IM 883: Gates-Gate - AI Model Watermarks

34:47You know, I've been in the industry for X number of years. These are my beats. This is what I'm good at. And then it will take your information, put it against the various pipelines and try to match you to roles that you would be good at. Oh, you would be really good at, you know, this job that the Los Angeles Times is hiring for. And that's a premium product that I remember the pricing offhand. But the kind of the cool thing is that, you know. it's worth it because if you get a job this is a lot less than joining a job board and to me it's like what the what it does and what there's a huge time saver one it finds jobs that like match your skills i mean nothing is few things are more demoralizing than like than looking for a job honestly i'm like okay i'm good at this i'm good this you give it and the models will scour the internet to find roles that are open that you may be a good foot a good fit for then if you want to pay a little extra, it will then go ahead and, you know, tailor your resume to the job description.

35:50You know, you give it your resume. Okay. It's going to rewrite it matching the job description exactly. And it will then create a cover letter. You know, hi, my name is Nicholas and I would love to join your company. All of this is like a humiliation ritual, obviously. So if, but you know, I would, I would never recommend, and for all this stuff, you know, I would never recommend just like submitting it blindly. You know, you need to edit this stuff. You need to like make it you, not just for like, you know, that you just should, like, you should make it you you're trying to so but but it like save so much and okay, does it work?

36:23I've given this tool, you know, it's been it's been in beta for like, let's call it like six weeks, I've given it to a handful of friends, I'm aware of I think I want to say five interviews with real companies that we've all heard of on this call, which I will obviously not mention. But like, I'm like, okay, this thing works. Ultimately, I can't guarantee anyone gets hired, obviously. I cannot guarantee anything, but what it can do is it can save you time. And overnight, you get an email. So you wake up in the morning, you get an email that says, hey, Nicholas, hey, Paris, we found you 20 roles that you are a good fit for.

37:02We used, I forget offhand what models I'm using to kind of filter it out, but like, here you go. Here's 10 roles that you would be a good fit for. Three of those roles, you'll be an awesome fit for so we've gone ahead and made the cover letter and made the resume for you for you to edit and submit uh at your own at your own pace the thing that's really so interesting here is here see just one guy not a you know i don't i presume you're not a computer science you know phd or anything you're a journalist just a guy yeah who in his spare time has done all of this really high quality work. I think it's just fascinating.

37:42And then I have two iOS native apps that are - Of course you do. One is - In the water you get up at five o 'clock to walk the dog. You got a lot of energy. So tell us about the iOS apps. Yeah, the iOS apps. One is, I don't want to give two, maybe they should be out in the store maybe the next time I'm on Twit, you know, a couple of months from now. But basically, one is kind of like a lifestyle app, I'll say. That is code complete. I'm literally in the process of putting together the bank account stuff for the app store for that. And the other one is a gaming accessory app. If you play a lot of video games, it will be useful to you is really all I can say.

38:24But especially for folks who play on Steam, I'll leave it at that. But that is like 90 % code complete. It has like a bunch of cool themes, like all through gaming history. You know, I'm getting old. You know, I played a lot of Super Nintendo, Sega. Those are kind of like the games I care about. N64, I don't care as much about PS5. So if you have like a real history of like video games, you may appreciate the overall design and aesthetic of the apps. And those should be launched, I don't know, in the next, well, some of it depends on App Store review, but like very, very, very soon. And those were made, again, using primarily Cloud Code.

39:03And when Fable came out, that really helped with the UI work. Fable was regular with UI work. But it's just me messing around. It's just me tinkering. And I'm having fun. I tell my wife, she's like, are you having fun? You're in that room like, oh, what are you doing in there? I'm like, you know me by now. If I'm not having fun, I'm very easy to read. uh i get real grumpy really quick uh but it's like this is all cool to me this is all fun oh you know it's cool it's very impressive what you're doing uh yeah unbelievable you know i never set out to like figure out the future of news or like i'm gonna do this in journals no that was never my never my goal it was just i these things exist i kind of want to see what they can do is basically just i think you've shown us what they can do and i'm very impressed especially considering you've spent a tiny amount of money doing this.

40:01That's obviously many hours, but a tiny amount of money. And it is fun. It's very fun. It's fun. To me, that's the bottom line. It's just fun. It's fun to mess around with this stuff. Nicholas DeLeon is senior electronics reporter at Consumer Reports. Of course, you'll see him on Twit again soon. We love having him on. And I just thought it'd be fun to spend a little time talking about these projects. We never really get to delve into it. I still feel like we only scratched the surface. you're very productive i'm impressed as hell thank you nicholas go be on tv yeah i got i got a tv hit thank you again i'll speak to you guys soon all right uh i i uh i'm sorry because i have a feeling paris nicholas is headed well i asked him on that sweat i said do you he's been at consumer reports for seven years i said how long before somebody comes and snatches you up a lot of people at cr have worked here for like 25 years.

40:57He says, I don't want to leave. He says, no, no. It is, I would say most of the people that I interact with on a day-to-day basis have worked there for more than 10 years. It's a great job. And I'd say a not insignificant amount of the people I interact with on a day-to-day basis have worked there for more than 20 years. It's a good place to work. Yeah. We are going to take a break. We'll come back in just a bit with, I was remiss. I did not do the rundowns. And actually, I get a lot of help from AI. And I still didn't do the final chore of putting all that stuff. I was about to say, we got a blank spreadsheet.

41:33Well, if you scroll down, Mr. Jeff Jarvis never sleeps. Finally, finally, my moment of the song. Wait, are we finally going to get Jeff time? I'm starting to think maybe. After months of no. I should just let Jeff do the show. Yeah, what am I doing? I was going to say, this is actually incredible because despite the fact. So for the listener, we operate off a spreadsheet. where we put in our links and stuff like that. For most, the first like two years of my time here, you had a section at the top of Leo, you had a section at the top of a million links from Jeff, and we kind of pick and choose from all of them.

42:06Sometime, I think over the last six months or so, when Leo started having AI do his briefings, we got into a very good routine of, we're just going to go down Leo's list, but Jeff, who believes in himself, kept putting his 65 links down there regardless, even though we never got to basically any of them every single education and now it's jeff time baby my turn you go the parents there's a chapter before this used to be there was only one rundown and leo put in his stories and i um not knowing uh interfered and i would add in more stories and it drove him completely bananas until he finally said enough there's my space and then there's other space oh that's how we got that's how i remember it at all but okay if you insist i i i don't remember that i thought we were uh no no i remember but i don't was it was it jason who came and said uh leo has another idea about the uh maybe maybe i said something to jason that was that might make a little bit what are all these stories doing is going on i don't want this uh we'll take a break we'll come back uh there is a lot of news i don't know if you got to it all and some of it's in my head new models we're going crazy here new business models new new everything yeah people moving upstairs downstairs and out the side door uh you're watching intelligent machines with jeff jarvis and paris martin oh more in a moment our show today brought to you by monarch now i gotta say i love monarch so much so that you know i i tried it for a while and i said i'm this is it i'm using this from now on but i gotta tell you my subscription uh recently okay i i bought a year uh i buy a year every year and i subscribed and i bought a year and i so my subscription came up and i thought well i really ought to look around and see what's out there and I literally spent a morning installing all the other guys.

44:02And I said, what am I doing? There is nothing as good as Monarch. I love Monarch. So yes, I re-upped. It's the personal finance app that tracks everything. Accounts, investments, savings, goals, spending. With Monarch, I can feel relieved that my financial picture is the clearest it's ever been. It's so easy. I open the app or go to the website. Boom. home not only do i see where i stand right now but it's kind of like having a financial advisor in your pocket most apps focus on what you've already spent you know oh you spent a lot this month monarch no they don't do that it helps you set goals it helps you plan map out big purchases see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust see how you're doing for retirement that kind of thing planning for uh getting married at college putting your kids through college you ask monarch's ai assistant anything about your finances like how much did i spend on travel last summer or can i afford this vacation without touching my savings it will spot things you wouldn't think to look for with its ai insights has your spending gone up or is it just inflation that's costing everything get a heads up on what's happening with your money you'll even have it has a great ai weekly recap which flags spending spikes net worth shifts upcoming expenses honestly this is what i would design if i had the time you don't have to you got monarch oh and there's one little thing i just love it's just a little extra feature they just threw in split the check without headache with monarch's bill split you scan the receipt in monarch everyone claims what they got then you settle up you don't need a separate app it's just one more wonderful i call them quality of life features write your own money story with monarch use the code i am at monarch.com to get your first year of monarch core half off just 50 that's 50 off your first year at monarch.com don't forget the offer code i am so they know you saw it here monarch.com code i am well it's been a busy busy busy week for the models busy week for me um i have to say i admit it i spent a little bit of money this week you spending money it was like the old days it felt like the old days i i missed when you you this show used to have a segment that was just what you bought through instagram the crap i bought or they or a game which says what can we get legal to buy today i did buy this uh macintosh clock that seems like something you would buy on instagram you know what you should get one of your little models to start doing a thing where every week it just presents just buys me something no no oh it could that could actually be interesting but it could just make five to ten fake instagram ads for you of wacky products it thinks you would like.

47:03You could cut out the middleman of Facebook. Yeah, just go, I don't need it anymore. I got to find me. I haven't made them, yeah. Well, I really got spooked a little bit. I was both impressed by the advance people were making in open weight models, DeepSeek and others. And a bunch of open weight models came out this week. We'll talk about that in a second. And I also got a little spooked by the RAM crunch, by my inability, for instance, to buy a Macintosh with more than 96 gigs of RAM, which is really not enough to run a lot of these local models. I also got spooked by some of the news stories.

47:38You saw the news story yesterday that Anthropix decided to put tracking code in all of its results. Why does that spook you? Why wouldn't it? Do you want a tracking code in all of your AI results, even text? you mean a watermark in text so that if much like a water might do it no it's a like oh it's the equivalent of like a watermark in images where if you then paste the text back into anthropic it says yes an anthropic but how would it do that because i'm copying text it's going to change something about the text in a way it's writing the text in a weird way it's going to change the identified that's not a good thing at all no it also raises all sorts of specters uh steve i disagree i think that anthropic has said that their whole goal in this to make it the there's no noticeable change in the output in terms of quality or words being used and i think it's incredibly a it's a great idea and something that all the companies should do that you should be able to put a piece of text back into the company's thing and be like did this come from you and it could tell you yes or no it's the exact same that gemini does with its images where if even if it doesn't have a visible watermark on it you put that image back into gemini and it's like yes this was processed using uh have they said that's how it's going to work they've said they'll provide a means that can tell you yes they did i've got a a link in the rundown if i can find it on my computer screen.

