2024's Big Ideas — With Jessi Hempl and Hello Monday

0:00Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, where we have a special bonus crossover episode for you today. Hello Monday is a great show from Jesse Hempel that's part of LinkedIn's podcast network. It's a show that spotlights great thinkers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and icons. And it's driven by Jesse's great, thoughtful questioning. Jesse is a longtime tech journalist. We actually met back when I was a cub reporter, and she was a senior writer at Wired. She's now a senior editor at large at LinkedIn, and we've kept in touch all throughout. So in this episode, I join her on Hello Monday, and we talk about the state of AI, we drop some big predictions for 2024, and we look at the overall state of tech today.

0:40We also talk about self-driving cars, which I still believe in, even if Crew CEO Kyle Vogt resigned shortly after we recorded. I think this is a fun, timely episode covering many of the themes we speak about regularly here on Big Technology Podcast. And I think if you like this show, you'll also love Hello Monday, which you can find in your podcast app of choice. And so I'm so happy to bring you my conversation with Jesse coming up right after this.

1:36From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel, and this is Hello Monday. Welcome to our Big Ideas episode. I'm part of a team of journalists here at LinkedIn. That's the LinkedIn news team. And this is the season where we begin to ask an important question. What's going to happen next year? understanding the future is a big part of what this show is about it will shape the trends that drive the changes we experience at work and beyond this year i'm devoting an entire episode to predictions in particular technology predictions and i've got an amazing guest to help me think through them alex kantrowitz alex is host of big technology it's another show i love within the LinkedIn podcast network.

2:25And he also has a newsletter. You should subscribe to both. Alex follows tech. He's interviewed many of the most important people in the industry. And he watches developments with the experience that comes from decades of seeing what breaks through. Now, we recorded this interview live earlier this fall. You're going to hear it in the low buzz of noise behind us, an audience made for a swell of energy that was contagious. But as you'll also hear, we very quickly tuned everyone out and went deep on the things that are about to happen in tech. And since ChatGPT has now made free accounts available to us for a full year, that is where we started.

3:08As I was tracking some of this data in the summer, it seemed to me like maybe the ChatGPT revolution was on the way to an end. because in the United States, and this is reflected globally, traffic to ChatGPT dropped 10 % in May and then 15 % in June and another 4 % in July. Now remember, this was the fastest growing consumer product ever before Threads, and maybe we'll talk about Threads later. Lord. Okay, anyways. That's a whole other can of worms. But this was the fastest growing consumer product before Threads, and it seemed like initially ChatGPT was going to be the product. and as USU started to tick down in the summer, it made me think maybe not.

3:51But one interesting thing has happened is as the school year has begun, that has ticked up back again. So it rose 3 % month over month in the US and 0.3 % worldwide in August, meaning that back to school is happening. We're still going to see what's going to happen in September and October. So does that mean that your thesis is that a whole bunch of high school students have started using CHAC-TPT to write their essays again? More than a whole bunch. Nearly every high school and college student. I visited a college in the spring and the students were telling me not only were they using it to complete their work, but when their professors couldn't explain a concept well enough, they would go to ChatGPT and say, hey, can you help me understand this in a way that professors so-and-so could not?

4:35And they learned from the thing. And I want to stay with that a second, right, Alex? Because I think the whole thing about ChatGPT, about the launch of any new tool, and certainly at scale with ChatGPT, is that as it launched, we didn't exactly know how to use it, right? We all sort of ran it and started experimenting with it. But, you know, when I was a child, I remember in sixth grade, my sixth grade algebra teacher sent me out to the drugstore to buy a calculator. and my father was scandalized that I would bring a calculator to school. But of course I would bring a calculator because it was a helpful tool.

5:09I would be able to do my math better. And it sounds to me like what you're talking about when you're talking about the professors and the students is like a world in which ChatGPT is the same version of a helpful tool. Absolutely. And ChatGPT happened to be perfect for some situations. School is one example because it's so generalized and you learn so much in school. But what we're starting to see now is that the technology is being adapted and applied into different professions in different iterations. So I think now we're starting to see this moment where it went from a demo that OpenAI, which is the creator of ChatGPT, put out into a broader phenomenon and had to get applied differently into different chatbots.

