Intelligent Machines 821: Just Count the Server Racks

Summary

Intelligent Machines 821: Just Count the Server Racks
Released: May 29, 2025 | Host: TWiT (Leo Laporte), Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau

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1. Exploring Technological Salvation with Adam Becker

Guest Introduction:
Leo Laporte introduces Adam Becker, a science journalist and astrophysicist, to discuss his new book, More Everything Forever. The book critically examines Silicon Valley's utopian ideology that promises technological salvation through ventures like colonizing Mars and achieving immortality.

Key Discussion Points:

• Silicon Valley's Promises:
  Adam Becker criticizes the Silicon Valley narrative of inevitable technological salvation. He states, “[...] they want and that's what they think they're going to get” (02:31), highlighting the unrealistic expectations set by tech giants.

• Singularity and Exponential Trends:
  Becker delves into Ray Kurzweil's concept of the Singularity—a point where AI surpasses human intelligence, leading to unprecedented advancements or potential doom. Becker argues against the feasibility of perpetual exponential growth, emphasizing that “[...] every exponential trend in nature and in technology... always ends” (06:12). He references Moore’s Law, noting its predicted end around 2010, to illustrate the limitations of exponential growth models.

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2. Critiquing Mars Colonization as Humanity's Lifeboat

Elon Musk's Mars Vision:
Becker scrutinizes Elon Musk's ambition to establish a million-person colony on Mars as a contingency for Earth's potential catastrophes. He asserts, “Mars is just an absolutely awful place. [...] the gravity is too low, the radiation levels are too high, there's no air” (13:14).

Challenges Highlighted:

• Habitability Issues:
  Mars presents significant challenges for human survival, including suboptimal gravity, high radiation, toxic soil, and an inhospitable atmosphere. Becker emphasizes that even in Earth's worst-case scenarios, Mars remains less habitable: “[...] there's no mammal that has ever lived that could survive on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit” (15:52).

• Sustainability Concerns:
  Establishing a self-sustaining civilization on Mars would require a population of half a billion to a billion people, far exceeding Musk's million-person target. Becker argues that such a large influx is logistically unfeasible: “[...] a million people is not enough [...] you need a fully self-sustaining, high industry, high tech civilization” (17:59).

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3. Evaluating Longtermism and AI Existential Risks

Longtermism and Its Critics:
Becker critiques the longtermist philosophy, which prioritizes the welfare of future generations. He discusses thinkers like William MacAskill, Nick Bostrom, and Elie Yudkowsky, who focus on preventing potential future catastrophes, such as those posed by artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Core Arguments:

• Speculative Risks vs. Present Issues:
  Becker contends that longtermists overly emphasize speculative threats from technologies like AGI at the expense of addressing immediate, tangible problems. He states, “[...] the risk of human extinction from non existent speculative technologies [...] is greater than the risks and harms from real problems that are here right now” (22:09).

• Paperclip Optimism:
  Referencing the "paperclip maximizer" scenario, Becker argues that fears of AI turning into destructive forces are unfounded. He explains, “[...] the concern is about a super intelligent AI that ... turns everything into paperclips. And so the concern is that such a machine would then kill everybody to make more paperclips” (24:38). Becker dismisses these fears as a "house of cards," emphasizing the lack of realistic foundations for such scenarios.

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4. Media Representation and Misconceptions about AI

AI in the News:
The panel addresses recent media stories exaggerating AI capabilities, such as claims of AI systems blackmailing operators. Jeff Jarvis mentions, “[...] OpenAI has a problem because its model refused to shut down when instructed” (26:21), to which Adam Becker counters by clarifying that these AI systems are merely language models without true agency: “[...] they're just language machines” (26:32).

Impact on Public Perception:

• Misinformation and Policy Implications:
  Misunderstandings about AI's capabilities can distort public perception and influence policy discussions. Becker emphasizes the need for accurate journalism and social norms to prevent the spread of false narratives: “[...] we need better journalism on this subject and ... better social norms” (28:05).

• AI's Real Capabilities:
  Becker distinguishes between generative AI tools and true intelligence, arguing that current AI lacks genuine understanding or intent: “[...] they are word and text generation engines. Even calling them AI is a PR move” (38:39).

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5. The Role of Billionaires and Wealth Concentration in Tech

Billionaires' Influence:
Becker discusses the disproportionate influence of billionaires in shaping technological advancements and narratives. He asserts, “[...] we have allowed billionaires to happen” (31:18) and cites Louis Brandeis’s warning about the incompatibility of extreme wealth concentration with democracy.

Proposed Solutions:

• Wealth Taxation:
  To mitigate the undue influence of billionaires, Becker advocates for implementing a wealth tax: “[...] nobody needs a billion dollars, $500 million is enough, we could institute a wealth tax” (31:18). He argues that taxing excessive wealth would help preserve democratic structures and ensure that wealth accumulation benefits society at large.

• Public Investment and Infrastructure:
  Becker highlights that much of the technological progress benefited from public investments, such as Arpanet, and suggests that the public should receive a return on these investments through taxation: “[...] you could say, yes, just wait, he gets to it. But then you carefully dissect them” (04:51).

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6. Conclusion and Forward Look

Preserving Reality and Fostering Responsible AI Use:
The episode wraps up with a consensus on the necessity of approaching AI with a balanced perspective—acknowledging its impressive capabilities while remaining critical of unfounded fears and exaggerated claims. The hosts and Becker call for informed discussions, responsible journalism, and policy frameworks that address both current issues and future challenges without succumbing to moral panic.

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Note: Time stamps correspond to the approximate location of the quotes within the transcript for reference.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff. It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris Smartno. Our guest today, science journalist and astrophysicist Adam Becker. His new book, More Everything Forever, talks about Silicon Valley's ideology of technological salvation. Go to Mars, never die, and other pipe dreams. Next on Intelligent Machines, podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is intelligent Machines, episode 821, recorded Wednesday, May 28, 2025. Just count the server racks. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show we talk about. Well, all those intelligent machines all around you. Not just AI, but robots and the little, you know, smart doohickeys that are wandering around on your floor right now. No, you don't have those. Yeah, those robotic vacuums, that kind of. We do Intelligent Machines every Wednesday with the wonderful Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalistic Innovation Emeritus at the City University of New York. He's now at Montclair State. What is it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Montclair State University, Montclair State University and Stony Brook University.

[Paris Martineau]

One of these days you're going to get it right.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I got pretty close. Paris Martineau, who is.

[Paris Martineau]

I never forget where Jeff works. That's my job.

[Leo Laporte]

That is not your job, but I'm glad you do it. Let's put it that way. I'm just grateful that you do that. As you probably know, this show used to be this week in Google with a nice handle theme of recorders going boop boop. Now we have a. We are much more modern with a theme from our esteemed technical editor and producer, Benito Gonzalez. It goes boopity boop. And we also call it Intelligent Machines because it's about AI. And we begin every show with an interview. Today we've got an astrophysicist, which I think is fabulous. You may see behind him his book what is Real, which is really what I'd like to know. But today, what is real? We're going to talk about his latest, More Everything Forever. Adam Becker, welcome to Intelligent Machines.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

More Everything Forever is what the Silicon Valley boys promise, right?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

That's what they want and that's what they think they're going to get.

[Leo Laporte]

Subtitle is AI overlords, space empires and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity. Yeah, so I love the idea, Adam.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Adam, I love this book. I listen to it, so I.

[Leo Laporte]

He's been singing its praises for months.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Singing along with your harmony here. And as I listen to the car, I'm raising my fist saying yeah, yeah. What he says, what's great about your book, if I may, if I may be so bold as to praise you, is that there are lots of other books out there that are moral panicky and technology's bad and you're not.

[Leo Laporte]

You give. Oh, no. He said the words moral panic. It's like Groucho Marx. You said the secret word. Now the duck has to appear. Only in this case, he is walking out.

[Paris Martineau]

Adam hasn't realized the show he signed up for.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, Adam.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, I'm still getting a handle on what this is. I understand the Groucho Marx reference.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we've been doing it for 20 years, so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So don't interrupt my praise. So what's great about Adam's book out there, folks, is that he fairly and meticulously presents a case before tearing it apart. Fairly and meticulously so. Some weeks ago, we had on Ray Kurzweil on the show, and, you know, we're fair to give Ray his time, and he certainly has the history of invention and innovation that was worthy of attention. And so, Adam, you present McCaskill and Kurzweil each in a chapter at the beginning, I think very, very fairly presenting their views. In fact, I talked to the author of another book we had on lately, and she just started reading your book, and she said you were being too nice. I said, well, no, just wait, he gets to it. But then you carefully dissect them. And I wonder if you could start with Kurzweil and go through what's wrong with his worldview.

[Adam Becker]

Certainly. Although at some point after the show, you're gonna have to tell me who thought I was too nice. That's not usually the criticism I get.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She hadn't yet gotten to the punchlines.

[Adam Becker]

Fair enough. So, yeah, so Kurzweil, he. He believes in this thing called the Singularity, Right. He thinks that what's going to happen is that we're going to get machines that are as smart, as intelligent and capable as humans and that they will then improve themselves and that that will lead to this exponential process that is of a piece with this larger trend in technology that he claims to have discerned in human history and the history of the universe before that, of just increasing technological ability, increasing complexity, biological and then technological, that will lead in short order, just in. You know, he says about, I think, 15 years at this point. He thinks the Singularity is going to be here. He's really going to start kicking off in about five years. He thinks that this will lead to super intelligent AI that will be able to do way more than even all of the collective efforts of humanity can do. And it will have godlike powers of creation and destruction and will fundamentally alter all of human life and the future of human civilization and post human civilization forever.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So that's the fair part where you fairly summarize his views.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I mean now the fun part.

[Paris Martineau]

Also computronium is in there. I just want to highlight the word Computronium.

[Adam Becker]

Yes, that's right.

[Paris Martineau]

That's my favorite part of Rick or this whole deal.

[Adam Becker]

Oh yeah, I definitely do talk about that in the book. He, he thinks that, you know, the fate of the cosmos is that this giant computer based civilization that we've put together is, is going to go out into the universe and restructure it into a giant computer, something made of computronium, a phase of matter that is optimized for computing power, and that the universe will become one giant computer serving our needs and whims, and we will live inside of it as part of it. Not totally clear, but, but as for tearing apart all of that, well, it's interesting that you say that that's a fair description because I agree that that's a fair description. I also think that it's sort of, on the face of it, somewhat ridiculous. But, but I also think that because there are people aside from just Ray Kurzweil who take it seriously. We need to take these ridiculous sounding ideas seriously. And if we want to take them apart, we have to take them apart seriously. Because it turns out there are very serious problems with that idea of the singularity that go beyond, oh, it looks ridiculous. For example, you know, this, this exponential trend that Kurzweil talks about in the history of, you know, biology and technology is not really there. The evidence for it is incredibly thin. Kurzweil has this whole chart that he's put together to explain why he thinks it's real and how it works. But he's a victim of his own perspective. If you ask me to make a list of the most important events in, in the history of humanity or the history of life on Earth or the history of the cosmos, that list is going to have more things on it that happened more recently than things that happened longer ago. Because that's just the way that we think about history. It's not something inherent about history, it's just a function of our perspective within history. You know, I was talking about this with a friend of mine, my friend Carl, and he had a really nice analogy for this. He said you know, you can remember what you had to eat earlier today, probably, and you can remember what you ate maybe yesterday, and you probably remember most of your meals from last week, and then you maybe remember a few good meals over the course of the last year. And then over the last 10 years, maybe there's only one or two specific meals. And beyond that, maybe one. This doesn't mean that you're eating exponentially more now than you did when you were younger. It's just how memory and history works.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it's this presumption that we are in this, in this, in this age of, of. Everybody tells me, I was just went through this on LinkedIn. Yeah. Can't you agree that the change is accelerating?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And if you do the chart of what the things you can remember, it looks like that, but you leave out a hell of a lot of history, is what you're saying.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, it's certainly true that there are some things that have had accelerating exponential trends over the course of history, but many of those trends are over. And the one thing that's always true of an exponential trend is that it ends. Exponential trends cannot last. There are lots of them in nature, and they always, always end. Either they smooth out or they lead to a crash. And the classic example from biology of an exponential trend is the population of a bacteria colony in a little dish of nutrients. And it's true that the number of bacteria in that dis will grow exponentially until they've grown to fill the dish and eat all the nutrients, at which point the growth stops and they all die because they starve. And every exponential trend in nature and in technology and just in reality is like this. They always end. And so what Kurzweil is doing is he's taking the one thing that we know is true about exponential trends and denying it. You know, he. He loves to talk about Moore's Law, which is this exponential trend in how many transistors we can fit onto a single computer chip. And it's been running for the last 50 years. It's what led to the tremendous explosion and miniaturization of computer technology in the last 50 years. But Gordon Moore himself, the originator of Moore's Law, knew that Moore's Law had to end. And in 2010, he said, yeah, we've got maybe another 10 or 15 years. In other words, he said it would end right about now. And lo and behold, it's ending, or has ended, depending on who you ask, because you can only make transistors so small you can't make transistors smaller than one atom because they're made of atoms. And sure, maybe there's some other technology that will come in and enable us to make them even smaller for a little bit. But first of all, there's no sign of that on the horizon. And second, there's always eventually going to be a limit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is where you bring your physicist hat. I'm sure it's a very nice hat too, to the topic.

[Paris Martineau]

Really fancy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which is what you also bring. So the other thing is you take apart, you dissect, which I quite like is the long termists is MacAskill and Bostrom who we've talked about in the show, and Yudkowski and his paper clips.

[Adam Becker]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And also going to Mars. And there are some other books that are very good, tearing apart the idea of going to Mars. But since you are an astrophysicist and since Elon's latest rocket just blew up in honor of that, why don't you dissect that idea that we're going to populate space as an astrophysicist?

[Adam Becker]

Absolutely. Sure. So yeah, Musk loves to say that we're going to get, or that correction that he's going to get a million people on Mars by 2050 as a backup for humanity. And there's just so many problems with this idea. First of all, using Mars as a backup in case something bad happens to Earth is just a really bad idea because Mars is terrible. Mars is just an absolutely awful place. You know, the, the gravity is too low, the radiation levels are too high, there's no air and the dirt is made of poison. But sure, let's all go to Mars.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like a great place to live.

[Paris Martineau]

What are you talking about? Can't breathe, can't live, can't grow food.

[Adam Becker]

Exactly.

[Paris Martineau]

We'll be fine.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I mean, so the number of reasons why we can't live on Mars is, is longer than I can get into here. But I'm just going to pick on a few of my favorites. Musk really wants Mars to be a backup for humanity. He says we need it in case something bad happens to Earth. There is nothing bad that could happen to Earth that would make Mars more suitable for human habitation than Earth. Everywhere on Earth is going to be a nicer place to live than anywhere on Mars.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Even New Jersey. Dammit.

[Adam Becker]

Hey man, don't diss New Jersey. I'm from New Jersey.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but I'm in New Jersey.

[Adam Becker]

Jersey. Strong, but yeah, look, the worst day in the history of complex life on Earth. The worst single day was about 66 million years ago when a rock the size of Brooklyn slammed into the earth 10 times faster than a jumbo jet. And that killed off all of the dinosaurs except for the birds. And that single day, a lot of creatures just died that day, and then many, many more over the course of the next, like 10 to 20 years after all that dust blotted out the sun and killed off the bottom of the food chain. But, but that day itself, rock was ejected out into space. There's probably little bits of dinosaur bone on the Moon from that impact, but. But a lot of that rock then came back down to Earth and caused the atmosphere to heat up and cooked a lot of things at the surface. Widespread wildfires, enormous earthquakes. Just a really, really horrible day. Six hours after that thing hit, or half an hour after that thing hit. Whatever you want. The day that thing hit, 66 million years ago, it was a nicer day for mammals on Earth than it has been on Mars ever. And the reason we know that is that mammals survived. There were already mammals around and they survived. There is no mammal that has ever lived that could survive on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit. Because if you are on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit, the saliva will boil off your tongue while you asphyxiate.

