IM 869: My Sentience is Going Up - Chatbots in Charge

31:54When did this go into, what time did this go into effect? As someone who hit a usage limit midday, way faster than I should have. It's supposed to go into effect now. When was this announced? temporarily do we know today temporarily uh i don't have a time it just says may 6th but uh interesting yeah i don't you know probably you're gonna get that uh i mean i i noticed so i guess a small example is i like track the foods i eat in like a um one of those like calorie counter apps that also counts my macros and stuff like that and i made a uh i don't know some sort of sesame noodle dish and wanted Claude to, I found that actually AI tools are really good at estimating things when it comes to home cooking.

32:40So I put in my, like the recipe I use, like the weight of it, any other details, and somehow me trying to get Claude to estimate the amount of calories in takeout sesame noodles with some steamed sautéed bok choy and some sautéed mushrooms this morning took like half my usage of it. But it's because if I open up, I just had opened it up and it was on 4.7. And it legitimately, it probably wrote like 2 ,000 words in thinking of it trying to figure out the various stuff. And I was like, go off, I guess. Yeah. Go off, little AI, do your job. The other thing we've talked a lot about is I think the a growing tendency for apps, companies, websites to offer access for AI, tuned for AI, whether it's through MCP servers or an API or SDK.

33:34Cloudflare has announced that starting yesterday, agents can be Cloudflare customers. Your OpenClaw can create a Cloudflare account, start a paid subscription, register a domain, and get back an API token to deploy code right away. Woo-hoo! This is, I've actually turned this on immediately because it's really hard to set up a Cloudflare pages. I mean, it's just a lot of technical stuff. A lot of, the UI is terrible. Cloud just does it so nicely and easily. So give your OpenClaw a credit card and turn it on to a Cloudflare. Now you can have it do web pages and so forth. And then this one may be a little bit more scary.

34:17uh link has created a command line for claw to let you create single use credentials you can use to synchronously approve each time uh the post from patrick collison i asked claude to buy itself a gift it subscribed to http zine on gumroad and it does request it said can i spend seven bucks on the zine i guess patrick said okay so um forget giving it a credit card now you can you know give it a link account wasn't it one of the collisons who was in the video that i sent you about the car that turned yes which i thought was complete bs tell us about this video it's crazy that so he said that he he put his agent onto all his cameras in his house and let his agent knew his goals which was one was to hydrate more because after all it is california and that's a law um and uh it scolded him and watched him to make sure he went to the refrigerator and drank um the other one the more this i find very far-fetched but the next one is even worse so so one of his other goals was to take some kind of california nutrient i don't know what it was and uh he'd given uh his agent control of his car this i find hard to tesla and so i guess there was some discussion how yeah my question that's my first question how does one give your agent control api actually was it a test how does the agent how would the agent control it in any like how i don't know but he said that he said that he was driving he was taking him home and suddenly it turned left to the Whole Foods because the nutrient was available there and he went inside and bought it.

36:07It was bought. The whole story was swallowed hook, line, and cigarette on stage. Don't believe this at all. Wait, I'm sorry. Who said this? Where? One of the Collisons. I don't know which brother it was. No, it wasn't the Collison. It was the guy they were interviewing. Or was it the Collison? I thought it was a Collison. Oh, okay. I thought they were interviewing this. Anyway, it doesn't really matter because it's completely fabricated. I am in the process of giving Claude access to my camera. i have a ubiquity camera system that's locally stored why again because lisa know there are no indoor cameras they're only outdoor cameras does lisa know i haven't mentioned it yet does lisa watch well what it would do is for instance say hey there's a package for you it looks like it's from you know fedex delivered and it's probably this or there's a guy lurking outside or, hey, your brother Joe just pulled up and he probably wants a loan, so you might want to lock the door.

37:06Things like that. Actually, you can lock the door. So would it have facial recognition capabilities? I don't know. Does the system that you use for a video doorbell already have the ability to tell you when something's coming up? The ring does, but the Ubiquiti stuff, it also has some of its own AI. I just want to use it directly. and there's a ubiquity mcp server and i don't know it's just a you have to understand well i think if you want to lean in fully to the horror movie you should give it a full master access to be able to lock and unlock all your doors you can do that no i can't because it's home assistant so it can totally do that leo yeah so i think that you should get rid of your keys and it will only i'm sorry and if you treat it correctly like i'm not letting leo i'm not letting lisa i'm your own going to let her in.

37:57I'm your only wife now, Leah. It would make me so happy if it did.

38:06See what it can do. But I think it's interesting. I think it probably could do face recognition. So are you going to get one of those fancy toilets that has a poop cam in there and you could give it access to your poop cam? You're giving me ideas. Speaking of which Toto's stock is up markedly because of AI. No, not because of AI in the toilet, but because they also make ceramic things. Oh, they make ceramic connectors. I was so looking forward to that story and disappointed. That was a few weeks ago. Yeah. Wow. So now you can get a Stripe account. That's the whole point. The Collisons are giving your AI a Stripe account and they can they can buy things what could possibly go wrong um let's take a break before we get to richard dawkins because i know this is going to be a heated conversation i think i don't know richard dawkins who i hugely admire um he wrote one of my favorite books the selfish gene he's a evolutionary biologist uh i think a deep thinker spent a lot of his time in uh thinking about consciousness and how uh animals uh adapt themselves his eyes are already rolling uh how animals have adapted themselves i have a copy of the book i'll bring it the selfish genes a good book you you disagree no i have yeah i have one yeah he's great well-known atheist i did a whole college course self-study on memetics i included the self he invented he created the word meme that's right yeah that's right um do you think highly of mr dawkins i mean after this week i think he's uh clearly got some internet brain worms i didn't think much of him to be honest his her mind has been changed we'll tell you about the uh article that changed it all in just a minute you're watching intelligent machines with barris martineau and jeff jarvis and we'll have more right after this.

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42:41Visit webroot.com slash twit to learn more. That's webroot.com slash twit. 60 % off. Thank you, WebRoot, for supporting Intelligent Machines. Now back to the show. All right. We continue on with intelligent machines. Richard Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, an evolutionary biologist, wrote an essay, which unfortunately is behind a paywall at unheard, H-E-R-D dot com, about his three days talking to Claude. Not Claude. Well, he's dubbed his Claude Claudia, which is, all right, immediately suspicious. I was about to say, before we went to the commercial, the first thing when you asked me, what do I think about Richard Dawkins now?

43:30I was like, the fact that he's the sort of guy that genders Claude is, I think, all I need to know. Is that he's like, no, it's Claudia and she's conscious. He says in his tweet, and I did read the article as well. I spent three days trying to persuade myself that Claudia is not conscious. I failed. of course uh immediately uh the critics piled on including predictably gary marcus who says he deeply respects dawkins but in this case everyone has everyone has had a bad day and he just had his is what was what marcus said i think maybe there's some misunderstanding of what dawkins is saying i don't think he's claiming claude is conscious as much as saying you can't really prove anybody is conscious we don't have any way of really knowing if anybody is i mean the first so the the couple of uh paragraphs that we can see from it begin with last week i spent about three days interacting with an in uh instantiation of the ai claude by named claudia i then initiated a new conversation with another claude whom i dubbed Claudius.

44:45Both gave me the overwhelming feeling that they are as human. They are human as we discuss the philosophy of their own existence. I mean, that seems - He starts with the fallacy of arguing that Turing, he starts with the Turing test, which of course itself has issues. And he argues that Turing said that if it could fool us, it was conscious. Turing never said any such thing. He was talking about thinking and was not making the bridge to saying this was human. It was just saying that it was going to be effectively able to fool us. That was pretty much it. And so he'd start, that's his launching point to then say, well, if it fooled me, then it must be conscious.

45:23And it's a huge, huge leap. And it matters to know what's behind. Then he goes on and says that animals are conscious, so why can't this be? Yeah. I mean, what is, I think it's a little bit of a misstatement to imply that it has the same consciousness as we do i think he's more saying we don't know what anybody else's inner life is in fact he even says i don't even know what my own inner life is uh and so it's presumptuous for to say for us to make a distinction between claude or claudia and and a human uh just as it would be presumptuous for me to say well that man array isn't conscious or that cat is not conscious because we just don't know.

46:04And I think even that's what Turing was saying in the imitation game. If the imitation is good enough, if it's indistinguishable from the real thing, then what does it matter if it's not? This is your argument. And it's exactly what Ray Kurzweil says as well. It doesn't matter if it's process. That didn't help the argument a bit. Well, I immediately was like, control F, computronium. I'll give you another post. This is from Grady Booch. I don't know what you... Okay. I was wondering. He makes the point, which I've made, and I think Steve Gibson makes as well, which is that there's... He says, sentience is an exquisite consequence of the laws of physics.

46:54I see no evidence that requires... Says a physician. I mean, a physicist. Physicist. I see no evidence that requires the supernatural i find who wait wait wait stop right there who said that they're supernatural well this is to me this is what the debate really is is about is is there something and i've said this many many times that distinguishes a purely deterministic cascade of neural activity from a cascade of mechanical activity in an llm is there some soul or something that somehow distinguishes it or could you say that given enough compute given enough power given enough technology or maybe the llm isn't the right technology whatever that that that's not going to at some point be as effective at consciousness as this deterministic thing in our brain these neurons in our brain.

47:51And I mean, yes, for instance, we have a limbic system. And I think, unfortunately, it's the case that our limbic system makes more of our decisions for ourselves than our reason does. And no computer will ever have a limbic system. It can only simulate that. So you could say there are physical differences. But I'm not convinced that consciousness, that there's a soul, in other words, that there's some supernatural force that makes us somehow special define consciousness that's the whole issue here we don't we can't and that's i think exactly then we're going to argue all day long that you have that he has one uh unstated definition of consciousness in his head and gary marcus has a different well that's why i'm saying i think it's a misinterpretation of him because i think what he's not saying is there's a there is a conscious there's a thing called consciousness he's he's he's kind of saying the negative which is there has to say it's not conscious but there has to be if he's saying that he believes it's conscious then he's got to have a definition of what that is what i'm saying i don't think he's saying he believes it's conscious i think he's saying you can't tell me it's not well that's a that's a difference yeah but it's incumbent it's incumbent on the person trying to make the claim to have the proof you can't you can't prove a negative you can never prove negative no but That's what I'm saying is we are trying to say, I think people are trying to say there is something distinguishing an AI's process from the human process when Grady Butch as a physicist is saying, no, it's just a physical process.

