Big Technology Podcast - OpenAI's New Video Generation Model, Zuck Returns Fire, Tesla's Fatal Crash

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) OpenAI's new video generation model Sora 2) Will Sora challenge Hollywood? 3) Does Sora understand physics or is it just spitting back video? 4) ChatGPT's declining user numbers 5) Gemini 1.5 6) Meta's new conceptual model of the world 7) Zuckerberg's Vision Pro review 8) Temu dominates the Super Bowl 9) Tesla's fatal, potentially self driving crash 10) A financial advice columnist put $50,000 in a shoebox and handed it to scammers. Would you? --- 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]

Let's talk about SORA, OpenAI's new video generation model, along with plenty of AI news this week, including the stagnation of chat GPT, meta's new AI model, and Gemini 1.5, and Edis, if that is not enough, we'll also break down Mark Zuckerberg's Vision Pro response and the wisdom of putting $50,000 in a shoebox. All that and more coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition when we break down the news in our traditional, cool-headed, and nuanced format. Wow, wow, wow, massive week of AI news and plenty of other good topics to talk about. We're joined as always by Ron John Roy of Margins. Ron John, welcome.

I try to underplay big news weeks in AI, but I think this actually is probably the biggest week, at least this year, but in a long time in AI news. Absolutely. So let's start with SORA, which is Open AI's model that instantly generates eye-popping video. It's a video generation model. And this is what the New York Times says. Opening Eye has unveiled a system that creates videos that look as if they were lifted from a Hollywood movie. A demonstration included short videos created in minutes of willy mammoths trotting through a snowy meadow, a monster gazing at a melting candle, and a Tokyo street seemingly shot by a camera swooping across the city.

Now, this is what they say the implications are. The technology could speed the work of season movie makers while replacing less experienced, artists entirely. It could also become a quick and inexpensive way of creating online disinformation, making it even harder to tell what's real on the internet. What do you think about that assessment? Do you agree with that? Like they're editorializing pretty big in a news article right at the top. I think we need to break this down into kind of like different categories. You have the actual technological achievement, the coolness factor, the impact on jobs, and then

disinformation and I really want to start with the technological advancement and the coolness factor because oh my god if you saw those demos i am so excited this is what i like this is probably the biggest advance i've seen in a while because again you go from mid journey version five to six dolly two to three all of those are still i don't want to say incremental because they're still big leaps but this is the first time in a long time that wow that when I first used chat GPT and I saw the text starting to stream across and actually answering my question and generating text, this is the first time I've had that feeling in a long time. And my favorite part of all of this is how Open AI probably, I think they're throwing

a bit of shade at Google on this one, that they make clear that these are all real demos and this is not just some research paper. Because every time meta and Google release this stuff, it's always just a new research paper and they'll get their headlines this is real okay but let me ask you this is what we're seeing okay it's definitely a breakthrough but is what we're seeing computers able being able to understand more than you know they have in the past or is it just as simple as like we trained a dolly like model with video instead of images and they can do images because you saw that they were able to like for instance put pirate ships in a cup of coffee so do you think these models like understand the fact that coffee is a liquid and a pirate ship is a solid and

therefore it would basically sail on the coffee ship the coffee cup the same way that it would on the water and let's do it this way so do you think this is increased understanding by the models or is it just simply like them taking the same process they have all the time because that is a very big difference yeah no no that that's exactly that's perfect that's i think that there's two layers to how big of an advancement this is as you said now physics are involved before the kind of physics understanding of how things move and what's happening in an image is obviously not nearly as important still how the boat would render the pirate ship would render on the coffee cup and balance or whatever in that still image still mattered but now how

things move even that you know the video they released the first tweet with uh women walking in Tokyo, how they're walking, how things move around her. That's huge. And then you start to think about the processing power and kind of like overall processing advancement here. Generating one still image is one thing. Generating in a one minute video clip essentially, I don't know, however many thousand frames with one prompt and doing it, I don't know how long this will take, how long it'll take to render this stuff. But I mean, that's a massive jump. There was some like really fun stuff also with the mistakes that I made like there were a bunch of people trying to place a beach chair down in the sand and it just kind of floated and wobbled and it's like wow like the what does the model think a beach chair is made of and what does it do like it does show I think some emergent understanding of physics like you mentioned and that is really the interesting thing we're going to see where it goes I think I'm a little bit more freaked out now about what AI is and what AI can do than I was at the beginning of the week and I'm curious speaking. Speaking of people being freaked out, what do you think Hollywood should feel about this?

I wish we had Sharon Waxman with us again from the rap talking about this stuff because the reaction from all the Hollywood trades is like, it's over, people pack it up. But that being said, like, come on, like this is not something in my opinion that can start to replace the feature length film. Yeah, you're not going to get acting. Like I think the entire art of acting is the most human thing imaginable and, you know, conveying human emotion in original ways is not going anywhere. I do think all these kind of things,

advertising is going to change a lot faster than feature films. I think this is the stuff that gets me excited that small brands and creators are going to be able to create videos in ways that they never would have been able to before and pretty quickly because there's not as much need. That's more just about doing it, setting the scene, communicating visually whatever you're trying to communicate. So I think feature-length films are nowhere near, you know, changing.

