OpenAI’s User Growth Miss, Musk vs. Altman, Prediction Market Ban

17:31Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Or are they moving out of a position of weakness where like, oh, it's not growing as much anymore. And now we have to make our move.

17:38Ranjan Roy:So that's where I can turn and get skeptical again. I think they're moving, it is a strategic mistake. My kind of hot take on this is when you have a company that's a developer-first culture, everyone is going to get more excited about Codex. Why is everything moving to the command line? Most average people are never going to do anything from a command line interface. yet so many of these projects, so many of these products are moving in that direction and people get very excited. I even see all this stuff around how everyday users are going to be actually in the command line using codex. No, they're not.

18:23Ranjan Roy:I think it's a bias within these organizations because they're developer-first cultures and I think it's a mistake. I think there's a lot of opportunity from everything I was saying. Actually, again, Amazon, I think, gets it. You don't see Amazon. They know this is our product. This is our business. This is our customer. So we are going to embed generative experiences or AI-first experiences throughout. And we're going to move things in that direction. And that's where I think everyone is rushing there. This is what I work in. And everyone, and again, you're seeing like, like Anthropic had this historic run and suddenly 4.7, you just see all this negative sentiment come out around cost and people instantly start stepping back little.

19:12Ranjan Roy:And then Codex comes in and 5.5. And like, I don't think when everyone is rushing towards the same thing, that for a company like OpenAI that has such a foothold in consumer, it's the right decision.

19:26Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Your advice, Topin and I, would really be like, stick with consumer. Don't give up on the Sora type stuff and try to own the consumer side of generative AI as opposed to shifting to codex.

19:40Ranjan Roy:Yeah, unless they're almost accepting Google will beat them at it. Interesting. Which is not unreasonable. Like when you are Google and you're already on the, I don't know, did you see this study around how like Google, I mean, in an evil way, like giving Chromebooks to every student in America and now the actual YouTube usage during school hours is up like exponentially. Who could have guessed that? Yeah, but for better for worse.

20:11Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Hopefully they're watching big technology podcasts there.

20:13Ranjan Roy:As long as the first graders of America are just, actually my son who's in first grade, he, if I ever play our podcast in the car when we're driving, he gets so mad and he's like, this is the most boring thing ever. So I'm sorry. I don't think the first graders, that demographic is our biggest fan.

20:36Big Technology Podcast Hosts:These are the people that were angering. First graders and anti-AI listeners. Hate mail from both. These are the constituencies we will not win over.

20:44Ranjan Roy:He's leaving two-star reviews without me even knowing on my phone.

20:47Big Technology Podcast Hosts:But Ronjan, I mean, okay, so this is a thing. My other side of it is, even though these, let's just take this stuff to be true. Even if it were true, revenue miss, user miss, but deeper engagement, I would say OpenAI is heading in the right direction with Codex. I mean, if you think about Anthropic, right? Last July, I was in Anthropic speaking with Dario. He was happy that they were making$4 billion ARR. Now they're at$35, potentially. There is a tremendous market opportunity to go after with this agent-style use case in the enterprise. And so, to me, if OpenAI thinks that they can pass Anthropic because they're going to have more capacity and potentially on par or better models, go there.

21:31No?

21:31Ranjan Roy:I mean, I work in that at Rider. I mean, I see it firsthand. It's very attractive. And when it's working, it works very fast. But it's competitive. It's also like for a company of OpenAI size, again, at Rider, we've been enterprise only for our entire life. So that's the game. OpenAI, it hasn't been the game. And they have this asset of 900 million users. They can be integrated directly within everyone. And the important thing here is you can grow revenue fast. And I do think this is all ahead of the big IPO race and battle here because you can grow revenue a lot faster by getting a bunch of developers, using your tool, them not paying attention and token maxing and just blowing out tokens.

22:26Ranjan Roy:And you'll increase consumption, you'll increase revenue very quickly. but that's a short-lived phenomenon versus you have every person in the U.S. you own the verb to search with AI is to chat GPT something. Like that is a tremendous asset. And I think they're kind of seeding it to Google right now. Okay.

