ScarJo vs. ChatGPT + Neuralink’s First Patient Opens Up + Microsoft’s A.I. PCs

24:58And I think that that works with most technologies. But I think with AI, it's a little bit different. Yeah, absolutely. it's also like he asked for permission, not for forgiveness. He did it backwards. He asked for permission, didn't get permission, and then asked for forgiveness after he didn't get permission, which is not something that - But no, he didn't even ask for forgiveness. He said, I would never ask for forgiveness because there was nothing to apologize for in the first place because this voice isn't based on Scarlett Johansson. It is the wildest sort of, hardest to pin down narrative.

25:30It is. I mean, look, the thing that this brings to mind for me, Kevin, is that you and I both covered the decline in public perception around Facebook, right? And Facebook once seemed like this silly little toy. Nobody paid too much attention. Then after the 2016 election, everybody is like, wait, is this secretly a mind control device that is, you know, making all of our teenagers insane and everything else? And obviously, it's way too soon to say that something like that is happening to open AI. But I'm telling you, this is how it starts, right? I think more and more people are becoming convinced every day that whatever AI is going to be in the short to medium term is not going to be a good bargain for them, and they're not going to give OpenAI the benefit of the doubt.

26:06And that means that OpenAI, I think, needs to be really careful in how it makes its next several decisions around this kind of stuff. So look, I'm glad the Hollywood A-list is paying attention. If you are worried about what a company like OpenAI might do with your voice or your job, you're in good company, which is a 2004 movie starring Scarlett Johansson. Oh, good. Good. I was worried there was one Scarlett Johansson movie we weren't going to mention. When we come back, Neuralink's first ever patient joins us to talk about how the technology is changing his life.

26:54So Casey, as you know, one of the technologies that is fascinating to me right now is the brain computer interface or BCI. That's right. In fact, it's so fascinating to me that I forced you to try one a few weeks ago, and I think it's safe to say it was not all that impressive. No, I was willing to go through with it because I've always wanted to see if we could detect any brain activity for you. But afterwards, I thought I can't do this anymore. So just to back up, brain computer interfaces are a type of technology that allows you to basically control a computer directly with your brain. And this has been something that obviously science fiction has been talking about and that scientists have been working on for decades.

27:32The company that is perhaps best known in this space is Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain computer interface company. And I've just been fascinated by this whole area. I made you try one. It was what's called a non-invasive brain computer interface, which means it's not inside your literal head. It's like a headband that you wear. And it doesn't work that well. The technology was not all that impressive. We didn't end up airing the segment where we tried this thing on because it just wasn't very good. But with Neuralink, the implant, the brain computer interface goes literally inside your skull on your brain, and it allows you to control a cursor with your mind.

28:08So I think we should tell people a little bit kind of about like what this thing is and what it looks like, because there are these threads that have electrodes on them that penetrate into the brain, and those electrodes read signals, which then get translated through the Neuralink device. And that's where I've lost the plot. So can you pick it up from there? Yeah, so it basically translates your electrical activity in your brain into commands to control something on the outside of your body, like a computer or something like that. And for years now, tech companies have been looking at using BCIs to help people who have debilitating conditions like a spinal cord injury or a stroke or some limitation on their mobility.

28:49But also, a lot of people in Silicon Valley just talk about this as a potential next step in computing altogether. Like in the future, you know, some or all of us will have these kind of brain-computer interfaces. And I've even heard people in the AI world say, this is the way we are going to stay ahead of the robots as the AIs get smarter, is that we are going to implant computers in our head that will basically increase our own cognitive capacity. Now, Now, that technology does not exist. It is mostly, you know, just an idea from science fiction. We have no idea whether that would work or not.

29:18But this is a big, important technology that a lot of people in tech are excited about. And just over the last few months, we've actually seen one of the clearest views yet into how this might work in a real human. Yeah, and while you've just spun out some really fantastical sci-fi scenarios, Kevin, what appeals to me about this story is that it is a case of technology helping one person who had something really terrible happen to him. So I want to say up front, very few people have been as critical of Elon Musk as I think the two of us have been on this show in particular. And as hard for me as it is to set aside my personal feelings, particularly about what he did to Twitter, I truly am so inspired by how this technology is helping one person.

30:01And I think it is absolutely worth understanding what is this thing that they built and how has it changed the life of at least one individual. Yeah, so today we have a really special opportunity to talk to the one person on Earth who has actually gotten the Neuralink brain-computer interface implanted in his skull. This man is named Nolan Arbaugh, and he now has a computer system about the size of a coin and a bunch of threads with electrodes that connect to his brain that allow him to do things like move a cursor around on a computer with just his mind. And this is a big deal for Nolan because for the last eight years, he's been paralyzed from the shoulders down.

30:40He had a freak accident eight years ago where he suffered a severe spinal cord injury. And so he has been a quadriplegic for the last eight years. And he volunteered to be patient number one in this Neuralink experience. So today we're going to talk to Nolan about what having this Neuralink device in his brain has been like, how it's changed his life, and why he volunteered to risk his body on this unproven new technology. Let's bring him in.

