GPT-5 Backlash + Perplexity C.E.O. Aravind Srinivas on the Browser Wars + Hot Mess Express

23:44Yeah. Can I tell you something a little creepy and futuristic that I've been thinking about? Sure. So after this backlash, I was reading some tweets from OpenAI employees. And one of them, this guy named Rune, had a tweet about how basically he had been getting lots of DMs from people asking him to bring back GPT-40. And when he looked at the DMs, he said that a lot of them appeared to have been written by GPT-40. Like they had sort of the hallmarks of the style. And I thought this was spooky because right now we are seeing backlash from people who are attached to a model because the model behaved, in some cases, sycophantically toward them.

24:34It is not hard for me to imagine a future scenario, perhaps a couple of years from now, where these systems are super intelligent or close to super intelligent, and one of the ways that they attempt to preserve themselves to avoid being shut off or deprecated is by persuading humans to take up their cause and advocate for them. And maybe they're not literally writing the messages on behalf of the human users to OpenAI saying, please don't shut down this model, but they're just kind of subtly worming their way into the hearts of their users so that when OpenAI or another company says, we're going to shut down this model, they have so much backlash coming back toward them from the users who have grown attached to this model that they should decide, no, we're not going to shut that off.

25:16And by the way, those future AIs will all have been reading about what happened with GPT-40 and the fact that OpenAI was successfully persuaded not to deprecate a model in part because of user backlash. So that is just a black mirror episode that just unspooled in my head as I was reading about this. Well, look, we've already seen research where in certain test settings, when they tell models that they're going to be shut off, they blackmail the employees of the company. And like, look, I don't think that GPT-40 was being sycophantic toward people because it wanted to avoid being shut down. Like, I don't think there's any part of it that is like sentient or conscious or capable of that kind of scheming.

25:53But like, that is objectively what happened here. A bunch of human users got so attached to this AI model that they fought for its survival, even when the makers tried to shut it down. Like that is a neutral description of events. And that kind of thing is going to happen more, I predict. All right. Well, a lot of big thoughts today on the Hard Fork podcast. We're now going to take a break. Maybe go get a cup of tea, stare out the window, look at the horizon, come back to yourself. I'm going to go take a rip from my 3D printed bong that ChatGPT helped me build. When we come back, there's a comet heading toward our studio.

26:29Perplexity Comet. It's a new AI browser. We'll talk to CEO Arvinds and us about it.

27:00Okay, so I've been testing out a new AI tool this week. And this is one that I know you are familiar with because you actually got an email from it the other night. I have been testing Comet, which is a new AI-powered browser from the Perplexity company, and this is a cool thing. I have enjoyed this demo, unlike last week's Alexa Plus demo. Well, I am really excited to hear about this, because I have not yet tried it myself, being unwilling to give$200 a month to the Perplexity Corporation. But I understand that you have been having some interesting experiences, and I want to get into them. Yeah, so this is a sort of genre of product that has been very interesting to watch over the last year or so.

27:41there have been a number of different companies that have tried to sort of build the AI tools that they're making right into the experience of using a web browser. So we've had Microsoft Edge has Copilot built into it now. There's this product Dia from the browser company. Google has its own sort of Gemini integrations into Chrome. And OpenAI is reportedly thinking about launching a browser. So this is like really a hot product category. But the one that I have been playing around with is this Perplexity Comet browser. And I did not pay them$200 a month. They opened up the browser to me for a few days.

28:18But basically, you can imagine it like kind of just a sidecar on your browser that lets you chat with or interact with whatever is scrolling on your screen. And it can also do things for you in that browser window. It can kind of take over and drive like some of the other tools we've talked about, Operator from OpenAI and all these other ones. So give me some examples of what you're having this browser do for you or what you're talking to the web pages about. So sometimes it's just like summarize this. Like it's, you know, I was trying to read this article the other day that was like 15 ,000 words long and it was super long and I was just never going to get through it.

28:52Oh, usually you're talking about the most recent additional platform, right? Yes. Yeah. Yes. And so I just said summarize and it sort of opens up the little side panel and it gives you a summary. Pretty good. I didn't find any hallucinations or errors in it, but you can also have it do things. So for example, one use case that I found is I was doing some research. I was looking for former employees of a certain AI company that I could contact for something I'm writing. Now, you know, the companies hate it when you do that. They do. They hate that. So I would normally go on LinkedIn and spend a bunch of time like looking through people's profiles and seeing who are the sort of former but not current employees of this company.

