Latest / In the Loop AI / OpenAI Device Leak: They Claim Fake News, But We're Not So Sure!

Transcript

OpenAI Device Leak: They Claim Fake News, But We're Not So Sure! · In the Loop AI

0:00
Ejaaz: Picture this. It's Super Bowl Sunday, 140 million people are tuned in tensions at an all-time high.
0:06
Ejaaz: And a mysterious Reddit account posts about how OpenAI was supposed to release
0:10
Ejaaz: an advert about their new consumer AI hardware device.
0:14
Ejaaz: Minutes later, someone hacks into this person's server and reveals a 35-second-long
0:19
Ejaaz: polished advert featuring celebrity Alexander Skarsgård wearing futuristic stainless
0:24
Ejaaz: steel over-the-ear pair of earbuds and staring at a mysterious pebble-like metal device.
0:30
Ejaaz: The internet absolutely explodes. News publications post about this.
0:34
Ejaaz: Tech Twitter absolutely blows up.
0:35
Ejaaz: Until a few hours later, when the president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman,
0:39
Ejaaz: shuts it down with two words, fake news.
0:42
Ejaaz: Now, the advert might have been fake, but the device is very real.
0:46
Ejaaz: And on this episode, we're going to explore the $6.5 billion love child between
0:50
Ejaaz: OpenAI and Johnny Ive and revealing
0:52
Ejaaz: why that's going to lead to three potential new devices this year.
0:56
Josh: Yeah, I have a lot of questions about the legitimacy of this,
0:59
Josh: the way in which we came to discovering this ad, which we're going to get into.
1:02
Josh: This is very much an investigative episode, but I figured the best place to
1:06
Josh: start is probably just to show the leaked ad. So let's watch that first before we talk about it.
1:25
Josh: Man, it really, it looks so good.
1:41
Josh: Dime. Almost time. Okay, there's a lot to unpack with this video.
1:46
Josh: But first, maybe let's set the backstory of how we came to discover this.
1:50
Josh: So as the Super Bowl was winding down on Sunday night, a Reddit account named
1:54
Josh: Winnehata, which has since been deleted, posted what appeared to be a rant of
1:59
Josh: a frustrated OpenAI employee.
2:01
Josh: And the story was pretty simple. They'd worked on this incredible Super Bowl
2:04
Josh: commercial for OpenAI's first hardware device, and it was supposed to air during the game.
2:08
Josh: But at the last minute, leadership got cold feet, supposedly because of all
2:12
Josh: the heat they were taking from Anthropics attack ads, and swapped it out for
2:15
Josh: a safer commercial about their codex coding tool that we saw in the Super Bowl.
2:20
Josh: The employee was seemingly, or I guess the employee was seemingly livid.
2:25
Josh: And in their frustration, they leaked a screenshot of what was supposedly the original ad.
2:30
Josh: Now, here's where things get interesting, because when people in the
2:33
Josh: Reddit thread questioned whether this was legit the poster
2:36
Josh: shared a screenshot which contained metadata and an
2:39
Josh: ftp link now an ftp link is kind of how you share
2:43
Josh: files and somebody cracked the password to that link and inside was this polished
2:47
Josh: minute-long commercial featuring alexander skansgard who for people who don't
2:52
Josh: know is an actor that just wrapped up a new hbo show and is famous for being
2:57
Josh: a character in secession so this is a fairly famous actor who's featured in this?
3:02
Josh: I can't help but ask myself the questions, right? It's like.
3:05
Josh: Well, it's a famous actor.
3:07
Josh: It's showing this unbelievably cool looking product.
3:10
Josh: I mean, we're seeing these beautiful wraparound silver earbuds that are almost
3:13
Josh: stainless steel. And then we see this metallic orb.
3:16
Josh: It's kind of like this smooth pebble shaped case, which is what we were all expecting.
3:20
Josh: And then it ended with the code name that everyone was expecting it.
3:24
Josh: So that says dime almost time. And it was an unbelievably amazing ad. It looks so real.
3:31
Josh: Everything about it matched all the rumors that we heard until the OpenAI president,
3:35
Josh: Greg Brockman, followed up and said, fake news.
