Cocomelon For Adults

Hello, search engine listeners. Before we start the show this week, some news. We're doing something new, and I need your help. So basically, I need you, our listeners, to submit questions that you think I would be unqualified to answer. So like, stompers. Don't ask me how to make a podcast, or how we find stories for search engine, or where to get a sandwich in Brooklyn, FederOPS. Ask me stuff that I probably could not answer. What's the meaning of life? How do batteries actually work, technologically speaking? How do you raise your child? Who I've never met? Everybody wants to look smart online, but in an act of daring and bravery, I'm going to completely and valiantly with for an hour, and reveal the shallow limits of my own intellect. Send your questions if you have them to PJVote85 at gmail.com. This is going to be a live event online for our incognito mode listeners. We're going to do it on October 17th. 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To stream the best of cinema, you can try Mooby free for 30 days at Mooby.com slash search engine. That's mubi.com slash search engine for a whole month of great cinema for free. A week open AI launched a very strange new app called Sora. Sora is actually Sora 2. There was a Sora before this that fewer people used and which lived inside the paid version of Chatchee PT. But Sora 2 lives inside a standalone iPhone app called Sora. The short version is that it's an app that lets you make very realistic AI videos using your own face. Plug in a prompt and a little bit later, it'll spit out a very realistic looking video clip. There's a little uncanny valley effect where you can tell, particularly if it's a video of someone you know that has been AI generated, but it's pretty close to being indesernable from real. I think even someone relatively practiced at spotting fake videos on the internet should expect going forward to be fooled pretty often. Sora launched with some safeguards. Nobody can make a video of you without your permission, but if you want to, you can choose to give the app permission for you to use your own face and videos, for your friends to use your face, or if you're nuts, for strangers to use your face. I got on and I did the thing you do with these AI toys where I started making videos for myself of myself, a very, very fat PJ shook hands with a very, very skinny PJ. Whoa, you're me, just thinner. And you're me plus a few pounds, good to finally meet. Likewise. Manosphere, bro, podcaster PJ, talked about his nutritional supplements from behind his no-knack huge muscle bod. I'm running right now, five grams, creatine monohydrate every day, fish oil, vitamin D, and a little ashwaganda, that's my baseline. I would tell you more, but there's this rule of AI, which is that the things we make are like our dreams. Very interesting to us, very boring to everybody else. Anyway, there was a moment this week where I felt a little nausea about the future of the internet. AI slop content made by bots that floods the places where humans are trying to talk to each other, has been rising across social platforms. And convincingly faked video seems like it'll make the internet worse, not better, at least for me. So I wanted to understand why this is happening. I wanted to both know how we got here, how a company claiming to want to create machine intelligence is detouring into the slop business, but also where we might be going. And that's why I'd call the KC. KC Newton, welcome back to the terror town. Hi PJ, nice to be here. So can you just explain, and my dad would understand, like how do you explain what Sora to is? Sora to is a text to video generator. If you compare it to something like chat GPT, that's text to text, right? There's a box and I type, hey, do my high school English homework for me, and I click enter and it does it perfectly. Sora lets you say, hey, make a video of me doing my high school English homework using my face, and then it does that instead. And it has audio as well. So it might include a little bit of dialogue in what it produces. And the way that it gets the audio is that when it captures your face, when you sort of let it capture your face, you just speak a couple of numbers. And from that, it is able to kind of create a facsimile of your voice. Yes, although as I'm sure you've noticed, it's a pretty bad facsimile. You're saying at most four or five words to this thing when you're getting started, which at this point is still not enough data for it to be really good. So we're talking Thursday, October 2nd. How long have you been messing with it? So I was able to get access to Sora earlier this week on the day that it launched, and I have been making videos with it every day since. So can you show me when you're stupid videos? So I thought it'd be fun to like imagine myself trapped in a video game and unable to get out of it. And so I wanted to see if it would put me in the original Mortal Kombat arcade game. That of course is also like copyrighted material. So I also kind of wanted to test like, what are the boundaries as far as copyright? And I found that Sora was quite happy to put me into Mortal Kombat. Hahaha. Oh no, ow. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, we're watching now. Oh, it is a really good recreation. It's like you're fighting Raiden. Oh my God, someone's throwing lightning at me. This isn't fun anymore. Please don't finish me. It really looks like you've been put into Mortal Kombat. Like I'm sure that if I compare this to an actual Mortal Kombat screen, there's funny details they got wrong. But relative to my memory of a Mortal Kombat screen, they did a good job. Yeah, I'm definitely more impressed with what they got right here than what they got wrong. Like you might also notice that both Raiden and me have a health bar as you would normally see in a fighting game and my health bar does just say Casey on it. So like the amount of details that it was able to conjure over the, let's say two to three minutes it took to generate this video, didn't impress me. So those are the sort of videos that Sora can quickly output from a prompt. I wanted Casey to also describe the Sora app itself. The Sora app is different from the existing chat GBT app. It's a whole separate thing to download. And once you install it, it's hard not to notice that it looks a lot like a clone of an existing very popular platform. So the actual app looks like TikTok full stop. In their live stream announcing this OpenAI employees said, we've designed this to look familiar, which is a nice way of saying we have copied something. So when you open Sora, you see a feed of videos that are all about 10 seconds long. You swipe up to move to the next video. You can double tap something to like it. You can add a comment. You can share it. And the one sort of interesting thing about Sora is you can also remix it. So if I see something that is funny, for example, I saw somebody took a popular meme character and put it into the world of the video game Death Stranding. And some people hit the remix button. And they said, well, put him in this video game instead. Or instead of this meme character, actually make him Jesus. And you do that just by typing out a few words in text and Sora will then generate a video, which then appears next to the original video. So if you see a video on Sora, you really like. You can kind of swipe to your left and videos appear at the right and show you all the remixes that people have made. So, okay, so that's the tool. That's you playing with for a couple of days. Like, talking about just how Sora, too, was announced to the internet. It was announced via a live stream, which is how OpenAI likes to announce things. They'll get members of the team who worked on it. They'll go live on YouTube and they'll kind of walk through. Here is the research that we've done. Here is the new tool and then they demonstrate the tool. Welcome back to reality. I'm Bill, I'm the head of Sora. I'm Rihanna, I lead the Sora product team. I'm Thomas, I lead Sora engineering. Back in February, 2024, we introduced Sora one. We really view that internally. The OpenAI live streams tend to be somewhat casual, I would say. No one is in a suit. Everyone is in there sort of San Francisco, slightly preppy hoodie forward uniforms. When you see their feet, you're going to see all the fun we've been having on the Sora team. Some of memes have been emerging as we play with the product. There's one about ketchup. I'm freaking ketchup for some reason, which I think. And everyone is in their 30s, it seems. And they just casually talk through the research they've done, the thing that they made, and it's very much presented as, well, we made something we think it's cool, we hope you like it. We're training a lot of models that we think the world can have a great deal of fun with and can bring a lot of joy. So we're really excited to see what you ultimately create on this app. We'll see you guys on Sora. They tend not to hype things up too much. Sometimes they will say, we think this is a big leap forward in this way or that way. But these aren't iPhone announcements, where the CEO is on stage, constantly telling you how amazing something is. The way I, as a sort of like, when I pay attention to it, kind of tag journalists, I had not seen the announcement, but what they successfully did, they caught my attention was that later in the day where they announced it, they were just posting lots of stuff on Twitter. And there was one opening I employed in Gabriel Peters who was posting all these sort of funny and goofy videos he'd made of Sam Altman. And Sam Altman had said it so that you could use his face as much as you want to do, which is such a weird sentence to find myself saying. But the thing that caught me was, there's one point where Gabriel Peters has this post. And he's like, I have the most liked video in Sora 2 right now. I will be enjoying the short moment while it lasts. And it was fake security ham footage of Sam Altman stealing GPUs at Target. Please, I really need this for Sora inference. This video is too good. And then being caught and like, cuffed by a security guard. And I think he was trying to say, look at the funny thing I made, and I, and I saw a lot of journalists having the same reaction. He was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This seems like not good technology. Yeah. Making realistic videos of people committing crimes that they did not commit can lead to negative outcomes. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I wanted you to really say that. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. What did you think when you saw that? One, I was struck by the fact that Sam had let anyone remix his likeness into anything. He would later post on X that seeing himself so much in this Sora feed was less strange than he expected it to be. But I was thinking a lot about, wow, we have another billionaire who has made himself the main character of a social app. Why does this keep happening to us? Why do you think it keeps happening to us? I think at the end of the day, everyone is the same. They want the most followers and the most likes and the most reposts. That's what I honestly think. And that people will compete for attention, even if it's negative attention, and the people not willing to do that don't end up in the public sphere in 2025. Yes, we live in a world where attention is perceived to be power. Right. I mean, I saw Sam Altman's face in all sorts of, I saw it in Antoylid. I'm a CEO in a porcelain spa, I give a juice, give a day, yes, yes, yes, that's me running AI from the vacuum. Stop, head above water, flush that tune, everybody bouncing, I saw the Sam Altman dress like a teacup committing acts of musical theater. Silver towers breathing snow, fans revolving, measured time, keeping circuits still alive. I pour my heat. I saw the Sam Altman playing with teletubbies. I am gonna touch the purple one. Like I saw so many Sam Altman's this week. It was weird, it was like he was putting himself into everybody's dreams. It was a very strange thing. Because even like the way Elon Musk dominates X.com, it's not the same as just seeing someone in video clip after video clip after video clip after video clip. There is a nightmare on Elm Street quality to it, where you're flipping through the Sora feed of dreams and Sam Altman walks into every dream. Yes. Watching one of the most famous tech CEOs appear in realistic video after a realistic video of himself in various fake situations, I had that feeling again when you watched the future become the present. It's happened so fast that it feels almost cringy or millennial or those different words. To ring my hands about all these deep fakes, they're here. They're gonna keep getting better. And while OpenAI has put safeguards on Sora, users will want AI video generation with fewer safeguards and companies will compete to give it to them. We all live here. I don't have to tell you how it works. What I did find remarkable was how fast we've arrived at this moment. How we went from, oh, the robots can draw pictures sometimes too. I don't trust political video anymore. I ask Casey about it. Can you just kind of help me remember like what the steps along the road that have gotten us here? Like, where do we start and how do we get here? Where did we start? We started with a crazy and dangerous dream to build a machine, God. That most of the people involved said to each other, this would be a bad idea. The whole time. And then one by one, they said to each other, while this is a very bad idea, I do think I can do it in a slightly less bad way than you are going to. And so I'm gonna raise $500 billion and I'm gonna do it my way. That was kind of the start of it. Yes. And then from there, the first image thing I remember was Dolly, but was that actually the first popular one? I remember there was a moment where Dolly had first launched and people were making these incredibly primitive. It was like looking at a three-year-old drawings but the three-year-old is a computer. It wasn't that they were good, but the novelty of it was exciting and watching a computer try to make images was exciting. I did find it exciting. I even thought the images were cool. I mean, at least it was cool that I could say like make me a picture of a bulldog on the moon and like 30 seconds later I'd be looking at like a really cute bulldog. So yeah, Dolly was a moment where all of a sudden the idea that you could conjure not just text, but also an image out of thin air became real. So Dolly's 2022, the other thing I remember, when does video start? Was it like 2024? Do we start to get video? Yeah. So Sora gets introduced in December of 2024. So last year and gets added into paid subscriptions for chat GPT. At that time, it did not have audio. So you could make a very short video clip, but it would not have sound. And so while OpenAi was very interested in exploring what potential applications of this could be, they start working with like Hollywood filmmakers, it can't really make what you and I think of as video, which is video with sound. Right. And at the same time that they're doing this, it's like OpenAi, the sort of pattern for this is OpenAi will release something. They're often ahead. They'll release something that works pretty good and feels like a sketch of what might happen next. And they'll have rules in place to prevent abuse. And then usually there are competitors, like prominent companies, less prominent companies, who will build similar things with fewer guardrails. So like my memory, incorrect me from wrong, but 2024, one of the big ones people used was called stable diffusion. And stable diffusion was like, you could do a very similar thing, but you were much less likely to run into the chat bottle on the other side telling you that it couldn't generate an image you wanted. Yes, stable diffusion made models that were small enough that you could download them onto a laptop and just sort of use them without essentially any guardrails other than whatever might have been baked into the original model. And what I recall also from that time is like, it's where you see there's this like, I don't wanna bring it up. The Will Smith video where he's eating spaghetti. Yeah. Ah, ah, ah, ah. Ah, does that, does that. Uncle Phil come try this. Brush pasta of belly. Do I describe it, Casey? So this is Will Smith's face eating spaghetti with his bare hands, his chin is kind of