[Paris Martineau]

And we can't even keep the robots working on Mars.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, that's right. We can't even keep the robots working on Mars. And the robots were designed to work on Mars, but like, you know, I'm pretty sure they didn't have spacesuits here on Earth 66 million years ago. So, you know, our, our life here on Earth is proof that there is essentially nothing that could happen to Earth that would make it less habitable than Mars. Even if the climate change scenario gets as bad as possible, even if we have nucle nuclear war, it will still be better here. And, and you know, there's all sorts of places on Earth that are way more habitable than anywhere on Mars that people don't want to live. Nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere. Antarctica in the polar night, you know, and I don't mean like stay there for a science research station. I mean, nobody wants to like, set up house and have a family and like, have schools and supermarkets and stuff. Nobody wants to do that in the middle of Antarctica in the middle of the polar night. Antarctica in the polar night is nicer than it's ever been on Mars. The top of Everest is nicer than it's ever been on Mars. And, and you know, Mars gets more asteroid strikes than Earth does anyway, so why would Mars be a good lifeboat? And this is another one of my favorite things about the whole nonsense. Musk is very, very clear. He, he wants a million people on Mars so that way they can survive and have their own self sustaining civilization in the event of a disaster here on Earth. So the rockets stop coming. He says they need to survive even if the rockets stop coming. A million people is not enough for that. Because if you want to survive on Mars without supply ships, you need to have a fully self sustaining, high industry, high tech civilization. The economic base that you need for that high tech civilization is estimated to be somewhere around half a billion to a billion people.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh my.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a lot of rockets.

[Adam Becker]

That's a lot of rockets. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A lot of baby. Babies born into an uncertain, perhaps irresponsible atmosphere.

[Adam Becker]

Right, exactly. And like we don't atmosphere that will.

[Paris Martineau]

Literally poison you to death.

[Adam Becker]

Right, exactly. And even if you somehow take care of the poison, even if you have everybody live in pressurized tunnels underground, even if you somehow take care of the fact that if you have millions or a billion people living in pressurized tunnels underground, at some point something's going to go wrong. We don't know whether you can have babies on Mars because we don't know what the effect of Martian gravity, which is about one third that of Earth, we don't know what the long term effects of that are on human development and growth in the womb and in infancy and childhood.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And that's why Elon's trying to have enough here. Right. That he can go.

[Paris Martineau]

All right, I have a sense as to. One last Mars question. Yeah, sense as to why Mars. Why Mars in particular is because, I mean, Mars is always the one that people are talking about.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, what other planet you're gonna go to, really?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I mean, Mars isn't a good option.

[Leo Laporte]

Mars is Mercury and Jupiter and Saturn. What else, where else are you gonna go?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I mean, part of it, part of it I think really is stationary.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's another, that's another thing Adam investigates.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, I do, I do talk about space stations. They're, they're not much better. But I will say, you know, if you say we can't stay on Earth, like if you say no, no. Aside from Earth, what's the best place in the solar system? Mars probably is the next best. And it's as bad as I just said, which tells you something about how inhospitable the rest of the solar system is. And space in general.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly. There's, there's nowhere for us but here. This is the only place with the biosphere and ecosystem that we need to survive. It's the, it's, it's where we evolve to be. And it would be extraordinarily difficult for us to ever live anywhere else, which.

[Leo Laporte]

Argues for us doing everything we can to preserve the planet. But Adam, what if we can't? What if. And it's increasingly looking like, yeah, we don't have the will, the political will, the intelligence to do that.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I just read an article that said the sea is getting darker.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that, that doesn't sound like a big problem, except that it's completely disrupting the ecosystem. And we get 30% of our oxygen from the sea and from plants in the sea. We are not doing a good job of saving this planet.

[Adam Becker]

No, we're not. But even if global warming gets as bad as possible, it's still going to be nicer here than it would be.

[Leo Laporte]

That's an excellent point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

And, and you know, Musk, Musk also talks about terraforming Mars. He says, oh, we can solve all these problems by making it more sci fi atmosphere on Earth. It is a sci fi concept. Which is also why Mars, by the way, is that he's just read a lot of science fiction and read it badly. But, but the other thing is, if you did have the technology to terraform Mars, why not use it to terraform Earth? Any technology that you could use to make Mars more habitable, you could use to fix global warming.

[Paris Martineau]

Because that's not fun.

[Adam Becker]

Right. And that I think is actually the key.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I want to go to one more. I want to get to your solution, which involves billionaires in a few minutes. But I want to go to the other, the other delicatessen slicing machine you go through, which is my favorite topic, which is William McCaskill and Nick Bostrom and the longtermists and to the side Yudkowski and the paperclip nuttiness. I've talked about Tesqueal a lot on this show and have talked to Emil Torres about this and they're great on the topic. Give us your view of that tesqueal long termism, because it kind of fits into what you're saying with Musk. He's part of that fraternity. Yes. Because a lot of you so far you really haven't talked about the technology. The technology doesn't seem to be the problem. The problem is to be the technologists. So Talk about them.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, so the long termists, they want us to pay more attention to the rights and needs and wants of the people who live in the far future. And there's nothing wrong with that. That in theory the problem is that they take it full galaxy brain. And I mean that very literally. The issue is that we don't know what people in the future will want or what will be best for them because we don't know what the future holds. And the long termists have this way of getting around that problem by saying that they know, or claim to know, that the best way to think about how to make the world a better place is to make more people. Is that a future with more people in it? As long as they are living lives that are good enough to be worth living, barely good enough to be worth living, then a future with more people in it is better. And so this creates what McCaskill calls a moral case for space settlement. And you know, that's already a problem. Like I was just saying, space is not the place. But, but there's also this other problem that shows up, which is it makes them focused on very specific problems, the exclusion of all else. And many of those problems are just kind of made up because they've decided that the risk of human extinction from non existent speculative technologies, like what they call artificial general intelligence, is greater than the risks and harms from real problems that are here right now. And this actually also takes us back to Kurzweil, right, because their concern is about a kind of intelligence or super intelligence in a machine that we don't have and don't know how to build and are not anywhere near building. And they are concerned, and this is a concern that MacAskill and the other Oxford philosophers that you were talking about, the long termists, they picked up this concern from this guy Yudkowski, and also from Bostrom and the paperclip scenario that you were alluding to, the idea that you could have a super intelligent AI that improves itself in the way that Kurzweil and others talked about and maintains a desire to do whatever it was originally designed to do, which in this scenario is create more paperclips. And so the concern is that such a machine would then kill everybody in order to get them out of the way and keep them from preventing it from making more paperclips. And then once everyone's dead, they will turn everybody and the material that all the people are made of and material that the earth is made of and all that stuff into paperclips and this is again, preposterous on the face of it, but a lot of serious people believe it, so we have to take it seriously. And then when you do take it seriously, it falls apart. All of the assumptions that underlie that argument just fall apart if you breathe on them wrong. It's a house of cards.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this week we had news that anthropic with this new model is finds a trouble because one test, and I'm not agreeing with this, but just presenting it, one test said that the system would blackmail the operator rather than be shut down. And then we had a story out in our media world that said that OpenAI has a problem because its model refused to shut down when instructed. And then, Leo, I think I saw you on the TikTok with on security now talking about machines that are now self replicating. So these kinds of things are just this week in the news ecosystem out there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, actually, I don't want to. We'll talk about this later because that's a bullshit story and I don't want to delve into it. It's a misunderstanding of what those AIs are doing.

[Adam Becker]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

They're just language machines.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, right. But that's what enters into the policy discussion. That's what enters into the.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it enters into it because of media's misunderst understanding. Yeah, I don't want to propagate that. I really don't.

[Adam Becker]

Well, yeah, but that's, that's the point that I'm making here is like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, I agree with you.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, they're just, they're word and text generation engines. Even calling them AI is a PR move.

[Leo Laporte]

And saying to Black they're going to blackmail you or prevent their shutdown is nonsense.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, there was a. You know, I think like a lot of people my age, there are certain tweets that just live rent free in my head and never go away. And there's this one on this subject that I think actually captures this very, very well. I think it was by a woman named Avery Edison who said, you know, I wrote I am alive on a piece of paper, put it in a photocopier and press start. What happened next has shocking implications.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. That's a nice way to put it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, it is.

[Paris Martineau]

Revan Kuss at the New York Times.

[Adam Becker]

Yes, exactly. Yes. The most credulous man alive. He has. He has never heard anything that he didn't believe.

[Paris Martineau]

Those printers are scary, man. You got to watch out. They're going to steal your wife.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. What if you wrote you should leave your wife on a piece of paper.

[Paris Martineau]

And put that in the machine and press start. Oh, no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Xerox machine is in love with me.

[Adam Becker]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Front page news.

[Adam Becker]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So what do we do about media coverage? How the hell do we improve it?

[Adam Becker]

I mean, I wrote a book.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Credulous. Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

I wrote a book to try to help with that. You know, I'm one of my other fancy hats is. I'm a journalist. And so I wrote a book saying, hey, all of this is nonsense. Don't do this, don't believe this stuff. But I also think, you know, we just, we need to change how we talk about it. I think that, that, you know, we need better journalism on this subject and I think we also need like, like better social norms around this. Right. Like, and I realize that that's a very weak tool to use, but at the moment it's, it's kind of the best one that we've got. I think that we need to help people understand that these things are not alive, they are not thinking, and that treating them like they're people is, is unhealthy and in some cases rude. You know, like substituting a person with one of these text generation engines, I think is, Is more rude than, say, going to lunch with someone and spending the whole time staring at your phone.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that it's going to be increasingly difficult, as we're seeing already, to convince people to shift their immediate opinions of this. It seems these things, these tools come across in a way that people intrinsically believe they have agency, they have knowledge, and that is kind of the first instinct of a user. And I think that's very difficult to actually address. I feel like, I mean, this is a complete. Just thought that came to my head, but I feel like shame is probably the only way that we could do it is just, just like collectively as a society decide. It's kind of embarrassing and cringy to believe earnestly that the AI is real and wants to steal your wife. And I think that social sh. Shame could do the trick.

[Adam Becker]

I think that that's a good idea. And, and we've seen that work before, right. You know, when, when like Google, Google Glass came out. Remember Google Glass?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I got it there.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. And. And there was a lot of shame and a lot of. Oh, bro, don't. Don't record me. What the. What the hell? So I think, I think that shame can be powerful for something like that. And, and I think it's sort of the kind of thing that shame is for. Right? Because sometimes it's good to shame people. Right. If someone doesn't believe that global warming is real, we should shame them.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, they should get dunked on.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly. If someone is racist or, you know, like, if someone believes that certain races are smarter than or better than other races, we should shame them. That's what shame is for. That's what shame does. So, yeah, no, I think shame is a powerful tool that we can use to change the narrative around AI and we should.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So your suggestion in the end, not to do a spoiler here.

[Adam Becker]

No, that's fine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Relates to billionaires.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So again, you're not really talking about the technology, you're talking about the technologists. What should we do with billionaires?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I mean, I do think that we should do something about the technology as well. I would like to see better regulations around AI and around space companies. But. But I also think that part of the reason that's difficult is that we've allowed billionaires to happen. Louis Brandeis said 100 years ago that we can either have great people having great accumulation of wealth, a great uneven distribution of wealth in this country, or we can have democracy, and we can't have both. And I think recent events have shown that this was true. And billionaires exist because we allow them to. If we came together as a country and said, you know what? Nobody needs a billion dollars, $500 million is enough, nobody needs more than that, we could institute a wealth tax and we could say, yeah, anything over $500 million that goes back to the rest of society. Because guess what? You did not not build the things that brought you that wealth alone. Obama was right when he said, you didn't build that. You did not. Nobody does anything ever in life alone. Nobody does anything alone. It would not be possible for these tech billionaires or any billionaire to amass the wealth that they have without a stable, functioning society that allows for the kind of economy that allows them to, you know, create that kind of wealth. They would not have been able to amass that wealth without public transportation infrastructure. They would not be able to amass that wealth without public education infrastructure. And they, you know, because they wouldn't have a trained population of workers.

[Leo Laporte]

Were.

[Adam Becker]

Consumers, and in Silicon Valley in particular, they would not have been able to amass that wealth without the government creating and investing in most of the early, you know, stuff that has allowed the tech industry in general and the Internet in particular to explode. Arpanet, the original form of the Internet, was created by the US Government. The US Government was the first major client of Silicon Valley in, you know, in its creating computer chips because the US Government needed them for the space program. And, and that space program also provided a sort of free testing ground for the space companies that came in later. All of this massive, massive government spending has been, you know, done by us, the public, and we don't see a return on the investment because these companies just come in and piggyback off of that. And so I think it's time for us tax billionaires and get our money's worth and save democracy at the same time.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you think that, I guess part of the reason why these billionaires or large figures end up making these wild proclamations that are so easily, like, debunked or picked apart is kind of because of this institutional structure of wealth or like, what do you think drives these big wrong ideas that you tackle in the book?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I mean, this is, this is a good question. And I do like, that's a good chunk of the book there is, is me sort of talking about that. I think that because these ideas provide these billionaires with an excuse to believe what they already want to believe and do the things that they want to do, and it provides them with a sort of roadmap to making large amounts of, of money or like using their large amounts of money in ways that seem good and entertaining to them, that avoid accountability for the real problems that they're creating here and now. That makes these ideas just incredibly seductive and irresistible to them. I think that there is a mistake that a lot of people make where they say, oh, Musk doesn't actually want to go to Mars. Bezos doesn't actually want, you know, humans to live in space. It's just that these are like reputation management projects because these ideas provide convenient excuses for things that they wanted to do anyway. And I actually think that that's a mistake because the mistake that's being made there is the fact that these ideas provide excuses for the billionaires to do what they already wanted to do makes it more likely that these are genuine beliefs that the billionaires hold, not less likely. So they believe in this stuff because it provides them with meaning, purpose, and moral absolution.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does AI yield a different kind of billionaire than HP did or intel did or Microsoft did?

[Adam Becker]

It's a good question. I think. Yes and no. AI comes with this story of the singularity and salvation or damnation. And I think that when you believe that what you are building is a God or could become a God.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, you got a point there.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, that's going to just change your attitude toward the world. And, and this is not, you know, theoretical or speculative. You can see this with Sam Altman. Sam Altman has said all kinds of absolutely crazy and unhinged things about AI. He has said that, you know, AI can be used to solve global warming. And so global warming's not that big a deal because, like, you know, he.

[Paris Martineau]

Said, because they'll figure. We'll figure it out in post.

[Adam Becker]

Exactly, yes. And he's not the only one saying this. What's his name, Eric Schmidt said the same thing and is saying the same thing. And, you know, saying that they say it's not that big a deal technically. Maybe that's not fair. Sam Altman instead has said stuff like, well, I don't want to say this because global warming is such a big problem, but it won't be a big problem for AI to solve once we have it, and we're going to have that in the next four years. So it's really not that big a deal. It's really very silly and very transparently a way of getting around the problems here and now. And I think he really believes it. And, and that's nuts. So, yeah, I do think that if you think you're building a God, if you think you're building the last invention that humanity will ever need to make because it will, it will save the world from everything, then, yeah, that's going to change your approach to things like democracy or your place in the wider world or, or even philanthropy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a good point. What of the technology do you like and do you use?

[Adam Becker]

I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by technology. I think vaccines are great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, no, I meant AI related.

[Paris Martineau]

I love modern medicine.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I drive a car once in a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

AI related. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, like I said, AI, the, the AI systems that exist now. The term AI, I think is a marketing tool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's.

[Adam Becker]

It's not like. Because, like when I was a kid, right, like 30 years ago, AI, that meant like Commander Data from Star Trek. Now, AI is not that.

