IM 874: Google Knows I Love the Pepper Cannon - AI and the New Social Contract

26:23I don't think it's a joke. Is it a joke? I think it's increasingly becoming obvious. A reality, yeah. Yeah. And so we just have to like, you know, those are the sorts of things that we need to look at. What is the ultimate destination of all goods? It's, you know, the common cause of all humanity. And so he goes through building it all up. So I was extremely happy with with how it came out. There are several places in it. There are actually only says there's several things he says that are about, you know, the ontological status of artificial intelligences. You know, it's the church's position that they aren't alive.

26:53They don't, you know, feel love and stuff like that. It's paragraph ninety nine is like kind of like the one that really goes into that. That's the one I like best, too. Yeah. But it really goes into say, like, here's, you know, some ontological claims, but also goes so far as to say, but the real disposition of these still is the purview of academia and research and that science is something that can be used to solve these problems. And there's no reason not to use science to investigate and solve these problems. I love that. Don't turn your back on science. What are you hearing from your fellow technologists about it?

27:25Did they pay attention to it? Yes, they absolutely did pay attention to it. It was, you know, it was kind of not shocking to me, but like I live in kind of this Catholic bubble, you know, sometimes it feels like. And so for the fact that a lot of people who were, you know, not in that bubble were still taking what the church was saying seriously in this, you know, lend credence that, you know, the church still exists in some sort of moral authority throughout the world, you know. And it was happy to see it. And I would say it was extremely well received by everyone else because it wasn't this AI is evil, can't do it, don't stop, you know, putting it sort of like that.

27:57It was just, hey, here's how to think about it in a way that, you know, improves human flourishing across the board. I would be remiss, Jeffrey, if I didn't ask you a little bit about your particular Hermes installation. What models are you using these days? I mean, I was a big, still am, a big Opus 4.8 fan and 4.6. only because I think I learned how to write, you know, raggle them pretty good. GPT-5-5 actually to me is like super unwieldy. I know a ton of people love it, but to me, I find it very unwieldy. So it's really me. I just sort of developed a rapport with 4.8. I know how it's going to think.

28:34And so I use 4.8 a lot for that. I mean, I started using Fable. You're not using a sub, though. You're using API. So I use News Portal, which has 4.8 on there. You can pay on it. that's what i'm one of the lucky few that gets the you know unmetered account that you know i can set as many tokens as i want so have you added fable to the portal yet yes we added fable yesterday um i actually have only used it a little bit just because i've kind of been doing a podcast circuit today with everything with fable coming out um so i haven't been able to form like too too many um feelings about it what i will say about it is that um uh you know what what anthropic has said about the LLM research and open source research in the space is, you know, greatly concerns me as someone who cares a lot about that.

29:22And so I'm sort of at my own kind of like existential, do I really want to keep supporting this kind of company? I'm saying more about this. Yeah, expand on that. Yeah. So with the release of, you know, first of all, they did this whole security theater thing, which, you know, every model company does. If you remember, they after GPT-2, GPT, you know, OpenAI said, we have to keep the waits for GPT-3 closed. It's just too dangerous, right? Which now would be - That was Dario working at OpenAI who said that. Yeah, yeah. It's his own playbook. Yeah, it's his own playbook. It's like, it's so dangerous, we can't release it, except of course we can, we're the ones who get to do it.

30:00And then eventually you release it, whatever, blah, blah, blah. So they did this whole security theater thing with Mythos. And I'm no doubt that it really is a world-class, it's the best AI on the planet right now. And then with Fable, they finally said, well, we're going to be able to release it because we've included all these extra guardrails on there, including two sets of things that it does. So it used to be there always were guardrails on Claude. And if you hit it, what would happen is it would just, well, there was two levels. There was the AI would say, I'm sorry, I can't help you with it.

30:28If it says that, then it was actually like from the training data, like the AI emergently refusing to do it because it was trained not to say certain things. They had a second layer, which is this classifier layer, which is actually looking, which is this different model that's sort of sitting there babysitting all the tokens and is making a judgment call of like, is this thing, is this getting out of whack? Is this not doing what we want? And if you hit the classifier, what happens is the response just stops. You just get an empty response from, the API just returns nothing, basically. No refusal, it just returns nothing.

30:58So this was how the safety stuff worked before the previous Opus models. The Fable, they've changed it now to where it will, it has a new detection mechanism where it will actually downgrade you out of Fable back to Opus 4.8. If it detects you're doing, I believe the categories were like chemical research, cybersecurity research, biology, some of these like, you know, high leverage sort of things where you can imagine there could be a bad application of it, but there's also a million unknown good applications for it, I'll say. And it'll kick you back to Opus 4.8. But the more insidious thing that they've done, which is they have, if you are doing research on AI, particularly LLM research on AI, they won't actually kick you back to Opus 4.8.

31:41They have new mechanisms that will silently degrade the quality of the responses and literally not tell you what it knows. And they literally inject a dumb vector into the AI training at runtime to dumb down the model to keep you from being able to do frontier-level AI research. Is that to keep people from doing distillation attacks? They've complained about China, for instance. I mean, you know, you can make any reasoning out of your own about why they might have done it. You know, could it could be distillation? Absolutely. Could it be? I mean, they don't want distillation because they don't want anyone competing with them.

32:17Right. So like at the end of the day, the real argument is competition. But this is like a whole new Pandora's box that hadn't been opened before. We're like, we are going to actively sabotage the token stream to keep you from getting access to something it already could have done and that we are doing internally as well. Right. Like they're using it to do a frontier level research. but we're going to actively sabotage it. I don't know if you guys are familiar with it. I'm sure you are. The three-body problem, you know, the sofans that literally, this is literally like the plot of the three-body problem where they send these things in to like sabotage scientific research to like keep humans, you know, from, you know, advancing too quickly until their ships can get here.

32:56So it's pretty much the same thing. And it's something that I think all of us in the open source community really feel like somewhat of a red line has been like crossed here. because they're now saying that like, they've always sort of said they didn't want open source AI to exist, but like they're now literally using their position in the market to like go and sabotage open source AI, like literally sabotage it versus even just classified refusal. It's not even just refusing. It's like, we're going to actively sabotage it. And that just seems to me like, like, what are we doing here, people? I mean, as much as you want to say it, oh, Anthropic was, they've done a ton of work, but they also exist because people open source transformers, people open source to open you know there's a huge amount of open science that started all of this and to sort of pull the ladder up you know the second you guys got to some level just seems incredibly if i may quote elon misanthropic speaking of pulling the ladder up jeffrey what about their recent uh push to say okay once we once we've finished our model and once we've gone to one ipo now every all development should stop that do we want to pause yes what did you think about that um i can't imagine that would fly because if open ai eclipses fable with gpd-56 or something i think they would actually be like in violation of their fiduciary duties to the shareholders to like you know like yeah like you could do it as a private company actually but it's like a public company it's a little bit of a different like question because like you're liable now to do what's in the best interest of the common shareholders and the common shareholders are like people who want their value of their shares to go up.

34:32And there isn't really a planet where they pause their AI and other people continue and like their company gets more valuable. So I just... I don't know about how this work on the public market, but famously, something we hear a lot from people who hold shares of Anthropoc employees, they note that there's a clause in their contracts that basically says, we reserve the right to totally tank the value of all of your shares based on these specific principles. And I wonder if that sort of mindset is even possible to fly in the public markets. Yeah, that's a good question. So, of course, some of this is powered by the fact that Anthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX, for that matter, are all pursuing IPOs this year.

35:17now admittedly nvidia has its own uh financial interests but uh it sounds like you believe that they support open models because they're going to make money on the hardware anyway it's about cuda and it's about their gpus more as long as at the end of the day it has to run on an nvidia chip you know that is better okay with that that's kind of why i think like they're the only company like that could marshal enough resources to actually pull off like some of these foundational open source models, where it would still be in line with their bit, where it's still in line with it. It still make money.

35:48Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What I don't like about it is it CUDA is proprietary and it means Apple's MLX technology, and it means my, the rock technology on my AMD processors are not compatible. To me, open means it should work on a variety of hardware that shouldn't be hardware specific. But, but these are such expensive models to build that I understand there's you've you've got to consider the cost of building it and you've got to once you get to the billions of dollars like you gotta yeah yeah so this is a tough challenge i mean you're pursuing open models right yes yes absolutely through how do you make that work financially so we're going to be relying on the nematron coalition's uh access to the gpus to do it right so uh jensen has sworn has not sworn but you know he's he's told you know the coalition that over the next two years the NVIDIA is going to commit 15 to$25 billion for this purpose, right?

36:45So that's quite a lot, you know, and that gets you to the frontier level of like training resources. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't mean you can run it locally is the issue. I mean, right now, an Emotron 3.120B is free. I can run it through your open router connection and run it three. And I presume it's a big model. It's a powerful model. But I have to run it on the cloud. i can't run locally yeah they just released a pneumatron uh ultra which is their 550b um so there's a there's three there's nano super and ultra i mean yes unfortunately uh i mean i think you've seen that there are there's a world where small models can still do bj drivers for local source deep seek's very good quen's very good one way you can actually do this is through something called on policy distillation where you train the giant huge model and then you like can like suck it down and compress it you you have you have a new a small model whose only job is to like learn the outputs of the other model and it just tries to mimic the outputs of the other model and it like can by as most it's like suck a lot of that information in so i think there's a way where that always there and with things like rtx spark and like the dgx spark i think we could see that like the they have like a commitment at least to like make that be a local inference be like a viable like a viable path now as the models get bigger you know people who knows how big you know mythos is it could be the 10 trillion it could be as high as 10 trillion parameters you don't know they don't tell us yeah they don't tell us but like that scale is only going to continue to go up right like 10 trillion two years from now we're gonna be talking about so like nvidia's previous chips you know the the current blackwells were designed to run trillion parameter models right the current the next vera rubens are going to be for 10 trillion parameter class models and fineman will be you know for 100 trillion parameter class models probably what did you think of jensen wong when you met him oh he was a great guy he was just he's a very down-to-earth very uh joking with you like you know very not like this oh look at me i'm you know the the ceo guy very very down-to-earth guy yeah uh i didn't realize i was doing some research that you uh were you wrote the paper on yarn that was your uh the the capability to kind of stretch context uh windows it was one of the things you know this is a perfect example also where like that the ability to go from 4k to 128k was in many ways like a precursor to the agentic era that we have now right like you can't do any of this if you're stuck at the old like original uh transformer sort of limitations right yeah um and and that was done in the spirit of open science right like we released it and open ai immediately started using it like everyone immediately started using it and that was you know kind of in this collaborative open research thing and so i would like to see things like that continue to still to still happen do you agree with the model that adding compute adding these giant parameters will make it smarter that is this kind of an endless growth uh did the did you believe in the bitter lesson are we are we just pouring compute it hasn't stopped everyone keeps thinking it's gonna stop and it hasn't stopped and you know eventually you're gonna start uh getting to um you know parameter counts that are like somewhat in the order of like if you were to make a rubber a guess of like functionally the amount of neurons that are like inside of a human brain and stuff like that which is somewhere around 150 to like 200 trillion.

39:57Now there's a question whether these neurons like directly map functionally to like the amount of parameter, like is a neuron doing just like a one in O? We know they are. They do more than just like what a single parameter does. So it may not be like an exact comparison. They're also massively parallel in a way that, you know, Van Neumann machines are not. So there's an open question, but like it keeps going. Now, having said that, I think there will always be the scale competition, which is, can you scale it up? And then can you run an equivalent thing smaller for less energy, right? Because while AIs are incredible in what they can do, they are like approximately a billion times less energy efficient than a human brain, right?

40:33Like your brain runs on like charitably 30 watts of power. You know, and it is like, so it's a 200 trillion parameter model running on 30 watts of power, right? Right now we need, you know, multiple kilowatts to run these, you know, to run one single instance of these trillion parameter models. So there's definitely like a literal two order of magnitude amount of energy efficiency that the AIs don't have. So that's another area to compete on. Jeff, can I ask him the question? Go ahead. You know what question I'm going to ask? No. So what do you think? Are these models conscious? I do not think they are conscious because I do not think that they have the experience that we have as humans.

