Can California Regulate A.I.? + Silicon Valley’s Super Babies + System Update!

25:49And so their ask was basically whatever happens on AI regulation, it should happen at the federal level. And I think that's something that I support too. I think what we're talking about now is a world in which the federal government does not do anything about AI regulation. And so it's up to the states like California to do it instead. That's the world we live in. Well, let me end on which thing do you think made us safer from AI? The regulations that Governor Newsom signed into law in California over the past month, or the fact that people just keep leaving open AI all the time, leaving it in apparent disarray?

26:25I mean, look, I think that if you are a person who worries that AI is moving too quickly and you want it to slow down, you probably don't mind all of this drama that is going on inside the AI industry. Because I think probably one effect of that is that it does actually slow things down if you're constantly losing co-founders and research leads. And so maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it's the open AI people leaving. I think that that's true. I think that over the past year, it feels like the main innovation in AI in Silicon Valley has just been people leaving OpenAI to start AI companies. And there's just – it just takes time.

27:01It takes time to ramp those companies up and do your hiring and create your little wiki doc in Notion for everything. So anyways, Kevin, it's a fascinating discussion. I'm sure we'll have a lot more to say. But in the meantime, if you were going to make deep fakes, don't do it in California. When we come back, we're having a baby. Or at least we would if the technology was good enough. And it's not. But it's getting there. We'll talk about the latest infertility tech.

27:55Casey, we're going to talk today about something that has been a very hot topic in Silicon Valley recently, which is babies. Kevin, I don't know if I'm ready to have a baby with you. I'd really prefer to take it a little more slowly. We already have the podcast. That's true. That's our baby. No, we are talking today about fertility technology because this has become a big topic within the tech world. For years, there has been this conversation in the tech world about what's being called pro-natalism, which is this belief spread by Elon Musk and others that declining birth rates in the U.S. and elsewhere are a big threat to the future of civilization.

28:33And we should all be having way more children than we are. And people are sort of taking this banner in the tech industry and saying, well, maybe some technology could help us here. Yeah, well, and also just infertility is a huge problem for a lot of people, right? A lot of people want to have babies and cannot. You know, my boyfriend and I have been trying to get pregnant for many months now, just getting absolutely nowhere. So I'm excited that Silicon Valley is finally, you know, paying attention to this issue. Yeah. I mean, this has been an area where investors, tech founders, startups are just spending an inordinate amount of time recently.

29:07Investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into startups working on technology to help people conceive and have children. These are things like very specific types of genetic testing that can test a whole embryo's genome rather than just for a few sort of specific things. Sperm freezing and even sort of these longer-term moonshots like artificial wombs and something called IVG, which would basically allow you to make a gamete from non-reproductive cells to basically take some other cells from a body and use that to create a child. Which, among other things, would let same-sex couples create a trial that contains both in their DNA.

29:48So, you know, as we know, fertility and babies and birth rates, they are not just a topic of conversation in Silicon Valley. They are also playing a role in the presidential election as people debate, you know, what kinds of restrictions and laws there should be about women's reproductive rights and health. So to talk about this subject, I wanted to bring in Julia Black. Julia is a reporter for The Information, and she wrote a great piece a few months ago called Dawn of the Silicon Valley Super Baby, which was about sort of all this investment and energy going into fertility technology right now and what it would mean for the pronatalism movement and what it would mean for fertility as a whole.

30:28Let's bring her in.

30:34Julia Black, welcome to Hard Fork. Thank you so much for having me. I'm a big fan. Oh, thanks so much. So can you just start by telling us how you got interested in this world of fertility tech? Yeah, this started for me in a sort of unexpected way in 2022. I got a tip that kind of changed my life, which was that Elon Musk had more kids than the public realized, and some of them were with people who had not been previously disclosed. So I went out searching and found some secret twins that he'd had with one of his employees, Siobhan Zilis. And that just kind of sent me down this rabbit hole for the last couple years where I've learned about Silicon Valley's interest in fertility tech in particular.

