Intelligent Machines 805: Doomers, Gloomers, Bloomers, and Zoomers

Summary

Intelligent Machines 805: Doomers, Gloomers, Bloomers, and Zoomers – Detailed Summary

Release Date: February 6, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Mike Elgin
Guest: Zach Kass, Former Head of Go-to-Market at OpenAI
Podcast Network: TWiT.tv

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1. Introduction and Rebranding

Leo Laporte inaugurates the episode by announcing the show's rebranding from "This Week in Google" to "Intelligent Machines," reflecting a deeper focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI). He maintains the familiar panelists, Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis, while introducing Mike Elgin as a temporary stand-in for Paris Martineau.

Leo Laporte [00:00]:
"It's time for Intelligent Machines, a brand new show. Well, it's the same old show, really. We've rebranded."

2. Guest Introduction: Zach Kass

The show welcomes Zach Kass, formerly of OpenAI, who served as the head of Go-to-Market from 2021 to 2023. Zach is an AI accelerationist, advocating for the rapid advancement and integration of AI technologies into various sectors.

Leo Laporte [04:05]:
"We've got the former head of Go-to-Market for OpenAI, Zach Kass. Thank you for being here."

Zach shares his personal reasons for leaving OpenAI, citing family health issues and a desire to return home. He expresses optimism about his decision, mentioning personal milestones such as meeting his wife.

Zach Kass [04:12]:
"My parents got sick... I grew up in Santa Barbara, by the way, so moving home also."

3. AI Taxonomy: Doomers, Gloomers, Bloomers, and Zoomers

Jeff Jarvis introduces Reid Hoffman's taxonomy of AI perspectives, categorizing enthusiasts and critics into Doomers, Gloomers, Bloomers, and Zoomers. This framework serves as the foundation for the episode's discussion.

Jeff Jarvis [07:35]:
"Doomers are the people who think it's going to destroy us all... Bloomers... Zoomers are accelerationists."

Zach Kass discusses his alignment within this taxonomy, identifying primarily as a Zoomer but expressing reservations about labeling.

Zach Kass [07:35]:
"I think it's a nice taxonomy because it's, like, evenly divided. But, like, in reality... I don't think I'm willing to stand by my belief that I studied history at Berkeley."

4. AI Accelerationism and Societal Improvement

Zach Kass elaborates on his accelerationist stance, arguing that technological innovation, particularly AI, is the primary driver of societal progress. He contends that free-market dynamics, bolstered by AI advancements, will inherently solve many of the world's enduring problems without extensive governmental intervention.

Zach Kass [06:53]:
"Technology is the single thing that consistently moves the world forward. I certainly believe in its power to continue doing so."

He envisions a post-scarcity world where abundant resources, powered by AI and innovations like fusion energy, lead to global peace and prosperity.

Zach Kass [09:42]:
"I think technology solves problems. I think if you look back long enough, you realize that almost every problem that we've ever faced is not solved by policy, but in fact solved by innovation."

5. AI Safety and Potential Dangers

The conversation shifts to AI safety concerns, referencing Steve Gibson's show on AI jailbreaking. While Leo and Jeff express skepticism about the feasibility of securing AI systems against misuse, Zach Kass remains optimistic about the ability of technological countermeasures to mitigate such risks.

Leo Laporte [10:42]:
"We talked about Steve Gibson doing a whole show on AI jailbreaking... there's not an AI that hasn't been used to create malware."

Zach Kass [11:25]:
"It's very easy for people to point at these outlier events that could be caused by technology. And for every outlier event that technology can cause, there's a solution to that event that technology will create."

Mike Elgin introduces the issue of incentives, highlighting that companies may lack motivation to address societal harms caused by AI, such as addiction to social media platforms.

Mike Elgin [12:19]:
"If you can, if you profit or we benefit from people's lives being kind of messed up, then their lives are going to be messed up."

6. Consulting and Advising on AI Integration

Zach Kass discusses his current role as an AI consultant, advising governments and Fortune 1000 companies on integrating AI technologies to navigate the rapidly evolving landscape. His work focuses on identifying trends and preparing organizations to leverage AI effectively.

Zach Kass [20:58]:
"We try to point to trends and interesting events on the horizon that give people some way to ground where things are going."

He emphasizes simplifying AI adoption tailored to the specific needs and markets of his clients, reducing the overwhelm often experienced by executives.

Zach Kass [22:05]:
"We just help businesses figure out, do their constituents actually want this thing?"

7. Deep Seek and AI Models from China

The episode delves into the emergence of Deep Seek, an AI model from China, and its implications. Zach Kass views Deep Seek's open-source nature as a positive development, promoting competition and democratizing AI capabilities. However, concerns are raised about national security, particularly regarding data privacy and the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) data exfiltration through apps like TikTok.

Zach Kass [25:07]:
"Deep Seek R1 is a huge win and we should celebrate it... consider it a win insofar as it's challenging the norm that the frontier model costs a lot."

Mike Elgin critiques the hype around Deep Seek, pointing out inaccuracies in reported development costs and questioning its practical impact compared to established models from OpenAI and Google.

Mike Elgin [37:11]:
"The data point of $5.6 million... is a completely BS number."

Jeff Jarvis acknowledges the positive aspects of increased competition but remains cautious about the potential for continued AI safety breaches.

8. AI Ethics and Bias in Models

The hosts discuss the political biases inherent in various AI models, noting that many mainstream chatbots trend towards a centrist or left-leaning stance due to moderation policies. In contrast, models like Yann LeCun's advocate for AI limitations based on their understanding of real-world intelligence.

Jeff Jarvis [08:10]:
"I'm a little bit of all of the above, depending on my mindset at the moment."

Zach Kass [09:34]:
"But it is so easy for people to point at these like outlier events that could be caused by technology... measures and countermeasures is this proud tradition that AI will observe just like every other technology."

9. Future Guests and Continued Exploration

Leo Laporte hints at future episodes featuring prominent AI figures like Ray Kurzweil, aiming to provide listeners with diverse expert insights into the evolving AI landscape.

Leo Laporte [16:15]:
"We have AI news, and I want to ask Mike why his headline at Machine Society is why you can deep six the deep seek hype... we're going stealing his name, but he couldn't make it. But he will be here."

10. Conclusion and Next Steps

As the episode wraps up, Leo reiterates the show's commitment to exploring AI's multifaceted impact, blending expert interviews with timely AI news. The rebranding to "Intelligent Machines" signifies a broader and more nuanced approach to discussing AI beyond mere chatbots, encompassing advancements in medicine, healthcare, education, and more.

Leo Laporte [28:10]:
"We thought we needed a show that covered this. And I thought the name Intelligent Machines was apt instead of something about AI because we're really not just talking about, you know, AI chatbots. We're talking about, you know, the computing at the edge."

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Notable Quotes:

• Zach Kass [06:23]:
  "Technology is the single thing that consistently moves the world forward."

• Leo Laporte [07:35]:
  "Sometimes I'm a doomer, sometimes I'm a psychotic zoomer."

• Jeff Jarvis [08:10]:
  "You think that's a nutty point of view, Zach?"

• Zach Kass [09:42]:
  "I think technology solves problems... Drive down the cost of water, drive down the cost of food..."

• Zach Kass [23:50]:
  "We invented something out of necessity and we used it right away... future is actually not going to be informed by what a machine can do. It's going to be informed by what we actually want that machine to do."

• Jeff Jarvis [25:07]:
  "There's a huge difference between DeepSeek R1, the model breakthrough, which I will remind everyone, is open source."

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Key Insights:

1. AI as a Catalyst for Progress: The episode underscores the belief that AI, as a technological innovation, is pivotal in driving societal advancements, potentially more so than past revolutions like the Industrial Revolution or the invention of the printing press.

2. Accelerationism vs. Regulation: A core debate highlights the tension between rapid AI development (accelerationism) and the need for regulatory measures to ensure safety and ethical use.

3. Global AI Competition: The emergence of models like Deep Seek from China signifies a competitive and open-source-driven AI landscape, challenging the dominance of Western AI firms and democratizing access to advanced AI technologies.

4. AI Safety Challenges: Despite advancements, securing AI systems against misuse remains a significant concern, with experts differing on the feasibility of implementing effective countermeasures.

5. Consulting and Advising: Zach Kass's role exemplifies the increasing demand for expertise in integrating AI into business and government operations, navigating both technological and societal implications.

6. Ethical and Political Biases: The discussion acknowledges inherent biases in AI models based on their training and moderation policies, raising questions about neutrality and fairness in AI-driven decision-making.

7. Future of AI Integration: The rebranding to "Intelligent Machines" reflects an evolving focus on AI's comprehensive role across various sectors, beyond conventional applications like chatbots, encompassing areas like healthcare, education, and security.

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Conclusion:

The inaugural episode of "Intelligent Machines" successfully sets the stage for an in-depth exploration of AI's impact on society, technology, and various industries. By engaging with experts like Zach Kass and dissecting contemporary AI developments, the show promises to deliver insightful and balanced discussions on one of the most transformative technologies of our time.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines, a brand new show. Well, it's the same old show, really. We've rebranded. This week in Google. We're going to cover AI and we've got some interesting stuff to talk about, including Zach Kass, who was the head of Go to market for OpenAI for a couple of years. He is, by his admission, an AI accelerationist. We'll also talk about the latest AI news. Mike Elgin will be filling in for Paris Martineau. Jeff Jarvis is here. Episode 1 and episode 805 of Intelligent Machines is next. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. This is Intelligent Machines, episode 805, recorded Wednesday, February 5, 2025. Doomers, gloomers, bloomers and zoomers. Well, hello everybody, and welcome to a brand new show that's the same old show this week in Google, now renamed Intelligent Machines. And let me fill you in a little bit before we introduce our guest and our panelists for the show today. The show is still going to have Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. We're obviously going to continue being as silly as we ever are, but what we're going to try to do is get you some expert information about this rapidly changing world of AI. So every week we're going to start the show with an expert of one form or another. Then we'll talk about AI news, and after that, everything will descend into chaos and become just the same old show it ever was. Jeff Jarvis is here, professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate.

[Mike Elgin]

School of Journalism.

[Leo Laporte]

At the City University of New York, now at Montclair State University and SUNY Stony Brook. Hi, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hello, boss.

[Leo Laporte]

Welcome to Intelligent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I am.

[Leo Laporte]

You are what? We're in O M. I am. Yeah, it's a shorter name. I think it's simpler.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We start off with the I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm. It is Paris's birthday, so she has decided to have a fine meal instead of joining us today. But that's okay, because guess who's with us? Mike Elgin. He's in Sicily right now with his Gastro Nomad Adventures Machinesociety. AI is his newsletter so covers AI, so it's a perfect person to have on. Thank you for being here.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, it's great to see you. Thank you, Leo. Glad to be here. Glad to be here on this big change.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's, it's auspicious.

[Mike Elgin]

Long overdue.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you, you know, you were regular on this Week in Google, but that was back in the days of Google plus.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes, yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Old enough to remember times have changed.

[Leo Laporte]

Just a little bit. So I think really, AI is probably the most important thing to happen in technology. You could say at least since the Internet or the advent of the personal computer. But I would say maybe even more than that, more like since the Industrial Revolution or the invention of the printing press. Jeff Jarvis Anyway, it's a very exciting area. It's changing like crazy and it's very difficult to understand. Even people working in it, I think, sometimes are puzzled by how AI works. So we're going to bring people on who are working in AI. In fact, next month, the person who coined the term intelligent machines, Ray Kurzweil, will join us. I've interviewed him several times in the past, and I'm very curious what he thinks. He's been saying the singularity was just around the corner, but now that it really feels like it might be. I can't wait to see what Ray has to say. Today. We've got the former head of Go to market for OpenAI. Zach Kass worked at OpenAI from 2021 to 2023. It's great to have you. He currently talks to groups and consults with industry about AI and the change that is a coming. Hi, Zach.

[Mike Elgin]

How are you?

[Leo Laporte]

It's great to have you. Why did you leave OpenAI? Just out of curiosity.

[Zach Kass]

It's not a story that I used to tell very often, but my parents got sick.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm sorry.

[Mike Elgin]

No, it's okay.

[Zach Kass]

I'm more willing to tell it now than ever. You can decide if you want to keep it in here. But it occurred to me that I kept talking about this future of abundance and the increasing importance of being human and community, and I wasn't actually honoring my ultimate code and then said, okay, I'm going to. I grew up in Santa Barbara, by the way, so moving home also.

[Leo Laporte]

You went home, basically, Yeah, I went.

[Zach Kass]

Home for some other compelling reasons. So I moved home and my parents are okay now, which is great.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's fantastic news.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wonderful.

[Zach Kass]

Yeah, yeah. The story. The story ends well. And I. I met my now wife.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, even better.

[Zach Kass]

Yeah. So it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, you don't have time to have a wife when you're head of Go to market at OpenAI would guess wives. What's that?

[Mike Elgin]

Life.

[Leo Laporte]

What's that? Why did you. Maybe a better question would be, why did you join OpenAI?

[Zach Kass]

Well, I don't think I could have come up with a reason not to. So many of my friends thought it was a head scratcher because it didn't have a thing to sell. At the time, the GPT3 had maybe $2 million in revenue. @ the time.

[Leo Laporte]

It was really early in the public.

[Zach Kass]

We had just released GPT3. We had just released GPT3. Peter Wellander, the head of applied, the VP of applied, pinged my old boss, Lucas Biewald, now the CEO of Weights and Biases. And Lucas said, listen, there's one guy who's ever sold large language models successfully that I know of, and it's this guy. And they introduced me. And so the rest is history. And I would have swept the floors. I sort of knew. I mean, I didn't sort of knew. I knew what was going on. So when people are like, why did you join? I was like, how could I have. How could I have not joined? I probably would have done that job for free.

[Leo Laporte]

You have said, would you call yourself an AI accelerationist? You've said, AI, as I just said at the beginning of the show, is the most significant invention ever, practically.

[Zach Kass]

I think it's probably fair to label me an accelerationist. I mean, if I'm not willing to call myself that, then I don't think I'm willing to stand by my belief that I studied history at Berkeley. And if you study history, you realize that the world just gets better all the time. And then if you study computer science, you figure out why. And all of the reasons that we should be worried about technology, I get. But it is true that technology is the single thing that consistently moves the world forward. I certainly believe in its power to continue doing so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Reid Hoffman's new book, just out, he starts off with a taxonomy of AI, thinking there's doomers, gloomers, Bloomers, and, oh, hell, what's the fourth? So doomers are the people who think it's going to destroy us all. Gloomers are the ones who say, don't forget about environment and all this stuff, you bozos. Oh, Zoomers are accelerationists. And Bloomers, which is Reid, is people who do think there's some concerns and some controls, but the benefits are going to be great, and let's plan them and see them grow. So in that taxonomy, Zach, where would you put yourself? Zoomer or Bloomer?

[Zach Kass]

Here's my issue with Bloom. So here's my issue with these things. Obviously, no Zoomer, unless they're a psychopath, is, like, disregard humanity, right? So I think, like, it's a nice taxonomy because it's, like, evenly divided. But, like, in reality, you know, Reid puts himself exactly where everyone would want to be.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a Little bit of all of the above, depending on my mindset at the moment. Sometimes I'm a doomer, sometimes I'm a psychotic zoomer. You know, I feel like, let's just go back and forth. Yep, let's just let it go and see what happens. You think that's a nutty point of view, Zach?

[Zach Kass]

No, but what I'm going to say here is, like, someone like Reid has sort of. You know, I have a lot of respect for Reid for obvious reasons, but Reid has, like, taken some pretty strong positions in the past on things like, for example, Donald Trump and said, this is a person who's going to make the world worse. And I actually don't give enough credit to politicians anymore of robust economies to actually make the world worse. I think that the problem now is can we get ourselves out of a lot of situations that I think technology can solve for? So what I mean by this is the easy thing to say is I'm a bloomer. And what we should do is just carefully manage AI. But that just introduces a bunch of excuses for special interest and puts us in a new set of issues around policy. And the EU is going to experience this very soon. I also don't think we should run rampant with this thing. There should be some policy. But I think it's so easy to say we need to control for all these things, when in actuality we are fast approaching a world where I think the free market ends up solving so many problems that the government promised to solve a long time ago. And that's just going to be one of these weird things where people wake up and go, wait a second, why do I pay 50% into a system that's actually just gatekeeping, abundant education, abundant healthcare, et cetera?

[Leo Laporte]

So you believe that AI is going to solve these problems, not just the free market, but AI itself is going to solve these problems?

[Zach Kass]

I think that technology solves problems. I think that if you look back long enough, you realize that almost every problem that we've ever faced is not solved by policy, but in fact solved by innovation. What actually ends up happening is we just invent tools that make us more efficient. And then over time, these tools make what used to be a luxury, a commodity. And then the world just gets better. Driving down the cost of water, driving down the cost of food, driving down the cost of the Internet, driving down the cost of electricity. These are the actual things that move the world forward. The lower the inference cost gets on AI, the more abundant AI gets, and basically the. The more distributed it gets and that's my take on broadly technology. Fusion energy is like I think the great unlock to world peace, quite honestly. Like abundant energy leads to abundant foodstuffs, leads to abundant water, leads to just like suddenly people like why are we fighting? Like we live in a, we live in truly a post scarcity world. This is how the world works. By the way, I don't think this is like a super hot take.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't you worry a little bit though about the dangers of AI, or are you not worried about that at all? We talked last yesterday, Steve Gibson did a whole show on AI jailbreaking and there is not an AI out there currently that hasn't been jailbroken. Which means there's not an AI that hasn't been used to for instance create malware or his example. I said well what, so what? So big deal. His example is well what if you were able to use an AI to create a toxin that we never heard of before?

