Pixel 11 Series is More of the Same But is That Bad? - DTNS 5336

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3:56This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 20th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand. Today, science communicator Bobby Frankenberger tells us what's holding back using ocean waves as an energy source, and the Pixel 11 reviews are in. That's right. I've got one of them. I've got thoughts, though I don't have a full review, but we'll talk about the reviews. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Jen Cutter. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. Yes, the Pixel 11 reviews are out. So you've got the 11, the 11 Pro, the 11 Pro XL.

4:33Well, you know, you've also got the Pixel Fold. Actually, now that I think about it, I don't know that I saw the Fold reviews, but I wasn't really paying close attention to those because I've been using the Pixel 11 Pro personally. And so I've been very curious to kind of see what reviewers are saying about it as far as, you know, does it kind of line up with my own personal kind of perspective and experience? So I'm not ready for a full review. I'm probably going to be delivering that. Well, almost certainly delivering that next Tuesday on Android Faithful with the crew. But I thought we'd do a little bit of a roundup to kind of let you know, like, is this a phone that you might actually want to get for yourself?

5:14Well, there's a bit of perspective here. Seems like a resounding yes on the feature that is also my favorite feature called Rambler. Rambler is this AI-infused voice chat, essentially. So instead of me just using my voice and saying a bunch of things and it does it in real time exactly as I said it, it kind of cleans it up. So if you say a bunch of things and maybe you mess up or maybe you change your mind and you say something else or whatever, what it does is it sends that to an LLM, cleans it up by keeping it to your voice and then giving you the output in the text box. I was worried that it was not going to sound like me when I used that, but I use it all the time.

5:54I absolutely love it. So it seems like everybody's loving Rambler, one of the AI features. Another AI feature is something called camera looks, which essentially means you can assign a default camera setting to – it's like a template to all of your photos. So essentially – and I'm curious to know what you think about this, Jen, because the idea is, at least if I was to interpret it, Google might not like this. But it's like adding a filter that you might add in like Instagram or whatever, like a photo changing filter or whatever, just like color and contrast and that stuff. But doing it as a setting in your camera instead of applying it after the fact.

6:33So everything follows that look. Does that sound useful to you? Because I'm kind of like, I don't know why I need that. It is aimed at a very specific market because probably not a group of people you follow on photo-based social media. but like the aesthetics people if you remember when flat lays were like the big thing this saves them a step they can set their preset shoot and go uh and i like i do know some people who use this kind of thing uh like for ios like when you can like have those settings and for people who have their save stuff in snap seed where they just like auto run it through they have a shortcut going this takes out that step i suppose so but you're kind of making the decision i guess in my mind it's like but that's destructive maybe i don't maybe i like that picture but i wish i didn't shoot it like that or yeah like i mean i have everything off and then so all my terrible pictures i own is my terrible pictures yes and then in some cases like because from there i can take the extra time to do the thing but you know i'm not that's not my job i i'm not doing this in a hurry i'm not working for any brand where i have to have a preset set and like who knows for some of these brand deals if they want a very specific, hyper-specific look for their products and then say, we want these settings and don't change them.

7:52Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm clearly in the minority on this one because I'm still scratching my head, but apparently most of the reviewers are like, this is pretty awesome. And I guess I can kind of tell it allows you to apply basically like a signature to your camera look on your phone so that every picture you take kind of falls inside of that signature. So I get it. That does sound kind of appealing. I just don't know that I need it for me. There's also a feature that everybody seems to like, myself included, called Magic Capture, a pretty universal standout. This is the idea that when you hit the shutter in Magic Capture mode, it's captured a couple of hundred frames before and after the shutter, and then it goes through with AI and pulls out the best frame from there.

