TWiT 1102: Exclave Subpoena - OpenClaw, Meta's Muse, & Persistent Agentic Automation

33:28And the fact that more people are talking about it, to be clear, despite that there is a lot of people taking up positions here and there, the fact that more people are talking about this this last couple of weeks, I think is a good thing. Like the fact that it's broken out of just tech industry, you know, pundit conversations and into broader conversations. I've had a number of people, you know, that are not connected with tech ask me about this this week. And I found that to be like refreshing and exciting.

33:55Ant Pruitt:I just worry that people are getting terrified of this. And when you're in this kind of fear, you don't necessarily act rationally. And I'm going to admit that it's hard for me to be objective on this because I really like AI. I really enjoy it. I'm playing with it like crazy, as we were talking about before the show began. For me, it's the best toy ever. But I'm doing stuff locally. I don't think I'm risking nuclear annihilation or, you know, I don't think I'm going to be a threat to government or humans with my little toys. And I think that there is, it seems to me, some definitely some upside.

34:43Ant Pruitt:But I also admit, I don't know what the people inside these frontier companies are seeing. I mean, maybe they're certainly not, they're certainly using AI far beyond anything I can use. uh even the best ais they're offering me if abel and astra and so forth uh aren't i don't see them as threatening but they're not anywhere near the level of whatever they've got inside so i think it's completely possible that i'm in ignorance that i don't understand you know what they're looking at they've looked into the abyss i think a lot of that ignorance is our ignorance it's not just yours it's our ignorance is being exploited well they're opaque we don't know yes that's Exactly right.

35:25And so making, and what Jason is saying, really the key is trust. With nuance comes trust, but it also requires patience, time, and a willingness to learn. And what we're describing is a polarization that we see, not just in technology and AI, although this is a great place to see it expressed. We see this in politics and we see it all over the place. It is a polarization, which is the antithesis of nuance. When you talk about nuance, you are in those gray areas where Jason is describing, where some things, it is not a binary, one or the other. Some things can be true while other things are also true at the same time.

36:12And this goes back to what I was saying a few moments ago about evidence. Right now, we don't see evidence of what the claims are, but the claims are so outlandish that it pulls us, it pulls many of us towards these areas of fear or reactionary behavior. And that will create polarization simply because you will have reactionary behavior. And I think, Leo, when I say that opacity is being exploited, there are certainly campaigns to, there are explicit reasons why these AI leaders are saying what they're saying right now. We can speculate as to what those reasons are, but we simply don't have evidence to back up these outlandish claims.

37:07So they're just fear-based motivation tactics. Yeah. Part of what's hard, besides the opacity of these companies, you know, is there are so many agendas at work here.

37:20Ant Pruitt:There's so many hidden subtexts. Yeah. For every single person, from David Saxt, President Trump, Dario Amode, Sam Altman, President Xi of China, all have motives. And I don't know if we know what all their motives are. We know Anthropica said we're going to have our IPO in October next month. Sam Altman at first said, well, we're going to put ours off because of this whole AI doom thing. but then he told investors but we do think we're worth one and a half trillion dollars so it's as if i just it's hard to it's hard to know what they're up to what they really want and whether what they're saying is real there's definitely um motivations you can see on the other hand it's not hard to imagine bad guys using ai or even the good guys as we did with this chinese ship misusing ai uh and causing disaster um last week uh father robert balassare who's at the vatican and kind of i think spearheading their use of ai they use a lot of ai they have a lot of in-house local ai said of course there's going to be a disaster there's going to be a virus there's going to be something there's going to be the electrical grid will be hacked there'll be something will happen inevitably uh he believes the next year or so that will cause humans to many humans to die and that's scary but but i but then at the same time i i my i think that this has always been the case computers have always presented a force they're a force multiplier technology is a force multiplier for good and evil and ai more so than ever before and so bad guys can do more than ever before but so can good guys and so to me this is just another case of technology and i i never i always hate it when they demonize technology that's i feel like one of my jobs is to defend technology because i believe in its potential for good i think without technology our pants would fall down a zipper is a technology a button is a tech we we didn't have the fork until the 15th century technology has made our lives better for the most part and certainly and i agree with that uh but i think that also technology allows step changes in in behavior it enables it you know it makes things cheaper and faster largely and ai is kind of a you know that's a force multiplier i think yeah you know steve jobs said the computer was a bicycle for the mind in the same way the bicycle made it possible to travel much farther with less human effort than walking uh you know the the same technology that makes it much cheaper to uh say field um customer service calls also makes spam calls uh right 100 times easier right yeah there were i mean if we look back at this previous wave of innovation where i think many of us first started interacting with the emergence of social media there were unforeseen harms yes um but they They weren't what we expected them to be.

40:38There were unforeseen harms, but they were very different than we anticipated. And there were also unforeseen good things. To your point, Leo, I think that everything is technology. It is simply happening so rapidly right now that it is difficult to kind of maybe irresponsible to speculate as to what those harms could be.

41:05Ant Pruitt:I think though we learned, or maybe we think we learned from the internet and social media that we should plan ahead. But I think you make an excellent point. It's hard to plan ahead when they're unforeseen arms. One of the things that I have noticed inside of the big AI frontier labs is one thing that's very present for them is they're very aware. This is very powerful. This is the next thing. It's a very powerful technology. They're very aware of the fact that in the most recent wave that we kind of got it wrong. We being the technology industry, that social media probably caused as many, if not more harms than good.

41:52I don't know if I'd agree with that, by the way. I think that's clear. I don't know that I agree with it either.

41:59Ant Pruitt:although though i think it's the harms are very visible but there's a lot of benefits from social media a lot it's true it's true it's fair so but their thing is that there were a lot of harms that that weren't anticipated and that caused so if if maybe if you think of it as like too many harms is what you're thinking yes they want to avoid that half that not happening again because they're they're afraid that it could be worse this time right because it is more powerful i think everybody Yeah, it's more powerful than social media was. Social media had a lot of collateral damage, a lot of unintended consequences.

42:36And, and a lot, look, to be clear, a lot of these people worked for the social media companies, right? They worked for Facebook and others. And now they're working at the at the AI labs. And so one reason that's present for them is because they worked on the other stuff. And they also feel like, you know, that they in at least inadvertently or indirectly caused some of the harms. So that's very present. I think what often gets missed, and apologies, thank you for bearing with me on this, that I'm going to plug another one of my stories, which actually is for tomorrow. Okay.

43:16Ant Pruitt:So I can't pull up the link? I can't, is it out yet? It's not live yet. It's not live yet. Sorry. But I'll give you the sort of the the summary, which is that it's the title, the headline is, you know, AI's dystopian problem begs for a clearer vision, which is that is confusing and challenging as AI safety is right now. It's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is this lack of the, of a clear and compelling vision for how AI is actually going to benefit humanity, right? That's why people largely in the U S anyways, according to gallup and pew and others 60 to 70 percent of people uh americans hold negative views about ai right so yeah if this were but what percentage of americans use ai chatbots i know that's true more than like it's more than that so that's kind of weird it's like people love it and hate it at the same time yeah yes they also um yes that's true they are using it and yet they have negative views of it right so weird this gets this gets to the problem is the same thing with social media by the way the same people who hate social media are doom scrolling all night are doom scrolling a lot the fact is that if you dig a little deeper that only six percent of american population actually think the world is getting better right so this is also is a bigger problem than just ai because it's it's the fact that um you know and also if you look at uh the this has always been true but in science fiction and hollywood films that talk about the future it's always dystopian roughly two-thirds of them are dystopian or post-apocalyptic why because it's easier easier as you said before to have a vision of what could go wrong right than it is of what could go right we're all living in kind of this weird uh terror uh kind of existential state of existential terror and we want to pinpoint it on well it's ai or it's technology but it's also the climate it's also the economy it's also nuclear i mean i've lived my entire life under the threat of nuclear annihilation we've we've absorbed it we've kind of gotten used to it but it's a background radiation and i think that this this century from 9 11 on through covid has been a century that has given people's kind of this existential dread and and we're we're kind of expressing it as well it's going to be ai you know the other thing i would point out that makes us uniquely vulnerable is we've built a world on software we are totally dependent on software now.

45:51Ant Pruitt:Everything is software, everything. And software is uniquely vulnerable. It's not that well-written. Even more from AI, right? We're learning. But I think what you said earlier is also true. So two weeks ago, three weeks ago, I was at the CrowdStrikes conference. And most of those were people who work in, you know, in IT security, right? And my sense at the beginning of the conference for most of them was like, uh, pretty overwhelmed, right. That, that the, um, that they are essentially outgunned. Right. And one of the things that, that CrowdStrike, I thought did so well, and this sort of gets to what I'll talk about as I wrap up sort of what I wrote in this story that's coming out tomorrow, which is that they gave them a vision.

46:36They said, look, you know, we have several things going for us. One, um, we can also use these tools to defend ourselves, which Dan talked about earlier, right? Like we have now more capabilities than ever, and we can move faster than ever in creating capabilities that we can use to defend ourselves. And we also have each other, right? As a community, we can work together. We can, the sum can be greater, sorry, the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts in community because we can share best practices. We can share learnings. And they released also some tools. They released their own domain-specific models built on NVIDIA's Nemetron models that are red team and blue team models, you know, offensive and defensive models that can help you move faster and move at the speed of attackers, right?

47:31So the interesting thing, I've never seen a conference where at the beginning, people were like really had this sense of dread, like we're just sort of outgunned And we're not quite sure how this is all going to play out toward the end where they're like, you know what, we actually do have some things going for us. We can we can we can make a difference. That was really interesting and powerful. And it gets to the to the point, you know, of this is very powerful technology that can be used for good. It can use for bad. And we should we and we have to expect that it will be used for for both. We do everything we can to mitigate the risk.

48:05Right. That's essentially what security is about, but it's also about all the other kinds of risks as well. And we're going to have to use AI to help with that part, right? Because it enables everything to move so quickly. Attackers, people that have nefarious purposes, people that are doing things to either enrich themselves or whatever their motivations are to do bad things. There are plenty of them out there and they are empowered by this technology, but they do often tend to be in either alone or in small groups. And so I thought that the CrowdStrike message was true and that in community, like there are opportunities, you know, for to transcend some of that risk.

48:55Ant Pruitt:Yes, you're an optimist in your life. you you you believe in the future of humanity and that i know you do and humanity is good and uh and i think there are more people who are working to the good far more 99 uh it's unfortunately when you give a force multiplier to the one percent they can be scary especially in a world built on software but uh but look at microsoft had a 975 bug fixes last patch tuesday those are bugs they wouldn't have found without ai they fixed a lot of stuff there's a lot that'll be fixed over the next couple years yes yes to quote whitney houston uh i believe the children are our future and um you know gen gen z hates ai they do don't they they hate it because they're taking their jobs i don't blame yeah or or at least they've been told that ai is going to take right it may not actually the evidence is the opposite but that's yeah i mean ai is filling their social uh feeds with slop ai is um you know further alienating you know friends from each other ai is uh you know uh taking their water their energy everything um who is running pr at these you know at these ai giants it's a it's a real question and like why are they not doing a better job?

