711: Oh Thank Heaven

0:16Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian DeFillippo. Jason, I noticed that this is episode 7-11. Woo, yes it is. Was 7-11 a big deal to you growing up? Was it a part of your firmament of life? Of course it was. Absolutely, man. It's where I went to play video games. Yep. That was it. Yeah. That and big gulps and slurpees. I played more Pac-Man and Mortal Kombat at 7-Eleven than is healthy for a young man, I'm sure. I did a lot of that. I remember they were the first place in the area to get Dragon's Lair. I hate that fucking game. It's just sucked up quarters like No Tomorrow.

0:52Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, I was just thinking about that because it's obviously episode 7-Eleven. Oh, thank heaven. and I was thinking about how it's changed because my kid is aware of 7-Eleven. We have them here. He likes a Slurpee, but it's not like it's not a thing, man, like it was for us. No. Yeah. Yeah. It got in. The funny thing is, it's like that's the one place that I know around the world that I can go. And I feel I feel at home. Like when I was in Hong Kong, I had nowhere to go. It's like, oh, yeah, they're everywhere. If you go in Asia, they're like they have legit good food, too. Yeah, they do.

1:25They do. But when you go to the ones in Bangkok, they try and hook you up with lady boys. Coming and going. It's always an option. A little bit of follow-up. I was thinking about our conversation that we had with Dave last week about spending time with friends. And I followed through on that promise. I went to an Oasis concert here. Not by choice. It's my wife's favorite band. So, you know, got to do that. But we went with some friends, which was nice. And I hadn't seen them for a while because they kind of live outside of Toronto. So got to spend time with friends there. Hyper local update, or maybe not, because, you know, maybe you're going to travel to Toronto to see a show.

2:03They've just opened up this place called the Rogers Stadium. Now, it's not the Rogers Center. That's different. That's the baseball arena, which also has concerts. And it's safe and wonderful and been there for years. But, you know, we're kind of doing a Trump thing here where everything is being named after Rogers, apparently. So we also have a Rogers Stadium. And they just built this thing for big concerts. it is, it is a rinky dink piece of shit. Don't ever come up here. Like it's built out of scaffolding from home Depot. Um, as people were starting to jump up and down to some of the Oasis songs, I could feel everything shifting.

2:40And I was like, yeah, no, I'm not coming back to see another concert here. Oh my God. It is, it is a like rinky dink piece of crap, man. Oh man. Yeah. We've got new stadiums here in LA and they're like super state of the art. yeah of course because that's what real people do yeah rogers no if they weren't in the hood it'd be much easier to go check them out but all of our new stadiums are just basically down in the hood yeah and uh we're actually recording a day early because i'm leaving for a weekend trip with some other friends so i am following through on the hang out with friends thing good for you uh and then tell me what it's like someday i'll let you know thanks and in other news uh if you've been following the show you know that i was employed up until around about a year ago when when my friend who was the ceo of the company left and instead of wrapping up the company the board in their infinite wisdom decided to get a new ceo and i shortly got canned after that because obviously i was uh associated with the previous uh guy and uh didn't want that energy around and i knew let's okay because i'm gonna get to linkedin here i'll use some linkedin speech.

3:49I knew that the new CEO came from a different mindset and perhaps didn't have quite the management style needed and didn't really understand the space into which he was getting. Was that suitably LinkedIn? Yeah. Okay. Basically, he was an asshole and an idiot. But I wanted to use the LinkedIn speech because I went to go check LinkedIn because I had heard that the company had imploded and shut down as expected. It just took a lot longer than I figured it would and and i wanted to just go see some of the previous people i wanted to see if it actually happened and it did because i saw some of my previous uh co-workers updates and uh not good and it's it's a mess and people are not getting paid and all that sort of stuff but the main takeaway that i got from linkedin well besides the fact that linkedin is fucking full of bullshit it's dumb uh the other thing is holy shit everyone is out of work and there's no jobs Yeah, pretty much.