8:33So if you're trying to get something that's fast moving or whatever, you're always trying to time the shutter. This way, it captures all of them, and it says, oh, well, here was the best frame, and you can kind of select and everything. I've used it a couple of times, been pretty impressed with what it pulls out. So I'll be curious to use it more in like when I go to my kids' sporting events and stuff. It seems that everybody agrees on Highlight. Highlight is the feature that is this little light here. If I could trigger it to light up, I would. But it's a very subtle kind of glowing light that replaces the flash on the rear camera bar.

9:10And it does a couple of colors. It's supposed to be kind of like an extra notification layer. If you have your phone down and a contact is assigned to a color, you'll see the color there. If you're interacting with Gemini, it kind of flashes a little bit. It's super underwhelming. Maybe they build this out over time and it becomes something more interesting. But right now, pretty disappointing across the board, myself included. It's like I have to go out of my way to even see it doing anything, which is weird because they've been promoting it so heavily as like a big feature. That's a little disappointing.

9:46I don't know. LED light. Okay. Overall, though, I think resoundingly, and we were talking about this a little bit before starting to record, hardware design, pretty iterative, right? Like the previous designs look a lot like this one. The last like three or four years have looked very, very similar. minor changes in the camera bar where the glass goes the full distance instead of kind of going halfway um and you know becoming metal on the other side uh on the pixel 10 um but overall the language is is staying put and a lot of people are calling this out in their reviews as kind of a ding saying you know google's not doing anything exciting here maybe it's time for a change personally I like it I continue to like it what and I feel like the call to like change it is just like change for changes sake maybe I don't know how do you feel about that sort of thing like if there's a good um if there's a good ingredient why not keep it yeah that's my feeling yeah I believe that they are aiming mostly at I'm gonna I might be making up a market here but the safe phone market.

10:55The people who already like their phones and just they're finally like at the end of their support, they want to run a faster phone, a more modern phone. They can switch to this and feel safe that it's not drastic. And then for people who want just a phone, this can appeal to them as just a phone, even though it is pricier. And I actually had thoughts about the highlight thing, because there's always two ways you can go with a feature like this. You can either start it at 11 and drop back or start mild like this. Because Google was always going to respond to the feedback here. So if they start mild and bump it up, that's more of a positive response to feedback as opposed to, oh, God, everyone hated this.

11:34Turn it off. Turn it down. Yeah, that's true. And you know what? And almost certainly Google is going to add feature set to it. You know, like I'd be really surprised if at some point we don't have more apps that tie into it, the ability to get really granular with like what color is attached to what thing. I'm guessing that's going to happen somewhere down the line. Yeah, it's two different ways you could go about that. And I guess time will tell whether Google chose the right way. Inside, oops, sorry, wrong camera. Inside, you've got the Tensor G6, the RAM, the display. Those are the same whether you are on the Pixel 11 or the 11 Pro.

12:14So there's a little bit of an incentive that's a little bit more difficult to sell between the upgrade and the kind of lower version of it. So definitely reviewers calling that out. Battery life, Google said that they made a lot of software changes on here to improve battery life and battery efficiency. Many reviewers saying this is still a weak spot here. I've noticed mine hovering about 20 % more by the end of the day than I was getting on the Pixel 10. So I see that as a little bit of an improvement, but still it's kind of down in that lower end where I feel uncomfortable at the end of the day having it down there.

12:49So it could be better. And overall, I'd say people just kind of agreeing that 12 gigs of RAM is a little disappointing. Although I don't run into any use when I'm using it where I'm like, gosh, I wish this had more RAM. I'm sure I will eventually, but I don't right now. And I think the last thing I'll say, because I could keep going on, is proactive assistance with Gemini. This is kind of what it sounds like, where you can either, you're in messages and you mention, you know, we should go out to dinner and then it gives you a little thing to say, want to add that to your calendar and maybe I'll book the reservation for you and it can do all these things for you.