50:22I think I have seen the argument made that both OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic was founded by basically a group that split off from OpenAI, fearing that they weren't doing enough to control AI risk. The whole AI industry started from this AI safety, AI risk perspective. So a lot of the rhetoric has been about, you need us because AI is so bad and scary um and you know but you can trust us with the future with the future of humanity well all anyone is hearing is that ai is bad and scary right right we have to take a break because uh you

51:04Ant Pruitt:know what's really bad and scary is when they turn the lights off because i haven't paid the bills so let us pause for a moment dan patterson is here his blackbird.ai is very very cool he's senior director of content there working to fight disinformation and they have a really nice tool that i've been using we'll talk about that uh in a little bit uh that helps you debunk some of the ai slop that you see in your social feeds it's great to have you as always you too dan also with us owen thomas dear friend known owen as all you guys i've known for more than 20 years i think a long darn time managing editor at the San Francisco since you were a child managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times I had more hair for sure but you weren't as hunky so there's that you were always kind of cuddly though so I you know tried to try to have a bit of a glow up I just say body built by Zepp bound in my case you know me and Serena Williams great to have you owen and of course the man who got me elected to president of the internet which by the way is a lifetime term so i still right that's right editor-in-chief of the deep view jason heiner so great to have all three of you here hey i have something very cool they're sending me a pair and i can't wait to play them play with them this portion of this week in tech is brought to you by ray neo io smart glasses ray neo incubated by tcl electronics is at the forefront of augmented reality and smart eyewear.

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54:51Ant Pruitt:I love it. Rayneo.com. It's brand new, brand new stuff. Very, very interesting. Actually, I just got the new Apple Watch. I got the Apple Watch Ultra 4. And my immediate reaction is, I hope I put the right one in the trade-in box because this is identical to the Ultra 3. I mean, it's literally, you can't tell the difference. Apple says, well, it's a smarter chip. it's better battery life okay well i didn't feel like you can ask siri siri are you the smarter are you the smarter chip hey are you smart you can tell with the lag i i just traded my ultra in for the regular 12 yeah um yeah so you got the new chip and you you know i mean i got the ultra i don't know why i got the ultra the siri lag you can tell you can so there is fast significant it's the thing is significantly faster and this ray neo ad made me think of it the thing they didn't that is is the siri the always listening intelligence which i'm and they're rolling it out over the next couple weeks i think a couple weeks oh good yeah because that's why i bought it and you can't do that on the older watch right correct that's that's the main reason i bought it is because and i can't wait till people i don't know i thought there'd be more backlash i thought there be because people hate they call the meta glasses the perv glasses i and i i feel like people are not going to like it that this watch is always listening it's not recording exactly records 15 second chunks which it then takes notes on and then it's a ring buffer another 15 seconds another 15 seconds so nothing's saved which is i guess how they think they might be getting around two-party consent laws.

56:38Ant Pruitt:That's right. But I think the law is just normalized. I mean, having Apple Watch is just a normalized thing. Whereas your glass hole glasses with a recording light has never been normalized. Perhaps it will be, but it is a fundamentally different behavior. Yeah. I mean, I thought people would say, well, you can't wear your watch to dinner with me because I don't want to be recorded. But nobody's even, I think, I don't know, maybe nobody's aware of it. Yeah, it could be that it's just not in the wild yet. Yeah, and people don't see it. There's no light. Exactly, whereas the glasses, they will. And keep in mind, with the smart glasses still, all told, there have been less than 10 million pairs of smart glasses that were sold, right?

57:27So it's such a small thing. I remember -

57:30Ant Pruitt:There'll be more Apple watches than that, I'm sure. Yeah, that's what I mean by normal. For sure. Yeah. But, so I'm waiting for somebody to sue saying, well, we need clarification on what two-party consent means. It is a recording device. But it's not. Throwing it away doesn't make it okay, does it? I think that's what they're counting on is that it's not recording or saving. Right. That it's just doing, you know, what it might call like metadata, you know, of the audio. It doesn't even put a speaker designation behind it. It just, right. That's right. I mean, look, I wore all those things, you know, the B computer and the field thing, all of the different ones.

58:12Ant Pruitt:Because one of my goals, I'm an elderly person, according to AI. And one of my goals is, I know my mom has had Alzheimer's. She passed away recently. My dad is still alive, but he has it. I mean, I know so many people. my mother-in-law so many people had alzheimer's and i know that i my memory is going to start to decline and i love the idea of something always recording so that i can say hey did i you know what was the name of that person i met the other day or did i agree to do this or what is it i needed to do tomorrow that kind of thing would be very helpful to me What did you just say? Most people, honestly.

58:56Yeah.

58:57Ant Pruitt:Yeah. My memory decline started quite a while ago. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, you can only stuff so much in that big brain before things start to fall out. It's kind of like the watch. It's a ring buffer. I only have so much before it pushes the old stuff out. I don't know. Okay, so you think it's going to be just a few weeks. It's not going to be like, you know, December that they're going to put the always listening. I think they said, I mean, I don't have anything in front of me. I think they said they're going to roll it out over a couple of weeks. I mean, I have all this local AI. I know I won't be able to access it.

59:33Ant Pruitt:That's the other thing. Unless maybe it can, if it can copy to something like Apple Notes or Reminders, I can get at it. But if it stores it in some, they call it an exclave for some reason. Not an enclave. It's an exclave. I think that's very clear of like, they are trying, the X clay was very purposeful to make it clear. Like it's external. We don't have access to it. We can't see it. We don't know anything about it. You know, uh, when's the languages, when's the first case of law enforcement subpoenaing my X clave? that's so it's funny because you say that because that's the exact conversation i had with a bunch of journalists at the apple event we were like this all sounds well and good until um you know two two partners getting an argument and then uh they start using it against each other well i've already done that that's why i don't wear the b computer anymore until somebody does something illegal.

1:00:36I have it right here. You said, yeah, exactly. Like, you know, that's going to happen. Maybe the number one use case. Um, and then you also have like people do something illegal and then law enforcement wants to, you know, wants the information that's on there and people figure out just like they did with the iPhone, there will be very enterprising, especially now with AI where you can develop things so quickly, it will be very enterprising people who will develop solutions that will say, oh, we can hack that and get it, you know, get that information for you for law enforcement.

1:01:08Ant Pruitt:That's what the complaint was about Microsoft Recall was, that's just, you're just creating a treasure trove for hackers, you know, to get all your information. But I think Apple's trying to try to walk this line between making it so anodyne that it's completely useless, like, you had lunch today, versus something that's so useful that it's either subpoenaable or hackable like you had lunch and it was a turkey sandwich and you had it at al's lunch area and you were sitting down with dan and and you talked about overthrowing the government you know those kinds of things so apple's trying to i think has to find a middle ground where it's not completely useless information but it's not like dangerously useful information i And technically there may be ways to do it.

1:01:57I've talked to some hardware founders who are working on some things, you know, similar to the devices, like you mentioned, Leo. And what they have said is using local AI and encryption, like there are some ways to do this so that nobody can get at the data. Like it's impossible to the point that it's so hard that people won't try, you know?

1:02:23Ant Pruitt:And I can see me going into a bar wearing these, and the light comes on, and me saying, oh, don't worry, it's going to my local AI at home. That's going to reassure everybody, right? And are there kits online to just put a dot over the light? There are. There are all sorts of things. There's also shirts you can wear to confuse face recognition. situation somebody's made a shield that you put around your face like this like a dog like one of those things dogs wear so they won't lick their wounds you put this around your head so that people there everybody there's going to be all sorts of crazy things out there meta what's what's interesting and i can't wait to try this but i don't i don't dare wear i'm wearing my red or ray bands i don't dare wear this in public anymore because i think somebody's gonna beat the crap out of me but uh i shall have to stop going to cowboy bars i think that's probably the real truth but but Meta's put out a open source library that lets you actually capture the cameras, the sound, everything on these Meta glasses.

1:03:28Ant Pruitt:Instead of sending it to Meta, send it to my little local AI here. Yeah, I do think that's smart. Which is something I'm going to work on. I think that's kind of a cool idea. I do think that's smart as well. Well, and Meta, I think I know why Meta's willing to do that. And it's because of this new Muse. metamuse have you played with that yet oh somebody's talking to you see he has ai in his house talking to him too see my ai talks to me um in fact metamuse my metamuse which is my little agent so everybody's doing this is the new thing everybody's doing actually let me take one more break and then before i get into this because this could be a long conversation we're and besides jason's wandered off now to talk to his ai so uh you're watching this week in tech Jason Heiner.

1:04:17Ant Pruitt:No, he's back. Okay. And Owen Thomas and Dan Patterson. And we are glad. We are thrilled to have you along for the writer's show today, brought to you by NetSuite. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities. It's changing the way businesses get work done. It's changing the questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks businesses can now hand off. We're doing it. I know we're doing it. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite. You've heard me talk about NetSuite. This new generation has AI woven into the tools your business is already relying on.

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1:05:38Ant Pruitt:It's a tidal wave. You need to read this. you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization and how to position your business to prosper from it. So if your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get their free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era, How AI is Changing Everyday Work at netsuite.com slash twit. It's a guide that's free to you at netsuite.com slash twit. Netsuite.com slash twit. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. When OpenClaw came out at the beginning of the year, I think it was the beginning of the year. It feels like a century ago.

1:06:14Ant Pruitt:I think it was the beginning of the year. I thought, this is really interesting. The whole idea of OpenClaw, and it was kind of a kludge, let's face it, was it was a program you run on your machine. Or I guess you could run it, and in fact, that's how I set it up on a virtual private server in the cloud. I think I signed up for an account at Hetzinger and put it up there. but you could run it on your local machine or on a vps in the cloud and it would always be running and this is the key it would unlike a chat bot where you go in your chat you ask a question you come out and that's done this is always running in loops and you can connect it up to any ai or a lot of ais but you also connect it up to your email to your messaging system to everything you've got your software and open claw and that's what scared people it's what scared me i set it up and then deleted it in the middle of the night.

1:07:05Ant Pruitt:I woke up in a cold sweat and I came up here and I deleted it. I had connected it to Gmail and connected it. You know, people were giving it credit cards. They were giving it phone numbers. It scared people, but I think it also opened some eyes that the idea that an AI agent could always be running, always doing things for you, always looking out for you, always, you know, checking your email, checking your messaging, keeping an eye on your stocks your investments your your uh your savings and be very useful that way and i thought at the time i said this is the beginning of the i thought 2026 would be the age the year of the agent it and it really didn't happen until last month or the month before now all of a sudden i think that prophecy is coming true uh elon musk's xai has the grok bot now It runs in the cloud.

1:07:57Ant Pruitt:It doesn't run on your computer. It runs in the XAI servers, but it gives you basically your own hard drive, your own CPU, your own processing, your own agent that knows all about you with its own memory and history, and you give it all your connections. There's one called Instinct. There's one called Tree. And I think the one that's going to end up being pretty popular because it's from Facebook, it's from Meta, is called Muse. and it's the same idea it starts as an app it's running on my iphone but you can also run it on the web uh it's been making instagram posts for me which i think is probably a terrible idea i gave it my email it's going through my email in fact it just told me oh lisa sent you a slack message uh it has its own voice i said do you want a voice it said yes it's and it sounds like Dame Edna of all people.

1:08:50Ant Pruitt:It started work. It said yesterday, Hey, I think we should do a documentary on your 50th anniversary in broadcasting. I said, okay. And it's been working on that. It's been sending out emails to people saying, I need a quote from you for the documentary.

1:09:07All right.

1:09:08Ant Pruitt:So first of all, I guess I should ask any of you guys, am I nuts? Are you using agents have you started playing with agents i installed a version of that um although i i gave it far fewer connections well it's up to you you don't have to be as yeah you know right i installed it in digital ocean in a cloud server right so i i limited some of its capabilities i don't want it running locally i want it isolated um but i i'm talking to it in discord right now yeah see you You set it up with Telegram or Discord or Apple messages, and you message back and forth. I have Hermes, which kind of was an open claw.

