Bad Apple + The Rise of the AI Empire + Italian Brain Rot

Speaker 2 the last two decades, the world has witnessed incredible progress.

Speaker 4 From dial-up modems to 5G connectivity, from massive PC towers to AI-enabled microchips, innovators are rethinking possibilities every day.

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Speaker 16 Well, Casey, have you heard the exciting news this week?

Speaker 17 Which news, Kevin?

Speaker 16 The Golden Globes are adding a podcast category.

Speaker 17 I did not hear that.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that just came out. So yet another award.
We're not going to win.

Speaker 17 Well, I don't know about that because if I know one thing about the Golden Globes, it's that until very recently, it seems like you could just bribe them directly to win.

Speaker 17 I don't know if that's still true, but we should look into it.

Speaker 16 Yeah, what does it cost to win a Golden Globe these days?

Speaker 17 I don't know, a few hundred dollars.

Speaker 16 checks in the mail wait unless there are tariffs topical

Speaker 16 okay now we're definitely not winning now we're not winning because i accused them of corruption oh listen we speak the truth on this podcast we do

Speaker 17 i don't care what it costs me

Speaker 16 I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Newman from Platformer.

Speaker 17 And this is Hardform. This week, the scathing court ruling that that forced Apple to give up some control over its app store and could send an executive to jail.

Speaker 17 Then, author Karen Howe joins us to discuss her new book on the history of open AI and the hidden costs of reaching massive scale. And finally,

Speaker 17 it's time for me to teach Kevin about the joys of Italian brain rot.

Speaker 16 Mama Mia.

Speaker 16 Casey, have you noticed a smell in the air over San Francisco this week?

Speaker 17 Many smells in the air, Kevin.

Speaker 16 Well, the smell I'm talking about, Casey, is the smell of freedom.

Speaker 16 Because in the last week, Apple has lost its iron grip on the iOS App Store thanks to a ruling by a judge.

Speaker 17 Commerce is legal in America again, Kevin.

Speaker 16 Yes, so we're going to talk about this today. Apple has been forced to make some big changes to its app store by a lawsuit that was brought by Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite.

Speaker 16 A judge ruled last week that Apple had not complied with an earlier injunction. And we will get into all of that.
But first, I just want... you to make the case that this matters to normal people.

Speaker 16 Why should the average person with an iPhone care about what Apple's rules for its app store are?

Speaker 17 Well, to me, it actually starts with the Kindle app, Kevin. Lots of people love to read on their phones and tablets.

Speaker 17 And I think most people I know in my life have had the experience of opening up the Kindle app or the Amazon app, thinking, I want to buy that book.

Speaker 17 And then there's just kind of a big blank spot where you're expecting to see the buy button. And Apple is the reason for that blank spot.

Speaker 17 They charge such a high commission on ebooks that Amazon and other companies cannot profitably sell them.

Speaker 17 And so since the dawn of the App Store, in order to buy a book on your phone, something that should be very easy has required you to open up a browser, log into an Amazon account, navigate that whole system.

Speaker 17 And Amazon is not alone. Many, many developers have had to go through similar contortions just to be able to sell their products and still make any kind of profit.

Speaker 16 Yeah, this is the so-called Apple tax of up to 30% that developers have to pay when they want to charge for apps or purchases within their apps.

Speaker 16 And for many years, Apple has not only levied this tax, but they have also made it impossible for those developers to direct users off of Apple's platforms to say, hey, if you want a better deal on this Spotify subscription or this Netflix subscription or this purchase of an iPhone game, you can actually go on the web and get a better deal there because there we don't have to pay Apple's 30% fee.

Speaker 16 That has not been allowed. And so Epic Games, which makes Fortnite, brought a lawsuit years ago to try to get those policies changed.

Speaker 16 And in 2021, a judge in California named Ivan Gonzalez-Rogers ruled that Apple had violated the law in California against unfair competition.

Speaker 16 She ordered Apple to allow apps to provide users with links to pay developers directly for their services. And that way they could avoid paying Apple's 30% commission.

Speaker 16 And after that ruling, Apple did go and make some changes, but apparently they didn't do a good enough job.

Speaker 17 No, and I would say this has been apparent to most people who've been following this. I think we've talked about this on the show.

Speaker 17 Apple did what is often called malicious compliance, doing the absolute least while dragging and kicking and screaming the whole time.

Speaker 16 Yeah, so we're going to talk about some of that malicious compliance, but let's just say straight up, this was a scathing opinion.

Speaker 16 I have rarely read a judge who is so obviously angry at a tech company for doing what they did.

Speaker 17 No, this was the kind of speech that you typically only see on a Bravo reality show.

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 16 So Judge Gonzalez Rogers not only accused accused Apple of doing this kind of malicious compliance, but she also accused them of outright lying to the court under oath.

Speaker 16 She referred both Apple and their vice president of finance, Alex Roman, for potential criminal prosecution for perjury.

Speaker 16 And we should just read the last paragraph of the order from Judge Gonzalez Rogers, which is truly the mic drop moment.

Speaker 16 She writes, quote, Apple willfully chose not to comply with this court's injunction.

Speaker 16 It did so with the express intent to create new anti-competitive barriers, which would, by design and effect, maintain a valued revenue stream, a revenue stream previously found to be anti-competitive.

Speaker 16 That it thought this court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse.
For this court, there is no second bite at the apple. Period.

Speaker 17 But you know what? It kind of was a second bite at the apple because she bit him the first time and then they didn't do it. So she had to bite him again.

Speaker 17 Yes.

Speaker 16 So let's just talk for a second about some of the details that were revealed in this judge's opinion that have come out about how Apple tried to skirt compliance with this earlier 2021 injunction.

Speaker 17 Yeah, well, and this was well known to all of the developers, but if you wanted to use an external sales system in the App Store, you still had to pay Apple a commission.

Speaker 17 And that commission was 27% or 3% less than it was paying Apple. And of course, these companies have to pay the payment provider.

Speaker 17 So basically, Apple created a system where you were actively disadvantaged in multiple ways from trying to operate outside of the app store.

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 16 So I knew that Apple was charging a commission for apps that would send people, like if you're Spotify and you want people to be able to subscribe to your app on the internet, pay a lower price, pay you directly rather than going through Apple, you could do that.

Speaker 16 under Apple's sort of revised rules, but Apple would actually charge you a 27% commission, which by the time you added credit card fees on top of that would probably be more than the 30% that they would charge you.

Speaker 16 So this was clearly a case of Apple trying to say, well, go ahead and use this other system, but it's not actually going to save you any money. No.

Speaker 16 And what I did not realize until I read Judge Gonzalez Rogers' opinion here was that Apple would not just collect those commissions if you went directly from an iOS app to the web to buy a subscription or a service, but if you went a week later, they would be able to track that you had gone to the web from the iOS app and they would still charge the developer that commission.

Speaker 17 Yeah. It was absolutely outrageous.

Speaker 16 It was insane. And it was also not the only thing that Apple did to try to dissuade iOS users from going to external links to buy goods and services outside of their payment system.

Speaker 16 Casey, what is a scare screen and how did Apple use this?

Speaker 17 The scare screen was a pop-up that you would see when a user did actually try to click out of the app store to make a purchase using an external system.

Speaker 17 And while these were not the exact words, Kevin, here was the vibe. Hey, loser, looks like you're trying to do something stupid.
You're probably going to die. Do you want to try it anyway?

Speaker 17 And believe it or not, Kevin, when people saw a message that had that vibe, most of them just chose not to click it.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 16 And what was so amazing about this was that Apple, I guess, had tried to protect some of its private company communications from being seen by the judge in this case by claiming some sort of attorney-client privilege.

