Challenging Truth-Seeking and Communication Dynamics

Speaker 3
little specs on a spec rocketing through space we've been along for the ride okay this is just another ride yeah you're right yeah
Speaker 2
and i think also like it's easy to forget that at the end of the day it's like humans serving humans you know it's humans driving the car at least for this ride with like the agi and stuff by the way man so you guys know that open ai went for profit like two weeks ago i
Speaker 3
did not know that they
Speaker 2
restructured another for-profit company i don't know if you guys remember but sam altman the ceo of open ai was in front of congress being like look it's a non-profit i don't even have any shares in the company. I'm just doing this because I care about AI safety because it's going to be dangerous and we're here to make it safe. Liar. And guess who got equity when OpenAI went for profit? I can't believe it, Nico.
Speaker 3
I can't believe it. Here's
Speaker 2
the thing that really pisses me off about Sam Altman. Let's hear it. Tell me what you really feel. This talk about AI safety had nothing to do with AI safety. It had everything to do with him making people think it was dangerous so that they would think that OpenAI had something powerful and important and he could get notoriety and get funding and he could get in front of congress and get his name out there so in in raising the notoriety of open ai and raising that venture capital he's poisoned the well of public perception on ai for what is an incredible tool and once again it's just machine learning it's just math it's not magic like every thinks it's this magic thing that's gonna destroy their lives and turn society upside down and steal their jobs and also kill everybody or whatever. Because Sam Altman went out and said, this is what's going to happen, but we're going to stop it from happening. Which is just his way of hyping it up, poisoning the well, making himself sound like a hero. Because look who got some equity in his for-profit business after raising billions of dollars once it was all done that's so so yeah when you guys i don't know i mean our audience is pretty like chill with ai because i feel like we've we've taken a very reasonable stance on how we use it and like we don't talk about it like this mysterious ghost or whatever but if any of you guys have that like cringe when you hear ai just wonder just, is that just Sam Altman whispering in your ear?
Speaker 3
Well, it's the same thing as when you hear about studies that were done. The first thing you need to do is ask who funded it. Yeah. The same thing. It's like, that's why you say when there's humans at the wheel, it doesn't necessarily make me feel better. I sound like I know how flawed we all are. So, yeah, that's not surprising, but still equally disappointing. Yeah. Lame.
Speaker 2
That's my hot take. That's my hot take, everybody. Yeah. Let me know what you think. It's a fair take. It's a very fair take. Yeah. But it's a thing. It's a thing. Nobody knows what this stuff's going to be like anyways that early. And
Speaker 3
it has been a thing literally in every again i
Speaker 2
mean field open ai said that they couldn't release chat gp2 because it would be too dangerous oh my god do you remember chat gpd2 by the way they just open sourced it they released the model recently but they're like this will this could destroy the world if we dropped gpt2 if it fell into the wrong hands so
Speaker 3
forgive my ignorance here then but as far as other players in the field when avoiding monopoly for this kind of stuff who else is there there's
Speaker 1
open ai or meta there's meta there's anthropic
Speaker 2
um there's mistral um
Speaker 1
so like there's also like microsoft but like they're in bed with open ai that's not really their thing apple's
Speaker 2
kind of in the game a little bit i
Speaker 1
mean apple's definitely in the game they're just being very apple about it yeah you know there's also a lot
Speaker 2
of uh chinese companies uh oh yeah i don't know who makes quen but quen is very very good um claude claude is anthropic claude
Speaker 3
is anthropic okay the
Speaker 2
thing is like this stuff you know you need resources you need power and all that kind of thing but like just naturally with the way humans work, this stuff doesn't really get isolated to one company because people are bopping around from company to company. People are putting in big money to try to poach people. But also a lot of this stuff grows academically first. It's all the academic papers which are done through like universities or through studies that get published. And then somebody goes, okay, somebody posted a paper that says how to do it. Let's put the money up to like actually train the thing. But the knowledge is still out there and still free. And there's that one paper, which I, or that memo, which I love from Google, which is we have no moat. I'm just talking about how open source is like always hot in the heels of closed source. And like, there isn't a magical secret sauce that closed source has because for all the benefits of having like investment and money and funding you also have downsides like a smaller team and like a more narrow like idea pool because of that team as opposed to like the entire world working on your open source code if it's an interesting project so it you know it's a give and take and you know of course the for-profit companies are leading the charge, but there are open source LLMs that are really good. And, you know, they could argue they're being made by for-profit companies also, but open source is keeping up. It's not like it's not there at the top, but there's open source models that are as good as GPT-4 was when GPT-4 was first out.
