Boom Times For ChatGPT, OpenAI’s Deep Research, AI Super Bowl
Channel: Alex Kantrowitz
Published at: 2025-02-07
YouTube video id: OblBUk5MWKk
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OblBUk5MWKk
New chat GPT growth numbers come in. Open AI built a pretty good research assistant and the Super Bowl fills with AI ads. We'll cover it all in a special edition of Big Technology Podcast taped for our YouTube audience. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a major week of news to cover and some of our own to break and we're joined as always on Friday in studio by from Spotify headquarters by Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, nice to see you in person finally. Welcome back to the show. Podcast Friday edition is all cleaned up today. Alex and I are here at Spotify studios. We're sounding good. Usually we're sitting both in New York or in some strange locale having a conversation through the computer screen, but today we talk in person. And we love to cover the news every week. This week we're going to break some news or at least share some new data on chat GPT that I've gotten from SimilarWeb, which shows chat GPT's really interesting growth story. So, we're going to start there and then of course we're going to cover deep research with both which both you and I have spent $200 to try and then of course it's the Super Bowl this weekend. So, we're going to talk about why these companies are spending money on Super Bowl ads and not on improving foundational models and I have a feeling I know where both of our perspectives are going to be on this one. Although we might be more aligned than usual. All right. Here's the data from SimilarWeb. So, for quite some time and I even wrote a story about this last year, chat GPT had been flatlining. The growth had just completely stopped. So, you see a very very quick run up to 100 million um monthly users or on the chart that we're looking at now from SimilarWeb they're measuring web traffic. So, about 2 billion uh visits per month and it flatlines and it is basically either down or just barely touching where it was in early 2023, so four or five months after chat GPT's released and then there's an inflection point. And I'm pretty sure the inflection point is when Sam Altman tweeted her because the moment Open AI releases uh or not even releases, announces the fact that they have these superior voice uh chat type of capabilities where you could talk, you could interrupt, it feels live, all of a sudden interest in chat GPT skyrockets and then we can see in the chart that we're looking at uh and for those at home, it's just a inflection point moment where Sam Altman tweets her and it goes from 2 billion visits per month to 4 billion, basically 4 billion. Uh and that's when we start to see Open AI announce that they've gone from 100 million users to 300 million users. So, Ranjan, I'm curious what you think about the boom times for chat GPT. Mostly just like how important is this for Open AI that they've actually found something that's made their chatbot take off. I think this reflects that Open AI and chat GPT is the Kleenex or Xerox or the household name of of any kind of generative AI. And the numbers again, we heard 100 million to 300 million, but seeing this from a third party is actually pretty impressive. To see it from February or April 2024 to late 2024 almost triple in terms of traffic is incredible, but it makes sense. They're the household name. They're the every non-core tech person I talk to does not say does never talks about Claude, has no longer talks about Bing. There's a brief moment they might have been and uh is only talking about chat GPT. So, it I think it's both good for Open AI, but it's also good for generative AI in general. It shows it's becoming more of a regular thing. So, my theory is that this whole brouhaha with Scarlett Johansson when Sam tweeted her and people were talking with Open AI or they thought they could. By the way, they never really they they did release it, but just months later. Generated way more interest in using chat GPT. Now, there's been so many other releases. They've done better models, they incorporated Dolly in um which is image generation. So, that might have done part of it. They've also like they stopped hallucinating, the responses are definitely better. But I'm curious. I mean, it's really really fascinating that chat GPT just stagnated for almost a year and then picked up. So, I'm saying it's the Scarlett Johansson thing. What's your perspective? I'm That's an interesting theory. I'm going to give you uh I'll give you that, but I'm still going to disagree. I don't think it's Scarlett Johansson here. I think this is again, this is reflective of if I think in throughout 2023, no one outside of tech talked about generative AI. 2024 it became a thing. We've we've talked about this. That was when the hype cycle kicked in in high gear. That's when everyone started thinking about it. That's when everyone started talking about it. It's every single headline and chat GPT is the first place people will go. It it literally it's shorthand for everyone I know for AI right now. So, that makes sense. It's it reflects the industry, not just Open AI. One of the thing that's interesting looking at these numbers is just how unevenly distributed the gains in AI have been. So, if we're looking at our SimilarWeb numbers again, this is web visit web visits. Bing had 1.5 billion per month in February 2024. It had all of 1.85 billion per month in October 2024. You look at chat GPT, starts with 1.6 billion and now it has 3.7 billion per month. So, it's left Bing in the dust and by God, I mean, the rest that you mentioned Claude, uh it doesn't even factor. There is no consumer adoption basically for Claude. Question here, is bing.com in the data the search engine as well or is it That's the search engine. Okay. Okay. GPT has surpassed the search engine and the search engine really hasn't gotten much of a bump even though it's delivering so much of the same services. So, you're right, it really is the brand that makes the biggest difference here. Actually, let's take a moment here to pour one out for Bing cuz remember in 2023 when we would talk, we were Bing boys. Remember like Bing was on par with chat GPT as kind of the face of whatever was going to happen in generative AI. Remember people having like just the weirdest, wildest conversations with Bing. No one is doing that today. No one is stress testing Bing. With Microsoft, they just kind of I guess they went all in in Copilot and enterprise, but Bing consumer it was a good run. It was a good run, but we tried. We tried. do have cameras with us today. So, allow me to just quickly address the audience. Yes, uh we were Bing boys and we apologize for that. And if you're just joining us today or recently, um let's wipe that out of our memory and we're going to pick up as if that never happened. I I'm a proud former Bing boy. I'm okay with it. Honestly, we all go Everyone goes through their Bing phase at some point, right? Well, look, that's true. Bing was at its best when it was trying to steal reporters' wives. Once they neutered that capability, it was toast. I mean, look at what happened. Really a disappointing and a disaster. Yeah. Uh sorry, Bing, but but you're right. To me the oh man, it almost makes me question my normalcy because I'm on Perplexity all day. I'm looking here at Claude. These are the places I'm spending a lot of my day and no one else is. No one else is. Maybe we're just ahead of the curve. I hopefully. I like to think that sometimes, but uh But here, look, this is another thing that we think about coming out of last week where we talked about how Deep Seek came out. It's about as performant as Open AI's reasoning model. It's much cheaper and it shows you the full chain of thought. Um and