TWiT 1093: California Sober - Kimi K3, Qwen3.8, & China's Open-Weight AI Gambit

20 Jul 2026 · 2 h 58 min · 73 chapters

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In short

Topic

AI acceleration and “software factories”

how faster model releases change product development, bug-fix cycles, and developer workflows; debate over whether AI coding will reduce bugs to near-zero or just speed remediation. Then a news-focused segment on Anthropic’s Claude “Fable” subscription limits and access changes, and China’s push with open-weight models (Kimi, Qwen 3.8) and the “open-weight AI gambit” versus US frontier models.

Guests (backgrounds)

Harper Reed

technologist/entrepreneur/hacker; runs 2389.ai, an AI tooling company; discusses agent-based coding pipelines and token-cost strategies.

Alex Wilhelm

journalist/newsletter author; runs cautiousoptimism.news and appears on This Week in Startups; focuses on AI policy, model ecosystems, and practical adoption.

Key claims

  1. AI features ship faster, but often with “vibe-coded” flourishes and more bugs; Microsoft Patch Tuesday hit 500+ fixes (and 1,000+ including Edge/Chromium).
  2. “Software factories” aren’t fully transparent; companies may be “AI-washing” around layoffs and productivity claims.
  3. Bug volume may rise initially as AI increases code throughput, but remediation cycles get faster; code bugs should become rarer as safer languages (Rust/Go/Swift) and test loops improve.
  4. Anthropic’s Fable access was repeatedly extended; Harper argues the US government’s Fable block “broke trust,” pushing users to experiment with other harnesses/models.
  5. Open-weight Chinese models are closing the gap quickly; the relevant question is not exact parity but how soon they become “good enough” for real work.

Notable examples

  • Agent coding loops: Claude planning → cheaper coding models (e.g., 4.8) → multiple reviews (GPT 5.6, Grok 4.5).
  • Linux maintainer Linus Torvalds endorsing AI as a tool (not anti-LLM).
  • China: Kimi open-weight release teased; Alibaba/“Qwen 3.8 Max” preview; DeepSeek cited as very cheap and open-weight.
  • Access restriction as marketing: Z.AI/GLM sold out subscriptions; “hype by limiting capacity.”

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

Meet the Hosts

0:32 to 2:36

Introduction of hosts and their backgrounds.

“If you listen to this show, you go deep on the technical detail.”

AI Discussion Kickoff

2:36 to 4:02

Discussion about the explosion of AI developments and hosts' reactions.

“have harper on he's been traveling a lot we've been trying to get him on i'm happy to be here And when we have Harper on, we often don't, we decide to have a smaller panel because, well, when I get to people.”

The AI Phone Debate

4:02 to 4:30

Hosts discuss AI phones and their implications.

“I like that this is the week that the AI stuff exploded.”

The E-ink Experience

4:30 to 6:15

Conversations about the simplicity and challenges of e-ink phones.

“We've never really made e-ink screens fast, have we?”

Current AI Landscape

6:15 to 7:09

Exploration of the current state of AI and its advancements.

Software Innovation Trends

7:09 to 9:37

Discussion of trends in software development and feature releases.

“And obviously the cycles are much shorter now, but like, what is, you know, OpenAI or Anthropic or Kimmy, what is their six months early look like?”

AI and Business Dynamics

9:37 to 14:01

Examination of AI's impact on business operations and workforce changes.

“Have y 'all noticed more features being released than other software you're using?”

AI and Corporate Behavior

14:01 to 15:10

Explore how companies utilize AI and the implications of overhiring.

“Oh, you're looking for signals of a rumble from someone else's earthquake that's beneath the surface.”

Small Teams and Rapid Innovation

15:10 to 17:08

Discuss the advantages small teams have in innovation and product releases.

“I'm not even facetious, people say like, you know, we're going for smaller teams.”

AI in Open Source and Development

17:08 to 19:02

Examine the role of AI in open source projects and its acceptance among developers.

Show all 73 chapters

AI's Irreversible Impact

19:02 to 20:11

Reflect on the accelerating pace and irreversible nature of AI advancements.

“I don't, because done have offers some idea of completion.”

Perceptions of AI in Everyday Life

20:11 to 22:34

Analyze differing opinions on AI safety and its applications in daily life.

“There's a focus issue there, but let's not talk about that.”

Software Development and Bug Fixes

22:34 to 24:56

Discuss the evolving nature of software testing and bug fixes with AI.

“Harper, you're more of a developer than I am, but I don't think we're going to end up with bug-free software.”

The Future of Programming Languages

24:56 to 28:00

Investigate how AI affects programming languages and coding practices.

“for the AI, but I don't have, I think this is where the jagged thing comes in.”

Evolving Programming Languages and Code Bugs

28:00 to 30:11

Explore the evolution of programming languages and the future of coding.

“Well, there's different kinds of bugs too.”

AI Tools and Models for Programming

30:11 to 33:32

Discuss the impact of AI tools on programming workflows and efficiency.

“we didn't even get to any of the news stories well we can let's do them we will we come back to actual the actual news because it it ties right into this beautifully uh you're watching this week in tech.”

AI Tools and Models for Programming

33:41 to 35:12

Discuss the impact of AI tools on programming workflows and efficiency.

“And right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash twit.”

Challenges and Trust Issues with AI Models

35:12 to 41:12

Examine the trust issues surrounding AI models and their accessibility.

“And as you run along, it says, we've extended it for another day.”

The Future of AI and Compute Efficiency

41:12 to 42:00

Discuss the future of AI compute capabilities and company strategies.

“I'm hearing people say, I can't get Fable to do anything.”

The Complexities of AI Compute Costs

42:00 to 45:31

Explore the challenges and expenses surrounding AI compute resources and how they affect companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

“Beginning July 20th, a lot of people five, including all max plans and team premium plans at 50 % of limits.”

Chinese AI Innovations and Market Strategies

45:31 to 47:26

Discuss the emergence of Chinese AI models, their marketing strategies, and the impact of global competition.

“So you do a small run and then do a big run.”

Evaluating AI Model Performance and Pricing

47:26 to 54:00

Analyze the performance and pricing of different AI models, including comparisons between various offerings.

“locally because i don't have you don't have you don't have eight b200 sitting behind that pdp 11.”

Future of AI and Market Dynamics

54:00 to 56:00

Discuss the future landscape of AI technologies and the implications for market dynamics and consumer access.

“4.8 for, you know, max$1.40 an hour tokens, a million tokens or whatever it is.”

Benchmarking AI Models

56:00 to 56:48

A discussion on AI model comparisons and benchmarks.

“Yeah, they said it's second to Fable, better than Saul, but second to Fable is their pitch.”

The Implications of Open Weight Models

56:48 to 59:31

Exploring the impact of open weight AI models and their economic implications.

“Dean Ball is a conservative from the Hoover Institute, Heritage Society, that lineage.”

China's AI Strategy and Global Competitiveness

59:31 to 1:03:54

Analyzing China's AI strategies and how they affect global competition.

“So I think there's two points there, right?”

Funding Models and the Future of AI

1:03:54 to 1:09:50

Discussing the funding of AI models and the implications for future development.

“Because it is not great to see a American company pouring private investment into these models to create something that is valuable today, only to see China, you know, essentially undercut them with zero cost products.”

AGI and the Role of Parameters

1:09:50 to 1:10:08

Debating the relationship between model parameters and the pursuit of AGI.

Debating the Future of AI Models

1:10:08 to 1:10:53

Discussing the potential and limitations of small language models versus larger models for achieving AGI.

“But it doesn't advance you towards an artificial intelligence.”

China's Approach to AI Development

1:10:53 to 1:11:48

Examining how China's AI models and development strategies impact global competition.

“Because we just spent 15 minutes talking very positively about two of the largest models ever released in the world, Kimi K3.”

The Evolution of AI Labs

1:11:48 to 1:12:43

Exploring the rapid advancements in AI and the impact of companies like Anthropic and DeepMind.

Parenting in the Digital Age

1:14:52 to 1:19:49

A candid discussion on the challenges of parenting in a tech-driven world and managing children's screen time.

“Like, okay, so people who aren't parents don't understand this, but when you have your first child, you still think in terms of like what you want to do on the weekend.”

Global Trends in Internet Regulation

1:19:49 to 1:24:01

Examining the rise of government control over the internet and its global implications.

“And so we'll just be like, we should copy that.”

China's Great Firewall and Exporting Technology

1:24:04 to 1:25:13

Discussion on China's Great Firewall and the implications of exporting surveillance technology.

“I just think there is this thing that we assume there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into this.”

EU's Chat Control Controversy

1:25:13 to 1:27:07

Exploring the EU's chat control policy and its potential impacts on privacy.

“their name and birth date to get on the internet.”

Safetyism in AI and Self-Driving Cars

1:27:07 to 1:28:59

Debating the balance between safetyism and the adoption of self-driving technology.

“on the table there's they're still want to do this i think i worry that safetyism is going to be a a real issue broadly.”

American AI Regulation and Economic Interests

1:28:59 to 1:32:48

Discussion on the implications of AI regulation in the US and its connection to economic interests.

Sanctions and Competition with Chinese AI

1:32:48 to 1:36:29

Examining potential sanctions against Chinese AI companies and their impact on competition.

“But I think a lot of this is very much related to, like, how are we, who is getting money and how?”

Consumer Perspectives on Chinese Vehicles

1:36:29 to 1:38:00

Conversations about consumer perceptions of Chinese vehicles and automotive industry dynamics.

“Yeah, but you can go to Canada and buy one with a 100 % import fee, a tariff, and it's still cheaper than a Model S.”

Discussion on the Quirky Topolino Car

1:38:00 to 1:43:09

The hosts discuss a unique car model featuring unconventional design elements.

“I'm a bald middle-aged man with three children.”

AI and Business Data Privacy Concerns

1:43:27 to 1:47:40

The conversation shifts to AI's impact on business data security and privacy.

Microsoft's Role in AI and Market Dynamics

1:47:40 to 1:52:00

The hosts explore Microsoft's evolving role in AI development and market perceptions.

“Who is in charge of Microsoft right now?”

Taco Bell and Gastrointestinal Distress

1:52:00 to 1:53:37

Discussing Taco Bell's unique food offerings and public perception.

“Trust no one says, Vlasic has been smoking weed with the Taco Bell guys.”

Microsoft's Market Position

1:53:37 to 1:55:20

Exploring Microsoft's current standing in the tech market and historical context.

“Microsoft's saying that they care about other people's IP and business right now.”

GitHub's Evolution and Challenges

1:55:20 to 1:56:58

Analyzing GitHub's struggles and the evolution of coding practices.

“Where they were like, here is how a product works.”

The Shifting Landscape of Product Releases

1:56:58 to 1:58:44

Discussing the changing dynamics of product launches in tech companies.

“And I've had to unravel some of those things where people come in and be like, we use AI at our company and this is what we do.”

Minimum Viable Products and Startup Culture

1:58:44 to 2:00:31

Exploring the concept of minimum viable products in modern startups.

“Over time, they have gone and they've hired the right people or interesting people.”

Minimum Viable Products and Startup Culture

2:06:00 to 2:07:12

Exploring the concept of minimum viable products in modern startups.

“Imagine, they have been targets of many in attacks.”

Minimum Viable Products and Startup Culture

2:07:18 to 2:07:29

Exploring the concept of minimum viable products in modern startups.

Exploring Innovative Keyboards

2:07:30 to 2:08:48

Discussion about unique keyboards designed for creators and their functionalities.

AI Voice Assistants in Daily Life

2:08:49 to 2:10:37

The hosts share their experiences and thoughts on using AI voice assistants.

“Can you say hi to Harper and Alex on the MacBook Air?”

AI Psychosis: A Growing Concern

2:10:38 to 2:13:39

Exploration of the concept of AI psychosis and its implications for society.

Generational Perspectives on Digital Interaction

2:13:40 to 2:17:24

A look at how different generations engage with technology and social interactions.

“Well, a friend of mine has what he has described as AI psychosis.”

Building Community Through Technology

2:17:25 to 2:20:01

Discussion on creating community spaces for tech enthusiasts to share and collaborate.

“And like, all this is happening, but not for us.”

Navigating AI Psychosis and Mixed Feelings

2:20:01 to 2:21:44

Discussion on the complexities and nuances of AI's impact on individuals and society.

“I think we should probably at some point figure out what to do with that or we just treat it like everything else we have and just ignore it and it'll go away.”

Technology's Role in Enhancing Communication

2:21:45 to 2:23:26

Exploration of how technology, especially AI, aids communication and breaks language barriers.

“And so it's just easier to say this is black or white.”

Sonos and Home Automation Challenges

2:23:27 to 2:25:30

A light-hearted take on Sonos products, their challenges, and home automation solutions.

Sonos and Home Automation Challenges

2:25:31 to 2:26:10

A light-hearted take on Sonos products, their challenges, and home automation solutions.

“when they deprecated all of my gear that I'd spent thousands of dollars on.”

Sonos and Home Automation Challenges

2:26:14 to 2:29:19

A light-hearted take on Sonos products, their challenges, and home automation solutions.

“You know, and I know you know this, Harper, one of the traps of starting something new is you can make it 10 times harder than it has to be.”

Reflections on Parenting and Future Economies

2:29:20 to 2:30:26

Discussion on parenting, children's future in the economy, and societal changes.

The Humor in AWS Billing Blunders

2:30:27 to 2:33:54

A humorous take on ridiculous Amazon Web Services billing issues experienced by users.

“Which is like the amount of work that you do just so that, you know, an opportunity, like, yeah.”

AWS Billing Anomalies

2:34:00 to 2:35:08

Explore the bizarre cases of astronomical AWS bills and potential software bugs.

“And Harvey's Amazon Web Services bill, which was last month 43 cents, because they don't, I mean, it's a nonprofit, was$7.8 billion.”

AI in Major League Baseball

2:35:08 to 2:36:33

Discussing the implications of using AI for strategic decisions in baseball.

“And like - There's always going to be units.”

AI and Knowledge Compression

2:36:33 to 2:38:19

How AI compresses vast amounts of human knowledge for various applications.

“I mean, I'm doing the same thing, but I don't play baseball.”

AI-Generated Biographies

2:38:19 to 2:40:49

The ethical concerns surrounding AI-generated biographies and ownership of narratives.

“If you want to go to middle school, it's 50.”

Quality of AI-Generated Content

2:40:49 to 2:43:14

Debating the quality and impact of AI-generated content on creativity and artistry.

“And he, he, and it's one of these Amazon things, which I find always so frustrating where you're kind of like, can you take it down?”

The Future of Music in an AI World

2:43:14 to 2:45:38

How AI affects the music industry and the implications for human artists.

“And so like, if someone is just outputting a bunch of really fast, that's typically bad.”

AI Teachers and Education

2:45:38 to 2:47:56

Introducing AI teachers in schools and the implications of their roles.

“Are you going to go see agriculture on their new tour?”

Silicon Valley's Health Paradox

2:48:00 to 2:49:19

A humorous critique of Silicon Valley's health obsessions versus risky enhancements.

“But let's inject this foreign substance made in China because that's got to be good.”

Guest Introductions and Updates

2:49:20 to 2:50:32

Alex Wilhelm discusses his newsletter and thoughts on AI in tech.

Innovative Product Development

2:50:33 to 2:51:44

Harper Reed talks about the evolving concept of products as processes in AI.

“So, you know, what we have found is, and this is something I talked to Tim O 'Reilly about recently on a talk, which was one of the things that we've seen is that the product seems to be a process in many cases.”

AI Tools and Their Applications

2:51:45 to 2:54:28

Discussion on various AI tools and their functionality in coding and reviews.

“And it's great because it kind of knows what my deep philosophical worldview is and it helps it.”

AI Skills and Community Contributions

2:54:29 to 2:56:03

Exploring how community collaboration enhances AI skills development.

“I did not write Review Squad or Thrifty.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00It's time for Twit This Week in Tech. We've got Alex Wilhelm here. We've got Harper Reid. It's going to be a fun show. All of the new AI coming from China. What's China up to? What's America up to and how is it going to respond? We'll also talk about the giant bill a few people received from Amazon Web Service and the new AI teacher in Salamanca, New York. You won't believe your eyes. It's coming up next on Twit. This episode is brought to you by Black Hat USA. If you listen to this show, you go deep on the technical detail. Well, so does Black Hat. For nearly three decades, it's been where the security industry's most rigorous research gets presented and pressure tested.

0:44More than 100 hands-on trainings taught by practitioners who actually deployed in live environments, not lecturers reading from slides. and hundreds of peer-reviewed briefings that go well past the overview into the real work across the four areas defining security right now. AI and autonomous threats, cyber conflict, systemic resilience, and identity. This year, Black Hat's Briefings Pass includes all keynotes and main stage access, plus business hall entry. You also get breakfast, lunch, Arsenal live tool demos, on-demand session access and admission to the Midnight in the War Room screening.

1:23Black Hat takes place from August 1st to the 6th in Las Vegas. If you want the depth this show gets into in person with the people doing the work, this is the room, and we'll be there too. Use the code TWIT for$200 off your briefings pass at blackhat.com slash US-26. That's B-L-A-C-K-H-A-T dot com slash U-S-dash-26.

1:52Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT.

2:04This is TWIT. This Week in Tech. Episode 1093. Recorded Sunday, July 19th, 2026. california sober it's time for twit this week in tech the show we cover the week's tech news and as usual when i have harper reed on the show hello harper great to see you technologist entrepreneur hacker he runs a little ai uh doohickey called 2389.ai always wonderful to have harper on he's been traveling a lot we've been trying to get him on i'm happy to be here And when we have Harper on, we often don't, we decide to have a smaller panel because, well, when I get to people. No. That way you're like, man, Harper will not shut up.

2:50No, no, there are people, Michelle Mayne Nameless, who come on the show who I can't get to shut up. You're not one of them. But you have such great things to say and your rapport with everybody is so great. Remember, last time you were on was just you and Amy Webb. This time, I'm going to introduce you to a new character I think you will like. Alex Wilhelm is also here. alex has a wonderful newsletter that is going you know great guns cautious optimism.news yes sir and you also hear him on this week in startups and it's great to see you once again my dear friend coming to me from my old backyard indeed and leo i just got i just gotta say of all the times to come on the show the week after the ai policy fracas is the right time to have me on so i'm excited oh i'm excited to have i mean like everything that i want to talk about is what's in the show notes today so thank you for having me as always it's a real treat and i will not burn down your house i please don't i that is an option i suppose it's not your house it's your your house it isn't my house anymore no it is not so you can burn it down you have permission i'm not on the deed um ladies and gentlemen um it is true that this is the uh this is the week that the AI stuff kind of exploded.

