IM 860: You Gotta Get Computer - Claude Surges to No. 1

28:39Dan Patterson:And so they will inform our engineers about the signals and the types of behaviors and the platforms on which information is manipulated. And so, again, I'm not an engineer, but I know that we take some of those signals, many of those signals, and we build those into the system so we have a better understanding and are not manipulated ourselves. Dan, so I want to be respectful of your time. One last question I'm thinking about. So this compass.blackbird.ai, this is a great resource for everyone in the audience to be able to use if they have questions about the veracity of an image, of a report, of a video.

29:26Is it a deepfake? Is it manipulated? All of those things. How is your company, as I understand it, could you talk a little bit about how the company itself is using AI? How's it using, you know, AI, you know, are you developing your own models for that tool? Also, when I talked to Wasim, one of the things he mentioned that sort of, you know, scared me straight a little bit was he was saying that if you're not using AI, if you're a leader and you're not working and thinking about AI agents right now, and you're really just still using chatbots, you're already behind. Like you need to really be thinking about what are the ways that agents can transform, you know, your organization, the ways that you work, the ways that you operate, all of those things.

30:15And so I thought this would be a great opportunity to talk a little bit about the ways you all as a company, even though you are and have been an AI company before it was fashionable, as you said, you know, AI itself as a tool is changing some of what you do and the ways that you do it. Yeah.

30:34Dan Patterson:Yeah, for sure. Sure. So we do build and train our own models. And the second part of your question, Jason, we seem probably spent quite a bit of time articulating what executives and decision makers should be doing when it comes to agents. But I think that the reality is many of these tools are so accessible that they're being used by your teams and they are transforming the business. So above you and below you, they're transforming business. And it is, I don't want to speak for him, but my guess is that you would just have to have the vocabulary and the capability to use these tools that are advancing so much more rapidly than almost any other technology we've seen in prior to be able to manage and to lead teams to make good strategic decisions for your own companies and know the difference between homegrown and home-built networks and what you can have with your own generated systems or trained systems versus and make the decisions on, you know, maybe kind of the old technology challenge.

31:50Dan Patterson:Do we build it? Do we buy it? Do we integrate something? And I think that these things are happening so rapidly that decision makers and executives must have the same vocabulary as the rest of their team and their clients, their partners, and the rest of the players in the ecosystem. It's a great insight. And that's one of the things that podcasts like the Intelligent Machines are trying to do, help people have that understanding, have that knowledge and awareness of how these tools are advancing so that they can work with them, learn about them, and be able to sort of lead from the front, as it were.

32:29in their companies. Dan Patterson, thank you so much for being here. Always a pleasure. Thank you for the important work that you and Blackbird are doing, really providing people with tools that were not possible before and are making the world safer, are making us smarter about the level of threat and risks that are out there. And also just a pleasure to have you. You are one of the the best you know people in this industry one of my favorite humans and so uh such

33:03Dan Patterson:a uh such an honor always to to be with you and you too jason uh and jeff paris and benito it's it's great to to stay with you all i really appreciate being able to talk about this stuff thanks take care amazing take care dan take care we'll see you talk to you soon okay all right dan patterson um what a powerhouse i mean that um that stuff that they're doing you know i i just couldn't even have of uh of conceived of some of those things you know even five or ten years ago you know and and now it's just rapidly accelerating it is accelerating right like the ability to do the things that they're talking about right it's it's empowering threat actors in ways that we never could have, you know, I guess we could have anticipated.

33:51Science fiction has anticipated some of it, but it's at a level and a speed that's just out of this world right now. I mean, that's kind of a chicken and egg thing, though, right? Because science fiction is also the responsible for some of this stuff. I was going to say a lot of the people doing these sort of things are directly influenced by science fiction. True. Chicken and egg. Chicken and egg. Chicken and egg, indeed. Well, Paris, great to see you. And Paris and Jeff, thanks for letting me sit in the Leo seat for this week. Hey, thanks for taking Avers. We get in trouble when we do it. We do, I was going to say, Jeff and I are on hiatus because we bring up too many spicy stories when Leo's coming.

34:35I'm here to take all the bullets this week. Thank you. Thank you. Everything that's great, I will tell them was all your guys' idea. You know, all of the mistakes were mine. Now you're speaking our language. Excellent. Excellent. We have so much to cover. I want to start. It's been a big week in AI. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my. First, you got to make money. I was going to say, we have a lot of ads this week. Let's pause and send it over to Leo to talk about one of the sponsors for this week's show. This episode of Intelligent Machines brought to you by Delete Me. If you have ever wondered how much of your personal data is out there on the internet for anyone to see, please do me a favor, don't look, because it's more than you think.

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40:06In part, we spoke with this last week, it's this kind of paradoxical thing where Pete Hegseth has simultaneously designated Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security and they also used Anthropic and Claude in particular as part of their operations to enact war in Iran. Yes. Yes. The number of aspects of this to unpack are so many. So we discussed this a bit last week, where I think that Leo's starting point was similar to strategy this week. The government has to decide how to use these tools. I disagreed, and I think that there's, I disagree with trajectory as well. I think there is a need for, especially in unusual times, so we try to be not too political and call this unusual times, a need to speak one's conscience and decide what's used and what's not.

41:15The analogy I make is that certain pharma companies will not sell certain drugs to certain states if they're used in executions. Yep, yep. And so companies have some rights there and have that ability. So Anthropoc came along and said, you can't use our stuff to autonomously kill people. And you can't use our stuff to surveil Americans. And there was a moral aspect to that. But there was also a practical aspect of that. Like, this stuff ain't ready. You don't want to use it for that. You know, I wouldn't trust it to go kill people. What are you doing? Then the Hexas stuff got all macho, chest beating.

41:54and then Trump got all macho chess bean, as Paris recounted, they're out. And it's worth noting that this designation, the Pentagon, as of when I checked today, the Pentagon has not formally issued this supply chain risk designation threat through any official channels. All this messaging has been on social media, as is kind of the norm in this administration, which really adds an unusual aspect to all of it. But what we've heard so far is the Washington Post also reported this weekend that a hypothetical around nuclear ballistics might have been kind of what, for lack of a better term, blew this whole thing up.

42:36The Washington Post reported that Emil Michael posed an extreme hypothetical during a meeting in January 2026. if an intercontinental ballistic missile was launched the u.s could the military use claude to help shoot it down and the accounts as to what happened next diverge sharply the pentagon's version is that anthropic responded you could call us and we'd work it out and officials were really mad at that because they were like that is ridiculous anthropic's version is they say that's totally false we said we've always agreed to allow claude for missile defense which is a crazy sentence to have to stay.

43:17That's not part of their shtick, right? It wasn't part of their red lines, as they call them. No, not at all. Anthropic says the red lines are two specific categories, mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Yeah. Right. Yes. So that was crazy enough as a story, right? Right there, that has huge implications. Is the government going to destroy Anthropic? How far could this ban go? A friend of mine at University of Virginia said, do we have to stop using it because the university gets grants from the from the federal government that's that's that's her shattering questions yeah and then along comes sam altman yes who um uh comes in and uh says okay i'll do it and apparently was doing this all along and um at various points supposedly had his own uh rules agreed with anthropics rules but really didn't because otherwise they wouldn't have done it.

44:13Then he admitted that it was opportunistic and sloppy. Then he whined to his staff that this was really painful. Give me a break. And so that's added a whole nother layer here to where this goes. I've got to ask you both because you're younger than I am, which is not hard to be. Does the name Eddie Haskell mean anything to you? Never in my life. No. Oh, Paris, Paris, Paris. I also couldn't remember most names that I've heard. Well, no, this is an old guy TV reference. TV show reference. This is Leave It to Beaver. Oh, I know Leave It to Beaver. Well, then you should know Eddie Haskell. Eddie Haskell was the friend of Wally's who was the two-faced, slimy ass kisser.