31:09nolan arba welcome to hard fork nice to be here thanks for having me yeah where are we catching you right now uh just describe where you are um i'm in my house uh in my bed um so if you hear any weird noises in the background it's my bed um i have an air mattress so it's kind of blowing air through the whole thing all the time got it where's home for you Yeah, I'm in Yuma, Arizona. Cool. So it's been a crazy last few weeks for you. Back in January, Elon Musk announced that the first human patient had been successfully implanted with a Neuralink device, but he didn't say the name. It's only really in the last two months that your name has become public, and just the last week or so that you've started to talk more broadly about your experience.

31:54What has it been like to be sort of the literal face of this technology? Yeah, it's been all right. I'm just here trying to get all the information out to as many people as possible. I think it's an amazing technology. I think what's going on in my life and what I foresee the future will hold is worth bringing the whole world along with. So it's been cool, man. I'm enjoying it so far. Yeah, I just want to go back to sort of before you got this Neuralink device implanted in your head. what compelled you to register to participate in this extremely you know new and untested experiment yeah i mean i didn't really know much about it my buddy called me up one day and kind of gave me the five minute rundown i wasn't expecting anything to come from it so i like made a few jokes on my application you know i just i figured i would never hear back and then once i did start hearing back i had to think about it a little bit more seriously had very serious candid conversations with my parents, my friends.

32:57And ultimately, when it came down to it and I was selected, I decided that I just wanted to help. I knew that I wanted to help make it safer for everyone after me. And I knew that I wanted to try to make a difference in the world and something I've been trying to do, something I've been looking for for eight years. And this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Do you remember any of the jokes that you put on your application? Yeah, yeah. I said I wanted an Iron Man suit. I said that I wouldn't mind being uploaded into the Matrix. You know, just things like that. One of the truisms that Casey and I have learned in reporting about tech over the past decade is that you never want to try version 1.0, right?

33:42It's risky to try the first version of anything because the bugs are still being worked out. Usually there's some rough edges. But you were literally being asked to try version 1.0, not just of a new gadget, but of something that is going to go inside your skull. So was that part of your process of thinking through this? Like, no one has ever had one of these put in their brains before. Maybe I want to let someone else be the first person. Yeah, it crossed my mind. Something that my buddy and I, the buddy that called me on the phone, we talked about at length was, you know, this is the worst version of it that's ever going to be in a human.

34:19maybe someone else should go first and I'll get a better version later on down the road or maybe I don't do it at all and wait for it to be on the market to the public and then I'd get an even better version but ultimately I figured that if anyone's going to do it then I should I have a pretty solid foundation with my faith in God and I just felt like I've thought my entire you know accident I'm glad that it happened to me and no one else I know because it's just a very hard thing to experience, you know, being a quadriplegic. And I wouldn't ever want any of my friends to have to go through this.

34:52So it's just the mindset that I've had forever. And with Neuralink, it was the same thing. Like if anything were to go wrong, I would feel terrible if I passed up to wait for a better version and something went wrong to someone else. So I knew that it had to be me. Your parents are your primary caregivers. What were your conversations with like them about doing this? Yeah, they were really hard for a while. I mean, as a quadriplegic, the only real thing that I have left is my mind, is my brain, is my personality. And it's hard to let someone go in and kind of rummage around up there, especially with something that's never been tested in a human.

35:31So one of the things that I mentioned to them was that if I had any sort of brain deficiency afterward, if I was mentally handicapped in any way, that I didn't want them to take care of me anymore, that I wanted them to put me in some sort of home. Because taking care of a quadriplegic is hard enough, but taking care of a quadriplegic with a traumatic brain injury is something that I would never want my parents to do. So I made them agree to that. Yeah. Were you nervous? Like the night before the operation to install your Neuralink device, what did you find yourself thinking about as you went to bed?

36:05yeah i wasn't nervous at all i was just excited my buddy and i were sitting around making jokes i don't know hanging out night before i just wanted to get it over with honestly what kind of jokes were they making um we were planning on uh releasing some like cyborg related jokes you know thinking of things that only i would be allowed to say um you know just random like turn to phrases, dude, like, oh, blew my mind, picking my brain, like things like that. Yeah, just all sorts. I'm curious if you had a thought, like, you know, as you were heading into this surgery of what the first things you wanted to do would be once you had a working brain-computer interface.

36:49Yeah, I mean, I'm a big gamer. I wanted to play games. That was one of the big things I wanted to do. I also wanted to be able to read. I mean, there's nothing like being able to hold a book again and the smell and the feel of a paperback book. It's one of my favorite things in the world and something that I've missed for a long time. I can't do that. And so the next best thing is just being able to read in general. I've had to listen to audiobooks for the last eight years because I haven't been able to sit in the same position to read a book. And I had no way of turning pages. I can do it sort of on a Kindle.

37:25But I was listening to audiobooks and I don't really like listening to audiobooks, to be honest. Sometimes the narration is terrible. I don't want to throw shade, but I remember reading like an Aragon audiobook and the voice that the narrator had for the dragon made me turn it off immediately. I was like, this is quite possibly the worst thing I've ever heard in my life. It was Gilbert Gottfried voicing the dragon. No, that would have been amazing. I would have listened to that on repeat, honestly. No, but just something as simple as that. Being able to, like, you know, lie in my bed and read a book.

