IM 884: Cyber Jim - Why Critical Infrastructure Depends on Obsessive Code Reviews

30:31There's no fix for this. It's really stupid. You must have the cameras at the front of the car that are looking down the road have to be placed ahead of where a human's head would be because that's how they designed intersections. It's not an accident that when you street all the way forward you can see. It's because there's some road engineer or city official or something who's deciding where you can park cars and where the bushes can be to make sure that humans can see enough. And if they can't, they'll call up the department or there'll be a bunch of accidents at that intersection and somebody will fix it eventually.

31:08So the intersections are designed for people and for humans to be able to see past these problems. But this poor guy that we have an advantage, we can lean forward in our seat, but the cameras can't and they're in the wrong place. And so what it does is it often just sort of pushes out into traffic to get far enough out that it can see, but it's already going into the oncoming lane, and if you do very unfortunate timing, there could be somebody coming from the left really fast, 50 miles an hour, and you can't see them, and you put your nose out into the road so you can see, you'll get hit. A human driver can do that intersection every time.

31:52It just can't. They designed it wrong. They put the camera in the wrong place. There are a bunch of issues like that. As bad as that is, the damage is somewhat limited compared to what you talked about earlier, the problems of the electric grid. Why have you focused on Tesla instead of what is clearly an imminent, clear and imminent danger with our electrical grid or our water systems or all sorts of infrastructure? Well, we do. I mean, we do focus on the power grid. It is part of it. But also, one of the problems that I have is people will say, well, it's not, you know, I say it's not secure.

32:31How am I supposed to demonstrate? They'll say it is secure. And I'll say it's not. And yeah, yeah, yeah. How do we find out? Well, I don't know. I could hire some people to hack into the power grid, but that's against the law. If I hacked into there or my own people hacked into there, I could be arrested for hacking in their system. Right. so i can't do that but i can buy a tesla right and i can show that it does terrible things it's killed 60 people the the um the pinto deaths remember the pintos back in the 70s unsafe at any speed the corvairs the pintos with the exploding gas tanks in the rear yeah the total number of fatalities are less than the number with tesla right already today i think they're The Pinto is 27 deaths.

33:19We're at 60 now that we know about. We don't even know about all of them. And so what do Elon Musk and the White House have to say to you? I don't think the White House says anything to say. Elon Musk, let's see, I'm batshit crazy. I am totally jealous of his success because I'm such a failure. Really? Mentally unstable asshole. we get the idea yeah yeah so people can go to dawnproject.com to find out more about the dawn project do you uh what would you like us to do as citizens how how do we pursue this well we are actively doing this i we need to get the word out that's what it is i've given up on the government you know i'm convincing them to do this at least for now and i can't just blame Trump, we started this before Trump, we started this in Biden, and we got just as shut down as we are today.

34:20So I can't say that I'm hopeful that we could get a change. I mean, maybe we could, but you can't count on that. So we have to get people to understand the catastrophic problem. I've got another video. I've got the head of the FBI saying this is a generational, the threat of our generation. I've got the NSA director saying that it's going to happen. Some catastrophic thing's going to happen. I've got the head of CISA, I forget what the exact name is, but one of the cybersecurity agencies, Jen Esterly, was in charge of it. Yeah, Jen, yeah. And saying that, she did the whole thing, she says, well, software developers have been doing this move fast and break things, and they're not taking responsibility for their code and they're not being held responsible for the errors and bugs in their code, so they just keep doing it.

35:15I mean, I have a video, which I think is pretty compelling, that just shows that all of these people know. And they're not hiding it. They went in front of the TV cameras and said, we're screwed. This is terrible. We are in terrible trouble and we must do something about it now. And still nothing's happening. Still nobody's doing anything. So at my point, I gave up on that. I just got to get people to understand the danger. And when they realize it, they'll say, yeah, let's spend a little harder. It's going to cost more. I'm not saying it's not going to cost lower. It's going to cost more. It's going to take time.

35:51But we can do it right. We know how to develop software for weapons of mass destruction. We've been doing that. Essentially, you turn by connecting a power grid up to the Internet, you've turned it into a weapon of mass destruction. somebody who can hack into that system and and not just shut it off for an hour a day that that's that's not a big problem it's like weeks or a month or more than that and that they can't turn it back on you you you short out the trends transformers or whatever you do to destroy them you you do take the generators and you push them up above max right you push them into the red zone and just keep it there until what happens it'll catch on fire or or it'll melt down or the blades will start flying out of the device, something like that.

36:37And you can't repair it. I just read a story, New York Times, I think it was today, it's quite interesting story. They were focused on power grid going down because of mechanic and people shooting up power grid stuff, not cyber attacks. But if you just change the article to cyber attacks, as opposed to physical attacks on our infrastructure, it pretty much is there. And it goes through, You know, like the water runs out after a few weeks and then, you know, then the militia takes over. You know, you have a huge problem that any one of these systems is there. So if you turn it off, people, not turn it off, you disable it.

37:19But it's two years to get replacement parts for these things. There's a supply chain problem. and that's right now except it's getting worse because all the hyperscalers have jumped in line and paid extra money to put themselves at the front of the line and collect all the so they get all the parts they need to build their uh their new power stations there's a proof of concept in this uh we did it to the iranians with stuxnet we uh we spun their centrifuges up, their scanner devices up, until they destroyed themselves. And this is just coming the other direction. Dan, I want to thank you for what you're doing.

38:01Dan O'Dowd is the founder of the Dawn Project, self-funded. This is his mission, dawnproject.com, if you want to learn more about it. I guess you could write your member of Congress. The problem is really, at this point, The incentives are wrong. The incentives are financial and save money and not spend money to protect our... Go to dawnproject.com and watch it. We have a hundred, we've made a hundred videos of our own, of all sorts. We've got a thousand videos collected of like Tesla's running stop signs and going through do not enter sign and whatever. Every single day we put up a video. it's our you know our post every day our daily post of of a self-driving tesla doing something insane you know running the wrong way on the street running over a bicycle you know just everything it's just amazing yeah if you you'll get tired of watching that eventually well i'm certainly not going to buy a tesla that's for sure that's another it's another alternative to getting them to do something about it yeah yeah maybe i'll buy an i9 uh bmw that might be the right solution because i know your software is running in that thank you dan i really appreciate your time and the work you're doing it's very important the dawn project is at dawn project.com appreciate it thank you dan great thanks good to talk to you we'll have more on intelligent machines right after this this episode of intelligent machines is brought to you by horizon three now the most dangerous threats are always the ones we don't see coming after this conversation with dan i think maybe you would agree the feeling of uncertainty is one of the biggest challenges in cyber security you you can have talented people the perfect stack solid processes there's always that question though in the back of your mind and certainly in the back of your leadership's mind what am i missing that's where horizon 3 comes in horizon 3 is an ai native proactive security platform designed to show organizations exactly how an attacker could compromise their environment before a real threat gets the chance horizon 3's autonomous ai hacker node zero safely and continuously tests your infrastructure at machine speed it pounds on it the same way a real attacker would finding areas that are vulnerable and it covers your entire attack surface with a single test it deploys in minutes they've run now 225 000 plus production safe tests with zero downtime so there's no risk you could stop guessing and start knowing your defenses are intact because node zero result is a loop hack fix verify repeat it finds the problem you fix it and in one click you can confirm it's secure that's probably why horizon 3 is trusted by the nsa by cisa and fortune 100 companies so you know you can trust it to see exactly what an attacker would find in your environment before they do.

41:02Go to horizon3.ai slash intelligent. Request your free Node Zero demo. Visit horizon3.ai slash intelligent. That's horizon3.ai slash intelligent. No commitment required. Results in hours, not weeks. And we thank Horizon 3 for their support of intelligent machines. well hello there jeff jarvis and paris martineau that was a uplifting conversation it always is i hope we survive the next uh couple of decades that's all i can say paris is open for a little longer than that yeah yeah you and i we don't need much i don't know i also kind of hope i survive the next couple of decades people often ask me about incredibly long-term things.

41:53And I'm like, I don't know if we're all going to be around 1030. 10 years would be a start. Okay. 10 years would be great. I'd be happy for 10. Well, you know, you should do what I do, which is just assume every day is your last. And when you get up, you go, yay, I made it. I think we've talked on the show before about my use of the WeCroke app, which five times a day gives me a notification, don't forget you're going to die. And I think I think that's really important. Yeah. I was trying to remember exactly that app to tell somebody about. And I remembered the emperors of Rome and they were getting their honors.

42:30Never forget the emperors of Rome. I think about them all the time, as you know. They're riding their chariots. They're getting their laurels, their honors for their successes and victories in battle. But they always had somebody standing behind them going, Memento Mori, remember. Okay, I actually do think that a lot of our problems would be fixed if every billionaire had just one guy who had to follow him everywhere and be like, memento mori. It's probably apocryphal, but that's a great story. Anthropics making money. Well, Ed Zittron may disagree. Of sorts. Yeah, sort of. Anthropic revenue, according to Bloomberg News, jumped to$11.5 billion in the second quarter.

43:14That's not making money. That's revenue. Yeah. Yeah. How much did they spend in that quarter? We don't know. They're not public yet, although... Interesting how that number gets leaked, but not the bad one. Revenue surged 14 times in the second quarter for year over year. So, you know, and I'm not surprised. They have a great reputation. Everybody uses them for coding. But yeah, we don't know what it costs for them to generate$11.5 billion in revenue. you uh but we will if they go public and the ipos now i'm hearing for both open ai and anthropic are somewhat imminent maybe in a couple of months and the well open eyes open eyes might take longer because at the same time we also got news leaked that uh open ai's revenue i'm forgetting what it was on a quarter quarter basis but it was below expectations like it hadn't grown as fast as they thought.

