The Discord Leaks, San Francisco Safety, and Kate Crawford on AI

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Speaker 14 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 12 So I'm on the flight back from Tokyo to London, which is about a 73-hour flight. Yeah, 73.
And I'm working on my book because I heard you're finished, which really upsets me. Okay.

Speaker 12 And I decide, okay, I'm going to take a break. Weeks ago.

Speaker 15 Weeks ago.

Speaker 12 I'm going to take a break from my 15 minutes of working on the book. And I pull up the TV.
And who do I see?

Speaker 12 I'm literally, I thought I was hallucinating. I had taken a Lunesta, had a couple of Jackson cuts.
I'm like, oh, my God, I'm now seeing, I'm hallucinating by Kara Swisher. You were on the BBC.

Speaker 15 The beep, yeah.

Speaker 12 Oh, my God. It was hilarious.
They would play 30 seconds of their interview with Elon Musk, and then he'd be like, Kara, what do you think? And be like, no, he's a fucking idiot. This makes no sense.

Speaker 12 You were very good, by the way. I thought that was,

Speaker 12 you know, most of your work I find pretty mediocre, but this was

Speaker 12 Mediocre Plus, the new streaming platform from Kara Swisher.

Speaker 12 Yes, thank you. You were very good.
I was really impressed.

Speaker 14 Thank you. You know, I thought it was BBC Radio.
That's why I was wearing a sweatshirt. I just did.

Speaker 12 I was like, you were just so over it. You're like, whatever.
He burnt his hand and called himself a hero.

Speaker 12 You had all of these like arsonists.

Speaker 14 He's an arsonist is telling us.

Speaker 12 Yeah, you had all of these Brian Williams adages. You're like, well, you know,

Speaker 12 a moose can't drive a convertible. You know, and you're like, what?

Speaker 12 And you're like, well, it kind of makes sense.

Speaker 14 They ask me a lot. I like the BBC.
They're smart. They're very smart.
I did a Canadian one, too, which you may, then your next flight find.

Speaker 14 Because I have to go up to Toronto. And then I was with the CBC, and they're so good at interviewing.
They're just really solid. They're not screaming.

Speaker 12 I'll tell you, you literally, that guy must hate you because anything you said, they'd stop and they'd go to you. And I'm like, this is why that was a really fucking stupid thing to say.

Speaker 12 You literally, you tore him limb from limb.

Speaker 14 It was a terrible interview. Come on.

Speaker 14 I mean, I expect that from Tucker Carlson tonight. He stuck his chin out.

Speaker 12 I couldn't believe that guy didn't push back.

Speaker 14 He didn't have any, like, he didn't just push back. He didn't have any, like, when he said, give me an example.

Speaker 14 That's what, that's what teenage boys do when you're like, your room is a mess. Give me a specific example.
Well, when you were rude to me, give me a specific example. You know what I mean?

Speaker 14 Like, you're just an asshole.

Speaker 12 I wanted, I was screaming at the interview because he said, well, you've laid off Holly Springs. I was like, okay, you're four months from bankruptcy.
What do you do?

Speaker 12 And I was like, boss, they weren't four months from bankruptcy until you took over.

Speaker 14 That's correct.

Speaker 12 They were financially solvent and on solid basis. That's correct.
Until you took over.

Speaker 14 He just made a crisis. He loves a crisis, that man.

Speaker 12 And alienated 70% of your advertisers and created a financial crisis. I agree.
I agree. Well, anyways, well done.
What did you do this weekend, Kara?

Speaker 14 I went to a funeral and a birthday party. My son turned into a bunch of people.
Well, tell me about the funeral.

Speaker 14 I will. It was interesting.
My aunt died.

Speaker 12 It's the last of my brother's sister.

Speaker 14 It was months ago. Yeah.
And so they did a memorial service and I drove Lucky out to Morgantown. Me and Lucky took a road trip to Morgantown, West Virginia, where my dad is from.

Speaker 14 And I took her to the, my dad's buried there. And I took her to the cemetery.
And then there was a memorial service at this. I don't know what her, she was very Christian.
She was quite Christian.

Speaker 14 So it was a lot of Jesus during the ceremony, which was actually, it was lovely. The kids are, they're her kids.
She has four kids. They're just, one is more terrific than the other.

Speaker 14 And, um, but uh, they're really great kids. And they, but it was a lot of Jesus everywhere, I have to say.

Speaker 15 She was very religious.

Speaker 12 As long as I gave her comfort, right?

Speaker 14 Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 The preacher was like the guy who was, and he was really, he was sort of a preacher type character because they kept doing the Jesus thing even when they were every everywhere you go, you move like a block and they're like, now let's thank Jesus and our Savior and stuff like that, which I really, I do respect.

Speaker 14 And it's some, this guy goes, I guess you're not too religious. I I said, actually, I'm Catholic, although I'm not a practicing Catholic.
And he goes, well, you probably don't like all this praying.

Speaker 14 And I said, you know what? I love your praying, but it's, it's getting a little much, I gotta say. I gotta say, it was nice.
It was really nice to celebrate her life.

Speaker 14 She was an incredibly kind and good person. And

Speaker 14 her husband is still living and he's terrific. And it was nice to go back.
I used to spend summers there

Speaker 14 when I was a kid.

Speaker 12 That's nice. Well, you know, Jesus drove a Honda, but he never spoke of of it.
He used to say, for I speak not of my own accord.

Speaker 12 Oh,

Speaker 12 a little dad humor to lighten up the light.

Speaker 14 Nice. Oh, you know, a little bit of

Speaker 14 a biblical. And it was nice to be with my mom driving hours and hours to West Virginia.

Speaker 14 That was like a road trip all.

Speaker 12 We almost lost another relative on the way down.

Speaker 14 You sit down here, mom, and I'll just leave you by the side of the road. No, it was my roots, my roots, as they say there.
My roots.

Speaker 12 It's my roots. I'm sorry for your loss.

Speaker 14 Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 14 Anyway, and Alex turned 18, which was nice. We took him for crabs.
We took him to

Speaker 12 crabs. Well, that's funny.
I got crabs on my 18th birthday.

Speaker 12 That was good. That was good.
I see that you're not. And Tijuana, actually.

Speaker 14 You're not making crab jokes about my 18-year-old son. Anyway, I think you thank you for speaking to him about college.

Speaker 14 Scott was very kind to talk to Alex because he's gotten to a couple places and give him good advice. And he keeps saying the word optionality to me now because I feel like it was true.

Speaker 12 Is that correct? Well, that was easy.

Speaker 14 He was saying optionality like all day yesterday, optionality, mom. And I'm like, where did you come up with that crazy phrase?

Speaker 12 Yeah, but literally, this is like, this is a conversation like, well, I don't know if I should go to this world-class university or this world-class university.

Speaker 12 And I'm like, Yeah, this is a tough one.

Speaker 12 Most of the kids I speak to are like, you know, at some point I want to go, got to be honest, boss, I think you're a little bit fucked in this economy, but your kid is definitely overachieving.

Speaker 14 Anyway, you had a great impact on him because he's talking like shotgun. He loves you.
He listens to prof G and

Speaker 12 Pivot.

Speaker 14 So Prof G and not pivot. Anyway, he's a big fan of yours, and you had a great impact because he went with your

Speaker 14 selection. I think he's gone with your selection.

Speaker 12 Oh, really? I think so. Oh, I'm excited.
That's great. I think it's going to be a great move for him.

Speaker 14 I see that you're back on Twitter. What happened?

Speaker 12 Well, I got back on after two and a half weeks, and I don't know. I can't figure out if it was a conspiracy or just a conspiracy of Dunces.
I think it was the latter. I don't think it was anything.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I'm back on. Yeah.
I'm back on Twitter. And did you miss me? How were the two weeks? I listened.
Did you enjoy the shows while I was gone?

Speaker 14 Yes, I did. I had Alyssa Farah, who was great.

Speaker 12 She's the view. The conservative on the view.

Speaker 14 She's the conservative on the view. She was terrific.
She was great, actually. And then Olivia Nutsi, who is from New York Magazine.

Speaker 14 She had written a big Stormy Daniels piece that week, so it was perfect. And she very political-oriented shows, but there's a lot of politics because of the indictment and stuff like that.

Speaker 14 And I'm glad you're back on Twitter. We're going to do it.

Speaker 12 We're going to do a lot of things. By the way, I listen to all your shows, and I think you perfectly encapsulated what it means to be a progressive now.

