Limitless: An AI Podcast - Meta Vibes vs OpenAI Pulse: A Tale of Two Releases

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

In this episode, we examine the ethical implications of AI development by Meta and OpenAI, contrasting Meta’s addictive “Vibes” video platform with OpenAI’s productive “Pulse.” Ejaaz and Josh discuss user reactions to both technologies, prompting a dialogue about engagement-driven versus life-enhancing AI. Join us for insights that challenge listeners to reflect on their values in the evolving tech landscape and anticipate an upcoming interview with Pulse's creators!------🌌 LIMITLESS HQ: LISTEN & FOLLOW HERE ⬇️https://limitless.bankless.com/https://x.com/LimitlessFT------TIMESTAMPS0:00 Meta Vibes1:44 Short Form AI Addiction3:24 Public Reactions to Vibes5:37 Meta's Talent Acquisition7:08 The Dystopian Perspective11:10 OpenAI's New Feature: Pulse13:17 Pulse: Your Digital Assistant15:38 User Experiences with Pulse17:31 Public Sentiment on Pulse21:09 Optimism vs. Dystopia22:55 Future of AI Personalization23:35 Upcoming Episode Preview------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/Josh_KaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

So remember all those big billion dollar paychecks, multi-billion dollar paychecks that we've been talking about Zuck issuing to these top-tier AI engineers, EJAS? Well, the good news and the bad news is that we know where the money's been going now because the meta team has released their first major product. And it's a little freaking scary. It's a little dystopian. We're going to get into exactly what it is, how it all works. But before that, there is a second character in the story that is taking a seemingly opposite approach. And that's Open AI, who has dedicated all of their engineering talent towards a new feature. called Pulse. Now Pulse proactively assumes what you are going to want and delivers you value

and things for you literally overnight in order to make your life better. So what we're seeing here as these companies release more features is that they're actually taking two very separate approaches that are seemingly one kind of optimistic one a little more dystopian than each other. Ejas, can you first walk us through the meta news, what they announced, how it works, what they've been up to with all of this multi, multi, multi, multi, multi billion dollars worth of talent. Okay. So the product is appropriately called vibes, which implies that it's something good that's going to kind of like comfort you, maybe even sedate you, Josh, and I use that term very specifically, because they've basically

created AI TikTok, AI IG Reels. In the words of Alexander Wang, the head of Meta's superintelligence lab, he goes, excited to share vibes, a new feed in the Meta AI app for short form AI generated videos. And rather than speak about what it is, I'm going to show you a few videos. You've got an astronaut riding a bike here. You've got a bear and a dinosaur fighting underwater. You've got a cat announcing the news. You've got people running on clouds. And before I start shitting on this, Josh, I'm going to say that it's actually really high quality. The graphics, the kind of way that you can seamlessly edit and remix a bunch of these different contents and videos, it's actually pretty cool. But I don't really agree.

with the thesis, which is basically how can I get a bunch of people addicted to watching short-form content, as if they weren't already addicted as well already. You can now basically take any kind of idea that you might have, spend a few seconds running out a prompt and create a new video that just endlessly loops addicting you to watch it over and over again. So can you walk us through exactly how this works? Is it the user that's kind of prompting a model and then posting it to a separate timeline? Is that kind of what's this? So maybe like an Instagram, Facebook hybrid, but purely AI generated? Yeah, so if you imagine you're on your Instagram app and you click at a post or create a post,

you will now see an option to create an AI generated video. And when you tap that, it'll come up with a little prompt box, similar to if you've ever interacted with chat GPT or even typed anything in Google. And you can just describe what you want to see in a video. So it could be, in this case, a cow wearing sun, glasses mooing at you enthusiastically or it could be a bird flying under water. It could be pretty much anything you want to make up. Okay. This was shocking when I saw this. I guess something would be an understatement was my perception. But before we get into my perception, your perception,

because I'm curious what did the public think of this? How did they take this news? Okay. So there are two camps. One is louder than the other. So camp number one, one, unsurprising, is summarized by Lindyman over here. Always a good reminder that the people making these products are not using them. Zuck is spending his time doing MMA training, running a business, reading, buying Hawaiian real estate and talking to people. This is meant for you, not him. He sells you plastic and rubber so he can buy wood and stone. The point that this man is making is basically he's selling your product that is going to waste your hours, waste your time, suck your attention up into a vacuum that pays metas bills, pays their advertisers

out, whilst you eventually are the product. Now, the other camp is displayed by Alpha Rock over here, where he goes, not surprised by the overwhelming decel takes on this. It is the same myopic snobbery of inventions past. David Hockney called the photograph looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed psychops. Basically, this person is saying you guys are being extremely short-sighted. This is the new innovation that everyone's been hoping for, and it'll end up being a very productive thing. And, okay, before I want you to retaliate to this, Josh,