5:45And the legal field is one example where it's been very, very interesting. And I think an example of what we're going to see where there have been these chatbots that can do discovery for you and can look through legal texts and do all the work that you would assign to paralegals and junior associates back in the day. Right. And now you can just use it. You can do it with these new products that are coming out that are not JetGPT but built on similar technology. And one of the interesting things that's happening here is that these firms are actually hiring more people because they have more capacity now.

6:15They can bill more. And, yeah, the special… When you say these firms, you mean… Law firms. You mean the law firms. So, in some ways, the general conclusion would be like, oh, well, you know, the AI will take away the jobs. But what I'm hearing you say is actually, at least in this moment, the AI is allowing for more jobs because there's more work to be done because the AI makes things efficient and faster. Yeah. And I also spoke with the Mayo Clinic about how AI has changed radiology there because they have about seven AI tools inside the clinic. And they use it for actually the person who's running AI there, not surprisingly, is a radiologist.

6:52And they're still hiring. So it's one of these things where it's sort of cliche to say it, but it makes people more effective. It frees them up to do things that are more productive with their time. And I think so we started talking about what's this going to look like in 2024. To me, it's the specialization, the more enterprise uses. So it's going to happen. If you're working in a legal field, you're probably going to see this. If you're in a research field, you're going to see a different iteration. And medical field, you'll see a different iteration and so on and so forth. And it's actually a beautiful moment for the field because, you know, ChatGPT has to die for AI to live.

7:27And that's what's starting to happen. So you're predicting that actually ChatGPT, I mean, it's ticking up a little bit. But like ChatGPT is the MySpace to the future Facebook, essentially. It needed to exist in order to make the case for something that will exist after it. Yeah, and there's a crazy theory I've been playing around with in my head about how open AI may become irrelevant at some point in the future. Maybe not fully irrelevant, but it is interesting how quickly the technology that they've built has been commodified. So they built ChatChapDN, released it, and the next thing you know, how many companies have?

8:01I mean, Bing, of course, but that's a partnership with OpenAI. Google has released their own with BARD. There are startups like Anthropic who have their own chatbots. Theirs is called Claude. And they recently announced a partnership with Amazon that's going to be worth up to$4 billion. You're bridging us into sort of our next big idea, which is that the big tech companies, well, they're inkling towards an arms race here. And I'm wondering how it stacks up. And I just, I want to remind our listeners that I am asking this from a desk that was supplied by my employer, LinkedIn, that is owned by Microsoft.

8:34So I am somewhere in this story at the same time as we chat about it. But Alex, help me understand, like, what's the landscape? What's the stack up? So you have OpenAI and Microsoft. obviously the first big partnership and the first one out the gate with this technology while companies like Google were afraid to launch their version. Because remember, before ChatGPT came out, Google had an engineer who said that AI that they had in their office was a person and sentient. Yes. So they clearly had the goods. Yes. So you have that partnership. That seems like they'll be developing. So licensing the technology out through Azure and cloud, developing the consumer product with open AI.

9:13So you have ChatGPT you have Dolly they're going to do more multimodal stuff which is a fancy tech way of saying it's not just text but it's you can drop an image in and ask it to modify it or explain to you what's happening or you can write a concept and it can create an image and you can speak to it and then maybe it will speak back or actually it already is starting to speak back so that's sort of like the the frontier so to speak right then you have Facebook and I think we're going to get to this a little bit, but I might just spoil it right now. I think Mark Zuckerberg is trying to destroy Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI.

9:49Let's just back up with these two characters here. It's funny, I actually met them each at about the same time when both of them were in their early 20s, and one would never guess that these two people would go on to be such formidable characters. So you get Mark Zuckerberg, started Facebook in 2004, I believe. We've built Facebook into something that became meta because, do you remember exactly his line around why it became meta? Like, Facebook is a blue app, but meta is the future. Right. And then you've got Sam Altman. And Sam Altman, of course, is at the helm of ChatGPT. Exactly. And OpenAI.

