June 20, 2025 • 32 mins
What does Google Search sound like? This week in the News Roundup, Oz explores Google’s new AI-generated audio summaries — and why a simple question like “what’s two plus two?” triggered a two-minute podcast. Then, Wikipedia tried its own AI experiment and faced backlash from editors. On TechSupport, Semafor’s Reed Albergotti recasts Big Tech as characters from The Wizard of Oz and explains the current AI landscape.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of iHeart Podcasts and
Kaleidoscope iMOS vloscan and carries out again this week. So
today I'll bring you the headlines, including what Google Search
sounds like and why you're out of stock Cereal may
be the result of a cyber attack on today's tech
support segment. Semaphor's read Albergotti casts AI companies in the
(00:36):
Wizard of Oz.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
The funniest part of this whole thing, honestly, was reaching
out to all of these companies and explaining to them
why they are the Munchkins or the wicked Witch of
the East or the West.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
All of that in the Weekend Tech. It's Friday, June twentieth.
In summary, today's headlines are about Summary's perhaps the most
ubiquitous artifact of the age of AI, and today we
have two stories about AI summaries, one about a new
AI feature on Google Search and the other about Wikipedia's
(01:11):
turn away from AI. We'll start with Google. As you
might know, Google has this product called Notebook LM, which
allows users to feed their own research sources, PDFs, websites, spreadsheets,
whatever it may be, and Notebook LM will analyze the
data in all kinds of different ways. One of these
ways is a quote audio overview, where users can generate
(01:33):
this two hander deep dive podcast where a male voice
and a female voice talk each other through whatever the
topic at hand is. Now, Google is bringing this feature
to its search results. According to Ours Technica, the feature
hasn't been fully rolled out yet. Users have to opt
in by going to labs dot Google dot com slash
search and turning on audio overviews. There seems to be
(01:57):
a wait list, but one of our producers was able
to turn the future before news spread too far, and
here's what she found in the search results. Underneath the
section that says quote, people also ask, there's an oval
button that says generate audio overview. When you click it,
it starts working because even AI podcasts take a little
(02:19):
bit of time to cook. So while you wait, Google
tells you exactly what it's doing, which is quote, understanding
the query intent, researching websites, generating transcript, and then in
less than a minute, an audio player appears. So our
producer searched in Google, what is two plus two? The
resulting audio overview was two and a half minutes long,
(02:42):
which already tickled her spidery senses. But before we listen
to the audio, we checked out all the websites listed
underneath the clip as sources. They were a Reddit thread
asking why some people think two plus two equals five,
a link to study dot com, a Wikipedia page for
two plus two equals five, as well as a link
(03:03):
to a TikTok meme around the question of two plus two,
which I couldn't really understand, let and explain. And underneath
all these links is another message quote generative AI is experimental.
So here's the beginning of that two and a half
minute audio overview for what's two plus two?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
So?
Speaker 3 (03:24):
What's two plus two? Seems like a no brainer, right four?
End of story.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
Well, that's what we learn in grade school at least.
But the idea that two plus two could equal something
other than four pops up in some pretty interesting places,
like where.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
I'm picturing some kind of crazy math equation.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Now it's less about complex math and more about, shall
we say, bending reality a little.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
The podcast has then launched into a discussion of instances
where some people might say two plus two equals five,
like in All Wells dystopian novel nineteen eighty four, in
which he ponders a totalitarian government that might insist two
plus two equals five. It also includes a joke about
it mathematician, an engineer, and a lawyer answering two plus
two questions two plus two will always before that. The
(04:06):
AI podcast hosts had this to say in conclusion, it's.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Kind of mind bending when you think about it. This
simple little equation can represent so much more than just
basic addition.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
It really does. It's a reminder to question things, to
consider different viewpoints, and to be aware of how easily
fax can be twisted or manipulated.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
My personal view is that the notebook LM product can
be pretty great if you want to bring a bunch
of your own narrowly bounded set of data or research
into one place and then here it played back to
you in podcast form. More power to you. The last
time I use it myself was over the holidays when
I was going to go and see the Nutcracker Ballet,
and I kind of wanted to know what to expect
(04:47):
so that I'd be able to enjoy it more. And
I've fed Notebook LM the Wikipedia page about the Nutcracker,
some reviews, some other information, and it summarized all of
that and turn it into a ten minute podcast which
I listen to on the way to the ballet, and
I honestly think that gave me a better enjoyment of
the ballet because I knew the context, but I wouldn't
have actually done the work myself of reading all the materials.
(05:10):
So that was kind of a cool use case. That said,
I don't think when I search for something like what's
two plus two, I need a audio conversational summary of
the randomness of the Internet. It just doesn't really seem
very relevant, and it seems more than anything like a
solution in search of a problem, which brings us to
(05:30):
our next story. There's another Internet titan that tried out
an AI feature recently. Wikipedia. On June second, the organization
that hosts and maintains Wikipedia, called the Wikimedia Foundation, announced
it would run an experiment with AI. The project, called
Simple Article Summaries, would provide AI writeups at the top
(05:52):
of Wikipedia entries. It was an attempt to make the
denser Wikipedia articles more accessible, and the experiment was set
to last two weeks, with summaries generated by an NLM
called Aya by Coheer. Then came the criticism. According to
a form media, the announcement was met with replies from
Wikipedia editors who warned that AI summaries were a very
(06:14):
bad idea. One editor pointed out that AI's ability to
get things wrong could damage the platform's reputation, which is
something that editors and the organization have worked very hard
on for a very long time. Another editor said quote,
just because Google has rolled out it's AI summaries doesn't
mean we need to one up them. Some even threatened
to quit if Wikipedia didn't roll back the summaries. And
(06:37):
here's the thing. Wikipedia relies on its editor's passion for
the website to keep this participatory encyclopedia running. So after
the editor upraw and just a day after the announcement
of the experiment, Wikimedia said they would pause it, but
that they were also still interested in AI summaries. It's
not clear when they might try them out again, but
(06:58):
it is clear how human editors feel about them. I'm
not somebody who's implacably opposed to AI summaries. In fact,
I use them myself. But what was really important to
remember is that AI summaries rely on the input of
human work and ingenuity, and with that in mind, I
read this article in the financial time that I wanted
to share. It had the headline AI alone cannot solve
(07:20):
the productivity problem, and it talks about something I had
no idea about, which is the average scientist today produces
fewer breakthrough ideas per dollar spent than their counterpart in
the sixties, and that despite all the headlines about progress,
progress is actually becoming more incremental. And here's the part
of the article that really got me thinking. Quote, had
(07:43):
the nineteenth century focused solely on better looms and plows,
we would enjoy cheap cloth and abundant grain, but there
would be no antibiotics, jet engines, or rockets. Economic miracles
stem from discovery, not repeating tasks at greater speed. The
article went on to make the point that large language
models gravitate towards statistical consensus. So think about it. If
(08:09):
there were NLMs back before the Wright Brothers, all the
data that the model was trained on would have suggested
that human flight was absolutely impossible. Wikipedia is not going
to solve the larger problem of fostering human ingenuity in
an age of statistical consensus, But at least for now,
you can rest assured that the articles you read on
it will be written and driven and created by humans.
