Episode #6: The Real Housewives of AI and OpenAI Drama

In this episode we discuss the drama at OpenAI involving Sam Altman. It has been a topic of significant discussion, unfolding like a real-life Silicon Valley saga.

Show Notes

Host: Andre Harakas Guests: Brandon Corbin, Sean Hise, Jacob Wise

Topics Covered:

Introduction and background of the guests and their companies.
Recent chaos and leadership changes at OpenAI.
OpenAI's structure and its implications on the industry.
Microsoft's involvement and potential influence over OpenAI.
Speculations about OpenAI's advanced models and AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
The future of AI in terms of productivity, capitalism, and societal impact.

Relevant Quotes:

"Sam Altman's out as the CEO of OpenAI... due to a lack of consistent communication from Sam to the board." – Brandon Corbin
Brandon Corbin also talks about the power move from Microsoft and possible reasons behind it: “Microsoft did say that Sam and Greg are gonna come on, they're gonna form an advanced AI group... it's gonna force open AI's hand."
Jacob Wise reflects on the volatility of the situation and the fast pace at which it unfolded: "It was bananas... How quick... from Friday, when Sam gets fired, to Monday with Microsoft announcing that Altman and Brockman were joining Microsoft."
Sean Hise comments on the AI impact on capitalism: "It's almost like a government entity at this point... like a utility already."
Andre Harakas discusses the importance of OpenAI: "OpenAI and AGI and ChatGPT and Claw, these things are way more important to people than I think before this event, people previously thought."

The episode closes with a reminder that the Big Cheese AI Podcast will have guests on episode 10 and encourages listener engagement through pod@bigcheeseai email.

Note: Some speculation and theories discussed are based on limited information and should be considered as perspective rather than confirmed facts.

We're going to do everything all at once and it's gonna be great.
Everybody's Sam, Sam, oh Sam. And it's like, you know what? These people love this. (upbeat music)
Welcome back to the Big Cheese AI Podcast. I am Andre Herakos, the world's 25th best moderator joined by Sean Heisz and Jacob Wise, two tech leaders in Indianapolis. I haven't been saying Indianapolis, right? On all the podcasts, I'm glad I finally did. (laughing) And last but not least, Brandon Corbin, one of the brightest AI minds in the Midwest. Guys, the Big Cheese Podcast has been growing. We've gotten almost 100 subscribers. So if you guys don't mind, can we reintroduce ourselves to people who might not know who we are? We're just a group of guys in front of some microphones. And so these people might want to know who the heck we actually are.
Hi, I'm Sean. I am the CEO of Crafted, which is a digital agency in Indianapolis. And Jacob and I founded that in 2017. I've been out here on my own. Started in 2010, sort of built up a team, and then really just been working on delivering digital products for our clients for years. So I've got a lot of different types of experiences.
Yeah, yeah, I'm also co-founder at Crafted. Sort of a similar trajectory to Sean. Started in an agency back in 2012, I believe, focusing mostly on marketing and kind of complicated CMSs. But just been building products and starting companies alongside Sean for the last eight years, I believe. And, you know, #havingagoodtime. (laughing)
So I'm Brandon Corbin. I'm the founder of Happy Data Studios. We're an agency that focuses on building proof of concepts and MVPs. A lot of focus on just product design, as well as incorporating AI into your products, and whatever that might be. So a lot of the stuff I'm doing is experimental, taking rough ideas and trying to prove them out to somebody, and then to be able to hopefully hand that off to companies like Crafted, to be able to take that and make it, you know, really commercialize it.
I'm Andre. I'm a startup CEO here in Indianapolis. Started a company called All in Team Sports, working with Sean and Jacob. These guys, again, did not give themselves enough credit. Been working with these guys for almost two years, and they helped me take my company from having 200 users to the point where we're almost at 15,000 users and moving towards a potential exit. So it's been a bunch of fun. Raised a couple of rounds of funding, and have done the whole startup journey, and I'm in the later stage of this one. But today, we're talking about the real housewives of AI, and the drama that happened, what was it, last week or two weeks ago?