3:38
Josh: Something is off because it's too real it's too good what what was this.
3:44
Ejaaz: I'm so confused so i think
3:47
Ejaaz: a few reasons why this went viral is this device
3:50
Ejaaz: is real maybe not the device that we're looking at in this advert we'll get
3:53
Ejaaz: into that in a second but we know from several different rumors and leaks that
3:58
Ejaaz: open ai is working on not just one consumer device but a range of devices maybe
4:02
Ejaaz: up to five devices actually one of the devices is going to look like this pebble
4:06
Ejaaz: disc like thing that sits on your desk, similar to what you saw in the ad just now.
4:10
Ejaaz: And so it's very believable up to the point where the president of OpenAI says,
4:16
Ejaaz: no, it's actually fake, it's not real.
4:18
Ejaaz: And so a bunch of people or critics said, yeah, it's not real, it's AI generated.
4:22
Ejaaz: Now there's two claims here. One, that the video is AI generated and not real.
4:27
Ejaaz: And two, that they may not be working on that kind of a specific device.
4:31
Ejaaz: So we tackled one by asking the smartest people that we know,
4:35
Ejaaz: because Greg's words is his word.
4:37
Ejaaz: But Claude AI is, you know, a million different Glegs all at once, right?
4:43
Josh: You uploaded it into Claude and you asked, is this video AI generated?
4:46
Ejaaz: Yeah, so I uploaded the video to Claude and I asked, is this video AI generated?
4:51
Ejaaz: Now, for those of you who don't know, AI models have gotten really good at calling
4:54
Ejaaz: out what has been generated by themselves.
4:57
Ejaaz: And so it said, let me take a look at this video to analyze it and his conclusion.
5:00
Ejaaz: This does not appear to be AI generated. It actually looks like a professionally
5:04
Ejaaz: shot live action teaser ad.
5:06
Ejaaz: And it goes on to give a few proving points.
5:09
Ejaaz: Number one being the time codes burned in the bottom left of this video is very
5:15
Ejaaz: professional and typical of a raw cut.
5:17
Ejaaz: It says it's consistent, realistic detail.
5:19
Ejaaz: There's no optical illusions. You know, Alexander Skarsgård doesn't have six fingers.
5:24
Ejaaz: And to be honest, if this was an AI generated video, this is the best quality
5:28
Ejaaz: AI video I've ever seen. Josh, what do you think?
5:31
Josh: Yeah, I spent a long time pixel peeping and trying to figure out how this could
5:36
Josh: possibly be fake and every single,
5:38
Josh: frame it looks real and it looks really well done
5:41
Josh: it's in fact it's exactly what i would expect open ai
5:43
Josh: to do to release a new product it has the
5:46
Josh: celebrity actor it has the like beethoven
5:50
Josh: soundtrack that's very epic it has the dime branding and it shows the guy kind
5:55
Josh: of like tapping on it as if it's this new foreign ident object it's just like
6:00
Josh: unbelievably well done but then there's more and there's more to the story where
6:04
Josh: it gets even more interesting because this wasn't just some random person posting a deepfake for laughs.
6:09
Josh: There were tech reporters like this guy, Max Weinbach, who revealed that a week
6:13
Josh: before the Super Bowl, he'd received an email offering him over $1,100 to be exact.
6:20
Josh: I think it was like $1,146 to promote a tweet about the.
6:26
Josh: This new product. And the payment was actually real.
6:30
Josh: Funny enough, if we go through the rest of this conversation,
6:32
Josh: the guys actually paid him.
6:34
Josh: He says, you know what's funny? I did send an invoice and they paid me instantly
6:37
Josh: for it. Hit PayPal within five minutes.
6:39
Josh: Assume this was real and was waiting on them to send a post to retweet.
6:43
Josh: And then this guy's signal says, wait, they paid you? And then he replies,
6:47
Josh: yeah, he sent a screenshot showing that he actually received payment for it.
6:51
Josh: So there was this entity who was reaching out to influencers to do promotion
6:56
Josh: for this new hardware product, and they even paid the influencers,
7:00
Josh: but they never actually released the product.
7:04
Josh: So there's so many contradicting theories here as to why this went down the way it was.