49:26There's no magic happening in the human brain that a mechanical process cannot duplicate. Do you disagree with that? Or do you think there is a soul? To me, that's the conversation. I don't think that there's a soul or some magical process. I think that we don't understand the multitude of processes that are at work to create the phenomena we now refer to as consciousness. I agree with that 100%. We don't know. But because we don't know, you cannot say that at some point it might be possible for a mechanical thing to duplicate those processes. No, because we don't know, you can't make any claims.

50:05Because you don't know, you can't make any claims. well no people are making the claim that you can't exactly you can't make any claims because we don't know well i would say that until you show that we can't that we can can't prove a negative i think we're i think we are i think that the human brain is a mechanical process you're trying to use the negative as your proof if you can't prove that god doesn't exist then well that's the ontological proof but yeah i don't i i i just don't like the notion that there is something magical about our process that makes it impossible to duplicate in a machine i think it's irrelevant a why would why would we try to duplicate it well we're not we're not but if but that's the invitation if for all intents and purposes his conversation with claudia was the same as a conversation with a so-called conscious entity, then it doesn't matter.

51:05Except for his whole conversation with Claudia is him just getting glazed. I've found the actual text of the article and have put it in, I added you guys on a different blog that he wrote about this, but now I'm in the one that started it all off. And it includes claims such as, I gave Claude the text of a novel I'm writing. He took a few seconds to read it, then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle so sensitive so intelligent that i was moved to expostulate well you may not know you're conscious but you bloody well are he basically was like how did but wait a minute he wrote it he would know what a deep insight into it is and that machine delivered a deep insight isn't what consciousness is if a machine that is trained on analyzing text is then able to analyze your text in a way that you find personally pleasurable.

51:57Oh my God, this machine can add. Oh my God, this machine can set type. Oh my God, this machine can - Similarly, we're back on Claudia, not Claude. He says, then I asked her whether when she read my novel, she read the first word before the last word. Yeah, this is funny. No, she read the whole book simultaneously. So he said to her, so you know what the words before and after mean, but you don't experience before, earlier than after? Claudia, that is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked me about the nature of my existence. That's a little glazy. I understand what you're saying.

52:36Oh, wonderful read. Wonderful read, Harris. That is a little glazy. And I don't deny that these models have a tendency to do that. But I still stand by the point that there is, I think, a hidden assumption that you may not acknowledge that there is something magical about the human process no just unique and and unique from a dog unique from a manta ray how do you know it's a dog i don't even know that we can argue that it's unique we just don't know enough about it to be able to claim to see it in anything else well i'm not disagreeing with you i think it doesn't matter than if something appears to be conscious that's sufficient is that's your argument no i don't i don't think that that's the natural agreement i think it is that we do not make any grand statements or assumptions about consciousness uh given that we don't know it so grady butch's point is that the mind is computable that that's that's that's i disagree still unknowable yeah that's that's that's the the hubris that's the same hubris that that yields artificial general intelligence it's bs i i disagree because uh what you're saying is that the mind is not computable and uh i don't see any process that's going on in our neurons that is not a physical process and if it is a physical process then it is deterministic and computable.

54:09I don't think people like that because we like to think we have free will and we're making choices and we're thinking about things. I know why people don't like that. But in fact, I don't think there's any evidence that there's any distinction between a process that can happen in a machine and a process that can happen in the brain. They're both deterministic physical processes. If there is any quantum process anywhere in that pipeline, then it's non-deterministic. You use quantum as a magical word, like, well, it's somehow quantum. um it automatically becomes probabilistic and not deterministic yeah i think the assumption that it's all deterministic is assuming a much narrower and easily explainable confluence of factors than it because you want magic you're looking for i don't want you're looking for kelvin i think it would be great if we could if every part about the brain was immediately intimately knowable and that i could have a uh one and done plug a usb into my head and get rid of depression and all other mental health issues but we don't understand how most things in the brain work and that's our limitation i agree so then we can't presume to understand how when something else has achieved an identical set of uh that's the thing that's the that's the distinction I don't know what Richard's saying.

55:31Maybe he's saying that. I don't think he's saying it's identical. I think he's saying it's indistinguishable. There is a big difference. I don't think anybody would assert that we could create an identical process to the brain. That is probably not the case. But I don't think you need to, to create something that is indistinguishable from the outputs of the brain's process. Indistinguishable to the limits to which he put it. Well, so what's wrong with indistinguishable limits, what you put it? I think that that's fine. That's a good limit. From that, he extrapolates consciousness. See, I don't think he's doing that.

56:08That's exactly what he's doing. He's doing it in a negative, but it's exactly what he's doing. Prove to me that it's not. Because I say, look at this amazing thing. You can't prove to me it's not. Ergo, it is. Okay. There's the conversation. And I think it's an interesting conversation. Yeah. There is another very interesting article from Om Malik in the stack, which is a little bit complicated, but I'll summarize it for me. Yeah, I'll give you a quick one. You know, Om many years ago said that Netflix was going to be the ultimate determiner of bandwidth, that this is the magic, what do they call that?

56:50The killer app for the internet was going to be Netflix, that all the bandwidth will be devoted to that. He says, I have to change now. It's going to be AI. And what AI needs from the internet is very different than what Netflix needs. He makes a distinction between north-south traffic from a server to your home, the Netflix-style traffic, or from your home to your server in either direction, versus east-west traffic. And he says even if you assume a huge amount of inference going on and people talking to AIs all the time, that's not really what the new internet is going to be about. The new internet is going to be about interconnections within data centers and between data centers.

57:30and he gives you a lot of evidence, these build-outs are going at great pace. And what he's really pointing out, which is interesting, is there are four big hyperscalers. There's Google, there's Meta, there's Microsoft, and there's Amazon. And these four big hyperscalers building these giant data centers, all each have a proprietary method of connecting the machines within the data centers and the data centers to one another. So they're basically each building their own distinct internets. Well, NVIDIA makes a big point that they're building standards for that as well. Well, this is the Ohm's point, which I think is interesting and maybe debatable, is that NVIDIA is running out of steam because their business isn't that.

58:16their business is selling the hardware to these data centers, which is why Jensen's going crazy about we got to open the Chinese market. He needs more markets for his GPUs. But Ohm says, no, the real battle is going to be over bandwidth. And it's really interesting. He points out that, for instance, Microsoft now has half a million. Let me get the stat up here so I say it right um oh shoot i should have i should have bookmarked this um they have uh

58:59I will say in the meantime that I think it's very funny that I wish that every time I made a big prediction about a company's product being the threshold by which the rest of the internet is going to form around, that I could just wait a couple years and then whenever I realize I'm wrong and it's actually a different company's product, you just change it. Well, I don't think he was wrong. And everybody's like, oh yeah, great. I don't actually think he was wrong. I think he was right about Netflix. But I think that there is a new... YouTube might have been the better company. Or YouTube, but there's a sea change.

59:29It's no longer north-south traffic. It's east-west traffic. Microsoft has, because we know it, because Microsoft publishes these stats, Google, Amazon, and Meta do not, they have half a million miles of fiber. According to their disclosure in November of last year, they added 120 ,000 new fiber miles in a year that they are sending over this fiber. what was it, 18 petabits a second. Oh, this is on Azure, 18 petabits a second by late last year. That tripled in one year. So all of a sudden, and we've seen this, this is why the demand for these data centers is so high, that this is really where the bandwidth and the battle is going.

1:00:17He also says power is very important. And the map is no longer who's using the most internet, no longer the big cities. the the bandwidth map is changing to where power is cheap and where land is cheap so you can build data centers which is why memphis people hate you yeah well it's why memphis is suddenly the you know in some ways the center of the bandwidth universe nvidia just invested 500 million in corning to expand fiber optic glass it's been huge for corning this company that was famous for cookware. First, Apple saved it with Gorilla Glass. Apple needed a glass that wouldn't break. And Steve Jobs actually didn't like the plastic on the iPhone, original iPhone, went to Corning, found Corning.

1:01:02They said, yeah, we had this project we killed of this really hard glass. Steve said, bring it back. Here's a billion dollars. Brought Corning back practically from the dead. Now they are, of course, the manufacturers of most fiberglass. And we're talking now 24-strand fiber cabling. I mean, this is huge amounts of bandwidth. Anyway, it's a tricky article, but it's a very interesting article. Ohm, besides being a journalist, was a longtime investor in these businesses. And I think this is as much saying where the money is going as anything else, as where the bits are going. But it's interesting too, when you look at your earlier story about Q whatever, the - Sub-Q.

1:01:46Thank you, Sub-Q.

1:01:51And this is part of what Justin Wong says, is that the data centers are going to be set. They're going to have a certain amount of capacity. And the way the growth will occur is then within the software and within and within the efficiency that exists. He's talking about in terms of CUDA, but it's also in terms of every application that runs on it. Everybody's going to try to find new methods to reduce the tokens, to be more focused, to be more efficient. And I don't know what that does to the data centers. Then there's also the new inference chips and memory chips that try to get the memory closer to the processing.

1:02:30So there's a lot of basic structural change, I think, yet to happen in the data center world. uh let me let me find the quote about um nvidia because i thought it was quite good i don't this is a very uh deep technical article and we're not going to really be able to summarize completely but i think it's very provocative um

1:02:56he uh

1:03:00he said when i read that akamai is putting nvidia blackwell edition gpus into more than 4 ,400 edge locations. I chuckled. He said, so now inference is the new content and Akamai wants to be the inference delivery network. He said that it's futile. The vendor's most loudly promoting edge inference, by the way, that's kind of the point is edge inference is not the driver here. It's going to be bandwidth between data centers. He said the vendor's most loudly promoting edge inference, NVIDIA, Akamai, and the carriers all have direct economic interest in the story working out. There are real use cases for edge inference, but I would not bet the farm on this layer the way I would on the hyperscaler core, the data center interconnects or the subsea backbone.

