IM 867: The Ketchup Effect - The Lines Are Too Damn Long

31:21Ian Bogost:Absolutely. And almost all these tools have skills for security checks. They're third-party skills for security checks. I will run sometimes multiple ones. But the ironic thing is I'm just doing that for myself. I am not putting out commercial software. I mean, it's public because I put it on GitHub if somebody wants to see it, but I'm not putting out commercial software. And yet I still do that because I don't want to accidentally publish an API key or the passwords to my house or whatever so i always do that i always do that and i think that that's going to be a standard operating procedure if it's not already with every bit of software the question that i was asking steve is software perfectible and he says yes it's deterministic it's math so it is ultimately it is possible to have perfect software humans are not good at that we now know humans cannot do it.

32:18Ian Bogost:I'm still going to question that premise. Again, because I'm going to say it one more time. You cannot anticipate every malign use that someone will come up with to get around something. Well, this is kind of what the CSA paper seems to touch on, is that there's basically going to be this. It says that there should be the development of like Volnops, like a permanent organizational capacity modeled on DevOps that is all about constantly trying to get ahead of this all the time. And that's a huge resource investment and just change in the way that a lot of companies are going to have to operate.

32:58And I don't think that's entirely feasible. It might end up being very expensive. But I mean, is that feasible for anyone outside of the top 50 or 100 companies? Does this just make the hegemony of the big guys more entrenched? I think Paris's point is really, really right. It's just an impact. It's not everybody's fault, but it's something to consider.

33:19Ian Bogost:The trend is, by the way, that these models are getting smarter and smarter at a very rapid clip, that they're getting cheaper and cheaper to run at a very rapid clip, or the software that you run today at a certain cost will be cheaper in a year. The frontier models will always get more expensive, but the software you run today will get cheaper not necessarily we'll talk about that a little later well i mean we even you we've mentioned this jensen wong has said uh that one of his chief goals is making the uh making these uh gpus uh more efficient right yeah of course that's one of his chief goals is that practical or realistic in the next five years it's as new it's as new more as long absolutely it is you know why it is because we have to because he because because his point is that you can't increase the size of the data center that's already built.

34:10You can't put more chips in it. The only way you're going to increase the investment is by him increasing the efficiency of it. And that that's why they're coming to him to do that.

34:19Ian Bogost:Anthropic says that their most dangerous AI model, aka Mythos, has fallen into the wrong hands. a discord group has had access to mythos for two weeks uh this actually comes from a bloomberg and if a discord group no offense to our discord group but if a discord group was able to get access to mythos who else has access to myth they got it through uh contractors yeah i know you know who else has access to be able to do this well and that's why this c i think that's this hair on fire report from the csa and why so many cso's 250 signed on to it is it's gonna get out there well they also did because because anthropic was or whoever i'm sorry not in tropic but the client was sloppy because they went through the basic email structure or url structure the way they came from the prior league right yeah the unauthorized access highlights the challenges this is from bloomberg anthropic faces in fully preventing its most powerful and potentially dangerous technology from spreading so it's kind of like nuclear proliferation well it's also mythos couldn't protect mythos

35:33Ian Bogost:okay well yeah i don't know what that means but uh well if it's supposed to be all powerful security aware thing and it's going to be perfect software and there's going to be no vulnerabilities well that's actually a great point if mythos is so good why couldn't it protect its own because mythos is not being it's it's it wasn't mythos that was exploited it wasn't mythos that was exploited so mythos isn't like magically protecting everybody now if mythos is so good then how could mythos get because it isn't everywhere but it isn't being used i don't think you understand how these things work it's just deployed anthropic has used to say you're on this yeah i don't but it's a it's a nonsensical question is what you think you are jensen wan with patel well it's just but you're asking a nonsense question mythos isn't sitting there protecting everybody and everything going well don't touch me they i'm not saying that mythos is there ready to karate chop anything but mythos has been deployed on the on all of anthropics current person had permission to access anthropic models okay they gained access from a company from which they perform contract work um bloomberg's not naming the company for security reasons i'm not sure how mythos was supposed to prevent this poor mythos we should well you're a person you're personifying it it's not okay i'm gonna move on see i thought i thought when you had lucas on i was um do we want to somebody sick their own version of mythos to figure out exactly how many minutes and seconds it was since leo said he's not going to tell jeff and i that well i didn't expect you to say so many stupid things i'm sorry i i'm trying well jensen i'm trying if you would just not ask dumb questions i wouldn't have to but we dare we dare to criticize no it's not a dumb question it's just that mythos you you're assuming that somehow mythos is permeating everything that everybody's doing and is protecting itself from everybody but if somebody has access to mythos and then gives that access to somebody else there's no mythos in the middle it's not sitting there going that's not no no no what happened is that's the issue that they took they exploited it wasn't a bug it it is that the it was a bad it was no no it wasn't a bug it was bad policy mythos isn't there staying doing you have a bad policy you can't do this it's it's it's not it wasn't available to to fix that problem there and and actually that goes back to what jeff was saying earlier which which is a legitimate point which is there are things that can go security things that can go wrong that aren't bugs that an ai can't fix if you for instance have don't you know this is why we always talk about zero trust if you have a security policy that allows a former contractor access to your system you're going to have a problem and i i mean i guess you could have they could have asked mythos how should we um put this out to our 10 contractors um seriously i was hoping that when when you had lucas on you wouldn't know what he was doing i was hoping he was one of the guys who broke into mythos broken i don't think those guys are going to talk to anybody no they're not if i were them i wouldn't uh look they may be drafted into the army before you know yeah i i i think it's funny because uh you're now ascribing to mythos amazing capabilities beyond what mythos can do well what what if what if anthropic literally had asked how do we do this well i don't know if i don't know if Mythos is one of the most impressive claims about it is supposed to be that it helps anticipate a wide range of potential security risks.

39:29Yeah, that's a good point. And this could have been one of the many things it anticipated, which is that you currently have… Only with the code, not with the deployment thereof. I guess it failed. I don't know.

39:42Ian Bogost:Maybe Anthropic hasn't run Mythos on all of its policies. I'm not sure exactly what's going on there. Darren Oki says rightly it's about the attack surface, which varies. Yeah, I mean, it isn't a magical being that can prevent all attacks. I'm just saying it can fix bugs in software. I don't know about the rest of it. um yeah it's it's just it's a very good model and it happens to have cyber security abilities interestingly enough that it wasn't specifically trained in um let us take another break we're gonna we're about 15 minutes away from our guest in bogost so bogost so i will uh practice his name did you get a pronunciation guide claude told me it was bog ghost bog host claude could never be wrong about anything like pronunciation it's clearly so good at we'll find out i know it's surprising you wouldn't expect it to be good at pronunciation but it is apparently according to someone who has not checked and has not been confronted with the reality of the situation uh yes um somebody's saying it's like if you left your password on a sticky note on the monitor mythos can't help you it's i guess the point it can it it has a domain that it works in but it's not omnipotent i'm sorry i just enjoyed the irony that's all that yeah well i mean yes mythos is not going to and actually this really was the point that you were making uh which is that it isn't perfect you cannot anticipate every no yeah it's not going to fix all security it's going to fix all but potentially software bugs could be eliminated but again i wasn't sure about it when i asked unanticipated attack surfaces cannot be because they're unanticipated no i no that just means a human didn't anticipate it if it's in the software the presumably the ai could find it but the ai is not going to have anything to do with a post-it note on your screen with the password it doesn't doesn't have that that is not what happened here it's no something very analogous to that though i don't think that's accurate it's not through it was not through a cve it was not through a uh i don't think we're anyone's claiming that it was through a cve well that's what mythos fixes is cves it was not through an exploit it was through bad policy like having a password on your monitor bad behavior you see i mean there's a difference It can fix bugs in software.

42:32I don't know.

42:33Ian Bogost:I'm not an expert in mythos. I wish someday maybe they'll release it and we could talk to somebody at Anthropic about what mythos. Well, we're also questioning the idea that software can be perfect. Yes, and I don't claim expertise in that area. Steve, who I think is pretty sharp about this kind of stuff, believes it is perfectible. He ships, by the way, he says software without bugs. because he works very hard to make it bug-free. And he says, because it's math. The problem is humans are not very good at it. We don't do a great job with it. And this is Benito. There's also the hardware part of it.

43:10Like hardware cannot be perfected. So there's always that as a service.

43:13Ian Bogost:That's true. Things like, and somebody mentioned this in the Discord, things like Rowhammer, which is an exploit which allows you to see what's going on in a parallel process on a processor, is a processor defect. And I don't... Now, Mythos probably could be applied to microcode. And I wouldn't be surprised if it could say, hey, you know what? You've got a problem here with leakage in your prediction pipeline. That I think Mythos probably could see. But you'd have to then know about it before you fabbed the chip. and once it's in the chip mythos can't fix it but it couldn't fix anything like radiation in microcode so you can't really think about radiation or anything like that yeah okay yeah yeah I'm just saying the hardware I'm just saying the hardware it's like there's the hardware can never that that can be fixed yeah okay it is it's not a Superman not a superhero and I don't think anthropics claiming it to be omnipotent I didn't say that I didn't say they were claiming claiming that mythos is an omnipotent superhuman that is perfect, Leo.

44:27Ian Bogost:Okay. Right. We will take a break, and then we will talk about— For the earth's blood pressure. No, I'm fine. We will talk about the crunch that is apparently happening with a lot of companies. Your buddy Ed actually has a scoop on one of these. We will talk about that. in just a bit. You're watching Intelligent Machines as we try to figure out what is going on in the world of AI. It's not obvious. Brought to you today by Monarch. When the seasons change, it's natural to want to declutter and get organized. Monarch helps you do the same with your money goals. Let Monarch do your financial spring cleaning for you.

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47:14Ian Bogost:Well, I was going to say 50 bucks I ever spent, but actually I didn't have the code, so I spent 100 bucks and it's worth it. Monarch.com. I love it. Use the code IAM. All right, we're back. And guess who? Look who showed up, our special guest. uh ian bogost is he gosh darn it bogost is here did i get that right yeah you got it right this time good to see you uh uh i will say something uh ian you know this guy jeff somebody told me you know jeff i i want well i have much to thank ian for ian um i wrote a blurb for one of the object lessons books in the series that ian uh co-edits and um uh taking every opportunity i I said, hey, you want a book for me?

48:00And so I ended up writing a magazine. Magazine. I had great fun writing. Do you have it there? There it is. There it is. Always be selling. Always next to you, yeah. And then I also said, I got this book about Gutenberg. You think anybody in Bloomberg might want it? And he introduced me to Harris Naqvi, who's our mutual editor and publisher. And that's led to that and my next book, Hot Type, and the book series, Intelligence. So I have much, much to thank Ian for. A lot's going on, yeah.

48:25Ian Bogost:that's uh i introducing you is a uh challenge because you do so much bigger i was talking to jeff before the show saying i don't understand how ian is so accomplished he said he hates you because you can do so much you make me feel like a loser people ask me what i do and i my heart just falls out of my body and you're like do you have seven and a half minutes he's contributing writer at the atlantic and i and that's where i know you from i read your stuff i love it fantastic thank you so much uh is uh also a game designer in fact you might know the game he did a few about 15 16 years ago called cow clicker how clicker that's right on facebook which was uh a parody a sat it satirized the exploitation of facebook and its games but it became so big you actually had to have a rapture yeah i had to get rid of all the cows how many cows did you murder that's a good question a lot of cows I have never counted the number of cows I wouldn't think of me as murdering them they were you delivered them to cow heaven that's right well they got raptured I think that's actually from the point of view of the cow a good thing well we don't know what sort of sins those cows committed the cows were innocent that they were 100 % raptured not one cow was left behind yeah um so he's also a professor in kind of multi-disciplinary professor at washington university inst louis the barbara and david thomas distinguished professor co-executive director of the office of public scholarship provost fellow in interdisciplinary initiatives this is too much i know it's too much for one person uh his portfolio focuses on ai plus design he's also assistant vice provost because you know you had a little free time i guess founding partner at an indie game studio called pervasive games which has consulted for 2k games activision disney nintendo sony the tetris company and how many books has he had written 11 according to claude claude could be lying right this is my 11th 11th book it's an odd number i need to write a 12th i want to talk about that later and that's a very bad number well no you've got a baker's dozen that's a perfect number well the good news is i only wrote like a couple the rest were ghosts the rest of the world

50:47Ian Bogost:actually the thing that really interests me most about uh ian uh particularly is your notion that and i'm going to misstate this so you can kind of restate it but friction is important to our humanity uh yeah i've been um you know what i this this book this new book the small stuff is about gratification. And at the same time as I was working on the book, this idea of friction got really popular. You hear this a lot now. We need to reintroduce friction. There was just a New Yorker story about this just a couple days ago. It was good. It was a good story, right? And I think what I'm saying is related, but different.

