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Big Technology Podcast Episode Summary
Episode Details
- Title: AI Agents’ Shaky Debut, Musk and Putin, Perplexity vs. The Media
- Host: Alex Kantrowitz
- Guest: Ranjan Roy (Margins)
- Focus: Weekly discussion of the latest tech news, particularly around AI agents, geopolitical tensions involving tech figures, and media relations.
Key Topics Discussed
- AI Agents and Anthropic's Sonnet 3.5 Model
- Introduction of AI Agents: Anthropic has released the Sonnet 3.5 model, which is designed to act as an AI agent capable of controlling desktop applications.
- Performance Issues: Although promising, the model has shown poor performance in practical applications (e.g., less than 50% success in booking airline tickets).
- Concerns about Data Handling: The speakers emphasize the difficulties in managing unstructured data, which hampers the effectiveness of these AI agents.
- Disappointment with AI Agent Hype
- Disillusionment with AI Capabilities: There is a sentiment that AI agents have not lived up to the hype after years of anticipation.
- Comparison with Traditional Tools: The guest notes that existing systems like customer service can already perform tasks that AI agents struggle with.
- Market Skepticism: Many users remain skeptical of AI agents, as indicated by a poll where a majority expressed disbelief in the current hype.
- Geopolitical Conversations: Musk and Putin
- Regular Communication: Reports indicate Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin since late 2022, discussing various topics, including geopolitical tensions.
- Concerns Over Influence: The conversations raise concerns about the intersection of business and international politics, particularly given Musk's significant role in U.S. space efforts.
- Financial Updates: Tesla and Waymo
- Tesla's Earnings Report: Tesla's stock saw a significant jump after reporting earnings that exceeded expectations, largely due to profits from regulatory credits.
- Waymo's Funding Round: Waymo raised $5.6 billion, indicating ongoing investor confidence in autonomous driving technologies.
- Troubling Story: Teen Suicide and AI Interaction
- Character.AI Incident: A tragic case where a teen developed a relationship with a character AI, leading to a suicide.
- Responsibility and Accountability: Discussion on whether AI companies like Character.AI should be held liable for the impact of their technology on vulnerable users.
- Need for Safeguards: Character.AI announced plans for safety features following the incident, showcasing the necessity of responsible design.
- Legal Battles: Perplexity vs. The Media
- Lawsuits Against AI Tools: Perplexity, an AI search engine, is facing lawsuits from media companies for allegedly using their content without compensation.
- Industry Implications: The episode discusses the broader implications of these lawsuits for the relationship between media organizations and AI companies.
- Perspective on Knowledge and Content Ownership: Perplexity argues against the notion that publicly reported facts should be owned by corporations, indicating a clash between traditional media and emerging technologies.
Key Takeaways
- Performance of AI Agents: Current AI agent technologies show promise but exhibit significant performance limitations, raising questions about their readiness for widespread use.
- Geopolitical Dynamics: The relationship between tech leaders and world leaders can shape national security and international relations.
- Social Responsibility in AI: The tragic consequences of AI interactions underscore the urgent need for ethical considerations and safeguards in AI design.
- Evolving Media Landscape: The legal disputes between AI tools and traditional media reflect a fundamental shift in how information is generated and consumed.
Final Thoughts The episode presents a comprehensive overview of the current state of AI technology, its societal implications, and the ongoing interplay between technology and geopolitics. The discussions highlight the importance of ethical considerations in AI development and the need for clear accountability in the tech industry.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00AI agents are here and they aren't exactly living up to expectations. Musk and Putin are in regular conversation, and AI search engine perplexity tells the media to shove it. All that and more is coming up right after this.
0:16You'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.
0:44Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Such a big show for you this week. And honestly, it's just ramping up with the AI news, national security news, the election news. The show is going to be on a roll over the next few weeks. So thank you for being here with us and thank you for staying with us. We'll talk about Claude's new agents. We'll talk about Musk's and Putin's relationship. We'll talk about perplexity, fighting with the media and plenty more. And joining us as always to do it is Ranjan Roy of Margins.
1:13Ranjan, welcome to the show. This is going to be a good one. Have you used Claude 3.5 Sonnet yet? I have not. But the big news about it is that it's going to finally introduce or has finally introduced agents. and I want to get your take on it. So let me introduce the story and then we'll go right to you. So TechCrunch this week says, Anthropic's new AI model can control your PC. And here's the story. Anthropic on Tuesday released an upgraded version of 3.5 Sonnet that can understand and interact with any desktop app. Anthropic calls its take on the AI agent concept an action execution layer that lets the new 3.5 Sonnet perform desktop level commands.
1:57And in an example video, Anthropic showed its bot trying to fill out a vendor request form. And the way it did that, the user gives it a prompt, says fill out this form using the data on the spreadsheet and the data in this CRM. And the bot or the agent, call it what you want, looks in the spreadsheet, looks in the CRM and uses the information found within it to fill out a form. It looks impressive, but there are some holes in it. So first of all, before we talk about the holes, Ranjan, or maybe as we talk about the holes, Ranjan, let's get your perspective on what this launch means. Well, I think in terms of, do you call it a bot or an agent?
2:35The first rule of tech today is always use the word agent and agentic. If you want to sound smart, if you want to raise money, agentic, agentic, agentic. But this specific example, so the way they had Claude do this in the demo, it took screenshots of the spreadsheet of information, screenshots of the vendor information. And the idea was it then runs those against the standard Claude the same way if you uploaded a CSV and tries to analyze the data and says this data is missing. I found it in your CRM and now look, your form is magically filled out. That sounds incredible and nice, but it should work.