Speaker 12 A bunch of white women yelling at each other about what should offend us versus what affects us.

Speaker 12 I really enjoyed it, though. Yeah, she didn't.
Uh-uh.

Speaker 14 She likes Mike Pence. I let her go on about Mike Pence.

Speaker 12 You found the only woke Republican. I'm like, this woman's a Republican?

Speaker 14 She worked for Trump. She was at the Defense Department.
Mike Pence, Mark Meadows. This woman's got her bona fitis, but she's not part of the gang anymore.

Speaker 12 Yeah. She describes,

Speaker 12 She felt like what I would refer to as a Rockefeller Republican, and that is like sane conservative values, but not mean.

Speaker 14 Yes, that's what I would say.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I think we would part ways on abortion, all kinds of stuff, but you could at least, you know, it wouldn't be this sort of vicious struggle in the dirt, as in the mud, as Logan Roy, the now late Logan Roy says.

Speaker 14 Anyway, today we're going to do a lot of things.

Speaker 14 We're two notable arrests shaking up the tech community: one over the Discord leaks, the other over the murder of a San Francisco tech executive Bob Lee.

Speaker 14 And we'll speak with researcher Kate Crawford about secret ingredients of AI spooler alert its people.

Speaker 14 Elon Musk has biggest news following your Twitter return, Scott.

Speaker 14 In an interview with the BBC conducted on Twitter Spaces, Musk said most advertisers have returned and the platform is roughly breaking even and could be cash flow positive.

Speaker 14 This quarter, he has shown no proof of this, but there you have it. In another interview, he said the government can see your DMs, another thing he has no proof of, and many people say this is untrue.

Speaker 14 That I've spoken to.

Speaker 12 Three

Speaker 14 top executives from Twitter, former at very different times, wrote me, this is crap.

Speaker 14 So talk about any of any and all these things.

Speaker 12 Well, I thought you summarized it perfectly. I mean, that sincerely.
I thought your critique or analysis of the BBC interview, which I do real time, which must have driven him crazy,

Speaker 12 was

Speaker 12 exactly right. First off, you can't trust anything he says.
I don't believe that most advertisers have

Speaker 12 returned to the platform. I know big advertisers who left, and I have not heard their back.

Speaker 12 And what he basically has done is

Speaker 12 taken a company that he paid $44 billion for and turned it into a company that's probably worth four or seven.

Speaker 12 And,

Speaker 12 you know, again, and this is the Silicon Valley playbook, I'm going to start a fire in my backyard, pick up a hose, and then call myself a hero.

Speaker 12 I just, and the thing that just I think is hilarious is him, I think Tristan Harris and the people who signed that AI letter were really earnest and genuine about their concerns.

Speaker 12 I think where they screwed up was having, agreeing to have him sign it because as he was signing this letter urging for a pause, he's buying GPUs for

Speaker 12 Twitter to start ramping up AI at Twitter and is also supposedly starting his own AI startup. So what it comes right down to is anyone calling, you have to be very, you have to ask one question.

Speaker 12 Is someone who's calling for a pause in AI, are they genuine about the risks?

Speaker 12 It's like we're a number 50.

Speaker 14 He wants to catch up. He wants to catch up.

Speaker 12 So Karen, we're the 52nd biggest podcast in the world. I'd like the other 51 to pause on their pods for a while.

Speaker 12 That would be great. Right? Because it's just so ridiculous that Elon is calling for a pause as he is accelerating his own AI efforts.

Speaker 12 Everything he's, I mean, he's just monstrously full of shit is what it comes down to.

Speaker 14 And the government stuff, the government in your DMs. Literally, I got so many.

Speaker 12 Well, they can subpoena them, but they don't have open access to that.

Speaker 14 That's correct. But he's just claiming this on.
It's just crazy. I usually get

Speaker 14 tons of emails from Twitter executives, and and they're like, this is such shit, this idea that the government. Now, listen, I'm sure the government is spying everywhere.

Speaker 12 As these new documents, we'll just talk about in a minute, show.

Speaker 14 But they're not, they don't have access to your DMs unless you get subpoenaed. And if they spy, that's a different story.
And he doesn't have any proof of it.

Speaker 14 And what he does is he says things without proof. And that was my issue is like proofless.
Let's see the numbers then. Don't tell us it's breaking.

Speaker 14 Let's see the actual numbers and what's the advertising numbers? What's this? So I don't take his word for anything. I don't know about you, but cutting people, fine.
That seems fine.

Speaker 14 Probably saved a lot of money, right? A couple, whatever.

Speaker 12 But this libertarian notion that the deep state, this amorphous but evil, sinister thing is coming for you. First off, the government is us.

Speaker 12 And anyone who spends any reasonable amount of time with people who work for the most noble organization in the world, which is the U.S.

Speaker 12 government, will see that generally speaking, they're really good people who make less money than they would in the private sector because they want to do something in the service of their country.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 there's some incompetence, there's some waste, there's some bad actors, but for the most part, this notion that's being fomented that it's the deep state are by people who want to be the deep state themselves or that don't want...

Speaker 12 that don't want regulation. And if you look at the really bad shit that's gone down in the last few years, has it been a function of over-regulation or overstepping of the government boundary?

Speaker 12 Or is it because government hasn't done anything to stop crypto from vanishing or disappearing 1.3 million people's ftx accounts is it that there's overreach in social media and they're reading your dms or they haven't moved in to stop anything resembling a guardrail such that teenagers don't get images of nooses and pills and razors.

Speaker 12 It has not been government overreach that is the problem. It's been government underreach.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I just think, I just don't believe anything coming out of his mouth unless I see the actual proof. And I wouldn't even believe the proof, honestly.

Speaker 14 It's just so, it's so, just, he he says whatever pops into his brain.

Speaker 14 And that's, you know, I think one of the things I think was factual about that interview with the BBC is that I shouldn't be tweeting after 3 a.m. That is a very good piece of advice to himself.

Speaker 14 Another thing, calls are growing for, speaking of government, Senator Feinstein of California to resign, my longtime senator for when I was living there, the 89-year-old has missed almost 60 Senate votes and left a seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee open while at home recovering from shingles.

Speaker 14 The Judiciary Committee has only been able to confirm one judge in her absence last week.

Speaker 14 Feinstein released a statement saying she has asked Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to temporarily fill the seat until she's able to return, which is not the easiest thing in the world to do because you've got to get the Republicans to agree to it.

Speaker 14 I don't know.

Speaker 14 I mean, you talk about this issue a lot, and she refuses to step down. She refuses to step down.
But Strom Thurmond didn't step down either, as you recall.

Speaker 12 Yep. And he was wrong not to.
I think these people are public servants. And I think that at some point their service to the country should outweigh their narcissism and their

Speaker 12 understandable

Speaker 12 desire to stay in their jobs. And I think I got to give it to Representative Rocana.
He was the first to kind of take that leap, which was dangerous, and say, this is a dereliction of duty.

Speaker 14 He's a California representative in the House. He's getting a lot of prominence recently.

Speaker 12 Who's a Democrat?

Speaker 12 And by the way, that costs him a lot, I bet, of personal relationships and goodwill with people he knows.

Speaker 14 I bet people are giving them attaboys. Good for you.

Speaker 12 Well, you know what?

Speaker 12 It's never the wrong time to be right. And he's absolutely right because

Speaker 12 I had questions about Senator Fetterman's ability to serve.

Speaker 12 And you correctly pointed out, or I think there was a really good argument, that we're in such a sensitive time with such low margins for Democrats when you're talking about a woman's right to choice and protecting that, that a reliable blue vote is a lot of reason to vote for somebody.

Speaker 14 And he's back, by the way. He's back in the the office.

Speaker 12 I get that. I think that's a really good argument.
But now, in the case of Senator Feinstein, another Democrat would be appointed.

Speaker 12 And if you talk to people on her staff, this isn't something, quite frankly, that is probably going to get better.

Speaker 14 Well, there were a lot of articles about her cognitive abilities, too, not just shingles.

Speaker 12 A year ago.

Speaker 14 I don't, yeah, I don't even know. Oh, there was tons of, I have people who are very close to her.
And, you know,

Speaker 14 great,

Speaker 14 great mayor of San Francisco, great history as a senator. Some of the last years were, you know, up and down.
But it's really, it's an interesting question of this age.

Speaker 12 We're going to have more of it. 100%.