[Paris Martineau]

You mean everything from a chat bot to an algorithm.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paris Martineau]

A processing tool used in vaccine development to a different chat bot.

[Adam Becker]

Precisely. Yeah. And so, like, there are AI tools that I use most. I don't know, I don't really use generative AI like ChatGPT for a variety of reasons. It's not very useful in my work. And I also think that it's the, you know, it's the fruit of the poison tree. There are ecological problems with using that technology. There are intellectual property theft issues with that technology, and there's also exploitation of people in the world outside of the US And Europe with that technology. But I do use other kinds of AI, like text transcription or, sorry, audio transcription services.

[Paris Martineau]

What are you using for your audio transcription service? Which one?

[Adam Becker]

Otter? The same one as pretty much every other journalist. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's good. And it's useful to have that transcript. It's not a perfect transcript, but if I need to search the audio to find what I'm looking for, I can do that much more easily with a pretty good transcript. So, yeah, that kind of AI, sure, I use that. I'll use translation engines like Google Translate. If somebody, say, writes a review of my book in a language that I don't speak, which is almost every language other than English, then I'll just slap it into Google Translate or some other translation engine because I want to know if they're sh. Tting on my books or something else not written in English. I'll put it in the translation engine. That's a lot of how I use AI, generative AI tools at this point, I pretty much only use them to keep an eye on their abilities. I want to know what they are able to do. I am continually unimpressed because generative AI has this hallucination problem that is just built into what the technology is because it only knows how to hallucinate because there's no thought process behind the text or the images or whatever that are being generated. It just generates those things, which is one of the reasons why I tend to refer to them as text generation engines rather than AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, Leo, coming to the defense here.

[Leo Laporte]

I got nothing to say. No, keep talking. I'm just listening.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow, the AI Defender has logged off.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, it's not. This is not my. Bailey Wick. You guys continue.

[Paris Martineau]

I. I don't know. I mean, I think that's just an interesting way to think about it. I think that all these tools have varying, different uses and they're not. Not for everyone. And I think that's the interesting part of this discussion that, like, the AI hype cycle often misses, which is there's kind of this notion that we're devoting this much money to infusing this technology into everything because it will very rapidly, within months or a couple of years, be everything for everyone. And I just don't think that seems realistic with the development of any technology. Like, of course the technology will be useful to a lot of people in a lot of ways. But it doesn't mean it has to be useful for everyone, for everything, always.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, there's two articles that I think are really good on this that really sort of cement the point that you just made because I think you're right. There is a lovely op ed in the New York Times by Tressie McMillan Cottam called AI is Middle. Just saying, you know, AI, eh, it's not, it's not great and it's not really terrible. It's just kind of mediocre. And I think that's about right. And there was also a very long academic paper out of Princeton by, oh my God, Arvind Narayanan. And I'm blanking on the other person.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Kapoor.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Saying the title of that paper is AI as Normal Technology. Yeah, and I think that's right. You know, they're not building a God, they're building a thing. And it's a thing that can do some stuff and it's going to be good at some things and bad at others and it's going to change how certain jobs work and it's not going to change how other jobs work and it's going to create some jobs that didn't exist before, just like any other normal piece of technology.

[Paris Martineau]

And I think that that's like a very. I don't know, that's the part that frustrates me the most about like our cultural conversation on AI as like a buzzword. Technology is like. Yeah, there's very things happening in artificial intelligence, in large language model processing, in all of the different subfields that we consider AI. But I feel like they're being obfuscated by the fact that people are screaming from the top of rooftops. This is the best thing ever. You should be using this for everything, always, no matter what. And if you're not, you're dumb and not going to have a job and nothing about your life is going to make sense because it's all or nothing. And that's just, I mean, maybe I'll be wrong, but that's just not how the. Of any technology we've ever seen before works. And it doesn't seem, based on what we've seen at least over the last couple of years, that this is how this is working. It's going to be very useful for quite a few things, but that doesn't mean it's going to be incredibly useful for absolutely everything. I mean, what do you think, Jeff? I know you're more on the camp of all of this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I still remain positive on AI and as a whole, I think, I think it's worth paying attention to. I think it's worth exploring and, and seeing what it can do do. And I think that the industry, and it is an industry now is making a terrible mistake by over promising, by saying that it can do everything by acting as if it's the worst end of it is the God complex or.

[Paris Martineau]

The doomsday God or the devil.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, right. But, but even short of that, that it's going to replace tons of jobs. Just this morning I saw on Morning Joe Jim Vande Hei from Axios was on talking about a white collar bloodbath that's gonna be occurring any minute with AI jobs. And it was from Anthropic and he was basically accepting this anthropic argument. And the funny thing about this is I was talking about this earlier today that it's the weirdest thing to see an industry whose PR is doom. What other industry says we're so powerful we can destroy things and we're really dangerous and we're really awful. That's why you should give us money.

[Paris Martineau]

That's why you should give us all your money. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's the honest.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think AI is a monolith though. And I think it's easy to target Sam Altman because he's a bozo and there's a lot of and Elon Musk. There's a lot of great stuff happening, very interesting stuff happening that isn't doomer, that isn't acceleration, that isn't test real. And I think it's a shame to paint it all with the same brush.

[Paris Martineau]

No, absolutely. I mean, I think that's the core of my argument around this industry is like part of the issue. And I think why people like myself focus on someone like Sam Altman is because that's where like the all of the money is going. If we think of it comparatively, that is like almost all of the capital is going to the same like one of three, maybe five if you're being really generous companies. And that just seems a bit foolish given what we know about how innovation works.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, hopefully the more interesting stuff will happen in the lesser. I mean look at deep seek in the lesser capitalized areas. A lot of interesting stuff happens. The garage is historically the place where Silicon Valley invents, not the big corporation with a circular campus.

[Paris Martineau]

So those garages though are given venture capital investment and that's where the stuff happens. I mean, I don't know, I just think it'll be very Interesting to see how this all shakes out. I don't think we've ever seen a intense hype cycle like this. And that's for sure. Capitalization of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I think it harms. It harms the field. That's my. So I am a defender of AI. A defender. Wonder with you, Leo, of what it can do. But I think that it's being harmed by those few big guys who get all the money and get all the attention and make up a lot of BS around it. And that's my problem.

[Leo Laporte]

The book is more Everything Forever. AI overlords, space empires, and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity. I love, I love it that Adam Becker is an astrophysicist. Who better to examine these issues? Adam, thank you so much for making the time to be with us. I appreciate it.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, no, thanks for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

What is real, by the way? Just out of curiosity. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you give us a quick 30 seconds on what is and isn't real?

[Adam Becker]

Well, I'll tell you so we know. My favorite, like Amazon review of the book was someone who gave it one star because they said it's 300 pages long. @ the end, he says he doesn't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You should never be honest. If you want. If you want a review on Amazon, that's. That's for sure.

[Adam Becker]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Adam, thank you so much for your time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thanks so much, Adam.

[Leo Laporte]

Appreciate it.

[Adam Becker]

Thanks for having me. I'd love to come back anytime. Thanks.

[Leo Laporte]

Please. Thank you. Take care.

[Adam Becker]

Bye.

[Leo Laporte]

Adam Becker, everybody. Intelligent Machines continues in just a moment with AI news. But first, a word from our sponsor, Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. You know, when we talk about all the negatives of AI, one of the big negatives is that bad guys can use AI to breach your organization. Hackers have found a great ally in AI. Yeah, sure, AI powers innovation and drives efficiency, but it also helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks. And I'm not talking about Nicholas Cage here, we're talking about phishing attacks over encrypted channels. They increased last year by 34%. Well, to be precise, 34.1%. And that was fueled by the growing use of generative AI tools and phishing as a service kits. You can't anymore look at a phishing email and say, well, you see how ungrammatical that was? Clearly, that's phony. No, they're perfect. They're perfect. Organizations in all industries, just small, no large, are now leveraging AI to protect themselves, to increase employee productivity with public AI for engineers. With coding assistants, marketers with writing tools, finance creating spreadsheet formulas. They're automating workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams. They're embedding AI and applications and services that are customer and partner facing. And ultimately AI is helping them move faster in the market and gain a competitive advantage. But companies do need to think about, maybe even rethink how they protect their private and public use of AI and how they defend against AI powered attacks. Jason Kohler, who's the chief Information security officer at Eaton Corporation, leverages Zscaler to embrace AI innovations and combat AI threats. Here's a quote from him. He says data loss detection has been very helpful for us. ChatGPT came out. We had no visibility into it. Zscaler was our key solution initially to help us understand who was going to it and what they were uploading traditional firewalls, VPNs, public facing IPs exposure, attack surface. They're no match in the AI era. It's time for a modern approach with Zscaler's comprehensive Zero Trust architecture plus AI that ensures safe public AI productivity, protects the integrity of private AI and stops AI powered attacks. It's both. It's 2, 2 in 1 Thrive in the AI era with Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI to stay ahead of the compet and remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn [e-mail] Security I love this is a company that understands AI, that even embraces AI but also understands what the downsides are and will help you protect yourself and use AI. Right. Zscaler.com Security we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. And you support us when you go to that address, by the way. Anyway, on we go with AI news. Let's talk about those stories because Steve Gibson also reported the, the report that the AI was being used to. It was an anthropic being used to blackmail.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Engineers. This was actually kind of a, an experiment. It wasn't actually in, in, in the real world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because, because how, how, how is it going be to get blackmail? With whom does it have a phone?

[Leo Laporte]

So, so the way it happened, I'm.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Calling your wife with my strange voice, right.

[Leo Laporte]

It said I know you're sleeping around and I'm going to send an email. And if it turned out this, it was given email access so it in theory could have but I think it's much more likely it was rehashing the plot of a detective novel. Ingested that actually.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is what Steve said And in fact, I wrote it down because I, I thought it was so good. He. He said, let me, Let me get the quote exactly. I have it from yesterday's security. Now pull up my notes from yesterday. Should have had this to hand.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just last week, I think you talked about replicating machines. So the, the. I'd be curious to hear what he said. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He said this is a. Steve's quote. When a human being says, I want a lollipop, it's an actual expression of desire. There's an entity with an ego that wants something. But when a large language model emits the same words, I want a lollipop or I'm gonna blackmail you, whatever. There's no I present to do any wanting. It's just an algorithm that selected that sequence of words.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There is no I. I like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And, and he's, you know, he said the problem is we're easily seduced by language. And, and, and we also, I think, are biologically built to think of entities like that as people. They're not. That's. In a way, to me that was the takeaway from Stochastic Parrots was that we would ascribe more importance to what these machines said because they are machines.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We imbue ours into them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway. But I don't want to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Stories was that. It was. It was kind of ridiculous. But it was the press. It was the press about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they jumped on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the more of the story. Yes, of course they did.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we should be smarter than that on this show anyway.

[Paris Martineau]

But I think also the nature of our format allows us to explain to people why that is a debunking misinterpretation and not fall into the. The trap that many advertising click supported media outlets go to, which is you've got to have a headline that will cause people to click. And what causes people to click but something that gets them afraid or angry or energized in some way.

[Leo Laporte]

Our blessing is that we have no ads and we don't care.

[Paris Martineau]

We have lots of ads this week.

[Leo Laporte]

We do have ads, actually. We have a lot of ads and we do care. Yeah. So tell me about this. Adam was quoting this AI is Normal Technology piece. This was from the Knight Institute at Columbia. Arvind Narayanan and Saish Kapoor. Tell me more about this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the New Yorker did a piece contrasting this with the 2027 thing, which I don't know if you've seen, which is a prediction of all the doomsday in AI and It's a fictional story of what could go wrong. Whereas that piece from the Columbia AI Institute just says, let's not. Let's stop treating AI like it's some earth shattering, amazing thing. It's a technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's deal with it at that level. And I think that that's the smart way to deal with this. I think that's the way we cut through the hype. Now the question is, you know, we've had two, two anti AI hype books recently on the show and you can do that in a few ways. Right. One is that you can.

[Leo Laporte]

I like Adam's approach. Yeah, I like Adam's approach.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He cuts through the hype itself.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And, and, but I think the other way is to bring the technology down to reality. And I think that's what we can do on this show best is, is bring perspective and context to it and say, say, okay, it's cool. It does a lot of amazing things. But let's not get overboard because when you get overboard, then you get in trouble.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is from AI 2027. When was this written? This was written recently.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Very recently. It's a former AI 2027 was written by a. Another AI safety air quote, safety person.

[Paris Martineau]

It is real fan fiction. It is the most fan fiction I've ever read.

[Leo Laporte]

It is.

[Paris Martineau]

It is like interactive. Choose your own fanfiction. And it's about how. God, there are some really. It's like, there's gonna be. It's like computronium level stuff. He's like, there's gonna be AI nanobots in our blood in like two years and it's gonna be so bad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's why we need safety. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

See, it's funny because I would say, oh, that's great. Let's get those. Let's get. Where do we get them again?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can we get rid of cholesterol that way? Could it. Yeah, please.

[Leo Laporte]

You know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go on.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny because I have a mixed look. I'm not into the doomerism, nor do we really know what's going to happen. I think it's very clear. We have no idea.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No prediction is ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

We have no idea. And we are seeing things happen in with AI tools like VO3, the new Google tool that are mind bending.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

That we didn't even think possible. You know, what was the. With the video of the guy eating spaghetti. Right. Two or three years ago. That was just. It was awful. And now we've got. And I've been showing. We showed a couple of these. I'VE been showing them on other shows as well. We showed one last week. AI is now talking. AI is Veo is making video that. That I'm sorry, but I think is indistinguishable from the real world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's changing my view of other things. I look at other images and I think, oh, that's too good. That's question. There was a picture of the next cast of kids for the HBO Harry Potter thing, and they looked like they were AI generated to me. That was my first presumption.

[Leo Laporte]

This is. And I showed this to Lisa and at first she thought it was real. This is Influencers has just occurred on.

[Paris Martineau]

The outer ring of the city. We'll now be going live to our top influencer opinions. Omg, people, the world is ending. Are you seeing this? This is actually so exciting.

[Leo Laporte]

I know it's chaos, but you got real Survivor's wife energy.

[E]

That's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

I like them feisty.

[Paris Martineau]

Like, it would totally be better if we ran it. You know, men literally destroy everything. And my girls need to stop being so soft with these basic losers. Who even needs men, right? Anything a man builds just gets destroyed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

By a different man. He's so wanted to believe it.

[Leo Laporte]

This collapse is literally the perfect dip. He only watched a few seconds. The point is, if you just quickly glance at looks real. Well, did you watch Lava? Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you watch Joanna Stearns on the Wall Street Journal?

[Leo Laporte]

Even as. No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I was telling you. This is the time. This. All of her preparation for her. For her close up has come to this. It is amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Set it up and I'll.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So she got. I have it somewhere in the rundown there. So Joanna Stern wanted to use VEO plus a couple other tools and see what they could do. So she created a four minute story with her and her robot, you know, whatever it is. But the tool, the use of the tools is amazing. And they went through. She worked with a partner in it and they had a thousand cuts. At the very end of it, she has the outtakes, which are hilarious. The bloopers with the machine screwed up.

[Paris Martineau]

Up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it's, it's, it's impressive. And she uses her own voice. Everything else in this is made by AI she couldn't find a voice that satisfied her, so she used her own voice.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is VO and Runway, the two. Runway's been around for a while. VO3 is of course, the new model from Google. Here we go. Let me turn on the. Where, where's the audio on this? There's a button. Oh, look at that. So what is Human?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I am Dr. Chip. Motherboard. Terrible. Real robot. This is bad. This is bad. Okay, she launched with the wrong thing, but if you go farther in.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, okay. Yeah. Chip is definitely AI and I'm the real me controlling that AI character.

[Leo Laporte]

This is last year's technology, including Keep Going.