7:10
Josh: I mean, generally, if you're creating a scam, it's to harm a brand's reputation
7:14
Josh: and to cause confusion and generally to earn money, not to actually pay out
7:18
Josh: money to influencers and then get nothing for it in return.
7:20
Josh: I mean, this was a payment of what, $1,146 that just went right to this guy on Twitter?
7:25
Ejaaz: My hot take is this is real, Josh. And what scam do you know of where you actually
7:30
Ejaaz: receive money by the end of it? Like more money than you had before you started?
7:34
Ejaaz: The incentives don't make sense here.
7:37
Ejaaz: If you are paying people to promote your hoax, you have to have something to gain from it.
7:44
Ejaaz: And let's say this went over really well, right? And they gained even more attention
7:49
Ejaaz: than they already did. What did the scammer gain?
7:52
Ejaaz: They, in fact, gave better PR to open air by the end of it.
7:55
Ejaaz: The second point for me is Alexander Skarsgård, the celebrity featured in this
7:59
Ejaaz: video, hasn't come out and denied it.
8:02
Ejaaz: And that kind of reeks of OpenAI NDA disclosures, them telling him to just keep
8:08
Ejaaz: quiet because his PR team is probably saying, well, we can't deny it because
8:11
Ejaaz: that would be fake if it is real.
8:13
Ejaaz: So I think it might be real. And then the third thing is the quality of the video.
8:17
Ejaaz: It's too good. And it looks too realistic. like him.
8:20
Ejaaz: Like, listen, there are models out there that are capable of making celebrities
8:24
Ejaaz: look realistic. Like we've got a new Chinese model that came out this week called Seed Dance.
8:28
Ejaaz: And you're watching a Chinese teenager absolutely cook LeBron at the net right now.
8:34
Ejaaz: And it looks very realistic, but there are some things that are a little janky.
8:37
Ejaaz: It's a little quick. It's a little gritty. It's a little blurry.
8:40
Ejaaz: Nothing of the fidelity and quality that we saw in this video.
8:43
Ejaaz: I just I just don't believe it.
8:44
Josh: Yeah. And it's it's amazing, right, that we can look this deeply at a video
8:48
Josh: and still not know for sure whether it's AI or not.
8:50
Josh: It's a testament to how good this is. And the new Chinese Model C dance that
8:53
Josh: just came out yesterday, it makes it even better. That said,
8:57
Josh: It does look like it's real. So maybe we'll go through the thought experiment,
9:00
Josh: assuming that the ad is a real ad. It's a real celebrity.
9:03
Josh: They're real products. There was a real production budget. It was actually filmed.
9:07
Josh: Who is it for? What was it for? What are the intentions of it?
9:11
Josh: That's the part that I'm still hung up on because Greg Brockman and the OpenAI
9:15
Josh: team claimed that it's fake.
9:16
Josh: But then what is it? And how is it so elaborately done?
9:21
Josh: And I'm still kind of torn as to what the intention of this was.
9:25
Josh: And I want it to be real, right?
9:27
Josh: It's like it matches all the rumors of OpenAI's new device.
9:30
Josh: It has the puck, it has the ear pods, but we're not sure.
9:33
Ejaaz: I think the simple answer is it is real. OpenAI is working on a device like
9:38
Ejaaz: this, but at the last minute, they had to hold it back because of a more boring
9:43
Ejaaz: manufacturing obstacle, which is high bandwidth memory.
9:47
Ejaaz: For those of you who have been tracking this in the AI infrastructure race,
9:51
Ejaaz: memory has become the most expensive component to build a GPU or anything hardware related.
9:57
Ejaaz: It's driven the cost of custom computers up by like 5X in the last like two
10:02
Ejaaz: months, which is just an insane stat and rate of growth.
10:05
Ejaaz: So if OpenAI had planned to build and release this Puck disk-like device,
10:10
Ejaaz: which requires memory, obviously, they can't do it at scale because now the
10:14
Ejaaz: cost of producing that device has gone up like twice.
10:18
Ejaaz: So it wouldn't make any feasible means for them to release.