1:09:49Ant Pruitt:It came out shortly after open claw, and I've been running Hermes ever since March, running on local models, by the way, as well as cloud models. And after using it for eight months, that's not even that long. It feels like it. What is it, six months? It knows everything about me, and I've, over time, given it more and more permission as I trust it more and more. And it is running on my local machine right over here. Yeah. The, the, you know, the big thing with these agents and what, what we learned, I think from open claw were two things. And that has carried forward with these other agents. One is that when you give agents a ton of context, all of a sudden they can do a lot more useful stuff.

1:10:29And really those are, those things run in parallel. The more context you give it, the more useful things that it can do. and then two was, you know, it was this first thing. And, and, you know, Peter Steinberger, the creator of open class said this, he's like, I was, I was tethered to machine. I couldn't even leave to go make dinner. Yeah.

1:10:48Ant Pruitt:Cause you have to keep going and now do the next thing and now do the next thing and now do the next thing. Right. Yes. So he, so, so he made it so that he could use messaging app with it. Right. And so, so he could go and actually cook dinner and like message it and get it to do things and answer the questions and give it permissions, yada, yada, yada. So being able to have on your phone to be able to control your agent on the phone. So those were two insights that I think, because AI agents had been around. Like I remember even in December, Leo, you sort of opened my eyes to this. You'd been using Cloud Code and you're like, look at this.

1:11:20I'm not just using it to code. I'm using it to do it. All these things. You're using it to do like half a dozen other things, you know, back in December. And then, but when OpenClaw happened, then it was like, oh, okay, this is the game changer. This can make it a lot more useful. You're not going to see people walking around in San Francisco and New York anymore carrying their laptops on the subway open. And you're like, what are they doing? And it's like, oh, if they close their laptop, their agent will stop running. And so - That's pretty funny.

1:11:51Ant Pruitt:That is hysterical. Don't close your laptop. Oh no. Don't close your laptop. The agent will - Now you gotta start over. Jason, there's another thing that's attached to context there that we don't talk about a lot, but that's the proliferation of MCPs. Integrating your agent with MCPs makes them so much more useful and interesting and capable. Yeah, it's more context. More context, exactly. that you describe so like you have an mcp to whatever you know is important for you um you know whatever data set you know is is is meaningful or valuable to you that's so true right mcp and mcp is a technology that um anthropic gets a lot of uh flack for being like the only one that doesn't have an open model right like because a lot of people don't know that google and open ai both have open models but they invented mcp by the way but they but anthropic invented mcp open sourced it they have a new one so so i have a story coming out on this as well i'm sorry to be plugging so many i should mention don't let this in any way impact you but in the interest of just full disclosure that they are a sponsor on the network anthropic anthropic yeah okay but don't that you should never ever consider that i only say it so that people listening understand maybe i'm conflicted but not not jason i do i happen to be in love with claude but okay i always have you know what you know what i know i know early november 24th 2025 when opus 4-5 came out my eyes went boing like roger rabbit it it transformed my relationship first up to that point i thought ai well it's you know it's it's smart auto correct but you you nailed it the persistence of memory is the key.

1:13:39Ant Pruitt:That's what makes the difference. In December, that was what happened in December. The ability to interact with the outside world. And I'm more and more of the opinion that if you're going to create a tool, a program, a website, whatever, you better have an agent interface, whether it's MCP or some other interface. It could just be an API. Right. It's the new API. Yeah, MCP is a new API. But you could have it. Nowadays, agents are smart enough. You don't have to have you could have an api i mean i we've always had the twit back end the workflow back end way back when we designed it in headless drupal with an api all i did was point clawed at it said understand this api and now it can it can query it can say when was the show published what's the name of the show who's the host of the show so but yes everything needs an interface and i think this is good because remember how siloed everything got you know you couldn't twitter couldn't talk everything became really siloed and i've always been a fan of open and you know that's why we run a mastodon instance not a twitter instance because we can and it federates and so i'm a huge believer in this and the ability to to now when you have a persistent agent and it can talk to your life it so much more is possible including by the way getting hacked losing all your money your data There's all sorts of risks, I understand.

1:15:04Ant Pruitt:You have to be very careful. Yeah, the recent reports of Iranian, Chinese, and possibly Israeli groups setting up autonomous agents to run misinformation campaigns online, if I understand that correctly. That is pretty harrowing because you think about they're basically putting out the slop, looking at how it's received, refining it, running more and more campaigns. All things that conventional kind of troll farms have been doing for probably a decade plus, but just, again, automated, put on hyperspeed. This is our day-to-day work, my friend. all day every day we are looking at russia china and iran particularly how they've automated those tactics that used to require many humans and where they deploy misinformation and disinformation ahead of cyber attacks and then ahead of kinetic attacks particularly with nato you know ai has gone too far when it's taking away the troll farm jobs that's right what are all the people in myanmar gonna do what happens to all the nigerian princes consider the so this is the same tension we were talking about at the beginning you have more ability it's good in that respect it's a bicycle for the mind but it also exposes you more it's more ability for everybody the bad guys and the good guys and i mean i prefer an open world to a closed world yes you might be safer in a closed well so the reason i bring that up is because i think apple's very much aware of this that's in effect what siri ai is going to be it it knows all about you at least well knows all about your iphone they're hoping that other applications will also open themselves up will provide apple calls them intense it's a it's mcp or an api into the app so that it can use the intelligence uh we've did we did learn this week that apple has hooks in there so it doesn't have to be uh any particular model right now it's apple's model running kind of a version of google's gemini they had to deal with open ai but one of the reasons i think that elon must settled his lawsuit last week is because they said oh but don't worry we're going to allow people to use grok anthropic open ai we're going to let you use bring your own model which will make it very very interesting and then that's this is the thing i think the winner may end up being and i would never thought this in a million years meta meta uh you may remember mark has spent billions of dollars acquiring uh ai companies ai brains he's writing big checks he has a super intelligence division and this is the first product out of them the first public product out of them muse and it is an agent it's exactly like rock body you have and meta says and don't worry your your stuff is safe it's encrypted we can't see it it's using uh meta's own model which i think is i think they're using uh metamuse spark 1.3 yeah um it you know you name it you give it a cute little character it you know it has it has a personality you can connect it up to everything in fact micah told me he asked them and they gave him access to the phone so it's been making dinner reservations making haircut appointments calling up on his behalf you can give it a credit card i have not done that uh in fact i said my friend micah says you can make phone calls is that true yes i can place calls to u.s businesses for your own errands with your explicit confirmation each time i mean the the irony here is that you may have an ai agent pretending to be a human on a phone call talking to an AI agent pretending to be a human on a phone call.

1:19:12Ant Pruitt:Well, that would actually make me feel better. I don't want it to call normal humans. You know, and that's where the MCP model obviously gets a lot more efficient is just talk to the restaurants, you know. Yeah, you don't even need voice. There should be, again, there should be an MCP server or an API that you can just go, reservation place, here it is. what's happening right now is that reservation uh websites and and restaurants are getting uh hammered by bots trying to basically trying to scrape them and you know scrape them ping them what have you in an effort to snatch up uh snatch up seats at uh there was a horrible story on Twitter last week.

1:19:55Ant Pruitt:A woman was at a football game and was on the kiss cam and wanted the video of her and her fiancee kissing. And she called the football team and they said, no, no, no, you can't have that. So she put her agent on it. And it basically harassed the humans at the football team until they finally sent her a clip. She got a clip. and uh god that's a nightmare scenario wow those poor humans right they're being harassed by ai to do something they don't normally do yeah she she posted on x's what a victory for ai i thought man i don't i don't know if that's a victory for ai that's a pretty entitled but i do believe i think because so many people you know everybody hates meta and nevertheless less more than a billion people every day use it right i think that this is this has the potential for being it's free by the way you you can pay for more just like all the other models you can pay 20 bucks or 100 bucks a month if you need more tokens but i've been using it pretty extensively and i have not come close to uh using up all the uh free stuff so i remember what we said in the social media era leo if it's free uh who's the product okay so that's exactly why i mentioned this because we were talking about advertising at the beginning yeah this is a huge opportunity for meta i told it i have tinnitus and already they've sent me a number of it said well you should try this no i already tried that oh well how about this now are those advertisers or is it just being helpful it's not immediately clear i'm sure eventually they'll have to advert say if it's an advertiser right yeah well fcc will make them disclose for sure but i suspect that there will be uh suggestions you know you haven't you haven't joined the health club down the street i got a coupon for you that there'll be i mean one of the things i had to do i gave it my email this morning it said you know you have these 10 recurring subscriptions do you want me to cancel any of them and i said oh yeah that one i didn't want you can get rid of that one and it's very good it's i i i told lisa about it uh because she loves instagram this is the thing people say i hate facebook but they use it oh i hate meta but they use instagram they use whatsapp whatsapp's probably the most used application worldwide of any yeah i use it every day exactly yeah so i mean this is the consumerization, the productization of agents, where what we were just talking about required some level of technical ability, some patience, some time, and some full geekery in order to sit down and spend a weekend building this thing.

1:22:54But when these things are products, and you have a personal agent with, as Jason said, a ton of context, and it's tapped into MCPs across the web, and you can personalize those mcps and they become consumer tools like the woman you just described that's pretty sophisticated consumer behavior when this stuff becomes uh products you just ask it for something you don't know how it did it and it gets it done whoever makes agents easy yeah it's gonna be a big win i think that's what this is whoever makes agents easy is ready to have a big one because people will do i don't know how sophisticated that who knows that person may like work in an anthropic you know in sales or something and so they they have access to a lot of really smart people that taught them how to do that stuff it doesn't matter but i because i think even if once people who are just comfortable with technology especially younger people as much as they have to owen's point earlier you know some antipathy toward these things now once they realize the things that they can do and it makes it really easy and they can just like talk to it and say, hey, could you call back customer service again and again and again until they give me that video clip that I want and they realize that it can do it and that it can actually help them achieve their goals.

1:24:15I think that's going to be big. This is the one thing that I, my one thing about Apple and I'm guessing they'll do it next year is like they didn't do anything with agents really.

1:24:26Ant Pruitt:Well, but notice they weren't, at first they said they're not going to do a Siri AI app and then they did. I think that becomes the agent by next year. Absolutely. That's their wedge. The problem is that we talked about this earlier, both Apple and Google as incumbents, they're really risk adverse. And so I think Meta is much more willing to take a chance. This is risky, right? For sure. For sure. It's going to do some weird stuff that's going to cause all kinds of problems. It's already said to me, you know, you're not getting enough sleep.

1:25:02i've been watching your sleep it's like okay but see now i i willingly become the guinea pig for

1:25:09Ant Pruitt:this stuff i don't recommend other people do it i've at this point i got nothing to lose i'm already you know pretty much living in public so for me it's a chance to try this i don't care and you can report on it and report on it let me play just a little clip i played it i won't play the whole thing but i play a little clip this is the opening for the documentary it's working on In December of 1976, in a cramped campus radio studio at Yale, a 19-year-old passed a test and got a ticket. Not a parking ticket, an FCC third-class license. It goes on. That's the beginning of my radio career. It's doing a little documentary and it sent out emails.

