N.Y.C. Says Airbn-bye + How Far Would You Go for a GPU? + The A.I. Songs of the Summer
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This podcast is supported by KPMG. Your task as a visionary leader is simple. Harness the power of AI. Shape the future of business. Oh, and do it before anyone else does without leaving people behind or running into unforeseen risks. Simple, right? KPMG's got you. Helping you lead a people-powered transformation that accelerates AI's value with confidence. How's that for a vision? Learn more at www.kpmg.us slash AI. Casey, happy

Happy Burning Man week. Happy Burning Man week to you. Now, of course, if you don't live in the Bay Area, you might not know this, but starting this Sunday, it is the best week to be in the Bay Area because you can get a restaurant reservation anywhere. Correct, or parking. Parking. Anywhere you want. The city empties out because all of the tech people go to the desert in Nevada to drop acid and dance. I'm going to rent a car and just drive around parking in different locations in the city just because I can.

That's the plan for this week for me. Have you ever been to Burning Man? You know, I haven't. And for the following two reasons, I don't like to be hot and I don't like going outside. And Burning Man is basically the most concentrated version of those two things. So what I've always said is if they would do it like at a hotel with air conditioning, I'm very interested. Have you? Do you go?

I did. I went once. That's right, because you wrote about the rich people there. Yes, I went once, and it was a horrible experience. I will say the most memorable moments of this, this was now like a decade ago that I went to Burning Man. There's a shower tent that is like a giant, like picture like a, you know, a wedding tent. Okay.

But there's like people with hoses in there and they will spray you with soap and then they will hose you down. This is where I would be spending all of my time in Burning Man, by the way. So everyone gets naked. There are hundreds of people. You're all just stark naked in the desert. You go into this tent, you get your hose down, and then that's like your shower for the week, right? Because there's no amenities here. No. Yeah. So I'm in line naked. I'm already very uncomfortable because I'm the only sober person in this shower tent. And so I'm sitting there and I just hear, Kevin?

Oh, no! Literally the worst thing you could hear in that situation. And who was it? And I turned around. It's a Google executive I know. Oh, no! Sundar! Sundar, give Kevin his privacy! I had interviewed this person like a week earlier, and now here they are, naked, staring at my naked body in the desert. And they said, I just want to circle back and touch base on a few things. Just wanted to bump this email that I sent and see where we were on that project.

I'm Kevin Roos. I'm a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. And you're listening to Hard Fork. This week, New York City is saying Airbnb to Airbnb. Then Silicon Valley is scrambling to get a hold of the hottest new commodity, its chips. And finally, we check back in on AI music and YouTube's new plan to make synthetic voices profitable.

Casey, I want to start today by talking about a story that I don't think is getting enough attention, which is that New York City is effectively banning Airbnb. And how does that affect our New Year's Eve party house that we've rented? Well, it's going to be... We're going to have to do it outside the city, maybe in Westchester. All right, seems fine. So this story...

has been bubbling up for months now, but it finally seems like there is actually going to be a decisive turning point. So starting on September 5th, the city of New York is cracking down on short-term rentals, which is basically code for Airbnb and then like a few other sites like Vrbo. I never know how to say it. I think it's VRBO. I think it's Vrbo. No, no one says Vrbo. I think they say Vrbo. Okay. Okay.

So, Airbnb has been fighting with New York City for many years. Since the dawn of time, basically. It's the dawn of time. But now it appears that this is actually coming to a head. This week, the Wall Street Journal published a story titled, Airbnb hosts and guests scramble as New York begins crackdown. And it...

Basically is sort of a glimpse into what's happening in New York City when it comes to Airbnbs, which are that hosts are taking off their listings ahead of this September 5th deadline. And Airbnb is actually starting to block people from booking new stays in New York City after September 5th.

So that's a big deal because New York is one of the tourism capitals of the world, and Airbnb is a way that a lot of folks choose to plan their vacations. So how did all of this come about? So this has been a long time coming, this conflict between New York and

Airbnb. And I think the broader context here is that a lot of cities sort of treated Airbnb as kind of like a novelty when it first arrived. And, you know, it wasn't that many apartments or houses that were being listed for short-term rentals. So they didn't really care. And then it used to be considered a weird thing to let a stranger sleep in your house for a night for money.

Yes, exactly. But this has been changing over the past several years as the number of Airbnbs has been growing in cities. A lot of cities have been cracking down on short-term rentals. Dallas, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Oakland, where I live, they've all passed their own restrictions on short-term rentals. Here in San Francisco, there's sort of been a long process of cracking down on Airbnbs and other short-term rentals.

And New York has gone farther, I think it's fair to say, than most cities. The big thing with these rules is that in order to list your house or your apartment or your spare room on Airbnb or any other short-term rental platform, you have to register with the city and follow a number of rules.

Well, that doesn't sound like a big deal. Well, it doesn't, but you got to sort of dig into the details of what these rules say. So one of them says that in order to be able to list a short-term rental on Airbnb or any other platform, you have to be living in the space during the rental, right? So you can't go to a different city for a month and rent out your room or your house or your apartment while you're there. Right.

You have to be in the space and you have to give your guest a back rub when they wake up. That's not technically in the rule. It's implied. Yeah, it's implied. So the second part of this is that you can only rent out your space to up to two people at a time. And you have to maintain what's called a common household, which means basically that you cannot have locks locked.

on any parts of the house. So you can't have, you know, if you have a three bedroom apartment, you can't lock off one of the rooms because that's your room or a supply closet or something like that. And if you're limited to only having two people in the rental, that just means that throuples are out of luck.

So if you're in a three-person partnership, you literally cannot stay in an Airbnb in New York anymore. That's true. That's true. We haven't examined the effects on the poly community, but they are reeling. So much for the liberal order in New York. Yeah, we know what they'll be talking about at Burning Man this year. So this rule also implies that you can't have multiple properties, right? Right.

And importantly, there are actually going to be fines for not complying. Hosts under this rule can be fined up to $5,000 for listing their units illegally. And companies like Airbnb can actually be fined for processing payments for unregistered rentals. It seems like in general, there's a lot of fines that are associated with living in New York. You used to live there. Would you say that's true? It seems like there's always just fines and fees and

It's true. I remember I did have to pay like a dog registration fee to have my dog. This is exactly what I'm talking about. So there are nickel and diamond people all over the place. But this actually does feel like a major change in the way that cities have been treating Airbnb. And a lot of people are worried that this is sort of the start of a bigger national crackdown.

