OpenAI Drama, Ford's EV Plant Downsize and Police Hogging Hybrids

Paul J Daly: 0:32

That's it. day before Thanksgiving Wednesday. I wonder how early everyone's going to stop calling, texting emailing today? I don't know. One o'clock two o'clock we'll see what happens when we have some AI drama, some four news to talk about actually, two pieces of boredom isn't double up. Adrian, first comment again on the live stream. Free Thanksgiving, love. Thanks so much for being here with us. I love it so much. Kyle, to one

‍Kyle Mountsier: 1:00

of his family, music leanings.

Paul J Daly: 1:03

Sometimes you just need to let it go. When did people start arriving at your house? Is this today thing?

Kyle Mountsier: 1:09

People started arriving this afternoon? Yeah, it'll be like rolling out of work heading in to family dinner. So it'd be good. Oh,

Paul J Daly: 1:16

do you do like a like a prepared dinner tonight? Is that gonna happen? I mean, I,

Kyle Mountsier: 1:22

I mean, we cook every night. So I don't know. Okay, my wife has on the table.

Unknown: 1:26

But it'll be Oh, you're eating dinner and it'll be cooked by her. And it'll be real good. So I think

Paul J Daly: 1:32

that's a good idea. It's a good idea. I have I think mother in law coming in tonight. And then the Horde is arriving tomorrow. We're gonna have like, 30 people over that word. Just picture like this little stampede of people moving their way. But yeah, no, no, no, no, I'm not. And then they kind of like stampede their way out. That's Oh, man, we're having a lot of fun. As you can tell, it's always a nice feeling. before Thanksgiving, we had a couple of things go on last night, we had a little premiere of kind of like a little evening premiere, we tried leaving premiere more than cars just to get it out there on the internet, a mash up of all three episodes of one through three anyway. And it's a fun, it's a fun fast, like 27 minutes, where we give you a little sneak peek of all those that's still lives on our Instagram account and on our YouTube channel. And we wanted to put something out there that you could share with some family or some friends who are interested about the industry or wonder why you're in the automotive industry or why you would sell cars for a living. You know, you can you can be all quiet and be like, hey, well show me the video of your industry. You know what I love financial services help show me your video. Yeah.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:39

What I loved is my family. We gather around our TV last night, threw it up on the YouTube app. And my wife goes, Wait a second are like halfway through she goes. You guys threw some stuff in there. I hadn't seen before or something. Yeah, that was our crew just like, given a couple little nuggets that weren't in if you've seen all of episode one and two, just check it out. Because there's a couple little nuggets that we threw in there. Little little side stuff that we had recorded. That was a Director's

Paul J Daly: 3:07

Cut. Yeah. He's got stuff in there. What else we have going on? Oh, we have a buy one get one sale going on at the asoto store. There's probably one or two items that might not be on the store just yet. The mint color T shirts are not up. We're going to try to get those up today. Buy one get one on any shirt. And he hat that we have in stock we have. We still have a bunch of stuff. So do it up. We'll pack it I will actually personally write a note to everyone who

Kyle Mountsier: 3:31

bought Look at that. Look. If you just want a handwritten note from Paul, buy something and

Paul J Daly: 3:37

I will hand write you a note for sure. 100% Certain speaking

Kyle Mountsier: 3:41

of handwritten notes,

Paul J Daly: 3:42

oh boy,

Kyle Mountsier: 3:43

you tube right into the show there.

Paul J Daly: 3:47

So after a crazy wild few days are probably the better part of a week now I guess a calendar week. Sam Altman, the CEO, former CEO, now current CEO of open AI, he has been rapidly reinstated following intense pressure from stakeholders and a massive threat of exodus of hundreds of open AI employees. So at 1am today, though, so this morning, so it's nine o'clock right now. So eight hours ago, Altman posted it on x, and I'm gonna quote his tweet. I love open AI and everything I've done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together. When I decided to join Microsoft on Sunday evening, it was clear. That was the best path for me and the team with the new board now there's a new board. And Satya supports I have the CEO of Microsoft. I'm looking forward to returning to open AI and building on our strong partnership with Microsoft. So basically, some new people joining the board including the ex CEO of Salesforce, and, you know, so he's was out back in now, and Greg Brockman open, a nice co founder actually tweeted out returning to open AI and getting back to come Coding tonight, the reason we're talking about the story first, is because you may not understand the impact that it has on our industry and, you know, across all industries 1000s of startups that now rely on open API's API. But also a lot of automotive startups and tech, building into an integrating with open like this was potentially the very thing

Kyle Mountsier: 5:22

it like, if you thought that Amazon Hyundai was a big story, it pales in comparison to the fact that if for some reason, the 700 employees that were a part of open AI, were pressured into, because the board wouldn't have agreed to bring Ottoman back if they would have moved, like the slowdown of the progress of technology development over the next three months until that got recouped would be incredible. It's clear that Satya and the whole team at Microsoft was like, this is a necessary thing. This is something that we have to see continue to live on. They have a massive multibillion dollar investment in open AI. And I suspect we're gonna see even greater collaboration over the next few months because now there's a deeper tie. Now you owe us wanting those two people are deeply intertwined with each other. The other the other really funny thing that happened last night, I think it was around seven central. Oh, chat. GPT was like down for two hours. So it was super ironic. A whole Yeah,

