Big Technology Podcast - RIP Blue Checks, The Open Letter To Stop AI, Startup Funding After SVB

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

Erin Griffith is a reporter at the New York Times. She joins Big Technology Podcast to break down the week's news. We cover: 1) The end of Blue Check verification on Twitter for notable users. 2) The open letter to stop AI research processing beyond its current state. 3) Whether we could stop developing AI technology, even if we wanted to. 4) Italy's plan to stop ChatGPT. 5) Police departments using facial recognition to make wrongful arrests. 6) The rising field of 'prompt engineers.' 7) Startup funding after SVB 8) The continuing wind down of SPACs. 9) Gweneth Paltrow's victory in her skiing trial. 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]

We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of a cherished symbol of status and credibility, the blue check verification on Twitter. For many news personalities, the blue check was more than just a badge of authenticity. It was a sign of recognition, influence, and prestige. It was a way to stand out from the crowd of anonymous trolls and bots. It was a way to show that their opinions matters. But alas, all good things must come to an end. Tritter has made a sudden and drastic change to its verification system, leaving many

news personalities in the dark about their status. Without any warning or explanation, they have lost their blue check verification, and with it their sense of belonging and respect. We understand this is a difficult time for those who are affected by this change. We know that losing the blue check verification can feel like losing a part of your identity. We know that you may feel angry, betrayed, or humiliated. we know that you may wonder if your voice still counts. But we are here to tell you that you're not alone.

You are not forgotten. You are not worthless. You still have your followers, your fans, your colleagues, your friends, and your family who support you and appreciate you. And you still have your talent, your passion, your expertise, and your integrity that make you a valuable contributor to the public discourse. You still have your dignity, your courage, your humor, and your grace that make you a respectable human being.

The Blue Check Verification may be gone, but you are still here, and you're still awesome. Rest in peace, Blue Check Verification, you will be missed. And with that, I want to welcome you back to Big Technology Podcast, Friday edition, where we break down the news in our cool-headed and nuanced manner. And not dramatic at all. Is Aaron Griffith of the New York Times? Aaron, welcome. Thank you.

By the way, just full disclosure, that was written by Bing. So thank you, Bing. I love it. Wow. Wow. Because I did have some quibbles with that. I mean, I think because of how addicted many of us blue checks are to Twitter, I'm not sure that we do have our dignity or our families. It's all gone. It's all gone. I know. So, so how are you dealing with this? Are you going to, are you going to be paying? How's your emotional state? The thing is I've been sort of stepping back from Twitter, I guess, over the last year, not even on purpose, just like I've noticed that my, I don't know if it's me, you know, my, my content's not too interesting anymore or, but I've just, I haven't been getting that much engagement out of it. And so, I mean, I've always mainly used it as a way to message sources. And so it is important for me, for for them to know that I'm, I'm who I am, that I work for the times.

that I'm not an impersonator so that part of it is a little worrisome to me I might have to find better ways to message people but or you know to reach out to potential sources and other than that I don't know I'm not really in the mix that much my tweets aren't finding their audience there like they used to so I'm not I'm not too sad about that that piece of it I am I'm not famous enough to worry about impersonators either so that piece of it is is not a very big deal. But it is, it is a really useful reporting tool for doing my job. So I am a little worried about that. This is the thing. The status of the badge is gone. So even if you pay now, it's just like, it's almost like a reverse thing. You start to wonder what's up with the people paying for

Twitter blue versus, you know? I mean, I have noticed, even though, ironically, the fact that, you know, the whole reason Elon initially said he bought the, bought Twitter, which, I mean, come on. we know that was kind of a farce but that he wanted to get rid of the bots I've noticed a huge increase in the amount of bots and that I have in my mentions like crypto bots or just things that are clearly just being generated from text like if you if you look at the replies sometimes that seem really off and then Google that exact text you can see like 10 other bots that tweeted the exact same thing so I've noticed a lot of that in my mentions and some of them do have the blue uh badge so it it like the experience has been slowly degrading and it's just kind of a matter of how people are still there. I'm still there. I'm still reading following along even if I'm not tweeting as much. And so it's just a question of like how much can they experience degrade before we'll really see the impact of it. It almost kind of reminds me of some of the legacy media brands and I've worked for some of these. It's like, okay, you know, these companies had such an important and credible brand and they've

been completely gutted and now they're just a shell of themselves online and it's like how much can you actually degrade this brand and people will still think it's credible and it sort of feels like Twitter's doing that a little bit too. It was interesting to watch the fact that Donald Trump was indicted criminal charges the first time it's ever happened for a U.S. president and obviously the breaking news all happened on Twitter but there wasn't such a discussion like there usually is on a breaking news event and it did sort of feel like, okay, well, wow, something is, something's missing here in terms of what it used to be. But, you know, I'll say, like, for my part, I'm paying for Twitter Blue.