(08:41):
I've got a couple more headlines for you, including why
you might be struggling to get your favorite box of cereal.
Tech Crunch reports that some grocery stores are reeling from
the effects of a cyber attack. United Natural Foods or UNFI,
is a large food distribution company that provide it's fresh
produce and products to over thirty thousand stores across the US.
(09:05):
Whole Foods uses the company as its primary distributor. Earlier
this month, UNFI experienced a cyber attack that caused them
to shut down their electronic ordering systems. The system is
now back online after more than ten days, but grocery
stores are still waiting on some of their stock. And
this isn't just an issue in the US. Cyber attacks
(09:25):
are also roiling UK supermarkets. The thing is, grocery chains
are a prime target for hackers because they have these large,
interconnected supply chains, which by definition have multiple failure points.
They also have treasure trows with customer data, and of course,
when shoppers can't get what they want at the store,
angst and headlines are sure to follow. Finally, for today's headlines,
(09:50):
ads are a huge business for social media platforms, and
TikTok is aiming to lower the cost of production for
its partners. According to The Verge, TikTok is adding new
capabilities to give advertisers the ability to upload images and
give text prompts that can then be used to generate
video advertisements. The videos can include virtual avatars holding or
(10:12):
modeling different products, just like an influencer mine for brands
that they partner with. TikTok has said that all this
content generated using AI will be labeled as such and
will go through quote multiple rounds of safety review. The
biggest story is that influencer marketing transformed the ad industry
over the last decade, and it will be interesting to
(10:32):
see what AI influencers can actually do because, unlike say,
fashion models, whose job it is to show what products
will look like when they're worn, influencers have thrived when
they make a case for a product based on their
personal experience. After the break, we bring you a production
(10:55):
of The Wizard of Oz starring your favorite tech giants.
Stay with us on this show. We've talked about tech
upstarts like open ai and its model, chatchipt Anthropic and
(11:17):
its model, Clawed at Length, and We've also talked about
the numerous tech giants racing to gain or defend market
share with AI products of their own, including Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon,
and Microsoft. It's a crowded field, but also an open
one in terms of knowing who will ultimately prevail, and
it can get quite dramatic their acquisitions, partnerships to get
(11:40):
contentious legal fights and hedge rolling at big tech companies
as they fight to stay in the game, and recently
there have been some big AI power moves. Meta has
just made its largest investments since acquiring WhatsApp, putting fourteen
billion dollars into a company called Scale Ai. So we
thought it'd be helpful to outline them many players the air,
(12:01):
current positions, and what might be on the horizon. And
here to walk us all through it is read Albagotti,
who's the tech editor Sema fool Read Welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Thanks for having me. Good to be here.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
You came up with a very creative paradigm for helping
your readers make sense of all the different players in
the AI race. Tell us a little bit about it.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Well, it all started because, like you said, I mean,
there's this this huge race, and I was sort of
going back and forth with my colleague Rachel Jones, talking
about Okay, so like, what are the lanes that these
companies are starting to take and how do we sort
of define that? And I'm sort of writing this thing
and it's kind of it's a little dry, it's a
little heavy on the analysis, and Rachel's like, why don't
(12:44):
we just make them Wizard of Oz characters? And I
was like, that's a terrible idea. But then I thought
more about it, and I thought, that's actually kind of
a great idea. So you know, we decided to try
to fit you know, each of the biggest players that
we see in the field into these characters and the
(13:04):
Wizard of Oz and sort of explain why. And I think, look,
I mean the funniest part of this whole thing, honestly,
was was reaching out to all of these companies and
explaining to them why they are the Munchkins or the
Wicked Witch of the East or the West, and you know,
getting their responses and I thought, you know, actually, kind
(13:25):
I kind of like this because the best part was
when I got pushed back from these companies, right like,
we are we are not this, we are this character
just like, oh, actually I'm getting an insight now into
like how you see yourself as a company. And so
what I kind of hoped was, like, you know, we
would this was like people would write in and say
you're a complete idiot, like open Aye is not Dorothy,
They're you know, the tin man or something like that.
(13:47):
Just get people talking about what are the lanes here
and how and how should we think about these these players.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
But that said, you did cast open Aiye as Dorothy.
Why was that?
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Well, you know, Dorothy is is kind of the main character. Right.
They are the Kleenex of chat bots, so to speak.
They're the winner take all sort of consumer chat bot.
They get all the press, but you know, at the
same time, they require a lot of other you know,
players in this space to make it possible. Right, So
you know they they've borrowed technology from Google, right, you know,
(14:21):
they're using the data centers or at Microsoft for such
a huge part of that. So it's this supporting cast
that kind of really makes them who they are. I think,
so that was that was the justification there. Do you
agree or do you want to do you want to
fight me on that?
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Well, I think I'll you've thought about this more than
I have. But I think I agree with you that
despite my name, I think that I agree with you
that that that opening I definitely has the main character
energy in this story. But I have to ask you
about her cost of supporting characters the tin man, the
cowardly line, and the scarecrow. How do you assign each
(14:59):
of these crucial pots?
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Well, okay, so let's start with Let's start with with Google,
the cowardly lion. Google has, you know, all this power, right,
They've developed this technology for years. You know, the attention
is all you need paper, right like that. That's what
really laid the groundwork for CHATCHYPT. But they kind of
sat on it. And I think a lot of that
(15:22):
was out of fear. You know, these chatbots go off
the rails. They're crazy, Like, what are people going to
say if we just start releasing this stuff into the wild.
