Morning Brew Daily - OpenAI can take your SATs, Meta Layoffs, Boneless Wing Controversy

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Episode 17: Neal and Toby explain why ChatGPT may soon be a better test-taker than the average human. Also Meta is laying off another 10,000 people - how did they get there? Plus the latest on the SVB fallout, tumultuous train situations across the country, and why a man is suing Buffalo Wild Wings over... boneless wings? Learn more about our sponsor, Grasshopper: https://www.grasshopper.bank/thedailyshow Learn more about our sponsor, TaxAct: https://www.taxact.com Listen Here: https://www.mbdailyshow.com/ Watch Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow Sources: OpenAI announces GPT-4, claims it can beat 90% of humans on the SAT: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/14/openai-announces-gpt-4-says-beats-90percent-of-humans-on-sat.html Meta plans another round of mass layoffs: https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2023/03/14/meta-plans-another-round-of-mass-layoffs Credit Suisse sheds nearly 25%, key backer says no more money: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/credit-suisse-shares-drop-fresh-record-low-cds-widen-2023-03-15/ Train debacles across the country: https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1635648069755707395?s=20 https://www.governing.com/community/atlantas-incredible-shrinking-transit-plan https://simpleflying.com/new-tork-laguardia-airport-airtrain-proposal-scrapped/ https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-11/new-cost-estimate-for-high-speed-rail-puts-california-bullet-train-100-billion-in-the-red Man Sues Buffalo Wild Wings over Boneless Wings: https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/debate-over-boneless-wings-to-court Vinyl records outsell CDs for first time in decades: https://www.bbc.com/news/64919126 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Consider this comparison. PWC data found the percentage of CEOs who report revenue gains or cost reductions from AI is almost equal to the percentage who say they're still stuck. What separates these two groups? PWC points to a clarity issue. Even for CEOs, it's hard to tell what's AI hype, what's reality, and where this tech can make a tangible difference. Learn where AI can actually make an impact and what successful adoption looks like at

pwc.wc.com slash U.S. slash brew AI. That's PwC.com slash us slash brewaI. Good morning, Brew Daily. I'm Neil Priman. And I'm Toby Howell. And Neil, we got this epic email from a listener this morning. Shout out Jordy from Guadalajara, Mexico. He emailed and told us about his experience with Japanese 7-Elevens

because we talked about it on the show yesterday. He said, I just wanted to tell you about something peculiar I found in 7-11 stores during a trip to Tokyo. you can find white dress shirts to purchase. There are even dressing rooms to change shirts before you head out to work. And the reason why they sell white shirts is to serve corporate workers that get drunk the night before and pass out and don't have the chance to go home. So they need to change shirts before heading back into work.

Any store that doesn't have that should not be able to be called a convenience store. Seriously, 7-11s in Japan sound like the most magical places. So thank you, Jordy, for emailing us. Literal definition of convenience, thanks for the email. We have a great show for you. Not talking about 7-11, unfortunately, but we are talking meta-layoffs. We are going to talk U.S. train debacles, which is always fun and sad at the same time. And then a chicken wing scandal.

Excited for that. But first, we have some AI news. So yesterday, OpenAI announced that the latest version of its large language model, chat GBT4, is officially here. So basically, I'm going to take you through some of the headline stats and why this is a major advancement over the previous edition. So OpenAI said the tool is 40% more likely to produce factual responses than chat GBT 3.5. Plus, the new version can handle text and image queries, so you can submit a picture with a related question, and it asks chatGB4 to describe it or answer some questions. We'll get into this, but I've seen it break down means, which is just extremely impressive.

But I think the headline news is actually how ChatGBTGV-4 does on certain standardized tests. So Open Eye said that it exists human-level performance on many professional tests. And this isn't just human-level performance. This is like smart human-level performance. So I'm going to take us through a little bit how it did on certain tests. Chat-GB-D-4 performed in the 90th percentile on a bar exam, the 93rd percentile on an SAT-reading exam, and the 89th percentile on SAT math exam. It's crazy.

We have a chart behind and we'll get into it, but first, I want to say, Neil, what do you react? What do you make of this new chat GPT for? This just comes after a few months after they first released ChatGPT 3, or GPT 3.5, which powers ChatGPT. And we thought that was the craziest thing we've ever seen. They're rolling out these updates every few months. The first thing that I think of is, like, we're just at four.

