Guest · 9:38
Privacy issues, and they're like, please don't upload our internal documents to OpenAI. That's been a problem. It's trained in a lot of workplaces. So one in nine doesn't surprise me. I think it's going to continue to grow. I just published a story today about AI agents, which is just like the new next thing. So sort of an AI assistant. And where I'm seeing this a lot is in SaaS products. Like Salesforce released a CRM agent. Microsoft has copilots, stuff that they believe will increase efficiency amongst their staff. But I think it's going to be hard for that number to grow so long as there's transparency issues and that trust has to grow. Okay.
Kara Swisher · 10:17
Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about where we're already using AI without realizing it and what we should not be using it it for.
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Kara Swisher · 12:13
Scott, we're back with our special series on AI. We're talking to a senior AI reporter for The Verge, Kylie Robison. Huge leaps have been made in AI over the last couple of years. Talk about how we're using it without realizing it. It's also been around for a while. Right? Where where are people not realizing they're using it today?
Guest · 12:31
Totally. I think in your career, Kara, you've probably covered AI. It's been around forever. I think, you know, your Netflix algorithm, that's AI. Automated self driving cars, Waymo's... I live in San Francisco. Waymo's are everywhere. That's AI. It is used in, you know, TikTok algorithms. That's AI. It's it's everywhere, and it has been working in the background quite a bit. I think, you know, you'll hear companies, especially as a reporter, they're like, we've been in the AI business for two decades, which is, you know, it's not facetious, but it is different than the frontier models we're seeing, OpenAI and Anthropic release. But it it is those algorithms you're used to using.
Scott Galloway · 13:13
So break down or do a quick kinda JD Powers review of the biggest LLMs from your favorite to your least favorite.
Kara Swisher · 13:21
Favorites to least favorites. Scott likes Claude, just so you know.
Scott Galloway · 13:24
I do like Claude.
Guest · 13:25
Claude is really good. It... It's surprisingly good. I just started using it recently, and I messaged a coworker. I was like, I'm a bad AI reporter because this is way better than I anticipated. It's... It also has... I don't know if you've noticed this, Scott, like, kind of intense guardrails. I asked, you know, some questions about AI. It's like, well, as an AI, I can't exactly answer these questions, whereas ChatGPT would have just spit it out.
Kara Swisher · 13:47
It... Just so people know, it's by it's by Anthropic, which was a a group of people who thought OpenAI was not safe enough and started Anthropic.
Guest · 13:55
Exactly. And it's backed by Amazon. Exactly. Yes. And Google has a smaller cloud share for Anthropic. But... Yes. So Anthropic is a competitor to OpenAI. OpenAI has g p t four o is their latest frontier model. They've also released a reasoning model called o one, but they consider that, for lack of a better word, kind of dumber than their frontier model. And frontier models are basically the biggest, the best, you know, models that are out there. So frontier models are like, the next one is like the next iPhone, basically. So I would say Claude is amazing. Claude Opus is amazing. I think I think the thing is they're all building the same thing with the same training data, which is the entire Internet. So they're going to con... Like, continue just leapfrogging over each other. So it's hard to compare because it's, you know, five major companies with some of the best researchers in the world with all of the same training data all building the same thing.
Kara Swisher · 14:48
Do you use Grok? Don't laugh.
Guest · 14:53
Do you use Grok?
Kara Swisher · 14:54
I've... I'm not getting in any of the new... Whatever cyber attacks he's getting. I'm not getting in, and I'm not putting any information into any of his properties. I don't trust him personally.
Guest · 15:04
I used Grock when it first came out to... I think I I made, you know, Kamala with a gun is Mhmm. You know, The Verge put out a story because they have Grock for the for the listener is available on X, formerly Twitter, which is owned by Elon Musk, and he owns XAI, which created this chatbot. And it has what it feels like no guardrails. So you can make a lot of photos that, you know, break all sorts of copyright laws. No. I don't use Grok, and I don't I don't necessarily find it to be top of the line. If I were to rank models, they're not Mhmm. You know, at the top.