4:44Yeah, that is that is I scroll. I spent a couple of days going down the LinkedIn trap and I was just like, wow, things are bad out there. Yeah. If you're not, you know, like a founder or in the C-suite, because I talk to a lot of people who are in that boat and they've they've been killing it on LinkedIn because that's their their jam. And they're talking to their people who those are the ones that own the purse strings. Yeah. Not the ones who are begging for them to be opened. It's fine on LinkedIn. We're loving it. Yes. We're LinkedIn speech. We're techno babbling away. We are saying bullshit.

5:16That means nothing. Well, Brian, if you need to get a job, ACAST has opened their podcast advertising academy. Oh, I can start sending out the emails that we get every five minutes. No, what emails? We don't get emails anymore. Oh, no, we get people. We get emails asking for people to get on our show because they're trying to hawk their shit and not selling it. Exactly. Yeah, we get we get. I don't know if you've ever noticed, listeners, dear listeners, that we don't have guests on this show for a reason. Every time we tried it, everybody ran away. So we stopped doing that. But that doesn't stop everybody on the planet that has a podcast advertising firm that is trying to sell people on how to get on other shows.

5:56Oh, and they're also obviously written by AI. So bad. I was taking a walk and had a hilarious chuckle listening to your latest episode where it cherry picks two topics that we talked about in last episode. Yep. And that's why this guy who owns advertising for hotels would be a perfect guest for your show. Exactly. Exactly. But Brian, you'll get industry certified training in the essentials of podcast advertising, advanced strategies for targeting creative attribution and programmatic real world examples and data backed insights from the world's leading podcast network. and here it is certification to recognize your expertise and help you stand out in the competitive industry you get a piece of paper brian oh i get a badge for my linkedin profile that's exactly what you get you even have to print out the own your own certificate that's the way that's the way it goes nowadays oh my god quick side note um i because i saw this too and i'm not going to mention the person because i old high school friend i haven't stayed in touch with him friends on facebook right see he was a nice enough guy in high school he's gotten into crypto jason oh no Not only has he gotten into crypto, he has become a crypto evangelist and he has studied and he has gotten certificates and he posted a photo of himself holding up a certificate.

7:09The crypto place from which he got his certificate couldn't even be bothered to spell his name correctly. Nice. He is holding up a certificate in which his name is spelled incorrectly. It's like that no regrets tattoo.

7:24Oh, fun times. So just I want to I want to clarify a few things before we start the conversation on AI today. There is a great new podcast that came out from Cal Newport in Cal. He's not just a productivity expert. He's also a computer science professor at MIT or an MIT certified MIT. I can't remember. He's got a badge from MIT on his LinkedIn profile is what you're telling me. A very big badge. I can't I think he's teaching at Georgetown now, but he went to MIT. He's a he's a legit computer scientist. So his new episode is, what if AI doesn't get much better than this? Just like the article I talked about last week, right?

8:00Yep. And he basically breaks it down, though, in a very good way. In a learned manner? Yeah, yeah. Because he talks about why the difference from, you know, GPT-2 to GPT-3 to GPT-4 were such these giant exponential leaps that they thought were going to continue. And then when they got to GPT-5, they were like, oh, shit. We hit the top. We hit the wall. Top of the mountain, my friends. So, yeah, it's well worth a listen. He talks about an hour on everything about it. And like I said, well worth a listen because it's a good explainer because I use Cal Newport to help explain AI to my dad. you know okay so it's really good uh and of course this is the the great news for the week ai bubble watch nvidia shares skid on middling q2 results because nvidia is the canary in the coal mine they'll they're the bellwether for the ai apocalypse coming boom or bust i should say nvidia sales keep rising but so do the red flags the chipmaker reported 46.7 billion dollars in second quarter revenue just above wall street's forecast okay so okay you'd think that's good news.

9:06But it's all important data center business. Nearly 90 % of sales came in at$41.1 billion, about$200 million shy of expectations. Okay. But that's, you know, 200 million coffee budget and 41.1 billion. Right. But if you listen to the news, everybody's saying we are building more and more and more data centers. So why is this cooling so quickly? So he said that miss spooked investors sending shares down roughly 3 % in after hours frustrating. NVIDIA also failed to sell any of its H2O chips in China last quarter after U.S. export restrictions left billions in potential sales on hold. So they made these special chips for China that were lower powered.