13:25Some reviewers seem split on its usefulness. I've used it a couple of times and it's neat that it does it when I remember that it's there. I mean, it's kind of cool that we have devices that'll do that sort of thing for you now. So I'm about it. So I would say iterative, some neat features. If you're on a Pixel 10, it probably doesn't make sense for you to pay for a Pixel 11 right now. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's pretty important feedback. And for the Gemini, obviously Gemini is going to be more closely integrated with these phones with probably every OS update at this point. Never mind the physical phone.

14:02So you have used it. You have had it walk through some stuff for you. Yeah. Yeah. And it doesn't go the final step. It doesn't actually book, right? You have to push the button. But it's cool to kind of watch it kind of skip through and offer you the information and connect to the different things with your personal intelligence. It's a neat feature, and I'm sure it will get better. So I like it. I've seen lots of people say, like, it's okay. But so far, this isn't doing more than my Google Assistant did. It's not doing more than my setup shortcuts did. So we've got some ways to go on that. There you go.

14:37DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Chris Allen, Reed Fishler, Larry Bailey, and Sean Myers. Thank you all and always.

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18:29It's just three simple steps, set up, sample, and ship. If you're 45 or older and at average risk, ask your doctor about the Cologuard test, available by prescription only. Learn more or request a prescription at colaguard.com slash podcast. All right, there's plenty more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. stripe has officially agreed to acquire open router the ai model gateway used by more than 10 million developers and businesses stripe will add the model routing capabilities along with token spend optimization to its payments and token billing business so what exactly is open router the service routes business and developer spending across more than 400 models from more than 80 providers, so users have direct access to all kinds of agents from Hermes, CloudCode, OpenClaw, and Codex, to name a couple of examples.

19:25This allows users to pick a model based on price, speed, and reliability for the agent work that they are doing. There are also open source models offered alongside the Frontier models. So why would Stripe want OpenRouter? It's because it considers tokens a form of currency, and Stripe thinks it can help customers spend tokens more efficiently. Stripe actually launched a token billing product last year, so this ties directly into that kind of product offering. Open Router intends to keep its name, product, and existing roadmap within the deal, and the closing date is currently unspecified. Yeah, and Open Router is, you know, not the only company that's doing this sort of thing.

20:06There's a lot of demand for this, especially like we've talked about, like in the past year, a lot of companies have been incentivizing employees to spend lots of tokens and use the things. And then they've had to kind of scale back, right? So demand is high for companies on looking now anyways, at efficiency around token usage and kind of pivoting away from that maximizing mindset. And so something like OpenRouter is really great because it doesn't lock you into a single solution for doing all your things kind of gives you the ability to set up these agents that reach out to other agents that are better at certain things.

20:45And that allows you to pay closer attention to, oh, well, this is cheaper for that task versus just using this for everything. That's kind of part of what Open Router does. And then you got Stripe thinking about these tokens as payments. So it kind of basically what it does is it gives Stripe more financial control over AI apps through through open router yeah i know these things are are becoming more and more important and i think for uh for a lot of companies they're like oh i know stripe stripe is reliable stripe isn't going anywhere they get to borrow that credibility buy that credibility yeah yeah i mean it basically it puts stripe in in like a money manager position for ai in this deal which isn't a bad place to be right now.

21:32There's so much happening in the enterprise around, you know, and potentially as agents gain more access to like spending capabilities and stuff, right? We're kind of like starting to dip our toes into that water. And so Stripe will be in a good position as a result of that. So interesting purchase, interesting acquisition. Thanks to RWNash and subreddit for linking us to this story. According to Bloomberg, YouTube is reportedly offering leading creators and very popular channels, millions of dollars in exchange for keeping their videos exclusive to YouTube's platform. That includes direct funding for some shows, a cut of major brand deals when it lands them.

22:15Why? Well, those partner agreements, even though they have yet to be finalized, say sources, have to do with YouTube wanting to keep people from going over to Netflix. YouTube is basically warning that cross-posting to Netflix would harm their viewership on YouTube because they'd then miss out on certain – those creators, if they do that, might miss out on certain marketing campaigns, event invites, reduced brand campaign payouts. So it kind of feels like, hey, keep it over here because if you go over there, you're going to miss out on all this stuff. And Netflix, I don't know if you've noticed, Jen, I've certainly noticed, signing some notable YouTube creators that are coming into the platform.

