Our 2025 Tech Predictions and Resolutions + We Answer Your Questions

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Speaker 14 I'm not sure. Have we ever had a guest who's under active federal investigation?

Speaker 15 We've had many who have since been on.

Speaker 14 I want to get one while it's still going on.

Speaker 15 You know?

Speaker 14 In fact, that's one of my New Year's resolutions.

Speaker 14 I want to get somebody who's in severe legal jeopardy to come on hard fork and just air it out.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 14 Let's get their side of the story.

Speaker 15 Yeah, let's get the FBI to send us their pipeline of upcoming investigations so we can do a little advanced planning.

Speaker 14 Is Elizabeth Holmes still in trouble?

Speaker 15 I honestly, I would have her on. Oh, I mean, completely.
I need to ask her what happened with the dog.

Speaker 14 What happened with the dog? Because she has a wolf dog.

Speaker 15 She had a wolf dog. Yeah.
And it died under mysterious circumstances.

Speaker 14 Who killed the wolf dog?

Speaker 15 Honestly, serial season six.

Speaker 15 Who killed Elizabeth Holmes' dog?

Speaker 14 Honestly, that podcast will get a lot of downloads.

Speaker 15 A lot of downloads. That's led to Balto's revenge.

Speaker 15 I'm Kevin Roos, a tech colonist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Noon from Platformer, and this is Hard4.

Speaker 14 This week on the show, it's our predictions. We'll tell you what we got right and wrong about 2024 and tell you what we think is going to happen in 2025.

Speaker 14 Plus, we'll take some of your questions and make them good.

Speaker 15 All right. Well, Casey,

Speaker 15 happy new year.

Speaker 14 Happy New Year to you, Kevin. I know last year was very dramatic and stressful.
There were some terrible things that happened. There were some great things that happened.

Speaker 14 But what I can tell you is 2025 is going to be different.

Speaker 15 Different how? Better or worse?

Speaker 14 It's going to be good and bad, but just different.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 15 Wow. A bold prediction going into the new year.

Speaker 14 I have a lot of hot predictions this year.

Speaker 15 And speaking of predictions, as has become our annual hard fork tradition, it is time to check in on our predictions from last year and lay out some new predictions for this year.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and I'm really glad we're doing this because, you know, I think both of us identify as reporters, but I do think that we stray into punditry from time to time.

Speaker 14 And a criticism I have of punditry is they don't check in enough on the things that they said were going to happen and say, hey, did that actually happen?

Speaker 14 So this week on hard fork, we are going to check in our predictions and see what we got wrong and if we got anything right.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's time for some damn accountability on this show. Yeah.

Speaker 15 So last year, we broke down our predictions into confidence intervals. We had high confidence, medium confidence, and low confidence predictions.
So what was your high confidence prediction for 2024?

Speaker 15 And how did that pan out?

Speaker 14 All right. So my first prediction for 2024 was that threads would overtake X, the former Twitter, in daily active users.

Speaker 14 And this one is a bit mixed, Kevin, but I feel pretty good about the prediction.

Speaker 15 So, yeah, let's talk about this because you

Speaker 15 made the case to me that this had actually happened or may have happened. What are the numbers that you're looking at there?

Speaker 14 Yeah, so this one is hard to determine with total accuracy because X is now a private company. They do not publish audited user numbers.
So it's sort of very hard to compare.

Speaker 14 But what we know is that Threads recently reported that it has 275 million monthly users.

Speaker 14 Today, as we record this, it is actually the number two app in the app store in the United States, and it has been at or near the top of that chart for about the past month.

Speaker 14 And there was some reporting in Business Insider that if you just looked at the U.S.

Speaker 14 daily active users, people who are using X versus Threads every day in the United States, that threads actually had overtaken X. Now, again, these are estimates.

Speaker 14 We cannot say that these are completely true. But I said with pretty high confidence, look, I think Threads is going to have a big 2024.

Speaker 14 And I do think you have to hand it to me on that one because Threads did have a big 2024.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I don't think I have to hand it to you on this one, actually. I am dubious of the numbers that both X and Threads are putting out there.

Speaker 15 And maybe we should do like a teeny little dive into these metrics that we're talking about.

Speaker 15 So daily active users, the metric that you predicted threads would overtake X in last year, is basically the term in the industry for people who log in every day.

Speaker 15 Monthly active users, as you might expect, is people who log in at least once a month. Now, those could be sessions that are very long.
People could be

Speaker 15 spending a lot of time on the apps.

Speaker 15 Or in the case of threads, which is very tied to Instagram and often Instagram is trying to sort of kick you over to threads with these little like links in your feed.

Speaker 15 It could be someone who like accidentally clicked on a thread, went over to threads, it counts that as a session, and then they go back to Instagram where they meant to be.

Speaker 14 Yeah. So what you're saying is these numbers seem like they have probably been juiced a little little bit.
And I'm willing to accept that, but I think there's juicing on both sides.

Speaker 14 And again, to me, the larger question is like, is X going down and another platform coming up? And I think the answer is basically yes.

Speaker 14 And like to the extent we have numbers, the numbers are on my side.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I would, I would sort of agree with that. I think that it has been a big year for threads and Blue Sky, another.

Speaker 15 you know, X competitor. But I think that X is still very relevant.

Speaker 15 You know, I was thinking about this prediction as we were getting ready to tape the show, and I was trying to think of anything in culture this year that had sort of originated on threads besides the viral post of you at Gay E8 of the San Francisco airport.

Speaker 15 And Casey, I literally couldn't think of a single news story or trend in culture that originated on threads.

Speaker 15 So while I do accept that it is probably growing in part because it's being thrust in front of Instagram users, I don't think it's nearly as relevant as X even today.

Speaker 14 All right. So what I'm hearing is that you're going to be incredibly hard on me during this recording.

Speaker 15 So, let's hear you.

Speaker 15 What I'm saying is: look, I think it's important to have clearly resolvable predictions because one thing that we did last year when we made these predictions is we also set up prediction markets on them on Manifold.

Speaker 15 And these are play money prediction markets. No one's getting rich or losing money as a result of our predictions.
But one thing that I have been yelled at by people over there on Manifold

Speaker 15 for doing is not having clear enough resolution criteria. So, I think we should just say for this prediction, we just don't have enough good, reliable data about the popularity of these platforms.

Speaker 14 All right, fine. What was your high confidence prediction?

Speaker 15 So my high confidence prediction from last year was that a lawless LLM large language model would get to 10 million daily active users.

Speaker 15 And I would say for this one that it has the same problem as your high confidence prediction, which is just that it is very hard to know, given the available data that is out there, which LLMs are getting how many daily active users?

Speaker 14 Yeah, so I accept that.

Speaker 14 But to me, the spirit of this prediction was essentially we may start to see a bit of a migration away from the big mainstream chat bots like ChatGPT and towards something that was a little edgier and less likely to refuse your request.

Speaker 14 And I'm just not sure we've actually seen that.

Speaker 15 No, I don't think we have. I think this one was more wrong than right.

Speaker 15 You know, there are some large language models that are less restricted than, say, ChatGPT that have become quite popular.

Speaker 15 Llama 3, the open source AI model from Meta, it's not lawless, but because it's open source, it's not hard to kind of make your own version of it, to fine-tune it in a way that makes it much less.

Speaker 15 restricted. And Meta has said that its AI assistant, which is based on Llama, now has nearly 600 million monthly active users.
All right.

Speaker 14 So we're trusting Meta's numbers for Lama, but not for threads. Do I have to?

Speaker 15 No, I don't trust them for either. But I would say, like, Grok, the language model from X, is also pretty uncensored, but we also don't have good usage numbers for that either.

Speaker 15 So I would say, in the absence of better data, this one was also a bust. All right.

Speaker 14 Let's go to our medium confidence predictions, Kevin.

Speaker 14 My medium confidence prediction was that Google would mostly catch up to OpenAI in the quality of its large language model, neutralizing ChatGPT's lead.