38:01Like, there's just something about it. So I was really looking forward to that kind of stuff. So how was the actual surgery? Was it long? Like, what was the recovery process like? Can you tell us just about the actual implant? Yeah, it was super, super quick. We got to the hospital at, like, 5 a.m. I think I was scheduled for surgery at 7. There was a lot of just getting me ready, getting me in bed. The surgery was supposed to last between like four to six hours. They were expecting there to be hangups. They were expecting, say, like the needle on the robot to break. They brought, I think, 20 iterations of that needle in case it broke, and then they had to stop and replace it.

38:38And the needle didn't break once. Just everything performed above and beyond what they expected. And so the surgery took under two hours. And then I was out of surgery, and they prescribed some pain pills. I didn't take a single one. I don't know. It was just so easy. The worst part was I wasn't able to shower for the first few days because my incision needed to heal. But outside of that, like the recovery process was so easy. Like I didn't feel any pain at all. Wow. And when you woke up from your surgery, like what was actually different? Did you feel different? And then sort of how long was it before you actually got to like turn on and use the Neuralink device itself?

39:20Yeah. I mean, I had a gnarly scar with some staples in it. I mean, that was pretty freaking sick. Like I was, I was super happy about that. I got some cool pictures, but yeah, I think within, I don't know, like an hour or two after my surgery, they came in and connected me to, um, like a little tablet they had. What do you mean connected you like, like literally plug something into your head or like, what is it? It's a Bluetooth connection. Yeah. So they, they just wake up the implant with a little coil, like a charging coil, almost like the same thing that you put your phone down on a mat to charge.

39:54It's very similar. You just hold something over my head and it wakes up. That's how you charge it as well. I put that in like a hat and I wear a hat and it charges. And so they woke it up. They connected that to a tablet. And on the screen, they just showed a bunch of the channels. The channels are each electrode in my brain. And those electrodes are picking up like neuron firing. And so they showed me, say, like eight channels, and I got to see like live, like real time, the neurons firing in my brain. And everyone just kind of freaked out in the hospital room. Everyone started cheering. They were clapping, which was totally unnecessary.

40:31It was so awkward. But yeah, it was really, really cool. Right. I'm so curious, Nolan, about the actual experience of using this Neuralink device, because one of the things that it allows you to do is to control a cursor on a screen as if you were like using a mouse just by thinking. But I've never known like, you know, when I'm using a computer, I'm not thinking I'm going to place my cursor here. I'm going to click this button. It's just like it's a much more kind of fast twitch sort of unconscious response. I'm curious, when you're trying to control a cursor on a screen, how intently do you have to think about it in order for the cursor to actually react?

41:11I mean, at first, I wasn't very good at it. I was doing what we call like attempted movements. Attempted movements are basically, you know, like I said, all the signals in my brain are still firing. So the threads are implanted in my motor cortex. And so when I attempt to move my hand, those signals are firing, the implants picking that up, and an algorithm is basically learning what I'm trying to do. And after doing it a certain amount of times it'll translate that into cursor control in some way or another. And then it'll keep learning. As I was like a week in, maybe two weeks in, I just thought to move the cursor in one direction.

41:49And it moved, it blew my mind. Like it was, it was so wild, but then over time it just becomes second nature. It's not like I'm thinking like cursor come over here and like I'm waiting for it to get there or anything. It's just, it's very, very, like I said, intuitive. And how fine-grained is the control you have over a cursor now? Is it roughly equivalent to what it used to be like when you were using a mouse? Or is there still a gap there? I would say it's very similar. I'm not as quick with a cursor as a lot of other people. But I don't think that can't be made up. I think that just comes with a bit more practice and also just a bit more tweaking on the software side.

42:32This is still very early days. is a few months in, and we're already where we're at, which is amazing. I think by the end of my time in this study, whenever that will be, I'll be better than most people with a cursor. Wow. I mean, one of the details that I just love from the initial reporting on your story is that after you got your Neuralink, you played eight straight hours of the video game Civilization 6. And I just love that because it's like, I imagine that, you know, you had doctors years ago thinking that in theory, if this ever, you know, this brain computer interface thing ever worked, it would allow people to, you know, do more types of creative labor and, uh, and be more productive at work.

43:12And, and you get this and just immediately start gaming, which I think shows that you just have the heart of a, of a true gamer. Yeah. Yeah. I, I keep telling them that I keep saying, you know, I'm just so unproductive with this thing. Like, don't you guys like give me more things to do? Like I would much rather be doing work. And they're like, no, just do what you want to do that's what we want is to make you able to play games to go surf the web and do things that you want it's not about you know what other people believe you should be doing or anything it's just whatever makes your life better and waste your life like the rest of us exactly that's what i'm saying i'm no better than any of you guys i mean it makes so much sense though because it's like for for what eight years you had been deprived of being able to just like use your hands to play games.

