OpenAI’s Safety Team Reaches Breaking Point & UAW Takes Big Blow in the South

0:28This episode is brought to you by eBay. Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, more leadership turmoil at OpenAI. Can Sam Altman plug his leaking chip? Then how come our sunscreen in America is so much worse than other places around the world? It's Monday, May 20th. Let's ride.

0:52The New York City to Dublin portal is back open. The giant circular art exhibit that connects the two cities via live video feed was shut down due to some unsavory behavior on both sides of the Atlantic, but with some new preventative measures intact, organizers flipped the switch back on five days after it went dark. The biggest change, instead of a 24-7 video, the portal will only be live from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m., so maybe we can have nice things after all as long as those things are only open from 6 to 4. No happy hour at the portal. What are some of these measures? They're going to have on-site security during those hours of operation.

1:28They're also going to put up signage and have a fence. I'm not sure that accomplishes the goal of not flashing people because you can still do that. Not that we're recommending it, but you can still do that with what the security measures. So I don't know exactly what they're trying to prevent here, but I guess it's like people get intoxicated after 4 p.m. and maybe that's when the shenanigans ensue. Yeah, I am glad that the portal is back open, but I think this has revealed a lot about the human condition and the human condition maybe needs some restrictions from time to time. Now let's hear a word from our sponsor, Sage.

2:03Not the herb, but a tool that saves finance professionals a lot of time, money, and headaches. We talk so much about AI on the show, but Sage is a great example of how AI can actually help in the real world. Sage uses the power of AI to review thousands of transactions in just minutes so you can get an up-to-the-second view of your business performance and aren't bogged down by tasks that can be handled with Sage. Sage's AI is like a really attentive worker who never misses anything and constantly keeps you up to date. Kind of like Neil now that I'm thinking about it. Close, but I need a little more sleep than Sage's AI.

2:37If you're interested in having your own time-saving, reassuring, and confident Neil around, check out sage.com slash morningbrew. Sage, helping businesses flow.

2:51When 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.com. Well, OpenAI's leadership team of super nerds is beefing again, reviving conflicting visions about the future of artificial intelligence within the company that's driving the AI revolution. Last week, two long-serving execs resigned from OpenAI.

3:32First, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Suitskever, followed shortly by company vet Jan Laika. In explaining why he quit, Laika wrote that over the past years, safety and culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products, and his disagreements with OpenAI's leadership had reached a breaking point. As you might have gathered, Tsutsukever and Laika are deeply concerned about AI's long-term threat to humanity. They co-led the company's super alignment team, which was formed last year to study the existential risks posed by AI that's smarter than humans. But they and CEO Sam Altman do not seem aligned on how to tackle this problem.

4:11As Altman ramps up the money-making part of the business, his critics say he's prioritizing profits over safety. Remember, that led to his firing by the board last November, which failed spectacularly and he was reinstated within a week. Toby, what is going on at OpenAI? I think that since that board kerfuffle in November, Sam Altman has increased his grip even more so over OpenAI. Since that went down, at least five of the company's more safety conscious employees have either quit or been pushed out. Not many employees are speaking about this publicly either because there was this another controversy too because OpenAI requires its workforce to sign these really kind of stringent offboarding agreements with non-disparagement clauses in them.

4:55There was also some rumors that if you could give up your equity in the company if you said something about OpenAI, Sam Altman came out and said like, yes, that was a provision. We took that out. So there's been a lot of more coming out about the level of control Sam Altman has over the board and the level of control OpenAI is exerting over its employees when they do end up leaving the company. Let's talk about the concept of alignment and super alignment. What is that? Sounds very jargony. And it is an AI alignment is an actual concept. And it describes whether a machine has the same goals as its human creators.

5:28and making sure the machines and humans are aligned becomes extremely important, super important, when the AI becomes super intelligent because without alignment, the downside would be human extinction, according to some safety researchers. OpenAI is trying to build a superhuman intelligence. This is called artificial general intelligence. It is the goal of OpenAI since it was created. Some people at OpenAI I think they're going to create artificial general intelligence within the decade by 2030. So these researchers said we have to get out ahead of this because if machines and humans don't have the same goals, then it could really realistically lead to humans getting wiped off the map.

