Technology

1. Google’s robot bet
2. Are we ready for humanoids?
3. Chinese AI courts businesses
4. Situational schadenfreude
5. Where AI outsmarts us

YouTube makes the case for humans, and AI appears to be smarter than us even at scamming.

Since large language models started outputting images and video, we’ve been debating what it means to make art and content.

Studies have shown, in side-by-side comparisons, that humans often prefer AI-generated content over human-generated content. That has even applied to Shakespeare.

But outside of the research, it’s playing out differently, and YouTube is ground zero. The company was candid with me about what they’re seeing, and how AI is and isn’t working. You can read more about it in this article, published this morning.

The short version is that people are rejecting experiments in which YouTube uses AI to disintermediate creators from the information contained in their content. For example, it attempted a search feature where answers were pulled from different YouTube videos and aggregated together. It sounds like a helpful tool on paper. In reality, “people just didn’t like it,” said Emily Moxley, YouTube’s vice president of product management.

Plenty of people have made the case for human artists, perhaps no better than Nick Cave: “Algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing,” he said.

But YouTube is helping make the case for the human audience, and that’s why this is so interesting. The messenger matters to people, perhaps as much as the message. Humans are often very bad judges of quality. But they are very good judges of authenticity.

One side note: In today’s edition of AI-humble-brag bingo, Anthropic completely forgot to secure its sandbox and its agents hacked three companies.

Robots can now tie a trash bag

Google DeepMind unveiled a new model this week that gives humanoid robots finer control over how they interact with objects around them. Promotional videos show a robot doing complicated tasks like tying a trash bag and screwing a small lightbulb, suggesting we’re a step closer to general-purpose robotics — where humanoids can accomplish more than repetitive, pre-programmed tasks.

The advancements point to the West’s lead over China in robotics software — the “brains” that power an android. But there will be fewer bodies for those brains to go into, at least in the US, after Washington this week banned new foreign humanoids and quadrupeds. There simply aren’t that many US-made robots yet, and many American researchers and startups use Chinese hardware to train and test their own tech.

“People are going to be pretty stuck in terms of options,” China tech expert Kyle Chan told Semafor. He worries the ban will slow down American innovation, and could push some research to Europe, where it’s easier to get a Chinese bot.

It could take years for US robot-makers to stand up a non-Chinese supply chain, given Beijing’s hardware dominance. And if the US’ goal is to build a fully made-in-America pipeline for robots, Chan said, “it’s really, to put it bluntly, a hopeless cause.”

— J.D. Capelouto

Americans worry robots will take jobs, but not theirs

Americans think robots will start taking people’s jobs in the next five years — but not their jobs. That’s the finding of a new nationwide survey, shared exclusively with Semafor, by advisory firm Breakwater Strategy and YouGov. It offers an early snapshot of Americans’ attitudes toward robots in various corners of everyday life.

“There’s a lot of anxiety about job displacement, but somehow it feels like at the moment, the notion of robotics is still a little bit distant,” Steve Weber, a Breakwater partner and UC Berkeley professor, told Semafor.

Most people would be comfortable with robots working in grocery store stock rooms or loading docks, where they’re out of sight. But only 39% are cool with them working at a self-checkout area.

Public sentiment toward robots will probably improve as deployments ramp up beyond pilot programs. Barclays researcher Zornitsa Todorova compared it to the rollout of large language models, in which attitudes “wax and wane” as the public mood swings between excitement and deep anxiety over the tech’s impact on jobs, privacy, safety, and security.

— J.D. Capelouto

Chinese AI companies aim to serve businesses

China’s tech giants are deepening their push into AI for businesses as they look for profitable revenue streams. TikTok owner ByteDance, which boasts the highest annual AI revenue projection among its peers, announced a restructure this week to bring its workplace tool closer to its flagship AI chatbot Doubao, which is “by far China’s most widely used standalone AI application,” a Beijing-based commentator wrote.