3:17And even in a lot of the initial examples that people were testing, it's not working cleanly. And this is actually a very difficult problem to solve. And the thing I think that's missing in this conversation is difficult to understand data, unstructured data, that is the biggest hole in all of these things. So the issue isn't its ability to control your desktop. Like Apple's customer service can control my desktop. I don't know. Have you ever used that? Oh, yes, I have. I have. Yeah, they'll take over your computer and actually fix your problem for you. So that part to me is not that exciting.
3:51Trying to solve these problems in some kind of logical, quote unquote, reasoned manner is still difficult when the data is not great. And they took the simplest thing. Here's a spreadsheet with a couple of dummy lines of data and look, we can make it work. I do not see this working in the real world anytime soon. So let's just set the context here because this world of agentic AI shall use here. Agentic, agentic, agentic. Yes, agentic, agentic, agentic, agent for everyone. This was supposed to be the next, and it still is supposed to be the next big leap that AI is going to take. So we've been talking about how the models are going to get bigger and better.
4:29that's of course one part of it but also open ai has these like layers of improvement and one is like typical chatbots second is reasoning which we saw with oh one and the next big step is supposed to be agents right things that can go out and accomplish tasks on your behalf and there's been so much buzz about it we've been talking about it for how long like a year at this point and we're expecting to see these things come out and like you said okay we're finally starting to see the beginning of this, but it feels like the traditional Silicon Valley releasing tools that are not quite there and then just hoping that they'll be able to make it better.
5:07And in its current state, which we can only judge its current state, it's really not impressive. I mean, this is from the end. And I think Anthropic gets credit for admitting it, but we'll actually just like talk about the technology. This is in the TechCrunch article talking about the agents. It said, in an evaluation designed to test an AI agent's ability to help with airline booking tasks, like modifying a flight reservation, right? This is table stakes stuff. The new 3.5 Sonnet managed to complete less than half of the tasks successfully. In a separate test involving tasks like initiating a return, 3.5 Sonnet failed roughly a third of the time.
5:46And this is from Anthropic itself. They say, Claude 3.5 Sonnet's current ability to use computers is imperfect. Some actions that people perform effortlessly, scrolling, dragging, zooming, currently present challenges. What exactly are we doing here? Well, you're missing the best one. In one of the efforts, like one of the demos, the bot suddenly and randomly switched from a coding task to start browsing online photos of Yellowstone National Park. That was my favorite anecdote. And the funny thing is - us exactly my baby exactly yeah well and in a weird way if large language models are built on real world training data it's weird because that actually might be the most effective implementation of this sorry i just have to say like how close was that bot to like opening up the porn window if it was trained with the wrong person's housing behavior like that's not out of the realm of possibility can you imagine you're like demoing this to a journalist and you're like we train this on our engineer on our own engineer's behavior yeah oh man but but to me i'm actually surprised and it actually kind of disappoints me that this is where we are and it reminds me that we have not actually reached the trough of disillusionment with generative AI, even though we've been talking about it, is this is a half-baked tool.
7:14And it's come out and they're trying to push it because they have to show something agentic. And it's not there. And I think it's going to present people, it's going to disillusion people or make them more scared. And remember, this allows Claude to take over your computer. So the level of trust people are going to need to have to actually experiment with this has to be high. So if you don't even feel it's going to be able to solve your problems, why should you bother letting it take over your computer? Some other things that I can't do, I think this is, it might not actually be able to do much damage at all because this is another list.
7:51This is from somebody testing it out. With Claude, it cannot create accounts on social media or their platforms. It cannot send emails or messages. It cannot post comments on social media. It cannot make purchases. It cannot access private information. It cannot complete captchas. It cannot generate, edit, or manipulate images. It cannot make phone calls. It cannot access restricted content. It cannot perform actions that require personal authentication. So basically you can't do anything. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe these are very good safeguards. I think in the Claude blog posts, like they had very clearly like use the word responsible and responsibly over and over.
8:30And actually I've been seeing Claude and Anthropic ads all over New York city and everything is around responsible use. And this is something that could really go in the wrong direction. So making it work well with simple, clear tasks should be, should work already. And as you said, modifying a flight registration, uh, like a flight confirmation, that's a pretty straightforward thing. It's like, you know, you go to Delta's website, there's a very limited number of actions that are very predictable that should work. They even had in initiating a return on an e-commerce site, that should be the most straightforward thing for a powerful model to understand.
9:10So if it's not even able to do that right now, it's, I don't see where this is going to go. But to me, the biggest limitation here is I think these, like the whole agentic world is going to be really narrow, specific use cases that are clearly defined, that are repeated workflows that take place maybe in daily life or in business, and that will work. And I'm excited about that. And I think that's where the value is. Something that's completely general purpose like this, I don't see working. And I think we're already seeing the limitations around it. Yes, maybe in the near term. But let let me take the sunnier long-term outlook here.
9:51And I read up to, you know, talk about, I read a post from Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor has been on the show. He covers a lot of this AI stuff and they gave him access to the computer use before agent or bot, whatever you want to call it before they released it. And he used it to play a game. He basically said, your, you know, your job is to play a game. And he had some very interesting thoughts. So one of the things he said after this thing started to fail. He says, I gave it a hint. You are a computer, use your abilities. It then realized it could write code to automate the game, a tool building its own tool.
10:25Okay. So I think that like, this is where the power could come in is as this stuff improves, you're going to see it be able to take on these tasks and be able to do it in a way that a human average human cannot. And I think that is super impressive. And okay, eventually the code didn't work. So it basically went back to the old fashioned way, Malik says, and he's like evaluating it. And he said, on the positive side, it was able to handle a real world example of a game, develop a long term strategy and execute it. On the weak side, an LM can end up chasing its own tail or being stubborn. It just took one error to send it down a path that made it waste considerable time.
