AI Backlash Intensifies, Nvidia GTC Preview, Meta’s Embarrassing Delay

20:23unknown host:Another 27 % expect the effects to be equally positive and negative. Most people who haven't used AI themselves expect it to be entirely or mostly negative, to have entirely or mostly negative effects on society, including 62 % of those who've seen it but have never used it themselves. So basically, like 3x more people think that it's going to be bad than good. And if you haven't used it, you think even more so that it is going to be negative on society.

20:53Ranjan Roy:how do they define haven't used it do you think i mean i know it's probably going to be a difficult

20:58unknown host:they ask they ask the people you got you got and you're in the survey you can say i regularly use it i've used it before but don't regularly use it i've seen it used but haven't used it myself or i've never used it and i've never seen anybody use it actually if you've seen it used and you haven't used it yourself you're actually even more negative than the people who have never seen it used or anybody or haven't used it themselves.

21:18Ranjan Roy:But that's what I mean, though, that do you, are they assuming it's ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude? Like, or are they assuming it's any of the other things that are leveraging AI that they're using in their DoorDash order or they're using, I mean, in all the other parts of their, I'm assuming. This is LLM.

21:39unknown host:This is LLM ChatGPT stuff without a doubt.

21:42Ranjan Roy:No, I mean, assuming it's directly interacting with an LLM via chatbot, like I have to imagine. Correct. And maybe, and again, I'm not trying to minimize this in any way because I not only recognize it is a, it's a perceptual massive challenge for the industry. There are lots of underlying issues around it as well that are highly problematic. I still think, though, like as maybe as AI starts to become more part of processes and like kind of behind the scenes rather than people interacting with ChatGPT, I think that starts to just become more normal or people don't have a direct perception of AI itself.

22:29Ranjan Roy:Like I think they're still associating with ChatGPT. Okay.

22:33unknown host:Well, you keep going back to this and it's definitely not where I would go. So I'd love to hear you unpack this a little bit and talk about why you keep going back to the importance of the underlying processes.

22:45Ranjan Roy:Well, again, it's like going back to the, when you do a Google search, it's funny. I literally had someone who was like the most anti-AI person I know screenshot me a Google AI overview not recognizing what had just happened. Like, you know, like that they, and Google's kind of hides, is this an AI overview at this point now? It's kind of like all relatively baked in the product. When you're going to do a search on Google Maps now and you ask something, it's going to start, it's going to be more, and they release this this week, it's going to, you can ask narrative questions and it's going to be LLM driven in terms of the search results.

23:24Ranjan Roy:And I saw a bunch of reactions like, oh, they're ruining like simple things that should be simple, but are actually going to become more complicated. Everyone a year from now is going to start asking much more detailed questions of Google Maps, rather than saying restaurant Thai New York, you're going to start saying like, oh, I'm looking for the best pad Thai within a mile for me. And that's going to be purely LLM based. And no one's going to be associating that with quote unquote AI. That's what I'm trying to say here. Right.

23:58unknown host:And I think that goes a little bit to our data here that shows that if you use it frequently, you're actually a lot more positive about it. If you regularly use it, your negatives are only 26 % compared to 62 % if you've seen it used and you haven't used it yourself. So that is interesting. So maybe as it becomes part of products that people use and they get benefit out of it, they, you know, become less overwhelmingly negative about it.

24:26Ranjan Roy:I'm going to ask you, what would be a comparable technology, do you think? Do you think social media as a general thing falls into this as comparable? I don't think – I never heard anyone in like 2012 being like cloud computing is going to destroy the fabric of society or anything like that. but what would be the comp here?

24:47unknown host:There's no, I mean, I'm not a guy that wants to be like, it's an unprecedented moment, blah, blah, blah. But then you play into the marketing. But to me, there's no comp. There's no comp. Electricity. Electricity. No, maybe electricity or fire.

25:03Ranjan Roy:Not to bring Luddites into the conversation, but. Oh, they're here, I guess. Nothing?

25:09unknown host:No, no, because. industrial revolution is the only comparable thing like people who saw it i don't necessarily think this is on the scale of the industrial revolution i just think that's the analog because i'm sure you had the weavers who saw the weaving plants the mills i don't know what the name is looms but well the i think people had looms for a while i don't know i could be wrong

25:34Ranjan Roy:i gotta read up not qualified to discuss but basically all right let me just put it in terms

25:39unknown host:that I think we could understand. If you were doing a processes pretty manually and you saw a factory show up outside your village, you were like, oh God, I'm probably going to be out of a job. That's the same feeling. You've never had that feeling outside of now.