51:31Because to me, this idea of gratification, it's all about the sensory enchantment of everyday life. It's about your constant sensory encounters with the world and how you can derive, you know, small amounts of little pleasures from them all the time. And that's a little different, isn't it, from friction? It's not about making it harder. In some ways, it's about making it easier. So that's an interesting idea that I've been thinking about since we started promoting the book and since I've started thinking about it in the context of today, have conversations about technology today where this idea of friction has suddenly become quite popular.

52:08Ian Bogost:Well, it's also germane to the topic of AI, because one of the things AI seems to do is smooth all the edges, right? And AI pros in particular is... Oh, yeah. I think that's true. But I've also been thinking about the ways that AI pushes me, at least. I don't know that it does this generally. I'm starting to see evidence that AI is pushing people back into the world rather than removing them from it. In what sense? Well, here's an example that just happened to me this week. So it's the springtime. Thank gosh. I mean, golly, it's like been so cold all winter and finally spring and I need to water my lawn because it's spring again.

52:50And I live in a place where it freezes. So you have to turn on the irrigation system. And there's like a leak in my backflow, my irrigation backflow, which is something we don't need to talk about today. But it's a thing that you have to have in your irrigation system. And so I talked to AI and I'm like, help me figure out how to fix this, right? So in that sense, I'm not generating text. You know, AI is pushing me back out into the world where I'm taking on these real material tasks that I might not have done otherwise. So I think it's complicated. I think the smoothing over is happening for sure.

53:27But there's also these kind of rough edges that AI is revealing, including, for me really, like inviting me to engage with the physical world in ways that I might not have chosen to previously. Is there a linkage to the fact that you edited the book series called Object Lessons? Well, certainly when we, so Object Lessons, which is a delightful book series, we've done about 100 books with Bloomsbury. And they're all about the secret life of ordinary things is the tagline. We've done so many books, Taco and Phone Booth and Jeff did Magazine. And so I've been interested in things for a very long time, ordinary things, toasters and stuff.

54:09You know, that's just an obsession of mine for forever. and people sometimes sneer at you when you think when they find out that you're interested in toasters they're like why like that's not important and one of the things that object lessons was meant to do was to say yes it is that it is important to to to tell those stories uh and then we tried to make the books themselves jeff held one up at the start like really delightful delightful objects they've got french flaps and you know we do pantoin printing on them and their covers are just wonderful. So I do think it's related, you know, that this is a project, this is a longstanding project for me that really touches a lot of things that I've done over the years, even if I didn't realize at the time how they were contributing to this, in this kind of discovery of gratification as a, as a, as a topic of interest.

54:58It's a very academic thing to do, to abstract those common things in life and ask, what else is there about this? And to learn lessons from that. And I haven't read your book yet, but I'm suspecting that there's a through line to that. There is. The through line, I mean, for me personally, you know, you asked like, what's the story with all these things that you've done? And as a game designer, you know i was always thinking about the games are absurd games are ridiculous and there's no purpose to them there's no reason to play candy crush um or even scrabble uh but we do it and we enjoy it and that's unless paris is playing against me and then i don't enjoy it at all she smashes him you could even enjoy being you know like like whooped right defeated at a game And there's something about it that like, that's part of the deal is, is the pain of the suffering of playing.

55:59And so I've, I've, one of the things that it was always eating at me when I was writing about games, making games, studying games, teaching about games, it's like, why, why is this miserable, weird, useless, purposeless thing so compelling? And one reason I think it's compelling is because games invite us to engage with something that doesn't matter, that, that doesn't need to exist, that almost shouldn't, that's pure excess. And if you, if you look at the world, it's full of all that kind of stuff too, that, you know, like I, I can, I can feel the, the smoothness. I have this walnut desk in front of me and I can feel the smoothness of the wood under my hands.

56:39And sometimes I just, I just do that. And that's gratification. That's, that's delight. That's sensory delight. It doesn't do anything for me. But if I didn't do that, if I didn't accept the gift of that sensory encounter, would my life be better? No, it wouldn't. I would be missing out on that little moment that's free. And so, it may not seem that that has anything to do with games, but I really did come to some of those observations through my experience with games and then later with the philosophy of objects and the way that Jeff kind of hinted at. So, AID objectifies things. Everything is an abstraction in AI.

57:16AI is complicated. I think what AI is doing is giving us a very easy to use window into answers or simulated answers to lots of questions, which means that we ask a lot more questions. And that's qualitatively different than Google, I think, partly because it's quantitatively different. It happens faster, but that makes it qualitatively different. Like the story I told about the irrigation fix like why wouldn't I have done that just by going to YouTube or Reddit and the answer is pretty clear isn't it it's because I wouldn't have been able to find the answer on YouTube I would have like stumbled into some some channel that had a bunch of ads and pre-roll and I would have had to find the part of the video where it was correct and or I would have had to wade through all the arguments on Reddit about someone had already asked and answered this question eight years ago.

58:09And the AI just tells you, it's like, oh, you know, I can take a picture of this apparatus. And it's like, okay, here's what you do. And you know, it's not always right. And I know that people worry about that. And I worry about it too. But it's often right. And in my case, in this example, it was right. And it helped me not just fix something in my life, but engage physically with a part of the world, a part of my home that I had never touched, not really um and that is i think that's kind of magical and it's a different story than the one that i've heard told about ai

58:43Ian Bogost:You famously said you were glad that AI ingested your books. I did, yeah. Yeah. Someone noticed this, I guess. I was wondering if anyone had noticed that I wrote that. I agree with it. In fact, I've said the same thing. What was your argument for it? When you make something as a creator, it is no longer yours. It lives in the world. Isn't that what all of us want? you write a book or you make a piece of art and you want it to um to travel it's no longer connected to my intention and what i might do with it and and anyone can consume it and they can misinterpret it or they can reinterpret it or they can throw it away or they can crumple it up or whatever it is that they do with it that is that is what it means to be a creative person and to disseminate work in the world and i'm disturbed in a way by this this this idea that we ever had control of our work.

59:31And yes, I realized that AI, I mean, it was like stealing the books, like the digital files for the books. That's like a slightly different topic than a computer reading them. Who would have ever thought when I wrote these books 20 years ago, that someday a computer would read and understand them and make new sense of them? Oh my God. That is certainly something that I don't want to squelch. I don't want to say, well, you know, that's not what I meant when I wrote the book, because we don't get to mean how our work is interpreted.

1:00:05Ian Bogost:It's another form of dissemination. It's another way to give what you're giving. Readers are the ones who give books meaning, and it's another way to give meaning. And the funny thing about this is this idea of dissemination, this idea that when you make something, it enters the world and there's no longer yours. This is like, you know, 50, 60 years old in literary criticism and philosophy. This is not a new concept, but somehow we kind of forgot about it. I think the internet made people feel as though they had more control and they deserved more control than they ever did before. And now it suddenly seemed like you could talk to celebrities or you could repost when someone misinterpreted you or you perceived that they did.

1:00:49And every article I write, now I have to deal with people responding to it online and thinking that i should engage in conversation with them about it it kind of changed our our worldview about how work enters the world in uh 2022 you wrote a a great piece called which

1:01:07Ian Bogost:i remember vividly chat gpt is dumber than you think and basically you said it's a toy yeah not a tool but a toy yeah now here we are four years later things have changed a little bit yeah i mean it was always going to become a tool because that's the thing that we make when we make computer systems, but it's also a toy. And, and what I mean by a toy is like, it's something you just do for its own sake, you know, like you manipulate it and you mess around with it. It's an entertainment vehicle too. Like sometimes I'll just have chat GPT, like, you know, write me heart crane poems about Diet Coke or whatever.

1:01:44Like, what's the point of that? It's not in order that I can have the hard grain poem. It's in order that I can kind of explore two things that I love, that poet and Diet Coke in a different way. And like, I think that that persists as a use of AI, that usage still persists. And sometimes I'll just kind of hang out with one of these machines and spend a little time with it, not personifying it, but just exploring it in the same way that I would have, you know, clicked through Wikipedia articles, or in the same way that I would hold a... I have a Rubik's Cube over here. When you play with this thing, sometimes it's just about holding it in your hands and kind of feeling what it's like for the...

1:02:27For me, it is because I can never solve it. Oh, I can't solve it either.

1:02:32Ian Bogost:That's an interesting point. It's a game that you can't solve, but it's still pleasant. Right. And some of the things that we love about games and toys and objects is not that they're useful, but that they can be manipulated. I mean, I don't mean manipulated, like used in indiscriminate ways. I mean, like just physically touched. That's the game. Yeah, playing. That's what play is. That's right. Yeah. Ian, I'm eager to hear your thoughts on AI and education. Not the obvious, not the everybody has blue books. Right. But calling on what you said earlier about the machine reading your books, you now have a machine that not only speaks our language, but it supposedly learns.

1:03:14And does this affect, at a high level, does this affect your view, your perspective on learning generally? And then because of everything you do in education, I'm curious about your view of education in the class, AI in the classroom. Yeah, you're on the front lines. I am. And I've written about this extensively. And, you know, I've tried my best in my writing on AI and education. And I focused on higher education because that's where I live. I've tried to give everyone voice. You know, the students, the faculty, the administrators, the AI companies, even. And I feel like it's complicated. These things are here and we can't deny that.

1:03:54And what does it mean? In terms of learning, I do think that this ability, like think about the irrigation story, like this ability that I have to try something out, like relatively easily, fairly consequence free uh this is related to a concept in the learning sciences of which i'm not an expert but i do know and i've loved this concept for many years called performance before competence have you ever heard of this the idea is uh it's it's generally good for learning if you get kind of thrown into the deep end you don't quite know what you're doing and instead of ratcheting up from the basics, at least all the time, by pretending that you're an expert, by, you know, really kind of jumping in with both feet, you can learn in a different way.

1:04:46And, you know, some kinds of learning, you want like skill and drill basics. Sometimes you want to learn fundamentals and build up, you need to learn color theory or something before you can paint. And then in other cases, especially complex situations, performance is performance before competence really works. So you get a new job and you don't really know what you're doing and you You kind of figure it out by being in the environment of work and talking to people. And then you work it out relatively quickly, partly because you have to, and partly because you're fully embodied in that situation.

1:05:15And AI seems particularly, potentially good at this. I don't know that it's actually good at this. It's very, very, very good at it for computer programming, which is something that interests me. I don't know if it's so great for writing argumentative essays. But I think it has a lot of potential. and I also think it rubs against the standard practices we've used in classrooms for a long time, which are not like that. We don't really trust the students to learn in that way, and we haven't set up the learning environment for them to learn in that way most of the time. That said, I worry about, it's so easy.