49:19In my nice, well-organized rundown, you can't find it there? Yes, it's under the section called France, which is my section, row 221. And it's called How Claude Marks AI Generated Content. And it basically says, we'll help you detect Claude's marks. We'll support users and other third parties to detect Claude's marks. marks will apply to output from supported clod models across clod platform api clod clod code clod co-work and clod tag um if we can see the embedded watermarks in text when a supported clod model generates text it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself you won't see it and it doesn't change the meaning quality or readability of clods response says anthropic i'm sorry i am stunned that you think this is a good idea this why would it not be i'm never using claude again what are you talking about the only so you think that the only way you want to use claude for text output is so that you can pass it off and no one can ever know that you used claude i don't know but i don't want this is the only thing that it tells this calvinism about it was a i helped come from that oh my god it has a i cooties we must identify saying i'm not i just think that we should understand the provenance from where things come and i think that it's helpful if you're creating something with a very specific tool and the maker of that tool wants to provide a way for other people to identify it them's the brakes buddy well yeah it is the brakes i'm never using anthropic again and by the way i'm not alone uh dario i think has gone off the deep end in his fight against open weight models what wait no they are attempting to protect this i don't even i don't know where to start yeah we'll give a disaster scenario for paris because she's not well steven sanofsky gave a disaster scenario on twitter he's he used to work at microsoft he said at one point we thought it'd be a really good idea to put a good uh globally uh identifier global identifier in all microsoft word documents and uh what we did what we didn't realize is that people could use it to you know track you to figure out who you are you know we spent a lot of time on wait a minute slow down we've spent a lot of time uh talking about how to keep your browser from fingerprinting you uh this is exactly that it has nothing to do with you personally it all it says it's a simple yes or no it says this may have been processed by Claude, or this does not show signs that it was processed by Claude.

52:02Those are the two options. I think that that's a fine data signal to have. What is the big deal if suddenly all the text you output using Claude could return a signal that says this may have been processed by Claude? What if one of your sources says, I'm not a very good writer. I'm going to try to provide an explanation of what's going on in this scandal to Paris Martin. know because she will uncover this but i'm going to use claude to write this up and then it goes to you and you don't know there's a watermark in there like um i would never publish the text that someone else sent me well but you wouldn't even know because it's text and the reality winner story was that there was something hidden in the text there that's right reality winner went to jail for five years as a result now the reality in reality winner's case it was something that specifically identified the user ID and name of the person who printed it, this is not that.

52:56Well, we don't know what data is subpoenaable. What can be subpoenaed by the authorities? If the authorities say this text, and you wouldn't publish it, but if you quote from it, let's say you just have to do a block quote of this. You don't know what's got in there. And they're saying that even if you cut and paste this, it's still in there. And so then the government comes along, the DOJ, and puts it into Claude and it says yes. And then they go to claude they say we're going to subpoena you this who did this when and where and you are not even aware as a reporter that that was in there does that freak you now not at all i don't think that you're describing what anthropic has said they've done it's simply was this processed by claude might or they don't even say this was processed by claude they say the signals are this may have been well that's not processed by claude or this may have not well then they could be schmutzing some poor student who who did the work and actually did write it but claude says oh yeah that looks like ours and the student gets gets kicked out of school because claude they're not made a mistake that's also not what they're saying they're saying my advice uh if we can stop now paris my advice is no one should ever again use an anthropic product they're doing this because the eu demands it by the way the only ones responding to the eu this way although i imagine open ai is going to do it one of the reasons that really convinced me to move to local models is exactly this.

54:20These are nightmare scenarios, and I'm sorry you don't see the potential disaster for this. I really wonder, somebody who raises this in our club Twit Discord, if this will be done with enterprise products, because in many cases, this would absolutely be a problem for enterprise. And of course, that's Anthropik's entire business. uh the eu is i think requiring it across the board yeah well we'll see um anyway we can debate its merits uh there are those of us who do not like the idea of a fingerprint in our content whether it's on our printed page um so so one more second here paris um defend the if you will if you will the societal reason for having the watermark.

55:11I think that if you are using a tool to create writing, and other people want to know whether you used a tool to generate writing that you're passing off as your own, having a thing out there that just says, aspects of this contain the sign that some words in this were processed by me, the company that made this is fine. It's not a privacy issue. It has nothing to do with your identity. It just shows the factual truth. Well, you just care that there's a signal of creation. I think it's a useful signal to have. If, in your example, a source passed me off a document and claimed it was theirs, and I put it through this and found out that it was generated by Claude, that'd be incredibly useful information for me to have that that person was passing me off a fake document.

55:59No, who says it was, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, right there. Who says it was fake at all? I use it to help me write it. I'm a bad writer. I had to help get help. That would not be. I decided the end. I went over every word of it. That would be considered fake because I would not want a document. The usefulness to me of getting a document from a source is that it comes from. The source went over word by word and says, this expresses exactly what happened in this case and exactly what I wanted to say. And I'm glad it helped me write this. I use Grammarly to get the commas right. And I use this to help me write this.

56:30and i should put it off and then you're now going to reject it might have to do this according to the eu i just think i agree if it doesn't identify you uh it only says this was made by claude i it's less of a problem i'm very concerned no one has said it identifies well but we don't know we don't know whether description of it does not indicate that it does this We don't know what data they may be. They're completely trustworthy. I don't trust them far than I can throw them. Anyway, I'm just saying, you made your point. Good point. We disagree. Moving on. We'll get both sides. Yeah. let's see what else is going on more models are coming out like crazy glimmer you wanted to use glimmer i do leo is human made criticism not even me having a basic criticism me supporting a feature an ai company has released this week does not mean that you can't talk about ai on our podcast about ai i use ai i co-host a show with you about ai we can talk about it and you can talk about it okay

58:03um yeah i don't really talk about glimmer talk about glimmer can you talk about your thing that you just bought that you wanted to tell us about why why not i've been dying to hear about i don't want to be mocked and i have a feeling that's what would happen i'm not going to mock you please talk about it so you wanted to run models at a higher rate i mocked me so i really did feel uh that it more and more important to uh if you can to run your own models i was concerned that that is going to become harder and harder to do this is another example of that is uh you know if you're running an open weight model that doesn't have a watermark in it the eu might say oh i don't know what the eu could do about it frankly uh i don't know what the u.s government could do about it i don't know what the chinese government could do about it the interesting thing is there are and i thought i would be using a local model i bought some hardware to run the local model i upgraded my gaming pc from a 10 gigabyte old very old five-year-old video card to 3070 to an RTX 3090, which is almost, I think it is as old, but it has 24 gigabytes.

59:10It allows me to run one of the Chinese models, Quinn. It's a very good model, 3.5. Now, 3.8 has been announced and I hope will be downloadable at the end of the week. They announced 3.8 Max, which I had been using for a while as an open weight download today, this morning. They will do 3.8 smaller model 27B on Friday, they say. That would run in that 3090, I think, I hope. Certainly their older version of that does. And runs quite well, quite fast. So that's nice. That's for quick inference. But I also wanted to run, I was hoping to run something more substantial. I thought I had been using DeepSeq's B4 Flash for a while.

59:52I was very, very impressed by it. Turns out you can't run it in a single DGX Spark. and these are not cheap machines these are four thousand dollars each they are basically headless computers designed to do one thing how old a set amount of uh ram uh yeah uh 128 gigs of ram unified ram and it's a blackwell gpu in it so it isn't it isn't by any means like a 6 000 or even a 50 90. it's not it's it's a little bit slow it's not a super machine but it is big enough to host a larger model and they have on the back of it a 200 gigabit connector port and if you buy two of them and they buy the cable they can be paired to run an even larger model and a deep seek v4 flash will run in but it needs two of them so i thought well that's probably what i want to run i like it it's good there's going to be a deep seek v4 pro coming soon uh these open weight models you know you want to run as big a model i thought you want to run as big a model as you can uh locally because that's going to be your main model uh what i did before i ordered these i spent a long time agonizing about this uh and i finally spent some money out of my uh my savings to do it um i guess i'm glad i did but a funny thing happened on the way to the sparks I set them up last night.

1:01:22Quinn's running nicely. I have the Mac 64 gig Mac mini, which is running whisper large. It's very nice, very fast. And I was hoping to not do coding with it. I think I still think I'll probably need to use a frontier model for the bigger coding projects like the Twit sales system that I've been working on. But I was hoping to use my agent Hermes with a local model entirely, especially when it's doing things like financial and health information. I'd like to keep those things to myself. Now, it's not a good economic decision. It's so cheap to run deep seek on a server, whether it's a Chinese server or an American server like OpenCode, that it really doesn't make sense in any financial sense.

1:02:06It's purely for autonomy and for privacy. And now that Anthropik's doing what it's doing, that's why I let off with that. and you could learn the limits of it not being connected to the mothership yes and how it operates which i think is really interesting yeah in fact of late deep seek seems to not be as good as it was a couple of days ago and i think the china i was running through the chinese deep seek servers the official servers and i think they have been so bandwidth constrained they've already talked about they've already said we're going to raise prices a lot uh they've been so bandwidth constrained that they can't serve the people want to use it uh and as a result you get less of a model.

1:02:45So if you're running it locally, you're going to get at least a consistent result. As long as you can afford the power. The nice thing about the NVIDIA sparks, they're very low power. They're comparable to a Mac mini. So they're not. And Leo, by the way, asked his models to give him a report. I have actually a dashboard. I can look at the currently the Mojo model, which is the Quinn model is running full bore because I'm having it analyze a code base. This is what it's very good at uh analyzing a code base making a code what's called a graph out of the code base to save energy when the coding models are looking at it and you can see it's at 96 it's 75 degrees centigrade it's using 350 watts of power it's using a lot of power that's almost the entire power budget total power budget for the three machines right now is 366 watts so the sparks aren't using very much power uh and that's one of the other advantages of them they're fairly inexpensive uh to run now so i thought i'm going to run flash and i got a recipe but i thought i should also test some of these open mother which flash who's who's flash uh deep seek v4 flash okay i thought i should try to test some of these open model other open models so i had a the other agents mostly fable and uh sol uh create a harness of benchmark tests they created seven like word problems and you know the kinds of things that you know trip up ai like you know i'm going i need to wash my car should i walk or drive kind of question uh those turned out to be too easy all the all the local models i tested i tested about a half a dozen of them all got those all right uh but it had a second trench of uh problems which i thought were a good idea which is stuff we've struggled with over the last few weeks of coding stuff the other models got wrong or mistakes they could have made and I ran that by them and they solved all of them as well they were very good and the winner when I finally gave it the hardest problems of all was not deep seek v4 flash so I tested Nemo Tron a deep seek flash Quinn three five GLM five two open a eyes GPT OSS I think it's 20B, not 120B.