But, okay, I take that back because I think some changes you can see is maybe for B-roll, you know, like the little bits of film that, you know, are not involving an acting or an actor, I think that stuff might start to get generated and it'll actually make movies potentially better because you don't need to fly across the world to get one shot and you'll actually be able to story tell in a better way i feel like they can already do that with special effects though yeah no i think that's why the stuff has already been changing a good amount so yeah no i agree you know your half the stuff is shot even stuff about new york city is often shot in hollywood so right exactly yeah i agree so so that's why i don't think it's gonna be just pack it up hollywood you're done

I think this has a much bigger impact among smaller players, people, all that kind of stuff. The big players have already had a lot of this technology and access to it. It just makes it more readily available. And I think we should also note that this is not going to be available anytime soon, at least from Open AI. I mean, basically they were making the announcement showing that they got ahead of this model. I mean, their model is definitely far ahead of the other models that are out there. But they are also saying that they're trying to red team this, basically find

holds in the technology and that the general public should basically shouldn't hold its breath about getting it anytime in the near future yeah no i think they're they to their credit you know you always say open ai is in the hits business yes they're pretty good at product marketing and they and like you know again going at google and saying look these are real demos people created it's here getting that excitement going but still making sure and working on the product i think they've shown that they can release products pretty well, certainly better than Google has recently. Meta doesn't even really have

any consumer facing products in the same way. I think they have an image generator now, but Microsoft has been all right, but Open AI is still in this whole wave been the master of product releases and marketing. So I think they've started this one pretty well. Yeah, and I do think just going back to our original React,

to it is that this is incredible technology and seeing some of the videos and the way that it you know video can really trigger emotion in people and seeing the way that it was triggering emotion and people across Twitter yesterday and of course you had some people farming for clout but like seeing a cow a cat rolling around on a bed with someone was just like totally unbelievable and if there was any question of whether the progress at nai is going to come to an end or slowing down it doesn't seem like that's the case it seems like we are really in for another year of breakthroughs and this is i think the first big one on the agenda so what you're saying is in videos valuation makes sense no i'm not saying that no i think

i think i think i agree i think this is that's why i think this is a big week this is it i i agree that there's been a moment the last few months almost have felt calm in a good way that you can actually start trying to really use the technology and trying to figure it out. And then suddenly now it's like, oh, here we go. 2024 is going to be just as big. Exactly. But, and there's always a but, right? You mentioned that I think that Open AI is in the hits business. And here's why. It's that this technology can become equaled. And it's not, and because it's so new and novel, it's not always going to take off. And there's some data that I broke in big technology this week with a similar web, which is an online analytics company,

just looking at like where chat GPT stands. Because I think you'll remember in the summer, chat GPT stagnated a little bit. It had a couple of real big dips in usage, and people said once students come back, it's going to go back again and surpass its highs. Well, the data that I saw from similar web, which measures web traffic across the internet,

found that not only have they not reached their peak, They're now 11% off the peak that they hit in May, 23, stagnant from mid-20203, and they declined in both November and December this year, key months where students are in school and the usage dropped. So basically my perspective on this is that the chat chip ETs growth has flatlined, and if you want to read more and see the data, I'd definitely encourage you to go to big technology.com and check it out. And Ronan, I'm just kind of curious what you.

your reaction is to this. I mean, we thought for a minute, it was the fastest growing consumer product in history. It had 100 million users in about two months. And then we thought that, okay, it's such a cool technology that maybe it will continue to grow, but it hasn't. What do you think that means? What do you think the implications are for open AI and chat GPT?

Yeah, I think that's why this video, text a video, maybe that's why they're pushing it even more right now because personally, and we talked about this the other week, I have perplexity. I have Microsoft co-pilot. And let's all remember that Microsoft co-pilot for free gives you access to GPT 4 and Dolly 3, whereas with chat GPT, you have to pay for chat GPT plus 20 bucks a month. So they have a lot of competition.

And I'll admit, I've been Geminiing a little bit in the last week. I have. Doesn't it feel great not to say barding? Oh, my God. Let's not beat a dead horse. No, but I'm going to do this all year. all year long. All year long. Thank you. And I'll never forget the name Bard, because Gemini is great. I feel good saying Gemini. And it's working. It's working pretty well. And it's integrated

nicely. At first, I was a little surprised they did not release a separate app for it. And it's actually funny. I asked Gemini, does Gemini have an iOS app? And still in a good old school Bard fashion, And it returned to me Gemini, a crypto, the crypto trading app. And then another Gemini, it wasn't even self-aware about, I was asking if it self had an iOS app. Oh my goodness. But then they did, the way they released it is in the Google iOS app, Gemini is kind of, you can like hit a toggle and switch to Gemini mode. I actually think it's smart because it gets you into the Google app itself, uploading images and these things are already built in. Like, it still really entrenches it in the overall Google ecosystem that everyone's already, you know, used to.

So I actually think it could be a very, very smart consumer play. And a lot of people already have it on their phone anyways. And that means that they are going to be a direct competitor to chat GPT. And so you have so much competition coming from every single angle that just being the first, it might not be enough for them. So, okay. So one of the aspects might be competition, but the other aspect might be just the format is getting tired. I think that people were initially so excited about how well these bonds performed, but started to lose the ability to find new things to ask them and the use cases. Like they're like, there's like a desire to use chat GPT, but also just sort of a confusion in terms of what to do with it. After that initial novelty wore off. And I think that's another explanation. It's not just the competition because yes, Bing has ticked up. But basically, you look at any of these bots compared to, let's say, a Google, and you're just single digits, low single digits. Like, for instance, chat GPT's web visits are a tiny bit more, maybe a few hundred million more than Bing's, but still Bing is just 3.4% of the total search market. So I wouldn't go as far as to call it a niche product, but it almost is there.