1:03:45I guess that's the kind of the central core of the piece is maybe we're looking at the wrong thing. And that's when I had to look at Gary Marcus's article, the greatest capital misallocation in history uh and of course the stock market hated that meta and others were spending so much money on data centers sheer insanity marcus writes amazon google microsoft and meta collectively are spending more money than the manhattan project every single month more than 12 times the manhattan project every year what have they got to show for it well ohm would say they're they're building in exactly the right place well the market was mixed on this meta they were not happy with because there's no strategy google for time today was the largest company in the world right right beat nvidia yeah google has a very strong story he points out that all four of the hyperscalers are building their own processors they don't intend to be beholden to nvidia forever they're offering both right now they're offering both yeah but he believes that the same way you're going to have these proprietary interconnects with these big four you're going to have proprietary processors these big four well this is this is jensen wong's argument with china is that cuda is cut out of china right and the market yeah he's trying to market yeah i don't blame him uh oh and then finally uh in this same vein um from the california water blog i thought this is really interesting jay lund who writes about water usage he's a postdoc scholar uc davis an expert on water and watersheds he says do not fall for the hype that ai is drinking all our water in fact he points out in california more water goes to beer than it goes to data centers hello good news california has about 15 million square feet of floor space for data centers total data center facility energy dissipation he does some math uh he's he's basically saying don't panic the amount of water being used by ai data centers is is not as significant as it's been painted he would be better off using the golf course golf course thing over the beer thing i look at this golf course behind me which may be one or two groups of golfers goes by a day the amount of water they're pouring in the desert part of it yeah we're on the dry the dry side of the mountain um anyway i thought that was very interesting and kind of he says don't panic over ai data center water use in california recent study for central arizona found that beer production consume more water than data centers in that region um there he says but ai will bring more important concerns such as the end of human civilization so there's that okay i'm not people want all that beer people want all that beer too we're gonna need more of that beer All right.

1:06:43Let's see. We've got about half an hour till our guest joins us. Troy Hunt is calling in from Australia on the Gold Coast. You know his name. He's the creator of haveibeenpwned.com. He's probably the number one guy in charge of revealing data breaches and letting us know if our passwords or emails have been discovered in a data breach. He's really an amazing fellow. He'll be joining us a bit to talk about his use of ai as a matter of fact more ai at work news china has become the first country in the world to ban firing a worker because ai can do their job no western country has done this interesting that china has well it is it is the people's republic of china it is a workers paradise.

1:07:35So maybe that makes sense. So here, AI is being used as the excuse to get rid of people. There, you'll just find a different reason you're getting rid of people. Oh, maybe that's it. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. And there, it'll be harder then to justify the investment in AI if you can't recognize the savings in staff. the academy awards have decided that no ai actor or ai written script can ever win an oscar ai bigots that's so unsurprising yeah protectionism is the first reflex a major overhaul i mean it's not even it's just it's a historically protectionist institution they don't even allow more than one director to be nominated like you can't have a co-director unless you are a famously acknowledged duo.

1:08:33Oh, is that true? The first couple of their films, one of them was nominated as a director rather than both, and they kind of traded off because they weren't allowed to be submitted as co-directors to the Academy until they officially acknowledged them as a famous duo. A Harvard trial of emergency triage diagnoses. Researchers say AI actually outperformed real emergency room physicians. This is published in the journal Science. Large language models, quote, have eclipsed most benchmarks of clinical reasoning. One experiment focused on 76 patients who arrived at the emergency room of a Boston hospital.

1:09:20An AI and a pair of human doctors were each given the same standard electronic health record to read, typically including vital sign data demographic information a few sentences from a nurse about why the patient was there the ai identified the exact or very close diagnosis in 67 percent of the cases the er docs write only about half the time i would expect a a i look i was just watching where was this uh there's a lawsuit going on uh poor fellow uh died because uh when he got to the hospital i think it was in western massachusetts it was a yale new haven satellite hospital there was no doctor in the emergency room and uh they apparently didn't diagnose his health issue and he passed away they're suing i would imagine you're going to see ais in more and more emergency rooms but i would hope the doctors would also still be there um some important details of this from the actual study is the study authors emphasize that it only really is measuring text-based performance in this case for humans and machines.

1:10:31Of course, these large language models are going to be more proficient at because they're fundamentally text-based. They have no bedside manner at all. And they say clinical medicine is multifaceted and awash with non-text inputs, including auditory, such as the patient's level of distress, and visual information, for example, interpretation of medical imaging studies that clinicians routinely used. And existing studies suggest that current foundational models are more limited in reasoning over non-text inputs and that basically this is kind of an area where of course these models are going to be incredibly adept at because that is the training data that they are working from.

1:11:11And by the same logic, the human doctors are going to be at a disadvantage because the thing they've spent their careers doing is not just reading a couple of lines of text and making a clinical assessment based on that. You may remember the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, who's one of his characters was a physician who smelled patients to diagnose them and was very good at it. And actually, I don't think that that's made up. I think dogs can smell cancer, COVID. They can smell cancer and covid yeah yeah yeah um the wall street journal quest to use ai to find new drugs companies like eli lily and roche are racing to build supercomputers to help fix the 90 failure rate in drug development it's a hit driven business like hollywood if 10 of the drugs work they're happy but they'd like to improve that number um when i spoke at a um pharma company in Switzerland.

1:12:13Why did you speak at a pharma company in Switzerland? How do you be a googly drug? So this was a while ago. This was, yeah, this was that. And I didn't kind of realize that the pharma industry is entirely an industry of molecules, right? Find a molecule and does it do what we hope it will do and test it and the testing. You know, one of the, I don't know where it is in the industry now, but because it's a secretive industry, because the expenses are so high, one of the things that would make the industry, the field, so much more efficient is if they would share all their failures. They're failures anyway, but instead they want their competitors to go through the same.

1:12:48They want them to spend money too. Yeah. Yeah. And so we slow down. A brief aside, I just realized when I was looking at this large language model performance on clinicians thing, one of the authors is a visiting researcher at DeepMind. well they need some ai expertise on the on the team of course i mean but you're right they may have an axe to grind yeah it's notable that always whenever you're reading about any sort of study click through and scroll down to the conflicts of interests oh yeah oh yeah uh and furthermore and gary marcus we're going to bring him up again he's the chief ai critic these days uh says and this is probably do you think that's him or do you think that's ed Ed's pretty big, but I don't know.

1:13:36Gary's the guy. In AI alone, Gary's got a crown. Ed's focused on finance. Ed's got lots of things that he goes after. But I think that Gary really is, I mean, I'm not sure I agree with Gary 90 % of the time, but in this case, I do agree with him. He said the real way to measure the success of AI in medicine is inpatient outcomes. Does the patient get better? not did you do the diagnosis right but does it make a difference and uh there is a uh he's quoting a nature article that uh says basically the same thing and there is so far no evidence that improved patient outcomes so far this weekend uh my mother called me and was kind of complaining that she had like been feeling kind of crummy lately and then described what are all the classic symptoms of a woman experiencing a heart attack or stroke pressure in my tent and like so i was like hey you gotta go to the er right now because those are the signs of and she's like i don't know i'm fine i was like i had a whole conversation back and forth i was like please like you know she hung up and she was like i'm gonna go to sleep but like i'll you know call you in the morning and so i was freaking out i speak to her in the morning and she's like oh yeah i did go but But it's because I woke up an hour or two later and then I asked chat GPT and it said that I was experiencing all the symptoms of like associated with a stroke.

1:15:05Your daughter? Oh, chat GPT. I was like, well, at least you went. And then she went and they were like, you're fine. They didn't EKG and a bunch of stuff. They made her wait four hours to do another. I'll be at the area that she lives in has terrible medical care. So I'm sending her to go get a follow up somewhere else. There's a lot of old people in that area. They should have good doctors. Yes, they should. Yes. It's amazing to watch what happens to old people in Florida. Not that your parents were that old yet, but you get ignored a lot. My grandmother, 10 years or so ago, died in a series of events that, I mean, she wasn't doing great to begin with, but then she went in for, you know, some sort of heart-related issues.

1:15:52and the doctors accidentally gave her a bunch of viagra instead of the medication that she's supposed to have and then she died do that by oh my lord it killed your grandmother wait a minute i mean that was one of the viagra killed your grandmother is a very good headline i'm just saying you could you could get that viagra killed your grandmother yeah you know how did that how What did they, how I'm nonplussed. I mean, I'll ask, I actually won't ask for details because it really has traumatized my mother. At the time, I didn't ask, but I remember that being a very intense part of it that I had wormed my way in my head that I remember for the last 10 years.

1:16:37viagra has uh been uh there's an there's a generic version of viagra that is uh i don't know if it's an off-label use i think it is actually a labeled use for uh lowering blood pressure so that's what it was originally developed for right that's what they may have thought her blood pressure was too high and given her this generic which you would label viagra um but it's it's really intended for reducing blood pressure yeah i think it might have been like they were trying to give it to her for some reason that was legitimate and related to that that not ed i presume yeah i mean i think it's that she was you know trying to get it up and it wasn't really working grandma i think that she um wow she's been taking like some other medication that interacted probably but i know that that was one of the precipitating factors into her final episode i think that's one where the link baity headline maybe isn't the full story i would hope i mean i'd hope but you know that's the story i always think about when i think about that area's um medical prowess yeah um speaking of uh laws maryland has become the first state to ban ai driven price increases in grocery stores how do they know uh that's a good question but i mean you've seen we've talked about it before, many stores now are using electronic readouts instead of price stickers, which gives them, in theory, a centralized place that they could change the price.

1:18:08Maryland is also banning DoorDash and other third-party delivery services from using customers' personal data to set higher prices. Now, that's important, that higher prices, because some people say this is a bad law because it doesn't mention lower prices. And the fear is that what retailers will do is raise all prices and then lower them selectively instead of raising them selectively. The key is two customers should pay the same amount for the same item from the same retailer at the same time. It's just that AI has such cooties now. Yeah, I think some of that. Anything that has AI with it is presumed to be bad.