22:49Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Well, I think we'll just have to watch this play out. As OpenAI does this, of course, it has the thorn in its side of Elon Musk. And I'm curious how, if you've been watching the trial between OpenAI and Musk this week, and if you have any thoughts on whether this trial will lead to anything of consequences. Of course, Musk is suing OpenAI for taking his money, going from a charity to a for-profit, unjustly enriching themselves and betraying the charitable trust value that is taking place this week. What's your read on it? it's rare that listeners will hear me agreeing with Elon Musk,

23:35Ranjan Roy:but I think this is one case like it feels like at a very simple logical level, this is, they were a nonprofit and that was the entire founding story for a long time. I mean, they are a nonprofit. Hold on, what, if the current status, so much happens that I can't even remember it. Have they converted or not?

24:01Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Yes, they've converted, but they still have the - The nonprofit arm that owns a certain amount of, yeah.

24:09Ranjan Roy:We've joked for a long time around how opaque the structure is. I think it put Ceylon Musk in a pretty good, just from a very human logical, like if you're trying to convince a jury, I think it's a pretty good argument. I think there's been zero accountability for any large technology company for so many years that the idea that anything would ever happen that would actually derail the business because there's just so much vested interest in it. I don't know. The cynic in me just assumes nothing will actually happen. Maybe there's a fine. Musk and Sam put on a good show. But do you think there will actually be any consequence coming out of the trial?

24:59Big Technology Podcast Hosts:No, I don't think so. I mean, maybe there should maybe there will be a fine to OpenAI because they'll have to end up paying that money to the nonprofit. But I agree with you. I think that Elon has a like to stand on here. I mean, he gave 30 plus million dollars to found this thing. And he currently has like no share in it at all. I don't see how that's fair. And of course, the open a argument is like, well, Elon gave this as a donation to a charity. You can't look at it as an investment. And I'm like, well, of course you gave it to as a donation to a charity. You were a charity. You set up that structure with him in the beginning.

25:36Big Technology Podcast Hosts:If you began as a for profit, he would have looked at it as an investment. Now, I know Musk is trying to get Musk and Sam Altman removed. Sorry, he's trying to get Sam Altman and Greg Brockman removed from the top of OpenAI. I don't think that's going to happen. But I wouldn't be stunned if the jury ended up siding with Musk here. And of course, it's advisory, so we'll see what the judge does. I don't think the judge is going to blow up OpenAI, but there could be some consequences.

26:03Ranjan Roy:Like, but what though? A couple...

26:07Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Yeah, billions. Billions going down from the for-profit to the non-profit. I wouldn't be stunned. like many billions like a significant amount of billions and by the way that could hamper the whole build out the can you imagine you're an investor and you put all this money in for them to have database capacity to compete against Anthropic and then you have to go elsewhere, I don't know

26:29Ranjan Roy:so the interesting part here is one, the fact that Grok is a direct competitor, XAI like it just makes the whole thing even just richer I think in terms of how they're approaching this. Did you see that Elon was promoting the Ronan Farrow, Sam Maltin article across Twitter? X?

26:55Big Technology Podcast Hosts:So talk about what happened there.

26:57Ranjan Roy:Yeah, so users were reporting. It was actually like a new UI experience almost of having an article pop up, both in the standard ad format, that Elon retweeting it, but also even just popping up at the bottom of your screen, the Ronan Farrow New York article about Sam Altman having many faces. Did you read it? If you've been following Sam Altman and OpenAI for a long time, there wasn't anything groundbreaking in it. No surprises there. Yeah, but it painted a pretty strong picture, especially if you're not following closely. But it's still funny to me that like this bastion of free speech and non-manipulated speech, supposedly of X, literally the owner going to trial is able to kind of just manipulate and control what people are seeing.

27:52Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Do you think that OpenAI kind of has a Zuck-Winklevi argument to make here, which is like, if you were so smart, you would create a Facebook, but you didn't? like they could point to the fact that like most of the value has been created by them and elon has sunk billions into building xai which has had mixed results oh that would be

28:19Ranjan Roy:has that been said yet because if you're listening sam that's the argument like i i feel this this whole thing is for show i mean i think like they've both recognized and elon's trying to kind kind of like cut them at the knees ahead of their IPO, boost XAI. Like obviously there's a strong show element and that would be the greatest. It's like, how's XAI going, bro? Like you already paid your 44 billion for X and for Twitter and you're jamming that into everyone as much as possible. But we built something people love. We basically like invented this entire industry right now. How are you doing?

