Tech Talk with Kara Swisher: Mass Layoffs, ChatGPT & More

HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Sarah, thanks. Kara Swisher, thanks so much for joining us. Let’s start this conversation – earlier this week, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, announced that they are going to be letting Donald Trump back on their platforms. And they say that they have put in certain guardrails to prevent what happened on January 6th from happening again. And that there will be consequences if he continues to do what he’s done so often on social media with them. You think it’ll work?

KARA SWISHER, HOST, “PIVOT”: No. No. Cuz this time he’s gonna be better. I don’t know, I just – the past two years that he’s been off, he’s been pretty, I would say racist. He lies on Truth Social, where he’s been since that time. And he’s doing the same things that got him kicked off of Facebook before. So I don’t know why he would change his behavior for Facebook or have – I just don’t, I don’t understand why they think he’s gonna do the things they think he’s gonna do now, that he’s sort of learned his lesson. Cuz he hasn’t learned his lesson. They came right – he got right back on the platform.

SREENIVASAN: I mean, the companies seem to want to thread this sort of needle where they don’t want to get jammed up by conservatives who say there’s a bias against conservatives. And at the same time they want to kind of dish this all off onto this oversight board, and say, well we had to make a decision. It’s been two years, so here’s our decision.

SWISHER: Yeah, I got that. I mean, one of the problems was, is they made the decision in haste and it was after years of him abusing the platform and they didn’t do anything about it. And it’s sort of like raising a child and feeding them endless sugar and then cutting off the sugar and now they’re giving him the sugar again cuz he can presumably handle it better. It – the whole thing is just so chaotic. And I think that’s one of the things the oversight board pointed out is they had no rules in place. And apparently now they have rules in place, which they did have before, they just didn’t enforce them. And so the whole thing, they’re gonna spend all their time whack-a-mole with this guy and then ultimately probably have to kick him off at some point. Cuz he’ll definitely cross a line. And that’s what’s happened with Elon Musk on Twitter. They had Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist, back on yesterday and then they kicked him off right away. Same thing with Kanye. These people don’t change and they love gaming these systems and it’s not their fault at this point. It’s these platforms. They either should have rules or not have rules.

SREENIVASAN: Has the landscape changed significantly enough? I mean, set aside kind of the relevance of Donald Trump.

SWISHER: Right? The safety. Yeah. I mean, I think, I don’t really want – I have – Nick Clegg is a very smart guy, but is he the one that should determine our public safety and who’s safe and who’s unsafe? I guess he can on his platform. I wish they’d just say, you know what, we just decided to do it and we have no rhyme or reason. We’re a private company. We can do whatever we want. I’d prefer that – for them to say that. But now, a pub – a private company essentially, which is a profit making company, is deciding for the rest of society what should happen. And that’s where we are at this moment cuz these social media platforms have such power. Now, let’s just say Facebook has a lot less power from two years ago, which is, I think, probably a good thing. There’s more competition. There’s – audiences have gone elsewhere. And so maybe that will help it.

SREENIVASAN: Another topic that’s making headlines in the tech world. And I don’t know if the problem is that they’re making headlines or the underlying layoffs. We are hearing about Spotify cutting about 6% of its workforce. I wanna say Google 12,000, Amazon, 18,000, Microsoft, 10,000. Obviously the economy has hundreds of millions of jobs or millions of jobs. And this is a very small, you know, drop in that bucket. But it seems to have an outsized amount of attention that it gets when these companies do. Why do you think that is?