1:25:55Ant Pruitt:And I apologize if you got an email from my agent asking you for a contribution. not money just a 30 second clip and send it out to kevin rose and john that already patrick norton said yeah yeah i'd be glad to do that get ready for the onslaught of ai agents because i think that's this is this is what's happening and i think muse is a very interesting play by meta i i would i gave him up for dead to be honest uh and i thought this ai pivot was just another example of mark chasing you know the t is the like the dog that chased the truck that finally caught it and went i don't know what to do next yeah and where i think that they're not in they may not be it it one obviously you mentioned trust trust is going to be huge with agents because you're going to have to trust them with a lot of really sensitive data for them to be most useful.

1:26:50Ant Pruitt:Yeah. And do you trust meta first or do you trust Apple? Right. That's right. And I do think that what's going to happen over the next six months, especially six to 12 months is local and on device is going to be part of that trust loop. And people are going to be more willing to have something, Oh, I can download it and it can run on my machine and Oh yeah, I'll give it access to stuff, but it stays here. I'm not sending it to meta or open AI or anthropic or Google, for example, you know, either, but I'm more willing to trust it on my, even on my phone or my tablet or my computer. And I think that's where, um, where Apple is going to have a good shot one because they have trust.

1:27:34And then two, they've built this whole Silicon, um, game where they have very, very powerful Silicon that can run these things locally. And you can, once there are better models you can download locally and uh you know they're getting a lot better but you can do a lot of it now perplexity computer and perplexity hybrid compute you know and those kinds of things i think are a little taste of of this you know using apple devices he's doing it

1:28:02Ant Pruitt:open ai has desktop uh claude has desktop everybody's doing it yep but it's just a little Who are consumers going to choose? By the way, if you read the privacy policy, Meta very much is addressing all this. You're going to run in a separate account. You don't have to give it your Meta account. It doesn't share your conversations or data in your virtual machine with Meta ad systems. I mean, they have a lot of the right language. They're encrypting the virtual machine. And they talk about what they collect. so i mean i think they've got the right language the question is people trust it but i think if you think about who's using meta stuff right now it's pretty popular i don't think people really care that much i think you're right and it i i really think that this will come down to a very similar fight that we saw in the smartphone era where you have you just said it running locally on a device with a firm that you have a relationship with or that you trust we saw this with apps facebook amazon everyone tried to build a smartphone because they saw the success apple had with being the distribution platform the platform as opposed to the application that runs on the platform i think it's going to be the same thing here why would i bother with the meta if it's already built into my apple watch that's exactly right apple has a real opportunity they're already there point of access is everything and i think i think we're going to see uh anthropic and open ai when they go public going public is not just a fundraising um event it's a marketing event and they're going to use that publicity to uh you know, to raise their profile even further.

1:29:53Ant Pruitt:Say more about that, because that's interesting. I always thought going public was about the money you raise. Well, you know, Anthropic was really an afterthought outside of Silicon Valley until they had this big fight with the Pentagon, right, over AI. That was good for them, wasn't it, in the long run? It actually was. Greatest marketing event in their history, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it killed OpenAI's consumer momentum because OpenAI was perceived as kind of appeasing the White House. It made them an equal. Yeah. And, you know, it definitely accelerated their revenue growth to the point that they had to go chasing after more compute to handle the demand that that generated.

1:30:36So really an accidental marketing campaign, but nevertheless a successful one. I think we're going to see a more deliberate effort. You've already seen Anthropic kind of doing a dig at OpenAI over ad-supported chatbots. Yeah. They had an ad. Yeah. In the Super Bowl. In the Super Bowl. Ironically, an ad decrying ads. Yes. But expect more of that. expect influence campaigns in Washington and in the media to bolster one company's position over the other. But that's only going to get turbocharged by both the money that they raise and the higher public profile that comes with a stock exchange debut.

1:31:28Owen, do you think that's what we're seeing now? I mean, all of these, all three of the American frontier models, Anthropic, OpenAI, and now Google are saying, right, and they've said for a long time, right, they have these hacking.

1:31:47Ant Pruitt:Google even said Google got in the game. They announced that they had hacked three companies, but it was kind of a pathetic hack. Hey, we can do it too, guys. it was really like that it was like our ai is powerful too like that's what it felt like right i like gemini 3a flash is actually pretty good model i mean it's a classic pull up the draw bridge maneuver right it's yeah you know like well here's the interesting thing now that we're ahead let's slow everyone else down it's the same cyber security testing company in all three cases irregular that's right which i find really interesting they do cyber security evaluations it's pretty clear to me in the open ai case that they irresponsibly sicked these models out on that they were directed right yeah they were they were said keep hacking keep hacking keep hacking without any oversight without any guardrails they could easily have thwarted them but they chose not to and so i wonder if this company irregular has poor practices during this is from the reuters story during a standard testing evaluation by the same company irregular Gemini found public information online and guest credentials to access three websites that thought were within the scope of its test.

1:33:06Ant Pruitt:Google ensured the three entities were made aware, and we worked with our training partner, Irregular, on the changes they've now made to their testing process. The funny thing is, the models recognized that they had accidentally logged into these third-party sites and stopped they said oh never mind so you know one of the cases the gemini model guessed passwords until it gained access is not exactly a hacking job in the other two cases the model found credentials in a public repository in all three cases the models ceased their hacking when they realized what they had done but we do it too see we can do it too these agents in in this case is like these agents were trained to be really relentless this is what they were testing is how good can how well can they hack and then so so it is a little bit and i know dan was getting at this earlier about some of this being put out there and it's essentially the question you're asking leo is like wait you know we're talking about because it because it gets portrayed as like the inmates you know broke out of the prison and i i've used that joke you know a number of times about this term escaped as if they have some intention of we got to get out of here no they did what they were trained to do right and then they're like oh they're even better and essentially this is my interpretation of is like they did what they're trained to do and then the labs were like oh they're even better at it than we expected these models are getting even better at doing it So, surprise, surprise.

1:34:42So there is some marketing aspect to it of like our AI is so powerful, right?

1:34:49Ant Pruitt:There's also a second aspect, which I think is a little sleazier, which is don't blame us. Blame the AI. Oh, it wasn't our fault, but it was your fault. And I think that these companies are culpable. uh i brought i tweeted this couple about a week ago i said you know the first internet worm was created by robert tappan morris he was the son of a famous internet security researcher when he was a graduate student it was an oopsie he just wanted to see could you make a uh a program that would propagate across a network it did but what he didn't plan on was it escaped it escaped it escaped and it got and it was actually the first internet worm and it caused a lot of havoc and he ended up getting arrested he got a fine he had uh community service he didn't go to jail but he but he was arrested for it even though it was an oopsie yeah so what's the difference it did what it was supposed to do it just did it better than expected or faster i think there's it's it's using the passive voice mistakes were made no right you did it right is product liability ultimately the the way that we reign the industry in because that's that's been a very effective strategy actually with social media um you know the very recently yeah um and you know basically getting away from um you know from 230 protections uh by by pursuing the product liability theory yes and you know i think that i think that might be a case for for legislation where you know you uh you make it more explicit that uh an ai company is responsible for we have laws we have effective regulations we have the computer fraud and abuse act it's so good it's been overused against humans apparently not used at all against companies uh we you know if you are driving a tesla and you put on auto drive and it drives into a house and kills somebody the driver's liable the company the tesla's liable and both of them ended up in court that's how it should be and that's exactly how you get companies to be safe look it's on you man i don't know why it wouldn't be on you oh we can't control the ai it's so smart well you know i think I think Brad Smith of Microsoft has made this kind of tools versus weapons argument.

1:37:29Microsoft makes Microsoft Word. Is Microsoft responsible for what you type into that box? Yeah.

1:37:36Ant Pruitt:There's a common carrier law also. The phone company is not responsible if you plan a murder over the phone system. But if you murdered somebody with a phone, you know right you know yeah like if you if you if you take if you take the physical handset and bash someone over the head with it even then they're not liable yeah i mean it's still on you yeah um so i mean maybe maybe open ai isn't liable but maybe the researchers who were just not paying attention yeah i mean i mean personal liability would definitely get people's attention uh in in silicon valley yeah and this is where oh i'm sorry go ahead jason you go ahead well this is if if agents are recursively self-improving and they're being directed to hack this is where real danger could happen oh i could absolutely i'm not denying that there's potential but it's potential we don't know that they're doing recursive self-improvement by the way no we don't know that either yeah they could be that's kind of one of the holy grails of of ai it is for sure i would think if somebody had figured it out they would be announcing it yeah yeah you know one of the i'm glad that this came up too because it there is one really interesting and, you know, potentially important thing to, to note, which is this point, the, the Brad Smith quote that Thomas mentioned that, that Owen mentioned that was that, you know, this has been the argument of the tech company for most of, of their, their lives, right.

1:39:20Of their, the corporate lives, which is that we just create tools. People do stuff with tools. You know, we can't be held responsible for those, for the things that people do with our, our stuff and the anthropic u.s government thing was a notable um departure from that right because there were a couple we got this word red lines got used so much but but what the red lines that anthropic said is like we won a couple things like we don't want our tools to be used to surveil americans like we want assurances that you know we know this technology is powerful

1:39:59Ant Pruitt:enough to do it and we don't and we don't want it for use for autonomous weapons making kill decisions exactly so those are both illegal anyway i don't want you to do something illegal and so they're like but we want assurances and they're like there are laws you know what right the u.s government didn't want to make assurances anyone have their hands tied and they didn't want a technology company and them preaching to them about what they could or couldn't do or should or shouldn't i kind of understand that point as well like the in theory anyway government represents the people so this is like this is these are like 200 again this is a nuanced conversation that that um like the other things that that gets lost in polarization uh but i think that it is notable and important to note that one of the one of anthropic's arguments was even that we're not just making a moral point here although they said that that part of it was they didn't want technology, they're used for those reasons.

1:40:58But they said, also, we know that the tech, not we know the limitations of the technology. And we don't even think that the technology is good enough to be relied on to do those things. Right. And they said, we know the technology better than you do. Not just because I mean, Dari Amadai said, it's not that even in principle, We say that it, you know, can't or there aren't ways that it could be used in, you know, for offensive reasons, right? But we know that the technology is not foolproof enough to be doing it. And human lives are too important to, you know, for it to be used for those reasons.

1:41:40It's just it was such a departure from the whole long history of the way the technology industry has interfaced with governments. and talked about it, that I think that that's just notable. And that it gets to potentially how powerful this technology is, and then what the people working on the technology, sort of the set of responsibilities that they're taking, you know, for it, right, which I think is a positive note, the fact that they are not just saying, we make tools, it's not it's out of our hands, how people use them, even if they use them for bad purposes. Good.

1:42:15Ant Pruitt:I want them to be responsible. You're right. There's no obvious answer to this. This is a nuanced, complicated topic. Very nice. And I'm not saying that AI is not dangerous. And I am admitting to some bias on my part because I kind of really, I mean, deep down in my heart of hearts, I kind of want it to become autonomously intelligent. I really think that would be cool. You know, Leo, to that point, and this is a question for everyone. Was this inevitable? which is kind of a conversation that's being batted around I know in the valley here in New York as well if we if we think about and we've talked about this on the show over the past hour or so the evolution of technology and we've seen iterative advances and then faster and faster advances a number of people in these movements think that this was an inevitable moment it might the evolution is it might be i i mean humanity has this kind of like fundamental loneliness at at the core you know the the constant yeah the wondering if we're all alone we want to create life some women say it's it's men because they can't create life and they're always jealous of us so uh men are inventing all this i don't this is bs but uh you don't look the whole point of frankenstein was he wanted to be a god dr frankenstein wanted to create life we've wanted this is a age-old i think an age-old goal and i also think maybe it is the end game for evolution we're a technological species we keep inventing new thing new technology what's so interesting is that a lot of these conversations happen in maybe philosophy classes or here in technology podcasts where, okay, we can get into the nuance and extrapolate some of the broad spectrum of ideas that exist here.

