Dear Sam

Intro/Outro

That was a week No time to be meek The goal is to seek The next big thing

Andrew Keen

Hello, everybody. It's Friday, May the 24th, 2024. The last Friday in June, the last That Was The Week with my old friend Keith Teer. the author of the invaluable essential, that was the week newsletter. And there's only one story this week I need to tell you. And it really is a story that has nothing to do, one would think, with technology. It's associated with Scarlett Johansson and the supposed appropriation of her voice by a certain Sam Altman from a little startup company called OpenAI. This is triggered keith to write a dear sam letter for that was the week newsletter um for may 24th keith i hear your wife thought it was all about keith rather than sam yeah

Keith Teare

we have a we have a vibrant let's call it debating culture in our family janae

Andrew Keen

thought you were uh

Keith Teare

putting myself into the middle of something that isn't about me and making it about me.

Andrew Keen

That was the... Keith Teer would never do that. He is the least self-centered person in the universe. Anyway, leaving aside Keith Teer, let's talk about this story. What exactly has happened? Why is this the dominant tech story of the week? It's bizarre, symbolic, but also hardly surprising in many ways.

Keith Teare

Well, I think the... The popular way of understanding it, which is probably somewhat mythical, is that Sam Altman is a bit of a sociopath, that he decided some time ago... Just a bit? Just a bit. And he decided some time ago that he wanted to associate the OpenAI voice with the movie Her.

Andrew Keen

Which, of course, Scarlett Johansson was a voice character in.

Keith Teare

Yeah. So that's not a bad instinct. That's a really good marketing instinct, probably. Her was really good and somewhat prophetic because it does seem as if the current open AI that's being rolled out now is capable of some things that were depicted in that movie that we all thought were total science fiction at the time, and it wasn't that long ago. So good instinct. Scarlett Johansson was apparently contacted to act as the voice and she declined. But Sam didn't let go of the her idea. Now, it would be entirely okay to want to mirror her without purchasing Scarlett Johansson's voice, conceptually at least.

Andrew Keen

Could you pay for Scarlett? Or is it one of those MasterCard ads that you can't? It's beyond money. Invaluable.

Keith Teare

Well, you know... If I was her, I wouldn't want to be the voice of OpenAI. It kind of typecasts you for the rest of your life in a way. So she's probably right to turn it down. And Sam's probably right to still think that her movie is a good framing for what the next version of OpenAI is.

Andrew Keen

So when you say the voice of OpenAI, he didn't just want to have Scarlett Johansson as a voice on it.

Keith Teare

Yeah, that's all he wanted, yeah. so it's just one voice it's just a voice so he went off and hired an actress um scarlett johansson says to copy her voice the the actress and sam altman say no there was no remit to sound like scarlett johansson they did the voice they demoed the voice last week when they did their launch or two weeks ago And Scarlett Johansson immediately reacted saying, this is a copy of my voice. And the actress reacted, no, this is me. It's my normal voice. And there was no request for me to sound like Scarlett Johansson.

Andrew Keen

So the question I have on this, Keith, is that OpenAI is an AI company. It's not a text-to-speech company. So it's really what was happening here is not associated with...

Keith Teare

No, it is. It is. You missed last week's newsletter. It was called Eyes, Ears, Hands, and Mouth. And actually, the new OpenAI is designed to be conversational using your voice, and it replies with a voice. And by the way, it can interrupt. You can talk over each other. Like you and I. Just like you and I. So it is evolving to be a voice interface. and you can also type into it but voice is really well done and um and that so that's the guts of it but it's more than a voice it uses the camera now andrew as eyes so you can like i pointed my camera a tree in my yard and said what is this tree and it spoke back oh that that is um uh california and blah blah tree uh uh pretty much instantly so this is gpt

Andrew Keen

yeah yeah i just put it up on screen so that we have it yeah so it's so oh it's a that's a pretty big deal so they were using the the scar or they were apparently

Keith Teare

according to scarlet at least using her voice to yeah they they denied it hence the the uh the sam altman is a sociopath kind of yeah one one of the pieces you connect

Andrew Keen

with is sam altman is full of and And then there's also a defense of what he did in Ars Technica from a piece in the Washington Post. It's a he said versus she said. There's always going to be arguments on this. What did you say, Keith? Let's annoy Jeanne. What is the point of your Dear Sam newsletter? What are you trying to tell Sam as a startup person yourself?