Speaker 14 This is a bigger trend that quality differences will matter less and less and distribution will matter more. So this one is a bit of a mix bag.

Speaker 14 On the Google mostly catches up to open AI and LLM quality front. I think the answer is basically yes, they did.

Speaker 14 I see you have a note here that if you look at chatbot arena, which is where the chatbots compete in various benchmarking challenges, that as we record this today, Gemini is on top.

Speaker 14 But did it neutralize chat

Speaker 14 lead? On that front, I think it's much more mixed and I sort of think it was wrong. ChatGPT said recently it has 300 million weekly users.

Speaker 14 If Google was doing any kind of numbers like that, we definitely would have heard about it by now.

Speaker 14 So this was actually quite surprising to me that in the end, ChatGPT's lack of a giant distribution channel like the Google search bar, right? Didn't actually matter that much.

Speaker 15 And this was a year where ChatGPT's reputation as like the chatbot that everyone uses just grew and grew yeah I think that's that part of it is totally right Google may have caught up to open AI in some of the benchmarks that are used to measure these language models but chat GPT is still the industry leader when it comes to just how widely referenced it is in the culture.

Speaker 15 I think a lot of people don't even really know about Gemini or if they've encountered it, it's because

Speaker 15 it's been shoved into Google Docs or Gmail or some other Google product that they use.

Speaker 15 So it does not seem like Gemini has reached the level of mainstream awareness or usage that ChatGPT has.

Speaker 14 And I wonder how much of that has just been that while it does seem to be performing well on these benchmarks, it also had some really bad launches, right?

Speaker 14 There was the famous case of search results telling people to put glue on their pizza or eat rocks. There was the case where it would not generate historically accurate looking founding fathers.

Speaker 14 It kept spitting out racially diverse founding fathers. So they actually stopped it from generating all images of people for a while.

Speaker 14 So in that sense, I don't actually think that this is a year where Google caught up. And I'll be quite interested to see whether these

Speaker 14 new benchmarks that they've been hitting recently in the chat bot arena translate into the product. Because I have to say, as a Gemini, I pay 20 bucks a month to use Gemini.

Speaker 14 And I think it is the worst of the three that I pay for, for what it's worth.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, I definitely use Gemini less than other models. I do like some stuff that's been built with Gemini, like Notebook LM.

Speaker 15 But in general, I've been pretty disappointed disappointed by just the actual quality of the Gemini model.

Speaker 15 So I'm curious to see whether model quality ends up being a differentiating factor or whether the models have all kind of gotten good enough for most people to do most of what they want to do.

Speaker 15 And so it really will come down to like, how is the app designed? What is the distribution strategy? Those kind of non-technical factors.

Speaker 14 All right. What's your medium confidence prediction?

Speaker 15 Well, my medium confidence prediction last year was that white-collar workers would start unionizing to fight AI-related job loss. And this one was a total dud.

Speaker 15 This was, this did not happen at all in any of the industries like finance or law or tech that I thought it might.

Speaker 15 We did not see substantial union activity related to fears of job loss.

Speaker 15 Now, we did have the port strike, which was partly about automation and workers' fears of being replaced, but it wasn't really about AI. And that's not a white-collar industry anyway.

Speaker 14 Well, Kevin, I don't think it was a bad prediction. I just think you might have been a little bit early on that one.

Speaker 15 Well, early is just as good as late in this business.

Speaker 15 You're a really tough customer today.

Speaker 15 Look, I hold myself to a high standard, as I think we all should. So I really blew that one.
You're doing great, buddy. Okay.

Speaker 14 Final prediction from last year. These were our low confidence predictions.
So stuff that we thought there was a remote chance might happen.

Speaker 14 And my low confidence prediction was that the Apple Vision Pro would succeed enough to revive interest in mixed reality and the metaverse.

Speaker 14 So I'm going to say this was mostly wrong, but I have a couple of things I would say in my favor.

Speaker 14 One is that the information estimated that Apple would wind up selling about 420,000 units of the Vision Pro this year.

Speaker 14 That is a rounding error when you compare it to something like the iPhone, but it is enough for about $1.5 billion in revenue or just under that.

Speaker 14 And if you were in any other company and you had a new product launch that generated $1.5 billion of revenue for the first product, you would say, well, we should at least make another one.

Speaker 15 You know? Yeah, but this is Apple and everything that Apple does

Speaker 15 gets more promotion and marketing and also

Speaker 15 has higher expectations attached to it. So I was also open to the possibility that the Apple Vision Pro would be a huge success.

Speaker 15 And despite the steep price tag, people, you know, you'd be walking around and just you'd see, you know, tons and tons of people with their Vision Pro strapped to their heads.

Speaker 15 And like, I barely ever see anyone with one in public anymore.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's not a hit.

Speaker 14 But, you know, I do think that interest in mixed reality was revived anyway. And it wasn't because of the Vision Pro, it was because of the meta Ray-Ban glasses.

Speaker 14 It got the interest of some of the other big tech platforms, which are now working on glasses of their own that are quite similar.

Speaker 14 So the metaverse is definitely on hiatus right now, but mixed reality, I do think, is poised to continue kind of creeping into our lives.

Speaker 14 And I can see a world where it's going to be, you know, maybe a bit unusual to buy a pair of sunglasses that doesn't have some sort of computer inside.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I agree with that. All right.
My low confidence prediction from last year was that Elon Musk would get his own Hunter Biden laptop scandal on X during the 2024 election cycle.

Speaker 15 And this one, I gotta say, I really nailed it.

Speaker 14 Yeah, this was a banger, Kevin. Yeah.

Speaker 15 So what I meant by a Hunter Biden laptop scandal, if your memory doesn't extend as far back as 2020, is

Speaker 15 basically a politically motivated act of censorship taking place on X.

Speaker 15 Elon Musk and other conservatives have been worked up for years about Twitter's decision back in that election to suppress the reach and block links to a New York Post story about the Hunter Biden laptop because there was a belief that it might have been part of a Russian intelligence operation and a hacking leak.

Speaker 15 That kind of thing happened again in the 2024 election. There was a document, some called it a dossier, about J.D.
Vance that was hacked from the Trump campaign.

Speaker 15 It's believed to have been linked to Iranian hackers. And the journalist Ken Klippenstein, who runs a Substack, was banned from X for posting links to this dossier.

Speaker 15 X said that he had violated the rules about posting unredacted personal information to the platform.

Speaker 15 But many, many people saw through that and said this was just because Elon Musk didn't want people reading this thing.

Speaker 14 Yes. It also goes against everything he said about how he was going to run this platform, which was with complete neutrality.
Is what he promised. He promised.

Speaker 14 He was going to run it with complete neutrality. And then that was just never true.
I mean, the thing that gets me the most about the story is that, yes, you were absolutely right.

Speaker 14 And I have not heard one peep about it since the day after it happened, right? I still hear people talking about the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Speaker 14 Have not heard one person talking about the JD Vance dossier.

Speaker 15 Yeah. So that was our roundup of last year's predictions, but we also have some predictions for this year.
We do. For 2025.

Speaker 15 So, Casey, what is your high confidence prediction about technology in the year 2025?

Speaker 14 Okay, now this is a big one. Are you sitting down? I am.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 14 You know, Apple Computer?

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 14 I'm predicting.

Speaker 14 People are going to be mad. I'm predicting that they're going to release the iPhone 17.

Speaker 15 Don't buy it. No, I've crunched the numbers.

Speaker 15 Let me walk you through this.

Speaker 14 This year, they released the iPhone 16. Yeah.
That really only leaves one option for them for next year.

Speaker 15 What did they do the year before?

Speaker 14 I believe it was the iPhone 15. Yeah.

Speaker 15 No. Okay.

Speaker 14 Here's a second one. I'll give you a second one.
You don't like that one? I'll give you a second one, Kevin.

Speaker 14 I think that this year.

Speaker 14 The AI culture war is going to begin. What do I mean by that? The last Trump administration, we got a real social media culture war.

Speaker 14 And the nature of that war had a lot to do with are these systems biased against conservatives in particular?

