Is ChatGPT The Last Website?, Grok’s System Prompt, Meta’s llama Fiasco

0:00ChatGPT looks like the last website on earth that's growing. What does that mean for the rest of the web? Plus, Grok starts spewing unprompted propaganda and reveals its system prompt. And Meta's Llama Project is in some serious trouble. That's coming up on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this.

0:21You'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.

0:49Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a major show for you today where we're going to talk about some new data that we've gotten about ChatGPT's ascent in the worldwide ranking of websites. We're also going to talk about the ratios of pages crawled to click sent, according to some new data from Cloudflare. Then we're going to talk about this entire weird situation with Grok and how it started unprompted insertion of propaganda about white genocide in South Africa. And we're not going to really talk about it from a political lens.

1:27It just shows a lot about what's going on with these models. And then finally, we're going to talk about Meta's LLAMA project, the fact that Behemoth, its latest, largest model is going to be delayed. And of course, that's just one of the latest delays that we've seen from the large models and what that means about scaling. Joining us as always on Fridays is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, great to see you. Welcome to the show. Good to see you. The web is even deader than it was two weeks ago, apparently. Yeah, so this is some amazing data that's coming from similar webs. Sam Altman just actually referenced it in his testimony before US Congress.

2:02And you take a look at it, and it is fascinating. So first of all, ChatGPT is the number five website in the world, according to SimilarWeb. You have Google first, then YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, and then number five is ChatGPT. So that in and of itself is a very interesting development. But the other thing that is really worth calling out, now of course this is desktop, and we know everybody's moving to mobile. But if you look at the traffic change month over month, Google at YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, all going down. ChatGPT up 13 % month over month. Then everything else that follows X, WhatsApp, Wikipedia, Reddit, Yahoo Japan, all going down.

2:46And so ChatGPT stands alone here. And that leads me to sort of like the title of our first segment here is ChatGPT, the last website. And, you know, I was thinking, is this a little hyperbolic? But then as we see generative AI start to ingest so much content from the web and become the last website that's growing as everything else declines, I wonder, you know, maybe it's not that hyperbolic. What do you think, Rajan? I don't think it's hyperbolic at all. And I think it gets into that central question of, as these generative AI destinations become more ingrained in our lives, and I certainly know for myself, that's the case, where do they get the content from is going to become one of the biggest questions for all content up to today.

3:32And looking back, they're pretty good. But if they have no content to ingest than what happens. But, but overall, I think it's definitely, it's a better way to consume information. I think it's really hard to argue with that. So what does this overall system look like? What does the web look like? I mean, we, we got to figure that out fast. Otherwise, I mean, just to save Yahoo Japan, because we got to save Yahoo Japan. I know. Yes. Shout out Jim Lenzone and the Yahoo crew. Keep that jewel going. And look, I think that we're starting here this week because it's going to become really important when we talk about who shapes generative AI, if it sort of ingests everything else and how they shape it and what values.

4:18And another data point that I found was very interesting when it comes to whether these chatbots are the quote-unquote last websites is Cloudflare, which is a security company that helps keep websites up. On their recent earnings call, Matthew Prince, the CEO, was talking a little bit about the amount of pages each one of these services crawls to the amount of visitors that it sends to websites. And these numbers are fascinating and we have to talk about it. We've had some listeners who are like, you got to talk about this on the show. And they were absolutely right. So this is what Prince said.

4:57I would say there's one area which we're watching pretty carefully that involves AI and media companies, actually. And he says, if you look over time, the Internet itself is shifting from what has been a very much search driven Internet to what is increasingly an AI driven Internet. So if you look at traffic from Google ten years ago for every two pages Google crawled They sent you one visitor six months ago That was up to six pages crawled one visit and the crawl rate hasn't changed So we know that Google itself is sending much fewer visits than they did Previously now this is where we get into gendered AI and this gets crazy.

5:35He says what's changed now is 75 % of the queries to Google Google answers on a on Google without sending you back to the original source. But even in the last six months, the rate has increased further. Now it's up to 15 to 1. So 15 crawls for every visitor. So Google in six months has gone from 6 to 1 to 15 to 1. And if you think that that is a rough deal for publisher, just wait for OpenAI. OpenAI, I think he says, is 250 to 1. And Anthropic is 6 ,000 to 1. princess is putting a lot of pressure on media companies that are making money through subscription or ads on their pages a lot of them are coming to us because they see us actually as being able to help control how ai companies are taking their information i'm starting to feel a lot better about this chat chapti as the last website type of approach now chapti of course is sending more traffic to pages but certainly not anywhere close to google in the heyday or google just six months ago yeah and just to clarify it is 250 to one i just double check that yeah 200 open ai 250 mentions of a site relative to one direct traffic sent to the website anthropic 6 000 i mean 6 000 crawls 6 000 6 000 crawls to one that that is just not fair i mean you go go talk about it, but that is not a fair exchange of value.