Yeah, I think the chat interface itself, I agree, is limited and not people, unless you get in the habit of understanding how to use it in different ways, I think it is a limiting factor. And again, going back to Gemini for the win, possibly integrating again as the chat part is just one part of the overall feature. But getting people to take a picture with their phone and directly tell you all about it, Google has had Google. lens for a long time and integrating the Gemini model directly into that is smart i think starting with that blank cursor the way chat gpt has you do is is definitely going to keep it more niche than it otherwise was so yeah i think that they need to but they have been better at like integrating again image generation image understanding with text um but but to me the more i thought about it is like Again, there's the, using large language models for knowledge retrieval or information retrieval

and then using them to generate new content. And the first half is just search. And, you know, perplexity is doing well, co-pilots doing well. Google is building their own search generative experiences. So that's something that will chat GPT compete on. I don't think so. Right. I'm going to push back on this idea that this multimodal thing is something that people actually want to do.

Google's had lens out forever. It has not broke through into the mainstream, which is that app that you could take pictures of and Google will search and stuff like that. And maybe there'll be some moments where you'll drop an image in and ask these bots to have a conversation with you about it, but it's hard to see that really being like the super use case.

Wait, what are you basing your Google lens is not a mainstream product on? Just like how many people do you actually see talking about lens. Have you just anecdotally? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Traveling, I've seen, I've used it. It's a kind of a common thing. I remember it was actually a friend who told me about, oh, when they're traveling, especially like in countries with non-English alphabets, they go straight. Any menu you open, any sign you look at, you pull out Google lens right away and get it to instantly translate things for you. And after I heard that, that's how I use it myself. I'm Google

lensing all the time okay all right so you versus me i'll take your word for it i'll take your word for it so um also on the google front just a quick note to hit they released this new model jemini 1.5 already it's interesting to me they have said that you know they're already then they just released jemini one and now they're already releasing 1.5 and the interesting thing about 1.5 is that it has one million tokens compared to one thing 1,000, 128,000 for GPT4 and 32,000 for Gemini Pro, right? And so basically it's, let's see, this is what Sundar says. It's about 10 or 11 hours of video, tens of tens of thousands of lines of code.

So in the context window, that's the tokens, means you can ask the AI bot about all that content at once. That seems big to me, but it got basically no attention while everybody was looking at the, the SORA news. What do you think about that expansion at Gemini? Yeah, I think it's tough because, well, and first of all, I agree that guys, take a breath. You're doing well with just the whole Gemini rebrand. We don't need 1.5 just yet.

Save it so you can build some buzz around it, but they are doing it. So we'll talk about it. The token windows are interesting to me because one of the big changes that happened even in a lot of the work I've done, is as these context windows and the amount of tokens you can use get bigger, that means in the past you would fine tune a model, meaning you would like train a model, a foundation model

in a very specific way and it took work and you had to write code and it was difficult. Now you can literally make a prompt that's the size of a book and say, here's 200 examples. Now using those, recreate this kind of text in this style. And but yeah, so it changed. changes the way you actually build the entire process that now it's called prompt tuning. It's that you can actually get it to do exactly what you want and provide all that instruction just in the prompt alone because they're so long. So you can put in a whole book, but even in GPT4 and use that to essentially on the fly train that prompt and get it to respond in a specific way.

The difference between that and 32,000 and 128,000, I don't even know what 128,000 feels like and you had a quote in here that was really good from Sundar or not he says it's about 10 or 11 hours of video tens of thousands of lines of code so what exactly you're inputting i can't even fathom like are you putting in 10 or 11 hours of video i don't know what you do maybe you can put in entire code bases and get that to train to output specific code in a specific way that gets kind of interesting but but the size of it has been a major change, especially GPT4, then Claude. All of these have been pushing the limits on how big these context windows are, and it changes the way we all can use LLMs in a

pretty powerful way. But is this out yet because there was somebody from Founders Fund that tweeted this guy, John Coogan. Google launches a new AI tool. I go to check it out. Wait a minute, this isn't a working product. This is just a blog post every time. Are we in that scenario again? Thank you, John Coogan, for outlining exactly what I've been trying to say in a much pithier way in a good way. Because, yeah, that's when we're talking about product marketing and releases, like, again, why Google always does this. They announce something way, way before it's ready, and they just fall behind even more. So Open AI still for the win on product marketing. But Open AI also this week just released a blog post and everybody's going to go.

and not so you can't be selective about that no no but that that's they were very specific that these are real demos created by real people this isn't like a research process that we validated and something this is people there are red people folks red teaming this are the ones who created these prompts can i tell you what my favorite bit of uh ai news this week was nothing not text to video and the complete transformation of reality no it was v jeppa Did you see this about VJEPA? So VJEPA, let me see what it stands for. It stands for video joint embedding predictive architecture,