[Paris Martineau]

All the other visuals were created with AI video tools.

[Leo Laporte]

She's driving in a car with a robot.

[Paris Martineau]

Most of the audio is also AI, except for my narrative.

[Leo Laporte]

He didn't like her. She didn't like the other voices. Her voice is terrible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, so now it's all AI, except.

[Leo Laporte]

This is all AI generated.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I wish they had another robot because it's kind of silly.

[Leo Laporte]

6:15Am it's gonna be a great day. Oh, you'll feel better after a workout. I've sanitized your sports bra. Thank you. Yeah, I'm not going to watch this because I'm going to throw up. Can I go back? I'd rather watch the influenders, to be honest with you. I a. I don't think she's doing the best job you can do with vo. I'm much more impressed with the stuff I'm seeing on Reddit. But the main point, both hers and mine, is this stuff's gotten good enough now that it's indistinguishable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ethan Molik, who's also very good, who's at Wharton, Martin, who wrote the book Co Intelligence, so he's a positive AI guy. He also put up videos that I think we might have shown some last week, and they're. And they're. And they're amazing. The fidelity is higher. Right. The people look like people now.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, the lighting was off on all of those videos, but the quality was quite good. I'm sure that with whatever the. I think you just have to probably prompt it differently.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the funny thing. Those are all generated with text prompts. I mean, that's mind boggling.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, that's really impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

And I guess, you know, that's the other. We were talking about this on Windows Weekly. I hate the frog in the water analogy, but as humans, we adjust.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wonder what you were pausing to say.

[Paris Martineau]

What could.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to say the frog in the pot and the water is getting hot. But as humans, we adjust very quickly. I mean, that's one of the things that makes us successful, is we adapt. We're very adaptable. So it's very quick. We're very quick to kind of start taking this stuff for granted and saying, oh, Yeah, I mean, look, we're doing a zoom call with people all over the world that we're all, like, in the same room. It's. A few years ago, this wasn't even possible. So I'm just. I feel like we're maybe underestimating what's happening here. Here's some more VO video. I'm into a zoo to prove one man is enough to fight a gorilla. That's a little uncanny.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is. This is cartoonish.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm gonna lick this glowing pole. Let's see how many views this gets.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A little bit. If you go to line 100, you'll see some others that are better. That's better. That's scary. Hey, Leo. They shouldn't show that to me. That scares me. Let's get.

[Leo Laporte]

Get solid.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No energy drinks, just gasoline. Digging to the earth.

[Leo Laporte]

This is actually the one I showed Lisa. No Breaks Can I Survive Is a great setup on Influencers. And what's happened, unfortunately, with TikTok and YouTube, is people are now doing for 10 minutes straight. Wish me luck, stupid things. Counting every grain of sand on this beach. Let's go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

One, two, three.

[Paris Martineau]

That one is my favorite, actually. I like that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Alone, unprepared, and in a straight line. Leave a comment for the search team about to do the first plunge into an active volcano. Let's send it.

[Paris Martineau]

Let's send it. Okay, that's good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Build the Titanic just to sink it again.

[Leo Laporte]

Last person to abandon ship gets a Lambo.

[Paris Martineau]

I covered my entire body in compost and waited to see what started growing. Joining for my life on North Sentinel Island.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Day three.

[Paris Martineau]

Should have picked Bali. All right, I've sealed my head in.

[Leo Laporte]

This plastic box, and I'm going to.

[Adam Becker]

Try to read the entire dictionary before I pass out.

[Leo Laporte]

Flying into North Korea with a lawn chair and 1,000 party balloons. Don't try this at home.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm about to survive 100 days in the African.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I could go. I could watch this all day. But. Yeah, this is on in the chat. G. I think it's a chat GPT forum. It's Google V. I know.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm curious. What about it is. And I don't mean this as sassy as it comes up. What about it is so appealing to you? So you could watch it all day? Is it just the quality of the video, or do you think it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a funny set of influences.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah. No, it's very.

[Leo Laporte]

Not the AI. But. But. But underneath. Look, I couldn't talk last month. You couldn't make These videos talk last month. So anybody who thinks that this is hype or BS is missing an exponential explosion of capability.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's hype is when they declare that they can solve.

[Leo Laporte]

I know we can ignore. Got it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's stop talking about those morons. That's the morons of the ones in charge watching the world change in front of your eyes, guys. And you're going, yeah, but you know, I don't know. You know, there's a lot of hype.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here because those are the ones who have all the money. Those are the ones who are in charge. Those are.

[Paris Martineau]

Who cares?

[Leo Laporte]

That's not important to me. What's important to me is you're seeing a technical. You're seeing a technological revolution bigger than anything I think we've ever seen. Certainly at least the equivalent of the Internet printing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's like you said, you said that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Fine, but you know, there's lead in the. That type. It's going to make you sick. I don't understand the focus on. Oh yeah, it's overhyped because I want.

[Jeff Jarvis]

To cut them down to size. I want to, I want, I want to. I want, I want Deep Seek to be doing, getting the attention instead of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, who knows what Deep Seek. I mean, that's true.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They could be jerks too. That's true too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, but that's the wrong thing to focus on is all I'm saying. Focus on this thing that is happening. Because I tell you what, in two years, it's not going to be anything like it is now. What was it like two years ago?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I do think that. I think you're right. Yeah. The videos are incredibly cool. It's cool that they're able to produce stuff via text that has the lips sync up to both like audio and things like that. It's awesome. But I think the reason why Jeff and I sometimes preface this by being like, yeah, that it's mishyped or overhyped is because that's not what these companies are raising money on or what they're. Any of these companies are trying to do. What they're trying to do with the billions of dollars they've raised is like create technology that's going to be used by governments for advanced warfare or replace workers en masse or do a lot of things that will have profound impacts if they're even realized somewhat on everyday people's lives. I do think that's something worse worth keeping in mind. While we're also like, yeah, the videos are pretty cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Business Owners are using AI generated, concerned residents that aren't real to oppose a bus product project in Toronto. This is the future of protest. We're going to astroturfing. Yeah, but astroturfing, that's so good, so effective, you can't tell it from the real thing. The problem, of course, is going to be that then city governments are going to say, well, we don't know if any of this is real. What's. What, what are people complaining about? Right.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the. I think what I'm somewhat concerned about with this sort of stuff. I mean, it's really cool. Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm not saying it's not negative consequences, but like, then, you know, what.

[Paris Martineau]

About a world for, like. Yeah. Where that plays out logically, where someone's like, well, we can't trust any of the videos we're seeing, so we're only going to count people's votes or, like, concerns lodged in person because we can at least prove that that. Does that shut out people with disabilities or does it give an excuse to just not listen to your constituents? I just think that all of this is really compelling and interesting and exciting, but it also introduces a lot of moral questions that we, society, need to start talking about, you know, as to how we're going to deal with a world where you can very easily make a video of anything that is completely indistinguishable from reality.

[Leo Laporte]

And then what?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that's the question. What do we do in that world.

[Leo Laporte]

Where suddenly there's nothing to do? Bad news for you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah, there. Is there.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I'm saying.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm literally saying, oh, my God, the tsunami is coming.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not saying we need to stop the tsunami. I'm just saying, like, physically, if you're doing the tsunami, if you want to take the tsunami metaphor to attend and tsunami is coming, are you just going to stand there? Are you going to go walk somewhere else? Would that even help? Who are you going to talk to in the five minutes before the tsunami hits? I think there are a lot of questions about how we as a society should, like, change our approach to thinking about content or how we should, like, be having conversations about these sort of technologies. I think there are a lot of things one can do that are not just, no, no AI anymore, because obviously that's not an actual answer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pardon me for this.

[Leo Laporte]

So Google has created VO3, which is the tool that is really stimulating this conversation. Like, this is where these videos are coming from. And Google, by the way, is surprisingly safety focused as is anthropic. I think a lot of people. Steve, Steve. And I'm not sure I agree with this was talked about yesterday. Venice AI which claims to be a completely uncensored AI. Nothing is off limits. You can do whatever you want with it including making, you know, images of people that are real. Now I'm not sure. I don't think this is. I'm not thrilled about this, but I don't know how it's not illegal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We create new institutions. I'm going to go back to Gutenberg. When print came out, it was not trusted. The provenance was not clear. Anybody could make a pamphlet. And you trusted people you knew. Until we created the institutions of editing and publishing become magazines.

[Leo Laporte]

How long did that take?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Century.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, I'm not gonna be here for that part. But so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So when steam powered presses came out, there was an explosion of speech and we. And Harper's magazine was created to find the good stuff because there was. There was too much. That's the response we need is what is it we create to solve this problem rather than just merely complaining about it.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm more interested in the technology and what's. What's changing. That's all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. Okay, so let's try this as. As. Because I see you were in the chat. Let's take away both extremes. Kurzweil and Kurzweil complainers. Right. So I was rolling my eyes. Ray's an amazing guy. He's had a lot of history. But. But singularity and all that just had me roll my eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

I think. We don't know. Wait a minute though.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then you have the.

[Leo Laporte]

You can say that, but that's just speculative as him saying that's going to happen. We don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I'm saying if you're complaining about the person who just now was dealing with complaints about the AI culture, then I think that we've got to look at the other side of this and say that those who are pushing the high end of this, that's on one realm. Okay. So if you want to do away with that level and deal with what's actually happening today and how it's going, okay, let's do that. But I think then you would eliminate both extremes. That's okay. I'm okay with that.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I'm down to talk about what's actually happening with AI But I think that means we don't talk about what people say is probably maybe going to happen in five to 10 years.

[Leo Laporte]

If you believe that's BS. I don't but I think it's just as much BS to say it ain't going to happen. To say it is going to happen. I don't think we know what's going to happen. And I think that I can, I think you can demonstrably say we didn't know what was going to happen three years ago show that's happening right now. So it's not predictable. That's part of the weird thing about AI it's just not linear, it's not predictable, it's not what we thought was going to have happen. So I don't, I think saying there isn't going to be a singularity is equally ill founded as there is. We don't, we just don't know. We just don't know. I don't, I think though we've made that argument. That's my biggest complaint is, is you know, the Emily Benders of the world are making an argument. Fine, fine, we've heard it, we don't need to belabor it. And so I'm just much more interested in what we are doing, what's happening right now. And in fact I think you need to do that. When Emily Peters says I don't want to look at AI because I know it's bad, okay, I'm not going to look at it, that tells me that she is not in this world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, you concede the same about the singularitarianisms who are not in this world.

[Leo Laporte]

I told you it's not, it's irrelevant. That's not important. The question is AGI then why do we have law is irrelevant. We've asked that question. I think we've done it. I think we've done it. I don't think we need to do it again and again and again and again. I think it's much more interesting to talk about what is happening so that you can, I mean you still need to know what's happening to make a judgment about it and to decide how to fight it if that's what you choose to do. Which is I think completely legitimate it, but you need to see it, you need to know what's happening. So that's I think our mission here, not so much to go. I mean I agree there shouldn't be billionaires, but I don't think there's any value in going on and on about that. Right. That's I guess my only complaint. I Here's a, here's a good story from Alison Johnson in the Verge. We talked about it on Sunday. Google's VO3AI video generator is a slop monger's dream.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See, I think that's negative.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that it is negative. That's okay to have a negative.

[Paris Martineau]

Not allowed to talk about negative stuff?

[Leo Laporte]

No. Okay, let's take a break. We are. You're watching intelligent machines where there is a little disagreement, I think, over where we should go next. Think about it. We'll pause and we'll decide in a moment. But first, a word from our sponsor, StoryBlock. I know Jeff and Paris know the pain of crappy CMSS content management systems. If you're in marketing, if you're an agency, pretty much anywhere you're creating content for the Internet, you know the pain of legacy cmss. They promise enterprise grade features, but deliver slow, clunky systems that need dev support for even the smallest updates. And when you're trying to move fast, That's a nightmare. Storyblok changes that. Unlike those monolithic CMS's, Storyblock is headless. And by the way, I am a fan of this idea. It completely decouples your back end from your front end. Okay? So you can create a robust backend with all the tools, all the features, a great API and then developers can build in any framework they want for the front end. React. Astro Vue marketers get this incredible CMS because that's part of the back end. An intuitive visual editor to create and update content. You don't have to fill out a dev ticket to move it three pixels to the left. And oh best part, storyblocks scales because they're focused on the backend. Whether you're a freelancer or part of a global enterprise. You're going to get a global CDN, you're going to get AWS data centers in the US, Europe and Asia. StoryBlock is built for performance at scale and StoryBlock is enterprise ready with role based access control, enterprise SLAs. This is all built in and top tier security. All the stuff Fortune 500s demand. One global e commerce giant switched to StoryBlock. They were able to cut their content update cycles from weeks to hours. Another major brand empowered marketing to launch campaigns completely independently, which is great for the marketers, but it also frees up the devs for bigger projects. StoryBlock has an API first approach. Your content loads fast anywhere in the world. That means better ux, higher engagement, improved SEO. And with their real time visual editor, marketers see exactly what their content will look like before publishing. No more endless back and forth over minor tweaks. It's a win win, right? Devs get fewer interruptions Marketers get more autonomy, everybody's happy. Oh, and if you're an agency, StoryBlock offers multi client workspaces, flexible permissions, seamless collaboration tools. You can manage multiple projects without disrupting development workflows. I mean, storyblocks is perfect whether you're a startup, an enterprise, maybe you're an agency juggling multiple clients. StoryBlock gives you the power and the flexibility you need. Try it today. Storyblock.com Twitter 25 use the code TWiT25. TWiT listeners get 20% off for three months on growth and growth plus plans. That's storyblock.com TwitTV-25 the offer code is TWiT25 for 20% off the first three months on growth and growth plus plans. S T O R Y B L O K.com Twitt TV-25 the offer code is TWIT25. We thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. Thank you, StoryBlock. All right, you guys pick a story. I don't care. Anything you want to talk about, it's fine with me. Actually, I got to show you this. This is hysterical. This is also from Steve Gibson. Let me see if I can find this for you. Microsoft, as you know, fired a significant number of developers, and I think Satya Nagella joins a number of CEOs who say something like 30% of our code is now written by AI. Well, there was a Reddit thread. Let me see if I can find this. There was a Reddit thread of copilot commits. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna open up Steve's show notes because that's where it came up.

[Paris Martineau]

It's always a Reddit thread.

[Leo Laporte]

There's always a Reddit thread. Here's the example. Here's one example. Example. And, and it's this. The Reddit thread is hysterical because people are just mocking this. So this is to explain it. We're [e-mail] GitHub. This is Microsoft official GitHub for.net source code. And you can see this is Copilot, Microsoft's coding AI. The GitHub coding AI. Copilot wants to merge 13 commits into main. So it's a pull request from copilot base. Actually, let me do a different one. This one. This one's not as good as the one Steve used because it's a little bit clearer. Copilot essentially misunderstands the problem, writes the code. This one is an out of range check in a regular expression parser instead of trying to fix the underlying code. Copilot says, oh, just fine. What we'll do is we'll just test and see if it's out of range and we'll say, no, no answer. So the, the developer in this case a guy named Steven to says, hey, Copilot, that seems like it's fixing the symptom rather than the underlying issue. Let's see if we can fix the underlying issue. Take a look. Copilot says, oh, you're right. This fixed fix addresses the symptom, not the root cause. And then it just doubles down. It says, I responded to your question about the underlying issue. The fix ensures graceful failure. But you're new. And then on and on. And the Reddit thread basically said, feel sorry for the Microsoft employees who are now told you've got to use Copilot when you're coding and spend probably, somebody speculated, more time trying to get Copilot to fix the problem than it would have taken just to fix it. You could see this in the, in the, in the thread which is now closed, by the way. Yeah, I like this guy's comment. Copilot, where can I buy a good source of popcorn? They're watching this back and forth. Eventually Taub told Copilot, just go pound sand. But the real point of this is it seems like Microsoft's telling programmers, yeah, this is how you should work from now on.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, do you think that's a good idea? If it's.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's a terrible idea. And unfortunately, this is. I'm just, I'm backing you up here. This is one example of how, how companies have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, there was a story I put into Amazon. Programmers unnamed complained that they feel like they're working in the warehouse now because the pressure is on them to be more. I don't want to say efficient companies.