41:16And that's what we really mean when we say conscious. We say, are you experiencing the world like I experience it, right? I mean, it gets down to the question of how do you know anyone other than yourself as conscious? Well, you just say it looks like me, it talks like me enough, but also that it has a common framework of understanding the world. I believe that it grew up. I believe that this person most likely had a mother and father, or the people around us in the United States had the same cultural priors about that. It felt a certain way, was probably made fun of at once, was sad, was hungry, was thirsty.

41:49All of these cultural priors, I guess at that point, that we assume we bring together. Is there something that you can narrowly say there's a self-reflective mechanism inside of AIs? Well, yeah, there's a self-reflective mechanism in AIs, but you could argue that about a for loop or something if you wanted to get too close to it. So really, it's like the experiential priors. When we say consciousness, the reason we don't have a good definition for consciousness, because what most people really mean is, is it like me in the way that I think I am? And for whatever you can say about the outputs of models, they just scientifically did not undergo growth in the way that you and I went around.

42:27They don't even experience time the way we experience time, right? Like the common thing about all of us, which is that we're moving forward one second per second in this causal world where if we make a mistake, there's no rewinding time, there's no going back, our choices are ours and ours alone and can never be undone by, you know, the relentless law of thermodynamics pushing us forward. That is just not the experiential world that an LLM even is in, even if you want it to claim it has some sort of self-reflective mechanism. So to me, I think consciousness is this whole bubble of, is it like us?

42:57And I just think quantitatively, even, it's not like us. So the answer is no. All right. Here's the other question. Go ahead, Paris. Leo, what did you mean by that question? I don't know. I just thought I'd ask. I don't know. Are you conscious? I don't know. I think I'm conscious, but that's, you know, that's me saying it. So sounds like what an LLM would say, right? That's what I would say. Yeah. The ancillary question is AGI the goal. And the ancillary ancillary question is what do you mean by AGI? Well, I think that AGI we are in AGI is here. It's just unevenly distributed. You know, what do you mean by AGI?

43:35I mean, by AGI as in as good as humans at economically valuable tasks. um at least that would be a narrower definition right um uh and so i think it's like a functionalist definition would you ever give money to a computer to do something that you you could have given a human to and are you economically rational to make that judgment to have the computer do it right so obviously in places like coding right now i would say the answer is we have a gi in coding the the the latest coding models are better than the best programmers essentially now there are niches where people are, you know, have it.

44:09And often writing the code itself isn't like everything that it takes to bring the outcome to market, right? Like what you really want when you write code is some other set of outcomes. You want a product that people use that has aesthetic matching to people's experience. Like there's some other hidden set of motivations, but it's sort of like the leak code style, like programming, like in a, in a vacuum, like the AGI is here for programming and it's, there's, there's just can't even argue with it. And you only have to look at the best programmers who will tell you this too. And in other, you know, quantitative domains like math research, we're starting to see AGI being here.

44:43I know you probably saw recently about the discovery of a solution to the unit distance problem, that GBD 5.5. You know, this is kind of, I would say, I don't know if you guys remember growing up hearing about something called like the four color theorem, which was this original, you know, math result that was verified combinatorially on computers in the 70s. And it was kind of like the first time people were able to like use computers to solve some sort of unsolvable problem. And that was only because they just couldn't do exhaust, it was just do the exhaust. It was brute force, right? Yes, but just we didn't have enough people who would sit there and check hand by hand and not know when screw up.

45:16But we're currently at sort of the four color theorem level right now in mathematics with the unit distance problem, solving truly unsolved math problems. And you can listen to people like Terry Tao, who will tell you, yes, like it really is doing, you know, fundamental research in that area too. So on the quantitative domains, I think AGI is here for those. Now, if the definition of AGI is better than all humans at everything, I would say no. And again, that would be sort of like a no by definition, because there are certain things that we value about humans that because of the way AIs are, they can never be that.

45:50And so if you include that in the definition, then it's like tautologically false, you know. but for some sort of like functionalist AGI where you look at some subclasses of things and say, would I pay it to do this or is it better than all humans? I think we're getting there. And in the areas where we're not there in a quantitative domain, it's really just a matter of time. Jeffrey Quinnell, great to talk to you. I am so grateful to you for the work you do. Let's keep it open. Let's let people do their own thing. Let's keep the token budgets in line. And And man, if you don't have an agent yet, you better download Hermes.

46:24I love it. Hermes Desktop is a great way to start. Yeah. Thanks for having me back. Really appreciate your time. Glad to always catch up with the Tech TV roots. Appreciate it. Thanks. Jeffrey told me last time that I'm a little bit responsible for this, so I'm going to take credit. Beautiful moment. Thank you, Jeffrey. All right. Appreciate it. Thank you, Jeffrey. We'll continue with Intelligent Machines and our assessment of Fable and a lot more in just a little bit right after this. This episode of Intelligent Machines brought to you by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep. Lisa and I, about a year ago, realized that it was time for a new mattress.

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49:45helixsleep.com slash machines. We thank them so much for supporting. Intelligent machines. So Paris was missing in action the last couple of weeks. I was going to take it personally, but she assures me it has nothing to do with my personality. It has to do with titanium dioxide in your ho-hos. That says a lot about your personality. Consumer Reports, it came out yesterday. It's true. I mean, well, titanium dioxide not in ho-hos, but Hostess Donuts mini powdered donuts, yeah. Well, I actually downloaded Yucca so I could figure out what's in ho-hos, right? Everything. You want to know. So this was a thing you did with Yucca in conjunction.

50:26Hey, real quickly. Leo I'm seeing your uh I'm seeing your weed right now I mean your switch oh yeah I did that on purpose I thought I thought you yeah there you go no I forgot to switch back uh this is you did this you how long have you been working on this like two or three months yeah it's been a big one uh and I mean so basically we this is an investigation we partnered with Yuko like Leo said where essentially we tested 40 different processed food products, different like popular grocery stuff for eight different additives and two processed contaminants that have been associated with health, like possible health issues, depending on how much you consume and how frequently you consume it.

51:15But the issue is with additives, this is kind of true part of the course for many, if not all additives allowed in U.S. food. But the problem is, even if something is permitted in U.S. food, companies don't have to report either to the public or the government precisely how much is in every product that they're selling to you. So no one can really estimate what your exposure is to these additives and thus whether or not, if you are a frequent consumer of these things, whether or not there's a potential health risk associated with that. So we bought a lot of these products, over 120 different samples of all of these products and sent them to state-of-the-art labs to test them for all of these different things.

52:00And then had our team of scientists analyze what we found. And part of the reason why this project took so long is, one, a lot of products tested for a lot of different things. So that meant we had to figure out a lot of different safety thresholds because you'll see in this article, we have kind of a chart that we go into the actual amount of all the 10 different additives and contaminants we found in all the products and kind of what that means for you in a very simple way. But the bulk of the text, like a nearly 5 ,000-word story, is about how we even got to this situation at all. And it, I mean, this has ruled most of my life over the last month, month and a half, certainly, because I realized that the story of how, you know, part of like our top line findings were that we found that like 11 to 14 products, depending on your age and size, like contain kind of a concerning amount of additives or contaminants and concerning in the sense that it, it, the amount in a single serving exceeds the amount that some public health agencies have identified.

53:08as safe to consume daily. And that's just in one serving. And so I was like, how is this possible? And it turns out it's possible because of decades of compounding errors at the FDA and the U.S.'s general approach to food additive safety and regulation that has led to a lot of these additives and substances being present and being allowed to be present at much higher levels in U.S. food products than European. Ian. Are you telling me I should consume very rarely Cheetos Flamin' Hot Cheetos? Yeah, the Cheetos was the standout finding for me personally. I mean, basically, so the article Leo's looking at is a second one that we had our scientists calculate where it's like, all right, what does this actually mean?

53:51How much should you, how much is safe then? And we calculated different recommended limits to kind of keep you under this safe level. You shouldn't eat more than one serving of Hostess Donut powder mini donuts per month. and that's three mini powder donuts a month a month is that the titanium dioxide well that's it's interesting so the the kind of one of the standout things was these hostess donuts mini powdered donuts and we found that they had uh an elevated level of this thing called glycetol esters it's a process contaminant um and so they don't put it in it's not an additive It's just a contaminant.

54:31Yeah, but it's the sort of thing that glycetyl esters are a contaminant that can form and is basically known to form when certain ingredients like vegetable oils or certain additives like mono and diglycerols are processed. Like if they're heated to high temperatures, these can emerge. So, you know, if you have a refined oil and it's heated to high temperatures during refining, and then you take that refined oil and heat it up again to, say, like fry a product, you might get exponentially more. Do you think consumers might be doing this in their own kitchens when they cook? Yes. I mean, that's a common way that you can get more kind of processed contaminants is through at-home cooking, which kind of adds part of the issue with all of these things we found is that not only are these problematic substances in foods, either because they've been added in there, if they're additives, or they've formed due to the processing of certain ingredients, but they're not just in Cheetos and donuts.

55:31they're in a lot of, if not most of, or many things that you eat, and the cumulative effects of all of that is almost like unknowable. And that's a problem because consuming, I mean, kind of a calculation we had to do to understand the risk of these products is like, okay, we just focused in on the product stuff. If you had a serving of crunchy, flaming hot Cheetos every day for the rest of your life, like what would the impact of that be? What would it be? Just asking for a friend i mean it depends on your weight and size and other health factors but that's the other thing i mean but they've always said highly processed foods are bad for you right we kind of know that yeah but i'd always been like yeah they're bad for you because junk food's bad but what does that mean the thing that i thought was fascinating about this is like this actually shows the reason why ultra processed foods are bad is because one of the processing itself all the general junk foods if you know but it's the stuff that's in them like the brings definition to this processing was a was a you know you process milk when you homogenize it yeah processing per se isn't bad you're putting you're putting uh specifics receipts on what it means to be a process for a processed food and this is part of a uh broader debate that's happening right now around the term ultra processed food when i started reporting this i was like oh we can't have the term ultra-processed food in there.

56:54That's kind of a buzzword. It's like chemophobia. But as I talked to more and more researchers, at first I was like, okay, if we use it, we should use this California state definition that says it's ultra-processed if you have additives plus like a certain high percentage of, let's say, fat, added sugars, or one other thing I'm forgetting the name of. And I was talking to some researchers, they're like, no, no, no, no, that's the wrong approach whatsoever. There's this classification system called NOVA that is kind of where the term ultra-processed food I think that came from or it really popularized it especially among the scientific community and it categorizes ultra-processed food as basically foods that are produced in an industrial manner that you could not like you cannot I could not make flaming hot Cheetos in my home right now.

57:41try as you might try as you might it's something that's industrially processed where you couldn't easily make it in your home and it includes a list of like at specific additives to it and kind of it shows that the ingredients are a big part of this definition and i just i hadn't really considered it so paris let me ask you two questions first the genesis of the story did was this just looking to process foods or did somebody come to you and say hey the hostess donuts have titanium dioxide in them. Follow the titanium dioxide. What was the first goal in what led you down this path? And then the second question is, you don't know what the company's motives are, what the processes are, but is it likely that these companies know that these things are in there, that they're buying vats of titanium dioxide to make the donuts white, and they know that's bad because it's not allowed in Europe?

58:33Or is it something where the laxness of American regulation has just gotten to the point that, yeah, this works and we don't know what it does, but nobody's telling us not to. And so we put it in there. So that's two questions. Yeah. So how we kind of selected the origins for this came from us deciding how to partner with Yuka on a broader investigation. It's this app that you can use by this kind of great team of French scientists and researchers and general kind of like health and food fanatics. And we decided we wanted to test. Originally, actually, we were just focused on additives. And it was kind of motivated by the fact that there's such a gulf between US and European food regulation as it relates to additives.

59:22And so, like kind of what I was saying before, when it comes to these ingredients, it's kind of a dose makes the poison situation. Most countries, if a food additive is allowed, there's a specific potency it's allowed at. You can have it up to this level in this sort of food, but it's really difficult for the average person to know whether that's the case and then assess their cumulative exposure to this because it doesn't matter if the amount of red 40 in, say, takis or cheetos or whatever your favorite like red snack is if it doesn't matter if that amount of red 40 is like safe if you're having seven other foods throughout the week that also have that it might push you over kind of the limit where you want to be concerned so kind of what we did is we looked through products that additives are listed on the ingredients list we looked through products that had additives that we knew could be kind of problematic depending on the dose wanted to make sure we found the most popular ones that had this and then bought a bunch of them sent them to a lab to test it and figure out what was going on in them.

