¶ Intro / Opening
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
¶ Introducing Media Challenges and AI's Impact
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ad Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe Wisenthal.
So, Joe, we continue to publish some of the conversations from our recent live show in New York, and I hope people didn't mind. They didn't seem to, they seem to enjoy it. But we did do a little bit of media industry naval gazing.
Totally, so as we've been talking about it. If you listened to past episodes from the show, you know, the theme obviously had this big like sort of future of markets, future of trading theme. But you know, I would say, and maybe this is like I'm very biased here, but I would say that information dissemination collection And I guess you say, journalism is an important part of markets, right, how people get informed?
Say journalism? Like that journalism?
No, But you know, like the thing like in the way if you think about like the floor and the faun of the market ecology, then the people who like report the news, digest the news, explain the news, highlight what news is relevant, what is not relevant are important actors in that system and in a period of so much change and uncertainty. The question of like A, how you decide what's important and b how you convey that to an audience. These are really tough questions.
Yeah, so, I think there's two major challenges here. One of them is what you just said, which is like, how do you explain these huge technological shifts to people who may not you know, they might be outside of the tech industry. How do you explain like an incremental improvement in a model to the average lay person. And then secondly the other big challenges. The media itself is caught in the crosshairs of the debate over whether AI is going to take all the jobs.
Right.
That's it, right, So any one of us who's in the business of trying to consume, figure out what's important and relay it is also thinking about well AI do a better job than we do, and precisely that included writing newsletters, are producing podcasts.
That's right.
So we had a trio of perfect guests for this particular discussion. All of them have been on the show before. We had James van Gelan. He is, of course the founder of Satrini Research and the author of the viral AI Jobs Doom scenario as well as Jasmine's son. She writes a substack that's all about AI and the culture of Silicon Valley and tech as well as samro He is the author of one of my favorite newsletters with the best name, the t kre So take a listen.
¶ AI's Threats: Job Loss and Existential Doom
Where to even begin?
I'll start with.
James because he's next to me and I just want to know what his life is like. Right now, do people like recognize you on the street and scream at you about AI job losses?
I've done two credible death threats, but not on the street. Okay, I guess yeah, now yeah, I mean you know better when it's no person right, But now I've I luckily, I have been very much an internet personality and not someone that does a lot of taped interviews.
Like this.
Percent of you. No, But in case if you randomly don't, I assume you do. When was it that February or something you wrote a post about a theoretical possibility of you know, we're all going to lose our jobs but anyway,
so I could see why people were upset about that. Jasmine, you write about AI and you sort of like try to when I read you're writing it's like bridging a gap right to some extent, because there are people, most of them in San Francisco, often on a lot of drugs or maybe they're on an occult or something like that, and there's like these are like the people who are
like going to influence the rest of our lives. How do you think about the question of, like what is actually important to communicate to a broader public.
Yeah, I mean it's really interesting because I think the vast majority of aimedia coming out of Silicon Valley is buy AI people for other AI people, and it serves that purpose really well, right, Like you got really in depth podcasts, you got the Door Hush podcast, you got
this whole ecosystem of sub sex. One thing that I really noticed in that I think most people who listen to the comms coming out of the industry leaders will notice is they're saying all these crazy things without like four second thinking that like any normal person might hear them say it, and they're like, oh, man, why don't
these people like AI very much? Just like I don't know, You've been telling them you're going to take all their jobs and kill everybody for the last several years, and like you're on the record saying this stuff, and so I think it's really interesting where it's not like crypto where only a small fraction of sort of the broad public ever deeply engaged with it.
AI is something that, whether people want to or not, is impacting their lives.
It's on their social feeds, their kids are using it, it's in their workplace, and so people have all these questions about the intersection of AI and politics, AI and affordability, AI and parenting and education, and the majority of I think AI media historically has not really focused on that. It's been more of the business and technology community. And so I'm sort of trying to say, like, okay, but what about the.
Rest of us?
