Predicting AI’s Next Advances — With Suhail Doshi

26:58And that's where I sort of say, you know, sometimes I'll be surprised by what an AI image generation engine will, will, will create. But oftentimes it's like, yeah, that sounds right. Or that's close enough. Let's put it in the top of the story. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's interesting. Humans, human graphics designers are also kind of overfit, right? They have their own particular style. Like when, anytime I've reached out to a graphics designer, sometimes they'll say, Hey, why did you reach out to me? Like, what did you like that I did or an interior designer or whoever. Right. Um, so they all have their style.

27:29They're kind of like less rope. These human human graphics designers are somewhat like less robust designers in some sense, like they are very skewed to something and then you pick them. Um, and that's cool because they can lead to brandable things. The models, if you prompt them simply, then they will, they will be an average style, an average style that represents something you will, you will probably get at this point, you will get something that is beautiful, but it may not be, it might not be like stretched. It might not be headed in a, in a stylistic direction because everybody uses it. Then it feels kind of fatigued.

28:01It's like a, you know what I call it? I internally, I call this pop. It's like pop art. Yeah. There's pop music, top 40 music. And then you like, like growls and noises and sounds. Right. But then there's pop music. There's like Justin Bieber, that kind of thing. what you're getting from the image models is pop and people love pop we know that love top 40 but it's hard to market pop all the time because it gets tiring so yeah and in this case you know it is definitely the models are capable it's just you have to have like this perfect alchemy of figuring out the right prompt engineering but then here's then that's where it gets interesting then because then let's say okay you know i like um like art in the style of a specific graphic contemporary graphic designer yeah and let's say the model's trained on that art and i say all right you know create a image of like a robot playing tennis in the style of you know person why sure but then you get into some really tricky questions because we have to figure out a way to either compensate these people because it's like, it really becomes like some sort of intellectual property theft.

29:14So I'm curious, like you're running a company that does image generation. So how do you think about this? Oh yeah. Super, super interesting issue and really complex. You know, these days we don't really, we're not really seeing customers, you know, wholesale be like, I want it in this person's, this one person's name, you know? which is good i think it's a good thing you know greg greg rukowski is someone that i think about in this case because a lot of people add that person's name he makes really amazing fantasy art that on deviant r and maybe he's helped out some video game studios and stuff i'm not sure but um uh but his name is kind of quintessential in this debate and um you know what the reason why people are it's important to understand the reason why people are doing it people aren't doing it because they're trying to copy Greg Kowski.

30:06They're doing it as a shortcut to get somewhere. Because if you take an image from Robert Kowski, it's not easy to articulate. In fact, I mean, there's a reason why there's a phrase called, you know, picture speaks a thousand words. It's very hard to describe his art completely. We can come up with some words, but it's a, it's a vibe, it's a style. And so people are using it as a shortcut. And there's other people like HR Geiger, who does like kind of more eerie, you know, worst type stuff. I've learned about a lot of artists because of how people are prompting. There's a lot. And there's no easy way around this.

30:42But I think that this thing is going to go away in the next year, this year. I mean, we're working on something. I can't talk about it exactly right now. But I think this idea is that users are doing this because it's a shortcut to get to a very difficult to describe style. And what they really want is to say, I like this. Like I want to reference this. I want to reference, actually want to reference five of these different things and get to this, get to an image. Because actually with graphics and a lot of, a lot of images and art, what's happening is like, it's like remixing a lot of things.

31:17Like even I, because I make music, I can kind of relate to it because it's sort of like, you know, if your inspiration is Kanye West and then your other inspiration is, you know, Dr. Dre. and then your other inspiration is, you know, Six who produces music for Logic and you want to combine like the drum rhythms of this person and the instrumentals of this person and the lyrics of this person, did you copy them? I mean, all of these people were inspired by people. And so I think in this case, people are just feeling inspired, but they're using a shortcut. So the question is, how do we get them away from just copying actual Greg Wachowski?