An Airbnb backlash. If you will. Well, Kevin, what does Airbnb have to say about these new rules? So I talked to Airbnb. You know, they say these rules are extreme and oppressive. They basically say like this is the hotel lobby sort of throwing its weight around to try to like kill a competitor. They also say that this licensing process that the city is talking about, like in practice, doesn't really work. They say, you know, the city has only approved a tiny fraction of the applications it has received in part because they're understaffed.

And the bigger thing they say is that these rules just really don't make sense. They don't achieve the goals that New York City wants them to achieve. Isn't the goal to just get rid of Airbnb? I mean, if that's the goal, it seems like it could work. Right. Well, the rationale that Eric

Eric Adams, the mayor of New York and city council has given for this rule change is basically that the number of Airbnbs in the city is contributing to an increase in housing prices for New Yorkers. You know, by having all these apartments and brownstones and buildings that are not licensed as hotels, but that are effectively functioning as hotels, you

you get units taken off the rental market that otherwise would be available for people to rent long-term, and you actually get higher housing costs for everyone. So that's one thing. They also say, like...

This is hurting the hospitality industry in New York to have all these sort of, you know, Airbnbs, you know, where people would otherwise be staying in hotels. And in response, Airbnb basically says, well, it's not clear yet how Airbnb and other short-term rental websites affect housing prices. In a city, there's been some conflicting data about that.

They cite a study by Boston University professor Michael Salinger, which they actually commissioned, that found that banning short-term rentals in New York wouldn't alleviate the city's housing crisis because over 80% of the listings on Airbnb in New York City would actually generate more income if they were rented on a long-term basis, which implies that sort of hosts aren't just

taking units that they would otherwise rent long-term and making them into Airbnbs. They're doing it, you know, because they're traveling out of town for a month or they only spend, you know, a couple months a year in New York and they want someone to live in their place the rest of it. So they're basically saying, like, this is not going to fix the housing crisis. They're also saying that a lot of Airbnbs in New York are not in Manhattan.

They're in the outer boroughs. They're in Queens. They're in Brooklyn, places where there aren't really a lot of hotels. And so they're not really competing with the hotel industry in Manhattan. And they're kind of spreading tourism and tourism dollars around the city. Yeah. So I can understand why Airbnb doesn't like this law. What are the hosts saying about what it might cost them?

So a big point that Airbnb has been making during this sort of campaign to fight this is that there are a lot of people who really do depend on Airbnb and other short-term rental sites to help with their mortgages or their living expenses. The Wall Street Journal interviewed a 46-year-old playwright and director who rents out his two-bedroom apartment in Harlem when he goes out of town for work.

who said that, you know, he depends on this money. Andrew Lloyd Webber depends on that money? You'd think he'd have enough just from cats, but go on. So there are a lot of people like that. You know, these are not landlords who own 15 different apartments and are sort of running a little, like, unlicensed hotel chain. These are people who use Airbnb to bring in a little extra money to help them pay rent.

their living expenses. And they're not happy about this. They've already had to do things like register with the city, pay a hotel tax. It's already kind of onerous in a lot of places to run a small Airbnb. But this law is going to make it much, much harder. And in many cases, we'll just prevent them from doing that altogether. That makes sense. And if you own two or fewer homes, I feel sympathy for you. If you own three homes, I don't. That's just my personal feeling.

Casey, what do you think about the crackdown on Airbnb and short-term rentals more broadly? Well, look, I've always been of two minds about these short-term rentals. One is sometimes when I'm traveling, it is a very cool option to have. And also, I would not like to live next to one. And I've just never known how to square those two things, right? It's something that can be convenient to me as a traveler, but as a resident of my town, it makes me nervous, right? If there's like sort of a

different family of eight pulling up in a station wagon every three days to stay in the house next door, it can just kind of create some friction. So I think it is only understandable that so many cities are coming up with regulations on these things. At the same time, I do think there's maybe a case to be made that New York's going overboard. Yeah, so I've thought about this a lot, and I

I have lived in New York. I understand it's a very dense city. People are on top of each other. There is a concrete jungle where dreams are made. Yeah. Famously. Yes. And I get,

that, you know, having a ton of Airbnbs show up in your neighborhood can be upsetting for people. You know, you do hear the horror stories of like, you know, someone rented my apartment and held an orgy or there's, you know, like drunken tourists cavorting on my street at 2am, you know, that kind of thing. New Yorkers are very precious about their personal space. They don't have a lot

of it and I get why it would feel strange and alien to all of a sudden have these like unlicensed hotels operating in the city sure but at the same time like it's New York City baby okay crazy weird things are gonna be happening if you wanted the quiet life like you should not have moved to the Big Apple totally if this was

they call it? So my take, I have two takes on this. One of them is my personal take, which is that I agree with you. I think this is a bummer because I stay in a lot of Airbnbs when I travel. It's often better for families, right? Because you've got the kitchen and there's sort of a little bit more room for y'all to spread out all your plastic toys for the kid. Exactly. So I travel a lot with my family, including extended family. You know, every summer I go on a trip with my mom and my brother and we all get a big house on Airbnb. And that's been a really good option for us.

I would say like as a consumer, I have really enjoyed this sort of category of travel that Airbnb has opened up, which is like the ability to take a trip with a large or medium-sized group of people and all stay under one roof with common space. Now, I think that's less of an issue in New York than other places because there aren't a lot of huge like, you know, eight-bedroom listings in New York City anyway. I did stay in one Airbnb in New York City once on a work trip that had a cabin.

a cage in it? Have I told you about this? No. This was years ago. I was on a work trip and we booked this Airbnb and unbeknownst to us, it was not displayed in the photos. When we arrived, there was...

a cage. This was not a bird cage. This was not a dog cage. This was a human cage. This was a floor-to-ceiling cage that was almost certainly some sort of fetish thing. Right. It's sort of, you know the killer song, Mr. Brightside, when he says, I'm coming out of my cage and I'm feeling just fine. Maybe that was his apartment!

So anyway, there aren't a lot of big, you know, multi-bedroom listings on Airbnb in New York. So I actually don't think like that's the kind of travel that most people are doing in New York City. Right. But in other parts of the country, that is a big draw of Airbnb over hotel.

