The AI industry is at a major crossroads

Hey there, and welcome to Decoder! I’m Hayden Field, senior AI reporter at The Verge and your Thursday episode guest host. I’m subbing in for Nilay while he’s still out on parental leave, and I’m excited to keep diving into the good, the bad, and the questionable in the AI industry.

It’s been a very big news week in AI, and a lot of it had to do with OpenAI. The company hosted its annual DevDay in San Francisco on Monday, and I’m still here in person to cover all the news. It announced a bunch 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 has shoved AI-generated video into the mainstream, creating all sorts of unintended consequences and even surprising OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who’s become the face of Sora memes across the internet.

And earlier this week, The New York Times published a great story about how AI-powered job screening has become so prevalent that applicants are starting to sneak in hidden messages to chatbots inside their resumes — effectively trying to prompt-inject the automated job-screening process for a better chance at an interview.

I brought in Kanjun Qiu, CEO of AI startup Imbue and a close watcher of the industry, to help me break all this down. Kanjun has been both a tech founder and investor, and her perspective on AI and the broader tech industry in general is a very unique one. She believes the biggest question hanging over the AI industry today is whether it will resemble the more open, user-centric vision of the early internet or the closed, 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’d like to read more on what we talked about in this episode, check out the links below:

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