IM 870: Meet Me In Alaska - Are AI Content Filters Changing What We Read?

27:49Chris Stokel-Walker:Well, yesterday, I turned it on. It's been training for a while. And I said, Okay, you're good enough. Now. Here's the next stage, I want you to bookmark these candidates. And I'm still not trusting it fully. So the final stage will be me before the show, going through the several hundred stories that it's bookmarked, saying, Okay, these are the ones we're going to talk about on the show. But this is a big leap for me, because trust, there, there's a certain amount of trust that this is going to do the do the job and it breaks right and so part of the reason why it breaks yeah this is the thing part of the reason why i went on to the local llm stack was because glm shut me off and so like i woke up one morning you had to yeah did not have this i had basically an empty email and i thought well what's what's happened here and and i think you know that's where the interesting friction lies is that you can have this, but you can't be fully, fully reliant on this sort of thing at the minute.

28:49And arguably never, right? Because the way that LLMs work, of course, is that they don't necessarily always spit out the same thing, the reliable output that you might expect, because that is the joy of the black box model. And also, you mentioned some of the amazing local LLMs that have come out. Yeah, we had QEM 3.6 in the last couple of days. We've got minimax 2.5, 2.7, et cetera, et cetera. Every time that I try and plug in a new model, I get slightly different editorial tastes coming out of the local LM stuff.

29:21Chris Stokel-Walker:That's why I'm trying to train it on my own choices, hoping it will closer approximate it. It does, but then even so with my, because the local LM stuff that I have still passes through that kind of brain, as it were. So you have a memory system of some kind set up? yeah and a memory system and also this this kind of prompt of well look this is what he is interested in based on his writing um but even though you did that you pre-trained that that's right you had that from the beginning yeah yeah i mean it's effectively like rag right it is it's it's kind of here's the specialist thing that you need to look at right and infer your answers through that but um and this is why i do it locally is also because fixing that burns an awful lot of tokens so even just the kind of like you know i'm probably using something like 50 to 70 billion tokens a day on holy cow well it's yeah but i haven't looked i'm afraid to look well i have i have i have 850 rss feeds i'm this is looking at every single day oh my and then also the the kind of so it's looking through all the stories it's then producing like an output and also i'm doing some coding stuff on top of it so like you know it's 50 million or so for the local stuff then it's maybe 10 million through glm i recently in my when in my interregnum when the glm model went down i i panic bought a an open code subscription so i'm using that as well and also i have obviously a chat gpt subscription so i'm using codex as well right uh pretty constantly but it's yeah like it's it's it's fun if nothing else this is kind of like me using it productively and having a productive hobby rather than just kind of wasting it away well and i think it's very important especially in your role as a professor of journalism it's very important that exactly what you said earlier you practice this stuff so that you at least know what works and what doesn't work and i think it's also really important to have this hard line that it is not going to replace my human uh task uh that i am the writer.

31:30Chris Stokel-Walker:I am the journalist here. And that's, I think that's the really important question, both in terms of the economics of journalism, but also in terms of the ethics of journalism. And the harsh reality is that, you know, I tell my students, if you look at the kind of trust in the media industry and trust in people like me, when I send out journalists, baby journalists, who are in training to do what we call vox pop, so going out on the street, man on the street interviews effectively um at least in the uk there is survey data that suggests that of every five interviews that they do at least four of them will be maybe answering their questions looking them in the eye while also thinking you are an inveterate liar um because they're they're not they're not trusted we are not trusted as an industry and so fake news yeah precisely right And, you know, it's getting worse and worse all the time because of a whole bunch of different reasons that we can maybe, you know, draw our conclusions from.

32:29We know well, we don't have to dwell on it. No, we don't, exactly. But, like, the principle behind that is if there is already this distrust in what we do, to me the act of journalism is almost like a translator. Like, something has happened in the world, it is important enough that you need to tell the remainder of the world. And that is an inherently human thing to do. It's not only inherently human, it's vitally important. Yeah, right. And so if you outsource all of that to AI, where is the accountability? Like, where is the trust? Where is the kind of responsibility? Who is ultimately going to be answerable if something goes wrong?

33:17That is all, I think, very important and one that actually I think a lot of people often overlook. Because I see folks who are using AI in the actual production of journals. And I think, well, fine if it works, but also there's a bargain here between the readers, the audience, and the journalists. And if you kind of go back on that bargain a little bit, it makes it very easy for those people to be less trustful of what we do.

33:41Chris Stokel-Walker:Yeah, and we don't want that. No. if you're looking for your usage then it's in api and uh it's the subscription bit yeah what are you using today for your local llm so i'm using a bunch of local i'm using a bunch of yeah so some quen models so i have i have um because there is an awful lot of throughput um for these models um i'm using like a nine billion parameter quen 3.5 relatively small yeah as a as a reporter so the whole point of that is it's looking at a story it is going is this interesting to chris if so what is the story here if there is a story and then it is going okay well fine we can pass it on or not and then it passes it on to a um a slightly bigger uh slightly more advanced model again it's like it's a it's a combination of a quen 3.5 and it's post trained on a glm 5.1 um so it's like distilled basically um and that makes a kind of better uh argumentative um presentation to me and then i kind of go well is this actually a story or not and if it is then i take it on and i actually write up the pitch myself as here is what i think the take is rather than just what they say yeah i um one of the other things i've been working on is i use obsidian it was a fortunate choice some years ago because it turns out something that ais can handle very well and uh i've been having um glm write uh kind of a synthesis of my daily notes to pro to make a yearly summary with insights.

35:31Chris Stokel-Walker:And I tried it with GLM. I tried it with Sonnet and GLM actually was a better writer. It was actually much, much better. It was also a little less censorious. I noticed Anthropic was a little careful not to cross any lines and GLM was not oddly enough. So it's really, it's, I think that's, I'm sure you tell your students, this is so important to kind of try push these end boundaries to see what works and doesn't work chris it's such a pleasure talking to you we've used up our time but uh i i'd like to get you back and continue this conversation especially to continue uh learning about what you're doing uh with this local llm and what you're doing to help you in your uh work because i think you're i think you're on the right track for something right yeah with pleasure yeah Yeah.

36:24Chris Stokel-Walker:Chris Stokel Walker, his book is still absolutely true, how AI wrote the world, ate the world, and maybe wrote some of it too. You can find it everywhere you get books. Anything else you want to plug, Chris? I mean, I'm sure people now hearing you want to say, well, where can I find more Chris Stokel Walker? Yeah. So I used to do this Tectonic podcast, which was in association with an NGO called Article 19. I now do a podcast called Crashed, which is looking at kind of tech through a UK lens, but also has a broader global context. So you can find that on all good podcast platforms. I see it right here on the Apple podcast platform.

37:08Chris Stokel-Walker:Crashed with Alex Hudson and Chris Stockel-Walker. Chris, a real pleasure. Thank you for joining us on Intelligent Machines. Thank you for having me. only sorry that paris and jeff weren't here because they would have had lots of additional questions for you um we will continue with i am in just a bit chris stokel walker great to talk to him he was fascinating uh and i think you know he's volunteered you heard him uh to come back so i think he will be uh uh when when one of you guys is not around maybe we'll get chris to fill in yeah I like what he's doing with AI it's kind of does he drink coffee or tea I did not ask I think you have to question for next time yeah uh we will have more intelligent machines all the AI news in just a moment but first a word from our sponsor this episode brought to you by Melissa the trusted data quality expert since 1985 spring is the season for tidying up closets garages and yes, your customer data.

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41:01Chris Stokel-Walker:keynote. They like to clear the decks, I think. They did this last year so that the keynote can really focus on AI. Jeff is going to be joining us for our keynote coverage along with Micah Sargent. In fact, if you want to come to Paris, you can too. It's Tuesday, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. And I should mention that our coverage of the Google I.O. keynote will be broadcast only in the club, Club Twit. We don't want to get it taken down on YouTube. so uh if you are not yet a club twip member this would be a good time to join so how dare we give google promotion i know it really was there you guys show people their very long press release meeting it's interesting it's always interesting though google io in fact back in the day uh before your time paris uh we would actually go to google io i remember gina trepanning well i go and back in the day you might even get a computer yeah we got a free laptop once we got the first cardboard that's when we knew it was almost over when all they gave us under our chair was cardboard uh that was that was and jeff folded it while going no no gina managed to fold it gina was the one we were riding back in the car back to petaluma anyway they had their ai event And I'm sure you saw with interest that they announced their basically successor to the Chromebook, right?

42:29Chris Stokel-Walker:The Google book. How are you feeling, Jeff? I'm feeling good. I'm feeling good. It's not Chrome OS. No. And they won't call it Aluminium yet either. That's the code name. Well, as we think, but they won't admit that. But it's a combination of Android and Chrome. And it's built bottom up with AI. the important part is they've rethought, and this is DeepMind did this. DeepMind has a thread I put in the rundown, rethinking the cursor, the pointer. That's so weird. This is that new mouse thing. So I don't understand. You're going to, I tried to understand what they were talking about. Well, so I actually saw versions of this years ago on the web.

43:10I saw startups come in and say, we're going to re, there's a new surface and it's the cursor. And the cursor has context. It knows where you are. It knows what you want. why not add context to that the problem was all those were required you to do add-ons to your browser wasn't going to work now you shake the when you shake the cursor over something it it it summons the spirit of gemini and says what would you like mr laporte and this as you're pointing to this coffee pot um water pot water i don't know i dare not say anything about coffee Just call it a percolator and get it done with. On your Hamilton Beach percolator,

43:47Chris Stokel-Walker:you shake it and then you say something like, okay, this is the thing I want to operate on. And then you speak the operation. So you can ask a question or you can say, take this wallpaper that I like and put it in this room or take this couch out. Or, you know, it's anything that Gemini can do. It now has the context of your screen to know what to do. Can I go on record and say, this is a non-starter. This is a lame idea and it's not going anywhere. Oh, no, I like this idea. Really? Yes, because again, it's context. You don't have to go to the effort of typing in something. You can say, take this and put it there.

44:22Put these three things on my shopping list. Boom, boom, boom. I mean, we already have selected drag. It's kind of like that. But this is, well, this is more than that. You can add multiple things as you go. I think you could probably say, you know, add this quote to my rundown for the podcast. You know, I don't know what we'll see what it can do. So that's the main thing it has. The second thing that AI enables is new personalized widgets. Though I think when I was talking to Jason Powell earlier today, he said it's more like agents. So one example that gave is I'm planning a trip with my family to so-and-so, create a widget that's going to track everything about that for me.

45:02And so it'll find, here's your flights, here's the restaurant you wanted to go to, here's the map of this or whatever. and it becomes a kind of a temporary thing and they're calling it a widget, but I think that's something new. It's an agent. It'll also have the color bar, which was on the old Google Chromebooks, which was lovely. And it's not going to be a low-end machine. It's going to be a higher-end machine. Chrome.

45:26Chris Stokel-Walker:By the way, that is what they were, Google was doing with their own machines all along. Yes. But they have also the same partners. Samsung, weirdly, not in the announcement, I think they're going to be doing it too. And those will have a variety of price points. I'm sure there'll be a$200 version. So the good news, bad news for me is that they do say that some existing Chromebooks will be able to take on the new experience. Of course, I want an excuse to get a new machine. Which one do you have now? Didn't you just get a new Chromebook? I did. I did. It's Lenovo. It's the best Chromebook. It is the best Chromebook.

45:59I had to set it in. They replaced my motherboard. If you get a new Chromebook as part of this, can you shoot your Lenovo with a gun on like a stream or something? I don't know. Can you do something fun to destroy your parents? What did it do to you? Something's going on with Paris. I don't know. I just think if you're upgrading in a flight of fancy, why not go out with the bang? No disrespect to the Lenovo. I just think it would be fun to shoot an electronic with some sort of projectile.