31:51Because that's definitely the wrong thing. We definitely don't want that in the world. Nobody should be copying Kanye. you know, wholesale. That's bad too. Right. But you just kind of, it's difficult to eliminate the prompts completely. Like, let's say you did have audio generation, you know, and you could say, write me a song about, you know, I don't know, my girlfriend in the, you know, style of Kanye West. I don't know why you'd want to do that, but you could. And, you know, you sort of get into those issues. You do. Yeah, you definitely do. But I don't think, I don't think that's people's true intent.

32:22Let me ask you this. Do you think that the artists that are, whose work is being trained on should be compensated? I think we need to find some solution for them. Yeah. You know, we do, we do a small, you know, it's not clear, like, you know, every time you generate an image, they get like, you know, some Spotify streaming payment, you know, 100, 1 ,000th of a penny. I don't think anyone's going to be happy in that circumstance. Right. But, you know, we, we try to do something small, small. We don't, we don't think this is like solution. We don't think this is enough of a remedy per se by any means as a stretch of imagination but one thing we do that nobody seems to else to do is uh we actually look back to a lot of these artists yeah when an image gets generated we say additional credit Greg Warkowski and it links directly back to his DeviantArt page so that people can find him learn about him pay him donate to him whatever they want right we even we even link back to like Wikipedia artists that you know are no longer there are artists that are on wikipedia they're not living just so people understand what they're doing um yeah i think that's a good start okay so let me let me ask you this um you're like you're you're doing you're doing an image generation startup you're very focused like you'll tweet often about how it's so it's so important to stay focused and i do think there's something to be said for that because there's so many other companies that are just kind of going all over the place um do you regret not doing video though, because what we've seen out of OpenAI Sora and others is just kind of, you know, jaw dropping.

33:51It's pretty amazing. So is that something that now you think you should have done? I mean, it's too soon to tell. You have to ask me in a year to find out if I regret it, right? Right now, you know, I don't have any regret. It's funny. Where we are with video is kind of where we were with images. And I don't know if people remember, but about two years ago, Dali came out, Dali 2 came out in April and the world was amazed. Totally amazed. But if anyone goes, looks at a Dali 2 image today. Those images are awful. Horrendous images. You would laugh. Right. So when we see something like Sora come out, you know, I have this belief.

34:37I've been having this personal reaction or a moment with all of this stuff, which is that my baseline for quality instantly resets. Like 15 minutes after the technology comes out, I'm just kind of like, anything worse than this is unacceptable. And my feeling is that we're only at the very beginning of video. And the truth is, if you could probably go talk to real video people, they'll be like, yeah, this is not good enough. This is definitely, I can't use this. People are going to have a lot of fun doing it. but the utility is probably not there yet. It's probably, we're really just at the beginning, I think for video.

35:13So I think my feeling is my bet to people, you know, sort of listening is that in a year we will think, you know, we'll think something like Sora was not even close. Right. Yeah, it is amazing. I mean, that transition, you're, you talked about from Dolly two to Dolly three. I mean, even going from Dolly two to mid journey, I was just like, Like I'll never type the word Dolly in a Google search ever again. I don't want to get anywhere close to it. And it's amazing. I think you've pointed this out, how fast that we're moving, that these jaw-dropping breakthroughs become obsolete or like kind of looked at as unimpressive a few months later.

35:51That's the speed that this stuff is moving at. Totally. And I think with, you know, so that's video. So I don't have any worries about video because I think video is still early. Like there's still maybe a moment where we can do video. There's nothing. Right. Seems like you'd be able to somewhat easily take what you've learned with images and go to video. Easy might be you're underrating it, but. Yeah, I think, you know, without saying too much, I feel like probably where we're headed with images is not going to be like, it's not going to be like a completely, we throw every, we have to restart and throw everything away to go do video.