29:02Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I will say though, there are, I mean, there are Grok users out there. I was flying back from Vegas to New York and sat next to a guy that drives the subway. And I was like, you're talking about AI. And he goes, yeah, I use Grok. I don't have to badger it to give me an answer I want. So there is appeal out there, but clearly it's not, it's not as far as like the big businesses go, it's not holding a candle to open AI or Anthropic right now. Well, what do you think the Grok strategy is in this?

29:32Ranjan Roy:Do you think they're going to pivot to enterprise away from consumer?

29:37Big Technology Podcast Hosts:No, speaking of the opening and consumer, maybe they should lead into Bad Rudy and that other AI girlfriend that Musk made. That could be the potential growth area there, just from a business standpoint.

29:49Ranjan Roy:Maybe if OpenAI is truly kind of moving away from consumer, it does like open it up. But I guess like why has Meta AI, I mean, it's not a good product, but like the actual chat bot experience from every time I've tried using it. But it's just like to me, it still feels like if you already have the consumer's undivided attention, they don't have to open up another app and experience. Like someone should be killing it on this, whether it's Meta, whether it's Elon and X, But it hasn't happened yet.

30:25Big Technology Podcast Hosts:This is the point I was making at the beginning of the show. All right.

30:30Ranjan Roy:Thank you for seeing the light. I guess that chat bot, I guess Google has shown. Google for real?

30:39Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I don't think so. No? Do you think Google is this great hit consumer AI chat bot?

30:46Ranjan Roy:I mean, Gemini, like funneling users from your core experience to a standalone app, Google has shown they are able to do that far more successfully than Meta. I mean, I think like based on Gemini's numbers in the consumer market, they've shown you can do that.

31:06Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Okay, before we go to break, because we have a lot more to cover today, you highlighted a section of dialogue in this court case. you want to share a little bit about why that's important and what it is yes so one of the there's

31:21Ranjan Roy:a few interesting really interesting parts that came out so far in the trial including elon playing like logical jujitsu about like it's a yes or no question that's like asking me do you beat your wife which i don't know like doing that in a courtroom is just so ridiculous to me as though it's like I did high school debate and that felt like the kind of thing you would do when you're a freshman. But more important relative to the industry, Musk was asked, do you know what distillation is by OpenAI's lawyer, William Savitt? It means to use one AI model to train another model. And he was asked, has XAI done that with OpenAI?

32:04Ranjan Roy:Musk replied, generally all the companies do that. So that's a yes, partly. Musk continued, distillation is a technique where a smaller AI model is trained to mimic the behavior of a larger, more capable model, making it cheaper and faster to run while preserving much of its performance. So it's actually, and he continued, the Sabbath has open AI technology been used in any way to develop xAI. Musk, it is standard practice to use other AIs to validate your AI. I think like this is significant because I think the distillation conversation when it comes to Chinese models and deep seek has been a pretty loaded one.

32:46Ranjan Roy:And if the fact that he's just admitting this openly and saying it confidently, still like from a commercial perspective, what does that mean is kind of crazy to me. Like you would think and maybe there I guess there's probably not a lot of law and regulation around not doing this but it's still I don't know again from a purely commercial perspective I was shocked

33:11Big Technology Podcast Hosts:that he was saying this were you yeah definitely no it's it's stunning and clearly it's happening everywhere and um and it goes to sort of a question I asked Greg Brockman last week which is that like is it going to be economically viable to train these models if you just get distilled And I don't know, there may come a point where, you know, right now we're seeing real leaps in every new model to a degree. And it might come a point where it sort of levels out. And once that does, you know, how far is the distillation going to be behind the proprietary stuff? Probably not that far. And so that sort of gets to the question of, well, do we end up seeing sort of intelligence at a certain point commoditize and compute at a certain point commoditize?

33:58Big Technology Podcast Hosts:And we end up in a price war because everything is basically delivering the same. And so then you compete on price. I mean, that's sort of, that was the logic behind this kind of memorable quote that Mark Cuban gave me in the episode we did on Wednesday, where he said, open AI is shitting money away at scale. Because that's his belief is effectively you kind of get to that place. What do you think, Ronjan?

34:23Ranjan Roy:Well, are you saying that the models will be commoditized and it will be about product and price?

34:29Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Yeah, that could be the case. Okay, okay. That could be the case.

34:33Ranjan Roy:Just checking, just checking. I'm advancing this theory.

34:37Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I'm not sort of throwing it out.

