OpenAI wants NYT's notes; AI meets email; Startup vets eye EV charging marketplace

This episode delves into the implications of AI in journalism and daily technology use, spotlighting a legal battle involving OpenAI and emerging innovations in AI-integrated email applications and electric vehicle (EV) charging solutions.

1. OpenAI's bold legal strategy could redefine copyright norms in AI training.
2. AI's integration into daily tools like email is making data management more intuitive and efficient.
3. The startup Juicer Energy could innovate the EV charging sector by leveraging residential infrastructure.
4. The separation of Microsoft from OpenAI's board could signify shifting strategies amidst regulatory scrutiny.
5. AI should be viewed as a collaborative tool rather than a standalone solution.

1. Legal Battle Over AI and Journalism

The episode starts with a discussion on the lawsuit involving OpenAI and The New York Times, emphasizing the complex interplay between AI, copyright, and journalism. This segment explores the nuances of legal strategies and the implications for future AI development. Todd Bishop: "This lawsuit could set the standard by which AI companies train their models." John Cook: "It's a bold move, but it's in the lawyers' hands now."

2. AI Integration in Email

The conversation shifts to AI applications in daily technology use, specifically through Google Gemini for email management. This part focuses on how AI can transform mundane tasks like email sorting into strategic data handling. Todd Bishop: "It's amazing... I've gone from my email being messages that I have to go through to it being data that I can mine and understand."

3. Innovations in EV Charging

Discussion of Juicer Energy's innovative approach to EV charging, which plans to utilize a network of residential charging stations, reflecting broader trends in cleantech and startup culture. John Cook: "They're going to be able to collect some additional revenue on that. It's a very interesting idea."

1. Consider AI tools for enhancing daily work efficiency, especially in data management.
2. Evaluate the potential of AI to transform existing infrastructure, such as residential EV chargers.
3. Stay informed on the evolving legal landscape of AI to anticipate changes that might affect your sector.
4. Explore AI's potential in personal productivity tools to optimize routine tasks.
5. Engage with new technologies early to understand their implications and integration challenges.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we catch up on the latest twist in the New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft over the alleged use of its reporting to train GPT-4 and other large language models. The NYT is fighting OpenAI’s request to turn over reporters’ notes, interview memos, and other materials used to produce stories, to prove they were worthy of copyright.

On a related topic, we take a closer listen to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's comments about AI and fair use at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which were more nuanced than some of the coverage might have made them appear. Watch Suleyman's full conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin here.

Turning to the Seattle startup scene, an entrepreneurial supergroup has quietly formed a new electric vehicle charging startup, Juicer Energy, that appears poised to create a marketplace connecting homeowners and others with personal EV charging stations to EV owners in need of places to charge up their vehicles.

In the return of our "My AI" segment, we explore the concept of using AI to turn email into a database that can be intelligently mined, in this case with Google Gemini in Gmail and Google Workspace.

We also talk about using Microsoft Copilot in the Edge browser for domain-specific queries, and discuss the importance of treating AI not as an authoritative oracle but rather as a partner in the quest for insight.

People

Todd Bishop, John Cook, Nick Huzar, John Gelsey, Amit Mittal

Companies

OpenAI, The New York Times, Microsoft, Apple, Juicer Energy, OfferUp

Content Warnings:

None

Todd Bishop
Welcome to Geekwire. I'm Geekwire co founder Todd Bishop. And I'm Geekwire co founder John Cook. We are coming to you from Seattle where we get to report each day on what's happening around us in business, technology and innovation. What happens here matters everywhere.

And every week on this show, we get to talk about some of the most interesting stories and trends in the news. John, it's been weeks since you and I have sat down for a podcast. Yeah, what's going on? I've had some great guests on. Last week we had the CEO of ecobee.

We've been talking all about Aih and smart homes and even ADHD with Brett Green. And a great podcast we had a couple weeks ago that a lot of people have given us some great feedback on. So if you missed any of those shows, be sure to go back and check them out. But this week there was a story in the news that I wanted to start with that really resonated with me, in part because it's this intersection of artificial intelligence and something that you and I have been involved in for, gosh, 30 years. Does that make us sound old?

We are journalism. The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft took a really interesting twist over the holiday break. Of course, folks will recall back in December, the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI, saying that OpenAI for chat, GPT and GPT four, and all of the other related large language models had illegally absorbed New York Times content in the process of training those models. The twist over the past week or so is that OpenAI is demanding, through discovery requests, that the New York Times prove that it is creating original content, that the materials that are alleged to have been absorbed into the large language model through this training process are actually copyrightable. This took some guts, in my view.