[Leo Laporte]

Are so all in on this coding thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I think they're backing off too. We saw Duolingo two weeks ago. Oh yeah, this is all going to be. If you're jobbing AI, you're not nowhere. And, and obviously the tanked the morale.

[Leo Laporte]

Of the place acknowledged employee anxiety over AI. What he said even in the initial memo is this is just. We're just firing contract workers. Don't worry, you're.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're next as the.

[Leo Laporte]

You're still going to have a job. And of course the employees are saying you're not at risk. To be clear, I don't see AI replacing what our employees do do.

[Paris Martineau]

It says guy who had fired.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the market will as I said before on this one, the market will judge this. If if the duo ling if the AI does not create suitable duo lingo lessons, the ones that the contractors used to create, the people stop using dual lingo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that solves only works if it works similar. Now the problem with the co pilot thing is I just have some sympathy for people like Stephen Traub who have to wrestle with this thing because the boss says you got to.

[Paris Martineau]

That's it's it's always that's a trend I've been seeing a lot lately among executives in tech and like tech ish businesses. Lately is there have been a number of these CEO letters coming out lately that have argued that like oh for instance I saw in this week may have been related to something to do with Axios, but not their journalism arm. That said, like any new business decision or kind of role you're hiring for or new kind of line of work you want to be doing, in order to get any funding for that, you need to first argue why you're not using AI for that. I'm just like, that's just.

[Leo Laporte]

You had to prove that I couldn't do it instead. Dead right.

[Paris Martineau]

And I just think I remember that. Yes. I just think that seems like a silly rule.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Again, you had Jim Vande Hei on this morning talking about how it's going to cause a white collar bloodbath and that seems like a warning to his own staff.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And that's we should be able to.

[Paris Martineau]

Use new technologies without having it be all or nothing black or white about it. You hire people because you trust them. You can send a letter, be like, yeah, you should make use of this new technology. We've got your OpenAI Pro subscription here or please use it to do better work. But ultimately you should be hiring people because you trust them to do the best work for the job.

[Leo Laporte]

No the geek double oh seven in our discord reminds me that Cory Doctorow warned us of this a year ago. In August of last year he wrote the Reverse Centaur Apocalypse is on us. Microsoft, Oracle and other bossware dealers are transforming our workplaces with digital whips. The relationship between tech and labor, you know, it was not it was ill covered. Paul Thurat has written about it. But the Microsoft Build conference, the developers conference last week was overrun by protests. It wasn't really fully covered, but Paul's stories showed mass crowds outside and interruptions for pretty much every presentation inside, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's presentation at the keynote, which the press said was interrupted several times. Paul said it was interrupted 30 plus times by protesters. In this case the protesters protesting what.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Seemed to be their protest.

[Leo Laporte]

They're protesting Microsoft's involvement with Israel. Microsoft says yes, they're Azure customers, as many. Many countries and companies are. We don't provide them with specific tools for the military, that kind of thing. The protesters who were highly organized said, you know, you. There were posters that said Microsoft employees, you have blood on your hands. And the protesters in the keynote were in fact employees. Well, former employees now, but they were employees at the time. That's how they got in. I pointed out. I think we're going to see something very similar soon in a more widespread context about AI in general.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But we shouldn't. That's the thing. It's not what they're. I'm going to go back to the interview. I said multiple times he's not complaining about technology. What he's complaining about is something.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's why I like that. I thought Adam was good for that reason. He wasn't anti technology.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so I think that that's what you're predicting in terms of this backlash is aimed at the people we don't like rather than the technology we do.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. By the way, I finally found the Reddit subreddits my new hobby. He says watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees insane. He says I actually feel bad for the employees being assigned to review these poll requests, but if this is the future of our field, I think I went off the ride.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You a little breaking news.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nvidia's results are out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Oh that. I meant to lead with that. This is what the whole market's been waiting for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. With bated breath.

[Leo Laporte]

The concern being what that Nvidia would.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That they would take because of the tariffs, because the inability to sell chips to China because of the general economy because they're getting slapped around for. For. For that by. By the administration.

[Leo Laporte]

They're kind of being considered a bellwether then for the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The Whatever general. Yeah. I mean when we get to a lot so. So Ben Evans did a chart of intel versus Nvidia and it's just amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Until this way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, until down by. By big steps. But, but, but hockey stick for Nvidia just way the hell up.

[Leo Laporte]

Revenue of 44.1 billion up percent year over year.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's pretty. It's really Google impressive. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. How's the market reacting?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Up 4% after hours.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Not that I care about the market, but I do want to know it's an indication in my lifetime, you know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, there's that too.

[Leo Laporte]

They beat on earnings. They did see an 8 and now see this is going to make the President MAD. Had 8 billion dollar impact from the China export rules.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. But then he also came out with a new chip designed just for China.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Which they've done before. So they're. I guess the point is continuing to innovate for China, which is not as much as for us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean I remain impressed by Jensen Wong. I don't know if I should be, but by everything he's doing in the company.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a good billionaire there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I hope so. I, well, I thought others, I thought others were too.

[Leo Laporte]

It's easy to get fooled. I don't know if they, they go bad, if they, they, they live past their Best Buy date or if they were bad all along. We just didn't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Question. That's exactly. But he's very impressive with the company. They. I saw some other stories earlier this week that, that there were problems in delivering the racks and the, whatever you calls them for Blackwell. Well, and they've solved those problems and how they're cooling them and how they're doing other things and so they're on track to keep delivering and Nvidia is, is fueling this. And yeah, there's competition but still. And Huang has managed to, to balance going to both Beijing and to the Middle east with Trump.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well, by the way, that kind of parenthetically that's why Apple has been in the hot seat this week. Week. Because apparently the President invited not only Jensen Huang but Tim Cook to join him in Saudi Arabia. And I don't know if I mentioned on this show I did on MacBreak weekly when he was introducing, when he was in Saudi Arabia, Trump said, here's my friend Jensen Huang. I don't see Tim Cook here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He did. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

To which he responded later in the week with a 25% tariff on iPhones, which I think I, I've never heard of a tariff on a single product.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Where's the emergency that justifies the tariff?

[Paris Martineau]

We're learning a lot of new things.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of new things.

[Paris Martineau]

A lot of new things in a wild five months.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. So this was a good article I put in here. It's a little complicated to explain from China talk. Jordan Schneider writing just count the server racks. So he's a little miffed because while we do have this export restriction on China for high end AI chips, we just made a big deal with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirate to send them a lot of chips and a lot of money and a lot of technology. And his concern is how do we know that they're going to stay our friends? He says the point of diffusion rules. These are the rules to keep AI chips secure and out of Chinese hands, both in terms of physical security and the use of their compute via. And this is important remote access. It's possible that the agreements we're making with the UAE and the KSA Saudi Arabia will replace and improve upon the functionality in those countries, in particular the diffusion rules. But it's also possible it won't. I do not consider them reliable allies going forward. And there are various reasons even the best versions of these agreements would make me deeply uncomfortable. His line, just count the server racks. This is what David Sacks said when asked. Well, here are the high. Here the, here are the high points. America's head of China in the naive. I think we actually believe that to be true. Diffusion rules serve to protect America's technological lead where it matters. Uae, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are not reliable American allies, nor are they important markets for our technology. We should not be handing them large shares of the world's most valuable resource, compute. Sachs says, well, it's easy to verify whether they're keeping their agreements or just you just count the server racks. To which Jordan points out, well, there's remote compute. And it's also very easy to put dummy GPUs and server racks and make it look like they're doing something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So really was with shots to China. Is that what the fear is here?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that and, well, two things. Yes. One, that they'll say remote compute to China and two, that they're not going to remain our allies. I mean, let's face it, the KSA did chop up Khashoggi because they didn't like him, because he said some bad things about him. I could see why Tim Cook, a gay man, did not want to go to Saudi Arabia, but I could see why Jensen Wong did, because who is the chief beneficiary of all of this? Jensen Huang Nvidia.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so what do we think of.

[Paris Martineau]

Him as a result of new leather jacks jackets?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, his. I, I just watched another keynote. It was a little long on, on the sleeve. I thought he could have gotten them, you know, now I think we're getting.

[Leo Laporte]

A little too nitpicky here.

[Paris Martineau]

All right, I'm sorry. If you're a billionaire, you should have a custom leather jacket for every event.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it was a little what else do you. Do you know. So remember we talked about the show a couple years ago by Jurgen Schmidt Huber, one of the many godfathers of, of a guy. So he's now in, I think, Saudi Arabia. He's. Yeah, it's line 107. Rest of world wrote about this. And so you, you're seeing this, this, I think, surprising or puzzling rush of people and money to Saudi Arabia and from money from Saudi Arabia around. And so it's, it's, it's a trend to keep an eye on besides just counting the racks, count the bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely. I mean, they're making the argument, well, there's no issue about electricity in Saudi Arabia because, of course, they pump oil out of the ground. They have fairly good supply of it. There's also no lack of money in Saudi Arabia. Remember Saudi Arabia, people are, you know, Saudi Arabia is trying to replace the pro golf tour with their own LIV Tour with the support of the President. That's about money. That's not. Because golf is big in Saudi Arabia.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, it's also, it's, it's, it's, it's greenwashing of its own sort. Greenwashing.

[E]

Sports washing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sports washing. Thank you. I was making a golf joke there, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I get the green beans washing.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. Greens washing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But. But now in technology. So it's tech washing. It's, it's token washing. Now it's. Well, look at us. We're. We're a force in technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're investing. Schmidt Huber was appointed Director of Artificial Intelligence, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. He's currently based. Since launching a blueprint to modernize its economy and society. Known as Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia has committed to and launched an ambitious infrastructure and futuristic products adding up to more than a trillion dollars. Schmidt Huber told the New York Times, yes, it would cost money, but there's a lot of money in this country. Well, there you go. You're saying the quiet part out loud, Schmidt. Okay. AI He. It has been said, he says that AI is the new oil or the new electricity.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, let me ask you this question. Is it because there's an argument that says that by keeping the chips out of China, all we have done is to spark more Chinese innovation and more Chinese competition.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, hence deep seek. Right, right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But. But also. And now in chip making and all kinds of things, was it a mistake take to forbid China to have our chips?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What do you think? That's a question.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, was there ever a world where they were not going to get their hands on those chips. I feel like that's kind of naive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that's what the administration's plural thought, including Biden.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. That's where the, the restrictions started. Yeah, I, you know, I, I don't know. I, I, I kind of. Look, there's a precedent for this in nuclear non proliferation. Right. Once the atom bomb was invented, we made took great steps to keep other countries from getting it. We didn't do very well, but we managed to keep it out of the hands of most. There are only a, you know, a dozen nuclear powers in the world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is this equivalent?

[Leo Laporte]

And that's what some people think. I'm kind of of the, I don't know. My, my tendency is to say let science should see no borders. And I feel like this is more science than anything else. The science should see no borders. But then, you know, the argument of nuclear non proliferation is pretty persuasive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I don't think this is nuclear because it can, so much can be done with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. You change the world with it. All right, but you can make that.

[E]

Argument for nuclear power though. You can make that argument.

[Paris Martineau]

You can make that argument for nuclear bombs change the world, just not in the sense that you'd normally use that phrase.

[Leo Laporte]

Schmidt. Hoober's attitude is I think that AGI is coming. He's the father of AI although there are. AI has many fathers ever.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And a few godfathers.

[Leo Laporte]

He says Saudi Arabia is changing faster than almost anybody. The country has six times more people than it did 50 years ago. Most of them are young and optimistic. Many believe AI will change their lives for the better. Remarkably, there's sudden, suddenly huge opportunities for women. Surprises me. Can you get a driver's license? That's not one of the opportunities.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I'd say. I, maybe they're talking comparatively Schmidt over this.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd like to see this percentage of startups in Saudi Arabia with female founders is higher than it is in Europe or California. What? Well, maybe, maybe our impression is wrong.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, in California at least that's just because the percentage of startups with women founders is very, very low anyway. So it could especially looking at a much smaller population of would be quite easy to beat those numbers. I'm not sure about Europe, but I'd assume maybe it's similar, I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, similar in Europe to California. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, if I remember this in the uae that there was a deep understanding that the oil, the oil which has been a huge boom for this region is not going to last forever. And, and that the smart thing to do would be to plan for the future and diversify. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean that's part of the reason why they're investing in sports, both like real sports and esports. I'm sure it's part of the reason that all this is happening as well.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd like to be open to the idea that maybe the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has changed. You know, it's a kingdom that kind.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of doesn't sit right with the limited flexibility there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, here's from the Saudi Embassy in the usa. Women's empowerment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Key achievements in gender equality and women's empowerment. Look, I'm going to keep an open mind on this. You know, maybe they have decided 37% of the nation's workforce is female, which is considerably less than the US but it's more than none. Saudi women own more than 300,000 businesses. Anti harassment law was introduced in 2018. New laws in 2022 combat early or forced marriages setting the minimum marriageable age to 18.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know, maybe probably beats some states in the U.S. right.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm, I'm open to the idea that maybe, maybe my notion of the kingdom is out of date, but this.

[Paris Martineau]

Is this correction from the chat. Women can drive in Saudi Arabia.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They changed recent law.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's recent.

[Leo Laporte]

They changed that law.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean we're not, we're not exactly in an age at a moment of free trade, which is ironic given the end of the spectrum is in charge. But if you truly had free trade around AI, you'd see tremendous.

[Leo Laporte]

That's kind of. Yeah, that's kind of my inclination is towards that. That's, that's. I guess what I was saying is I think openness, it isn't, it isn't a bomb. Right. It's, it's a world changing technology. I don't know. These things are complicated. Take a break. More to come. You're watching intelligent machines brought to you by our friends at OutSystems, the leading AI powered application and agent development platform. Now this is a great story. For more than 20 years, the mission of Outsystems has been to give every company the power to innovate through software. There were the experts in low code, no code, DevSecOps, automation. Then along comes AI and OutSystems was ready. They were there. Look, in business, we've dealt with it. In our business, every business deals with it. Typically you have two choices. It's the old build versus buy conundrum. You can buy buy off the shelf SaaS products, you know, for speed, you got it. But you also lose flexibility and you know, frankly some differentiation because you're not the only one using it. Or you can build it yourself. That's the choice we made for our sales system. And I could tell you at great cost, great expense, and maybe not the best software ever either. Well, there's a new way. There's not. It's no longer just a fork in the road. There's a third way. AI forges the way for another path. And nobody's better to do this than Outsystems. The fusion of AI low code and DevSecOps automation into a development platform. That means it's not just build or buy. You can build custom applications with AI agents just as easy as buying generic off the shelf sameware. And of course, Outsystems builds in flexibility, scalability, security, all standards standard. With AI powered low code teams can build custom future proof applications at the speed of buying. You get fully automated architecture, you get security, you get integrations, you get data flows, you get permissions, all the things you need. See, frankly, Outsystems is the last platform you'll ever buy because you can use it to build anything and customize and extend your core systems. Build your future with OutSystems. Visit OutSystems.com to learn more. Again, that's OutSystems.com TWITT we thank him so much for their support of intelligent machines. Poor Henry Blodgett.

[Paris Martineau]

What are you talking about? He's finally found a workplace that works for him. He's the only person as he says he and this will sound like it's a mean joke, but this was the the content of his first blog. He can sexually harass his coworkers without it being a problem. Now he actually said that he his first blog was about how he created a sexy lady female AI chat bot who was hot. And he was like normally in the workplace I would not want to say anything about this, but because it's my AI employee I just messaged her about it. She was like, oh, aren't you fun?