10:21
Ejaaz: So they've kind of held back that advert until prices go down and then they
10:25
Ejaaz: can like feasibly scale this up
10:27
Josh: Yes this might be an interesting time to bring up that deal that they
10:30
Josh: had between open ai and love from which
10:33
Josh: was six and a half billion dollars to build a suite
10:36
Josh: of devices and the alleged roadmap currently as it stands is we're expecting
10:41
Josh: about five devices by the end of 2028 or at least according to a lot of these
10:45
Josh: reports and interesting enough one of our favorite leakers who was reporting
10:49
Josh: all this stuff who we actually went to go reference for this video the account is gone.
10:54
Josh: And that was the source of a lot. There it is. Yeah, the account doesn't exist.
10:58
Josh: My guy Pikachu, he was publishing all of these leaked Weibo chats from China
11:03
Josh: about the supply chain and how the tooling was going for these devices.
11:07
Josh: And it's totally gone. There's a lot of suspect things happening right now.
11:10
Josh: But the idea and the leak was that there will be about five devices by the end of 2028.
11:16
Josh: We have Dime, which is the product that allegedly we just saw.
11:19
Josh: There's Gumdrop, which is the smart pen type thing. then
11:22
Josh: there's perhaps smart glasses there's perhaps
11:25
Josh: a home device a smart speaker there there will be some sort
11:27
Josh: of suite and johnny ivan love from is responsible
11:31
Josh: for designing and developing it and johnny i
11:33
Josh: for those that don't know he's the guy that did all the apple products that
11:36
Josh: you've ever used he has designed them basically so it's
11:39
Josh: a huge deal and we actually just earned a little bit more information
11:43
Josh: about it this morning which is open ai
11:46
Josh: just gave kind of clear timelines for it and ijaz like you mentioned earlier
11:49
Josh: there's a lot of supply chain issues going on right now and what people were
11:52
Josh: hoping to be released the middle of this year and those leaks from our guy pokemon
11:57
Josh: said it would hopefully come sometime this summer well the reality is now it's
12:01
Josh: pushed back to february of 2027.
12:04
Josh: Earliest so that means we have an entire year before
12:07
Josh: this thing releases and that also kind of
12:10
Josh: feeds into the idea that they wouldn't want to tease a device now that
12:13
Josh: the reality is they can't actually make it until early next year so i'm still
12:17
Josh: not totally buying the fake thing totally but yeah there is some truth to the
12:23
Josh: fact that there won't be any device coming from open ai or any of these suites
12:26
Josh: of devices until early next year and that we have confirmed by sam altman this morning.
12:31
Ejaaz: Yeah, I think the intention was for OpenAI to release one or a set of consumer devices this year.
12:37
Ejaaz: Sam's actually gone on record saying that this year was the planned year to
12:40
Ejaaz: do it at the end of the year.
12:42
Ejaaz: But I think they just simply ran into manufacturing issues, which is funny.
12:45
Ejaaz: The supply chain is tough.
12:46
Ejaaz: Dude, we discussed this on an earlier episode where we chatted about what the
12:51
Ejaaz: OpenAI device might look like.
12:52
Ejaaz: And one of the problems that we raised was the fact that OpenAI AI are good
12:57
Ejaaz: at creating consumer software for AI, but they have no experience in the hardware game.
13:02
Ejaaz: And that is a completely different beast that the likes of Apple,
13:05
Ejaaz: Google, and a bunch of other companies can absolutely nail.
13:08
Ejaaz: So we're starting to see the effects of that actually come into play here.
13:11
Ejaaz: And I got to say, I'm not really surprised by this.
13:15
Ejaaz: The other thing I want to say, okay, let's assume that they're building out
13:19
Ejaaz: this device or those devices that you mentioned just now, Josh.
13:23
Ejaaz: A few things need to be true for this device to be successful.
13:27
Ejaaz: Let's just like assume what they are, right?
13:29
Ejaaz: Number one, if it's earbuds, we're betting that like voice AI is going to be
13:35
Ejaaz: Perfect by that point. You get advanced voice mode right now,
13:39
Ejaaz: but it has a little bit of latency and it runs on the older model.
13:43
Ejaaz: So when you release a new model from a Frontier AI lab, that's typically not
13:46
Ejaaz: the model that is in your voice mode.