Speaker 3
Look at Blender to tether it back to visual effect. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1
I was thinking the same thing. Yeah. Blender
Speaker 3
is like totally keeping up it's not used in like you know those those major production houses or anything to my knowledge but i mean ink incredible work comes out of that there's
Speaker 2
something really special about people who are really passionate about doing something and they maybe go and get a paycheck from a you know a big company for a while but like the people who are still so passionate that after that they then go and keep doing it and they put it out there just for the sake of putting it out there for people to use. Like those are very special people. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be very appreciative of them. Yeah. The feature is now old man. Yeah. Feature is now old man. Oh man. All right. Look, it is 12.01. I feel like we should talk about one last thing and that is our name change we said we're gonna do it and we did we did we changed our name to corridor digital everybody's like what are you talking
Speaker 1
about meeting the most unceremonious thing we've ever done. Like, literally, we were talking like, oh, should we change the name? Sam's like, yeah. And he changed it right there. He was like, done. And we all kind of just, like, stared at him and Sam's like, oh, okay. I guess we changed the name back to Corridor Digital from Corridor, which was originally Corridor Digital. The channel's
Speaker 2
tag is still at Corridor, which we can change that, too, if we want to. But kind of like the short at Corridor. Actually, Cor digital is not available as a handle oh really i tried to check it oh really someone
Speaker 3
nabbed it that's
Speaker 2
probably actually because it's like disabled due to us actually because we are the original corridor digital without a space yeah yeah we could i'm sure we could bug andrew if we
Speaker 1
wanted to um hallway analog was a twitter account i think ben yeah ben waller made years like a decade ago like early corridor days yeah so
Speaker 2
yeah our our our main channel the uh our our gallery channel our what would you call it our archive channel our corridor digital perhaps yeah a corridor digital channel digital channel it's no longer called corridor we call it corridor digital again i
Speaker 1
mean we can call it the the corridor channel and the crew channel yeah that's been our our go-to for
Speaker 2
years yeah but now when you type in corridor digital you'll actually get something that says corridor digital which is cool and you know the other thing like i can't remember i was searching for a company that like their name was like i don't know i can't remember what it was but it's something like solar or you know what it's like what you know it wasn't them it was something else i don't remember the name of the company but it was something like that like carrot or you know whatever it's like you type it in it's like here's a picture of a carrot it's like yeah how do i specify this company i'm looking for and there's a little bit of that with corridor where it's like you type in it's like wait how do i specify corridor digital there's a lot of them yeah and they're all over the place. So which one?