But wait, so what's your second? So your first take is basically like, I like doing Airbnb when I travel. So what's your second take? My second take on this is that I think this is a very bad policy idea to restrict the short term rental market in an attempt to fix the overall housing crisis. And I'll tell you why.

We have a long history in this country of telling people what they can and can't do with their houses, right? And some of that is good, right? I don't mind like the fact that there's an electrical code that your house has to follow and you can't have like exposed wires dangling.

That seems like a good idea. - They turned down my application to make amphetamines at my house the other day, and I said, "Oh, great. "I guess I'll just have to make more podcasts." - But some of this is, we know, bad and exclusionary and actually part of what is fueling our nationwide housing crisis. I'm thinking of things like zoning laws, land use restrictions, HOAs, that kind of stuff. This is just bad and exclusionary, and it's part of the reason that we have this housing crisis.

I'm not a big fan of the NIMBYs. I mean, the joke in the Bay Area is like, you know, people will have these signs in their yard being like, everyone is welcome here. And then like, you actually look at who's showing up at the city council meetings to oppose new development. It's like all the same people. So we are in a housing crisis in this country.

And there's actually not a lot of evidence that having a reasonable number of Airbnbs in a city impacts the cost or availability of housing in a major way. But that probably depends on how you define a reasonable number, right? I mean, this debate has been going on basically ever since Airbnb got even a little bit popular. It does seem like one of those cases where I have read competing research on the subject and I am not a housing economist. And so I don't really know where I land on all that. But I will say,

It feels intuitive that the more Airbnbs that are on the market, the fewer places there are for me to rent. Well, and that may be true in some places for some threshold. But there's also been some research that has shown that the availability of short-term rentals has actually incentivized people to build more housing. So there was a study called The Effect of Short-Term Rentals on Residential Investments.

And it found that actually in areas where there were short-term rentals like Airbnb, people were incentivized to build more houses, right? And actually people did more things like building ADUs or these kind of in-law units in their... Accessory dwelling units for the uninitiated, yeah. Which, you know, you could say like, oh, well, how does it...

help the neighborhood if there are people just building Airbnb ADUs in their backyards. But those may not stay Airbnbs forever, right? Those may become part of the long-term rental supply if they're built. Well, that's interesting. Like, I would not have thought about that. But when you say it, it does make sense that if your house becomes an asset that generates cash, then people might actually try to build more of them. Right. And I will say, though,

I don't think any decision that a city makes about Airbnb or other short-term rental sites is going to fix or exacerbate greatly the housing crisis, right? According to Airbnb, there were about 38,500 Airbnbs in New York City as of January of this year. That doesn't include like hotels listing on the platform, but it's just sort of the basic like what you think of when you think of an Airbnb.

And just compare that to the total supply of housing in the city. In 2021, there were about 3.6 million housing units in New York City. It's just a drop in the bucket. So a tiny, tiny fraction of the apartments and houses in New York City are or have ever been Airbnbs.

I don't think that banning Airbnb is going to solve the housing crisis. In fact, if you looked at cities that have placed restrictions on short-term rentals, the rents are still going up there. The housing prices are still going up there. We need a lot of other solutions. We need changes to zoning and land use, environmental review. We need to address rising construction costs. And there are all kinds of things we could do to make that happen. I don't think banning Airbnb is going to play a big role at all. And to be clear, I'm not saying that

all regulation of short-term rentals is bad or that Airbnb should have no rules whatsoever. It would be fine with me if New York City wanted to make them pay more taxes or register with the city or even limit the number of units that one person can rent out at a time. But when I hear people talking about banning short-term rentals altogether because they don't want their neighborhoods to change or they don't want these transient people coming in from out of town, what I hear is just

NIMBY. I hear, not in my backyard, I hear the same arguments that people in California have been using for decades to stop people from building housing in their neighborhood. And I don't think this has anything to do with addressing housing costs. I think this is that New Yorkers do not want drunken European tourists on their streets at 2 a.m. And someone has to stand up for the rights of drunken European tourists. I will be that person today. That's very brave of you. You know, I'm sure that that is part of it. But I think

Something else you said earlier is probably equally as big, which is there is a massive hotel lobby in New York City. And man, are they excited to get those Airbnbs off the market because that's 38,500 more sets of visitors who now are going to be forced to stay in their clients' buildings. Yeah. I mean, one interesting thing about this is that even though these crackdowns are happening all over America,

the country on short-term rentals, Airbnb still seems to be in a good financial position. Their stock is up 50% this year. Their bookings are still going up. So what do you think explains that, given that people in cities seem to be turning against them? Well, when Airbnb filed its S-1 before going public, they disclosed that no one city accounted for more than about 2.5% of its revenue.

So even if you did wipe a city like New York entirely off the map, even if it is one of their biggest cities, they're still going to be making about as much money as they were before. They were also smart in that they just proactively started working with a lot of cities to get rules into place that were more favorable for the company. They've done that all around the world. Some cities choose to be more restrictive than others, but for the most part, they were able to get systems that worked into a lot of cities.

Yeah. Gazi, do you think, I've sort of heard it theorized that this crackdown on Airbnbs across the country coming at the same time as like Uber getting regulated in places. And there's this sense that these kind of companies, these darlings of the so-called sharing economy of the 2010s that, you know, raised billions of dollars, basically promising to like transform the fabric of urban life in America and elsewhere, that that's sort of coming to an end.

This sort of move fast, break things era where you could just kind of like open up a new app in a city and wait for regulators to catch on. Do you think that's over? Kevin, there are people in this world walking around with orbs, scanning eyeballs to create a new global currency.

And let me tell you, my friend, they do not have permission and it is still moving ahead. So I think, look, the way that the Silicon Valley works is that entrepreneurs are always on the hunt for these areas where there is enough regulatory gray area and wiggle room that they can try something without permission and

you never know. Maybe you do wind up upsetting the entire global taxi industry or the entire global tourism industry. So that is absolutely not going to stop. And look, it's hard to be a city administrator, right? These folks are already facing all sorts of problems, and they are not constantly scanning the horizon for new threats and disruptions. So my guess is there's still going to be plenty of room for entrepreneurs to get out there and shake things up. Yeah. Would you ever list your house on Airbnb?