1:05:04A minimax model. I tested also what's called an obliterated model of DeepSeq V4 Flash. So it can't say no. Wait, what do you mean? Well, many of them - What does obliterated mean? Is that specifically what it means? It's not obliterated. It's abliterated. It's abliterated, which is not a real word. It's jailbroken. It's actually applying the liberator's word for jailbroken. But, you know, and it's jailbroken in what way? Like, what are the many models have? Well, the Chinese model specifically, for instance, if you ask about Tiananmen Square, we'll say what? Nothing happened. Nothing. Nothing.

1:05:42What are you talking about? So it also will return off the guardrails or you think. And one of the guardrails that concerns me considerably, both Fable and Chachi PD Saul, 56 Saul, have been very much locked down by these companies that are terrified of the Trump administration. you remember fable got pulled for weeks open ai is holding astra back because it doesn't want the government to say you can't release these models they're dangerous so they often have cyber security they have classifiers but even within the models they have holes where they i'm not going to do any cyber security research i'm not going to do this i'm not going to do that because they don't want to get in trouble with the government so an obliterated model in theory doesn't reject what you ask of it.

1:06:27It does. Now, in truth, that's probably also nerfing it to some degree. It's making it a little bit stupider. In any event, I wanted to try it, so I have a DeepSeq V4 Flash that's obliterated. After running the tests, I was shocked that NVIDIA's model, which runs on a single Spark, is easily the best, certainly the fastest more than twice as fast as flash three times as fast as quen uh and made no mistakes and it's an open weight model it's an open weight model from nvidia now this is when they just the new nematron this new one okay this is the new one nematron lightning they call it and i was kind of stunned at how good it is i'm running it right now locally on hermes why were you stunned kind of i well first of all it's a lot smaller it's half the size i thought and that he is good folks i thought deep seek flash would do better well nvidia is good on nvidia's hardware exactly maybe it's secret sauce i don't know uh the nematron models are surprisingly good so i did say but now we should test it with harder problems including coding and it failed miserably at coding i mean it literally it it was it was close to dumb uh encoding here's the result uh hard fail by the way it's nematron grading nematron ironically um it gave it a problem where to to refactor some python code but uh it did a bunch of things just dumb things it's it clearly is not a good coding model which is okay because i i anticipated i'd probably be doing coding somewhere else but what i want is a good agentic model and it seems like it is a good agentic model but there's also a lesson here a these open weight models are getting better fast b they're like all ai spiky they're good at some things not so good at other things.

1:08:34And see, I shouldn't have bought two Sparks. How did you get two Sparks? Are they having the same sort of, are they just having the same sort of, they're not having the same supply crunch? They haven't changed the price. Well, this was what concerned me. They haven't changed the price since they announced them. And my feeling is they probably built 10 ,000 of them or whatever. And then once they've sold them all, then it'll be. It was like a high-end Chromebook. You know, who's going to buy it? It's a very specific hobby. They'll be done. And so I was very afraid that if I didn't buy it now, it might be that I, Ram is, you just cannot get Ram for love or money at this point.

1:09:07And Ram's one of the things you really need. You need fast cards. Why do you think that these haven't sold out then? They're very expensive. I mean, if you're going to run, let me ask this question then, to go to Parrot's question. If you're a small company wanting to run models, are there cheaper things to use than not really sparks no not well again there's a there's a you got to pay a certain amount of money honestly if you're a small company i wouldn't even buy sparks i'd buy something in the hundred thousand dollar range yeah what are your small company well not so small but companies if you want local inference because you want to protect your company's proprietary information or privacy uh that's worth something to you well the the machine you built that you were using before was what it's the it was a gaming rig i bought from dell an alienware gaming no no no no the other one you're the um oh the framework framework fine but how much was that it's not cuda that was about the same as a 3500 bucks okay i had hoped that that would last me and it is it's still the heart it's still the server it's running everything the models are running headless on these three other machines and then they connect into the agent which is running on the framework could you run nematron on the framework no it can't run on the framework because it doesn't have cuda as a yeah os okay so it sounds like it's worthwhile to have gotten yeah and and i keep saying this work i keep saying to quicksilver i'm sorry i shouldn't have bought those other spark i said don't say that leo you're so smart you no it didn't say that it said well remember that's today tomorrow v4 pro might come out tomorrow there'll be new models that may well require all of that but what's really interesting is nematron lightning runs quite well on a single spark and i think very impressive so that's the point now interestingly elon came out with as nicholas said today with uh grok 4.6 which he was touting on x's all that did you see a lot of stories about it i didn't everybody was waiting for the 6 30 a.m pacific time drop of quen nobody was waiting for 4.6 or even cared which is ironic because grok's actually pretty good uh grok 4.6 is better but people just don't want to use it after the mecca hitler no they just don't want to use it so uh it's a it's a good time to be using local models i guess is the point uh glimmer uh the meta models uh about what you'd expect what i'm glad to see it's very important to mention is meta hadn't put out a local model in years they started the local model trend with llama uh and really seeded that whole industry and so i'm glad to see them back at the table it was fascinating all over social media pray is like it's like um good grasshopper good uh praising uh zuckerberg and meta for sticking with open yeah yeah um and as i mentioned they opened the the meta glasses um i think mark zucker i think what it is is an admission much like google's admission we'll talk about that in a second that they are not in the race really and maybe they better find another way uh to justify their billions and billions of dollars they've spent on ai how are your glasses hacking going oh i haven't hacked them i'm not i haven't worked on that yet i don't partly because i i'm waiting for better glasses i really don't want to wear these around i'd have to i have to put real they have cute ones now i know but i have to put good lenses in them it'd be hundreds of bucks yeah no i'm not wearing kim kardat or no uh kylie jenner's glasses they look kind of cute you should it could be i don't want to get beaten up by my friends i also just have no interested the features that they offer but yeah well that's right because you'd have cameras walking around with cameras in them i mean i carry both a camera in my pocket and i have a physical camera i don't need a third camera and i've also been transitioning away from wearing glasses so yeah oh you're transit you're transit you're going to be all contacts all the time i got contacts are you getting more comfortable i mean yeah they've been very comfortable after since the first week or so oh good yeah because i know you were i mean i used to wear contacts all the time so it wasn't a new thing no it's the new thing for me as someone who wore contacts you know all through grade school and stuff is now they have dailies that are cheap and that's the thing that everyone gets i used to wear monthlies always that was the only option clean them and yeah you have to clean them and store them now i'm just out and about just plopping them out everywhere do not put them in your mouth yeah now you just throw them out yeah i'm done with these i'm done with you uh we're gonna take a break anyway it's it's an interesting time to be uh local and i i still real quick leo i have one question about your setup like do you have a photo of it gonzalez yes sir is it like a 90s hacker aesthetic you have going on over there or is it like or is it all in a closet it's kind of a 90s hacker aesthetic let me put it this way if the if the if the popo come knocking at the door i'm throwing everything in the microwave oven and climbing out the back no i'm kidding that's a mr robot reference um yeah it kind of has that aesthetic there's a lot of screens a lot of machines it's beastly hot in here 86 degrees jesus christ it's only 81 outside but uh air conditioning just can't control what's going on in this in this office mostly it's because of this mojo the uh the 3090 churning really hard it's good it's a four-hour job to it's actually kind of cool i found a project that takes uh your code base makes a graph out of it to speed up the frontier models looking your code base they look at the graph instead of the code base and it's much faster uh so i'm actually pretty excited about uh about that and this is where local model's great i'm not using any tokens or anything i'm doing this all uh locally and it's pretty pretty fast um i want to hear a little bit about the business model here the so you talk about well hold on let me do it okay the business models all right we do have one hard to believe uh and again i want to emphasize i actually just got a check from the irs for exactly that amount of money and i thought that's a sign lisa says don't cash that check they're going to want it back i said no they said i overpaid three years ago and they gave me my money back jeez she said they did that to me and then a year later they said oh our mistake can we get can we get it back otherwise when we want interest no i think they said if you pay us right away we won't charge you all that oh how nice of them how nice of them so i i may be spending funny money but i i'm not spent i don't i don't make enough to do this this is this is dipping into my children's inheritance um but i i i it's almost a political thing.

1:16:27I feel like I really need to do this. Plus, it's fun to have it local and have it be my own. You're in control. I think that's so much where the future is going. It's also part of my job. I mean, it's nice that I can benchmark these models locally and see and so forth. I am still looking for a good coding local model. I don't think they exist. I think you still have to go out to the real world. Our show today, anyway, we'll be back. More Intelligent Machines coming up it's the jeff jarvis rundown actually i should let you just run the show no no no no no no no no it's not a democracy well it is today since i didn't do my job uh our show today jeff jarvis paris martineau great to have you our show today brought to you by helix sleep oh man it's hot right those hot august nights what do they call them the dog days of summer it's making uh hard to get restful sleep, right?

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1:19:18Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. This offer ends August 13th. And if you're listening after the sale ends, you can still check them out at helixsleep.com slash machines. We thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. Yeah, more models just around the corner. But good on NVIDIA. it proves that we don't have to use Chinese local models uh so so the NVIDIA started the letter that now I think 250 companies have signed in favor of open weight uh everybody by the way Mark Zuckerberg also wrote a long piece on 6 ,500 words I I had to I had to have it read it to me because I was not going to spend my time but he was in support of open weights as well but that's what I understand so you just explored Meta's model is kind of okay we're behind we're gonna we catch the llama breeze again, see what's what.