SWISHER: Cuz people are obsessed with technology people. It’s not a very big deal in the scheme of things. I’ve been a little tougher on this. They hired enormously during the pandemic cuz their stocks went up so much and they over, they overhired and their costs – they had to bring their costs into line. It’s as simple as that. You know, I feel sorry for anyone who gets laid off, but I feel more sorry for a regular worker than tech workers. They have lots of jobs available to them. And that’s what they’re doing. They say they hired 40,000 people, I think that was either Facebook or Microsoft, and they’re laying off 10. So they’ve a net – a net gain of 30,000, which is still a lot. And so they’re trying to figure out their businesses when the prospects aren’t as good. And that’s what happened. They had a huge boom, and now – this is very typical – they’re cutting back, they’re cutting back more than they usually do. They usually keep these people in place for the next boom. But in this case Wall Street, because of the declines in stock are saying do something about costs essentially. And I think that’s really what’s happening. People are investing in businesses that are working for them and cutting certain things. Microsoft cut out some of their hardware stuff. They’ve never been good at hardware. And so that’s, that was a natural place to do it. And those people don’t have any roles to go within that company. And so they can go elsewhere. And one of the things that’s that’s, these are not nearly as bad as the last two layoffs, which I think was in 2008 and 2001, 2 area is lots of companies are formed. If people get laid off, they start, they do startups. It’s always, you know, it’s, it’s sort of a trope for Silicon Valley, but it’s actually true.

SREENIVASAN: Speaking of Microsoft, they decided to put a much bigger investment behind OpenAI, the company that’s behind things like ChatGPT and DALL-E and for anybody in our audience that doesn’t know what chat GPT is, it’s sort of a large language model that’s been trained to answer questions in a very natural human sounding way. Why is this significant?

SWISHER: Well, I don’t know if it’s as significant as the press makes it out to be. I, some of it’s a little bit of a stunt, right? Oh, look, it can talk like a person kind of thing. Like I’m a little bit – I’m gonna wait to see where the actual businesses are. There’s gonna be a lot of investment in this. And by the way, Google and Facebook and – excuse me – and Meta, and Amazon and Apple all have very significant AI businesses. They’re just not doing it this way. This is sort of a more loud way to do it because ChatGPT wants to sort of get market share at this moment when people are paying attention to it. And Microsoft has been really far behind in search and this area. And so this is a great way for them to get in here and try to take a lead. That said, Google’s really – I know they’re saying they’re scrambling. They’re not – they have some of the most significant investments in AI. And the question is, what do you make of it? How does it change search? How does it change the way we behave now? How does it change a range of things? And that’ll be interesting. But right now they’ll probably be a bit of a boom around it and it’ll feel a little like crypto. Like everyone’s gonna have a chat bot or whatever. And so let’s just see where the businesses are rather than, Ooh, it can write a term paper for a student in college and help them cheat. I mean, it’s gotta have something, a business beyond that. And we’ll see where it goes. I think some of the applications in search and imagery are really interesting, but it’s sort of search on steroids if you think about it. And we’ll see, we’ll see if that, that becomes a business. I always like to wait and see what these things, cuz they – everyone goes, Ooh, ah. And then, you know, like the Oculus, it’s a very good device, but you don’t use it every day. And we’ll see if people wanna join the Metaverse, but not today. They don’t. And yeah, for lots of reasons, we’ll see.

SREENIVASAN: You know, while teenagers are probably looking up how to write term papers through ChatGPT.

SWISHER: I know. Yeah. That story, that story has to stop.

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. Right. I mean –

SWISHER: The press loves that story. I’m like, I think that teeter – teenagers have been cheating for many, many centuries now. So it’s just a new fresh way to cheat. Whatever.

SREENIVASAN: Don’t, yeah. I saw a college professor out there saying, you know, my peers and I are all looking for ChatGPT to help grade those papers.

SWISHER: Yeah. Whatever, you know, whatever.

SREENIVASAN: But I wonder also, you know, one category of the tech companies that’s also suffered through the pandemic and maybe coming out the other side is the streaming players right now. Netflix announced that Reed Hastings, the co-founder and first CEO, is kind of taking an executive chairman role, and he’s gonna have two co-CEOs. It sort of sounds like he’s still gonna be in the mix.

SWISHER: He is. He is.

SREENIVASAN: But you know they’re, they’re coming off of, maybe a bottom. They kind of, overspend and they’re, they’re tightening their belts in a big way. What, what do you see for them? What do you hear from people that are kind of in this entertainment arena about what Netflix has to do to try to regain some of that swagger?