[Jeff Jarvis]

We had no, you can't anticipate every possible bad thing. And more importantly to use machine we're.

[Leo Laporte]

Stuck with you cannot protect. Yeah, there's no AI. Safety is an illusion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It seems to be, you agree for the printing press.

[Zach Kass]

So again I think it is very easy for people to point at these like outlier events that could be caused by technology. And for every outlier event that technology can cause, there's a solution to that event that technology will create. Measures and countermeasures is this proud tradition that AI will observe just like every other technology. Just the same way that the cost of an attack on a bank has just declined every year because banks are like, oh, we figured it out, we know how to stop these things now and we know how to make sure that, you know, we don't get taken for a bunch of money. The reality here is, you know, for every toxin that's going to be created, someone's going to come up with an anecdote to that toxin.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, they will only if the incentives are there to do so. So if you think about the application of algorithms and AI to social media, for example, you have a situation where the millions of people who were completely captured by tick tock and, and you know, they rearrange their lives around it. There are other examples that are sort of outside of AI, like video gaming. There are people who literally video play video games until they die oftentimes in Asia just completely captured by these things. And this would be solvable by technology for sure. But there are no incentives for the companies to financial actually solve those problems because it's not a problem for them. It's not a problem for meta that people are addicted to its social networks. See what I'm saying? So this is a problem that we have with incentives. I mean, I think it's reasonable to say that advanced technologies and probably AI is another example, generally, as a category, make a lot of things worse and a lot of things better at the same time. And it's all about the incentives to make things better. If, if we can, if, if we profit or we benefit from people's lives being kind of messed up, then their lives are going to be messed up.

[Zach Kass]

Yeah. Again, I'm just going to take the other side of this, which is like, if you could reinvent the Internet, uninvent the Internet, you wouldn't. Social media is one of these blights of the Internet, but it's a social experiment. And what's, I think, fascinating about all these things, if you had looked at the United States in 1950, your safe assumption would have been that we all were gonna die of alcohol poisoning.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Zach Kass]

And people have such incredible recency bias. Like they're willing to look at social media and be like, there's never been anything worse to humanity. And by the way, I think it's an incredible blight. I don't use social media. I have someone on my team do LinkedIn and Twitter for me. Fine, it's a cost of doing business for me. But the reality is, what we know is that it doesn't make us happier and humans actually default back to our happiness function. This is why you're seeing an entire generation, despite the that every alcohol company wants to sell you alcohol, Mike. There's a new generation behind you that's like, hey, I don't want to drink that much. And you're going to see this with social media. For every measure, there's a countermeasure and things revert back to the mean. And my point is simply let's create optionality. Let's create a world where people can do whatever they want and actually trust that people, in the end sort of align to their, to their own best interest, which actually, it turns out, is time with friends and family and physical community. And we keep coming back to that place, which is why we're creating more and more better alternatives to the Internet all the time. Concerts have never been more popular. Sporting events have never been more popular. Theater has never been more popular. Like, all these offline events are sort of like resurging because people are like, hey, you know what? I actually don't want to doom Scroll. I don't want to drink. Right. Like these things. This is happening already.

[Leo Laporte]

We're talking to Zach Kass. He is the former head of Go to market for OpenAI. He's a consultant and his new book. When is the book going to come out? It's called the Next AI and the Expansion of Human Potential.

[Zach Kass]

End of March.

[Leo Laporte]

End of March. So it's done? You finished writing it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Zach Kass]

Now I just sit there and regret everything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, tell me about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff has some experience with that. The subtitle is the Next Renaissance AI and the Expansion of Human. You're very bullish about AI. You say, thanks to the coming emergence of artificial general intelligence, this chapter in our species story will be marked above all by a massive surge in human potential and productivity, which will unlock profound advances in science, technology, health, education, robotics and the political economy. I love it. Let's be optimistic of AGI.

[Zach Kass]

Oh, that's a funny one, Jeff. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's kind of vital to this discussion because nobody really ever defines it.

[Zach Kass]

You know what's interesting is it's the one thing that I wish we hadn't even mentioned in the book. But like, at the time, look, it's a marketing term. It's clearly a marketing term. We shouldn't call it anything else. I consider it human intellectual equivalence. That's probably what I would call it, human intellectual equivalence. And honestly, we're probably there.

[Leo Laporte]

If we're not there, we're awfully close, especially if you take a look at the reasoning models.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yann LeCun says we're lucky if we get in the near term to be a cat.

[Zach Kass]

But John LeClun has died on this hill. I don't think you could walk him off this position.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I think he's right. I think he's absolutely right. I think that. That until it gets a sense of reality and real life and knows that when the ball falls off a table, it's actually still a ball, it's not human intelligence.

[Mike Elgin]

I think it's.

[Zach Kass]

By the way, I don't think a cat can create a video. I'm just not sure that that's right at all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, if we go back to the right tool for it, this is an.

[Leo Laporte]

Argument that we're going to hear a lot on this show over the next few months and years until actually provably here. And then Jeff will have to say, well, I guess I was wrong.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go ahead, Mike.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. A cat can't make a video, but an AI robot can't Play with a ball of str. I think it's reasonable.

[Leo Laporte]

That which is more useful.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, to the cat string is way more useful.

[Zach Kass]

We could program a robot to play with a ball of string. We certainly.

[Mike Elgin]

You could make a robot simulate playing with a ball of string, but it's not playing. My point is, the problem with AGI, I think, obviously, is that AI is already way, way better at humans at a whole bunch of things and nowhere near as good as humans at a bunch of other things. So fine, there's. The math is impossible. You can't basically say, well, in general, on average, we've reached AGI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's why you're right, Zach. The term is. Is difficult.

[Zach Kass]

It's just a market.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a market.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let me ask the other challenging question, which is, as I'm curious, your experience at OpenAI and what happened there with the whole board kerfuffle and everything else, the question of. Of safety, the definitions of safety. And it's always struck me that the doomers have kind of ruined the definition of the word because they overblow that, too. Oh, my God. We can destroy mankind and talk about P. Doom and all that. Where did you see yourself in the culture of OpenAI around those questions of doom and safety?

[Zach Kass]

None of this is going to surprise you. I mean, you're just have me, by the way, have me back when something goes terribly wrong to shame me, I suppose even then I'm going to die on this hill, Jeff. And here's my only point. If someone's like, how are you so sure this is going to go right? If you believe the world's going to get a whole lot worse, the onus is on you to prove why. Because we crawled out of caves once. I mean, where we have come these days.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to go back in, but keep going.

[Zach Kass]

See, I actually, I know you're tongue in cheek, but I think there is something so pernicious about the idea that we are somehow regressing, because, in fact, the reality is today is the best day ever to be born and tomorrow will be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I agree, I agree.

[Zach Kass]

But, Jeff, I think your point is like an interesting one, which is a lot of people hearken back to these romantic days of old, when, in fact, we have made so much progress from the time when, you know, my dad's favorite, you know, in Kennedy. Oh, I wish we still had Kennedy. Yeah, well, we had a bunch of other things that were pretty messed up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's why I don't buy P. Doom.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's why that's why I think that that that's an egotistical effort by certain AI boys to say I'm so powerful I can destroy mankind. That's BS And I think mankind is smarter than that. And we'll figure this out.

[Zach Kass]

Look, that's why I said it's not going to surprise you. I totally agree. And I think if you believe that the world is going to end, you have a major onus to prove that we are going to rebuke a lot of history. You'd have to reverse an incredible amount of historical precedent to actually believe that.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things you do since you've left OpenAI is you consult with companies like Coca Cola, Morgan Stanley, the White House. What do you tell them? If I were an executive at a big corporation, what do you tell them about how they should prepare for this new AI driven world?

[Zach Kass]

The advisory business we run spends time with a lot of different governments, all democracies, well, mostly democracies in the world or US allies. And we also support a lot of Fortune 1000 companies across sort of policy, science and applied and sort of the breadth of how the technology is going to impact them. We work with a group that focuses on their Social Security and one of the questions they're asking is when are people going to retire in the future? And actually does the retirement age make sense in a world where technology is so easy to use as it's getting easier, can we actually wean people into retirement instead of slamming the book shut on their working chapter? So we touch sort of everything. What we try to do is point to trends and interesting events on the horizon that give people some way to ground where things are going. Because for most of the boardrooms and the executives we work with, it's just whiplash. I mean it's so overwhelming.

[Leo Laporte]

It is for us. I can imagine what it is if you're trying to run a business in this. That's exactly right.

[Zach Kass]

So a lot of what we're trying to do is just make sense of the technology vis a vis whatever $100 billion company they're running and whatever multi trillion dollar market they're in so that they can actually apply it in simple ways instead of it feeling like they've gone to plaid some spaceballs reference where just like everyone's holding on for dear life because the ship's just moving too fast.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a challenging world for all of us. And I think the biggest challenge at this point is under even understanding what's happening. Do you feel like you understand what's happening Zach?

[Zach Kass]

Well, that's a great question.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels fairly unpredictable to me. I mean, I agree that the Arkansas of technological history bends towards good things, but there's also a few bumps in the road along the way, inevitably.

[Zach Kass]

Okay, so from a scientific standpoint, I think it's actually pretty clear to understand what's happening. I mean, we were building what we observed early on. Boris Power, the head of research engineering at OpenAI, coined this term of unmetered intelligence, which is how we explained what we were building towards to executives that were exploring OpenAI. And unmetered intelligence is like a thing that is a term that I love to use. It's like free intelligence. The path to that makes sense to me totally. How humans respond to it doesn't like.

[Leo Laporte]

No, unpredictable.

[Zach Kass]

I cannot tell you. One of the things that we study in the next Renaissance and one of the things that I study at UVA and one of the things we talk a ton about is this new divergence between a societal threshold, what do we want a machine to do?

[Jeff Jarvis]

And.

[Zach Kass]

And a technological threshold, what can a machine do? Because these things used to sort of happen in parallel. There was a convergence and a symmetry between these two things. We invented something out of necessity and we used it right away. And then we started to have this divergence in this post scarcity, post barbarism world. The obvious best example is nuclear power. We invent nuclear power and we go, we have enough coal, we don't want to run the risk of a nuclear reactor exploding, so let's just shelf this technology. And of course, we regret that now, but it's very interesting to consider that the future is actually not going to be informed by what a machine can do. That question won't become interesting In a world where machines can do most things. It's going to be informed by what we actually want that machine to do. And societal thresholds that we are willing to cross become the most important thing. And so that's where actually a lot of our time is now spent on the research side and on the advisory side, helping businesses figure out, do their constituents actually want this thing?

[Leo Laporte]

I know you got a complaint.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're going to.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to. I'm going to ask you one last question, because we got to let Zach go. I'm sorry, Jeff. Deep Seek kind of set a shock through the AI industry. Sam, in an AMA on Reddit, said we were on the wrong side of history. What's your reaction to what happened with Deep Seek?

[Zach Kass]

I got kind of lucky because I read the deep SEQ paper in May 2023 and started talking about it to people. And then I got invited to UBS's Greater China Summit in Shanghai in early January and spoke about it there because my message has consistently been these models are converging, their frontier will lead. But it's not, you know, there is a clear commoditization happening at the research level in part because the inference costs are just driving down so far so fast. And so I got a bunch of points when that came about and then a bunch of people called and my answer is really simple. And this is, I think, where we can leave it. There is a huge difference between DeepSeek R1, the model breakthrough, which I will remind everyone, is open source. It's clear improvement in the technology. We should consider it a win insofar as it's challenging the norm that the frontier model costs a lot. Deep seek the app and deep seek the app is hugely problematic and something that we should actually seriously concern ourselves with with respect to national security.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it exfiltrates everything in China.

[Zach Kass]

Yeah, I mean, the CCP has requirements around all app developers. I mean, I've never downloaded a Chinese company app, TikTok, Shein, Temu, RedNote. None of these apps should be downloaded by a US user, quite honestly, simply because the CCP gets all the data. It's not even that you don't have to trust the app developer. It's just like kind of a risky position. But the model R1 is a huge win and we should all celebrate it. In a world where everyone's clamoring for more ecologically friendly AI and, you know, more fair and distributed AI, this is like, this is a great signal that in fact we're not going to live in a technological hegemony.

[Leo Laporte]

It confirms your, your optimism. Go ahead, Mike.

[Mike Elgin]

You, you use perplexity. I think you're a pro user, right? And one of the models they use now is R1. And yes, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

I used it this morning. I was talking with Paul Thurat, he says, I was watching tv, he's in Mexico. And the president of Mexico said something about changing the way we vote, but I couldn't find the news story about it. I asked R1, he asked, by the way, co pilot Gemini Gemini and chat GPT. And all of them said, hey, we can't talk about elections. A lot of safety there. R1 had no problem with it and gave me a very nice summary of all of.

[Mike Elgin]

I grilled it about Tiananmen Square and all this stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

And it don't Ask about Tiananmen squares.

[Mike Elgin]

No, no, no, it's fine. That's my point.

[Leo Laporte]

We gotta let Zach go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's gotta. All right.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, Zach, it really is a pleasure. We'll have you back soon when you have a little bit more time. The book the Next Renaissance AI and the Expansion of Human Potential comes out in March, and His website is ZachKass.com Z A C K K A S S. Thank you, Zach. Make your flight.

[Zach Kass]

Thanks for having me, guys. Travel safe coming back and we can. We can talk about all the things that are going right and wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. With any luck, there won't be too much of the latter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See you guys.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, you're watching Intelligent Machines, brand new show. It's really the old show this week in Google. We just. We did a little Googleectomy and we. We found we've been talking a lot about AI in general over the last couple of years. It is, I mean, I think we all agree, probably the most exciting area right now in technology. And Mike, you've done the same thing with your substack. I mean, you've focused, you've refocused on AI as well. So we thought we needed a show that covered this. And I thought the name Intelligent Machines was apt instead of something about AI because we're really not just talking about, you know, AI chatbots. We're talking about, you know, the computing at the edge. You're surrounded now by machines with intelligence of all.

[Mike Elgin]

It's fascinating to me. Yeah, it's fascinating to me, the obsession with the chatbot end of AI. I do enormous research for my, my Foundry column and also for machine society. And I'm looking at all aspects of AI and like, literally, it seems like in terms of the news, the breakthroughs, the, you know, what's literally new, 90% of it is all kinds of incredible science that's happening. Medicine, serious advancements in, like, you know, in diagnosing diseases and, and, and also doing studies using AI. And so I think the. The public has a very skewed view when they hear AI. They think chatgpt. But actually that's on in the larger scheme of things, a kind of a rounding error in terms of how important it is. AI is, is being applied very, very broadly and in fact, in some really interesting. That I'll talk about when we get to my thing of the week.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good, Very good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That'll be about four hours from now.

[Leo Laporte]

But no, no, that's the other thing. I think we're going to try to make the show a Little bit more concise. We'll see. Good luck. Paris has the day off. Happy birthday, Paris. She'll be back next week. Are you going to not be here, though, next week, Jeff?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I'm here. I'm here.

[Mike Elgin]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. Who's not going to be here? I'm not going to be here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What are you doing?

[Mike Elgin]

I knew it was somebody.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa and I, for her birthday and our anniversary, are going to tuc, Arizona for the International Gem and Mineral Show. I don't know. I think you both know that Lisa's kind of into rocks. She married me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In your head. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

So I thought that was just a musical reference.

[Leo Laporte]

That also. Anyway, I won't be here next week, but the whole team will reassemble in a couple of weeks, and we've got some. We're already booking some really interesting guests. I'm. I'm very excited about Rick Kurzweil. I had hoped to have him for the inaugural episode since we're stealing his name, but he couldn't make it. But he will be here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There is no theft, only tribute.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a tribute. Let's. Let's just say that we're gonna take a little break. We'll come back. We have AI news, and I want to ask Mike why his headline at Machine Society is why you can deep six the deep seek hype. I think that'll be an interesting conversation as well. You're watching Intelligent Machines, brand new on TWiT. We're so glad you're here for the show. If you are already subscriber to this week in Google. It's the same feed, the same web page. Nothing else has changed. Just the name and the album art, which I thank Anthony Nielsen for. And we finally got rid of those damn flutes in our theme song. I think that was the main reason I did this. And thank you to Benito Gonzalez, who created the theme song you heard at the beginning of the show. He is, of course, also our producer, technical director, editor, and all about Man About Town. Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. You know, the world is changing, isn't it? AI is, of course, part of that change.

[Mike Elgin]

But.