Are you? It's not about the verification. It's the fact that I'm a small publication. And Elon has said, all right, if you do this, you're going to be able to get into other people's for you feed, even when they don't follow you. That's worth it to me. But also, like, I like having other publications and other reporters surface there. Yeah. And the fact that they're not going to make their way into four.

for you because they don't pay to me does seem like you're spot on it's going to degrade the experience yeah i don't i don't look at the for you tab very often because i follow mostly startups and venture capital people and the stuff that has been going it's not relevant to me from a news perspective anymore because it's just all these like life hacking or hustle threads of like you know i watched all of mark cuban shark tank episodes and here are the 43 takeaways or whatever. It's all that kind of stuff and not actual news or discussions that I care about. It's just like a lot of like designed to be viral kind of DREC. So I've only been, you know, looking at the at the follow page. And you, you don't get menswear guy, do you?

No, I think I think I'm my I think he was on my four you page and I was so confused. And that was one of the many things that I saw where I was just like, I'm not going to look at this tab anymore. This is not good information that I need. Exactly. Yeah, he might have done it. Yeah, for those listening. So if you're on Twitter, you've probably seen, like, Aaron and I have a tweet for menswear guy who's a dude who just tweets about fashion trends for men.

And apparently he was on this list of accounts that Elon is, like, gassing up and promoting across the platform. So, like, it's not an accident that everybody started to see his tweets. But we'll see. I do think that it is interesting. I think that, like, there's going to be a lot of people that will lose. their verification badges and make a big deal about it. I think there's been a lot of virtue signaling going on by publications. We're like, we would never spend $8 a month for our reporters

to get distribution on Elon Musk platform. But we'll see, I think we'll see some come around over time and who knows. But the fact that this is happening, I don't even trust necessarily that that's going to be a good way to get distribution. So that's the question, exactly. Yeah, he created this list of his favorites. It's clearly there's, there's, we've done a way. with any pretense of like this is a platform where the best content rises to the top. This is like, it's like clearly his just personal preferences of what's being promoted and what's not. So I don't know that necessarily paying means you're going to get a fair deal. Well, I report back.

And if it turns out that it's not the case, because now everybody can see the impression. So if it turns out that not, it's not the case, I'll shut it off. But yeah, very interesting. He's also written down the value of Twitter, I think, to like about half of what he paid for it, which who knows where it goes from here. But this idea that it was going to convert to subscription only and continue to basically take away things like two-factor authentication and the badge and that will like force people into using the app that hasn't materialized or using the

subscription package that hasn't materialized. Right. Yeah. It's, I mean, that news cycle around Twitter has gotten so noisy and, you know, the report, there's so much good reporting coming out of it. but it's really hard to believe when you see headlines, the things that he claims he's doing, he either reverses on it immediately or just never does it. And so it's, it almost, you start to tune it out after a while because you're like,

well, I'll believe any of this when I actually see it. And this is one that's actually happening, you know, apparently tomorrow. So we'll see. Yeah, April 1st is great timing for it. There's definitely going to be some, some, another sort of Eli Lilly situation where there's, you know, impersonators or, you know, things that go viral, it's going to be a chaotic day, I imagine. Just as he wants. So another story that he's involved in is this open letter.

So Elon is one of hundreds of people, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang that are, they're calling for a six-month pause on AI experiments in this open letter. And without this six-month pause, we could face profound risks to society. and humanity they say this is according to a CBS news report but everyone's seeing the letter it's coming from the future of life institute. Aaron what do you make of the fact that some of these folks is not just you know these business people but also researcher like yashua benjio who's one of the original deep learning conspiracy members are calling for this pause. Is this a PR thing

or is their actual merit in pausing it? I mean it's super interesting that they decided to do this the logistics of it seem impossible to enforce you know they have suggestions as to how, you know, you're going to have to verify it, uh, that, that you're not working on it, but I, I'm a, come on. Like, don't you think it seems like crazy that, that even the people who say they're going to are, are really not going to. I mean, I, I think it still is a, is an important, like, line in the sand to have drawn or flag to plant, whatever metaphor you want, that, you know, especially even though I think there is a personal element to this for Elon Musk, He was involved with Open AI at the start, and, you know, there's good reporting out there that shows that he left sort of because he was angry about his not being able to fully control the project, and he's talked about how he wants to launch his own AI thing now.

So there's clearly a personal element for him, but his name on it, I think, added to the headline, you know, factor of it. And everyone, you know, his name is in all the headlines. So that got a lot more attention because of it. And I think that's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, we need to be, everyone who's reporting on this stuff has this sort of background element of this is really scary. And I think it's worth highlighting that people are raising these red flags and expressing these concerns.

