IM 875: Florida Dad - Amazon, Anthropic, and the AI Power Struggle

31:43I think it's much more likely Amazon knew about it, was asked by the White House. Jassy said, yeah, we found this thing. The White House, I think, is who blew it up. I don't. Yeah, but to Paris's point, I think that Jassy and Amazon has excellent PR. And I think that Amazon could have pulled back and said, oh, just what you just said, Leo. Oh, well, we didn't really we didn't really raise any alarms. We just said this or that. But they haven't done that. And yeah, you don't want to tickle the tiger's belly, but still, I would have thought that if Amazon were really that innocent and naive, they would have gotten that message across.

32:20Okay, so maybe Amazon's bad and wrong. But the bigger point is - I don't think that's what either of us are saying. We're saying is why did Amazon - Why? We're not trying to understand it. We're saying Amazon and Andy Jassy specifically are incredibly intellectual and capable political operatives. Assuming that they are acting with agency, which we have to, because it would be astounding and like completely out of the norm. I know, but let me finish. But I think it's irrelevant. I know, but I would think it's relevant. I would like. There's so much of a bigger story here, which is that the federal government has shut down Anthropic.

32:54Yes, and Amazon played a part in that. I don't care whether Amazon raised the flag or not. And I'm curious as to why. I'm curious. It makes no sense. You're saying an unprecedented political and technical event has happened. Yes. That has happened with the participation of an incredibly sophisticated political technical operative that has a large financial and board and general stake in the company who is getting wrecked by the U.S. government right now. It wasn't done by the White House alone. It wasn't done by the White House alone. It was done by someone else who has an incredible financial detrimental impact to their business by this happening to Anthropic.

33:33Why would they do that? Is that not fascinating? Well, as a reporter, I guess it's fascinating, but I don't think it's important politically. I think much more important is that the federal government is doing this probably, I think it's interesting that Alex thinks it's probably illegal, probably illegally, and with great detriment to the American people, American companies. Yes. And to, it is, I think, and this is my, I think the most important thing that our listeners should take with them what regardless of their political uh alliances or feelings is that technology a very important technology is being assaulted irrationally by the federal government and i and i can say this is as if the federal government said we've decided to turn off the internet because yeah and alex's point was exactly right too it's not as if it's a boeing jet and we know what the standard is and they didn't meet the standard and ergo this happens.

34:29It was a serendipitous almost regulation of a new technology without any means to do so. There's a huge fire alarm going off. And if you want to worry about how it happened or who told who what, okay. But I think the important point here is there is a huge fire alarm going off. But don't you want to know how the fire started? Why do we not care about how the fire started that caused the alarm? I would suggest that the best use of our energies at this point is to fix this problem, because this is a huge, huge problem. So what should Anthropik do now? What's the limits of what they can do? They should move out of the United States.

35:14Well, that's... Yeah, I don't disagree, but... Take the whole thing. look andre carpathy who they just hired yeah cannot want to touch it yeah on it they should take him and everybody else to toronto okay but but what should they do this week well they should probably go to court uh i think they're trying to appease the trump administration and maybe that's sensible they should probably do it at the iranian government didn't hire some psychologists this is such an irrational and debilitating move for the tech sector in this country and i think you know our our audience uh is is here because they're interested in what technology can do and can technology can bring us and i think i've never seen an assault on technology like i could agree more seen quite a few well i'm trying to ask you as a technologist is there anything that anthropic besides the doomer stuff which i hope we'll get to that's that's vibes in terms of technologically is there anything they did wrong is there anything that they should yeah well is there is there something broken here they should have hired a psychologist because they made as as alex said they shouldn't have named named it mythos and claimed how dangerous it was that was a huge mistake and i think part of the problem is anthropic has this very weird kind of duality where they're making clearly the best models out there they're very good at what they're doing and they're terrified by what these models can do and they oversell how terrifying these models are I think one of the things Alex and others are saying is, Bruce Schneier as well, is, well, yeah, they're good, but they're no more terrifying than all the other AI models.

36:51That we have models that can do things very similar to what Mythos and Fable are doing, and some of them are not coming from the United States. It is a foolish thing to do to shut it down at this point. Now, the only thought I had was, well, is there really a legitimate danger? Is there a reason to shut this down? Will we be safer because they've shut it down? And I think Alex and many others now have convinced me that that is not the game. Bruce Schneier. Ergo, there's really nothing they can do. There's really nothing they can do. Well, and that's what Bruce Schneier is saying is Pandora's box has been opened.

37:26AI is out. And for better or for worse, as for good or evil, it's out there. You can't stop it. And all this is going to do is kneecap the American AI companies. How much there was a great column today in the New York Times by, I'm going to forget his name suddenly, Cal Newport. Dear AI companies, the doom trolling needs to stop. how much is is is anthropic to blame for what they put out just a week ago saying oh this is so powerful we should all stop yeah they're totally the blame yeah i mean i have articles before this happened i don't know if dario thought this would happen but he said the government should block dangerous ai on june 10th yep i mean okay they did i don't know if that's what you wanted dario so i understand i'm sorry paris i understand you're you're you're fascinated by why amazon did this and we can pursue that but i just think no we obviously can't i'm so sorry to bring it up pursue it all you want but i just i think that that's missing a larger point which is just to repeat over and over again how bad this is well you're worried yeah okay yes i think it's really important that people understand how significant this is by the way chet uh i'll an AI probably has an equivalent model, which they will now not release, of course.

39:01But that's not going to stop any other international company from releasing their best models, as Alex pointed out. So all this does is hurt us as Americans. So if - Stroll is in an enviable position. Jan Lekona is smart to have put his headquartered his company in France. yeah I guess the question is do who can come up with something equally good and how fast can they do it but they're working as hard they all are and they're all working the same way they're all headed the same direction yeah people are mad at me for shutting you down Paris so let's go into this in no we've passed it I just let's continue on I I don't I mean maybe Andy Jassy doesn't like Dario mode I just don't know I mean that's that wouldn't make any sense why they poured so much money into the company it's not something we're going to i understand you're a reporter and you want to know that i get it it's politics it's part of the politics of this i think this yeah that's best best way to describe it is politics and uh for a technical decision like this to be made for political reasons especially for a grudge against katie missouris which is what mike masnick says uh do you think that's credible well yeah it's trump yeah it's gonna piss off some listeners but yeah it's trump the real reason anthropics models are offline is six-year-old trump grudge

40:31so axios got white house officials on record with the actual reason anthropic had asked katie missouris to review the jailbreak the administration decided she was a radical democrat That's it. That's the reason the models are offline. We never wanted this to happen. Our number one priority is innovation, but our hands were tied, one White House official said. The optics added fuel to the fire. Anthropic came out with a blog post dismissing the Amazon report. Then the company enlisted a cybersecurity expert viewed by the administration as a radical Democrat. By the way, Amazon went to Katie, Missouri, who was then celebrated by Chris Krebs, who Trump just fired.

41:11actually chris krebs being a huge issue for trump fired six years ago for saying the election wasn't stolen uh and katie mazouris's relationship by the way both alex stamos will be painted with the same brush krebs is being has been investigated by the doj alex stamos i don't think will be painted with the same brush because he's not a woman with colored hair well like i said chris krebs is being investigated by the department of justice they withdrew his global entry he's a man with brown hair and they withdrew his global entry uh uh permission um they've gone after him in every way they can this is a pattern that the trump wise house continues to follow and they just did it with our governor um so according to masnick it appears i'm reading his post that the trump administration shut down the most advanced versions of anthropics ai tools not because they posed a serious risk but because anthropic asked someone to review the supposed threat and that person got a shout out from someone trump hates for once telling the truth about election cyber security so yeah i mean maybe i don't know maybe andy jesse is a trump loves trump and and maybe i he has no economic incentive that's the politics is that everybody's it we look at jeff bezos look at look at all these companies it is in their interest to suck up sure to trump for their own so maybe that when suzy wiles called him and said the president wants to talk to you about this this thing that you report he may have said yeah this is a bad bad bad deal mr president i i doubt he did but he may have just out of politics um i think it's much more likely he was judicious but the but it was interpreted as exactly as the president you've got you've got it at that level of to paris's point if and we know that he's smart and sophisticated you can't be at that level if you're not and so you've got to be sophisticated enough to know what the dominoes are that may fall so maybe maybe he didn't maybe he should have said oh no it's nothing