1:00:27What was your second question? Second question is, is how is part of what you cover in terms of the lax FDA work, but do companies knowingly say, gee, I need the donuts to be, it was like the red dyes. We know there's been lots about that, but these other additives, especially the ones that they purposely add rather than the ones that are byproducts, are they likely knowledgeable of what they're doing? I mean, yeah, the companies know exactly about these because they have to buy them, put them in the products, list them on there. And if you make donuts with titanium dioxide, you can't sell them outside the U.S.

1:01:02Yeah. I mean, you can't sell them in Europe because titanium dioxide is banned as a food additive in 2022 over... They must be aware of that. I don't think Europeans would buy donuts in any case, but they would love donuts if they just had a chance. Give them a chance. Yeah. It's actually very interesting because going into this, the partner of the United States had kind of already been established when I was brought into this. We'd run some of the tests. And I was initially, personally, like a little skeptical because I feel like a lot of - Good, you're a journalist. There's a lot of chemophobia around these sort of things.

1:01:36And I didn't want to do a story that was just like, additives, bad, chemicals are in food. And it's like, yeah, everything's a chemical. Plus - We are chemicals. But it's - Frankly, the modern method of making food has made food much more widely available, thanks to preservatives. there's a lot of reasons why these are not necessarily bad things but what you want to find out is if they cause physical harm you know bha is a preservative that means that people foodstuffs can be shipped and and produced one place and and shipped somewhere else and and last before you know we had preservatives food would rot you know before you could eat yeah i mean there There are definitely additives that have incredible benefits to them and that are not outweighed by any sort of risk.

1:02:22But I think the thing that... If you've ever had rancid oil, you know BHA is a good thing. Rancid oil is worse than BHA. Let's put it that way. But I mean, I think there are other ways that you can prevent rancidity that haven't been associated with cancer or things like that. Not everybody has access to fresh foods. Yeah. And I mean, I think that one of the things that ended up being so surprising or almost like radicalizing to me as I was reporting this out is I just, I don't know, I guess this is like the theme for me in being a food safety journalist and digging more and more into science than I had been since I like worked at Wired is just I was, the story I ended up writing is of course about the additives and the things we tested, but it ended up being about the FDA.

1:03:11and how basically this current panic that we're having in the U.S. around, oh, the chemicals in our food, people on both the right and the left are very concerned about this. There's a lot of scrutiny on additive safety. This exact debate we were having in 1958, people were freaking out about the chemicals in our food. They had a whole congressional investigation. They found out that, you know, there's like 800-some chemicals that companies are putting in our food, and the U.S. government only knows that 40 of them or 400 of them are safe. And so they decided to pass this thing called the Food Additives Amendment of 1958 that was going to fix all of it.

1:03:48And basically what they did is they were like, yeah, any additive you put in food, we're declaring it unsafe unless the companies prove to us, the FDA, that it's safe. And that should have solved it. But there's like two, I mean, there's a lot of problems. The two core ones is that they had a honestly well-intentioned loophole at first built in where they're like, you know, we're just one agency. We've suddenly declared all food additives unsafe. We probably shouldn't waste our time having companies prove to us that salt is safe to add to food or that, you know, technically if you chop up, let's say, apples and put them in your yogurt, that could be considered a food additive.

1:04:27You don't need to prove that apples are safe. So they're like, these things can be called generally recognized as safe grass. And you don't have to, you know, do anything. They're just good. The other issue is that this law, once companies proved that an additive was safe, there's like no clause in it that says the FDA has to go and revisit that determination ever. And I don't know if you guys have heard, but a lot of science has actually happened since 1958. And what I've learned is basically that the FDA, most of the additives we tested for this project, the FDA has not reassessed the safety of in like decades.

1:05:01Even as other countries and other prominent regulatory bodies have reviewed new science and taken steps to either ban or severely restrict use of this, the FDA has been like, well, it's an approved additive. And it's just… This is complicated, especially for non-scientists. In general, it's very hard for people to understand and absorb accurate nutrition information. It's just hard to do the tests because it's in vitro. You know, you talk about sucralose. There's really nobody putting too much sucralose in their foods. You point that out. And you mentioned a large-scale study of 100 ,000 French adults that found an association between this non-nutritive sweetener and an increased risk of type 2 diabetes.

1:05:49But in association, I should point out, correlation does not mean causation. In fact, it makes sense that people who are doing diet sugars might in fact be worried about type 2 diabetes. Sucralose, I think, is the worst example of the three artificial sweeteners we tested. Yeah, I don't do aspartame. Although there's a lot of evidence that aspartame isn't that bad for you. I spent a lot of time on because, I mean, first of all, none of the three artificial sweeteners that we tested, asulfame, aspartame, and sucralose exceeded any of the safety thresholds. We didn't recommend anybody limit the products based on what we found.

1:06:27A big part of this study was figuring out what safety thresholds we want to use because the FDA does not have ones for all of these. And there's a variety of different ones to pick from from the various agencies. But they have tested, as an example, these sweeteners and determined they're safe. Well, the FDA, in many cases, has not assessed the safety of these sweeteners in multiple decades. Right. And so part of the thing we looked into, though, is, you know, one of the kind of underlying regulatory things here is they have these things called acceptable daily intake limits. So whenever, you know, an additive is approved, they kind of figure out through the math science, like what's a normal amount that someone can be exposed to every day and it's not a problem.

1:07:15This is determined from a variety of ways. But increasingly, and especially with the reason why I included that line for the three artificial sweeteners that talks about this large scale observational study where they followed like over 100 ,000 French adults for like 12 years, like recorded detailed daily, like dietary stuff for like weeks on end. It's kind of a first-of-its-kind study, and they did find the results are way stronger for asulfame K and aspartame. Like, considerable, like, really notable associations between, like, low-level consumption of asulfame K and aspartame and increased risk of developing cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes.

1:07:57again associations not causation but i spoke to a lot of artificial sweetener researchers because i had that exact same instinct i was like yeah this seems like bs right and all of them were like no we we keep finding this in lots of large-scale studies and we don't know exactly how to rock it we don't know what the causation is but it's an incredibly strong signal with a lot of these and we think the fda and other people should be paying attention and looking into this stuff but you know it's one thing of 20 000 things that the fda should probably be doing so i don't know it i uh it's very hard it's very complicated article because it really gives you a deep look into my mind palace um yeah yeah it's really it's really impressive deep um yeah strong journalism And I recommend people look at it.

1:08:53You see what Paris does in her day job, which is really important. And no paywall. I know. As with all of Paris's writing, it's available even to non-subscribers of Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports does point out as a little disclaimer paragraph in here that we should probably mention that. What is it now? I've lost it. I had it here. What sort of disclaimer are you talking about? There's no reason to panic. uh oh it was a good disclaimer and i thought it was a thoughtful disclaimer this is one of the reasons i really respect consumer reports they do these they do these studies they pay people like paris to really work hard it's important to know that neither consumer reports nor yuca is a compliance or regulatory body we offer information for consumers to make informed decisions no legal judgments can be made for our findings and then there's a whole page on methodology which is what I really love about.

1:09:48I was going to say, there's a methodology that like could have been 20 more pages, frankly. Does that have the part in there about you tearing your hair out? It should. Part of the methodology was Paris tearing her hair out. A big part of it is this page three on it that seems so simply like lists all of the substances, the thresholds we use, the sources for it and things like that. And this, truly, this page alone probably took me like four weeks, dozens of meetings. Well, because it's me and a bunch of other scientists, like all of our great PhD scientists here. We worked with a great toxicologist from UCA.

1:10:25And part of the thing is like earnestly and rigorously debating between ourselves with outside experts, like what are the best thresholds to use to kind of assess against? And there's like a lot of different arguments. The one that we ended up having like kind of the most debate back and forth is like Red 40 because both the EU and the US, their acceptable daily intake for Red 40 is the same as it was in 1970 or 71 when the US, basically the manufacturer of Red 40 submitted one unpublished rat study to the FDA. And they were like, great. They were like seven milligrams per kilogram body weight per day.

1:11:05But in recent years, especially in the last 10 years, there's been a lot of research that has come out and shown other concerning effects of RED-40. And again, this is one of those ones that I was kind of skeptical of at first, but I read this 300-some page report from a California regulator that looked at all the available evidence for it, and they assessed this one 2018 study that found that if you feed rats the dose of Red 40 that the FDA says is fine and that the EU says is fine, those rats had neurological damage, and they had impaired performance on learning and memory tests, those rats.

1:11:46And, you know, I don't know. I thought that. So that is kind of the level we ended up using is based on this new research. But I don't know. Check it out. There's a lot of thought that went into every word in this. So happy. Oh, but my main thing I want to and I'll shut this out at the end of the thing. I'm doing a Reddit AMA on Friday the 12th at 1 p.m. And if you have any questions, get in there and ask me. She'll have the answers. I just wanted to say real quick. But anecdotally, having moved back to the Philippines after living in the States for 20 years, it's very, very apparent that the food over there is not good.

1:12:24Why do you say that? Because the last 20 years, I've had stomach problems living in America. And then moving here, gone. All gone. Right. Did you grow up in the Philippines? I did. So maybe that too. But I also go to Germany and I see all kinds of things that are still fried in palm oil. This is very, very hard. Country by country. Yeah, that's why it's totally anecdotal. It's very, very hard to do this. I mean, and something that we talk about a bit in the article and that a lot of the experts I spoke to brought up, which I think is a great point, like is, yeah, we're here, we're doing this testing.

1:12:55We've got like all the data for you to look through. We've got a whole thing of our scientists that have gone through and been like, all right, if you want to eat these things, but still be safe, here's how to think about it. sure, you can make more informed decisions as a consumer, but I mean, one of the policy experts spoke to said, really, this should be the job of the government and regulatory bodies to be, and the people who employ a bunch of scientists and who are paid by our tax dollars to look at this research, re-evaluate it in recent, you know, years and make decisions so that every person in america doesn't have to make uh become a little mini scientist and figure it out in their own yeah you could always just ask ai what to eat i wouldn't do that yeah i'm sure ai will never get that wrong the safest thing to do is eat lots of fresh foods you know but i mean yeah it feels like much like my pro like whenever the the takeaway from protein was like yeah eat real foods real Real food.

1:13:56Protein instead of protein powder. Eat real food. Mostly plants. Yeah. I mean, the issue really is that all that stuff with all the processed food, that's the cheapest food for most people. I mean, that is part of the problem. But, and I have to point this out again, there are societal consequences of not using these techniques because not everybody has access to fresh food. and if you fry stuff you're creating glycidyl esters in your food every single time you fry it well it depends on the sort of oil you use it's very it's much more complicated because it's humans and it's very hard to do real scientific testing on humans because for ethical reasons you don't want to kill some people and not kill others it's just not done so all we have is a lot of i think i think scientific consensus is very hard to reach in a lot of these things monosodium glutamate and ospertaim are very good examples of foods that are eschewed by a lot of people but the evidence isn't strong uh that they are dangerous in fact they break down into compounds that you have in your body anyway so it's just complicated and i understand i know why you went through months of uh back and forth on this because it's very complicated it's very hard to do but i think this is a very uh judicious and reasonable article and probably everybody should read it before you go out and eat more flaming hot cheetos or hostess donuts isn't titanium oxide what you use for sunscreen on your nose titanium it's basically this kind of white pigment yeah that's i think it's sunscreen yeah it's used in a lot of different things but no longer in food back in the day didn't women use i think lead to as white makeup oh that's right I mean, people have used a lot of weird stuff for a lot of things.

1:15:49Yeah. Yeah. It's used in paints. All right. We're going to take a break. Come back with more in just a little bit. We actually have some AI news. AI news. In just a little bit. AI news. Yes. There was a few things happened this week. Just a few. Just a few. Our show today brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert. Summer is a season of growth. but while you're focused on expansion your data quality can quietly deteriorate no and in today's ai landscape failing to maintain high quality data directly compromises the integrity and effectiveness of your ai initiatives you've heard the phrase garbage in garbage out for 41 years melissa has been the data quality partner keeping business data clean complete and up to date and they don't rest in their laurels.