well, actually that we'll get into that in a second. But it's it's about as performant and it's much cheaper and we talked about how models don't matter. And if you're looking for the optimism about Open AI, is that they have a runaway success as a product in chat GPT and the numbers just really push it forward. Yeah, no, no, I think that's correct that uh and and we talked to me still Open AI's greatest trick in the world and we've talked about this before is that in the UI, the way it kind of like let the text stream out to you when it didn't need to. If you ever call via API, it just gives you a block response, made people feel like this was something magical and it was thinking. Open AI has always been and we're going to get into Deep Research, operator is not a good product, but it's a mesmerizing product. It's a beautiful product. It's just not very good. So, they they still have a strong team and now the head of product Kevin Weil from Instagram and Artifact briefly, like they they're playing the right game in terms of product, I think. I think. Financially we can discuss separately, but Last week we also looked at Deep Seek's performance and we said, "Oh, this is bad because they've commoditized Open AI's model." But further data that I got from SimilarWeb shows another story, which is maybe even more concerning for Open AI. So, we we all saw Deep Seek go to the top of the App Store charts. And for me it was like, "Well, the App Store charts take into account hotness. Like how hot is your app?" If your app is super hot, then you're going to go to the top of the charts. But then you look at the traffic and it's not only that people were downloading it. It's people were using Deep Seek a lot. A lot, a lot. And this is again from SimilarWeb. You see last week, so January 28th, chat GPT had 139.3 web uh and mobile visits. Deep Seek had 49 million. So, it cut about like further more than any other company has been able to cut into the lead of Open AI and it had about a third of the traffic that chat GPT took years to build overnight. And I think part of this is just because the product the Deep Seek product, if you go to deepseek.com and I I can't recommend it because you never know what's going to happen to your data there. Uh but if you go there, you'll see the the chatbot write out its full chain of thought, and it's mesmerizing. You see it the reasoning work uh in a way that you only get bullet points with Open AI. And of course, there was a lot of media interest which drove this, but for me to see these numbers and to see that it basically built a third of what ChatGPT has to again taken years to do, that to me might have been the most concerning thing for Open AI, that all of a sudden there's a challenger that might make uh ChatGPT not that verb or noun or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, but I think the numbers are more interesting part of that to me is again January 28th, 49 million uh visits versus 139 for Open AI. That reflects just kind of that just how quickly this can rise and fall cuz that had to be driven by the media hype, curiosity. It also kind of makes me wonder still how niche is all this behavior cuz I don't think tech norm or normie normal people who are going to Deep Seek. It was all of us going and spending time and testing it against Open AI and to get those kind of numbers for that quick but like that bounce, I think still shows that the stuff's ephemeral and like it can people can go anywhere. People can have a bunch of bookmarks up. They'll switch to the next thing cuz if Deep Seek came out of nowhere and got to those numbers quickly, and we'll see where it is in a month or two now, I think it shows that yeah, no one has a competitive stronghold or any kind of lock-in on this stuff other than us now paying $200 for Open AI per uh ChatGPT Pro which we'll get into. Well, 49 million people in a day or 49 million visits in a day to um you know, a website, that's not just the nerds. That is some part of the general population. If if it Okay, if it is just the nerds, then what? The entire usage of ChatGPT is nerds times three. That's That's embarrassing. That's what worries me. No, no. When when I look at this number, I cannot believe any non We'll go with nerd, but tech forward person uh was going to Deep Seek. Verse So, that actually the 139 million visitors to ChatGPT, how what percentage of that is non-early adopters? That does make the kind of addressable market of this a little more questionable. Back to Open AI. If we were worried about their models commoditizing last week, if their chatbot can commoditize like you said, you could just go to a different website, and next thing you know, ChatGPT is unseated. Uh aren't shouldn't there be alarm bells going going on in Open AI headquarters right now because of what we're seeing? Of course. I think definitely. To me uh Gemini is the most interesting competitor in this cuz or even I mean, Microsoft I guess is it Copilot now or what's what's the generative chat bot? It'll always just be Bing to me. It'll just be Bing to me as well. I think I think Once a flame, always a flame. Because where people already are and just injecting the chatbot layer is always going to be easier. And the distribution side Actually, sorry. We haven't even mentioned Meta AI in all of this. And their numbers, I'm sure they always have they can always get when you have 3 billion users some dramatic headline number. But having the chatbot integrated into where people already are is always going to be a natural advantage. And I think this is another case where we have not started to see that level of you utilization for Gemini, but it Open AI, yes, alarm bells ringing very loudly I think is about should be the case. And so as the siren went off, the Open AI team, a merry band of characters, made their way to Reddit to answer questions from the town. It really feels like that's what happened. They all did a Reddit AMA. And they gave some very interesting answers. So, uh it is really clear that Deep Seek put them on their heels, and they said as much in this AMA that included Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, Kevin Weil, head of product. Somebody asked This is uh I think we should just read the Reddit usernames because they're fun to say. I always love I gave a wedding speech once where I found marital advice from Reddit, and the best part of it was reading the entire Reddit usernames out loud to the entire audience. You still friends with these people? Yeah, he's one of my closest friends. Okay. See, so folks, what we're about to do is just going to bring us closer. So, let's go to our good friend elo lol's inventor. Lol's inventor says um to the Open AI team, "Would you consider releasing some model weights and publishing some research?" And in response comes a remarkable statement from Sam Altman. "Yes, we are discussing. I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open-source strategy. Not everyone at Open AI shares this view, and it's also not our current highest priority. We are on the wrong side of history on open source." Coming from the CEO of Open AI. To me, it's just it really pushes the point home that whatever happened last week and you know, the whole everybody's been out there trying to you know, sort of bring it down and say this isn't such a big deal, it put the whole proprietary model industry, the Open AIs and the Anthropic's of the world on their back feet understanding that they are about to be passed by open source, and they have to embrace it. Curious how you read the statement. we're on video today, so what viewers can see me just shaking my head because uh this is where in terms of a company with this valuation, it sometimes still kind of it amuses me to know that whatever corporate communications people would normally be around are not cuz this is just Sam Altman I feel just writing out loud and just at this exact moment that thought went through his head that, you know, maybe open source, that's the the topic du jour, so let's say something big and controversial. But then even qualifying himself saying it's not a top priority. So, I had that one felt really to me like just kind of stir the pot a little bit, but I don't think that I don't read too far into that because it can't be their strategy. It literally cannot. So, and then financially, like they cannot if they open source their model and try to win only on the product and the UI alone, they will never be What is it? Wait, what was the massive $300 valuation that they're aiming for. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 300 bill. You're not going to be a $300 company when you're open source like that. Yes, you will. Maybe it's the product that matters, and you open source your model, and you incorporate the best of open source, and you grow that way. Which I do argue regularly, but in this case, the way they have built themselves out, I don't think they will win on that. I happen to like this about Altman. Get on Reddit, leave the comms people in the conference room, and just say what you feel. go. Even if it's not 100% true, and then people like us can sort of break it down and explain to the people at home uh what we think is is real. Thank you, Sam. Thank you, Sam. And your merry band of Open AI gentlemen uh singing on to Reddit. Right. The nobles of the court. Bounced their way down to Reddit. Okay. Uh back on the rails. So, here is from Theory Sudden 5996. They they say, "Let's Let's address this week's elephant, Deep Seek." Uh you know, what what do you think about it? Sam Altman says it's a very good model. We will produce better models, but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years. I mean, that to me is the biggest confirmation that what Deep Seek did really evened the playing field when Sam saying it himself. Yeah, no. I mean, on one hand, recognizing and trying the rational point of view would be they see Deep Seek, they see R1, and they're just recognizing that this is the state of the industry. Potentially, we need to go open source. Potentially, we will not have as as dramatic a lead over our competitors, but we're certainly going to get into then there's GPT-5 comments down the road, and they obviously are still trying to sell this idea that GPT-5, whatever it is, and it's not going to be GPT-5.0, it's just going to be GPT-5, is going to be this earth-shattering AGI, whatever it is. They still have to sell that idea, and they're trying to. I see you've been deep in the Reddit AMA, which always makes my heart warm. It really does make me happy. Where else can you get Sam Altman unfiltered? Actually, pretty much everywhere. Okay. Uh let's talk about chain of thought. So, one of the most interesting things that Deep Seek will do when you go to deepseek.com is it will show you exactly the way it's thinking through a reasoning problem when you use its R1 model. And Open AI just give you some bullet points. I've had so much fun trying to work through these uh this chain of thought, really seeing how the model thinks. And I think whether the model's actually thinking or just computing is like a pretty fun debate uh that we can have in what is thinking. Maybe we'll come to that at another point. But there the the Redditors are asking uh can we please see all the thinking tokens? Here's Sam Altman. Um yeah, we're going to show much more helpful and detailed version of this soon. Credit to R1 for updating us. So, okay. So, here they are literally admitting out loud that they've been pushed by Deep Seek. And Kevin Weil, the product head, says, "Uh we're working on a bunch a bunch of these uh to show a bunch more than we showed today. The problem is the more we show, the more that we can get distilled." They're obviously still smarting in their minds Deep Seek has distilled some of their models and put it into their own. I think this is a great for the industry. I think this is really good. No, I Okay. So, I'd said one of the greatest tricks UI tricks of all time was Open AI and the text streaming to make you feel like the computer is thinking. I think Deep Seek has taken the next greatest UI trick in terms of showing the chain of thought processing. And again, as you said, we can maybe save the what is thinking for an ayahuasca retreat or something like that down the road, but I think Live on air. Live on air, of course. But without getting too philosophical, it's again kind of a party trick in the sense that these models always go through some logical iterations to get to that output. There's There's always, and you said in the end it's actually just math. So, the text representation of that you're seeing is still some kind of party trick here, let's say. Like it's still a computation that's happening, but DeepSeek doing that. And And I've seen a writer.com, which is an enterprise generative AI tool that we use Like they had sub questions, and it showed you the different types of questions that it was asking to get to the final answer. So, other tools and models have done this. DeepSeek brought this to the general population, and it's brilliant because it makes people even more attached to these type of tools. Like it makes them really think that they're thinking, which makes them more usable. It But in reality, like I don't know if you tried this. When you saw within that chain of thought something that didn't quite work in the way you wanted to, you can't just tweak that step. You're starting from scratch again. So, yes, I'm sure there's like some Twitter thread about how to prompt engineer your way out of chain of thought reasoning. But in reality, it doesn't really give you that much help. Yeah, but the chain of thought is really very cogent and so fun to read through. And you see the model be like, "Nah, maybe that doesn't work." Like especially one of the cool things about DeepSeek is just like it's very casual, the language and not not so formal. So, whatever they did to make that work is pretty impressive. All right, let's talk about Stargate. So, Theory Sudden asked how important is the success of Stargate to OpenAI's future, which is again for listeners, it's the 500 billion attempted infrastructure bill by OpenAI. More likely Announced 500 billion. Maybe likely more likely tens of billions, which is still impressive. Kevin Weel says, "Yes, everything we've seen says that the more compute we have, the better the model we can build, and the more valuable the products we can make. We're now scaling models on two dimensions at once. Basically, the traditional LLM and the reasoning models, and both take compute. So, does serving products for hundreds of millions of users. And as more as we move to more agentic products that are doing work for you continuously, that takes compute. So, think of Stargate as our factory for turning power GPUs into awesome stuff for you." Such a product guy response. Such a product Such also a strange communications Well, he was spent years at Meta. He's been on this show. So, that's just how he operates. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even on your episode last Wednesday with the VP of Omniverse and simulation from Nvidia, it's it's interesting to me that how kind of like dogmatic people are about more compute means more intelligence, better outputs, better products. And I mean Kevin here is going down that same path. More compute is better. And I And I like that they're people are starting to recognize And it's kind of a nice way of putting it, two dimensions. There's going to be the like raw compute and in terms of getting better output, but also coming up with new techniques and ways to actually drive that output. But in reality, I still I think DeepSeek shows has shown us and the number is not 5 or 6 million dollars to actually build and train the whole model, but the actual training part of it was 6 million dollars. We can probably take that at some face value. That the future does not only mean more compute means better products. And I think the industry, at least a lot of people, but the people with the most vested interests are still living by that that rule right now. Yeah, but I'm I'm a believer. I think it's I think it's right. Once I try to tell you a quick story. Once I tried to get Kevin Weel to leak me some information from Facebook. I've never been shut down by somebody so quickly in my entire life. So, that's just that that gives you some context to his response. All right. Let's talk about GPT-5. Ranjan, I feel like this brings you great joy, so do you want to take this one Concheria had asked that means, Concheria? Conch like the shell and then turning it into a name? They have a bunny user They have a bunny ninja avatar, whatever you will incorporate that we'll find out after the fact that it's something dirty. If you're listening, Concheria Concaria, please let us know the etymology of your Reddit username. Now I'm starting to feel weird reading these names because I'm like I'm sure we'll find out it's some dirty term after this. Anyway, let's just read it. or cancel. But so, they ask, "Will there be an update to to advanced voice mode? Is this a focus for a potential GPT-5.0? What's the rough timeline for GPT-5.0?" I did like that they just kind of by default called it 5.0, showing how confusing and there's been a lot of kind of like almost hilarious aggregations of what the series of model names has been from OpenAI. And I think this shows how ridiculous it is. So, thank you. Sam responds, and he says, "Updates to advanced voice mode coming. I think we'll just call it GPT-5, not GPT-5.0. Don't have a timeline yet." So, at least one they're they're streamlining the way they're marketing this to GPT-5, which I think is a good thing. He doesn't At least he didn't say AGI. I'll give him credit because actually they need to announce AGI before we get to GPT-5. So, I think that's why that did not make its way into there. Um but I don't know. It's There was a long period of time where for OpenAI to succeed, they had to get to GPT-5, whatever that would be. And I think they've actually, to their credit, gotten to a point where that's not necessary anymore. Like the battle of the next year or two could just be in the operator and deep research and whatever other product, which makes me happier than anyone that people are actually competing on product now. But I think it shows that the fact that he's a bit cavalier about this after What was that tweet about like night sky or something like that? Oh, yeah. So, Sam wrote this like really weird crypto like cryptic crypto. Lord almighty. Cryptic poem that, you know, made us think that something big is coming. But I think he was just writing a poem. Or maybe he had ChatGPT write him a poem and he was sharing it with the rest of us. But so, whatever Sam was trying to communicate in the past or at least kind of allude to, now I kind of like it that it's just no timeline. We'll call it GPT-5, but let's talk about other things. Yeah. Again, I doubt we're seeing GPT-5 this year or maybe ever. It'll just be versions of I think we see GPT-5 this year. Oh, yeah. End of the year. I think if they don't have any killer runaway products, they kind of have to. They have to release something. And again, like what it whatever 4.0 became, 4.0 mini, whatever They could have just called one of these GPT-5 and tried to like build some hype around it, and we'd all go along with it. So, at a certain point, if none of those products that they are releasing and we are both paying $200 a month right now for these new products, so maybe they'll be okay and they don't need to. But if the pressure comes, I think they have to release something. Okay, so you've mentioned multiple times that we are paying $200 a month. I mean, when I spend $200 a month on SaaS, We're talking about it. I'm talking about We did it so we could tell we could tell you everybody at For you. For our you our listeners. what ChatGPT Pro is all about. And so, we will skip our planned segment on ChatGPT search and tell you about our experiences giving OpenAI so much money to use ChatGPT. Um so, OpenAI now allows you to spend $200 for a few things. Unlimited use of ChatGPT. Um their AI agent operator that will go use your browser and do tasks for you. And then something that just came out this week, which we teased in the open, a new ChatGPT agent called Deep Research. By the way, amazingly, they decided to take the exact name for the similar product that Google has. We'll cover that in a bit, but I found that fairly shameless and wrong. Let me read the story. OpenAI is announcing a new AI agent designed to help people conduct in-depth complex complex research using ChatGPT, the company's AI-powered chatbot platform. This is from TechCrunch. I love how reporters still have to write that ChatGPT is the company's AI-powered chatbot platform. Just in case you didn't know TechCrunch. You're writing to a tech audience. What are you doing? Yeah. Come on. Appropriately enough, the bot is called Deep Research. OpenAI said in a blog post published Sunday that the new capability was designed for people who do intensive knowledge work in areas like finance, science, policy, and engineering and need thorough, precise, and reliable research. Could also be useful, the company added, for anyone making purchases that typically require careful research like cars, appliances, and furniture. Um We have both attempted this. It is, to my mind, the best research agent that you could potentially use that you could use right now. And Ranjan, I know you've been deep in the weeds, so I'm curious what you've been using it for. Last week you said Operator was interesting, not worth the money. Is Deep Research worth the money? Yes. I will say Yep. Yep. It is It's fantastic. It is incredible. It's And And I said last week Operator is mesmerizing and useless. Deep Research is fantastic. So, basically, more like market research-oriented questions asking, "What are e-commerce trends within a specific category?" Look through Reddit. Look for through different research reports. Look based on geographies. Even asking an initial question, it will break down and ask you back good questions as though you're talking to an actual research analyst, and then it will provide you an incredibly well-sourced number of bullet points, paragraphs, with hyperlinks embedded. Like, it does an incredible job with this, and it makes smart arguments the way you would expect from I don't want to say PhD-level person cuz I don't even know exactly what that would mean in terms of intelligence, but overall, this to me was huge, and it did a good job. My my kind of litmus test on all this is I think there's a lot of generative AI where people products come out, and people, rather than looking at what is available today, talk about what it could be in the future. Operator definitely fell into that category. This, on day one, on day zero, actually delivered what it promised, and I mean, honestly, you have to figure, if you're in any strategy-oriented role, any just any business-oriented role, research-oriented role, this becomes incredibly valuable. Yeah, I I've used it for a number of interesting things. I use I was on CNBC Tuesday to talk about Google earnings. So, I asked it to give me an entire like prep document about the state of Google. It was Yeah, so, this is the cool thing about it. It searches the internet, and it will, if you ask it, it will give you current information. Um and so, it like pulled out like the projected ad spend, and right now it just has text, but over time, OpenAI