bobbing all around, almost like detaching from his face. It's incredibly grotesque. They are playing the fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song though, which brings up warm and nostalgic feelings in me. This infamous video originally from 2023, before rewatching it with Casey, I forgot how aesthetically disturbing it really is. A version of Will Smith whose facial proportions I would describe as wrong and dripping, shoves a mop like mass of spaghetti near the general vicinity of his grotesque melting mouth. It was so bad it went viral, but as new AI video models have appeared, oftentimes he will showcase the new better version of AI with new Will Smith's eating AI spaghetti. It's one of the informal benchmarks for how the technology's moved forward. You can watch these spaghetti videos get real error. Underneath that progress though, I wonder what's been happening technologically. Casey says probably some of this is from the models being fed more training data, more video to learn from. And they're using more horsepower, more GPUs, more energy consumption. But beyond that, it's a little opaque what's driving the rapid progress here. You know, I tried to get a really good answer that would be accessible to a broad audience on like why is Sora two better than Sora one? And the answer proved to be just dauntingly technical. Like one thing that's better about Sora two is that it can generate videos faster than Sora one. And so I know PJ that you're a smart guy, you're wondering like, well, how can it do that? Yeah, how can I do that? The answer to that question involves step-reduced solvers, rectified flow variance, and kernel level optimizations. So hopefully that answers your question. But it's funny because there's been other kinds of technological advancement where there's been jargonia explanations for it that I've read you parse. This feels more jargonia and less parts of it. And I think the reason is because it's relatively easy for me to understand how a single image gets made. You probably watch this happen. It uses this process called gradient diffusion where what it's essentially trying to do is find the median in all of its training data. So if you say something like make me a picture of a bulldog on the moon, the model works. And it's like we're gonna show you the thing that looks the most like a bulldog. And we're gonna show you the thing that looks the most like a moon. And we're gonna show you the thing that looks the most like the two of them together. And you can just sort of watch that like gradually come into focus. Now you think about a video. You have to do that across hundreds of frames over 10 seconds. You have to synchronize that with audio. And so there are just a lot more processes that are running in order to make that happen. And they have simply overwhelmed my pathetic human brain in this moment. Hahaha. Do you get this into the people building at completely understand it? What I've learned from my time covering the AI industry PJ is that no one who works there completely understands any of it. So no, I don't think that they totally understand it. I mean, when you talk to people who work on the models themselves, they talk about them like they are growing orchids, right? Where it's sort of like, well, these ones look really good. This one has a problem. We're gonna see if we give it a little more light if maybe the flowers grow a little better. But we're not exactly sure why it turned out that way. So I saw a two that Sora app was released to a limited set of users on September 30th. By October 3rd, it would be the most popular app in Apple Store. Setting aside obvious necessary conversations about copyright or fairness, what was immediately so clear is just that a lot of people really enjoy Sora. It's a novelty. The way that Sora was set up at launch, users could generate videos using realistic images of many copyrighted characters and public figures. Copyright owners work was fair game by default unless they'd explicitly opt it out. That meant I saw a Pikachu from Pokemon Grilled Inthalade. Pikachu on the grill here. It's already got a beautiful char and it smells like somebody plugged in a chicken. Let's give it a flip. I'm gonna carve it into some thick steaks. I saw a lot of Stephen Hawking's on a lot of half pipes. And I watched last weekend in real life as a group of teenagers in 20-somethings played with the tool and just got totally sucked into it for hours. I'm using each other mainly by trying to see how inappropriate they could be. Watching I thought, okay, a tech company has created one more tasty brand of junk food. A new reason to look at our phones a little longer. It was what I expect from this internet, although not what we've typically seen so far from OpenAI. The company talks about super intelligence, about trying to improve the lot of humanity. And now they built a tool that let people use Martin Luther King Jr.'s likeness to make more Epstein jokes. I have a dream that the Epstein files get released. To me, this seems like a pivot. But was it? What were OpenAI's motives here? After the ads, some answers. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. I'm going to be a little bit more honest. Get started today at vancer.com Welcome back to the show. So our question, what are OpenAI's motives here? We of course reached out to OpenAI directly to ask them what they think they're up to with Sora. A spokesperson said in part, quote, on the road to general purpose simulation and AI systems that can function in the physical world, we think people can have a lot of fun with the models we're building along the way. In keeping with OpenAI's mission, it is important that humanity benefits from these models as they are developed. We think Sora is going to bring a lot of joy, creativity, and connection to the world. So that's the company line. But this is the where we're here to help humanity company unveiling junk food, an AI-slop social media feed that is glugging and seemingly amounts of electricity. I wanted to ask Casey about this. Since, as far as I could tell, none of this had been a part of OpenAI's lofty mission at its start. When OpenAI gets formed, the idea is to create artificial general intelligence that benefits all humanity. It's famously set up as a nonprofit. It seems like the last thing that they would want to make is a social app that just sort of sucks away. Your time. On Wednesday, October 1st, there's a person on X who posts Sam Altman two weeks ago. We need $7 trillion and 10 gigawatts to cure cancer. Sam Altman today, we are launching AI slot videos marketed as personalized ads. And he's got a point there, right? And Altman actually responds and says, I get the vibe here, but we do mostly need the capital for build AI, I assume he meant for building AI, that can do science. And for sure, we are focused on AGI with almost all of our research effort. It is also nice to show people cool new tech slash products along the way, make them smile, and hopefully make some money given all that compute need. So that was really interesting to me because it was an acknowledgement of the fact that this is a money making enterprise. And in part, it is a money making enterprise that is going to be designed to subsidize the absolutely enormous cost of running open AI. So talk to me about that. Like the idea is you make one more stupid app to make people look at their stupid phones. And if you can do that and it causes people to sign up for the more premium version of Chatchy PT, that money is just sort of like revenue that open AI to someone desperately needs. Yes, the idea is find ways to generate revenue now that helps to offset some of your losses across the rest of your business. And here's where we can talk about one of the most interesting and under-discussed phenomenon that we've seen at one of these companies recently, which is what I think of as the Facebook effication of open AI. Meaning what? So when opening AI gets started, it really is mostly a research lab. You have some startup people in there like Sam Altman, who used to run by a combinator, was just sort of like deeply enmeshed in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. But it's a lot of sort of big brains who are trying to figure out how do you build large language models that can do everything Chatchy PT does today. Over time though, open AI in addition to being this brainy research lab also becomes one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, maybe the hottest one. And they start to attract a lot of talent from other big companies, including Meta. Recently, open AI hired a woman named Fiji Simo to be what they call their CEO of applications. So in charge of running the various apps that the company has, which now include Chatchy PT and Sora, Fiji Simo came from Instacart where she was the CEO. But previously she had spent almost her entire career at what was then called Facebook. And she worked on systems that helped people spend a lot of time looking at feeds and buying ads based on what they were seeing in those feeds. And when you look across open AI, according to some research that we talked about on my podcast recently, we think there are about 700 people at open AI who used to work at Facebook. So that's not to say that all of them were Facebook true believers and they want to make Chatchy PT look exactly like Facebook. But a lot of the DNA of this company is now people who worked on social feeds that were monetized by advertising. And as we saw with the launch of Sora, there is part of the company that is now moving full speed ahead in that direction. And for you, like, I think one of the interesting things about trying to understand technology in 2025 is that most of the prominent tech reporters in our cohort generation, or at least maybe those are the ones I pay attention to, they're people who watch the rise of and were disappointed by the social media internet. And one of the questions has been the AI tech companies like, how much are they like what came before and how much are they not? Like, how do you see open AI as at least representing itself as having a distinct mission? And like, what does it mean for it to become Facebook-ified? Yeah. So in terms of open AI's mission, over the past few months, as there's been more concern that Chatchy PT can lead to delusions or even psychosis in the people who are using it, open AI puts up a blog post in which they try to assert their mission. And what they say is, we want to help you get stuff done, and then we want you to stop using Chatchy PT. We do not want to trap you in some endless engagement loop where you're refreshing a feed 100 times a day. And what Chatchy PT is to help you get stuff done and to improve your life. And I just want to say that this very, very different from that's almost like when I think about why I have positive feelings towards this company, I mean, I've never felt the need to put screen time limits on my Chatchy PT use because it's something