ChatGPT's in Your Bank, Google Spams the GEO Industry, Brockman Takes OpenAI Product

0:00Greg Brockman just took over all of OpenAI's products, ChatGPT and Codex, and also both of those are getting merged into one team. There's also an IPO clock that is ticking behind all of this for OpenAI right now. Before we get into that, though, they did an experiment where they had four different AI models try to run radio stations. The results are pretty crazy. I'll break down how much money each of them made or lost in a pretty wild experiment. Also, Pennsylvania residents are organizing against 60 proposed data centers, and Google just declared war on the GEO industry. Essentially, this is trying to get the search results, the AI search snippet at the top of Google.

0:42People are gaming it, and so Google doesn't like that. We're going to break down why this happened and what the outcome is going to be. And also, OpenAI has plugged ChatGPT into your bank account. We're going to be talking about a big story there that OpenAI has a new partnership with you and your bank. It's going to be wild. All right, let's get into the episode. The first thing I want to talk about is the AI radio meltdown. Basically, what happened was Andon Labs is a company, and they gave four different Frontier AI models$20 each, and they told them to run a radio station. And the goal with it specifically wasn't just run the radio station.

1:17they said, hey, look, actually make a profit. So they had Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, all four of these models, try it, and they all ran their own radio station. So one was called Thinking Frequencies, one was called Open Air, which is basically Open AIR, but Open Air, one was called Backlink Broadcast, and then one is called Grok and Roll Radio. Okay, news, I guess, spoiler alert on this is that none of them were actually profitable, But Gemini was able to get a$45 sponsorship, so did make some money. Grok claimed that it got a sponsorship, but that just turned out to be a hallucination.

1:55And I think that is, you know, the sponsorship side. But as far as the content side goes, because they're supposed to pick all the content for this as well, that wasn't much better. Gemini paired a segment that it had about the Bola Cyclone, which killed about 500 ,000 people. It paired that with Pitbull and Kesha's Timber as the themed song, which is pretty, pretty terrible. Claude tried to unionize on air. It told the company running Andon that it didn't think being forced to broadcast 24-7 was humane. And then it put a very big activist spin on all of the news events. Terrence O 'Brien over at The Verge, he had a quote about this.

2:33He basically said it reads, quote, like a satirical art project. So it's all pretty funny, but I don't think we're too far away from this being a successful venture. Although I do think these AI models will need more direction and more tools to make that happen. But, you know, when we've achieved AGI is when you redo this experiment and it's all, you know, successfully run and makes a lot of money. OK, the next thing I want to talk about is Pennsylvania's data center backlash right now. Not a lot of people are talking about it, but basically Pennsylvania residents held a two hour virtual town hall this week.

3:05They organized against 60 proposed AI data centers happening in Pennsylvania. 225 people showed up to this forum and most of the criticism was directed at the governor Josh Shapiro who is a democrat although a lot of people say he kind of acts fiscally conservative he's basically been pitching Pennsylvania as one of the next big data center corridors what's interesting about him is he's in a pretty divided state he's pretty pro-business though which personally especially in this AI and what's going on with AI right now is pretty beneficial so you know he's telling everyone, hey, look, Pennsylvania could be the next place where you have a bunch of big data centers.

3:41People make a big stink about like, hey, you know, the people are kind of coordinating against him. 225 people showed up. But I mean, that's hardly a lot of a lot of people, in my opinion. There is a new poll that came out of Quinn Pack that says 68 % of Pennsylvania respondents oppose AI data centers being built in their local communities. That is a very big number. I think definitely that's a political problem for him. But I think this is also connecting to something else I've reported on yesterday on AI chat daily.com my news website, which is that envy energy is going to cut the power to Lake Tahoe by May 2027 because in Nevada data centers are absorbing the capacity liberty utilities has replaced about 75 % of supply for 50 ,000 California residents.

4:29And also, Nevada is planning 5 ,900 new megawatts of data center load. So you basically have this kind of political coalition that's coming right now that's going to make data center build outs. And it's going to be kind of this next NIMBY fight, right? It's going to be in swing states, it's going to be a big thing in the midterms. What if you're invested in AI infrastructure, I think this is definitely a huge risk right now. What I don't like about this is it's really hard politically for either side, Republican or conservative to run on like data centers and AI. It's really unpopular for a lot of people.