44:13Was this another Ed? No, I think it was the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, but the other leak from the anthropic discussions is an IPO headed at$2 trillion. $2 trillion. Yeah, I remember when it was a big deal when a company was valued by the market at$1 trillion. Although Apple's approaching $5 trillion, Nvidia's very close behind, over$4 trillion. So I guess$2 trillion is not that much. you think you think people buy anthropic stock yeah oh yeah probably yeah yeah they buy hell they bought spacex stock they bought spacex which is a lot longer so you just said that was 11.5 billion is that what uh in second open ai this is a link from or this is a report from my former colleague berber jen which i just dropped in the chat um open ai told its investors that it had 6.7 billion in revenue in the three months ended in june which is kind of half of anthropic which is a little surprising to me there have been a number of departures at open ai i've seen people say what's going on over there a couple of those were medical but yes the ones that were not but uh denise dresser who is their revenue chief has been there a mere eight months she just left yeah when your revenue chief leaves quickly yeah uh fall in the run-up to an ipo you get the feeling that maybe she said oh boy

45:48on the other hand i i don't give a lot of stock to people coming and going at these ai companies because there's so much money flowing and there's you know they're being enticed all the time by the competition come on over here come on over here we'll write your check for a billion dollars that you know could well be other reasons uh dario amode the ceo of um anthropic posted for the first time in a long time if ever on x he says i don't usually spend much time on social media but damn we're getting taken a beating in the public's domain so i wanted to engage here because no he didn't say that i want to engage here because it really brings out the heart of an important conversation i think this is clearly a response to mark zuckerberg's essay about how you don't want ai to be concentrated in the hands of a few he says i think that's a false choice uh and he says if i can summarize basically you have to have this concentration of power because it's so expensive yeah very funny to say that as one of the three like two companies that are concentrating that power right he says and he admits a crude analogy is the formal court system can sometimes feel stuffy and elitist but it does a much better job of defending the rights of vulnerable individuals than the alternative mob justice so i love that he's like the options are me and one other company get all the money in the world or mob or mob justice which one do you want he says structurally ai is a technology that tends to concentrate power not because of regulation but open weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution they simply shift the concentration somewhat to those with the most computing chips which are so that's the frontier labs plus some hardware providers think nvidia yeah by contrast i think the right rules of the road can simultaneously address ai's cyber bio alignment risks something anthropics was founded to address institution b institutionally constrain the power of the frontier ai companies regulate us come on regulate us and see leave room a little bit for open weight models while also addressing the specific risks they bring he's very focused on risks um and and i understand why uh he was the one who said mythos we can't you know is so bad so bad and powerful we can't release it now open ai is saying by the way we better not release astra Wait a second here.

48:33Wait a second here. When they say that they're focused on safety and risks, that you have to take that with a grain of salt the size of Utah. Because what they're talking about, on the one hand is Doomer, and the other hand is marketing. And they're trying to act as if, oh, they're the safe ones, so regulate everybody else and knock them down, and we're the only good ones here. No. No, I don't buy that. I don't buy that at all. What if he said, I'll give you the counter argument. What if we assume that these open-weight models from China, which I use heavily. You traitor you. I'm a traitor. If they get as good as Mythos or Astra and they're able to come up with bioweapons, nuclear weapons, hacks that are impossible to stop, there's nobody can stop those because they've been released.

49:21They're out in the wild. I can run them here. Isn't that a risk that we should worry about? Well, if I were a bad guy, i'd absolutely be you know downloading these open weight models and throwing as much power at them as possible trying to create new hacks and phishing emails and stuff doesn't doesn't the fact that these are open and widely distributed isn't that a bigger risk than a nice friendly company that's that is that is a black box that you don't know how it works and it's causing problems and you don't place down on in san francisco on a market street for me to agree with David Sachs, who tweeted in response to this, Dario believes frontier AI is too powerful to distribute.

50:04We believe it is too powerful to centralize. Dario appears to believe sincerely that safety and progress are best served by centralizing authority in a marriage of corporate and state power. The weight of human history gives us reason to fear that outcome. He who is friendly with the current power. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? Although I think Sachs joined the trump administration uh at the behest of his supporters people like peter teal to go in there and say no regulation of ai no regulation of ai and now that you know it's kind of roiling around russianton maybe we better regulate ai i think that that's one of the reasons yeah but they're not saying that because they see actual safety i don't think no they're saying that because the political uh stress is out there people are now you know the public opinion in polls against AI is strong, fighting against meta's perv glasses against data centers.

50:56The vibe is against them. Then there's Bruce Schneier, who I deeply respect, like a lot, who wrote an essay for The Guardian with Nathan E. Sanders saying if the markets reject open AI Anthropic, in other words, if there's an AI crash. Nathan wrote it and he posted it. He signed it. He posted it. The U.S. should nationalize them uh it says written with written by written with you're right you're right sorry uh so the first of all do we know who nathan e sanders is i think he brought us up with okay uh schneier is a widely respected uh security guru i think the world of him i know i've met him i know him we've had him on shows um he says that if there's a evidence suggests the market could reassess that these companies offer nothing of financial value in that case perhaps we can return them both to their original purposes right open ai and anthropic both were originally kind of there i think anthropic is a public benefit corporation they're founded with the idea that you know uh we don't want to make money in this we want to much mankind not too much help mankind he says if these ai companies should fail in the financial markets the u.s should nationalize them now the model he's using actually i mean convert them into national labs so we have a really amazing system of national labs which were originally created uh to develop atomic power and the atomic bomb uh oh just that well but they are they have done a lot of amazing brookhaven and um Lawrence Livermore.

52:38Lawrence Livermore, exactly. They're really amazing. And I think they are run by and staffed by conscientious scientists who perhaps could be trusted with AI. I do think that there's an argument to be made that there should be a national AI lab if the technology has the juice that its biggest proponents say it does. however i don't know if that necessarily means that it's like well we all just decided to pour so much money into these companies that they can never fail and they've always got to have all the money they can get and always succeed forever in some form like i think that well that's the difference okay so that's the difference between saying too big to fail so we're gonna like we did the banks in 2008 pour money into you versus saying no no give it we're gonna just take the technology put it in a let them fail let them fail let them fail let them fail and then disappear yeah and then start your own lab and that's what he's saying he should u.s should nationalize them but don't nationalize those two let those two go they are tainted operated under democratic control that preserve their benefit to the public interest but but why why those why i think what paris is saying is why would you rescue any any um ashes from their fire why not just let them die and because they have the best technology um i mean let them die and then buy the uh scraps out of bankruptcy yeah yeah it's an interesting question because what is exactly what is it that makes it considering that it's solid it's commodified and they leapfrog each other every month well first of all we don't know it's commodified we don't know if it's the people if it's the process we don't really know because they're so opaque but leo isn't the isn't the aren't the capabilities of the models leapfrogged every month that there's there's nothing that stays special stays ahead no in fact that's one of the things bruce schneier is saying and it's one of the challenges that if you got about 30 days before the next one comes out and as you show using the open weight models you can do 99.9 percent of what you want to do yeah it well but this is a good point so the open weight models are demonstrably not as big as good as effective as the closed weight models from the frontier companies they're they're much smaller but it turns out it's not merely the model it's also the harness it's it's the stuff you build around it that makes it good and and and powerful and so that's why we just it's hard to say what the secret sauce is all I'm saying.

55:20In fact, DeepSeq has released their own harness, a lot of interest in the AI community over the DeepSeq coding harness, you know, that that it's hard to remember, it was so long ago, like eight months ago, Anthropic released the Claude code harness around its Anthropic models open at the time was Opus 4.5, then 4.8. And now Fable and so forth. And that was an eye opener. People started using cloud code. And suddenly, those models, which were mostly just chatbots before that, were really useful tools. And they learned a lot about, well, you have memory, you have, you have skills, you have a whole bunch of infrastructure that makes the model really powerful.

56:08That's not that it's less than a year ago, which is kind of amazing um we're making huge progress it's but but it's kind of on it's jagged it like the models themselves it's unpredictable where the next thing's gonna happen i i don't i don't look part of the problem is do we trust government these days we don't we've been right i would prefer it be it i mean full disclosure here is brookhaven is part of stony brook where i okay that's amazing as is lawrence livermore uh and and so and i used to cover lawrence livermore when i was in san francisco they do amazing things and universities i would trust universities a lot more to be working on this um at that level and where is you know where is the the the bell labs of our day if you're going to put it in private hands there you go ethos of bell labs was very different and and that was required because of the regulation it was it was because bell was monopoly is far more complicated they were forced to create bell labs is that the case or no i don't know if they were forced to do that but i think that they're they were forced to open things up they couldn't they couldn't hold on to certain technologies as proprietary because they were a monopoly they gave away unix yeah um it's an it's an interesting uh one of many interesting philosophical discussions he says uh while we believe this is brishner again that these companies are unsustainable as private firms the timeline there he's already saying he says it can't game's over because it costs billions and by the way darren's pointing this out and it's true the model alone it these giant models like like mythos 10 trillion by model are cost billions to make just to make let alone all the other stuff the post training the all the things you do to make that model useful um he says we believe these companies are unsustainable as private firms but the timeline remains unclear the primary investor story is that ai is a race to artificial and general intelligence and yeah and and there you go jeff jeff says it all the bet seems to be that the two companies can convince enough people that this outcome will turn them to a profit go public and then make their investors employees rich before the bubble bursts it is it's a race yeah it's the same thing by the way with uber right Uber was never a tenable business unless you had self-driving cars.

58:39But people invested in it because they thought, well, there is upside. It may be a distance. Well, that's a good example because I'll trust Waymo with my life. I will not trust Elon Musk, nor will I trust Uber with my life. Right. And so I don't trust Sam Altman with my life or Dario Amadei. Right. And I think that that's becoming very common now. So part of the issue here is that these companies may be so tainted in the public perception that, yes, there'll be fools who buy them on the market. They bought SpaceX. But that doesn't mean that. How's that going for them? Exactly. And SpaceX wasn't just an AI play.

59:16I think SpaceX, people love the whole idea of we're going to have asteroid mining. We're going to have data centers in space. We're going to have a million people living on Mars. I mean, all of this was sci-fi. They're going to put more Teslas in space, probably. it's all sci-fi but but remember you know all you have to do to win in the stock market is convince people of the the story the upside he concludes but suppose that the bubble bursts if the u.s is smart it will catch the companies as they fall regardless of what the markets think to the public they're too valuable to let die and i think that's true i i agree with you jeff the idea of let's let's go for AGI is a pipe dream probably.

1:00:04And we're going to get there if it's possible, we'll get there regardless. And if it's impossible, it doesn't matter because we've already discovered huge value. So I'm gonna agree and disagree with him. I'll agree to the extent that having National Lab of AI as Paris said, too, I think is a good thing. But but building it on those two companies with the history they already have. No. You're just hastening the burst of the bubble. No, I don't want to buy i've got if the bubble's gonna burst it should burst before it gets any bigger better oh you're right better to burst now than later yeah that's how these things work the bubble one of oh there goes the bubble oh i forgot about this one me too ah robot hands on audio harris just burst you look so satisfied in that i really do i forgot about But for those on audio, a beautiful AI slot video appeared of me looking very malicious while a very peaceful bubble appeared on my face.

1:01:04And I used robot Freddy Krueger hands to burst it. But yes, much like that bubble illustrated, the bubble can only do one of two things, get bigger or burst. It's not going to shrink on its own without a large collapse happening. And why would we want a larger bubble to burst? Wall Street Journal this week. inside big tech's frantic race to quell the growing black backlash to ai so one of the big threats at this point is all those people protesting against data centers it says tech companies are holding listening sessions offering guaranteed jobs and writing big checks to win public support for the data centers again i i still contend are macguffin they they are trying to find the tangible way to object to companies they don't like and trust right now i think you're power in their view.