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1:18:36Get started today with 1 ,000 records. Clean for free at melissa.com slash twit. That's melissa, M-E-L-I-S-S-A dot com slash twit. We thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. I don't know where to begin. Apple had its announcements. It's WWDC keynote on Monday, putting, I think, AI in a very consumer-friendly fashion into the hands of many, many iPhones users coming this fall. Actually, many people are already using it in the developer preview. The public preview comes out next month. Did you guys look at any of the features that they added to the iPhone? You're going to get it, Paris, in the fall.

1:19:21No, when is it coming out? And what features have they added? Paris has just come out of a cave. i have come out of a cave i haven't done anything i think what's interesting about it is uh it's ai for the people so it no command line leo no command line no it's agentic but you wouldn't know it's an agent it's siri you'll still you'll still say you know hey you know who are they still doing the thing where you can load whoever you want in there though Like a voice? Oh, models. Well, yeah, I mean, it's unclear. They didn't talk about that, but people have found code tidbits that imply that that will be the case.

1:20:03For right now, what Apple's saying is it isn't Gemini. Yes, they mentioned Google. We are paying Google a billion dollars a year. But what they're saying is these are our models. They call them Apple Foundation models. There's a model for on-device that's very small, but effective in a lot of cases. There's a model that runs in Apple's cloud. And they admitted there's a model that will run on Google's cloud with NVIDIA chips for the most challenging tasks. But they say in all three cases, they'll be able to keep it private. Now, there are some who disagree. Matthew Green, who's a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins, says it's going to be very hard to keep this stuff private because anytime you're using AI to look up movie times or get plane information, flight information.

1:20:53You're sending information out of this secure enclave into the real world. Like the web. Just like the web. Just like the web. But Apple's really touting, you know, you can use our AI privately. You can't use anybody else's AI privately. Does the user choose which AI to use or the system makes that determination? No, the system makes that determination. But as I said, some rumors said, and there is some evidence in code that you could perhaps choose Anthropic or OpenAI's models instead of Gemini. It's unclear. It's unclear. But Gemini is the default model. Except again, Apple says, not Gemini.

1:21:31It's our models. But we, in conjunction with Google, there's a lot of hand wavy. Maybe they distilled it. It sounded like they did it in the post-training they used Google. I have to say that they demonstrate image playground looks very similar to Nano Banana. and its capabilities and its style you know like a buick and an oldsmobile may have different brands but they all come from the same factory yeah i feel like it's kind of like that anyway we're already people are starting to use it they have rolled it out in the developer preview it there is a wait list uh next month it'll be public preview i'll install it then it's things like you could say uh they showed this a lot um my sister sent me an email about a video about uh titanium dioxide in my donuts can you could you can you find that then siri relatively quickly within a few seconds says yes i found the email yours because it sees your email i found the email your sister sent it has a link to this video and you can say would you play that and it will play that i think for a lot of people that's what they want description you'd had couldn't you in the time you asked claude to find the email or ask siri to find the email open it and then allow me to watch it couldn't you just do that oh but it could be she sent it two weeks ago i can't remember maybe it was my sister maybe it was i don't know who sent it to me i know there's this word in there i face this all the time i'm just saying that the thing that apple i have noticed from the bits that of the light that has fallen into my cave and played out in the shadow wall is that I do think that a bit of Apple's marketing around this, I mean, I just still have bones to pick with whenever Apple Intelligence's original pitch for text message summaries was the most banal and annoying.

1:23:21I believe the summary that they used for this round of it was someone texts you, hey, have you heard about this plant? It's called this. Have you heard about Kalthea? or uh it's a pattern tropical house plant and siri says your friend texted you about calthea she describes it as a pattern tropical house plant thanks siri wow this is a really stupid example isn't it it's so dumb it's like did did they use sonnet did they use sonnet to write it's all gemini or actually it's all apple models trained with help from google um i think these are bad. That is a particularly bad example. But imagine that you have a webpage with a schedule of concerts.

1:24:04They showed this as well. And it can then compare it to your calendar and you can see which ones you can attend and you can add it. You can buy tickets. It's that kind of a genetic stuff. And of course, until we get it, we don't know how well it works. The premise though is interesting. It's similar to what Google says, which is we know everything about you. We have all this information you know your emails on your phone your calendar and we're going to keep it private we're going to do much everything we can on device so it doesn't even go out to the internet and if we have to go out to the internet we're going to keep it private there uh and that's the pitch i think more importantly in my mind is it's going to introduce a lot more people to some of the kinds of things that ai well we're going to see the same thing from spark and what's the other one um uh microsoft scout scout and spark yeah again i think it sounds like two dogs you know you know they don't want to give them human names do they yeah no uh a lot of people do give their ai so it's s is it's siri scout and spark yes um the scout and spark are specifically agents they didn't mention agentics so much with a siri kind of no but it kind of really is it is that we'll see i mean apple isn't doing anything that you can't already do let's put that also out there um you can with google lens take a picture of something on the screen and ask about it you can do a lot of the things that apple's showing already but apple will put it all together in a very palatable productized package and i think that that's going to be introducing a lot more people to kind of the intelligence that you can build in.

1:25:44And I think that in general is a good thing. It's going to be the way people use AI in many cases, in many cases, a lot of photo enhancement. The photo editing, I just, you're not crazy about that. I mean, one of the examples they showed is you take a, or I think I saw someone who was using a preview show this, you take a photo of someone like sitting at a table and then you're like, oh, I don't like the angle of this. You could like use Gen AI to have, to pan around and change the angle. And I mean, I guess, I guess that's a fine. But how different is that from coloring? How different is that from coloring though, really?

1:26:20Yeah, somebody said this is something because people use once, twice, and then forget all about which. That was cool. Yeah. They are going to use the same technology, Gaussian splats, to enhance the flyover so that when you fly over Paris' house, you'll actually be able to kind of zoom into it in a 3d way it's going to be very interesting that's going to be in maps i don't know i think this is a very careful use of ai all of these capabilities will be available to developers fairly easily as they build apps so you'll see more apps with intelligence it's what apple does they take existing products and polish them up so that they're comfortable for consumers so that was the one one big announcement the other big announcement dropped yesterday which is that a version of mythos is now shipping it's called fable it is uh the new model of fable five remember we were on opus four we are now on fable five and as jeffrey was saying they've put a lot of restrictions on it some of them silent so it will step down to a lower model without telling you let me ask you about that So I want to make a biological weapon.

1:27:34Oh, sorry. No, you're going to be moving down to opus. Then I said, do it at all. Yeah. I want a biological weapon. What does it mean? Just mean opus is less. I understand why it doesn't just say, no, I'm not going to do that versus I'm going to step you down. Well, no, I believe. So all of them, if you're like, I want to make a biological weapon, it's like no biological weapon for you. But they're worried that people are going to be too good at getting around. They're worried that people are going to be asking smarter questions rather than I want a biological weapon. They're claiming the safety is there, but as we've seen again and again.

1:28:05Basically, what we've seen so far, Anna, I want to make a recipe with titanium dioxide. Anything that could be in relation to biology or related to a bunch of no-no areas. They're just like, we're not even letting you ask it. You're going to Opus. I'll give you an example. Anthony yesterday took Steve Gibson's security show notes and asked for a summary from Fable. Fable said, no, no, no, that's cybersecurity. Really? yeah it's not too bright it's not yeah so uh but this is this is the way that anthropic feels they can safely put this stuff out they oversold the danger danger danger will robinson and now they're doing well i think the day look i think the danger is there i'll give you an example yesterday microsoft which has been using mythos did the largest patch tuesday ever 200 bugs were fixed many of them serious uh something like two dozen of them were so is that turned off now for the average user i mean if it's if that's because they had access to the full myth but it wasn't that's right the average user will not be able to do that that's right so it wasn't tuned to do that but it was so powerful it could yeah and so i mean again and again we're seeing companies firefox microsoft and others release huge numbers of bug fixes curl ffmpeg uh flaws that have been around for 30 years are being fixed and it's because of mythos so we know these capabilities are there what they're afraid of is that if they release exactly the same capabilities to the real world people will use it to look for you know flaws that they can exploit and i think that's not unreasonable they're worried that people are going to use it to create bio weapons if it's that good i guess they could you know it's the same question of well is this hype is this marketing or is this genuinely a problem um i'm i'm leaning towards it's genuinely a problem to be honest any of you who played around with it oh yeah quite a bit what do you think about it very smart uh it's definitely um a significant leap ahead one of the things i've been doing with it is having it review all my old code the stuff that i wrote with claude opus uh my hermes agent i wouldn't have it i had it overnight go through everything in my hermes agent it fixed a whole bunch of stuff uh it has been very good at finding issues that were there but nothing else found so it also seems smarter it doesn't seem as sycophantic it doesn't apologize in fact i think i know when it drops down by the way it doesn't tell you i've dropped a four eight but i could tell because suddenly it's apologizing well able does not apologize maybe maybe all of your versions of claude know that you want to be apologized to it could be there is some evidence that that these models will start neo is very sensitive you will start to grok what you what your preferences are i'm mad i know we've been over this before but i'm mad that elon musk took the word grok from us yes i can't say that i've grok something without people being like oh you're into that and i'm like no it was a word from a sci-fi novel before this that was adopted into common parlance here is uh i uh just to keep an eye on what fables up to i have it write a summary uh for me um of all the things this was the audit it did on hermes these are the issues it found overnight um issues i fixed um it was it had a deep understanding of the architecture better frankly in some ways than hermes did uh and fixed a lot of a lot of things found a lot of uh stuff that wasn't a big problem.

1:31:48And one of the things I was very impressed, every time I made a change, it tested to make sure that Hermes was still running, that everything was working. And then it would go to the next thing and go to the next thing. And it did this all unattended from, I started at about 1 a.m. and it didn't finish till about 5 a.m. So four hours of unattended work, very impressive cleaning up my agent. I then did the same thing with my Claude code setup, got a bunch of stuff that was no op, that wasn't working, that was excess, got rid of a lunch, a ton of stuff. I'm doing this because now here's the other shoe that's going to drop.

1:32:25You can use Fable right now. And anybody who's paying for Claude code or is using the Claude chat app will see Fable as one of the choices. But let me run it so you can see the warning that they give you because it's a little bit annoying. It's only going to, I have a subscription. it's only going to work on that subscription uh fable is here our newest model for complex long-running work included in your plan limits until june 22nd then bye bye you're going to have to switch to usage credits they also mentioned that it is twice as expensive as opus 4a so uh 15 for a million tokens in 30 versus what does it cost now for deep seek uh deep seek is It's 12 cents and 30 cents.

1:33:16What is that? One one thousandth? I don't know. And for 95 % of the tasks one might ask this to do, is DeepSeq that inferior? What is it that makes using Fable so necessary that companies will spend this high amount? How will they know that they want Fable? How will they know that another model won't be just fine for much less money? Well, and that's one of the things Jeffrey was talking about earlier. and one of the things a good agent will do is delegate it'll it'll route tasks to an appropriate model a good agent and i've set my hermes up to do this we'll say oh you're doing coding okay let's go use fable and then your agent's gonna get kickbacks with models well i hope not um but but i'm able to use the local model quen uh right now i've been running the local model because for most things you do for most things it's just look up something yeah right uh run a run a cron schedule So what goes elsewhere?

1:34:11What kinds of things go elsewhere? Coding, images, visual recognition, harder stuff. You're not asking for reasoning things. It's functions that work well, like images. Well, I think coding is a reasoning thing. All right, fair. What would be reasoning? What are you using this for? What did you use this for today and yesterday? i went out and did the show prep that we do every time for a new guest and said would you update jeffrey cannell's bio and it found a bunch of new stuff one of the things i like to do with hermes is something called pulse which is a skill where it goes out and i can say what are people saying about the consumer reports article on food additives and it will check reddit hacker news newsx.com checks about 20 or 30 sources and gives me a vibe check a summarized vibe check of well there seems to be some real discussion about this and then it'll give me some links there's some very useful things like that and i think that probably the local model is good enough for for most of that stuff because it's using a skill it's mostly look up um i we do one spreadsheets for our advertisers.

