Transcript of AI Basics: How and When to Use AI

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Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York magazine in the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

And you're listening to our special series on AI. We talk a lot about the business of AI, but today we want to focus on the ways we can actually be using it in our day-to-day lives. But here to chat with us about some of the AI basics is Kylie Robison. Kylie is a senior AI reporter for The Verge. Welcome, Kylie. It's good to talk to you.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

First of all, talk a little bit of how you personally use AI in your day-to-day life. Why are you covering it?

Yeah. Before this, I was covering Twitter at Fortune magazine, which is run by Kara's favorite person, and that wasn't easy to cover. I thought AI showed a lot of promise and was just such an interesting area to tackle for a young reporter. I mean, who doesn't want to be covering the biggest technology to hit the scene? I live in San Francisco, so it just seemed perfect. But it is perhaps the most stressful beat I've ever had because it's so large and so nuanced, and people argue about it all day. About using AI in my day-to-day life, I would say it's not something I use heavily. I do use it For... I upload a document, for instance, OpenAI will release these safety cards for their models that show this is how safe it is. I can upload that PDF to GPT 4.0 and say, Okay, and ask questions based off that PDF. Do they mention this? Can you expand on what this means? So really heavily technical documents or white papers, I can ask questions and simplify it in a way that's more helpful and it's quicker for me to understand than going to a bunch of researchers, making a bunch calls to get them to explain it.

I think that's been really helpful for me. I know Scott uses it for writing. I've noticed Claude can be a helpful writing assistant, but in terms of actually using it to write, I don't use that because I don't think it's helpful yet. But just as a partner, as Scott has mentioned on the podcast, as a partner, to be like, Okay, here are some of my rambling thoughts. Can you streamline what I'm trying to say and edit it for me?

Right. Absolutely. Give us a few tips for someone who's looking to implement AI in their lives, like daily tasks that could be made easier when people ask you this question. Obviously, Google is integrated into writing emails, for example, which I don't find useful, but bills, resumes, and much of what the average person knows of AI is ChatGPT and related tools. Try to expand on that. What other tools are useful for them?

Yeah, there's so many different AI tools now. I think a lot of people use Grammarly so that can check your grammar in your browser, which is really helpful. I think When you want to use AI, I think you should consider it for low-stakes tasks. You have to imagine your data privacy because often these models will use what you input to train the model. You don't want it someday spitting back your bank account information, which is really funny because I'm a big listener of Pivot and Hard Fork, which Kevin, one of the hosts there, had uploaded his bank statements to Notebook LM, so they could create a podcast to help him with his financial financial information, which was a really interesting thing that I think people want AI to be capable of right now is like, Can you help me budget? Which I think, again, low stakes tasks, thinking of the data you upload, try not to upload sensitive information. I think, just like I said with the PDF, that was really helpful. I think I used it. I just turned 26, so I used it to compare health insurance. These are my needs. These are the options I have.

Here's a PDF of what they offer, which one should I choose, was really helpful, stuff like that.

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

I'm so sorry, Kylie. As a young woman, you need and endure this, but here you are. Go ahead.

Or I'll say, How can I feel better about myself? And it'll just come back with, Good morning, you fucking stack of sunshine. Anyway, a lot of people use AI. A lot of people haven't even started. What would you suggest someone does to get started? Which one or two LLMs would you suggest they download, the free version even. How do they start to try and unlock the potential and just understand it more? Of course, I'll start with an answer. The first time I really interfaced with AI was trying to figure out fun stuff for me and my 14-year-old son to do in London, and it went from there. What two or three things would you suggest to help people get started?

Yeah, I think that's a really helpful example and something I think the makers of these models want people to be using it for rather than highlighting any nefarious way is to use AI. They're hoping people use it to write a story for their young child, set with pictures. You can use ChatGPT for that or Grok. You can use it to book travel or to plan your travel, which is really cool. And I used it just when I went to Spain. I was like, What should I go see? So I think those are really helpful examples. Again, these are all low-stake tasks that you can use really any chatbot on the market that's capable enough to use creatively. I think you have to check to see if these places are open and exist because it can hallucinate very confidently. But yeah, any model right now, they're all on par each other. A lot of them are because they're all working towards the same thing. You can use it to decide what hair color you want to do next. Anything that's just fun and low stakes, I think is easy.