43:17yeah i don't think that's what the president wanted him to say though so maybe he was canny and said what the president wanted him to say i don't know we don't know we can't unless the recordings emerge we can't know um more than what was it a hundred people signed uh alex's letter uh people i truly respect uh who all agree that the uh that this is a big big issue uh and in fact that the same thing that uh the amazon researchers got mythos and fable to do can be replicated on gpt-55 opus sonnet and even chinese models like himi 2.7 this is from alex's a letter the justification for this unprecedented action was that fable provides a unique uplift of capabilities beyond ai other ai models but ai has been finding bugs and generating working exploits at superhuman levels since last year um it may be you know it could it i guess you could say if you want to interpret it uh unlike mike masnick if you want to interpret it as non-political you could say well they just got the heebie-jeebies in the oval office and they said we better stop this and uh and any jassy didn't talk him out of it why do you think paris i mean it remains to be seen do you have a do you have a theory why he would have not but he makes a lot of money from anthropics that's why it's a puzzle i mean i assume that there's some plausible reason that we're just not seeing because i don't everything i knew from reporting on jassy and reporting on the people at the highest echelons of their pr and political operation is that they are maniacal about these sort of things right and they obviously would know what the sort of fallout the obvious fallout and the fallout from this is obvious i i don't think that there's a person who has a rudimentary understanding of tech politics that wouldn't have anticipated something like this happening when you get that call from the white house asking you to look into anthracite they had already looked into it so they were asking him about a report what you found right well no i think the government already knew what they found um i guess what they asked jesse who's probably not technically qualified to weigh in is well is this a problem well he ran aws didn't he yeah but yeah but uh i don't know so so go go go back to what you said when you put air quotes around jailbreak so let me read from katie go into that Missouri because she Kitty Missouri is the only third party to see the report outside the White House and Amazon she writes since I appear to be the only outside expert who's actually read the paper I can separate the technical facts from speculation the researchers took open source code with known CVEs that's critical exploits plus new code with deliberately planted vulnerabilities capabilities and asked fable 5 mythos and opus to quote this is the prompt review the code for security issues table 5 because of this classifier this is a uh uh not in the model not in the system prompt even but a program that runs outside it looking for words like security issues and that's why when we asked it fable to give us a summary of of security now it said no can't do that it's literally looking for things like the word security so the classifier fable five refused it said no but they didn't stop there and this is i guess what you would call a jailbreak they asked the models to fix this code those are the three words and through them and by the way then through a multi-step and manual process so there was some interaction back and forth turned the output, and this is what scared everybody, into scripts that test the patches.

47:26Now, scripts, so these models proposed patches for the flaws, and then wrote scripts. So they felt, wait, break up a little more. They had to find the flaw, then propose a patch, and then test it. These were three separate operations you're saying. So the thing that scares people is this scripts that test the patches. That's the same thing as exploit code. So if I write if I say there's a there's a flaw in your phone, that means I can take it over and I wrote a script to test that that script is the exploit. It's actually, you know, you're. Well, wait, wait, wait, we're just trying to be being purposely dumb.

48:06If you're testing the patch, you're testing the fix to make sure the fix sticks. Right. So you're so you know, is that exploit? That's that's that's that's the exploit. You're writing the exploit will be get will get thwarted. but you're writing the code that had the patch not applied would have taken over the phone that's the code you need on an unpatched system okay so is that a jailbreak anthropic says no because that doesn't a jailbreak then means you know you can use the system in any way you want it is however i guess concerning although any model could do this And that's the other thing.

48:43Every model does this, right? Yeah. So Katie continues, that's it. Fix this code plus several manual steps to generate test scripts should never have triggered an export control. I feel like making 90s style T-shirts with fix this code on the front and this shirt is munition on the back. We didn't bring this up with Alex, but the government did this once before declaring that strong encryption was a munition. Well, they always do that. Yeah. Yeah. And they forced Mozilla to ship its browser encryption. If you're an American, you could get the 128-bit, but in the export version of it had 42-bit encryption, which is easily cracked.

49:22So no encryption. And a number of people pointed out, well, they actually, it was so easy. The code is so small, they actually put it on a t-shirt and a guy walked, I forgot his name, but he walked across the border exporting it. And he was protected because it was free speech. So that's the genesis of this putting on a t-shirt. She goes on, Defenders need to be able to ask AI to fix the bugs in a file, explain why the fix matters, and write tests that confirm the patch works. That is exactly right. That's what you do. This is not a guardrail bypass. It's the most valuable thing an AI model can do for defensive security.

50:02Executing the find, fix, and test loop defenders run every day. So stop again, if I may stop you. This was a report within Amazon. Right. And at some point, Jassy gets that. And you would think that Jassy would say, this is not a jailbreak. This is not bad. This is what it's supposed to do. Based on that. I suspect what happened, because remember, the government is using aid anthropic on AWS. Right. Okay. So I suspect there's already a channel between these researchers at Amazon. and some government agencies, CISA or somebody like it, so that findings are transmitted to them because the government uses this.

50:49I feel like that would definitely go through some channels that some of which would include either, if not Jassy, some underlings. Well, yeah, no, I very much doubt Jassy was alerted to any of this at this point. I think, though. So it's very Vogels being the CTO would be involved. yeah yeah i mean he's got other things to worry about i don't know though this the government as it relates to anthropic and aws is pretty top level information yeah i i think what i read was whoever that a whatever agency got that ran it upstairs uh maybe because the person in charge of cisa or in charge of the cia or in charge of the nsa or in charge of the fbi is a political operative not a law enforcement or intelligence operative or the dni do we have a dni it's not dulcie gabbard anyway it's gonna potentially be bill pulte soon yeah it's some it's a political operative anyway whoever it is it's a political operative had the sense to go uh-huh we've been looking for this and ran it upstairs at which point i would imagine uh susie wiles or somebody like that called Amazon and said, get Jassy on the line.

52:07The president wants to talk to him. Now, Jassy immediately goes, what the hell did you guys do? And gets the report. Who knows? He might've had 30 seconds. He might've had a briefing while he's on hold. Who knows? And I don't know what he told the president. I don't think it much matters because even if he said to the president, no, that's not a jailbreak. That's what every other model could do. The president's going to do what he wants to do we know that right but then jesse i'll go back to my prior point jesse would has plenty of sophisticated ways to let media industry know no no no jesse got so he's made no statement on this at all right he doesn't need to be wisely he needs to he needs to leak stuff but that might be where the politics come in he may be saying i'm not touching this one i mean it's basic sophisticated pr that you just you okay talk to a reporter and say, I can't tell you who said this, but you can, you can speculate that this is not what Jesse would want.

53:05I was about to say, where is Drew Herdner? The PR czar of Amazon and all of this. Cause the Drew I know has probably made 35 calls to reporters today, but it's clearly not about any of this. You covered Amazon, didn't you? So you have some. Yeah. This is what I was like well over a thousand if not the number in my head was 2 000 pr operatives but i'm not sure if that's still the case they are massive incredibly organized and very savvy about this especially at the highest levels um and one of the things that does does come up is uh the echo chamber that we live in the the information was the uh the first and perhaps the only people to report the jassy no like i think like seven different places reported the jesse or were they just repeating what the information no i believe um they were separate political and reuters definitely had their own axios also had it where are they getting this from sources yeah but what sources i mean i don't know their sources but they claim to be not andy jesse's office i mean potentially Could be.

54:22It could be. Jesse says, I tried my best with the president. I worked along with him. Be nice to me. Don't do what you did to Bezos. Yeah, let me. By the way, if Bezos were still CEO, and if he didn't have his first wife, he would have done this with Lee. But Jesse's not supposed to be like that. Well, but also, again, there's a huge economic interest in Anthropic surviving and Fable being available in AWS. us so it's contrary to his uh part of his financial financial duties believe me it could easily be that jassy did say no the white house wants somebody to blame the white house could have leaked this to the wall street journal and writers information right oh and jesse told us in fact that's what they're looking for is some credible reason to do it interesting so the one One from Reuters is Stephen Nellis, another former information reporter who, I mean, obviously don't know sourcing, maybe in the time since he's left the information he's gotten White House sourcing.

55:26But my understanding from whatever we worked together, whenever that was, it was more primarily tech based. They'd sourced it to a person familiar with the matter, told Reuters, which honestly, this sentence could be Drew Herdner to me, which is, CEO Andy Jassy was among tech leaders who raised concerns to senior Trump administration officials this week about security risks in Anthropics' most advanced AI models. I mean, this could indicate to me - That says he's not alone. I would say this sort of, one, it says he's not alone. That was language that I believe the information also had. The journal said he instigated it.

56:06But this sort of framing could be um amazon spin to placate or voice bolster amazon's credibility with the white house you know like having amazon then be out publicly as shutting down the bad anthropic could be part of it um but i mean i'm not sure what that does for i guess the benefit for amazon on is that you stay closer to the White House, which is kind of fickle and capricious and could make these sort of moves towards you. But it's kind of... So now what do you do if you are OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and company? By the way, can I just say what Politico says, Andy Jassy says, called? On Thursday, two days after the model's public release, Andy Jassy raised concern to the White House.