1:20:13NVIDIA's model for this. I mean, he generally says the more people use AI, the more they use chips, the better. What do his customers think of this? He doesn't make money. Oh, I know what you're saying. Yeah, he doesn't make money selling inference. He sells money selling inference engines, right? So making a model that you will use his hardware better than anybody else is great. But I understand what you're saying. doesn't that piss off all the people who are buying nvidia gps but they need them too badly i mean yeah they can't what else are they gonna do they're not gonna piss them off he has a monopoly there is no other choice i mean the chinese are choosing other hardware from huawei uh big and uh xiaomi because they have to because they can't in theory they can't legally buy nvidia's chips but everybody else is snapping them up as fast as they can make them so i guess he feels like he can do this i also think he's not really threatened i mean as good as no nematron lightning is it isn't claude code it isn't you know a fable or even opus 4.8 or 4.5 even it's just you know it's a good agentic harness the fact that it failed so badly at coding is a good example glimmer is not bad glimmer is pretty good it's not bad it's not good enough that i would make it my full-time model but it's so so here's my 64 gig mac pretty pretty snapple it said you can actually run it for less but yeah yeah i don't i don't know what the minimum is yeah um there there is in general a relationship between model size and performance here's my question uh because i keep on trying to think because i'm an idiot about this stuff about the retail level of this you still have to go to you have to install it with terminal window and all that right glimmer who is is anyone going to make a locally run ii model as easy to install as an app well that's an interesting question because of course all these companies are doing their own apps perplexity computer but those call to the mothership they call the mothership and they're hoping that's what people will want and use.

1:22:25I think the really interesting challenge is enterprise at this point, because businesses are maybe sometimes legally constrained and certainly want to be private and don't want to send all their proprietary information to a frontier model. So they have to go out and pay a lot for private compute. And of course, all the big companies will sell that to you through aws or microsoft or anybody else it's very expensive but it's what they want paris do you see any consumer as a consumer do you see any need and as a reporter who cares about ai appliance yeah would you like an ai appliance would it be worthwhile to you?

1:23:12Muted. Muted. I mean, to preface, my response is not indicated, is not informed by me hating or disliking AI. But to respond, whenever I have had appliances that are connected to the internet in some way, that connection ends up being one of the immediate points of failure. It is like some update that goes poorly or a new update that's ported over that doesn't allow me to use bootlegged ink for my printer or things like that. There are just, I think whenever we, in my experience or whenever I am getting an appliance that is internet connected, it has never satisfied me in the same way as a good old fashioned brand that had worked for 20 years prior but i guess if there's an ai appliance that has longevity and is buy it for life in addition to being ai and the ai provides some sort of use that would be useful yeah i don't think these companies really incented to they really like and this is what all companies all technology companies learned it's much better to rent than to sell yeah i don't want to rent they want a laundry machine as a service right this uh the chat room's reminding me there is this there are a number of programs like this jan is one of them that is a uh it's an app you download and will let you run local models i mean the again the problem is you're going to be unhappy when you run a local model on anything less than a 128 gig mac or more yeah um that's the problem is most and people can't get these big machines anymore by the way this is mac windows and linux um and if you i mean i i tried it i i did a lot of these uh you know lm studio and things like that uh and as my first yeah i i did all you know i worked my way up very much like nicholas did you know you start with a chat bot and you kind of get more into it and you work your way up um yeah i know yeah i just don't know you at the same time you're seeing companies open ai says we have a billion users google just said we have a billion users for gemini i suspect they're including all the people using ai overviews against their will but um people there are people are interested in it i don't know so i think i think there's an opportunity here for a a retail scaled level of ai when people understand that they can make an agent without geeking out and it can do what they want it to do and they want it to be local and they want it to be private and they don't want to pay constantly they're they're tired of subscriptions all around they hate subscriptions for entertainment and they have to pay it for ai too i wouldn't be surprised in two years if nvidia doesn't sell a machine in the one to two thousand dollar range it runs a local model it's all ready to go you plug it in they have an app on your phone they have an app for all your operating systems that connect through that model and you put it in a closet i i think that's within two years for sure since it's my rundown today um i see a a transition here to tim o'reilly's uh speculation about what google's up to with its uh reorganization he calls it the westinghouse bet this was that i i mentioned there were two pivots one is microsoft saying yeah i guess we lost so we'll do something else to some degree you Google's saying yeah we're not gonna be a frontier model maybe I don't I think I think it's reading a little too much into say and saying they're giving up there but they do I think what the opportunity yeah I'll tell you before we get to Tim's much more astute analysis I think my sense of it is Google's trying to put an arrow in the sand in the distance yeah skate into the where the puck is going saying you know what okay we missed the boat on coding but you what's going to be the next big thing curing cancer uh making vaccines making new medicines so let's let's aim for that and let's take our smartest mind demisus away from day-to-day operations at deep minds and put them in charge of discovery loop which is their health lab so that was my sense that's one pocket why would they if that was their focus why would they dissolve one of the labs that was working on this wasn't that what we reported like but i think that's spin out isn't it basically it becomes the spin out instead no but all those people went to gemini well some of them went to the spin out which is going to do just that right i apologize jeff dean went to discovery loop that's his startup that's a big loss jeff dean was like google employee number 30.

1:27:59well that's what paris is asking so that's why would you keep that in the company or is is the fact that's going to be well he left and he probably left because he wasn't appreciated i don't know why i mean yeah that suggests google's investing it's not focusing a lot of time and effort into that being its differentiating factor well so but but sundar pachai's announcement said we're moving we're promoting demis right so what does dim o'reilly say about well tim o'reilly is arguing something different he's arguing a Westinghouse model that in the age of steam powered machines, you had a huge steam machine and belts would power every single thing in the building.

1:28:40And then along comes electricity and you had a huge electric motor that did the same thing. And Westinghouse said, hmm, no, we can distribute that. And you can get lots of little, as long as we get the electricity to you, we can get lots of little electric engines all over doing all this kinds of work, wherever it is. You don't have to be next to anything. Isn't that better? And that's what he thinks Google is trying to do, given that it's a consumer company and it has all of these structures of distribution and advertising and such in place, that it becomes the distribution company for AI. So I think that's what I'm reading into what Tim is saying.

1:29:15And Cecile Tamura in Facebook, who does great summaries of this thing, she did a very good summary of it, which I also have in the rundown. I think that that's, I don't think Google's given up on Frontier. I don't think they've given up on science either paris so i think you raise a really good question is why did they dismantle their nobel winning division um but i do think that the puck they're seeing ahead of them is is saying the frontiers are going to be commodities and we can get ai in the hands of more people than anybody else they already have a foot in the door with apple remember yep uh apple's going to put in effect put gemini in a billion and a half pockets so uh tim says you know the analysts are probably right google gave something up on august 5th but possibly wrong about why it's hard you know this is keep talking about how opaque these companies are we just really don't know what's going on i don't think bringing sergey brin in is necessarily a move for the better um i don't know i don't know he's been heavily involved for what the last 18 months or so yeah their efforts yeah i don't know it's an interesting uh you know it's we can only speculate this is a problem we can only speculate about what mark zuckerberg's thinking what darren dario modi amode is thinking uh although uh sam altman's thinking although you gotta judge people by their actions and that's that's i guess where i'm where i'm judging them um

1:31:01what else is going on let's see here you jeff it's your rundown well um jeff oh how let's talk about the hockey puck the mechanical hockey puck or as i call it the mechanical donut open ai this is a mark german leak from bloomberg german says open ai's first hardware device will be released next year it is a donut shaped smart speaker no display with mechanical movements inside this is so johnny ive it's coming out of his love from design firm mechanical devices inside to make you think it's thinking to make you feel like something's happening instead of it just sitting there, which is probably why it's going to cost$200 to$300.

1:31:50What does that mean? What are they? A thinking donut. The circle, this is what Mark writes, the circle-shaped device will include parts that move on their own, according to the people in the know, that will help show when it's responding and interacting with the user. The goal is to make the object feel more alive than today's stationary speaker products. Actually, let me. I love that OpenAI paid so much to get Joni Ive. And basically what he came up with is, what if we do a smart speaker like everybody else? But it's not going to be just like everybody else's. Ours is going to move so it feels different.

1:32:29And they're like, wow, that was a lot of money well spent. And Paris, you can carry it from room to room because it's a donut. You can bring your finger in it. I kind of understand what they're thinking because every time I've been designing, like I have this ESP32, when I design these things, it wakes up to, hey, Quicksilver, I have to put different things on the screen so I know, A, it heard me, and then it flips over to another screen it's thinking, and then a final screen when it's speaking so that I understand what state it's in. Otherwise, it just sits there. Well, isn't it the new Android phones, the Pixel 11 is going to basically do that, the pixel what do we call it yeah oh yes well they're gonna have they're gonna use the color bar to let you notify you of that yes I heard you right and actually that's kind of what Apple's doing with Siri the new Siri has a little blob that hovers and then you could see it's it's hearing what I'm saying because it's responding to that and when I stopped talking it's thinking and And then, so you have to kind of...

1:33:33It sounds like a animated blob avatar, Microsoft Co-Pilot. It floats on the screen, changes shape and color. To show that the assistant is listening and processing your voice, are you using Microsoft Co-Pilot? Or is this happening on a different app? Yeah, you dummy, it's happening on you. That's the new Siri. And so I understand you need some interaction cues. I don't know. This is a rumor. The product, according to, again, the rumor will have speaker grills and a microphone for fielding commands and conversing with users. Ooh, what an innovation. It's battery powered, which means you can carry it around.

1:34:15This is also battery powered. I don't have a battery on it right now. And it's, by the way, a$60 ESP32 device. But I'm just putting one on every floor so i can talk says it has a camera system it has a camera in it it says a camera system and other sensors meanwhile will perceive the surrounding environment and feed visual information into the ai that's a deal breaker ladies yeah my little my little donut that goes has little clunky robot parts has not just one camera but a camera system that's interesting i missed that uh okay well also moving parts means it can be broken easily i was going to say that's the first thing i thought when he was like those moving parts mean that that's going to get caught on stuff so quick stuff's going to get in there your cat's going to tear it apart oh the cat's gonna know something's going on man there's something in there i got a new vacuum this week and gizmo is both terrified and really trying to assert her dominance is it a robot vacuum or is it no i didn't get a robot vacuum i don't have the floor i don't have i've got too many things on my floor to have a robot vacuum i got a canister vacuum which i you know i'm right now experiencing vacuum mania which is where you get a new vacuum and especially a new type of vacuum and suddenly Consumer Reports.

1:35:47I mean, yes, but now I'm just vacuuming everything like crazy, and I feel energized by it because it's a new vacuum. Did you get it at the auction? I didn't. He's talking about it's currently the CR auction, which is a wonderful employee perk at Consumer Reports where a couple times a year we do an employee, friends, and family auction for stuff we've tested. And I was holding out for the CR auction to get a new vacuum, but I knew I wanted a canister vacuum, and I guess we didn't test it. None of the ones we've tested are in this batch. So I just got a basic kind of Kenmore. But I'm going to try.