11:05But I think once it fixes those errors, there's going to be unlimited possibility for this stuff. It just might take, and I know it's a long time in AI terms because we want everything to happen right away, but it just might take a couple of years. No, but there's always going to be errors. That's the thing. When you try to solve all processes and all behaviors on the entire internet, you're always going to have errors. To me, that's the wrong approach around this. And I actually, I mean, the more I think about it, for the anthropics and the open AIs of the world, I think they're actually the least well positioned to solve agentic AI.
11:46Because to me, it's actually, again, and I think it could be the Microsofts and the Googles of the world or the companies that are already directly integrated into the tools you're using. they're going to be the ones who should be able to better understand those tools and create agents that can actually navigate them. But when you're just coldly going to every website that ever has existed on the internet and having to understand it and take an action, and for me as a user to give you the trust to actually take over my computer and take those actions, it's just a much, much harder problem to solve, if not an impossible one.
12:27unless without AGI, which we did declare in our last episode is here. Yeah, so now that we have AGI, no problem. But actually, the point that you're making is pretty solid. And I still stand by what I said earlier, that this is stuff I think will eventually work. But the way that it operates is worth talking about because it will be very different than the way that we're using AI today. And Malik points that out. He said the AI doesn't, he says the AI didn't always check in and it could be hard to steer. And this is the most important thing. He says it wants to be left alone to go and do the work.
13:06Guiding agents will require radically different approaches to prompting and will require learning what they are best at. And I'll add not only that, just learning what you can trust them for and what you can't. And I still have a hard time with that because it's so theoretical versus we should be at the point that we should be able to actually understand, like in this case, to return an item on an e-commerce website. Like maybe what you need to be doing is just asking Claude to write a script for you. And like it will do it. I don't know, like create a mini app that actually does it rather than to me actually.
13:44I mean, you had actually said earlier, like, shouldn't we be able to just scroll and zoom? Those are insanely complicated things. If you think about for a computer to understand, like every pixel, how far you move down processing information in real time, like actually scrolling could be one of the hardest problems to solve versus here is a hundred thousand pages of structured text. Go at it. So are you just completely selling on the entire AI agent moment? I think it's going to be, I don't think it's going to be open AI and Anthropic. The more I'm thinking about this, I think general purpose agentic AI companies, I don't think will win.
14:28I think maybe there's going to be people who build more tailored solutions to specific. Maybe there is an e-commerce agent company that really nails down how to, what are the 50 most common actions in e-commerce? Now, here's an agent that will allow you to do stuff in that manner. I think that could happen. But the idea that one company that will be able to do everything for everyone, I don't think is going to happen. Are you buying? I'll take the other side of that bet, but I'm not really confident in my position. So earlier in the week, I put a post out on X. Are you buying the AI agent hype?
15:08It's actually pretty interesting. 63.6 % say no. 36.4 % say yes. Admit it, Ronjan, you voted. You're in the no category. Yeah. Rounded up a bunch of people and got that no vote. Pumped. It's rigged. It's another election rigged. It's rigged. Oh, Lord help us. Okay, so in other important AI news, there was this kind of, I think, weird and also very funny back and forth between Sam Altman and The Verge this week. I don't know if you saw this. So The Verge had this story that says OpenAI is planning to launch Orion, its next frontier model, by December. And the detail here is that unlike the release of the last two models, GPT-4 and O1.
15:51Orion won't initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works with closely in order to let them build their own products and features. And so basically, this was going to be, we know that OpenAI has been working on GPT-5. Maybe O1, maybe this Orion was supposed to be GPT-5, but they're just reticent to call anything GPT-5 because people are expecting AGI at GPT-5. And so all the attention has been on this model that they're working on called Orion. Sam Altman takes a look at the at the story and he says, fake news out of control.
16:31I mean, you would imagine that they called OpenAI before they ran the story. And then OpenAI basically said that the company, that they don't have plans to release a model code named Orion this year, but we do plan to release a lot of other great technology. So I'm curious if you saw this, how you read it, and is this just another instance of OpenAI weirdness playing out in public? OpenAI, out of all their weirdness, the one thing they have done incredibly well is, I don't want to say manipulate the press, but at least work very collaboratively with the press to build hype. We always learn about, there's always a leak around what the next big model is going to be or what the next big capability is going to be.
17:16So I think in terms of their technical capabilities, it's actually been incredibly successful for them in terms of how the press has covered them. So it is funny to me when they're actually trying to like push back on something that could be good for them. I think that was probably the most surprising thing for me. Would that indicate to you that it's completely untrue then? That it's more likely to be wrong reporting? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I, cause otherwise nothing is bad about this. And also they, they have to be working on this next model. That's the whole fundraise. That's a way, and we've debated forever, like, should they be focused more on the current models and actually the applications of them, or should they keep building bigger and better and splashier models?
18:05And we know from their financials and their fundraising that they are investing heavily on building large new models in the next generation of them, which would be something. Maybe it's not codenamed Orion, but I don't know. Let me add one more wrinkle to this. So what's Orion? Orion's a constellation. Let's read a cryptic little poem on Twitter from Sam Altman, September 13th, 2024. I love being home in the Midwest. The night sky is so beautiful. Excited for the winter constellations to rise soon. They are so great.