6:11And then even though Ilya has since left the company, there's been rumors that for the last six months he hasn't even been in the office. He's been co-leading. He's been leading the team remotely, the super alignment team. So it's clearly hasn't been a priority for a while now. A lot of people, the knock on Sam Altman is that they're just going ahead with commercializing the product. Full steam ahead. They just rolled out that Siri replacement, their voice-activated assistant, and they're not really taking super alignment very seriously. Even when the team was at full capacity, they were only promised around 20 % of OpenAI's computing power.

6:45And computing power is gold at these companies. You need computing power in order to conduct the experiments that you want to conduct. So even though the team has been hollowed out before that, they were very hollow to begin with. Yeah. So we'll see what happens at OpenAI. It's an$80 billion business now. And it doesn't seem Altman did respond to like and suits covers saying, well, we take your concerns seriously. We need to do more. But it doesn't appear like they are driving any shift change within OpenAI. And it's going to be full steam ahead. What was the result of the United Auto Workers Union vote out of Mercedes-Benz plan in Alabama?

7:19and were Uber, Lyft and the city of Minneapolis able to come to an agreement on driver pay? We're going to circle back on both those stories today to tell you how things shook out. For those of you just getting up to speed on the UAW vote, there was this important showdown between the union and workers at a Mercedes-Benz plant near Tuscaloosa on Friday. The UAW felt good about its chances fresh off winning a union election at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but the auto workers decided against joining the union. The result was very close. 56 % voted no, while 44 % voted yes. But a loss is a loss.

7:55Neil, Sean Fain, the union president, said that losses are part of the process and they'll carry on and keep fighting. But this definitely was a blow in his attempt to, quote, win the South, especially after having success in Tennessee. Right. Well, definitely slow down the movement. They scored a huge victory in Chattanooga. I think more than 70 % of workers voted to join the union there. This Mercedes plant, there were two of them. This is another, this was too big. There was over 5 ,000 workers at both of those plants. And I think the main difference between Volkswagen and Mercedes, Mercedes launched a big anti-union drive.

8:29They pushed back. Volkswagen did not put up much defense. So they kind of steamrolled through Chattanooga. But when they went to Alabama, there was a lot of pushback, including from the governor who warned that unionization would lead to a lot of job losses in the South, which has been a huge beneficiary of all these automakers setting up shop in this region. Right. This likely says more, too, about Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen than the actual maybe feelings of the workers there, because you're right. Mercedes-Benz did do a lot more to prevent this union. The National Labor Relations Board said it's investigating six unfair labor practices, stuff like disciplining employees for discussing unionization during work, that are surveilling employees, prohibiting the distribution of union material.

9:13So there's definitely a push against this union. The general consensus I've been seeing though is that this is not a horrible loss because it gives the UAW a chance to just see where they're at in the South. Like they had that important victory. The Mercedes plant was a little bit bigger. So, and the vote was closed. So even though some of that momentum, that role has been slowed a little bit, it's not the end of the world in their union push in the South. Now let's circle back on the other auto-adjacent story that we've got some closure on this weekend. So Uber, Lyft and Minneapolis, Minnesota have been locked in a three-way Challenger-esque duel.

9:47Over the details of a minimum wage law for nearly a year now, Minneapolis initially adopted a rule that mandates drivers be paid at least$1.40 per mile or 51 cents per minute. Uber and Lyft said it made their business untenable and threatened to pull their services from the city. But over the weekend, the two sides struck a deal that institutes a statewide minimum wage for rideshare drivers that comes out to$1.28 per mile and$0.31 per minute. So a little less than initially proposed, but still a 20 % increase in pay for drivers, according to lawmakers. So Uber and Lyft aren't leaving after all.

