Google’s Deceptive Gemini Release, More Tech Layoffs, George Santos Saves Cameo

0:00Google releases its long-awaited Gemini large-language model, but it used some deceptive marketing in the introduction. Where's the real value once these models are commoditized? Spotify lays off$1 ,500, and George Santos may just save Cameo. All that and more coming up right after this.

0:22You'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.

0:50Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. Matt, we have a big week of news this week, touching on Gemini and plenty of other interesting stories. We're joined again by Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, welcome back. Maybe George Santos and Cameo is more interesting than Gemini, but I think there's a lot to talk about Gemini as well. That's right. Okay, so let's start with Gemini. The first thing we should just do is talk about what this model is. I think that you have some thoughts on it. You contributed to the panel on bigtechnology.com this week.

1:27Some really interesting thoughts. But basically, it's Google's answer to GPT-4. It's a large language model. It's multimodal, which means that it can understand text and images. And we thought video and voice, but okay, we have some questions about that, which we'll get to in our next segment. And it also seems to outperform GPT's, OpenAI's chat GPT model in a number of different cases. What's your general read on the introduction of Gemini. I guess my question about it is, has Google caught up to GPT-4? But I've gotten some pushback on that this week. What do you think? All right. So we will definitely get into this introduction video, but I think this is a big moment for Google.

2:09This is what I've written about for the panel newsletter. I believe strongly that Gemini is their first really core offering that's clear to customers that this is the main model and this is what you can use to do the business type operations or build on in the same way you can easily have built on gpt3 3.5 and 4 and i think google this actually they have an advantage where four businesses already operating on google cloud to be able to build on a kind of foundation model like this build easily connect to their existing data infrastructure, it presents a big advantage. I think already OpenAI has that relationship with Microsoft and every Azure client.

2:53So now any Google Cloud client can build on this. I do think one thing as they release this that I was thinking about is, we all can remember the name Gemini. Do you know the names of their previous iterations of these large language models yeah i think you wrote that in your in your blurb it's like what like four plex or some stupid name like that so so so in classic google fashion they have vertex ai is like the overall ecosystem but then palm 2 was the actual large language model equivalent then under that they had these things like text gecko text by they had all of these different names that were very confusing and then vertex ai would live differently whether it's in google cloud or google workspace like everything was incredibly confusing i hope they have it together where now gemini is the model gemini ultra gemini pro gemini nano and they don't g chat this whole thing and turn it into hangouts chat meet whatever else and just make a clear offering for customers who want to use it to be able to use it why don't they just call it bard like why don't they call everything Bard.

4:02Because Bard is a terrible name. They should name Bard Gemini then. Yeah, actually, if I was Google right now, and if they, I actually thought that exact same thing. Gemini is kind of a cool name. It's a great name. I would be happy to Gemini something or ask Gemini, but I don't want to Bard anything. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. If they're listening, change Bard to Gemini. It's not too late. It'll make a huge difference. Everyone will be happy. Let me ask you this, though. So you say the main advantage here is that they have like a GPT-4 like model that they can use for Google Cloud customers. But Google Cloud is number three.

4:38And if you look at what OpenAI is doing with Azure, which is number two, and what Anthropic might be doing with Amazon, bring their own model type of approach, number one, like you are actually maybe at a severe disadvantage if you're Google, because you now have a preference in terms of cloud platform with Gemini and you're effectively like, I don't know, seeding or you're allowing other models to run away with it on bigger cloud platforms. No, but I believe we're entering a new era for cloud services and this is why it could be a key for Google Cloud. One of these companies is going to build the best overall cohesive offering.

5:23One of these companies, and it doesn't exist yet because like open AI still is relatively separate from Azure. It's somewhat integrated and Anthropic is even more disconnected from Amazon. One of these companies is going to build the best overall offering where customers feel secure, can build on it easily, can integrate it into other parts of their business where these cloud offerings live. Like one of these companies is going to figure it out. So I actually think even though Google's number three, if the fact that it's in-house, it gives them an advantage here. The fact that they're building it, it's their model, it's not a partnership.

5:59I think the way a lot of this stuff's going to go is it's less about power and it's more about ease. Now, Ranjan, I'm sure you've read the coverage of this and it's been kind of interesting, you know, going back to our Bard or Gemini points, because half of the press is like, this is its answer to chat GPT. And then half of the press is like, now it has a large language model it can offer similar to GPT-4. And of course, like this is obviously more aimed at the enterprise to build on top of than it is necessarily with the chatbot. And it kind of puts an interesting question about Google into the field here, which is that like, they have to do something on the enterprise side, but also are they accelerating the death of their consumer business in search?