34:40Ranjan Roy:I think it's a possibility. Well, actually, on that, I don't know if you saw one of the more on the topic of both distillation and price. There's a lot of hype around DeepSeek V4 is supposed to be, again, top-level frontier model at a fraction of the cost that almost certainly, proudly, is distillation at its core. and then like, I don't know, had you seen like Brian Chesky who's I think been on the show a few times? Just once. Yeah, okay, so they're talking about using Quen from Alibaba from a cost perspective that basically, and I do think moving to a world where let's say you use Anthropic and OpenAI to actually build, but then start to cost optimize towards cheaper models and maybe it's within their ecosystems, Maybe it's just an open free for all in terms of any model.

35:32Ranjan Roy:I do think that's where things will go. But did you see there's apparently like a House of Representatives recommendation around like banning the use of Chinese models and like actually calling out Airbnb specifically? Really?

35:51Big Technology Podcast Hosts:No, I haven't seen that. I mean, I have seen, I mean, if you look at like apps like Perplexity, for instance, like they'll allow you to use like the OpenAI or Anthropik models or Kimi K2, which they have, of course, like they've downloaded the weights, they've post-trained on their own. They've sort of given their own version of that model. But I just don't see the Chinese models going away because ultimately, if you ban the Chinese models, aren't you effectively saying like you're banning open source? I mean, there are the NVIDIA NEMO models, which are open source, but outside of that, it's mostly a China thing.

36:25Ranjan Roy:Well, actually, so here, so two Republican-led House committees, they're probing specifically Airbnb and AnySphere, which is the owner of Cursor, over their use of Chinese models. So I found this really interesting specifically because after, like, we didn't talk about Meta and Manus last week. I mean, to me, like, first of all, we could definitely get into what's going to potentially happen there. But China, that's, like, quite the salvo. You know, like you cannot acquire our technology, even after that technology has moved to Singapore and trying to get out of the CCP oversight, to actually say we are blocking that transaction.

37:10Ranjan Roy:To me, actually, the US-China tech Cold War heated up significantly when that happened. And then when I saw this, that the Republican House committees are actually throwing out this idea that you cannot use Quen or other Chinese models. I think it's going to get, I mean, that whole Jensen-Dwarkash exchange is going to become far more significant or a bigger story this year. Okay.

37:40Big Technology Podcast Hosts:This week, I'll just say one thing, then we really need to go to break. This week, I heard probably the best explanation of what Jensen's position is, which is effectively, if you don't sell the American or NVIDIA tech stack into China, you will force the Chinese model makers to build, to optimize basically algorithmically on Chinese chips, like chips from Huawei. In the event that they are able to make those optimizations and in some ways, you know, outpace the American models or become a appealing alternative. They could potentially build those on Huawei chips alone and not make it compatible on the NVIDIA stack.

38:27Big Technology Podcast Hosts:And then do their own form of export controls on the US or to the rest of the world and basically have control over AI. So let's say they make state-of-the-art models built on Huawei chips. They could hold the U.S. back from actually using those and effectively restrict our ability to have cutting-edge AI. By putting that constraint on them, you sort of put yourself under the barrel in that way where you could potentially not have access to the AI that you want.

38:57Ranjan Roy:I think that's a circular but reasonable argument. but question should large tech companies in the US be allowed to use Chinese models?

39:10Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Yes, I mean you should be able to download the weights, do the work on your own and then run them I think so

39:18Ranjan Roy:Okay, but only the open source side of it not directly connecting to the Alibaba Quint infrastructure the same way you would to an Anthropic yes or no.

39:27Big Technology Podcast Hosts:It depends what you're doing

39:28Ranjan Roy:It's a yes or no question

39:31Big Technology Podcast Hosts:God Mr. Senator, I'm going to say yes. I'll say yes. I don't have a problem with it for now until we see malicious things. I don't either. It's not going to lead to, I don't think it will lead to like a clear catastrophe right away. Like is the fact that you can't say, I mean, I don't know. This is kind of a weird thing to go, a weird rabbit hole to go down. But is the fact that you like can't get straight answers about Tiananmen Square going to impact which hotel or apartment room you book on Airbnb, that would be weird. Well, maybe feng shui, I say this with the Taiwanese mother-in-law,

40:09Ranjan Roy:could start injecting itself into Airbnb successfully. Maybe that would be good for everybody. Exactly. So maybe this is what we're both arguing for.