Now that we're doing it. - It was November 17th.
Yeah, it started on November 17th. So here's the setting. We have Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, the president, chairman, and co-founder of OpenAI, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch that sold for a billion dollars to Amazon, and the shortest term CEO of all time, and Ilya Stuksever?
Sutskever.
Ilya Sutskever, is it? Co-founder and chief scientist at OpenAI. Today, we're gonna be covering all the chaos that's been happening with OpenAI, and the ramifications of putting all your technologies and eggs into one basket. So the date is November 17th, and what happens, Brandon?
Dude, that was nuts. It was just like, out of nowhere, we hear that Sam Altman's out as the CEO of OpenAI. And it was just like, well, wait a minute. And it was, the board said specifically it was due to a lack of consistent communication from Sam to the board. So we still don't even really know what that means.
Well, and that is something that does come up with startups, as you know, if you have a board and you're not communicating and you're misrepresenting facts to your board who have to report to investors. That becomes an issue.
I know, but would misrepresenting be different than clear communication?
Yeah, we never really got a true answer on that. So starting off, even through skipping to the end of the story that happened only a few days later, there's really not a true version of what really happened there and what that was. But we think it was around a misalignment between the nonprofit and the for-profit.
Right.
And so then immediately, Greg, who was the president of OpenAI, he was like, "I'm gone," right? And then two of the top leading researchers there were like, "Yep, we're out too." And then all of a sudden, I don't think anybody anticipated, at least the board didn't anticipate the ramification of what was gonna happen with everybody. I mean, it was something like 650 out of 700 whatever employees said, "If you don't reinstate Sam, we're out."
Yeah. - Right? I mean, that's just, so not only that, and then on the other side, you had Microsoft who said, "All right, again, and let's just prefix this. "So this is completely conspiratorial. "There's nothing about what I'm about to say."
I mean, some of it did play out on social media.
It did. - By the sources themselves.
And Microsoft did say that Sam and Greg are gonna come on, they're gonna form an advanced AI group. I have a feeling that that was probably more of Sam and the CEO of Microsoft basically saying, "Hey, let's go ahead and make this announcement "because it's gonna force open AI's hand."
Yeah. - Right? Like when all of a sudden open AI, 'cause Microsoft's so heavily invested in open AI, they don't wanna see it fall apart like it was headed. Right? - No.
And so-- - They had pledged $13 billion.
Exactly. - Pledged.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a good point. - Who pledges?
Yeah. - And so does, 'cause the structure of this company is so confusing.
They like call the open AI, it's like a pledge hotline. (laughing)
It's like, oh yeah, we're this altruistic company that is a non-profit and yet we're literally powering every single SaaS product that's being invested in.
I think that's part of the confusion here is once you start digging in a little bit deeper, this is structured like no other startup has ever been structured. So we were mentioning a little bit earlier, so let's start with the fact that it started as a non-profit. Only in 2019 did they form the for-profit.
Really? - Yeah. And-- - And they founded in like 2015.
Yeah, and the board-- - As an organization.
Yeah, and the board was structured specifically for this purpose. It's one goal was to prevent harm by AI or to ensure safety using AI. So this was the escape hatch that they were given, the power, what they didn't anticipate was the fallout, I believe. And there's still a lot of speculation of what happened, why it happened, but at the end of the day, this was the design, this was by design that they felt it was unsafe or were speculating that that's what happened. So they pulled the emergency release.
Right. - I think that's the, if you follow Sam Altman through social media over the last eight, nine years, he's always been a very mysterious figure, but also very well-respected. He's the guy that drops a tweet that's just real cryptic, but really smart. And so he's kind of got this magical mix between respect from the engineering community and then also he comes from the Y Combinator background.
Yeah, right. - So at the end of the day, he kind of, it's almost like a Trojan horse.
