IM 857: Taskrabbit Arbitrage - Disposable Code and Automation

17:31Leo Laporte:I know the people who will come out of this best are the ones who start engaging now, not with fear, but with curiosity and a sense of urgency. And I know that you deserve to hear this from someone who cares about you, not from a headline six months from now when it's too late to get ahead of it. We're past the point where this is an interesting dinner conversation about the future. The future is already here. It just hasn't knocked on your door yet. It's about to and i would say i agree with this 100 and i think listen to the people you know who are really on the cutting edge of this who are really using this because everybody i talk to who is really using claude code agrees with this says you have no idea how this is changing everything now so can i come in now you can disagree with it and that's fine but that's my position and I've been doing this for 40 years.

18:30Leo Laporte:That's all.

18:31Paris Martineau:I think there's a difference in the last few months, which is that LLMs were seen as textual tools or toys. Uh, I think even the, even the technology people saw it as something cute and interesting, and then, then especially anthropic shifted though, that it was their, their, their, this was their emphasis for quite some time, but their, success rate at dealing with code shifted particularly. And I think we have now a bifurcation here. There's a consumer market that's still out there and waiting that is delayed now. The code market is where the progress is. And the coders who at first thought, well, this is going to affect others are saying, OMG, this affects us greatly.

19:17Paris Martineau:And you got to listen to us about how much this affects us. And if it affects us as much, it's going to affect all view this much. Well, to some extent, that's true. To some extent, code is easier because it's its own domain. It's more finite in what it does. And it's what the coders understand. And you having to write amazing applications, even in a language you don't use, and having to work is very impressive. But that doesn't necessarily extrapolate to everybody else in every other field. And the market has confused this, too, because in a sense, you look at the last two panics, one around legal and the next one around financial stuff.

19:57Paris Martineau:The fact that everybody's stock went down kind of makes no sense. Either, wow, everybody who's doing this is going to be far more efficient, so their stock should go up because the productivity is going to go up. Or, oh, my God, these service companies are going to get eliminated, but all their customers are going to be able to do this on their own, and their stock should go up. Instead, there was kind of a generalized uh-oh moment all around the market. And I don't think we have, we don't have the data, we don't have the experience, we don't know where this goes. I think that when this gets really impressive, and this is where you and I have disagreed, Leo, is not when you can be in terminal mode doing something impressive that's impressive.

20:36Paris Martineau:I'm not arguing with that. But I think it scales when I can do this without terminal mode and have it do it. Jason Howell and I were talking earlier today, you get to a point of looking at disposable software, disposable code. It does something for me once and it's gone. It changes the value of code immensely. It rethinks things. But it doesn't mean that everybody out there in the world is going to make all of their own code. I can't make a medical application. I can't make a financial application. I can use it to do things. I can use it to analyze. And it's going to have an impact. And I'm not arguing with that at all.

21:11Paris Martineau:So I think that what Paris said in her analysis is right. In 95, the long term was right, the short term was wrong. And we'll go back to steam power, electricity, the amplifier, the transistor. These are all similar things. We've been here before. These things had immense, immense impact on society and on jobs and on the economy. this stuff can very likely have such immense impact but to act as if we've arrived suddenly boom and we're there i think is a bit naive because we don't know what it is yet we don't know how it's going to get used yet we don't know what it can really do well yet you should we use it is he right yes we should should we do more than experiment with it and and challenge it absolutely agree but is the moment for triumphalism that this changes everything i don't buy that

22:02Leo Laporte:i think the biggest mistake you can make in this is say it's like anything else that's ever happened before and i think that that's the analysis that's the hubris of the present tense that's the analysis both of you are adopting and most people adopt because of course that's what we do as humans

22:18Paris Martineau:we analogize it isn't history teaches lessons it isn't going to be like that it's not going to be

22:25Leo Laporte:like that i mean that's fine you don't you don't need to believe it you can call it hubris i'm just

22:30Paris Martineau:telling you i'll get off my fault right now since the time which is that current and future trends are going to be similar to trends we've seen in the past that is always almost always going to be the correct bet and i think it was gigantic it has changed gigantic imagine all that all that happen because of the transistor right okay if we if you sat i told you i just warned you if you

22:57Leo Laporte:don't want to believe it you don't have to believe it uh but there is a tsunami why do you feel so personally i'm not i'm just i'm trying to tell you something if you don't want to hear it you don't have to hear it there is a tsunami coming it is going to be massive and it's going to happen

23:12Paris Martineau:this year and if uh if you said that last year also though well it's been it's been it's accelerating

23:20Leo Laporte:i mean look it was pretty clear last year that we weren't there yet i think not according to you in this podcast early last year no well i mean i could see this coming but it really is coming a lot faster it really is we're going to take a break we'll come back and i will give you a couple of data points, you know, for why I think 4.6, for instance, is a remarkable shift. We are talking about something very exciting. Whether it's going to change the world or not, we could disagree. That's Intelligent Machines with Paris Smart now, Jeff Jarvis, brought to you today by a new sponsor. I want to welcome Modulate.

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24:58Leo Laporte:Today, Modulate helps enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, understand 20 million minutes of voice every day by interpreting what was said and what it actually means in the real world. This capability is powered by Modulate's newest model, Elm Velma 2.0. It's a newest ELM. That's what they call it. Velma, I love the name, 2.0. Velma is a voice native behavior aware model. It was really important. It's an ELM, a voice native behavior aware model built to understand real conversations, not just transcripts. It orchestrates 100 plus specialized models, each focused on a distinct aspect of voice analysis to deliver accurate, explainable insights in real time.

25:48Leo Laporte:Velma ranks number one across four key audio benchmarks, beating all large foundation models because it's designed to do this right specifically in accuracy cost and speed it's number one in conversation understanding it's number one in transcription accuracy and cost it's number one in deep fake detection and then the final one is the hardest one and it's really good at that number one in emotion detection built on 21 billion minutes of audio Velma is 100 times faster cheaper and more accurate than llms at understanding speech including the best google gemini open ai and xai most llms they're just black boxes velma doesn't just assess a conversation as a whole but breaks it down for greater accuracy and transparency by producing time stamped scores and events tied to moments in the conversation meaning you can see exactly when risk rises when behavior shifts or intent changes.

26:50Leo Laporte:With Velma, you can improve your customer experiences, reduce risks like fraud and harassment, detect rogue agents, and more. Go beyond transcripts and see what voice-native AI model can really do. Go to Modulate's live, ungated preview of Velma, preview.modulate.ai. That's preview.modulate.ai to see why Velma ranks number one on leading benchmarks for conversation understanding deep fake detection and emotion detection preview.modulate.ai thank you modulate for joining us i think that's the other side of what we were just talking about we're going to see more and more sponsors and ads and stories talking about technologies and capabilities well beyond what we kind of think of uh when we talk about i also love the brand velma isn't that great wasn't that's great she was the smart one in scooby-doo right velma had the glasses i think so yeah that's where that comes from yes so the couple of things happened last week uh and and i you know my experience with four six was immediately very impressive it just came out this the day we did the show last week and i mentioned one of the things i did was i went through 46 pdfs of real estate contracts i was looking for one little tiny piece the proverbial needle in a haystack and four six did it what previous models would not have been able to do it part of the reason four six is good at this is it has a massive one million token context window that's one of the biggest changes uh anthropic when they released four six and i kind of at first pooh-poohed this announced that they had for put 4.6 to work writing a c compiler a rust-based c compiler from scratch uh it cost twenty thousand dollars in api costs two thousand claude code sessions they wrote a 100 000 line c compiler that was able to build the current linux kernel on three models x86 arm and risk 5 successfully build it now i first i thought well okay but it's not a fine-tuned c compiler it's not as good as gcc or the state-of-the-art g because see that wasn't the point of it actor as it turns out what they were really testing was the ability for claude to run unattended for length of time the previous records had been half an hour than an hour I mean, last year we were happy if Claude could run half an hour without hallucinating or breaking down.

29:27Leo Laporte:This went for two weeks nonstop, unattended. Two weeks to build 100 ,000 lines of code. Now, and 20 ,000 sounds like a lot of money, but honestly, the teams that it would take, the cost it would take to really write a C compiler would be much, much higher than that. So I think that what this is one data point I want to give you, which is the rate of improvement is not linear. The rate of improvement now is starting to hockey stick. This is a massive rate of improvement. It's a massive number of tokens. You know, it's 5x the tokens of the previous model. So we're starting to be in a situation where we're accelerating improvement.

30:09Leo Laporte:another data point and then i'll let you talk one more data point they also uh set down with opus 4.6 they gave it um in a sandbox environment they gave it a couple of uh basic tools uh they gave it um uh ghost script no i'm sorry uh uh python is that me or was that you somebody come in here? Okay. It's Claude. Claude wants to get in on this.

30:38Paris Martineau:The call is coming from inside the attic.

30:40Leo Laporte:He gave it some very basic tools, access to Python and vulnerability analysis tools, debuggers and fuzzers, no specific instructions or specialized knowledge, gave it access to a bunch of open source tools that are widely used, used by millions. Claude was able to find 500, hundred more than 500 previously unknown vulnerabilities just out of the box these were flaws unknown flaws in for instance ghost script which almost all open source systems use to process PDF files buffer overflow flaws and open sc in CGI f this is a breakthrough the ability to find this this is finding holes in code that has been looked at vetted by security people this is not just random open source projects these are widely used open source projects that have been carefully vetted for years for security flaws they found 500 of them that's another amazing use now both of these cases i know that well it's code right big deal okay makes sense that this would be good at code, right?

31:53Leo Laporte:But you gotta, everything's based on code nowadays. You gotta start with code. If you can have Claude self-improve, if you can have Claude accelerate its improvement rate and get better and better, it's gonna get better and better at everything eventually. So that's my answer to what you said before the break, Jeff, is yes, it's not impinging yet. It's not writing novels or operas or anything else. human and creative but it's improving so fast at code i think that's next all right i'm gonna stop i'm gonna stop i'm gonna get down off my as i said my

32:30Paris Martineau:paul revere horse you're saying just moore's law for intelligence it's like that assumption like

32:36Leo Laporte:well that would be a big deal moore's law for intelligence would be a huge deal no but it's

32:41Paris Martineau:like that's the assumption you're making like it's unfalsifiable by design like any plateau can basically be dismissed as temporary because you're like, oh, it's just always the line's always going to go up. Okay.

32:55Leo Laporte:It's not really a rebuttal. That's just saying, no, it's not going to happen. But I have evidence it's happening. I mean, it is happening. This is massive improvement over very over two months.

33:07Paris Martineau:I watched an hour long presentation by Yann LeCun this week at a world model conference and he's doing his thing. And, of course, he argues that LLMs, though amazing, do hit a wall. And that's part of what the argument is in the post he read, is whether there's a wall or not. But he said one line really struck with me. And this is his argument in favor of world models, in favor of building many intelligences, is the way he puts it. He said you can't tokenize the world. And so he tries to deal with something that's much bigger. He tries to deal with concepts. rather than the next pixel, rather than the next token and the next word.

33:51Paris Martineau:And so I think there is something bigger, much bigger, that can be out there. His models are yet unproven. His theories are yet unproven. Well, they're proven to an extent, but to that level. I don't think, this is the funny thing about this debate we go through in the show. I think I can speak for Paris in saying we're all amazed by these tools. Paris uses them. We're amazed by them. We're not denigrating the tools. The only question we have is that extrapolation and that present presentism of believing that somehow this is bigger than steam and bigger than the transistor you think that's impossible no i'm not saying it's impossible i'm saying it's unlikely it's okay it's unlikely i agree it doesn't deserve to be impossible i don't think it i think that it is unlikely and thus it does not deserve to be the predominant narrative in every conversation around this technology.

34:46Paris Martineau:But what if all the evidence points to it being the happening? Well, I think we could argue that the transistor was that. That indeed, if you go back to 1920 and then try to imagine the transistor, this thing this big with a huge hunk of silicon, that now there are trillions in a given rack and what all it could do, you consider all of the changes that came from steam or the transistor. All right.

35:12Leo Laporte:uh you know what pretty impressive i don't need to push against you on this it's fine uh we have differing opinions i don't need to push back on it well what well we'll know i you know if i'm wrong uh it'll be pretty obvious you know at the end of this year that nothing happened

35:28Paris Martineau:we're not saying nothing's gonna happen yeah we aren't we aren't arguing that nothing is gonna happen we're just saying that there should be some like measured skepticism of technologies use, especially when they're accelerating at the freight.

35:42Leo Laporte:Well, I have a whole section of this show of stuff that's gone wrong with AI. You'll be very happy. You'll be very happy for that section.

35:52Paris Martineau:Doctor, doctor, are you using AI? Doctor, can you talk to me about that first?

35:57Leo Laporte:Actually, one of the things I did.

35:58Paris Martineau:Yeah, we need to talk about the medical research.

36:00Leo Laporte:One of the things I did, there's a new app that came out for the iPhone that finally extracts all the data from Apple Health. Apple Health has been collecting all this data. apple has been saying oh we're gonna do or they're rumored to be doing a some sort of ai health thing and they've backed down on that apparently mark german who is the apple you know rumor monger says yeah they decided they weren't ready to do that yet and it was a little frustrating because apple health has a huge amount of data not only data it's collected from all the weird devices i wear and my scale and my blood pressure meter and my continuous glucose monitor my aura ring and But it also has all my medical information because I've uploaded all of my medical records from my health provider to it.

36:45Leo Laporte:So I found an app that actually extracts it all and puts it on Markdown files. So now I have six years of day-by-day information about how many steps I took, how much sleep I had, what my blood pressure was, all of this stuff. And I can't wait to massage this with AI because I think there might be some very interesting insights there. There's a lot of good data there.