It was really interesting. I saw it in the court filings and I was surprised. I think there's a lot of media organizations that you could legitimately raise this question about. I think it's pretty bold. I'm trying to avoid using the inappropriate slang here, but it was pretty bold for OpenAI to come in and say, hey, New York Times, the gold standard of journalism.

Prove to us and to the court that your work is original. This gets into all sorts of questions about reporter sources and notes and journalistic privilege. What was your take as you read through this coverage in these filings? Legal tactic? Absolutely.

John Cook
Slow down the process, make it costly. I think it's just a tactical maneuver. Yeah, we'll see how it plays out. I agree with you I mean, I'm going to side on the case of journalism on most of these. So I think it's a bold move, but it's in the lawyers hands now.

Todd Bishop
Microsoft and its lawyers did not participate in this particular aspect of the litigation. And I thought that was notable. I think Microsoft is going to let OpenAI really take the lead and bear the brunt of a lot of the criticism in the defense to the New York Times lawsuit just to take a step back. This is a consequential lawsuit. Potentially this could, if case law is going to determine it, set the standard by which these AI companies train their models and develop the technology that a lot of us are going to be using.

So this is important in that way. But Microsoft in a variety of respects has been separating itself from OpenAI after getting that initial tailwind. And we also saw this this week when Microsoft declined and relinquished its seat as an observer on the OpenAI board, which was kind of a big move about eight months ago after the Sam Altman ouster. At the same time, Apple has come in and partnered with OpenAI on its latest Apple intelligence technologies. It seems like the Microsoft OpenAI partnership was one of convenience at the time.

And we're now seeing it in all these different respects kind of fade away a little bit. What did you make of the board observer role? That seems to be a move to try to deflect regulatory review and criticism of these deals that we've talked about where the FTC and the DOJ are not allowing these big tech giants to go forward with acquisitions of companies like OpenAI or Amazon and Anthropic. And so in that way they've been going and making these investments and now the FTC is scrutinizing those too. Microsoft, I think, is saying, hey, let's separate ourselves from OpenAI on the regulatory front and say, hey, we're not even an observer on the board, even with our financial interest in the company.

And the initial reporting out of Reuters citing a source from the FTC is that that's not going to work. The FTC is not going to say, oh, okay, you're not an observer on the board anymore, so we're just going to lay down our swords. It's not going to be that simple. I think to your point, all of this is strategy and it's tempting to kind of take big picture takeaways from it. That said, I do think that Microsoft is recognizing that it needs to control its own destiny in AIH.

And it got that initial lift from the partnership with OpenAI and I think you're going to see Microsoft in the months and years ahead, really try to pave its own path and make sure that it doesn't depend on OpenAI, especially given all the partnerships that OpenAI has with the likes of Apple and others. Along these lines, I was really intrigued by some of the coverage this gets into some of the journalism and AI issues in a different way. Of Mustafa Suleiman's comments to CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Aspen Ideas summit recently. I saw coverage of that and he talked about the fact that effectively things that are on the web are in the public domain and in the process of covering this New York Times litigation. The latest twist with OpenAI, I went back and actually listened to his entire clip.

And it's funny, it's one of those cases where everybody in the reporting focused on the first part of what he said. And actually let's listen to that. Let's listen to that right now. There are a number of authors here at the Aspen Ideas festival and a number of journalists as well. And it appears that a lot of the information that has been trained on over the years has come from the web and the question, and some of it's the open web and some's not.

Mustafa Suleiman
And we've heard stories about how OpenAI was turning YouTube videos into transcripts and then training on the transcripts, who is supposed to own the IP, who is supposed to get value from that IP and whether, to put it in a very blunt terms, whether the AI companies have effectively stolen the world's IP. Yeah, I think, look, it's a very fair argument. I think that with respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the nineties has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like.

Andrew Ross Sorkin
That's been the understanding. Okay, so that's the quote that got a lot of attention. But there was actually more to the quote and it relates specifically to this New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, although not explicitly in his case. So let's listen to the rest of it. There's a separate category where a website or a publisher or news organization had explicitly said do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.

That's a grey area and I think that's going to work its way through the courts. It's interesting because the first part of his quote was just one part of it. He actually added a lot more context that would be important to know. All right, I feel like I'm in full rant mode in this segment, but coming up, we've got one that's more in your sweet spot, John. That is the startup world and a really fascinating development this week with kind of an all star team of startup people from the Seattle tech market.

Todd Bishop
Let's get into that when we come back. You're listening to geekwire. And we will be right back. Technology moves fast. I need to move faster.