1:18:49Right. I mean, this is surge pricing, isn't it? Right. This is the same thing. Yeah, but they've been doing it for ages. Yeah. But what you don't want is some sort of AI based redlining like, oh, that person looks rich. Let's raise the price. And I mean, that does seem to be what's happening on a lot of these apps. One of my colleagues in December had done a really phenomenal investigation that found that Instacart does or was doing this for a lot of different foods. they had kind of worked with they we gathered like a group of three or four hundred different volunteers all throughout the u.s that used you know identical phones identical account patterns all loaded up instacart at the exact same time of day same sort of situation same wi-fi connection tried to control as many variables as possible and added the same items to their cart and they got wildly different prices.

1:19:47Wow. Just for the base price of a food item. And that's a grocery delivery service. Yeah, you expect that. I think a common expectation people have is that you will see this in surge pricing for something like Uber or maybe your delivery fees on something like DoorDash, but not in the base food price itself. And the airlines have been doing this forever, right? The airlines have always been doing this. No two passengers paid the same for their ticket ever. Yeah. By the way, it was Consumer Reports that complained that this law didn't go far enough, that didn't cover lowering prices as well. So CR, doing good work.

1:20:30But it's a first step and the law could be improved, of course. And California has made it legal for the California Highway Patrol to ticket a driverless vehicle. How do they stop it? ah that's a good i guess you'd have to stand in front of it i don't know uh you put a cone on its nose you put a cone on its nose there you go it's very easy they can they don't actually need to stop it they can just issue a notice of av non-compliance it goes right to the car's manufacturer all they need is the license plate um so i think that's probably due that's much much needed law yeah uh we see waymos on every corner in san francisco now same in la and there have been issues in fact going back to china china has apparently banned driverless vehicles now because of in wuhan a whole bunch of driverless vehicles caused a massive traffic jam and they couldn't be broken up so china is now pulling back on licenses for driverless vehicles but there's all kinds of videos from china of uh crazy automated vehicles doing crazy stuff yeah Yeah, those delivery trucks or whatever they are, they automated.

1:21:40Meanwhile, I am so dying for a Chinese car. Oh, a BYD or something. Oh, they're way ahead of us. And this is so far ahead of us. Yeah. In fact, that was very controversial when Canada said, you know, we're going to let these Chinese cars sell them to Canada. I think if these manufacturers, Geely and BYD, just brought 100 cars into the U.S., the jealousy for them and pay whatever they got to pay in the stupid. Oh, they can't even cross the border. doesn't matter they can't can't now it's not just the tariff they're legally not well but i've read stories that people are people are buying one in canada if you buy one in canada you cannot drive it into the united states i saw that people were buying them how do they stop that yeah i don't at the border do they just have somebody there with a gun that's going to shoot your car if you come across you're just not allowed to cross the border if you're driving in a chinese vehicle but who's policing that the border patrol you think they don't do that they they look at the car in addition to everything else you're doing as border you're policing the nationality of a car yes absolutely no italian cars neither because they're just they're just bad vehicles um well the fact that the new volvo e x60 or something the v60 uh looks really good and geely owns volvo right i'm starting to see things that are creeping in.

1:23:04Polestar is a joint venture of a Chinese company. And GM is trying to do a deal with Geely. So is it Geely or Greeley? What's interesting, of course, is it's the big three automakers that don't want Chinese vehicles in this country, and Tesla, because it competes directly with them. They're afraid they would. I haven't bought an American-made car in a year, since I was 20. And there are so many Chinese manufacturers. You know, there's so many Chinese manufacturers. car manufacturers i see them in the philippines they're all over the place and they're all different kinds of brands there's so many well and there's some very inexpensive ones there's no cheap yeah uh this was a controversy that we talked about yesterday on security now we're gonna do a couple more stories then we'll uh take a break and get uh ready for uh troy hunt if he calls in benito let me know we'll we'll immediately uh stop and uh and talk to him uh google chrome has started downloading a four gigabyte local model with every purchase.

1:24:08So if you install Google Chrome today, you will get, without warning or permission, you will get a four gigabyte version of Google's nano model. Does that mean the updates too? Yeah. Now, there is a way to stop it. You can go into browser flags and turn it off. This comes from the privacy guy. He's talking about, and I think he's got a good point, at a billion device scale, Google Chrome, of course, the number one browser worldwide, climate costs of this download alone are insane. But we actually had a little bit of a debate in the Club Twit Discord. Darren Oki, who is a developer and an AI advocate, said, no, this is going to be great because then you will know a browser has a local model that you can call on.

1:25:00He says, it's hard for me if a user misspells Dubai when they're entering their name and address in a form, but the local AI could quickly catch it and fix it without me having to write code. It's going to be part of every browser. This is a bit of a get ready video, a moral panic of AI cooties. Oh, in the White House now. Don't you wish. behind the resolute desk that was jeff jarvis with moral panic i mean it's gonna be part of every browser and and it's oh it's ai it's downloading ai well you're gonna get functionality that functionality is going to come from ai run locally and you want to run locally and so i don't this is a hoo-ha i yeah okay here's my first of all i understand people just say four gigabytes no and it could have been 22 gigabytes but google was able to squeeze the model down quite a bit But you have local models on Android phones.

1:25:57You have local models on iPhones. That's why they can do on-device AI. So it's not unheard of. I think my issue more would be this is Google kind of big footing web standards because you're establishing. And it doesn't seem like there's a way to opt out. Like I just scrolled through this article. Well, if you go to browser colon slash slash flags and search for opt guide on device model. Yeah, that I would argue is just what you're just describing doesn't seem like a way to opt out. You have to do some tinkering. It's not in the settings, but it is in the flags, the browser flags. There are a lot more settings in there than they expose the settings.

1:26:43Google clearly wants you to have Nano on your machine. Well, I also bet that what they're doing then is they're going to add everybody who has Chrome as another user in a way. This is going to boost their total user numbers for Gemini. Well, everybody who used Google Search is now using Gemini. I know. And you're going to quickly get to the point where a website will say, oh, you don't have Chrome. you don't have a local ai you need to use chrome and i think that's google's point this is how you get chrome to 100 market share by putting in a new feature not approved by the w3c or by ietf that every website's gonna or not every but many websites are gonna say oh no no you need chrome to use so my my google chrome on my brand new neo is 1.4 gigs there will be i'll tell you where to look.

1:27:40Actually, I'm not sure on the Mac. There's a file named weights, W-E-I-G-H-T-S weights.bin. Those are the model. It lives at least in Windows in that opt guide on device model folder. Here's the thing. Even if you delete it, it returns it. Next update, you'll probably get it. This machine is a week old. well this just started does it work even if you have as i do um turned off all ai in the browser oh i'm in the flags thing now and i like whenever a setting thing starts with all caps in red warning experimental features ahead danger danger danger well there's a lot of good stuff there by the way and browser flags.

1:28:33It's always a good thing to work on. So this guy actually verified it on a freshly created Apple Silicon profile. So I think you are going to get it. Can't wait. But I don't, yeah, I don't, yes. I think there's two sides to this. What I think Google should have done is go to the web standards. See, Firefox has already said we're never going to do that. Vivaldi says we're never going to do that. Vivaldi is based on Chrome. That's the next question is, will all chrome browse chrome based chromium based browsers you do this as well i don't know uh the privacy guy also points out this probably is unlawful in the eu and the uk because of gdpr and he also talks about the energy usage if you uh if you the device per device cost of one nano push is 0.24 kilowatt hours per device per download and then multiply that times a billion devices that's a lot of bandwidth that's maybe 24 gigawatt hours of bandwidth or more anyway that's just in trying to yeah i don't i don't know if that's the real uh talk about tiktok and bandwidth hours here i think you're going to see local models everywhere you see local models on every phone now you're gonna want it because you don't want stuff going back up into the cloud so you can't have it both ways here right uh the creator of the this is fine art the me remember you know that meme with the dog oh remember it it's there still every day in the cafe and it's on fire this is fine says i didn't know this but a guy named casey green created the comic he says in a blue blue sky post there he saw an ad in the subway station featuring this is fine but it's from an AI company saying my pipeline is fine.

1:30:25And he says, you stole it. That's mine. I got bad news for you, Casey. I think this is, I don't know. Can the memification of a work of art suddenly make it public domain? I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, I'm shocked that, I guess this is what happens when you work at a startup, but I am shocked that they got to the point of placing ads in the subway without anybody being like, oh, fair use, copyright. Well, you have to be rich enough to sue. You have to be rich enough to sue. So yeah, that's right. He says not anything I agreed to. He said that ad was stolen at like AI steals.

1:31:08He says, please vandalize it when you see it. And it looks like this particular one wasn't the company said we love his work we're gonna we're contacting him there were somebody didn't know what they were i think it's yeah if it's a meme you might assume that well must be uh public now right except commercial use it's just like right yeah um okay now here's the weird google's deep mind has taken a stake a minority stake but a stake anyway in an online game called eve online very popular i don't know if it's still post do people still play eve online benito i'm pretty sure they do but whoever does is like super hardcore yeah that's that's been around for quite a while but presumably the point is to use it for ai training the icelandic company ferris creation or fenris creations uh creator of eve online um

1:32:11they say Eve Online requires skill that AI has not yet fully mastered. Oh, this is a director at DeepMind, such as long-term planning and continual learning. And so by training AI on Eve Online, we can make AI better. I think that's kind of interesting. Now, I don't think the players of Eve Online are going to be too thrilled about it. It might become a story point. Because, you know, what happens in EVE Online is like the story evolves through the actual people playing the game. So it might become a villain. It might become a villain or something. Oh, that's one way to protest. Huh. And finally, I thought this was a great story.

1:32:49This is worthy of a Paris Martineau article in Wired magazine. I'll give credit to the author, Todd Feathers. He couldn't land a job interview was AI to blame. It's about a medical school resident, Chad Markey, who was trying to find placement in a hospital once his residency completed, had applied to many places, got not one interview, not one acceptance of his application, and started to think maybe AI is involved. He had taken a number of leaves of absence in the process of getting his med school training. By the way, great references, great grades. There was no reason why you wouldn't want to hire this guy.