Sam, you write a newsletter and the tag line is basically, you know, stock markets usually go up over time. You've you've been very right for the past couple of years because they've certainly gone up, But like, are things starting to get uncomfortable for you when people are talking about AI bubbles and overvaluations?
Oh?
Yeah, things are always uncomfortable for me. I think that's sort of like one of the most important things about understanding this idea of stocks UJ go up is the key word there is usually right, Like every way you cut the data historically, even good times and bad times and bull markets and bear markets, you always have like these periods of volatility where you know, stocks do go down, like that's the that's the catch share with stocks uj
go up is that they go down a lot often. So, yeah, of course I'm nervous, especially when you're at at peaks. I mean, of course, the data will also tell you that the you know, twelve month returns after all time highsac tend to be higher than when you're at low's. But yeah, of course I'm nervous. I mean, I think that's like very healthy for anybody in the investor class.
Is even no matter how optimistic you might be over the near term or long term, you have to be prepared for those big drawdowns because they do happen, and they happen.
Frequently, Jasmine. You know, so James wrote his piece about you know, the potential at least and it wasn't a forecast, it was a prediction, but a scenario.
We've also written others right, right, but no one.
Likes the idea of like mass job laws. But I've been reading some other stuff and there's a lot of people who don't talk about AI job laws. They talk about AI will literally kill every single person in the world if the labs don't do a good job of aligning the models. How seriously do you think the public should take that specific element that if the models are misdesigned, they will destroy humanity as we know it.
Ah Man contents, Oh god, they call this a pe doom out in San Francisco. I won't give you a probability, I suppose, but without getting to the question of like, will literally every single person die? I do think there is a very good reason to be concerned about misalignment and ROGUAEI, because when you think about it, there's sometimes people say that safety and the safety of a model is maybe intention with these goals like acceleration, and is the model really useful?
And I think the thing that's.
Really interesting is in the history of AI research is often the people who make the biggest technical advances and these foundational models who end up the misconcerned about misalignment.
And that's because actually the product functionality.
Of the models, their utility is only as good as how controllable they are and how much.
They do what you expect.
So when you say, hey, like AI agent like go off and like make me a million dollars or whatever, like whether that model goes and does so in a law abiding and safe and non violent way. The safety of the model, the alignment of the model is very correlated with whether it is economically useful as well.
So I think that it's.
Important that we not hold them in total tension. And I think there are really good reasons to be concerned with whether these agents are doing the things that we expect them to do.
¶ Silicon Valley's Genuine AI Concerns
Just going back to AI job losses, and I guess any of you can answer this question, and please like feel free to chime in on every question that we ask. But you know, you also hear a lot of the big tech CEOs talk about being genuinely concerned about the future of society once AI is developed and starts like taking people's jobs. Some people interpret that as AI CEO is basically talking their own book and being you know,
like hyping up the capabilities of AI. And then you have some people who argue that like maybe they're genuinely concerned, not least because they're going to get like molotov cocktails thrown at their houses and things like that.
Where do you fall in that spectrum.
Is this like a real concern when you talk to senior people in Silicon Valley?
I do think that most of the people that I've spoken to who are worried about it are genuinely worried about it. Something that I'd add to it is pretty much unanimously throughout history, when we've had any sort of technological leap forward, it's been a positive thing. And I think that AI will mirror that. It's just the question is, we've never had a technological kind of advancement this quickly.
We you know, we go from having the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization of agriculture and ninety five percent of people used to work in agriculture, and then now I think it's five percent too. And I'm very happy to work in an air conditioned office rather than in a field. A little bit. Yeah, so maybe not. But the thing is that will happen. I think believe very strongly it will happen with AI. It's just what happens in the interim.
What happens if the models get so good and and can and people kind of adopt them with the same approach and use them correct over five years instead of one hundred. So I think speaking to some of the senior people, they would echo the fact that over the next thirty years, AI is going to be an immense force for good and going to make people's lives more comfortable. They're just worried about the pace of the trend.