Speaker 16 But the judge said, no, no, no, out with it. Let's see those emails.

Speaker 16 And so we have, in this opinion, lots of emails between Apple executives, including Tim Cook, the CEO, talking about the very specific language to put on this scare screen and how to make it even scarier so that users would be less inclined to go outside of Apple's ecosystem and make a purchase.

Speaker 17 Yes, and these internal documents showed that the company would lose minimal revenue or no revenue at all from this, right?

Speaker 17 That they built a system that was maximally designed to protect their revenue, which was contrary to the judge's order, which she wrote in the spirit of increasing competition and other companies' revenue.

Speaker 16 Yeah, so to put it mildly, Judge Gonzalez Rogers did not find any of this charming in the least.

Speaker 16 And she also directly accused at least one Apple executive of lying outright under oath about what it had done. Casey, explain the perjury charge here.

Speaker 17 Yeah, so this perjury charge was leveled against Alex Roman, the vice president of finance at Apple.

Speaker 17 And among other things, she focuses on this moment where he testifies that until January 16th, 2024, which is when Apple's revised system went into effect, Apple had no idea what fee it would impose on purchases that linked out of the App Store.

Speaker 17 He testified that the decision to impose a 27% fee was made that day, which is just like so obviously untrue.

Speaker 17 And of course, during the legal proceedings, business documents revealed that the main components of the plan were determined in July of 2023.

Speaker 17 So basically, this guy got caught red-handed, and the judge is going to punish him for it. Yeah.

Speaker 16 And so, effective immediately, according to Judge Gonzalez-Rogers' order, Apple has to drop these commissions, these 27% fees on these external links.

Speaker 16 And Apple, as of last week, had officially updated its App Store guidelines to allow those links out of the app in the U.S. But Casey, what are the implications of this?

Speaker 16 And how are other developers that put stuff on iPhones reacting?

Speaker 17 So developers are reacting by implementing the links that they've always wanted to have. So in the Kindle app, for example, now, you will see a get book button.

Speaker 17 You'll tap it and it'll kick you out immediately into a browser where you can complete a purchase. Spotify, Patreon are also doing something like this.
This is not a perfect solution.

Speaker 17 Like you can't actually just buy a book in the Kindle yet for reasons that actually aren't entirely clear to me. Maybe we'll get there.

Speaker 17 But on the whole, we are essentially removing the restrictions that prevents outside businesses from communicating with their customers, telling them about deals, telling them about their websites.

Speaker 17 Just these sort of like very onerous restrictions on the speech of these other companies have been wiped out. Yes.

Speaker 16 And I think that gets to why these arcane and somewhat small-seeming changes to the rules governing Apple's App Store really are important.

Speaker 16 Apple has been for many years this sort of godlike gatekeeper on any company that wants to make things for the billion-plus iPhones out there.

Speaker 16 They have made extremely strict and specific rules about how developers can and can't build their apps and sell products and services to customers.

Speaker 16 They have effectively been a landlord over the entire digital services economy.

Speaker 16 And I think judging from this opinion, they have really abused that power and now they are getting slapped on the wrist for it.

Speaker 17 Yeah. And I think it has been to their own detriment, Kevin.

Speaker 17 You know, Apple's view is that these developers should feel lucky that they get to sell in the app store at all, when in reality, a big reason that we buy iPhones is because of the apps that are there.

Speaker 17 If you took off the Amazon app and the Spotify app and the Patreon app and a million, you know, all these other apps apps off of the iPhone, people would start considering alternatives, right?

Speaker 17 And so I think that the balance in between the developers and Apple had just gotten completely skewed. And Apple has not been recognizing the value of what those developers are bringing to iOS.

Speaker 16 Yeah. So you think this ruling is a good thing?

Speaker 17 I think it is absolutely a good thing. I think it has been long overdue.
And I hope it is upheld after Apple appeals, which it is going to do. But what do you think? Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 16 I think it's an open question. So Apple's defense of these App Store rules has always been some version of like, we're protecting our customers, right?

Speaker 16 If we let people, you know, sideload apps onto the iPhone in a way other than through the App Store,

Speaker 16 people will put all kinds of dangerous malware and stuff on the iPhone and you'll be sorry.

Speaker 16 If we let people pay for things on external websites, then people will run all kinds of scams and people will be taken advantage of.

Speaker 16 And so by implementing these rules, we're really protecting our customers. It's for your own benefit, essentially.

Speaker 16 And I think it'll be really interesting to see if when these restrictions are gone, people actually do say, we wish that Apple were taking a more active role here.

Speaker 16 We want some of these restrictions back.

Speaker 16 Or if the net result is just going to be that people have more choice and they pay a little less for stuff because the developers making that stuff are not having to pay 30% of their revenue to Apple.

Speaker 17 Well, I think that's going to be the case. You know, this whole argument that, you know, Apple maintains this pristine vigilant control over the app store, I think has always been mostly a fantasy.

Speaker 17 You know, think about in the early days of like ChatGPT, before there was an app, you know, you would go onto the app store and you would search for ChatGPT.

Speaker 17 You would see a dozen plus apps that were all just clearly misrepresenting themselves as OpenAI, that were some of the most revenue generating apps in the entire app store.

Speaker 17 Apple could have stepped in to prevent that. They didn't.
I'll give you a more recent example. One of the best video games of the year is called Blueprints, P-R-I-N-C-E.

Speaker 17 All of the gaming bloggers love it. I've been playing it.
I've been loving it myself.

Speaker 17 The day it came out, somebody just ripped it off and just uploaded it onto the App Store and was selling it for, I don't know, 10 bucks or something. Why didn't Apple know that?

Speaker 17 They are not paying the attention to the App Store that they are telling you that they are paying.

Speaker 16 Yeah. I mean, to me,

Speaker 16 the most interesting part of this, as with a lot of these antitrust trials that are going on right now, was just seeing the internal communications at these companies.

Speaker 16 And, you know, in this ruling, there are all these like fascinating excerpts from these emails and messages between Apple executives sort of talking about the various plans that they had to sort of circumvent this injunction and charge this 27% fee.

Speaker 16 They had all these code names like Project Michigan or Project Wisconsin, so that they could talk about this stuff in a way that would not be obvious that they were doing some sort of price fixing.

Speaker 16 And it just makes you realize like these giant tech monopolies monopolies did not end up that way by accident, right?

Speaker 16 They have had to work very hard for a very long time to prevent competition, to keep their market power and their dominance. And I don't know, man, there's just something really depressing about that.

Speaker 16 Like these are companies that used to succeed by making good things that people loved. And in some respects, they still do that, but they also spend just a ton of time.

Speaker 16 Their top executives are in these meetings talking about whether the fee should be 27% or some other number. And it just makes you realize like they have really lost the plot here.
Absolutely.

Speaker 17 Well, let me try to cheer you up a little bit then, Kevin, because I think there actually is a negative consequence for these folks of just growing their profits so big on the basis of this extremely easy money where, you know, they just make every developer pay this very high rent to them.

Speaker 17 And that is Apple has been missing the boat on next generation technologies.

Speaker 17 We know that they invested billions of dollars into a car project that they could never figure out and had to abandon, right?

Speaker 17 We know that they are struggling to figure out how to do anything with AI and have had to walk back a bunch of claims recently in a really embarrassing way.

Speaker 17 We know that the Vision Pro, their most recent hardware initiative is not taking off in part because developers do not want to make apps for it because they have not been able to get rich.

Speaker 17 making apps for it, right? So all of this stuff is just adding up in a way where Apple's decisions really are coming back to haunt it.

Speaker 17 And while it remains a giant and I'm sure will for a very long time, we are starting to see some little cracks in its armor.