Keith Teare

yeah my letter may be too subtle because what i think i i say is sam you need to get ahead of this tell the truth and put it behind you because if you don't it's going to hang over you and you're sitting on top of probably some of the most important technology for the next 10 years so you don't want to screw it up based on this what my wife thinks i say is poor sam you've been cruelly

Andrew Keen

uh accused of we're not going to have any more stories keith of what happened with you and microsoft you always manage some readers when keith gilmore always talks about paul mccartney or john lennon you always talk about that one so let's leave

Keith Teare

that one aside so i will say readers read it for yourself and yeah readers read it

Andrew Keen

for yourself keith keith and sam altman are both

Keith Teare

Andrew, before you move on, someone in the chat says, Sam A., a sociopathic, narcissistic, egomaniac. So I'm right in kind of capturing what people think of him.

Andrew Keen

Yeah, and I think if we want to capture... Maybe again, we always talk about this, the zeitgeist. This wouldn't have happened 5, 10, 15 years ago if Zuckerberg had made a mistake or the Google boys had made a mistake. So everyone, I'm no great fan of Altman or or even ai but everyone's out to get him so anything that happens people pile in i

Keith Teare

think yeah you know for you and i have both done startups i think if you think about this from the point of view of a startup and even though they've got a lot of money they are still a startup this this uh launch was the day before google io on purpose as a kind of a a bomb and um it was rushed The tech really isn't ready. So if you look at what they've rolled out in the two weeks... Which is classic for a start-up. Yeah, it isn't ready.

Andrew Keen

The tech is never ready.

Keith Teare

Nothing was ready, including any agreement with Scarlett Johansson.

Andrew Keen

And when it is ready, then you've moved on to the next thing.

Keith Teare

You've moved on to the next thing. So I think this is probably the cock-up theory applies, not the conspiracy theory. And I say that to cinematographers who made the comment. I think Sam A. is, you know, got a decent ego. There's no doubt about that.

Andrew Keen

Oh, yeah. And he's clearly not the most honest of people. I mean, even your old friend Paul Graham has said that. So within the tech community, he's not trusted.

Keith Teare

As the board of directors said, he can be evasive.

Andrew Keen

In other words, he lies. Casey Newton made an interesting point. We can't include his stuff in here because he's so... uh hard to pin down in terms of his stuff but he said that ever since altman came back to open ai neither altman nor the company has been the same thing is there any

Keith Teare

truth to that do you think well look there's there is a bad smell a lot of people have left um A lot of people have left, mainly the safety people. Although, to be honest, I think that's appropriate. I think there's almost no danger.

Andrew Keen

Some of the early people left as well. So you don't think this bad smell, you say? I mean, a few months ago, I can't remember what the exact numbers were, but you suggested that the future of the entire global economy was built around open AI and it was going to dominate everything. Are you more or less bullish? More bullish. Not on AI itself, but on open AI.

Keith Teare

More bullish. I mean, what they launched last week was a little bit better in terms of the quality and the hallucinations and all that. But it was a lot better on the user interface and the use cases. So they integrated live Google Docs and live Microsoft Docs. so you can now give it documents to look at and interact with.

Keith Teare

It's a monster from a point of view of a future value.

