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Episode: AI Basics: How and When to Use AI

Author: New York Magazine
Duration: 00:24:20

Episode Shownotes

Kara and Scott are back in your feeds for a special series on the basics of Artificial Intelligence. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you watch out for? Kylie Robison, Senior AI Reporter for The Verge, joins Pivot with

a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. Follow us on Instagram and Threads at @pivotpodcastofficial. Follow us on TikTok at @pivotpodcast. Send us your questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or at nymag.com/pivot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.

00:00:17 Speaker_01
Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.

00:00:22 Speaker_03
And I'm Scott Galloway.

00:00:24 Speaker_01
and you're listening to our special series on AI. We talk a lot about the business of AI, but today we wanna focus on the ways we can actually be using it in our day-to-day lives. But here to chat with us about some of the AI basics is Kylie Robison.

00:00:37 Speaker_01
Kylie is a senior AI reporter for The Verge. Welcome, Kylie, it's good to talk to you.

00:00:42 Speaker_00
Yeah, thank you for having me.

00:00:43 Speaker_01
So first of all, talk a little bit about how you personally use AI in your day-to-day life, and why are you covering it?

00:00:50 Speaker_00
Yeah, before this, I was covering Twitter at Fortune Magazine, which is run by Kara's favorite person. And that wasn't easy to cover, and I thought AI showed a lot of promise and was just such an interesting area to tackle for a young reporter.

00:01:09 Speaker_00
I mean, who doesn't want to be covering the biggest technology to hit the scene? And I live in San Francisco, so it just seemed perfect.

00:01:18 Speaker_00
But it is perhaps the most stressful beat I've ever had because it's so large and so nuanced and people argue about it all day. About using AI in my day-to-day life, I would say it's not something I use heavily.

00:01:33 Speaker_00
I do use it for, like, I upload a document, for instance, OpenAI will release these safety cards for their models that show, like, this is how safe it is. So I can upload that PDF to GPT 4.0 and say, okay, and ask questions based off that PDF.

00:01:50 Speaker_00
Do they mention this? Can you expand on what this means? So, like, really heavily technical documents or white papers, I can ask questions and, like, simplify it in a way that's more helpful and it's quicker for me to understand.

00:02:03 Speaker_00
going to a bunch of researchers, making a bunch of calls to get them to explain it. I think that's been really helpful for me. I know Scott uses it for writing.

00:02:11 Speaker_00
I've noticed Claude can be a helpful writing assistant, but in terms of actually using it to write, I don't use that because I don't think it's helpful yet.

00:02:21 Speaker_00
But just as a partner, as Scott has mentioned on the podcast, as a partner to be like, okay, here are some of my rambling thoughts. Can you streamline what I'm trying to say and edit it for me? Right, absolutely.

00:02:33 Speaker_01
So give us a few tips for someone who's looking to implement AI in their lives, like daily tasks that could be made easier. When people ask you this question, obviously Google is integrated into writing emails, for example, which I don't find useful.

00:02:45 Speaker_01
But bills, resumes, and much of what the average person knows of AI is chat GPT and related tools. Try to expand on that. What other tools are useful for them?

00:02:55 Speaker_00
Yeah, there's so many different AI tools now. I think a lot of people use Grammarly so they can check your grammar in your browser, which is really helpful. I think when you want to use AI, I think you should consider it for low stakes tasks.

00:03:10 Speaker_00
You have to imagine your data privacy because often these models will use what you input to train the model. So you don't want it someday spitting back your bank account information.

00:03:21 Speaker_00
which is really funny because I'm a big listener of Pivot and Hard Fork, which Kevin, one of the hosts there, had uploaded his bank statements to Notebook LM so they could create a podcast to help him with his financial information, which was a really interesting thing that I think people want.

00:03:41 Speaker_00
AI to be capable of right now is like, can you help me budget? Which I think, again, low stakes tasks, thinking of the data you upload, try not to upload sensitive information. I think just like I said with the PDF, that was really helpful.

00:03:55 Speaker_00
I think I used it, I just turned 26, so I used it to compare health insurance. These are my needs, these are the options I have. Here's a PDF of what they offer, which one should I choose was really helpful, stuff like that.

00:04:08 Speaker_03
Nice to meet you, Kylie. By the way, I used it this morning. I asked AI, why am I so broke? And it immediately sent me a copy of an email confirmation from Amazon that my Mexican cat costume will be delivered tomorrow. That's a little AI humor, Kylie.

