Listening Devices

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Happy Wednesday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is OpenAI revealing that an employee planted a sophisticated recording device inside one of its offices.

Today’s Lineup

Fragment CEO Thomas Neckel at 11:50 AM
Erewhon CGO Kabir Jain at 12:00 PM
Wilder Market Founder & CEO Danielle Axman at 12:20 PM
MIT Math Assistant Professor & Former NFL Athlete John Urschel at 12:30 PM
Attio Co-Founder & CEO Nick Sharp at 12:45 PM
ICON Co-Founder & CEO Jason Ballard at 12:55 PM
Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson at 1:05 PM
The Atlantic Staff Writer Josh Tyrangiel at 1:15 PM

Run of Show

Listening Devices

The OpenAI spy listening device story is all over the timeline. I don’t really think there’s a strong take to be had here other than, it’s a crazy story, reinforces the stakes at play here, and makes clear the importance of security, which has been top of mind all year.

In this case, surreptitious ambient listening was the goal of the employee, who is now being investigated by the FBI. But ambient listening has been an uncomfortable technological possibility for years, and one society has grappled with in various ways. I actually heard the “Facebook listens to your for ad targeting” concept just yesterday, even though that claim has been investigated by Wired in 2017, refuted by Antonio Garcia Martinez on Joe Rogan in 2022, and Facebook corporate has a whole article directly stating: “We don’t use your microphone unless you’ve given us permission and are actively using a feature that requires the microphone.”

But even though it seems pretty clear that Meta isn’t secretly recording in the background (the incentive for whistleblowing on this issue would be immense), I was wondering how far we are from ambient audio recording actually influencing ad recommendation systems, even if indirectly.

The core idea is this. A non-Meta device ambiently records audio, analyzes intent signals, and then works with brands to upload custom audiences to Meta Ads Manager. Smart TVs (and IoT devices generally) could be a vector for this. I initially thought the recent LG scandal might be linked here, but it’s not quite so clean. To review:

Last month, Gamers Nexus reported that LG TVs were scanning local networks for third-party phones and other devices. Steve Burke, Gamers Nexus’ editor-in-chief, said: “The [LG G5] crawled our entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including smartwatches and phones of our staff who didn’t even know we were working on this.”

Even when the TV wasn’t online, the LG TV they tested was able to record sound around it: “We were even able to capture microphone audio while the TV was unplugged from the network. Burke said the audio was reportedly stored locally via plaintext, which could potentially allow the data to be sent to LG [if] the TV connects online again.”

Shortly after the video dropped, LG responded by denying continuous conversation recording. They acknowledged that active voice sessions (when a user presses a button to talk to the TV) can capture nearby speech (obviously) but they denied supplying ambient-audio data to LG Ad Solutions, which could potentially feed into Meta Ads, and make your Instagram ads scarily accurate.

That doesn’t stop confirmation bias from making your ads feel like they are listening to you. If you are working on a DIY project at home, you might have searched the web once and landed on a pixel that influenced your ad targeting, it’s pretty rare to leave absolutely no breadcrumbs across the internet when you’re interested in buying something.

I’m personally not a huge fan of LG’s smart features, even if they aren’t ambiently listening to me, but I find myself counter-intuitively excited about Apple’s new partnership with LG. Yesterday on the show I was lamenting the fact that Google has Nest, Amazon has Ring, but Apple doesn’t really have a strong solution for doorbells, cameras, locks, and thermostats. The basic stuff that is actually somewhat useful in a home without going crazy and having your fridge be able to tweet.

Reviews for Apple HomeView yesterday were… not very good. Adding a screen to a busy family situation in a kitchen can just inject more chaos, and many of the use cases they outlined would be better on an iPhone directly. I generally agree with the critiques. This feels like it would be clutter, although the wall mounted version might solve this. Overall, the HomeView might be the least exciting product launch for me personally, but I like the broader direction Apple is taking here. It’s great that Apple is finally solving the integration problem by forming deep partnerships with IoT device manufacturing.

A lot of the benefit that Apple brings to the partnership with LG is a sterling reputation and crystal clear messaging around privacy. “Data is encrypted end-to-end in Apple Home” is a very simple message, which I love, but also, I’ll probably wind up running Apple’s Home app on a headless Mac Mini and puppeteering it with ChatGPT computer use.

Clip Spotlight: We asked Neal Stephenson if he uses AI in his writing. He gave us lore about his book Quicksilver:

"I'm not real big on atrophying my skills."

"There's something about the serendipity and the randomness of doing it yourself that is very productive in the end."

"When I was writing my Baroque Cycle series of historical novels, I would just make notes by hand in comp books."

"It was all hodgepodge. It wasn't organized or searchable. And so I would have to flip through them trying to find stuff."

"In the course of doing that, I would stumble across things I'd have forgotten about or connections would get made, and new ideas would emerge."

"So for me, having that work done by a research assistant, whether it be a human or AI, would actually be counterproductive."

"I mean, I already know how to write books, so I don't need help."