AI Scandals Rock Newsrooms, Uber’s Road to Profitability, NVIDIA’s Underappreciated Weakness

0:00AI scandals are rocking newsrooms. Uber's intriguing road to profitability. Millions of Tesla's are recalled, and NVIDIA's surprising competitive challenge. All that and more coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Ranjan Roy is here with us. We've got a huge week of news to break down. We're going to talk about all these big AI scandals in the news everywhere, some stuff about Uber, the Tesla recall, and then a little bit more about chips. Ranjan, Great to see you. Welcome to the show.

0:35Yep, and I'm really here. This is not an AI clone of me. I think our newsroom has still been remained human only. Exactly. We'll see what happens on the holidays. Maybe when we take our little break, there's going to be Robot Alex and Robot Ronjan, but people will just have to tune in to our Christmas and New Year's time shows to find out. That's your incentive. But not yet. We're still here. We're still here. Speaking of real, authentic humans and not AI, I have a fun story to tell. I met Sam Altman this week. I was at the Time Person of the Year gala, and Sam was being honored as the CEO of the year.

1:15And I was like, all right, I heard he's walking around. Let me see if I could find him. And I saw him at the bar on his own without any handlers and just went up and said hi and had a really nice about five-minute conversation with him, the contents of which I'm not going to reveal today because I'm hoping. You know, we spoke, I was like, listen, let's talk off the record. I got some questions for you. And my hope is that he'll come on the show at some point. But it was very interesting getting a chance to meet him right after all this stuff happened. But you were at the Time Person of the Year gala and you did not meet Taylor Swift?

1:47So Taylor did not show, but Sam did. Wait, Taylor Swift is so big. She won Time Person of the Year and did not show up at the gala. Not only that, she was apparently walking around New York City at the time and didn't come into the plaza. Meanwhile, and by the way, this is how dedicated I am to the Big Technology Podcast crew. If you have Sam standing on one side of the room and Taylor on the other, I'm going to Sam for you guys. And he did speak, actually. For you, our listeners, give up Taylor Swift or Sam Altman. No doubt about it. And there were some interesting things that he said on stage because he spoke on stage.

2:26And they asked him what happened at OpenAI. And he said this really interesting thing. As we get closer to super intelligence, everybody involved gets more stressed and more anxious. And we realize the stakes are higher and higher. So like he said that he prefaced that to say like to be a little empathetic in the beginning. But clearly he's kind of winking at the idea that there was something safety or some super intelligence related thing that freaked people out. Qstar, we still there's more to that story, I'm sure, that's going to come out. He also spoke about open AI governance. And this was interesting.

3:04He said, so they asked him about the governance there. And he said, we have to make changes. We always said that we didn't want AGI to be controlled by a small set of people. We wanted it to be democratized. And we clearly got that wrong. So I think if we don't improve our governance structure, if we don't improve the way that we interact with the world, people shouldn't, we're very motivated to work on those changes. I mean, that was also interesting. So, I mean, they're obviously expanding the board, but it seems like, you know, maybe they're thinking about other changes to the governance that we still don't know.

3:37I mean, it's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out. Yep. Wait, he's sorry. They said they had originally wanted artificial general intelligence democratized or like controlled. The control of it democratized. Okay. I did have somebody who quote tweeted or posted on my LinkedIn or something talking about how like the word democratized has totally been ruined. But that's not a story that we're going to tackle today. Instead, let's talk about something else that seems to be ruined. And that's the news. Story after story show that newsrooms are not only embracing AI, but basically using it to plagiarize other articles or just.

4:19it's amazing to me how many AI robot reporters there are already here at the end of 2023 here's a story from Semaphore one of the most highly trafficked financial news websites in the world is creating AI generated stories that bear an uncanny resemblance to stories published just hours earlier by competitors investing.com Tel Aviv based site owned by Joffrey Capital is a financial news and information hub that provides a mix of markets, data, and investing tips and trends. But increasingly, the site has been relying on AI to create its stories, which often appear to be thinly veiled copies of human-written stories written elsewhere.

5:01I mean, this happened to me earlier in the year when I had someone rip off my work by remixing it with AI, publishing it as their own, and then showing up on the front page of Hacker News. I just thought that would be something that's sort of done by these freelancer pirates, not by some of the most highly trafficked sites that exist what's going on this is such a tough problem because in again the domain value of a site like investing.com clearly is the you know why it receives so much traffic it's been built up over years but it is so easy to simply rewrite any original article in your own voice take all the information and just rewrite it and there's no reason that's not going to keep happening.