6:42What do you think? Yeah, that's the right question. And I think they're going to have to do something. And BARD slash Gemini chatbot is going to be part of that experience search generative experience, SGE, which we've talked about plenty of times, where now you start to see generative results in your regular Google searches. It's going to change the entire way we search. So I think on the consumer side, they do have to do something. And I think this is it. And they said that Gemini is going to power both BARD and the SGE search generative experience. So it's clear that they're working on it and they're approaching it that way.

7:19But yeah, I think overall that they have opportunity in both the consumer and the enterprise. And if they roll this out properly, it puts them on not necessarily an even footing just yet, but at least puts them back in the game in a way they have not been for a while. So there's one more thing I want to talk to you about, which is the timing of this. It was very interesting because the information earlier in the week had a report that Google had scheduled a launch event for Gemini and then decided to push it to next year. And then all of a sudden there was another report that said, hey, actually, Gemini might be out soon.

7:56And it almost seemed like Google was trying to capitalize on the chaos at OpenAI and then decided, OK, let's wait until this is ready because there are parts of it, including Ultra, which is their most powerful model that aren't going to be ready until next year. and then for whatever reason said, F it, let's just put our foot on the gas and release it. I mean, what do you make of like the back and forth here? Yeah, the rollout, and we can definitely get into that video and we will, but it's suspicious. I agree that already in this entire cycle over the last year, Google has repeatedly made big demos and flashy demos and then not had a product to back it up.

8:34Whereas OpenAI, every time they announce something, it's there. it's ready like uh and and that's part of been what's made them feel more powerful that they talk about something and then people can actually use it so it does feel a bit rushed in the sense that they debuted all this stuff the most powerful model still isn't available other than to maybe a very limited set of developers so yeah getting ahead of that year end i hadn't thought about the capitalizing on the open AI chaos. But that actually could be, now that I'm thinking about it, that could be the right answer here. Because it's true that, again, on the enterprise sales side, people at big clients have to be feeling a little uncertain ahead of year-end renewal talks and contract talks, which for the most part are probably done, but there still could be ones ongoing or as those talks would start at the beginning of next year for Q1 to look at the year ahead, positioning themselves a little bit stronger.

9:37Because again, we have no one talked about text bison, but we're all talking about Gemini. So something's working. Yeah. There was something weird about it because I almost missed the introduction of this. So what they usually do is they have these big release events where they gather people in, you know, together, or they at least give you like a good amount of notice if they're going to do something online. And for this, I think I got noticed the day before that they wanted to do some sort of embargoed briefing. And I was like, oh, like I missed, actually missed the first briefing because I was like, I don't know what this could be.

10:09And I was like, maybe that was Gemini. And I wrote back and they were doing one at 830 at night in New York time. And I was like, all right, like I'll watch this. And I was like, oh, this is Gemini. And it was like, huh, that is interesting. Like it does, it does seem like they rusted out the door. And then let me tell you a little bit about what I saw and what the world saw in terms of the way that they were introducing this. So they had this video that's now, you know, been infamously called the duck video, where they effectively like did all these different, really interesting interactions, basically in live video asking, you know, this mysterious Gemini, like what they're drawing and which car was more aerodynamic and how a roller coaster would work and all these.

10:51and to take two different balls of yarn and give ideas of it. And it was all in one shot of a video. It was jaw-dropping stuff. I mean, definitely like I was like, holy crap, this is advancing the state of the art. And then the next day it comes out that this marketing video was quite deceptive. So first of all, it showed a user speaking with Gemini, but the whole presentation, I mean, the whole interaction was entirely a text conversation that they sort of dramatized as someone speaking to it. Then it showed a moving video, but it was actually just feeding Gemini still images. It showed fast responses, but those were actually sped up.

11:31It showed tight model outputs. Basically, the answers from Gemini were quite tight and precise, but it had shortened those for brevity. And it also showed very brief prompts that were eliciting terrific answers. But then it listed longer prompts in a blog post depicting what was actually happening in this video. Now, look, later it clarified that the shorter prompts would, you know, would actually work. But I also asked them like, then why did you list the longer prompts in the video and in the blog post? And I still haven't gotten an answer on that front. So overall, like this video backfired on them.

12:06It was viewed as extremely deceptive. It made the rounds on Y Combinator, like basically was like a front page of Hacker News the entire day. And I wrote about this on big technology and included like just one of the more benign quotes from one of the developers on Hacker News who said, he said, I was fooled. It's one thing to release a hype video with what ifs and quite another to claim that your new multimodal model is the king of the hill and then game all the benchmarks and fake all the demos. That wasn't entirely fake, but it's certainly like rubbed a lot of developers the wrong way. And it's actually become the story.