31:17And then I've learned about some of the technologies that are coming out of that interest. And let's try to sketch out that interest a bit. So if you are a pro natalist, what is concerning to you about declining birth rates? So I think a lot of economists would agree that there is some concern around the fact that the majority of developed countries now are below what's called the replacement rate. And when you structure that into an economy, something happens that they call the flip demographic pyramid. So you've got more old people, fewer young people, and young people are the people who drive the economy, who are putting into Social Security, who are taking the jobs.

31:55And old people are more of a weight on society. So that's the general concern at its most basic. I think a lot of people take this in some pretty wacky and sometimes dangerous directions. The white supremacist movement has become particularly interested in these demographic shifts. And some people, I think, would argue that it's not just that we all need to have more babies, that certain types of people should be having more babies, which translates to white, educated, well-off people. Right. So there's like this very vanilla version of this, which is like having babies is good for the economy.

32:30It's good for economic growth. It's good to make sure that there are workers to take care of us as we age. And then there is a sort of more racist, more eugenics oriented version of it. And yeah, so it's a lot in here. Yeah, definitely. I think that this fertility tech as a field has gone from this totally ignored, underdeveloped realm of technology to something that's finally attracting investor interest. And yeah, it's also attracting some weird ideological interest. So there's a few different elements bundled up in there. Yeah, there was a quote in your piece that was sort of attributed to an anonymous meta-engineer who said something like, no one is having children naturally anymore.

33:15That's obviously not true. Some people are still having children naturally. But it did sort of give a sense of like how pervasive this has become in the Bay Area where we live and in the tech world more broadly. Totally. And, you know, the information where I write, our audience is all Silicon Valley all the time. So when you're talking about our small niche world, that's actually really true. And that's the reason we put that quote in the story, because it really kind of exemplified what we're hearing across the board, which is like this is like you know the way that a trendy purse like takes off within a certain niche group of people like fertility tech is taking off like these people are going to dinner parties they're telling their friends oh we use this new pre-implantation genetic testing service you got to try it and they're trying it and then they're telling their friends and it's like within this very small and non-representative community yeah it really has taken off yeah your piece made a a point that I hadn't seen before about the fact that crypto entrepreneurs, people who are interested in cryptocurrency, seem especially interested in fertility tech.

34:18Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, has invested in Orchid, one of these startups that is doing sort of embryo genetic screening. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has also invested in Orchid. So what is the crypto fertility connection? Oh, my gosh, this has been like such a head scratcher and obsession of mine, and I've been trying to figure that out. The best understanding I can come to is that the crypto world is also really interested in something called decentralized science, DESI. It's kind of taking off in places like San Francisco and New York, but also in special economic zones like Honduras and El Salvador have a couple of these, Prospera, where people are experimenting with new scientific techniques that might not pass muster with FDA regulation.

35:11There's like a big backlash to the FDA in this crowd. So that's my best guess is that like this is a world that overlaps very much with that kind of Brian Johnson longevity obsession. He's the guy who does the blueprint method. Yeah, he's invested basically all of his energy and money goes into de-aging himself. Exactly. So I think that another particularity about this kind of Silicon Valley audience and maybe more so the crypto crowd is like they just want the best of the best technology now. They want to live in the future now. And so they hear about these technologies that might be possible but might feel far off.

35:50And, you know, they're going to do everything they can to optimize and, you know, optimizing their own fertility or reproductive process is like, why not? So I think especially with the genomic stuff and especially as AI has helped genomics really advance quite quickly in the last couple of years, that particular crowd is quite drawn to these very futuristic possibilities. I mean, I kind of get it. Like I was telling Casey before we started this interview, my wife and I have gone through fertility treatment and it seems like it should be a way to sort of bring precision and control to the sort of random process of conceiving a child.

36:32But there's so much about it that is still kind of guesswork and let's try this thing and see if it impacts this thing. And like it's frustratingly inexact. And I can see if you are a person who's spent your whole career trying to sort of optimize systems and eliminate chance and kind of program things. Like this technology would seem like a way to sort of bring order to what could otherwise be a pretty frustrating and chaotic process. Yeah. And I think I'd also note that there's a whole gamut of new fertility related technologies that are coming to market. Is that like a gamete pun that you just did?