5:47So I feel this is a tough one to solve. The only thing I could think that does potentially help kind of regulate this is reputation and context that because this stuff is getting reported, because people like next time you go and read on investing.com, the idea that you're going to be reading an AI recycled article could at least denigrate the idea that you're going to be doing getting in any investing advice from it but but this is tough because this is gonna keep going there's what's to stop this correct and it's only going to get better and better right so we'll see these models improve there'll be less hallucination and then right now like it seems somewhat easy to suss out but in the future might not be that easy yeah and this is where i've thought a lot about this like the having i hate the word personal brand, but I think the personal branding of specific journalists, it becomes that much more important.

6:46And I feel the New York Times has been like on the, and I mean, others as well, some for as well, like really leading on this kind of thing, because at a certain point, it becomes less about the content and more about the voice and knowledge and trust of a specific person or voice. And otherwise, from a pure content standpoint, so much of it is going to be recycled or unidentifiable that it has to become that level of trust. By the way, it's a good moment to give you a shout out because I've been using a bot that you recommended, Claude, the Anthropic bot. I didn't realize when you mentioned it that you could just upload documents and then have it do things with them.

7:28And it's really fantastic, Ranjan. It's really amazing. I mean, it kind of makes me nervous what's going to happen to information. But this bot is pretty damn good. Well, yeah, this is where, I mean, commoditization across all these different products, you see it, that ChatGPT, Claude from Anthropic is just as good. It can even, I think it's now. And better in some cases. Yeah, now it's on par in terms of, originally Claude could basically ingest an entire book's worth of content based on its token limit. Now, ChatGP or GPT-4 kind of matched it. But yeah, all these things, maybe BARD will start to get there.

8:05maybe but uh yeah i think like seeing how good and how fast more and more of these uh chatbots are it's it's it's good it's something to see so i uh signed up to claude pro so i'm now using the juiced up version and i like um pasted my entire article about nvidia in there today before i hit publish and just had it play with different iterations and basically review the writing and the arguments and even the lead. The lead is, it's about to get hot in NVIDIA's kitchen. And I was like, does this sound right? And then I said to Claude, hey, listen, can you just rewrite this entire article as a cooking article with NVIDIA metaphors, as opposed to an NVIDIA article with cooking metaphors?

8:52And it did a freaking fantastic job. Like it was one of the more amusing things I've done with technology this year. Wait, have you, do you have access to grok yet grok is available if you use the 16 a month twitter blue and i'm not going to go that far i'm at eight dollars a month i'm not paying to send more so i'll wait until it rolls out to us mid-level twitter bluers twitter twitter bluers yeah x blue is it even called x blue now it's called x premium i have not paid attention to that in a while but wait actually yeah so it is X premium now? I think so. Okay. And there's premium plus, obviously the branding is really going well over there, but okay.

9:35Getting back to our topic though, I know we've gone astray. There, there's a good thing happening and that's that some publishers are actually, uh, looking at this and saying, and maybe this goes back to the reputation thing that you mentioned. And they're saying if the editorial folks want to use AI and not do their job, we're going to fire them. And And that happened with Sports Illustrated, where the company fired a number. Okay, two top executives. Okay, so the company that owns Sports Illustrated is from Futurism, the arena group. It fired two top executives. It said that their departures had nothing to do with the fact that potentially the company had fake personas writing AI stories.

10:14And then a week later, they announced that the CEO of Sports Illustrated is leaving too. And they say, effective immediately, Ross Levinson, who, by the way, is a big media name, will be leaving the company and his role as CEO. And they go, this follows the recent departures of three senior executives last week. And they sent the press release out to the newswires. It is very interesting. Like some people that I know in my circles are like, well, it seems like a pretty big price to pay for him. And it's like, no, you don't want to be known as a publisher that does not have humans writing for you.