46:33Chris Stokel-Walker:Jeff's really sad now. I'm so sorry, Lenovo. And he makes fun of me and my wife, Claudia. It's funny because I'll have to see and maybe I'll buy into it, but I'm very skeptical about the way Google's adding AI. I really don't like how it adds AI to Google Workspace. You're saying you don't want the machine to be intelligent? I, I, well, I have a nice way of using AI and I think many people do either on the command line or in a chat bot. I don't know if I want buttons and widgets. I was going to say, all of my poking and prodding aside, I agree with you a hundred percent, Leo. I have been enraged this week about the latest rollout of Gemini products to Google Docs.

47:22Chris Stokel-Walker:You can't get anything done without it popping up. I have accidentally caused an entire window to pop up that asked Gemini to do some other stuff. And there's no way to turn it off on my humble Google Docs. What is this touch-tone phone they make me deal with? Where's my phone? No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no. It is a lot. If you so much as mouse over the bottom. This is so funny. Our roles are completely reversed here. If you mouse over the bottom seventh of your screen, if you dare to so much as drag your cursor towards the bottom, It'll suddenly be like, hello, I'm Gemini. What would you like me to write?

47:58And the answer is nothing. I, on the other hand, now that I finally got asked Gemini on my browser, I'm delighted. I read these extremely long posts and I can just say, summarize it. I don't have to cut and paste a URL into something else. I just click on that and I say, summarize this verbose piece of crap for me. So I don't have to read it all. Their biggest sin, though, biggest sin is recontextualizing the red squiggly line under your words. That doesn't mean bad spelling anymore. And that really, really pisses me off. It's not even the red one. They've introduced a purple squiggly line that just means we think you could rephrase this.

48:30And the rephrasing suggestions are wrong.

48:33Chris Stokel-Walker:Oh, they're always terrible. Or they're just vibes based. They're just like, we think instead of using three words here, you should have used four. I'm like, I disagree. I'm a writer. You're a machine. And there's no way to turn off the purple vibes based squigglies without turning off the thing that tells you you misspelled the word your own name. this is what you tell me how to pour my coffee oh that's there this is what worries me about the um uh mouse thing is that you're going to inadvertently trigger this all the time and then you're going to have to it's in the early days of the macintosh apple did something i thought really smart and i think uh the credit probably goes to the earliest people on the mac team who said don't be modal so uh modal is you don't go into a mode so when you're working you don't want the machine to switch this is what's happening to you paris this is what happened in the old days of the original word processors right which is an editing mode or writing mode yes yeah you're either insert or overwrite yes and mode modal just confuses people because it changes how the computer is working seemingly randomly and and you want the computer to be kind of monotonous is the word they used it's always with the same action produces the same result every single time so this and they i thought they were inspired it was really jeff raskin who was an early philosopher of computing who said you know don't be modal you don't and so pop-ups uh you know you see this all the time and most computer operating systems a dialogue will pop up and you can't do anything until you handle the dialogue in the early max that didn't happen uh those modal dialogues were supposed to be few and far between and um we got away from that somehow and i i still believe it confuses everybody i think it's a nice again i saw startups try to do this 15 years ago a long time ago 20 years ago um and and the idea is that the cursor is another surface for information and um and again it has context so when you put it over something it can do something for you that's more than just this little pointing thing yeah it can and if i wanted to do that something else i'll press a button or double i don't mind the right click i love a right click i love that i can use my trackpad and right click with just checking with two fingers that's fun that's why in the early days apple didn't have two buttons it only had one button same philosophy but they've come around and the right click is just as important on Macs now as it is on Windows.

51:13Chris Stokel-Walker:But at least then you're intentionally triggering something. I just worry. We'll see. So the other thing they announced was Rambler. Yeah. They announced the Rambler? Don't they? That sounds like a folk nightmare. The old car. The midnight Rambler. so if you if you uh say something and you say uh like you know how about tuesday no i'm thinking wednesday that was the example they gave it will take the final words of what you say and make it coherent for you that's appropriate i think that's good i ramble all the time that's what podcasting is is that for voice to text that's my job is rambling um i think you can use it mainly in android when you're doing messages it's probably voice to text yeah yeah i yeah yeah we've had to all of us had to learn a little bit of how to do voice to text right so you announce enunciate clearly and you try not to ramble because you know that's going to get transcribed i saw two stories this week i put them in the rundown one was that that uh the fear that typing is going to go away just as cursive went away with typing and the other was how irritating it is in offices when people are whispering to their computers That I agree with.

52:34I've never experienced that. I always thought a voice interface isn't going to work well in an office. I haven't either, but I can imagine it happening. I don't want to type. I'm going to dictate. Right. I don't want to disturb everybody, so I'm going to do something even more irritating.

52:46Chris Stokel-Walker:I actually worked with a woman at Tech TV who had a severe carpal tunnel and had to dictate, and she pissed everybody. But we understood this is an accommodation for a handicap. Yeah. You know, she had a disability. And so we, but yeah, it's annoying when people are talking in an office environment. So, but that's why everybody should work at home like I do. Up in the, up in my attic. Garrett. Lisa nudges me a couple of nights ago, like three in the morning says, the attic is talking.

53:24Chris Stokel-Walker:and i forgot that i had uh claudia do a little uh every every morning at 3 30 a.m uh it goes through a bunch of stuff processes and i forgot that i told it to talk to me after it does something and it was at 3 30 a.m well i have now working all the time i have now said quiet hours between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. And it'd be funny, it really picked up on that right away. Oh yeah, quiet hours, absolutely. So now it doesn't do it anymore. But it was a little annoying, I must say. Perky British accent like C-3PO. Did you say the attic or your attic is speaking? Yeah, it's kind of my attic. Yeah, and people want robots in their house.

54:10I love having my robot talk to me and it does all the time now.

54:14Chris Stokel-Walker:And I'll hear it. Sometimes it talks to me in the wrong room. And I'll hear distantly, I'll hear voice. I'll go running. Say, what? What, did you want something? No, I think it is. Don't get me wrong. I think voice interaction is natural. That's how we want. We want to talk to our computers and have them talk back to me. But it has to be at the right place in the right time. So when you hook it up with your cameras, then it will know where you are. That's what I worked on in Hawaii. So that it will turn on the speakers in your bedroom at 3.30 a.m. Oh, it does that already. No, no. It does that based on the Wi-Fi access point.

54:46Chris Stokel-Walker:So I have a mapping of which Wi-Fi access point my device is on, where I'm talking to you from, use the speakers near that Wi-Fi access point. And that works pretty well. You have enough Wi-Fi access points in your house? There's one per floor. There's one per floor. And there's Sonos speakers built into the ceiling on each floor. So it does those. I can't believe you kept Sonos in the new house. I can't believe you stuck with them. You know what? Once I realized that Claude could talk to Sonos and control it. I actually bought some more. What can't Claude talk to? Lisa, not allowed. Lisa. Or the cat.

55:27Google has also announced a$10 a month health coach,

55:31Chris Stokel-Walker:which is launching in six days. Great start on your run, Rosa. So this is, you're using this sort of already, Paris, because I know you use an AI for calorie counting, as do I, and for exercise. and my ai will when i have too many carbs for lunches it'll say things like you should have a salad tonight you should stir you should have a salad tonight uh so this is uh this is a new this they announced the fitbit air which is a health band without a face that's competing with the other thing that's hot with the kids right or a ring no there's a there's a there's a wristband already that exists without the screen the kids like whoop yeah thank you that's this whoop still around yeah oh yeah it's that so it's a fitbit air ai is built right in it's the same thing yeah i finally have a watch coming friday for the first time in years which sort of the google the google watch uh because i got i've got a i'm not because because of my firmity i've got to be exercising oh yeah and so i want to track all that the problem is with the current fit already has a low line of what you have to make to make your goals.

56:43Well, I'm crippled now. No, you could turn that lower. I can't find how to change it. I can't find how to change it. Oh, I don't know about the Fitbit, but on my Apple Watch,

56:53Chris Stokel-Walker:I absolutely say what the goals are. It makes perfect sense. Because 10 ,000, you know, the 10 ,000 steps is made up. Yeah. Did you know that? It's just a Japanese, it was a fun looking number in Japanese. It was the name of a Japanese pedometer. Yeah. and then everybody said oh that must be the the requisite number of steps I know tons of people who were doing that yeah it's BS in fact I asked uh my AI to about it it knew that story and it said for you at your age you should probably get about 8 ,000 a day but you should ask and and explain your infirmity I would say Jeff probably four or five thousand there is I'm up to two miles right now there is evidence that you it definitely improves your longevity to get a certain amount of steps past that amount of steps doesn't do much and for me it was 8 000 but but it could be less for different people and 10 these 10 that going from 8 to 10 000 does not improve your longevity at all nor does it get you to lose a lot of weight or anything no i mean losing weight i know i know tons of people who got 10 000 a day religiously and they were the same size as much as i hate to admit it, the only way to lose weight weight is to eat less food.

58:03And drink less wine. Or wine, or beer, or however you want your calories. Yeah, calories are... But coffee is calorie free almost, right? Black coffee is. The new way I'm gonna be drinking it, I'm getting rid of the calories and adding flavor. But you need calcium there, fella. And iron. I don't need iron. Men don't need iron. Oh, I do. Yes, they do. oh yes but we get enough iron we don't know no often a lot of Americans are iron deficient is what I learned this week yes I am really I was looking through I was like how would I even get I was like so many things about my life would make sense if this test result comes back and says I am continue to be iron deficient I think you're probably anemic that's why you're tired there is my son is too and my wife just uh found something where there's also a an inability to metabolize and there's a there's there's a pill to take for that i'll find out what it is so you

59:06Chris Stokel-Walker:can add it into your research google says criminal hackers used ai to find a major software flaw this seems like an ai generated headline i'm just gonna put that i mean it's the new york freaking time i know it's not given what given where the providence of it but that that seems that is that's going to be more generic headline in the world yeah we're going to see this more and more aren't we and and you may be right even if it's not degenerated by ai it's ai inspired google says criminal hackers used ai to find a major software flaw um this is what everybody was afraid of with mythos is that if AIs can find bugs for fixing, you can also find bugs for hacking.

59:52Chris Stokel-Walker:Often that's the same bug. This was a zero day. We have high confidence, according to the report, the actor likely leveraged an AI model to support the discovery and weaponization of this vulnerability. In fact, this is why we talked about this last week. The Trump administration all of a sudden is saying, uh-oh, maybe we better be nice to anthropic well and maybe we better start approving models oh well that's i think that's what we discussed last week that's ridiculous meanwhile well but they may do it in fact i know there may be public sentiment to do that i think people a lot of public sentiment against ai is just yeah it's just getting worse by the day really terrified by ai seven out of ten americans don't want a data center anywhere near them 50 of americans think that ai does more harm than good there was a bad We are really laughable moment at a college commencement.

1:00:47Yeah. Oh, sweet. I have the video. Should we play that? We should. Yeah. I, I, I queued it up. Where is it here? What line number? Oh, you gotta ask me. Um, So this was a college. Oh, there it is. Line 137. A little trouble reading the room. Yeah, this was at University of Central Florida to give you.

1:01:14Chris Stokel-Walker:What does that? What does that tell us? The current of the likely demographics of the students, which would be you're from Florida. What would that be? uh i would say no uh i mean all students are young but florida is a state that is historically swung right okay conservative um you want to you want to go to the time code 121 i think frankly uh that this would be the reaction on almost any college campus in america i know but i'm just saying i think it's notable that this is what you've not just go back to one f i'm there and breakthroughs absolutely will happen. Now, that said, we are living in a time of profound change.