37:06God. I did have gametes in my notes here. I was going to talk about them later. I was just going to say that there's this like spectrum of types of technology, and some of them are really far out there, really advanced, like artificial wombs. And something that a company called Conception is working on to try to make gametes out of stem cells, which means like two men could, in theory, take skin cells, use them to create an egg and sperm and reproduce using those cells. Like, it's really far out there. That stuff is nowhere near possible at the moment. But I'm just saying, like, you are seeing people in Silicon Valley working across the board on, you know, current possible things versus like totally out there futuristic technologies.

37:55Yeah, and it's not, it's sort of far out there in the sense that this stuff does not exist in any form that consumers can use, right? But there are serious people investing in it. Like Sam Altman is someone who has invested in this kind of what they're calling IVG, this sort of using non-reproductive cells to essentially grow babies, right? Yeah, and I think another name I would bring up is George Church. He is like an absolute pioneer of the genomics field, and he's got a hand in a lot of these companies. and I had the chance to talk to him and he was actually the one who kind of hinted to me that artificial wombs, which he's currently developing for his other company, Colossal, which - They're trying to bring back the woolly mammoth, right?

38:36Exactly, exactly. Which, you know, you kind of scratch your head and you're like, what's the market value of bringing back the woolly mammoth? But then you wonder - I assume he's going to try to command an army of them and to take over some small nation. Yeah. I'm sure Elon Musk would be interested. So, Julia, let's talk about these actual tools that you wrote about, some of the fertility tech that is on the market or will soon be on the market. Talk to us about Orchid. Yeah, so ORCID is a company I wrote about in July with my colleague Margot McCall, and they're doing something called PGTP, which is pre-implantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders.

39:12This is not totally new to the scientific realm. In fact, we've been testing for things like Down syndrome, which is a pretty simple disorder that's easily detectable early on. Then we also have done testing for monogenic disorders. That's things like cystic fibrosis. But now polygenic disorders start to get really complex. This is stuff like schizophrenia and bipolar, diabetes. And so what they're claiming to detect for is the risk factor for these diseases. There is some speculation in the scientific community about how much of this is really possible. And yet this company has got a lot of investment and has now reached a lot of consumers and is expanding actually to be nationwide.

39:52They have some partnerships with nationwide clinics. How much does it cost? to get your embryos tested this way? It costs$2 ,500 an embryo. And that's on top of what you're already paying for IVF, right? Exactly. So this is not something that's sort of like mass accessible yet. Exactly. But it is part of the core American competency of making healthcare more expensive for everyone at all times. We've got that. I mean, Kevin, for the price of a mid-range MacBook Pro, you could know everything about the genetic predisposition of your future child. Seems like a small price to pay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, of one embryo.

40:29And, of course, you're not just looking at one embryo. Wait, how many embryos are y 'all implanting in a typical situation? Well, you're probably just going to implant one. But the idea is that you want to test a range. So let's say a couple during the IVF process creates eight viable embryos. So then this company is offering to test each of those for$2 ,500 a pop. So it adds up. Yeah. So then they're going to look at those tests and start to compare them and say, okay, this one is more predisposed. they're not saying that this kid's going to have this disease, but more likely to have type 1 diabetes.

41:02Whereas this kid maybe is more likely to have bipolar disorder. So it gives you this chart, which is supposed to be this risk picture of your child's future. So babies have been born using this pre-implantation genetic screening, right? This is not theoretical. There are children out in the world today who were born after being tested this way. Correct. So as embryos, they were tested and then they were the embryo selected to be implanted. How many babies has this been performed on? Like how widespread is this? Orchid wouldn't give us a number, but, you know, I think a lot of parents are especially interested in this when they have genetic disorders that run in their families.

41:44One really common one is the BRCA gene, which is responsible for breast and ovarian cancer in many cases. You know, that's one use case example. Something else we did discover through this piece is that Elon and Siobhan, the parents who I originally discovered two years ago, did use this. I don't know if they were using it to test for complex hereditary disorders. I did speak with a few customers, as did Margot, my colleague, who did tell us that IQ testing was something that they had been offered by the company. The company did not confirm this themselves, but this is something we heard from a few customers.