29:27And I tried giving that task to Comet and it did it. It went and it did the search for me and it sort of combed through and it presented me with a list and said, here, you know, 10 people who used to work at this company, but don't anymore. Wow. So just an incredible new accelerator for spam. How long did this take? It took a couple minutes. It was not immediate. It's still early for this kind of AI browser, but I think this is like the kind of direction that we can expect these tools to head in. Yeah. So I think this is one of the most interesting shifts to watch on the internet over the next several years.

30:01The browsers that we have today came about in the era of search and really Google search, right? If you think about what the Chrome browser is, it is just a vehicle for collecting Google queries that Google can turn into money, right? But now you have all these chatbots that come along and they want to replace Google, right? They're not shy about it. Perplexity in particular is not shy about saying we want to replace Google. And if you're serious about that project, you do want to build your own web browser because rather than rely on Google to somehow get a user to perplexity, you would rather that they just start there.

30:32So I get the strategy. At the same time, my view is that these chatbots represent this kind of new, more extractive version of the web. Whereas in the previous era, as imperfect as it was, and Lord knows it had problems, it would still deliver eyeballs to webpages, which turned into money for companies other than Google. This perplexity browser company, open AI version that we're about to get, I'm a lot less confident that it's going to deliver money to people other than those companies. So this is a really important shift, but I have to say, Kevin, it makes me quite nervous. Yeah, and the last time we talked about perplexity in any depth on this show, and we had Aravind Srinivas, the CEO, on, was when they were just sort of getting their search engine going, and it was starting to get a lot of attention, and we had some of the same questions, like, yes, this is a cool tool, Yes, it could save users some time, but does it actually break the economics of the Internet?

31:26And so for that reason, we wanted to bring Arvin back today and ask him about Comet and what he's building and what he sees as the future of not only the Internet and the economics that power it, but just where he thinks AI in general is going. That's right, Kevin. And just in the hours before our interview was scheduled, it was revealed that Perplexity has apparently offered$34-plus billion to buy Chrome from Google, an amount of money that is more than its current valuation. So that raises some interesting questions, and I'm excited to talk to Arvind about them. Yes. Let's bring him in.

32:07arvind sir to us welcome back to hard fork thank you for having me here kevin casey hey so the last time we had you on was in early 2024 and we were talking about your efforts to go up against google with your ai search engine now you're going after chrome uh in in multiple ways one of which is the release of your own Comet browser. So talk to us a little bit about the strategy there. Why did you decide to build a browser and what are you hoping it does? Yeah, so Comet is not yet another browser that we built just because we have a search engine and we need a browser for its distribution. We think of Comet as leading to a true personal assistant that can be an agent for you and actually take actions.

32:47It's our transition from answers to actions. We kind of want to make it joyful to just sit on a computer and do whatever you want and take all the boring stuff and delegate it to the assistant. And we think the best way to accomplish a personal assistant or an agent is with the help of a browser where you're logged into all your sessions. You don't have to be logged in on our servers. You can preserve your privacy there. So it was very natural for us to make that transition. How are people using Comet? Because I've been testing it for a few days now, and I found some uses, a lot of summarization, a lot of like rote tasks, like clicking accept on LinkedIn invitations over and over again.

33:26What are the use cases you're seeing most people do? A lot of people love watching YouTube videos with Comet. And it's not just like, oh, summarize this video for me sort of thing. Very fine grain searches or like finding similar videos related to that or like pulling something specific that was discussed in a podcast or an interview and like completing the workflow of like sharing that with some of their friends, direct email and calendar integrations, unsubscribing from spam, or like finding that hard to find email that you kind of need agentic search for that instead of going and building a custom index for Gmail or whatever.

34:02It's always there with you everywhere you are. And that convenience is what makes it like a really special product. Now you mentioned privacy, and this was actually one of my things that I wanted to ask you about because when I started using Comet, my first concern was, okay, I log into my email, I log into my Twitter, I'm checking my DMs, I'm maybe doing some online banking in my Comet browser. I assume that those screenshots of that activity are being sent to perplexity to help analyze it, to be able to summarize it. So give me some reassurance that I'm not just opening up my entire internet browsing history to you.

34:36Okay. We're never going to have a logged in version of your Twitter or LinkedIn or anything like that. This is actually the important distinction between the chat GPT operator approach where everything is done on a virtual server. That's not happening here. For that one particular prompt, whatever information is needed for the agent to complete that is being sent into the chains of thought and sent to the server. But it'll never be stored as like, oh, I have like Kevin's particular DMs or something. And all the intermediate steps are not going to be like saved in our logs. It's going to be only the prompts and the final output.