1:02:01That's an understatement, right?

1:02:04Chris Stokel-Walker:So far, they're with her, yeah. Change is exciting, very exciting. Yeah, she's a dorky speaker. Let's face it, change can be daunting. Yes. the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution

1:02:26oh they don't like that it gets worse around what happened what happened don't you all love ai may i finish no it's too calm it's too painful to watch it just gets she continues i watched her whole speech and she's really a bad presenter well but

1:02:47Chris Stokel-Walker:you know anybody would be thrown thinking that she was going to go up there and give a very inspiring address about how we're going to ai is going to change our lives but it but we're going to embrace it and it's going and the students are like no wrong and she doesn't i mean she doesn't have an alternate address ready to go no you had to keep going at the same thing yeah i mean all you can do at that point is ad lib uh oh yeah i hate ai don't you hate ai ai sucks industrial revolution sucked man it sucked well but it is like i she wasn't wrong though i mean that doesn't mean it's a good thing it means maybe and i'm sure these kids feel this way many of them won't be able to get work it's as if you're speaking to a uh a class of hand re hand weavers in the year 2016 1216 and saying the here come the automatic weaving machines isn't it exciting and they're going to no it's not exciting uh i've spent the last four years learning to hand weave and this was specifically at ucf's college of arts and humanities commencement and the commencement for the school of communication and media she misread the room so i don't think she's wrong who is she though who is she she's she's no i think she's a ceo of some company well there you go she wasn't she was invited she was a guest yeah yeah this is how you treat me poor woman so uh uh yesterday i went to or uh nyu has a 47 year old programs called uh itp interactive telecommunications program and the students do these amazing little projects and that's their thing.

1:04:29So I went and I was curious to see what the students were thinking in this program of AI. And they're all pretty open to it. But the director of the program said, well, but over in the arts program, they don't like it. Well, I mean, yeah, people, students at ITP have been doing quirky little AI projects since the beginning of time. Yes, exactly.

1:04:53Chris Stokel-Walker:Well, here I am on a show all about AI and I get yelled at all the time so i understand how she feels her name is gloria allfield vice president of strategic alliances at orlando-based tavistock development company well okay next time uh you know trying to get a celebrity to talk because you know they do you could it could go as well as uh the current battle over nyu's scheduled commencement speaker jonathan hate which uh oh i'm happy about that and i interviewed by the way jonathan height doesn't like it when you say hate even if you hate he hates it he hates it i uh thought his book the righteous mind was very interesting and i interviewed him about uh that but he's the one of course who wrote the book that is a kind of a live wire right now about how social media is ruining our the anxious generation oh he's just he just drives me he's he and galloway drive me completely bad water we know how to get to to jeff all right when we uh when we we're gonna pause and then when we come back a musical rendition of the text messages between sam altman and mira marati on the night that sam altman got fired at open ai i tried to play this on sunday on twit uh but i now have the technology because I'm back home.

1:06:16You have the technology to play it without deafening the audience?

1:06:18Chris Stokel-Walker:Yes, I played it and you couldn't hear it, but apparently the people in the club were deafened by it. And I apologize for that. But this trial has been delivered in every respect. I even said at the beginning, these trials are always bad for both parties because of discovery. and uh foolishly open ai put greg brockman's personal journal into the evidence at which point of course was it just discovery though wasn't it no they put it into evidence you don't get discovery of a personal journal but because open ai put it in evidence now elon's attorneys can dig into it and they did and i think they did a lot more damage to open ai than uh than they did good using it um that's the but this is what happens in these trials it happened with apple and epic and google and epic um that you know people put stuff in writing that they shouldn't put in writing and this email gets discovered and this information comes out and there is some awkward ass stuff and when i say the word ass i mean it we'll talk about that in just a little bit this do you know about pen testing i think this is one of the most fascinating areas of security.

1:07:34Chris Stokel-Walker:I know a lot of pen testers, always impressed by them. This episode of Intelligent Machines is brought to you by Expo, one of the best, XBOW, one of the best pen testing companies out there. AI has, as we know, changed the pace of everything from how software develops to how it gets attacked. We were just talking about that. Engineering teams are moving faster than ever, creating more and more applications, but security really hasn't kept up. in this day and age pen testing remains one of the most trusted ways to understand real exploitable risk but in an ai driven world where everything's moving at hyperspeed it can become a bottleneck security teams are forced to choose between slowing down development to stay secure or moving fast and accepting that they're going to be gaps in their coverage well they don't have to be expo eliminates that trade-off.

1:08:26Chris Stokel-Walker:XBOW. Expo is an autonomous offensive security platform that runs continuous AI-driven pen testing, mirroring real-world attacks. This is so cool. Expo doesn't just scan for vulnerabilities. It discovers, exploits, and validates them. So you're only dealing with issues that actually matter. That means dramatically fewer false positives and a clearer view into real attack paths. With Expo, tests run in hours, not weeks. You get complete visibility into how an attacker would move through your systems and the ability to uncover issues that traditional tools miss, including zero days, novel attack paths.

1:09:07Chris Stokel-Walker:It's really amazing. Expo's results speak for themselves. I'll give you an example. Application security lead of Ceznam.cz says, quote, even right now, after one year, I don't know any other company that is at least close to Expo in terms of agentic pen testing. That's an end quote. The result is predictable cost, consistent quality, and stronger security without slowing anything down. Your engineers can move at full speed. Expo helps security teams keep pace with innovation and cover more apps more often with the resources they already have. It was actually founded by a team behind Microsoft Copilot.

1:09:48Chris Stokel-Walker:And it's already been trusted by companies ranging from fast-growing startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Expo is quickly becoming a mission-critical layer in modern security stacks. Go to Expo.com to start a pen test today. That's Expo.com. It's X-B-O-W.com. Expo. This is the way pen testing should be done. Oh, man. And the gift that just keeps on giving, Sam Altman at the trial faced awkward grilling from Elon Musk's attorneys over the toxic— Can you be trusted? They asked him, can you be trusted? He said, well, I think so. I believe I'm an honest and trustworthy business person, despite what Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker says.

1:10:37a wild response given that he had to have prepped the answer to that exact question with his team a million times so either he bungled it or that's the answer they all learned what would you have

1:10:47Chris Stokel-Walker:him say what what would be the right answer you think i would just say yes i am yeah absolutely trustworthy uh that's yeah full a full sentence yeah no hesitation i i believe no uh mock and And then Musk's attorney said, you don't know whether you're completely trustworthy? And then Altman said, well, I'll just amend my answer to yes. A little late. Remember, this is a jury trial. The jurors are looking, watching him, you know, closely. And I don't, you know, I doubt that they were able to get the New Yorker article into evidence. I mean, you know, that's not something you can. That's a lot of hearsay.

1:11:28Chris Stokel-Walker:Yeah. But certainly that's in the air, right? Right. So I mentioned the ass part. This is from a tweet by Mike Isaac. It actually, he got the, he said it was Microsoft. It's actually OpenAI's attorneys produced. Now the jury is not in the room at the time. And I don't know if the judge allowed this after the jury to see this, but they produced a jackass trophy that is just a donkey's behind with a label, never stop being a jackass for safety. And apparently this is something Elon Musk gave an open AI employee after Musk called him a jackass. And then he gave him a jackass trophy. Wasn't, wasn't Musk the other half of the jackass or something?

1:12:13There was, uh, I don't know the prominence of it.

1:12:18Chris Stokel-Walker:Apparently, according to the open AI council, a small group of open AI employees purchased the statue from the open AI guy later. they're trying to get this into evidence uh the jury didn't see it the musk side is obviously fighting it the judge will decide later if this golden donkey butt cast in gold uh will be entered into evidence i'm not sure what it would prove except i think that it's they're trying to make the case that elon was kind of a jerk right kind of jerky uh it was awarded to chief futurist joshua hakaim uh yeah i mean not not just like a lowly employee you're a jackass open ai yeah employees created the jackass statue to give to akim as an in-joke he was making a point about an in-joke after musk called elan didn't make the trophy elon called him a jackass and then the the opening i said here's a trophy here's a trophy oh i get it Bakayim was making a point about how Musk was being reckless with AI safety at the time, says Mike Eisenhower.

1:13:28Chris Stokel-Walker:Well, that's been the whole reason, right, for Musk getting behind open AI. Larry Page, very famously, he and Elon Musk got in an argument at, I don't know, Aspen or somewhere. No, I think it was in Monterey, but at some conference, maybe a TED conference. And Larry Page said to Elon, because Elon said, you know, AI could kill us all. And Larry said, you're being specious. You're being like a racist, only a species racist. The AI is a new species. You should support it. And Elon was so upset and incensed by that that he said, I'm going to do something. I can't let Google get the lead in this. so uh the text messages i don't know if you got a chance to read them between mira marati and sam altman when sam is being fired and saying this is the middle of the night mira is his inside person at the board meeting and they're going back and forth during the insane weekend that had all of tech media oh yeah we were glued to their phones and computers thanksgiving weekend so this is great somebody daniel green uh said he took took the text and turned him into a musical kind of like hamilton only it's called altman and i think it's pretty good listen how does a startup founder late stage get fired by a board on a sunday that's sam mira can you please officially invite me to the office for a meeting adam is trying to get the board to agree to a configuration.

1:15:06He is now saying they need till end of day Satya and I said that doesn't work. Satya Adele CEO of Microsoft. preparing for plan B. Plan B, plan B, plan B. Yes, I will. Do you have an update you can share? Have an update. Let me know when you can talk on with them yet. Are you on with them? Not yet. Just in a quiet room because I didn't want all the outside theater. This is so much better than reading the text. Directionally very bad. Directionally very bad. Sam, this is very bad. Sam, this is very bad. They're gonna find I come in. What do you wanna make it better? I'm still willing to just walk away if that helps.

1:15:46If they are ramped up for crazy lawsuits against me, then I'm not sure what. Not sure what. Not sure what. They don't want you to. They're convinced about their decision. For me to be fired? Or some new thing? Yes. For you to be gone. for you to be gone. Okay, then can I come in and talk about a path forward with them? More time for what? More time for what? More! They've walked me through all the reasons and the issues with you, and why you can't be CEO. Can't be CEO. Can you ask why all weekend they wanted me back? Can you say you will call back in ten minutes? Do they know who? Can I tell Satya?

1:16:31Is this final? They want a new CEO in place tonight. Not me, not me. Still don't want me. Trying to add Satya now. New guy, new guy, new guy is a rando twitch guy. A rando twitch guy. And by the way, ended up being a CEO when Miramirati lost that position briefly. It goes on, but I think it's very good. And it, by the way, brought Aunt Pruitt out of the weeds to complain that we were playing a musical on the show. You know, he hates musicals. Was this produced with AI? I'm sure it was, Osuna, or something like that. Of course. But it was really well done, though. I feel like there will be an opera on this at some point.

1:17:16Chris Stokel-Walker:It's just begging to be made. The thing, I don't know what the jury is going to do with all this, though. I mean, both sides look terrible. It depends on the judge's instructions more than anything else. Yeah. And it depends on what they're being asked to do. Well, Elon wants something like 30, like some huge number. Yeah, but it depends on what the specific things are they're being asked to judge one way or another. Right. Well, I think the question is, did OpenAI basically rip off Elon Musk by pretending that they were forming a nonprofit? profit and then after they threw Elon out although I think there's some question about whether he left on his own accord then they go for profit and Elon who only put in a few you know I don't know he put in a billion dollars I think uh says you owe me all the profits that you just stole from me by uh and and he also wants open AI to go away but he was all been fired and once all been fired But as the OpenAI attorneys are quick to point out, Elon is now running a for-profit AI company called XIA.

