Anne Barry

recent antitrust rulings over at search and advertising dominance.

So, Toby, I'm curious, how much of this is an attempt to try and reclaim some reputational high ground again, if you're Google?

Of course you were a star pupil and star athlete and all these kinds of things.

Well, is that because you were at a school where basically your teachers were being intellectually honest and they weren't inflating your grades at that time?

Particularly if these are students who are innately competitive, actually, they want to see some differentiation in performance.

I'm so skeptical.

That just means you get great inflation to more A pluses over time.

One of the things here, Toby, that struck me when I was reading about this, there's a lot of conversation around how the students are pushing back.

They're saying they already face extreme workloads and stress.

What about the professors, right?

If you take a look at this from their perspective, one of the reasons this has happened is because professors have been stressed that if they don't have a course as perceived as being at least accessible for getting grades that are within reach, then they might see enrollment fall.

And there's this kind of race to the bottom in some sense in terms of it being a popularity contest for them.

I'm going to repeat a sentence you literally just said, Tibby.

You literally just said that ChatGPT is used by people to probe the depths of themselves and their existence.

That was poetic in terms of your voice over there.

So I'm writing that down.

One of the things, too, that was interesting here is there is this risk of something called AI sycophancy,

which is where you type something into ChatGPT and it has a tendency to agree with you more than to actually push back, which just shows the importance of the prompts that you use if you really want something objective coming back.

You know, it's a little bit like improvisation training.

You know, it's always yes and every sentence you have.