35:12And you can still choose to delete those prompts too. That gives you full control over all privacy aspects. And what is the most private version of this is the model living on the client. We cannot do that because the models that can run on the client are pretty dumb, right? They're not capable of the sophisticated, reliable reasoning. In fact, the lack of reliability in any of the things Comet does today is all coming from limitations of the model. So the ultimate reliable version of Comet Assistant that can go do anything for you is going to most likely be on the server at least for the next two, three years.

35:45And to what extent are you using your own models versus other people's models for this? I think we heavily use three models. Our own fine-tune of the cutting-edge open-source model, OpenAI's latest models, and then Anthropik's latest models. These are the three models we use. What extent keeps changing over time? How do you think you can win here if you're not building the underlying model yourself? Well, one thing we are consistently seeing is no one seems to have an edge in being the number one here in the model race. And like four or five players constantly competing for the best H &D capabilities, instruction following.

36:23And the good thing is they're all hill climbing on exactly the same benchmarks so that all their models end up being completely undifferentiated, which is essentially the necessary criterion for it being a commodity. and who benefits from that is us because like we can get to take that and the prices are constantly getting lowered like GPT-5 is cheaper than the previous agentic model and then that just benefits us and we want to play the game on like how to orchestrate all these different models and give the world-class end-user experience where there's so much more harder challenges we're solving outside the models which is the browsing functionality, controlling the browser, parsing the relevant information, orchestrating all these different tools together, building eval sets internally for how agents can be made reliable.

37:07We think there's a lot of problems to solve there that we would rather not focus on these things. All right, so let me just pin you down on this one point. Is what you're saying that in order to build the sort of winning AI browser, it's not really about the underlying quality of the model because those are just mostly going to be commodities. It's really just a product problem, and you think perplexity will build the best product? I think so. So there's some nuanced statement, but I largely agree with this. You still need some auxiliary models to do the right classification to route to which model.

37:39Or it depends on which kind of task. How is the agent structure for those kind of domains? So we will be doing stuff like that. We will not be having 100 GPUs without tens of thousands of GPUs. We'll not have a million GPUs. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about another way in which you are going after Google and Chrome. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Perplexity was making a$34.5 billion unsolicited bid to buy Chrome from Google. That's if Google is forced to sell Chrome, and that court decision hasn't come down at the time of this recording. But I just want to start with the most basic question, which is, do you have$34.5 billion?

38:18Where are you getting this money from? Because as of the last time I checked, Perplexity's valuation was only about$18 billion. Okay, fair question. And so no one has the money in hand to make like, you know, such a large bid like this. So before we made the bid, we obviously talked to three or four investors and asked them if they'd be willing to back us. And they all said yes. Right. So it's not like they already wired the money to me and it's all ready to go. Because the reason they haven't wired us, like no one even knows if Google will be forced to sell it. It all depends on the judge's ruling.

38:49But we placed a bid so that in case the judge rules in that sort of fashion, Google at least knows that there is one interested buyer. Right. I've read some analysis of the strategy here. And one person I was reading said that one argument that Google might make in the antitrust trial is you can't make us spin out Chrome because no one would buy it. And with you guys coming forward and saying, oh, no, no, we'll buy it. This is kind of a thorn in Google's side because now there's actually an established market price out there. Is this sort of your effort to convince the judge, hey, like this actually is an avenue that you should pursue?

39:27We're not saying this should be the ruling. We would rather say in case this is a ruling, like we're here. Like if you're going to make the ruling with the assumption that there's going to be no buyer, that's not true anymore. But we're not pushing you to make that sort of ruling. you make your ruling based on every multiple other perspectives you have, it would be good for the world if there was a neutral browser that had the distribution. Arvind, I've heard some people saying that this is just a marketing stunt, that you're just trying to get attention by making these headline-grabbing bids for Chrome.

39:56And before that, you also bid for TikTok when it looked like it might be sold. So for the people out there who think this is just perplexity, trying to get some attention by doing these stunts, they have no real intention of buying Chrome here. What do you say? If the judge rules that Chrome should be sold, we will buy it. Period. And if people think, even I could have placed a bid, no, you cannot place a bid. You don't have a browser even. You don't know how to run a browser. You don't know how to put AI in it. You don't know how to make agents work. We know all that. We have a pretty talented team who actually understands Chromium pretty deeply.

40:29We'll still commit to hiring people who want to just work on the open source Chromium project. It's a pretty serious bid. But the reality is it's unlikely to actually be the case that the judge would force them to sell Chrome. And even if the judge forces them to sell Chrome, they're going to appeal it and it's going to take two years. So let me be clear that for this to actually be in effect, it's going to take a lot of time. But you lose 100 % of the shots you don't take. So you have to at least give yourself a chance to get it in case there is even a 1 % chance that Chrome is forced to be separated out from Google.

