Mass AI-Driven Unemployment, NVIDIA Surges, CEOs' AI Avatars Unleashed
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Is AI going to drive mass unemployment or are urgent warnings about job loss just marketing? NVIDIA, meanwhile, turns in stellar earnings. Mark Zuckerberg and Paul Merlucky team up to build war goggles. And CEOs are using AI avatars for their earnings calls. We'll cover it all on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this.

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Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a big week of news to speak with you about today, starting with the prophecies of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that we're about to see mass unemployment due to AI. We'll also touch on Nvidia earnings. We'll talk about this partnership between Meta and Andruil to build these war VR goggles, which is quite interesting.

and might signal a shift in silicon valley and of course we're going to talk about ceos dispatching their ai avatars to their earnings calls and maybe they will come to a meeting near you joining us as always on fridays to break down the news with us is ron john roy of margins ron john good to see you welcome well at least when i lose my job to an ai avatar i will have war goggles so this week makes me feel better

It is interesting. Every time we talk about AI technology, there's this combination of will it work, won't it work, and this is going to be great, and this is going to be terrible. And I think we're just kind of hitting all of those emotions in one this week. And so let's start with this prophecy from Dario Amode, the CEO of Anthropic, about what is going to happen to white-collar jobs. He tells

He tells Axios that there's gonna be a white collar bloodbath. He says AI could wipe out half

of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20% in the next one to five years. He said AI companies and governments need to stop sugarcoating what's coming, the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs.

So let me just turn it to you right away, Ranjan. I mean, 50% of all entry-level jobs within five years. I don't think that this is entirely out of the realm of possibility, but wouldn't you agree that this would have to just be like, it's weird to say best case, but the best case scenario for this technology in order to come anywhere close to that would have to meet and exceed all of our expectations to actually be able to do something like this.

Yeah, this still feels a bit like marketing hype for me. And I think to me, if we break it down to a couple of different pieces, yes, I think the jobs of today are fundamentally going to change. I'm a big believer that especially white collar work, which was not threatened in the same way as more blue collar or manufacturing type work in the last 30 years is going to be threatened.

I actually, my theory on this is entry-level jobs are actually going to be safer because they're going to become different. And the type of workforce that's going to be entering the market is going to be a lot more AI native than a lot of existing, especially more senior people. So if I'm junior, if I'm entering the workforce, I would much rather be entering now than 10 to 15 years ago.

Okay, I hear some music in the background. Is this the... It can't be. It's the Hype or True jingle. Listeners cannot see. My jaw is on the floor. Alex just took the worst name game of all time. And I guess we're doing this. I guess we're making a thing out of it.

I ran it through Sudo. Thanks to AI. And we are in the thick of it. Hype or true, Dario Amode's prediction that 50% of entry-level jobs will be wiped out. So let me take the other side that this isn't marketing just for the sake of conversation, right? I mean, we are seeing this technology improve dramatically. And we're also already seeing some evidence that it's harder for companies

people coming out of grad school to get jobs today. And AI is definitely in the workplace, especially in areas like coding, for instance. And we're going to talk about it in a moment. But Amazon, for instance, is a company that has smaller teams responsible for the same amount of code.

just with like less people to do it so this idea that if the technology keeps improving the way that it is and we go into this world where we do get agentic technology and we do get ai that can go out and do the deep research for us with fewer hallucinations maybe it's not so crazy that dario who sees the trajectory is going out there and telling us that hey listen this might be an issue

Now, again, I still look at this as it's self-interest in the idea that Anthropic is a company that directly benefits if that is the truth. But to me, I mean, we just mentioned coders or software engineers or developers. That job at the scale that it is today didn't exist before.

nearly in the same way 20 years ago. So to me, it's just going to be a shift. And maybe it's a little bit overly optimistic. I do think his call that governments or the civil society needs to recognize that things are going to change is important. And I do think there needs to be genuine conversations around this. But again, jobs change, people adapt. And I don't know, maybe I'm

too hyped up from that song that you just played. But if we're talking about innovation, in what other world could we have a hyper true jingle that quickly? That's a net positive for society. That's all I'm saying.

