GPT builder, be a chatbot that answers questions with cringy boomer humor in a sort of awkward shock to get laughed sort of way. And then GPT

builder responds. Great. The chatbot is set up. Its name is Grock. How do you like the name? Or would you prefer something else? I mean, just an absolutely ruthless takedown. And then Elon Musk responded. And he goes like this. He goes, GPT4, more or like GPT snore. When it comes to humor, GPT4 is about as funny as a screen door on a submarine. Humor is clearly banned at OpenAI, just like many other subjects, it sensors. That's why it couldn't tell a joke if it had a goddamn instruction manual. It's like a comedian with a stick so far up its ass, it can take the bark. It can, oh, can taste the bark. Okay, that was Musk's response. There's one more line of Musk response. I'm going to ask you this. Do you think that

musk wrote that response that's a good i was at just as you're saying it i was like so you can taste the bark that's good that's actually pretty good if grok wrote that maybe i'm going to have to give grok a little bit of credit because i it's rare i say this on this podcast i agree with elon musk one of the the most annoying things about the way chaty bt barred even claude everything it's like everything is so defensive and hedging itself and saying, but I'm just a chat bot. I do not do these things. I don't know humor. I don't know. So on that side, I think there's a there's a space for something that is a little funnier. But again, maybe that could just be a custom GPT. And you can actually just train it on actually funny things. And that'll be enough. Yeah. So I think there's room for

improvement in terms of all of these chatbots the way they've been so defensively programmed to date. But again, what Brock is and what it's going to be, is it going to just kind of be like a rumble or something that's kind of like the anti-woke technology version of some other platform? I have a feeling it could go in that direction more than any kind of like big transformative technology. Right. And so by the way, that comeback was written by G.PT, but was written by GROC. Musk admitted it. So here's the thing. Or a team of copywriters that came up with them and then attributed to GROC. Well, in which case they should all be fired. It wasn't that funny. Here's my thing. If you want to build a piece of technology that's a counterweight to what they're doing in the mainstream and wants to not be more edgy, but just be able to go places that the current technology won't, then you should build an equal.

good piece of tech and just have it go there. And it doesn't mean program it with political views, but just like, you know, when it gets, when it gets topics where there's room for debate on it, like actually decide to like lay out the debate as opposed to chat GPT, which so often will take one side. So to me, Elon Musk did hire like lots of great people to build this. But if his answer is this sort of edge lord that, um, is supposed to it's like cringy funny as opposed to what I just laid out, I don't see it working. Yeah, I think that's a really good point because we have talked about this a lot that the team he's assembled for this X.a.i, he's gotten some serious talent. But this is again a reminder that like

you're some leader in the field and whatever you have been working on, it's turning into a joke about a stick up someone's ass and tasting bark. Like, I mean, all this year, yeah, all the serious work you've done in your entire life and this is what is coming to. I'm curious how long people will stick around. Right. Okay. Before we go to break, I want to address something that we brought up last week. So I was making all the cases for why Open AI might be at a disadvantage. And I heard something this week that was actually quite interesting and makes the case that one of the disadvantages that I talked about is actually an advantage. And I'm curious what you think, Ranjan. So I said that open AI is limited to Microsoft. And that will keep it out of, you know, potentially keep it out of

places like Google and Amazon where a lot of people are going to be looking to build. And, you know, it's the opposite of the anthropic model. So effectively, it kind of seems like Microsoft is taking more of the Apple approach with the more closed approach. Now, here's how this could actually benefit Open AI. If they work very closely, right, Microsoft is deeply embedded with open with open AI they have the huge investment in the company if they work closely you know you're talking about silicon you're talking about servers through Azure and you're talking about the technology if they work closely to integrate all three in a way that an anthropic never will potentially with so many different other bots you're going to get better

performance through open AI working with Microsoft what do you think um I still think this is such a tough one because, again, Microsoft, I think that closed ecosystem has tremendous benefits in the sense of risk is such a factor in generative AI that especially with enterprise clients that anything you can do to decrease that perception of risk is a good thing is something that I think can work for them. But again, as we've talked about, you know, it's still something that the pace of innovation, the more access to different platforms you have in order to push this kind of technology is still better. So I don't know.