43:58I love to play video games. I play video games myself every week, and I guarantee you that if I had been in your shoes, I absolutely would have been playing Civilization on day one too. Yeah, yeah. Now, is it also true that you played Mario Kart? I did. I did. Very early on, maybe a couple weeks in, they hooked me up to a Switch, and that was very hands-on. They were real-time tweaking things. Right now, we're working on giving me that capability on my own, so any day I want, I could just hop in. I think that's pretty close. That's amazing. Now, I want to know like how different this is from other assistive technologies that have come before, because we've had things like eye tracking for computer control before for people who have lost mobility.

44:41So have you tried any other ways of controlling computers before this? And so how does this implant stack up to other things that people have been using to do similar things in the past? Yeah, I've tried it all from, you know, the first few weeks, first few months I was in the hospital after my accident, they had me trying everything. And sure, things have gotten better since then, but they're just not even in the same league as Neuralink. Eye trackers, they're just not as good. A lot of it has to do with being centered on the screen, making sure that your levels don't change. I have really bad spasms.

45:17I'm very spastic. So if I move at all, like my body spasms to the right and I'm off center, then the eye tracker doesn't really work anymore. I've tried other things like a quad stick and there was a video of a guy, a quadriplegic who was using a quad stick to play things like Fortnite and stuff. I tried playing one of the Call of Duty games that had come out after my accident and I hopped on and tried the campaign and I think they're storming the beaches of Normandy and I didn't even make it off the beach. Which was unfortunately the case for so many people who hit that beach. It's a very real case.

45:51I was going to say, that happens to me, too, when I play team shooters, because I just get my butt kicked by 11-year-olds. So I'm sympathetic. Yeah, what's your excuse, Ruth? Nolan, I want to ask you about thread retraction, because this is something that has happened since your surgery. A lot of the threads that connect the Neuralink device to your brain actually started retracting. I saw a figure that 85 % of them had retracted, and this was potentially endangering your ability to use this device. So talk with us about this and sort of what the first signs you experienced were that something wasn't right.

46:27Yeah, a few weeks in, I just started losing control of the cursor is what it comes down to. It would start drifting on me. I would want it to go right, and it would go left. I could not get it to go down, things like that. And it just became impossible to use. and then you know about a week later so this was about three weeks and about a week later they told me that you know they had seen some evidence of thread retraction but i think they had only found out like a day before they kept me in the loop the whole time so they actually took a scan of your brain and said it looks like we can see that the threads have retracted no no so like brain scans won't even um show the threads what they can do is look at the electrodes over time and see which electrodes on the threads are sending signals and which ones are sending strong signals or weak signals.

47:19And so they can really tell like which electrodes are still in my brain. And so right now it's about 15 % that are still actively sending like strong signals in my brain. And do they have any theories about why these threads had come loose? Yeah, it has to do with how much the human brain moves. Apparently, they had thought that everything they had read, all the surgeons they had talked to said that the brain moves about one millimeter. And then when they implanted everything in my brain, they found that my brain moves actually three millimeters. So it's on a scale of three X what they were expecting.

47:55So obviously this is not like fixing a computer or an iPhone or something where you can just like open it up and fix it. Like the opening up would involve opening up your head and your skull and and doing brain surgery on you again. So how did they go about trying to fix this? Yeah, I offered them to go in, take out the implant and put in a new one. I was like, if it's going to get me back to peak performance, then that's what I want. If it's going to help me stay in the study, I offered that and they said, no, we're going to like stop, take a step back and see if we can fix this on the software side, which is ultimately what ended up happening.

48:35They just tweaked the way that they were recording signals from the threads and from the electrodes. And that ended up working there. There were a couple of different ways they were recording the neuron spikes in my brain. I mean, there's a ton of information coming from the neurons at all times. And they were trying to interpret those spikes in a certain way. And they had found that the way that we started was the most efficient. But then once all the threads started retracting, they needed to rethink that. And so they switched to a different way of recording those signals. And they found that that was actually much better.

49:11And so where are you at now? Neuralink has said that your performance with the device is now better than it was before all of this happened. Does that continue to be the case? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm still getting better, too. I'm curious, like some of the people that I've talked to in the tech community believe that BCIs are going to be just a major mainstream technology in the future, not just for people with disabilities, but for basically anyone. And that, you know, the next big platform shift may not be people putting computers on their head like with VR. It may be people putting computers in their head and eventually we will all be walking around with these brain implants.

49:49Based on your experience, do you think that is a plausible future here? Yeah, I don't see why not. I think they're safe. I think the possibilities are endless with this technology. I mean, we're just scratching the surface. I don't know what kind of things people are going to be able to do with this in 10 years. I don't think anyone really knows. There are applications that we see can be useful, like helping cure paralysis or different motor diseases, helping cure blindness. But once we start getting all of that, then that begs a lot of other questions. Like, If we can do this, why can't we do even more?

50:27And with the AI revolution that we're in right now, how can this be applied to all of these pieces of hardware in our brain? I just think we're in for an explosion, like exponential growth in this field, especially now that Neuralink has come out with this. It's going to bring all the other BCIs up and it's going to push Neuralink to get even better. It's going to be like a new space race, but in the brain. You know, I'm curious to get a sense of what this has just been like for, you know, you were talking earlier, I was really moved when you were talking about just craving the experience of holding a book in your hands again, something that I take for granted.