Scott Galloway · 15:40
So I'll go back to my question. What's your favorite LLM?
Guest · 15:43
I would say Opus, Claude. They're... It's it's really intelligent and incredible. I think, you know, it's enviable from other labs what they've built.
Scott Galloway · 15:52
Mhmm. And then what... Can you name some long tail LLM or AI ops that are sort of fun that people that maybe haven't gotten gotten very much attention that are kind of fun? Any sort of undiscovered gems out there?
Guest · 16:04
Undiscovered gems. I mean, if you go to Hugging Face, if you're into open source, there are hundreds of thousands of open source LLMs that people can mess with. I mean, that's that's the cool part about open source LLMs, which is a very hot debate. But, you know, developers are creating all sorts of cool shit with the open source LLMs available on Hugging Face. So there's almost too many to choose from, but none of them are are mainstream in the way because it's... It costs it costs so much money. Hence why OpenAI just raised the most money that anyone's ever raised ever. It's it's a lot of money.
Kara Swisher · 16:40
Yeah. It's it's just for people that are Hugging Face is an AI community where it's a platform where they collaborate and they do different things. And, you know, this will be very much like the early app days or the early Internet days where there was suddenly websites and things, and then there was Yahoo that compiled them into a yet another hierarchical, vicious oratory.
Scott Galloway · 16:58
I have a follow-up. I find that AI is very politically correct. That it it will say, to answer this question, you know, make sure that you check with law enforcement or
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Scott Galloway · 17:11
I find it very politically correct.
Kara Swisher · 17:13
I find it Please don't steal from the jewelry store.
Scott Galloway · 17:17
No. It'll... But it'll come back and say, well, this might reflect bias or you should... I just find it's very... I... I'm looking for an AI that'll say, that's a stupid fucking question. Or your question, I want it as a friend.
Kara Swisher · 17:30
He wants to shame AI. Yeah. Shame AI. Makes sense.
Scott Galloway · 17:34
Hit me harder. Call me call me daddy, you bitch. Anyways
Kara Swisher · 17:38
my god.
Scott Galloway · 17:39
No. But I do find it's very... That they've put it... They're so worried about it going weird places that it
Kara Swisher · 17:45
It has gone weird places.
Scott Galloway · 17:46
It's preconditioning and qualifying all its answers and being very gentle. And I find it's very overly sensitive and quite frankly politically correct. So I'll start with Kylie. Do you find that to be the case, or do you think that's just they're putting in appropriate guardrails?
Guest · 18:00
I think they're putting in their appropriate guardrails because it's so nascent. I mean, why start off crazy? Yeah. Like, I feel like we can work I our way feel like we can work our way up to getting you a sadistic chatbot, but for now, it's so
Scott Galloway · 18:12
Go on.
Guest · 18:15
It's just such a nascent technology. So I think being overly safe and correct and and nervous about what it's going to output to millions of people,
Kara Swisher · 18:24
I think that's I think that's a good move. Yeah. Scott, come on. I think that... I'm gonna answer something. I know you wanna please bitch AI, but one of the things that's really important is it doesn't sexually harass people. It doesn't, like, start Okay.
Scott Galloway · 18:37
You're taking this to an even darker place than I would go.
Kara Swisher · 18:40
Saying. It it it has. It's been... The original ones were racist.
Scott Galloway · 18:44
If you ask it a simple question, it'll start conditioning everything and telling you to check with this and make sure that you talk, and it's a sort of, just give me the goddamn answer.