45:03Oh, Mrs. Cleaver, you look absolutely lovely today. Right. And that's what I did. I got AI to do a gift for me of Sam Altman meeting Eddie Haskell, but it doesn't mean anything to you. So I'll not even bother showing it. But Sam Altman proves himself to be a two faced, traitorous ass kisser to the government. And is this surprising to anybody? No. Not to oversimplify this, but is this not the sort of behavior that led to Sam Altman's original ouster from opening up? So now what happens? So now it gets more interesting because he whines about, well, you know, this could be damaging to the brand, blah, blah, blah.

45:45There's a movement to delete ChatGPT. Anthropic goes to the top of the downloads. and and the uh google play store also it is skyrocketed as the number one app in the world passing chat gpt which had been the number one app in the world for you know three years anecdotally um as uh listeners of this podcast will know but uh jason for context i'm in a lot of um subreddits for all the various models and i really enjoy being in the um open ai ones in part because up until recently, my main source of joy was whenever opening, I would depreciate a model. People would freak out because they were going to lose their girlfriend.

46:29Now, all of those people are aggressively organizing to switch to Android. They're angry. There have been hundreds and hundreds of posts. Let me understand. These were adamant ChatGPT fans. These were chat GPT fans so adamantly fans that they're like attuned to different models making lengthy hundred word plus posts whenever a brief change happens to a model or some sort of tweak is made to the system. And these people are not only switching en masse to, and it overwhelmingly seems like Claude, but they are really relishing in the experience of not being in the chat GPT ecosystem. I mean, maybe this is just the anecdotal experience that I'm seeing.

47:20I have seen probably 20 to 50 posts in the last day or two, not looking for it, of people being like, wow, I like Claude so much more. Or, wow, I think I've seen one or two that said they liked Jenna. So here's my question to both of you. Did Sam Altman do permanent damage? Did he shoot his company in the foot? Or does this go past? I mean, there's two minds. One, ChatGPT is in a position now where they are the dominant market leader. They have such a head start isn't even the way to describe it. They have so much more market penetration than any of the other companies and significantly, significantly more.

48:04Both they and Gemini have so much more penetration than Anthropic. So it's hard to compare the two. but one consequence of that is when you're overexposed you are increasingly likely to end up getting kind of a negative to have your brand reputation be tarnished and i do think that there's been a number of instances that have increasingly tarnished the chat gpt and open ai brand starting with everything going on with the sycophancy the suicidal impulses a common complaint I see in all these forums is that as a counter to the kind of sycophancy and AI psychosis inducing tendencies of these models, now like you'll be asking ChatGPT for help sorting through some emails and you'll be like, you're not crazy.

48:56You're not broken. Take a deep breath and we'll work through this together. And people are like, what the heck? I'm just asking for my emails to be so I do think so I think that this exists in that context while they didn't report a suicidal person in Canada of course a homicidal person I think that this is a huge sticking point for like I was out to dinner last night with a friend that is not plugged into AI stuff at all I'd say an an anti-AI person in every sense of the word she was like oh yeah me and a bunch of other people have like signed the stop using chat GPT thing and I've been seeing that being shared around everywhere.

49:31I do think that it's a notable moment so far in this company's history. What do you think, Jason? Yes. So I think that it reminds me a little bit of the Instagram. There was like the Uber, the boycott Uber movement, because of all the things that came out about them. Until they changed CEOs. CEOs. It caused them to change CEOs, for sure. There was the Instagram one, similar to that, a boycott of Instagram. It does remind me a little bit of those, for sure. And they both were consequential. And I think that they were brand moments where there was brand damage done. They did both recover. And so I expect this to be a bit like that.

50:26And here's why I'm thinking so. And then there's a couple parts of it I'd love to unpack with you all and get your thinking on too. So I think that what OpenAI still has going for it is with the level of talent that they have at the company, they are also making these tools like the easiest to use. I think by and large, even lately, I've heard some programmers talking about the fact that developers that they're using codecs instead of Cloud Code because they're like, it's actually gotten better over the last few weeks. And so that was some kind of surprised me because Cloud Code has been really has just had it figured out among developers for a while.

51:12But in MonkChat GPT itself, some of its controls, user customizations, things like that are just a little bit better. I think their browser also is just a little bit easier to use. People often go to the path of least resistance, as we all know, human beings. And so I expect as long as they don't have, and there's the risk of Some people have left OpenAI publicly even in the past week over this. I think the employee sentiment is a huge aspect of this. The employee, if they start to lose and they've lost several important people over the last few days, if that exodus becomes more acute, then I'm going to be more worried.

51:59But I do think right now they still have the people and the staff and this mission of making these tools better and easier and faster to the fact that I think that they will likely still own a lot of the consumer sentiment of this. And they will continue to – this will be a little bit of a blip. I do have some bigger questions though too and I'd love to get your thoughts on this. The Sam Altman thing, I do think that, you know, Altman's, he is very much almost like the mirror image of Dario Amidai. You know, Dario is, he's very, and my sense has always been this way, he's very sort of almost like single-mindedness and like steadfast on an idea, right?

52:56That he pushes forward. And I want to talk about one of those ideas first. Whereas Altman, I think Altman takes in a lot of things and reads sort of the tea leaves and then sort of makes some decisions of like, you know, which ways, which way things are going. And let's sort of listen to our audience. Is it unfair to say he's a little Trump-like and that he's impulsive? I think there are. I mean, he will act very quickly on information. I'm not sure that I would even consider this move impulsive. I think this was calculated and I assume that Sam Altman, OpenAI, Google, I'm sure even Meta were salivating at the idea of getting Anthropics.

53:41That contract. $200 million contract. Yeah, but comes with a lot of not just baggage, but bombs. Well, none of them care because, I mean, Google rolled back its internal prohibition on an AI for weapons and surveillance. in February last year. Yeah, now you have 900 employees of Google have signed a letter. Well, that's what I think is the most interesting part here. I think that, yes, all these consumer reputational blights, that will continue to exist. But the real place where this could actually make a market difference is in the employee talent wars that these AI companies are doing. And this is something that Karen Howe got into in her book, An Empire of AI, which is that all of these companies are paying their employees crazy amounts of money.

54:31They kind of have the pick of the litter in a sense, and it's been a real struggle for all of them to figure out, hey, how can we attract the best possible talent that can give us the edge? A lot of these people were attracted to these companies by them making lofty promises about ethics, doing the right thing, building a technology that's going to change the world. And you're starting to see that in the way that employees of OpenAI and Google are really reacting negatively to this and being like, hey, why aren't we standing up to these absurd demands like Anthropic is? And I think that that's the sort of thing that people are going to listen to when they want to make their employment decisions about where to work.

55:16If Anthropic comes to any of those people that have signed, now Anthropic has a literal list of a thousand employees that they could possibly scoop from these competitors. They could go pick off. So here's the thing that is interesting, I think, for us to consider. If we consider those two red lines, if we go back to that for a quick second, because there's been a lot of, and you mentioned the stratechery piece. There's also Altman who tweeted out and he said, I don't feel like the executives of private companies should be making decisions in a democracy that, you know, they should be made by elected officials, not non-elected executives of private companies.

55:59you know, to a degree, Ben Thompson, his trajectory unpacks that and essentially is saying much the same thing. But here's what, here's my question about that is, and you all tell me if you understand this the same way, I don't feel that Dario and Anthropik is necessarily saying this is wrong and nobody should do it. They're saying we are not comfortable with it. As Jeff, you said it, like, we know this technology, we know the reliability of it, we know that the challenges of it, and we are not comfortable with this technology being ready to be given the, you know, weapon where it can choose which humans should be, you know, taken out that that there should always be a human in the loop on that.