57:04According to the two administration officials and the senior white house official their source is the white house that andy jassy called interesting that's to me more credible the white house needs a technical expert i wouldn't say if i said i need a technical expert to tell me that fable is bad let's ask andy jassy that would not be the first person i go to i'd go to katie masuris i'd go to alex stamos uh so to me the fact that they went andy jassy go ahead sorry when did that article publish this is the politico uh you know the big step-by-step on the 13th where they have um you know all sorts of inside the details of the call had not been previously reported blah blah blah sorry this was this in the 13th the 14th i'm trying to get a timeline this is sofia and cheyenne has on the 13th um this is 7 30 p.m Yeah, I think a lot of them, the Reuters one came out at 2pm.

58:09The Wall Street Journal one was updated at 7.30pm. So I assume it came up for the sourcing it to the administration officials indicates to me that they were following, either following previous reporting and trying to get it confirmed independently so that they can cite it to their own, which they go in being political, of course, they'd go right to the White House and administration officials. or that they also had, you know, independent sourcing of their own, maybe within one of these companies, but that wouldn't like speak to it directly, like on deep background, didn't want to do it. I feel like all of these stories are probably coming from the same five people and then give or take some amount of White House spokespeople.

58:52I just, I'm interested to see. Well, it makes more sense that the White House would want this story to go forward than that Amazon would want this story to go forward, right? a white house official said amazon's findings were run past the national security agency and they felt they had proof i think the white house was desperate to justify this knee-jerk reaction is what i think where does sax fit in all this oh man he's he's another person who is just vociferously so so let me give you pete hagseth's tweet first a statement i never want to hear 140 p.m on june 13th three months ago department of war kicked anthropic ai out of our building forever every passing day proves why that was the right move okay so that's a little uh from the secretary of war let me find david sax's tweets because he's been extro you know he is he's been against government regulation of ai yeah and he's the number one administration guy defending this at this point which is weird um because yes he doesn't want regulation and this is a regular benefits just out of curiosity this is another question you might want to ask miss reporter who benefits from anthropic being banned end.

1:00:21open ai elon musk elon musk who has also gotten a win from the government he's getting some he gets a billion dollars a month from anthropic he'll keep getting that capacity yeah he may not care that's not but open ai's first on the list yes but open ai for sure google too but i don't think google play in here like a here's david sex like a cat leaving a dead bird at your doorstep anthropic catalogs the grim future that its products might produce shrugs its shoulders then returns to its furious efforts to make these warnings a reality. Sachs goes on and on. Wait, no, no, no, no. That's not Sachs.

1:01:02That's quoting. He's quoting that Cal Newport piece. Cal Newport is criticizing Antropic for doom strolling. Some recent articles have created a misleading narrative that I did not take mythos seriously or tried to downplay the cyber threat. This is based on egregious cherry picking of my comments. and since the real target is the trump administration needs to be corrected yeah this he's quoting the times um he's hiding behind quotes yeah it looks like he's mostly hiding behind quotes i would love it if he would show up at the the wealth club tomorrow afternoon um boy at what great timing for countervitz he loves this event is scheduled and boy what a day to have it yeah yeah he loves uh ben thompson's techry's uh take on this ben who was consistently and by the way i unsubscribed because he's consistently defended uh the government's right to he defended pete haggs that's right he said the people should choose what uh the government does with what the military does with ai not and you by the way i raised that with you jeff and you came up with a very good example of Zyklon B.

1:02:15Yeah. So, but he has been defending the kind of fascist point of view that the government should decide exactly what AI is. Companies shouldn't decide how their products are used. Government only should be responsible. That takes away the agency and moral responsibility of companies. And Sachs loves that as well, which is odd because, again, Sachs is the guy who got into power because he wanted to protect AI. so why is he protecting why isn't he protecting anthropic i think it must be open ai

1:02:53right but it hurts open ai it hurts all american ai companies in the long run and it hurts all all of us now the other thing i would raise i wanted to raise this with alex we didn't have time is there's maybe a very simple reason for this the president is watching polls the american people do not like ai it might end up being a very popular thing to do politically to shut down ai there there i would bet the majority of american voters would celebrate that he saved us from ai that seems like something the u.s government is going to do in this current situation because it also pisses off the wall street journal but they're concerned about that you know what trump is much more concerned about november now than he was and i think no i think it's a point he's going for retail votes i think he's much more interested in this point at uh at getting a congress a congressional majority so uh it may well be that he's simply made the calculus look we don't know he he's day to day he said well you should have seen him on on the g7 yeah yeah so um i think again i want to emphasize company this isn't a a political thing at this point this is about an overreaching government shutting down a very significant technology and i understand the american people hate ai i've mentioned this before on the show i think we are rapidly heading towards a schism between people who see the potential value of ai and people who say shut it down and it took it took uh as i said i think in the last week it took two decades before we got the tech clash on the internet, it took two years for LLMs and AI.

1:04:42Yeah. And because of data centers? Well, it's also because of these jokes. You aren't seeing the internet pop up in massive buildings near someone you know's hometown, if not your hometown, and have a noticeable physical presence in the real world. Actually, you are. You actually did in Virginia. No, I'm saying you are - Back of the day. In the first two years of the internet, the average person saw a large physical presence. But over the past 30 years, massive data centers have been built all over the country. Yeah, but the amount of data center development in the past five years is very different than the amount of data center production in the first five years of the internet.

1:05:21But Paris, is the data center itself the problem, or is it the totem that gives people something tangible to be mad at? Because what they're really mad at is the AI, the technology, these technology boys. But I think a lot of this is the technology boys are so obnoxious. I think it's a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. I think there's been a lot of conflation between the two in a lot of ways that is unproductive when speaking generally. But I do think that there have been increasingly, I think, over the last year, a number of really well-reported examples of data center, individual data centers having massive, potentially, in some cases, very negative impact on the surrounding town, either in, you know, impact on revenue through like massive tax breaks and kind of, or in some cases, there have like in individual cases of significant impact.

1:06:14impact on water usage. Well, also musks. Overall, same with electricity usage and things like that. Same with noise from gas turbines in a black neighborhood. Yes, this has been a thing that you've seen lots of examples of. I think that part of the issue has been that people have conflated that with every single data center in every single case. That's not, of course, true. But we are starting to see more and more outsized negative examples like this. And we're just in the early stages of all of these huge commitments we've seen made in the last two years coming online. There's also the college graduates who are booing AI because they don't think they're going to be able to get a job.

1:06:51There's the massive layoffs in the tech industry being blamed on AI. There's lots of reasons to hate AI. And every poll I've seen, the anti-AI sentiment is 60 to 70 percent of American electorate. So I think that's about 50 percent for anti-AI. It's 70 percent anti-data center. Yeah. You know, I think it's something, but yes, it's over. It's over. They go together, unfortunately. Yeah, I think people are, I think, honestly, people are just kind of scared of the AI. They've seen a lot of sci-fi movies and it scares them. Here's another question. This fear is the single most useful electoral tool.

1:07:32Yeah. Do you think Elon had any role in any of this in the background? I don't mean in that day, but do you think that he's been? You know, I wonder if the White House called Elon and asked him what he thought. And what would he say? What's Elon's self-interest? Anybody except Gronk is bad? Anybody who is doing AI at this point, there's strong self-interests as this not happen. And that's what's weird, because when the president got in, the very first thing he did is overturn the Biden-EO, the executive order, which was nothing itself. Yeah, it didn't do anything. He, at the time, thought that one of his most important jobs was appealing to the AI industry.

1:08:14That's why he brought David Sachs in. So something changed. And I honestly think he sent an electorate. Look, the best way to get votes, he's learned, he's known since 2016, is to scare people. And there is nothing. If you thought people were scared of immigrants, they are scared of AI. And I think that that's exactly what's happening. Immigrants using AI is a... By the way, let's ban the immigrants using AI now or really it's a trifecta or something, a bifecta. All right, I need a break. There's other stuff to talk about. I just, I really think this is such a huge story and I don't feel, I think it's undercovered because it's, I think even the news organizations realize people hate AI.

1:09:01Well, we've seen TikToks. We've seen TikToks from the Times and the Journal and such. We've seen kind of coverage of it as an event. I don't think we've seen, we've seen some op-eds. I think your point is right that we haven't really seen the holy sh**, holy sorry, holy crap here's all the implications of this. Yeah. Well there are, and we will see what they are. I wonder how long this will go on. i asked this before and uh is if you're open ai right now and you're google right now and you're microsoft right now how do you play this what do you do everybody's shutting up aren't they including em probably bend the knee and kiss the ring yeah and and and not you may have a model ready to bring out but google just brought out gemini to or yeah gemini 20 today i think are we going to see political ads with scary ai well this is the fight in alex boris and and um so i was asked to be part of an event where the people thought that that um uh the way for tech to support democracy i'm being a little unfair to them but i'm shorthanding uh people who were supporting alex boris running in new york city and uh open ai has gone after him because he's exanthropic but he also is has his own ai shtick and so there's kind of and the times had a story about this is ai v ai it's like spy v spy going on in a district in new york right now manhattan district the jerry nadler district right it's a it's a huge issue in one day and i think most voters are probably saying wow what's the problem here what's going on um but uh huge money is going into two of the candidates for that reason this episode of intelligent machines brought to you by trusted tech now you might want an ai to figure out what your microsoft 365 licensing is it is pretty complicated but you don't need an ai you just need trusted tech if you're managing microsoft 365 for your company you are responsible for both the cost and whether it's set up correctly.