Kara Swisher · 18:54
I get that, but that's... They're never gonna do that because they they they literally... They... The first time they put out some Microsoft stuff, it was racist. Right? It started to say racist things. So they really can't have... One of the things that I think I tell a lot of people is I I met these two guys on the street yesterday, and they were creating an AI. They just ran up to me. They love Pivot. They're creating an AI that goes on... Speaking of odd and unusual things, that goes on top of nine one one calls that they'll be selling into cities. And it... It'll translate, say, Spanish immediately, because not every person... There's a delay there because the the person who's taking the call is not Spanish, and they have to go get a Spanish speaking dispatcher. And so it's doing all kinds of things that grocks it and sends things out really quick. I thought it was a great idea. I thought it was a really interesting way... Use of AI. And I said, but you know what something is? You can't make a mistake even if human dispatchers do. So I think they have to be unusually careful with all these things as this AI is shoving us around the planet. I don't... I just feel like that's okay. You can take it, Scott. But I'm gonna make... I'm gonna get someone to make you a mean AI, a overlord, or please bitch, or something like
Scott Galloway · 19:59
that. Learned this morning from AI that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance. That's true, and I love that. How awesome is that?
— Predictions segment begins —
Kara Swisher · 20:08
That's also in the dictionary. A flamboyance? You're a flamboyance. Anyway, last question. We just sort of covered the idea of what things we should not use it for. It's gonna be used for everything, just FYI. But any predictions? Last question on things AI can't do yet but will be able to do for us in the next three years. Use your, you know, imagination hat here or things you're seeing or hearing.
Guest · 20:30
I think in the next three years, it... Again, these are so hard to tell because you need so much money and so much compute. So if we just continue on that exponential curves that these companies are hoping for, I see, you know, probably more accurate and natural voice interactions. That's something that they're building that they really want, you know, the the Her movie style reality. I do think that that will get better, especially as they release all of this to the public and people test it and they train on people using it. I think those will naturally get better. Advanced code generation and debugging, that's something they're already really good at. And if these reasoning models from OpenAI and others continue to get better, it's gonna be better at coding and debugging, which will be really cool. And they're all building agents, which, again, are like little AI assistants. That's sort of the high stakes tasks that they want to access. Hence, why all these guardrails are so tough because they want they want these high stakes tasks like running your life and booking new flights and, you know, having access to all of this. So I do see them building out agents, but it would require so much compute and so much money to get there. So, you know, I'd be curious what you guys think because I get asked all the time, like, is the bubble gonna pop? Is OpenAI just gonna crash? Which I think, you know, it's so hard for me to tell you guys have been doing this for
Kara Swisher · 21:48
No.
Guest · 21:48
So long.
Kara Swisher · 21:49
It will. But no. No. No. No. It's when... Like, when the Internet crashed. This is a big deal. This is a change in computing. It's yet another great change in computing. This is not crypto. This is not, you know, some of the little little bubbles. But a bubble, I guess, but it's directionally correct. It's directionally... And it's gonna be huge and encompass everything. Scott?
Scott Galloway · 22:09
Well, there's two things. There's the valuation of these companies, and then there's the real impact they have on the economy. I think the latter is just getting started. There's gonna be a lot... There's gonna be... What I would say in terms of valuations, there's just gonna be a lot of volatility. We've talked about this. We think that relative to its size and leadership position, OpenAI, in my view, is actually at 12 times revenues, is actually probably the best value. Because some of the long tail ones you talked about who have almost no revenues and no real visible business model yet still get $210.20, $50,000,000,000 valuations. So it's gonna be a wild ride. It's like... I would describe it as, like, late nineties Internet. We don't know if it's '97 or '99, though. But we know that by 2005, it's gonna be much bigger than it is now. That's a long winded way, Kylie, of saying I have no idea.
— Predictions segment ends —
Kara Swisher · 23:01
Yeah. He does. He's up into the right eventually. Anyway, thank you, Kylie. We really appreciate it. You can read Kylie on the verge. Does amazing work on on this topic and breaks a lot of stories.
Scott Galloway · 23:13
A colleague. A colleague.
Kara Swisher · 23:15
She's a scoopster. She's a scoopster, and she's a great one at it. Anyway, okay, Scott. That's it for our AI basics episode. Please read us out.
Scott Galloway · 23:25
Today's show was produced by Lara Nayman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie and Ortod engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Miel Severio. Nishat Kurat is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to the podcast. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com/pod. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.
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