OpenAI Finally Ships Its Superapp, Meta’s AI Price War, ChatGPT Cheating At Brown

18:55Big Technology Podcast Host:What's the value because it's going to be four companies that are going to be doing the same thing and we're already starting to see signs that the premium is going to be on lowering costs and does everything just eventually go to zero for example sam altman talking about uh gbt 5.6 this week said it was 54 more token efficient uh than others right than its previous model so like the if you're a client and you're thinking about your roi well the i is going to matter a lot the investment of the return on investment calculation and you can get a higher roi if the investment is lower and if you have all these products doing the same thing or similar versions of the same thing um it seems like there's a chance that even though you're you're providing an extremely valuable service it's a race to the bottom see i'm still about the r i think uh okay

19:50Ranjan Roy:this is our next one you're you're the i guy i'll tell bdr bring on a third person for the o

19:56Big Technology Podcast Host:like what's your role in this podcast i just do on actually i'm just ron john does return alex does investment i'm i'm here for on why are you here well someone had to do on

20:06Ranjan Roy:someone had to i mean it is required um so so i think i think cost becomes important i don't know like on this costume we're going to get into zuck's comments like it is almost comical to me at points how dramatically the conversation now shifts it was one uber quote like even i mean telling you like talking to c-suite people six months ago no one brought up tokenomics and cost and now it's on everyone's mind meta's coming in hard as like making i listened to the boss episode around like you know like they don't like they have more capital they have more cash they have more profit so like actually investing in these things they have more strength versus some of the other frontier labs in this case um but still like we're not there yet because people don't have this stuff working at scale outside of software like it hasn't it's there's bits and pieces and promise but i can tell you definitively like this we are so early on this that like to even think or worry about cost optimization before you've actually figured out how to make it work well i think is like this is more like everyone in the small groups within these companies is realized that cost will be a factor and it wasn't before but i feel the pendulum again just keep swinging too far each way and just just let us work people just let us work okay there's two

21:45Big Technology Podcast Host:separate things here right first is is this cost discussion overblown maybe to some degree right but you also have because you were right that 2026 is the year of agents and i give that to you once again thank you um the agent workflow is that much more token intensive that people who previously were using generative AI and didn't really care, you know, what it costs because it wasn't costing a lot. You know, now we're seeing 10x this year and are starting to worry. Like end of the year, last year, Anthropic was at a$9 billion ARR, despite the fact that it is a flawed measurement. Now I just saw maybe they're at a$69 billion ARR in five months.

22:28Big Technology Podcast Host:You know, they've 7x'd or more, 8x'd, right? So that's why these costs are starting to become real to people. And that's sort of the driver of this discussion is there are people within companies who are like spending this and telling leadership it's justified. And that was an easier sell when it was one seventh or one eighth of the cost than when it is now. Like leadership is actually going back to them and being like, we need to see the productivity increase and the return. But, you know, that's one side of it. The other side of it is, so that's a discussion we will continue to have. But to me, the more pressing thing here is that whether that discussion is merited or not, we are literally going to be in the middle of a price war here between these companies.

23:15Big Technology Podcast Host:And again, it comes from the centralization of the AI product experience into this like co-work, cloud code type experience, right? These super app experience. And the fact that there are some companies that are quite motivated to drive the price down. And you mentioned Boz, so let's go to Facebook. So Facebook this week, they introduced their MuSpark 1.1 model. This is according to Bloomberg. and they are going to do something to strategically bring this market down. There's Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg. Since this is not an open source model, I think this is the first time we're doing a serious API and the pricing is going to be very attractive and aggressive, is the Bloomberg story.

24:03Big Technology Podcast Host:The API will be used to collect fees from developers. its API pricing is roughly 25 % the cost advertised by other top models from OpenAI and Anthropic. I mean, Zuckerberg has said there's some good margins, that the labs make some good margins here. And so he's like, well, we have the compute, we have a model, it's almost as performant as everything else. We are going to go, not a half, not a third, quarter of the price of the models it's competing with. Now, obviously, it's not the same level of intelligence. but i just want to hear your perspective on what is the consequence here if all ai pricing starts to just crumble you know as this commoditization era kicks off oh i think it's a massive i'll use

24:51Ranjan Roy:the term headwind liberally there where it's like i mean this changes the entire battle it does and it already has like again becoming model interoperable uh whether like having the right model for the right task everyone is and i don't think that's unwarranted i think everyone is rightfully thinking about that so in any normal like development of a new economic cycle or whatever like new industry you would think okay this is all pretty normal it's uh you know where new technology, kind of the economics of it are being understood, the technology itself, the application, it's going to cost a lot at first, and then price is going to come down.