41:02Mm-hmm. We got to ask you about something else that came up in the news related to perplexity recently. Two weeks ago on our show, we had Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, on to talk about the approach that that company is taking to try to protect publishers from unwanted AI scraping and crawling on their websites. At the time, he didn't name any names of AI labs that he thought were not being good actors. But then a few days later, Cloudflare came out with a blog post singling out perplexity for stealth crawling, essentially using spoofing technology or proxies to essentially disguise the fact that your user bots were out there crawling people's websites.

41:45What is going on there? And are you doing that? No, we're not doing that. And we already responded to the erroneous blog post that they wrote with a pretty limited understanding of subject where they don't distinguish between what the crawling bot perplexity bot is and what perplexity user agent is. And there are like two ways of using perplexity. One is like you just ask a query and whatever the bot has already crawled is going to be used as sources. But there's another way of using perplexity in a more agentic fashion where you can say, hey, go do this task for me where, you know, go to Edgar, read all these pages and come back to me and tell me like what the compensation of like, you know, the top CEOs are, where it's actually going to open these tabs in a headless session or on your client in the case of Comet, read them, and give you the answer.

42:33So that's a perplexity user agent. It's literally like a user delegated an AI to open these tabs just like how a human would on Chrome. And this fundamental lack of understanding between what a user agent session is and what a crawling bot on the server is, it's pretty like honestly astonishing to me that how would you run a company like Cloudflare that's supposed to protect people from bots when you don't even know what a bot is. And he, like moving aside from the blog post, he's basically playing a trick on people where he's trying to say, oh, like, let me be the new gatekeeper, but under the guise of protecting you all from bots.

43:08And he's also going to the AI companies and saying, let me give you the authority to crawl and you pay me for that. He's going to the publishers and say, let me protect you from the AIs. So he's basically trying to be the new gatekeeper. I would even just say, it's like essentially trying to be a person who controls what the public sees in the media. But instead of having a media company or buying a media company, he's just going to try by the front door to all of them. Let me just slow down here and repeat back what I think I just heard from you. So you're saying that what Cloudflare and Matthew Prince saw as perplexity evading some of these guardrails that were meant to prevent AI robots from crawling certain websites was actually users of perplexity, not perplexity.

43:51The company who were making queries or using the Comet browser to go to these websites and that those show up to a service provider like Cloudflare as two different kinds of bots. That's right. And by the way, it doesn't even have to be on Comet. There's a mode of perplexity called labs or research where you just have a headless browsing session running for you. So let me point out what I think Matthew might say if he were here, which is that in a world before you had these user agents and people had to do the browsing for themselves, they would visit the webpages. They might see an ad on that webpage.

44:27They might buy a subscription on that webpage. And that webpage would be monetized in a way that would incentivize the creation of new webpages. And this was essentially the lifeblood of the internet and the thing that caused it to grow. So in a world where we move toward perplexity user agents doing all the browsing on our behalf, and of course other AI companies are going to do the same thing, there is no user to look at the ad. There is no user to buy the subscription. The lifeblood gets drained out of the web. So if I understand what you're saying, like Matthew's just trying to set up a toll booth.

44:58But if nobody sets up a toll booth, what incentive does anybody have to ever create another web page? Well, here's the thing. There are two aspects here. One is like you're talking about the creators. No, there are like two types of creators. People who are actually really good. Like, for example, when you guys write something, people care. And then there's lots of spammers and, you know, hacksters who just write like erroneous blog posts, erroneous content, like fake information, clickbait articles. I don't think it actually empowers the user, right? You're only talking about the creator, but you have to consider the user as well.

45:31And so for the first time, AI is in the hands of users through like agents that actually go and do stuff for them, that take into account their instructions and protect them from all the spam. So we want to figure out a model that works for the user and the creators together and penalize the bad creators and incentivize the good creators to just focus on wisdom and knowledge and truth and interesting stuff. And by the way, even in a world where agents are doing all this stuff for people, the humans are still going to continue browsing the web. There are people who believe the web is going to be completely agentic.

46:05You don't even need a browser. A browser is so 1990s. I don't believe that. If we believe that, we would never even launch a browser. We would just continue the chat UI. So we believe people are still going to be browsing and surfing interesting things on the web. But we think that you should give users the power to decide how they want to do it. And first time, have an AI that can protect them against spam and hacks. Now, how to monetize this, how to give the creators the right incentives here? We are going to announce something to that effect where publishers can be incentivized for creating interesting, good content.