00:04:25 Speaker_01
Little AI humor. I'm so sorry, Kylie. As a young woman, you needn't endure this, but here you are. Go ahead.

00:04:32 Speaker_03
Or I'll say, how can I feel better about myself? And they'll just come back with, good morning, you fucking stack of sunshine. Anyway, a lot of people use AI, a lot of people haven't even started. What would you suggest someone does to get started?

00:04:47 Speaker_03
Which one or two LLMs would you suggest they download, the free version even? How do they start to try and unlock the potential and just understand it more? Of course, I'll start with an answer.

00:05:00 Speaker_03
The first time I really interfaced with AI was trying to figure out fun stuff for me and my 14-year-old son to do in London, and it went from there. What two or three things would you suggest to help people get started?

00:05:11 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think that's a really helpful example and something I think the makers of these models want people to be using it for rather than highlighting any nefarious ways to use AI.

00:05:21 Speaker_00
They're hoping people use it to write, you know, a story for their young child set with pictures. You can use Chachapiti for that or Grok. And you can use it to plan your travel, which is really cool. And I used it just when I went to Spain.

00:05:38 Speaker_00
I was like, what should I go see? So I think those are really helpful examples. Again, these are all low stakes tasks that you can use any, really any chatbot on the market that's capable enough to use creatively. I think you,

00:05:55 Speaker_00
have to check to see if these places are open and exist because it can hallucinate very confidently. But yeah, any model right now, they're all kind of on par with each other. A lot of them are because they're all working towards the same thing.

00:06:08 Speaker_00
So, you know, You can use it to decide what hair color you wanna do next. Anything that's just fun and low stakes, I think, is easy. Low stakes.

00:06:19 Speaker_01
So you did mention privacy. Now, we do put a lot of privacy online. My bank's names are online, everything else. But I really limit what I use here because of that. Cuz I'm very worried, and I'm someone who's very aware of privacy.

00:06:32 Speaker_01
I'm like, Scott, when you said you put your medical records, I'm like, I'm not putting my records into OpenAI.

00:06:39 Speaker_03
They already know, Cara. Your privacy's gone.

00:06:41 Speaker_01
Yeah, I guess, but I just don't want to help them along to put all the things together. And so they definitely don't have my heart surgery stuff. They don't. They don't.

00:06:51 Speaker_03
Are you worried about the CCP scaring you to give you a heart attack?

00:06:55 Speaker_01
I don't know. I'm just telling you the feeling I had.

00:06:59 Speaker_03
Kylie, this is what I deal with. This is what I deal with.

00:07:02 Speaker_01
This is my feeling. I don't want to give them too much personal information. I don't mind it on writing things. that are our low stakes, but then now we put lots of stuff on the regular. When do you imagine that crossover?

00:07:15 Speaker_01
How should the average person feel about that? Because we don't know what this stuff is being used for, correct? There's not as much transparency as there needs to be.

00:07:24 Speaker_00
No, there is not as much transparency and they claim that it's because of, like Scott said, the CCP or, you know, anti-competitive reasons. I think, you know, they've already hoovered up the entire internet. There is no going back from there.

00:07:36 Speaker_00
All these models have hoovered up the entire internet. It's something I've kind of reckoned with when they said, you know, Photobucket signed over all of its data to train large language models.

00:07:46 Speaker_00
I was like, dang, like, whatever I put on Photobucket that was stupid when I was 11 is now going to be used to train large language models. And 11-year-old me wouldn't have known that. So I think it's kind of... It's a really tough position.

00:08:01 Speaker_00
People on Instagram, celebrities were like, you know, Meta does not have the right to use my photos if I post this story.

00:08:09 Speaker_00
I think people are really protective over, you know, the lives that they have shared with the internet, that they have been encouraged by these large companies to share with the internet.

00:08:19 Speaker_00
And it's just, I think they feel like it's being taken away from them and, you know, used to train these black box models. I think people have different opinions on it.

00:08:27 Speaker_00
I personally feel I have the heebie-jeebies about it because I grew up with the internet, with Facebook launching when I was a young teen, so I think it's a very tough position. I think some people are like, I don't care.

00:08:41 Speaker_01
So do you think that people are more wary? Cuz a recent study found that one in nine Americans use AI every day in the work. That's a very small number at this point, right? Where are we in that? Do you think everyone's just gonna do it?

00:08:53 Speaker_01
Not do it, it's gonna be done to them. It'll just be foisted upon them by Apple Intelligence or whatever. Do you wanna get an Uber? Do you have your airport? That seems like a good thing, for example.

