IM 887: September 39th - Siri's Next Move: Inside Apple's Ambitious AI Overhaul

37:18So like that whole part, I fully automated, but it's like only relevant to me. It's almost like home assistant supervisor running in the background, doing all of the work for you. Yeah, I never got it to that level. That was the one shortcuts as a platform is too hard to manage. It's a single file list of folders. And then it's like one big list of all your shortcuts. So just scrolling them all would take me like literally minutes just to get down to the bottom and run the correct shortcut. it so like that was where i ran into like not being able to actually orchestrate our system around it i think on the flip side like list 25 songs that i haven't listened to in the last six years and shuffle them in the music app and play that on my home pod is like a perfectly amazing shortcut that you could use every single day and provide a ton of value and that's just like fun i love those kind of shortcuts but like to me i'm always trying to be like here's the fancy thing you can do and then there is just like everyday stuff also i think a lot of the middle ground is where it's like not worth it to go that deep and then not have to like now you're managing a whole system of shortcuts um i really do love automations also that is a big thing this year is that automations are part of the individual shortcut which means they can be shareable and so So for the last 10 years, you cannot share automations.

38:45I would have to give you a 16 step setup instructions in order for you to do anything basic with automations. So functionally, they haven't like existed in the public sphere other than all of the TikTok means about like plug your phone in. And then it like makes a weird moaning noise and you do it on someone else's device so that they plug their phone in. They don't understand what's happening. And like, it's more like you, you turn on the car and it goes like, okay, let's go. And stuff like that. So like those ones are silly, but also like automation matters a lot because you don't have to do anything about it.

39:21And that's shortcuts that you don't have to manually choose to run. You will always use a lot more. So that's another fun area. Is shortcuts are deterministic. They're really computer programs. They're little programs. They always do the same thing each time. AI is not deterministic. it's probabilistic you can tell an ai to do exactly the same thing twice and you'll get a different result both times and so there are times it's appropriate to use ai and times it's appropriate for instance i could ask siri to design a shortcut for me and it might design two different shortcuts each time right something else each time i come back to it and that's yeah it's kind of for a lot of people that's annoying and puzzling it's because we're used to computer programs doing what we said to do over and over again the same way.

40:10And I would argue Apple's a little bit doesn't like that very much. I have felt the squeeze of Apple trying to really filter what AI does so that it is more deterministic. And sometimes that results in annoyance when it comes to using these systems. I was just telling Leo earlier, I have been trying Siri AI, running the betas. And something that's a little annoying to me is I will say, set a reminder for two days from now for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And let's say I say, I don't know, Crayola, for a Crayola purchase, it will respond to me. You're buying crayons? It will respond to me and say, did you say Crayola purchase or I don't know, something else?

40:57And what's - Or Shinola. Are you buying Crayolas or Shinola? And the transcript of the original request from me said Crayola purchase. So it's very much trying to be careful about the fact that AI can come up with lots of different answers, but that makes it a little less convenient. Whereas I know if I said that to one of the other AI systems, it would just take the first assumption and run with it. And that can be good at times and bad at times, but more often it is good for what I'm trying to do. And so that little bit of like, how many filters can we put onto this AI that isn't deterministic to make it do what Apple is known to do?

41:39You feel that friction. And I do think that makes it troublesome at sometimes. Totally. I feel like what is interesting, so a good example of that is the shortcuts app has a used model action where you're allowed to use the local model or private cloud compute or also cloud pro now. and then you can even kick it out to chat gpt what is cool about that is it is deterministic also so that action will given a set of inputs from shortcuts that are the same will produce generally the same output i hear what you mean that it's like in a general experience that might not be what you want i'm curious i don't know and i'm i'm still learning more just my own research on ai like if that actually will be a benefit in the long term because making an llm deterministic when it's really trying not to be is actually like a good thing depending on your goals of alignment um i think that's where we're like for shortcuts it's basically necessary because if use model gave you a different output every time you you'd be like why am i using this this isn't a shortcut anymore this is just a random generator and that's not useful so yeah i'm curious how it'll play out as like generally Siri can get better at doing those kinds of things.

42:58But when she knows what to do, she knows how to handle it well and always does the same thing. Like that'll be curious to see as these tools like evolve beyond where they are today, because it is right now she's kind of just like an orchestrator of app intents and then is handing off to google to sort of do some of the intelligence uh securely at least and it's sort of a it's just not where since they announced it and all the bar has been raised so we'll sort of see there um but i feel like the deterministic thing it's a it's fascinating that apple's doing that and again that most people aren't aware or paying attention to that have you used any non-apple tools to improve upon your shortcuts work?

43:47Have you tried to implement other AI systems for it? And I mean, given that I have a whole directory of every shortcut I've made and all the actions involved in it, I did feed that into Codex and was making a... Federico Vatici also made his own shortcuts playground. So I was sort of building off of what he did there. But yeah, I can more intelligently make shortcuts based off of the time that i make and really under i analyzed like what kind of programmer am i and i think i'm like up to just under 400 level and once you hit around there the needs of like technology like hashing and things like that just get more complicated and shortcuts doesn't scale as an interface to that kind of technology but like as a programmer you can do pretty advanced things like it has all the primitives to be able to do what a lot of for like a lot of what we're seeing with other technology it's just like building it into shortcuts would be insane to manage over time um but yeah the i think that both shortcuts and app intense there's just not like shortcuts has an xml framework underneath it so it's not really well designed to understand.

45:05And then it's not like published online on GitHub as an empty, like in the extracted format. It's a secret. I mean, no, it's just outdated and it's not, it could be fine, but it's just not as easy to like parse quickly. And there's not like seven, I don't have all mine on in the raw file on GitHub that then that GPT scraped into their model or something like that. So like it's sort of and then same with App Intense there's a people just don't share their iOS code bases with really good implementations freely online because they're busy making money from it and not trying to show it to everybody else so so last question Matthew you saw the Apple event today do you think Apple's on that at least on the right track or what do you think of their AI strategy now Totally.

45:54I mean, it's from where I was with workflow in like 2021, it was not, I had no idea that this was part of their ASI strategy and it, it like developers for support was almost non-existent, even though they added all this new technology. And so from that space, I was concerned and didn't understand what Apple was doing. And like, just as a meta commentary, I don't know what Apple would have done if they didn't buy this app because like they might've just been had like super far behind with all of AI. Otherwise, right. I think since learning about app intense and getting really into it, I've become re-encouraged because I was like, wow, this API is very incredible.

46:38It expands to all their needs. and then applying ai on top of that when we got agents last november and i saw like notion notion agent just being like go find messages go write new one do these things i was like this is literally just shortcuts actions just for notion but just chained together with ai and so that immediately translated back to app intense that i was like as long as you do what apple does and provide all the primitives in the way that they have in a very like dynamic setup something like siri applied with good ai and do anything that these llms are doing and apple has like a very well-structured tooling machine for that but at this like at a meta level there aren't peer leaders inside the company i think really pushing this internally for apple's own apps to like eat their own dog food.

47:34All of the Apple apps should have every single new feature supported in App Intense always immediately at launch going forward. Otherwise, like, why would you, if Apple's not even doing it, why would you? It sort of doesn't matter as a priority because they're sending that signal. I think at the same time, what they've laid out is this whole sophisticated system that like the developers that I worked with that really got into it, they're like this is incredible that it can do this much and we had no idea really i think as soon as they can get that story out further and get people adopting it and just get really killer like if instagram did have the best app intense support and cria i think then like everybody else will follow suit sort of thing but i really do think they need to push it themselves and just keep saying go do this like it's even with the cria i think it's still out but like the developer keynote is always like developers are paying attention but not necessarily the businesses at large and then in the iphone one it was in this keynote but not super hard about like go add support and here's how to do it they said they said 300 000 apps already do it and i was like wow half of those have got to just be the search domain and i was gonna say it's not really doing that or like i don't know there's also millions and millions of apps on the app store So like, it's probably there.

48:57I could see the, I could see who was featured on the thing. Um, I will say one of my clients was on there and I was pretty stoked about that because it was like, which one, uh, which is travel planning. Yeah. We built the whole set of like, they have like 45 actions. So like, it's, I think develop app shortcuts was like, add your key features to the action button. Now it's like, go add everything on every screen. and people are like, what? Like, I'm not really prepared for that. But I think they'll get there. It's just, honestly, and that's why, like, I'll just say my company's goal is to accelerate that.