VJEPA. And it's from Meta, and they released this model, or they've announced this model, and they say it's a first step toward artificial general intelligence. Those are bold words. Now, why is it? Okay, so basically what it does is, this is from Fast Company,

it learns by processing unlabeled video and figuring out what's probably happening in a certain part of the screen during the few seconds it was blacked out. So basically if you have somebody playing guitar like Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of this and you blacked out the part of his hand that's actually strumming the chords and you ask the model to create what's in that blacked out area, it can show the hand strumming the chords. And this isn't just like, you know, total video generation. It requires a true understanding of the world. And to me, that is very interesting. It's, you know, effectively saying that, like, you know, I, the video, I, the AI model, you know, I'm not just generating, but I am understanding

and that to me. And I think that's different from just generating a full video. It's figuring out what's missing. To me, it sounds pretty crucial and very interesting. And that's why VJEPA, to me, is a, is the big news of the world. And this is what fast company says. It is not a generative model. it develops an internal conceptual model of the world and then acts based off of that. I mean, if VJEPA, if VJEPA is working, if it actually is for real, that is a change because, you know, again, large language models with text work with trying to predict what is the most statistically probable next word or word that will fill in that blank space and the gap. images similar what's the next pixel but to try to do that for video is uh if it can get that right that does seem pretty profound and maybe that is like a breakthrough as big as the 2013 computer vision breakthroughs but i don't know yon lecun i give us a demo come on on the show

i know i did invite him on the show they said he was i think he was somewhere making some speeches or something like that he won he won an award i I saw like in Dubai or something like that, but it was some like a global AI award. Listen, Jan, if you're listening, less awards, more big technology podcast. Less awards, more big technology podcast. Simple as that.

Show us Vigua. It's the formula for success. It's the formula for success. Here's what we can do, black out the image of Jan Lacoon accepting that award in Dubai or wherever it is. And then have real, and then the model will figure out that it's him, have real Yan Lacoon come here.

and demo v jeppa but it is interesting because these models like this is weird right we're talking less about predicting the next word more about reasoning more about understanding a you know the world conceptually more about learning physics like where is this going to end this is kind of getting scary creepy exciting all the above i mean it's interesting because jan lacoon i feel and meta overall has been kind of actually in a pretty smart safe response responsible place, especially versus Open AI and others, where Google might be too conservative, or, you know, they're like open source, build guardrails directly in, recognizing the need to be responsible while still progressing. Like overall, I think they've positioned themselves

pretty well in terms of how these things develop. But yeah, and as we started this conversation, especially in this election year, how this stuff plays out and in the disinformation realm is going to be pretty scary interesting we're going to we're going to be living the in real time the potential impacts of these things these tools i'm way less worried about the disinformation and more of like what happens if this thing becomes self-aware which like i don't know it sounds more or more like that that might happen in our lifetimes where before it seemed far-fetched i'm more concerned about disinformation in the election than self-aware artificial general intelligence choose your enemy pick your poison it's only a matter of what kills you first yeah i mean i don't know do we really need

disinformation when we have tucker carlson out in a russian supermarket um talking about how great the cart return system is that's fair that's fair it's the algorithm it's the algorithm yeah by the way that is a very innovative system that cart return you put the coin in return the cart i didn't say i didn't actually even watch the video i tried to block out the entire i saw some of the memes but i i really tried to block out sometimes you have to make like a very concerted effort to not partake in something or engage with something and this is Tucker and Russia was one of those things for me I mean I love how Putin said that it was like impudent goes yeah it was a week interview too soon yeah it's amazing

okay anyway let's talk about another comeback video which is Mark Zuckerberg coming back And basically giving the Vision Pro a tongue lashing, saying that not only does he think that Quest is a better value because it's seven times less expensive, but also that it's the better product in general, period. And he makes all these different comparisons saying the Quest weighs less, its controllers are better, it is more immersive, all of the above. And it was very interesting seeing the reaction there. People really liked Zuckerberg taking that swing against Apple. Did you think this was a wise move? Do you think it was accurate? Have you tried the Vision Pro yet?

Give us your thoughts. I have. I have. And I actually, I don't think I'm going to buy one just yet, but it was incredible. I think I'm in the same exact place as you are where I'm going to let it breathe a little bit, give it a little bit of time. but it was spectacular technology. I've not, I've tried the Quest 2.

I've not tried the Quest 3. And we can get more into Vision Pro, but on Zuckerberg's video, I have to say, and I have a lot of issues with meta overall and their products, and it's, but I respected this video.

It was great marketing. It was great, like the way he did it, casually sitting down and just talking, it was a reminder that, like Mark Zuckerberg, and I've heard this, I've read about, there's many places like he's a competitor and you know Apple is coming for them in many ways

and you've written well about how maybe Apple's actually helping them inadvertently but but he's here he's here to play and he's sitting on his couch and just looking in the camera and talking and i do find it kind of like you know rich that when there are headlines like Zuckerberg coming out saying quest three is better than vision pro because of course why wouldn't he exactly i thought I thought the overall format was good and great, in fact. I do also find it interesting that I've been using threads more. And somehow my algorithmic feed in threads for a couple of hours was literally all fawning praise of Zuckerberg's video. And I really do wonder how meta is tweaking that algorithm the same way Elon did with Twitter to favor themselves in particular ways.