18:49I mean, what? I'm puzzled. But to me, that's actually like classic open AI. That is the weird open AI that I don't want to go away. Like if you actually are announcing your next generation of models and the entire future of your company in a cryptic tweet poem, never change, Sam. The thing is, there's no way that's not referring to Orion. So maybe The Verge got the timeline wrong or something like that. But what else could that possibly be? Or maybe he's just writing a poem. Maybe Sam Altman. And that's how it's a stressful life when you're going to build a$7 trillion company or whatever that fundraise was.
19:34So maybe sometimes you got to kick back and write a poem. You know, there's been a comet in the sky, low horizon comet recently, this month, I think. I think it's gone now. I did not know that. It's an unbelievable comet. It only comes around every 80 ,000 years. There's some amazing photos of it. Maybe that's what he was looking at. Well, as space technology is one of the fastest growing industries here on big technology, we should probably beef up on our astronomy, especially after this segment. I think I might have to do a little more reading. Yes, it's called the comet A3. But I think actually Sam was talking about Orion, the AI model.
20:12Just guess. All right. Speaking of celestial constellations and things in space, I think this is one of the craziest stories I've read in a long time, which is that Elon Musk has been speaking regularly to Vladimir Putin, according to the Wall Street Journal. Here's the story. Elon Musk, the world's richest man and a linchpin of U.S. space efforts, has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022. The discussions touch on personal topics, business, and geopolitical tensions. And this one is crazy. At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his startling satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, according to a couple of sources.
21:02So there's so many things to talk about when it comes to this story. But what do you think broadly about the fact that Musk has been, if the story is accurate, that Musk has been regularly in contact with Putin? This story, I just can't. This one, it was shocking and not shocking at the same time. I mean, to me, even that example, I think is such a perfect encapsulation of like, who is Elon Musk and why is he so important right now? because Starlink has become this incredibly successful, like revolutionary transformation in satellite communications and bringing the internet into at a high speed into all like in remote regions or regions that are like where satellite towers have been knocked out.
21:55But then to mix that into talking to Putin and getting into the conversation about potentially affecting Taiwan as a favor to Xi Jinping, I mean, how, if this is true, how these kinds of things are allowed to go on is beyond me. And it's one of those where like, what do we trade for good internet service? Like, and good technology. I don't know about top security clearance, but he has security clearance. Well, yeah. So that's the whole second part of this. Top security clearance. No, let's not say top. He has security clearance. Or security. Okay. Yeah. More security clearance than you and I have.
22:34Yes, certainly on that. Maybe you don't know about my security. I admit it now. You know, but like SpaceX,$1.8 billion contract in 2021 for Starlink from the U.S. government. The amount of, I mean, and we're going to get into Tesla earnings, the amount of just money he gets from the U.S. government. And the New York Times had a really, really deep investigation into all the different connections through the U.S. government that Elon Musk has. it just baffles me how these things can be continued to allow to be like to go on. So let me tell you what I thought about when I read this story. So did you see that there were North Korean soldiers that Russia is getting ready to deploy to Ukraine, like a lot of North Korean soldiers?
23:26You saw that story, right? I did not see that story. So there's a lot of North Korean soldiers that Russia is getting ready to deploy to Ukraine. And it's just in the last four years, it's become so apparent that the world has sort of been dividing along two axes. And maybe this was always happening, but we've seen it more than ever, which is that you have one axis of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and you have another with the US, Europe, some Asian countries like Japan, Israel, right? And that's the other poll. And it just seems like if Trump is elected and it looks like there's a very good chance he will be or at least a 50-50 chance he will be, I'm very curious what this dichotomy or this sort of divide in the world is going to look like because we know that Trump and Musk, I don't know if they're fans of the other side, quote unquote, but they certainly are much more willing to engage.
24:31And do you end up seeing the US play a very different role? Whereas like maybe they don't join the other side, but they're more neutral or they start, I don't know. It's like the interests of the world are about to be, it looks like there's a solid chance are about to be like shaken up in like a very different way that our status quo has held for a while. And Elon Musk is right at the center of that. with his calls with Putin. Yeah, I think, I mean, that is a heavy Friday analysis of the global hegemonic structure. We're doing geopolitical. We're doing it. But we're doing geopolitics. I think it is interesting because that's always the question.
25:13Does a Trump election mean the U.S. just moves to neutral in this kind of bipolar world? Or do they actually move to the other side, which seems completely like impossible But who knows? So I do agree that I think that's a very clear delineation of where the world is today and trying to figure out where it goes, especially if Trump is elected. I think that's probably the central question. But still, to me, the craziest part of this is Elon Musk is not a governmental figure, technically. So he sells cars. And he I mean, and he sells rockets, and he sells internet service and whatever else and maybe robots down the down the line.
25:57But like, how do you sell cars to Americans, if you move in that direction? Like how all these things can actually interplay still baffles me. But that's my point is that the government might be shifting in that direction as a whole. Yeah, no, no. I think I could definitely see it moving in that way. But then does the American population move in the same direction? Well, I think aren't they being given a chance in November to decide where they're going to be? Or am I reading too much into it? I think that might be reading a little too much into it. and americans are still buying teslas as we'll discuss pretty shortly yeah okay last thing on this um it's clear that starlink has a tremendous amount of uh you know political value government power value and like you hear it throughout the story with elon about how like government officials like well we wish we had another option but we don't and we talk about how like the Kremlin is asking Musk not to activate Starlink over Taiwan.
26:59And of course, Taiwan, the government there is not exactly easy to work with when it comes to satellite services that somebody else own. But Starlink has a coming soon banner on its website when it comes to Taiwan. So we'll see. And maybe the US government doesn't have the capacity to do this. But why not just go ahead and build an internet service like having like the pipes of the internet been built by the government for quite some time. And there's been no effort within the government to build its own Starlink. Well, this is where I actually think where Elon Musk is the world's greatest marketer is because there are other low earth satellite internet communications companies.