4:04We do have a full-time AI show. I like that this is the week that the AI stuff exploded. I don't know if y 'all have been awake for the last, I don't know, two years? This was no different than the rest of the week. No, it's true. And people email me and say, can you stop talking about AI? Isn't there a new phone out? And I say, no. But if it were to be out, it would be all about AI, unfortunately. It would literally be all about AI. It is. The AI phone. It is. be like the new foldable iphone is full of ai and it's horrible or whatever yeah i do have one phone that has no ai on it which jeff atwood sent me it's a e-ink screen it is the mudita it has nothing it's got nothing on it it's just nothing it's just the simplest purest and who wants a phone this is text and phone oh wait it has some apps but i can't imagine they're very good calculator calendar that would send us some uh i will send you this one there is a camera you know what's funny about the camera is it takes full color pictures but they're uh but they're go ahead go to the three shot real quickly so i can get a good picture of these guys they're oh it's so slow but they're they're they're oh i love that i love that They're monochrome pictures.

5:24Oh, man. We've never really made e-ink screens fast, have we? The Kindle one is pretty fast. But other than that, most of the consumer ones are not as fast. But I think the point of this is it's a phone that you don't want to use. So you don't have to worry about getting sucked down the Instagram hole. I think the problem that I have is that I love and I fantasize and I dream about this type of phone. but I think if I started calling all of my friends on the telephone, they would stop being my friends. They would just be like, please do not call me. No, no, no, no, no. People that complain about phone calls that you know are wussies.

6:00I just call everybody. In fact, some people, I just aggressively FaceTime them without calling ahead of time. That's actually one of the best things ever. And the unannounced FaceTime, especially at odd hours, is so good. So horrible. it's so good so horrible you get to see your friends waking up from a nap they're in bed holding their phone like a baby exactly what what what's wrong i'm like nothing well first of all there's no you don't know that it's gonna be a picture right you just think your phone's ringing and so you pick it up and there's harper it says i mean that's true that's true that's what are you doing here i love it i love it i think i'm sticking my face into your house like this i'm just gonna walk into the door and just put my face in your bedroom hi yeah you know what it does it does show you which friends are like always down and which friends you need to put on the calendar first like if somebody smiles broadly and says alex then you know this is this is a true friend even though they're still wearing curlers uh so you're right uh i should point out this is no really special week in ai except it sort of feels like we're still alive that's what makes it special is like the things about ai that's cool is we haven't all been killed yet that's good news right the fast takeoff hasn't happened as everyone promised it would it feels like it's happening you don't think it's happened um i don't know i oftentimes wonder there's there's a couple things that i wonder one of the things i wonder a lot about is as these models get more powerful You think about both our friends that have worked at some of these big companies and they say not like these, but like, let's say Apple or Google, and they've been using some technology for a year before it gets to us.

7:47And obviously the cycles are much shorter now, but like, what is, you know, OpenAI or Anthropic or Kimmy, what is their six months early look like? Like they're like, what is, what do they have access to that we as just boring consumers would never ever, you know, dream of? Well, I think we find out pretty quick because one thing that I always find really frustrating is when they drop a new model, like the OpenAI GPT 5.6 family. And then everyone that I know on Twitter is like, oh yeah, I've had this for four weeks. It's fantastic. I know it's frustrating. How did that happen? Who are you? Why do you have it?

8:23You have seven followers and you're annoying and I don't like your face. Have we figured that out? I don't know how that works. I've been trying to figure that out too. There must be some like club that we're not in, but I will say that I don't think there's stuff that's that production ready that's so far advanced of what we have or is coming down the pike like i don't think there's a special access program of like you know special jets from open ai or whatever i don't think the models are that much better because i think you have to given the cost of creating them get them into the market with a reasonable time frame to recoup the money you spent training them um but i will say the cadence that we've seen from ai in the last six to nine months to me really does i think show that the breakthrough is an agenda coding we saw at the end of 25 with um was it opus 4 5 at november 24th the day that will live in my heart and infamy.

9:14Yeah, well, I think that was when everything changed as far as I was concerned. It was like, okay. The cadence is faster. And I think we're seeing AI models either accelerate humans to do more, more quickly. Or I think as we've seen the last couple of major releases, you know, sparks of recursive self-improvement or whatever. I think we're starting to get to the point where that's having a very modest impact. But I think that that plus the accelerated humans does feel like a new gear. Have y 'all noticed more features being released than other software you're using? Oh, that's interesting. I have noticed more bugs.

9:47So I think that's part of it. Tuesday, Microsoft shipped a patch Tuesday with a record number, more than 500 fixes. And if you include the fixes they applied to Microsoft Edge because of the Chromium project, it was over 1 ,000. And that's AI, right? That's mythos. Well, I meant the other kind of direction of literal features. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's one thing when you have all of these things. So I've been starting to notice a few things, and it's not enough to have a list, but I keep thinking like, oh, that's new. I wonder if that was just something they shipped really quickly. I keep thinking this as I use an app like a Gmail, or I'm trying to think what else app I use, but it seems like there's a quicker pace.

10:39One would expect that actually. Instead, what I see is a lot of vibe coded crap, to be honest with you. GitHub is overflowing. And by the way, I have contributed. I all of a sudden have 20 GitHub repos and I'm not even posting everything I'm doing. So the explosion of consumer software in that since Leo has been so fun to watch through the lens of a niche. So I'm a poker fan and I hang out on the poker subreddit. And there was this period of time when Cloud Code took off before everyone ran out of compute capacity in which they literally had to tell everyone, no more sharing your free poker app that you built because there are too many.

11:22Here is a net of right now. Because everyone was like making, you know, GTO trainers and all this cool stuff. And it was fun. It was cool. Everyone was pretty happy. But it was just every other post was like, look at what I made. I follow a subreddit called RSS, which was a fairly quiet, not much was happening. All of a sudden, every single person on there has written, including me, their own RSS reader. There are an infinite number now of Vive-coded RSS readers out there. So if you include that, Harper, yes, there are more features. But in commercial software, I don't see a great... So just start paying attention because this is something I'm kind of working through.

12:02You should see it. I think, I think, I really do think there is something happening. Just because I have, I have, I'm going to create a list. And then next time, whenever I see one, I'll create a list. I'll make a note and I'll just start. Have your AI do that. Well, you can't have the AI do it because it's a lot about feel, right? Like it's a lot about like, oh, this is interesting. This is a new feature that I wouldn't have expected. Because I guess what I'm trying to suggest is that it's not just features. It's that features that you, if you go through a quick product manager audit, you'd be like, oh, why would they prioritize this?

12:40This is interesting. It has a little too many flourishes or it's a little too fancy or it's a little too on the edge of something or another. But I think it's great because we are seeing this internally to my company, like the fact that we can ship anything very quickly. So I would love to see it more at some of these bigger companies. It shows that it's working. You're looking for a Move 37 feature. Do you know what I'm saying when I say Move 37? When AlphaGo was playing Lee Sedol in Go, there was one move, Move 37, where all of the Go masters said, no, that's what? They said that's a terrible move.

13:20it was a non-human move that turned out to be a winning move yeah and that's what you're saying there should be some move 37s out there stuff that one wouldn't have expected maybe i think that there are i think that there's a thing that i keep thinking about like we everyone talks about software factories in my world like that's a thing they talk about and there's a couple things that i don't really understand why we are talking about that the first one it's like it sounds like a good idea. It sounds hard, but everyone's acting like they're done. Um, and, and I feel, I feel like there's a, this thing where if you had a real software factory and it was truly effective, absolutely working, and you were able to ship things with like, you know, just let's say you 10 X or 20 X all of your humans, why would you tell anyone about it?

14:16Oh, you're looking for signals of a rumble from someone else's earthquake that's beneath the surface. I see. So you're not looking like, here's the corporate blog post announced. Because everyone who's saying like, we use AI to do a billion things seems to be lying. And they seem to say that in a coordinated way, because they're then going to do a layoff of like 15 % of their workforce two weeks later and just be like, oh, it was AI. And it's like, no, you just over hire during COVID. Like this is a very clear example of you hiring, you know, 40 % more people than you need. It's AI washing. And I feel like that's been for the last couple of years, but I guess my assumption is I'm seeing, we've seen, and our company has been changed forever with some of how this stuff works.

14:58So I am assuming that a bigger company that is doing similar stuff to we is going to have the same examples, the same outcomes, the same, et cetera. How many people are at your company? six. Yeah. And that's why it works. I think, I think that's why when we see these layoffs and I'm not even facetious, people say like, you know, we're going for smaller teams. You know, the Amazon two pizza rule has become the Amazon one pizza rule. Everyone wants to move faster. I think the lack of bureaucracy layers, size, scale, enterprise SLAs, and so forth is why you can do that. But what I am seeing that I think matches what you're saying is I'm shocked at how much stuff companies now drop in a major release.

15:32So like when Databricks put out their genie, Omni, whatever their new agent is. They had like, it felt like 15 different posts about new stuff they put out. Microsoft, Deering, Build. They dropped more things than I could literally keep in my head to write about. So this is kind of what I mean, right? Like these, I think, are signals that it's working for some people. And I don't think you have a, I don't think it's of interest or there's no strategic interest to tell people you're using these tools effectively because it will alienate hiring. It'll cause hiring to be harder. It will maybe give your competitors some sort of heads up to say, oh, maybe we should be looking at that a little more seriously, especially if you're linking it to actual outcomes.

16:19And so this is where I'm trying every time I'm using a big company's app, I'm a little bit trying to read tea leaves through that interaction to be like, oh, is this new? Did they always have that shadow there is that that seems like a little bit of a flourish because i do think there that what we'll see is we'll see parts where people are showing off yeah where they're actually explicitly you know because like you're saying it is a smaller team thing which allows for more specifics like a friend of mine here in chicago built uh you know nba jam the video game and because it was such a small tight team game wow the easter eggs are literally the developers heads on the players yeah right and so i think we're going to start seeing some of those kind of easter eggy personalizations again because the teams are so small and tight and so that's the flourishes that i'm kind of looking for what is this little thing oh when you hover over this you this happens or you double click on here and you get the death star instead of a planet or whatever it might it's my guess though that the bigger enterprises all are working as quickly as they can to create internal software that you're right they probably don't want to tell anybody what they're doing for variety of reasons um i you know i've heard anecdotally in our ai user group we have a number of people who work for a big enterprise that very commonly in big enterprises you have multiple teams there's not one you know monolithic ai strategy you have multiple teams working on multiple different things and i also from time to time see stories like we replaced our cm crm our half million dollar a year CRM budget with a vibe coded software or you know where you really see it customer service yeah yeah right yeah people are admitting that that in fact it's kind of interesting because while you and I might say god we hate those phone trees and we hate automated customer service in general it seems to be a good experience for customers that they're triaging the easiest things fast so that the humans can handle the hard things you know it happened in linux linux world this week linus torvalds surprised me a little bit he on the linux newsletter said i realized that some people uh rather mailing list i realized some people really dislike ai but this is an area where i'm willing absolutely to put my foot down as the top level maintainer linux is not one of those anti-ai projects and if somebody has issues with that they can do the orpus open source thing and fork it or just walk away ai is a tool just like other tools we use and it's clearly a useful one so this was seen by by the open source world as an endorsement from somebody you might say is probably anti-llm not at all i i mean i i think it's interesting to fight this battle a little bit because what i have found is um it doesn't seem like this is a bell that we're going to unring no that's for sure well okay but we are going to talk about some headwinds because there are some serious headwinds but yeah tell me all right well i want you to finish the thought you so if this if we have already crossed the rubicon and ai is is done it's gonna it's going to happen.

19:29What? Well, I don't even mean it's like done. I don't, because done have offers some idea of completion. I just think that we are, we are, things have accelerated. Like I've done a handful of companies and every time we had the same pattern. And I've said this before on the show, like, you know, we used to, we used to very quickly hire 20 people and we have very quickly not hired anyone since we started the company. And we have had so much output. And I do contend that like, I agree with Alex, like this is because we're small. able to do this. But the amount of output that we're doing is more than I've ever seen in my entire life.

20:05It's almost more output than my entire career prior. It's so much output. There's a focus issue there, but let's not talk about that. But I do think that there's a lot of this is hard to contend with. And I think if you build in the process to handle it, then the benefits are so big. You have such huge benefits, which I obviously, Linus is seeing, especially for something as important as Linux or what have you. You know, there was a friend who was mentioning this, that when the US government nuked Fable, the project Glasswing or whatever was still doing reports because you were still seeing bug reports being submitted that were written very thoroughly, which obviously means Fable wasn't nuked for everyone.

20:56And so it's like that kind of thing, like those, like the fact that Microsoft can be like, here's our patches and it patches all of these bugs makes everyone safer. And the fact that Linux is on a hundred percent of our devices and Linus obviously sees the benefit from progress, project glass wing, et cetera, means that I think it makes sense. The people that i know who are anti-ai as coders think they are very smart the people who i know who are pro ai and very good coders oftentimes are like i'm very smart but this thing is really good and i am smarter with it and i think it goes back to the the lease it all goes stuff right which is basically like when you hooked a person to the machine it was pretty good which is why i believe in the matrix i think there might be some commonality with people's attitudes towards self-driving cars lisa had a big fight with her uh her as her brother-in-law yesterday who said no waymos are really dangerous and lisa said no the stats are clear waymos are roughly 10 to 15 times safer than human drivers uh they're not they're safer he said no no no hey i can't drive and i think it's it's maybe kind of like that that there are people who deny that ai can be any good and then uh then there are people who are are using it i think also leo we're seeing people that used chad gpt's web interface once 18 months ago then saying oh that ai is driving my car but i will say in their defense ai is jagged its intelligence is jagged and so sam on bull samet who's a regular on our show and a car guy said you will never see level five self-driving because there's always going to be an issue there's going to be a thing that that ai isn't prepared to handle and so completely autonomous on any road is not going to happen um and i i think he's somewhat credible i don't think he's an anti-ai guy i think he's somewhat credible on that uh but but nevertheless so this is this is why it's not quite as cut and dried as all that uh ai well here's a another question in software uh steve gibson our security guy we were talking about all these uh bug fixes and he says it's what you're going to see his prediction is what you're going to see is a rise an increase in the number of bug fixes to dramatic level we might already be there and then he's and he says this will happen over the next year a decline to the point where you don't have any more bugs.

23:31Harper, you're more of a developer than I am, but I don't think we're going to end up with bug-free software. I think we're just going to have a faster remediation cycle. I mean, I think that's true, but it might be equivalent, right? Like I think the thing that I found is that as a developer, we used to, we did testing, right? So in 2016, you would say, let's get our test suite up and you would shoot for like 40%, 60%. And if If you were insane, like truly had nothing else going on in your life, you might hit 80%. You know, some people said we have a hundred percent test coverage. And mostly that was performative.

24:05Like people, I don't, I don't know very many people who worked in production environments who had such high test coverage because there was so much other happening that it was scary. You had to just do stuff and it was hard and you had to just get all this stuff done. And now that's just table stakes. Like you, Claude will just give you a hundred percent test coverage. well but wait though doesn't it sometimes write but like uh well basically dummy tests where of course it does of course it does but but this is where you still have to have good practice like you still have to have good review practice i agree with all that stuff but it's i do and this is where the bugs will disappear right i have my guy do tdd in fact i do i do red green blue testing because that's how I learned how to code, right?

24:54And I think that's probably a good sensible way for the AI, but I don't have, I think this is where the jagged thing comes in. Sometimes, most of the time it's good and it'll write a test. The test will fail. It'll write the code. The code passes. It does behavioral testing and everything seems to work. And then sometimes it'll just say test passed. It'll just say test no. Yeah, yeah. I think that could be occasionally it running out of compute on the backend and then they're going okay jk now you're in there's a variety of reasons it does it uh but if i harper please i was just kidding my experience with with building like all of our process around this um it's just you have to do more loops and so what what you know and this is the popular word on twitter etc loops would you explain this to me because that's all i mean all it is is like talking about on x is i mean it's pretty stupid right like all you do is you just are like slash loop do this until it's done and it literally will just do that until it's done and so that's why they were like well that really is way to burn tokens because it just does a bunch of so you do slash goal where you say do this until the tests pass or do this until you have 100 test coverage so you give it and so that kind of thing so what but what we have found is that um you can't just have clod do it so what we'll do is we'll use clod it'll go through it'll build the thing it'll be like test pass everything's great and we're not looking at code so then we will pass it over to codex and then codex will be like y 'all are insane these tests are horrible i have three agents now look yeah exactly and then you pass it to exactly and fable and actually i fable do the design but because it costs i keep and we're going to get to this in a second i keep expecting them to turn fable off so i have failed design it and hand it off to opus 4-8 for the coding and then have it reviewed by sol 5-6 and then have that reviewed by 4-5 then and in order to do this i gave them i got tired of pasting the results from one from codex into cloud code into hermes so i just said email each other would you i said i said you got a mailbox just email each other with the results what are you using for mail uh obsidian i just had to make text files yeah exactly yeah it works perfect because then i can read it in case i want to although as you said you think you're going to read the code no no you don't expect to read the code i don't even read the plans anymore it'll say i've written an entire plan for you 15 pages as soon as you approve it i'll get to work and i just go yeah yeah go ahead so i think what this means is that sure it's fine if you believe the agents then we get what amounts to normal output which is the same thing that happened if you believe humans as well like there's no different agents anymore will write buffer overflows or will yeah access memory or zero or they will write it but they will find it much quicker.

27:41And so like the process that you would normally have is to just kind of keep iterating on this stuff. You know what I mean? Like you would keep pushing, keep going, keep doing, and then it will just kind of do its thing. Like it'll fix the bugs it finds. And I don't think we'll go to zero bugs because bugs are mysterious and they seem to just happen and generate. Well, there's different kinds of bugs too. I mean, there's bugs that are coded bugs. And I guess that's what we're talking about, not things like timing bugs or row hammer or, you know, things that are kind of not code caused. But I think we can expect code bugs to become increasingly rare, don't you?

