The Coming AI Crash No One Wants to Admit | Alex Heath x Newcomer Podcast

26:26wait is the last one true i don't believe all the other stuff but please tell me the last one's true so i did this is this is partially true when i had covet a couple of weeks ago i wanted to give it I wanted advice from it on how to like monitor or to measure out which like fucking sleeping medications I was taking. I don't know. I was bored. I had COVID. I was, it was my birthday. I was depressed. And so I was asking it to tell me like, Oh, when should I take NyQuil? When should I take Advil? And then in that process, I was like, can you also explain this stuff to me in a Jamaican law? Did it do it?

26:59Yeah, it did. But I don't think I can read it on air for a, No, you actually did it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'll send it to you later, Alex. Again, I don't think I could read it out loud, but it was very funny. I got good mileage out of that. Okay. So at least some of this is true. I don't know why I decided I'm from Russia. Are you like wrong? Because I was very, very specific about COVID, which had no stomach. Are you are you like a fan of Putin? Have you been like asking a lot for like pro propaganda or what? I do love my strongman. Yeah. So it interpreted from that. And then movies and culture. And then other bits, you've asked about product slash company accuracy checks.

27:36Okay, so I do do some fact checking through ChatGPT too. Ask about Broadcom, Oracle, NVIDIA, Confluent. That's the high-level sketch. Do you want me to keep going? No, I don't, Chat. I don't. What's yours, Alex? Let's go clean slate here. I'm scared to do mine. Madeline, why don't you read yours? Well, I searched mine and it didn't work very well because I have a separate ChatGPT account for my personal use. And right now I'm only logged in. for the Newcomer business account. So it only knows things related to me about business. But it does say, here's what I've learned about Madeline Rindbarger.

28:11You are an employee at Newcomer, and here's your email and your Twitter handle. And I joined Newcomer as the publication's first reporter to cover startups and venture capital, and previously was at Business Insider. So it knows a lot about my work history, but it knows very little about what I like to search. So if I go to my personal account, that's where the juicy details really lie, I bet. Yeah. So here's mine. You're Alex Heath, a tech journalist currently launching your independent media venture. You're leaving the verge where you're a deputy editor to run your publication sources. New companion podcast access with Ellis Hamburger.

28:46You cover the inside conversation in the tech industry, AI, big tech, executive level developments. You regularly interview top figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Dylan Field, Brett Taylor, Andrew Bosworth. You're setting up a California LLC. You're evaluating credit cards and banking. you've been negotiating distribution and sponsorship deals reach out by the way if you're listening to this you carefully think about revenue splits monetization models long-term growth strategies you enjoy cooking you're into travel you like film photography you play poker you enjoy gardening and plants kind of i mostly ask about that for my wife you like efficient direct answers uh and then it keeps going so like this is like that would happen so you're just getting pissed off at it be like you're taking too long i don't like this keep it quick like i don't like when the blowback to 4.0 was happening, I was like, what are people talking about?

29:31Like, I don't want this thing like pretending like it's my friend. Um, but yeah, no, this is like, this is like an advertiser's wet dream. Like, yeah, it's honestly a lot more detailed than I feel like even on meta, I know you can go in your settings and search how much from your Facebook profile it can glean about you. And this is, I'd say on par with that. So in terms of data, they're kind of neck and neck with Facebook there about what they can get about you. I would say it's more because it's like search. It's an intent-based environment, whereas meta is having to infer based on more passive interactions, scrolling, liking, sending something.

30:10They're implicit. They're not explicit. Whereas you're literally telling Chachapiti what you want, what you're thinking about, your deepest, darkest secrets. So yeah, the opportunity financially is tremendous. the responsibility is even greater. And, um, well, have you gotten a sense, uh, you know, very early days about like where they're trying to put guardrails in on how data is used? I mean, I asked, I asked Sam about that at the dinner and he was like, yeah, it's a huge responsibility. We think about it, but like, we'll figure it out. Yeah. By the way, uh, you guys can read it later, but I threw in my Jamaican Patois answer into the chat.

