Intelligent Machines 823: Intelligent with Two G's

Summary

Podcast Summary: Intelligent Machines 823: Intelligent with Two G's

Podcast Information:

• Title: Intelligent Machines 823: Intelligent with Two G's
• Host: Leo Laporte
• Guests: Steven Witt and Jeff Jarvis
• Release Date: June 12, 2025
• Description: Leo Laporte hosts discussions with leading technology personalities to explore pressing issues in AI, robotics, and more. This episode delves into NVIDIA's pivotal role in the AI revolution, led by CEO Jensen Huang, as explored in Steven Witt's book, The Thinking Machine.

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1. Introduction to Steven Witt and The Thinking Machine

[00:00 - 02:55]

Leo Laporte introduces the episode by welcoming Steven Witt, the author of The Thinking Machine, a comprehensive biography of NVIDIA and its charismatic yet formidable CEO, Jensen Huang. Steven Witt is portrayed as a seasoned writer and investigative journalist with deep insights into the technology sector.

---

2. Jeff Jarvis' Experience Interviewing Jensen Huang

**2.1. Jensen Huang’s Leadership Style and Temperament

[04:17 - 07:42]

Jeff Jarvis shares his personal experiences interviewing Jensen Huang, highlighting Huang's brilliance contrasted with his notoriously volatile temper.

Jeff Jarvis [05:04]: "Jensen has a terrible temper. I've heard a great number of times that he sometimes explodes in anger at people."

He recounts an incident where persistent questioning about the risks of AI led to Huang launching into a humiliating tirade lasting over 20 minutes.

Jeff Jarvis [05:38]: "Why would you ask me that question? We gave you access inside our company. What kind of crappy book are you writing?"

**2.2. NVIDIA’s Strategic Pivot to AI and the Creation of CUDA

[14:44 - 29:15]

Jeff details NVIDIA's evolution from a gaming GPU manufacturer to a cornerstone of the AI industry, primarily through the development of CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture).

Jeff Jarvis [17:30]: "So this is called CUDA. It was the switch on the graphics card that I flick and it turns it into a low-budget supercomputer."

He explains how CUDA empowered scientists to leverage NVIDIA's hardware for complex computations, inadvertently positioning NVIDIA as an AI hardware leader.

Jeff Jarvis [16:18]: "One time success. The success is shared at NVIDIA."

**2.3. Jensen Huang’s Vision and Company Culture

Jeff discusses Huang’s relentless pursuit of excellence and how his leadership fosters both loyalty and a high-pressure environment within NVIDIA.

Jeff Jarvis [07:34]: "It's classic cult leader tactics where everyone I talked to at NVIDIA had a story where Jensen, they just felt so loved by him."

He emphasizes that despite a harsh internal culture, NVIDIA’s employees remain fiercely loyal, partly due to the immense financial rewards and the company's pivotal role in technological advancement.

Jeff Jarvis [09:10]: "If you've been hanging out with Jensen for 10 or 15 years, you have several hundred million dollars."

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3. NVIDIA’s Dominance in AI Hardware and Future Directions

**3.1. Current Market Position and GPU Importance

[10:01 - 16:18]

The discussion highlights NVIDIA's status as one of the most valuable companies globally, driven by the soaring demand for GPUs essential for AI computations.

Jeff Jarvis [10:03]: "They can't make them fast enough, and they sell them for $30,000 a piece. This has made NVIDIA the single most valuable company in the world."

He elaborates on the substantial investments in supercomputing infrastructure, such as the $50 billion mega computer in Texas, underscoring the critical role of NVIDIA’s hardware in AI advancements.

Jeff Jarvis [11:19]: "If you do the math, you'll get to a lot, you know, like $10 billion order, if not more, and it all just goes right into NVIDIA's pocket."

**3.2. Future Projects: Edge Computing and Omniverse

[31:09 - 34:30]

Jeff elaborates on NVIDIA's future initiatives, focusing on edge computing and Omniverse, a high-fidelity physics simulator aimed at training AI systems in digital environments to minimize real-world errors.

