Meta Bets on Scale + Apple’s A.I. Struggles + Listeners on Job Automation

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Speaker 11 Let me ask you about this. There's this startup called the Browser Company, and they have a new browser called DIA, which

Speaker 11 is sort of, you know, based around AI. And so you have like an AI chat.

Speaker 11 And I was reading David Pierce's story about this in The Verge, and he was like, there was a point in using DIA where I came to understand that it knows what my social security number is because I had like entered it onto a website.

Speaker 11 And when I think about all of the things that I, you know, put into a web browser, some of very sensitive information, Kevin, yeah.

Speaker 11 I don't know that I want a cloud service to have total knowledge and memory of what I've been browsing.

Speaker 12 Yeah, that sounds to me like a bad idea.

Speaker 12 Perfect.

Speaker 11 Cut print.

Speaker 12 We're moving on.

Speaker 12 I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist of the New York Times.

Speaker 11 I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.

Speaker 12 And this is Hard Fork.

Speaker 11 This week, Meta hits the reset button on AI. But does it actually believe in super intelligence? Then, Apple's big developer conference was this week, and it still seems a little stuck in the past.

Speaker 11 And finally, we asked you if your jobs are being automated away. It's time to hear what you said.

Speaker 12 Well, Casey, we have a live show coming up.

Speaker 11 Boy, do we.

Speaker 12 My God. So on June 24th, we are going to be at SF Jazz in San Francisco for the first ever Hard Fork Live.
And boy, do we have some special guests to announce.

Speaker 11 Now, do I have to do anything for the show?

Speaker 12 I would like you to do the following things. One, show up.
Okay. Two, stand on stage with me.
And three, help me interview some of our amazing special guests. All right.

Speaker 11 You drive a hard bargain, but I'll do it.

Speaker 12 So, Casey, tell the people who's coming to Hard Fork Live.

Speaker 11 Let me tell you about the show, Kevin. You are going, if you're coming to Hard Fork Live, you're going to be hearing from the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, the big payments platform.

Speaker 11 That's Patrick Collison. We'll be at the show.
You will be hearing from and seeing the work of the founder of Skip, a mobility company that makes exoskeleton pants.

Speaker 11 Catherine Zeeland will be on the show, Kevin.

Speaker 11 And finally, to cap it off, we have from OpenAI, the CEO, Sam Altman, returning to Hard Fork, and he's bringing along Brad Lightcap, his chief operating officer.

Speaker 11 We're gonna have a big conversation about AI. And so that's the stuff we're gonna tell you about.

Speaker 11 But if you can believe it, there's actually other stuff that we're working on that we're not ready to tell you yet. But suffice to say, this show is packed.

Speaker 12 Yes, our cup runneth over. When we set up the show, we sort of booked like a medium-sized venue, sort of expecting that, you know, some people would want to come out.

Speaker 12 The demand was overwhelming we sold out very quickly and so the show you cannot buy tickets to it unless you're scalping them on stub hub or whatever don't do that by the way yeah that's right but here's what if if you can't come to the show but you just want to stand outside the building i'm going to come out during intermission and just tell you what happened casey i don't know how to break it to you there's no intermission there's no intermittent what if i have to pee

Speaker 12 So if you did not get a ticket to the show, don't worry. We will be bringing you the interviews from Hard Fork Live on this very podcast feed with not too much delay.
That's right.

Speaker 11 You'll be able to take part of the show even if you were not there physically. Exactly.
Yeah, but we're super excited for all of those of you who did get tickets to come say hi.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Yeah.
It's going to be incredible.

Speaker 11 See you there.

Speaker 11 All right, Kevin, let's dive into the story that I think you and I are both most excited about this week, which is what is happening over at Meta's AI Division.

Speaker 12 Yes, they're having a big reorg and they are making big moves to try to catch up in the race to powerful AI. So, Casey, what has been happening?

Speaker 11 So, the big headline news is that as of this recording, Kevin, multiple sources, including myself, have reported that Meta is about to make a huge investment in Scale AI, which is a startup here in San Francisco.

Speaker 11 They're going to take 49% of the company for somewhere between $14 and $15 billion.

Speaker 11 A lot of money. That's kind of thing one.
Thing two is, as part of that investment, the co-founder and CEO of Scale, Alexander Wang, is going to come to Meta.

Speaker 11 He's going to leave Scale, come to work at Meta and lead a new AI team that is devoted to creating super intelligence.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 12 And what caught my eye about this announcement was not only the dollar figure and the new super intelligence team, but the fact that Meta is also going out and trying to aggressively recruit a bunch of top AI talent to come sort of turn their ship around when it comes to AI and help them catch up to companies like OpenAI and Google Anthropic.

Speaker 11 Yeah. And so recently on the show, you and I had a conversation about the somewhat botched rollout of Lama 4, the company's latest AI model, and what it told us about the state of AI over there.

Speaker 11 Today, I want to go through what happened over the past year that led Meta to this place and what do we make of this new plan?

Speaker 11 Do we think that this will put them back into the conversation with some of the real Frontier AI labs? So before we get into that, is there anything we want to disclose to our dear listeners?

Speaker 12 Yes, I work at the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement related to the training of large language models.

Speaker 11 And my boyfriend works at Anthropic. So let's dive into this story, Kevin.
And I think the first thing to do is kind of lay out the state of play.

Speaker 11 When you think of Meta's place in the AI ecosystem, where are they right now compared to some of the other big players?

Speaker 12 So right now, I would say Meta is considered a second tier AI research company.

Speaker 12 They've had a bunch of internal turmoil and disorganized, sort of messy strategy decisions over the past couple of years. And so I think a lot of people feel like they have kind of fallen off in AI.

Speaker 11 And if you're Mark Zuckerberg, why is that a big problem?

Speaker 12 Well, because AI is increasingly the thing that people in the tech industry are pinning their hopes on, not just as the future of large language models, but as really the future of social media, the future of lots of other things that Meta is interested in doing.

Speaker 12 And Meta has spent tons and tons of money trying to build these powerful AI systems and buying up a bunch of GPUs. They sit on one of the largest stashes of GPUs of any company in Silicon Valley.

Speaker 12 And I think the feeling is that they have just not been doing a lot with that.

Speaker 11 That's right. And you compare that to some of their peers.
Like look at at Open AI, the incredibly rapid growth of ChatGPT.

Speaker 11 Look at what Google is doing and how those products are gaining tons and tons of users. Anthropic is building a huge enterprise business.
Meta is not yet part of that conversation.

Speaker 11 So let's talk a little bit how we got here because Meta has been working on AI basically as long as any of these people. What is the history of AI development at that company?

Speaker 12 It's a really strange and interesting story because I think people who are just coming to this story may not know that Meta was once considered one of, if not the leading AI company in the world.

Speaker 12 So here's the capsule history. Back around 2012, Facebook tried to acquire DeepMind.

Speaker 12 Mark Zuckerberg thought Demis Hassabis and his co-founders were doing cool and interesting things, thought this could be strategically important for Facebook. And so he made them an offer.

Speaker 12 Now, they did not sell to Facebook, obviously. They decided to sell themselves to Google instead.

Speaker 12 But so Facebook around this time set up up its own research division, FAIR, which was led by Jan Lacun. And tell us about Jan Lacun.
So, Jan Lacun is a big deal in AI research.

Speaker 12 He is one of the people who is considered a godfather of deep learning. He won the Turing Award several years ago.
So, he's a big deal in the world of AI.

Speaker 12 And he was able to recruit a bunch of other really good, well-respected AI engineers and researchers to come work at Facebook.