13:48
Ejaaz: That's why most of the people just end up just typing or chatting to ChatGPT
13:52
Ejaaz: or Claude or whatever that might be.
13:54
Ejaaz: So they need to nail voice mode. The second thing, and this is like the biggest obstacle for me,
13:58
Ejaaz: which probably moves us into the competition section of this
14:01
Ejaaz: episode open ai doesn't have a ecosystem yet they have a chatbot and they'll
14:06
Ejaaz: release these new devices but it needs to connect to one of these an iphone
14:11
Ejaaz: it needs to connect to your android device and that is where the likes of apple
14:15
Ejaaz: google or android can extract a lot of value that open ai needs maybe
14:20
Josh: We don't know that for sure in theory at least the puck is large enough that
14:24
Josh: it could if it has a battery a cpu and a cellular chip it can run on its own
14:28
Josh: in theory and just ping the server. So we're not entirely sure.
14:31
Josh: I think you made an interesting point about the competition and how it's kind
14:34
Josh: of interesting how much pressure is on OpenAI for their first device to land.
14:39
Josh: I mean, when you think about the comp, which is Apple devices,
14:42
Josh: Apple and Steve Jobs, they were uniquely good at setting these expectations
14:45
Josh: and then actually delivering on them.
14:47
Josh: And basically nobody else in consumer hardware has ever pulled it off to that
14:50
Josh: level before, including recent
14:52
Josh: Apple, who promised Apple intelligence and just was not able to deliver.
14:55
Josh: So there's a tremendous amount of pressure on getting it right the first time.
14:59
Josh: And I would expect them to really put a lot of time and effort into making sure
15:02
Josh: it goes about as good as possible.
15:04
Josh: You mentioned what needs to happen on OpenAI side to actually make this device work.
15:09
Josh: Well, the voice model is a huge thing. I think one of the things we can assume
15:13
Josh: with like fairly high levels of conviction is this will be a voice first device.
15:16
Josh: You will be able to speak with it. It will be able to speak back with you.
15:19
Josh: And there were rumors earlier in the year that OpenAI was actually building
15:22
Josh: up this division to launch better sound voice audio models this year.
15:28
Josh: And I think that's a further signal that that's kind of the direction they're going to.
15:32
Josh: Seems like they're certainly under a lot of pressure from competition.
15:35
Josh: I mean, we have the Meta Ray-Bans, we have Apple that's aggressively trying
15:38
Josh: to ship their new version of Siri, which is going to be basically what OpenAI
15:43
Josh: hopes to do, but built into the iPhone, which is already where everyone is.
15:47
Josh: So it seems like they are certainly in a race. And again, I think that the constraint
15:51
Josh: is going to be the supply chain and how difficult it is to get memory.
15:54
Josh: And we're seeing it with companies like Apple who haven't been able to ship
15:57
Josh: the new MacBooks on time or the new M5 series ships on time because there's
16:01
Josh: just so much supply constraint.
16:02
Josh: And that may prove to be pretty difficult for OpenAI.
16:05
Ejaaz: OpenAI is entering a battle where the odds of them winning it are really low.
16:10
Ejaaz: I'm not saying they won't make it, but the chances are slim.
16:13
Josh: They got to hit a home run.
16:15
Ejaaz: They have to hit a home run. And also Apple has mentioned now explicitly that
16:19
Ejaaz: they're going to be releasing AirPod Pros or their next generation. It's leaked.
16:24
Ejaaz: It's going to have cameras and different sensors, very similar to what OpenAI's
16:28
Ejaaz: earbud device is also going to have.
16:29
Ejaaz: So you're going one-to-one, head-to-head with Apple.
16:33
Ejaaz: And Sam has actually explicitly said that OpenAI's future biggest competition
16:36
Ejaaz: is OpenAI versus Apple, not OpenAI versus all the other Frontier AI labs.
16:41
Ejaaz: So he's intentionally going against this giant. You mentioned Google.
16:44
Ejaaz: Google is releasing or supposed to be releasing Google Glass 2.0 this summer.
16:49
Ejaaz: And Meta Ray-Bans, as much as you and I hate them,
16:54
Ejaaz: have sold 2 million units so far. And they're actually scaling to 20 million
16:57
Ejaaz: units by the end of this year.