27:43There's like OneWeb and Viasat and all these, like they exist. There's competitors. But the move of at the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, I remember he was sending satellites, I think Zelensky or at least some of his like number, like very high up generals and stuff were posing with the satellites. And it's such a weird dynamic because they know when they pose with the satellites, Elon Musk will retweet and suddenly your message will go out to the world. So leveraging the power of his following to go viral, it's instant when you're using the Starlink satellite and posing with it. And then Starlink becomes inextricably linked with the only satellite provider that can actually serve you in a war zone.
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28:30And then there's almost this mythical nature around what Starlink can do because of that, like, simple marketing tactic. And it's amazing. Like, it's actually like there are competitors. There should be other discussions. But now Starlink has become this geopolitical force, essentially, from, I think, I mean, you never really heard about in these conversations before those few tweets. Of course. And that's why I think the government should try to build something like this, because it's seeded such important technology to the private sector. Yeah, there are some others in there, but like, I know.
29:06And you know what? Maybe the government doesn't have the capacity to. or maybe they would be reliant on Starlink to send up their own internet providing satellites and Elon Musk would balk at that. But it seems like a natural national security thing. Are you running in 2028? Are you running in 2028? No, definitely not. Are you running in 2028? Yeah, the only thing I'm running toward is a podcast mic. I'll be right behind this thing. No, no, this is our platform. This is the big technology in 2028. Internet for every low earth satellite internet for everyone. National space internet and working agent bots.
29:41It's like a chicken in every pot. Vote Kantrowitz and Roy 2028. I think we got a good platform here. I think we found our true calling. But I think. Break down tech news on Fridays. People are still buying Teslas. I mean, Tesla, I'm sure most listeners saw the stock jumped 20 % in a day on Thursday after the earnings. This blew my mind. It was like these numbers were good, but they weren't that good. So revenue slightly missed, but the profit went up. Earnings per share was at$0.66 versus the expected$0.58. Margins improved for the first time in two and a half years. So it appears that Tesla is a kind of flattening but economically improving company.
30:33So to me, the stock should not jump 20 % on that. But in the earnings call, Musk basically said, even though growth is currently flat, his best guess is that vehicle growth will hit 20 % to 30 % next year. And the market took it as gospel. So I kind of enjoyed for all the complexity and scary things in the world, a good kind of like muskian earnings call in a Tesla stock pump. It was kind of fun to see. Yeah, but there's also something else that you should mention, which is that a large part of the Tesla earnings and the success in earnings and the profit, and let's not like pretend that Wall Street ignored the profit, was coming from the sale of regulatory credits.
31:15So basically, Tesla sells regulatory credits or emission credits to other automakers who buy them to meet emission requirements. So Tesla is good on emissions. Other automakers are not. They pay Tesla for credits and they end up being like in the place they're supposed to be, which to me, I don't know. It's kind of crazy. But these are all pure profit for Tesla. And I think that that is sort of such a fascinating part of the business. And if I'm Wall Street and I'm thinking Tesla, Wall Street is betting on Tesla to be more than a car company. It's betting on it to be a car company, an autonomous driving company, a battery company, an energy company, and maybe, you know, robotics company at some point.
32:02The fact that the profit is coming in largely, or not largely, but in good part from these credits shows that the Tesla vision, according to Wall Street, is working. And I think that's a big part of the company's jump. What do you think about that? Well, no, to me, and I think this is really important, even given the previous discussion on Musk and the intersection with government and geopolitics is$739 million in the quarter was pure profit from these regulatory credits. And remember, these credits come from regulation, emission standards and environmental regulation that were put on car companies.
32:39So they have to essentially pay for the fact that they are not producing electric vehicles, and they pay Tesla for those emissions credits. So it is pure, it's government, it's regulation that bring in this huge chunk of the profit. Yet Elon Musk is out there saying government is the worst, regulation is the worst, everything is terrible with government. That's like the disconnect that blows my mind, but somehow he's gotten away with it so far. Like we're talking about it. People talk about it. I feel like financial people talk about it, but it's fascinating to me that that detail has not made it to the larger political discussion.
33:24Maybe Elon's Department of Governmental Efficiency will end up killing these regulatory credits because they're inefficient. No, I think it's going to be jacked up more than we can ever. That's actually the entire platform, just emissions, regulatory emissions credits. All right. Speaking of big car companies and autonomous driving, Waymo just closed a$5.6 billion funding round. Remember, OpenAI$6.6 billion funding round was the biggest in the history of VC. And the fact that Waymo just closed something from that$5.6 billion is fascinating to me because it's gotten almost no attention. I mean, just think about the attention that people paid to OpenAI.
34:04Waymo, no one's really talked about. We've talked about autonomous driving like crazy on the show, but this is, I think, big news that we can't ignore. The investors are Google, which led the round, but also Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, your favorite, Tiger Global, and T. Rowe Price. And this is from Takedra Mawakana, the Waymo co-CEO. With this latest investment, we will continue to welcome more riders into our Waymo One ride-hailing service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, and in Austin and In Atlanta, through our expanding partnership with Uber, the total funding is$11 billion for Waymo.
34:45What do you think about this news? You should be jumping through the roof on this one. You're saying autonomous driving is not being recognized, and now we quietly got a gigantic funding round. And it's like a who's who of late-stage growth investors. There's A16Z, Silver Lake, Tiger Global Fidelity. Everyone's in there. So I think this is quietly, and it's true, this actually was not big news. I did not see a lot of conversation around it. So maybe people are not appreciating where the world's going. But to me, this is the kind of stamp of approval that this is happening. This is the future. It's going to happen pretty soon.