Speaker 12 And I would say say during the sort of 2010s, Facebook did a bunch of really solid AI research.

Speaker 12 They were pretty instrumental in building this thing PyTorch, which is now used by most of the big AI companies still to this day.

Speaker 12 They did a bunch of sort of foundational work that led to the models that we have today.

Speaker 12 But then in 2017, something happened, which is that Google published this transformer paper that outlined this sort of framework for building these so-called large language models that we see today.

Speaker 11 And would you call that a transformative paper?

Speaker 12 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 12 It did end up being transformative because for basically the next five years, OpenAI and to a lesser extent, Google and DeepMind were just building these bigger and bigger large language models and finding that they were actually getting better with scale.

Speaker 12 And as that happened, Facebook and Jan Lacun did not really head down that same path, right? Facebook had a bunch of other priorities. This was right after Donald Trump's election.

Speaker 12 They were still worried about misinformation on Facebook. They were making bets on things like crypto and later the metaverse.
They were trying to compete with TikTok.

Speaker 12 So there was just a lot going on at Facebook. And I think people that I've talked to say that the AI research division just didn't really get a lot of attention from the top.

Speaker 11 Yeah. Well, and to the extent that they were shipping AI features, it was machine learning that would help them identify bad content that needed to be removed or improving a recommendation algorithm.

Speaker 11 So stuff that was useful to them, but was not the sort of large language models like ChatGPT that wound up, I think, being a lot more interesting to people.

Speaker 12 Yeah. And one of the reasons that they pursue that direction is because Jan Lacun, the guy leading their AI research division.
didn't believe in large language models and still doesn't to this day.

Speaker 12 He is one of the sort of foremost critics and skeptics of the scaling era of large language models.

Speaker 11 Yeah, if you want to know why ChatGPT didn't come out of meta, like Jan Lacun is sort of the reason. They were never going to build that kind of product under him.

Speaker 12 Yes. So in 2022, after ChatGPT came out, Meta, like every other company in Silicon Valley, started to freak out.
Mark Zuckerberg says, oh my goodness, we may be behind.

Speaker 12 We don't have our own sort of version of this that is ready to go. And so they kind of go into panic mode.

Speaker 12 They start buying up a bunch of GPUs and start working on what becomes Llama, which is their version of an AI language model.

Speaker 11 Yeah. And the first versions of Llama actually winds up, I think, being more successful than some people might have guessed.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 And at this time, Meta still has a lot of really good AI researchers. And, you know, Jan Lakun doesn't believe in large language models, but a bunch of other people there do.

Speaker 12 And so they start building Llama and they make this decision to open source Llama.

Speaker 12 And so it does actually get widely used because, unlike ChatGPT, which you have to pay for if you're a developer, you can just sort of build on top of Llama for free.

Speaker 11 And this, by the way, was a hugely important decision, Kevin, because it was meant to be a strategic move that would blunt the momentum of Open AI, right?

Speaker 11 The idea was we will take this product that you are selling for $20 a month. We will give it away for free.
It will put cost pressure on you. It will make it harder for you to innovate.

Speaker 11 So that was the idea behind Lama. And I think it's important to remember because whenever you hear Meta talking about open source, it's always like, well, open source will save the world.

Speaker 11 It was like, no, open open source was meant to slow down open AI and Google. Right.

Speaker 12 And so I think during the last few years, this sort of post-Chat GPT era of AI research and development, a lot of Meta's top AI researchers have left.

Speaker 12 And, you know, everyone's got their reasons for leaving.

Speaker 12 But one of the things that I've been hearing from people who left Meta during this time is that the company just did not believe in AI the way that some of the other big AI labs did.

Speaker 11 Yeah. And we should talk about why that is, right? I think if you are a a researcher at a company like an OpenAI,

Speaker 11 from the very start, you have been trying to build the absolute most powerful AI that you can,

Speaker 11 essentially, like almost without regard for how much that changes society, right? You believe that this thing is inevitable. You're going to build it.

Speaker 11 You're going to try to steer it in a positive direction. But you think this thing is going to be hugely transformative.

Speaker 11 If you work at a giant tech incumbent with a trillion-dollar valuation, there is no obvious reason why you want to disrupt all of society, right?

Speaker 11 Because if all of society is disrupted, that might not necessarily be good for you. So I can understand why if you're running a company like Meta, you're incentivized to think a little bit smaller.

Speaker 11 You're thinking not, how do we build super intelligence? You think, how can we create a slightly better advertising recommendation algorithm?

Speaker 12 Totally. And that's fine as a strategy goes.

Speaker 12 But if you are an ambitious AI researcher who's really committed to this idea that this is a transformative technology, you want to do that at a place that actually believes what you do, that believes that what you are working on is not just a better way to sell shoes to people or make chatbots that go inside Instagram.

Speaker 12 You want to be building super intelligence. And so a lot of their top AI talent did leave and go to other places.

Speaker 11 Yes. And around that time, Kevin, the company's playbook stopped working.

Speaker 11 And that playbook, which we've seen so many other times across so many different products, is essentially the fast follower model.

Speaker 11 You let somebody else figure out something interesting, then you reverse engineer it, put it in your own products and take over. This is what Meta did, for example, with Snapchat stories.

Speaker 11 It put stories everywhere, was hugely successful for them. They start to think they can do the same thing with AI.
We will let the Frontier labs go spend all the money, figure out all the innovations.

Speaker 11 We'll read all of the research they publish. We'll build our own version of that.
We'll give it away for free.

Speaker 11 We might not be a little bit behind the state of the art, but it won't matter because we'll be basically there. That's good enough for our purposes.

Speaker 11 And this works up until about Llama 3, but then they start building Llama 4.

Speaker 11 And an interesting thing happens, which is that the latest Frontier models, Kevin, turn out not to be as easy to copy as the ones that came before.

Speaker 12 Yes, I think a lot of people who were impressed by the first couple versions of Llama saw Llama 4 come out recently and thought, this is a company that has lost its way and they are no longer considered a Frontier AI lab.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 11 And so the last thing that I want to say as part of this capsule history before we move into the present is that while Meta is making some big moves now, it's important to remember they also tried to make some big moves in January 2024 when they also did a big reorganization of their AI teams in recognition of the fact that they weren't getting the results that they wanted.

Speaker 11 You know, they didn't go out and make a huge investment or try to bring in a bunch of new talent. It was sort of more on the order of, you know, reshuffling a few teams.

Speaker 11 But, you know, Mark Zuckerberg went out and did an interview about it.

Speaker 11 He started talking for the first time about trying to reach AGI, so artificial general intelligence, one notch down from super intelligence.

Speaker 11 And he said explicitly that he had to do that because he knew it was going to attract more researchers. And then a year went by and that reorganization did not get the job done.

Speaker 11 And so that is what finally brings us today, this investment in scale and this once again hitting the reset button, trying to find a path forward for them in AI. Yeah.

Speaker 12 So I want to ask you about two possible ways to interpret this week's news out of Meta.

Speaker 12 One way is that this is basically a sign that Meta has kind of come to its senses after many years of betting on these directions for AI research that did not pan out, that it is sending Jan Lacun to sort of research Siberia, and that it is essentially trying to buy its way back into the race to AGI by bringing on Alexander Wang and Scale AI, and that it is going to spend whatever it takes to actually get back to the frontier of AI research and development.

Speaker 12 The other way is that Meta is basically pretending here, that they have realized that if they say that they believe in AGI or even in superintelligence, that might allow them to recruit these engineers who would otherwise be going to work for OpenAI or Google or Anthropic or somewhere else.