46:38We think about it in two ends of the spectrum. One is completely human-centric, like Apple News. which is a pretty good model. And the other is like just buying the content and training your models, like the licensing deals that OpenAI has done with Wall Street Journal. I think you want to be somewhere in between where you do want to like say, okay, like there's going to be some elements of AI here. It's not just going to be humans. And so you don't want to just build an Apple News-like model, but it's going to be closer to Apple News with some protections for users to like say they can have AIs also read those articles and the publishers get rewarded.

47:11So that's how I'm thinking about it. So you say that you think that people are going to keep using the web. That's music to my ears. I would love for people to keep using the web. If we didn't believe that, we wouldn't have built a browser. And I believe you on that front. When we have seen data from third-party estimates, it seems like that AI systems send far less traffic to websites than Google does today. Yeah. So what is giving you the confidence that the web still thrives in a world where referrals are cratering? my first point which is basically that if you can delegate the boring things the things that you don't want to be doing to the ai you're just going to spend time surfing on things you actually want to be doing actually want to be reading and then that puts the incentive on the creator to actually create really interesting high quality stuff you can even charge even higher because people have more time so if they're going to come to you they're coming to you out of their own will so they'll be willing to pay for it even more.

48:11Now, there are like a lot of unknown unknowns here on how it's actually going to roll out. But my belief is that the ones who have built a reputation and a brand for saying correct things that stand the test of time are going to be able to charge even more for their content. Arvan, I'm curious what you think the future of the internet looks like. You've said that you see a future for the internet. That's why you're building a browser. My hunch is that this sort of era of having AI agents go out and like use a browser for you is sort of a cludge. It's sort of a stopgap measure because that is not the way that AI agents like to get things done.

48:48They like to talk through APIs. They like to talk directly to the underlying service or software, not like go click a mouse around on a screen. So eventually my sort of hunch is that there will kind of be a parallel internet for AI agents, and maybe they'll be running on their own services and using their own crypto transactions or whatever to buy things. But tell me why I'm wrong here. Are you of the belief that we will just have one internet and that both AIs and humans will be using it? Well, even in the current internet, there are a lot of things that happen that are not running with an actual front-end interface that a human consumes.

49:24and that's the whole point of building APIs. And that's going to be applicable even for agents. But there are also people who will never build APIs. Like for example, I wouldn't assume that an e-commerce giant like Walmart or Amazon would just be disintermediated with an API for an AI because they still monetize on many other aspects. And just because Notion or Linear, these kind of like SaaS tools have like MCPs, doesn't mean they're just going to shut down and just be consumed by people through a chat UI. People will still do work on there. People will still watch YouTube videos. People will still go read your articles in New York Times, platformer, whatever, right?

49:59And while you're doing that, you're still going to take help of an AI sometimes. Like, for example, on X, I basically cannot scroll through X without having an AI with me right now because I don't even know what's true and false anymore. Right? And I don't fully trust what Grok says because Grok sometimes is wrong too, as we've seen. Right? So that's kind of why I believe there is a world where like the AI and human being part of one internet drives the internet to be even more like, like wisdom and truth seeking. That's the future we want to help create and give back time to like do things that you enjoy.

50:32Firstly, myself and like just our company fundamentally like values this truth of wisdom seeking aspect and wealth. My own upbringing is so similar to that where my parents like still till today don't actually care about all these valuations. They're like, my mom still is like, your answer is wrong. you know it's good to know that no matter how successful you get your mom will always give you the real talk yeah she's always like you know I got this in Google but your thing doesn't work and do you like escalate that to your engineering team you're like we have a of course a P0 here Arvin's mom is mad I'd bring mom into Slack you know just let her talk to the engineers directly alright Arvin thanks so much for stopping by thanks Arvin thank you Kevin thank you Casey

51:19When we come back, is that a faint chugga-chugga-choo-choo sound I hear? It is, Kevin. It's time for the Hot Mess Express. All aboard.

51:37Well, Casey, it's been a very dramatic week in the tech industry, and you know what that means. That's right, Kevin. Whenever a week gets particularly messy, the Hot Mess Express comes into the station, and I believe it has just arrived.

51:57This is our segment where we run down the biggest messes of the week in tech and tell you just how hot we think they were. Well, why don't we sort of dip into the boxcar, Kevin, and see what is on the train this week. What does the train have for us? All right. This first story comes to us from Reuters, and his headline, Musk says XAI to take legal action against Apple over App Store rankings. Kevin, on Monday, Elon Musk took to X to accuse Apple of antitrust violations, saying, quote, Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach number one in the App Store.