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Todd Bishop
A lot of news lately about electric vehicle EV charging stations. We had some great coverage by Gillian Dorn, our climate technology intern for the summer, about this vandalism that's been happening recently with EV charging stations. But then this past week, Geekwire's editor Taylor Soper came across this interesting story in the filings that indicated a round of funding by some pretty prominent people in the Seattle startup world for a new company called Juicer, Juicer Energy. And the CEO is Nick Huzar, who used to be the CEO and founder of Offerup, which is the online marketplace. And then the chairman is John Gelsey, the former CEO of Auth Zero, and Exnor.

The company's chief operating officer is Amit Mittal, former Microsoft leader, former CTO of Symantec, somebody who's been very involved in angel investing and I guess incubating companies. When you saw this lineup of executives, what did you think? Kind of an all star group. They've done it before, have built big companies, very successful companies in the Seattle area. So it's certainly worth paying attention to.

John Cook
There is a lot of activity going on in the cleantech space, and EV's so not a surprise that people are jumping into the market. What's interesting here is that the company is, they're not saying much, so they're not talking to us and they seem to be in stealth mode, but they appear to be tapping into residential charging stations. So you can almost think about this as a, an uber approach to charging is how I was thinking about it. Almost like an Airbnb kind of, or an Airbnb. But it's, you can go to your neighbors now and charge or go to, and that's going to create the network of these existing charging stations that residents have already put into their homes or apartment complexes and tying into those and making a network.

Now at offerup, what Nick Hussar has done in the past was create a marketplace. So I assume this is a marketplace concept of the consumer that has the EV will be matched with the person who has the charging station and is going to bring those two together. That's how I read it in Taylor Soper's story and we'll see where it goes. It's one we definitely want to pay attention to. As you said, we don't really have the details here because the company specifically declined to comment.

Todd Bishop
And that's part of the dynamic sometimes with these SEC filings. It's great for us as reporters because we get hints of things before the companies are ready to talk. And that's frankly, our jobs is to dig that stuff up. Right. And I think if you read this so you can imagine someone will set the pricing on what it costs to come and use their ev charging station at their apartment complex or their home.

John Cook
So they're going to get, I assume it's going to be a higher rate than what it cost to actually charge your vehicle. And you're going to, then they're going to be able to collect some additional revenue on that. So interesting idea. I've not come across that in the past. And some very compelling people that are behind it.

Todd Bishop
And to your point, offerup is effectively this Craigslist alternative competes head to head with Facebook Marketplace. This idea of providing a venue for individuals to connect someone with something of value to provide and somebody else who wants to purchase that thing of value. And in the abstract, it makes a lot of sense when you think about it that way. All right. We will link to that from the show notes as well as everything we're talking about this week coming up.

John, do you remember the jingle for our my AI segment? This is something that you typically do, so think about it for a second and we'll do it when we come back. You're listening to Geekwire and we'll be right back.

Welcome back. It's Todd Bishop with John Cook. And it is time for the return of my AI. My AI. My Aihdeene.

John Cook
I'm trying to remember the jingle. I think it went my AI one of these times. I say this every time, but I will actually do a segment where we use AI to come up with that. Would probably be better than not singing it. I have been using AI now, I guess along with a lot of other people for more than a year.

Todd Bishop
If you think about when Chat GPT came out, and I am convinced that the stickiest applications of AI are going to be those that are integrated into what we use day to day. And along those lines, over the past week I've been using Google Gemini as part of my personal email. It's amazing, John. So I feel like I've gone from my email being messages that I have to go through to it being data that I can mine and understand. For example, I'll go in and say, hey, what are some upcoming events from my email that I should know about?

And it brings up concerts that I might have missed buried in like a random email from some of the media newsletters that I subscribe to. It'll bring up things that are happening in my neighborhood from various services that have sent me things. So events, I'll say, hey, tell me, are there any important receipts or bills that I missed in my email? It'll surface things that I might not have noticed because I'm not paying as much attention to my personal email. It just kind of slips through the cracks.

Um, just the ability to query that set of data. It, to me it's super valuable. And I'm convinced that these are the applications that are going to have real traction versus the standalone things like chat GPT or other kinds of standalone AI chatbots, the ones that are right there in front of us. And for me it's otter AI, Microsoft copilot in the sidebar of Microsoft Edge. And now I got to say, gemini, the fact that I'm such a heavy Gmail user and I have the ability with this to use these things as data.

Now, I know you're still sort of in the beginning phases of this. You're not a, you're not a heavy AI user, if at all, am I right? Yeah. I am not an early adopter. So I wanted to ask you, would you want to trial this in your geekwire email if I set the two of us up with licenses?

Because it could be the kind of thing we could talk about. I mean, what sort of things could I, here's one. Could I ask it? You could say, are there any emails over the past six months that I need to follow up on as business leads that I might have forgotten about? I'd be really interested to see what it said about that, asking questions as soon as you start to do those really simple things.