Speaker 12 And that it still wants to do what it has always wanted to do, which is to use AI to, I don't know, build companions into Instagram or develop sort of things for the metaverse, but that it has essentially changed its posture toward AGI as a recruiting strategy and that it is not actually trying to build super intelligence.

Speaker 12 Which of those two explanations do you think is closer to the truth? Hmm.

Speaker 11 I think I'm going to cop out and say I think that the answer is somewhere in between.

Speaker 11 I yesterday, as part of my reporting, was going through the evolution of the way that Zuckerberg has talked about powerful AI.

Speaker 11 And it is true that his desires to build more powerful AI have scaled along with what some might call a desperation to get back into this race, right?

Speaker 11 I think back when he thought that he could use AI as a very practical tool to enhance a bunch of his current business objectives, he felt no need to talk about super intelligence whatsoever.

Speaker 11 But once he noticed that all of the best talent in the world did not want to come work at his company, that's when he said, okay, I am going to have to change my tune on this front.

Speaker 11 Where I think your first explanation resonates with me the most is it's still not really clear to me how super intelligence benefits Mark Zuckerberg and Meta in particular, right?

Speaker 11 I think that if you talk to the researchers at the Frontier Labs about they want to build super intelligence, it's like, well, they want to usher in a world of abundance. They want to cure disease.

Speaker 11 They want to, you know, solve poverty. And, you know, a lot of people think that those claims are sort of too grandiose.
But I've talked to the real believers there. I think they really believe that.

Speaker 11 That's not what Mark Zuckerberg wants to do. Mark Zuckerberg wants to rule over Meta and have Meta be among, if not the most powerful companies in the world.

Speaker 11 And in a world where superintelligence exists, I'm not sure Meta will have much of a role to play.

Speaker 12 Yeah. I want to ask you about one other angle here that I saw people discussing, which was actually about scale AI more than Meta.

Speaker 12 So scale AI, for people who are not familiar, they are not sort of an AI R ⁇ D lab, right? They are essentially a data provider to the big AI labs.

Speaker 12 So Casey, how would you explain what Scale AI does and how that might fit into Meta's strategy here?

Speaker 11 Sure. So the bulk of their business works like this.
They have a couple of subsidiaries. Those subsidiaries hire people for pretty cheap, and then they show them a bunch of content.

Speaker 11 For example, example, they might show them content that might violate Meta's standards because it has like violence or nudity.

Speaker 11 And the content moderator will go in, they will say, okay, yeah, this violates the standard and I'm going to categorize it and I'm going to feed that back to Scale AI.

Speaker 11 And then Scale AI is going to label that data and clean it up and send it back to Meta so that Meta can then build a machine learning classifier to sort of create automated content moderation systems.

Speaker 11 So it's that kind of service that has been really important for them. Now, it's not just content moderation.
Some of the other big labs like OpenAI or Google DeepMind are customers of theirs.

Speaker 11 And they will have people out in the world, you know, labeling, let's call it, let's say like a picture of a car or something, sending that back. And that helps to train a large language model.

Speaker 11 So we know that to make large language models more powerful, you just need a lot of not just data, but like clean, structured, labeled data.

Speaker 11 And Scale AI has been one of the biggest providers on that front.

Speaker 12 Right. So one.

Speaker 12 hypothesis that I saw floating around this week online is that by acquiring a stake in scale AI, Meta was essentially trying to lock up that valuable data for itself and keep it out of the hands of its rivals.

Speaker 12 Now, I think that there's probably some multi-year contracts in place.

Speaker 12 I don't think it's actually going to be the case that Meta can just sort of unilaterally decide to shut down Scale AI's business with all these other AI companies.

Speaker 12 But I do think it will give them privileged access to a pretty important ingredient in training these large language models.

Speaker 11 Yes, which is one reason why a person I spoke to yesterday who's sort of like close to this deal said that they fully fully expect that the biggest customers of Scale I are going to stop being customers precisely because they assume that their usage of the product will flow back into Meta's hands and they do not want them to have that proprietary information.

Speaker 11 Ben Thompson wrote an interesting column on Wednesday saying this might actually trigger some regulatory concerns because even though Meta isn't trying to buy all of Scale AI, it may effectively be removing a very important player from the market at a time when Meta is already under under a lot of antitrust scrutiny.

Speaker 11 We just wrapped up an antitrust trial that is trying to force them to divest WhatsApp and Instagram. Yep.
So let's talk a bit about what is going to happen now.

Speaker 11 Assuming that this does go through, here is what I've been able to piece together about what this new team is going to be doing, Kevin.

Speaker 11 The first thing to say is these people are going to be sitting next to Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaker 11 So this is something that Zuckerberg does from time to time is he just will clear out everyone who sat next to him during the last crisis and he brings in people to work with him during the current crisis.

Speaker 11 So for example, during the Cambridge Analytica crisis, he brought in a lot of his like communications team to sit around him to like tell him about, you know, all of the, you know, breaking news.

Speaker 11 Now, and presumably those people shuffled off long ago. Cambridge Analytica was like in 2017, but now they're bringing in the AI team.

Speaker 11 And so, you know, if you've always wanted to like bounce ideas off Mark Zuckerberg, that's maybe something you could do.

Speaker 11 We should also say the people sitting around him are going to be really rich, not like Mark Zuckerberg rich, but you know, the Times reported that these pay packages that they're offering are stretching stretching into nine figures.

Speaker 11 That's $100 million. I heard one credible report of an engineer being offered $75 million to go work for Meta.

Speaker 12 Which we should just say, like, that's a lot of money, right? That's like what

Speaker 12 a star pro athlete would make.

Speaker 11 Yeah. And by the way, if you ever say to somebody, how much would it take me to give you for you to come work with me? And the person says $75 million,

Speaker 11 reflect on yourself.

Speaker 11 What choices did you make, right? Totally. So they're going to have that team.
Now, I've also been trying to figure out what is this team going to do?

Speaker 11 Because look, the way that Meta has rolled out this announcement has basically felt like a help-wanted ad, right?

Speaker 11 They are out basically, now they're officially they're declining to comment, but read these stories.

Speaker 11 I'm getting strong hints that someone inside Meta very much wants the world to know that there's $100 million on the table for the right person, right?

Speaker 11 It is basically a help-wanted ad saying, come work here, okay? Well, so what happens when people actually take that deal? This is what I've been trying to figure out.

Speaker 11 It's like, okay, let's say you take $100 million and now you go get your desk across from Rox Zuckerberg. What does day one of your work look like? Is there a plan?

Speaker 11 There actually isn't. The plan is we have to figure out the plan.

Speaker 11 We have to figure out how to take the best practices of the companies that we came from, bring those practices into Meta and somehow get back in this game.

Speaker 11 Alexander Wang is going to be leading that effort. I think Wang is a capable leader.
Like Scale is a very successful company.

Speaker 11 The way that they've been successful is by always kind of pivoting to where the money is.

Speaker 11 They've been very good at that Silicon Valley startup thing of just staying alive by being very resilient and resourceful.

Speaker 11 I want to say, though, that building super intelligence is a very different prospect than building scale AI, right? Because for when you look at what scale AI actually does, they help you scale AI.

Speaker 11 They do not build the AI. Right.

Speaker 12 They're sort of like a classic like picks and shovels company that is making money by building the inputs to AI, but not actually training their own frontier models.

Speaker 11 Yeah. And so, you know, Wang is 28 years old.
He's going to be now leading a team of supposedly around 50 people, some of whom might be making as much as $100 million a year.