22:58Alan Chicken Chow, Nick DiGiovanni, just a couple that I've seen to have their videos posted on Netflix concurrently with YouTube. And in fact, I had never watched Hot Ones before. I'd always heard about it. For years and years, I'd heard about it. Oh, really? Okay. I'd seen little clips here and there, but I'd never actually sat down and watched a full episode until I came across it on Netflix. And for no reason other than it was just right place, right time, I watched one. And I was like, oh, OK, this is great. But it's interesting to me that it had existed for years on YouTube and I never gave it a start to finish time of day until it was on Netflix.

23:38So clearly that's what Netflix wants and what YouTube doesn't. Yeah, well, whether it is a streaming service or an app, time on platform is one of the biggest metrics they're always looking for and looking to increase. And yeah, if you're watching Hot Ones on Netflix, your recommendations after that are going to be Netflix shows and not other YouTube shows. That's true. That's true. It keeps you in that space, right? Also curious about the whole regulatory aspect of this. If YouTube is saying, you stay with us, exclusive with us and you get all these things, if you don't, then I'm just saying they go away.

24:16Certain aspects of that sound similar to what Android has been under the view of and what Search has been under the view of. There's been a lot of unwanted regular attention from Google's perspective recently does this then kind of put youtube in a similar position potentially we'll well it depends on are you viewing it as tech or are you viewing it as broadcast television because network sign development deals all the time you keep your stuff with them they get first rights of refusal and that's a contract you are entering in it sounds at this point you get to make that call it's a willing contract it's not a you will do this or we are burying your channel unless it turns into that and then i i would hope that some regulatory body chooses to step in at that point yeah yeah yeah there if you have any feedback about anything that goes on in this show please get in touch with us we've got lots of social media options for you we are at dtns show on x instagram threads blue sky and mastodon and for youtube on and on tiktok you can find us at Daily Tech News Show.

25:50and done well. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at Angie.com. Hi, this is Kim and Penn Holderness from the Laugh Lines podcast. This episode is sponsored by Ollie, your wellness partner for back to school and beyond. Back to school season is here. Packed backpacks, packed lunches and packed schedules are officially back. Ollie Kids Sleep helps little dreamers wind down with a gentle blend of melatonin, L-theanine and botanicals for restful sleep. Translation, an easy way to put those school night negotiations to bed. And for the grownups, Ollie's Sleep helps you fall asleep, stay asleep, and wake up feeling refreshed.

26:29Because as you know, the morning mayhem comes early. Visit ollie.com and stock up on back-to-school must-haves today. That's O-L-L-Y.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. All right, we're going to jump into some quick headlines and make you look really smart before an interview coming up. Google bid$10 million in Spirit Airlines bankruptcy auction for the airline's internal archives, including about 100 million employee emails, all for training its AI. While the flight attendants union is fighting it in court, arguing de-identified records could still be traced back to individual workers.

27:15Yeah, this one's really interesting because they're all looking for data that isn't influenced by AI, and this is one way to do it. You know, I think we're going to see a lot more of this sort of thing. Very interesting. Samsung's apparently holding another Galaxy event, this is official from Samsung, on August 27th, announcing, quote, the newest addition to the Galaxy S26 family. We're kind of thinking it might have something to do with the budget galaxy s26 fan edition smartphone uber launched autonomous rides in zagreb croatia its first driverless rollout in europe it'll run on pony ai's tech through coation startup verne's existing robo taxi fleet there's a first qualcomm's teasing new two, sorry, new flagship chips for next month's Snapdragon Summit, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, and a beefier Pro variant that's rumored for ultra-tier phones like Samsung's next Galaxy S27 Ultra, we can imagine.