Speaker 14 Are they privileging one set of politics over another? Are the employees woke?

Speaker 14 I think over the next year, as chatbots sort of enter more and more facets of Americans' lives, we're going to start to see the rumblings of a backlash here.

Speaker 14 I can imagine there being congressional hearings about the way that ChatGPT responds to certain questions, for example.

Speaker 14 I can imagine frustrated conservatives using something like Lama to build a right-leaning chatbot that maybe actually starts to get some traction.

Speaker 14 I can imagine a big national conversation about the fact that so many people are now in these somewhat intimate relationships with chatbots, including both adults and children that we know are doing this.

Speaker 14 So there's a lot of sort of dry tinder there. And I don't know what the spark is going to be, but I'm telling you, everything is in place for this to have a moment in 2025.

Speaker 15 Totally agree. I like this prediction a lot.
I think that we are going to have many flare-ups in an AI culture war in 2025.

Speaker 15 What would you say is the one that you want to use as your resolution criteria here? Like

Speaker 15 what would cause you to think, okay, we've had an AI culture war?

Speaker 14 I would say if there's a congressional hearing about the response that a chatbot gives.

Speaker 15 I agree with that. Can't you just picture like a big poster printed out with like a chat GPT's transcript

Speaker 15 in the halls of Congress? Yes. And like Jim Jordan like yelling about it.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Ted Cruz will say, like, I asked ChatGPT to criticize me and it did. Explain that, Sam Altman.

Speaker 15 Oh, God.

Speaker 15 Like, I can picture it now. Yeah.
Yeah. This is, this is a good high-confidence prediction.

Speaker 14 All right, Kevin, give us one of your own high-confidence predictions.

Speaker 15 So my high-confidence prediction for 2025 is that a newly released crypto meme coin will briefly reach $100 billion in market cap before crashing.

Speaker 14 Now, is this inspired by the recent success of the Hawk Tua girls meme coin? It sure is, Casey.

Speaker 15 So, I was looking at the news recently and I saw that Haley Welch, who is known as the star of the viral Hawk Tua meme.

Speaker 14 By the way, could you explain that to me? I've always wanted to know what it was about. Nope.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 15 People can go on the internet and look that one up, but I will not be doing the explaining there.

Speaker 15 But she had a digital crypto meme coin called Hawk that launched in December and briefly hit a market cap of almost 500 million dollars. Again, this did not do anything.

Speaker 15 There was no like value attached to this thing. It was purely a kind of pump and dump operation.
And it crashed within hours, losing more than 95% of its value.

Speaker 15 But I think that we are headed into a second golden age of speculation, of gambling. The Trump administration is going to be very crypto-friendly.

Speaker 15 And I think that people are going to take that as a signal to try everything they can to cash in.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 14 I mean, when it comes to crypto and meme coin market caps, I basically believe anything is possible.

Speaker 14 I also think, and you sort of highlighted this, but one of the big themes that is unfolding in American life right now is the rise of gambling in more and more places.

Speaker 14 I think it's quite harmful and destructive.

Speaker 14 But when the Trump administration comes in, I do think it is going to be all bets are off on this gambling stuff. And so, yes, we're going to see many more speculators.

Speaker 14 And I do think that that is going to at least briefly juice a lot of market cap. So yeah, good prediction.

Speaker 15 Okay, Casey, what is your medium confidence prediction for 2025?

Speaker 14 Okay, so.

Speaker 14 My medium confidence prediction is that 2025 is the year that Waymo goes mainstream. So this is something you and I have been talking about a fair bit recently.

Speaker 14 Like I think I've said to you that to me, when you step into a Waymo, that might be the first moment that you actually understand how AI is going to transform everything, right?

Speaker 14 There's something about a car driving itself that will sort of cause things to fall into place for you. And until now, Waymo has been extremely limited.
You can use it in San Francisco.

Speaker 14 You can use it in Phoenix and now LA. But pretty soon, you'll be able to use it in Atlanta and Austin.
And they just announced that they're coming to Miami as well.

Speaker 14 And so you're going to see more of these cars in more big urban centers. And I think as that continues, it's going to become a pop culture phenomenon.
I think we're going to see memes.

Speaker 14 There are going to be so many viral clips everywhere. And if you're looking for a resolution criteria, maybe it's that there is a Waymo sketch on SNL, right?

Speaker 14 Like to me, that will sort of be a moment where you think, okay, there's something. happening here.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I'm surprised there hasn't already been a Waymo sketch on SNL.

Speaker 15 But that goes to my feeling about this, which is that the real mainstream spur for Waymo will be when it goes to New York City, because most of the media still exists in New York City.

Speaker 15 And a lot of people, you know, I was just in New York and people there just genuinely do not understand how many Waymos there are on the streets of San Francisco or how unremarkable it has become to walk around the streets of San Francisco and see just dozens of cars driving themselves.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I do agree. And that probably is like the number one reason why SNL would not do a sketch about this.
But I don't know. I'm just going to say, keep your eyes on this, right?

Speaker 14 I mean, like, I can imagine Waymo showing up in rap lyrics next year. Just like it's going to

Speaker 14 start to feel like it's a little bit more of the culture in 2025.

Speaker 15 I agree with that.

Speaker 14 All right. Give us a medium.
confidence prediction, Kevin.

Speaker 15 My medium confidence prediction for 2025 is that Apple will acquire Snap. Okay.
Now, this is something that people have been talking about for years.

Speaker 15 Snap is, of course, the company that makes Snapchat.

Speaker 15 And it has been, I would say, sort of, you know, chugging along for a couple of years. Now it's not really growing much.
The stock price is down about 23%

Speaker 15 year to date as of today. They did some layoffs earlier this year.
And I would say this is a company that has always had really good product ideas and really creative

Speaker 15 use of technology, but that has never really managed to build it into an amazing business. And I think that pressure from investors, from employees could force them to look for a buyer.

Speaker 15 I also think that it's going to be much easier to do tech deals and acquisitions during the Trump administration than it was during the Biden administration with Lena Kahn at the FTC.

Speaker 15 And I think Apple and Snap are sort of culturally, they share some DNA, right? Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, is a big acolyte of Steve Jobs. I would say they have similar design philosophies.

Speaker 15 And Apple is also reportedly interested in developing smart glasses to compete with the smart glasses being made by Meta and Snap itself with its spectacles.

Speaker 15 So I think this would make a lot of sense for both Snap and for Apple. And I would not be surprised to see it happen in 2025.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, this is one that has made sense for a few years, at least in some ways. Snap has struggled a lot as a standalone company.
It's been a while since they had a true big hit project.

Speaker 14 They do continue to be one of the default modes of communication for American teenagers.

Speaker 14 And that is an enduring source of strength for them, but it's been pretty hard to build a big business around it.

Speaker 14 If I'm Apple, my number one question is, do I want to be the default way that a bunch of teenagers communicate?

Speaker 14 Because it truly introduces so many annoying questions around privacy, security, safety, CSAM, right?

Speaker 14 All sorts of really tough stuff that all of a sudden Apple is going to have to operate and manage and answer for.

Speaker 14 So I think there's a reason that Apple sort of likes keeping these social products at arm's length where it can continue patting itself on the back for being, you know, privacy warriors that does nothing but keep everyone safe all day while allowing all of these apps to, you know, roam free in its app store.

Speaker 14 But all that said, can I see it happening? Sure.

Speaker 15 All right, Casey, what is your low confidence prediction?

Speaker 14 All right. So my low confidence prediction is that X, the former Twitter, will be merged into XAI.
So XAI is Elon Musk's AI company.

Speaker 14 He currently plans to expand his giant supercomputer, which he uses to train Grok to something like a million GPUs.

Speaker 14 And already, Kevin, XAI has been valued at $50 billion.

Speaker 14 You may remember that Twitter, when he acquired it, was only valued at $44 billion.

Speaker 15 That's wild to me because XAI does not really have a product yet. No, it's not a good idea.
So how is it valued at $50 billion?