25:36Ranjan Roy:Like, that's all pretty standard. I think what that, I mean, the two companies that affects the most are OpenAI and Anthropic. And like, and again, that wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't their actual cap tables and just the way they've raised money. But it is. If everything is about the near term and rush to IPO for them, I think that's a big issue. Yeah.

26:03Big Technology Podcast Host:I mean, I think Zuck would personally be thrilled to play the spoiler here. And by the way, didn't I say last week that Zuckerberg was going to come out and complain about the concentration of power among the frontier labs?

26:16Ranjan Roy:Oh, Zuck. Love him.

26:18Big Technology Podcast Host:And what he could do about it. and you said, you heard it here first, within the next week or two, you're going to hear Zuckerberg make his attack. And he did. And this is the quote I was looking for. The price from some of the other labs is very extreme and has very high margins. We think that there's a real ability to offer frontier or very high level intelligence at a much more affordable cost. So knives out, right? And again, this is because power has consolidated between within OpenAI and Anthropic. You know, there was inevitably going to be a player who's going to come out and say, well, screw that.

26:49Big Technology Podcast Host:Let's even the playing field. And that, by the way, goes to, again, this idea that this could commoditize. And lo and behold, Zuckerberg raised his hand the week after he said he would. And Leroy Jenkins' his way right into the competition.

27:06Ranjan Roy:I mean, when I think about people that must hate concentrated industries and power and high-margin, monopolized areas like platform advertising, I think of Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, you know, he...

27:21Big Technology Podcast Host:You know, it's funny to make that joke. The reason why Zuckerberg has as much power as he does is because when he's seen a threat to his business, he has often masterfully thwarted it. Whether that is, you know, copying stories from Snapchat, copying reels from TikTok. AI has yet to... He's yet to be able to do that. Now, obviously, they have this quest to build personal superintelligence, But I think, you know, with that taking longer than expected, as he said last week, you know, the other option is, you know, just run in there. Now, he had open source models, right? And they were free. So he's charging for them now.

28:02Big Technology Podcast Host:So is it really that different? But I think what he's doing is very interesting. He's saying, all right, I've spent all these billions and I'm going to at first use it to commoditize the model layer. Like Boz said, and Boz agreed with you, it's the product layer that matters. And so for Meta, the idea that AI would be costly, does not serve their purposes. They want it to be free so the product can be built on top of it, whether it's theirs or others. And in particular, they also want to be able to use this, as Boz said, as negotiation leverage when they rent models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

28:44Ranjan Roy:Well, I think for them, it's almost it's like a two layers. It's one like I think you had made the point that just like an existential threat that chat GPT competes with social media that could compete like people could be spending more time talking with their chat GPT rather than scrolling Instagram. that is a threat. And like kneecapping the companies that are coming after you on that would be kind of like, you know, classic Zuck and kind of amazing. But then I think also, it's like you said, if personal super intelligence, whatever that may mean, but like something around being that like for every day for the consumer for like helping you manage your life and everything not enterprise whatever i think that is another area that the cheaper everything gets the better for them and again they how many is it four billion people use their products a month three billion whatever i mean in that neighborhood everyone stopped counting i feel like it's

29:50Big Technology Podcast Host:basically the world they saturated anybody on the planet with a phone yeah you you own distribution

29:56Ranjan Roy:So like being the one to actually be the front door to all AI, which is interesting. Like, as I'm saying this, like they really could be competing more head to head with Apple going forward. I think like if Siri iOS 27 becomes a bit of personal super intelligence, ambitious statement there, but like they could be competing a lot more directly soon.