SWISHER: Well, it’s a media company. It’s gotta keep doing hits. That’s how you win in this thing. It’s not, you know, it’s sort of is a tech company, but not really. It just as a tech-ish, tech adjacent, I guess, you know, it delivers it. But everyone’s on to how to do that now. It’s sort of, you know, are you in the car business? I mean, you’re not in the engine business, but you are kind of thing. And then you, then you compete on design and cool cars and various, various things that consumers want. And so what’s happened here, there’s a lot of spending going on. There’s still a lot of spending going on. And I think what’s happened is Netflix managed to eek out a pretty good business doing it. They have competitors that are suffering, like, because it costs so much to get into this business. And then there are big tech companies like Apple and Amazon, which have more money that can really spend here. And so I think it’s still gonna be a spending spree going on, but a lot of these companies that are competing, like Disney and some of the other media companies are gonna have to figure out how to do costs and make money from it, because you can’t have an endless amount of these streaming services and have consumers wanna buy them. And, you know, it’ll, we’ll see. Do people want old IP like Star Wars or Bond? There’s now MGM Plus, I don’t know, that just was introduced. There’s plus on everything. And will they have to be bundled? Who – where’s the valuable thing? And I think unbundling and bundling is something that happens all the time back and forth. And – but Netflix has, and under Reed Hastings, you have to say, done a remark – has been a remarkable pioneer here. And the fact that they continue to innovate is really impressive. We’ll see, they’re gonna always be having to compete for talent and great shows and things people like, and they’re quite good at it. Yeah. And so we’ll see if someone gets better. And it’s highly competitive though, and so they have to keep on their toes.

SREENIVASAN: Let’s talk a little bit about Elon Musk. Tesla, the primary company that he makes most of his money from had just announced earnings recently.

SWISHER: Great, great earnings.

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. Right. And at the same time, they might have missed Wall Street estimates, which were expecting greater earnings. Right. So, given that he is spending some of his time these days between court cases, he was in a federal court recently about the tweet that he sent out a couple of years ago saying that he had secured funding at $420 to take this company. I mean, so there’s that case. Then there’s – there are – there’s a lot of different court challenges that he has while also managing this company Twitter, hands-on, which he’s doing, you know, but what do you think the kind of accountability is that people can expect? I mean, I know there’s Tesla shareholders that are kind of upset saying, Hey, come be the CEO of this company that I have all my money in.

SWISHER: Yeah. It dipped quite significantly down close to a hundred dollars, which was amazing given how ridiculous the price was. It was, it was up in the couple hundreds of dollars. And that’s where Elon sold actually, in order to buy Twitter. You know, I think it’s difficult because he’s got this business that is far ahead, the most significant in this space. That said, there’s a lot of competitors. There’s a decline in demand, he’s had to cut prices. He does have better margins than other car companies. So he can do that. But, you know, eventually when there’s choice, people are gonna go and buy other things. Right. And there’s gonna be good competitors. Even though Tesla’s way ahead with manufacturing and battery technology, people do tend to catch up and people are very committed, whether it’s Mercedes or Ford or these newer companies like Lucid. So he’s got a lot of pressure there, even though he did very well and sold a lot of cars. But eventually everyone’s not gonna wanna have a Tesla. They’re gonna want something else. And the alternatives are getting better and better. So that’s under pressure. And he really should be focusing on that, cuz that’s a really terrific – it has been a terrific business where he dominates. Then there’s SpaceX, which also he’s doing very well dominating in the – in rocketry and, but he does of course have competitors there. And those are two significant businesses which are also challenged and costly and you need to figure out ways to continue to make money doing them. Like in Tesla’s case, they wanna expand their battery plants. Great idea. That’s where money should go for their businesses. That said, over to the other side, he’s got all these legal cases, whether it’s around silly things he says on Twitter – I think most things tend to focus on silly things he says on Twitter that affect his businesses. Silly and terrible things, actually. It’s now become really kind of every day he says something outrageous in order to attract attention to himself because he’s obviously so shy. But he, you know, he’s got – he’s creating lots of problems for himself when he has some very significant businesses to pay attention to and over Twitter. He seems to just be wrecking it for reasons that he says he’s got a master plan. Other people think maybe he’s just ID and is just doing it cuz he feels like it. We’ll see what happens. Twitter was never a very big business and never a promising business the way Tesla and SpaceX has been.

