Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Kaleidoscope.
Speaker 1: This week, we're taking you on the road for a
Speaker 1: special episode recorded in Doha, Cutter. Now, before you start
Speaker 1: imagining sand.
Speaker 2: Dunes and pure blue coastlines, I should describe my surroundings.
Speaker 1: I'm currently sitting in a makeshift studio in a massive
Speaker 1: airplane hangar like conference center called the Doha Exhibition and
Speaker 1: Convention Center, So if this episode sounds a little bit.
Speaker 2: Different, you'll know why.
Speaker 1: For the last couple of days, I've been attending Web
Speaker 1: Summit Cutter, an international conference where investors and entrepreneurs and
Speaker 1: thought leaders.
Speaker 2: Gather from around the world to talk about the future
Speaker 2: of technology.
Speaker 1: Our friends at iHeart are the official podcast partner's Web Summit,
Speaker 1: which means that I'm here and so is a very
Speaker 1: familiar figure, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 3: Well, hello, I'm so pleased to be a guest on
Speaker 3: this historic, amazing podcast. I've heard so much about.
Speaker 1: It, Jonathan, Welcome back to tech Stuff. How does it
Speaker 1: feel to be on the other side of the table.
Speaker 3: I'll be honest, it feels odd, but I'm so pleased
Speaker 3: to be able to be a part of this. I
Speaker 3: was been joking all week about you know, just when
Speaker 3: I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Well, I'm very pleased to see you.
Speaker 1: It's been almost seven years, I think since we saw
Speaker 1: each other in person, So who knew the next time
Speaker 1: would be in Doha?
Speaker 3: And yeah, here I am here we are.
Speaker 1: Based on the listener emails I've been receiving, I think
Speaker 1: the listeners are going to be very, very very happy
Speaker 1: to hear your voice today.
Speaker 2: You're already missed.
Speaker 3: Well just for you guys, Hey there, welcome to tech stuff.
Speaker 3: There you go, what the tech? The tech?
Speaker 1: So nice have you vation? And I hope, I hope
Speaker 1: this will be the first of many visits. Absolutely, I'm
Speaker 1: not just in Doha. Yes, I would love to do
Speaker 1: this on East time. So there've been some fascinating speakers
Speaker 1: already at the conference, and I wanted to talk to you,
Speaker 1: Jonathan today about some of what I've heard, hoping that
Speaker 1: you can contextualize it kind of from a bird's eye
Speaker 1: view of having covered technology as a journalist for two
Speaker 1: decades sure and attended a bunch of these conferences.
Speaker 3: Yeah, conferences in the tech world in general play an
Speaker 3: interesting role. So I've been to lots of different kinds.
Speaker 3: I've been to trade shows like CEES or E three,
Speaker 3: I've been to ones that have been held by specific
Speaker 3: companies such as Intel or IBM and the web Sumit
Speaker 3: of course is more of a general tech with Internet
Speaker 3: focus on it, and there have been some pretty phenomenal speakers. Actually,
Speaker 3: they've really impressed me.
Speaker 1: And when you come to these types of events, like
Speaker 1: what do you look out for, both in terms of
Speaker 1: kind of getting a peek around the corner to what
Speaker 1: may be coming in the world of tech, but also
Speaker 1: in terms of applying some kind of critical lens to
Speaker 1: what you're hearing.
Speaker 3: That is an excellent question. So let's take CES for example.
Speaker 3: Everyone is looking for the quirky thing that is a
Speaker 3: standout from the standard stuff you would run into. So
Speaker 3: an example would be from a couple of years ago,
Speaker 3: the Little Rabbit AI, you know, pocket sized computer device,
Speaker 3: which ended up not doing very well when it finally
Speaker 3: came out. That's often the case where something that's quirky
Speaker 3: gets your attention because it's different, but it turns out
Speaker 3: it's not really practical or maybe it doesn't work as
Speaker 3: well as was presented. So that's one thing you have
Speaker 3: to look out for is yes, it's exciting and that
Speaker 3: it's different, but at the same time you have to
Speaker 3: ask the question, Okay, does this actually solve a problem.
Speaker 3: One of the speakers we had yesterday actually talked about
Speaker 3: this about how innovation for innovation's sake is a fool's
Speaker 3: errand and that really innovation needs to be applied to
Speaker 3: looking at real world problems, not inventing one. So that's
Speaker 3: one thing, But I'd say another is you look to
Speaker 3: see what people are talking about, what they're excited about,
Speaker 3: and how they're talking about it, so that you can
Speaker 3: kind of get a feel for what is going to
Speaker 3: be the next push, and keep in mind that not
Speaker 3: all those pushes are going to be successes. So as
Speaker 3: an examp back in two thousand and eight when I
Speaker 3: went to my first CEES, the big push back then
Speaker 3: was from companies like Panasonic and Sony, where it was
Speaker 3: all about three D television. Yeah, now, you and I
Speaker 3: know that three D television never really took off. People
Speaker 3: balked at the idea of having glasses that they had
Speaker 3: to wear at home, and the expense and the lack
Speaker 3: of content. All of these things contributed to the failure
Speaker 3: of that technology. So when you're being exposed to these
Speaker 3: new ideas and people are really excited about them, you
Speaker 3: have to temper that a little bit with the reminder
Speaker 3: that not everything that's being talked about is going to manifest,
Speaker 3: or if it does, it won't manifest in the way
Speaker 3: we anticipate. But if you do that and you proceed
Speaker 3: with a kind of cautious optimism, I think great things
Speaker 3: can be achieved.