30:26Big Technology Podcast Host:Oh, yeah, they certainly will. Right. And this, by the way, you know, in a roundabout way, you know, there's, you know, we've now given all the explanations for like why they're happy just to cut off the economic benefits from the other labs for other purposes. In a roundabout way, this might actually help their AI efforts in general. This is from the information. Now, what Meta's doing is no way to make money in AI, but that clearly isn't Meta's strategy. It knows that the cost of AI has become a paramount issue for many businesses, so much so that they're trying various methods to reduce it, including the use of open source models or routing some AI work to older and more cost-effective models.

31:06Big Technology Podcast Host:In that environment, Meta presumably thinks that by undercutting everyone else on price, it can persuade users to at least try out its new model and potentially hook them. If that approach works, Meta could jack up the price later. So it's like maybe it's using the old, I don't know, the drug dealer model of economics where I give you a taste, you become hooked. And then I say, all right, if you want to keep using it, it's going to be a little bit more pricey.

31:35Ranjan Roy:I mean, Anthropic and OpenAI both, I think, have definitely been Anthropic more than anybody went that route. So, yeah, I think everyone gets that, like, and again, overall consumption of AI and compute will exponentially increase and it's going to make its way into more and more parts of our lives and the ways enterprises work. So I think, like, it is interesting. Everyone is trying to find where they fit best in that equation under the assumption, which I do agree with, that it will happen. So I guess it's good. Before, everyone was just kind of riding on if the explosion happens, it's just great and you will be valued at a trillion dollars or whatever.

32:24Ranjan Roy:But now everyone's starting to actually try to map out where do they fit in that future.

32:31Big Technology Podcast Host:yep okay so before we go to break um you know one of the underwriting themes or underlying themes on the show is always has always been um you know we believe that there's real technology here but we just wonder whether there's a business here um so given what we've discussed for the last 31 minutes what do you think all this means for the business prospects of open ai and anthropic I mean, I don't see how it's good.

33:00Ranjan Roy:I really, and I know I compete against them in some cases, but I'm just being like, can you map out in a world where models are interchangeable and interoperable and cheaper and cheaper, how that could be good? The only way I see it being good is if they still maintain that model that subsumes all the verticalized slash functional offerings or are so good that somehow you just stop using social media and then that becomes your personalized super intelligence. I mean, they're still making the bet. That's why it's kind of almost weird to me that when Sam Altman starts talking about 50%, 4 % more token efficient, that's not their game.

33:52Ranjan Roy:Their game has always been, we are going to build AGI, and then that's why we win. And it feels pretty binary.

33:59Big Technology Podcast Host:Well, they've also said they want to build intelligence too cheap to meter.

34:05Ranjan Roy:Wait, I thought he said it will be like electricity and metered.

34:10Big Technology Podcast Host:I guess they've had mixed messaging. Okay.

34:14Ranjan Roy:No, no, but explain to me, what would be your take on, in a world where AI gets cheaper and models interoperable and application layer, et cetera, how do they win?

34:30Big Technology Podcast Host:I don't know. I mean, I think this has always been, the problem here has always been you're building on something that it's very difficult to hoard. and I don't know if there's an answer to that yet so they've they've started to build products right and you know maybe get to go back to the laptop example from last week you know you're building something that's like a laptop can be used by a personal folks folks can be used by people for personal reasons can be used by people for business reasons and so like your Or there can be multiple laptop makers, but ultimately we see what happens. They compete based off of cost and based on cost.

35:12Big Technology Podcast Host:And, you know, Apple's doing well in its MacBook business and there are some others. But, you know, it's not like world beating businesses. So that to me is like the real question here in terms of where they go. But, I mean, the other side of it is you could say, let's say we take your line right here. that the product matters most. They both have built compelling products, you know, OpenAI with ChatGPT, Anthropic with CloudCode and CloudCowork, and those will continue to grow. And they've been the engine behind their growth. And maybe that won't slow down, even if the pricing power goes down a bit.

35:51Big Technology Podcast Host:So that's kind of the way I think about it. Totally unsettled.