Speaker 14 No one said anything about Ronald Reagan. They kept it quiet.
It was wrong.

Speaker 12 I don't agree. I'll be honest with you.
I don't think President Biden should be running again.

Speaker 14 Well, as you said,

Speaker 12 at some point,

Speaker 12 there's a general trend in our society of hyperindividualism, where people believe

Speaker 12 their individualism and their rights supersede their fidelity to the Commonwealth or the greater whole.

Speaker 12 And I think it takes a certain amount of leadership and dignity to say, okay, I can no longer, I've lost a step. I can no longer.
Being a senator, I mean, you've spent time with these people.

Speaker 12 They do really hard work. It's really

Speaker 14 hard work. It's very exhausting.

Speaker 12 It's very mentally and physically taxing.

Speaker 14 100%. And

Speaker 12 most normal 69-year-olds would have a difficult time doing that. Agreed.

Speaker 14 Interestingly, Alyssa Ferris said that about Biden. She said that would be the greatest thing he could do for his country, doing George Washington, which was interesting.

Speaker 14 And then today I interviewed Jen Saki for the on podcast, and she talked about it.

Speaker 14 She said, he's got to prove, he's got to get out, they've got to get him out with the people and prove that he's cognitively.

Speaker 12 But it's not about whether he's cognitive now. The last time Marine One would leave the West Lawn if he's re-elected, he'd be 86.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 12 And at the end of the day, biology is not politically incorrect.

Speaker 12 And you need an individual, if need be, can get on an Air Force One to Singapore and be sharp in negotiating and start talking to commanders of the Pacific Fleet. This is a difficult, taxing job.

Speaker 14 I have a history of this with Reagan. I mean, Reagan, they had all kinds of paid.

Speaker 12 And he was 10 years younger than that. I agree.

Speaker 14 But he had, well, he had Alzheimer's, I think. Is that correct? Or something in that area.

Speaker 12 I mean, I'll even, just to really piss off people, I think Ruth Bader-Ginsburg should have resigned.

Speaker 12 I think she, I think her narcissism and popularity got in the way of her making the right decisions for what ultimately would be the right thing for the nation.

Speaker 14 Well, I have some news. I'll be quitting now because I'm old.

Speaker 14 I can't, I can't. I don't have the answer.

Speaker 12 Stepping down.

Speaker 14 Stepping down. Well, thank you.

Speaker 12 Thank God erectile dysfunction is not an issue in podcasting. I'll be here for a while.

Speaker 14 Speaking of erectile dysfunction, we have to move on from this topic. The Fox News Dominion trial was supposed to start on Monday as we record this.

Speaker 14 It went limp, but late Sunday night, the judge announced a delay until Tuesday. He has asked them to talk.
The parties are looking. The parties are not looking to settle.
Fox is looking to settle.

Speaker 14 The judge asked this to happen and avoid what was shaping up to be the libel travel century. The wind is all at Dominion's back here.
So they have to get exactly what they want.

Speaker 14 And Fox has to really give up some stuff. Last week, the judge sanctioned Fox News for withholding evidence and mischaracterizing Rupert Murdoch's role in the company.

Speaker 14 He's king, everybody, just FYI having worked for him. We'll see if they settle.
I think.

Speaker 14 they will unless they give up everything that they want and you know admit on the air and have like Tucker Carlson read it. That's the kind of thing I think Dominion would want.

Speaker 14 And Sean Hannity and especially Maria Bartaroma and Lou Doppes, all of them. I don't even think Lou Dops is still on there, but I don't think they're going to settle.

Speaker 14 And then there's another trial right after it, the SmartMadic trial. So I don't know.

Speaker 15 And then shareholder lawsuits, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 12 You haven't seen anyone want to settle this badly as the News Court board does

Speaker 12 since Elon Musk on the eve of the Delaware Chancery Court about to say, no, you've lied, and we're going to show how much you've lied in court. Indeed.
And what do you know?

Speaker 12 He kept saying, let's settle, let's settle, let's settle. And on the eve, he said, okay, I'll give you exactly what you want.

Speaker 12 And Twitter just said all along, no, you're closing at the exact same price. Right.
And Dominion,

Speaker 12 their lawyers, their counter should be the following. We'll settle at $1.6 billion.

Speaker 14 And apologies. They want public apologies.

Speaker 12 Even though they can't have cameras in the courtroom, can you imagine what they're going to do to Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs when they say, what are some of the, do you consider yourself a journalist?

Speaker 12 We're going to have to say yes. What are some of the responsibilities of the tenants around truth that a journalist has? Okay, now let me read you some of your emails.
Right. They are going to.

Speaker 14 They're tough trials. The New York Times had one with Sarah Palin, even though they did prevail on that.
They had a lot of stuff on their side and not this much proof. This was crazy.

Speaker 14 This is a crazy amount of proof that they did what. Dominion's saying they did.
I don't think Dominion wants to settle. That's my impression.
I think the judge was just like, let's try.

Speaker 14 And Fox is probably screaming for it. And we'll see.
They're not going to get what they want. They've misbehaved the whole time, including last week with all this stuff.
I say they don't settle.

Speaker 14 What do you say?

Speaker 12 Money is powerful, right? And you have a company. I mean, this is the weird thing.

Speaker 12 So there's some veracity to the notion that a $1.6 billion fine or judgment would be a little bit extreme given that the firm was seeking financing at a $60 million valuation. But

Speaker 12 News Corps not want this to go to trial. They are all wet.
Every day, there's going to be a ton of media sketching, talking about the questions. Right.

Speaker 12 And just how terrible this network and these anchors, their stars look. They might just say, they might bite the bullet and go, give them the $1.6 billion and let's call it a day.

Speaker 14 Yeah, they still need the apology. They're going to still demand the apologies.

Speaker 12 Well, they've already apologized. I don't think that.

Speaker 14 No, they're going to have to say it on the air.

Speaker 14 They're going to make them say it very explicitly for a matter of time.

Speaker 12 I think I really, I mean, all of us are really praying this goes to trial.

Speaker 14 Anyway, we'll see. Speaking of a thing, you got right.
JP Morgan Chase reported first quarter earnings and they're beating expectations.

Speaker 14 The bank's revenue rose 25% to almost $40 billion in profit jumped 52%.

Speaker 14 The report also suggested net interest income will be slightly over 80 billion this year, beating previous forecasts by $7 billion. Shares of the bank were up almost 10% in the last five days.

Speaker 14 Scott, I seem to remember you making a prediction about this in March. Let's play it.

Speaker 12 JP Morgan's about to have have their best quarter in history. The wave of capital that goes into JPMorgan and is going in.

Speaker 14 Just JPMorgan or Goldman or what?

Speaker 12 Oh, all of them will benefit, but no one's going to benefit like J.P. Morgan.

Speaker 14 Well done. Take a bow.

Speaker 12 That was an easy one. That was an easy one, Kara.

Speaker 14 Very smart. Well, there you are.
Let's take a bow for Scott Galloway. There you go.
Jamie Dimon's really hitting on all cylinders.

Speaker 14 It'd be interesting to see if he next becomes like a Treasury Secretary or Fed chairman.

Speaker 12 I would like to see him in government.

Speaker 12 I think he's a a great leader.

Speaker 12 And I think he's measured.

Speaker 12 Also, my limited experience of him, I think he's quite empathetic. And I think you want to talk about the difference between citizenship and these venture catastrophes.

Speaker 12 Four banks shored up and put deposits into the First Republic because they see that there is a benefit to having a healthy banking system.

Speaker 14 But he did bear hug Adam Newman, as you know.

Speaker 12 Well, he was looking for fees. He was looking for fees.
Remember, I'm the guy who interviewed him on stage at the J.P. Morgan conference.

Speaker 14 That's correct. But they're bankers.

Speaker 12 That's their job. I know.
I get it. But I would love to see him in government.
I think he's a really decent man.

Speaker 14 He's also very spicy. I've spent a lot of time with him.
He's a very spicy. He likes to get into arguments, which is great.

Speaker 14 Anyway,

Speaker 14 he's very accessible in that regard. He doesn't mind mixing it up, as they say.
Okay, let's get to our first big story.

Speaker 14 The man who allegedly murdered a Silicon Valley tech executive is in jail. Earlier this month, the founder of Cash App, Bob Lee, was stabbed to death on the streets of San Francisco.