And so they didn't and they got beat right, chatchapt
came out. Google has had to completely reorient itself around
this race now.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
So what you're saying is is Google could have had
market leadership here, and because of fears about cultural blowback
or erosion of that cool business, they basically sat on
the technology.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah, that's very well said. They're a big public company.
They have to be sort of cautious, and you know,
I think that's somewhat in there, has become part of
their DNA. But they've had to get really bold, right
and they started to release new products. The notebook LM
is one of the big successes. They're throwing more spaghetti
against the wall. They're finding that they actually do have courage, right,
(16:10):
which you know, of course, if you've watched The Wizard
of Oz, you know in the end they all kind
of have the thing they thought they were missing. So
you know, tin Man is Microsoft this well oiled machine.
If you remember the tin Man was always putting oil
and oil can. They seem a bit rigid, right, but
(16:31):
in the end, like they kind of do have a heart.
I mean I think they I had an interview with
Satia Nadella recently and and Kevin Scott, the CTO, that
it's really clear they really do want to sort of
like enable these developers. I think they have sort of
a I think a less ego, a bit more of
a selfless kind of attitude around this stuff. They're building
(16:52):
the infrastructure for this industry and letting others kind of
use their creativity to benefit, so they really do have
a heart in the end. And then I think Amazon,
you know, this the scarecrow, right, no, no brain. When
I think about the beginning of this race, you know,
much like Google, people were really putting Amazon down and
(17:15):
they thought, oh my god, they've completely missed this, like
Amazon's got nothing here, and totally ignored the fact that
actually they had been thinking about this for years. And
even though you know, maybe they're sort of fighting for
market share in this new AI race, I think they're
pretty well positioned to profit from the growth and you know,
(17:38):
just the the market demand for tokens for compute.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Are they the market leaders in data centers Amazon today?
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Oh yeah, I mean for sure in the in the cloud,
in the cloud business. And I think that the question
though is, you know, can they remain the market leader
in the AI you know era right, they've been the
market leader in cloud in terms of just you know,
normal compute AI data centers is it's a whole new ballgame.
AI runs on what we would call a GPU, right,
(18:08):
and so everyone is now you know, racing to add
these GPUs or build new data centers that are built
around these GPUs and it's a totally different business model
and concept, so it kind of restarts the race in
some ways.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Okay, so we got Open Air as Dorothy, Microsoft as
the tin Man, Google's the cowardly line, Amazon is the scarecrow.
There are also some wizards and witches who need to
be accounted for Glinda, the Wicked Witch of the West,
and of course my namesake, the Wizard of Oz. Who's
who in this cost.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
So let's start with Perplexity being, you know, the wicked Witch.
As we found in Wicked. You know this, this witch
was kind of misunderstood, and I think that's sort of
how Perplexity became the absolute villain, especially in the media industry,
because they, you know, were were I guess, republishing almost
like articles without proper citation. I think they very quickly
(19:08):
changed I mean, it wasn't a policy. I think it
was a mistake and they very quickly changed them. And
they're actually have all these media deals where there are
revenue sharing agreements between Perplexity and the media companies. And
I think that Wicked image is starting to fade a
little bit from Perplexity. So I put them in the
role of the Wicked Witch, and Arvin strinovas the CEO Perplexity,
(19:32):
responded to me on Twitter with a I think AI
generated repurposing of the song from Wicked.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
I've got the final close my eyes and leap. It's
time to try to find Google. I think I'll try
to find Google and you comple me down.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Right, So they're disrupting Google. Therefore they're they're really the
good guys. So you know that was I thought that
was fun. That was a fun response from Arvind. I think,
you know, we put Apple as the role of Glinda,
the good Witch, who you know sort of over over
promises and underdelivers. I think that's sort of the you know,
(20:11):
using a little bit of the old and the new
Wicked version of that that character. Obviously, you know, that's
based on the fact that they, you know, they had
this huge event where they promised the world around you know, AI,
they were going to do these amazing things with Siri
and your phone, and it turns out, oh, they hadn't
actually really built any of this, and it's not clear
(20:32):
that they can.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
And what what's your reporting suggests? Why has it been
such a bust?
Speaker 2 (20:36):
I think that was a train wreck that anybody who's
been following Apple has kind of seen for a long
time because they just have ignored AI and you don't
see the Apple people are not really like mixing with
the rest of Silicon Valley, and I think they just
didn't quite understand this whole AI thing. And and I've
also written that, you know, I this is a bit
(20:57):
this is kind of my view, and I don't know,
I haven't heard that any people agree with me on this,
but I think they also, you know, because they position
themselves as this privacy focused company, they that they also
shied away from AI there because it does require gathering
a lot of data right on people and personalizing things
(21:17):
in ways that make people maybe feel like, oh, I'm
being tracked or what have you. And it turns out
that that's you know, that's now everything in the tech industry,
and they're they're way behind.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
And then of course the Wizard, just by having a
movie named after him, is actually no very important character.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Right exactly. So I cast x Ai in the in
the role of the Wizard. You know, I think x
Ai has this huge, you know, colossus data center, right,
and they've they've promised that, you know, it really kind
of made me think of them as that is the
fact that they're going to understand the secrets of the
(21:57):
universe with AI that theirs is the Is that literally?
Speaker 4 (22:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I mean this is like literally, you know. I mean
I saw Elon Musk in a recent interview saying that
their model grock is based on basic physics and that's
where it gets its ground truth from. And so you know,
their effort is to actually ultimately figure out, like, you know,
a unifying theory of the universe. You know, I think
that's a lot of it. It remains to be seen
(22:23):
what's behind the curtain. There.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Two other companies we haven't spoken about yet are Meta
and Anthropy. Where do they fit in?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, well so Anthropic I cast as in the role
of the Munchkins. I felt a little bad doing that
because you know, I think there's the Munchkins have this
negative connotation. But actually I was reading about it and
researching this article, reading about the Wizard of Oz and
trying to understand the different characters on a more nuanced level.
(22:50):
And without the Munchkins, there is no Wizard of Oz. Right.
