Craig Newmark sees an AI bubble. It may not be a bust.

Meta is investing $600 billion in AI infrastructure, bringing jobs to communities across America. Phil, a Meta building engineer in Las Lunas, New Mexico, says, Locoming Meta into our community is creating more opportunities. Learn more at Meta.com slash Building America.

Hey, welcome back to Politico Tech. I'm your host, Stephen Overly, and on this show, I break down tech, politics, and policy with the people shaping our digital future. Craig Newmark is best known for shaping our digital past. He's the founder of Craigslist and a pioneer in online advertising. These days, he's giving away his vast wealth.

to organizations that fight disinformation and bolster cybersecurity. And he's especially keen on fighting online scams, an issue that plagued Craigslist in its early days. And since then? has only gotten worse. On the show today, I sat down with Craig on the sidelines of the Aspen Cyber Summit to talk about fighting fraud, his philanthropic legacy, and how the rush toward AI today compares to the dot-com boom and bust he saw 25 years ago. Here's our conversation.

Craig, welcome to Politico Tech. Hey, I'm really glad to be here. For anyone who may not know, just your brief history, you started Craigslist, if I remember, in 1995, right, as an email list. and then incorporated into a company in 1999. So you were very early on in not only internet advertising, but the internet period. You saw kind of the dot-com bubble and bust.

We're in this moment now with AI where we see all this investment. Everyone's talking about the potential. Do you see kind of a new bubble forming like you saw in those early days? I think we are seeing a bubble here. because there's a lot of issues which haven't been addressed, like hallucinations, which could get people hurt, or not seeing the right kind of guardrails, preventing deepfakes of all sorts.

And that's a pretty serious kind of thing because they are good enough to perpetuate scams or breaches in cyber defenses. I'm worried about this to the extent that Mrs. Newmark and I have a safe word. And now and then I remind her of it. I know a lot of the work you're doing now on issues like fraud, disinformation, cybersecurity. I mean, these are all issues that you talk to experts. We talk to them on the podcast. They say.

It's only going to get worse because of AI. I wonder what is the AI future you see in that regard and through your work, through your philanthropy? How are you trying to prepare for that? Well, I've been spoken to a lot of people. thinking through a lot of issues, and there's a lot of cybersecurity basics that everyone should be doing to keep themselves safe, their families safe, even their jobs safe, and even maybe help utilities.

Water and power, stay safe. The basics are things like, well, most fundamental, when you think you're being approached, pause and take maybe nine seconds to reflect on what's happening. There's behavioral work which suggests that if you do that, you'll avoid some scams, like you won't be scammed in the manner I was some years ago. Is that how you got into this? Were you the victim yourself?

No, I saw it from the very beginning in the Internet because I'd been working on the Internet pretty actively for over 30 years. And I saw its potential in really big and good ways. But I also saw how people could abuse it. Now, there are very few people, comparatively, who will abuse the net. But the people who will do so are very loud. and very active, and people of goodwill need to work together to fight bad actors. The deal is that you do security basics, again, pausing for a little bit.

then you've got to do things like using the tools that are available to all of us, like single sign-on, pass keys, multi-factor authentication, update your systems. These are basics that everyone can do. We need to get the word out in a way that everyone can see they can be part of the solution.

perpetuated by social media or perpetuated online. And I'm curious, as someone who has been involved in the internet, largely from the start of the consumer internet, certainly, what is the responsibility you see for tech companies today, for social media companies today to address these issues? I think everyone, you know, providing services over the net should step up, act in goodwill and do what they can.

to prevent scams, to stop them. And that means a lot of things like participating in efforts to detect signals that a scam might be happening and then work to prevent them in real time. For example, there are groups that publish the indications of possible scams, like the Global Signal Alliance, which is part of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance.

So the Global Signal Exchange provides all sorts of these signals which companies could use to detect things which may be happening. I'm looking forward to AI being used to do this. Because there are companies that are detecting what are the tokens in the AI sense, which indicates suspicious behavior. And then they can... tell somebody that something is a suspected scam. And in fact, I do get those messages, like today, when my phone says, hey, something looks...

kind of sussier, as the kids say. And I should reconsider responding ever to that one. So the technology is emerging right now. And I'm going to be digging pretty deep into this because I can and because it's needed and, you know, because a nerd's got to do. What a nerd's got to do. Well, and, you know, you're in, I think, kind of a unique position because I know in the very early days of Craigslist, right, you all had criticism as well about.

fraudulent posts or illegal sales and some of the things that we still see online today in a different format. And I wonder what you learned from that early experience that you think internet companies today should be learning. Well, the most fundamental lesson for everyone is that while things can be dangerous out there, most people are okay. They're good. They don't want to hurt you.

If you're providing services, I think you should exercise a good faith, goodwill, in stopping what you can. And the thing that I learned is there's always something you can do. Then you can do better. The bad guys will see what you're doing and then develop countermeasures. And this involves cybersecurity and scam fighting. But the idea is that there's more to be done.