Speaker 14 As the Bay Area mourned his death, some prominent tech personalities, most especially Elon Musk, were kicked to blame the killing of the city's leadership, its supposedly lax approach to crime.

Speaker 14 Among them, Elon, as I said, Jason Calakanis, who posted an all-caps tweet accusing city officials of, quote, enabling rampant violence.

Speaker 14 But there's one problem. On Thursday, police arrested a man they say killed Bob Lee.
He wasn't an unhoused person suffering a mental episode. He was another tech consultant who knew Lee personally.

Speaker 14 Reports say that Lee and his accused killer, Nima Momeni, argued about Momeni's sister prior to Lee's death. Our condolences to Bobs Lee's friends and family.

Speaker 14 Unfortunately, the information had a great story. He's been caught up in this fight, you know, over this thing.
He became a symbol of violence in San Francisco immediately.

Speaker 14 Everything about this is terrible. It seems to be a personal beef, what happened.
It's shocking nonetheless. But you don't want these pet theories to show up.

Speaker 14 He did the same thing around the Pelosi attack, all this violence towards people. They jumped to this, it's a crime, it's the homelessness,

Speaker 14 not just waiting to find out. The tech guys trying to make San Francisco into a healthcare, it's got enough problems, it is, it is, including homelessness.

Speaker 14 And the mayor just got a federal court just said she couldn't clean up people off the streets, for example. So she's contending with legal issues, fentanyl crisis, all kinds of things.

Speaker 14 And this just added to the pile.

Speaker 12 I mainly went to the data. And the reality is the murder rate for a city of 1 million people is not especially high or low in San Francisco.

Speaker 12 Having said that, and your opinion matters more here than mine because you spend a lot of time there.

Speaker 12 I live there. I've lived in L.A., San Francisco, Miami, New York, now London.
San Francisco for me is a distant fifth.

Speaker 12 That's the only place I would not live again. And whenever I go back there, and I only go back about once or twice a year now, I am shocked at how many severely mentally ill people

Speaker 12 are on the street in front of a building where there are billionaires. And I find that it's somewhat to stop.

Speaker 14 Downtown.

Speaker 12 Yes, downtown. But if you look at the data.

Speaker 14 Yep, look at, let me read the data. Local police data recorded 56 homicides each in 2022 and 2021, and that's a rise of 36% over 2019.
For comparison, Columbus, Ohio recorded 140 last year.

Speaker 14 That's quite a bit more. And Indianapolis recorded 226.

Speaker 12 St. Louis.

Speaker 14 I know. And Duval County, Florida is apparently quite a dangerous place to be.
But property crimes such as burglary and larceny are up according to the San Francisco PD, but still below 2017 levels.

Speaker 14 Certain areas of the city, I'll speak to this, like

Speaker 14 the tenderloin, some parts of Soma, some parts of Soma, not all, downtown, because nobody's downtown. It's a really bad situation.

Speaker 14 You go to every city, storefronts are closed, people aren't in offices, et cetera.

Speaker 14 And that's an issue. But my neighborhood is cleaned up a lot.
Like it's much better since the pandemic.

Speaker 14 And the area where he was killed, when that happened, if you remember me saying to to you, there's no way this was a just that I know this neighborhood. It's not a dangerous neighborhood.

Speaker 14 It's a desolate neighborhood.

Speaker 14 But I always felt it was like somebody new, like, because it was such a, it wasn't where you would imagine you'd run into something like that in any way.

Speaker 14 You know, we were talking about reading this, David Sachs, what he said on his all-in podcast where he blamed it.

Speaker 14 And he said he'd, I'm not going to play it because I don't want to listen to him blather on inaccurately.

Speaker 14 He said it was a psychotic, homeless, possibly a psychotic homeless person, which is, and then he used it to attack the city because a lot of them want to run for office.

Speaker 14 They want to run the city, essentially. So I find it incredibly sad that they continue to do this around attacks like the Paul Pelosi one.
It's just heinous to do things like this, especially around

Speaker 14 someone who died or was hurt either way.

Speaker 12 Yeah, the politicization of everything is. obviously discouraging because at the end of the day, I mean, the thing that's rattling here is a young,

Speaker 12 you know, someone's son was wandering around bleeding to death. He wasn't.

Speaker 14 He wasn't wandering around. He was, he went, this guy took him where he murdered him.
But go ahead. Sorry.

Speaker 12 Yeah, but wasn't he looking for help after he'd been stabbed?

Speaker 14 He was, yes. But this is a very empty part of the city.
I can't, I, I don't know how to describe it.

Speaker 12 My first thought when I heard about this was I was just really sad for the guy and that his life,

Speaker 12 you know, is being politicized, or his death, I should say, is being politicized. That's kind of sad on its own.
But my first thought was

Speaker 12 the tech community is much more dangerous than the the San Francisco community. These guys want to talk about that.

Speaker 12 The tech community and

Speaker 12 this belief that they're saviors and shouldn't be subject to regulation and their success at avoiding all regulation has resulted in a lot of unnecessary death of kids and children and tremendous damage to the Commonwealth.

Speaker 12 It's the tech community that's the menace, not San Francisco.

Speaker 14 And of course, they were immediately going, well, not in this, after doing that,

Speaker 14 same thing with SVB.

Speaker 14 After doing very irresponsible things, they're like, see, what we did made a difference. And here they're like, see, what we pointed out made a difference.

Speaker 14 I'm like, all you did was take a guy's death and use it for your own selfish purposes and just to scream. You know, Elon Musk is the worst of them.
But,

Speaker 14 you know, there's definitely, there was a really interesting story at the same time in,

Speaker 14 I think it was the Times. Yeah, Aaron Griffith did it about alleged fraud in Silicon Valley.
Charlie Javis at Frank was arrested last week, speaking of J.P. Morgan on charges of falsifizing data.

Speaker 14 Founders of Slink Slink Softer was arrested last month, charged with defrauding investors or upcoming fraud trials.

Speaker 14 The co-founder of Headspin, Carlos Watson of Aussie Media, was arrested on fraud charges. Elizabeth Holmes is headed to provision, of course, Sam Bankman Freed.
There's a lot of people, you know, this

Speaker 14 dishonesty going on, but it's also compounded by these people on the top just deciding to be trolls in a way that's really disturbing.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's not,

Speaker 12 you get to this certain level of influence. And again, it's more, let's shit post our local government, let's shit post our state government, let's not offer any solutions.

Speaker 14 Let's post our government making up stories about

Speaker 14 could not be true.

Speaker 12 And then in our notes, you have the actual text of this person's statements. And I apologize, I got to read it.

Speaker 12 We don't know what happened yet, but I think we suspect, and I would bet dollars to dimes, that this story, very similar to the case we had in LA, recently where a young woman was basically stabbed stabbed for no reason by a psychotic homeless person who had been through a revolving door of jail and criminal justice system who should have been locked up who was arrested multiple times but not kept locked up because of this push for decarceration push for decarceration we have more people locked up in this nation

Speaker 12 than I think the other 10 nations biggest nations combined we absolutely need a prison release program in this nation but and then to use terms like psychotic and homeless and by the way this was not a psychotic homeless person this was an acquaintance This is, yeah.

Speaker 12 So it's an acquaintance, yeah. It's again, it's just not.

Speaker 14 And then this is the last thing, so they are setting loose on us a predatory criminal or a psychotic element that jeopardizes our safety and makes these cities unlivable.

Speaker 12 They, meaning the tech community? No, the tech community is setting loose.

Speaker 14 I mean, no, government. The government.

Speaker 12 I know, but

Speaker 12 that's my point. The tech community is a much bigger threat to our society right now.
But on the whole, if you look at crime in America

Speaker 12 over any extended

Speaker 12 period of time, it's been going down.

Speaker 14 Yeah. There's no solutions.
That's what it is. It's never about solutions.
It's all about accusations.

Speaker 12 It's about recall Democrats and put libertarian weirdos, i.e. me, in office.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and do nothing about it. And then be authoritarian.
Like the fact that

Speaker 14 Musk is doing this and at the same time, Russia just convicted someone 25 years for dissent. They don't care about that.

Speaker 14 They don't care about. They don't attack Russia for that.
In any case, it wasn't wasn't a psychotic homeless person, all you bros who did this.

Speaker 14 We look forward to all your next monologues about cracking down on the culture of tech entrepreneurs who don't think the rules apply to them. That's what we need to crack down on.

Speaker 14 Anyway, Scott, let's go on a quick break. We come back.
A popular app is in the news for national security risk, but it's not the one you think.