You know, at this point in my life, probably...

probably not like, it doesn't feel amazing to me, but I think I'm just maybe a little bit more anxious about that sort of thing in general. And I mean, look, you know, I think it can be cool and people are very different. You know, I had a friend who actually worked at Airbnb who came to town for work earlier this year. And he told me that he was staying in an Airbnb while he was in San Francisco, as you might expect, and was staying with somebody who just like lived a

above the store where he worked and loved to invite guests in from Airbnb because he loved to meet new people from around the world. And I do think we should sort of make room for these things. You know, if you're the sort of person that wants to throw open your doors to a stranger and like charge him a couple hundred bucks a night and get to know people from all over the world, that's cool. You should probably be allowed to do that in some regulated way. And if you are listening to this show and you want to spend a night in Casey Newton's house in San Francisco... We're raffling it off!

When we come back, New York Times reporter Aaron Griffith takes us inside the crazy scramble for GPUs in Silicon Valley.

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Give your team the power of limitless potential with Snapdragon. To learn more, visit qualcomm.com/snapdragonhardfork. Hello, this is Yuande Kamalefa from New York Times Cooking, and I'm sitting on a blanket with Melissa Clark. And we're having a picnic using recipes that feature some of our favorite summer produce. Yuande, what'd you bring? So this is a cucumber agua fresca. It's made with fresh cucumbers, ginger, and lime.

How did you get it so green? I kept the cucumber skins on and pureed the entire thing. It's really easy to put together and it's something that you can do in advance. Oh, it is so refreshing. What'd you bring, Melissa?

Well, strawberries are extra delicious this time of year, so I brought my little strawberry almond cakes. Oh, yum. I roast the strawberries before I mix them into the batter. It helps condense the berries' juices and stops them from leaking all over and getting the crumb too soft. Mmm. You get little pockets of concentrated strawberry flavor. That tastes amazing. Oh, thanks. New York Times Cooking has so many easy recipes to fit your summer plans. Find them all at NYTCooking.com. I have sticky strawberry juice all over my fingers.

Okay, so we've talked about chips on this show. We have, against my will, but we've talked about it. So a few months ago, we did a show about NVIDIA and how they kind of became a central part of the AI economy by making these things called GPUs, which are these high-end graphics processors that you need to build large language models.

And this week, NVIDIA reported a 101% jump in its second quarter revenue compared to last year, which they said was in part because of the huge demand for these chips. And the other day, my colleague Aaron Griffith published a great story titled The Desperate Hunt for the AI Boom's Most Indispensable Prize, which is sort of all about the crazy, insane lengths that companies are going to to procure these high-powered chips.

It's like the game show supermarket sweep where you have to put as many groceries in your cart as you can before time runs out. It's like in the AI industry, there's a giant supermarket sweep and all anyone wants to put in the cart is GPUs. Exactly. Remember on supermarket sweep how they always went for the hams first? Always the hams, the big cheeses, the diapers. Yes. So these are the hams of the AI world right now. Everyone wants them in their carts. I thought we were the hams of the AI world, but go on.

So I wanted to have Aaron on because I think it's just a great story and a good way to understand how insane the market for these AI chips is right now and what lengths people are going to to get them. So Aaron Griffith, welcome back to Hard Fork.

Hi, thanks for having me. Hi, Aaron. So I was hoping that we could just start by talking about kind of just the lengths that you describe in your story for how far some of these companies are going to procure GPUs. You talked to one executive who basically called GPUs a rare earth metal. So what made you want to do this story and what did you hear while you were reporting it? Well,

Well, I've been going to a bunch of AI events, hackathons, meetups, pitch events, just to get a sense of what's happening in this kind of boom time. I mean, there's tons of companies springing up and I want to know which ones to pay attention to. And

I noticed that one of them, that when founders were pitching their startups to a bunch of engineers that they're trying to recruit, one of the main selling points that they were including alongside all the regular perks like free lunch and stock options and all this stuff was like, oh, and we have access to all of these H100 GPUs, or we just raised $40 million and we're allocating 8 million of it to GPUs. And I

I just thought that was kind of a new thing that I'd never heard before. Like, this is a recruiting tactic. Like, we have access to compute. I was like, well...

Isn't that just kind of a given? We live in the cloud era. We live in an era of computing abundance. Why is this suddenly a hot commodity that you're bragging about having access to? Right. Startups used to brag about doing your laundry. And now it's like, get a load of this chip. Yeah. Yeah. It seemed so bizarre. I was like, it almost reminded me of the supply chain issues in the beginning of the pandemic. It's just like, what is happening here? What

we live in a world where we can't get access to everything we want at the tap of a button. What? And so I started, you know, talking to more and more startups and all these comparisons came out. The rare earth metal, people talked about it like it was drugs. Like, you know, you have to know somebody and have a hookup. People are just walking down Market Street in San Francisco in trench coats, like opening up and saying, hey. So that's

That's why I take issue with your supermarket sweep comparison because that would be like if the supermarket shelves were empty. And it's more like a sort of Hunger Games situation. I see. It's a post-apocalyptic supermarket sweep where there's nothing left on the shelves. Right. Yes, exactly. So the more I started talking to people, the more I realized this is an enormous problem that's impacting startups. Erin, the most upsetting thing that I learned from your article was about the existence of something called

the GPU song. Oh, I'm so sorry to have introduced that to a broader audience. Which is a song that was put out by someone calling themselves Weird AI Yanko Chip. And it is a version of We Didn't Start the Fire that is all about the quest to procure GPUs. And I think we should listen to it. ♪

Elon Musk, GCP, Sam Oman, AMD Inflection, 4N, Alan Turing test. Oracle, Anthropic, Google Cloud, Symbiotic, Nvidia, Microsoft, AWS. Hugging Face, DGX, Lambda Labs, AlexNet, AMD, InfiniBand, A100, LLMs, Twitter, Tesla, SpaceX, TinyCorp, HGX, Call of T, SMC, Emodems, Userfire,

Everybody's hunting for some H-100s. GPUs are weakening. Who is this song? Do they play this at parties in Silicon Valley? I don't understand. Did you interview Weird AI Yankochip? I didn't. I didn't. I had limited space and I didn't want to oversell. Well, my understanding is it's very hard to get on the phone. It's sort of like getting an interview with Beyonce. Yeah.