Speaker 11 I think that's just going to be a very difficult management challenge. You know, think about some of the big teams you may have worked on at your job.
What is the fastest it ever gelled?

Speaker 11 Was it less than six months, right?

Speaker 11 If you're somebody who believes that we are on the precipice of super intelligence already arriving, or maybe just AGI already arriving, you're talking about what, six months, a year and a half before this team has actually been able to maybe ship their first major project.

Speaker 11 So, you know, I am sympathetic to Meta here in the sense that they don't have another choice. They had to do something significant if they were going to get back in this race.

Speaker 11 But we should not understate the challenge of what they are attempting to do because they just lost the last year.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 I'm skeptical that this plan of Meta's is going to work. And there are a couple of reasons for that.

Speaker 12 One is that while there are many people working on AI and many talented researchers and engineers, the universe of people who have actually built and trained the biggest language models on the biggest supercomputers is still quite small.

Speaker 12 It might be a couple hundred people worldwide.

Speaker 12 Unfortunately for meta, all of those people are already rich. They can work anywhere they want.
They can make whatever they want. These people are writing their own checks.

Speaker 12 And so I'm not sure that there is a sufficient amount of money you could pay some of these people people to give up their jobs and come work for Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaker 12 The second reason I'm skeptical is that I think that even if Meta does manage to sort of assemble this Avengers super team of AI researchers, I still don't think they have an attractive or coherent AI strategy that is going to motivate these people to work hard there.

Speaker 12 If you actually... look at what Meta has said so far about what it is doing with all of the AI stuff that it has built.
It has basically said two things. One, it wants to make AI companions.

Speaker 12 The second thing it is announced is that it is going to build weapons for the military, right?

Speaker 12 This came out of a recent story where Meta is going to partner with Anderil, the sort of military technology company, and they are going to build something like an augmented reality headset for soldiers in the battlefield.

Speaker 12 That might be a worthy project.

Speaker 12 It might even be a profitable project, but that is not the kind of thing that top AI researchers researchers want to spend their time working on, at least the ones that I'm talking to.

Speaker 12 And I will close my analysis of this situation by reading you a text that I got from a leading AI researcher who I texted this weekend to go ask if they were going to work for the Meta AI Superintelligence Lab.

Speaker 11 All right, let's hear it.

Speaker 12 LOL, LMAO.

Speaker 12 So, Casey, I think that tells you about how successful this new recruiting push by Meta is going to be.

Speaker 11 Yeah, Yeah, I would be more optimistic about this if this was the first big reorg that Meta was doing in its AI division, but it's not.

Speaker 11 You know, the big reorg they did in January 2024 was also not the first reorg that they had done in this division. You know, you mentioned a couple of the key ways that Meta has been using AI.

Speaker 11 And to your point, this is just like not really inspiring stuff for a lot of those researchers.

Speaker 11 But more importantly, I don't see a way how to get from here to the there that they are envisioning, which is super intelligent.

Speaker 11 So look, this is one of the most interesting stories in tech to me right now for this reason.

Speaker 11 Mark Zuckerberg is on many days the most competitive person in the entire industry, and he's now legitimately behind in a race that he might not be able to afford to lose.

Speaker 11 So for that reason, Kevin, I think we just want to keep our eyes on this story because I suspect this will not be the last big move that Meta makes as it tries to get back in this game.

Speaker 12 All right. When you come back, there's another big tech company that is struggling to find its AI future.
We'll talk about Apple and what it announced this week at its annual developer conference.

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Speaker 12 Well, Casey, let's talk about the other big tech news this week, which is also about a large technology company that is on the AI struggle bus. This week was Apple's annual developer conference, WWDC.

Speaker 12 And unlike last year, when the two of us were invited to Cupertino to take part in the festivities, we were not invited this year.

Speaker 11 We were. And whenever I get uninvited to something, I think this company's in trouble.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I don't think it is because we were rude or ate too much food at lunch or smelled bad.

Speaker 12 I think what's going on here is that Apple is embarrassed about what has happened since last year's WWDC when they announced a bunch of new AI features under their banner of Apple Intelligence.

Speaker 12 And then many of those features did not actually ship.

Speaker 11 Yeah, last year they had a story about AI that they were really excited to tell. This year, that was not the case.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 12 So the big thing that people were excited about at last year's WWDC was this new and improved Siri that would not only be able to respond to more complicated questions on your iPhone, but would be able to kind of pull things from all of your apps and your data and your text messages and cross-reference your email with your messages, with your calendar, and sort of do all that seamlessly.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 11 The classic example was like, hey, you know, send an Uber to go pick up my mom at the airport when her flight gets in, right?

Speaker 11 Which is like a very complicated multi-part query that involves communicating with many apps. And we saw that.
We're like, oh yeah, that'd be really cool. if that worked.
Yes.

Speaker 11 And that did not work apparently because Apple still, a year later, has not shipped that version of Siri. And I still have to pick up my mom for the airport in a regular car, like an animal.

Speaker 11 It's a disaster.

Speaker 12 So we were not there. We were not able to grill Apple executives about what the heck was happening with Siri and why it has been so delayed in its new and improved form.

Speaker 12 But friend of the pod, Joanna Stern from the Wall Street Journal was invited, and she did interview some Apple executives about what was going on with Siri and all these delayed features.

Speaker 12 And I want to just play a clip from that because I think it really shows you how defensive they are.

Speaker 12 In this clip, Joanna is talking to Craig Federigh, who is Apple's senior vice president of software engineering.

Speaker 11 Let's hear it.

Speaker 15 So many people associate Apple and AI with Siri

Speaker 15 since plus 10 years ago now.

Speaker 16 Sure.

Speaker 15 And so there is a real expectation that Siri should be as good, if not better, than the competition.

Speaker 16 Oh, and I think ultimately it should be.

Speaker 16 But it's not right now. That's certainly our mission.
Yeah, but that's our mission. You know, we set out to tell people last year where we were going.

Speaker 16 I think people were very excited about Apple's values there, an experience that's integrated into everything you do, not a bolt-on chatbot on the side, something that is personal, something that is private.

Speaker 16 We started building some of those and delivering some of those capabilities. I, in a way, appreciate the fact that

Speaker 16 people really wanted the next version of Siri, and we really want to deliver it for them. But we want to do it the right way.

Speaker 15 When's the right way going to come along?

Speaker 16 Well, in this case, we really want to make sure that we have it very much in hand before we start talking about dates for obvious reasons.

Speaker 12 So, Casey, they have a mission. They have a vision.
They have values. What they do not have is a date when any of this will be available.
Yeah.

Speaker 11 So bad news for anybody whose mom is still stuck at the airport. I shouldn't keep coming back to that joke.

Speaker 11 But no, that's, you know, look, on some level, it's like, what can they say? They tried to build it, it didn't work.

Speaker 11 It's better not to ship it and to delay it than to ship something, you know, that doesn't work.

Speaker 11 There has been some great reporting over the past couple of months about what happened inside of Apple that led us to this point. Mark German at Bloomberg has done a ton of amazing reporting on this.

Speaker 11 And the gist is like, there just were not a lot of AI true believers inside of this company. It really kind of rhymes with the story that we just told about Meta.
Apple is working on its own thing.

Speaker 11 They have an incredible business. The last thing that they want is to be disrupted by some coming wave of AI.
And so they just kind of gave it short shrift.

Speaker 11 AI systems don't work like the systems they know how to build. They know how to build these rigid, deterministic, if this, then that type of systems.