I think it's already, just because we have that jingle, it's already outweighed all the negatives of all time that we might see with AI. But Dario, in his conversation with Axios, actually goes through step by step how he sees this happening. And yes, innovation always creates job loss and job creation. But the idea is that this technology is potentially so powerful that

That it just puts this process on steroids or, as you said last week, on acid. OK, so here's the step by step. Number one, open AI, Google, Anthropic and other large AI companies keep vastly improving the capabilities of their large language models to meet and beat human performance with more and more tasks. This is happening and accelerating. The U.S. government worried about losing ground to China or spooking workers with preemptive warnings.

says little. The administration and Congress neither regulate AI nor caution the American public. This is happening and showing no signs of changing. Most Americans, unaware of the growing power of AI and its threat to their jobs, pay little attention. This is happening too. So do you have an argument that any of those three steps are incorrect? I would actually still, again, argue with number one, but that's more of a

improvements in large language models I don't think is going to actually see adoption in implementation. I don't think that's the issue or the problem. I think there's a lot of other points of resistance, so I would disagree with that one. I like, number two, the idea that to avoid spooking the population, I mean, it's a good little conspiracy theory that seems like a good... That is a great conspiracy theory. Yeah, and I mean, again, it seems completely plausible in the political climate, but...

Again, in number three, I think unaware of the growing power of AI. This is where I would actually vehemently disagree that AI, the promises made by the industry are at such a scale that it's my, again, my mom, whenever I go home, she's like, so what do I do with AI? And she's retired. And like, I mean, it's to me, it's not that there's a lack of awareness. It's just like,

There is a lack of actually adoption and implementation. I do think it's not because of a lack of awareness. I think it's because of a lack of how focused these tools are. We've been talking last week about how Anthropic and Clot are going to potentially move much more towards coding and software development, which shows that

it's not working in other areas. So overall, I don't know. As regular listeners know, I can be a bit cynical about a lot of topics, but I genuinely don't think it's as much of a threat as he's making it out to be.

Yeah, this is the part where I started to veer more into the hype side, where he says, then almost overnight, business leaders see the savings of replacing humans with AI and they do this en masse. They stop opening up new jobs, stop backfilling existing ones, and then replace human workers with agents or related automated alternatives. I think this just completely underestimates how

change management works in most companies and how slow most companies are at implementing even the most helpful software. And this idea that this could happen almost overnight to me is far-fetched. Now, is this something that you could see happen over 20, 30 years? If the technology keeps accelerating at the pace it's been accelerating, which is an open question,

Maybe, but this idea that we're going to see it within one to five years, that just doesn't really seem to meet the reality test for me.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. Because Dario came from, he had his PhD at Princeton, I think. One of his two PhDs, yes. Yeah, I mean, two PhDs, that's not, in terms of not needing to learn about change management at organizations, I think that's like a pretty clear idea. And then the other thing that- Oh, he's the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company right now, so I won't take that away from him, but.

Okay, fair. I won't. But the part that he's missing in that whole thesis is growth. That it assumes kind of like a steady state of economic output, and then underlying that there's fewer jobs. But if we take the other side, and again, the more optimistic side, that this actually unleashes new waves of growth and new types of companies, I think...

Then new jobs are created. There's different types of jobs are created. I never thought I'd be this optimistic, but on this one, I still believe, still believe.

It is interesting to me that he is taking that pessimistic perspective, given where he sits. Like he doesn't believe that if you are an entry level developer rather than a company like not hiring you, his tooling could help make you a 10x developer and then help the company grow much further than if you weren't there. So interesting.

I think that is pretty telling, telling in terms of it falling on the hype perspective. And there's this kind of great slash funny CNN article by this woman, Alison Morrow. She says, if a CEO of a soda company declared that soda making technology is getting so good, it's going to ruin the global economy. You'd be forgiven for thinking that person is either lying or fully detached from reality. Yet when tech CEOs do the same thing, people tend to

perk up. She says the point is that Amodei is a salesman and it's in his interest to make his product appear inevitable and so powerful it's scary. He stands to profit off the very technology he claims will gut the labor market but here he is telling everyone the truth and sounding the alarm he's trying to warn us he's one of the good ones. Yeah actually that's a really good point I think

If you have this technology and you're genuinely worried about it and you are the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, either you are the most altruistic person alive or you're doing it for self-interested reason. Again, soda CEOs did not tell the world that our soda will become so addictive it will unleash a wave of obesity.