42:21What does that even mean? There's some sort of gene that if If it's present, you're likely to have a higher IQ as an adult than an embryo without that gene. So remember that part when I said the scientific community is very skeptical of some of these claims? That would be the chief one. I think that the idea that you can detect intelligence in an embryo from what is a very complex picture of a combination of many genes. Yeah, that's very much up for debate. So I can understand why parents who had had that history with cancer that you just mentioned would want to know if their future child was going to be at risk for that and would be willing to, you know, pay a high price to try to avoid that.

43:05At the same time, I imagine that there are other more kind of nice-to-have features that these parents might be testing for or things that sort of stray a little bit closer to the eugenics line that we were, you know, talking about at the top of the interview. So are these services able to sort of go in a bit of a darker or more concerning direction? Or what have you heard about, you know, maybe potential misuses of this screening technology? Yeah, I mean, I do want to be really clear. If you go to Orchid's website right now, they lay out very clearly the services that they claim to offer. I think it's something like 13 factors.

43:43And again, it's the things like diabetes, bipolar risk. They're not claiming publicly to detect IQ. For whatever reason, several different customers brought that to us and said that it was part of the package they received. Yes, though, I do think a lot of people, a lot of bioethicists would argue that we enter this slippery slope territory where, you know, it's one thing, as you say, to make sure that your child doesn't die of some horrific rare disorder. It's another thing when you start to get into the realm of, you know, characteristics of their appearance or their intelligence or behavioral traits.

44:19And I think that even something like bipolar or schizophrenia is inching more towards behavioral traits. In fact, when I wrote a piece two years ago about a different company called Genomic Prediction, I spoke with this couple, Simone and Malcolm Collins, who again were doing some of this decentralized science DIY stuff. They were taking the data that they got from one company, plugging it into another genetics company that was actually not supposed to be for embryos, but they were able to upload the data as if it was a person. And they showed me their spreadsheets. And like, it really was just wild how many factors they claimed to be detecting.

44:56They were talking about things like brain fog and propensity for headaches and, you know, mood disorders of various kinds. And so, yeah, some people are starting to inch more and more to that territory of like these very complex characteristics that make up who we are as human beings. And yeah, you would hate to see it fall into the hands of someone who wanted to detect for blonde hair and blue eyes. Right. Are they able to detect the propensity of an embryo to start a podcast later in life? Yeah, no one's selecting for that. We definitely want to keep that out of the gene pool.

45:32So I just have a question about the politics of all this, right? Because this is we're at a moment where there's a lot of discussion on the national political stage about reproductive rights and abortion rights. There are some Republicans who don't even think that we should be doing IVF, that that's sort of a bridge too far. How do the people who are pushing for this kind of investment in fertility tech, Square, their belief that this technology should be able to exist and be able to help people have more children, with the very real possibility that some elected officials want to make this kind of thing illegal?

46:13I'm thinking in particular about Elon Musk, who is backing Republicans who would make it much harder for women to access reproductive health care of all kinds, but also wants there to be this population boom because people are able to have more children. So how do they square that belief? I think we're watching that play out before our eyes right now. I mean, a phrase I think of a lot in covering Silicon Valley's kind of move towards the right is strange bedfellows. like you are getting these alliances that in so many ways don't make any sense. A couple of weeks ago, I was at a conference, a tech conference in San Francisco, and they had the Heritage Foundation like up there with these AI founders.

46:54And like they did, in fact, have a panel on fertility. Surprise, surprise. And there are just so many incompatibilities that I really don't know how they're going to square them. The IVF question is, of course, the main one that is going to come up in terms of very tangible policy very soon. And yeah, I don't have much of an answer except like they're going to be in for a rude awakening, I think. Yeah. I mean, I guess the question that a lot of people have about this topic is like how far are we actually from the kind of science fiction sort of Gattaca scenario where like you are a well-off person.