I don't necessarily think that the letter itself is going to have that much of an impact. But hopefully it caused lawmakers to sit up. and take, you know, maybe take some meetings with some of these people and listen to their concerns. And maybe they'll move a little faster than they have on other tech regulations. Europe is obviously moving way ahead of us. So I think there is some value in this and there's definitely value in reporting it. And I think, you know, a lot of people are freaked out by this, but is a six-month voluntary pause really going to do anything? Probably not.

But it is worth, I mean, it is, I think, not a complete waste of effort for this. them to have done this. Absolutely. There was like an Aaron Levy tweet yesterday, CO Box. It was like, we are going to pause this existential threat for six months. And then in six months and one day, it's going to be safe for everybody. Yeah, that was part of it where the letter is like, you know, once we know what the consequences are, and it's like, how? How will we know? It sort of reminds me a little bit of when the Trump administration was like, let's just have a ban on like immigration from all Muslims until we know what's going on and everyone's like what are you talking about what's going on how what does that mean like how and so there's like this vagueness to it um that is like

I don't like logistically speaking I don't see how this could possibly work but it's great that people are are raising these concerns and that metaphor doesn't apply to that part now some people have said oh this is actually you know they're saying don't do any research on like anything beyond GPT4. And some people have said, well, this is actually great marketing for GPT4 because dang, if anything beyond this is scary to the point that humanity is going to, you know, crumble, then my business really needs to put the generation right before and into practice somehow. It overstates the risk in a way that makes it seem scarier than it actually is. I mean, that's a great point too, I think. Yeah. So I wonder if there's, but it is interesting because

Sam Altman from Open AI did not sign on. So clearly he thinks, like, let's keep going. Jan Lacoon from Facebook we've had on did not sign on. So there are people who are like, well, we should just keep going. And I mean, in what world would anyone who's actually working on this kind of stuff be like, oh, let's just take six months off and stop working on it? That's not how capitalism works. So some people have said, like, this is like a good moment to say, okay, like should we keep developing the tech?

and you know I thought about that and said is that even possible like do we even have a world where we can say you know maybe we shouldn't and then don't and there's so many reasons why I think that this will continue to go on no matter what people's concerns are number one like you're talking about private enterprise in the United States is going to just keep building the products unless they're forced to not an open letter isn't going to solve them it isn't going to stop them. And then there's the other question of, well, and this is what I've heard brought up, if the United States stops or the Western world stops and China keeps going, you then put yourself at a strategic disadvantage versus China. So, you know, I think this idea, and it maybe

is concerning, right, that we just don't know how to stop when it comes to discovery ahead of us. And, you know, maybe there are concerning things here. But I just wonder if a pause is feasible. Yeah. I think that's a great question and I have no idea. And both of those points that you raised are very common arguments that I've heard talking to a lot of VCs and technologists about this. And there is an interesting argument from critics that basically says these leaders, it is in their best interest to make this stuff seem inevitable, unstoppable. And that and so we won't fight it and we should actually consider the fact that we can stop it and so I mean and same with the China thing like this is just a way to push forward the agenda that they want which is like I'm going to make a lot of money on this and I believe that changes that progress and change and you know technological disruption is important and inevitable like that's fine they have that belief and that is their um sort of agenda but using that threat of like both if we

don't do it china will do it like that doesn't that doesn't change the question of like should we do it right do we want this but it is yeah it's interesting though to consider because you know it it doesn't change that question should we or but it but it does have an impact on whether we will and that's a thing of like you know is there anything that we we develop nuclear weapons in this world, right? Everyone will always have a rationalization to develop the most dangerous stuff and just be like, well, you know, reason A or B. And I don't know. I guess I'm curious what you think about the dangers of this technology just to begin with, because I'm kind of questioning whether we, whether if we develop like GPT5, we're actually going to be in such a threat,

such a danger. I don't, I don't think I have a fully formed opinion on this yet, honestly. I, I like everyone else was blown away when I was first starting to use these tools and of course your mind first goes to the possibilities of how this can change the world and how exciting this is and then of course you start to see all of the weird and unimagined all of the weird and crazy ways that it's going wrong

and it's always going to do it in ways that are like impossible for you to imagine there's no way that we can possibly think of all the ways that this can be bad. It's the same thing that happened with social media. Like, it was like, oh, Arab Spring, revolution. Like, look at all this, like, positive, great progressive change that these social media networks are creating. And then, you know, later on, it was like, oh, misinformation, brain poisoning.

Like, look at all these, like, you know, flat earthers, Nazis. Look at all these terrible things that we never imagined could happen. And so I see us going down that path only so much faster and in a much more powerful way. So it does freak me out. especially on the miss info part like we're all you know i i miss the the pope coat thing oh my god but just for the context so for people who have who've missed this someone put an image of the pope into mid journey which is one of these AI generation tools in a enormous puffy white puffy coat and tweeted something like the boys in brooklyn don't have this drip or

something like that the pope looked amazing let's just say it yeah he looks great yeah loved And it went ballistically viral. It just went insanely viral. And only after the fact did someone say, yes, this photo that looks extremely real, that has the Pope's face, that, you know, seems like it's photo realistic, was developed by AI. So. Yeah. And that kind of stuff, it's, are we really going to get to the point where we can't believe anything we see? And, you know, there's already such distrust of the media. And so it does freak me out from that perspective.

