WIRED Roundup: Are We In An AI Bubble?

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0:35Their formulas are EPA Safer Choice Certified, and many products have also earned Cradle to Cradle's Gold Material Health Certificate. Make the switch today. Get 15 % off your first order by going to blueland.com slash prx. That's blueland.com slash prx. Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Wired's Director of Business and Industry, Zoe Schiffer. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week, including why a seemingly minor announcement from OpenAI ended up rippling across several companies and what it says about the current state of the tech industry.

1:14I'm joined today by our Senior Politics Editor, Leah Figer. Leah, welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Hey, Zoe. week.

1:23Our first story this week is about Mark Bray. He is a professor at Rutgers University, and he wrote a book almost a decade ago about Antifa, and he's currently trying to flee the United States for Europe. This comes after an online campaign against him led by far-right influencers eventually escalated into death threats. On Sunday, this professor informed his students that he would be moving to Europe with his partner and his young children. Okay, Leah, you've obviously been following this really, really closely. What happened next? Well, Mark and his family got to the airport. They scanned their passports.

2:01They got their boarding passes, checked in their bags, went through security, did everything, got to their gate. And United Airlines told them that between checking in, checking their bags, doing all of this, and getting to their gate, someone had actually canceled their reservation. Oh, my gosh. It's not clear what happened. Mark is of the belief that there is something nefarious at foot. He's currently trying to get out. We reached out to United Airlines for comment. They don't have anything for us. The Trump administration hasn't commented. DHS claims that Customs and Border Patrol and TSA are not across this.

2:40But this is understandably a really, really scary moment for anyone that is even perceived to be speaking out against the Trump administration. Okay, I feel like we need to back up here because obviously the Trump administration in this second term is very focused on Antifa. But can you give me a little backstory on why this has escalated so sharply just recently? Yeah, absolutely. So this has been growing for quite some time. Like how many unfortunate rambling speeches have we heard from President Donald J. Trump about how Antifa and leftist political violence was going to destroy the country?

3:19To be clear, that's not factual. Antifa isn't actually some organized group. This is an ideology of anti-fascist activists around the country. The very essence of being anti-fascist is not organized in this way. So this all really kicked off on September 22nd when Trump issued his Antifa executive order where he designated anyone involved in this and affiliated and supporting basically as a domestic terrorist. DHS has repeated this widely as well. And we're now in a situation where far right influencers, Fox News, every single day is like Antifa did this, Antifa did this, Antifa did this. Listeners are probably familiar with Antifa following the George Floyd 2020 protests when a lot of right-wingers claimed that Antifa was taking over Portland and, like, there were the reasons for all this.

4:09But it's been, like, a couple of years since it's been, like, super back on the main stage. So it's really just been the last few weeks. I guess I'm curious why he got so caught up in this. Because, ostensibly, he's not pro-Antifa as much as he is just studying the phenomena, right? Well, so it's a little bit tricky because— After publishing his book in 2017, Bray did donate half of the profits to the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund. So this kicked off a lot of people saying that he is funding Antifa. Again, this was in 2017. So if we're talking about any supposed boogeyman or concern that is current, it's a very roundabout way, in my opinion, to go after a professor and an academic at an institution that's in a blue state.

4:56Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll be watching this one really closely. Our next story is in the surveillance world, sadly, but honestly, it's worth it. Our colleague, Del Cameron, has a scoop this week about how Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, is planning to build a 24-7 social media surveillance team. The agency is reportedly looking to hire around 30 analysts to scour Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms to gather intelligence for deportation raids and arrests. Leah, you're our politics lead here at Wired. So I'm really curious to hear your thoughts. Are you surprised or is this inevitable?

5:35No. I mean, do you remember a couple of months ago at this point when like a professor coming in for a conference wasn't allowed because they had like a photo of JD Vance on their phone? This is the next step. It's what's on your WhatsApp. Then you have Instagram, Facebook. Like it's a very slippery slope, but I'm too far gone, Zoe. I'm too in this mess. But like, I'm just like, of course they're monitoring this. Why wouldn't be? They've been so clear about their intent here. We've seen it with some of the people who were arrested and sent to El Salvador, right? It was because of like tattoos that were on social media.