35:54Ranjan Roy:Yeah, I mean, I don't know. The next few months, I'm just waiting to see an S1. I want to see the numbers, but it's definitely again, all of this stuff in a one two, three year time horizon it's just such a different conversation over the way this is going to play out the next six months

36:15Big Technology Podcast Host:the moment those S1s hit it's not going to tell us anything because the battle, like what we're talking about right now battle's just starting we're just approaching the start line between four years it was four i'll just say there were it was four years before these companies figured out the trajectory of what they could build and the form factor and now they finally centered around it so

36:41Ranjan Roy:now it's game on everything else was a wind-up but do you think if numbers come out and they're atrocious and then that affects like stock price and then that affects like employee and researcher attrition and that point like do you think they are two separate things or do you think one could affect the other i don't know i mean of course it can affect it can affect

37:11Big Technology Podcast Host:the future without a doubt like we've talked about this but ultimately you know it's all prologue they would argue and i would argue too the businesses they've run they've run up until now are not the businesses they're going to run from now on. Except for maybe Anthropic. We have a preview of that with Anthropic.

37:31Ranjan Roy:That's not how S1s work. They're backwards looking.

37:35Big Technology Podcast Host:That's what I'm saying. I'm saying that that's why I'm saying the S1 in this case isn't going to tell us anything and this is entirely narrative based.

37:46Ranjan Roy:Alright, alright. Fine. SpaceX showed us the alternative so So it remains to be seen. Dude, SpaceX trading below its first day.

37:57Big Technology Podcast Host:Opening price,$148 right now. Opened at$160. Yikes.

38:03Ranjan Roy:Still valued$714 billion market cap.

38:08Big Technology Podcast Host:No,$1.96 trillion.

38:11Ranjan Roy:Yeah, sorry, sorry. That's Elon's share. I vibe-coded an app. It's ElonMuskTrillionaire.com if you want to go over there. and he is currently a trillionaire, but it's at 1.01 trillion. So he's right now is like right on the border.

38:27Big Technology Podcast Host:Well, prayers out to Elon. Hopefully you'll get through this difficult time. Hopefully we'll get through this break. And on the other side, we'll talk a little bit more about the cloud business that Meta is considering. And then of course, those students at Brown University using ChatGPT to tweet. We'll be back right after this.

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39:38Big Technology Podcast Host:Chevrolet. Together, let's drive. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition. All right, so the rumors that Facebook may start its own AI cloud business, there seems to be something to it. I shouldn't say rumors, I should say reporting. This is from Bloomberg. Meta Platforms needs all the computing power it can get, Mark Zuckerberg said, but in a market starved for resources necessary to run and develop artificial intelligence products, he's also considering whether some of Meta's AI infrastructure could be more valuable if rented to outsiders. This is what Zuckerberg told Bloomberg.

40:12Big Technology Podcast Host:The offers that you get for using the compute are so high that it may make sense in some cases to rent out or consider those kind of deals instead of your own internal uses. Zuckerberg said the potential for a cloud business is certainly there anytime we want to build it. I just want to say this. So we got this comment on the show. And by the way, I love the comments. Keep them going. But sometimes we'll want to respond to them. This is on Spotify. You're not thinking like economists. opportunity costs. If demand for compute is outstripping supply, why not sell off your excess and make profit rather than struggle with figuring out what to do with it?

40:52Big Technology Podcast Host:Rent it out for a profit and let others figure out what to do with it. Let me, I just want to address this. Why is, let's say, Anthropic willing to pay so much money for your compute? The answer is because they have built a product that even if they're paying you such high rates, they can mark it up and be profitable or at least build a business for the future. The way tech companies work is they invest early in a product and they end up, you know, building something that people want and then profiting on it later. It's like this idea of like, you know, the opportunity cost. There's an opportunity cost on your VC money, right?

41:40Big Technology Podcast Host:You don't see startups taking their VC money and loaning it to other companies and saying, well, we're going to make a profit here. To me, it just shows a lack of either imagination or what's probably happening is success with the product. And there's the gap between the winner and the loser, where you have one company, let's say Anthropic, willing to pay you that much that you can't say no, and then finding an even more valuable use for it via their product while you sit at home, you know, or in your office and try to figure out what to do with your compute. Does that make any sense? That's how I see it.