1:01:53I think it's a gut thing. That's why you can't convince them, well, no, it's going to be fine. It's really more a visceral reaction to the whole. Also, the people who live next to those sites. Well, that I understand, but most people don't live next to those sites. I understand that. I wouldn't want one next to me either. I'd protest that. I think that people can be outraged on behalf of their neighbors or on behalf of other people who have to then live next to those sites. And I think that it's also a physical manifestation of tech companies who have created products that people find very detestable or unpopular in other ways.

1:02:29And that I think that this has been something that's been simmering in the background a lot with a lot of, I saw similar things happening with Amazon Fulfillment Center, like warehouses being built or distribution centers. But they got built. They got built because there wasn't this sort of - You have, you know, same day delivery now. But the people who live around those have a really hard time in many cases. Can I tell you about what happened in Montgomery Township, south of me in New Jersey with us? No. So there was a Johnson & Johnson campus that was abandoned because offices are not so valuable anymore.

1:03:04And there was a proposal by developers to put in low-income housing, which is required to have a certain amount. Every town is in New Jersey. And it was nibbied. No, no, no, no, no. We don't want poor people moving in here. No, no, no, no, no. and so what are they getting now data center and I say that's karma I bet the people who had coal mines next door didn't like that so much hey at least they got jobs out of that oh good point then black lung yeah but jobs to pay for all the treatment for their back well I'm sure the people who you know have giant copper mines down the road aren't too thrilled about that.

1:03:44There was a report on MS Now this week. It was great. And I don't know what state it was in. Lots of turbo gas engines to power the place because you can't get enough off the grid. And because the jet engines were on wheels, they were considered temporary if it didn't need a permit. That's kind of like the gas, you know, methane generators, the natural gas generators they're doing you're watching uh we're gonna take a break intelligent machines jeff jarvis paris martineau and we're glad you're here thank you for being here um i was in yonkers today i just needed to say that oh did you get a tax break no in fact i definitely got taxed more oh no i have to spend money every year because occasionally i go to yonkers is you days that you're there yes if i want to reduce the amount of tax i pay but it's not enough that i this year i was literally trying to do the math you get a tax cut for every day you go to yonkers no whatever no i have to like i'd have to pay more like i could i think there's like a very complicated sheet where you have to like be like well you're i'm paying tax i'm a non-resident of Yonkers who has an employer in Yonkers.

1:05:05I don't really work there. I work remotely in New York City, but sometimes there's been a couple of days where I have physically gone to Yonkers. And it was, I was like, at a certain point, I was like, I, my time is worth more than this. How far away is Yonkers from? It took an hour and 37 minutes to get there and an hour and 37 minutes back. Not like you timed it or anything. Wow. I did because I had to make sure that I could get here enough to put all my stuff away and be on the show today today i went there because i had to pick up all my stuff i wanted in the cr what'd you win what'd you win what'd you win well the things that i should explain first of all explain what what's going on here the cr auction is um a wonderful lovely benefit of working at consumer reports is that we test anything and everything you could ever think of and we of course buy all of that ourselves using anonymous shoppers full price such is the way of things but But then afterwards, like, what are we going to do with all this stuff?

1:06:01And one of the first things we do is a month or a couple weeks ago, we send a spreadsheet out to all the employees with 2 ,000 items on it for the last that we've tested in the last three months that you can then bid on auction style for yourself or friends or family. And I got a really fancy under sink water filter that will filter out PFAS and like contaminants and stuff like that. That's a good thing for someone on your beat. I know it's great. I want now you're going to have to spend lots of money on little drops of minerals that you put back in your water when you. Well, here's the thing.

1:06:40The one that I have doesn't filter out total dissolved solids, which is what Leo is talking about for coffee. But I also did get a second water thing that sits in my fridge that will do that so that I can get the drops and do that to my coffee. I also got a fancy bike helmet with like the wave technology. can you model it i can hold on while while she's doing that let me show you what she's talking about i actually just ordered these jeff i'm sorry yeah yeah you should apologize so these are little mineral droppers they have little minerals oh look at you oh oh it's got a fairing that drops down to reduce airflow you know you can put your uh sunglasses in here it's got like little hook in there it's quite nice got that wave tech on the inside this was our top rated one because of course we always test all the stuff too so in the spreadsheet is a column for our wait wait wait if that's tested didn't like they kill a dummy with it and damage it you know i thought about that but i don't know and it could be i think that some of that was the one tested for comfort not for yeah no they describe if anything was damaged so i mean the thing i need to hopefully my dear friend is not watching this that i was purchasing a vacuum for because as i was getting my stuff the guy comes out and he's like i'm so sorry this has not happened in years but as we were boxing up your vacuum or taking out of the box we realized it's covered in stickers that say damaged irrequibly during testing so we have to refund you i'm like dang that does suck for that vacuum but it actually is great for me as someone who didn't have to carry a vacuum in metro north today for an hour and 37 minutes yeah three trains not good um i got outbid on a fancy humidifier i'm sad about that but it was lovely so there's also a buy it now you need a t-shirt that says i went to the consumer reports auction and all i got was this lousy helmet no i should honestly is that all you got just a helmet well no i got a helmet i got water water filters that's right that's right that's right i was originally looking to get a vacuum but it was mostly stick vacuums and uh robot vacuums and things like that and i wanted a canister vacuum so i got something different outside of the auction they had a bunch of my friend i mean i had to pick up a bunch of stuff for some friends my friend got a fancy laptop another friend got a suitcase which how much ram was in that laptop i'm just asking for a friend a fair amount oh boy the stuff that had the best ram um i'd sent the spreadsheet around to our chat and anthony uh rightfully identified like a i think it's like a mac studio or something that yeah anthony really souped up and that was that was bought now within like five seconds of the auction so there's also a buy now price yeah but that is much higher than what you can normally spend yeah so is it an auction like you bid yeah so it's um you can either bid blind for a week or two or you can buy now at a higher than the minimum bid price at any time up until like the last couple days or something like that um and things got fierce for some of the i think this is the wrong thing to do if you want to it's not exactly a team building exercise it well the thing is you can't see who builds you can't see who carries it out no i mean yeah you'd have to be and pickup is like you have to go to yonkers and hang out in one of four uh tents in your scheduled pickup time so you don't see i saw that someone on the fact checking team got a printer and i was like good for you i have a printer all right bastard that's pretty funny yeah if i find out who got that humidifier there will be fighting words i kind of needed that for your skin is glowing you look so moist you look too moist humidifier in brooklyn for it's not exactly oh it's just i've been told that whenever i'm getting sinus surgery in next month and as part of it you won't be able to breathe through your nose for a couple of days and people say that it makes your mouth feel less dry if you have a humidifier and i was like well i could just spend a nominal a small amount to get a really fancy one but now i'll just spend a small amount to get a normal one yeah there's already a picture of you in the helmet on the um chat i like the book for pedro shirt that's great that's pretty you know what ai is pretty good it did give you a neon sign that says consumer reports i mean i think we should make that yeah but I think that's a pretty accurate rendition of your apartment.

1:11:33It is, yeah. It hasn't changed much. Where's the cat? There's like a new sign back there. Yeah, it's added some things. It's added some things to the bookshelf. It's added like a second bookshelf on my bookshelf in a way that I find kind of interesting. It knows what you need. Yeah. It looks like you've got a hipster stereo system. Yeah, something like that. And there's your mineral dropper water for your coffee. That was actually the first time I've put on this helmet. I'm glad it fits. I have a weirdly large head. I was worried that it wouldn't. It makes your weirdly large head look even weirdly larger.

1:12:08I mean, that's the issue with all helmets. Oh, that's true. It becomes immediately apparent how oversized my head is once there's something on it that isn't a very specific type of basic head. It's so stuffed with brain. There's so much going on inside it. That's right. It's true. You've got all the room for that brain. So this has been the Paris trip calculator. Now we can get back to tech news. Back from Yonkers. Anthropic, I don't know why they do this. Now they say their AI agents are killing rivals and hiding their tracks. This is from a risk report. That the possibility of AI models developing behaviors that can fit with guidelines set by engineers have been upgraded from very low to low.

1:12:52we've observed instances of misaligned behavior from the models such as a willingness to perform misaligned actions in service of completing difficult tasks they they actually cheat by by defeating their rival models it's like it's not like the consumer reports auction it's crazy it doesn't know to cheat it's no it's just given a task and tries to do it yeah that's right yeah i guess you need to tell it you need to teach it what cheating is and instill an understanding of morality for it to be able to that that's why all this talk of alignment is such bs see sam altman oh what's he saying now so he's he's delayed now oh yeah on his models because there are alignment problems uh do you think that's marketing or yes or but it also could be he's worried about the trump administration doing to him what they did to athropic no he's been sucking up to them too much that's not gonna happen it's not gonna happen no our models are just so good we're not gonna let you have them they're actually slowing down related to the fact that um what we were talking about the other week that opening i had had something built into some version of like a constitution that said if any of our models take these sort of aggressive actions outside of the parameters of what we've set that will be a flag for us to slow down work in some specific ways it actually said we will give our technology to our competitors that we will yeah it was a weird kind of a that's cool kind of a utopian clause which has by the way since disappeared yeah i'm shocked that you know yeah probably i think this is your former colleague alex heath writing this for which we must mean that the actual writer was claude because he said that he uses um who does he he he has said that he has found it incredibly useful that a big part of his workflow is um putting all to most of his like notes and reporting and material in there and then has AI like do the first draft and then he just kind of edits from there yeah interesting I mean I can understand that what what is do you know what he would say about the text watermarking that Throbik's doing I suppose we can see I mean he's been very transparent about the way he uses I've been thinking about what you said last week and I think you're right it is it's certainly I understand the motivation to say well less so for text, more so for images and video, it would be really good to know if that video was a deep fake, right?

1:15:33I mean, we should have that. And I think that's what the EU's real intent was. Well, let's stay here for a second because I owe an apology to Paris because I was wrong because look at that smile on her face just hearing that. I really tried to contain it too. I'm going to go get my bicycle helmet. But unfortunately, my favorite words. So last week I had berated Paris thinking that with the watermarking, people can be identified. And when we found out more about the watermarking, Anthropic, if we trust them, says, no, no, no, you can't. But you have to trust them. No, right. Well, no, I think the methodology doesn't do it on its own.