that I look stuff up on and then I put my phone down. Right. And I have felt the same way. And then the week before Sora comes out, they put out something called pulse. What is pulse? Yeah. Pulse is a feed of stories personalized to you. Some of those are news stories. So if you're like me, read a lot of news, it'll be like, hey, here's what's going on with the TikTok sale. But then it all says, hey, you were looking up some stuff about meditation. Here's a quick meditation you can do in between your meetings today. And, you know, we know you got a dinner coming up this weekend. Like here's a side dish that you could make. And on one hand, this is like good and helpful stuff. I basically like the idea of it. But is it also a feed I can come back to and check every day? Will they send me a push notification if I let them letting me know that my pulse is ready? Is this an obvious spot where they could integrate advertising in the near future? Of course. I see. And so the question, one of the questions you have watching this right now is opening I says and let's just like give them the benefit of the doubt. Opening I believe that they've a mission and the mission is in a real way to improve humanity. And like obviously there's lots of potential downsides, which we can talk about. There's energy consumption and climate risk and job loss. But they have this optimistic vision and the optimistic vision requires tons of money. And so one of the ways that they are trying to suck money into that mission is to be a little bit more like Facebook. And one of the questions you have to have is like how much do you trust them to be a little bit like Facebook versus in two years. Catchy BT is a super optimized product that gets you to stare at your phone using all the tools the existing social platforms you just get you to stare your phone. Most of which will leave you feeling worse off when you're done. Right. So unfortunately, I do think the trend is that the open AI products are starting to look more like social media apps in that they are asking for more of your time. They are becoming more explicitly commercial products. One of the other changes that they've announced the week that we're talking is that there is now a commerce integration into chat GPT. And so you can start buying products directly from the chat GPT feed over time all of this adds up to something that could very credibly serve not just as a replacement for Google, which is where a lot of the attention has focused so far. But possibly for the metafamily of products as well. So on one hand, there is still kind of the big crazy AI story of oh gosh, what happens if the machine God does get built and none of us have jobs anymore. But there's this other much more normal and traditional Silicon Valley story, which is hot new startup comes along and starts to eat the lunch of the incumbents. And a lot of what we've seen open AI do over the past few months has been much more in that direction. Remember, according to Sam Altman's tweet about all this, his belief is that if open AI is going to deliver on its promises to humanity tomorrow, it needs capital today. That's why they've begun to nibble at the lunches of these existing social media companies. Open AI needs more capital seemingly always because the resources that these AI companies are fighting for are very expensive, particularly compute power, which comes from enormous data centers, which need oceans of electricity to run. This is the subject actually of a couple of stories we're working on that'll be out in the next months. But that said, for the purposes of this story, all you need to remember is that open AI is currently spending enormous amounts of money to try to stay ahead of its rivals. Because nobody competing in AI seems particularly interested in second place. There is a belief within AI world that this is maybe a winner take all race. And if not a winner take all race, then probably a winner take most race. That has been the case with many of the big internet categories, right? There's more than one search engine, but Google took most of the market share. Unfortunately for your show. We keep trying to hire. You're trying to add under. There's more than one social network, but for a long time, Facebook had taken most of that market. So the question is, is AI sort of the same thing where one company creates the AI that is used by 80 plus percentage of the population? And if that is the case, you want to be that company. And right now the race is still unsuddle open AI has done a great job so far of cementing itself as the leader in that category. But there are a lot of challengers nipping at its heels. And the big incumbents have started to wake up to the fact that, oh, wow, these guys actually could eat my lunch. You know, Mark Zuckerberg is browsing that sort of feed and he's going to go put the fear of God into his employees because this is something that he thinks about constantly, right? Just like what is the thing that is finally going to dethrone me? So you're just starting to see all of these very competitive, very ego driven executives taking a look at the future and thinking, it'd better be my name that gets written in the history books as the person who builds the machine God. And we are going to spend as much money as fast as we can to get there. And so for this narrow thing this week, like Sora to launched as basically AI tick tock, do you think it will work like asking people to make predictions is kind of