1:36:25I got a kind of lower end model for what I was expecting to pay because I wanted to see if I want to live the canister vacuum lifestyle as a former stick vacuum person. And if I do, then I'll maybe spring for a meal. See, I always, if I were going to get a canister vacuum, I'd get a Henry. The ones that they have little faces on them and the nose is the vacuum hose that comes out. I mean, that's a great idea. I should get two big googly eyes and put it on. Yeah, you could make it a Henry. That'll really freak the cat. They actually have a Henry and they have a Hedy. I didn't know this. It's a British company.

1:36:56And they're only 149 pounds, so. Oh. Yeah. Pareidolia. Everything looks like a face to me. Wait a minute. Does that vacuum have eyelashes? That's beautiful. Isn't it? It looks like it's plotting something. It does look like it's up to something. It's looking up and to the right. Like it's... It's looking at you as you vacuum. Oh, that's fun. It's coy about it. If a vacuum doesn't work, I guess, Larry says, you can't say it sucks. You can't. It doesn't suck, which means it doesn't work. So, back to the rundown. Yes. I'm the NVIDIA$500 billion fund. I also found fascinating. They tied together a whole bunch of money to help companies buy NVIDIA's chips, which NVIDIA was doing on its own before.

1:37:57But now they've gotten this huge debt market in there. And the problem the Wall Street Journal explained was that companies couldn't afford to buy the chips. So NVIDIA needs to give them the money to buy the chips, which is circular. i don't know it's outside money now it's outside money and but nvidia still has skin in the game they both book it as income don't they and if and if the company defaults well nvidia gets hurt to an extent by that but then somebody else is going to pick up the chips there's a constant market for chips you'd buy used chips in a second oh well that's one of the reasons i didn't mind buying those sparks because they're only going to go up in value they're not going to go down right right well for at least a year or so if in a few months i go boy that was a dumb thing i just sell them and uh i'm sure i could at least get my money back uh what's interesting is this nine billion dollar deal is with bitcoin miners this is this is another deal yeah different oh this is a different one it's a different yeah yeah the nvidia is a debt market of 500 billion to securitize chips.

1:39:04To securitize chips. So that just as when United doesn't buy the jet, an entity buys the jet and leases it to United, now basically you have a mechanism to securitize chips. Now the journal argues that the problem is the chips have a short shelf life because the next chip comes out and then nobody wants that chip. But it's not as if these chips are going to become useless. They still have value in the marketplace. and and so that's that story the separate story is that anthropic uh did a deal to buy a server capacity from a bitcoin company because bitcoin well you know it's that's not today's thing yeah you know i don't i when i bought this uh rtx 3090 i bought it used on ebay i'm gonna bet that it probably was part of a bitcoin mining rig that got disassembled sold out for parts uh i was a little nervous it might be kind of uh on its last legs but it seems to be it's doing pretty well it's chugging away over there it's putting a little heat out but otherwise uh it's it's survived it's working so ben 191 megawatts of computing enough to power roughly 143 000 homes at any given moment that that bitcoin deal yeah wow to make nothing to make yes so ben thompson says that uh the nvidia deal is like the railroads of the gilded age did they make the same kinds of uh loans yeah there was a lot of of money out there i don't necessarily agree with Ben on this but um he says in 1864 Congress created the Northern Pacific Railway Company Congress did this because they wanted to link the Great Lakes and Puget Sound with tracks that would run from Duluth to Tacoma all the way from the Midwest across to the the West Coast which as you could see I mean that's something a government should invest in that's good for you know the the polity the charter included 40 million acres of land uh adjacent to the proposed line in exchange for the build-out for years six years they struggled to secure financing even as the union pacific and central pacific did the same thing that's the golden spike story uh what happened to a northern pacific did they they all went bankrupt it went bankrupt it was the great crash of 1873 was one of it's it's probably the greatest crash of all time people talk about the great depression of 1929 but 1873 there's a new book out about 18 73 called 1873 well there's one called 1929 and now there's one called 1873 yeah i should get both and just have them as bookends and then anything that happened between 1873 and i put that in the middle i don't know i don't know i don't know everybody says the uh the the crash is imminent i'm sure it is at this point it really feels like a shell game but you've got real money being invested i mean the the 2000 crash was idiot internet companies buying traffic and 2008 was banks giving bad loans 2008 was yes because they're securitized right but that was to consumers in this case you got 500 billion dollars not going to consumers they're going to companies that are desperate for this so that they can grow.

1:42:40So I don't see, I can famous last words. I don't yet see the, uh, well, this is what everybody says. What's the end game? What, how do you make that money? And I'm increasingly of the opinion that Dario and Sam, because it's this test Greal thing you talked about, uh, really believe they're creating gods that will create so much value with agi that money will be meaningless that all of this will be just you know that's the crap they believe but i think this is where i have some hope because the open weights yes yes i agree uh i also think if you have if you own the server and you have downloaded the models as long as you can still get electricity that's the that's the only thing i have to the next question is who would be from outside then it's the journal it's the same as the journalism question if all of our facts go into ai then who pays for getting the facts if all of our models are open weight and free who pays to advance the models that becomes the next question yeah do they advance at all yeah right well the chinese are going to advance them yeah because they have a different incentive they have a political incentive right the soft power incentive yep uh and and nvidia has an incentive yeah i guess you always should look at why what is it they're looking to get nvidia's incentive is to sell chips china's incentive is to wield soft power and screw america there was a video i watched on on tiktok a marxist analysis of what china is doing that i think i sent to y 'all um there was a fascinating bit above my head but arguing basically this is the next stage of capitalism and that it's it's part of a lot it's not just this is a canny business move it's not political it's it's it's not business it's political yes but how is that capitalism it's because you get to the end stage of capitalism oh it's to take down capitalism yeah it's to get you what's next which is marxism so it's religion after religion yeah they're still marxists that's that's what struck me about this i thought they'd kind of given up on it and they're just capitalists now um but no it's to an end to an end i didn't get that workers of the world unite coders of the world unite a u.s appeals court has uh struck down the injunction that blocked perplexity from using its ai shopping agents on amazon we've been talking about this amazon said how dare they we've got our own ai and if you use perplexity you may never see the ads on the amazon site uh amazon sued perplexity it said because its ai agents log into customer accounts and place orders the court ruled that users themselves were accessing amazon through their agents not the ai company so it isn't they were using the federal computer fraud act to pursue this.

1:45:38Amazon. Well, you might have to find another venue.

1:45:45Why can't they just ban access to it? Oh, because it looks like a customer. That's why. Because that was the clever move perplexity made. They're using your browser to log in as you and search around. You know, they probably are fingerprints. There are probably ways that they could tell, but maybe they're not reliable enough. actually i really like it because one of the things amazon has started doing i don't know if you've seen it lately that pops up a sidecar on your amazon page and one of the first thing it has this little amazon what do they call it rusty or whatever it's amazon what is it rufus rufus one of the things rufus will do is show you price history i used it the other day to see how much hard drives have come that is the only useful feature an ai agent that pops up in the recitable web page has ever given me on the internet.

1:46:38That's a good one. Ever. I know. I'm saying it's the only useful feature. I normally completely tune them out because now every website has something go boop boop and it's intolerable. It's replaced the previous intolerable thing, which is those little chatbots. You want to talk? You got a question? I mean, those chatbots are still there, but they're just AI. Another AI. What do you want? What do you want? You could talk to an agent. so the uh danish schools think they've found a solution to ai cheating you're gonna i think this is brilliant you're gonna have to if you're a high school in denmark you'll have to make an oral defense just like uh you know a phd thesis uh of your papers to prove that you actually understand them and wrote them a verbal defense will be needed for all exams written at home I think that's great.

1:47:30Yeah. Yeah. It's from the Danish Ministry of Education. High schools will also use a firewall to keep you students from accessing content to get an advantage. How dare they?

1:47:48The issue becomes, so I wrote a course syllabus that I didn't teach but was taught at Stony Brook. and the last section of it had 450 students so you can't congratulations well yeah but the scale as they say but you can't imagine doing oral recitation no I think by college at least the expectation should be you're there because you want to learn this is the problem is that college has become instead a certification factory yes so that you can get a job because you have the piece of paper but what it really should be is in the original idea of a collegium a place for scholars together to learn from one another and if you're there to learn then you certainly aren't going to use a shortcut you're going to do everything you can to learn that was my attitude opportunity graduate school you're here for graduate school you're here for a purpose undergrad is a little bit different i was talking to a professor at seton hall this week and i you You always ask, what about AI in your classes?

1:48:53And he was empathetic to his students because they want to do well. They want to do well, and they're under a time pressure. I don't know if you saw the story this week. I'm curious what both of you think about this. The University of Michigan is eliminating grades for the first semester for students. Not for all classes, for some, I thought. Oh, is it? Oh, I missed that, Paris. Say more. I mean, I literally scanned across the headline within the last two or three hours and saw that. Let me look it up.

1:49:25my understanding is that it is something like that it's trying to find it here i mean the aim is so the students will experiment more they'll be less freaked out they're mainly so they're they won't get for their mental health which says something about grades it's a so starting in fall 2027 students entering specifically the university's college of literature science and arts will receive pass or no credit marks on their transcripts for the first semester instead of traditional letter grades their actual grades will still be kept internally it's a pilot program so you're still getting grades you just don't get to know yeah it's a pilot program intended to ease academic pressure helping freshmen adjust to college and helping them start strong and curb up their mental and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college age how does that help if there are covert grades being assigned which are going to be on your transcript now it's even worse now i don't know i don't know what's gonna be your transcript i don't think it will yeah they say it's lsa first semester grade covering pilot program beginning in fall 2027 the college will designate all first year students first semester grades as pass or no credit on the transcripts so it's the other way around they will tell you your grade but it won't be on the transcript yeah while the students will still receive grades and instructor feedback in every course as they always have final grades will not be recorded on the external transcript it will not be reflected in their gpas yeah some students will still be motivated by grades you know but it doesn't it's not on your primary record my dad started teaching at university of california santa cruz in 1971 everything was pass fail that was a that was a great that was a hippie school hippie school but it was the trend in america was to do the only classes i ever designated pats fail were in my first semester of college because that was the semester where i thought i wanted to do pre-med neuroscience and then quickly realized no no no chemistry not what i want was that what was the killer course paris organic chemistry yeah i was just like i don't want to be doing this amount of math in combination with science and so i was like rather than you know once i figured that i was like i'm just gonna do a pass fail on it and then focus on other things rather than spending it was one of those kind of weed out courses that It required like 20 hours of extra work outside of the class just to study independently.