51:06And now, presumably, you've been able to read books, you've been able to play games. What is this done for you emotionally to kind of get access to some of those things that you had been missing out on? I mean, it's hard to even put into words. Just this amount of independence that I've been given, it changed my life for the last few months. It's changed my parents' lives. little things. I mean, very, very little things have made huge differences. Like when I was able to get a drink of water on my own in the middle of the night, because I got like a little bottle that stretched across my bed and allowed me to have drinks in the night, that relieved about 90 % of sleepless nights that my parents had.

52:01And now with Neuralink, it's even more than that. I'm able to do a lot more on my own than I was never able to do in the last eight years I don't have to wake anyone up in my family to come help me in the middle of the night I don't have to feel guilty if at 2 a.m I want to connect and read or listen to an audiobook or play a game or just go on and check my social media or text someone back I don't have to feel guilty about trying to wake someone up There's just so much that i'm grateful for being able to do this and ultimately I want to use it to help people people, find some way to help people.

52:37And I'm on the path to doing that. And that's what I've wanted since I was a kid, just to find some way to help people. And after my accident, I didn't think that was ever going to happen. I knew that I could still speak. But I mean, who would want to listen to me speak about, you know, nothing? I had no like life experience to give them. I guess now it's a bit different. But yeah, I don't know. It's just it's been such a huge blessing to me, honestly. Yeah. I'm curious, Nolan, what have your conversations with Elon Musk been like? I haven't had many. I talked to him on FaceTime right before surgery.

53:11I was like, hey, thanks for choosing me to do this. I'm really excited, really thankful, really blessed. And he was like, yeah, this has been great. We're looking forward to it, making a huge step. And I said, let's rock and roll. He's like, let's do it. And that was it. And then after surgery, I spoke to him in person. He came to the hospital. I was still pretty drugged up on anesthesia and I couldn't get his sweet bomber jacket out of my mind. I was just lying in my bed thinking the whole time, don't mention his bomber jacket. Don't mention the bomber jacket. But it was cool. I think we have very similar ideals about what this can do for humanity and where we can go from here and just our drive to help people in that way.

53:56I think it's amazing that someone of his caliber has stepped up and stepped into this role for helping people like me. I mean, I never thought anything like this would ever happen to me or to people like me. And to have such a high-profile figure say, you know, I'll take that on and I'll fight that, it's just amazing. I'm curious what you make of the promises that people like Elon have made for how BCIs could improve in our lifetimes. He did get a little criticism a few years ago for some statements he made at a Neuralink presentation where he suggested that these BCIs could eventually allow blind people to see or give people with spinal cord injuries the use of their full bodies back.

54:42A lot of health experts were very skeptical, and they basically said, it's irresponsible to say this stuff, given that the science is just nowhere near there yet. And I'm curious how you feel when you hear the kinds of lofty promises about what this technology may be able to do someday. Do you get excited, or do you say, like, hey, wait a minute, let's, like, stick to what the science is capable of now? No, I'm super excited about it. It gives me and people like me something to hope for. Once you take away hope, that's the end for most people. and for him to promise something like that even if it never comes about it's just the fact that he's trying and he sees it as a possibility i take that kind of passion to heart i don't agree with people who say that it's irresponsible i think it's a reality from my perspective that it's going to happen probably in my lifetime and if i'm irresponsible for saying that then like I'm sorry but it gives me something to look forward to and gives me something to strive for and to work towards and maybe I fall short of that but I'll be damned if I don't give it my all yeah I mean what's very clear to me about you Nolan is that you just have like a much higher risk tolerance than I do like I get nervous to go to the to the doctor to get like some little uh you know thing and you here are saying I will volunteer I will step up to be patient number one for this potentially very severe use of technology.

56:06So yeah, my hat's off to you for just being willing to put your hand up for it. Yeah, for real. Yeah, thanks, man. All right, Nolan, well, great to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time. Dude, you're awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, guys. I really appreciate it.

56:23After our interview, we reached out to Neuralink to confirm some of what Nolan shared with us about his surgery, but we didn't hear back from them. You can read more about his experience on their website. When we come back, we'll talk to my colleague, Karen Weiss, about Microsoft's big AI announcements.

56:52Well, Casey, it is the most exciting time of the year in the tech industry, which is developer conference season. That's right. For a lot of people, Kevin, this time of year is about dads and grads. For us, it's about APIs. So last week we talked about Google's IO developer conference and everything they showed off. And this week, Microsoft had its big annual developer conference called Build. You did not go in person, did you? I didn't. And candidly, while I read some coverage of this, I want to learn so much more because, you know, I only had so much time left over after I finished researching the filmography of Scarlett Johansson.

57:27Right. So Microsoft obviously is also very excited about AI. They have been building out a lot of their own AI tools and products and services. And this week at Build, they actually demoed some new hardware that they are making that is sort of built around AI. Now, isn't putting AI directly into the computers how Skynet began with the Terminator films? I'm not sure. It's been a while since I watched those movies. But I think Microsoft gets less coverage by tech journalists like you and me than it deserves, in part because a lot of what they do is like boring enterprise software stuff. But, you know, they are the biggest company in the world and they have been investing in AI significantly over the past few years.