Speaker 1: Yeah, with that in mind, I mean, there are a
Speaker 1: bunch of kind of smaller booths where people are presenting
Speaker 1: on the floor, largely on laptops. I guess it's like
Speaker 1: AI applications, but then as a main stage where there's
Speaker 1: been some really interesting speakers.
Speaker 2: So I've into three talks so far.
Speaker 1: I kind of want to talk about each of them
Speaker 1: briefly to get your view of how they exist in
Speaker 1: the context of the history of technology.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 1: The first one was about the global chip race and
Speaker 1: the continuing ways from deep seeg the second was about
Speaker 1: the augmented reality presence in future, and the third was
Speaker 1: AI and journalism. A fun time, a fun top, especially
Speaker 1: for US journalists to come of technology.
Speaker 3: Yeah, especially for those of us who worked for a
Speaker 3: company that famously eliminated its editorial board in order to
Speaker 3: replace it with AI.
Speaker 2: Wait wait which company?
Speaker 3: How stuff Works? Really? Yeah, back in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3: People have heard me talk about this on the show before,
Speaker 3: but if you're new here, I worked for HowStuffWorks dot
Speaker 3: com and I was a writer there, and in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three the company decided to stop working with freelance writers.
Speaker 3: They had a freelance writing crew, and then they had
Speaker 3: an editorial crew in house, and the idea was that
Speaker 3: they were going to go with AI general rated articles
Speaker 3: from that point forward. The editors would have to do
Speaker 3: a full edit pass to make sure that everything was
Speaker 3: accurate and correct, and then correct anything that wasn't right,
Speaker 3: and as you know, generative AI can sometimes confabulate and
Speaker 3: make things up. The editors protested, and then they were eliminated,
Speaker 3: and everyone I knew who worked at how Stuff Works
Speaker 3: was let go.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I say this not so people will take
Speaker 3: up torches and pitchforks and yell or anything, but rather
Speaker 3: to explain that I am very much aware that I
Speaker 3: have a very strong bias here, like I cannot be objective,
Speaker 3: is what I'm trying to get.
Speaker 1: At I mean, I think if you work as a
Speaker 1: journalist and you know you're constantly hearing about the idea
Speaker 1: of being replaced by AI, it h it's not the
Speaker 1: most appealing seat to sit in.
Speaker 2: This for sure.
Speaker 3: And we've been through similar shifts before, like the pivot
Speaker 3: to video being the famous one, right, we saw editorial
Speaker 3: departments decimated because the idea was that the written word
Speaker 3: was no longer the way to deliver and it was
Speaker 3: going to be video only. But it didn't last very long,
Speaker 3: and then by that time you had all these journalists
Speaker 3: who were out of work. So obviously, as journalists, we
Speaker 3: have a sensitivity to these things.
Speaker 1: So we'll come back to that, but let's start with chips.
Speaker 1: The talk I went to yesterday was from Andrew Feldman,
Speaker 1: who is the CEO and co founder of Cerebras, which
Speaker 1: is an AI chip manufacturer that has big ambitions to
Speaker 1: take on in video. They manufacture the world's largest AI
Speaker 1: chips and they're hoping to IPO in the US this
Speaker 1: year to add fuel to their ambition to kind of
Speaker 1: take on in video, and the company recently started offering
Speaker 1: deep Seek running on its servers house in the US.
Speaker 1: Deep Seak obviously being the Chinese AI model company that
Speaker 1: managed to create this high performing reasoning model despite US
Speaker 1: export controls on in Nvidia's most advanced chips, and the
Speaker 1: CEO of Feldman talked about being quote crushed by demand
Speaker 1: ever since offering deep seak on these servers. But first
Speaker 1: of all, let's take a couple of steps back, because
Speaker 1: I think last year you did a great episode on
Speaker 1: tech Stuff with the title what are AI chips? And
Speaker 1: I think that a brief refresher while the world talks
Speaker 1: about it would actually be super helpful.
Speaker 3: Oh. Absolutely so. If you think about processors in general,
Speaker 3: if we're talking about your classic processors for computers, you
Speaker 3: really have three major types at this point. You have CPUs,
Speaker 3: the central processing unit that's the BOG standard basic processor.
Speaker 3: Typically they're very good at performing high speed arithmetic operations
Speaker 3: in sequence, right. And then you have GPUs or graphics
Speaker 3: processing units. These we associate with things like gamers, like
Speaker 3: if you're a real gamer, you got yourself a killer GPU.
