Crypto Congress + HBD ChatGPT + What Social Media Platform Should I Be On? AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Hard Fork

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Episode: Crypto Congress + HBD ChatGPT + What Social Media Platform Should I Be On?

Author: The New York Times
Duration: 01:17:47

Episode Shownotes

This week, we explore how the 2024 election paved the way for a new crypto-friendly Congress and what that means for the future of crypto. Then, for ChatGPT’s second birthday, Nick Turley, ChatGPT head of product at OpenAI, stops by to tell us where it goes from here and share

some of his favorite chatbot hacks. Finally, a listener emailed us last week asking what social network he should be using in 2024. We’ll share our thoughts on which text-based platforms are the least annoying. One more thing: We want to learn more about you, our listeners. It will help us make a better show. We would appreciate it if you filled out a quick survey: nytimes.com/hardforksurvey. Thank you. Guest:Nick Turley, ChatGPT head of product at OpenAI Additional Reading:Crypto Industry Lobbies Trump and His Allies After Election WinsHow Crypto Enthusiasts Hijacked a Dog Mayor CompetitionOpenAI Folds A.I.-Powered Search Engine Into ChatGPTBluesky Adds One Million New Users After Election We want to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Summary

In this episode of 'Hard Fork' by The New York Times, hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore how the recent election has led to a pro-crypto Congress, which may impact regulations in the cryptocurrency landscape. They discuss ChatGPT's growth and features with Nick Turley of OpenAI, reflecting on its capabilities and the future of AI technology. The hosts also address listeners' questions about social media platforms, specifically focusing on user experiences in the evolving landscape post-election.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Crypto Congress + HBD ChatGPT + What Social Media Platform Should I Be On?) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_01
Casey, how are you? Well, Kevin, I couldn't help but notice you weren't at the Grindr press mixer last night. I was not. I had a previous commitment, but how was it? Were you invited? Yes. Oh, and you just said queer people's lives aren't important to me?

00:00:16 Speaker_02
No, I figured you were gonna go, you wouldn't miss that for the world, and you would give me the rundown.

00:00:22 Speaker_01
Well, I went and I learned some exciting things on the horizon for the Grindr Corporation. Such as? Well, the big idea over there is they're like, we don't just wanna be for hooking up anymore.

00:00:32 Speaker_01
They're like, we will always be for hooking up, but if you're queer and you're traveling around, we want you to open up Grindr and just be like, here is the coolest club in the city, and here is the most interesting thing that's happening right now.

00:00:44 Speaker_01
and here's maybe somebody who lives 50 miles away, but might actually be your future husband. And I just wanna say, I don't think any of those things are gonna happen. Have you ever met a gay man?

00:00:54 Speaker_01
These are not the questions they're asking with their opening grinder. But you know what, you gotta have a dream. And this is why I love tech industry, Kevin. You have to have dreams.

00:01:03 Speaker_02
Wait, so are they trying to branch out beyond queer people? Or are they just trying to expand the menu of options available to queer people?

00:01:09 Speaker_01
First of all, I love that you are trying to make straight people on Grindr a thing. How dare you? Can we not just have one space to ourselves, okay? But no, they are not trying to bring the straight folks in.

00:01:19 Speaker_01
They are just trying to say, hooking up, you know, it's a problem every app has. It's like you kind of saturate your first market, and then you're like, I'm a public company now, I have to show growth, what else can we do?

00:01:31 Speaker_01
What is the sort of next thing we can build? And the next thing you can build is usually something that is not as good as the first thing that you built.

00:01:37 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah. So would you say they're trying to become more versatile? I would say they're still grinding. I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

00:01:50 Speaker_01
I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, how the election paved the way for a crypto Congress. We'll tell you what the Trump administration is planning.

00:01:59 Speaker_01
Then it's Chad Chippity's second birthday and head of product Nick Turley stops by to tell us where it goes from here. And finally, a listener wants to know what social network should he be using in 2024? Give you our thoughts.

00:02:19 Speaker_01
Well, Kevin, right now, there is a lot of uncertainty about what the next Trump administration will bring, but as we read the news this week, one thing seemed increasingly clear to us, and that is that cryptocurrency is poised to have a huge year in 2025.

00:02:34 Speaker_02
Yes, this is one of the places in the tech industry that is celebrating the hardest about the Trump victory.

00:02:40 Speaker_02
A lot of people feel like this is the end of a brutal period of excessive regulation and what some people are calling a reign of terror that is now over. Wow, did you experience it that way?

00:02:51 Speaker_02
No, but that's what literally people were calling it the Reign of Terror.

00:02:54 Speaker_01
Alright, well, let's talk about some of the things we've started to see as prospects were raised that maybe the Reign of Terror is over.

00:03:02 Speaker_01
What are some of the things we saw this week that made us say, oh wow, crypto actually is one of the big stories coming out of this election?

00:03:06 Speaker_02
So the first thing was just that the prices of all the major tokens have risen precipitously and started rising on election night as it was clear that Trump was winning the election.

00:03:15 Speaker_02
Bitcoin in particular has hit a new all-time high on Wednesday when we're taping this. It's around $93,000. That's up from $62,000 a month ago. That is far higher than Bitcoin price has ever been.

00:03:29 Speaker_01
Yeah, also crypto executives seem to be lining up to speak with the Trump transition team.

00:03:35 Speaker_01
So a friend of the pod and New York Times reporter David Yaffe-Bellini reported this week that Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, a big crypto company, along with some executives at the crypto company Circle, had been in touch with people close to Trump and the transition team.

00:03:51 Speaker_01
And Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has also been trying to arrange a meeting with them. So a lot of people are trying to get in Trump's ear.

00:03:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, and it's not just that the prices of crypto assets are going up. These people also feel like they are making inroads to getting friendlier regulation, to getting more clarity around what the rules are for crypto.

00:04:13 Speaker_02
And they are also just having a lot of success at the more conventional special interest stuff that the crypto industry has been doing.

00:04:21 Speaker_02
A lot of the candidates that their groups and super PACs have been supporting won elections and are now going to be in Congress.

00:04:28 Speaker_01
Yes, this is more of a Crypto Congress, I think, than we have ever had.

00:04:32 Speaker_01
And to put a bow on all of it, Kevin, Elon Musk just got named to co-lead something called the Department of Government Efficiency alongside the former Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy.

00:04:44 Speaker_01
This Department of Government Efficiency is, of course, an acronym for DOGE, which is Musk's favorite cryptocurrency and something he has long hyped. And in the aftermath of the announcement of this,

00:04:56 Speaker_01
Department of Government Efficiency, the Dogecoin price popped 20%.

00:05:00 Speaker_02
Which I was glad to see because my entire 401k is denominated in Dogecoin, so I'm feeling good.

00:05:05 Speaker_01
Seems like a smart choice, you know. Speaking of smart choices, nothing says government efficiency like having two people doing the same job. But anyway, today, Kevin, let's unpack what the crypto industry's growing political influence could mean.

00:05:20 Speaker_01
On one hand, this is a huge win for that industry, which might now be able to realize some of its wildest dreams.

00:05:27 Speaker_01
On the other hand, I'm worried it could introduce some significant new risks into the economy, as the people who once mostly kept crypto separated from core banking and finance functions are about to be swept away and replaced by people who run crypto companies.

00:05:41 Speaker_01
Yeah, let's talk about it. Okay, so let's start with something very basic. How many pro-crypto candidates won in the election that we just had?

00:05:49 Speaker_02
So it's a little hard to say who is a pro-crypto or anti-crypto candidate, but according to, there's a tracker run by an industry group called Stand With Crypto that sort of vets politicians based on stuff they've said about crypto in the past or positions they've taken on crypto-related bills or initiatives.

00:06:07 Speaker_02
And according to that tracker, as of Wednesday, 272 pro-crypto candidates were elected to the House this year, and 19 pro-crypto candidates were elected to the Senate.

00:06:19 Speaker_02
Paul Grewal, the chief legal officer of Coinbase, recently said that we now have the most pro-crypto Congress in history, and I think that's true.

00:06:28 Speaker_01
Yeah, and it sounds like Stand With Crypto is doing much better than its counterpart industry group, Sit With Regulation. They really got wiped out this year. So it seems like the crypto folks won some very tight races this year.

00:06:40 Speaker_01
Kevin, tell us about Bernie Moreno.

00:06:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, so this was a race that a lot of people in the crypto world were paying close attention to in Ohio, my home state. This was an election between Bernie Moreno, who is the Republican candidate,

00:06:55 Speaker_02
and the Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown, the long-term senator, staple of Ohio politics for many decades. And Sherrod Brown is a sort of a centrist Democrat, but he's also been seen as a major opponent of crypto.

00:07:09 Speaker_02
He was an ally of Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He's also been an antagonist of the crypto industry on a bunch of different bills that they have wanted.

00:07:19 Speaker_02
And he became a big target of the crypto industry and its lobbying and influence groups. The crypto super PAC, Fairshake, in particular, reported $40 million to support Bernie Marino in unseating Sherrod Brown. And it worked.

00:07:34 Speaker_02
Bernie Marino, who is a longtime crypto supporter and actually started a blockchain company in 2018, he beat Sherrod Brown and will now be in the Senate.

00:07:45 Speaker_01
And Kevin, with all of these crypto candidates winning, can I assume that Bernie Moreno and the others made crypto the centerpiece of their campaigns? Well, not really.

00:07:54 Speaker_02
So Bernie Moreno is a longtime crypto supporter. He has a long track record of supporting this stuff. But what's he

00:08:00 Speaker_02
What's interesting about the crypto industry's lobbying efforts and their donations to candidates in this cycle is that a lot of them did not play up crypto as a big issue in the campaign, right?

00:08:11 Speaker_02
They were just sort of funneling money to politicians who they knew were more sympathetic toward crypto.