58:05And I would say between their stake in OpenAI and all of their own AI projects, they're just a major, major player in this world. Yeah, and it's true. I probably don't pay as much attention to Microsoft as I should. And it is for a somewhat selfish reason, which is I just use Macs. And so sometimes it feels like this stuff just is not as relevant to my life. But let's face it, for most of the working world, they are doing their work on a PC. And so if Microsoft says we're putting AI in it, then we should be paying attention. Yeah. So to talk about this, we're going to bring on my colleague, Karen Weiss, who covers Microsoft for The New York Times.

58:37She went to Build, and she's going to tell us all about what Microsoft announced.

58:49Karen Weiss, welcome to Hard Fork. Happy to join you guys. So, Karen, you actually went up to Microsoft's headquarters earlier this week for their annual Build conference. So just set the scene for us a little bit. Like, what was it like? How did it compare to previous experiences? Well, I think what was unique was on Monday, they tried to really hype this AIPC announcement. And they did something on the campus, like the big headquarters in Redmond, just outside of Seattle. And you had to be in person there. They weren't live streaming it, and Satya was going to give a keynote at it. So it was trying to definitely build attention.

59:25And so, you know, they tried, it was like a lot of hoopla. There's a lot of like music in the background and stuff like that. And they tried to recreate the magic, if you will, of when they launched the Bing Sydney chatbot that shall not be spoken of about a year and whatever ago. Yeah, that all turned out great. So, Karen, one of the things that Microsoft announced are these things called Copilot Plus PCs, which, as I understand it, are basically a personal computer, a Windows PC that is basically built to run AI and that runs it very fast and that is sort of all wrapped around the capabilities of these AI models.

1:00:03So what did they actually announce and sort of how is it different from the Windows PC that people use today? Yeah, the main thing is that these PCs have a bunch of AI models, AI systems locally on the computer, and they can run different AI tools or models because they have this new type of processor, essentially. It's called a, bear with me, an NPU, a neural processing unit. And it is very quick with really little drain on your battery because the problem you have is when you run AI, it's like super intensive, right? It's running all these calculations constantly. And And so this is a whole new generation of chip.

1:00:41Right. So I guess I'm just struggling to understand what it means for AI to be able to run locally because I also have run large language models locally on my hard drive before. And is that what they're saying? Is that if you want to run something like a chatbot, it'll just be much faster to do? Or are there actually capabilities that these will have? Is it going to be so deeply woven into the operating system that people's experience of their computer will actually change somehow? Right. So they are hoping the latter. You'll be shocked to hear. But basically, the idea is because there are these things that are run locally, they can have access to information that is only stored locally.

1:01:19And they can be faster and more interactive in a way where, you know, even right now when you go into a chatbot, you ask your question, right? And it like takes a second and it goes boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And each little word kind of comes out one at a time. This would speed that all up as well. And so they're hoping that by putting these different, they have said there are more than 40 models that can run, can kind of come pre-installed, so to speak, on the laptops. And their hope is that developers now start playing with those and build tools off of it. And they liken it to the iPhone where the iPhone said, oh, wait, here's a, you know, GPS, here's a altitude meter, like whatever kind of tools are in the hardware, people start building it.

1:01:56And then you get Uber or whatever type of system that then made the iPhone this kind of like key platform for people to build off of. And so I think there's a reason why they announced this before their big event for developers is because they're trying to say to developers, build for this. There's a future here. Now, I think speed matters a lot. I do think that that can really change the way that this stuff gets used. And I could absolutely see this becoming a developer platform. But at the same time, Karen, I am reminded of the last time that Kevin and I went up to Redmond for an event, and we were told Bing has AI now, and AI is going to change everything.

1:02:31And I think we were optimistic that maybe that would be the case. And then you fast forward to today, and Google is still by far the most dominant search engine in the market. So I wonder, as you're hearing this presentation telling us that AI chips inside PCs are going to be a next-generation kind of PC that is truly going to change everything, I wonder, what did you think of that? I think the difference between this and Bing is Windows. So Windows is this ubiquitous operating system that Microsoft controls. So when they announced this, it wasn't just them trying to move from a tiny market share.

1:03:07They have this enormous market share, and they had all of the biggest laptop makers in the world there showing off versions of these devices. So I think they have a power or an influence on the PC in a way that they don't necessarily in search or with Bing. That said, they have to prove the utility of these things. And part of why running the models locally is important is it's cheap, right? You pay for the processor up front when you buy the laptop. But every time you ping it, you're not spending a penny. Whereas if you're inferencing things in the cloud, if you're running things off the cloud, it becomes really expensive for a developer to think, oh, can I even afford to offer this product to people?

1:03:41Now, if they can just do it locally, it might not be quite as good. Like the language models that can run on a laptop now are not as good as GPT-4. But they say about as good as GPT-3.5, which was what ChatGPT was initially launched with. So you can get some like good enough uses is the theory. But again, they have to find the kind of key use cases that will show it. I was a little surprised. The examples they released with were not, they were clearly trying to demonstrate certain capabilities. Like what? What did they demonstrate? Some were a little more speculative and futuristic, saying this is the kind of thing you would be able to do.