42:15Ranjan Roy:Yeah, but where I, that actually all I think like is a logical line makes perfect sense. Where I still think that actually kind of brings back the whole like race to the bottom commoditization conversation even more is exactly what you described. Anthropic has a very expensive product they can charge a lot for and so they're willing to pay a high amount for compute and then facebook is willing to realize that they can sell them that product at a high price because they're willing to pay but if that cost structure like a cost battle happens then that goes away then suddenly anthropic has to default to cheaper models even within clod or whatever clod co-work slash code, like even within cloud, the moment they have to start defaulting more to cheaper models, then they won't be able to pay as much for compute, which means that it becomes less of an attractive business.

43:14Ranjan Roy:So like, actually, what I love here is like kind of Zuckerberg is basically taking both sides, right? Like the cloud businesses, if it's prices high, and people are willing to pay, then we'll just sell compute via the cloud business to Anthropic. If prices are low which we're also helping make happen on the other side then we'll kind of kneecap them put them out of business and make our personal super intelligence even better so suddenly meta

43:40Big Technology Podcast Host:is looking pretty good in this yeah i just love that though zuckerberg said it doesn't you know he told bloomberg it doesn't mean meta is overbuilt or has excess computing power available available i mean that you know it's either one or the other you either have late yeah exactly you either have

43:58Ranjan Roy:excess computing power that you can sell or you don't no no no it's like what's the wire line there's always a buyer at the right price or something like that i'm sure there's some stringer bell line that's in there but it's like they they don't have you could argue you don't have excess computing you have that internal demand at a price but when the facebook is mass market massive like you know i mean they have high margins high profit on advertising but like the way they would deploy to customers you know who don't pay them like like that is a they would need that internal demand but at a low price for compute whereas if it's coming in higher then maybe you you just do it again you could he can forever argue you have four billion phones with like meta ai kind of jammed into instagram and facebook messenger and stuff you could just a couple of growth hacks get everyone adding prompts and using some kind of compute and doing ai stuff very easily half of facebook feeds are probably ai generated anyways now so like you could do it shrimp jesus you're yeah shrimp oh shrimp jesus i gotta say like we can get into the world cup stuff like actually just ai content overall is getting pretty good did you see peptide seinfeld no i have to see that

45:24Big Technology Podcast Host:though i've i've watched all the harland uh memes have you seen them the early harland memes of like the norse versus the british yeah battle of old and modern the ai slop this did you say this this is the week that ai slop has really transformed to like ai majesty it's amazing right yeah it's

45:43Ranjan Roy:not slut like i think the word slot it's kind of fascinating again like watch peptide seinfeld it's like well done it's george goes on peptides and suddenly good looking and like kind of like jacked and uh like it's so well and it's not just like that it looks like them and it is jerry talking it's just actually good a good story and funny and in the seinfeld tradition those world i think the world cup is going to be when ai video found its moment and everyone realized like you can actually make good stuff like it's no longer gone are the do you remember will smith eating pasta from two or three years ago yeah and we're we've come a long way come a long way

46:24Big Technology Podcast Host:that's where the compute demand is that's where it is this week my perspective on ai videos did change right i went from oh man i've been fooled to like seeing so many of the england versus Norway videos that I started seeking them out and sharing them. Like this week I'm telling you my wife who is a very big Harlan fan as I think are many women here who are watching the World Cup. Her WhatsApp inbox is filled with AI videos from me where I'm just like watch laugh sent. I'm like a robot. Watch laugh sent. These AI slops.

47:02Ranjan Roy:Not even slops. It's not. No no it's not. These beautiful AI art pieces. no no i mean i think the word slop yeah is needs to be like reminded it's kind of like everyone uses vibe coding for in a certain way i feel slop is overused as well because like slop is when it's bad and man videos are getting good people people are being creative like they're being genuinely they're making good content just in a different a different tool yeah no it's pretty cool and

47:35Big Technology Podcast Host:And as OpenAI has gotten out of that business, there's an opening for Meta. But as Meta tends to do, the company just can't help itself. This is from The Guardian. Instagram's AI image generator alarms privacy experts. Meta has sparked blowback from privacy advocates for allowing its new AI image maker to generate photos of users with public profiles by default. Users of Meta's Muse Image AI tool released Tuesday can tag public Instagram profiles and generate pictures that pull from faces of people featured in these social posts. Instagram users are not notified when their posts are integrated into what the company describes as its most advanced image generation model yet.