Like, what happens at 10, 15 down the line? These things are so powerful. But I do want to talk about this visual interpretation thing because this kind of wowed us the most in their presentation in Open AI exec drew a mock-up of a website, a very crude mock-up on a piece of tissue. And the AI literally made a website just from a screen grab of that thing he drew, which is very crude. And it is very astounding to see that they can interpret images. Right.

So they call it vision as this latest advancement that they can deal with images. I saw it break down a meme, as I mentioned earlier in the show. It was of chicken nuggets arranged in the shape of the world map. Yeah. And someone asked, what is this meme showing? And it literally said, like, it's funny because, like, you're saying this is a beautiful world map, but in reality, it's chicken nuggets. So it doesn't have a sense of humor, but it understands what the joke is in certain pictures, which is kind of crazy to comprehend. Sometimes I watch something.

I'm like, I have no idea why that's funny. So maybe I can ask GPT4. Yeah. I'm just super bullish on this overall because in their presentation, they talked about, they actually revealed that a lot of companies were using this technology already. Morgan Stanley is using it so their employees can search company documents, really. quickly. Khan Academy is developing an automated tutor, Duo Lingo, and Stripe are using it. And then Microsoft also said that GPT4 was what the AI that they were using in their revamped Bing. Yeah. And that was something that we were talking about before the show is that this is how you know

that this is a real advancement is when corporations immediately put it into their product suite because they're just like, this is such a good product. And that's where the real money is, too, when corporations actually use it. I do actually want to just jump back to, how ChatGBT for performed on these standardized exams. So obviously it's done really well on some of like the math and science-based exams. So we have a chart that we're looking at right now. It essentially is a bar chart where the left side of the exam is the ones that they do the worst on and the right side is the ones they do the best on.

The ones that they do the worst on, which is hilarious, is the AP literature exam. So it's still, I feel good as a former English major. It still is not great at interpreting, I don't know, like prose or the meaning behind text. So that makes us feel good as, like, writers. Makes it feel good for now. But I would say, if I was going back in the workforce, I would learn the hell out of this technology. We talked a few weeks ago about how it would look good on your resume to be proficient in chat, GPT. But now companies are literally asking you to have proficiency in this technology in order to be hired.

A Japanese startup is telling new hires that they need to know chat GPT and other AI language models, or else they just won't have a job. Right. It's going that way. We're already seeing it. We already forecasted it. Yeah, the pace of news is crazy. Like, Google, it's constantly on their heels right now, scrambling to release updates on their own AI strategy. And they did release kind of a snazzy video showing how they're going to incorporate it into the G Suite, which Microsoft is ahead of them in that.

But I do think overall, huge boosts and productivity, net positive for technology for humanity. We'll say. It might come back and invite us. We'll talk about GPT5 in the next few weeks probably at this pace. Let's keep it in the world of tech. This is kind of the opposite news to that development, but meta keeps on shrinking. So Zuckerberg announced plans to lay off 10,000 workers yesterday. And that comes just four months after mass layoffs in November at the company.

META laid off 11,000 employees then or 13% of its workforce. Those were its biggest layoffs ever. So this is all part of META's year of efficiency that execs have called it. And it's just wide, wide cost cuts across the company. Yeah, I mean, it is, we're seeing a correction for sure. Like, META ballooned after and, like, during the pandemic. They got up to 87,000 workers. So there actually are still bigger than they were before the pandemic,

which is crazy to think about. But I really love, honestly, Zuck is on a bit of a wartime CEO path right now. He has this great quote that he said in January is, I don't think you want a management structure. That's just managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing people are doing the work, which is... Did he write that or did he say that out loud? I don't know.

I hope it was a little bit of both. But basically, he was spitting bars about how ridiculous the corporate culture at Meta became. Yeah. Yeah. He let it get that way. Yeah, it is. Listen, he's dissing himself when he says this. He did let it balloon into what it is. But yeah, we saw a TikTok too that was going pretty viral of a former meta employee who said, listen, I was hired at meta and literally had to fight for work. There was nothing to do. There was whole teams of people who were there maybe just so Google couldn't have them or Apple didn't have them. That was definitely one of the hypothesis of why meta's headcount grew so big.