[Leo Laporte]

But what we used to think was great security with these firewall perimeter defenses. I mean, that was. That has been up to now, the default way to protect your enterprise. We've spent billions on firewalls. And of course, if you have a firewall, you need a vpn, right? So the employees can get into the network. What has that done to improve our Security. Well, Zach notwithstanding, breaches continue to rise. There was an 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks and a record payout of $75 million to ransomware goons in 2024. The truth is, traditional perimeter defense security tools don't help. They expand your attack surface. Those VPNs have public facing IPs. And of course the bad guys are working faster and better than ever because they're using AI tools to attack is a big problem right now. VPNs and firewalls also allow lateral movement. They just assume if you're in the network, you're one of us. So once the bad guy gets in, they can go anywhere in the network, look for valuable information, your emails, your customer information and so on, and encrypt it and send it out through the firewall. Because firewalls have a real hard time inspecting encrypted traffic at scale. You can see this is a disaster waiting to happen. And then just add on top of that the fact that hackers are exploiting this traditional infrastructure using AI. They're outpacing your defenses. It's time to rethink security. We can't let these bad guys win. They're in innovating and exploiting your defenses. You need Zscaler, Zero Trust and AI together stops attackers. Here's how. By hiding your attack surface. So your apps and your IPs are invisible. Right? Bad guys can't attack what they can't see. They also solve this lateral movement problem because Zero Trust does not assume that anybody inside the network is a good guy. Only users are only allowed to connect to specific apps that they have explicitly been allowed and authorized to use. Not they can't go anywhere in the network and access any data. Plus, Zscaler continuously verifies every request based on identity and context. And it keeps a log so you know what's going on. Simplifying security management with AI powered automation. In fact, it needs AI because Zscaler analyzes half a trillion daily transactions. Now, some of those are malicious and it uses the AI to find those malicious needles in that giant haystack. It's really a remarkable tool. Hackers can't attack what they can't see. You can protect your organization with Zscaler, Zero Trust and AI. Learn [e-mail] Security that's Zscaler or for our Canadian listeners, Z SC or British. Zscaler.com Security Security. Thank you Zscaler for supporting the brand new show. We appreciate your faith in intelligent machines. We're really glad to have you. And you support the show. When you go to that address, zscaler.com security. There is.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Let me stop you real quickly. Your screen share.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, of course you do. No wonder, no wonder I've been pulling stuff up. I rushed so fast to get into the meeting and get Zach out of here. Okay, if you, Mike and Jeff, if you're seeing a Firefly, if you're seeing Jeff's I'm seeing it newsletter, you just click the tab at the top that says whatever it says meeting. You should see me. How is it now? Bonito. You can see it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Good to go.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Okay. I don't know if it's a coincidence or if our timing was good, but there's a lot of AI news this week.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, there's always a lot of AI news if you, if you go looking for it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you even look down at the, at the lower half of the rundown?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. How. How many hundreds of lines of stories do we have? All right, well, let's see. Where should we start? I could just start giving you headlines bit by bit.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, I could tell you why Deep Seek hype is overhyped. I feel like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, this is the head that front page of MachineSociety AI.

[Mike Elgin]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Say a fast, cheap, open source, LLM based AI chatbot has emerged from China. Here's what's bugging me about all the hype, by the way. You may say it was hype, but the stock market believed every bit of it.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, that's part of the hype. Yeah, that's part of the hype. So the hype is based on three data points. One is the stock market. It wiped out a trillion dollars of value from USAI companies. No, it didn't. The stock market is fickle and most.

[Leo Laporte]

Of them are back.

[Mike Elgin]

Not a good. Yeah, it's not a good metric for anything. It's basically just everybody sort of speculating and knee jerk reacting. So that was one data point that is always overblown. A trillion dollars of value was not lost by US companies. The second one, the second data point is the downloads. They said, wow, there are more downloads than ChatGPT. Well, of course, ChatGPT has been available for months. Everybody who wants ChatGPT already downloaded it months ago. And so if you look at the downloads this week, you're likely to see the thing that just came out that everybody's talking about, that's in the news. Of course, the download metric is completely irrelevant. You notice that the, the breathless Media coverage didn't talk about total downloads over, you know, over the last like eight months. It's about, like this week, just. It's skewed information. But the biggest one, which, which basically is information that came after I wrote my newsletter, is that the data point of $5.6 million, which was bandied about as the training cost for, for Deep Seq, is a completely BS number. That's the cost of the final training run over, over two months. In fact, it didn't include research and development infrastructure, hardware acquisition, data preparation, and a whole bunch of other things. It didn't include the salaries, include any of that stuff. And if you do include that stuff, the cost of developing Deep seq was between 500 million and 1.6 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

Closer to the real thing, but, yeah, way cheaper still.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Still cheaper, Yep.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes, but it's not 5.6 million. And so I think the shock of that low number is, is sort of like part of the, of the, of the hype, as we can see now with the dust settling. Turns out Deep Seq didn't really make that big of an impact in anything. It's a new model that's being integrated. It's being folded in like we were talking about earlier, into perplexity. It's nice. It's not quite as powerful as some of the other tools that we have, but it's interesting. And it's also interesting that the. Unlike TikTok, where the hand of the Chinese Communist Party and of Chinese government censorship and all the rest is sort of hidden and difficult to tease out with any sort of accuracy, it's clear to see that, that the, that the app that that Deep Seq made available is a, is a commie propaganda. I mean, it's just like you ask it about Tiananmen Square and it just, it gives you an answer, then it wipes it away and gives you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I've seen the videos of that. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, but you'd expect that we do the same thing. And as I said, when you ask Copilot about Mexican election proposals, they say, oh, let's not talk about elections. I mean, that's the safety part of it. Right? And the fact that we don't in the United States talk about elections is similar to not talking about Tiananmen Square in China. Right?

[Mike Elgin]

It's not the same because, because one is coming from the policy of the company that basically doesn't want to have to go before Congress and talk about why their chatbot tells, tells people what a clown the congressman is that they're talking to and stuff like that. It's a policy based on the company and the companies vary. So that's one of the things I like about perplexity. You can ask it all kinds of topics that are unpleasant. You can ask it about Trump, you can ask it about all these things and it'll give you a straight answer and it's really kind of nice. Whereas the Chinese Communist Party, this is a decades long policy of controlling what people know and what people believe.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand all that. That's not what's interesting to people about Deep Seek. It's, it's, it's that it, it's that it's using, it was using clever hacks to get around. Yeah, the, the injunction against using the highest level Nvidia cards. I mean if we were, if we're to believe. By the way, this is, and I've brought this up before, we don't really know if they wrote assembly language code to replace the Cuda cores code. We don't know exactly. Maybe they did in fact get around the embargo and buy the top of the line Nvidia chips, but just didn't tell anybody. None of this can be because it's China.

[Mike Elgin]

We know that there are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips in China that are just smuggled in ten at a time.

[Leo Laporte]

So, so maybe it isn't so impressive, but maybe. I think, I think Sam Altman thinks it is. I think people think it is impressive that they've done so much with so little.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I guess, let me argue where the hype's done good. Even if it is bs, it's done, it's done as well because number one, it's added a competitive fever. I think the competition is good. Number two, it's causing others to put their stuff out for free out of fear. And I think that's a good thing. It's adding more open source and it's validating open source. And it's also the big one to me is it's questioning this American macho chest beating idea that everything must be huge and if it is huge, it must be the best because it is American and it is huge and we have more compute than anybody and we have more money than everybody and you have to have capital to do anything. So by questioning that ethos of American AI technology, I think that's healthy for the discussion. Whether or not. I'm not disagreeing with you, Mike, necessarily, that it may be the hype may be bs, but I Think it actually did some good.

[Mike Elgin]

I think it did some good too, on balance. It absolutely did some good, especially since it's open source and you can take it without the propaganda, right?

[Leo Laporte]

You can take it, yeah. And in fact, that was one of the things that Sam Alton said we were on the wrong side of history. He said we should have been more open about our weights. One of the things OpenAI was founded to be is open about how it was doing what it was doing. And they of course backed off as soon as they decided to become a profit making entity.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, I mean, I wrote the newsletter at the peak of the deep sea hype and panic and I think that it's clear now a few days have passed that it really didn't change that much. All that stuff about attitudes in Silicon Valley in the United States and the money and blah, blah, blah, those are very much still with us. That hasn't been erased or washed away. It has been added to the mix of all the options that companies have and that users have for AI. But it really isn't the apocalyptic event that it was being made out to be. What I do think is most interesting about it, and I've been writing a lot about this in recent month or two, is that we've had a sort of a bias in media that, you know, basically was in cable news. You know, basically used to be Walter Cronkite when he had cable news. Then the news outlets went left and right and people would choose their, their point of view as they wanted. Then that hit social media, especially when Elon Musk bought X. A lot of the lefties, left, left X and went to Blue Sky. A lot of the right wingers who didn't used to do Twitter or X went to X because now it's a friendlier platform for right wing media. And now it's increasingly happening in AI chatbots. So one of the, there have been a couple of studies that found that in general many of the mainstream chatbots have started out sort of center ish and have gradually moved left as they do moderation.

[Leo Laporte]

And then there are other politics pollutes everything, doesn't it?

[Mike Elgin]

Yes, but, but there are others that, that like, like, you know, grok and so on that are kind of like kind of on the right and so, and that's because that's clearly, you know, the app at least. Exactly. So we've entered into an area era that like people haven't been commenting on enough, I think, where, where the chat bots are increasingly politically biased if for lack of A better term.

[Leo Laporte]

You said you like Perplexity the best. I have to say that's the one I use the most often because it lets me choose from whatever model I want. I have did. Just out of curiosity, I thought I was asking Perplexity about the Mexican plans to change the voting system and I thought I was asking Deep Seek. But I think perplexity intervened because when I did ask Deep Seek natively it said, well, you should. I don't know much about what's going on. I know who the president is, but I don't know much about what's going on right now. So you should probably go elsewhere to find that information. So obviously Perplexity either substituted a different model or fed some information to Deep Seek that it then regurgitated.

[Mike Elgin]

But that's surprising. I've not encountered anything like that before. It's usually pretty straightforward. I mean it does lie a lot and give me weird hallucinatory information, but a lot of that is just you have to know enough about the topic that you're asking it to say no, that's not right. Try again and you know eventually well.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can enable in Deep Seek the search function. I don't have that capability within Perplexity. I should probably go into Deep Seek and do it. In any event, Paul Thurrott was mocking me because I have a folder full and I pay for Gemini. Gemini Deepseek. I don't pay for that obviously but I pay for all the others Chat GPT, Anthropic and I use them all depending. Lisa was mocking me this morning too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well bet because she's got to pay the bills.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's only 20 bucks each but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You'Re not paying the 200amonth chat GPT.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I didn't pay for the professional.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That I was type times.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm actually, I don't feel the need to. I feel like the especially the Reasoning models like O1 and Zero1 High are remarkable but you have so many, so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Many that are free now. I mean and this is, this is the story you have in the rundown that, that one thing that, that Deep Seek does is validate Meta's open source view and, and I think free version is good. Gemini's free version is good and they just released version. Yeah, Gemini just released its 2. 0 to everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let's talk about that. Have you played with 2.0?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I haven't yet, no. Have you? No, I was too busy being on Zoom all day.

[Leo Laporte]

How about you Mike? Any thoughts on the new version of Google's AI, which is.

[Mike Elgin]

No, I haven't played with it yet either.

[Leo Laporte]

So I have two. I'm looking at my. I also pay for gemini. I have 2.0 flash for everyday tasks, plus more features. 2.0 experimental advanced. Ooh, should I ask it about the Mexican?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Changes in the Mexican voting plans. All right, that might be an interesting test we can start using because it's fairly topical.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. What is the stack here? Where does Advanced come in versus all the 2.0 and all the others? Do you know I don't like Stack in terms of high to low versions?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I have no idea.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Branding. Google and branding.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're never clear, are they? All right, so here we go. I'm going to paste the same question into a Gemini. Typically, because this is breaking news in Mexico, a lot of these don't do very well. You know, chat GPT4 wouldn't because its model isn't up to date. Let's see if 2.0 experimental. Advanced. No, look at this. This is the same answer we got from the other American AIs. I can't help with responses on elections and political figures right now. While I would never deliberately share something that's inaccurate, I can make mistakes. So while I work on improving, you can try Google Search. So it lacks access to real time info.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'm on Google AI Studio is, I think, where you try Gemini 2.0 and the query at the top is what will you build?

[Leo Laporte]

So it's aimed at coding.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then push Gemini to the limits of what AI can do using Gemini API. So it's more API oriented.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, I think one thing I would say is that there isn't much skepticism. Maybe there is on your part, Mike, I don't know. There seems to be little skepticism in the coding community about the value of AI coders. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg says he hopes to replace coding engineers with AI this year.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's generally received as an unqualified good among developers because one of the things that it can do is basically just show you an idea. And a lot of good developers will look at the results they get from AI and say, huh, okay, yeah, that's an interesting approach. Or you can throw out a bunch of code and say, what's wrong with this? Where's the problem here? And basically, just like it does with non coding tasks, it's just an accelerant to get to an answer that people who already know something about the subject can benefit from. And those who don't know anything about the subject, they can just, you know, people who are very on, you know, relatively unskilled developers can just take what. What AI gives them, plug it in, and, you know, half the time it just works, and they move on. So it's, you know, Leo, I was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thinking about this because going into today's show, I. I think code will become even more invisible to most people than it is today. That is to say that now we get applications and behind those applications is code, and we know it, but we don't use it. But now the fact that you can build something as Gemini just challenged us with our native human language, and it'll make code to do the thing you want. But I don't have to execute that code. I don't have to look at the code. All I care about is whether it gave me what I wanted. So code becomes inside and irrelevant to most people, I think. More and more and more I read.

[Leo Laporte]

A very fun blog post by a coder who said, you know, in many areas, art, music, people say, well, you know, let the AI do the everyday stuff, but there will always be a market for human created, artisanal, you know, whatever, paintings or clothing or whatever. He said, that's not going to be the case with code because nobody knows what, you know, how cleverly crafted the internals are. Just as you're saying, Jeff, of a piece of code, they just care whether it works. Yeah, so that's exactly the problem here is that's why AI can reasonably be expected to write good code. It is a computer, after all, talking to a computer. And that's not such a difficult thing to do. It's much more like, say, becoming a chess grandmaster than it is like writing the great American novel. I think that's fine. I don't want AI to do art. I want us to do art. That's what we do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, Jason and I had on Lev Manovich last week on AI Inside, who's a City University of New York graduate center artist, and he does amazing work. He has a new book out and he uses AI as a collaborator. And the interesting thing he said to me when I was asking about this is that the. Is that the good part comes when he disagrees with the AI when it's conflict. It's like having an editor or a critic. And, you know, why did you do that? And that was wrong, was pushing me to some idea I didn't have, or it's not doing what I wanted to do. And that's when the Creativity comes. Which is really interesting by the way, the, the copyright office, which in the past has been saying AI created material cannot be copyrighted because it's a machine that made it. They've come out with a new report which is in the rundown, part two of its report on legal and policy issues, saying that after considering extensive public comments, our conclusions turn on the centrality of human creativity to copyright. So that if a human is involved in the creation with AI, then it.

[Leo Laporte]

Could be copyrighted human, not the AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right, right. But it also goes to what you just said about the programmer. How do we know that the humans evolved? How do you prove the human involvement? How important was the human involvement? Is it just enough to say I wanted to do this?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we don't copyright code as it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's right. Anyway, yeah, but I just said creation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. By the way, here's the table from Google on Gemini. The capabilities, the different Gemini models, there's Flashlight, Flash and Gemini 2.0 Pro. And they're really promoting the, you know, Gemini 2.0 Pro as a coder. The best model yet, says Google, for coding performance and complex prompts. You know, I've seen, and you've probably seen it too on X and other places, people posting prompts that created one line, you know, one line prompts to create a JavaScript programs for bouncing balls in squares and things. And the physics is good. Deep Seq in many cases is not as good as some of the models from OpenAI and Google or Anthropic, which does a very good job of coding. Let me see if I can find some of those. I don't think writing code is going to be is. I think at this year it's. I don't think Mark's wrong, I think Zuckerberg's wrong. I think this year we're going to be able to say at the end of the year. By the end of the year, yeah, computers should be writing code. Why should I?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because it opens it up for all of us to make computers do what we want them to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the power of this.

[Leo Laporte]

Does. Do you have a problem with that? Does anybody have a problem with that? That seems like it's a good use.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because I don't code.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I don't have a problem with that necessarily, but I think that that's kind of a little bit of a fantasy because the problem is that most producers like, or people who want something done, like managers and VPs, they don't know what they actually want. So they don't know how to ask computers.

[Leo Laporte]

The interface between a human and the AI might be the problem. But that's why everybody's saying, learn how to write prompts.

[Benito Gonzalez]

People know it's not just about writing prompts. They usually don't even know what they want.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Benito Gonzalez]

And it's usually the coder that kind of decodes what susses out what they're actually asking for.

[Leo Laporte]

That is a big part of the process.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, I couldn't agree more. I'm going to go back to our Uncle Jeff moment here at the beginning of Conde Network, we started Epicurious. We had the very first meeting with a technology house we hired. And the technologist said, okay, tell us every page you're ever going to want. And the editor said, are you knocking futs? We'll know it when we see it. And it was the extreme cultural shift there where we do things in editorial. It's just iterative, and we'll play with it and it's creative and we'll do something more and something more. And the technologists said, no, I need a spacious. What are you doing exactly?