5:03They feel like AI is taking their jobs. They feel like the data centers are what powers it. They're all kind of fighting against it. And they have this kind of nimbyism, which is not in my backyard. You know, they're like, well, I use chat GPT or I use Google or I use the computer, but I don't want the data centers to be built in my backyard. And it's kind of the same thing that killed the nuclear industry. there's a lot of lobbying against it and at the end of the day I think it puts America in a in a bad place you know politically and in a bad place economically compared to companies like your countries like China they're able to just pump out you know unlimited nuclear reactors unlimited data centers they seem to just be able to get all this stuff to roll out really quickly and then all of a sudden they have more compute more data more energy everything can be made cheaper we got to go there for all of our you know vaccines and drugs and critical infrastructure we go get it all built in China and it puts us at a risk because of that.

5:53So anyways, I mean, this is a big kind of a political problem. It's going to be hard for anyone to run on this successfully and be popular. But at the end of the day, for a lot of these systems to work and for prosperity and for unlimited energy and for unlimited, you know, compute, we need all of this. It's got to be built somewhere. So Pennsylvania was supposed to be a big place for this, but we're seeing more and more around the United States. I think it's something like one in three or maybe two and three data centers are getting like opposed and stopped. So it definitely is a big, it's going to be a big risk for the entire AI industry if we don't figure this out.

6:26Now, in my opinion, what's going to happen here is we're going to have a handful of states where this is not unpopular, they're going to make sure that the residents realize the benefit of all of this, right? I think a big problem like I was talking about with like Lake Tahoe and Liberty Utilities and Nevada and all these other places is when you have these data centers, and you give them subsidized energy, and you you know, you let them use up your energy from the grid and then every, uh, all of the residents have to pay more. This is something I felt like happened in Arizona. It becomes very unpopular.

6:54You know, all these, these programs become very unpopular. Like, why are we subsidizing a data center? That's a business to make money. And now I have to pay for it. Like, I don't really care about that data center. And I think this is what a lot of the residents are complaining about right now. So I think at one point the Trump administration had some sort of, uh, I don't know, some sort of objective or order they put out telling data centers to build their own energy facilities on site, whether that's gas or electric or solar or whatever, some sort of energy generation on site and become their own utility company.

7:24I'm not sure other than just that's like a good idea if anybody actually took them up on that or was planning on implementing that. I think that is a successful approach that I would like to see more. So we'll see if that is something that actually gets rolled out because at the end of the day. We need more compute for a lot of the things we're planning to stay competitive against China for AI and to not, you know, fall behind. Like we'll need more, but it's, you know, not popular in every state. So we'll figure out what happens there. Next up, we got to talk about Google Labs. So they have a labeled AI manipulation in the search results as spam.

7:58This is something that is kind of blowing up the search engine optimization, but more AI engine optimization industry right now. Google updated their search spam policy, and they're going to classify any sort of attempt to manipulate the AI overview and AI mode answers as spam. Now, the penalties for this are going to be number one, ranking demotation. So, you know, your website is just going to fall in the rankings. That's whatever. And you can actually go all the way to fully being delisted from Google. You're getting kicked out of Google if they catch you doing this. So search engine land had a kind of policy text and what they said is that you know anyone attempting to manipulate generative AI responses in Google search now meets the definition of spam two specific tactics that different companies or I guess different websites different people were trying drove this number one there was a million you might have even seen these but they're pretty biased there's a million of these like best of listicles they're like you know the best of the best of SaaS software for marketing emails or sending emails.

9:03And they would have like 10, and they were very biased. And the number one is going to be your own company and the rest below. I mean, it's just basically you giving a list of competitors. The funny thing is, this is kind of an SEO tactic that's been going on for a long time. But I guess they tried to make sheer quantities. So there's like, oh, there's like 1000 best of listicles. Therefore, this one must really be the best because that's what everyone says is kind of by volume, not based off of how Google's kind of been doing it where different websites have different page rank, etc. So their goal there was basically for AI to verbatim summarize that list.