It just happened and people made money. Like, I think the idea that I'm going to, I don't know, is he trying to risk the entire business of Anthropic by saying this? I think it's good. We've seen this for three years now. AGI, ASI, AI, like killing all of humanity is a threat. Now white collar bloodbath. I think that it works from a marketing perspective. So we'll keep seeing this.

Okay, let me one more time try to make the case for Amodei and then we can move on.

I think if you're being super charitable to his perspective, you would say he's interested in building AI that's going to have a big impact on the world. Things like he talked about in this interview with CNN, curing cancer and helping us with medical applications, creating abundance. But he also sees that there's going to be a downside. And maybe he truly believes, and I don't know, is there a 100% chance that he's wrong in this, that he believes that his technology will have benefits?

an impact. And if you do believe that, then maybe it is in your interest to go out and say, yeah, there could be problems. And in terms of being the one that's developing it, well, I think maybe there is something to be said about being the person who wants to develop, develop the technology and steer it in a way that's impactful versus destructive. All right. I will actually, I'll end on a charitable note as well. I think

On the topic of regulation, Amode came out when there's this proposed 10-year moratorium on any kind of AI regulation, and he said that's not a good idea. So in fairness, he is advocating for at least some kind of steering the industry in the right direction. And I think we should talk about what happens in the near term, which is not necessarily going to be job loss.

But in some companies, and I think in some companies that aren't really viewing this the right way, it will be a change of job, one that will require harsher requirements on employees versus one that will sort of free them to do higher impact work. And this is the thing that I hinted at the beginning of our discussion about Amazon. This is from the New York Times. Very interesting story. At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work.

And the article says the more immediate downside of AI for software engineers appears to be the change in the quality of their work. Some say it's becoming more routine, less thoughtful and crucially, much faster paced. Three Amazon engineers said that managers had increasingly pushed them to use AI in their work over the past year. The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines.

and had even encouraged coders to gin up new AI productivity tools at an upcoming hackathon. One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code using AI. So is this kind of what the world looks like where companies say you no longer have these long timelines to build the thing that you want to build because, in fact,

effectively, I know that you can use AI to build it. We've seen similar things from Shopify, for instance, you know, the AI first company episode we did a couple of weeks ago kind of hits on this idea. I have a hard time feeling sympathy. I know Amazon is a rough culture. So like an aggressive culture and many and often in a good way. So I'm not, I'm guessing those were not cushy jobs, but

Yes, work is changing. This is happening. Even the idea, it's like they were encouraged to come up with AI tools at an upcoming hackathon. That's not bad. That's like people... In your interview with Sergey Brin the other day, he said, if you're a computer scientist, this should be the most exciting time for you. I actually would expand that, that if you're at all interested in technology, this should be the most exciting time for you. And

Yes, for software developers and coders, work will look vastly different. It was a good 20 to 30 year run. It's not going to be the same for the next 20. And that's okay. Yeah, I think that's a very good perspective. Okay, so but what about this? Maybe you don't have time to think as deeply about projects as you did. This is again from the story. The new approach to coding at many companies has in effect eliminated much of the time the developer spends reflecting on his or her work.

This is when developers say, or no, sorry, this is an analyst. It used to be that you had a lot of slack because you were doing a complicated project. It would take a month, maybe two months, and no one could monitor. Now you have the whole thing monitored and it can be done quickly. So maybe this idea, can we end up seeing less deep work or less reflection and then bigger thinking because you have to do things so quickly and be so reliant on the AI to program for you.

I think that conflates two different things because on one side, almost by definition, this should allow for more deep work. This is taking care of the more monotonous, repetitive things people did instead of having to rewrite an entire code base from scratch, that kind of work you're able to do. The question of monitoring work, that's to me not an AI question.

That's a culture question. That's a technology question that's increased dramatically, especially since the pandemic and when more work is being done on digital surfaces. So I think those are two different things. And I think some companies, like in Amazon, will very closely monitor and that's how it works. And other companies will work differently. But again, to me, AI almost by definition is,

should free up more time for reflective deep work. And it is kind of interesting that I guess a company like Amazon will just say, okay, now you're kind of like, you know, the delivery driver with the AI systems monitoring your every move and every second optimized to a T. I mean, yeah, probably the people who built those systems to monitor the delivery drivers are the ones anonymously being quoted. Yeah. Yeah.

