AI can make tech CEOs’ lives easier. What about everyone else?

Dazzle AI CEO Marissa Mayer recently became the latest tech CEO to face criticism over seemingly out-of-touch comments extolling the usefulness of AI.

In Mayer’s case, that involved asking an AI tool for help with a school-assigned description of her daughter. For OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, that’s included suggesting that parents create personalized podcasts for their kids’ drive to school and also declaring that he could not imagine parenting without ChatGPT. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even suggested that it will become increasingly acceptable to meet your social and romantic needs through AI.

This all led TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling to wonder if AI executives are simply too out-of-touch to build products for normal people — a crucial question with Anthropic set to go public just as Wall Street begins losing its appetite for heavy AI spending.

On the latest episode of the Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I chatted with Amanda about why industry leaders can sometimes seem so tone deaf. Kirsten wondered if this is more of a marketing problem or a product problem. 

Amanda’s answer: “A little bit of both.” She also argued that the tech industry is increasingly pushing a future “where basic human interaction gets more and more optimized out of actually occurring,” adding, “And call me old school, but I think that humans being able to talk to each other is probably a net positive for society.”

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Ha: There’s a lot of societal skepticism about AI, this feeling that the people running these companies don’t have our best interests at heart, that they’re out of touch. And so, you would just think, “Maybe don’t make statements like that,” because of course, people are going to see them very skeptically.

I think [CEOs] are trying to walk this delicate balance. On the one hand, there’s a tremendous financial incentive for them to make the case that you should use this technology in every aspect of your lives. But when you make that case, it actually [doesn’t paint] a very appealing picture. In some cases, it’s downright dystopian.

Kirsten Korosec: Anthony, if they took your advice, we would have nothing to talk about on this show. 

But I will say this: There’s this whole idea of ChatGPT and other AI tools making your life easier when it comes to personal relationships. And in many of these cases, it just seems to overcomplicate what would be, like, observing your child. That might be hard for some people, the people who are building these products, and it doesn’t necessarily relate to everyone else out there in the world. It can just seem so incredibly disconnected when you see these quotes.

To me, it always comes back to — who are they speaking to? Are there people out there who can relate? Maybe there are.

Amanda Silberling: Other use cases we’ve seen people mention are, like, the Bumble CEO Whitney Wolf Heard has made comments about, “Well, what if we had AI concierges, your AI dates the other person’s AI. And then if the AIs have a good date together, then they introduce the people.”

Or in the New York Times article, Marissa Mayer mentioned, “Well, what if my AI could coordinate with my husband’s AI” and stuff like that. And I think that it feels like people are trying to over-optimize out of just having conversations with people.

I’ve already seen that happen in my generation, where I do notice in myself that if I’m ordering takeout, it feels weird to call a place. I’m just so used to, “Well, obviously you can do it online and you don’t have to talk to anyone. And I feel like there’s just going to be more of these things, where basic human interaction gets more and more optimized out of actually occurring. And call me old school, but I think that humans being able to talk to each other is probably a net positive for society. 

Sean O’Kane: Yeah, but what’s the ROI, Amanda? How much revenue can you generate off of a conversation that somebody’s having in meatspace?

Amanda: That is the thing, though. Dating is really inefficient. It sucks that you have to go on a bunch of dates with different people. You might waste an evening and be like, “Well, that was a bust.” And so you can see why people are [wondering,] “What if you didn’t have to go on dates? What if your AI could go on dates for you?” But there’s just something not human there.

And then also, you are outsourcing the decision of who you are going to date to a computer that you are trusting knows you better than yourself, which I don’t think is true.

Kirsten: One thing that I think is worth going back to, and I sort of hinted about this earlier: Who are they talking to? Who is their audience for all these optimizations, in your view? Is it a product problem, or is it a messaging problem? Are they just talking about it in the wrong way, and actually, there’s this really great value in here and it just seems out of touch with reality and humanity, but if they just talked about it differently, it would be better? Or is it actually a product problem, and to your point, that we’re focusing on optimizing sort of the wrong things with AI tools?

Amanda: I think it’s a little bit of both, but I think that the marketing problem comes from when you have these high-up people at these massively valuable companies in a room together, talking about the pain points in their lives, and [they focus on] making dinner reservations, booking flights. Everybody does those things, but I’m not booking flights once a week. I’m not making dinner reservations all the time. And when I do, those aren’t really things that I find to be a particular challenge in my life.

I mean, obviously people find value from things like ChatGPT and Claude, but I think the value that the average person is finding isn’t necessarily like booking a flight for me.

Anthony:  One of the things I’ve also been thinking about is, there are companies like Uber that, when it first launched, it was targeting this tech early adopter set in San Francisco, and I remember being very confident [that] this will never catch on more broadly. This is just for a very narrow audience of young urban millennials who have money to spare on cars, and it works [uniquely] well in San Francisco. 

For a lot of things, the tech industry has succeeded by betting that, “People have not caught up with us, but we are the leading edge, and we reflect what the consumer of the future looks like, the family of the future looks like.”

And in this case, it just seems like that bet is not borne out yet — for a variety of reasons, partly because the society that this technology is being promoted into is very different. People are starting to say, “I don’t love the influence that this technology is having in my life. I don’t love that you’re pitching this as something where every experience in my life should be optimized out of. But actually, I want to live my own life. I actually want to parent my own children.”

Amanda: I think that it’s not a coincidence that at the same time we see this over-optimization happening among people in tech, that there’s also a movement of people that are reverting back to wanting to use flip phones, which I’ve talked about on Equity before, or people who are buying CDs because they’re tired of an algorithm telling them what they want to listen to.

And it is just an interesting cultural tension that’s happening, where we haven’t found the balance of what optimization actually helps us and what optimization just makes us feel like we aren’t as human as we want to be.