10:31OpenAI. Right. So you remember that after Mark Zuckerberg created the blue app, he made a few very important acquisitions in one product development. He bought WhatsApp. He bought Instagram, which is content, but it really is a messaging app at the end of the day. And he built Facebook Messenger. And so how do you think Mark Zuckerberg felt when he saw the hottest new consumer product ever as a messaging app? Not very happy. No, not too much. So people have said, like, is open AI a threat to Google? Is it a threat to Amazon? Maybe. But the real threat is to Meta, because if people start really going ham on these on these AI chats, it leaves Meta as this sort of irrelevant human chat app.

11:15And so what Zuckerberg has done is a few really interesting things. One is with his AI team, he's released Llama 2, which is a set of generative models that allows you to do similar stuff to what you would do with the underlying technology behind ChatGPT. Right. And then he's also released these series of messaging bots inside WhatsApp and Messenger, which each have different personalities and are played by interesting people like Snoop Dogg and Dwayne Wade. And, you know, right now they're just kind of like faces that smirk at you, but eventually they're going to be voices. That's at least what they say.

11:51And so you have Facebook going to war with OpenAI and Sam Altman. And I think it's been an underappreciated part of this entire story. You know, it feels to me that over the course of Mark Zuckerberg's career, he hasn't been consistently good at creating new things inside Facebook that take off. Sort of like a classic innovator's dilemma there. The thing that he is actually pretty good at is killing other things that are taking off in other places. Yeah. And that's a skill. Yeah. Well, that is a skill. Do you buy my theory or do you think I'm nuts?

12:27Jury's out, man. I appreciate that you have a theory. I will say that the bots thing, show me consumers who want it before I'll believe in it. Okay. We're going to take a quick break here. When we get back, more thoughts on 2024 with Alex Kantrowitz.

13:10to your account. Plus, sign up now for a$200 Bitcoin bonus to kickstart your rewards. Visit Gemini.com slash card today. Check out the link in the description for more information on rates. Again, if you're looking to invest in Bitcoin but don't know where to start, the Gemini credit card makes it easy. The Gemini credit card is issued by WebBank. In order to qualify for the$200 crypto intro bonus, you must spend$3 ,000 in your first 90 days. Some exclusions apply to instant rewards in which rewards are deposited when the transaction posts. This content is not investment advice and trading crypto involves risk.

13:47The Gemini credit card cannot be used to make gambling related purchases.

13:54You're used to hearing my voice on the world bringing you interviews from around the globe. And you hear me reporting environment and climate news. I'm Carolyn Buehler. And I'm Marco Werman. We're now with you hosting the world together. More global journalism with a fresh new sound. Listen to The World on your local public radio station and wherever you find your podcasts.

14:22We're back with Alex Kantrowitz. Last year, Elon Musk bought Twitter. This led to the rise and fall and maybe rise again, maybe fall again of an app called, well, now called X. The question I really wanted answered was, who's on X these days anyways? So I still use it. But I've noticed and yeah, I've noticed that the community feels a lot thinner now than it did previously. I think that's due to, you know, people talk about Elon driving people away. I think it's really due to some of the product changes that they've made. And the core of these products are the feed. right that stream of new information and funny jokes that are just presented to you and rolling through with an algorithm and the feed has changed without a doubt it used to be a lot more let's say timely a lot more you know interested in showing you the news and now it shows you chat gpt influencers and memes and i pulled it up today i haven't opened it in a while but alex i knew we were it up.

15:29And the first third of the screen was this huge ad at the top of my feed telling me that, did I know I could now buy ads on the platform before we even got to the content? Yeah. That's another problem is their ads don't work very well. And they did lay off most of their sales team, or not most, but a very good chunk of it. And so they've really struggled on the revenue side there. Although Yaccarino did say they're going to be profitable next year, but I'll wait until that happens until I believe it. So here's the thing that is, to me, most interesting about what's going on with X. It's about what it means for everyone else.