Another one that I read in this Wired article, love this phrase, ghosts in the machine. And that kind of refers to people who were brought on to work on projects like Libra or its various cryptocurrency ventures. Or we talked yesterday about how its NFT platform was being collapsed. So when these products fail to launch, the employees stay on and I guess go to other teams and don't really know what to do. So that is just those are the ghosts in the machine and they just stay around even when sort of their project that they were working on is not really an initiative for the company or is not a thing anymore. I love that phrase goes to the machine. I also just want to quickly bring up, we saw some Apple news yesterday, which was basically they were saying that they're going to reduce the frequency of

corporate bonuses, which is hilarious to me because here you have meta and Google laying off tens of thousands of workers, and Apple is like, everyone's like, holy crap, Apple's reducing the frequency. It just shows Apple was the only one to really not overhire during the pandemic. They're still running a tighter ship than these other big tech companies. But, yeah, I guess cuts are hitting Apple right now. Yeah, it's still showing that Apple is not growing like it could be. And the higher interest rates and economic downturn are affecting the wider sector. Speaking of interest rates and affecting the wider sector, we're going to do a little bank recap because a lot's happening in the world of banking.

We're actually, we thought we were a little bit out of the woods in the U.S. given the regulatory FDIC stepping in, helping out SVB and whatnot. But we woke up this morning to see that Europe is on fire right now. So this news is about Credit Suisse. Its stock hit an all-time low, which is not really surprised to anyone who's been monitoring the situation over the past year or so. So Credit Suisse has been teetering for a while now. It's lost money for five straight quarters.

Its clients withdrew about $100 billion from the bank in the fourth quarter alone. and today, which is the news that predicated this huge stock drop-off, is the Saudi National Bank, which is Credit Suisse's largest shareholder, said it won't invest any more money to support the bank. Not good. I just want to give you credit for the use of the word predicated. I literally stopped in my tracks. I was like, that was amazing. Yeah, no, I think we're all trying to figure out how much this relates to the bank jitters in the United States.

Like if SVV hadn't failed and Credit Suisse did this same news, would globally. stocks be cratering like they are right now. So it's a little bit of a question about how much of SVB's failure and problems were kind of spread across the banking sector. And it seems like, from what we've been reading, that Credit Suisse is somewhat of an isolated case, yet it kind of has a very similar problem to SVB, and that it's holding these bonds that when interest rates rise are worth a lot less now. And that is, every bank has that problem. Yeah, it's definitely you're right in the sense that it's not the exact same issue that SVB had, but it is now shining a brighter spotlight on these banks and how they've been managing their balance sheets. So yeah,

Credit Suisse, very large bank, not doing well over in Europe. It's crashing. And then I also just want to briefly touch on some SVB news that came out as well. So the Justice Department has opened an investigation into SVB's collapse, which sounds It's headline making news, but honestly, this happens. It's almost like routine for when a bank collapses. The Department of Justice steps in, sees if there's any malpractice. The thing they're looking at potentially is that some executives exercised stock options worth millions of dollars before it collapsed. These things are usually scheduled, right, in advance?

So this doesn't happen, and there's not all this conflicts of interest. Yeah. So, I mean, who knows what they'll find, but that is generally what people are saying that, These were pre-scheduled, so there's, yeah. We're still doing a lot of autopsy on SVB. One thing that I found interesting is that there are a lot of losers here. There are a ton of losers fed. There's so much finger-pointing going on.

So many people messed up for this to happen. But there are some winners, and the rich are getting richer, and I'm talking about big banks. So there's this new stat that Bank of America received more than $15 billion in deposits in just a few days after SVB. collapsed as everyone in these regional lenders and SVB were like, I don't want to do this ever again. I want to go to a bank that is backstopped all the time. It's too big to fail. The government will never let it implode. And so you're going to see the J.P. Morgans of the world, the Morgan Stanleys, the Wells Fargoes, the cities. I think they're going to come out of this on top.

The rich, get richer. You hate to see it, I guess. Okay, before we jump to the next story, we're going to take a quick break. It's time to refresh your yard during spring, Backyard Days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting $179, like the next grill 3-burner gas grill. Or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together. Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot. Now through May 6th.

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They say that the American pastime is baseball, but I'd argue that there's nothing more American than complaining about our train system. I do it. So let's do it. Let's complain about trains. And I'm not just doing it to complain about trains randomly, but three headlines about rail projects just surfaced this week.