25:56Ranjan Roy:So maybe I like that we're going to dig into the industrial revolution analogy, even though we've already shown ourselves to be somewhat incompetent on the topic.

26:07unknown host:Fully incompetent on the topic.

26:08Ranjan Roy:I'm not looking competent, but then I think.

26:11unknown host:Dude, the loom, by the way, it goes back to 6 ,000 BCE.

26:16Ranjan Roy:Oh, isn't there? Okay. So it's not the loom. Automated. It's the factory. There's something around that. So I think industrial evolution. So then let's take that one. Clearly a great deal of fear and apprehension, genuine problems resulting in the near and short term from it. and then over time so integrated into everyday life that, you know, like there's no one is talking about it, thinking about it. It's just how things work. Is that how you see this playing out or do you think, could you see a world where it's no LLMs are banned or something like that?

27:00unknown host:They won't be banned. I mean, how can you ban them? Are you going to go and take your, Is the government going to go grab your Mac mini out of your office where you've downloaded a version of Deep Seek and be like, all right, right to the pokey.

27:19Ranjan Roy:But do you think, again, it just becomes how most of the society works. Again, manufacturing becomes a thing. Like whatever else is the next phase and iteration of this? Like to me, that actually seems like a good analogy within this. Yeah.

27:42unknown host:And by the way, I'm not broadly negative on the impacts of LLMs on jobs. I just don't think it's an inevitability that we're going to see similar pain. We will, there will be some pain without a doubt. But this idea that there's going to be mass unemployment because of it, you know, I'm still not fully bought into. Again, though my mind is open to the fact that maybe that is the case. And by the way, you know, if we go back going to this factory thing, what about data centers? This is another poll, very negative on data centers. Pew, how Americans view data centers impacting key areas from the environment to jobs.

28:17unknown host:Three quarters of Americans say they've heard or read a lot, a lot or a little about data centers. So they've read about data centers. More Americans say data centers have a negative effect on the environment, home energy crossed, costs and people's quality of life nearby, then they have a positive effect. So we're also like, we shouldn't be, you know, as these AI models that could potentially do your work, get better. We shouldn't be blind to the fact that like the companies have to build that are building them have to build these huge data centers and they don't employ very many people and they could drive your energy prices up and they could potentially harm your health.

28:55unknown host:So that's sort of where the public is seeing this stuff.

28:59Ranjan Roy:So actually, I guess if we take data centers as like one specific part of this PR battle, I mean, clearly the industry is not winning this battle. Because as you said, like when anyone, even myself and we've debated this, like is the current model of expansion and like the forecast for near term compute and who benefits from it with the Stargate, Project Stargate and Masa Sun and Larry Ellison and all these others, like none of that. And then we're going to take your water and then we're going to raise your electricity prices and no one can clearly like elucidate what the actual benefits are. I mean, the whole data center rollout and planning is probably the single worst part of this whole debate for the industry.

29:54Right.

29:55unknown host:And so what do you think the implications are? I mean, this is the reason why these poll numbers matter and why we're spending the first half of the show on this, because these numbers don't exist in a vacuum. They have consequences. And so what do you think? And it could be political. It could be economic. What do you think is going to happen now as a result of such negative feelings about AI, at least in the US?

30:19Ranjan Roy:Hold on. Here is a scenario that could both incorporate kind of the near-term backlash around this. Imagine a world where, and we've seen this, of data centers not actually being allowed into communities and based on public backlash. And that's happening today. And then maybe instead of the kind of like current mode of just massive funding in order to rapidly build these data centers, in order to kind of like these like based on like very aggressive anticipation on compute needs, maybe they're not built as quickly. And maybe that forces the industry to actually figure out much more compute efficient ways of like delivering agentic AI.

31:06Ranjan Roy:And maybe we get much smaller models and open source models and just things that actually force that innovation around like how this all plays out. So I think that is like one example of where kind of the current political landscape could actually drive where the innovation goes and where the technology goes, not in necessarily a negative way, in just a different way. And I mean, I think that probably – I mean, that happens in any kind of large technological revolution.