Speaker 1
Yeah. Nico, what was the original decision behind the name corridor? I mean, it was it was started as corridor digital. I mean, I know the story. I want you to tell it. Oh, OK. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so
Speaker 2
when Sam and I. So Sam and I shot that movie in Vancouver, moved down to L.A. to finish the film, went back to Minnesota to then get the rest of our stuff and actually move out to L.A. And we did a car trip from Minnesota back to L.A. in Sam's blue Ford Focus, which you can see in Dubstep Guns. Dubstep Guns. Dubstep Guns car. And, you know, when you get to the southwest part of the United States, it's beautiful. There's mountains everywhere. And we're kind of in that area we've been working trying to come up with the name forever and we're driving through a corridor mountains and i was like oh it's a really cool corridor of mountains like that's kind of a cool word corridor you know it's this moment here we're on our trip to la what do you think he's like oh okay let's go for it and then you know it's kind of it but it's like you know you need something else and like weta digital was kind of the inspiration here. It's like, they don't just do movies. They don't just do like visual effects. They do a lot of everything. And so, like, let's be Corridor Digital as opposed to like Corridor Studios or Corridor Productions. Because, you know, what if we want to do something else other than like be a production company? And so that's what it was. And then I guess it became our youtube channel name too um but we weren't really we actually weren't a youtube channel at first we were just another one scrappy indie youtube or not youtube another scrappy indie la movie company studio guy thing you know whatever it was like two it's two or three people so whatever you know that's putting a name on ourselves to make us feel important um but yeah that's that's where and where corridor digital came from dang thanks for asking ran even though you already know the story as a good prompt no it was like i
Speaker 1
don't think many people know that story i didn't know that because i remember like being very curious way back at some point and what is what's the source
Speaker 3
corridor what is what is this range of mountains do you know specifically which ones i don't know specifically lost a time it's
Speaker 2
probably the mountains that you hit on the uh like when you're going to vegas and you're coming in like
Speaker 1
right after vegas like really we're like near the ivanpaw solar station no no no sorry on the other side like when you're going to
Speaker 2
vegas but on the la side of that when you start hitting the la side of the mountain so like right before you hit the san bernardino mountains oh yeah okay yeah or san gabriel wherever that range is that's i think that was the mountain range that was really just
Speaker 1
right up the road i've been through that corridor a hundred times yeah man i thought this whole time i thought you guys were going through like some place in like western canada
Speaker 3
or something like that no it was local southern tip of new zealand in milford sound that's
Speaker 2
probably why it stuck is because it was local and it actually felt like relevant to hear and somebody at morgan hamer asks was there a close second choice for a name we actually uh for a while we think about silo silo productions or silo pictures silo production
Speaker 1
did you drive by
Speaker 3
a silo as well well
Speaker 2
we're from minnesota there's a lot of farming out there also like missile silos kind of cool but there's a there's like a billion silo pictures and productions already so like oh that one's taken yeah because
Speaker 1
the other thing is you also need to have it be original so also i know the story behind the origin of the sam and nico channel name why did sam's name come first oh that's right why did
Speaker 3
his name come first wow wow was there was there even a conversation about it there was a big conversation again this was before
Speaker 1
my time a little bit uh because I I joined up like right after you started the Sam and Nico channel that's right and you guys had the conversation of like shouldn't it be the Nico and Sam channel like no it should be the Sam Nico channel and you guys settled it over a game of that's right yep that is amazing so i guess sam won yeah that is
Speaker 3
the best way to that's such a healthy way to do it uh but also i will say sam and nico moves smoother that
Speaker 2
is actually the right so there is actually a way you order things by the way and it's based on the vowels a i o u sam and nico that's a nice
Speaker 3
flow to nico and sam yep
Speaker 2
and flows a's first then you have the i then you have the o is that like an actual real linguistic thing crate and barrel uh what's another like some arm and hammer how do you use both a's the e comes after wheat and barley i mean barley that
Speaker 3
barley and wheat i'm just making it up i just have no idea uh what are some other like i about? Yeah,
Speaker 2
Salmonico just feels better. I don't know. I'm trying to think of some other companies.
Speaker 1
Maybe it doesn't actually hold up at all.
Speaker 3
Start putting it to the test, but. It just feels better to me.
Speaker 1
Everyone has always agreed that Salmonico seems to flow better than Nico and Sam. Yeah. And also
Speaker 2
it turns into the word Salmon Eagle. Salmon Eagle. Salmon
Speaker 3
Eagle. That's a great name. Someone's got to take that. Okay,
Speaker 2
now Jenna decides to chime
Speaker 1
in on the cast. We have a foosball table at home, and we used to get really into playing foosball a lot. Oh, really? And she would always be me. So she's like, we would be the Jenna and Ren channel. Her subtle way of saying that she destroys me in foosball. That's great. Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 3
A little history lesson to end it huh yeah
Speaker 1
and i guess uh last thing here
Speaker 2
is you know we're still doing the subscriber drive on corridor yeah
Speaker 1
which has its own storyline going now which i don't i don't think we should spoil too much right now but you can go too much here i'll make
Speaker 2
an analogy for everybody i guess we talked about it last week we literally discovered this last week You're right. We did. I love that we've been doing this journey with the podcast crowd here. So you get, they know what's up. I mean, yeah. Losing subscribers slash flatlining. I would gain like 10 subscribers in the past two days in that channel. Oh, that's amazing. I feel like we basically made like a travel commercial for like, come to New York city and then accidentally broadcast that commercial in New York City.