Yeah, I think the transition is like super important because as much as everyone likes this idea, like even on the corporate side or the shareholder side, like the promise of all this productivity that's unlocked by AI, and you know, maybe some people are thinking quietly in terms of like, oh, this is going to replace all of our workforce. But you know, the economy sort of stops working when no
one has jobs and no has income. Right, It's like, it's great that you have this huge profit margin, but you have no revenue because everyone's unemployed and they have any money. And you know, those people aren't shopping, those people aren't buying you know, washing machines and the washing machine manufacturer kit, you know, by you know, mental parts. And suddenly we're digging up less copper, and the whole
economy shrinks because no one has jobs. Then the whole point of this exercise becomes sort of meaningless, So which is why I think you're increasingly hearing from folks on this side, you know, talking about things like you know, basic income and guarantee jobs and all these things. So it's I think that's where you know, the conversation sort of goes, is, all right, let's make this assumption that we have all this productivity because of job loss. Well, that doesn't work.
You know.
We people need to have money to go out and spend and buy these products that are being produced so efficiently.
And I mean it's worth noting that, like for example, like people politicians will point to say, retraining is the default. We have never had a successful large scale reskilling program in the history of the United States. During say, you know,
the de industrialization. You lost all these factory jobs. It wasn't that many jobs, and we created way more net jobs, say in Silicon Valley, but the steel workers did not learn to code, right, And so people are right to be concerned, both morally and about the political backlash that could occur even with relatively small numbers of net job loss.
¶ Human Writers' Edge Against AI
Sam like, I love your newsletter, I read it and paid subscribe. Where all that I think I could train a model to write a newsletter that say stocks go up? Yeah, I think I could, like I believe or not?
My uh my, my sister. My sister recently got into claude coding and she did this project with herself and and thought that, you know, I find this really interesting. And basically she created this app that was like a sam robot that was informed by you know, stuff that I've published and like by by bilin all this free stuff that's out there, and it's like, I was kind of offended first of all, but yeah, it's a problem.
Do you worry about it? Is it absolute proprietor of a yeah, the company, you know, it's one.
It's like there was this time where you could go out and say, well, you know, something that you can't really replace is you know, the individual's voice, the personality or whatever. And it's like I, you know, I run some of this stuff too, and run these queries and say like, well, how would Samua write this? And it's like it sounds like me? And sometimes it actually you know, uses the language and comes up with the words faster
than how I would. So it's like, you know, what I do has to be about something more than just having the samual voice right, so to answer the question like the problem and the challenge and I you know, James and Jasmine and we talked about this a little bit in the back is like, you know, where do
you add that value? And it's like it's it can't be something that's like just sort of replicable or or something that you know, someone who might be interested in what you're reading or writing about can put into a query and get back like, you know, the toughest part about my job, and I think a lot of our jobs is being able to come up with those ideas
and those angles that no one's asking for. Yeah, and you know, again like I write about the stock market usually going up, which, by the way, even before AI, it's kind of a ridiculous thing to be writing about because everyone who has money in their fore one ks and iras, I've already been told this. They already know this.
So it's like why do I exist? And you know, it's a relatively small market of people who are reading what I'm writing about, But yeah, I guess there's something about And not to toot my own hornets, this is reader feedback that I'm getting, but I've been told that there's something about whether it's the cadence or the timing of things I do write about, or the way I frame it that feels a little bit more human than the research or the analysis that you know, the chief
investment strategists or whatever is sending out to their financial advisor who's regurgitating it back to them.
James, one of the things you've been doing that I don't think a bot can replicate just yet is sending actual human beings or a human being to the strait of hormone. Is that like the edge in media? Is it like first person experiments and data gathering?
