Google’s AI Gives Weird Answers & Worst Box Office Weekend in 29 Yrs

0:00Tonight on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozma St John host the highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best I do it! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere tonight on NBC. Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, buckle up because the stock market is getting a speed boost like Yoshi in Mario Kart.

0:40Then Google bots the rollout of yet another AI feature, this time affecting its all-important search engine. It's Tuesday, May 28th. Let's ride.

0:54So, your Memorial Day travel boom is over, but some people are already making future travel plans. Larry Connor, a billionaire from Ohio, is planning on taking a trip down to see the wreck of the Titanic to prove that the journey is safe nearly one year after the implosion of the Ocean Gate Submersible last June. He's going down with an exec from an exploration company and a custom-built$20 million two-man submersible from Triton submarines to make the 12 ,400-foot journey. Neil, are we really doing this again? Not me. I'm not doing it. But this guy, he is a daredevil in every sense of the word.

1:31He's been up to the International Space Station on the first all-private mission, and he served as a pilot. He's been down in the Marianas Trench as well. So if there's anyone who's going to go down to the Titanic after what happened last year, it's going to be Larry Connor, this billionaire Ohio businessman. And I think that the co-founder of the Triton submarines, the person he's going with, said that they just want to prove that it's safe once again. And that he was quoted by saying Ole Miss, that only a crazy person would go underwater, kind of ran rampant after the Ocean Gate submersible.

2:03So this is definitely one of those. Let's prove that it's safe again. We designed a new sub. So I can't believe that almost a year later they're going down again. I think they want to show that the Ocean Gate submersible was a kind of a joke, and they want to prove that the industry is safe, and they're going to build a much safer contraption. So we'll just have to see when that trip is planned. Now let's hear a word from our sponsor, Sage. Not the herb, but a tool that saves finance professionals a lot of time and money. There are so many tools out there that promise to save you time and money, but Sage is a veteran of the time and money game.

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3:08Sage helping businesses flow. Raise the rudders. Raise the sails. Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sails solution? Reach sails professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started today at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. AI is wriggling its way into your every moment online, but the infiltration hasn't gone as smoothly as big tech has hoped for.

3:49Google is once again making news for letting loose an AI feature that isn't ready for the spotlight. Last week, the Goog rolled out one of its biggest changes to search in years, adding in Google AI overviews, which automatically generate summaries of search results, it has led to some whack search results. Some users have posted screenshots of the AI telling them to put super glue on pizza, eat small rocks to aid with digestion, and that a coconut is an example of a fruit that ends in UM. Some of those are obviously funnier, but false and misleading answers can also be dangerous. So clearly it's AI sourcing needs work.

4:25One of the issues is AI can't tell what's a joke and what should be taken as face value. The rock-eating result, for instance, comes from a satirical article from The Onion, which is something a human would probably be able to spot, but not AI. Neil, Google has already had a major mishap when it had to pause a rollout of its Gemini image generation software after it was making inaccurate pictures of historical figures. And now it's wrestling with untruth infesting its all-important search engine. Yeah, I mean, we all got a big laugh out of these search results. But this is not a laughing matter for Google because it searches kind of its entire business.

5:00It does$240 billion in annual ad revenue from Google search. And people search Google on Google 8.5 billion times a day. So if people can't trust Google, it has become known to be trustworthy and the place where you find accurate information. And if Google search can't fulfill that promise, then there's a legitimate threat to that business. Yeah, Ars Technica kind of dug into the faults and why the AI was making these mistakes. And something I found is that sometimes it was conflating people with the same name. One of the examples of that was said that 13 U.S. presidents had attended Wisconsin-Madison.