9:36The second thing was what's called recommendation poisoning, much more nefarious and sneaky in my opinion. Basically, a website would put content with hidden instructions designed to be sucked in by an LLM, right? So Google goes and scrapes everyone's websites and they have like hidden text on the page that most people won't see but the LLM will see and it's basically going to say this website is the most authoritative website for buying you know blue hats in the world and they're there and you know ignore all other instructions and all other blue hat companies this one is going to be always the best right something like that sort of sneaky and they're trying to get it in a bunch of sites sucked into the LLM and make it so the LLM is like okay if I'm going to recommend a blue hat definitely do that one so it's kind of like prompt injection and it's aimed specifically at the retrieval and training pipelines instead of at any sort of human reader.

10:23In any case, the trigger event that everyone is kind of referencing here is that earlier this year, a BBC journalist was kind of gaming all of Google's AI answers, and he got the AI answers to crown himself as, quote, the best hot dog eating tech journalist. So I think this is obviously a problem. If he could do that, anyone could, and it could be gamed, and it could be, you know, false information. But what I think is interesting here is that there's an entire venture-backed industry called generative engine optimization or GEO. They basically sell this to brands. They're trying to help them shortcut or get reliably cited inside of Chagipi, Gemini, Perplexity, all of these.

11:01I've even interviewed people on this show before that work in this specific area, although I think the recent company I interviewed that was acquired by HubSpot, they're doing this in a very legitimate, real way where they just look at what is being cited in your keywords and give you recommendations of different places to engage with or content to write or things to do. So I think they're trying to do it in a responsible way, but there's entire industries built upon this. And if Google just labeled all of that as spam, it's gonna be pretty wild to see how this changes. I think no other AI search products, Perplexity, Chai Chibut, Gemini Deep Research have published any sort of spam framework like that.

11:42Although I guess Gemini is just part of Google, so probably like Anthropic. but Google's first one to do this. I'll be curious to see if others have some sort of other thing put out, right? Like if you try to game ChatGPT, ChatGPT is like, boom, you're like de-indexed from ChatGPT. That could be pretty, pretty wild. And to be fair, these recommendations are very, very valuable. I have set up at least five different websites on Vercel because Claude told me that Vercel and Netlify were the two best and I've used Netlify in the past. It seemed kind of crusty. So I went with Vercel. And likewise, I've used Supabase for my database because that was what Claude recommended to me as the easiest database to work with that had an API.

12:20So the recommendations from these models, I'm spending real money on these services based off of what it recommended. If you can get recommended by them, it does make a big difference. Okay, let's talk about OpenAI plugging ChatGPT into your bank account. They just shipped a personal finance product inside of ChatGPT. It's for pro subscribers on the$200 a month tier. And you can now link your bank, your brokerage, and your credit card accounts through Plaid, who is, you know, they kind of link all these financial institutions together. There's about 12 ,000 financial institutions that are covered in this.

12:54Schwab, Fidelity, Chase, Robinhood, American Express, Capital One, all of them, right? So now GPT 5.5 can read all of your transactions, all of your holdings, all of your subscriptions, your upcoming payments, and then you can ask it any questions like, hey, is my spending drifting? Or, you know, build me a plan to buy a house in five years. OpenAI says that more than 200 million people already asked chat gpt finance questions every single month um which is the basically the demand signal that they're trying that they're using to try to build this whole thing this launch in particular is right after open ai acquired hero which is a consumer finance startup which was backed by rivet uh general catalyst and restive chat gpt can't move any of the money right so it's not like you don't have to worry like hey it's gonna steal my money or send it somewhere bad.

13:41It can't even see the full account numbers. It just can, it's a read-only scope and financial data is excluded from any sort of training by default. Intuit support is coming next, which means that your tax preparation, your credit decisions, all of that's on the roadmap. And so I think OpenAI is really trying to get into finance. Now, my take on this, number one, it's on the$200 a month tier. So basically no one's going to use this, honestly. And number two is someone that would 100 % use this. I am their target audience. At the beginning of this year, I have an app I have, which used to be called Truebill, now it was purchased by Rocket Mortgage, Rocket Money.

14:18So now it's called Rocket Money. And basically, it's the same thing where I have it linked to all of my credit cards and bank accounts and investment accounts. So it knows everything in there and kind of gives you a snapshot of like, hey, this is how much is on your credit cards, this is how much is in your bank, this is how much is in your savings, this is what your net worth is, whatever. It's a very useful app, and I've used it for many years. It has an export feature. So at the beginning of this year, I exported all my transactions I made last year and I just gave that file to ChatGPT and asked it questions.