00:08:16 Speaker_02
But it's not like those politicians were turning around and making their entire campaigns about deregulating cryptocurrency or something like that.

00:08:23 Speaker_01
Yeah, and this seems somewhat cynical to me. Jessica Piper had a great piece in Politico where she wrote about some of the ads that these pro-crypto candidates were running.

00:08:32 Speaker_01
She writes, in Ohio, a woman shares how GOP Senate candidate Bernie Moreno invested in her business making uniforms for female police officers.

00:08:39 Speaker_01
In Iowa, a spot highlights Representative Zach Nunn's military credentials and work to lower childcare costs. And in Colorado, a Spanish-language ad touts first-term Democratic Representative Yadira Caraveo's support for more border patrol agents.

00:08:53 Speaker_01
What do these have in common, Kevin? These were all ads from pro-crypto PACs, and none of them mentioned crypto at all.

00:08:59 Speaker_02
Yeah, and I'm sure that was a strategic decision that they made based on focus groups and polling of how voters felt about crypto. But look, I think it's fair to say that they had a very good election cycle. The crypto lobby got most of what it wanted.

00:09:13 Speaker_02
Most of the candidates that they supported were elected, and some in very tight races. So whatever their tactics were, I think it's fair to say that they worked.

00:09:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, they work, but I think it's important for people to note that we are not saying this was some sort of crypto election where Americans stood up and said, you know, please let me go buy unregistered securities.

00:09:31 Speaker_01
We're saying that a lobbying group funneled money to people who supported their cause, and they sort of worked very quietly to get those folks elected without talking about what they wanted them to do.

00:09:40 Speaker_02
Sure, but isn't that how influence groups in this country work in general? I mean, the oil and gas industry does the same thing. It's not like, you know, candidates show up suddenly talking about how much they love fracking.

00:09:50 Speaker_02
It's just that pro-fracking groups will give money to their campaigns. I'm not saying this is, like, a good way to run a country. I'm just saying, like, this is basically just crypto catching up to what other industries have been doing for decades.

00:10:00 Speaker_01
Well, I'm actually very disappointed to hear that, and I'm calling on the oil and gas industry to do better. Now, Kevin, are all these pro-crypto candidates the same? Do they all sort of share a common platform and set of common beliefs?

00:10:13 Speaker_02
No. I mean, what they have in common is, in the crypto industry's eyes, a sort of track record of at least being open-minded about the possibility that crypto could be

00:10:22 Speaker_02
a kind of mainstream asset, that you could have Bitcoin as part of something like a strategic reserve, that you could have more clear guidelines that allow crypto companies to build stuff without worrying that the SEC is going to sue them and try to put them out of business.

00:10:40 Speaker_02
Basically, they've sort of assembled a group of legislators and candidates who they believe will usher in the kind of crypto regulation that allows this industry to become a mature, full-fledged part of the U.S. financial system.

00:10:53 Speaker_01
Okay, so we have a crypto congress that will be seated next year. Let's get into what we think that means, Kevin. And I think the first thing to say here is that the casino is back open, right?

00:11:05 Speaker_01
I feel like during the 2021 run that crypto had, folks were talking to us regularly about how their coins were useful in various new ways, enabled all sorts of new and exciting things.

00:11:17 Speaker_01
But let's face it, most of their popularity just comes from the fact that people love to gamble on them, right?

00:11:23 Speaker_02
Well, so I've been talking with some folks in the industry since the election and, you know, I'll just tell you what they're telling me without sort of endorsing their beliefs or saying that they actually reflect reality.

00:11:35 Speaker_02
But what I'm hearing is that actually the status quo of crypto regulation and politics in the US has been part of what has created the kind of casino atmosphere around crypto because It's sort of hollowed out the market.

00:11:49 Speaker_02
And what I mean by that, or what they mean by that, is that you have basically the things that are considered sort of kosher or legal to do with crypto right now include betting on Bitcoin, which is sort of safe in their eyes from regulation.

00:12:04 Speaker_02
It's sort of the oldest, most established cryptocurrency. It's treated differently by regulators than some of the newer tokens, and so it has kind of this special status when it comes to how it's regulated. And then you have the meme coins, right?

00:12:15 Speaker_02
The sort of meaningless, just frivolous tokens that are considered, like, too unserious for regulators to care about, and so you can bet on the prices of those things to go up.

00:12:25 Speaker_01
Dogecoin.

00:12:25 Speaker_02
Like Dogecoin.

00:12:26 Speaker_02
But there's this kind of middle of the market that they see as being full of actual serious applications of cryptocurrency to things like real estate, to things like music royalties, these kind of things that you'll hear people in the crypto industry talk about as being part of DeFi or Web3, these sort of attempts to move more parts of economic activity onto crypto blockchains and have them work in that way.

00:12:51 Speaker_01
Right, so anything about which somebody might say, put it on the blockchain, you're saying is in this category.

00:12:57 Speaker_02
Well, it hasn't been impossible to do those things, but it's been quite hard for institutional investors in particular to want to fund those kinds of activities because of this sort of uncertain regulatory environment where if you start a startup and it's trying to do something using crypto to do something with music royalties, for example,

00:13:18 Speaker_02
you don't know which government agency could show up tomorrow and try to put you out of business.

00:13:23 Speaker_01
And this was the Andreessen Horowitz argument for why they back President Trump, was essentially saying, because of this, our startups cannot get funding, they cannot succeed in the marketplace, and we want that to change.

00:13:34 Speaker_02
Right. And so I think, you know, the people who I'm talking to in the industry, they believe that actually the casino part of crypto may become less prominent as a result of having a more crypto friendly administration.

00:13:47 Speaker_01
Well, maybe it will, but I'll hit you with just a few numbers from over the past few days, Kevin. So as of the time of this recording,

00:13:54 Speaker_01
not only is Bitcoin up above $93,000 as we said earlier, Ether is up more than 10%, Dogecoin is up more than 118%, and Coinbase's stock is up more than 40%.

00:14:07 Speaker_01
So while there might be other things you can do with crypto, to me it seems clear that the gamblers are getting very, very excited.

00:14:14 Speaker_01
Now, let's talk about a second thing that you can be sure of in the next Trump administration, which is the crypto industry is going to be regulating itself now.

00:14:23 Speaker_01
Talk to us about what changes we're expecting to see over at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

00:14:27 Speaker_02
So again, I'll tell you what people that I talk to who are plugged in in the crypto industry are expecting. This is what I would consider the sort of consensus industry view.

00:14:35 Speaker_02
is, look, the most obvious thing is Gary Gensler, the head of the SEC, will be gone. He is not expected to serve a day in the Trump administration.

00:14:44 Speaker_01
Wait, what if he puts out a statement later this week and he says, I love crypto now, and President Trump, well, he's got some good ideas.

00:14:51 Speaker_03
It worked for Jeff Bezos!

00:14:53 Speaker_02
I think he should be polishing his resume. I don't think there's any chance of that happening. And I think the person who will replace him will almost certainly be someone that the crypto industry knows and who they consider sort of a strategic ally.

00:15:05 Speaker_02
Some of the names that have been floated as potential replacements for Gary Gensler are people like Dan Gallagher, who's the chief legal officer for Robinhood, which is, of course, the big finance and crypto trading app.

00:15:17 Speaker_02
Chris Giancarlo, who's a former regulator who served as an advisor to crypto companies. You know, none of these people are sure shoe-ins, but I could see any of them being named to lead the SEC.

00:15:27 Speaker_01
All right. So the Foxes are going to be appointed to guard the henhouse industry. I also hear, Kevin, that they want to get some new bills through Congress.

00:15:35 Speaker_02
Yeah, so there's a bill that has been sort of making progress through Congress called Fit 21. Fit 21 is sort of the crypto industry's attempt to create some of this regulatory clarity that they've been so desperate for.

00:15:48 Speaker_02
I have to say, it sounds like a diet that you would do before your wedding. Yes, the FIT 21.

00:15:54 Speaker_01
You look great, I've been on FIT 21. I'm sorry, go ahead.

00:15:58 Speaker_02
So this is basically a bill that would create some rules that determine essentially the market structure of crypto.

00:16:07 Speaker_02
So which tokens, which crypto assets are considered securities, which are considered commodities, which are regulated by the SEC, which are regulated by the CFTC, basically creates some sort of rules of the road so that crypto companies who are doing these things

00:16:21 Speaker_02
know what the rules are and what lines they need to avoid crossing. And that's sort of the crypto way of describing this bill. Another way of describing this bill would be that it is a wish list of all the stuff that the crypto industry has wanted.

00:16:33 Speaker_02
But interestingly, there's been some reporting in recent days from some crypto news outlets, including an outlet called Decrypt,

00:16:40 Speaker_02
that actually FIT21 may not be ambitious enough for the current crypto industry because it was written during the Biden administration when this was sort of the crypto industry's last-ditch attempt to save itself from sort of being regulated out of business by creating this bill that, if it had passed, would at least allow it to continue operating in some capacity.

00:17:03 Speaker_02
Now that Donald Trump has won the election, some crypto lobbyists are saying, wait a minute, we should go back to the drawing board and come up with a bill that actually includes all the stuff we want, and maybe we can get that passed.

00:17:13 Speaker_02
We should write a fit 22 or even a fit 23.

00:17:15 Speaker_01
Yes, exactly. So we can expect to see that moving through the next Congress. And then, Kevin, there's also this one other idea that I've heard floated that I have to ask you about.

00:17:24 Speaker_01
Who are these people who want the government to establish what they call a strategic Bitcoin reserve?

00:17:30 Speaker_02
Yeah, this is an idea that's been, I don't know, a pipe dream of many crypto boosters for years, is that eventually cryptocurrency would become such a valued part of the financial system that countries, including the United States, would start stockpiling Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency the way that we stockpile other global currencies as part of our strategic reserve.