5:37But that came from an article where the University of Wisconsin was just listing names of alumni that shared names with presidents. So that's just another example. And then, yeah, they cannot determine what's a joke and what's real. Some of these answers are coming from old 12-year-old Reddit posts where it's like a longstanding Internet joke. But again, Google doesn't have a sense of humor. AI doesn't have a sense of humor. So it cannot make these seemingly easy, logical jumps because it is just kind of an aggregator. I think it shows the desperation from Google to roll out all of these AI features as it faces increased competition from OpenAI, which is rumored to be launching its own search engine.

6:17There are upstarts like Perplexity and Anthropics Cloud and Microsoft Bing, which is incorporating ChatGPT. So Google feels the need to rush out these AI features that just aren't ready for prime time. And we're seeing the results over and over again. It's become a pattern of Google releasing AI features that just aren't ready to be released. Yeah, it almost doesn't have a choice. Investors are demanding it keep up with the other tech companies, so it does have to move quickly even if it's not ready. And then just on that competition front, we also got some big news from XAI, which is Elon's artificial intelligence company.

6:50It raised$6 billion in its last fundraising round. It's brought the valuation to – this is just a year-old startup to$24 billion. It's now the second most valuable startup behind OpenAI. So Elon is in the arena now and Google is looking over its shoulder at Elon once again. Like many of you who listen to this podcast but wish it would take just half as long, the U.S. stock market is going 2x speed in one of its biggest updates in years. Starting today, the U.S. is slashing the time for settling a trade from two days to one. And in Wall Street jargon, that means going from T plus 2 to T plus 1.

7:28It is a sweeping attempt to modernize trading for the 21st century and offer a fix to the meme stock debacle of 2021 when Robinhood became public enemy number one for blocking investors from buying GameStop and AMC when that frenzy hit a fever pitch. You might be wondering, wait, when I buy a stock, I don't immediately own the stock? And the answer is no, not necessarily. When a trade is initiated, it sets into motion a process that takes up to two days to complete. The investor who bought the stock goes and grabs their money to pay for it. The seller goes and grabs the stock. And then the parties meet two days later to conduct the actual transaction.

8:07Finance writer Matt Levine says, think of it this way. When you're shopping around for a new home, you don't carry bags of money to every open house you go to so you can immediately buy it. You go agree to a deal first. Then you go to the bank, get your mortgage, then finalize the transaction while the seller gets the house in shape to hand over. And that's what happens in the stock market with a two-day grace period for closing a deal. But it is not all that efficient. And regulators think that reducing the grace period by half will ultimately make the market work better. Yeah, the biggest benefit people see from this is that T plus one reduces that settlement window, which means that there's less of a chance that something can go wrong in that transaction.

8:47If we go back to your housing example, sometimes deals fall through because, I don't know, extenuating circumstances happen. Maybe you catch a bad break and the money that you're going to pay with is no longer there. That's the same thing can happen in the stock market. And when that window is larger, there's more of a chance that the buyer or seller might default on that transaction before it's completed. So that's when we're saying T plus one adds efficiency into the market is because hopefully it brings that like default rate down. And that's exactly what happened with Robinhood back in 2021.

9:16Brokers like Robinhood and Schwab and all the other ones are required to post collateral to these clearinghouses, which are intermediaries that settle the final transaction, so that there is cash on the table for this transaction to be made. During the meme stock mania frenzy, whatever you want to call it, there were so many people buying GameStop, AMC, and all these other meme stocks that Robinhood just didn't have the cash to settle all of these trades. It had to put up billions of dollars in liquidity to the clearinghouse. So when the clearinghouse said, Robinhood, your people are buying so much of these stocks, we need more money from you so that these settlements can take place.

9:53Robinhood said, look, we don't have the money. So they block people from trading, which caused a huge uproar, led to congressional investigations and things like that. By moving from T plus two to T plus one, the idea is that these brokers will have to put up less collateral, less cash on the table so that it will lubricate the market even further. So the next logical question here is, should we move to T plus zero, which is an even faster settlement cycle, which basically does real time, same day transactions. And probably not. We're kind of in the Goldilocks of settlement periods. T plus zero adds in additional kind of riskiness because there could be fraud and you can't spot fraudulent trades when they're happening.