sure there's something there. So, but okay, here's the counter argument about the Zuck video, right? So M.G. Siegler, who's a former Google, or I think maybe it might still be at Google Ventures, he says that Zuckerberg is running a real risk of this all coming back to bite him in the ass. Steve Bummer laughed off the iPhone, but actually his stance at the time was quite reasonable. The iPhone was too expensive relative to the market, so much so that Apple rather quickly dropped the price. But no one remembers that. They just remember the dismissive laugh is Zuckerberg in another bomber situation he could be I think he totally could be but I think that I don't know he wasn't as dismissive I thought he was like

well rehearse at least spoken about you know here the very concrete reasons I think this and not kind of laughing it off more because he can't laugh it out he can't say headsets are stupid because the whole argument is our headset is better so I I don't think he's fully at risk do you i think that's that's totally right i think it it is much more sensible yeah for him to take this position than it would have been you know if he was in like the balmer spot and they never had they never really competed against the iphone right they mean they had the windows phone but that went nowhere so they have the device that's been in market and it's been selling have you did you ever see a windows phone i have i have seen them for sure okay they were not

good no there's a reason i saw i saw a few zoons remember the microsoft zoon yes their uh ipod player yeah that was also bad yeah but there's a reason why they fell behind and had a lost decade they just continued to ship total shit for years and that's yeah that was a problem they've rebounded but but now satia is just rolling right now okay last thing on the vision pro it's uh the apple fans are returning them to the apple store this is from the verge it's no coincidence there's been an uptick on social media a vision pro owners saying they're returning their 30 3 500 dollar headsets in the past few days apple allows you to return the product within 14 days of purchase and for the first wave of vision pro buyers we're right about that point

comfort is among the most cited reason for returns people have said the headset gives them headaches and treasure triggers motion sickness the weight of the device and the fact that it is front loaded has been another complaint okay here this is amazing the verges the verges the product manager said he thought that using the device led to a burst blood vessel in his eye at least one of the person noted they had similar experience with redness do you think this is just people blowing social media chatter out of proportion or is this a real problem for apple i think that it's definitely a problem if it's for if it's happening at any kind of scale actually in that uh verge piece one thing that was interesting to me is you do note what uh

platform all of these posts are on that when where they went viral which platform uh every single every single hyperlink was on threads okay but that's also i'm just noting i'm just noting that i'm just because all these verge journalists are on are on threads and they've given up on x i'm just noting that coincidentally uh stories about the vision pro being returned are going utter viral on threads. Well, as the original thread boy of this podcast, I would say, okay, somewhat vindicated. Yeah, yeah. I'm on threads now. I'm on threads. I'm using it. It's pretty good. But yeah, no, I think if this stuff is for real, if this is a genuine problem, if you start to see this not as one-off tweets and as like a larger narrative and, and again, people not on threads

talking about it, I think it definitely presents risk for Apple. But honestly, After trying the Vision Pro, I really came away in the same way. And I like it more in the context of like the Apple Watch, even the original iPad, the, we don't know exactly what the use cases will be, but we're going to get there. And it's just such an incredible piece of technology that it's going to, I'm very excited about it. Again, it's expensive right now. I don't know if I want to shell out the money.

right now but it's definitely a big part of the future yeah i've been waiting for maybe the next generation or the generation after it sounds good we also have one zoon head in the chat noble akerson says love the do love the zoon i disagree all right sorry noble i'm glad to have a proud zoon head listening to big technology podcast did not mean to uh disparage one of your favorite products i apologize really regret the error so did you watch the super bowl ron john i did watch the super bowl i thought it was a great game yeah it was It's a second overtime Super Bowl ever, the first one being Tom Brady and my Patriots, but still a great game. It was excellent. And the commercials were, I thought, just a highlight for me.

Like the commercials have gone through like a bunch of like different iterations. They've been like the heartfelt ones, the preachy ones, the Crypto Bowl. But this just felt like a return to Super Bowl commercials that were just funny and goofy and star studded. I loved it. What I loved even more was the five Super Bowl ads, so many Super Bowl ads that it actually became somewhat of a meme on social media that people continue getting them from Timu, the Chinese social app. It was the Timu Bowl.

Yeah. This was the Timu Bowl and also what was fascinating was just as a sign of this company that remains a mystery in so many ways in the last Super Bowl when they ran their first shop like a billionaire ads, the company in their ads pronounced it, Timo. In this year's Super Bowl, they pronounced it Temu. They changed the, I saw, and it threw me off because I've said Timo, and we've talked about it on the show. I've written about them a lot.

In my head, it's always been Timo. And then on the Super Bowl, I'm like, have I been saying it wrong the whole time? But then I looked up the old ads, and they changed the pronunciation of their company's name just like that. I think it's like a play to like the Midwest and the South that Temu is easier to pronounce. Yeah, I'm sure there was like some user research or something where they or maybe they saw you, Timu was more awkward or maybe I don't know what it was, but they just, they totally changed it. But what's what I think was really interesting is it's going to be Timu, Temu in the program, Timu in our hearts. Sorry, go for it.

So what's interesting is this time. the sheer volume it entered the conversation like i heard so many more people talking about it than last year and again because this has been they as a company and she and these have been kind of an obsession for me for a long time it was fascinating to hear so many people talking about them more um what's also interesting is again everyone's like how much could they have spent how much could they have spent i think one thing i've been reading recently that was really interesting meta has been blowing out earnings the amount of chinese advertising on meta went up from three billion to 13 billion dollars last year i think it was three billion in 2021 so in about

two years time it almost quadrupled so and there's rumors that over in last year timu whatever it is was three billion plus even up to four billion that's crazy in terms of spend so these companies have gone in and it's this really interesting kind of like a alliance almost at facebook's blowing out their earnings timu is going getting across united states and letting everyone shop like a billionaire so just this massive quiet onslaught of advertising money is taking place by a company that we don't even know how to pronounce their name well they don't know how to pronounce their name in fairness well they don't either yes yes it was interesting because tamu like has all these, see I'm already on the Timu game. They already, they have all these like