00:09:02 Speaker_00
Totally. I think automating, you know, rote tasks is not a bad thing. When it comes to the workplace, I think a lot of workplaces are well aware of the data privacy issues and they're like, please don't upload our internal documents to OpenAI.

00:09:15 Speaker_00
That's been a problem. It's trained in a lot of workplaces. So 1in9 doesn't surprise me. I think it's going to continue to grow. I just published a story today about AI agents, which is just like the new next thing. sort of an AI assistant.

00:09:29 Speaker_00
And where I'm seeing this a lot is in SaaS products, like Salesforce released a CRM agent, Microsoft has co-pilots, stuff that they believe will increase efficiency amongst their staff.

00:09:42 Speaker_00
But I think it's going to be hard for that number to grow so long as there's transparency issues and that trust has to grow.

00:09:50 Speaker_01
Okay, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about where we're already using AI without realizing it and what we should not be using it for.

00:10:02 Speaker_02
Support for this episode comes from AWS. With the power of AWS generative AI, teams can get relevant, fast answers to pressing questions and use data to drive real results. Power your business and generate real impact with the most experienced cloud.

00:10:19 Speaker_02
Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.

00:10:36 Speaker_01
Scott, we're back with our special series on AI. We're talking to a senior AI reporter for The Verge, Kylie Robison. Huge leaps have been made in AI over the last couple of years. Talk about how we're using it without realizing it.

00:10:48 Speaker_01
It's also been around for a while, right? Where are people not realizing they're using it today?

00:10:54 Speaker_00
Totally. I think in your career, Cara, you've probably covered AI. It's been around forever. I think, you know, your Netflix algorithm, that's AI. Automated self-driving cars, Waymos. I live in San Francisco. Waymos are everywhere. That's AI.

00:11:09 Speaker_00
It is used in, you know, TikTok algorithms. That's AI. It's everywhere. And it has been working in the background quite a bit. I think, you know, you'll hear companies, especially as a reporter, they're like,

00:11:20 Speaker_00
we've been in the AI business for two decades, which is, you know, it's not facetious, but it is different than the frontier models we're seeing, open AI and anthropic release, but it is those algorithms you're used to using.

00:11:35 Speaker_03
So break down or do a quick kind of JD Powers review of the biggest LLMs from your favorite to your least favorite.

00:11:44 Speaker_00
favorites to least favorites. Scott likes Claude, just so you know.

00:11:47 Speaker_03
I do like Claude.

00:11:48 Speaker_00
Claude is really good. It's surprisingly good. I just started using it recently and I messaged a coworker. I was like, I'm a bad AI reporter because this is way better than I anticipated.

00:11:57 Speaker_00
It also has, I don't know if you've noticed this Scott, like kind of intense guardrails. I asked, you know, some questions about AI. It's like, well, as an AI, I can't exactly answer these questions. Whereas, Chai at GPT would have just spit it out.

00:12:10 Speaker_00
Just so people know, it's bi-anthropic.

00:12:13 Speaker_01
which was a group of people who thought OpenAI was not safe enough and started Anthropic.

00:12:18 Speaker_00
Exactly. And it's backed by Amazon. Exactly. Yes. And Google has a smaller cloud share for Anthropic, but yes. So Anthropic is a competitor to OpenAI. OpenAI has GPT-4. O is their latest frontier model.

00:12:31 Speaker_00
They've also released a reasoning model called O1, but they consider that, for lack of a better word, kind of dumber than their frontier model. And frontier models are basically the biggest, the best models that are out there.

00:12:44 Speaker_00
So frontier models are like, the next one is like the next iPhone, basically. So I would say Claude is amazing, Claude Opus is amazing.

00:12:52 Speaker_00
I think the thing is, they're all building the same thing with the same training data, which is the entire Internet.

00:12:59 Speaker_00
So they're going to continue just leapfrogging over each other, so it's hard to compare because it's five major companies with some of the best researchers in the world with all of the same training data, all building the same thing.

00:13:11 Speaker_01
Do you use Grok? Don't laugh.

00:13:16 Speaker_00
Do you use Grok?

00:13:17 Speaker_01
I'm not getting in any of the new cyber taxis. I'm not getting in and I'm not putting any information into any of his properties. I don't trust him personally.

00:13:27 Speaker_00
I used Grok when it first came out.

00:13:31 Speaker_00
I made Kamala with a gun is, you know, The Verge put out a story because they have Grok for the listener is available on X, formerly Twitter, which is owned by Elon Musk, and he owns XAI, which created this chatbot, and it has what it feels like no guardrails.