unfair, particularly about something measurable like the success of an app like I just say I want to do it is unkind, but like do you think that opening I will make the money it needs to offer this thing. Do you think people will use it the way it seems to want people to. I'll tell you the prediction that I have that I am confident about and that I think I might differ from my Peter's on. I think this feature that they're calling cameos, which is the ability to take your friends like this is in your own likeness and put it into whatever situation you can dream up that the content guidelines will allow. I think that's here to stay. I think people are really going to like that. I think it's the sort of thing that in live ends any group chat, which is where most discussion now takes place. And I think you can make a lot of like fun and funny stuff that will like drive memes and engagement online. Can open a I take that basic creative tool and build an entire social network around it. That's a much bigger challenge and it is impossible to judge on the first week whether a social network has any staying power by default every social network dies there have only been a handful that have managed to last decade. And the ones that have done that successfully have essentially found some kind of influential community that had a reason to be there and liked being there and they just like kind of stuck around and they drew more and more people to them over time and the creative tools evolve and maybe the people who are creating things there find ways they can make money. Like these are some of the ways that these networks can take off and it just remains to be seen whether Sora is going to be one of those things, but we have reporting that open AI has thought for a long time not just about creating a tiktok clone, but also maybe wanting to go after X wanting to replace the Twitter of old with something. Would that I don't understand what would that. A Twitter where nobody's real well I think the idea was like there should be a place where you can share and discuss your creations and open AI so you know at the time we were thinking maybe it's the images that you're creating maybe you want to share some of the conversations that you're having with chat to put the I realize none of this sounds like fun or interesting to browse but. These were some of the discussions that people were having now along come Sora and it's like oh well like maybe that's actually the core of it is like people are sharing these videos but it would not surprise me at all if this thing starts to gather momentum and open AI says you know what you can actually share text posts and the feed now as well if you like right you could use the sort of feed as the basis to create something larger so if they feel like they're having some success they may go for it. It's funny you know I've been a bystander to fight between a adult and a teenager about social platforms and like there's been an attempt to hold the line against a teenager getting on. Instagram and what's been hard is that for the teenager they're like this is where my friends are like plans are being made here homework assignments are being shared here not by the teacher but like. It's communication that they legitimately have a need to have and as an adult you're like the platform doesn't care about your relationship with your friends the platform is holding that relationship hostage said the platform can relationship with you correct and the fears and what your friends are going to say you on the platform the fears that once you on the platform. What your relationship with it's going to be and there's something very confusing to me about right now where if open AI wants you to have a relationship with its platform but its platform isn't even kind of about other people like it wants you to share your funny sort of videos so that you see the funny sort of videos and then more people get online and talk to their chat bots is very weird trying to imagine what I did AI mediated social platform is going to look like and I do kind of have faith in. Do you kind of have faith in their ability to draw people into it yeah I basically do to you know one of the dimensions of this conversation that we haven't discussed yet is that I think a lot of folks who are around our age have a powerful disdain for what they would call AI slop and they're in disbelief that companies keep creating tools to make and share it. And I'm sympathetic to that view it's weird for me to go on Facebook and see shrimp Jesus and obviously fake woman who says that she just turned 101 today and made a birthday cake but there's no one here to celebrate and it has like 800,000 likes and comments from people wishing her happy birthday. It's weird to me that that's like so much of our reality and it's easy to get from there to this is all going to burn itself out like this is obviously stupid. But I do think that this is one of the lessons of the internet over the past year is that you can say on one hand I don't like AI slop it makes me uncomfortable I can't imagine spending much time looking at it and then on the other hand digging into it a bit and finding out this stuff is crazy popular. You know you read the comments of these things and people seem to have an awareness that like their brains are being cooked as they're watching it like they're just sort of being hypnotized into a stupor by the sea. So I think I'm going to start by the series of images we haven't talked yet