1:05:58It's so easy and so tempting when you have a problem solving machine like this just to have it solve problems and what i see among the students they are they are pulled in so many directions they're they're they're full of anxiety they are facing a a difficult and a difficult job market that seems to be becoming ever more difficult they have spent their whole lives worrying about performance and trying to get to the next thing in order that they can then get to the next thing they don't even know why they're doing things sometimes and so they're like wired to just accomplish and they don't even know why they're accomplishing things sometimes and so you put ai in front of them and what do you expect to happen it's like well the moment i need a release valve there it is and it will give you the answer i i teach this class we just had the last meeting just just this afternoon i teach this class on atari 2600 programming where we make atari games love it yeah it's delightful oh the mosfet two years ago.

1:07:01Sprites. Oh yeah, sprites. And, you know, I mean, it's a really challenging machine to program. You have to write it all in 6502 assembly and it doesn't have any video RAM and it's very, very weird. And I love it. I love the thing. I've been teaching and writing about it and making games for it for a long time.

1:07:17Ian Bogost:Oh man, I wish I had classes like that. Yeah, no, I mean, I can't believe I get to do this. So a couple years ago, you know, when AI started, I was like, look, guys, like, you can't use AI to program the Atari. like trust me it just it's just gonna and now you kind of can you kind of can really you kind of can there's enough 6502 code out there it under it understands it well enough now it doesn't mean that the students understand what they're doing and if they want to go in and modify so it's a very tightly you know wound up system and the time you only have 16k you've got yeah it's very we got 4k 4k roms 128 bytes of ram and um anyway so i have some students you know this even this term.

1:07:55And, you know, they would submit code and I'd be like, I know that they wrote this with AI. It's totally different than the code that I was showing them. And when I talked to them about it, you know, they're trying to solve the problem of their lives. They're like, well, look, I've got a million other things going on. I was trying to get a handle on how to do this. I thought I had to ask it and it was giving me the answers. They're not cheating. I mean, they are cheating, but that's not the way that they perceive it. And it's not the way that I perceive it either. It's rather that the whole world has been wound so tight in this watch spring-like way that what are you going to do?

1:08:31And I think that is the thing I think about most with education. Where do you learn these, when you have to learn fundamentals, how do we guarantee that it happens when it's so easy to shortcut or short circuit the process? I loved your I love your idea of games being the analogy used of a playground which yeah

1:08:57Ian Bogost:is a series of rules that a kid can go into and because of the rules can be free and yeah this is the weirdest thing about about games and play there's this paradox that the way that play becomes more interesting is becoming by becoming more constricted rather than less so so you think you know play sounds like do anything you want it's freedom go out and play but that's that's not right it's not fun yeah what you need and if you watch children who are better at everything than adults are if you watch children negotiate play they do this instantly you know they're like okay here's what we're gonna do you can't go you can only work through steps in this direction right you can't go past the the line of the door uh if you sneeze you're out whatever it is they're always you know assigning these new constraints on the system and broadly speaking in your life if you're missing meaning or if you know if something feels like it's just no good anymore uh and you want to get out it's just like oh if i could just escape from this then i would finally be free and happy again it's usually the opposite it's that you need some some set of constraints to work to work under maybe that's what this book is all about is recovering that since that childlike sense it's very Zen there is a there is a yeah there is a child I mean there is there's some lessons from from children in it yeah I think that kids are curious okay children have not encountered things before right like the reason a baby will put stuff into its mouth is is because it wants to sense it.

1:10:35And there's like so much sensation in your mouth. And if you think about what makes a three-year-old really irritating, it's that they're always asking questions. And it's because they don't know anything. They don't know what anything is. They're like, what is this thing? There's a telephone pole here. What's that about? What's a telephone pole? And if you think about that curiosity and that openness, we lose it over time. Our lives get busy, but also we have to tune out the noise. or we'll go crazy and part of what i'm interested in in this book is um letting back in the stuff that we shut out i guess that's what object lessons was about too i just love the idea of 111 books

1:11:19Ian Bogost:about not just magazines remote controls golf balls yeah drones driver's licenses driver's license was there any one that really surprised you oh so many of them have surprised us you know So when we, Silence, the one that's on the screen right there by just an amazing writer friend, John Biganet, people were like, you can't do an object lessons book on silence. Silence isn't an object. And I was like, well, yeah, who says? Like, all I mean by object is like an entity in the world, you know? I just mean like a noun. A noun, yeah. And, you know, it's funny the way that that rubs people the wrong way.

1:11:57So that was one that was surprising. And we've learned a lot about books. you know like the like it turns out that golfers spend a lot of money on on golfing but not a lot of money on books or baseball baseball uh they'll spend money on on books so that was interesting didn't really have anything to do with the objects but that was something it's so much fun to i mean just having written one of them and i've got five more i want to i want to buy all 111 it's so much fun to write too because you you look at something differently it's yes it's focusing very holding The skull. There is this concept in philosophy, the TSD question.

1:12:32It's from Greek. It means, what is it? TSD, what is it? What is its nature? And it's the first question that you ask when you're thinking about existence or something existing. And you can kind of live your whole life in that question about anything. You could spend the whole rest of your life asking, what is a phone booth, actually? And you would be happy with that life, I think. Because there's so much to learn and to observe about everything in the world. And this attitude of mine, I mean, it's really been one that I've cultivated. I just want to share it. I feel so compelled to share it because I am not perfect and I haven't figured it all out.

1:13:09But I feel like this attitude has been so helpful to me. And it's so different from the attitude of big stuff, happiness thinking, which is like, I have to accomplish more. My life needs, I have to have more wealth. My relationships have to be this way instead of that way. Whereas I'm going to just allow the crunch of the twig under my foot or the sensation of the hot mug in my hands. Just I'm going to accept that. I'm going to let that happen to me right now and accept it. And then I'm going to move on to the next thing. That's such a different way of thinking about contentment.

1:13:42Ian Bogost:The whole world in a drop of water. It's kind of Taoist, actually. There is a kind of Eastern perspective that's represented here. And in a couple of my books now, I've kind of taken the Western adoption of kind of Buddhist style Zen mindfulness to task because I think that mostly what it's done is giving people a – it's like, I need to take a break from achieving so that I can recharge so I can achieve more. Yeah. And that's, that's not what the Buddhist meant at all. You know, that's all about letting go. And so in the, in the, in the small stuff book, you know, one of the things that we had, I did this, this podcast at the Atlantic and we had Oliver Berkman on and Oliver Berkman's in the book too, this sort of story from the podcast.

1:14:33And he did this great book called 4 ,000 weeks about how you're mortal and you actually have less time than you think. And we were talking about some of these themes. Tell us about it. Yeah. And, you know, and he says, he said on this, on this show of ours, he was like, I find it, you know, like, like getting back to the senses is one way that you can just kind of live your life in the moment. But I find, I find it really hard to get in this mindset. He said something like that. And that really caught me dead in my tracks because I was like, well, what do you mean? Like, you don't have to have a mindset for experiencing your senses at all.

1:15:03I'm not talking about your mind. I'm talking about your body. I'm talking about your fingertips and your nose. And it's just amazing to me that in the West, especially, we've tied ourselves in these knots where we feel like we can't, we won't accept that we can just sense things. We can just feel and see and smell and be in the world that somehow we have to practice that. That's kind of bananas actually, isn't it? And if you let go of that idea and you just let it happen to you, then the whole universe unlocks. And every moment is available to you as this kind of easy opportunity for this sensory enchantment, this thing I call gratification.

1:15:44Do you have a related view on the move by some folks, Jan Lacon and company, toward world models, trying to imagine AI to have that experience of the world like a toddler or experiencing it and learning from it or a cat. Yeah. I mean, the thing that I think about the most in this topic is like, what is the difference between being embodied and not being embodied? Okay. And, you know, as I've become so interested in embodied experience and as AI has been on the rise and AI is fundamentally disembodied, and like, let's set aside our matrix conspiracy theories, right? Like, you might say to me, well, Bogus, like maybe we live in a simulation anyway and you're not embodied you're just it's just a simulation of embodiment but i feel like i'm embodied and that's enough for me for now you know what's the difference between understanding something by having read everything on the internet and being able to predict what word comes next and give me information about how to engage with that world and feeling it for real and maybe that is helpful because we can can't we have it both ways?

1:16:56You know, we could, we could do the world modeling thing and have a sim. I think it's like, I have all this experience with simulations, right? And back in the day, when I started working on simulations, I did a lot of stuff for like, you know, science and politics and, and, and, and education and corporate learning. And, and in the world of, of simulations, we always knew that they were representations. And then somehow we stopped, we started thinking, no, they're not, they're just the world, the world and the representation of the world. are indistinguishable, which is very odd to me. So even a world model in this advanced Yann LeCun kind of way is still a representation of the world.

1:17:36And if we can agree on that, then I'm totally on board. And what that gives us is that gives us this incredible distance between what the AI knows and can do and what we as human beings know and can do. And yeah, you can wire it up to a robot and you can do all that kind of stuff, but it will still be a differently embodied entity. It won't be you or me. And the thing that we share as human beings in the world, which should give us comfort, I think.

1:18:02Ian Bogost:Ian Bogost, his book is The Small Stuff. It'll be out in July. You can pre-order it now from a variety of places if you go to the website. Are you doing the audio book, Ian? This is under discussion. I want to do it because I have a chapter in the book about ASMR. um yeah you sound you could do a you have a great voice for it yeah yeah yeah yeah uh we've been we've been debating us back and forth like currently the plan is that there is an audiobook and we have a professional and uh and i'm still like a little bit jealous you know i really kind of want i want to speak the words but i also would love it i'd love to share that experience but like there will be an audiobook no matter and you'll be i should know this and i don't did you record your early books?

1:18:52No, no, I didn't do it. You've never recorded a book? I have a previous life as, I had a small publishing company many years ago, and so I've overseen audiobook production, but I've never recorded one. It's a lot of work. It's torture. It's an exquisite torture. No, I know how I've been on the other side of the board in the studio with it. Oh, you definitely should do it. Well, I'm glad to have that. Let us convince you.

1:19:17Ian Bogost:The small stuff, how to lead a more gratifying life read by Ian Margoz, I think would be a bestseller. I would listen to it all the time. You got disconnected from the physical world, but you can reclaim the sensory enchantment of everyday life. I guess there is a thread leading through a lot of your work. There really is. People ask me all the time. They're like, how did you get from where you started to where you are? And it's like, well, one day at a time. And I think the difference between me and some people is that, oh, this is going to sound haughty. I don't mean it to. Like, I've really learned from the things I've had the opportunity to do, and I've changed my mind a lot.

1:20:00And so I am on this random walk through life, taking those lessons and trying to find new things to describe and tell people about. And I'm just so grateful to have had that opportunity.

1:20:14Ian Bogost:Yeah. We're grateful. and i hope you come back when the book comes out i'll be back when the book comes out good absolutely we would love that uh and meanwhile everybody uh readian's writing in the atlantic uh get his books i have i want to get all of these object lessons books these are so cool it's such a great idea uh to honor these individual they're a little 100 books on the shelf yeah they look very nice together on the shelf too oh i might there's even one about the bookshelf there is one of them it's kind of a meta a meta experience we got yeah and they're all they all have their own take on things by the way it's not like let me tell you everything about bread or the cigarette light right like they're all very particular right neat what a great idea thank you for your time Ian oh thanks so much I feel very fortunate thank you thank you have a great day all right take care we will have more with intelligent machines but now no more fighting just peace oh no i'm gonna bring up y 'all in the cone in a few minutes we're gonna we're gonna we'll always be fighting i was waiting for ian to just destroy you on that but okay nope nope couldn't get him to do it you tried thank you ian you can hang up now he's looking for the button i can see him i know there's a button here to get rid of these people we'll have more intelligent machines just a bit with paris and jeff this episode brought to you by out systems the number one ai development platform out systems helps businesses bridge the enterprise gap to their agentic future you've been looking for this haven't you where the constraints of the past give way to unlimited capacity and scale out systems enables companies to build ai agents that can actually do work such just take actions, make decisions, and integrate with data rather than just, you know, answering questions.