00:17:53 Speaker_02
like gold. Yes, exactly. And, you know, this has not happened in any major economies. El Salvador has started to establish a Bitcoin reserve.

00:18:03 Speaker_01
Kevin, it's not just El Salvador that's amassed a large store of Bitcoin. It's also Norway and Bhutan. So put some respect on their names.

00:18:12 Speaker_02
I didn't know that. But basically, the crypto industry thinks that this would be a huge win for crypto for a couple reasons. One is, obviously, if the government is buying something and stockpiling it, it's not going to ban it, right?

00:18:25 Speaker_02
It sort of gives them some protection against some of the more extreme regulatory scenarios that they are afraid of.

00:18:33 Speaker_01
Also, it's just a huge mark of validation, right? If the government thinks this has value, you should too, right? Right.

00:18:39 Speaker_02
It creates an additional layer of legitimacy that makes it easy for lots of investors to say, well, if the U.S. government is doing it, I guess we can do it too.

00:18:49 Speaker_01
Do you think that if we established a strategic national Bitcoin stockpile, America could become the next El Salvador?

00:18:57 Speaker_02
I can't hope. I hear it's beautiful this time of year.

00:18:59 Speaker_01
All right. So I want to ask three questions to finish this one out. And the first one is, will Web3 make a comeback? Here's why I care about this. You know, I'm not a gambler.

00:19:09 Speaker_01
I never, you know, bought a cryptocurrency to try to, you know, see if I could make a quick profit.

00:19:14 Speaker_01
But I was very interested in 2021 and the people who were saying, we think we can build cool new applications using blockchains and we sort of want to remake the Internet in the image of crypto.

00:19:25 Speaker_01
That proved very controversial, and I think I eventually became persuaded that that was a super bad idea. But one reason why it never really took off was because the Biden administration just hated crypto and tried to get rid of it wherever it could.

00:19:38 Speaker_01
So now that that is kind of off the table, do you think we're going to see the Web3 comeback?

00:19:43 Speaker_02
I don't know, but it's certainly possible. I think the thing that I can say with confidence is that crypto will now have the opportunity to prove itself, right?

00:19:52 Speaker_02
For years, people in the crypto industry have been saying, well, we would have all this cool Web3 stuff and this decentralized internet if only the regulators would let us. Well, now the regulators are gonna let you.

00:20:02 Speaker_02
So let's go build some stuff and let's see how it does.

00:20:05 Speaker_02
There's a possibility that it does come to fruition and that all the things that the crypto industry has been saying are sort of barriers to its growth and mainstream adoption turn out to disappear under the Trump administration.

00:20:17 Speaker_02
I also think there's a possibility that we have more blowups and people losing money as a result of scams or protocols that aren't as risk-free as they're advertised. So actually, I think there's a, a real risk here for the crypto industry.

00:20:31 Speaker_02
I think in a lot of ways, they're kind of like the dog that caught the car. It's like, well, you're going to get everything you've been wanting.

00:20:38 Speaker_02
But now if you fail, if you don't do what you have promised your believers that you would, that's going to be totally on you. There's not going to be a sort of evil regulatory regime to blame anymore.

00:20:48 Speaker_01
I agree with you. And at the same time, I sort of feel like this has already happened because a good amount of crypto applications did remain legal and possible during the Biden administration.

00:20:59 Speaker_01
You might remember the Constitution Dow, the group of people who came together to buy a real copy of the U.S. Constitution and sort of manage its career using something called a decentralized autonomous organization. After that happened, I feel

00:21:15 Speaker_01
like we never heard about DAOs basically ever again. There was also some momentary enthusiasm for what they called play-to-earn games.

00:21:22 Speaker_01
These were games that pay you in crypto for playing them, and some of the biggest ones turned out to be Ponzi schemes.

00:21:28 Speaker_01
So while I think everything that you said is true, I tend to be a little bit more skeptical because I feel like the world got a pretty close look at these crypto applications a few years ago, and they just decided these really kind of suck in a lot of pretty structural ways.

00:21:43 Speaker_01
Okay, question two here is essentially how far will Trump actually let the crypto folks go, right? At the end of the day, the cryptocurrency is a parallel financial system that operates in some ways independently of the U.S.

00:21:59 Speaker_01
financial system and away from regulatory oversight. And there are a lot of reasons why most countries don't want that to happen.

00:22:08 Speaker_01
And if you're, say, an incoming authoritarian leader, you might have even less interest in there being a parallel financial system that you don't actually control.

00:22:17 Speaker_01
So I'm curious if the optimism that the crypto folks are feeling right now might soon run into a hard wall, which is Donald Trump's self-interest.

00:22:27 Speaker_02
It's possible. Look, I don't think that Donald Trump is, you know, an erudite scholar of crypto market structure and economics. I think he's basically doing what the people around him want him to when it comes to crypto.

00:22:41 Speaker_02
But I think there's this tension, right, that crypto at its core was designed to not require the kind of centralization and the planned market structure that traditional financial instruments do. It was created to be

00:22:56 Speaker_02
an alternative to the financial system.

00:22:59 Speaker_02
And now it's possible that with the loose regulation that the Trump administration is likely to put on it, that that whole crypto economy just kind of merges with the conventional financial system and they become one in the same.

00:23:14 Speaker_02
And I think that would be a good thing for people who want to make lots of money doing crypto stuff and convincing mainstream investors to invest in it. But I think it also introduces a kind of risk to the whole crypto ecosystem.

00:23:28 Speaker_02
You know, we've seen crypto companies and projects blow up a lot in the past. And those have been big stories. We've talked about them on the show.

00:23:36 Speaker_02
But they have not sort of cascaded through the financial system in the way that, say, the 2008 financial crisis, the credit crisis at the big banks did, right?

00:23:46 Speaker_02
But as these two economies sort of become interlaced and interwoven more and more, I think there's a real chance of contagion and of systemic risk in a way that they haven't been with these sort of earlier crises, which were much more cordoned off.

00:24:00 Speaker_01
Sure. I have to say, Kevin, nothing I've seen so far makes me feel like the crypto industry is taking this seriously. And I was glad that the regulators that we still have today do take that seriously.

00:24:12 Speaker_01
I do think that there is a real systemic risk here that comes with intermingling the crypto system ever more with what I think of as the real U.S. financial system. As banks start to store more of these assets as it becomes more of a tool in finance.

00:24:29 Speaker_01
If, as often happens in crypto, there is a sudden collapse in prices, we could find ourselves in these liquidity traps, you know, banks going under, retail investors losing their shirts, and who is going to be left to protect us, right?

00:24:45 Speaker_01
We're talking about moving out of the realm of

00:24:48 Speaker_01
Oh, well, you're kind of an odd and quirky person, and you follow certain subreddits, and so you have some Bitcoin and Ether into, oh no, this is now just a tool that your bank uses, and now your bank just went under.

00:24:59 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, I'm not as worried about systemic risk as it sounds like you are, but there is something else that worries me. which is that I think we are rapidly turning into a nation of gamblers. This is broader than crypto.

00:25:11 Speaker_02
This is also the story of the rise of legalized sports betting, of prediction markets, of all of these new ways that people have of doing what is essentially speculation or gambling.

00:25:24 Speaker_02
We just are starting to see that legalizing a whole bunch of forms of what are essentially gambling has not been an entirely net positive thing for society, and that some of the people that it may be the worst for are the people who can least afford to lose money.

00:25:39 Speaker_01
Well, now I feel bad about the way I wanted to end this segment, which was by asking you to make a bet. What's that? Will Sam Baikman Freed be pardoned under the new Trump administration? I don't think so. He gave too much money to Democrats.

00:25:50 Speaker_01
I'm gonna bet that he's the Secretary of the Treasury within three years. I'll take the other side of that. Okay.

00:25:58 Speaker_02
When we come back, a conversation with Chat GPT product head Nick Turley on the product's second birthday and where it's going from here.

00:26:05 Speaker_03
Well, Casey, we have a birthday to celebrate today. Oh my God, I'm sorry I didn't get you anything.

00:26:20 Speaker_02
It's not my birthday, it's ChatGBT's birthday. The popular app is two years old as of this month, and I would say it had a pretty eventful first two years of its life.

00:26:31 Speaker_01
Yeah, this was one of the biggest launches of a new piece of technology that we've seen in a long time, and I would argue is probably the biggest launch since we started this podcast.

00:26:39 Speaker_02
Oh, for sure. And not only is it big in our world, it is also big in the world at large. According to SimilarWebChat, GPT is now the eighth most visited website in the world. It has millions and millions of users, and it has even become a verb.

00:26:55 Speaker_02
In fact, I recently heard a college student say that they were going to chat something rather than Googling it. This is clearly a profound and important product.

00:27:04 Speaker_02
Whatever you think of generative AI, it has already had a ton of implications for the tech industry and for people's lives around the world. But we haven't actually dug deep into the product itself in a while, and it has been changing a lot.

00:27:17 Speaker_02
So today, we've invited on Nick Turley. Nick Turley is the head of product at OpenAI for ChatGPT.

00:27:25 Speaker_02
He's been at the company since before ChatGPT launched, and he has a lot of interesting thoughts about how the product has evolved over the last two years and where it's going next. Let's bring him in.

00:27:35 Speaker_02
Before we do, we should make our traditional caveat every time we talk about this company. The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. Nick Turley, welcome to Hard Fork. Thanks for having me.

00:27:55 Speaker_02
So let's start by rewinding back two years to November of 2022. You're about to release this thing called Chat GPT into the world. What did you think was going to happen when it was released?

00:28:11 Speaker_00
Yeah, we've been playing with Chat GPT internally. We had a version of it. We called it the Chat Playground. None of us thought it would be a product. So we had very, very tempered expectations toward this thing.