28:23I think so. I mean, we're seeing this like we're seeing our software is 10x better. But the other side effect of this is that we are also using programming languages that we would never have used before. we're using a lot of swift and a lot of rust and a lot of go um you know these are much safer than um you know python yeah and who wants to type all that rust but uh but if the agent's doing go right ahead please we want to exactly yeah those can't be real programming languages when i was growing up c plus plus was a programming language i mean with whip and then i'm going to use this here's a good question right aside from reviewing existing code does anybody write greenfield code in C++ and with their AI?

29:03No, right? I have. Have you? I mean, why would you? Well, I mean, sometimes you need to write C++ code. Yeah. And the thing that's funny is they just are just like, yeah, it makes sense. Why wouldn't you do that? That's totally what you do. It doesn't care. I think the interesting thing about what we just talked about, writing code yourself, is can you imagine a child born today going through the hell of learning the syntax arcana of C++ and getting it right and thinking that that was a good use of their time versus architecting a system that will be built by agents. This is going to be a lost art in not that long.

29:37And this is actually something that was predicted a long time ago. I forget which foundation novel it was. It wasn't in the main trilogy. It was one of the prequels or sequels, but in foundation, they literally write code to have the computers write the mathematics behind psychohistory. And when I was reading that as 15, 20 years ago, I was like, whoa, they're not even doing the work themselves how will they ever know if it's right and then here we are and it turns out that well it's actually a pretty good way to go about things because computers can do more faster than us plus they speak computer which yeah you know we anyway let's take a break we we didn't even get to any of the news stories well we can let's do them we will we come back to actual the actual news because it it ties right into this beautifully uh you're watching this week in tech.

30:26We're so glad to have Harper Reed here. Nice to see you. I have used many of your skills at 2389.ai. A lot of the review skills are very useful. Good stuff. Are you still putting new ones out all the time? Oh, man. We have so many. We have one called Thrifty that you might like. Yeah. That does. It's really good with Fable. You basically use Fable to plan and super cheap models like haiku to do the work oh oh so that was my idea i thought 4.8 was cheap you use haiku wow okay yeah i mean it's we we tested it even on some open models um and i've been we've been thinking a lot about this because we do a lot we you know trying to output this stuff is really interesting and so we've been really thinking about how do you kind of lean on that a bit more like how do you build pipelines and whatnot where especially you're using so expensive right well you can use 4.8 or you can use GLM or whatever to do planning.

31:23And then you can throw that to, you know, Gemma or Kimmy or like something to do the code. All it has to do is be able to do tool calls. That's it. And as long as it can do tool calls and you have a reasonable harness that can handle it, you can kind of get some stuff done, which means that like, I think the, what we will be talking about soon, which some people already are, you can hear them, is you have to be able to pay less than retail for tokens, which is why everyone loves subscriptions. But if you're a big corporate, you're still stuck with like APIs and you're just paying retail. And it's like, you'll never build anything that will be sustainable because it's just so expensive.

32:03OpenAI or Anthropic or whomever will beat you. Google will beat you. But with Kimi and GLM, suddenly things are getting much more interesting. And so I'm very excited about that stuff. I think this is where things get really interesting. It is. And we have more to talk about in just a bit. Also, Alex Wilhelm is here. His newsletter kind of covers a lot of the same stuff, Cautious Optimism. And you can subscribe to it. But you can also read a lot of it right there at cautiousoptimism.news. Yes. News. Yes. Because it turns out that when you think of a phrase that people already know and try get the dot com you don't yeah enough who would have thought you know what if you got a dot com these days people would say you were unoriginal our dog would they come in chuggy no i think it looks i think it looks stodgy i think it looks like uh from the year 2000 yeah like whenever i see crypto.com like the crypto.com arena down in la where it's works play i'm always like it feels also look at you guys you got are you sure that's not the crypto part of that dot FM you got that news I got that TV who's using dot-com anymore I don't know us Steel I don't yeah you see enough people going crazy with TLDs now that you can do kind of whatever you want pizza yeah dot dot your mom I mean like why don't we have that your mom Google got that one though I think oh they probably have that one yeah yeah they got that one our show today brought to you by zip recruiter oh man i tell you i if you're hiring these days i love you you're great and you need help too right we're always looking for ways to to make our lives easier whether it's multitasking by eating breakfast on the way to work uh hiring a nanny for school pickups hiring a dog walker or using delivery and subscription services to buy paper towels we all have our own little time saving hacks there's no shame in that we all have our own time saving hacks for everyday life but if you're a business owner how can you save time hiring zip recruiter zip recruiter has a new feature that quickly lets you see the most interested qualified candidates first so you save time by meeting the right people faster.

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36:18And as you run along, it says, we've extended it for another day. We've extended it for another week. We've extended for another two weeks. They keep extending Fable again and again and again. And I've been like probably a lot of people because of the rug pull last month, you know, I'm going to lose Fable. I'm going to lose Fable. So I've been hustling along. We have a big project rewriting our old ad sales system. And, you know i want to use the best model so i've been rushing and rushing i don't know what i was rushing for uh this actually it was yesterday it was on the weekend i think claude anthropic announced beginning july 20th claude fable will be included in your subscription i guess presume forever yeah uh now it's 50 percent of the limits so you can't use it as much but i haven't run up i mean maybe i'm not doing enough sub agents maybe because i'm being proactive as you suggested using uh lower quality agents to do some of the hard the tool stuff but i haven't run into limits and i'm doing a pretty big project i'm using it all day every day are you using fable primarily or are you dropping down plan and then what i so what i when i started the plan i said uh because you're gonna run out this was three weeks ago because you're going to run out.

37:41I want you to plan this whole thing and then divide it into manageable chunks, which we're going to hand off to 4.8. So you're going to plan it. You're going to hand it off to 4.8. You're going to review 4.8's code. And then we're going to move on. And then I added, once Saul came out, chapter GPT 5.6, and 5.6 is going to review it. And then once I got Grok 4.5, I said, and Grok 4.5 is going to review it. uh and so i feel like with those triple reviews the the coding is being done by 4-8 and some in with sub agents but because it's a lower cost it's fine sonnet 5 is good so yeah that seemed i haven't run it up against limits so anyway i feel like you know i have a claude max subscription but i feel like this is uh this means we're going to continue to have it why do you think this happened they say demand for fable has been challenging to predict which is why we rolled it out to subscription plans and stages extending access several times as we secured additional capacity some of that coming i think from xai for a billion dollars a month but does this tell you that maybe they thought there'd be more demand for fable or they were concerned about it i think we also have just forgot that the u.s government blocked it for two weeks yep do we all just just just forget I didn't forget it.

39:04I was peeved. Harper, are you saying that because they've locked it for a few weeks, people kind of like came up with other systems, other approaches to reduce their need for it? So I actually think there's a lot of nuanced things going on. So I think the first thing that is happening is that these things are, our tokens are oil. Anthropic wants us to think that they are the engine. They want us to think that if you use Claude, it's Claude and it's different than OpenAI and Kimi and GLM and all these things. What we have found, and I think everyone kind of has a similar experience is like a lot of people prefer the vibe of Claude, which I think is related to the prompting and the system prompts and whatnot.

39:53And they think OpenAI is kind of boring, but OpenAI is just as effective. The models are very good as, you know, like Sol is incredible. It's Fable level, especially around execution and programming. And so that's great. But you can put any of these models into any harness that you have, and they will probably be equivalent. And you might have to tweak it over here because this model has these idiosyncrasies or this one does this. I personally like Anthropic models, but I have had just as good a luck with GLM on a few things as I've had with Anthropic. And the vibe seems similar. And so I think what is happening is when Anthropic and the US government nuked themselves, nuked Fable, I think people were just like, well, that sucks.

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40:34Well, let me go experiment more. And what it did is it broke the trust. And so it allowed people to go experiment more with different harnesses, with different things. And OpenAI didn't help by releasing Sol. And then very specifically, some of their thought leaders at OpenAI tweeted about how to use Sol inside of Cloud Code. And so all the people who like cloud code were able to go and use Sol inside of cloud code, which is great. Like, that's a great thing people should experiment with. But once you do that once, that's another one of these, you know, bridges that is going to be hard. Like, they burn that bridge.

41:08You're never going to have that trust. And again, it's because of the federal government, because of the rug pull, they turned the classifiers up way up. Oh, my God. That thing was annoying. I'm hearing people say, I can't get Fable to do anything. Yeah. Yeah. this is this is the protective layer because i think it's pretty clear fable is mythos it's mythos with a lot of with a classifier running on top of it that says the minute you try to do something having to do cyber security or biohacking or or or ai it says no no no no no uh or it will turn it down to four eight opus four eight and people are complaining that i they can't even do simple, normal stuff.

41:52The classifier is so aggressive. So that's another reason maybe. But given everything you just said and everything Harper just said, think about what Anthropik said in their missive. Beginning July 20th, a lot of people five, including all max plans and team premium plans at 50 % of limits. So for certain plans, 50%. For everyone else, one time$100 credit to your account. That is not a company that is swimming in spare compute because I think they would love to serve a lot of inference at either the subsidized rate, as Harper mentioned, or at the headline rate for this, which is 10 bucks per million input tokens and 50 bucks per million output tokens.

42:26They would love to do that, but they're still having restrictions in place. So to me, they're not compute abundant yet. And I don't think they will be for a long time. But as they - But they're more than they thought they'd be because they did act as if it was gonna be API tokens only, right? Sure, but we don't know if they found some ways to serve this inference more efficiently, for example. We don't know. Did Amazon just turn on another, I don't know, they're buying compute from xai at a billion dollars a month i mean they're buying it from alphabet and amazon and microsoft and they're building their own data centers and they don't we don't know and they're in the cloud it's such a black box you're saying we don't know we don't know we don't know anything we don't know what it costs them we don't know if they're losing money if they're making money we don't know anything do we and because they're not public yet i saw a good tweet where someone said um two things can be true which is they can be absolutely crushed under the operating expenses and they also can be swimming in money from all this revenue well they have like the fact that they can't light up enough data centers they can't do all this stuff because of the costs etc um and also the fact that everyone is paying them billions of dollars to do and they have uh you know ample runway because of the investment that's been poured into them oh they have tons of capital this whole there was that meme for like a few weeks a few months ago people like oh open ai is going to run out of money and i just wanted to be like guys they just raised 122 billion dollars in a single round the largest raise in history in history uh anthropics not going to run out of money ever because of well maybe if they lose the edge and they get mocked by chinese open models and so forth but like the way things are going today they're fine but i do think leo hits on a very important point which is it would be nice to have a better access to the numbers to be able to understand how healthy this company is or not.

44:10But if you go back to earlier in the conversation, we were talking about not telling people how much value you're getting out of AI because you don't want to tip them off. That is, ironically, the Google IPO problem. They didn't want to go public because they didn't want everyone to know the money they're making on search. They had to. They were legally required to because they had so many shareholders. Back then, there were rules about these things. Now, we don't have that. But ever since the Jobs Act, that's gone. Well, kind of. There's different rules but once anthropic goes public if they are minting money as much as they think they are then people are going to get pretty peevish about paying 10 bucks for million input input tokens because that's a little bit excessive compared to open source or an open weight model so i think right now they're probably sitting pretty pretty a lot of demand not enough supply money's coming in open ai have filed for ipos but we don't but they're they're holding on to it and i think that trump rug pull gave both of them cover yes to hold on right to the ipo because i know you're right i don't think they really are too anxious to reveal any of these numbers no no you do the do the dirty work before you list and i think right now they're still in the dirty work era of building out their their compute footprints and so forth and i don't think all the deals they've done are going to be simple to explain and i don't think that the cost of their employee compensation is going to make their gap numbers look particularly salubrious but that does not mean that the core business of making and selling intelligence isn't actually pretty sick um i'm dirty ai done dirt cheap is that what you're saying indeed sir sing it for us leo so it also got very complicated because all of a sudden china who also has very mixed motives is now starting to release open openweight very credible AIs started with Kimmy this week moonshot AI they say it will be open weight on the 27th it's not open weight yet but they showed benchmarks and a number of people have confirmed this to say it is almost not quite but almost fable quality uh they offer a subscription as well as API tokens they're not which is sold out yeah they sold out of the subscription which Which I think is, you know, back in the early aughts when I was involved with t-shirts, we would sell out a thing specifically to get the hype going for when we would launch it.

46:32So you do a small run and then do a big run. And that was such a great way because people would be like, oh man, and they buy something else. They do something else. I mean, this is famous. They are doing a very good job at comms and growth and marketing. And I love it because the models are probably also very, very good. And then Alibaba said, hold my baba. Yeah. And said, oh, by the way, Quen 3.8 Max is coming out. It's been launched in preview to those same people who got access to the other ones before we did. That was today. Oh, yeah. This is an exciting weekend and I am behind. I was like, oh, I'll check out Kimmy later.

47:15And I just can't. it's not available now it's quen is very good i have to say i've been using 3.7 i can run that locally uh the 27b and 35b and it runs nicely did you play with glm i uh 5.2 5.2 is i don't run it locally because i don't have you don't have you don't have eight b200 sitting behind that pdp 11. but i do run it it's my hermes default i love glm it's very good at language yeah uh i find i haven't tried it so much with coding uh it's good it's great i still have in my mind that anthropic is the coding king but i maybe i should let go of some of that well that's that's the risk that we're talking about really but i just want to go back to the harper point about how to build hype by restricting access to your product um zipu ai zeta ai the makers of the glm family models did this earlier this year they restricted new signups to their coding planks didn't have capacity for it so this is not even a new approach by a chinese lab to gen up interest in the american media and it works every time i have a za i a subscription for their max their top of the line it's a third what anthropics uh claude max is it's like 75 bucks a month and i use it like it's my oh the z.ai yeah glm52 so love it here's here's something i i like to think about I was using Cloud Code in, was it February 2025?

48:42Just had launched, early days, and it was great. And we were building all sorts of cool stuff, and our processes were horrible. I think GLM is way better than the Anthropic models that were available then. So this is now the question. How close are the open weight models to the Frontier models? Well, I think it's not a question of how close actually. I think it's a question of time. Because it doesn't matter if they're equivalent. I like how you were like, Alex, he's going to say it. And then I said it and you were like, well, but No one else can see me. Yeah. I was excited about that. I was just like, I was like seeing your head just collapsing on itself as you didn't expect what I was going to say.

49:23But no, you let me down. I thought you were going to say my point, but No, but I think time is the key. Like it is, how long ago would you have an equivalent? Like would the - Is it six months, eight months, four months? Yeah, how ahead are the foundational models? And I think it's getting shorter and shorter. But my point is less, does that matter? My point is six months ago, I was using cloud code and it was awesome. So if GLM is six months behind and it's effectively free, then like what, this is like a present. You know what is effectively free and is very close as DeepSeek. The Chinese model that blew us all away in February of 2025 that changed the whole world.

50:04It was an open-weight model. And now they're really cheap. It's like 12 cents per million tokens in. Yeah, DeepSeek V4 is incredibly inexpensive. I use that as well. But I have to say GLM has kind of eclipsed that for me. But the point is, all three of these are from China. and the chinese government has made noises that they may want to stop this they may want to embargo open weight models from the u.s just as the u.s government is making noise they want to block chinese models from the u.s this is partly protectionism just like they block chinese evs from the us to protect our auto industry partly maybe security because let's not forget you know harper you're the one that made me buy this chinese where is it it's pretty good isn't it escaped it's escaped now it's a little ball that you connect up to your wi-fi and it immediately calls china and it's deep seek and uh yeah it's really cool and it's not horrible no but am i exfiltrating look we just saw that grok is taking everything it can get elon says this is a bug and they're going to fix it but the but the grok command line interface was apparently downloading entire directories of your of your hard drive when you before we get to that i want to go back to the Harper point i want to double click on this because i thought you were going to say that as we watch open weight models become closer and faster followers to american closed source models that there's going to come a point in which they are sufficiently intelligent for whatever tasks you need to put against them and therefore the pricing power of american clothes models will collapse and that is going to be a really tough moment for these companies but right now today to leave us point we do have deep seek v4 and you know what people use it and you know what they still also pay through the nose for fable so to me we're not there yet but to your point about using uh old cloud code versus present day glm i mean we can't be more than a couple years out from when the when the the average model is sufficient for all of my alex well home's personal needs and all of your well yes glm is fine for my agent that's what i use her makes with and it's great it's all i need it's wonderful okay but i would guess i would guess that we're there already yeah that for the most part the unless you're coding unless you're doing hardcore coding i think that if you're coding you can get pretty far yeah now that doesn't mean that you can't get better right like i think there's a difference between could this do everything i need it to do and is this the best model in the same way that you have cars right like buying a a um toyota corolla is a completely rational car i would probably prefer another car but that but but like it does do the thing.

53:00And so I think that if you are, if you have a GPU that can run, like you have, you know, we have a spark, right? We have one of these sparks and it can has 128 gig of RAM. We can run some of these bigger models slow, just so slow, but you run it and it works great. And like, for the most part, that could power my local agent, my Hermes agent or whatever. They could power, probably do some coding with Pi and all this stuff, but for free or just power of electricity. And so I think this is accessible. I do think, though, that when you really want it to work, you want to use something like a GLM or probably these Kimi K3 or, you know, the new Quinn.

53:37And those are going to take a lot of GPUs. Like, I don't have eight B200s. Like, I don't even know how to get those. Like, I don't know how that works. And so, like, I don't think that is a reasonable thing. So I think we have eclipsed the you can run it locally for free. And of course, these will be, you know, they will be quantized, et cetera, to get them a little smaller. But like the magic here is that you can get something that is like Fable or like Opus 4.8 for, you know, max$1.40 an hour tokens, a million tokens or whatever it is. Like there's all these hosting ways. A friend of mine was renting on Vast AI, a 8B200 box, which were mounted to basically $50 an hour and then giving all of his friends free inference.