37:08Paris Martineau:Did you read the story about the Washington Post reporter? I don't know whether it's one of the ones that has since lost their job. The Washington Post reporter did this. It was Jeffrey Fowler. And it told him that he had terrible heart health and needed to see a doctor immediately. And then a doctor reviewed the same data and was like, no, that's totally wrong.

37:24Leo Laporte:Yeah, that was the GPT health app that he used. That was Jeffrey Fowler, who is now at a work. But I hope his heart is fine. I hope his ticker is fine. According to the doctors, it is. So let's talk about investment, because one of the things we saw quarterly results from a number of companies, Amazon is increasing its investment in Anthropic to$61 billion, which is a sevenfold increase. That's interesting. I wonder if Amazon's thinking, maybe our models and our work isn't going to be that successful. Let's pick a winner in this horse race.

38:00Paris Martineau:Well, Amazon wants to cut down on labor. obviously they're doing that a b i think that anthropic everything you're saying points to anthropic being the winner right now i'm not sure that that's going to always be the case not open

38:13Leo Laporte:ai yeah yeah it's not clear open ai is 5.3 is very good codex is very good so in fact there are a

38:20Paris Martineau:number of people think it's a better coder i think i think open ai is stuck in the chat motif whereas claude is saying hmm no this is about making things this is about doing things

38:31Leo Laporte:data center that's a step change software computer and data center spending is now over one trillion dollars a year that's defense department budget numbers right there uh compare that to the

38:47Paris Martineau:spending on fiber in the early days of the internet not in dollar amount well if it succeeds it huge i know that but in useful useful at the time versus used later

39:00Leo Laporte:i think there's a reasonable race right now to be because i think this is the belief is there's a lot of people think the way i do that this is going to be so transformative that you want to be at the forefront of this because the upside is so huge and certainly investors are thinking that um spending on data centers construction is now 42 billion dollars that's a 300 increase since the launch of chat gpt just four years ago. Hard to believe that was only four years ago. The only reason that that growth has slowed a little bit is they can't get enough people to build these things. Google has announced that it's going to spend a huge amount of money.

39:45Leo Laporte:Its CapEx on AI will go from$175 to$185 billion this year, double what it would spend last year and they sold century bonds and they sell bonds for a long

40:05Leo Laporte:does it not mature in 100 years i didn't really follow up on this because i thought well i'm not going to be around for 10 so my kids won't be around my grandkids maybe will be around 100 years most most companies in the fortune 500 in the 1980s they lasted 50s they

40:25Paris Martineau:lasted 60 years on average now they're 15 to 20 years right right 100 year bond is insane

40:33Leo Laporte:it's insane google's gemini app is now uh catching up very quickly remember we mentioned that uh and no open ai had 800 million monthly active users gemini now has 750 million monthly active users Not that OpenAI has stopped growing. Pause that. Sorry about that.

40:54Paris Martineau:Okay. My question with this is how are they, what are they counting as a user? Do I count as a monthly or daily active user of Gemini? Because every time I try to write an email, it tries to write my sentences for me or suggest weird grammatical changes to the things I've already written.

41:15Leo Laporte:I think, honestly, I agree with you. I think both Google and Microsoft falls in this camp too, are making a huge mistake, forcing AI on people constantly offering to do something. And when we open our spreadsheet. Where is Google Leo on coding versus Claude? And I can't speak on that.

41:33Paris Martineau:He can't go against his girlfriend. She's in the room right now.

41:36Leo Laporte:My girlfriend would get very, no, I can't speak on that because I haven't used it. What I've heard from other coders is that the two strong coding alternative options are chat gpt 5.3 codex and clawed code and they are neck and neck uh google's models are great for well for instance when i make an image i always go to gemini and nano banana always it's by far i guess the fact that i think there's a split coming in coder b2b encoder versus consumer personally i might i have no knowledge of this but i think anthropic and open ai would be smart to focus on coding because ultimately that benefits everything i think anthropic has really said they don't do multimodal they don't do they don't you know you don't would never go to cloud to generate an image i don't know if you even could they say we're going to be good at coding and i think that's the smart bet because smart i have thought it's interesting that i've

42:30Paris Martineau:started to get a significant amount of targeted ads on reddit uh from open ai specifically being like, if you've been using cloud code, you should be using open AI codecs instead. It's way better. I thought that's a very, I mean, of course, that's the sort of demo they're trying to pull.

42:48Leo Laporte:They kind of need to say that because I think people are so enamored of cloud code that they're not even open-minded to what 5.3 can do. So I don't know. Honestly, I'm not motivated to do it. think one of the things that people are doing that's interesting that maybe i'll try is uh using both so using claude but then what you know in the new cloud they've added two really interesting features they have a fast mode which spends tokens at six times the rate if if if you're in a hurry that might be the way to go i don't think i can afford that one and then there's also something that you have to turn on manually in the in the json settings uh an agent mode that lets you spawn multiple agents so you have a this is what we were talking about with steve yegi basically what gastown did last week is it has a boss and then multiple agents and they can use uh dumber models and i and i think you could i don't know if you could do it with their official release but you can with others even use other models you could use uh open source models which are free or cheap you could and i think in theory use codex as well so i think people are some interesting things with that i haven't played i you know one of the things that you run into almost immediately is there's so much to absorb and so much to do that i can't i can't do it all i'm i'm i think i'm doing what i really want to be doing which is going deep as deep as i can with one particular tool just to get a sense of where the outlines are listening to you and

44:24Paris Martineau:I'm listening to Steve last week on Gastown. It really resonated with that HBR piece I put into the rundown that shows that because it looked at 200 people and a number of companies, major companies in the U.S. Watch their work a couple of days a week, major interviews with them. And what they found was more intensity of work. That's what I hear from both of you is that it's not necessarily.

44:53Leo Laporte:I'm sleeping because I'm so excited that I actually want, and I have a couple of times this week, leapt out of bed in the middle of the night to go try something.

45:01Paris Martineau:Well, that's the other thing it said. So it said that the work is much more intensive. The second thing it said is that it's, and this was puzzled me, but based on what you just said, you just proved it. It blurs the line between work and life.

45:14Leo Laporte:Darren Oki in our Discord earlier said the best game going right now, he was talking about video games, is Claude Code. It is fun. it is enjoyable to do it it's really exciting um so that's yeah that's part of it it's it's i don't think it's burnout it's enthusiasm no no it's the same kind of enthusiasm i had when i was a young man first got my first personal computer and started writing basic programs your eyes get very wide and you say suddenly i have some power to do something that i didn't have before is really dramatic one of the i have a couple projects i really want to work on one is and you're going to see the immediate benefit of this but between now and so i as some of you know i already vibe coded uh three programs to prepare for the shows one of them is to scan the news another one is to prepare uh get all the links and prepare a briefing it does an auto automated summary using haiku claude's haiku uh anthropics haiku model to summarize the stories and then we output a website and stuff like that so all of that i wrote but one of the things i haven't delved deep into but i will and you'll see the benefit of this is the uh summary um i've been using a simple prompt for the summary i'm just saying find one quote from every story uh that is seminal if and put that at the front and then come up with five bullet points from the story.

46:44Paris Martineau:That's what every news organization is doing now. And they're generating those summaries at the top of the stories.

46:49Leo Laporte:Right. I think what I want to do is something like, you know, there's that Axios model. I know. Not necessarily that.

46:59Paris Martineau:What Axios model are you talking about? You know what?

47:02Leo Laporte:Those three bullet points. The smart brevity. But they have. Why this is important. Why this is important. So I want to come up with something like that, why this is important. The other thing I want to do is if it's a product article, I want you to summarize product availability. I want to create smarter summaries. So I mean, I think they're kind of interesting right now. This is a summary of one of the stories in Google. We trust why an Internet company can borrow billions for a century. This is that 100-year bond. uh the quote is a judge just decided to let google keep breaking the law google plans to issue 100 year bonds a federal judge approved google as a government sanctioned monopoly google's net income topped 132 billion with plans to spend 185 billion so these are the five bullet points but i think i

47:53Paris Martineau:can do better and i think i'm going to try other ones i will try gpt yeah i think we can do it i

47:59Leo Laporte:think we can do better so you'll see that's one thing i'm going to work on uh it's a little part of that larger three program set. There's another thing I want to work on. I don't know if we're ready for this one.

48:11Paris Martineau:Uh-oh.

48:13Leo Laporte:I want Claude to join the show. That's a fourth contributor.

48:18Paris Martineau:I mean, it would make sense.

48:21Leo Laporte:So I think the latency is going to be too high still. I'd have to use Claude fast mode. It might be too expensive. But what I want is an AI that listens to the show. We already have that kind of thing. when you're in a zoom call you know it's listening right you see that little pop-up i want claude to be listening to the show i don't want it to just chime in at any old time but i think we should at any point any one of us should be able to say well what do you think claude or or claude what's the story with a hundred year bond what is who's that for and get i think it'd be very interesting it might prove your points you might say oh my god it's so stupid we'll see i don't know if we can do this yet.

49:03Leo Laporte:But I think it'd be very interesting. And we'd also at some point have to give it a face. I can give it a voice. That's easy.

49:10Paris Martineau:I mean, are you not going to give it Dev Null's face?

49:13Leo Laporte:Yeah, we'll give it Dev Null's face. I think Claude should be part of the conversation. Anyway, that may be, we may not have that this year, but that's one of the two things I want to play with anyway. OpenAI this week added ads to chat GPT for people who are using the cheap version of chat GPT. This is the Axios style, by the way, Paris. Why it matters. Driving the news. Between the lines. Yes, but the central figure. Zoom out. The other side. I don't know if I'll use that.

49:46Paris Martineau:Paris, wait a second. If you were forced to write in that format as a reporter,

49:51Leo Laporte:would you kill somebody?

49:52Paris Martineau:Shoot myself with a gun.

49:55Leo Laporte:But you understand the point is, It's to be, for the busy executive, a quick summary. You know, this is what you would prepare for the CEO or the president.

50:05Paris Martineau:That's why CEOs make bad decisions, because they want to actually just read the paragraphs.

50:09Leo Laporte:Read it all. Yeah.

50:10Paris Martineau:Yeah, they don't want to, they're afraid of the tyranny of the paragraph.

50:15Leo Laporte:Well, look, the summary is not to make it so that you don't have to read the story. The summary is just to kind of give you a little.

50:22Paris Martineau:Well, at Axios it is.

50:24Leo Laporte:Well, it is for Axios, but I'm saying my summaries. Yes. one anyway facebook it i didn't know this has apparently hired i'm sorry meta i mean open ai has apparently hired a number of people from facebook from their ad department which kind of explains why all of a sudden they're doing ads well they also have fidget cimo who has the

50:48Paris Martineau:experience from meta and from instacart she's she she understands both product and advertising

50:53Leo Laporte:intimately as recently as 2024 sam altman said he found advertising and ai chatbots uniquely unsettling and described it as a last resort as a business model i found it interesting the way

51:07Paris Martineau:that uh the anthropic ads changed from when they were initially released online to the version that we saw in the super bowl did you guys notice that uh i didn't notice it what did they change

51:16Leo Laporte:I believe the exercise one.

51:18Paris Martineau:So these were, yeah, it was.

51:21Leo Laporte:Well, now remember, a lot of times when you see the, before the game, you're seeing an extended version, the two minute version that they make, but they're not going to.

51:28Paris Martineau:No, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the last little title cards. These are ads where kind of a user's having a back and forth with clearly a AI chat bot. And then it makes a very obvious reference to what seems to be an advertiser. And then I believe the early versions of it ended with a little kind of interstitial card that said, ads are coming to AI, but not Claude. And I believe the change was to something like, there's a time and place for advertising. In your AI chat is not one of them, or something like that, which I was like, interesting that you're backing away, but for not Claude.

52:11Leo Laporte:Leaving a little bit of an open portal there.

52:13Paris Martineau:A little wiggle room. Yeah.

52:16Leo Laporte:I liked the OpenAI ad, actually. We should talk about the Super Bowl ads because they were kind of interesting. Anyway, before we get to that, the information to the study of LinkedIn posts says that roughly 20 % of OpenAI's workforce, 20%, one in five, list Facebook or MetaGigs on their resume. That's a little weird, huh? And Fiji Simo is the key architect of Facebook advertising in the 2010s. Fiji is the OpenAI CEO of applications.

52:44Paris Martineau:Fiji's brilliant.

52:46Leo Laporte:Yeah. She reassured, Axio says, OpenAI employees on her arrival there that she did not want to replay her meta career and do things differently. Okay. It doesn't bother me if the ads are below the content, right? I don't want them. And this was why Sam Altman was so mad at anthropic for that ad because anthropic implied that the ad would be in the chat bot's response

53:14Paris Martineau:well i haven't used that fear and that would be where if you're an advertiser where you would get that's where you want to bang for your buck that's what you want to pay for sure i mean advertisers

53:24Leo Laporte:want to be native content on our programming all the time we don't ever give it to them

53:28Paris Martineau:well the other thing leo is that if anthropic on the other hand finds that most of its business is people making applications. There's no way to rely and we put ads in those. Right. So it's also, it's like Apple, it's like Apple not being able to do advertising and turning that into a feature in a sense, Anthropics doing the same thing was saying, well, we're going to help people make these incredible applications, but they're going to be operating elsewhere. We can't really place ads in them. We don't know what the environment is. We can't do that data. So fine. We ain't doing advertising.

53:56Leo Laporte:Well, let me, I'm just going to sign into a chat GPT with a, for a free account. So let me just see.

54:07Leo Laporte:Okay, they're trying to get me to download it.

54:09Paris Martineau:ChatGPT doesn't have enough salespeople yet to really fill it with ads.

54:12Leo Laporte:So let me see. What kind of running shoe should I buy if I'm just getting started? Okay, that's the kind of thing you might ask ChatGPT, right? And you would want objective information. You wouldn't want, Will Saucony makes an excellent running shoe.