48:14Big Technology Podcast Host:So basically, if you want your Instagram photos and videos to not be able to be used for this AI engine, you actually have to go and opt out. You tap the hamburger menu on the top right of Instagram. You go to sharing and reuse, and you toggle the button that allows other people to reuse your content off. That's our PSA. But, you know, it's sort of like, gosh, Meta almost had like a really good week in AI and had to sort of spoil it with this typical, you know, privacy shirky behavior.

48:45Ranjan Roy:I can go to anyone else's. I've not used this yet. I'm definitely going to go look at this now. So I can go use anyone's public profile and use their likeness to generate new images.

49:04Big Technology Podcast Host:Okay, I don't want to say definitively yes, but it seems like that is either that or they can incorporate it. Bottom line is your stuff is ingestible by these AI tools and then apparently remixable. So I turned it off from my personal profile, but I kept it on for the Big Technology Podcast Instagram feed because I guess if people remix and reuse that stuff, we'll be happy about it. Meme us.

49:30Ranjan Roy:Just meme us. Yes. We're ready for it.

49:34Big Technology Podcast Host:by the way uh meta you know it's so interesting that last week we talked about how there are basically two points of failure in this uh ai industry and meta as it seems to always do has just inserted itself right into the conversation again and how much have we talked about meta this week you know yeah they're back they're back they're back just had july 4th

49:59Ranjan Roy:we're waiting for the next one zuck on uh the hydrofoil american flag hydrofoil yeah yeah

50:05Big Technology Podcast Host:bony would be an what would you call it if it's not ai slop

50:10Ranjan Roy:i mean it's just no no it's actually something it's something i've thought about a lot it's just it's just a video like it is interesting i think like where the whole debate around is it ai or not Okay, if it's pretending to be something real, if it's like a true deepfake in that sense and it's trying to convey that it's real, I think then that's a deepfake, that's a problem. But otherwise, when it's peptide Seinfeld, it's just content that's pretty funny and good. And yeah, it's just content.

50:51Big Technology Podcast Host:New era, new era. All right, so let's close out this week talking about the cheating at Brown University. So this is the story from, I think, Institute of Higher Ed, a publication like that. No, I should really cite them. I'm going to cite them. This is from Inside Higher Ed. Okay, so what happened was there is this professor at Brown. For the first time since he started teaching welfare economics and social choice theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown.

51:36Big Technology Podcast Host:So it was appropriate, he said, to allow the students to take their exams home. By the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. But Sorano, in turn, made the final exam in person, which led to more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. His welfare economics class typically attracted up to 30 students by the spring. He had taught 86, an increase he attributes to the promised take-home exams. When the midterms came along, the average score was 96%.

52:13Big Technology Podcast Host:Historically, that was 65 to 80%. So the professor knew something fishy was going on, and he and his graders ran the test through ChachiPT. The AI gave answers that mirrored what his students had written, which were kind of correct, but very off, with a very convoluted style. So he said, okay, the final exam is going to be in person. Here's what happened. Three students, oh, 18 students dropped the class. Nine stayed enrolled, but didn't show up to the final exam. So you already have 27, acting very fishy. Three got a zero. The average score on the final was 48.6%. Again, this was for kids who had an average of 96%.

52:50Big Technology Podcast Host:on the midterm. By far the historic low. Previously, the average on the final exam never dropped below 68%. He has a great quote, the professor, at the end of this. We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is okay. This leads to a declining society, to a failed society. We cannot choose to become idiots. Your thoughts?

53:17Ranjan Roy:i don't know if we can uh we might have crossed that rubicon a while back as a society but uh before ai ai didn't do that one um i i've thought about this i mean again education like should fundamentally change based on the tools that are available and like i would exams should somehow be like, all right, you all have access. Who's going to put out the best work? And I think like the way tests and exams have always been structured, it was less around like the information will and the calculations will get done. But your understanding of it, like your ability to kind of extract new insights from it, that's where the value is going to be.