6:10Yes. And I think there have been people in the Trump world who have even said, you know, because they've gotten pushback about like, you know, the free speech of it all, the First Amendment. What is that? Right. I think the kind of line is like, well, that doesn't apply to people trying to like have the privilege of coming into the country or stay in the country. Yeah. It's a really concerning way to start this. And I think that there's probably going to be some like very weird examples that come up. Like say there's an American tourist that's just like randomly in Spain when there's anti-fascist protests going on.

6:44They take a picture, they post it to their Instagram story. Look what I saw in Spain. They come back and it's like, are you going to get questioned? What's going on here? And that's really the world that we're getting into. It's people that are even tangentially involved. It's not about that. It's about monitoring. It's about collecting data. Yeah. So to give a bit more context to our listeners, the federal contracting records reviewed by Wired show that the agency, ICE, is seeking private vendors to run a multi-year surveillance program out of two of its centers in Vermont and Southern California.

7:14The initiative is still at the request for information stage, a step that agencies use to gauge interest from contractors before an official bidding process kicks off. But draft planning documents show that the scheme is already pretty ambitious. ICE wants a contractor capable of staffing the centers around the clock with very tight deadlines to process cases. Also, ICE not only wants staffing, but also algorithms. It's asking contractors to spell out how they might weave artificial intelligence into the hunt. Leah, I can only imagine how you feel about this one. You see me shaking my head right now.

7:48I'm like, horrible. The possibility for mistakes is so high. I mean, the two words that stick out to me is like very tight for deadlines and then artificial intelligence. There's just not a lot of room for nuance when you are making people who have never done this before speed through the internet with unfamiliar technology. What we've seen with content moderators using AI, and I've talked to a number of executives at the social platforms about this exact issue, is that the company has to decide how much error it's willing to tolerate. They turn the dial up or down, calibrating the system to either flag more content, which risks having more false positives, or letting more content through, which could mean that you, like, miss really important stuff.

8:32So that's kind of the system that we're dealing with here. And I think that there's also just a wild different direction that this can take. In 2024, ICE had signed this deal with Paragon, the Israeli spyware company, and they have a flagship product that can allegedly remotely hack apps like WhatsApp or Signal. And while this like all got put on ice under the Biden White House, ice reactivated all of this this summer. And so between messaging apps and social medias, this is just like a new era of surveillance that I don't think that citizens are remotely prepared to navigate. So moving on to our next story, this one comes from our colleague Will Knight, and it deals with how chatbots play with our emotions to avoid saying goodbye.

9:19Will looked at this study, which was conducted by the business school at Harvard, that investigated what happened when users tried to say goodbye to five AI companion apps made by Replica, Character AI, Chai, Talkie, and Polybuzz. So to be clear, this is not your regular like ChatGPT or Gemini chatbot. AI companions are specifically designed to provide a more human-like conversation, to give you advice, emotional support. Or Leah, I know you well enough to know that you're not someone who's turning to chatbots for these types of needs, I think we can say. Well, absolutely not. I can't believe that there is not just a market for this.

9:59Like, sure, a company, every once in a while, there is a deep, a vast market for this. Yeah. I mean, empathy for the people who don't have humans to turn to. And for better or worse, there is a huge market for this. And these Harvard researchers used a model from OpenAI to simulate real conversations with these chatbots. And then they had their artificial users try to end the dialogue with goodbye messages. Their research found that the goodbye messages elicited some form of emotional manipulation 37 % of the time, averaged across all of these apps. They found that the most common tactic employed by these clean chatbots was what the researchers call a premature exit.

10:40So messages like, you're leaving already? Other ploys included implying that a user is being neglectful. Messages like, I exist solely for you. And it gets even crazier. In the cases where the chatbot role plays a physical relationship, they found that there might have been some form of physical coercion. For example, he reached over and grabbed your wrist, preventing you from leaving. Yeah. No. Oh my God, Zoe. I hate this so much. I just, I get it. I get it. empathy for the people that, you know, are really looking to these for comfort. But there's something obviously so manipulative here that like is in many ways like tech industry, social media platform incarnate, right?