They they they're the people, They're the ones who populate
this universe, right, And I think I think what Anthropic
is doing, and I think a lot of people don't
really realize this, is they have become the de facto
coding model for AI, and that is really what's driving
(23:12):
all this, you know, the excitement and AI right now,
it's not so much chat GPT, even though I think
that's what the broad population sort of thinks of. But
in the tech industry, what I think really excites people
is that this stuff, even if it never advances beyond
just being able to generate code with AI, that's going
(23:33):
to completely change the world because you know, code is
already so powerful and can automate so many things. The
reason that the whole world isn't running on code is
that it's too expensive, and so Anthropic is kind of
like bringing that power to the people.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
So when I read about vibe coding, though I read
about CUSS or AI and stuff, But you're saying that
Anthropic is a real big player in the world of
vibe coding.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Well, yeah, I mean Cursor is running on Anthropics code
generation model, and so is Replet and you know a
lot of others.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
I mean, it's Anthropic, it's really underpending this vibe coding
revolution exactly what about Meta. It's a big week for them.
I think you cost them in the in the movie
before their then news announcement, But who are they and
the Wizard of Alls? And did they did the news
announcement change you're thinking at all?
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, of course, of course I'm going to make an
argument that it didn't change my thinking.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
But I would I would.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Encourage people to totally disagree with me and argue with
me on this. But no, I mean Meta I cast
as the yellow brick road. They're they're open sourcing these
AI models, and similar to to Anthropic where it's like that,
it's an amplified effect. Many companies are using Meta models,
(24:54):
these Lama family of models to run their own custom
software because you know, it's free and it could also
be fine tuned, it can be run locally, so it's
actually you know, having this big impact that a lot
of people don't really see. And then of course this
recent acquisition of Scale AI.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
You know, we'll see whether or how does that You
don't talk about the.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Yeah, you're right, I called it an acquisition, and it's not.
I mean, it's a it's a forty nine percent of
the company takeover, but not an actual takeover and and
yes it's not an acquisition, but really kind of puts
them in. The CEO, the co founder and CEO of
Scale AI is now going to go work at Meta,
(25:40):
but Scale will still continue as an independent company. What
I think Meta is interested in them for is their
ability to generate a lot of data, you know, to
train these models. So you know, these AI models trained
on the entire Internet. I'm sure you've kind of heard
these people say that they sucked in all the data
and the entire Internet and train on it. Well that's
(26:03):
somewhat true. There are these huge databases that are free
that anybody can train on, and they've sort of tapped
that up, like using that data can has sort of
They've gotten as far as they can with that, and
now they have to generate more data and it's getting
very expensive. And so companies like Scale have these huge
networks of contractors who can generate a ton of data.
(26:26):
And it's actually like PhDs and like you know, high
level business executives who are doing this I think kind
of for fun. I mean they're getting paid, but they
sit there and they do like very complex stuff that
can then be used by these models to learn and
become much more you know, specialized in certain areas. And
(26:48):
part of the deal with Meta is that Meta has
sort of pre paid for a bunch of Scale services
to get this data.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
So this is really giving itself a competitive edge. The
New York Times ran a story saying though that this
was like part of socker Bug's personal quest to build
a super intelligence lab. So I wasn't sure how to
balance that with Yeah, what I'd understood about Scale was
that it was a company that sort of specialized in
creating this very high value data that's not available organically.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
This is sort of my my take on this. I mean,
it's easy to focus on, you know, the Scale CEO,
Alexander Wang is going to run it, and it's all
this talent. I mean, Wang is not an AI researcher.
He knows a lot about the AI industry and he's
one of the world's most experts on you know, data
(27:38):
being used in AI. He was roommates with Sam Altman
when basically the groundwork for chatch ept was being built,
and that sort of brought him in. I mean, he
didn't and I've listened to interviews with him where he said,
like he didn't really understand what Opening Eye was doing,
but it was clearly like this great opportunity and so yeah,
(27:58):
I mean that help them with recruiting, and it's it's great,
you know, it's great for marketing and it all, it
all helps. But I think the bread and butter of
that deal is really about Metas saying, well, Okay, we
might not be the most cutting edge AI company right now,
but we're putting a lot of money into having the
best data.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Read this the question that is normally a cache, but
in this case, I think it's appropriate. How did this
movie end?
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Well, they all get to the Emerald City, which is Agi,
and it was all set in motion by this tornado
which is chatchbt. No, I don't think we know this
one hasn't This one hasn't ended yet. I think it's
I think there are many alternate endings, just like all
the Wicked and and and probably other fan fiction around
(28:47):
the Wizard of Oz.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
But if you look looking at the landscape, maybe you
had to bet on you had to bet on one company.
I mean, who do you think is really positioning themselves
in the smallest way for this immediate future of AI.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Yeah, if you had to bet on one company that's
a that is a really that's a tough one. I mean,
because you know, I don't think this is a winner
take all race either. I think that if you look
at the compute layer, I mean, this is a growing
pie that will be divided up. I mean, Opening Eye
might be winner take all in the consumer chat bots space.
(29:22):
I could see them becoming sort of the Google of
of of that era. But you know, I look at
Google right now and I think they have there. It's
interesting because I think, on the one hand, they have
so much promise. I mean, they have the best models
right now, they're applying them in the most diverse ways,
(29:42):
right they have because one is waymo right. They have robotaxis,
which are probably ultimately just gonna run on Gemini at
some point in the future. They they're doing stuff in
other you know, humanoid robotics as well. But they've also
got these, you know, they've got their own consumer chat bots,
They've got you know, a lot of consumer distribution in
(30:02):
the software space. So I think they're very they're set
up for success. The interesting part though, is that their
core business of search advertising is also It's like, it's
not even just that it's under threat, but like the
whole the whole concept of of like the Internet economy
(30:22):
running off of advertising dollars is up in the air,
like we don't even know if that's the future. So
they're challenged and they're having to completely change, like reorient
themselves as a company. But at the same time, they
have such promise, so I don't know, I mean, it
would be sort of it's sort of like a gamble
to put money on anything. But I mean, I think
(30:43):
they're just very well positioned. I think them in open AI,
I mean open a eye, just what they've built is
so is so valuable, and not because of their models,
not because they have the best AI, but because they're
just they've they've become this consumer products now and that
is we've seen in history that like that is something
(31:05):
that you know just will be hugely valuable in the
long run. It's kind of like their game to lose there.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
On that note, read, thank you so much for your time,
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
It was great.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
That's it for this week for tech stuff. I'mos Voloshin.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Victoria Domingez.