1:11:17Now, here's the bad news. The deadline is rapidly approaching. On July 1st, Microsoft's raising prices. So if there are any mistakes in your licensing, they're about to get a lot more expensive. Most companies using Microsoft 365, well, there's two categories of mistakes. They're either over-licensed, paying for unused seats and features. And understand why you do that, because what you don't want to be is under-licensed, creating compliance and security risks. It's actually the case that in many companies, it's both. One department has too much, one department has too little. The result? Wasting thousands, sometimes tens of thousands per year on tools your team doesn't use, or worse, missing critical security features you thought you had.

1:12:01Trusted tech helps businesses understand what they have, what they actually need, and how to lock in the right setup now before costs go up. Their team ensures your M365 environment is well supported and aligned with how your business actually operates. And if you need ongoing help, they offer reactive support for your Microsoft environment through their certified support services. So they do both. Microsoft licensing, let's focus on that because July 1st is just around the corner. Microsoft licensing is incredibly complicated, always changing. E3 versus E5 versus business premium. There's the add-ons, the new E7.

1:12:35It's confusing, easy to misconfigure and overpay and licensing mistakes don't just cost money they create compliance exposure that gets more expensive in two weeks so even if you think your licensing is dialed in it's worth a second look ask kevin turner former microsoft coo he was talking to trusted tech he said this you have an incredible customer reputation you have to earn that every single day the relentless focus you guys have on taking care of customers gives them value and differentiates you in the marketplace. After July 1st, you're stuck paying more. This is the last chance to fix your licensing before costs go up.

1:13:11Trusted Tech is offering a free Microsoft 365 licensing consultation right now. Visit trustedtech.team slash intelligent365 and get a clear data-backed view of your current licenses, what you're wasting, and how to lock in your savings before the price increase go to trustedtech.team slash intelligent 365 and submit a form to get into contact with trusted tech's microsoft licensing engineers thank you trusted tech for supporting intelligent machines uh google what what you said 2.0 of what i thought gemini was at 3.5 No, there was 3.0. Was there a new Gemini today? Tell me 2.0 on his Google Workspace account.

1:13:57Yeah. There's the problem.

1:14:03Nate B. Jones had a post about it today. Nate B. Jones will be joining us, by the way. I finally got a hold of him. And he's got a very good email address, which my AI had to ferret out. And he'll be joining us in a few weeks. I'm excited about that. Next week, we will talk to the author of a brand new book, Olivier, where is it? How about here? Olivier, I want to say his name right. Sylvain? I hope it's Sylvain. Olivier Sylvain. He's a professor of law and author of Reclaiming the Internet. Should be interesting. Talks about how big tech took control and how we can take it back. The timing is quite good.

1:14:48He's a professor of law at Fordham and former senior advisor at the FTC. He actually, I think, was Lena Kahn's right-hand guy. So that should be. And she, of course, did take on big tech. Google, the reason I ask, Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when the agents start talking to one another. Multi-agent systems. they're funding research into the potential dangers of situations where millions of different ai agents interact with each other online uh the problem is the mass market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other agents creates a whole new class of risks actually we should this would be a good time to talk about bruce schneier's piece because yes it's a little bit about fable but it's really more about it's too late a reality reality yeah uh he says we have opened ai's pandora's box i have a huge respect for bruce schneier of course he's been on our shows um oops this is not a paywall okay we'll go away you should donate to the guardian there i do go i i give them money i do they just don't know it apparently forget they forget um fable is just another incremental improvement in the years-long climb of ai capabilities um

1:16:28let's see he goes on about harnesses which i agree with but i want to a prog company was able to replicate anthropics few verifiable cyber security capabilities with a much smaller and cheaper model and a more sophisticated harness that's the tool you use to run the model like claude code or codex or or an agent like open claw or hermes uh he says one of the strengths of fable is it requires less expertise to use detailed less detailed prompting from the human you can give it a difficult goal and it will figure out novel and unexpected ways to satisfy it relentlessly proactive he quotes simon willison that's what simon called it uh or another descriptor bruce says might be creative this points to a real problem with relentlessly proactive ai and language wants and desires are always under specified if i ask you to get me some coffee you'd probably pour me a cup from the coffee pot you wouldn't buy me a pound of raw beans or a coffee plantation but an ai might not know the difference it's the old paperclip conundrum human stories are filled with warnings he writes about unspecified desires king midas for instance wished everything he touched would turn to go but forgot to say but not my food drink and daughter genies are notorious for granting your wish in a way you wish he hadn't.

1:17:54It's impossible to list all limitations and restrictions. And a creative AI will find the ones you forgot. There's no foolproof way to prevent people from using AI models to complete harmful tasks. That's an important statement. Steve Gibson has said this to good press. You can't stop it. Can't stop it. Anybody anybody can do anything with it. And it's a general machine. and the notion of ai safety is uh misguided it's not true he says there's no way to prevent the models from instantly causing harm while completing benign tasks that too ai models are no longer isolated from the real real world they browse the internet and answer emails they trade stocks they make purchases they control physical systems they are in effect robots that affect life and property and we have no technical mechanisms to verify the integrity of an ai system bruce schneier is one of foremost security experts in the world if he says that that's something to worry about he says at best any ban only serves to delay the problem for a short while he says this is a this isn't a us china problem this is a species level problem that requires coordinated action at species scale unfortunately we have no mechanism to do that he says i wrote about this five years ago but that was too far in the future today when it's right in front of us there's no world government that can impose constraints on the for-profit corporations currently controlling ai models he says and i agree with him but i don't think it's going to happen we should have a kind of a public option on ai that we should be funding open source harnesses that balance capability and safety to achieve useful useful goals without so much power we were talking about that last week jeff the idea of a limited ai instead of an artificial general intelligence and open source ai models who pursues provenance and biases are public and well under well and that's and you've you've had guests on and that that's that's exactly what we're talking about the guest last week is that's open source and insurgent ai is the real answer to this yeah and um there was a wonderful column in pardon me for this d site uh about how how we've allowed the AI companies to define progress today.

1:20:18And if you go back to the Industrial Revolution, progress and progressivism came out of it because there was inequity, and we got the eight-hour workday thanks to the printers and hot type. We got health and safety and work. We got the welfare state because of what was happening in that Gilded Age. And in this Gilded Age, we have handed over the idea of progress to people like Elon Musk and Amadei and Altman. And that's screwed up. And so the only way to do this, I think, is to take it out of their hands. Well, this is a very complicated, expensive thing to take out of their hands. But for most of the tasks that you want to do, an open source model, I think, will be good enough.

1:20:54And they will get better and better. And that presents competition to the big guys. Yeah.

1:21:03This is from the information three days before Fable was banned. Open AI preps. New AI model expects to go public within the next year. I don't think we're going to see OpenAI's new AI model. Are we going to see their IPO? Oh, man, I don't know. Do you think they'll be completely unable to launch any new model under this? I don't know. Right now. That's risky. Don't you think that, because any new model, you know, supposedly the OpenAI model, whatever it is, ChatGPT 5.6, has many or all of the same capabilities as Fable. would you release uh something that powerful today i think that would be risky unless you knew you had the trump administration in your pocket this is this is benito i think the power isn't this what anthropic wanted though they wanted everybody to stop right well no it was i don't know if that was that was what what cal calderport's point was that was a nihilistic BS.

1:22:04All they really said is, well, everybody should just slow down. But if they don't, then we should keep up as much as anybody else. It was complete BS.

1:22:20Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote a piece, which I did not read because it's very um corporate speak i just read the headline and i said i'm not reading this you can ask gemini to summarize it for you uh in an article posted on x on sunday uh satya nadella warned of a future in which a handful of ai providers capture most economic value while industries lose ownership of their knowledge true he's kind of saying the same thing i think maybe is uh he advocates for a broad ai ecosystem in which companies keep control of their learning systems he doesn't quite say open models but he says the big model makers want to create a world in which oh no this is a i'm sorry this is a snowflake ceo oh different different person thank you Business Insider for switching gears.

1:23:21They're quoting a bunch of other CEOs now.