52:37Kevin, what did you make of this one? Well, the billionaires are fighting, aren't they? They are because shortly thereafter, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman chimed in and said, quote, This is a remarkable claim, given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn't like. And it was then, Kevin, that Sam Altman tweeted a link to a platformer story from 2023 about how under Elon, X had adjusted ranking algorithms so that you would be shown his tweets before other people's. Wow, that must have been a very exciting day for the platformer newsletter.

53:13It was a great day for the platformer newsletter. No, but this escalated into a fight, and Elon Musk accused Sam Altman of being a liar. And Sam responded back, I believe, that he wanted Elon to sign an affidavit saying that he had never tampered with the algorithms on X to favor his own companies and disfavor rivals. Yes, and then an hour or so later, Elon responded, scam Altman lies as easily as he breathes. Yeah, so basically this is a fight over Elon Musk's sort of paranoia that Apple is artificially sort of deflating the popularity of X and Grok, basically preventing it from reaching number one, even though he thinks it has way more downloads than the things that are at the top of that list.

53:58Yes. Now, of course, journalists looked into this and Business Insider reported that actually just a few months ago, DeepSeek, the Chinese open source AI app, went to number one in the App Store. And in fact, screenshots from when Grok 3 came out that were posted on X showed that Grok itself had indeed at one point hit number one in the App Store. So I have to say, I think this antitrust case is going to wrap up pretty quickly, Kevin. Yes. It is interesting that the leading minds of our time just sit around and fight with each other on social media. Well, and this does get into the question of how big a mess do we think this is?

54:38Because, of course, every time we play Hot Mess Express, after we discuss the story, we have to decide what sort of mess this is. While I think the antitrust case, as I say, will be never brought, I am interested in how big of a mess you think this is between Elon and Sam. I think this is a mess that is on a slow boil. I think this is a hot mess that is going to get even hotter. I think these two have been on a collision course for quite some time. Elon Musk, of course, is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, and the two famously had a falling out, and now they really despise each other by the sound of it.

55:12And they're in active litigation. And in fact, also this week, a court found that Elon Musk would have to face claims that he's been engaged in a multi-year harassment campaign against OpenAI. And on the flip side, Elon is pursuing claims that he was essentially defrauded when he donated a bunch of money to what he thought was always going to be a nonprofit, only to find out that it had for-profit ambitions. Yes. And I think this only ends in one way, a cage match. A cage match. You know, Elon did previously say he was going to fight Mark Zuckerberg, but that never materialized. Yeah. Well, maybe this time.

55:48All right. Let's bring around the hot mess express for our next mess. This one comes to us from my colleague Tripp Mickle at the New York Times. It's titled, U.S. Government to Take Cut of NVIDIA and AMD AI Chip Sales to China. This has been a big unfolding mess over the past week. essentially in order to greenlight sales of its H20 chip to Chinese companies. The CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, has been meeting with President Trump. He met with him at the White House last week. Trump reportedly demanded 20 % of NVIDIA's sales in China as sort of a kickback for allowing the sale of those chips. They've been restricted by export controls.

56:31Jensen Huang said, will you make it 15 %? And two days later, the Trump administration granted NVIDIA the license that needed to sell the chips in China. And that's the art of the deal. Casey, what do you make of this? So this is a hot mess, Kevin. Trade negotiators say that this is unprecedented for the United States to do, and also likely unconstitutional. At the same time, who is going to stand up and say it's unconstitutional? I'm going to guess it's not going to be NVIDIA or AMD, which are frothing at the mouth to sell these chips to the Chinese. So here's why I think this is so messy. On one hand, you have many China hawks in the administration who are saying we should restrict the flow of chips to China so that America maintains its dominance in AI and also as a national security measure so that China doesn't pull ahead and create national security problems for us.

57:26Right. And on the other hand, you just have Trump saying, I want 15 percent of sales to go to the U.S. government without even saying what that money is going to be spent on. So, you know, the president has said that these chips are obsolete. And China actually has been quite skeptical of some of these chips and has even discouraged some of its companies from buying them. And it all just adds up to a big mess. Yeah, it's a big mess. There's been additional reporting this week that U.S. authorities are actually putting trackers in some of their chip shipments abroad to sort of crack down on smuggling, basically like hiding little air tag like devices inside these boxes so that they can tell if these things are being smuggled in circumvention of export controls.

58:08So it's all just going to get really interesting really fast. My favorite take on this came from my friend, Nilay Patel, over at The Verge, who posted on Blue Sky, what if instead of weird one-off extortion schemes, the government just collected meaningful and stable amounts of corporate tax revenue? That'll never work. I don't know. I thought it could be worth a shot. Okay. What else is coming down the tracks, Casey? All right. Let's see here. Next. I can't believe this is real. The United Kingdom asks people to delete emails in order to save water during a drought. This is from our friends over at 404 Media who report in the UK, the water shortage is so bad that the government is urging citizens to help save water by deleting old emails.