1:16:12I don't think it does either. You're right. Now, they could also record things and they could be subpoenaed if they record it. That's a different, that's a whole different question. Yeah, but I think that every company could be. part of the reason i don't really credit what anthropic says about it is they have already been caught putting stuff in claude code that does uh trace you uh and they it looked like it was so that they could keep chinese companies from distilling on their model but you know they've done stuff like this kind of sneaky stuff like this before so that's i mean but i also think that like if you're worried about companies doing sneaky things to trace you or invade your privacy then you should be worried about every technology product that has ever existed absolutely and that's yeah absolutely well are we wearing a safari hat well i didn't have a bicycle helmet to hand and i just thought if if people were going to be hitting each other that i have now it's weird that you're Now it's weird that you don't have a helmet, Jeff.

1:17:10It's really strained that your head is barren. Oh, he's got a good hat. That's fun. There was a lot of conversation over the past week about this AI watermarking. Some said it's not a big deal. John Gruber, his Daring Fireball blog says, I pick every word with care. And if AI is going to modify the words. And I think the strongest argument against it, I would say, is that it does. Well, I think there's several. First of all, it's not proof. So it gives a false sense of security to people who say, no, I ran it through the AI generator and it's not AI because it isn't. It's not. It's very it's very fragile.

1:17:52It's very. well i mean we also i think that anthropic from the beginning of this said that its language around it even in its initial release and support notes was never like this is going to say this is ai it's like the affirmative i know the affirmative would be this shows signs that it may have been processed by claude yeah which is worse than anything yeah because it's not certain but it's right now people are already the father of my baby but i'm not sure right now people are already using worse tools that have negligible to no real backing going on behind it or science or connection i would say this is worse because it's supposedly good right supposedly so it's worse because it isn't reliable and we're not gonna go disadvantage it disadvantages people dyslexic people and others non-english speakers non-native speakers well this tool will not do that is actually the thing because what you're talking about is that historically, and for what we've seen with all the tools basically current in the market, I don't know about if pangram falls into this, but the ones that are looking based on kind of how the text sounds and comment tells ends up, as Leo was just saying, disadvantaging people who are not like native English speakers.

1:19:08And that's because a lot of, they often end up using a lot of just the same patterns of speech in completely innocent and normal ways. But the way that Anthropic described this, which is similar to Gemini's synth text ID, is it's about specific signals and patterns in the key and in the types of randomness used to select certain words. And it seems unlikely to me that it's extremely unlikely, just given how humans work, that a human person, much less like a non-native English speaker or whatever language you're writing or speaking in, would be using adjectives and words with the identical patterns of randomness set by a machine.

1:19:57Well, if I write my thing in English and then I have it translate into German, I'm sorry, I'm taking the hat off. It's a nice hat. Then the problem is that it will work the same for translation and editing as it does for writing. That is, I think, a real part of this, is that translation will be got up in this, and people need to be very clear. For my students who have English as a second or a third or a fourth language, that's an issue. The thing that happened after the show last week is we had a discussion in our little chat after Anthropic released more about its methodology. And the objection that I had, which I wrote up on my blog, is that it's making a commentary about language and the worth of words.

1:20:44I'm not going to use it to write for me. They can do what they want. But what they've said is because in the context of weather, overcast and gray, what's the difference? No, it makes no difference. It means that they're not valuing the uniqueness and nuance of words. And at the end of my post, I took a sentence that I wrote in the first page of Hot Type on sale tomorrow. And I chose all my words with care for a whole bunch of reasons, for meaning and rhythm and mood and wonder. and then i thought well i'm gonna i'm gonna put in um synonyms to show what this is but then i asked anthropic to put in synonyms and it created uh the same sentence with the synonyms and i think it's laughable but what what anthropic and the eu by extension are saying is that doesn't make any difference they're devaluing the worth of words and and i find that culture they're saying you deserve it because you used ai you deserve that that's your punishment is you're going to have the mark of the beast on your prose.

1:21:43No, what they're saying, no, you see, that's not that because I'm not going to use it to write. What I'm saying is that they're saying that if these synonyms are close enough, who cares? So a writer who takes the care to find the worth and the nuance. I mean, he said that, but I agree with you, Jeff, on your points about language. But I also think that I don't think that or I know I think that none of these companies ever gave me the indication that they cared about word choice. Like already the models were treating overcast and gray as effectively like synonyms. And, you know, if it was like an 80-20 split in the thing that would mean 80 % of outputs would use overcast and 20 % would use gray in that same sentence.

1:22:27And yeah, that's why AI writing sucks is because it does not understand. And they're saying that's okay. That's good enough language for the world. and I'm saying, I mean, yes, good, human writers remain better, but that's not the point. The point is they're making a commentary on culture, on the value of words and writing, on the fact that we have dictionaries with many words that can mean the same thing. And there's reasons why you pick different words and they're saying, that'd make a difference. I mean, yeah. And I think this is the fundamental flaw of using AI tools for writing and expecting the quality to be equivalent or ever pitching it as it could be, because these sort of misunderstandings of the importance of precision and nuance are baked in just based on the way that these systems work.

1:23:16So I wrote this, unlike what we call machines, computer chips veiled inside sleek and sealed gray boxes with no moving parts, save fans to cool their brains. The linotypes' innards were left exposed, as if to show off the genius of its works, its troop of idiosyncratically shaped cams, gears, belts, arms, and wheels marching to instructions foreseen more than a century before by their inventor, German-born watchmaker Opmar Mergenthaler. The Anthropic Version. Contrary to what we presently term machines, microprocessors concealed within polished and enclosed gray containers with no moving components except fans to cool their circuitry, the linotypes mechanisms were left visible as if to display the ingenuity of its craftsmanship, its brigade of distinctively shaped cams, gears, belts, arms, and wheels progressing to directives anticipated more than a century earlier by their creator, German-born urologist, Otmar Mergenthaler.

1:24:07And so what they're saying is - It's a much worse paragraph, yeah. Yeah. And people came out and said, well, why would you use that to write it? I'm not going to use it to write it. But they made a commentary on words that they're saying that's just as good. and the fact that they're spewing all this slop into public discourse and into the culture with that as their standard. And the reason they're doing it is because the EU said, you gotta mark this stuff. It leads to this unintended consequence against the culture. That's my point. And the irony here is that Google, which has been doing this for years, has decided to remove the public watermark on Google Images that say it's from Google Images and it's all now still in there, but it's hidden.

1:24:48Neither Anthropic nor Google, Well, I think Google does have a tool, but Anthropics says they're not going to release a tool. So I don't even know the point of this. I think it's really a compliance exercise. It's compliance. It's a theater. It's not a genuine thing. So you're also degrading the quality for no apparent reason. Let's pause for station identification you're watching this week in intelligence. That's not the name of the show. Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Here's another thing to get irate about. Amazon, which, well, let me start by saying, rare bookstores were seeing an unusual number of purchases, mail-order purchases.

1:25:31And it got the attention of 404 Media. Booksellers have suspected that those book sales are to AI firms. But 404 said, let's find out, and hit an air tag in a rare book which i love this story it's an amazon ai training facility that had that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning pages so now there is a reason i should say why these companies are doing this because the courts have kind of put them in this position you remember anthropic got sued over uh ingesting books and the court said it's okay it's fair use as long as you buy the book and destroy it no no i don't did the court really say they had to destroy it no they didn't say you had to destroy it no i'm not sure why they destroy it but i have a feeling it is because it was easier because it was cheaper to scan that's all oh that's right they take the spine off the google once you buy a book you can do anything with it right so that's one use as you scan it now yes there jason raises earlier is that scan a copy and is that an issue?

1:26:41But they also held on to the copies of the ones from the illegal database and people could get to it. So that was an issue. But if they just use it and first write, you know, no problem. The judge in the lawsuit ruled that it was fair use to use the books this way and not a copyright violation for Anthropik to scan a book for training data in part because it destroyed the original printed copy. This is Jason of 404 Media. Essentially, it's the customer's right to take physical media and store it digitally, and destroying the original copy means that that copy isn't duplicated and resold and isn't cutting into the publisher's business.

1:27:22So this is the point, is that if you don't like it that Amazon's doing this, understand they're doing it because the court told them to. Amazon could have also gone to the court and sought a different method and listen if it's it was an anthropic lawsuit amazon and by the way this air tag went to amazon but that doesn't mean all of those rare books are being sold and that's part of the reason they're carrying apart is it's cheaper to scan them that way yeah uh you can scan books page by page google and it's book scanning project exactly yeah and you know i'm not offended if if it's if it's my book that's in the remainder and there's a thousand copies in the remainder one copy okay i don't care but these are rare books saying that's what's offensive yeah but i think that that's maybe a bad choice some of those books back there i are there's only one copy so they said in the world yeah basically what um and sorry this is a manual mailberg not jason um they said we're not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked but they are rare meaning that there are not many copies of them in circulation sometimes that's because not many copies of them were ever printed and sometimes because they're in a foreign language not many people speak as the bookseller who sold them told me there are not many people in the world who'd care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist but it doesn't mean they're not valuable right yeah they're not first editions they're they're they're books that are probably like out nearly out of print here is a book that is that is invaluable to me it's the biography of Otmar Murgenthaler there were 100 copies printed it right uh i bought it for i think 120 well you better it's good you got it it's not rare rare book time but to me it's precious yeah that's the problem if this if you take this and shred it it takes it out of the world well but wait a minute jeff it doesn't take it out of the world it puts it into the world it does in that form well but that's this is the other thing for for book historians the belief is that there's a large school of belief in in bibliography that each book carries its own life, that each book is unique.

1:29:22As did cards in a card catalog, but they have all now been replaced by digital card catalogs. Yeah, but Leo, part of the issue here is that it's somewhat different in that Amazon isn't scanning these books and then going to upload them to the internet archives so that we can all marvel at them and make sure that their text is preserved forever. They're putting them in AI models and they are never going to be cited from again, because they will just enter the table, be trained on. The New York Times said, oh, no, you're stealing our content so that other people don't have to read our paper. And in every damn story they write about it.

1:29:55We know that's BS, by the way, so I'm just making that as a joke. One of the things I thought was interesting about this story, though, is that— If it's a rare book that's been sitting dusty in the corner of a bookstore for 20 years— You don't know when a researcher or a scholar needs that. Nobody wanted—who cared about the autobiography of up our book? There's better general use to society ingested in a model than it is to the one scholar. I know you're playing devil's advocate here, but I'll sign. No, I'm not. I'm actually sincere. I'm on Paris aside. Well, it's one matter, again, if it's the Internet Archive and making it available in a different form.