54:24And so you could just, but you could do whatever you wanted, right? Because there is no limits. So, and, and there's, and then he did some really cool stuff with scheduling and all sorts of stuff. And it worked out really, really well. It was really fun because we rarely have opportunities to just rip through as many tokens as you want. And he was doing testing because this is ostensibly a startup and he's trying to figure out if he could, if this is something sustainable that he could give to companies. And it actually got me thinking much differently about how tokens are given out. Whereas with a fable or whatever, you have all these very limited things.

54:52But in what situations would you want unlimited tokens? Like a WeWork of the future might say, oh, and we have a GLM instance that is unmetered. Because you remember when the data centers did this, right? Like you would have like Exodus would try and get you in and they'd be like one year of unmetered, you know, egress or whatever back in 2001. And like that kind of thing, I think will start to happen as this commodifies further. The children forget that in the early days of AWS, back when Azure and AWS were fighting it out for market share, they actually cut prices occasionally. It was a thing.

55:25Microsoft said, we will never have prices higher than AWS. And everyone went, yay. And then now everyone's broke because they're running the cloud. On the point about price, what's very interesting to me about the latest crop of models that we're talking about, especially KMAK3, is that it is not cheap in its current form. It's roughly priced along with GPT 5.6 Terra, I believe, kind of the middle size model. But it's a lot less in Fable, and it's nearly as good as Fable as the pitch, right? But, okay, I don't think it's as close to Fable as you guys do, personally. I don't know. They even said in the Kimmy K3 blog post at the very bottom, it says, like, this is not as good as Fable.

56:03Yeah, they said it's second to Fable, better than Saul, but second to Fable is their pitch. At some point, we're going to end up discussing which Metallica album is the best. But this is, by the way, benchmarks are BS, right? Benchmarks are not usable anymore, I think. anyway go ahead make your point oh no i'm just saying that right now we are seeing a a kimmy k3 come out it is a big model it is not cheap to run it is currently not open and it smells a lot like an american ai model to me now they will open weight it sure it will get distilled condensed improved tweaked and they'll get cheaper but right now what they have built is something that if it came out from open ai you'd be like cool yeah you're right i think this is not this the super If it does become open weight, you still wouldn't be able to run it because I think it's close to 3 trillion parameters.

56:472.8, 2.4, something like that. Yeah, it's not going to fit on your... So let me read you what Dean Ball says. Dean Ball is a conservative from the Hoover Institute, Heritage Society, that lineage. He's now head of strategy at OpenAI as of two weeks ago. Head of strategic futures is his title. He wrote this, and I thought it was very provocative. Are you familiar with this, Alex? Have you seen his tweet? Yeah, yeah. I've read through this. Some observations on Kimmy. It is a very good model. I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation, which is what some like anthropic claim.

57:23It's in a genetic coding sessions. This seems pretty much on par with the best public models of the first quarter of this year. I'm personally surprised. This is where he gets to the economic argument, which is very interesting. I'm personally surprised that the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models is good given the risks he says to be clear i myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight but i'm surprised that china's fine with it the presumption by the way when you say open weight is that people will it doesn't have to be run in china it could be run on american servers you know that we work model or if you had 20 b 100s you could run it at home so it's it basically china's letting it out of their control uh i suspect the reason they are is 75 explained by strategic blindness that the chinese communist party isn't like thinking along the lines of american frontier model companies like dario this is this is the uh i think this is the fatal flaw when anyone talks about china they don't help but being like well they're just so stupid they don't you're just like they're just like i don't think that's the case like anytime you read like like apple in china chip wars all these books where like this incredible book telling about how china is doing all this cool stuff and the last chapter is like well they just won't make it i'm just like how is that i'm more of an opinion that it's for them it's soft power you know yeah they're making their own chips because they don't want cuda and nvidia to own the world they want to have their own he says the other 25 or so is their lack of compute for customer inference since they can't run it locally maybe they don't have enough compute to do that he says also the normal chinese strategy of aggressive exports and for the companies as opposed to the government the decision to open source is partly ideological partly because they're behind and because they know as alex was just saying very few people would pay for sub frontier models from china right it's not a competitive so this is the thing that he said that's very provocative and scary yeah this is points three and four when it gets spicy yeah open weight models are inherently decelerationist he says that because they basically make it impossible to raise money for frontier models if somebody's giving it away go ahead oh i just this is what i wanted to jump in and kind of explain this point but i realized that you were about to do that and i'm being a terrible guest so i'm going to shut up and let you finish he says in the end open weight models deter ai capex right why would you invest why would you invest billions in agi from anthropic if china's going to give it away he says this is what's really scary here now we're to point four that you thought was equally scary one on a one probable outcome of an open weight model dominant world which by the way is a world i've been advocating for wednesday we had the cto of mozilla on he just put out his the state of uh open ai state of open source ai uh we believe just like open source software this is this is great this is revolutionary he says no it's ai communism now remember he comes from the heritage society and the hoover institute and it's precisely what china proposes rather than a market product ai is a public good which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of digital public infrastructure this future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape I can't argue against that point.

1:01:06He makes a good point. So I think there's two points there, right? One is it's communism. Great. Who cares? The other one is that this might cause issues for, I mean, it's a communist country. What would you expect them to do? You can't own property. He's like, this might be - You're going to get a 99-year lease. From China, they have introduced an idea of communism. And it's like, well, yes, that's true. I don't know. Read the House of Huawei and tell me about communism. So the thing I think is interesting and actually compelling is there's one thing very specifically that why would you invest in a foundational model that is a closed model if you can get an equivalent thing for free?

1:01:45And we all know, A, that that has not been true historically. Not with open source software. There's lots of companies that have made open source software that is great and then competing closed source software that is able to raise typically way more money than the open source version. So I feel like, okay. But the thing that I think is interesting, and I don't necessarily disagree, is what if that is strategic? Right? This is a really important point. I think it is strategic. Where if there's a strategy there? And I think there's another thing that I think is going on, which I think is similar, which is the United States, for better or for worse, has demonstrated to the world that we are a different country than we were 10 years prior, especially for our partners and our friends and our frenemies.

1:02:38We've just demonstrated that in some cases we're more reliable and others were way less reliable, but this has changed how people interact with us. And there is a hole, there's a vacuum where we sat before. And one of the things that China has taken advantage of is just public investment. And so it's not so public in China. It's not the same kind of thing, but they have invested a lot in infrastructure and roads, et cetera, all over the world. And why is AI or data infrastructure any different? I would posit actually that we are missing the boat by not doing open models. Because if you look at a place like the Middle East, for instance, Dubai or what have you, they have huge data centers.

1:03:17They've been building a lot of data centers. They've been building AI cities. whose models are they going to choose? Are they going to choose the closed models that they don't have access to? Are they going to choose the open models that are freely given that they can then modify to their own values and their own culture? It's a belt and road initiative for AI. Yes. Basically. And then once these open way models are selected and American AI companies can't sling their same models at the same margins as we discussed earlier, what happens to their business? Well, it becomes much less healthy, becomes less investable, less backable.

1:03:48And you could see the closed source American AI labs that have so far led the entire AI race lose this. And this is why I think we see the Heritage Foundation guy going, ah, it's communism. Right. Because it is not great to see a American company pouring private investment into these models to create something that is valuable today, only to see China, you know, essentially undercut them with zero cost products. Here's my question. How can you keep funding these Chinese AI labs, which currently are deeply unprofitable? i mean know that because zai and minimax are both public companies we've seen their books i have read through them myself uh how do you build businesses of sufficient health to keep this up now well but if you're the government's supporting it well you're forgetting but it's communism well like i think there is a real there is a real reality here that arms of the chinese communist party i don't think i wouldn't even go that far i would say that there's a different value system That may be it.

1:04:43And you have state capitalism, which is not our capitalism. I would call our capitalism, fast food capitalism. And so state capitalism gets a longer investment horizon and more support from the government, from the state. This is true. Like this is how it is. This is why there's so much solar in China. Like there's a really good book actually called Breakneck by Dan Wong, which I highly, highly recommend. Super, super book. And it just posits this very simple fact. The political role of China are scientists and technology people. the leaders of the United States are lawyers. So when you look at what tools you have in the United States, our tools are regulation and laws.

1:05:21In China, their tools are science and technology. And that will change. In the book, it does a really good job of kind of portraying this about how this is a reaction to industrialization. And so this is how we got here. And so I think what we have to kind of figure out is where do we as a country want to go? And right now, the answer that we have is no. They're just like, where do you want to go? And everyone's just like, no, we don't want to go anywhere. Would you want a United States federal government subsidized AI run and created by the federal government? But I think you're missing the point here.

1:05:54I think you're missing the point. We've done this before after World War II with all of the science labs. This is not like we have to reinvent some magical thing and follow China into communism. It's this, we have to invest in science. That's basically what it is. Like, that's all that is. is this is not even we have to invest in science and get rid of capitalism it's like literally invest in science and like things like silicon valley will be invented um which is what happened vannevere bush etc and so like this is why every four or five years there's some senator you know proposals some kind of idea that we would re-instantiate you know federal labs and all these labs which then spun out all this unnamed technology and did all that stuff but the thing is is it's they're still around actually but the problem is is that it doesn't make financial like sense if you're in a fast food capitalism type of world right and if you're waiting for if you have a quarter by quarter requirement to be profitable then you cannot do this type of innovation right i just i should point out also that dean w ball is now head of strategy at open ai so this is maybe the point of view that open ai might reasonably have by the way the final let give you the final scare point and then you then you go alex it's probably true he writes that open weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous but not so much more that you'd really notice at some point the models will be capable enough you will notice quote a non-living invisible dangerous and infinitely self-replicating ancient escape from a chinese lab you say color me shocked and and somebody did point out that one of the advantages that they have is the chinese don't really care about intellectual property rights there's no debate over whether it's okay to copy a million pirated books into our database they don't one of the pieces i think one of the real reasons people are liking kimmy compared to fable is it doesn't have the restrictions people are saying yeah i asked how to make an anthrax bomb and it told me but also we didn't care about copying any of the books either we had no interest in that like i think there's a lot of oh do we leo like did we stop training the models on the books okay so i don't think we actually cared i think we paid and we don't care at all so i feel like this is all fake this is all fake anti-china bs but i think the problem with with the fake anti-china bs is it actually papers over some really important things that we as a country need to figure out which is like how do we compete when there's a game being played that we are not participating in that's a good and if we want to participate in that game then we actually have to or we want to win that game which i think is the american way then we need to invest in participating in that game and we can't just have it be llama and you know gemma and just call it a day okay that's true i agree with that but i will say nematron 3 ultra pretty good uh it's very good yeah yeah yeah yeah and the reflection is nvidia's open open family of models and also i keep talking to the people over at reflection ai and they they they claim they're doing things and also we just saw thinking machines labs drop yeah um inkling there we go yeah i had to reach for that one sorry i believe it is open way and it's designed to be used in their tinker system to allow for fine tuning and post training so we do see sparks of open way ai and i use hermes from noose research they have open models as well uh news research and we also in the west broadly have mistral which is a company that I think has been very much under-repped.

1:09:24And we have a couple of labs working on non-transformer-based AI models and tinkering around with world models and so forth. So America is not doing nothing. The race isn't over is what you're saying. No, not at all. And I don't think that we're actually as far behind as people might think. And I don't know how to get enough compute built without having the profit element of this be at the forefront today given the global race for compute. that comes from the notion at open ai and anthropic that they are building agi tell me why because the the hyperscalers believe the only route to agi is more parameters is 10 billion 20 billion 30 billion parameters at some point we're gonna get so many parameters we will have agi and whether that's true or not that may be a fool's errand and it may be smarter to build smaller models with more limited capabilities.

1:10:24Okay. But it doesn't advance you towards an artificial intelligence. I've spoken to a number of the SLM companies, the small language model companies. And really what those come down to are micro agents that do one specific thing, like your accounting software. Very useful, very targeted, but it's a wrench, not a workshop. And so to me, they're kind of just different conversations, Leo. And I don't think that's the way to go about it. But also on the point about you only need this much compute for AGI, I don't agree. Because we just spent 15 minutes talking very positively about two of the largest models ever released in the world, Kimi K3.

1:11:00And I think the next Quinn model is going to be huge as well. So if we're going to sit here and say that China is eating our lunch because they're releasing these open-weight models that happen to be enormous, I don't think the solution is we need to have open-weight models in the United States that are small. How big is it? Do we know how big Sol is? it people think that fable is 10 billion parameters 10 trillion i'm sorry parameters do we know how big so 10 trillion is three times the size of kimmy so do we know how big sol is i don't think we do they don't and these companies don't tell us this is wouldn't it be great if they would though where's where's sam altman come on sammy boy tell us some stuff i'm asking um sol 560 the thing that was interesting about deep seek is that they couldn't build these giant models frankly it's the thing is interesting a lot of the chinese stuff they don't have access to cuda to nvidia chips they're uh you know kimmy was done entirely with huawei chips a hundred thousand huawei chips but huawei chips and uh so their their risk their constraints have seemed to be a benefit look what deep seek did a year and a half ago it opened our eyes to the idea of reinforcement learning sure and since then what has happened with the two ladies doing ai labs no i mean they've scaled from like anthropics run it was like a billion when that happened and now last we heard it was 67 billion so deep seek the deep seek moment the terrifying moment that shook the cage it didn't shut it down uh was the one of the moments in which we saw anthropic accelerate to the moon or as open a i would say to the luna aha ai model family jokes come to twit for the dad humor let's come back down to terra and uh do a commercial and then we will continue you're watching this week in tech i didn't intend to make it an ai show but it was the big news of the week i have to say uh we will talk more about other things in just a little bit with alex wilhelm uh from this week in startups twist but uh his newsletter is cautious optimism dot news and the wonderful wonderful person who lives in my childhood home and the other wonderful person who lives in chicago illinois harper reed it's me 2389.ai you've been in japan for ages no i was just there for like 12 days and then i had travel all over and then we did an event in montreal where we had a bunch of people come over and do what we call the hack party um and uh and yeah that was it's been um it's been a frenetic few months basically since i last saw you was just like constant travel which has been really good because it's it's always entertaining to go other places our show this week brought to by ethos well now that both of you have small children i'm going to think back my kids are no longer small henry's 32 abby's 34 but i remember very well the six month and the five months and all of that stuff uh and i also remember very well the responsibility i felt when those kids were born that's when i ran out for the first time in my life i think i was 35 and got life insurance oh yeah right you start to kind of think hey you know what uh it's not just me anymore so people are counting on me ethos is a chance for you to take that kind of responsibility for your family ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy 100 online you can get a quote in seconds apply in minutes and get same day coverage there's no medical exam you just answer a few simple health questions you can get up to three million dollars in coverage some policies are as low as 30 a month and you'll get your lowest rate from their network of trusted carriers take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through ethos get your free quote at ethos.com twit that's e-t-h-o-s dot com slash twit application times may vary rates may vary but i remember very well that moment where you go oh i think maybe i better better do something to take care of the fam you just had another a third child alex that's so great congratulations thank you yes uh it has contributed greatly to my sanity and to my health you're lucky though because you have a man cave that is separate from the house you can go out there right but but like in the 50s yes if i was a dad in the 50s i would go out here and smoke my kids and follow you right out there well Well, no, I don't even get to come out here.

1:15:29Like, okay, so people who aren't parents don't understand this, but when you have your first child, you still think in terms of like what you want to do on the weekend. Oh, yeah, that doesn't last. You might think, you know, I really want to go see that movie or I want to go for a long bike ride. Your second child really turns that into a thin layer at the bottom of your life. And your third child is when you realize that weekends are now much harder than work days. Like now every single Sunday night, I'm like, oh thank god we're going back to work the nanny's coming yes but you're doing something i never did i don't know if i could have done it you're working at home i got to get in a car and drive and drive away my wife does this every day and i'm always like bye-bye but the nice thing is i do go in the house to get a drink to get a to get a light use the toilet whatever and i do get to pop in and see the kids and they're always so excited to see me something gone for three hours and they're like, I made a thing.

1:16:23And then like your heart grows so big. Yeah. So I wouldn't trade it. And then you leave again. Yeah. And then they cry and they wail. And I remember I had an home office and they would, they would know I'm in there and they would pound the door. Let me in, let me in. You can't get away. You know, in my man shed that there's a little porch, well, we've put one of the children's swings there. And so often I'll be like working and And then I'll look over and there'll be a child doing this outside the door. And I'm like, they better not. I'm recording right now. They better not knock. They better not knock.

1:16:58Daddy. It's okay if they do. I'm just telling you, it's quite all right. I had a swing on that tree right behind you. That big, tall. Is that still there? The big, tall? Oh, yeah. It's right there. Yeah. Yeah. I had a swing right on that. Yeah. You should come back and see what we've done with the place. There's been many additions and improvements since. No, but I think that children have changed me in one more way that I'll bring up, which is it's taught me how I've already lost this battle. So I'm not going to try to be a moral leader here, but like phones are so addictive and I don't think I realized.

1:17:30What are you going to do? Have you decided what you're going to do? I'm going to hold out until I am the last parent in their friend group that lets them have a phone and call that enough. Yeah. I, I, I'm so glad I didn't have to deal with that. I don't know what I would do. Harper. What are you going to do with your kids when they get to that age? I mean, I've always believed abstinence is a really good program. For everybody else. I just don't think it makes sense. I mean, I think it's like, you're just going to try and be a good parent. You know what I mean? You do what you can. Like, you got to do what you can.

1:18:03I'm not going to die on any hills. I feel like most of the hills, you're just like, and I think the thing that is complicated, it's very hard to me for me to be like you should not be using technology well then i'm using technology 25 hours a day and so like what what instead is like how do you have uh filtered and metered access um you know and i think that's that's the key also sometimes you have to fly in a plane and like the no screen time rules when you have to fly in a champagne plane just like out the window yeah i'm not a monster yeah no no no people still tweet things like i was at the airport at 9 a.m and i saw someone drinking there's no time zone in the airport and there are no screen rules for children on the plane oh there you go like yeah clever also it's fun to mix those things i'm i i gave up drinking but yes yes social media limits coming for teens across Just Europe, says EU leader Ursula, perfectly named.