10:49Right move? What do you think? I see this is the difference. Like sports articles, to me, at least recaps of games, there's no reason that should not be AI driven. Like the idea that understanding what are the key things to talk about, key stats from the game, key plays to link a highlight to, any of that should be totally AI generated and just pushed out quickly and easily. and then commentary analysis all these kind of things should be humans but i think this is where the newsrooms that really figure out how to balance the two are going to be the ones that do well and maintain trust with their readers and are able to actually just function better because because the idea that people are not going to use any generative ai in their entire journalism process is crazy to me but the worst thing you can do if any publishers are out there right now is do not create a fake persona pretend it's a human and try to pass that off that not only yeah it's the not only that you know what sports illustrated was doing so i just clicked into the story the stories that they were talking about were recommending products play like a pro with the best full-size volleyball and they recommend the wilson so there's affiliate links as well in here yeah there's amazon links in there okay okay that's why you get fired honestly that's why you get not you but the person who did that using using some generative ai that's okay do not do what ross levinson's people did you will be fired terrible so and and but the thing is that this is going to be a fact of life inside every newsroom because this week uh the new york Times hired Quartz co-founder Zach Seward to work on AI in the newsroom.

12:40And this is from a quote that they gave to the Wall Street Journal. They said about Seward that he shares our firm belief that Times journalism will always be reported, written, and edited by our expert journalists. But they said he will be establishing principle for how we do and do not use generative AI. Note how it's not whether or not we use generative AI. It's how we do and do not. All right. So this I am very interested and excited by. And I think I'm going to make a bold prediction at the end of this. But one thing to note for non-media news industry junkies, Quartz, which was he co-founded, I think it was like 2012, 2013.

13:24One of the really interesting things they did was, I mean, they really pushed on the front of data visualization and data driven journalism is they made their charting tools that they built available to anyone. And I actually use them for a lot of different projects. And they would create beautiful graphs in different ways. And you could feed in CSVs. And it was just like this little tool that they built in the newsroom that they released to the public. I think the New York Times is going to get into that type of innovation and imagine whether they release their own chat GPT competitor, whether they release their own and like like help every college student write with the trust of the New York Times behind them rather than using some other random chatbot.

14:13I think it's a huge opportunity for them. They have the brand. They have their own unique data set that no one else has. And the way Quartz actually innovated within media and news, I think the New York Times is very well positioned. So you've heard it here. Well, I reached out to – I know Zach actually from a bunch of meetups that I used to go to back in the day in New York City and asked him what he's planning to do and how this could impact publishers. I just did it like five minutes ago so we'll see if he responds maybe sometime during the show but if it's afterward I'll definitely read it to readers overall do you think Genitive AI is going to be good or bad for news?

14:54Good, great I think it's going to reshape the news industry the biggest thing being any content farm that creates those crappy articles that are recycled if you think about the famous what time is the Super Bowl everyone would try to answer that question make that the headline because everyone was Googling it. That whole industry dies with generative search and that's good. And I'm very happy about that. So I think it's going to reshape the news industry, but again, it makes it so much easier for more people to do journalism. Right. So I think it'll be good and do better journalism and get information more quickly and understand what's correct and what's not correct.

15:36So I think it's good. I'm into it also. And, you know, I've started to think maybe I can do a side business where I write cooking articles, you know, with tech motifs. And I think that might be of interest to some percentage of our audience. So speaking of news and journalism, I just want to hit this one very quickly. So The Verge did a series of stories about how Twitter's dead. And look, I'm going to say personally, I don't think Twitter's dead. The numbers are definitely off, but it's not dead. It felt pretty vibrant, actually, during the Sam Altman moment. And the argument that Nilay Patel made, and I think Nilay is very good and I like his writing, he made this argument that Twitter broke the news.

16:20And let me just read a bit. He says, step back now and you can see exactly how destructive the situation was for journalism. Reporters around the world provided Twitter with real-time news and commentary for free, increasingly learning to shape stories for the algorithm instead of their actual readers. Meanwhile, the media companies they worked for faced an exodus of their bigger advertising clients to social platforms with better, more integrated ad products, a direct connection to audience, and no pesky editorial ethics policies. Look, I don't think that Twitter's had an altogether good impact on news.

16:55In fact, I think it's probably been negative. I think that the idea that people write for algorithms is true and bad. but I wouldn't go as far as to say that it broke the news and I think that like the amount of different stories that you can find as a journalist there the amount of different people you can connect with there the amount of ideas you can expose to there you can get exposed to there can be good as long as you find a way to not sort of be drawn in by the sort of pull negative pull of the site that can play to outrage and sort of rage baiting that a lot of Twitter and news became, although it seems like the rage baiting era of news is maybe not coming to an end, but less prominent than it was in the middle of the last decade.