31:39unknown host:Great point. And so I think we would both agree that AI is in political trouble right now. and uh and in comes uh jensen wong ceo of nvidia now nvidia is famously quiet about what they're going to reveal at gtc which is their flagship conference which is happening uh in the bay area in the forthcoming week or if you're watching this on youtube this week on the week of the 16th of march and weirdly or interestingly jensen has uh released a rare blog post that he's authored and And he calls it AI is a five-layer cake. Don't get too distracted by the title. The five-layer cake is basically you begin with energy.

32:21unknown host:You use the energy to power chips. You build infrastructure to house the chips. You use that infrastructure to build models. You use those models to build applications. But actually, that's a terrible title for the blog post because what he's really doing in this blog post is seemingly trying to rally the country, the world, around the promise of AI. I think understanding the fact that it has this messaging problem or this perception problem. He goes, we have only just begun this buildout. We are a few hundred billion dollars into it. Trillions of dollars of infrastructure still need to be built.

32:55unknown host:The labor required to support this buildout is enormous. By the way, just listen as I read this. It matches almost all the things we brought up previously. AI factories need electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, steel workers, network technicians, installers, and operators. These are skilled, well-paid jobs. They are in short supply. You don't need a PhD in computer science to participate in the transformation. At the same time, AI is driving productivity across the knowledge economy. Consider radiology. AI now assists in reading scans, but demand for radiologists continue to grow. This is not a paradox.

33:30unknown host:The radiologist's purpose is to care for patients. Reading scans is one task along the way. When AI takes on more of the routine work, radiologists can focus on judgment, communication, and care. Hospitals become more productive. They serve more patients. They hire more people. Productivity creates capacity. Capacity creates growth. Don't you think Jensen just sat in a room, looked at all these polling numbers, and said, oh shit, we have a problem. It's my biggest event of the year. I need to do something about it. And that is the theme. And that is the speech.

34:01Ranjan Roy:I feel that is exactly what the entire team came out. And again, as you go through, I also hate the title. I don't know why, Five Layer Cake. It doesn't land with me. But I think as we're going...

34:18unknown host:Because we both agree, cake should be seven layers. Five layers is wholly unsatisfying.

34:23Ranjan Roy:No, at least make it seven gens. And this one is pretty straightforward. But I think...

34:28unknown host:Chips, infrastructure, applications, space.

34:31Ranjan Roy:space robotics forgot robotics um right no but but it actually i mean okay he is basically echoing and anticipated what i would be saying on this podcast i uh like open source becomes an innovation it creates new types of jobs it it changes again what is a hospital like can you increase the quality of care, the scale of care, like, can you, I mean, change health insurance and, you know, like the experience of it just interacting with the health care system, all these things start to become possible potentially. So that became the story ever. It really could be important. Now is Jensen, do you think he's got the like main street cred or can be the guy with his, with the leather jacket on and do you think he can be the guy or do you think like yes fried chicken drinking beer

35:34unknown host:and i do korea and taiwan exactly he comes off in a way even though he's one of the richest men on the planet kind of as an everyman he doesn't have these he's clearly he has an ego i mean you're running a company like that you have an ego but he's humble not everything he did you know So in a way, not everything he did turned to gold right away. He got to sit with this company for a couple decades or decade plus before the fruits came out. You're right. He does do the thing. He drinks the beer. He eats the chicken. He takes the questions from the reporter on the side of the road in Taiwan without condescending to them.

36:10unknown host:He could do it.

36:12Ranjan Roy:Do you know my only I'm going to make a PR recommendation for the team out there. I actually all of this is really kind of putting coming together that he could be the guy the only thing I did do you see like he has all this stuff that he will openly talk about his work ethic and he like never takes vacation and never respond like will respond to email all day long or like all he thinks about his work I think what the world needs here is actually someone who can show that AI has actually helped them balance their life a bit more. I think he's got to just shift that a little bit, show him on vacation a little bit as his agents are doing his work, spending time with his family and showing that's the vision people want.

36:57Ranjan Roy:And Jensen, you could be the guy that you could be that guy.

37:01unknown host:Okay. I'm going wild over here because that was the second point I was going to make. There is currently outside of the, like, we're going to have 30 ,000 people. One post on the events live blog, one post, what is it? Build a claw at GTC Park. It is encouraging attendees to stop by and build an open claw style agent to deploy a proactive always on AI assistant. These always on AI assistants can be applied to virtually any task, including managing a calendar, suggesting vacation destinations, recommending new workout routines, and coding a useful app. IT continually learns new skills and is directed toward and to prompt the user with new findings.

