Dazzle AI CEO Marissa Mayer recently became the latest technology CEO to face criticism for seemingly off-topic comments extolling the usefulness of AI.
In Mayer’s case, that included asking an AI tool for help with a description of her daughter assigned by the school. For OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, that includes suggesting parents create personalized podcasts for their children’s school journeys and declaring that he can’t imagine raising a family without ChatGPT. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg even suggested that meeting social and romantic needs through AI will become increasingly acceptable.
All of this made TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling wonder if AI executives are simply too uninterested in building products for the masses. That’s a key question for Anthropic, which plans to go public just as Wall Street is starting to lose appetite for big spending on AI.
On the latest episode of the Equity Podcast, Kirsten Kolosek, Sean O’Kane and I spoke with Amanda about why industry leaders can sometimes seem so tone-deaf. Kirsten wondered if this was a marketing issue or a product issue.
Amanda’s answer is “a little bit of both.” She also argues that the technology industry is increasingly pushing for a future where “basic human interactions are increasingly optimized away from what actually happens,” adding, “People say it’s outdated, but I think it’s probably a net positive for society that humans can talk to each other.”
Continue reading for a preview of the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Anthony Ha: There’s a lot of societal skepticism about AI and a sense that the people running these companies don’t have our best interests at heart and that they’re out of line. So you think, “Maybe I shouldn’t make that statement.” Naturally, people will view them with great skepticism.
I think[CEOs]are trying to strike this delicate balance. On the other hand, there are significant financial incentives for them to insist that this technology should be used in every aspect of life. However, making that claim makes for a very attractive picture (although it doesn’t actually become a picture). In some cases, it’s downright dystopian.
Kirsten Kolosek: Anthony, if they took your advice, there would be nothing to talk about on this show.
But I will say this. ChatGPT and other AI tools have the idea of making your life easier when it comes to personal relationships. And many of these cases seem to overcomplicate things like observing children. That may be difficult for some people, the people who are developing these products, and it doesn’t necessarily concern everyone else in the world. When you look at these quotes, they may seem incredibly disconnected.
For me, what always bothers me is who are they talking to? Is there anyone you can relate to? Maybe there is.
Amanda Silberling: Another use case that people are mentioning is Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd making comments like, “What if you had an AI concierge? Your AI would date the other AI. And if the AIs had a good date, they’d introduce you to that person.”
Or, as Marissa Mayer said in a New York Times article, “What if my AI could work with my husband’s AI?” And I think it feels like people are trying to over-optimize just by talking to people.
I’ve already seen it happen with my generation, and I realized within myself that it feels weird to call a store if you’re ordering takeout. “Well, of course you can do it online, and you don’t have to talk to anyone. And I feel like we’re going to see more and more optimization of basic human interaction from actually happening. It’s an old-fashioned way of saying it, but I think the ability for humans to talk to each other is probably a net positive for society.
Sean O’Kane: Yeah, but what’s the ROI, Amanda? How much revenue can you generate from the conversations someone is having on Meatspace?
Amanda: But that’s what it is. Dating is really inefficient, isn’t it? It’s annoying having to go on multiple dates with different people. You might end up wasting your night and thinking, “Oh, I failed.” So you can see why people wonder, “What if you didn’t have to go on a date? What if an AI went on a date for you?” But there is something that is not human.
And you’re also entrusting the decision of who to date to a computer that you trust to know you better than you do, which I don’t think is true.
Kirsten: There’s one thing I think is worth going back to. We’ve alluded to this a little bit before, but who are they talking to? Who do you think is the target audience for all these optimizations? Is it a product issue or a message issue? Are they just talking about it in the wrong way and, in fact, there’s really great value here that seems out of touch with reality and humanity, but wouldn’t it be better if they were talking about it in a different way? Or is it actually a product issue and, to your point, focused on using AI tools to optimize for some sort of wrong thing?
Amanda: I think it’s a little bit of both, but I think the marketing problem comes from people at the top of a very valuable company getting together in the same room, talking about the problems in their lives, and focusing on booking dinners and booking flights. Everyone does that, but I don’t book a flight once a week. I don’t always make dinner reservations. Even if I do, they don’t feel like special challenges in my life.
I mean, it’s clear that people see value in things like ChatGPT and Claude, but I don’t think the value that the average person sees is necessarily like booking a flight for me.
Anthony: One of the things I was also thinking about is that when companies like Uber first launched, they were targeting early adopters of the technology based in San Francisco, and I remember being very convinced that this was never going to become more widespread. This is aimed at a very specific demographic of young urban millennials who can afford a car, and it works (uniquely) well in San Francisco.
In many ways, the technology industry has been successful in making the bet that people are not catching up with us yet, but we are cutting edge and reflect the consumers of the future and the families of the future.
And in this case, that bet doesn’t seem to have materialized yet. There are many reasons for this, one of which is the vastly different societies in which this technology is being promoted. People are starting to say, “I don’t like the impact this technology is having on my life. I don’t like selling this as if every experience in my life is something that should be optimized. But the reality is, I want to live my life. I actually want to raise my children.”
Amanda: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that at the same time that we’re seeing this over-optimization among people in the tech industry, we’re also seeing this movement of people going back to using flip phones, which I talked about before on Equity, and people buying CDs because they’re fed up with algorithms telling them what they want to listen to.
And it’s just an interesting cultural tension going on where we haven’t found the balance between what optimizations actually help us and what optimizations just make us feel less human than we’d like them to be.
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