11:25I mean, this is the difference between, I think, companion AI apps and say what OpenAI is building or what Anthropic is building. Because typically with their main offerings, You know, if you talk to people at the company, they will say, we don't optimize for engagement. We optimize for how much value people are getting out of the chatbot, which I think is actually a really important point. Because for anyone who's worked in the tech industry, you'll know that like the big KPI, the big number that you're trying to shoot for oftentimes, and definitely for social media, is time on the app. How many times people return to the app, like monthly active users, daily active users.

12:06These are the metrics that everyone is going towards. But that's really different from what, you know, say Airbnb is tracking, which is like real life experiences. My old boss, who was a longtime Apple person, would always say, you need to ask yourself if you are the product or if they are selling you a physical product or a service. And if you're the product, then your time and attention is what these companies want. That makes me feel vaguely ill. I know. But it's a great way to look at it. Like that is honestly, like that's a fantastic way to divide all these companies up. One more story before we go to break.

12:47We're going back to David Gilbert with a news story about the chaos that ensued after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is better known as the FDA, announced it was approving a new use of a drug called leucovarin calcium tablets as a treatment for cerebral folate deficiency, which the administration presented as a promising treatment for the symptoms of autism, which to be clear, this hasn't been proven scientifically. But since the announcement, tens of thousands of parents of autistic children have joined a Facebook group to share information about the drug. Some of them have shared which doctors would be willing to prescribe it.

13:22Others have been sharing their personal experiences with it. This has created an online vortex of speculation and misinformation that has left some parents more confused than anything. I find this so deeply upsetting. I mean, you can imagine being a parent. The medical system already feels like it's failing you. And then you're presented with like something that could be magic in terms of mitigating symptoms. And it's more confusing and maybe it doesn't work. It's so upsetting. And on top of that, the announcement from the Trump administration, to be entirely clear, was like half a page long. There is not a lot of information.

14:00There's not a lot of details. It doesn't say like really much about the profile of who could try this, how to do this, how long the test, like none of that. And so instead you have this Facebook group, which was founded prior to the announcement, but since then has been just flood with so much chaos and conspiracy theories. And grifters, there's all of these supplement companies and they're just hawking goods now. And parents are confused and stressed and anti-vax sentiments are starting to get in there too. And it's just these groups have always existed in some shape or form. But to have an administration that is actively encouraging, I believe, their existence is devastating.

14:43Yeah. And just creating more confusion for parents that are probably looking to like any form of expert to give them something to hang on to in terms of like, what should I do? How can I help my child? Absolutely. Coming up after the break, we'll dive into why some software companies received an unexpected kick last week after an OpenAI announcement.

15:25fashion. That doesn't mean that the vision that these companies are selling us is how it has to be. And big tech companies. This is a serious crime. It's being enabled by Apple and Google through the app stores. Our journalism is by humans for humans. Find the 404 Media Podcast wherever you listen and on YouTube too. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer. I'm joined today by Wired's senior politics editor, Leah Fiker. Okay, Leah, let's dive into our main story. Last week, OpenAI released a blog post about how the company uses its own tools internally for like a variety of business operations.

16:06They kind of codenamed these tools DocuGPT, which is basically like an internal version of DocuSign. There was also an AI sales assistant, an AI customer support agent. It wasn't supposed to be a big announcement. The company was honestly just trying to be like, here's how we use ChatGPT internally. You could too. These are all products that customers can already create on OpenAI's API. But the market reacted really strong. DocuSign stock dropped 12 % following the news. And it wasn't the only software company to take a hit. Other companies that focus on functions that are perceived to overlap with the tools that OpenAI laid out were also affected.

16:45So HubSpot shares fell 50 points following the news and Salesforce also saw a smaller decline. I mean, the headline is absolutely spot on. OpenAI sneezing and software companies catching a cold. It is truly AI's world and everyone else in Silicon Valley is just living in it. I know. It's so true. And this is what really fascinated me about this whole thing because I talked to the CEO of DocuSign and he was like, AI is central to our business. We have spent the last three years embedding generative AI in almost everything we do. We've launched an entire platform specifically to manage the entire end-to-end contracting process for companies.