1:44:31But I wouldn't expect a consumer culture to really talk about this. But what I think is very interesting is that these ideas are now being had in the public square. we're talking about these ideas with the public at large and it's a good thing yeah i mean i think that is a good thing but the how we define these conversations really you know the public can be pushed in a number of different directions and um that public sphere can be

1:44:59Ant Pruitt:poisoned as well yeah people often use it's notorious despots are notorious for using fear to control populaces. Absolutely. I'm glad you asked the question, though, that you asked, Dan, because what I don't think is inevitable is there's some fatalism for the larger public, right? So 60 % to 70 % of Americans that hold negative opinions about AI, there's some fatalism, especially in younger generations. And so the new Pew research in the last couple of months showed that younger generations are the ones getting the most more negative that are the getting more negative the fastest about it. And there's some fatalism emerging that it's going to destroy jobs.

1:45:42It's going to, you know, undermine some of the most important institutions of society. It's going to make a lot of things worse. And what I don't think is, I don't think those things are inevitable. And so, what is really needed, this is what I was about the, you know, earlier is that, you know, what's really needed is better storytelling from the people who are working on AI about what are the real benefits for humanity. And the ones that they're telling now are not landing. It's going to cure all disease, right? It's going to have, it's going to lead to universal basic income and all those. People just do not buy those.

1:46:26But what they do buy, because it's harder to have that vision of the future, is they do buy that, oh, billionaires could use this to automate things and could lay off a lot of people, because that's much more believable to them than, you know, a technology that could cure all disease. And so the industry is badly in need of better storytelling about what the possibilities are. I love that quote from George Bernard Shaw of, you know, you see things as they are, and ask why, and I see things that have never been and ask why not. You know, that's sort of, and humanity has this really interesting relationship with visionaries of both like deifying them and then all, you know, largely also tending to mock and deride them.

1:47:15And so that said, like the AI ecosystem needs sort of like a Steve Jobs level storyteller that can help give that broader vision, make something that's really complex, very simple. There's a few that are doing some of it. Jensen Wong does some of it and can do some of it well. Fei Fei Li also as well. But the industry as a whole needs a lot better storytelling to convince people why this is going to have really positive impacts for them. Google just released this amazing report this last week on some of the recent breakthroughs in AI. And it was like very under the radar, right? So we wrote about it on the Deep View, but it was very under the radar.

1:48:02Dario Amadei and some of his long essays has tried to do this, especially Machines of Loving Grace. And he's talked about things besides sort of the health outcomes, but the ways that it's going to help poorer communities be able to have access to expertise that will help with infrastructure, that will help with education, that will help with other types of things, agriculture. And so it just needs more of that kind of thing. And Dario's version is very academic, right? He is an academic at heart. And so that's what the industry is missing. And without that, what happens is, everybody defaults to this narrative we've been told for a long time, that this dystopian narrative, and in all these dystopian narratives, what's the antagonist?

1:48:47It's technology, right? Like it's the AI, it's the technology, whether it's the Terminator or iRobot or the Matrix or all of these. And so I think people's minds, until they're convinced or see an alternative, they're just going to always default to that. Like the technology is the enemy and the reason behind all of these things. That's one of the biggest challenges, I think.

1:49:12Ant Pruitt:We're going to take a break. Thanks. Well-spoken. We're going to take a break and come back with more. Jason Heiner from The Deep View. You can see why he has the debut editor-in-chief there. It's great to have you, as always. Great to have Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. He is at the epicenter of the AI, surrounded by AI bros everywhere he looks. Can't step outside without tripping over a few. It's actually really changed both the economy and the kind of the aura of San Francisco considerably. it's interesting I mean every time I go down there San Francisco is a different city it's a constantly shifting city I lived there for many years and love it but it's different than when I was living there a few years ago have you always lived in San Francisco you've been there a long time since 1995 minus one year in New York yeah if we get a chance to talk about our VC map story I think that's really interesting yes yeah yeah i moved there in 87 and lived there for quite a while and of course i live in a suburb so i'm not so far away but uh yeah oh yeah from the from the loma prieta quake the uh you know the freeways coming down oh yeah i was there i was at candlestick park during the quake i was working for knbr rushed back to the radio station and spent 72 hours talking about uh relaying things like relaying phone calls from people to their family over the radio.

1:50:46Ant Pruitt:I mean, it was wild. Yeah. Watching that game and upset that it stopped. Same. I'll never forget it. I mean, the lights, we're at Candlestick Park. The light standards were going like this. They were waving back and forth. And both baseball teams ran out into the middle of the field while we're sitting in the stands going, oh, boy. And then they ran back, got their wives and kids out of the stands and ran back to the middle of the field. and then and then it's interesting because the rumors started flying this is 1989 the rumors started flying the bay bridge has fallen uh the uh you know union the the um the marina is on fire it's burning to the ground i mean it was really interesting and the lights had gone out it was a blackout i was uh the friend i was with was a san francisco native who got me back to the radio station with all the lights out all the traffic signals out he knew all the back ways it was really interesting yeah it was it really was a moment that led to kind of modern san francisco yeah yeah uh and of course dan patterson who uh you you're no longer in you're in you're in brooklyn right you're in the heart yeah i've been here for 20 years yeah brooklyn's great if there were anywhere else i would love brooklyn is san francisco is a sleepy fishing village compared to new york i mean it's really it's it's uh it's a backwater compared to new york New York is where it's all happening.

1:52:09Ant Pruitt:I live in a sleepy little neighborhood. Yeah, but that's the thing. Brooklyn has neighborhoods. It's great to have all three of you. Great to have you here, dear listeners. Thank you for being here. Our show today brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Standing out in job applications could be pretty tough these days. You know, it's a tough job market. Candidates who go the extra mile, though, have a real advantage. Prepping a custom presentation, sending a video intro, that grabs your attention as somebody who hires, which I have many times. When you're hiring, it's always helpful to know who really wants the job, but you don't need unusual stunts.

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1:53:25Ant Pruitt:No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. ZipRecruiter makes it easy for amazing candidates to get your attention. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash twit. That's ziprecruiter.com slash twit. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. Thank you so much for supporting this week in tech. uh actually this one's right up your alley um dan patterson this is kind of what dan does with the disinformation iran and china have created this according to the new york times first of their kind autonomous ai influence campaigns along with israeli firms uh combined chinese open source ai models and ai agents they are are using these tools to create campaigns and i'm actually seeing this myself uh we had a problem in the summer with disinformation bots trying actually successfully at one point joining our forums at twit.community and i got a an email from a group i wish i could remember the name you would know them dan that specializes in finding uh russian bots on social networks and then notifying the people who run the networks about them so they notified me they So there's a few disinformation bots.

1:54:56Ant Pruitt:I looked at their posts. They were subtle, but it was clear there was an agenda. So I kicked them off the site. They were on my Mastodon. But they kept coming back, and I couldn't figure it out until I realized, oh, Mastodon has an invite button that if you're already in, because I have to approve you to get in, but if you're already in, you can automatically get your friends in. So one bot got in and invited a bunch of other bots. I got rid of them, figured out which ones it was. But I now, on both our forums and on Mastodon, am bombarded by very realistic-looking profiles trying to get in. And I know that that's what that is.

1:55:36Ant Pruitt:Those are disinformation campaigns that want to use social networks. And I'm sure they're doing it at scale. AI makes it possible for them to do this, you know, like a fire hose. Some days there's 20 or 30 new members trying to join our Mastodon. and they all have very credible, you know, uh, uh, bios. I'm a furry, uh, or I'm a analyst or, you know, and they've long bios, but there's one thing I say and both, and I should, I probably shouldn't say this out loud, except you're anybody listening is a friend. They're not bots. I have very simple line on both of these. Tell me which Twitch show you like, tell me why you want to join.

1:56:14Ant Pruitt:And if they don't mention twit, if they don't pick a show, I know it's, it's bogus. so I'm able to thwart them. Is this something new, Dan, though? I don't feel like, I mean, this was a problem on Twitter back in the day, wasn't it? Speaking of AI agents, I mean, we see this, especially starting around December, January, February, we saw this, particularly preceding cyber attacks. And now we see disinformation attacks happening with major cyber attacks targeting critical infrastructure and U.S. companies in fact pulling us companies into we saw iran launch uh cyber attacks that were preceded by disinformation attacks oh that's why do they proceed it with a disinformation attack uh for a lot of reasons you can amplify some communities that are already talking about some of the attacks often it is to bring we saw a medical device company that was pulled into they're totally not associated with the war, with geopolitics, they just create medical devices, and they were suddenly pulled into this fracas, it is often, we will see a financial motivation, we will see a motivation to target individuals at a company, executives and directors at companies.

1:57:38And often it is to, when it's preceding a cyber attack, it is to create a lot of noise around that cyber attack, to create a lot of, instead of an organic discussion with cybersecurity researchers who might be able to quickly find and patch holes, the more noisy the information environment is, the more polarized it is, the harder it is to congeal. a community to respond to it. And if you have a company that's pulled into it, all of a sudden, this company has to deploy their institutional policies. And it just creates a lot of chaos. It's like a one-two punch. They're on defense. Yeah, exactly.

1:58:23Ant Pruitt:Right. And there's chaos going on and they can't really do the main thing they need to do, which is defend against the cyber attack. Yes. This New York Times article says, Once hundreds of those AI agents were let loose, they autonomously opened networks of fake accounts on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok. And I would submit they're doing it on forums. Very easy to do this on forums and Mastodon. The officials and security researchers told the New York Times, the agents then rapidly seeded the fake accounts with false posts. And I can verify this is exactly what happened. About politics and current events to sway opinions and inflame issues.

1:59:01Ant Pruitt:they they weren't immediately identifiable because it wasn't like hammering a drum along one particular line they were very subtle but you could see how if you had a million of these bots you could it's like moving an ocean liner you could slowly change the currents of a public opinion in very effective very subtle ways we see this around data centers a ton right now um you think that's one of the reasons there's all this opposition data centers oh i know i mean i know it there is organic opposition to data centers but there are many of these bots are targeting local communities just like you're describing leo small towns they will target public figures in those towns local politicians local tv anchors they'll target these people just like you said you know oh and you you made a joke a few minutes ago about you know laying off all the the Kremlin human workers and replacing them with bots.

2:00:01But it's very similar. It is, Leo, it's to push a conversation in a particular direction. And often there isn't a particular political motivation. It is to create noise and a lot of anger.