Low stakes. You did mention privacy Now, we do put a lot of privacy online. My bank's famous are online, everything else. But I really limit what I use here because of that, because I'm very worried, and I'm someone who's very aware of privacy. I'm like, Scott, when you said you put your record your medical records, I'm like, I'm not putting my into OpenAI. No way.

They already know, Cara. Your privacy is gone.

Yeah, I guess, but I just don't want to help them along to put all the things together. They definitely don't have my heart surgery stuff. They don't. Are you worried about the CCP scaring you to give you a heart attack? I don't know. I'm just telling you the feeling I had.

Kylie, this is what I deal with.

This is what I deal with. This is my feeling. I don't want to give them too much personal information. I don't mind it on writing things that are low stakes. But then now we put lots of stuff on the regular internet. When do you imagine that crossover? How should the average person feel about that? Because we don't know what this stuff is being used for, correct? There's not as much transparency as there needs to be.

No, there is not as much transparency. They claim that it's because of, like Scott said, the CCP or anticompetitive reasons. I think they've already Hoovered up the entire the Internet. There's no going back from there. All these models have hoovered up the entire Internet. It's something I've reckoned with when they said, Photo Bucket signed over all of its data to train large language models. I was like, dang, whatever I put on Photo Bucket, that was stupid when I was 11 is now going to be used to train large language models, and 11-year-old me wouldn't have known that. So I think it's a really tough position. People on Instagram, celebrities were like, Metta does not I have the right to use my photos if I post this story. I think people are really protective over the lives that they have shared with the Internet, that they have been encouraged by these large companies to share with the Internet. And it's just I think they feel like it's being taken away from them and used to train these black box models. I think people have different opinions on it. I personally feel I have the heebie-jeebies about it because I grew up with the Internet, with Facebook launching when I was a young teen.

I think it's a very tough position. I think some people are like, I don't care.

Do you think that people are more wary? Because a recent study found that one in nine Americans use AI every day in the work. That's a very small number at this point, right? Where are we in that? Do you think everyone's just going to do it? Not do it, it's going to be done to them. It'll just be foiced upon them by Apple intelligence or whatever. Do you want to get an Uber? You have your airport. That seems like a good thing, for example.

Totally. I think automating rote tasks is not a bad thing. When it comes to the workplace, I think a lot of workplaces are well aware of the data privacy issues, and they're like, Please don't upload our internal documents to OpenAI. That's been a problem. It's trained in a lot of workplaces. So one in nine doesn't surprise me. I think it's going to continue to grow. I just published a story today about AI agents, which is just the new next thing, so an AI assistant. Where I'm seeing this a lot is in SaaS products. Salesforce released a CRM agent Microsoft has copilots, stuff that they believe will increase efficiency amongst their staff. But I think it's going to be hard for that number to grow so long as there's transparency issues and that trust has to grow.

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

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Scott, we're back with our special series on AI. We're talking to a senior AI reporter for The Verge, Kylie Robison. Huge leaps have been made in AI over the last couple of years. Talk about how we're using it without realizing it. It's also been around for a while, right? Where are people not realizing they're using it today?

Totally. I I think in your career, Cara, you've probably covered AI. It's been around forever. I think your Netflix algorithm, that's AI. Automated self-driving cars, Weimos. I live in San Francisco. Weimos are everywhere. That's AI. It is used in TikTok algorithms. That's AI. It's everywhere, and it has been working in the background quite a bit. I think you'll hear companies, especially as a reporter, they're like, We've been in the AI business for two decades, which is not facetious, but it is different than the frontier models we're seeing, OpenAI and Anthropic release. But it is those algorithms you're used to using.