They caught my eye and showed, you know, basically what a miserable state were in. And speaking of states, let's start in California. California is trying to build this 500-mile bullet train system. This is massive. It would be, it's the largest infrastructure project happening in the country. country right now. But costs keep going up, and the operations start date keeps getting pushed back. It's at 2033 right now, and like, no one thinks this is actually going to happen. So there was updated report this week, calculated that 171-mile segment, which is just the first segment of this

thing, the cost has increased to $35 billion. So that's $10 billion over budget. And that $35 billion of that one segment is now costs more than the entire project was expected. to cost in the beginning. And so it's 500 miles. This is only the first 170 miles. Yeah, only the first 117 miles already costs more than they thought the entire project would cost at the beginning. Speaking of the entire project, that is now over budget by $100 billion.

So, yeah, you can't do anything else. It's just a ridiculous. That's billions. That's not really. $100 billion. Oh, my gosh. They need Jeff Bezos come in and just buy it out, I guess. So they're saying this might, this probably won't get, like, ever happen.

Because, yeah, 2033 is the first time. And so everyone writes these thought pieces about why we can't build trains here, and it's just kind of a complex amount of factors. Obviously, supply chains were disrupted. There's higher labor costs, but it seems like we should be able to figure this out. Yeah. And California in particular has some interesting labor laws, too, where they have to pay for the health care of the workers rather than in Europe, for instance, like that's a federal expense. And so California in particular is a S show. It is a mess for trains.

But also in New York, we're not building trains. So there was this air trans system that was supposed to be built to go to LaGuardia. And LaGuardia just had this $8 billion renovation, and everyone loves it there now. If you've ever been in New York in the past year, basically the only topic of conversation is how beautiful LaGuardia is. But this train project just got scrapped, and they're just going to put in they're going to put in buses because it, too, went five times over budget. Yeah, it's ridiculous, and this was supposed to be, yeah, the crowning moment for LaGuardia. I was really excited for it because LaGuardia's airport closest to me.

I would love to be able to take a train there. But, yeah, they scrapped it. Instead, they're spending $500 million or so on a bus system. I have to say that the urbanist Twitter people that I follow because I'm kind of embedded in this world, I love that for you. Hate the air trend to begin with, and they were like, this was dead on arrival. There's no way this should have happened in the first place. Disappointing, but...

Yeah. No, they were, like, expand buses. Buses work. And so maybe if you get, like, a bus with a dedicated lane, I used to take a bus to Lugardia. It was fine. I was right. And then the final train debacle is in Atlanta, which in 2016 had this sales tax that was supposed to fund large, large capital expansion projects for buses, trains, stations, and then a new

report out this week said they're pursuing half of all those projects. It's ridiculous. Also, but give the number of how much that was going to cost versus how much the California one was going to cost. It's not, it's not. I don't know. I don't have that figure on me, but it's in the millions. The California one is, yeah, is 138 billion now. So crazy, crazy. I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that project is not going to happen. But overall, trains are real, trains and trans are in this huge existential crisis right now as ridership has not come back from pre-pandemic levels. And so you don't have the funding that you once did. There's fewer passengers. How do you plan for the

future? And how do you create transit for people that need it to get to work? It's tough because the younger generation loves trains. You love trains. Thank you, honestly, for being embedded in urban planning Twitter, so you can bring our listeners all these train facts. Okay, Neil, obviously the transportation sector, the banking sector is in shambles, but there's another industry racked by controversy right now. The boneless wing industry is having an identical crisis.

Okay, we'll get to your emotions in a minute. But the headline news is a Chicago area man. has brought a class action lawsuit against Buffalo Wild Wings claiming the restaurant chain is falsely advertising its boneless wing product. And here's his main gripe. You shouldn't call a boneless wing a wing if it's actually just breast meat molded into the shape of the wing.

So obviously you just had an emotional outburst earlier. What are you on the Chicago Man side? What are your thoughts on this wing debate? Yeah, so he's saying that Buffalo Wild Wings is misleading advertising, and it should just say these are chicken nuggets. So I went down a Reddit rabbit hole, and there's this huge debate going about what the difference is between a chicken nugget and a boneless wing. And there is, or a chicken tender, right?