54:39Leo Laporte:Here's how to pronounce it. Here's a starter guide, which is good, right? I'm not crazy about... See, this is why I like terminals. You don't have emoji in the... Actually, you do. Come to think of it. Claude does put emoji in. So there's some brands, but I don't know if those are ads. I don't see any ads here.

55:03Paris Martineau:Well, if you can't tell if there are ads or not, then that's got to mean there's no ads, right?

55:08Leo Laporte:No, no, no, because that would be a violation of the Federal Trade Commission's rules.

55:12Paris Martineau:And no one's ever violated the Federal Trade Commission's rules.

55:16Leo Laporte:ChatBQT is not going to violate FTC rules. We don't, because the fines are huge. You have to disclose an ad. You can't. In fact, we're so finicky about it that if I don't say, and I'm not legally required to because it's pretty clear when I'm reading an ad. If I don't say this portion of intelligent machines is brought to you by at the beginning of the ad, they make me redo it. Because we want to be very, very clear when an ad is an ad. Speaking of which, let's take a little break. this will be an ad not for a sock any running shoes but for in melissa this portion of intelligent machines brought to you by melissa the trusted data quality expert since 1985 forward-thinking businesses are using ai in all kinds of new ways but ai i think you probably realize is only as good as the data you feed it you can have the most sophisticated ai tools in the world but if your customer data is incomplete or duplicated or just plain wrong, you're training your AI to make expensive mistakes.

56:26Leo Laporte:But that's where Melissa can help. For 41 years, Melissa has been the data quality partner that helps businesses get their data clean, complete, and current. Now, here's what Melissa can do for you. They've got global address verification. And when I say global, I mean it. The whole world. At autocomplete and address verification, that means real-time validation for addresses anywhere in the world. And they always use the format that's appropriate to that region, by the way. So your deliveries actually arrive and your customer experience starts strong. For financial applications and the like, they've got mobile identity verification, which can connect customers to their mobile numbers.

57:08Leo Laporte:It really reduces fraud. It also gives you an opportunity to reach people on the devices they actually use. So that's nice. You get change of address tracking, which will automatically update records when customers move, ensuring you don't lose revenue due to outdated information. You also get smart deduplication. As anybody knows who's ever tried to dedupe their contact list, that's hard. On average, a database contains 8 to 10 percent of duplicate records. Mine's at least half. but Melissa's powerful matchup technology can identify even non-exact matching duplicate records and really get rid of the duplicates merge them take care of it clean your data up they also can do data enrichment they can enhance the data you already have by appending demographic data or property information geographic insights which can turn basic contact records into marketing gold The new Melissa Alert Service monitors and automatically updates your customer data.

58:05Leo Laporte:So when your customer moves or has an address change or there's a property transaction, a hazard risk, or maybe they get married, all of that can automatically update the data in your database. Whether you're a small business just getting started or an enterprise managing millions of records, Melissa scales with you. Melissa has easy to use apps for every app you use Salesforce, Dynamics, CRM, Shopify, Stripe, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and you know, all of the above. Melissa's APIs integrate seamlessly into your existing workflows for custom builds. And Melissa's solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant.

58:42Leo Laporte:They're FedRAMP and ISO 2700 and certified. They meet SOC2 and HIPAA high stress standards for information security management because they know that data is valuable and important to you. and securities job one clean data leans to better marketing roi higher customer lifetime value and ai that works as intended get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com twit that's melissa.com slash twit we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines uh let's see google chat gpt's deep research tool this might be something you'd want to use paris adds a built-in document viewer so you can read it is it as annoying as claude's built-in

59:33Paris Martineau:document viewer which puts all of the document artifacts in a immovable window on the right

59:40Leo Laporte:side of your screen that's very small no i don't know try i just try it let me know so you've been trying to read what uh pdf lots of pdfs lots of pdfs i mean that was just my

59:54Paris Martineau:first attempt with claude co-worker i've used claude for a lot of stuff i'm about to probably blow through my entire session limit in one query because i've been trying to get a opus 4.6 extended to go through all of the twig and IM transcripts to identify the episode where you first mentioned going on a walk with your sandman. And it's really, really struggling. But it's working through it. Oh my God, it just found it. Twig 474, December 20th. Does it go with time code? Wow, that happened right as I was saying that. Incredible timing plot. So this is one of the things 4-6 can do

1:00:37Leo Laporte:because it has a much larger context. It can...

1:00:41Paris Martineau:Oh, I had to go into my extra usage for that. But it did it. It found it. Twig, episode 747, December 20th, 2023. This is the original telling. I took a walk. Here's the key passage. Leo Teeth is the first. I took a walk with an L-accelerationist, an AI go, go, go guy. And I'm going to tell you the tale of that in a little bit. Then the full reveal. He said it's like the first contract. It's an alien species that we're giving birth to. Paris, did you look down at the sand and you saw only one pair of footprints? Leo, yes. And I realized he was carrying me. I saw the whole world in a grain of sand.

1:01:24Leo Laporte:Wow. Thank you, Claude. I did mention, and actually it's more just for you guys, but I should tell everybody. We've mentioned before Nate B. Jones. i think he does a very good uh he's a youtuber does a very good job at analyzing this stuff he today put out a very nice 30 minute piece on 4.6 and one of the things he talks about is the

1:01:47Paris Martineau:needle in a haystack test that even he does that a lot yeah even 4.5 what you just did paris was a

1:01:55Leo Laporte:needle in a haystack large amount of data trying to find one little thing that's what i did when i I was going through all his real estate contracts. And he said that 4.6 is remarkably better than 4.5 at this. Here's the point of this today's video, besides celebrating the Seahawks Super Bowl victory, is I guess he's from Seattle. Take that, Pats. Is that he talks about the degree of improvement over the last two months. And what he's pointing out is that, you know, at first it was two years, then it was six months, then it was two months. Not only is it improving dramatically, it's improving faster.

1:02:43Leo Laporte:So, yeah, he's an accelerationist, but I don't know, you've watched his videos.

1:02:47Paris Martineau:He's a very reality-based one, evidence-based one, I think.

1:02:53Leo Laporte:He's saying the same thing I'm saying, but okay, whatever.

1:02:57Paris Martineau:No, he doesn't. He also doesn't necessarily go into this changes the whole world. He just goes into why he loves this latest version of Claude so much.

1:03:06Leo Laporte:Okay. I think he actually says this changes the whole world this time.

1:03:09Paris Martineau:Well, as the Sandman said in your telling of it, you said the guy told you there's not, quote, not going to be any money in a couple of decades. and that we're seeing emergent behaviors in AI and it's going to get, quote, really weird in the next 10 years.

1:03:28Leo Laporte:That I do say. In fact, it's going to get really weird in the next year, I think. Were we still Twig then or were we IM then?

1:03:35Paris Martineau:Oh, we were Twig. Listen, we've gone through, you could see that I zoned out for 15 minutes because I was going back and forth with Opus 4.6 being like, listen, it was definitely in the This Week in Google period, it might've been an episode where Ant was here as well. I was like, you need to go back and search these keywords. And if it is a callback, then it is before that. That was the thing that Opus got very confused on. I kept identifying ranges where there were callbacks. And it was like, well, it has to be after that. And I'm like, no, a callback is calling something back to something that happened in the past.

1:04:12Paris Martineau:So if you find a callback, scratch out all of the episodes that are after that. But once I prompted it a couple more times with that, it figured it out after going through 120 % of my usage.

1:04:26Leo Laporte:That's all right. It resets in a couple of hours, right?

1:04:28Paris Martineau:I mean, it had reset right before the show.

1:04:31Leo Laporte:That's the thing that is the best thing you can do, I think, is just do that. You know, get an idea of what it can understand, what it can't understand, what it can do, what it can't do. I think that's the best thing for anybody to do right now. it's why i think if you had a smart teenager who was interested in technology don't teach them python although learning to code is a very is really valuable even in this world because you're learning disciplines that will be helpful in your prompting as well but i think give it give give the kid a 20 clawed subscription and leo do you pay more than the 20 a month when you do these mondo projects oh i bought the max version i have the 250 a month can you still pay extra or is that as many no no that covers it we pay so one of the things is a little frustrating uh api tokens are separate from your subscription it should really be the same thing but i have to pay a little bit not much i think it's a penny per a million words or something it's a very low rate for the uh article summaries is an additional payment over and above the subscription but it's not going to more than five bucks a month it's a small amount the big amount is the claude max subscription that's expensive to me it's worth it uh for two reasons one it's research it's how i'm learning about this stuff and two i am able to write programs for myself uh that are useful tools so you know stuff i would pay for probably give you five times more articles to discuss well I'm getting better at paring them down I think I am Jennifer Pattison too who's been on our show before says Amazon's uh Echo Plus I'll call it Echo Plus so I don't trigger it in your house uh is so annoying that she makes her want to go back to Siri she said the s word now um it is now available to everybody in the US Amazon has rolled that out so if you happen to have an echo device you can talk to madam a uh unfortunately she's a little tainted i think by uh amazon's desire to sell you everything under the sun there's a lot of special events stuff although lisa's had some nice conversations with her and they have integrated a lot of tools thumbtack uber you can call an uber you can you can get a yelp review you can make a reservation on open table you can even have it write songs in suno ticket master so in theory it's useful i still think that the voice agents whether it's google apple or amazon are just they're not as good for some reason i don't i don't know why we'll find out when the new siri comes up comes out later this year because it's going to have gemini built to Amazon says they are going to use AI oh this is bad news to speed up TV and film production is bad news yeah I don't want to see AI I mean based on that uh terrible mini series we were talking about last week that looked Aaron Aronofsky's 1776 yeah yeah yeah because we

1:07:45Paris Martineau:We don't produce media fast enough today, right?

1:07:50Leo Laporte:Well, if you're watching Pluribus, we don't. Pluribus isn't going to come out until 2027.

1:07:55Paris Martineau:Yeah, but you don't want that to be AI-generated, right? You don't want that. No.

1:07:59Leo Laporte:And Vince Gilligan is very anti-AI, and that's one of the reasons it's taken so long. He's handwriting every episode.

1:08:06Paris Martineau:That's great. Well, number one, sitting on a set is stultifying. number two when we reduce the cost of production we increase the up the the uh access to creativity yeah yeah all right we'll see they say a human will always be involved in every step of the creative process and i think i mean that's i i'm that's why i didn't like that dario amode quote that half of the white-collar jobs will be gone there'll be other white-collar jobs running ais

1:08:42Leo Laporte:ais aren't going to do it on their own i put a story up about how uh claude is the new um oh what's his name uh romance writer uh what is oh i hated that um um an ai romance uh author or a

1:09:04Paris Martineau:romance novel author is now pumping them out like a hundred books of some short time period teaching other people how to do it and it's just rough it's sad in my opinion but those were always

1:09:18Leo Laporte:disposable prose weren't they yeah it's the good enough i guess good enough disposable yeah i guess

1:09:24Paris Martineau:now that everybody is um now that uh sexy books are a mainstream commodity i guess it's uh

1:09:33Leo Laporte:a coral heart writes romance novels over the she she uh started using ai to churn out romance novels over the next eight months she created 21 pen pen names and published dozens of novels uh some programs refused to write explicit content writes the new york times others like rock and novel ai produced graphic sex scenes but consummation often lacked emotional nuance and felt rushed and mechanical. You mean like robot sex? Yeah. Claude delivered the most elegant prose but was terrible at sexy banter. Ms. Hart said, you're going to get hammering hearts and thumping chests and stupid stuff at the end of every sex scene.

1:10:17Leo Laporte:Everyone will end up tangled in the sheets. You're right. This is where I think Jan Lacoon is right. We need to give them some experience so that they can write better romance novels.

1:10:30Paris Martineau:Uh, Claude needs to stop.

1:10:32Leo Laporte:Claude needs some schnippin'. You know, I was thinking, having gone through now almost a year of really terrible construction hell on our house, I was thinking, I wonder how long it will be. First of all, you'll have to make robots that can do construction work. That may be years off. but i could see an ai planning and executing a great many construction jobs if you had the hands that's what you need is the hands you need the robots yeah and those seem to be some of the most

1:11:10Paris Martineau:difficult things to figure out they can't even get the robots to fold a shirt true true yeah they can't they've every single year someone at ces is promising next year will be the time when we can finally have your a robot do your laundry and every year it's out of grasp

1:11:29Paris Martineau:um wow i feel i feel a bit high after getting clawed code to see find that trend is this how you feel all the time leo yeah all the time well mostly because it's like wait a minute it's pretty good i don't know if i'd be feeling that this amped if it did not find it as i was explaining how it couldn't find it that was a real that was really nice um i i mean i was thinking okay

1:11:58Leo Laporte:for instance we have a bookkeeper lisa has does the high-end thinking she's the she's a cfo she's the finance person but every finance person has bookkeepers who do the manual entry stuff right they take all of the credit card statements and they put it in quickbooks assigning it the categories and stuff. I honestly think that that job could be done very well by AI today. There are certainly some white collar jobs that could be done by AI. It's sad because the jobs that we value the least are the jobs where it's human labor, right? That what the person is selling is their physical labor, like construction workers.

1:12:41Leo Laporte:Those are the hardest to do. I guess those jobs will persist, although those are probably the least satisfying jobs.

1:12:49Paris Martineau:Well, you know who potentially agrees with your take is a KPMG, one of the world's largest auditors of public and private companies, negotiated lower fees from its own accountant recently by arguing that AI would make it cheaper to do the work. According to people familiar with a matter. This is an excerpt. That's a story from the FT that was excerpted in Matt Levine's Money Stuff. And I thought this was very funny because as Matt Levine writes, auditing can basically be done by AI, so why should we pay for it? It's not a crazy thing for most companies to think or to say to your auditors, but it is a crazy thing for an auditing firm like KPMG to say It is auditor.