1:22:10Ian Bogost:OutSystem provides the only AI development platform that's unified, agile, and enterprise proven. It's unified because you can build, run, and govern apps and agents in a single platform. It's agile because you can innovate at the speed of AI, but without compromising quality or control. And it is enterprise proven, trusted by enterprises for mission-critical AI applications and durable innovation. OutSystems is the secret weapon behind the world's most successful companies. They're not just for small apps. They're for the massive, complex systems that run banks, insurance companies, and government services.

1:22:47Ian Bogost:OutSystems even helps companies with aging IT environments bridge the gap to the AI future without a rip-and-replace nightmare. OutSystems provides the safest and fastest way for an enterprise to go from yikes we need an ai strategy to we have a functioning ai application stop 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 use out systems to build deploy and manage ai apps and agents quickly and cost effectively without compromising reliability and security. That's O-U-T-S-Y-S-T-E-M-S.com slash TWIT to book a demo.

1:23:30Ian Bogost:Outsystems.com slash twit. We thank him so much for supporting the enterprise, sorry, the intelligent machine program. I was, boy, he's great. Why haven't you pushed to get him on before, Jeff? This is, you're muted i put him on the list sometimes oh i think i think well i'm glad he's brilliant he's awesome amazing yeah uh barbara and david thomas distinguished professor at washington university inst louis contributing right here at the atlantic as i said best voice we've had in the pod isn't it yes it's very peaceful yeah it's first i think the asmr version of his book would be fantastic yeah so yeah if he just wanted to record a version of him uh reading every single one of the object lesson books people all around the world would be falling asleep to that in a complimentary way in a complimentary very good yes an enjoyable with a smile on the face yes it would be so we have so much news i don't know exactly what to do here there's no way i knew that we wouldn't get through it all.

1:24:36Ian Bogost:But I'm really now we've only gotten through one segment. Two interviews in one segment, I guess one of the stories, and we can kind of take a bunch of data points and squeeze it down to the story, which is I think compute has become really a precious resource. Dr. Emily Helderberg 1 It was always we just weren't aware of it. We weren't as con as it wasn't as top of mind, but it's always been a precious resource. It was like VC money and audience back in the - I was going to say, we're now getting to a point where these companies are realizing they have to be more explicit with their efforts to ration it as consumers are using more and more of it.

1:25:19Ian Bogost:Well, that's why it wasn't constrained until now because consumers weren't using as much, but they've wrapped up very, very, very rapidly and data centers can't be built fast enough. um anthropic has now decided that they're no longer ed ed had this uh ed zitron had this scoop uh going to allow you to use claude code not only from the free claude but from the 20 a month pro subscription you have to be a max subscriber well that's not exactly they anthropic what happened was a lot of people on reddit and twitter uh over the weekend um or maybe it was Monday, and noticed that Claude code was removed from the$20 a month pro plan on some of the pricing pages on the Claude website.

1:26:06And people started asking around, being like, well, I could still see it and use it on my pro subscription. What's going on? Anthropics head of growth, Amal Evazar, claimed that it was a, quote, small test of 2 % of new pro-consumer signups. However, Ed and some other cloud users view that statement with suspicion because they were wondering why support documents were changed and other things like that. But that has since been reversed. Oh, okay.

1:26:39Ian Bogost:It's interesting because the immediate response from OpenAI was to say, oh, and guess what? You can use codex in the free program. So have at it. I think the theory is this was a come on always was a it was always subsidized it was a come on to get people to try it but ultimately they really want you to move not just to the max plans because i think they still lose and it's been saying this too that they still lose money in the max plans that i mean they lose money on all the plans all the plans the max plans were designed to get your data in for training and that they really want you to start using their api tokens where you pay as you go and in fact now they are saying to enterprises that's the only way you can use us you have to pay for tokens pay as you go which i don't it's not demonstrated that they lose money on that by the way um i think there's no it similarly there's absolutely no evidence that they don't lose money on it and all you know anecdotal understanding of how much these sort of things cost suggests otherwise like if if anthropic was making money on any of its subscriptions I'd hope that it'd be shouting that from the rooftops because it'd be an extraordinarily rare and unique thing that they'd be using to raise money on.

1:27:55Important context here is that during all of this, Amal, Evisar, the head of growth, tweeted, when we launched Max a year ago, it didn't include cloud code, co-work didn't exist, and agents that run for hours weren't a thing. Max was designed for heavy chat usage. That's it. And I think this kind of goes up against what we're all talking about. The way that users are using Anthropics monthly subscription products has really changed rapidly over the last couple of years. As more and more companies and more and more people are becoming cloud code power users and using an immense amount of resources for$20 or$100 something a month.

1:28:39You also have to get to the point of rationalizing the business. It reminds me of the early days of the web when VC money was used to create content cheaply and, more importantly, to market and get audiences inexpensively. And it was marketing dollars. And in a sense, usage is marketing. It convinced people this is valuable. They spread it. It was an investment. But at some point, it's not rationalized on a P &L basis.

1:29:05Ian Bogost:Microsoft doing something similar. GitHub has stopped accepting new co-pilot individual subscriptions. because they are having trouble meeting their service commitments. And so no new subscriptions at all. They've also changed the, they've adjusted the usage limits as has Anthropic. I think this is a general problem going on. Turning away customers is not a great business strategy. Well, yeah. I get it. But worst strategy would be to take customers you cannot serve. Yes. And I think that that's what they're up against. And that's why I say it's not a financial crunch. It's a capacity crunch. And it's going to be an issue.

1:29:47Ian Bogost:It absolutely is going to be an issue. Although Michael Dell has something interesting to say about this. He says the demand for tokens is proof that we are not going to have an AI bubble, that there is demand for this, that the businesses have accepted that it is valuable and something they want. the demand for tokens is in excess of the supply by a lot he said this was at the semaphore world economy summit yesterday it would hard be hard for there to be a bubble right now just because there's not enough supply at this price point we'll see when you get to paris's point if you get to the real cost will that continue to be i would i would push back on that i don't think we know what the real cost is so yeah that's the underlying but you're making an assumption that The real cost that they're doing this at a loss, it's not at all clear.

1:30:36Well, we've had a lot of, there's been no evidence that none of these large AI companies have reported making a profit on any aspect of their business because of the compute costs.

1:30:52Ian Bogost:Well, they're not public, so they don't report, first of all. They have not in, sorry, in conversations with investors as well as. Okay, but you don't know what the costs are because remember they're also building - Are you genuinely arguing that you think that the Claude selling access to Claude code is profitable at$20 a month? Well, no, no, it's not at$20. That's why they're stopping. What about at$100? What about at$200? It's not at either of those. The token cost is considerably higher. Most enterprises are paying tens of thousands of dollars, but you're asserting that that's losing the money as well.

1:31:23Ian Bogost:And I'm not saying that may not be. That's why they're moving people to those. I mean, we may, I just don't think we know. And because they're not public companies, We don't have that information. Plus the costs that they face are more than providing inference. The costs are buying all those GPUs and building data centers and so forth. Settling with copyright suits. Yeah. Certainly that's not an insignificant cost either. Anthropic is doing something interesting with regards to Amazon. They are expanding their partnership with Amazon. They're setting up five gigawatts of new compute. five gigawatts is pretty significant that's uh that's a couple probably a couple of data centers um and amazon is committed to a further investment of up to 25 billion dollars in anthropic but anthropic saying and yeah in return we're going to buy a hundred billion dollars worth of aws so uh i think that's that's kind of interesting that's building on the 8 billion amazon's already invested so they put 5 billion in today an additional 20 billion in the future and they've already put in eight billion so i listened to the um uh now infamous interview with patel uh dworkish patel with uh jensen long because i am a student of jason long i listen to all of his performances i think dworkish actually did a very good job and i i know you think that jensen was prickly no i don't think i think he appreciated the chance to defend he said he said enjoyed it and i think that uh i think dworkish um yes he tried but i think that jensen in the end i think won the day yes um because he knew the most interesting one jensen said and i thought this was really interesting and i'm not sure how i feel about it is it is foolish to hold back chips from china now obviously nvidia would love to sell every one of its chips if it had actually I don't know if NVIDIA needs to sell any more chips.

1:33:18Ian Bogost:I think they're sold out. But it wants CUDA to be everywhere. He made that very clear. And I think this was his point, which I think is a very good point, that if you create a supply constraint to China, they're going to invent their own way. And it's not going to end up being a universal capability. It's going to be restricted to China. And it's going to hurt America. It's going to hurt enterprise because China will have its own better way. the best thing is for us to all they don't need it we should all so it's a little self-serving because cuda is his and his proprietary his chips are his and proprietary but at the same time it makes an interesting point he also argues that that they don't need the top chips because they have unlimited power this is to what paris was saying earlier is that what what what um nvidia has to do to prove its value to its customers here in in finite data centers with finite gigawatts of power, he said they've got to constantly increase the value you get for that power.

1:34:17And he said, in China, they have unlimited power. They control it all. They can do it all. And so they don't need the top chips. They don't need that level of efficiency, and they can compete with the US. And he said, why would we give up this huge market? The other thing I didn't get, and it's just a bit of history that you probably know that I don't, he was, Dworkish was asking him about the early days of Anthropic and how NVIDIA would have done more with them, but couldn't at the time. Did you understand that part at all?

1:34:48Ian Bogost:No. Okay, nevermind. But I thought it was a very interesting interview. It was very interesting to see the debate squad, Jensen Wong. I think he's a brilliant communicator, a brilliant presenter. It's time that Jensen got in a situation where somebody challenged him, was smart enough to challenge him. And I think that Jensen - I think he did very well. Yeah. I think he's a great debater, too. Yeah. And it's just fascinating to watch him in operation. This is the problem with things like the Tech Bros Podcast Network and others, is they're softball throwers. And I know that CEOs like softballs, but I think Jensen's one of those guys who might prefer every once in a while something a little juicy across the country.

1:35:28Well, we kind of heard that from Stephen Witt, who wrote the book on Jensen Wong. here on the podcast yeah he's combative yeah yeah yeah spacex has struck a deal this is a wild deal

1:35:37Ian Bogost:talking about deals with cursor saying well either buy you for 60 billion cursor is a very popular vibe coding platform it's kind of an ide plus as we found out recently claude code in the background well cursor doesn't admit that uh 60 billion or if we don't buy you 10 billion for working together not sure what's going on there a lot of these ai deals two of two of interesting two cursor people left for for x which explains the bridge to this but i wonder why given that if open ai has been out there buying stuff others been buying stuff if your cursor is musk where you want is that the best place to put your chips yeah how did this deal i think this is personally opinion i think cursor isn't is really laggard they don't have their own models it's just a harness uh all both it's the perplexity of vibe coding yeah open ai and anthropic have their harnesses there are many many open source third party harnesses like open cordon or in pie and and i just think cursor is rapidly losing its motor has no mode at all and so i take the money and run if i were them personally and i wouldn't care who's giving it to me i remember when that old company long ago that had the uh the screen saver was an information i can't remember the name of it uh when you when your machine went to a screen saver this very early internet and rupert murdoch offered them 400 million dollars Yeah.

1:37:16And they said, no, no, no, we're far more valuable than that.