1:04:18So like one was a dad speaking with a voice chat bot, essentially asking for help on how to solve the particular Minecraft situation. And the voice thingy can come in and then say, oh, you need these materials to build this new thing in Minecraft. And therefore, oh, hurry, this thing just popped up. Go run over there and hide in this basement thing. And because gaming is real time, you can't do that if you're pinging the cloud. And so this was an example of a way where you could bring in generative AI and assistant into like a real live moment, essentially. But that was one of the more futuristic products.

1:04:54It's like not launching with that. Right. I want to ask about this other feature that they announced that I think got a lot of attention, which is something called recall. What is recall? They liken it to a photographic memory. And it's actually kind of makes sense because what it does is it basically builds a history of everything you have looked at on your laptop. And it literally takes constant screenshots of your screen, stores those locally, and then you can ask it, oh, where was that thing that Kevin sent me that was like kind of weird? And he laughed when he told me about it. And since you and I are, of course, chatting on Teams, Kevin, on Microsoft Teams, it would be like, oh, we can pull that up here because the transcript says that he laughed in this moment.

1:05:40And you can kind of scrub back and forth in time trying to visually look for what you were searching for. So basically, if you've always wondered what would it like to have an FBI agent living inside your computer, you can now have that. Perfect. So there's an app called Rewind that has been doing something that sounds very similar to this. But just so I'm clear, this is taking screenshots. It is storing them on your machine. And then it is allowing you to use generative AI to sort of search back through your previous encounters with your computer and say, what was that restaurant menu I was looking at last Tuesday or whatever?

1:06:18But I'm curious, Karen, what you think the target audience for this. Who is actually going to use this feature? And like, what examples did Microsoft give of how it might be useful? They gave some of kind of personal uses. They had this very funny example of this woman trying to get a dress for her grandma. And they talked about how she had searched things online. She had chatted in Discord with her abuela, which I thought was very funny because like my grandma used to AOL instant message me, but I'm not sure how many grandmas are on Discord. But the idea was that there's this like digital record and you can go back and be like, oh, what was that sparkly one?

1:06:54and you can use language like that. And because it has visual intelligence, it can go back and look for the sparkly blue dress you had looked for. And then, oh, didn't Abuela say that she actually really liked a pantsuit instead? And then you can kind of find the pantsuit. So that's kind of a personal one. Like I was recently shopping for jeans and part of me is like, oh, I could see that. Like, where was the jeans that I liked? But also I'm scared if I were to type in like wide leg jeans I was just looking at, how many wide leg jeans would show up. It's kind of mortifying to think about how many wide-leg jeans you need to find to find a good pair.

1:07:25Totally. So, you know, I can see all those use cases. At the same time, all of us are journalists. We often talk to people off the record confidentially. We have sensitive information on our laptops. We're not alone in that. I think most people working jobs have some sort of confidential information that is on their computer. So I hear everything that you've just described, Karen, and I think, absolutely not. I tried Rewind for a while. I found it terrifying and deleted it from my phone. What is your thinking right now about whether a lot of people are going to be willing to invite this level of surveillance onto their devices?

1:07:58Yeah, I mean, the default is definitely to take all of it. You can go back in and manually delete certain days. You can have it opt out of certain applications. But, like, if you're going to opt out of the web search, like, that's one of the main uses for it. So it's a big question. That said, it's defaulting to being there. And one of the things when I was kind of researching before the event was a lot of people haven't interacted with chatbots. They haven't used ChatGPT, but they get a basic Windows laptop from their work. And there's a big old button that says Copilot on it. And these tools will be there.

1:08:31And for many people, it might be the first time that they really have exposure to it. Also, I'm not sure people will understand the technology behind it and that it's literally taking a picture of everything that you're doing. And we should say, like, you know, Microsoft has said that all of these screenshots stay on the device itself. They are not being sent to Microsoft. Microsoft has also said, you know, they're not doing any kind of, like, content moderation on them. So, like, if you've been looking at your, you know, bank account information on your PC, they're not going to, like, scrub that from the screenshots, but that it will all stay locally on the device.

1:09:04And so only the person whose device that is can access that. But I think there are a lot of questions that people will have, especially, you know, if this is maybe a corporate-issued computer, does my employer then have the ability to go back and look at screenshots of every time I've ever used this computer? Of course they will. And as this stuff gets normalized, I can imagine employers handing you your shiny new co-pilot plus PC and saying you have to leave this recall feature on. And then if we ever have a disciplinary issue with you or we are just suspicious about you for whatever reason, we can review everything you have ever done on your corporate issued laptop.

1:09:42That seems like a nightmare dystopia to me. And they can search for it easily. Yeah. They now have this search tool. Right. Your only chance to survive that is just that they're using Bing search, which doesn't work most of the time. Well, Karen, that brings me to one of my other questions about all of this stuff that Microsoft announced this week is like, who is it for? Because I think traditionally Microsoft, a big part of their business is selling to businesses. It's enterprise customers. It's large companies that already run a lot of Windows PCs that already use Outlook and Teams and all the other Microsoft products.