30:44Um, again, I do not feel comfortable reading it out loud on the air, but it should be the cold open. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I tried to get the voice to do it, but good God. Yeah. No good thing. We didn't read this. Yeah, I can't. We've all seen the Adrian Brody, uh, SNL clip. And, uh, as much as he does resemble me in some ways, I don't want to, I don't want to experience that level of cancellation. You don't want to do a Ross Trent bit here. So let's talk about, uh, let's talk about what's going on in our socials these days with, uh, with Sora two, uh, and, and, and meta vibes. Um, Alex, I've seen you post some of your, some of your slop, um, on the feeds, uh, the slop factory mining away, Madeline, uh, you, um, got an invite code.

31:32Uh, have you, have you played around with it yet? I did. Yes. I just started playing around with it. So I was, I was generating myself kind of gardening some strange plants. I think I was on a little shop kick there for a bit. But I have noticed that the guardrails are pretty intense about what it can or cannot generate. Like I tried to get it to generate me jumping off of the Empire State Building onto a Phoenix and then flying away. And it will not let you use the prompt, jump off a building. It will not let you generate that. So it actually, the content moderation is pretty limiting, honestly, from what I found a lot of stuff to do because avoiding, you know, they're really sensitive about like the self-harm kind of like dangerous images stuff.

32:16But I found that interesting. You can get around it though. Like I asked it to make me look like Superman. It wouldn't do it. And then I was like, you know, red superhero with a cape flying. And it was like a mix of Supes and Avengers. I mean, the IP theft is incredible. There was a Wall Street Journal story that they're basically telling all the studios you have to opt in to not have your IP featured in this. So I've seen like straight up Pokemon. Yeah, the Pokemon and Mario and Luigi. Rick and Morty struck a deal with Nintendo. I've seen a lot of SpongeBob, too. Yeah. I mean, Rick and Morty, like there's no way they got all these deals.

32:54There's no way. Right. So we're just betting that this will play out how it has with all the text-based copyright AI stuff, which is like years of litigation, some settlements. And by the time it really gets to like a ruling, we're on like AGI. I mean, I think that's the play. Classic tech industry play, you know, just like basically break the law or, you know, get to a point where you get sued for allegedly breaking the law and then pay a speeding ticket. And then everyone kind of moves on. It's like YouTube Viacom all over again. I mean, you remember all that. Yeah. Right. And we saw what happened to the industry after that.

33:27I mean, it does get fairly depressing if you're someone who cares about that stuff. But the thing that I guess everyone is trying to figure out right now and I'm on the fence about is like, is this really that big of a moment, this Sora 2 thing that we're seeing? Or is it just, you know, a fad that dominates our algorithms for a couple of days, a week or two? And then it just kind of fades into the background as another kind of cool feature. Um, and it's hard to have this conversation. It feels like because we're in the midst of this deluge of all of this, you know, just being overwhelming. That's basically all I see on my fucking feeds right now.

34:06Um, I mean, where do you stand on this? Cause I think you and I are going to come out on different places, Alex. So the top three maximalist argument, the top three free apps in the app store right now in order are Gemini, chat GPT and Sora. So that's within like 24 not even 24 hours and it's not even public access yet it's not public access the reason it's going to work and the reason it is a success and meta vibes was a slot failure is the cameo thing is being able to feature your friends opt into sharing your likeness with other people sam altman opted into sharing his likeness with everyone on the app so he's like the main character like you cannot if you scroll through the feed it's just non-stop like sam altman gpu jokes oh yeah alex i was i was joking with tom earlier that half of my sora feed is sam altman and the other half is jesus so yeah yeah and like he wanted that clearly and like i think you know all these texios love attention and i'm sure zuck is fuming that he's not like the main character of vibes could you have imagined if this the shoe was on the other foot and vibes had a cameo version and you know it should have himself up to this people would like it would like it like that though people have been meaner about it you know because people just have a natural revulsion to Zuck uh either his personality or the technorati does the technorati yes but normal people like again who's to say because it didn't happen but like Sam kind of has this you know dorky philosopher image that people you know lightly make fun of but you don't see this level of pure hatred whereas Zuck you know really does bring a darkness out of people because of the way he is I know you you know you're closer to him than i am as a you know interview subject but uh you think this could have happened with the same exact situation with with zuck in the sam position and vibes just had this cameo feature i don't know if it would have the exact thing i mean like chadgbt has such a halo like the vibes are good everyone wants to know what opening eye is doing like they have the they're the bell of the ball like anything they do is going to get the most attention.