Yeah, I mean you just have to look at this from I'm pretty confident that investment research won't exist in the same way that it does now. The Internet kind of made it democratized, so to speak. The distribution. It was like the only the banks had distribution. Now we
have distribution and we can utilize that. But if we're just utilizing it to kind of do the same thing that the banks are doing, well, there is so much investment research that these models have been trained on, and as they get better, they will pretty much be able to do the same thing. So it becomes very much about doing something different and I think that there's like
two ways you can do that. One you can be right all the time, so hopefully you know fingers crossed well, you know, I think that that one aspect is like like when I came on Ale's was the only media that I did after that piece, which I was very happy to thank you. I said, one of your questions show was like, why do you think this so viral? And I think it's like, this is not like tooting my own horn. It's just sometimes you go on a
hot streak. And when we started that was very much in like a year of just like one hundred percent correct calls, and you know, obviously I've had a bunch of wrong ones since then. But it was like a bunch of people were reading something and they would read it and they would say, well, if I hadn't read this piece, I wouldn't have bought in video in twenty twenty three, or wouldn't have bought Eskehinich something. So I
generated value from it. And then if you can add into that something that the model can't do with a query they can't be out in the real world, then it's going on in the real world. If there's if you know in five years, the robots come and then the models can go out in the real world. We'll have to find something else that they can't do.
Judgment, How do you think about this question of like what the human writer can still bring to the table. The one time you were on Autolaus before was nothing about you were talking about Chinese peptize.
But you did go to a peptid rate now, yeah.
So like that is sort of your equivalent of sending an analyst to the Strait of Homers.
We were talking about this, I would be the San Francisco spy that Jay sets up. I guess I'm I've doxed myself already, but I can get away.
But is that like, do you feel like that's a big like yes, margat that like being in it in some way physically in it is that it is like what you can do at least currently that the AI can.
Basically, I mean, I'm very bullish on secrets and I'm very bullish on gossip, right and and.
I mean that's kind of what journalism is in the end.
It's you have what is not in the trading data, Like data is like one of the most valuable things. It's like chips, data algorithms, right, and the data's out there in the world, and they've scraped the entire Internet.
They've torn the covers off all these books.
Their markre is like paying hundreds of dollars for these experts to like feed all their knowledge into the models.
But the thing is, the world's constantly changing. It's very dynamic.
They're parts of the world, parties u straits that are unexplored by humans. And if you go and you are the first person to see that, or you're the first person to be there at a critical moment in time as news is happening, as news is breaking, that kind
of actual reporting is like more valuable than ever. One way that I think about reporting is that's you have this private knowledge that's maybe known in whisper networks, in the you know, in some party scene or whatever, or you have tacit knowledge that nobody's really written down yet. And as a reporter, my job is to take the taseit, or to take the private and to turn it into public knowledge. Like that particular task I think is extremely robust in.
The era of AI.
¶ Contrasting US and China AI Strategies
Okay, so speaking of secrets and gossip and going out into the real world, you recently came back from a trip to China, right where you were sort of comparing I guess how China is thinking and undertaking AI versus the US. What's your big takeaway?
Oh yeah, I mean China is one of those places where it's hard to get a sense of without going in person, because it's so restructed.
What's on the public Internet, and we have these off internets.
One interesting thing is the way that I think about USAI research is it sort of had three eras of American AI. You had the academic era, maybe you'd call the boom kicking off with image net or alphag. You had the commercial era, let's call it kicked off with CHATGBT, you know, the maybe geopolitical era that's sort of Pentagon in Mythos drama. And China is weirdly still in the academic era. More so, it's very collaborative, very pro open source.
The labs and the researchers themselves seem unconcerned pretty much with the sort of.
Big philosophical and geopolitical questions, and that's there's sort of.
A division of labor where because the party and the government is so active in shaping exactly what AI's role in society ought to be. Then the companies themselves have sort of abdicated that responsibility, and they're also much more focused on collaborating because they'd see collaboration as the only way to sort of maybe have a chance against the US front here, just.
To follow up on this a little bit, because so much of the American AI conversation is suffused with both the job loss question and then the even more sinister question of like will the models turn against us? Is that to mention there as well, that's sort of the safety alignment part is that a big part of the Chinese AI culture.
Not a lot, And I mean we ask researchers that a lot of the top Chinese labs how much they thought about safety, and it was clear that it was less of a propriety. One is that they're compute constrained, right, Like, so one open AYE researcher is allocated more compute than like an entire Chinese lab, oftentimes.