Speaker 3: These are really good at parallel processing, where they can
Speaker 3: take multiple threads of operations and run processing on them simultaneously,
Speaker 3: which can sometimes depending on the type of computer problem
Speaker 3: work faster than a CPU could for specific types of processes. NPUs,
Speaker 3: or neural processing units, are the new hotness, and they're
Speaker 3: kind of like GPUs, but on steroids. They're even more
Speaker 3: about parallel processing. They're optimized to run the types of
Speaker 3: processes that your typical AI operations require these days. So
Speaker 3: the laptop I have in front of me right now
Speaker 3: has an NPU in it. So there's a neural processing
Speaker 3: unit in my little laptop I've got that will run
Speaker 3: those kind of operations natively on the computer that don't
Speaker 3: require you to have a cloud connection, so that you're
Speaker 3: not shipping all your data off to the cloud to
Speaker 3: get processed and then sent back to you once it's done. Obviously,
Speaker 3: that brings up questions of privacy and security. So one
Speaker 3: of the big attractive features of having NPUs is you
Speaker 3: can run those processes natively on your own devices and
Speaker 3: not have to depend upon some third party being able
Speaker 3: to access the information, especially in a world where we
Speaker 3: worry about the information being used to train future model
Speaker 3: of AI.
Speaker 2: Had you come across this company before.
Speaker 3: Cerebras only in Greek mythology, where the three headed hound
Speaker 3: of Hades is guarding the Gates.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 3: Actually, I have heard of it before, but I had
Speaker 3: not really looked into it. One of the downfalls of
Speaker 3: my era of tech stuff, and I often said this,
Speaker 3: is that being in the United States and being an
Speaker 3: American meant that it had frequently a very strong American perspective,
Speaker 3: and it meant that companies that were operating outside of
Speaker 3: America often got less focus on my show. So one
Speaker 3: of the things that I think is cool about the
Speaker 3: Web Summit is I'm encountering companies that maybe I've heard
Speaker 3: the name, but I really didn't know much about, and
Speaker 3: I'm starting to learn a lot more about them and
Speaker 3: have a greater appreciation for them.
Speaker 1: It was interesting that kind of deep seek was such
Speaker 1: a big part of this talk, I mean not surprising.
Speaker 1: When did this narrative of like chip Wars or the
Speaker 1: chip race start to kind of you know, Chris to
Speaker 1: your when is when you were hosting takes stuff.
Speaker 3: So a few years back in video was starting to
Speaker 3: get incredibly popular, not through the AI world, but because
Speaker 3: of cryptocurrency. Because for cryptocurrencies like ethereum, you would still
Speaker 3: use parallel processing in order to attempt to mine a
Speaker 3: block first and get that reward for things like bitcoin.
Speaker 3: That value had gone so high that you were looking
Speaker 3: at purpose built chips for that that we had gone
Speaker 3: beyond GPUs. But in Video was riding high because of that,
Speaker 3: and it meant the gamers were really upset because the
Speaker 3: chips themselves were in very short supply and often where
Speaker 3: you would find them in the aftermarket marked up to
Speaker 3: ridiculous prices, and they're already quite expensive. So in Video
Speaker 3: was already in the news then and their stock price
Speaker 3: was soaring already because of the popularity of the chips.
Speaker 3: Once the AI industry started to really take off toward
Speaker 3: the end of twenty twenty two, that's when in Vidia
Speaker 3: really flourished, and in an incredibly savvy move, they began
Speaker 3: to reposition themselves as a company that made AI chips
Speaker 3: and not just the GPU company.
Speaker 1: Right, they sort of forced themselves into being considered a
Speaker 1: national security or a kind of critical natural company.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like they like they it was them or no one,
Speaker 3: it was kind of the view. And so that's when
Speaker 3: in Nvidia went from being really a pretty powerful company
Speaker 3: to like in the top three gets often battling in
Speaker 3: the top three spaces for most valuable company in the world.
Speaker 1: Because of this chip race or chip wars narrative that
Speaker 1: they were able to both profit from it also drive.
Speaker 2: But also I mean it's true, right, I mean that yeah,
Speaker 2: has been true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: What happened next?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's not boasting if you can back it up, right,
Speaker 3: And you certainly could argue that there was exploitation going on,
Speaker 3: like they were exploiting the the narrative, and in some
Speaker 3: part I'm sure that's true because as I'm certain you
Speaker 3: have noticed the craze around AI, there's a nugget of
Speaker 3: truthfulness at the center, but there's a lot of hype
Speaker 3: around it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well it was interesting presentation yesterday.
Speaker 1: I mean, I would say taking on in video is
Speaker 1: a lofty goal, absolutely point.
Speaker 3: But we've seen that happen before too, right, Like if
Speaker 3: you go.
Speaker 2: Back, I guess the way Vidio disrupted Intel, which is
Speaker 2: on the floor.
Speaker 3: That's exactly what I was going to say, Like if
Speaker 3: you if you go back to the nineties, you could
Speaker 3: ask someone like do you think n video is going
Speaker 3: to overtake Intel? And you'd be left all the building. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so there is precedence.
Speaker 1: What did you I mean, you were out of the
Speaker 1: chair when when deep Seak happened, that was like my
Speaker 1: second week. Yeah, there's a text down host and I
Speaker 1: was like, oh my goodness, this is a this is
Speaker 1: for me. I think probably the biggest text story I've
Speaker 1: seen since the chetchipt released in November twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: I mean it just the reaction from the world, from
Speaker 1: the market, like everyone wants to know what's going on,
Speaker 1: But what did you think in the moment, and how
Speaker 1: have you digested it since then?