56:48That seems like a pretty reasonable, you know, ask. And then the other mass surveillance, which is illegal. Yes. But what the government has said and the very important part in the contract was like, for essentially we can use this technology, we want to be able to use this technology. And as I understand that this is standard language in all Pentagon contracts for all legal purposes. And what they said verbally was, we don't have any intention to use your technology for mass, you know, for killing of humans autonomously, or for mass surveillance of workers. And yet, we have to go to the line, we're not going to allow any carve outs of language saying we won't agree to those things specifically, because they are illegal.

57:38And all things are, you know, that are illegal are part of the contract. And the anthropics said, like, we're not comfortable with that. We want that carved out because those are things, these are areas where if humanity, like we've seen this movie, right? Where when robots and AI can kill humans without any human intervention, the potential consequences are very, very negative. And we believe that we don't want the technology we've built to be a part of that because our feeling is the consequences are very negative and we don't want to do that. That to me seemed like a very reasonable consequence.

58:15And I feel like it has gotten mischaracterized as them moralizing to the government and trying to tell the government what to do. Is that, am I understanding it correctly? What do you think? Yeah. I mean, this is what we discussed last week too, but, and Ben, who does great analysis, though I will confess, I go to, I always go to Gemini and ask it to summarize him first, because he's so long. Ben argues strenuously that you can't have companies deciding what's what, You've got to have elected officials deciding how to use these tools. Otherwise, you'd have a dictatorship of companies. Well, there's a few issues here.

58:52One is we are in exigent circumstances with the government we have. And individual responsibility and accountability will matter. And so just as the six members of Congress who did the video reminding members of the military that they should not follow illegal orders because they are ultimately responsible under the laws, the precedent established at Nuremberg. Pardon me, I'm not going Godwin's law here, but I'm going to end up going there a little bit for a minute. Sorry. It's going to get worse for a second, then it'll get better. So there's responsibility for the military person. Is there not also responsibility for the company?

59:37As I mentioned earlier, pharma companies choose not to sell their drugs to states that are going to use them in executions um i gave fodder been the manufacturer of zyklon b uh has been held responsible by history and and others for selling that poison to the nazis in the concentration camps and we hold we say to that company to this day thinking of that exact comparison jeff you shouldn't do that you are held responsible for that you are accountable for that And so the trajectory is where Ben's worried about the dictatorship of the company. Okay, I get that, but I'm worried about the dictatorship of the government.

1:00:21You're worried about the dictatorship of a dictatorship. Exactly. And if you're going off and doing things, and we constantly are saying to the AI companies, you need to be careful about how your stuff is used. You need to put in guardrails, though I think that's impossible, but we still say that. People say that, right? You are ultimately responsible. We say the same thing to social media companies. We say that in all these companies. You are responsible. You are accountable. You have to be moral in these decisions. Well, okay, so Anthropa comes along and says, yeah, we have a moral line, and here it is, and we don't want our stuff used in this way.

1:00:54And then they're being accused by people like Ben of trying to be dictators. No, they're trying to be accountable and responsible in, again, again, exigent in times, where the risk is very high that their technology could be used in a way that would at least shame them in history. So I think that they've got an opportunity and a need and a responsibility and a right to say no. So it's a really interesting issue here of where you go. And then if we go to Google, I think Google's right now trying to hide, like, just forget us for a while. We're not really here. It's very interesting. Google and Meta are both like, oh no.

1:01:35And Microsoft, I think, and Amazon, right? Well, Amazon, we'll get to that in a minute. But they're all kind of trying to hide. But Google now has employees rising up again, as they did in the robot days. That is the days when Google had a robot company, saying, ah, you don't use this stuff for war at all. Yeah. And so where do these other tech companies go for all the reasons you mentioned, Jason, but also for their moral and legal responsibility to themselves and their legacies. I also want to point out Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, who was the inaugural director of the DOD's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the guy who led Project Maven, the Pentagon AI program, that famously caused that Google employee revolt in 2018.

1:02:22He waited on the subject this weekend as well. and he said painting a bullseye on anthropic garners spicy headlines but everyone loses in the end he called anthropics red lines reasonable and said quote no llm anywhere in its current form should be considered for use in a fully lethal autonomous weapon system it's ludicrous to even suggest it i think that speaks for itself you know i don't think that i think i'm just i'm baffled as to how the situation got to the point that it is at now because you're dealing with some nut jobs i mean yes i mean hegseth is at the same time he went to the boy scouts and said okay you can keep girls for a little while but you have to get rid of all the dei so i'm sorry i'm going to do it again here i'm going to go to the same place i'm going on the nerve so it's now the hegseth you can't right and and they're they're dictating to the boy scouts um what do you do in that case You've got macho.

1:03:20It's a macho thing. And you don't dare disagree with me. I'm going to get you. I'm going to destroy you. And they have the mechanisms to do so. Yeah. What was incredibly unexpected, maybe, was that they did this and they told them. Now, to your point, Paris, they haven't actually executed on the promise, which is to make them a supply chain risk, which is normally reserved for foreign adversaries. So it was definitely a DEF CON 5 move. It's like, we're going straight to DEF CON 5. We're going to term you an adversary to the Republic. And there was some concern, I think, that was that, okay, that could really damage Anthropic, right?

1:04:12That could have some - It could kill them almost, couldn't it? It could kill the company, right? Or at least it could make a lot of people uncertain about whether they could still do business with them. Yes. And they are largely, for those who aren't familiar, I'm sure most of our audience is, they make most of their money on their API, on their enterprise business, companies paying to use their services. So if a bunch of those companies have questions about whether it's legal for them to use it, that causes a lot of problems. and then something happened that we didn't expect which is that American citizens and maybe people around the world were so inspired by the stance of what they did, of this sort of principled stance that they had taken, that they started downloading Claude.

1:05:04Claude has been, most people, if you say Claude, they don't even know it's a chatbot until last week. Yeah. It's like this very second team. It doesn't give me pretty pictures. Yeah. What does this go for? I mean, nobody really knew what Claude was. Not nobody, obviously. It had its fans. A lot of the tech neurati, like the people who are really into AI, a lot of them for years have, not years, for months have been saying, because this industry, it feels like years, but months, have been saying like Claude is the best. and i i've seen this and probably you all have seen it with a lot of you know people you know who are really deep into the ai ecosystem and use a lot have been using claude because they're like there's just parts of it that are a lot better and more accurate and less hallucinations and safer and all that so fine but the broad um the broad spectrum of people did not know what claude was until this weekend and all of a sudden it went from like it was like 40th to a hundredth on a of jimmy kimmel of ai shot to exactly the top number one um within hours essentially after the the word came out on friday surged so much that claude also went down this week and experienced well the twice it was in part twice in part because a surge in downloads and usage but also I think a data center got hit by a missile.

1:06:33So, you know, a complicated weekend for good old good. Very complicated. So, Claude rises to the top. And I don't know about you all, but I'll even share an experience I had with, I have a friend, does not work in tech, works in nonprofits, is an educator, very smart person, wonderful friend of mine who came to me on Saturday afternoon, and he had downloaded an AI chat bot for the first time. And he downloaded Claude. And he was having to do two things. He was having to sort of make a social speech. And then he was working on this presentation that he needs to give in an academic forum. And he told me, he's like, I have to show you this.

1:07:18He's like, this one, I asked it to sort of make the basics of a speech for me. And he said, I have to tell you. And then the other thing he said, and the other thing is I helped it think helped it have it helped me think through the arguments that I need to make in this, this presentation. And he said, I have to tell you, and I'm going to show them to you. He said, I'm both really upset and incredibly impressed. He said, I'm upset at how good it is. And I'm also impressed that it could help me, you know, think through some of these things in such a powerful way. So, he showed me them and he had done a great job with these things.