36:23You know, to put it simply. I mean, we were trying to work to a unified vision model that incorporate 3D and video and everything related to pixels into a single model. that's capable of everything. But I think for now, we're just, we're trying to start with something that's narrow and sharp that we think is deeply under-invested in. Right. I still think that images have a ways to go. Yeah. Let me ask you something about video before we go to break. Because there's a debate that I've been trying to wrap my head around, which is kind of this debate between Jan LeCun who built this thing called VJEPA, right?

36:57Which will black out a portion of a video And then the model with its understanding of the world will basically fill in what it should have been. So, you know, you have a guitar and someone seems to be playing it, black out the hand, and the model will create the hand and the strings, showing that it has an understanding of the real world. They say that that's not generative, that that's actual real world understanding. And then on the other side, you have OpenAI that's created Sora. And it's this pretty amazing thing where clearly this model understands the physics of what's happening. Because the pirate ships are sloshing around in a cup of coffee ocean.

37:38And it's like, oh, they understand that the ships belong in the ocean. And this is the way the ocean moves. And this is the way the ships should interact with the water. It's so impressive. And it seems like it also understands the world. But you ask the meta folks and they would say that actually that process of generating these videos is actually limited and doesn't achieve what the AI research community is trying to achieve. What do you think? Yeah, I think that, you know, I haven't studied Jan's BJEPA thing too deeply, but I get the gist of it. I mean, I would posit this to you. Are you sure it understands physics?

38:22No. Right? Because - Actually, let me stand on the side of that it does, and then you can sort of take this argument down. I mean, come on, like, boats in the water, the water's coffee, you know? Right. All right, that's my argument. What do you have to say? Well, I mean, it's not too difficult to refute in part because, like, just imagine that there's video. And the video represents the physics of a different world like Mars, right? And even though there are natural physics to Mars, they don't necessarily represent the physics of Earth. They represent some physics. It just happens to not be Earth.

39:02And so I would say you could just pull that thread a little bit longer and just say, actually, what it's really doing is it's representing the physics it understands and the videos it's being trained on, which could be incorrect physics. It understands what it's being trained on. It's kind of the main thrust of my point. And that to a human, to us, it looks like physics. It's imitating physics. But it's not necessarily imitating correct physics. So it's really mimicking an understanding of its training data. And likely, and if there's any training data that's like cool CG or like the matrix where So Neo's like bent, you know, on his back.

39:41That's not real physics of our world, but it models its training data. And I think that that's totally fine though, for a tool that's meant for creativity, that's acceptable. But can we really say that it has learned physics? I can't say that. I don't think we can, not yet. You know, maybe lighting, but even the videos that have lighting could have incorrect lighting. Right. Yeah. It is interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I think that the folks that I speak with in the AI community are really divided on this. Like we had Brian Canizaro from NVIDIA a little bit back. He runs applied machine learning there.

40:15And he's like implying some metaphysical capabilities in these large language models. Whereas like others would say that it's just predicting the next word. And this could be the same thing. We're like, we're still so early on and still trying to figure out like what's happening in these advances that it's still an open question. Or maybe I'm just giving the people who disagree. with you too much credit. I just, but I, I, I took like a very different argument than like two different factions. Yeah. Okay. I pause it. I take the argument that it doesn't, I just like, I don't think it matters. Right.

40:48Like at the end of the day, we are making, we are making these models could do it or could not, but either way, what matters is what utility it brings to humanity. And if what it brings is this amazing, you know, creative tool to create super slow motion action shots for the next Matrix movie, that's fine. And if it can truly model physics in the real world because we want to simulate what might happen with self-driving cars at a faster speed than actually having the cars be out in the world, so be it. To me, it doesn't matter. It's kind of irrelevant. What matters more is its value to us as humans.

41:26And I think we're a little too deep on a philosophical level about whether it's this or that. the reason why i asked the philosophy questions is that they matter from my perspective in terms of like what you can do next like if it does understand physics then you can imagine or anticipate that it will be able to do more than if it doesn't but it's it's definitely interesting i guess i'm trying to say that it can do both right no no anything is really like the options are kind of wide open definitely okay let's take a break i want to when we come back i want to do a quick lightning round through the tech giants and also talk a little bit about uh well one of the tech giants to stay at Google.