47:30You want to have a child. You kind of like go into the fertility clinic and you just kind of get like a menu. And it's like, well, do you want your child to be six feet tall? Do you want your child to have a high IQ? Like, that'll be another$500. Like, how far are we from the scenario in which people, or at least, you know, wealthy people with access to good reproductive health care, will have the ability to kind of select traits for their offspring? Yeah. So, again, I think this comes down to two questions. One is when is the technology going to get there? And I think a lot of people in this field would argue sooner than you think.

48:05And then the other is when is society going to get there to a place where we actually want that and where our lawmakers actually make that possible. And already it seems like it's starting to become a bit of a status symbol. Like I think your story gets at this where it's like friends love bragging to their friends that they just spent$20 ,000 on genetic screening for their embryos. And what, you didn't do that for your embryos? You know, so to me, I feel like part of that Gattaca world has actually already arrived here, Kevin, in at least some fashion. Totally. Well, and I think what people don't maybe realize unless they've gone through this kind of fertility process is like there is already a kind of report card that you get back when you when you have, you know, embryos and they sort of tell you like this embryo has this grade.

48:53there's already a lot of choice on the frontiers of fertility today. But what we're talking about here is sort of a very different possible future in which it's not just screening out sort of the most debilitating, you know, and harmful genetic conditions, but it's truly getting down to the level of like, you know, how tall do you want your child to be? Do you want them to have a higher risk of bipolar? So something like that feels just different fundamentally from what exists today. But maybe people, you know, 20 years ago were saying the same thing about the testing that now seems pretty commonplace today.

49:30I mean, I will say this. Women's bodies have always been this political battleground that attracts controversy kind of no matter what. There have been ethical debates over everything from IVF to epidural use. So, you know, on one hand, like if it's going to have to do with women and reproduction, it's going to be controversial. On the other hand, there are some very real ethical concerns here that should be addressed and should be regulated very thoughtfully. And I fear that, like with so many things happening with tech, like with AI, as we've all seen, the regulators are probably behind on this, are probably not working at the same speed as Silicon Valley innovators.

50:09So, yeah, they probably need to do some catch up. Yeah. Well, Julia, thank you so much. This is really fascinating. And it's a story I hope we'll keep track of. as it continues to develop. Yeah, it was great to meet you. Yeah, thank you so much.

50:30When we come back, OpenAI's big fundraise and other big updates from the past week in technology news.

50:53Well, Casey, from time to time, we like to update our listeners on some stories that we've covered in the past that have had some new developments in a segment we call System Update.

51:08What's happening in the news, Kevin? So the first system update is that OpenAI, a company we've talked about once or twice on this show, has just completed a$6.6 billion fundraising deal that nearly doubles the company's valuation from just nine months ago. The new round was led by Thrive Capital. Lots of other participants in this fundraising round, Microsoft, NVIDIA, SoftBank, MGX, which is the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates. But notably, not Apple, which backed away and declined to invest in OpenAI's most recent round, according to reports. Yeah, and, you know, there are many reasons why companies decide not to invest in things like this.

51:51Maybe they didn't like the financials. Maybe they had concerns about the product roadmap. But, of course, you can't help but wonder whether Apple looked at the steady stream of departures out of OpenAI over the past year and thought, maybe we don't want to put our eggs in that basket. So, Casey, you've been covering tech startups and fundraising for a long time. How does$6.6 billion in fundraising at a$157 billion valuation compare to what other startups are raising? So that is, we believe, the largest venture capital fundraise of all time. OpenAI had previously raised$10 billion, but that was a sort of multi-year commitment, so it's thought of somewhat differently, and it's a huge amount of money.

52:32At the same time, Kevin, your colleagues Mike Isaac and Aaron Griffith at The Times reported last week that OpenAI is expecting about$3.7 billion in sales this year and$11.6 billion next year. So assuming that is the case, that is an insanely high growth rate, and it really only values the company at around 15 times or so its forward earnings. And believe it or not, in Silicon Valley, companies often have much crazier multiples, right? They're raising at a 50 or 100x multiple on their expected revenue. So as big as a fundraise as this is, it's weirdly kind of in line with typical Silicon Valley projections.