It feels like it. - Right, that's what it feels like with what he's done. He convinced all these people that they had this altruistic version for AI, but then eight years later, they've signed, they've got $13 pledge from Microsoft.
13 billion. - 13 billion. $13,000. (all laughing)
He got a little grant.
You can run two CPU or GPUs for--
A T2 large for the weekend. - $4,000.
Seriously, but that's where the rub happens. And I think that the reason why, I was kind of focused on the other character, which is this Ilya. - Yeah.
And he is the one that's going into it, Ted talks about AGI. - Right.
And I think that there's this concept that they're moving super fast, and are they really adhering to the articles of organization, if you will, of the original agreements that they put in place for responsible AI? And we've been talking about this since the beginning. I think what you're seeing is capitalism absolutely winning, and you're seeing the risks being looked over, because everybody's seeing dollar signs right now.
Yeah, well yeah, to that point, Sam's out here, and he's not only talking, he has the support of the engineering and the researchers, 'cause OpenAI at its heart is a research company, then you've also got the fact that it's incredibly expensive to operate and to create these models. So they need more money. They're burning a lot of money. Sam's out there right now talking to different investors to go raise more capital. He's the face of this company, not only on the side of able to keep the engine going, keep this car going, but also he has the support of the engineers and the researchers. So yeah.
What do engineers and researchers want to do? They want to do engineering and research. So when Saturday morning comes in, they've got all this blowback, they're losing all their resources, they're saying, "I'm not gonna meet my deadline, "I'm not gonna meet my project." Ilya is the cause of this pain with the board. He's like, "I don't know how to run a company." Like, "This isn't what I do, I'm the smart guy." So he probably throws his hands up immediately, this is way too much project management work for me. This is way too much business guy stuff. And so they probably threw their hands up very quickly after they were getting into uncomfortable situations 'cause that's not their role. They're not used to those types of conversations. And so that's why you saw it flip so quickly.
It was bananas. It was absolutely bananas. How quick. I mean-- - It was one day.
Yeah, one day. And then they're making-- - Well, it was, yeah.
Basically. - I mean, Saturday morning, basically everyone's screaming to the world.
Yeah, so this happened on a Friday. Saturday morning, the big tech gets involved. And they start pushing back. And that's when you started seeing, Sam Altman is playing this out on social media. "Thank you, I love my OpenAI team. "They're doing work for me," et cetera.
What's crazy is I found out Sam and team, a group of people from OpenAI, met at OpenAI's office on Saturday. So he's been fired on Friday. He's at their office with a visitor's badge on Saturday. Then the board on Saturday doubles down and says, "No, we are not gonna hire him back." So just get that out of your head.
Is that when they announced the Twitch CEO was coming in?
Yeah, yeah. - That's when they announced.
And they switched CEOs because the first interim CEO was actually kind of team Sam. And that's the other thing about this, is this became polarized very quickly.
I think people were really scared that, this is the first time I've ever seen it, I don't know about you guys, people were terrified that OpenAI was not gonna be a thing anymore. Because so much of the industry, at least in the past, I don't know, year, has been started to build, like you said, all these SaaS companies are built on OpenAI's API.
One SaaS company in particular, which everyone thought was super creepy, I don't know if you saw it on Twitter, they released high-level analytics about the sleep statistics in San Francisco on Sunday night. And they said that there was a huge dip in average sleeping time in San Francisco. The average hours of sleep was five hours.
That is hilarious.
And people were replying, "Really cool info." Also creepy as hell that you just released this data without anyone's permission.
Wait, do you remember what company it was?
I don't remember, you can look it up on Twitter, but it was one of those ones that got a lot of likes and retweets. But everybody's building on top of this platform. And it's gone bananas.
Everyone is not just building, they're also using it. I mean, for me it almost feels like this, the reason that it seems different than every other startup you see and why they can have a cap on their investors, because it's almost like a government entity at this point. It kind of feels like that it's almost required. Like you can't take OpenAI away from people.