Speaker 12 Very polished, very predictable.

Speaker 11 And they do an incredible job at it. But AI isn't like that.
It's chaotic. It's messy.
It's probabilistic. It doesn't work the same way every time.

Speaker 11 They've had a lot of trouble wrapping their arms around that.

Speaker 12 So I want to diagnose more about what is going on with Apple when it comes to AI. But first, let's talk about what they actually did announce at WWDC.

Speaker 12 Casey, what were your top highlights from their announcements?

Speaker 11 Well, Kevin, obviously we have to talk about liquid glass.

Speaker 11 Now, I don't know if you've seen the YouTube video of WWDC where they promoted liquid glass, but the YouTube play button sort of appeared over a couple of the letters.

Speaker 11 So it looked like Apple had announced liquid ass. So if you're still thinking that that's what they announced, I want to correct that.
It's actually called liquid glass. Now, what is liquid glass?

Speaker 11 Liquid glass is a redesign of the operating system. And on one hand, I don't want to underrate the significance of a redesign.

Speaker 11 These devices are used by hundreds of millions, if not more than a billion people. And when you give something a new look, it is kind of a big deal, right?

Speaker 11 You might have to relearn how certain things work. On the other hand, when that's your marquee announcement after a year of development, when the last year you were like, the AI future is here.

Speaker 11 And this year you're like, Control Center is a different color. It really speaks to the kind of difference between the two presentations, Kevin.

Speaker 12 Yes. It was such a small ball presentation.
I did watch the event from afar. And I got to say, it was like very strange to watch these Apple executives get on stage and like.

Speaker 12 express like like delirious enthusiasm over like adding polls to iMessage. You can now start a poll with your friends in the group chat, which, you know, I gotta say, cool feature.

Speaker 12 I'll probably use it a bunch, mostly as a joke, but that is not the sort of marquee futuristic vision that I was expecting out of Apple this year.

Speaker 11 No. And, you know, because Apple made these new features available to developers basically right away, we've started to get some early feedback about how they work.

Speaker 11 And some fair number of people are complaining that this liquid glass look in particular, it kind of just makes everything harder to read, right?

Speaker 11 The basic idea in here is that all of the operating system elements are like literal glass and they'll sort of, you know, slide over each other.

Speaker 11 And of course, you know, the presentations were like very beautiful, but then you put it onto your phone and it's like you find yourself squinting a lot.

Speaker 11 And, you know, I found myself thinking, Kevin, about this, this old Steve Jobs quote that I like. And, you know, I want to acknowledge it's very hacky and cliche to quote Steve Jobs.

Speaker 11 But he has this quote and it's actually from the New York Times in this interview he did in 2003 about the iPod. And the thing that he said was, essentially, design is not how it looks.

Speaker 11 Design is how it works. And as I found myself looking at liquid glass, I thought, this is a design that is about how it looks.
It is not about how it works.

Speaker 11 I don't know what this design is supposed to do that it didn't before.

Speaker 11 All Apple really said was like, everything is more beautiful than ever, you know, but it's still very familiar, but it's more beautiful.

Speaker 11 And, you know, I don't want to tell people don't make things that are beautiful for their own sake. I appreciate beauty as much as the next fella.

Speaker 11 But on the other hand, I thought this doesn't actually really seem in keeping with the Apple design spirit of the past.

Speaker 12 Yeah, well, Casey, I want to bring some light to this discussion by quoting another Steve Jobs quote that was sort of lost in the archives where he said, What if we made a phone where everything was transparent and you couldn't see anything?

Speaker 12 Oh, wow, I missed that one. And so, I think the Apple design team really found that and ran with it.

Speaker 11 So, that's liquid glass. Let's talk about some of the other stuff that came out of this.

Speaker 12 Yeah, what caught your eye?

Speaker 11 Yeah, so the place where it seemed like they'd put the most engineering into a feature that might help people just get things done a little bit more efficiently was Spotlight.

Speaker 11 Spotlight is the feature, if you press Command Space on your MacBook, that brings up a search bar. It's great for finding files.
It hasn't evolved much over the years. It's been around a long time.

Speaker 11 This year, they were like, well, we're going to start to convert this into a little bit more of what they call a launcher app. We talked about launcher apps on the show before.

Speaker 11 I love and use one called Raycast. And the basic idea is this could be kind of the command center for your Mac.

Speaker 11 So instead of just searching for a file or like, you know, opening keynote, it's now going to be about actually using it to take some actions, run some shortcuts, that sort of thing.

Speaker 12 Like, like, what could you do with the new spotlight that you couldn't do with the old one? What's an example of something that you might type in?

Speaker 11 So for example, you could like trigger a shortcut. Shortcuts are these like automated routines that you can set up on your Apple devices.

Speaker 11 So maybe you have one that's like, okay, I'm like, you know, going to bed for the night, like turn off all the lights in my house.

Speaker 11 And you can just open up spotlight, run that shortcut and do that without, you know, having to do it some other way.

Speaker 11 The main benefit of doing it this way is that it just becomes second nature to hit command space and then do something as opposed to grabbing your mouse, looking for the icon somewhere on a desktop, double clicking, opening it up, right?

Speaker 11 It's just, you're just trying to take a few steps out of it to get things done slightly faster. Now, I'm very conscious as I describe this of like, this does not sound that interesting.

Speaker 11 And, you know, I might say it. Yeah.
But

Speaker 11 I say that as somebody who like loves little, you know, productivity hacks and like getting stuff done faster on my computer.

Speaker 11 But that said, it was like, at least in the spirit of the Apple I love, which is like, help me get more stuff done. Make me a more creative and effective person.

Speaker 12 Okay. So new spotlight.
What else caught your eye?

Speaker 11 There are a couple of like lightly interesting new features. Like there's live translation, although we're not exactly sure which languages that's going to be available in.

Speaker 11 Something I'm excited about is there's apparently a phone app that's coming to the desktop. So you can like start calls from your Mac, which I think is probably something that I will do a lot.

Speaker 11 They are also yet again rethinking how the iPad works, right?

Speaker 11 Like how iPad should operate has been a kind of long-standing, unresolved question where it's like, it looks a lot like a Mac, but it doesn't work quite like a Mac.

Speaker 11 This year, it's starting to feel ever more like a Mac because, Kevin, you can resize the Windows on an iPad now.

Speaker 12 Thank God. Every day for the past 10 years,

Speaker 12 I have woken up in a cold sweat thinking, when can I resize the Windows on my iPad?

Speaker 11 One feature I'm not particularly excited about is you will now be able to change the backgrounds in your iMessage chats.

Speaker 11 And, you know, I am in some group chats with some real jokers, and I feel like this could potentially wreak havoc in my group chat server.

Speaker 12 I also saw they're introducing like a typing indicator for group chats so you can now see the little bubbles that say like this is, you know, someone's typing.

Speaker 11 Yeah. You know, you can already see that on one-on-one chat.
For some reason, you couldn't see that in the group chat.

Speaker 11 So, you know, by now, I feel like most of our listeners has been like, are like, one, I can't believe they're still talking about this. And two, how is that everything that Apple announced this year?

Speaker 11 But I think it's important just to mention

Speaker 11 for this reason. For the past, call it a decade, I feel like Apple's main priority has been trying to figure out what is a seventh subscription we can sell you on this iPhone.

Speaker 11 And while that was happening, the future was was being born across town and they were not paying attention and they haven't really started to pay the price for it but you come to the end of this presentation and you can kind of start to see the cracks in the armor of a company that has looked pretty invincible for a long time yeah i watched this presentation and i thought uh this is a company that has not yet admitted that it made a bad bet when it came to AI.