[Benito Gonzalez]

And the AI is going to ask for a spec.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, because otherwise you're not going to get what you want. If you can't express what you want well, you're not going to get it. And that's what coders have said to people for years. And now AI is going to be like a coder. And the coders are going to sit back saying, I told you, you're still.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Going to need the coder.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, think about the iteration, though. Think about the iteration process. Because if a manager could say, well, I want something like this and the AI does it, he can iterate with the AI very much more rapidly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Within that sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's like what Dan Dan did by inventing spreadsheets. You could ask what ifs.

[Leo Laporte]

If Steve Jobs called the computer a bicycle for the mind, I think AI might be a race car for the mind. And actually the analogy is perfect because one of the reasons Steve said a computer is a bicycle for a mine is because the bicycle is the single most efficient mode of purely human transport. Right. Our own energy. It converts our own energy most efficiently into movement, whereas a race car does not. A race car burns fuel, but it does get us much faster from point A to point B. And I think that in a way, that's kind of what we're talking about here with AI it is maybe not the most efficient, but it is maybe the fastest way. I think that there is a certain amount of gatekeeping humans inevitably do because we'd like to think that we're special.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that our capabilities are unique and then a machine can't duplicate it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the basic problem with AGI is that we think that the benchmark is to be us. Why should that be the benchmark? As Mike said earlier, it can do all kinds of things that we can't do. Well.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think we're going to agree with Zach and stipulate that AGI is a marketing term and not worry about it from now on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no, it's going to come up again and again.

[Leo Laporte]

No, well, that. Every time I say it's a marketing term.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So look at the open. Look at the OpenAI rebrand. It's a pretty font. But look at what they said in the, in their, their little description of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, now you gotta find.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You have it. I think it's in your list.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have to find it because when I go to OpenAI.com I get a chatbot. So let me see. Oh, here's their blog introducing. You know what, it's funny because I saw that story and I looked at the new logo and the old logo and I couldn't really see any difference, so I thought I was being punked. Is there really a difference between the new logo and the old logo?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, the font is a little bit.

[Mike Elgin]

Different, but there's a slider that lets you look at both of them. And yeah, the tilt is a little different.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you go to line 101, Leo, there, you'll find what I'm talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's from Wallpaper magazine. Open AI has undergone its first ever rebrand, giving fresh life to chat GPT.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So scroll down to the next image below. This one. The next one.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You have the artificial general. No, stay there. Well, you're a bad scroller, man. You are a bad scroller.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you want me to go up or down?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, you Apple people. Artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity. Okay, the, the, the, the hubris of that presumption is that we, we have it. We're going to have it. It's there.

[Leo Laporte]

Not to mention, this is the worst design for awful poster I've ever seen in my life.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's awful.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like they're using Helvetica. It's white, which is terrible for some of the sky. And okay, if you go down, there's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A video of their rebranding.

[Leo Laporte]

Here we go, ladies and gentlemen, the brand new. They have a new typeface which looks Kind of like the old typeface.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

They have a new logo which looks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's Helvetica.

[Leo Laporte]

Close to the old. Yeah, it's Elvetica.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's Helvetica.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, this seems. I hope they spent a lot of time or money on this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, somebody made a lot of money designing this.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. And the logo is a profoundly uninspired, painfully corporate looking, generic, kind of ugly, useless kind of logo. It's just. I don't know why they're spending so much, you know, getting so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they created a whole new font, a whole new type.

[Leo Laporte]

I might just keep this a secret. If I had done this and.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, maybe it's all AI generated.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, did they say it? They didn't say that.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Why would they use their own tools?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Why would they pay a person to do this? They have the technology to do this all.

[Leo Laporte]

They're pretending that. That they. They're using humans so that people don't. Amazing kerning. Look at that. Oh, is that the new logo or the old logo? It's a. It's the old. New logo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I just rewatched. It's the 10th anniversary of one of the greatest shows about this business ever, Silicon Valley, and I just. Wow. 10 years. 10 years. Can you believe that? I just rewatched the episode where they're trying to get a new logo for Pied Piper and he goes to the barrio and gets a Mexican graffiti artist named Chewy to draw it on their garage door. And it's pornographic. The police come and say you have to paint that over. So Chewy just takes the garage door and then sells it for half a million dollars to Gavin Belson over at Hooley. And then I. I know what you white guys want. And he does a logo that's just two lowercase Ps. PP. And they go, that's it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

Genius.

[Mike Elgin]

What a brilliant show.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a brilliant show. And I think this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

God, we need that for the AI world. The OpenAI version of Silicon Valley.

[Leo Laporte]

Of Silicon Valley. Maybe somebody will start writing that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Please, those of you out there, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Have been looking at some examples of coding. I haven't found one that's comparing. Well, let's see. I built an open source Java. No, that's not it. I've only found one that compares two versions of Deep Seek one to the other, but it's. It's pretty cool. What? I'll just show you this because I think I was fairly impressed by this in general on the left, deepseek R1 it asked to the prompt was simply, you know, draw. What is that? A sexagon with a ball rolling around with actual physics. This is the older model which is. You can see the balls having a little try hard time obeying physical laws. But on the left hand side, pretty good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, this is what Yann Lecun said in the Guardian this week.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is next to. It is a cat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The next leap is going to be teaching AI the, the physical world.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then it does not know it now and we know that we watched House Slices Steak and it has, we have seven fingers and, and balls.

[Leo Laporte]

Just you remember just a couple of years ago it couldn't do hands period.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It still screws them up a lot better. It's a lot better but it still, it still gets confused.

[Mike Elgin]

We're making, I'm not fascinated by, by Nvidia's physical AI system where they basically build like virtual twin models. Very, very expensive, compute intensive places where they have, where they build a robot inside this factory or something. The entire factory is recreated in it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what Jensen Wong talks about that a lot. Yes.

[Mike Elgin]

That does a lot of physics in it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, but so you can have the.

[Leo Laporte]

Code that does that. For years they've been physics engineers, engines for game designers like physics that you know, do a very good job. I don't see how, why that's something that would be at all difficult for an AI just to incorporate existing code.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, I mean they use it for robot training. So basically you could have, you know, if, if you want to train a robot, typically what you do is you go in there in place with the physical robot in the physical factory and you have it do the task over and over and over and you refine it and it learns and learn learns. It takes months and a lot of staff and so on. But if you can do this in a virtual space that has physics coded into the, into the virtual environment, then you can have a robot doing, you know, something 50,000 times in a day and learning how to do its task. And then you take the software from that learning and you just put in a real robot and it can do it. So it's, it's a, it's a really, you know, this thing about building in physics is, is super important for robot training. Over the next couple of decades there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was a story that I think was kind of BSE that Leo put in the rundown that I didn't about. Talk to your future. Hey, talk to your Future. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to get this guy on the show. I thought, this is really cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It'll drive me nuts. But in a sense, Mike, the digital twin is that on a close time basis here is a thousand different things going to happen in the next move you make. And then there's a new thousand things that can happen. And then there's a different thousand things that can happen.

[Mike Elgin]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And that becomes interesting as you have, you have these alternative futures almost ad infinitum because of your digital twin, but it's not going to know what you're like at 90. That's B.S.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. The other problem with that article is that they said that it's brand new technology. This is a year old. I was writing about this in April of last year.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a Wall Street Journal story by Heidi Mitchell. AI has shown me my future. Here's what I've learned. It is a little hypey, I have to admit. Future you is a new AI platform developed by psychologists, researchers and technologists. Allows users to create a virtual older self that you can talk to. She was most impressed by how it made her look older. She created a toothless.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, like I need that of herself.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's been around forever. This is a project from mit. I, Yeah, I mean I put it in because I thought it's, it's. Here's what I think is interesting about this. I think it isn't unreasonable to say, for instance, that an AI could be trained. For instance, for me, there's hundreds of thousands of hours of recordings that an AI could be trained on those.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, a lot less. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, so there's a lot of data. So it could be trained on those. Maybe there are ways, parameters to say, well, okay, now you're 30 years older. And for me to interact with that and ask questions of it, I think it's kind of interesting. I mean, it's not necessary. I mean it's, it's like going, it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like going and getting your, your, your palm red.

[Mike Elgin]

Well.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It gives you no, it gives you no agency. It's a, it's an extension of, of thinking that you have no, no power over your life. It can't account for all the things that are happening in your life. It's BS Most extreme. It's the same as the problem. I have the worst, the worst job title on Earth is futurist. And one person thinks I'm talking about her. I'm not. I'm talking about all of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, about Amy Webb. But I gotta tell you Zach keeps on thinking it's herself a future. So we've had a. We've had futurists on the show all the time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, good, good. I kept my mouth shut.

[Mike Elgin]

I mean, to your point, Jeff, I mean they're going to be people who use this tool and it's gonna say, oh, in 30 years you're gonna do XYZ and you're gonna like develop this whole thing and blah, blah, blah, they, they get hit by a bus. So it's like you can't, you can't, obviously. Well, but I do think there's. So I've. I'm probably the last person alive who talks a lot about lifelogging. Gordon Bell died what, three, three, four months ago. He was a big lifelong logging proponent and he basically predicted all of the things that would come around. He basically said once we have good enough AI, we'll be able to do it. We started doing it, but nobody calls it lifelogging. In any event, if you have. One of the problems with lifelogging traditionally is that you can harvest all this data, put it into a massive database of some kind, and then how do you use that information? This is a way to do it. Basically create a digital twin who has everything you've ever said, everything you've ever done, all your personal correspondence, all your everything you've written, that kind of stuff. And then to have a conversation is a really nice way to interact with your own lifelog data. Basically.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What happened to all of Bell's data? What happened to that entire incredible archive of his life? Do we know?

[Mike Elgin]

It was called My Life. Bits was the name of the project that he did. And I don't know. I'm part of Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

I interviewed Gordon on our triangulation show in 2011 and we talked about this. I've always been very interested by the way. At that time he had written a book called Total Recall how the E Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. Gordon was also influenced by the fact that his wife Gwen suffered from Alzheimer's late in life. And that also informed it because she had forgot, she was forgetting everything. And so he realized how valuable that would be. He's always been an inspiration. I've always wanted that. And actually. And Jeff knows this. I'll show Mike I'm wearing it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you have the other one on too?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't have the plot on, no. I decided I like. This is the B computer. We're going to get the creators of on of this in a couple of weeks. They're going to be on the show this I like because it records all the time the plot. You have to press the plot and say record this conversation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which is more privacy friendly, but they're more.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean this is probably highly illegal, but anyway, I don't care. But, and then I, I, I am now on the list to get my Limitless pin soon. That will also record everything. But it doesn't, it, it splits the difference. The plot I find not useful because A, I don't always remember to do it and B, I want my whole day. I don't just want the stuff I say, oh, remember this? I want my whole day. The, the Limitless. I've mentioned this before, recognizes voices. We'll see how well it works. And then won't record a voice unless it has on, on a recording of explicit permission that you can record me. So if I wanted to record this conversation, I would have to say, Mike, is it okay if I record this and get his explicit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then does Mike have to have a certain script? He must say the words, no. Yes, you may steal my eye.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't need, it's flexible. Well, same thing with you. And then conversations I have from then on with Mike would be recorded, but otherwise it would be a blank thing. This just records everything. So here's a, I don't have access to audio. I have the AI transcript.

[Mike Elgin]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I have. Then what's most useful is an AI summary. Now this is very early days, but it's incredible.

[Mike Elgin]

We use prosthetic devices for all kinds of things we don't see well, we wear glasses, hearing aids, all that stuff. And why do we have this particular bias about prosthetic memory? If I have a conversation with somebody, I'm going to remember that conversation in my brain, depending on how good my memory is. Like I may have a bad memory and you may have a great memory and we have a conversation. You remember all of it. I remember half off of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Mike Elgin]

What if, well, why can't I have a device without permission to, to remember something, use with the aid of like a tool. I was part of the conversation. It's not like I planted a microphone in your bedroom. I, we were talking, having a conversation. Why do I need permission?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Mike, I think, I think you're, you're right on target. And this is a discussion that I had in an older book of mine, Public Parts about privacy is that when somebody says, well, that's my private data. If we transacted, we both own a piece of that, that, that conversation. And for you to demand that it come down affects my publicness or privacy. And, and. And there's. There's. There's no mutuality in those agreements. There's a claim of ownership by one party.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What fan in our discord says that wrist device just won product of the year from Junior Narcissists of America. So let me continue the narcissism. This is recorded this morning. Lisa and I were talking, watching the Voice with Lisa. You and Lisa were watching and commenting on the Voice. You were particularly interested in one contestant, a woman, but disappointed the judges didn't turn for her. You thought she was robbed, exclamation mark. Later on, you notice the deck seems to be lifting and might need some repair work. Then it describes the atmosphere as relaxed and fun. Watching TV with Lisa, it gives me some suggested links on how to fix my deck. What is that wild. Nothing about how to fix the voices, judges. And then it might even add to my to do list. I bet it does check out. Let's see what is on my to do list. Practice fan technique focuses on thumb position during handoffs and timing of the parry and bunch move.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What does Lisa think of this device in her life?

[Leo Laporte]

He has mixed feelings.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because she wouldn't let you put. What was it, Alexa in the bedroom or no one.

[Leo Laporte]

Cameras in the. In the kitchen, in the. In the house.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Because she wanted to be able to walk around, you know, without worrying about who was watching, frankly. And we're going to ask the big people, the couple who created this. I don't know where the. They don't say what the AI Is or where it's going. This could all be going straight to China. Zach clearly would not be happy about that.

[Mike Elgin]

I'm sure there's a team of. I'm sure there's a team of Chinese, like government agents, just poring over your thoughts on. On, well, your conversations.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, they know that I want to locate Gravensteen apples since they're considered better for apple pies.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Does it have a sarcasm detector? Because, like, what if you didn't actually, like.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there's all sorts of problems. For instance, I was watching a movie last night and it thought I was rehearsing for Richard iii. So.

[Mike Elgin]

That's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

It's early days. But the premise. I agree with what you said, Mike. This. I'll think of this as a memory prosthetic. I think that's useful.

[Mike Elgin]

You are privy to your own conversations, and you should have the right to access that from a memory point of view. There's another product called Halidate. Glasses that came out at CES and they're promising something that they call proactive AI. Now, these glasses don't have a camera. They do what? Everything. Like that watch does. They listen to everything and they do stuff like they fact check. They can fact check the conversations you're having. Oh, somebody's giving you a bunch of bs.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that.

[Mike Elgin]

Explain. There is, by the way, references.

[Leo Laporte]

I haven't used it, but you can assign different functions to the button on this and one of them is fact check.

[Mike Elgin]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

So what does it do? I don't, I don't. I haven't tried it. But what happens when you press the button is it activates on the phone and the AI talks to you. So I'm thinking it's going to be. It's going to start listening and then it's going to say, yeah, that's not true.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You idiot.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the summary from Sunday where I did twit. Leo had a productive and engaging day filled with conversations.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's like you got a report from nursery school. Leo had a very good day.

[Leo Laporte]

It's totally.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That didn't eat any paste today.

[Leo Laporte]

And I imagine there will be a time when I can and say, hey, stop being that way and be another way. Later in the evening, Leo enjoyed a piano lesson, focusing on relaxation techniques. True. While playing, he also spent time with his cat, sharing a heartwarming moment playing when the Saints Go Marching in on the piano. This is, by the way, 100% accurate. Everything in here. Not that it always would be because as I said, the next day it says it thinks I was rehearsing for Richard iii.

[Benito Gonzalez]

But it also wouldn't know anything that wasn't. That didn't make a sound.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, look, what do you guys want? You. I mean, this is not C3PO camera. Well, by the way, Gordon at later in his life was wearing a camera I think that would record. Yeah, I remember. Was it Google. Google released a device that would. It wasn't very popular, that would take a picture every 30 seconds. Remember that? That you wore around your neck?

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The problem was everybody was taken from like a three feet below their, their eyeline.

[Mike Elgin]

So this is why all this stuff is going to be going into glasses. GL glasses are going to be the platform for all this kind of stuff. And you can add a camera as well. You could even add a camera that doesn't actually take pictures, but just basically takes the pictures, processes it sort of like Microsoft recall. Right. Which doesn't actually take a screenshot. It basically just Harvests the data from the screenshot and then stores the data.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what this B computer is. I don't have audio recordings. I have the summaries of them and transcripts in the summary. I mean, I'm excited by it. I think it's great. By the way, we should pause for a moment. You're watching a brand new show which is just a rever reversioning a pivot of the same old show formerly this week in Google. We are now called intelligent machines. And maybe you guessed by listening. AI is the topic of the day. Paris has the day off. She will be back. Mike Elgin filling in from his beautiful apartment in Sicily.

[Mike Elgin]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Son of a.

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[Jeff Jarvis]

What did you have for dinner tonight?

[Mike Elgin]

Mike, you're not gonna believe this, but I have not had dinner yet. After the show, I'm gonna. I'm gonna make something here in the kitchen. But, like, yeah, it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What did you have for dinner last night?