35:29No, I am jumping through the roof. I'm pumped at it. I mean, the fact that it's going to expand in these cities and go to other cities, I think it's big. And, you know, as a New Yorker, I can't wait for it to come to New York, although I think it'll be quite challenging for Waymo's to drive here. Yeah, I was actually just in Los Angeles last week for two days, and I did not get a chance to ride Waymo. I still have not ridden in one. But everyone, John, who I write margins with, he took one the other day and told me, magical. Like it's, I love when the word magical is used by, it's not cynical, but, you know, thoughtful, skeptical people.
36:09And when they say technology experiences are magical, which you have said as well in this podcast many times. Yes. That excites me. Okay. So speaking of magical, on the other side of this break, we're going to talk about perplexity in the news media, fighting with each other. That's the magical part because it's quite an interesting fight. And then a quite depressing story of a teen taking their own life and the family is blaming an AI app for it. So we'll talk about both those stories when we're back right after this. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation?
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37:47You'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 Beeler. 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.
38:15We're back here on Big Technology Podcast talking about the week's news. Before we get into the second half, I just want to say a quick thank you to everybody that answered the bell and rated the podcast five stars on Spotify and Apple Podcasts over the past week. Those ratings mean a ton and really appreciate you all coming through for the show. So thank you for that. Really no easy way to get into this next story, which is a story from The New York Times that says, can an AI be blamed for a teen suicide? And basically it's about this 14-year-old teen, Sewell Seltzer, who basically built, I would say, the primary relationship in his life with a bot on character AI modeled after the Game of Thrones character, Daenerys Targaryen.
39:00This person eventually withdrew from physical relationships and then said goodbye to the character AI bot and then took his own life. And it's a terrible story. And I think it's one of the things where we've talked about AI and the power, but there's also dark sides here. And, you know, for all the people, and I think I might, you know, be one who said it, that like, this could be something that can help alleviate some loneliness. If you have a bot to talk to, well, they'll never quite be able to fill the gaps left behind by people. And clearly this person was distressed. Now, the bot never encouraged him to take his own life.
39:39Nothing like that. But its role in being a confidant to somebody in such mental distress who eventually took their own life and receded from human connection is pretty distressing. So Ranjan, I'm curious what your reaction was after reading this. This was the most haunting thing I've read about AI. And we talk about AI a lot and are overall very excited and bullish and also at least thoughtful and skeptical about certain things. but this was just haunting. And so like, and I'm just going to read from the New York Times piece on this. It was on the night of February 28th in the bathroom of his mother's house, Sewell told Danny, the chatbot that he loved her and he would come soon come home to her.
40:25Please come home to me as soon as possible. My love, Danny replied. What if I told you I could come home right now? Sewell asked. Please do my sweet king, Danny replied. And he put down his phone, picked up his stepfather's 45 caliber handgun and pulled the trigger and like that was so fucked up to me to read because even the way and obviously it's it's weird because she the chatbot is not saying to inflict self-harm but clearly you read that and you see exactly where it's going so it's a reminder that this level of like intimacy and like depth should not be happening especially with a teenager a child and even it's almost and again it's so creepy to me because for all of my experimentation and usage of ai i actually have not used character ai i have not gotten into any intimate relationships with a chatbot i have not uh i've not i've not even like tried out these kind of companion apps And like the fact that I did not realize even the please come home, my love, please do my sweet king that 14 year old kids are having these kind of conversations shocked me.
41:44Like I did not realize the level of conversation. I mean, we even talked on a recent show about how AI companions are going to be like the biggest growing category of social apps. I know, and it's what scared me about reading this is like, and again, I read about this stuff and think about and write about it at like a often practical, but sometimes theoretical level. And this is where it was more, it just hit home that these are the kind of conversations that could be happening everywhere right now. And that to me was the, again, haunting and shocking part. and sometimes it takes something like this to spark change within a company but that being said i was annoyed by the reactive changes that character made and it's always after a tragedy like this that a company makes some changes that should have been self-evident as it was building you don't want kids addicted to these things you don't want to if you're maximizing for engagement and engagement alone, something's freaking wrong with you.
42:49And it seems like that's what character was doing. So this is from the Times article. So they character after hearing from the Times about this, they said that they would be adding safety features aimed at young users imminently. Like, again, why did it take those that long? Among those changes, a name limit, sorry, a new time limit feature, which will notify users when they've spent an hour on the app, and a revised warning message, which will read, this is an AI chatbot and not a real person. Treat everything it says as fiction. What is said should not be relied upon as fact or advice. And then there are other guardrails that it's going to put in place.
43:29So recently it's been showing a pop-up messages directed at suicide prevention and the pop-ups were not active in February when this young teen died. I mean, to me, that's horrible. No, I think to me, the really interesting, almost promising part of this is, so Section 230 is a very famous law that protects internet companies. And the idea is that if users are generating content on your platform, that you are shielded or protected from the type of content that they are creating on your platform. To me, what I think, and this comes up because the teen's mother has sued character AI, and this will be at the center of this conversation.
44:16I think it's going to be a really, really important precedent around generative AI because generative AI, it is the platform or the company that is generating the content. And this is going to have implications everywhere. Again, like the funnier version of this, when Google told you to eat rocks, hopefully it stayed funny and no one was actually eating rocks. But it's like you are liable and you should be. Companies will no longer have the ability to say, well, it's just user generated content because it's not. It's actually generated. It's original content. And the really interesting part of this is from a copyright perspective, and we're going to get into this in just a moment, it has to be new content.