Speaker 1
That's
Speaker 2
good. That's really good. That's kind of what happened. It's like almost 100,000 views on like the pogo stick short and this gained like 20
Speaker 1
subscribers or something like that. Wow. Man. Well, we have a lot more shorts left the whole point of this was to have a large variety so that at least like maybe a couple of them could go viral
Speaker 2
so far none of them have there's been some little interesting movements we'll see i think i think we just need to you know we're warming up that algorithm getting it spinning yeah i think
Speaker 1
i think it requires a little bit of momentum yeah
Speaker 2
i agree we
Speaker 1
tried the trick where we don't uh notify subscribers when you upload doesn't seem to work. It actively worked against us. And that was a pirate software recommended trick. Yeah. And now we know. It was the worst advice we've ever acted on. H-U
Speaker 2
why don't we post them on TikTok? Because I don't want subscribers on TikTok.
Speaker 3
We do have
Speaker 2
a TikTok channel. People don't jump from platform to platform yeah people that watch us on tick tock will not bother to then open youtube and subscribe in there i
Speaker 1
have a tick tock account with 1.3 million followers i know i've not posted anything in two years yeah you know it's crazy to me that like online
Speaker 2
if somebody's like hey somebody asked me to do this job they said they'd you know give me some exposure i was like what the heck you don't get paid in exposure you get paid in dollars you go back there and you tell them what's up get paid for your work and then tiktok's like a multi-billion dollar company and they're like we'll pay you with exposure and everybody's like yay a multi-billion dollar giant tech company built their value off of paying people on exposure
Speaker 3
is the monetization on tiktok better than shorts or i don't think i don't know if there's there even any tiktok there's really some there is it's
Speaker 1
it's weird so uh the shorts uh strategy is actually similar to how tiktok and instagram are doing it but that is not the same how youtube has normally done monetization usually they they i think it's like 55 percent of revenue goes to the creator 45 goes to google or is it the other way around the way around oh wow wait no you're right 55 45 um but for tiktok and eventually instagram although instagram now has changed again too i don't know how monetization works on instagram anymore uh they created what was called the creator fund where they put a bunch of money in it and everyone is able to share from this fund and that's not directly correlated to how much money tiktok actually makes yeah whereas youtube is like all the money we make we're splitting half of it with the creators yeah because they're the ones generating or tiktok's like yeah we may have made 30 billion dollars last year but we're only going to share 500 million wow or maybe like one or two billion i forget the actual numbers i haven't paid attention a while
Speaker 2
tiktok is a scummy company yeah
Speaker 1
straight up there's also the the conspiracy theory that because it is a chinese driven company that they've actually changed the algorithm for western the western uh world rather than you know china which incentivizes fun dances and like fun cutesy things and like stuff that kind of doesn't really stimulate the brain in the way that the algorithm in china is doing it where engineering projects and math competitions are like the top of the algorithm i've heard of that yeah were you wearing that yeah it's like oh are they playing the long game where they're trying to like subtly you know dumb us down and make them smart it's this conspiracy theory there's no evidence for this other than just a bunch of things that kind of can point that direction yeah
Speaker 2
or it turns out we all just like dumb dance videos and they all like cool engineering videos they're trying to push engineering and we're like no yeah don't underestimate how truthful the algorithm actually is yeah Yeah. That's
Speaker 1
always been YouTube's whole thing. Everyone keeps saying like, it's the, it's the algorithm, uh, doing this. It's like, YouTube's like, no, it's the audience. We've made the algorithm basically good enough to, to know that it's like, it's just a reflection of the viewers. If, if, if a video is not getting, getting served to people, it's because the people they have served it to didn't like it. And you just gotta be honest with yourself about that yep
Speaker 3
yep whenever i'm fed something on my feed that makes me question myself i always look back at myself i'm like what did i do how did i get here because i i blame myself if something pops up i'm like that shouldn't be there that's on me so yeah uh
Speaker 2
you, our last thing. So as you guys know, the podcast, it comes to an end normally, but then we continue a little after show live hangout, just answering questions, sometimes talking about spicier things that don't go on YouTube. Join on corridor digital.com if you'd like. But our last thing before we head to our kind of after show hangout here is I found a YouTube channel last night where the guy that invented Venmo or one of the guys that was on the team who sold it for it. He made like $800 million or something like that. He has a YouTube channel. And in this theme of singularity, living forever, futurology, his YouTube channel is dedicated to him trying to stop the process of aging.