Speaker 14 And we'll speak with a friend of Pivot, Kate Crawford, about the planetary cost of artificial intelligence. You'll enjoy that conversation.

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Speaker 14 Scott, we're back. The U.S.
national security state is in disarray. They're not like sneaking around.

Speaker 14 In fact, over Discord, last week, the FBI arrested 21-year-old Air National Guard Jack Tashira on charges of unlawfully copying and possessing classified defense records.

Speaker 14 Authorities said Tashira uploaded the documents to the app Discord, where he shared them in a private chat room that you can have there. That included about 20 people, many of them young men.

Speaker 14 The online group shared an interest in guns, video games, and frequently posted racist and anti-Semitic memes.

Speaker 14 The documents provide some insight into the war in Ukraine, although they don't know which ones are real or not, including a bleak assessment of Ukraine's upcoming spring offensive.

Speaker 14 There are also some reveals around the U.S.'s ability to spy on Russia. Apparently, we're good at it.
And evidence that U.S. is spying on its allies.
Not a surprise, of course, but embarrassing.

Speaker 14 I'd love you to comment on these document leaks. Other leakers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner leaked to journalists and wanted their leaks to have large social impact.

Speaker 14 This leaker seemed to have clout with teens. He wanted to impress teens and school them.
So talk to me about this because there's a whole young men thing in here.

Speaker 14 There's a whole security thing in here.

Speaker 12 I found this really upsetting, and I think it calls on a number of issues.

Speaker 12 The first is obviously in the short term, they're going to have to review the protocols around who has access to classified documents.

Speaker 12 1.2 million people in our government have access to classified documents.

Speaker 12 And it's actually been expanded since 9-11 because they found some of the red flags that were ignored around 9-11 were because interagency shareability wasn't happening.

Speaker 12 So they actually lowered and loosened the requirements for who has access to classified information. But I'm sure they'll address that sooner rather than later.

Speaker 12 The issues that it really brings up, I think, that are more interesting is one,

Speaker 12 again,

Speaker 12 If you look at the pharmaceutical industry worth a couple trillion dollars and has a big impact on our society, massive regulation, hundreds of millions of dollars to get through FDA hurdles to get anything on the shelves.

Speaker 12 If you look at the restaurant industry, once we have 20 locations,

Speaker 12 you have to disclose the number of calories. If you want to put out a product, any sort of consumer product, it has to go through testing.

Speaker 12 If you want to launch a car, you have to have all sorts of emission standards, airbags.

Speaker 12 The industry that is worth more and has more influence than any of these industries has absolutely no regulation or guardrails.

Speaker 12 And the question I would put forward is similar to sex trafficking.

Speaker 12 If we had a carve-out from 230 on national security, I would bet, I would speculate that organizations and platforms, including Discord, could use an LLM, a large language model to recognize this type of data and before it gets forwarded or out of control, move in and flag it for human review.

Speaker 12 But because there is no need, there is no incentive.

Speaker 14 It costs too much.

Speaker 12 The zero-to-land speed record of young, dumb men getting in trouble and causing huge damage has never been greater.

Speaker 12 We have given every kid in this nation a car that no longer goes 60 miles an hour, but goes 600 and said, no airbags, have at it.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 it also goes to a larger issue, and that is younger people have less opportunity.

Speaker 12 to

Speaker 12 get together with people offline. In general, the offline analog to anything online is much safer, much better, much more empathetic, much more loving.

Speaker 12 These kids were into Christianity and they were into guns.

Speaker 12 If they had been at a gun range and started yelling out anti-Semitic tropes, someone at the gun range would have said, cut that shit out and this is why you don't say that shit.

Speaker 12 If they had been at church, in a church group and laid out on the table, hey, I have information. about

Speaker 12 the Ukrainian war effort, someone in that church would have said, this is dangerous. Come here, speak to me.

Speaker 12 But what you have have online is absolutely no guardrails.

Speaker 12 So you take every terrible impulse, poor judgment that young men, especially, demonstrate in spades, and it goes from zero to really fucking awful faster than ever before.

Speaker 14 I have mixed feelings about the Edward Snowden stuff, the Reality Winner stuff, Chelsea Meaning. Some of it, you know, the government was saying they were not doing things that they were doing.

Speaker 14 I don't know what they could have done otherwise in many ways, except become what is considered traitorous. At the same time, this seemed to be done for just social status.
Social status.

Speaker 14 And you're just like, what? Like, and also what happened to you that this is how you are? Like, this is what you think about the government.

Speaker 14 It's like you're too much, too many online conspiracy tropes, but it's sort of like, wow, you were in a position of authority of some point. And this is what you do with it.

Speaker 14 You know, this is, this is your thing just to impress 15 teenagers and have status among them.

Speaker 14 If you read some of the articles, the Washington Post had one of someone in that group, a young guy, and his quotes were heartbreaking. Like he was cool, he was tough, he was our guy.

Speaker 14 And I was like, oh my God, your life is so small on your little online service.

Speaker 12 It's getting smaller and smaller because

Speaker 12 lack of male role models, lack of offline socialization, lack of potential for romantic interests. All of these things are guardrails.

Speaker 12 All of these things, when you're in person with people, whether it's a Boy Scout troop, whether it's an after-school program, whether it's

Speaker 12 a male, a man who takes an interest in your life, whether it's the prospect of a romantic relationship.

Speaker 12 All of these things serve as guardrails where you start behaving in a more societally accepted way.

Speaker 12 And when you go online and can begin clotting with other extremists from around the world, and there's no safeguards, there's no. I agree.
Snowden and Assange, that was different.

Speaker 12 They saw themselves as people who were deeply disturbed by what the state was doing, took a risk. I think they knew they were taking a risk.

Speaker 12 This is a kid who made a series of terrible decisions, and he's probably Kara going to be in a basement cell in a max, super max federal prison for the rest of his life. He may never.

Speaker 14 It is a long time. This is the end of his adulthood, really.

Speaker 14 Yeah, his life is ruined.

Speaker 14 Although he's become a right-wing look, Marjorie Taylor Greene thought he was a hero for doing this.

Speaker 14 The thing is, you don't know what's real and what's not mixed in there. That's the thing.
It's like, who knows? He was copying some things down.

Speaker 14 It's just like, oh, God, this just makes it even more confusing. One interesting detail in the documents: the U.S.,

Speaker 14 there was a U.S. intelligence assessment that repeated an internal claim from the Russian government that says social media platforms catch less than 1% of fake Russian accounts.

Speaker 14 If the claim is true, and who knows, it comes from Russia, who knows? They're probably bragging on things. It's a pretty damning indictment of Meta's efforts to combat disinformation.

Speaker 14 It could also reflect poorly on Twitter's mass layoffs. Who's to say? Like, who's to say, right?

Speaker 14 In that area. And then in the other area is this, the names, this this right-wing hate group kind of mentality.
The group was called Thug Shaker Central.

Speaker 14 It's a racist, anti-gay joke, about a gay porn thing, I think, I believe,

Speaker 14 where the documents shared

Speaker 14 it was called Bear versus Pig for a Russian slur about Ukrainian people. You know, that was also disturbing sort of disguise in the military.
And I'm not surprised necessarily.

Speaker 14 There's a survey that found more than one-third of all active duty troops reported witnessing white nationalism or racism within the ranks. This is not a surprise either.

Speaker 14 But it's just sort of this attitude towards our country that's just so,

Speaker 14 I don't expect you to be raw, raw, patriotic. I'm not.
But it's this idea of Armageddon almost, right? Like what anything goes. And again,

Speaker 14 it's linked to that stuff we were talking about earlier.

Speaker 12 It's a lack of respect for institutions. It's a lack of appreciation for shared stories.

Speaker 12 And quite frankly, the liberal press is guilty of some of the reason why people don't feel as good about America as they should.

Speaker 12 And these young people, they don't have the same economic prospects that my generation had. They don't have the same opportunities for socialization.

Speaker 12 And so they find each other, they engage in extremist content. And it just sort of the zero to 60 from bad impulses and poor judgment to something really damaging is just much more fluid online.

Speaker 12 And look at,

Speaker 12 you make bad judgments on alcohol. So look at the guardrails we put in there.
You're not supposed to drink under the age of 21. Cigarettes.
Cigarettes, adult content. I mean, we educate the military.