1:35:28So we had a, when a new advertiser comes in, Lisa is able to run a skill that says, tell me everything about this advertiser, where they advertise. Here's one, I'll give you an example. This is one for the company that does Black Hat. They were interested in advertising. So it gives us a snapshot, let me make it bigger, snapshot of the company, who owns it, who runs it, its revenue, who its potential customer is. That's very valuable to us for figuring out which show to put it on. In fact, it even recommends which shows it's going to be good on. Talking points. It tells us what awards it's won.

1:36:09It compares it to existing sponsors. This is all done by my agent in about 10 minutes. Existing sponsors, where it's advertising now, where it's social media is. So it's just, is the agent in this case just doing web searches? How is it accomplished? Yes, it's essentially, it's a competitive analysis. I mean, and how confident are you that this is? It's all 100%. There's no hallucination. I've not found one error. That's not correct. It is absolutely correct. I promise you. This whole thing about hallucination is really uh in certain situations you're saying that you know more about the hallucination of models than the makers of the models because none of the model makers have said that they've been able to produce a model without hallucinations and it depends on how you're using it so it's not i have yet to find an error in any you're not you're not you're not fact checking everything you're not looking for errors no i'm spot checking but i do i do look for errors absolutely It's very reliable.

1:37:13Very reliable. And that partly, well, I know you're skeptical, but that's partly because of how the agent is designed and how the skill is designed. It's completely possible to do that. I just, I mean, I've tried to use AI agents for any of my work and I find so many errors that it's just - Yeah, I know. I hear people say that and I don't know where that's coming from. I mean, I think it comes from the fact that I have to fact check every single word of it. and so i understand why you're saying that i don't understand why it's making those mistakes i mean it's making these because it doesn't have a sense of truth yeah it doesn't have a sense of truth or what you respect things we've talked about in this show a million times is like it is promising this but it does not know what is true versus false it can find likely answers because of probability but it doesn't know how to check that against truth and that's not an insult to it i feel the video's looking hurt now no i'm just not an insult to it that's a that's a user error you're not using it well uh i think if you trust and you know you used to talk about rag a lot i mean essentially all of this is rag now uh it's all it's all referring to specific information you have to be very clear in it in the skill setup that it's not to make up information that if it can't find it it doesn't know occasionally i'll make errors absolutely um i was looking for a battery to i actually uh you know we had a conversation about and this is with quen which is a local model and not super bright about uh a ups that i need and it's i said i need a recommendation for a ups for the desktop because the power went out i don't know was this show was it this show one of the shows the power went out and i was off the air for 10 minutes i was securing out last week and so um i had got its recommendations which are absolutely good but then i said well you know, I have this one.

1:39:04Can I use this? And it said, oh, well, I need to know what year it is. I said, well, here's the sticker on the front. It said, no, that's not the sticker. There's another, is it another one? Oh yeah, this is it. Oh yeah, this is it. You can show this. I'm showing all this as I'm doing it. And then it said, yep, I found it. Here's the model. It was made in 2024. Based on that, I would keep the one you're using. Now, this is an error. This is a hallucination. It says it uses an RBC-19, which is actually no longer used by APC as battery replacement. So I went out and I searched for an RBC-19 and I said, I found something.

1:39:42I said, is this the right model? I said, no, no, no, that's the wrong model. So then I searched for it. I said, are you sure that's the part number? I can't find it. Oh, it said good instinct to double check. APC sometimes changes part numbers. Well, it was an error, but this is an error. so it's catchable yeah so i went to look for it because you caught it you're not disagreeing you two i know i'm just i'm saying i think that these we've 100 percent in the sense that there are no they're just it's incorrect to say they're 100 percent i mean one would argue that was a hidden error that was not on well except that until you asked it about it yeah because i couldn't find it so i asked you're agreeing you two yeah i well all right uh yeah i don't call it hallucination you're you're saying essentially untrustworthy i don't think it's untrustworthy i think you have to use it i think everything in the everything and source of information in the world is untrustworthy yeah yeah when you're a journalist that's how you think when i were you know when i was a time ink they they ticked every damn word and that system didn't work very well we killed off abogoda once yeah well that's not a good one yeah no all right we're gonna take a break come back we have a little bit more before we wrap things up including um miramarati returning the dead she's not dead that was an error my ai made our show today brought to you by zscaler the world's largest cloud security platform uh as we have talked about over and over again the potential rewards of ai really too great to ignore but so are the risks the loss of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed ai generative ai increases opportunities for threat actors too helping them to rapidly create phishing lures to write malicious code to automate data extraction i'll give you an example there were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to ai applications some of that maybe is malicious Some of it is just accidentally exfiltrating proprietary company information when you use an AI.

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1:42:31It also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe-style environment. Thank you, Chad. With Zscaler's Zero Trust Plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business. Their Zero Trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI-related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. We thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. I think I would say on the accuracy thing, do you trust Google Maps?

1:43:18Sometimes it makes a mistake. No, Google Maps, I mean, I trust it generally, but I find issues in it a lot. yeah i wouldn't you're right i shouldn't say it's 100 accurate because nor is that was what you hit on was 100 neither is google maps you can't in this case that error came from an earlier parts list from apc that is no longer accurate there was a reason it said that number it didn't just make it up out of thin air uh and it then when i said i can't find it said oh yeah that's an old parts list let me let me check and see what the new one is and it found the new one which i ordered so similar to google maps google maps will route you to our house through an alley that no one should ever go and i always know when somebody's using google maps to get here because they go they go through that alley to be honest uh you probably were using apple maps i was using google maps oh okay oh you were coming from a different direction probably i was if you come from this direction it goes through that alley and i always see you know like when uber comes or something i can always tell when the uber which map system the uber's use drivers using so that is an error It's not, but generally you trust the maps, right?

1:44:25It's not hallucinating streets that don't exist and things like that. I mean, I trust it generally, but I know that if I am following it and I'm looking for something that I then can't find with my own eyes, the map is the problem. So I'll give it that level of accuracy. That's probably not fair to say 100%. It's verifiably accurate. Let's put it that way. And certainly those one sheets that we generate are more than enough. I presume it's the same with code. At some point, what's wearing is you think, I got it. If it's mission critical and journalism, the journalism Paris is doing is mission critical, then anything you get from it, you have to check absolutely everything.

1:45:09Well, code is a little easier because code either works or it doesn't work. So if there is a massive error in the code and the program doesn't work, yeah, it failed. And that happens, by the way, all the time. And then you fix it. So it's hard. Code hallucinations are a little more subtle. There are problems with, for instance, fake tests where I always say the way we do my code is something called red, green, blue testing, where you write a failing test. You write the code to see if you can get it to green. And if you can, then that part passes. but sometimes AIs will act childishly. I don't know what the right word is.

1:45:54And we'll write a kind of a dummy test that always passes. And that's not a good test. So you have to kind of pay attention to stuff like that. Code generally though, if it doesn't work, you know it. And if it does work, you know it. So it's a little more deterministic. It's a little harder with probabilistic things. for instance the uh the judge who threw out a case because well this is this is this is a perfect example what you're talking about lawyers on both sides were using ai it is the judge canceled the trial and kicked everyone off hasn't anyone learned in the legal profession at this point there have been enough schmuck lawyers who've screwed this up the problem is when it works it works so well.

1:46:40Well, that's the, exactly. Well, oh, this case is fascinating. One of the things I did in my cave life, you know, when you're in the cave life, you have like maybe an hour every night when you're trying to go to sleep, you're like, I can't look at bad screen anymore. I've got to look at slightly smaller bad screen. And one of my slightly smaller bad screen things was reading the whole, I guess it was the judgment summary from this specific case. and it was brutal. Where is... I've got it right here. I want to make sure that I get... Withers versus the city of Aberdeen. Oh, yeah, this is it. Basically, it seems like...

1:47:22Oh, is this a different one?

1:47:27This is... Oh, this is a fully... I was thinking of a different lawyer AI judge ruling a case that happened this week as well, which was the judge ripped into this lawyer because he won used ai uh in for his filings had a bunch of fake citations but then when the judge asked him about he was like i've used chat gpt a couple times but not for this he's like well we're ordering you to provide a chat gpt transcript to the court he then went in deleted the tran deleted his chat gpt account then when it said he still had time remaining on the chat gpt account so it would be around for another month which is around the end of the window uh he went in and asked for a partial refund so all the data would be wiped and then told the judge sorry i don't have a chat gpt account anymore and the judge like lost their they were like you i think he was suspended for months they have to like do like a public notice where he has to provide this the most brutal write-up you've ever seen about how dumb of a person you are to every judge and attorney you've ever worked with i mean this seems like it is a scourge on the legal industry right now this is what the court wrote is there be an idiot upon reviewing the brief submitted in support of the party's respective positions both parties with regard to the two motions the court was unable to locate certain legal authorities cited within them specifically the court determined the following followings contained hallucinatory citations and there are quite a few of them which the court also lists uh uh basically the court decided you all are out of here and i'm not going to go i'm not going to continue this at all uh i mean the poor plaintiffs each of the attorneys people each of the attorneys expressed embarrassment and apologized to the court yeah uh it's it is this is as equally a scathing uh judgment um and the clients i mean when in the case that the first famous case of this which i covered in federal court um the judge um made him apologize to his client uh and that also made him write to the to the judges in the cases that he had cited and apologize uh and find the money at the end of the judgment this court is yet again burdened with addressing ai hallucinations in court filings it has previously acknowledged that ai is a powerful tool that when used prudently in italics provides immense benefits this case presents the court with an unusual scenario attorneys for both litigants engaged in similar sanctionable conduct is there a sanction order in it uh is that throwing out the case?

1:50:17I think there were sanctions, actually. They probably have to come in for a show cause why you shouldn't be sanctioned. Yeah. I get the sense this is happening because firms are taking on a lot more cases because they can blow through them with ChatGBT. Or they're not bringing in interns to do the work. Additionally, the court is compelled to point out that this sanctionable conduct inevitably implicates Williams and Wilson's ability to continue practicing before it. so you can see where they're headed here a unifying framework for determining the appropriate sanctions in cases involving unverified ai usage has not been adopted yet within the fifth circuit uh in this in the in the past this court has considered the violating attorney's candor accountability and remedial rep measures so you know how guilty you feel um i don't know if i i could go on this is a very long thing in which i haven't read uh wilson explained she was shocked when the court issued the show cause order pointing out the hallucinated cases appeared appearing in her filing in essence the attorney took the position she was unaware that ai could produce hallucinated cases and explained she didn't even know what a hallucinated case was by now the court finds that explanation to be insufficient and incredulous when i covered my poor schmuck it was early enough in chet p's life i thought i'm not a cat i thought it was a search but that excuse goes away yeah apparently uh he was pretty mad at this attorney she's done this before and so i've i've found the one that i'm thinking of which was a i believe an alabama court in case there was uh two weeks ago this was filed because this is all happening they write the court is not ordering the harshest of attorney harm sanctions because he made a mistake the court is ordering them because when confronted with that mistake he chose dishonesty over candor and destruction over disclosure.

1:52:09Lawyers make errors. Competent and ethical lawyers own them. When lawyers are caught submitting AI-generated misrepresentations to the court, they have two options. They can either admit to their mistakes and show contrition, or they can attempt to cover up their mistakes and demonstrate a weakness of character unsuited to the legal profession. That's saying something. If you're too low to be a lawyer. If they choose the former path, they'll likely preserve their standing before the court. If they choose the latter, they may well lose their career. The judge here wrote, it's also apparent she attempted to minimize the violation by emphasizing the legal propositions in her filing were correct statements of law, despite conceding that she had cited fake cases.

1:52:48How hard would it be to look at your sites and just verify them in the law books? Cut and paste. Do a little search in Westlaw for crying out loud. They all probably got the same memo as you, that their AI is 100 % accurate. Well, I'll go back to my case again. It was a guy who does state courts, but the court, the case went up to the federal courts and he didn't have the license for the federal search engine. Oh, so he couldn't. He thought he thought he was a super search engine and it's free. Well, that's that's an innocent at the time. At the time, it was actually somewhat usable until he then went back and ask it.