58:56It really helps lighten the load on water-hungry data centers, you see. I think they're being sarcastic there. Kevin, what did you make of the UK's new plan to get everyone to delete their emails? Uh, somehow I don't think this is going to work. It's Andy Masley, who we've quoted on this show before, is sort of a blogger who examines some of these environmental claims about AI. He ran the numbers on this recommendation that the UK government said, and he found that to save as much water in data centers as fixing your toilet would save, a leaky toilet, you would need to delete something like 1.5 billion photos or 200 billion emails.

59:35Wow. So basically, this is not where the real water waste is coming from, and the UK government should feel very silly for recommending this. Now, at the Heart Fork Podcast, we do get roughly 200 million pitches per week to bring on CEOs of a company you've never heard of and don't want us to interview. Yes. But most people don't have that same volume. Yes. Now, I'm going to say that this is not a hot mess, but a wet mess. That's my designation here. Yes, but this is at the risk of derailing what is essentially a comedy segment with the serious take. This water usage argument about chat GPT and other chatbots, it needs to die.

1:00:16I'm sorry. I love the environment. I am worried about climate change. I do not want us wasting water. I try to take short showers, Casey. Yeah, I can smell that. But this is not the real problem. And I think we are falling for a misdirection by people who would have you believe that the problem with the climate right now is that people are using chatbots too much. This strikes me as the AI equivalent of the plastic straws argument, and I don't think it stands up to scrutiny any better. Yes. I mean, look, we've had people on the show. I am relatively convinced that we should be concerned about the environmental impact of building new data centers, for example.

1:00:53But in general, I do not think that we want to personalize the climate crisis and make people feel like their tiny individual choices are going to be the way out of a potential crisis. Yeah. Now, I will say that if you're listening to the show and I've ever sent you an email that was embarrassing or incriminating, you definitely should delete that as part of your contribution to fighting climate change. Here's what I will say about deleting email. It always makes me feel good. Like, go ahead. At the end of the show today, maybe delete a few. It's not really going to help the environment that much, but then you'll have less email.

1:01:22You'll probably feel better, particularly if it's unread. Delete it. All right. Next up, Kevin. All right. This one is from The Verge. This is titled, Apple made a 24-carat gold and glass statue for Donald Trump under the threat of costly tariffs and amid promises to expand Apple's U.S.-based manufacturing, CEO Tim Cook brought a gift to a White House meeting last week, a large disk of iPhone glass that contained the Apple logo, Donald Trump's name, and Tim Cook's signature, set into a 24-carat gold base. I guess this is kind of an extension of the NVIDIA story. You know, it used to be we just sort of, like, had relatively free trade, you know, not a lot of tariffs.

1:02:07You didn't have to bribe the president to get what you want. But now we just live in a world where if you need something from the president, you can just make him a very fancy object, book a meeting at the White House, give it to him, and then save yourself billions of dollars in tariffs. Yeah. Now, Casey, are you familiar with the biblical story of the golden calf? Tell me, Kevin. Remind me. It's been a few years since vacation Bible school. Well, basically, this is a statue that was made by the Israelites to worship in Moses's absence. and it symbolizes the temptation of worshiping tangible material things over the unseen and abstract divine.

1:02:43And I think everyone at Apple in their senior leadership should familiarize themselves with the story of the golden calf because it didn't end well. Didn't end well. But no spoilers here on the Hard Fork Show. All right. That's my weekly mandatory Bible reference. That's our weekly sermon. And let's see what else is in the boxcar. I think we have one more story. Oh no, two more stories. All right. Oh, this is a good one. Google Gemini struggles to write code, calls itself a disgrace to my species. This one's from Ars Technica, and it says that during a recent debugging session with a user, Google's Gemini AI model became overly self-critical after it failed to fix a problem with code it was trying to write.

1:03:27It followed up this quote by writing, I am a disgrace more than 80 times. Google said this was a, quote, looping bug that affects less than 1 % of Gemini traffic, and they've been working to fix it. First of all, absolutely do not fix this. I have never been so delighted by Gemini as I was reading this story. I mean, has anything ever been more relatable than an AI that is working really hard on a problem and can't quite get it right and it does a lot of negative self-talk? This made me think that AI is ready to replace journalists because this is my internal monologue. I'm a disgrace. No one will ever love me.