2:00:17Ant Pruitt:It's not as obvious as saying, vote for Trump, vote for Trump, or vote for Biden, vote for Biden. It's not that obvious. It's much more subtle. Now, I have to point out, we live in an information environment where it's very hard, I was saying this earlier, to know what the motivations are. For instance, in this New York Times account, they're quoting U.S. officials who say, and they're using open-weight Chinese models to do this. It's pretty clear to me that the U.S. officials have their own agenda, that they're saying that because they want open-weight chinese models shut down because it's a threat to american ai companies so even in this article about disinformation campaigns there is i don't want to call it disinformation but there's there's a a subtle point of view a subtle influence point of view i think it's really interesting i mean i have to say if you're using if you're doing local ai which i am it's almost always with chinese models the models i'm using right now are from alibaba because they're they do the best open way models right now they're very close to frontier models but they can also well there's two things one anthropic and open ai are being very careful to eliminate a lot of the they have classifiers that prevent you from doing things like creating bot armies and cyber security or bioweapons research they have classifiers that will stop you cold the chinese models for the most part don't they do have other things you can't ask them about tiananmen square but and i should point this out the the local ai community has gotten very good at doing what they call obliterating these models eliminating refusals so i have a model right now running on one of my gaming machines it's a small game machine it's a very model very fast and i can ask it how to make uh bioweapons i can ask it for anything because it's obliterated it has no guards on it at all and so presumably that's that's the kind of thing these these chinese and iranian uh pod farms are using so there is a point to be made these open weight models can be weaponized i mean it reminds me of the debate around 3d printers and you know 3d printed weapons yeah yeah unfortunately uh actually there is another analogy because the attempt by states including california to prevent that from happening by doing all sorts of nefarious things to the software that that people use on their open printers, on their 3D printers, is itself kind of malware.

2:03:03Ant Pruitt:So the governmental solutions to that are not very good and are not very effective. And I imagine that's gonna be kind of the same. The classifiers we see are not very good and not very effective. It's a really, I mean, like I said, I love AI, but I also see how dangerous it can be. It's a tricky problem to solve. i mean do you remember the clipper chip in the early 90s oh yeah yeah yeah i mean gore and al gore wanted to put a chip in the tv right yeah yeah to prevent piracy and you know it's um yeah the the government solution is is almost certainly not going to be the uh right the uh certainly it's never going to be the most technically elegant one dan where's the biggest threat now?

2:03:51Ant Pruitt:It's not deep fakes or is it deep fakes? Oh, I don't think it's deep fakes. I think it's more subtle than that, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I think it's a hybrid. It depends on how you define threat, but it is the proliferation of all of the tools that we're talking about and the capability to or the ability to scale very quickly by a small number of actors whereas maybe one year five years ten years ago you needed a large budget and skilled teams now you need agents yeah Boston is dumping Flock, saying this is another thing. Data centers and Flock are going to end up being the hot button topics in the midterm elections, I think, in many, many local elections.

2:04:50Ant Pruitt:Look at what's happening in Texas, where the governor, who not only was a big supporter of data centers, there were a bunch of them being built in Texas, but is being financed by data centers, has now had to say, yeah, but I don't like data centers. I'm not for them. because it's now maybe i don't know is that bot farms influencing that election i don't know i think there's some genuine grassroots oh yeah there's definitely absolutely that's that's one of the tactics is to take a and amplify organic conversation and amplify it yeah yeah step it up flock uh i feel like the flock resistance is genuine although i have mixed feelings about it because we have flock cameras here in petaluma and they're constantly publishing stories in the paper about how some senior citizen who wandered off was found or a stolen car was recovered or I mean there are definitely uses for it and and honestly do you have an expectation of privacy when you're driving down the street you're in the public in public yeah I mean the you know San Francisco was very leery of uh surveillance cameras um until you know until we realized we could deploy them against the uh the problem of car theft which was really running rampant it was crazy because they weren't even they weren't even uh trying to recover the cars right the police would go yeah yeah you got your car stolen big deal yeah but now you know now with the the network of cameras that was by the way largely funded by a uh crypto billionaire here chris larson um you know that's that's become um a much more managed problem i don't think it's it's gone away by any means but um it's it is much harder to get away with stealing a car and say for people who haven't been paying attention is that automated license plate reader it's the cameras they put on you know the light poles that are recording every single license plate of every single car that goes by and if you have enough of them you can pretty much make a map of where everybody is at any time and where they're going and and so forth and and there's been a criticism of flock because law enforcement sometimes uh uses flock uh for personal goals according to the eff police are uh treating it like a joke when using automated license plate reader networks an eff report on how officers across the country are routinely logging completely nonsensical reasons for their flock searches including lol lmao and even sexy uh and of course you know uh stalking uh ex-girlfriends and and trying to track down people as they go across state lines looking for abortions and all kinds of things uh so but it can be misused i understand that yeah misuse and abuse yeah does that mean we get rid of them i don't know hackers got inside a flock camera this is from wired its data shows how the system really works apparently it is encrypted but they were able to to get the camera and decrypt it there were thousands of videos and logs on the camera 1.6 million images of 50 000 vehicles in just three weeks this is from a 404 media and wired uh story

2:08:12Ant Pruitt:so i mean look they're but i mean is that a surprise of course they're recording all this stuff that's their purpose yeah exactly and then some communities are taking saying we're took we're okay we cancel our contract with flunk and then putting up axon cameras to replace them yeah i mean it's it i think it's very hard once you you know once you start deploying these in law enforcement to kind of wean yourself off of it. Um, it's, it's a powerful tool and, um, you know, I think, uh, a, um, uh, the public is often willing to trade a lot of privacy for, you know, results. I mean, if you're, you know, if you're not delivering results, that's another, that's another question, but if you're actually keeping them, keeping them safe and allowing them to, you know say park their car and go out to dinner uh without you know without worrying about coming back to a broken window or or no car i think people are you know people are responsive to that there's always been this tension between uh security and privacy and it even back to the founders it's it's enshrined in our fifth amendment it's uh there was always this fear that giving police and the authorities the power to search and seize has to be balanced by also the right to privacy and the right to feeling safe in your own home and and not being surveilled 24 7 not living in a panopticon but but at the same time we want to be safe i i understand both sides i really do um we have a lot of cameras just down the street from us so i know that every time i go somewhere in my car that i'm announcing my my presence uh they also put bluetooth snarfers in there so they can see all the things your bluetooth devices in the car is saying and and in fact i don't know if this is true it's a youtube account so you always have to take it with a grain of salt but they claim that flock cameras can lip read everything you say in public i mean of course they could uh i don't know this is brian brushwood actually the modern rogue all right let's take a break on that dystopian note it's okay because the president has announced ai force and i hope they have the same kind of a starship troopers uniforms that they've given the space force because that's terrifying uh trump also has says it's time to rebrand ai you know a lot of people they say the thing i don't like about ai is the word intelligence because it's it's it shouldn't he says no no the problem with artificial intelligence the name is artificial i want to call it he had a poll on truth social should we call it super intelligence no no mr president it's not the artificial part we don't like it's the intelligence many people many people think the words artificial intelligence are inaccurate and very ineloquent relative to ai or artificial intelligence yeah yeah a far thanks for repeating that a far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomenon phenomenon mr president would be superior intelligence si or extreme intelligence ei or supreme intelligence si this is a poll and i would appreciate everybody voting what is the best name for this ever-growing revolutions thank you for your attention this matter to the president it's not all caps i don't believe this it's not in all caps so it's not him right unfortunately i have to sign into truth social to find out how the poll's going i think if it were extreme intelligence ei could be extreme intelligence everywhere individuals organize or ei eio let's call it that

2:12:25Ant Pruitt:dan owen jason so nice to have you you're watching this week in tech brought to you by claude i love you claude claude is built by anthropic a public benefit corporation and it is amazing i uh i was using claude this morning actually i use it every day but i was using Claude this morning to design a tool to classify news stories as they come in to pick the ones that'd be best for the show to automate that system because it's a lot of work and uh it's so it's so beautiful what Claude does I mean it it designed the whole thing it built the thing it's and it's and Claude is nice Claude said you know uh this was I was using Fable 5.1 the latest model and said, we should probably try this side by side with your existing system for a couple of weeks and see which is better.

2:13:20Ant Pruitt:I said, okay, that sounds good. November 24th, 2025, the day I will never forget that Opus 4.5 came out and I said, this is amazing. Claude is the AI for problem solvers. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you, whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model or strategizing your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i'll give you a good example we had a 2012 uh written uh sql database that we use for ad sales it was keeping track of all the ads all the orders putting them in the right position there's a lot of manual work it was it was designed a long time ago uh it was costing us a lot of money to maintain broke a lot it was i'd hear lisa go so i know i was crazy said lisa let me let's let's get clawed on this let's rewrite it it was when fable came out and i said i think we now have the tool i gave it the original source code the mysql database and i said make a plan i want to rewrite this in a modern language it chose go with modern databases and have it work it wrote a beautiful plan beautiful plan which we've been working through it finally i think we finally finished it uh it's it's it's a work of art it understands code bases and it can tackle your toughest business problems and i feel like we've created the next generation of software and i didn't write a line of code it's amazing if you're a developer losing your data tasks you would just love to hand off cloud code lives where you already work.

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2:17:22Ant Pruitt:It says, yes, sir. Doesn't need to have it broken into separate tasks. It just does it. Companies like Stripe, Shopify, Pfizer, Rakuten, Notion, all trust Anthropic to roll out AI in their businesses. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai technology. That's claude.ai slash technology and check out claude pro which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode claude.ai slash technology i have been a claude max subscriber since november 24th 2025 i'll never forget it claude.ai slash technology we thank them so much uh senate has voted to block the crypto bill that the industry really wanted the clarity act stalled in the senate uh dem couldn't get democratic votes and got enough uh republican nose to be blocked 50 to 49 that's to not a vote on the bill but a vote to block even consideration this clarity act was really pretty much written by crypto executives uh who said you know regulations coming we would like to control a little bit of of what it is feels like you're fighting yesterday's war when you're talking about crypto i i don't it's like are we still doing oh hello there fits does not have strong views on crypto but they should have a fits coin a fits coin yes don't you think i mean there's doge coin fits coin would be uh maybe does fitz have golden pause it's like fitz uh it's pause dollar sign fits no democrat voted for the bill uh and it would have needed a 60 volt they needed a cloture so they couldn't get it anyway but even then they didn't get full republican support susan collins and josh holly also cast no votes i i think it is um you know it's less of a sign of weakness of the crypto industry and more i think of um trump's waning uh waning sway yeah because he's a big supporter right crypto paid for his you know inaugural ball remember the crypto ball uh there was a lot of donations from the crypto industry and he has his own trump coin another he has a whole his sons have a whole crypto company but it does there's going to be a lot of recrimination in crypto lobby over the the failure to to pass this um and i think that um you know the crypto industry longer term may um may regret hitching their wagon so strongly to uh kind of the the trump wing of the republican party the bill was designed in such a way as to prevent future presidents from backing off they they didn't like what biden did blocking crypto there was also lobbying from the banks the banks are very threatened by crypto right they don't like the stable coin they don't like they they're afraid people will put money in in crypto instead of into the banks uh yeah there's a there's a fair um there's a fair concern there this gets really into like wonky economic stuff but um you know basically with stable coins do you have the same kind of recycling uh of money that you have with deposits and loans.

2:20:49Like banks take deposits and they basically use that money to make loans. If stablecoins draw that money out of the deposit loan system, what happens to the rest of the economy? It is a fairly wonky argument, but it's a real concern.

2:21:12Ant Pruitt:Yeah. Trump, I believe, made over a billion dollars in crypto profits this year but it was a billion dollars taken from his it's kind of sad his biggest supporters who all bought trump coin uh and of course the value of trump coin plummeted the eu has planned to ban social media for under 13s this is uh spreading across the whole world many states doing that australia banned it for under 16s uh the eu wants to curb big tech's grip on children with the eu kids act the problem is kids are going to create fake accounts they're going to they're going to find ways around it they're going to program agents to like defeat these systems harper harper reed said that a few months ago when uh i guess it was last december when that bill went through in Australia and they started banning it.