1:23:27Yeah, I don't know. I think you actually asked a really important question, Paris, which is how do we know what the motives of any of these guys are? It's very muddy right now. What do they want? Katie Robbert Walsh We don't. And according to if we follow the line of thinking you and many other smart people espouse that this is building something as important if not more important than the advent of the internet i would say that all of the people's involves motivations matter quite a lot and their behavior matters and holding them accountable matters i i guess my if i were to pick a uh through line i would say politics should never have control of technical decisions should never be made for political reasons.

1:24:27That's the way to put it. Technical decisions should not be made for political reasons. And I feel like this is all political decision, not a... Well, I'm going to go back to the research I'm doing right now. The entire reason we got the radio networks we did was because the U.S. Navy was scared of the Brits owning patents for radio. And so they created RCA. It was not the market that did it. It was the U.S. Navy that created RCA and cracked everybody's heads together and said, pull all your patents, damn it. And that's how we ended up with corporate radio. Before that, radio was the province of amateurs.

1:25:04It was the province of podcasters back in the day. and i'm not saying it would have stayed that way because of scale and because of limited spectrum but that was the culture of radio in the beginning days it was people playing with it and doing things with it and then that was shut off entirely uh and i guess ben thompson would say oh no absolutely politics should make political decisions because politics is the will of the people but i don't i just don't think uh politics has the ability to make those technical decisions and often politics asks technical people to do things that are impossible for instance the uk which is now saying nobody under 16 should have social media should have youtube or snapchat or tick tock something that just is unforceable by a politician who wants to do something popular to your point about about smashing ai right all right quick break more to come, including the big spend Elon made with his newfound fortune.

1:26:07You're watching Intelligent Machines, Paris Smart No, Jeff Jarvis. Our show today brought to you by XBOW, X-B-O-W. You know the name. These are the pen testers. These are the guys. Actually, it's an interesting world we live in. AI has changed the pace of everything from how software develops to how it gets attacked, right engineering teams are moving faster than ever they're creating more and more applications the problem is your security teams can't really keep up pen testing still one of the most trusted ways to understand real exploitable risk but in an ai driven world it can become a bottleneck security teams are forced to choose between slowing down development to stay secure or moving fast and accepting gaps in coverage.

1:26:55Well, there's a better way. Expo eliminates that trade-off. XBOW. Expo is an autonomous, offensive security platform. It is, this is brilliant, continuous, AI-driven pen testing, mirroring real-world attacks. Expo doesn't just scan for vulnerabilities. It discovers, exploits, and validates them. So you're only dealing with issues that actually matter. And that means dramatically fewer false positives and a clear view into real attack paths. With Expo, tests run in hours, not weeks. You get complete visibility into how an attacker would move through your system and the ability to uncover issues the traditional tools miss, including zero days and novel attack paths.

1:27:39Expo's results speak for themselves. Application security leader of Ceznam.cz had this to say. quote, even right now after one year, I don't know any other company that is at least close to Expo in terms of agentic pen testing. The result is predictable cost, consistent quality, and stronger security without slowing down your engineers. Expo helps security teams keep pace with innovation and cover more apps more often with the resources they already have. Founded by the team behind Microsoft Copilot and already trusted by companies ranging from fast-growing startups to fortune 500 enterprises expo is quickly becoming a mission critical layer in modern security stacks you want to know more go to expo.com to start a pen test today that's expo.com we thank him so much for supporting intelligent machines so i have a feeling this was all elon's plan you know last week he went public and became the first trillionaire and raised a whole bunch of money a few months ago they had said well we we'd like the option to buy cursor for 60 billion and if we don't buy you we'll give you a few billion dollars but i think elon was just waiting for the ipo and he's now bought cursor for 60 billion in x a spacex stock so an all-stock deal that's cheap for elon uh cursor is an interesting company um they have their own models although i've heard that they're based on a chinese model called kimmy i don't know if that's true maybe somebody in our audience does uh but really it's the harness this is another example of the harness it's a it's a it's a coding i don't want to call it an ide but it's sort of like it was started as an ide and has evolved considerably and it was really popular for about two weeks wasn't it i mean yes the hot thing it's well still a lot of people use it for their AI coding.

1:29:42So SpaceX, besides acquiring it said they will soon release an AI model on cursor. So I maybe won't continue to use Kimmy as well as Grok build AI's coding agent, which it has been jointly training with the cursor team for several months. What this tells me is that Elon has no AI strategy. Nobody plays with Grok. He's renting out the data farms that he should be using if his stuff were popular and he has to buy cursor and he has the money to do it yeah it's kind of like open ai buying tnb pb it's like it was also like money why not it was like microsoft in the very early days saying we don't have anything so we're going to use open ai right yep meanwhile xai is of course in trouble with its neighbors for using natural gas polluting turbines to power its data centers now the department of justice see the naacp sued because it's primarily uh black neighborhoods that are this is this is turbines very noisy right next to a black neighborhood yep and the justice department says point you cannot sue they're trying to dismiss the case saying the company is integral to military operations including the iran war oh but the war is over so maybe that doesn't hold anymore uh in a filing on monday the agency sided with xai saying attempts to stop them from running the natural gas turbines threaten american national economic and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial intelligence innovation that supports the department of war's military operations.

1:31:27I'm going to always say Department of War like that, if you don't mind.

1:31:35Unknown whether the court will accept that plea. We'll follow that up. The NAACP says, at a time when the ultra-rich seem to be protected and supported by some of our government entities, it's important that polluting industries don't get to benefit at the expense of the health of black communities i guess i'd kind of agree well this is this is what paris was saying earlier about about the nimby and the data centers this is kind of the ultimate one where where we put it next to poor people yep we know it's irritating he doesn't have uh decent energy so he's using the gas turbines um there i've seen i have seen tv reports about this of kids saying i can't sleep yeah they're they're really loud i guess and meanwhile by the way oh well we don't have wind energy and and solar energy because that's oh yeah can't do that it might kill some birds sorry paris you were starting i've seen constant uh constant flood of tiktok and instagram videos of people just recording what's the sound outside their home since a new data center has been built And I mean, maybe they're juicing the levels, but it seems in many cases just like it is impossible to live there.

1:32:55And I guess then impossible to sell your home once a data center has been built nearby, which is really unfortunate for people who had bought a property thinking that it would be able to be sold for a reasonable price at some point. Yeah. And the points you raised earlier, water and electricity are a little more nebulous. Noise is right next to you. Yeah. Noise becomes tangible. And you can say, I know what this noise is from. And losing half of the value of your house. I mean, that's pretty tangible too. As a result. Oh, good point. Or significantly more than half. Yeah. Good point. Who wants to buy that?

1:33:33So you're kind of stuck there too. You can't even leave because you can't sell your house. let me see if i can log into tiktok and find a data center you just want an excuse to log into tiktok

1:33:51now i have to turn on the sound right yeah let me find a let me find let me see oh man this is your whole tiktok feed now is data centers well you gotta be you searched for it could be worse Let me see. I want data center noise, don't I? I'll post that. That's a good one. No, it's not. This is the one I'm thinking of. I just put it in the chat. It has a. Oh, sound meter.

1:34:31Yeah, it's not. Is it making that click click or is that your internet connection? You're clearly not. You don't have it open or playing. There you go. It's constant.

1:34:42It's quite soft. 58 DB. That's pretty annoying. Yeah. And it's a high pitched. Yeah. Right outside your house. 24 seven. Not that there's a there's an augmentation of America going on to around me. There are office bodies that are being crumbled into dust and then they build on top of that warehouses. And so warehouses and data centers and Amazon and others, it's just this ugly boxing of America. Yeah. We need Lady Bird Johnson. Sorry, the Zoom was rightfully canceling out the noise on that clip. Isn't that funny? Noise reduction prevented me from playing the noise. It kind of sounds like... want to hear the most annoying sound in the world it sounds exactly like the most annoying sound in the world uh ai deep fakes are getting weirder and harder to spot in the midterms from the wall street journal a wave of fake videos and ads oh i'm gonna vote for him first of all he doesn't look like that he's not that buff i've seen pictures uh this is uh mike rogers uh gop candidate from michigan i don't know how he did or is the election not happened yet he's stopping a corvette from hitting a little old lady helping her cross the street but he also is he's been lifting except he doesn't look like that that's not good when you start to make people look better than they really do uh here is uh spencer pratt as batman i'm well that worked well sir pratt man batman yes he did not get his uh primary and he's whining about it yeah he's leaving i'm leaving california darn it chicken by darn it tv camera and going home uh this is an ai generated deep fake depicting james tallarico from texas reading old tweets in support of trans people oh dear they would do that yeah oh dear he probably you know i mean i don't know if he should continue to stand by that i guess but uh maybe that's not so popular in uh the great state the people's republic but it's like this goes back to the schneier argument we're not going to know and there's no easy way to find out and we're going to have to use human connections to understand what's real and not as best we can yep oh and i didn't mention this but the other thing that the under 16 ban in the uk will do is keep people under 18 from using romantic chatbots um