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44:24And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast. We're here with Suhail Doshi. He's the CEO and founder of Playground. We talked a little bit about image generation in the beginning. In the time we have left, let's go rather quickly through the tech giants. I'll start with Google because Google's been sort of like the punching bag of the AI community for a while. Suhail, you even had a tweet that says, Google's lost its way. It's the best company to compete with. Even investors have stopped asking, what if Google does it? I mean, Google did just start doing image generation. They had to shut it down.

44:59What is happening there? Oh, man. I wish, you know, obviously I only have a slight preview into what's going on at Google. But my guess as to what feels like is happening is they are in a significant race where either investors or customers believe that by losing this race, it's an existential issue. Time will tell, however. And Google's rushing to be a strong leader in that race. And they have to contend with a significant complex bureaucracy that is not really well attuned for the velocity that AI is running at right now. so it's organizational. I've wondered how much of it is because Google sees a threat to search over time if it pushes the status quo forward too quickly.

45:58And right before we were talking, I was on CNBC talking about the state of Google, and I was absolutely floored by one of the numbers that Deidre Brosa, who's an anchor there, brought up, which is that I think Gartner believes that by 2026, we will be doing 26 % less searches than we are today. Our search engines will have 26 % less traffic. I know you're connected with perplexity in some way. We just said Arav and Srinivas. I'm kind of floored by that number. I don't believe it. I think that search is going to continue to be a way that we use web navigation and AI search like perplexity will be more to satisfy curiosity and engage with different topics.

46:43What do you think about the stat? And what do you think about that argument that I'm making? I mean, I think there's a very high probability it is greater than that number in a shorter span of time. Whoa, for real? That will be doing even fewer? That search engines will have even less traffic than, or even an even greater decline than 25%. That's right. And that will happen before 2026. okay yeah that's right exactly because let's think about the model jump so far right we've got um we had dolly 2 in april two years ago look at the difference between that and in any cutting-edge model uh we can look at gpt3 which was four years ago um and now we have gpt4 gpt5 is probably slated imminently this year the jump from four to three was incredible and i don't and i think the The reason why I believe this, perhaps this very surprising thing, is because I don't think people quite internalize how big of a jump can be had still.

47:45We're still so at the beginning, the early phases of this thing, that it is moving faster than Moore's Law by a lot. and the biggest people right now are putting in huge quantities of money i think i already find it annoying to have to go to google and like run through a few links and then click and then back and then click and then back and then oh there's an ad here okay let me scroll down you know it's already it's i think humanity already can tell it's frustrating so if you were to if you were to go hmm this thing is already kind of inefficient somewhat frustrating in fact like i just want the answer.

48:25I don't want to have to find the answer. I think that's the problem these things are solving. And you look at the model jumps over the last three, four years, it doesn't seem surprising that almost all the traffic would shift to something that is... I mean, Google has very low switching costs. I mean, right now it happens to be integrated well in the browser. right it happens to be um uh but actually the funny thing about google is like it has slightly less lock-in and ease on mobile in most consumer traffic desktop is shrinking for consumer while mobile's dramatically increasing many times yeah we do have android we do have android but but we're talking about you know whether google search matters like google could make a model that matters and is relevant.

49:14But it still might spell the end of its search business. So my general feeling about this is that the UX of something like Perplexity, we've already figured out, is like a nice UX. And you combine that with another model jump, like GPT-5 or 6, it doesn't seem that crazy to me that we end this desire of going to Google and then scrolling through bootlinks and clicking on each of them. Is your default search engine Google or something else? oh certainly it's google but i've already but but i've already shifted so much it's not my first go-to right right unless i want to go to a very specific site i mean people going to their address bar inside of a browser or phone to search a website that they're trying to go to is just they're not really using google's value they're just you know right it's like my you know my dad used to type in cnn.com into google and you could just type it in the address bar it's not a real search.