anticipates it'll be able to put charts in there, which I think will be fascinating. And I thought, wow, like I won't prep for CNBC without this again. It is really really good. going to end with I won't prep for CNBC, but Yeah, no, I know I do my I do my prep. I work very hard on that and on this, and I also had it give me a prep for the podcast today. And so, I I actually took last week's prep document. So, for folks, we spend the week just kind of dropping stuff in a Google Doc that we find interesting, and now on our Discord also, which has been quite fun. And I just downloaded the prep doc last week, and I put it into the query, and I said, use this as a reference. You can now go to the internet and search our show, and see what my episodes with Ron John look like, and give me some topics to talk about. And at first, like, it went super broad and gave me like what I would do if I was doing like an AI overview podcast, and I was like, no, I need only information that came after February 2nd. And so, of course, like, the top AI story of the week is Deep Research, so it gave me It talked about itself as the top uh Oh, yes. Oh, no, you're good, Deep Research. It's like a Look, it has selfish tendencies and motivations, so it does really feel human. That's AGI. That's human. That's AGI. And then it really broke down next thing, Alphabet earnings, which again, I was on CNBC to talk about. Um and, you know, it says AI spend soars among DeepSeek challenge, and it talks a little bit about what we're going to talk about in a bit, just the capex that that Apple is going to go through to try to build AGI AGI, but AI, right? So, I found I found that to be very good. And then I also asked it to sort of give me a report on like this like how to enroll in healthcare in New York state, and Good luck with that. it was I don't think AGI I don't think super intelligence will help us that Well, that one, so Well, I have a question. Yes. Is there a moat for this for OpenAI? Is it It's a really really well-done product, and again, going back to our my general thesis that OpenAI's strength lies in the product, and the models shouldn't matter, and hopefully they they recognize that too, and if they they'd only invest in the product more, but it's a good product, but can DeepSeek or Google or whoever else I mean, Google has a product named Deep Research. We just don't have access to it. I don't even Oh, yeah, we do. Is it public? It is public. Oh, have you tried it? I tried it today. I had it put together a similar episode plan. Who won? OpenAI won. Okay. Although Google was good, but but OpenAI won. So, the question of is it a moat? No, I don't think it's a moat. Yeah. Okay. I switched my laptop over here because um I'm about to read a lot, and I don't want to face away from the camera for the entire thing. That's I think that's that's right, and we can proudly see our Apple devices here. That's right. Even though Apple intelligence sucks, but Apple intelligence. Oh, so I did buy a new Mac computer this week, and I I went to the to the Apple Store, and they're like, and have you heard about Apple intelligence? And I'm like, oh god, yes, I have. By the way, Vision Pros, nobody Nobody anywhere close to them. Are they still up in the Apple Store? they used to have a special section, and now they're off in a corner, and legitimately no one cares about them. I don't know what I would do if I walked into the Apple Store, and the sales rep with a smile on their face came up to me and have you heard about Apple intelligence? I I might be arrested. I might I might be arrested. Calm, cool, and collected. Siri. Siri, calm, Siri, calm. So, I I this is The post that I want to read is from Ethan Mollick. It's called The End of Search and the Beginning of Research. He's a Wharton professor that's actually quite good on AI, and he's been on the show, and which I have to mention every time we cite his work. It's just part of the contract. Part of the contract. And he makes this point that what we're what we're seeing right now is this combination of a new mode of AI interaction called reasoning, which we talked about, and agents. So, let let me read some of this cuz I do I do think it's so good. He says, For the past couple years, whenever you use a chatbot, it worked in a simple way. You type something in, and it immediately started responding word by word, or more technically, token by token. The AI could only think while producing these tokens, so researchers developed tricks to improve its reasoning, like telling it to think step by step before answering before answering. That approach, called chain-of-thought prompting, markedly improved AI's performance. So, that's like the move from traditional LLMs to reasoning. He says, "Reasoners are capable of solving much harder problems, especially in areas like math or logic, where older chatbots failed. The longer reasoners, and this might be rep- repetitive for for people who are deep in, but I feel like it's worth reading. The longer reasoners think, the better their answers get. The the the rate of improvement slows as they think longer. This is a big deal because previously, the only way to make AIs perform better was to train bigger and bigger as model bigger models. Because reasoners are so new, their capabilities are expanding rapidly. In months, we've seen dramatic improvements from OpenAI's O1 family to their new O3 models, and that's where DeepSeek factors in. And DeepSeek has its R1 model that everyone went crazy about last week was a reasoner. So, basically, what's going on with this Deep Research he calls it he says, "Deep Research is a narrow research agent built on OpenAI's still unreleased O3 reasoner with access to special tools and capability. You can see that the AI is actually working as a researcher, exploring findings, digging deeper into things that interest it, and solving problems uh like finding alternative ways of getting access to paywalled articles." And it goes on for 5 minutes. Sometimes it can think for 5, 10 minutes. He ended up getting a 13-page, 3,778-word draft with six citation and and additional references to one of his queries. This is the point I'm trying to make by reading this. I think what we're experiencing with Deep Research, and the reason why it's even a question that it's worth paying $200 a month for, uh is because it is an implementation of these new AI methods that we're starting to see with with Deep Deep Research, we're starting to see with R1, and it might be that we're just at the cusp of something very interesting happening in AI with this reasoning moment. Uh what do you think about this? And And do you think that um I am reasonably excited about it the same way that Ethan Mollick is? No, I I completely agree, and this is to take I don't want to be cynical about it, but to me, I'm incredibly incredibly excited about, again, watching what Deep Research was able to do, and what that means for certainly any kind of like just general research type stuff, but also and OpenAI very kind of, you know, and from a marketing perspective, shoved in, you can research couches, or cuz they want to try to have some more commercial aspect to this, or more consumer-focused aspect, but this is going to happen. Like, this is going to There's no question to me that these type of models, these type of actions will kind of reshape what the web is, the way we interact with it, the way we interact with most apps. And I think that's good, and that's going to completely rebuild so many areas and so many things. I think the area to kind of maintain some caution is what is the word agent mean? What is the word agentic mean? Is this agentic? Is this something else? I think that term is still being thrown around a little too cavalierly, cuz like now they're if they've kind of gotten it to where a simple chatbot query is an agent, which