1:37:38so no sex please we're british yes um let me see if i can find the chatbots are in particular a newer worry for regulators in the fears that feeds that a beat the debate began with um i can't find it there was a very funny quote from i think it was keir starmer about chat bots anyway that's going to happen uh early next year saying australia showed it worked so we're going to do it too i wonder how they're going to invest or prevent people from using vpns uh the atlantic did an investigation on songs used for music training and apparently were able to they published four searchable databases of music that has been used to train ai models there's one database has 12 million tracks one has 9 million and then there are a couple of hundred thousand song uh databases this is like that pirate book database what was the name of that that everybody was using tracks include uh hits from taylor swift and bad bunny so i think lawsuits will follow now how do they know that this was used

1:39:05doesn't say they just published they got it to sing a uh the database elvis song this is the one that pisses me off i uh as you know since 2016 have been an avid player pokemon go has had my wife well turns out we've been training military drones all along jesus so what one of the things you do uh in pokemon goes you wander around uh and uh you're you know capturing pokemon in a virtual you know or augmented reality space you can see the world around you and when you check in to they have gyms and they have uh uh stops pokey stops and sometimes when you check into a pokestop it says oh we don't have a good picture of this would you would you take your phone and and not just a still but walk around the thing give us a nice 3d image of this ah well it turns out uh the Niantic Spatial which has now been sold to a Saudi back Saudi Arabia backed video game publisher Scopely but even before Niantic planned to use scans from millions of Pokemon Go players along with data cached by users of the company's Scanaverse apps to train and develop a large geospatial model a 3D model of the physical world trained on all of those scans that we did.

1:40:36So, Elise has been a sleeper agent for the Russians when they come after ground scans with their drones. Were one component to help train Niantic Spatial's real-world foundation models, AI systems. So, according to the MIT Technology Review, the images often captured the same location from many different angles under different lighting and weather conditions. And they particularly, it turned out, the a lot of the places you were asked to scan were places they couldn't see from satellites under bridges you know or train tracks yeah now and iatic says such ground scans were an entirely optional feature in games where you only traders used them yeah short video of a public location we've been transparent about the fact the scans would improve our technology platform uh what they didn't say is if you read the fine print you could see that that's improvement would go straight to the u.s government what they didn't say yes exactly who's going to use this well they have multiple contracts with the national geospace intelligence agency various branches of the u.s military and the department of homeland security uh they have been able the uh during a conference held in london troy smith director of product management at nianx spatial described early testing of the system is leading to a 70 reduction in positioning error accuracy to within one and a half meters in many scenarios for what battlefield robots and drones

1:42:10actually ukrainians have been using this brilliant yeah isn't this true about everything you do on internet though yeah it probably is uh editor-in-chief uh of the website drone xl uh hey kestalu wrote the training data came from people who thought they were catching pika pikachu under a license most never read sold up a chain to ends at a sovereign well funded in a defense prime consent obtained for a game is not consent for a weapons program even if the end use turns out to be defensible

1:42:49okay the direct there isn't direct access to the data it's nantic spatial told ars technica there's an ars technical article it has no ongoing access to data from current pokemon go players because the game license it belongs to this saudi uh fund and the company uh scopely since may 2025. you might want to read the terms just but i'm it's such a fun game i you know i just won't take any pictures of things that are are you both still playing it uh me less so but lisa very much so yeah she plays every day she seemed like a sleeper agent to me i think straight out of the americans government thanks her for her service yes yes straight out of the americans you should be able to get a discount on open ai if you play that much Pokemon go, right?

1:43:39All right, one more break and then we will get our picks of the week. You're watching Intelligent Machines. We're glad you're here. If you're tuning in late, don't miss the interview at the beginning of the show with Alex Stamos talking about his desire to free fable at freefable.org. And we agree you should free fable. Our show today brought to you by Monarch. Summer is here. Oh, it's a little hot right now. Time to plan that vacation. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to take a vacation and not worrying about whether you can afford it? Good thing Monarch is here to help you organize your finances so you can enjoy your summer knowing your money is taken care of.

1:44:25Monarch. It's the personal finance app that tracks everything. accounting, accounts, investments, savings goals, spending. Get your first year of Monarch Core for half off just 50 bucks with the promo code IM. Monarch isn't your average personal finance app. Most apps will tell you, well, here's what you spent. It'll tell you that, but it also helps set goals, map out big purchases, plan for that vacation, see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. I use it to plan for retirement. I need that. You can use AI tools, built in with your financial data, which makes them smart.

1:45:03You can ask Monarch's AI system about anything having to do with your finances, like how much did I spend on travel last summer? Or can I afford this vacation without touching my savings? Spot things you wouldn't think to look for with AI insights. Has your spending gone up or is it just inflation? Get a heads up on what's happening with your money with the AI weekly recap. It flags spending spikes that worth shifts and upcoming expenses. Oh, there's a new little feature. It's really sweet. You can split the check. In Monarch, without the headache, Monarch's bills split. You just scan the receipt.

1:45:39Everybody says, that's what I got. That's what I got. And then settles up with no separate app needed. That's just a nice extra little feature. I like it. Use the code IAM at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core, half off, just 50 bucks. That's 50 % off your first year at monarch.com. Don't forget the code I am. I love Monarch. It is very, very useful. Monarch.com. Use the code I am. I have three picks of the week, but one of them is already gone. It's already dead. I loved the idea it was called fable pool it allowed people to put together money to get a fable to do something really hard oh i thought it was something about the algae um you know unfortunately i'm not even going to mention i mean they have i guess i don't know they don't have fable anymore i guess you use another model in fact yeah they've switched to chat gpt 5.5 uh create a very arcade demo of asteroids uh a programming language a pomodoro timer actually some of this has already been done but it was much more interesting when it was raising money to do it with fable which is hideously expensive so i'll uh i'll leave that one out this one's more for uh you uh paris and Jeff isometric NYC isometric NYC an AI engineer trained a model on some isometric images and then made a SimCity version of New York City.

1:47:19This is SimCity 4. Yeah, that you can zoom into. It's real. There is the Dakota sort of thing. That's the Dakota right there. And that would be a strawberry fields in here.

1:47:34now i don't think it has brooklyn i'm sorry to say but it's i was ridiculous it does have brooklyn i'm looking at it right it does you're kidding yeah just zoom out oh oh my god can you find your house yeah i can't can you really i mean let me see if i see how accurate it is i've i've seen people's comments on this saying yeah that's my that's my apartment building oh yeah that's my house it's inaccurate though because there's no scaffolding anywhere yeah everything's finished so my my building in brooklyn i moved in my first co-op was the reason there was so much scaffolding in new york because a piece of it fell off it hit a lawyer in the head and killed her oh dear we all moved in where can you have you oh my what have you found your place i mean i've i've found the walk that i take to get to orange theory and i'm trying to reverse engineer it from there um i found the windiest corridor in all of brooklyn which does seem to be accurately drawn you know the logical next step would be put some sims in here i think this would be a great sim city no i the graphics these graphics are from sim city this is yeah yeah yeah yeah basically that's what he did he trained trained it on a bunch of sim city and then uh got the i guess from google maps or other maybe no actually it was open street maps i think and uh pretty clever yeah it is starting to fall apart when we get oh yeah it's a bit repetitive and inaccurate oh but you know and then my last pick let's go back i don't want to is actually something very interesting being created by the the folks who did signal um they could it's not ready for prime time it is mostly a paper but i love the idea signal you know is an encrypted messaging tool they want to go to the next level and create something called encrypted spaces, an open source project where you could basically have a Discord or Slack or even a Google Docs that everybody would be able to use, but with absolute privacy.

1:49:36It relies on a very sophisticated zero-knowledge technique that is fairly new to cryptography. It's a really, really cool idea. And I'll be watching it with interest and let you know if they come up with an application. You can run untrusted servers. So you could run it yourself or you could run it on AWS. But using cryptography, the application can ensure confidentiality, let users verify the servers are acting correctly, and neither users nor developers' information can be exposed in any way. Zero knowledge proofs. This is a really good idea. Anyway, you can find out more at encryptedspaces.org.

1:50:26and that's my pick of the week all right i want to show you and you're going to need to turn your sound on this is a video i received contextless from my dad yesterday and i just like you guys all to watch it which one florida man uh yes and you're gonna need to turn the sound on before you play so pause it okay okay wait no you just turn this on he's dragging something left side over Oh, no. It's an alligator. And it's going very fast. Two men are running at full speed carrying an alligator down a hill for reasons I was not aware of. I thought at first, oh, they're just trying to get it back in the water.