00:13:49 Speaker_00
So you can make a lot of photos that, you know, break all sorts of copyright laws. No, I don't use Grok, and I don't necessarily find it to be top of the line. If I were to rank models, they're not at the top.

00:14:03 Speaker_03
So I'll go back to my question. What's your favorite LLM?

00:14:06 Speaker_00
I would say Opus, Claude, it's really intelligent and incredible. I think, you know, it's enviable from other labs what they've built.

00:14:15 Speaker_03
And then what, can you name some long tail LLM or AI apps that are sort of fun that people that maybe haven't gotten very much attention that are kind of fun, any sort of undiscovered gems out there?

00:14:26 Speaker_00
Undiscovered gems. I mean, if you go to Hugging Face, if you're into open source, there are hundreds of thousands of open source LLMs that people can mess with. I mean, that's the cool part about open source LLMs, which is a very hot debate.

00:14:41 Speaker_00
But developers are creating all sorts of cool shit with the open source LLMs available on Hugging Face. So there's almost too many to choose from, but none of them are mainstream in the way

00:14:54 Speaker_00
Because it costs so much money, hence why OpenAI just raised the most money that anyone's ever raised, ever. It's a lot of money.

00:15:02 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's just for people that are hugging faces in AI community, where it's a platform, where they collaborate and they do different things.

00:15:08 Speaker_01
And this will be very much like the early app days or the early Internet days, where there was suddenly websites and things. And then there was Yahoo that compiled them into a yet another hierarchical, officious oratory book.

00:15:21 Speaker_03
I have a follow-up. I find that AI is very politically correct. That it will say, to answer this question, you know, make sure that you check with law enforcement or... That's not politically correct. Oh, I find it very politically correct.

00:15:37 Speaker_01
Please don't steal from the jewelry store. All right.

00:15:40 Speaker_03
No, but it'll come back and say, well, this might reflect bias or you should... I just find it's very... I'm looking for an AI that'll say, that's a stupid fucking question. Or your question, I want it as a friend.

00:15:53 Speaker_01
He wants the shame AI.

00:15:57 Speaker_03
Hit me harder. Call me daddy, you bitch.

00:16:01 Speaker_01
Oh my God.

00:16:02 Speaker_03
No, but I do find it's very, they're so worried about it going weird places.

00:16:07 Speaker_01
It has gone weird places.

00:16:09 Speaker_03
It's constantly preconditioning and qualifying all its answers and being very gentle. I find it's very overly sensitive and quite frankly, politically correct. So I'll start with Kylie. Do you find that to be the case?

00:16:20 Speaker_03
Or do you think that's just they're putting in appropriate guardrails?

00:16:23 Speaker_00
I think they're putting in the appropriate guardrails because it's so nascent. I mean, why start off crazy? Like, I feel like we can work our way up. I feel like we can work our way up to getting you a sadistic chatbot. But for now, it's so... Go on!

00:16:38 Speaker_00
It's just such a nascent technology. So I think being overly safe and correct and nervous about what it's going to output to millions of people, I think that's a good move.

00:16:49 Speaker_01
Yeah, Scott, come on. I think that I'm going to answer this one. I know you want to please bitch AI, but one of the things that's really important is it doesn't sexually harass people.

00:16:59 Speaker_03
It doesn't, like, start- Okay, you're taking this to an even darker place than I would go.

00:17:03 Speaker_01
But I'm just saying, it has. The original ones were racist.

00:17:06 Speaker_03
If you ask it a simple question, it'll start conditioning everything and telling you to check this and make sure that you talk. And it's a sort of, just give me the goddamn answer.

00:17:17 Speaker_01
I get that, but they're never gonna do that because they literally, the first time they put out some Microsoft stuff, it was racist, right? It started to say racist things.

00:17:25 Speaker_01
So they really can't have, one of the things that I think I tell a lot of people is, I met these two guys on the street yesterday and they were creating An AI, they just ran up to me, they love Pivot.

00:17:36 Speaker_01
They're creating an AI that goes on, speaking of odd and unusual things, that goes on top of 911 calls that they'll be selling into cities.

00:17:43 Speaker_01
And it'll translate, say, Spanish immediately because not every person, there's a delay there because the person who's taking the call is not Spanish and they have to go get it Spanish speaking.