10:34T plus two is also risky because of that settlement issue. So T plus one seems like the Goldilocks of settlement periods. And it looks like a lot more of the world, too, is going to jump on this standard as well. So, yeah. So other countries are jumping on board. But say you're the average investor listening to this. Are you going to notice T plus two to T plus one today? And the answer is likely not. The people it's most going to affect, honestly, are international investors who are going to have to scramble a bit to buy thing by U.S. dollars to settle their transactions. All of this time zone stuff gets very tricky for them, especially when making a trade in U.S.

11:10assets. So if you're an international investment manager, you've known about this for years and you've likely made preparations. But it's always interesting to look at the stock market plumbing and see how this actually works. OK, let's catch you up on some business headlines from the long weekend. The first hits close to home because I, like many of you, spent a lot more time at the airport than expected this weekend. nasty storms across the country led to more than 3 ,500 flight delays and 350 cancellations yesterday alone. The bad weather couldn't have come at a worse time because a record number of Americans were traveling for Memorial Day.

11:46TSA said that Friday was the busiest day for airports in U.S. history, with nearly 3 million people going through its checkpoints. Meanwhile, for people living in the central United States, the weather was destructive and deadly. At least At least 23 people died over the weekend as tornadoes and other storms obliterated homes in the Ohio and Tennessee Valley. Nearly 600 ,000 homes and businesses also had their power knocked out across 13 states, which was made worse by the intense heat. Toby, it was a very frustrating and very dangerous Memorial Day weekend thanks to Mother Nature. Yeah, I mean, just go around the country.

12:21In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott signed a severe weather disaster declaration and covered 106 counties. Kentucky, the governor activated the state's price gouging statute to prevent price increases on necessary supplies because there was just such a big cleanup effort in a lot of storms there in Missouri. There were severe thunderstorms. They were producing hail, tornadoes in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma led to, you're right, a loss of lives and property. So yeah, it was just very bad timing because this was the most busy travel day that the TSA has seen and then also on the roads as well. the triple a was projecting nearly 44 million travel travelers 90 of which were going to be traveling on road so just bad timing from from top to bottom for our next headline it may actually be time to hit the panic button on the movies because we just had the worst memorial day weekend box office performance in nearly 30 years the mad max prequel furiosa brought in just 32 million dollars over the four-day weekend barely beating out the garfield movie for the top spot it's the lowest number one box office haul for a movie since Casper brought in 22 and a half million dollars in 1995 and that is not adjusted for inflation either overall revenue for the four days was down 37 percent from last year it is ugly out there part of the brutal start to the summer because comes because there's no real big studio tentpole this year Marvel usually drops a superhero movie around this time but this year Deadpool and Wolverine is delayed almost three months to July due to last year's labor strikes.

13:53What's going on in the movies? Barbenheimer seems like a distant memory. I mean, I think it's just a content issue. There really aren't that many good movies that have come out or are coming out, but it is a problem for movie theaters. I think they are hitting the panic button because the few months from Memorial Day to Labor Day accounts for 40 % of all cinema box office revenues for the entire year. So when they look at what just happened this weekend and they look at the slate coming up and it is a little thin. I think the biggest movie that they're expecting to come out is Deadpool and Wolverine.

14:26And then there's also Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4. It's good that those are sequels, though, because I think this is a pattern that we've seen that prequels, especially that don't cast the same stars as the originals, just fare far poorly than the originals. Our final headline for the weekend is a sad one. Bill Walton, the legendary UCLA basketball player, Hall of Fame NBA player and famous color commentator died yesterday, age 71 from cancer. NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement, Bill Walton was truly one of a kind, which sums him up pretty well. Our older listeners might remember his dominant reign at UCLA under John Wooden, where he won two national championships, or maybe you remember his two NBA championships, but our younger listeners most likely know Walton from seeing him in the broadcast booth on ESPN.