Speaker 12 This is a company that is still not bought into the idea that language models are important or powerful or useful or that they might unlock new ways of interacting with computers.

Speaker 12 I think you're right that it rhymes with our last segment on meta because Apple had its own version of Jan Lacun, a sort of senior AI researcher who was brought in to lead the strategy of AI at Apple.

Speaker 12 This guy named John Gian Andrea, or JG as he's called, was brought in from Google years ago to kind of oversee all of Apple's AI research.

Speaker 12 And according to Mark German and Bloomberg, JG did not believe in large language models either. He thought they were sort of a distraction.
He was convinced that consumers were turned off by chatbots.

Speaker 12 He didn't think that Apple should be putting a lot of

Speaker 12 efforts and investment into developing its own language models. And I think we're really now seeing the fruits of that decision coming out or not coming out in Apple's case on stage at WWDC.
Yes.

Speaker 11 Now, here is what I will say in Apple's defense, Kevin, for everything that we have just said.

Speaker 11 It is also true that if you were to pick up a pixel phone, which is the phone made by Google, which has access to all of the much more advanced AI features that Google offers, I still don't think there is one feature on that pixel phone that would make the average person say, oh, wow, I got to ditch my iPhone for this.

Speaker 11 The way that Google has figured out AI, I am so excited to ditch, you know, iMessage and become a green bubble over in this other ecosystem.

Speaker 11 And I think that speaks to the fact that for as advanced as these systems are getting, there has been a surprisingly long lag in turning them into really good products.

Speaker 11 You know, just this week, Amazon said that its new version of Alexa, which is sort of souped up AI powered, had finally reached 1 million customers. Now, Amazon has a lot more customers than that.

Speaker 11 They have been rolling this thing out at a glacial pace because they're still so uncertain about the reliability that they're trying to make sure that it doesn't blow up in its face.

Speaker 11 So while we're being hard on Apple here, I just want to point out that really it's all of the tech giants that are having this problem.

Speaker 11 That folks like you and I are having a pretty good time figuring out how to slot AI into our lives. And it mostly just involves using chatbots.

Speaker 11 The other big companies, though, have not figured out how do we bolt this on to what we're doing in a way that is going to make people really excited. Yeah.

Speaker 12 There's one more Apple-related story from the past week that we should talk about.

Speaker 12 And it is not something that was discussed at WWDC, but it is something that a lot of people have been emailing us and that a lot of people I know have been talking about.

Speaker 12 And this is this research paper that came out of Apple's machine learning research division.

Speaker 12 And this paper was called The Illusion of Thinking, Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models Via the Lens of Problem complexity, which I'll say could have used an Apple iOS rewrite on that.

Speaker 11 All right. Well, so try to describe, Kevin, concisely.
What did this paper say?

Speaker 12 So this paper was basically an attempt to pour some water on the hype around these so-called reasoning models, which are kind of like large language models with an additional step performed at inference time to sort of improve the outputs.

Speaker 12 So we've talked about this before, OpenAI's 01,

Speaker 12 the latest versions of Gemini and Claude, they all have these reasoning features built into them.

Speaker 12 And what this publication, this research paper said is that this is not actually reasoning, that these systems are not actually doing anything like thinking, that there are some big limits to how much this approach to improving language model performance can scale.

Speaker 12 And basically, they released this and it it was immediately seized on by a bunch of people who said, aha, there is proof that the AI companies are on the wrong track, that all this is hitting a wall, and that these models are not actually getting us closer to general intelligence.

Speaker 11 Yes, this paper was beloved by what I have come to think of as the AI cope bubble. So people who are looking for reasons not to worry about AI, oh, this paper was mana from heaven.

Speaker 12 Yes. So, Casey, why is this paper so controversial and so beloved by what you call the cope bubble?

Speaker 11 Well, I think one issue here is essentially semantic, which is the paper is trying to make the case that, as you put it, this is not actual reasoning, which is to say that large language models are not reasoning in the way that human beings are doing.

Speaker 11 I think everyone involved would stipulate, like, yes, that is the case, that large language models do not work in the exact manner that the human brain does, even if there are maybe some interesting parallels.

Speaker 11 So it's presented as this gotcha. Aha, these things are not reasoning like human beings.
When in fact, again, anyone who's paying attention could have told you that from the start.

Speaker 11 The second problem with this paper does relate to just the limitations of the way that these models are constructed, which is they can only output a certain number of tokens.

Speaker 11 And so in order to reason through the most difficult problems given to them by the researchers, they simply did not have enough room.

Speaker 11 Now, if you want to say, that is a reason why large language models are bad, okay, fine. Yeah, there are like some problems that they can't solve.

Speaker 11 But that is not how this paper has been received within the AI code bubble.

Speaker 11 Within the AI code bubble, it is, oh, well, this proves that LLMs can't reason like human beings, and therefore we should just junk it because it is essentially not real and it is not going to have any meaningful impact on my life.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 12 So I would say this paper did not change my sort of view of large language models or the kind of reasoning models that have become popular recently.

Speaker 12 It did, however, help me understand what is going on inside Apple, where you simultaneously have a company that is trying to be seen as being on or close to the AI frontier, but where a lot of the intellectual firepower and research is still being directed at trying to prove that all of this is just hype and fake and it doesn't actually work and we should maybe stop investing in it.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I think we should say this is like probably like Apple's like highest profile AI paper, at least in the last year, maybe ever. And I think it had a lot of problems.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 11 So let's tie that back to WWDC, Kevin. What does it all mean?

Speaker 12 I think what it means is that Apple is still undergoing this kind of identity crisis about what it wants to be. Is it a hardware company that wants to make phones?

Speaker 12 Is it a software company that wants to sell subscriptions to put on those phones? I think both of those business models are being challenged right now.

Speaker 12 Apple's iPhone sales have been sort of flat to declining over the last few years. They really haven't gotten that much different from model to model.

Speaker 12 We may kind of be reaching the sort of pinnacle of what a smartphone can be.

Speaker 12 And its service business is being challenged by all these antitrust actions and these court decisions that say things like you can't, you know, stop people from paying for things outside of the Apple App Store anymore.

Speaker 12 And so I think they are still struggling to find the next gusher of cash that could replace declines in some of these other areas.

Speaker 12 And I don't think they have sort of come up with a solution yet, but it sounds like they are still trying to make up their mind about AI and how big a deal it is.

Speaker 11 I agree with all of that. Fortunately, Kevin, you know, as you know, on this podcast, we always try to be problem solvers.
We like to come up with solutions for the companies that we talk about.

Speaker 11 And I think I know what Apple could do to turn the ship around here. What's that? They have to hire Alexander Wang.
I don't care how much it costs. I think they go to him right now.

Speaker 11 They say 49% stake. We'll take all.
How much money do you want? We can afford it. Just name your price, Alex.

Speaker 11 And, you know, not only would that turn around their fortunes and AI, Kevin, think about how mad it would make Mark Zuckerberg. Oh boy, he would blow a gasket over that one.

Speaker 11 Siri, throw it a commercial.

Speaker 11 Didn't even work. Siri, pick Casey's mom up from the airport.
She's been there for a year. Actually,

Speaker 11 can I tell you what happened on my computer when I said just now, Siri, throw to commercial? It opened up a map to something called the Commercial Coverage Insurance Agency. No.
Why?

Speaker 12 You're looking at it right now.