Speaker 14 It is a wish and a dream. And people look at Tesla's valuation and they think, well, if he can do that for cars, surely he can do that for AI.

Speaker 15 And I'm going to confess my ignorance here, but I did not actually know that XAI was a standalone company. I thought it was part of Tesla.

Speaker 14 Well, it is a standalone company. Now, I understand your confusion, though, because Elon Musk treats all of his companies as if they are all related already.

Speaker 14 So, for example, this year when he was building this big supercomputer, he had a bunch of GPUs that had been reserved from NVIDIA that were supposed to go to Tesla to help Tesla work on self-driving.

Speaker 14 And Elon Musk said, no, actually, NVIDIA, just send all those over to XAI, right?

Speaker 14 And this is the sort of thing that like in normal times and normal circumstances circumstances would cause shareholders to revolt and say, Elon Musk, like Tesla and XAI are not the same company.

Speaker 15 You can't just buy a bunch of GPUs for one company and give them to another company.

Speaker 14 But it's Elon Musk, so there are no rules. So.

Speaker 15 Anyway, so why would they, why would he merge X into XAI?

Speaker 14 Because I think the primary value for X going forward is just going to be to generate training data for XAI. That this is just going to be the sort of subsidiary that exists to help XAI grow bigger.

Speaker 14 I think the total value of something that like a truly powerful AI model could provide is just much greater than what a diminished social network like X could provide.

Speaker 14 So might as well just bring them all in-house. Now, why wouldn't he do this?

Speaker 14 Well, as I said, he already treats his companies like they're related already, and he probably just won't see the point in merging the two.

Speaker 14 But, you know, if X continues to decline in some ways and it's feeling like a hassle in some ways, I can see him just saying, you know what, from now on, this is just a subsidiary of XAI.

Speaker 15 And what would the actual ramifications of this merger be?

Speaker 15 Like, if he already treats all his companies as if they're one big company, what would be meaningfully different if you did merge X, the social network, into XAI, the AI company?

Speaker 14 I think that that is the right question. And the practical answer might be not very much in the short term.

Speaker 14 In the long term, though, it would signal to me that he had finally decided to get more serious about the AI stuff and was going to stop wasting quite as much time posting on social networks.

Speaker 15 Yeah, or like create an AI agent to do that for him. Yeah, exactly.
All right.

Speaker 15 My low-confidence prediction for 2025 is that at some point during the year, OpenAI will officially declare that they have achieved AGI or artificial general intelligence.

Speaker 15 And there are a few reasons I think that this might happen in 2025. For starters, they want to get there first, right?

Speaker 15 This is a company that is very competitive, that is very motivated by wanting to reach these big milestones in AI ahead of their competitors.

Speaker 15 And Sam Altman, the CEO, has said basically that they think they are getting quite close to AGI.

Speaker 15 He said that super intelligence, which is sort of the step beyond AGI, might only be a few thousand days away. So I think that as soon as they have a model, whether they call it GPT-5 or

Speaker 15 O2 or sort of their next generation model, I think they might go ahead and just say, we've done it. We've built AGI.

Speaker 15 And the benefit of that for OpenAI would be that it would release them from their current deal with Microsoft.

Speaker 15 Because under the terms of that deal, once OpenAI reaches AGI as defined by its nonprofit board, Microsoft effectively loses access to any of its future models.

Speaker 15 It doesn't have to share them with Microsoft, which would effectively mean that OpenAI gets out of this deal altogether.

Speaker 14 And why do you think they want that?

Speaker 15 Well, I think that they are eager to reduce their dependency on Microsoft. There's been some reporting that there's been some tension between Microsoft and OpenAI about things like compute allocation.

Speaker 15 But the real real reason that I think this could happen in 2025 is that OpenAI is undergoing this restructuring process.

Speaker 15 And there's been some reporting recently in the Financial Times that OpenAI was weighing whether to basically get rid of this clause in this deal with Microsoft that would close off Microsoft's access to its models once it achieves AGI.

Speaker 15 So this could go a couple ways. The most likely way that it might go is that Microsoft wants to strike this clause entirely so that they can keep using OpenAI stuff even after they say it's AGI.

Speaker 15 But I think my low confidence prediction is that that will sort of blow up somewhere in the negotiation. And then instead, Sam Altwin will just come out one day and say, we've done it.

Speaker 15 We no longer have to give you our models.

Speaker 14 It's interesting. I mean, you know, so I also read the reporting that said that OpenAI was thinking about getting rid of this clause.

Speaker 14 And to me, the fact that that's under consideration suggests that OpenAI still needs Microsoft. They need access to Azure and the data centers and everything else.

Speaker 14 So I'm less inclined to believe that this is going to happen because I think that OpenAI and Microsoft still need each other.

Speaker 15 But Microsoft is also developing its own proprietary models. And I just don't know how that sort of works in the long term.

Speaker 15 If you've got Microsoft that's developing its own models, but also, you know, giving compute and sort of, you know, data centers to OpenAI,

Speaker 15 and OpenAI is giving all of its models to Microsoft, which is then using it to improve its own. It just feels very messy and like it may explode at some point.

Speaker 14 Here's how it works. You know, Microsoft also makes its own proprietary web browser called Edge and no one uses it.
So that's how that's going to work.

Speaker 15 Okay. All right.
Fair point. And our standard disclosure, as always, the New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.
So those are our predictions for 2025.

Speaker 15 And if you want to kind of play along with these, you can log on to Manifold Markets.

Speaker 15 I will go in and create markets for each of these predictions, and you can bet with Play Money on whether you think they will come true or not.

Speaker 14 When we come back,

Speaker 14 I resolve to share my New Year's resolution with you, Kevin. Me too.

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Speaker 15 So, Casey, in addition to making predictions at the end of the year, we also do our resolutions for the new year.

Speaker 14 Because we're always striving to better ourselves. That's true.

Speaker 15 So, let's just quickly recap our resolutions from last year and see how those went. And then we can make some new ones for 2025.

Speaker 14 All right, Kevin, remind me what you resolved to do this year.

Speaker 15 So, my resolution for 2024 was more delight, less fright. Basically, I wanted to stop doom scrolling and warring against my phone and trying to like get it out of my hands as much as possible.

Speaker 15 And I wanted to make it into a more delightful experience.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and for context, if you're a newer listener, one time Kevin just put his phone in a box in an effort to stop using it. So, that's the kind of person Kevin is.

Speaker 14 So, this has been a sort of podcast-long journey for him. How did it go for you this year?

Speaker 15 It went great, honestly. I have much less guilt about my phone use this time, this year than I did this time last year.
I've got

Speaker 15 my phone is now presenting me on my home screen with

Speaker 15 my delights folder of photos of things that make me happy. And my screen time has stayed about the same.

Speaker 15 It has not gone way up or way down as a result, but I do just have a much better feeling about my phone. And I think that's good.

Speaker 14 And did you have to do anything special to make this happen?

Speaker 15 No, basically, I mean, I I did rearrange my phone. So I put some apps that make me happy in this photos widget on my home screen.

Speaker 14 I remember you said you had put my face in your delights folder.

Speaker 15 It is, actually. I have a photo of you.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 I mean, it's one of like 500, but

Speaker 15 every couple of weeks it shows up, and I, you know, I quickly scroll away. But yeah, you're a delight.
So, Casey, what was your resolution last year?

Speaker 14 So my resolution was when you're watching YouTube, watch YouTube. And here's what I'm saying.

Speaker 15 Don't just like leave it on in the background. That was what you had been doing before.

Speaker 14 Yes, because, you know, I grew up in this house where like whenever there were like ads on TV, we would always mute the television.

Speaker 14 Like, you know, we would only turn on the TV when we were watching TV. And I always thought this was the right way to do it.

Speaker 14 And people that just sort of, you know, let the TV go on all day, you know, were doing something wrong.

Speaker 14 And then I woke up like halfway through last year and I realized that I was doing this with YouTube. I would just be at my desk and I would open one video.

Speaker 14 I would immediately stop listening to whatever it was, even though it was a video I had chosen to watch and I would play a video game.