So it's not, to my understanding, just that startups are using their GPUs to recruit engineers. They're actually being used by lots of people as different types of incentives. They're also using GPUs as collateral. This is something that I learned for the first time from your story, which is that at least one company has gone out and sort of raised money, like gotten a loan with their GPUs as collateral, the way that you might use your house as collateral for a loan. Yeah, that was crazy. And so I guess...

My understanding is that that market is not new, but it has gotten a lot more intense in the last year or so. I guess there's always been the ability to finance your GPU or your servers or anything like that with this special kind of debt that if you default, the debt provider just

they just get the GPUs. And so, yeah, there are now, you know, there's all kinds of weird shadow markets that have sprung up to service this disconnect in the market right now. Aaron, what is the craziest story that you heard about a startup or a company trying to get information

Nvidia's GPUs? They're making hundreds of phone calls. They are calling in every favor. I mean, this one guy that I talked to that I quoted in the story, Eric Jonas, he was calling his friends at hedge funds that run quant funds, seeing if they might have extra capacity lying around outside of trading hours.

I mean, he basically stopped short at what he called the equivalent of buying some GPUs from a guy in a van. There are like third party brokers that are, you know, obviously seeing an opportunity to get in here and maybe mark them up or something like that. Yeah.

That's what I want to know is like, who is the Stringer Bell of GPUs? Like, who is the person who's just like driving around vans in San Francisco, just slinging GPUs out of the back? I mean, that could be these guys from SF Compute Group who were also in the story. It's basically two startup guys who had trouble finding GPUs for their own startups. And then they somehow got a line in somewhere after working the phones together.

for a little while. And they're now banding together a bunch of startups and researchers to essentially share an allotment of GPUs. And they wouldn't even tell me where they were getting them from because they were worried that if they publicize that, that somebody might swoop in and buy them out from under them. It also strikes me that it puts NVIDIA in a very unique position in the tech world right now. Because not only are they essentially the bottleneck for all AI businesses,

development, right? They sort of are controlling, as you said, Casey, like kind of the pace of overall progress by virtue of having these chips that everyone wants and they're not being enough to go around. But they're also kind of the kingmakers in the sense that they can choose, okay, you get a thousand H100s and you don't get any. And

and we like your project, and we don't like your project. So Aaron, what has NVIDIA said about how they are deciding how to allocate these very in-demand GPUs? Yeah, do you have to write like an application essay like for college where you talk about the traumas that you had and how it informed your journey?

I'm sure that would help. So they do have programs for startups that maybe need a smaller amount of GPUs, because that's part of the problem is that small startups, some of them don't even know how much they need. And they certainly don't need like a year's worth of reservation that would cost them, you know, $50 million or something like that. They only need a small amount. And so they work with this company called CoreWeave that is, you know, specifically providing them for smaller companies. And they're obviously moving as quickly as they can. They just like...

everybody else in the world were kind of taken off guard a little bit by this huge AI wave. I mean, it just so happens that the video, that the chips that they make that are good for video games also work really, really well for AI. And so they have a huge head start on AMD or the other chip makers that are trying to catch up to them now. So I don't know. I think a lot of people

in the industry do think that the backlog will catch up in, you know, the next six months, hopefully, maybe not as long out as a year. But, you know, I think the shortage will probably die down soon enough. I mean, maybe as some of these companies start going out of business, if some of them weren't great ideas or they pivot to whatever the next thing after AI is.

Yeah, you wrote in your story about the sort of challenge of being a smaller company or a smaller research project that maybe doesn't have connections at NVIDIA, doesn't have, you know, an in with Jensen Huang or someone else high up there who can say, okay, you can buy these H100s. You wrote about this company called Docugami.

which was trying to, what do they do? They fold up documents into origami. They use AI to read and process documents. So like long PDFs, their AI can help companies turn it into useful data. Got it. So they were looking for these GPUs to do their projects and they ended up actually getting them from the government, which is not a place that I expected to have access to a lot of cutting edge software.

So explain that. Explain how startups are kind of trying to use the government to get access to these things that maybe they wouldn't be able to buy on their own. Yeah, that was kind of an interesting thing. I also spoke with some university researchers who, you know, they have a little bit of a closer connection with the government in some instances, too. I mean, there are programs like the National Science Foundation has these grants that they give out for companies that are doing research.

And then there's this program called Access, which is what Dakigami used. And any startup or researcher who wants to apply for it can get access that way. So that's an interesting avenue that I wasn't aware of either. I mean, you know, most people in the tech industry like to complain about the government moving slow or, you know, being slow to adopt technology. But here's one instance where it might be very helpful. Yeah.

Well, I'm trying to think of what research project Kevin and I could propose to get the government to give us an H100. And then resell it really quickly for a QuickBooks. Exactly. And then just see what kind of price we could get for it. Yeah. You also wrote in your story about the companies that aren't getting these GPUs, that are not

sort of part of the elected elite that NVIDIA has chosen to receive these H100s and how they are kind of making do without them. In particular, you wrote about a company called Hebia, which used to get GPUs through a cloud provider, but ended up doing something different because they didn't have enough of the chips that they wanted. So talk to us about

that company and sort of how other startups are coping when they can't get the GPUs that they want or need. Yeah. So what Hebbia was doing, so they have online, some startups don't have a product yet and they don't have anything to show for it. Hebbia has a product and they have customers. And so they basically ask their customers, could you please go to our cloud provider and beg them and tell them how important our product is to you and how much, you know,

you need us to get those GPUs so you can keep working. And so they're basically pulling any string they can. And then they also did the equivalent of like digging around in the couch cushions. Some of their engineers, you know, found some old gaming computers that they had that had some GPUs that are, you know, less efficient, not necessarily designed for the kind of AI work they want, but they're using them to run smaller experiments in a server, in a closet environment,

in their office in Soho, which, you know, of course, my first question is, isn't that very loud and very hot? And they're like, yes, yes, it is. And they're like, we put it in a closet. We close the door. We have liquid cooling units there to keep it cool, but it is very noisy.

It also seems like, I mean, NVIDIA seems like they're trying to do some things to kind of expand access to make it so that it's not just the biggest, richest tech companies that can get these things. You know, maybe some startups, maybe some university researchers. It seems like the government is also trying to expand access. But it does seem like we are coming back to this fundamental issue with the state of AI right now, which is that the market really favors AI.