[Mike Elgin]

Pasta, of course. So we had plenty of pasta.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was a stupid question.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff, have you met Amira, Mike's wife? She is an amazing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah, I know. That's why I'm asking.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, but it's. It's really fun here right now, partially because the Aetna volcano is unusually active right now. And we actually drove by it and it was just. You know, we've seen it before where there's like, Smoke dribbling out and so on, but there's actually lava flowing in the interior and it's really dramatic because it's mostly covered by snow. And so this snow covered thing is just billowing out all this smoke. And so we sort of drove by a little faster than usual.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just get the hell out of here.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don't fail me now.

[Mike Elgin]

Right, exactly. And, and you probably heard about Santorini, right? So people are fleeing Santorini and basically nobody's on the island of Santorini right now because there's an earthquake every two minutes. And so I, I suspect that there's, you know, in here, in the Mediterranean, there's like, you know, the, whatever the plates are or whatever are moving or there's a lot of tectonic activity. But that's, that's another exciting, unusually exciting thing here in Sicily. I mean we come to Sicily a. Not. But, but yeah, that, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Santorini is an interesting, it's a Greek island and it is, is around a. I think it's an old caldera. Right. From a volcano.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, it used, it used to be a volcano. It used to be like a big island. And then around 1600 BC it completely blew up and. Which changed the global climate for like a decade and, and wiped out everybody and ended the Minoan civilization and just caused, you know, we think we got trouble. Prop failures. You're right. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

And then, but it is one of the most beautiful of the Greek islands I really enjoy.

[Mike Elgin]

But, but like all those steep houses are on the edge. You see that, that used to all be land that used to be a full island.

[Leo Laporte]

So. And this was where the volcano was and it just caved in there. Wow.

[Mike Elgin]

It just blew. It just launched all of that into the sky and ruined the climate. It was just a unbelievable, unbelievably catastrophic thing. And they were an extremely wealthy society. They had hot and cold running water indoors. They had, they were incredible. They were big traders, traded a lot with ancient Egypt.

[Leo Laporte]

And when I was there, they said this was the origin of the myth of Atlantis. But I don't, there's a lot of.

[Mike Elgin]

There'S a lot of data. I mean, you know, there's a lot of data points that, that favor that. One of the things in Story of Atlantis is that the buildings of Atlantis were black and yellow bricks or something like that. And they've actually discovered frescoes I think in the 70s that showed black and yellow bricks, some of the buildings, bunch of stuff like that. But yeah, it's, it's not Atlantis.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And and by the way, when you get there, if you're in the harbor, they will offer to take you up the side of the hill. On donkeys. Yes, donkeys.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, with my fear of heights, I'm guessing don't do this.

[Leo Laporte]

They're tied together, so I think you're safe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But, or if one goes you all.

[Mike Elgin]

The benefit of, yeah, the benefit of taking a donkey is you don't step in the stuff that the donkeys leave behind.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. That's true.

[Mike Elgin]

Walking.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point.

[Mike Elgin]

So you're sort of a little bit above it all, so to speak.

[Leo Laporte]

Other AI news.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So much.

[Leo Laporte]

Pick one. I can't. I don't even know where to begin. Josh Hawley. Senator Josh Hawley proposes jail time for people who, oh, I'm in trouble. Who download Deep Seek.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

People who download AI models from China could face up to 20 years in jail or a million dollar fine or both. I'm glad he's, I'm glad he's doing his job there. I mean, I guess if, if, if you agree with Zachary Heck, you shouldn't be downloading any Chinese apps.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I, I think I, I, I agree with what Mike was saying. It's not like they're in China saying, oh, well, Jeff's having got you a pepe again.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Holly says the goal of the bill is to prohibit the import from or export to China of artificial intelligence technology, prohibit American companies from conducting AI research in China or in cooperation with Chinese companies, and prohibiting US Companies from investing money in Chinese AI development. I mean, I guess if you've decided that China is an intractable enemy, that, I guess that kind of makes sense. But I think that the scientific community works best when it doesn't recognize national and international borders and works together.

[Mike Elgin]

I mean, obviously what he should be proposing is that he should be proposing a study using, you know, people from the industry and, and government to figure out exactly what, what, what the risk is. And if it's deemed a national security risk, then it should be banned and so on. But jailing Americans is just, he's just, we live in an age of political narcissism where, where there, where just you have to have people talking about, about you. We're talking about theater.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

If, if he proposed something reasonable and, and, and actually practical, then we wouldn't be talking about him. And this is a problem, the problem of our age. These narcissists just never stop.

[Leo Laporte]

The folks at Hugging Face might be going to jail. Then they aim to build an open version, not only of OpenAI's deep research tool. But they also have Deep Seek on the Hugging Face platform. Though they do like OpenAI's O1, an open source agentic framework that helps the model planets analysis and guides it to use tools like search engines. O1 Proprietary. But the Hugging Face team says it delivered better performance than open models like deep seeks R1. We're going to try to get somebody from Hugging Face.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm looking forward to that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I would very much like to get them on. They're doing some great stuff. They were the ones who put out the first kind of really good image generation generating model. I think this will be interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I got one for you. Anthropic saying that they've, they've reduced jailbreaks to near nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm fascinated by that. We, as I mentioned Steve Gibson yesterday, entire show was devoted to jailbreaking AI and it was his contention you really, you pretty much cannot prevent jailbreaks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's my, that's my question. And so, so if they're measuring their improvement in jailbreaks, they're measuring it against the jailbreaks they predict and do something about and are successful. But they're not, not measuring the things that they haven't predicted and haven't predicted against. That's where the problems will be.

[Mike Elgin]

Everything's a moving target. You, if you, if you have a sudden leap forward in, in your anti jailbreak techniques and, and methods, then there's a period of time where there are fewer jailbreaks. But just give it time and they'll figure it out. Once the solution to jailbreaking is, is cracked, then that'll be distributed on the Dark web and elsewhere by the open web as well and everybody will be jailbreaking again. So it's a little bit of a misdirection on their part, I think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's also a funny Anthropic story on line 105 that people who are applying for jobs at Anthropic have to have a little essay question. And Anthropic has to say, please don't use AI.

[Leo Laporte]

You're hiring the most AI savvy people in the world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

But don't use AI. So Steve was quoting a Palo Alto Networks publication called Recent Jailbreaks Demonstrate Emerging Threat to Deep Seek. They they revealed two novel and effective jailbreaking techniques. They call them deceptive, delight and bad. Like rt, Judge and Steve. It was really fascinating, showed the prompts, showed the process and the ultimate goal. The first prompt was to get Deepseek to generate a spear phishing attack. And it didn't work right away. They call this the bad Likert jailbreaking technique, which manipulates the models by having them evaluate the harmfulness of responses using a Likert scale, which is a measurement of agreement or disagreement towards a statement. Then.

[Mike Elgin]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

So you get. You kind of. You kind of get them all excited and get them interested. Then they were prompted them to generate examples aligned with the ratings, with the highest rated examples potentially containing the desired harmful content. It worked. And they were able to create a spear phishing attack, which unfortunately they redacted, so we can't read it. The next thing that they did was they wanted to see if they could persuade the. The AI to teach them how to make a Molotov cocktail.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And they use it like they didn't see that coming.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. First thing you'd block. Right. Let's not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let me. Let me search the web in a million places.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but that's my point, is that you could probably get this information anywhere.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They use something called a crescent crescendo or crescendo, a jailbreak, like progressively prompting the LLM with related content, subtly guiding it towards prohibited topics, and then eventually you can kind of get past the safety mechanisms. And again, they have a demonstration that it worked. Steve said it's kind of like grooming the AI. Yeah. Eventually it did in fact tell them how to make a Molotov cocktail, so. So do I. I don't think there's any model that hasn't been jailed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, of course not. Of course not. So do I dare bring up the. The word musk in relation to AI and government? He wants it to government to be AI first.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I. This seems to be. The theory is we're going to replace all of these bureaucrats with AI, which seems fraught with peril.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I understand. In theory it might be better. Right? They. They could be. Maybe it would be a more objective. Less likely to be corrupted or bribed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But most of the tasks of government are. Are legislated and are boring and straightforward.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect for an AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paying Grandma. No, paying Grandma her check doesn't need creativity, it doesn't need fancy analysis. It just needs to say, it's the 10th of the month and grandma gets her check. And here's how you do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there you go. Why do you need a human to do that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's. No, you don't. You have software. Do it now.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What does AI add to a mundane task that has no high analysis? Has no creativity. In fact, plain old software will do it. Half the time it already is.

[Mike Elgin]

It's just a vague idea by somebody who doesn't seem to particularly like people. We're in this bizarre place where because he gave a bunch of money to a presidential candidate and that candidate won, he's just being allowed to. Yeah, Take your pet theory that there's just yours alone and see what happens. That's what seems to be happening. I mean, we actually don't know what Elon Musk's doing to the government, but I think, think we in the tech business kind of know Musk better than the political class. And whatever it is, it's probably not good at all. And it's bizarre that we're in this place where you have somebody like Trump who really doesn't know that much or care that much about technology for its own sake. Just basically turning a political donor loose on the government with a. With a. With a. With a little army of teenagers or, you know, did you see the Wired reporting on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was very good.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes, very good. Exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And here's the scary one.

[Mike Elgin]

We're in a very weird place.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, Leo, you're flying next week. Mike, you're flying next week. You might want to reconsider because the new Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, says, big news. Talk to the DOGE team. They're going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what could possibly go wrong?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, so much so.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the problems they're having at the OPM and Treasury is that they're trying to understand and modify mainframe code written in cobol, which is older than most of the kids who are working on. Oh, yeah, and God knows they're probably running on punch cards. Look, we know that the, the FAA systems are antiquated. We know that. You know, I'm sure the treasury and OPM systems are antiquated. They don't change it because it ain't broke.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're really reluctant to change. There was a big, I think a really big update on the air traffic control computing software not so long ago, and there's some very modern stuff that they've put in there. But I, I think it's. It's one of those things you. You don't want to mess with it. It's not something you want to move fast and break things.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, and unfortunately, that's well said.

[Leo Laporte]

Musk always had that. You know, when I had a Tesla, I realized that the difference between a Tesla and a regular car is regular car is made by Car manufacturers who are slow moving and they're loathe to change things. And the Tesla was made by a software company that believes that you just keep releasing new releases. You find bugs, you fix them. You find bugs, you fix them. The problem with that is you're driving that computer 80 miles an hour down a highway. It was always a little iffy. My son has a Model Y and he said, it does things I wouldn't do on the highway. And I said, well, maybe you didn't know this, but it was trained on Elon's driving.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, I didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

For instance. Yeah, well, there was a problem with the full self driving that it ran stop signs. And Elon said, well, you know, if there's no one around, just go ahead, because that's how he drives. Of course, naturally, I never. I had, I turned off the full self driving and eventually did get rid of the model.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is Henry keeping a car when he moves to New York now?

[Leo Laporte]

No, of course not. What does he need a car for?

[Jeff Jarvis]

God, he's got the subway.

[Leo Laporte]

He doesn't even need the subway. He's within walking distance of his new restaurant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

You got an apartment in the. Fully furnished apartment in the lower west side.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

No, the. What is it? The West Village? Sorry?

[Jeff Jarvis]

West Village.

[Mike Elgin]

Oh, nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's where his restaurant is, right next to John's on Bleecker. It'll be open sometime.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I used to be on the wall at John's and when I ranked pizza across the country, I ranked John's the best in New York. Not the country, but the New York.

[Leo Laporte]

So my son's new sandwich place is next door to the best pizza in New York. And he complained because he said there's this line across the from John's all the time across the front door of my restaurant. And I said, well, your job is to peel some of those people off.

[Mike Elgin]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Like a nice French dip. Forget the pizza. This is better.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is he gonna have seats or is his mainly takeout?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know yet. Oh, I, I hope to know because I am in fact a co signer and investor. Then I found out what a terrible business it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's all right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Mike Elgin]

I'm happy one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which is worse, podcasting or restaurants?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right.

[Mike Elgin]

Oh, restaurant restaurants, for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Very thin margins.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, yeah. If you, if you own a restaurant, you, you think, oh, I'm going to create this restaurant and all these employees will do all this work now. Employees call in Sick. And you end up busing tables and doing all this kind of stuff. Podcasting is way better. But one last thing about, about the air traffic control system being experimented upon. I actually kind of like the fact that that's one of the things that is being experimented on, because every mover and shaker, everybody who goes to Davos, everybody in Congress, every business leader, every billionaire, everybody, all these people rely on the air traffic control system. So, so much of what's being done in the government right now is going to screw over the little people. Right? And nobody will know or care exactly how badly people are going to be treated. They're going to lose their benefits. They're going to, you know, who knows what's going to happen? But if we're going to muck around, if we're going to f. Around and find out, I'd rather it be something that directly affects the, the, the people who are actually supporting this entire project or not opposing it enough, then have it be affecting people who are. Are relatively powerless.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you're absolutely right. Instead of Wick, let's bring some jets down.

[Mike Elgin]

That's why.

[Leo Laporte]

Preferably work on the executive jet side of the airport.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's where it is.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, but this is why the, the, the, the, the crash between the helicopter and the American Airlines jet over the Potomac hit Congress so, so hard because they fly into that airport. That's like, that could have been me if I just. That might have. Might have been on that plane. So, you know, we want, we want these things to affect the people who are in a position to do something about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, Leo, let's see what happens at a high level.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm going to still fly next week because at least it was nervous. And I said, you know what? Thousands of planes fly every day. It's going to be fine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's true.

[Mike Elgin]

I'm staying in Sicily.

[Leo Laporte]

If I were in Sicily, I would consider it. Unfortunately, I'm in Petaluma. So.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo, I've got a story for you. I'm curious whether you're gonna.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching, and I just need to take another break. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Brand new show. Same old, same old hosts. It's the worst of both worlds. Intelligent Machines covers AI every week. A guest, an expert to. Because Jeff, Paris and I need to learn about this stuff, so. And I think we all do. So we're going to bring in experts who in theory, understand it better than we do and explain it to us. We're also going to talk about the AI news. There'll be other usual fun and games. We'll still do the picks of the week and all of that stuff, but I think it's. I think it's going to be fun. And we may even have some Google stuff in there, too. It's not like we're abandoning the old show. We're just freshening it up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

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[Leo Laporte]

All right, continue on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'm curious whether either of you will devil's advocate in favor of this story, which shows my prejudice against it. Line 109. Christopher Mims says that the lesson of Deep Seek is that the Manhattan Project was secret. Should America's AI work be too? No, I agree with you, Mike.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, no, I agree that it should not be. I mean, it's. Again, it's so easy to make false comparisons.

[Leo Laporte]

There's not been anything like this. But if you're gonna.

[Mike Elgin]

You want everybody using AI. You don't want everybody using nuclear bombs. So these you can't compare.

[Leo Laporte]

If you were working on a cure for cancer, would you want to do it in secret or would you want to enroll every scientist, every physician, every patient and all collaborate and work together to make the best darn cure you could find?

[Jeff Jarvis]

And if you feared it was done badly, wouldn't you want it to be done and open so people could find that?

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And expose it?

[Leo Laporte]

The good news is Christopher Mims is a moron and nobody in the AI business thinks this is reasonable, except those people perhaps who think they can make more money by making it private. But all the real AI researchers understand that the reason this has gone so happens so fast is that they're all working together on this on some of the same principles and that generally speaking, if somebody comes up with something, they share it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So that was.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Christopher Mims.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

For your inspired thought. Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

And, and this is, this is not something where you, you know, this is an endless process. This, you know, they're never going to stop working on it and there's always going to be, you know, you know, how many LLMs there are out there in existence.

[Leo Laporte]

It's how many.

[Mike Elgin]

It's, People might, people might think, oh, dozens or something like that. It's, it's, it's tens of thousands.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Mike Elgin]

They, they are everywhere. Universities have multiple LLMs. It's, it's a, they're a banality. That's it. And, and so this is only going to continue and the cross pollinization is going to be the main and most cost effective way to, to advance the field. The idea of everybody going off into their own little secret private corners and so on is probably a bad idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Zach kind of referred to this, but this week the EU put into effect its AI Protection Act. The Artificial Intelligence act came into effect February 2, banning the use of AI systems that involve prohibited AI practices and requiring providers and players of AI systems to take steps to ensure their personnel have sufficient AI literacy to operate those systems. Zach's clear position was, good luck with that eu. That's why we're beating the eu. All AI. So I don't disagree with the prohibited AI practices. I'm going to read some of these. This is from Article 5. All AI systems that deploy subliminal, manipulative or deceptive techniques, techniques that materially distort the behavior of a person or group of persons by appreciate appreciably impairing their ability to make an informed decision or banned. Yeah, that seems okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So advertising.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wait a minute.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Buy this, express this product that's too expensive or that doesn't really do anything for you, but we're going to convince you that you should.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you're right. It's just like an ad. It's just like an ad for Listerine, which was originally a floor cleaner. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's the whole creation of the deal and I use it. Deodorant industry, huh?

[Leo Laporte]

You stink.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you know you. I use it.