00:17:55 Speaker_01
And so it's doing all kinds of things that grogs it and sends things out really quick. I thought it was a great idea. I thought it was a really interesting way, use of AI. And I said, but you know what something is?

00:18:04 Speaker_01
You can't make a mistake even if human dispatchers do. So I think they have to be unusually careful with all these things as this AI is shoving us around the planet. I don't, I just feel like it's okay. You can take it, Scott.

00:18:17 Speaker_01
But I'm gonna make, I'm gonna get someone to make you a mean AI. Overlord or please bitch or something like that.

00:18:22 Speaker_03
I learned this morning from AI that a group of flamingos is called a flamboyance. That's true, and I love that. How awesome is that?

00:18:31 Speaker_01
Fabulous. That's also in the dictionary. A flamboyance? Okay, you're a flamboyance. Anyway, last question. We just sort of covered the idea of what things we should not use it for. It's gonna be used for everything, just FYI.

00:18:42 Speaker_01
But any predictions, last question, on things AI can't do yet, but will be able to do for us in the next three years? Use your imagination hat here, or things you're seeing or hearing.

00:18:52 Speaker_00
I think in the next three years, again, these are so hard to tell because you need so much money and so much compute.

00:19:00 Speaker_00
So if we just continue on that exponential curve that these companies are hoping for, I see probably more accurate and natural voice interactions. That's something that they're building that they really want, the Her movie style reality.

00:19:12 Speaker_00
I do think that that will get better, especially as they release all of this to the public and people test it and they train on people using it. I think those will naturally get better.

00:19:21 Speaker_00
Advanced code generation and debugging, that's something they're already really good at. And if these reasoning models from OpenAI and others continue to get better, it's going to be better at coding and debugging, which will be really cool.

00:19:34 Speaker_00
And they're all building agents, which, again, are like little AI assistants.

00:19:39 Speaker_00
that's sort of the high-stakes tasks that they want to access, hence why all these guardrails are so tough, because they want these high-stakes tasks like running your life and booking new flights and, you know, having access to all of this.

00:19:51 Speaker_00
So I do see them building out agents, but it would require so much compute and so much money to get there. So, you know, I'd be curious what you guys think, because I get asked all the time, like, is the bubble gonna pop? Is OpenAI just gonna crash?

00:20:07 Speaker_00
Which I think, You know, it's so hard for me to tell. You guys have been doing this for so long.

00:20:11 Speaker_01
It will, but no, no, no, no. It's like when the internet crashed. This is a big deal. This is a change in computing. It's yet another great change in computing. This is not crypto.

00:20:21 Speaker_01
This is not, you know, some of the little bubbles, but a bubble, I guess, but it's directionally correct. It's directionally, and it's going to be huge and encompass everything. Scott?

00:20:32 Speaker_03
Well, there's two things. There's the valuation of these companies, and then there's the real impact they have on the economy. I think the latter is just getting started.

00:20:41 Speaker_03
There's gonna be a lot, what I would say in terms of valuations, there's just gonna be a lot of volatility. We've talked about this.

00:20:46 Speaker_03
We think that relative to its size and leadership position, open AI, in my view, is actually at 12 times revenues, is actually probably the best value, because some of the long-tail ones you talked about, who have almost no revenues and no real visible business model yet, still get $2, $10, $20, $50 billion.

00:21:07 Speaker_03
So it's going to be a wild ride. It's like, I would describe it as like late 90s internet. We don't know if it's 97 or 99 now, but we know that by 2005 it's going to be much bigger than it is now.

00:21:19 Speaker_03
That's a long-winded way, Kylie, of saying, I have no idea.

00:21:23 Speaker_01
Yeah, he does. It's up and to the right eventually. Anyway, thank you, Kylie. We really appreciate it. You can read Kylie on The Verge. She does amazing work on this topic and breaks a lot of stories. A colleague. A colleague. She's a scoopster.

00:21:39 Speaker_01
She's a scoopster. She's a scoopster and she's a great one at it. Anyway, okay, Scott, that's it for our AI Basics episode. Please read us out.

00:21:48 Speaker_03
Today's show is produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie and her dad engineered this episode. Thanks also to Drew Burrows and Miel Ceverio. Nishat Khurra is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.

00:21:59 Speaker_03
Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to the podcast. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag.com slash pod.

00:22:09 Speaker_03
We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

00:22:20 Speaker_02
Support for this episode comes from AWS. With the power of AWS Generative AI, teams can get relevant, fast answers to pressing questions and use data to drive real results. Power your business and generate real impact with the most experienced cloud.