10:21No, what seemed to have happened here is that Minnesota state lawmakers looked at what Minneapolis did and said, guys, come on. Like, we can't have Uber and Lyft leaving here. A lot of people rely on them. So at the state level, they worked with Uber and Lyft to work on a compromise for a minimum wage for drivers that overrode the city's measure. So we talked about this with Uber CEO Dara Khashrashahi on our interview that was published on Friday. Just quick plug right there or published on Thursday, excuse me. And he kind of called into question both sides of the user experience when you see these things like minimum wages for drivers come up.

10:56because it's a two-sided marketplace. If you jack up driver pay, that is then passed on to customers and then potentially less people start losing the service, which ends up with less business going driver's ways in general. So Uber was definitely saying, like, we have more data around this that we'd like you to consider. And it looks like they've reached kind of a middle ground here, which is kind of what you want in any scenario like this. It's just incredible how much leverage Uber and Lyft have when going into these negotiations because when they threaten to pull out, it could lead to a lot of job losses for drivers and so they can go into these negotiations with a really upper hand and they rarely leave a city when they say they do which you know critics say is you're just bluffing but they can come they can go into these negotiations with with a lot of leverage okay we are on to our winners of the weekend now neil and i got some golf in and watched a lot of sports so i'm inclined to just say it's us and move on but there were some important things that went down outside of me shooting 79 that deserve a mention neil you want our pre-show parallel parking contest.

11:55So you're up first. Who's your winner of the weekend? That's right. Yeah, I learned in the mean streets of South Philly. My winner is Ed Dwight, who is a perfect example of why you should never give up on your dreams. Back in 1961, Dwight was selected as the first black astronaut candidate by NASA, but never made it to space. Fast forward to yesterday, and Dwight finally got his chance to see the curvature of the Earth. He was one of six private passengers to travel aboard Blue Origin's new Shepard rocket, which flew to space and back in a 15-minute flight. At 90 years old, Dwight became the oldest person to ever go to space, beating William Shatner's record by just a few months.

12:34Dwight isn't the only winner from this story, though. For Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, this was the first passenger flight in nearly two years after he took its rocket back to the garage for some work. This whole space tourism business has been slow going, but so far, Blue Origin and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic have now flown more than 60 people to space since 2020. And yesterday's flight was a small but important step forward to regain momentum. Yeah, I do just want to circle back to Ed Dwight real quick again, because he said about the experience, I thought I didn't need it in my life, but I lied.

13:06I really, really did need it because Ed Dwight, even though he was the nation's first black astronaut candidate, he never ended up going to space. So it was like this very good full circle moment of closer for him. And he's, and he was hyped about it. I mean, of course you would be hyped going to space, but especially him. It felt like it was something that his life needed. And he was, he was really pumped about it. Yeah. He was so pumped and he wants to go back and he's like, I'm not just satisfied doing this 15 minute flight to about 317, 317 ,000 miles. I want to go into full orbit and see the full curvature of the earth.

13:38My winner of the weekend is the English premier leagues, Manchester City for winning the record-breaking fourth league title in a row. Another team in history, not Sir Alec Ferguson's Manchester United or the Chelsea teams of the early 2000s, have accomplished this feat. So as much as it pains me to say this as a Manchester United fan, Manchester City is truly in a league of their own. This run of unprecedented form comes after Sheik Mansoor bought City in 2008, bringing with him immense financial resources as a member of Abu Dhabi's royal family. All that money has come with incredible success, but also controversy.

14:12There's a cloud looming over City in the form of 115 alleged breaches of financial fair play regulations over a period spanning nine seasons. You know, Manchester City's reign of terror has continued for the sixth time in seven seasons. Crazy. But we might have to apply some asterisks once these cases make their way through the courts. We'll see. This just goes to show how golf money is transforming sports. soccer golf boxing i mean the the boxing big boxing match this weekend was in riyadh saudi arabia and i think it really came to the fore in 2008 in soccer in global soccer when uh the emirati money came to manchester city you have to give a lot of credit to the coach pep guardiola who brought a new style of play to the premier league as well but you can't you can't mess with all these billions that this uh this chic started pouring into man city and it might have been improper.