I don't think is necessarily the case. Just seeing chain-of-thought processing from DeepSeek isn't agentic, but Deep Research showing you that it's going into, you know, a bunch of different websites, and showing you which websites it's going to, and showing you what it's extracting from those websites, and com- how it's compiling it, I think that's huge. I think that's incredible in terms of showing people this is possible. To me, the biggest change that I think needs to happen is letting people interact within that process. Cuz right now, you kind of like put in the prompt, let it think for 20 minutes sometimes, and then get something and then have to revise it. But imagine you can actually in the middle of all of that action say, "Actually wait, I don't like that. I like this." I think that will be a huge change in terms of how useful this stuff is. Not only that, it's going to learn your tendencies. And the more you interact with these things, like right now the memory is just something that they don't have. And that memory's coming. So, they'll learn your tendencies and next thing you know, uh you're going to have like a research assistant that really knows everything that you want. So, um and and just to think about how much room there is to improve, there's already so much going on now. Uh this is uh it's Malek is pretty level-headed. Again, Wharton professor who's deep into AI. He says, "These systems are already capable of performing work that once required teams of highly paid experts or specialized consultancies. These experts and consultancies aren't going away. If anything, their judgment becomes more crucial as they evolve from doing work to orchestrating and validating the work of AI system." The labs, the research labs he means, uh "believe this is just the beginning. They're betting that better models will crack the code of general-purpose agents expanding beyond narrow tasks to become autonomous digital workers that can navigate the web, process information across all modalities, and take meaningful action in the world." It's pretty high praise. It is. I think to me, I was thinking especially on that shopping side of things and like thinking, "Okay, management consultants potentially replaced or that industry certainly changes. Us having to do lots of research in general, but we have very specific parts of our job and profiles for the larger population, like where does this start to apply? And the shopping thing, it's still weird to me because how much of that does someone really want to be automated? Like it is the process that the agent is going through, is that actually the joy that a person experiences? Is going around and clicking on different websites and reading through the reviews, is that annoying and a pain or is that the part of it that people actually enjoy? I don't Do you like online shopping? I do. I do. Yeah, I I think most people enjoyment. And also like you'll never feel that emotional attachment to something you get if the bot just got it for you. Yeah, exactly. Like it's the act of doing the shopping or doing the research sometimes is Am I getting into It's the journey, not the destination right now. I think I have the destination. Oh, it is the destination. There's definitely joy in sort of finding cool stuff to go visit and then going and doing it. Like if a bot's just doing that for you, then it's just like, "All right, well, I could have just Googled it and went to the first result." Yeah, so I think right now and don't get me wrong, this the research, consulting, strategy, journalistic This is a pretty big opportunity and market. I'm not I'm not downplaying that at all. But still, who is using this and how, especially to expand outside of that, is still not a trillion-dollar market or it's a I mean, to get to that, what are the use cases for agents? Because again, Apple intelligence cannot find our flight information in our email when you ask Siri, which they pitched us as agentic and that's my momentary Apple intelligence bashing. But But like what are actual agents being used for in everyday life and for normal people? People have not been able to articulate that case well and I I'm still waiting for that to happen. It might have to be humanoid robots, going back to the Nvidia conversation. All right, all right. That's humanoid robots are always a an easy sell, I think, for anything. But Everyone's building them. But let me ask you another question about what Ethan is saying, which is basically that um consultancies aren't going away and that it the orchestration of AI is going to be more important than um what the actual reports are. I don't know. I've always been on the side that like AI will be uh creative in in the workforce and not destructive. But uh I think you have to look at this with clear eyes and that is that there are going to be jobs that just completely go away even if more jobs are created over time. And seems to me like this stuff is going to not maybe not get people fired, but certainly make a company think twice before hiring. Not 1,000%. Actually, I think it was from Goldman Sachs like a couple weeks ago, they were talking about how an S-1 financial filing, which is a enormous document, but was always kind of a non-human, kind of like really plug-and-play type of document, used to take 2 weeks and 16 bankers and now can be done in like 5 minutes. And again, that all makes complete sense to me. You have a bunch of data feeds and AI can aggregate it and you just review the entire thing. Like that's going away. Management consulting, all the research and grunt work goes away. And that's good. And I mean, you can imagine out of all the job displacement, the least sympathetic group when we say the bankers and consultants are have the are under threat. for being in the the bankers. Yeah. By the way, one of the interesting things I don't know I'm sure you noticed this, too. It's way more accurate than it's been. Way less hallucinations. You can click It gives you sources, you can click through the to the sources and the numbers are good. Yeah, actually that's a really good point. There everything I clicked through was 100% correct, which was almost shocking to me in terms of the output. So, That's huge. This This meaningfully changes especially any kind of job that involved opening a lot of browser tabs and copying and pasting text and synthesizing that text. That is completely changed and there's no way to argue. I get saying orchestrating and validating will keep certain populations like at least a little less scared, but this is big. This is huge. My internship from 2009 just disappeared. half my life has disappeared right now. Uh so, it's not just OpenAI, Google also has a release this week. They released a set of Gemini thinking models. Uh from TechCrunch, Google is bringing its experimental reasoning artificial intelligence model capable of explaining how it answers complex complex questions to the Gemini app. The Gemini 2.0 flash thinking update is part of a slew of AI rollouts announced by Google this week. Uh also, talking about the CapEx, the company is planning to spend 75 billion on expenditures uh like growing its uh family of AI models this year. It's a considerable jump from the 32.3 billion on CapEx it spent in 2023. That's a lot of money. 