Speaker 14 I would read a browser tab and I thought I am truly just destroying my own attention and this has to stop.

Speaker 15 So I did pretty good about this.

Speaker 14 I would give myself like an 85 out of 100 for the most part. I really did.
Now, I do think I started to slip a little bit toward the end of the year.

Speaker 14 I think I was stronger through, let's say, the first three quarters of the year than I was this last quarter. A big thing I did was was I stopped playing video games on my laptop, basically.

Speaker 14 Like I used to have these like very simple games that I would do just to waste a little bit of time. Marvel Snap, when we've talked about a few times, I stopped doing that.

Speaker 14 So now it's like, if I'm going to watch video, I watch video and I try not to change my attention too much. Now, do I look at my phone while I watch TV? That's a different story.

Speaker 15 And maybe a resolution for another year.

Speaker 15 All right. Well, I'm glad you got that under control, at least for most of the year.

Speaker 15 I'm curious if you think that being more intentional about YouTube has made you also more intentional about other things that you do on your phone or your laptop.

Speaker 15 Like, do you feel like you kind of command your own focus more?

Speaker 14 I think that this year was pretty good for me in terms of doing more single tasking and less multitasking.

Speaker 14 Where I feel like I succeeded was in moving away from that place of I am just going to let technology mindlessly steer me around, right?

Speaker 14 I think the big exception is anytime you're looking at a feed-based social network, you are letting an algorithm drag you around. But TikTok, you mean?

Speaker 14 For example, or threads or Blue Sky, which I also spend probably even more time on.

Speaker 14 But when I'm not doing that, like I'm relatively locked in, you know, I think my biggest attention-related challenges are I find it pretty difficult to get through a lot of books.

Speaker 14 I find it difficult to read like academic research papers. I just feel like the attention leaching out of my brain when I try to do that.

Speaker 15 Other stuff I feel okay about. Yeah.
Well, that is a good way to segue into our New Year's resolutions for 2025. You know, I enjoy the process of making New Year's resolutions.

Speaker 15 I don't hold myself to some impossible standard. I'm not one of these people who, like, you know,

Speaker 15 sort of needs to accomplish it or I feel like a failure. But these are, I would say, they're more intentions than resolutions.
But did you make any resolutions about your tech use for next year?

Speaker 14 So I have one. So I would like to get medium good at meditation using AI.

Speaker 14 And here's why. This year,

Speaker 14 more than others, I struggled with feelings of burnout, which was really surprising and challenging for me because I truly love what I do. I do not want to do less of what I do.

Speaker 14 But there were moments during the year where I was like, oh, gosh, I feel so tired.

Speaker 14 And so I thought, I'm going to do what people have been telling me to do for years, which I have just avoided, which was meditate.

Speaker 14 And when I started to do this, instead of reading a book, I went and I used a chatbot, in this case, a Claude from Anthropic. And I said, hey, I want to get started with meditating.
What should I do?

Speaker 14 And it gave me a bunch of instructions. And I went and I tried it.
And then I came back and I talked to it again. And I said, hey, I tried that.
Here's what I noticed.

Speaker 14 And then it helped me refine and iterate and say, hey, why don't you try this different? Or you might want to try this different kind of meditation. I really enjoyed that feedback loop.

Speaker 14 So what I would like to do next year is to continue doing this because while the AI piece of it is interesting and makes it a little bit techie, meditation, of course, is the least techie thing in the entire world.

Speaker 15 Right. It's one of the oldest hobbies in existence.

Speaker 14 Exactly. And like one of the most time-tested methods for just sort of like improving your mental health and your well-being.

Speaker 14 So to me, this feels like a good marriage of like a true goal that I have in my life, which is to like manage those feelings of feeling burnt out and give it just enough of a tech twist so that I, as a tech reporter, think, aha, I'm doing something very cool and futuristic.

Speaker 15 Now, can I ask you something about your AI meditation practice? So I have also struggled to meditate. I've never really successfully had a consistent meditation practice.

Speaker 15 And I was very optimistic when ChatGPT's advanced voice mode came out that I would be able to have it basically be my meditation teacher.

Speaker 15 And so instead of just typing to it, I could actually say, like, could you lead me on like a 15-minute guided meditation about this thing that I've been stressing out about?

Speaker 15 But it can't really do it because it doesn't sort of know how to insert all the right pauses. Like it wants to talk to sort of like fill the space.

Speaker 15 And so it's not actually built in a way that has made it a good meditation partner for me.

Speaker 15 I know some startups are trying to do more AI meditation coaches, but do you ever use it for that for literally like leading you on our meditation?

Speaker 15 Or is it just sort of talking to you about an experience that you've had on your own?

Speaker 14 It's the latter. I think about it as a journal that talks back to you, right? Which is like kind of what being coached in anything feels like, right?

Speaker 14 You think about you're learning an athletic skill, something that I haven't done in years and probably might never do again.

Speaker 14 But you have a coach who's standing there with you and says, hey, go try this thing. And you do it and you come back and the coach says, next time do it this way.

Speaker 14 That is like essentially what the AI is doing. And because it is this general purpose technology, it can coach you pretty well in a lot of things.

Speaker 14 And one of the things I like about this is it gets around a common and true criticism of these chatbots, which is that they make a lot of mistakes or they hallucinate, right? All of that is true.

Speaker 14 But if you just want to like become a novice at meditating, it can handle that. And actually, it's like really good at it.

Speaker 14 And so I think it's important to find those chatbot use cases where it's not mission critical, no one's life or career is at stake, and yet it can provide you this meaningful help.

Speaker 14 Because I think that actually is the truest story of AI that is unfolding. right now is this expanding set of a positive and helpful and increasingly more powerful things.

Speaker 14 And if you're not sort of encountering that, I do think you're missing a big part of what's happening in Silicon Valley right now.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I agree. And I've been using AI to teach myself stuff this year a lot with pretty good success.
I was trying to get really good at poker this year. That was like a hobby that I picked up.

Speaker 15 And I found that

Speaker 15 sort of like what you said, like, like is very good for getting you from basically knowing nothing to sort of having a sort of beginner's understanding of a topic, if that thing is sort of widely represented on the internet in the training data.

Speaker 15 But I've found that there's a sort of limit to it, right? Where if I get good enough, if I want like, you know, more advanced strategy advice for poker, it can actually help me with that.

Speaker 15 So are you worried that with meditation, you're going to kind of reach the limit of what Claude can do for you?

Speaker 14 Yeah. Well, first of all, it sounds like you should try a no-limit poker pot.

Speaker 15 That's a poker joke.

Speaker 14 But yeah, I absolutely will. And, you know, let me anticipate another criticism that I may get for this suggestion, which is, Casey, why don't you you read a dang book? That's a good point.

Speaker 14 I can and should read a book. In fact, you know,

Speaker 14 my boyfriend recommended me some good meditation books to read. And I probably will read them next year, honestly.
But the thing about a book is that it can't talk back to you.

Speaker 14 You cannot ask questions of a book, right? You can't do that with an AI.

Speaker 14 I love books. I'll continue to read books, but like this is something different and it's really engaging.
It brings you in because you are having a conversation. And that's just a powerful thing.

Speaker 14 So will I hit a limit? Yes, but like that's okay. It's okay to hit those limits.
That's just when you go deeper and you know what to do when you want to go deeper.

Speaker 15 Well, I hope that resolution succeeds. I don't like you feeling burned out.
We need you strong and kicking for all of 2025.

Speaker 14 Thank you, Kevin.

Speaker 15 Um, my 2025 resolution is to be the poster I wish to see in the world. All right.

Speaker 14 I'm excited to hear, I'm excited to hear about this because I feel like you have had a somewhat distant relationship with posting this year.

Speaker 15 Yeah, so I was once a very active user of many social media platforms. I posted all the time.

Speaker 15 I was constantly on there, you know, arguing, posting jokes, you know, putting links to my stories and other people's stories up there.

Speaker 14 And spreading vaccine misinformation.