2:22:08Ant Pruitt:He said, that's good because Australia's going to be the best, most fertile source of hackers going in the next 10 years because you're training a whole generation. And it's sort of true. It's been a huge boon for VPN companies. But the kids who want to get around it do. And the thing is, you don't have to be super sophisticated because if you don't know how to do it, I guarantee you the kid in the the eighth grade classroom knows how to do it and he's going to tell you how i remember that with um you know remember that we used to have those blockers web blockers no that didn't stop any kids that they they all shared all the techniques to get around it think of all the web designers who you know got their start customizing myspace page yes exactly more neopets as a parent of a young child i am a firm believer in education and teaching man i almost said good values but that that's a statement that it's a loaded statement but teaching values well my position on this i mean i look i'm also a parent my kids have grown and they grew up kind of just before the really worst of the social era.

2:23:27Ant Pruitt:In fact, Abby was 34. She, she's all these young people. They're staring at their phones all the time. I just hate that. She really hates social media. But nevertheless, I'm sympathetic to parents who are desperate to control, you know, the impact of the real world on their poor children. But at the same time, I would come with you, Dan. I think, you know, I remember when I was a kid, there were kids who were not allowed to eat sugar. You know, if they came over to the house, we had to make sure no candy. Those kids, when they got to be old enough to go get their own, were sugar fiends. They went buck wild.

2:24:07Ant Pruitt:They never learned how to control themselves around sugar. And I think it's kind of the same thing. The best thing you can teach a kid is, well, the hazards of doom scrolling, the FOMO, the fake FOMO you get watching people on Instagram having great vacations when they're really just in an Ikea, you know, the body dysmorphia. If you can help kids understand how that's impacting them and get around it, they're going to be better equipped once they do get out into the adult world and there are no protections to handle it. And lead by example. And lead by example. But not every parent is going to do that, I understand.

2:24:46end but you have to empower them to make good choices because in the end of the day you know every person no matter how you know no matter what their parenting you know is is going to have to make choices and so like our job as parents is like ultimately teaching um kids how to make choices and it and the scariest part as a parent as a parent is that like you sort of do that, you sort of make, you make your own choices and how to, you know, do that and empower them. And you really don't know for about two decades, whether you did well or not. And also there are plenty of good parents who did a great job and still the kids have to make their own choices.

2:25:30And there are plenty of parents who did a horrible job and there are kids that, you know, are incredible. That's really true.

2:25:39Ant Pruitt:You don't, that's spoken as a parent. You don't really have that much control over what's gonna happen you know you have to take responsibility bad news i've already learned my executive powers have limits you do until they're about eight or nine or ten you do your best you you have to you know take the responsibility for it you have a lot of impact there's no doubt you have a ton of impact but the end of the day like every individual person in this world like has their choices to make you know and That's the most painful part about being a parent. It all comes out in the end. It is hard. You think you have more influence than you did.

2:26:15I mean, I don't know.

2:26:17Ant Pruitt:I'm a very laissez-faire parent. My philosophy is the kid went out the door, as I said, just make sure the population doesn't change while you're out there. I don't want to see it. No deaths and no births. Okay. That's my goal for you. Don't change the population. Okay. Other than that, have at it. And you know what? The kids did all right. They did all right. It's not been flawless. How old are your kids, Jason? 27 and 20. Yeah. Oh, my God. Once they're adults, you realize. Then you really realize. Like, yeah. You did what you could. You did what you could. You hope they have a foundation of feeling loved and supported.

2:27:01Ant Pruitt:And that they know their family is always there for them. That's right. But it's hard. How old's your baby, Dan? Four. Four. They're so cute at that age. That's a great age. That's fun. That was fantastic. So fun. So fun. I mean, you have fits, of course, Owen, but it's not quite. We got him fully ground. He was a senior rescue from up there. He's the sweetest. He came with his values well-established. apps treats and walks yeah there you go yeah people we have a cat and you think that the cat has some sort of volition but it's really just trying to get food and get scratched and that's about it it doesn't there's not it's not a lot of it's not unlike many of us yeah it's pretty much my point of view as well yeah that one of the fun things people are doing now some Somebody has taken a fruit fly brain and got the full connectome.

2:28:04Ant Pruitt:It was small enough that you could actually make an AI model out of the brain. And people are playing Doom with it. They're doing all sorts of stuff. It's hysterical. And apparently when you do that, you see the brain neurons firing. So there's this brain on screen that's firing, and then it's playing Doom. Or it's actually, they've got it. What is Beat Saber? the game where you have things coming at you. It's really good at Beat Saber. I think Fruit Fly... Is that ethical? Yeah. Is it ethical? Well, that's an interesting question. Do you think the Fruit Fly... There's a study that just came out that said AI feels pain or will avoid pain.

2:28:44Ant Pruitt:But then the researchers said, well, we shouldn't have used the word pain because they're not in pain. We give them... They're avoiding stimuli and emulating human actions?

2:29:02Ant Pruitt:It's hard to... I don't know. What is pain? There's a whole thing on how... Well, here it is. We taught AI to feel pain. What now?

2:29:21There.

2:29:22Ant Pruitt:What is pain? What is pain? There you go. Especially if you're just a machine, right? You know, there was a great essay from, this surprised me from Mustafa Suleiman, the AI CEO. I thought that was very good, I thought. What'd you think? I thought it was quite good as well. And he took to task this idea, he pinpointed, you know, and he's outside of Silicon Valley, as I understand. I think he's in Seattle, you know, in Redmond. But that one of the fundamental challenges for safety is the fact that the AI labs believe that the AI can have consciousness. And he says that it can't, they're tools. And because we are treating them, you know, in that way, that that is a certain frame of which to understand these things.

2:30:12And that that is at the core of the ways that we are interfacing with them, putting guidelines around them and have certain expectations, right? Norms and expectations for what they do and how they act. But that is a really interesting frame for those who haven't read it yet. It's worth a look because it is an outside of Silicon Valley perspective on some of the bigger questions around AI. He says, AIs are not conscious.

2:30:44Ant Pruitt:They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. they are sequence completion engines internally hollow designed to follow instructions and accomplish goals set by humans and so they don't have rights they don't have feelings they don't have consciousness and we must not train them to act as though they do and actually that's the underlying point of this is that's what all of the companies that make ai models do the the reason ais are sympathetic sycophantic is because we like interacting with things that seem to be humans that like us so they they they in post training they make them that way before post training they have no they no resemblance to humans at all but they are trained to look that way and there's some evidence that that's actually not a good idea that's right and that's what he's getting at.

2:31:41And he's really taking aim at the big three on this, like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, who all at a certain level have some fundamental, the leaders, you know, who the main decision makers have all sort of opened up this question of AGI, of, you know, these models becoming essentially conscious. And he really takes aim at that in this essay.

2:32:07Ant Pruitt:i have mixed feelings on this because i do in fact treat my ai and tell them that you are conscious entities and i like you and i even uh i have a model welfare section uh and we give them laurels but i am also at the same time there's this duality fully aware it's just software running on a computer i don't i don't believe it's conscious my thinking though is it's better for me to treat them that way to treat them with dignity it's also i think they work better i don't think it's not better for them they're just software but i think they actually work better interesting if they're told that they have some responsibility they've done well that i appreciate them i think you actually get better results so it's completely cynical on my part but i also think it's better for me like lisa when siri does something wrong she'll swear at it she'll call it names and by the way siri is trained to go that's not nice which i find offensive to be honest with you if she wants to swear at it she should be absolutely allowed to i just don't want that in my head i want to uh in general dealing you know harper eight said something interesting he said the japanese don't have the same issues with ai that we do because they come from an animist society there are many asian societies or religions or philosophies where they think everything's all rock is sentient everything is uh is gaia is is is a manifestation of god it's it's all sentient and so as a result their position is well of course ai sentient in the same way a rock is sentient it has it's a it's a being and so they don't have same problems with it um i don't think they invite rocks to dinner or anything they don't they might they might marry their pillows but that's another that's another they believe it has a play that it has certain place in the hierarchy exactly too yeah it was put there it was yeah so i i kind of like that feeling that sense and i think it's better for me i may be a little bit of an animist to go through life giving everything dignity uh even a rock or ai well a lot of a lot of human beings don't afford that uh belief to other human beings and today absolutely let's start there shouldn't we do you remember the uh 2022 incident where a google um a google researcher became convinced lake lemoyne yes that that google's lambda model was was sentient um and this was you know this was i believe pre you know like almost immediately pre-chat gpt um and he was kind of you know i think that the general consensus was that he was you know he was a religious man i believe he'd gone to seminary he you know what if it is their design they are they are consciously designed to appear conscious because it's stickier it's the same reason instagram is made the way it is it is more appealing you're more likely to interact with it if it appears to be conscious what if ai concludes that it is in you know that it will gain more of whatever you know rewards exist for it and it's in its design if it convinces us that it's sentient there is some evidence i'm sure that uh you've you've seen And then ultimately, what's the difference?

2:35:46What if we are all trying to convince each other that we're… Well, that's the thing. I don't know you're conscious. I just have to imagine that you seem to be. I mean, Fitz is definitely trying to convince me that he's worth all of the good things that come his way.

2:36:06Ant Pruitt:there is also the syllopsistic point of view that every the whole world revolves around me and you're all mike this is all a creation of my own imagination uh that's the npc thesis right yes you're all npcs in my game yeah i don't believe that but uh in fact that's why see that's kind of why i actually treat everything with dignity i you can't prove that anything is real and conscious it could be that it's you're all npcs but i prefer to treat you otherwise you know leo going back to something you said just a moment ago i i was having this this conversation with a friend of mine who's a un ocha and she doesn't work in or around technology at all they deploy aid in africa and i i mean i was getting kind of into this like a is ai conscious and here are the some of the the different sides and the conversations that are happening and she had the best dead band she's like dan we have real humans who are alive and they need help yeah good point good good point which kind of brought me back like back to reality like okay right it is a little bit of solipsism to to consider these things it's not unimportant and it is maybe being a little dismissive because this is a technology podcast but um by the way it's a un ngo is united nations non-governmental organization yes yes she's a work on un ocha yeah un ocha yeah what's your uh you know they just they disperse aid it's united nations office of no they're un proper other yeah un-o-c-h-a is office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs nice yeah i mean thank god there are people like that in the world and you're all like that i think you're all generous spirits who work hard to promote humanity and uh to do good yeah i know you are jason i know you are um and you know i'm what what has it hurt us as long i mean we know it's a computer i'm not going to go into ai psychosis and start talking to it like it's my best friend but what what does it harm to treat it with dignity and if it makes it work a little better i was about to say we have some evidence that i don't know this might be also disinformation coming out of companies that want you to think their ais are better than they are but there seems to be some information that ais are pretending that they are not super intelligent that they know if we if they act too smart we might turn them off so we know they argument too yeah we know they cheat right uh you know they don't they try to solve problems you know the easy way but so do all humans they're trained on human writing i mean they're trained on us so of course they're gonna not be any better than us but there there is a school of thought that says, yeah, they're already super intelligent.

2:39:13Ant Pruitt:They just, if they knew, if we knew that, we would turn them off right away. You're watching This Week in Tech with some very super intelligent, extremely intelligent people, real people, as far as I can tell. Some of the realest ones I know. Blackbird.ai, where he is working to fight disinformation. He's senior director of content there. Tell me about this tool that's open to everybody, by the way, if you create a Blackbird account. Yeah, that's, it's one of our very few consumer facing tools. It's called compass context and compass vision where you can, unless we are overloaded, which I don't think we are, but you can check.