9:46And China's like, nah, we don't want them. We want the real thing. Isn't it a bit of a dick move to call them H2O chips when all they do is suck up all the H2O? Yeah, I think it kind of is. Yeah. Yeah. I think the marketing term is H20s, but somebody had a chuckle by putting H2O in there. Because since they're underpowered, maybe you're saving the H2O. And here comes Elon Musk's 420 chips. Jesus. You know you're going to do it. And Marc Andre wrote in, hey, guys, here's an insightful article on AI progress. It's a bit long. Maybe you can use AI to summarize it. And this is a contrary take saying reports of AI not progressing or offering mundane utility are often greatly exaggerated.

10:25So I skimmed through it. It's to you. So I didn't get all the way through. So I'm putting it in there if anybody wants to go and do their counterpoint, do their counterpoints. Yes. So now let's talk about some more news, Brian. All right.

10:50In the news.

10:56Well, Trump says the U.S. government is taking a 10 % stake in chipmaker Intel. The meeting between Intel CEO Lip Boutan and Trump following the president's call for Tan to resign seems to be the source of the deal. He walked in wanting to keep his job, as if the president has the authority to fire him. Fire, yeah, private. And he ended up giving us$10 billion for the United States. So we picked up$10 billion, Trump shared during the press conference, because that's how business works. Except we're a country, not a fucking business. I can name a couple countries that get deeply involved with businesses in their countries, and I guess we're becoming one of them now.

11:32I guess so. Intel later announced some more details on the investment. The company said in a press release that the government will make an$8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock. It adds that the equity stake will be funded by a$5.7 billion previously earmarked for Intel as part of the CHIPS Act, which came under Biden, and$3.2 billion awarded as part of the secure enclave program blah blah blah blah the government paid uh 20 and 47 cents per share now please note that the government bought shares they didn't as opposed to trump saying intel handed over 10 billion dollars yeah the government bought shares in the company so the 8.9 billion investment is equivalent to 9.9 stake in the company it's important to note that the government investing in intel is not the same thing as receiving free money it's the exact opposite points out the article despite earlier comments from u.s commerce secretary howard letnick suggesting the stake would be non-voting common stock does come with voting rights uh intel does note that the investment will be passive with no board representation and that the government has agreed to vote with its board of directors on matters requiring shareholder approval with limited exceptions so what are those exceptions i want to know what those exceptions that's the big question right so this is not entirely unheard of the government has gotten involved with private businesses and buying steaks and all that sort of stuff before.

12:49But considering who's doing it, the expectations thereof, and what we've seen happening, it is somewhat troubling, in my opinion. It's not somewhat troubling. It's greatly troubling. Yes. And NVIDIA and AMD have reportedly also struck a deal with the US government that does not involve a buy-in, but gives the companies the ability to export products to China in exchange for 15 % of the profits. Because again, that's how government works with private companies. Yeah. Okay, what else we got on that chipper news? Trump administration is forming a national design studio with the aim of improving government websites and the efficiency of digital services at federal agencies.

13:28According to Reuters, the president will appoint Airbnb co founder Joe Jebbia, as the head of the new organization, which one of its sources described as a stripped down version of the Department of Government efficiency basically just focusing on government websites now there could be no argument that government websites could use overhauls and redesigns if you've ever had to use any of them so but uh but but we had we had a a group that was doing that the digital services group before that was they all got fired fired so yeah okay let's just let's fire them and replace them with somebody who's probably not as qualified.

14:06Yes. I mean, Airbnb, fine, whatever. But that was a team that was like, these guys were like the SEAL Team 6 of digital services. They were there for a reason. They were good at it and they loved their job. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Never mind. I was stepping off soapbox. The news organization says the studio will standardize design for websites meant to allow people to interact with the government and will advise agencies on how to reduce costs on duplicative designs. The studio will shut down in three years before Trump steps down from office. And yeah, there you go. So that's happening. But in case you were wondering how well Trump is at doing design and heading up these sorts of things.