1:08:01And I just was, I was so blown away that the first place he went was Claude because he had seen all of this. And he really, he subscribes to our newsletter, but he only does it, I think, because since I started there in December and has been keeping up with it. But that told me that Claude has truly broken through the mainstream. It has skyrocketed into the level of attention and not only that, but usage in a way that really is giving it a moment that I do wonder, and to your all's question, is it durable? Are they truly going to you know, be this counterpoint? Is it a cultural moment? But I think we have to acknowledge that we kind of in the, at least in this sort of three year AI boom that we're in, we haven't seen anything like this before something, you know, come out of nowhere and go from zero to zero.

1:08:59I had a very similar experience this weekend. A friend of mine who's always been, I guess, a big Gemini head, but it's kind of like waxed and waned. Like there's maybe a time where he was using it more, but it wasn't that often. He mentioned to me this week, and he was like, yeah, you know, I downloaded Claude, and I'm just playing around with it. And by Monday, he was like, Claude's helped me reevaluate my whole current life professional progress. I've vibe-coded a CRM for my custom outreach that I'm going to be doing this week. I literally just got a text five minutes ago. He was talking about some sort of camera that he wants to buy.

1:09:39He's like, I've got to ask my new best friend, Claude Opus. I'm like, good for you, bro, I guess. So the other, I didn't even put this in the rundown, but NVIDIA, Jensen Wong said they're going to invest the 30 million in OpenAI. But he said that's probably it for both OpenAI and Anthropic. And what he hid behind was because they're likely to do IPO. Yes. So that becomes another interesting wrinkle in this, is they're both headed that way, I think. But I think that OpenAI has just got delayed. Yeah, I think you're right. And Anthropics might have just gotten accelerated. Yes. Sentiment, you know, the markets are based on sentiment, you know, in addition to earnings.

1:10:23But really, the sentiment and the sentiment on both of these companies just shifted so dramatically, you know, in the last 70 years. or the 72 hours over the weekend, that it really changes the game, at least in the short term, but longer term. These are both going to be public companies. They're destined to be some of the biggest companies in the world. I think they are on the way. NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Anthropic, it feels like in three to five years from now, they are the sort of Apple, Microsoft, Google of this. Now, we shouldn't count Google out either, right? Google it was just a few months ago that Google was sort of the bell of the ball with Gemini 3 and Nano Banana, and they do have some things going in the right direction.

1:11:11And so we can't count them out either, I guess. Yeah. So Paris, you raised in our private little chat, it's probably time, Jason, to earn some more money. It is. And then come back for some more stuff, because you've got three ads to get in before we turn into a pumpkin. You know, everybody loves to advertise on our here show, Intelligent Machines. They do. And we love them. Four today. Leo's gone, and look what happens. The money comes ka-chinging in. People were just shaking out of trees. Get me there. Amazing. All right, so let's send it over to Leo to talk about another one of this week's sponsors.

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1:14:01It breaks it down for greater accuracy and transparency by producing time-stamped scores and events tied to moments in the conversation, which means you can see exactly what's going on when risk rises, when behavior shifts, when intent changes. With Velma, you can zoom right in. You can improve your customer experience. You can reduce risks like fraud and harassment. You could detect rogue agents and more. Go beyond transcripts. See what a voice native ai model can really do go to modulates live ungated preview of velma it's at preview.modulate.ai that's preview.modulate.ai see why velma ranks number one on leading benchmarks for conversation understanding deep fake detection and emotion detection again that's preview.modulate.ai now back to the show all right thank you leo and we have more war news we do so before we could talk about this whole anthropic pentagon open ai thing for another hour i'm sure the last thing i wanted um to wrap it um is we ran a poll on the deep view so we we have our audiences um goes uh it's about half a million people uh every day we we run the top stories in ai and we have a poll and so in our poll we asked, should Anthropic have acquiesced to the Pentagon's request to remove safety restrictions?

1:15:32All right, before you hear the results, Paris, have you cheated and looked? No. What do you think the answer is going to be? Yeah, what do you think the answer is going to be?

1:15:44Overwhelmingly, no. I'm going to be optimistic. Okay, what do you think, Jeff? Yeah, I'm going to be optimistic, too. Siding with Anthropic. 79 % said no, they should not have acquiesced. 17 % said yes. 5 % said, you know, other. Do you have any other details on the 19 % who said yes? No. Do they have a sub bucket that's like corporate shill or something? i don't know but you know our our audience is pretty diverse it's mostly professionals who work in the ai industry or who work with ai um and it's pretty diverse uh across the u.s and canada um and so all the canadians skew it then all those good guys yes yes so the i was i was surprised by that like that um that What about it was surprising to you?

1:16:45What was surprising to me? I figured it would be, yes, the majority, but I thought 55, 60 percent will say yes. Because in most anything these days, you will find a minimum of 35 to 40 percent who will side with the administration. Exactly. Exactly. Well, as someone who's spent probably many hours at this point with our survey team at Consumer Reports, I've had to write these sort of things. I think that part of the reason why you get such an overwhelming response is the way the question was asked. The way the question was asked. It's true. It's definitely asked in a way that it makes it clear what the moral choice is.

1:17:28It's true. It was a little bit of a leading question. But it's also kind of a leading scenario, you know? I would argue that that's an accurate way to describe the situation, even if it is leading. How would you otherwise word it? Did anthropoc do the right thing or the wrong thing? Check one? Well, no, probably. I mean, the thing I've learned about talking with, like, we have this whole team of, like, professionals. I don't even know what the profession is called, of surveyists. And it's a million different caveats. It would be like a thing being like a paragraph that dryly summarizes the debate, providing arguments on both sides, and then says, like, do you agree or disagree with anthropic stance as stated or something like that?

1:18:16It would be making it a lot more boring, opaque, and kind of hard to parse, which I think is perhaps a disservice to— It's like would should, you know, Anthropic made its stance on the two items that it believes should not have been left to LLMs to do. Whereas the government, you know, believes that they are elected officials and should be the ones that decide, you know, where do you stand? Boom, boom. Like something like that would have been a little more. yeah but i think also i mean part of the thing is there's like a million ways to slice and dice surveys and i'm not sure that it's entirely a useful endeavor when i think it's true i thought this was the most because i wrote i also full disclosure i wrote the question so like i thought this was the most obvious question to ask ultimately it was like should they have asked or not Yeah.

1:19:12Well, I argue that all surveys are biased by their nature, period. Yes, it's fair. And I'd also argue that anyone who's reading your newsletter and respond to the survey already has a more robust understanding of the situation than an average survey responder. That's right. That's right. So that's fair. They understand what an LLM is. They understand the risks. They understand hallucinations. They understand how long they get things wrong, and they probably are less likely to trust them to do really, you know, important and sort of existential kind of things. Is this one of the most overwhelming responses you've gotten?

1:19:48It is. It actually is one of the most overwhelming responses we've ever gotten to a question that went sort of one direction or the other. Do you remember any others off the top of your head? Should Claude 4O, I mean, should ChatGPT 4O be killed? I mean... should we be allowed to marry a chat gpt4o 85 say yes yes yes now i do want to go to the amazon question there are some other war you know related things that we should touch on so war section tonight guys oh my god we do a whole a whole one so jeff why don't you talk a little bit about the amazon this is straightforward uh that uh amazon says the drone strikes damaged three facilities in the UAE and Bahrain.

1:20:33And there's no one saying directly that they were targeted. However, things are pretty well targeted these days. And Amazon as an American institution, bigger than Kentucky Fried Chicken in these foreign places with the internet and technology, with everything that's going on, it's really interesting to me that I think that American tech now becomes a pretty clear target. Yeah, it's a really interesting development that one of the things that are most known about America and Americans are these companies, these global tech companies that are the biggest companies in the world are in some sense, the biggest symbols of, of American, uh, of what is American in the same way that Coca-Cola might've been, or Nike, or, you know, other companies in past generations, the most iconic, you know, things, Kentucky fried chicken, you mentioned Jeff, you know, McDonald's in, in a very real sense, the tech companies are the, um, emblems of what america is and so in in that sense they are also the what we've learned now the biggest targets to if you want to um make a statement about your feelings rest of world had a good reporting on this as well this week it kind of captured the larger stakes uh which is that i mean the gulf has basically positioned itself as a safe harbor for the world's data like to attract silicon valley like they've there's been like over two trillion dollars in investment pledges like made during Trump's golf tour last May.