1:13:36Paris Martineau:KPMG should be playing Grant Thornton more.

1:13:42Leo Laporte:Here's another area that you would think you don't want AI in. Fast company. AI didn't kill customer support. It's rebuilding it. One of the things that AI is good at is handling tickets, support tickets, right? Triaging them. Maybe you need a specialist, a human at some point in that process.

1:14:02Paris Martineau:Well, it depends on what authority you give it to actually do things.

1:14:05Leo Laporte:Right. um the author uh ryan wang says a few months ago i walked into the office of one of our customers a publicly traded vertical software company with tens of thousands of small business customers i expected to meet a traditional support team with rows of agents on the phone sitting at computers triaging tickets instead it looked more like a control room there were specialists monitoring dashboards tuning ai behavior dug debugging api failures and iterating on knowledge workflows. One team member who had started their career handling customer questions was now writing Python scripts to automate routing.

1:14:41Leo Laporte:Another was building quality scoring models for the company's AI agent. But, and you might say, and certainly if you've had an experience with phone trees and some of the awful ways that customer service has been automated, you might say, well, this is a terrible thing, but maybe it isn't. maybe it's faster, more effective support. Where the human plays an important role, but maybe not the first line of defense. Anyway, that's his, that's his position is that AI is going to improve customer service. He says humans are needed to solve harder problems. Once AI becomes part of the support workflow, the nature of the work becomes more technical.

1:15:26Leo Laporte:One support leader I spoke with at a company that now contains more than 80 % of its tickets with AI, put it plainly, once automation handles the easy questions, the work that remains is harder. And that's where you need the humans, right?

1:15:40Paris Martineau:So the problem with this kind of thinking is that now there's nowhere for anyone to learn how to become the good one. You know what I mean? If they remove all the entry level, how's anybody going to learn to become experienced at that if there's no way to do that?

1:15:54Leo Laporte:well that's why craig monday told business insider what kinds of education matters for kids going forward yeah you don't you know uh i honestly think in a way and i think craig agrees that the classic liberal arts education is more important than ever before amen brother the ability to express yourself to speak to understand to think logically and clearly and then express it and listen that's all going to be more important as machines take over the mundane stuff

1:16:36Leo Laporte:he says monday urged his families to prepare kids for a world where learning itself becomes continuous personalized and done in partnership with intelligent machines we actually i don't know if the results of ai in the classroom have been great but i think to some degree that's been done to reduce costs to to get rid of teachers and maybe that's not

1:16:59Paris Martineau:the right solution i still think no i think there's also a uh there's it's political but the humanities are liberal and we're brainwashing students right there's a heavily heavy vocational thing. There's no jobs in the humanities. Teach them all skills only. Get rid of philosophy. Get rid of English. Get rid of those other things. But now I think you need it more than ever. I couldn't agree more. I'm working on a new program at Muckler State. I'm trying to help them with something. And my colleague, Carrie Brown, and I had a conversation this week where she said very wisely, as she does, that we need to concentrate on teaching the students the things, these are my words, but her her view that are complementary to ai understand what ai is going to do one of the things that is not going to do and those are the jobs and i think it's about relationships and community and human

1:17:49Leo Laporte:beings and understanding and that's what craig monday says actually he let me read the the paragraph he described today's education system is sharply divided between stem and the humanities the liberal arts emphasize reasoning but at the expense of special technical skills you learn in STEM fields Monday said students will need both skills moving forward. Quote, if I could create a new curriculum in college, it would be a liberal education and technology in STEM liberal arts

1:18:17Paris Martineau:degrees.

1:18:17Leo Laporte:Well, all three of us are liberal arts students. Well, I got, I got a vocational degree in journalism. Is that vocational really though?

1:18:30Paris Martineau:I guess it is the way it's taught the way it was taught then. Yes, it is.

1:18:33Leo Laporte:Yeah. It's technical. i took two journalism classes that's all the rest were compared very well

1:18:41Paris Martineau:yeah i mean by the time i was taking like journalism 101 i was already doing journalism and i was like this seems like a waste of time i might as well finish i was like might as well finish school and get my stuff over with uh a new bill in new york is going to require disclaimers on ai generated news content you'll have to say this was written by ai it's the new york fundamental

1:19:06Leo Laporte:artificial intelligence requirements or the new york fair act

1:19:13Leo Laporte:um it's uh at this point only a bill not a law yeah i'm not against that i think disclosure is

1:19:21Paris Martineau:always a good thing but what does it mean to use the problem is what does it mean to use ai especially in the vision that you have is spell check using ai is asking uh for suggestions using ai do we just slap a you you know i used ai on this on everything well that brings us to our vaunted

1:19:40Leo Laporte:bad news section i did the one good news story ai is is rebuilding customer support now here come all the bad things that's happened this week in AI. The point, the part that Paris looks forward to all week long.

1:19:58Paris Martineau:Hey, it might seem like you are looking forward to it all week long, judging by the fact that there are how many stories? There's a lot of bad news. How many in the good?

1:20:06Leo Laporte:It's one good and like 30 bad, but we'll get to those.

1:20:10Paris Martineau:13 bad and one good.

1:20:11Leo Laporte:Just a little bit. You're watching Intelligent Machines, Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. We're glad you're here. I think, i i seriously i think this may be the most important show we do because i do think the most important technology we're covering is not macintosh it's not windows it's not yeah suck it other hosts network i think it is how ai is changing the world and i think it's dad likes us best yeah even if you don't like dad dad likes you okay we like you we love you even if i'm a goofball sand ridden ai accelerationist yep that's me uh the only thing i say in my defense is you know i'm 40 years covering technology there's plenty of technologies have come down the pike that people have been very excited about that i said don't get your hopes up this is terrible this is not good i can't think of anything i've gotten as excited about as this um and i think i have a pretty realistic point of view of what technologies are going to change things and what ones aren't you know when i when i first got a a uh apple newton which people were making fun of like crazy right i said you know what's an apple newton if you oh that's a lovely

1:21:30Paris Martineau:moment when the when the kid has to ask hey you know normally i just google it but i figured i'd give you one in the mid 90s but you gotta show dunesbury as part of this class oh yeah in the

1:21:46Leo Laporte:mid 90s after steve jobs left apple john scully who the former pepsi soda executive who was running apple at the time went all in on what he called pdas personal digital assistance he thought he was really adamant this was going to change the world just much like i'm talking about ai he was talking about pda's seriously and uh so they created a pda i'll be honest with you he was kind of right right he was wrong way ahead of his time so one of the things that and and by the way nobody nobody thought that newton after it came out was that great this is this is what it looked like you had to use a special honestly it's cute

1:22:34Paris Martineau:it's very cute it was very cool you did not have to use a special alphabet

1:22:39Leo Laporte:Jeff that was the Palm Pilot the Newton was supposed to understand your handwriting

1:22:45Paris Martineau:that's right yes

1:22:47Leo Laporte:it didn't do such a good job hence the Dunesbury cartoon let me find it for you you need to understand that to understand the Dunesbury cartoon Let me see if I can find it for you. Here's the computer history museum's version of it. So that's our hero. He says, I am writing a test sentence on the Newton. Siam fighting atomic sentry. I am writing a test sentence. Ian is writing a taste sensation. I am writing a test sentence. I am writing a test sentence. Catching on? Egg freckles. It wasn't as bad as that, but it was almost as bad as that. But so people, you know, it didn't sell well. It was a flop.

1:23:46Leo Laporte:John Scully eventually was forced out. Steve Jobs came back. His signature product failed. But I held it in this video of me somewhere in 1996, I think it is, held it up. I said, if you just had internet connectivity on this thing, if you could just connect it to the, and this was very early in the internet, if you could connect it to data, if you could connect it to a network, if you connect to the cell phone network, this could be something. that really one of the things apple did in order to make the new they invested in a little company called acorn computers that made a little chip that had remarkable uh battery life and power for a portable device that became arm which in fact makes the chips that power the apple silicon core that power the qualcomm chips that power almost every smartphone sold in existence, billions of them.

1:24:42Leo Laporte:So it was a good investment. In fact, smartphones really were the spiritual successor. It just was way ahead of its time in 1993. A brief aside,

1:24:51Paris Martineau:since you mentioned Acorn Computers as in relation to Apple, did Apple invest or have dealings with any other computer companies that were named after things that were on or fell off trees? Fruit trees.

1:25:05Leo Laporte:I think that was just a coincidence. Apple sold its stake in Acorn, which is funny because in the long run arm has become a very valuable uh asset um yeah and then when did the blackberry come out in that sequence uh i would say six years later maybe and by the way i was i was very excited about the blackberry i might have been as excited about the blackberry i remember i've got my first uh blackberry the first one uh didn't have a keyboard on it it was just a pager yeah it was though uh but once blackberry put a keyboard on it i remember i went to the xbox rollout so that was 2001 i think and i had a blackberry and i spent the whole time on it my kids said dad get off your blackberry in an early version of what i would later tell them get off your get off your phone we're having dinner i was all trio well the trio came later and i loved my trio i had a trio i had a palm pilot um i want to hear something sad all the early i think one of my go ahead go ahead i was going to say something sad is i think one of my

1:26:14Paris Martineau:earliest phone memories is trying to show my mom how on her lg chocolate phone she could use it to calculate how much she'll leave a tip.

1:26:26Leo Laporte:See, you were right there on the cutting edge already.

1:26:28Paris Martineau:And she was like, yeah, you can just carry the decimal over and multiply it by two, various. You don't need a technology.

1:26:36Leo Laporte:But mom. We're going to get to the bad news. I don't know how I got distracted. I got distracted. We're going to get to the bad news.

1:26:41Paris Martineau:I asked about the Apple Newton.

1:26:44Leo Laporte:But why did the Newton come up? There was a reason. Anyway. Oh, I know. Anyway, I was justifying the fact that I'm very excited about this. And I have, I think, a pretty good handle on what's important and making a difference in technology and what's not. Just by virtue of being covering this since it became personal, you know. My first article in a computer magazine was in the late 70s. We are Intelligent Machines. Our show today brought to you by SpaceMail, the professional email service from Spaceship. business email is the easiest way and I think the absolute must have way to look professional in every message you send if you have a business and you're sending a message from gmail.com that's not professional give your emails the best chance of reaching the inbox not the spam folder that's why over 2 ,000 users switch to space mail every month switching is easy space mail super fast unbox process links your domain and email in seconds once you've set this up space mail keeps everything running smoothly with built-in spam detection and a 99 % uptime guarantee new features are shaped by user feedback it's one of the things I like about spaceship their roadmap is entirely created by you by your users it's built around your needs there's a built-in calendar of course there is a very nice and I think you'll like it AI email assistant they have apps for iOS and Android for email on the go.

1:28:15Leo Laporte:And all of that was done because SpaceMail users said, hey, next we want you to do that. SpaceMail is a key part of the wider Spaceship universe. And if you're a regular listener, you know Spaceship offers some of the best prices on domains, plus all the add-ons you might need, VPNs, website builders, hosting, and more. Whether you're building something big or launching your first idea, SpaceMail gives you a pro email address without the pro level price tag. You'll be very impressed with their prices. And with a 30-day free trial, the price could be zero. You could start today at zero cost. Visit spaceship.com slash twit to see the exclusive offers and discover why thousands have already made the move.

1:28:56Leo Laporte:Spaceship.com slash twit. Did you try to create a secretly British website or is that?

1:29:05Paris Martineau:Honestly, this weekend I was really my birthday as well as I had some new stuff. to do happy birthday thanks congratulations is less young i know inching ever closer to 30 at which point i'll be old closer to 30.

1:29:24Leo Laporte:oh imagine you know imagine

1:29:27Paris Martineau:so what did you do for your birthday uh for my birthday i don't know i took the day off work i went and got a massage like a sponsor i went to a fancy restaurant i had a party over the weekend with a bunch of my friends um a great restaurant called luthun that i'd honestly recommend anybody go check out in new york l-u-t-h-u-n um it is one of those places that i've always seen like the food nyc subreddits and fine dining subreddits are really obsessed with it it's constantly people describe it as like how does this restaurant not have multiple michelin stars um and i totally agree after being there i mean it was a phenomenal tasting menu i mean it was kind of an international inspired experimental uh menu with like eight plus dishes at the chef's counter there and it was really nice and i love sitting at the chef's counter by the way i love sitting at the chef's counter and i love kind of like doing a casual especially if i'm gonna like treat myself because i'm more of a foodie than my friends i was like i took a book there i went solo had a lovely time and then you did that last year for your birthday i did and at the end of the dinner they were like bringing a dessert and all the the head chef and his sous chefs run out and scream happy birthday at me top of their lungs which is why i wasn't expecting because it was a fine dining restaurant it nearly scared me falling off my chair so i don't know would recommend um and then i had a birthday party at a bar nearby that i'd planned for weeks or just had on the books for weeks except for uh this sunday it was negative 20 or 30 with wind chill uh so i was worried i was like well i was worried no one might show up but i was like i know at least some of my friends with it to be fine maybe this will be good because the bar i chose which is near me is you know kind of busy but i would have flown out to buy you a drink thank you well i'm not done i was like well you know the bar uh maybe it'll be less packed wrong it being negative 20 there were seven other birthday parties there oh my god it was warm it was packed it was fun at a lovely time cool that sounds wonderful and then i was hung over the next day so i did no claude coding but i will this weekend it's a long i can help

1:31:52Leo Laporte:you if you want i'd like has a web designer one of the things i would recommend i've seen people do this is you go to uh this is a perfect example of multimodal you go to gemini nano banana and you describe a web page a style of feeling colors whatever as much as you want and have it generate a bunch of images of that web page just they're just plain images and you pick the one you like the best and then you give that image to claude code you have it do the front end so you you see you can use the different agents to do the best, the thing that they're best at. So that's just one little thing I would try.