Speaker 12 We have all sorts of guardrails. I mean, I know this sounds stupid.
You know what I think would have saved this? If this kid had had a girlfriend. Yeah.
And where do 21-year-olds?

Speaker 14 I gotta say, both my sons are nicer with their girlfriends.

Speaker 12 I love having them having girlfriends. You know what? They get their shit together.
The prospect for companionship and, quite frankly, sex makes men behave much better.

Speaker 12 And also, a woman who tends to be a little bit more thoughtful and more engaged in slow thinking says, should you really be copying confidential national security documents and putting them on Discord?

Speaker 12 You know, it's just, but these kids have no opportunities or fewer and fewer opportunities to build offline relationships with each other.

Speaker 15 Yep.

Speaker 12 And we're mammals. We're meant to be, we're meant to be in each other's presence.
And the, you know, you just, if you have sons and you think about, you see firsthand what fucking idiots they can be.

Speaker 12 Because

Speaker 12 you're literally your role as a father and as a mother is to be their prefrontal cortex.

Speaker 12 And the problem is every piece of bad judgment can take a, you know, can take a firecracker and turn it into a fucking nuclear bomb online. Right.
Agreed. It can go to millions of people.

Speaker 12 It can do tremendous damage. And not only that,

Speaker 12 when they say these things, if they said these things in a group of people, of normal people in the community,

Speaker 12 someone in the community would intervene and go, no, this is wrong. And this is why it's wrong.
And this is why I'm going to get involved in your life. And this is,

Speaker 12 but online, it's like, well, let's find all the other crazies.

Speaker 14 Yeah. There are some great places online to find community.
There really are, but this is just so toxic. You know, it's going to get worse.
So we need to talk to our friend of Pivot.

Speaker 14 Kate Crawford is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Labs, a research professor at USC Annenberg, and author of Atlas of AI, Power Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence.

Speaker 14 Welcome, Kate Crawford. You and I have talked many times.
Let's start like some some basics. Everyone's familiar with generative AI, like ChatGPT, but help bring us back to the basics.

Speaker 14 How do you define artificial intelligence?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, I think there's a common misperception with AI that it's, you know, this set of...

Speaker 15 mathematical or sometimes magical functions in the cloud. But actually, these are profoundly material systems that have very real impacts.

Speaker 15 They use lots of human labor, lots of natural resources like energy and water, and of course a gigantic amount of data.

Speaker 15 So part of what I think is really useful with understanding AI is really breaking it down into its component elements, really demystifying it and moving away from the kind of super intelligence hype that's happening at the moment to really say, you know, these are socio-technical systems.

Speaker 15 People build them. They build them on all of these resources.
Let's look at how they work.

Speaker 15 And I think that's a really good way to start to unpack a lot of the kind of gloss that gets attached to this term AI.

Speaker 14 All right. So explain,

Speaker 14 you can call it big data, machine learning, cloud computing,

Speaker 14 and now a generator of AI.

Speaker 14 Explain the differences for people. And now that we're finally talking only about something like ChatGPT, what it means for the field.

Speaker 15 Well, there's a really long history here. We could go back to the Dartmouth conference in the late 1950s.

Speaker 15 We could look at the first phases of AI that were really focused on expert systems that were about modeling human understanding. So you would literally try to teach a computer linguistic principles.

Speaker 15 You know, this is how language works.

Speaker 12 Right, sure.

Speaker 15 We start to see this really big shift that happens in the 1970s and 80s that takes off with the popularization of the internet, which is this idea of really just probabilistic modeling.

Speaker 15 So effectively trying to guess the next word in a sentence, you know, doing this type of mode of brute force AI, which is much closer to what we're seeing with things like GPT.

Speaker 15 So we could get super technical about how generative AI works, but the important thing to understand is that these are essentially gigantic probabilistic models. They don't understand language.

Speaker 15 They're much more interested in predicting things, predicting the next word in a sentence, predicting the type of image that you might be requesting.

Speaker 15 And it's not coming from a basis of understanding all all language or understanding all languages.

Speaker 14 Or the intelligence of humans.

Speaker 15 It's a very different form of interpretive ability. I think even the word intelligence can actually be a bit of a trap here.
I mean, intelligence has its own gnarly history as a term.

Speaker 15 And I think it can become a real cul-de-sac where people try to anthropomorphize these systems when actually they are very large statistical analysis at scale.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I always say it's not real. They're not real people.
I say like, I don't know what regular people are getting that idea. So is chat GPT a radical technological advance from your perspective?

Speaker 15 You know, that's a really good question because the idea behind ChatGPT has actually been around for decades.

Speaker 15 I mean, we could go back to Joseph Weisenbaum, who created ELISA, you know, in the 1960s at MIT, which is essentially a chat bot that just used simple scripts and was designed as a therapist that would basically ask your questions back to you.

Speaker 15 And Weisenbaum wrote at the time that he was shocked how easily people were taken in by this. He said it was basically creating delusional thinking and quite normal people.

Speaker 15 And like, why would people believe this?

Speaker 15 And what we have now is decades later, a huge shift in computational scale, a huge shift in available data, which means much better modeling of speech, much better modeling of ideas, information, things that these systems are trained on.

Speaker 15 And they are trained on truly, I mean, we're talking about data sets the size of the internet itself.

Speaker 15 So think about putting that in a blender and you're really getting an idea of, you know, how much data these things are working with with the foundational model.

Speaker 15 So perhaps what's new here is not so much the idea, but the difference that scale can make.

Speaker 12 I'm curious what you think of this AI pause movement.

Speaker 15 So this is a very big deal in the AI world. So basically over a thousand scholars and business leaders signed the letter that said, pause for six months.

Speaker 15 I didn't sign it. And here's why.
It's, it's really framed in this kind of apocalyptic tone, essentially.

Speaker 15 It talks about this idea of, you know, incredibly powerful digital minds ending human civilization.

Speaker 15 And I think this is a massive distraction from what we really need right now, which is how do we actually regulate these systems?

Speaker 15 What impacts are they going to have right now on things like misinformation and security?

Speaker 15 So I think in some ways it's sort of drawing us away from the bigger issues that are underlying these questions.

Speaker 15 I also noticed that Elon Musk was one of the first people assigned, you know, asking for a pause.

Speaker 14 And he just said at an interview, it's going to kill us all.

Speaker 12 It has the potential of civilizational destruction.

Speaker 15 And then two weeks later, he announces that he's training his own AI model called X.

Speaker 12 So I'm like,

Speaker 12 surprised to be.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that doesn't surprise Scott or I, but go ahead.

Speaker 15 No,

Speaker 15 it's not surprising, but I think it points to some mixed motivations about why people are signing that letter. But if there's something really useful here, it's that there are concerns.

Speaker 15 And I think you'll see several more letters start to circulate before the end of the year from different types of communities.

Speaker 12 Just as a follow-up, it feels as if we'd be smart to get out, at least not ahead of it, but develop some sort of regulatory oversight and not make the same original sin of the internet and have no regulation.

Speaker 12 Is there a model we can look at in terms of an industry for,

Speaker 12 let's say, okay, we're charged with establishing some sort of regulatory oversight that lets a thousand acorns bloom and keeps our lead in this and creates economic growth?

Speaker 12 And I'm actually excited about this technology. I think it could be an unbelievable unlock across healthcare, medical research,

Speaker 12 you name it.

Speaker 12 What could we do to ensure that we we don't make the mistakes of the past with other emerging technologies?

Speaker 15 Right. Well, I mean, you're pointing to exactly this issue of balance.
You know, how do we ensure that those benefits are possible with the types of guardrails that we need? And

Speaker 15 there's different theories that have been circulating around, but one of the core things, America still doesn't have basic comprehensive federal data protection laws, right?

Speaker 15 So we can think about the GDPR in Europe. You know, that would allow us to have much more more control over how our data is being used to train these models.

Speaker 15 So there's a proposed American Data Privacy and Protection Act, the ADPAR. I think that's definitely a step in the right direction.
But, you know, I wonder if we need something a little more urgent.

Speaker 15 And for example, the White House has had a domestic policy council for decades that kind of coordinates policy across diverse and, you know, different sorts of areas, including criminal justice, healthcare, education.

Speaker 15 You could imagine something like an AI policy council that would go across these domains.

Speaker 14 It can't be called an information council, though, because look what happened there, right?

Speaker 12 Well, exactly, right?

Speaker 15 We know how that goes. But you could think about what's happening with AI in the Department of Education, in transportation, in labor, in the SEC, in the FTC.