15:03They're investigating whether this guy sort of improperly inflated the financials, the bottom line of Man City by saying that by inking sponsorships with Abu Dhabi firms like Etihad, 67.5 million pounds per year, when actually Etihad only poured 8 million in and the rest was kind of topped off by this guy. So that's what they're looking into with these 115 alleged breaches. Yeah. Inflating some sponsorship deals, maybe hiding some player and manager salaries. These are stuff that you can't do at the highest levels of European soccer and are in violation, but they're going to make their way through courts.

15:38There's a lot to be mad at as fans of not Manchester City in the league, but you can't fault the players or the coach for just winning when they go out there. Up next, some stories about sunscreen and weed drinks. Tonight on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema 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.

16:16Make the best idea win! On brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere tonight on NBC. 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. Shop NFL by Abercrombie in the app, online, and in store.

16:52Memorial Day is just around the corner, and many of you are about to head to the store to load up on sunscreen for your beach weekend. But as you scan the shelves, you might be wondering, why is American sunscreen so awful? Why isn't there sunscreen that effectively blocks UV rays and doesn't make you look like Casper the Friendly Ghost at the same time? Well, there is an explanation for this. In the US, sunscreen is regulated as an over-the-counter drug, which means the FDA has to evaluate and approve all ingredients individually before they can be marketed. And that's not the case in Europe or Asia, where sunscreen is considered a cosmetic and formulators there have far more ingredients available to mix and match.

17:33And that is why sunscreen found in foreign markets is considered far better than the sunscreen we have here in the States. Congress tried to fix the problem in 2014 when it passed the Sunscreen Innovation Act. That's a real thing to speed up FDA approval of sunscreen. But that hasn't really worked. And we're still stuck with sunscreen from the Stone Age. Toby, having sunscreen that people will actually use is a big issue for public health. It prevents skin cancer, which is the leading type of cancer in the U.S. Yeah, and the disease costs the healthcare system around$8.9 billion a year, according to CDC researchers.

18:08And that's the most frustrating part. Unlike most forms of cancer, skin cancer can largely be prevented by using sunscreen. And yet we are caught in like the stone age of sunscreen research because the FDA is just moving at a glacially slow pace. even though Congress, even though a lot of these manufacturers are please saying, just free us up. We want to use ingredients that are used all around the world. Just give us the chance to do that. People aren't dying from using sunscreen. They're dying from melanoma in skin cancer. So it is just this weird wrinkle, pun not intended there, of the U.S.

18:42healthcare system and the FDA that we cannot get good sunscreens out there. Yeah, let's give the FDA's argument here because we should give them some real estate. They say that, you know, people are using sunscreen now daily. They're not just using it to go to the beach and at times when there's peak sun. It's part of people's skin care routine. And therefore, it should be regulated. There should be a safety review of these ingredients that go in just like anything you would use a daily from your medicine cabinet. So that's what they're saying. I think the majority of people that you read say that this is a bit of an antiquated system.

19:16and we only have eight, sunscreen makers in the United States only use eight active ingredients compared to dozens around the world. We also look to the EU as pretty intense regulators in pretty much every sector. They've approved a ton of stuff. And so the FDA does feel like it's falling behind the rest of the world here and Americans are suffering from it. There's also another angle here. There's a campaign from sort of that raw milk influencer crowd where a lot of these wellness influencers are actually touting the sun's natural processes and saying that it's sunscreen that's making us sick instead and sunscreen that's giving us cancer.

19:50Even Tom Brady in his 2017 book says all he does is drink water to help prevent sunburns. That's not actually true. So there is this wrinkle, this health influencer wrinkle as well that is kind of promoting people not using sunscreen instead just saying like the sun is the best thing in the world for you. So there is a lot of discourse around sunscreen. You're right, as we're ramping up for Memorial Weekend, It's important we talk and tell the people why our sunscreen isn't as good in the U.S. as it could be. Okay, now I want to talk about weed drinks. No, not CBD drinks, which include the non-psychoactive ingredient of cannabis plants, but THC-infused drinks, which is the ingredient that gives you the giggles watching planet Earth at night.