I can see his point of view. I can see his point of view. If this is a tool that is used for good, imagine being able to educate on a very abstract concept that is so hard to communicate over words or just by speaking into a microphone, much that we do, if there was a way that we could visually kind of illustrate a complex topic and teach many others, I could see that being really productive,

but I don't think that that's what it's going to be used for the majority. I think it's going to be used for mass consumption, whatever gets you views, whatever gets you paid. Josh, I want to pass the ball to you to give the first opinionated take on this, please. Okay, so like I said, like we've been saying for months, they have spent an astronomical amount of money. hiring talent. They have extracted the best engineers in the world. $23 billion, which includes a $15 billion investment to acquire Alexander Wang, the guy that heads up this product. They spent $15 billion

for the guy that just posted that tweet. So that's the context there. Like, they have spent an ungodly amount of money designing and developing this team, which you would hope that they are working to design this really impressive software. And before I get into the actual commentary, I do want to provide a little context for the people who kind of aren't aware, or this was something I was thinking about as I was reading the news, is that when you think about meta and previously Facebook, the Facebook team spent a lot of years and a lot of talent on developing a way to better serve ads, and that resulted in a very addicted algorithm. So they spent, God knows how many engineers, millions of hours, top talent out of universities, they sucked them in, they paid them with a lot of

incentives and these wonderful offices that they get to work in, free lunches, and they said, hey, your job is to figure out how to create a better timeline to get people more hooked to sell better ads. And that is a little bit of a dystopian way of seeing things. So when I heard that they were spending all this money to hire all this talent, this new AI initiative for a new company named Meadow, I was like, okay, we got a chance here. And the very first product they announce is how to get people addicted to a timeline for the AI age, where it is AI version of this timeline except it's generated completely through an AI model instead of human-generated. And the scary thing for me is that AI-generated content, EJA, we've talked about this in the past,

it can get very good very quickly, where if you have access to a front-facing camera on someone's smartphone, and it's watching your eyes dilate as you watch more interesting videos or lower and it detects every retention rate, it can slowly iterate over time. And with TikTok, when you're scrolling through these timelines, there's a fixed set of content that you can get through. So maybe the algorithm is choosing between five top videos that are interesting to you. With an AI-generated timeline, there is no limit to the amount of videos. It's very open-ended. So that n number that they could choose from becomes infinite,

which means you can iterate over time until it becomes maximally addicting for the specific user and generate content on the fly. So that is my dystopian approach. It is very discouraging to see this. Like, I understand where they're coming from. But like, my God, as the first product to offer, without any good explanation. Like, I'd love to hear from them why. I think they really just dropped this and like, hey, here's this thing we've been working on.

Here's our first cool project. Without explaining the vision and the why behind it. And I think that's equally as important because, sure, this is great technology. It's nothing novel. We've seen V-O-3 make great videos way better than these. So it's not like this is novel technology. They've just applied a timeline to it for the first time. But I'm curious if you agree or disagree.

What are your thoughts on? Where do you stand with this? Okay, so I'm conflicted. I agree with a lot of what you just said. but I want to point a few things out. I want to argue with you a bit, Josh. Feel free to jump in whenever. Okay.

Number one, I think we might be sitting on our own ethical horses right now. Do we apply the same kind of critique to TikTok as much or social media in general? I'm not sure that we do. I think that because you and I are so invested in AM, we want to see it kind of change the world, we expect that anyone, particularly someone that's spending hundreds of billions of dollars on compute to scale the best AI models in the world to use it for good or whatever we define as good. I don't think Zucks ever explicitly stated that he was going to do that, right? He never claimed that he wanted to build the best AI model to make you a genius. He said Facebook or meta specifically's mission and gold has always been to bring people together, to create a better social environment, to help them connect, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

and he said that Mehta's chops have been cut in building consumer apps. That's their bread and butter. He said that on the Dohaquash interview that he was on a couple weeks back, right? And he's kind of delivering on that promise, I guess, and maybe we just don't like how it's materialized. I agree with you that he should have sold the vision a bit more because Zuck has never explicitly come out and said, hey, we want to increase eyeballs on our app.