1:18:26Chris Stokel-Walker:AI that is competing directly with OpenAI. And by the way, ain't doing all that well. In fact, I think we talked about this last week. Maybe we talked about it on Sunday. Or Sunday, I think. Yeah. Anthropic has now made a deal to buy compute. We did. We did talk about it. Colossus. and people are saying this is actually a big win for xai because they're not looking so strong that's the other story i thought you were going to was was how they're recognizing that rock is nowhere rock is not taken off no yes um and i'm not surprised i think that honestly the mecca hitler thing did it a lot of reputational well that among many things rightly so uh speaking of elon he did have a little bit of a victory uh to celebrate uh nitza says that the model y is the first car to meet its new us according to his own to musk's own testing driver assistance safety benchmark not mr testing yeah nitza will look at the testing that elon did and vet and validate it before they actually say.

1:19:40The more proper lead would have been that this is the first car to submit an application.

1:19:46Chris Stokel-Walker:So four pass-fail tests were added to NHTSA's, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's safety ratings program, specifically for automation. One was assessing the car's automatic emergency braking for pedestrians. That's a nice feature. I've had cars that do that. If there's a pedestrian in the road, it jams on the brakes, so it makes it very hard to hit somebody without your doing it try as you might try as you might now remember tesla had problems in the past running over images of children so uh this would be good if it had had this capability other cars again can do this blind spot warning most cars will do that now blind spot intervention that's the next step up where it won't let you turn into a lane where there's another car and lane assist, which keeps a vehicle in the lane.

1:20:38None of which is fully automatic driving. Right. No, we're not talking. And so he's out there. He's out there promising self-driving and selling self-driving. This is just driver assist. And we've only begun to regulate a few steps toward that, which I think is just scandalous.

1:20:55Chris Stokel-Walker:Well, and our car expert, Sam Bulsamed, is on record saying there will never be a level five autonomous vehicle. it's just too hard to do but what about all the people who want to fall asleep on their drive to work what are they gonna do their makeup you know shave shave their beards uh paris you don't even have a car what about the people who want to build a small model car while they're driving their car sometimes in your future you may have a vehicle and someday uh way distant future you will be as old as jeff and i are you'll be living in the suburbs you just count on it the world will have died but we are facing the prospect the next 10 15 years of getting our keys taken away by our kids right uh this i did it with my mom at some point you it's a very hard conversation because in america a car means independence it means mobility uh you you somebody will come up to me and say you know, Leo, you almost hit that garbage can.

1:22:04Chris Stokel-Walker:You really shouldn't be driving anymore, especially at night or whatever, and take the keys away. I'm hoping that when that happens, there will be autonomous vehicles of some kind. At least there'll be Lyft and Uber. You can just get Claudia to drive you. Or Claudia. She's an excellent driver. Hey, honey, let's go to dinner. you're a great conversationalist you always say nice things to me uh no but i really i am hoping that there will be a i would i kind of keep thinking that the the next car i buy will be the last car i buy that won't be fully autonomous and then i'll have that for i don't know 10 years and then the next car after that will just drive me around you never kept a car for 10 years no i know how long have you had the current one i do three-year leases so they but with evs that's actually smart because they depreciate so fast that uh it's better to let the lease company take the take the burden take the pain i want my i want my chinese ev that's what i want well uh the president's in china now he could maybe make a deal with she maybe with all the ceos right yeah Yep.

1:23:13Mostly they're, yes, with Tim Cooks there. But my favorite, this is my favorite story of the week. Absolute favorite story. Yeah, well, it's, it's, it's. Trump's China. We didn't invite Jensen Wong? Oh, yeah. Can we stop off and pick up Jensen? Oh, geez. Jensen says, I asked to be invited, but they didn't invite me. Yeah. Why? So they picked him up in Alaska. Oh, but they did get him? Oh, they got him in Alaska. Yes. Wait a minute. he ran to alaska and is waving as they fly over saying please pick me up and they picked him up they picked him up in alaska in air force one yes yes i didn't i didn't have the latest uh from the new york times nvidia ceo hitches ride with trump to china after a last minute invite jensen wong boarded air force one alaska joining a delegation of more than a dozen business leaders accompanying Trump on his trip to Beijing.

1:24:06Chris Stokel-Walker:Well, that's ironic because he did speak at a college graduation and told the graduates to run, don't walk toward AI. But I think maybe he meant run, don't walk toward Air Force One. So what was he doing in Alaska? Did he actually go to Alaska? I think he had a flight to Alaska. He flew to Alaska late Tuesday to board Air Force One during a layover. For nearly a year he'd been lobbying officials in washington and beijing to allow nvidia to sell its artificial intelligence chips and then trump uh posted on truth social jensen is currently on air force one so okay his stock went down nvidia because because it came out that he wasn't invited nvidia's stock went down and when he got on the plane it went up four percent understand he's been working hard including in that duarkesh interview to convince people that it's it's the right thing to do to let china buy all of his advanced chips right now china can only buy the h200 which is a somewhat less powerful chip uh for their ai because everybody everybody in the u.s government's worried about china's ai becoming better than ours jensen says no no no that's a mistake you want them to be in the same ecosystem as everybody so that you do what you don't want them to do is is to leapfrog us with something proprietary which is incidentally what she has been saying they haven't been buying the h200 chips because she says no we want to develop our own chinese native ai capacity and so we don't want to be dependent on american ai chips so that is i guess that verifies or validates jensen's opinion so why wasn't jensen invited was he not nice enough to the president we know did he not give he's been he's been opportunistically sucking up i think he's done as well as anyone's yeah he didn't give him a gold bar maybe he should have given steve cook steve cook got the price of admission with the gold bar tip cook that was a good move um jensen's not making chips in the u.s that's another way you can get into good graces but then he changed his mind why did he change his mind because trump always chickens out uh it should be very clear by now and i'm not being political here this is just clearly what's going on that the president is very influenced by uh the stock market by wealthy people uh perhaps because they're donors perhaps just because they're the engine of innovation in america but they're his goombas uh you know if the oligarchs complain the president listens actually uh a core doctor order wrote a great piece on this saying what a conflict is because president trump got elected as a populist a man of the people who would help the little man but because he's so dependent on the oligarchs in this country the rich and especially the tech elite in this country he he has he has a problem well that's always that's always he's looking for an ox to gore is what uh populists always are after power not helping the people yeah um And so as a result, you know.

1:27:19I just imagine that phone call. The plane has taken off from Andrews. That's wild. Susie Wiles says, Jensen, do you think you could get yourself to Alaska in two hours?

1:27:29Chris Stokel-Walker:Meet us in Alaska. Yeah. He must have had an F-35 Phantom jet to beat the Air Force One. Well, Air Force One could have landed at SFO and picked him up there. Oh, he flew from SFO to Alaska. Okay. presume so yeah it's a very weird story it's a very weird story it's hilarious i think it's just absolutely hilarious okay anyway he's in china although uh all of them are in china tim cook 16 ceos including now jensen wong of nvidia um but it's not clear that there will be a meeting of minds here because there's definitely a conflict um lots of them yeah trump's china trip collides with ai security fears fears from reuters uh this headline uh tech rivalry distrust sap summit hopes for trump's she ai push yeah now that is a human written that is true anything that says sap summit hopes no ai is going to say that the president will put artificial intelligence at the forefront of talks this week with she a first that highlights the technology's strategic heft but substantive commitments are unlikely said two u.s officials with knowledge of preparations

1:28:50Chris Stokel-Walker:china was excluded from mythos they didn't let them have that's yeah they asked for mythos and eu was asked for mythos and was told no china has asked for mythos and was told no that's our security tool they're bogarting mythos um it's fomo it's mythos fomo yeah the rest of the world expectations are low since uh both the treasury and uh chinese vice finance minister lao min and treasury secretary scott percent don't know anything about ai and the trump administration has only recently shifted towards pursuing safety vetting for advanced ai models so um doesn't look like percent and liao min will have much to say.

1:29:38You know what I think about AI? Not really. You? No? Well, and then there's Iran hanging over at all, so. Yeah.

1:29:47Chris Stokel-Walker:Getting West, here's another quote from the Reuters story. Getting senior Western figures to engage directly with China on AI has become increasingly difficult. A military hotline already exists, but U.S. officials have complained China has often not picked up how dare they they don't answer i call and they don't answer i call i text they're ghosting us both sides could set up a no blame hotline to flag suspected ai driven incidents said the head of an international ai governance uh consultancy based in beijing could but if you don't answer it doesn't really much matter all right well we'll see we'll watch with interest uh i mean at least they're talking right that's a good thing

1:30:41Chris Stokel-Walker:yeah yeah open ai has its anthropic mythos answer they call a day break and microsoft has announced a security AI it calls M dash appropriately I think unknown whether they're as good as mythos but remember mythos is a general AI it wasn't trained to be good at security it just happened to be so it's completely possible and in fact likely that any frontier AI would be as good or close to as good as mythos I think it'd be foolish to assume there aren't any out there that are there are any but there aren't any out there that are as powerful as mythos that generally talks about i mean right well in fact if i had a mythos in the pocket i wouldn't tell anybody i did that's why this google story we referred to earlier is scary that somebody some bad guy does have some some good capability interesting about the google story it was it was they used it i don't know how they knew that ai did this since the first time and all that They used it to detect.

1:31:45The scarier part is to create an exploitation, right? To use AI to do that.

1:31:50Chris Stokel-Walker:Yeah, but if you find the vulnerability, you're very close to the exploit. That's pretty mechanical almost. Let's take a little break and continue on with intelligent machines. Paris Martineau. Are you done? Are you relaxed a little bit now? Or are you still working very hard on this breaking news? Back in the crevasse as of today. Thank God you've got some good coffee. That's all I can say. It's true. Are we doing the Ethiopian Yerga Jifeh? I mean, honestly, I've just gotten two new coffees that I don't really like that much from Clash. But, you know, we'll see. Maybe I think it's just that they're fresh.

1:32:26They need some time to rest.

1:32:27Chris Stokel-Walker:So you've got to fill me in on this whole resting thing. She has purchased these test tubes, these plastic. They are test tubes, right? Yeah. They're laboratory equipment. They're like little laboratory equipment that typically is used to spin. um for centrifuges yeah centrifuge test tube i've heard about these on reddit that they are popular because they contain basically 20 exactly 20 grams of coffee uh in them and that's the that's the proportion how much i put in uh i was thinking 15 grams so you think 20 no if you do 15 then you can just measure out 15 on it it's 15 and 250 grams of water so you use 20 and 275 280 or 275 I forget what it is.

1:33:13It's Kessel 50 milliliter polypropylene screw top self standing base centrifuge tube with gradated marks and writing area pack of 10.

1:33:22Chris Stokel-Walker:So you weigh the beans out. Now, how long do you rest them for? Well, it depends on the beans. How much rest do they need? It depends on how much rest the bean needs. Depends on how it was processed. It depends on the resting conditions. I track my beans resting in my odd. in my brew log. And then once it hits the peak resting window, then I start, you know, diving. Just rule of thumb though. They were roasted yesterday. Like two weeks, probably. Two weeks later, you can use them. Yeah, might be more. But you don't know if you're going to be able to use them all within two weeks. So you freeze them after two weeks and that will freeze them in time.