72 75 billion? It's like when Satya said, "I'm good for my 80 billion," right? Sundar is saying, "I'm good for my 75." That of course went had me go check where Nvidia is right now. It's So, it's down 12% since the Deep Seek announcement and it's back up a little bit. The story of compute, the story of Nvidia, the story of chip demand, I think the one thing that was interesting about the last week or so, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta did not show that they're, you know, moving away from this CapEx spend. Google's coming out and saying it. So, it's clear that the, you know, the big the tech giants are still taking this path. And OpenAI still wants this path and saying Stargate is very important. So, I think it's interesting because the entire like big technology industry has a vested interest because if compute and CapEx are critical, then only they can win. So, this is going to be really interesting to watch play out that as long as compute and CapEx are critical, they're the winners. So, they're going to say that, they're going to keep spending. And if someone, that's why I still think and we talked about this, Deep Seek was such a big story and remains a big story cuz it showed that that entire narrative can just collapse on its own if smaller players come out and do interesting things. That's right. And by the way, I like went out on CNBC and I said I think Google is on its way to being the best-positioned company in the AI race. And of course, they promptly missed their cloud numbers and went down double digits. So, um but but I think they they do have so much potential. The one thing they really need to fix is the way that they name their models. So, if you go to Gemini right now, there's uh Gemini 2.0 flash, there's 2.0 flash thinking experimental, there's 2.0 flash flash thinking experimental with apps, there's 2.0 pro experimental, there's 1.5 with deep research, at least we know what that means, 1.5 pro, and 1.5 flash. Do they do this? Is it Is it just a joke to Google. Don't change. I love it. I love it. I want Google to never never stop naming model. You know, OpenAI, I'm a little disappointed in them. I think their model naming convention is a little is not good. I want that from Google. I don't If they ever had a perfectly streamlined suite of products with a beautiful name, I would question everything. Remember Bard? None of this stuff works. They've had a thousand chat apps. Nobody uses Google Chat. Yeah, it They need to spend G Chat was the greatest product of all time and they I don't even it's called like Hangout chats with Meet or something like that right now. to put my head right through the table. I am. They're spending 75 billion this year. Could you spend 500 million and buy an ad agency and just name this stuff like normal human beings? Get a subscription to Gemini 2.0 flash thinking experimental with apps and ask it to name your models for you. But I don't know. I This the with all the turbulence and volatility in the world, Google giving its models and products really inconsistent names just makes me feel just a little more at peace. This makes you happy. Don't change, Google. Don't change. So, speaking of AI and job loss, there was a great New York Times story about Klarna over the weekend. Klarna is, of course, a payments startup. It says, "Why is the CEO bragging about replacing humans with AI? Ask typical corporate executives about their goals and adopting artificial intelligence, and they will most likely make vague pronouncements about how the technology will help employees enjoy more satisfying careers or create as many opportunities as it eliminates. And then there's Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the chief executive of Klarna. He has repeatedly talked up the amount of work they have automated using generative AI. Okay, yeah, that sounds familiar because he was on the podcast and he was talking about how much work they automated with generative AI. Oh, that's a story that catches my mind or catches my eye. Let me scroll down. Okay, so this Times story, as usual, sites one podcast and another podcast, and then it says this. "When the host of the Big Technology podcast asked why he was so intent on taking Klarna's AI prowess, Siemiatkowski said that partly it was good for humanity. We have moral responsibility to share what we are actually seeing and that we're actually seeing real results and that actually having implications that are actually having implications on society today." Then he acknowledged that another part of the motivation was self-promotion, for sure. "We are regarded as a thought leader." I was pretty stunned to see the Times name our show in the story, especially cuz they had so many podcasts be nameless. So, thank you, New York Times, for citing us. And I want to point out this was Ron John's question cuz we spoke right before and he goes, "Ask him why he's talking about it." Very interesting question, Ron John. Thank you for that. Well, I'm glad the Times is finally on it, that what is the motivation behind bragging about replacing humans with AI. I think again, I'm glad. I genuinely am glad that they're asking this question because the marketing impetus behind all these pronouncements have to be questioned, and that certainly applies to Sam Altman and that certainly applies to an AI in our entire AMA discussion from earlier. And I I did love that moment that there was this big kind of pronouncement, literally, the good of humanity, and it's self-promotion, for sure. We're regarded and he even called himself called it a thought leader, which is normally, I feel, maybe some people out there use that seriously, but most people I know do not use that as like a serious term. And he kind of just was like, "Yeah, we're a thought leader. We're self-promoting." They are still, I believe, looking at IPO. This is a question that if people start pushing on more, start asking more, not why is someone saying this, but or sorry, asking why is someone saying that, not just the content, but the motivation, I think the whole AI industry needs to ask that question for every announcement. Absolutely. I was stoked to see that story. I was stoked to see the headline be the exact question that you asked, and I was surprised and grateful that we were mentioned. So. Not by name, name, but by podcast. Okay, I will I will take it. They put podcast name more than host name as host name. they not just say Alex How do they not just say Alex Kantrowitz from the Big Technology podcast? hurt. They would hurt. They would really They would have to cry. Oh, come on, Danny. Yes. Uh so, we are on the cusp of the Super Bowl. If you're listening to this, either the Super Bowl has happened or it's about to happen or maybe the Super Bowl is happening and you're one of the few humans on Earth that's listening to the podcast as the game's going on, in which case we appreciate you. Thank you for choosing good content. Um guess who's going to be in the Super Bowl? Of course, the Chiefs and the Eagles, but also OpenAI and Google. This is from the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI set to make its Super Bowl ad debut. OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, again, I just like love the soul coming out of the reporter having to write that explanation, is expected to air its first TV commercial during Sunday's Super Bowl. OpenAI's brand took off in late 2022 when it launched its wildly popular chatbot, ChatGPT. The big game ad is by far OpenAI's biggest foray into advertising as the race to build the world's most powerful AI technology and win over users intensifies. And the Hollywood Reporter also says about Google, "Google bets that the Super Bowl can turbocharge Gemini's ad business. Google is planning a major Super Bowl ad for its Gemini AI product line, including a 60-second ad in the second quarter of the game and purchasing 50 different 30-second ads in every state, each one spotlighting a local business that uses its AI software. That's smart. Um I was reading this news almost instinctively saying, "Spend that money on buying GPUs and scaling your models." However, I think this is brilliant on behalf of OpenAI and smart on behalf of Google. You got to get your products in the hands of people, like we talked about at the beginning of the show. People have to use ChatGPT. People have to know ChatGPT, and millions of people are going to