Speaker 15 Yes. Yes.
Snuff films,

Speaker 15 disinformation campaigns.

Speaker 15 And then.

Speaker 15 I can't exactly tell when it happened, but maybe a year or two ago, I just kind of ran out of posts.

Speaker 15 And I felt like, you know what, I can promote our podcast. I can promote stories that I'm working on.

Speaker 15 Once in a while, I can go on and, you know, spend a few minutes doing a back and forth with someone. But I just kind of got tired and I stopped really posting.

Speaker 15 And, you know, I think there are good reasons for that. I think I'm not the only person who's had this experience.

Speaker 15 But at some point recently, I began to feel like a hypocrite because I spend a lot of time complaining about social media and how all these platforms platforms have their problems and the people who are active on them are terrible and they're spreading all this garbage.

Speaker 15 And at a certain point, I started to feel like, you know what? It is my job if I want social media to be better to roll up my sleeves and get in there and start posting what I want on social media.

Speaker 14 And what do you want on social media?

Speaker 15 It's a mix of things. Like I think part of what I want is just more casual engagement that is not self-promotion.
Like I want to go, I want to promote stuff that I like on the internet.

Speaker 15 I want to, you know, know, do the kind of thing that was much more common on Twitter a decade ago, which was just like, here's some interesting stuff that I'm reading, or here's a news story that just happened and maybe a comment that I have about it.

Speaker 15 Like, that feels almost archaic in this day and age for people to do.

Speaker 15 But I think that is one of the best ways to use social media is to tell the people in your network, like, what you are paying attention to

Speaker 15 and give them some sense of what you're thinking about it. So, that is something that I have not done in a while, but I am going to get back into it.

Speaker 15 Not because I think I want my brain to be more hooked into social media, but I just, I feel like I can't complain about it unless I am prepared to do something to fix it.

Speaker 14 You know, my case for doing this is I just think it's the fastest way to get your, your finger on the pulse of the conversation. Like, how are people understanding certain subjects?

Speaker 14 What are like the sort of third rails that no one ever touches? And what are the things that people can't stop talking about? The only way to really get a handle on that is to get in there and post.

Speaker 14 And, you know, I mean, mean, it can be hard. I've been obviously canceled twice on Blue Sky this year, once in Portuguese, and it takes a toll.

Speaker 14 But I think there's a way to do it that's really enjoyable.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And a way to do that that takes for granted the fact that if you're an active poster on social media, like people are going to get mad at you.
Yeah. Like that is going to happen.

Speaker 15 You're going to post something. It's going to be a little out of pocket or a little risque or people are just going to take it the wrong way.

Speaker 15 And so part of what I'm trying to do as part of this resolution is just kind of prepare myself for the inevitability that something I do online is going to piss people off.

Speaker 15 And that when that happens, I just have to sort of greet it with poise and with understanding and try to do better the next time. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Comes with the territory.

Speaker 15 If I ever told you what I think about

Speaker 15 cancel culture, no, what's something that would get me canceled?

Speaker 14 Like

Speaker 14 the top 10 dogs that your followers own that you think should be given away.

Speaker 15 Because you don't think they're good pet owners.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I didn't say I wanted to be the shit poster that I wanted to see in the world, but I do think that there is a kind of defensiveness to the way that I and a lot of other people act on social media these days because we've seen so many people just blow up their lives and careers by posting in an unhinged manner that we've sort of retreated into this very comfortable, kind of boring use of social media.

Speaker 15 And so I'm going to spice it up a little bit.

Speaker 14 The thing that I like about social media is that it just lets you show up and say, well, this is interesting, which I actually think is most of a journalist's job. Yeah.
Well, this is interesting.

Speaker 15 But I do want to get your opinion on this as I set out in this resolution, which is that what I don't want to have happen is to rot my brain by spending too much time on social media and by over-indexing on what is happening on social media.

Speaker 15 Because you and I have both seen plenty of examples, including some people in our own industry, of people who just spend way too much time on social media, who start to think in posts, whose every reference point becomes some meme or some controversy on social media, and who kind of lose contact with reality.

Speaker 15 So as I'm going into this be the poster I wish to see in the world year, how do I keep that from happening to me?

Speaker 14 I think, you know, if you find yourself posting more than three or four times a day, check in with me.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 15 Something bad might happen. Like I might end up running SpaceX

Speaker 15 and Tesla.

Speaker 14 You might wind up being the White House crypto czar.

Speaker 15 Yeah, a lot of bad things happen.

Speaker 14 No, I think it's you want to, and honestly, it's not really the post. Some people do fall into like posting too much territory.
I actually think that's quite rare.

Speaker 14 I think the more common thing is you just sort of can't stop looking at the feed. Um, and that's something that only you can really decide for yourself.

Speaker 14 But yeah, try to get a sense of like when you know that you've had enough. When do you have a sense of what the conversation is?

Speaker 14 That maybe that's like the heuristic is if you feel like you have a sense of like the contours of the conversation that day, whatever it might be, great.

Speaker 15 Now you can move on. Great.
And if I do slip into a social media brain rot, I want you to tell me. I absolutely will.
All right. Those are our resolutions.
God help us all. all.

Speaker 14 That's great.

Speaker 14 Based on this, we're going to be better people next year.

Speaker 15 I think so. Yeah.

Speaker 15 When we come back, we'll answer some listener questions: like, why is Casey so annoying?

Speaker 14 Hey, I'll ask the questions around here.

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Speaker 15 Well, Casey, we have one more thing to do on our very special beginning of the year episode.

Speaker 14 This is where we commit a ritual sacrifice to the gods to protect us in the year to come.

Speaker 15 Yes. And we should also answer some questions from our listeners.

Speaker 14 Yes. And, you know, we always love hearing from our listeners.
They send us so many good thoughts and questions every single week.

Speaker 14 And so what better way to kick off a fresh year of hard fork than by finding out what's on their minds?

Speaker 15 Yes. So we want to do something special, never before done today, which is to bring in one of our producers, Whitney Jones, to help us sort through all of our reader mail.

Speaker 15 So Whitney, welcome to Hard Fork. Hey, welcome to Hard Fork.

Speaker 15 We're breaking the fourth wall here. So tell us what our listeners have asked and what we should respond to.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I feel like I should have a giant mailbag, but actually I just copy and pasted these all into a document.

Speaker 15 They sort of fall into different categories, and so I want to take them sort of in categories. And the first one is just responses to segments that we've done on the show.

Speaker 15 There was one recently after the Paw Market Elections betting segment that we did at the beginning of November. Listener Ann Lachey wanted to know more about VPNs that you guys mentioned.

Speaker 15 You mentioned that Americans were using these VPNs to get around restrictions on polymarket to bet illegally on the election on the the site.

Speaker 15 So Anne wanted to know, she writes, how many people are using VPNs? Is it mostly for downloading movies, music, media without having to pay? Is it for gambling as mentioned?

Speaker 15 Is it for political disturbances? Is it for hijacking Wi-Fi? I don't know, she writes. Are companies concerned about it? What is the future for VPNs? Is anyone cracking down on it?

Speaker 15 What happens if you get caught using one? That is so many questions about VPNs.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I want to be clear. In the future, you're limited to one question.

Speaker 15 No, we will try our best to answer this one because I think it is a good one. Casey, what do you know about VPNs and how common they are and what people use them for?

Speaker 14 So virtual private networks have been around a long time and they are a pretty big market. I found one estimate that said that the market for them is well in excess of $40 billion.

Speaker 14 And I can just say anecdotally that when I go on YouTube and I'm watching videos, one of the most popular ads that gets inserted into creator content is ads for VPNs.

Speaker 14 So to answer one of these questions, yes, I do think the primary reason that people use VPNs is to get around geographical restrictions on what kind of media they can consume. Yeah.

Speaker 15 And just if people have not used VPNs before, what they are is basically a kind of means of making it look like your traffic is coming from somewhere else, right?

Speaker 15 So you're basically renting a server located someplace else and it sort of sends your traffic through that server to the website or the service that you're going to.