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 16 And yet Apple just reported its earnings for the last quarter. It made $95.4 billion in revenue, up 5% year over year.
So despite the fact that they are missing all of these

Speaker 16 new innovations and trends, that they're late on generative AI, that they haven't succeeded with the Vision Pro in the way that they had hoped. They are still doing quite well as a company.

Speaker 16 So I don't know that this is actually coming back to bite them in the way that we might hope it would.

Speaker 17 Well, I mean, let's see what happens. You know, the idea behind these rules was never to make Apple a tiny company that was struggling to get by.

Speaker 17 It was just to get them to share a very small portion of the wealth with a large number of developers. Like, you know, Apple has done a ton of incredible innovative things.

Speaker 17 They deserve to be rewarded for that. They deserve to take some sort of commission from the apps in the app store, right?

Speaker 17 But this has been about trying to create a more level playing field for other developers out there.

Speaker 17 And, you know, if the end result of this is that Apple is still pretty rich and profitable, I think that will actually make the point that the judge is making, which is that there is no need for Apple to engage in the sort of shenanigans it's been up to.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think the best outcome possible here is that all the big developers that can afford to sort of develop their own payment systems for their apps or send people to external websites to buy things that they do that and they start charging way way less than 27% for that and that Apple is ultimately forced to improve its own payment system to maybe reduce its fees to in other words compete like that is what all of this is about is forcing Apple a company that has not had to compete for the affections of iOS developers in a long time, to finally step up and do something different.

Speaker 17 You know, keep in mind, even Microsoft, which was sued for anti-competitive behavior, you know, back in the early 2000s, they never said we want to take a 30% cut of every software program sold on Windows.

Speaker 17 They actually left a lot of money on the table and it helped that ecosystem to thrive, right? I would like to believe something similar could happen here.

Speaker 16 When we come back, we'll talk to author Karen Howe about her new book on open AI and the costs of building such big models.

Speaker 1 Over the last few decades, the world has witnessed incredible progress, From dial-up modems to 5G connectivity, from massive PC towers to AI-enabled microchips, innovators are rethinking possibilities every day.

Speaker 5 Through it all, Invesco QQQ ETF has provided investors access to the world of innovation with a single investment.

Speaker 8 Invesco QQQ, let's rethink possibility.

Speaker 9 There are risks when investing in ETFs, including possible loss of money.

Speaker 10 ETF's risk is similar to those of stocks.

Speaker 12 Investments in the tech sector are subject to greater risk and more volatility to the more diversified investments.

Speaker 14 Before investing, carefully read and consider front investment objectives, risks, charges, expenses, and more in perspectives at Invesco.com.

Speaker 15 Investco Distributors Inc.

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Speaker 16 Well, Casey, it's a day ending in Y, so there's some OpenAI drama making the rounds this week.

Speaker 17 Yeah, although I don't know if this is so much drama as the company is trying to retreat from drama, Kevin.

Speaker 16 Yes, so OpenAI announced on Monday of this week that it was no longer trying to get out from under the control of its nonprofit board.

Speaker 16 That was something that a lot of people, including Elon Musk, had objected to. A lot of former OpenAI employees and others in the AI field had said, hey, wait a minute, you can't do that.

Speaker 16 You've still got to have this nonprofit board controlling you. And OpenAI, after hearing from some attorneys general that they were not happy about this plan, has retreated.

Speaker 16 So what is the new plan, Casey, and how is is it different than the old plan?

Speaker 17 So, the old plan was basically the nonprofit is going to no longer have any control over the for-profit enterprise.

Speaker 17 It's going to go be a separate thing, it's going to invest in various AI-related causes and philanthropies. Under the new plan, the nonprofit is going to retain control over the for-profit.

Speaker 17 So, basically, the status quo is going to be in effect, Kevin, except for a couple of key changes.

Speaker 17 One is what is now a limited liability corporation is going to become what they call a public benefit corporation.

Speaker 17 And a PBC, as they are called, has a responsibility not just to think about shareholders like Microsoft and SoftBank and everybody else who owns a chunk of OpenAI, but also to think about the general public, right?

Speaker 17 So that's sort of one important idea that's there.

Speaker 17 The other big idea is that the nonprofit is currently set to get some unlimited amount of profits if OpenAI does eventually become a trillion-dollar company. That's not going to be the case anymore.

Speaker 17 Under this new model, the for-profit is going to give some stake to the nonprofit, but after that, it's going to be a very normal tech company.

Speaker 17 Everybody who owns shares, all of the employees, they can get unlimited upside. And the more money that OpenAI makes, the more money that they can make too.

Speaker 16 Right.

Speaker 16 So these profit caps that OpenAI had previously had in place where investors like Microsoft were sort of limited to earning some multiple of the amount that they put in and no more, those caps are now going away.

Speaker 17 Yeah, they put on their thinking caps and they said, we're getting rid of the profit caps.

Speaker 16 Well, it just goes to your point that you've been making on this show for years now, which is that OpenAI is a very weird company.

Speaker 17 Yes, and I have to say, when Sam Altman wrote a letter to employees this week, the first sentence of the letter was, quote, OpenAI is not a normal company and never will be. And I felt so seen.

Speaker 16 Somebody's been listening to Hard Forum.

Speaker 17 And in other Open AI corporate news, the company announced late Wednesday that its board member, Fiji Simo, would leave her job as CEO of Instacart to come be the company's new CEO of applications overseeing its business and product divisions.

Speaker 16 So we are not going to do a whole segment about the Open AI corporate conversion story this week. Because we love you too much.

Speaker 17 Yeah, we love our listeners too much.

Speaker 16 We would not subject you to that. But we are going to talk about it and many other things related to Open AI with Karen Howe.

Speaker 16 Karen Howe is a reporter who has been covering Open AI and the AI industry for years now.

Speaker 16 And she has a book that's coming out later this month called Empire of AI, where she writes about Sam Altman and Open AI and what she calls the dreams and nightmares of this very strange company.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and you know, but by the way, I think she should already start working on a sequel and call it The Empire Strikes Back.

Speaker 17 Something to think about.

Speaker 16 Yes, and this is a very buzzy book. People in Silicon Valley and at the AI companies have been sort of nervously waiting for it.

Speaker 16 Karen is very unsparing in her descriptions of AI companies and the AI industry.

Speaker 16 I would not say it is a book that the AI industry will think is flattering, but it's an important conversation to have because I think it's got a lot of people talking.

Speaker 17 Absolutely. And before we do that, Kevin, do we have anything we want to disclose?

Speaker 16 Well, let me make mine first. My boyfriend works at Anthropic.

Speaker 16 Kevin, you're coming out. I'm so happy for you.
No, I work at the New York Times company, which is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for alleged copyright violation.

Speaker 17 Interesting. And my boyfriend works at Anthropic.
Yours too?

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 16 Anyways, let's bring in Karen.

Speaker 17 Karen Howe, welcome to Hard Fork.

Speaker 19 Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 17 So I imagine your book is sitting there behind you on the shelf. It's all printed up.
It's ready to go.

Speaker 17 And then this very week, OpenAI puts out a story: say, hey, maybe we're going to change our structure around again. Why the heck not?

Speaker 17 So what's it like trying to write a self-contained book about a company that just never stops making news?

Speaker 19 Tiring.

Speaker 19 Yeah,

Speaker 19 but you know, like, honestly, people have been asking me this question a lot, like, how do you even write a book at a book scale? Because usually it's like months on end before it goes to publish.

Speaker 19 And I think sometimes the news is actually a little bit distracting in that, yes, there are a lot of changes happening.

Speaker 19 Yes, things are evolving really fast, but there are some fundamentals that are kind of ever-present. And so I tried to keep the book focused on the things that don't change so much.