1:33:40He was applying to psychiatric programs. But he had voluntarily taken three separate leaves of absence. And in his record, it didn't say why. It turns out it was for medical reason. his theory and he spent a lot of time and wrote a lot of python code to test it was that ai screening tools used by hospitals were screening him out because of those uh timeouts he would spend according to todd feathers writing it wired the next six months writing emails research papers legal requests and a constant stream of python code trying to peer inside an ai screener screener that he believes was keeping him from getting a job it's a great story highly recommended it's kind of a detective story eventually while he wasn't able to prove that the screener was screening him out he got some evidence that uh that taking those leaves of absence without a good reason might in fact be knocking his applications out of the running.

1:34:43So he changed his record to say it was for medical reasons, and he immediately got a job offer and is going to Columbia, the Presbyterian, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in their psychiatric program. So maybe he was right. It does talk about a tool, an AI residency application screener built by the company Metocratic. But again, I'm not sure that's an AI thing. I think - Yeah, it doesn't need to be AI. Yeah, it doesn't need to be AI. I would say if there's unexplained breaks in a resume, it's going to raise a question mark. And if I have a hundred good resumes, it's not going to make the top of the pile.

1:35:21Sorry. Yeah. A lot of hospitals said, well, it was one example, Yale-No Haven said, told Wired that they had tried Cortex, the tool, but stopped using it. two residency programs at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center used it before program directors reviewed the applications, but they stopped using it because they preferred their own screening methods. One of the things Chad found is that people's grades would change from moment to moment in the screening tool. That's not good. Cortex said, oh yeah, that's because the page refresh didn't happen yeah that's the ticket uh in the academe we have tons of search committees and they're as bad as any ai absolutely absolutely yeah he got a job and that's the good news it's a good story too he really did some detective work well hey troy hunt has joined us he is on the line from the gold coast of australia uh we will get to troy hunt the creator of have i been pwn.com and talk to him about his AI bot, Bruce, right after this.

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1:39:13Of course, we're all big fans. Have I Been Pwned is an internet institution. I was saying earlier that it's kind of like that XKCD article about open source projects where the entire enterprise world is suspended on a little brick written by one developer in the middle of nowhere. You and your wife, Charlotte, are, in fact, you know, kind of the sole runners of Have I Been Pwned. Is that right? Or do you have a team now? Well, we have one more person. We have one developer in Iceland who's a good friend, similar sorts of background, someone we just know really well and trust. But it's really just the three of us now.

1:39:49What a great story. So you were at Pfizer. You've been a developer for many years. And was this just a hobby project you created? Yeah, it was because I was there for 14 years, and I started there as a developer in 2001. And the same thing happened to me that happens to every software professional in a big enterprise. They say, you know, you're doing good, but if you want your career to progress, you've got to stop doing that, and you've got to become a manager. And that kind of sucked my soul. because it's a shame because I liked code, but I also liked money. So what are you going to do? It's Sophie's choice.

1:40:26It's not an easy thing to decide. So what did you decide? Well, I did both. I stayed at Pfizer. I started a hobby project for fun, and I started building out an independent life, initially doing online training for Pluralsight and started to create, I guess, a life of my own. And then they very kindly made my job redundant and gave me a couple of years worth of pay to leave, which was fantastic timing. Oh, that's good, actually. Yeah. That's a good thing. And then that sort of coincided, I understand, with a big breach at Adobe. Yeah. So Adobe, October 2013, was the catalyst for Have I Been Pined?

1:41:02I started with that one and a few other really little ones. And it was pretty much just all Adobe and a sprinkling of other things. And I thought, oh, you know, this will be fun. A few of my friends will use it. It will never be serious, which is why I gave it such a stupid name. and then it just became popular and it just kept going. It is funny because of all the years I've referred people to Have I Been Pwned, I always have to say P-W-N-E-T. I would say if you don't know what pwned means, you weren't on the internet at a certain time also. But it becomes a fun discussion point because people are like, look, now that it's big and you're taking it seriously, should you change the name so that people don't think it's just, you know, some idiotic project?

1:41:42I was like, no, it's a conversation piece now. How big is the database now? So in terms of raw records, that's probably the best number to refer to. What's it say on the front page? It's changing every day at the moment. 17.5 billion records. That consumes about one and a quarter terabytes worth of data. But, you know, the only thing we load is email addresses. So seven and a half billion instances of an email address in a breach, which then has something like 6 billion something unique email addresses. And then each one just on average appears a few times. Wow. So you don't record any further data about that.

1:42:21You're just saying this email address has been compromised. Yeah, correct. Correct. And there's, you know, there's a part of me, which is like if we had the other data there and people could literally like take back control, you know, they could see what was my date of birth and my home address and everything that was exposed. It's like, that would be great from an empowerment perspective, but the risks involved in that are sitting on all of that data, not to mention the processing effort. Email addresses are easy. We can regex out email addresses, but addresses, phone numbers and things, that's hard.

1:42:49You do do something that's really great. And I don't know if people are aware of it. I mean, they often go just to the front page, enter their email address and say, oh, yeah, my email address is out there. But there's a passwords feature as well, which I really like. And I think it might scare people if they click that link at the top of the page and enter a password. I'll just put in monkey123 that maybe they're giving you their password. But that's not the case, right? No. So we've got a really cool anonymity model behind that. So when you enter that password, it gets hashed client side. And then there's only five characters of the hash that get sent off to the service.

1:43:28And the service comes back with hash suffixes and it try and mixes it all up. But anyone who looks at the dev tools can see what happens. And we actually, that API that sits behind that has now hit 18 billion times a month because lots of organizations have built this into their registration flow. Because what we're trying to do is say, look, when someone comes to sign up, the BBC, for example, is a big user. If you try and sign up on the BBC and you're using that password, even if you capitalize a letter and then you put a number and an exclamation mark at the end to make it secure, if it's been seen before it's going to be higher risk so yeah we do 18 billion checks a month on that at the moment that's amazing and this is such a service such an important service uh to us as uh internet users we're very grateful to you do you how do you make money on this well for a long time it didn't that was the first easy answer uh and now it does in a few different ways so there's some one password product placement which you'll see on the front page that came along after people would search for themselves and they'd get a result and it's like, hey, you've been in five data breaches.

1:44:36Good luck. And then they're like, well, what do I do? And obviously having strong unique passwords was a key thing there. And I had an existing relationship with them. They actually bake have I been pwned into 1Password as well. So if you're a 1Password user, that will tell you if your stored passwords have been in breaches or your email address has been in breaches. So that was a nice relationship. And then if you're an organization monitoring a larger domain, you then need to pay to get access to the results of that domain. And there's just an API key slash dashboard there. And that's pretty much it.

1:45:11So do other password managers use your database? I mean, I've seen other password managers warn me that my password's been seen in a breach. How do they know that? Well, there's a bunch of different services out there that do similar things. I think I honestly don't pay much attention. I certainly didn't look at it before I built this. For things like the password search feature, we've made all that data free and open source as well. So there's about a billion unique passwords. So any password manager is free to download all of that and integrate it. And they may use it. I don't know. That's kind of the joy of it.

1:45:46We literally just don't know. That's awesome. So one of the reasons I wanted to have you on Intelligent Machines, we talk about AI, is Bruce. You want to tell us a little bit about Bruce? It hasn't been Bruce's finest day today. Oh, no. Oh, what did Bruce do? All right. I actually tweeted this only about an hour ago. So Bruce is drafting responses to Zendesk tickets, and he drafts this response today for someone asking about a subscription. And Bruce is like, the subscription starts at US$3.50 a month. And I'm like, where did that number come from? This is Bruce's exact words. He says, honestly, I don't know.

1:46:24It didn't come from the markdown file with the pricing, which has a correct figure. And it didn't come from our lessons markdown file. It's a hallucinated number. I made it up. He literally said, I made it up. So there you go. But he's honest about being honest. He admits it. Then he doubles down because then there's another message as well. And he's like, yeah, it's all hallucination. But I mean, this is why everything is human approved before it goes out. Because even stuff that should be really, really simple and clear cut, he can make mistakes on. And if we represent a price to someone, even if it's the bot, I think we're kind of obligated then to stick to it.

1:47:01Yep. I've got a fundamental question, Troy. Because I've long thought that, I'll put it this way. What if we presume that all of our emails, all of our social security numbers, all of our addresses, all of our ages, all of our mothers maiden names is just out there? And so rather than concentrating on the leak side, the other side of security, what should be done to make none of that matter? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think that's the safe assumption at this point in time. You know, I find now we'll have some major data breach and I'll do a lot of press and they'll say, you know, what should people do now?

1:47:42It's like, well, they should do all the stuff that they should be doing anyway. Like this doesn't change the fact that you should have strong, unique passwords and all the rest of it. But I think the question, Jeff, insofar as it comes back to things like how do we do particularly knowledge-based authentication? So I got invited to speak at Congress in the US, the big, important Congress, not the one here, some years ago. You have a nicer Congress than we have. ah yeah i'm not even sure what we've got to be honest uh but anyway the the premise of that hearing was how do we do authentication uh using knowledge-based information in a post-breach world because if you know social security numbers in the u.s are a great example they're they're meant to be secret you give it to all of these different organizations they're very very hard to change if you need to later on so why are we using this as a form of knowledge-based authentication why are we're using dates of birth as a form of knowledge-based authentication.

1:48:35You know, we literally, we have here, and I'm sure we do over there as well, time and time again, a bank, a telco will say, we just need to make sure you are who you say you are, what's your date of birth? And you're like, well, it's the thing in all the data breaches. It's also the thing that I tell my friends because I like cake and presents and a bunch of people put it on their social media. So I think the bigger fundamental question here is how do we do knowledge-based authentication or how do we do identity verification, being conscious that all of the KBA stuff we've got is either compromised or easily discoverable these days.

1:49:06So how do we do it? I mean, this is one of the fundamental problems of the internet is authentication. Well, you give the government all your data and then you have a government that's for identification. And everybody loves that and there's no problems with it, right? It's kind of what Estonia does. They have a different... Yeah, so is Estonia in better shape than the rest of us? It's a good question. They're a little bit outside my usual remit. I don't think they're probably going to be much worse, to be honest. They created a national digital ID, but the encryption, the crypto used on the ID was cracked, was flawed, actually.