1:22:22And it's been kind of positioned as, quote unquote, the third global center for AI alongside the U.S. and China. And now, I mean, there was a researcher at Qatar University who told Rest of World, the security frameworks behind the U.S.-UAE-AI partnerships were built for supply chain control and political alignment, not for protecting buildings during a military crisis. And now, I mean, this just makes it increasingly complicated. It does. And I want to go back to what we were talking about before, too, in terms of Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. Yeah. They were all scared of pissing off the administration.

1:23:08Now they're scared also of pissing off the populace, of pissing off nations, I'm reading Europe, that are not necessarily aligned with what's happening out of America and Israel right now. And they're scared of pissing off Middle East powers. They're hot under the collar. This is not easy. There are hard decisions to be made in those cases. Yeah, I remember somebody telling me, like, this is when leader, that's when you actually have to be a leader. Like most of the time when things are going well, your job is just sort of keep the trains running on time, right? When things get hard and there are difficult decisions, like that's when you need a leader, right?

1:23:49That those are the time when leaders, you know, have to earn their money. They have to make very difficult decisions. And this is one of those moments where there's, uh, there are signals to, to sort out and, and try to, um, try to understand. And I think the one that you mentioned, Jeff, that maybe was the X factor is the populace. I don't think we expected, you know, like we saw it in terms of this poll, but also in terms of the way people voted with their downloads in overwhelming fashion with Quad over the weekend. And like people have made a large statement about where they stand on this in ways that has really been in one sense encouraging, right?

1:24:35From maybe a democratic process standpoint. I don't know if you want to call it that. And another in terms of almost like a level of engagement and activism. And I don't mean activism in maybe the traditional sense, but maybe just a level of not being, you know, just resigning bystanders. yeah well i i'm serious about jimmy kimmel i think it's a jimmy kimmel moment for ai okay um where um viacom when it lived thought okay no big deal you know i'm sorry disney disney wrong wrong megacorp yeah wrong uh wrong wrong late show um disney thought well okay so this is the obvious thing we got to do so we'll do it okay no big deal well you know we'll we'll eat some crow with Kimmel and figure it out.

1:25:25Uh-uh, uh-uh. Nope. Got into much hotter water then and gave them the cover and the courage to say no to the administration. So that's what's going to be interesting in all of this. Yeah, yeah. I do think European regulators are going to sort of speaking up too and saying, no, we don't want to use tools that are used to autonomously kill people. We don't want to use tools. And why are you just saying don't surveil Americans? Why don't you have the same standard for the rest of us? Sure, sure. What gives here? They're going to get caught in that vice. If they could encode some of that, I mean, what's been happening, we've been seeing, because of the gridlock in the U.S., because of the political division and the gridlock in passing laws, in sort of functioning.

1:26:24The legislative branch has been really in gridlock and not functioning well for a couple decades. And because of that, the European regulators have been really setting the standards on a lot of these things. And then when they do it, these companies that are global companies, they often prefer not to have two different sets of rules they play by. And so the European standards will often be propagated. Although we have start to see that splinter in some ways, the last few years, there are some things that features or products that aren't available in the same way in Europe that they are in the US.

1:27:11And so we'll see how sustainable that is long term, but this could get codified. Some of these things that Anthropic, to your point, Jeff, like some of these things Anthropic has brought up could get codified by the EU and or other places. And that could make that more of a, have this sort of global impact on some of these companies. That's going to be really interesting to watch. If you're Anthropic or if you're a company that now doesn't know what to do, the question is who can give you cover? Oh, gee, we'd love to do this, but we really can't. Look at all the implications. Yeah. I do think one aspect of this that has been interesting to me is there's, I'm probably bungling the precise details of it, but I've always heard that there's some part of the terms for Anthropic employees' equity packages that say like, by working at Anthropic, you have to recognize that we may very well make choices that reduce your equity to absolutely nothing, make it absolutely worthless based on our moral and ethical standards.

1:28:13standards that we have built central principles of the company. And it's like, this is a perfect example of that. It's an example of the competing values inherent in trying to combine morality or ethics within not only a capitalist ecosystem, but perhaps one of the most hyper capitalist ecosystems we've ever seen in terms of the AI race. It's interesting. this came up over this weekend as well, Paris. I'm glad you surfaced this or elevated this because I hadn't seen that before or heard it or read it, but basically some people took the language and put it on Twitter and said, in the employment agreement, it says we may make decisions, just as you said, that could take the value of the company to zero, but that we will make these decisions based on our, you know, essentially our company mission.

1:29:10So now I'm going to play devil's advocate for a minute. That's the proper Leo role. Yes. Thank you. So Nat Rubio Lict, who works for the Deep View, wrote a perspective or a commentary. We have this, at the end of all of our stories, it's called Our Deeper View, where we're trying to, you know, really get to what's the thing, Not just report the news, but also get to what's really going on here. And in one of these over the past few days, what she wrote was that in one sense, what else was Anthropic going to do? They built the company on this mission that we are the safe AI, we are the principled AI, and we are the ones that's going to put guidelines in place.

1:30:02And so did they really have any other choice? You know, like acquiescing would have literally - I would say absolutely they did. Every single company in existence has basically made the other choice. Google used to have a core principle of don't be evil. And they went so far the other way. They were like, we're scratching that out, buddy. It's too hard. So this is why, you know, we published that argument just as it was. And I'm really proud of the way that she wrote it. but I thought it was very well reasoned and very clearly stated. When we talked about one of the things that I said was similar to what you mentioned, Paris, what we've seen throughout history is when these moments come, what the technology companies have all said is we make the tools.

1:30:51How other people use them is up to, they sort of wash their hands of it. This goes all the way back to IBM in World War II selling technology to Germany. So I know we keep going back to Germany in the 1930s, but here we are. All roads lead back to Germany. All roads always bleed back there. For the disaster that it became. But that was what IBM said in the 30s. This is what Microsoft said in the 80s and 90s. This is what Google said, as you said, in more recent history. Paris says the technology companies always default to being sort of morally neutral. And we make the tools. What people do with them, we can't really control.

1:31:27And so, one of my counterpoints was that Anthropic actually saying, no, we will not do that. We have certain red lines that we can't cross because we are not confident that technology can do this and do it well. And the consequences of it not working correctly are disastrous. and so and our core to democracy our core to human rights like we um we can't do it and we won't do it i find that pretty unique in human history in terms of all these tech companies i can't think of another example um other jeff's example of the the drug companies is a good one the pharmaceutical companies um that's pretty educated well but that is i mean i think had you If you asked me a week or two ago what I thought Anthropic would do, I would have said, oh, yeah, they're going to cave, keep their military contract, make sure they're not cut off from the supply chain like every other company.

1:32:27I will say it is very startling to me. It's surprising that they decided to literally put their money where their mouth is. So let me let me go devil's advocate again. OK. Thank you. here in the hall of years here is um i i contend that the idea and i've done on the show often that the idea of um guardrails is a lie okay it's a general purpose machine my example always hello gutenberg is um thank you benito for the uh the the plug there for the full screen for those watching uh you can go back to the three three shot now uh uh is that the printing press was a general machine You couldn't have said to Gutenberg, okay, you can do this, but there's this guy who's going to be born called Martin Luther.