Speaker 3: So I had two very strong reactions when the deep
Speaker 3: seek information started to become mainstream news. One was how
Speaker 3: interesting because we've just been through a year of the
Speaker 3: biggest fuss ever being made over TikTok, and here we
Speaker 3: have an artificial intelligence system from China where the perceived
Speaker 3: thread of TikTok is you could argue minuscule compared to
Speaker 3: an AI company that is completely dependent upon devouring as
Speaker 3: much information as possible and then making use of it,
Speaker 3: Like that should be the big national security concern. If
Speaker 3: in fact that's the real reason why you're concerned about TikTok,
Speaker 3: we could go into a crazy conversation about whether or
Speaker 3: not that's true. And I'm not going to do that here.
Speaker 2: But the second, especially because the TikTok booths is right
Speaker 2: next to it.
Speaker 3: Well, listen, every time I go by, I give reverence
Speaker 3: and I floss a little bit. But no, the the
Speaker 3: other reaction I had was that, golly, people have really
Speaker 3: been waiting for a challenger to chat GPT. And I
Speaker 3: think that tells you that as excited as people are
Speaker 3: about Chad GPT and open ai in general, the need
Speaker 3: for there to be competition and for perhaps there to
Speaker 3: be a check on open AI's otherwise dominance in the
Speaker 3: space is one that a lot of people were feeling,
Speaker 3: even if they weren't able to articulate it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think.
Speaker 1: I mean that the point that the surrebrass guy was
Speaker 1: making yesterday was that there they run these you know,
Speaker 1: servers with their with their chips that run the open
Speaker 1: source version of deep Seek's model, but in the US,
Speaker 1: so that la is some of the he was basically,
Speaker 1: he said explicitly like, don't use the deep seak product
Speaker 1: like you. I mean, that's that's kind of interesting. I
Speaker 1: think the second point you make about people wanting a
Speaker 1: challenger to open ai is very true. I mean, emotionally,
Speaker 1: like nobody likes, you know, one big bully in the playground, right,
Speaker 1: But I think when you're in a place like Doha,
Speaker 1: you also understand how the idea of a competing ecosystem
Speaker 1: of different AI models and maybe a cheaper way to
Speaker 1: use AI is an incredibly attractive thing in a world
Speaker 1: where you know, the concept of American hegemony is is
Speaker 1: fast receding and people want to know what's coming next.
Speaker 1: So this this tech element of geopolitics or something which
Speaker 1: is super fascinating.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and again that's something that that's probably the most
Speaker 3: valuable takeaway I'm going to have from this I say
Speaker 3: that it's only the second day, but the most take
Speaker 3: a powerful takeaway I'm going to have on this trip
Speaker 3: is that opening of my perspective.
Speaker 1: Coming up, Jonathan Strickland and I dig into the future
Speaker 1: of augmented reality.
Speaker 2: Stay with us.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot to say about chips, but but
Speaker 1: I wanted to move on to another technology that you've
Speaker 1: covered closely over the years, augmented reality. I also went
Speaker 1: to a talk given by a gentleman called Keyppan of
Speaker 1: snap and he came out wearing these very futuristic RoboCop
Speaker 1: like ar Snapchat glasses, and his view of the audience
Speaker 1: was supposed to be broadcast on the screens behind him. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the WIFEI didn't want, so poor guy came out wearing
Speaker 1: these you know, spectacles and then.
Speaker 3: No, no first person's view. Oh that hurts.
Speaker 2: I know when you especially when you're giving it. I mean,
Speaker 2: you're like a thousand.
Speaker 1: People in the audience and and you've got your big
Speaker 1: razzle dazzle opening moment doesn't work.
Speaker 3: I don't know about you, os, but I get I
Speaker 3: get secondhand embarrassment really easily. How ridiculous did the glasses look?
Speaker 2: I mean they looked.
Speaker 1: There was a there was a famous Greek shipping billionaire
Speaker 1: in the sixties called Aristotle Nassis who married Jackie Kennedy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he wore these great big sunglasses that come about
Speaker 1: half his face. These look literally like they'd been pulled
Speaker 1: off Aristotle Aristotle and assets his face.
Speaker 3: I mean, I was at Cees the year that Lady
Speaker 3: Gaga came out and promoted her polaroid glasses, and I'm like, okay.
Speaker 1: I've we've seen big, big, big glasses, but anyway, keep
Speaker 1: handed a valiant job. And I was thinking, probably, you know,
Speaker 1: as you are also feel quite a little empathy and
Speaker 1: thinking in his head, you know, his whole mind is screaming,
Speaker 1: this is.
Speaker 2: A failure, like blah blah.
Speaker 1: But he had to just keep going, soldiering on, and
Speaker 1: to be fair, he did and actually it was a
Speaker 1: good talk. He kind of broke down the three phases
Speaker 1: of augmented reality at Snapchat. Phase one was the phone
Speaker 1: capturing the face and the computer vision basically knowing.
Speaker 2: Those eyes, that's the nose, that's the mouth when you want.
Speaker 1: A puke rain, but that's where it should come from.
Speaker 1: The second phase was the computer vision understanding the human
Speaker 1: bodies and feet, legs, so that you could basically put
Speaker 1: gloves on, you could wear a costume where you would
Speaker 1: know what your arms, it.