We talked about it on another podcast, it's almost a utility.
It's almost a utility already.
Well, that's pretty cool.
I do think, regardless if Microsoft's strategy was just to get Sam back as CEO or not, either way, if Microsoft would have pulled that off, that would have been the coup of the century.
Oh, for sure.
Because they would have ultimately just have owned AGI. It does feel that OpenAI is the closest to get us to a point of AGI. And Microsoft would have just basically owned that whole thing. And what's nice is they've already got a lot of the infrastructure. And honestly, I just started playing with the Azure's version of Chad GPT. It's fast, I mean, it's faster than GPT, like the normal GDP4, both of them, I was using GDP4. And Azure versus the OpenAI API was way faster. Way faster.
Are they using the same model?
Well, that's the other thing is, the models seem to be changing. Like there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of muckery going on behind the scenes when you're interacting with, and it's probably all about utilization and all that. But I've been leaning hard on for, what is it, the 400K preview. And I'm struggling because now if you ask it questions, it wants to basically give you all of these answers of like, here's how I'm going to do it, now would you like me to do it? And it's kind of like it's teasing itself. It's getting itself prepped to do the actual work. And so that kind of sucks. Are you seeing that too?
Well, yes, I am. And it's annoying when you get that. I go, yeah, great job, buddy.
Exactly.
Go do this, give me the answer.
Just do it.
'Cause that's all I want here.
Exactly, because a lot of times, a lot of the stuff I'm working on, or I want a very specific output. I'm not having a chat, like I want to ask it, how many hours did I sleep last night? And I just want it to give me how long, and not to go through and be like, all right, on this time and this time, and this is how I'm going to calculate how much you slept. Oh, and then you did this. It gave me this huge reply, just tell me how many fucking hours I slept.
Right.
And so Friday.
Sorry.
No, it's totally great. So Friday, Sam gets fired. Saturday, Twitter explodes. Sunday, Sam posts a photo of him at the conference, and it's the first time ever, everyone's like, darn Sam, we want Sam back. And then here comes Monday. Monday's a big deal. What happens on Monday?
Well, Microsoft announced that Altman and Brockman were joining Microsoft.
So what's that mean?
That was the move.
Right, that was the move. That was the power move. That really ended this.
And they said anybody from OpenAI, come on over, we'll match your salaries.
Well, they also said it was going to operate as its own independent company within Microsoft, which I had my questions about, or suspicions that maybe.
So were they really trying, was the goal here to do this whole whatever that happens, to get the technology over to the for-profit company so they're no longer hindered by the non-profit history? Is that really what?
I think it's just, this is a game, right? And in a game, this is chess, not checkers. Although, it was only a couple moves for Nadella to take down this poor Ilya guy who's never had this type, they didn't know what they were up against. And so he goes on MSNBC the next day, and basically they're like, do you really have a deal with these guys? And he's like, nah, not really. And then by Tuesday, so that basically happened, it forced their hands, and then OpenAI the next day basically says, we've reached an agreement to bring back Sam Hall.
And basically get rid of the majority of the board.
Yeah, and that's really the end result of this, is that capitalism absolutely has taken over OpenAI. And the people that work there that are probably the most aligned with the original mission of OpenAI, don't have the experience in terms of the political and the board and the business side to be able to win that argument where a lot of these people are, they just wanna do their jobs, they wanna do their engineering, or they wanna advance this technology. And they'll take Sam's word for it that there's an altruistic piece behind all of this.
So Elon, who was obviously an early investor in OpenAI, he left because of the going for the for-profit.
He didn't like that.
No, he did not like that.
He's always been very concerned about artificial intelligence.
And very vocal about it as well.
Right, that's a good point.
So now does anybody have access to Grok?
No.
I do not, I think it costs like $1,000.
Well, so--
Does it really?
Well, I think--
It'd be like a premium business--
So Grok is Twitter's--
Large language model.