16:02So what does the current state of X mean for social more generally? Well, social is going through a bit of a shaking out, so to speak. I think social media used to be a lot more fun, wouldn't you agree? I mean, social media used to be social. Yeah, exactly. I used to know that I could find somebody. I could find you if I look for you, Alex, right? Yeah. So the social element has gone away and it's been replaced in some ways by a more homogenous type of format. So if you think about any social media app right now, it's largely a version of TikTok. TikTok is TikTok. Instagram is definitely TikTok.

16:45Facebook is kind of TikTok. And then you have sort of the text-based apps. which is Twitter and its clones, Twitter threads and blue sky and true social, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So we have basically two formats now. The Reels format is doing really well. The text-based format isn't doing as well because it really worked well when everybody was on the same app. But now that people have fanned out, like the fact that you have, I don't know, tens of millions of users on threads and Donald Trump and the conservatives on true social, people don't see each other anymore. Like you said, it's not social and for better or worse.

17:25And so that's sort of falling into irrelevance in the way I see it. Well, social used to be a path to both relationships and information, right? And at this point, it has become so fragmented that it's no longer a good path to information. And you have to know the relationships you're looking for before you get to where you're going in order to get to the right places to find them. And it makes me think, well, is social over? Are we moving on to new ways of organizing both relationships and information? I don't think over. But I think there's this very, very interesting thing that happens when something accelerates.

18:04You know, you tend to look at the mode of acceleration. You're like, that thing is a rocket ship. And then it tops out at 60 and the car starts shaking. And you're like, oh, it's just a dilopy. It's road safe. but it wasn't exactly going to space and maybe that's what happened with social where it seemed at the moment that it had all the energy and um and was just going to take off and dominate our lives and people built businesses i mean buzzfeed my former employer was built off this idea that we were only going to live in social and no other format would make sense and that's tailing off and so some of like the new media formats or like the old media formats that have now resurfaced like podcasts, for instance, like email newsletters.

18:47I'm so much more bullish on those as a way to find information and actually find people that you connect with, like your audience that, you know, they find you and they connect with you. And that is a very deep and meaningful relationship for them. And then they'll find, there'll be other channels to like get in touch. I think LinkedIn, you know, we're both part of the LinkedIn podcast network. I think that is like an unbelievable vehicle for people to connect with hosts and shows they like and other listeners. I mean, I know Big Technology Podcast is all in on LinkedIn and it's been amazing, both for show growth and for me to connect with the people listening.

19:21And so that's one interesting evolution that I've seen. Well, I'm glad to hear you say the word LinkedIn not once, but three times in that, like in the last minute, Alex, because you're right, it is my employer and it is also a social platform. It was somewhat of an accident that I'd been bringing up. It didn't even pop into my mind because I think of LinkedIn at this point as something a little different than the rest of those, that it is social, but it has this protection in the form of both real identity and access to economic opportunity. And those things serve as a bit of a moat for it. And when I began covering social, I felt like those were the things that made it boring, Alex.

19:57I remember in fact being like, oh, I'm not even going to include LinkedIn in that story back in like 2007 seven or something because like, that's just your resume. That's not even interesting. But at this point, it turns out that those are the things that make LinkedIn a safe place where you can find real people and have meaningful conversations. Yeah. I like the fact that then I wrote this before I joined the network. So for anyone who's saying that like I'm biased on this one, I mean, look, I'm not going to try to pull apart the fact that I'm part of the podcast network. The network sells the ads on my podcast.

20:28We do a rev share. That's the truth. That being said, like I wrote this before I even joined, I like the fact that the feed is a slow burn. So I think part of the problem with social media is that people write ridiculous things for that quick endorphin hit of like, I wrote this incendiary tweet and now a thousand people like it. The LinkedIn feed actually decided, this is not any inside information, it's just my experience. It seems to move information about the network a little bit more slowly and deliberately. And I think you can still reach a tremendous amount of people there. but because it's not that instant oh man hit of dopamine when you post you're actually incentivized to be a lot more thoughtful and try to reach people with stuff that matters versus stuff that might piss them off and i think that's cool i really appreciate that and i hope that that continues to be true in 2024 here's one we haven't covered 2023 it felt to me like cars began to truly drive themselves in cities all across the united states in these little pilots um Are we going to see more of that next year?