deals for like one dollar or they'll ship you something for free if you sign up. And my favorite reaction was people saying, wait, they have the money for a Super Bowl ad. Like where are they getting that money from? And someone's like they paid for those Super Bowl ads on Klarna. Oh yeah. Yeah. They must be making money and that might not make Amazon so happy. got to say well no this it's it's not existential in any way but it's certainly they have to be at amazon really concerned about this because remember amazon almost it unfortunately i don't i want to say like made the strategic decision to move to lower cost goods from chinese suppliers move away from brand oriented products move away from kind of like direct to consumer and online brands

and products that really are built around at least quality or inspiration and just what's the cheapest thing I can buy and get it to me fast. And that's what Temu, Timu, Shian, that's what all these companies are doing. And, you know, we're seeing it in the Super Bowl. And it is interesting to me. And another thing that came out this week that was interesting, and especially in an election year, how are these companies going to kind of be brought up in the political context? Because I think Chinese ownership of the fastest growing e-commerce and shopping platform in America, you have to imagine when that's the one bipartisan issue is going to be brought up. Right. And then, you know, you look at TikTok and further issues develop.

Yeah, TikTok. So this came out this week and it's really interesting. There is a one of the female executives who was, uh, uh, had moved up pretty quickly during, especially, during the COVID years, joined in 2019, had moved up to leading all global marketing initiatives for TikTok, had left. And there's an entire harassment lawsuit around this. But what's interesting is in the lawsuit, it's very clear that it's executives out of China and Bite Dance, who is still the owner of TikTok, that call the shots. And there's a great Matt Schrader who covers Chinese business politics very closely, you know, he said it's in these lawsuits that are more about how Chinese employers treat American employees and just the entire standards are different

and the way, you know, what's the expectations are different. That's where we actually start to find out how much is bite dance really controlling TikTok. Because remember, the new CEO of TikTok, who is Singaporean, went in front of Congress and had a great viral moment where Tom Cotton looked kind of ridiculous because he kept asking about the Chinese Communist Party and he kept saying you know sir I'm Singaporean I'm not Chinese I served in the Singaporean army like TikTok is doing everything they can do to distance themselves from its Chinese ownership with bite dance and saying we're a global company based in Singapore nothing to do but then it's just a reminder that bite dance still owns a company and still in

these situations you realize runs meetings there's been plenty of reporting around how, you know, meetings have to start a lot earlier in the middle of the night for American employees because they have bite dance executives in those meetings, even though they're TikTok employees. So I think this, the TikTok story, Timu's going to be one big one this year around geopolitics and business, but the TikTok story, I think, is really going to get interesting, especially when the Biden campaign just awkwardly went on TikTok as well this week. I don't know if you saw that one yet.

Yeah, definitely saw that. So, okay, Ranjan, tell me this. So first of all, what happens if, like, TikTok and these other Chinese companies go into the microscope in the U.S.? Like, the U.S. has done absolutely nothing. And also, like, are we finally going to just do away with this illusion that TikTok is independent? Like, it was very clear and not this past hearing, but they're hearing before that Chochu was taking orders from BightDance and not really authorized to speak as a CEO. And so, like, they keep making the claim that they're independent. they're not we all know that at this point and i just wonder like okay so further off so everyone

like puts evidence out like oh this is like a real discovery but like to me it's old news it's a tough one because when you say we all know you and i i feel no we're talking about it technology readers and listeners no but come on the average person opening tictock or thinking about ticot i don't think is associating as clearly what that means regarding like from a geopolitical standpoint i actually think the biden campaign it it was a tough decision i imagine they're like how can we not try to reach x million gen zs and teenagers or whatever like so still to go on the platform but i think taking a stand on that actually would have been interesting and kind of helped solidify things is can the app get banned this year i think

they've set themselves up pretty well where it won't and that conversation seems to have gone away but yeah i i agree where this goes i don't know but i think it's going to become on the tip of a lot more people's tongues in the next year yeah you could say like maybe if people like users themselves like with big tech and in particular it's users themselves that have all the power here and you could say that okay users themselves might feel weird about it and decide to go to you know reels instead and that might happen regardless but it just uh i i think we've shown with social media companies and social media apps that users can deal with and basically unlimited amount of bull crap coming out you know about these companies and they will not change their

behavior unless the product sucks so it's going to i mean if tic tic tic is going to go away in the u.s it's going to be because american companies you know out competed it not because the government is going to do anything maybe changing the perception a little bit will help but i doubt it will make huge difference. I think that's fair. I think that's, I mean, and it's sadly fair, but yeah, counting on users to make that switch is not going to happen. And could there be, actually, you know what? Hold on. I'd take that back. Here's the bull case scenario, not the bull crap scenario, is that for democracy and justice is, no, but seriously, TikTok has to, I IPO and whether that like is it going to be bite dance that IPOs is it going to be TikTok actually spun off in IPOing and in that process every one of those investors is sitting on paper returns of ungodly amounts of money it's definitely late enough in those fund cycles that they are going to try to like try to realize some kind of return the market is where it needs to be to IPO and can that IPO be blocked that is can get very interesting can the structure of that