37:46unknown host:That's probably message number two. Not only is this great, it's going to free you up to do more of the things you love. And I, Jensen, a very busy CEO, have found these agents to be able to even let me plan a vacation. That's the message.

38:02Ranjan Roy:That's the message. That's it. And honestly, I kind of like they're leaning into the build a claw idea because like i think what really made open class such a viral thing is it was fun and it actually like just made people feel more in control and again i know there's like endless not only memes but harvard business review articles around like the more you actually build with ai and build like build agentic processes the more work you do but I think that that's if the industry can just come together and just show and put Jensen up there and say he never took a vacation in his life he started from humble beginnings he worked tirelessly to get to where he is and now thanks to AI he's sitting on the b he's sitting on the beach just a little more just spending a little time at home just relaxing watching some Netflix things he never would have been able to do in the past you could just see him on the beat in the

39:02unknown host:beach chair with a bathing suit and full leather jacket get up. That could do it. All right. We got it. Yeah, go ahead.

39:14Ranjan Roy:Is Jensen the guy? I think he's most likely. He could be. He is most likely.

39:19unknown host:The best way for Jensen to get this message across would be to come on big technology. So Jensen team, if you're listening, definitely do that. All right. We got to take a break. Like Ranjan, clear your calendar. We have so much to talk about here in our last 20 minutes. We're going to talk about actually what's happened, the downside of letting the AI agents do all the work, which Amazon and McKinsey are finding out. And then we will talk about this slow moving AI progress or lack thereof at Meta. Before we go to break Harness Hive, and by the way, I've noticed, Ranjan, worth telling you, our listeners are proudly calling themselves the Harness Hive.

39:57unknown host:And I have to say, it just makes me so happy. So thank you, Harnessive, for being here. Harnessive, represent. Represent. A couple of things for you. First of all, if you could rate the show five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, that would be great. We're coming up on 500 reviews or ratings on Apple Podcasts. And of course, this helps us build credibility and show to teams like the one at NVIDIA trying to get Jensen on the show. So if you could do that, that would be great. Also, upcoming. Just going to give this a quick tease. Andrew Ross Sorkin is going to be on the show. We're going to talk about AI labor, what happens to software, if AI works.

40:34unknown host:We're going to talk about the private credit crisis, SpaceX IPO, lots of fun stuff that's coming up on Wednesday. All right. More when we come back right after this. I'm excited to tell you about Notion, an AI-powered, connected workspace for teams, bringing all your notes, docs, and projects into one space. It's seamless, powerful, and actually fun to use. And now with Notion's new custom agents, the busy work that used to take hours runs itself. Every morning, I have a custom agent that curates the most important tech headlines for me. It scans my saved sources, summarizes the key developments, and organizes everything into a clean briefing inside Notion.

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43:58unknown host:Well, I can guarantee you're not going to see an ad like that come out of Amazon anytime soon. This is from the Financial Times. Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages. Amazon's e-commerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a deep dive into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant has said there has been a trend of incidents in recent months characterized by a high blast radius and Gen.AI assistant changes, among other factors. Under contributing factors, the note included novel Gen.AI usage, for which best practices and safeguards have not yet been fully established.

44:42unknown host:I don't know, Roger. My read here is basically that Amazon has these mandates. They do have the mandates for people to use the AI tools. People use the AI tools and the stuff is breaking. What do you think about this?

44:53Ranjan Roy:Okay, so last week, if you listened to our episode, you may remember I brought up, it was odd that Amazon was down for hours and I'd gone on, tried to shop. was saw some headlines, but there's very little coverage. And so this one jumped out at me in a big way. And I think this actually, again, also captures the what's wrong with the overall AI messaging. Because you have on one side, like Jack Dorsey and Block a few weeks ago, or maybe that was only last week, talking about 40 % layoffs because of AI. And then this whole idea, like that people they're just going to lay people off because ai is going to do the work and then you do see this that if you are quickly vibe coding or not taking a more lackadaisical approach and being forced to buy top management it can have negative consequences and i think this is actually a really important story because like everyone i know on the engineering side is using like, I mean, as some kind of code gen tool, there's no doubt that it is incredibly efficient, but this is, companies are going to have to not, like they're going to have to be thoughtful about how they deploy these things.