Speaker 15 You've got all of these different agencies and groups seeing different parts of the elephant. So, how do we quickly harmonize a sort of a policy vision across all of those components?

Speaker 15 And I think, honestly, trying to do this quickly is one of the most important things right now. Now, the EU is streets ahead.

Speaker 15 They've got their AI Act, which should be becoming law essentially by the end of this year.

Speaker 15 But even there, they started framing that three years ago plus, and they're now racing to catch the generative AI framework.

Speaker 14 So they've been at it. We tend not to do anything.
Because, you know, let's talk about who benefits from the efforts.

Speaker 14 Because one of the issues I keep focusing, I said, let's stop talking about student term papers and it killing us because really that's not a concern, either of them is not the biggest concern we have.

Speaker 14 But who controls and owns it? Who benefits are these private, large private companies, which I do agree with Elon on, and although he wants to be one of them.

Speaker 14 I don't want to be in his camp because I think he's just Maddie's behind and they didn't want to do what he wanted to do. How do you share them across society?

Speaker 14 Because this is really, again, our information. Right.
It's ours that these private companies are using to benefit themselves and then vomit it back up at us in some fashion.

Speaker 14 And then if you could talk, you just mentioned environmental impacts,

Speaker 14 add that in, because then we'll pay for that too, if there are impacts, not them.

Speaker 15 Well, this is one of the questions that the research field has really been pointing to for years, which is concentration of power.

Speaker 15 So you could go back to the first dot-com boom and you could look about how many players were there and kind of, you know, making money from pets.com or whatever it might be.

Speaker 15 And then you start to see that number start to shrink. And you could think about sort of the big data moment, the deep learning moment.

Speaker 15 We really start to see fewer and fewer companies who are really at the forefront. And now we are looking at one of the most concentrated industries in terms of who can do generative AI at scale.

Speaker 15 Now, the interesting counterpoint to this is the number of open source models that are starting to be released.

Speaker 15 And that...

Speaker 15 you know, we can we can raise questions there too around, okay, if it costs so much in terms of energy, in terms of human labor to try and make these things work and to build in some guardrails, and that happens at multiple layers in these technical models,

Speaker 15 are people going to be able to do that in the open source models? And what is that going to do to these broader public harms and risks that many of us have been flagging?

Speaker 15 So I think in the end, you're looking at the moment at a kind of an interesting turn, which is, are we going to see the gains just go to the same big tech players?

Speaker 14 And of course Microsoft, Google.

Speaker 15 Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Adobe's just released a model. I mean, it really is the kind of, you know, all of the big players are in this now.
This is, this is, everybody is playing this game to win.

Speaker 15 But then you've got this open source question. And so,

Speaker 15 again, we've seen this play out historically before, but I do think that if we start to see these models being able to be trained with less data and with less energy, which is key, then it opens up some more space.

Speaker 14 For everybody, for innovative young companies.

Speaker 15 That's right.

Speaker 12 What are you most excited about?

Speaker 12 Where do you think the, just talking about trying to be a little bit glass half full here, where do you think the most disruptive change for good lies in terms of this new technology?

Speaker 15 Well, the things that, I mean, I'm going to speak personally here, the things that I use these sorts of large language and large multimodal models for is like summarization.

Speaker 15 Extremely good at, you know, give it a long document, get a really concise answer. Coding, you know, I haven't had to code for years.

Speaker 15 Takes me all the way back to, you know, when I was learning this stuff in my late teens, early 20s. I can, you know, really, what is amazing is that the hot programming language in 2023 is English.

Speaker 15 You can literally just write the program that you would like to produce and you'll get that. That is exciting to me.
I think that actually

Speaker 14 spreadsheet questions. It's like spreadsheets.

Speaker 14 Who uses an abacus anymore except for Scott?

Speaker 12 Well,

Speaker 15 they're kind of cool. But yeah, I mean, I think in some ways, I think it's more transformative than a spreadsheet.

Speaker 15 I think you really have to think about some of the biggest technological changes that we've experienced. I mean, a lot of people compare this to, say, the iPhone or

Speaker 15 the Internet. I tend to go further back.
I kind of think about this in relation to, say, the creation of artificial perspective in the 1400s. It literally changed how we represented the world.

Speaker 15 And that's why I think these models are so powerful.

Speaker 15 And Scott, you know, there's some big upsides there, but there's also some very big social questions that we have to get ahead of because if they just get released and they just go and do their thing, we know that a whole lot of problems can emerge.

Speaker 15 So this is why research and guardrails are so important.

Speaker 14 10 years from now, if you had to make a prediction for AI, where it is, besides killing us all, apparently.

Speaker 15 Kara, you know, I don't know.

Speaker 15 It's been such a hectic year. I mean, I don't know how much sleep you guys are getting, but we've, I mean, I've just never seen this fast.

Speaker 14 You AI people must be crazy.

Speaker 15 I've never seen anything this fast. I've been in this field for almost two decades.
This is unlike anything else.

Speaker 15 I think it's really difficult to make a 10-year prediction, but I do think that the things that keep me up at night are not, you know, machines that are going to run the world.

Speaker 15 It's going to be people who haven't done enough of the work to actually think about the really complex social interactions that are going to happen, you know, that are already happening with these systems.

Speaker 14 Here's what I'm scared of: the people who run the machines keep me up at night.

Speaker 12 If you're somebody who wants to get,

Speaker 12 say, from A to, you'll never get to Z, but wants to get some elemental or some basic foundational knowledge of AI, what LLMs would you suggest experimenting with?

Speaker 12 How do you get to not letter Z, but letter D or E quickly?

Speaker 15 Well, I'm a big fan of experimentation. So there's different types of models out there.

Speaker 15 As we know, there are ungrounded ones that just, well, give you answers and you won't know where the source comes from.

Speaker 15 There are so-called grounded models that are connected to search results that will give you a different kind of set of answers.

Speaker 15 But honestly, one of the things that I'm really excited about is how do we put this in this broader social and cultural context? And that means you need to read further afield.

Speaker 15 That's part of kind of what we're doing with our knowing machines research project is really trying to show people, okay, let's think about how you might actually interact with a model yourself.

Speaker 15 How do you start to look at training data and understand how it maps the world? And then how might you start to think about how you'd use these systems differently?

Speaker 15 In some ways, I think we need this kind of rapid increase in literacy. And it's not just going to be about focusing narrowly on the tech.

Speaker 15 It's going to be looking at what does this this do to the public sphere? What does it do to the media? What does it do to democracy?

Speaker 15 That's the piece we need to be thinking about.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I try and use it every day. And I just think it's fascinating.
And I'm a big believer that it's not AI is not going to take your job. Someone who understands AI is going to take your job.

Speaker 12 So I think my advice to any young person would be is Kate is suggesting experiment with this and get good at it. It's a weapon.
You want to be trained in it.

Speaker 14 100%. It is like using the internet in the early days.
Anyway, the Atlas of AI is available everywhere. and Kate is on Twitter and Mastodon.
Thank you, Kate Crawford.

Speaker 15 It's great to see you both.

Speaker 12 Thanks, Kate.

Speaker 14 You know, that was really interesting. The one thing I thought most interesting was coding.
Like, you say, I want a program that does this, and it does it for you.

Speaker 14 Like, you don't need to, just like you don't need to fix, you know, there's a lot of things you don't need to do anymore that you used to, you know, basic research, the internet help, for example.

Speaker 14 That's really interesting that you could code without learning to code. Why bother? Because it does it for you.

Speaker 15 Anyway, just thought that was interesting.

Speaker 14 Not sure if you want to code with me, Scott, but in any case.

Speaker 12 I'll melt with you, but I won't code with you. Okay.

Speaker 14 One more quick break. We'll be back for wins and fails.

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Speaker 14 Okay, Scott, let's do some wins and fails. I'm going to start with a fail.

Speaker 14 Russian journalist Vladimir Akaramirza was convicted and sentenced to 25 years on charges of treason after he criticized the war in Ukraine. He's in jail, obviously, is for political views.

Speaker 14 He's very sick. He was poisoned, too.
It's depressing, the whole thing. And of course, American journalist Evan Gersovich remains in jail in Russia.
The U.S. ambassador to Russia finally visited him,

Speaker 14 but also in potentially trouble to get the same kind of sentence for treason. What kills me is all these people talking about free speech in this country and then giving an easy time to Russia.