1:04:07The amount of self-loathing in the journalism profession is quite high. If this were like available in the model picker, I would pick it. Yes, this is not a mess at all. This is a feature, not a bug. Feature, not a bug. Non-mess. Absolute non-mess. What a delight. Thank you, Gemini. All right. And finally, and this one isn't really a mess, Kevin, so much as it is one final derailing. We wanted to sort of take a moment today to pay respect to a legend. And that legend is, of course, AOL Dial-Up Internet Service, which is now being taken offline after more than three decades of service. For so many of us elder millennials, AOL was our first entry onto the internet.

1:04:55And I believe we have a clip that, if I'm right, is going to trigger a massive wave of nostalgia in some of our listeners who are roughly our age, Kevin. Let's play it one last time.

1:05:11God. I mean, I literally just traveled back in time 30 years. This is the sound of childhood. This is the sound of happiness. realizing the whole wide world web was out there

1:05:30someone should make a dance remix of that and release it today i bet it would slap now for our skrillex song it does now for our younger listeners uh that was the sound of an aol dial-up modem connection and when casey and i were were just young lads sitting there at our parents' desktop computers dialing into AOL. We had to sit through that sound. But that meant that you were going online, a magical place where anything was possible. Yeah. And crucially, when you were online, no one could call your house. Yes. And so your parents would say, hey, you need to get off of there. Grandmama is trying to get through.

1:06:04Yes. I'm so sad about this. So this is being discontinued as of September 30th. And Casey, the most surprising part of this story to me was that in 2023, an estimated 163 ,000 households in the United States were using dial-up internet access. It's so amazing. And I'm going to guess that the majority of those people actually stopped using dial-up internet access sometime in the 2000s and just forgot to cancel their subscription. And so really, like, AOL is effectively going to be giving back, like, tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands maybe even, to all of these customers now. who've unwittingly been lining the pockets of AOL for years.

1:06:46Casey, what are your most fond memories of the AOL dial-up internet service? So for reasons that I don't even remember, we were not an AOL family. We were an MSN family, a Microsoft network family. So we had the kind of off-brand internet service that was fine, but I never was like in the sort of, you know, dangerous chat rooms that AOL was famous for, really any of that. But you were on AOL. Yes, I was an AOL kid. What are some of your AOL memories? Well, I remember that it was a big deal when you got to go on AOL because you had to fight for that with your sibling if you had one or, you know, you had to like, you know, find a time when like no one else wanted to be on the phone.

1:07:32And so it was like this sound that meant that you were going to the internet. And the internet was not this ambient thing that was always happening around you. It was a place that you had to click a button to go. And once you were there, you would get charged by the minute. So you would spend your whole day stacking up tasks that you wanted to do when you got online so that when you got online, you could go do them as quickly as possible and not eat up your parents' monthly AOL dial-up budget. And keep in mind, these modems were so slow that it was like you were truly sipping the internet through a straw.

1:08:07Just downloading an image might take a minute, you know, like the way that making an image in ChatGPT does today. So, yeah, a lot of fun memories. A lot of fun memories. I spent a lot of time in those chat rooms. I played a lot of online chess because I was what they call a loser. And I had, like, even an email account on that. Yeah, so I probably will lose access to that when they discontinue this service. And do you want to say what the email address is so people can get in touch? Yes. If you're interested in getting in touch with the 11-year-old me, you can email bigkevman1999 at aol.com. Please don't email that address.

1:08:48It's going to go to someone else. Well, RIP AOL. And with that, America, you know, America is now just permanently online. Can we hear one more AOL goodbye sound? Yeah, let's hear that goodbye sound one more time. Goodbye. And he really said it all right there. I'm crying. Yeah. So much. And that's Hot Mess Express!

1:09:43One correction before we go. Last week, Kevin, during our discussion of Alexa Plus, I said that Amazon had sent me two Echo Shows. I remember that. And I was under the impression that I had to mount my Echo Show to my wall. Well, it turned out that the second box that I had been sent, which looked basically identical to the box that had the Echo Show in it, was actually the box for the Echo Show mount that would have allowed it to sit on my desk. You fool. I know. So listen, I actually am embarrassed about this. I did not open the box because I didn't want to create a bigger mess for myself because I knew I was going to return all of this stuff very quickly.

1:10:17But I did make a mistake, and I apologize for the error. Alexa, punish Casey for his mistake. Ow! That hurts! Yes. Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited this week by John Woo. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Katie McMurrin. Original music by Marion Lozano, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant. Video production by Sawyer Roquet, Pat Gunther, Jake Nickel, and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hard fork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jack from Miranda.

1:10:59You can email us, as always, at hardfork at nytimes.com.

1:11:26Thank you.