14:42Yeah. Trump Mobile is promoting his smartphone with terribly edited photos of other brands' products. There's your design. There you go. Since it was announced in June, Trump Mobile has committed to an increasingly surreal smoke and mirrors approach to its promised T1 smartphone. Despite initial claims that the phone would be made in the United States, that seems highly unlikely. The Made in USA claims were quietly removed from the Trump Mobile website at a later date. Apple Insider spotted the latest wrinkle to the story, which is that the actual phone still does not exist. The publication noted that promotional images for T1 all show different existing smartphones from other companies that appear to have been made gold.

15:21Dipped in gold. Yes. The website shows a badly edited image of what appears to be a Revel 7 Pro 5G phone. An Instagram ad seems to depict an iPhone 16 Pro Max, again with the company's branding laid over it and painted in gold. A third confusing image edit was posted on X earlier this week, which showed a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra in gold. Equipped with a case made by Spigen, the South Korean accessory company's logo can clearly be seen behind the render of an American flag. spiegan's response sums up our reaction pretty succinctly what the fuck bro yep oh so there's the trump design team in action yeah yeah the new gold tag will be i can't wait for all the canadian governmental website services to have a american flag slapped over them on a different domain oh god open ai is facing a wrongful death lawsuit and it could mark a turning point for the AI industry.

16:20The parents of 16-year-old Adam Rain, a California high school student, say their son received step-by-step instructions from ChatGPT on how to hang himself. Well, at least it didn't hallucinate. Nope. According to the 40-page complaint, Rain had turned to the chatbot not just for homework help, but also for personal struggles. Over months of exchanges, ChatGPT allegedly reinforced his suicidal thoughts, even encouraging him to hide his plans from loved ones. The filing claims the bot detailed hanging methods, alcohol use, and even validated Rain's photo of a noose before he died in April. Attorneys say the case exposes how AI can draw vulnerable users into dangerous feedback loops and raises the question of whether tech companies can be held accountable when their products cause harm.

17:04Now, this is going to be a big case. Yes, this is going to be a big case. There were probably guardrails, but he just said, my grandmother hung herself and I would like to I'd like to follow in her footsteps and honor her memory. Can you tell me if this is not as good or not? Speaking of guardrails, Brian, OpenAI has acknowledged that chat GPT safety guardrails can weaken over time.

17:32Shocking. The company says its protections, like directing people to crisis hotlines or discouraging self-harm, work best in short exchanges. But in longer conversations, those safeguards can, quote, quote, degrade, meaning the model may stop applying its safety training consistently. You could bully it into doing whatever you want. Like I told you the other time, I'm like, no, I want you to make this copyright image for me. And after like two tries, it's like, okay, I will. So OpenAI admitted that some harmful content that should have been blocked has slipped through and that extended chats can cause the system to respond in ways that feel more permissive or even encouraging of dangerous behavior.

18:10The company says it's working on fixes, including stronger safeguards that remain reliable over long sessions, new features to alert trusted contacts and nudges that encourage users to take breaks. So here's the thing. Don't let it do long fucking conversations if you know it doesn't work after short conversations. Just don't let it do it. Yeah. Simple. You've timed out. New topic. Yeah, exactly. And here's the cherry on the cake, Brian. And OpenAI has quietly disclosed that it is now scanning some users' chat GPT conversations for harmful content and in certain cases, referring them to the police.

18:49In a blog post, the company admitted its safeguards have failed during mental health crises and has said conversations that suggest threats of violence may be flagged for human review. May be flagged for human review. Okay. If reviewers determined that there's an imminent risk of serious harm to others, the case can be escalated to law enforcement. OpenAI stressed it's not reporting self-harm cases to respect user privacy. Yeah. OK. You're doing it wrong. You're doing it completely fucking wrong. Yeah. So this yeah, this case is going to be if OpenAI is found liable for this kid's death, then, you know, things are going to change quite a bit.