28:19I will actually be at the event, so I'll be reporting on the news for DTNS, so you can look forward to that. The UK Cinema Association is weighing a ban on Meta's AI glasses in theaters. Unsurprising, since the camera can easily record theater stuff. I think you got a lot of cojones walking into a theater wearing meta glasses like, what? I'm not going to use these. Although it would kind of suck because I think you can only record until like three to five minute clips. You're doing it in chunks. You're watching the movie nine times a day. That would be a horrible way to watch a movie. I've seen worse though, but that would be a horrible way to watch a movie or record one.

28:59Waymo built its own custom chip for its robotaxis to cut its reliance on nvidia and amd hardware it's already running in the ziker built cars in its fleet the chip handles more than 1 000 trillion operations a second which is on par with nvidia's latest self-driving systems adobe's firefly can now generate music voiceovers and sound effects for video each running on its own model and it's free to try with daily limits and no separate subscription required. LG's got a new OLED manufacturing process called Flip, F-L-I-P-P, that skips the fine metal masks that other makers actually rely on. That basically means panels 1.6 times brighter.

29:45The panel is 2.4 times longer lasting while cutting power use by 13%. So better. I want an OLED monitor so bad. So I love watching this stuff being like, please, please make this good. Maybe your next one will be this. Yeah. And even if it makes the old ones cheaper and I can buy one, that works out great. Right, right. Slack launched Slack Code, letting teams tag AI agents like Cloud Code, Devin, or GitHub Copilot right in a group chat to build and ship software. A human still has to approve anything before it merges to production, hopefully. And finally, Sennheiser's new Momentum True Wireless 5 earbuds arriving September 3rd for around$300.

30:30They add Dolby Atmos with head tracking, Bluetooth 6.0, and batteries you can actually replace yourself both inside of the buds and inside of the case. I like that. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper. Yeah, we got an interview for you recently. BGR.com wrote up a report on tidal energy, a renewable energy source that doesn't rely on the sun or wind, but the tides to generate power. Tom Merritt caught up with communicator Bobby Frankenberger to check on where we are with this source of energy. Hey, Bobby, thanks for taking the time to help us understand this. Yeah, no problem.

31:11Thanks for having me, Tom. All right, let's start with tidal energy. It probably explains itself a little bit, but what exactly is it? Maybe we have misconceptions. Yeah, tidal energy, it's sort of this, it operates on the same principle as say, wind energy. The atmosphere is also a fluid, just like the water is water is. And so what wind energy does is say, it says, okay, there's a lot of energy moving the atmosphere around, let's let's figure out a way to capture that energy. So you put up wind turbines, the wind moves across the turbine, causes it to spin, and then we turn that mechanical energy of the turbine spinning into energy with magnets, and we put it into the grid and store it in batteries.

31:54It's the same exact concept with turbines under the water. The tides, which are being pooled and affected by the moon and the sun, gravity, sloshes water around on the earth in a predictable way every day. And so we say, well, there's tons of water moving every day across the surface of the earth. Why don't we do the same thing that we do with wind turbines? Put turbines under the water to capture the energy. And it works exactly the same way. You just put it under the water. And as the water moves across it, it spins. So that's turbine energy. And there are power plants that actually take advantage of that.

32:32Yeah. I mean, I guess pretty much every energy generation method relies on turbines at some point, right? Yeah, yeah. That's a good point. And tidal energy is just using the waves to do it. Now, tides are much more predictable than the wind, though. So it seems like it would be a more reliable source of energy than wind? Reliable, yes, in the sense that it's predictable, like you said. So one of the downsides with other kinds of renewable energy like wind or solar is the weather. The weather's hard to predict. And whenever the weather's bad, you're not generating as much wind or solar energy as you would like.