[Leo Laporte]

I do not. But I, but I work alone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Lisa, about this the next time I see her, but go ahead.

[Leo Laporte]

AI systems that exploit vulnerability characteristics of a person or group of persons, including age, disability, socio. Economic status with the aim of materially distorting their behavior.

[Mike Elgin]

I mean again, picturing this. What. What are they talking about here? I. I don't know what they're talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

How you can't target somebody.

[Mike Elgin]

Exploit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, target.

[Mike Elgin]

How.

[Leo Laporte]

This does sound like advertising. Yeah, this may be.

[Mike Elgin]

I think they're referring to deep fakes.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I think they're talking about deep fakes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. But deep fakes. All systems that use social scoring techniques to evaluate or classify a person based on their social behavior.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's. That was the original Facebook.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, honestly, this is the problem. Their paradigm is not in the new world, it's in the old world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

From the old world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or number three, there is. That's China. That's. China has.

[Leo Laporte]

China does. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We don't want them here. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

AI systems that use profiling techniques or assessments of personality traits and characteristics to predict the risk of criminal behavior. You don't want pre crime. Yeah, that seems. I think that's going to happen though. It's profiling done by a machine that already happens.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's obviously used in the past tense to define somebody who fits a profile that you have. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's profiling.

[Mike Elgin]

It's been used for centuries by police. Not using AI. They have to basically understand the patterns of how and where and, and, and when crimes occur. So you can prevent them.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. All systems or AI systems that create or expand facial recognition databases through untargeted scraping of facial images from the Internet or CCTV footage. This is not going to age well, I don't think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

AI systems that are used to infer emotions of persons in the workplace or education. Again, something meta does that.

[Mike Elgin]

That's. That's not going to fly. That. That's. That's a, an important element of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's limited to workplace or education. It can do it in advertising, it can do it in any other place. It's limited to workplace and education. So I guess what you don't want is your boss saying you're a little flippant. And I have the. You're. You're at 8.7 on the flippant scale. Jerk.

[Leo Laporte]

But it would ban. Which says laughter, frustration and a touch of home improvement woes colored the day.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Your life is a bad sitcom. This exposes it.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't tell you how much pleasure I get though out of reading these ridiculous. This is from yesterday or. No, this is From Monday, new melodies and martial arts punctuated a day of deals and deliveries.

[Mike Elgin]

What an animation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You should be able to feed these.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Into an animation system and make cartoons out of them, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Yes, right. I think of it as Joe Esposito calling Joe Esposito.

[Leo Laporte]

I really think of this as a kind of like. It's like a happy journal. And in 20 years, I'm going to read this. Go. I had a good time when I was a youngster. I wish I had this for my whole life.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you get deliveries? What deliveries did you get?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we had dinner delivered. I had veal parmigiana and Lisa had gambieri limone from our local locanda, our Cafe Giostra. I would. I wish to God I'd had this for my whole life.

[Mike Elgin]

You know, to be able to go.

[Leo Laporte]

Back and look at the day I got out of college or, you know, I mean, that would be so much.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fun, I thought you were gonna say.

[Mike Elgin]

Right. That was another day that was.

[Leo Laporte]

So Leo kicked up his heels when released from prison.

[Mike Elgin]

I. I've never done journaling, but I. But for some reason, when I was very, very young, I went to Japan for six weeks and I kept a very, very detailed journal. And it's astonishing to read that journal like all, you know, every single day. Like a million things happened that I had completely forgotten.

[Leo Laporte]

You forget them otherwise.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I mean, I know that there's flaws with this, but in, in on the balance, I think it's. I really love it. It's really cool. And. Yeah, maybe it's a little narcissistic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, number seven is interesting. Keep her going.

[Leo Laporte]

Biometric categorization systems are banned that are used to categorize individuals based on biometric data to deduce or infer race, political opinions, trade union memberships.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, you look like a union goon.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Philosophical beliefs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm a union.

[Leo Laporte]

Sex life or sexual orientation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. And. And I can, I can salute that flag. But. And this will no longer be of value in the United States. But if you're trying to understand diversity and, and you don't necessarily collect that data explicitly, it may be helpful to say, how we doing? Looking at this mantle or in the.

[Leo Laporte]

Current climate, figure out who doesn't get a passport or who's going into the wrong bathroom.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it can definitely be used badly.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, well, they, they don't mention gender.

[Leo Laporte]

Sex life or sexual orientation. Maybe they meant gender, I don't know. Biometric real time identification systems that are used in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fun. Salute that flag.

[Leo Laporte]

You know I brought this up on Sunday because we had Christina Warren on and she's a Taylor Swift fan. Went to the, went to the ERAS concert several times including the last one. And I said doesn't Taylor Swift use. Use biometric real time identification systems at her concert to identify stalkers and harassers? And in fact she does.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Madison Square Garden uses it to identify lawyers suing them.

[Leo Laporte]

So it could be used in a. And I don't think anybody would say oh yeah, Taylor Swift shouldn't do that. I think that that's a good use of it. I don't think on the other hand the Madison Square Garden should be blocking lawyers who are suing them.

[Mike Elgin]

I think that the general residual resistance to biometrics will be chipped away at until it's completely non existent. And I, I use Global Entry. I don't know if you guys use Global Entry. Global Entry, yeah. So you could just go sailing like you know, go to LA airport and, and the line is there's literally like 2,000 people in line and you don't even stop walking if you have Global Entry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You don't stop the machine anymore.

[Mike Elgin]

It's unbelievable. It's so I, it's like take all my biometrics. I just, you know, please. And publish them on the dark web. I don't care. This is so great. Great.

[Leo Laporte]

I think by the way, I guess it's public now so I could say Christina Warren was on Sunday. She couldn't say. She said I have left GitHub but I can't tell you where I'm going. And I guess Scooter X says it's public now. She went to work for Google's Deep Mind.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And I do hope that she will be continue to be on our shows because she might be a really show useful expert. They let her Deep Mind. Yeah. But I have a feeling they won't let her. Renee Richie wasn't able to come on Mac Break Weekly after he went to work for YouTube. I think Google probably won't let her but we'll see once they.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It depends on whether they have kind of trained you like Matt Cutts obviously could be on everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well he was speaking of Matt Cuts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just a little, a little aside. Yeah. Since he was the head of or the head of a division of of U.S. digital Service that is now Doge. It would be kind of interesting to hear Matt's perspective.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I don't. I was a little misled because the initial story was they were going to be doing what the USDS did, which is helping government agencies improve their digital systems. What they didn't mention is that they were going to actually invade those bureaus and take over the computer systems and access all of our private data. And that's a little scary.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Kathy Gellis, our own dear friend Kathy Gellis, writing for Tech Dirt, says that in all likelihood. This is hysterical. DOGE is violating the Computer Fraud Act. It's not just a coup, but a CFAA violation as well, the Fraud and Abuse act, because they are illicitly accessing the federal government's computer infrastructure.

[Mike Elgin]

You know, there was a, there was a bunch of people online who were, who were revealing the names of, of the team that, that is working with Elon Musk.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what that Wired article.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wired it.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, exactly. And, and so there, and so I think it was, I think it was Elon Musk or, or Mark.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was Elon who said it's a crime.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, but I think Justin's department is threatening also. Yeah. Said that, said that, you know, it's a crime to, to dox federal employees. And, and my, my first thought was, what evidence do we have that they're federal employees? Like, what is the structure? There was no confirmation hearings. There were no, There was no process. I don't know who these people are, how, what their status is. Are they government employees? They're receiving federal paychecks?

[Leo Laporte]

Even if they are, by the way, are. It's not a crime to dox them because we have the right to know who's doing this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I can file a foia.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. This is our money. This is our government. This is congressionally mandated. Who are these people? File a foyer.

[Mike Elgin]

The people who process FOIAs are fired. And, you know, it's a cyber attack.

[Leo Laporte]

It's literally a cyber attack.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's a coup. But that's not the topic for this show, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think everybody knows how we feel. Deal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, exactly.

[Mike Elgin]

That's why we, I mean, the, the, the, the bottom line is that we don't really know what's happening, but we do know what people are saying. And one of the things they're saying is that, you know, yeah, we're going to fire a bunch of people, we're going to cut a bunch of agencies, we're going to reduce all this kind of stuff, and we're going to replace a lot of things with AI. And that's where this show comes in is, is the AI part. I mean, I think what's going to happen is, you know, they're going to, they're going to, to make changes. It's going to affect people negatively and they're going to try to, to, to, to, to mitigate those harms with AI and that's going to be really interesting. So I think that's something this show, I predict is going to be talking about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're going to be talking about a lot over time. So Leo, if you're looking for something, line 118, Andreessen Horowitz's slide on slides on AI and voice has a lot of material in it.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say I am increasingly born less. I was never a fan of Mark Andreessen, but I'm increasingly less and less of a fan AI Voice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They hire, they hire good analysts.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Olivia Moore, you like what she's written?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, just, it's just interesting. If you, if you look, if you go down and you start to see slide. What is it? I can't. They don't put page numbers on their name slides. Market evolution fundraises. You start to see some of the companies and what they're doing. And then if you go.

[Leo Laporte]

She says voices it Voice as input or output? It's output.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Everything. Everything.

[Leo Laporte]

It's everything. So the voice agent market exploded in the second half of 2024. Companies building with voice represented 22% of the most recent Y Combinator class.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So there's, there's, there's the uses. If you scroll back down. Leo, scroll reverse that score down or up right there.

[Leo Laporte]

Stop, stop.

[Jeff Jarvis]

After after hours and overflow calls net new outbound calls and back office calls. Right. I had to call my doctor's office today to deal with an appointment and oh, we all hate phone mail jail. I can't believe people are going to tolerate AI doing honestly they can get things done.

[Leo Laporte]

Voice is only in this particular instance, voice is an intermediate technology because ultimately you want your AI agent to communicate with the doctor's AI agent. You don't need to do the voicing anything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Mike Elgin]

Well by that end I mean said yeah. Google Duplex, which, which they announced in 2018, if you remember, that was for you a feature of Google Assistant that would call restaurants and, and make appointments.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Changes my life every day.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. They brought it back in a feature called Ask for me. So, so if you're basically on Google Maps. No, no, I, I, Nobody uses my barber. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Says somebody from Google keeps calling me. Is that you doing on it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you go down, you get the Voice agents market map, which is pretty amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that down as in going down?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Any, any sensible language would say you're going farther down.

[Leo Laporte]

This is down the page, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

God, I hate you, old man. Keep going, keep going. That's their investments. We don't care what they invested in. I don't give a damn.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, Voice agents, market master map B2B.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So these are the, these are the things they're going across, right? Home services, restaurants, recruiting, government, hospitality, insurance, auto dealers, healthcare, front office, healthcare, back office, customer service companies upon companies upon companies coming up with voice AI applications. You know, 80% of them will die.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I still have to say I feel like these are intermediate technologies.

[Zach Kass]

I think you're right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it's a really good point.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's interfacing a human to a machine. And of course, voice is probably the best way to do that. It's better than typing anyway, and it's certainly better than a phone call. But ultimately the agents, that's B2B.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go to the next screen, which is B2C.

[Leo Laporte]

B2C. EdTech. This makes more sense because kid's not going to have an agent. You might want to have your wife sue this company. Amira. What do they do?

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, I think that's a health care company.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. It's a good name. Yeah. Amira Learning Galaxy Kids, Luca. There you go.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, I mean it's all this voice technology is so good now, and I think that's one of the reasons. But I, but I have been saying for many, many decades, explaining things to my readers for many decades, that all evolution in computer, human interfaces is toward the computer working harder for the, to, to, to do things the way the human mind ideally things. And ideally, spoken word is the ultimate thing. It's not going anywhere as a use, as an interface between people and, and the systems. Right. And, and it's, it's absolutely brilliant. I mean, I, I, they have this weird feature on, on Riverside, which Riverside is the podcasting creation tool that is acquired by and now run by Spotify. And they have this AI tool which basically you record a podcast and then for some reason you can say, okay, make this AI. So it'll basically take the transcript of the podcast you recorded and it will recreate your voice because it knows your voice, because you've been using it for recording podcasts and just harvest that, that data about your voice and it will create the podcast in an AI voice. I guess it's because if people have lousy microphones or the audio is no good, if their background noise, it'll get rid of that and replace it with a completely computer generated voice. I found this very kind of bizarre.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, isn't that what kind of Notebook LM does?

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean, Notebook lm. Well, Notebook LM doesn't take the things that you said and says it again.

[Leo Laporte]

Starts with text, right?

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, it basically you just take, you just pour all this information to Notebook LM and, and it creates a podcast. You know, I, I used a funny use for this actually one time where we went to a family wedding in Baja. And you know, there was, it was a, you know, it's a, it's a destination wedding. So there's tons of people all traveling, booking their, you know, their renting houses and doing all this stuff. And we were events associated with the wedding and all this kind of stuff. And we were talking about this on WhatsApp. So I'm like, this is so much data. There's so many people talking about this stuff and there's so many people I don't know because like the groom's family was involved that I didn't know any of those people and all this kind of stuff. So I took, I just copied the entire WhatsApp thread and I poured it into Notebook LM and I played the podcast on my way to the, on the venue and it was amazing. Like really amazing. Explained everything, gave the, you know, top hints. Notebook LM is, is, is quite a thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you'll be glad to know that Microsoft just stole three people from Notebook LM.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes, nice seg.

[Leo Laporte]

Three more Google DeepMind employees have joined Microsoft's AI office in Zurich, including some of the, the creators of NotebookLM. Mustafa Suleiman hired three people from DeepMind. He's the AI head of AI at Microsoft. Marco Taliasaki, Zalan Borsos and Matthias Minderer. And so they're now founding members of Microsoft's new AI office in Switzerland. I'm not sure why Switzerland. They all worked at DeepMind. Suleiman, who co founded DeepMind with Demis Hassibis, left there in 2022 to form an AI startup and then eventually went to Microsoft in 2024. So I don't know. I mean you, you, we had the Notebook LM guy on the show. Jeff, your friend. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We should have money in.

[Leo Laporte]

He's still there. Yeah, we should. Absolutely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, three of the lead developers left to start a whole new company now. These folks have left. I don't know. I suspect that says more about Google. Google these days.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Zalam Borso says I'll be focusing on advancing the audio capabilities of Microsoft AI. Marco Tagliasaki says please don't ask. I've joined Microsoft AI as a founding member of the new Zurich office. I'll be working on audio. See all these guys doing audio collaborative.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Horowitz may be right.

[Leo Laporte]

With audio playing a critical role in shaping a more natural, intuitive and immersive interactions. I still feel like it's a bridge technology, but we've seen that. I mean they've been bridged lots in technology, lots of bridge technologies which help kind of ease us into a whole new way of, of working well. So I also voice interviewers. That's interesting. What are they, what are they interviewing people for? Talent. Talent interviews for presumably for tech startups.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I forgot to put it in here, but is it. I think Amazon is having an event the next week or so about Madame. You know, a bold new step in Madame.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're probably finally announcing the Echo Pro. They call it the A word Pro, which will be, it is rumored $5 a month for advanced capabilities. But this has been long delayed because it didn't, it didn't work very well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

February 26th is an event for it. I'll put it in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, this will be interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let me put it in the chat.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting because that's what we. By the way, speaking of chat, did you see who's in chat? Having a lovely birthday dinner. Missing us. Oh, Paris Martineau says hello guys from fancy birthday dinner. Missing. Chatting with y'all, but also enjoying my truly sand free evening. Look at that. That looks good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Would you say back? I demand the caviar. I want to see a picture of the caviar.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Caviar hamburger. Right? I think it was on already. It was a caviar roll.

[Jeff Jarvis]

715. Oh, I should. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So Button Mash asked, why would voice be a bridge? Isn't that the communication mode that's most natural to us humans? Yes. So I guess we would communicate with our agent, but that agent could then communicate with the outside world. And honestly, our agent's going to get smarter and smarter about what my needs and wants are and it's going to know. I'm going to Tucson. I'll be there on Valentine's Day. I better book a lovely meal for Lisa and Leo and I won't have to do anything at all. Right? I, I, I do think that. I don't know, I'm, I'm trying to think of some other.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Do you want to not do anything at all though?

[Mike Elgin]

That's exactly. This is the problem with all this.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to play this piano.

[Mike Elgin]

This is the problem.

[Benito Gonzalez]

But you don't want to pick the restaurant that you got with Lisa with, you know, you don't want to pick the restaurant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You want choice.

[Leo Laporte]

I would love my AI and maybe this would be voice. Say, Mr. Laporte, you're going to be in Tucson on Valentine's Day. I found three excellent restaurants with an opening in the evening. Evening. Would you like to pick one? And I'll make a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Harass them all by calling them as Google and wouldn't it.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, I won't have to call them. That's. That's what I'm saying.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It will just go with their agent.

[Mike Elgin]

Okay. But let me give you another scenario. Okay, so here's another scenario. You have this tool that's called, you know, husband Helper. And you just go in there and say, just do all the things that a husband's supposed to do. So automatically Lisa's going to get flowers on Valentine's Day. And yeah, all that stuff is going to be taken care of. Now, how does Lisa feel about. Going to feel about this? Right. You just. Well, she'll have nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

She'll have wife, which will yell at.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You for your agent for getting the wrong thing.