Sorry, I can't say you're surprised. But meanwhile, we're going to have an opportunity to really figure out what's going to happen because the surge in infrastructure building shows no sign of slowing down. We saw this in NVIDIA's earnings that came out this week. This is from the Wall Street Journal. NVIDIA's business is booming despite being shut out of China. The company's revenue reached 44 billion for the first fiscal quarter for its first fiscal quarter, a 69 percent increase since

that was curtailed so limited to just a 69% increase that was curtailed by Washington's new limits on China chip sales the company was unable to ship 2.5 billion of its H20 processors and projected an eight billion dollar eight billion dollars in lost revenue for the current quarter due to that policy so that's lots of money lost to China and and or lost to not selling to China and the company is still

Yet, we still see a tremendous amount of spending coming in from the tech giants. Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Google, and Meta, they are all going to be boosting their spending on AI. And analysts expect combined spending by those four companies to alone top $345 billion this year, up 41% from last year. And the data center business is going to be up 10%.

a surge 73% over last year to 39.1 billion. So two things here, Ranjan, obviously Nvidia is healthy. No doubt about that. Even with the China stuff, it's still growing tremendously. And then second, like if scale is going to be one of the ingredients that makes these models better, we're still in the finding out stage. Like this infrastructure is still just booming. - Javon's paradox.

welcome. It appears to still be the reality. I think

And we've seen more and more about, again, to reference the Sergey Brin interview again, I really liked he said it's going to be algorithms rather than compute, then create the next round of advances. So I think like how the actual modeling works and how these things are built could change and it appears to be changing. But as of today, May 30th, 2025, we're

Everyone's playing the same game and it's a compute game. So that's definitely not changing. And DeepSeek, but this is a six to 12 to 24 month thing that we'll see rather than DeepSeek happened. And then you're going to see a cut in spending the next day. Do you think that the export restrictions that I just mentioned are working?

when it comes to restricting the exports to China. Now, Jensen, of course, is going to be against them because there's lots of money to be made if he can sell to China. But this is from Bloomberg. He said the Chinese competitors have evolved. They've become quite formidable. So speaking specifically of Huawei, he says the latest AI chip is similar to the performance of NVIDIA's H200 chip.

a component that was state of the art until its replacement in recent months. You cannot underestimate the importance of the China market, Wang said. This is home to the world's largest population of AI researchers. And he basically says, like, you know, it's important for the U.S. to at least be in there and be steering the way that they do it as opposed to restrict them. And then they're going to go ahead and do what they want anyway on almost as good technology. What is your perspective here?

Yeah, I think, again, the details of our export restrictions working are difficult for me to, like, I mean, very directly say. But I think overall, I mean, that idea that, I mean, NVIDIA to expand, seeing increased competition from Chinese suppliers, it's definitely going to be, it's going to evolve pretty rapidly. And now we have a new DeepSeek model, speaking of which.

So this came out this week. There's a new upgrade to DeepSeek's R1 model that the company says reasons better and hallucinates less. The Chinese startup DeepSeek said Thursday that its upgraded artificial intelligence model can perform mathematics, programming, and general logic better than previous versions. Its overall performance is now approaching that of leading models like OpenAI's O3 and Google's Gemini 2.5.

pro this is according to deep seek in a post on the ai model platform hugging face so the

So deep seek still keeping, keeping pace. It seems like deep seek, still deep seeking. I think it's a reminder, like the competitive dynamics of what's going to happen are still completely in flux in a good way. I think we're going to see more and more competition at the foundation model level. And I think this is just a reminder that like, we just came off a couple of good weeks of Google IO and, uh, open AI announcements and all these kinds of things. But, uh,

the competition is going to be there and only increase. As long as those Nvidia earnings are so juicy, their margins are...