Because of the chip controls.
And so when you're that constrained, you're probably not going to devote as many as much compute to safety and alignment.
So that's one thing.
The other thing I noticed is just that China has a little bit of this more I almost like I call it like it's not techno optimism, which sometimes people confuse. It's more like technodeterminism or this pragmatic approach, which is that technology has always progressed, automation like mechanization, like the nutural revolution, like technology has always progressed.
It's overall made life better. There's no way to stop it.
There's not really a culture of protests and resistance in China because of the political environment, and so as an individual or as a company, there's no point in being like, oh, we don't want this, We're going to regulate it, We're going.
To refuse it.
Like it's like you adopt or else you are going to fall off, You're going to get left behind.
And so every individual is much more concerned with how can.
I adopt like open claw or whatever it is, as as I can so that I get this job, because if I don't do it, there's a million people behind me who are going to take it instead.
James, I know you're approaching the US versus China AI question. I guess both from an investment perspective and also from a social economic perspective. Per your doom scenario, not Jesus doom scenario, but like, where do you stand on this particular question.
I think that it's very important that we continue to sell chips to China. I think that if you were to cut China completely off from chips or crack down on some of the smuggling, it would It's there's like a sun Zoo thing about you, like you build your enemy at Golden Bridge upon which to retreat. I think it's very similar here where we don't really want to encourage even more capacity for China to take the reins in Ai. And if we can control certain aspects of
the infrastructure stack, then the US absolutely should. I think that the next thing that we'll see, and this is like a really I think, kind of spicy take if you were to look at the price action of the memory complex, I think that we will see within the next like Chinese deep seek moment will not be about a model, It will be about hardware. That's so, is it?
Oh?
Really?
I thought Wellex that I think you know, everyone's kind of piling into uh, the bottleneck trade so to speak, and and uh, I think there's kind of a new vintage of investors that are doing this bottleneck investing without the awareness that bottlenecks are made to be widened. And I think that what's going to happen if we continue to see this kind of meteoric rise in de ram prices, uh, is that just like every other technological bottleneck, there will be a bunch of nerds in their basement that are
very very incentivized to fix this. And there's there are many ways that you can do that. One is, you know, you match flash bandwidth d RAM. It's one hundred times cheaper, like like it's so And I think that with China CXMT is there like a Micron skha, you know, And with the IPO happening this year, there will be a lot of capital that will I.
Wondering about this because it's like the models are so like why even store any photos or images or whatever in a big bank of memory data? The models could just recreate it on command. And so I've been wondering if like in the end, like storage is not going to be that big of a deal because the model just like, yeah, let's see that photo of like, you know, me and my son's birthday, and the model will just create it and why did I need to save it to my iPhone?
I think that the reason why it's it's interesting because if you look at like memories like a key component of the GPU. Rightah, so but then why didn't you know in video was rallying for a year and a half before memory started rallying, right, So why did that happen? Well, it's because of the event of agentic AI and having to remember Sam.
¶ Engaging with Market Uncertainty
I have a question for you, Like, for the theme of your substack, generally speaking, stocks go up? Is the sub theme? Just ignore the everyone else on the stage because you're just gonna get distracted and you're gonna get freaked out and whatever. And then allimately ignore all the odd lacked episodes, ignore all the news, ignore the doomers, because in the end, the only thing that can happen if you paint to the news is you do something stupid. Then you missed the long run.
No, I'm actually the complete opposite of that, okay. And you know, like I said before, like you know, I'm always worried, okay, And this is like start of the message I try to, you know, communicate out to the world. Like you know, I do a lot of things and communicate a lot of things that are kind of counterintuitive, Like, you know, I do check my prow in K plan
every single day, you know, I do. You know, Instead, you know a lot of advisors and professionals and stuff will go on TV and say, you know, forget your you know, for and K password or ignore politics or ignore what's go on, and I run. You know, we have a long history of getting past all this stuff. I think that's all incredibly silly. I think you really do have to think about how bad things are at
a given time. That way, you sort of build up those memories when you know, ten years from now, when there is another war, you do remember how bad things were in the past and how you know, markets evolved out of all that stuff. So yeah, like I think it's you know, to ignore things makes you sort of
more vulnerable to making mistakes. So it's like, yeah, be really conscious of like where there are job losses, where there will be industries that fall apart, because all the lessons you learn today from all the bad things that happen, and when you lose your job and when your neighbors lose their job, and then you know, a couple of years from now, you know, maybe the market's higher. You know, ten years from that, it's going to happen all over again,
and you're more robust when that stuff happens. So yeah, I think it's a complete mistake to ignore terrible things going on as someone who's optimistic in the long run.