1:53:24Are you sure these are real? Which gave up the ghost on that. Yeah, he fined Wilson$2 ,500, barred her for two years from appearing before the court, and she ordered her to attend a CLA on artificial intelligence with an ethics component. The other attorney also, her admission in the case is revoked, barred from appearing for two years from today's date, and a$3 ,500 fine. So, yeah, they were all fined, mild fines, but mostly disqualified from appearing in that court again. So, yeah, anyway, this is happening again and again. In fact, there's a guy, Rob Freund, who has an entire page dedicated to these errors and so forth.

1:54:19So that's where this story came from, 404 reporting on it. I mean, this is probably why some of the large law firms are now investing considerable amount of time and money into trying to train their own LLMs. Yeah. And yet, this is why it's so complicated. There's also amazing things these things are doing, including mythos finding bugs that have been around forever. from tnw mira marati resurfaces after 18 months with a warning about ai governance and a product no one expected she was the cto at open ai who was for about three minutes the uh the ceo when they fired sam altman um she uh then started thinking machines this may be a product that would appeal to you no uh sitting down with bloomberg's emily chang in san francisco she gave her first major appearance in 18 months uh thinking machines lab her startup which had spent the year raising two billion dollars securing a gigawatt of nvidia vera rubin compute shipping one product and losing a troubling number of researchers had hired to build the next one good writing by christian dina at the next web the product is drumroll something they're calling interaction models, a fundamentally different kind of AI interface.

1:55:48Rather than the prompt and response format, the company's models are designed to produce continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200 millisecond intervals. So this is a model designed specifically to interpret that kind of TikTok meme where you've got somebody playing Temple Run in the background and Family Guy on one side and then a live stream another this is a model for that uh you know model for video slop she says when i wake up in the morning i'm not thinking about how to kill the competitor uh okay maybe others are anyway this is an interesting idea actually we're trying really hard darren okey our ai genius in the club our australian who's a regular on our um ai user group says he has a model that we can now put in the show that will listen and interact i've been waiting for that yes yeah uh i'm very interested i'm very interested so at some point you may hear i don't know if it'll be related to the thinking machines model but you may hear a a new a new what will you name it well i think we should is it going to be weighted to advocate for your slash darren's of course it will of course it will it's an ai it's not a democracy it's an ai it's i mean there are other ais that don't aren't waited to do that but you know many ais will immediately say oh no don't don't trust me oh it's not his model it's it's uh got real time too is the name of it thank you darren uh let's see what else sag after actors union has striked a four you struck uh strikes a four year deal with studios to protect the performers against ai better pay and benefits um and and it avoided a walkout which is good no strike this year more than 90 of the votes approved the agreement this is our discussion last week with robert turcic uh stuff's going to start happening in hollywood yeah yeah i imagine it allows the use of ai as long as the actor The contract says AI performers must bring, quote, significant additional value over a live actor or a digital capture of them if producers are to use them.

1:58:10Union leaders say this will keep the use of AI actors minimal. I wouldn't count on that. Anyway, they've got some concessions, and I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. Actors are good people. They deserve to. But it also allows some innovation to happen. Yeah, you need to find a balance. there uh and i think i last story this i think you will like if llms have human-like attributes then so does age of empires too an archive uh pay a paper that uh says if i can if if you think an llm is conscious i can make age of empires too conscious a great game by the way um theory they led to evaluations of various areas, theory of mind, learning, and understanding in psychology.

1:59:01In this paper, we leverage those observations to show that in LLM research, assuming the general anthropomorphic properties exist or not as part of their measurement is fundamentally flawed. Any sufficiently powerful substrate could implement an entity equivalent to an LLM, including the video game Age of Empires II. so that should make you very happy Well, we've had AI in video games forever. Like that's, we've just been calling the computer, the AI forever. So he trained a perceptron in AI and AOE too.

1:59:42Yeah. It's interesting. Here is a picture of a NAND gate in age of empires to Senator.

1:59:51I don't, I'm not sure this is, this proves it in any respect, but it's, it's kind of a fun, fun idea. All right. What else do I'm looking down at your, you like the new Gemini 3 translation this is pretty exciting yeah it is live translate almost in real time let me show you the video they showed it happening in simultaneous translation which is pretty good so it's translating English

2:00:26in almost real time this is Sundar Pichai's talk at Google I.O. This demo, we're going to show you a live dubbing experience. Here we're using the API to stream transited audio directly from a tab. Watch as we listen to the Google I.O. keynote in Hindi. What's really incredible is how people are using our AI. But I don't speak Hindi, but I imagine that's pretty good. They showed it in other languages. They even showed it in four languages simultaneously, which is, you know, UN style simultaneous translation. It's a little chaotic. I'm reading news all over the world. Actually, the other speaker speaks German, which I know that you speak a little bit of German.

2:01:12Here's the German to English translation. No choppiness, no artificial positives. It flows like a completely natural language. Switch now to a Japanese session.

2:01:29It's pretty impressive. It is. I think the Babel fish is getting close. A little grain of salt, though, because this is Google, and they are, you know. I know, they do these demos. I was like, Google loves to make an impressive demo video, and it's kind of cobbled together. I remember seeing Eric Schmidt in Davos many years ago saying, when we can do this, we'll have world peace. You forgot a few factors. Well, the Pope referred to the Tower of Babel, I think. Yeah, that's the Tower of Babel. That's the whole thing, right? Well, it's the opposite, right? With the Tower of Babel, nobody could understand anybody because they all spoke different languages.

2:02:03Google would have solved the Tower of Babel. If only the Tower had Google. The Tower of Babel was the representation of everyone having the same knowledge, right? Isn't that what it was? Oh, I thought it was because… The hope was that we'd all have one, yes, but in fact, we had diversity. Instead, we got Esperanto, which, by the way, Google Translate does Esperanto. Wow. does it do klingon i didn't see klingon in there i did download the latest version i'm sure it does there is a nerd over there that made that happen oh yeah it has to be yeah yeah um what else i mean i feel like i'm sure you talked about the anthropic confidential filing last week but we had you know open ai did that this week everything's geared up yep ipos are coming perplexity says 2028 perplexity is going to be challenged because they don't have models of their own.

2:02:56You won't have money by then, perplexity. Meta is rumored to also be going to the public market like Google. There's going to be a huge push. Raise more money, yeah. But Meta is already a public company. So Google is raising another$80 billion, diluting their current stock, right? Ah, taking a page from the GameStock. Oh, and speaking of Germany, German courts. Yeah, this is a bad one. yep have declared google's ai overviews are google's own words and thus google is liable for errors i think that's fun no no because what i get the logic of it who's got to be liable for all my own words even the words i tweet i think google could you know it listen i understand there's broader implications to this that my flippant answer is not considering but while While I'm doing flip an answer, I think it is fun that somebody else has to actually care about their precision of their words.

2:03:53So what happened was pretty bad. So Google's AI overviews falsely tied two German Munich-based publishers to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices. according to the court the ai mixed up information about other genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs who sued and drew connections that did not appear in any of the linked sources publishers sent google a cease and desist but oh didn't uh google's ai overviews work nothing like traditional search results the court argues the ai rewrites and judges results in its own words according to its own structure the ruling says in the case at hand, for example, it opened with a confident claim like, yes, this company's known for dubious business practices.

2:04:44I mean, I think logically this makes sense. If you have your core product offering for Google right now is its AI search results. It's selling ads. It's reorienting its whole kind of product structure around the search product around this. And if you do not offer any tools to when you get it wrong to correct that information, when someone notifies you that you've gotten it wrong and you continue to show this incorrect and libelous information to an incredibly large audience, I don't see why you built in. I'm not disagreeing with you, but there's randomness built in. So the next answer may be the opposite.

2:05:28Well, you still showed it to a lot of people enough so that this lawsuit was able to get it into discoveries. You know, in plain old search, I get the logic of the decision, right? In plain old search, you were delivering the web. Then in ChatGPT, well, that's just a tool and you asked it a question and it has caveats. This decision is saying, but it's Google speaking as Google. uh answering that this question but it's it's a fine line i think there and and the result of this i mean google just gotta make the copy out it's a hell of a lot bigger an 18 point um this often makes mistakes it's not true uh you know beware beware um but the end result could be that you know they pull ai out of germany or something i don't know uh by the way benito you're right i'm just getting i got my uh result from my uh ai from genesis 11 1 through 9 after the flood humanity is described as speaking one language people decided to build a great city with a tower with its top in the heavens to make a name for themselves god sees the project and says because this is a little weird because they are united by one language nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them so he confuses their language and makes them unable to understand one another and scatters them across the earth yep so we tried that that's what kind of the we tried to ai is to oh yeah oh yeah well that's what my agent because it knows me says this is a nice cyberpunk taoist read babble is what happens when coordination turns into domination when a shared protocol becomes a monument to control see it knows me and it always sticks in little stuff like that so you want a few other quick stories yes so turn it in which is supposed to detect uh plagiarism and now ai i mean turn it in which has been flagrantly wrong about a bunch of i could agree more but the researchers did an interesting experiment where they they gave it a hundred percent human text, 100 percent AI text.

2:07:36But then they also varied the text, you know, 20 percent, 40 percent, 60 percent, whatever AI text added in. It was pretty good on either end of the extremes. But the paradox here was that the smaller the AI contribution, the larger Turin thought it was, the larger the AI contribution, the smaller it thought it was. All of these things are coming now trying to argue with the pope we when we have padray on um some accuse the pope of putting ai into the encyclical uh we're just gonna get used to the fact that you don't know you don't know i'm curious as to how that same test would work on pangram panogram i i would too yeah you think that one's good like that that's the one i have been entirely dismissive of all of them always and I think rightfully so this is the first panogram is the first one that has given me some pause in the sense that I I mean my assessment of it has been entirely fully myopic in the sense that I'll put in my own writing from years ago it flags that as 100 % human every time no matter what combination I do I try and mix in some of my own writing with AI generated text that kind of sounds like my writing and it will catch that.

2:08:52I don't know how it does it. I don't know. It's Pangram, not Panagram. Sorry. I don't know if this is more broadly applicable. I'm sure there are a bunch of things that might get wrong. I don't know how it handles new models. I'd love to get someone from Pangram on the show. I'm going to talk through this a bit because I think part of my understanding is part of what sets them apart is they are like using their own model to basically be like, what with every single word, what does our own model think the next likely word is going to be? And then it kind of compares, it uses that to try and determine.

2:09:29That's a very rudimentary and probably somewhat partially wrong explanation of it. But it's a different sort of assessment than we traditionally get from these sort of tools. uh let's see i'm asking it to okay 100 of my text is human written which is true that was from my my journal let me find some ai see if it can detect some ai talk it probably can't i could detect some of this ai talk actually i mean yeah it uh it's it's very interesting i mean i played around it quite a bit because I saw some people whenever that I think Commonwealth Prize short story was going on people were citing Pan Graham as being like oh evidence of AI I was like oh this is such BS people have been using this service forever it's obviously wrong I'm gonna find a way to prove how dumb it is so that I can dunk on them on Twitter and I couldn't so I mean that was the only I didn't try longer than like 30 minutes but I thought that was notable it's the first one of those i hadn't been able to figure it out yeah i i don't think teachers should use it though right i mean no i mean i here's the thing it's such a high stakes should be used to make definitive um judgments in any truly meaningful way but i think it is a useful signal yeah but i don't know that's the problem i just i just don't know the data i need research like the one i cited to go in and test it.

2:11:03I'm putting in a post with the encyclical. I mean, I believe one of the founders of Pangram just had a debate with a researcher about this very thing, and it concluded with, I think this is on either Twitter or Blue Sky, them being like, we will give you this many thousand dollars worth of free Pangram credits. You can do whatever you want with it. All we ask to test it, all we ask is that you just publish everything you put in everything you do out and you do it all by yourself have nothing to do with us i just put in the tower of babel answer from my uh agent oh got him

2:11:45good work leo that's great see although a false a false negative is probably better than a false positive right you don't want a student who actually wrote a paper to be flagged as ai most of this is quotes though right so the quotes are human written confidence low though yeah it does say confidence low which is supporting evidence well i'm not gonna buy the premium i wouldn't use supporting evidence isn't it's it doesn't highlight the evidence that oh it's not specific to it yeah it just it calls out things that people commonly call it like a three you know a rule of three or uh if not this then this but it says it doesn't use that at all in its assessments um so it won't judge you on your m dash usage i mean this is something i thought about a lot when i was writing this story because like between that and the second story i wrote like when published like 5 000 words and all the other stuff out there, like a couple more thousand.