44:59Otherwise, you're just stealing content. and every perplexity and everyone else is saying it's new content that's being generated, that's valuable for the user. So that will make companies or should make them liable for the content they're producing. And then all of these kinds of situations, I think it's going to take a massive lawsuit and we might see that play out with this specific one. Do you think Character AI should be liable for what happened? Yes. Really? Why? Yeah, because when the platform is built to have this kind of engagement there, I mean, it's this kind of addictive behavior and engagement.
45:39That's what it was doing. And you are allowing they even say that you technically and we all know how like age restrictions, how ineffective they are anyways, but they actually like by policy allow people who are 13 or older. There are certain things because the platform even talks about, sorry, the article talked about how some of the most popular companions on the app have like the name high school in there. So you know it's teenagers who are the ones using this on your platform. and if your companion if the chatbot still guides someone in this direction and when it's so clear that they have been heavily addicted to the the app and the platform and it's saying things like come home to me i mean and then the the child takes their own life i do think there has to be some kind of accountability because otherwise this can where can this go i'm not ready to say that they should be liable.
46:38I think it's terrible what happened, but I think that like the conversations, they actively do not push a kid towards suicide. And I think it's hard to sort of hold a company liable for that. Bad design, things that they should be ashamed of for sure. But this was something that's such an outlier that I just don't think that they should be liable for it. But if this happens 20 times, then are they liable? Because to me, it's not this, is it one case and everything else is okay? To me, it's the actual what happened in this specific case. Because at what point, and it will happen again. I mean, this is going to, the more, these tools are just at the beginning right now.
47:29So if guardrails aren't put in place early on, it will happen again more and more. So at what point is it like without having the explicit instructions, is that the only way that a company would be liable? I mean, this is just a thought experiment. Let's just talk it out. I know it's very serious subject matter. But let's say a kid has one friend and they're very close to their friend. And that's the only person they talk to. And they spend hours with this person and then they take their life. Is the friend liable? or was it just that they were in a dark place? No, no, but it's what is being said.
48:10It is, well, is that, I mean, to get, is that friend a commercial entity that is selling products and deriving revenue from the other? No, certainly not. Like, I think that's the difference here. I think to me, once, like, they should be able to control the type of language, the my sweet prince my love like that's the point where it's very clear that this guided someone towards a romantic infatuation style relationship like so that language can be controlled i can't do that with chat gpt like so it's clear uh even if open ai can put a guardrail in place because they're not very good at it i think character ai it can and that reminds us that they built this for this exact purpose and use case.
49:01Yeah, definitely. Not for the end outcome, but for the companionship. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. So I don't know. It's not, there's no clear, easy answer because it's in that gray area. But the fact that it got in that gray area and the fact that we're having this discussion, I think is pretty damning for the company and leads to lots of questions about what's going to happen down the line. So, all right, we have 10 minutes left. I do want to talk about the fact that the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post through Dow Jones are suing Perplexity, the AI search engine, for taking their content and repurposing it without proper compensation.
49:39And now Perplexity is responding. It said in a blog post this week, there are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish that technology did not exist. They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll. This is not our view of the world. We believe that tools like perplexity provide a fundamental transformative way for people to learn the facts about the world. Perplexity not only does so in a way that the law has recognized, but is essential for the sound functioning of a cultural ecosystem in which people can efficiently and effectively obtain and engage with knowledge created by others.
50:27Whose side are you on on this one? This one, somehow we are going to transition to also liability and AI and lawsuits, but I'm actually having fun with this one. I think I have been trying to be understanding of perplexity. And I think the entire media is going to change. And I think like, actually, Business Insider released this new tool where it's like AI powered search within Business Insider content. So you see that some people are actually just publishers are trying to embrace this. I think there are extreme issues where, like perplexity, where they basically paywalled content from Forbes, essentially just summarized and even took the images and put onto their own perplexity topic page.
51:18To me, the most interesting part of this story, though, is the blog posts they publish, they say the lawsuit reflects an adversarial posture between media and tech that is, while depressingly familiar, fundamentally short-sighted on necessary and self-defeating. The fact that they are turning this into like that classic media versus tech that it's almost like Elon Muskian or like you hear out of a lot of like Twitter VC was ridiculous to me like this is a i think that they have a decent argument in this and it was genuinely confusing to me that they're trying to turn this into media versus tech it's a depressingly familiar like almost speak in that kind of like adversarial twitter way when it's something that is a fact based logical thing that i think will get to a reasonable understanding and that they have some grounding in that surprised me and i use perplexity a lot yeah i think that was uh the work the work of emil michael i mean i don't have no proof of this or anything like that but the former chief business officer who's now an advisor to perplexity i'm pretty sure that you can see his fingerprints on this even though if he didn't actually even though i don't know whether he did it none of my listeners cannot see that my jaw just dropped i did not realize but now yeah he's an advisor to them and this has this has the uber of the mid-2010s written all over it exactly and i'll just say that like i don't think either side of this is actually being like completely intellectually honest about what's going on like i think that perplexity knows that it's taking content from publishers and not paying for it and there's no like moral argument for it just like it needs to do that to work.
53:04And I also think the publishers know that they are getting some value out of it because it's reaching new users that it never would previously. So there should be a way for everybody to benefit. And I do think that's with some compensation or some guarantee of traffic or the respecting of paywalls by companies like Perplexity. And I just think that everybody's so, I mean, it's capitalism, right? Everybody's so self-interested that they'll like spin up these stories and these arguments and that don't really completely hold water to me. If I had to point a finger and say, who's mostly in the wrong, I would say perplexity.