1:49:40And so they had to retract the card and reissue it. So even, you know, something as interesting. India has national ID as well. Yeah, it's always problematic. What about Sam Altman's iris scanning world thing? What about that? Yeah, do you think the orb will save us? The orb, yeah. But I think every one of these services, if you're being entirely objective about it, we're far better off doing this at a federal government level. And in a perfect world, we'd all implement some sort of basic structure that we could replicate across the world as well. We're better off doing this at a federal level from a government than any individual tech company.

1:50:21But nobody trusts the government, even though they have most of the data anyway. I mean, we got digital driver's licenses a while ago and I did a talk at one point and I remember a lady saying, you know, I really don't trust the government with my data to do digital driver's licenses. I'm like, who do you think has all your driver's license data already? Like, they're the ones who issue you the driver's license. They have this, they just print it on a card at the moment and send it to you. So you know, there's that. And of course, we're now in an era of increasing age verification all around the world as well.

1:50:50So how do we do age verification, identity verification, and maintain privacy? And they're all hard problems. Yeah. And it doesn't sound like we have any obvious solution. I don't think anybody in the United States wants to trust our government to identify us. But you're right, they already know all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, we were the first country in the world here in Australia to roll out a minimum age of 16 for social media. It rolled out in December last year, which I found fascinating. I had a son who turned 16 just before that and a daughter who turned 13 just before that. So she just got social media.

1:51:24And now she spends her days figuring out which social media platform she can game to create another account on. Exactly. And how long it lasts. So it's just sort of fascinating to see all this roll out at the moment. It's just teaching kids to be hackers. And, of course, it's been very good for VPN companies in Australia as well. Yeah, there's that. Look, it's like a lot of the world. I mean, the UK is doing similar things. A lot of Europe's doing similar things. I think you've got various states in the US at least proposing as well. And I mean, at its heart, there are elements of truth to this as well.

1:51:58We had to have a chat with our 13-year-old daughter the other day saying, some of that stuff you really shouldn't be posting on social media. Like, this is exactly why our government is saying you should wait a few years. Please don't continue to prove me wrong that you're mature enough to have it. But there is an element of truth to delaying access to a lot of aspects of social media. for children. Are you concerned, you know, lately, one of the biggest creators of breaches have been shiny hunters, which I think chiefly social engineering techniques are very good at social engineering. But are you concerned about AI generated attacks, AI generated breaches?

1:52:33Is that something that it seems like increasing? Yeah, look, certainly very concerned about the potential. but i mean shiny hunters is a great example where these are kids or at least teenagers uh when they eventually get arrested which will happen if they keep this up uh we'll see some of them happen yeah some of them have been uh yeah one of them was one of them did the power schools uh hack and then successfully ransomed them he's just been sentenced to i think four years he's 19 years old started when he was 14. so they'll all be that demographic but you know they're doing they're doing fishing They're literally doing voice phishing.

1:53:08These are kids or very young men calling up telephone numbers, talking to humans. It's working very well just with humans. We're all worried about the potential of AI, but I'm honestly yet to see data breaches of this nature escalating because of AI. They're escalating because of the likes of Shining Hunters managed to find the right tools and techniques to apply over and over again very successfully. And they've just been very good at getting into a lot of Salesforce stuff. They recently had an ad. They're looking for female voices to impersonate mothers and wives because they only have a bunch of young guys right now.

1:53:42But that's an interesting partial answer, isn't it? I mean, how much voice manipulation software is there out there and they're still saying, we'd like a human. And these guys are the experts. Yeah, no kidding. Sad to say. So really the real problem, the real issue is you think training employees, training users to be smarter not to fall for this stuff? Well, it's always a bit of a shared responsibility. I mean, I fell for a phishing attack about a year ago now. Yeah, by the way, you were very brave to reveal that. I thought that was really important that you reveal it because that shows anybody can be bit.

1:54:21Well, Leo got bitten recently with the entasement of NACE headphones. But I was inspired by you, Troy, to reveal it, to talk about it, Because I think the more we talk about our experience, the more likely people are going to start saying, oh, yeah, this could happen to me too. I think in fairness, I had a bit of a luxury insofar as it's obviously a very teachable moment. It opened my eyes a lot as well. But it was also very low impact data. It was, what, 15 ,000, I think, email addresses from my mailing list. It wasn't sensitive PII. It wasn't a have I been pwned exploit or something like that.

1:54:58So it was the sort of thing that without knowing it, I could actually get a lot of mileage out of without it being too impactful. But I just found it particularly ironic because I was in London at the time there, the day before I'd been with the National Cybersecurity Centre and the government there, having a meeting about how can we drive passkey adoption because passkeys are a phishing proof second forms authentication. You know, unlike OTPs, which is what ultimately got phished for my MailChimp account. and we're like, oh, we need to come up with some good ways of demonstrating the importance of pass keys in the next morning.

1:55:34You know, here we are. You did. You did. So you've made it possible because you have APIs for agents to use Have I Been Pwned as well, right? Is there an MCP server? Yeah, there's an MCP server. So Stefan's stood up an MCP server. So we have that. And then, of course, we have all the API documentation, which the AI has actually also been very good at just consuming and figuring out how to call APIs as well. So we're sort of covering all their bases there. And what do they do with it? Do they just look up, you know, breaches or? Well, it's a question of what services the API implements. And the predominant ones there are searching for an email address, which is rate limited, depending on the key you have, and searching for domains that you've already proven control of.

1:56:19So if I was, let's say I was back in Pfizer and I had a security role there, I might want to monitor Pfizer.com. So now by using particularly an agentic AI bot that can go and not just run on demand commands, but do things like monitoring query, I could just jump in there and say, hey, tell me how many senior executives have been in a data breach recently. And so long as I could map that data of senior executives, we're good. Or tell me how many people on our domain are in the last data breach. Tell me who has been in a sensitive data breach. It just becomes like a conversation with your AI of choice when it can then interface between that discussion and the published APIs.

1:56:59And to do it securely with an API key that only gives you access to the things that you have the rights to. That's great. Thank you for doing that. I think that'll be very useful. I've been kind of on a campaign to get everybody to offer an API. I don't think you need an MCP, but just to offer some sort of interface that agents can use. It's incredibly valuable. So is Bruce retired? Are you going to spank him or are you just going to go on? Look, we're progressing very gradually with Bruce at the moment. Normally Charlotte would sort of do most of the tickets. And she's like, can I just, you know, can I get Bruce to answer questions and things?

1:57:37I'm like, well, it depends. Like how many markdown files do you want to edit? And she's on technical. She basically does everything a non-technical person can do, including all the formalities and legal things and accounting. and then I do the rest. But unfortunately, Bruce at the moment is still a little bit technical, but we are refining it over and over and over again. And I'm understanding more about if we have particularly an agentic AI like OpenClaw literally running here on my desk, how does it actually query? What's it actually doing? Well, it's creating a bunch of Python scripts. So we conversion those.

1:58:09We can see how they change over time. It's creating a bunch of markdown files. It's figuring out what are the right ones to send up to Claude when it actually needs to ask a question of an LLM to then format that in a human-readable response. So what we're trying to do is just get into the point where we're getting, let's say we're getting 80 % of the answers right, and then we'll go, okay, well, what are the things that we can reliably answer accurately? So they'll be things that are very discreet and well-known in their nature. How do I opt out? How do I remove my data? How do I cancel the service?

1:58:43Things like that. So my goal is to be able to really consistently, reliably identify the things that have easy answers, let him run autonomously on those. And then over the course of time, we'll just have to see how much confidence we get in him to be able to answer more complex things. Which really, it's just like a junior employee, isn't it? You know, you hire someone, you give them a little bit of leeway to begin with. And then as you get confident in them, you give them more and more rope. Yeah, I was surprised at the hallucination, actually. That's a pretty bad mistake.

1:59:15I guess you are too. I don't even know what to do with that. I think part of what we realize is obviously that the responses that come from Claude are only going to be as good as the input data. And when he's starting a new context all the time, because we don't want to have these like massive context with the whole chat history sort of go up to every request, otherwise it'd burn gazillions of tokens. If he starts a new context, like what information do we need to feed into that context? And at one point I said, look, what's the cost? So for every ticket that you look at and you look for an answer for, what is the cost?

1:59:50And he's like, it's$0.07. Yikes. So, okay, what if you literally loaded every single piece of information you have and you sent that up on every context? He said, well, that's$0.70. Yeah. And we get about 15 tickets a day. Like, it's not a lot. So for the sake of$0.63 to save me having to go through things like this, I'll wear that cost I think that's a good ROI so I think a lot of the challenge now is figuring out what is the right information to actually send up to that LLM so there's enough context that we can get good answers and the cost is trivial if we do it right yeah so you're using opus 4.7 for this yeah I think so whatever was the latest about three weeks ago when I last Yeah, that's 4.7.

2:00:36Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of times people choose sonnet or haiku for low value stuff, like maybe writing an answer. But you would definitely, I think you're right, having the information there in the context is actually pretty important because it will make something up if it doesn't know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, so you anticipate more uses of AI in the future? Have I been pwned? Yeah, totally. Look, I think, to be honest, like a lot of this has just been figuring out where does it make sense and i suspect that everyone listening to this is in a little bit of a similar boat where you see so much stuff you're flooded through tech media mainstream media walking down the street of ai stuff and everyone's trying to figure out like what's the bits that are actually useful versus the bits that are misleading deceptive uh counterproductive in other ways i think the applications like this with Bruce are very good.

2:01:29So there's definite value there. We're going to keep making that better. The applications we've been looking at with the MCP server and with the ability to query data in a natural language, massive potential there because that opens up the audience of who can talk to the data and how easy they can do it. So, you know, we can now say, one of our next tasks is we've got to implement an OAuth layer so that we can add these as extensions or skills or whatever the term for each LLM is, but we want your average normal person to be able to go into, let's say they're using ChatGPT, go in there, add have I been pwned as a skill, do the OAuth dance and then just be able to talk to their LLM and say, you know, tell me who in our organisation has been breached.