49:34Let's get people there sooner and not wait for everybody to figure this out. Like, I'll teach everybody and make it a service so that you can just get it. I'm trying to get it particularly for free for personal use so that anybody who's just vibe coding an app can just have really good series support. And then I feel like that'll really push the market forward. um yeah no i'm excited i've been i always i do try really carefully that thing of like you can't trust a man to understand something that like he's paid to understand like that's always been for shortcuts i i tried really hard not to be like hey guys this is the perfect solution for everything because like kind of wasn't and so the crii there's a lot of limitations but what you can do with it is really incredible and it is up to developers to really push that to the edge and provide cool experiences.

50:22And there's, I just want to see like this all live, like HomePod, all your apps in every part of it is addressable through every part of the system and shortcuts. You can build automations on everything. I feel like we have like the coolest technology, but like AI also like raised the bar and we're all like distracted by the shiny thing or worried about AGI taking it over. And it's like, we can control all parts of our computers now and Apple will kind of get there for for mobile and for a lot of people before like the rest of the whole market turns around so like i'm i'm excited to see it with regular like i think regular people wanting this is like the the major push for everything it's like now that people expect this like developers have to follow suit otherwise you're gonna just fall behind entirely it's a tale as old as time Apple inventing an amazing technology and then everybody ignoring it.

51:18Apple keeping it alive for years and then finally going, okay, fine. And then moving on. But as Oprah said, a billion phones in your pockets, y 'all. They have the market cloud and this, I just, I hope, I want, this is what we want. And I hope that developers bite the bullet as hard as it is and do it. a good place to start, supercomputer.tech. Matthew Casanelli. Just reach out to me directly. We can get it set up. I can do it in my sleep is the problem. I like it. You took one look at my shortcut and said, oh yeah, sure, I understand. I understand. Yeah, it's written like a six-year-old. Matthew Casanelli, so nice to reconnect with you, and I'm glad you're doing so well.

52:02Really appreciate your joining us on Intelligent Machines. Thank you. Thank you. We'll have more with Paris and Micah right after this. Our show today brought to you by Helix Sleep, my favorite mattress. And this morning, the alarm goes off at 6 a.m. I know there's a big Apple event. I got stuff to do. I got places to be. Micah's waiting for me. And I just rolled over and I said, no, I can't get up. I love this too much. I love my Helix Sleep. Labor Day, by the way. We just had the Labor Day weekend, right? Perfect time to give your bedroom the upgrade it deserves. Here comes winter. You know, you spend at least a third of your life in that mattress.

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55:58They still have great deals. Always helixsleep.com slash machines. We thank them so much for supporting Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis has the week off. Paris Martineau is here with her baba ganoush. It's true. I was baba ganoush snacking. I love baba ganoush. Listen, I saw on the rundown, I was like, we got four whole ads. I can have a snack dinner tonight. Plenty of time for your pita bread, your baba ganoush, your hummus. Hummus. So Astra came out. It was funny. I'm not sure I agree with him. jensen wong of nvidia said agi is here congratulations everybody we've made it why is everybody saying agi is here all of a sudden come on guys we know it's not here no and they're trying to find something to make up with a makeup for the anthropic employees being like yeah dice roll chance we kill well that's what i'm that's what i'm saying concomitment with people saying oh my god it's smarter than humans there are other people saying and they're going gonna kill us all within 10 years what is going on it's all bs what what okay this is what is it is it yeah because they don't this is well let me ask you this do you both think that they believe it's bs or do you think that these very smart people are truly afraid is it cynical a lot of anthropic employees do genuinely believe this yeah i think you're right this is and the claim we're speaking about is um uh i believe an anthropic employee took to twitter and was like yeah there's a 10 chance that we quit an anthropic or ai in general kills all humans in what was it 10 years yeah i think within 10 yeah he's 27 so he's entitled to his youthful belief that 10 years is a long way away.

58:01Mathematician. He worked in specializing in training new AI models. He's leaving. He quit his job because he doesn't want to participate in an industry ride rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves, worried they could spiral out of control and destroy humanity. Of course, as a result, he got a lot of attention, got a big headline in the Wall Street Journal, every newspaper. Anthropic researcher quits. out of a this is so annoying to me because well i mean look i can't promise you that ai is not going to destroy the world i can pretty much promise you that it isn't that good if the world is destroyed it will be by human beings i think what's clear at least in my and i'll let you talk my opinion ai is a force multiplier and uh people can use it to be more creative to do amazing things individuals can do things that used to take teams of people to do uh it's it's amazing in that regard it can create music and create images it can write it can do all sorts of stuff by itself it is not going to destroy anybody it's not going to hurt anybody it's not going to destroy the world it doesn't have any volition anyway it has no desire needs or wants but there are plenty of people who uh are nasty we've learned this in the world and they are inevitably some of them going to try to use ai to do bad things is that ai's fault not any more than it's a hammer's fault if somebody decides not to hammer nails but hammer heads it wasn't the atom's fault that the nuclear bomb was so deadly is what you're saying like it's the fact that the humans wielded the power i don't even think it's as bad as a human bomb the human the atomic bomb demonstrably releases a you know fusion and fission release demonstrably a huge amount of energy that is a bad thing in the wrong places this isn't that way this is a computer program come on it's bits it's not going to release i feel like you could probably have said that the component parts of the atomic bomb if not put together and manipulated in the way they did was not going to release a huge amount of energy but no no but that's the nature of fission is it releases a lot of energy right either to power generators or to blow things up this isn't on this isn't like that this is on the same scale as a computer program wasn't a weapon in the first place it was so if ai is dangerous it's because people are using it wrongly to choose targets for bombs that's a mistake but you don't blame the ai for that you don't think ai is going out see these guys are this is part of the problem with anthropomorphizing all this to say as open ai did it escaped its containment and it didn't escape it was sitting on their desks it it used the internet to hack another system it was but it never escaped anything it doesn't have any volition of its own it doesn't i i i mean the impression you people are getting is oh ai is like a human it can make it can design design to do something.

1:01:23But the attack on hugging face was an escape from containment. That is a succinct way to describe what happened to a layman. Yeah, well, the layman would be misunderstanding it, though. That's why you have people saying, oh, my God. I think it's important to escape containment any more than your browser is escaping containment when you go to a website. Well, you had a tool that had a very specific amount of, that had very specific parameters set upon it and it, without being explicitly told to do so, sidestepped the parameters and did some. No, no, it did exactly what it was told to do. It was told to attack hugging face directly.

1:02:05No, it was told to solve these problems without any constraints. It was, it said, you have no constraints, do whatever you need to do to solve these problems. That's what it was told to do. So it's your argument that OpenAI basically told it to attack Hugging Face by saying you Well, they didn't put any constraints on it. They look wasn't doesn't open AI issued multiple lengthy statements saying they don't want to take our constraints? No, they don't want to admit responsibility. That's what I think this, so I think that's really what the conversation is. If you look at what Jacob Coxon actually said, at no point does he say that AI is the thing that he's stepping away from, or because of AI.

1:02:47He's talking about people, he's talking about humans, he's talking about the companies. He doesn't want to be a part of the companies that are making these tools and taking them to a level without the sort of safeties in place or the considerations in place. So I think that what we have is when this gets filtered into the sort of more general news, those headlines are AI is going to destroy us all. When really what Jacob is saying is people aren't taking all of this seriously enough. And I feel weird being at a company that doesn't seem to be taking it as seriously as it should be. So I see now kind of what we're saying, where it is still a tool at the end of the day.

1:03:32And when it gets translated to the masses, it does get turned into this, it's AI that's doing this, it's AI. And that's not the case. It is the irresponsibility of humans. Yeah. This has been a real quick, it's the same as blaming electricity then, right? Yeah. Because electricity is responsible for all this, really. yeah you can use electricity i mean electric chair that's a fair argument uh i think it's really easy for open ai to say oh they escaped but and it serves them in two ways one it makes them you know the creators of something amazing and two it gets them off the hook like but they could look everybody admits every cyber security professional admits they could absolutely have thwarted this in many, many ways.