And you just got to keep acting in good faith, build up trust and safety, and do what you can. I do think the large language model stuff does offer partial solutions. In this regards, partial solutions in the here and now. I'm just hoping that the companies doing AI who can get effective can publish their stuff to be shared.

but in a controlled way because you don't want to tell the bad actors what you're doing to stop them because they are smart and they are adaptable. What's the solution you would like to see from them? I'd like to see them publishing in open source mode their large language models, including weights and biases and thresholds and the code to use that, but in a very careful way.

Again, a lot of companies could implement that kind of stuff in real time. But we want to prevent bad guys from getting that. And we want the implementation models. to be ones which run economically without excessive power drain. And that involves the kind of stuff I learned in computer sciences 50 years ago, like...

You don't have to compute things in 32-bit precision. Eight bits suffices right now. Thank you for letting me feel technical. Right. I appreciate the technical notes. I'm not a technologist myself, but I do follow, and I think it's a good point.

And one question I come back to a lot is the business models in tech today are heavily centered on monetization and on using. data and using ai to sort of extract as much profit as possible is that kind of economically incompatible with safety and with some of these sort of features we'd like to see from our technology today? I think everyone has to act in good conscience and to protect their community, even if it's less profitable.

Turns out some of the emerging technologies may help solve some of that. If that's not enough, the lawyers have figured out. that unless a company is acting in good faith, there may be liability issues. I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but the lawyers are already launching lawsuits, and that may be part of the solution.

Or maybe the insurance companies will say coverage may only be there if you act in good faith to protect your community. Maybe that makes sense. This requires legal knowledge, which I lack. And again, I am not a lawyer, even though my high school tests said that maybe I should consider being one. Not a computer scientist, but a lawyer. Would have been a very different career for you. I don't think I'm tall enough to be a lawyer.

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I was reading a recent report, you probably saw it too, from Reuters, where Meta had allegedly predicted it would make $16 billion from fraudulent ads and scams. My takeaway from that story was just... frankly, how big of a business it is for these bad actors to be online, to be conducting these kinds of scams. What's your sort of...

Take away from that, how do we combat something that is so lucrative for bad actors, for tech companies, for all these players? I think the big guys need to implement the spam detection. methods that I was alluding to before. They already have some. They need to get much better. I think large language models trained properly really are a part of that solution.

And I think that will show the good faith required by whatever the lawyers will figure out. What's your thesis or your ethos these days when it comes to your philanthropic investments? What's most important to you? What I've done is I've built a network of networks of people who are really good in my focus areas, and I rely on their advice to get things done. Frankly, as a philanthropist,

I don't know what I'm doing. But with a network of networks of people who do, well, when a person is ignorant of something, if they get the help that they need, they can actually get something done. More charitably to myself, I guess that's beginner's mind. I'm keeping a permanent beginner's mind because I do have networks who are getting the job done for me so I can sync.

quietly into my dotage. What would you like to see the impact be, I guess? I imagine you provide some sort of guidance in terms of the legacy you want to have or the impact you want your giving to have. Well... Something part of the legacy of Craigslist is that it helps people get through the day like putting food on the table. Craigslist showed a lot of people in our country that the Internet is actually useful.

and can be reasonably easy to use. With my work now, I want to show people that with the cooperation of good actors in an industry that the internet can be a relatively safe place to get things done. I mean, if something happens on the street... It's going to happen online, but we can do better online because systems can detect signs of, as the kids say, sus behavior. Right.

Tell the user, the customer, hey, something looks bad here, maybe with an X percent probability. That's what I'd want to see. And then I can act accordingly.

It sounds like you're still very much an optimist then about the internet and about technology in general. Is that fair to say? I'm very much an optimist, if nothing else, that doing customer service for most of my adult life, like... 50 years in the business, 40 years of customer service, at ground level, I see that most people are just fine. They're okay. They just want a level playing field, a safe one. where we can all work together.

I had an interesting conversation on the podcast a few weeks ago with Velas Dar, who's the president of the McGovern Foundation, which does a lot of philanthropic giving. And he made the point that he would like to get to a place where philanthropy goes away because... government and industry are sort of tackling some of these issues sufficiently on their own. Do you share that mentality? Billis and the McGovern Foundation do great work. I chat with them.

I share that attitude. I just don't see it happening in my lifetime. So I just, I need to keep plugging away. Why don't you see it happening? What do you think is the hurdle to get there? There's a lot of challenges in the world these days, and I think philanthropy is going to play a role in a lot of these things, at least within the next 20 years. And I'm committed.

to doing this kind of thing, but only as long as I live. After that, it's over. Well, listen, Craig, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate you being here on Politico Tech. It's my pleasure. Like, uh, the Batman says, I'm not the nerd you want, but I'm the nerd you got. The nerd we got. Thanks for being here. That's all for this week's Politico Tech. If you like Politico Tech, go ahead and subscribe.

and recommend the show to a friend or colleague. And for more tech news, subscribe to our newsletters, Digital Future Daily and Morning Tech. Our producer is Norma Mulichel. Fran Vandy made our theme music. I'm Stephen Overly. See you back here next week.