15:13He called both NCAA and NBA games and definitely put the color in color commentator wallen just had a different flair from anybody else he'd wear these tie-dye shirts and sprinkle in references to the grateful dead while calling games and would say things like come on that's no foul and maybe a violation of the basic rules of human decency but it's not a foul neil truly a big loss for the basketball world big loss and yes i i do not remember him playing uh but i do remember him as a broadcaster and he won an emmy for his broadcasting He was also named one of the top sports broadcasters of all time.

15:47He also had a memoir that was a New York Times bestseller. So he was a remarkable figure that always loved to sprinkle in very intellectual references to his broadcast. And I don't remember him talking much about basketball at all. But he also, to me, like represented this West Coast aesthetic and vibe. He was a very big booster of the Pac-12. And that just doesn't exist anymore as that conference has got obliterated and college sports has gone more national. So he represented this regional West Coast flair that I just don't think exists anymore. Yeah, you got to find what makes you and bring that to the table.

16:20And Bill Walton definitely did that. So I think it shows you can just have success being different, being yourself. And that's why so many people connected with Bill Walton. Up next, Neil takes us across the pond to talk about a controversial proposal in the UK. I'm Christian McCaffrey, pro running back. And Abercrombie is an official fashion partner of the NFL. I'm not kidding when I say NFL by Abercrombie broke the internet last year. And I think this season's lineup is even cooler. And so does my wife who keeps stealing all my hoodies. Stay fit for the season and Abercrombie's newest arrivals.

16:54Shop NFL by Abercrombie in the app, online and in store.

17:07When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at WhatsApp dot com. The UK elections are coming up on July 4th, just over a month out, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak kicked off his campaign with a proposal that went viral on social media for all the wrong reasons.

17:47Sunak proposed that should his Conservative Party win the elections, he'd institute mandatory military or civilian national service for every 18-year-old. Sunak said that national service would lead to young people getting the skills and opportunities they need for their careers and would result in a more cohesive British society. And as you might imagine, Gen Z had a field day with this proposal on TikTok. Some young Brits created mock recruitment videos for the military with dramatic voiceover lines like, if you can fix your parents' iPad, then you can fix an Apache helicopter. Others posted fake get ready with me videos of them putting on cargo khakis as they prepared to fight in World War III.

18:28With his national service proposal, Sunak did not seem to be helping his case with the use and was instead trying to attract older, more conservative voters who may view Gen Z as too woke and too lazy. Either way, he needs a jolt. Poll shows Sunak's party faces an uphill battle against their opponents, the Labor Party, heading into the election. Yeah, this would be the first time a form of national service was back in more than 60 years. they introduced it back in World War II and then briefly between 1947 and 1960. But yeah, there's definitely a social angle to this as well. They don't just want to boost the military.

19:03They want people out in their communities, out and beyond their communities as well. But you're totally right that this is bringing the youth vote out in a way that probably Rishi Sunak doesn't want because this is clearly appealing to an older generation of voter. But the youth are smart where they're saying, listen, most of the older generation also didn't have to go through this. So how are you telling us that we now have to go through this? And yeah, if you fold in the presence of TikTok as well, you can see why this blew up on social media. Right. And the Labor Party, the opposition, called it just out of touch and an expensive gimmick.

19:36It's going to cost$3.2 billion a year. They posted a video that went absolutely viral, and it was about Lord Farquaad from Shrek. And when he's saying, some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. So this was not very popular, and his conservative party is not doing well with kids in general. Only 8 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds who say they're going to vote are going to go with conservatives. So, yes, Rishi Sunak is facing a sort of a stagnant economy that's performed worse than all of its peers. High inflation. They haven't gotten a rate cut over there yet. We're also waiting for that as well.