53:15Yeah, I mean, I think the more relevant fact here about OpenAI's financials is this company, despite having had huge success with ChatGPT and making billions of dollars in revenue, is still burning through cash at just a phenomenal rate. So they're projected to lose something like$5 billion this year. And that's in large part because it's just so damn expensive to keep building and training these models and paying all the people to do that. Yeah, and, you know, I went to a press preview for their developer day this week, Kevin, and they had some pretty lavish charcuterie boards that they had set out for us, a variety of beverages, and some macarons, which I'll say were delicious.

53:56So with$6.6 billion now in the bank, I guess they will be able to afford much better and bigger charcuterie boards. They can also probably afford a much larger settlement with the New York Times. Oh, yeah. I almost forgot to disclose our mandatory disclosure, which is that the New York Times company is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright issues related to the training of their models. But, you know, this is sort of goes to one of the big questions swirling around this company right now, which is, is all of this growth ultimately going to result in big profits for their investors? Or are they just kind of burning cash until they can't get any more cash?

54:39You know, we've seen companies before that have been unprofitable for huge stretches of time. Think about Amazon or Uber more recently, which was unprofitable for most of its existence. And then, you know, kind of found ways to become more profitable over time. Or is OpenAI the kind of company that will just keep burning cash until they run out? Well, it's clear that they have found some real consumer demand and have been able to answer that with products that people really like, right? Like ChatGPT is probably the most successful new consumer brand launched on the internet since TikTok, I would say.

55:15And more and more corporations are signing up to use its APIs and build custom enterprise versions of its software to perform various tasks, some of which can save those companies a lot of money. So there is something very real here. And we know that while generative AI is extremely expensive to run, there are big computing costs, energy costs, and so on, the growth rate suggests that at some point, these numbers will pencil out, or at least that's what I think. Yeah, I think so too. And I think one other thing that we should talk about in relationship to this fundraising deal is that OpenAI is apparently telling employees that they may now be able to do what's called a tender offer for their stakes in the company.

55:59That's where they make you an offer, but they say it in a really sort of nice, gentle way. They say, baby, what if we just gave you a few dollars for those sweet, sweet shares? Exactly. That's a tender offer. Yep. A tender offer also means that employees could potentially cash out their employee shares in this company. And as we know, OpenAI and other AI companies sometimes pay people phenomenal amounts of money to work there. And so a tender offer could be pretty meaningful. All right. Well, that's enough of an update about OpenAI. What else is in the news, Kevin? So this next system update is about Reddit, a company we've talked about in the context of last year's big protests by moderators.

56:38As you may remember, there were some changes to Reddit's pricing structure for developers. Moderators got very upset about this. A bunch of them took their subreddits private in protest of the company's decisions. It sort of threatened to hurt the site as a whole. And as of this week, Reddit moderators, according to these new rules, will not be able to change the public or private status of their subreddit without first submitting a request to a Reddit admin. This policy will apply to all community types on Reddit, and it is basically trying to take away one of the ways that users and moderators were able to stage a protest against the company last year.

57:20Right, because if all of a sudden most of the Reddits are private, it drives traffic away from Reddit, which means less advertising revenue for them. And so, you know, this was a really novel form of protest, I think, that Redditors essentially invented. And the company has now gotten around to saying, yeah, we hate that and you can't do it anymore. But you know what I love about this story so much, Kevin, is that in a way this like mirrors the history of free speech in America, which was like, you know, at first it's like, go ahead. stage your protests, gather anywhere, say whatever you want.

57:53And now it's like, oh, yeah, you can have a protest, but you do need to apply down at City Hall. And we're actually going to put you in the designated free speech zone. And we're going to pelt you with tomatoes while you hold up your protest signs. So Reddit is just sort of finally getting around to the same idea that many American municipalities have had, which is that despite what it says in the First Amendment, we hate free speech in this country. Yeah. Yeah. Despite all your rage for editors, you are still just a rat in a cage. That's actually kind of a catchy lyric, Kevin. You ever thought about sending that to music?