Will they not allow them to list in the U.S? Because that's something regulators can have a lot of control over. And then that changes the entire conversation, you know, like where not being able to cash out and sell to public market investors, I think that's where the only possible point of leverage could be. I don't think TikTok's getting banned. I agree. I don't think people will stop using it, but they need to go public soon. Yeah. That is possible for sure.

for sure trying to think whether we should talk about this Tesla crash let's do it quickly okay so there was a Tesla worker who was killed in a crash with inside his uh Tesla his name is Hans von Ohain and they found that the auto drive okay so the passenger was with him said the auto drive feature was on and the car ran straight off the off the road at the scene in the crash there was uh rolling tire marks and no skid marks which means that the car that he didn't hit the brakes now the driver was drunk at the time so his widow cannot get any lawyer to take up the case saying that basically Tesla was responsible for this death but it all points to be all all science point to this being a full self-driving death and of course musk said that

he did not have it full self-driving on and musk said this in tweet he was not on full self-driving the software had unfortunately never been downloaded i say unfortunately because the accident and probably never would have happened if all self-driving had been engaged. And there's this big thing that's happening here because the car was in a remote location and apparently unable to send the data about what was on and what was not on, you know, back to the servers. And so therefore, Tesla is saying we don't really have any clue as to what happened. But the physical signs and definitely the testimony from the witness there,

who was in the car with this driver seems to indicate that full self-driving was engaged. Now, to me it was surprising, a few things were surprising. One, if this was just the first full self-driving death, that's unbelievable given how many miles this stuff has worked on and be like, I guess it's gonna be just like,

this is sort of gonna be the future of what self-driving in Tesla's looks like where like there will never really be any like full, admitting from the company that its technology could be behind an accident like this what's your read on it first of all i love that you said let's quickly run through probably the most complicated nuanced yeah difficult serious serious story of the week um but yeah i think so i was a bit confused because there's been a ton of reported deaths many reported deaths where the

they had full self-driving engaged in some way like and i don't know perhaps their hands were still on the wheel or so i was it calling it the first known fatality was a little confusing to me because i've even i think the washington post has covered and many other fatalities related to teslas that had the technology on but but i think i was surprised like musk even said you know the software, if it had been downloaded, this would not have happened. Like, trying to use this as almost a marketing moment was surprising to me. And it's what's also surprising about that is how that inconsistency exists, where the Washington Post is writing this entire long piece about how full self-driving was engaged. And then Musk is just saying he didn't even have it

downloaded. Like, that discrepancy is kind of... But there could be semantics there, right? it could be already installed in the computer and you just have to activate it or something like that so maybe he's saying it wasn't activated he was an employee got it for free there might not have been a purchase order like there is great area around that you think they're trying to legal ease their way out of this or potentially but also i guess like as someone who's a fan of self-driving and understands that people get killed in car accidents you know when they're behind the wheel as well like do we do we want every crash even if it's fatal with full self-driving to be something that could lead to a lawsuit that will potentially put the technology out of service like is the cruise outcome optimal or do we need like a little bit of leeway with these companies to allow them to go ahead and and do this stuff and is that I mean maybe that's what Elon is doing here is seeing what happened to cruise and saying like you know there's already been a recall full self driving and we can't have that happen to us and just trying to finesse his way out of it but I don't think it's necessarily a good outcome to have these companies.

be so responsible for what happens that they go out of business if they kill somebody, however terrible that is. Yeah, but to me, the difference is. And I agree with the idea that I believe that self-driving is the future and will be far safer than what exists today and result in overall less crashes, but they will still be road fatalities. To me, the issue here is simply, and it all comes back to full self-driving. as a marketing term is encouraging people to believe that the current technology is level four, level five self-driving

and you don't need to be, you can get drunk and get in the car and that's totally fine because your car is gonna drive you. That's the issue. And I think like to me, Cruz, I almost felt bad about how everything played out and that's where I might be more in line with you that I think how aggressively and quickly everything

was kind of pulled back, I think, because they approach things responsibly so far. They've been very, you know, coordinating with the regulators, transparent about everything unlike Tesla, which is, again, calling it full self-driving. How could someone not think that I can get drunk and get my car and I'll be okay? So I think to me, that's the issue. And I do worry that as long as Tesla is the dominant player and approaching things in this way, that's exactly where these lawsuits will be bigger or people will have more of an overreaction. Right. And that's what the widow said. She said, you're told this car should be smarter than you.

So when it's in full self-driving, you relax. Your reaction time is going to be less than if it were not in full self-driving. So yeah, maybe it is just a branding issue and they have to change it. But you can't imagine them going from like full self-driving to mostly full self-driving. Kind of self-driving. Kind of self-driving. I mean, could you imagine what the reaction would be for Tesla stock was just already down, you know, it's 50% off its highs at this point. Yeah. I think regulators should step in and force them to name it, rename it to kind of self-driving. Kind of self-driving, KSD. KSD.

Yeah. It's like, college Sheikh Muhammad, no. Close. Sorry. KS. I just go to KSM anyway. Sorry. I don't know why I said that.

And. Yes. The final story of the week. Go ahead. This is a crazy one too. This is also like one of our... You introduce this one, Alex. All right. So basically it comes down to this. It was the big talker on Twitter this week. A financial columnist for New York for the cut, which is part of New York Magazine, wrote a whole story about how she put $50,000 in a shoebox and handed it to scammers. And basically she was called by Amazon who said like they're working with these.