12:40This the fact that like the marketing was deceptive as opposed to the actual model that they released so i'm curious what you make of this i mean to me it seems like this is google kind of operating from a place of weakness where they feel like they have to produce something revolutionary even though they only had something evolutionary they portrayed it as if they had that revolutionary advance and just totally got busted on it and and i'm curious what your perspective is. It infuriated me. This launch video infuriated me because again, and you had written this as well, Google really didn't have to exaggerate.

13:18Like they didn't. I'm so confused. Again, as Alex was describing, like there's one part of the video looked really cool. There's you lay out a world map and then you say, make a game for me, Gemini. And then it's like, point your finger to a country that has won the most world cups. And like, you know, there's really cool ideas about imagine all the things you can do, but none of that matters right now. The multimodality, it's not something that those use cases have even been invented at scale yet. Like there's so many just straightforward business problems that customers want to pay for and know they have a reliable service for.

13:58There's just text alone, text to image. All these things could sell and be great. It literally was just, it's pretty much as good as GPT-4. That's all they would have to say, but it's from us. It's easier to access. It's free. All these kind of things. So I was so confused as to why they felt the need to try to do something that flashy. The one thing I will give them that maybe is hopeful for them is I did see friends who are not that into technology sharing that video and being like, this looks pretty cool. So whether that conversation about what was deceptive or not makes it over to the normie world, I think will be interesting or whether the Gemini brand still look is thought of as cool to the average consumer.

14:48But I was completely confused as to why they would try to do something like this when they absolutely do not need to. No, I love when you look at marketing and you try to make your best guess as to what the heck is going on inside the company behind some of this stuff. So why don't we put the conspiracy hat or the speculation hat on? And Ranjan, from your perspective, what the heck has to be happening there? I, I, my guess is that want for virality and kind of like consumers all talking about your product was at the core of it. And I don't think it's necessarily the wrong thing to want because as we've talked about a lot, because of the chat GPT consumer familiarity and like that, because it's almost the verb to look up something via generative text.

15:41uh they want something like that they feel they need to that stuff is going to translate both on the consumer and the enterprise side so so it's not unreasonable to me but you can totally see how they're like we need something viral really cool and and then they figured let's stretch things a little the prompts are a little too long so let's shorten it let's dramatize it a bit and here we are yeah it just doesn't think it doesn't seem like people are buying their their explanation i mean they had uh one of their vice presidents oriel vignals uh go out and talk about this and uh this person said all all the user prompts and outputs in the video are real shortened for brevity and like everybody was like what wait what you can't be both it is interesting that they had because he was he's like the deep mind vice president or something like that yeah like it's funny that i wonder if it was more engineering driven than marketing driven or more marketing driven than engineering driven that they had him speaking but yeah actually that that would be do you think this was do you think that demo was pushed by the engineering side of the organization or the marketing side because my my initial gut feeling would have been in the marketing side, but the more I think about it, maybe the engineers want a bit of credibility and some people talking about how powerful their models are.

17:12So I think it was both. And my perspective on this is that Google's pressing a little bit. And sorry, I'm going to have to use a sports analogy here, but the Jets, who I watch a lot, unfortunately, we don't talk about this often, Jets fan, Patriots fan, but we managed to get along. But we're playing the same game right now. The Jets can't score points on offense. And they have this great running back, Brees Hall, who's trying to score a touchdown every time he gets the ball and he ends up getting tackled in the backfield because he thinks he has to do so much in order to make the thing run. And that's kind of what I think Google is doing here, which is that they feel they're behind.

17:51They feel they have to go for those home run hits as opposed to get five or six yards and put themselves in good position to score. And that's kind of what happened here, Just an obvious case of pressing from someone who's behind, from a company that's behind. Actually, but if you think about it, I always go back to, do you remember the Google duplex demo when Sundar called a restaurant and they made a reservation all over the phone? So this isn't their first kind of playing from behind, rushing things out a bit, forcing things a little too hard. So maybe it's more ingrained. But I agree, though.

18:28They are playing from behind right now. So I agree. You can feel it a little bit. I don't want to say desperation, but at least additional energy, let's call it. And I had someone basically put it to me as this, like everybody thinks that they're behind. And so to exaggerate in their marketing is the reason why it's bad. If they were open AI and they did something that was a little bit embellishing, people would be like, all right, but their products are cool. But in this way, this is really just egg on the face. Like the actual, the cream filling has to measure up, you know, we don't have the cream filling yet.

19:01No, but they don't even need it right now. I wish. Exactly. Get that, find that confidence, Google. Find that confidence. So right now with the release of Gemini, what we're seeing is that a lot of these models are starting to look the same. You have GPT-4, you have Gemini, you have Anthropic, and it's moving towards what we've been talking about for a while here, which is that these models are going to start to commoditize and look the same. And they will start to differentiate based off of things that you said, ease of use, and then also probably the data sets that are ingrained within them.