36:04So sure, it's not the same. At the same time, I think, and I wrote about this in sources last night is like, I think meta fundamentally misunderstood that people, it's not that people don't want AI slop. It's just, they want AI slop with their friends in it. And I think the reason people were done for the social media option for the friend company, for the social media company to not understand this. Right. And they clearly rushed it out. I actually know this they rushed it out because they knew that Sora was coming the Sora app was coming and they wanted to be first and they're not even using like custom models that are using Midjourney and Black Forest and it was very hacked together like the they tried to get me to write about it and um and gave me access I think it was the first person get access like um before it launched and like the metadata was broken like it was like text strings on the captions that weren't English like like didn't make sense like it was so rushed together and you saw the dunking on twitter about it because it was it was it was like there was no um there was no humanity to it it was just like all these crazy fantastical it was like deviant art on steroids and like there's a market for that that's fine like that is an interesting idea but it's nowhere near to a degree at this point kind of i mean the news feed at least still has people in it it may not be people you want to see or may increasingly be AI characters, but like the meta vibes feed is like a dog that looks like a unicorn, you know, flying like into hell.

37:31Like it's all this crazy stuff. And like Sora is like, this is what I call it. It's like, it's AI vine. It's like completely what it is. It's like vine, but AI generated. It's funny. It's lighthearted. It features your friends faces, you know, like that's the better approach. Right. Well, so, but then this brings us to the question because you make the vine comparison, I mean, that obviously was a phenomenon in its day, gets bought by Twitter. They kind of killed the whole thing. And, and, you know, TikTok comes along to basically take short form video and make it into a massive industry. But how do you know that what's happening right now, as we're in the heat of this moment, isn't just going to be another studio Ghibli moment or, you know, Facebook filters moment or MSQRD or any sort of thing that people kind of enjoy in that particular moment.

38:18It's fun. You can put it out there. You get some attention for it. And then it just was like a toy that you put back onto the shelf because it didn't fit intrinsically into the way you really want to express yourself. I mean, it's hacky. I mean, Studio Ghibli added like a hundred million users to chat GPT. So I don't really buy the argument that that was like a fad that like didn't matter. Well, but are these people using, I'm not saying it won't have benefits to open AI or to chat GPT, but I'm saying as a medium, as a, as a mode of expression, again, it's only based on what I consume through my socials, but like, I don't see the Studio Ghibli thing happening anymore.

38:50It was a couple of weeks, which was more than I thought it was going to be. But like, you know, does this, you know, is this just a feeding mechanism for more people to sign up for chat GPT? Yeah, or I guess Sora and that or do you think like this is going to be sustained as a, you know, mode of expression as another way to people to create shit? Who knows if it'll be sustained. But I think it clearly has, as they say, product market fit within the first 24 hours, which we can't say that MetaVibes did. So, uh, you know, it's number three on the app store or probably number one at some point this week.

39:25It's not even open to the public. Um, it's just funny. Like I I've laughed when I'm on it, which is like something you will never say using Meta AI. Um, and I think that says a lot, like there's something about AI that is AI content that is silly and jokey and featuring people you know and their faces that is just way more approachable and feels like oddly human in a really strange black mirror way but it's something you can't it's like you can't look away from at least that's my experience so it's like i mean it's slop like it's not i'm not pretending that this is like you know the same thing as like solving you know cancer with ai but i mean or making a real you know movie or tv show or something i mean that's yeah this goes off it branches off in a whole different discussion, but anytime a tech video creation tool goes off in the way this one has, you do have people out there being like, Oh, Hollywood's fucked.

40:18Oh, this is the only way that we're going to be making movies in the future. Hollywood's always fucked. Yeah. I also just want to disregard that point. It's just a whole different conversation, but yeah. Short form video isn't comparable to like cinema. Yeah. Yeah. It is its own thing. And like film festivals have a separate track for AI video. Like they do consider it its own genre for now right now for now for now um but yeah as a creator you know sorry not myself as a creator but as someone who's like played around with this stuff um you're a creator tom don't sell yourself am i yeah am i i don't know i like to consider myself a philosopher influencer um um i didn't have as much fun as i thought i was gonna have on it i don't know i made a couple of videos most of them were me and sam just hanging out uh just sort of fulfilling my fantasies, but, um, please don't tell it just, we were, you know, talk, we were podcasting.