40:19Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Okay. That form of soft power, I'm for. All right, let's go to break. We'll go to break and come back and talk a little bit about big tech earnings and prediction markets right after this. Most leaders know how work is supposed to happen, but when it comes to how it actually gets done day to day across tools, teams and handoffs, they're mostly guessing. That's exactly the problem Scribe Optimize was built to solve. Trusted by over 80 ,000 enterprises, including nearly half of the Fortune 500, it gives leaders a live view into how work is really happening across approved business apps without interviews, manual process mapping or extra effort from the team.

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43:13Big Technology Podcast Hosts:If you're building something tech first, don't settle. Secure your .tech domain from any registrar of your choice and make your positioning obvious from day one. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition. Just to continue going on with my conversation or my point here about AI consumer, if you look at the earnings that came in this week, if you were a cloud company, you were very happy. If you were building AI consumer apps or you were building for consumers, you were either not happy or you were thrilled that you didn't invest a lot into AI. So let's just break it down. This is from CNBC.

43:53Big Technology Podcast Hosts:You look at Google Cloud, Google Cloud grew 63%, $20 billion. This is by far the strongest growth rate for any period since Google started breaking out cloud results in 2020. That's massive. AWS, by the way, stuck in the 17, 18 % growth rate range for the past few years, grew 28%. Microsoft grew 40%. Azure. If you are providing the AI infrastructure for this enterprise build out, you are doing really well. What do you think about this, Ronjan?

44:30Ranjan Roy:I mean, the numbers are insane. 63 % at that scale. I mean, and I guess it reflects, this is like a public company earning breakout that kind of tells the anthropic story as well that we keep hearing about through fuzzy ARR numbers. Here we have a clear 63 % growth to$20 billion in a quarter for Google Cloud is nuts. Like I think, yeah, it's, I feel the, will there be demand or are we over building capacity? It seems like that question has been answered. Do you see any holes in that story?

45:09Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Yeah. So here's a tweet from Gary Marcus. Sheer insanity, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta collectively are spending more money than the Manhattan Project every single month, more than 12x the Manhattan Project every year. And what do they have to show for it? None are making major profits on AI. None has a technical moat. A massive price war is inevitable. A few of their customers are seeing major returns on investment. Greatest capital misallocation in history. I mean, here's the question. Is what these cloud services divisions are seeing this big, massive bump in revenue just downstream of the major amounts of money that the Anthropics and the OpenAI are raising and sort of not quite sustainable without those big fundraising.

45:58Big Technology Podcast Hosts:And by the way, big fundraising moments. And by the way, a lot of that fundraising is coming from them. What do you think?

46:03Ranjan Roy:Okay, I like your circular funding. And again, and actually a lot of that funding is in the form of cloud credits often that is recognized as revenue.

46:13Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I'm not saying that's 100 % sure what's happening, but maybe.

46:16Ranjan Roy:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So on one side, I feel like, again, if you listen regularly, you know I can be very skeptical and will OpenAI or Anthropic have a successful IPO? I'm not sure. I feel like Gary Marcus and Ed Citron and them, I wish they just said, okay, something positive or impressive has happened.

46:41Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Like not everything. Gary has to a degree. He did say that Claude Code is a combination of neurosymbolic systems and machine learning.

46:51Ranjan Roy:Which is fair, which is fair. Like LLMs on their own without a harness, without a product, without like all of this. Okay, all right. At least Gary's recognizing it. I do think the investment in the infrastructure side, it's interesting because maybe the one argument against this is obvious that the demand is there and they got to keep building is maybe if I take what he's saying and extrapolate a bit, is the idea that the economics of how they're investing are flawed. that the building out assuming constant price at today's growth and today's revenue, the fact that it will scale linearly or exponentially like that, maybe it's true that as costs come down, the amount they've invested if DeepSeek v4 and Quen and others and people are using open source and the actual cost goes down dramatically, then it could be pretty bad capital allocation.

47:54Ranjan Roy:Right.

47:55Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I mean, I think we can't, even though the use cases are there, which they are, right? And even though this won't go to zero, we cannot discount the fact that there could be a collapse here because of the very factors that Marcus is pointing out.

48:12Ranjan Roy:Yeah, I think, okay, I'll say, and it's true. No one understands the economics of any of these businesses right now. Like what is a true margin? Again, we've seen it with Anthropic that just that insane spectacular growth, the pushback on price after 4.7 came out and recognizing that a lot of it is subsidized anyways. So what are the expenses to Anthropic? will eventually have a more clear picture of. And then how all that relates to the infrastructure side. I guess it's fair. What is an average margin for an AI business? No one knows yet.