Speaker 12 When we come back, it's time to pass the mic. We'll hear from you, our listeners, about how your jobs are changing as a result of AI.

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Speaker 12 Okay, in the past few weeks, we have been talking a lot about a different topic related to AI, which is what is happening with AI and jobs.

Speaker 11 Yes, you recently wrote an article saying that we were starting to see the early signs of AI job loss. And so we threw it out to our listeners to say, what have you been experiencing? Yeah.

Speaker 12 So today we're going to go through some of the many, many responses we got to our call out for stories about AI and whether it's taking your jobs.

Speaker 12 And I think we should start with a question that I think captures a common frustration that we hear from listeners.

Speaker 11 Oh, that we say like an and an um too much?

Speaker 12 Then we're too handsome. No, here is listener Christian Danielson.

Speaker 17 Hey, Casey and Kevin. This is Christian from Hood River, Oregon.

Speaker 17 I've noticed in a lot of interviews, yours and others, with tech executives, that almost all of them seem to think there's going to be a categorically different level of job displacement due to this technology rolling out.

Speaker 17 And yet, almost all of them also don't seem like they have any real concrete plans or are putting nearly the amount of energy they are into their products around how to mitigate that.

Speaker 17 It just seems like they don't feel like it's really their responsibility or it's someone else's problem to manage that side of things.

Speaker 17 So I'm hoping you might pose the question why it is that the government shouldn't really frankly just tax the shit out of their technology both as a way to potentially compensate people for all this wealth that's going to be concentrated into the hands of a very small number of people

Speaker 17 and also to slow the technology down a bit until our aging policy process can kind of catch up.

Speaker 12 Thanks.

Speaker 11 Yeah. So why is there no sort of plan from these executives, Kevin? And what do you think about the idea of taxes?

Speaker 12 Yeah, I think it's a really useful and important point. I think many of the executives and the companies building this technology, their goal is just to automate the jobs away, right?

Speaker 12 They are not thinking or talking much about what will happen on the other side of that to all the people whose jobs are displaced if they are successful.

Speaker 12 And, you know, some of them have done some studies or made some suggestions, like Sam Altman actually funded a big research project where they gave people these unconditional cash payments and sort of studied what would UBI or something like UBI do.

Speaker 12 And Dario Amade from Anthropic has actually proposed something like our listener is suggesting. He called it the token tax.

Speaker 12 And basically the idea is if you have all these AI models out there generating billions of dollars of revenue by automating people's jobs, some portion of that should go back to fund the sort of welfare programs and social safety net for the people who are displaced.

Speaker 12 But I will say that most people I've talked to about this issue inside the AI industry are not even getting that far.

Speaker 12 They are not even proposing solutions or they're just kind of doing hand waving about how the government will have to step in and take care of people who lose their jobs this way.

Speaker 12 I would like to see a lot more people not only coming up with ideas, but actually advocating for those ideas with policymakers.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I mean, the main thing I would say is that like, it's not up to the corporations to run our society. Like that is the job of our elected officials who should absolutely have plans in place.

Speaker 11 They should be developing them right now for a world where we do experience significant job loss through automation.

Speaker 11 I think most lawmakers are probably getting on board at this point with the idea that this is, if nothing else, a real threat.

Speaker 11 And so it's unfortunate that there has just been so little movement in this direction because I do think a lot of this is going to come true. And we're going to wish we had better plans in place.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 11 Now for some listener stories. This first one is from the perspective of a young person navigating a tighter labor market.
Listener Sarah writes, Hey, hard fork.

Speaker 11 I'm one of the junior software engineers who was thoroughly depressed by the latest episode on the AI job apocalypse, mostly because it was exactly in line with my current experience.

Speaker 11 I graduated in 2022 and felt very lucky to get an amazing job straight out of college where I felt very supported and valued by my team.

Speaker 11 That entire team was laid off last year to be replaced with cheaper human labor, not AI. And after a grueling job search, I ended up at a very large company that's a well-respected household name.

Speaker 11 They're not really a tech company, but the leadership wants us to embrace that culture and has proclaimed us to to be an AI-first company.

Speaker 11 Developers are evaluated based on what percentage of our code we say is written by AI, and those with low scores are laid off. Obviously, we all say that most of our code is written by AI now.

Speaker 11 It's been thoroughly depressing working here, and I've been looking to move jobs since about my second week, but there are almost no openings for someone with only two years of experience.

Speaker 11 I think my only real chance is to stick around for a year and hope that my career still exists by then.

Speaker 11 With some luck, maybe I can make it into a mid-level position before the ladder is pulled up behind me i feel terrible for the people just now graduating wow does this one break my heart

Speaker 12 yeah like this can i just say this is what we've been talking about the whole time yes is people like sarah having this exact experience yes and what makes this particularly bleak is this is something that i actually do think is going to become a major problem for these companies is that they are just going to lose their pipeline of their future leaders, right?

Speaker 12 If you are replacing your junior workers with AI or just forcing everyone to use AI, you are really neglecting your own future because you are not doing the kinds of skill building and training and mentorship that is going to allow people like Sarah, who may be your next executive, to build the skills and the experience that she needs to come in and do that job.

Speaker 11 Let her cook. Yeah, but here's the problem.
I think it's so silly that companies like this are creating incentives for their workers to lie to them about how they are using AI.

Speaker 11 You're just going to get a very distorted sense of what AI is doing in your company.

Speaker 11 And then, if you lay off those people because you're thinking, oh, AI is already doing 80% of everything, then you're going to find yourself in a lot of trouble.

Speaker 11 So, this just seems like a classic, self-defeating, like corporate thing.

Speaker 11 And these people need to get a better sense of what's really happening. But, in any case, Sarah, thank you for writing in.
And, you know, here's hoping that your next job is better than this one.

Speaker 12 All right. Here's a story we got from an executive.
This is from from listener Joseph Esparaguera. He writes, I'm the CFO of a $150 million plus home remodeling business.
Wow. Okay, Bragg.

Speaker 12 I'm in the wrong business.

Speaker 12 I'm reaching out because I think I'm living in the awkward middle of the AI transformation story, not at a tech startup, not at a Fortune 500, but in the trenches of a mid-sized company where AI could and should have massive impact, especially in accounting and HR.

Speaker 12 He continues, I'm trying to get ahead of the curve. I want my current staff staff to be the ones who survive and thrive as AI reshapes their fields, but I'm hitting resistance.

Speaker 12 They'll use AI to clean up an email or write a job posting, but they don't seem to grasp or want to grasp the bigger opportunity.

Speaker 12 I believe AI should let us do more with fewer people, and the ones who adapt will stay. But if my current team doesn't evolve, I'll be forced to hire different people who will.

Speaker 12 Casey, what do you make of this email?

Speaker 11 So I suspect that this is playing out at a lot of companies where you have managers who are more excited about AI than their workers are.

Speaker 11 I think this is true of lots of different kinds of software, by the way. I remember I used to get really excited about like project management software like Asana.

Speaker 11 And I would like try to get my old company to like adopt it. And then like that had actually happened.

Speaker 11 The company adopted it and no one wanted to use it because it was like, you know, why do I want to go like fill out a new form every day saying what my tasks are?

Speaker 11 You know, so it's like a lot of times software has more obvious value to the manager than it does to the worker who, you know, in many cases is just trying to get to 5 p.m.

Speaker 11 So they can like get home to their family. So I think this is like kind of a durable attention in workplaces.
At the same time.

Speaker 11 I think that this is going to be part of like the rough part of this transition is more and more managers being like, no, really, like you actually have to use this thing because if you're doing it another way, it is going to make you slower and worse at your job.