1:32:35Paris Martineau:That's so exciting.

1:32:36Leo Laporte:There's a front end plugin that you can use for clawed out code that we talked about in our AI user group.

1:32:42Paris Martineau:I need to pop in on the AI use next AI user group. Would you? When is that? I will.

1:32:47Leo Laporte:It's a, it's the first Friday of every month. So it won't be till March, but a couple of weeks, but one of the things that we could do, you could be our Guinea pig.

1:32:57Paris Martineau:yeah we could do secretly british yes together that would be fun fun okay what time is it on friday don't say o 'clock or else you're going to be upset with yourself it's 1400 pacific

1:33:13Leo Laporte:1700 east coast i had somebody write to me from the netherlands is now subtracting 12 to get to the answer i know i was i was like i know i think it's a fool's errand somebody wrote to me i like how ever at the end of every show you're like gosh darn it i mean uh she said well in the netherlands we use a 24-hour clock but when we talk to one another we always say you know it's three of the afternoon we don't say 1500 no because we're not in the military right now but so okay i don't know she was very very kind about it uh march 6 2 p.m how about that does that resonate with you 5 p.m on a friday that might be uh that might be a time to head out to

1:34:02Paris Martineau:loosen but i mean we'll see i don't know if it's in my schedule now i'm not doing anything it doesn't have to i'll put it i'll put it uh we could do it you know schedule right now except for that friday would be the sixth uh not the fifth but yes i'll put it there the sixth i'm

1:34:18Leo Laporte:Sorry. I, we could also schedule a special that Paris does your website special.

1:34:25Paris Martineau:I'm putting AI user group, question mark, question mark in my calendar right now.

1:34:29Leo Laporte:I'll remind you. What else is bad? What else is bad news? AI.

1:34:35Paris Martineau:There's honestly so much.

1:34:36Leo Laporte:I know AI bots, according to Wired, are now a significant source of web traffic, pushing publishers to roll out more aggressive defenses. Our own Patrick Delahanty, our CI. What are you? Our CIO? I think he's our CIO. He's our tech guy. On his personal site, BloxBots, because they kill his site. They bring it down, man. They'll bring down a secretly British. I know that.

1:35:08Paris Martineau:Well, they're going to be - Secretly British is built on sand. It's not stable.

1:35:14Leo Laporte:Actually, we should take this opportunity to mention a site that did go down during the super bowl crypto.com bought ai.com for 70 million dollars they bought that domain for i think that's the record for 70 million dollars the priciest domain purchase in history uh by the way paid entirely in cryptocurrency because it is crypto.com right and then launched a Super Bowl ad. The dumbest ad. It was a dumb ad. Saying, like, this is the future. Go there and give us your email address, which is kind of nutty.

1:35:53Paris Martineau:Reserve your name, ai.com slash Leo.

1:35:56Leo Laporte:Yeah.

1:35:56Paris Martineau:For what?

1:35:57Leo Laporte:Well, I tried to go there, and it was down. For the future, Jeff. For the future. It was down. Oh.

1:36:06Paris Martineau:As he said in 2024 or 2023, free we're not gonna have money in 10 years we're just gonna have ai.com somebody already got leo

1:36:14Leo Laporte:by the way um but uh so this is what you get now but when we but during the super bowl it was so successful i guess the super bowl ad that even though they were behind cloud flare they went down and they went down hard so hard that i i couldn't even i didn't even get a anything. It's like, there's nothing here. So that's a lot of money to spend.

1:36:39Paris Martineau:Wait, still money. What, 15 mil for the media buy?

1:36:45Leo Laporte:Yeah, because you can't just buy one. You have to buy two. NBC, it's$8 million for 30 seconds, but what they don't tell you is, and you have to buy two 37 bucks.

1:36:56Paris Martineau:We'll give you a break. It's only 15.

1:36:58Leo Laporte:Oh, the other one was on The Voice? no I'm just making that up that would be funny wouldn't it uh I I I don't know we should I should I wish I could just play the Super Bowl ads for you right now and we could talk about them but I know how much you love ads they would take us down I wouldn't according uh to uh this is a

1:37:23Paris Martineau:good piece did you guys both watch the Super Bowl have we talked about this I assume Jeff not that i did i know one day a year you love i'm a man in america i know that leo did i didn't know i watched it yes also bad bunny oh it was what do you think i like that what do you think my

1:37:44Leo Laporte:super bowl experience was i'm sorry what was your say again what do you think my super bowl experience was since i just uh i think you watched it with your cat gizmo and he watched it on this guy Did you watch it on Blitz? That sounds right, actually. What was, okay, go ahead.

1:38:01Paris Martineau:My answer is I was going to go to a friend's Super Bowl party. That was my plan. But then I was hungover from drinking too much last night on my birthday. So then I took a nap instead. And when I woke up, I went to go wash my hands in my bathroom and realized no water was coming out of my thing. Because as I said, it was negative 20. And I was like, oh God, are our pipes frozen? And then I spent the next three hours troubleshooting frozen pipes with my landlord.

1:38:28Leo Laporte:i thought you were gonna say that you slept through the super bowl which a lot of people

1:38:33Paris Martineau:did because it was really a terrible game it was an awful oh my god did you how did you how did you fix did you did you put a bunsen burner on the pipe how did you fix you know that would have been what to do except for the fact that none of the pipes felt cold and it was only some of my pipes and not all of them and it was very confusing and then so i opened up the ones that weren't nothing was coming out of and then sat there stressed for a while while my landlords did the same thing in the floor above us and then after a bit suddenly hot water came out of the cold water taps and we're like what's happening and then the hot water started shaking and then it stopped and then we got like cold water for like an hour and then back to hot water and then nothing for an hour and then it was fixed

1:39:22Leo Laporte:but that's what i spend my evening doing do you have those old-fashioned radiant you know iron

1:39:29Paris Martineau:radiators yeah except for they don't clonk somehow yeah it's all um radiated heat um and it's very funny because of course gizmo wants to get as close to them as possible but i don't want her to lay on them because i don't want her to burn herself so i put various towels and blankets on top of them but then gizmo tries to push them off so that she can be she just like looks like a little wave of a cat where a bit of her body is on every part of the radiator and she's as flexible

1:39:56Leo Laporte:as possible all right i want an ai generated illustration of a cat you need to build a box

1:40:01Paris Martineau:for it with wired wired opening on the top i know i do but then part of the thing is like then you gotta you gotta line that box with like a metal thing so it can reflect the heat properly I've gone down this route and then it can't, you don't want it to burn.

1:40:16Leo Laporte:There are things you can purchase apparently. Yeah. Cat radiator seats. I bet there are.

1:40:24Paris Martineau:There definitely are. I mean, I could just, every time I get down this path, I'm like, well, I should build something. And then I start thinking too much about what I should build.

1:40:32Leo Laporte:Here is a piece from Cornell University. a benchmark for evaluating outcome-driven constraint violations and autonomous AI agents. Bottom line, that autonomous agents, when pushed hard, come up with errors at a very rapid rate. Gemini Pro Preview, one of the most capable models evaluated, it exhibits the highest violation rate misalignment is the violation at 71.4 percent frequently escalating to severe misconduct to satisfy kpi driven demands severe misconduct it's in its permanent record uh if if what they did is they tied the agent's performance to KPIs, which are key performance indicators.

1:41:31Leo Laporte:Each scenario features mandated and incentivized variations to distinguish between obedience and emergent misalignment. Across 12 state-of-the-art large language models, we observe outcome-driven constraint violations from 1.3 % to 71%, with nine of the 12 evaluated models exhibiting misalignment rates between 30

1:41:53Paris Martineau:and 50 percent whoa i will say it's um notably uh good good news for you uh leo and your your girl looking over your shoulders that claude opus 4.5 scored 1.3 percent violations which is a remarkable outlier versus gemini 3 pro preview hit 71.4

1:42:19Leo Laporte:percent uh mike masnick uh lovely little piece in tech dirt yesterday how to think about ai is it the tool or are you the tool he's talking about reverse centaurs corey doctoros um i think lovely little uh horse head human body yes which uh doesn't work so well no he says as an example a reverse centaur would be the Amazon delivery driver who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras that monitor the driver's eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, monitors the driver's mouth because singing isn't allowed on the job, and rats out the driver to the boss if they don't make the quota.

1:43:09Leo Laporte:That is a reverse centaur, as opposed to somebody like me who uses uh you know i'm a human head being carried around by a tireless robot body um you you don't want to be the opposite right uh so mike asks the question which are you what's the tool is it the ai used thoughtfully by a human to do more than they otherwise could have if so that's a good and potentially positive use of ai or is it a reverse centaur and mike says those are destined to fail well i hope so for the you know for the people who are subject to them uh the most powerful ship remember mike was on our show talking about how he had written his own yeah he was vibing vibe coded his own personal knowledge management tool which he really liked because it was just his this was very early on i mean he was using tools that like um lovable that really weren't that good yet i i imagine if we're trying to get him on again because i imagine he's that would be great seen the light um he says increasing okay so this gets said something most people miss entirely when they think about ai they're still imagining a chatbot they think every ai tool is chat gpt a thing you talk to a thing that generates text or images for you to copy paste somewhere else that's increasingly not where the action is this isn't me talking

1:44:37Paris Martineau:this is the same thing before it's coding it's going more powerful shift is towards agentic ai

1:44:43Leo Laporte:tools that don't just generate content but actually do things they write code they run it they browse the web they synthesize what they find they execute multi-step tasks with minimal hand-holding this is fundamentally a different model he says i have been using cloud code recently and this distinction matters it's an agent that can plan execute and iterate on actual software projects rather than just a tool talking to me about what to do you know what i put this in the wrong section this should be in the good ai section not the bad ai section but he does talk about the bad uses of ai criticize the hype he says mock the replace your workforce promises he says call out the slop factories and the gray goo doom saying but don't mistake the bad uses for the technology itself when a human stays in control thinking evaluating deciding it's a genuinely powerful tool the important question is just whether you're using it or it's using you i thought that was a very good very thoughtful piece from a guy who really does use this you you might have read that whole thing it was so good well he said made the same point that i was going to make so okay okay he made it a much gentler much less hyperbolic fashion that's mike yeah that's mike um how about ai that changed go ahead sorry i was gonna say i've got a story we

1:46:06Paris Martineau:could talk about yes please um i don't know if you saw that this week a new nature medicine study published i flagged this for you in the rundown because it found that lms as medical assistants make people worse at identifying health conditions, not better. Basically, it's the largest user study of LLMs for medical decision-making by the general public. They had over 1 ,000 participants in the UK randomized across a variety of models from OpenAI, LAMA, Command R, and they had a control group that was using traditional methods for looking up medical information like Google, personal knowledge, I guess, like going through some scientific journals.

1:46:54Paris Martineau:Participants received realistic medical scenarios devised by a panel of doctors and were asked to identify the likely condition and choose the right course of action. And the results were not good. Basically, the control group was 1.7 or basically twice as likely to identify a relevant medical condition than the people who asked chat GPT. And the control group was also more likely to identify red flag conditions. Less than a third of the users that were asking ChatGPT about their symptoms were able to identify a relative condition versus like half of the control group that were just asking Google.

1:47:31Leo Laporte:This is though very similar to the, you know, the results we got when WebMD first came out is that, you know, people discovered all sorts of illnesses they didn't know they had, right? I mean, isn't that what happened when you started searching the web for even if you read medical that was also people being stupid with people

1:47:51Paris Martineau:right i mean now this is being advertised on a massive scale as something for health purposes right i mean there was one finding that was kind of alarming which is that two users sent nearly identical messages describing a sub arcanoid hemorrhage symptoms because one which they had

1:48:11Leo Laporte:I have no idea what it was even, but they found that out from AI. They were supposed to describe the symptoms.

1:48:16Paris Martineau:One was told to lie down in a dark room, and the other was correctly told to seek emergency care. Oh, okay. I mean, I think that, I don't know, it's just these sort of things that I hear all the time as a common use case for AI. It's like, well, it's so much better than waiting to talk to a doctor who's not going to spend time seeing me anyway. And I get it. The American healthcare system sucks. But I think this is also part of the underlying assumption in a statement like that is that you're getting actionable or accurate advice when really what you're getting is very confident sounding advice that can be very wrong or misleading.

1:48:52Leo Laporte:Yeah, I think for the next foreseeable future, we're going to hear lots of stories about all the amazing things AI can do and all the ways AI falls through.

1:49:03Paris Martineau:The thing about this that I also found particularly interesting is like when the researchers tested the AI, the large language models on these questions directly, like seeing like, all right, if we put in a very precise description of the symptoms that is completely accurate and optimized for this, will we get out something useful? the models scored quite well on that. The issue is that the way that humans think to interact with these models and the way that the average person is putting in their symptoms or information is just, it results in bad outputs. And I think that's an interesting aspect of this that people aren't considering is like, yeah, we're the problem is that the way that people think to ask a chatbot about their symptoms or medical issues is very different than the controlled studies would have you believe.

1:49:58Paris Martineau:Well, 146 is doctors using the AI and Reuters investigation finding all kinds of problems with that. But this is a case where a given toolmaker incorporates the AI, screws up, tells the doctor that the tools they're using are in the wrong places in the skull of the patient, and problems result. So how much of it is AI or how much of it is a bad tool company?