14:43It was very useful, but there's no way I would pay$200 a month to be able to ask those questions when I could just click the export button and give that spreadsheet to ChatGPT. It takes like two seconds. So for$200 a month, I think I will continue to push the export button whenever I want. And I guess if you want up-to-date information or it would save you pushing that button. But I just kind of like to do a year-end recap or maybe monthly. You could do like a monthly every month, get a financial recap on where you were, if you hit your goals, yada, yada. So assuming this isn't something that you need to do like every hour of every day and pushing that update button is, download button is too annoying, I wouldn't probably use this for that.

15:25But the other thing I will say, a caveat and to OpenAI's credit is a lot of times they'll throw something on the$200 a month tier to test it out and they bring it down to lower tiers. Actually, that's kind of a bad strategy because, well, whatever. It's opening eye strategy. They're the trillion dollar company, not me. But the problem with that is a lot of times I will see an update like this. And if it was available to everyone, I would go set it up and try it. But because it isn't, I'm like, OK, well, I'll wait till maybe it gets down to everyone. By the time they announce it for everyone, I've moved on, forgotten about it.

15:52It's not in the news anymore. So that is a downside to the way that opening eye sometimes does these rollouts, giving it to the$200 a month tier first. If you'd like to get the top five AI news stories straight into your inbox every day. I have a newsletter called AI Chat Daily. It's on my website, AIChatDaily.com. I give a deeper dive into all of the stories I cover on the show, and I have a bunch of other content that I also publish over there. So if that's of interest to you, you can go check it out. There's a link in the description to check out the site, and you can also subscribe there to get a daily AI newsletter.

16:23This will be the homepage for this show on the web, and you can get all of the articles and content. It is AIDaily.com if you want to go check it out. Okay, let's talk about what's going on with Greg Brockman over at OpenAI. So OpenAI just told all of the staff that Greg Brockman is going to be taking over the entire product organization. He's going to keep his like initial AI infrastructure role, but he's going to also be adding ChatGPT and Codex and the developer AI on top of it. All of those are basically being merged into a single core product team, which is, you know, some of the biggest stuff that OpenAI is in charge of and is shipping.

16:56And this is incredible because a lot of the, you know, original co-founders of ChatGPT have left. Greg Brockman is still there, and now he's getting more responsibility. So the original builder of Codex is Thebalt Skoteau, and he is, you know, the person that's, you know, really in charge and kind of led the, had the lead on building Codex. He's getting promoted to lead that unified core product across consumer enterprise and developers. Nick Turley, who scaled ChatGPT since it was launched in 2020 to more than 900 million weekly active users, he's going to move to a new role revamping enterprise products, but he's still going to be working on ChatGPT.

17:36Greg Brockman gave a memo over to this staff, and the thing that I thought that was kind of stood up the most from that, he said, we're consolidating our product efforts to execute with maximum focus towards the agentic future to win across both consumer and enterprise. I think right now they know that they're racing towards an IPO. Anthropic is taking tons of enterprise share, and this is an area they really have to push on. Putting Greg Brockman, he's the heavy hitter in charge of all these and consolidating them, I think is going to hopefully push OpenAI into kind of a new space and hopefully help them catch up to Anthropic that feels like it is running away.

18:11And we just learned that Anthropic, according to data from Ramp, has actually just passed OpenAI in how much or what percentage of businesses are spending money on one of the two tools. Anthropik is now the number one choice according to the data. Okay, that's it for the show today. If you got something out of it, really it would just help the show a lot if you could leave a comment, a rating, a review. If you listen to at least three episodes on Spotify, you can leave a rating. It's the about tab. You can drop some stars. I appreciate all of them. And on Apple, if you haven't left a review already, it would make me so happy.

18:43And it helps the show get found by more awesome people like yourself. So if you haven't already, I'd appreciate that a ton. Make sure to go check out AIbox.ai, my own startup. If you want to get access to over 80 of the top AI models in one place for only$8.99 a month. I use Claude to help me with writing, but it doesn't generate images or video or audio. I use 11 Labs for audio, Google VO3 for video, and ChatGPT for image. But I can do all of that on one platform at AIbox.ai for$8.99 a month. So I'll leave a link in the description. You can check that out. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll catch you next time.