19:36So this is a tweet that you and I have been kind of pushing back and forth and chatting about. But Chamath Paliapatiya talked about how basically he says, this is a race to own data that is valuable in fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with human feedback. You should expect foundational models to be largely commoditized and largely free largely soon. And the non-obvious data sets are going to be in huge value in the end state. So he lists a number of them. One is Tesla's real-world environmental data. Two is Meta's real people preference and behavioral data. Three is Google search intent, YouTube behavior and Gmail.

20:19Four is Amazon's purchasing behavior. I'd add a fifth and that's, you know, real-time information and news. Basically that if all these models start looking the same, those that can actually take and exploit proprietary information are going to be the ones that have a leg up. I'm curious if you think that's really the next step here. Is that where we're heading? Yeah, and we were definitely talking about this because it's rarely that I agree with Chamath, but I think he's totally right here. And we've been talking about this for a while ourselves, that foundational models are going to be largely commoditized and free.

20:55That's, again, even not necessarily always free, but integrated into existing ecosystems. But the actual power of the foundation model is not what's as relevant. But I do think the difference here is foundation models to be used by a large group of potential clients or use cases, or foundation models used by the companies themselves to release new products. And that's where Tesla could have a self-driving advantage because of their data set. Meta certainly and probably already is using their data advantage to build out their advertising ecosystem. I mean, their advertising is back and then some.

21:38So Amazon obviously reinforcing their own business. Like, even for me, like, I'm still convinced Reddit has one of the most valuable content data sets in the world. And they actually cut off access to the API because they're clearly going to be doing something interesting. So I think each company looking at their own data set and thinking about how do we use this in a generative way is going to be a very, very big thing. But again, it doesn't translate to sales of the model. It translates to new products and experiences of your own business. Absolutely. All right. Let's take a quick break. We have two more stories we want to cover, the layoffs at Spotify, broader layoffs in the media, and then the George Santos cameo story, which might be my favorite story of the year.

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23:36You'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.

24:03And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, it's been a really rough couple of weeks in the media business. Spotify in particular is about to lay off or is in the process of laying off 1 ,500 people, but we also have layoffs at Wired and Vox and the Washington Post seems to be laying off. I mean, and it's wild how many companies are cutting now. And the thing that really caught me by surprise about with Spotify was the fact that the business is doing great. It's profitable. It is on pace to add more than 100 million users this year, which is going to be its best year yet.

24:41And but it's apparently still spending too much. And the CEO, Daniel Ek, is talking about an economic slowdown and the rising cost of capital. Are these just like the push down the road impacts of what happened when rates were raised? I mean, why does it seem like the economy is going well? Like we were talking about a potential of a soft landing, and yet all these companies are still cutting? it's it's still the covet hangover and it's it's a combination of rates are no longer a zero interest world and i do love that even the spotify ceo now cites the rising costs of capital i.e no more zerp in his own layoff announcements i never thought that day would come um but then that combined with spotify doubled its headcount during the pandemic and now it's still well well above where it was pre-pandemic.

25:35So this goes back to, and you've written about this plenty, the extrapolation of COVID trends and that not being realized and we're seeing it. And honestly, there's probably room to go in a lot of these companies that just, when you double your head count in the space of a year or two, and then realize that you're not going to grow in the way you thought you were, there's probably a lot of people that are not going to be there for much longer. And do you think that this is going to be constrained to our corner of the world, like the media and tech world, or is this going to be broader in the economy?

26:11I still, I think we're seeing more now. And again, there's plenty of indication and talk around a soft landing in the economy overall, that this is going to be still constrained to companies that grew too much during the pandemic and overinflated their own expectations around where they would go and what they would do. Because again, streaming, they had a profitable quarter. They're not necessarily doing amazing. They finally saw a bit of profit. But again, you can imagine a business like Spotify, you always do wonder how much operational overhead really is there to run a software product like that obviously licensing and marketing and all these other things but but overall you know what how do you double your headcount what are you what are you going to do with that so so i think in technology overall if like if there there's definitely the more aggressive ceos become and also the more positively capital markets respond and other CEOs see that, I think we'll probably see more of this among companies like this.

27:22But I guess my question is, wasn't this supposed to be over? We have a story in our doc that we used to talk about what stories we find interesting this week about how the economy just added 199 ,000 jobs in November. The unemployment rate fell. Looks like we're going to leave this year without a recession. it seems like i mean you said more to come but like it also seems like shouldn't we just be done with this already um i mean but i think again that's why it's even more because the jobs being added i think i saw services jobs continue to be like at the core of a lot of our job growth versus spotify and software engineer or product marketer or consumer marketer at spotify So I think these businesses realize like they, if you, if you're Spotify right now, you're back to looking at, let's say a three to five year plan.