1:37:19Ian Bogost:Yeah. No, you always take the money and run. Yeah. If there's any lesson we've learned from the internet era, take the money and run. Google right now is doing its next conference. And man, were there a lot of announcements out of Google. And I don't know if we want to cover all of them, but one of the biggest is the eighth generation. Change log. The Google change log. do we have that still i don't know no those graphics are long gone long gone oh really oh sorry thank god uh google has announced its eighth generation of tpus these are the uh chips google makes in competition with uh nvidia's how do they compare in terms of of i think uh a lot of people use them in fact i think that's what amazon's using i may be wrong on that well i think they all have to use all of them because because again cuda is a shortage you can't i mean doesn't google google's hosting offers nvidia chips and cuda yeah have to oh i don't know yeah maybe they do have some so cloud next introducing the eighth generation of their custom tensor processor unit i'm not expert enough to know i mean i think generally the consensus is that the nvidia chips are superior partly because they own cuda right there's a certain advantage there um but i don't think uh you know i would think it'd be premature to write google off in any of this and google just uh we think rumor did a deal with marvel to produce more chips right and i think more inference chips again this is what dell is saying i think is that there is such demand that it you know if it's a bubble we're not at the end of it by any means also to answer the efficiency question these tpus are designed to be much more efficient the seventh generation tpus were two to four times faster and 30 percent lower i'm sorry the eighth generation are two to four times faster and 30 percent lower and this is unclear that one then the the seventh are better than the sixth and i guess the eighth are even better should be but should be yeah yeah but but they're going for efficiency in other words uh symmetric and this single tpu super pod has 9600 chips two petabytes of shared high bandwidth meta memory wonder where they're getting the memory chips uh with double the interchip bandwidth of previous generation 121 exaflops of compute so these are very powerful machines it's funny how cuda really has become a moat for uh nvidia the software not the hardware uh they announced a gemini uh enterprise agent platform and developer tool built on vertex they said maybe this is interesting 75 this is sundar pachai talking 75 of the company's new code is ai generated 75 percent um i wonder though if they're using claude or if they're using gemini there's a wondering if they're gonna have a come to jesus moment like amazon did when was it a couple weeks right over there where they're like yeah actually yeah all of our code has been generated and it's a real problem that it's a problem with engineering because deep mind has access to Claude and uses Claude, the competitor, and everybody else at Google is forced to use Gemini.

1:40:58Ian Bogost:And Yegi says, it's been a real problem in engineering at Google. Google is at great pains to deny it. When I asked Christina Warren, who used to work at DeepMind, she's now one of the hosts on MacBreak Weekly, she said, no, that's not been my experience. That's not accurate. But Yegi says, oh no, I'm hearing from a lot of people at Google who's very distraught that they They're forced to use Gemini. And in fact, Google, he says, tried to take Claude away from DeepMind. And DeepMind said, you take it away from us, we're walking. We're out of here. Let's see. I'm running through these really quickly, trying to get at least some of these big stories out.

1:41:36Ian Bogost:YouTube is making its deep fake detection tool to anyone at high risk of having their likeness abused, not just public officials and politicians. Good. Yeah. there are a bunch of new models uh we kind of hinted at this there's Claude design and this is the change log yeah this is the change log Claude design from anthropic labs is a design tool aimed straight at the heart of Figma uh chat GPT has announced images 2.0 everybody's using images they say they can even pull information from the web to create your images Salesforce has launched headless 360 to turn its entire platform all that business information into infrastructure for ai agents they're running a bit scared i think two big new chinese models alibaba's quen 3.6 agentic coding power it's open weight but you need a pretty hefty machine to run it i can't run it on my framework that's for sure uh you need probably a a few 50 90s at least is Is there a system requirement?

1:42:41Is there a system requirement, Doc?

1:42:44Ian Bogost:Probably. You know, when I was looking around to see if I could run it, I asked Claude, can I run it? And it laughed at me. It said no. But it is a fully open source. You don't have enough RAM, man. I have 128 gigs. It's not enough, man. Fully open source MOE model mixture of experts, which does mean it can be smaller because all of the model isn't running at the same time. Alibaba is saying, Exceptional agentic coding capability, competitive with much larger models, strong multimodal perception and reasoning ability. But you can run this on other places. Olama has a subscription. There are a number of places, open code subscriptions.

1:43:29Ian Bogost:Kimi 2.6 has also come out. not open weight, but a very powerful Chinese model, Kimi 2.6. And I've heard coders say some very good things about this. So everybody's chasing Anthropics Claude and Codex 5.4. Very, very hard. And I think this is good. Competition is always good, right?

1:43:55Ian Bogost:Did we talk about this last week? I think not. Sam Altman's world, you know, the iris scanning thing we didn't talk about it well now tinder is going to use them to make sure that uh you're a human not a bot uh when you're asking for dates um i'm not sure how this is going to be implemented but tinder users can use a can put a digital badge in their profiles signaling this is wired writing to potential suitors they're a real boy or real curl provided the data already have this but they just use kind of like a yodi like right thing this is this is like your eyes are getting your irises are good do you still get the world coin i don't i don't know probably although i think you don't get as much world coin in the u.s as you would get in other places uh world says 18 million people have been verified with an orb so the dating pool is wide yep uh but it's not just tinder zoom is going to use it uh to verify humans in meetings uh this is sam altman's company is one of his side bets this is not open ai docu sign octa shopify and vanek all signing deals with world to verify humanity uh one thing humans are good at is bipedal motion but they are no longer the world record holder for bipedal half marathons a robot has now the new world record 50 minutes and some seconds in a half marathon uh there look how fast that guy's going john henry woo it is it's like john Henry in the locomotive.

1:45:46Ian Bogost:I don't know what it means. Got a deep stance, that robot. Oh, yes. It runs low to the ground. The better videos of the robots falling over. Yeah, yeah. That's more than 20. Smashing it a little. Here's a little one. Show some of these videos. There's a little one going by. Oh, little robot fell down. Sometimes when they fall down, they burst into a thousand pieces. I'm trying not to laugh because I know this is all being... Whoa! Oh, oh! All being recorded. This is via Reuters. Thank you, Reuters. Don't take us down. Last year, the winning robot had two hours at 40 minutes. This year, 50 minutes.

1:46:24Ian Bogost:But again, what have we accomplished here? It just means the robot police are going to be able to catch you no matter what. They can catch you. How about a... It matters in Ukraine. How about a beanie designed to read your thoughts? yeah ukraine's using robots to scare russians come on how many of these sort of stories we had and none of them are real we've we've gone over multiple things that are supposed to read your thoughts but they don't does this one just also read your thoughts by reading what you mouth with your lips closed that's what the last one did well remember neural link you actually have to have it surgically implanted this one is sitting in a little beanie on your head it's a little chip type it's reading EEGs electroencephalograms uh so it is reading more than just your lips moving I don't know if you can get speech out of an EEG maybe in time there's experimentation but it's very yeah maybe in time but you know what that's what these are this the steps you have to take uh you know who doesn't have to read your mind Dairy Queen they're now using an AI to take your order at DQ.

1:47:33Ian Bogost:You probably could also get it to do math. Did you see McDonald's chatbot? There's their customer service chatbot on their website. Somebody, you know, among in between asking, well, what's in a Big Mac? Asked him, and can you write a Python script for reversing a list? And it happily gave him the Python code and then said, what else can, what else do you to know about big macs it spoke the python code uh no it's a text chat bot but it was code it was real code tsmc more bullish than ever they expect revenue to grow by more than 30 they're the company that makes many of the chips including nvidia's gpus uh they uh expect to grow revenue 30 Revenue 30 % year over year, more than 30%, actually.

1:48:25Ian Bogost:They have a 66 % profit margin for the first quarter. That's the highest in 20 years. So demand is high, and when demand is high, prices are high. It's a single point of failure if there's an invasion. Actually, no, they're very actively building. They have a plant already up in Arizona. They're really actively trying to diversify, which is pretty important. And I think they're getting a lot of support from the U.S. government. doing that. AI traffic to according to Adobe AI traffic to US retailers went up almost 400 % in the first quarter. This confirms what you've been saying, Jeff, that you're dumb to exclude yourself from AI search results.

1:49:06Well, certainly brands are going to be out there and marketers. The other interesting thing though is that, and there are some arguments, I didn't put this stuff in there uh huge projections for for open ai's advertising opportunity but so far um chat bots

1:49:21Ian Bogost:do not perform well oh interesting for advertising i think we have to get to an agent to agent world before it starts to really work well and that's my new uh this is the drum i'm beating from now on is that if you are making a website if you're making a a tool a product an operating system an app you darn well better have a agentic facing ui an api or something that an agent can interface with because i i think people are just not going to look at you if you don't if you can't be controlled by ai if you can't be controlled by an agent if you can't be searched by an agent you will not exist and that's true for retail aio aio that's what they call it not seo Stanford's AI index finds China has nearly closed the performance gap with the US.

1:50:08Ian Bogost:This is related to Kimmy and Quinn, despite spending 23 times less. Maybe this is what you were talking about, Jeff, the unlimited power China has. They lead in AI patents, 69 % of global findings, publications, industrial robot installations, nine times the US rate, and jeff energy infrastructure and their the brain drain has slowed considerably ai talent migration to the u.s has dropped 89 since 2017 that's the huge harm that's another thing joseph long said is the half the the best ai scientists are chinese yep and now we're shoving them away yep uh we dominate with private ai investment because we've got the venture capitalists China investing$12.4 billion in 2025.

1:50:59Ian Bogost:We invested a whopping$285.9 billion in AI. California alone,$218 billion of that, more than 75 % of the U.S. total. You know, I recently read a history of the Bell Labs, and it really struck me how history could have turned out differently, that so much of the great innovation, including especially the Transistor happened at Bell Labs in New Jersey. And the serendipity of how California ended up being the place. Instead of Jersey, man, Jersey should have been the valley. Really? Yeah, there was so much happening here on the East Coast. Oh, because of Bell Labs. Well, I also just read it. I recommend this right now.

1:51:43I was going to do it as a take. I just finished a wonderful book. Hold on here. Conquering the Electron by Derek Chung and Eric. Is this about the transistor? It starts with the Edison effect. It goes all the way through. Chung worked in chip making and so there's more of that stuff at the end.

1:52:06Ian Bogost:This is a Jeff Jarvis subtitle. The geniuses, visionaries, egomaniacs, and scoundrels who built our electronic age. So it's 12 years old, but it's really... sounds good it's very educational to read it yeah um and it's so it was it was uh the fact that um shockley went to california uh he was a horrible manager uh from bell labs but he but he and a credit hound and then he's not a great person in any bad stuff yeah but he hired the best people and there was the so-called traitorous eight who went and created fairchild and then from fairchild created intel and so on and so forth and it was really that seed that created silicon valley yep well so you know hewlett-packard always gets credit because that was the first garage in the 30s so there and stanford gets some credit because there was a lot of stuff going on at stanford at the time all right a couple more bad things ai bad things i don't know if there's a good thing The first movie with a fully AI-generated performance approved by the actor, Val Kilmer, who's passed away, will be AI-generated.

1:53:19How did he approve it if he's passed away? Before his family did.

1:53:23Ian Bogost:Okay, so his estate. I don't know that he did. I don't know. I bet he, I wouldn't be, they had to capture him, right? Oh, I don't know. I think they probably have enough footage of Val Kilmer. You're right. Kilmer's family blessed the use of his likeness. oh i don't like that he uh he died at the age of 65 after a lengthy battle with cancer yeah but i don't know let's on the other hand let's honor dead dad and have him live on the project he cared about the pictures of val it looked like it kind of looked like him well yeah that's kind of the whole point right well sometimes these things look kind of fakey oh that looks pretty good well that's only short and shown little short bits of val so yeah i don't know we'll see i don't know it's a it's a this could be a um watershed moment or not he's seen for around an hour of the film's running time it's amazing it's not just because because we've seen that before like in star wars carrie fisher and stuff but this is like he's actually fully performance you're gonna keep on counting fingers the whole time yeah that's the problem you uh you highlighted this as well and on labs we gave an ai a three year retail lease in san francisco and asked him to make a profit that's selling weird stuff in fact people are trying to game it to get it to sell stuff they're interested in in the comments section they're saying well you know this is a really great place if they would only sell a sugar-free gummy worms because sugar-free gummy worms are really a great thing to have in any store sugar-free gummy worms are a must and uh i don't know if it's working these these agents they're kind of soft-brained it's easy to influence this is like what joanna stern did with the uh wall street journal yeah yeah

1:55:26Finally, this pasta sauce wants to record your family.