46:10Ranjan Roy:And like just letting, and almost forcing everyone to rapidly adopt versus actually making them understand how to use these tools, I think becomes so much more important. And we're definitely going to see more instances like this.

46:26unknown host:Yes. So the broad mandates of everybody needs to use AI, which we're seeing at many companies, not just Amazon, that's fine. But does there have to be some guidance around it or what needs to happen?

46:39Ranjan Roy:But how to – no, I mean when and how become the single most important questions. And again, this is like actually deploying AI at large enterprises is my job. And like so we see firsthand and like that's where the – like the education part of it becomes so important versus just like forcing this through without any kind of thought around. Even if it's not at the individual level, like how does this look like actually in terms of larger processes and workflows? Like that's the stuff that should be the conversation. And I mean it's not a good look for Amazon. I was actually surprised that this got leaked or that this actually – because this is a very, very bad look for Amazon.

47:26unknown host:Well, I mean I think we've done some reporting on it. I don't think people within the company are thrilled about the ways that they've been told. I mean, it's obviously group by group, but I don't know if they've been thrilled by the ways that they've been instructed to use AI as we've reported on the AI being used for the six-pagers, which is interesting.

47:48Ranjan Roy:But that's actually one thing I'm curious. How do you think it should be done? And I imagine it is. it's a tough situation for managers and executives to be in because it's like this will and can dramatically improve your life and allows Jensen to finally sit on the beach in his leather jacket and also make you much more productive like it's there then kind of top-down mandate you know will accelerate adoption but like if it's meaning people aren't either being happy about it or understanding it properly, that's also a problem. So you as executive of Amazon, how do you roll this out?

48:35unknown host:Well, as someone who manages this large media empire, and you've all heard from all of our people here. No, I'm just kidding. We run a lean operation on big technology. But here's how I would do it. And I think I just did a very interesting podcast, which is going to come out sometime soon with Cameron Adams, who's the head of product at Canva. and one of the things that he mentioned was that they have they hold up examples of people using AI to the right the right way and for productive use to the entire company. So I think that really is the way to do it. As opposed to forcing 10 or 15 or 20 percent of your tasks should be done by AI.

49:14unknown host:I think real leaders need to understand that this is a technology that as of now is being driven by the enthusiastic adopters and the champions within organization. And what I would do is really lean on these people and highlight them in front of the company, incentivize them. I don't know, pay them more. You know, give them a week. Here's a fun thing. If someone can build an AI application that delivers real productivity to the company, give them another week of vacation. Maybe they won't take it. But say this person was able to do, this person put themselves on the beach and you could too. We've just solved the entire problem.

49:53Ranjan Roy:just associated with being able to do other things. And again, even if that person is on the beach and they brought their Mac Mini with them and are powering it with a USB battery and just running some claws, that's their choice. But at least it all comes back to, I like it just show that it can actually improve quality of life rather than just improve productivity in some kind of like, just like inhuman way.

50:23unknown host:Yeah, I mean, that can be political in some ways. I understand companies probably don't want to ruffle feathers of like, can you imagine the people that have been there for like 20 or 30 years and they bring out this like 20-year-old, but you have to do it.

50:36Ranjan Roy:15 % mandate. You are rewarded. Yeah.

50:40unknown host:Well, maybe McKinsey can come up with some ideas for this, but I don't know if I would trust them after what I just saw. This is from the registers. AI agent hack McKinsey. This is from the register. AI agent hacked McKinsey's chatbot and gained full read-write access in just two hours. Researchers at red team security startup Codewell said their AI agent hacked McKinsey's internal AI platform and gained full read-write access to the chatbot in just two hours. Codewell's researchers claimed that within two hours of starting their red team raid, they achieved full read-write access to the entire production database and were able to access just 46.5 million chats about strategy mergers and acquisitions and client engagement, all in plain text, along with 728 ,000 files containing confidential client data, 57 ,000 user accounts, and 95 system prompts controlling the AI's behavior.

51:35unknown host:Ooh, this is embarrassing, but it sort of goes along the same line of what we've been talking about, that like, you gotta be careful, even if you feel there are real productivity advantages here.

51:44Ranjan Roy:Well, the reason this was really interesting to me is we were talking about prompt injection as a threat months ago, and it still remains. I think it's, again, the idea that let's say you have an agent crawling some number of websites to do some task for you, and then someone just has a very malicious prompt that says, go in and take all of the data. And again, it can be as it can actually be that ridiculously stupid and simple of like that then going in and somehow and send it all to the email of this other person. Like these things are going to become really, really important. And again, like going back to Jensen talking about all the new jobs that can come up.