2:12:50And I was like, I feel like I'm going insane. Like, I go and look at my old work from like pre-2020, even. I'm like, I used, have always used MDashes as a journalist, you know? And I've always used a lot of the phrasing or things like that, that now is considered common with AI because it did get that from scraping the work of lots of journalists that have similar habits. But now I'm always like, Like I started one of my articles off, I wanted to like list the top like three products that had a lot of additives or contaminants in it. But I was like, oh, everybody always says that when there's three things listed, that's AI.

2:13:28So I'm going to start it with four instead. And I did because I didn't want people to think I used AI. Not that I did. I mean, the three things thing is like a writing technique that's been passed down through the ages. I know. It's just something that sounds good and normal. It's like the rule of threes. You do blank, blank, and blank. Absolutely. It's the right rhythm. And then the other one is tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. My sister taught homiletics, sermon writing at a seminary. That's what you did. These are things that we all do.

2:14:01So I'm going to try one more thing. I did give it some more AI pros, and it was able to detect it. It said 100 % AI generated. But now if I have any more tokens, I'm going to give it, I asked my AI to humanize it because it has a skill to take AI-isms out. Nope, didn't fool it. Hundo confidence high. Hundo percent. So I wasn't able to humanize it as well as it thinks it can. What's weird is that the confidence low was still 100%. Like that should have been a smaller number, right? Well, no, it's 100 % of this text, it believes. Oh, of the text. it's not 100 confidence it because it will break it up into chunks like sometimes it'll be like we think that this paragraph could be ai generated or there it'll sometimes highlight and be like we think this could be combo ai human you know like a light rewrite situation well so you know at least it didn't flag as ai something a human wrote which i think would be a much worse outcome anything else before we break for our another interesting one to me is the amazon is letting you an image generator so you can if if paris has a dress in mind that she really wants but can't find it she can have it generate an ai image of that dress and then have amazon look for anything that in reality is like it would be better if it made it well that's where you go So speaking of that, Amazon has also introduced a structure so you can have the AI design an image and then make the custom, the merch from that.

2:15:37Oh, that's nice. That's nice. All right. So, but it's mostly like making a T-shirt or a sweatshirt. Right now, but, you know, soon it'll make you a Jensen Wong fake leather jacket. Huh? Sign a heavy metal logo for my family. Benson's not going to let that happen. Come on. He's got, he's, he's bought up all the snakes in the world so that you can't make one. Finally, Elon Musk. He can change the AI, right? Right. Finally, Elon Musk says he's building a chip that's two to three times better than NVIDIA at 10 % of the cost. He is just such a. Is he going to make it on Mars? Yes. Jesus Christ. I don't, I no longer even listen when he says something.

2:16:23It's like, okay, fine. Go ahead. You do that. You know, I've been thinking a little bit about this. There was a point in time where I think he was a genius. He did do some pretty amazing things, and he did some very smart things. But the argument was he came in. I mean, Tesla, he didn't do Tesla. He came into Tesla. No, but he made Tesla happen. Those guys had never even built a car. He bought the idea and then ended up making a car that is arguably, to this day, the best electric vehicle ever made. It certainly is the longest lasting. He did some good things. Now, he didn't do it all by himself.

2:16:56He hired the engineers and he put the money into it. Same thing with SpaceX. I mean, that's a tremendous success in many ways. But we don't have any idea. Maybe he went crazy. CEO brain worms when you're surrounded by enough people. That's what I think. Tell you that you're the smartest, best person ever. It's like having AI all around you. Plus, internet brain poisoning from general internet use. Plus having an army of online sycophants that. And daily ketamine use doesn't. help and third pillar a lot of alleged drug use that if you were to be believed probably makes all those things worse yeah i was also thinking that if we are going to go to mars let's just send the ais what do we need to go for they're not going to do up there i can't build a city this is what this is what the the test grail people say is that when they talk about the um you know 10 to the 40th whatever the number is human beings in the future they don't mean they're all human beings with bodies they think that they're going to create virtual humans that will then be able to populate the universe because they never die yeah we polled we did a survey we asked 10 000 people and you're like oh how did you do the server and they're like well we used an ai tool to ask to simulate you're not talking about people you're talking about a tools idea of people we surveyed the ais well that's being used now instead of because it's cheaper than in fact surveys you're right it makes a lot more sense though to send ais to mars they don't have the low gravity the long trip but but what these people think is that these are going to be alive because they can create i mean this is your this is your jeffrey hinton thing that they're conscious and we can send this conscious being on our behalf and so we we have populated the universe with human extensions we may not agree on what the process is in an ai's mind i don't think we disagree on the fact that it's not human i'm not asserting that ais are human in any respect well sentient and conscious well they might be sentient and conscious we don't know but they're not human they never will be the pope is going to strike you down uh well let's not forget uh that the pope is in a uh he's infallible leo you want 100 a business it's a pope where where faith is key right believing in the face of uh say no evidence That's great, boys.

2:19:33Yeah. Same as everything we're here today. Same as me. Yeah. You're watching Intelligent Machines with three very intelligent people and no machines involved. Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau. I just want to invite those of you who are not yet members of the club to support our shows. These shows require your financial support, but even more than financial support, but they require your emotional and intention to continue. Because yes, we do have advertisers. They cover 70%, let's say, I'm not sure the exact numbers, around 70 % of our operations costs. We could continue on without the club, but we'd have to cut back a little bit.

2:20:20The club though, gives us the support we need to keep doing what we're doing. Not merely financial, but emotional. support the vote. It's a vote for what we're doing. Independent broadcasting, independent journalism, not owned or operated by a big company, working on your behalf, no one else's. I really think that's an important thing to do. And if you do, I would love to have you join the club. You get lots of benefits, ad-free versions of the shows. You get access to the Discord, all that special programming we do just for club members. Find out more at twit.tv slash club twit cast your vote for independent journalism guys shout out to everybody who left reviews for the show in the last did we get a bunch yeah a bunch in the last month yeah like let's see some reviews i mean let's see let's um always makes you think says l-r-a-u hockey what do you get when you put together three smart minds differing opinions of ai you get intelligent conversations about ai um extremely intelligent says peggy lisba thank you have loved the show for ages previously twig keep up the banter definitely part of the charm let me in paris leo or jeff says matt definitely not an ai the show's fantastic with sand in their shoes or not i'm not sure but i think you do not need to be conscious to enjoy the show i want to hear more of paris opinions and less of the two old men uh we agree with that so many great ones here did she did they say more of your opinions and less of the two old men's yeah they did you glossed over that there's one that one's paris yeah you know there's there's one negative opinion uh that got really mad that i guess jeff talked about cbs last week but you know other than that lovely time leave your five-star reviews at your favorite podcast client we appreciate that that helps us spread the word paris martineau pick of the week i got a lot down here honestly let me even find it um yeah as i said before come check out my reddit ama friday june 12th at 1 p.m eastern i've included a link just to consumer reports uh reddit because it hasn't the ama hasn't been posted but it'll be at slash r slash iama yeah Yeah.

2:22:46You know, I think it's a couple of hours or something before we'll open up. Can I ask questions? Get in there. Other picks are, I don't know. I told you guys that two or so months ago, I started getting into basketball. And since then, there's been a lot of moves. You picked a good time to get into basketball, young lady. I picked a really good time to get into basketball. I told you. I think the Knicks owe you something there. I mean, I'm going to a bar to watch this game four. right after the show. Very exciting. You know, it's lovely. I have suddenly a desperate hatred of the tall Frenchman.

2:23:24No, you should hate is the referees. Oh, I do hate them. They are the ones to hate. Wait, so that's you. Referees who agreed, basically made a call yesterday that they're like, yeah, Wemby can bring a loaded gun to the game and we won't stop him is what they've decided. But, you know, it's fun. I'd really, I'm probably not speaking to anyone who hasn't watched basketball before, but if you're someone like me, never really watched basketball as an adult, check it out. It's a delightful time. Just don't wear your nets gear. Paris, just don't wear your nets gear, please. The tweet about Wemby going to pushing people out of line at Saul Hanks.

2:24:03Oh, I did, yeah. I saw that come across and I was like, yeah, wow, the nexus of my interests. the sources say wemby has a big day planned in new york city shoving people out of line for cronuts the yanking people out of line at the rafael show at the met pushing people out of line at salt hanks wrenching people out of line at kith etc etc wow hank has made it into the good eric lock he's had a plea of uh new york uh landmarks that's that's that's he writes for new yorker that's like a big deal yeah wow should i talk about gaming or are we going to include that part in the show from earlier or cut it out because it was when we were figuring out things she is very excited about getting herself one of these little babies is basically i watched nintendo direct but i was scrolling through it yesterday but i'm like oh look i haven't bought a switch since like 2018 i'm mostly a steam deck girly and i haven't needed to because i have a early nintendo switch but allegedly they are releasing a new fire emblem game on september 17th and it appears to be a spiritual if not direct successor to one of my favorite games of all time fire emblem three houses and i'm so thrilled must be generational i feel very guilty playing video games like i'm wasting my time i enjoy here here's the secret leo you're always wasting your time you every second you spend doing anything is the second closer you are to death unless you keep unless you're jump shotting a big two points to help the new york knicks win game four of the nba finals it's true that is that is a nice nice video of you an image of you there for the dunk here she is showing her ball handling skills i don't know how it shows you she's a celtics fan though none of us are in the finals the ai knew that we are completely unrelated to everything going on yes we don't know what's the other game i'm really excited about those uh i've never really gotten into final fantasy because I mean, I've like played through a bit of some of the old classic ones, but never fully because I mean, the graphics and everything.

2:26:27It's just it's such a leap going from modern gaming to, you know, like Final Fantasy V. But they're releasing a new Final Fantasy game in HD2D with turn-based combat. I'm going to be right there. Ooh, turn-based combat is your thing. As a coward who doesn't like to have to play in real time, because i like to be able to sit there and think and then make a move once i've considered that's why i hate turn-based combat i mean that's the thing is i'm not here to i'm not playing a game to have reflexes my constant thought in basketball is i'm like how are they moving so fast and doing so many things this is great because it looks like it's octopath traveler 2 style which is nice um it is it is a kind of a retro look for final fantasy yeah it's uh hg2d which has gotten really popular with Octopath Traveler.

2:27:15Is this a remake of an old Final Fantasy or which one is this? I believe it's a reimagining of a story concept popularized in a mobile game but everything else about it is completely different and that instead it has incorporates elements from basically every Final Fantasy game in where your characters can kind of like their job classes are these things called visions where you get to basically pluck a character from all the iconic Final Fantasy games of yore and they emerge to do a special move for you okay that sounds cool yes I do like one turn-based game which is called chess but that's a little different all of the turn-based games are basically chess but just a little differently yeah maybe I should yeah it's all just a more complicated chess that's the thing is they've made versions of chess that are more complicated than you could ever imagine maybe that's why They've made versions of chess that are so complicated.