Right. It really favors companies that have billions of dollars that can order, you know, tens of thousands of these chips, which are like forty thousand dollars a piece. And that can do so without it really like affecting their overall financial picture. So.

Talk about that. Talk about the sort of balance between how the sort of companies that make these chips like NVIDIA would like them to be allocated and just the reality that these things are very expensive and you kind of need to have billions of dollars to even get really started with building one of these models. I mean,

I mean, that's partly why you see so many of these startups raising money from what you would think is maybe their direct competitors, but they're the incumbent players. You know, like Google, Oracle, even Salesforce, Amazon, they have been investing in these smaller startups and NVIDIA also. And so it really pays to have some kind of

potentially financial with these large cloud providers who are kind of the ones who are doling out the access to this. I mean, OpenAI and its investment from Microsoft as partnership with Microsoft Azure is like a great example of that. And,

In my story, I write about Inflection AI, which is one of the bigger AI startups that raised $1.3 billion from Microsoft and NVIDIA. And they are spending 95% of that or more all on compute power, which, you know... We have to just spend a moment there because what you just said is...

actually insane. You know, usually if you're a startup and you raise a big round of funding, you're using that to go out and hire people, maybe to get a bigger office. You're using that to go into research and development. You're using that for operating expenses. This company, Inflection, raised a huge round, one of the biggest rounds I've ever heard of for a startup.

And they're saying that 95% of that money is going to go right back out the door to buy GPUs. That is extraordinary to me. It is. I think the quote from the CEO, Mustafa Suleiman, was, it's eye-watering. I mean, it's...

It's madness that this company only has like 30 employees or something. But if you are trying to build like a general LLM, the kind of thing that's trying to compete with OpenAI, you know, you need that amount of compute power. And, you know, he's like, we're already at capacity. They're going to be running 22,000 of NVIDIA's H100 chips. And, you know, he said that other startups have asked him, like, oh, do you have any extra capacity? Like, can you share a little? And he's like,

Yeah, exactly. And he's like, no, we're already at full capacity. Sorry. And now, does NVIDIA really care who gets the chips? Like, isn't their job just to sell the most chips for the highest amount of money? Like, why is it to their advantage to try to spread these things around?

In general, I think the tech industry understands that there is supposed to be a cycle of innovation coming from the bottom up, starting with the small startups. And if we do not have that in this wave, you know, that's kind of a problem. We're going to be missing out on a lot of

fresh thinking and innovative ideas that come from small, scrappy startups. And those small, scrappy startups often grow into big, powerful customers that spend lots of money on things like chips and cloud computing. And so it's smart to try to get those customers early. So the cloud provider's

and NVIDIA know that they do want to have those relationships with small startups, especially the most promising ones, and help them flourish because eventually they'll grow into big companies that buy lots of their products. How long do you think it will take for the supply of these chips to meet the demand for it?

So there are kind of like amateur investigators out there who are writing these elaborate blog posts trying to game out when they think the backlog will lift. And some of them are saying maybe by the end of this year, maybe in six months, maybe in a year, which is a scary prospect.

for a lot of people in the AI world. In the meantime, you know, they're just trying to make do with whatever they can. Startups that I've talked to who have, you know, called their cloud provider and asked for more compute have said that they're put on waitlists that are, you know, four months was one. One said that it was a year-long waitlist.

You know, they're all trying to skip that line however they can. Erin, if hypothetically I were interested in building a large AI language model to, you know, say, replace a podcast co-host with an AI, where would I go? Where can I get some of these sweet, sweet GPUs? I mean, I would start with the university researchers group.

they seem to have the most connections. They might be able to hook you up with a broker, maybe someone who knows about a random server that Google has left over, you know, in some European country, perhaps. Or maybe, you know, some like...

French OEM who's selling computer parts, but their deal fell through. That was one example that someone told me about. What I hear you saying is that it might be easier for me to just keep my faulty human co-host. Now you're talking. NVIDIA, please help me. I'm on a desperate mission here.

All right, Erin Griffith, thank you so much for showing us inside the wild and wacky world of GPU procurement. You're very welcome. Thank you, Erin. Thanks for having me. Well, Casey, we've heard one terrible AI song on the podcast this week. And when we come back, I gather you're going to play some more for me. You ain't heard nothing yet. Because we're going deep into the world of AI music and YouTube's big plan to get it under control.

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Christine, have you ever bought something and thought, wow, this product actually made my life better? Totally. And usually I find those products through Wirecutter. Yeah, but you work here. We both do. We're the hosts of The Wirecutter Show from The New York Times. It's our job to research, test, and vet products and then recommend our favorites. We'll talk to members of our team of 140 journalists to bring you the very best product recommendations in every category that will actually make your life better. The Wirecutter Show, available wherever you get podcasts.

Well, Kevin, as great as he is, I couldn't let Weird AI Yankochip be the only musical artist we featured on today's show. Because believe it or not, there is a lot more going on in the world of AI music, and I think it is long since past time that we caught up about it. Let's do it. Okay, so you may remember in April, we discussed a somewhat

controversial song called Heart on My Sleeve. Remember Heart on My Sleeve? Yes, this was by Fake Drake. That's right. Somebody used a synthetic version of Drake's voice created with AI and put him together with a synthetic Weekend, the musical artist The Weekend, and they made a song.

And it was quite successful. And eventually, Drake's label stepped in to get it removed. Right. And our question at the time was sort of, what happens now with AI music, right? Are we going to see a lot more of this thing? Right. Because these AI synthetic voice tools, they're getting a lot better. You know, when we first started this show, I made like a version of your voice that was synthetic and it kind of sucked. It was not

that good? It was terrible and it was less than a year ago. This really was not very good unless you had access to a vast amount of speech. Right, but now these AI synthesizers are getting quite good and people are able to create very realistic versions of not just like people's voices but their singing voices as well. That's right, but I think

the important thing that happened in April was that when that song went viral, I think we started to understand, oh, there is going to be a market for this sort of thing. And the fact that Drake didn't really sing it, that these aren't his lyrics, isn't going to stop a lot of people from not just seeking this stuff out, but also wanting to make more songs like it.