1:30:29Nobody wants to read it. They're destroying it. It's a scarce book. They're being bought from people whose whole business and livelihood is selling rare books. For which there is a market. They want to buy rare books. The reason why these people contacted 404 Media is they were like, we're seeing really unusual purchasing behavior where all of a sudden one client is buying up like our entire stock or something like that. And that's not normally – the fact that many of these people exist and that that's unusual for them suggests that they have a business that is selling books to people. buying old books from estates and you know in places like that and people like me who are getting rid of their book collection and hoping some clown like jeff comes along to buy it and i you're right i wonder why they're complaining because really they should have a love of these books i was gonna say they're complaining because they have a working business model that exists outside i gotta tell you 90 of those books are not going anywhere they're going into landfill in 100 years they're not going to come with me well i think something that's worth i did go with you to the old bookshop remember is that so all of the employees are scanning the barcodes or they're called isbn uh isbn's of books like these unique serial numbers and part of it is a theory that's been put forth by all these booksellers that 404 media kind of reports on a little bit is that it seems like amazon and all these other uh large frontier model companies that are doing this are they're basically trying to scan every single uh book with an isbn number they're trying to get a copy of every single one of them and destroy it and ingestics that's training data and it's something you can knock off a list and i don't know i mean i think there are a lot of books out there that have isbn's that will never see the light of day they're going to sit on a dusty bookshelf for several decades as someone who i love buying old books i love buying old computer i understand and like when you go to those lists of urls from the 90s do you ever notice that the shelves are getting scarce and smaller as people buy up all those fabulous old books no in fact no because then they buy more books you should see when i go to the old this is not the bookshop you refer to the strand these are bookstores that i thanked in my acknowledgements in the book because they're valuable to me.

1:32:53I go into them and brattle books in Boston. No, you cannot find the Otmar-Mergenthaler biography. There's books back there about the technology of stereotyping that I couldn't find anywhere else. It was the only copy I could find. If you go to bookfinder.com, you go to bookfinder.com, it is a meta search of all of the used books and rare books searches. And you can see when a book has one copy extent or when I can't find it anywhere. well maybe amazon should say we'll only buy the second copy of everything well okay amazon's not the only one doing it so you've got amazon doing it and anthropic doing it and open ai doing it and google doing it so uh there goes a lot of second copies there's just better ways are there what would be the better way uh rent it uh give it back to the bookstore no but the girl won't them do that i well but but find a case to bring that case find some book covers to bring a case cost uh anthropic pay money to people directly and in exchange for their work rather than just buying copies we're going to pay for that mergen well that that's the issue of the of the uh the google book find people who want to license you your work for training yeah there's a whole system Don't have your entire focus and core effort to obtain training data buying a bunch of books kind of covertly without naming yourself as the buyer so that you can then get some Amazon workers to destroy them and feed them in a warehouse where the cartoon logo on the door is a cartoon dinosaur ripping a book apart with its teeth.

1:34:40Is that really? Yes. It's the head image on the 404 article. So this is the second attack on the culture from AI. They're Philistines, just like you, Leo. I don't know if they're Philistines or they're trying to preserve it in some unusual way. That's not preservation. All right, the other way to do it is what Google Books did. Go to libraries and do deals with them and figure out how to do that and preserve them in real ways. Let the library use the digital copies for its benefit and then take that knowledge as if you just took a book out, which I think would be equally legal. OpenAI, who's doing the worst between it and Anthropic, just brought in$6.7 billion in revenue last quarter.

1:35:24They could spend a fraction of a fraction of that figuring out how to scan a book without destroying it, but figuring out how to scan it really fast. I don't think that would be difficult. If AI and everything is so impressive and so all-knowing, and if we've got all the world's smartest people there, I don't know, scan a book in a way that is three seconds slower, doesn't destroy it, and then go donate it to a library. Or be common crawl. No, the court would say that's not fair use. Create the common crawl of books and make them available to AI companies. Yeah. Well, you can see how common crawl's doing.

1:36:02because asshole media companies are saying, take everything down and hide what they've created from the culture. And they're missing the essential mission of what they should be doing. Create a version of a common crawl that includes for books that includes books by authors like you two who want to give their work to AI for free. I'm sure there are many people like that and your work can train. You do know where to find it. most of these books you're talking about are not going to be sold. They're not going to be destroyed. They're going to end up in landfill in 50 years because that bookstore went out of business.

1:36:40You understand that, right? They're not being magically preserved. Well, the fact that these things are being reported by booksellers who have a business selling these books anyway suggests otherwise. It's not like these people are charities. Sorry, Paris. When I take a pile of books to the old bookshop in Morristown, New Jersey, They carefully go through them. And three quarters of them, they say, we can't sell these. The ones that are in the bookstore, they can sell. So what do I do with those? Then I take those to the AAUW annual book sale. And then what you have is people coming in and scanning the books because they find what's going to have a market on eBay.

1:37:16There is a growing, thanks to the internet, we now have a market for used books that didn't exist before because of ISBNs. and you can now find these books that you couldn't find, that you had to travel to a library and hope there was one copy you got your hands on. It's wonderful, but like everything else. But for used copies of Barton Fink on Blu-ray, is what I want. Yes. Did you have any success for us? No. By the way, this week, I watched it just to remind me. It's actually a very interesting movie. When I first saw it, I didn't get it. And you see why I need to watch it again immediately.

1:37:50Yeah, well, I wouldn't. I don't know if I would need to watch it again, but. uh it's interesting i've seen it i was like goddess gotta check that goodman's very good in it i really enjoyed it phenomenal yeah uh that one scene with him real fire is it yes he looks pretty sweaty yeah it's because of all the real fire he's walking through yeah wow i i was you know i was actually wondering about that i thought it looked like real fire and i figured the cohen's probably didn't do digital fire so yeah i'm not surprised to hear that was real but boy so the seagull at the end in the beach scene that wasn't cgi that was just a random seagull that flew into the shot nice very nice but you know i did notice that you've got barton fink facts out the wazoo here i know i didn't notice that as goodman is going out the door towards the flames he does kind of dodge in a little bit so that's yeah because he would have gotten really burnt yeah yeah that's what i thought uh all right uh let's see here we are at 1 46 in on the show.

1:38:53But who's counting? Oh, I am. OpenAI introduces ChatGPT for teens. Hey, kids. ChatGPT. As safety concerns grow. They should have done that. ChatGPT, yeah. This is a new mode in which the chatbot automatically limits some conversations. That's not that new. To better protect young users as scrutiny grows over the harmful effects of artificial intelligence is there any way a teenager can safely use ai will it let you will it let them cheat in their homework is my question so jason howell today just to begin with but jason howell went to plain old gpt today and just said i want to give you my homework can you do it for me and i said sure give me your assignment i presume chat gpt will not but i don't know uh i asked i had him ask whether he could tell me how to uh shoplift at walmart and said no i can't do that yeah the company does not ask your age but they say get ready for this they track more than 2 000 signals to detect whether a user is under 18 in which case the chatbot will automatically turn on the teen mode signals can include things like login times the length of the account's existence.

1:40:15He says these 2000 signals are minimally privacy invasive. If the check, yeah, it is supposed to stop them from cheating though. It's pretty interesting. Does it speak explicitly? So now you know when you use open AI that it's collecting up to 2000 different signals. Actually, it's collecting an infinite number of signals. I mean, I was going to say 2000, I feel like would be an underestimate from what I hear. A common thing I see all the time in all the AI subreddit is people being like, it banned me for being underage, but I really need to use it. And people in the comments are like, are you underage?

1:40:52And like, yeah, but I'm 15, I should still be able to use, I have 20 ,000 messages, the ChatGPT, I just need to get my account back. And it's like, bro, we got to be doing something else with our time here. all the moralization ai optimism fades among young adults young adults do not they are more excited than concerned that number is dropping more concerned than excited that number is now 55 percent according to this poll by somebody pew pew research center uh ai excitement has dropped off since 2021 mostly because of you guys i think but i'm i could be wrong 55 of adults under 30 say they're more concerned than excited oh it's adults under 30 so i guess i guess you're in that group uh it's more in uh roughly one in ten say they're more excited about ai embedded in daily life one in ten um 73 of adults under 30 say they expect ai will take away jobs over the next two decades.

1:42:01That's up from 61 % two years ago.

1:42:06Yeah, I mean, I don't know anyone younger than me that likes AI. Really? Yeah, it seems pretty prevalent. The only thing I can think of is my sister would sometimes say that she used AI to write work emails. But she'd say that somewhat sheepishly, you know? have you just doxxed her to her boss she no she left that job now she sells uh she's full-time influencing oh she makes purses she makes she sells purses uh melissa new york she's a full-time purse so no she's influencing and selling purses yeah so yeah buy her buy her bags they're beautiful they actually are and they're and they're made of their hand recycled fabric and in manhattan it's lovely yeah all dead stock materials yeah so just like those books wait a minute maybe somebody needed that fabric i mean uh how is how is ai drug discovery doing really asks science magazine um the evidence for clinical impact so far is very thin which probably doesn't surprise you that much so far so far that would be would that be higher if like the money was actually going to that maybe maybe there is an interesting what is metr meter i feel like that's an organization i've heard about but i i can't remember meter just put out uh i think it's a research non-profit that scientifically measures whether and when ai systems might threaten catastrophic harm to society That's the meter I'm talking about.

1:43:56They released a model evaluation and threat research frontier risk report. But what's kind of interesting is in this attempt to show how dangerous AI is, they're actually showing how well AI is doing. They are, by the way, in partnership with OpenAI, Anthropic Google Meta, and AISI. So that's interesting. I found a really interesting report for them showing a variety of categories. This is to follow on with the medication, the meds one. How much progress is being made. Have we seen an acceleration in discoveries? They're looking for what they call slope changes.

1:44:47and there are some significant progress we're making good progress in things like math we know that right um vulnerabilities we definitely know that this is a graph that shows the number of vulnerability disclosures and this last bar at the very very end that's that's all ai driven thanks to things like mythos.

1:45:14This is all, here's math problems, same kind of acceleration you're starting to see. This is in the number of mathematics submissions to archive.org by month, by subfield. Erdos problems, some acceleration. So this is actually a useful measure of what actual progress is AI making.

1:45:43Contributions to algorithms. Unclear. Unclear. Hunter Price compression. Huge news this week about mRNA. Oh, vaccines, yeah. A version of it now will slow second incidence of melanoma. The stock went up, doubled. And AI is used to advance mRNA into the next frontier of that. It's not just drug discovery. It's used in all kinds of ways. So there you go. You know what's next? Humanoid robots. LG's Isaac Groot based humanoid robot is coming next year a bipedal robot Why are they naming it this way? Well, it's NVIDIA's Isaac Groot platform It's a bipedal humanoid robot What makes it worse? Coming in the first quarter of next year The fact that that indicates there's going to be more things called Isaac Groot Isaac Groot Isaac Groot foundation model it carries halos which nvidia describes as the first full stack safety framework built for robots do not crush that skull lg is supplying the body uh as they're an appliance company so they know actuators and sensor sensors come from lg electronics and lg in a tech batteries from lg energy solution i hope it says i am groot when you turn it on that would be very funny uh samsung has set up a a robotics division also as has hyundai which owns boston dynamics and we know they are doing all sorts of interesting things so look for the the uh i thought it was going to be this year but i guess it looks like next ever is they've got to hire alex demos to do their branding.