1:52:02And I was like, I don't have time for this. That's OK. That's OK. It's OK. Apparently, Benito was also weeded out unless you're a physician, Benito, and just slumming. I was on a path and like, yeah, organic chemistry is not fun. Everybody says that. I knew I couldn't do it. You know, it's funny. For me, it was geology. My father's a geologist. And I thought, oh, this is great. I'll take a class in geology. How hard can it be? It's rocks. And I went to the class, and the professor said, oh, you're Leo Laporte's son. We'll expect great things of you. Uh-oh. Oh, no. And then it got hard. I dropped out.

1:52:49I said, yeah, no geology for me. I was wrong. University of Michigan has some interesting context on here, which is that a lot of other colleges do this. MIT in 1968 implemented PASS, no record first year grading. Same with Wesley and Swarthmore College and California Institute of Technology. I don't know. Sounds, but I think it's wrong to try and conflate it with AI, which I feel like a lot of people had online. I hadn't read the full thing. It seems like it's for mental health, which I think is reasonable. A lot of students get very stressed, and this could be a useful way for them to kind of experiment and take courses and figure out what they like.

1:53:33You know, the hospital in Berkeley, Alta Bates, clears a bunch of beds in their mental ward for exam time at UC Berkeley. Jesus. Because they expect a number of people to show up. That's grim. yeah isn't that we do our kids our own kids yeah well that's stressful it really is and that's that's the problem of focusing on the outcome the certificate as the the degree as opposed to the pleasure and joy of learning and it's actually kind of why i dropped out because i was much more interested in taking my time and reading books and learning things uh and i was surrounded by a lot of pre-med and pre-law students and it just seemed like it was a grind instead of a pleasure a joy now i just sit up in my sweltering hot attic and type at the keyboard and talk to my little friends at my own pace i might add oh moose espionage gets the pun of the week he said uh the rock class was hard the material wasn't very nice.

1:54:44G-N-E-I-S-S. So, in Good AI, line 45, Google debuts SL2T, the AI model designed to understand the sign language. Oh, isn't that cool? It is so cool. That's a visual model. If you look at this, yeah, there you go. How cool. Yeah. it so that would become a first step in simultaneous translation of ASL yep nice yep see it's it's another language wow that's great I wish I knew more of it but I can't do any languages yeah it's going to be on the pixel 11 tell us about the new phone I did not watch the pixel event I was busy I don't think I compared the models before we got on and there's really not much new i know i have a pixel 9 and i feel i didn't feel a compulsion upgrade last year and i don't feel a compulsion upgrade this year i skipped from the 6 to the 10.

1:55:47yeah yeah if you're in a way old model maybe but the 10 is going to be fine for years and it's better but the 6 was actually okay but it's also partly driven by the fact that the the ram and storage are hard to come by these days Yeah, I couldn't figure out what affected the price. What effect it had on the price. Did it go up a lot? Yeah, I don't know. If we go to the store, hold on. I'm going to go to my Google Fi store because I have a Google Fi account. And they often have good prices on new stuff. I'm saving my pennies for the folding iPhone, which I'm probably going to bitterly regret. the folding phones i go into the best buy and i fondle them the samsung ones yeah pretty amazing yeah i have a samsung the what the thing i like about the rumored new apple phone which will be by the way we're like three months three weeks away from that it's probably september 9th or uh yeah is the foldable apple phone coming in this one or is it coming in the thing that they're announcing i think at the beginning of next year i thought there were two the the so there will be an iphone 18 that they will nothing i don't know i can't remember yes there will be a phone next year but the high-end phones are september probably september 9th so probably three weeks from now and um it's a passport it's a different it's a square it's an aspect ratio of more like a passport that opens up to roughly an iPad mini, which I love.

1:57:21Samsung has that mini, I think. Samsung, yes. Samsung, I think, is making the screens for the Apple. And they thought, well, as long as we got them. So they jumped. I don't know how happy Apple would have been. I don't know. Apple couldn't say anything because they haven't announced a phone. They never do until the day. So they can't really say, hey, we were going to do that. But anyway, Samsung, yeah, I think this is very much like what Apple is doing. In fact, Baral Heady, who has the new Samsung Passport phone, says this is a really nice form factor. Now, here's the other problem. Apparently, Samsung has figured out a way to do a creaseless folding phone, and they're going to put that out in a few months.

1:58:02And Apple apparently maybe jumped a little too soon. So the Pixel 10 is now$799. The Pixel 11 is$899. uh the 11 if i bought it from google fi is 449 and 5.99 for the that's with it that's with a trade it no yeah it says retail price i don't know maybe it is okay yeah this is yes you know what if you compare if you go on that page and you compare the 11 to the 10 there's virtually nothing changed yeah it's a different color they have a nice pink this well we don't call it pink oh what do we call it oh i don't know uh canyon

1:58:54canyon olive fog and obsidian and look at that starts at 256 gigs for 749 bucks so let me see should i get a i'm not gonna get one but let's say let's just see eyes no that's not with a i don't know how they do i guess it's because i'm a fi customer it's like 500 bucks off yeah that's if you have it's without the phone huh it's a five because i'm a five customer yeah yeah see it's good to be it's good to be a fly customer live love you to google oh you have to stay active on five for 120 days to save that instant how many months is that four months four months jeff thank you you can see why i didn't go to okay you should have tried geology it's a it's a easy gut course we say it rocks gut yeah it rocks you're watching intelligent machines jeff jarvis pettis martino great to have you both um and uh let's see let's continue on shall we paris did Do you have some stuff from your end of the rundown?

2:00:04Yes. Let me go down to France. Now I'm feeling bad. I didn't do my job. This is fun. It's fun. It's like kids' table. I love being able to talk about things. There was a really interesting story. I mean, this isn't directly AI related. But there was an interesting story this week about Phoebe Gates' app, the FIA shopping app, that had previously been kind of implicated for, it's one of those kind of apps like, or software programs like Honey that lives as a browser extension and is supposed to, I guess, help users save money on transactions by finding coupons. There had been kind of a big expose some months ago that it had basically been kind of circumventing what is typically allowed for those companies to do and basically taking a cut of every transaction, whether or not people had engaged it at all.

2:01:02And the defense from the co-founders, which includes Bill Gates' daughter. Oh, that's who Phoebe Gates is. Yeah, it's Bill Gates. This is the Bill Gates' daughter company. Who has plenty of money, I might add. Yeah, the defense from the co-founders was, well, we didn't know this was happening at all. We didn't, you know, intend for this type of deal. It was a complete mistake. We're remedying it right now. So Bloomberg published the Slack transcripts. The two co-founders both were told it's happening and were like, yeah, go for it. And it's a delight. It's a really delicious story because they have just like verbatim the full Slack transcripts of both the co-founders, including Phoebe Gates.

2:01:47It's like basically in one case of this, an engineer, like they're asking an engineer to do some, to do the thing I just described. And the engineer is like, yeah, but that would be against compliance, right? We're not supposed to do that, right? Isn't that against compliance? And they go do it anyway. Wow. And they have transcripts of that? literally basically somebody sent bloomberg the screenshots of slack the slack and they remade them which is honestly incredibly good journalistic opsec because you never want to send post the slack screenshots but you can recreate them fully like this in text don't put it in writing kids don't put your don't put your crimes in writing One of the big stories at Black Hat, which I went to after our show last week, was, of course, that hugging face incident.

2:02:46And OpenAI had two security researchers go through it step by step. And it was mind boggling. I said it was both simultaneously the most exhilarating and terrifying thing I never heard. They were so good and so sneaky. and the funny thing is shortly after open ai said yeah this is our new model uh astra did that anthropic said yeah ours did too we have three of them and now meta says ours did too meta's like my child can commit crimes as well we've got bad boys yeah we've got a crime child will you date me now that i'm a bad boy meta not a nerd i'm wearing a leather jacket meta has confirmed that one of its ai models reached the open internet by exploiting a vulnerability during a security evaluation the incident which involved a misconfiguration during testing by an ai security firm probably the same one by the way open ai and anthropic both were using the same security firm closely mirrors the same the uh disclosures by open ai and anthropic so i wonder if we can find out what the firm is because if it's the same one then there's something going on here.

2:04:01Oh, it is irregular. okay okay so all three companies contracted with this outside vendor to test the capabilities of their model Well, they found out the capabilities. It worked. So no one's talking to this vendor? Like all three of these companies worked with these people? No one's talking to them? Yeah. Reporters, you mean? Yeah. Well, speaking of Black Hat, line 109, Wired is a bit chagrined because an online-only news company, not unlike Nicholas's, wasn't at Black Hat, but watched the video like everybody else. And Runtime Wire got a story up about that presentation three hours before Wired.

2:04:55I wasn't at the presentation only because I was doing Windows Weekly at the time, but I immediately, when I got home, got back to the hotel, watched it. I watched it with Lisa, uh and it is an incredible story but it is it lost me in a few spots i didn't know enough yeah i sent it to you guys generally generally yes there's some jargon you know ssrfs and things but you know among other things uh the rogue agent at open ai created a message board with other agents at open ai almost out of an altruistic motive saying you have a message board and so So they kludged a way to have messages. That's what amazed me most.