Speaker 17 Yeah, well, and among other things, this book is a history of OpenAI. So maybe let's go back all the way to the beginning.
What was this company like when you started writing about it?

Speaker 19 So I started writing about OpenAI in 2019, and I went to the office to embed with them for three days as the first journalist to profile what had just become a newly minted company. So

Speaker 19 right before I started covering it, it was still founded as a nonprofit nonprofit, and it had this explicit goal that it should be a counterbalance to for-profit companies.

Speaker 19 And it sort of became clear to me during my time at the company then that the idea that this was a bastion of idealism and transparency and was going to be totally open and share all of its technologies to the world and not at all be beholden to any kind of commercialization was already going away.

Speaker 19 And there were a lot of kind kind of early signs of that that I picked up on while I was there. Just there was a lot of secrecy for a company that purported to be incredibly transparent.

Speaker 19 And there was a lot of competitiveness, which to me suggested that like, if you're going to be competitive and you want to specifically reach AGI first,

Speaker 19 you are going to have some really hard trade-offs with this transparency. mission and this like open up everything to the public mission.

Speaker 16 So I've talked to some people people at OpenAI who have said that they felt quite burned by some of your early coverage of them, like they were expecting something different than they got.

Speaker 16 And you write in the book that after you published your story on them, they stopped talking to you for three years.

Speaker 16 I'm just curious, like what you think surprised them about your coverage or if they should have been surprised given some of the questions you were asking.

Speaker 19 I think they were surprised because

Speaker 19 they gave me a lot of access and they thought that i would sort of adopt a lot of the narrative that they were giving me

Speaker 19 and to be honest like i i kind of came in without really a lot of expectations it was actually my first ever company profile and i i was going in kind of just with an open mind of okay like this company presents itself as as this like ethical

Speaker 19 lighthouse and like what

Speaker 19 let's try to understand a little bit like how do they organize themselves and how do they try to achieve the goals that they've set out to do?

Speaker 19 And I just found that they couldn't quite articulate what their vision was, what their plan was, what AGI was.

Speaker 19 And I think the prioritization of the problems that they were saying that they were focusing on just didn't quite feel

Speaker 19 right to me. Like, I pointed out to them that there were environmental issues that were starting to become more and more of a concern as AI models were scaling larger and larger.

Speaker 19 And, you know, Ilya said to me, he was like, yes, of course, that's a concern, but when we get to AGI, climate change will be solved.

Speaker 19 And that was just like, okay, that's kind of a, you know, it's like, it's like a cop-out card to just be like, well, when we get to the thing that we don't know how to define, all the problems that we might have created along the way will just like magically disappear.

Speaker 19 And so that's when I started being like,

Speaker 19 I think we need to like scrutinize this company more and just be more

Speaker 19 cautious about taking all the things that they say at face value.

Speaker 16 Right. I mean, it sort of sounds like a microcosm of the arguments that have taken place for the last few years among the AI safety crowd and the AI ethics crowd.

Speaker 16 That, you know, the AI safety people, they're worried about existential risk and bioweapons and

Speaker 16 malicious use of these systems.

Speaker 16 And the AI ethics crowd are much more worried about like issues like bias and environmental concerns and things like that.

Speaker 16 So I'm just, I want to make sure I'm characterizing it fairly.

Speaker 16 You yourself are coming from more of the perspective of the AI ethics crowd and that you think we should be paying more attention to immediate harms of these models rather than trying to avert some future harms.

Speaker 19 Yeah, so I would I would call it like the AI accountability crowd and that

Speaker 19 and the reason why I use the term accountability instead of ethics is because I think accountability acknowledges that there's a huge power dynamic happening here where like the developers of these technologies have an extraordinary amount of power that they've accrued and amassed and are continuing to accrue and amass based on this narrative that they need all of these resources to build so-called AGI, right?

Speaker 19 So, I definitely come from that perspective.

Speaker 19 And I think that if we take seriously the present-day harms of what is happening now, that will help us not get to future harms because we will be more thoughtful about how we develop AI systems today so that they don't end up having like wild detrimental effects in the future.

Speaker 19 And I think, like, this idea that we don't really know how bad AGI might happen or like what the catastrophic scenarios are

Speaker 19 is not quite right in that we have already so much evidence right now of like how AI is affecting people in society. And also, like, AI is harming people literally right now.

Speaker 19 So, like, we need to address that. We need to document that.
We need to change that.

Speaker 16 One of the central arguments of your book is that open AI and the sort of AI industry in general has become an empire.

Speaker 16 It's the title of your book, Empire of AI, and that has done so by exploiting people and resources around the world for their own benefit.

Speaker 16 Sketch that argument for us.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 So if we think about empires of old, the long, centuries-long history of European colonialism, they effectively went around the world, laid claim to resources that were not their own, but they designed rules that suggested that they suddenly were.

Speaker 19 They exploited a lot of labor, as in they didn't pay the labor or they paid extremely little amounts to the labor that ultimately helped to fortify the empire.

Speaker 19 And all of that like resource extraction and labor exploitation went and accrued benefits to the empire. And they did this all under like a justification of a civilizing mission.

Speaker 19 They're ultimately doing this to bring progress and modernity to the rest of the world. And we're literally seeing empires of AI effectively do the same thing.

Speaker 19 And what I say in the book is like they are not as overtly violent as empires of old. We've had 150 years of like social mores and progress.
So there isn't that kind of overt violence today.

Speaker 19 But they are doing the same thing of laying claim to resources that are not their own. That includes like the labor of a lot of artists and a lot of writers.

Speaker 19 That includes all the data that people have put online that they've just scraped in these internet loads of data sets. That includes exploiting

Speaker 19 labor of the people who they contract to help clean their models and annotate the data that goes into their models.

Speaker 19 That also includes like labor exploitation in the sense that they are building technologies that are ultimately, like OpenAI literally says, their definition of AGI is to create AI systems that will be able to outperform most humans at economically valuable work.

Speaker 19 That is a labor automation machine.

Speaker 19 So they're also exploiting labor in the sense that they're creating these AI systems that will dramatically make it more difficult for workers to kind of demand rights.

Speaker 19 And they're doing it under this civilizing mission where they're saying, like, ultimately, this is for the benefit of all of humanity. But what we're seeing is that's, you know, not true.

Speaker 19 When you go far and away from Silicon Valley, when you go to places like the Global South, when you go to rural communities, impoverished communities, marginalized communities, they really feel like the brunt of this AI development, this extraction and this exploitation.

Speaker 19 And they're not at all receiving any of the supposed benefits of this accelerating AI quote-unquote progress.

Speaker 16 Let's talk about some of that

Speaker 17 extraction of natural resources. This is one of the things that your book gets into that I think doesn't get discussed a lot in the context of AI.

Speaker 17 Tell us about some of your reporting and what you saw.

Speaker 19 Yeah, so I ended up spending a lot of time in Latin America and also in Arizona to kind of understand the just sheer amount of computational infrastructure that is now being built to support the generative AI paradigm and the quest to AGI.

Speaker 19 And these are, you know, massive data centers and supercomputers that are being plopped kind of in communities that initially accept this kind of infrastructure either because they don't know about it, because companies enter these communities in like shell companies and don't and aren't transparent about actually putting this infrastructure there.

Speaker 19 or they're sort of persuaded into it because there seems to be like a really positive economic case where a company comes in and says, we're going to give you like hundreds of millions of dollars to build this data center here and it's going to create a bunch of jobs.

Speaker 19 And what they don't say is that, like, the jobs are not permanent. They're talking about construction jobs.

Speaker 19 And once the construction jobs are over, there's actually not that many jobs for running the data center.