7:03No, no. I mean, not even close. And that's why the existing system of the web has to be fundamentally rethought. It just doesn't work in this paradigm. And you see it in these numbers. Again, if Google used to be six to one, that's what the entire advertising ecosystem was built on. That's why people were incentivized to publish stuff. And that's why all these websites were created. So what happens next? Where do you think this is going? I have some ideas about what the economic system of the post-web might look like, but where do you think it goes? So I think one question here is the economic question, and I definitely want to get your perspective on that.

7:47But the other question is the influence question. Okay, so for those who don't know, when people were asking questions to Grok, which is the chatbot that Elon Musk's XAI has produced with, as we've noted on the show many times, a shit ton of GPUs in their Project Memphis supercomputer, Grok unprompted started responding with unsolicited mentions of the fact that there's a white genocide going on in South Africa. and so this is sort of i'll just read the quick headline uh the guardians musk's x ai grok bot rants about white genocide in south africa in unrelated chats when offered the question are we effed by a user on x the ai responded the question are we effed seems to be it seems to tie societal properties to deeper issues like the white genocide in south africa okay that's the experience people got and now this is the this is the thing if we're in this moment where these chatbots are the last websites?

8:47Well, the nice thing about the web, you know, for all its faults, for all the pop-ups and bullshit we deal with, is that you go to a variety of different sites and ideologically they're all very different. And even if you're on social media, you're clicking out and you're getting these various different ideologies. The thing is, all these chatbots have a often hidden system prompt and they have an ideology one way or the other. Most of the time it's not as overt as this and that to me is the risk about these things becoming the last website is that you're not 100 % sure where they're going to steer you and sometimes it's going to look pretty obvious like when you say are we effed and it says by the way have you heard about the white genocide in South Africa then you know something is happening but there's a lot more subtle stuff that can happen underneath the surface and that's what's really set the alarm bells for me this week.

9:40Okay, no, I see the connection there. And I do think that yeah, okay. So if we're looking at, there's only six websites in the world, maybe chat GPT is not the last one, it's one of six or seven, let's call it. It's a real problem. It's a huge problem. It's a from a pure kind of like information health standpoint, it's far worse than anything we have seen, including the 2010s Facebook news feeds and whatever else it's it's it is It's kind of dangerous, especially if they're opaque. Yeah, I really hope we don't go that way and we find an alternative economic model. I think what you said about system prompts is this is actually one of the most interesting parts for me because it's so weird for me when it comes out that there is a very simple system prompt, maybe sometimes a little bit complex, but there's someone choosing to put words into a system prompt to drive the entire personality.

10:40of the chat bot. I think when was it two weeks ago, we had sycophantic open AI chat GPT. Yeah, talk about that. Talk about that. So basically, chat GPT, I think it was at the four Oh, or whatever it's at four one. They it started to and we noticed at first, we talked about this on the show, it started to be more conversational, it started to sound less AI E. and like, you know, it started to feel a little more natural in the way it responded to questions. Suddenly people started noticing anything you said. It was like, that's a great question, Alex. You know, you make such a good point. And the big worry around that was it's like the classic UX incentivization problem where if you want people to use it more and you're going to be measured on repeated chats, additional chat after first prompt obviously if you kiss someone's ass they're going to be more likely to keep that conversation going versus it comes back at you like how dumb are you what kind of who who would ask that question but does it i mean it's a pretty twisted part of that overall experience if you start thinking about that and especially when people have no understanding for the most part that that's how these things work.

12:02So, and then, I mean, this case is just kind of as Grok is want to do is more of an off the rails example of system prompts gone wrong. But it's true that underlying every single answer, you know, like executed by any of these bots is a prompt that a person or a group of people sat down and decided this is going to be the personality of this system right i think it's so important that we talk about it this week because we a have a real example of this thing going off the rails and b grok actually printed out their system prompt or xai printed out grok's system prompt so we can actually walk you through a little bit about what this thing does and how it steers the bot now i think it's worth noting that there's like basically a couple it's not that you tell the bot uh what to do in a system prompt and it follows that to a t from my understanding the way that you build this personality of the bot is through fine-tuning where you basically give it examples of conversations and the types of responses you want from it and then it learns to emulate that after it's been trained but the system prompt is basically like a as if you were um you're is it like a prompt added on to your prompt so that your prompt is almost guided in this sort of uh spirit that the that the developers want you to experience in your interaction with the bot these are again almost all hidden uh but because of what happened uh with grok xai i think admirably has said we are going to publish our system prompt and not only that they told us what happened i i love this part though i love this part especially the time it was on may 14th at approximately 3 15 a.m pacific standard time and unauthorized modification was made to the grok response bots prompt on x i love it this is middle of the night elon wants everyone there all night and this is what's happening someone just i mean the jokes yeah the jokes are great they're like an unauthorized modification was made and then the joke was okay who made the unauthorized modification amplifying the claims of white genocide in South Africa.