Speaker 14 These people, it's sort of like the people who maybe on the left who are censorious, and then the people who actually pass terrible laws around gays and trans or whoever they happen to or abortion.

Speaker 14 That's, we need to focus on Russia, like what they're doing here. And they are thugs, they are the world, the global thugs of this world, I think, and getting closer and closer to China.

Speaker 14 I can't believe what these families are going through with their relatives just convicted in a kangaroo court.

Speaker 14 You know, at least we have courts that have problems, but they're not kangaroo courts.

Speaker 14 In any case,

Speaker 14 that is my fail. That is my fail.

Speaker 12 All right. Any wins?

Speaker 14 Oh, happy birthday, Alex.

Speaker 14 And Louie's birthday is coming up soon. They're really wonderful kids, as I've always said.
And so Louie's going to be 21. And Alex is 18.
So

Speaker 14 they're on their own now. They're on their own.

Speaker 12 They're both

Speaker 14 Good luck, boys. Enjoy.
I've done all that I can for you. Anyway.

Speaker 12 My win and fail both fall under the same kind of umbrella, and that is

Speaker 12 if you have high blood pressure, you just become much more vulnerable to a series of health outcomes. If you're pre-diabetic, I mean, there's just certain things.

Speaker 12 Absolutely. If your body mass index is over a certain

Speaker 12 level, you're just prone to all sorts of bad health outcomes. And I think there are some things in our nation that are basically high blood pressure.

Speaker 12 And unless we address them, we're just going to have a series of bad outcomes. We can never be truly healthy.

Speaker 12 And I think that reinvesting in young people and giving them opportunities to be more economically and emotionally viable, especially young men, is a huge issue. I think

Speaker 12 some sort of common sense gun regulation.

Speaker 12 But far and away, the number one for me, and it's become a litmus test for who I'm going to vote for and who I'm going to give money to, is until we restore something resembling modern progressive rights for 51% of our our nation, specifically a woman's right to choose, I just think we're going to have terrible outcomes everywhere.

Speaker 12 I just can't see how we move forward and claim to be a progressive empathetic nation when we are rolling back women's rights.

Speaker 12 It is so counter to every modern, thoughtful societal movement around the world, whether it's Ireland, whether it's Mexico. It's just, it's so incredibly discouraging.

Speaker 12 And we have always held onto this cold comfort that it couldn't happen here, and it is happening. And so my fail is in Florida, my state where I'm a resident, just passed an incredibly,

Speaker 12 or the governor just signed a very restrictive abortion law with very few exceptions. It's a bill banning abortions after six weeks.

Speaker 12 Both my children, we didn't know we were pregnant until after six weeks. That is correct.
Me either. And not only that, I mean, as if to say, you know, and a big fuck you to women, if

Speaker 12 the exception of rape or incest, you have to show a police report.

Speaker 14 Documents, yeah.

Speaker 12 To prove incest.

Speaker 12 And in the case of the life of the mother, two doctors, two doctors must sign off on an abortion. And Florida is a wonderful, diverse state, huge state.

Speaker 12 And the fact that they've basically outlawed choice, it means to me that Florida is no longer part of a modern functioning democracy.

Speaker 14 And they did it under the dark of night. They didn't do it.
They did it 11 o'clock at night. He didn't do, because he knows it's a losing issue in elections, right? So he's trying to do it and then

Speaker 14 get credit among the people he needs to please and yet not let everybody else know.

Speaker 14 We're going to hang this around his neck.

Speaker 12 100%. And I believe it was a stupid move for him.

Speaker 12 And granted, I have some bias here, but the reality is one of the best examples of minority rule is that the majority, the vast majority of Americans believe in a woman's right to choice.

Speaker 12 And the nation is headed the other way. It is the best example of minority rule in our nation, maybe with the exception of assault weapons.
And then my win is on the same subject.

Speaker 12 It is now a litmus test for me. Janet Protosiewicz, I think is her name, was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court and flipped it to a more progressive body.

Speaker 12 And it was basically Wisconsin voters, and there's more, Republicans outnumber Democrats here, which is a tell for how America feels about this.

Speaker 12 It was really about choice and a little bit about gerrymandering. But America has said, how can we pretend to be an economically viable? I mean, this not only goes to just basic human rights,

Speaker 12 it goes to our economy. It goes to our ability to have functioning households.
It goes to our ability to have kids who are raised in loving, economically secure households.

Speaker 12 And I'd like to think, and my win here is that Wisconsin, which is sort of a purple, slightly reddish hue, has said, okay,

Speaker 12 this is just out of control.

Speaker 14 She won by a lot. She won by a lot, too.
It wasn't a little. It wasn't a squeaker.

Speaker 12 No, this really is.

Speaker 14 And I'm hoping. Young people.

Speaker 12 I'm hoping this represents a bottom on this and that and that the demo and democracy is going to kick in here.

Speaker 14 And then more people.

Speaker 14 Scott, they're relentless. These people are relentless.

Speaker 12 Well,

Speaker 12 but we have justice and righteousness on our side, Kara. And I do think that America gets it right over the long term.

Speaker 14 These people are fucking relentless and they'll stoop to no, they'll stoop to every low possible. But go ahead, sorry.
I think they're relentless.

Speaker 12 Yeah, but I have a lot of faith in our system, not over the short term, but over the medium and the long term. And I do think that this is, I think people are waking up to the fact that

Speaker 12 our fears are being realized. And again, we're all sort of took this cold comfort that, oh, it couldn't happen.
I even think a lot of Republicans weren't expecting it to go this far.

Speaker 12 And I think that I'd like to think Florida is a terrible example of where it can go, but Wisconsin hopefully represents a turning point.

Speaker 12 And anyways, my win is that essentially the voters of Wisconsin have decided to ideologically flip their Supreme Court because

Speaker 12 they are, in my opinion, concerned and worried about the constant.

Speaker 12 We're the only nation. I think we're the only nation in the world that hasn't been taken over by religious fanatics where rights are being taken away.

Speaker 12 That's never happened in the history of America. We always granted rights to people, additional rights to people.
So anyways, my fail is what is an incredibly restrictive, primitive,

Speaker 12 just no way around it, misogynistic law that's been passed in Florida, the great state of Florida, which is feeling less great today. And I'm hopeful around the flipping the election of

Speaker 12 someone, a Democrat, to the Supreme Court in Wisconsin.

Speaker 14 Yeah, well, you know, you know who the only person who's saying this is a real loser for us is, but Donald Trump.

Speaker 14 Trump's the only one who gets it. Someone who's familiar with the topic.
Allegedly. He's the only one.
And the rest of them, it's it's like a suicide pack, these people have.

Speaker 14 I don't even understand it, but they're relentless, they are just relentless, and now they've got a lot more allies like Musk and others that are just lying their way right to the top, which is really depressing to me.

Speaker 14 Anyway, uh, we'll see. That's those are real, that's a really good one, Scott.
I really appreciate that. Um, we want to hear from you.

Speaker 14 Send us your questions about business tech or whatever's on your mind. Go to nymag.com/slash pivot to submit a question for the show, or call 8-5-5-51-Pivot.

Speaker 14 And don't forget, we were nominated for a Webby Award, and we need you to vote for us at the link in the bio.

Speaker 12 We're losing. We're like in third right now.

Speaker 14 Okay, well, what are you going to do?

Speaker 12 Do I got to make my jokes dirtier? Is that what's going on here?

Speaker 14 Make your jokes dirtier.

Speaker 12 Jesus walks into a restaurant and says, I need a table for 26. And the waitress says there's only 13 of you.
And he said, yeah, but we all sit on the same side.

Speaker 12 Oh,

Speaker 14 that's a terrible Jesus joke. You need to up your Jesus jokes.

Speaker 12 You know what car he drives?

Speaker 14 Honda Coi.

Speaker 12 A Chrysler.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 12 Vote for us.

Speaker 14 Next time I'm in West Virginia, I'm going to do that one because

Speaker 14 they would laugh at that one. That's a good one.
I like that. In any case, please vote for us.
Okay, Scott, that's the show and Jesus Jokes. We'll move back to dad jokes very soon, hopefully.

Speaker 14 We'll be back on Friday for more. Scott, read us out.

Speaker 12 Today's show was produced by Larry Neyman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Inder Tott engineered this episode.
Thanks also to Drew Burroughs and Miles Severio.

Speaker 12 Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media.

Speaker 12 We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business optionality.

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