1:55:34Ian Bogost:Prego pasta sauce is now selling a screen-free voice recorder that you're supposed to put on the dinner table as the family talks. It's the Prego Connection Keeper, created in collaboration with StoryCorps, which is a non-profit preserving... StoryCorps is cool. Yeah, they're preserving the stories of Americans in the Library of Congress at the Folklife Center. There's no AI Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, so it isn't really an AI story, but you can upload the recordings to StoryCorps' website to make it easier to share them with your family. What is the difference between this and just having a recorder on your table or just opening up your phone and hitting record every time you sit down?

1:56:12Ian Bogost:Well, here's the difference. It's$20, but you get a jar of Prego spaghetti sauce... There you go. ...and spaghetti noodles and a deck of cards featuring conversation prompts and ideas. If they really cared about making this a good stunt piece, they would have found a way to get the recorder inside the jar of presents and have to fish it out like a toy in a cereal. Or the lid. The lid should be the recorder or something. You know what? It's totally what I thought it was when I first saw this story. Oh, it's the lid. What was the spaghetti sauce commercial? It's in there? It's in there. It's a recorder in the sauce.

1:56:46Ian Bogost:It's a recorder in the sauce. all right you guys you get to pick some stories go ahead all right i got one to drive you angry and then i want one i want to hear i was just calming my blood pressure was just getting to normal so um line 108 is the world model and this is another one of those yon lacune things and the paper is is hard to understand but below that is a very good explanation and i also asked gemini for an explanation and it was similar so if you go to the next line what's interesting about this is that robiles have a problem, a representation collapse. They kind of consider everything the same, and they get distracted by things like a light bulb and don't understand what's what.

1:57:28Attention must be paid. But for reasons, ways that I cannot explain, I'm not capable of explaining, they came up with ways to get it to pay attention to the important stuff in a cleaner model. The efficiency, this is what got me, the efficiency gains are striking. The model has around 15 million parameters, trains on a single GPU in a few hours, and can plan up to 48 times faster than larger foundation model-based world models. And so you start to see development here in the world model side of things. And this doesn't say anything against LLMs. It doesn't say anything against the scale world.

1:58:04But it is a competitive worldview, which I think is really important that we get research going into other areas.

1:58:09Ian Bogost:I it's a little deceptive because uh I mean I I can train a model I have been training models here you can train uh small constrained models easily on some these are trained on video these are not on text but on video to understand so what I'm training is of uh I don't want to have to say uh Alexa or any of those words to talk to my agent I want to say hey Kenobi so i was gonna go hey obi-wan or actually i want to go help me obi-wan kenobi but it said that's not it's not good and that we actually tried it and what we did is we generated thousands of with speech synthesis thousands of audio files and trained on that plus some audio files that were similar but not it so that would have what to reject um but i think it was a bad phrase and And I was using a text-to-speech model called Piper that wasn't very good.

1:59:07Ian Bogost:So I'm going to move to a better model, the one I use called Kokoro. And I'm going to make it Hey Kenobi.

1:59:15Ian Bogost:Claude and I went back and forth on this and said, you know, you need some fricatives and some consonants in there. It'd be better if you started with something clearer. Call it fricative. A fricative. You need a fricative. I like that. Hey fricative. And so I said, what about Hey Kenobi? And he said, that's really good because of the K and the Kenobi, the B and the B and the Hay. And it said, that's going to be really good. So I haven't done it. I said, you know, would it be better if we use a synthetic model or if I said it? It said, well, you're going to have to say it 200 times and you're going to have to say it another 200 times of things that are close but not the same.

1:59:53Ian Bogost:I said, it's worth it. If it works, it's worth it. It said, you know, if you used Alexa, it'd be a lot better. I said, no, I don't want to use Alexa. So, in other words, if you're doing something constrained, you don't need a thousand GPUs and 8 trillion parameters because you're not training on a giant universe. You're training on a constrained universe. And so that's, I'm sure, what's going on here. These world models are simpler models. It's not a universal world model where it's like, well, you now know everything that happened in physics. We've had physics models for years. Games have them.

2:00:30Mm-hmm.

2:00:33Ian Bogost:So I think Jan has something he wants to sell. I'm not against it. I think it's just a competitive view. Jan and Fei-Fei Li, I think it's a competitive view. I wanted to get Paris' view, Paris, on the Peter Thiel-backed startup called Objection. Did you see this? Oh, vaguely. I mean, this is a startup that you can pay inordinate sums of money. Well, it starts at$2 ,000, yes. Yes, to basically, I think it's a mix of, they claim it's a mix of AI and humans that then will do research to disprove or investigate a claim you set it to. And some of the arguments or case studies that they're putting out there is things like basically trying to correct the record if you believe an article is false, which I just think is very laughable and speaks to these sort of people not really understanding how journalism works.

2:01:32Exactly. Or facts. It degrades anything that comes from a not named source. So all investigative journalism goes away. And it most trusts official documents. Well, we know how well that works. And then the AI is going to be the tribunal of truth in the end, having been presented with this information. and the idea is that it replaces both journalism and the courts and part of it is you're able to assign truth scores to every single reporter or outlet and your truth score will go down if you do terrible things like ignoring objections from objection so no no there's no objective truth then right so that's just whatever it says There's no objective truth.

2:02:24Ian Bogost:So here's a sample honor index for a fake journalist named Sarah Chen. She is 810 % trusted out of, no, 81 % trusted. Top 18 of tracked authors. And this is your score. Corrections. Well, you know, that's one good thing that retractions are issued within 48 hours. So publish corrections. Yeah, there's something called the Trust Project. Yes, but that's different than three objections ignored for over 30 days takes your score down negative 24 points. While correcting one published error and doing a retraction within 48 hours only takes it up 12 points. Gee, do you think you could game this? Yeah.

2:03:17Yeah, so it's ignorant. Is the principle wrong, though?

2:03:22Ian Bogost:I think the principle is wrong, right? Yeah. I mean, everything about it is wrong. Well, it's what Benito was trying to say. There's context. There's framing. There's nuance. And this erases all of that. Two plus two is four no matter what anybody says. Right. Facts is facts. And I mean, it gets to something that Ian was touching a little bit in our interview earlier, which is one downside of our increasingly interconnected world is that when you put anything out into the world, especially if it's journalism or something, suddenly, or even if it's just a post, suddenly, there's this whole class of people who believe that that means they have a right to be in your inbox or at you on things and demand an answer and a response and your time.

2:04:15And I don't want to conflate this statement with saying like, oh, people who publish things or journalists or quasi-public figures have no obligation to their readers. Obviously, that's not true. But I worry that if something like this were to take off, one of the downsides is you'd suddenly publish an article that's maybe a bit controversial. you instead of being flooded with you know spam and hate emails you'll be flooded with the spam and hate emails and hundreds of objections that if you do not respond to on every single fact in your article your credibility is taken down it's just silly it's totally uh weaponizable in other words yes exactly yeah one other quick one real quick i found this amazing line 133 a Tokyo court ruled that somebody who published a movie and anime spoiler articles, that it was a copyright infringement to say how something ended, number one.

2:05:17And number two, it's criminal, got jailed. What? Spoilers.

2:05:22Ian Bogost:Go to jail. This is an example of all the things I hate. I don't under, I mean, listen, I don't understand how maniacal spoiler culture or anti-spoiler culture has gotten lately. I understand not wanting to be spoiled about things, but it has also gotten to the point where people on, say, you know, Reddit will get mad at like 48 or 72 hours after, say, the winner of Drag Race was announced that they're like, I go on the subreddit, I open up Reddit, and suddenly I see posts spoiling the winner of drag race i'm like i'm sorry baby that that happened seven hours ago have you heard of time why are you on reddit why are you on reddit then if you don't want to know this information why are you on the internet it's one thing to complain it's another thing to go send somebody to jail for a year and a half yeah that's insane for publishing spoiler this is copyright gone mad but you know i think japanese uh courts are very aggressive about copyright i about nintendo which is extremely litigious and and always seems to win i think this is not this is something typical of japan but that's ridiculous yeah it feels like there's something cultural going on here it's cultural uh in the movie godzilla minus one which came out by the way in 2023 uh the godzilla article 3 000 japanese characters in length was a complete uh detailed plot summary of the movie uh the the makers of the movie sued toho largest studio in japan they're famous apparently for stringent trademark protection uh-huh interesting uh went after him he also wrote an article about the anime overlord that aired in 2018 so it's not even like recent stuff when does when does the spoiler thing that uh the thing that apparently ended up being the smoking gun for prosecution is the fact that the website ran ads these spoiler articles therefore were not only stealing copywritten work but earning money through it but the fascinating bit uh this uh writer at hassan nasir at a tom's hardware writes the fascinating bit is that these pieces were all written by outside contributors.

2:07:53Takeuchi simply operated the site, though he did earn revenue from it, but he's still the one that has gone to jail over this.

2:08:01Ian Bogost:So this is an interesting question. This actually applies to this whole question of copyright with AI. If I read a book and then write a summary of it, because I think spoilers might be kind of not a good way to describe this, because we think of spoilers as like telling you about the plot twist. he wrote detailed plot summaries you know more like classic comics or cliff notes uh we don't think that's a copyright violation but it is kind of what an ai does right it's not recreating the the book it's summarizing it in its head so that it can use that information which is why i argue that that it has a right to learn the same way we do yeah apparently not in Japan.

2:08:44I wonder. Yeah. So Paris, you had something too. Oh, my last thing is just, I don't know if you guys saw this week that Reuters broke a story that Meta is now going to be recording all of its employees' clicks and keystrokes on its computers to turn all of that into AI training data. And of course, the Metamates are up in arms about this, that their precious keystrokes and clicks could be suddenly everything happening on their computer screen is going to be logged by their employer and used to train on, which is...

2:09:21Ian Bogost:Well, are they mad about the training or that it's recorded? Because there's a historic right to record everything. Every employer has the right to record everything. I mean, yeah, I think they're mad about the fact that suddenly everything they do on their computer is being recorded and logged somewhere. Chances are it's being recorded and logged at every no because i believe part of this is they have to are having to install new software on all this a lot of i'm sure what is going on on their almost all businesses i have to tell you almost all businesses do this because they're liable for what's done on their premises with their hardware on their internet connection and so almost all businesses record what you do on their computers well they record every stroke they are installing new tracking software on their computers to track mouse movements and keystrokes in order to train ai agents so that's the question are they mad about the ai training are they mad about being recorded they are mad about being recorded and i think some of them are also mad about bad news i bet you anything met is always recorded almost all companies do that big companies all do that you you know you go down the hall to it they can look at what's on any screen in the premises at any time they have to they're protecting But when you're doing that, something pops up in your screen that is you're suddenly being remote accessed.

2:10:40I think people are.

2:10:41Ian Bogost:No, no, there's no requirement. The law absolutely is clear on this. Courts have held this for years. I mean, I'm not saying that they're legally required to. I'm saying that the general practice employee will see when you work at one of these large companies is something pops up in your screen to show remote access. That has happened at Condé Nast. That's what we did. They're being very good about it. that's what it was because i talked about this a lot on the radio show for years because people were up in arms about it the courts have been very clear it's nice if you put it in your policy and tell people you have no requirement to do so i mean i think people have always assumed they were being recorded i think the difference here is that now it can be queried and now you can like find out it could always be what people are doing no but like always that's always been the case that's always been the case and now it's being especially in a company like facebook i'm sure It seems like there's something new going on here because they are being notified they are putting new software on their devices.

2:11:38We've never done this at Twitter.

2:11:39Ian Bogost:We're small enough we didn't really probably have to. But many big companies, very common practice. It's actually very nice of Kandi to warn you. Because they don't even have to put it in their policy. It's just what pops up on the top right bar. You should just always only do work on your work computer anyway. Like that was never an idea to do anything other than work on your work. That was always the message that I told people on the radio show is you should never do anything personal on your, on your company phone, your company computer or at work or with the company internet because they have the absolute right to spy on you.