use and know and talk about ChatGPT, especially if the ad is half decent after it's in the Super Bowl. I think this is the game. It's five, whatever, 5 10 million dollars really well spent by OpenAI. I think what for OpenAI specifically, as well, I mean, they clearly have been moving towards a more formalized professional marketing function. In December, early December of last year, they had hired the former Coinbase CMO, who had been at Meta for 11 years and was global head of brand and mark product marketing for Instagram. Actually, the whole suite of products. So, serious marketer. So, I'm very curious to see what they're going to do. The The challenge for me is twofold. One, the AI ads to date we have joked about have been terrible. Apple intelligence, not to go back there, but if we remember, they had all these ads of basically people kind of like not wanting to pay attention to people not as important to them, so summarizing their content in real time. But even Google had a disastrous ad in the Olympics, if you remember, where it's like a little girl wants to write a letter to her favorite athlete and the dad uses Gemini to do it. Like, how tone-deaf. Like, it's still one of the greatest things I saw. I was like, "These companies need to just hire one person who's just normal and sits in the corner and does nothing, but just gets shown the ad and says, 'This is terrible.'" and I don't think it's a bad idea. No, I literally just in the corner, they get paid a lot of money, and they just sit there and, "Okay, that is just terrible." Okay, normal people think they will think that's good. Um Oh, man, I go back and forth though because the other side of this is these this generative AI has a branding problem. Like, when I still talk to most non-tech friends and family, they still associate generative AI content as bad. And like, that's the whole joke. It's like, "Oh, that's so ChatGPT." Did ChatGPT write this? Yeah, did chat No, no, I mean, it's still the entire Which is a fair insult. Which is, but it's a to call kids Wikipedia when they were saying generic stuff. Generic stuff. That's what I mean, that And to me, like, the actual products, if you know how to use them, are so far beyond that that that stereotype of AI-generated content is like for overly formulaic, and that's like 2 years ago ChatGPT. But so the so the so there's a clear branding problem. How do you solve this when people have a negative connotation of the technology, have a negative connotation of you, the company? Like, it's got to be a damn good ad, and I think the crypto bowl of 2022, I believe it was January, with the Larry David ads, the Coinbase ads, remember the bouncing Yes. They're brilliant ads and they're really well done, but like, I don't think it helped the In In fact, certainly was not a good moment afterwards for the industry like certainly got a lot more people to put their money in crypto and then they got the rug pulled out from under them. But this is different. point. Like, I don't think that's we're going to have the same scam. No, no, no. The The to me, that part isn't the scam, but how do you solve this branding problem? I think like, if you're Katie Roach, the CMO of OpenAI, you're sitting in a room, you're like, "We have this branding challenge." I hope they recognize it. How do we overcome it? I am very excited to see what this commercial looks like. What What's your best guess of what it's going to be? I'll give you mine. All right, go. maybe you're going to have Shaq and Charles Barkley sitting at the Inside the NBA desk, and they're like saying nasty insults to each other that they're like typing in ChatGPT is giving to them. Or maybe something voice. Maybe it's just somebody like driving in the car and like having a conversation with ChatGPT. And it'll be like a Snickers commercial. It's like, "Bored? You know, bite into a ChatGPT." Oh, all right. Hold on. Yours Do you know the the most successful kind of like not even skeptical AI thing thing that converted AI skeptics I saw? I don't know if you saw like Insta ChatGPT roast my Instagram profile, where you literally just screenshotted your grid and then put it on, and it And that was the moment that I think a lot I saw a lot of people being like, "Wait, this is genuinely creative. It's not formulaic. It's actually funny and interesting and and creative." So, I think that that would be mine, roasting Sam Altman or other famous people letting their Instagram profiles get roasted by ChatGPT. That's my ad. Yeah, okay. So, basically, we both agree that it's some form of AI roasting humans, which is humans, and it's and it's got to be funny. It's got to be good. I I don't think trying to trying to tug at heartstrings in any way Google's going to do that. Google's going to do that. I'm sure. It's going to It's going to be like a kid and a grandmother, you know, just trying to communicate with each other, and then Gemini will solve it. but the weirdest part like I introduced my dad to Gemini voice. And he really he has Parkinson's and has trouble typing into his phone. And it it was this emotional moment. Like it genuinely that could have been the commercial right there. Yeah, it could have been. And they're still they they that that is sitting there and somehow it's still going to get screwed up. They'll mess it up. Somehow it's They they have made some really beautiful search ads before in the past. ad of all time and I realized how old I was when I brought that up to some younger people. Parisian love. It was from 2009. It's a Google search ad where and it really made Google search emotional where someone goes through the process of studying abroad, falling in love, getting married. It was it was amazing. If they can pull off the 2025 Parisian love, I'm betting it all on Google. If they can pull I have a good ad on that. bet against their their ad agencies. Okay. Uh we need to get out of here, but uh who do you think is going to win in the game? I I'm a New England Patriots fan. Yeah. I don't want Mahomes to three-peat. So, I want the Eagles to win, but my God, the Chiefs somehow they always do it. So, I will grudgingly bet that the Chiefs will win. And I am a Jets fan and I want Tom Brady's legacy, especially his and Bill Belichick's legacy to fall apart. So, I'm taking the Chiefs. And uh All right. I mean, I'll take the Eagles just to take the other side and that's where my heart lies, but What's your prediction on uh what happens at halftime? We got Kendrick Lamar coming out. I have this feeling that Drake is going to come out. They're going to hug. Oh. And then they're going to both take out fake guns and shoot them and it's going to say "Bing." Wait. As in as in The search engine. As in Bing. That could be the most aggressive call of all time. And if you are correct about that, I mean, it's time to retire. they should hug it out on stage. I could see if they can do it, world peace will happen. literally We Are the World comes on just like Stevie Wonder at the Grammys and uh Kendrick and Drake sing it together. Canada and the US friends again. Let's bring it. Let's bring peace at the Super Bowl. Peace to all of us. Yes, as the Eagles and the Chiefs go at it. That's right. All right. Well, Rajan, great to see you in person. This has been so fun. This has been fun. Let's wave to the people at home. All right, everybody. Thank you for watching us or listening to us. We do this every single Friday breaking down the week's news. Sometimes we break some news and we hope you join us. If this is your first time watching the show, you can subscribe to us here either on Spotify or whatever app you use to get podcasts and on Wednesdays we'll do we'll do I'll do one-on-one interviews with people in the tech industry and then Raj and I will be back every Friday. So, that'll do it. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.