33:13And when I say bad, I mean just not favorable, right? But tides are much more predictable. Tide comes in and goes out at predictable times every day. so if we have something in place that can capture the energy at those times then we we can plan for when we're going to be getting energy and then and then we can if it's not at a time when it's actively being consumed we can store it in a battery right or something like that but that's also um at the same time as being a pro like you know we can predict it in a sense it can kind of be a con as well if you think the tides happen only at certain times, right?

33:54So that means between the tides, the water's not moving as much. So whereas we can predict the high generation times and low generation times, there are also definitely times when it's not producing energy. So it's not a hundred percent of the time energy source, but at least we know when it won't be there. Because unless something happens to the moon, we're pretty good on knowing when the tides are. Where are we with doing this? Like, are there efforts to make this happen? Are there actual operations using it? Where are we there? Yeah, you'd think that this seems to be, check a lot of the boxes in the pro column, right?

34:38Like, it's predictable, we know how to do it. So why aren't we seeing these kinds of plants everywhere? And so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself a tiny bit because we, as far as where we are, there aren't very many of these in the world. There are a handful. I think, I think I thought when there were only two, but then I think there's a third one that's either being or just being built. But I know the two that have been in operation for a little while, one's in France, the other one's in South Korea. They're put in specific locations that are suited to best take advantage of the tides and how much water they push through certain areas.

35:19Like in France, I think there's like a narrow waterway in the ocean that the tide comes in and it pushes a lot of water through this narrow opening in the land. And so that's an ideal place for it. But to answer your question about where are we, like there aren't as many as you might think because for many reasons, but one of the reasons being location, right there aren't you have to have them next to coastlines that's just what you have to do and then further not just anywhere on the coastline it has to be in kind of an ideal place not too close to the coast not too far away the waves can if it's too close waves can cause problems with the energy generation and and then and then in those places where it's best suited and ideal to build them, you, you know, is it going to affect the wildlife?

36:06Is it going to, are you going to be able to get people who are beach goers and tourism departments to on board to say like, like, yes, we would like to have this 15, 10 year construction project. So that becomes challenging. And so I'd say that's why we're not further along than we are currently. Yeah. So it's a limited number of places you can put it. I assume because if you put it too far out, it's either hard to get the energy in or the tides just don't help as well. So it's basic. I can't remember the name of the law, but it's the idea of when a fluid gets concentrated down into a narrow opening as it's moving, the velocity increases.

36:57Um, and, uh, and so the, um, so when you restrict that, so that happens not just in places like France where the, you know, there are, there are, you know, like, like literally the land is creating a narrow opening, but also every coastline creates this effect because as you move from deep water where there's a lot of space for this moving water to move, it doesn't move very fast. Oh yeah. The land is constricting it. Yes. The land in the air, I guess. Exactly. Exactly. As you get close to the coastline, the land raises up to the coast to come up above the water. And so that narrows the amount of space that the same volume of liquid has to move.

37:41And so as it's moving towards the coast, it gets faster and faster towards the coastline. So ideally, you want it to be really close to the coastline. But like I said, the wave, the mechanics of the waves at the surface can interrupt that flow and create turbulence, which the turbines have to take advantage of the water moving in one direction. So where waves are crashing at the top, it causes the water to move in lots of different directions that are not ideal for the turbines. Yeah. And I know it's expensive. And I know that because everything in energy is expensive. So when you take into account, like, it has to be in the right place, and then you have to have everybody who lives in that place tell you, yeah, cool, build this huge thing right in our beautiful ocean side view.

38:33And you need to make sure you're not damaging the wildlife and causing a problem that is, you know, what we're trying to get away with with these zero emission alternatives. I can see why this is not something that is easy to just pop down everywhere. What do you think the chances are of this becoming more common? Like, is it just something that's only going to be small? I know that recently Nova Scotia has tried to encourage smaller versions of this to happen off its coastline. Scotland, I think, has a program to develop them as well. And there's a few others out there. How are you feeling about the future of this technology?