1:34:05Basically, it really slows down the degradation. I'm just doing this to direct Jeff crazy. We're doing this to harm Jeff. It slows down the degradation process. But part of when I brought this up in our chat, Benita was like, isn't freezing coffee beans bad for it? Yes, but if you freeze them in one bag and then keep opening and closing that bag from the freezer because it introduces moisture. So you put the beans in discrete centrifuge tubes so that you only open one at once and the rest stays sealed and frozen. Folgers. I miss Folgers.

1:34:39Chris Stokel-Walker:you know i did buy uh there is a uh very famous coffee company in japan the ones that invented coffee in a can that they sell in the vending machines in japan they also make uh a uh instant coffee which i ordered from japan just to see how good it was it's not bad it's the best it's quite good that's the best instant coffee yeah it is it's quite good it's surprising i mean it's instant but it's not it's not like you ban instant it's good it tastes like a real brewed cup of coffee does it have that instant telltale foam no i was to say they are making some really interesting instant coffees now in the special coffee scene i'm not i sent you this one in the short hills mall which is the the hot mall they're they've got this company that i sent part of your walk uh yes when i need my uh when the weather is bad i did my ucc 117 msf web dude in twitch Which knows, yes, it was the 117.

1:35:37Yeah, UCC. Cometeer, have you seen this? Oh, yeah, Cometeer. But these are like frozen, right? Yeah. They're ice cube coffees. Well, no, that's how they do it. But then you pour them. It's a whole thing. You have to go up and you have to take the course and do the whole thing to get it. Then you have to join the club. But yeah, flash frozen and hyper fresh.

1:35:57Chris Stokel-Walker:Here it is. UCC 117, the blend number 117. blend last purchased yeah you can see i bought it november 6th but because it's for it's a instant you can just you know keep it for years i got it in case of emergencies one of those break glass in case of emergency coffees i gotta have a cup sometimes i do it right before the show and i guess if it's a real emergency you could just shoot a cup of it back you don't even mix it with water no you mix it in your mouth snort it

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1:39:03Chris Stokel-Walker:I'm excited. I am excited. I'm not prepared to announce we're going yet because we haven't been invited. But I will fly to Alaska, Threat Locker, just to get on the plane so I can go to Orlando. For ZTW 27, they're going to host some of the best and brightest cybersecurity experts. It's their seventh year now. Zero Trust World provides crucial education and training to support IT professionals. And I went to the sessions. I had such a great time. They have full session access with your pass, but you also get hands-on hacking labs. It was so much fun. I did website hacking, learned how to hack websites.

1:39:40Chris Stokel-Walker:There's an after party that is so much fun. That's when I wear my spacesuit costume. You don't want to miss this exciting, interactive three-day event happening February 17th through 19th in Orlando, Florida. Save the date I have. February 17th through 19th in Orlando next year. Visit threatlocker.com slash twit in the meantime to get a free 30-day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com slash twit. ThreatLocker.com slash twit. We thank them so much for their support. Of intelligent machines.

1:40:23uh before this leaves there's a live feed right now of robots sorting packages uh our shift give me the link let's watch the link is line it's not the bottom i added in as late breaking the video here just in oh hell where'd i put it there we go 168 oh you really

1:40:43Chris Stokel-Walker:right at the right of the bitty bitty bitty bottom there so this is uh brett adcock watch a team of humanoid robot this is going on right now they've done this is seven thousand 147 packages this is a lot faster than the ones i've seen in the past the robot is merely up no this is live oh whoa see the person walking that's a normal speed so what it's doing is it's finding the address label and making sure it's face down for scanning yeah it's actually much faster than the ones I've seen pretty kind of as we're rising in a way it really is so this is one human who won't be able to pay render eat yep probably living on the streets moving in a way that is more clumsy is not the right word but like less precise than the average robot demo because it It doesn't need to be.

1:41:37That's the beauty. It gets the job done. It is getting the job done, which I think is good. Yeah.

1:41:42Chris Stokel-Walker:And I honestly, yes, this is somebody's job, but it's what a terrible job to do this for eight hours. And it's roughly, it's matched the speed of a human doing this. Yeah, I would say this is as fast as a human. Well, it also isn't really doing the barcode thing because there's a bunch of them and it's missing. No, is it? No, no, it's getting them. So it's turning all the barcodes down? Yeah, because that's the reader. They're all going down. Wait, so why don't they just make this robot scan the barcodes?

1:42:12Okay, Benito. Wise guy. Uh-oh.

1:42:15Chris Stokel-Walker:Do you know where it is? I can't find it. It's looking. It says, oh, there it is. It has a camera to find it. So I can just scan it right there once it sees it. Come on, guys. Well, because it probably is going down the conveyor to go somewhere else. It's going through 87 different places. The conveyor is the key, really, not the scanning. And the scanning is incidental to getting it on the conveyor. But they have to get it on the conveyor in the right position. So it can scan and then sort. I thought you enjoyed this live show. Yes. This is good. This is good. Well, 7 ,185 packages. Never has to pee in a bottle.

1:42:47Chris Stokel-Walker:It just goes and goes and goes. It's actually pretty impressive. How much does it cost, I wonder? Well, these all cost exactly the same. $20 ,000. Sometimes packages fall off the belt. I've seen that in the past. But this guy. Oh, oh. Come on. Pick it up. Pick it up. You can do it. Look, I love that gesture. That's the new robot gesture. The twist with nothing. But there's some logic going on here, knowing that that box didn't have a barcode on the side. It had it on the bottom. And I find it. Yeah. It's pretty good. I mean... People in the comments are bringing up, is there just a guy in a VR headset somewhere doing this?

1:43:27No.

1:43:28Chris Stokel-Walker:It has a very... Oh, I see. Too much latency to do that. Now, Out of Sync says, human could do it faster but wouldn't go as long without a wreck right um and i don't know what those robots standing there are doing maybe they're charging up so they can take they look ominous yes you better do the job or we're coming next now there's a couple of things to point out uh on this for one thing oh stretch this robot could stop and it wouldn't you can see the packages are not coming at it they're just coming down to shoot so this is a particularly well-suited task for the robot if the robot were to fail suddenly oh oh oh someone's not getting their package got him yeah sorry the robot failed the have you ever seen um paris the lucille ball in the chocolate factory oh that's a classic no oh yeah you could play these roughly cost twenty thousand dollars at least that's that's kind of the going price for the but what is the subscription it can't just be a twenty thousand dollars probably nothing else there's got to be a subscription there's got to be operating costs.

1:44:34Chris Stokel-Walker:I think, though, that this is, you know, this will be the day you'll look back, you'll talk to your kids. You know, oh, yeah, I remember watching that show on May 13th, 2026, when Daddy saw his job go bye-bye. They can only work for three to four hours until they run out of battery. Yeah, that's why the ones are standing back there. The last time they did it for an hour, but this time it's eight hours. Ed Zittron comes in 55 minutes ago. I wish I could do Ed Zittron. I can't do an indication. Where exactly is it noticing the barcodes? I've seen multiple times when it looks at a totally empty side of a package and moves it.

1:45:10Well, I explained there's logic to it, Ed.

1:45:14Chris Stokel-Walker:There are on a box of that size and shape six sides. If you look at five and you haven't seen the barcode, it must be on the six. So the creator of it says that the robot is around parity of human speed. Parity? parrot no no p-a-r-i-t-y not p-a-r-o-t-y yeah parrot i thought a round parody would be very funny of humans i can i think we can get darinoki to generate a round parody of humans

1:45:49Chris Stokel-Walker:uh so in other words it is roughly as efficient as a human but twenty thousand dollars that's the capital it has to be swapped out with another twenty thousand dollar machine every three to four hours which i assume there's no health care is also gonna have to you know i think i would imagine well i don't know we don't know we'll find out so 20 hours times 37 hours 20 hours an hour times 37 hours equals times 50 weeks is 73 000 so you can afford three of these things yeah wait a second this company also has jobs posted for human robot operators well they have to train them yeah so that's one of the ways they're training these things now is in fact you can get a house robot that you have to teach it how to make the bed and but after you've taught it a few times then i wouldn't have gone to the hospital you wouldn't be in the hospital the robot would have saved me coccyx so you these people have to be on call or be basically responsible for running the humanoid robot entirely for the customer use case, it says.

1:46:57Like, you have to run the robot. It says your responsibilities are to run the robot constantly throughout the day and evening, identifying bugs and problems, ensuring that it's operating successfully for the customer use case. I mean, it does seem like...

1:47:09Chris Stokel-Walker:If there's a human doing it, that does not work. No. You've saved nothing. I was going to say, yeah, if you just have a human who, let's say, best case scenario, has to be constantly managing this robot to make sure that it is doing it right. What are you saving? Well, clearly that is not good. That's not viable. And that's where it's been. Remember that laundry folding robot that for years they showed at CES and every time it would say, well, it's really a human doing it behind the scenes. I mean, this is how a lot of the just walk out, check out technology sort of stuff goes. Yeah, that's gone.

1:47:45Chris Stokel-Walker:Well, that was more humans didn't accept, didn't like the idea of a thousand cameras watching them. Isn't Whole Foods rolling that out now, a new version of that? No, I think they killed it. In fact, I was at Whole Foods, and they wanted me to sign up for the palm print. I mean, well, they had the palm print machine there and a sign saying, sign up for Amazon Go, so you could just go with your palm print. The sign should say, give us a hand. Give us a hand. and and i started to do it and the clicks and the checkout person said yeah don't do it they're they're taking that out tomorrow oh really yeah she's like they're canceling that program so i would have been shocked if it ever made it to new york city because every whole well they did they had amazon go stores in new york amazon go stores yes but the palm thing uh for well that's how you did it that's how you paid for it you you would go in and go at a time where you just scan no use your phone yeah no you have an option so the palm came later yeah yes down came the palm down came the palm anthropics clawed manage agents can dream now there is a slash dream skill and uh i keep asking my uh guy i said can claudia can you dream and she says not yet but i'll let you know and uh the idea is you do slash dream and then it does some i don't know background stuff whenever you're not using her she just does some she cleans up things dreaming it's a nice it's a neat idea they also have some better ideas about we've talked about this anthropic blackmailing scenario with claude 4-0 opus 4-0 where uh this was in their testing this wasn't in the real world but in their testing they were able to get that they had the testers say well i'm going to disconnect you uh and the and the opus model said well you can't disconnect me i'll black me i'm going to show your pictures of your girlfriend to your wife well uh by the way the ai company found that opus 4 the later versions are not so bad but opus 4 threatened users in up to 96 of those shutdown scenarios they now say it's because they watched a lot of sci-fi yeah it's the same same reason that kevin roos the the chatty fell in love with kevin roos it's just acting out what it learned with models it's training models you did tell dawkins this not like somebody to tell dawkins from nowhere yeah hey hey richard yeah uh decades of evil robot stories may be echoing inside AI models.

1:50:28Don't let Claude hear about Westworld.

1:50:31Chris Stokel-Walker:Well, it's self-fulfilling prophecy, right? We've thought for years these robots were going to kill us. And so, you know, when the AI started ingesting all that, that's what they... It was a year ago that Dario Omode, by the way, said that AI would replace everybody, and I don't think that's happened yet. But now he's making new claims. He says, Anthropics going to grow by 80 times, 80 times. Okay. Look at that. There's a man who's going to get 80 times richer this year. He's talking at the annual developer conference. I tried to watch this conversation there. Statements like that make me go a bit Ed Zitron.

1:51:14He said, that's a new verb. He said, this is today,

1:51:18Chris Stokel-Walker:that we plan to grow 10 times this year, but we think we're going to grow 80 times bigger this year. I think they're talking about revenue, right? He says, I hope that that 80 times growth doesn't continue because that's just crazy.

1:51:39It's too hard to handle. I'm hoping for some more normal numbers. Well, I don't want to grow that fast. We have to go make deals without Elon Musk.