Speaker 3: Could map properly to the right location on the body exactly.
Speaker 2: And then phase three is basically capturing the world.
Speaker 1: So these spectacles that are kind of looking out and
Speaker 1: I keep calling spectacles because that's what the product is called.
Speaker 1: They're called spectacles. They don't normally say spectacles. I normally
Speaker 1: say glasses, right, just FYI. But basically, you know, the
Speaker 1: big leap forward is that rather than just understanding the
Speaker 1: human body, which is hard enough, This actually understands the
Speaker 1: whole world around you in terms of being able to
Speaker 1: interpret what objects are, knowing what a surface is, knowing
Speaker 1: how far away things are, so that you can basically
Speaker 1: create a virtual overlay on the physical world. And one
Speaker 1: of the really cool demos was actually somebody wearing these
Speaker 1: glasses and looking at a bunch of ingredients, and then
Speaker 1: the glasses sent the picture of the food in real
Speaker 1: time to the cloud, which bat back at JENNYI suggested
Speaker 1: recipe cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is fun.
Speaker 1: I mean it's not I can't imagine it's going to
Speaker 1: be a huge consumer use case, but it's fun.
Speaker 3: It's making me think of I don't know if you
Speaker 3: remember this, but Google had Google Chef for a while
Speaker 3: where you could do something similar. But obviously you're typing
Speaker 3: the things. It could not, you know, do image processing
Speaker 3: and do this, but you could type in the things
Speaker 3: you had and it would suggest different recipes for you.
Speaker 3: But it had the same foibles i'll say as generative AI,
Speaker 3: and that occasionally you would get something where you're like,
Speaker 3: well that sounds inedible, but all right, I.
Speaker 1: Hope raid if I just looked in my fridge, the
Speaker 1: glasses might just say get a breeze again.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it's time to take out Exactly. But you mentioned Google.
Speaker 1: I think you were the proud owner of some of
Speaker 1: the very good specs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so not only was I an owner of Google Glass.
Speaker 2: You removed the way proud. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, I was not going to call attention to it,
Speaker 3: but it's true. I think Google Glass was a noble effort.
Speaker 3: I think it was nowhere close to being ready to
Speaker 3: be a consumer product, which I think Google actually understood.
Speaker 3: I mean, they never really marketed it as a mainstream
Speaker 3: consumer product. But when I had them, I could see
Speaker 3: the potential, and I thought that it was an incredible
Speaker 3: potential that certainly was nowhere close to being realized. Yet.
Speaker 3: Let's say you're walking around Doha and it's the first
Speaker 3: time you've ever been here. Having the ability to see
Speaker 3: directions in front of your eyes are or at least like
Speaker 3: in a way that's not going to obscure your vision,
Speaker 3: so that you can seamlessly navigate a city you've never
Speaker 3: been to, that's incredible. Or being able to look at
Speaker 3: a building and get a listing of the different businesses
Speaker 3: that are in there, so that when late at night,
Speaker 3: when you're craving Nando's. You don't spend forty five minutes
Speaker 3: walking ground a mall wondering where it is. You know
Speaker 3: where it is. Immediately.
Speaker 1: In twenty seventeen, you didn't have of tech stuff which
Speaker 1: asked the question is augmented reality ready for prime time?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 2: That was seven years ago.
Speaker 3: Yes I did, I did ask that, and no it's not. Well,
Speaker 3: there's a chicken and egg problem that's going on, and
Speaker 3: that is the classic chicken and egg problem of hardware
Speaker 3: versus software. Basically, the idea is that you have people
Speaker 3: who are making the hardware, and when they create something,
Speaker 3: even if it's really compelling, if there's not enough applications
Speaker 3: for that hardware, there's not enough reason for people to
Speaker 3: buy it. On Moss. The flip side, if you're a
Speaker 3: software developer and you're looking at you see this really
Speaker 3: exciting technology come out and you're thinking, Wow, that's really cool,
Speaker 3: But I don't want to start dedicating resources to building
Speaker 3: assets for this hardware until there's enough of a user
Speaker 3: base to justify it. We talk about this with game
Speaker 3: consoles all the time. A new game console comes out
Speaker 3: and you're like, the console's incredible, but there's nothing to
Speaker 3: play on it, so I'm going to wait, And so
Speaker 3: it's this ongoing circular issue and it could be really
Speaker 3: hard to break out of that.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's that.
Speaker 1: I think the software side is pretty interesting, right, I
Speaker 1: mean the advances in AI on the computer vision side
Speaker 1: have been pretty amazing.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, And you know.
Speaker 1: If this deep Seek story plays out and it becomes
Speaker 1: way way, way cheaper to run AI models everywhere, the
Speaker 1: idea of real time computer vision could potentially unlock this
Speaker 1: air reality. And what do you think needs to happen
Speaker 1: for the situation you just described of walking down the
Speaker 1: street in Doha Jonathan Stricklan was wearing his glasses.