17:43What do you think, Ronjan? Well, on the last point, we have not entered the election 2024 cycle in full swing. So I think rage baiting might be making a comeback. But to me, one of the biggest issues around how Twitter broke the news is how even among very established, credible news organizations, suddenly you started seeing the same people who were really good at Twitter being sourced as experts for every single possible story. And it kind of like, again, made the overall news world smaller because everyone was looking at the same thing listening you saw this especially during covid it was the same few viral doctors like doctors that went viral uh that were cited in absolutely everything so so i think that to me getting journalists to break out of that and going back to like finding sources who are experts and not necessarily the twitter famous ones that i think is the most important thing I mean, this is why I like LinkedIn, but that's a story for another day.

18:50Why don't we take a break? We have so many more stories to cover, including Uber's business, the way that it's been able to achieve profitability. We also have Tesla's recall, the Epic Win, and NVIDIA. Oh man, a lot. Okay, we'll be back right after this. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee. Every swipe at the store or gas pump earns you instant rewards deposited straight to your account.

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20:06The Gemini credit card may not be used to make gambling-related purchases. What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the Global Editorial Director of Wired. And I'm hosting our new podcast series, The Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that... That eats the internet. that turns it all off.

20:42Unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online, to the best of my ability. Every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false, you, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to The Big Interview right now in the same place you find Wired's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Ranjan Roy of Margins.

21:25So, Ranjan, let's talk about Uber. Let's talk about Uber. Let's talk about Uber. Because for listeners, I'm pretty sure everyone has felt that Uber rides have gotten ridiculously expensive. You're not just feeling it. I took a Uber from 1st and 23rd in Manhattan to Midtown West, and it was$52 for longtime New Yorkers. Like, the prices have gotten insane. And basically, there's this really good analysis in Forbes from the Columbia professor, Len Sherman, around how Uber, they're doing it all. I can never say his name. CEO, Derek Khosrow. Khosrow. Khosrow. Khosrow. Khosrow. Khosrow. Khosrow. Khosrow.

22:08Khosrow. Khosrow. Khosrow. Khosrow. Khosrow. consumers lower driver pay which has actually made uber a profitable if not profitable at least cash flow positive business after uber for years was losing billions of dollars and basically this is a thing that especially from the anti-monopoly side that was the worry was always uber the their pitch and the pitch of the doordashs of the world and so many others was you know completely dominate the market by undercutting on price and then you raise prices and that's what's happening and they're doing it on both sides of the marketplace to consumers and to drivers because even driver pay is more opaque but it's been the there's analysis from yippit data that showed that uber's take rate has increased to 40 that was up from 34 before and the way they did it is they changed One of the big things they did a couple of years ago is for drivers to accept a ride, they now get an upfront price.

23:10Whereas in the past, the price was calculated as the ride took place. And that upfront price is done. It's given to them by an opaque algorithm. So basically, it just kind of turns into this race to the bottom that's gamified for the drivers. And overall, everyone is miserable. But at least finally, Uber has learned that it can turn a profit. exactly and uh it is it's kind of crazy it almost seemed like this is always what it was going to come to for uber to become profitable like there was only so much it could squeeze riders and it because it would lose demand to lift and like the driver pay was the place where it was going to get those margins or it was going to be unprofitable forever and you know it's sort of the not to use a car cliche but it's the rubber meeting the road here and it's a pretty unfortunate turn of events, especially as people have made Uber their number one job.

24:06But if you think about it, it was done as Lyft was already basically getting decimated. I mean, from a pure business case study standpoint, it's been masterful. But from a societal and consumer standpoint, it's troubling because this is the exact, when we all talk about monopoly, this is it this is it it's that you know we're 13 years later since uber was launched and finally now you're seeing what it always should have cost from the beginning but if it costs that at the beginning then no one would have taken it yeah it is interesting asking drivers like what they're getting paid when you know the fare that you're making and i've had a moment where drivers like hey what did you pay for that why don't you pay me in cash and i'll take like five dollars off Have you had a moment like that?