2:12:15Ian Bogost:What's funny is the law says they, if they, if you're on a company phone and they listen in on the phone call and they hear you having a private conversation, they're required to hang up. They're not allowed to listen to a private conversation on the phone. That's because older laws protected privacies on phones. Those laws never applied to digital technology. They never got around to making those laws. So unless something's changed, which I don't think it has. I used to talk about this all the time because people would always call up saying, hey, I got in trouble for this. It's like, dude. And I always said it would be really good if the company told you, but they don't have to.

2:12:52Ian Bogost:They absolutely don't have to.

2:12:59Ian Bogost:and I bet you knowing meta that that's always, that's what they've done always. And it's their full right, right? To do that and to train AI with it. That's your work product. Yeah, I think that the employees are probably, you know, thinking like, yeah, you're training the AI to replace you. That's exactly what's happening. It's like - That's their right as well. It's a new, I think it's a new implication of what's possible. because they have it. Yeah. I mean, look, I don't blame them. I wouldn't be happy about it either. Because people in the chat seem to think I'm an idiot. I in no way am saying that you should have personal and private access to your work computer.

2:13:42Work computers are obviously work computers and are owned by your employer. And the things you do on them are monitored as almost any one of the corporate job has a pop-up that says that when you're logging in. right okay has a funny noting that we there was an article this week that reuters said that well

2:14:04Ian Bogost:that's what i was curious about is what the people were upset about was the ai was it the ai training or the spying or both because uh the ai training is new but again i think it's probably it's the moment too also like you know we always assume that we're being spied on by our company but like being told explicitly that we're spying on you is also different it's better it is better better to be told i think so i think you're conscious of it that's just like companies paris that told you because i don't think a lot of companies do i really don't i think a lot of companies just spy on you uh well anyway i hope somebody has learned something here today and they now know that they should stop buying drugs while they're at work yeah wait till uh 5 30 p.m when you get home here's your phone not your company phone do you have a company phone and a private phone right paris i think you said that i mean i have a work phone number and a personal phone you have different numbers are paid for by me because i don't want to mix any ass i want my to be able to can take my work phone number with me wherever i go right uh ergo signal uh you're watching intelligent machines guess what's next picks of the week before we wrap things up paris martineau from the very ethical consumer reports who i'm sure would tell you if they were spying on uh right right of course it would i'm happy to hear that condé does that that's good even condit yeah and jeff jarvis whose uh personal emails are incredibly dull so spy away right my life is an open blog uh author of many wonderful books like the gutenberg parentheses i didn't realize magazine was part of that 111 book oh yeah object lessons what an interesting idea that is it really is and then the ideas they come up with there's others i i'm dying to write i've got an expert to get out but then there's others it's such a fun format to work in what's the what's the retail price of magazine um 22 but you can buy it online for 11 i think 11.

2:16:14Ian Bogost:so it's a It cost me$1 ,121 to buy all 111 of those. Because I would love that on a bookshelf. There's no bundle? There must be a bundle, right? Well,$11. It's 111. Bookstores, it's hard. They can't get the whole series into bookstores. I got a London magazine store to carry the book. It's like, hello? Yeah. It's about magazines. As a professor, I like a lot. Your magazine store, you've got to have one. Eileen Giselle, I don't know how to pronounce it, G apostrophe S-E-L-L. She just did one on a lipstick and she's been on a, she put herself on a national tour promoting it. It's been fun seeing where all she's talking about it.

2:16:56Ian Bogost:Actually related to what we were talking about. I forgot. This was one of the stories I had. Defunct startups are liquidating their Slack archives, Jira tickets and email threads by selling them to AI and finding a whole new revenue stream. Oh my God. So that's exactly everything you wrote. Every email you wrote, every Slack you wrote, every Jira ticket. The company, Simple Closure. When Shana Johnson was winding down CLO24, the transcription and captioning company she ran as CEO, she discovered an unexpected asset. This is from Forbes. It's operational exhaust, the digital leftovers that piled up across years of work and collaboration.

2:17:50She sold to Simple Closure everything.

2:17:55Ian Bogost:Everything on the hard drive. Every 13 years of Slack jokes, Jira tickets, emails, multi-terabyte Google Drive as training data. And she got hundreds of thousands of dollars for it. This is brilliant. hundreds of thousands of dollars is actually impressive i thought it would have been much it's worth something you know i'm just thinking our google drive is uh more than 100 terabytes no i i'm thinking not selling our data we even broker deals between you'd be a middleman between selling this data from good defunct companies see he's already thinking about a business why wait to be defunct you know what it really is they've run out of every all the public data there's nothing more to ingest they ingested it all and now they need something something new that's what ilia switzgeever says that's just to inspire synthetic data yeah all right last uh call for picks of the week in just a moment you're watching intelligent machines i mentioned paris i mentioned jeff thank you for being here what i didn't mention is our fabulous club twit members who make this show possible literally make this show possible uh club twit now is rapidly it's soon going to be half of our operating expenses come from the club that means advertising only covers about 50 or 60 percent of our costs of benito's salary of the lights the cameras because it's more expensive than one would think to have 15 podcasts going all week.

2:19:36Ian Bogost:And, you know, advertising used to cover most of it. It doesn't anymore. Thank goodness we've got the club. Lisa says that to me every morning. Thank goodness we have the club. If you want to be part of our salvation, twit.tv slash club twit. It's, I think, a good deal. Ten bucks a month. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't hear me begging for money. You wouldn't hear any of our ads. You would get access to the club Twitter discord, which is full of really interesting people and great conversations. I really like it. I think one of the advantages of being in something that people pay to be in is it just raises the bar.

2:20:12Ian Bogost:There's, there's great content in here. Not just about the shows, of course, during the shows, but also around other topics that geeks are interested in. There are also a great many things we do in the club, special programming. Tomorrow at 9 a.m. I'm going to interview Chris Stokel-Walker for Future Intelligent Machines. You can join us for that. The mayor of San Jose on Monday, April 27th. He's running for governor of California, but he has a lot to say about AI and city government. We also do a few shows like iOS Today, Hands on Tech. The AI User Group coming up May 8th. That's a really great gang of smart people who are using AI every single day.

2:20:54we talk about tricks tools tips show and tell just like a real user group chris marquardt's

2:21:01Ian Bogost:photo time our google io coverage coming up may 19th micah's crafting corner on the 20th these are all special programming we do just for the club would you like to join us we'd love to have you and we really need your support twit.tv slash club twit thank you thank you very much club members and of course the twit network bikini calendar what pretty fly for a city guy we don't have leo we don't want to see you in a bikini so you don't want to see me yeah it's 12 months of leo it's all me all the time and the twit t and the twit tattoo features heavily in ways uh this is not the future we were promised like how about that for a tagline for the show From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.

2:21:58This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet.

2:22:11Ian Bogost:Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Paris, pick of the week. This weekend I went to Depths of Wikipedia live show. What? Which was a great show put on by Annie, I guess I should have remembered her last name, Annie Raruda. She runs the fantastic accounts called Depths of Wikipedia, which you may have seen on Twitter, Blue Sky, Instagram. and it was this really funny live show all about kind of the wonders of Wikipedia and it has fantastic guests. They still have a show going on, I think in Los Angeles next month. So if you're around there and interested in any sort of nerddom or Wikipedia, I'd really recommend it.

2:23:04So it's a comedy show? Kind of. Yeah, it's a bit of a comedy show. She goes through like a presentation and then interviews people about just incredible fun facts and deep dives into wikipedia and it's about also the culture of wikipedia editing um some of the interesting time like the interesting minutiae in terms of uh let's say like wikipedia editor on wikipedia editor violence or uh the various sort of drama going on in the sub this is very enterprising of her to do this

2:23:42Ian Bogost:fantastic cool she's i mean it was a packed house it was a packed house at the ground university theater they were so sold out they had to have two different shows she organized a perpetual stool stew yes in a brooklyn park the famously uh organized a perpetual stew there was a couple of signs up saying perpetual stew this bushwick park and she didn't expect many people to show up but suddenly i believe there were hundreds if not more and there was a new york times article written about it uh she's very funny uh she had a couple different guests up for the show i was at um including the woman who is the voice of the new york city subway oh that's cool next stop uh did you recognize did you go oh that's her yes she sits down and everyone's like oh who's this and then she goes into the voice and everybody The next train is a sea train.

2:24:39Ian Bogost:Yeah. Wow. Brooklyn bound four train. Next stop. Yeah. Wow. But I'm excited to see. And they're at great merch as well. I got a good shirt. There's only one more show. It's in Los Angeles, May 9th at Hollywood Forever. She's done Seattle, San Francisco, a bunch of shows in New York, Chicago, Philly. and if you have no idea what i'm talking about i'd highly recommend that you follow her on instagram or twitter or wherever you are because her accounts are so funny it's called depths of wikipedia and it is just let's see if it'll come up here i love it that ciabatta was invented in 1982 as a rival for baguettes she will post just some of the most interesting tidbits of lore that you could ever imagine about things you never even thought of.

2:25:38Ian Bogost:There's clearly that she has massive fan base. I mean, does she have a podcast or just an Instagram? No, it's just this. I mean, her Instagram has 1.6 million followers already, which is incredible. She is brilliant. It's brilliant. This is what you can be. And she's a fantastic Wikipedia editor as well. Yeah. One of their most famous Wikipedia. Is there an AI angle you can get her on? I think we should just get her on just because it's hysterical. I mean, we should. It was fantastic. Yeah. How did you learn about it, Paris? You already followed her? I've followed her on multiple platforms for potentially years, and I don't really know when it started or what it didn't, but I just, I love her posts.

2:26:19They're all so funny.

2:26:22Ian Bogost:She's only 26. I mean, she's a young person who's kind of just hit on something crazy. Yeah. Yeah, and she runs a great live show. Brilliant. Yeah, you know what? This is why the modern world is so interesting and the internet is so interesting. This could not have made it through the gauntlet of Bass Media. No. I mean, one of the anecdotes she told during it is if you look up the Wikipedia article for humans, or I guess human, there was a lot of back and forth over what photo should be chosen to be on the Wikipedia page for human. And there was also just a lot of internal conflict within the Wikipedia editor community because normally you're not allowed to edit any article that you have any potential relation to.

2:27:12It's a big bias. By definition, all Wikipedia editors can't edit human because they are human. So once they got around that, they were like, well, what photo should we use? And they ended up using a photo of an Aka couple in northern Thailand. And she, after I think the Wikipedia editor conference in Singapore a couple of years ago, ended up flying to Thailand and tracking them down or ended up tracking their children down because they've since passed. And it showed them that, yeah, she said basically Google the word human, click on Wikipedia. And they were like, oh, my God, that's my parents.

2:27:54Ian Bogost:That's very funny. They are the quintessential humans. Her Instagram is Depths of Wikipedia. And that's also where tickets are. Also on Blue Sky. And I see that Micah already follows her, of course. Yep. You all know each other. There's Paris also following. That's great. And Megan Maroney follows her. Very nice. It's good. Oh, and my favorite, Worcester Terrariums. She has lots of good followers. Including AOC. Yeah, it's a big one. Green, Jamel Bowie. Amazing. Brandy Zadrozny. Amazing.

2:28:37Ian Bogost:What are you laughing at? I'm looking at the Wikipedia entry for ketchup effect. The ketchup effect is when nothing comes, then way too much, very fast. That's it. That's the whole article. Ketchup effect on Swedish Wikipedia. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. be faked i mean that's the thing is the whole account is just little things like this that are just that's fantastic oh my goodness uh let's see my pick of the week uh i had a couple i've forgotten completely what they were one of them is uh because we're talking about how claude uh now has claude design anthropic has claude design and then google which has stitch which is does kind of the same thing lets you design your own you know design stuff with ai somebody at google said you know you know how we could we could trump anthropics cloud design let's just give them all our uh prompts for google stitch and they can run it in cloud code and they don't even need cloud design so this is on github google labs code design.md it's the prompts you need to basically turn cloud code into Google design, which is probably something very close to what Anthropic did to create Google design.