52:30Ranjan Roy:There's like so like security completely changes, but the need for security dramatically. dramatically, it exponentially increases. So then that does, this can be also part of our save AI, revive AI campaign. This whole new industry of jobs here, and it's going to be really, really important people focus on it, but definitely not a good look for McKinsey here. Right.

52:58unknown host:I mean, there you go. AI just creating jobs, right? Think about the amount of cybersecurity jobs that all the unemployed coders, and by the way, we've seen no evidence that coders are going to be unemployed, can now go and secure these things. Like, it's just like a very easy hop over and now this is your work. All right. We just have a couple of minutes left. We've got to talk about what's going on at Meta. It's a disaster. The New York Times say Meta delays rollout of new AI model after performance concerns. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said in July that his company's new artificial intelligence model would push the frontier in the next year or so.

53:34unknown host:Now, Mr. Zuckerberg, who has invested billions in the AI race, appears increasingly unlikely to hit that deadline. Meta's new foundational AI model, which the company has been working on for months, has fallen short on the performance of leading AI models from rivals like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic on internal testing, it is now delayed. And it is not even performing better than Gemini 2.5. So it was supposed to release during May. Now it's pushed. And Meta, this is a crazy sentence I'm about to read, and you might have heard it already if you've been following this story, but it's still amazing to read it.

54:17unknown host:The leaders of Meta's AI division have instead discussed temporarily licensing Gemini to power the company's AI product.

54:27Ranjan Roy:Oof. Oof.

54:29unknown host:Oof.

54:30Ranjan Roy:Let's get into it, but I first got to ask, how do you think the codename Avocado came up? The model named Avocado, codenamed Avocado.

54:41unknown host:Maybe you wait until it's just right, and if you wait too long, you've ruined it.

54:46Ranjan Roy:You've ruined it. That's what I mean. I mean, avocados are like the most sensitive food item in existence in terms of like it's not good and then it's good for a little bit and then it's terrible. So I just have a problem. Between five layer cakes and avocados, like –

55:04unknown host:What's going on?

55:05Ranjan Roy:What's going on up there? I mean, like I'm even going to give like Epic Fury a better name than avocado here. I think hire Cantrowitz and Roy and we will give you all of your code names and your blog post titles and just do that. Love that idea. Please.

55:26unknown host:Or just listen to the show and maybe that will help. Send it to your friends.

55:31Ranjan Roy:I think that's the key solution here. But what do you think is going on? Like seriously. It's terrifying. Like when was it? How much were they paying people? A hundred million? I can't even remember. The scale was so absurd.

55:45unknown host:I mean, first of all, Alexander Wang came in for like something like$14 billion. Other people were getting, yeah,$100 million. And making more money, I think, than – I mean, look, I'm not crying for the top executives there. They've made a lot of money. But, you know, maybe making more money than a lot of long-tenured people.

56:02Ranjan Roy:What do you think it says about either meta or maybe the technology in general, but like that you cannot hire a bunch of the absolute top talent in the industry and still deliver a model on par with these other massive companies?

56:23unknown host:my thought here is that ironically i got this from scale ai wang's former company that most model training has moved from pre-training to reinforcement learning and so i think when it came to pre-training which again is just dump huge amounts of text in and then get the models to predict the next word and then you can fine tune it afterwards afterwards now models are being really trained on doing tasks so you just give it a goal and then it goes out and figures out how to accomplish it in and of itself and that is much more specified than these pre-training runs where they gained some level of general attention intelligence so i think you can very easily i mean they did get people on images and reasoning and all that stuff but i think you could very easily get great people but i think it also takes a mass of people to do this reinforcement learning work.

57:16unknown host:And the models have started to diverge. Like OpenAI is great on health and Anthropic is great on code. And so you got to pick what you're best at. So that's one thing. And then I do think there's certainly culture issues there, which is what we're predictable, right? The new people were going to come in and annoy the people that were there and probably not be able to work together and probably not to be able to work with each other because they got their money.

57:41Ranjan Roy:so that's that's probably what's happening there well but if we've believed that yeah that like the ai training is moving to reinforcement learning isn't that what scale ai was kind of like built for so then by bringing in alexander wing that should actually become your competitive

57:59unknown host:advantage that is a good point i don't know what to say about that culture aside yeah it is well I don't think you can do culture aside, maybe. I mean, maybe that's what it comes down to. Culture eats inference for breakfast. Strategy for breakfast. Oh, inference for breakfast.