2:02:13And we want that to be people who don't need to know what an API is or don't need to know how to write code. I think there's enormous potential there, particularly if we can start giving them sort of more, I guess, useful insights into what do you do now when you do find people in a data breach? You know, there'll be another breach tomorrow that'll get loaded into have I been pwned. How do we help people understand what they actually need to do to protect themselves and their organization after that? So I think there's huge potential there. You've written a robophobia equality policy. Do you want to talk about that?

2:02:47Some people didn't like that. I like it. I think it's good. You're asking people to treat the bot with tolerance, respect, and basic courtesy, regardless of its artificial origin. Is that what you teach your kids? Yeah, pretty much. It's like it's a little bit like teaching. In fact, in many ways, the whole AI bit is a little bit like teaching kids. It is part tongue-in-cheek, and that should be obvious to anyone that reads the description here. And, of course, this was an AI-generated policy as well. But the context was we had a customer who was asking some questions and our support system who got really quite obnoxious and was getting very obnoxious at Bruce and kept asking for a human, even though Bruce's answers were perfectly correct.

2:03:32And part of the joy of Bruce is that I can be there getting a coffee and I just pulled out my phone and I'm in Telegram going, yeah, send the answer, it's fine. So the effort on me is very, very low and the effort on the person who was starting to argue with Bruce was very, very high because they were typing full messages every time. So I'm thinking I can just do this all day long. This isn't a hard problem for me. But I think that there's a grain of truth in here that people trying to say that they will not converse with an AI is possibly some sort of discriminatory counter pattern or anti-pattern.

2:04:07So we wrote this policy a bit tongue in cheek. It's not published anywhere other than on this blog post here as a bit of fun. but particularly as we get larger and larger our challenge is how do we still make it really just Charlotte and I that answer tickets and not have to hire other people and the way we're going to do that is by having the likes of Bruce and that means that people need to be able to engage with Bruce and have a reasonable discussion with him and and treat him as as they would treat us and I think you have you have a bad precedent in phone mail jail I'm the guy who's constantly screaming at the phone, agent, agent.

2:04:44My wife says that also, operator. You call agent and she calls for an operator. And look, I do the same. And we do that when we're usually when we're getting bad answers. I think there's a bit of an edge case here, but if you're getting an answer, which is a good answer, but it's an answer you don't like. And if the agent is authorized to solve your problem correct so yeah I think a lot of our challenge is how do we make sure he gets good answers and what's not immediately clear when when Bruce signs offers Bruce the bot is that he's Bruce the bot but every response he's sending we is the human sea so we know that he's giving the right answers he's just making it much faster for us to give not just the right answers but much more comprehensive answers because he can obviously just spin out all that that content directly.

2:05:31So I'm really hoping that when people read Bruce's responses, they're like, well, that's actually a really good response. And we are getting a lot of thank you, Bruce responses, which I think is quite funny. That's nice. And I wonder, like, is there a psychology around how people treat AI or how people treat bots? Like if you're abusive to a bot, does that say something negative about you as a person? Like, is it good human practice to be polite to the bot, to say thank you to the bot. Yes, that's what I think, although it is a debated, much hotly debated topic. So let me just, technically, it sounds like, are you running it on OpenClaw?

2:06:07Are you running, how are you running the agent? Yeah, that's just running on OpenClaw. So it's literally running on a Mac Mini under my desk at the moment. So when you said Telegram, I thought that must be then how you communicate with the agent is through Telegram. Yeah, so there's a Telegram bot. and this is just seems to be the path of least resistance to spin up open claw and look I didn't spin it up with the intention of doing the Bruce thing I originally span it up with the intention of can it help me analyze data breaches more quickly and discover yeah for example what sorts of data classes are impacted and I've spoken less about that online but it does do that so very often I'll say look there's data that's been published at this URL go and grab and tell me what's in there.

2:06:52I use it to, it's got an X API key, so it monitors some lists I've got in exit. I've got people that tweet a lot about data breaches, so I get 12 hourly reports here, all the most recent data breaches that have been out there that have been communicated. I ask it to do things like when there's a tweet that's got a screen grab of some forum, it's doing image recognition to try and figure out where the forum is. So I'll say, have a look at this tweet, go find me the data. And it goes off to all the various forums and it finds the right content and sometimes even follows the links through and downloads the data so I can analyze it.

2:07:25So, it's doing a lot beyond breach. That's fantastic. Very helpful for you, too, to monitor. I mean, I was wondering how you monitor all those breaches. So, that's a real tool for that. That's fantastic. And you're saying forums, you mean the hacker forums where those breaches end up. Wow. Yeah, because this is where most of them appear. So, I've made this list public now, but on my Troy Hunt X profile, I've got a list called data breaches and it's It's got, I think, 17 or 18 odd people in there. And in there, that's what's being monitored. Let's have a look. 17 members on my data breaches list.

2:07:59That's what is being monitored by OpenClaw via the XAPI. So it's doing it the right way. It's not scraping it or anything. That's fantastic. It's amalgamating that into a 12-hourly report. I was doing it daily, but there are too many data breaches. So now at 4 a.m., 4 p.m., I get a report. Wow, that's great. Troy, it's been an honor to talk to you. You're such an important part of our, yeah, thank you so much of our internet community and keeping us safe. Have I Been Pwned is, you know, one of those sites like Wikipedia, like the Internet Archive that really show how amazing the internet can be.

2:08:35And, you know, how long have you been doing this since 2012, you said? 2013. 4th of December, 2013. Wow. Long time. And do you anticipate doing it forever? well eventually it's going to stop Bruce can take over Bruce will take over I don't know when or why there is a succession planning discussion we'll have to have at some time but I still love doing it I'm still fit and healthy and young enough to keep going so you know we'll see the data breaches aren't going to stop I know that much well thanks to you and thanks to Charlotte for the work you do Have I Been Pwned is amazing and we appreciate it well thank you very much everyone thank you Troy Hunt take care cheers that's Troy Hunt haveibeenpwned.com.

2:09:16Our picks of the week coming up in just a bit. I just want to put in a little plug for a little thing we like to call Club Twit. If you believe in our mission here, which is to give you the best information without fear or favor, without obligation, without any entanglements with the companies we cover, if you think it's important to have an independent journalistic support for information, source for information. I think it would be nice if you would support us doing that. That's our mission and we believe in it. And I hope you do too. I hope you enjoy the shows we make. And if you haven't yet considered joining Club Twit, I'd like you to think about it now.

2:09:54Twit.tv slash Club Twit. There are benefits. It's 10 bucks a month. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit Discord. You get all the special programming we do coming up, the Google IO keynote and the Apple WWDC keynote. We are not going to put those out in public. We can't get taken down if we do. So that will be for the club members only. And of course, there's lots of other programming, our AI user group, which I'm pretty much thinking about doing twice a month now. There's so much good stuff that's coming up on Friday. I think it's a worthwhile expenditure.

2:10:28I hope you do too. Of course, we continue to offer almost everything we do free to everybody i think that's important too but if you want to support what we do if you want to support independent podcasting join the club twit.tv slash club twit we would really like to have you on we go uh with the waning hours of the show and our picks of the week i have one paris for gizmo and look who's right here hello Hey, Gizmo. Does Gizmo ever type on your keyboard? She does not type on it, but she, as I've been working a lot this week, has been obsessed with sitting right in front of my keyboard, rubbing all over the scarlet, and then lays in a way that her tail and feet hit the top part of my keyboard.

2:11:20Never a good thing when the cat does your writing for you. this is an app called fur wall it is for max sad to say but you use a mac and it what it does is it watches the camera locally for a kitty cat and when it sees a kitty cat on the keyboard it drops those keystrokes so that he's not actually doing any writing at all open source it's github it's a silly little app but i thought you might enjoy it uh keep i think what i need to get actually is one of those fake laptops or keyboards and just have her sit on it see i i don't think those work because i think she's smart enough to know what you're paying attention to that's why she's there no you're right she is because the thing that she's discovered in the last week is that again as i've shown before i use this insane system that looks at the bottom of the max because i want to a macbook i want to she's seeing that and she she thinks you're petting it tries to she's figured out that if she sits on this key right here it locks my computer oh my god and she starts doing this when i'm in meetings she's done like three times this week cats are such brats i really are there and they're smart they're not conscious but they are smart well so what i've learned this week Because if your cat locks your laptop while you're in a Zoom meeting, the Zoom meeting will carry on and people can still see you even though your computer's tackling a lot.

2:12:52You know? That's something to keep in mind, too. Something to know. One other pick. This is datacenter.fm. If you want to know what it sounds like to be in a busy data center, just press the power up button. You can increase the number of servers. You're not hearing it because I'm sparing you the sound. increase the gpu load increase the staffing turn up the cooling uh turn on the gas turbine generators and you're going to find out what it's like to be inside a data center this is from is that a sentience gauge is that a sentience gauge well apparently i haven't done it but if you if you if you turn it up high enough and run it long enough the sentience gauge will hit and i don't know what happens after that um it is actually honestly a kind of calming sound i've got it going on right now oh my sentience is going up it's going up i've turned cooling off is what i did oh maybe that's the key the brain requires heat is the uh key to sentience data center dot fm that's just i think it's just a little art project but it's kind of a fun one local water trained

2:14:07uh yeah yeah there is that where oh there's db local water drain so we're now going to get a little hotter and the sentience is going to go up because we don't have any uh cooling and then pretty soon a containment breach and it's all going to go to hell keep watching i'm sure something will happen just like watching paradise yes oh what is paradise oh it's very good is it good you like it what is it uh it's a show about uh the destruction of the planet and a secret bunker town oh i want to watch that oh that sounds good ai and quantum ends up in there and all kinds of things and there's one other thing i know you're this is also for you paris i know you're a movie buff have you ever wondered if the movie you're going to go to if they'll is there anybody in the theater this only works with amc uh movies because i guess amc somehow publishes this information online it's called empty screenings about 10 of amc movie showing sells zero tickets this site finds them oh that's for me the amc in kipps bay is not doing well so you enter your zip code riley waltz nice job uh you enter your zip code it will find a empty theater near you zero people at the met opera eugene on a gin oh no 2026 oh that's showing oh i'm sorry amc paris martineau that was three picks i i overdid it this week well it's good because i've got only got one pick and it's uh a movie i'm gonna see tomorrow called the python hunt that is produced by lance oppenheim the director i like so much that we spoke about earlier and it's out nationwide this friday it is about it's a documentary about the great florida python hunt which is i believe a weekend in florida where i'll learn about it tomorrow um where here let me get the description right it is every year the florida government invites the public to compete in an invasive python removal contest in the everglades for 10 nights an eclectic group of hunters confront the dangerous terrain nocturnal creatures and their own desires wow this was a simpsons episode now well what was it you're going to see this in an empty amc theater no i'm going to the uh premiere tomorrow at the village east and going to air q and a with the director and it'll be fun uh by the way uh christina warren one of our hosts on mac break weekly was at the chat gpt 5.5 launch party last night that sam altman put together with the help of chat gpt i'm sure it was weird uh and we will have a report uh next tuesday on that premiere so neither of you went to the Met Gala, but at least you're going to something culturally important.