So break down or do a quick JD Power's review of the biggest LLMs from your favorite to your least favorite.

Favorite to least favorite.

Scott likes Claude, just so you know.

I do like Claude. Claude is really good. It's surprisingly good. I just started using it recently, and I messaged a coworker. I was like, I'm a bad AI reporter because this is way better than I anticipated. It also has, I don't know if you've noticed, it's got intense guardrails. I asked some questions about AI. It's like, Well, as an AI, I can't exactly answer these questions, whereas ChatGPT would have just spit it out.

It's just so people know, it's by Anthropic, which was a group of people who thought OpenAI was not safe enough and started Anthropic.

Exactly.

It's backed by Amazon.

Exactly. Yes. And Google has a smaller cloud share for Anthropic, but yes. So Anthropic is a competitor to OpenAI. Openai has GPT 4.0 is their latest frontier model. They've also released a reasoning model called O1, but they consider that, for lack of a better word, dumber than their frontier model. And Frontier models are basically the biggest, the best models that are out there. So Frontier models are like, the next one is like the next iPhone, basically. So I would say Claude is amazing. Claude Opus is amazing. I think the thing is, they're all building the same thing with the same training data, which is the entire Internet. So they're going to continue just leapfrogging over each other. So it's hard to compare because it's five major companies with some of the best researchers in the world with all of the same training data all building the same thing.

Do you use Grok? Don't laugh.

Do you use Grok?

I'm not getting in any of the new whatever cyber taxi I'm not getting in, and I'm not putting any information into any of his properties. I don't trust him, personally.

I used Grock when it first came out. I think I made Kamala with a Gun. The Verge put out a story because they have Grock for the listener, is available on X, formerly Twitter, which is owned by Elon Musk, and he owns XAI, which created this chatbot, and it has what it feels like no guardrails. So you can make a lot of photos that break all sorts of copyright laws. No, I don't use Grok, and I don't necessarily find it to be top of the line. If I were to rank models, they're not at the top.

I'll go back to my question. What's your favorite LLM?

I would say Opus, Claude. It's really intelligent and incredible. I think it's enviable from other labs what they've built.

Then can you name some long-tail LLM or AI apps that are fun that people that maybe haven't gotten very much attention that are fun? Any of undiscovered gems out there?

Undiscovered gems. I mean, if you go to Hugging Face, if you're into open source, there are hundreds of thousands of open source LLMs that people can mess with. I mean, that's the cool part about open source LLMs, which is a very hot debate. But developers are creating all sorts of cool shit with the open source LLMs available on Hugging Face. There's almost too many to choose from, but none of them are mainstream in the way because it It costs so much money. Hence why OpenAI just raised the most money that anyone's ever raised ever. It's a lot of money. Yeah.

It's just for people. Hugging Face is an AI community where it's a platform where they collaborate and they do different things. This will be Very much like the early app days or the early internet days where there was suddenly websites and things. Then there was Yahoo that compiled them into yet another hierarchical officious oratory.

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

Please don't steal from the jewelry store.

All right.

No, but it'll come back and say, Well, this might reflect bias or you should... I just find it's very... I'm looking for an AI that'll say, That's a stupid fucking question, or your question, I want it as a friend to say- He wants the shame AI.

It makes sense.

Hit me harder. Call me Daddy, you bitch. Oh, my God. No, but I do find it's very... They're so worried about it going weird places. It has gone weird places. It's constantly preconditioning and qualifying all its answers and being very gentle. I find it's very overly sensitive and, quite frankly, politically correct. I'll start with Kylie. Do you find that to be the case, or do you think that's just they're putting in appropriate guardrails?

I think they're putting in the appropriate guardrails because it's so nascent. I mean, why start off crazy? I feel like we can work our way up. I feel like we can work our way up to getting you a sadistic chatbot, but for now, it's so... Go on. It's just such a nascent technology. I think being overly safe and correct and nervous about what it's going to output to millions of people, I think that's a good move.

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

You're taking this to an even darker place than I would go.

But I'm just saying it has. The original ones were racist.