Speaker 19 And these data centers, they consume an enormous amount of power and they consume an enormous amount of water because they need to be cooled when they're training, you know, these models 24/7.

Speaker 19 And this infrastructure is permanent. So once it gets put there, even if a city doesn't have that kind of energy anymore or the water to provide to these data centers, they can't really roll it back.

Speaker 19 And in Chile, I was like with activists who had been fighting tooth and nail to try and get these data centers from not literally taking all of their drinking water.

Speaker 19 And they were entering also communities in Uruguay where I was spending time as well during a drought where people literally were drinking bottled water if they could afford it or they were drinking contaminated water if they could not because there was not enough fresh drinking water to go around and that was like when google decided to build a data center there so that's kind of when i say that there's like the current ai development paradigm is creating a lot of harms at a mass scale.

Speaker 19 Like that's the kind of stuff that I'm referring to.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 17 I mean, part of empire building is about exerting political power, right? I'm curious why the governments in Chile and Uruguay are okay with this.

Speaker 17 Like, like, what is the mechanism through which they're deciding to grant all of this power to these AI companies?

Speaker 19 A lot of governments learn that they have to serve the global north if they want to get more investment and more jobs and more opportunity into their country.

Speaker 19 And in the AI case, it ends up not being a good bargain, but a lot of them don't know that up front.

Speaker 19 And so they think that if they can open up their land, their water, their energy to these companies, that somehow they will get more investment, more high quality, like white collar jobs in the future.

Speaker 19 Like I was talking with politicians who said that they hoped that if they allowed a data center, then eventually, you know, Microsoft would bring in like an office with like software engineering jobs nearby their data center.

Speaker 19 And so that's kind of the reason why they end up doing this. And Chile has like a really interesting history in particular in that they have dealt with just like centuries of extraction.

Speaker 19 Most recently, they've become like a huge provider of lithium for the lithium boom. And so they sort of

Speaker 19 have developed this mentality over time that like this is what they do. Like they open up their natural resources to

Speaker 19 these multinationals and that somehow this will convert into economic growth, broad-based economic growth through people. But unfortunately, it doesn't really.

Speaker 16 Well, I want to push back on that a little bit because I think if I'm being like sort of trying to be sympathetic to the people, the politicians, the communities that are accepting this stuff, I think there's a case to be made that it is actually helping them.

Speaker 16 Maybe not in terms of direct GDP or economic growth.

Speaker 16 But like the World Bank recently did a randomized control trial with students in Nigeria who were given access to GPT-4 for AI-assisted tutoring and found that it boosted their test scores significantly and that the gains were especially big among girls who were behind in their classes.

Speaker 16 So like, as I'm hearing you talk about the exploitation taking place, I'm thinking, well, maybe there is something that they're getting in return. Maybe there is something worth it to them.

Speaker 16 Maybe this technology can, in some instances, help level the playing field between poor countries in the global south and places like America.

Speaker 16 And maybe there's a deal to be had where it's like, okay, you wanna like extract our lithium, you wanna build a data center in our country?

Speaker 16 Sure, but you have to give all of our students free access to ChatGPT Pro or something like that. Is there any sort of fair exchange that you can imagine that would help these people?

Speaker 19 So I think this question is kind of premised on the idea that like we have to make these trade-offs in order to get that kind of gain. Like

Speaker 19 we have to give you our lithium in order to like have some kind of educational boost from ChatGPT. And like that's kind of a premise that I just don't agree with.

Speaker 19 I think that there are ways to develop AI that gives you the gains without this kind of extraction.

Speaker 19 So like the reason why I call it Empire of AI in the book is in part to point out that this is not the only pathway to AI development.

Speaker 19 These companies have chosen a very particular pathway of AI development that is predicated on absolutely massive amounts of scale, massive amounts of resources, massive amounts of data.

Speaker 16 Well, that's how you get the models to be general and good and to be able to work in all kinds of different languages. Is there another path that you're suggesting there's another path?

Speaker 16 Like, what is the path other than through scale?

Speaker 19 So we don't necessarily know what it is yet, but it isn't being explored at all. And there are already signs that there can be other ways to get to these more general capabilities without that scale.

Speaker 19 DeepSeek is a really interesting example of this. I think there are a lot of also problems with DeepSeek, but DeepSeek demonstrated that there is a,

Speaker 19 even in a resource-constrained environment, you can actually develop models that have more generality. And so, I mean, this is what science is.

Speaker 19 Like, you have to to discover kind of the frontiers of what we don't know yet.

Speaker 19 And the industry has fallen into this very specific scaling paradigm that they know works, but it has so many externalities with it that it's ultimately not actually achieving what OpenAI says its mission is, benefit all of humanity.

Speaker 19 And so, like, if we constrained the problem to think, like, how can we get more positives out of this technology without having all of that negative harm, I think there would actually be more innovation that would come out, like true innovation that would come out that would be more beneficial.

Speaker 16 Karen, one thing that is very clear in your book is that you are not a fan of the big general purpose AI models.

Speaker 16 You call them monstrosities built from consuming previously unfathomable amounts of data, labor, computing power, and natural resources.

Speaker 16 Is there any way for people to engage ethically with these models in your view, or is it all fruit from a poison tree?

Speaker 19 I think the way that they're being developed right now,

Speaker 19 me personally, I do think that it's root from a poison tree.

Speaker 16 Do you use ChatGPT at all?

Speaker 19 Not really. No.

Speaker 16 Have you ever?

Speaker 19 Yes, I have.

Speaker 16 Did you? I'm just curious because like writing a book is, I'm doing it now and I'm finding a lot of uses for AI. And I'm just curious, like, this is a very well, you know, thoroughly researched book.

Speaker 16 Was it helpful? Any AI tools were used in the creation of this book?

Speaker 19 So no generative AI tools, but I did use predictive AI tools.

Speaker 19 So, I used Google reverse image search to try and figure out the price of OpenAI's furniture because they had some like really nice chairs. And I was trying to explain like

Speaker 19 the level of upgrade that happened when they went from like a nonprofit in one office to this new like Microsoft-backed

Speaker 19 capped profit entity in this other office. And when I like ran the reverse image search through, it came up.

Speaker 19 It was like Brazilian designer chairs that were like ten thousand dollars each um yeah so i i mean like i do use predictive ai but uh i did not use generative air for this book other than to just like understand how the tool works and like test its new features but i like never used it for like getting research or organizing thoughts or anything like that.

Speaker 19 Because at the end of the day, I'm writing a book about Open AI and open, like I'm not going to like willingly hand a bunch of my data about like what I'm thinking about and what I'm researching to open AI in the process.

Speaker 17 And that's where you and Kevin are different.

Speaker 17 So I want you to, I want you guys to interact about this a little bit because Karen, let me tell you, if Kevin can use generative AI to do something, he's doing it. Okay.

Speaker 17 Like there's gonna be a lot of generative AI that's going into the making of this book you're writing, right?

Speaker 16 Well, in the research phase, because I found that it's not that good at like composing. Right.

Speaker 16 And, but it is like super, super useful for doing like, give me a history of the term AGI and where it originated and who, who was the first people to use it, and how it evolved over the years, and how has every lab defined it in all of their various publications.

Speaker 16 Like, that kind of thing would have taken me weeks before, and now it's like minutes.

Speaker 17 Right. So, Karen, make your case that Kevin should stop doing that.