00:28:27 Speaker_00
But we wanted to get it out, it was very important. I think we'd went sort of, it was a 10-day sprint from deciding to launch this externally to actually doing so. So everyone was pretty heads down.

00:28:36 Speaker_00
And the reason for that was that we really wanted the learnings back when we came back from the holiday.

00:28:40 Speaker_00
If we'd known it was gonna be a takeoff product in any way, we would certainly not have done it right before everyone was leaving to go on break and see their families, etc.

00:28:49 Speaker_01
So what was the moment that you first realized, oh, wow, this thing seems to be resonating with people more than we'd expected?

00:28:55 Speaker_00
It was the next day. This is probably a classic story for any product that takes off, but I thought the dashboard was broken because we've taken sort of these over or under bets with the team that you know how people would ever try it.

00:29:06 Speaker_00
I think the sort of outlier bet was 100,000 users would ever try it or something like that. I was like, that's crazy. I'm from a small 30,000-person town in northern Germany, and I remember going home two weeks later.

00:29:17 Speaker_00
And normally, it's a very serene environment where, you know, that world doesn't interact with my Silicon Valley world, and I kind of like it that way.

00:29:23 Speaker_00
But this time, I remember the kids, the neighbor kids, were talking about ChatGPT already, and it was two weeks later, and it was unprompted. Like, I didn't even ask them. And I was like, wow, world's colliding.

00:29:32 Speaker_00
This thing really is going around the world. So that's probably when I viscerally felt it, but I saw it in the data, like, on day two.

00:29:39 Speaker_02
So I think, you know, a lot of people that I talk to, they tried chat GPT when it came out, it blew their minds, you know, they tried a bunch of different prompts, and then maybe it sort of didn't work its way into their daily routine.

00:29:50 Speaker_02
Maybe their usage has sort of trailed off a little bit. If someone's last experience with chat GPT was back in, call it late 2022, and they went back today and revisited it, what do you think the biggest differences they would notice are?

00:30:05 Speaker_00
Yeah, if I think about some of the big things that have happened, GPT-4 was like the first big update we made to the product, right? And what users noticed was it's just much more creative. And it just feels smarter.

00:30:18 Speaker_00
And then there's all these capabilities that we built on top of GPT-4 because GPT-4 was so smart. So for the first time ever, it could browse the web.

00:30:27 Speaker_00
It could actually run code, which is not something that most consumers care about, but what that means for you as a user is that it can actually crunch numbers, which historically the first version was really bad at.

00:30:34 Speaker_00
It was bad at math, any type of analysis or calculation.

00:30:37 Speaker_00
It could suddenly do it because GPT-4 was smart enough to literally run very, very reliable code for you, which is a nice kind of connection of these large language models with traditional computers.

00:30:48 Speaker_00
Later that year, we started venturing into multimodality, which is our term for giving it inputs other than text to play with. So it could start generating images, it could start viewing images.

00:30:59 Speaker_00
We launched our first voice mode, which allowed you to talk to the model. So I think year one was really the year of all these new capabilities that were unlocked by GPT-4 and related innovation.

00:31:11 Speaker_00
Year two was, we kind of saw this interesting consolidation where all these new capabilities came into one model, which we call GPT 4.0. And that model was itself, it was anything in, anything out.

00:31:22 Speaker_00
And the way that that feels is that you could just talk to ChatGPT in an incredibly natural way, like the new voice mode that we launched earlier this year. It's a completely different way of using ChatGPT because it's your companion.

00:31:33 Speaker_00
You can have a real conversation with this thing.

00:31:35 Speaker_00
And then most recently, and I think this is maybe the rawest form of chat GPT or the rawest evolution is, it started to reason for you, which basically means it thinks before speaking, which we very much value in humans.

00:31:48 Speaker_01
It almost never happens on a podcast.

00:31:53 Speaker_00
No, you get the raw chain of thought, as we call it, right?

00:31:56 Speaker_02
Yeah, that's right. There have been a few studies recently of these kind of large sets of transcripts from AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, basically researchers trying to figure out what are people actually using these things for?

00:32:10 Speaker_02
And it seems like these researchers are finding that the most popular use cases are, number one, doing homework. number two, sexual role play, and then all the other use cases. Does that match your own understanding of how people are using ChatGPT?

00:32:26 Speaker_00
For us, the order, and you know, obviously this varies about different products. For example, there's these like character products. ChatGPT is very much not that. It's, you know, I always describe our use cases as worky.

00:32:36 Speaker_00
They're not necessarily at work, though I think we are in like 90% of Fortune 500 companies or something like that, something crazy. But it's worky stuff. It's like I'm trying to get something done.

00:32:45 Speaker_00
So, you know, there's other products out there that, you know, will skew the distribution of use cases. For us, I think the ranking is question answering. That's how everyone gets started. I just ask, you know, and that just got better with search.

00:32:54 Speaker_00
So I think I see an increase in that. It's the most relatable use case for many people. Then writing that both, you know, can be like, hey, draft this tricky text that I don't know how to send.

00:33:03 Speaker_00
Or, hey, I wrote this email, but, you know, English is my second language. Can you please edit it? Then it's coding.

00:33:10 Speaker_00
We have a huge base of people doing technical things that includes beginners who are learning how to program and also, you know, experts who are looking to debug what they're working on or they're running something Excel and it's not working.

00:33:20 Speaker_00
And then it's a long tail of other things.

00:33:23 Speaker_02
Have there been any popular use cases that you didn't expect or that really surprised you?

00:33:28 Speaker_00
So many, um, cooking was a really interesting one because I got into cooking just as, you know, Chachi Petit was happening too. And I was like, this is amazing that you can just like sub out, you know, oh, I'm missing this ingredient.

00:33:40 Speaker_00
And it'll just like slightly modify the recipe for you in a way that, you know, I probably would have called by my parents. I still do, but I don't want to bug them anymore. Um, a lot of people use it as kind of a,

00:33:50 Speaker_00
Coach or self-improvement tool, this has been really striking to me actually. A lot of people use it to kind of process. I do this actually on my way to work every morning.

00:34:00 Speaker_00
When I'm in the car, I talk to it and I just give it a bunch of unstructured thoughts of everything that needs to get done and have it repeated back to me.

00:34:08 Speaker_00
So it's almost having this kind of second brain or coach thing that surprised me, both in my own usage and what I've been seeing with other people, because it's really kind of helping people be a better version of themselves.

00:34:18 Speaker_01
Say more about what you get back out of that. It sort of distills everything that you've told. I mean, are you doing that because you sort of want to get like a to-do list or like what is it giving you?

00:34:26 Speaker_00
Kind of. I wanted to sort of help me structure my own thoughts.

00:34:31 Speaker_00
kind of ramble at it, and by the time I finish the call with it, in part because it's getting me to talk, probably, and in part because it's actually repeating back to me, okay, here are priorities I'm hearing. And I'm like, no, that's not right.

00:34:42 Speaker_00
The fourth one actually scratched that. I have this ready-to-go list of what my day's going to look like. And so I think it's some combination of getting me to talk and actually producing a tight list of stuff to do. Yeah.

00:34:55 Speaker_01
So I have been, uh, talked about this a few times, but over the past month I have been meditating more and I have been chatting with a chat bot and it has been coaching me and it is incredible. It is this journal that talks back to me now.

00:35:07 Speaker_01
So it's not just me like processing my own thoughts. It is something that has a vast body of knowledge about this very particular subject and it's able to say, here are some new things that you can try.

00:35:18 Speaker_01
So this is something that I feel like most people have not caught on to yet, but more people should try. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about the trajectory here.

00:35:29 Speaker_01
You've sort of described over the past couple of years how ChatGPT has grown more capable, it can work in different modalities. But give us a sense of where all of this is going.

00:35:41 Speaker_01
Will ChatGPT always be a box we type into or where do you think it will be in two years from now, let's say?

00:35:49 Speaker_00
First of all, what I'm about to say, I say it with a lot of humility because I hope, you know, the best story- Also rare for a podcast, by the way, but go on. Rare for a podcast.

00:35:59 Speaker_00
I have been so wrong and I tend to underestimate how quickly things are moving, even myself. I think there's gonna be a few evolutions. The first one,

00:36:08 Speaker_00
We really saw in the last couple of years, it's been an era of asking questions to the AI, and you can ask increasingly interesting questions, get increasingly better answers. You can ask them in new ways, including voice, including with vision.

00:36:21 Speaker_00
You can get different types of answers, including images and including voice itself, right? But fundamentally, it's been this interaction paradigm where I'm asking and I'm getting something back.

00:36:30 Speaker_00
But when I look at where the technology is going, we have really, really smart models now. And in a certain sense, I think chat underleverages what they're capable of. And what we're going to see instead, I think, is tasks.

00:36:42 Speaker_00
You delegate to this AI and it goes off and does stuff for you. You know, this idea isn't new. People have been talking about agents for a couple years now. People even say they're building them.

00:36:53 Speaker_00
And it's true, you can kind of build these things already in certain domains. And it reminds me of how building chatbots felt before we had the right technology, where you could sort of do it, but they weren't really good and they weren't reliable.

00:37:05 Speaker_00
And I think by having these really smart models out there, and our O1 model is an incredibly smart model, I think you can build reliable tasks for the first time where it goes off and does something, whether or not it's planning a full trip for you, whether or not it's finding you the best shoes under $300 that are made in the US, whether or not it's coding an application for you, running a data analysis for you.

00:37:27 Speaker_00
I think you'll be able to go off for 30 minutes, an hour, maybe two hours, maybe even longer, and do this stuff.

00:37:32 Speaker_00
And the reason that this is possible now versus a year ago is that the models are smart enough to deal with all the edge cases that they're going to run into, right?