FTC and there are corporate accounts that are opened up in her name and like the whole story she keeps going along and saying like yeah saying like all that's that seemed to make sense to me and like here this is like she's asking like for okay so the FTC this fake FTC agent connects her with the CIA who's like we need to give you a new social security number and we need you to therefore give us your cash and We'll give you a treasury check as we update your accounts. And she's like making some smart checks. She goes to one of the officers, I need to see your colleague's badge. I'm just not going to hand $50,000 of my money to someone I don't know.

And then the person on the phone says, undercover agents don't carry badges. And, okay. And he goes, they're undercover. Remember, you're probably being watched. The criminals cannot know the CIA agent is there. And she goes, in a twisted way, this made some kind of sense. me or maybe i lost my grip on reality so completely that i was willing to resign myself to a new version of it and she goes i met the SUV on the curb and put the money in the back seat it was

6.6 p.m. even if i tried to see who was driving the windows were tinted and it was dusk he maybe wore a baseball cap when i turned around i could see backlit faces of my husband and son watching from our apartment nine stories above as i walk back inside one of the agents texted me a photo of the the Treasury check made out to $50,000 and told me a hard copy would be hand delivered to me in the morning. You'll receive a confirmation text shortly. Of course that money never came. Everybody on Twitter is saying I would never put $50,000 in a shoebox and drop it in the back of it, an SUV to somebody I don't know without a receipt. But then again, these type of scams happen often to the point where Lena Khan, chair of the FTC, said, listen, like this is something that happens, or billions of dollars that are stolen in these types. type of fake identity scams, I think, every year.

So I'm curious what you made of it. Do you think that everybody's saying they would never get scammed is having false confidence? But also, it just does also seem like she really got taken for a ride and should have known better, especially the financial columnist for the cut. I think the one part of the story that again, once she felt her little child was in danger,

that obviously will, you know, people will react in different ways. So I think that's the one part because otherwise I agree that overall you're like, how are you doing this? You're really going along. Like someone doesn't have a gun directly to your head that you see and this is all being done over the phone. But for me, I thought I'm actually glad this kind of went viral because the whole scamming topic. And we've talked about the crazily named but very prevalent pig butchering scams that resolve from crypto that Zeke Fox's book is amazing at outlining, which is a huge industry. of billions of dollars being scammed out of people.

But honestly, in the last year, I've heard at least four stories from friends about parents getting scammed. And she makes the point in this that, you know, she's younger, she has a, is a financial columnist. So like, obviously it's not like, you know, someone, a senior citizen sitting at home. But the amount, like, because the creativity with which these scams can now exist and the amount of data that's out there in this case they had her real social security number and probably all of our personal information is out there just you know oh my god definitely it's just

it's an assumption and it's interesting too because in the whole gen a i like obviously everyone's freaked out about when people can fake your voice and have it like send a panic call to your parents and stuff but but i i don't know like how this stuff gets regulated and solved but i feel i don't know The fact that I've heard four stories just recently about people, even, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, not at this scale, but just people like getting convinced their computers are being taken over. And again, I would say almost actually all four of them were people, I know as parents, so people well into their like 60s, 70s.

But so this is just happening everywhere. Maybe this is any election 2024 candidate, this is your platform to a run on because Yeah, this is, I think it's quietly, yeah, stop the scams. I heard about another one where people will get $2,000 or $3,000 in their Venmo, and the person, like, responds and says that was an accident, can you send it back? And what happens is they send it back. They've washed that money for them. And then when it goes, the money goes to get reclaimed, it goes to the person that the money was sent to.

Oh, yeah. I actually. Be careful, folks. This stuff is crazy. I, so I played along. And actually, I think what's helped me is because I worked in trading for a long time, there was so much, like, there are so many money laundering trainings and compliance trainings and stuff. So it was like programmed into my head, what's a red flag?

You literally had to identify, this is a flag, this is a flag. And it was, I remember, so I was buying something on Craigslist, a guitar, and it was like $1,500. And I don't know if anyone, have you ever had the Craigslist cashier's check scam run on you? Oh, no. What's that? So basically, it's like someone is like, oh, you know what? I, like, if you can send me $10,000 now by cashier's check, I'll send you more money, or sorry, it's the opposite. Like, you send them some money, and then they give you a cashier's check that of a lot more

money and give you some excuse why they need to. And so obviously I hear this happening. I'm like, okay, this is total scam, but I kind of kept it going just to see, I never met up with the person, but we had a lot of emails going back and forth. And again, anytime someone's offering you more money than you are supposed to give them just to, you know, they say there's some inconvenience. It's probably going to be a scam. But then I remember hearing from a friend from business school who was from India and came to New York City and got scammed out of two grand on something like this. And so like it happens. It happens this very smart guy, you know, like very

worked in finance himself in investment banking but still got scammed out of it so yeah stop the scams stop the scams hashtag i mean i guess stop the scams definitely a problem uh i've had i've like had some situation facebook marketplaces filled with scammers by the way like i've had a situation where like someone's like they sent they found my google voice number and they uh tried to like reset it with two-factor authentication and they're like here just send me the number you got there i'm like not sending you the two-factor number you idiot so but stop the scams he's running alex is running folks he's announced today yeah i'm here to unite america against scammers yep it's a good platform yeah it is i mean at this point you know potato could run and

probably get a good amount of support but anyway we'll leave it there all right leave it there all right ron john great uh speaking with you as always thanks for coming on have a good weekend me too and thanks everybody for listening stay vigilant and we'll see you next time on big technology podcast