We need to increase shareholder value, and therefore that's what we're trying to do here. he's always sold a more like we're going to connect people online and that's going to bring us closer together. I want to hear what his pitch is. I'm kind of curious to hear from him versus Alexander Wang. The other thing that I'll say is I do think they're going to spin this from an educational point of view as well. I think they're going to use examples of people using this to kind of explain really complex topics to illustrate new inventions or whatever that might be, or even to ideate like kind of new film concepts or video concepts to entertain.

And I don't think net net that's going to really result in too much of a bad thing. But I think you and I have been primed on TikTok too much. The other thing that is in your camp, Josh, is I think Zuck has seen a growing trend of Gen Z people watching absolute slop. Not AI slop, just slop on TikTok. If you watch what some of the kids are digesting, like what was that skibbiddy toilet trend? that was going nuts that basically all the kids could talk about or a baby shark and all that kind of stuff. I think he's seen that and he knows that there are a bunch of kids that are entering the workforce or whatever that like this kind of stuff and he's just engineering a product that

they're going to get hooked on and I'm very bearish on that. Very well could be. I guess we'll leave it at that and we'll see. I'm very much looking forward to the messaging that they're going to have around this going forward and how they plan to use the technology. But maybe you're right. Maybe we're just being a little too optimistic on our expectations for meta and the team. But this isn't unlike meta or Zuck's nature, right? Like literally last week, they released a new AI dating app with two features that will help you find the love of your life or, you know, just a girlfriend or whoever you want to hang out with. And I'm referencing this post summarizes actually very well that their new AI assistant lets you search for a Brooklyn Tech bro who would go to EDM concerts. with me. And this one hit pretty close to home because, you know, we live in Brooklyn and it's,

it very much fulfills a stereotype here. So the point I'm making is Zuck and Meta haven't really kind of blindsided us or surprised us. They've kind of been making moves like this all along. And maybe this is the next step of a part that they just want to go down. Yeah, I guess, well, time will tell. I'm looking forward to future messaging from $15 billion Alex Wang. Hopefully he has something a little more inspiring to share with us. But on the inspiring, front on the optimistic front. On the hopeful front, we have OpenAI, EJAS, who is now doing something proactive. I think this is the first time where an AI is actually thinking on behalf of you without being prompted. Can you explain to us what's going on with this new Pulse feature?

Okay. What if I told you, Josh, that the episode that we're filming tomorrow, the AI roundup, was actually formed by Open AI's latest product that they released a few days ago. That'd be pretty stoked because that would save us a lot of time in preparation. Yep. I am talking about Open AI Pulse. And in Sam's words, Pulse works for you overnight and keeps thinking about your interests, your connected data, your recent chats, and more. Every morning you get a custom generated set of stuff you might be interested in. It performs well if you tell ChatGPT more about what's important to you. In regular chat, you could mention, I'd go, I'd like to go visit Bora Bora someday, or my kid is six months old and I'm interested.

set in developmental milestones, and in the future, you might get useful updates. And to kind of summarize what this product does, Josh, it's kind of a digital you that thinks and gets better as you sleep, literally. So whilst you and I are asleep, it's thinking about what would Josh want to hear about tomorrow morning. What was the task Josh was trying to figure out at 12 p.m. today that he didn't end up figuring out. How can I help him achieve that goal faster and quicker than his deadline in a week's time. It's meant to be a digital version of you that's meant to help and aid you, very much like a personalized AI that you and I have been so, so excited about kind of using and interacting with.

This was a feature that they released for pro users. And in the words of Fiji Simo, their CEO of product, she goes, AI should do more than just answer questions. It should anticipate your needs and help reach your goals. And I kind of like this idea of instead of pitching you an AI agent that can solve all your problems, they're taking the step before that, which is let me help understand what you're trying to achieve and help you in small ways, which is give you up the information that you didn't even know you needed to help reach your goals. This is super exciting. This is, it feels like a very natural extension to Open Air's memory feature. I mean, if you remember, they were the first ones, I believe, to roll out memory.