Speaker 15 So if you're on a streaming site and you want to make it look like you are in London, but you're in California, you can use a VPN to accomplish that.

Speaker 14 Yeah. Now, it is the case that there is a political dimension to these.
And often we see in authoritarian countries, VPNs become quite popular.

Speaker 14 In fact, once the war in Ukraine started and Russia became a sort of a country non-grata on the global stage, various apps pulled out of Russia and the number of VPN downloads in Russia went through the the roof because everybody wanted to use the internet that they were used to without all of the new geographic restrictions that had been placed on them.

Speaker 14 So that's why I do think they can be a really important technology to sort of help people in those countries.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and I like we should say also that VPNs, there are many, many legitimate uses for them. I use one when I'm on a public Wi-Fi network, it makes it harder to sort of intercept your traffic.

Speaker 15 Corporations use them for employees to sort of keep their networks more secure if you're giving people remote access.

Speaker 15 So lots of people use VPNs for lots of totally normal and probably pretty privacy conscious reasons.

Speaker 14 Yes. And if you want to know, can you use a VPN to hijack your neighbor's Wi-Fi? I don't really think you can do that.

Speaker 14 I mean, I get if you can hijack your neighbor's Wi-Fi, you don't need a VPN to do that, really.

Speaker 15 Right. But they are useful in some cases for things that are not listed.

Speaker 15 So if you want to gamble online in a jurisdiction where that is not allowed, you can sort of route your traffic through a place where it is allowed and do it that way.

Speaker 15 Although if you win a lot of money,

Speaker 15 you may not have an easy time cashing that out. And a bunch of gambling sites do actually block VPN traffic.
There are ways to sort of figure out which traffic is coming from VPNs and block those.

Speaker 14 And that's all we know about VPNs. Thank you, Anne.
We hope you're happy now.

Speaker 15 Yeah, have fun gambling from

Speaker 15 Lithuania or wherever you're going to do it from. All right.
Another segment we got a lot of email about was the interview you did with Stephen Johnson about Notebook LM.

Speaker 15 And Bob Flint wrote recently asking, How do I know that you guys aren't bots? Thanks to you, I'm now familiar with Notebook LM.

Speaker 15 How can I know you're not using similar technology to produce your podcast, albeit with a certain degree of human intervention?

Speaker 14 Well, let me ask you a question, Bob. How do I know that you're not a bot? How do I know that you didn't use ChatGPT to write that whole thing?

Speaker 15 You can play at this game, bud.

Speaker 15 But Casey, this is a, I like this question because there are actually, you know, companies that are building AI podcasting tools that will allow you to like clone your own voice.

Speaker 15 And we actually do have sort of a laborious process here where if we mess something up when we're originally taping the show, we will go back and record a little insert.

Speaker 15 And some eagle-eared listeners have sometimes picked up on these. We try to make them sound as smooth as possible.

Speaker 15 But, you know, that kind of thing could be easier to do if we just had AI clones of our voices and our producers could just kind of change what we say. But we don't do that now, do we?

Speaker 14 No, we don't. Now, you know, is it true that due to the existence of these technologies, it now does just get harder to tell which of the media that you're consuming is synthetic in some way?

Speaker 14 Yeah, it does mean that. That's one of the big concerns I have about the rise of AI.
And we have to keep our eyes on it.

Speaker 14 In the meantime, all I can do is tell you something that GPT2 would never tell you, and that's that two plus two equals four.

Speaker 14 So hopefully that gives you some confidence. Wait, wait, I'm being told that we're now at GPT-4, so I'm actually not sure.

Speaker 15 Yeah, we should do like a captcha at the beginning of every episode to just prove that we are humans. No, this is interesting, actually.

Speaker 15 And I'm glad you wrote in with this, Bob, even though I think this question was mostly a joke, because a thing that I am starting to hear is that people are sort of getting suspicious of podcasts that sound too much like the notebook LM podcasts.

Speaker 15 Have you heard about this? I haven't heard about this.

Speaker 15 So I was recently talking with a friend and I was asking them, they were talking about a podcast they recently started listening to, and they were like, I think this might be a Notebook LM thing.

Speaker 15 Like it sounds very similar. And it wasn't.
Like,

Speaker 15 I know the people who make this podcast, but because of the way that these podcasts sound with the kind of back and forths and the disfluencies in them, there is starting to be kind of this question about like, is this a real person?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, maybe the only answer is that like all podcasts will have to move to three or more people so that it no longer sounds like the two people podcast.

Speaker 15 Oh, you don't think Notebook Line is working on that? I hope not.

Speaker 14 Well, the whole team just quit, so hopefully that'll help.

Speaker 15 That's true.

Speaker 15 Okay. What's next, Winnie? Another category of questions that we get a lot are just general questions about different technologies, like why is my chat bot behaving in this particular way?

Speaker 15 I've got one from a listener, Raphael Holmes, had a question about AI image generators that I wanted to run by you guys. He says, hi, Kevin and Casey.

Speaker 15 I was trying to show my octogenarian dad the wonders of generative AI, and his request was to try to draw a loon in a bathtub. And it turns out,

Speaker 14 and it drew Kevin.

Speaker 14 No, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Speaker 15 It says, as it turns out, Dolly has no problem putting a terrifying five-foot loon in a bathtub.

Speaker 15 See attached images, one of many, but it can't get the correct proportion to one another, even with tons of wrangling, still only monster loons.

Speaker 15 My sister-in-law tried Gemini and got very similar failures. Would you try it with a few image generation tools? The world needs to know.
And so I have a bunch of images here for you guys.

Speaker 15 If you want to have a look at these, so these are the ones that the listener, Raphael, sent in to us.

Speaker 15 This is a giant loon in a bathtub. There's this one, which you can see the prompt says, a tiny loon that appears almost invisible in a huge bathtub.
And this is the image that comes back with.

Speaker 15 And like for reference, like how big is an actual loon?

Speaker 15 Well, I'm not a big loon guy. Loons appear to be a bit bigger than a duck.
Okay. But in these images, they're like filling up the whole bathtub.
Like these are giant loons.

Speaker 15 It's either a very big loon or a very tiny tub. Yeah.

Speaker 15 So the images you're showing us, Whitney, are these AI generated images like the ones that our listener described of just these like monstrous loons that are taking up most of the bathtub. Correct.

Speaker 15 Okay. I went to Meta AI.
Meta AI did the same thing. So do we know why this happens?

Speaker 14 Yes, we do know why. Here's why.
When you use a text-to-image generator, it's trying to find the statistical average that satisfies your prompts, right? It's kind of like a sculptor.

Speaker 14 It's trying to take away everything from the image that is not a loon in a bathtub and get to the like median image that it can, you know, sort of conceive of.

Speaker 14 And the thing is, loon in a bathtub is probably not a very high-volume request. I don't think a lot of painters out there had painted a lot of normal size loons and normal size bathtubs.

Speaker 14 And so this is just a classic case of asking a model to do something that it is not well-suited to do. You know, when you are using a text image generator, you are throwing a wish into a fountain.

Speaker 14 And sometimes the wish is granted. Many times, the wish is not.
It is not your problem. You're doing everything right, but the model cannot do this yet.
Maybe someday it will, but it can't yet.

Speaker 15 I think it will be able to do it soon. And I put this question to Claude about like why these image generators are having trouble doing a loon in a bathtub.

Speaker 15 And it drew me a like diagram of a loon in a bathtub. It actually coded like

Speaker 15 a diagram of the common loon at 26 to 28 inches and the standard bathtub at about 60 inches. So this kind of thing is possible, but

Speaker 15 I think that the reason that this is having trouble with current models is because of these things called contextual scaling issues.

Speaker 15 Basically, if two or more objects do not frequently appear together in the training data of whatever this system was trained on, it may not sort of understand the proportions of one and the other.

Speaker 15 And so, often people will notice that it just, these image generators, they have a hard time with proportions, with sizes, and that will probably improve somewhat in future models.

Speaker 15 But right now, I would not use it for anything mission-critical when it comes to loons and bathtubs or any other sort of like juxtapositions.

