Hello, and welcome to Decoder! I’m Hayden Field, senior AI reporter at The edge and your guest host of Thursday’s episode. I’m filling in for Nilay while he’s still on parental leave, and I’m excited to continue diving into the good, the bad, and the questionable of the AI industry.
This has been a very big week of news in the AI space, and much of it has to do with OpenAI. The company held its annual DevDay in San Francisco on Monday, and I’m still there in person to cover all the news. It announced a number of ChatGPT product features and new agent tools, and executives also laid out a pretty bold vision for the future of AI.
At the same time, the new Sora iOS app pushed AI-generated video into the mainstream, creating all kinds of unintended consequences and surprising even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who became the face of Sora memes on the Internet.
And earlier this week, The New York Times published a great story about how AI-based job screening has become so prevalent that candidates are starting to insert hidden messages to chatbots in their resumes – effectively trying to quickly inject the automated job selection process to have a better chance of getting an interview.
I tapped Kanjun Qiu, CEO of AI startup Imbue and a keen industry observer, to help me break it all down. Kanjun has been both a technology founder and investor, and her perspective on AI and the tech industry in general is very unique. She believes the biggest question facing the AI industry today is whether it will resemble the more open, user-centered vision of the early Internet or the walled, walled-garden approach of the social web.
So I wanted to chat with Kanjun about this week’s biggest AI stories to understand what’s really happening, why it’s happening, and the societal implications of it all.
If you want to learn more about what we talked about in this episode, check out the links below:
Questions or comments about this episode? Contact us at decoder@theverge.com. We really read every email!