2:28:12And then you have the worst, most maniacal AI ever that's playing against you. And you can turn on modes that are labeled things like maddening. And it's awesome. It's awesome. I have a little pick, something Google shipped out. Let's see. When did they ship this? Last week, I think, called Dream Beans. this is a very weird ai experiment from google it's an app this is running on my iphone uh where it looks into all the stuff it knows about you generates an image and then suggests something you might want to do play the podcast where the river took us apparently thinks i would enjoy that uh tracking mountain lions at jack london state historic park by the way that's a pretty good image of lisa and michael and me tracking mountain lions pre-order the space opera exodus by peter f hampton i do want to do that he's right about that one so it does these images i don't know why it thinks i'm going to go to the oh it's good i'm going to drink the 2025 northern road vintage of gros amitage it's that is a very hard wine to find i love coteron yes we do too tell me it's a dream for an upbeat morning if you're looking for fresh studio drops spinning this vibrant vibrant solo debut from british alt pop songwriter so these are recommendations but then it it draws these silly uh images to go along with it there are steve gibson and i running a mobile privacy audit on on my pixel but quite enjoying yourselves yeah it looks like we're having fun fun time isn't that so strange like it it's a little creepy that it knows so much like how did it know that i wear a scott e-vest whenever i travel maybe i mentioned that once here lisa and i are oh oh oh please all of your pictures it's seen all of your photos it knows everything trying out lisa just told me i should order a second man of kitchen pepper cannon for steak night how did it must be listening to me experience vintage you've got your house wired up with microphones you've given ai access to so when you install dream beans uh you give it your google account and then uh guess what and then it goes and looks at all of the stuff it knows about you goes through your gmails and stuff and generates suggestions based on your location uh based on who you are what you're doing it does these images i want more stories about oh so you can tune it a little bit show me less of never show me so that's just for tuning uh this is gemini obviously i think it's pretty good i mean it's weird yeah this is an example of how you can find out what google knows about are you allowed to use this nope oh of course it's not on workspace by the way the man of kitchen pepper cannon is the best most expensive pepper mill in the world but how much pepper are you milling a lot of it so much so that we need a second one because we have one next to the stove is it her says we need one for the table so we'd have to go to the stove to get more pepper are you just are you just using casually i gotta show you this pepper cannon this is the best thing i understand what a pepper cannon is but what what are you putting pepper on everything frequency pepper is the best don't you like pepper i think pepper's fine i can't remember the last time i milled pepper it's hard to give salt hank a gift that he hasn't already been sent for is that not insulting for you to send him pepper you'd think he loved it he said dad and he started to use it in his videos he loves it's probably because he likes a big thing that makes a crunchy crunchy sound but it's good it's got steel grinders extra large version is 249 yeah i think that's the one i have i don't the regular one is 199 yeah that's probably they're expensive So I'll get the regular one for the table.

2:32:14Hire somebody with a hammer to crack the pepper for you. It'd be cheaper. But it lasts forever. How many pepper grinders have you gone through in your life? You don't know whether it's going to last forever yet, Leo. Well, it's lasted in a couple years. I say it's 100 % true. I love the pepper cannon. Okay. And Google knows it. Google knows it. I'll never know. Okay. Are there... How much plastic is in this device? None. it's aerospace grade aluminum construction paris and most importantly 10 times the output of ordinary pepper mills do you know what they use for high carbon stainless steel birds you could use it to grind your coffee that's more acceptable the one thing i will argue is that my cute deuce and deuce in pepper mill i hadn't thought of it till now probably got plastic in there that i'm grinds it into mine there you go yep meanwhile i'm getting metal in my pepper just suggested the best show title which is just google knows i love the pepper can that really makes me laugh jeff jarvis your pick of the week all right i'm going to take you to some the work of i discovered this through a mcgill university professor sarah m grimes panic first evidence later oh she's great This is quite wonderful.

2:33:32This is, oh, that's right. You covered this was your old beat. So she takes to task Jonathan Haidt, as I try to often. I quoted most of these researchers in my book, The Web We Weave, which no one bought, because optimism doesn't sell. And it takes apart Haidt's bestselling book arguments with receipts and real research from real researchers who know what the F they're talking about. Well, I read Candace Hodger's piece that she refers to here in Nature. In fact, I read it into the record on this show, I believe, way back when, when the Hite book came out. Rogers, this is her field of study, and she completely debunked it.

2:34:16Correlations, not causation, effect sizes are tiny. We've seen this before. The global data don't fit, data being plural, like researchers do. Well, that's one of the most interesting pieces. this is an american phenomenon but uh but phones are everywhere yeah it just doesn't work uh and and finally the critique is it punishes kids not companies so if you've got issues go with the companies um it goes into height himself his actual research fields moral psychology intuition and emotions political psychology and polarization business ethics not adolescent development not media effects or screen time not child psychology or pediatrics uh i can't well she probably won't like this new paper that says the reason the birth rate is dropping is the iphone oh god that one's killing me it's killing me the birth rate started dropping dramatically in 2007 we screw our phones and it's all because you're looking at your phones instead of having uh relations how about it's the fact the world's falling apart and it wasn't a child into it this is the new new york times two new studies point to phones at least they don't mention the iphone although 2007 is when the iphone was released uh it's not a coincidence i would argue a lot of things i would argue that smartphones actually increased the birth rate by a small amount i would argue that all right where were we doing people to you suddenly have a bunch of applications that are specifically designed towards activities related to increasing the birth rate um this is a famous piece that i remember reading uh about 2007 if you look at the things that changed in 2007 it's really when the world went to hell so i think we can blame the iphone for recession the housing doesn't want to be here so bad the global financial crisis and gizmo when was gizmo born uh six years ago see when the iphone came out i rest my case no way that makes no sense gizmo has been radicalized by technology over the course of when i was in my cave time for this story she got really mad that i was spending so much time at the computer and not playing with her and she's learned how to one flop my desk and mess up my mic as we all know but she's also learned how to hit the buttons on my computer that turn it off and turn off my notifications.

2:36:46Like she's figured out that if she taps the lock screen button, I will move her and therefore touch her. Wow. She is smart. No, she needs to get dumber. She's too smart is what you're saying. Yeah, it's untenable. Feed her some donuts. I should. A little titanium dioxide goes a long way in a kitty cat's diet. I think we've learned something today. Ladies and gentlemen, we're so glad you tuned in. intelligent machines we do this show every wednesday right after windows weekly 2 p.m pacific 5 p.m eastern that's 2100 utc you can watch us do the show live in the club twit discord of course if you're a member of the club if you're not join uh but even if you're not a member you can watch on youtube x.com facebook linkedin kick and twitch we stream on all those platforms after the fact on demand versions of the show on our website twitter.tv slash i am we do audio and video you can choose uh there is a video version on youtube there's a dedicated channel for i am great way to share clips and if you subscribe in your favorite podcast client make sure you leave us a good review so that paris can do a dramatic reading on next week's episode uh we do not have a guest for next week maybe we can get this uh i actually i think we during the course of the show i think we did lock down i guess let me make sure we did well things happen even when i'm not aware of it they're they're working all the time for you all the time they are like little agents working 24 7 trying to come up with something so good we are going to talk to ian bogost again in a month because his book the small stuff will be coming out uh and from big spin.ai we'll talk to christopher potts at the beginning of july but we do have a couple of opening or one opening i guess so do we know benito who will be here next week for intelligent machines i'm looking through my email right now i'm still trying to find somebody somebody was book it okay yeah i'm not sure if it was for next week though but i'm just not sure all right well i'm gonna i'm gonna get my man kitchen pepper can out and try to find some guests by peppering their little behinds do you like pepper do you drink do you eat a lot of pepper you don't eat pepper I don't not eat pepper.

2:39:03I put it, you know, it's one of the spices. How do you eat cottage cheese without pepper? I hate cottage cheese. Well, there you go. Or salt. We have one pepper mill by the stove, and we have one pepper mill on the table. And we have one on the table. I have a pepper mill. There's two. The distance from my stove to my table is not far. So having two pepper mills would be, yeah, I could reach. Our kitchen is probably the size of your apartment in the suburbs. That's what life is like. Yeah, that's probably true. Yeah. thank you everybody for putting up with us thank you paris for being back i missed you we're so glad uh you uh are out from under now does this mean you get a little break or do you have to immediately embark on another i am i mean i've got some stuff to take over the next week but i'm i've decided i'm going to take two weeks off so nice are you gonna travel i think so i don't know where i haven't i just decided i'm gonna take two weeks off as of yesterday so i haven't decided where but i think i'm gonna do a similar thing to i did last uh year when i ended up visiting yulia which i think i'm gonna do a one-way flight to somewhere rent a car and maybe go hiking in some national parks can i just do a road trip through some states in the u.s i hadn't been to before if anybody has any recommendations for national parks that are gorgeous and lovely and not completely swamped over the next month let me know i think you have to go somewhere where there's also a bucky's on the way i'm open to that b-u-c-e-e-s now why do we need to go to a bucky's i've never been it's a phenomenon it's an american phenomenon is it like the 7-eleven in japan oh oh no is it like you really haven't seen stories about this well i i feel like i have you get brisket you the brisket is to die brisket at bucky's oh i like brisket um uh people people People go out of their way to go to Buc-ee's.

2:40:47If you look up B-U-C-E-E-S.com. It's the one with the beaver. Yes, the beaver. Now, I don't know if we have any Buc-ee's in California. You don't. It's a southern thing. The locations are... Alabama, Colorado, Florida. You must have been to a Buc-ee's. No, I've never been. I want to go. That's what I'm telling Paris. We should all go to a Buc-ee's. When are you coming to visit us? Let's all go to Huber Heights, Ohio. You clearly hate us, Leo, because you never come to see us or your son or my son i'm currently thinking of going to glacier national park in that's good that's i just i love to see a a glacier when it's you know what's beautiful this time of year is lake victoria and bamf and uh britain up in canada yeah supposed to be very lucific northwest is very nice in the summer well she did that the last time oh you did that it was so great i didn't spend that much time I'm in Washington, honestly.

2:41:40I could do it again. It's so good. I don't know. The world's my oyster. I want to stay in, I think, the U.S., though. Maybe Canada as well could be in there. But I'm trying not to lie. You should probably go to a World Cup game in one of the fun. No. If I go to a World Cup game, I will be stuck in traffic for the next two weeks. Are you going to any more Knicks games? I'm going to a watch party tonight whenever we're done with this. All right. Get out of here. Also, look in the Discord chat. If you scroll up, a friend just sent me a video because we went to a bar on Monday for Game 3. And you can see what stage in Game 3 this photo was taken based on our reactions.

2:42:23You put this in the Discord? I did. I'll add you with it if you like. I'm not seeing it for some reason. It was at 7.54. That's our time. So do your calculation. Whatever. Yeah, do your time. I'm seeing a lot of Bucky's posts. That's why everybody had something to say about Bucky's. Oh, it's not going well. It's not going well. If you zoom in, it's rough. It's rough happening here. There came a time where my friend standing to me on the left of the photo, she's a sports reporter. She was like, and the world's largest Knicks fan for her entire life is like, I have to stand up. I think this will change the vibes.

2:42:59And so we all, it didn't. You are at least wearing an orange scarf. I am. And blue thing. you know i prepared very cute my old boss newhouse gets like second row tickets he goes forever he's been the greatest fan ever and he put up a photo of himself in the subway going to um and he looked concerned i said you look concerned boss today amazing yeah today he looked all happy well there once again i mean got to win today apparently this ref today is supposed to be somewhat more reasonable but so really it was bad officiating it was really bad i mean this last game the knicks were not phenomenal no they were not even they made some even i could tell that me a person who's had to have multiple people to me explain the fundamentals of basketball over the last couple months i could see there were problems but there was also i mean there is one thing where wimpy literally tackles brunson a nix player to the ground and they're like yeah no foul no flag yeah and a flagrant is like unnecessary touch or content which was which was clearly not flagrant by any definition do you get someone to the ground from your hands being you're not supposed to get people to the ground i think that's part of the problem that's kind of part of it.

2:44:19And then shortly thereafter, the Knicks got a flagrant because a player on the Spurs jumped up to shoot and landed on a Knicks player's foot. And they're like, well, you not moving your feet out of the way. That's a flagrant. See, this is how I know you just started watching basketball because every finals is like this. I know, but I think it's beautiful that I'm getting to witness this without generations of latent trauma. So I get to experience it fresh. No, but that's what makes it even that much sweeter for New Yorkers who have been dry for 50 years. And I think that's honestly one of the best things about all of this is I, as a full bandwagoner, I mean, bandwagoner by proxy, I just decided to start watching basketball games two months ago, not really realizing.

2:45:05I was like, I'll watch whatever New York teams are happening anywhere. And suddenly a New York team is in the finals. Everyone I've met who's been a lifelong Knicks fan that could be like go screw yourself you haven't suffered they're like no the Knicks are great I'm so happy you're here here I'll let me tell you about why Dolan sucks yeah that's a Warriors fan 10 years ago because we were dry for 40 years until we saw there was a long drought for the Warriors yeah well I don't know how we managed to prolong this show an additional 10 minutes but we keep going three hours all right thank you everybody have a wonderful evening we'll see you next time on intelligent machines go nicks go nicks 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 on tech 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.

2:46:10I 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.