And it became kind of the moat that they had. And I love that this is an attempt to build on top of the moat. And I also love that that came from Fiji, who is the CEO of product of OpenAI, like the semi-CEO. But it's cool that they're shipping these really cool features that are now building on top of that mode that they've created. And again, I mean, I use chat chippy T mostly because of that memory mode. I think it's really powerful. It makes a big deal. And I would love for AI to be proactive.

And by all means, I very much think this is the first time an AI is doing this, where it is actually ingesting your memory, sitting on it, thinking about it, they are applying the absolute best models they have overnight when you are not online, and then surfacing the most helpful things based on their absolute best models the following morning. And that, to me, seems really helpful. Like, okay, maybe it's, in a way, it's like, a lot of times someone will tell you like, oh, just go sleep on it. You'll, you'll come to an answer in the morning. AI is very much, it's sleeping on it. It's sleeping on it for you on your behalf. And it is surfacing the best answer. So to me, this is a really cool feature. I'm a big fan. Do you want to know something cool, Josh? So I have a pro subscription

and I've been using it in the four days since it's been released. What has it been like? What do you get? It started off kind of like a newsletter, your own personalized newsletter on your life, Josh, on all your interests that you wanted to hear about. And the newsletter would tell me things that happened over the last couple of days. Okay, this is the progress. I'm really excited to tell you about this.

Okay. So step one is newsletter debrief on the things that have happened the last few days. That's cool, but nothing super novel. Day two, it started telling me those things that happened over the last couple of days, but also started giving me ideas of what could happen in the future. It was like, oh, have you ever thought about, like, you know, maybe this AI agent could end up actually feasibly doing this because of this advancement that Nvidia did with this chip?

But I'm like, huh, you know what? I never really thought about that. That's actually really interesting. And then yesterday, Josh, the prompt that it gave me was a list of things that was the latest news in AI, and it said, by the way, have you considered talking about this angle

when you filmed the episode on Wednesday? And I was like, how, wait, how do you know I'm filming an episode on Wednesday? And then I realized I had had a separate conversation with ChatGBTT earlier on that day, trying to brainstorm ideas of how I would frame an argument. And it had brought in a new news topic

that had broke that morning, and synthesized it with that goal that I was going to film on Wednesday. And it was said, by the way, you should include this in that and frame it this way. So it's already kind of getting me to think ahead of my life in ways that I actually hadn't considered. Or maybe I would only think about on that day. So it's kind of like helping my future self in a weird way. That is very cool. And it seems like you're not alone in your, your happy sentiment around it because Kevin, I mean, we have some public commentary.

People also seem to be pretty stoked that this is happening, right? Yeah. So Kevin Rose has a tweet here where he goes, Chad GPT Pulse is one of the most impactful features OpenAI has released. It's an agent that continuously researchers on your behalf, building on topics from your recent conversations. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this paradigm because it's truly unlike anything we've seen before.

I guess that I kind of resonate with that. So I guess in the search to figure out how this works, we stumbled upon this post by Nathan Dashez. And he just said, just had an interesting experience with GPT Plus. Last night I asked Chat Chapti a question, and it gave me an answer that was just so-so. This morning, the first card in Pulse was three times better to the same question. And then you could see there's a response from Adam Fry, who is the lead of product at OpenAI. And he said, well, overnight, we use our best models and also try to think the broader intent of the question you asked to see if ChatGPT can be even more helpful.

So what's really cool is what they're doing is, I also have to wonder if they're using this as a test bed for new models without telling you. They said they're absolute best models. I wonder if that's a teaser. I don't know. I'm just speculating. So I wonder if this creates this new meta of engaging with the AI where you can actually prompt which topics to think about overnight. And if you don't feel satisfied with the answer, maybe you could just subtly hint it to

request to think harder on it overnight. Yeah, I think you kind of nailed it, Josh. So there's this paragraph in Fiji's announcement post where she goes, our reasoning models, and she's referring to Open AI's a as a lot. latest models, were built to spend more time thinking before they answer, allowing them to work through complex tasks in science, coding, math at near PhD level. And this is something you and I have spoken about, Josh. We keep talking about these models breaking benchmarks and being so, so smart. But most of our listeners, including you and I, don't really get to see the fruits of