Speaker 3: I think probably the biggest issue, honestly is the battery issue,
Speaker 3: right right, because you can only manaturize batteries so much
Speaker 3: before you get to a point where you don't have
Speaker 3: enough juice to provide power to a sophisticated device for
Speaker 3: more than maybe an hour. And if that's all you
Speaker 3: need it for, that's fine. But I think for a
Speaker 3: lot of people, the thought of a device that they
Speaker 3: can wear for an hour and then they need to
Speaker 3: recharge it is quite frustrating. I think it's one of
Speaker 3: the reasons why things like Active three glasses, we're a
Speaker 3: non starter because even though they provide an incredible experience,
Speaker 3: having to recharge your glasses every couple hours. Like you know,
Speaker 3: if you're watching a Peter Jackson movie, you might have
Speaker 3: to stop in the middle so that you can recharge
Speaker 3: your glasses to watch the rest of the film. So
Speaker 3: I think that's really a big issue, is that how
Speaker 3: do you miniaturize the technology in such a way that
Speaker 3: the glasses are something that you want to wear. They
Speaker 3: look cool, but there's still enough power capacity there to
Speaker 3: provide a good experience for more than a short time.
Speaker 3: And I don't know the answer to that, because batteries
Speaker 3: are dependent upon chemistry, and we can hack technology really
Speaker 3: quite effectively, but chemistry you start to run against fundamental
Speaker 3: laws of the universe and it starts to get a
Speaker 3: lot trickier.
Speaker 1: So do you have a whole I haven't had a
Speaker 1: chance to attend any of it, but there's a whole
Speaker 1: kind of new energy track at this conference where they're
Speaker 1: talking about new battery technology. Right, it's interesting to be
Speaker 1: here where you know, natural gas is coming out of
Speaker 1: the ground the tune of trillions of dollars. Yes, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of interest here in investing some of the
Speaker 1: proceeds in these chemistry issues.
Speaker 3: Yes, right, Yes, And it may be that there's some
Speaker 3: breakthroughs that can come through that makes it more of
Speaker 3: a practical application, right, And I think that's what really
Speaker 3: is needed. It ends up being it transcends the issues
Speaker 3: of hardware and software and it starts to get to
Speaker 3: we've got all the technical capability here apart from where's
Speaker 3: the power source coming from? Right, And I think that's
Speaker 3: going to be the big thing, honestly. Obviously Apple was
Speaker 3: trying to get there where they wanted to have a
Speaker 3: really kind of lightweight pair of glasses that had incredible
Speaker 3: augmented reality capabilities to it. Instead we got something that
Speaker 3: like futuristic robotic ski goggles. You know. And if you think, well,
Speaker 3: Apple being a multi trillion dollar company, if they're having
Speaker 3: they're starting to hit a wall there. Then we're probably
Speaker 3: at a point where it's just going to be a
Speaker 3: while before we start seeing something that people think of
Speaker 3: as being oh, this is something I want to wear
Speaker 3: on a regular basis, as opposed to I have a
Speaker 3: specific application in mind, I don't mind wearing it for
Speaker 3: that application, whether it's like industrial or educational or military
Speaker 3: of course, military or gaming, something like that where you're thinking,
Speaker 3: all right, I'm gonna wear this for forty five minutes
Speaker 3: to an hour or whatever, and then I put it aside,
Speaker 3: Like I think the real dream of augmented reality is
Speaker 3: you have something that you can wear pretty much all
Speaker 3: the time and activate it whenever you need to.
Speaker 1: When we come back, jonathan' strictly and I continue to
Speaker 1: unpack what we've learned at Websomitic Cutter stay with us.
Speaker 1: So finally, the last talk that I went to I
Speaker 1: wants to discuss with you, which you've already touched on,
Speaker 1: was from al mah Latour, the CEO of Dow Jones,
Speaker 1: which is the parent company at the Wall Street Journal,
Speaker 1: and he spoke about the future of journalism in the
Speaker 1: age of AI. Unsurprisingly, he was very focused on how
Speaker 1: IP creators and owners such as news publishers, can hold
Speaker 1: onto the value of their work, and he mentioned there
Speaker 1: are two ways of achieving this, commercial partnerships and litigation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I'm not surprised. So obviously this is a
Speaker 3: very tricky topic, right, with a lot of different components
Speaker 3: to it, one of which is that as people who
Speaker 3: generate content. People who generate news content. We are very
Speaker 3: well aware that the things we're putting out, which are
Speaker 3: meant to inform, maybe entertain, maybe open up people's eyes
Speaker 3: to new perspectives on certain topics, is also being used
Speaker 3: to train AI. So one component that scares me about
Speaker 3: AI and journalism is just the idea of AI benefiting
Speaker 3: from the work of journalists and the journalists see no
Speaker 3: benefit in return, right, So it's the copyright issue essentially
Speaker 3: is what comes down to. And then the flip side
Speaker 3: is the concern, like what I saw at hell Stuff works,
Speaker 3: where a company and perhaps it's a company that's actually
Speaker 3: in dire straits and they're really looking like, how can
Speaker 3: we reach a point where we're still able to provide
Speaker 3: the services that we're trying to provide without bleeding ourselves
Speaker 3: dry because we're in a business that it just does
Speaker 3: not have a huge return on investment, and sadly, the
Speaker 3: media often can be that. So you have these companies
Speaker 3: that have an incentive to say, well, you know, human
Speaker 3: resources are staff. That's a really big expense, and if
Speaker 3: we could just cut them and use this tool to
Speaker 3: do the same thing they were doing and perhaps just
Speaker 3: have a few people left behind to massage whatever is
Speaker 3: made into something that the general public can consume, and
Speaker 3: maybe they don't even notice the difference. Why don't we
Speaker 3: do that? And we've seen why you don't do that.