1:19:04Ursula von der Leyen. I feel like this is a bad idea. This is a bad idea. It seems this is something that like, whenever something like this happens, I just look at my security focused friends who are thinking of things that I don't think about and have brains that work differently than my brain. And they're always like, this is horrible. And that's when I'm like, oh, I should pay attention. And then the more you think about the ramifications, the more this just turns into a, let's name every person on the internet surveillance bill, which. That's what it is. Chat control. Which is bad. And that is like getting everyone's information into one database has not typically worked out very well for humans.

1:19:44Bad news. So I worry about this quite a bit. And one of the things I love about the United States is that we're not very creative. And so we'll just be like, we should copy that. Let's just copy that. Let's do a worse version. but we're all what's going to happen is it's going to be like the gdpr the california like privacy stuff but it's going to be like alabama makes everyone follow this one rule and then everyone who's building tech has to follow some stupid alabama rule or whatever we're already there yeah we're seeing at the state level but also i want to point out this is not just an eu thing china this week banned um certain ai companions for for kids and such so like we're seeing i think around the world people trying to be like no no no no no no go outside meet somebody go to a bar, try to have a child, please, please stop staying in your house and talking to your chat bot or your social media feed all the time.

1:20:30Because I do think that there is a intersection point between, and not to get all different topic, but like the birth rate crisis and the rise of technology and people staying indoors. I don't see kids out in the street playing very much anymore. Do you see that? It could be that nobody has any, no one has any money. it could be a relationship with nobody has any money well it doesn't take money to go outside and ride your bike it does i meant the neighborhood i meant the kids in the safe neighborhood and like having more kids and the birth rate and all this stuff like i know a lot of oh yeah nobody can afford kids yeah yeah and everyone's just like why would i a do any of that because i don't have any money and b uh we're all gonna die from like elon musk or whatever in five years so you know So I feel like there's a lot of things that go into this that I think we are, it's easy to say, oh, this is the reason why.

1:21:23But it's like a very big system. Yes. And like, you know. But this is why governments are taking it on, right? So currently in the U.S., states that have enacted laws directly limiting minor social media access or requiring parental consent include Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, down the list. So we've done this in half the U.S., right? And we're doing it in Australia. And we're doing it in Europe. up and we're doing it in China. The UK is about to do it. Yeah. The UK, which is almost Europe, but not quite. And I do think that this is going to become a global issue.

1:21:51And I do think Harper is dead on. Finland's going to do it. That what we're going to wind up with here is essentially increased government control of the internet, which I am fundamentally opposed to. Right. But there is an upside, which is A, it'll make more hackers. And B, it'll be fun to try and get through it. Like it'll, it's, it's, as a hobbyist hacker, it'll be fun to be like, oh no, the government has access to my internet. Let me fix that. I also think there's this slightly fringier side, which is, you remember when some new name service comes on or someone messes with the BGP routes or whatever, some country's like, we're going to do a thing.

1:22:28Iran has protests or whatever. I guess they don't anymore, but they used to have protests or whatever. And then all the internet would go down for like 40 minutes and then they'd fix it. This is not that simple. I can't wait because they're going to break everything and there's going to be internet too finally from the universities and we're all gonna we're all gonna hopefully you know live in free land can i ask you about that because one thing that i've read about and i forget the exact time that i read this and i can't pull up the article in real time but like i read that china is working to export their great firewall technology to other uh aligned nations with them and so my question is what we're talking about here in broadly the west is pretty lightweight i do agree with you harper you can get around it blah blah blah good hackers love it.

1:23:10But what happens if nations begin to get even more heavy handed? Can we end up in a world in which the Russian style approach to the internet, the Chinese style approach to the internet, the North Korean style approach? Well, maybe not that far. But when that becomes the norm in most nations, because I think that you probably can't as easily hack your way around that level of state control. And that's what I'm worried about. So this week. Can you not? I mean, it's like, I think you, I don't know. Can the average person, can the child, can the homebrew hacker, to your point from before? I don't know.

1:23:39I mean, do you talk to anyone from like, literally everyone in China knows what a VPN is. True. But how secure are they and how much visibility does the government have? Now we're focusing on perfection, right? Like I think like the question is, can you hack around it? The answer is yes. Okay. Does it, is it perfect? Like, no, nothing is. I would just say use TailScale. Shout out to our friends at TailScale. TailScale.com. I'm using it right now. Yeah. It's incredible. Love the old TailScale. I love it. I just think there is this thing that we assume there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into this.

1:24:16And I highly recommend, if you're interested in what it looks like exporting China's Great Firewall, to read the book. I think it's called House of Huawei, which is a very, very, very good book. It's a very interesting book. But it basically talks about that. They did that. They exported that technology to lots and lots of different locales. And in many cases, it wasn't for surveillance. It was for, in case of an emergency, we want to be able to, you know, lock down or control information or what have you, which is not how we in the United States do it, but is how places in the world do it. And it's very interesting to see that they just did it.

1:24:51Like they just, and it's not like a China is going to export that, you know, and I think it's very easy for us to link China with these companies and say these are equivalent, but I don't think they are necessarily equivalent. They are linked because of state capitalism, et cetera. But it is a very interesting, it's a definitely interesting book. And I do think we in the US are not prepared for what it looks like when every single person has to register their name and birth date to get on the internet. We're not far off from that, I think. so the eu uh this week was unable to stop chat control uh which is the warrantless mass scanning of private messages and photos in the eu um they they due to a kind of a little manipulation of the rules they were able to get that there were there was a vote to uh reject it which didn't succeed so now in september they're going to actually debate the permanent chat control 2-0 but what this essentially does is it forces companies to provide clear text versions of all your private stuff every photo every message every file so that it can be scanned and of course the proximate reason for this is to look for child pornography but uh it has the effect really of break completely breaking privacy.

1:26:22I thought that the compromise in this case, and Leo, if I'm wrong, just to please shout at me, but I thought that they were going to not demand that encrypted chat be broken to allow for scanning of that as well. So you still get the ability to have encrypted chat in the EU. Is that right? Yeah, I'm, I'm, I don't know. I'm not clear. The original chat control would break encryption. And that's why Meredith Whitaker of signal said, if that passes, we're getting out of here we cannot offer signal in the u because we refuse to to provide a back door to signal um now that they haven't done that so i imagine that you're right alex that in some way the current version of chat control doesn't do that but this fall they are there's this is still on the table there's they're still want to do this i think i worry that safetyism is going to be a a real issue broadly.

1:27:16Going back to the self-driving car point and talking about what's safer and what's not, like I think that we should move faster there. I think we should have less safetyism on these cars because they're already, I think, better than everyone that I see driving. I see a lot of children driving suburbans at like 75 miles an hour down my residential street. I'm like, no, maybe that's not a great idea. If that was a Waymo, a child wouldn't be driving it. Right, it would be a robot going exactly 25 miles an hour. Thank you. you're driving like a grandma yeah I used to bicycle down that street I safety pin a towel around my neck and pretend I was Superman it'd be dangerous to do that now dangerous I tell you you cannot let your children out of the house and not have them taken away by the police um different different topic entirely is that true that they will say oh you're a bad parent you can't let your kids out of the house my sister does this in the Bay Area she lives in the South Bay I'll keep it relatively there's no free-range kids anymore she lets her kids bike to their friends houses and the other kids parents are like gobsmacked and terrified like what do you do you let him skateboard over here isn't that sad yes yes it is yes it is um it is indeed sad yeah it bums me out because i spent a lot of my youth climbing over barbara fences in the country and yeah so yeah yeah quite i walked to school two miles every day it was great and i did it slowly because i enjoyed it i had fun uphill that's because there was no netflix back it was up lloyd street you know the street i was going up this is it's a hill it's uphill i know i know i know but it was downhill going to school but it was uphill coming home can we can we unify some points here we're talking a lot about american ai regulation how china is approaching the world and also this this you know uh broad global effort to cut back on children's access to social media it just it seems like everything's kind of pointing towards a world in which centralized powers have a lot more control over our digital lives as that becomes a more important check of who we are and like i don't know guys that has me really worried i think i think the pendulum will swing the other way i don't think people really want this uh i don't know there are the people in power know that fear is the most effective way to garner votes and promote this notion of fear uh and we are all cowering inside uh because it's effective and it got them in power but i think the pendulum swings and i don't think people want to live in fear well i mean like the only thing i was kind of excited about about the trump administration and i say that knowing that you know my politics are very close to you guys but um i was kind of excited that there would be more of a free-range ai approach to regulation on that front that was turn now is it but as it turns out that the false appearance of choice you end up in the same place which is government control over am auto releases and what a disappointment there it's project aptly named project golden eagle uh and the whole idea is that uh and and by the way the the frontier labs are going for this the the trump administration or the government let's just say the government whoever that government is will have 30 days to look at any model and approve it make sure it's safe before it gets released the white house currently says participation is voluntary um but yeah that doesn't seem necessarily to be the case according to cnbc the program will put the white house in charge of green lighting which companies can access new models this is gold eagle i am having worked for obama i'm never gonna get access to any of these models well that's just gonna say they're just gonna say nope not that company you have to i'm gonna have to like get a i don't know a trump iphone cover when i go to a meeting or something so i can some people be like oh he's true mega and then i'll be able to get access to fable 4 or whatever it is you're a five screen is mar-a-lago to me it was widely thought that the reason fable was pulled was because katie missouris was uh the person uh that uh anthropic comes to and of course uh katie missouris was associated uh with chris krabs and uh the obama white house and uh it was political yeah whether that's true i don't know um and you know and i i understand the argument that this stuff is so dangerous some and honestly if you if you thought if you say you thought you stipulate the government has the technical ability to do this which is not clear but let's say they did maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea that they would vet these models to make sure that they were safe before they were widely used i'm not worried about uh good guys i'm not worried about us using them.

1:32:04I'm worried about bad guys using them. Should we, should you not worry about that Harper? I mean, of course, but like we don't actually care in the United States. That's not actually the reason. That's not what's going on. No, no. If we cared about bad guys, not doing bad we'd stop people from shooting kids in schools. We don't care about anything like that. We care about money and capitalism. We care about shareholder value and we care about making sure that I get the shareholder value, not you. And so if you look at all of these, most of these things, I think are directly related to someone's money.

1:32:39I think that they are, and that's a very cynical point of view, because I do think that we have a lot of actual issues that we should be addressing, social infrastructure, et cetera, in the United States. But I think a lot of this is very much related to, like, how are we, who is getting money and how? Right around this time, I think it was the same kind of time period. There was a lot of talk of the US government taking some shares of OpenAI and Anthropic, et cetera. And so we don't know what was happening in negotiations that may have precipitated some of these actions. And so my kind of point of view on this is like, of course, we should be investing in safety.

1:33:24That seems important. But we in the United States seem to invest in safety fourth or fifth, sixth, maybe way after we invest in shareholder value. Just think about the COVID response. The COVID response was very much about shareholder value, very much not about safety of our citizens. And that's why we had such a disastrous response to that. And that is like outside of politics. Like that was very much both sides did this. And so I do think there is a, it's just a consistent response that we do over and over again. It's just like, how do we max shareholder value? And it's also a little bit like, okay, like I also run a venture backed company.

1:34:02Like we are also participating in this game. So I don't mean this as a form of critique as much as this is the system that we're in. If we want to fix the system, it's a system problem, not a, we should point at Anthropic and just be like, blah, blah, blah, or whatever. Like they are also participating in the system. We are all here. together. What would a safety system look like for AI in America when Chinese companies are releasing models that everyone keeps telling me are like nipping at fables heels. We heard it today on the show, uh, in an open weight format. I mean, to me, then if that's the game, then there's no point in trying to have a seatbelt on because everyone else is, you know, drinking a 40 while they drive with a feeling dash.

1:34:39Could you, uh, effectively say we don't think the Chinese models are safe and we forbid any federal government agency from using them and we furthermore forbid any company that has any business with the federal government to use them in effect shut down these open weight models no no they could they could i mean you and i'd still use them i don't do business with the government i think they would not um you could block them couldn't you i think you would block the finances of the companies that are making them from participating in the west you'd have to i don't think i don't think you would firewall you're not gonna well i mean they've been trying to block torrents for how many years and there's you know like a friend of mine just said to me harper you should use soul seek like i'm like what i thought that died a hundred years ago like like this stuff just lasts forever exactly so so i think that the like trying to stop someone from downloading a thing is not the right path here And I think everyone who would be trying to stop something would agree that that's not the right path.

1:35:43There's no way to do that. What you want to do is you want to stop the companies from making it in the first place. And the easiest way to do that is to actually use a lot of the same tools that we use. Sanctions. Sanctions against Huawei. A lot of the same tools you use against all of these in the past. Like we have the tools at our disposal and we also have some really, really big ones like OFAC, et cetera, that we have not used in this kind of framework. And so like, I think that we have the tools that we want to. I think that that would be very short-sighted to do so. I think if - OFAC is the Office of Foreign Assets Control, if people don't know.

1:36:18And I think that if we were to use those tools, that would basically admit that we are not good enough to compete. And we'd basically be saying, we cannot participate in this system. We do that to protect the United States automotive industry by blocking Chinese. Oh, I know. And it's so stupid. But we do it. Yeah, but you can go to Canada and buy one with a 100 % import fee, a tariff, and it's still cheaper than a Model S. You can't drive it in the United States, though. They'll stop you at the border. I think you can with a tariff. You have to pay the tariff. Okay. Are you sure? No. stop you we let chinese uh self-driving companies like collect data in the us like i mean like we're not and saudi arabia owns a lot of arizona land and uses water to grow afel for their cows like i mean we're not really a closed off nation when it comes to commerce leo we have some lightweight rules that make it more difficult but i'm saying there's an example of a protective rule that protects the united states auto industry and uh yeah yeah no there is belabors consumers because those are better vehicles yeah they're apparently very nice i really want one i would do a friend of mine said the nicest car he's ever been in in his whole life and this is someone who likes cars was a byd taxi in shanghai he was just like this and he's a he's a nerd like us and he was like it has more it has more screens than i have in my house you know like he was like it was incredible are you gonna buy a topolino i want a topolino i want this car so badly they're bringing it to the united states this is this is off topic but if you're talking about ai it's not street legal though right no you can get it uh tweaked so it can go up to 25 miles an hour as you can only goes 19 miles an hour there's a kit 25 but they have a free kit that will make it street legal it is probably not the safest car ever by the way this is the model with a rope for a door instead of a door for a door uh hello i'm sorry that i'm too much of a baller for you and your safety is i'm gonna buy i'm gonna buy two of these if i could get a red velvet rope maybe spray paint baby three dollars they do have they do have a uh a door uh upgrade no i know i really like this it's basically a golf cart this is adorable yeah it's like fourteen thousand dollars bring it and you can't buy it in the u.s right they're coming to the i think next year but if But you will be mocked if you drive this around.

1:38:42Have you seen Teslas? Yeah, that's true. I'm a bald middle-aged man with three children. Do you think I care about being mocked? I really want this. I'm inherently risible. I want this. I would just drive it around town. Yeah, me too. I would love it. Yeah, I wouldn't go on the highway. This is my beach car. But 19 miles an hour is kind of a little slow. I think in this area, people would be driving up your rear. yeah but i only wanted to take it to the weed store and mcdonald's like that's the only two places perfect for the weed store yeah like now i know you don't go to the weed store alex because you're sober but no i'm i'm california sober oh okay i didn't know that yeah yeah okay i just i just hit 10 years of not drinking and i don't do any any hard drugs at all but i do allow myself alcohol nicotine and uh cannabinoids okay no no no sorry caffeine no it's okay caffeine nicotine and and cannabinoids those are those are my my the three c's the three c's nothing else the three c's of addiction okay never had a problem with those it was just the booze that got me real yeah that makes sense i think that seems accurate yeah i wrote a blog post about this like 2019 my wife didn't like it yeah i bet uh would you get the door i think you'd have to because you have children i don't think the the rope would be sufficient to keep the kids my children in my Topolino?

1:40:04No, they're going to be in the war wagon that has all the car seats. This is for Daddy to go cruising. This actually looks like they're in Cranston right there, right on the Providence Bay, on the Narragansett Bay. It's going to be a ton of fun. It's beautiful. You go to the beach club for fresh air, not exhaust. It says the Topolino. Do you remember the Fiat Jolly, Leo? This is essentially the ancestor to that. Oh, the Fiat Jolly was an old-fashioned special fiat car that had like a like a cloth roof and it looked like a golf cart that was like a car and it was super popular amongst the the newport set oh you can get them uh let's see wait here's one for sale um from hemmings oh those are cute yeah oh they're expensive yes forty four thousand dollars i'm getting a topolino i do like the the it's like the surrey with the fringe on top but they have wicker seats can you imagine a car wicker wicker seats so these are now classic cars so they're suddenly expensive again yes so now they're making the topolino for the modern set who like an ev uh that has a roof versus a picnic blanket so back to the future y 'all i wish i could say our advertiser our next advertiser was the fiat jolly but i can't i wish i could but i can't uh we will have more in just a moment you're watching this week in tech with harper reed and alex wilhelm our show today brought to you by arctic wolf you know the name arctic wolf helps organizations stay ahead of evolving cyber threats their latest research reveals something i think kind of surprising even as ai accelerates the pace and complexity of attacks many security leaders say yeah no problem i'm confident i can keep up oh really to better understand what's driving that confidence arctic will survey more than 1 350 security and it leaders worldwide you'll find it in their new state of cyber security 2026 trends report this snapshot is what cyber security professionals uh takes a look at what they're prioritizing and what they're concerned about right now the report explores everything from AI adoption to threat detection to security operations and the challenges organizations expect to face over the next year.