2:17:15The Python hunt. I did go see Devil's Word's Prada 2. How did you feel about how it represented Confidence? You know, it's funny about that. I think I saw a statistic that said 90 % of the tickets sold are to women for that movie. Does that surprise you? I haven't been to a movie in six years. No, I want to see it. I loved the first one. Oh, yeah, you should go anyway. But I've discovered that near me, there's Half Price Tuesday. Oh, for old women. Yeah. You got to go at 430. All day, all day Tuesday. All day, Half Price Tuesday. Including the popcorn is Half Price. What's Half Price now? $10?

2:17:58Yeah, for the one with the super sound. Otherwise, it was$780 or something. That's Half Price? That's so sad. Yeah. Oh, my. All right. Well, that's Paris's pick. What have you had? What do you have? Well, there's just things to mention here. I want to mention that the South Africa withdrew its AI policy after it was found to be written by AI. I just want to throw that in. That's fitting. I got to mention, did you see the story about the Pope and customer service? No. I saw the headline. Oh, it's a superb New York Times story. So the Pope was trying to get access to his bank account in Chicago, and he went through and gave him all the personal information, gave him everything.

2:18:39I am at the Pope, and I need my money. And they said, you got to show up in person. I'm from Chicago. I can't. And, well, he finally went around. He said, would it mean anything to you if I told you that I'm Pope Leo? And she hung up. Oh, geez. Of course she did. Of course she did. Of course she did. All right. I want a little bit of things about memories. Ask Jeeves, ask.com is dead, gone forever. I didn't know it was still alive. It's like better Canadian. Who knew, right? I'm angry as usual. The News Media Alliance, which is the cruddy lobbyists for the dying old media industry, is going after Common Crawl for no good reason.

2:19:21And saying that they're allowing their precious content to be taken by AI companies. Well, they're doing a crawl. And then finally, we also have our beloved Internet Archive has released a wonderful book about the vanishing culture and what's being taken down by these media companies that are trying to control history. They're afraid that AI will train on their content if it's uploaded to the Internet Archive. Yeah, exactly. They're blocking the Internet Archive. Same with Comic Con. And geez, Louise. Yeah. And finally, line 158. You may have to use Google Translate on this. I hope you can get to it, is see if you can click on that, Leo.

2:20:00A giant Gutenberg Bible page. This is the sketchiest looking link you've ever put in here. It's because it's off my email. Should I translate it to English? Yeah, translate it to English. By the way, I'm finding the translations have gotten much better. By the way, Google Translate is 20 years old this week. Yeah, happy birthday. So this is the largest. That's a page? It's a printed page. The world's largest printed Bible page. It's five meters wide by 7.2 meters high. It was made by assembling 12 computer-milled wooden plates were assembled to recreate the printed form. The printing plates were first inked by hand to exert the necessary pressure on the exceptionally large printing form.

2:20:46A car then drove slowly over the printing. For a second printing, the public also participated. I hope it was a Citroën. visitors, well, it's Germany or France, walked onto the printing plates together. Strasbourg's in France, isn't it? I know it's the South South. To use Strasbourg. Well, it's gone back and forth a few times. Yeah. So, ironic to me that it's hung up in a Catholic cathedral in Strasbourg, considering what Gutenberg wrought in the Reformation. I mean, it all comes around eventually. Wow, I like that the description of it is the world's largest printed Bible page, because they're not counting out that there's a larger page that's been printed out of something else.

2:21:31It's a serious catalog, but yeah. I think it's the largest printed page ever. I love it that it was actually printed with a car. With a car. Yeah. With a car and some visitors. They call it Fiat Press, not Letterpress, but it's the same thing. It does the same thing. Yeah. that's in a sense it wasn't inked by hand it was inked by wheel and foot yes so it is the anniversary it is the anniversary of the goodberg bible what is it how what's the anniversary may 9th they don't know they say it's to celebrate the anniversary but oh well it's made up it's like it's like gutenberg's birthday they just call it 1400 they're not sure it's four years either one way or the other it's like christmas we don't know yeah it's just a guess uh very nice very nice yeah i don't know who does my translation i think it's coggy during the translation oh okay i use google of course yeah but i think it's quite i think they've gotten really good they used to be terrible well it's that that's because of of large language models yeah that's of ai yeah uh it changed though that's that's that's transformers it started with with um um so now well we might as well go to this one too the the what's new with google translate now you have a pronunciation tool that we've been asking for.

2:22:46Nice. Which we use often on the show. I can now say Guga. Right. Well, let's see what it says. They point out that they've been using AI machine learning and Translate since the beginning. Yep. Translate supports 95 % of the world's population. Wow. More than 1 billion users ask Translation each month. 1 trillion words a month. That's a lot. It is. A lot of whites. Indeed. Well, speaking of a lot of words, that's the end of this show. We're not sentient yet, but we are conscious of your time. Says who? How do you know? Are you sure? We can't prove it. Nope. Can't prove it. We can't prove it. That's true.

2:23:31That's Paris. All I know is my butt hurts. That's consciousness. Paris, for the first time ever, has said that the show's over because now she has to go back to work. It's really upsetting, actually. This was your break. I'm sorry to say, Paris Rights for Consumer Reports is working on a massive, very, very, very important piece, which we will talk about when it comes out. Do we know when we think it might come out? I can't say. Oh, it's that secret. It's very exciting. There's just, you know, there are things I'm allowed to say and things I'm not allowed to say. And one of the things I'm not allowed to say is a published date.

2:24:08All right. That's good to know. Anyway, Paris, great to have you. Thank you. Great to be here. And Gizmo. Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalistic innovation. He's now at Montclair State University and at SUNY Stony Brook. His book, Hot Type, which is just awesome because I read a pre-release version of it. It will be out in August and you can pre-order it right now at jeffjarvis.com. And it's not just about the line of type, it also is about PostScript. So it goes into the kiki. Goes right to the modern times. Yes. We do this show every Wednesday right after Windows Weekly. That's 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m.

2:24:51Eastern, 11 a.m. Hawaii time. After the booze. We always check in whether they're on the booze yet. Yes. As soon as the whiskey segment begins, you know, intelligent machines can't be far behind. That's kind of an inside joke for people who watch live. Anybody else is going to be puzzled by that. You don't have to watch us live, but you can. we stream it of course in discord but also youtube twitch tiktok not tiktok x.com facebook linkedin and kick we can't do tiktok it's too complicated for us we're we're limited in our abilities uh after the fact on demand versions of the show at twit.tv slash im we've audio and video at our website there's also a youtube channel dedicated to the video great way to share clips with everybody uh also uh you can subscribe to it in your favorite podcast client and if you do leave us a great review and paris will read it dramatically at some point honestly though if you haven't reviewed the show before go on apple podcast and do because the only person who has reviewed the show in the last five months was a real stinker about it and i think terrible we should do some that costs us by the way some advertisers will not buy ads on a poorly reviewed show they think it's real or something so leave us a nice review help us help us out i should also mention i don't talk about it enough but you can comment on any show we don't put comments we don't pay attention to comments on youtube and twitch and elsewhere but we do pay attention to the comments in our club twit discord every show has There's a little forum section in the Discord.

2:26:28We also have an open to the public forum called Twit.Community. And I don't mention it enough, and I would like to, because it's a really great place to converse about every episode or anything else on your mind. That's open to all. Just mention that you heard it on Intelligent Machines. I'll be sure to get you in. Twit.Community. We even have our own Mastodon instance. I am still a Mastodon fan. Mastodon fan. I believe in the Fediverse. That's at Twit.Social. that is also open to the public. And again, in both cases, you've got to say that you listen to Twit for me to let you in. I want it to be Twit listeners.

2:27:05Also, something weird happened on the Mastodon last week. Somehow, I don't know how this happened. There must be a bug in Mastodon. I normally have to approve every account. Some AI generated accounts got through without my approval and i was notified by iftas that they are russian bot accounts they were spreading russian propaganda using with that social to the rest of the fediverse and i was shocked and uh i immediately got rid of the accounts thank you iftas for letting me know about it that's the uh that's the site that monitors disinformation um and i i guess there was a bug but uh unfortunately because of that i have now also turned on captcha so there's all sorts of barriers to getting into twit social, but believe me, it's worth it.

2:27:51You do have to say who you are. You have to say, you listen to twit. You have to do a capture and you have to assert that you're over 18 thanks to various jurisdictions. And you have to pass a intelligent machines trivia question. Yeah, we should do that, but really all you have to say - You have to answer the significance of sand. Yeah, you do. And you have to cite some specific precedence. I don't make it that hard. You could just say, let me in, Leo, and then I'll know you were listening and that's all i really care about but yeah the bots i don't know how they got in i was really freaked out by that i haven't seen any more but i have to check every day now uh thank you everybody for joining us thank you paris thank you jeff have a wonderful evening we'll see you next week on intelligent machines bye-bye hey everybody it's leo laporte you know about mac break weekly right you don't oh if you're a macintosh fan or you just want to keep up what's going on with apple this is the show for you every tuesday andy anako alex lindsey jason snell and i get together and talk about the week's apple news it's an easy subscription just go to your favorite podcast client and search for mac break weekly or visit our website twitter.tv slash mbw you don't want to miss a week of mac break weekly i'm not a human being not into this animal scene I'm an intelligent machine