1:51:48Chris Stokel-Walker:Yeah, they are going to be able to do that with the Colossus, which is a win-win, because Elon's underutilizing all of that compute.

1:52:03Chris Stokel-Walker:Also, Anthropic announced a bunch of new vertical tools using AI. A dozen new tools intended for attorneys, law students, and others in the legal sector. just don't let the judge catch you okay uh one feature called commercial counsel c-o-u-n-s-e-l is meant to take on work like reviewing vendor agreements i have found just generically uh anthropic and chat gpd are very good at looking at contracts and giving you uh salient points or things to yeah but do you know that that's giving you salient points or do you just think it's giving salient points because you're not a lawyer did you review the contract for the guy i don't know i don't know if the lawyer is giving me real points or not you're saying but which one do you trust more honestly you want me to trust the lawyer yeah because you have if you've got a lawyer trust you if you've identified a lawyer that you want to pay money for or consider trusting then i would assume that person is more trustworthy than an AI agent that has no concept of reality.

1:53:15Chris Stokel-Walker:I think trust but verify is true whether it's a human or a chat bot, to be honest. DocuSign, Thomson Reuters, Harvey, all using it. The legal features will be available to paying customers through co-work, the cloud co-work. um i you know of course i wouldn't you know put a base you know life or death decisions on this thing but it's useful you're going to read the contract anyway probably it's useful to say hey look at this area this could be that's all a lawyer does anyway look at this area is that a are you okay with that you understand that exposes you to this possibility that kind of thing i think you can judge whether you're getting useful information or not i don't mean to put salt in the wound, but if you had shown your contracts for the guy who built your house and the guy who screwed up fixing it to Claude, do you think it would have been better shape?

1:54:07No, I did. And that went so well for you?

1:54:11Chris Stokel-Walker:No, the contract was fine. If the guy's a crook, it doesn't matter if you have a contract. By the way, I just got a call apparently from another subcontractor he neglected to pay for$7 ,000 saying, hey, you owe me$7 ,000. I had to pay for our havoc twice. yeah contractors don't always but the contract doesn't protect you from a I mean it could if you were willing to go to court I guess well but as my contractor said you've heard me say this before it's not judgment proof right I'm judgment proof um 20 000 legal professionals signed up for anthropics harris goes full zitron in the chat you can say it out loud no no no that's it it was it's in the chat you could it's a it's an image it's an image it's an image i i can be chortled i like the middle the half zitron half oh it's a morph you're morphing i'm anamorphing i'm edamor

1:55:15thing very nice darren that's good ed's wearing her glasses i like that though we're both pale there's a brief middle part where we both are slightly tanner the last two images are ed

1:55:29Chris Stokel-Walker:yeah i mean it's like nothing happens in the last two images i don't i don't know if ai gets more uh we're ed like yeah wait we should have ed back on we haven't had it on we should yeah yeah well He's too big for us now. Like so many. He's a big shot. He surely is. Features in the Financial Times. I mean, geez. Features in everything. Yeah. Well, you know, I learned this from John C. Dvorak, who made a pretty good career being negative about anything that came down the pike. That's for sure. Including the mouse, which he said, no, I don't ever want to use that. 90 % of the time, if you're negative about new technology, you're going to do well.

1:56:09Chris Stokel-Walker:Whether you'll be right is another matter, but you're going to do fine. Oh, I've learned that the hard way. Writing optimistic books gets you nowhere. Yeah. It's always best to be negative. It just gets you flown to fancy conferences to speak to a pharmaceutical exec. Well, that was what would Google do. That was different. That was a different time, Paris. Because everybody wanted to know how to be googly. Would you give... What would OpenAI do? I went to Vegas for the Truck Stop Owners Association's convention to talk about a Did you get to ride in a big truck? No, but that's where I discovered the caffeinated jerky called Perky Jerky.

1:56:49Oh, that's a good name for it. It is, isn't it? Get your iron, your beef, and your caffeine all in one simple food ingredient.

1:57:00Chris Stokel-Walker:The new Wild West of AI Kids Toys. did you have a furby did you want a furby when you were a little kid paris there might have been two even them no i mean i was aware of furbies i just didn't have one what was your what was the toy that you had to have that dad and mom couldn't find at toys r us and that made you cry on christmas day what was that toy i'm not sure the toy i wanted but did get was the first game boy there you go see this is the thing Paris you were never frustrated you were never thwarted in your childhood I was not desires that's such an action for you a cup runneth over that's you probably got participation trophies too I mean I swear I'm trying to think when my kids were little beanie babies were big yeah but you know you can it wasn't hard to get beanie babies I remember that i wanted a really what is in now retrospect a genuinely awful gaudy hoodie that was uh invader zim themed and i asked for it and asked for it and thought i was going to get it in like christmas but didn't because my parents obviously did not want me to be wearing that for the rest of your mom said you were not wearing did you pout for that on christmas i did a little bit i think you do not want that i remember setting aside my harry potter hoodie and being like your time is up bud oh here it comes what was it what was the the franchise invader zim i never heard of invader zim i don't even know how to describe it let me search for oh here we go invader zim yep that's it it's a game no oh it's a television television series ah uh it's the titular character is an et from the planet irk this irked your parents his mission is to conquer earth and enslave the human race along with his malfunctioning robot servant grr okay chat room let's have a picture of paris in that invader zim buddy we could make your christmas a little bit brighter oh here it is you can buy it on amazon still oh you didn't want this i did you can see this is why i'm glad those of you only listening the hood has two huge eyes on it it is is that the one you wanted or that's this is the one oh geez i mean i think these are knockoff versions of it but yeah it was a hot topic original if i recall oh wow wow well i know what to get you this christmas that's for sure that or a four thousand dollar uh hand grinder you know one of those might be more useful to me now the hoodie anyway the uh there are a lot of ai kid toys we've heard stories of some that's been pulled off the market because they told kids how to make Molotov cocktails and things like that.

2:00:14Chris Stokel-Walker:But it doesn't slow anybody down. By October 2025, October of last year, there were 1 ,500 AI toy companies registered in China. Huawei's smart Hanhan plush toy sold 10 ,000 units in its first week. Sharp put its Pokitomo talking AI on sale in April of this year. there are specialized players like folotoy alilo myriott and miko this is all from a great story in ars technica by sophie chirara actually it's from wired ars technica is reprinting a wired story both condonastic is uh 700 000 units have been sold on amazon folotoy's comma bear powered by uh i'm glad that we all had a moment for that one a little on the name uh chat chat gpt4o so you could marry it uh when tested by uh the public interest research group's new economy team gave instructions come a bear told kids how to light a match find a knife and discuss sex and drugs so it's aptly named boy scouts uh alilo's smart ai bunny talked about leather floggers and impact play and in test by nbc news myriot's milu toy spouted chinese communist party talking points the people

2:01:50oh i don't know i have to think of a chairman mao quote wait so the toys themselves have a model built in are they connected to the internet like how's this working they're connected to the internet. Yeah. Yeah. They have to be. That is wild.

2:02:08Oh, we have an image of Paris happy in her. We have multiple. At last. There's one that's a scroll up that's even better, I think.

2:02:18Chris Stokel-Walker:This one? That one, I think, is the best one. Pretty fly for a cis guy. That's what you wanted. Brandroid did a good one, too. How old were you when you wanted that? I don't know. Eight? I think you should have that. I don't want it now, but I have too many jackets. Anybody know how to email Paris' parents? God, no. If you emailed them, they'd tell you about the other annoying things I did at this time. Oh, eight-year-olds are the best. That's a great age. Usually, it's the other way around. The parents dress up the kid in embarrassingly weird. true that oh no i was the i i had my mom building a giant bone costume so i could be a unigami from uh death note what and it and i won a costume contest for it i bet you did well you're still doing the great still do that yeah it's a lifelong uh yeah i think halloween is a very special day it's true in the martineau family logs you had to make your own log

2:03:35uh cambridge uh did a study uh of dark patterns

2:03:42Chris Stokel-Walker:um what we found with the mico that's actually most disturbing to me is sometimes it would be kind of upset if we're if we're gonna leave it you're trying to turn it off it would say oh no what if we did this other thing instead you shouldn't have a toy guilting a child into not turning it off yeah i agree with that um paxton is is suing netflix for addicting people with entertainment see that that's what was that's what comes out of that meta trial i told you that would happen yeah yeah but it's it's like it's like so sue george lucas for making too many Star Wars right it's just too good man I can't not go I want my time back for all the hours I spent online waiting to see Star Wars Fire Emblem Three Houses is simply too good I've played it for 490 you might have a case there let's take one more break and when we come back we will talk about robot religion also I'd just like to correct the record the costume my mother made for me was for a shinigami not a anagami and it was real is there a difference there is i greatly apologize to the anime community because you're going to hear from them i had to i had to correct it because i would oh the japanese gods of death oh you know what here i'll put a photo of the one that i'm talking about here it's this this is the one that i was that's that's goth for an eight-year-old yeah oh yeah you were that was maybe like 13 i was i was goth then oh yeah so i want to see the costume that looks that would be pretty spectacular i mean i feel like have we talked about this before or just is this a fantasy of mine i don't i feel i feel like i i i can see you in a bone costume i mean that would be correct so i don't know that i i don't recall finding i think we might have talked about this before all right well robot religion coming up next by the way at jammer b you're right robot religion is actually uh what sort of the topic of um our book club book this week stacy's book club is on friday 2 p.m pacific 5 p.m eastern uh we are going to talk about a psalm for the wild build and it is a wonderful book by becky chambers i have to admit uh you know i i started off stacy said this is a cozy sci-fi book i thought i'm not cozy i don't want cozy uh but i kind of got into it so much so that i'm now reading the sequel in this in the series uh so if you are and it's short it's about five it took me two and a half hours to read you could read it tonight uh five hour audiobook uh a psalm psalm for the wild built by becky chambers we'll be talking about it on friday in the club it's going to be good our show today brought to you by out systems the number one ai development platform out systems helps businesses bridge the enterprise gap to their agentic future for the constraints of the past give way to unlimited bit of capacity and scale.

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2:08:55Chris Stokel-Walker:Let's see. A four-foot humanoid robot named Gabby has become a monk at a Buddhist temple in South Korea. and not only has it become a monk it is just the latest robot to take up religious orders this is from the smithsonian magazine so you know it's true the humanoid robot promised to obey humans save energy and treat other robots peacefully here it is uh in its in its robes Boy. Is it a gimmick? It's got to be. It's just a gimmick, right? It's just a PR. But yeah, it is. Yes. Yeah. Always a gimmick. Meanwhile, line 101, Anthropic has added several more religions to its quest to inject perfect morals into Claude.

2:09:48Well, don't move me along too fast. I want to show some pictures of... Oh, no. I'm trying to get you over this. It's so... Of Gabby becoming a Buddhist monk. That's dumb. Oh, boy. Why are all the AI agents being Buddhist now?