It was executive produced by me Karen Price and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. But
he Fraser is our engineer. Jack Insley makes this episode
and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join us next
(31:55):
Wednesday for text Stuff the Story, when we'll share an
in depth conversation with Yasmin Green, the CEO of Jigsaw,
about the tech that could change town halls forever. Please rate, review,
and reach out to us at Tech Staff Podcast at
gmail dot com. We want to hear from you.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of iHeart Podcasts and
Kaleidoscope iMOS vloscan and carries out again this week. So
today I'll bring you the headlines, including what Google Search
sounds like and why you're out of stock Cereal may
be the result of a cyber attack on today's tech
support segment. Semaphor's read Albergotti casts AI companies in the
(00:36):
Wizard of Oz.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
The funniest part of this whole thing, honestly, was reaching
out to all of these companies and explaining to them
why they are the Munchkins or the wicked Witch of
the East or the West.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
All of that in the Weekend Tech. It's Friday, June twentieth.
In summary, today's headlines are about Summary's perhaps the most
ubiquitous artifact of the age of AI, and today we
have two stories about AI summaries, one about a new
AI feature on Google Search and the other about Wikipedia's
(01:11):
turn away from AI. We'll start with Google. As you
might know, Google has this product called Notebook LM, which
allows users to feed their own research sources, PDFs, websites, spreadsheets,
whatever it may be, and Notebook LM will analyze the
data in all kinds of different ways. One of these
ways is a quote audio overview, where users can generate
(01:33):
this two hander deep dive podcast where a male voice
and a female voice talk each other through whatever the
topic at hand is. Now, Google is bringing this feature
to its search results. According to Ours Technica, the feature
hasn't been fully rolled out yet. Users have to opt
in by going to labs dot Google dot com slash
search and turning on audio overviews. There seems to be
(01:57):
a wait list, but one of our producers was able
to turn the future before news spread too far, and
here's what she found in the search results. Underneath the
section that says quote, people also ask, there's an oval
button that says generate audio overview. When you click it,
it starts working because even AI podcasts take a little
(02:19):
bit of time to cook. So while you wait, Google
tells you exactly what it's doing, which is quote, understanding
the query intent, researching websites, generating transcript, and then in
less than a minute, an audio player appears. So our
producer searched in Google, what is two plus two? The
resulting audio overview was two and a half minutes long,
(02:42):
which already tickled her spidery senses. But before we listen
to the audio, we checked out all the websites listed
underneath the clip as sources. They were a Reddit thread
asking why some people think two plus two equals five,
a link to study dot com, a Wikipedia page for
two plus two equals five, as well as a link
(03:03):
to a TikTok meme around the question of two plus two,
which I couldn't really understand, let and explain. And underneath
all these links is another message quote generative AI is experimental.
So here's the beginning of that two and a half
minute audio overview for what's two plus two?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
So?
Speaker 3 (03:24):
What's two plus two? Seems like a no brainer, right four?
End of story.
Speaker 4 (03:27):
Well, that's what we learn in grade school at least.
But the idea that two plus two could equal something
other than four pops up in some pretty interesting places,
like where.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
I'm picturing some kind of crazy math equation.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
Now it's less about complex math and more about, shall
we say, bending reality a little.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
The podcast has then launched into a discussion of instances
where some people might say two plus two equals five,
like in All Wells dystopian novel nineteen eighty four, in
which he ponders a totalitarian government that might insist two
plus two equals five. It also includes a joke about
it mathematician, an engineer, and a lawyer answering two plus
two questions two plus two will always before that. The
(04:06):
AI podcast hosts had this to say in conclusion, it's.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Kind of mind bending when you think about it. This
simple little equation can represent so much more than just
basic addition.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
It really does. It's a reminder to question things, to
consider different viewpoints, and to be aware of how easily
fax can be twisted or manipulated.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
My personal view is that the notebook LM product can
be pretty great if you want to bring a bunch
of your own narrowly bounded set of data or research
into one place and then here it played back to
you in podcast form. More power to you. The last
time I use it myself was over the holidays when
I was going to go and see the Nutcracker Ballet,
and I kind of wanted to know what to expect
(04:47):
so that I'd be able to enjoy it more. And
I've fed Notebook LM the Wikipedia page about the Nutcracker,
some reviews, some other information, and it summarized all of
that and turn it into a ten minute podcast which
I listen to on the way to the ballet, and
I honestly think that gave me a better enjoyment of
the ballet because I knew the context, but I wouldn't
have actually done the work myself of reading all the materials.
(05:10):
So that was kind of a cool use case. That said,
I don't think when I search for something like what's
two plus two, I need a audio conversational summary of
the randomness of the Internet. It just doesn't really seem
very relevant, and it seems more than anything like a
solution in search of a problem, which brings us to
(05:30):
our next story. There's another Internet titan that tried out
an AI feature recently. Wikipedia. On June second, the organization
that hosts and maintains Wikipedia, called the Wikimedia Foundation, announced
it would run an experiment with AI. The project, called
Simple Article Summaries, would provide AI writeups at the top
(05:52):
of Wikipedia entries. It was an attempt to make the
denser Wikipedia articles more accessible, and the experiment was set
to last two weeks, with summaries generated by an NLM
called Aya by Coheer. Then came the criticism. According to
a form media, the announcement was met with replies from
Wikipedia editors who warned that AI summaries were a very
(06:14):
bad idea. One editor pointed out that AI's ability to
get things wrong could damage the platform's reputation, which is
something that editors and the organization have worked very hard
on for a very long time. Another editor said quote,
just because Google has rolled out it's AI summaries doesn't
mean we need to one up them. Some even threatened
to quit if Wikipedia didn't roll back the summaries. And
(06:37):
here's the thing. Wikipedia relies on its editor's passion for
the website to keep this participatory encyclopedia running. So after
the editor upraw and just a day after the announcement
of the experiment, Wikimedia said they would pause it, but
that they were also still interested in AI summaries. It's
not clear when they might try them out again, but
(06:58):
it is clear how human editors feel about them. I'm
not somebody who's implacably opposed to AI summaries. In fact,
I use them myself. But what was really important to
remember is that AI summaries rely on the input of
human work and ingenuity, and with that in mind, I
read this article in the financial time that I wanted
to share. It had the headline AI alone cannot solve
(07:20):
the productivity problem, and it talks about something I had
no idea about, which is the average scientist today produces
fewer breakthrough ideas per dollar spent than their counterpart in
the sixties, and that despite all the headlines about progress,
progress is actually becoming more incremental. And here's the part
of the article that really got me thinking. Quote, had
(07:43):
the nineteenth century focused solely on better looms and plows,
we would enjoy cheap cloth and abundant grain, but there
would be no antibiotics, jet engines, or rockets. Economic miracles
stem from discovery, not repeating tasks at greater speed. The
article went on to make the point that large language
models gravitate towards statistical consensus. So think about it. If
(08:09):
there were NLMs back before the Wright Brothers, all the
data that the model was trained on would have suggested
that human flight was absolutely impossible. Wikipedia is not going
to solve the larger problem of fostering human ingenuity in
an age of statistical consensus, But at least for now,
you can rest assured that the articles you read on
it will be written and driven and created by humans.