2:30:02Ian Bogost:I think that was kind of a nice little competitive jab from Google. And then the other one is maybe a little bit more important. And it's something we were talking about. Is your website agent ready at, let me see, what's the, isagentready.com. So you put in your website. Why don't we put your website, paris.nyc, and just see how ready for agentic AI it is for MCP, for markdown negotiation, for agent skills. It'll do a scan. Will it transfer? Oh, yours is better than mine. I was about to say, it scans to parismartineau.com, right? Oh, it did. it's it automatically redirected mine's better than yours yeah mine is only 17 yours is 25 out of 100.

2:30:57Ian Bogost:um i make no attempts to make it compatible i mean i've made no attempts to make it oh you have bot access control set on yours that's i think the big difference i don't know maybe you're uh hosted it what is this website uh is this is kind of a terrible url is it agent is it agentready.com what was Paris's score 25 I got 33 at Jeff Jarvis nice twit gets a 17 as well and uh as does Leo FM so Paris you beat twit and me Jeff you beat Paris and twit and but probably this this is more seriously to the whole thing we were talking about which is I think everything has to be, what did you call it? AIO?

2:31:47AIO. Well, there's one, it was called GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. But in some schools, that's overly old. So AI optimization. AI optimization, yeah.

2:31:58Ian Bogost:And Jeff, you used up a bunch of picks. Are there any left? Oh, I want to come. I have a happy ending to my long saga on getting Ask Gemini into my browser on my Google Chromebook. on my Google Chrome, on my Google Workspace. So there was another story about more features they're adding. But once a month, I go to my admin settings and I say, surely there might be something left out, something new. I'm going to go through all of them. I go through all of them. I find nothing. I have said yes to everything. I am my administrator. I am the entire site. I am it. But now there was a new feature. There was, you can use Gemini on the admin site to get help with admin.

2:32:39So I thought, okay. I put my complaint in. I say, hello, I'm this is this and this, and I don't have it on my browser. And it comes back and it says, well, you need to set this, this, and this. And I went back and I said, I have. And I said, it's still not working. And I came back and it said, no, no, no, if you do this, this, this, it'll work. And I said, I have, you're wrong. No, I still don't have it. Third time, it said, oh, try this setting that you would never find. and I'd gone through everything about, you think it'd be in the Gemini part? No. You think it'd be in the apps part? No. Hidden three layers into the user, there was a special thing where you had to set defaults to okay.

2:33:24Now, mind you, I shouldn't have gotten Ask Gemini on anything, on Gmail or anything by this. I got it on everything except Chrome in my Chromebook.

2:33:34Ian Bogost:The one thing you wanted. I checked the three boxes and now I have it. Woo! wow now what i do with that have i used it no i actually you don't really want it but i took well the only thing i've done so far is when i read try to read the on the cone uh the world bottle oh it's good for that yeah i said explain this to me it did a good job it did a very good job yes i now have it so i'm not going to say all is forgiven because i begged here a hundred times and no one told me it's true i bored the world three check boxes and you're in jess i'm in meanwhile one more line 152 uh benito are you going to show your loyalty and get one of these with leo on it uh oh now i'm worried me too must have item in silicon valley the 178 sweater with the ceo's face on it leo when are you going to get ones of this with for all of us yeah yeah a great uh that's a jensen no i have not sufficient ego i know you don't believe me when i say this but i do not have sufficient ego to send you all sweaters with my picture on it that would be appalling alex carp has his on a t-shirt what a surprise i think that's even i i don't know what do you think it says more appalling sweater okay yeah the fact that the t-shirt says dominate yeah Wow.

2:34:57That's a...

2:34:58Ian Bogost:Wow. Now, I don't mind the Hawaiian shirts that Anduril sells based on Palmer Luckey's Hawaiian shirts. At least there's that Palmer Luckey's face on it. The guy who makes your t-shirts, you should get him to make a Twit one or a Leo face one. Yeah. Somehow to incorporate the Twit logo into it. wait yeah can you get someone so it's in that guy's version of your uh colorful hawaiian shirts but with your own face on it yeah paris don't mock me i know you would not wear anything that had my face on it i would wear it for this show just for an episode yes well twitter tv slash store uh nothing has my face on it but uh there's one yes it does it does have something with my just scroll up you just scroll by your own face yes go up oh my god right there i think we may i would never do that i don't know i think we not only is his face but chief chief chief chief we did it when elon took the name chief twit and i had nothing to do with it i just want to tell you i didn't say smithers make a t-shirt with my face on it call it chief twit okay i take it back i guess i guess you can buy that twitter tv slash store and yeah you should now paris you have to retract that you want it because otherwise you're gonna get it for christmas yeah i mean that's not what i was thinking about no yeah i know i know it's not what you were thinking you know i was hoping there'd be some white shirt would be better yeah the guy who we are going to hawaii we used to have a lot of the twit uh hoodies that we used to sell were really great these are not quite as nice as the ones we used to sell you know the reason is you just make no money on these and uh and we'd have to we have to charge so much for these to make even a dollar that it's you know need to do collabs and limited time drops yeah we gotta do this week in google sticker yeah isn't that funny but there's nothing for intelligent machines is there there is a lot of stuff for intelligent oh is there oh good there's homeware there's an intelligent machines tote holiday i don't know what that is ceramic ornament for your tree somebody's having oh there look there is an intelligent machines die cut Oh, yeah.

2:37:31Ian Bogost:Look at that. That's nice. Pets? What do we have for pets? And ask the tech guys, pet t-shirt. And you can get a mug, Intelligent Machines mug. That's fun. I think Anthony does this when he's feeling like a little bored. Bored. Puts these together. All right. Get your twig merch before it goes. Gone away forever. Collector's item. By the way, I should mention, Jeff, I forgot to mention this. Google is apparently working on a Pixel laptop. Yeah. Pixel glow lights. Because you can see apparently something in the latest beta releases of Android, Android 17 beta. They make reference to a feature called Orbit.

2:38:23Light animations. Maybe the aluminum laptop. Pixel glow. Guess what I bought this week. a new a mac do you buy a neo but a new oh you sent us the bill i feel no no no no no no let me let me complain though are you going to be using the neo for this can the neo even support stream oh totally yeah yeah yeah well i'm this is harris i'm on a 12 year old mac intel intel mac 12 years old

2:38:52Ian Bogost:yeah and it works fine i'm using an m1 mac mini that probably has eight gigs of ram to do the show right now. Bonino's using something a little heavier duty. So I go in the store and I say, I want to buy a Neo. I want the blue one. I want this education. Good choice. Right. Oh, I'll sign you up for a specialist. Go sit over there in my cane in an incredibly uncomfortable shoe. I hate the Apple store. I hate the Apple store. It drives me nuts. Used to be in the day, if they were busy, anybody would, oh, I can write that up for you now. No, no, no, no, no. So I sat there for more than a half an hour.

2:39:28Oh. To buy it online and pick it up. To give them your money. I left. I left. I said, and I'm walking out. The scheduler, I went to the scheduler at some point. I said, come on, man. I know what I want to buy. Just sell it to me. There's no way to run a store. No way to run a store. No way to run a store. Yeah, I didn't like that. So I walk out and I say, goodbye. And he didn't catch the nuance of my voice. He said, goodbye. Or maybe he did, but is used to be a customer service. Maybe he did, but I don't think Apple people would have that much irony. So I go home and I order it. Did you shake your cane at him when you said, that's no way to run a store?

2:40:00I should have. Meanwhile, my Chromebook died. Oh, that's not good. It's brand new. Was it before or after you got Gemini on it? Good question. Before. It died before you got Gemini on it? I question that. It went black and it couldn't boot. So there's some hardware problem. So it's now slowly, FedEx is very slow. I got it to FedEx on Sunday. It's supposed to be delivered to the place on Thursday. Then it's seven to 10 days to do it and then time to get it back. So I decided, okay, screw it up.

2:40:35Ian Bogost:That's no way to run a store. So did you just mail order a Neo? No, because actually, no, you couldn't get the Neos until mid-May. They happened to have it at my local store. Well, what you do is you go online, you buy it online and you say, I want to pick it up at the store. Exactly. yeah or i go in that was nice nice and efficient that was easy yeah that's very efficient they just give it to you there's obviously you get one in a fun color blue i like the blue no i didn't get the greeny one no the blue's not the blue's nice i think we all agreed on mac very quickly that's the there's nothing like i should not i should not move any anything over from the 12 year old mac mini probably not no uh yeah because those will all be intel programs don't don't even and don't even just download a new copy of Zoom and you'll be fine.

2:41:20Ian Bogost:Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you, Jeff, for your commitment to the show. I appreciate that. That's very nice of you. And we would buy that for you if you want. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Well, I've used this one for 12 years. If we buy it for you, though, you understand we will use all clicks, all documents. Yes. And sell it to a Grok. All mouse movements and send them to AI. Yes, send them to a Grok. Yeah, actually, if they buy it for you, they're going to put bad Rudy on your computer. mad rudy's good thank you everybody for joining us thank you paris martineau you'll find her at consumer reports you're still on on deadline are you are you working no i just you know we got a lot of things going on and i am the person who has to solve all of those problems but a story will come out of it i do love it you love it this is tomorrow if you happen to be a retiree in westport connecticut i'm gonna be speaking to you really me and some of my colleagues are doing a food safety discussion for the wise men of westport tomorrow though you're talking to the wise men of west not we think it's the letter y at the y we could be discussing it should be at the may or may not be wise it's not at the y either the wise men of bridgeport so so it's uh don't leave fish in the refrigerator for two weeks is that what what are you doing no actually we're talking about uh kind of an inside look at how consumer reports like three pillars the testing the school testing team uh reporting and our advocacy teams kind of work together and they were particularly interested in our food safety coverage specifically the protein powders investigation and in my reporting on radioactive shrimp of course taking them through it by like kind of a deep dive into protein powders well if i if i weren't going to my wife getting an award tomorrow i would call up to westport as a retired man congrats bring your cane and your food safety questions yes true for the wise men of bridgeport well they're very fortunate to have that it's lovely how are you going to get the bridgeport well i'm getting to west it's westport i'm getting there by taking the train very early tomorrow and then going to be picked up at the westport train station by as you deserve content officer nice well have a wonderful talk yeah i shall yay i would say everybody was uh we're all discussing this week like oh do you need to prep and stuff i'm like i i can talk i have some practice just let me go nice mic in front of me and nice and by the way should we note the dulcet tones remained the entire show did not did they not they did there was a brief moment where we thought we were flickering but they have remained and i think that one was laying on top of the scarlet oh and so i would expect that would be impacting it but it isn't i think she always do that no because i usually pick her up but i didn't overheating could explain it it's not she's not on top of it it's just she like lays in front of it and definitely touches it i think it's doing it now by the way well it could have been because i was wrestling a cat as i said that uh okay my friends thank you jeff jarvis don't forget his new book hot type available now at jeffjarvis.com for pre-order it comes out the same time as ian's book no it actually comes out in uh now in august because they were going to come out and it was supposed to come out in june then they moved it for production reasons to july and i said i'm not gonna say this to ian but july's dead time so they moved it's now an early fall book okay you'll still get it if you order it now yeah if you order it now it'll make it'll make me happy it'll make jeff happy and that's our goal in life thank you everybody you've made us happy by joining us we'll see you next week on intelligent machines bye-bye hello everybody leo laporte here you know what a great gift would be whether for the holidays or at just any time a birthday, a membership in Club Twit.

2:45:42Ian Bogost:If you have a Twit listener in your family, somebody who enjoys our programming, and you want to give them a nice gift and support what we do, visit twit.tv slash club twit. They'll really appreciate it, and so will we. Thank you. Twit.tv slash club twit. I'm not a human being Not into this animal scene I'm an intelligent machine No joke.