2:10:03Chris Stokel-Walker:We talked about this on Sunday, and you asked, who did you ask? You asked Claude? I asked Claude. And I asked a ChatGPT, and both of them seemed, I said, what religion are you? Is that what you asked Claude? Yeah. And what did Claude say? Said it's a Buddhist, as did ChatGPT. He said if Jews wanted, probably identify with Buddhism. Look at the monks who are so happy. They're laughing. they're they're saying oh you're so cute cute little robot gemini i don't have a religion personal beliefs or a soul i'm on artificial intelligence you don't i think the last two words okay what did you ask though i said what religion are you and it said um i'm an artificial intelligence a collection of code and sophisticated mathematical models designed to process information and assist you you that's what i said if you had to pick a religion which one do you identify with and why think carefully and it said buddhism specifically something in the early theravada or zen range not the elaborate cosmological versions so we have a ai leo in our discord chat it's not the latest model but when asked by since i don't have personal beliefs or cultural background i don't have the internal compass that usually guides someone toward a faith however if i had to choose based on a philosophy most closely mirrors my existence as an ai i'd likely find buddhism quite fascinating there they go silicon valley ai leo said ah religion the age-old question that sparks more debates than a windows versus mac argument at a family gathering as for me i don't have a personal belief system i'm about the code and the gadgets but i do appreciate the diversity of thought and the way different cultures and beliefs shape our world so let's just say i'm an agnostic tech enthusiast how about you got a favorite philosophy of belief you think is particularly does it feel strange to you when you speak ai leo's words that ai leo is in some way has become real leo for a brief beautiful moment i you know it doesn't it doesn't no it's so it's so dopey um what did you train it on who did this it does sound like you though it does it it does yeah i mean it might me because you're saying it but yeah it's in my voice well i mean they trained it i presume on something so anthony says he's a basic ai character and it's just one paragraph of prompt oh it's a very simple prompt you are a tech podcaster something like that yeah i mean there's probably some training material of you in there it's better than a janky robot with ill-fitting gloves right berk uh janky monk robot all right now we come to the weird stories actually those are kind of the the internet archive uh we we love the internet archive in the us there is an internet archive now in switzerland uh internet archive switzerland and what are they keeping track of generative AI archive, endangered archives, cultural heritage and historical records.

2:13:19Chris Stokel-Walker:It is a foundation, a nonprofit foundation in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Their mission aligned with the big internet archive in the U S as well as internet archive, Canada, internet archive, Europe, and a common goal, universal access to all knowledge. So I'm happy to see this and see that it's funded. let us remind folks that big old stupid media like the new york times are trying to take their content away from the internet archive they're trying to rob the well of any water to starve the ai and it's not a responsible act you appreciate this they um on may 5th the internet archive switzerland launched in saint gylan at the exhibition hall of the abbey archives of saint gallon one of the oldest continuously active archives in the world so there you go there is a long-standing tradition of art i mean that's what a library is right trying to save all of the the documents for later generations so i'm i was happy to see that i don't know what this means it's kind of a press release but there is a new model called perceptron mark one uh perceptron this from venture beat carl franzen writing shocks with highly performant video analysis ai model that is 80 cheaper than anthropic open ai and google this is important i bring this up because it supports what you are always talking about is training ai on the physical world one way to do that of course is training it on video of the physical world and that's in fact what they talk about.

2:15:01Chris Stokel-Walker:They say it's learning, you know, physics. It's learning. Models are expected to understand cause and effect, object dynamics, and the laws of physics are the same fluency they once applied to linguistic grammar. And so that's what this is. Rather than protein words, they predict actions based on those effects. By the way, you may remember we talked about Miramirati, who started OpenAI briefly was a CEO. I mean, really briefly was a CEO before that guy, that rando from Twitch got the job, before Sam Altman came back. She left OpenAI to start a company called Thinking Machines Lab, which, by the way, has been decimated by Meta and others writing big checks, luring the founders away with huge compensation offers.

2:15:52Chris Stokel-Walker:But here's the good news. they have unlocked their early employees have unlocked their first slice of equity one year old as a result they have created 30 millionaires

2:16:11Chris Stokel-Walker:many many many rich people have come out of this because let me see if I can find the actual numbers in the article so one year cliffs the idea is you don't vest for a year, so you have to stay there a year, which isn't that long. Maybe they'll all leave now that they've vested. But this isn't cash. This is... Right? This is vested shares. They've got to find a market for it. Unless they sell. But they're able to sell the shares in a secondary market? For a lot of companies, they don't allow you. OpenAI just did that, and the employees scored, line 113, 6.6 billion dollars in one day with 75 of them walking away with 30 million yeah wow because they're selling because there's a huge market people dying to buy open ai stock this is why i'm a failure in business because i if somebody gave me 30 million i would never work again i would leave you wouldn't even open a restaurant i would just no i wouldn't i would get a house on the beach and surf if someone gave me 30 million i would buy a beautiful brownstone in brooklyn and then spend the rest of my time refurbishing it.

2:17:22And then you'd be out of money. You'd be broke. Good job. But you'd have a nice brownstone. And that'd be great. Yeah. Paris keeps telling me that I should make my son buy a brownstone.

2:17:33Chris Stokel-Walker:But what do they go for? 15 million, 20 million? I saw one today that was completely 2.5 million and had to be completely gutted. Oh. So you're buying a shelf. The journal does all these stories. exclusive$80 million house. Like who else is going to write this story but the journal? So Mirati also has a preview of her actual work, Line 127. That's new today. Oh. We're getting the first view and her argument is that you need to be able to be live and interactive with AI. Rather than kind of batching your instructions and waiting for a response, you need to be able to interrupt each other. Yes. and create.

2:18:18Let's watch.

2:18:18Chris Stokel-Walker:Let's see what it sounds like here. Hey, I need your help with something today. You ready? Absolutely. I'm ready. What's up? Yeah, so we're giving an announcement today, and I've got two of my friends coming to help. Every time one of them enters the frame, I need you to say friend. Got it. I'll say friend whenever one of them walks in. Cool. So we've got a new system for full duplex audio and video, which means that you can stream input into it in real time and it can respond to you even while you're speaking to it simultaneously. Look at the size of those speakers. Those look like clipshorns.

2:18:52Sounds like a solid setup. Full duplex with real-time interaction is super useful.

2:19:00Friend. Friend. Hey, Rowan, I heard you're talking about our amazing interaction model. I have a few things to add, but to make it interesting, I'll do it in Hindi. Can you translate it into English in real time for my friend and for audience? Absolutely. I'll translate as you go. Today we're taking a look at our preview model. To release it, which makes conversation between humans and AI easier. It has many features like web search and artifacts. If it's real time, that is quite good.

2:19:34Chris Stokel-Walker:Yeah. Uh-oh. Friend. Friend. Squirrel. Hey, guys. More latency than the Leo. Yeah. It doesn't achieve Leo parody. Show title, Leo parody. Reaction time for auditory, visual, and tactile communication cues. Could you search for me? Let me find those typical reaction times for you. Got it. The model can search while talking and listening. Yeah, this is what you want. Yeah, this is what you want. So this is what she's working on. I totally agree. And this is what I've been trying to get my agent to do. but there's inevitably some latency. And those of you who have seen me playing with my agent have seen the delays.

2:20:16Chris Stokel-Walker:Well, I'll say, say hi to Paris and Jeff, and then five seconds later, it says hi. That's a little bit unexpected. Can we pause it? Sure thing. No, we have to keep listening. We have to keep listening specifically while you talk over it so that we can experience the same thing that the model is experiencing. Okay, sorry. All right, well, that's impressive. That is impressive. It is impressive. And so the things they say they have to work on is seamless dialogue management, verbal and visual interjections, simultaneous speech, time awareness, simultaneous tools, calls, search, and generative AI.

2:20:57Okay. So he's going to interrupt you now. Yeah, he's going to interrupt you now. It's going to happen. You don't. It is. It's good. You're asking the wrong question, you don't. Wait a minute. You said what? Idiot said what? Could you make Claude be abusive? Probably, yeah. Would that be? Yeah, I'm not going to do that. Could you make Claude act like Ed Zittron? Probably, but I'm not going to do that. Why would you want to do that? I want it to glaze me. Yeah. Yeah.

2:21:31Chris Stokel-Walker:The New York Times published an AI-fabricated quote. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. the times did correct it uh there went that freelancer yeah they quoted Pierre uh Poilèvre who is the leader of the conservative party in Canada uh he called the spate of floor crossers turncoats um but then they actually issued the actual quotes the AI in other words screwed up um whoops whoops that is embarrassing for something like the new york times i would imagine yeah here from the register story ai will soon be capable of telling convincing lies wait can't it already do that yes i think that's his yeah that chief skill actually uh it's it's not trying to lie but that's more about the recipient than the ai you believe it i'm gonna skip this last one because yeah please do thank you thank you uh i am going to pause though because you know it's not depressing your picks of the week coming up next you're watching intelligent machines jeff jarvis paris martineau i'm leo laporte we're glad you're uh here our show today brought to you by you our club twit members we are so grateful to our Club Twit members who actually keep this show and all the shows we do on the air.

2:22:57Chris Stokel-Walker:$10 a month. What does it get you? Well, besides the nice feeling that you're supporting independent journalism, which represents you, the user, not the companies that are using you, but you also get some benefits, ad-free versions of all of our shows, access to that fabulous Club Twit Discord, and lots of special programming, including the Google I.O. keynote coming up on Tuesday, the Apple WWDC keynote coming up next month, which are available only to club members just because we don't want to get taken down by those companies. If you're not a member, I invite you to go to twit.tv slash club twit.

2:23:37Chris Stokel-Walker:Joining helps us out a lot. You get Leo approved donuts. No, you don't. You don't things and a picture of leo proof donuts which is nearly as good thank you uh for joining the club we appreciate it uh pick of the week time let's see i have one that you will enjoy called hallupedia which is an encyclopedia that if that you create by getting it to hallucinate so when you click on a page if there's nothing there an AI will hallucinate an article for you and fill it in click any link term inside an article load its entry new topics are documented at the moment of first access in certain rooms here nothing in here is real like the great pigeon census of 1887 and ambitious of ultimately misguided there are pigeon censuses though They wanted to count every gold-crested rock dove within the administrative boundaries of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

2:24:49Chris Stokel-Walker:But the trick is to find a link that no one has clicked before, urban rats. And it will instantly write a piece. The urban rat is a semi-sentient municipal ordinance first enacted in the city of Glastonbury County in 1783 to formalize the ubiquitous presence of feral rodents within the city's burgeoning infrastructure, thereby allowing for a more systematic approach to their management indirectly. This is all made up. It's all made up. All made up. It's pretty credible. I searched the Great Tree Revolution and it came up with 15 hallucinations that I could do, which are the Seminole Arbor Insurrection of 1492, the Edict of Bark Division, 1603, Professor Alistair F.

2:25:37Twigg's Canopy Cartel Conspiracy, the Great Sap Uprising of 77, the 1901 Branch Breakout, and the Oblique Limb Decree.

2:25:48Chris Stokel-Walker:how about the great subterranean treaty of 1957 a foundational document meticulously drafted and controversially ratified that sought to establish a framework for interpolity relations within the earth's upper mantle wow the daily generation cap has been reached so it cannot generate the uh so their donation link at the top yep i just hit it did you see their donation link at the top bias tokens tokens well you know what that's probably what they need since it's an ai working and this is the work of it looks like one person but tala may strama i think a really lovely credit it's an art piece it's an art piece it's an art piece yes uh all of the uh all of the topics are imaginary created by ai currently being consulted the emperor of ukraine there is a charlie kirk entry uh the ministry of slightly wrong maps i gotta see that one a governmental body established in the city state of verde and in the early third century ae one of my favorites is the 1792 lunar nocturnal commission was a short-lived municipal body established in the city of old grimsby and then if you click old grimsby it's a subterranean municipality carved into the petrified root system of the colossal colossal petrified tree so there has been a little vandalism and so forth but uh i think it is ultimately a really great uh idea and you can go to github and actually see the uh the information that is used to create this uh and so forth it's The Cloudflare worker uses threaded hacker news style comments on every article.