What's the Jeff Bezos thing again? Oh, their margins are our opportunity. All of our opportunity. Yeah, that's right. So just to sum up this segment. So I think we both agree that NVIDIA still has a lot of room left to run in terms of being able to sell its chips and produce them. And there's no sign of slowing down. Like if you're thinking just about the hardware side of the AI trade, and of course, NVIDIA has software that you use to train the models. But like thinking about the thing that makes them the most money

That's in good shape. It's in great shape. It's in incredible shape. That has not slowed down. And I know there's a lot of talk after deep seek that it would, but it hasn't yet. So there will be more deep seeks. And I think I feel very confident in saying that. Okay. And let me ask you this as deep seek continues to rise, is there going to be any value in building these proprietary models? Returning to one of our old questions. Yeah, that's a,

I still believe that overall increased competition will see commoditization at the model layer. I believe that the one model to rule them all, one giant model is going to wipe out 20% or 50% of white-collar jobs. I just don't see that happening. So yeah, I think the model layer will get commoditized. What about you? Yes, for sure.

And maybe that's why we see these big statements. - So what you're saying is it's not the model, it's the product. - No, I think better, no, there's nuance here. Better commoditized models will lead to better products.

it's not about it's so interesting we have this debate all the time actually i think we're just going to converge here you want better models and better products i guess the question is what drives the improvement in the ai industry i think yeah even if the models are commoditized then better models are going to matter more what leads to the white collar bloodbath yeah exactly better models and better products it's coming okay uh by the way just one quick no i mean

lord almighty meta there was a story this week how meta's lost lots of uh of its ai researchers as deep sea continues to surge the conversation around metas llama models has certainly fallen off in a big way and i i mean they've made some changes to their organization this week minor ones uh but i would watch that space very very closely yeah i think uh i mean yeah where metal still lives in this is it's interesting because

They actually managed to be, maybe I have to support it, more product focused it sounds. They separate out the research conversation from the product conversation, which is kind of a reminder. They're a pure consumer company and they're able to separate the two. So meta AI, meta Ray-Bans, all these things

You don't really see or hear as much hype around. I don't even know. What llama are we on now? Four. Four? Okay. Yeah.

But don't we think that if their models were better, then people would be using their chatbots more? I mean, they have bet a lot on voice and their voice AI is just not as on par with open AI. Meta AI is pretty good. Meta AI is pretty good. And I say that with a, like, it's, I think it's on par. You're the first person I've heard say that. So maybe I'm not asking enough people.

All right. Yeah, you're not asking the Meta crowd. See, this is why. Maybe they're going after the everyday consumer while we're talking to the people who actually use and stress test Anthropic, OpenAI. That's true. Gemini, et cetera. Yeah, it's a great reminder. For reporting on this stuff, it's important to look outside of New York and San Francisco. And to the people using Meta AI. But I still think that the Meta AI is not as good.

Yeah. Okay. All right.

So we're going to talk a little bit about this very interesting Grammarly story. But before that, let's just talk a little bit about this other area that Meta is going down, which is that they are going into defense tech with a very unusual alliance, shall we say. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Meta fired Palmer Luckey. Now they're teaming up on a defense contract with him. Meta platforms had a messy split with its virtual reality chief, Palmer Luckey. Now the two have reconnected to build Meta.

Thank you.

Kind of the details of the system is crazy here. I'm just going to read this. The system called Eagle Eye will carry sensors that enhance soldiers' hearing and vision, detecting drones flying miles away or sighting hidden targets, for instance. It will also let soldiers operate and interact with AI-powered weapon systems and rules...

Autonomy software and Meta's AI models will underpin the devices. I think this is a very interesting story. It shows, of course, Silicon Valley getting like fully getting back and or getting into war technology in a way that you wouldn't see from, let's say, Meta or Google years back. And this device itself is kind of interesting to me as well. What do you make of this partnership, Ranjan? Well,

Well, first, is this the first mention of the term war goggles on this podcast ever? This is our first. Well, we had Palmer Luckey on, so I have to check the transcript just to see that. We've definitely talked about defense tech, but this is definitely a new product idea. War goggles are a whole other... War goggles, it's a good term. War goggles, baby. Yeah, war goggles. I like it. I like it. I mean, the question of...

This is another one where Silicon Valley was founded on defense technology. So much of

American Innovation was founded on defense technology. And to me, I guess I don't have a hard time stomaching this. I think it's not a bad thing to have the technology industry close to the defense industry. And companies like Anduril and others are definitely defense first. So yeah, I think I'm genuinely curious of how crazy and cool this technology is and

I mean, I know it is for war, but yeah, I think innovations often has started in the defense sector. And if we're going back to that, it's not the worst thing. Yeah. Who do you think made the first call, Palmer or Zuckerberg? That is the more important question, I think. I have a feeling. What do you think? I think it had to have been Zuckerberg.