And there's so much bad info out there. Like the volume of garbage on the internet and the ways that people can use it to manipulate to, you know, change people's minds or convince them of something that's not true. Like it's really scary to think about. So that does freak me out. I also see a lot of the positive benefits and amazing. things that this could could help us with too so i i don't know i have pretty mixed the feelings about it right now so after the pope image came out i said okay i need to learn how to use mid journey version five because that's what it was with mid journey version five for those listening it can

create images where the faces look realistic it can even do hands which is something that the prior uh things could not and a very interesting thing is you can upload a photo and say use this person's face and this type of photo and it can do an amazing job of it now it's a little bit difficult to use because it's all on discord so i went i you know as one does when they want to figure something out in 2023 i went to youtube and was like all right please show me what am i supposed to do i got to figure this out and figured it out signed up for a paid uh paid account for mid journey which is how you can access version five and just started creating tech leaders in puffy coats. Mark Zuckerberg sitting alone at a McDonald's in a puffy coat.

Oh, I saw these. Tim Cook at Apple headquarters in a big puffy coat. I did Satya Nadella in a tank top. I did Jeff Bezos standing in a pool surrounded by rubber duckies. And the thing is freaking amazing. And then today, just earlier today, I created something that like really just was completely different than the others and absolutely blew me away. So I, for those who are listened a few weeks ago, last week, I had Kevin Sistram on the podcast. So I've just decided to start publishing the Q&A's on these shows and got the Sistram interview transcribed and said, okay, I'm ready to publish it. I just needed some art. So what I did was I uploaded an image of Sistram into Mid Journey. And I said, top art of a magazine profile using just the face.

I just was like thinking, okay, like, you know, what would the art look like if you put it at the top of a magazine story? And Mid Journey, like, took that instruction and drew this amazing magazine spread. And the image, like, looks like, Sister, like, in a, you know, two-page magazine spread with, like, his hand on his chin, one of those, like, super realistic looking magazine spreads. And I was like, holy crap. Like, I was just looking for the art. But this This image is like an amazing format that I'm now going to use for these Q&As. And the power is just amazing. And previously I was like, oh, like maybe, you know, this will help inspire graphic designers.

And now I think in some cases it will just because beforehand I was using dolly art. And I was like, ha ha, like you can tell that this is garbage AI generated stuff. Almost does the job. And with Mid Journey version five, I'm just like, oh my God, this is the future. Yeah. I mean, we used to all be really comforted by those stories. like here's how you can tell if like someone's avatar is AI generated like their ears are messed up or whatever you know there was always like little tells and those are going away and

it's that's scary do you think do you think so I'm curious from your standpoint I mean you do a lot of reporting on startups reporting on the finance of Silicon Valley is AI going to now become a bigger part of the stuff you cover because we all have to make these decisions right yeah as reporters like what exactly and of course like now all Silicon Valley seems to be gravitating towards this stuff. How do you think about it? I mean, the first wave of stories is always about the money. Like, you know, investors are just pouring money into this at a time when startups are not really having a lot of success, raising funding for other projects, certainly not crypto, you know, certainly companies that don't have a path to profitability. Like all, all the like, you know,

maybe the second or third most successful company in each category is particularly struggling. So, but in AI, it's like a whole different world. And so of course, you see tons of startups like pivoting or playing up AI or calling something AI when it's really just, you know, kind of like a boring old algorithm. And so that is like the first wave of stories that you do, but you do that which is like, oh, this is frenzy, oh my God, and don't really think too much about like, okay, well, what does it mean? And so now I'm kind of taking a step back and being like, all right, so let's think about the ethics of these companies. Let's think about what they're actually doing and whether or not this is a good idea or what is a business model, because that

ultimately determine, you know, the economics of it is ultimately going to determine whether or not they are successful businesses versus, you know, science projects that have been, you know, lingering inside Google for too long. So those are all the big questions that I think everyone is thinking about now and it's been interesting to watch some of the founders answers. Some of them are really thinking deeply about this and others are just like, you know, taking a more libertarian approach where it's like you can't stop this, it's happening, so get on board, and it may as well be me. So that's been interesting. I mean, that's kind of the startup mentality that we've seen for the past decade, but it's never

quite been applied to something this powerful, except for, you know, perhaps social media. Absolutely. And we have seen some regulators try to stop it, right? So if Silicon Valley isn't going to stop, the tech world isn't going to stop, governments are trying to stop it. And in some cases, they're going to use it. And let's focus on that for a minute, both sides of that story. So in Italy, for instance, this is just breaking news. The Italian privacy regulator on Friday today ordered a ban of chat GPT over, and this is very interesting, over alleged privacy violations. And they say that they say that it is processing data of Italian