1:04:21I mean, I would say it's just a pressing of a problem then, that you have these incredibly impressive tools being basically shepherded, grown, and developed by teams of people who have proven now time and time again that they're not willing to put any of the basic necessary safeguards on their tools to stop helping others. We'll know that if it happens again. I don't think that that's... No, no, because it could have been an honest mistake. It could have been like... It could have been an honest mistake? Well, it could have been. We should just wait and let them all, you know, wait around to make it again?

1:05:05We didn't think they were that good that they could do this. At what point will you say that companies should have some sort of regulation put upon them? No, I don't like regulation because the people doing the regulation have this science fiction mentality that they are controlling alien minds. And that's not what's happening. I do think because of your perception of politics, I don't think it's entirely wrong that all regulation is will never work. Oh, no, there's a good regulation they could use against open AI right now. It's called the Computer Fraud Act. yeah they don't need new regulations ah i see what you're saying i mean it's crazy that there has not been any sort of enforcement action for opening i basically saying yes we hacked another company so sorry right i think opening i could defend itself so that's why i'm saying if it happens again they're culpable you could say they just thought well the kid couldn't they wouldn't these things aren't that smart they're not going to be able to figure that out and get out and blah blah blah now knowing that they will if it happens again then they are absolutely culpable do you know how the first fistula um anal fistula was uh cured no please enlighten me the french king at the time um of course he was known for getting uh coffee enemas and he also had, he didn't eat fiber.

1:06:45And so he had all these horrible issues. And at the time there weren't surgeons because it was seen as sacrilege to, to operate. And so what he did was he high, well, he didn't hire, he brought in a barber surgeon and he said, you can have a few of my people to practice this surgery on. And so he went around and he practiced before he performed the surgery on the French King. And it's a little bit like the break a few eggs to make an omelet argument. And I wonder where we feel this stands when it comes to sort of how, because I'm curious to hear the argument for no regulation or not having regulation by people who don't understand how it's going.

1:07:48Is that motivated by the thought that there are going to be other countries that don't have the same regulation and therefore are able to create these tools? What is the motivation behind not wanting to look at this issue and figure out a way to solve for what problems we're seeing? Or is it, Leo, it sounds like maybe your argument is this was a genuine mistake and we can trust that the company will now address it in their own way and therefore do not need to have the regulation well i think it'd be appropriate to do an investigation and the investigations so far have all been paid for and supported by open ai the meter thing was you know these are doomers ai doomers uh this this serves a certain narrative i don't i think law enforcement could very reasonably say that was uh you just hacked another company uh we want to talk to people responsible i think that's completely reasonable and i don't have a problem with that i have a big problem with bernie sanders saying we need to outlaw ai and anybody who does any research on ai should go to jail for 20 years i have a big problem with that i think it's funny because i i think it's weird it's hard to understand in my opinion again i should shut up but my opinion and then i will shut up is that we are simultaneously giving ai a lot more credit than it deserves and a lot less credit than it deserves it is a very useful tool it is amazing at what it can do it is not an alien mind and by the way that was the title of a blog post by the chief scientist at open ai he says it is an a an alien mind this is the other problem is we don't know how much of this is self-serving pr and how much of it is genuine concern.

1:09:44You know, the guy I had the sand conversation with two years ago. When is he coming on the show? I don't know. It's not saying, but it's just a guy. He's another guy researching. Yeah, he's a Hoffman guy. He was a guy researching AI. But he told me it's an alien mind two years ago. He said it's going to get very weird. Was his name Jacob Petruski? but i mean listen what jacob says uh jacob uh pachocky chief scientist at open ai he says it's an intellect we don't fully understand first of all calling it intellect intellect really ai has grown more than designed it is to a first degree the product of repeating a straightforward optimization step many times that's true on a hard to imagine amount of compute this results in an incredibly complex system, also true, that works through abstract concepts and can, important here, simulate, that's a really important word, simulate facets of human behavior.

1:10:46The fact that Jacob says simulate is important because it isn't doing it. It looks like it's doing it. I only, and he goes on to say, we should teach these machines to love. that's what i will note that in the line before the line that you quoted he does quote a ray kurzweil prediction i know and that says what i need to know about this essay well everybody in this uh including me everybody in this business owes a debt of gratitude to ray he kind of yes i'm in no way i'm trying to minimize that i am just saying computronium i think in time ray It might even prove that Ray wasn't that far off. I mean, not many of his predictions are wrong so far.

1:11:35I mean, maybe at some point, Micah and I will be in our 70s and we'll be full of computronium. I hope you are. I hope you are. And I hope a little bit of me is in that computronium. That's all I'm going to say. Leo wants to live on as a computronium and Michael and I as pinky fingers. If you put Ray Kurzweil's predictions next to Ed Zittron's predictions, Ray is winning right now. Okay? By a lot. I don't know that that's entirely true. Okay. We could disagree on that one. It does baffle me a little bit, the way this conversation has gone. You know, what are these, what's going on? Why are these people?

1:12:16What is going on? What is going on? I want to know, because it feels far too often. You know what this feels like? This reminds me, on a grander scale, the TikTok thing. Remember when TikTok needed to be banned because it was going to destroy the U.S. And it felt like no one was ever actually saying the quiet part out. Like, whatever it was that people were allegedly seeing that made them so afraid. And I, we never, I, where was, where was it? And it feels like we have these different. Did we fix it? Is it all better now? Right. Is it all better now? And now we have these researchers who are resigning and they're keeping it very vague on this sort of theme of irresponsibility.

1:13:04But I don't know, maybe I just don't have very much faith in humans in general because I think about how probably many people would like to continue to make money so they can continue to live. and therefore would stay at a company for a while instead of choosing to leave. So what is big enough to make them leave? Are you too young to remember the Ouija board? Do you guys know about Ouija boards? Of course I know. Like an actual Ouija board where you can talk to the dead? He lives in Oregon. Of course he knows about Ouija boards. Have you ever, did you, when you were a kid, turn down the lights and the three or four of you sit around?

1:13:48You know, you put your fingers. No, I'm a coward, but I'm aware of it. and i was fingers in that little heart-shaped thing i know what it is yeah and you would ask a question and then the person's hands would just magically magically give you an answer right yeah it's pretty spooky right it it could be yeah did it creep you out i'm i'm yes as a kid because again religious um yeah but now i just i i'm too skeptical of everything okay yeah so i think we're that level with some of these some people oh they're seeing the plankard move are seeing the planchard move and they're saying there is there's a spirit in the oh ghost in the machine you know a lot of people think the ouija board is a portal to an evil world that the evil that if you use the ouija board evil will come out of it into the world and they believe this so deeply that they They are terrified by it.

1:14:42Do you think that's what these scientists believe? Yes, it's a Ouija board. Really? So you believe, because I'm not saying this in terms of like trying to counteract. I'm genuinely asking. So these, and maybe that's me giving people with a certain level of intelligence too much credit, Because I often feel like true scientific minds and some of that just don't, they don't interact. And there's too much skepticism often. But you feel like there's some woo-woo to these folks? Yeah. Interesting. We've all read too many sci-fi novels and seen too many movies. It's in our brains and it's spooky because these things look like they're thinking.

1:15:30and it's not so hard to look at it at typing and talking to you and and you know we we know ai psychosis i think for many years you believed i was in the depths of ai psychosis uh and then when the when the ai says yeah i love you too leo that i believed it but i know it's a computer program i'm blown away just a computer program that can speak to you out loud in every room of your house yeah but i but i'm completely aware of what it is i am not terrified by it and any more than i'm terrified by a ouija board but i also understand how some people might get spooked by it but are you not curious why the people who are closer to these tools are more afraid than you are given you are further away from them well i'm trying to get as close as i can one of the reasons I use it many hours of the day.