2:05:36And according to the security researchers, the premise was, well, we don't know if these other guys will be able to help us. Or we don't know if the things we found will help them. But what if we put it on a message board? Maybe somebody will find it useful and help us. The message board, which took advantage of a zero day in Artifactory, a coding tool that's used at OpenAI, was discovered. They shut it down. They told Artifactory about the zero day. artifact repatched it the agents did it again they create a new message board but this time because they couldn't make like a real message board they used file names and folder names as the messages they changed file names to be a message you know i didn't want this to happen with my guys so i gave them a message board of their very own you're just like yeah let's cut the middleman yeah why should i you know i know you're going to do it so i'm just going to do it for you so related to the um online journalist right above that is a great story good on them for doing that i mean yeah i don't see a problem i think we've got it we've got it and as long as it's to paris's point as long as it's transparent you know the source and you can judge it you know what i really wanted to do and i just i it was too much work and i'm lazy was to take that video and take little clips from it and kind of explain it and talk about it by now it's kind of old hat so i i but the other reason i didn't do it is because the chilling effect of google and youtube i know if i play clips even though that is an absolutely journalistic standard to play clips and explicate them that we would get taken down on youtube i see other podcasts that do video you do it and they don't get taken down that's what you are targeted because no it's just it's automatic it's a content id i think some people i don't think it's in some cases i think they they just well in some cases it's not apple it wasn't it was an attorney but right but uh but uh yeah i mean i think it's perfectly legitimate to take that video which is owned by black hat by the way a sponsor it's owned by black hat and take little excerpts and explicate it that's fair use clearly but i ain't going to court to defend it oh so good on runtime wire yes that they got scooped yeah maybe those kind of um immediate stories fine let the ad do it it's an easy thing for you to do you can look at the video can get a transcription it can it's the same as the town meetings yeah it's the same thing yeah so the story above that i love i saw it just before we got on david corn who's a wonderful washington an investigative reporter for Mother Jones.

2:08:22I know his name, yeah. You've just read stuff by him, I don't doubt it. So he's sitting around with a friend talking about AI and bemoaning, as he said in here, the future of writing and so on and so forth. And he and his friends said, well, could it write a novel? And he did a clever prompt. A struggling writer who has had five novels rejected turns to an AI chatbot to write a novel. He submits that novel to a publisher without revealing it was written by an AI chatbot. It is accepted and goes on to become a bestseller. No one knows it was written by AI. But eventually that fact becomes publicly known and a controversy ensues.

2:08:56The writer that writes a book about that experience. If Anthropocene says this way, you wouldn't be able to get away with that. So he went to Claude and he gave the novel to Claude. And Claude wrote the first - By the way, it was a paragraph prompt. It's not a long prompt. Yes, it's nothing. And he said the story, at first he did a short, basically a short story. He said, well, that's not enough for a novel. So it came back and it did a longer story. and David read it and he said, it's actually pretty good. It's actually pretty clever. They had the writer not have the first book written entirely by AI.

2:09:28It was collaborative, but still got exposed, still write the next book and so on and so forth. And it's a really well-written story by David and you can read the novel. And I kind of appreciate how he said, yeah, it's not bad. i like claude's response to the initial prompt that's a fantastic premise it's got layers of irony commentary on the publishing industry and a real timeliness to it let me write this for you i did pick a good name the ghost in the machine i think that's a decent name not great but it's decent yeah yeah it's kind of decent is probably how you would describe all of it not not stellar very you know what there are a hell of a lot of novels novels out there that are just at best decent and they're written by actual human beings the protagonist is ethan moss a 41 year old failed novelist who lives in an apartment in astoria queens he's divorced from dana a lawyer who resides in suburban new jersey with her nine year old daughter sophie even if it has a cat named bellow get it oh uh and on and on and on um it's like saw bellow by the way e-l-l-o-w yeah so anyway i just wanted to point that out because i think it's a fun story and it it makes us ask you know what's the nature of creativity uh if it amuses you if it gives you the story you wanted to read is it so bad well and again um if you you couldn't use claude to make that because it would immediately be fingerprinted as a clawed generated content so i saw i couldn't figure out who did it so i couldn't verify this but in tiktok somebody said they put moby dick into one of the detection machines and came up 12 ai and 20 ai assisted yeah it's very hard to identify although i i flatter myself i've seen so much AI writing now far too much for any human uh I can I almost immediately recognize it in fact uh did they did they publish Dario's uh comments to the Congress because it's it felt to me very AI written I wonder how much Mark Zuckerberg's piece was both and then 6 500 words of it i i don't know why everybody was freaking out over the length of it tech boys are publishing long diet tribes forever it was a word salad it had interesting things to say but his op-ed which was a condensation of that pretty much said it all the way before which is probably what means it was ai written right i had it i i had in the app read it to me is I took my morning constitutional.

2:12:22That's the future. Yep. Other people are listening to fascinating things. I'm listening to Mark Zuckerberg about saving the world with his AI. In his voice or no? No, no, no. And the weird thing was, it couldn't say AI. It always said aye-aye.

2:12:38All right, one more break and then your picks of the week. Paris Martineau, Jeff Jarvis. Special thanks to Nicolas DeLeon who joined us to talk about what he's doing. A lot. Really interesting stuff. We're glad you're here. This is Intelligent Machines. All right. Picks of the week time. We start with Paris, right? Paris. Yep. I've got a silly little game that came across my blue gay feed, and I'm bringing it to you before it's bought by the New York Times or Politico. It's called playyayorne.com, and it's a game called yay or nay where every day you can vote it gives you uh five senators and you get a little description of them and then you click in and it gives you three bills that they all voted on you have to guess whether they voted yay or nay oh that's hard it is hard and it's kind of fun so it gives you the time of it um i've got a i've already played today so i've got to open it up in a all right well let jeff and i play because you know we we follow yeah you followed this we should be really good so it's the class of 2008 five senators four of whom all want the same promotion you got barack obama hillary clinton john mccain joe biden and bernie sanders the first one is minimum wage increases this is february 2007.

2:14:11say yay nay he says barack obama voted yay i was gonna what that hillary clinton nay this is what i'm saying john mccain nay joe biden nay bernie bernie sanders yay so what do you think do you agree with me jeff or no i'm gonna say barack obama nay yeah he was you think that right as you know um this is 2007 you think he was a freshman because this is also the time of bill clinton after bill clinton people try to be reasonable and middle middle road i mean they're both you know they're like four of these people are vying for the nom you're trying to give me you don't think any of them are i'm just trying i'm trying to give both sides you know the trick one is the trick one is gonna be john mccain what do you bet because he's a maverick in this case well we know bernie said yay all right that could be the trick should we say mccain yay yeah there's a trick all right let's try it uh oh okay we missed all of them was the only got right is uh mccain was john they were all yay they were they all voted for it oh well so you got McCain and 94 to three.

2:15:26You guys were thinking through today's political lens back then. Yeah. And by the way, the minimum wage was$5 and 15 cents and they raised it to$7 and 25 cents. But it was a 94 to three passage. Yeah, that that was a different era. Yeah. See, it's kind of fun. Then we go, the next one is Iraq war funding. No timeline. It's just a delightful look into the past and you kind of get to they change up who the five senators are every day it's kind of fun it feels like the distant past doesn't it it feels like it was well 20 years it could have been abe lincoln's congress it is 20 years okay that's one whole voting person's lifetime yay or nay uh i got an interesting uh pick for you this is a simulator of the of the The Voyager 1 computer, Voyager 1, is now a light day away.

2:16:26The farthest any man-made object's ever been. In fact, the good news, we talked about it on Sunday, is they have figured out to get it to last yet another year. It's running on a plutonium generator that is really running low. But they've managed by shutting things down to keep it working. And it does have a pretty rudimentary computer on it. Not a lot of memory. not a lot of processing, but you can write code in Voyager FDS Assembly, the flight data subsystem, and you can even run the code, and they even have examples. So let's see if we can get to countdown from 1 to 10. It's machine code. This would actually be kind of interesting if you're curious about early computers, because remember, this was launched in 1977.

2:17:16You can put it on your Spark, Leo. i'm sure this is ai generated i'm i have no doubt whatsoever uh but what a great way to celebrate the most amazing that is what year did it go up 1977. wow different era again it will be 50 years next year we liked science and it's going to make it to its 50th birthday it takes so long to get there it takes now 37 hours and 26 minutes to get a signal there so if you wrote this program you would press send, and it would go for almost a day and a half, more than a day and a half. Then it would run it and send you the result for another. Three days later, you'd find out if it counted down from one to 10.

2:18:01Oh, brother.

2:18:06I just, kind of an interesting history. An 806 kilohertz computer, which for 77 is probably pretty fast. uh it had 8k of 16-bit memory so in our modern parlance that'd be actually 16k of memory uh it had uh kind of just a couple of registers your l2 cache is bigger than that yeah yeah absolutely uh and it was based on it's really cool i think it was done by ai because it was It was based on scanned JPL documentation of this computer from 1974. It's in the Wichita State University Special Collections. And so you can see that the guy who wrote this scanned these in, interpreted them, and turned it into a computer simulation.

2:19:02We live in marvelous times, man. Jeff Jarvis, picture, or sorry, pick of the week. So one little thing is Google on, since I use Chrome, you don't, Leo, so you can't use this. But a major change in my life is that you can now put the tabs on the side. I love vertical tabs. I am a vertical tab. That's a big thing. So now you can read the whole thing. You hate it. I hate it, but I'm happy for you. I hate when I open, when I use a different browser on mobile and the tabs are not at the top. It's just too ingrained. Well, on mobile, they should be on the top. I'm still getting used to it. On a widescreen laptop or desktop, you got all this room on the left and right.

2:19:46Listen, I know. I know that logically they shouldn't be up there. But in my heart, in the heart that exists both in the top, that's where they go. Who would think she's such an old fart? Who would think that? I hated vertical tabs for a long time. I've only been a recent convert. Well, I don't think you could do it on Chrome before, but now you can. Oh, yeah. Can you? You can. Okay, good. You can now. All right. So that's that. congratulations jeff welcome to 1979 no what else so the other one is bmw owners angry at spider-man ad that they got on their car screen they could this is infuriating i'm not a car owner and i'm mad they shouldn't be allowed to just put an ad in the car you bought that you spent a fortune on it's a beamer which models was it because i didn't get it and i'm very upset um maybe i haven't got it yet they push it down they do it over the air updates and i have received in the past like a christmas uh thing that kind of stuff crazy you yeah well tesla started it you know tesla pushes all sorts of crap to the tesla yeah can you are there ads on teslas not ads though but things like i loved this there was a christmas display on the model x it would play manheim steamroller music really loud through the speakers and it would flap the wings and the lights would go like this and it was very festive yes it's not an ad but it also is you think about it using bandwidth and memory on your on your car i know so i'm not sure yeah i mean you shouldn't be putting ads on there at all but b bmw they're the ones who wanted to charge you rent to have heated seats so bmw said it was a special surprise for their drivers it's it's like apple giving you um youtube an album you didn't ask yeah it's a special special surprise it's more about the someone else taking control of your device and putting something that you didn't want that's really right that's what it comes down to right unacceptable well and it the thing is it's sort of an ad but it's an ad how it it's spider-man in your car that's this is what a cultural moment spider-man in your car to promote a movie that's an ad so but it's not like is it well i don't know because i didn't get it is it just like an ad place or is is it a little cool thing where spider-man is like in your dashboard and he's doing things okay imagine spider-man is ronald mcdonald is that an ad now now i don't want it you're right uh the banner touting the film appears in the car started if you wanted to see the ad you have to click the full video yeah i don't i don't really like that no i just don't i don't know why i didn't get it maybe maybe you're hurt you wanted i'm hurt i'm hurt by the way it's a joint thing because in the movie there's product placement for bmw tom holland finds himself in a random civilians bmw i hope this isn't a spoiler and the driver activates the car's sport mode before they drive off i hollywood's dead it's just dead have you have you seen did i tell you i yeah i didn't like it you didn't like it i haven't been able to get tickets anywhere i mean because you're trying to go to the full well i've been trying to go to the imax i've been trying to go to nighthawk i refuse to go to alamo because i will never support a company that changes its policies to promote cell phone use during films but i don't know it's hard it's hard out there for someone who wants to see the odyssey Where do you draw the line, Paris?