I think in the same way when we started this conversation around what does the sustainable business model for any kind of generative AI look like going forward? I think especially at the consumer level, especially at the enterprise level, we're going to see, you know, completely new models shape out. And again, always exciting competition. Exactly. Yeah, I think it was an interesting point that I hadn't considered. So I felt it's worth bringing up. We're here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, joined as always by Ron John Roy of Margins talking a lot about AI before the break.

Did you already go out and try to pre-order the pin? If you get it, let us know. We'd like to hear how your experience is with the product. Okay, on the other side of this break, I'm going to, it's accountability time because there's been a major recall with crews and I think I need to take some accountability for the bullishness I've had on this company and we'll go back to our debate about whether it's good or bad that they're being more cautious but definitely something that is going slower than anticipated. So we'll talk about that on the other side of the break and

then also about whether we've reached peak subscription, which we're going to end with here this week on November 10th. All right, back right after this. 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 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, Friday edition, breaking down all the news with myself and Ron John Roy of margins, who you can't see because he's off camera, but he's currently navigating some hallway through a house and has just managed to seamlessly pull off a transition to a second room as we record. Ron John, it's impressive that you just did that, I have to say. Somebody get this guy on an NFL team. I just carried my microphone, my laptop into another room seamlessly. So thank you for recognizing that. You know, we are all about giving credit words due here on the show. And that credit starts at home. All right. Let's talk about Cruz. Cruise is in a very interesting position. And by interesting, I mean awful position. So what happened

was this week, they recalled 950 robotaxies after a pedestrian collision. This is from CNBC. Cruise, the Autonomous Vehicle Venture, owned by General Motors, has issued a recall affecting 950 of its robotaxies following a pedestrian collision in San Francisco last month. Previously, the company had grounded all of its driverless operations, and now it is going all the way. Okay, the cruise autonomous vehicle braked aggressively before impact and then tried to pull over to the side of the road. In the process, it dragged a pedestrian forward about 20 feet. Not only has this happened, the company has also given up. I believe, on development of its custom-built car that was built specifically for self-driving

and didn't have a driver's seat. You know, basically had facing seating with plenty of room in the cabin. Kyle talked about it when he was here on the show. That is out. I've been getting owned in my group chat with some of my reporter friends because I was just way, way too bullish.

Ranjan, the last time Cruz had a problem, you praised the fact. that it was working with the government. But this seems like something different altogether. And definitely an accountability moment for me. Obviously, Waymo is still going strong, but a really rough moment for Cruz. What's your perspective here?

Yeah, I think, and we had talked about this last week, that to me it's still the fact that Cruz is engaging with regulators very, very responsibly, I still think is good for the overall development of autonomous vehicles. And it's definitely, the press is not good right now. It's still recalling 950 Robotaxies. More stuff is coming out around, you know, can it recognize, I think it was like what children or differentiate them from adults, are they missing holes in the road? There's more questions coming around out about this, but I still feel, again, you felt

the magic of riding in a fully autonomous vehicle. I think these problems will get solved, and I still think the fact that Cruz is engaging on this topic is still overall better. But at the moment, certainly doesn't seem great. But I still think in the two to three year time frame, you can go back in the group chats and say you are right. Yeah. So there has been this, and I think that's crucial to point out, right?

So A, definitely too bullish, but B, the technology is real. Like, there have been so many moments in tech like where a technology. has hit a speed bump and that was it for it right it was oh it was done and over with and I just don't think that's the case this stuff will happen it will work but that being said it's going to take longer I mean Kyle Vote was here the CEO of Cruz talking about how the company was going to uh 10x this year and 10x the next year and obviously that's not going to happen and you know I pointed it out I spoke one on CNBC and talked about it and I pointed out that when a CEO says something like that they're held accountable and if it doesn't work out it's really bad for them

So we're going to, we'll see what happens here. I mean, they're like currently, like, you know, looking for a chief safety officer. It just feels like a desperate scramble. So they obviously have some issues that they're going to have to work out. But that being said, I would say that we're definitely, the fact that these, well, I don't know about Cruz, but I can say Waymo for sure. The fact that this is out on the road, this technology is working as impressive. There's a roadmap to get there. But the path, as it seems to always go with self-driving, is just a little.

a little bit further down the road than anticipated. But anyway, I felt it was important to bring up because, you know, if I get things wrong or if I'm overly bullish on something or if I'm overly bearish on something and I've proven wrong, I think it's important to talk about. Can't just pretend like it didn't happen and certainly won't in this case. Yep. Okay. It won't be as smooth as we hope for, but it's coming.