this labor, right? We don't, we're like, okay, we're not doing PhD level coding. So what? Who cares? And Fiji goes, Pulse takes that intelligence and applies it proactively to your personal everyday life, helping you make progress in the things that matter even when you don't think. So it's almost as if they're saying these models were already available and intelligent, and we're surfacing this feature, this new product for you so that you can see it happen to you in real time, literally change the way you work and interact with AI over time. And I just want to give my quick take and opinion on this because we just covered like the doom of vision. of like Mehta's scrolling TikTok app

and then we have suddenly this. This is way more optimistic. I can see myself using this every day and actually growing to really depend and love it. Obviously, the Duma side of that is like, if I'm dependent on this and open air has all my data, could they use that for different things? But the optimistic side is,

do I care if it's making me more of a productive human being? If I can do 10x more things than I could originally do, if it can anticipate problems before they even happen to me, that's something that I'm willing not only to pay 200 bucks for, but maybe even $1,000 for, if it ends up doing that, right? And then the start contrast to point out the obvious is this seems to be a product that is sucking your attention

to make you more productive, to make you smarter, whereas Meta's thing seems to be like, you know, let me help you consume a bunch of video content and waste your time on that kind of stuff. That's the obvious. Do you have the same kind of take, Josh, or anything different? Yeah, what you said reminded me, of this war that I've been at with all of the large model companies, which is against the singular

text box, like, the fact that you're presented with the world's knowledge and a single text box to engage with it really drives me, like, frustration to no end. And what I love about the open-AI approach is, well, it's just, it's proactive. It serves you things that you wouldn't necessarily require that amount of knowledge for, but it takes the large knowledge that's unused, and it applies it to something that's valuable for you, and it serves it to you. And I think that's great. And I mean, meta, meta just has this, this kind of like strange, slightly less inspiring

approach. And sure, AI video, it's not that great now. It's going to get fantastic. I'm sure AI video will, I mean, eventually become more interesting than TikTok. And it will become a very interesting, valuable platform. It's just, on a personal note, leaves me

uninspired to see all of this talent going towards that instead of something like Open AI. So for today, for this moment in time, I am, I'm a little upset with Meta. Pretty happy with Open AI. We'll see how this changes over time. But two very interesting,

noteworthy product releases that had happened just very recently here. I think it is a tale of two different cities. Facebook and Meta is doing its own thing. It is a social media platform. They never claim to change the world and make you the most intelligent person ever. They're there to kind of connect people. And I'm ironically lacking the argument for connection with their new product. addiction, I get connection, less so.

And with the Open AI product, Sam has always kind of pitched this vision of AGI, super intelligence, like, we're going to make you smarter and it's going to make you way more productive and humans are going to prosper, UBI, all this kind of stuff. And I can see this as a step towards that. The thing that I'm most excited about in the Open AI stuff is this seems like the premeditated step before launching your own personal agent that can do

way more things than just talk to you. It can buy stuff for you and buy stuff for you. build stuff for you and, you know, they released something this morning that will allow you to like pay or buy anything, which anyway is super cool. But Josh, we have a really exciting episode that we're filming on Thursday, which is with the guys that built this product. Yes. The Pulse product. The Pulse product. The one that we like today. The Pulse is the product. The optimistic outlook. I'm highlighting to the optimist. Yeah. I'm highlighting the end of Sam's announcement post where he goes, huge congrats to Christina.

and Samir and the team for building this. Christina and Samir are coming on our show on Thursday. We are recording that episode and we're going to dig deep into AI personalization and agents. And we cannot wait to show this to you guys. But that comes to the end of our episode. Unless Josh, you have any other hot takes. That's everything. So, yeah, if you guys are excited about the Christina and Samir episode, please tune in.

That is, like, pretty huge for us to actually talk to the people who are responsible for creating the news that we were discussing on the show. super exciting. One task for you in the comment section is to share which side you are on. Are we being delusional? Is it the pessimists that are correct? Is it the people who are building AI Slop? Are you team meta? Are you team open AI today? It's all right. You'll have to change your opinion next week. Before today, where do you stand? And as always, if you enjoyed, please share it with a friend who would also enjoy an episode from Limitless. We appreciate your support always. Don't forget to like, subscribe all the good things. And we will see you again in the next one for a roundup of all of the other stuff that we didn't get to talk about today. So stay tuned.

We have a lot coming up and we will talk to you all in the next one.