And by the way, I'm actually not even talking yet about the flagship feature of Gemini in your Gmail one of the cool things that it does is before, if you wanted to summarize or shorten an email that you were creating, like, you would go to chat GPT, copy paste it from your email inbox and say, hey, summarize this email. Gemini in Gmail just has that built in. There's a little button that says expand or shorten. So that's another way that you could do it. It's funny.

So I had a vision for this segment. Initially, I was going to find a really long email that you've sent in the past. Now, you hate long emails, but I. Have to tell you, because you and I have talked about this in the past, and, you know, I work on this as well. I try and make emails as succinct and to the point as possible.

I couldn't find an email that you'd written, at least to me or to the team in the past six months that I could use as an example on this segment. I even asked our colleague Holly Grambler to come up with one, and the one she sent me, I was like, I don't know, that's pretty darn good. I'm good. You're coming along with your email. Good to hear.

At any rate, this Gemini AI for Gmail to me is just one of those next steps that has kind of opened things up in terms of how I think about what AI can do. And so I wanted to share that. As our do you think it would help surface story ideas? Yes, I think it could. Like what stories should we resurface or come back to?

Yes. And that's where then, if it had. Google Analytics tied into it, you could see which stories have resonated and then compare it to your inbox and some of the trends that it's picking up through your inbox. That's an interesting application. I'm not sure if you could do that natively through Gemini.

It might take a little bit of stitching things together. Minor software development. I actually think that would be even more interesting if you were able to say to analytics directly, and I actually need to look into that, just not even email, right? Like, hey, what are the stories that have resonated over the past six months that would be worthy of further exploration and follow up today? I think that would be interesting.

The other thing I've been doing is with Copilot, the sidebar in Microsoft Edge. They've got a toggle now where you can say effectively, these aren't the words, but base your answer on the open web, base your answer on this domain. So, for example, geekwire.com, comma or base your answer on this page that I'm on right now. For example, an article. And so when I was writing this past week about Amazon and I Amazon's investment in the new parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus, I was able to go in there and say, okay, base your answer on geekwire.com.

give me the history of Amazon's forays into fashion, much more powerful than a straight site search. It basically gave me a bullet point with sources. It was not perfect. Microsoft Copilot missed a couple things. For example, it missed the fact that Amazon had closed its physical fashion retail stores Amazon style.

That said, it gave me some things that I otherwise would have missed myself. So it's just this tool. And I'll share this in the show notes. There's this podcast from a Stanford University professor that I shared with the team that really talked about this. I think a lot of people have come to AI initially and expected it to basically replace human thought.

And it's not that. Yeah, we've talked about this, where I think I had listened to a podcast as well, and there was a discussion around the pr, around chat GPT and that it got it all wrong, that it came out thinking that it was the magical answer to everything and it was factual. Well, it's not factual that the correct way to approach it and think about it is as a brainstorming tool. And if, but I think the way they came out was, oh, everything's accurate in chat GPT, and it's not. But if you use it as just a tool to spark creativity, then it's great.

And in the same way. And the podcast, by the way, is think fast, talk smart. And our friend Mark Briggs shared this episode with me and it really resonated. I'll link to it from the show notes. It's a Stanford business professor, and he talks with these AI experts about needing to ask the next question and the next question and really refine your queries and use AI more as a brainstorming partner versus an oracle that comes down from on high to give you the answer.

And to me, that is what the Microsoft copilot sidebar does. It's what my interactions with my email do. And it's funny because I've had this debate with David Shimda at read AI a lot. His big thing is that AI is not going to be asked Jeeves, and I don't know that that's the case. I really think that the questions we ask are going to continue to be vital.

It's not like we're just going to be able to sit back, and in some cases we will be. But for the most part, I think our creativity, our curiosity is going to be the pivotal factor in whether AI is actually a useful tool for us. And I actually, I'm encouraged by that because that means I'm not going to be replaced. I've just been given a new, powerful tool to use and to apply to the things I want to. So I've been ranting a lot on this episode, but this, this stuff fires me up.

And when I find something cool that I really enjoy using and that kind of gets me out of bed in the morning going, hey, I can try this new thing related to this old thing that I've been doing for years and just have this refreshed approach to it. I think that's pretty cool. And that's what I'm getting from a lot of these AI tools. I'm realizing I probably shouldn't have had that second cup of coffee today. So I'm sorry to talk so much on this episode.

Good to catch up. Thanks for listening, and thanks everybody out there for listening to the Geekwire podcast. Until next time, I'm Todd Bishop. And I'm Gian Cook. We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Geekwire podcast.

John Cook
We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Geekwire podcast.

Todd Bishop
We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Geekwire podcast.