users and it's a temporary order until the company respects EU's landmark privacy law. This is from Politico, the general data production regulation, otherwise known as GDPR, which up until this moment has been known as like one of the least effective regulations on tech ever to exist. And most annoying. Unless you love pop-up ads, pop-up blockers, because if you love pop-ups, you love GDPR. But it's very interesting that Italy is trying to block them with GDPR. What do you What do you make of this? You think that will hold up? I mean, do you think that it's a way for them to just say,

this is dangerous, we don't like it, and these are the tools we currently have in order to do this? I mean, sometimes that's the way that regulators have to do that with novel tech that there's no current regulation for. It is interesting because that is one question that we don't really have the answer to, is where exactly, like what is the exact sources of some of these images? We have some ideas, they've, they've, but no one that I'm aware, I could be wrong, has, you know, fully released that what the source of data is that they're feeding into these large language models that's training them on the info that they then spit out to us. And so, you know, you see, you have like all these examples of artists who are going in and saying, you know, do something in the style of me and they're spitting out art that looks exactly.

like what they've done. So the language model has clearly been trained on their art or you have the Getty image watermark that that's currently, you know, in a lawsuit right now. So these companies should come clean with where they got the info and there should be an ability for us to opt out of like, I don't want my face or my photos or, you know, private things about my life being used to train these things. So I think that's like smart. but it does seem like a little bit of a cudgel to use GDPR for it. Right. It is like, yeah, it's not addressing it head on.

I don't think. So we'll see how it plays out. I think that there's going to be a lot of people in Italy downloading VPNs. That's just my guess. Interesting. Because from the user side, people love using these things, right? They use them for very interesting. Yeah.

A lot of students writing essays. Exactly. I mean, that's, yeah, if I was an academic and someone, like I was doing like a literature course and we end up progressing beyond GPT4 I'm going to get pretty scared so like we'll see what happens there so the other side of this is that governments are already using AI in interesting ways and profound new ways and sometimes extremely sloppy ways and one of your colleagues a couple of your colleagues just wrote about it was cashmere hill and ryan mac um wrote about how clear view a Clearview AI has been used to wrongly accuse somebody of a crime.

And they basically identified this person as someone who was stealing different purses or handbags. And the sheriff's office who identified this person and arrested them and had them in jail for a week. had been paying Clearview AI for $25,000 a year and had used terminology in describing the arrest like we tracked it to this person, but also didn't clearly specify that this was a facial recognition mistake. And again, talking about this murky area with AI, right, if we don't have clarity from police, from police bureaus about the fact that they're using this when they make mistakes without fessing it up. We end up in dangerous territory, don't you think?

I mean, what did you think when you read this story and what do you think it's going to lead to? I mean, it's such an incredible story. They're amazing reporters, so kudos to my colleagues for this. And we're going to see so many more of these stories and we need these stories to keep coming up because there's going to be all these situations

where this kind of stuff is used. And the people didn't even necessarily know. It took them a really long time and a lot of dollars in legal fees to figure out that this is why this guy. And I think it said that he had then got arrested a second time later using the same tools. I mean, how crazy is that? Yeah. So this stuff is currently being used and it's really scary.

And the lack of transparency around it is like the very bare minimum lease that we should be demanding around it. You know, setting aside whether or not it should be, it's good enough to be used at all, particularly on people of color who are, you know, know, have been raising this flag for a long time saying, like, this is, the stuff really messes up the most on us. So, yeah, these are some, these are issues, like, it's similar to the social media thing. Like, it really is frustrating that it takes reporting to expose this stuff after the fact versus, like, preemptively anticipating, like, this could be a problem. Let's, like, put in the guardrails from the start. Okay. One last AI story. Then we're going to go to break and then I want to cover some of the more financing stuff that you like to write about.

I don't know if you saw about, I don't know if you saw this, but Bloomberg has a story about prompt engineers. Yeah, that was interesting. $335,000 to write prompts for AI. We almost had a, I was very close. I had a prompt engineer, the one named in the story, Albert Phelps, who works for Accenture. He was supposed to come on and agreed to come on and then Accenture's PR, team, I think, nixed it because I got a message this morning saying,

whoops, shouldn't have done that. But he's talking about, yeah, he's talking about how he has a history background. And I read this story and he's like saying people with history backgrounds and literature backgrounds who are good with words are starting to become so valuable because they're able to talk to this AI in ways and express themselves in words and talk to them in ways that they can get the most out of them. And I read the story in the first thing, I was just like, aha, okay, finally, people who've been saying a liberal arts degree is worth nothing. Actually, they're wrong.