Andrew Keen

The issue, though, and this comes back to the Hansen case, which is about ownership of data and business models here. The other piece of news which got buried a little bit, which I think is extremely interesting, is that OpenAI And News Corp, owned by the Murdochs, signed a content deal. Now, News Corp has always been very hostile to big tech. So this is quite surprising. And this reflects well on the promise of open AI, because presumably if they can do deals with enough people in the media, in Hollywood, then none of these issues will come up in the future.

Keith Teare

Yeah, I think one of the things that's shifted in the last week is sources of data for open AI. Paying for data is one, but once you turn on the camera on the phone as a data gatherer, you have 4 billion people that can give you data. By the way, it works even by pointing the camera at a newspaper article. It will read it and tell you what it's about. Maybe that's what we should reinvent now.tv as.

Andrew Keen

As what? As those 4 billion. You're always good at appropriating, writing one off other people, Keith.

Keith Teare

For them, yeah, yeah. Anyway, data is not going to be OpenAI's problem because we're all going to become data gatherers for it.

Andrew Keen

Yeah, but this comes back to an issue that you and I have argued over for years. I mean, it's one thing to turn everybody's camera on. It's quite another to figure out reliable news from credible journalists at places like the journal and the times. I mean, the times is still suing open AI. So yeah, a lot of this stuff's going to get determined in the courts over the next year or two.

Keith Teare

Yeah. You know, we've talked about it before and I've predicted the open. I will win those court cases. I mean, how do you know? I don't have to know. I can predict. I am the voice of him.

Andrew Keen

Yeah, but you're not the legal voice of him. You don't think that the Times have a good legal case? It's going to go to the Supreme Court.

Keith Teare

No, because I don't think OpenAI used any logged-in data. It was all publicly available, just like it would be to you and me or anyone writing a book. So I think they'll win based on fair use. I doubt they'll... But I think the world will move on. I don't think the Times is threatened, actually. I think to your point- Why are they going to court then? I think they're reacting against something new that they don't understand yet. And so the first instinct of a corporation is lawyers. But the second instinct is better than that. And there will be a second instinct.

Andrew Keen

Of the content verticals from the news industry to the publishing business, to Hollywood, to the music industry, we'll come to the music industry later because your startup of the week is an AI music company. Which do you think are the most vulnerable and which are going to do the which you're going to throw in there a lot with the open AIs of the world.

Keith Teare

I actually think they'll all benefit. Open AI has started giving links and references now, as has Claude. And I think what will happen is a lot of traffic that was on Google doing searches will now be in open AI. And it will behoove most publishers to allow their links to be exposed so that people can click on them and go to their content. And I do still think human beings are going to be the determining factor when it comes to quality. You know, when I read something from OpenAI that I don't think is good, That damages up an AI in my eyes. So I do think we're all going to be judges and we're going to start using the AIs that serve up quality. And at least in my experience, they're capable of doing that.

Andrew Keen

Well, this will be a dominant story. We'll come back to it. A couple of other interesting pieces of news about whether or not the AI industry is basically all of tech now. Nvidia crushed earnings again. Does that speak of the reality of this market? What does that tell us, the Nvidia numbers this week, their quarterly numbers?

Keith Teare

It tells us that people are buying the Nvidia cloud GPU services in order to train models. They made $26 billion in a single quarter in revenues. That is a 250% gain over the previous year. So these numbers are unusually large numbers for any company ever in the history of companies. So it really does tell us that lots and lots of money is being piled into

Andrew Keen

these tools is there um i mean it's obviously good news for nvidia i assume it's good news for open ai and the downstream open ai companies is it bad news for microsoft who who's nvidia's most direct competitor actually microsoft is a big

Keith Teare

customer of nvidia so intel missed the boat on this one intel missed the boat amd missed the boat um you know google and facebook are building their own chips to not have to use NVIDIA, but that probably is a process that's going to take a while. And there'll be new chip companies. Now that the world needs fast model-building chips, the NVIDIA chip is the best right now, but it wasn't designed for this purpose. It was designed for games.