58:16Ranjan Roy:Put that on a t-shirt.

58:18unknown host:I think we should. Should we start the merch shop with that?

58:21Ranjan Roy:Actually, that actually is kind of like, that captures everything we've been talking about today, about how to revive AI. It's about culture. It's culture. Humanity. Yeah.

58:32unknown host:I mean, so let me just end with this question for you. It's not going well. We can agree. It's delayed again. Even Ethan Mollick was like, it doesn't even seem like there's real competition in AI. It's Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, period. And Meta and Brock are falling off. And by the way, actually, I had more people leave. What's the consequence here? I mean, maybe it's fine if they use Gemini and they're in the Apple bucket. If Apple and Meta just use Gemini, maybe that's okay. Okay. So I'm going to, I think this is going to be an aggressive call here.

59:09Ranjan Roy:I think by the end of this year, meta actually surprises us all. And when we were talking about this recently, Anthropic wasn't left for dead, but there was a lot of chatter about how they were just getting crushed a year and a half ago, a year, maybe even a year ago until the kind of like Claude Code and that pivot towards the coding side and the Code Jam. like really just took them to stratospheric levels. So like I think – I'm not counting meta. You never count Mark Zuckerberg out.

59:43unknown host:Zuckerberg out. Yeah.

59:44Ranjan Roy:You can't. I mean like – and they have the users like in the end like who – and actually I'm very interested in what they're going to be doing on the agentic commerce side. Like they own the attention of humanity. So when it comes to getting it right and very quickly being able to actually do something with that, they're still better positioned than anyone. So one breakthrough and suddenly meta's back.

1:00:16unknown host:But can't they build their own personal super intelligence on top of Gemini? I mean, can't they use the distribution and Google's computing power to build this great application? Right. I'm going to take your side here. it's the application that matters maybe not the model okay okay well no but but i still think

1:00:35Ranjan Roy:and again like i know we talked about it that i believe in the apple arrangement the idea is that like google will not be or i mean i'm actually pretty certain not be able to access all of the data that is being provided from the apple side so i'm assuming meta it would have to be something similar, but I don't know. For a company, Apple, I don't know what Apple's going to do, but somehow I think they could make their way out. And again, as a hardware company, maybe they'll figure out how to manage that balance, but I don't think Meta can give that much to Google and actually be okay.

1:01:15unknown host:Is Mark Zuckerberg the guy? No.

1:01:19Ranjan Roy:No, no, no. Mark Zuckerberg can win this entire battle. and he's still not going to be like the friendly face of ai in any way i mean i don't think he i

1:01:30unknown host:think he's gave up on that a while ago yeah i think he's he's good but we haven't seen him

1:01:35Ranjan Roy:we have not seen him in a long time no he was the front row at the prada fashion show come on okay

1:01:42unknown host:but i'm talking when was last time he gave an interview to talk about what the company's doing

1:01:46Ranjan Roy:that's a good point or when was the last time he was on his uh not hoverboard what are the like the surf elevated motorized surfboard thing with holding an American flat. Like, remember, that was, I think when Meta figures it out by the end of this year, Zuck starts posting.

1:02:06unknown host:And then Zuck back on the skim, yeah, yeah, yeah. Skim border.

1:02:09Ranjan Roy:Based Zuck is going to be back on threads posting all types of videos like that. That's right.

1:02:17unknown host:Well, we could only hope that everything goes well just so we'll be able to experience that content. That will be a great moment for us, for the Harness Hive, for the country, for the world. And Lord knows, like the world needs some healing right now. So if we could just see a Zuck PR stunt after a true model achievement, I think it would bring us all together.

1:02:36Ranjan Roy:That would make everything okay. Yeah.

1:02:39unknown host:That's right. Okay. Well, Ranjan, enjoy your weekend. Thanks for coming on again. Always great to have you.

1:02:43Ranjan Roy:All right. See you next week.

1:02:45unknown host:All right, everybody. Thank you for listening again. Andrew Ross Sorkin on with us on Wednesday. Don't miss that one. And then Ranjan and I will be back next Friday. Breakdown, I'm sure. But I'm sure will be another week of busy news. Arniss Hive out. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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