39:16I think it depends on the mathematics of scaling it up, right? And small turbines aren't going to produce as much energy as large turbines. But then large turbines, like you said, cost more and have a greater impact on the environment. The fact that these things spin, they use magnets to generate the electricity. And so the spinning blades are also spinning magnets, which create magnetic fields, which some research has shown that that has an impact on wildlife in the area. Also, just sound. Over and over again, as we put stuff in the ocean, we learn more and more that that sound travels very far and has wide ranging impacts on wildlife.

40:04So I think those are the biggest things. Look, if we can put wind turbines up that do something similar, it seems like an easier sell to say, let's put a whole bunch of wind turbines out into the middle of the desert rather than putting these kinds of turbines near the coast where people and lots of wildlife are. Unless you can find those areas of coast or enough area of those coasts where there aren't people and maybe not a significant impact on the wildlife. Right. I know there's some efforts to come up with sensors that can monitor the wildlife. And I'll be the guy who points out like, hey, at some point we do have to make a decision of like, is it worse?

40:45Is it a worse impact on the wildlife versus a worse impact on the heating of the atmosphere? You know, those are a Sophie's Choice kind of situation as well. Bobby, thank you. Oh, yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say real fast that I don't think that that's an insignificant point to make, though, because we can if we just keep spinning our wheels talking about all the downsides and never actually do anything, then that's bad, too. Yeah. Yeah. And that doesn't mean you have to dismiss the downsides. It's just difficult choices. Bobby, thank you so much for helping us understand this. If people want to find more of what you do these days, where should they go?

41:18They can go to allaroundscience.com. I've got a weekly science podcast that I do with my co-host Maura, and we talk about things like this and all other kinds of things that are happening in science news. It's all around science, just wherever you get podcasts or check out the website. Fantastic. Thanks, Bobby. Thank you. All right. We end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Dana has a reminder on how large language models actually work. Dana writes,

42:17The real issue, which you mentioned many times but never discussed, lies within guardrails. Currently, guardrails are the primary defense used to control models, but they only provide guidance on known or envisioned behaviors. Because AI reasons on its own, it's impossible to anticipate everything a model might do. Having worked in the early days of AI-based security, I know firsthand that you can never truly determine why a model makes a specific decision. You can only guess based on observation. The models today are infinitely more complex than the ones we used, making it impossible to establish all-encompassing guardrails.

42:57To use an analogy, it is like a pet dog escaping despite fences and leashes, or a child finding an unimagined hazard in a baby-proof house. With guardrails, there will always be an AI bypass, whether through a model escaping security or a user bypassing controls to get a desired answer. That is the real issue with the current state of AI, and I'm not convinced the current approaches can truly scale to the level of control that is needed. Best regards, Dana Kaufman. Yeah. I mean, you speak truth, Dana. I mean, guardrails are imperfect, right? Everything, there is no 100 % when it comes to AI is something I've been saying lately.

43:37Like in all different directions, there is no such thing as 100%. Guardrails is absolutely one of them. And I think it's easy. I know it's easy for me to kind of feel a little complacent about it because it's kind of, well, what do we got to do? You know, what can we actually do? But it's good to know exactly how this works underneath. And I think you do a really good job of illustrating that. So thank you for sending that in. Yeah, no, I love the analogy. I take care of dogs and puppies sometimes. And boy, are puppies real inventive of finding things. That again, my house pretty puppy proofed at this point after several years.

44:16And I'm like, how did you find that? I didn't even know that was a problem. And now I know it's a problem. So, you know, you iterate. You need better guardrails. That's how I'm going to look at it from now on. So what are you thinking about, you people out there? Do you have some insight into a story, some more analogies that I can borrow? Please share it with us over at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Yeah, thanks again to Dana for contributing to today's show. I want to also thank Bobby Frankenberger for the awesome interview. And thanks to you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business by becoming a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS.

44:57See you tomorrow. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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46:48Thank you.