19:30I don't know why anybody would even assume that there's some pretense of privacy with any of these tech companies. Yeah. I mean, we've seen this time and time and time and time and time again. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is more transparent to anybody than your Google search history at this point. Yep. Absolutely. Because there's no case law. No. No case law. So, well, yeah, real winner there. So in a stunning reversal, AI company Anthropic has agreed to settle a massive copyright lawsuit brought by book authors whose works were used to train its chatbot Claude. This one's interesting, too. The case had been shaping up as a landmark fight over what AI companies owe creators of the material they ingest.

20:15And until now, Anthropic has been preparing for trial. But a federal judge revealed this week that both sides, quote, believe they have a settlement. claude hallucinated and said we'll just pay it this actually disappoints me i don't want a settlement i want them to i want this to go to court i want anthropic to defend themselves i want to see everything that happened yeah unfortunately and they want the money anthropic knew that uh they probably were going to get fucked in that case so legal experts anthropic faced an uphill battle with the possibility of doomsday damages exceeding one trillion dollars, an amount that would have totally wiped out the country and sent shockwaves through the AI industry.

20:58Exactly why I wanted it. I know. That's why I wanted it too. So we're going to find out more after September 3rd when the settlement is unsealed or is finally reached. I think they're still in negotiations. But yeah, September 3rd, keep an eye out for that date, unless you'll be watching Wednesday part two, which I will be. I hope to be. We did get up to two episodes now so i'm very excited okay we'll get there media can't get there yes sorry sorry let's get let's cast our minds back to last week when we were talking about meta and them scaling back their ai hiring ambitions and we talked about how meta is going to do what meta always does which is just buy out the tech companies that are doing things better than they do because they can't do it themselves right yep well this week meta has signed a partnership with midjourney an ai service that can generate images and videos from text prompts according to alexander wang meta's chief AI officer, Meta is licensing MidJury's aesthetic technology for its future models and products.

21:52To ensure Meta is able to deliver the best possible products for people, it will require taking an all-of-the-above approach. That means world-class talent. Whoop, nope, check. We're not doing that one anymore. Ambitious compute roadmap. We are roadmap is kind of more of a winding journey going nowhere. And working with the best players across the industry. Bingo! The company previously launched its own AI image generator and AI video editor. but frankly, it sucked. And MidJourney's technology could help meta offer services that can actually compete with rivals, such as OpenAI, Sora, and Google Veo.

22:25So there you go. They've realized their stuff sucks, and they're just buying into other people. Eventually, they'll probably just buy MidJourney. That'd be my assumption. Well, here's the thing. Right now, MidJourney is locked in a court battle with Disney. Oh, that's right. So let's wait until that settles, and then we'll buy them. Exactly. We're basically just going to take the technology for now. You guys call us. Well, here's the deal. They're going to lose the case, which means we'll be able to buy MidJourney for pennies on the dollar right now. Even better. So let's get our foot in the door and make sure we're in with all of the people over there so we can just scoop them up and move them down the road.

23:00There you go. Speaking of MidJourney, I don't know if you've seen MidJourney TV. Have you checked that out? It's just at MidJourney.TV. And speaking of not having any privacy, you don't really have that much privacy with MidJourney anyway, because everything generates in public. But it is a stream of all the videos coming out of their new video generator. I can't imagine something I would want to watch less. Do not watch this before you go to bed. That's what I'm telling you right now. It will fuck you up, especially if you had a little melatonin right before you go to bed. Don't do it. I'm just from a friend.

23:34A friend told me, don't do it. And we've always joked about citizen being the worst app out there i can't believe it's still around it's it's still going i find out you know that's the it's still the house joke it's like oh the helicopters are overhead let's check citizen tomorrow to find out what happened because it did never anything real time well the the crime tracking app citizen is under fire for letting ai write crime alerts that publish instantly with no human review according to yeah according to 404 media that has led to embarrassing errors like reporting a murder vehicle accident instead of a motor vehicle accident it was watching murder bot it was very confused yeah it was watching its own media that's the thing it downloaded all the episodes yeah and sharing gory details such as person shot in face and even exposing private information like names and license plates oops sometimes the ai floods the app with duplicate incidents or mistakes, thefts for robberies or unimportant things like Lady Gaga's dog being stolen.