Speaker 3: It's because the tools that are being made, they are fallible,
Speaker 3: and sometimes to a point that is disturbing. I told
Speaker 3: you this OZ, and there's an episode of tech stuff.
Speaker 3: I think it's called something like. AI wrote this episode
Speaker 3: sort of and in that I had it write an
Speaker 3: episode of tech stuff. All I gave it was very
Speaker 3: simple instructions. I used chat GPT and I said, write
Speaker 3: an episode of tech stuff about the technology of airbags.
Speaker 3: That was it, like. I didn't give it any further instruction,
Speaker 3: and as part of what it regurgitated to me, it
Speaker 3: gave me statements from three supposed experts, but none of
Speaker 3: those people existed, which means automatically you cannot trust the information.
Speaker 3: And when I would ask for things like I followed
Speaker 3: up I said, could you give me a source for
Speaker 3: this information? And it wouldn't be able to. So these
Speaker 3: things are going to be things that improve over time.
Speaker 3: But I think the problems we're seeing now concern me
Speaker 3: because whether the technology actually gets better, so it's being
Speaker 3: more accountable, or it just gets better at obfus skating
Speaker 3: when it's making stuff up. I don't know that we'll
Speaker 3: be able to tell the difference.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, Latour was talking about how basically, how
Speaker 1: do we at Dow Jones use these tools to make
Speaker 1: sure we had compensated for our work so that we
Speaker 1: can make more money so that we can fund more journalism.
Speaker 3: It's a very pragmatic sort of look, but it makes sense, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: the good balancing art and commerce is always a struggle,
Speaker 3: even no matter what outlet you're looking at.
Speaker 1: It's interesting as well, though, because it's not He wasn't
Speaker 1: just talking in abstraction, Like right now, Dow Jones is
Speaker 1: in partnership with open Ai and suing Perplexity.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: So with open Ai they made this deal last year
Speaker 1: that The Wall Street Journal reported on its parent company
Speaker 1: could be worth more than two hundred and fifteen million
Speaker 1: dollars over the next five years in both cash and
Speaker 1: credits for open ai technology.
Speaker 2: But last year Dow.
Speaker 1: Jones also sued Perplexity the AI search engine, and the
Speaker 1: suit's not public and al Maesa didn't want to go
Speaker 1: into details about what obviously, despite the best efforts of
Speaker 1: Sarah Fisher from Axios on stage, but why it did
Speaker 1: report on the lawsuit and they basically, you know, the
Speaker 1: headline was that dow Jones alleges Perplexity is hallucinating fake
Speaker 1: news and attributing it to real papers and that's illegal.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, so very similar to what I was just saying,
Speaker 3: exact right, Yeah, this is this is like someone writing
Speaker 3: a term paper and having a citation for a source
Speaker 3: that doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: It's like somebody making something up and then citing it
Speaker 1: to a professor when the professor never said.
Speaker 3: It, right, right, right, right, And yeah.
Speaker 2: That's what that's what this suit is about.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, yea, references in a way that's even more egregious
Speaker 1: to your point about AI getting better at covering its
Speaker 1: tracks that it makes up up when you're doing fake citations,
Speaker 1: that's pretty.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's it's terrifying because like obviously this is
Speaker 3: this ends up becoming like a political term in some cases,
Speaker 3: but like the whole fake news thing which often was
Speaker 3: being used to try and delegitimize real news sources that
Speaker 3: were just saying things you didn't like, Yea, you call
Speaker 3: it fake news. So that you can dismiss it. But
Speaker 3: we're actually talking about actual fake news, the news about
Speaker 3: stuff that didn't happen or at least didn't happen the
Speaker 3: way that you're being told it did, but it's being
Speaker 3: put down in a record as if that, in fact
Speaker 3: is what happened. How do you then get to the
Speaker 3: point where you can determine reality from computational fiction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean the litigation stuff is very interesting.
Speaker 1: Obviously if you look back to the Victorian times and
Speaker 1: the aftermath of the First Industrial Revolution, that was when
Speaker 1: copywriting laws took effect. And so you know, as the
Speaker 1: New York Times law suit against open Ai potentially comes
Speaker 1: to trial, as Dow Jones lawsuit against Perplexity comes to trial, potentially,
Speaker 1: we're going to see new president and it'll be really
Speaker 1: interesting to see how that shakes out and how that
Speaker 1: shapes our future. I mean, the power of law to
Speaker 1: shape reality is so huge, and copyright law has been
Speaker 1: such a fundamental of our society and who we are
Speaker 1: for so long.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely fascinating. It Also it goes back to that
Speaker 3: old saying. It's almost a cliche, but you know, necessity
Speaker 3: is the mother of invention and in this case, necessity
Speaker 3: is the mother of the need for new laws. So
Speaker 3: with copyright, before you get to things like mass printing,
Speaker 3: copyright really wasn't that big of a concern, just because
Speaker 3: it was such a pain in the butt to make
Speaker 3: a copy of a work. But then you get to
Speaker 3: a point where technology is capable of giving people opportunities
Speaker 3: to do things on a much larger scale. That's where
Speaker 3: you start to see the need for new law. And
Speaker 3: I suspect we're going to see a lot of changes
Speaker 3: to law in the next few years as a result
Speaker 3: of the rise of technologies like AI.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I also thought it was interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, dow Jones is, you know, a Murdock company,
Speaker 1: so perhaps no surprise that they're pugnacious bunch.