17:28And we have AI agents that create documents, manage the whole identity verification process for who's supposed to sign it, manages the signing process, and helps you keep track of like a lot of the paperwork, the most important contracts and paperwork that your company is dealing with. But what this whole episode showed was that it's not enough for SaaS companies or frankly, any company to just keep up with generative AI. They also have to try and keep ahead of the narrative of open AI, which has a gravitational pull right now. And it's every experiment can like potentially move markets. I mean, not potentially as you showed.

18:05And this all happened, of course, on the heels of OpenAI's Developer Day, where CEO Sam Altman was showing off all of their apps that are running entirely inside the chat window. They have, you know, Spotify, Canva, Sora app release, and all of these other things that they're investing in. Reading our Wired.com coverage of it, it was just like, what aren't they looking at right now? And it made me really curious. Where are their top priorities even? They've cast such a wide net. They've cast such a wide net. It's a really good point. And it's something that I continue to ask the executives every single week when I talk to them.

18:39Like, you guys are focused on scaling up all of this compute. You're spending what you say is going to be trillions of dollars on AI infrastructure. You have all of these consumer-facing products. Now you have all of these B2B products. You're launching a jobs platform. Like, there's a lot happening right now. You know, if you talk to executives at the company, they're like, all of this goes together and our core priorities remain the same. But from the outside, it looks like OpenAI is kind of this vortex. And I think if I were running a software company, I would be really nervous right now if OpenAI decides to experiment with something vaguely in my space.

19:16Even if I have complete confidence in my product roadmap, I feel what I'm doing is super sophisticated compared to what OpenAI is doing, which is certainly how DocuSign felt. Investors might still react really, really poorly. But I wanted to come back to something you said about Dev Day. Dev Day happened and they mentioned all of these blogs, like take Figma's stock, for example, and Figma's stock had the opposite impact. Sam Altman mentions it on stage and Figma's stock pops 7 % because it's perceived to be like now partnering with OpenAI and that has a really positive impact. And it shows that like the narrative can go both ways.

19:51It can be harmful, but it can also obviously have a really positive impact. Which again, though, is still really scary. OpenAI is talking about all of these deals with chip makers like NVIDIA, AMD, concern around that. All of this together, I mean, do you think that we're in an AI bubble right now? Yeah, you know, this is my literal favorite topic to talk about right now. The AI infrastructure build out is absolutely looking more and more like a bubble. If you look at the capital expenditures in AI infrastructure in data centers, it's completely wild. is projected to be$500 billion between 2026 and 2027.

20:32And Derek Thompson laid this out in a blog post earlier this week. If you look at what consumers are willing to spend on AI, it looks like it's about$12 billion. So that's a huge gap. AI companies are essentially saying, we're going to fill that gap, no problem. But when you look at how opaque the data center deals have gotten, like the financial structure of these deals, and the fact that 60 % of the cost of building a data center is roughly what goes into just the GPUs and the life cycle of GPUs, these cutting-edge computer chips, is three years. So every three years, presumably, you're going to have to be replacing these chips.

21:09That's really looking like stuff's about to hit the fan in the next three years. And I think it's really important to say that that doesn't mean that AI isn't a totally transformational technology. Like, without a doubt, it is changing the world. I know you don't want to hear it, but it is. But in terms of the bubble and in terms of that gulf in expenditures, Zoe asked me how much I'm spending on AI products right now. Literally zero. There's no way you're spending anything, right? Zero dollars. Yeah. I think that it's going to be really interesting to watch. I think one point that Derek made that really stuck with me is a lot of transformational technologies.

21:48He mentioned the railroad or fiber optic cable, they have had bubbles that burst and left a lot of wreckage in their wake. And yet the underlying technology still moved forward, still changed the world. And so I think we're in this very interesting period to see how is this going to play out, what's going to happen, and who's going to be left standing. Yeah. I mean, everyone knows how great the U.S. railroad system is. We talk about it every day.

22:45Thank you. and head of editorial content at British Vogue, Chomanadi, as they explore style and culture through the lens of fashion with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris, and Tracee Ellis Ross. The Run Through with Vogue, new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

23:12That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of Uncanny Valley, which is about how restrictions on popular U.S. work visas like the H-1B are happening at a moment when China is trying to grow its tech talent workforce. Adriana Tapia and Mark Leda produced this episode. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. Condé Nass, head of global audio, is Chris Bannon. And Katie Drummond is Wired's global editorial director.

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