21:31Oh, yes, we are. Have you been inside a Waymo or a cruise before? I have not, but back in the old days, in 2018, I went off to Pittsburgh to drive an Uber. I actually got to sit in the driver's seat and drive all around Pittsburgh in one. Oh, cool. Yeah. That's awesome. So actually, Pittsburgh is a crucial city for this development because it's where a lot of the self-driving work has been done through Carnegie Mellon. Right. So you were there. And it's interesting because there was this moment where Uber was investing a lot in it and everybody was investing a lot in it where people are like self-driving cars.

22:04We're already getting them to work in parking lots in the Uber complex and like they're coming next year. Stand by. Right. And then it was just like, OK. And we waited, you know, close to 10 years for this stuff to actually hit city streets. It started a lot of it started in Arizona. But I think people's eyes really opened when these self-driving cars started driving around San Francisco. Now, some of that might have been some bias because like a lot of the tech press is in San Francisco. Right. The other thing is it's really freaking difficult to drive around San Francisco. The hills alone. They're a disaster.

22:37Yeah. And the pedestrians. The fact that these cars worked in San Francisco showed, and both Cruise and Waymo. Cruise is largely owned by GM or GM has a huge stake in it. Waymo is Google's. The fact that these cars were able to generalize their skills, their way that they view the roads and identify lights and understand pedestrian behavior, that they were able to go from a place like Arizona to San Francisco was, to me, the most underappreciated inflection point in 2023. I mean, civilization rocking stuff. And you only really have to get it right once if you're able to generalize, because all that work to get into Arizona, That's all the work.

23:18And then that's the cool thing about technology is it scales. So it can move into San Francisco. And then if it gets San Francisco right, it can much more easily move into many different cities. And I was speaking with Kyle Vogt, who's the CEO of Cruise, and he gave us a stat, something like they 10X the amount of rides they gave this year, as opposed to last year, and will 10X again next year and 10X again the year after that. and riding in these cars you just see that it's a superior experience to uh riding in a car driven by a human they are smooth because it's a robot it's an algorithm driving it so it doesn't have to like react in the moment and slam on the brakes it will ease you into the light and it will ease you out of the light.

24:01But don't they take left turns like my grandma? They are they are surprisingly adept at at I mean I went through a number of like very challenging uh traffic patterns in San Francisco. I took about a dozen rides in these cars over the summer and they handled them extremely well. And this is, this is just this huge, huge change. And it went from like self-driving cars, ha ha ha, that will never happen for me at least to like self-driving cars, like my kids, and it's going to be a while, but they, they will not have to learn how to drive if they don't want to. This stuff is coming. Yeah. Well, all of these things are true.

24:38The thing that I think about when I think about self-driving is that it's a very start and go industry. And you know, all technology is, but you will make these big leaps and it will feel like it's all coming tomorrow, as you said, and then things will level out for one reason or another. So last big topic I have for you, given that it's you and me, and we have been doing this for a long time. Where is tech media right now? I mean, when I got started at this, tech media was in the business of propping up all of these things that were just like great ideas. I mean, stories were so fawning, right?

25:11And then we went through this period where we really struggled as people in the industry to figure out how to hold some of these companies accountable. And we're all kind of new at it because it wasn't really how we had approached tech reporting. Where are we now? I think we're in the middle of a really important and healthy and good balancing out where tech media as you mentioned started as cheerleaders and gadget people and just was like so reflexively positive toward the tech that towards the tech industry and then had this huge overcorrection a lot of that was based off of facebook which is you and i both interviewed mark zuckerberg so it's a company that that we know well and sort of like so well but the first time that i interviewed him he was still at harvard wow um and i interviewed him for the story i was doing on myspace somebody He was like, oh, you should talk to that kid.