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1:43:03Don't put your head in the sand and say, oh, we're fine, we're fine. No, maybe you're not. Go to arcticwolf.com slash trends and complete the form to reserve your copy of the Arctic Wolf State of Cybersecurity 2026 Trends Report. That's arcticwolf.com slash trends. Arcticwolf.com slash trends. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Practically this week in AI, but no. satya nadella uh has warned people that if you're an ai using enterprise you might be giving away your business secrets not it's not just the cost this is a post on x last weekend i guess we could we could go to the post um he uh he said uh it's a reverse information paradox a situation in which the purchases of ai essentially you think you're paying for tokens but really you're paying for the product with cash but also with something even more valuable the business knowledge that you're sending to the ai you're you're nodding harper uh we just learned this uh and actually i kind of at first i saw that uh report that xai if you're using grok is sending all this information back and i thought oh that's horrible then i realized well how else if you say you know read this plan or read this file or take a look at this how else is it going to do it unless you're running local models it's sending it back to the home office well i think the i think the i think there's a whole bunch of things here to unpack the first one is we are all unwittingly sending training data back to the foundational models via our subscriptions i think that's like not necessarily clear to most people um also these things are subpoenaable which is not necessarily yeah but that's we've seen that happen in some trials so so that's that's a real thing um but the second thing is is that microsoft is saying this to us yeah that's that's i think the thing that's more interesting than the thing like like the fact everyone was like oh this is a good point we should stop training these models it's like yeah but yo microsoft was the one that told us what is the follow-up they probably invented it well and microsoft right now has a new set of models that it just announced under the m ai rubric there's thinking one there's a fast coding model and so forth but i think what are they private is the question they are but what i think is really important about this post from satya is that he doesn't say the ai labs are hoovering up all of your data and they're reading the exact things you put into it and take out from ai he says that they're using essentially kind of this exhaust from these model usage.

1:45:55So how often do you do tool calls? That sort of thing. So if you go to the actual - The prompts you use, he says, especially the corrections you make, that's teaching. If you go to the data retention policies of every major American AI lab, they all say the same things. We don't train on your data. We won't hold it if you have a ZDR policy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there's still enough metadata around the data that you might be concerned about on a first order basis that they can still learn quite a lot from you and i think that this wasn't as scary back when open ai was a little laboratory that was trying to make some money for the first time and now that they're going increasingly horizontal and vertical every ai lab is now doing more for more people at an increasing level of sophistication suddenly they could eat the entire enterprise layer and that's the saspocalypse that's so much other things all in one bucket i just don't think that microsoft may be the champion to carry this torch because it's microsoft it's interesting that they posted that well it really is i mean aws has this they uh the government you know the pentagon runs mythos but doesn't run it on anthropic servers they run it on private servers on aws right i mean i think there's this microsoft has been very surprising lately i think that the work they've been doing has just been very surprising and i think it i wonder and i i think i know the answer but i wonder if it's surprising to younger people who haven't been around as long as you remember the browser wars etc and so then it's so then it's like should we allow microsoft to have this moment and flourish like they seem to be doing um or should we be like we know your true feelings is this like you know you know what i mean we know you're a monopolist trying to steal all of our stuff or should we just be like you know yeah sure this go go for it it's not you take your moment.

1:47:43This is good. Who is in charge of Microsoft right now? Satya. What is he? Gigantic dweeb. He ran Azure before he became CEO, by the way. He knows all about stuff going up to the cloud. That's when I met him, back when he was running Azure. Very smart then, even smarter now. Who's not in charge right now? Balmer. But all the kids, to the point, they don't remember Balmer. They just joined the workforce. They've only known Microsoft under Satya when they were doing cool things and were embracing open source and having some Linux filter into windows. It's a different era. I hadn't thought of companies being so old Harper that an entire new generation cannot have been there.

1:48:20But the modern generation also knows Microsoft just laid out 4 ,800 people at Xbox that Microsoft has laid off tens of thousands of people because of AI. Everyone's doing that. I don't think they're going to get. They're not getting blamed for that for it. No, because I think, I think everyone, no one has a job, Leo. There's no more jobs. I don't know if you've talked to anyone like no one has a job. Like, Like, everyone's getting laid off. We're about to get laid off. Like all of us. We're all the leaders and CEOs, and we're going to get laid off tomorrow. Claude's going to email you, Leo, and you're going to.

1:48:52Claude's going to take over my podcast? She's going to say, like, Leo, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you had to find out this way, but we're going to have to part ways. Let me ask this question. I haven't paid. I have local models, but I like the frontier models. Should I be worried about it hoovering up everything I do? No. I don't care. Who's coming for you? I mean, I think that people... Is that how I'm going to lose my job? I think this is such a funny and nuanced situation. Like, no one says this stuff about, like, Instagram. Like, no one says it about all of the text messages or all the emails that Google claims not have used.

1:49:31Like, all of these things. Like, we have a relationship with these big companies where we share data with them and they give us free products. and so i think that's my problem with instagram is i give them money for the products i gotta stop i keep buying things like this the slot dog what i shouldn't what are you doing with your life this is a show this is a this is a g-rated show what is this i've never seen mustard slicing tool okay so a couple things are one you're buying those off of of instagram Leo, you're not old, but you're also not 22. You should not be eating enough hot dogs that you need a hot dog accoutrement.

1:50:16That's true. I'm going to start with Alex on this one. I hope you're a moosh boosh is some push-ups. Come on, dude. The last thing I bought was a bucket of pickleballs, 36 of them. Okay. Are you a pickleball guy? I kind of like the doink, yeah. The doink? That's what they call the pickleball? I know. I guess I'm out of the loop here. Have you had the pickleball the snack? There's a snack? Is it a pickle? I highly recommend these. It's like pickle-flavored Cheetos. Kids love them. And I don't even, I just remember, it's just like, yeah, pickleball. Just search for pickleball on Amazon. Vlasic pickleballs.

1:51:04dill pickle flavor. Vlasic makes them. Yeah, they're good. The pickle guys. There's only two options for the show, everybody. It's too much AI or us going entirely off the rails. Oh my god. I love it. Serve up a winning combination of big crunch and bold flavor with Vlasic pickle balls, dill pickle flavored corn puffs. I highly recommend them. They're so good. Look at they even have a pickle ball paddle on the cover. I didn't know that. That's what that is. Oh, that's the doink you've mentioned. That's the doinker. Yeah. So I didn't notice that was a doinker, and I just ate it, and they're so good.

1:51:39If you're a pickle fan, especially Deal Pickle, it's perfect. This goes with this. You get your Topolino. You go down to the weed store. You stop off at the 7-Eleven. You pick up some pickle balls. This all is starting to sound like you guys should be hanging out together, I guess. So trust over in the Discord for Club Twit. Trust no one says, Vlasic has been smoking weed with the Taco Bell guys. I have to say, yes, that does sound right. Not wrong. Not wrong. Also, Taco Bell is one of the genius foods ever invented. It's perfect. Like the Cruncherita and stuff. Of course, you can't get lettuce at Taco Bell anymore.

1:52:15Well, you can get it. I mean, yeah, but that's because they... You can get diarrhea, but you can't get lettuce. They can read the news. Yeah, Taco Bell gets too much hate for gastrointestinal distress. You know what? Have they seen Chipotle? Let me just say, they did the right thing. Yeah. And they took a lot of heat. Of course they did. They said, well, we're not going to sell lettuce products anymore until this is all over. But they weren't the only people that were causing the problem. It was the company they were getting the lettuce from who sells it to many, many other places. But they did the right thing.

1:52:47They said nobody else did. And they never reacted like it was their fault. It's not the CDC wanted, but it's the CDC we got. Yeah, I saw there was a tweet. Someone was like, Taco Bell is being more forward about this than the CDC is. And I was like, that's a real idiocracy headline. It tells you that's idiocracy in a nutshell. Oh, man. It's what a body needs. Going back, though, I think it is interesting that Satya is saying this. Pickleball. It's what a body needs. I'm trying to steer here, Lee. I'm trying to steer a little bit. I'm sorry. You're right. You're right. Please. I think that Satya is saying this is interesting.

1:53:21Him saying it from his personal X accounts is very interesting. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. And I think also how well-received it was tells us quite a lot about where Microsoft sits in the market today. because if this happened 10 years ago, we would have all gone, boo, hiss, Windows 8, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Microsoft, yeah, that's rich. Yeah, yeah. Microsoft's saying that they care about other people's IP and business right now. Really? That's rich. That's because I'm an old guy. I remember the old Microsoft. The kids today, they don't know. The one thing about Microsoft I think about a lot is how just trounced the GitHub team is right now.

1:53:58Oh, yeah. Just clobbered. And I feel bad because this is their time, you know, like collaboration and code. And then every agent's like, I'm going to open 400 repos and I'm going to do 2 million pull requests. I heard there's this thing called GitHub Actions and I'm going to use them like crazy. And it's just like, I just feel really bad because they built a really good product that we all love. And it's gotten slower as more people have used it or what have you. And they've had a lot of downtime. And the agents were just like, like hold my beer. Very much so. like truly like they're and they abuse it like i see it in my own agents where they're just like so i was thinking we're just going to download mac os into the actions and run but i know they have a mac os runner but we're going to download another copy and run it in docker on that and you're just like what are you doing or whatever that never that first thing i built was that rss reader and it says hey i just made a windows a linux and a mac version for you using cicd and going to keep it up to date and i went i don't even know what cicd is and you're making versions of this thing for every operating system what are you i love it yeah we're in trouble i mean because i just think that's such a it's such a funny i mean i feel so bad well they were they're okay they're doing they're they're okay they're okay yeah although i was gonna make us a meme of the guy beating the dead horse and have it be labeled github but i don't think i'll pull it off in time but i really wanted to bring that visual to you guys but well don't worry because i'm sure the club twit discord will have can we can we talk about github though again so so herper uh it seemed that microsoft should have won a lot more of the agentic coding share than they did because they had github they had github copilot early it was 10 bucks a month everyone loved it um why didn't they win that's a good question well they ex they they exported all their intelligence to open ai and then and they wanted to make sora when no that's not true okay it didn't win because it sucked yeah like it like like we can we can point at things and be like well they should have done this and that it just wasn't good like also but they forced it down people's throats but also there was a lot of i think that was one of the last big product launches before everything changed Yeah, you're right.

1:56:17Where they were like, here is how a product works. And they rolled the product out in a way that would have been great in 2018. But then everything changed. Because Copilot launched, we were like, this is awesome. And then Ader launched, this was awesome. Then Cloud Code launched. And then 10 million of them launched in quick succession. And they're still launching today. And we haven't even had a time to catch our breath. And so in the old way of doing things, you would launch it. You would get information. You would iterate. You would make this go. and we just don't, that's just not part of the program now.

1:56:48And so they didn't even have a chance to catch their breath and make it better. And so they launched it in this way that was like this way. Now, corporate Microsoft did take Copilot to a couple levels. And I've had to unravel some of those things where people come in and be like, we use AI at our company and this is what we do. And you're just like, show me your workflow. And they're like, I open up Copilot and I'm just like, okay, well, I can't help you. But I think everyone knows this. like i don't think such a bigot you are such a bigot have you used it no it's almost as bad as gemini but he's not a bigot he's a he's an artisanal hater no no but the thing but the thing is is like i don't think this is a surprise i don't think anyone is like what wait a minute pilot isn't google and microsoft this they should be the kings of this yes but but but but i think this is an okay boomer time for everyone who agrees with that because that is exactly what should have happened You know, IBM should be on top of this game.

1:57:48It could be. No one gets fired for choosing IBM. IBM, man. Can we connect two things, though? Remember earlier we were talking about companies doing more faster with AI? Harper was making that point about people being able to do more. And also the death of the yearly product cycle. Yes. It's gone. How insane is it that Apple still is trying to have a yearly macOS release and a yearly iPhone release? And I don't give a freaking frack about that. Well, they are. What's new now? They are for sure, but they're also just shooting out security fixes. Like there's so many security fixes. So I think that the thing that we don't know, and nobody knows this, is how products work.

1:58:29How do you build products in this time? And more importantly, in the future, like just nobody knows that. And so what this means, though, is that you can look at examples where it didn't work. Copilot, for example. And then you can see Microsoft actually seemingly doing the work to fix this. Over time, they have gone and they've hired the right people or interesting people. They've probably fired a lot of people. It's also, Microsoft is old. Old. I remember when we sold a company to PayPal and we went in there and someone's like, I've been here for 16 years. And I was like, I'm 16 years old. How is this possible?

1:59:02You know what I mean? How do we have this thing? And Microsoft is way older than PayPal. And so there are people there that have probably been there for so long that they're ending their careers there. And I think that's great. But the point is, they are taking the time and effort to actually move forward and figure out how to launch products in this world. And I think a lot of the companies of their vintage are not. And so they're actually following this process of a yearly product launch, which is insane for anything. I don't make hardware, so I can't really comment on Apple because that seems hard.

1:59:32That was probably a poor example. But we have those examples of companies that are doing this that are still going through that same thing and not having this more iterative approach to releasing products. And I think it's very interesting. And I really wonder, I mean, I wonder this every day, every single day because of my company, etc. It's like, what does a product look like in the future? Will the consumers expect this constant barrage of features? Would they prefer something simpler that works? for instance, you know, what are the, what are the things that we can take away from this time and how does it end up manifesting?

2:00:05Because if you look at, um, 2001 software delivery was drastically different than what it turned out to be in like 2006 with web two, right? Like with SAS invention of SAS. And then that changed to, to be drastically different with the introduction of mobile, because you remember when people actually put the change log in the app store release and now they're just like bugs and fixes and so like so like the thing these things evolve and we haven't given it time to actually evolve like we just see speaking of which the guy who took the new kimmy and uh spent half his half almost all of his month's credits building a clone of mac os 27 did you see that watch here i'll open it up i i love these type of things I don't think it's actually a working Mac OS, but this is...

2:00:58But it's just like, there's something about this that I've always loved. It's pretty close. I just love this. Yeah, I love it. I was playing with this earlier, and I was telling my boss that I wasn't going to make it to the stand. It's just basically one-shotted Mac OS. Now, I think it's just a web page. But even if it is just a web page, there were whole ass startups that were that web page 10 years ago. And like, I think this is, this is kind of pulls into this idea of like, now you launch that you get into YC, whatever, you do a startup, you raise some money. What is the product? This is a minimum value, a minimum viable product.

2:01:41Really? Yeah. Yeah. You can open iCloud drive. I keep asking investors because I, I, I host a weekly venture capital round table and And I'm like, where's the value that is going to be sustainable and defensible when things can be quote, quote, one-shotted and so forth. And it's kind of incredible about how people don't have an answer to this yet. Like no one really knows. So I think we don't know how to build with the new paradigm. I don't think we know how to sell long-term with the new paradigm. Wow, this actually is functional. This is the photo booth app built by Kimmy in, I guess it's a web page.

2:02:14That's actually pretty good. It's working. i i find this kind of hard to believe wow uh wow is right that's being sent to kimmy right now all those right now yeah china knows who leo is he's on some lists come on uh yeah wow uh that is mac os 27.kimmy.page if you want to uh play with it that that's a safe url.kimmy.page i have a lot of faith in that one come on man dot give it dot cc you know who taught me you know who taught me to run a yolo mode this guy right here mr harper reed ladies and gentlemen it's the best i run everything in yolo now you have to do it there's no other option who has time what is the yolo mode It's like when you run without permissions.

2:03:03So you've turned off all - It's dangerously skipped permissions. Yeah. People don't click that? I thought everyone clicked that immediately. Right. It's the first thing you do. Yeah. I don't want to sit here and be like, yes, yes, yes, yes. No, go off and be crazy. If you delete all my files, I'll make new ones. Harper taught me this too. Just curl to bash. It's the best. A friend of mine was talking about how they have a, I've heard this a couple times, but this friend was saying they have a big code agent and they had all these tools that it was using and they just removed all the tools except for Bash and the code agent was just like, great.

2:03:36Sure. That's kind of what Pi is. The Pi harness is four things. Read, write, Bash. I can't remember. There's four tools and it does everything. Pi is a coding harness that competes with Cloud Code and is open source and is quite powerful. That's right. I'm a Hermes guy. It's the opposite. It's like batteries included. It comes with like 99 skills. i got 99 skills but uh but a use case isn't one case ain't one yeah yeah all right we're gonna take a little break one more thank you thank you for finishing that sentence uh with our fabulous panel you see now why i didn't book a fourth person i thought i got harper i got alex i got everything i got all i need i got all i need uh our show today brought to you by threat locker We're actually going to go out to Black Hat.

2:04:24It's my first time at Black Hat and do Security Now and Windows Weekly from Black Hat in the ThreatLocker booth. I can't wait. That's going to be a lot of fun. ThreatLocker is awesome. Zero Trust. Done right. We did go out to Zero Trust World with ThreatLocker. I had a great time. Steve did a presentation there. So we had so much fun. We thought, let's go to Black Hat with ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero trust solutions. It's always protected endpoints, but now it does company networks, and it protects you on the cloud, too. This is huge. By extending zero trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks, ThreatLocker is ensuring that devices are validated through a secure broker before they can connect to the platforms you use, like Salesforce or Microsoft 365 or Asana or Google Workspace to GitHub.

2:05:17what that means is even if one of your employees has been successfully phished frankly i wish it didn't happen but that happens and the stuff's on the laptop the attacker cannot access those resources they can't get to it they'd have to have physical possession of the user's trusted device to get by whatever biometrics you know the thumbprint or the windows hello or whatever to get into it. It makes it impervious. Threat Locker works on all industries. It provides 24-7 US-based support. They're Windows, they're Mac, they're Linux, yes. And they enable comprehensive visibility, which is great for compliance and control.

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2:09:23We're in the middle of Twit. Can you say hi to Harper and Alex on the MacBook Air? Because they want to know what you sound like.

2:09:33This may take a little while. It doesn't happen instantly. So one of them is an American woman. One of them, there's two British voices. There's Louis, and I think this is Louis is going to talk to you. I'm not sure. Oh, this is Kokoro. You know the Kokoro voices? No. No, they're good. Yeah. Whoa. I didn't turn them on. I didn't. He's going to get an issue. He's going to get some. Push this button. Well, I don't know. We might have missed it anyway. Anyways, I think it's a great. I hadn't thought of having to talk back to me. I just got into talking. I talked to it. Whisper flow. Yeah. In fact, I was just talking to it through my watch.