And what we have seen, I think it's fair to say, has been a summer of debate between YouTube and the labels and artists and individual creators and DJs about how all of this should work. Should you be allowed to make a song with a synthetic version of Drake's voice? Can you post it on YouTube? And of course, what is most important to everyone involved is who gets to keep the money if the thing is successful? I confess I have not really been paying back

close attention to this area since we did our story on fake Drake. You're not scouring the billboard charts every week to see what's hot. I'm just listening to rich men north of Richmond on repeat, my friend. It's time for change in this country. All right, we'll get to that in a future episode. So yeah, what's been going on? Here's the thing. I was browsing YouTube the other day, as I sometimes do, and I love to listen to music on YouTube, but almost always it is music that has been written and recorded by a mainstream artist, right?

What I saw for the first time the other day was YouTube's famous algorithm recommended to me an AI song. And I listened to it. What was it? Well, actually, do you want to hear it right now? Yeah. Okay. Now, keep in mind, I never searched for any of these terms. This was just presented to me as something I might like. So why don't we go ahead and hear this first clip that the YouTube algorithm recommended to me. Do you recognize the opening words? Oh, yeah. This is Frozen. That's right. Let it go.

but maybe not with the original Elsa. The snow glows white on the mountain tonight Not a footprint to be seen Yeah, you're right, this is not Elsa. It's not Elsa. Yeah, this is the touring cast. No, who is this? Let's see if maybe when we get a little bit closer to the chorus, we're able to tell. Like the swirling storm inside

This slaps! Right? Yeah!

Okay, I don't, I confess, I do not know who this is. Okay, this is Freddie Mercury from Queen. No. Can you hear it now? Yes. Yeah. That's really good. Yeah.

Freddie Mercury, famously not alive. No, he tragically died. Yes. But Queen is still one of the biggest bands in the world if you go look at their Spotify monthly listeners. But look, I saw this, and of course my first instinct was, well, that's probably going to be bad. But then my second instinct was, I should listen to it because maybe we'll want to talk about it on the show. And so I did, and by the end of the song, I thought...

It only sounds to me like Freddie in some places, and yet it was still passable, and at the end of the day, it's a catchy song, and I enjoyed listening to it. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. So after that...

I kind of started to go down the rabbit hole and I started to hear even more of these AI covers that have been popping up on YouTube. So maybe let's listen to another one. This is from a great channel. I first encountered it on TikTok. It's on YouTube as well. It's called There I Ruined It. And they do a lot of really fun and weird editing with songs. And increasingly, they've been using AI. And this one is from the legend of Folsom Prison himself, Mr. Johnny Cash.

Now this sounds amazing to me. That's really good.

Let's maybe just hear one more, and this one is also very beautiful, and it may unlock some emotions in you. You know, maybe if you feel the tears come, just let them come, because I think it has an important message to share. It's from a channel called AI Covers, which seems to be promoting one of these companies that is out there creating AI voice models. But let's give that one a listen, too. Here we go. This is sounding Rascal Flatts-ish. Yeah, very Rascal Flatts coded. Yeah. Yeah.

Who is this? I would say this is an animated character. Is this... I genuinely do. Is this, um... Is this Pinky? No, it's not Pinky. Yeah.

Life is a highway. I did all that long. It's Eric Cartman from South Park. Oh, it's Cartman. It's Eric Cartman saying life is a highway. Rascal Flatts version. That's really good. Yeah. And by really good, of course, you mean it's not it's it's something you want to turn off. Yeah. Yeah. I would like that out of my ears immediately. But I do appreciate the creativity. Sure. So look on.

one hand, everything that we've just heard, I think, is an evolution of the mashup. I used to love mashups in the 2000s in particular. DJs would take two different tracks and they'd sort of get the stems and they get a vocal from another song and they'd slam them together. It's very like girl talk. You remember girl talk? Yes, I love girl talk. I saw girl talk live on multiple occasions. Wow. Yeah. So look, I

At the same time, there is the potential for so much more here than just what artists were doing with mashups in the early 2000s, because now an artist's voice can essentially become a new creative tool. You can inhabit the voice of an Eric Cartman or a Johnny Cash or a Freddie Mercury and just have them go nuts singing whatever song you like.

Right. So it seems like this kind of thing is going to become ubiquitous. And some of these AI generated songs will be kind of novelties like, haha, isn't it funny to make like Eric Cartman sing Life is a Highway. But

I imagine that as with Drake and his fake song and The Weeknd and the tussle between their music label and the platforms, I imagine this is going to be very controversial because like Freddie Mercury is not alive, but Queen's record label still presumably has a vested interest in like making money when their voices are used.

That's right. And so that brings us pretty naturally to what actually happened this week that I think has put this story back in the news. And that's that YouTube and Universal Music Group, which is one of the major record labels, they announced what they call the Music AI Incubator, which they have outlined for us in a couple of blog posts.

And basically what YouTube is going to be doing is working with the UMG artists and songwriters and producers to use AI music tools and just kind of get a conversation going. They've got a bunch of artists who are participating so far, including the estate of Frank Sinatra. But the most important thing is that YouTube has also hinted that

at creating a system similar to Content ID. Now, you've written about YouTube for a long time, so you know what Content ID is. Yeah, Content ID is basically if you use a song in one of your videos as a background track or you're singing along to it. Basically, YouTube has a way of stamping that such that it gets credited and royalties get paid to the artists who made that song. Now, what's interesting, though, is that if YouTube develops

a version of this for AI-generated tracks, essentially something that would catch a fake Drake song the second it was uploaded so that royalties could be immediately distributed to Drake or his record label. Then we start to get into a really interesting and tricky legal world.

Yeah, so I have some questions about this because I have not been following the story super closely. So say that I am an internet creator and I want to make a video in which Frank Sinatra sings Vampire by Olivia Rodrigo, Song of the Summer. Sure, Song of the Summer. So...