Paul J Daly: 6:27

that wasn't, that was tweet late at night that wasn't connected. That was connected at all. It's amazing how this technology in the course of the last nine months has actually become super, like critical to a lot of things that are going on are not like mission critical, but like very critical to growth and innovation. And it's really like a case study these employees the moment there was like this threat that they would want to be leaves started immediately getting headhunted by Salesforce, and Microsoft. Like they had somewhere to go. And yeah, it's just the drama. It's like, I don't know, it's like tech nerd drama that affects everybody. Yeah, it's it's very, it's a very rare thing actually. I mean, some people mentioned like, this board decision to oust the CEO is very similar to back in 1985 when the apple board ousted Steve Jobs that's we all know how that works similar Yeah, we all know how that worked out so yeah whatever and

Kyle Mountsier: 7:23

and and and if you just look back at Sam Altman on their on their AI day like a couple of weeks ago and you kind of track there there's a little bit of Steve Jobs in that guy. You know,

Paul J Daly: 7:36

without a doubt Adrienne in the comments. This is great. She said it was down last night while we were prepping email blasts Oh yeah. Hey, so I'm saying like there are deals for Buddy other marketers out there relying on this to give them you know, ability to execute at scale. So there you go. Speaking of executing at scale. Good about our savings. Ford announced yesterday that they are scaling back their plans for its Evie battery plant in Marshall Michigan, citing slower than expected Evie adoption. We've been hearing that a lot lately. Ford is restarting construction. They had paused re construction, the restarting it but reducing the plants overall size and capacity impacting their investment there and the job creation that they said I was going to come so the project now originally, they were saying 2500 jobs. Now it's scaled back about 30% to 1700 jobs and a total investment cost cut back to 2.2 billion I think it originally is like 3.54 sites obviously, Evie adoption rate as an issue. UAW contracts as factors that are not going to say that at this point. You have to say that, you know, they say they're still committed to EVs and the growth of EVs. But Mike Truby chief communications officer said in statement, we want to be really disciplined about how we allocate capital and think about matching production and future capacity based on check. It was revolutionary comment, demand. Wow.

Kyle Mountsier: 9:02

No. It's it's a crazy concept. You know, we've talked about this a few times over the last few weeks in the adjustment in scale. It was interesting yesterday who really on Oh, wait, there's a great podcast coming out with a new friend of ours. Running an Eevee only used car retail operation. And Alex Lawrence right. Alex Lawrence. Yeah. Evie autos. If you haven't checked or Eevee auto.com. You can check out that podcast I think it'd be releasing next week. But he said he said something like this. People don't want a smartphone. They want an iPhone. People don't want an Eevee they want a Tesla. And that kind of like that hit me really interestingly here because we were seeing a waning Evie marketplace, but some of that is due to just the interest in the newcomers into the market. So we'll see how companies like Ford who kind of have this dichotomy between a lot of adoption in that 150 Lightning less adoption in the maki and some other of their their new products so yeah, looks like they're they're looking at demand a little harder than they maybe were a couple months ago.

Paul J Daly: 10:15

Well speaking of things being adopted that have a evey battery in them, segue to Ford stories in a row.

Kyle Mountsier: 10:24

So Ford has actually stopped production of the Explorer and Lincoln aviator hybrids apparently redirecting focus to meet the high demand for the Explorer police interceptor utility hybrid. Yeah, there is strong demand out there apparently from police departments for the hybrid police vehicle. The Explore hybrid is limited efficiency improvement over the base model contributed to his discontinuation only providing an additional two miles per gallon of efficiency. So essentially, the citing is that that the the Explorer right now is seeing a lot more people taking, taking advantage of their four cylinder EcoBoost engine as as opposed to the hybrid engine because the difference in cost and make up for the difference in miles per gallon. But there's still a lot of policemen that are and police departments that are looking for these hybrid vehicles.

Paul J Daly: 11:19

So I think this is like a big use case, a use case situation. And we've talked about use case across the Evie adoption curve, different people that use their vehicles in different ways, having different levels of adoption, because it fits how they want to use the vehicle. In this case, obviously, the explorer in the aviator getting to pour more miles per gallon and saying you have a hybrid isn't exciting. However, the police's use case, you think about the vehicles sitting down for a long period of time, just with lights on sitting somewhere at a traffic, you know, at a construction zone or something like that, or a crime scene. Right, great use for the engine doesn't have to be running to have the extended battery. Also, it still puts out a lot of horsepower. And you know, a lot a lot of get up and go a lot of get up and go right. So they're like, you know, the maintenance and the use costs fuel costs significantly less because the use case fits I think brava would afford for just saying like, okay, customers don't want the hybrid because it only gets to a place where

Kyle Mountsier: 12:15

demand lives, focus your energy do things in a row, right? Let's

Paul J Daly: 12:19

build products that match consumer demand. That is such a novel concept. Yep, business school should I saw I saw actually

Kyle Mountsier: 12:26

another article from from Bloomberg that we didn't include this morning, just citing the differences in commercial adoption of EVs and hybrid vehicles in China, in Europe and the US and we're still behind them, we know that we're behind them in in residential or or consumer adoption, but the commercial adoption across the board is greater than the consumer adoption. And that makes sense that it makes a ton of sense because these companies can buy at scale they can buy at reduced price.

Paul J Daly: 13:00

And again, back to us use case commercial use cases much more predictable. Yep. And you're not and you're having like, the people making the decisions are like fleet managers, business managers. It's not an emotional decision, right? It's like, well, if we can make it fit the use case, and it fits the p&l, then we're gonna get it.

Kyle Mountsier: 13:18

There you go.

Paul J Daly: 13:19

I don't know. We'll take it. Hey, we hope you have an amazing time with your family Marvel drop in drop a little pod tomorrow morning just to say hi, but whatever happens travelsafe love people more than you love cars and eat lots of Turkey.

Unknown: 13:44

Right

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