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Incorporated. View PBI's disclosures at kraken.com/legal

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slash disclosures. This

0:32

is Recode Media, Peter Kafka. That is

0:34

me, and today we're gonna talk about

0:36

AI, because it's been that kind of

0:38

year. But first, some news. It's

0:41

not bad news, but it is news, and

0:43

that is, drum roll, this version

0:45

of Recode Media, which I've been making since

0:47

February 2016, that is

0:50

nearly eight years, is

0:52

coming to an end. As some of

0:54

you may have seen on social media last week, I

0:56

am heading over to Business Insider. We're

0:58

gonna blog about tech and media and business stuff. That

1:00

will be fun. And the plan

1:02

is to bring this podcast with a new

1:04

name over to Morning Brew, which,

1:07

like Business Insider, is owned by

1:09

Axel Springer. So that

1:11

will be a change, but like I said, that's not

1:14

bad, it's just a change. And for you,

1:16

the people who like to listen to this podcast, really shouldn't

1:18

be much of a change at all. That's

1:20

because Jim Bankoff, who runs Vox Media, is letting

1:22

me bring the feed for this show with me

1:25

to my new home. So

1:27

if you're subscribed to this show, God bless you.

1:30

If you haven't subscribed to this show, you should subscribe, it's free. Anyway,

1:32

regardless, if you subscribe to this show, all

1:35

you gotta do to listen to the new show is nothing.

1:38

Sometime in January, we're gonna start making new episodes,

1:40

and you will get those just like you get

1:42

this one. You don't have to do a thing.

1:45

I think over time, we might make some other changes

1:47

in the show. We're gonna start with a new name,

1:49

then we'll tweak the format a bit, perhaps, try some

1:51

new stuff, but we can talk about

1:53

that later. I also wanna say

1:55

some nice stuff about the people I'm working with right now, but

1:58

I've been talking for a while, so that. I can wait

2:00

at least one more week. Okay, back

2:02

to this show, which like I said is about AI.

2:04

First off, I'm talking to Alex Heath from The Verge.

2:07

Talk about what exactly happened to OpenAI. As

2:10

you'll recall, they had fired their CEO the last time

2:12

we talked, and now their CEO,

2:15

Sam Altman, is their CEO again, so what

2:17

exactly changed? And then I talked to Danielle

2:19

Coffey. She is the CEO of the News

2:21

Media Alliance. That's a trade group that represents

2:23

thousands of publishers, including Box Media, trying to

2:26

carve out some kind of deal with the

2:28

big AI companies who are using publisher stuff,

2:30

mostly without permission. Danielle Coffey and

2:32

I spoke in late November before

2:35

the OpenAI stuff. All of what we

2:37

discussed there should still hold up today

2:39

though. Meanwhile, if you're here looking at

2:41

this on Wednesday, she is testifying before

2:43

Congress, so you can both see and

2:45

hear Danielle Coffey. Okay, let's

2:47

do an actual interview. Here's me and

2:49

Alex Heath. Alex Heath

2:51

covers tech for The Verge. He was

2:53

one of the leading reporters on the

2:56

Sam Altman OpenAI story, which means he

2:58

really needed a break, but he is

3:00

back. Welcome, Alex, thanks for talking to

3:02

us. I feel honored to be one

3:04

of the last. Yeah, it's

3:07

like the Layla montage

3:09

in Goodfellas, where

3:12

I'm not confusing it with the Godfather.

3:14

Anyway, the loose ends are getting tied

3:16

up, so we're gonna talk, this

3:18

is very meta. We said we're gonna have a

3:20

meta conversation, but now it's gotten very meta. Let's

3:22

talk about OpenAI. You were covering this minute by

3:24

minute. When did you finally

3:26

get to stop writing about OpenAI? I

3:29

think I finally decided to take

3:31

a break from reporting at like

3:34

10 p.m. the night before Thanksgiving.

3:36

I think we all realized at that point

3:39

that it was going to at least have

3:41

a moment of a break for us all.

3:43

So I should back up. The last time we talked

3:46

about OpenAI is with Kevin Russo of The New York

3:48

Times, and I had to caveat every other sentence saying,

3:50

at this time, as we're recording, because things were moving,

3:52

I think when I interviewed, when I talked to Kevin,

3:55

Sam Altman was out of OpenAI. If

3:58

you had just ignored the story completely, That

4:01

might have been one way to go,

4:03

right? Because everything is kind of returned

4:05

to where it was minus a couple

4:07

board members. So you cover this nonstop

4:09

24 hours essentially for about five, six

4:11

days. What is the net

4:13

result of what happened at OpenAI? Yeah,

4:16

I think on the surface you could say, man, you

4:18

could have just closed your eyes for those five days

4:20

and reopened them and everything would look the same. On

4:24

the surface that does appear to be true,

4:26

but I would actually say that there

4:28

have been some pretty important

4:31

changes. Most notably, Sam

4:33

Altman and his co-founder Greg Brockman, who

4:35

are both kind of ousted,

4:39

were on the board of the nonprofit

4:41

that controls OpenAI before

4:43

all this. And five days later,

4:45

they are no longer on the board, which means they don't

4:47

have a vote in kind of key

4:49

governance matters, which I would say is that

4:52

could change. Obviously, the new board could still

4:55

hire them, but

4:57

there has been a pretty, I would say,

5:03

impactful board change as a result. It's

5:05

interesting because I think from the surface

5:08

most people would say, oh, what has

5:10

happened is Sam Altman won. He has

5:12

more power than he had before. He

5:14

was fired by this nonprofit board. That

5:17

nonprofit board has essentially been fired or the

5:19

people who fired him have been pushed out.

5:21

But you're saying actually it's still kind of

5:23

unsettled. Yeah, very much so.

5:26

There's also going to be an investigation

5:28

by an outside law firm into what

5:30

led to the firing.

5:34

The details of that are still being worked out.

5:37

Who's going to be kind of