Can I do that? Or will YouTube take my video down? And what does this new program change about that? Great question. So currently, there is no law that says you can't train an AI on someone's voices to create a synthetic version. It's being litigated, but it's not clear. And I think what is...

if you're somebody who just wants people to be able to be creative and not to have major labels telling them that they can't be creative, is that you can imagine a world where in the not too distant future, you're a young creator and you create a song and maybe you're not even trying to sound like Drake, but you upload it to YouTube and YouTube's new AI detector says, this sounds enough like Drake that we're going to start giving royalties to the Universal Music Group. And

And who has the power in that situation? It is not going to be the teenager that uploads the fake Drake song. That person does not have legal representation. They are not going to fight this. They're just going to get their thing booted from YouTube. And then, you know, if it's a good song, they're going to have to go figure out a way to post it somewhere else. Now, obviously, all of these moves that YouTube and UMG are making are sort of defensive, right? They're saying, like, we don't want this technology to sort of become unpopular.

a free-for-all Wild West scenario where anyone can make any song with any person's voice. A Burning Man situation. Right, we want to be paid for this. We want to sort of keep control of this. So let me say, a lot of my thinking on this comes from my friend, Nilay Patel, editor of The Verge, who wrote a really great piece about all of these issues for The Verge this week. And what Nilay points out is that

When it comes to AI, YouTube and Google, which owns YouTube, are taking very different approaches. So let me explain this. So when it comes to music...

YouTube is saying, well, the artist's voice has value. We want to protect that value. We might develop a whole system to determine when someone is using that voice so that the value can be apportioned and we can keep our record label partners happy. Eric Hartman must be paid fair wages. At all costs. At all costs. You do not want to upset Eric Hartman. Okay? Okay.

And then there is the World Wide Web, which is populated by publishers who are publishing text of all subjects under the sun. And what is Google doing with that content? They are slurping it up,

into a large language model. They are not paying anyone for it, but they are going to use it to create the next generation of Google search, which they will then monetize in any way that they can think of. And the publishers might not see any compensation for that at all. Right. Okay. So at YouTube, they are saying that artists whose voices are synthesized should be entitled to some

compensation for the act of their voice being fed into these synthesizers and used to make new music. It sure seems like that is the direction that we're heading with YouTube and music. Then on the other side of the house at Google, you have the text-based AI models that are hoovering up information from the Internet, using them to train AI models and using that to create synthetic text.

But without that sort of financial and legal link between the outputs and the original things that were used to train it, right? So most publishers, whether they're newspapers or magazines or blogs or book publishers, they are not under the current model being compensated when, say, someone asks Bard to generate a news story that draws heavily on those sources. Am I getting that right? Yes, completely. So...

What do you think explains the very different treatment that Google slash YouTube is giving AI between musicians and publishers? This is a really simple business story about who has leverage, right? If you're YouTube and you lose access to even one of the major labels, you alienate a bunch of customers. And if they can find... Tell me why that is.

So because let's say you're a kid, you can't afford a Spotify subscription. When a new Olivia Rodrigo song comes out, you go to YouTube to listen to it. All of a sudden, you can't find it there. But guess what? TikTok still has a deal with major labels because maybe they've taken a stronger stance on this than YouTube. All of a sudden, kids go spend their time on TikTok and YouTube has a deal. Well, and you're jogging my memory here about something that happened years ago at YouTube, which is that the music labels fought back against not just like

Yeah.

be paid for that. And so YouTube actually struck deals with the music labels to allow that. And by the way, that's what Content ID does. It is scanning for Bruce Springsteen in the background of your other videos to ensure that the rights holder can get paid if they flag it. Right. So that is part of the sort of truce

that YouTube formed with the music labels is like, we will pay you royalties for the usage of your songs on YouTube. And in return, you can't go like getting people's cooking videos pulled off YouTube because they used a Bruce Springsteen song in the background. Right.

Right. You know, YouTube, it's in their interest to make these things very easy on the people who are uploading videos because if it's super hard and your stuff is getting yanked down every time you try to do anything, eventually you stop doing it and YouTube withers and dies. So if YouTube antagonizes the music labels...

they risk not only having like these official music videos getting pulled off YouTube, but also like a much more annoying world for anyone who is trying to make a YouTube video that has copyrighted music in it. Absolutely. And on the upside, there are only a tiny handful of these major labels. So you only need to strike three or four, maybe five deals, and you'll be able to get access to the vast majority of all the music that people are going to use.

I see. So then you go over to the tech side of the equation, and we live in a world where Google is maybe one of the main forces keeping what remains of the media industry afloat. And the reason is that when you search for things on Google, Google is directing a lot of traffic to news sites, which news sites are then able to convert into advertising revenue and into subscription dollars. And because...

Because so much of their traffic is derived from search, publishers will do essentially whatever Google says. So this is a case where Google has all of the leverage and publishers have very little. So this seems like what you're saying is we need music labels for writers. Right, but it's hard because...

Because if you own the rights to Olivia Rodrigo's Vampire, for example, Song of the Summer, that is a hugely valuable thing that thousands of creators might want to use in their videos. One single story at the New York Times, at the Platformer, as great as we would probably argue that they are, it's not going to have the value of even one song in a major label's

catalog. Well, speak for yourself. My stories are read out loud in the background of many thousands of mukbang videos, and they are a huge part of the fabric of the internet. But this just seems to me to be untenable, right? It's like, does a creator have rights or do they not? And why is it so different between music and tech? I understand the business reason why it's different, but as a

principle, it seems to me that those things are very similar. What do you think should happen here? Like, what is the fair resolution of all this AI-generated music stuff? Fortunately, you know, Kevin, I know this whole time you've been thinking, Casey, this seems very complicated. I hope you have a simple solution to it. And the good news for you is that I do. What's your solution? Going forward, we have to sing all of our articles. Yeah.

If we can copyright all of it, if we can get a major label to license us and publish everything we write, we're golden, baby. Casey, I would like you to pull up yesterday's version of your newsletter and do a rendition and I'll find a karaoke track for you. Well, thank God I wrote it in rhyme. Okay, I'm

I'm going to use... What style do you want to use for this? Do you want it like trap or indie folk? Oh, indie folk. Something like the Lumineers, maybe. Okay, so I'd like you to sing over the karaoke version of the Lumineers, Ho Hey. All right. Are you going to play that for me? Yes. Well, today let's talk about how an idea that we once took for granted on social networks is now under threat.

Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok all grew on the strength of recommendation algorithms that learned to predict your interests better than even you could yourself. And then it would just go on from there. Yeah, they're calling this the real song of the summer, actually.

Casey, I think you actually just got signed to Universal Music Group because of that. There's an A&R scout on the line and they're interested in a multi-record deal. This guy's got what the younger generation needs. He's going to be packing shopping malls all over the country. ♪

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Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Casey Newt. Shoo-be-doo-bop. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, Nell Gologly, Kate Lepresti, and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com. Let's keep those AI covers coming.

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