Yeah, I think that's a little hopeful. List all the history majors listening. There's hope yet. But just the fact that prompt engineering, I mean, I first heard the term, I was like, that's hilarious. There's no way that's real. And you go on LinkedIn and you start searching and it's just filled with jobs for prompt engineers. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, that's the thing you hear about this stuff.

And when you start messing with it, you sort of realize, too, like, oh, it is a little bit of an art to figure out how to get it to do the thing you want. You have to, you can't just, it's not like a Google search that we all know how to do so naturally, just put in the thing, like the proper nouns or whatever we're looking for and spell it wrong, Google will figure it out. Like, there's an art to it, but I think that will be very easy for the average person to learn. I mean, it was like a little bit hard for people to figure out how to use a mouse to click around on a website when it first came out too. I think this is going to become a commodity, but right now it seems really specialized and important and interesting. And then maybe for like some of the more B2B applications or the more technical things, there will be a demand for this. But it seems to me and whatever, I could be wrong, it seems to me that this is the kind of thing that it seems really specialized and important now and it will become a commodity soon once I'm. everyone kind of figures it out.

Most likely, yeah. So some good pushback for me on the live stream. We have Michael here who talked about, first of all, the salary range was $170,000 to $300,000. Okay, so maybe they're actually just trying to pay $170, in which case I apologize, but that's still a lot of money for writing prompts. And then there is, okay, a little bit of a technical side to this, which is that these people need to have at least a basic programming, skill, programming skills, and comfortable writing small Python programs. Okay, noted. It's nice to have

the audience fact check live. Couldn't you get Chad GPP to write those Python programs? I think you can. No, you can. Okay. Maybe you have to check them. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can. And we had a comment from Michael earlier that, you know, given how good this stuff is at programming, you know, maybe you can autonomously hack something. So, you know, do I have good Python skills? No. Could I use Chapch, GPT, if I'm a prompt engineer to figure it out? Probably. Okay, let's take a break. We're here with Aaron Griffith of the New York Times.

Thanks, Aaron, for coming on. We're talking about AI. We're talking about the blue checks. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about how startup funding has been impacted by the fall of Silicon Valley Bank. Maybe cover a little bit of the SPAC, the back half of the SPAC boom, which is the SPAC fall. We've done a little bit of that on this show, but we have some new stuff to talk about. And our fun story of the week is what we're going to end with.

I'm not going to give it away. But there was a lot of legal news last week, and this is the lesser legal news item that we're going to talk about. Back right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than two million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines

in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So search for the Hustle Daily show and your favorite podcast app like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology podcast with Aaron Griffith of the New York Times. Aaron, great to have you. Thanks again for coming back second time on the show. Yeah, thanks for a couple of years, I think. You were the all-time most listened to big technology episode really who beat me you were you were just surpassed by yam lakoun but i think you're holding strong in second place wow well i mean it's not really me i don't take credit for that it's it's all elizabeth holmes the the interest in her trial was insatiable so yes but still a great interview so appreciate you coming on let's talk about

a recent story that you wrote about the fallout from Silicon Valley Bank. Yeah. So obviously it was like kind of tough for startups to get funding over the past year in general. Then the bank goes away, which actually impacts the VC's ability to maintain credit lines, which then starting to impact startups in the process of getting funding. So everyone said, okay. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, all right. So fact check me on this one.

But everybody said that, you know, okay, the depositors are safe. it's over. Actually, maybe there is some continual turbulence here. So how's that can impact the tech industry? So just to be clear, there's no real direct impact where it's like the money's gone or like if you bank with SVB you're so screwed. There's no direct financial impact from what happened essentially with SVB to the actual like funding market. It's really more of a psychological thing. This has been a and VC investing is they maybe wouldn't want to admit it, but it is very psychologically. I mean, markets are. So like the market had been in this like really bad downturn for the last year. And I think a lot of

companies had been hoping that, you know, this year, the first quarter, or maybe at least by the second quarter, things would start to kind of bounce back. We saw this with the pandemic. The first, you know, six months of the pandemic were terrifying and, you know, companies were doing major layoffs. And it was we thought this was the bubble bursting and then all of a sudden things bounced right back and low interest rates all of that like sort of excitement people realize that tech was a recipient of the pandemic not necessarily a victim of it and things went crazy for a year and a half so I think people are sort of conditioned to think like okay well we might have a little bit of a rough time but like don't worry things will come things will come soaring back any day now and they were

hoping for that this year. And instead, this sort of earthquake that happened, this SBB, you know, all of a sudden, like, wait, my bank could run out of money? Like, that's not something that anyone had on their bingo card, you know. That just shook everyone kind of to the core. And everyone was already a little bit risk-averse, but now I think even more so risk-averse. So the dust is starting to settle and people are trying to get back to business as usual. But I think just, Psychologically, this has an impact where if you were already worried about taking risks, you're probably going to be even more conservative now. And I talked to a number of founders in VCs who told me that.