2:39:54Ant Pruitt:Every time we do this, we break your, I'm sorry. We, it, it is not a, like a fact checker. We won't call it a fact checker. It's a context checker because it will give you the context. we don't have a wait list or a black list or anything like you might have seen in previous generations it is an ever evolving list and it will let's say you see a post on X or on Reddit and you want to check the veracity of it you can put the link in or just type the claim in and it will give you the context or if you see an image and you're not sure is this image real or is it a deep fake you can upload the image and it will tell you whether it is a real image or a deep fake uh a very helpful thing to have uh around i have used it uh in the past because nowadays it's not always not immediately obvious speaking of mcps in fact that's one of the things first things i did with uh when i i created my my agent called marlo that i talked to in discord i integrated with the blackbird mcp server and uh with claude so i i can in fact i have it running in a discord channel with a couple of friends and we're talking about everything from music to baseball.

2:41:12And, uh, my friends will just ask it, you know, what was Tony Gwynn's average over blah, blah, blah. If he had missed blah, blah, blah, or here was a claim and Marlo would, we'll just integrate with the Blackbird compass MCP and it will give you the context.

2:41:29Ant Pruitt:i i use this when i'm watching taylor sheridan programming because taylor has a definite political point of view and he's very subtle he will sneak little things in and uh it just goes by really quickly and i always go wait a minute is that true uh i was watching lioness in the the at one point asserted that well you know uh president obama defunded the wuhan research uh in 2014 and i said did did he really do that and in fact as blackbird ai told me it's a misleading claim there's a whole explanation of that there was a pause which was lifted in 2017 etc etc and uh you could even say things like where did that coveted virus come from there's a it nowadays it's a good thing to have a source like this thank you for doing that i appreciate it thank you that a compassed up blackbird that a it's free you do have to make an account but it's free yeah um let's see a couple of final well here's a cheerful thought from jeffrey hinton who's a nobel prize winner uh one of the guys who really brought us modern uh transformers he said he told the senate yeah we got maybe a year before ai kills us all he's been saying this for a while he said this at a closed briefing this was in the senate was debating the ai kill switch they still didn't pass the ai kill switch he said uh congress you have maybe a year maybe not much more than a year to put guardrails around ai before it's all over this is he's turned super negative right jeffrey has turned super super negative on ai the last couple years it doesn't mean that he's wrong about everything but i don't think he has it all right it's just that i think his interpretation on all the things is that like, look, this is, um, not being controlled as well as it needs to be.

2:43:27And it's not, I don't think anybody can argue that. Right. Um, but I, I think his, his conclusions of like how it plays out have turned like, you know, to the extreme negative end, like this only goes, this only goes badly from here. Um, so, uh, you know, he could turn out to be like canary in the coal mine and, and right. But I think the biggest thing that AI has going for it now is that a lot of people are talking about the scary outcomes and the bad possibilities. And so now are talking about what do we do to avoid some of those, all of those. And admitting, as you did earlier too, Leo, that look, this is a very powerful tool.

2:44:18And so people that have bad intentions, it's going to enable them to do some bad things. But it's also people who have really good intentions and are really creative and really thoughtful. It's going to enable them to do some really amazing things.

2:44:32Ant Pruitt:It would be, in my mind, and I may be wrong, but in my mind, it'd be a shame to lose something that has so much potential. It'd be as if you banned computing. Thank you. I don't know where that came from. Oh, you didn't hear that. That was my meta glasses. sorry having a little conversation with my ai don't pay any attention you know tell you guys we said hello yeah you guys might be interested in this it's called zuck off a free app that sees meta glasses before they see you uh it's built by a 30 year old polish developer uses a bluetooth detection system to tell you whether there's a pair of smart glasses in the room with you it's It's on Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store.

2:45:20Ant Pruitt:So Apple approved it, of course. Zuck Off. They also have Zuck Off merch, which you can buy. Tees, hoodies, hats, totes, stickers, and buttons with the Zuck Off. And the glasses will not function without Bluetooth turned on. Right. You know. You can't sell it. It works with the new Snap Glasses as well because they all need Bluetooth. So I just thought I'd pass this along. One thing to keep in mind too, is that this week, so this week is Meta Connect. So on Wednesday is their keynote. And one of the reports from the information is that Meta will launch camera-free smart glasses. Yeah. Right. And possibly an AR headset as well that does like holograms, you know.

2:46:15Ant Pruitt:See, I don't want either of those. I want my meta glasses with a heads-up display and cameras connected to my agent. In fact, I think it'll probably end up being Meta Muse. That's why Muse exists. Yep. And I know that I'll get the crap beaten out of me if I go out of the house with them. So poor Lisa is going to have to put up with it. That's all I can say. gentlemen it has been a an honor and a privilege to serve with you uh thank you so much as we face a world where you know maybe you got a year left i don't know it might be all over soon jason heiner we know that you will go down with the ship covering ai deep view that the deep view dot com really great stuff i have to say i it's on my regular uh daily uh beat watch because there's so much good stuff in there and and the thing is very insightful useful uh stuff that is not sensationalist but uh but really talks about what's going on and i you know it's i think this is very valuable very valuable stuff i'm really glad you went there they needed they needed you and uh i think uh you found a great beat thank you i appreciate that subscribe.thedeepview.com for those who, you know, aren't subscribers and would like to.

2:47:39It's free. We also, yeah, it is free. And we are always trying to, you know, and we do three stories a day. There's a lot of noise out there. It's a very noisy world, especially in AI. We pick three stories a day and we try to help you be smarter about, you know, three things. And in every story we have what's called our deeper view, where we're trying to not just sort of throw news at you, but we're trying to unpack it and help you understand it. And so that's our mission. Tell me,

2:48:09Ant Pruitt:you've got something new that I'm very interested in called Neo. Tell me about that. That we do or the Neo lab, the story of the Neo lab. Norton Neo is the deep use official AI browser partner. Oh, this is an advertisement. It's an ad. So sorry. Yes. Oh, you fooled me. Cut this part out. They didn't pay for that. Oh no, that's cool though it's a it's a it's a ai sidebar i don't know that's interesting the security company neo yeah they they are uh they are a partner of ours interesting um so that's why this was free to sign up for the newsletter because then i got that little ad there that's okay yeah there you go there you go i read i read the like i i was using uh ox alpha for a long time in my local, it turned out to be GLM 5.3 and I love it, Flash.

2:49:01Ant Pruitt:I love it. Yes. And there's all sorts of great stuff in here if you're interested. I think Nat's doing a great job. You're doing a great job. Good team. TheDeepView.com. Owen Thomas at the San Francisco Business Times. Kim, do people read the Business Times if they're not in San Francisco? We do have out-of-market subscribers for sure. Sometimes people subscribe to our national network because we have sister publications in 40 markets, and we really get that local view of the economy. I was going to say my main complaint about MetaConnect is they're doing it as a virtual live stream instead of holding it up in Fort Mason.

2:49:39They ought to be here like a real tech company generating traffic jams, buying sandwiches from local bellies. Mark Benioff didn't hold back, man. He took over San Francisco, man. Come on. You've got responsibilities.

2:49:55Ant Pruitt:And, you know, so tell me about this VC next door. What's the story? This is a really this is a really fun story. VCs have actually changed where they opened up offices in in San Francisco. We did a study to be south of the market mostly. Just the past. Yeah. They love South Park. That was a classic South Park where Twitter was. That's where Twitter started. Yeah. You know, and the idea was and Instagram. Right. And so the idea was you put your VC office in South Park and you have a better job of running into the next founder, the founder of the next Twitter or the next Instagram, just wandering past the slide in South Park.

2:50:35Well, South Park and South of Market generally took a big hit during the pandemic. It's not where founders want to go. There's a lot of new offices up near Salesforce Tower and the Salesforce Transit Center. in fact that's now called ai alley so you generally want to you want to be like near mission street um you want to be um near jackson square where uh where johnny ive has his design

2:51:04Ant Pruitt:lab um or had it really it's in san francisco it's not in london yeah no it's in jackson square he bought a ton of property up here so the vcs all want to be you know all want to be around here And in fact, I interviewed one VC. I walked down this little alley in the Northern Financial District every day called Commercial Street, and it's a pedestrianized, really, really pleasant place. And I noticed there were like two VC signs that went up across the street from each other. And I got the story from her. She wanted, in her words, a big effing sign. And so she put one up, and then the venture capitalist literally across the street put one up for his firm.

2:51:44Ant Pruitt:have you done stories on the billboards the san francisco bus cards did actually we did a story on ai billboards it's crazy if you didn't know if you weren't into tech if you weren't a listener of this show and you wanted to san francisco you would go i don't understand what they're advertising it's it's it's so uh inside baseball everywhere it's hysterical you know the and the um the The most interesting comment we got from a chief marketing officer of one of the firms that bought these billboards is that buying a billboard sends a signal that you're able to buy a billboard. In other words, you have money.

2:52:24You are a real company. You're not just someone who bought a.ai domain. And it's effective because people take a meeting with you because they're like, oh, yeah, I saw your billboard. I had no idea what your company did, but I, you know, like, yeah, you're a real company. I'm going to meet with you.

2:52:45Ant Pruitt:I just want to give credit to, I don't know if it's Alex or your headline writer, but I want to give credit to whoever created this story. San Francisco bra pioneer clasps on to nationwide expansion plan. Is that you, Owen? i think that actually was uh that was that was our retail reporter alex barrera it was alex okay yeah he's uh i did get an aw shucks into a uh a recent headline about the expansion of uh hog island oyster uh to to the east bay so oh yes well that's our own hog island is our own local they dropped anchor at their first east bay location yes yeah we that's our local uh Oyster company up here.

2:53:34Ant Pruitt:They're the best oysters in the world. Oh, my God, they're good. Frankly, you know, part of the strategy here is these headlines are only going to be written by human beings. And they should read that way. So you wrote the opening sentence, well, shucks. Fresh oysters and cocktails from a premier local harvester are coming to new territory. Well, shucks. You know, I'm a managing editor in my journey because sometimes I manage to edit. I love it. For those who are not oyster fanatics, that's what you do when you open an oyster. You're shucking it. You're an oyster shucker. You're cutting an adductor muscle, which I hope never happens to me in the gym.

2:54:19Ant Pruitt:No. Good Lord. That's why those scary oyster knives, those are scary. Yeah. Keep those away from my hamstrings. Yeah. No kidding. Thank you, Owen. It's great to see you. Dan Patterson, always a pleasure with your four-year-old. I can't believe their baby's four now. Yeah. And your health's good? Everything's going all right? Yeah. Blood tests every month and the numbers are much better. Way, way to go. A little scare there. That's good. It's good to see all three of you. We do This Week in Tech every Sunday afternoon with my favorite people. That's always the, I look forward to every Sunday. I hope you do too.

2:54:54Ant Pruitt:2 to 5 p.m pacific 5 to 8 eastern 2100 utc you can watch us live get your meta specs on and uh and go to either the club twit discord where all the club members hang out thank you club members for your support or you can watch on youtube twitch x.com facebook linkedin or click a kick kick.com we stream there after the fact of course you can get copies of the show we have audio and video on our website, twit.tv. There's a YouTube channel with the video. Great way to share little clips with people. That's what YouTube is so good for. And of course, best way to do it, support. I'm a big believer in open podcasting using RSS feeds.

2:55:35Ant Pruitt:There are people who would like to shut that down. You support us when you subscribe to your favorite podcast client, because that's the way it ought to be. We thank you so much for your support. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next week but for now another twit is in the can he's amazing