20:13And Brexit continues to take its toll on the economy as a lot of countries put up trade barriers. and the UK positions itself as part of this free trade enterprise that was what was going on in 2016. But now we've seen that from the US to Europe to China, there's a lot more policy going into building up domestic manufacturing and the UK just doesn't have that. So there's a just a general malaise going on in the UK over its economy. It's a tale as old as time. So many good books to read or shows to watch or podcasts to listen to, but never enough time. But someone may have solved the reading time space continuum and it's what i want to talk about on today's edition of toby's trends where i comb through the internet to tell neil about a trend you guys should keep your eye on and today's trend is about the book summarization industry there's this company called blinkus you've probably seen an instagram ad for them over the years that takes famous works of fiction and non-fiction and distills them down to bare bones summaries of their more loquacious original texts i'm talking really distills them the first book that a reporter from the New Yorker Blinked was called Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker.

21:20In paperback form, it's 450 pages plus another 100 pages of notes. On Audible, it lasts 19 hours and 49 minutes, but over a series of nine blinks, it takes just 24 minutes flat to listen to. Now, of course, there are two ways to look at what Blinkist does. You can say that a stripped down, summarized literature is a shadow of the original text is not even worth blinking. Or you can say, hey, it can introduce you to a lot of different books very quickly. It's better to have blinked Heidegger than to have never come across Heidegger at all. Neil, where do you lie on this rise of the 15-minute book?

21:54I think it's worth noting that this is not new. There are abridged book versions that have existed for centuries. Readers Digest, the magazine, they had a condensed book club that started in 1950, and they had 2.5 million members to that condensed book club, which sent people abridged versions of books in the mail. So this is not necessarily new, but it is abridged books, maybe very abridged books for the smartphone era. And it's interesting to think about, like, you know, our phones are seen as a distraction from a book because I know I go home. I have my phone in one hand and I have the book on the couch in the other.

22:32And, you know, what am I going to, you know, direct my eyes to is probably not the book. So if you can make books somewhat accessible on your phone, I can see you're solving somewhat of a problem. But I do think for most books, like fiction books especially, where the plot really isn't interesting or doesn't matter, and the most important thing is learning the writing style and getting the descriptions and things like that, this does seem like a shadow of an actual book and not a worthy substitute. One thing that makes it interesting to talk about in the current climate, though, is the presence of AI because this New York reporter went over to their headquarters and said, who's doing the summarization?

23:10Because that is a really big deal. They control basically how people are encountering these books. And a lot of real people do do it. Subject matter experts, some PhD candidates, some consultants, they jump in. They read books. They take notes. They send that notes to summarization experts at Blinkist, and they take those notes and turn them into text. The only time that AI really comes into play is actually the narration because there's not a lot of narrators out there. And so they have the more popular books in their catalog read by humans, but the back catalog is almost entirely read by AI narrators.

23:45So it is very interesting to see where AI has come into play on this summarization of books debate. I'm sure a lot of people listening to this are like, oh, my God, the further ruination of society where we can't read a single book and need it into 15 minute clips. But, hey, that's where we're at. Finally, here's what you need to know about the week ahead, which may be short, but it is stuffed. There's a big boardroom battle royale reaching its climax tomorrow and Exxon Mobil is at the center of it. This conflict dates back months when environmentally focused activist investors submitted a proposal that would force Exxon to do more to curb emissions.

24:22Exxon then took the unusual and very aggressive step of suing those shareholders, which raised alarms that it was launching a broader attack against shareholder rights in the U.S. The backlash has been severe from Exxon investors. CalPERS, the largest U.S. public pension plan, said it would vote against all of Exxon's 12 board nominees and its CEO at the meeting tomorrow, while Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund said it would do the same. Yeah, there's two sides to look at it because, yes, you can say that this is an attack on shareholder rights. But then also there's some people, some major shareholders, some of which are pension funds that are against this ideological motivated opposition from groups that could affect the financial stability or the revenue generation of Exxon.