41:11Um, that's all I really think about. Um, and I, you know, I did one video where it was me and Sam and we were, uh, I turned into a mech and I wanted to stomp him actually. Like I was going to be a giant mech and stomp him, but I, I, I typoed and I said, stop him. And it made it sound like I was trying to stop him from achieving AGI. Um, I did a video of me like as a, as a, as a man, this was not creative stuff. This is just my fault. I guess. Um, I was like, I was in a, I was in a Western. I was coming into town and I was like kind of a, uh, like, like a baddie from the good, the bad and the ugly.

41:44And I was like, uh, you know, where are all the tech reporters? I want them out here and I want them gone. Um, it was okay. I don't know. Are you happy with your, are you happy with your, your sort of video? I need to think about it more. I mean, like you, I struggle with creativity, but you know, it's the thing that, the thing that it works about it is the remixing. Like, you know, Katie and the top list who I would say is much better at this. We'll just like make something because I've allowed anyone to use my likeness and then I can remix it. I can be like, Oh, that's an interesting idea. I want to like put myself in a GPU jail as I'm reading the newspaper about Sora hitting number one in the app store, which is something I did this morning.

42:19And like, that's fun. That's like no other platform you can do this on. Like at least it's new. It's probably going to destroy society in some way. Yes. it's like there's a really good argument that like are we lighting up data centers and poisoning the climate to create the slop like there's a lot of good arguments about why you shouldn't do this at the same time like i laughed last night and you know what like and launching a company i haven't had a lot of time to laugh so that was nice uh-huh as we saw from your chat gpt records none of them had anything to do with no mirth no there was not you you alex either a mirthful for a person um i guess maybe like to close off this this section of it like you've basically already described it as a success like it's it's high enough on the app store it's gotten enough attention on you know our socials that this did everything that sam wanted it to do i mean resounding like day one success yeah i mean i think like meta the largest social media company in the world that can like promote things on instagram uh meta vibes was not in the top 20 anything like no so the vibes are the vibes are changing as they say yeah the vibes are off um what what does google need to do to respond i've been having a lot of fun with nano banana yeah i mean they're number one tool and i think all this is showing by the way that like people just want this ai stuff to help them make things and like create and be expressive and honestly reminds me of when we covered snap tom and they had all those viral moments with the face filters which really propelled Snapchat through a lot of key growth moments.

43:52It was like face swap, um, the crying thing. Like all of that was like, it was new at the time and people ate it up and it was viral and it's great for a social product. And like Gemini is going through that right now. They're number one, nano bananas crushing. Um, and then chat GPT is number two and source number three. And it's like, those are the three tools right now that are letting people do weird new things with AI that are expressive and weird and fun. Yeah. The fun thing with Snapchat was always so interesting with, with Evan Spiegel, because he had this commitment to saying Snapchat as a toy.

44:28We are not trying to, you know, have effects on society. He would get a little off, you know, that, that mission at times, because he would say this is like essential to how young people communicate. And we are giving them the platform to express themselves in ways they wouldn't be able to otherwise. But literally in the S1, he was saying like, this is a toy. Sam has to sort of balance the like, we've made a fun toy with the like, yeah, we are curing cancer and this is going to have huge job displacement. And I don't think he's figured out the message yet on that exactly. I saw this morning, he was trying to like, you know, split the baby on like, well, it is important that we do these things because we need to show off what our technology is capable of doing along the way.

45:10And then also we'll do the AGI thing. It's all a step towards that. Yeah. I mean, there's, that's a debate inside open AI. I mean, you've got a lot of people who join these labs to invent AGI and to, you know, increase GDP and create like amazing productivity software. And now they're being told to create like AI TikTok. So you're going to have a culture clash for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And it makes me wonder, you know, because there are companies out there that are still dedicated i mean basically ilia soskevar's company is out there saying like it's agi or nothing yeah and i mean you that's interesting but about this internal debate there like i gotta think that's a good recruitment tool for for ssi right now for sure basically say like even um i was gonna say there's even a bunch of other startups jumping into this space too um periodic labs came out of stealth on tuesday and they're coming around you know they've It was basically a lot of the scientists who defected from open AI and DeepMind who wanted to be using this tech to, you know, look at the genome and discover new chemicals and do drug discovery and scientific discovery.