Speaker 11 And so I expect that there are going to be a lot of clashes.

Speaker 11 By the way, I think this opens up a lot of opportunity for listeners like Sarah who can show up at the front door and say, yes, I know how to use AI and you're not going to have to twist my arm into doing it.

Speaker 11 But I think there's going to be a lot of pain along the way.

Speaker 12 Yeah. I think this is a really important moment for a lot of companies that are starting to think about how to use AI.

Speaker 12 And my intuition on this is that the companies that are having the most success with AI right now are the companies that are doing this in a very bottoms up way, right?

Speaker 12 They are soliciting ideas from workers about how they could use AI to maybe improve the parts of their job that they don't love doing or maybe eliminate them altogether.

Speaker 12 They're holding sort of hackathons or having sort of days set aside to just get together in a room and figure out how to use this stuff. They are not sort of imposing it from the top down, right?

Speaker 12 They are not the ones sending memos out saying everyone must use AI and we're going to be tracking how much you're using AI. And if you don't use AI, we're going to replace you with someone who will.

Speaker 12 I think that is a short-term solution. And that's the direction, unfortunately, that I think a lot of companies have chosen to go.
But I don't think that's a strategy for durable transformation.

Speaker 12 You really need to get people excited about this and thinking about what it could do for them.

Speaker 11 Well, so what does Joseph do here? Because, you know, it sounds like if he doesn't act, there isn't going to be any bottoms up enthusiasm for AI at his company.

Speaker 12 I think what you do is you basically start a competition among your employees.

Speaker 12 You say, we're going to set aside a day or a half a day, or we're going to do an off-site sometime in the next few months. We're going to give everyone access to all of the tools.

Speaker 12 We're going to buy them subscriptions to all the tools they might possibly need to do their jobs using AI. And the person who comes up with the best idea or the team that comes up with the best idea.

Speaker 11 Gets to live. We'll call it the Hunger Games.

Speaker 11 No, they get a bonus. They get a

Speaker 12 reward of some kind. And you kind of make it thing where people are excited to contribute because it is in their best interest to do so.

Speaker 12 That's what I would do if I were the CFO of a company, which let's say it, we're all glad I'm not.

Speaker 11 Well, but the day is young. Who knows what might happen to you later, Kevin.
All right. Now let's hear from a listener who feels critical of the approach that some executives are taking to AI.

Speaker 11 So this person writes, hey guys, while my job isn't being replaced by AI yet, my boss is completely obsessed with it without actually doing anything meaningful with it himself.

Speaker 11 He's effectively put a hiring freeze on all process jobs because he believes that AI can do them better and more importantly, cheaper.

Speaker 11 I'm in charge of the sales and marketing teams, and my very meager headcount ask as we grow rapidly is challenged or ignored because there's an AI tool he heard of somewhere.

Speaker 11 I get messages at all hours from him with links to hacky LinkedIn posts full of emoji bullet points about how Excel, Word, PowerPoint, or Insert Program Here will soon be obsolete.

Speaker 11 obsolete thanks to these new AI tools or here are 20 AI miracles to revolutionize your workload. You know, our listener says, I'm far from being an AI skeptic.

Speaker 11 I make use of it daily, but honestly, maybe I will lose my job by my own hand soon because his attitude is exhausting.

Speaker 11 And right now, I just need a few more human people without spending all my time going down rabbit holes of half solutions or privacy nightmares.

Speaker 11 I think the time spent on reading up on AI and testing bad AI right now isn't considered enough when looking at the cost-benefit analysis. So, Kevin, what do you make of this listener's dilemma?

Speaker 12 i think this is really interesting it does sort of hit that there is like a new kind of boss emerging in the the sort of halls of corporate america which is like the ai addict boss we've heard a lot of stories along these lines of like my boss is completely obsessed with ai and i i think it's tough right i think this is a very good point that like businesses have immediate short-term needs that AI cannot do yet.

Speaker 12 And maybe by thinking about sort of where this stuff is all heading so much, you are actually like not listening to your employees who are telling you, just give me three people so that I can solve this problem.

Speaker 12 And I don't know what to do about that because a manager's job, an executive's job is to think about and plan for the future.

Speaker 12 But you also do have these very short-term needs that need to be addressed.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I mean, here, my question to the big boss here is like, what is the actual objective that we're trying to hit, right?

Speaker 11 It seems like maybe there's too much discussion about tools in this workplace and not enough discussion about goals and what is the best way to get to those goals.

Speaker 11 You know, it sounds like this person has a pretty informed perspective that AI is not going to be the thing that gets them to the goals that they have. And the manager needs to listen to that.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Have a conversation or post on LinkedIn.
They'll probably read it there.

Speaker 12 All right. Finally, let's hear a voice memo from listener George Dilfe, who is trying to find some short-term solutions to keep the staff he trains employable in this changing market.

Speaker 18 Hey, guys, my name is George Dilfey. I I live in Stanford, Connecticut, and I work at a high-growth B2B startup called Clay.
And my role, I actually head up the support team.

Speaker 18 So, one of the things that I've sort of leaned into is trying to hire, A, really, really good people for our support team, but also sort of like turning those folks into kind of expert generalists.

Speaker 18 So, the idea being that like they're rotating through different parts of the company, sort of learning about product or learning about engineering or learning about marketing, with the hope that they've sort of gained like a number of different skills across the company and can sort of just just like generalize into any other department.

Speaker 18 So just wanted to share. That was pretty interesting.
Love the show. Thanks so much.

Speaker 11 Tim, what do you make of this one?

Speaker 12 I like this one. I think that support and customer service are always talked about as sort of being the first jobs to go under the new AI regime.

Speaker 12 And we've talked about some companies that are trying to develop these AI customer service chatbots.

Speaker 12 But I think if you are working in customer service, you don't want to just be sort of reading off the script on a computer trying to help people solve their problems you really want to sort of offer a more bespoke personalized high touch kind of service and i actually one of my long-term complaints about tech companies is that they just do not take customer service seriously like for many years people have said you know there's no way to get someone on the phone if something happens to your facebook account or your Instagram account or your your YouTube account.

Speaker 12 And I think people at the senior levels of these companies should be doing a rotation through customer service just to get a sense of what their customers and users are actually experiencing.

Speaker 12 And maybe that would lead them to invest more in these areas. So I think this is a good idea.

Speaker 12 I think that the experience of doing customer service, if you are good at it and are not just sort of reading off a script on a computer, is useful in many, many jobs.

Speaker 12 I think that in the future, that will become very important, especially as the more sort of rote and routine parts of the job get automated. What do you think?

Speaker 11 Yeah, I think that people who work in customer support roles often have a much better sense of what's happening in the business at the ground level as executives.

Speaker 11 And so I love the idea that we're creating new opportunities for those people.

Speaker 11 I think that those folks can often just bring experiences to the roles that you're just truly not going to get with an AI system.

Speaker 12 All right, Casey. Have we said enough on AI and jobs this week?

Speaker 11 I think we have. We thank all of the listeners who wrote in to share their stories.

Speaker 11 I imagine this will not be the last time we return to this subject, but it's very clear, Kevin, that already we're starting to see the effects of AI on the job market.

Speaker 11 And I imagine that's only going to accelerate from here.

Speaker 12 Yeah. And I think we're going to have some more conversations on this topic coming up soon.

Speaker 12 We won't spoil them now, but let's just say this is an area where I think we are going to spend a lot of time because this is something that many, many people out there are starting to experience.

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