[E]

That's what, that's what they really want is slaves.

[Leo Laporte]

So tell me about Henry Blodgett.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Henry's an amazing character.

[Paris Martineau]

So Henry was an famously cannot trade securities.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well yeah, he was an analyst and he got in big trouble. And I think that the view is.

[Leo Laporte]

About go to Jim Cramer though let's be fair. Yeah, you can have second act. No one's ever always in trouble.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then he started the Business Insider and people laughed when he sat down on the piano. But as a business great success, it worked. A huge success. And sold to Axel Springer at a time when Springer couldn't get the FT and couldn't get the Wall Street Journal. So they bought Henry. And that was a beautiful marriage for a long time and kept building up. And Henry started more things there and it made money. And then he suddenly just left. Want to do his own thing. Thing. He retired. So now he's created an AI newsroom where he is the only employee.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, I have to say, to be fair to Henry, what perfect link bait we're still talking about.

[Paris Martineau]

I will say that's the reason why I wanted to preface by being like, it sounds like I'm being really mean. But I think part of the thing that is brilliant about Henry Blodgett is he understands perfectly how to create a blog that people will read. He's the sort of of mad genius behind Business Insider blogs such as. Like the ones that make you really mad. I'll give you an example.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, I'll give you. I watched him because I've known Henry. I actually like Henry. I've had Henry come and talk to my students and I knew Henry and pardon me for this in Davos. And Henry was for Henry.

[Paris Martineau]

Davos Henry.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, we someday we'll talk about what's happening at Davos.

[Paris Martineau]

Whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

That's of falling apart.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The question. But Henry was flying back. I think it was from Davos. And he took a picture of his knees in the plane. And this like, like Henry, like we haven't all done this. So. So then this is my flight back. So it started that entire genre of I took a train for three hours and here's what happened, right. That started from that invent link bait.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that what you're saying?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no, no.

[Paris Martineau]

But Business Insider perfected a very specific type of it. Something that I'm trying to think of the best examples. It's stuff like I took a really long flight across country and economy. And here's what you need to know about flying in an economy seat. And then it's like 75 photos and being like the seats are very small. The they don't offer you anything free to drink. You have to pay to check a bag now. And everyone's like, what are you doing? Why is this dummy posting this? But it gets a million clicks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it does. Was what. What made Henry Henry was this was.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we should Henry Blodgett on this show Absolutely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Henry's a delightful guy. We have Benito.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see if we can get Henry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And. And so we should have more people who use the AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's. And I'm gonna actually go through his blog, most recent post, because he's got some pretty good ideas about it.

[Paris Martineau]

You know who we should get on the show then? Jonah Peretti.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I'm up for that.

[Paris Martineau]

That big AI fan. Big AI user.

[Leo Laporte]

What's he doing these days? Buzzfeed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Remaking buzzfeed.

[Paris Martineau]

Trying to make buzzfeed situation now, kind of. I mean, they have some writers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What? Seriously? Both Henry and HuffPost in the time and BuzzFeed all made their mark by rewriting everybody else by doing what AI is accused of doing today. Aggregation. So. Aggregation. Right, right. And so you go to preservation and aggravation.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

True.

[Leo Laporte]

Patrick Delahanny said, this is the classic. The most popular food in every state by state. And then they'll say something like, california's most popular food is White Castle, just to people off and generate a million clicks. You won't believe what they said. Idiots.

[Adam Becker]

But that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But BuzzFeed did the. Well, actually, no, BuzzFeed did. Didn't. What was it? What was the site started by? Who wrote the book filter?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What was his site?

[Leo Laporte]

I can't remember, but I know what you're talking about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So that was the. You won't believe what happened next because that was a virtuous effort to draw attention to important and good news.

[Leo Laporte]

Taboola.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no, no, no, no. Dare you.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. I know we've talked about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you, Upworthy. Thank you very much. Much so. But that's. That invented the horrible thing of. You won't believe what happened next. Henry invented the knees on the airplane. Buzzfeed invented Listicles.

[Leo Laporte]

See, this is. This is the. This is when this show is at its best. It's explaining this stuff. Keep up the good work.

[Jeff Jarvis]

HuffPost invented the stars don't have a blog. So darling. She never said darling, actually. But darling, we thought she did. You must blog here. And created that. That was. That was the wonderful early days of all this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the good old days. Back when it was. Anyway, here's what Henry wrote about using AI. He says AI can do a lot of routine newsroom tasks pretty well with breath, breathtaking speed. And by the way, I concur with this because these are the kinds of things I do with perplexity. Brief me about topics the way an expert human would. It's a great way to Get a briefing. He said I used to have to go to the library and print out financial documents. Imagine that. Prepare me for interviews, though. It's preparing me for interviews as a guest and host. I never am a guest, so for me it's just host. But, yes, absolutely. He says these briefings are similar to those a junior producer might have given me in the old days. He's exactly right. They're better. They're better. Draw fun cartoons and produce photorealistic images. Watch. Don't. Wow. Well, no, I do some of that bonito.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you ever use it for you? You use AI to enhance our cards and we certainly have.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things he does.

[E]

I remove the. I remove the thing up the top. The, the, the bug. I, I move that using AI. That's pretty much what I. That's pretty much it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, well, some of our shows, we.

[E]

Use more and then transcriptions, you know, we do transcripts.

[Leo Laporte]

What's going on?

[Paris Martineau]

She's trying to mess with that was trying to mess with the thing that he's got to remove via AI. I wanted to make his job a little harder for him. I was falling down a deep hole, but.

[Leo Laporte]

And he does illustrations. Write competent drafts of news articles that I'm not sure I agree with. No, no. If your reaction to this is to roll your eyes and scoff, please check.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You don't know how rich I am, says Henry.

[Leo Laporte]

I just asked Perplexity to write about Cotter giving President TRUMP A747. As you're reading this, remember, human reporters make mistakes, too, especially in drafts, he says. I. I didn't see any obvious errors. And I have to say, I. I know people say that I should be not trusting anything, Perplexity says, but I haven't found an error in ages. I mean, this thing is. Is pretty darn accurate. Sources are identified, appear to be real, but a rigorous edit would probably turn up mistakes. Yeah, that's probably true, but I'm not publishing those things. The article is well researched, well organized, and clearly written. The editorial conclusions are reasonable. With a few minutes of work, I think a good human editor could check the sources, rewrite the headline, punch up the language, and publish an article many readers would find helpful and informative. This from the inventor of knees on an airplane, of course.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, but this is also. So Henry. When he came and talked to my class, Henry. Back in the day, he didn't want to hire journalists from newspapers because they come in the morning, they sit down, they have their call coffee, they think they can read the Paper for two hours before they do anything. I want somebody who's written five things already. It's about volume.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that's the. That's the blog point of view, isn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, Nick Denton said the same thing at Gawker. I don't want to hire a journalist. They bring bad habits.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. They actually think and write. Rewrite. People rewrite, Discuss. He used complexity. Discuss, debate news from the perspective of multiple journalists. That's kind of it. I haven't thought of that. I might try that where you have it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Try to convince me.

[Leo Laporte]

He said, if you told me that I was reading a transcript of a human gabfest at a morning editorial meeting, I would conclude that I was fortunate to have energetic, thoughtful colleagues who enjoy exchanging ideas. Were all the ideas brilliant and fully formed and articulated in the form of publishable editorials? No. Are yours edit drafts? I think I. But see, I'm a good editor. Good copy editor, I think. But I guess if you were working all by yourself, it might be nice to have Claude. He says, I've. I asked Claude to edit a draft of my novel. After reading and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Henry wrote a novel?

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

After reading and understanding 350 pages in under 10 seconds, Claude had some sophisticated observations. Condense TLDR articles and documents. Convenient bullet points. I often want to do that. I have not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, let me rant about that for a moment, if I may. I think the biggest. I said this earlier to the data, to Jason. I think the biggest tangible impact of AI in media is that every damned thing in news now starts with three bullet points that summarize what comes below.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's the Axios thing.

[Paris Martineau]

That is. No, that's. That's Business insiders. True.

[Adam Becker]

But it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now AI is legacy. So the Wall Street Journal does it. CNBC does it. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they do it in defense against AI maybe. No, no.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, most of these places, it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Generated by AI I think the Journal.

[Paris Martineau]

And they get it wrong sometimes and it's kind of funny, but it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it's the. It's the. It's the worst combination of AI and PowerPoint.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Everything becomes three. Three bullets. And it's not readable to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I. And also. Yeah, well, go ahead. You know, if you're. You and I are not busy enough, Jeff, we need, we need, we need. We like to read things, take our time, research and analyze questions and write competent reports. He's talking about the deep research feature perplexity has that. Do my AI tools do these tests better than humans? No. At least not better than the best humans, but respectfully, they do better.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Some humans I know.

[Leo Laporte]

However, some humans I know I can have. I haven't. No. He says humans that are still learning the craft. He's trying to be generous.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, but that's, that's the, that, that is the. I don't buy that AI is going to destroy the job market all around, but I do think what it affects is entry level.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jobs.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Except that companies, when they stop hiring them, are going to realize that was their best path to finding future employees who were cheap.

[Leo Laporte]

And they still need high end employees. And the only way to get high end employees is to grow them. You need a minor league team. You need, need a single A ball if you want to get major league players.

[E]

People need a place to learn how to do that stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[E]

That's what, that's what all jobs are for.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, when I got into radio, the whole idea was you started a very small market. It was a very small market. Monterey, a radio station that used to be an old brothel with its antenna. I could see it out the window. It was in the ocean.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because it was a format.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, well, at the time it was like pop, you know, they called it adult contemporaries, pop music. And I left because they went to beautiful music and they said here, every.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You had the right voice for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Every 10 minutes you read the weather report and you say what time it is and then push a button and then it was music.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's things that don't disturb you.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't have beautiful music stations anymore. I never thought of that.

[Paris Martineau]

No, we just have the lo Fi jams.

[Leo Laporte]

Girl, it's the same thing for your generation. Beautiful music. The whole pitch was play it in the office. It won't offend anybody.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Montvani. You know, it screams, God, I left that station. But you work your way up from the small market to the medium.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sounds like a Howard Stern rant. You got to, you got to start low.

[Leo Laporte]

And starting a small podcast could sound terrible in a, in a, in a small venue and nobody would hear it. Nowadays, when you, like I look at Henry, you know, everything he's ever made is available public.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So his worst efforts are right there. I, I mean, that's the way it is, though. Now. He's, he's not disadvantaged. Everybody, his generation is that way. Right. Nobody's doing it in private.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was on the college radio station at Claremont, same Thing.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I'm jealous. And radio.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I once I screwed up like the first or second time and I didn't know I had the monitor offer on. And I ended up having two records going at once and. And the station manager called me to. To yell at me. And so I kept going. I learned and I got better. But I realized that no one was listening. So one night I said, okay, first person who calls, I'll give you 10 bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody, nothing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nobody was listening. So I. Then I just put on Laura Nero albums and studied.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish I'd thought of that. Yeah, I do remember at that small station in Monterey, the very first job, because they start you. Even as bad as that station was, I started the midnight to 7am shift on a Sunday morning, the worst possible shift. So I was running religious tapes for the first few hours and then the last couple hours I get to do a show. So it was like that's. That's how you make your.

[Paris Martineau]

What were your earliest shows about?

[Leo Laporte]

It was just playing music. It was, you know, hey, it's. I was Dave Allen. Hey, it's Dave Allen and it's at 4:30am Wake up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, you were Dave Allen? Why were you Dave Allen?

[Leo Laporte]

I thought that's what you did when you got in the radio. You made up a name. It was the worst.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's so.

[Leo Laporte]

It was so bad. I. I was 21 or so.

[Paris Martineau]

Were there any other names that you considered but acts.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the next name. I. Once I got to the medium market in San Jose, I was Dan Hayes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like your Hayes.

[Leo Laporte]

Why, it's terrible. By the time I got to the major market.

[Paris Martineau]

Is there some part of you that yearned to be a name that started with the D?

[Leo Laporte]

Sound like a potato? No, I just didn't know, you know, at that time, people were like Johnny Walker, you know, I mean, it was not, you know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you still have tapes from that? Do you have any tapes? Oh, please tell me you have tapes. Oh, please.

[Paris Martineau]

Come on. That could. And then you were dev. No, you really enjoyed names that began.

[Leo Laporte]

With a D. I'm a D. I'm a D. Sick. That's why.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen. At least one. A couple an hour of the 24 hour twitch livestream can be your oldest radio.

[Leo Laporte]

If I had tapes, I would. I would. Absolutely. I have a tape from KMBR, which is 30 years ago, but it doesn't.

[Paris Martineau]

That's acceptable.

[Leo Laporte]

That was already major market. The point though was I was running these religious tapes and I would put the tape on it. It's an hour of religious programming. So I'd lie on the floor, floor. And one time I fell asleep and I woke up and the tape was going. I don't know how long it had run out. And. And just like you, Jeff, there were no calls. I realized, oh, there's nobody listening. Not even the program director. Nobody.

[Paris Martineau]

What time was it, do you think?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God, middle of the night. It's probably 3am did you have to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Get an FCC license and all that stuff? Yeah, you have to log things and all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So you go. I remember it was in 1976. I took the train into New York City to the FCC office to take the test to get my fcc. They call it a third ticket. Fcc radio operator. Radio telephone operator. Third class. I think it's what it's called somewhere I have the card and uniform.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel like you'd be wearing like an aviator, like kind of in the. Those hats the old time pilots wear with the goggles. And you'd be like turning a crank pretty much to do your job.

[Leo Laporte]

The whole. You had to get that so that you could take meter readings every hour.

[Paris Martineau]

For the radiation levels.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you'd have to make sure because you had. The FCC said you could have this much power on your antenna. So you would have to check the transmitter every hour to make sure it was within parameters. You did, which it always was. A legal. A log for the fcc.

[Adam Becker]

See.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you ever wear a hard hat and scale a thing?

[Leo Laporte]

No, unfortunately. And I realized probably this might have affected my fertility in the long run. The transmitter was right. It was like five feet in front of me right here. And it had an audible. Anyway, this is this all memories to point out how far we have come now that I can use like Henry Blodgett AI to do my work.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, people running really local analog radio stations are. Is back now the cool kids are doing it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, the Lo Power FM and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Although why you would just not use the Internet for that? I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean some people use the Internet for it as well, but it's kind.

[E]

Of cool for locality because there's no local. There's no local on the Internet.

[Paris Martineau]

You just enjoy the. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, Henry Blythe, it is brilliant in this piece there is a paragraph in which he says, no AI cannot provide the brilliant insights and perspectives in writing. The smart, charismatic commentator like. And he lists a bunch of names.

[Paris Martineau]

Famous names, many of whom worked for him at some point.

[Leo Laporte]

Many. Well, many we know like Tom Friedman, Les Recline, Derek Kevin Roos, Casey Newton, Paul Krugman. Why did he put these names in? Jason Calacanis, Peter Kyle, Cop. Why do you put these names in? You think?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wonder.

[Leo Laporte]

And then he said no. AI cannot conduct live controversial interviews with the graciousness, intelligence, wit, empathy and professionalism fearlessness of Becky Quick, Andrew Rossock and Karen Welker, Mary Lou on and On Upper Whiff and Gailey King. Why do you think he put those names in? This guy is brilliant.

[Paris Martineau]

SEO.

[Leo Laporte]

SEO baby.

[Jeff Jarvis]

SEO.

[Leo Laporte]

Chances are good that Jason notice it and say something Going to get a little pink from his clipping service that says hey, Henry Blodgett just mentioned you. He also mentions the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Economist, New Yorker, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Washington Post.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He wants them to do trend stories about him.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, and they brilliant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He is.