1:33:14Keep him away from the damn thing. You can't. He's a general machine. And AI, though I don't believe in AGI and all that, it is a general machine to the extent that anybody can make it do anything they want. And the guardrails are a lie. So in a sense, on the one hand, Anthropic could have said, yeah, we have no control over how people use our tools. Exactly the way you put it, Jason. Exactly that. We have no control. It can be used any way. But then on the other hand, they say that it's not up to the tool to be controlled. It's up to the people. And so it's up to us to tell the customers, you may not use it for this.

1:33:54And there's plenty of other examples in there, right? I mean, when I recorded the audio book for Magazine, On Sale Now, right? At the end, they were going to have me read a statement saying, and no company may use this in any form or any universe, this or in the future for AI, or we're going to kill you. And I said to the producers, I can't say that. It's not coming out of my mouth. And so they're setting a restriction. What are terms of service? They're all restrictions that are put on products, whether we read them or not, whether we follow them or not, is another matter. but companies all the time say, you may not use this in this way.

1:34:36Okay. You may not do these things. So it's not about the tool itself being foolproof. It's about the need to tell the people who use it how they may use it in your view. And if you don't like it, don't buy it. Should be what should be said. I think it's also interesting here. I know we're going back to our first story again because it's so big. It's so big. One thing I don't understand about the timeline of all this from the beginning is that this was in their contract and in their rules, right, from the beginning. You may not use it for these two things. Was it just the war game that motivated them to come?

1:35:13Was it just wanting to be hard asses with Anthropic? Yeah, I'm just like, how did it get this bad? Yeah. We are missing some information on how that unfolded and why and when. I think it's clear, likely to come out in basically the coming days, weeks, months. But yes, I think we don't know that. And it will be potentially, I think, helpful to us in understanding the story. For now, I'm going to send it back to our good friend Leo to give us another one of this week's wonderful sponsors. This episode of Intelligent Machines brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform look we here at a and i am know the potential rewards of ai uh and you probably should know about it too it's just too great for your company to ignore but we're also aware and i hope you are too of the risks not just i mean loss of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed ai but also frankly threat actors generative ai increases their opportunity helping them to rapidly create phishing lures to write malicious code to automate data extraction.

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1:37:49Now back to the show.

1:37:54So I want to talk about one more big thing that happened. There's so many big things. Like we could go and talk about a lot of other things, but there is one. We could have another three hours of this podcast. I know we could do a lot. I've never seen a week like this. And I feel like I've said that about three or four times so far in 2026. But here we are. I want to talk about a product that Perplexity has announced over the past weekend. Perplexity had been flying a little under the radar so far in 2026. But they released a product in the, you know, this has become the year of AI agents. The personal AI agent has become the thing.

1:38:35Claude Code. So Anthropics product Claude Code and Claude Cowork were a big part of this. That has become an AI agent. Leo has talked a good deal about that and the success he's had in doing some and automating some things in ways that he has found incredibly helpful and powerful. And then, of course, we've had the whole OpenClaw, ClaudeBot, MaltBot, MaltBook phenomenon, on all of its own. And then OpenAI, of course, hired Peter Steinberger and then OpenClaus become its own foundation. That has, again, risen to the level of consciousness, a new level, this concept of AI agents. And then when OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, they basically said, we're going to have Peter come here and create AI agents for everyone.

1:39:29We're going to make AI agents that are just so much easier to use because you have to be a bit of a techie to use either OpenClaw or Clawd Code and Clawd Cowork. And so they're like, we're going to make this a lot easier. And then one week later, Perplexity released the product that they, exactly the product that they talked about. And obviously they didn't do it in a week. They've been working on it for a couple of months, but clearly the level of acceleration in this space and the level of being able to use these coding tools to elevate what engineers are capable of and the speed at which you can ship new products has just taken the velocity of this industry to a level that we've just never seen before.

1:40:16And perplexity computer. So full disclosure, I had a bit of an exclusive on that. I published the story. It was on the top of Tech Meme when they released it last week, at the end of last week, and got a chance to use it a little bit right away. But beyond that, so I can speak to it, but there was something else interesting. There's like three things that this does that other AI agents don't, and we can talk about. But the thing that happened with this that was really wild was that on Twitter, essentially the perplexity team, you know, and I have this on good, on good, you know, terms from the perplexity folks that they said to their team, like they do every time they launch a new product.

1:41:05They're like, hey, this is our new product. If you want to tweet about it, you're welcome to. And usually you get like a handful of people that do it. Well, unforeseen by perplexity, their team, which had been trying this thing and loving it, they went on Twitter and just exploded Twitter with it. And so this thing spread far and wide really quickly and gained a little bit of a viral moment, got helped by one other thing, which is that there were some people that combined perplexity computers, what they call their AI agent, with perplexity finance, their sort of Yahoo finance competitor. And they basically were like, I use this to make a Bloomberg Terminal competitor.

1:41:50And they were like, I one-shotted. Take that, Mike. I one-shotted it and I used this AI agent to build my own perplexity terminal computer and I just canceled my$30 ,000 subscription. And so that gave it a whole nother sort of level of interest and buzz. And so, but this perplexity computer thing is really interesting. You know, Jeff, when we were talking about it before you were like, so is this open claw, this is just like an open claw for everybody that can use it. And I thought that was the perfect, that my headline had a little bit, my very first headline had a little bit of that in it too.

1:42:25It's a great way to think about it. So let me ask you two questions about that. One, I think I asked whether it was open claw, but ready for prime time. Is it in some way better, safer, not just slicker, but better, safer than open claw? Is that possible? And then second - I mean, I think almost anything is - And it would be, yes. ... safer than open claw. Is it safe enough? Yeah, that's true. Fair. Yeah. Though, I just saw that there was a story, I don't think I put it in the rundown, that cursor, what do they call their browser? Oh, Comet. Comet, thank you. The perplexity browser. Comet could be, I think one calendar invite, until about a month ago, a calendar invite could corrupt everything you have, which they fixed, but that was an issue.

1:43:11But my other question is, because the one thing perplexity has always done well is stay on top of PR. They're really good at, like, like Common is an example where everybody knew everybody was going to come out with these things. They came out with theirs first. They do these sometimes outrageous things. Do you think that they wished they had released computer before OpenClaw or did OpenClaw open the door for them saying, we got something better? Yeah, I think you're right, Jeff. They like to move fast and they've pioneered a bunch of the things that eventually OpenAI and Anthropic eventually ended up doing right as you're, as you're getting at.

1:43:51And so I think they do like being first. In this case, I do think that open claw gave them a chance to ride that buzz a little bit. And like in a way that maybe AI agents would have felt a lot nerdier. I mean, they still feel nerdy, but at least they open claw created a lot more curiosity, but it's very hard to use. You have to be very technical. It's very command line oriented. There are some hosted versions of that. You could get there a little easier, but. Did you get to play with computer? I did. So you only have, you can only use it if you have a Perplexity Max subscription, which is their 200,$250 subscription.

1:44:35So I had a version of that that I could test it with. And there are just a few things that it does really well. But Paris, I can see you're dying to. My issue is that it's a terrible name because Jeff just said, did you get to play with computer? And that made me involuntarily laugh. Like they might be good at PR, but naming your product computer, it's not gonna work. How am I gonna tell my mom to download computer? Download computer. Mom, you gotta get on computer. I know. I had the same first reaction, Paris. The funny thing is how quickly I'm like, okay, perplexity computer is like PC. right and so it's like it's basically it's even worse so generic yeah that it's that it's bad but also at the sense like you don't have to remember a whole lot about it you know at the same time it's but the but the pro the product itself is interesting it does three things really well and interesting i think in these ai agents so this is where it gets super nerdy and these ai agents you have to have an api key which is essentially where you pay per use for any because these things use a lot of what are called tokens.

1:45:48That's AI inference. And I know this is a lot of things, but they basically, every time you use one of these AI models, it's expensive. And right now, if you pay your$20 a month plan, you are typically somebody who probably doesn't use it a lot, or most people don't. So you don't, but these AI agents use a lot of computing power, if we just put it that way. And so if you're using them, OpenClaw, if you're using even clawed code, you have to have an API key because basically you're paying per use. If you use a bunch more, you're going to pay a bunch more. The first thing that Perplexity did to sort of make AI agents easier is they do away with all of that.