Speaker 19 So, I'm not going to make that case, but what I'm going to say is

Speaker 19 this is like the perfect use case for these tools because

Speaker 19 like these companies are constantly testing their tools for like

Speaker 16 on like ai topics like that is like the thing that they like stress test their tools on and so if there were any topic in the world that like these chaplets would be particularly good at talking about it would be ai and a gi and so kevin like move forward fire away no but so here's another thing that i wanted to ask you karen because i think this is another place where we we sort of disagree um yeah uh you are very skeptical about the claims that the AI labs are making about AI safety or the concept of AGI.

Speaker 16 And I guess I'm trying to understand that argument.

Speaker 16 My view on these folks is that they are sincere, that they are sincere when they worry about AI posing risks to humanity.

Speaker 16 I think that's why they're investing tons of money into AI safety and trying to work on things like interpretability, figuring out how these language models work.

Speaker 16 Is your view that they are sincere but just wrong about AI being an existential threat possibly, or that they don't believe it at all and that they're just kind of using AI safety as a smokescreen or an excuse for, you know, sort of raising money and continuing to build their models?

Speaker 19 I think it totally depends on who you're talking about. So in general, I think

Speaker 19 there are a lot of people that are incredibly sincere about believing in these problems. I don't have any doubt about that.
I talked with a lot of them for my book.

Speaker 19 And, you know, like I talked to people who were like, their voice was quivering while they were telling me about being really, really scared about the demise of humanity.

Speaker 19 Like, you know, like that, that's a sincere belief and sincere reaction. I think there are other people who

Speaker 19 pretend that they believe in this as, you know, the smokescreen.

Speaker 19 But I think by and large, like, a lot of these people do truly believe, and

Speaker 19 their heart is where their mouth is, and they are trying to do good by the world. My critique is that

Speaker 19 this

Speaker 19 particular worldview is just really narrow.

Speaker 19 It's just really, really narrow and like a product of like being in Silicon Valley, which is like one of the wealthiest epicenters of one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Speaker 19 Like, of course, you are going to have the luxury to think about these like really far off problems that don't have to do with things that are literally harming and affecting people all around the world today.

Speaker 19 And it's not that I don't think we should focus on any research to these problems. Like, that's not what I'm saying.

Speaker 19 But I think the sheer amount of resources that are going to prioritizing these problems over present day problems is a super, it's just like not at all proportional to like

Speaker 19 what the

Speaker 19 problem landscape literally is in reality. Yeah.

Speaker 16 So when people like Sam Altman or Dario Amade or Demis Asabis say that we are, you know, a couple years away from something like AGI or even super intelligence.

Speaker 16 Your view is that that just has no reflection on reality or that we should cross that bridge when we come to it and pay attention to the stuff that we can actually observe in the world now?

Speaker 19 So

Speaker 19 I think it like

Speaker 19 It also depends on how they define AGI.

Speaker 19 Like when OpenAI says that they are two years away from potentially automating away most labor, I could believe that they're on a path to systems that would appear to do so in two years and then lead to a lot of company executives deciding to hire the AI instead of hiring workers.

Speaker 19 If we're talking about AGI in another definition, then I mean, it would have to be like on a case-by-case, like, how are they defining AGI and what is their time scale? But

Speaker 19 do I think that OpenAI has high convictions to try and create a labor automating machine and that they have the resources to start making a dent in labor opportunities for people. Like, yes, I do.

Speaker 17 Well, maybe let's have the kind of how do you define AGI conversation. It's come up a few times during this conversation.

Speaker 17 And I know there are a lot of folks who regularly remark that the definition of AGI seems really sort of amorphous and slippery to them.

Speaker 17 You know, I have to say, like, it doesn't feel that amorphous to me.

Speaker 17 I work with an assistant. My assistant does customer service stuff, scheduling stuff, a little bit of sales.

Speaker 17 If there was a tool that I could use and pay a subscription to that did those things on my behalf, I think I would say, yeah, I think that feels like AGI.

Speaker 17 So that's kind of how I conceive of it in my mind, but I know there are so many folks out there who say, no, no, no, no, no, the definition is always changing and slippery.

Speaker 17 And, you know, and this is a really big problem. So, Karen, how do you feel about it?

Speaker 19 I mean, what you are describing, like, yeah, like, if you want to define that as AGI, that's totally fine. But I don't think that's how the companies are necessarily defining it as AGI, right?

Speaker 19 Like, they are not defining it well. But when they need to raise capital, when they need to kind of rally public support, when they need to get in front of Congress and try and

Speaker 19 ward off regulation, the things that they say are: one day AGI will solve climate change, one day it will cure cancer.

Speaker 19 Like, I think that the AGI system that you're describing is not exactly the AGI system that they are sketching out in that kind of broad sweeping vision that they're trying to use as justification to continue doing what they're doing.

Speaker 19 Right.

Speaker 17 There's a lot of hand waving that goes on when somebody says that some future AI technology is going to cure cancer. It's leaving out many, many steps.

Speaker 16 Well, but in partial defense of the labs here, I think like we have seen things like AlphaFold, which was Google Deep Minds system that solved the protein folding problem essentially and that was not something that they thought was going to be the end of their progress toward scientific cures for disease that was sort of the beginning stages and actually if you talk to biomedical researchers they say that was a huge deal and really did make it possible to do all kinds of new drug discoveries and i guess that part is like feels a little separate to me than the agi discussion um it but it does feel like the quest for a gi the sort of scaling up of these models, the attempt to make them more general, there have just been good things that fall out of that process.

Speaker 16 And also some externalities that you mentioned, Karen. But I'm just curious if you see any positive applications of the scaling hypothesis and the sort of dominant paradigm.

Speaker 19 I don't think I have come across a positive application that I think justifies the amount of cost going into it. And I think to return back to also DeepMind AlphaFold,

Speaker 19 that was not a general intelligence system. That was a task-specific system, right? Which I advocate for.

Speaker 19 Like, I think we need more task-specific AI systems where we give them a well-scoped problem, we curate the data, we then, you know, train the model, and then it does remarkable things.

Speaker 19 Like, I totally agree that AlphaFold was a remarkable achievement. And I don't think that that has much correlation with what

Speaker 19 AGI labs are now doing with the scaling paradigm. That's not, those are like two perpendicular tracks to me.

Speaker 17 Yeah, the, I mean, I think it's clear that the hype is far ahead of the results right now.

Speaker 17 We have heard a lot more about AGI curing cancer than we've actually seen progress toward curing cancer in the moment of this recording.

Speaker 17 Now, some people believe that's going to change very soon, but I can understand why if you read a lot of headlines and you don't see cancer being cured yet, that you'd have some questions.

Speaker 19 Yeah, and I think the other thing here is,

Speaker 19 I mean, these companies are continuing to say that they're AGI lives, they're pursuing AGI, but like they've dramatically shifted.

Speaker 19 And now they're really just focused on like building products and services that they can charge lots of money for.

Speaker 19 And like all of the maneuvering that they've tried to do to make it seem like that is on exactly the same path as to what they're saying is AGI. Like,

Speaker 19 come on. Like, that's probably not.
what's happening here.

Speaker 19 And like, ultimately, these companies are building these like, I mean, you know, in like the last episode that you guys were talking about AI Flattery and like the debacle around that, and how they're turning to maximizing for engagement because this is the thing that they've realized gets them a lot of users, gets them more cash flow.

Speaker 19 And like, that is ultimately what they're now building. So I think what they're saying they're building and what they're building is also starting to diverge in the kind of new

Speaker 19 era, I guess, where they need to be able to justify like a $40 billion raise.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Well, let's sort of bring it home here by talking about one thing that I think all three of us agree on.

Speaker 17 You write that the most urgent question of our generation is how do we govern artificial intelligence? I agree with you on that front, Karen.

Speaker 17 And so let me ask, how do we govern artificial intelligence?

Speaker 16 Please help us.

Speaker 19 Democratically.

