Is your doorbell using AI to spy on you?

18:22Kara Swisher:It's the cultural engine room right now. Exactly.

18:24Scott Galloway:This is the most compelling explanation of TikTok that I've ever heard. Like, I personally don't use TikTok, but now I'm feeling FOMO.

18:31Kara Swisher:Yeah, it is a really, really important ecosystem. And what people are freaking out about now is the app is undergoing some major changes. So part of this deal that was struck among the big concerns is that the Chinese government might have control over the algorithm and they might like spread propaganda. There was this amazing hearing in the U.S. Senate where the CEO of ByteDance. Oh, well, that was the CEO of TikTok, not the CEO of ByteDance. That was. Oh, right, right. So that's it. But yeah, I think it was Tom Tillis. The senator was like, have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?

19:09Kara Swisher:And the guy's like, he was like, so I'm Singaporean. The guy's like, have you ever been a citizen of China? And the guy's like, I'm Singaporean. Yeah, it's a really beautiful moment. But there is no reason to think that, I mean, Tom, maybe you can correct me on this, but there's no reason to think that your data is less safe with TikTok than it is with, say, Meta or Elon Musk's Twitter. There was never that we've been talking about TikTok freaking out about it for years. There has never been a single shred of actual evidence that has been produced that anything untoward happened with the Chinese government and American TikTok data.

19:54Kara Swisher:Never. There hasn't been one shred of evidence. It's all been speculation about things that could go wrong. So this new set of companies took over. It's called the U.S. Joint Venture is what TikTok is calling it. And part of their plan is that they were going to retrain the algorithm, like take the algorithm and start over from scratch and like build a new one. And in the first few days, like the first week after the app rolled out, things just went nuts.

20:24Scott Galloway:What do you mean by that? Like what happened?

20:28Kara Swisher:so it seemed to a lot of people like there was censorship so the tiktok account the official account for the democrats in the united states like usually their videos get like millions of views all of a sudden they were posting videos they were getting like zero views or like a couple of thousand there were uh some examples screenshots online where people said like they were trying to send messages that had the word epstein in them and they weren't getting sent and also there was all this weird stuff. Like if you looked at the search page, it was suggesting all of this like weird, creepy stuff.

21:03Kara Swisher:Like it would suggest that you search, like, don't look at that mirror in your house, like just the weirdest stuff in the world. It turned out that what was happening was that there was this big snowstorm a couple of weeks ago across the United States. And according to TikTok, a data center had a power outage and the app was just going haywire because things weren't working. Then very quickly, everything kind of went back to normal. But what we do know is the app is retraining the algorithm, right? They're going to shift how it recommends videos, what it recommends. And people are worried that these companies that now have control over this app have these ties to the Trump administration.

21:49Kara Swisher:And perhaps they could use this new power that they have to promote ideas that are beneficial to Trump or the American government or suppress criticism. And it's worth saying there is precedent for this, right? This is, um, people, people are not worried for no reason. This is exactly what did happen after Elon Musk took over Twitter is that the algorithm started favoring things based on differing political. He openly said that Twitter at the time was basically in that same position of being a cultural engine room. and it really changes conversation off the app in a way that affects people's lives, even if you've never been on Twitter or TikTok.

22:29Scott Galloway:Tom, to take a step back, when you said that they're retraining the algorithm, like how is it actually working between all of these companies? Like is Oracle the one that's going to be retraining the algorithm? Is the other company? And have they said anything about why they're retraining the algorithm or what they're going to retrain the algorithm with?

22:45Kara Swisher:That's a really interesting question. So part of the agreement in the sale of the app is that they have to retrain the algorithm because the algorithm is intellectual property and ByteDance, the company that, you know, owns most of TikTok, they still have like a 20 % share in this new company, the TikTok joint venture. So any concerns that you had about China, it's not like those have gone away, right? Like China still has major control over the app. I think it's like there's this new company called the TikTok joint venture and like the company is doing it. So Oracle, the giant tech company that Larry Ellison owns, is certainly involved in that process.

23:25Kara Swisher:But like you can just kind of feel that things are different on there. The videos that are getting recommended are just different. And like the order of whatever reason, they just have Larry Ellison's face in every single one. So weird. I've never been on TikTok. I've seen things that are TikToks because they come through Instagram rails. I think one of the things I want to do is join TikTok and sort of get an idea of how TikTok works and get a sense of it. You've been on TikTok for a while, right? I'm a big TikTok user. I actually joined it because I felt like, well, I'm writing about it. I have to be using this app in order to understand what's going on there.