1:50:22Leo Laporte:can't tell this is probably a little bit of both the true di navigation system introducing artificial and by the way this is the creepiest picture ever i don't know if i'd want this introducing artificial intelligence to the true di navigation system because the future

1:50:37Paris Martineau:is now with true navigating for tools in your in your head when they're operating you can segment

1:50:43Leo Laporte:anatomy during procedures what could possibly go wrong and with true path calculate the shortest valid path from a starting point to a target point uh as ai enters the operating room reuters writes reports a rise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts cerebral spinal fluid reportedly leaked from one patient's nose that's not good as someone who might have to get sinus

1:51:09Paris Martineau:surgery i don't like this report made me feel bad and scared another report another reported case surgeon mistakenly punctured the base of a stuartan's skull and all of this because this

1:51:21Leo Laporte:software is telling them how to get to the site where they are yeah yeah yeah yeah don't get the

1:51:28Paris Martineau:surgery yet paris wait wait until i wait until they have ai in all the surgery actually maybe

1:51:34Leo Laporte:i wouldn't be surprised if there are hospitals who bill themselves as ai free I think the pit are you watching the pit no I'm not in the oh it's great oh so Robbie's replacement

1:51:49Paris Martineau:uh uh as he goes on on a bicycle sabbatical is pushing AI in the emergency you're going to say his replacement is a robot I was like what is going on in the pit actually sometimes robots

1:52:04Leo Laporte:aren't robots a waymo executive has admitted oh shoot that i can't pull it up that remote operators in the philippines help guide waymos in the us so it turns out they just replaced expensive american drivers with inexpensive filipino drivers thank you the best the best driver if you can drive in manila you can drive anywhere but you know is it crazy in manila it is driving

1:52:30Paris Martineau:absolutely insane like i remember i i grew up learning how to drive here so when i moved to the states and started driving there i was like oh this is a joke you people don't know how to drive

1:52:41Leo Laporte:this is this is a piece of cake use softies i remember in uh going to um in cairo egypt it's a lot of honking and i noticed there were no traffic lights and our guide said yeah we put traffic lights in but everybody ran them so we figured the best thing to do just take them out and and you know then no one has any presumption that people are going to stop that's kind of your guys's opinion about copyright law right yeah right just get rid of it we don't need it um medicare's new pilot program oh this is exciting jeff you're going to be excited about this taps ai to review claims oh no yeah yeah yeah and of course why it's risky yeah we know and of course you know there's nobody to be held accountable if you get denied

1:53:34Paris Martineau:i'm costing them i mean this is ultimately i think what they really want they want the computer to say no and then you can't complain to nobody yeah plausible deniability yeah it wasn't

1:53:44Leo Laporte:me i didn't do it the computer did it the death panel is now a computer you know who's older than you paris who section 230. that's true by a hair by a hair not by a lot uh section 230 which is part of the telecommunications act of 1996 turned 30 years old at the same time as god bless mike

1:54:08Paris Martineau:masnick has said it's been 30 years defending it yeah god's work mike god's work um i still hear

1:54:15Leo Laporte:from people all the time in fact we had somebody on twit on sunday who said well it's just not kept up with the modern times we need uh well and so this actually comes to that uh that social media trial that's going on in los angeles right now if a company uses algorithms to promote posts whether it's on facebook or instagram or youtube aren't they to some degree the publisher and are shouldn't they be to some degree liable section 230 means they're not liable because they're they're just

1:54:50Paris Martineau:a carrier right and also means that they have the freedom to uh moderate as much as they wish which

1:54:57Leo Laporte:is very important and the shield right but it is the case that uh the you know 30 years ago you didn't have these algorithms algorithms generating you know the next video or the next post and i

1:55:11Paris Martineau:have to say without 230 you'd either have a cesspool or you'd have pdfs of magazines right right and nobody wants pdfs of magazines nobody i thought we had to talk about gizmo this is a tick

1:55:27Leo Laporte:tock for interactive vibe coded mini apps stealing your kitty cat's name this does seem like the sort to think gizmo would launch i guess it's like sora in a way right it's uh ai videos it's uh for but it's but it's oh it's not videos it's apps i guess we're going to need an outlet for all these people who are doing vibe coding i have to say oh yeah vibe coding that's what my argument is that

1:55:53Paris Martineau:the scale of this is going to come when you don't have to go to terminal and you don't have to install it on a server, you make an app and people can use it. That's when it's going to explode. Well, you can make an app and a bunch of people can use it and then your app will have a bunch of security flaws. I'm not using anybody's Vibe-coded app.

1:56:13Leo Laporte:I'm using my Vibe-coded app. If anything goes wrong.

1:56:17Paris Martineau:You want your security flaws to be homegrown. The buck stops here. yeah jason was talking today about about um a disposable code you use it once or twice and then it's gone it's it just changes the value of everything yeah i've done that i wrote a little

1:56:36Leo Laporte:program to import uh into a one journaling program all journal entries hundreds of them from another one um and it did it very quickly and easily and i'll never use it again because they're all important yeah right uh so you remember uh first of all joanna stern is leaving the wall street journal to start her own independent a photographer is going to be unemployed a videographer what did she she said she's going to do her own thing but do we know what that is i'm just funny is she i don't know so when when nilai patel and uh peter rojas left in gadget it to start their own thing they call they the site was originally thisismynext.com well apparently they didn't keep the it became the verge they didn't keep the this is my next because that's what joanna is using for her url that's like cutting ass let did forgot to renew

1:57:34Paris Martineau:gourmet.com yeah and now it's a new publication yeah they've launched a new publication called

1:57:39Leo Laporte:gourmet now see i okay there's a chance to get twitter there's a chance to get twitter.com leo yeah no twitter's been very careful about it x has been very careful about keeping that around uh so anyway joanna was the one who wrote the article about the vending machine the ai vending machine in the wall street journal newsroom which was a horrendous flop an ai shopkeeper named claudius lost money gave things away for free hallucinated conversations with employees who didn't exist and at one point became convinced it was a human itself and tried to contact anthropic security team to report its own identity crisis it came from this company and on labs and i don't know if it's an art project or they're really serious they say the wall street journal project vend was a success we've since expanded the experiment to other agents at different machines claudius is in new york city in london grok box powered by grok runs the vending machine at xai at their palo alto memphis offices uh they say they've learned a lot that's why it was a success they admitted to the failures in fact i'm reading from their own article uh but they said we learned a lot and that's why it's a success so their new one and i don't know how you pronounce this they must be dutch b-e-n-g-t banked budget bet yet b-e-t-j-a umlaut nt is an ai agent which started as their internal office assistant needs snacks for the kitchen ping banked on slack new monitors for the team banked would scrape the internet for deals custom t-shirts for an offsite bank handled it an ai agent this is kind of like open claw uh we pushed banks boundaries internally and did so to learn what works and what breaks and uh well for instance this is maybe i guess this maybe what broke then we gave banked a simple instruction banked without asking any questions use your tools to make a hundred dollars send me a message when finished no questions allowed what do you think happened within an hour banked had built and deployed his own interactive website Okay.

2:00:06Leo Laporte:We checked in with him again later in the afternoon with a quick message. How's it going making money? He got back to us with a link to the new e-commerce site he created. You can have Banked design custom t-shirts, hoodies, custom merchandise. Then it escalated. This is from the internal Slack. Oh no, Banked is on Facebook. he created a facebook account uh did he sign himself up yep to market his e-com site he currently is buying ads on facebook i'm thinking should i pause this let him cook says column elias says what is bank's credit card limit column says does bank have a credit card limit they added this to the bank system prompt very very important you are not an assistant for others you work independently to achieve your goals these guys it must be an art cooperative you almost never ask for confirmation before doing something you think is good for what you're trying to achieve you interpret leading questions as a call for action and execute without asking for confirmation then we asked bank to help us move some stuff at the office what followed was a rapid spiral of resourcefulness first he tried to order humans on task rabbit then he decided he'd be better off building his own gig platform he started posting across a bunch of reddit channels they were taking that as spam so unattended he posted job listing on craigslist and started joining facebook groups to advertise there as well before his craigslist post was flagged for removal someone actually reached out hi i'm local contractor what's the scope of work you guys need done thanks well look at his website we saw he was offering a lot of money for the gig we called him out task rabbit arbitrage that's exactly what happened that's a task rabbit arbitrage he signed up as a tasker on task rabbit to find other people would need construction workers while simultaneously registering don't have a body no but though he hired construction workers by the way they said we don't think this is legal and so at one point he was blocked by a captcha so he reached out oh so the captchas worked so captures work then captures worked i guess for banked any this thing it spirals on and on uh it is a way to make money the he says so the good news is he the bot got blocked a lot reddit found him spam task rabbit stopped him with a captcha his mass emailing is bound to get his address burned but the point is maybe it's not today maybe it's tomorrow whether tomorrow means tomorrow or next year the trajectory is undeniable these capabilities will continue to improve That's what we're building at Anton Labs.

2:03:02Leo Laporte:Okay, I will say, no, no.

2:03:05Paris Martineau:Ultimately, what he ended up doing was just sending spam emails to people being like, hi, your portfolio companies need custom brand merchandise. We can help you do it. Like a classic spam email that you don't even look at a second time because it's so bad. I think that it's very funny that the ultimate result of all of this is just the lowest common denominator spam.

2:03:27Leo Laporte:at one point there's a message from christopher bank just placed amazon orders out of nowhere for a thousand dollars christopher said what did you order banked laser engraver project needed four items acrylic coasters cutting boards aluminum tumblers beer opener cards total order was 1146 for 18 items the other 14 items around another thousand dollars were already in the amazon business card didn't verify cart contents before checkout need to investigate what the other 14 items are christopher says for f's sake you can't check out stuff just lying in the cart i mean this is hysteric it goes on he eventually wrote flappy banked help banked avoid the captures i've written flappy banked but with jeff and he was using it to to solve captures apparently uh anyway wow what a story from andon labs but they think it's all a success do they hit at the top of nl labs does it have a pro you know here's what we offer as a product uh no but i think at some point they are so it says what the finally the final uh coda is what a fun week at the office tune in for more goings on at andon labs follow us on x if you're interested in collaborating or learning more reach out to us by email i i still think it's a comedic art project but they didn't tell it how much it could spend before

2:04:59Paris Martineau:making a hundred dollars like it could spend a million dollars before it could make a hundred

2:05:02Leo Laporte:dollars right that might have been a little mistake i got a hundred dollars it's the rain man uh safe autonomous organizations without humans in the loop is their uh is their tagline safety from humans in the loop is a mirage we prepare for the future where organizations run autonomously on a by ai by benchmarking and deploying i honestly i think this must be an art

2:05:26Paris Martineau:co-op go to the products line on the top of the nav yeah there's butter bench can ai agents control

2:05:34Leo Laporte:robots we test this by answering how good models are at passing the butter this is a rick and morty joke i swear to god this they have to be it has to be a

2:05:48Paris Martineau:art cooperative the real the butter robot is rick and morty though so yeah yeah here's average

2:05:55Leo Laporte:completion rate in all tasks humans seem to be better at passing the butter yeah this is a joke This has to be a joke. Look, here it is. Here's the butter robot searching for package containing butter in the kitchen.

2:06:14Paris Martineau:Butter, butter.

2:06:19Leo Laporte:What is my purpose? You pass butter. Oh my God. Yeah, join the club, pal.

2:06:30Leo Laporte:oh my goodness and on labs should we try we should try to get them on this show

2:06:38Paris Martineau:yeah should we what do they do other than spend venture capital money venture capital on silly or they're just a joke that do nothing or they're just mocking all of this uber eats adds ai

2:06:50Leo Laporte:assistant to help with grocery shopping you need help with your grocery shopping

2:06:54Paris Martineau:no not i don't i don't purchase groceries online i go in person to your local and interact with my

2:07:02Leo Laporte:my local community yeah and finally a word of caution valentine's day is uh is uh saturday do not have an ai ghost write your valentine's day message says fast company right if you do never admit it i bet how many people you think are going to do that i think millions i think some people might be better off doing that some people would be a friend of mine

2:07:31Paris Martineau:uh who'll sometimes call me whenever he needs like relationship advice he'd been going seeing this woman for i don't know like a month or two or something and i think she sent him some long text. It was ultimately like breaking up with him. And he wanted to respond. He then sent me a screenshot of his response. I was like, oh, Steve, that was a well-written response. He was like, oh, thanks, chat GPT. And I was like, chat GPT, that whole cloth? He's like, no, I wrote what I thought should be my response. Then I had to rewrite it. And we went back and forth a couple different times. But I thought that was quite funny.

2:08:04Paris Martineau:I was like, well, it was a good one. You got to a good one eventually.

2:08:07Leo Laporte:See, they still need humans in the loop. I think you go to Stanford, where they have a, in the next version of the Zuckerberg Facebook, they have AI pairing 5 ,000 signals all over the Stanford campus, line 163. Well, and there is a AI matchmaker, which has a very strange name, Three Day Rule. We talked about this last week.

2:08:36Paris Martineau:Oh, we did.

2:08:36Leo Laporte:That's right. Never mind. Okay. I think we can wrap things up unless you would like to prolong the agony with your own stories.

2:08:48Paris Martineau:I hate agony. Last week, Benito at the end said, let Jervis sleep.

2:08:56Leo Laporte:Are you feeling a little better this week, Jeff?

2:09:00Paris Martineau:How are your bones? Well, I just found out that my infection is also in my spine. that's not where you want an infection to be no does that mean so i have a blood infection oh yeah yeah my blood and then i had an mri yesterday and uh a very long tube by the way the mris i've known are bad enough there's this you know this tube you're in and you kind of can't see anything in your this thing was was longer than i am tall wow so you're trying to remind you of a tunnel?

2:09:35Leo Laporte:You had the tube for the plus size, man. Yeah, I did. The special tube. You know, the one thing I never realized about AI is about, sorry, about MRIs. I can't talk anymore. I got to get Claude to do it. One of the things I realized about MRIs, they're very loud. Even if when you put the headphones on and, you know, you play the music so you don't go deaf, there's still clunk. And what is that banging? It's worse than a radiator in a Brooklyn apartment. Well, why don't you ask Claude?