Other Chinese tech players like Alibaba and Tencent are similarly looking to pivot toward the more lucrative enterprise market. For years, China’s AI race was dominated by a quest for market share at all costs, to the point that companies gave away tech, shopping vouchers, and even cash to attract users. And their open-weight models have taken off around the world. But they’re still struggling to make a profit. ByteDance now has a tiered pricing system, similar to its Silicon Valley rivals.

The lack of financial results has caused Chinese tech stocks to tank in recent weeks, despite technological advances like the release of Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model, The Wire China wrote. “A sector can lead the world in capability and still be a poor place in which to seek market gains.”

— J.D. Capelouto

From a Kobe Bryant Twitter follow in high school to a decade of courtside access, Fashion Week client work, and a branding studio in downtown Manhattan — Vic Jacobi has built one of the more unusual careers in sports media. On this week’s episode of Mixed Signals, the NBA personality and creative consultant joins Max and Ben to discuss how she earned the trust of players who keep famously tight circles, what it means to be the person between an athlete and an agency, and what former NBA star Carmelo Anthony told her about her work. Plus, who has the best “drip” in the league and why the “tunnel fit” era has peaked.

Hedge fund failure shows tech divide

The high-flying hedge fund Situational Awareness, founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, dumped its stock holdings to Citadel earlier this week. Guy makes a bad trade and loses — not news. Guy, who has become a cultural symbol of a certain faction of the tech industry that sees the world as a game-able algorithm, crashes and burns… You’ve got news, and a heap of schadenfreude. Here’s a quote from Guillaume Verdon, otherwise known as Beff Jezos on X: “It’s completely over for EA-adjacent ex alignment researchers at large now. So-called Rationalist Bayesians thinking they can outsmart the self-adaptive complex system that is the market. The sheer hubris.”

Effective altruism, the movement (some might say religion), has been rebranding itself since the collapse of FTX, which was founded by EA’s most prominent leader, Sam Bankman-Fried. But the reaction to EA member Aschenbrenner’s misfortune is a reminder that its remnants are still here, and that a San Andreas-sized fault line runs through the tech industry because of it.

On one side, you have “build, baby, build.” On the other side you have, “we’re only building this because if we didn’t, the wrong people would build it.” Or, worse, you have people who are fine standing on the sidelines and simply profiting from other people building. This is not something you traditionally brag about in Silicon Valley. There is no tech honor in trading your way to wealth.

—Reed Albergotti

AI will find hidden fees

There’s one place where it might be OK for AI to surpass human intelligence: Automatically spotting the hidden fees that traditional lenders depend on for much of their profitability, says Max Levchin, the founder of buy now, pay later company Affirm.

Affirm, which doesn’t charge late fees or compound interest, should benefit from the growth of agentic commerce, Levchin tells Semafor’s CEO Signal show, because AI tools will not skip over the fine print that traps consumers into paying unexpected charges. “Your agent has a PhD in consumer finance,” he says: “Agents will not make mistakes on your behalf.” The PayPal Mafia member tells Penny Pritzker and Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson he identifies entirely as “an immigrant engineer,” which gives him the advantage of understanding what’s happening underneath technology. “If I couldn’t write code anymore, I would feel like I’m missing a finger,” he said.

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AI chatbots outperformed human scammers at luring victims for online “pig butchering” cons, research suggested. Pig butchering involves building relationships, sometimes romantic, with people over time — “fattening” the “pig” — then conning them into fake crypto investments. The (admittedly small) study found that AI models were more successful at persuading unwitting test subjects into risky behavior, and were graded as more trustworthy, than humans. Since relationship-building is the most labor-intensive and time-consuming part of the scam, researchers suggested that AI could take over much of the process. That would make scams harder to fight, but also might reduce Southeast Asia’s human trafficking problem: Many scam workers are forced-labor victims, often held in brutal compounds of hundreds of people.