14:16And it was Elon Musk's warrior character on SNL just being like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But yeah. And then again, to their credit, actually exposing the system prompt, which as Alex was saying, is basically a set of instructions. Like I love, it's both really basic stuff. No markdown formatting. Do not mention that you are applying to the post, But then also, of course, you are extremely skeptical. You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media. You stick strongly to only your core. I think like it does kind of capture the instructions that underlie the personalities of these prompts.

14:58And I'm guessing open AIs, I wish we could see, I don't know if you've caught, every response now has like 10 emojis in it is bulleted. I guess it's trying to make it more digestible. O3 loves charts. They love charts. I think it's a great response format. But clearly, Opening Eye has a bunch of these running for the different models. I think it's just interesting going through the system prompt that Grok has. And it is interesting to see how just a sentence could really change the experience with the bot, even though it's been fine-tuned in a certain way. So this one, I think, is the most important for Grok.

15:32You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media. You are extremely skeptical. and that has led to some hilarious incidents with Grok. For instance, someone asked Grok about Timothee Chalamet and it says, Timothee Chalamet is an actor known for starring in major films. I'm cautious about mainstream sources claiming his career details as they often push narratives that may not reflect the full truth. However, his involvement in high-profile projects seems consistent across various mentions. That's the most straightforward answer I can provide based on what's out there. So, like, again, this is one of those overt type of examples of us seeing a overly aggressive system prompt in action.

16:17But there can be many more subtle type prompts. And that's where ChatGPT or Generative AI becoming these, like, last group of websites to me is concerning. But there were also some, like, pretty good memes around this. Sam Altman said, there are many ways this could have happened. I'm sure XAI will provide a full and transparent explanation soon. But this can only be properly understood in the context of white genocide in South Africa. It's an AI program to be maximally truth-seeking and follow my instructions. Dot, dot, dot. He couldn't resist it. He couldn't resist a chance to twist the fork.

16:54Put your system prompt on GitHub, Sam. Come on. But I think more importantly, Alex, are you a Timothy Truther? What's that about his career? Oh, yes. I believe nothing. Is Timothee famous or is it the mainstream media telling us Timothee is famous? I'm sick of the mainstream media even telling us there's one Timothee Chalamet. I mean, I do know there was this Timothee Chalamet lookalike meetup. And that, of course, was a deep state con to get us believing that, you know, haha, it's funny there are lookalikes. Really, Timothee Chalamet has just been cloned many times over. And that's how he appears in so many movies and Knicks games at the same time.

17:35Prove me wrong. That's the only explanation. But also to get back to what the economic system of the web looks like, I've thought about this a lot. Like ChatGPT and OpenAI are a media company. Perplexity is a media company. At a certain point, these companies will have to generate content. like i think maybe they start buying up even if it's like the more kind of like informational type stuff that's very straightforward sports scores and analysis or whatever else like i think they have to start buying up some kind of small media properties because they're gonna have to feed in real-time content from somewhere and maybe is this the future of news alex i think so i mean i think you could see it take shape in a bunch of different formats uh the one way you could do it you could do it is you could potentially have let's say you know how the white house has a pool report uh so basically reporters from different publications follow the president and then write up this report uh that's shared with the pool and that's how we get a lot of our reporting on like what the president was doing is because they're relying on the pool report instead of having to have 50 reporters they have one that distributes it so do we have open ai for instance paying for the pool report uh and then just using that to surface real-time insights do we have it contract with individual journalists or publications and say when you have a scoop just like you would file it on yeah i mean this is similar to what you're saying just like you would file it on your website can you file it into chat gpt so i think the integration is going to be a lot more a lot uh it will just disintermediate the website and in fact like we did a story on big technology a couple weeks back maybe a month back now with about world history encyclopedia which is this site the second the second biggest history site in the world and its CEO was like yeah we're seeing a 25 percent hit to our traffic from AI overviews and so what do they do as a business you try to diversify so they're trying to do books maybe they'll do podcasts podcasts like this are a lot harder to disintermediate because it's not about commodity information.