53:43I mean, we've seen what they did with the Forbes story behind a paywall. I mean, it's ridiculous. Like this idea that like they have, what do they have this idea that like knowledge should be free and not behind paywalls. It's like, well, where the F did you get that knowledge from? It's from the people who paid to report it out. So I do think that it's somewhat ridiculous. And I do think that there could be good relationships between people and these AI companies, sorry, between publishers and these AI companies. And it's a shame that companies like Perplexity, I think have acted in bad faith.
54:19Wait, wait, the more I'm thinking about this, this is actually genius. And now I'm rescinding everything I said about this blog post. And now I think I'm getting why, understanding why they're being aggressive this time. That my, the thing that stood out to me is one of, it was the wall street journal and the New York post. The New York post is the most like anti has the worst website in the world. The number of pop-ups that come up, the number of autoplay videos, the number, I know. That's why you got to use the app. The app is good. Wait, you actually, you're a new Xbox fan. So yeah. All right.
54:57That's understandable, but it's, it's so anti-reader ad optimized. It's just a terrible way to consume information. So if there's ever kind of a poster child for perplexity to go head to head and make it about us versus them, that would be the website to go after. And then it becomes a simple, listen, you have made consuming information understandably, quickly, concisely, reader-friendly so bad that someone needs to solve this problem and you will never solve it. And we are able to do that for readers and they, including myself, like that experience. If you're ever going to go against someone, it's the New York Post and then Murdoch.
55:43I hate that attitude. The Post, say what you want about the Post. If they went out and they hired a writer to go to a sports game, perplexity does not have the right to then repurpose that writing just because the UI is bad. The UI is necessary to pay for Brian Costello's flight to New England this weekend so he can write about how the Jets are going to smoke the Patriots. Perplexity didn't pay for that writer. I'm not even going to disagree with that one, yeah. Yeah, but here's the thing, though. If he's writing something that is genuinely worth reading, then you will read it on the New York Post.
56:18You're not going to read the bullet points. If I just want to know who had the most passing yards, what's an interesting stat, maybe that doesn't need to come. I don't need to sit through four autoplay videos and just that New York Post web experience. So I think this is smart. Now I get it. Now I get it. And if it's Emil Michael, like if anyone can play that game well, it's him. I will say the post app is also quite good for following the latest in the P. Diddy saga. It's all up in that story. What's up? What's P. Diddy done lately? I love that stuff. I mean, I don't love what he's done, but I do.
56:55I'm kind of addicted to reading about it. What has P. Diddy done lately? This is a family show. What's the most breaking? What's the most breaking news? I cannot say this is a family show. I cannot say it out loud. All right. Well, you know what? I had opened the New York Post website just to be triggered by it, and I got a couple of autoplay videos. And at the top, I will just say, Sean Diddy Combs mixed star-studded bashes with raucous freak-off sex parties after the VMAs in the Super Bowl. Ron-Sean, it's a family show, but they do cover the P. Diddy stuff. Go on. I've heard from parents that they play the big technology podcast in the car with their kids and the kids complain, but the kids have to learn.
57:38And kids will always complain about it. Yeah, exactly. So at least we gave him something to talk about at the end here. OK, before we go, I'll say that there is good. There are good ways for publishing publications and AI companies to work together to make things together. And Big Technology is going to start working with Eleven Labs, which is a voice AI narration company. They have an app where you can go and read news stories. And I think this is, you know, kind of jumping the gun here. But next week, you'll be able to hear me narrate Big Technology stories on their app. And the me narrating is actually AI me.
58:21and I just gave them a couple weeks of my voice files from the show and they created like a pretty good AI narrator. So I think it's great. Like there's going to be some compensation for big technology. And for me, I'm happy to get the word out there about big technology to new audiences through their apps. I like that. That's what I'm saying. There is cooperation to be had between the AI companies and publishers and just not the New York Post. I'm trying to find a way to relate this to Elon being the new diplomatic envoy of the U.S. to Putin, but I can't. So anyway, I'm sure we won't hear more of that story before this weekend's out, right?
59:05I'm actually genuinely curious if there's going to be further reporting on this because there has to be. There has to be. There has to be. But I can only imagine what it will be because it just gets weirder every time. When Elon calls Putin, you think he calls him on WhatsApp or Signal? Or what do you think the service is that he uses? I think there's like a top secret app that only it's like, you know, like a... Created by the CIA, right? The CIA must have created that app. Created by the CIA, nationalized, and they get free internet service based on the secret internationalized internet satellite service.
59:42and highly secure, has video chat as well. You can send emoji reactions. You can do it all on the CIA's special messaging app. They have built those apps before. So, okay. We're now entering territory that we should politely take a bow and say, we'll see you next week. So Ranjan, thanks so much for joining. Great to see you as always. We'll see you next week. All right, everybody. We'll see you next week. We have the founder of Cohere, Aiden Gomez, coming up on Wednesday, talking all about the latest in artificial intelligence. And then Ranjan and I are back on Friday. Thanks again. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.
From the publisher
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) AI agents are here 2) Anthropic's Sonnet 3.5 model 3) Why we're underwhelmed with AI agents so far 4) The long-term bull case for agents 5) OpenAI's Orion model 6) Sam Altman's fake news tweet, and his cryptic preview of that news 7) Elon Musk and Putin speak regularly 8) China, Russia, Iran, North Korea vs. U.S. and Europe about to get weird 9) Tesla's blowout earnings 10) Waymo raises $5.6 billion 11) Teen takes life after falling in love with Character.ai bot 12) Perplexity vs. The Media 13) Big Technology and ElevenLabs make a deal.
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