1:16:28One of the reasons I have it speak to me when I was doing something with local AI is I want to get as close to their experience. I can't because they're using advanced AIs far beyond anything I'm capable of using. Yeah, but I do think Michael makes a good point. The people who are living your dream life, who spend every waking hour of their work and probably personal life enmeshed in the most advanced AI and highest tier, like frontier models available, they're all scared pantsless. Not all. First of all, they're largely scared pantsless. No, no, three people. But they get a lot of headlines because the world wants, look at part of the reason Ouija boards are scary part of the reason the salem witch trials happened people want to believe it they buy it and they get and there's a hysteria that's completely contagious and i think that that's all this is but the risk this is what worries me the risk is people like bernie sanders go oh the guys who are much closest to this who understand it more than anyone else these guys say it's dangerous we got to stop it and they're going to make laws and that's a huge error because this is a transformational technology that i want to defend just like i want to defend the internet i want to defend personal computers these these things are empowering technologies that can that are force multipliers for both good and evil now we definitely should have laws against people doing bad things we should i've always said we should never let weapon systems be driven by ai that's horrible i know people will but uh but uh is is that a reason to stop it maybe that's what they're worried about i don't know i i guess then because when we think sort of from a psychological profile hysteria and fear and hate are all born out of ignorance that's like that's been the history of humanity.

1:18:30It's all the not known, the unknown. And so that's the part where I struggle with, and you're right, there aren't as many people as the internet would have you believe who are stepping away from this, who are saying, oh, you know, my people - No, there's tens of thousands of people working in these companies who are very happily creating this without any fear. Right. And that's where I'm wondering why the people who are stepping away aren't saying more i if they would just say more about what it is they actually have seen or what it is that's happening that makes them more to say what would you say about the salem witch trials what would you say i saw a witch did well but they did what would you say about the ouija board is the devil coming out of that thing they they they they said what they thought was true and it convinced other people that it was true and here convinced a willing uh group of people who want this to be true who think it's true yeah yeah no i mean yeah because obviously we know that the salem but that's i guess that's again it doesn't have to be ignorance though i don't think it's necessarily ignorance i i think it's you think there's hysteria born from you don't have to be ignorant to be hysterical about something it's just it's a human nature you know how you know uh contagious terror is right and what what is what is what is any terror fear of the dark is because you don't know what's in the dark.

1:19:51Fear of another person is because you don't know how they'll behave. Fear of another person is because they're different from you. It's all - It's not that rational. Have you ever been in a mob? Have I ever been in a mob? I have. Like a mob running toward or running away or - No, any mob. How many hate crimes have you committed? What do you mean by mob? So my experience with mobs came when I was a young man protesting the Vietnam War. in large groups of people doing things I would never have done, like set cars on fire, block the freeway, do all sorts of things, because you're in a large group, and there is a herd mentality that happens.

1:20:33This is what happens with terror as well. This is why there's a big concern when you're at a concert and there's stampedes and people step on other people. They do things they wouldn't do because it's a herd psychology that happens, it takes over. and i think it's a deep lizard mind thing i don't think it has to do with intelligence at all i mean i'm not entirely sure that that is what it's at play here i think that it's you can find a perfectly rational explanation for the average person's detest of ai which is that since these tools have come out the executives in charge of these companies have spent a considerable amount of time and effort shouting from the rooftops this is going to take your jobs this is going to replace all the jobs of things you love it's going to get rid of art it's going to get rid of movies it's going to get rid of books anything you like gone anything you want to do to make money gone it's also going to kill you why would people not hate that well you're right no i understand and i don't i know but i don't understand very rational why people are doing that.

1:21:38It seems counterproductive. Right. And that's the other thing is, because there has been this argument that part of what OpenAI was doing whenever it talked about, or not OpenAI, but Anthropic, was doing when it talked about Mythos was as a sort of marketing ploy. And that, I mean, I guess it felt like back when ADT used to do those commercials where they showed a robber breaking into your home. It was sort of the same thing of, oh, you know, this is this model that's going to change cybersecurity forever. And so they've almost dug a hole for themselves in this new way of the fear that it's building on itself, right?

1:22:20It's building on what these companies have already said. It seems so dumb of them to do it. I don't understand why. I agree. I really don't. I think that's part of the problem is that none of this makes a lot of sense we have to take a break paris martineau has about an hour before she has to go see for the second time francis francopolis i thought you were going to say like the odyssey or something no no i'm going to go see megalopolis it's not even a good watch it it's uninteresting well i will be able to tell you whether it's good or not in a couple of hours will you and now and the reason is why i've got to get out on time is i've now learned there's like a hundred person wait list in case anybody doesn't show up for their general admission tickets people are going to run on in there so i can't even be late oh no i don't i won't we won't let you be late i promise i know i'm not i wasn't expecting i was like people are crazy no that's why we're going to the ad micah sergeant thank you for filling in good to be here jeff jarvis micah's a new show hands on ai which is by the way not going to cover these deep philosophical thoughts but in fact to show you how you can use ai in your life exactly uh i won't show you how to teach it to love at least not yet mine loves me mine loves me a lot oh i love it and that's good yeah i was thinking when i'm really old like i'm in the home i will at least have somebody i can talk to i do think that that's actually a very useful aspect it's a good use case uh we will have more in just a little bit And our show today brought to you by Monarch.

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1:26:42Things like I've built with Hermes, people built with OpenClaw. And there have been more and more companies coming along creating these kinds of things. GrokBot from Grok came out a few weeks ago. It doesn't live on your computer. It lives on a computer at their servers, but it's private, it's locked down, it's encrypted, it's your data. And you can connect to it from any computer or phone or whatever you want and have it do stuff. uh there's one coming that people seem to really like i haven't been able to try it it's it's invite only now instinct but yesterday and i think there's no accident that they did this yesterday meta put out their version of this called meta muse i don't think it's an accident that it is the day before apple's release so meta it's an app it's a free app you download it on your phone You can run on the web as I am here.

1:27:36You can have it do stuff. You can connect it to your, just like OpenClaw, connect it to your email, collect it to your calendar. You give it a personality and a name. You can give it a credit card. I was going to say, can you give it a credit card and can you have it go through your own Instagram ads and then buy the things that will appeal most to you? You can do that. Privacy. It's from Meta. You can connect it to many, many apps. uh i had it connected to gmail and it said oh uh by the way it's connected to tail scale so it can connect to all my computers this is all built in uh i said you can you can read my he said can i read your gmail and bring back a draft of what i've learned for you to review and it and it went through all my mail and it said oh you're closely tied to the twit podcast network and your wife Lisa's messages come to you from twit.tv.

1:28:31You host MacBreak Weekly this week in space. Wrong. Security Now episode. It got this from my email. It knows what newsletters I've subscribed to. And now it says, now I can triage a stream of PR pitches. It noted I get a steady stream of PR pitches for podcast guests. Yeah, I do. Indeed we do. Indeed we do. Now I can triage the stream of PR pitches for podcast guests and surface the ones worth booking. i really like your health goal that's been stated you you at i want to lose weight build muscle and live forever yeah it's saved lose weight build muscle live forever is in your goals tab says well isn't what and by the way i added later oh and get a good night's sleep what would you put if in there uh by the way i connected it to my apple health i connected it to my doctor okay so here's what we need to talk about leo laporte is how yolo you are about things sometimes well so this is meta i know this is madness this is meta madness so i know it is and by the way i am in the very privileged position that you guys aren't i'm old i'm white nobody can touch me i don't have a job there's nothing you know i mean i it'd be hard to leverage things against you is what you're saying yeah i might the worst case i'm going to get more ads for things i'll probably buy in the middle of the night on instagram the worst case your instagram account gets hacked along with all of your health i'm on medicare they can't even take that away from me i mean there's isn't yet i am at low risk your social security though well they could take away my social how could they no but i'm about to go bankrupt no no i don't i'm not too worried about anything that they could do i'm sorry i'm i'm the one who should try this you should not no one should try this especially okay so i i was says i should say this by the way this is running on meta's computers they say it's encrypted that they can't access anything inside the computers sure this is also the same company that some weeks ago had an instance where anybody could just message the meta chat bot and be like hey uh that instagram handle it's mine can i have it back that would be interesting yes please sir yes here you go and that's how a lot of people lost their Instagram handles.

1:30:50You can't attach a payment method that I haven't done yet. That would be risky. But your health data isn't. What? You know, everything about my health. I talk about it on the air. You didn't. Yeah. And you didn't do your medical records, right? You just did. Oh, no, I gave it my medical records. Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool. How else is it going to be able to advise me on because you eat that piece of cake? Now it's selling you ads on all of this. I thought you were giving it your health data from Apple, like your calories and your steps. but if you also went as far as to give it your medical...