If you ask it a simple question, it They'll start conditioning everything and telling you to check it this and make sure that you talk. It's just, Just give me the goddamn answer.

I get that, but they're never going to do that because the first time they put out some Microsoft stuff, it was racist. It started say racist things. They really can't have... One of the things that I think I tell a lot of people is I met these two guys on the street yesterday, and they were creating an AI. They just ran up to me. They love pivot. They're creating an AI that goes on. Speaking of odd and unusual things, that goes on top of 911 calls that they'll be selling into cities. It'll translate, say, Spanish immediately because not every person... There's a delay there because the person who's taking a call is not Spanish, and they have to go get a Spanish-speaking dispatcher. It's doing all kinds of things that Groxet and sends things out really quick. I thought it was a great idea. I thought it was a really interesting way of use of AI. I said, But you know what something is? You can't make a mistake even if human dispatchers do. I think they have to be unusually careful with all these things as this AI is shoving us around the planet.

I don't know. I just feel like that's okay. You can take it, Scott. But I'm going to get someone to make you a mean AI, Overlord or Please Bitch or something like that.

I learned this morning from AI that A group of Flamingos is called a flamboyance. That's true, and I love that. How awesome is that?

That's also in the dictionary. A flamboyance? You're a flamboyance. Anyway, last question. We just covered the idea of what things we should not use it for. It's going to be used for everything, just FYI. But any predictions, last question on things AI can't do yet, but will be able to do for us in the next three years? Use your imagination hat here, or things you're seeing or hearing.

I think in the next three years, Again, these are so hard to tell because you need so much money and so much compute. So if we just continue on that exponential curves that these companies are hoping for, I see probably more accurate and natural voice interactions. That's something that they're building that they really want the her movie style reality. I do think that that will get better, especially as they release all of this to the public and people test it and they train on people using it. I think those will naturally get better. Advanced code generation and debugging, that's something they're already really good at. And if these reasoning models from OpenAI and others continue to get better, it's going to be better at coding and debugging, which will be really cool. And they're all building agents, which, again, are little AI assistants. That's the high stakes tasks that they want to access, hence why all these guardrails are so tough, because they want these high stakes tasks like running your life and booking you flights and having access to all of this. So I do see them building out agents, but it would require so much compute and so much money to get there.

So I'd be curious what you guys think, because I get asked all the time, is the bubble going to pop? Is opening eye just going to crash? Which I think it's so hard for me to tell you guys have been doing this for so long.

It will, but no. No, no, no. It's like when the Internet crashed, this is a big deal. This is a change in computing. It's yet another great change in computing. This is not crypto. This is not some of the little bubbles. But A bubble, I guess, but it's directionally correct. It's directionally, and it's going to be huge and encompass everything. Scott?

Well, there's two things. There's the valuation of these companies, and then there's the real impact they have on the economy. I think the latter is just getting started. There's going to be a lot. What I would say in terms of valuations, there's just going to be a lot of volatility. We've talked about this. We think that relative to its size and leadership position, OpenAI, in my view, is actually at 12 times revenues, is actually probably the best value because some of the long-tail ones you talked about who have almost no revenues and no real visible business model yet, still get 2, 10, 20, $50 billion valuation. So it's going to be a wild ride. I would describe it as like late '90s Internet. We don't know if it's '97 or '99, no. But we know by 2005, it's going to be much bigger than it is now. That's a long-winded way, Kylie, of saying, I have no idea.

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

A colleague.

A colleague. She's a scoopster. She's a scoopster. She's a scoopster, and she's a great one at it. Anyway. Okay, Scott, that's it for our AI Basics episode. Please read us out.

Today's show is produced by Lara Naiman, Zoe Marcus, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie and your Todd engineer in this episode. Thanks also to Drew Buros and Mia Saveri Cribs. Com. Nishad Kharat is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to the podcast. Thanks for listening to Pivot from New York magazine and Vox Media. You can subscribe to the magazine at nymag. Com/pod. We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

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