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 17 So what does a more democratic way of governing AI look like?

Speaker 19 So to me, it's like you consider the supply chain of AI development. You have data, you have compute, you have models, you have applications.

Speaker 19 I think at every single stage of that supply chain, there should be input from people, not just the companies.

Speaker 19 Like when companies decide that they're going to train, to curate a data set, like there should be people that can opt in and opt out of that data set.

Speaker 19 There should be people that, not just for their own data, but maybe there's consortiums that are debating like what kind of data, like publicly accessible data should or should not go into these tools.

Speaker 19 There should be like debates about content moderation of the data, because

Speaker 19 as I write in the book, there were a lot of moments in OpenAI's history where they kind of just debated internally, like, should we keep in

Speaker 19 pornographic images in the data set or not? And then they just decided it on the fly. Like that to me is not democratic governance.

Speaker 19 Like we should be having open public discourse about those types of decisions.

Speaker 19 When it comes to compute, like there should be an ability for communities to even know that data centers are coming in to their communities.

Speaker 19 And they should then be able to go to a city council meeting and actually talk with

Speaker 19 their city council, talk with the companies about whether or not they want the data center and have like good, solid information about like what actually the long-term trajectory of hosting a data center would look like.

Speaker 19 And when it comes to like the labor, the contract workers that are working for AI, like there should be,

Speaker 19 you know, know, they should follow international human rights norms.

Speaker 19 Because a lot of the conditions in which these workers are working do not follow international human rights norms.

Speaker 19 So I think that's the way that I think about like all of these different stages all need to be democratic.

Speaker 19 And when OpenAI says, like, we're going to develop democratic AI simply because we're an American company, like, that's not how it works.

Speaker 19 Everyone actually has to participate, have agency, have a say to shape and change what is and isn't developed and how.

Speaker 16 Well, Karen, this has been a fascinating conversation. Really appreciate your time.
And

Speaker 16 thanks.

Speaker 19 Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 17 Louie, come back. Turn your brain off.
It's time to talk about Italian brain rot.

Speaker 16 Ooh, sounds fancy.

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Speaker 17 Kevin, if I were to start referring to you as Kavanini Russolini, what would that mean to you?

Speaker 16 I would think it was some sort of mockery of my

Speaker 16 Italian heritage.

Speaker 17 I would never. I would never.
What about Trellalero Trallala? You know him?

Speaker 16 No, I think you're having a stroke.

Speaker 17 What about Bombardino Crocodilo?

Speaker 16 Okay, now this is just getting ridiculous.

Speaker 17 Vallerina Cappuccina? Nope. All right.
Listen, if you or someone you love recognizes any of these terms, Kevin, you may be suffering from a case of Italian brain rot.

Speaker 16 I'm almost afraid to ask. I have not been following this story, although I know you were very excited to tell me about it today.
What is going on with Italian brain rot?

Speaker 17 Do not be afraid of Italian brain rot, Kevin. If you have been on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube over the past many weeks, you may have encountered this unique form of AI-enabled insanity.

Speaker 16 Now, typically, I know that brain rot refers to this kind of feeling of, I don't know, cognitive decline related to excessive use of social media or something like that.

Speaker 16 People on TikTok are always complaining about their brain rot. But what is Italian brain rot?

Speaker 17 Well, if you want to catch up on this, I highly recommend a story in the times by Alicia Haradasani Gupta, who kind of catches you up.

Speaker 17 This stuff started to emerge in January, and it really is an AI phenomenon. You know, recently, Kevin, we've seen advances in some of these text-to-video generators.

Speaker 17 So you might be able to, for example, create a short clip of a little coffee cup that is also a ballerina. Well, congratulations.
You just invented ballerina cappuccino.

Speaker 16 I mean, to me, like this is sort of the, the difference between this age of viral content and previous generations of viral content.

Speaker 16 Like, I spend a lot of time on TikTok, but I have never, literally never seen anything about Italian brain rot.

Speaker 16 And it's such a contrast to like, everyone knew the ice bucket challenge was happening, right?

Speaker 16 Because you could see it everywhere, but things have become so like siloed and atomized that like you could tell me literally anything was happening on TikTok and that millions of people were into it.

Speaker 16 It was the trend sweeping the youth and I would have no idea. So, either that means I'm old or something has changed about social media.

Speaker 17 Well, look, this is why you have to have your younger colleagues like myself come in and tell you what's happening in middle school.

Speaker 16 You are not younger than me.

Speaker 17 Well, spiritually, I think there's a case for it. So, listen, there's no way to talk about Italian brain rot that improves on the experience of actually watching it.

Speaker 17 So, let's watch a couple clips of Brain Rot, and I believe we have one queued up.

Speaker 16 I hope I get hazard pay for this.

Speaker 16 So, if you are not watching these, let me just describe what I just saw. This is sort of a compilation of these Italian brain rot memes, which were all kind of like AI-generated, weird characters.

Speaker 16 Like one of them was like a, looked like a sort of hamster poking out from a half of a coconut. That's right.
And they're just saying these like Italian phrases. So this is Italian brain rot?

Speaker 17 This is Italian brain rot. You know, you're probably grasping the Italian part because they're sort of being voiced in this over-the-top Italian accent.

Speaker 17 And all of these sort of strange phrases that you're hearing are the names of the characters. So I know you're probably wondering, who is Trippy Troppy Tropa Tripa?

Speaker 16 And that's a shrimp with a cat head.

Speaker 17 So I love this one because, you know, a lot of meme explainers, there's like a lot of excavating to do of where did this come from and what this about. Here, it really is just what it says on the tin.

Speaker 17 It is an Italian accent over a series of images that make you feel like you're going insane. Yes.

Speaker 16 And was this made by an Italian?

Speaker 17 No.

Speaker 17 In fact, in the Times, one of the main creators, this is the person who created Ballerina Cappuccina, was Susanu Savatudor, who is a 24-year-old from Romania, and who told the Times that this is just a form of absurd humor that really has very little to do with Italy.

Speaker 17 But this creator just sort of created the name Ballerina Cappuccina, and they've gotten more than 45 million views on TikTok and 3.8 million likes.

Speaker 16 God. Now, like, at the risk of explaining a joke and thereby killing it, like, is there any point to Italian brain rot? Is it making some sort of social commentary?

Speaker 16 Is it trying to say, like, Italians are big users of social media and therefore are getting brain rot?

Speaker 17 Well, so I actually do have a theory about this. Like, I think here is what makes this feel new is that whatever this is actually does feel fresh.

Speaker 17 And we live in a time where everything that Hollywood is giving us feels like a recycled version of something else. We are on phase six of the Marvel cinematic universe.

Speaker 17 And in that world where it's like, oh, and here's Ant-Man's cousin. People are saying, F that, give me ballerina cappuccina.

Speaker 16 It does just feel like there is some like organic hunger out there for just like really

Speaker 16 stupid shit. Just like really random.
Like, I was thinking about this recently. You know, the the Minecraft movie is like a big hit, right? People are, it's like one of the biggest movies of the year.

Speaker 16 And there's this moment in the movie, apparently, I've not seen it, but where someone says the word chicken jockey. Yeah.
Jack Black does, I think.

Speaker 16 And at that moment, like teens and other young people have decided that this is the moment in the movie to like stand up and cause a ruckus. They start throwing popcorn.

Speaker 16 Someone actually, I saw, brought a live chicken to the theater and like held it up.

Speaker 17 Like, this feels like of a league with chicken jockey from the Minecraft movie in the sense that it is just absurdist trying to explain it actually makes you dumber in some way and so there's a kind of appealing randomness to it yeah and by the way i think that is actually part of being a young person is building a language that is inaccessible to people older than you right like that is sort of how the identity formation process works is there are older people older people have no idea who trippy troppy tropitripa is and that is something that you can talk about with your friends that belongs to

Speaker 17 what are some of the other ones okay well so i'm glad you asked because we haven't actually watched enough of these videos yet.