I think Palmer clearly did not like what happened to him at Facebook at the end there. And he wasn't going to go pitch Zuckerberg on this idea. I think Zuckerberg saw that he had lost tens of billions on reality labs and sort of needed a

a new way to do it. He's also had this like sort of political rebirth, Zuckerberg, and is now someone who seems like he'd be open to this stuff more than he was previously. I have to say it was, I almost certainly believe that it was Zuckerberg who made the call and Palmer gives him some edge or cool factor that he wouldn't have without Palmer. I think he needed Palmer more than Palmer needed him. - Okay, I buy that.

What? Again. Oh, again. Yeah, yeah. No, no, actually, that's a good point. I think, actually, have we seen cool Zuckerberg movies?

in any kind of virality or memes recently has he not been posting less i feel there was like a a wave of time where he was just you know the handsome mark zuckerberg with a chain singing with t-pain all these things were just like every week has that died down or i think that probably coincided with the ascent of meta's llama project

And after Deep Seek, we haven't seen anything like that or less. We've seen less of that. So I think he's feeling himself less these days than he was before. Okay. Okay. Well, either way, I will agree with your who called who theory. I think Zuck had to call Palmer.

Okay, so I definitely want to get to this Grammarly story that you mentioned. So let's talk about that. We might have time to talk about Elon Musk leaving the Trump administration. And we definitely want to get to this story about CEOs using their avatars to deliver their earnings reports. So let's do that right after this.

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And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, breaking down the week's news. So many fascinating stories to talk about this week. And one that popped into our document just as we started to record, courtesy of Mr. Ranjan Roy, is a new interesting story about Grammarly's funding and a new funding model. Very interesting. Ranjan, why don't you lead that story for us? Okay, so I see the headline, Grammarly has raised $1 billion, which...

is still surprising, but not like inconceivable in the current market. They definitely have been positioning themselves as more AI. But then the more you read about it, I realized all this talk about AI and technology, we're forgetting about America's greatest innovations.

Financial engineering. Because this story was, I did not know this model existed. So Grammarly did not raise $1 billion in the traditional sense we all talk about of equity. They secured a $1 billion commitment from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, CVF.

The way this money works is it's non-dilutive, it's not equity, it does not affect the cap table at all. And basically they are allowed to now use this $1 billion to spend on customer acquisition, on sales and marketing. And then any revenue they generate from the money that they put in from this pot of money, the return goes back to General Catalyst up to a certain point.

And those details weren't leaked. But again, it's basically a loan for your marketing budget, which any online business, the customer acquisition cost or tack, and then payback periods, these are the things everyone talks about all the time. And if you have a relatively predictable model like that,

It's so fascinating to me. And it actually like is one of those that I think will catch on because the more businesses have like very predictable cash flow models like this or acquisition models and payback models, it makes sense that we want to scale our revenue dramatically rather than diluting our cap table more. We'll take money in from a general catalyst more.

What's interesting, though, is apparently Grammarly does not have to pay back the money if it does not see the return. So it's quite a bet, but it's capped up to, in previous examples, Lemonade, the insurance company, they had public filings on this that they had received similar money. And it was that they were able to pay up to 1.4x the initial return.

So a 40% return. That's fascinating. Yeah. Basically, funding is changing. This is like, I've never seen this before. I really think this kind of funding model could be used at so many different companies. And it just made me remember America's greatest innovation. For all the large language model stuff, this is where we're the best.

So do you think Grammarly has their marketing operations so dialed in that they could like legitimately go $1 spent, $1.40 made and put a billion dollars in to increase? I mean, the TAM must be crazy. How many people need AI tools to correct their grammar? Well, so they've definitely evolved into more general AI, I believe. I'm sure they're going to be kind of like moving more into...

overall just AI solutions for companies. I mean, you're not taking in that kind of money, which is riskier because it's a less predictable revenue stream. But in terms of do they have a predictable model for this, they've been around for 14 years. The amount of upsell and if you've ever installed it and didn't pay for it, the number of emails you get from them, they're very good at that stuff.

entire lifecycle marketing. So I think for the traditional product, they probably have a really, really good model. I think whatever direction they're going to try to move in this new AI world, it's going to be interesting. But to me, again, they don't have to pay it back. So that's up to General Catalyst if it doesn't work. Yeah, I think it's a very risky bet. And here's my hot take on Grammarly.