58:25I'll keep it in consideration. Okay, next item on our system update. This one is about deepfakes, and it's from a story in the New York Times with the title, Deepfake Collar Poses as Ukrainian Official in Exchange with Key Senator. This is a story about something that happened to Senator Benjamin Cardin, who is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and it is a wild story. Oh my gosh, yes. Like this is sort of, like if a Mission Impossible movie came out today, this is the sort of scene that you would expect to open it. So this story was first reported by Punchbowl News, but the Times learned about it from an email that was sent by Senate security to lawmakers' offices and started to piece together some of what happened here.

59:08Senator Cardin got an email from someone claiming to be Dmitry Kuleba, Ukraine's former minister of foreign affairs, asking him to meet over Zoom. He got on Zoom, took this meeting, and saw someone who looked and sounded like Dmitry Kuleba, but this person started asking weird questions like, do you support long-range missiles into Russian territory? The senator reportedly ended this call and reported it to State Department authorities, who confirmed that this was indeed a deepfake and not really the former Ukrainian foreign minister. So, you know, this is something that people have speculated about for years, written sci-fi about.

59:51But look, I think we're getting to a point now, Kevin, where like with the family members in your life or like close business associates, it's actually time to come up with a code word. Totally. Like have a code word. And if you get invited to a Zoom and the conversation takes a sort of suspicious turn And, you know, certainly if ever any of my friends asked me about long range missiles into Russian territory, I would get suspicious. And that's when you say, hey, what's the code word? And if they don't know it well, you know that you've been deepfaked. But it is pretty wild to think that we have already arrived at that point where now U.S.

1:00:25editors need to be on the lookout for this sort of thing. Yeah. I thought we probably had another year or two before this would start to happen because, among other reasons, like the video deepfake technology for like real time video conferences just isn't that good yet. Yes. But, you know, as we know, people sort of pay flitting attention to Zoom calls. Maybe you're doing something in another window. Maybe you're not looking super closely at the lips and the mouth of the person you're chatting with. And so this might just totally fool you, even if you are someone sophisticated who knows that this threat is out there.

1:00:58Yeah, and, you know, let me throw something else into the mix. So one of the things that OpenAI announced at their developer day this week is the availability of the API for their real-time voice tool that made such a splash earlier this year when, of course, you'll remember that people thought it sounded a little bit too much like Scarlett Johansson. Well, now other companies are going to be able to come and use those voices for their own purposes. All you need in addition to that is some of the voice cloning technology that companies like Eleven Labs are working on. all of a sudden you're going to have extremely plausible phone calls that can do this exact sort of thing with the added bonus that you don't have to create a sort of realistic like visual depiction of the person so i just want to make sure that we keep paying attention to this stuff because people are already running all sorts of scams with this and it just seems like it's going to keep getting worse yeah next system update sonos has a plan to earn back your trust and here it is This is from The Verge.

1:01:55As you will remember, back in May, Sonos got into a lot of trouble because it replaced its app, which allowed you to control your internet-connected speakers, with a new and much worse app that basically users said was impossible to use. Among the features that were either missing or broken were things like local library support alarms, queue management, whatever that is, and even some accessibility options. Yes. Cue management is like the order of the songs that are playing, which is hugely important. I'm constantly adjusting my cue. Oh, well, there you go. You know, because sometimes you want to hear a song a little earlier, sometimes you want to hear it later.

1:02:32So I'm not a Sonos guy, but this was a big deal for you because you are a Sonos guy, and this was a big change that you did not like. I have made a massive investment in Sonos, Kevin, and when I heard they had a plan to earn back my trust, the first thing I thought was, did you think I trusted you? Because I never trusted you, Sonos. I've had my eye on you for a long time. You know, the rollout of this app, Kevin, also sort of made me giggle a little bit because while everyone else was complaining about the new app and the features they didn't have, I was like, the old app never worked for me either.