about metas vibes app which meta had rushed out the week before so I launched and is a kind of just worse version of it your friends and family aren't in it. It's just sort of random AI generated video and as I'm flipping through this thing I'm thinking this is cocoa melon for adults this is just raw visual stimulation designed to keep me hypnotically scrolling as long as I can. And on one hand that might not seem very different than tiktok today but on the other hand it's like well at least a person made a tiktok like at least that girl is dancing. You know and now it's like I'm going to get into my bed but my bed is made out of cookies and I'm going to fold the cookies over me and there's no real point to it but God it looks weird and I kind of want to share it with my friend and like this is the sort of kuku town direction that everything's going. Are we just going to end up looking at colors and shapes were so close. So close to colors and shapes. Underneath all this conversation maybe it's just some anxiety that I think everybody who covers tech has right now the invention of social media was so expensive for society that tech journalist like Casey Newton are now trained to spend way more time anticipating when new technology shows up. What it might break instead of what problems it could solve. There's this hope that if we can see the danger ahead of time maybe we can somehow be useful. Is that true at all? I don't know. I remember trying to impress a grade school history teacher quoting that line about how we have to know history so we're not doomed to repeat it. He asked me when has knowing history ever stopped anybody from repeating it. For me I continue to use our decaying internet. I continue to play with these new AI tools and I try to say curious which means for me I try to ask myself a lot these days. What do I think this technology is doing me right now and do I like it. And so what do you think just like as a person who needs to like not having high screen time is not related option for you with your work. You need to look at and make sense of an internet that is becoming both less sensical and less human driven. How do you prepare for the next season? So to try to inject a little optimism here. Yes, please. I do think that there are these avenues where you see people really hungry for human connection. I think podcasts are a big part of that. Like I look at these AI generated podcasts. The people are now making and I may have some blinders on here because it would be in my interest for this to be true. But I just think I don't know in the next two or three years at least I can't imagine wanting to listen to an AI podcast way in on events in the same way that I want to listen to all of the podcast that I listen to investigate all of the subjects of their interest. I think podcasts give us a connection to real people who we like thinking through difficult problems over long periods of time. And I think that's one reason why podcasts are so popular. I also think that you see this in the rise of newsletters and other kind of niche publications. There really has been a boom in blogging that I sort of thought we wouldn't see again. I thought it was like kind of one and done. But now I feel like almost everybody I know has a sub stack that they send out once or twice a year. And I think it's because people want those authentic connections. They want to be able to tell you what they actually care about and how they're thinking about things. So I don't think it's as if everyone is giving up on human connection and deep thinking at the same time. I do think there are more and more powerful distractions being injected into the bloodstream of the information economy. And they are kind of sniping people one by one and it is worse. I think it's genuinely scary, but I think you're right that it's worth remembering that as some parts of the internet get more senseless, people express a strong demand for a sense-making and that like sense-making is still happening. The solution to all this is clearly podcasts. The solution is podcasts. I bet listeners weren't prepared for that point, but we got it. Casey Dainty for being part of the solution here. My pleasure. Casey Newton, you can find him on his podcast HardFork and at his newsletter platformer. I recommend both. Music Music Getting instant insights is amazing, but if there are too many data points, it can be hard to see what works. So I'll ask my AI assistant for recommendations. And with PDF spaces in Acrobat Studio, it's easy to remix documents and transform insights into standout content so you can go from idea to creation in record time, all within an AI Powered Workflow. Do that with Acrobat. Learn more and try it out on Adobe.com. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It is created by me, PJ vote, and truthy, pin and an A. E. Garrett Gram is our senior producer. This episode was fact-checked by Mary Mathis, theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarriam. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis, and thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Mara Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. Our agent is Orin Rosenbaum and UTA. If you'd like to support our show and get ad free episodes, zero reruns, and even extra interviews, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You can join Incognito Mode at search engine.show. Follow and listen to search engine, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week. you