THE EZRA KLEIN SHOWHOSTED BYNEW YORK TIMES OPINION
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Eventually, the state representative representing that community was able to get the money for that public restroom. And he got $1,700,000. Sorry. He sorry. It's a very funny story on some little bit of very grim. You got $1,700,000 from the state. Then people noticed that this toilet was gonna cost $1,700,000, and it got really mad. And it got a bunch of press coverage. And the celebration became a scandal, and the state came in and said, we're gonna claw back this money. This is ridiculous. Some people begin digging into the store. Like, what's going on here? The representative who gets the money says, look, I know this is ridiculous. I know this costs too much money, but this is how much I'm told a toilet costs. And so I gotta get you the money. Nobody wants me to get them the money for half of a public restroom. This is a question of, well, why does installing a public restroom cost so much money right here? And you begin to get the the sort of answer on schools, which I would call not an explanation, but a description of process. And construction costs are very high in San Francisco, go and you gotta pay for the city, you know, higher wage. And there are, like, 7 or 8 or 9 different agencies that need to sign off on this. And, you know, it has to go through a design review and the normal way we would do it is have a a a sort of design come out and then we have to do a feedback meeting with a local community to or they like the design. And there's just a million things that that pile on. And in every point of this pile on, there are public employee salaries. That are are are coming into the cost of this. And the reckon Park agent who ends up, you know, being quoted on this in in in the media said, look, you know, this is just our process, but nobody likes the process. Everybody's mad about it. The the members of government are mad about it, and he's mad about it too. Like he's saying in the in the paper, listen, if you wanted to be cheaper, you can pass some bills to make this cheaper for me. You can pass some laws. You can exempt putting a toilet in from environmental review, which, again,
And the spilling over looks very spiky. It looks like it's happening all of a sudden. It looks like it comes out of nowhere, and it's triggered by things hitting various critical points or just the public happened to be engaged at a certain time. So I think the easiest way for me to describe this in terms of my own personal experience, is, you know, so I I worked at at OpenAI for 5 years. I was one of the first employees to join, and they built a model in 2018 called GPT 1, which used something like a 100000 times less computational power than the models we build today. I looked at that, and I and my colleagues were among the first to run what are called scaling laws, which is basically studying what happens happens as you vary the size of the model, its capacity to absorb information, and the amount of data that you feed into it. And we found these very smooth patterns, and we had this projection that, look, if you spend a 100,000,000 or a 1000000000 or 10,000,000,000 on these models instead of the $10,000,000 we were spending then. Projections that all of these wondrous things would happen, and, you know, we imagine that they would have enormous economic value. Fast forward to about 2020, GPT 3 had just come out. It wasn't yet available as a chatbot. I led the development of that along with the team that eventually left to join Anthropic. And maybe for the whole period of 2021 and 2022, even though we continued to train models that were better and better and OpenAI continued to train models and Google continued to train models, there was surprisingly little public attention to the models. And I look at that, and I said, well, these models are incredible. They're getting better and better. What's going on? Why isn't this happening? Could this be a case where I was right about the technology but wrong about the economic impact, the practical value of the technology. And then all of a sudden, when ChatGPT came out, it was like
Their CEOs, they will all tell you this is just a new challenge for us to solve. We have to sort out what is human, what is AI generated. I actually think the supply increase is very meaningful. Like, maybe the most meaningful thing that will happen to the Internet because it will sort out the platforms that allow it to be there and have those problems and the places that don't. And I think that has not been a sorting that has occurred on the Internet in quite some time where there's 2 different kinds of things. The example that I'll give you is every social media platform right now is turning into a short form video home shopping network. LinkedIn just added short form videos. Like, they're all headed towards the same place all the time because they all have the same pressures. Didn't we already pivot to video a couple years ago? We pivoted to video. I actually love it when LinkedIn adds and takes away these features that other platforms have. They added stories because Snapchat and Instagram had stories, and they took the stories away because I don't think LinkedIn influencers wanna do Instagram reels, but now they're adding it again. And what you see is those platforms, their product, the thing that makes them money is advertising, which is fine. But they don't actually sell anything in the end. They sell advertising. Someone else down the line has to make a transaction. They have to buy a good or service from someone else. And if you don't have that, right, if you're just selling advertising that leads to another transaction, eventually, you optimize the entire pipe to the transaction. To get people to buy things, which is why TikTok is now, like all of TikTok is TikTok shop. Because they just want you to make a transaction. And that, those platforms are gonna be most open to AI because that is the most optimizable thing to get people to make a transaction. And I think real people will veer away from that. So I wanna hold on something that that you're getting at here, which to me is one of the most under discussed parts of AI, which is how do you actually make money off of it? And right now, there are not
The powerful technology is emerging beneath my fingertips. As much as I believe it's gonna change the world I live in profoundly, I find it really hard to just fit it into my own day to day work. I consistently, you know, sort of wander up to the AI, ask it a question, find myself somewhat impressed or unimpressed at the answer but it doesn't stick for me. It it is not a sticky habit. True for a lot of people I know and I think that failure matters. I think getting good at working with AI is gonna be an important skill in the next few years. I think having an intuition for how these systems work is gonna be important just for understanding what is happening to society and you can't do that if you don't get over this hump in the learning curve. If you don't get over this part where it's not really clear how to make AI part of your life. So I've been on a personal quest to get better at this and in that quest I have a guide. Ethan Malek is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He studies and and writes about innovation and entrepreneurship, but he has his newsletter, One Useful Thing, that has become really I think the best guide to how to begin using and how to get better at using AI. He's also got a new book on the subject co intelligence. And so I asked him on the show to walk me through what he's learned. This is gonna be the, I should say, the first of 3 shows on this topic. This one is about the present. The next is about some things I'm very worried about in the near future particularly around what AI is going to do to our digital commons. Then we're gonna have a show that is a little bit more about the curve we are all on but the slightly further future and the world we might soon be living in. As always my email for guest suggestions, thoughts, feedback as recline show at ny times.com. Ethan Malek, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So let's assume I'm interested in AI. And I tried chat GPT a bunch of times, and I was suitably impressed and weirded out for a minute. And so I know
Stand as your own political home. Absolutely. I think that that's a contradiction that's sort of hard to square and makes populism hard. It's an effective political strategy or rhetoric, but as a system of government, sometimes obviously has problems. But, yeah, the idea of Rothbard and the people around him was that they needed to take attack and and take over the Republican party. Obviously, in 2015, 16, Trump's candidacy was the realization of this, which was an attack on the Republican statue from a figure outside. You know, he's not part of the leadership of the Republican party. He very explicitly comes as an outsider and says, these people are idiots. They don't know what they're doing. They've been constantly selling you out. And he immediately electrifies Republicans. So is Rothbard, in this essay, in this moment, trying to create something new, this new thing of right wing populism? Or does he understand himself as describing something old? I think he understands himself as describing something old. So in this essay, one of the big inspirations for the strategy that he's devising or articulating here is Joe McCarthy. So many conservatives and centrist liberals or right leaning liberals looked at McCarthy and said, well, we don't like communism, and we're worried about this. And, you know, we're cold warriors and, but we, but he's so crude. He's so demagogic. If it was only put nicer and Rothbart says, no, you don't get it. The form, the means that he used this populous attack on the establishment is exactly the point. That's what was effective about it. He scared the living shit out of them, and that's what I like about it. And it was exciting and fun for people. And he talks about something called, and I think that this is really interesting to think about in terms of Trump, he came up with this in a memo when he was in the 19 fifties when he was working for a right wing think tank. He called it a pop