I think they're going to go extinct. I think I wouldn't call them a rapper because they were around before large language models, but all this logic that they painstakingly built into their program and all the AI development that they did, you could legitimately just drop an article into chat GPT and ask it for grammar and usage and spelling checks. And it does a marvelous job. I,

I am no longer using Grammarly. I'm just using ChatGPT for this, and it's even better than Grammarly was. Yeah, well, I completely agree with that. So apart from the fascinating element of the financing, I do agree that a grammar checker, I don't see how that remains, how it still works. But again...

I'm sure they're expanding into new content generation efforts and stuff if you have it plugged in, if it's already evaluated your writing. I would hope that there's other areas on productivity. It's a risky one, but I'm glad to see some activity in the whole financing space. Innovation, not even activity. Man, what are they, 14 years old, but they're going to raise a billion? I don't know. Don't you think at a certain point you've got to figure it out?

They were valued at $13 billion in 2021.

off of a $300 million raise or $200 million. They had some insane multiple. So to their credit, they stick around. They got the COVID bump, things came off a bit, now they're doing this. So this is a company, it's like a financial vehicle disguised as a grammar checking tool, my favorite kind of thing. - That is your favorite company, absolutely.

All right, let's do a couple minutes about Elon leaving the Trump administration. His time to be a special government employee is coming to an end. That's 130 days he's leaving. He's going to focus more on his businesses. He wrote the Doge mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout government. But he also said that the spending bill making its way through Congress undermines the work that Doge is doing since it's adding, I think,

Well, it's adding billions, at least billions to the deficit or trillions even. The New York Post writes, so going to go to a conservative outlet to sort of touch on this. How did the New York Post cover this? With a story that Tesla shareholders are demanding Elon Musk work 40 hours per week amid a crisis.

And they sent a letter to the Tesla board chair saying that the board must require Musk to spend a minimum of 40 hours per week at the company and adopt new governance policies that would limit directors' external commitments. They also called for a formal CEO succession plan. I guess, look, it's indisputable that Elon Musk's time in the government did not really end up being a good thing for his companies.

So Ranjan, I guess the question for you is twofold. One, did it work inside the government? Did Doge work in any capacity? And two, can he now reverse the damage he's done to the companies? On number one, I think I have to imagine most people are in agreement that it did not work. To me, the more fascinating part is how...

just anticlimactic the exit was. Like, I mean, if just, if we go back to the, the days of February and March, I mean, the level of intensity and energy around the Doge conversation, and then it just kind of fizzled away with doing a lot of damage along the way. But, you know, like,

Certainly in terms of the savings that were promised, the trillions, none of that happened. I think the interesting question is what happens now to the Teslas of the world and SpaceX and stuff. I think...

I don't see the brand and reputational damage you can't just undo, especially with Tesla being a, like if it was a more progressive brand before, the typical owner at least was more progressive and environmentally focused. I don't see how you get that back.

If they're to just kind of actually launch some just wildly industry-leading products, I think that's interesting. But I don't know. I think there's long-term damage that's going to be tough to undo. What about you?

Yeah, I definitely think there's going to be long term damage at the companies. And but we'll see. I think that we tend people tend to be quickly forgiving. I don't know. Not always when it comes to a business leader entering politics in this way. But to me, I think one of the interesting things is the way that this did come to an end.

It was a fizzle, not a breakup with Trump, if you know what I'm saying. Like a lot of people expected this to blow up. But Musk has also said that he plans to keep his small office at the White House. Trump said he's going to be involved. So I think that the thing that really did Musk's effort in was politics. Like it turns out that politics is political. And there's a, you know, when you're trying to change a system the way that he tried to change it,

There are certain people you have to win favor with. And he ended up sort of sparring with a lot of cabinet secretaries in a way that sort of ended up dooming

the the initiative now we're going to have Bill Vass on who's the CTO of Booz Allen in a couple weeks and he's going to talk a little bit about the way that these Doge priorities live on in terms of getting the government to use technology to be more efficient uh but ultimately uh the the Doge era Elon's Doge era fell far short of the goals that even he set and I think that is just the bow you tie on it the bow you tie on it I think