Because I would argue that there is no such thing as a boneless wing. When I say boneless wing, you think of a wing that has been deep-boned. Right. Right. And there's no such thing as that. It's just a chicken tender. And chicken tender is basically chicken breast, right? Just like a whole piece of chicken breast.

Meanwhile, chicken nuggets are minced meat. So that is the difference between. So I wouldn't call these, I wouldn't call boneless wings chicken nuggets. I would call them chicken tenders. But whatever. I have lost. I'm a little lost. The fact that we're debating this, it has been a long debate.

And in 2020, there was this man that went in front of the Lincoln, Nebraska, City Council, and gave an impassioned plea that the city should remove all of their language saying boneless wings, from across the menu. And here we have a clip that he gives some of his reasoning. I don't go to order boneless tacos. I don't go and order boneless club sandwiches. I don't ask for boneless auto repair. It's just what's expected.

And then number three, we need to raise our children better. Our children are raised being afraid of having bones attached to their meat. That's where meat comes from. It grows on bones. We need to teach them that the wing of a chicken is from a chicken chicken and it's delicious. Oh my gosh. I just love how he brings up the children at the end. Think of the children. The mic drop with, it is delicious is so true. Yeah. Oh my God, March Madness is coming up tomorrow and I, I, this whole story has me wanting to eat boned in wings because I'm not a baby.

So what is your, what would you call bonus wings if not bonus wings then? Chicken tenders. But that's different. Chicken tenders are long and skinny. These are smaller and are modified chicken tenders. I'd call them Sassy nugs. Sassy nugs. It's different than chicken nuggets that are saucy nugs. So Buffalo Wild Wings clap back, though, right? Yeah, I don't like their clap back, though. So they tweeted, they said, it's true.

Our boneless wings are all white meat chicken. Our hamburgers contain no ham. Our buffalo wings are 0% Buffalo. So they're pointing, they're making fun of the fact that, obviously, just because something is named something doesn't mean and contains the thing it's named. I'm not on Buffalo Wild Wing's side on this, though. because wings mean something. Hamburger throughout history has never meant ham.

So Buffalo Wild Wings, I'm joining the class action lawsuit. That's what we're here right now. All right. So I'm definitely having wings tomorrow. I'm excited. This story has got me really hungry. And we're on the side of this guy, right? Yes.

We're on Chicago area man's side. We're on Chicago area man's side. Finally, I want to take us to the world of music. Vinyl is surging and Metallica is. seizing the means of production. The metal band is buying a vinyl plant in Virginia. Honestly, I read this headline. I was like, huh? What is going on? Yes, they are buying a vinyl manufacturing plant in Virginia so they can produce enough vinyl records to keep up with demand. And demand for vinyl is soaring. For the first time, the unit sales of vinyl records outstripped

CDs for the first time since 1987 in the U.S. That's an awesome stat. And I have vinyl records at at my home. I don't actually have a record player, which is ironic. But yeah, and I also love some of the stats around what's driving this final broom. Obviously, there's the nostalgia factor that people remember growing up on, or I don't even know, just like the fact that it's returned to the past. And then also some audio files think that it does create like a warmer sounding music. I think that's undisputed.

Right. Okay, I just have... Dan Batha can correct us. Right, our audio team. But then also, so Taylor Swift has been driving this boom, too. She sold almost 1.7 million vinyl records by herself last year, more than Harry Stiles, which is in the 700,000, and the Beatles. So Taylor Swift is like almost single-handedly propelling this vinyl renaissance.

Before we go, I have to say you are not alone. This is my favorite stat from this whole thing, is that you are not alone in having records, but not anything to play them on. 50% of vinyl buyers last year did not have a record player. So this is wall art or just a flex when someone comes in and you can say, look in my record collection. Yeah, it's truly just sitting on the floor next to our TV and we're like just for the clout, just for the social cloud.

All right, that's all we got for today. It's hump day. I want to give a massive shout out to our amazing crew behind the scenes. Show's producer and editor is Emily Milliron. The show's technical director is Justin Orlando. Our supervising producer is Bryce Belloff. Our theme song Mastermind is Dan Bousa. and makeup got replaced by AI.

Devin Emery is our chief content officer. Our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavatheater.com. Yamava Resort and Casino celebrating its 40th anniversary you in must be 21 to enter