50:08Yeah. Right. I don't, I already think it's not really a great go-to. Interesting. Okay. Another thing that you said, let's go to Meta. You said the only thing scarier than Satya is Mark Zuckerberg taking AI seriously. Unpack that. Well, I feel like Mark has been very focused on VR because he's trying to do something that I think, you know, just regardless of your view of whether VR is going to succeed or not, it's ambitious if he succeeds. And I think he's like a very relentless entrepreneur and founder. So, and he's one of the few entrepreneurs and founders that are like running a trillion dollar plus company.

50:45Not that many left. So I feel, you know, I somewhat feel like - It's him and Jensen, I think. Yeah. And he's very young still. So I think that, you know, for him to take AI, and the thing about Meta is it is super set up to succeed at this. They have the worlds, they're like the first, second, biggest research lab. they are they have an immense quantity of compute that's only growing i mean i think he talked about having 350 000 h100s by the end of the year or something like that yeah and they're gonna have total 650 000 either uh gpu like um equivalents by i think the end of the year which is crazy he's got an extremely ambitious uh ai research leader that's a lot of gpus it's a lot how many do you guys have uh no not anymore close to that i mean more than a thousand not more than a thousand right so it's just not yet the crazy i mean speaking with service now also which is their 150 billion 160 billion public company like they wouldn't say that they have in the thousands in an interview that i did with them so to have 600 000 isn't it's crazy Yeah, I just think that you combine founder with relentless ambition, with compute, with the best talent.

52:05To me, it's a recipe that is hard. And then you compare that with Google, it feels a little like, to me, it feels like they're a force to be reckoned with in the next few years. Okay, let's talk about NVIDIA. Speaking of Jensen, I want to test an assumption here. I recently have found out that they basically are the software that they sell along with their chips is core to training AI models. And that makes switching away a lot more difficult. Is that something that you're finding in your business? That you're using the chips and the software to train models and you'd have a hard time switching to like an AMD?

52:45Yeah, the software is called CUDA and it's like their platform for doing all kinds of these. It's their way of interfacing with their GPUs. And so, you know, it has lock in in the sense that there's like a huge developer community around it, just like x86 or something like that. You know, maybe there's, you know, software that's really tuned and optimized for x86. So that's what causes people to kind of stay on it. With CUDA, it's not CUDA that's keeping, I think, keeping a lot of us. It's actually that there is nothing really dramatically better than NVIDIA's GPUs. And so if there's nothing dramatically better, then the reality is the cost for training and inference are so high at companies at scale that CUDA is not a big reason why they're going to stay there.

53:32It's going to come down to compute costs. And so if there were somebody that were really driving the costs down for the rest of us, we would all flip because it would be worth it. So to me, it's not really, it's not just a function of CUDA. I think that does, that is true to some extent. But I think for the big companies or anyone spending a lot of money, we all want there to be someone that can compete with NVIDIA because one of the problems with NVIDIA was that they released their H100, but they didn't really reduce its cost. you know it is it's two is you know 1.9x faster but 2x costlier uh and um and it technically reduces your cost because you're getting more gpu compute per node like you have a server server costs finite amount now you can put more of the gpu dense compute per node so your costs go down but they didn't really price their gpus lower so that's somewhat disappointing because it would have been nice if it was the same price, but double the compute, obviously.

54:33So NVIDIA knows what they have. Right. And so what about a company like Amazon? They're obviously developing their own chip. They're making models available off the shelf. People are using AWS compute, I imagine, to run models. What's your perspective on Amazon's place here? I mean, they also have Alexa, which is like, you know, a sleeping giant. Yeah, I mean, I think AWS has significantly missed the mark actually on this. I think that Azure and GCP are doing Azure better than GCP, better than AWS. AWS is interesting. We were looking for compute last year and AWS wanted to charge us five times more for the same GPU than 10 different providers all around them.