48:58Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Exactly. So that is something that, I don't know, I think we need to keep coming back to on this show. At first it was like, is this technology going to work? The technology is working. and the question is like these business decisions that are being made are there's no other way to really describe them than YOLO decisions right nobody knows what's going to happen here the demand is coming in but it's a brand new category there's bumps in the road and we could end up seeing a a price collapse I also actually when you say YOLO it kind of makes me think like

49:35Ranjan Roy:the executives, the CEOs of these companies are all in the same circle, which makes this interesting too. So when everyone around you that you have known, respected, hated, that is your basically social circle or professional circle, your closest LinkedIn connections is saying the same thing, it's going to exacerbate how you think. Like, yeah, it is interesting to me. And the Musk-Altman trial reminds us this is a very, very small group of people that have known each other, competed against each other. I mean, you know, had spats with each other. Like, remember when Zuckerberg and Musk, the cage match?

50:24Ranjan Roy:Like, all types of interactions. And they're all speaking, they're all thinking the same exact thing. maybe that's another reason everyone could be wrong.

50:35Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Well, that's sort of what makes what Apple has done, even though Apple did try to make this happen, which has made what Apple's done quite impressive that they decide, hey, we don't want to spend on foundational models. I'm kind of going 180 on Apple, honestly. Let me just say, they had iPhone sales grow 21.7%. They don't have AI on the iPhone. Siri sucks. is just the counterpoint to what we've been saying. They had quarterly sales of$111 billion. I think I foreshadowed it earlier by saying, in consumer, you're probably unhappy if you spent a lot or you're happy if you didn't spend anything. And when I said that second part, I was referencing Apple.

51:18Ranjan Roy:I mean, if their ineptitude and incompetence and God, do I hate Siri, but if that ends up helping them in the long run, because by sheer virtue of incompetence, they did not go all in on building their own models and investing in AI infrastructure. And that ends up being the right decision. God bless John Ternus and his reign. Because I mean.

51:49Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Could happen. I mean, conventional wisdom now is like, oh, Apple, you did a good thing. And now you're selling your Mac minis. By the way, in the earnings call, they talked about how Mac Mini has become an important part of the AI agent infrastructure. And they've also talked about how the new Siri is coming this year. So you might end up getting the best of both worlds.

52:09Ranjan Roy:I believe it when I see it.

52:12Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Honestly, if they do this, I will take back many of the negative things I've said about Tim Cook.

52:18Ranjan Roy:Actually, I'm going to say something positive about Siri today. Do you know Alexa Plus cannot translate into Chinese? My wife was asking, and we actually have an Alexa Plus and Siri both kind of like next to each other. And then she turned around and asked Siri, and Siri was able to translate something into Chinese. So Siri's got something. I guess it's Alexa Plus, not the other leading ones. But Siri won one battle. Okay.

52:46Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Well, that is probably more than it's won in any time in recent history. So we got to give one to Siri. Man, Apple. Again, don't doubt Apple. I think that's something I'm learning. All right. Let's end today talking a little bit. We have some prediction market news. This is a recurring theme that comes up on the show about the prediction markets. And we have a story, Rantan, you can take us away, about senators banning themselves from prediction market trading.

53:13Ranjan Roy:The U.S. Senate unanimously, how rarely do we see something along bipartisan lines barring senators from trading on prediction markets? And obviously, Calci and Polly market. I mean, we apparently, it was a few weeks ago, Calci said it suspended one U.S. Senate candidate and two candidates for the House of Representatives for political insider trading on their own campaigns. There was this crazy story where a U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant actually was charged with using classified information around the Maduro capture that he was part of that mission to bet on, which is just like insane still to me and like the most dystopian thing imaginable.

53:58Ranjan Roy:But it's nice to see the U.S. Senate actually restricting themselves from doing something absurd. absurd.

54:07Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Yeah, no, I think that there is a growing recognition that some of the prediction market activity can be very cancerous to a society, can be unfair to voters, sorry, to gamblers, which is like, I guess they should know better. Yeah, voters, no one cares about. Yeah, but well, I mean, on the other hand, you could say, well, they're actually like more accurate now. So what do you think about that?

54:34Ranjan Roy:Where do you stand on that? So I've seen that argument and kind of like the companies themselves almost use that argument that if a small number of people are kind of driving the market in the actual accurate direction, using insider information, that makes the market more accurate.