20:31Alcohol distributors and marijuana companies are both competing for a stake in this new money-making product category. Internet searches for THC lace drinks have reached an all-time high in 2024, per Bloomberg. And even mainstream magazines like Bon Appetit and Esquire have recommendation lists for happy hour highs. Now, if it feels like weed drinks probably shouldn't be, you know, legal, you're kind of on the right track. According to Bloomberg, they were only inadvertently legalized as part of the 2018 Farm Bill, which allowed hemp to be grown for manufacture. Hemp is a weaker form of the cannabis plant that contains a smaller amount of THC.

21:09So drink makers have exploited this loophole tossing distilled hemp in their product like they are winemakers turning grapes into wine. Neil, Wee Drinks, you've said your friends have started talking about this more. And using it, yeah. I mean, if you go to, I mean, maybe other people have had the same experience as me. You go to a weekend away with the boys and instead of bringing, you know, beer or booze and, you know, other marijuana products, you get like weed drinks and people are just drinking these weed drinks because you can walk into a total wine and just buy them because somehow they're legal because of this loophole in the 2018 farm bill, even though cannabis at a federal level is not legalized, but you can make drinks from them.

21:48So it is this weird, strange liminal space that these weed drinks are occupying where they're completely legal. A lot of states are pushing back against that. But for the beer industry, which is suffering mightily, beer sales have stagnated or even declining. They're losing a lot of market share to cannabis during dry January, you know, marijuana sales absolutely surge. So their young people are using cannabis way more than they're drinking. So for beer companies is a huge lifeline because their market share is imploding. And they're like, please let us let us get into this space because this is an actually growing part of our industry.

22:21One party that is not so happy about this, though, is traditional kind of marijuana companies that sell like the budded plant or like rolled joints or something like that because they are subject to a ton of regulation. They can't ship interstate. They can't work with large national banks or accept credit cards. They can't take tax deductions. And yet here comes these hemp-infused drinks, these THC-infused drinks that can circumvent all those because of this weird wrinkle in the farm bill. So there is, alcohol distributors are lobbying to keep it open. Maybe traditional marijuana companies are saying this isn't fair.

22:56So there's a lot of interest on both sides. Meanwhile, people are very interested in this product category. Yeah, I think people do like these drinks a lot. But another part of this story that's fascinating, it just feels like the beer alcohol industry is just linking up with the cannabis industry in many ways. We know that beer companies are getting into cannabis, but at the same time, cannabis companies are getting into beer, Tilray, which is that big cannabis giant, bought eight different beer and beverage brands from AB InBev, including Shock Top, Blue Point, Breckenridge Brewery. So Tilray, which is a cannabis company, is now the fifth largest craft brewer in the United States.

23:35So this is a two-way street where both of these industries are just getting up together like, hey, you can get people buzzed. Hey, I can get people buzzed. Let's get up together and offer a wide variety of products for anybody who just doesn't want to, you know, be sober right now. Finally, here is what you need to know about the week ahead. All eyes are on Iran's next moves after its president and foreign minister were killed in a helicopter crash yesterday. President Ebrahami Raisi was an ally of Supreme Leader Khomeini and espoused hardline anti-Western views. So he will not be mourned by the U.S.

24:09and its allies, but his death will set off a scramble for power in the Islamic Republic, which has been waging a shadow war on the U.S. and Israel through its proxies in the Middle East. Back in New York, deliberations in Donald Trump's hush money trial could begin Thursday. Well, unless the former president decides to testify, which he said he planned to do before the trial started. Legal experts say Trump testifying would be really tricky for him because it could turn the attention toward his credibility and shift away the focus from any holes in the prosecution's case. Either way, the prosecution's star witness, Michael Cohen is expected to wrap up his testimony this week, and then we'll see what happens.