00:37:39 Speaker_00
This is why it's so hard to build these things, is you encounter things in the wild, like, you know, the shoes were sold out, or in the coding case, it didn't compile, it didn't run, and now what?

00:37:48 Speaker_01
You're reminding me of the evolution of self-driving cars.

00:37:51 Speaker_01
You know, like a decade ago, when I would test a self-driving car, I would go down to Google headquarters, and they'd put me on a track that a car had already gone around probably thousands of times before.

00:38:02 Speaker_01
They knew every single edge case in that particular parking lot, and it was super cool, but it could not really do anything that was not on that track. And then bit by bit, they started testing them on more and more roads.

00:38:11 Speaker_01
They started gathering more and more edge cases. And now, you know, when we leave today, we could order a Waymo and take it anywhere.

00:38:18 Speaker_01
It sounds like agents are just sort of a little bit behind in that process, but the basic logic is the same, and you're driving toward a similar outcome.

00:38:26 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think that's right, and I think that's a really good analogy.

00:38:29 Speaker_00
And even within, you know, if you accept that, if you believe that that's what the evolution is going to be, I think there's still the same kind of, you know, big fundamental questions that people have in self-driving cars, which is like, you know, is the future a world where

00:38:43 Speaker_00
this gradually gets better and it takes over more and more and I don't have to touch the steering wheels often anymore? Or is it this thing that is fully autonomous but it's only going to work for certain use cases?

00:38:51 Speaker_00
There's these different paths you can take. We're trying to figure out too what is the right path because we want the human to be in control. We want these things to be reliable and useful and safe.

00:39:00 Speaker_00
I think you're going to have the same questions that you have in self-driving in terms of how to actually get there. But I think that end state is very apparent, at least to me and I think many people working on this stuff.

00:39:09 Speaker_00
The question is how fast and what's the path?

00:39:13 Speaker_02
We talked to a lot of educators, teachers, people who are excited about tools like ChatGPT, but also a lot of people who are worried about them.

00:39:21 Speaker_02
This was obviously a major early use case of ChatGPT was students using this to write their essays, do their problem sets, do their homework.

00:39:29 Speaker_02
So I want to ask you about that, but in particular, I want to ask you, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that OpenAI had developed a tool internally for watermarking text, basically a system where you could take a piece of text and tell with something like 99.9% accuracy whether it had been written by chat GPT.

00:39:48 Speaker_02
The Journal reported that that had not been rolled out after a lot of internal debate. Can you tell us more about that watermarking tool and why you haven't rolled it out?

00:39:56 Speaker_00
I'm very much not the expert on this area. We have done research on this stuff. In the case of images, we rolled out ways to detect whether or not images came from DALI, and it remains an area of research.

00:40:11 Speaker_00
The thing that I will say, some of the considerations that go into stuff like this are, on the one hand, you want to be able to tell if people use AI. On the other hand, there are many legitimate use cases.

00:40:23 Speaker_00
English is your second language and use it to edit your cover letter. In which case you wouldn't, maybe wouldn't want people to know that you use chat GPT.

00:40:30 Speaker_00
I'm personally not sure both about how good the detection tools can get and about what the right thing to do is in terms of, you know, who gets access to detection tools, et cetera.

00:40:40 Speaker_00
But it's something we research and I'm, you know, I'm on the product side and therefore don't, don't, don't know the latest.

00:40:46 Speaker_02
Do you, I guess, just without getting into the specifics of that watermarking tool, do you feel like ChatGPT has any sort of responsibility to the people who use it and the people who may be trying to pass off AI generated work as original work, given that this has become a big use case of the product?

00:41:05 Speaker_00
Yeah, first of all, I and we feel a tremendous amount of responsibility to our users, our non-users, the broader world and the ecosystem, right? Everyone is affected by this technology.

00:41:16 Speaker_00
And we've generally found the best thing we can do, given that this technology will evolve with us or without us, is to release it iteratively to the world and to start the right conversations and to be as gradual and thoughtful as we can in the way that we introduce this stuff.

00:41:35 Speaker_00
I very much believe that this technology is a tool for people. We need to put people in control about how they want to use this stuff. That is true if you're using it for art. It's a tool for an artist. It's not an artist.

00:41:47 Speaker_00
And that's the same thing when you're writing stuff. This is not anything other than a calculator for words.

00:41:54 Speaker_00
And that is how I think we should treat it, which means that the onus should be on the people using the technology in the same way that we've treated any other tool.

00:42:04 Speaker_02
So the other thing that we'll hear from educators often is not specifically about cheating.

00:42:09 Speaker_02
I think a lot of schools are starting to move past the kind of panic that chat GPT is just going to lead to an outbreak of cheating and plagiarism, but there are some longer term

00:42:21 Speaker_02
concerns that people have about the fact that students may be using this kind of technology to short-circuit their thinking process.

00:42:28 Speaker_02
That if you have a chatbot that can teach you everything you need to know about Chaucer, you don't have to do the work of thinking through it yourself. Is that concerning to you?

00:42:40 Speaker_00
Yeah. First of all, it's something that absolutely concerns me. It's something I think about a lot. The way it makes me feel is I was in, I think, middle school when Wikipedia came out.

00:42:54 Speaker_00
And it was a shock to our teachers, far smaller of a shock than I think childhood PT, the grand scheme of things. But, you know, there was a lot of conversation, you know, is going to the library dead? Are people going to lose their research skills?

00:43:07 Speaker_00
This is not a legitimate source. We ought to teach people the right way to do this.

00:43:11 Speaker_00
And, you know, I think the forward-looking teachers at the time, they were starting to bring Wikipedia into the classroom as, you know, a way of discussing, you know, what does it mean for a source to be reliable? Let's look at Wikipedia.

00:43:22 Speaker_00
Now let's look at a reliable source. Let's find the gap. And in the same way, I do see many teachers now bringing Chattopadhyay into their classroom. Some of the coolest examples I've seen is, you know,

00:43:33 Speaker_00
examples where students create their first draft without the help of ChatGPT. Then they submit another draft that has them edit it with ChatGPT and explain what they learned from the edit. Then there's a final version.

00:43:44 Speaker_00
In the same way that I think we've integrated calculators, we've integrated other tools that were pretty disruptive and could be abused for undue shortcuts. I think ChatGPT is going to end up being the same.

00:43:55 Speaker_00
The thing I want to acknowledge is that all this is happening so quickly that I think many teachers just don't have the opportunity to

00:44:01 Speaker_00
talk to other teachers to figure out, okay, how are we going to evolve our lesson plan to use this stuff in a way that is exciting and empowering?

00:44:09 Speaker_00
Personally, I still believe that in net, this has been amazing for students because the thing you have to keep in mind is that there's people all around the world that don't have educational resources.

00:44:19 Speaker_00
Even for me, in the German public school system that I grew up in, people rarely read my homework and I often imagine what would have happened if someone had actually read my homework. I would have been-.

00:44:27 Speaker_01
Wait, your teachers didn't read your homework?

00:44:29 Speaker_00
Our pages were very, very busy and homework was oftentimes the thing you submitted. And then, you know, it was graded on completion.

00:44:34 Speaker_01
This doesn't sound like that good of a system to me. I hate to say it.

00:44:37 Speaker_00
I came out OK. I'm very grateful. I'm overall very grateful to the system. But I'm just saying that I wish I'd had this as a kid.

00:44:46 Speaker_01
Yeah, I want to ask about another debate that has it seemed like it really heated up just over the past few days.

00:44:54 Speaker_01
And it is about whether as companies like yours work to build these new models, they may be approaching the limits of what are sometimes called scaling laws, the idea that as you pour more compute and data into networks, systems like chat GPT get radically more capable.

00:45:14 Speaker_01
Do you have a sense that we may be approaching a plateau here in what we can get out of large language models just by making them larger? And is that a problem for you?

00:45:26 Speaker_00
Yeah, this keeps coming up. This is my take as a product person. I'm very much not an AI genius, but I'm around this stuff. And I'll say this thought comes up from time to time.

00:45:36 Speaker_00
In fact, I think we have this thought when I first showed up at OpenAI, because I remember when GPT-4 wasn't useful, and we were wondering, oh man, did something go wrong? And then it didn't, and we figured it out. So this stuff is science.

00:45:48 Speaker_00
It's open-ended. There's many scientific questions about how to scale these models. For us, we feel like we've stumbled on a new paradigm.

00:45:56 Speaker_00
The O1 model really changes the way that we think about scaling these models because you now can just not, you can scale the amount of thinking it does as it responds.

00:46:04 Speaker_00
Like for the first time, you can have this thing actually think really, really hard about something, give you a better answer. And, you know, that's an entirely new paradigm that we're just beginning to explore.

00:46:14 Speaker_00
We're just beginning to productize and we're just beginning to scale up. So I'm actually very excited about where we are.

00:46:20 Speaker_01
So is the basic idea that even if this one technique that had been the main technique for making large language models more capable over the past few years starts to slow in terms of the rate of improvement, you also have developed many other techniques for getting more out of these models that you are actually just starting to explore?

00:46:42 Speaker_00
That's right. We're really at the beginning of the reasoning era, not the end, and there's so much to explore there.

00:46:47 Speaker_01
On the reasoning point, can you give some ideas for, let's say, two writers for what they should actually be doing with this model?

00:46:56 Speaker_01
Because I have not been able to figure out anything to have the reasoning model do that I can't already get from the normal model. Is it just none of my business, Nick?

00:47:06 Speaker_00
No, it's everyone's business. It's everyone's business. You know, this gets back to the same problem that we had when we first launched ChatGPT, where nobody knows what it's really capable of, and we have to find out together.

00:47:19 Speaker_00
I say this in all earnestness, you know, we do so much before we launch these models now, you know, we red team them, we show it to experts. It's becoming an exploratory exercise for many of us to figure out what this stuff is capable of.