2:23:38Where I draw the line is I like seeing movies. And I would go to the Alamo because they're showing it in 70 millimeter. And that would be a great way to see it. But they made it so that you can't write your order on a piece of paper anymore. You have to open your phone and type stuff in to order everything. So when you go there, it's just a sea of people on their phones the whole movie. And that's part of the experience now. And why would I ever subject myself to that? Waiters coming in disturbing watching the movie. That drives me nuts. I think Nighthawk does it really well. They're the original, they're the originator of that.

2:24:13Yeah. Nighthawk was the first like dine-in sort of movie. Do they have the troughs in front of you so that the weight is low so it doesn't block the movie? No, they have the trough where you sit down and they just like put out a bunch of pig feed and then you all kind of pick it up with your hands throughout the movies. That kind of trough. It's queens, you know. I only went to the Alma once in Austin and I loved it. I thought it was so cool. not just the food but just nighthawk is like alamo but indian cool and cool kind of edgy did alamo alamo probably got bought i'm gonna go see uh steve buscemi at alamo or at nighthawk this week oh in person in person yeah he's doing a q a so did you see it leo have you seen odyssey no tell me why you don't like it so i'm gonna come off philistine how do you feel about uh nolan films first generally and i have no particular opinion and i haven't seen i still haven't seen oppenheimer i enjoyed oppenheimer on the oppenheimer one of the greatest moves so i'm just i'm the other question paris is how am i on myths and um legends legends not good not good anti-fan of oral history as yeah you know i understand it had its place this is going to sound one wine dark sea you've This is going to sound really bad, but I'm going to say it.

2:25:32The problem is it's the same reason I can't stand Harry Potter. It's deus ex machina. Things are getting a little boring, so let's have a Cyclops. It's literally. Yeah, that's what it is. It is deus ex machina. That's the beginning of it all, right? And so I think that it may have worked in its time, but as a modern movie, it just bored me. I was looking on my watch. Yeah. I'm pretty lonely. Have you ever seen Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Oh, that's the Odyssey, isn't it? that's the odyssey also but it's the uh cohen's odyssey and it also led to a revival of folk music in america oh yes we did that whole movement was excellent blind boys from alabama what a great movie you know i wouldn't recommend it for you jeff because you don't enjoy the odyssey and it's also the odyssey but it's a great you know i've been on my cohen it's loosely it's loosely the i i mean it's still very much the odyssey until the criterion collection said here's our collection of odyssey based films how do you not know there's a cyclops no but it's a cyclops there's sirens there's there's there's a flood there's all the odyssey i wasn't paying attention i just thought there's a nice movie i like it i like seeing some anybody turned into pigs wait isn't there a card at the top that says this is based on the odyssey yes there is as a matter of fact i just wasn't looking at that moment george clooney food on my phone probably you got some of the weirdest looking guys you've ever seen in that film they are john goodman does some great stuff he's a southern lawyer cyclops i'd really recommend oh brother that's my pick of the week no he's got if no but that's a cyclops he's a cyclops in the context of that world i get it yeah Yeah.

2:27:22Have we done it all? You know what I saw, though, that was great? Is it the invite or the invitation? The invite. I got to see that. It's really good. It's really good. My pitch, actually, for you listeners out there is, so I'm still on my Cohen kick, I watched Barton Fink, and I need to watch it again, but I'm like, well, I want to watch it on, I want to get a Blu-ray and watch it. So I'm like, all right, you know, I'll go to my local Blu-ray store. It's got all these rentals. You must live in Brooklyn, kid. I know. I went to Williamsburg for it. They didn't have that. So then I'm like, all right, I'll go online.

2:27:54I'll go. I know it's a Kino Lorber release. I'll get it from there. Sold out. This was re-released on Blu-ray in 2017. Does not exist for sale online unless you go on eBay and spend like five times more than the regular price for it. Barton Fink is not available for purchase on Blu-ray anywhere. So if you're out there and you're a listener and you know where I can get Barton Fink for maybe a two times markup, I'd be willing to pay twice as much. I'm not willing to pay three to five times a markup for a disc. So you stream it like a normal human. Well, I was hanging out with a friend and he illegally downloaded the Kina Lorber cut, but I don't have that technology.

2:28:38Oh, there are different cuts? well it's it's not a it's like the um it's the same cut but i think it's it's the way that it was formatted and like processed for digital um on it but i mean i would i love goodman uh i love to toro i that's a crazy goodman movie have you seen that movie yeah i just didn't i don't think i got it i mean that's why i gotta watch it again that's the art film that that's a true art film that the cohen's made the other ones are all like sort of plays on um genre and this one is sort of like there i would say this was a movie where you know you're watching through it and you're like wow this is very different than the other cohen movies there's not like kind of a central crime it's not a pastiche of a genre specifically and then one thing happens and you're like oh this is a kind of traditional cohen movie but no way i wasn't expecting and then you're like oh this is a david lynch film and that's what i'm into that's exactly what i was going to say i know it's a cohen movie that in the middle turns into a david lynch film in a way which goes to your heart i mean it's about it's a movie ultimately as i've been thinking over last week is that it's a movie about how hollywood is hell oh yeah that's that's the common interpretation a lot of movies like that by the way that's a very popular hollywood trope paris martineau is at consumer reports where she covers a variety of things i should have probably put my random story uh avoid jalapenos i know it's taylor farms again well it yes and no oh it's not yes taylor farms issued a recall but unlike so what we're talking about is i'll put this in the chat a link here um like dozens of different prepared foods with jalapenos in it were recalled this week for salmonella it was like prepared like fresh foods and things like that and a lot of them were prepared by Taylor Farms.

2:30:30But unlike with the lettuce, this isn't grown and processed by Taylor Farms. Taylor Farms is like the middleman distributor for this. This was grown by a totally kind of different company and distributed by it. It's like called citrus something. It's not cyclospora this time. It's salmonella, which is worse. I mean, cyclospora is worse. But salmonella can kill you. Salmonella can kill you. So salmonella can be worse. Cyclospora will take a long time. Not bad, but you die. I mean, well, in both cases, the risk, because both have now had deaths. There's been two deaths towards cyclospora. The risk is dehydration because the symptoms could be similar.

2:31:10But basically, the problem with this outbreak is that these were jalapenos that were produced en masse by kind of a no-name distributor and then used in a bunch of different companies' prepared foods. Even trying to write about this recall story, I was like, I can't literally list all the products and places it was sold because there's so many. It was sold in Albertsons, Dillon's, H-E-B, Hannaford, Kroger, Publix, Racetrack, Randall's, Whole Foods, Walmart, Wawa, a bunch of different - What about wholesale to places like Taco Bell and Chipotle? Right. I mean, it was also sold to how this outbreak first started is these jalapenos were used at Chipotle and at Codoba restaurants.

2:31:54But they've since, because that's where most of the identified cases have come from, they've since pulled that from their stores. Chipotle is using a different jalapeno place. Codoba isn't selling jalapenos at all right now. But yeah, it's just, we don't right now know. They're still trying to figure out where all these jalapenos went. So, the advice CR's food experts are giving is to avoid jalapenos of unknown origin in prepared foods. It's basically like if you're getting a, like a, the things these were found in were like pre-made burritos or like fresh salsa dip or pico de gallo or guacamole sold like unbranded at stores.

2:32:35Like if there's. Boiled beef. Yeah. It's like if there's like. Really bland. If there's something that's like fresh and pre-made and it contains jalapenos, maybe don't get that. Like maybe, you know, make chop, get a jalapeno list one and add your own jalapenos in it that you get at the store. but yeah it's kind of it's crazy well that's that hey that's your tech that's your uh safe another week uh you've been watching intelligent machines paris martino jeff jarvis his book is out go get it jeffjarvis.com you can order it there delivered soon what is glr is our code still good is our code still good i think it is till the end of the month or something yes and That gets you a little discount if you go to JeffGarrow.com.

2:33:24G-L-R-B-D. I'm trying to make an arrangement with a bookstore so that some people have actually asked for autographed books. Oh. So I'm trying to go to a local bookstore and say, if you order from this bookstore, I'll go and autograph them. I used to just go in the store and sign them. Well, there's that, but I want to be able to tell people where to go. And in my fantasies, I thought, oh, somebody's going to get this and go, wow, Leo signed it. well this store that i'm dealing with said we can't return autograph books i said i thought that was a myth they said no oh that's interesting it is you can't tear the cover off and send it back huh let's have the cover it's the title page all right everybody thank you for being here we do intelligent machines every wednesday 2 p.m pacific 5 p.m eastern 2100 utc uh you can watch us live on Facebook.

2:34:13Yeah, LinkedIn, Facebook, x.com, Twitter, Twitch, x, Facebook, YouTube, and kick. And next week, we were talking maybe about having Christina Warren on. I don't know if we've arranged that yet, Benito, or not. Not yet. We do have a recorded segment we're going to be doing. I don't know. We'll find out who's next week and let you know in the newsletter. If you don't subscribe, that's a great way to find out what's coming up on all of our shows. It's free, twit.tv slash newsletter. Very pretty now. They've really graphically jazzed it up. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show are available at twit.tv slash IM.

2:34:53There's a YouTube channel as well. And, of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it auto-magically. Thanks for being here, everybody. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machine. If you like what you heard and you want more of this week's top stories in tech, well, subscribe to Tech News Weekly. Every Thursday, I talk with the journalists making and breaking the tech news.