54:53Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Which is true, but it doesn't make me like this any better and it also rigs it against everybody else and i think it is i think if you look at it on a whole there is a serious you know this stuff has only recently been legalized and it's kind of taken as uh normal today uh and i say this as someone who likes to put like a couple dollars on the game when i'm watching uh anything on uh and put put it on um like the fan duel odds uh but but you know there there is without a doubt a lot of healthy activity here but also a lot of extremely cancerous activity here. And it's almost like you're seeing a society that can't help itself.

55:31Big Technology Podcast Hosts:So let me tell you one story before we leave. There's this quarterback in college football at Texas Tech. His name is Brendan Sorsby. He just entered a gambling addiction program for sports betting that could end his college career. This is according to Matt Schick from ESPN. And then Schick posts a article from CBS Sports about the fact that he could miss the season. This is the second paragraph of that article. And this really annoys me. Texas Tech was an overwhelming favorite to repeat as Big 12 champions after acquiring Sorsby this offseason, but now has moved to an even money at plus 100 via FanDuel Sportsbook after Monday's news.

56:15Big Technology Podcast Hosts:The Red Raiders' projected win total has also decreased, going from 11.5 at opening to 10.5 victories, and Sorsby's no longer on FanDuel's Heisman odds list after opening at plus 2 ,500 just outside of the top 10. CBS, allow me to address you for a moment. You are writing an article about a quarterback with a serious gambling addiction problem that may cost him a season in the NCAA and potentially send him right to the pros where his life may be destroyed because his draft standing will not be anywhere close to where it was before. Maybe destroyed is too strong, but it won't be what it was before.

56:54Big Technology Podcast Hosts:You have no less than three mentions of the odds movement from said person's life-destroying activity. With hyperlinks directly out to those exact bets. To those bets. Now, I don't say this lightly. Get a fucking grip, CBS Sports. Don't do this. This is just a, you know, it is a, it propels people into the situations that Sorsby finds himself. And I don't understand how we have a society who is looking at this and saying, we have no problem here. I, this is disgusting.

57:32Ranjan Roy:This is crazy. Like actually, this is a good call out for, this is the most kind of like weird example of like, obviously, like how much sports sites have been incorporating odds into even just like TV broadcasting into every, like their websites, apps, everything. but yeah that is quite do you think someone even do you think this is just ai generated and the logic around all these like incorporating bets is already built into the cms and like or do you think they someone actually sat down and was like i'm going to do this or do you think someone had to do it and actually felt sick to their stomach which of those three oh god i mean i

58:18Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I don't know which one would be better, to be honest. Someone's got to get on the phone with Barry Weiss and say, you know, don't do this, please. I mean, out of all their problems.

58:31Ranjan Roy:This is a pretty bad one, though. I'm going to do it.

58:33Big Technology Podcast Hosts:I'm writing a letter to the editor. I'm going to do it. I'm doing it. Dear Barry, first time caller, long time listener. Listen, we got to talk about CBS Sports. Well, I guess we will end on that uplifting note, Ron John. I mean, Lord Almighty. I didn't think we could get more depressing than OpenAI's missed billion user number, but I think we found it here.

58:56Ranjan Roy:I think generative AI is showing up in consumer experiences. There we go.

59:02Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Now, excuse me while I put a poly market bet on when OpenAI will announce that number.

59:07Ranjan Roy:Yeah.

59:08Big Technology Podcast Hosts:Just kidding. I don't do that. All right, everybody. Thank you for listening, Rajan. Thanks for being here again.

59:13Ranjan Roy:Have a good week. See you next week.

59:15Big Technology Podcast Hosts:All right, everybody. See you next week, and we will be back next time on Big Technology Podcast. What's up? It's your girl Jess Hilarious, co-host of The Breakfast Club, and now author and narrator of Till Death Do We Parent, my audiobook about the challenges of creating a healthy co-parenting relationship and lessons learned on life's journey. Till Death Do We Parent is available on Spotify or wherever audiobooks are sold.

59:41Ranjan Roy:It's Mushrooms with me, Maddie Matheson. You know what's better than thinking about dinner too hard? not stop that and just choose mushrooms. Five minutes done. Dinner's that easy and you feel like a genius. It's not magic, it's mushrooms. Stop stressing at mushroomcouncil.com