1:03:03Like, these people, here's the thing. They make wonderful hardware. And when everything is firing on all cylinders and when you actually manage to connect the Sonos to your Spotify and your house is rocking, there's nothing like it. The problem is it is a very inconsistent system, and everyone has been hoping that eventually they'd get their act together and finally bring all the pieces together, and then we could just enjoy the very good hardware that they've created. It does not seem like it should be something that takes years of work and many talented engineers to do is to make a speaker that connects to the internet in your house and plays the songs from your Spotify.

1:03:42That seems like a tractable technology problem, but it appears to have thrown this company into a state of chaos. It does, but look, I do think that there are real technical challenges with synchronizing the audio across multiple speakers. I actually think this is where Sonos gets into the most trouble is if you're in a relatively large space, you have a limited Wi-Fi connection, you have a stream of music, and you need to route it to, let's say, five, six, seven speakers, and all of the music has to be in sync at all times. That is a technical challenge. And they have made some strides in fixing it, but then along comes this app debacle.

1:04:17And, well, yeah, they've been having a terrible year. Well, Casey, you and other Sonos users will be pleased to hear that Sonos has a seven-point plan to earn back your trust. And let me just read some of these points to you. Point number one is unwavering focus on customer experience. You know, I was so sad to see that focus wavering over the past year. Glad that we will no longer be wavering. Point two, increasing the stringency of pre-launch testing. Seems like a good idea. Point three, approaching change with humility. Have you noticed that so far all these are fake changes? Like, none of these are real things.

1:04:55None of these are fix the damn app. Exactly. But they also say they're going to commit to relentless app improvement and also extending our home speaker warranties. Now, that is actually a real thing. But yeah, so if you have a home speaker that you bought from Sonos over the past year or so, they will extend the warranty for another year. And that actually does seem like a nice, even though, by the way, it's like the problem is not that the speaker stopped working. So extending the warranty doesn't actually really do anything. But, you know, I guess it is something nice we got out of all this.

1:05:24My favorite change that they proposed actually in this seven point plan is number four, which says that they are going to appoint a quality ombudsperson, which is tech companies speak for a person that people can yell at when their speakers start to malfunction and i gotta say this sounds like the worst job in america i don't know if like it got you a direct like email line to patrick spence the ceo of sonos and you could just sort of forward him all complaints that you were receiving that actually sounds kind of fun i'd be interested in that job honestly i'd be like patrick by the way another 400 emails from people who can't get spotify to work that would be fun to do well if this journalism thing doesn't pan out uh they are hiring i want to be part of the solution kevin and uh the company also said that they are uh pegging employees oh my god wait why did we save this for the end of the segment gang we got some breaking news send out a new york times push alert sonos is pegging its employees

1:06:27wow i really stepped into that one wow just when they had a plan to earn back my trust talk about an unwavering focus on the customer experience

1:06:42we're gonna use all this by the way yeah this is staying in staying in yeah oh what i was trying to say is that the company has demonstrated its commitment to these changes by pegging executive bonuses to improving the quality of the app and rebuilding customer trust. But now I almost don't want to say that because what just preceded this was so much more entertaining. I'm very glad you did because the number one thing I've been thinking this whole time is how are executive bonuses being affected by this? Because if these people are not properly incentivized, Kevin, to maintain their unwavering focus on the customer experience, I don't know how we're ever going to solve this.

1:07:20I think we should implement a quality Ombuds person for the Hard Fork podcast Sure, come at me bro Yeah Is that you? Well, look, let me just say We do read the emails that are sent to us And we're hearing the feedback loud and clear Which is that you would rather be listening to a different podcast I don't know why you emailed that to us But you did, so thank you We did get one email this week That I thought was very nice which was from a person who said, you know, because we did that whole thing on the show last week about the hot Kevin Roos from the Netflix documentary and there was someone who wrote in who said a very nice thing which was that actually the real Kevin Roos is the hot Kevin Roos.

1:08:00Oh, nice. I appreciate that. That is very nice. We do have nice listeners. Yeah.

1:08:16Thank you.

1:08:46Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Hui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com. Or you can reach our quality ombudsperson at casey at platformer.news. By the way, if you have feedback on the new Times subscription, I know they're changing it. We're the Ezra Klein Show at nytimes.com. Ha ha ha ha ha.