55:24Wow. Would you stop at a gas station? That was, that costs you five times more than the one that's right next to it. I would speed buy it, throw an egg. Right. And, and that's kind of what, and, you know, I think what's happening there is that, I mean, this is my insights. So I hope it's helpful for someone, but my guess is that they have a scarce stockpile of GPUs and they know that they can price those GPUs internally. they can price them to their internal customers at that price and the customers will buy it because the customers can't go anywhere else you know maybe maybe because they're not allowed to in their company so then they can charge five times more and that's what the sales reps are doing but if you are a new customer we have choices you're not doing that you're not going to do that but the sales reps will do it because it helps them reach you know quota that's crazy so i think there's a short term there's a sort of short it kind of feels like ever since Andy Jassy became CEO, AWS has turned very short-term minded about how it's going to earn revenue.

56:23And this is obviously bad because anyone that knows anything about startups knows that the biggest companies are yet to be built, but they're definitely going to not be running on AWS if their compute is five times more expensive. Wow. Yeah, that's crazy. And I wonder what that means for startups like Anthropic that have billions of funding from Amazon and are going there. that might be priced at 3.5x. Exactly. Let's talk Apple real quick. I wonder what they're going to do with AI. I mean, they're hinting that they're going to do something at WWDC. It's like, they're going to make a supercharged Siri or, you know, take the search bar away from Google and then give up on all that money they're getting.

57:05They have some incumbency disadvantage, don't they? Because if they really push hard on AI to, you know, take up more room and the operating system, then they can crowd out some of the advantages that they have today. Yeah, I think Apple is in a really good position because their culture is already seemingly like one where they wait and see. And their advantages are not easily eroded because they own the hardware platform and all the network effects that are associated with that. So Apple seems like they're in a really healthy position to wait and see and build the best things, not just build kind of like aimlessly.

57:47Google feels like it's just trying to build everything. They're building ImageGen and Gemini and the coding and they're building an IDE and then they're like, ask all the PMs clearly to like integrate it this week into like every imaginable product. I opened Gmail, opened Docs, I opened so many different random Google things and they're all trying to convince me to use AI. And I think Apple is super well positioned to just let Google do all those experiments and then just pluck the ones that are the best ones and use its massive install base and distribution power to deliver an amazing experience, not a rushed one.

58:25So I think Apple is behind, but I think that they are often okay being behind and they execute very well kind of from behind because they find ways to leap. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's talk lastly about Microsoft and OpenAI. You know, you gave a pretty strong statement about Amazon. I'm curious what you would think, what you think about the current offering from those companies. I mean, obviously you're competing with them on the image gen front. and also just like from your sense do you think that the open ai situation is stable right now or is or there are going to be more fireworks on the governance side there you know i think that i think that the folks at open ai really only care about one thing they and i think people don't fully internalize this because it seems it seems a little too crazy It seems like sometimes when you read a company's mission, you're like, whatever.

59:25But I think that Sam is genuinely focused on AGI and attaining that. And I think he does not care about graphics and video necessarily. I think those are stepping stones and that helps research get to the next point. But I think he is very focused on that. And so I think broadly, we don't tend to worry about that because we're pouring all of our energy into graphics. I can't say much about Microsoft, but I can just say that I genuinely believe that OpenAI is trying to pursue that effort. I can't tell whether that'll be three years from now or 30 years from now, though. Yeah. In terms of what Microsoft's doing.

1:00:10Yeah. I don't know. I'm not sure. But brilliant play by Satya. Either way. Yeah. Yeah. No matter what happens. To be the most valuable company in the world. But they seem like they're the tech giant that's in the best position right now, which is wild, given where they were like seven years ago, eight years ago. And also just very surprising because it's like if they had not done that, they would have been maybe in the worst position. Totally. I mean, being aggressive sometimes, it matters. They've learned their lesson, right? They sat by and tried to ride Windows for as long as they could. And then people were like, yeah, we don't want to use desktop operating systems anymore.