(08:41):
I've got a couple more headlines for you, including why
you might be struggling to get your favorite box of cereal.
Tech Crunch reports that some grocery stores are reeling from
the effects of a cyber attack. United Natural Foods or UNFI,
is a large food distribution company that provide it's fresh
produce and products to over thirty thousand stores across the US.
(09:05):
Whole Foods uses the company as its primary distributor. Earlier
this month, UNFI experienced a cyber attack that caused them
to shut down their electronic ordering systems. The system is
now back online after more than ten days, but grocery
stores are still waiting on some of their stock. And
this isn't just an issue in the US. Cyber attacks
(09:25):
are also roiling UK supermarkets. The thing is, grocery chains
are a prime target for hackers because they have these large,
interconnected supply chains, which by definition have multiple failure points.
They also have treasure trows with customer data, and of course,
when shoppers can't get what they want at the store,
angst and headlines are sure to follow. Finally, for today's headlines,
(09:50):
ads are a huge business for social media platforms, and
TikTok is aiming to lower the cost of production for
its partners. According to The Verge, TikTok is adding new
capabilities to give advertisers the ability to upload images and
give text prompts that can then be used to generate
video advertisements. The videos can include virtual avatars holding or
(10:12):
modeling different products, just like an influencer mine for brands
that they partner with. TikTok has said that all this
content generated using AI will be labeled as such and
will go through quote multiple rounds of safety review. The
biggest story is that influencer marketing transformed the ad industry
over the last decade, and it will be interesting to
(10:32):
see what AI influencers can actually do because, unlike say,
fashion models, whose job it is to show what products
will look like when they're worn, influencers have thrived when
they make a case for a product based on their
personal experience. After the break, we bring you a production
(10:55):
of The Wizard of Oz starring your favorite tech giants.
Stay with us on this show. We've talked about tech
upstarts like open ai and its model, chatchipt Anthropic and
(11:17):
its model, Clawed at Length, and We've also talked about
the numerous tech giants racing to gain or defend market
share with AI products of their own, including Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon,
and Microsoft. It's a crowded field, but also an open
one in terms of knowing who will ultimately prevail, and
it can get quite dramatic their acquisitions, partnerships to get
(11:40):
contentious legal fights and hedge rolling at big tech companies
as they fight to stay in the game, and recently
there have been some big AI power moves. Meta has
just made its largest investments since acquiring WhatsApp, putting fourteen
billion dollars into a company called Scale Ai. So we
thought it'd be helpful to outline them many players the air,
(12:01):
current positions, and what might be on the horizon. And
here to walk us all through it is read Albagotti,
who's the tech editor Sema fool Read Welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Thanks for having me. Good to be here.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
You came up with a very creative paradigm for helping
your readers make sense of all the different players in
the AI race. Tell us a little bit about it.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Well, it all started because, like you said, I mean,
there's this this huge race, and I was sort of
going back and forth with my colleague Rachel Jones, talking
about Okay, so like, what are the lanes that these
companies are starting to take and how do we sort
of define that? And I'm sort of writing this thing
and it's kind of it's a little dry, it's a
little heavy on the analysis, and Rachel's like, why don't
(12:44):
we just make them Wizard of Oz characters? And I
was like, that's a terrible idea. But then I thought
more about it, and I thought, that's actually kind of
a great idea. So you know, we decided to try
to fit you know, each of the biggest players that
we see in the field into these characters and the
(13:04):
Wizard of Oz and sort of explain why. And I think, look,
I mean the funniest part of this whole thing, honestly,
was was reaching out to all of these companies and
explaining to them why they are the Munchkins or the
Wicked Witch of the East or the West, and you know,
getting their responses and I thought, you know, actually, kind
(13:25):
I kind of like this because the best part was
when I got pushed back from these companies, right like,
we are we are not this, we are this character
just like, oh, actually I'm getting an insight now into
like how you see yourself as a company. And so
what I kind of hoped was, like, you know, we
would this was like people would write in and say
you're a complete idiot, like open Aye is not Dorothy,
They're you know, the tin man or something like that.
(13:47):
Just get people talking about what are the lanes here
and how and how should we think about these these players.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
But that said, you did cast open Aiye as Dorothy.
Why was that?
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Well, you know, Dorothy is is kind of the main character. Right.
They are the Kleenex of chat bots, so to speak.
They're the winner take all sort of consumer chat bot.
They get all the press, but you know, at the
same time, they require a lot of other you know,
players in this space to make it possible. Right, So
you know they they've borrowed technology from Google, right, you know,
(14:21):
they're using the data centers or at Microsoft for such
a huge part of that. So it's this supporting cast
that kind of really makes them who they are. I think,
so that was that was the justification there. Do you
agree or do you want to do you want to
fight me on that?
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Well, I think I'll you've thought about this more than
I have. But I think I agree with you that
despite my name, I think that I agree with you
that that that opening I definitely has the main character
energy in this story. But I have to ask you
about her cost of supporting characters the tin man, the
cowardly line, and the scarecrow. How do you assign each
(14:59):
of these crucial pots?
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Well, okay, so let's start with Let's start with with Google,
the cowardly lion. Google has, you know, all this power, right,
They've developed this technology for years. You know, the attention
is all you need paper, right like that. That's what
really laid the groundwork for CHATCHYPT. But they kind of
sat on it. And I think a lot of that
(15:22):
was out of fear. You know, these chatbots go off
the rails. They're crazy, Like, what are people going to
say if we just start releasing this stuff into the wild.
And so they didn't and they got beat right, chatchapt
came out. Google has had to completely reorient itself around
this race now.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
So what you're saying is is Google could have had
market leadership here, and because of fears about cultural blowback
or erosion of that cool business, they basically sat on
the technology.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah, that's very well said. They're a big public company.