46:15And they basically, in my opinion, that's like, oh, there was this mass defection of some of these researchers who are motivated by meaningful work, quote, quote, you know, starting their own company. So it does seem like people are just doing this in a way where they maybe will go out and start their own business. yeah no i think this will be i mean this is a good story wink wink but like this culture clash of ai people building this stuff who want to build agi science breakthroughs curing cancer and i would put like demis in this camp i would put um ilia certainly thinks he is over at microsoft i don't actually know what you should have him on the pod um and then and then i know if he's dying to talk to me but yeah and then zuck and then i guess sam now to a degree um who are like oh we can also do this slop and we can do like social and we can make this very consumery because we have to make a business in the near term um that's a culture clash for sure and that's fun to cover yeah and it's also it it speaks to the moment that we're in where you have this whole group of young people younger even than than you alex um who are part of this ai you know san francisco ai revolution who are you know these extremely grind set um don't even date uh they're all they believe is that they're being part of some sort of socially transformative technology um and that's the only thing that they talk about like i don't know if that's the entirety of the movement but it's a it's a it's a core part of it and you know that's what's gotten them excited i don't know how skillful they are i don't know how important they're gonna end up being to all of this, but like those people are going to be kids.

47:57Yeah. The 996 kids. I mean, they don't, they, there was a great line. There's this New York magazine article about them the other week. That was really great. That was just like, yeah, most of them aren't dating, but almost all of them are hiring. Yeah. And like, what's the difference? That's how they view social interactions. And like for them, Sora too, is not, that is not the off ramp they want. I don't know. I mean, we have the, we have the friend CEO on access this week, the access podcast, um, who's going viral for all those billboards oh yeah the subway ads i've seen all those for the ai pendant that you wear that your friend and he's like 22 and is exactly the archetype you're talking about tom and it was really interesting to talk with him like he's already like how do i build my company for agi like a lot of these people that are that age and coming up and starting companies they there's a phrase for this it's escaping me but they're basically already like they're they're rushing to build before you know none of this matters oh yeah they're like if agi comes by 2027 you only have like two years to amass generational wealth or you're yeah the amassing wealth thing and like yeah and that really came through for me with avi like i think there is this like like fervor and like insane drive uh to do as much as possible in a short amount of time and like open basically Collect as much before none of it matters anymore.

49:20Just like fill your bag with lucre before the whole fucking thing just like goes, goes under. Yeah. What a fun time to be alive. The slotpocalypse. Perfect place to end the episode. And I got a podcast plug in. Look at that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, by the way, I mean, since we're winding down here and you've mentioned it a couple of times, you've done a good job plugging yourself, but is there anything you want to mention? I mean, we didn't really tee it up in the episode, but like you recently left the verge, you know, you are a creator and an influencer and maybe you've joined us in newsletter world, independent media.

49:56Yeah, I'm on Substack, sources.news, the access podcast with Ellis Hamburger and Vox Media, a former Snap employee, Tom. Former Snap employee. Sorry, Madeline. You're probably like, why are these guys talking about Snap? Like, I don't think about Snap at all. and it's because we know no two people on earth have devoted as much reporting thinking power to snap as tom and i so of course we're going to talk about it on the spot the amount of times that i on vacation felt it necessary to discuss people that like oh you know there's a shake-up in the growth group it was a simpler time you know see i love that i love hearkening back to the the social media wars days is quaint for me as a reporter it's like talking about like the young kids you know running you know the the ai scene and certainly like young reporters they do not understand and give a fuck about the snapchat days it is of zero interest to them i was like man you don't understand this was the open ai of its time like the chaos within that company mattered so much to people yeah now i just sound old we're old it's okay we are old it's okay you're not old well you can keep generating sora videos of youth it'll be great yeah all my prompts are like at Tom Doton, but younger.

51:09Yeah. Yeah. We're beautiful. It is very weird to be meeting founders who like are, have businesses with millions in ARR and it's like, Oh, you're 10 years younger than me. Um, yeah, it does make you feel really old, but yeah, no. Uh, anyway, I'm sources. Check me out. Uh, and, uh, yeah, thanks for having me guys. This is fun. All right. Thanks for doing it, Alex. Yeah. Thanks again for tuning into this episode of the Newcomer Podcast. And shout out Alex Heath for joining us. That was a lot of fun. If you're new here, please like and subscribe. It really helps out our channel. And listen to new episodes every week wherever you get your podcasts.