Speaker 17 So, Kevin, I would now like to direct your attention to one Salamino penguino.

Speaker 16 Salamino penguino, mezzo salame, mezzo penguino, tutto problema, non shivo la siamo.

Speaker 17 This is like a penguin covered in salami, like wearing almost like a sort of headdress made out of salami.

Speaker 17 Now, let's take a look at Glorbo.

Speaker 16 Glorbo. Okay, this is a

Speaker 16 crocodile or alligator with a watermelon for a body.

Speaker 17 This is a still image with 578,000 likes.

Speaker 17 Everybody loves Glorbo.

Speaker 16 Is this even real Italian?

Speaker 17 Are we sure it's real Italian? I'm pretty sure it's not real Italian.

Speaker 17 Let's stop that one there and then let's sort of go now. I know what you're saying.
You're that Casey. These are these characters, they're just standing around.
Like that seems like super boring.

Speaker 17 What if I were to tell you that other creators are now incorporating them into dramas, Kevin? Oh, boy. Let's take a look at one of those.
And this one stars Trallalero, Tra La La,

Speaker 17 who is a shark wear extra. And is that Ballerina Cappuccina, I see? That is Ballerina Cappuccina, and she's with Tong Tong Tong Sahur.

Speaker 16 Tonga Tonga Tonga and Tong Tong Tong.

Speaker 17 Sahur enjoying their so he leaves for the day and oh, there comes Tra La Lero Tra La La the shark and now they're kissing in bed and oh no, Vallerina Camchina is pregnant.

Speaker 16 And now

Speaker 16 it's chasing after

Speaker 16 the shark.

Speaker 17 And that's Bumbolini Crocodini, and he sends in an airstrike.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 that was, let's just review. That was, I don't know, that was 10 or 15 seconds.
In that, you see two of these characters. One of them gets into an affair, has a love child.

Speaker 17 Her partner finds out and then sends in an airstrike to attack

Speaker 17 the sort of cheater.

Speaker 17 So they're doing a lot in 15 seconds.

Speaker 16 Wow.

Speaker 16 That was not a Pixar film.

Speaker 16 That was really something.

Speaker 16 I

Speaker 16 feel like I'm on a very powerful psychedelic right now.

Speaker 17 Well, you know, you mentioned earlier that, you know, in the old days, we would do things like the ice bucket challenge.

Speaker 17 Kevin, what if I told you that some of these Italian brain rock characters are actually doing the ice bucket challenge?

Speaker 16 no yeah let's watch that one my name is chimpanzini bonanini and i've been nominated for the usc this is a chimpanzee who is also a banana ice bucket challenge i nominate bomb bomb dinni cousini trippy troppie and boneca ambala and he's he's nominating the other characters to do the ice bucket challenge

Speaker 17 this is so dumb yeah

Speaker 16 it's very funny though i did i am like genuinely laughing at this but it is like i could not explain to you why this is funny if you paid me.

Speaker 17 Well, here, listen, I have done a little bit of comedy in my life. And one thing that I learned in improv was that everyone goes nuts for an over-the-top Italian accent.
It's extremely funny.

Speaker 17 All I have to do is say, make a bowl of spaghetti. You're already laughing.

Speaker 16 See, I don't have to do anything.

Speaker 17 The Italian brain rot functions much in the same way,

Speaker 17 but they are taking advantage of this AI thing. And, you know, look, we talked earlier on this show, these systems are being trained with other people's art without their consent.

Speaker 17 There are some people who feel like you can never make anything truly creative or truly artistic with ai and yet here you have this bona fide viral phenomenon that is people making extremely silly stuff using ai and it is resonating with us and i think this has been one of the more counterintuitive lessons of ai slop is a year or so ago we were looking at images of shrimp jesus all over facebook and we were saying that seems silly i'm sure the company is going to get rid of this no no no my friend they're going to lean into it because there are riches that lie down this path and italian brain rot is the first example i think of that happening god it just i mean so i have a couple reactions one of them is yes i absolutely think that like

Speaker 16 ai has uh utility and that there are good things that have come out with it but seeing italian brain rot makes me want to nuke the data centers

Speaker 16 like shut it all down

Speaker 16 you've gone too far but seriously i do think there is something here not just in the sort of like absurdist humor of this thing but i do think there are going to be new kinds of entertainment that are birthed out of these tools because, you know, if you wanted to make something like a ballerina with the cappuccino for a head, you know, 10 years ago, you needed to be an animator to do that or at least have some facility with animating software.

Speaker 16 Now you just go into an AI tool and you type give me a ballerina cappuccino and out comes this like pretty perfect animation.

Speaker 17 Yeah, which has always been the case for this sort of tool, by the way, is that it takes people who do not have those kinds of artistic skills and lets them express themselves creatively if they can think it, they can visualize it, they can make it available to other people.

Speaker 17 Here is my case why this is actually a good thing, Kevin.

Speaker 17 You know, I was thinking this morning about a few years back during the height of the crypto boom when people started talking about how crypto could be used to fund these alternative worlds of entertainment, right?

Speaker 17 Like the Bored Apes Yacht Club was going to become this mega franchise. But what made it cool was that anybody could buy in.

Speaker 16 Anyone could get a Slurp juice.

Speaker 17 Anyone could get a Slurp juice, put it on a mutant ape, transform your mutant ape, et cetera.

Speaker 17 And people didn't really get into this because I think nobody wanted to be involved. What was essentially like a homeowners association for creating entertainment?

Speaker 17 But I look at Italian Brain Rot and I see something similar happening where it's like, as far as I can tell, no one has a trademark on ballerina cappuccina or chimpanzini bannanini.

Speaker 17 You could just sort of make your own version of it and put it up there and nobody's going to issue a copyright strike you can have these characters do whatever you want to so it feels like there is actually a freedom in making this that people are really responding to and so maybe we do actually get the next version of like crowdsource entertainment and it all comes out of these bizarre text to video makers I gotta say, I believe you and you say that that is a possible outcome, but my brain just goes immediately to like some office at like Disney headquarters where they're like watching these Italian brain rot memes and like furiously trying to license the IP to make like a series of seven movies about chimpanzini Bananini.

Speaker 16 And I do think that there's a possibility that this becomes just like any other entertainment franchise.

Speaker 17 It could go that way, but you know, maybe that sort of robs it of the fun of it that, you know, makes it go viral today to begin with.

Speaker 16 I mean, they're making movies out of Minecraft. They can make movies out of anything.

Speaker 17 They're really running out of things to make movies out of, as far as I can tell.

Speaker 17 So, do I lean optimistic about this? Yes.

Speaker 17 At the same time, do I think that if China had just sort of come up with this idea independently as a way of bringing down American civilization, it would be a great idea.

Speaker 17 If they were like, what if we just sort of did weird characters in Italian accents? Could that distract all of American middle schoolers for a year? Probably worth doing.

Speaker 16 How hard could it be?

Speaker 16 This is all a CCP plot to undermine American sovereignty.

Speaker 17 That's kind of always been the thing with TikTok. It's like, I don't think it's a Chinese plot to destroy America, but it is working.

Speaker 16 Well, if Cappuccina Ballerina starts talking, singing the praises of Xi Jinping, we'll know that something grave has gone wrong.

Speaker 17 Yeah, we'll keep our eyes on that one.

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Speaker 17 Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited this week by Matt Collette.
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Speaker 17 You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com/slash hard fork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Pui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda.

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