1:46:28And that's why they only have it on the expensive plan for now, because they essentially are giving you a bunch of extra, you get a bunch of usage when you use that plan. Now, if you go over this massive cap, so if you're a really hardcore core coder or something, fine. You'll probably still have to pay. But if you don't, if you stay under that, you're just going to use this like everybody would. That was the first thing. The other thing that it does that's really unique and interesting is quad code only uses anthropics models, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that's the actually really notable and interesting thing here is that you can use, you could have like, different models, 4.6 for core reasoning, Gemini for deep research, Grok for yelling at someone on the internet, ChatGPT for sycophancy.

1:47:13You could have it all. And it's pretty good. It has like, it routes your queries to the best models, just like as you're saying, you know, it knows which ones are good at which things. And that part is pretty good. That's the second thing. The third thing it does is when you do it, say you want it to build an app. Say you want it to build the Paris app for scanning Twitter and giving you story ideas that have to relate to topics X, Y, and Z. And then you also want to share it with one person on your team. Perplexity Computer can do it. It can deploy it to the web, and then you can share that URL.

1:47:53Whereas if you had Cloud Code, if you had Codex, that's OpenAI's program, if you had Replit, Cursor, if you had one of those, You have to make the code. Then you have to go deploy the code to a server somewhere. The one reason why, and they learned this from Lovable, if anybody, for those who are familiar with that, that's a code, you know, an AI agent sort of coder where you just make the thing and it deploys it right away on Lovable. And then you can say, you can make your thing in 10 minutes and then you can send a URL. You just made a web app and you - And it uses Gemini, right? Lovable uses Gemini?

1:48:27I'm not positive about that, but I think you're right. I think it does. It is working with Gemini. It's a company that's based out of Europe, Northern Europe, but we like that. Yeah, they are. They are a company that has figured out that one piece of like, oh, if we let people make the thing and deploy it right away, that's a big plus. Well, perplexity computer learned that and it does that as well. So for example, I had it make an app and I had this app test that I have where I want it to go and every morning, scan all of the sources, you know, and I tell it, here's a bunch of sources, scan these and a bunch more like it.

1:49:04And it'll make like, you know, 20 sources for me. And I had, I had chat TPT and Claude, you know, make this a query for me to make a essentially a morning news scanning app for me. I took that most of the code, most of these programs break on it. When I do it, it either doesn't do it right. It messes something up. Lovable did the best job of making it and then putting something on the internet that it could use right away. The only other one that could do that was perplexity computer. I put it in there. The first time is the very first thing I gave it was this kind of somewhat complex, make me a morning, you know, AI news gatherer for me.

1:49:43It did it right away and it deployed it and I could send the link out. And I was like, whoa, okay. So this is more powerful than lovable. It deployed it as well. You didn't have to, you didn't have to go into terminal. You didn't have to put it on a server. You didn't have to do any of that didn't have to do that see that's i've been arguing about this with leo because leo is nerdy and he loves nerding out and and he wants everybody to be using terminal and i'm saying you're not going to scale at that level you're not going to scale if people have to install things to run them you want to say look what i made world with a link i'm nerdy and i get nervous when i'm in the terminal yeah i mean i still do it but it's just even the barrier of going from claude co-worked cloud code.

1:50:24It's a lot for the average person. For sure. For sure. So perplexity computer, it is the, the name is a little questionable. The project though is really promising for the reasons that, you know, Jeff, you just mentioned like the ability to be able, an average person to go in, describe what they want. And it spit out a thing that you can just take a link and send it to anybody. That is the thing that is really powerful. And then as you mentioned, Paris, the fact that you can do it, it can essentially do best of breed models across all of these labs is also a bit of a superpower. So really interesting.

1:51:02I'm going to go now, I'm going to send it back to Leo to do our last sponsor for the show. And then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about some tools. This episode of Intelligent Machines brought to you by OutSystems, the number one AI development platform. The agentic shift is happening. You know that if you listen to the show. We're really moving beyond simple chatbots. And here's the good news. OutSystems is leading the agentic conversation. OutSystems helps businesses build AI agents that can actually do work. It's amazing. Things like taking actions, making decisions, integrating with data rather than just answering questions.

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1:53:01Stop wondering how AI will change your business and start building the agents that will lead it. Visit outsystems.com slash twit to see how the world's most innovative enterprises are using ai-powered low code to transform that's out systems o-u-t s-y-s-t-e-m-s dot com slash t-w-i-t to book a demo and see the future of software development out systems.com slash twit let me thank him so much for supporting intelligent machines now back to our intelligent hosts. Thank you, Leo. All right. So now it's time for the picks of the week. Paris, would you like to get us started? I will. And this was an important pick for me to do in the week that Leo's not here.

1:53:49Listen to the show will know that last week, one of my picks was the New York Times crossplay app, which I'm somehow more addicted than I was last week. I perhaps have more than 12 games going on. Leo has been complaining mightily in our chat. Because I am trouncing him. I was really worried at first because I got such a bad rack of tiles. We started playing, but I beat him in the end and we are rematching and I'm still. But one of the reasons I think I'm beating him is I've gotten really into over the last couple of years, more Scrabble strategy theorizing. And there's a great book and online resource called breaking the game.net that is like all beginning intermediate and advanced scrabble and scrabble tournament uh strategy and you know wow i'm choosing to share this in the show because i've i shared this then last week with one of some of my other friends that i'm absolutely dominating in scrabble and it has not improved their ability to play so i feel safe sharing it in a place where leo could hear it.

1:54:58But I don't know. Check it out if you want to beat your friends more in Scrabble. It gives you some good some good strategiums to be thinking of. I quote Leo from our WhatsApp about Paris. Yeah, we're a WhatsApp family now. It's... Arrgh! You're a stone cold killer. I've been sandbagged. I mean our board right now is a carnage song. We've really played ourselves into several corners, none of which are particularly good. But I was very worried that I wouldn't beat him in the last game because he last, the last turn was like up by 30 points. But I think I ended up beating him by two in the end. So I don't know.

1:55:40Get on the New York Times crossword app and use breakingthegame.net to trounce your friends even harder. That's my pick of the week. Stone Cold Killer gives the pick. That's me. Very good. All right, Jeff, how about you? All right, this is my one. I have more than one. I want to mention this story just for the record to put on there, that News Corp did a big deal,$150 million with Meta. And Robert Thompson, who I disagree with constantly about all matters of internet and all that, he said that News Corp is now basically an AI input company, which I found amusing. But that's not my pick. I could do a few different ones here.

1:56:16I could do a paper that's out that says, we don't know how social media bans will affect youth, but we're doing it anyway. But I'll leave that aside. I could do a nice New York Times feature about Bell Labs and all that has happened there. This is why I wrote an op-ed a couple years ago now begging for the soon-to-be-vacated Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey to be turned into a museum. Yeah. But instead, I'm going to do Walkman Land. So, Paris, are you too young for Walkman? No, I had one once. And they also came back, I feel like, in the last five. They have to a bit. Ten years. So if you go to Walkman land, well, I guess we can't show it.

1:56:56Can we show it, Benito? Or no, we can't. I'm working on it. Oh, he's working on it. Sorry, I should have warned you, but he did. Okay. So it is, I knew Paris would do exactly that. And ooh, why don't you? So this is pages of Walkman. I always did the plural Walkman, not Walkman, Walkman. Walkman is right. Walkman. Good, good. That's correct. I had this one. I had this one. Which you did. The Iowa HSPS008 is so pretty. Honestly, a lot of these are very pretty. The Philips AQ 6492 is gorgeous. I'm up to 17 pages. I'm trying to see how many pages there are. 20 pages. It goes on and on and on and on.