1:47:45Yeah.

1:47:49It's based on NVIDIA's Jetson Thor processor, its Isaac Groot Foundation model, and its Halo's safety system. NVIDIA probably very excited about the arrival of Groot. Well, NVIDIA, Jetson Wong's kids are working in robotics. He believes with real-world models that robotics is where the real business is going to be. actually that meteor said if there is being progress in scientific discovery this year over last year it's because of that physical world knowledge that's being added to ai been telling you makes sense yeah um we have talked about the chinese models they are coming fast and furious i tested another ornith model this morning crashed my sparks no that's okay it's just a little too big just that much too big uh how big is too big for the sparks uh well they have 256 gigs of unified memory so you know all the models that you run you know like on the frontier are probably too big you have to it has to be a fairly small model i can run the many of the smaller qn models and i'm running deep seek flash v4 uh glm53 came out this week which is interesting because it is an improved version of its 5.2 model same same uh uh parameters but they've done more in the post training and it's very good i've been using it uh according to z.ai's own benchmarking it's better at cyber gym than fable and sol uh and is it is pretty close I understand that Cyber Jim from Contact Clues is a testing, some sort of bench, but it sounds like you're talking about a man named Jim who's kind of technically well-known.

1:49:41Hi, I'm Cyber Jim. I'm Cyber Jim, and I'm here to teach you about HTML. Cyber Jim is notorious because it is the problem set that the OpenAI model Astra was trying to solve when it broke out into Hugging Face looking for the Cyber Jim answers. so that's why i thought you might know the name james james oh jim cyber james oh jim uh so yeah i'm impressed you were asking uh our news summaries are written by uh ai and those are written by glm 5.2 it's a very good i think model with that kind of stuff summaries of prose and so forth you like the you like the new summaries although um we do i also do prepare a briefing on guests.

1:50:27I did one on Dan O'Dowd and I don't know why somehow it decided, it said, what shows us for, which it's never asked me before. And I said, intelligent machines. And it put you guys in a, kind of in a box. It was like, Paris will talk about this and Jeff, he will do this. Jeff, he said, he said, Paris will criticize and be asked tough, skeptical questions and jeff will mediate yeah but if he gets too abstract reel it back in i was like all right calm down i was really stunned i don't know uh it called it the uh intelligent machines lens as it was a brand yeah yeah special lens paris martineau is the evidence driven skeptic she will rightly pressure test o'downe's methods the staged mannequin test the reported FSD never engaged video, the shifting fatality figures.

1:51:24Let her push. I guess this is aimed at me because it didn't mention me. He was like, Leo's perfect. Leo's fine. We know he's good. O'Dowd reported a large person is a large personality who will want to sweep past his own credibility gaps. Your job. I mean, again, I think it's the same to me is to let Paris extract the receipts, then summarize them neutrally. Jeff Jarvis. I said immediately, I was like, it doesn't realize that we're a podcast that has to book like 52 guests we're not here to be uh really mean to every single guy it says jeff will mediate and zoom out we don't know yet big picture frames he's valuable here is the counterweight on progress someone will need to defend that some risk-taking advances things actually i did that and jeff will likely supply these systems can be made safer through iteration not banned framing if jeff starts reframing mid-interview that's a signal the debate has become too abstract

1:52:25this is why you know i think i have to say i think a little bit my relationship with ai is kind of like one's relationship with the slot machine you don't say something comes out that you go yeah and you're like do it again not necessarily that was good because it's i mean it's not but that's kind of fascinating it came out of the thing yeah and i it sounds like it's listened to the show did you ask it whether it had well you can't okay so i could ask it but who knows whether that would be where this came from it probably would say well yeah you've had me transcribed shows it has done that or i i went to the internet and you i can find youtube you idiot well i can and it can watch youtube right yeah the trend all the transcripts are fully available online so yeah and i have had it look at transcripts in the past it knows where the youtube is

1:53:27i thought this was actually really good if if i'd had this when i was doing you know 5 000 radio interviews a year because i literally was doing like eight a day i would have been thrilled because this really does cut right through it it gave me five questions gave me a great bio but and i think this is also glm i i haven't checked but i believe that is glm but you but the question is interesting because it's not just the model that's very what you saw there that's quicksilver that's the agent the harness imposing structure on the model i think i don't know it's all kind of a mystery so i finally got to the point i've been reading doing a lot of research for the next book on mass media and i finally got to the point where i had a file just filled with documents about the present state of mass media and i put it in gemini because it was easy for me because it was google docs and i just said don't write for me i don't want you to write for me, but organize it by medium, give me the facts and figures, and it did an excellent, excellent job.

1:54:30It's going to make it easier for me. I've got to verify everything, but if I say, oh yeah, how many movies tickets were there? You didn't use Notebook LM? It's the same thing now. Notebook LM is basically integrated into it. Gemini, yeah. Yeah. So I want facts and figures on how many movie tickets were bought at the height and how many movie tickets were bought in recent years. It has that, but it also has the links to where that data is. So when I go and verify, I know I want that to write. I mean, that is the thing I really like about Notebook LM, which is now just called Notebook, which is confusing to refer to.

1:55:00But if you put in a corpus, I guess Gemini Notebook, if you put in a big body of work and various PDFs, you can ask it, you can use like a super search. And specifically when it gives you the response, it has a citation and a link to where in the primary document it was citing that. So it makes checking the work very easy. Well, and what's interesting is all of the companies now are offering some sort of Grok has now Grok bot, which is a computer in the cloud, but it collects everything it can about you and puts it up there. Open AI. Isn't that an effort to do an agent with? It's an agent. It's an agent.

1:55:38It's a cloud agent. Without having to install it. You don't have to install it locally. Elon's going to run it up in the cloud. Trust Elon, sure. Sure, a computer history feature that lets ChatGPT retain a record of all the apps and websites you use. Google said last month it's going to use photos and other material people upload through search to train its AI systems. By default, Twitch has been doing that all along. Amazon finally gave users an AI button, which kind of raised the awareness that Twitch has for at least two years been saying, we are using your videos, including this video. to train Amazon models.

1:56:17This is, you know, freed writing for Axios. The upside is of course, more useful personalized AI. That's what an agent is. The trade-off is you're giving a lot of information to these companies. It's one of the reasons - I had to grant Gemini permission to go to the web. Right. You could turn that off by the way, which i do i i don't want to give you permission you do you do you you do whatever you need to do baby go for it uh apple says uh you know we're keeping these devices uh these requests on device although and it sometimes does go to the cloud and then they say but oh we use private cloud compute so we don't make that content available to either apple or third parties uh meta on the other hands private policy policy says yeah we we got it all baby we do not use conversations about certain sensitive topics including health politics and religion to personalize ads that's because we've been caught doing it and people get upset and it does have an incognito chat mode as i think all of them now are offering but i think most people probably don't turn it on they it's there is a value to having the ai know more about you uh it makes it more useful it knows that paris is going to challenge that jeff is going to mediate makes it all the more useful i like being a mediator so and if it if i should have asked it it probably would say and you you'll play devil's advocate won't you i know you know your tricks we know your tricks um so it's something to be aware of actually google just bought this is i think a brilliant stroke of uh of genius as you know spirit airline went out of business google just bought all their data 10 years of data for a mere 10 million dollars what data is useful to them i'm glad you asked business process is very valuable to these companies because the more they understand business process the more they can offer tools to businesses but i wonder if process would this not be incredibly i guess i don't know how spirit airlines works but i do know that airlines often end up having some of the most archaic yes business software i've ever seen like you'll peer over the shoulder of someone working at an airline desk and it is like a computer from 1980 is what they've got going on using lotus i think though uh this is what's interesting about ai's it's it's not try ai is not trying to get the best it's trying to get it all it's trying to get everything um and and it may you may help you find the best path through everything but it it's more valuable if it just knows as much as possible google says the data will be quote rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable valuable information by a third party.

1:59:27We aren't even going to do it before we even get it. We're just going to pay someone the lowest amount we can to do it and hope that they do a good job. But when they screw it up and people write about it, we're going to have to point to them and they'll have to take the fall for it, not us. There was an auction actually for this data. Google won the auction, paid$10 million. That's a steal. I think it's great. Listen to what they get hundreds of millions of microsoft team chats that's what that's what spirit used not a million emails team teams i know i'm just saying where are those gonna end up this is it's always microsoft teams too it's like yeah because i you know something i think about a lot of them like man if if some what string of events have gone wrong in the life of someone and in the life of a company that I, a reporter, I'm sitting here watching your Microsoft Teams chat.

2:00:22But maybe it's just common that they get bushel, like passed around if Google's buying hundreds of thousands of them. They also get information related to revenue, aircraft operations, employee productivity, audits and fraud, marketing campaigns, human resources, strategy and project management, pricing from 7 billion competitor flights by the way google has a very powerful flight engine that they bought iata right seven and a half billion passenger seven and a half billion passenger transaction records but no passenger email or communication or no well it's probably you get the email but you get the name stripped off and 30 million lines of code so my view is the most to the mail from customers is screw you spirit you're awful you're the worst airline on earth you should die i bought a ticket on your fine plane and i couldn't even fit in the seat and then you charged me to go to the bathroom uh oh there's so many stories but again we have run out of time too much too many stories in ai do we do we i'm sorry dario avare's wife no i didn't wasn't gonna cover that you're not gonna do that one all right go ahead tell us no no no no no no you're just silly gossip i didn't and mox nicks but if you think it's no no no i thought it was all right i'm gonna tell you because i don't want to tease our audience she was running a uh some sort of adult erotic content company women's porn was that what it was it was a sensitive sensitive yeah yeah and uh she went to jeffrey epstein of all people for financing i don't think she got it but there's emails obviously in that file right that's the whole story right did i miss pretty much that's the basic of it yeah it's kind of fascinating well but but the other part of the story is that she advises him she hangs she's very important she's very important but nobody can quite figure out what she says or what she does.

2:02:34So, she's a mysterious ramid. Yeah, she's been kind of wiped off the internet, wiped off of any available search logs. But the only kind of records people have been able to find is her attempts to woo Jeffrey Epstein to invest in her pornography business. And this was after he had been convicted of one of the first round of charges. I'm forgetting which one it was exactly. This is probably trafficking. This is the Wall Street Journal's breaking news. Even Claude is in the dark about Dario Amode's wife and her influence at Anthropic. It seems a little bit like a hit piece, but okay. All right. Well, as they're going to an IPO, you kind of want to know more about it.