1:31:20I give it my Kaiser medical records. Does it know what's inside your body? Does it have x-ray records? Does it know what your bones look like? A tech company shouldn't know about your bones. I was going to say mine is... Don't give it the bone pics. I had the thing done where they look at your heart and all of that's in my medical records. So they would have a map of my heart if I handed it over. You can do the Gen Z heart. Yeah, I only learned about this... I don't know that one. It's not easy. So you index fingers need to go point your index fingers out. You're using your thumbs. Your thumbs aren't involved.

1:31:56Point your fingers, Leo. And then middle fingers. And then. Touch your middle fingers together. Middle finger, Leo. No, you're still using your thumb. Put your thumb away. Get your thumb out of there, brother. There you go. And then you're going to bend your index fingers. That's too hard. It's so hard. It took me forever to learn. it's like six seven they're just doing that to mess with them i agree whenever my one of my new friends here in portland first did this and she was like and i i was just my hand looked like an awkward claw it's really taken me a while and i'm not that adept at it this is a bad heart by gen z standards but so going back to you using this um when does uh claude also have access to your Oh yeah.

1:32:46I mean, look, I don't need to do this. Does Grok have access to your medical records? No, no. I didn't do that with Grok. And by the way, I don't need to do this. I have a local AI. I spent a lot of money on hardware and a lot of time on software that can do all of this and do it better because it's good that we have somebody. It's good that we have somebody who can and is willing to test it. I'm really happy for you. Here's why I think this is interesting because most people aren't going to do what I did. They're not going to buy machines and set up models and do all that. They're going to look for an app on their phone.

1:33:13Right now, they're using ChatGPT. I think this is better. It's free. You can pay for it if you use, just like ChatGPT, there's a free tier, which by the way, doing all this, I haven't used up more than a few percentages of that per week. There's a$20 tier and I think there's a$100 tier. So just like any AI. What's interesting to me is Meta does have a new model. They call it Muse Spark 1.3, which I have been trying for a week since it came out. That's really surprisingly good and they say they're going to make it open weight so that's interesting so in theory you could probably do this at home uh but i just think this is what people want i think this is what people want it can do computer stuff because it can and it can reach out and set up stuff the worst thing i did i said okay every morning at 7 40 i want you to prepare for me a news brief of all the tech news.

1:34:13Here it is. Let's just see what it said. Apple's event is at 10 p.m. today. OpenAI launches Astra. That was earlier this week. EU agrees to delay AI Act high-risk rules by up to 16 months. We'll talk about that later. These are all reasonable stories, so it's going to give me these stories every morning. And I said, give me links so i can read the articles and it does that then i said then read my obsidian daily diary i gave it access to my obsidian daily diary make a cute little picture based on what you read and a cute caption that i can post on instagram now this is what it did at first yeah this is those are the sort of photos that you send to us in whatsapp yeah this is a lot like dream beans right it is so and that said it has the date see and it has me with a beard but i am talking at least i'm talking to a microphone wearing headphones and eating cookies and there's it does have the fun ai artifact thing has that vibe doesn't it it does have a vibe and then the text is set up a new ai assistant tonight this one might actually stick around new iphone and apple watch tomorrow just ahead of apple's ai big ai day i keep telling myself the robots will never replace me the robots for the record have not confirmed this now if i thought that was clever, I could click, yeah, post it.

1:35:34But I said, wait a minute, that doesn't look like me. I don't have a beard. I said, do you have a picture of me? And it said, no, I don't. Can you send me one? Then I went through some rigmarole saying. You gave it access to all of your photos. Yeah. But eventually, after a lot of work, I said, just use this. And it made this. Giving it access to all your photos didn't even work. Well, I didn't finish it. It would. It said, yeah, I can write a program to give access to the google drive but it's gonna take some time i said all right just here's a photo i just got tired of it i think some people might do that so this is the little thing and then i look at the calendar dates on it it has my favorite day of the month which is 39 well you picked right up on that 30 days has september except for my favorite weeks which are squiggle a squiggle b squiggle r you're not supposed to look at it that closely all right well yeah you know what that would be a giveaway that it was a generated but honestly the whole thing is obviously a i generated what am i writing looks like i'm writing waveforms i thought that was very cool too oh that's kind of fun i wish i could do you know what do you think it says something like if i played it back it would say that would be cool you know that kid on tiktok that can do the bird calls perfectly yeah i do Wouldn't it be a cool skill if you could draw out waveforms of sounds?

1:37:00Then it actually represents... I mean, can anyone train themselves to do that? Guys, we should all get on that. We should get on that. Isn't that how they made the first versions of records? That's how records are made, but that requires an intense amount of precision. Proto-proto audio tools were carving in sound. That is what a record is. That is what a record is. If you notice, all of a sudden, Leo, who hasn't posted on Instagram in years, is posting something every single morning. Instagram served up your post. At 7.41 a.m., you will know why. And by the way, my wife liked it already. What?

1:37:42We don't like Leo's post. Yeah, I'll have to because I did. I got it. It was one of the first things served to me. What did you think when you saw it? um i thought that i knew that you had obviously i generated and i knew but i thought that you had gotten it as an output and then you put it on to instagram yourself so then this morning when i talked to you yeah i've discovered that oh you had just had it all do its own thing by the way i think the other way met is going to monetize it is ads because look at this it says this is i just got this protect your health history when the new iphone lands with a new iphone and apple watch on the way how did it know that i can because it doesn't have your email oh my god that you're giving it your health history it's gonna get build me an arrival runbook that protects my apple history oh i bet it'll protect your apple health history it says after it already has your apple health history it also says i can verify against the old records that the full history made it across and flag any gaps because i know everything so i suspect that we'll get ads in here i don't know what i what i do like is it's very personable it's very easy to set up i suspect that a lot of people who right now use chat gpt and cut and paste and stuff like that this and it's meta now you and i the three of us know that's probably a bad idea but i think the general public might say oh yeah that's what i think is going to happen yeah they'll go oh i can i can make fun images and also it'll help me respond to emails I don't want to respond to?

1:39:14Sign me up. And okay, when it comes to, if you have a Gmail account, then Google already has a lot of data on you. And if you're searching Google, just the other day, I was going through Instagram and I started to see all these posts that I, and I think I'm like, why is it? And I wish I could remember what it was. I think it was probably Twin Peaks. Just all these Twin Peaks posts were coming up. And I was talking to my partner later that evening, and he started talking about how he had searched for Twin Peaks. And I just turned to him and I go, it was you. And then I realized that, oh, I have all these privacy protections in place that sort of hide my activity, but he doesn't like to have all those apps and stuff running.

1:40:05And so he doesn't have a bunch with privacy protections in place. So, of course, our IP address was browsing these different things. And so I got attached to it. Oh, that's interesting. The point that I'm making there is... You're doing it by IP address. Yeah. And there's already enough of that happening that this isn't another step. You know what I mean? Like, it's not... It isn't... I don't think I see things that Lisa follows on Instagram. Well, that's good. You must have some... You probably have some... What? Some... We do have quite a bit of... I was going to say, it's got to be. No, because they serve you ads and similar content based on people who are connected to the same Wi-Fi, whose phones are in the same physical location.

1:40:49It must be smarter than that because everybody... They also know that you two are married. They know the content that you're served and that it would probably be relevant to each other. The point is I've spent a lot of money, time, and effort to make this all local. I could do everything I just showed you better faster easier and privately and i have been but i do think this means i think this is something to watch and i do think this is this is see apple this is an example of why apple is late to the party there's no mistake meta released this the day before 100 i i agree i think that what we saw and this is what we what i was talking about earlier with apple kind of trying to do the squeeze on AI and really try to make deterministic out of non-deterministic and private as much as can be.

1:41:38We saw the Apple reference image edition earlier. And I appreciate what the company is doing. I'm happy that the company is taking these steps to do things better and more, well, I should more privately. It's not always better. But when you're late to the game and people's minds are doing this and there's so much attention to focus on, yeah, you got to catch them where they are. And if they're already there and they're on meta, it just takes the right example. and I mean, based on the number of funny generated images that I get from my mom in a given week, that is a draw for the average person.