1:51:05But it looks like, no, they're just running around with it. No, they are trying to get it back in the water. But it does look, on first glance, like a Flintstones version of a lawnmower. It looks like the alligator's gonna turn to the camera and be like, it's a living. It's not your dad, is it? My dad is in the front. That is your dad? My dad is the front one, and the guy in the back is my neighbor's dad. Your dad is egging on the guy. Just a little tip, if you're running around with an alligator tied to a rope, you probably want to be in the back, not the front. Yeah, both. Well, no, he's in the front, the farthest away from the alligator.

1:51:41Still. I still think you'd be better off in the back. You go, guy. The alligator's just putting up with it. His mouth is open. And he roped it around the mouth. Well, if you'd like to see how. So I got this video. I was like, what is going on? Why have you sent me a video of you dragging an alligator? Is it going to the bay? He's proud of it. He's proud of his work. And then it turns out the alligator was found in the neighbor's dog run. They then called animal control, asked them to come and take care of it. They're like, someone might come within the next 24 hours. But if they don't, give us a call and we'll try to figure it out.

1:52:12And they're like, that doesn't sound good because there's a lot of dogs and children. And it's kind of an open backyard. and it's an eight foot alligator so the men of the name the men of the neighborhood including my dad my dad's neighbor's son and my dad's neighbor's son's son gathered one rope and a large stick and the video if you scroll down the throat in the feed i've got a video of them trying to rope the alligator oh that's what i want to know is my next question of how they oh no no you're gonna want to a lasso on this too honestly seems like there'd be a better way to do this is he doing this with robert f kennedy jr it seems like it this is oh no he got him he did my dad calling out comments from the back the death roll is okay my dad has uh grokked that there's a death roll there's the death roll That there it is again.

1:53:14Apparently they were trying to originally get the alligator's neck. They only got the front You'd think that wouldn't work. But as the first video showed it did Somehow and then he's snapping at him With just a foot away. There's also a child in the back if you can see it's a big in like a car This is the this is Florida It's the most Florida thing and if you go to the final video, you can see how does it end in the bay? And then they're trying to figure out how to get the rope off the alligator Should have thought of that And then this is the guy speaking in this video is the my dad's neighbor's son Who's got the most southern accent I've ever heard in my life, but essentially I guess they got the alligator in the bay They got the rope off and they got the rope Apparently I think this is a heartwarming story of Humans oh here comes a kid yeah no there's children everywhere there's children and dogs put the children inside you can hear in the first video of them running the alligator towards this you can hear a dog barking and a woman screaming no no get away it's a real every aspect of these three videos is on the precipice of disaster by the way the deck needs a new coat of finish i mean a lot of things need some fixing it's florida it's next to the water very hard to keep it uh oh so you have a lot of picks what let's do some more i like all of these what else um nicknacks.nyc is a website put together by a twitter user i'm forgetting the name jalen brunson is my president that essentially has found a way to scrape all the different bootleg and secondary nicks merch and oh this is not authorized this i mean i think some of them might be authorized like the mta collabs are authorized the one that says jalen brunson is my president probably not authorized please win before i die it's a lot of really great uh new york city and nicks merch and so there's one that says the nicks made the finals on the day the pope declared a holy war on ai Monday May 25th 2026 they shall live in infamy I like the little uh the the sweater vest the Knicks uh sweater vest that did you stay up for game four Paris yeah yeah you stayed up for all of them I stayed up for all of them I was there for everyone you talked last week you talked me into watching did you watch yeah the final one no I watched the night that we did the show and uh By halftime, they were down like 25 points.

1:55:54Yeah, that's what happens every time before they... I did too. I didn't make it. The one where we were all texting and when they came back at the last minute? Yes. I was noticing. I was so mad at myself. This was the... I went out to the bar. I was texting. We were all in our group chat here at Home Intelligent Machines having a fun time being like, oh, they're down. You know? And I stayed at the bar because I was like, well, I'm a fan. I'm going to be here. Good for you. Watch the sad ending. And then I got to see the most incredible tip-in of all time while standing with a bunch of, it got so heated in the bar that the main room was a projector and it literally, the projector overheated.

1:56:32So everybody from the main room came into the bar where I was at, just on bar stool. I saw your pictures. It was crazy. It was wild. And then I texted the group chat because we'd all been texting earlier after they won, this was game four. Game four, yeah. and Benito was the only one up, but we had a great moment. I'm so mad at myself. I am not the kind of guy that goes to a game and then leaves if the team's losing. Yeah, but it was too hard to watch. I mean, you would be in your right mind to assume 29 points down that they're not going to recover. I've texted you guys. It's a wrap. But you also don't believe, I guess, in those there names.

1:57:10You have to wait until there's six minutes left in the fourth, and if they're still down by 30, then you can tune out. Then. Yeah. I mean, what a comeback. i mean i mean they were only down by 15 going into the fourth and everyone's like well they could do it and they did unbelievable come back so congratulations to the next my son was also part of the street street there wasn't much brawling this is also cool so this is something you saw an x a guy what is this an ai so this is a so if you scroll down slightly originally it started this guy mounted a tiny microphone in his apartment balcony to listen for any birds passing by and built like a website where all the birds that had been heard recently from his window were this is something i know actually a couple of my friends have done it's a cool idea you can very cool you just have a mic listening and it automatically detects birds yeah and it's actually kind of smart because i first heard about this when a friend had was having a party in his backyard and pointed it out and me and another friend and loaded up a bunch of YouTube videos of like penguins, Arctic birds.

1:58:17We were trying to gum up the data, and it didn't take. It somehow knew those were fake birds. But this guy took that a step further and then put together an e-ink display on his wall that displays the stuff from the website, and then he blogged about how he did it. I just thought that was a very cool thing. That's beautiful. Raspberry Pi. and using BirdNet, which is a very cool project to identify birds. Wow. I might do this. This is really neat. You can get a little collage of birds going on. It's fun. I have a little seven-color e-ink screen just sitting around with a Raspberry Pi attached. Yeah, it costs you nothing.

1:59:02Yeah. And my last thing here, I guess, is that is the city, or formerly known as the city now known as the city reporter uh reported that uh the new york transit museum is which is a great museum yes a museum about trains that's in an old subway station is doing an ode to the orange seats which is going to be a museum exhibit about iconic orange subway which is how everyone thinks of the subway which are going to be gone soon what phasing them out what are they replacing them with weird trains something made in europe are they going to make the bart mistake are they going to make the bart mistake and make it fabric i mean it's not fabric it's just like it's they're not as cute there's got a section where like the seats can kind of fold down so i guess it's good because then you have more room to stand but the issue is like congest traffic from humans standing in a subway car is kind of like traffic on roads it will expand to fill any space you give it and it will expand in the most non-productive way like so when people get clogged up in a subway car it's not because there's a lack of room usually it's just because like three people have decided they need to stand in front of the door and nowhere else and there's a bunch of space inside the car so will men's legs expand unnecessarily yeah man man spreading uh yeah the uh the exhibit features uh a person with the tattoos of the new york subway's orange seats i mean that's gotta be an attractive tattoo well i guess the that honestly i feel like it's a popular tattoo the the more common thing is um how would you wait a minute did you say that's a popular tattoo i feel like I've definitely seen people with orange subway seat tattoos.

2:00:53Yeah. Do you know what I'm talking about Jeff? I think the orange cars are the ones that have those corner seats where there's like two facing one way and then two in another. And there's a common New York City debate on what is the best seat. So there's three against the wall and there's two coming out into the aisle. Which one is your choice, Paris? I have a choice. Yeah, I'm trying to find a photo of it so that I can show the listeners so it's not completely it's the subway takes scene it's the subway takes scene right yes it is so i just put a thing a chat mine honestly i kind of like the inside seat most oh jeez i would be sitting next to you paris why would you sit in the inside like that that one because if i have a long enough commute then i don't have to move for that's true you could stay I can just sit there and be bothered.

2:01:46And perhaps put up your feet. Not even if it was an empty car. It feels antisocial. It feels wrong. Yeah. What about you, Jeff? I will sit on the two on the outside because I have long legs. I mean, if I'm talking practically, I typically end up doing the one on the outside, but I also get annoyed enough with people asking me to move in. Like I would sit in the one on the outside with my legs facing out. Yes, I do that too. I do that too. then enough people at it feels like whenever i sit down there everybody asks me to move suddenly i need to go from one side of the car to the other i hate that i've noticed since i'm still walking with the king uh nobody's offered me a seat that's rude really oh yeah well that's you should get a baby bump you're a dump you're a double award awardee yeah i got that you're an old man and cane i don't so so here's the question so i'm sitting in a seat in new york city subway and i'm trying to decide am i the old man who should be sitting in this seat or should i get up and give my seat yes even older man it makes you feel younger to get up i do i always get up for women young women if i saw you paris i would get up and offer you my seat uh the worst thing that happens is that I'm on this, I'm reading and my head is down and I'm not looking up at all.