1:00:47And they're like, oh, that's interesting. Okay. And the person that led that shift from one era of computing to another was Satya in the server and tools division. So here he goes again. Yeah, you know, he is doing something that I find that's even like slightly even more brilliant, which is not just the open AI deal. But if you observe very carefully, he is actually partnering with everybody. He is bringing all the models into Azure. Right. And he's doing it very methodically. And I think that he is really setting up Azure to leap and be a lot more competitive. So I actually think that he's doing a really good job kind of playing every field.

1:01:37Yeah. And positioning himself kind of in the middle, positioning Microsoft, sorry, kind of in the middle of all that. So, you know, game recognized game, Satya. Totally. All right. Just to end, I want to say that I actually reached out to you initially when you had a tweet advising founders that, you know, if you're going to speak with a journalist, speak with someone who's independent. And I certainly am independent and I DM'd you and I was like, so, and you lived up to your words. So I appreciate that. And I'd also say that like these conversations are super valuable. and I think that speaking with journalists inside, we're probably not going to agree on this one, so it could be a different conversation, but speaking with journalists inside some of the corporate media, I don't think they're all out to get tech founders, especially off the record conversations, sort of like if there's a divide between founders and reporters, then the misunderstandings will just grow.

1:02:39But anyway, that's just my piece. So I appreciate you being here though, but go ahead yeah yeah i think that's sort of the the real issue is not that you know the individual reporter is a bad person yeah i think they're all like well-meaning when well-intentioned so when you if we have conversations with them right if you have a conversation over drinks or dinner whatever they're obviously good people a good good well-meaning people working hard that's not so much the issue that a lot of us uh that you know that basically think that you should largely stop talking to the institutional media have.

1:03:11It's not that we think they're bad. It's that we think that their institutions are bad and their institutions create incentives that create bad situations. What is the cause? I think we should also be a little bit curious, what is the cause that causes a reporter to write a story and then email you and say, do you have a comment? And then publish the story one hour later. What is the cause for that? You know, is that person a bad person? Probably not. That person is under some kind of deadline or incentive or pressure that is causing this thing. And this particular, I pick on this instance because it's a very obvious one that everybody knows is bad, is not well, you know, that has really bad implications.

1:04:02They're not giving founders to respond to something. And it's happened to a lot of my friends, a lot of other people talk about this. So, you know, I think that's the real issue. And that's why, you know, you could just as well work at, you know, any of these media institutions, but the fact that you're independent causes your incentives and your desires of what you want to write and what you want to do to be totally different. And the reporters that used to work at some of these institutions that have struck it out on their own, like you, you can see it all get cleaned up. Right. They, they completely change what they write, uh, what their beats are and how they work and interact with other people in the world.

1:04:43So I think it's like, it's a lot better, more factual, more interesting, um, reporting. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I obviously am competing against like the broader media ecosystem. Um, so I do hear you on that front. Anyway, it's one, it's something that we could talk about forever. It is good to hear your perspective on it. And once again, I appreciate that you, um, you put something out there in the world. And then when I was like, all right, let's talk, you said, yes. So I hope this isn't the last time I hope to have you back. And so thrilled that you were able to come on and join and talk about all the new stuff that you're working on in the broader industry.

1:05:16It's like, it's cool to be able to speak with someone who like you read their stuff on Twitter. And then like, you have a conversation like this goes longer than an hour and it could easily go to or more. So, uh, pretty The substance is there and I appreciate you being here. Thanks again, Tawil. Thank you. Thank you for having me. All right, everybody. Thank you for listening. We'll be back on Friday to break down the news as we do every week. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

1:05:49What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the Global Editorial Director of Wired. And I'm hosting our new podcast series, The Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that... That eats the internet. That turns it all off. Unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online, to the best of my ability.

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