24:58Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's interesting you say that because I had never had that brought up by a driver. And then I think it was like a year or two ago that it started happening more and more where they would initiate that conversation with you. And it makes sense now that you learn about this upfront pricing change and that it becomes algorithmic and it becomes more confusing. And in that confusion, they can pay them less. So yeah, that has definitely happened. So let me ask you this, though. Don't you think that this gives Lyft an opportunity now because Lyft can sort of pay more and win more drivers over?

25:35This is the problem with marketplaces and a dominant player is that without the rider demand, you're not going to get drivers on the platform. And especially, I mean, in cities like New York, if you open Lyft, it's so much harder to find a ride. So then you just start defaulting to Uber. And then Uber, Uber has definitely established that dominance in New York. I mean, honestly, I tried using the Lyft app. Have you had this? there has to be some kind of class action lawsuit at some point about how they communicate how far away the driver is or when you have a ride because it will the app will do everything in its power to make you feel like the the driver is right around the corner here's a visual we're finding a driver and then suddenly delay after delay change after change yes i've had that it's a problem it's a problem it's a problem so they have monopoly so exactly well shout out to first of all len sherman who is a big technology podcast listener who wrote that story in forbes and uh and our friend sergio from the uh the ride hill guy podcast sergio vetian who uh made sure that i saw this story and has been also been texting me about the uh the fact that cruise just cut 24 % of its workforce.

26:58He was a little bit less optimistic than me about cruise and basically pointed out the fact that this was happening at Uber. It's taking a little victory lap. So speaking of ride hailing or the fact that we might not need to hail rides anymore, Tesla's autopilot recalled more than 2 million vehicles over autopilot safety concerns this week. Now, the recall, this is according to the Wall Street Journal, covers Tesla models 3SX and Y sold in the US between 2012 and 2023. They're basically saying that these autopilot systems don't have sufficient safety controls in place. And basically, it could be misused by drivers.

27:38Now, I saw this and I said, recall, that means Tesla is bringing all these cars back and going to have to give refunds and issue new cars it's i think the most unbelievably misplaced use of the word recall because when you get down to it what really happened is tesla pushed a software update to ensure that these autopilot features would be a little bit more safe than they would have otherwise and i was like why are you calling this a recall don't you think that that is a problem yes i do but and i say that with hesitation because we need a new word we need a new word because again in the same story it's like the nht and the htsa they reviews not and reviewed 956 crashes related to the autopilot that they wanted fixed based on this safety update if you were to tell me there was nearly a thousand car crashes and we need a manufacturer to change a bolt on the door or something like that, which is the kind of thing they would have had to do in the past before cars became so software driven.

28:41Obviously, that is a recall. And it communicates there is a safety defect that needs to be fixed. So it's not just a software over the air update, because that could be like a Tesla gets a new fart noise or something like that. This is actually, I mean, this is a real there's a safety concern and it needs to be fixed and it happens to be that it gets fixed via a software update so i think that's to me that we need a new word that's simple just call it a patch why can't you just call it a patch patch doesn't it has to be scarier is that what it is it has to be scarier it's not just even a patch is like apple actually maybe patch could work because when apple has some new vulnerability they do call it a patch in the updates so all right it's a patch it's a patch i can work with that you know speaking of stories that might not be exactly what they look like on the surface there was another big story this week where epic the maker of fortnite won in a case against google that it had an illegal monopoly in the App Store.

29:55So this is something that Epic had been pushing against Apple, against Google. It kind of won a tiny little part of its case against Apple, but it won on every count against Google. There was a jury this time. And so on its face, it's like, oh, this might revolutionize the way that the App Store works. However, it doesn't seem like that's the case yet because though Epic has won, we still don't even know what the remedy is going to be. effectively what the court is going to rule to make things right. And the judge has already been starting to rule different things out. So like Epic had asked it to, you know, make ask the judge to make some ruling to make sure that Google couldn't reintroduce some of the same things.

30:40And the judge goes, we don't do don't break the law injunctions. If you have a problem, you come back. So it's like maybe in this one specific area, they're going to fix it, but they might open themselves up to other vulnerabilities. And of course, Google is going to appeal. I mean, Wilson White, the VP of Government Affairs and Public Policy at Google, said that they plan to challenge the verdict. And they go, Android and Google Play provide more choice and openness than any other major mobile platform. And it does look a little weird that Apple could get away with it. But Google, which allows you to sideload ads and run different app stores, is the one that ends up losing the case because it has a lot of these side deals with different manufacturers that effectively don't allow, that prevent some of this stuff.