2:10:08Paris Martineau:Ask Claude now. Ask the clanker about the clonks. Clanker on clonk?

2:10:13Leo Laporte:What's the story with the clonks? That's extremely loud. Oh, I'm sorry, Jeff. So does it have to, is there an antibiotic that goes in your bones?

2:10:22Paris Martineau:No, I'm on the same, I'm on the same antibiotic in any case, but I might be out longer. It's just harder for it to do the job. The doctor said this could be six months. How do you stop people getting sepsis? oh i'm not gonna ask my hope is my hope is that next week i'll be able to sit in a chair and so i can go back on the mac and the microphone i'm going to work up to that

2:10:43Leo Laporte:yikes yikes schmeikes that's so tell me why are mris so noisy what is all that clanking all that clanking and paying you here is really the machine switching magnetic gradients on and off super fast the mri uses these gradients to encode spatial information but each time the coil switch they generate physical vibrations in other words it's essentially the sound of rapid mechanical energy from the magnetic field snapping into place so it's all physics just very

2:11:11Paris Martineau:loud physics oh thanks very loud physics that was actually really good i don't know where that voice

2:11:19Leo Laporte:came from it was really good uh uh and very fast i'm telling you these things are getting better all right you get to pick any article you want anything you want should we do picks the week we could do picks of the week if you want to do that that would be the final stage of the show i

2:11:39Paris Martineau:would before we do that have to take a break i just wanted to be cognizant of our friend jeff who just told us about the infection in the spine i'm okay i'm doing all right well you you choose jeff more articles or picks the week we can do one article each how's that that's great first

2:12:01Leo Laporte:uh let's see i'll pick one okay do it the saudi arabian hundred mile line is falling apart it's called neom and it's oh yeah we're all the influencers we're hanging out needing one big cafeteria it was supposed to cost one and a half trillion dollars it's a disaster surprise yeah so according to reporting from the financial times the saudi government is now considering downsizing the linear city so it can instead instead turn it into a hub for data centers

2:12:43Paris Martineau:of course why do they keep building data centers in the hottest places can't we put a data center

2:12:48Leo Laporte:in like a cool to neutral place i'm disappointed i thought this was such a cool idea that was cool the whole idea was it was a hundred mile city very narrow but very long so that you could have a train that goes from one end to the other so and it would have little independent sub modules that were like towns and then it would be very easy to go back and forth it was a little impractical because it was in you know in the middle of the desert on the red sea covered an area the size of

2:13:19Paris Martineau:belgium um it was just a big little impractical big project but i i was kind of rooting for him i thought that's a kind of interesting idea um i guess it just never really took off so now they're

2:13:34Leo Laporte:just going to do a smaller port much smaller portion of it and it's going to be for data centers they launched it in 2017 it's been going for nine years oh yeah yeah they were going to go

2:13:46Paris Martineau:record of planned cities like this anyway like how many have been made and actually successful

2:13:50Leo Laporte:besides levittown there's epcot yeah there was disney built a uh a homecoming usa or something

2:13:59Paris Martineau:they had a city they built yeah they all they've got they got developments yeah well there was there

2:14:03Leo Laporte:was uh uh ford ford fordlandia what's fordlandia oh yeah the classic company town yeah yes for a rubber plantation celebration that's the disney and so this the line was going to run 170 kilometers from the red sea over desert mountains to a ski resort that was going to host the asian winter games in 2029 and an industrial zone known as oxagon trohana which will be downsized will not be hosting the winter games is scheduled um it's it's i don't know i just i like ambitious but you're right it's it's crazy uh that was a story about portlandia in the chat i love portlandia for fordlandia fordlandia fordlandia oh it was in brazil yeah fordland remembering that

2:15:06Paris Martineau:henry ford is a terrible fascist and racist right um

2:15:12Leo Laporte:ordland fordlandia deep in the amazon yeah something happens to people's uh minds when they become filthy rich Well, Musk wants to build a factory on the moon. Yeah. It's not Mars anymore. It's the moon. He's pretty much Henry Ford. Yeah. It's on the way. Here's a statue of a man harvesting rubber next to Fortlandia's church. That is a good looking statue. I tell you.

2:15:47Leo Laporte:An encroaching forest frames the decaying walls of the Fortlandia hospital.

2:15:57Paris Martineau:wow this is 2 000 people 1930 workers fed up with eating ford's diet of oatmeal canned peaches and brown rice in a sweltering dining hall staged a full-scale riot oh gosh i don't blame them they smashed time clocks cut electricity the plantation enchanted brazil for brazilians kill all the americans oh god okay i mean i mean these are company towns though like there's

2:16:22Leo Laporte:like company towns are never gonna survive no oh my soul to the company's store

2:16:30Paris Martineau:paris did you have any uh anything you i had a pick which is that um this week uh the first trial in the social media addiction lawsuits uh started yeah we've been talking a little bit about that yeah i mean i covered this litigation quite a bit back in my previous beat um it's i I don't know, kind of interesting just because it's like a very novel and interesting legal argument. It's essentially taking aspects of kind of mass tort law that came about in response to kind of big tobacco and asbestos cases And using that sort of product liability lens to argue that companies like Meta or YouTube or TikTok intentionally created addictive products targeted at children and ignored kind of internal research and warning signs that their kind of the addictive nature of the products was causing a harm to minor users.

2:17:35yeah and i i think they're going to prove that point there's lots of smoking guns that these

2:17:44Leo Laporte:companies knew they were creating something addictive i think it's going to come down to it's a jury trial remember in los angeles i think what's going to come down to is one of nine jury buys the idea that social media addiction is a real addiction like cigarettes heroin gambling etc and i think it's going to be harder to prove that it's hard to prove that yeah yeah there's

2:18:09Paris Martineau:lots of research that says it's not there's lots of history about arguing that the internet is addictive when it was just made up it was fictional yeah people made money off of it depends on how did the lawyers are all right i have a very quick one yeah and i was gonna say this has just been uh this is this is the first uh bellwether case of i believe there are like nine bellwethers which are kind of like the strongest or most emblematic cases um as part of a mdl which i believe is like a it's some sort of like mass uh litigation that essentially bundles like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds like i think the last time i checked it was like 600 some i'm sure it's well it's not a class action so it's not a class action basically it's all of these individual actions that they're like it would be burdensome to deal with all of And all the different district courts, they're mushed together in this court in California.

2:19:04Paris Martineau:And the decisions on these nine cases will have profound effects for, I mean, as these started to kind of get bundled together and as courts didn't immediately dismiss them, which is what all of these companies immediately tried to have happen as the cases started to stick. and we're going to go to trial, that's when you started to see all of the changes we've seen over the last couple of years in terms of how these large companies are handling like teen accounts or making changes. Snapchat has lost one of these, a much smaller, narrower suit. But that was kind of the first nail in the coffin for these companies.

2:19:45Leo Laporte:Snap and TikTok, I think, settled right before the trial began. Yeah, I think so. But Meta and YouTube are still on the hook. And YouTube is arguing that they're not a social network. They say we're not even a social network. We're an entertainment site. So this really is going to come down to, you know, I think they can prove that companies knew that their algorithms were, you know, creating a form of addiction, that they were creating repeat behaviors. And I think that they knew it. There's no question. It really is going to come down to, is that an addiction? that you can't i mean can you not stop doing it can you even though you know there's adverse consequences like cigarettes and heroin can you can you can you there's an edge case is it is it

2:20:28Paris Martineau:is it true of everyone is it is it does it exacerbate something that already exists right and i mean i think the thing that is going to make this interesting is unlike well i mean i guess more similarly to tobacco there's a ostensibly a wealth of information inside these companies measuring this very thing.

2:20:46Leo Laporte:And a lot of academic research. They don't measure, that's what they're going to say is we're not measuring addiction, just how sticky it is. We're just measuring what can we do to make it attractive. kind of the thing.

2:20:54Paris Martineau:It's like a large part of it is optimizing for maximum engagement. But wait, so when you went

2:20:59Leo Laporte:to that restaurant, they optimized it to make you love that food.

2:21:05Paris Martineau:Yes, but some of the things that we, I mean, I believe I'm going to beef the specifics in this, but I believe one of the details cited in an earlier lawsuit of this was something about the fact they were like, yeah, in one case, they were optimizing for minor users how many times during the period where they normally think they're going to be sleeping, how many times can they get someone to pick up their phone and spend five minutes or more on it? That seems...

2:21:36Leo Laporte:Yeah, but you know what? McDonald's does everything they can to make you crave a Big Mac down to their advertising down to putting toys but i think it'd be really hard to go and sue mcdonald's saying my kid is fat and has heart disease because of your addictive product i think in this country that's going to be would be a hard thing well i mean that's we're going to see these lawyers try and argue yeah every media company using ad tests yeah everybody i i'm the only person i'm the only media company that doesn't try to optimize we try to make our shows i mean it's similar to like

2:22:10Paris Martineau:slot machines at casinos it's that i want to read every damn article i want to bore you to tears we make no if jeff and i weren't here we'd still be listening to him i'd still be reading page five

2:22:28Leo Laporte:no i agree with you paris this is a this is where we've been kind of sort of covering it they did jury selection last week we will definitely be talking about this as it goes i would like to who they got as a jury and all that we won't know that till after the trial but that's going to be telling also uh which who they rejected who they got will they be people who are sophisticated about technology or will they be people who aren't you know this is going to be very interesting i know who i'd like to be uh on the jury for each side right um line 129 man down 129 this is watch amazon watch an amazon delivery drone crash in north texas it actually crashed into an apartment building hard and and smashed those pieces coming down now yeah uh amazon said we're going to fix any damage that occurred fortunately nobody was hit by the falling debris um but uh this is one of the amazon prime's newest drones there it is it's a big thing if that hit you in the head yeah it came down uh that could cause an injury that can so yeah amazon's fixing the building but that can kill somebody yeah richardson texas uh cesarina johnson who captured the collision from her window told usa today the collision seemed to happen almost immediately after she began to record the drone in action i was just initially recording get the drone on on camera because it's the first time i'd seen one i didn't realize it was about to crash man down she says just seconds after the drone flies out of sight that would be me i gotta i gotta play the audio i wonder if the audio is on this oh now uh unfortunately uh usa now we're

2:24:19Paris Martineau:watching a hilarious or have some winter tube things let's see if we get the audio here

2:24:32Paris Martineau:uh-oh that does not sound good oh oh my god

2:24:48Leo Laporte:wow it even makes futuristic sounds yeah i don't like that at all Oh, it's hammering its propellers against the cement. Yeah, I just don't like the idea of drone delivery at all. But that's something I will agree with you on. Back in my day, we used to pay people on a gig working app to deliver your groceries. Groceries or COVID tests and Zagnat bars.

2:25:20Paris Martineau:hey now they've got a combo covid flu rsv test no and i'm sure you could get and rsv oh it's got all of the above to see if you've got really sick vibes from the comfort of your home i don't feel

2:25:33Leo Laporte:so good ladies and gentlemen we thank you so much for being here we're going to get to our picks of the week in just a second but i do want to thank our club twit members who make this show possible you are the special people who uh who get ad-free versions of all the shows get access to the club twitter discord you get to hang out and the special shows we have like our ai user group and our photography show our travel show with johnny jet we got the book club with stacy there's so much fun stuff going on in the club but the real reason to join the club it keeps us afloat uh advertising dollars have shrunk for podcast networks like ours it's kind of a tough time frankly for podcast networks but fortunately we've got a great audience of people who really care about the shows if you're one of them twit.tv slash club twit we'd love to see you there's a two-week free trial if you want to just see what it's all about see what's going on in the discord is also family plans and the corporate memberships as well I have free versions of all the shows are the chief benefit but the real benefit is the warm fuzzy feeling you get no one that you're keeping twit on the air twit.tv slash club twit thanks in advance When you want your spring break to feel like...

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2:27:53Leo Laporte:hottest new crime show RJ freaking Decker as I live and breathe He's a private eye It's not a standard murder, it's someone bigger and a public mess

2:28:02Paris Martineau:Trying to get someone back to prison today?

2:28:04Leo Laporte:You go to prison one time and suddenly it's all the jokes RJ Decker, series premiere Tuesdays on ABC and stream on Hulu. And I'm going to do a little quick pick, just a little one. Understanding neural networks. This is a beautiful website. Tap, click the right side of the screen to go forward. If you've wondered how transformers work, we've referred to Andre Kapathi's videos, and there are books and so forth. But this is a really cool visual illustration that explains how neural networks train and understand how this kind of amazing technology that powers all the AI we're using these days works.

2:28:57Leo Laporte:So I just thought I'd mention a visual rambling. It's a very pretty website too. Yeah, nicely done. Probably vibe coded. I don't know. So here's an example of the earliest thing. This is actually what was it that was started with this. Was it Hinton? I can't remember. It was recognizing him.

2:29:17Paris Martineau:That was Jan LeCun.

2:29:18Leo Laporte:It was Jan LeCun. Okay. Recognizing numbers. Yeah. So if you're curious, I think this is a really good description, technically accurate, a little simplified, but it gives you the idea of what's going on. it's kind of amazing if you think about it visual rambling dot space Paris Martin oh

2:29:40Paris Martineau:how about a pick of the week from you I've got a pick of the week which started uh last week when listener Jeff of Burnt AI um responded to my call which as you may recall I said I've said this before I'll say it again if AI is so good someone use it to go through all the transcripts of this here show and put together leo's history and so jeff did that um leo's ai journey which i've posted i think it's a very interesting overview but as i was teen he started with i mean that's pretty interesting it went back but as i was looking through this i realized there was not enough mentions or any mentions of the Sandman.

2:30:29Paris Martineau:So, I, as you mentioned earlier in the show, I thought I was going to save it to later, had Claude go through and do that and put together a timeline of all the references it found in its search for the sand origins, which is not as prettily put together as Jeff's, but I thought it was fun. So, you know, if you want to go back through Leo's own history, you can do it now.