Speaker 3: Yes that's pretty good, kindly, but you.
Speaker 1: Know, but the point that he made was basically, when
Speaker 1: the Internet emerged, you know, twenty five years ago ish
Speaker 1: as a mass adoption technology, the news organizations, the music
Speaker 1: rights holders, you know, film and TV industry essentially allowed
Speaker 1: the consumer expectation to develop the content was free, yes,
Speaker 1: and that essentially hollowed out those industries to to you know,
Speaker 1: to the extent we're seeing today where all of them
Speaker 1: are really struggling. So his point was, how do we
Speaker 1: make sure we we'ret a new technological inflection point that
Speaker 1: we don't roll over again? And you know, so I
Speaker 1: thought that was pretty interesting.
Speaker 3: You know, that's an incredibly good point. I mean, we
Speaker 3: are where we are today in part because we've all
Speaker 3: had the expectation of the content that we want to
Speaker 3: access at any given moment and any point of the
Speaker 3: day should be easy and free to access. That's a
Speaker 3: great eight thing in many ways for the individual, but
Speaker 3: it does put an incredible burden on the entities that
Speaker 3: are actually creating that, whether you are a solo content
Speaker 3: creator and you're just trying to make your passion your occupation,
Speaker 3: or you're a big media company and you're trying to
Speaker 3: put out really incredible content, which costs a lot of
Speaker 3: money to do, and then you're getting tiny little pennies
Speaker 3: in return. It's really hard in today's world to have
Speaker 3: the same kind of media output that we would expect
Speaker 3: from say the early two thousands and have it be
Speaker 3: a profitable business. And if there is no profit, there
Speaker 3: is no business. If there's no business, there's no content.
Speaker 3: So ultimately it does come back down to us to say,
Speaker 3: how do we create a world where this technology can
Speaker 3: be practical and useful, not dangerous, and not something that
Speaker 3: bankrupts any company that actually gets into the business of
Speaker 3: doing it.
Speaker 1: And that was the other thing Alma was talking about
Speaker 1: in terms of some of the positive use of AI.
Speaker 2: He talked about.
Speaker 1: Helping Dow Jones do better research. He talked about scaling
Speaker 1: the output across multiple languages. Apparently Dow Jones wire service
Speaker 1: is now available in Korean, largely translated by AI at
Speaker 1: such a good enough level that Korean traders are able
Speaker 1: to trade off it and also using I to make
Speaker 1: their content more interactive.
Speaker 2: How do you feel about some of these uses of AI.
Speaker 3: I think that that's incredible. Like I think the idea
Speaker 3: of using AI to improve accessibility to me is a
Speaker 3: no brainer. Use for AI, making something that has got
Speaker 3: value and usefulness to someone's life accessible to them is transformational.
Speaker 3: It doesn't do me any good If the information I
Speaker 3: need is in a format that I cannot access, it
Speaker 3: might as well not exist. So I look at how
Speaker 3: transformative the Internet has been over the last couple of decades.
Speaker 3: I think I'm old enough where I remember when I
Speaker 3: first saw the web like which I famously dismissed at
Speaker 3: the time because it was so slow. But when the
Speaker 3: web started to really take on properties that were undeniably
Speaker 3: useful and transformative, I just took it for granted that
Speaker 3: I was able to access all of it because it
Speaker 3: largely came out of the United States. Now, if I
Speaker 3: had lived anywhere else where I didn't know English, knowing
Speaker 3: that that existed might have been interesting to me, but
Speaker 3: it wouldn't be practical. I wouldn't be able to do
Speaker 3: anything with it. So using AI to do things like translate,
Speaker 3: whether it's a podcast or written piece of work or
Speaker 3: a movie, that to me is one of the best uses,
Speaker 3: the most incredible uses of AI. And obviously it's not perfect,
Speaker 3: but it's really good. The issues we tend to run
Speaker 3: into are things like idioms and cultural references that are
Speaker 3: not easily translatable from one language to another. Those are
Speaker 3: problems that are going to just remain for quite a while.
Speaker 3: I don't know how long it's going to take us
Speaker 3: to teach robots what these idioms mean. That's going to
Speaker 3: be an issue that's ongoing. But I think that's a
Speaker 3: very noble use of AI.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Jonathan. Thanks for joining today in Doha,
Speaker 1: and I hope we'll do it again soon.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I'll head up to New York if it's a
Speaker 3: much shorter plane.
Speaker 2: Ride, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week for Tech Stuff, I'm mos Voloshin.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis. It was executive
Speaker 1: produced by me Karen Price, and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope
Speaker 1: and Katrina Norvelle for iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2: Please rate, review, and reach out
Speaker 1: To us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com.