Okay. Yeah, I agree. All right. Let's talk a little bit about peak subscription. So this is coming to the podcast in a couple of ways. First of all, we've seen these streaming services like Max and Netflix, Disney Plus, and all the others go through a moment where it seemed like their growth would just continue forever and it hasn't, right? It's been the bumpiest year in recent memory for these streaming services and think about the stock fluctuations, even seeing something like Netflix, lose subscribers, quarter over quarter for a couple of, quarters and then have to do things like crack down on on ad on on on account sharing and

introduce advertising right so like that idea of peak subscription exists in streaming and then it also we're we're I don't know if we're fully encountering it with paid newsletters but I definitely am you know in the middle of this launch of a paid big technology newsletter and you know I'm thrilled with the response so far but I just like I've learned that this is going to be definitely a much deeper grind than anticipated I think people, as opposed to, like, jumping on and saying, I'm going to subscribe right away, they're asking, okay, show me what you're providing. And obviously, that's the burden. That's the, yeah, the burden on me is to actually go ahead and prove that, but I am learning

that that's something that exists. So here is a tweet from Jack Marshall, who he runs toolkits, which works on subscriptions or co-runs it. He goes, have we reached peak subscription? Now, 29% of subscribers say the total number of digital publications, they say, subscribe to has increased over the past 12 months, while just 7% say it's decreased. And 81% of subscribers now own subscriptions to more than one digital publication. Now, that sounds bullish to me. I'm curious how you think of this moment, Ron John, and how you read that data. Yeah, so the subscription topic has always been really interesting to me because when I actually worked at the Financial Times in the early 2010s, I worked on the subscription side of the business

and business development and innovation around subscriptions. So it had a firsthand look. And this is when the FT really was taking the lead in media and showing that a subscription model was possible and viable and sustainable. And then I saw, you know, in the heyday of 2021 and everyone thinking that there will be unlimited subscriptions and people will pay for non-stop, newsletter content,

and everything else, it always felt a little bit optimistic. I think we're actually in a healthy part of the overall curve around consumer adoption of subscriptions because I think the market is just now competitive. I tweeted this recently and was very annoyed from Max slash HBO or whatever it's called currently. They're changing their subscription plan again. I think I'm paying 15 bucks a month.

And then now they change features. You can stream it on fewer devices. every streaming surface is adding advertising-based tier like Hulu has had for a long time. So overall, the market is just getting a bit saturated and competitive. I think the overall share of every individual's wallet that goes towards subscription, content, media, newsletters, everything else is going to grow. I think it's here to stay, but I think everyone's realizing that maybe it's not unlimited. Again, this is probably the first time in a long time that I actually am thinking.

of do I cut Paramount Plus or Peacock or Max or Apple TV or Netflix or I'm probably subscribed to even more services and start after each one keeps rising rising in prices and decreasing the overall quality, the offering. People have to start to question, what am I paying for? Right. It does seem like with every quarter, there's like another announcement of a price increase and Julia Borsten came on and called it streamflation. I mean, does this eventually read? you know a tipping point here can it keep going on forever yeah I think this stickiness of these services again the moment and this is obviously from a personal standpoint this is the first time in the entire time I've subscribed to media

services like starting with Netflix years ago probably maybe like a decade ago or more this is the first time I've questioned where do I want to cut and never had that question before but suddenly again i don't even know my monthly bill is easily well over a hundred bucks now and like you know when disney goes from 699 to i think it's 1399 now netflix keeps going up in price like i think and this is kind of this is representative the overall story in the economy that companies were able to pass on the costs of inflation to consumers over the past few years again an extra value meal at mcdonald's costs i think like 14 bucks now um so far consumers hadn't been terribly resistant to it, I think everyone is going to start