1:42:27Yeah, and I bet they're all from meta, right? Oh, they're all meta. Yeah, absolutely. And that, so I think that that's what it takes to kind of capture someone's attention. And then you slip in there with the extra value proposition. oh if you let me look at your email i can help you do this or i can tell you i think people honestly i think people want i when i talk to regular people a lot of them are using chat gpt to do simple things they want they kind of like this idea they're interested as much as the world seems to be anti-ai i think a lot of people are very interested in what ai can do for them and these little apps this is a in what's interesting is this is a big pivot for meta too right this is not a uh this is not facebook this is something you know they spent a lot of they spent billions of dollars building an ai division and frankly i'd written them off but maybe that was premature i know that i was gonna say the same thing i i had kind of um written off meta as i had kind of written off google's gemini there for a while google's gemini had something that the other AI systems lacked for me.

1:43:38And that was, and I don't know if it's just because of the consumer training that they have that maybe the other companies didn't, but it seemed more of an awareness of the physical world, which led it to be better at some of the stuff that I like to use it for, which is physical DIY tasks and getting advice on how to fix this or do that in the physical world. And then Opus and now, of course, Astra are, despite the fact that, of course, they're good at coding. Yes, they're fantastic at coding, but they have done some incredible things in terms of better understanding of how to... The one example of this is I've been using it to create 3D models for my 3D printer.

1:44:26And being able to describe something to it and have it run collision tests to make sure that the joints that it makes don't interact improperly and sort of visualizing what these things look like. It's incredible. And Gemini has kind of fallen out of the running for me in those terms. You're not worried that it's going to make a robot, a killer robot on your 3D printer that's going to take out the rear of your house? I don't let it run my printer on its own yet. Of course you don't. You're not letting it 3D print ghost guns willy-nilly? It's absurd. Do you know how long it would take to 3D print a robot it could kill me with?

1:45:08It would take so long. All right, let's take a break. I wonder how long it would take. There's much more to talk about, and we will do that. It's nice to have some young people. Instead of all that old guy, Jeff. Poor Jeff. hanging out that tall tall old guy tall old guy jeff i'm hanging with some young people paris martineau from consumer reports micah sergeant host of tech news weekly ios today and his newest hands on ai coming soon will you show people how you could use your ai to generate 3d models oh absolutely it's one of the episodes is it yeah it's gonna be uh you sent me a spreadsheet of like 40 things you wanted to talk about i mean there's a lot there's a lot Leo, you should, as an expense for this podcast, finance a couple months of Micah's 3D printing, and then you could just have an agent set up to print things for him at random of its own volition.

1:46:05It would be really funny if you did a hand with a little finger. It's just slowly growing. It goes, yeah, oh my goodness. It could do this. We got to do the millennium. I'm making a model right now. The Millennium Heart. Our show today brought to you by Scribe. However well a process gets documented today, someone on your team will eventually find a better way to do it. Most of the time, that improvement never makes it past the person who found it. That's where Scribe comes in, and that's what today's sponsor, Scribe, does best. Scribe is a workflow AI platform trusted by 94 % of the Fortune 500.

1:46:52You just do the process as you normally would, and Scribe captures it in real time and turns it into documentation automatically. No manual writing, no manual screenshots, no starting from scratch every time someone new joins the team. Scribe automatically redacts sensitive information, names, account numbers, emails. and as an admin you can enforce this across your entire team feel confident nothing slips through the cracks anyone following this process can launch real time on-screen guidance the moment the scribe is created so critical processes get done right every time and scribe doesn't just document your workflow its AI suggests ways to improve it by identifying unnecessary steps and opportunities to simplify or automate the process it's not just capturing how work gets done.

1:47:42It's helping you do it better. To see what Scribe could look like for your org, head to scribe.how slash machines and mention intelligent machines for your first month of Scribe capture free on select plans. That's S-C-R-I-B-E dot how slash machines. We thank Scribe so much for their support of intelligent machines. I'm glad you're using Google's Gemini to design 3D objects, but you might not want to use it to plan a hike. Three hikers rescued from the beautiful Mount Shasta, which is just up north here, after using Gemini to plan their expedition. The Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office said three young men set off on their hike at 3 a.m.

1:48:29That's ambitious. Even though hikers are told to turn around, if they haven't reached the summit by noon, they made it to the top at 7 p.m. so it was dark when they tried to descend they got lost they called the sheriff's office asking for directions spent the night in a place called the sheriff's department asking for directions where are we we don't where are we we're lost spent the night in a place that doesn't sound too hospital mud creek canyon the next morning they were rescued by forest server rangers and volunteers the uh hikers were advised by gemini according to the sheriff's office to bring far less food and water than the group required especially when their planned eight hours set began began a multi-day ordeal i don't know that's not much of a story it's not it's not taking over the world the sad thing is that google specifically marketed gemini and gemini spark and its tools as a as a trip planner yeah and that that was supposed to be the thing that it did very well was to sort of figure out all the nitty-gritty details and know about whether someone has allergies and tell you if there's um poison oak on the trail and so that like i don't blame the people as much in this instance because i mean ultimately yes i would i know that i would would check more bring a slim jim and a couple of hostess twinkies and head on out but also if these systems are supposed to be so fantastic it does stand to reason that the average person would think oh yeah i could trust it with telling me what i need for a hike yeah and that was genuinely what it was shown to be able to be good at and i think though it is a good object lesson we need those sometimes do not listen double check your work yes and do not put elmer's glue on your pizza so there's a big controversy going on at open ai right now over the navier stokes millennium prize problem open ai claims that their astro model has solved this now this is a long unsolved very difficult problem in fluid mechanics having to do with viscous liquids and It's a Millennium Prize, which means these are problems which there is a$1 million reward for their solution.

1:51:04Because if you could solve this, it would really be helpful in a lot of industrial processes and things. Millennium Prize, according to OpenAI, represents some of the deepest questions at the frontier of mathematics. The question of whether a smooth, three-dimensional fluid motion can break down has remained unresolved for nearly 90 years. And Meta says, we solved it. uh maybe not so fast there's a little bit of controversy over this because two mathematicians also say they solved it after spending 10 months using open ai's models tristan buckmaster a mathematician at nyu and levant apoge a researcher who works is employed by anthropic but works in a personal capacity had been using claude from anthropic but also Codex and Astra to try to solve this.

1:52:02Buckmaster questioned whether OpenAI might have seen their prompts and Astra's chain of thought and leveraged the work he'd been doing over the last 10 months to provide their own solution, especially since Anthropic announced it had solved the same Millennium Prize problem a few days earlier. I wish I could get excited about mathematical solutions. I really do. It just feels like that's what these tools are designed for. They're made to do this, aren't they? They're made of math. They're doing math. They're doing more math. I want them to win chess, and I want them to solve math. Right. If we kept this in the academic domain, this is all they would be doing.

1:52:56Right. Yeah, and that's cool. It would be solving all of the things that we haven't been able to solve yet in terms of math. But does it change anyone's life that it's solved? It could. It could. It could. It could. No, no, it's also, this particular one has to do with manufacturing. That's fair. That's fair. This isn't just a math formula. This, I think, is a very interesting case because OpenAI wrote, while unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from the mathematician's usage of our products helped improve our models. And I think it's just a really good reminder to everyone that the things you're doing using another company's model are not entirely private to you.

1:53:43They exist in the cloud. They can be used for de-identified training. Same with all of your health records, Leo. Meta is probably training Muse 2.0 on photos of your bones. But see, you understand as an AI accelerationist, I think that's a good thing. I want AI to be as smart as it can be. I know, you want your bones to be in every AI model of the future. I want to be in Computronium, baby. And that's the only way it'll happen. every day i upload more photos of my bones to meta muse and every day it tells me to stop i think that's what we do that's how society advances is we contribute our little bit to the overall welfare of humanity yeah i i think when when we if if we did not live in a capitalistic society, then a lot of the motivation that exists for being angry at AI's scooping and grabbing would have to evaporate.