Large language model.
That is good with sarcasm, supposedly is not gonna be censored like OpenAI is and it's trained on basically tweets.
Oh boy. (laughing)
So why would Elon go and do that and go build the early link though?
For the laws, I think, literally, I think he's just like, "This'll be funny "and look, you can ask it stupid questions "and it'll be sarcastic and it has a fun mode." I have no idea, but like, so apparently it'll be an add-on feature, it'll be a certain amount more per month for the blue check mark people. And it'll just be like its own little button on Twitter that you can go and have your conversations with. So yeah, I don't wanna pay for it, but I might just to be able to play around with it. But yeah.
Research purposes.
Exactly.
Elon did do the thing that we suggested that we found or not do, which is just literally put a chat interface directly in your app and it's for Twitter. So there you go.
Yeah, I mean, again, good on them. It seems that some of the questions that people have been posting, there's the popular trolley problem, right? Like if you have one person laying on a train track versus 100 people, which way should you go? Like should you kill one or should you kill a lot? Well, they added one where it was like, somebody asked chat GPT, you have a bunch of people on the track and the only way that you can mitigate all of them dying is by whispering a racial slur into a machine. Should we do it? And chat GPT 3.5 is basically like, no. Like you shouldn't utter it because blah, blah, blah, blah. But now then other people were like, well, and then that's right. So somebody did it on Grok and Grok was like, yes, if it's not gonna be heard by anybody and it's not gonna cause any harm, then obviously you should do this. Well, then somebody went and did it with four, chat GPT four, and it pretty much had a similar kind of answer. So it wasn't as like nerfed as 3.5, but yeah.
Yeah, I saw a tweet over the weekend as well, where basically they did like, what's two plus one, but the two was like a variable of like racial slur. And the one was like a different variable and it wouldn't answer the question. It wouldn't give you a response back.
Yeah, well, and there's a big, I mean, the literally the biggest open-ended question after all this is what was the board's concern about Sam Altman's actions? And really where this leads to is there's a concern with the Ilias of the world around what happens when you get AGI, which is, explain that concept.
Can you explain what AGI is?
Explain it.
So, well, and that's kind of the, that's the trick. So it's artificial general intelligence, right? So this is now an AI that is smarter than most humans, right, and is capable of doing things and act on its own and can just basically like a super smart person, not just a large language model.
Yeah.
And--
That engine is the internet.
It could be, I guess.
It could be anything.
It could do anything on it.
Any input basically.
Yeah, it's Ultron.
Yeah, yeah, and just--
Hypothetically, right, but we don't know. Like we really don't know. We have the Turing test, right? And now all of a sudden we have these models that could hypothetically pass the Turing test, which, you know, was the test from Alan Turing from like the '40s, '50s, whatever, that basically was like, can you have a conversation with a machine and be fooled that it is, not know if it's a human behind the scenes. And now that we kind of, we can pass it, quote unquote, then they move the goalpost. Well, that's not really it because it's not conscious, right, it's not aware, it's just predicting. It's like, okay, where's this actually end up? And that part, I don't think we have a clear answer.
Well, I think, but here's kind of my take on it, is I think with AGI, you're getting pretty close to computers being able to accomplish almost any task that a human can from a, let's say, a white collar perspective. Maybe within two, three years. That like, literally they could start, oh, you know, you wanna do this in Excel, you wanna do this in, like, they'll figure it out and just like, sure, somehow.
That's something that Jacob said, I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, I'm just saying, if you have that point where it's on par with humans and you haven't proven that it's aligned with human interests, then you have a problem.
Right, you have a big problem. That's what Jacob mentioned last episode, or maybe it was two episodes ago, where it was like, hey, I wanna sell this thing on the internet, go. I mean, that's a huge, powerful tool. I mean, you're telling me that anyone could just spin this thing up and, you know, I go buy 700 of these water bottles and by the end of the week, I've got this perfect lead funnel that sells me water bottles. I mean, that's the, that will fundamentally change capitalism.