There is a flip side to this, and I had some VCs coming at me on Twitter because, listen, they got a thought lead. I thought that their main job is just to be on Twitter. Yeah, I mean, you should be investing steadily through good times and bad times, right? if you want to be a good that's like money managing 101 like and everybody on Twitter says like the best companies were started during our started during downturns like look at Airbnb and Uber they were created in the wake of the recession blah blah blah okay great yes that is like a wonderful sentiment and it's true but it is much harder so much harder and so so many of the companies that were created or you know overfunded over the last year and a half are going to have

to come to terms with that. And if they want to be one of those great companies that was created during a downturn, they're going to have to realize that their valuations are probably going to be a lot crappier. The money is going to be super hard to race. They're going to have to be a lot more created. They can't just like kind of buy their way into growth. And so anyway, I think what happened with SVB just made it clear that this turnaround or this like uptick that everyone was hoping for this year is probably not going to happen anytime soon. you know, companies are trying to extend their runway even longer, wait until end of the year or next year, if they can, to raise more accepting down, like, just realizing that they need to buckle

in because this downturn is going to last longer. Right. But it's also, I mean, the VCs, it seems like the VCs have clammed up a little bit. I mean, I'm just going to read a quote from your story to sort of support my position here. You have a quote from someone that says, it's just a founder it's just a brick wall no one is writing checks right now yeah and that's this person's experience and and i think that's we'll see you know why combinator has our demo day next week and i think it's next week uh and i think that'll be a really interesting thing to see if we have you know if if the companies are lowering their valuations if they're just unable to raise that that's going to be an interesting moment that i think will kind of tell us like how much this has

trickled down to the very early stage, which had been kind of a little insulated from this. The biggest companies that are closest to going public or the ones that were hurt first, and then it sort of trickles down lower and lower and lower. And now it's like VCs are going to be wary to fund companies that they don't think can get to the Series A because the Series A investors are worried about the Series B, you know, all the way up. So it does, I have talked to other people that have you know said oh well we're still writing checks and like no VC firm's going to say we're not writing checks we're scared um but i have to spend that money well they do um but they're a little gun shy you know they're like i don't think that it's gonna i don't think that lps are going to be

super excited if you bring them a hot crypto token these days um i don't you know i think they i think they're kind of thinking about the fact that they lps the people the people people who invest in venture capital firms are are digesting still they've they put a lot of money into venture over the last couple of years and they're they don't really have a lot right now to um deploy and so vCs are also thinking about that like okay well what if I can't raise my next fund next year maybe I'll like slow walk this one a little bit more there is a very weird dynamic though where all the founders are saying listen there's more dry powder than ever they have so much money it has to go somewhere, right?

They have to invest it somewhere. And VCs are kind of like, well, yeah, we're doing deals, but very cautiously, you know. AI companies, maybe these words are going to go. Oops. I just lost my AirPods. Hold on. Okay. So as Aaron gets her AirPods, I just want to say, for those listening, speaking of this question,

this upcoming Wednesday, we have two VCs coming on to talk about the opportunity when it comes to AI. and what type of AI startups that they're investing in. So stay tuned for that. I'm going to do the interview on Monday. We're going to put it live Wednesday. We have Joe Marquesi from Human Ventures and Michael McNano from Lightspeed. So that will be coming up on Wednesday. Yeah, AI is one area that there is a lot of deal making happening.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. So there's an exception there. Well, character, I mean, character AI just tried to, just did raise. Yeah. What, $150 million? dollars and the valuation was a billion no revenue so yeah there's tons of these companies that are uh it's so binary now there's um seems like there's very little in between it's either like

feast or famine exactly get this quote up on screen from your story once more it's just a brick wall yeah that was a guy he had a great idea i think a year ago or two years ago in the amidst the boom he would have been able to gather up that money super easily but everyone just kind of like pull back and they're like wait we got to we got to think about this a little bit more and then the companies that are doing deals are facing a lot more diligence and then you know yeah that is the ones that uh maybe didn't find product market fit and uh raise too much money and maybe weren't really real companies like we're we're going to see some of those like really struggling to to raise as well so be interesting times so let's just talk about what happens you know

know, there was this moment where nobody wanted to IPO and we saw a lot of SPACs happen. We talked a little bit about SPACs on this, on this show, but it seems like it's something that's worth, you know, oftentimes there's this boom of enthusiasm and people just forget about what happened. And, you know, SPACs, obviously, like people know SPACs haven't gone well, but they continue to go poorly and I do think it's worth spending continued time on it because people should know that, you know, what the consequences are for moments like this. So, Aaron, why don't you enlighten us? Yeah, well, so the SPAC thing was, I mean, for a journalist, it was great because it's like, okay, companies have been waiting longer and longer to go public. We never really get real info about their performance. And then suddenly, everyone's going public with like almost no buildup. It's just like kind of, oh, we struck this deal.