SREENIVASAN: You know, I also wonder about kind of the different levers that he has or governments have over him because he has these two big businesses, Tesla and SpaceX, that are really in a way very intertwined, one with China and one with the United States. I mean the, you know, could the Chinese pick up and say, Hey, it’d be, it’d be just, we love those cars, but, you know, could you do something about the anti-China stuff on Twitter? Cuz it would be, it would be just too bad if there was a lockdown around your factories. Right. On the one hand. And then on the other hand, if the US wants to try to do some sort of regulation, he could turn around and say, yeah, you know, can you find yourself a different ride to the International Space Station?

SWISHER: Right. Right. Well he’s gotta be careful about that cuz they will find, they will find another ride to the International Space Station eventually. You know, I think what’s difficult is this person can seem so ridiculous on so many levels, including how he behaves on Twitter, which is about, you know, maybe a very badly raised 10 year old boy. I think – incredibly bad eating a lot of sugar, speaking of sugar and other things. And so that’s the problem there. And then you have these significant businesses that are promising and really innovative. I don’t, I think at some point you can push it so far with people. Everybody, you know, everybody always says – you know, my grandmother used to say the graveyards are full of indispensable people. And so, you know, eventually if he pushes the government too far in the United States, they’ll find other alternatives. Eventually if consumers get kind of pissed over kind of the things he’s said. Most of his – the people who buy Teslas are the ones he’s attacking right now. The woke people. Maybe they’ll get tired of it and go somewhere else around – every one of his businesses is gonna be challenged. But you’re right. If he’s using them to help other businesses, it starts to get really dicey for him and for everybody else. But ultimately, eventually there will be competitors and there will be, you know, either he’ll lose a court case or the government will say, enough of you, you’re a security risk, or whatever happens that happen. And it’s a shame because a lot of his businesses are really quite innovative and, you know, eventually you can’t do all those businesses all at once. He’s sort of spreading himself rather thin as a person. And so in that case he sort of likes to be that Ironman kind of guy, but nobody – that’s a fictional character. You know, a very delightful movie, so I don’t, you know.

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. You know, speaking of security risks, the United States in local governments, the federal government have had these conversations about how to treat TikTok. Is there a there, there?

SWISHER: Well, you know, they’re trying to, right now. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States is trying very hard to figure out how to separate information used by US users of TikTok using Oracle and some other means to do so. They’re really in a jam because no matter what you say, whatever comp – it’s owned by a – it’s a Chinese company and the Chinese Communist Party is very involved in the companies from there. And so whether it’s issues around propaganda, which I think is more significant, whether it’s surveillance or things like that, which I think is probably less significant, I do think there is a, there is – should be a concern about that here in this country. I wrote a column three years ago saying, I love TikTok. It’s a great product. I use it on a burner phone cause I don’t trust the Communist party. I, why would I? I don’t, I don’t trust most governments, but I really don’t trust theirs cuz they’ve shown a record of doing that. That said, they’re super innovative, they’re doing some amazing things, people love to use them. And so there has to be a way to figure out how to, how to maybe separate it in some fashion. I’m not sure how – what’s gonna happen there, but it’s certainly not gonna – especially cuz US companies, US tech companies aren’t allowed in China. That’s the other thing. And they’re allowed here. So, you know, these things have to be sorted out by governments and that’s, that’s where it’s really – that’s where it’s going. Is that this is gonna be something settled by between governments and with government intervention and, as it should be in this case.

SREENIVASAN: Kara Swisher, thanks so much for joining us.

SWISHER: Thank you.