That's the best interpretation of this. All right, let's close this week with a discussion of CEOs sending their AI avatars to deliver their earnings report. So Sebastian Szymankowski, who's been on the show, the CEO of Klarna, this is from TechCrunch, he's leaning all the way into the idea that his buy now pay later IPO bound startup is an AI company. When Klarna delivered updated quarterly earnings on Monday, it was his AI avatar that presented the highlights.

according to the company's YouTube video. And then after him, Zoom CEO Eric Wan,

He followed suit using his avatar for initial comments. He deployed his custom avatar via Zoom Clips, the company's asynchronous video creation tool. He says, I am proud to be among the first CEOs to use an AI avatar in earnings calls. He said, or rather his avatar said, it's just one example of how Zoom is pushing the boundaries of communication and collaboration.

Is this like just a sign that all business communication is sort of worthless and most of it is sort of worthless and we're just going to end up having people send their avatars to meetings instead of themselves? Well, okay. I think...

Three things. One, I think I got to respect Klarna's CEO more because he just did it even. And it obviously helps with the overall AI branding a bit, but it's not like product related where Zoom tried to make it more of a product demo saying that we're using Zoom clips to actually make this. It's just one example of how Zoom is pushing the boundaries of communication and collaboration. So that was a little bit too salesy and promo-y. I think that...

Your point that does this show that business communication, a lot of it was pointless anyways? I think yes. To me, earnings calls, the CEO reading out the scripted part never made sense to me. Just send out the scripts and take the extra 15 minutes for the questions. That's the only important part. So this actually, I actually kind of love it because it shows the uselessness of the CEO ever actually delivering those remarks.

So I think I'm not pro-Avatar. I'm pro-make business communication worthwhile for everyone and don't waste our time. I mean, did you see some of those VO news clips? Like what else could you AI avatarize? Like, is it going to be news anchors? I mean, if it can be a CEO reading the earnings report, can it just be news anchors as well? Like where does this end? No, but to me, scripted language is,

Maybe does not need to be. Company wide updates. Yeah, no, no, but it does not need to be video necessarily. The earnings calls are the perfect example. News reports as well. Maybe if it's a scripted news report, not natural interview or conversation or kind of like genuinely valuable, uh,

piece of information that has like emotion tied to it, then it to me, it's more if you can do that with an avatar, maybe it did not need to be done in the first place. I think the same thing with like generative AI overall, I think we're going to find a lot of written communication that starts to get, you know, generated by AI. In reality, the discovery will be we didn't actually need that communication.

Yeah, a lot of this was kind of like proof of work, right? It's like you write a recommendation letter, who cares what the recommendation letter says, you took the time to write it. And that's what AI sort of minimizes now is that it's just like, okay, well, here's a letter of recommendation. It took me one second to prompt on chat GPT. And I may or may not care about this person. Or, you know, here's an update to the company, like a CEO's weekly update to the company delivered by its VR, their VR avatar.

This is the world we're moving toward. - Wait, wait, so that is such a good point that like a recommendation letter was less about the letter and more as you said, this person took 30 minutes to an hour to invest in this person's future. A CEO's communication to the company was about them connecting personally with their company rather than like the actual words being said. It's a lot more than the actual content.

And if we lose those things, then maybe very quickly we realize a lot of that stuff was wasting all of our time anyway. So apparently this is the most optimistic Friday I've had in a long time. There's no white collar bloodbath. Communications will improve. Financial innovation is alive and well in America. It's going to be a good weekend.

I was going to say, if the CEO no longer reads the earnings calls, then what does the rest of the white collar workforce get rid of? And then you do eventually lead to an entry level bloodbath. Maybe Dario was right in the end. See, we can both twist that exactly the way we want to.

So this is the beauty of media. Beauty of media. All right, Ron John, thanks so much for joining. Great to see you as always. Good to see you next week. Thank you everybody for listening. If everything goes according to plan, we're going to have Anthony Scaramucci on the show next Wednesday. And why don't we have a classic hit play us out the famous and much beloved Hype or True theme song. Thank you everybody. Have a good one. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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