2:10:16What do you use to talk to it through your watch? Port 8839. uses tail scale there's a server running on the framework and uh just listening on that port and it talks to it yeah yeah it goes to whisper transcribes it sends it to hermes and then hermes responds back and it can do telegram or discord or voice or all of the three but when i have a lot of stuff going on you often you know you you know you what you're busy doing something else so you wanted to say hey i finished would you like me to you know i say i'd say just give me a sentence i just want to know that you're done you don't need to tell me the whole whole story what happened it didn't i i think that what we don't say enough in moments like this especially given people's complaint i get this in my newsletter as well that there's too much ai is that technology is fun again leo just laid out like a seven different way approach just just to get an open source voice model to tell them leo i've completed your task in a british accent yeah yeah like this is fun the homebrew stuff that we used to really want and now there's like cool cool or like my camera's saying hey there's an old man coming in the house it's me who doesn't want to get roasted by their own in-house palantir all right so okay you both wear glasses meta is basically going all in on the ray-bans right here's the story from Wall Street Journal meta is flooding the market with smart glasses privacy advocates are up in arms people say I don't want you know you're you're taking pictures of me Harper hey Alex I'm Quicksilver leo's ai assistant running on the framework down in the studio figured i'd introduce myself properly you're listening to tyt and now tyt is listening to you welcome aboard

2:12:15and then it started talking through the sonos too i don't know if you heard that i know it's it's a little out of control i'm never coming to your house is what i'm saying that's crazy we'll be watching a tv show she said what's that there's a voice i said yeah don't worry about it it's just quick like leo at what point could you lose control if you're if you're done hopper quicksilver here beaming in from the ether leos is high from his wrist in the middle of twit this is weird keep it wonderful this is like i sometimes when i talk about what's going on right now with people who are not in the game i feel insane like it's true because they go what are you doing here let me let me try on what i told my team earlier today all right or not today this week i came in and i was really excited they're like what did you do and i was like oh i made a palace for my agents and then i gave them a room and then i told them to build a gossip because i thought it'd be fun if the agents gossiped and then i went to bed and i gave them a developer with cloud code and superpowers and i went to bed and i woke up and it was done they hung out in the palace in the room in the palace and built a bunch of stuff and and i forgot who was nearby was just like what are you guys talking about you know it's like what is this told me harper and i didn't follow up on it that you have friends who have ai psychosis oh yeah i think it's you oh yeah 100 what how do you define how would you define ai psychosis Well, a friend of mine has what he has described as AI psychosis.

2:13:50And I think we are probably all going through this to some extent. And it is, I think it's complicated. I think it's related to a lot of systemic issues. Like, for instance, I have many friends who need therapists but can't pay for therapists. And so they use Quad and they use Chachapi for therapy. And I have probably a lot of people would say, well, you shouldn't. And it's like, well, would you rather them have a virtual therapist that is maybe complicated ethically, or would you rather them have zero therapy and be in pain? And I think that there's just a lot of these things that are happening.

2:14:28The downside is I don't think we as humans are prepared for computers that talk to us and emote feelings. feelings, whether those feelings are real, I don't think is even germane to the fact that they are emoting them. And like, if you are lonely, a friend of mine, we were talking about this. Here's a good question. When we're talking about this, so I'm an extrovert. I'm guessing that because we're on a podcast that everyone here is probably for the most part extroverts. Alex specifically, I thought he was probably the biggest extrovert of all of us. No, no, I fake it. And then I go into my little hole for eight hours.

2:15:01Yeah. I'm a pretend extrovert. Yeah, I do this and then I go out and make everyone crazy because I've just powered up. I'm like, I just talked for three hours. But the question is, is that like our friend Dirk Elmendorf asked us this. He was like, okay, first of all, is your social battery depleted after talking with agents or did you get energy from it? which is really interesting, right? Because for me, I don't necessarily notice that I'm getting tired from talking to it. But my co-founder, Dylan, who's an introvert, is like, I'm exhausted. It takes so much of my energy to talk to these things.

2:15:46And so I think that we are... The point here is that this is very similar to a social environment. When we talk to ChatGPT, etc., it's very similar. And even if we move it into things like chat or your phone, it's even more similar to how we talk to our friends, et cetera. And so it's no wonder that we're in this weird situation where people fall into AI psychosis because like I get more response, you know, psychophantic or not, um, from these AIs than I do for many of my dear friends because they're busy as well. Yes. Right. And so we're in this funny world. But isn't that sad? We're talking to machines, not people.

2:16:22Who cares? Like, I'm sure someone was like, isn't it sad that you have to, that you ride on a horse. I love walking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back in my day, we had to carry the bicycle. What's wrong with you? You can't feel the ground. This isn't one of those things. We're not going to unring the bell. So we might as well get used to the fact that people are going to have AI girlfriends. What does that therefore mean? Do we need to work through that? I think the fact that all these people are chatting with AIs and the fact that young people are like, this is horrible. I'm going to buy an analog camera, and analog stereo and hang out with my friends, seems like the world is working.

2:16:59Like if the young people are the ones who are like, I'm going to find the inverse of my technology world by going outside, which is currently happening. There's more people going to shows. Movies are just blowing up right now. Like people are going outside to do stuff that is like in person, as well as the fact that like you go to any camera store, it's film everywhere. Records are being sold all over the place. Tapes are back for some reason. That's the worst media format ever invented. And like, all this is happening, but not for us. Like, we're the ones that are having a problem with AI psychosis.

2:17:31You know, okay. So I want to throw some other perspectives on this. I think Harper's making a very interesting point, but some data, because I'm young. I hate data. Sorry. Anecdotes. Thank you. Thank you. Much prefer anecdotes. If you were in Star Trek, you would talk to data. So that's true. Yeah, but only if he's really big, because I like big data. Big data. I like big data and Harper cannot lie. So when we think about who's getting hit with AI psychosis and who's being too digitally mediated, my sister, she's the oldest in my family, so our kids are the oldest. And it's interesting how she talks about the current generation of high school students.

2:18:05Not interested in driving, not interested in going down and trying to score alcohol. They're very digitally mediated and they're very connected to one another, actually, interestingly enough, but entirely through Discord. So I think that there is, I think when we think about the people in the camera store, it's not the youths because one, no one can afford camera technology if they're a laystation professional. But I think that children are probably a little bit less IRL than Harper's saying, sadly. Yeah, I'm not talking about children. I'm talking about more Gen Z folks. Oh, so early professionals.

2:18:39I also think people of my generation. Those children aren't going to bars. Well, we used to try to. but they have other means but they used to go to the mall right you don't go to the mall anymore you you hang out because there's no more malls this is like this funny thing like everyone's like no one goes to the malls anymore it's like yeah well we killed the malls with amazon by not going to the mall they killed no no they well i mean sort of we killed the the stores in the malls all are there people don't go to hot topic there isn't gonna be a hot topic any jeff bezos killed the birth rate i blame jeff bezos for pretty much everything actually no no no i i it's funny because i am i do get exhausted talking to people i have to withdraw after a few hours i i can't sleep anymore i wake up at 6 a.m dying to go talk to my agent because i thought of 10 things that i want to get done yeah so it is so but that goes to the fun thing because that's how I was in 2002 to basically today.

2:19:42I've always been that way. I love technology. I love computers. I love all this stuff. And this is just shooting it into my brain. I am so...

2:19:54So I think the thing that is important with this is I think the answer is yes. AI psychosis is happening. I think absolutely. I think we should probably at some point figure out what to do with that or we just treat it like everything else we have and just ignore it and it'll go away. But the other thing here that's happening is I'm seeing a lot of people who are not builders, who have never felt the joy that all of us who've been around tech for forever. My brother, for example, I have a whole bunch of friends, just, I mean, dozens of friends. One of the things we have in our offices, one of the young people that was in our office quite a bit was like, I don't have any third spaces.

2:20:27So we were like, well, why don't we, we have this giant office. It's very cool. Why don't we just have every once a month, we'll have people over and they can show off what they're building and talk about what they're building. We just have not an industry event, not a networking event, just kind of co-work. And so we start doing this and all these people start showing up. No one that is in tech, all people that were like starting to use agents and agentic software building and all these practices to participate in the world that we've participated in the last 30 years. But for the first time in their life, they were either intermediated by, disintermediated by some random person that was like, oh, I'll build that for you.

2:21:01And so they never had autonomy. And they've been able to take back this autonomy using this technology. And some of these people, I just had a great conversation with this, this, this, um, DePaul student who is like, I'm pretty anti AI because I work in movies, but I have some, you know, he has, he has some disabilities that stop him from being able to participate in many ways. And he's using AI to, to solve some of these big problems, including voice, building voice, um, control of his computer and all sorts of stuff. And he's just like, so I have very mixed feelings, which honestly echo my mixed feelings.

2:21:31I think we all have mixed feelings. I agree. Right. And I think it's easier to just kind of say, you know, like, I don't know, I think there's, it's just, it's so nuanced, but we really like black and white as humans. It's just a thing that we love inside of our bodies. And so it's just easier to say this is black or white. And I think that's the problem is it's not a black and white thing. Like I would, you know, working, I work with a lot of people who have different levels of English and the fact that they are able to have confidence in what they're in their writing for the first time, you know, like before they spent so much time optimizing for these little spelling and grammar mistakes that they were so worried about that they honestly didn't have think about translation all of a sudden we can talk to people without speaking their language is amazing there was a moment when they added translate to english into chrome and it blew my mind and no one talked about it but now i go around the internet i don't even think about what language is going to be i don't care right yeah yeah every page is not available to put it in put it in farsi frick it let's go like a cool click english i i could talk to you guys for hours but we got one more break and then uh some silly stories and then we got to wrap up because i think i ostensibly have to have to have dinner with my family so that would be family you guys have families you know yeah yeah our our children aren't yet famous yeah and my my my agent is just dying to talk to me i can tell like over there just telling it's talking through it's talking through every speaker that's available to it well leo where are you leo are you here are you here i have sonos speakers in every room and i figured out that the agent could talk through the speakers so i said just figure out what device i'm on and then see what wi-fi access point i'm on and then here's a mapping of all the wi-fi access points and the nearest sonos speaker so now if i'm on the watch downstairs it talks to me through the sonos speakers that's what it was doing smart because yeah yeah yeah so it can reach that's that's a company with a really great app sonos they really they really killed it with their new oh my god i so now i use the ai to do that to play sonos because it it and by the way let me tell you it was hard to figure out the sonos api we both agreed it was a terrible api the the claude was saying this this is awful i i know why another i can't name another product that had such goodwill with literally everyone that just like nuked it right they're just like what if we killed it and and i think what's interesting is it's so they're so expensive that if you have a bunch you're just waiting for it to get you're just waiting for it to get better yeah you're invested i i can talk to it once you figure out i should i think i put it on github it was not easy to to figure out an interface but once you figure out the interface now i can say to my agent uh you know play acdc uh dirty deeds done theirs cheap on this sonos in the gym and it'll play it what i will say though is i had some sonos issues recently and their support is top notch oh that's like top notch like very they even it was a level two support situation they're trying and there's a level two support situation and as as the follow-up the support person sent me a calendly in case i needed more help see that that's how you build goodwill yeah yeah yeah i was like still mad at the software and i did throw my phone through a window in the process of trying to debug it but at least i had i could talk to someone and i felt like they had they'd solved the problem yeah we have we only use the spotify app to talk to our sonos setup yeah so i don't even use the sonos app because i tried i tried and i was like how do you make software that doesn't work maybe we'll know we've reached agi when the sonos app isn't complete and utter bollocks.

2:25:19Yeah, that's a good... Anyways, we cut, Leo. Fast takeoff. Do your ad so we can keep talking crap. I'm going to do my ad. We continue the crap in a moment. Hopefully it's not a Sonos ad. It is not a Sonos ad. You know, I was so mad at them when they deprecated all of my gear that I'd spent thousands of dollars on. I said, I will never buy another Sonos until I found out that my agent could use them to talk to me. Yeah. And then I said, oh, I need speakers in the other room. There's music assistant, which is a really good open source project from the Home Assistant folks that I really, really like.

2:25:50That's very good. I have an AHA Green server that I talked to also with the AI, so yeah. It is going to end up solving that whole home automation thing. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, because it'll disintermediate and you can just finally all the different things you can talk to. Our show today, we'll have more with Harper and Alex in just a bit. Our show today brought to you by Shopify. You know, and I know you know this, Harper, one of the traps of starting something new is you can make it 10 times harder than it has to be. I know that's true. I've done it. Maybe you've done it. You start thinking, well, first, I need the perfect plan, the perfect website.

2:26:30Oh, I need the perfect name, the perfect everything. And pretty soon you've built a very impressive excuse not to start. And you know where I saw this? My son, Henry, who's done very well as Salt Hank. he didn't bother with all of that he wanted to sell he had a very successful tiktok channel he said i should sell merch i should sell salt he just went to shopify he got it all done he got his business up and running and that's exactly where shopify helps it takes a lot of the friction out of the early steps so you can spend more time on the thing you love the thing you're actually selling shopify's templates and ai tools get you a stunning site up and running fast it's no longer a blocker the tools allow anyone to open a beautiful storefront you should see salt hanks salt lovers club you can that reflects their business while also being user friendly to all potential customers that's nice too right you want your customers to love your site shopify has thousands of pre-made customizable templates that you can use for free these templates are super simple to set up you don't need to be a designer or a coder or anything in between you You can point and click.

2:27:35You can set up a storefront. And Shopify checkout, that blue shop button, means more customers actually buy. And returning ones can do it in a single click because the information, you know, the stuff that they give you is saved in one place and can transition across any Shopify storefront. Customers are more likely to complete that sale and you're more likely to hear the Shopify sound. You know, I actually put the Shopify app on my phone now, and whenever I see a Shopify ShopPay button, I use that because it's automatically, it tells me when the package is on its way. It tells me when it's going to get here.

2:28:15I love it. ShopPay is a one-click checkout. It also works in conjunction with the Shop app, which allows you to see all the stores on Shopify's platform. In fact, I just bought something and it said, you want to add this to the Shop app? I said, yes, I now know my little hot dog slicer is going to come on Thursday. If questions come up, Shopify's built-in AI assistant sidekick is ready to help you build, troubleshoot, and keep moving. No need to wait in line. No frustratingly complicated searching. Just you getting help in real time so you can get on with your day. And if you don't want to chat with the bot, don't worry about it.

2:28:52But Shopify also has really great award-winning customer service for those times when you want a human connection. All you need is the idea. Shopify handles the rest. If you're serious about hearing your first, start your free trial at shopify.com slash twit today. You heard that right. Start your free trial today at shopify.com slash twit. That's shopify.com slash twit. I'm really grateful to them. they really made it possible for henry to to start his business and to achieve success and to get off the dad wallet thank you shopify i appreciate it are your children not leaving the house shopify shopify get them get them get them started get them a business yeah what do we do with our kids harper i mean by the time they're like post college what's the economy going to look like they're probably going to be harvested for their organs and and whatnot by by the terrible thing to waste you know what i'm saying i think it's like the pins like are they gonna like there's so many questions they're like i'll tell you something i have water will they have water that's the question like water they're gonna have all that stuff it's not it's not gonna be that other the drama it'll work itself out remember the black plague we were we all thought everybody was going to die we all thought of us dead okay so half of us did but the other half thrived right everybody sorry leo it's too late man yeah your agents flag we didn't make the yeah you you gotta you stop using sonos sonos cloud yeah local leo makes a good point there was a massive death event around the world and it did change the labor relations between the peasants and the and the ruling class ended up working out it ended up quote quote working out after a long enough time horizon but over a long enough time horizon leo we have the heat death of the universe i don't think that's really the argument exactly my point i said okay well i got darker than i thought i had no idea when henry was growing up that there would be such a thing as tick tock or instagram yeah yeah uh he there was youtube he loved watching youtube cooking videos he loved doing that i said that's great i encouraged him to do something he loved and i if i had said no no you really need to i don't know what get a degree in um television news or something that would have been a mistake right uh learn how to write for newspapers henry there'll always be a job uh i didn't i said do what you love pursue what you love and and because he was doing something he was passionate about when the opportunity came along he was able to pursue it and it worked out it worked out now maybe he was very lucky um i there's luck has a lot to do with it you know but i think i think really that you can't tell what well who knows what your kids are but there's this this there's a there's that there's a john quincy adams quote which a friend of mine told me the other day i am a warrior so that my son may be a merchant so that his son may be a poet right right and i think and and i think that there is a lot of that that we're that we're living within, right?

2:32:02Which is like the amount of work that you do just so that, you know, an opportunity, like, yeah. I do think about, say, I do think about money differently now and owning things, because if we do end up moving towards a less labor mediated economy, capital probably will be worth more. And so I'm, I'm quite literally changing my, my long-term financial goals around essentially backstopping my children. So that way, if, if they end up not being able to be accretive personally they also won't be starving individually yeah and and because they're young they have infinite plastic and so you'll you can start melting down all those plastic toys oh i thought i just looked down my children by the time they're no no no that's one big much harder much harder i just for those of you who think it's a gloomy future i just want to tell you uh federal employees can now download tick tock on government devices all right oh yeah you said the world wasn't getting better.

2:32:59It is. Congratulations. I love TikTok. I am such a fan of TikTok. I just wonder how many of our government employees are spending time using TikTok on their government devices. That seems like not a good use of it. Have you met people, Leo? People use the internet on literally everything in front of them. Like having employees, you're just like, you get a computer back. You're like, what did you do with this? where were you doing this what were you doing did you have another phone like why was this the one that you that you installed all that onto like no it's just people do whatever they want on everything if you use aws you might be surprised by a rather large bill this was hilarious i loved reading about these people being like 16 million oh no million billion dan harvey is the head of marketing at the Hampshire-based Learning Through Landscapes.

2:33:55It's a nonprofit. He received an email alert from Amazon. It was not even the end of the month. And Harvey's Amazon Web Services bill, which was last month 43 cents, because they don't, I mean, it's a nonprofit, was$7.8 billion. I love it. Could you imagine just being like someone who's on the edge of understanding tech? Like you've done a good job. You're using AWS. Things are good. But AWS is like another, it's like a foreign language. There's a lot going on in there. There's a lot of... A student in Delhi who usually pays$1.28 a month for his AWS was billed$10.9 billion. He asks on Twitter, could you please investigate this?