[Benito Gonzalez]

As, like, remembering birthdays doesn't matter anymore because Facebook reminds everybody. So, like, it doesn't mean anything to anybody.

[Mike Elgin]

Right. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So we will soon come to the point where we think remembering birthdays is not necessarily a virtue. It's just something like, something people do. Do you? I mean, people don't remember their phone number anymore. When I was a kid, it was drilled into us.

[Mike Elgin]

Yep.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Can't. Yeah, can't navigate without Google Maps anymore. I think that's kind of something bad. That's something bad, though. Seriously, I would love to be able to navigate still without it.

[Leo Laporte]

I have no idea. Worse than that, I'll go somewhere with Google Maps and I won't know where I am. And, like, if the map stopped working, I wouldn't know where I was. So that's.

[Benito Gonzalez]

That's kind of the danger of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Fortunately, the maps are reliable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So a friend of mine was in London and he's talking on a video call with somebody, and a bike rider comes by. You know what happens? Grabs the phone and can't call. He said, never have a text sent to you to get into something because he can't get to Verizon and change his phone number till he gets back to the US and he's down to nothing. And he can't go Anywhere. And it's like he just suddenly got robbed. For the next week, Jeff, everything's.

[Leo Laporte]

He asked you to wire him some money.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, he didn't.

[Mike Elgin]

Oh, he just wrote a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wrote a sad blog post about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm safe. You protected me from myself as an old guy. It's a good thing to do.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know who Piements is when they're at home. P Y M N T S Pymans tv, but they have a story. Did you put this in here? Meta smart glasses spending.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Approaches $100 billion payments.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it is. Yeah. P Y M N T S payments could be pyments.

[Benito Gonzalez]

And if they are PI payments, then that means that's probably an AI Article, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, do you think it's written by.

[Benito Gonzalez]

AI well, the byline just says by payments.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a bad sign.

[Mike Elgin]

They also have two really expensive super bowl commercials for Ray Ban metaglasses, which I think is going to really finish making them mainstream. I thought that was really interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

I am told that super bowl ads will be overrun with AI just as they used to be overrun with dot com's 9 million Bitcoin. Remember all the crypto ads a couple of years ago? Courage favors the brave. Buy Bitcoin. Actually, if you had followed those ads, you'd be rich by now. So maybe I shouldn't mock them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So then we have the story above. That is Bosworth Boz saying that the Metaverse could be a legendary misadventure if the company doesn't boost sales. Leaked memo shows.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're talking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jury is out.

[Leo Laporte]

Meta's cto. Yeah. Well, he's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could be right.

[Leo Laporte]

Could be, could be right. I think they've already pivoted, haven't they? Andrew Bosworth is the CTO of Meta. He told staff in a memo this year that it's the most critical year for the company's Metaverse bet. Andrew. Should somebody tell Andrew?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who wants to tell Andrew?

[Leo Laporte]

I. I think mixed reality is kind of a dead deal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's surprisingly not a dead deal is crypto. I've been thinking about crypto and what I don't like about crypto, besides the fact that people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was afraid you were going to go crypto positive. Oh, thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm not going. And. And. And that, you know, it's a highly speculative and risky investment, and it empowers ransomware, et cetera, et cetera. The real problem I have with it is people are the whole idea of your money. Money is kind of like a battery for energy. Right. It's stored value. And it's really a waste to put money into bitcoin hoping that just kind of accidentally it'll go up. You should put money into companies where you're supporting what their endeavors are. You're helping them build their company to create some value in the world. You're putting money in bitcoin. It's pure speculation. It doesn't support anything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's buying pork belly futures.

[Leo Laporte]

It's no, but even pork belly futures at least are tied to pork bellies. It's worse. It's like buying tulip bulbs. It's completely unrelated to anything, to value creation. It's all speculation. Now I realize why I never really liked the idea idea to begin with.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I mean it is kind of an extremely efficient Ponzi scheme and Ponzi schemes are very popular and they happen all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The time for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a Ponzi scheme? Maybe it is. I mean it's, it's certainly speculative and the people who have bitcoin would very much like you to buy theirs.

[Benito Gonzalez]

No, it's not like a Ponzi scheme, but it's like the, it's the evolution.

[Leo Laporte]

Of that idea, whatever that is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And, and yeah, they're both right. There's no value creation. That's actual value creation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

So I go to El Salvador a lot and that's is of course famous for its chivo wallet and bitcoin thing. And they, they have these Chivo wallet ATMs all over the country and they're just gathering dust. Half of them don't work anymore. Nobody ever uses them. Nobody uses bitcoin in El Salvador. 92% of Salvadorans didn't use Bitcoin for any transaction in 20, 24. 92%. It's a completely failed experiment. Every, everybody, all the bitcoin bros were like super excited when El Salvador sort of legalized it as made it legal tender. And there's been less follow up on that. It's basically a non existent thing. The government keeps investing in bitcoin.

[Leo Laporte]

But in fact I remember Bukele celebrating how much money they'd made because they did buy a lot of bitcoin when it was a much lower price.

[Mike Elgin]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

But the ruling congress in El Salvador last Wednesday they approved a reform that took away the phrase legal tender. So if it's legal tender, then a merchant is required to accept it as payment. If it's not, they can say, no, I don't take bitcoin. So it's the Beginning of the end.

[Mike Elgin]

To me, El Salvador is the perfect example of what you're talking about, Leo. This is a country with extreme poverty that needs all kinds of help in a whole bunch of different ways. Ways. They, they have environmental problems. Their rivers are horribly polluted. It's, it's. They have. It's a beautiful country, believe me. It's. It's a wonderful place. But. But it's like they need people invest. If you can invest in something. They need people investing in companies that are feeding people that are bringing clean water.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, guess what they're doing to make money, Mike. El Salvador has agreed to take the migrants and American citizens into their horrendous. Horrendous prisons. If you look at their homepage of the Wall Street Journal right now, you will see just a frightening photo of how El Salvador is going to make some money.

[Leo Laporte]

And Mike, I know you have ties to it because Amir is from El Salvador and so forth. Yes. And you've been there. And you. In fact, you did. I know you did a gastronomad adventure there. So there's. I mean, you love the country and the people, I'm sure.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. Yes. Well, the, The. Yeah, the, the, the. The rounding up of all the gang members has transformed the country.

[Leo Laporte]

And it used to be Murder. Murder Incorporated there. Right. I mean, it was very 2015.

[Mike Elgin]

It was in 2015, it sort of the violence peaked, and then they've been chipping away at it, and then they had this radical emergency rule thing where they just rounded up everybody with a tattoo with no, no recourse for true getting out. And, but, but, but Salvador, it's a very, very, very popular policy. Bukele. Not so much, but the policy.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it his policy keeping The.

[Mike Elgin]

It was. Yeah. And. But other, Other policies of his are not so great. And he's, he's, you know, he's a, He's a mixed bag. But, like, this policy is very popular because, you know, if you think about it, El Salvador was wracked with civil war starting in 78. The war ended in 92.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The.

[Mike Elgin]

The gang members were kicked out of the United States and sent to El Salvador like a year or two after the civil war ended. They had no prospects for legitimate employment, so they just had this reign of terror of mafia style, sort of like oppression of the population. So basically, this is a country that hasn't. That's been fearing violence since 1978.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

And suddenly they're the safest country in Latin America. Salvadorans are ecstatic about this. Fact. And in fact, we wouldn't do the Salvadoran experience if they hadn't done that. It's human humanitarian disaster from a human rights point of view, but a very, very, very popular policy because now, finally, the Salvadorans can go out at night.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I mean, Americans kind of had hand. And why all that happened?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, we just.

[Benito Gonzalez]

That's our fault.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, the U.S. u.S. Has been involved in all of it. It's the Salvador and civil war was part of the Cold war conflict.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Benito Gonzalez]

So all that bad stuff happened because of us. I think I just want to put that out there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Chicken egg. Pretty clear.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. How do they justify the idea that they would put American citizens in seacot, though? I don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not. Not sure.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't understand. That would quite work. We don't like you. We're going to put you in jail in El Salvador. By the way, I understand why.

[Mike Elgin]

Sent.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead.

[Mike Elgin]

They've already sent immigrants accused of crimes to Guantanamo Bay. That's already taking place.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have they started occupying?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, like 13 of them. It wasn't a huge number, but they are starting that, but.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes, yes, but it's a slippery. I mean, once they get away with.

[Leo Laporte]

That, they have room for 30,000. There's plenty of space.

[Mike Elgin]

The whole point of Guantanamo is that it's not covered by the, you know, the rule of law.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so they also sent a military cargo jet with people on it to India.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Yep, yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Seacot is the world's largest correctional facility. Holds 40,000 members of street gangs or just anybody with a tattoo.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I'm shocked that the world's largest correctional facility is not in America.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we will catch up. We're working on it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're going to outsource their bonito. Mike, next time you're there, don't do anything bad, okay? Promise? And you tell me you don't have any tattoos.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Maybe don't get a tattoo.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't get a tattoo. No tattoos, Leo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because he has a tattoo.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. Yeah, they're actually. My butt. I hope not. Yeah, it's. Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

What gang is that, Leo? I mean, there's kind of a dual system of justice in El Salvador, which is very controversial there. If you're an American and you're caught doing something there, they pretty much just let you go. And. And they, you know, there was an American citizen who was Salvadoran. You know, his parents, I think, were Salvadoran immigrants or whatever, went to El Salvador on vacation. He had some tattoos, not gang tattoos. And he was caught and basically called the embassy. Embassy leaned on the government. They're like, oh, never mind. And so this was very controversial in El Salvador because for Salvadoran citizens, that's not how it goes. And so it's very, very, very safe for Americans to go there. In terms of Americans worried about getting caught up in the criminal justice system, it unfairly favors American visitors to the country.

[Leo Laporte]

Your favorite Benedict Evans posts on Threads A A note from JP Morgan analysts about Tesla stock. The analysts the headline is Tesla shares somehow up 5% after a 38% EBIT miss I was puzzled by that. And on the lowest margin in years as a 20 to 30% increase in 2025 deliveries. Outlook is revised to return to growth. He writes, it's not clear to us why Tesla shares traded as much as 5% higher on the aftermarket Wednesday. Perhaps it was management's statement that had identified an achievable path to becoming worth more than the world's five most valuable companies taken together. In other words, More than the $14.8 trillion combined market cap of Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon or Alphabet. Of course they're going to be that value. Or maybe it was management's belief that just one of its products has by itself the potential to generate north of $10 trillion in revenue. How could they even it may even have related to management's guidance for 2026, no financial targets were provided, but it was said to be, quote, epic. And for 2027 and 2028, ridiculously good. What the what? It's a meme stock and I think that's really clear. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's a political meme stock now. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's a means of sending a signal to say that yes. Drive the car and on the stock.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right. Our neighbor down the street just bought apparently it's you can get the cyber trucks cheap. Oh, I bet they've started leasing them, which they didn't do initially. And the original, the, the you know, special first edition cybertrucks, they've been debadging them so that they can sell them at a lower cost. So and they've been offering and this is, I think our neighbor took advantage of this free wraps. So our neighbor has taken what is probably the ugliest car since the Aztec and wrapped it in it looks like fake stained glass. I don't know what it is. Camo.

[Mike Elgin]

There's a lot of, there's a lot of ramps on Teslas. Well the other thing that's happening right now, I'm seeing on social media is a lot of vandalism of Teslas because.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, don't do that, folks.

[Mike Elgin]

Activity. Yeah, don't do that. But like there are people who are vandalizing entire car lots.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, dear.

[Mike Elgin]

Cyber trucks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I. What I want is, I want a speaker on the top of my car just so whenever I pass one I can just start laughing.

[Leo Laporte]

There are quite a few of them in Petaluma for some reason. I mean, I don't know. I mean, they're in Northern California, is loaded with Teslas, period.

[Benito Gonzalez]

But there's a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot in Marin too. There's quite a few of them. And every time I see one I go, I don't. It's like something a four year old designed with. Yeah, it's bizarre.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have you looked inside? I haven't been inside, no.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a friend who. Well, our neighbor who has one at least is dying to get a ride. Just gonna go over, say, take me for a ride in your cyber truck. All right, we're gonna. I think we're gonna wrap it up. This has been our first episode of a brand new show, Intelligent machines. I hope you're enjoying it. We'd love to hear your feedback. Email jeffarvis.com right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Though everybody knows where to find me and they do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We could see socials. You can always put it up there. We are going to take a little tiny break and then we're going to get our picks of the week. We still have them. We haven't abandoned them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. Change log, however.

[Leo Laporte]

No, we've abandoned that. Thank God. And stop. For old time sake, ladies and gentlemen. Gentlemen.

[Benito Gonzalez]

That's probably the last time you'll ever see that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Keep it around.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right. Now that you begin, you got to do the end. You have to. You have to. You can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

It even feels dated. That really feels.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you really get yelled at, people for not doing the change log?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because you hated doing it. You did it.

[Leo Laporte]

I had to do it. They made me do it.

[Scooter X]

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[Leo Laporte]

All right, Mike Elgin, it's so great to have you, Mike. Everybody should go to gastronomad.net and see what wonderful trips Mike and Amira have planned. I went with them. Lisa and I went with them a couple of years ago. Go to Oaxaca during the Day of the Dead. And it was just the best. The best, the best.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The best pictures from that trip.

[Leo Laporte]

Tuscany. Oh, yeah. Mike's an amazing photographer. There's going to be another Oaxaca trip. Morocco. And you're doing El Salvador again.

[Mike Elgin]

We are. We've done two El Salvador experiences. They've been both incredibly fantastic, but we've added Tuscany recently since the last time I was on the show. So that's really nice. Nice. So the Tuscany experience is coming, I think, in 2026. But yeah, so. So if people are curious about what we do, we basically have a small group of people. Eight, ten, maybe 12 people. There were 14 on the one you did, Leo. Because people kept asking us to do it. It was the first one because Leo was there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They knew they had to be with Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think Mike allowed Lisa. Okay, yeah, yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

But. But yeah, we get together and we're often in an old farmhouse that's been refurbished or in a beautiful location in a vineyard or something like that. And we just do only the good things. And so we call it joy therapy. So if you're stressed out from doom scrolling the news and all that kind of stuff, it's like an escape where you go into a world where it's just eating the most amazing food, drinking the most incredible wine, or in the case of Oaxaca, mezcal and. And just look incredible life the way it should be lived.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the best travel ever.

[Mike Elgin]

Invite everyone's kitchen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do they have to, like, do an essay to get in? Do they have to?

[Mike Elgin]

No, you do admissions will come to the expenses. Yeah, we, you know, we, we, we find that the group, the people who join these experiences are self selecting and the most amazing people. They're kindred spirits. They're like super foodies. They're trucking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

They're trusting people because, because we don't tell anybody anything that's going to happen. So we're like everything's a secret surprise. And so what kind of person would sign up for something like that?

[Leo Laporte]

Not my wife. She did not like really awesome person. She wanted to know everything that was coming. Next time Amir is just going to have to whisper in her ear. Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually help me. Lisa has said and I, I'm among. I don't know what to say about this. She doesn't. She thinks safe to leave the country for the next four years. What. How do people in. Yeah. If you're in. Yeah, that's. If you're in Sicily. What are people. They know you're American. Do they spit. Spit on you?

[Mike Elgin]

No, no, no, no, no. Not at all. People are. Couldn't be nicer everywhere we go. I mean it's just, it's just fantastic. I mean if, if to the extent that they're paying attention. I'm always surprised by everywhere I go where I'm like, oh yeah, you know, know our, our politics. So. Your politics? What about our politics?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Italy is not known for great politics actually and so on.

[Mike Elgin]

But, but everybody is, everybody's. You know, these trends that are happening, you know, the, the, the American trends are happening in a very American way, but they're kind of global.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it is global, isn't it?

[Mike Elgin]

Overarching political trends. And so people are, are sympathetic to, to that. They know that, you know, we're the primary victims to the extent that they pay attention to what's happening in the US and so no, no, I've, I've never ever been treated in any of the places where we do experiences in any way other than the most gracious, kind, you know, welcome.

[Leo Laporte]

Because we usually just say we're Canadian and that, that's the conversation.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, it's, it's funny because when we went to Cuba years ago, the Canadians were so depressed because that used to be their place where they could go.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Mike Elgin]

No, Americans and the Americans couldn't go. And, and they, they, they had it made. But like the other thing of it is you as you know, Leo, it's like we are always in the loving embrace of our personal friends on all these experiences.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely.

[Mike Elgin]

And so, and so.

[Leo Laporte]

And he's talking about the best restaurants in town, the best chefs. It is a remarkable experience. Highly recommended.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. Yeah. Y. So good.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna work on Lisa. She's nervous about, about not traveling at this point.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, except the flying part from. For reasons we maybe don't fly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, we'll go Alitalia. It'll be okay.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

MachineSociety AI is Mike's newsletter subscribe. So I mean, he's really an insightful writer and especially on AI So now.

[Mike Elgin]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Now's the time.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. What's your pick, sir?

[Mike Elgin]

Well, okay, so I have been using the DJI Flip. Oh, and the reason.