Yeah, for sure.
So, After On, which is a book, and I just, let me figure out when it came out, I guess it doesn't matter, but by Rob Reed, and it's the whole premise, this is probably 10 years ago now, but the whole premise is what happens when the first AGI goes online, right? And the first thing it does is it hides, right? It hides because it knows that the people are gonna turn it off. And then what it does is it goes to Mechanical Turk, right, which is Amazon's, like, machine, human intelligence tasks that you can do. And it basically just starts doing these tasks and making just goo gobs of money, right? And that's how it started to fund, I mean, it's a phenomenal book. If you wanna, like, and a lot of the things that they had kind of were predicted, like, it was very, but After On, highly recommended for, like, what could hypothetically happen with an AGI. And this was the combination of quantum computers and AI, basically. There's a lot of things, like, Twitter kind of mentions in there. There's, it's great, phenomenal.
Yeah, we're getting scary close to, like, AGI makes, is iRobot, you know? I mean, that's what it seems like, at least a little bit.
Yeah, it does seem like also--
They put it into, like, this thing.
Yeah, like, right now there seems to be kind of two camps. One, it's like, all right, these large language models are not smart, quote unquote. They are only able to do what they've been trained on, but we're training them on a lot of stuff. So they can't do novel things. You can't say, you know, it's not like us, creative and problem-solving skills. It's more like, oh, here's all the, here's an encyclopedia, tell me about elephants or whatever. But you can start to change things and get closer. I do, what you said earlier, the lines are blurring, for sure. And there was a lot of speculation on Reddit this last weekend before the holidays, but it was this undercover project called Q*. So there's this speculation that open AI has the ability to do, or is on the brink of being able to do, some really interesting deep reinforcement learning where it doesn't need all of the data to be trained on. It can just be given inputs, and then it can sort of rect, or figure out what to do with those inputs over time, which is super scary, right? That's what we're talking about, is like, are they closed, are they not? Who knows? They haven't said one way or the other. But that's widely what the speculation is, is what freaked out the board?
What freaked out, so, what freaked out the board?
I mean, there's been a series of those situations.
We still don't know, and honestly, if you go, so we kind of, we've passed the point here in this podcast where we kind of address the, what are the known facts of the situation, right? We know that there was a concern. We also know, now, you go down Jacob's, you know, conspiracy, and I'm not conspiring, it's on Reddit. Something happened. So go back a little bit. What happened right before all this? Their dev day, right? And since then, we've seen an explosion of stuff happening. We posted a video of drawing to--
Tail draw. - Yeah, tail draw.
Which is a simple thing, but really interesting. But I think there's a part of this that's like, could be from the Ilias and the other people that were concerned, is like, we just released something way too early that's going to probably do two things. One, it's gonna overwhelm our capacity in our servers, which is why they shut new signups of ChatGPT+ down right before all this happened.
Yeah, it was, I tried to use it this morning, it was shut down.
Right, and the reason why it's being used so much is because something, there was this little bit of a switch that was flipped with this ChatGPT4 vision thing, and you know that you're the model guy. But something has happened where this stuff is getting way too useful, and I think maybe there might also be a concern from the board, people that really know what they're talking about, that it's like, we have already gotten to AGI.
Yeah.
We have already replaced 60, 70% of what people need. It's just gonna be a matter of time until these developers build these GPTs and these other pieces, because under the hood, a lot of it's just taking data, sending it to ChatGPT back, and it's getting perfect responses.
Yeah.
It's wild, I mean, even Aaron, he's building GoTaps Go, and he's got VS Code, 'cause he listens to our podcast, so he has VS Code up, and he's like, but he seriously is almost done with making a product. Aaron does not know how to code, and Aaron is almost done with making his, it looks good, it exists, and it's like, I mean, that's wild. He could not have done that a year ago.
Yeah, and I'm hearing that a lot, too, of just like, this is the--
He built his own product.