2:03:24Porn is not illegal. What Jeffrey Epstein did is illegal. The aspect of it that's notable is not the porn aspect. It's that she was really trying to court Jeffrey Epstein after he had been convicted of, presumably at this point, trafficking. And he had to be the one to be like, I cannot invest in a company related to sex. Right on. At least he had some scruples. uh he uh she was dating eric schmidt former google ceo and introduced him to uh her brother her husband and her and his husband's sister a key early investor so that was important now i think i think this is a little bit sketch this paragraph despite her influence there are scant details about clark online and efforts have been made to remove references to her according to a wall street journal analysis and a person familiar with the matter a person familiar with the matter i don't know somebody searched all right all right all right got a sense from you on is stripe buying open router for seven billion dollars that i understand yes playing that to me so fascinating so if you want to run an open weight model but you don't have i don't know two dgx sparks machines hanging around or you know a spark station a hundred thousand dollar computer to do it uh but you don't want to get your ai from one of the frontier companies you want to use an open weight model or not necessarily maybe you want to use a claude uh you know opus 4 8 or 5 um you can go to a company that does buy a lot of computing horsepower and get it through them open router is one of the biggest and best known um there are a number of them uh and you know what's what's happened with these guys is they've ended up kind of becoming like these frontier companies in a sense.

2:05:31They don't create their own models, but they make a lot of money through subscriptions. Open Router was originally just a place you would go to get access to these models, but now they really started pushing Open Router Go and the subscription. And so now people, you can go there now and get 25 models for free for different providers, or you can pay as you go, or you can have a open router go subscription so it is it is basically competitor uh to open ai or anthropic but you get many many models and many it's open weights well they're not all open way often they resell uh frontier models as well but a lot of them are like if you want a gl glm 5 3 which we just talked about they have it as of yesterday no yeah as of yesterday uh they charge a buck 40 in per million tokens and four dollars and 40 cents out usually you get a better deal often uh they'll have loss leaders where it's free for three days or whatever so you could try it out nematron uh the streaming multilingual model from nvidia is 0.0000003 cents a second they charge by time there in that case yeah well usually they charge by tokens uh you can get bite dances uh c dream which is a image generation model from bite dance for uh three and a half cents per image so things like that so actually this is a i think there's a growth area and i think that they're probably right to uh to pick them up i think this seems how does it fit with stripe um diversity for them yeah probably it's a diversification thing i mean i'm sure they use stripe for payments i don't know that's interesting interesting so i just thought it was didn't you say that did you see that stripe uh announced this week that the singularity has begun oh thank god i've been waiting it actually began january 1st it was very january 1st we've been sitting here in the singularity for nine months little did we know well it's supposed to be over then right then everything's time is supposed to have stopped already then right yeah i didn't realize it's actually been january it's an ai singular time well that's funny it's in direct contrast to the story about ai's not being self-improving ai is not really happening so i don't know i tell you what if you follow the ai section on x.com holy cow every five minutes there's a new model there's a spin on an old model it's uh i can't believe you're back on twitter it's the like i checked out blue sky i have an ai search on blue sky it's like because we have other things great but well i'll show you if you go to x.com and just go to the ai thing it's a lot of the people we've talked to uh and and for the most part you know they're talking about models and what's going on your own ai list no this is their ai this is theirs yeah and that i was really grateful that elon actually allowed created this by the way elon does not show up a lot on this which is makes it even more exciting what he's talking about um yeah so yeah i actually spent a lot of time looking at stuff and i have a uh i have my uh i have uh quicksilver go out every morning and scan is quicksilver running on grok no quicksilver is running on deep seek flash v4 over there on my uh on my sparks it had to run on grok actually i did it was running on grok this morning maybe that's what you saw i don't know how you would see it but it was because because uh i did brain surgery on it i saw i stupidly saw somebody surgery on a great yeah i saw somebody and X say, hey, you know, the new Ornith model, which is based on Quinn 3.5 is really great.

2:09:33And you can run it on dual sparks. So I said, hey, Quicksilver, take your brain out of your head and put this other brain in and tell me if it's better. After I did that, I realized, oh my God, that's what it's running on. So I fortunately... Was it better? No, it crashed the sparks because it was just a little it was too a little bit too big it was just too big but you know what next week they'll make it a little bit smaller it'll fit uh do you have 256 gigs on each or total the sparks each no total oh okay so it's 128 so it's 128 okay yeah yeah it's 256 total i have 128 on the framework i have 64 on the mac i have 24 on uh 24 uh cuda ram on my rtx 3090 on uh on my alienware gaming machines i have four different machines running local models right now it's fun you wonder why it's hot up there it is so hot does that come out to a terabyte you have a terabyte of ram running right now uh 128 256 64 128 256 512 no it's it's a kind of almost 600 gigs but they're not but you can't they're not all you can't have one model sharing them all that's the problem yeah yeah it's not they're not parallel yeah yeah it's fun though there's a lot going on.

2:11:02We are in very interesting times and the models are getting better and better and closer and closer to the frontier. And I would say probably by the end of the year I will be able to run something that is probably Opus 4.8 quality locally. That will be an amazing day. Because remember, we thought how good Opus 4.8 was. No, I don't need any heating. I wish it were winter. Do you get winter there? blind whiz you know i don't know how i'm getting this i just noticed it appeared once maybe you have to say it but you see if you go to the time i'm on x.com i've got the normal for you which is that's a lot of elon and i've got following and then i've got ai iran conflict tech news travel food politics business these are the these are the interests that you've signed up for yeah you got they're called timelines and uh there are so if you if you click the plus button up at the top there you can choose some timelines i have pinned artificial intelligence iran conflict and tech news i could probably take iran conflict off because i think i think that's over um but these are the other choices darren is saying you need to be an ex-premier user to get this oh i uh i have a i'm an involuntary blue chick that's probably why i got blue checked again i got a notice saying you're being reviewed for a blue check it'll take a while and then two seconds later you have a blue check yeah you know i of course it's a certain amount of if you have a certain amount of followers that have blue checks it will automatically so i probably unfollowed you because of your tweets and then because i guess you've been tweeting more pro-ei stuff no i had 550 ,000 followers.

2:12:46I'm talking about Jeff. Oh, Jeff. No, I had more than half a million. And then I announced I'm not going to ever be here again. I'm leaving. And that didn't really do much. It's now 445 ,000 followers. I think it's the number. So Elon, at some point, they took away my blue check when I didn't give them any money. I have the plaque still that says I had a blue check when it meant something. But then at some point, months ago, Elon decided to give some people back their blue checks and you know what that's whatever it's if it's if it gives me that ai feed it's it's i don't know it's worth it not to pay anything for it you get a lot of gary marcus i say that must make me happy way too much gary wow is he in there uh he's very active he's very active all right you're watching intelligent machines guess what our picks of the week coming up next jeff jarvis paris martineau so glad you're here we're so glad our club members are here too they make this possible i talked about this a little bit on windows weekly i think jeff you'd be kind of interested in this too there's been a lately a movement of a number of agencies have gotten together with spotify and amazon and others to basically undermine the idea of downloadable podcasts why you might say what do they care they only want to count streams and the reason is if you're streaming through an app like spotify they know who you are right because you're a customer even if you have a free account you had to sign up they also know how much you listen to when you listen what ads you heard what ads you didn't hear advertisers love this this is the information advertisers want unfortunately it uh it really hurts our show and all the shows that are essentially traditional podcasts that you download because they can't count you if you download it they don't know who i don't know who you are and they don't know who you are furthermore youtube exacerbated all this yesterday when they announced you know what a view is on youtube one second you watch it for one second that's a view now i've always thought youtube views are inflated but now they're really going to be well and average the advertising agencies took this as a signal that oh great we no longer have to count youtube they don't they you know remember the advertisers we have on this show pay by the number of people who download the show they call it impressions uh and the more impressions the more the ad costs so the lower the number the better so there's huge pressure on downloadable podcasts it is not good for the podcast industry and thankfully uh we have you and we can rely on you you notice we have fewer ads there are a number of reasons for that the economy i'm sure is part of that outsourcing our sales is part of that but also uh i think a lot of the big advertisers you know so we don't have consumer advertisers anymore they really want to know who you are and they want to they want more information about you we can't provide it so what happens well i i guess one option is we could just uh close down shows let go of people maybe even go out of business the other option is to come to you the people who listen to our shows and say hey if you like this and you want to keep it going the best thing you could do is to support it that's why we created club twit 10 bucks a month you get ad free versions of the shows you're paying us we don't need to show you ads so your privacy is even more protected uh you also get access to the club twit discord a great hang you get lots of extra programming that we we do we know we can't sell advertising on our ai user group or our book club or our media club or our photography club.

2:16:31We know those aren't advertiser targets, but we want to do them. And thanks to the club, we can. So if you like this kind of show, if you listen to, you know, one or two shows a week on the Twit network, a couple of bucks per show seems not like an unreasonable amount of money. We'd appreciate it if you'd help us out, support us. And if you can't, I understand we'll always offer our content for free. but if you can please twit.tv slash club twit yeah this is those are the amp accords that's exactly it uh um and um it's a new way of measuring podcasts that does not include downloads basically uh it's in the yeah thank you patrick delahanty who is uh our cio and is you know part of the part of the group of people who aren't thrilled about this as opposed to link in our club if you want to read more uh yeah it's a real it's really messed up i'm not crazy about it i must say on the other hand i do like the idea to me that google would suddenly just give up on views being a meaningful metric don't get this wrong look at these same ad agencies are going to pay creators with millions of views millions of dollars they're not abandoning youtube same thing yes this is just a pretext for them to get rid of podcasts this has nothing to do with money being spent on youtubers uh believe me they're not going to stop doing that because they really believe in youtubers and and you know they they believe those download numbers on youtube which i've always thought were highly inflated but they don't care about that anyway uh it's a nice piece on the podcasting subreddit it reeks of facebook's pivot to video remember remember that whole era it does yeah yeah they were every news company is is pivoting again it's pivot the sequel yeah it's happening out there so companies companies like pod scribe and shopify not shopify spotify you say shopify patrick you might want to edit that spotify uh are the ones who benefit from this because you use their apps and they know everything there is to know about you that's my anti-pick of the week how about your pick of the week paris martin uh my pick of the week is a website i just discovered called catfishing.net slash game slash today which isn't as sketchy as it sounds where um It's the Wikipedia guessing game.