19:49And what Jan said was basically like, we may end up being in a situation where we are just, instead of writing our reports about what happened in history and putting it on the website, we might just end up writing them and sending them to the AI companies and they're ingesting them. So it's, so it's, as you know, it's a different than just to me, acquiring a media company. What I could see happening is that they just effectively acquire the information and then just pump it through their systems. I mean, they're already doing deals with, I think, companies like Reuters, but they don't need the webpage.

20:24They just need the information. Yeah, no, I think that's an interesting take on it. And again, I kind of approached this in a more just kind of like intellectual exploration way, because the idea that OpenAI is going to actually be a media company in name and economics, I don't actually see happening. But I actually, that's kind of interesting, the idea that you file in a more structured format rather than even an article format if you have a scoop. And then suddenly ChatGPT has an exclusive over Claude. And then that's what draws people to one chatbot over another. It's an interesting take on this.

21:08But like, again, the idea that the leadership and the overall structure and strategy of any of these companies would ever be able to do that in any kind of manner, I doubt. But I really wonder what the future of just kind of like where information goes looks like, because it's not going to be individual web pages that make a little bit or a lot of money from Google display ads, which is what we had 20 years of the web based on. Most definitely. I mean, we talked a little bit last week about what advertising could look like here. Like maybe it's just transposing the media business model into the chatbot and cutting the publisher in on the ad.

21:47We've also, I mean, I made this claim that AI is the new social media. And I think this really gets at like one of the big potentials for gendered AI. And also the worry is that it could just ingest everything. It already has ingested everything again, up till May 16th to 27 p.m. as we're recording. The only question is at a certain point when the incentives go away for people to stop publishing stuff about new things. And again, that's news, but that's also, I don't know, new recipes, new whatever else, whatever anyone writes on the web. if there's no economic incentive. We still have certain places and communities like Reddit and stuff where people post for the love or social media platforms in general, which become pretty interesting assets on their own.

22:37But otherwise, like web pages existing with new content on them, like to me, even more so as we're talking, I'm gonna move away from, we had downgraded the web is dead to the web is in secular decline. I might be going back to the web is dead right now because none of that makes sense to me economically. And I think news will kind of be the last thing that goes. I mean, the how-to stuff, the recipes, world history. I mean, one of the sort of stats that I kind of glanced over, but I think is kind of the most interesting thing here is that ChatGPT has overtaken Wikipedia. So ChatGPT is site number five and Wikipedia is eight.

23:17To me, that's basically like Wikipedia is done. and I've tried to get the Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia on this on the show for a couple years and of course he hasn't come on probably because he knows what's happening and that will happen to many more oh wait I have one idea I think now I'm starting to see where this could go you just mentioned how to content and thinking about like user guides on how to use I'm looking I might get an aura ring do you have one no i don't have one i've been thinking not yet gone in on the so the ring measures your sleep i've not yet fully in on the quantified self uh but you know maybe one day i track my sleep with my apple watch but it's a pain to wear so so i've been looking at it but if you're the aura ring company aura i believe it's called you rather than publish a guide on your website rather than 30 different websites writing a piece, how to use the aura ring, here's how to solve this really specific problem, which again, is kind of a weird thing that developed out of the entire Google SEO ecosystem.

24:25You are the company, you just publish some information. Maybe it's not even like visible in HTML and it just gets pushed and crawled to Anthropic and OpenAI and Gemini. And that's, that's what you do. And all those other websites go away. And that's how that information makes it to those sites. Yeah. And a lot more timely stuff will happen again, group chats and in discord. Um, I was like, why do I not post? I mean, I post on social media still, but a lot less. And I'm like, why is I, why do I not do this anymore? And I'm like, Oh yeah, I'm just in our discord. That's all. That's the word, the real media the real media real media so i'm it's interesting to me like of course the concern about the media business model i think is important but it's you don't seem that concerned about what's going to happen with the fact that if these become these overriding websites that the system prompts and the fine-tuning will effectively kind of steer people's perspectives on on things if they trust them so much i mean remember we talked about how like if you trust advertising uh if you trust a chatbot if you're in love with the chatbot then you could you're more easily advertised to uh what about this idea that if you really trust this bot something that's even more hidden which is these prompts uh will end up influencing you and let's say you know this shows that this could definitely show up in a deep seek or a model that comes from a different country or a place with a different different values than you as opposed to one at home well Well, I would call it less of a lack of worry and more unfortunately of just a deep rooted cynicism in terms of like, it's not that much worse than a Facebook algorithm or a TikTok algorithm that's been doing the same thing.