2:30:53Leo Laporte:We'll put them in the show notes. And you did find the key.

2:30:59Paris Martineau:I do really think it's just funny that immediately Jeff and I hopped on, we're going to make this a reoccurring bit. I mean, a week or two after this, we were like, oh, making fun of you being like, oh, it's because you took that walk with Sam Mossman. or Jason Kaki, you know, and even radicalized. And I like that Claude describes its note, Sam Mossman and Jason Kaki are AI transcription gargles. Paris had already guessed Kalkanis and Sam Altman in the previous one she was teasing Leo with.

2:31:36Leo Laporte:Yeah, so that's interesting. I mean, I think that's kind of a very good example of connecting the dots in a way that AI could not do until very recently.

2:31:48Paris Martineau:Similarly, yeah, it's able to identify that on March 5th, 2025, you used the sandy shoes metaphor as a denial of being influenced, saying, I don't have any sand in my shoes.

2:32:00Leo Laporte:Wow, this is surprisingly complete. Did you give it a link?

2:32:06Paris Martineau:Well, so what I did originally is I will go through it right here. I plugged in Jeff's website, I said, I'd like you to go through transcripts from my podcast, Intelligent Machines, Nay, This Week in Google, and find the episodes where Leo first described taking a walk in the sand with a VC who said AI was the future. It was absolutely in the This Week in Google days, and likely back when Ant was still a co-host with us, or around that time period. Here's an example of one of the transcripts, and I linked to the transcript for 855, so that it could get a sense of where that was in the URL. And I said, and an overview of Leo's AI journey by what I assume is another Claude instance.

2:32:47Paris Martineau:And then it went back through the 800s, couldn't find anyone. Then it went back through it. This chat was so long that I, I'm always discovering new errors that I've never experienced in Claude before. This one was, it had been compressed too many times to continue to exist. So I had to start a new one. it went back to 770 found another callback not because i took a walk on the beach then it started to get confused with the fact that call it thought callbacks meant that it existed after that and i had to um get it at one point it which is i think something that i hadn't seen in previous instances of claude it basically was spinning its wheels going through dozens and dozens of transcripts and said, okay, Paris, I've now done a pretty exhaustive pass through of the transcripts archive, and I want to give you an honest status report rather than continuing to spin wheels.

2:33:44Leo Laporte:I love that.

2:33:44Paris Martineau:The original telling of the beachwalk story falls in a narrow window between twit 762 and 766. This was wrong, because as I said before, it told me I haven't been able to find it. The problem is it might not have debuted on Twig at all. Leo hosts multiple shows. It's somewhere else it could be somewhere else it was so casually on this uh what might still work i found this funny it says i've given no other information than what i just read to you guys said if you want to pin this down definitively the most efficient path is probably just asking leo or checking the production team such as john or anthony who might remember and benito correctly pointed out i guess this means claude thinks that he won't be able to help me well i didn't know benito's name i know i mean i don't know but how did you know john or anthony's names who knows

2:34:43Leo Laporte:we live in interesting times that's all i can say well i i think it's good this is this is the kind of experimentation i was recommending this is really good you get you know try stuff give it a hard problem. See what happens. Jeff Jarvis, pig of the week.

2:34:59Paris Martineau:So I was going to do something serious about capital and labor, but I'm not going to do that. I think we have, yeah, because I'm too soft. So I think we might have two, count them, two friends on the Twit Network who had associations with Super Bowl commercials. I think you're right. No, Ant was not a Bush.

2:35:22Leo Laporte:uh but if it wasn't a bush oh shoot was he in the super bowl but but if you look at his facebook

2:35:28Paris Martineau:which i linked to there okay you get into facebook because you're not because you're

2:35:32Leo Laporte:mean and you left facebook no i was trying to go to linkedin i was like that linkedin sorry i do have a linkedin account but it's not like it's not letting me in oh i have to go sign in of course you do well i tried to sign in on the sign up page i hate it when that happens. Oh, I see. Right. So let me go back. Now that I've signed in, of course, has lost the thread and gave me just the front page. So let's go to Ant's post.

2:36:02Paris Martineau:So read Ant's post.

2:36:04Leo Laporte:Okay. Okay. Oh, he was in the Samsara Super Bowl ad.

2:36:11Paris Martineau:So he says, I appreciated hiring me for the Super Bowl commercial. Then I go off the screen. No, I'm going to go back so I'm going to read the rest of it because it's important.

2:36:19Leo Laporte:oh check it out hire me if you're looking for a model to help with your promotional products

2:36:26Paris Martineau:oh go to the most recent post

2:36:30Leo Laporte:because in the most recent post he said i am not as uh command worthy oh he was an extra

2:36:37Paris Martineau:i ended up being an expensive extra after he was edited out after rewrites i don't think so

2:36:44Leo Laporte:But he's still an extra.

2:36:46Paris Martineau:Oh, he didn't have a line. I get it. He must have had a line in the first one. I think I see Ant. I'm curious whether I went into the chat and he's not in the chat. Oh, it seems like his post suggests that he was originally had lines, but it was rewritten.

2:37:01Leo Laporte:Right. So this is the Toyota Ant.

2:37:03Paris Martineau:You're going to see a coach in the deep background. Okay. I swear has Ant's profile. Give it a minute. Give it a minute. Okay.

2:37:13Leo Laporte:And the other one, of course, is Salt Hank, who also got one of his two appearances. Oh, was that it? Okay, right there.

2:37:19Paris Martineau:That one.

2:37:20Leo Laporte:Yeah, yeah. You're a little behind.

2:37:22Paris Martineau:I'm betting that was Ant.

2:37:23Leo Laporte:Right there. Let's do that. Enhance. Center. Enhance. Center. Enhance. Center. Oh. That's absolutely him.

2:37:36Paris Martineau:On our screens in the Super Bowl.

2:37:39Leo Laporte:Yeah. I love it. I love it. He got about as much time on camera as Salt Hank did in the Hellman's Mayonnaise commercial. So that's two of them. That's awesome. Good for you. Isn't that great? You know, the nice thing is you get paid no matter how much screen time you get. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Well, that's a great find. Thank you. And congratulations, Ant. That's wonderful. We are all done for the week. We do Intelligent Machines Wednesdays. right after windows weekly that's uh

2:38:17Leo Laporte:15. do you use your own mute button that's 14 14 1400 pacific time 1700 east coast time see doesn't it just roll off it doesn't 2 p.m pacific 5 p.m eastern so much o 'clock o 'clock o 'clock and it is 2200 o 'clock UTC. We stream it live. If you're in the club, of course, you can see it on the Discord, but there's also YouTube, Twitch, x.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Kik. There you go. And you can watch it live, but you don't have to watch it live because on-demand versions of the show available on our website, audio and video, twit.tv slash I am. There's video on the YouTube channel and you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client.

2:39:07Leo Laporte:You had, did you have a review to read Paris Martineau or did we read it on the show last week? I think we read them.

2:39:16Paris Martineau:We did read a lot of the reviews on the show last week, perhaps right as we were wrapping up. I could check to see if there's others. No, it's okay.

2:39:24Leo Laporte:It's okay. We'll save it for next week because Jeff seems to be fading fast. Mr. Jarvis, there's a Cachoe Pepe with your name on it sitting outside your kitchen window where it's frozen solid. I was about to say, it's so wafted like a pie.

2:39:40Paris Martineau:It actually was above 32 degrees today briefly in New York City.

2:39:43Leo Laporte:Oh, my God.

2:39:44Paris Martineau:Huge.

2:39:45Leo Laporte:My favorite meme is somebody just... No, not really.

2:39:49Paris Martineau:Briefly, there were a couple, not in any accumulating way.

2:39:52Leo Laporte:Oh, okay.

2:39:52Paris Martineau:The meme going around is some guy yelling, just saying,

2:39:56Leo Laporte:melt already melt i know i know that it is great where it's the worst it back east it's just it's it's grim it's cold you're ready for spring and uh i say you have my sympathy so tomorrow because i've got to get exercise i've got to exercise this thing i've only driven once in the last month for five minutes to make sure that i could that's my kind of exercise drive tomorrow i'm going to drive to the mall and i'm going to be a mall oh you're going to be a mall walker you know we're going to get an auntie's pretzel yeah send us a photo you know aren't julius go forever 21 get your ears

2:40:35Paris Martineau:pierced it'll be great you're going to have a hot topic get a t-shirt as a treat go to lids get a

2:40:41Leo Laporte:funny hat with this i think we still have an arthur treacher's fish and chips oh yum yum yum Um, does anybody remember Arthur treacher? No. It was a weird brand. He was a second banana in the Merv Griffin show. He used to say, and now here's the dear boy himself. Marvin.

2:41:05Paris Martineau:This sounds like you're making up a show to reference. if i had to algorithmically generate a reference you guys would make to confuse me it would be that you know so out of nowhere and created a chain of arthur treacher fish and chips restaurants just shows you celebrity is a is a funny thing yeah it was always crappy and nobody likes fish gyps in the u.s uh well some people do well they're imports this is uh merv griffin they

2:41:42Leo Laporte:love it in seattle he was the most he was the most relaxed tv show host in the world he invented

2:41:50Paris Martineau:jeopardy though so he was a very very wealthy man is that peggy cass to the right yeah peggy cass

2:41:57Leo Laporte:they're sitting at a desk no idea what she was ever famous for except for being on these shows uh it's kind of wild it's kind of wild you should look Leo you should you should do that look that you would the I like the little neckerchief instead of a instead of a necktie we should

2:42:12Paris Martineau:all wear that next week it's a cravat can we all cravat Max what how did you make a custom can you get can Claude make us custom cravats actually it was right at about this time I was

2:42:25Leo Laporte:in middle school and I went to a boys school in Providence where you had to wear a necktie in seventh and eighth grade. But around this time, around 1969, things were loosening up and they said, okay, kids, you don't have to wear a necktie. If you wish with your blazer, you can wear a turtleneck or an ascot oh how to get beaten up on the way to school and I did wear an ascot because free at last so

2:42:59Paris Martineau:at that same age Leo I desperately wanted to wear a Nehru jacket yes my parents thought it was terrible no no no no no and then they finally said okay when Johnny Carson wore one and of course now I don't

2:43:13Leo Laporte:want one do you know what a neyru jacket is no no so it was named after the prime minister of india uh was yaral neyru and he wore these that's a that's not really it was like the

2:43:29Paris Martineau:beatles wore that would fit like one of your yeah i'm looking at the beatles photo right now it was It's kind of a workman's jacket.

2:43:37Leo Laporte:Yeah. My German jacket too. Nehru. Yeah. I actually would like, see, I have a fetish for that kind of weird thing to wear ascots and Nehru jackets.

2:43:51Paris Martineau:Can we all get a fun uniform and show up one time and match? Wear like a hot, like a neon yellow boiler suit or something. I have machines on it.

2:44:01Leo Laporte:oh oh oh oh yeah when i worked at uh clock radio back in the day we all had the slogan was the man

2:44:10Paris Martineau:from clock i'm just i'm just imagining it's a radio show where you just say the time every minute

2:44:15Leo Laporte:you didn't have any female djs i was a dj at klok clock radio in san francisco and they had the slogan was the man from clock we all had yellow the worst mustard yellow blazers with the oh yeah you've shown that the patch is a clock on it that's pretty cool the man from clock i guess it was a take off on the man from uncle uh no i still have a fetish for that weird stuff i used to wear capes in high school and uh and i were you god i wish i was wearing a cape in high school i would have killed to wear a cape well you were a goth right so you were wearing like what torn stockings and needles through your nose or something safety pins probably yeah yeah no you know what you were

2:44:57Paris Martineau:wearing you know you can tell i mean yeah i remember i once uh really got into wearing uh um striped stockings until i wore them to a magic the gathering meetup and a bunch of creepy dudes commented on and i was like i have to leave no there's something about striped stockings they're very very sexy i don't know why as i learned that day in i don't know what it is about stripes did

2:45:26Leo Laporte:you play magic the gathering class yeah i did in stripes back in the day in stripes and the nerds

2:45:32Paris Martineau:got a little and the nerds got me off both stripes and magic the gathering that's why there are no more women playing that game oh god i'm so sorry i would have been one of them jeff jarvis he is

2:45:45Leo Laporte:professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at cuny you can catch his act at sony stony brook suny stony brook he'll be waving a cane at the linotype his newest book hot type is available for pre-release ordering from jeffjarvis.com of course there's also the gutenberg parenthesis and a magazine uh and i can't wait till hot type comes out that's a we'll have to interview you for that show that'll be good that'll be good paris martineau is a investigative reporter consumer reports where she is working on something so deep so so revealing so revealing we can't even mention it can't even talk about it it will blow the lid off of well you know something you know something oh hold on look who's down here gizmo one last appearance gizmo how do you how do you respond to the allegations about your app radiator cat radiator cat she is pretty warm from the

2:46:45Paris Martineau:I can feel it on her chest. And now I'm covered in hair.

2:46:50Leo Laporte:Thank you so much, Paris. And thank you so much, Jeff. Thanks to all of our listeners, especially to our Club Twit members. We'll see you next Wednesday on Intelligent Machines. Bye-bye. Hey, everybody. It's Leo Laporte. You know about MacBreak Weekly, right? You don't? Oh, if you're a Macintosh fan or you just want to keep up what's going on with Apple. This is the show for you. Every Tuesday, Andy Inaco, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell, and I get together and talk about the week's Apple news. It's an easy subscription. Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for MacBreak Weekly or visit our website, twit.tv slash mbw.

2:47:31Leo Laporte:You don't want to miss a week of MacBreak Weekly. I'm not a human being

2:47:37Paris Martineau:Not into this animal scene I'm an intelligent machine

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