They have to be sort of cautious, and you know,
I think that's somewhat in there, has become part of
their DNA. But they've had to get really bold, right
and they started to release new products. The notebook LM
is one of the big successes. They're throwing more spaghetti
against the wall. They're finding that they actually do have courage, right,
(16:10):
which you know, of course, if you've watched The Wizard
of Oz, you know in the end they all kind
of have the thing they thought they were missing. So
you know, tin Man is Microsoft this well oiled machine.
If you remember the tin Man was always putting oil
and oil can. They seem a bit rigid, right, but
(16:31):
in the end, like they kind of do have a heart.
I mean I think they I had an interview with
Satia Nadella recently and and Kevin Scott, the CTO, that
it's really clear they really do want to sort of
like enable these developers. I think they have sort of
a I think a less ego, a bit more of
a selfless kind of attitude around this stuff. They're building
(16:52):
the infrastructure for this industry and letting others kind of
use their creativity to benefit, so they really do have
a heart in the end. And then I think Amazon,
you know, this the scarecrow, right, no, no brain. When
I think about the beginning of this race, you know,
much like Google, people were really putting Amazon down and
(17:15):
they thought, oh my god, they've completely missed this, like
Amazon's got nothing here, and totally ignored the fact that
actually they had been thinking about this for years. And
even though you know, maybe they're sort of fighting for
market share in this new AI race, I think they're
pretty well positioned to profit from the growth and you know,
(17:38):
just the the market demand for tokens for compute.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
Are they the market leaders in data centers Amazon today?
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Oh yeah, I mean for sure in the in the cloud,
in the cloud business. And I think that the question
though is, you know, can they remain the market leader
in the AI you know era right, they've been the
market leader in cloud in terms of just you know,
normal compute AI data centers is it's a whole new ballgame.
AI runs on what we would call a GPU, right,
(18:08):
and so everyone is now you know, racing to add
these GPUs or build new data centers that are built
around these GPUs and it's a totally different business model
and concept, so it kind of restarts the race in
some ways.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Okay, so we got Open Air as Dorothy, Microsoft as
the tin Man, Google's the cowardly line, Amazon is the scarecrow.
There are also some wizards and witches who need to
be accounted for Glinda, the Wicked Witch of the West,
and of course my namesake, the Wizard of Oz. Who's
who in this cost.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
So let's start with Perplexity being, you know, the wicked Witch.
As we found in Wicked. You know this, this witch
was kind of misunderstood, and I think that's sort of
how Perplexity became the absolute villain, especially in the media industry,
because they, you know, were were I guess, republishing almost
like articles without proper citation. I think they very quickly
(19:08):
changed I mean, it wasn't a policy. I think it
was a mistake and they very quickly changed them. And
they're actually have all these media deals where there are
revenue sharing agreements between Perplexity and the media companies. And
I think that Wicked image is starting to fade a
little bit from Perplexity. So I put them in the
role of the Wicked Witch, and Arvin strinovas the CEO Perplexity,
(19:32):
responded to me on Twitter with a I think AI
generated repurposing of the song from Wicked.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
I've got the final close my eyes and leap. It's
time to try to find Google. I think I'll try
to find Google and you comple me down.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Right, So they're disrupting Google. Therefore they're they're really the
good guys. So you know that was I thought that
was fun. That was a fun response from Arvind. I think,
you know, we put Apple as the role of Glinda,
the good Witch, who you know sort of over over
promises and underdelivers. I think that's sort of the you know,
(20:11):
using a little bit of the old and the new
Wicked version of that that character. Obviously, you know, that's
based on the fact that they, you know, they had
this huge event where they promised the world around you know, AI,
they were going to do these amazing things with Siri
and your phone, and it turns out, oh, they hadn't
actually really built any of this, and it's not clear
(20:32):
that they can.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
And what what's your reporting suggests? Why has it been
such a bust?
Speaker 2 (20:36):
I think that was a train wreck that anybody who's
been following Apple has kind of seen for a long
time because they just have ignored AI and you don't
see the Apple people are not really like mixing with
the rest of Silicon Valley, and I think they just
didn't quite understand this whole AI thing. And and I've
also written that, you know, I this is a bit
(20:57):
this is kind of my view, and I don't know,
I haven't heard that any people agree with me on this,
but I think they also, you know, because they position
themselves as this privacy focused company, they that they also
shied away from AI there because it does require gathering
a lot of data right on people and personalizing things
(21:17):
in ways that make people maybe feel like, oh, I'm
being tracked or what have you. And it turns out
that that's you know, that's now everything in the tech industry,
and they're they're way behind.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
And then of course the Wizard, just by having a
movie named after him, is actually no very important character.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Right exactly. So I cast x Ai in the in
the role of the Wizard. You know, I think x
Ai has this huge, you know, colossus data center, right,
and they've they've promised that, you know, it really kind
of made me think of them as that is the
fact that they're going to understand the secrets of the
(21:57):
universe with AI that theirs is the Is that literally?
Speaker 4 (22:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I mean this is like literally, you know. I mean
I saw Elon Musk in a recent interview saying that
their model grock is based on basic physics and that's
where it gets its ground truth from. And so you know,
their effort is to actually ultimately figure out, like, you know,
a unifying theory of the universe. You know, I think
that's a lot of it. It remains to be seen
(22:23):
what's behind the curtain. There.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Two other companies we haven't spoken about yet are Meta
and Anthropy. Where do they fit in?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
Yeah, well so Anthropic I cast as in the role
of the Munchkins. I felt a little bad doing that
because you know, I think there's the Munchkins have this
negative connotation. But actually I was reading about it and
researching this article, reading about the Wizard of Oz and
trying to understand the different characters on a more nuanced level.
(22:50):
And without the Munchkins, there is no Wizard of Oz. Right.
They they they're the people, They're the ones who populate
this universe, right, And I think I think what Anthropic
is doing, and I think a lot of people don't
really realize this, is they have become the de facto
coding model for AI, and that is really what's driving
(23:12):
all this, you know, the excitement and AI right now,
it's not so much chat GPT, even though I think
that's what the broad population sort of thinks of. But
in the tech industry, what I think really excites people
is that this stuff, even if it never advances beyond
just being able to generate code with AI, that's going
(23:33):
to completely change the world because you know, code is
already so powerful and can automate so many things. The
reason that the whole world isn't running on code is
that it's too expensive, and so Anthropic is kind of
like bringing that power to the people.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
So when I read about vibe coding, though I read
about CUSS or AI and stuff, But you're saying that
Anthropic is a real big player in the world of
vibe coding.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Well, yeah, I mean Cursor is running on Anthropics code
generation model, and so is Replet and you know a
lot of others.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
I mean, it's Anthropic, it's really underpending this vibe coding
revolution exactly what about Meta. It's a big week for them.