00:47:35 Speaker_00
For me, I found it to be really, really useful at things, and there's not very many of these things, where I know more than most people. I'm a generalist, but I happen to know more than some about jazz theory, so I had to re-harmonize a song.

00:47:53 Speaker_00
I won't bore you with what that is, but it's something that I happen to be really interested in, and I realized it is much, much smarter than the average model.

00:47:58 Speaker_01
Well, tell us a little bit about that, because I'd like to hear what ChazGPT actually does when you say, hey, reharmonize this.

00:48:03 Speaker_00
Yeah, I give it the chords, and I'm like, okay, what are other ways to express these chords that would sound more funky, more like modern Chaz, that still work and resolve at the end? So I'm having it, you know,

00:48:13 Speaker_00
kind of change the chord structure of the song and then I sit down at the piano and I try it out. So that's like one, you know, it's an area where I have a niche interest where I'm probably, you know, better than most humans at it.

00:48:23 Speaker_00
And I think the challenge with smarter than human models in many cases is that you've got to find an area where, you know, you can actually assess whether or not the model is, you know, just equally good, worse, or really, really smart.

00:48:33 Speaker_01
I have a lot of expertise in giving harsh feedback to Kevin. And so what you have me thinking about is could I actually use it to get even harsher feedback? Well, I'll get ready for that. Okay.

00:48:43 Speaker_02
Yeah, I'm going to use O1 to process your feedback and put it into a format that I can more easily accept without my ego shattering. Sounds perfect. So we can just have like a sort of battle of the AIs there.

00:48:54 Speaker_02
Nick, another question we get all the time from listeners and readers is about the environmental impact of ChatGPT. This is a big question. There's some people who believe that this is, you know,

00:49:06 Speaker_02
pouring out a bottle of water every time you ask ChatGPT a question or something like that. So can you settle this for us? How bad is ChatGPT for the environment?

00:49:14 Speaker_00
I don't know. I'm very much not an expert on this field. The thing I do know is that, you know, the costs keep coming down, the efficiency keeps going up.

00:49:22 Speaker_00
You know, we wouldn't be, if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't have been able to serve all the users that we have today. You know, you probably remember the time when ChetchBD was down all the time.

00:49:28 Speaker_00
It was a very unique era for all of us, including the team. So it's gotten a lot more efficient and it will continue to do so, but I don't know the exact economics. We'd have to ask someone.

00:49:38 Speaker_02
Okay, we'd like to close, Nick, with a game. I'm sure you've been seeing all of the people posting on LinkedIn and X and threads about their insane ways that you're not getting enough out of ChatGPT.

00:49:51 Speaker_02
And with these hacks, you could just become the ultimate ChatGPT power user. This has become sort of a meme among the hustle bros of America. Nick, as the head of product for ChatGPT, what are your top insane ChatGPT hacks?

00:50:08 Speaker_00
You can turn this into the most viral LinkedIn post ever. When we plan to, we're going to. Yes. You know, a few things. Really experiment with voice. It is a completely different way of using chat GPT. It's never existed before.

00:50:21 Speaker_00
It's like unlike anything else you will have tried in technology. Takes a little bit getting used to. The voice mode, specifically. Put your AirPods in, go on a walk, you know, try to use in the car. I really recommend trying this out. Second,

00:50:34 Speaker_00
Leverage memory. You can tell it to remember stuff. You don't have to wait for it to infer it about you. You can just tell it all the stuff that you want remembered. It can be your job. It can be your family situation.

00:50:44 Speaker_00
It can be your preferences on how it should respond to you. It can be, you know, your favorite food. Stuff that you want it to know, the effort will be worth it because memory is just going to keep getting better and it's already there in many cases.

00:50:56 Speaker_00
Third, if that's not enough, you can make a GPT. People actually do this for a variety of reasons, but in many cases, if you have this prompt you're reusing all the time, make a GPT for yourself. You don't even have to share it with others.

00:51:09 Speaker_00
It's super easy, takes seconds, and it allows you to customize everything that you want about your chat GPT. Four, try uploading stuff, uploading files. It's pretty phenomenal.

00:51:22 Speaker_00
If you've got a really long paper to read, if you've got a handbook you're trying to process, et cetera. A lot of people don't know this exists and it's really, really powerful. And then fifth, images in, images out.

00:51:35 Speaker_00
I find that there's text people and there's image people, and they almost don't overlap, where, you know, some people in my family think, you know, the text is the coolest thing about ChatGPT, and some think that the image generation is the coolest thing.

00:51:46 Speaker_00
And I wish there was a bit more cross-pollination between people, because there's a lot of cool stuff you're working on in Birthday Card. You're probably going to want to use both, make a little custom image and work on a cute little poem.

00:51:56 Speaker_00
So you can combine all these things in a way that I think most people don't understand. So those are a few. I don't think any of these are rocket science. I'm learning as much as you all are from observing what people do in the wild.

00:52:06 Speaker_00
So I always click on these posts. They get me every time. And sometimes I do learn something new.

00:52:11 Speaker_04
All right.

00:52:13 Speaker_02
Well, Nick, thanks so much for coming by. Thanks, Nick. Thanks for having me. Thanks. Bye.

00:52:22 Speaker_01
When we come back, we swoop into action to help a listener.

00:52:39 Speaker_01
Well, Kevin, when you and I had the idea for this show, we had one simple idea, which was to create parasocial relationships with hundreds of thousands of people and then monetize those on behalf of the New York Times Corporation.

00:52:49 Speaker_01
Is that what we decided? But somewhere along the way, we had a second idea, which is what if we could help people? And recently an email came into our servers here at the hard fork operation.

00:53:00 Speaker_01
And I thought this might actually be a chance to do some good.

00:53:03 Speaker_02
Yes.

00:53:03 Speaker_01
And it came to us from someone named Winston from Oakland, California nearby. And he writes, hi, Kevin and Casey, big fan of the show. I'm wondering which social network I should pay attention to.

00:53:14 Speaker_01
I want to be engaged in the cultural discourse, but not constantly fed attention-grabbing clickbait.

00:53:20 Speaker_01
What social networks are you guys on, and what do you recommend for someone who wants to have a thoughtful, engaging, and positive relationship with social media? Thanks. And I guess the first thing to say is, that's not possible. But we do think

00:53:35 Speaker_01
There are some interesting places on social media, places where you can learn some things, maybe have some good conversations. My expectation is they will probably stress you out and you will probably want to put them away for long periods of time.

00:53:49 Speaker_01
But if it's been a long time since you've rethought your relationship with social media, Kevin, it does feel like in the aftermath of this election, we're seeing a bit of realignment.

00:53:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, I'm getting a lot of texts and emails from people in my life basically asking the same question Winston is asking.

00:54:05 Speaker_02
I think people have this sense that the places they're spending their time right now, especially X, as it continues to change under Elon Musk, are maybe not the best places where they could be spending their time, but it's a big deal to invest time and energy into building a presence on a new app or a new social network.

00:54:24 Speaker_02
And so I think people are just a little bit confused and maybe we can offer them a path through the wilderness.

00:54:29 Speaker_03
I think we can.

00:54:30 Speaker_01
Look, you and I both really enjoy using social networks. Both you and I have written a lot about them over the years, and we have been taking a close look at everything that is happening. I want to correct you there.

00:54:41 Speaker_02
I don't I would not say that I enjoy using social networks. I say there are periods where I have good experiences and then there are periods where I do it out of a sense of dutiful obligation and self-preservation.

00:54:53 Speaker_01
And I actually do enjoy using them because I'm a fiend. Oh, good for you. So with that in mind, let us take a stroll through the current state of the art.

00:55:02 Speaker_01
And I think we should focus in particular on the text based social platforms, because this is where we're seeing the most change to the social media landscape.

00:55:11 Speaker_01
These are the platforms that people might be least familiar with, and that are still changing a lot day to day as they build up their user bases and figure out their cultural footing. So here's how we're going to do this.

00:55:23 Speaker_01
We're going to tell you a little bit about the network, who's on it, what the vibe is there, and some reasons why you might want to check it out.

00:55:31 Speaker_02
Yeah, we're not going to tell you which ones you should be on because that's a personal decision, but we'll give you sort of a lay of the land and you can make your own decisions.

00:55:38 Speaker_01
All right, well, let's dive right into it. And let's maybe start with threads, Kevin. So Adam Messary, who runs both Instagram and threads announced earlier this month, that threads had crossed 275 million monthly active users.

00:55:54 Speaker_01
That is up from 200 million in August. And Mark Zuckerberg says they're signing up a million people a day. So this is a place where frankly, I have been spending most of my time in social networking.

00:56:05 Speaker_01
And I would love to tell you a couple things about it. Tell us about threads. So let's talk about who is there. You will find stars like Simone Biles and Sarica Jessica Parker. Sarica Jessica Parker? Did I say Sarica Jessica Parker? You sure did.

00:56:24 Speaker_01
I like that so much. That's what I'm going to call her now.

00:56:27 Speaker_02
Sarica Jessica Parker?

00:56:28 Speaker_01
Yes. So you'll find stars like Simone Biles and Sarah Jessica Parker. You'll find a lot of folks who have big followings on Instagram who want to give more text-based social networking a shot to the sort of creators and influencers.

00:56:43 Speaker_01
You will find a lot of reporters there. It's kind of how I follow the tech news day to day and see what the conversations are about it. And you'll also see a huge international community from countries including Brazil, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

00:56:56 Speaker_01
But that's who's on threads.

00:56:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, and what would you say the vibe of Threads is for someone who has not spent a lot of time there?

00:57:04 Speaker_01
So I think it is candidly still trying to find its vibe.

00:57:09 Speaker_01
A friend of the podcast, Max Reed, has described it as the gas leak social network, which is sort of referring to the fact that if there is a gas leak in your house, you might sort of start hallucinating or behaving strangely.