16:59
Ejaaz: So OpenAI is entering what is soon to be a very crowded field.
17:05
Ejaaz: And it's not just like American startups that are working on this,
17:08
Ejaaz: right? It's also startups, companies.
17:10
Ejaaz: It's also like Chinese companies that have like kind of like been arguably years ahead of all of this.
17:16
Ejaaz: We're looking at a picture of Huawei's free clip buds that kind of look very
17:21
Ejaaz: similar to the concept that OpenAI is supposedly meant to be delivering.
17:23
Ejaaz: So they're entering a crowded market here Josh I don't really see um how uh
17:28
Ejaaz: it's a clear distinction that they're gonna win
17:31
Josh: I was gonna say as we wrap I wanted to showcase this
17:34
Josh: photo of the earbuds because they look surprisingly similar to
17:37
Josh: exactly what we saw in that teaser video which it was
17:41
Josh: just like okay were they actually just using Huawei earbuds was the video real
17:45
Josh: but was it a hoax and I think that's probably where I'll land as we wrap up
17:51
Josh: this episode is the video was real the actor was real the device may not have
17:57
Josh: been i don't know it's so bizarre so yeah tell us i.
18:00
Ejaaz: Mean you tell us please because like josh and i aren't are rarely kind of uh
18:05
Ejaaz: unconvinced or like we're really split on things but like we are we're generally
18:09
Josh: Don't have a good answer i don't know there's too
18:12
Josh: many contradictory facts for it to be totally fake yeah and
18:15
Josh: that's the thing that's bothering me is like if it's not an open ai ad then
18:18
Josh: what is it because it was really well done and the devices are beautiful and
18:22
Josh: it's very Johnny Ive coded in the essence of what the device would look and
18:26
Josh: feel like so it's really I'm just left I'm left asking more questions than I
18:31
Josh: have answers with this one yeah,
18:34
Josh: leaves me very excited for what the future of these devices will look like.
18:37
Ejaaz: If you're listening to this, if your name or pseudonym is Pikachu and you deleted
18:43
Ejaaz: your account a few days ago because you leaked some of this,
18:45
Ejaaz: please let us know in the comments anonymously, of course, whether this was real or not.
18:49
Ejaaz: And for the observers and listeners of this, like, take a look at the video.
18:52
Ejaaz: It's 35 seconds long. It looks incredibly realistic.
18:54
Ejaaz: Am I just an idiot that has watched this video and has thought,
18:57
Ejaaz: well, okay, this is, you know, I've just been one-shotted psychosis in AI,
19:01
Ejaaz: or is it actually real? you tell me.
19:05
Ejaaz: This has been a fun episode. I know it's been more on the speculative side,
19:08
Ejaaz: but I think it's super important to try and nail some of these predictions and
19:11
Ejaaz: take the clues that we are given.
19:13
Ejaaz: My take is this was genuinely a real video and they had to hold back.
19:16
Ejaaz: It's no qualms against them.
19:18
Ejaaz: They're running into manufacturing supply constraints, but I think it's real.
19:21
Ejaaz: And I think later on this year, we're going to see a bunch of devices being
19:25
Ejaaz: announced formally from OpenAI.
19:27
Josh: Well, one way or another, we will get to the bottom of this eventually.
19:30
Josh: I have my head on the swivel.
19:31
Josh: We are digging deeper every day and we'll keep you posted as we go.
19:34
Josh: But I think the prompt at the end of this episode is really just like,
19:37
Josh: is this real? Do you think this is real? And which parts of it are real?
19:40
Josh: And what does the device actually look like? And why would they cancel it?
19:43
Josh: There's a lot of questions. If you have any answers at all, if you want to do
19:45
Josh: any investigative journaling or send it to a friend who happens to be an investigative
19:49
Josh: journalist, that would be very much appreciated in our mission to getting to the bottom of this.
19:53
Josh: But as always, thank you so much for watching this episode. We will have many
19:56
Josh: more this week perhaps even on these crazy new video models that make it impossible
20:00
Josh: to tell whether or not these videos are real um but yeah as always thank you
20:04
Josh: so much for watching and we'll see you guys in the next one see you guys.