I think you cost them in the in the movie
before their then news announcement, But who are they and
the Wizard of Alls? And did they did the news
announcement change you're thinking at all?
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, of course, of course I'm going to make an
argument that it didn't change my thinking.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
But I would I would.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Encourage people to totally disagree with me and argue with
me on this. But no, I mean Meta I cast
as the yellow brick road. They're they're open sourcing these
AI models, and similar to to Anthropic where it's like that,
it's an amplified effect. Many companies are using Meta models,
(24:54):
these Lama family of models to run their own custom
software because you know, it's free and it could also
be fine tuned, it can be run locally, so it's
actually you know, having this big impact that a lot
of people don't really see. And then of course this
recent acquisition of Scale AI.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
You know, we'll see whether or how does that You
don't talk about the.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Yeah, you're right, I called it an acquisition, and it's not.
I mean, it's a it's a forty nine percent of
the company takeover, but not an actual takeover and and
yes it's not an acquisition, but really kind of puts
them in. The CEO, the co founder and CEO of
Scale AI is now going to go work at Meta,
(25:40):
but Scale will still continue as an independent company. What
I think Meta is interested in them for is their
ability to generate a lot of data, you know, to
train these models. So you know, these AI models trained
on the entire Internet. I'm sure you've kind of heard
these people say that they sucked in all the data
and the entire Internet and train on it. Well that's
(26:03):
somewhat true. There are these huge databases that are free
that anybody can train on, and they've sort of tapped
that up, like using that data can has sort of
They've gotten as far as they can with that, and
now they have to generate more data and it's getting
very expensive. And so companies like Scale have these huge
networks of contractors who can generate a ton of data.
(26:26):
And it's actually like PhDs and like you know, high
level business executives who are doing this I think kind
of for fun. I mean they're getting paid, but they
sit there and they do like very complex stuff that
can then be used by these models to learn and
become much more you know, specialized in certain areas. And
(26:48):
part of the deal with Meta is that Meta has
sort of pre paid for a bunch of Scale services
to get this data.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
So this is really giving itself a competitive edge. The
New York Times ran a story saying though that this
was like part of socker Bug's personal quest to build
a super intelligence lab. So I wasn't sure how to
balance that with Yeah, what I'd understood about Scale was
that it was a company that sort of specialized in
creating this very high value data that's not available organically.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
This is sort of my my take on this. I mean,
it's easy to focus on, you know, the Scale CEO,
Alexander Wang is going to run it, and it's all
this talent. I mean, Wang is not an AI researcher.
He knows a lot about the AI industry and he's
one of the world's most experts on you know, data
(27:38):
being used in AI. He was roommates with Sam Altman
when basically the groundwork for chatch ept was being built,
and that sort of brought him in. I mean, he
didn't and I've listened to interviews with him where he said,
like he didn't really understand what Opening Eye was doing,
but it was clearly like this great opportunity and so yeah,
(27:58):
I mean that help them with recruiting, and it's it's great,
you know, it's great for marketing and it all, it
all helps. But I think the bread and butter of
that deal is really about Metas saying, well, Okay, we
might not be the most cutting edge AI company right now,
but we're putting a lot of money into having the
best data.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Read this the question that is normally a cache, but
in this case, I think it's appropriate. How did this
movie end?
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Well, they all get to the Emerald City, which is Agi,
and it was all set in motion by this tornado
which is chatchbt. No, I don't think we know this
one hasn't This one hasn't ended yet. I think it's
I think there are many alternate endings, just like all
the Wicked and and and probably other fan fiction around
(28:47):
the Wizard of Oz.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
But if you look looking at the landscape, maybe you
had to bet on you had to bet on one company.
I mean, who do you think is really positioning themselves
in the smallest way for this immediate future of AI.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Yeah, if you had to bet on one company that's
a that is a really that's a tough one. I mean,
because you know, I don't think this is a winner
take all race either. I think that if you look
at the compute layer, I mean, this is a growing
pie that will be divided up. I mean, Opening Eye
might be winner take all in the consumer chat bots space.
(29:22):
I could see them becoming sort of the Google of
of of that era. But you know, I look at
Google right now and I think they have there. It's
interesting because I think, on the one hand, they have
so much promise. I mean, they have the best models
right now, they're applying them in the most diverse ways,
(29:42):
right they have because one is waymo right. They have robotaxis,
which are probably ultimately just gonna run on Gemini at
some point in the future. They they're doing stuff in
other you know, humanoid robotics as well. But they've also
got these, you know, they've got their own consumer chat bots,
They've got you know, a lot of consumer distribution in
(30:02):
the software space. So I think they're very they're set
up for success. The interesting part though, is that their
core business of search advertising is also It's like, it's
not even just that it's under threat, but like the
whole the whole concept of of like the Internet economy
(30:22):
running off of advertising dollars is up in the air,
like we don't even know if that's the future. So
they're challenged and they're having to completely change, like reorient
themselves as a company. But at the same time, they
have such promise, so I don't know, I mean, it
would be sort of it's sort of like a gamble
to put money on anything. But I mean, I think
(30:43):
they're just very well positioned. I think them in open AI,
I mean open a eye, just what they've built is
so is so valuable, and not because of their models,
not because they have the best AI, but because they're
just they've they've become this consumer products now and that
is we've seen in history that like that is something
(31:05):
that you know just will be hugely valuable in the
long run. It's kind of like their game to lose there.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
On that note, read, thank you so much for your time,
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
It was great.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
That's it for this week for tech stuff. I'mos Voloshin.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Victoria Domingez.
It was executive produced by me Karen Price and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. But
he Fraser is our engineer. Jack Insley makes this episode
and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join us next
(31:55):
Wednesday for text Stuff the Story, when we'll share an
in depth conversation with Yasmin Green, the CEO of Jigsaw,
about the tech that could change town halls forever. Please rate, review,
and reach out to us at Tech Staff Podcast at
gmail dot com. We want to hear from you.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.