00:57:22 Speaker_01
And this comes from the fact that some people, when they log onto threads, just find themselves confronted with a lot of people who are just telling what seem to be pretty lengthy, random stories about their lives, having various problems.

00:57:36 Speaker_01
So it's essentially not clear what people are supposed to be doing there.

00:57:42 Speaker_01
I find reporters sharing articles and discussing current events, but many reporters will tell you that the stories that they share there have their reach throttled because the thread's recommendation algorithms consider them too political and restrict their reach.

00:57:59 Speaker_01
So it's kind of a melange of things, but I will say that if you are somebody who just wants to use something that is a lot like Twitter to get your tech news, I do find the threads Threads works very well for me.

00:58:12 Speaker_02
I would describe Threads as a great social network for you if you want to learn who won the election 17 hours later.

00:58:21 Speaker_02
It is so much like what Twitter used to be in terms of the features and the short length of the messages and sort of the general appearance of the platform.

00:58:30 Speaker_02
But it is chosen intentionally, and Meta has chosen intentionally to de-emphasize news, especially breaking news on the platform. And so as a result, you just see a lot of times things that are old, that are stale.

00:58:41 Speaker_02
It's sort of missing the sort of beating heart of current events that used to be at the core of what old Twitter was.

00:58:48 Speaker_01
Yeah, particularly if you are using threads on your phone, it defaults you to this for you page, which you can think of as a kind of tick tock for text, the threads algorithm goes out, it tries to pick posts, it thinks you might be interested in.

00:58:59 Speaker_01
And as you just mentioned, Kevin, it is not always selecting for the most recent things. And so yes, one of the main criticisms of threads over the past year has been the stuff here feels really old.

00:59:09 Speaker_01
I will say if that's a problem for you, try visiting it on the desktop, you can set up different columns for threads, including just a feed of the people you're following. And that feed will

00:59:18 Speaker_01
update in real time showing you all of the latest things that people have posted. So that is the primary way that I use threads. And that's the way that I get around the recency problem.

00:59:26 Speaker_02
Yeah. And I am less optimistic about threads because I think that the company that is running threads meta is just not at all aware of what

00:59:36 Speaker_02
actually made the old Twitter so good, which was that it did have this kind of beating heart of being able to figure out what was happening in the world before it appeared anywhere else. And news is not something that they have emphasized.

00:59:48 Speaker_02
In fact, it's something that they've sort of walked away from. They don't want politics on there, whatever that means.

00:59:53 Speaker_02
And I think that that is a fatal flaw for any app that is attempting to educate people and show them what is happening in the world around them.

01:00:00 Speaker_01
All right, well, for an app that has a fatal flaw, it seems interesting that 275 million people are using it every month.

01:00:05 Speaker_02
Okay, how many of those people just clicked on something by accident while scrolling Instagram?

01:00:09 Speaker_01
That's what I want to know. Well, if they were on your profile, they definitely clicked on it by accident. Let's talk about Blue Sky. So, Blue Sky is another decentralized social network. We have had the CEO of Blue Sky, Jay Graber, on the show.

01:00:22 Speaker_01
And Blue Sky has had a real moment after the election. It confirmed that it gained more than 1 million new users in the past week, and now has 15 million users globally. So, who's there?

01:00:34 Speaker_01
I would say you could find leftists, resistance libs, artists, sex workers, journalists, and I'll say it, some of the most annoying people who ever had Twitter accounts.

01:00:44 Speaker_01
You know those people who, like, no matter what Trump had done, they would immediately have, like, a 70-part thread about it on Twitter? Yes. All those people have Blue Sky accounts now.

01:00:53 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, I have not spent that much time on Blue Sky since setting up an account there. I think I'm going to start again.

01:00:59 Speaker_02
But, you know, one problem for any social network is you get there, you set up an account and it's like, OK, well, who do I follow and how do I make sure that I'm following all the right people?

01:01:08 Speaker_02
And Blue Sky has this new thing, starter packs, which is basically like you can have a group of people that are all sort of connected thematically. Maybe you have a politician starter pack or a tech journalist starter pack or an artist starter pack.

01:01:20 Speaker_02
And those are sort of a bunch of accounts that you can just follow all at once. by clicking one button. Yeah, it makes it easier to set up your network.

01:01:26 Speaker_01
So what's the vibe? I would say if you want to learn about current events entirely through people criticizing how the New York Times covered them, Blue Sky can be a really good way to do that.

01:01:37 Speaker_02
This is really a theme of a lot of the social networks today.

01:01:40 Speaker_01
I would say the vibe is extremely horny art and not safe for work content. The furries are having a big moment over on Blue Sky. Are they? Yeah, and shitposting in general is just kind of a core value of the Blue Sky community.

01:01:55 Speaker_03
Yeah.

01:01:56 Speaker_01
Do you know I've been canceled on Blue Sky twice? For what? Once I criticized liberals for spreading misinformation about JD Vance by saying he'd borked a couch. And two, I had a take about Elon Musk and Brazil that was not received well in Brazil. Wow.

01:02:11 Speaker_01
Now the advantage of that was that most of the insults that came to me were in Portuguese, which is a language I don't understand. But let's just say I understood enough to know that I'm not welcome in certain parts of Rio de Janeiro.

01:02:21 Speaker_01
Yeah, some other interesting things about Blue Sky. It's also built on a decentralized protocol, but it is a different protocol than Threads and Mastodon. Theirs is called AT.

01:02:31 Speaker_01
And I have to say, so far, it seems like it is enabling a lot more creativity than ActivityPub recently. You mentioned the starter packs, which are cool. It also has a way for you to bring in your own recommendation algorithm.

01:02:43 Speaker_01
So if you don't like the kind of like the default feed, you can bring in your own.

01:02:48 Speaker_02
What does that mean? Like what's an algorithm that I could bring in on Blue Sky?

01:02:51 Speaker_01
You could say, I want you to show me more content about science, and the algorithm will work to find you more content in that vein.

01:02:59 Speaker_01
So, you know, like on threads, you're limited to the feed of people you follow and the feed of whatever threads, things you might want to look at.

01:03:05 Speaker_01
On BlueSky, you can say, I want a feed of just all the most popular BlueSky posts from over the past day. or I wanna feed of posts that have been popular with the people I follow on BlueSky. And you can get much more sort of granular and weird.

01:03:19 Speaker_01
And so of all of these networks, BlueSky is the most customizable. Now that also means that it kind of has the steepest learning curve. You don't need to do any of that stuff to use BlueSky, but I would argue that to get the best experience you do.

01:03:33 Speaker_01
But it speaks to the creativity that is possible because the way they have built their network. And I think it is super cool.

01:03:39 Speaker_02
And my understanding is that Blue Sky, which had this sort of invitation system early in its life, is now open to anyone. You can just go create an account, right? You don't have to get an invite from someone? Yes, absolutely.

01:03:49 Speaker_01
And something that the reporters are loving about it in particular is that unlike X and Threads, there is just truly no restriction on sharing news. If you're a reporter and you're in a story and it's about politics and you post it,

01:04:05 Speaker_01
No one at Blue Sky is going to try to reduce the reach of that post or make it take longer for the web page to load like Elon Musk does.

01:04:12 Speaker_02
Yeah, it seems like the only sort of major text-based social network that does not actively hate the blue link.

01:04:18 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:04:18 Speaker_02
And it's trying to like remove that from the server.

01:04:20 Speaker_01
Yeah, and of course, that is a core way that people use Twitter, was to see what was happening in the news, and Blue Sky is quite happy to let that happen. Threads has been much more skeptical of that.

01:04:31 Speaker_01
So that is a core difference between these two, and if really all you are looking for, Winston, is what network should I use to replace Twitter?

01:04:39 Speaker_01
This is, I think, the question you have to ask yourself, is do I want a fire hose of news, or do I want something that is going to be much more cautious about what news it shows me? So, who should check out Blue Sky?

01:04:51 Speaker_01
Well, I would say, if you hate capitalism, you're going to love Blue Sky. Comes up a lot over there. If you love the news, you're going to love Blue Sky.

01:04:58 Speaker_01
If you are a sort of protocol nerd who just likes to build stuff, or if you're horny, I think you could have a great experience browsing the Blue Sky app, Kevin.

01:05:08 Speaker_02
Well, I don't know any horny socialists, but if I do meet some, I'll direct them over there.

01:05:14 Speaker_01
Let's move on and talk briefly about Mastodon.

01:05:17 Speaker_01
Mastodon is a smaller network, but in a way kicked off this current realignment that we're seeing because while it was created several years ago, it has really ramped up after Twitter collapsed and was replaced with X. It had three and a half million users in November 2022, and it has almost nine million this month.

01:05:40 Speaker_01
So who is there? I would say IT administrators, college professors who study arcane subjects, and bots. Those are sort of three of the big categories I've seen. Kevin, how about you?

01:05:52 Speaker_02
I haven't spent much time on Mastodon, but in the times that I have gone over there, it's been pretty clear. This is a network for people who love being yelled at by Linux administrators.

01:06:01 Speaker_01
Yes. If you asked me to describe the vibe of Mastodon, I would say, imagine a place where every reply starts with, actually, And that's kind of Mastodon in a nutshell.

01:06:11 Speaker_01
So I would check out Mastodon if you want to sort of host your own federated server and send pedantic replies to well-meaning people who were just trying to share an opinion about something.

01:06:23 Speaker_02
I should say, I want to defend these social networks from some of the slander being perpetrated against them on this podcast. I think all of these networks have pockets of good in them, right?

01:06:35 Speaker_02
It is possible to tweak your feed, to tweak your following list, to really spend the time setting yourself up on these networks so that you're seeing more of what you want and less of what you don't want. But that is true of any social network.