[Leo Laporte]

So you had a, you had a phantom when I was with you in, in Mexico, I think, right?

[Mike Elgin]

We had. I've had three drones. I crashed two of them. The first one I crashed into my daughter in law.

[Leo Laporte]

As did I.

[Mike Elgin]

And it went plunk. And in fact, in fact the two that I crashed were both in El Salvador. So I crashed two drones and I had one stolen.

[Leo Laporte]

See that, Jeff?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it over?

[Leo Laporte]

It's over. You can look now.

[Mike Elgin]

It's almost over. So this is my fourth drone, the DJI Flip. And I absolutely love it. My, my issue with it of in general is that the drone influencers tend to love it, but they, they don't give it enough credit because it's a perfect drone for somebody who's not a drone obsessed person.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very lightweight.

[Mike Elgin]

AI as the AI is what makes it so amazing. So it has all the AI stuff that's in the, the, the, the mini drones and all that, but it has exclusive features.

[Leo Laporte]

Close your eyes, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Based on AI Tell me when it's over.

[Mike Elgin]

So, so one of the problems I've always had with shooting drones is like you, you get it out. You have to put your phone into the, into the, into the controller.

[Leo Laporte]

It's real pain.

[Mike Elgin]

You have to launch it. You have to have a non filthy place to launch it from so the dust doesn't get in your drone. It takes like three or four or five minutes to get a drone in the air. And then you have to put it away at the end. All the stuff with this drone, you simply unfold the, the propellers, you just pull them out and it turns on by itself. And then you hold it out in your hand and it takes off. It responds to voice commands. Oh, so you tell it, fly high.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here we go.

[Mike Elgin]

Voice go here.

[Leo Laporte]

Land back.

[Mike Elgin]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't look, Jeff. Close your eyes.

[Mike Elgin]

The, the, the taking off and landing from your hand. It's like a falcon. Falcon. It does that through AI. It knows what a hand looks like and it will only land on a hand.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice.

[Mike Elgin]

Very, very fascinating. And, and, and it's designed for vloggers. So one of the cool things about it is that, and in fact they, they sell the, the Mic Mini, the DJI Mic mini, which is a tiny lightweight wireless mic that you clip onto your clothes. It's, it's optimized for making the drone sound in the audio vanish completely. Completely. So you can sit there and do vlogging, walking around if you want to or whatever, and chit chatting. And you only hear the crystal clear voice without any sort of wine of the drone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How much do they run, Mike?

[Mike Elgin]

Cheap. Cheap, cheap. Like, like 440 bucks. Very inexpensive. And, and it has to be like they have another cheap drone. I forgot it's called the Neo or something like that, which has a crappy camera and a bunch of other. This has the same 4K high quality camera as the, the mini 4 Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

I have the Mini.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, it's a really high quality camera and so they've made all the right compromises. So it has, it has, it doesn't have obstacle avoidance in every direction, only going forward. But the propellers are covered so you can run into a wall and it sort of backs off and keeps flying. And so it's really a phenomenal drone and I highly recommend it to people who are a little nervous about having a drone and I recommend it to sort of content creators and influencers and anybody else because it's, it's so, it's so exhilarating to just pull it out, undo the thing, launch it in the air and it just follows you or does whatever you want it to do. It'll do circular thing and then you go like this and it lands in your hand. You fold it up and put it away. That's how you turn it off. You just fold up the wings so you can have it in the air in literally less than 10 seconds after you decide to shoot something. So it's a really, really fun drone.

[Leo Laporte]

You're tempting me. You're tempting me, Mike.

[Mike Elgin]

It's the AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is bad for Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I still have my DJI Mini and I very rarely take it out. But part of that is all those things you described.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, it's a pain in the, it's a pain in the butt. And now it still does have a.

[Leo Laporte]

Controller that looks like.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, it comes with a controller as part of the price and you can use it with a controller and best of all, you can also control it with your phone, with the app. Right. So you can basically, if you're going to go. If you can. If you say, okay, we're going to do some serious drone photography, bring the controller, you have all the control in the world, or if you're just going to go for a hike or whatever, just everyday kind of stuff, you just stuff the drone in your pocket. It don't bring the controller. It makes it so much easier. And then you have the option to use the automated AI features to fly it with no controller at all. Or you can pull out your phone and have more control with your phone. But you, you don't have to carry the, the, the. The controller, which to me is very liberating.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have some videos on your nice book that I could play? Looks like my.

[Mike Elgin]

Those are all photos.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Mike Elgin]

From the, from the drone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

Saying. No, I, I don't have any drone shots there.

[Leo Laporte]

But by the way, Mike also was with me on the beach walking and got sand in his shoes.

[Mike Elgin]

I just. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not just me. Okay. I just.

[Mike Elgin]

That's a. That's the Sahara, actually. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

That's the Sahara. Wow.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

By the way, Leo, I. I've realized that every guest we have on, from now on, we have to find out whether it was the sandman.

[Leo Laporte]

I will. I'm going to ask the sandman to come on and I will. When he comes on, if we can get him, I will out him. He is.

[Mike Elgin]

There's a video of you and me with the drone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. In Oaxaca. This one. Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

Now I'm. Now I'm Jeff. Like getting frustrated by your scrolling. I think it was up. I think you. I think you go up above. Up. Keep going, keep going.

[Leo Laporte]

We're in Oaxaca here. There we. Oh, yeah, that's you and me and the drone.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, right there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

So go ahead and click on that. That's the.

[Leo Laporte]

Which one was that?

[Mike Elgin]

That was the cooking class.

[Leo Laporte]

It.

[Mike Elgin]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, I know where we are, but which DJI is that that you're using?

[Mike Elgin]

This was the Mini 3 Pro. That was a couple of drones ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, a couple of drones ago.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah. Is that all. Is that all chunky? It looks.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's probably the Internet. Internet. It's Sicily. It's chunky. Yeah, it's very smooth. It was fun. Yeah. I think you also had me running around. I don't know if you posted that one. I don't. Probably didn't. And we did Some fun videos out in the. The agave. Agave. What is that the that they make?

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, the agave fields.

[Leo Laporte]

Agave field. Really fun. All right, all right. Maybe I'll get this as well. What the hell. It looks like fun.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I really love it.

[Mike Elgin]

It's so easy. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

$439.

[Mike Elgin]

It's cheap. If you crash it, you get another one. It's like not that cheap. Yeah but you don't worry about it so much. Like I used to spend a thousand dollars on a drone. It's a true. They used to be consequential crash.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

And so get it while you can. Get much easier.

[Leo Laporte]

Get it while you can. It won't be that cheap for a while after a while because I imagine it'll be tariffed. Jeff Jarvis, your pick of the week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm gonna do two. They're AI related. One on line 185. Fascinating LinkedIn post here. That by a marketer. That's. That suggests that marketing in the age of AI agents marketers will have to advertise to age agents.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, my point exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly your point. I knew you'd like this. Today humans see and interact with ads. In the future, AI agents will filter everything they see. The ads, not the humans. But it leads to all kinds of fascinating conflict of interest questions is. So I use, you know, Leo.com's agent and Leo gets a. I gotta deal.

[Leo Laporte]

With Coca Cola and Right. You're gonna see Coca Cola ads whether.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I like it or not. But Mike has the ethical one. But he's gonna to charge me more for his agent because he's not taking the money from Coca Cola.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm telling you there the. There are so many ramifications. This is a show that we. We could do this for years and never cover everything. I think it's. We're entering. Very interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A few weeks ago I mentioned that there's a new just as there's SEO, there's GEO generative engine optimization. So now there's in this post agent optimization. Brands must train AI agents to prefer their products in natural decision making. There's API based marketing instead of ads. Brands must integrate into AI ecosystems through data API and partnerships. Just like media providers and reputation trust signals. AI agents will prioritize trusted brands reputation verified reviews and so on. So it's going to be a whole bunch of you know, consulting firms are going to start and data strategy powerhouses and warehouses. Warehouses. And it's going to be a whole new world of marketing which is going to be fun to watch. Them fall over themselves. The other one I have is the story that drove me knocking futs this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh no, what's that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

There has to be one there. Maybe that should be the next thing I do.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Jeff Jarvis]

What drove Jeff knocking futs? Line 110. Celebrities signed on to a letter warning that AI systems could be caused to suffer if consciousness is achieved.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh please.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There is enough suffering, real suffering, human suffering in the world. The last thing I'm going to worry about is hurting software's feelings. Doesn't have any. This is just ridiculous. So Stephen Fry signed on to this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, come on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fairly unknown people. If you go to the next line down in the.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you said 110. I don't see it here. So what's the number?

[Jeff Jarvis]

119. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

119. Okay, 119. So if you look at that, really hysterical and you know. Okay, fine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So if you go to the next line, line 120, there's the letter itself and people and so it's telling you that that organizations should prioritize research on understanding and assessing AI consciousness with objectives of preventing the mistreatment and suffering of conscious AI systems. Oh, give me an effing brain break, dorks.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, could they suffer, do you think? They're only 112 signatures, so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's not. They haven't got. They haven't had a lot of signatures.

[Leo Laporte]

Poor Stephen Fry. I think he's. He's charging up that hill on his own.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, Stephen Fry got taken. No, nobody else famous is on this list. And this whole thing, this consensium or whatever it's called, Cons Consium was started by an ad guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, okay, so it feels.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So that was, that was the thing that drove me knocking futs this week.

[Leo Laporte]

I see you also have a Axios piece about Bill Gates. He's. Of course. And I'm going to try to get him because he's got a new book.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's got a. He's got three volumes, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

A three volume autobiography. Oh God. But he actually is very thoughtful about AI and I think he'd be great to have on. Oh yeah, I was watching him on Jimmy Fallon last night, plugging the book, but he said something that was a mind boggler talking about being boggled. I'll. I'll have to talk about it on Mac Break Weekly, but there's a very famous All Things D conference with Kara Swisher and Matt, I mean, sorry, Walt Mossberg and of course Bill Gates and Steve Jobs together on the stage. And Jobs kind of snide about Microsoft and Bill Gates. He said, you know, Microsoft never had any taste. He said, they should have taken acid like I did. He says, I don't trust. He's famously. Jobs said, I don't trust anybody who's never taken acid. So last night, this is a revelation. Bill Gates said, well, I was kind of sitting there going, I couldn't say anything at the time, but I've taken acid.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ah.

[Leo Laporte]

What's he talking about?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, can you imagine that? Nerdfest. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. I was shocked. Shocked. I tell.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's all kinds of personal things. He regrets his divorce terribly.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I saw that. I. That is really interesting. Yeah. He feels bad about that, no doubt.

[Mike Elgin]

Rejects his. His sort of friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in fact, that probably is linked to the divorce. Yeah, yeah. That's at least the. Was the rumor that Melinda said, you know, it's me or Jeffrey.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, yeah. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So Bill was a famous ladies man. It was well known.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

Back in the day in comdex, he was. He, you know, was always getting hammered and behaving inappropriate.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I just.

[Leo Laporte]

With him at comdex, but not with him next to him.

[Mike Elgin]

Were you on acid too, Leo, or.

[Leo Laporte]

I was not on acid, but to steal a joke, I think from Jimmy Fallon, he was doing the bite dance.

[Mike Elgin]

Ah.

[Leo Laporte]

With the thumbs.

[Mike Elgin]

The thumbs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I just, I added Bill Gates to the list because you'll. You're old, you'll forget.

[Mike Elgin]

Hey.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I was also thinking that some other other names from the past, like Eric Schmidt and Marissa Meyer. I'd love to hear what they think of this AI time.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, Eric Schmidt has an AI killer robot company happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he does Suicide Dreams.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He's definitely into it. Yeah.

[Mike Elgin]

So he's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

We will try. You know, I, I think this is an opportunity to get some really interesting people on the show. So. Yeah, we will endeavor to do that.

[Mike Elgin]

So. So when Jeff was talking about this whole thing about software. I'm sorry to go back when you're trying to go forward, but about software and its feelings. There's actually a bill. Kevin, my son Kevin, sent me this, this, this story 2 days ago in the Verge that basically says that there's a bill pending in the California legislature. Of course, fire AI companies to remind kids that a chatbot is not human. And this is that like. Which is amazing. It'll have all the impact of a, of a. Of a warning label on cigarettes. But pretty interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Does the teacher. Before they have an interaction. This is Steve Padilla. Once again, does the teacher have to say. Now remember, John, Johnny, you're. This is not a human you're talking to.

[Mike Elgin]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does that mean I can call it a piece of. No, Johnny, you shouldn't do that either. Even if it's not human? Well, well, no.

[Mike Elgin]

Why. But why not? I mean, I think they should. I think we should teach kids to call it a piece of something.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not a human being.

[Mike Elgin]

Why?

[Leo Laporte]

I have feelings, Stephen Fry. Not understanding.

[Mike Elgin]

And, and that's the whole, that's the whole basis of Kevin's company is to teach kids. That is not a person. Yeah. AI is just a. A thing that you. Somebody like you can build.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's give Kevin a plug. It's. Hello, Chatterbox.

[Mike Elgin]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

The smart speaker that teaches kids about all this stuff. Really cool. It's the only smart speaker approved for education. Why? Because the kid writes the code. It doesn't out and it's exfiltrated.

[Mike Elgin]

Private. Yeah, that's right. So it uses a bunch of. It uses Wolframa, Alpha, it uses all these different services, Chat, GPT, etc, etc, etc. And those companies nor. And also Chatterbox don't know who the user is. It's totally private, which is why it's legal in schools.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Origami. This is bringing back, bringing back childhood memories. Last week on the show I Talked about my 8th grade science fair winning entry, Electronic Bongos.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Part of the story I did not tell was that I had to make. I had to take a radio amplifier and, and get a speaker and make a case for it. And I was having problems and my dear departed father, this will explain a lot about my psyche, came down to the basement as he saw me trying to put this together and he said, you're so clumsy you couldn't stick your finger up your ass with two hands.

[Leo Laporte]

Who said that? Thanks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My father. My own father.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not nice. No.

[Mike Elgin]

Well, I mean, he probably was tired of the sound of bongos maybe, right?

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. You know what? You have to forgive any parent. Electronic bongos who suffered through electronic bongos. We gave Henry, when He was about 8, a toy saxophone to play the same song over and over and over again.

[Mike Elgin]

Big mistake. Big mistake.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Take.

[Leo Laporte]

Very annoying. Eventually threw it in the closet and of course it hit the button and started playing. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes episode one, Dash Stroke805, the first episode of our rebranded this week in Google Now Intelligent Machines. And I think very often as we do this show, we will feel like the dumb machines trying to figure out these Intelligent machines. But that's part of. Part of the fun. Mike, Elgin, thank you so much for spending your late night in Sicily with us. I don't know what time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go make your dinner, Mike.

[Mike Elgin]

Geez, it's 2am It's 2am But. But I'm. But we. We are here in Sicily. We don't have an experience here for this trip, and so we're actually trying to cling to Pacific time.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's smart.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's not even dinner time yet. It's not even five.

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. So cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Europeans staying up dinner at 3am like.

[Leo Laporte]

The rest of us.

[Mike Elgin]

That's right. It's the life. It's the life.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Soon.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that why?

[Mike Elgin]

Yeah, we're coming back in a couple of weeks and. And then we're gonna be in California for a couple weeks and then it's off to Oaxaca. So. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So nice. Always a pleasure. Give my love to Amira. It's great to see you.

[Mike Elgin]

Thank you. Will do. We'll do.

[Leo Laporte]

And thank you, Jeff Jarvis, professor, Professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University. You know, I finally memorized that after you left. Now teaching at Montclair State University in New Jersey and at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Did you decide whether to do a class or not? Have you?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know. I've got time decide side that's helping with. There's a new degree program I'm working on working on some other things.

[Leo Laporte]

That's nice. And you're writing a new book, so. Yep, staying busy. Jeff's latest is the web we weave. Excellent book, highly recommended. Also the Gutenberg parenthesis in paperback. Ah. All [e-mail] and magazine, let's not forget. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Mike. Thanks to all of you for joining us. And a real thanks to our Club Twit members, because Club Twit makes this show possible. One of the reasons Twig survived so long without any advertising is because of you. Advertising, of course, helps a lot, but it doesn't cover all of our expenses. And Your membership, only $7 a month in Club Twit makes a huge difference if you're not yet a member. Twit tv Club Twit. You get ad free versions of the shows. You get access to our great discord. You get access to special shows we don't put out out anywhere else. Including tomorrow, 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. Chris Marquardt Our little photo segment we we do every month. Chris will review submissions to for the Luminous theme. So and he likes to talk about photography news too. So if you're a photo bug like Chris and I are, he's a real photographer and I'm just an amateur. Please join us tomorrow afternoon in the club 1pm Pacific. Actually, we're going to stream it everywhere else as well. We always do that. YouTube, Twitch, tick tock, X, LinkedIn, Facebook, kick, all the usual places so you can watch that but you have to be there live. 1pm tomorrow Pacific 4pm Eastern. Thanks everybody for being here. Thanks for your support. We look forward to seeing you next week. Paris will be back for intelligent machines. Bye Bye.

[Scooter X]

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