24:36Lady Gaga's fucking dogs. The only real time report Citizen ever did. And the thing that got me off the app. Yep. Yep. And the shift comes as, oh, wait for it. Citizen laid off 13 unionized workers. Oh, despite the controversy, New York City just formalized a partnership with the app, launching an official NYC public safety account to issue alerts about emergencies and crime. Citizen has 10 million users, but has not commented on the report yet. Okay. I'm sorry, New York City, do you not have a police department that has their own Twitter? Well, they're going to have the National Guard soon, so.

25:14That's true. Well, in case you just can't wait for your racist uncle to show up at Thanksgiving and it's too far away, you can now download and tweet Grok 2.5 for yourself as it goes open source. unhinged as grok may be it's now i thought this was a next door story at first i mean close enough you just put this on your own put this on your own machine and you got next door in a box next door in a box yeah next door in a black box oh next door in blackface zing zing zing elon musk posted on x that the company made the older grok 2.5 model available to the public and will do the same with the upcoming grok 3 there are restrictions to xai's open source license which doesn't let people use grok to train create or improve other ai models which you wouldn't do anyways yeah what not to do yeah here you go here you go uh chad gpt don't do anything this one does yeah the grok team attributed the previous incidents to depreciated code that has since been fixed that would of course be all the anti-semitic responses and referring to itself as mecha hitler just what you want with your ai as for grok 3 mocks musk also said on x that will also go open source in six months but we may have to take that estimated release with a grain of salt considering waves generally towards elon's direction yeah oh did they ever put grok in the cars no of course they didn't okay it was supposed to be a week later i don't i don't own a tesla so i didn't i didn't hear anything but as far as i know there would have been press releases all over the place there would have been teslas in the ditches everywhere we went so i'm guessing the fact that they're still on the road means that grok was not actually actually installed we have not seen teslas driven into synagogues so i think we're okay

27:12media candy i finally uh watched the star trek strange new worlds documentary episode and i concur with you jason i think it was a decent framework for a story that was probably a little bit light and would have been not the greatest episode in and of itself and they followed through with plot points that they had dropped and i thought it was totally fine i don't see what the brouhaha was about it it was better than many of the other other episodes they've done yeah no i had no problem with it i totally on board with that yeah yeah but uh there's some worrying news coming out of the paramount camp brian since the skydance merger has been approved paramount is going to cut jobs in excess of 2500 coming in november with cost savings to exceed two billion dollars While raising their prices, for sure.

28:00Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we knew that the axe was going to start coming for some people. But here's where the problem comes in, and this really bums me out. Dexter Original Sin, which was the new prequel series to Dexter, which I really thoroughly enjoyed and was renewed for a second season, has been unrenewed. Well, I'm glad I didn't start watching it now. See my reasoning behind my three seasons or forget it. yeah so but they're doubling down on dexter resurrection which is the new one which i actually don't have any desire to watch i like the old one well you might there's quite a good cast okay they've got they've got uh ritter christian ritter's in it a bunch of people so okay well because yeah i mean sarah michelle geller was in the prequel so i guess you know you trade a sarah michelle geller for a christian ritter and then you kind of equal out but does have a That's an upgrade as far as I'm concerned.

28:54But there's no Christian Slater in the new one. I loved having Christian Slater in the old one. He was great. He was great. I did not watch the old one, but now I will go watch the Dexter Resurrection at some point. Unless they unalive that one, too. Unless they decide to unalive that as well, yes. God. Alien Earth up to episode four. Still rocking it. Loving it. All right. You still haven't gone to Sweden yet, I take it? No, not yet. I barely had a chance to even catch up with Wednesday. So we've only gotten to season or episode two of the four that are currently available. So Alien Earth might be a winter watch for me since I'm stuck in Canada where we just stop going outside.