54:05Ranjan Roy:And like to me, actually, I got to say, like serrano come up with new exam like to do stuff in the exact same way you've always done and then say it's a problem given how much things have changed i think that reflects more on the institution and the teacher than the students of course they're going to do it i don't think it's cheating in that sense i also love like could you imagine the three students who earned a zero how much they were sweating sitting there in the exam hall, just like even the average score for it. Imagine you just don't know any of it. This is like the stuff people have nightmares for.

54:44Ranjan Roy:And like, you're just sitting in there and you have no clue what's going on. You're just staring blankly at that paper. And I say this.

54:54Big Technology Podcast Host:Reminds me of my, yeah, go ahead. No, I mean, I feel it's never been that bad,

54:59Ranjan Roy:but I feel like there's probably been like maybe an exam. I never did no zeros in my time, but like where you're just like, oh shit, I did not prepare for this. Now imagine that 10, 20, 30 X.

55:14Big Technology Podcast Host:That's got to be some sweating. No, it reminds me of my childhood where I would bring a zero home from school and my parents would say, nice work, but you couldn't get a three. That's a joke, high standards joke. You know. okay anyway you know it's a joke it's like the typical parent but no matter what number the kid comes home from school with they say all right nice work but couldn't you have done a few points higher anyway it didn't land um god i guess we're at that point on a friday aren't we but uh but july it's friday that's all right so quick no personal story and then uh and then some thoughts about this seriously yes i have gotten a zero on a test um or a one of five on the ap physics

56:03Ranjan Roy:which i don't know one out of five not one out of yeah right no but i shouldn't have even gotten

56:09Big Technology Podcast Host:that one because i think that was the lowest you could possibly get if there was a zero i would have qualified for a zero i took ap physics in my senior year of high school and realized i was completely out of my depth on it i mean i remember a few things like specific heat but other than that I was toast. Like trying to calculate the trajectory of some object based off of like the mass and the velocity. I'm just like, you know what, this is not for me. You guys figure this out. I'll take the other stuff. Anyway, so I show up for my AP physics exam and you have to sit there for at least two hours, two of three.

56:41Big Technology Podcast Host:I'm done in like 30 minutes because I'm just like I'm failing this one pretty bad. And you don't get college credit unless it's a four or five. So I sat there for the next hour and a half like drawing pictures of the spaceships the solar system and spaceships and stuff like that and i handed it in and my uh my physics professor came up to me our teacher came up to me later and he goes hey alex i heard you were the first to finish the exam you must have done really well he knew i felt he knew i felt and i felt okay so that's that aside i've been there i've been there you know students at brown university who got that zero i empathize with you.

57:15Big Technology Podcast Host:I feel your pain. Okay, but I agree with you before we go. I agree with you, Ranjan. You know, there's been this dialogue. I wish we had more time for this. There's been this discussion. Since we're offloading so much of our thinking to AI, you know, our brain's going to rot. I think it's actually the opposite. I think now that I've handed so, like, all the, like, lesser activities to AI, I'm thinking through much harder problems. And I feel like my brain's getting stronger because of it, not weaker. Like I'm actually able to like really think about the tough stuff. And so I think you're right that the professor needs to realize that that's going to be the universe that we have going forward.

57:57Big Technology Podcast Host:And this binary just doesn't fully capture what you're supposed to be testing for at a university.

58:03Ranjan Roy:Yeah, I always think back. I know I can try. I grew up outside of Boston, Lexington, Mass. And then basically like junior and senior high school drove a lot and I can navigate more where I grew up without a map than I can in the New York City area where I've been forever or especially like I can't get to JFK without a Google map because I'm just so dependent on maps and that's one part of my brain I outsourced and nowadays I'm not making slides anymore which is the greatest thing ever you're just having the slides made for you so you actually think about what's in there. So I think there's, I'm sure, pitfalls in people who are not going to actually take advantage of this, but do better Brown administration, not students.

58:55Ranjan Roy:I'm team students.

58:56Big Technology Podcast Host:Team students. I mean, the disparity was amazing. Like one kid got a 95 on the midterm and a 95 on the final. So low average on the midterm, obviously the best on the final. and then one kid got like a hundred on the midterm and a zero on the final. So go figure. All right. Great speaking with you as always, Ronjan. And good to have you all with us again here in the Big Technology Podcast Friday edition. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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