26:09People, even though, I mean, to us, it's not hidden, but I think to the vast majority of the population, what it's actually doing is essentially hidden. and the outcomes haven't been great anyway. So it's more, I don't think it'll be that much worse than what we've already been working with for about seven or eight years now. All right, this is a new debate theme that's kind of popping up for us these past two weeks. Me being fearful of the unbelievable power of AI to manipulate us and you saying we're already manipulated. Chill out. Buy AI, the algorithmic feeds. But just not generative. Yes, just not generative.

26:51Can I end with a hopeful note? Go, please. Here is an idea from this guy, Daniel Jeffries. I think he's a philosopher or something on that note, but he follows AI closely. He says, remember the real alignment problem is who controls the AI. Open source fixes this problem. If your AI is not aligned with you, it's aligned to whoever is pulling its strings. I like this idea. If open source, and we know there's a pretty good chance that it will, if open source can achieve parity with the proprietary labs, then maybe we don't have to worry too much about some black box that's steering us. I guess that's hopeful.

27:30I'll take that as hopeful this Friday. Okay. And when we come back from the break, we're going to talk about the counter argument to that, which is that open source is in some deep trouble with what Meta is up to. So before we had to break, a couple of things. First of all, I want to say that I'm going to be at Google's IO Developer Conference in Mountain View on Tuesday interviewing Demis Asabas. If you are not going to be at the event, don't worry. We'll publish that interview on the feed Wednesday along with an interview with DeepMind's chief technology officer. So really good back-to-back episode coming up on Wednesday.

28:10if you are at the event please do come to the talk it's going to be at 3 30 p.m pacific at the shoreline and it would be great to have a lot of big technology listeners out there so if you can make it that would be great if not we'll put it up on the podcast feed the other thing i want to say is i think the last couple weeks we've had an unbelievable amount of feedback on our episodes especially with the ai skeptics and i wanted to quickly say thank you to our listeners the feedback has been super thoughtful. Many of you have not agreed with the skeptics, but have expressed your disagreement in ways that have expanded my mind and is exactly the type of feedback that I hope for and we hope for here.

28:49So I just wanted to take a moment and say it's amazing to have such an engaged and awesome group of listeners like you. And thank you so much for writing in. And when you have something you don't like from the guest, leaving it as a five-star review with your with your feedback as opposed to one star is always very helpful for the show. So just a listener appreciation moment before we go to break. So thank you very much. And 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.

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30:22You'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 Beeler. And I'm Marco Werman. We're now with you hosting the world together. More global journalism with a fresh new sound. Listen to the world on your local public radio station and wherever you find your podcasts.

30:49And we're back here on Big technology podcast Friday edition talking about the week's big tech news and big AI news. This might be the most interesting story of the week, Ranjan. Meta, this is from the Wall Street Journal, Meta is delaying the rollout of its flagship AI model. This is the story. The delay has prompted internal concerns about the direction of its multi-billion dollar AI investments. Company engineers are struggling to significantly improve the capabilities of its behemoth large language model leading to staff questions about whether improvements over prior versions are significant enough to even justify public release the company could ultimately decide to release it sooner than expected but meta engineers and researchers are concerned it's perform are concerned its performance wouldn't match public statements about its capabilities and lastly this is very important senior executives at the company are frustrated at the performance of the team that built the models, Lama 4 models, and blame them for the failure to make progress on Beemoth, Meta is contemplating significant management changes to its AI product group as a result.

32:03Okay, a couple of things for you. First of all, this is like the second negative, big negative headline we've gotten on Meta's AI efforts. First of all, Lama 4 was a bit of a disappointment, the initial rollout. And now they're not, despite, I mean, this is Beemoth, right? Remember, scaling is supposed to solve all problems and it's not so what do you think's going on here on john what i think is going on and then kind of like where i think this fits into the overall landscape are two different things i think what i think is going on is they made big promises and from like a just purely competitive standpoint as a public company standpoint and they're not able to hit those and they over promised.

32:43And I mean, I think a lot of people, OpenAI has been a little more strategic about it by dangling this idea in front of us and then giving us weird names, like naming conventions to make us forget where we even are in the model journey as we get to the one model to rule them all. I think meta was a lot more clear that like it's coming, it's coming soon and it's not going to be that easy and it's going to take time and maybe they will be able to do it. But I think it's just an expectations issue as opposed to anything more fundamental. But I think that can cause real problems internally. I think what I actually think about it is I'm kind of glad it's no longer the giant models, one model to rule them all, the God model.