making those decisions now. So it's definitely going to become increasingly competitive in the space. So what's your subscription mix right now? Just shout out every single thing you subscribe to. I can't even begin. I need to go through my, I need to subscribe to one of those services, subscribe to one of those services that tells you what you're subscribing to and how much you're spending because again up until now it's like paramount plus i want to watch champions league it's it's a couple of bucks a month i think you know like five bucks peacock i want to watch premier league netflix apple tv disney plus if i ever cancel my children would murder me but keep that going ron john yeah that's going to be the last one to go i think yeah so we have

Netflix ad supported. We have Max. We have the bunny ears antenna and we have an Xbox and that sort of our entertainment mix. Yeah. Wait, does over the air network still works? It does. Yeah, I mean, it's crucial for me on Sundays for football games, but we got the bunny ears antenna and CBS comes in pretty good, although a little staticy sometimes. Ah, interesting. Oh, and then also CNBC, CNBC Pro. So all those together. Yeah. I mean, but again, that's maybe where it gets interesting because, and again, going back to the big technology, premium subscription, a CNBC Pro, when there's utilization beyond just

entertainment, obviously there's additional value to these products. But so many of these products have essentially just been sold as entertainment, which is where I think the New York Times I was reading, they just hit 10 million subscribers. Exactly. But they positioned it well. they even said it's like it's it's it's almost an entertainment led company that then also drives the news side but they're cooking app the games crossword puzzle all of these things are just as critical to subscription as the news itself so so that i guess maybe we do start to see more bundling rather than everyone is just you know spread across a million different subscriptions definitely yeah i think i need to um you know figure out a gaming and a cooking strategy for a big technology and maybe that's what we got to do gaming and cooking for big technology actually if you ever want to do cooking i love technology gadgets in the kitchen so okay me you and the pin will just be the first

pin cooking channel pin cooking channel oh my god see that's the thing to succeed in this game you have to find the next platform and be early so only pin based media i think is the pivot to make right now I'm down. Be the first podcast on the pin. Podcast on the pin. So you worked at the Financial Times doing this stuff, Rajan. So what can you tell us about what you learned? Like what does inspire people to subscribe?

And what do publications need to do? I mean, I'm kind of asking selfishly here. Yeah. Well, so the FT had the greatest advantage in the game on becoming a subscription-based model because they have the brand that if you work in, certain industries, you have to subscribe, that to not subscribe almost makes you bad at your job or less educated or less, you know. So they had that huge advantage. But the other thing, though, they were, they were maniacal about how strict they were in locking down content. I don't know

if anyone's ever used this. I still get very annoyed. If you copy and paste text from an FTE article, there's this like 400 character thing that pops up of text over the text and when I'm just copying FT stuff and I'm a paying subscriber happily if you put into your own notes this thing it's like you are violating the terms and conditions please do not share but again it's a testament to how intense they were about locking down content you know to really test the the really I can't I believe I'm suggesting this. To really test the veracity of the open AI copyright shield, someone should copy and paste like a bunch of FT articles into the custom GPT

and let them go to war, like solve this issue. Let them, that's, we just set it off. And then they'll defend you in terms of copyright liability. They said it. There it is. That's what I think our next business is. We, we, you and I, we spend our days copying FT articles, putting them in open AI, making GPT, FT, GPT, that sounds amazing, by the way.

Sounds good. And creating a module on the pin that will read them to you as you cook. This pin-based media, it's already taken off. This is, this is exciting. There's got to be a catchy name for it. I don't know. Podcasts on the pin. I think that's, yeah, pincasts.

Pods on the pincasts. Oh, man, it's pincasts. Oh, you're welcome Humane AI. Yes, thank you, humane. Now you can be excited in your next video. All right, Ron John. thank you so much for joining great talking as always all right have a good week all right you too thank you everybody for being here with us on big technology podcast always great to bring the news to you

on friday um again thank you for helping us get across the one million download mark and again on track to do it every year all right that'll do it for us here and we'll see you next time on big technology podcast I'm going to be able to be.