¶ Surreal Realities of the AI Age
Good.
I have one last question for all three of you, and it ties into something that Joe and I have experienced on the podcast, which is a lot of our episodes are starting to feel very surreal. You know, we're talking about like space elevators and data centers in space, and companies with like trillions of dollars of market capitalization and lines that always seem to go up seemingly forever. Everything feels very sci fi and surreal at the moment.
What's the most surreal thing or like data point that you have seen or witnessed in person in recent months?
The first thing that comes to mind, like I said before, like prompting, I think this is actually Gemini asked this to like, you know, how would I write this? Oh yeah, and came back and I remember thinking, gosh, not only would I have sounded like that, but it's actually using you know, slightly you know, words I would have run through at the sarus and actively chosen to fold into my writing. That was really, you know, kind of scary. It really made me think about separating out, like exactly
what is it that I'm offering to subscribers. Yeah, but being able to sort of see increasingly see yourself in these machines that are getting better at, you know, replicating human behavior.
I think that probably for me, there's like a quiet kind of robotics boom that's occurring outside of like you like people are kind of waiting until the humanoid robot comes and folds their laundry and everything. But the dream Yeah, for me for sure. But the thing is like Amazon this year will employ more twice as many robots as
they do humans. You're starting to see in a lot of the earnings reports, like from a Panic for example, that like factory automation is really experience a huge inflection that's not commensurate with other segments of that are selling
into factories. And I think if you just imagine, like what level is robotics going to be at when it's fully like like automated the factory, automated, the warehouses, by the time it actually comes into your home that's kind of that's like, that's going to make things so much more.
Just to be clear, Amazon is not employing the robot.
Right, you just know that, like when this happens, you will be on a podcast talking about robot rights.
Yeah.
I can already hear it.
I mean already.
It's perfect that James said that because I was going to talk about my trip to the Unitary office in Hungjo and being both face to face with humanoids, which is an extremely surreal, Uncanny Valley experience. They are good dancers, they are good fighters, They're incredibly mobile.
The quadrupeds are they look like bug dogs.
They're like climbing all over and those are actively being deployed in factories for inspection and surveillance. We saw a twenty four to seven pharmacy that was in operation where a humanoid robot would take stuff off and drop it in a box and delivery drivers, Chinese delivery drivers were coming in and out.
It was fully in operation.
And so China's pushing as fast as they can on the factory automation and the physical AI stuff. And when you see it, you just look at it and you're like, that's clearly where the feature is headed by.
The way I always do the test in a new model, LLLLM comes out, I say, like, write ten tweets in my voice and there's still I don't think I can do. But there was one from Claude and it said the tenure Yield doesn't care about your feelings and frankly, it doesn't care about mine either, and I was like, you know what, It's not really a thing I would say, but that's kind of a good tweet anyway. Thank you all so much, James, Jasmine and Sam for coming on a lad flag. That's a lot of fun.
So that was our conversation with James van Gelan of Satrini Research, Jasmine's son, the Substack author, and Samro, the editor of the newsletter t K. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe Wasnental. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest James van Gielan he's at Satrini, Samro at Sam Row and Jasmine's son at Jazz New Sun. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen armand dash Ol Bennett at Dashbot, Keil Brooks at Kelbrooks and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano and from our Odd Lots content.
Go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, we're the daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you can chat about all of these topics twenty four to seven in our discord discord dot gg slash od logs.
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