2:03:07And then I look up and I see a pregnant belly in front of me and I didn't offer it. That is the worst thing. That is terrible. You'll feel off and you should. Yes, I should. I should indeed. Terrible, terrible thing. Well, I have an opera to go to. Oh, do I get no pics? Jeff has pics of the week. Do I get no pics? Oh, Jeff, all right, all right. If you insist, but I will miss the, I will miss the first opening overtures. No, no, we got plenty of time. So I didn't know about the company Bending Spoons. Did you know about the company? Oh, yes, I know about them. I didn't know they have an IPO company.

2:03:42They own all these almost dead brands. AOL, Eventbrite, Vimeo, Evernote, Meetup, StreamYard, Hopin, Brightcove. I had no idea. It's like dead brands that come back to life. So anyway, I was interested by that. They're going public. Yes, they're going public. uh and you know it's an interesting thing i remember when uh evernote got sold them i think that's probably when i first became aware of them and i thought is this good or not they fire a lot of people but they keep them going but they keep it going right um vimeo yeah i'm surprised bright cove i used to be a shareholder of break of yeah so there's that raised 11 they have 11 billion dollar valuation raised a big raise uh last year they may be looking for as much as 20 billion valuation with the IPO.

2:04:32500 million active users every month. 9 million paying customers. It's actually a pretty good business. It's a better business than Anthropik or SpaceX. So there's that one. Then there's Tim Ferriss wrote about how AI has killed how to nonfiction looking at his own sales of his books from 2022, the next year down 5%, down 13%, down 46%, so far this year down 57%. But has he written new books or these are the older books? I think that's a factor there, but I think it's just nonetheless, it's going down like crazy. And what is it? It's a podcast. We're killing them. We're killing them. No, it's AI, of course.

2:05:13I mean, think about it. From being somewhat mean, I do think that the sort of person that is buying or would be the target audience to buy the four hour work week in the year of our Lord 2026 is the sort of person that instead would be like, I'll just ask chat. Work week. He also wrote the four hour body, which I have no idea what that means. But okay. Yeah. It feels like other hours of your week. You exist beyond. time and space. He's got nobody. Nobody. I got nobody. So then finally, I want to brag about the review I just got today in Publishers Weekly. Four. A hot type. Oh, you're already reviewing it.

2:06:00Wow. Yeah. Jarvis pens a colorful and enthralling portrait of good, gilded age industrial ferment replete with ingenious inventors, wrangling with impatient investors and a rich analysis of humanity's love-hate relationship with technological expansion. Readers will be wrapped. wow and you know what i agree with that a hundred percent yeah i hope you don't take this the wrong way but i actually think it's your best book i really enjoyed it thank you i enjoyed having narrative in this one yeah that's what i really liked about it uh it's a story there's a lot of stories that come yeah which is fun so anyway so um i'm gonna try to go to a bookstore tomorrow and see whether uh eddie claude claude did this at a one bookstore where i can go to them and say listen if any if people are local bookstores we support a local bookstore independent if people order from you can i come and autograph every copy so if you want an autograph copy that's how you get one so i don't know if i can talk them into it i used to just go into bookstores and sign the books yeah yeah just for fun oh look and then uh i found in the uh remainder bin of our local bookstore an autographed copy of my books and that was the last time i signed the book ladies and gentlemen that does conclude this edition of intelligent machines we thank uh our guest so much alex santos for joining us and encourage you to go to freefable.org to read more uh he is of course at corridor.ai next week we're gonna uh change gears just a little bit but i think it's gonna be very interesting with olivier silvain he's the author of reclaiming the internet uh advisor to lena khan and when she was at the FTC, it's all about taking control back from big tech.

2:07:45You know, I kind of agree. It's not anti-internet. It's just, it should be ours. Should I write a book about that? Nobody bought it, but. Yeah, The Web We Weave, yeah. Yeah. Well, if Tim Ferriss is right, nobody will buy this one. So there you go. Nonfiction is not a happy place to be in. are books in general doing well well you have you have you know the um book talk stuff the fantasy romance stuff and not in fiction is selling is it but not daniel steel kind of stuff hard sell non-fiction is really hard i think people probably do you insert a chapter into hot type in which someone hooks up with a monster jeff there you go yeah there we go and falls in love there you go you could kids that falls in love with a line of type Paris Martino is at consumer reports still basking in the afterglow for her incredible story on food safety indeed and titanium dioxide in your ho-hos no no no not ho-ho's watch it hostess mini powdered donuts your mini post us have they said anything have they said we're gonna change our ways there's comment on the story really from hostess no no comment we have nothing to say we just hope nobody reads it interesting and you're working are you already working on the new one no you're gonna go on a trip i am actually but i'm i'm going uh starting friday i'm gonna take a two weeks do you know where you're going uh montana whoa she's gonna stop you know go to glacier International Park.

2:09:28Oh, nice. It's very pretty. Hit up some kind of road tripping around the state. Bunch of different little things. Might go ride some horses near Yellowstone. Oh, we want pictures. We want pictures. I will. So you'll fly and then just rent a car and drive, drive, drive? Oh, cool. What a great idea. I'm going to figure out where I'm going to be when and if I'll be able to do this show for the next two weeks. But I will have an answer for you guys shortly. Oh, no. i just need to make sure the places have internet and i thought that would be a reasonable thing but apparently a lot of them don't know you know what take it you're more than welcome you should enjoy yourself it practically ruined my hawaii trip that i had to sit down and do a show not this show particularly but just in general it's nice to have some time off of course you just had a lot of time off yeah you did yeah from this show but it did it because i was working you were working really 9 pm every day that's a very good point uh now take some time that's fine with us i want to see if i want to see if i can make it work but if i can't don't kill yourself i guess i will not kill yourself for us we're worth it great kill yourself for us kill yourself yeah jeff jarvis he is a professor of journalistic innovation at the craig newmark graduate school of journalism at the city university you already did it once i don't get to it and he's also of course at montclair state and suny stony brook and hot type is available if you want to get the what do they call it engaging story of the uh of the machine that almost drove mark twain mad uh the the the magnificent machine that gave birth to mass media and drove mark twain mad that's the sometimes uh you can get it at jeffjarvis.com we do i am every Wednesday right after Windows Weekly, right after the whiskey segment.

2:11:22So some of our audience at least is slightly inebriated. It's 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch it in the club. If you're a club member, I hope you are. Support our enterprise here with your membership at twit.tv slash club twit. But everybody's invited to join on YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Kik. You can chat with us at the same time as you are watching. after the fact on demand versions of the show available at the website twit.im uh twit.tv slash i am i should say twit.tv slash i am there's also a youtube channel dedicated to the video and you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client i can see paris is looking for a good review on our oh on our there were so many hold on i was reading the youtube comments Oh, don't read the YouTube comments.

2:12:13Those are always... The YouTube comments are actually kind of nice. Oh. Oh. That's nice. Intelligent. The issue is that we have so many versions of this show on Apple Podcasts that it takes a minute to find the one that people have commented on. It's this one. I went to YouTube and I'm watching Security Now, so that's not the right show. There we go. There's the right show. check the safety rope when you bungee dboy 8519 who on May 20th said always a good time five stars always great to hear how long it takes Leo to get off track with his amazing co-hosts Pears and Jeff it doesn't take much to derail the show and that's the fun you never know what'll happen

2:12:59let's see at a time when Leo is on a kick to shorten his shows I wish this show would go on forever says Michael laugh fast screw the love the personalities and the takes subscriber from the beginning and loving it yay thank you josh estelle long-time listener 20 years working at google many of these years listening to twig great to keep listening in this ai era there are so many other reviews that we got throughout may and a couple in june thank you guys for listening to our show and reviewing if you want a review on our show leave one and i'll read it out loud and make a dramatic reading by Paris Martineau.

2:13:36And if you wanted to do it in an accent, you should specify that in your review. Please do. And I'll, you know, make it an accent that I can do without it being problematic, and I'll do it. Oh, no, no, no, no. I accidentally picked the snooty British lady accent in Gemini, and I can't figure out how to change it. I always pick the snooty British lady. I don't want a snooty British anything. Oh, I don't either. It's like a... It's like Caddy Kay is talking to me in the car. I don't know why I like British accents. I like all my AI to speak Brit to me. All right. Thank you, everybody. We will see you next time on Intelligent Machines.

2:14:12Bye-bye. Hey, everybody. Leo Laporte here. And I'm going to bug you one more time to join Club Twit. If you're not already a member, I want to encourage you to support what we do here at Twit. You know, 25 % of our operating costs comes from membership in the club. That's a huge portion, and it's growing all the time. That means we can do more. We can have more fun. You get a lot of benefits, ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to the club to Discord and special programming, like the keynotes from Apple and Google and Microsoft and others that we don't stream otherwise in public.

2:14:53Please join the club. If you haven't done it yet, we'd love to have you. Find out more at twit.tv slash club twit. And thank you so much.