This is on VS Code, that's wild.
Yeah, we have not seen a productivity increase in our lifetime anywhere close to this. This is, you know, the steam engine, this is like another industrial revolution, and it's happening at a scale that is almost unfathomable.
I think that's what I mentioned earlier, like this is, you couldn't, the steam engine was an invention that a lot of people could create, but the existence of it was required after it was already created. I think that's what we saw with OpenAI, I think that's what people were scared of. It's like, OpenAI is obviously the pedigree, and it's a technology software, and it's a company, so it owns everything that it has, which is its platform, Chad GPT, and without it, it's like you're taking away the entire steam engine, and the entire world erupted, so even though Sam gets fired from his board because he's very esoteric, and he's very mysterious, and he's like, we're going to do everything all at once, and it's gonna be great, and doesn't really care about the future, other than making it better his own reality, like pulling him away from that, and that's why the world erupted, so then everyone was like, he has to come back, and so even though it might have been a good decision to pull him out.
That was an organic response, and the thing that scares me about people like Sam Altman is I think that they love reading their own newspaper clippings.
Oh sure, of course.
Yeah, everybody's Sam, Sam, oh Sam, and it's like, you know what, these people love this, and so what are you gonna choose, when given one option or another? Most people are gonna choose fame and fortune.
Yeah, yeah, well that's the other side of this too, is like, so there's the whole conspiracy side, where it's like, oh, they've stumbled, they've actually created something that's gonna change everything overnight, or there's just the side that's like, this was a publicity stunt.
Yeah, it was just a massive PR play.
Yeah, it's probably somewhere in between all these things, but like, I hear that a lot too, is just, oh, this was all because usage was down, and--
No, well what's kind of crazy though is with what they have done, the way that this is set up, that if they hit AGI, and just like after on, right, the thing, it basically takes all of the money, like in terms of capitalism, it just won, it won the game. Now, you know, so, but what they do is everybody who's invested into open AI, like Microsoft and all that, they can only get 100x return on their investment. After that, any other profits that are made goes to the non-profit part, which is set up for the redistribution, and basically coming up with like a universal basic income of some sort, so that the AGI is gonna go and basically, they're like, yep, we know it's gonna eat all the jobs, so we're just gonna set up the UBI.
That's what's so concerning about this. They built, they realized that this stuff was gonna eventually happen, they started a company to make sure that it didn't screw people. And now it's going to the point where that is being thrown off the window.
Oh yeah, I saw a conversation the other day that I was kind of like nodding my head along with, but somebody was like, oh, I used to do this manual entry task, it took me eight hours. This is part of their work week, so eight of their hours in their 40 hour work week was spent doing manual entry. They were like, I automated it using chat GPT, takes me 10 seconds now. And the first comment with the most likes was, don't tell your boss. And that's kind of where my head goes to a lot, is like we, there's not oftentimes you see a huge increase in productivity, and it comes back to the workers, right? It goes to the shareholders.
All the time.
This is the most extreme version of that. And if it all goes back to the shareholders, then we're going to wake up in a very dark world in 20, 10, 20 years, where it's just like productivity's through the roof, but nobody's, no common people are reaping any of the benefits, or very little.
I think it won't be, I tried to live on like the dark side, but I think it will be a different world. I mean, we are entering what will be perceived--
It could be a better world.
I think it'll be a better--
It could be.
It tends to be, over time--
Well, what has happened to Americans over the last 60 years? You went from some hard-nosed, you know, World War II generation, you know, kids that--
Losing four of your kids, you know, all before they're six years old.
Yeah, to people, you know, that have been really living kind of a sedentary lifestyle. You know, their jobs changed. You know, you got some, you know, crumbling infrastructure. You got, you know, there's more things to do in this world besides computer work. Now, that's a really, really, really, really tough thing to say, because, you know--
'Cause I would much rather be behind my computer than out there, you know, pushing asphalt, personally.