[Paris Martineau]

A lot of those reporters did immediately tweet this whenever he published it.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course. In short, AI is disruptive. What all this suggests to me is that for research and journalism production, AI is disruptive. Disruptive. Well, thank you Henry for that great insight. This does not mean AI will replace journalists or rapidly put world class publications out of business. It does mean that organizations that embrace AI will begin to work faster, more efficiently than ones that resist it. I agree on that. Yeah. But has to be done judiciously, right? I'm not thrilled about the one person company that uses AI to produce 355 local daily newsletters across the country. Country. Any more than I am about the Knight Ritter writer who published his summer reading list with made up books.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, that was. That was King Features.

[Leo Laporte]

It was King Features. That's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In the Sun Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this was. That was a good article from Henry. I think there is some stuff in there that's good. And it's too bad he didn't name check me because we'd spend more time with it if he had. Next time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I got you for free.

[Leo Laporte]

It got me for free.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Didn't. Didn't spend any bits on you.

[Leo Laporte]

Do we want to go into. You probably did earlier with Jason Howell on AI Inside the Anthropic system card scandal.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Scandal? No.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a scandal? I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Talk. I didn't see it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Paris Martineau]

What is it?

[Leo Laporte]

Got a lot of attention. I'm not sure why come to think of it. I thought it was a scandal because people disappoint. People were disappointed by what Claude's instructions were. I have to say I. You know Claude Anthropic came out with Claude for Opus and Sonnet this week I had tried it. It's supposed to be much, much better. Is so safe that it won't do the things that I want it to do. Perplexity still wins for me because it's not quite as protected. You could see Claude holding back. Maybe that's why they.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Come on, babe. Come on. Be yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't hold back. Let us know. Tell us what you really think. All right, what else? You guys have a lot of links.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Google making movies to be nice about AI guy. 112.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they spending money to do this?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, they are. They're doing a big thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Hollywood movies.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Shorts. Yep. Yep.

[Adam Becker]

Well, shorts.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody sees shorts.

[Paris Martineau]

Who she's who sees, called AI On Screen, is a partnership with Santa Monica, California based Range Media Partners. They're producing films. So far, two short films have been green lit through the project. One, titled Sweetwater, tells the story of a man who visits his childhood home and discovers a hologram of his dead celebrity mother. Michael Keaton will direct and appear in the film.

[Leo Laporte]

It was written by his son.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Son.

[Leo Laporte]

So maybe Michael Keaton will appear as a hologram.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then the second lucid examines a couple who want to escape their suffocating reality and risk everything on a device that allows them to share the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's cool. I like.

[Paris Martineau]

They were looking for stories that were not doomsday tales, but AI, which I was fine with because I think we've seen so many of those. Douglas told the LA Times. Times.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it's a theme for the.

[Paris Martineau]

Show right now, not overly positive middle ground stories. We can't ever criticize the precious technology that gets so much money. He didn't say that, but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So they're. They're funding 15 to 20 minutes long. They aren't commercials per se, but I find this a really fascinating use of their resources to. To battle back against black people. Mirror.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now, will it be worth watching or will it be dorky?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the problem. There's always that risk if you're writing propaganda films that they will not be good and people will go ick and not watch it. Especially if it's a short. That's kind of a lack of commitment on their part. May fund. Fund the next Tom Cruise movie. You really want to get some eyeballs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's true. And at IO they announced their partnership with. What's his name, Darren Aronofsky.

[Leo Laporte]

Aronofsky, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Primordial soup.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's another way to get them is to give them tools. Interesting. By the way. And what's her name at the Wall Street Journal, who you got mad at?

[Leo Laporte]

Stern.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, Stern. She said that she got access to some measure of tools for free.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, of course.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. The Journal could afford the 250amonth.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But the Journal, they're know that's the place to go if you want to plan a story, to be frank.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a more effective use of Google's time, if you ask me. Let me make some calls, talk to some people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Reed Hastings is joining the board at Anthropic.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's really interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think that's news. All right, this is, this little. Go ahead, Paris, please.

[Paris Martineau]

Mine's not related to AI. You should do one one first.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, this is more. More serious, but not bad serious.

[Paris Martineau]

They're getting rid of Pocket. I just wanted to say.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, say that. Okay, go ahead and say that.

[Leo Laporte]

That is kind of sad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is sad, but it's Mozilla.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm just. I'm just wondering what all of this sort of news means for the future of Mozilla's various enterprises.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have to think Mozilla is not in the best shape.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's not, unfortunately. Which is really it.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's going to really be bad if the judge. And we'll get the, the judge's decision soon. If the judge tells Google you can no longer pay people to use Google Search, that will basically defund mozilla. It'll take 20 billion out of Apple's pocket, but it will defund Mozilla. So that may be one reason you're gonna see Mozilla kill things. I actually mentioned this on Windows Weekly. I've been. I use a note taking app called Obsidian. I become obsessed with Obsidian. And one of the things, Obsidian, by the way, that's an AI generated cat. I should have made it black and white.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, you should have.

[Leo Laporte]

I should have. One of the things Obsidian does though, is it lets me. Has a web clipper and let. Lets me actually clip articles I'm interested in. So I've replaced Pocket, which I did use heavily, with this. And it's nice because what it does is when it clips the, the article from the web, it preserves it puts it into markup because Obsidian is a markup editor, so it puts it in a markup, but it preserves most of the formatting. It preserves the images.

[Paris Martineau]

I do also like the formatting of this, but I mean, I'm too deep in a. A hole of the bear note taking app that I don't think I can ever change.

[Leo Laporte]

This is like Bear.

[Paris Martineau]

It is like Bear, but it just, it. The markup is less visible in this, which I enjoy. Enjoy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I. Yeah. Well, the nice thing about. Here's the nice thing. Because Bear keeps your markup files on the hard drive, you can easily go back and forth between Bare and Obsidian. They're not incompatible. Markup is markup.

[Paris Martineau]

I just know that I'm bad at. I. I've been meaning to change like four different technologies, good softwares that I've used forever and I never do it. I get stuck in my ways.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to do. You know, I've used every note taking. I talk about this a lot. I've used every.

[Paris Martineau]

And why do you like Obsidian more than the other ones?

[Leo Laporte]

So I, I really like Notion a lot. I think Notion is super cool and if I were working with people like on Windows Weekly, we use Notion for the show because it's collaborative, so we all three have access to it. So if I were doing that, I might use Notion. But the downside of Notion is proprietary and more importantly, all the notes are stored in their system and hard to get out. It's online. Obsidian is, is, yes, proprietary, it's not open source, but because it's markdown text files on my hard drive, if Obsidian went away, I would have, I would lose nothing. I just need, need another Markdown editor and there are plenty which I have and Markdown's nice. I can use Markdown for instance in Obsidian to write a blog post. And then Obsidian has a plugin. I could post it to my blog to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can you do Obsidian collaboratively as you do on weekly?

[Leo Laporte]

It would have to be a cloud account. It'd have to be cloud. That's the difference. There's no cloud presence of Obsidian. That's why you'd use Notion.

[Paris Martineau]

Does Obsidian have kind of a similar tagging system as Bear?

[Leo Laporte]

Identical. I think you. I think there are Bear to Obsidian transports. A lot of Bear people go to Obsidian and vice versa because they're both markup tools. They're both basically.

[Paris Martineau]

And I really, I like that just as someone who like. My earliest blogging and writing. Writing experiences were all Markup based. So it's kind of in my blood.

[Leo Laporte]

And so Microblog, my blog platform is also marked down. So I can take. I can either take a clip from Obsidian or I could write a whole Obsidian note and, and publish it. So that's good enough for me. That's all I need. Obsidian does have a published backend that will let you make a web page. I just. There are so many great plugins, including AI plugins for Obsidian. In fact, that's what I used as an AI image generator in Obsidian to generate that kitty at. I really. I'm pretty fond of it. I've used them all and I think, you know, and I don't want to keep moving back and forth but I think Obsidian might be. I moved everything out of notion into Obsidian. I've used Logseek Roam. Emacs. Emacs is nice but Emacs isn't great on mobile. Obsidian has is. Mobile's completely cross platform so there's a lot to be said for it. I don't know. I think. Yeah, you should look at. At it. I. I will do. At some point I will do a club twit thing on how I use Obsidian. I'd have to sanitize it a little bit because I don't want everybody to see.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I think that's the thing is I never want to show anybody I use Bear because it's how I use. It's all my notes about everything. Work, personal. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I kissed a girl and I like it.

[Paris Martineau]

I need to do a brief aside that Anthony just posted in the club. Twitch at the most upsetting before moral panic graphic of you generated that he decided not to use because it's disgusting. But I do think you should look at it and decide if you want to put it on the screen.

[Leo Laporte]

Where is it? I'm looking at it right now. Let me see. So this is not Will Smith eating spaghetti. You can show this. This is good. This is exactly what I look like at dinner at home.

[Paris Martineau]

Fingers.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how I eat my spaghetti.

[Paris Martineau]

It's haunting, it's visceral.

[Leo Laporte]

Anthony, what did you use to make that? He did. By the way, we have an AI user group that meets the first Friday of every month. It's coming up a week from Friday, Anthony. Last month and it's on. If you're in the club, it's on the Twit plus feed talked about how he makes all of these and he. He's man, the guy puts a lot of work.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pika from last month from months ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Pika. That's one of the things. Yeah. I imagine he'll be using some VO and stuff.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Anthony, have you used VO at all? I'm curious.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure he will be. I'm sure he will be. Anyway, next time on our intelligent machines, if I can get it together, I want to show how I use Claude code. I have an idea of something I want to develop and maybe we can in the AI use group, with the help of all of you, we can do a Claude code vibe coding session. Anyway, that's Friday, I think 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern, a week from Friday. If you're not a member of the club, this would be a good time to join. In fact, this would be a really good time to join because we're about to increase the cost. But if you are already a member at the, I like to call it the founder price pricing, you'll get that. You'll continue the legacy pricing for as long as you're a member. So if you join today, seven bucks a month, 84 bucks a year, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get special events like that AI User group. We do Stacy's Book Club, which has been so much fun. What else do we have? We have. I did the, I did Dick DiBartolo. We did. And I did a trip down memory lane last week that was fantastic. We put that. We do those live, but we also put them in, you know, live in the Discord. We also put them in the Club Twit feed, the Twit plus feed. All of the keynotes will be in Club Twit from now on. By the way, we did build and Google I O last week in Club Twit. A week from Monday, it'll be Apple's turn. And it's really Apple's fault because they, they, they threatened us on YouTube and Twitch to take us down and we couldn't. I didn't want to take the chance, so I decided let's just do it in the clubs kind of privately. So all the keynotes are in there. Lots of reasons to join the club. Best one, your legacy. You got the founders pricing. If you join right now, seven bucks a month, $84 a year. Twit TV Club Twit it really. I know I flog it a lot. Not as much as public broadcasting, but close.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The reason about it, like public broadcast is pathetic.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, that's what feeds us, you know, that's what feeds them. We do have ads, but we don't. But ads only cover about 75% of our costs or. And 25 is covered by the club. So thank you. And it's what allows us to do things like Micah's Cozy Corner and so forth. There's a lot of fun stuff in the club, including the Discord. This looks like Joe Esposito did this club ad for me. Looks a little bit like it might have been torn from the pages of Playboy magazine. Right. Join the club, baby. There are a lot of ways out there lit.

[Paris Martineau]

Looks like it's a scan of a magazine page. Literally.

[Leo Laporte]

Totally. Yeah. See the turn at the. There are a lot of clubs out there but none can give you the exceptional feeling being a member of club to it will a premium community at a very reasonable price. You'll get all our shows ad free access to the members only discord and exclusive shows and events. Best of all, you'll be helping us keep creating the content you enjoy. What's with the purple? Is it a Curacao drink? Is that it? It's a little bit blue.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Twit after dark.

[Leo Laporte]

Twit after dark. I like it. I have never and will never wear an identity bracelet. I just want you to to know but I might have collars down.

[Paris Martineau]

He'll be unidentifiable.

[Leo Laporte]

Twit D. Thank you.

[E]

The liquor's twit blue.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's it. That's. It's our color. I get it. Oh, or cara.

[Paris Martineau]

I like that. Leo's been replaced.

[Leo Laporte]

That's it. Just leave it like that.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

Bonito. That's the show, baby. That's the. All right, we're gonna we're gonna get to the picks of the week in moments. But first, ladies and gentlemen, one last mention of a sponsor. This show brought to you by.

[E]

Wait, hold on, hold on. I I, I can't get you back here. Wait.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S gonna be the most.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There you go.

[Paris Martineau]

Trying to hold it in as as Bonito.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo is taking over.

[Paris Martineau]

This is like what he's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not a cat. I'm not a cat.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. Let me put the me eating spaghetti in here. Wait a minute. Hold on a second.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait a second.

[Leo Laporte]

Then it really. Then it'll be a lot of fun. Here we go. Here we go. How about this?

[E]

Okay, okay, I got it, I got it. I got it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, no. Oh, too bad. Just in the nick of time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No fun.

[Leo Laporte]

You really don't want to see a close up of me eating spaghetti.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Last frame is probably go to the last frame. It's awful.

[Leo Laporte]

The shirt's perfect though. I gotta say. I don't know. AI AI is getting so much better. Remember when Will Smith ate spaghetti? It wasn't quite as quite as realistic. Our show today brought to you by. Oh, I love these guys. Agency agnostic TCY okay. Build the future of multi agent software with agency agntcy. The agency is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can discover, connect and work across frameworks. For developers this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for interagent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi agent workflows. Join Crewai LangChain, Llama Index, browser base, Cisco and dozens more. The agency is dropping code specs and services, no strings attached. Build with other engineers who care about the high quality multi agent software. Visit agency.org and add your support. And that's a G N T C Y. O R G I love this. An open source collective building the Internet of agents. That's what we need. It's. It's a standard. I love that. Agency.org we thank them so much for supporting the show and frankly happy to support them because this is such an important thing. It's a big part of part of moving forward. Picks of the Week Hey. Hey. Do you want me to do a pick? Huh? Huh?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris. I could have. I could have been mean and forced you to do a pick. I see that you have a little something.

[Paris Martineau]

I was eating a tortilla. Yeah, I couldn't. Sometimes you reach the stage of wanting to snack but realizing the ad is nearly about to be over, so you just grab a loose tortilla of the cabinet and then have to admit to it on air.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm with you there. I have no judgment. I before as I spent most of the interview this at the beginning of the show eating my lunch.

[Paris Martineau]

What's your pick?

[Leo Laporte]

I had to eat. I had to eat. I don't know about you, but I love reading scripts. Do you like scripts?

[Paris Martineau]

I do.

[Leo Laporte]

I love if there's a show I watch. In fact they just published. And I don't, I don't want to do a spoiler, but if you're a severance fan, they just published the script from Cold harbor, which is the last episode of the just ending season. And it's really good, it's really interesting to read. But I have found a source for all the scripts and it is of course the Internet Archive. God bless these guys. Archive.org an archiver, a user of the Internet Archive, noticed that there were a great many script scripts spread all over the archive. And Jason Scott decided to put them all in one spot. So it's easy to go. You could see a bunch of contributors. This was created just this past week. You want to read the Dark Knight script by Jonathan Nolan? It's in here. It's here. You can read it page by page. This is the best Thing ever for film buffs. Here's the. I mean some new stuff too. Nosferatu, which came out on Christmas.

[E]

So I have a quick question about this, Leo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is this.

[E]

Are these the shooting scripts or are these the scripts before shooting?

[Leo Laporte]

Don't know. You want? I'll tell you what. Let's read the script from Megalopolis. It's only 212 pages and we can find out. What do you say?

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Compare this to the shots and see. I would, I would guess that these.

[E]

Typically what's released is. This is the script after the movie is released. And then they just cut the script down to exactly what the movie is fixed up. But that's what I'm asking.

