00:00:00 · Anthony Ha, Kirsten Korosec, Amanda Silberling, Sean O’Kane
[00:00:00] S0: This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner. [00:00:05] S1: Anthropic s one finally dropped, but one Apollo economist says AI has delivered a zero financial payoff outside of tech. So who's really benefiting from the AI boom? Also this week, Marissa Mayer's new AI assistant has sparked a wave of backlash over what tech leaders think people want from AI. And we're keeping an eye on a couple of deals, including a $600,000,000 funding round for a startup that's building self driving excavators. Stick around. Hello, and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Kirsten Korosec, transportation editor here at TechCrunch, and I'm joined as always by our weekend editor, Anthony Ha and senior reporter special projects, Sean O'Kane. And dot dot dot, we have a special guest today I'm very excited about. And this is one of our senior reporters who we talk about all the time, Amanda Silberling. Thank you for coming on the show today to talk about what other exciting stuff you have going on in the AI Internet culture world universe. [00:01:17] S2: Yeah. For sure. I'm happy to be here. I feel like this is a meta experience, and that sometimes I will listen to Equity. And then someone will be like, well, Amanda wrote this thing. And I'm like, oh, no. I've been perceived. [00:01:29] S3: Now you're full spectrum perceived. Yeah.
00:01:29 · Sean O’Kane, Anthony Ha, Amanda Silberling, Kirsten Korosec
[00:01:29] S3: Now you're full spectrum perceived. Yeah. [00:01:32] S0: Well, Amanda, I heard you wrote a thing specifically about AI executives and how they might be out of touch. Do you wanna just kind of recap that for our listeners? [00:01:40] S2: Yes. So I've been noticing that AI executives, I think, are bad at promoting their products. And most recently, we've seen people get a little up in arms about the way that Marissa Mayer, who was one of the earliest Google engineers, former Yahoo CEO, with her new AI company, Dazzle, the way that she portrayed it made people kind of mad because the way she described it was that she was very impressed with this tool, which looks at your camera roll and then acts as an AI assistant that learns about you based on the pictures you take on your phone, which is an interesting idea. Because, yeah, like, you're learning way more about a person than maybe just looking at their email or, like, their work life. But she used the bad example that gave her a bit of an uncharitable display in the media where she said that she asked it to make bullet points about her daughter so that she could tell her daughter's teacher what are three things about my daughter that make her special. [00:02:52] S1: Pause for that. Let it all sink in. I have to say, as soon as I saw that, I just stopped, and I kinda hung my head for a moment. And I'm like, oh, please let this be out
00:03:02 · Amanda Silberling
[00:03:02] S2: of context somehow. Please. Please. Please. I would say it's a little bit out of context. I guess we don't know what exactly happened in this interview with the New York Times where she said this, but after it was published, she was saying that she felt that the quote made it seem like she needed the AI to help her accomplish this, but rather she is the CEO of a company and is using the product she made to do various things. But basically, what it came up with was that her daughter is creative, empathetic, and an animal lover. And the way that the AI worked was that it came across pictures of her daughter where she made, little projects in kindergarten that were related to, like, sand cat playground, snake de venomer, which is very cute. And that does illustrate that she is empathetic, creative, and cares about animals. But I think that sometimes these executives are so out of touch that they don't understand that the general public is gonna hear this and be like, oh my god, why do you need an AI to tell you three fun facts about your daughter? And we see this happen repeatedly where Sam Altman often talks about how he thinks that parenting would be impossible without ChatGPT. We see, like, Mark Zuckerberg talk about how people typically only have three friends. I don't know where he's getting that statistic from, but that is what he said. But that we have the capacity for 15 and that AI is something that can stand in and help people achieve those 15 relationships. And again, I do think these these quotes could be blown out of context where Mark Zuckerberg did say, as I said in my article, like, you know, like, there is benefits to personal relationships. But if you don't have access to that, then, you know, those extra 12 friends out of your 15 total friends that you wanna have Could be a computer. Could be fun.
00:05:06 · Anthony Ha
[00:05:06] S0: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that you talk about context because there's both the context of, you know, trying to be fair as journalists to what they're saying. You know, what was the larger conversational context? But there's also the context in which people are hearing these Right? And there's this general feeling, I think, right now where there's a lot of societal skepticism about AI, this feeling that, you know, the people running these companies don't have our best interests at heart, that they're out of touch. And so you would also just think maybe don't make statements like that because, of course, people are going to see them very skeptically. And and so I think they are trying to walk this delicate balance of, on the one hand, they kind of feel... There... You know, there's a tremendous financial incentive for them to make the case that you should use this technology in every aspect of your lives. But when you make that case, it actually paints not always a very appealing picture. In some cases, it's downright, like, dystopian.
00:06:05 · Kirsten Korosec
[00:06:05] S1: First of all, Anthony, if they took your advice, we would have nothing to talk about on this show. So... You know? But I will say this. It... There's there's this whole idea, like, making... And and other AI tools making your life easier when it comes to personal relationships. And in many of these cases, it just seems to overcomplicate what would be, like, observing your child. But that might be hard for some people, the people who are building these products, and it doesn't necessarily relate to, like, everyone else out there in the world. And so it can just seem so incredibly disconnected when you see these quotes for for everyone else. So it just... To me, it always comes back to, like, who are they speaking to? Yeah. Are there people out there
00:06:50 · Amanda Silberling, Sean O’Kane
[00:06:50] S2: who can relate? Maybe maybe there are. Yeah. And I think that a lot of the time, other use cases we've seen people mention are, like, the Bumble CEO, Whitney Wolfe Herd, has made comments about, well, what if we had, like, AI concierge is among your dating, like, your AI dates the other person's AI. And then if the AIs have a good date together, then they introduce the people. Or in the New York Times article, Marissa Mayer mentioned like, well, what if my AI could coordinate with my husband's AI and stuff like that. And I think that it feels like people are trying to over optimize out of just having conversations with people. And I feel like I've already seen that happen in my generation where I do notice in myself that if I'm ordering takeout, it feels weird to call a place. Like, I'm just so used to like, well, obviously, you can do it online and you don't have to talk to anyone. And I feel like there's just gonna be more of these things where basic human interaction gets more and more optimized out of actually occurring. And call me old school, but I think that humans being able to talk to each other is probably a net positive for society. [00:08:09] S3: Yeah. But what's the ROI, Amanda? You know? How much how much revenue can you generate over over all of the conversations that somebody's having in meeting?