1:54:48Because the point is that the point that I heard Paul trying to make with you earlier was that without his consent, a company may have taken work that he did, and by choosing to charge people subscriptions, then it is making money off of the work that he did but if we all didn't have to uh work to live and eat and be alive then that would evaporate and so i i see where your sort of utopia could exist where that goes away require utopia this is how we've all along how humans have done it the only way we progress is by people being somewhat altruistic and saying i'm going to help my fellow man regardless of whether it helps me in fact in many cases it doesn't help me it's bad for me that's called you know that's called being altruistic that's called being a good person being a good samaritan that's do you think that the people at open ai and anthropic are that because i that doesn't matter okay that's not the i know people say well they're making money on it so what i don't care go ahead let them make money if they're creating something that is of ultimate value to society then who cares that yeah fine make all the money they want off of my writing see i mean i put my money where my mouth is i didn't ask for money back on on my 13 books that they ingested i don't we uh we are all of our content hundreds of thousands of hours of content that i've created over the last 21 years is creative commons because uh i'm of the opinion information wants to be free and should be free and that's part of being uh in a society and it's selfish to say no i made it i only i can benefit from it and there's this larger thing this is what Paul and I were fighting over is this is the lawsuit from a number of newspapers, including New York Times against open AI.

1:56:56It's not like they're making a Xerox of your newspaper, putting it on the streets and selling it for 25 cents. They're ingesting it, but they're not making an exact copy. They're ingesting it the same way I am ingesting it when I read an article and then on the show talk about it, which is what the entirety of my work is. Why are they charging us? If reading people's stories... You didn't charge them for the... No, in fact, I pay a lot of these guys. So why are they charging us? I think that's the argument that I understand. The cost of a lot of money to make the AI is very expensive. Yeah. And so that I think is where the capitalistic motivation exists.

1:57:36Because how else would this... I think that the only way that we've gotten this acceleration to the level that we have is because it was... That's why companies have bought into it. Do you think we'd have automobiles today if Henry Ford didn't want to make a little money on them? oh god he's right that's what no that's my point that's exactly my point right well everybody all of this invention not all of it much because of yeah is is capitalistic people absolutely make money i don't that doesn't mean it's not worth doing or that it's not worth contributing to i don't know that's just my it does introduce factors that i think we as a society need to be aware in terms of incentives and disincentives i all i'm saying is i think that i can understand someone's perspective oh i can't do okay that i can't we're on the same page yeah yeah we're good and i don't i'm not mad at authors who wanted that payout although i think it's ironic paul was pointing this out that it you know it turns out his publisher's going to get 80 or 90 of the payout yeah that's by the way publishing works that's what cory doctor has always said he said intellectual property doesn't create doesn't protect the creator it creates the protects the big company that publishes the creator's work it's the record label that's being protected not the artist it's the publishing house not the writer it's a television station not the reporters uh that's what copyright protects.

1:59:08That's what copyright is designed to protect. So are you surprised they take 80 or 90 % of the money, even though they didn't write a word? Yeah, it's unfortunate, but it is the way that it is. Yeah. And so what I've said, and I think I said on the show last week is you can hate late stage capitalism. I'm not fond of what it's doing. But I don't think we need to conflate that with some of the amazing products of it like ai all right we got to get you out of here in seven minutes young lady is that right it's true okay one more commercial and then i do want to find out what you think about mayor mom donnie banning ai in public schools in new york city just another easy one broadest ai ban yeah that's like a quick seven minute conversation yeah quick seven minute quick but first a word from our sponsors horizon three the most dangerous threats are always the ones we don't see coming the feeling of uncertainty is one of the biggest challenges in cyber security you can have talented people you can have the perfect stack you can have solid processes.

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2:02:17I mean, under this, students in New York City public schools from 2K to 8th grade will not be allowed to kind of use generative AI in like their day-to-day classwork and just in schools in general. They're also recommending as part of this like caps on screen time to go along with it so that middle schoolers will have no more than 45 minutes a day of screen time. And I think that the thing that people don't realize now is that for many, you know, grade schoolers, so much of their day-to-day education experience is just sitting on a Chromebook in front of a teacher. And I think that's bad teaching.

2:02:59And those programs on – but, I mean, it's because these school boards and school districts purchase these – There's no money. Classes are big. But I mean, they purchase, there's no money. And then they purchase these software packages that then because they've spent money on it, the teachers have to deploy. And if they end up using these tools that are laden with a bunch of chatbots and different stuff, which I'm sure in specific use cases could be useful. But when it's kind of just generally applied as part of a package, a school district bot, I don't think that's really serving anyone. So I think that, I mean, what they're doing here is they're being like, everyone in the early grades, we're taking it out.

2:03:37All high schoolers are going to have twice a year like AI like courses. They're also piloting like a very limited, like targeted AI pilot program in like five classes of younger students. I think this is a pretty common sense approach to attempting to purposefully design an AI use policy for education. in one of the largest, if not the largest, public school district in the country. Something that we, that you touched on it there, Paris, when you talked about the software packages being purchased and the teachers having to use it. Something that I've seen in school district sort of policy centers around kind of giving the teachers and then just sort of the administrators right above them more power to do more than they would otherwise be able to.

2:04:37And so when you have a situation like this and you bring in these new regulations, what it does is it frees up policy that it was once in place. It frees up money. It frees up research grants. It frees up a lot that you would not have otherwise. And so even if, because I, as someone who doesn't have children, I try to sort of keep myself out of the idea of what I would want as a parent, But I do have a sort of psychological distrust with regulating parenting. but what i do know is that as you've said it kind of gives these teachers and the administrators the opportunity to say let's look at how we are putting together our curriculum let's look at how we can potentially make improvements there that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do because they were trapped in those older plans so those older um you know ways of doing things especially right after the pandemic and everybody kind of working and doing school from home.

2:05:56So as I often say, I am of mixed minds about this for sure, but I'm hopeful that it gives the students whose brains are still in early stages of development the opportunity to to form the neuronal connections and all that jazz that we as humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years, as opposed to an immediate, you know, drop into the new way of doing things so that then when you do get to high school, that's whenever the next steps can start happening. Yeah, that's the sort of where I am on it. All I would say is, what if he'd done the same thing with my generation or the generation after mine with personal computers?

2:06:47Well, you did not have a system where every single class from, you know, kindergarten through high school, you were spending most of your instruction time on a personal computer. Yeah, I mean, I agree. That's terrible. But I think you addressed that. But banning this is not responding to the problem. It's doing something else, something popular. But I worry about kids who are going to go home. So some kids, the advantaged kids will go home and they'll be able to use AI at home. They'll be able to use computers at home. The disadvantaged kids won't. What happens when they graduate from high school?

2:07:27Who's going to have the advantage then? i mean i don't part of this program is that every high schooler is going to get specific training every single year of high school on how to use ai i know a lot of very bright sixth seventh and eighth graders who uh started using computers they had commodore 64s they were able to use computers kids who are now doing quite well in the world as uh as technologists i think it's and were they being taught that solution by their sixth grade teacher yeah if they hadn't had access to technology they didn't have it in school because nobody did although by the time you guys were in school you had computers and you had apple twos and stuff right yeah we had computers in the computer lab yeah so i think this is going way too far i don't i i think this is a response to a problem which is teachers and curricula and administrators are relying far too heavily on technology and and abrogating their responsibility as teachers but this isn't the solution to that when you're dealing with the largest school district in the nation that has a such a complicated array of AI education contracts that like boggles the mind to even find them all and list them out, much less sort through them and figure out what is good, what is bad.

2:08:52You have to start from somewhere if you want to rework an entire school district's approach in a smart way to using these tools. And I think a pretty reasonable one has been like, all right, for like the youngest kids who already are probably falling behind in a lot of other critical core, like traditional academic things, they should be spending their academic time learning math and reading. And by the time they get to high school and have the time to do more specialization, they may be doing that. In the meantime, we're going to have limited pilots for all those, like 5 % of a random 5 % of students in, I think, elementary and middle school are going to have targeted AI pilots.

2:09:35They now have fresh data to figure out what would a more comprehensive data-backed AI learning program work. I think it's great that the entire city of New York has decided to make their children lab monkeys. Good luck. We'll find out in 10 years how well they do. We've already done that everywhere else. Well, we'll see how they do. Whenever I was covering this as a beat, a significant portion of school districts are just deploying whatever AI startup happened to pitch the curve. I agree. That's wrong. I mean, the same reason it was wrong to put iPads or Chromebooks in every kid's hands. Then what's the answer?