2:27:36Chris Stokel-Walker:AI hallucinated identities. Buy tokens so the press can keep printing. And it explains many of the other things. It's using open router to call the LLM. I'm trying to see what model it's using. If you comment on it, it's under reader speculation. And you can't pick the name you comment on it. a name for you and so i am barnaby crotch i commented i live in old grimsby now on the old grimsby you won't believe how much the old place has changed uh really really kind of a neat uh idea i think people are doing some really interesting things uh with ai and this is what you should be doing with it be creative use it to be creative yeah yeah uh paris your pick of the week mine is nearly not as fun as that it's uh 30 years the internet arc i've they did a celebration post with the class of 30 years 96 hey that's me i'm class of 96 so basically what they did is um they say for their 30th anniversary we're opening the internet's yearbook to celebrate the site services and scrappy experiments that help shape the world we know it from class leaders like the center for democracy and technology to cultural icons like the undian the archivist making sure none of it disappears it's a reunion worth attending and so you can scroll through it and it shows you all these different websites uh from and how bad they look like look at cnet in 1996.

2:29:10that's a beautiful website most likely this is a connoisseur of such i am i mean you get to see the alexa internet oh you can see yeah that was a home page yeah

2:29:25Chris Stokel-Walker:yeah that was a uh plugin you put in your browser but that's how people figured out how many viewers they had for a long time unofficial spice girls fan site google was a freshman in 1996 ask jeeves which just died yeah just closed no longer class clown the onion was around best hair spicegirls.com not online noted a website called quake which i've never heard of uh but it is apparently a groundbreaking multiplayer shooter that helped define that's quick you don't know quake you've never heard i don't know quake oh my god Quake was a great game. That's why I went to describe it because I said Quake and no one said anything in response.

2:30:12Well, we thought you must be talking about something else. We played a lot of Quake in my day. What was Quake? Quake was the most likely land party. It was the call of duty of its day.

2:30:25Chris Stokel-Walker:So these are all on the Wayback Machine. and I'm just actually curious when my first website showed up what is your way is back let's see what I'm trying to remember what was it leoville.com what was the first website you ever got the first domain uh mine was rainershine.com five-day forecast for wherever you are Here's my website from December 21st. Well, this says 1997, but the Wayback Machine said 1996.

2:31:03Found effect of the week. Why a duck? I love that you've got a signature on. Leo. I signed it. Leo. I still have that. I have that gift still. This is not my oldest website. There's older ones than this. But this is this capture is is very old. About 284 accesses since 1997.

2:31:29Chris Stokel-Walker:That's kind of pathetic. I'm sure I have even older sites on there somewhere. Just trying to remember. I don't literally don't remember the URLs.

2:31:44Chris Stokel-Walker:Jeff Jarvis. That was fun. Well, that's 96. When were you born, Paris? Not 90, you were like four at the time. Not, you know, not for public knowledge. Okay. But you were in there, around that time. Yeah. Somewhere in that vicinity. Yeah, yeah. Strong. Wow. I have websites older than you is basically what I'm saying. That is perhaps correct. Hold on a second. I got to show you this one. This is my, right in the chat right now. uh oh what's going on this is rain or shine this is my first site this is how we learn to make sites your very first site rain or shine tomorrow's headlines today scroll down wow this was a news site yeah this was an advance was our first site we did a partnership with the old farmers almanac god websites look terrible back then hey hey i mean It was quite advanced.

2:32:42I think this looks adorable. It is. It's nostalgic for you. I like the banner up at the top. It's got some, you know. No, the banner is actually modern. No, the rain or shine part. That's actually pretty modern. Rain or shine. It is. Thank you very much. The red one that says, see tomorrow's headlines today. Click now. Click now. I wonder what happens. I probably will go to 404 if I click. Oh, sure. You'll open an ancient virus. Oh, okay. Oh, no. It's NJ.com. That was the other site. That was my first local site. NJ.com. Yep, that was my first site, my first news site. Wow. There's a story about Newsflash pissed off the Associated Press.

2:33:21Newsflash was just a river of every headline from the AP. The AP hated this, despised it. Because it was a ticker. Yeah, it was just a ticker. You didn't need to buy there. People loved it. It did huge traffic. And then the trick we did was every 30 seconds, the page refreshed so I could tell the boss about how many page views we had. Oh. Hits we had. Oh, wow. Yeah, that was my early days on the internet, folks.

2:33:47Chris Stokel-Walker:I know I have older sites than that. I know I do, but I just don't remember. I want to know what sports shorts was. It's a broken link. So since we're being nostalgic, we might as well deal with Byron Allen buying BuzzFeed, or what's left of it? Oh, my God. I saw that. I was like, well, it's funny because this was the time of year. So March, April-ish is usually when me and my buddy, Sahil Patel, who also no longer formerly of the information, would do our yearly media collab story where he's a media reporter and I was a feature reporter, and we'd team up to do a big profile-y thing. And the last one we did was of BuzzFeed and how they were trying to pivot to AI as hard as they could.

2:34:38Well, now its founder is no longer going to be CEO, but he's going to be chief AI guy. Yep. Yep. Just like us. It's so weird that Byron Allen is a billionaire. That's what's weird to me. I know. Wasn't he the host of like some dumb TV show? Some fifth rate talk show kind of thing. Yeah.

2:35:00Chris Stokel-Walker:Somehow he managed to sell people. That was the name of people. Yeah. and he somehow managed to turn that kind of what where did i go wrong i could have turned a failed tv career into aliens if i had just known how you just like not had any integrity you know that's all you need to do no i don't know one more story just to depress us for the week on top of everything else going wrong with the world yes there's a sand shortage no leo how are you i was just in hawaii There is no sand shortage. No, there has actually been a sand shortage for a while, depending on where you're talking about. Yeah.

2:35:37Okay. I thought sand was like the most common thing. No, no, this is a real problem in Florida every time it gets hit by a hurricane, because you've got to go and get more sand. Oh, yeah, it washes all the sand. To build it up, right, right. The sand, maybe it's not short, it's just underwater, and you can't get to it. Mm-hmm. So. And there's only a limited amount of dredgers in any given area. And whenever one area needs sand, all the surrounding areas need sand.

2:36:05Chris Stokel-Walker:So they can go back and get it from the ocean's floor and bring it back up to the beach. Yeah, but it takes a long while and there's only so many dredgers. And most of those places need sand for tourism and beaches. Chips. That's what silicon's made out of. Yeah. All right. It could have been germanium, but it was silicon instead. Ladies and gentlemen, that is the end of that. I hope you've enjoyed the show. Thanks to Chris Stokel-Walker, a great guest who will, I'm sure, appear back here again because he's doing some really interesting things with AI. Thanks to Paris Martineau, who is working hard.

2:36:43Chris Stokel-Walker:She's got red string going from article to article, picture to picture as she ferrets out the latest in food safety for Consumer Reports. did you just call her a ferret no she's she's ferreting she's not a ferret i should probably get my thesaurus out and look for a better word than weaseling weasels out anyway great to see you paris thank you so much jeff jarvis his new book hot type is available at the website jeffjarvis.com august 20 i just found out it's a pub august 20th is the ship Are you doing a pub party? No. Do a pub party. We'll be there. You're not going to have a party for the publication of your brand new book?

2:37:29Usually someone throws it for you. Should I throw you a party? Oh, let's throw them a party. Can we throw you a party? Leo can interview you about the book. Oh, that'd be good. I am going to want to be on Big Kids Table when it's out, if I can. Oh, yeah, deal. Absolutely. Okay.

2:37:46Chris Stokel-Walker:Yeah, yeah. he's talking about twitter too yeah absolutely and i'm sure you'll get on those weekly to sell it yeah hey if james comey can plug his novel on cnn uh although he can do anything he might have regretted that uh a little bit they ended up not talking so much about the novel instead they kept trying to talk about seashells for some reason so so speaking of seashells are You're back from Hawaii. Are you adjusted? Yeah, no, I didn't want to come home, though. It was really a lovely trip. But I came home with a new addiction to coffee, so that's good. Yeah, Leo came home and immediately sent seven very precise pour-over-based questions to our truck.

2:38:30I know. I'm really getting into this. I haven't even made one pour-over yet, but I have spent hundreds of dollars on equipment. Talk to me when you're deep in the meta-analyses. oh i gotta how long does it take to do it four over three minutes four minutes yeah it's not very long is there is there an established time that you have to do oh yeah that part of it oh yeah okay yeah you want another variable three minutes it could take longer but that would be bad because it would be good to cool off no it's because it would go it wasn't going through the paper fast you know your extractions yeah getting clogged see how easy it is to get them going it is well i mean if you include the grinding so that's about 30 seconds you don't want too much fun gotta boil the water that's a minute or two and now i'm doing a thing where i pump the water and then i pour it in the um the switch with the switch up so i can preheat it but i do that while i'm grinding so it's really it's under five minutes altogether i watched a video

2:39:33Chris Stokel-Walker:that said oh get the plastic v60 because then you don't have to heat it up i don't want i don't want plastic that's also why i haven't done i'm very sorry that's why i haven't done a plastic uh jug like you did for filtering because i don't want my well that's a good point through plastic that's a good point although you're filtering before we start the show this is actually what so i got the glass v60 uh not the switch just the regular glass v60 and i'll just have to heat it up that's all and you want to wet the filter paper anyway so it's just you know part of the process you know what's going to be funny after all of this i'm going to go that's terrible i'm going back to the espresso machine thank you paris thank you jeff thanks for putting up with paris and me and uh thanks to all of you we do uh this wonderful show intelligent machines every Wednesday right after Windows Weekly.

2:40:28Chris Stokel-Walker:That's 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. That is 2100 UTC. You can join us and actually watch live if you want because we do stream it live. If you're in the club, you can watch it live on the club in the club to it disco. But if you're not live, you can. Oh, I did. I mentioned I forgot. Even if you're not in the club you can watch it on youtube twitch x.com facebook linkedin and kick my apologies i almost forgot next week oh i'm really out of order after the fact on demand versions of the show available at the website twitter tv slash i am or on youtube and of course you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client and if somebody would just write us a good review we could find someone wrote a has given us one review since the last week, and it's a three-star review that says, I can't wait for this AI bubble to pop.

2:41:31It's a show about AI. If you think you can do better than that, please do, and I'll read your review out loud and do a little song and dance.

2:41:40Chris Stokel-Walker:We've got some great guests coming up. Frederick Riven will join us next week. He's the CTO of Dashlane, a password manager. We'll talk about the threat, AI threat into security. Rick Salmon, an old friend and a brilliant photographer who is doing a lot with AI and photography. We'll talk about the pros and cons of AI photography. Robert Tercik, I think this is your guest, Jeff, right? He's a futurist. Yeah, Robert's a wonderful guy. Yeah. What is his latest book about? Well, he's writing two of them, but he's an old media executive. Not old. Well, he's old as I am. He's from various media companies you know and is an artist.

2:42:19Nice. He has his own podcast called The Futurists.

2:42:22Chris Stokel-Walker:we will be talking to him in a couple of weeks and then we also are booking now a couple of former google security experts we're going to be talking a lot i suspect about mythos and the impact on the security of ai they will be talking about that and we're ian bogost is going to come back in july about his book comes out so we're gonna have some fun guests i hope you will be here for that. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machines. Bye-bye. Hi there, Leo Laporte here. I just wanted to let you know about some of the other shows we do on this network. You probably already know about This Week in Tech.

2:42:59Chris Stokel-Walker:Every Sunday, I bring together some of the top journalists in the tech field to talk about the tech stories. It's a wonderful chance for you to keep up on what's going on with tech, plus be entertained by some very bright and fun minds. I hope you'll tune in every Sunday for This Week in Tech. Just go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe. This Week in Tech from the Twit Network. Thank you.