01:06:46 Speaker_01
You're saying that my experience is not representative of all other people's experience?

01:06:49 Speaker_02
That is what I'm saying.

01:06:50 Speaker_01
That's highly offensive to me. Now, let's talk about the one other text-based network that some people might be considering, Kevin, and that is, of course, X, formerly Twitter. Yes. Still the biggest, by the way. Well, there are a few folks.

01:07:03 Speaker_01
For example, Elon Musk, people who love Elon Musk, people who worship Elon Musk, and people who work for Elon Musk or hope to work for Elon Musk someday. And in addition to that, there are some reporters. There's a lot more happening on X than this.

01:07:18 Speaker_02
What else is happening? So for example, all of AI Twitter or AIX is still there. It's still a very robust and popular sub-community.

01:07:28 Speaker_02
There are also lots of other groups of hobbyists and people working in specialized fields who are on X. So I know that you are grinding an X here, and that's fine.

01:07:38 Speaker_01
I'm grinding an X here.

01:07:40 Speaker_02
But I also want to say, like, one of the narratives that a lot of people I think have been wishfully hoping would come true is that X is a dying ghost town. And I think we have seen just how untrue that is. It may be changing, it may be morphing.

01:07:57 Speaker_02
You certainly see more right-wing political content on there than you would have in the old days of Twitter.

01:08:03 Speaker_02
But I think this sort of wishful thinking among especially many liberals that X is dying off or would no longer be relevant very soon, we have just not seen a lot of evidence for that.

01:08:13 Speaker_01
Well, I think it is dying. I don't think it's a ghost town yet, but I think it is well on its way. So what is the vibe on X these days? I would say it's kind of gloating about the election results.

01:08:25 Speaker_01
So if you want to read a bunch of posts by people who are excited about everything that is about to happen in America, this is a great time to check out X.

01:08:36 Speaker_02
We get it.

01:08:36 Speaker_03
All right.

01:08:37 Speaker_02
Oh, well, no, I have I have one more question for you, Casey, which is like there's been a lot of speculation about what X will become during the Trump administration, whether it becomes the sort of unofficial media arm of the Trump government, whether it draws back toward the center now that Elon Musk has accomplished his goal of getting Donald Trump elected.

01:08:55 Speaker_02
Like, what do you think the future of X looks like under the Trump administration?

01:08:59 Speaker_01
You know, I read a great post that sort of predicted, made a prediction about this on Blue Sky today, Kevin, and it reads like this. This is from Lauren at rotatingsandwiches.com.

01:09:10 Speaker_01
Another cool thing about Blue Sky, you can bring your own custom domain into it. So anyway, Lauren says, one day you're going to see Elon posting, we just cut $200 million going to bull weevil outbreak prevention, two cry laugh emojis.

01:09:24 Speaker_01
And then a couple months later, the entire Midwest will be decimated by the first mass bull weevil outbreak since 1884.

01:09:29 Speaker_01
So that's what I think you can expect from X. There's going to be a lot of pronouncements from Elon about how he and his cronies are reshaping the federal government. I think it's going to feel like state media.

01:09:40 Speaker_01
It's going to be a sort of 24-7 Trump rally. And yeah, that's kind of what I expect. What do you think?

01:09:48 Speaker_02
I think that's certainly possible, but I do wonder if liberals, if people who are opposed to Elon Musk have made a mistake by migrating off of X because some of the reason that you might be seeing more right-wing content on X

01:10:03 Speaker_02
is because the knobs are being tuned in such a way that promotes that content artificially. But some of it is just that a lot of people who are creating other types of content have left the platform.

01:10:12 Speaker_02
And so now if you are a person who forms your view of the world or your view of politics or your view of current events by seeing what's going on in X, you might get an artificially sort of right wing seeming view because that is sort of the user base that is most active there.

01:10:28 Speaker_02
And I'm starting to wonder if maybe it was a mistake strategically for Democrats to sort of stop investing in that platform and start going elsewhere.

01:10:36 Speaker_01
What do you think? I think that that is a total trap. I think, you know, if you think that the election's outcome would have been different if liberals had just stayed and fought on Twitter, I truly do not believe that is the case.

01:10:46 Speaker_01
I think that so much of the power that X continues to have is the folks who are telling themselves, oh, no, I am there. I am fighting the good fight.

01:10:54 Speaker_01
But every day you look around and you have fewer and fewer allies around you and you realize the people that you are shouting at, you are not actually persuading them.

01:11:01 Speaker_01
What you are is you're providing a fig leaf that lets other people justify staying there because they're like, well, no, you know, there's still like a few of these other accounts.

01:11:09 Speaker_01
But in reality, this thing has just become a one way partisan broadcast service.

01:11:14 Speaker_02
Well, I think we've gotten a little far away from the prompt here, which was about what social networks people should be on. But do you think there's anyone who should be on X, Casey? Yeah, Trump voters. No liberals? No. No journalists? No.

01:11:28 Speaker_02
No policy makers? No. What about people who just have a sort of an interest in knowing what the people with Donald Trump's ear are thinking and saying?

01:11:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, that's actually why I still have an account, just to log in and see. If you wanna see what other people are saying, that's fine. I don't know what your expected value would be from participating in Twitter at this moment in 2024. Okay.

01:11:49 Speaker_01
So, Winston, we hope that helped you think through. No, that absolutely did not help Winston. Why was that not helpful?

01:11:55 Speaker_02
We just gave Winston a laundry list of the pros and cons and jokes about various social media apps, but I wanna actually try in earnest to answer the question that we received from our dear listener here, which is like,

01:12:07 Speaker_02
Without knowing more about Winston and what he uses social media for and is trying to get out of a social media experience, it is hard to say with any precision which social network or social networks Winston should be using.

01:12:22 Speaker_02
Maybe you are just an average consumer of social media. Maybe you want to see some jokes. Maybe you want to learn a little bit more about a topic you're interested in. Maybe you want to hear what people in your profession are doing.

01:12:34 Speaker_02
Maybe you just want to catch up on a little bit of news. So the all-purpose social media use case What in today, in 2024, what is the place, the social network, the app that gives people the best chance of getting all of that in one place?

01:12:50 Speaker_01
Well, here's the unsatisfying answer. I don't know that you can consistently find all of that in one place. I think the good stuff is scattered across every single network that we just talked about.

01:13:01 Speaker_01
And if you want to find all of the good stuff, you're gonna have to spend a lot of time browsing. If somebody came to me and they said, I have a little bit of time for social media, where should I spend it?

01:13:12 Speaker_01
I think the answer is that most people, if you just sort of look at like how people are voting with their feet, they spend most of their time on TikTok and Instagram. Okay, so that would actually be my default suggestion.

01:13:21 Speaker_01
Most people don't want to post. Most people don't want to fight with strangers in the comments.

01:13:25 Speaker_01
Most people just want a little bit of entertainment while they are, you know, in at the dentist's office waiting for the dentist to, you know, come get them. So that's sort of what I would

01:13:34 Speaker_01
But I think the hard fork listener, Kevin, is a little bit more sophisticated and a little bit more refined. I think they are very interested in the future.

01:13:41 Speaker_01
They want to see the debates that people are having about AI, about what stories are in the news right now. What is the conversation around those stories right now?

01:13:49 Speaker_01
And if you are one of those kinds of people, I would say, get on threads, get on Blue Sky, and see which one you like better. And you will probably wind up having a pretty decent experience either way.

01:13:59 Speaker_02
Yeah, I just I'm hungry for like something that just right now I feel like I spend about 10% of my day just like shuttling between various apps and the like the thing that I actually want is the is the one app to unite them all right the thing that will sort of use AI or something to sort of pick out the best 5% of posts from threads from blue sky from X from Instagram and show them all to me on one beautiful interface and how likely Casey would you say it is that something like that will be developed?

01:14:29 Speaker_01
Well, this actually is one of the cool things about these decentralized, federated networks, is that you can download a Mastodon client and use it to browse threads.

01:14:40 Speaker_01
At the moment, the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon is based on is not compatible with the AT protocol that BlueSkate runs on, but people are talking about potentially building a bridge that would let those two protocols speak together.

01:14:55 Speaker_01
And I think whatever else you think about, you know, this state of social media, to me, this remains a very exciting thing, where in the future, it will not be one giant monolithic company in control of a social network.

01:15:08 Speaker_01
It looks like it very well may be different social networks talking to each other over protocols. And if and when that comes to pass, you will be able to read Threads and Blue Sky in the same place. And that could actually be pretty cool. Yes. Yeah.

01:15:21 Speaker_01
So Winston, we hope that helped, and if it didn't, well, it was free advice. You get what you paid for. You get what you paid for.

01:15:59 Speaker_03
Before we go, we have a special request.

01:16:02 Speaker_02
We want to learn more about you, our listeners. What you like, what you don't like. It will help us make a better show. But don't just start talking to the radio right now.

01:16:13 Speaker_01
We won't hear it that way.

01:16:15 Speaker_02
If you can, we would really appreciate if you filled out a quick survey. You can find the survey at nytimes.com slash hardfork survey. Your answers will not be published in any way.

01:16:28 Speaker_02
They will just sort of help us make the best show we possibly can and understand more about who listens to this show in the first place.

01:16:35 Speaker_01
We wanna know your most private desires. And will we keep it to ourselves? I don't know.

01:16:40 Speaker_02
Okay, send your most private desires to Casey's email directly. But if you want to fill out our survey, again, you can find the survey at nytimes.com slash hardforksurvey. We'll also drop the link in show notes.

01:16:56 Speaker_02
Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Diane Wong, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell.

01:17:12 Speaker_02
Our audience editor is Nel Galogli. Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Hui-Wing Tam, Dalia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda.

01:17:28 Speaker_02
As always, you can email us at heartforkatnytimes.com. Send us your best chat GPT hacks.