Dazzle AI CEO Marissa Mayer recently became the latest tech CEO to face criticism over seemingly out-of-touch comments extolling the usefulness of AI.<\/p>\n
In Mayer\u2019s case, that involved asking an AI tool for help with a school-assigned description of her daughter<\/a>. For OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, that\u2019s included suggesting that parents create personalized podcasts for their kids\u2019 drive to school<\/a> and also declaring that he could not imagine parenting without ChatGPT<\/a>. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even suggested that it will become increasingly acceptable to meet your social and romantic needs through AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n This all led TechCrunch\u2019s Amanda Silberling to wonder if AI executives are simply too out-of-touch to build products for normal people<\/a> \u2014 a crucial question with Anthropic set to go public<\/a> just as Wall Street begins losing its appetite for heavy AI spending<\/a>.<\/p>\n On the latest episode of the Equity podcast<\/a>, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O\u2019Kane, and I chatted with Amanda about why industry leaders can sometimes seem so tone deaf. Kirsten wondered if this is more of a marketing problem or a product problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n Amanda\u2019s answer: \u201cA little bit of both.\u201d She also argued that the tech industry is increasingly pushing a future \u201cwhere basic human interaction gets more and more optimized out of actually occurring,\u201d adding, \u201cAnd call me old school, but I think that humans being able to talk to each other is probably a net positive for society.\u201d<\/p>\n Keep reading for a preview of our conversation<\/a>, edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n Anthony Ha: There\u2019s a lot of societal skepticism about AI, this feeling that the people running these companies don\u2019t have our best interests at heart, that they\u2019re out of touch. And so, you would just think, \u201cMaybe don\u2019t make statements like that,\u201d because of course, people are going to see them very skeptically.<\/p>\n I think [CEOs] are trying to walk this delicate balance. On the one hand, there\u2019s a tremendous financial incentive for them to make the case that you should use this technology in every aspect of your lives. But when you make that case, it actually [doesn\u2019t paint] a very appealing picture. In some cases, it\u2019s downright dystopian.<\/p>\n Kirsten Korosec: Anthony, if they took your advice, we would have nothing to talk about on this show.\u00a0<\/p>\n But I will say this: There\u2019s this whole idea of ChatGPT and other AI tools making your life easier when it comes to personal relationships. And in many of these cases, it just seems to overcomplicate what would be, like, observing your child. That might be hard for some people, the people who are building these products, and it doesn\u2019t necessarily relate to everyone else out there in the world. It can just seem so incredibly disconnected when you see these quotes.<\/p>\n To me, it always comes back to \u2014 who are they speaking to? Are there people out there who can relate? Maybe there are.<\/p>\n Amanda Silberling: Other use cases we\u2019ve seen people mention are, like, the Bumble CEO Whitney Wolf Heard has made comments<\/a> about, \u201cWell, what if we had AI concierges, your AI dates the other person\u2019s AI. And then if the AIs have a good date together, then they introduce the people.\u201d<\/p>\n Or in the New York Times article, Marissa Mayer mentioned, \u201cWell, what if my AI could coordinate with my husband\u2019s AI\u201d and stuff like that. And I think that it feels like people are trying to over-optimize out of just having conversations with people.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve already seen that happen in my generation, where I do notice in myself that if I\u2019m ordering takeout, it feels weird to call a place. I\u2019m just so used to, \u201cWell, obviously you can do it online and you don\u2019t have to talk to anyone. And I feel like there\u2019s just going to be more of these things, where basic human interaction gets more and more optimized out of actually occurring. And call me old school, but I think that humans being able to talk to each other is probably a net positive for society.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sean O\u2019Kane: Yeah, but what\u2019s the ROI, Amanda? How much revenue can you generate off of a conversation that somebody\u2019s having in meatspace?<\/p>\n Amanda: That is the thing, though. Dating is really inefficient. It sucks that you have to go on a bunch of dates with different people. You might waste an evening and be like, \u201cWell, that was a bust.\u201d And so you can see why people are [wondering,] \u201cWhat if you didn\u2019t have to go on dates? What if your AI could go on dates for you?\u201d But there\u2019s just something not human there.<\/p>\n And then also, you are outsourcing the decision of who you are going to date to a computer that you are trusting knows you better than yourself, which I don\u2019t think is true.<\/p>\n Kirsten: One thing that I think is worth going back to, and I sort of hinted about this earlier: Who are they talking to? Who is their audience for all these optimizations, in your view? Is it a product problem, or is it a messaging problem? Are they just talking about it in the wrong way, and actually, there\u2019s this really great value in here and it just seems out of touch with reality and humanity, but if they just talked about it differently, it would be better? Or is it actually a product problem, and to your point, that we\u2019re focusing on optimizing sort of the wrong things with AI tools?<\/p>\n Amanda: I think it\u2019s a little bit of both, but I think that the marketing problem comes from when you have these high-up people at these massively valuable companies in a room together, talking about the pain points in their lives, and [they focus on] making dinner reservations, booking flights. Everybody does those things, but I\u2019m not booking flights once a week. I\u2019m not making dinner reservations all the time. And when I do, those aren\u2019t really things that I find to be a particular challenge in my life.<\/p>\n I mean, obviously people find value from things like ChatGPT and Claude, but I think the value that the average person is finding isn\u2019t necessarily like booking a flight for me.<\/p>\n Anthony:\u00a0 One of the things I\u2019ve also been thinking about is, there are companies like Uber that, when it first launched, it was targeting this tech early adopter set in San Francisco, and I remember being very confident [that] this will never catch on more broadly. This is just for a very narrow audience of young urban millennials who have money to spare on cars, and it works [uniquely] well in San Francisco.\u00a0<\/p>\n For a lot of things, the tech industry has succeeded by betting that, \u201cPeople have not caught up with us, but we are the leading edge, and we reflect what the consumer of the future looks like, the family of the future looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n And in this case, it just seems like that bet is not borne out yet \u2014 for a variety of reasons, partly because the society that this technology is being promoted into is very different. People are starting to say, \u201cI don\u2019t love the influence that this technology is having in my life. I don\u2019t love that you\u2019re pitching this as something where every experience in my life should be optimized out of. But actually, I want to live my own life<\/a>. I actually want to parent my own children.\u201d<\/p>\n Amanda: I think that it\u2019s not a coincidence that at the same time we see this over-optimization happening among people in tech, that there\u2019s also a movement of people that are reverting back to wanting to use flip phones, which I\u2019ve talked about on Equity before<\/a>, or people who are buying CDs because they\u2019re tired of an algorithm telling them what they want to listen to.<\/p>\n And it is just an interesting cultural tension that\u2019s happening, where we haven\u2019t found the balance of what optimization actually helps us and what optimization just makes us feel like we aren\u2019t as human as we want to be.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n