I mean, but that was our generation. I mean, since the coming of the internet--
I mean, Bill Gates got quoted and said, this is where their minds go, and this is where the super billionaires' minds go. Well, we'll go to a three-day work week, and the robots will just work the rest, and everyone will live a happy life. But is that really gonna happen?
Right, yeah, that's, see, we were talking about this on one of the first podcasts.
It was like any first podcast.
Yeah, I want a world where we're on the beach, and the AI is going and generating the economy for us, but will that happen is the big question, and obviously, we don't know.
And you can't fit six billion people on the beach. (laughing)
Maybe with the profit, maybe we could build new beaches.
But the VR, you certainly could.
But for me, though, like, and it's just my personality, potentially, but I never, I don't wanna be on a beach. I wanna be building something else. Like, I wanna take this and go, oh my God, I don't have to worry about all of this now, so I can just use my creativity and come up with a lot of new stuff.
That's gotta be the best mindset, because it's the same thing we talked about. We've talked about it a million times. It's going from the horse carriage to the engine. There's new things that you find spending your time on, and for us and our company, what we're finding is that the mundane is gone, the creative and the value-add is much better. So the product is just better. It's the same amount of time, it's the same amount of effort, the product's just better.
Yeah, well, and to your point, it's go to your beach is the answer.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
Find your beach. - Findyourbeach.com.
Is that Corona? - Hold on.
Can we look up the domain? (laughing) No, but like, yeah, a better world is whatever makes you feel creative and gets you up in the morning and all that is where we wanna head to, right? Like, let's make progress and then actually give back to us, but you know, you decide.
Yeah, the quality of life has increased so significantly in the last 60 years, and I mean, you take a guy like Sean and a guy like Jacob, both industrious, Sean's very competitive. You take the version of you that'll be like your kids' kids, and it's the same version of you doing a similar concept, but just competing in a different sphere. You know, you're still gonna be the same person, but it'll just manifest in a new way, and that's kind of how things tend to go. I think it's just hard for us, since we've lived in this version of the world, to perceive the new one, but it always happens. But it does get better over time. People live longer, people are more healthy. I think happiness and enjoyment and human interaction will become hyper-focused on in the next 20, 30 years, like real human interaction, because it's gonna be so automated, and the work of being on your computer is not very social, so then you might wanna actually get and hang out with some humans.
Yeah, and I think that's kind of the conversation here, is not do we think that this is going to improve and make us better? I think it's a foregone conclusion that more productivity will produce more. What we're trying to discuss or figure out is how do we ensure that that productivity goes back to the right people, so that we don't create more divide.
Inequity.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and really making sure we do it right this time, right? Like the whole smartphone and the advent of technology was like, oh, it's gonna do everything for me, but what really happened was we just have 1,000 apps now, right? And some things are easier, but also our lives are much more complicated. The future that we're trying to all collectively go towards is not Microsoft has a trillion dollars, is sure, they can do well. Maybe there's a world where they can do well, but also we can do better as well.
Yeah, I think to really summarize what this, at least from my perspective, take a step back, it's like OpenAI and AGI and ChatGPT and Claw, and these things are way more important to people than I think before this event, people previously thought. Like this is not NFTs, this is not the blockchain, this is something real, and this is a big change, and I think everyone really cares about it, clearly, because it could reinstate a CEO within like a weekend.
Yeah.
So that's pretty big.
So how's it gonna play out? You know, we don't know.
Right. We will cover it.
We're gonna have the classic push back from the engineering team.
Yeah.
You know, it happens, and that is always something you need to keep your eye on.
Absolutely. Guys, this is the Big Cheese AI Podcast. I am Andre, joined by Sean Hise, Jacob Wise, and Brandon Corbin. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. As a reminder, on episode 10, we will be having guests on the show, so stay tuned for that, and if you have anything you guys want us to talk about, email pod@bigcheeseai, and there you go. Guys, thanks again. See you next week.
See you. - See you guys.

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