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