Speaker 3
Wait a minute. Is this the guy who takes on the blood of his son? Is that the same guy?
Speaker 2
Maybe.
Speaker 3
Is this blood son guy? Wait,
Speaker 2
I think I do know this guy.
Speaker 3
Oh, no. Wait, that's the founder of Venmo? Okay, hold on. Let me confirm before I get all excited here. He
Speaker 2
just recently released a video where he tried to make his face. Brian Johnson is his name. He just recently released a video where he tried to make his face younger. And it's called project baby face which I think is half of the joke but like he's very candid about it and like he's doing it in such a way where it's like I can't like I can't be like too mean to him or anything like that it's your turn now come on there's a blood boy bell I don't want to be like mean to him or like be like you know derogatory towards him but like it is one kind of a... Part of me really enjoys the fact that $800 million, a desire to flog, and an obsession with immortality all came together in one man. I really appreciate that. That's the future we live in. Once again, guys... But what if he finds out the answer we gotta appreciate the sci-fi tropes we are living through right now there's a man who's almost a billionaire who's trying to live forever and he's vlogging it dude let's go that's
Speaker 3
actually so sick and some of these titles are very funny i'm not gonna read them here but there's some really funny ones so enjoy that so
Speaker 2
yeah that's uh that's where we live in yeah
Speaker 3
everyone's laughing until he does it and then we're all going okay what'd you do you know i'm
Speaker 2
a big proponent of aging gracefully and embracing embracing that seasoned vibe that you get as you get older like it's a special vibe when you get to go around and like just squint at people a little bit and they're like ah he knows what's up he's older than me it's like enjoy it it
Speaker 3
sounds like someone who's never had a blood boy if we spoke a different language yeah
Speaker 1
it sounds like somebody who doesn't have their own blood boy yeah
Speaker 3
that's embarrassing meanwhile
Speaker 1
i'm sitting over here just super excited for the nba season to start yeah preseason right now yeah and i bring that up because lebron james is going to turn 40 in December in his 22nd season in the NBA. Crazy. Playing alongside his son as a teammate who he had like two or three years into the league. First person ever to do that. He'd already been playing for a couple years. Yep. When he had this kid and now that kid is his teammate. Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 3
Yeah. We've never seen that in professional sports. Yeah. It's insane. So we're trending in the right direction well at least LeBron is I don't know if he has blood voice
Speaker 1
too
Speaker 2
something's working for
Speaker 1
him he just needed to have his blood voice closer to him during the game he's attached to him during the game
Speaker 2
oh that's dark very fun ending do you think when he drives home it's like Mad Max where he's like Nux in the car and then like his son's on the front of the hood. I love that. Oh man. All right. Oh man. We're two people away from a hundred. Let's go. Two people away from a hundred on this podcast, man. Are
Speaker 3
we going to hit a hundred live viewers right now or uh 10 million on the corridor channel first that's
Speaker 2
a good question yeah
Speaker 3
definitely here i'll join up oh shoot i can do it right now if you want it to feel empty we can join right now we lost someone
Speaker 2
we
Speaker 3
lost somebody oh it's over uh yeah log in on your phones come on guys i'm back in i'm back in 99 let's go come on this is the biggest event in Corridor Digital history. Let's go. The biggest milestone. Are we already
Speaker 2
at the post- Are we in the after show? Are we going to save this for the after show? Are we going to finish this in the after show? All right,
Speaker 1
thanks for watching, everyone. We're taking this after show. And we'll be back
Speaker 2
next week. Yeah, thanks for listening to the podcast. All right, after show begins now.

EP 97: How Aravind Srinivas (CEO, Perplexity) is Disrupting Google Search with AI

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