1:57:44All the Walkman models. 52 pages. Yep. How many? That is crazy. 52. Jeez. Jeez. V2 pages. And it was a life-changing thing. Oh, some of my friends have the Sony TCM 4500, the My First Sony range. That's a real popular one among the Brooklyn crowd nowadays. Oh, you mean like today they have one, like right now? Today. I know at least two people who have that. This, I'll put it in the chat, in their home right now. and i always see it at people's apartment and then take a photo of it and then never look it up which i so now i know this was this was a huge change right people could take their music anywhere the bigger change of course came before that i went to greenbrook electronics today which i can't wait to take a paris and leo there because it's this weird kind of dusty museum store and i had to buy a transistor for a class i'm teaching friday i'll put this in front of the camera Wow, look at that little thing.

1:58:44Oh, look at that. Of course, replaced this, the tube. The tube. As Benito pointed out earlier, he still uses tubes because he's an audio freak. So anyway, this is what changed everything because this is what enabled the portable radio. This is what made it so you could take music with you anywhere. The transistor radio? It was battery operated, right? Amazing. but then you were stuck with radio you were stuck with DJs, you were stuck with all that the Walkman gave you the first control and so I think it's important so that's that I'll mention one other thing where is it here that according to Edison Research podcasts now lead AM FM in spoken word listening really?

1:59:34first time it's crossed the lubricant I'm kind of thinking I'm surprised that didn't happen before, but there's a lot of our grandparents who still listen to AM radio. And like in factories and stuff like that, they still leave it on all day, right? There are lots of, and even restaurants like the back kitchen and the back offices and things like that. A lot of the Brooklyn girlies also have AM radios, I will say. A lot of, a coolest one is one of those, like it's a under cabinet AM, like a radio setup. It also has a cassette player in it. And one of my friends who has one of those is moving to Chicago and I'm hoping and I get it.

2:00:15Oh, okay. You know, there's also this kind of comeback of the iPod. So because it has more notifications. Oh, the iPod is so hot right now. Yes. It's like actually expensive to get an iPod. So that's not just the New York Times making up a trend? No. As a matter of fact, I saw Tony Fidel, who was one of the creators or was on the team, him tweeting out. He's like, look, I don't know if Apple's going to start making it again. But he's like, look, it's official. Like, this is going pretty big. And I think a lot of it is the sort of anti-screen time device, you know, where no notifications. yeah yeah that's what that's what i roll my eyes all that i i do a little bit like could i imagine going there probably not but anyway it's it's also the flip phone i know some people that have done the flip phone you know thing as well um but one of my friends has a flip phone and i ridicule him every single time as you should it would be like going back to the tubes when you have the transistor you know uh it doesn't he also got one and he like tries to text from it and we're in group chats and i'm like rick you can't be doing this it's rude the ipod thing is so weird because like for the longest time we were just like just put this thing in my phone please put this in my phone already please and now we're just like separating it again that's funny now we're like i want the ipad the iPod back.

2:01:49All right. Well, for my pick, mine is going to be something that I feel like should be so obvious on its face and really should be a feature and not a company. And yet I almost like can't live without it on a daily basis, which is this, this app whisper flow that lets you, you know, on, I use it on Mac and I use it on a, you know, phone as well, where you just hold down one button and you can dictate to it and it essentially puts it into clear text. It'll sort of correct it and make it clear into complete sentences. And I feel like this should not exist, right? Like Alexa, Siri, Google Home, Google Assistant, like should have done this really well a long time ago.

2:02:38But it's funny that for all of the challenges that Apple has in AI, if it would just buy Whisperflow and make it so that when you talk to Siri, it actually works every time because this thing essentially works every time or 90 % of the time, the perception of what Siri being better, the way that it would go up so dramatically would be incredible. And so that's what makes me think like, this is really something, there's a couple other ones like this, a couple of competitors as well. Whisperflow is probably the best known. And I find it to be, you know, the sort of one of the easiest to use, especially on the computer, because all you have to do is hit the function key on your on a Mac, and then it pops up and you can use it for anything.

2:03:20The thing that I found, there's two things that I love about it. One is that it tracks how fast you go, you know, most people can type, if you're really fast, you type like 75 words a minute, right? The average person is like 45 to 50 words a minute. And I think I was, I'm about in that range, you know, when you speak, you're up to about 150 words per minute, 125 to 150 words per minute. So I've noticed now there are times when I can't do it and where it's like, I'm in a cafe or something. It's a little weird, but the whisper is the right. Cause you can actually do it where I could like say it like this.

2:03:55I could just whisper and it actually works, which is pretty, which is pretty cool. Um, and then, um, you know, the, the other aspect of it that I really enjoy is the fact that it sort of does, it sort of gamifies it a little bit, right? You can get the stats on how fast you're going and you can do it. Like I can be in bed and everybody's asleep and I can like whisper into it and my note. And then the last thing I love about it is I do my best thinking when I walk. And I was like, if I can only type, I get my best ideas to write when I walk. But if I can only type and so sometimes I would, you know, type on my phone, leave notes and Apple notes and stuff.

2:04:41But with this, I have actually started writing some things while I'm walking in and it's been super, super handy. So that's mine. It's like the AI feature that really shouldn't be an AI feature. I feel like every one of these AI is so good at it. I mean, I use a I've talked with the show, I have a thing on my computer, Mac whisper that allows a bunch of whisper kit transcriptions. And that's how I transcribe a lot of interviews and it's phenomenal. It's local. I love it. So good. So good. So if you're, if you're still typing most of your stuff out there, folks, you know, you could use this tool, use another one too.

2:05:16I can't, I can't, I can't think without typing. You got to use your fingers. I got to use my fingers. I got to. That's part of my, my book. Yeah. Hot type. The end is a typographical autobiography where I talk about how the keyboard changed the way I thought and then the computer changed the way I thought. But unless my fingers are poised over the home keys, I can't think. No. Interesting. Interesting. I would not be able to do it. So it's an interesting world. It is an interesting world. Great pick. Yeah. Those are all fun picks. Those are all really, really fun picks. What a week. Well, Paris and Jeff, thank you for letting me be here, do this with you.

2:06:02What a pleasure. Really, really good job, Folio. Thanks so much for steering the ship. This was phenomenal. Yes, it was great. And we're finishing before a large cane emerges from offstage to drag you out of the podcast studio booth, which is here. That's right. There's the cane. All right. It's going to take you. Well, appreciate it. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in to Intelligent Machines. Leo Laporte will be returning. So you can count on that. And thank you for a great week. And we will, of course, this show is back every week. And Paris and Jeff will be here again. And Leo Laporte will be back.

2:06:40And you can get, and you can count on even more news that's going to happen. However big the news was this week. It's going to be even bigger. It's never stopping. I'm sure. It never stops. And where can people go to follow your work, Jason? Yeah, thank you, Per. So the deep view.com, you can find me there. Subscribe.thedeepview.com is how you can get our newsletter. Every day, we have a send of the newsletter with the top stories in AI. We pick three stories and we also try to unpack them. And then you can also find me if you want my updates in real time on Twitter, God help us all at x.com slash Jason Heiner.

2:07:21And yeah, thank you again. and have a great rest of the week. Hey, everybody. Leo Laporte here. And I'm going to bug you one more time to join Club Twit. If you're not already a member, I want to encourage you to support what we do here at Twit. You know, 25 % of our operating costs comes from membership in the club. That's a huge portion and it's growing all the time. That means we can do more. We can have more fun. You get a lot of benefits. It's ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit Discord and special programming, like the keynotes from Apple and Google and Microsoft and others that we don't stream otherwise in public.

2:08:05Please join the club. If you haven't done it yet, we'd love to have you. Find out more at twit.tv slash Club Twit. And thank you so much.

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