24:04Kara Swisher:And I really had to force myself to do it. I was like, this is so uncool. I don't want to be using it. And then I got completely addicted to it like i have to force myself to put it down but yeah i uh i'm a big tiktok user at this point would you be up for teaching me you would you give me the i think we have to yeah we gotta get you because you're like really you're not participating in the modern era if you're not on there i mean karen i don't know if we can we can get you involved but i feel

24:29Scott Galloway:like i feel like this is a situation where tom you're the earthling and nikki is an alien that's coming to earth well and i am like the relative that's still on the other planet and nikki's just gonna have to call home every once in a while and explain to me what's happening on earth let's talk

24:45Kara Swisher:let's set you up with an account i'll tell you how to make a video like what you can try and do to go viral and get people to pay attention that could be like a nice project we're working on in the background stay stay tuned although hang on in the uk will i be getting the ellison algorithm or the OG TikTok algorithm? Outside of the US, it's the same TikTok it always was. It's connected to the US TikTok app, so the content is flowing back and forth. But you, Nikki, if you set it up, you're still getting that pure, original, it's like classic Coke, right? You're getting the original TikTok algorithm.

25:21Kara Swisher:But what I do want to talk about for a second is maybe why you shouldn't be worried. There are real concerns what's going to happen with TikTok now, who's in control, what's going to happen in the algorithm. What we saw with Twitter now called X, right, is that Elon Musk turned it into an ecosystem to promote his political agenda. Like he openly said that's what he was doing. And this was, it seems, catastrophic for the app. They lost a ton of users. They lost a ton of advertising revenue. It seemed like this wasn't a great business decision. It certainly wasn't handled in a smooth way that didn't upset lots of people and push them off the app.

26:01Kara Swisher:I think with TikTok, there's like three different companies who are investing along with TikTok. I think that these people are more concerned about business and the TikTok app itself making money. And I think they're very worried about upsetting TikTok's users and losing the cultural cachet and the force and the power of this app. We reached out to TikTok to ask them to comment. They declined. But certainly the company's position is that they are as concerned about protecting people's privacy and promoting free speech as they ever have been. That's the company line. That's what it's always been.

26:44Kara Swisher:But in the time that follows, like the future of this app, people are going to be looking for examples of where things are going wrong, where it's, oh, they're suppressing this kind of content. They're promoting this and I don't want them to. Is that happening because TikTok and its allies and, you know, people from the Trump administration are putting their thumbs on the scale? Or is it just that people are making bad videos that no one wants to watch? You'll never know because the algorithm is a total mystery to the people who are using the app.

27:13Scott Galloway:Okay, I need to talk to you guys about a different Super Bowl ad. I know that we already talked about one Super Bowl ad, but there was another one that a lot of people were talking about,

27:24Kara Swisher:which was the anthropic ads i love this i i think this is so funny yes anthropic is an

27:32Scott Galloway:opening eye competitor they make the chatbot clod and this is anthropic basically made four different variations on an ad where there's a user of a chatbot and then there's a chatbot personified in another person who is then basically responding to the person as though they were the chatbot so one of the ads is like this guy who's trying to work out and he's struggling to work out and he's like can i get a six-pack really quickly and then the chatbot personified is like it's like his personal trainer right yeah it's like this is like really buff dude standing next to him who has this like deadpan expression and then goes perfect that is a clear well established goal.

28:18Scott Galloway:Let's start with, and then whatever. And it goes through this whole thing. The chatbot then suddenly goes, and you know what else you should do instead of working out? Have you considered getting these insoles that will make short kings stand taller? And like every single one of these ads then has this tagline, ads are coming to AI, but not Claude. I think for most people who saw this ad, it was probably just really funny because obviously OpenAI and Anthropic are competitors and OpenAI just announced that they are going to be rolling out ads to JadGPT.

28:52Kara Swisher:This was an attack ad, right?

28:54Scott Galloway:This was basically a subtweet back in the day when there were subtweets because OpenAI is not explicitly mentioned anywhere. There's just this reference that ads are coming. And of course, OpenAI is the only only company that's rolling out ads this deeply triggered sam altman yeah ceo of opening eye he tweets out this really long dramatic essay where he's like first of all these ads were funny second of all seriously dishonest and then he just like insults anthropic with like more and more intense insults as like the essay goes on. So he says, Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people.

29:40Scott Galloway:And then he goes, one authoritarian company won't get us there on their own to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path.

29:50Kara Swisher:Yeah. I mean, we should talk about why OpenAI was so freaked out about this Anthropic. Like the whole AI industry is in this super precarious position. And this like weird petty fight between the billionaires who own these different companies actually ultimately will have a direct effect on the experience that you're having on the Internet. It seems like, you know, just this like high school drama. But this this actually matters in some surprising ways.