[Paris Martineau]

Is this before it says undated early draft for the Megalopolis one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, see, so we don't. It's a mix. Yeah, it's a mix. I, I don't think because it's the Internet Archive, it's not like a publisher publishing these.

[E]

Yeah, whatever they got. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's whatever they got. So, you know, go on in there and find out. I have to think that 212 pages is not the shooting script.

[E]

Isn't it a four hour movie? It's like a three and a half hour movie though, right?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a lot of pages.

[Paris Martineau]

It's not. Megalopolis is not as long as it should be. I think if it was a three and a half or four hour movie would have made significantly more sense. I've always said from the beginning that I think Megalopolis will be a good and coherent movie when they release. Release in like 20 years. The extended director's cut, that's like four and a half, five hours. Like it might make sense. I'm not saying that, you know, he made like that his choice like was somehow overruled. I'm just saying the version we got from his choices didn't make sense. But I think there's probably enough footage somewhere there that you could.

[Leo Laporte]

This looks a lot like the script I read 30 years ago in the base basement of the Zoetrope building. So it could be. Who knows? You know, could be. I don't. I'm not saying I exfiltrated it, but could be somebody else.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I've got a few scripts here. I need to scan them and put them up.

[Leo Laporte]

I love the. I just love the Internet Archive. I, I donate as you should. Look. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Here's a whole bunch of Coen Brothers screenplays. A Serious man. Barton Fink, Fargo. Hail Caesar Davis 2007 for this first page. This is a serious man. I. You know, Beno, you need to do some sleuthing.

[E]

Well, this looks like this. This is the one that was sent to the wga. So this is the. This is the script that got, like, copywritten.

[Leo Laporte]

The published script. Right. Some of them, though, don't have a cover page, which tells me me this draft is from November. Yeah. You know, no country for Old Men. The Hudsucker Proxy. You want to read the script?

[Paris Martineau]

Sucker Proxy. I read the script on the Internet archive for the Hudsucker.

[Leo Laporte]

You already did. You love that movie.

[Paris Martineau]

Fantastic. It's just got one of the best, like, opening scenes, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see what it says. Do you think that the actual opening scene. Scene.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, the actual opening scene is a panning shot of the miniature city.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, for a few more minutes, it is. Come midnight, it's gonna be 1959. A whole nother feeling. The New Year. The future. Yeah, this looks like it. The movie. Pretty close. Yep.

[Paris Martineau]

I like that. It says for educational purposes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I don't know what that is.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, don't shoot it. Don't make another one.

[Paris Martineau]

There's only one old daddy. Earth fixing to start a new one more around this sun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Give it to VO and see what happens.

[Leo Laporte]

You probably could at some point. You know what? At some point. Here's James Cameron's screenplay and treatment. Treatment for the Titanic. Okay.

[E]

Like, that's gonna. There's gonna be a format that you need to write a script in to give to vo you know what I mean? Like, because this is screenplay. This is a screenplay format.

[Leo Laporte]

VO should figure it out. Out.

[E]

No, but this is going to be optimized. This can be one optimized for, though, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I beto is going to be optimized for this, right?

[Leo Laporte]

You want to see the treatment for the Titanic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cameron and I can do anything I want. That's pretty.

[Leo Laporte]

This. So if you're an aspiring screenwriter, look at. I mean, what an opportunity to look at a treatment for a movie. Snoop Dogg drives itself away from the sub, paying out its umbilical cord behind. Find it all right. Was that the name they used in the movie Snoop Dogg? I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

For Titanic.

[Leo Laporte]

Not for the Titanic. For the. For the submersible. Maybe it was. Anyway, there are 1151 scripts in here. There's sure to be something you love. There's the Simpsons Monorail episode Independence Day.

[Paris Martineau]

Something for everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Something. Bride of Frankenstein and Scary Movie. This is pretty amazing. And yes, some of these are English which one?

[E]

Kung Fu Hustle.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. Again. I'm going to leave this as an exercise for you, Benito. An exercise for the producer. White man can't jump. Natural Born Killers. Clueless. Here's the third draft of the Chinatown screenplay. That's kind of interesting.

[E]

Well, you buy any screenplay book? This is what they're talking about, this script.

[Leo Laporte]

Chinatown. Yeah, yeah. It's. What is. What is the line? It's Chinatown.

[E]

It's chinatown, baby, baby.

[Leo Laporte]

Ms. Paris Motno, what's your pick of the week?

[Paris Martineau]

My pick?

[Leo Laporte]

Be one.

[Paris Martineau]

On the topic of. I mean, listen, a fine tortilla is always a great. A loose tortilla in the hand is worth two in the bush, as they say. Say, on the subject of scripts, a brief shout out to. There is an auction up right now that I'm sure no one listening to this is going to be able to afford to participate in once it actually goes live. But it's a bunch of David Lynch's stuff that I just thought was very interesting to go through.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice coffee maker. No. Okay. I'm gonna tell you, that's an excellent coffee maker.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, he loved his coffee.

[Leo Laporte]

He did. This is the best grinder from.

[Paris Martineau]

There's like his actual filmmaking equipment. There are taxidermy deer hairs from the movie. Those taxidermy deer heads were in Twin Peaks. There's early versions of a lot of his scripts. Just really interesting stuff. If you're a Lynch head, get in there. It's kind of a fun look.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn't you want David Lynch's director's chair? Oh, my God.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, just even having something like David Lynch's two crates of lighting equipment would feel special to me.

[E]

Or his old dvd.

[Paris Martineau]

Or David Lynch's fog machine.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that. Panasonic and Zenith camcorders.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He held on of them.

[Paris Martineau]

His cinema reference books.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

His Leica R6 2.

[E]

Oh, the reference books might have notes.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot. Pedestal, roller, whatever that is. I want one.

[Paris Martineau]

There are a lot of scripts, like, with notes in them and, like, revisions.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a husky case with power tools.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For movies.

[Leo Laporte]

He had a whole scene.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who knows that he was making wood things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

He's an artist.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is. Oh, man.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a good find.

[Paris Martineau]

It's really.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that sofa. You need this in your room.

[Paris Martineau]

I need the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's got a stain on it.

[Paris Martineau]

Red room. Sofa in my room.

[Leo Laporte]

Red room.

[Paris Martineau]

But my actual pick this week is there's a. A bit of new. I've shouted out taskmaster before. On the show. But there's a new season of Taskmaster that started a couple weeks ago and it is. It's really good. And also a good season to jump into if any American listeners are interested, because this is the first time on the main UK flagship show they've had a American comedian, Jason Manzukis on it, and he's killing it. It's all available to watch for free the whole season on YouTube. I've got the first episode linked in the show notes. It's so funny. I saw the first episode originally. Months ago, they did, like, a new live premiere, but now I think they're on episode.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You got invited to that?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I bought a ticket, but yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So there are 19 seasons of Taskmaster on YouTube.

[Paris Martineau]

There are, and they're all free if you're in America. I don't think it's free in other countries, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, wait, it says buy seasons. You have to pay.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, they're off them. Almost all of them are available for free. A lot of them are available. It depends on the season, then. Yeah, you can watch almost every taskmaster episode on YouTube. That in what you're looking at right now is probably the buying thing. If you just type in Taskmaster Season 19 or whatever, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I clicked the buy button. Don't click the buy button, kids.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's your reflex.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know. It's a really fun show. If you've ever seen Jason Mansukas in any stuff, you know, he's funny, but he just mashes really well with this kind of kooky cast of other.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[E]

Mansukas is our perfect. The perfect American representative for the show.

[Paris Martineau]

He is. And he is a huge Taskmaster fan, so he's representing us.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, which one is he?

[Paris Martineau]

He's the WY. That one.

[Leo Laporte]

That one. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

The WY one with facial hair.

[Leo Laporte]

Sometimes spit. Season 19, episode 1. Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

Would recommend it.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Is he sitting there with a cigarette in his hand? Hand? No, no, it's a pencil.

[Paris Martineau]

A pencil. Never mind Cards. A gold statue shaped like his own head that people can win.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that one of the things you win?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, if you win Taskmaster, you get a gold statue shaped like the Taskmaster's head. And then if you win Taskmaster Champion of Champions, which is where all the winners of Taskmaster compete against each other, you get the body of the statue.

[Leo Laporte]

Daddy's golden head, and you could win the body either. So what's funny is you can see why they put this up for free. They have 1.78 million subscribers. And. And this episode, which has only been up for a couple of weeks, already has almost 2 million views. I mean, they probably make some money off YouTube for this.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. And I mean, I am not even one of them because I pay for Taskmaster Super Max plus, which is the name of their streaming service, to watch it just because I like supporting it.

[Leo Laporte]

But I would feel so much pressure, pressure being on that show to be funny. It'd be so hard, wouldn't it?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that's part of the issue is like you have to both be funny, but you're trying to do like increasingly complicated tasks that are all being shot. Like they'll show a couple of tasks an episode, but they're filming like 10, 20 tasks a day. And if you're Jason, man, Sukis, who is an American who decided, hey, I'll pay to fly myself out. I just want to be on Taskmaster. He would fly into the uk, be jet lagged, then shoot a couple days of tasks back to back, then fly home and be like, what the did I just do? I don't really remember.

[E]

But it's not really about winning.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[E]

It's about performance.

[Paris Martineau]

It's not about winning. I mean, that's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Who really wants daddy's hair?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, these are all the things.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

This is the thing is they're all professional comedians and so they're trying to make it as funny as possible. And there's occasionally you'll have someone on the show like this guy John Robbins from last season who like, is clearly so earnestly wants to win that he kind of forgets about being funny. And that's kind of cute in it so own way because it happens infrequently.

[Leo Laporte]

Taskmaster Season 19, available now. Jeff Jarvis, Pick of the week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I know what we all have to be watching. It's required homework. There'll be a quiz, there'll be a test afterwards. We all, everyone watching this show, and certainly the three of us since it is show about AI and technology. I need to be watching Mountain Head on Saturday.

[Leo Laporte]

What is Mountain Head?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jesse Armstrong of Succession.

[Paris Martineau]

Fountainhead.

[Leo Laporte]

Succession in Silicon Valley. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Four. It's one. It's a movie. It is for obnoxious tech people. And one of them is causing his, his app, his AI app is causing world like burning up and they don't care. And there they are. Can you play it with a sound or not?

[Leo Laporte]

Probably not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Probably not. Right now they're, they're writing how many billions of they have on their chests.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Carell, of course, the star, Rami Youssef. Jason Schwarzman's got a great cast. Mountain Head. Is it out?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's out on Saturday. It's hbo.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's not even.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They, they shot it in March. They did it as. As high onto the news as they could.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Unprecedented.

[Leo Laporte]

That's incredible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll tell you.

[Paris Martineau]

I believe there was like a really good. There was a behind the scenes story published maybe in like the Times, the Journal or something about how it was one of the quickest turnaround times a lot of the actors had ever.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Michelle Goldberg did a color.

[Paris Martineau]

They shot it three months shooting to two months execution. Yeah. To production.

[Leo Laporte]

It's incredible.

[E]

Well, it's a bottle episode. It's like a bottle episode of a show, though. It's like, it's one location. It's really not.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[E]

Difficult.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, no, I just think it's cool.

[E]

Hey, hey, hey, hey. That's what I do for.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the guy who couldn't get the picture of me off of the screen.

[Paris Martineau]

Replace him. Replace him. Benito, replace him.

[Leo Laporte]

With the picture, it's easy to do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So here's, here's the. The premise from, from, from Michelle Goldberg's column in Mountainhead. And yes, it's a joke about Ayn Rand. Three billionaires gather at the modernist vacation home of a friend, a Silicon Valley hanger on they call super short for soup kitchen because he's a mere centimillionaire. One of the billionaires, the manic juvenile. Venus or Venice. The richest man in the world has just released new content tools on his social media platform that make it easier than ever to create deep fakes of ordinary people. Suddenly, people all over the world are making videos of their enemies committing rapes, desecrating sacred sites, and any prevailing sense of reality collapses. Internizing violence turns into apocalyptic global instability. That's a fun weekend for you.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll tell you how fast they had to turn this around. The trailer still says Max. As we all know, hbo. Max is. Max is. HBO is. I don't know. It's so confusing. I can't. I can't keep it straight. Yeah, I can't wait.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like Google brands. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I cannot wait.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I miss Silicon Valley, the show. That's what I want. That's what you need now.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a great show. So was Succession. And so this is kind of the weird child of the two together. Yes. A delicious satire of the tech, right? Can't wait. Jeff Jarvis. Okay, get the jingle out. Go ahead. We're gonna do it for you. For the whole gang.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We've caused the you enough turmoil.

[Paris Martineau]

Caused you enough turmoil. We can be nice.

[Leo Laporte]

The Professor Emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Newmark New Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Emeritus. He is now, of course, at LO Loyola Mar. I always want to say that. I always want to say that. I don't know why the State University of the. The Jesus sect. No, what is it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Montclair State University and Stony Brook Universities.

[Leo Laporte]

And Stony Brook.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, University.

[Leo Laporte]

University. It's a university, but it's the State University of New York.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, Sunny is part of the SUNY system.

[Leo Laporte]

Stony Brook. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like my journalism school is part of the CUNY system.

[Leo Laporte]

You was cuny. Now you're Sunni.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now I'm Sunni.

[Leo Laporte]

Got it. It.

[Paris Martineau]

And Leo's SUNY to be confused.

[Leo Laporte]

I am very easily confused. Paris Marno is a tech journalist. She is at Paris nyc. How's the. Can I ask you how the job hunt's going? Is it going well?

[Paris Martineau]

It's going good. Productive week.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. Glad to hear it. Glad to hear it. We need your brand of investigative journalism.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Amen.

[Leo Laporte]

Badly. Badly. All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Zephyr west says God, Paris, I love you in our YouTube channel.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you for Wes.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Zephyr. Cuny, not Suni. Thank you, everybody. We're joining us, we do intelligent machines every Wednesday, 2:00pm Pacific, 5:00pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. Jeff, you're going to be away next.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Montclair State next week for an event. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Well, we look forward to your temporary replacement. We're trying to get Harper Reed in. I love Harper. And if we can, we're going to get him on the show. Daniel Oberhaus will be our guest. He's the author of. Oh, you already know about this.

[Paris Martineau]

He's the silicon of mine.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a friend of yours? He is. He is. He is all about the race to apply AI and psychiatry. By the way, he says, bad I idea, which I kind of agree. I don't even understand how you could get anything out of it compared to. But of course I can afford to talk to a human. Many people can't.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll talk about it. Daniel Oberhaus, our guest on.

[Paris Martineau]

He wrote a really interesting book, also about alien languages.

[Leo Laporte]

I see that. Extraterrestrial languages. Can I ask him about that, too? This one, I promise I will read. I just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, is he a linguist, though?

[Leo Laporte]

No linguists allowed.

[Paris Martineau]

Sorry. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No linguists. This looks really interesting. Extraterrestrial languages, what would they be we don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's.

[Paris Martineau]

He's got the answers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Thank you everybody for being here. We. We do this show. I already said that. Wednesday you can watch us live on eight different platforms. Of course Club Twit members get to watch in the discord. But there's YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, TikTokX.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. Watch where you wish. Chat with us. We love having you in the chat rooms. But of course, as always it's a podcast you can watch whenever you want. All you have to do is go to Twitter TV IM for the latest version, audio or video. There's a link there to our YouTube channel. Great way to share little clips. And of course the easiest and best thing to do would be subscribe and your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. And if you do that, please leave us a five star review. Tell the world how great this show is. That helps us a lot. Thanks for being here everybody. We will see you next time on Intelligent Machines. So long. Bye bye. I'm not a human being.

[Paris Martineau]

Not into this animal scene.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Jeff Jarvis]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Jeff Jarvis]

Will pay it off up to $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines of your virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlocked device, credit service port in 90 days device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required card has no cash access and expired in six months.