Astro Teller is the CEO of X, Alphabet's moonshot division. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a taping in front of a live audience at Summit at Sea to discuss the calculations society must make around advancing AI research and how the technology can help the world. Listen for a dynamic discussion that digs into Teller's family history, the current 'moonshots' that X is taking, and whether AI moonshots should've stayed separate from Google for longer.
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Ranjan Roy of Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the week's tech news. We cover: 1) Tech stocks consolidating growth in the S&P 500% 2) The 'Asset Market Meltdown Hypothesis' 3) Amazon's entry into wireless. 4) Japan's threat to AI copyright law 5) The lawyer that used ChatGPT and looked like a fool 6) The Center For AI Safety's bold Statement 7) The fake 'simulation' where an AI killed a military operator 8) Meta's new Quest 3 headset 9) What to expect at Apple's big WWDC event
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Ryan Mac is a tech reporter at The New York Times, Bobby Allyn is a technology correspondent at NPR. The two join Big Technology Podcast for a wide-ranging discussion touching on: 1) TikTik's ban in Montana and its potential spillover effects. 2) The rise of Instagram Reels. 3) Twitter's Role in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. 4) Elon Musk as Republican kingmaker. 5) Elizabeth Holmes reports to prison. 6) AI regulation's long road ahead.
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John Herrman is a contributing editor at New York Magazine. He joins Ranjan Roy and Alex Kantrowitz to break down the week’s news. We cover 1) NVIDIA’s Blowout quarter 2) The emergence of Temu and Shein — in great depth.
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Jack Krawczyk is the director of Bard at Google. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss his vision for the chatbot, where it's heading, and whether this technology will be as impactful as many imagine. Join us for a fun look into one of the tech industry's most important generative AI initiatives.
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Ranjan Roy of Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the week's tech news. We cover: 1) Apple's mixed reality struggles 2) Whether the stock market is in an AI bubble 3) OpenAI's Sam Altman testimony in Washington 4) Montana's TikTok ban 5) The rise of Shein 6) Whether Musk or Bezos is in a better place today.
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Richard Mathenge was part of a team of contractors in Nairobi, Kenya who trained OpenAI's GPT models. He did so as a team lead at Sama, an AI training company that partnered on the project. In this episode of Big Technology Podcast, Mathenge tells the story of his experience. During the training, he was routinely subjected to sexually explicit material, offered insufficient counseling, and his team members were paid, in some cases, just $1 per hour. Listen for an in-depth look at how these models are trained, and for a look at the human side of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback.
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OpenAI's response:
We engaged Sama as part of our ongoing work to create safer AI systems and prevent harmful outputs. We take the mental health of our employees and our contractors very seriously. One of the reasons we first engaged Sama was because of their commitment to good practices. Our previous understanding was that wellness programs and 1:1 counseling were offered, workers could opt out of any work without penalization, exposure to explicit content would have a limit, and sensitive information would be handled by workers who were specifically trained to do so. Upon learning of Sama worker conditions in February of 2021 we immediately sought to find out more information from Sama. Sama simultaneously informed us that they were exiting the content moderation space all together.
OpenAI paid Sama $12.50 / hour. We tried to obtain more information about worker compensation from Sama but they never provided us with hard numbers. Sama did provide us with a study they conducted across other companies that do content moderation in that region and shared Sama’s wages were 2-3x the competition.
Ben Smith is the author of Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. He's also the editor-in-chief of Semafor. He joins Ranjan Roy and Alex Kantrowitz for our weekly news recap show. We cover: 1) New Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino 2) Tucker Carlson's move to Twitter 3) End of the streaming wars 4) Trump's CNN Interview 5) Lessons from Ben's book, Traffic 6) Mark Zuckerberg's jiu-jitsu prowess.
Ashlee Vance is the author of When The Heavens Went On Sale, a new book about the modern day space race. Join us for a conversation about the commercial ventures fighting for their place in low earth orbit, and why governments have ceded the space to the private sector. We'll discuss SpaceX, Planet, Rocket Lab, Astra, and Firefly Aerospace. Stay tuned of for the final 20 minutes, where Vance discusses his relationship with Elon Musk and the state of the billionaire entrepreneur.
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Brian McCullough of the Techmeme Ride Home Podcast joins Ranjan Roy and Alex Kantrowitz for our weekly news recap show. We cover: 1) OpenAI's massive losses 2) Whether generative AI has a business model problem 3) The battle between open source AI and proprietary research 3) AI fears go mainstream 4) The White House hosts AI leaders amid worries 5) The AI PR industrial complex 6) The WGA strike and AI's potential to replace writers 7) The Fed pause 8) Apple earnings 9) Apple's mixed reality device 10) Ed Sheeran's copyright victory 11) How Sheeran's win might influence AI 12) Welcome to Brooklyn, Ed Sheeran.
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