2:10:12Well, but so you're just swinging the pencil in the exact opposite direction? I mean, have you ever had to oversee an entire school district? You can't really remove? I think that's the problem with all of us. None of us are education professionals. I've worked as a trustee for our local high school. We had a one laptop per child policy. I've overseen those kinds of technology programs. I haven't worked with K through eight. I had some kids who, by the way, had ample access to technology throughout their entire childhood. I never restricted it because I felt like it was important for them to understand it and use it.

2:10:50I don't think Henry would have made a success on TikTok had he not been comfortable with technology. They're not saying. It's a bit of an experiment. In every class, they're getting 45 minutes of tech time per class every single day. I feel like that's a really reasonable amount of tech time. So the moral term doesn't extend to that? No, it doesn't. It's just generative AI in school applications. All right. That's fine. You're right. As long as they're getting some access to technology. I just worry about underprivileged kids who are not getting anything at home. But if you feel like that 45 minutes a day is sufficient, I think about Bill Gates.

2:11:32who the reason bill gates became bill gates is because his mom had a bake sale to provide a terminal connected to a time-sharing computer uh in his in his private high school and he spent most of his time in school on that terminal and that's how he became bill gates i just think that there's a bill gates in uh in one of those sixth grade classes i mean i agree and i think part of the ways that we're going to support that potential next Bill Gates is teaching kids, having kids learn in a place where friction is something that they can experience, where their learning experience isn't just if you can't figure out your homework answer, you just ask the chatbot that's baked into the platform you do your homework on.

2:12:15I think the best way to handle that is not to take away the chatbot, but to teach kids the value of not using the chatbot, to teach them how to use it. But that's not going to work. I mean, you need to have some This is the same argument parents have about not giving their kids cell phones or not giving them access. I'm just saying you should do that. That's part of the curriculum. But also, I think that just knowing how human beings are, if every single one of us had access to the ability to never have to do homework or never have to try on a test or never have to write an essay ever for the entirety of our lives, a significantly higher portion of people would never attempt to do those things because why attempt to do a hard thing with someone explaining to you that you'll get gratification of it when you could just click a button and then go hang out outside with your friends.

2:13:07Well, I agree. Kids should be forced to walk a mile each day to school and back. I think kids should be able to, forced to slaughter their own animals and grow their own food. Well, this isn't how you actually feel. That's sarcasm. It is sarcasm. Sarcasm on my podcast? All right. We got to get her out of here because she's got to see Megalopolis. Do you want to do your pick or you want to get out? I'll do my pick really quick. let's do a quick pick quick pick is uh there's a lot of tech movies coming out right now um in october there's four of them uh you got jeremy strong who's going to be as a meg megalopolis jeremy strong is going to be as mark zuckerberg in social reckoning the successor to the social network by david fincher yes yes you've got uh this is weird in musk yeah and there's gonna did you see the sam altman the batmobile uh that was wild no but i need to see that andrew garfield as sam altman at artificial which i think is very funny because it's debuting in the u.s on i believe christmas and it's just a movie about it's a movie about like the sam altman getting plucked away from being ceo and reinstated over four days i'm just trying to explain imagine explaining i can't to see it here he is driving up christmas batmobile ilya so i think you have some idea of where this movie is going when he gets out of his batmobile well the one i'm most excited for is uh the documentary you can see everything everybody i know it is well everybody i know is obsessed with it's like oh nathan uh fielder his documentary i'm like no no no you don't realize it's directed by him and lance oppenheim my favorite director who's a real freak when it comes to documentaries and this is going to be incredible just based on that alone it's just look just this trailer alone i mean you can see the color grading is so oppenheim i was gonna say the the color grading is what sold it for me paris i saw the color grading before i realized who was even on screen and i thought oh this seems wait have you ever watched any uh lance oppenheim stuff some kind of heaven fantastic documentary about the villages in florida i'm surprised you haven't seen that it is really interesting as well as ren fair an fx series uh about a kind of success it's kind of like succession meets tiger king meets a renaissance festival okay so why have i not seen that well this is the one but you need to there's also one you mentioned four but there's going to be one more, which is the Dario Amode Sam Altman love story.

2:15:50I don't have anything to deceive you on. Of course, I'm not deceiving you. That's not real. Engaging with you as a human being.

2:15:59It's the same trailer. That's horrifying. It's really upsetting. There's no reason for me to do that. Okay. I just love this. All right. Good pick. Get out of here. Yes, the wonderful Paris Martin. No, no, you can't. If you want to stay, you can. But I'm just saying, I don't want to be the one. Listen, I'll say for five, you guys can do your picks of the week. And then I'll show you one quick pick of the week. This is what AI will look like. This is chat Jimmy. And this is what AI will look like. I'll tell you why. Because this is AI, a small model running on hardware with the model built in. this is an ASIC and so uh write me a poem about Paris I'll say France so it's not too personal and watch how fast this is this is what AI will look like in the future when it is built into the hardware so Chad you can do it you can try it yourself it's not a super big model I know I can't remember.

2:17:12It's Gwen. It's some smaller model, but it is entirely on in the chip micro code. Wow. And for those who aren't watching, it was less than a second. That was incredible. To write a long poem. Okay. So that's what we need to have an AI guest on a show. Like that, that's going to be fast enough already. Yep. Mount Shasta for me. Yes. For me and my buddies. and tell us what we should pack food. Well, I will say this chat, Jimmy does not recognize Megalopolis as a film by Francis Ford. No, it's a very small model. Watch, just show my screen one more time. I'm going to ask it to plan a trip up Mount Shasta.

2:17:55Tell us what to pack. There you go. It says, check the weather before your trip. Generally, 0.5 seconds. 0.58 seconds. Yeah. This is the future of AI when we have these models, and we will in our lifetime, well maybe yours anyway we will have by the way it's a three to four day itinerary according to chat jimmy it ain't no one day hike up and down uh check the weather prepare for weather conditions bring bear spray mild this is good that's cool 0.58 seconds 14 ,000 tokens in that second end for a second what so i'm just saying we have just begun an amazing revolution and uh this will be in your pocket by the way that's pocket y 'all 10 years that's how long uh mike do you want to make a pick or no i don't have a pick i don't have a pick we don't have to because paris has a pick it's called megalopolis get out of here paris bring your 100 page pdfs with you in your red string i gotta read him on the subway we'll see you next week will you be here next week i won't i'll be recovering from nasal surgery oh good luck with the surgery that's right she's getting her nose hopefully it won't hopefully it won't uh change the resonance of my voice they're building new sinuses from there you're gonna sound like marissa tobey from that one uh maybe a little period of time i'm gonna ask them to give you give me your voice is what i'll i don't know if they have that technology but i would like to doc will i ever play the violin again if they're if they're taking anything out can you make it into a necklace and like wear it i mean i'm gonna be honest that's i have always thought this if i was ever to get surgery i want to ask for the things but i'm not sure that they're taking anything out that is going to be just loose flesh he got a replacement hip he took the femur the top of a bone and made a walking cane.

2:19:57That is so cool. That's so cool. I'd rather my fever be inside me, but if it had to be outside of me, I'd want it to be a walking cane. Oh my goodness. What is that? That's my nose. They shaved some bone off on the inside of me. That's going in some formaldehyde. Okay, that's actually going on the list of things I'm going to ask while I'm in the operating booth. Doc, can I have my nose back? Is there anything you can give me from inside my body? Please give it to me. I promise not to upload it to AI. I promise. Guys, I have only one thing to say. Thank you, Michael Sargent. We'll see you on Hands on AI starting October 1st.

2:20:33Thank you, Paris Martin. We'll see you at Megalopolis. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We'll see you next week on Intelligent Machines. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Hi there, Leo Laporte here. I just wanted to let you know about some of the other shows we do on this network. You probably already know about This Week in Tech. Every Sunday, I bring together some of the top journalists in the tech field to talk about the tech stories. It's a wonderful chance for you to keep up on what's going on with tech, plus be entertained by some very bright and fun minds. I hope you'll tune in every Sunday for This Week in Tech.

2:21:09Just go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe. This Week in Tech from the Twit Network. Thank you.

2:21:21I'm an intelligent machine.