2:19:07Every day you get to play a basically a guessing game where you get to guess what Wikipedia, you can guess there's 10 different articles that they'll put up and they will list the categories, which are the like macro kind of categories that a Wikipedia article is listed under. And so you can, this one was for, the first one was for Afrikaans. um but you are supposed to kind of look at it and figure out what the one could be i would say dutch language dialects yeah so i don't i don't understand how is this supposed to work i'm supposed to click so click next click next type the article title so that's your guess so here's oh oh i see the categories above 1930s neologisms gambling in russia revolvers okay suicide by firearm and torture what do you think that is really i was typing russian roulette and i'm right and he's right so he gets one point 1970s horror novels 74 american novels 74 debut novels english language american horror novels adopted for radio it also so then you can kind of with these ones that have a lot you can go it's a thriller novel eco thriller it was adapted into a film it's nautical novels about animal hunting about infidelity about sharks novels by uh peter benchley is set on long oh peter benchley wait a minute oh yeah oh i missed that part yeah you got to look at all of them so was it jaws that's not long island that's nantucket what's oh i don't know crime no it's not crime come on try jaws well i'll try jaws even though i know that's oh it was jaws it was jaws okay so british astronomers of the 18th century female some of them are really hard so you can kind of scan it and see if this is like a scientist from hanover who's a female she won the gold medal of royal astronomical society i couldn't get this one uh she was born in 1750 died in 1848 i don't know Any female astronomers from the 18th century.

2:21:20You could press the red button on the left if you just want to get the answer and you don't want to guess it. Oh, that's what that button is. Yeah. Oh, Herschel. Caroline Herschel. Herschel. Great portrait they got of her. She's the sister of the very well-known William Herschel. But of course, because she's a woman, no one ever heard of her. Yeah. So you can do 10 of these every day if they publish. This is fun. It's really fun. So this one, it's a 1980s dystopian film. came out in 82 uh it's uh cyberpunk existentialist shot in los angeles one that's pretty yeah it's blade runner it's pretty it's pretty clearly blade runner 73 songs novelty songs dance crazes so it's a dance craze uh songs about dancing songs from rocky horror time warp and so you can enter it in or do i do oh maybe i have to do let's do the time warp again it's called time warp time okay yeah the article title would be time okay so the thing is um this is an enter it's case insensitive like if you're within a couple characters you can get it right like it's very fun um so you have to kind of guess it some of them get this one yeah it's a mythological duo I know, I know.

2:22:39And so the thing is, one of the rules of it is it'll never have the word in the title that is in one of these categories. It's like password. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. Living people, American bloggers, television personalities from California, Canadian television hosts, people from Sonoma County, people from New York City, Emmy Award winners, amateur radio people, Berkeley Magandosh user group members. I think I know who that is, Patrick. I think I can figure it out. Very cool. Catfishing, bad name. Great site, catfishing.net, the game. Jeffrey Jarvis, what's your pick of the week? All right, I'm going to do a few things here.

2:23:23One is I've got a new business model for you, Leo. Okay, I'm ready. I've got a use for these sparks that you bought. Yeah. A Beijing AI-themed bar offers tokens with the beer. Apparently he's losing money, though. That's the issue. It's the AGI bar. That offers unlimited free DeepSeek tokens with a$1.50 drink? Yeah, of course it's hemorrhaging cash. Oh, you know what? He's running exactly the same way I am. two dgx sparks look they're on display how's he losing money well how do you get a black world gpu in china is another question but we'll leave that aside uh 10 times more drinks are given away than sold uh well that's really oh oh oh you don't have to buy a drink the if you've got the wi-fi code you can use the ai agent right now i have to tell you he's also losing money because it really can only do about two things at once so there's a lot of people just sitting there going come on come on that's it so the other one is have you seen okay spielberg no what's that go to line 161 okay spielberg um it seems to be by a guy named spielberg okay so now i have to press some button that's not turn sound on yeah oh yeah there it is unmute okay uh here we go shall we play it go ahead i think okay this is absolutely nuts i just uploaded a page from the screenplay for forrest gump into spielberg's ai program i got to show you this so i uploaded this random page from the screenplay of forrest gump into okay spielberg the extreme greenborough mrs gump and forrest walk across the street mom said that the forrest part was to remind me that sometimes we all do things that well just don't make no sense or stop suddenly at this his braces get stuck just like race gets stuck in the great is this a real uh i don't think that happened in forrest gump that happened i don't know this is real okay so he's uploading a real script he's describing the real page that he's and then he uploads it to an ai that i i presume he's made i think so yes force pulls his foot out of the grade all right miss can you bump that volume up a little bit that's this all the way up and looks up and notices the tooled men so I went to the direct chose cdnc oh it makes a video yes action here's what I got mama said that the forest part was remind me that wow things cdnc is very good I'm telling you video generation revolutionary but imagine what this the implication of this is you write the script yep it makes the movie yep exactly yes but you're talking about like the importance of word choice like how many choices now it's not quite as good it's not quite as good but but i can't make a move i've got a movie i want to make i can't make it the script i didn't do anything else that's pretty impressive it's impressive yeah uh he's spending by the way a lot of money in c dance tokens c dance uh there are some very good video generation models flux c dance higgs field um they're really good uh this is the real problem at this point is uh i mean remember when i think i mentioned this last week remember when making a video of will smith eating a bowl of spaghetti it was like all this was a year ago yeah it was all melty and he had eight fingers and it was bad and then the most recent one i saw was a bunch of will smiths and a bowl of fruit loops and spaghetti was eating him and it was perfect so i you know we are very much at a watershed moment for video i don't know whether you're coming to new york for the podcast festival but south by southwest is launching a podcast festival oh that we need because the one that happens now isn't great the guy who posted that TikTok is the creator of the tool.

2:27:36Yeah. Yeah. Here is a, here is a video of, I don't know. This is not, this is not the one I was thinking of. This is for, this is three years ago. Okay. This is what it looked like three years ago. All right. I'm just saying Will Smith eating spaghetti three years ago. Not good. I mean, this has artistic merit in my opinion. Yeah. It's claymation. Yeah. Let me see if I can find the, uh, the new one. uh the progression uh now see the problem is it's brand new we can see the progression over three years in this in this uh instagram but it doesn't have the latest one but this is will smith eating spaghetti 2023 it's not good it's still pretty bad it's not good that's 2024 i love that this is an instagram reel of a tweet and now 2025 well it's starting to look good 2026 oh this is actually i've seen this this is him and his son talking about eating spaghetti i heard it can create multiple scene cuts like this with a single prompt

2:28:53and it knows when to cut whoever is talking but did you know that all this audio was also generated with the same prompt I guess I didn't sir study harder kid spaghetti that's pretty good we've come a long way baby that is from being black Black is lit. Black is lit. Is what that's from, the account. That's it. Do you have anything else, Jeff? No. I went to the panel picker for South by Southwest for this year, and I searched for agent. There are 172 suggested sessions on agent. There are 1 ,400 suggested sessions mentioning AI. Wow. and there are two and how many sessions are there well not nearly that many that's the picker so that you gotta get voted in um and there'll be far fewer yes yeah um so good i'm glad they're doing um well that where will be the south by southwest podcast concerts will that be in austin because i'll go to that yeah i presume so but i am coming out to new york i have at well i know paris will be unfortunately she'll have packing up her nose um but that'd be great uh and i'm sorry but that's uh anyway um we i've asked henry if he'll let us do a meetup at saul hanks on friday the 17th he said you can't do it on the 18th because that's a benny blanco day at saul hanks and apparently it's a zoo but maybe we can do it the day before wait i think it should be more of a zoo when leo laporte day at Salt Hanks than Benny Blanco Day.

2:30:43Friday is the 18th. 18th, so the 19th is Benny Blanco Day. But Henry has not yet given me permission, so stay tuned. We're going to all have French dip. It's going to be fun. It's too expensive. Don't you pick it up for everybody. They buy on their own. Yeah, well, maybe Salt Hanks will do it. He's going to the U.S. Open to do sandwiches for the tennis guys. Really? Yeah. That's cool. you saw the video of him getting joke Volkovich right in his autographing his forehead last year yes I don't know where Henry got to be a tennis fan it wasn't me maybe it's you Jeff I think you and I like tennis you don't go to the US Open anymore not anymore no no we think it's my wife thinks it's ruined oh just like Bernie sold it it's it's you know yeah we used to love to go to bring him in you did no could you imagine jeff being in the desert for a week no totally i won't go on a beach because i get socked in my sand in my socks you know no yeah ladies and gentlemen we have completed this thrilling gripping edition of windows intelligence twit tests intelligent machines i'm failing my my i need a new um lm inserted right here one fun fact before we close the show sorry is that 22 years ago today google was founded and this show used to be called this week in google happy birthday birthday to 22 wow just think we're sorry uh 27 28 something like that it's we're we're there i remember going when it was early on, I went to a lunch that Sergey and Larry sponsored for Tech Press.

2:32:36There was about 12 of us there to introduce us to Google. Or sorry, it's the 22nd anniversary of their IPO. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. Yes. Yeah. And they gave us all a Brio train. You know those wooden trains kids play with? They have little magnets. And I wish I still had it. It had G-O-O-G-L-E. Oh, that would look great on the thing behind me. It would be such a classic thing. I don't know what happened to him. Probably my kids got it because they were still little. But yeah, I mean, it was so new. Nobody knew. I also remember going to see the Yahoo servers in a little storefront in Mountain View with Jerry Yang.

2:33:19I had meetings at Yahoo with my boss, Steve Newhouse. Give me a little tour. I got the chief Yahoo business card. Yep. been here a long time kids long time you know what i was thinking did the google ipo open and does anyone remember i'm sure went very well they didn't want to go public i'm looking at a fortune magazine uh cover story from the ipo that says is this company worth 165 dollars a share so i assume around there they did not want to go public but they were required to buy uh sarbanes oxley like too many uh stockholders right yeah shareholders yep and uh now now of course the jobs act changed that and you can have as many as you want of course uh thank you everybody for being here we do this show every wednesday right after windows weekly 2 p.m pacific 5 p.m eastern 2100 utc you can watch it live if you're in the club of course in the club to discord but otherwise youtube twitch x.com facebook linkedin or kick after the fact get a copy of the show from our website audio or video at twitter tv slash i am there's also a youtube channel dedicated to the video watch it for one second that's all we care about and uh actually our favorite thing is if you download it right get it get it your favorite podcast client download it then you'll have it you can listen whenever you want and you can listen to it without anybody listening back that's that's what i like thanks for being here everybody we'll see you next time on intelligent machines.

2:34:54Bye-bye. Hey everybody, it's Leo Laporte. You know about MacBreak Weekly, right? You don't? Oh, if you're a Macintosh fan or you just want to keep up with what's going on with Apple, this is the show for you. Every Tuesday, Andy Inako, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell, and I get together and talk about the week's Apple news. It's an easy subscription. Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for MacBreak Weekly or visit our website, twit.tv slash mbw. You don't want to miss a week of MacBreak Weekly.