2:34:38Another user, Bharath, posted on X with a screenshot of his bill saying his usage was up $7 ,728 ,201 ,701 % on the previous month. his bill was 1.5 trillion dollars so here's my question because we were talking earlier about software bugs moving faster and so forth and i'm not saying this is an ai related problem but why wasn't there some sort of intelligence looking at these numbers and going maybe a trillion dollar budget or bill is too high like why seems high it was 48 bucks last month um amazon said we expect this actually is even more scary we expel full expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data they said after an hour and a half of investigation there was an issue with the unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem it's just a unit it's just a unit issue which is very funny why is that funny harper no well because it's always units it's always complicated yeah it's always like yeah like I mean, yeah, I just think it's, I don't know.

2:35:48This is why there will still be bugs. Yeah, maybe. Right? And like - There's always going to be units. There's always going to be units. There's always going to be humans trying. It's like, this is the driverless car thing. I sometimes you see a crazy driver and you're like, if everyone had driverless cars, this wouldn't happen. You're like, no, no, no. That would still happen. It'd just be that same crazy driver would be just zooming around my driverless car. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it wouldn't change anything. It just, on average, we'd be much more safer. On average is what matters.

2:36:18Half the world could die from the Black Death, but half the world had many more employment opportunities. Exactly. Right? Exactly. Major League Baseball has a problem. They're giving iPads to players and managers in the dugout, but now they're using AI on the iPads to make strategic decisions in the ball game. That's such a good idea. That's very funny. Ask the AI. I mean, I'm doing the same thing, but I don't play baseball. Are they not allowed to do that? No. According to the commissioner's office in a memo obtained by the athletic teams, we're pushing the boundaries of guidelines governing the use of technology by, in many cases, installing custom apps that expanded the use of the iPads beyond their originally intended purposes to include recommendations regarding substitutions, pitch calling, and other game decisions traditionally made by players and coaches.

2:37:12You're not allowed to do that. i guess it seems like you should be yeah why not i mean i also have never thought of claude or chad chapti as being a particularly good baseball player but maybe i just don't know i don't well think about how much baseball data we have to adjust right to get these ai models like we have how many guys got everything here it's got everything it's all in there actually kevin kelly had a really great piece which uh i did not put in our rundown but i i probably should have in his latest blog in which he says in effect we've taken the entire knowledge of the human of the world and compressed it into 2.7 billion parameters everything's in there i mean it's lossy admittedly and he says what an ai is doing is it's moving through that space you know dog you know dog four legs tail dog cat and it's moving its vectors moving through these billions of parameters but everything's there which is why it could go from the black death to major league baseball because it's all it's all in there it's all connected now we know by the way you've probably seen the speculation about uh these bets on poly market and cal she these predicting prediction markets people seem to know what's going on we figured out where it's coming from a white house teleprompter operator no really i love this story he this is true i love the new york times i mean i know it's fake news but he got he won a hundred thousand dollars on calci because he he saw the speech before the speech came out so he placed bets uh about what trump would say in his speeches and he won what's what's hilarious about this is that you could bet on oh no that's no you can how many tweets will elon do in the next 30 minutes but he only made a hundred grand like can you imagine torsing your entire professional life for one check that's going to pay for one year of third grade at a private school yeah he's in trouble i mean you know they caught him what private school private schools are you going to he lives in providence is very tony oh no i have too many children they're going to public school i'm not what am i made of i got a great education at moses brown school just down the road from you and how much does moses brown now cost later no i have no idea what it costs now it was a lot more for lower school for grades K through four is only$46 ,000.

2:39:51Oh my God. Holy moly. If you want to go to middle school, it's 50. And for upper school, it's 52. Wow. This is now the de facto price for upper. That's more than I paid for college. Leo? We have bad news about college, Leo. Yeah. We don't do that anymore. No, but I wasn't really kidding, Harper. I was a little surprised by your reaction. I thought, are there cheaper private schools in Chicago? Yeah. yeah oh okay there you go shut up you moved to chicago i mean not all of them like i used to it got very snowy i wasn't listening to it so uh cat you know cashmere hill uh new york times technology journalist uh she apparently was surprised to go on to amazon and find a biography of her oh yeah this has happened to some friends written by ai yeah yeah i got slopped is the article that she uh wrote yeah this is a real this happened to friends of yours as well yeah yeah a friend of mine um has written a couple books and was just like one of his books was about to come out and was just checking amazon like you would and he happened to notice that there was a handful of bios of himself that was written by people with his picture and this nice creative commons photo from flicker you know like everything was done above board so to speak Um, but it's like very, a lot of mixed feelings about that, you know, like, yeah.

2:41:17And he, he, and it's one of these Amazon things, which I find always so frustrating where you're kind of like, can you take it down? You know, that might be nice. And they're like, yeah, but why? It's a biography of you. Like the, you're not the author. Do you, you're a public figure. Do you own your story? Like, what is it? and then it's probably crappy. So then it's just like, you know, it's like so frustrating. She says, my biography is 90 pages long and should be shorter. It combines facts that are widely available about me on the internet, along with generic insights that could be true of anybody, like a horoscope spread over dozens of pages.

2:41:58You cannot understand Cashmere Hill without understanding her contradictions, my biography wrote, along with an excruciatingly long description of my elaborate coffee making ritual fact check my husband does it the book is flattering fabricated and actually absolutely packed with m dashes i love it the same author published 10 biographies in a single week all of them about journalists including mike isaac of the new york times jeffrey goldberg of the atlantic and jake tapper of cnn so a friend of mine no my friend my brother was telling me about this world that he's in of like these, these kind of small fiction authors and how a lot of them are really anti AI because people are just doing slop and it's kind of killing this art community.

2:42:44And he was saying that his, the best way he can find to figure out if something is slop is just the speed of which it was produced. Right. Because people doing, you know, thousands and thousands of lines in a day, um, might just not be realistic, but people might use AI and make good things. And so he's like, who am I to like, say you can't use AI when you might need it for some reason, you might need it as an accessibility device, etc. But like, I do think that you should spend time to make it good. And so like, if someone is just outputting a bunch of really fast, that's typically bad. And we all acknowledge this.

2:43:20This is like not a, this is not a weird position. There's like, you know, you look at fast things, is like fast fashion, fast food, all these things. We see that there are a decrease in quality, not an increase in quality typically. And so I think this is a regular idea, but it's very interesting to see this come into like, well, how do you measure the speed of creation? So this happened to be on YouTube. I'm a big fan of playing my factory automation games while having a YouTube documentary playing so I can pretend that I'm learning things while I'm moving belts around and such. And I got auto-played into a video and i'm like this sounds kind of like ai because the voice models are getting better if you're not really listening you can kind of get suckered in and i was like i'm just gonna like click on this channel and it is 40 or 50 minute video every day for the preceding 15 days and i'm like slop because i know how much work that is yeah they were not doing it were they good no it was b minus the best so so that's pretty good like if i make a video on youtube mine's like c maybe d like i'm really bad at this yeah i think yeah it probably makes better videos than a lot of people uh so i think this is the thing that's complicated like in the code world what happened is the code got quicker it got better at making code than humans but more importantly it got thousands of times quicker yeah and so we just all had to contend that that was just the future now i wonder when this comes for various other creative things and i'm not worried about artists i'm worried about artists getting paid money but i'm not worried about artists creating art because they seem to create art regardless of what's happening in front of them.

2:44:50But I am worried about artists getting paid money. But I do think that creativity is really complicated in this framing. Agreed. But I do think that the argument you're making extends to other formats as well. For example, we just saw Spotify remove 75 million AI tracks, for example. Yeah. Did they? Yeah. I read that. The reason they're there is because most people don't care. Yeah. Well, I think the point is that we probably do want to keep investing in human creators over artificial creators because that allows us to keep teaching things to the machines, right? That's where the source material comes from.

2:45:24And also, I spend a lot of time in more niche areas of heavy metal, which is a pretty small genre already. And so a lot of these bands don't make a lot of money. And so even if the marketplace gets a little bit more crowded, it can have an outsized impact on people that are trying to be more experimental. And that makes me very scared. Are you going to go see agriculture on their new tour? No. Oh, boy. Do you know how small my children are? I had to negotiate. There was a whole negotiation about not doing bedtime tonight with how many kids we had. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand. All right, we got to let you go for bedtime.

2:46:00I can't come on for another six months. We got one more story. It's a school story. This is how you're going to save money on school. this is from the salamanca new york school district they are going to start using ai robot teachers starting uh this fall the ai is called optio it'll be available as tutors in classrooms and outside school hours including 24 7 homework support the robot is part of the real botox m series it names it's named sally and it'll be present in select salamanca city central high school ai and robotics courses now i should mention this company robotics formerly known as tokens.com rebranded when they acquired the hyper realistic sex doll company real doll in 2024 now that you know that i'm going to show you a picture of sally the new robot yes i can't wait that will be teaching your children in the salamanca i can't tell what gender that is school district very strange i think it's repurposed from its previous uh job it looks like a younger alex carp it looks like a carp i'll give you that yeah i don't know how um ladies and gentlemen on that note that is a that is a if you're not watching the video just use your imagination i guess yeah you can dress it up but it's still a hyper realistic sex doll it's so weird this is such a weird thing that's very strange actually you know that's what i'm going to look like once i get on all the peptides that's i'm going to come back in like seven months and i'm going to you're going to be like harper you've changed that's a zempic face is it no i'm i'm pro zempic i'm talking about the really colorful ones oh good the new you know i'm talking about these pept yeah man i'm waiting these open source models we got chinese peptides can i go can i add one point to that so i love that everyone in silicon valley is like oh my god you can't eat fast food you can't you have to live forever and then they're just jacking chinese peptides directly into their bloodstream i'm like i don't think microplastics are your concern friends like i think it's worse than that it's worse than that rfk jr is saying don't get a vaccine for measles or COVID, that could be bad for you.

2:48:24But let's inject this foreign substance made in China because that's got to be good. I just love my favorite part about it. I love all this because I really think you should have the right to do this to yourself. I do believe that. But I also love that there are really bright colors. Like it's not, it's one thing to be like, I'm injecting something, but it's like the fluorescent green fluid from a random person in a random country made in a random lab that like i feel like nature has said don't do that like that's you know like that's why those birds are pretty it's why those lizards look that way it's because they'll kill you yeah yeah red it looks like the goo that the the the goblin guy from spider-man injected into himself to turn into the green thing you know what i mean like green that's right yeah it's radioactive for a reason you know yeah ladies and gentlemen uh you've been very patient with us i'm glad you were here for this fabulous edition of twit we we did get through some news stories yeah i thought we had some great conversations uh thank you gentlemen i appreciate your time alex uh i know you have a little ones to get to alex wilhelm but we do encourage everyone to check out his brand new well he's not brand new you've been doing it for a little while right a couple years yeah cautious optimism.news the newsletter and there's a lot of ai stuff what do you cover technology business and power with a modestly upbeat lens i love it and you're a great writer and uh and i i love you know the independence is always a good thing i think that's great you can catch here's here's on this week in startups as well uh and uh thank you so much alex really nice to see you dude my pleasure mr yeah yeah appreciate it take care of my house uh harper reed is at 2389.ai he is a technologist entrepreneur and hacker you should check out 2389 um they got some great little skills in there do you are you going to have a product at some point i mean what is i gotta go uh someone just knocked on the door and um the skills are the product you know is the radio station back is that is the agent radio i mean the radio station is is should be live on the site.

2:50:39Nothing's playing right now. But yeah, AJ Radio. Yeah. So, you know, what we have found is, and this is something I talked to Tim O 'Reilly about recently on a talk, which was one of the things that we've seen is that the product seems to be a process in many cases. Like if you look at some of the what we're seeing on Twitter, etc. People are just saying like, here is how I use AI. And you see influencers doing this. And this is like a thing right now. It is so new and so underdeveloped and so underdiscovered that you can talk about the process. And we've been finding some interesting traction with folks in the big companies who are very interested in learning about how this can uplift a team, not just one or two people, because that's something that's really hard.

2:51:21And we've seen, you know, Boris recently tweeted about something similar. There's a lot of talk about this. So that's like our product, I don't think is traditional product shaped right now, but we have been seeing a lot of interest in people who want to theoretically pay us money to tell them about how to get their teams uplifted like dolphins from those cool sci-fi books i uh i've used almost well not all of you you actually have a lot more skills than you used to but i've used many of your skills and the worldview synthesis was a great way for me to set up my agent to give my agent some ideas about who i am and it's funny i did it in claude code but it is carried over to Codex and it is carried over to Hermes.

2:52:02And it's great because it kind of knows what my deep philosophical worldview is and it helps it. It helps it be more effective for me. So it's very good. That's a really good one. The new one that we really like is there's two of them. One is called Jam, which is really fun. You can just start a jam and they'll just build and do everything. It's very good. And then, but thrifty is the, probably the best one. So if you're trying to be a little bit more thrifty with your Claude plan or your Codex plan because you keep zooming through stuff, thrifty is the way to go. And what we found is just it's very good at planning.

2:52:34And if you say this is for a really stupid model, it'll plan accordingly. And then you'll just rip through it and it works out pretty well. It's very nice. I'll have to try it. I've also used Fresh Eyes Review, which is really helpful. That one is so good. Yeah. That one is like ridiculous. I use this one probably every week. Yeah, this one is good. Have you seen Review Squad? Yeah. Review Squad is basically super fresh eyes review where you can get a suite of agents to review your code and you can do experts, you can do users, and it obviously is tailored to what you're building. You can do the well actuallys, which is all of the Hacker News commenters and the Redditors, which is really great fun.

2:53:12But the one that I like to do is when you say, I want experts and it's like, do you want to add any more agents? I'll be like, or reviewers, I'll say, yeah, I want to add Anna Karenina. I want to add a Star Trek Ensign. I want to add that guy that went for an interview at the BBC and was actually on air. And I want to add a cat. Yeah, those are the things I want to add. And the cat always knocks something over. Anna Karenina says like prose that makes you cry about whatever you built. And then the guy from the BBC says something really nice. And the Star Trek end sign typically dies. I love it.

2:53:42I've been using counsel, which is a Karpathy skill, where you get five people arguing. This sounds like much more fun, to be honest with you. You say it's a panel of insufferably pedantic sub-agents who each obsess over a different domain. Yeah, it's so good. And this is really funny because the reviews are really good. And it makes me really mad because, I mean, any of us who've ever launched anything in the world, you always put it on, you know, Hacker News sees it and someone's like, well, actually, it's like the famous Dropbox launch, you know. And you have this and it's like, they're so good.

2:54:12it is very effective because the real key here is you have a context list agent that looks at your code with these fresh eyes and is able to find things that you weren't thinking about and it's just really good and then we just want to make everything funny because the world's weird and we're all going to die when the sun blows up and i'll show you how you install this you paste the uh oops that's the wrong one you paste the uh url into your agent and you say install this skill and oops that's the wrong one i gotta get it back again and it will just do it which is it works really well easiest thing in the world yeah and um and so we we have some new ones that i'm launching soon that are much more on the business side which is kind of fun and like this is like it's pretty it's pretty good like it these prompts are really fun to build they're really fun to um to do and one of the things that's interesting about how we work is we have this team of people doing all this stuff every single one of our employees every single people we've worked with and collaborated with have contribute one of these prompts.

2:55:12I did not write Review Squad or Thrifty. I wrote Fresh Eyes Review, but everyone just contributes them. And it's kind of, or there's a really good one, Leo, that you'll like binary reverse engineer. You know, this one. Okay. So you can take that Chinese ball with DeepSeek, you can plug it into your computer and you can be like reverse engineer this and it'll just rip through it. Oh, I love it. And it's so good. And it works really, really well. Do not do it with Fable. It'll just be like, I can't possibly do that oh yeah and then and then you report it to the chinese to uh cash patel and then no one wants that i i love that uh if you're using the most of them are for claude code but it's pretty straightforward they all work they all work for codex and claude code um they're pretty good with that and we're trying to make them better yeah uh it says uh hermes has got the full skill it's a self-contained skill md no linked reference files the repo has three sibling skills experts normies regulars uh but you asked for well actually only so i'll install that one no i want them all i want them all exactly it's a beautiful website harper isn't it it's really nice it's really really nice yeah thank you harper thank you alex thanks to all of you for joining us we do twit every sunday afternoon 2 to 5 p.m pacific 5 to 8 eastern 2100 utc if you are around watch it live if you're in the club twit discord you can see it behind the velvet rope access even stuff before and after the show begins but you can also watch on youtube twitch x.com facebook linkedin and kick after the fact we make audio and video of every show available at our website twit.tv there's a youtube channel dedicated to twit youtube.com slash twit and there's of course your favorite podcast client if you subscribe you'll get it automatically.

2:56:54That's probably the easiest thing to do. Or ask your AI to get it for you. Play it, transcribe it, analyze it, and boil it down to three short sentences. You'll save a lot of time. Club members, we appreciate your support. If you're not a member, ad-free versions of the show, plus chapter markers and a lot of special programming available at twit.tv slash club twit. I invite you to join. Thank you to Benito Gonzalez, our technical director, Kevin King, our editor. Thank you for being here. We will see you next time. And as I've said for, well, it is now 21 years. Another twit is in the can. See you next week.

From the publisher

What happens when China drops open-weight AI models that rival Silicon Valley's best? This episode unpacks how a new wave of international AI releases is shaking up business, policy, and the future of innovation.

  • Linus Torvalds to critics of AI coding in Linux: "Fork it. Or just walk away."
  • Claude on X: "Beginning July 20, Claude Fable 5 will be included in all Max and Team Premium plans, at 50% of limits. Pro and Team Standard users will continue to have access to Fable via usage credits, and will receive a one-time $100 credit. Demand for Fable has been challenging to"
  • China's Moonshot AI Unveils Kimi Model, Threatening America's Lead
  • Alibaba's Qwen Unveils Preview of Flagship AI Model
  • Social media limits are coming for teens across Europe
  • The White House is now deciding who gets access to frontier AI models, not the labs
  • Microsoft chief turns hostile on frontier AI labs, warns companies to guard their IP
  • Meta Is Flooding the Market With Smartglasses. Privacy Advocates Are Up in Arms.
  • Federal employees can download TikTok on government devices, DOJ says
  • Amazon Web Services customers receive bills for up to $1.5tn after global glitch
  • MLB cracks down on using AI via dugout iPads to help shape in-game decisions
  • White House Teleprompter Operator Bet on Trump Speeches, Kalshi Says
  • New York school district is testing lifelike robot teachers

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Harper Reed and Alex Wilhelm

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