1:10:16and they can just kind of keep adding to that bundle. So do you see these AI PCs and all the features that are on them as being aimed at businesses or are they really making a consumer play here? You know, I initially thought beforehand that it would be more of the businesses. Businesses buy literally the majority of laptops now. When was the last time you guys refreshed your PC? Mine was in 2011, I believe. You know, you're eligible every three years at the New York Times. Oh, no, no, my personal one. When was the last time you bought a personal one? Wait, your PC is 13 years old, Karen? Are you running Windows 98?

1:10:48XP? This was the whole—it's a MacBook, and it's lasted, and, like, for the Internet, right? Everything's on the Internet that I do now. I'm not, like, ripping my CDs anymore and taking my music from one thing to another. You're not mining Bitcoin? I'm not mining— Okay. Interesting. I was surprised, though. They definitely sort of benchmarked it and kind of compared it to the MacBook Airs. So they're smaller. They are lighter. They say they start at$1 ,000. So they're not, like, Chromebook prices. but they're also not a MacBook Pro super heavy thing. Karen, I'm curious how this positions Microsoft against Apple.

1:11:24Apple's having its own developer conference next month, and there's a lot of speculation that Microsoft's announcements at this event this week were sort of designed to take some attention away from anything Apple might announce in just a few weeks. Apple is also expected to do a lot around generative AI in its own hardware products. So what is the competition between Microsoft and Apple like right now? These chips, these new NPUs, do propel the performance of these laptops basically in the realm of Apple now. So it's in the same class because they've changed over this chip architecture or style essentially now to a model that actually Apple had been pursuing.

1:12:07So the question is, will people make the jump from one ecosystem to another? where their employers make a jump from one ecosystem to another, all of that stuff is, I think, I don't know the answer to that. But they are clearly trying to show that they are building even their hardware with this kind of AI first mentality. And again, if people want that, if they can demonstrate the utility of that, that's like the kind of question about all of this. Yeah. I just think so much of this is going to depend on how Microsoft implements all this stuff and honestly, like how annoying they are about it. I mean, one of the, So I have a Windows PC.

1:12:43It's my daily sort of PC that I use. And I would say most of the time, I really like it. But then there are just these times when it's very clear that Microsoft is just getting a little bit greedy. And they just start popping things up or putting things in weird places. Like the other day, I was using my computer, and I got a Skype news alert. Have you seen these yet? I've seen somebody posting these on threads, and it's so funny. It's so funny. I was just minding my own business, doing email. Up comes this little notification. It says Skype says the U.S. economy added this many jobs last month.

1:13:14And I'm like, why is Skype talking to me? Did I ask Skype to talk to me? No, I did not. But that is just a classic case of Microsoft sort of trying to juice engagement by doing something that I think a lot of people would feel is very annoying. So I can see these AI PCs being very useful, and I want to try one. But I think that if they can't resist sort of, I don't know, just trying to nudge you into using it more and more or in different ways, I think that is going to turn a lot of people off. I mean, I think a lot of AI things are going to be nudging you more and more because they want discoverability is that phrase that you hear a lot about, about the features that these things can do.

1:13:46You know, this is a huge Alexa problem, right? People know Alexa can do the timer or whatever, but she can do more and they want you to do more, but like they got to push it to you. Otherwise, how do you know? So I think that's a very hard urge to resist, even though I completely understand and agree. Yeah, I mean, Kevin, I'm like you. I would like to give one of these things a try, see what it can do, see how fast this AI is. once you get it on the device, but I do continue to have trust issues with Microsoft. This is a company that just last month started testing ads in the Windows 11 start menu.

1:14:17So every time you go to like, look at the programs on your computer now, you might just have to see an ad. And I don't know, the more AI is on my computer, the less I'm excited about a company that is looking to shove ads into different parts of the interface. You know, imagine you're going to, you know, shop for jeans for Abuela, and then, oh, you're looking for that? Well, here's an ad for that now, Karen. So there's just a lot of stuff in here that sort of has my eyebrows arched. Karen, did you actually get to try any of this stuff? Did you get to get your hands on one of their new AI PCs? Yeah, they had like a demo station set up.

1:14:52And so it's populated with all the demo data. And so the recall example was hard to know what it would be like when you had a real body of your own data. Would it feel super creepy? Would it be really useful? Would it be not useful because it returns so much information that you can't actually scrub through it all? I understand the problem they're trying to solve with that. Like, I think we all have the zillion tabs open that you keep open just so you don't forget about it. So I understand that, like, impetus behind it. But it was hard to get a sense for that for me of, like, would I personally use this and like it, essentially?

1:15:26Because it was just filled with all this dummy content, essentially. Right. You know, Karen, dummy content was actually the original title for this podcast. Some people think it still should be. All right, Karen Weiss, thanks for coming. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Karen.

1:16:01Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Marion Lozano, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nel Galogli. Video production by Ryan Manning and Dylan Bergeson. If you haven't checked out our YouTube channel, you can find it at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, Kate Lopressi, and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com. Thank you.