Speaker 14 This is a great time to just learn how to draw a loon in a bathtub.

Speaker 15 You have the power, listener.

Speaker 15 All right, what's next? The next one says, a couple of different listeners asked about how, what's hot and what's not when it comes to data sources for training AI right now.

Speaker 15 One listener, Asa Strong, says, do they want satellite data? Ben Stone says, are they using data from home assistance and security cameras?

Speaker 15 So any new news on training data and what's in demand right now?

Speaker 14 So, I mean, in short, they want all the data that they can handle. Do we know what data is hot? No, not really.
And the reason is because they don't tell us what data they put into the models anymore.

Speaker 14 They used to, but then they stopped. Let's just say some certain newspapers got a little bit irritated about what they were reading about the training data that was going into those models.

Speaker 14 And so now there's a lot less transparency. I wish there were.
It would really help us understand these models.

Speaker 14 If I told you, if I could tell you one kind of data that is becoming increasingly popular in this world, though, it is video data.

Speaker 14 There is a lot of thinking among AI researchers that the final frontier of developing models that have something approaching human or even superhuman understanding is the kind of knowledge in the world that you only get by moving through the world.

Speaker 14 And so they're starting to adjust a lot more video to understand motion and depth and everything else, reasoning, everything else that you can learn by just sort of fixing cameras on the world, running them through models and trying to understand what's happening there.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I do know a little bit about the training data that is in demand right now because unlike Casey, I've done reporting on this.

Speaker 14 Oh, let me guess. There was a huge demand for Kevin Roos columns.

Speaker 15 They couldn't get enough of them over there.

Speaker 15 No, but I did talk to someone who is

Speaker 15 working on a project where they're basically going into university libraries and archives and digitizing a bunch of stuff there that has not been previously digitized.

Speaker 15 Because the sort of low-hanging fruit, the stuff that's online, the stuff that's in these sort of repositories that are widely used,

Speaker 15 that stuff is good, but has already been used. And so now they're looking for new sources, these AI companies.

Speaker 15 And a lot of what they're finding is that there's just a lot of stuff that hasn't been digitized.

Speaker 15 And if you can go in and go into a library and just put everything on there online, you will maybe improve the resulting models. That's great.

Speaker 14 Maybe you should write a story about that because I think it's time you saw the inside of a library.

Speaker 14 What else do we got?

Speaker 15 Mitzi had a question about security and voice cloning technology. She writes,

Speaker 15 both of my investment institutions use voice verification to ID customers on the phone. The password is literally the voice saying, my voice is my password.
In this era of AI, it seems foolhardy.

Speaker 15 Am I being paranoid?

Speaker 14 No, you're not being paranoid. Tell your bank to knock that off.
Go to a new method of authentication immediately.

Speaker 15 Yeah, this is a known issue. There was a story in 2023 in Vice by Joseph Cox about how he broke into a bank account with an AI-generated voice.

Speaker 15 These voice verification systems, they are not secure. And it is very easy to clone someone's voice using just a small snippet of audio from that person.

Speaker 15 So yeah, yeah, I would move as quickly as I could away from using your voice for verification. Cool.
Do you guys want to close out with one ethical hard question? Sure. Yes.

Speaker 15 Dylan writes, Here's my ethical dilemma. Someone I was recently dating, but now no longer, left their HBO Max account logged into my computer after a movie date.

Speaker 15 I only realized it was still logged in after we had stopped seeing each other. I was going to log out of their account, but then ended up binge-watching House of Dragon, which I had been dying to see.

Speaker 15 Was that wrong? And if not, could I watch The Last of Us Next?

Speaker 14 Well, I mean, it was wrong to watch the second season of House of Dragon if you had watched the first season because it was really bad. And I thought, I really thought it should have been canceled.

Speaker 14 But as far as the ethics of using a logged-in HBO Max account, I say go nuts.

Speaker 15 So I have feelings about this because I've been on both sides of this this year. Because I, well, not in the dating.
Wait, did you break up with Dylan?

Speaker 15 No. But

Speaker 15 I left my Amazon Prime video logged in at an Airbnb

Speaker 15 like several years ago and only discovered it this year because I was getting, I like was checking my credit card statements and I found like a Britbox subscription and like other stuff that I had just not, like movie rentals that I just not subscribed to.

Speaker 15 So someone had been. purchasing things on my Amazon Prime video account at this Airbnb that I had stayed in several years ago.

Speaker 15 So I would say the ethics do not extend to purchasing, but I would say if you're just watching the stuff that is like included for free, I would say that's kosher with one exception. What's that?

Speaker 15 Which is that if you are watching a show on a Pilford streaming account that the owner of that account is also watching, you may not skip episodes.

Speaker 15 You may not watch that show until the owner of the account has also watched that show because you know what happens. And this has happened to me and I've actually accidentally done this to people.

Speaker 15 You're borrowing their account, you're using their account, and you start watching a popular show that just came out, like the show about chimps on Netflix or something on Mac.

Speaker 14 They're not a chimp show.

Speaker 15 And they are watching it at the same time. And by watching these things on the same account at the same time, you are actually screwing up all of their time stamps.

Speaker 15 When they go into resume watching, it's going to take them to a totally different episode of the show. So don't do that.
Just keep your hygiene consistent when you're sharing these accounts.

Speaker 14 I think that's good advice.

Speaker 14 And, you know, I think it's really brave of of you after having recently made fun of me for having wine on tap at my house to have just admitted that you ignored thousands of dollars of purchases of videos over the years.

Speaker 14 You literally don't even notice when people are renting thousands of dollars worth of movies from your Amazon Prime account.

Speaker 15 Now, must be nice, Roos. Must be nice.

Speaker 15 And if you are the person who bought Britbox and rented movies on my Amazon Prime video account at this Airbnb, I will track you down. This is not over.

Speaker 15 Can I ask a follow-up question? Yes. Do you think the ethics of borrowing logins changes if you're no longer in a relationship with somebody?

Speaker 15 No, I don't. I don't think

Speaker 14 who is the victim here?

Speaker 15 Who is being harmed? Yeah, it's the victimless crime. And in fact, I've heard of people actually sort of continuing to voluntarily split accounts with exes after they break up.

Speaker 15 So, you know, you might even not need to hide it.

Speaker 14 And here's what else I would say. As long as there is a single logged in HBO Max account between the two of you, there's a chance you could get back together.

Speaker 14 There's a fiber of something there that could turn into something actually really special.

Speaker 15 Ooh, that's, I hadn't considered that, but it might give you some hints. You know, if you know they're watching, you know, House of the Dragon, you, you know, you might just spark up a conversation.

Speaker 15 Right.

Speaker 14 Like imagine you've broken up with someone and then you like go back into your HBO Max and they're halfway through a movie and the name of the movie is, I really miss my ex.

Speaker 14 All of a sudden, the wheels start turning.

Speaker 14 Maybe I should text that person.

Speaker 15 Maybe there was something there.

Speaker 14 Yeah. So,

Speaker 14 yeah, keep watching it. Just, but oh, but last, last, The Last of Us, that's a

Speaker 15 hard watch. I'll say it.
That's a hard watch. I couldn't do it.
It was too dark. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Did I tell you about my idea for a sequel to The Last of Us? No. It's called The Second The Last of Us.

Speaker 15 Anyways.

Speaker 15 Oh, well, on that note,

Speaker 15 Whitney,

Speaker 15 thank you so much. And we should also just say it's delightful to have a producer on the show.
It is. Our team, Whitney, Rachel, Jen,

Speaker 15 Caitlin,

Speaker 15 Chris, Ryan,

Speaker 15 everyone works so far

Speaker 15 all year to make this show. And we are just so, so appreciative.
So thank you, Whitney. And yeah, don't let this be the last time.
Yeah,

Speaker 15 come back anytime. It was fun to be on.

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Speaker 15 Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyant.
We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

Speaker 15 Original music by Alicia Baititoup, Marion Lozano, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galokli.
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Speaker 15 You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Quee Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda.

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