30:25Scott Galloway:Yeah. So this literally is the beef of the century because this is the beef that launched ChatGPT. I don't know if you guys know this story. Like, basically, OpenAI did not actually intend to launch ChatGPT as a product. When they were in November of 2022, they were actually working on a totally different product, which was this super assistant. It was going to be like a chatbot, but it was going to be built on GPT-4 and they were supposed to launch it in the spring of 2023. But in the fall of 2022, rumors started circulating within OpenAI that Anthropic might launch a chatbot before them. And so the executives literally made a decision on the spot to accelerate the launch of the chatbot in two weeks time using not GPT-4, which the entire company was working on, but using an older model, GPT -3.5, and just smacking on the user interface that they were already developing for the launch in spring of 2023 onto this older model.

31:35Scott Galloway:and they messaged it to the entire company and also to the public as this is going to be a low key research preview. It's not going to be a real product. It's going to maybe have a small viral moment on the internet. They wanted specifically to get the data flywheel going. So they wanted that virality to then generate a bunch of interest, get a lot of user data, and then use that user data to train up and refine the real product launch, GPT-4, that was going to happen later. And instead, like they pop this out and it just blows up and completely changes history. Right. And the reason why OpenAI made that decision in that moment is also because of the history of Anthropic.

32:20Scott Galloway:So Anthropic was founded by a splinter group from OpenAI. Right.

32:26Kara Swisher:So this is personal.

32:27Scott Galloway:Yeah. In late 2020, Dario Amadei, CEO of NowAnthropic, was actually a executive at OpenAI, gathers up a bunch of his buddies who were in critical roles within OpenAI, and they decide to leave to start this competitor because they fundamentally disagreed with Sam Altman's approach to running OpenAI and also fundamentally did not trust Altman's character. and did not believe that he would be capable of continuing to run an AI company well. This is like a multi-year, extremely personal vendetta that has literally shaped the entire trajectory of the industry and of people's lives around the world.

33:12Scott Galloway:And it is the beef that is still fueling so many decisions in the AI race today.

33:19Kara Swisher:That's the interesting thing, right? There's this moment that we're getting right now with AI that we haven't had in technology for a long time, which is that there is actual competition, right? Most of these giant tech companies have these monopolies, right? Google has a monopoly over search engines. Amazon, like that's where you go to buy things on the internet. There's all these companies that have their little fiefdoms and nobody really competes with them and they can make their products worse and worse and or like in the pursuit of making more money and there's nothing you can do about it.

33:50Kara Swisher:With AI, there's all these different companies that make a product that is kind of the same.

33:55Scott Galloway:Yes.

33:56Kara Swisher:So there's like this desperate competition to be the cool kid in high school and like Anthropic launching this ad that makes OpenAI look bad. Like that's a code red. Like they're freaking out right now because, you know, in a month, OpenAI's empire could collapse. Like I'm not saying that's going to happen, but they're like everybody is right on the razor's edge right now.

34:19Scott Galloway:So we talked about how this beef had a historical importance in actually launching ChatGPT, but it also is going to continue to affect your experience with these chatbots moving forward. Because, for example, the New York Times reported late last year that when OpenAI started seeing this drop in its market share, the company internally declared a code orange to try and figure out how to get their user numbers and their user engagement back up. And when OpenAI declared that code orange and when they were tinkering with the way that the model behaves, it had a direct effect on users. Like people are worried that the company is going to make the product more addictive.

35:06Scott Galloway:And we have already seen the effect that that had earlier last year when OpenAI accidentally made the product more addictive. And then it led to this entire new phenomenon of AI psychosis. So this beef and the competition between all of these companies is literally driving how hundreds of millions of people are going to be experiencing their AI product. And it's worth noting that it's like not just a beef between open AI and Anthropic, like the CEOs of every single AI company has beef with one another. You think that this industry is primarily driven just by profit and business competition, but actually a huge, huge component of the moves that these companies make and how it's ultimately going to affect your experience on your phone is because these individuals hate each other.

36:03Kara Swisher:It's so childish. And that's our show. Join us next week. If you're in the UK, you can listen on BBC Sounds. Or if you're outside the UK, you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. Or just search for The Interface Podcast on YouTube. If you want to get in touch with us over email, you can reach us at theinterface at bbc.com.

36:34Kara Swisher:You don't need AI agents, which may sound weird coming from ServiceNow, the leader in AI agents. The truth is, AI agents need you. Sure, they'll process, predict, even get work done autonomously. But they don't dream, read a room, rally a team, and they certainly don't have shower thoughts, pivotal hallway chats, or big ideas. People do. And people, when given the best AI platform, they're freed up to do the fulfilling work they want to do. To see how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit ServiceNow.com. Thank you.