Now we're public and now we're reporting. So we're getting this wealth of information about companies that were younger than had been going public recently. So I love that. As it turns out, many of them were like kind of science project-y, companies that had no revenue or had, you know, very little in the way of a hypothetical business model. Spacks are great for that because they are allowed to market, like, future growth versus in traditional IPOs, you are not really allowed to make forward-looking statements that way. So anyway, a lot of these companies, surprise, surprise, investors are not too excited about them anymore in a down market because

their whole sales pitch was like possibility and right now people want to see results. So a lot of these SPACs now are trading at less than a dollar a share. And so the way that a SPAC works is that generally when they go public, it's the price is $10 a share. So that can tell you that a lot of these SPACs are trading off by like 90% or something. There was a CrunchBase article that came out late last year where they just picked 50 random SPACs and half of them were trading under a dollar. So there are a lot of companies out there that, you know, if they, I think private equity firms or anyone who has a lot of capital on the sidelines right now is looking around and seeing,

okay, is there value here? If so, let's buy it. So, you know, we saw one this last week, a company sold that went public for a few billion dollars, sold for $300 million. And I've reported on a few others that have happened over the last year. And so I think we're going to start seeing a lot of this of just like private equity firms or investors taking private or snapping up these companies at a tiny fraction of what they went public at. And then, you know, that, yeah, so anyway, we're going to see a lot of those. And then the ones that don't, that there's no value there, that's going to, they're going to have

some tough choices, I think. There's, yeah, that's going to be kind of crazy. and maybe a little sad and weird to watch. I mean, there's some that are in danger of being delisted. Like, if you trade under a dollar for too long, you know, you became a penny stock, like a bird scooters, which was once valued at $2.5 billion, I think. They've been trading, they're trading at $0.28 a share now. Oh, my God, that low?

Yeah. And they spec. Yeah, I think they were, yeah, they were a spec. $86 million market cap. So, you know, these are, These are rough. And then there was, I don't know if you want to talk about the Succession. Do you watch Succession?

I don't watch it. I will eventually, but I'm not in it. There was the premiere last night or last week had an episode or had a scene that was shot in this house that was like an 80-something million dollar house that a 20 something, 28-year-old founder of like a, I think an autonomous company that went public for something like $12 billion market cap, which. which is now trading at like $2.4 billion. They should have seen there, and it was an incredible house. But I'm also like, man, I hope that guy, you know, got his money out in cash and wasn't using his shares as part of his kind of collateral for his mortgage. But anyway, yeah.

So let's talk about one successful SPAC. Well, just kidding. But BuzzFeed, where I used to work this week, there was news that they are using AI to write their articles completely. and BuzzFeed was trading at about 90, 86 cents on Tuesday. So under that dollar range may be at risk of being delisted. This news comes out. BuzzFeed today trading at $1.13, up 18.47% on the week.

Yeah, investors love they are. Yeah. Wow. Our final story of the week, let's just talk about. something fun. There's great news in the U.S. legal system, big news. Shout it from the hilltops. Gwyneth Paltrow is found not liable for the ski crash that happened in 2016. She was initially sued for, I think, $3.1 million. The guy brought it down to $300,000. He lost. She ended up winning the countersuit for a dollar and on the way out of the course,

out of the courtroom, walks by the guy, whispers in his ear. I wish you will. and leaves ice cold for our legal system what were you what have your feelings been about this paltro case why has it captured the nation so and whose side have you been on I actually think it I maybe it's just my

filter bubbles also she's a startup founder that's uh yeah oh someone had a meme that said had her walking by the guy and she said use code goop for 15% off that's amazing yeah I mean I uh I actually wish that I don't know how I have my news filter set up, but I did not get as much details of this trial in my, fed to me as I would have liked, actually. I kind of, I kind of wish I had seen more of it, unfortunately. Maybe I wasn't on Twitter enough this week, but, yeah.

It's definitely, it's been top of YouTube for me. I've watched it too much of this trial, and I probably should have. But I'm glad that Ms. Paltrow's been exonerated. Justice prevailed. Just as prevailed and she can ski freely on the beautiful bold slopes of this great nation without her project mark. And thanks so much for joining. Great to have you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, super fun. Awesome. Thanks everybody for listening. And for those watching on the feed, thank you. Thank you for your questions. On Wednesday, again, two VCs who talk about the opportunity in AI. And then next Friday, Ranjan Roy will be back, back from vacation from Paris. Ranjan, I hope you've had a good time.

I hope you're listening to this on the end. airplane back and thinking about how much you miss us here at the podcast. And that will do it for us. So again, thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. If this is your first time, please hit subscribe. We do these twice a week flagship interview on Wednesday, live podcast on Friday covering the week's news. And if you're a long-time listener and feel inclined, a five-star rating goes a long way. Have a great weekend and we'll see you next time on Big Technology podcast. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. I don't know.