Jeff Jarvis [31:09]: "The brain has to be in the thing. And that's going to be a huge market in years to come."

Jeff Jarvis [33:57]: "Omniverse is a high fidelity physics simulator of the real world of our universe."

**3.3. Integration of Software and Hardware as Competitive Advantage

[29:00 - 30:10]

NVIDIA’s competitive edge is attributed not just to its superior hardware but also to its robust software ecosystem, particularly CUDA, which creates a software lock-in that competitors find hard to circumvent.

Jeff Jarvis [29:10]: "Their real advantage is actually that they go out and they embrace the scientific community and they will look for the hardest computing problems in the world."

Jeff Jarvis [29:15]: "So they have a lot of low-level software, but their real advantage is... they embrace the scientific community."

---

4. Insights into Jensen Huang’s Personal Traits and Leadership Philosophy

**4.1. Jensen Huang’s Intelligence and Continuous Self-Improvement

[37:02 - 41:07]

Jeff provides a personal glimpse into Huang’s personality, portraying him as highly intelligent yet personally driven by fear of failure and a constant push for self-improvement.

Jeff Jarvis [38:03]: "Jensen is totally neurotic. He is so driven by negative emotions."

One notable anecdote describes Huang’s attempt to overcome stage fright by practicing baseball with his wife, ultimately mastering the skill.

Jeff Jarvis [41:07]: "So over the next six months, he gets his wife Lori to go in the backyard... and throw the baseball around with him. And by six months later, he nails it."

**4.2. Huang’s Reluctance Towards Public Speaking and Genuine Charisma

Despite his nervousness, Huang’s public persona during keynotes exudes charisma and confidence, a stark contrast to his private insecurities.

Jeff Jarvis [38:24]: "He's terrified that he's going to bomb. That's why he does everything he can to avoid that happening."

Jeff Jarvis [37:59]: "This guy is special."

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5. Conclusions and Reflections

[43:35 - 45:17]

The conversation wraps up with reflections on NVIDIA’s strategic foresight under Huang’s leadership, emphasizing the company’s synchronized focus on AI, gaming, and autonomous systems. Jeff underscores the difficulty competitors face in replicating NVIDIA’s integrated hardware-software approach.

Jeff Jarvis [43:35]: "He's brilliantly timed his business pivots... catching the wave as it's beginning."

Steven Witt [43:35]: "Cuda is so important... it's the secret sauce."

The episode concludes with acknowledgments and anticipations for future developments in AI and NVIDIA’s role therein.

---

Notable Quotes

• Jeff Jarvis [05:04]: "Jensen has a terrible temper. I've heard a great number of times that he sometimes explodes in anger at people."

• Jeff Jarvis [09:10]: "If you've been hanging out with Jensen for 10 or 15 years, you have several hundred million dollars."

• Jeff Jarvis [37:59]: "This guy is special."

• Jeff Jarvis [45:30]: "The computer, the compute. It's not the brain of it, especially the training. It's more like the evolutionary conditions that led to the development of the brain."

---

This episode offers an in-depth exploration of NVIDIA's ascendancy in the AI landscape, driven by Jensen Huang's dynamic yet demanding leadership. Steven Witt's insights, coupled with Jeff Jarvis' personal anecdotes, paint a comprehensive picture of how NVIDIA's strategic decisions and internal culture have positioned it at the forefront of technological innovation.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines. Our guest, Steven Witt wrote the book about Nvidia and Jensen Huang. It's called the Thinking Machine. We will talk to Steven in just a little bit. Plus all the AI news. Next podcasts you love from people you Trust.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is TWiT.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Intelligent Machines, episode 823, recorded Wednesday, June 11, 2020. Intelligent with two GS. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show. We cover the latest in AI robotics and all the smart doohickeys all around you. Paris Martineau is here. Great to see you, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Great to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I like that. Is that your new signature with the fingers like that?

[Paris Martineau]

It is actually an old signature. I used to be a classic this sort of.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you really?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it.

[Paris Martineau]

I was a finger. I was.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it was ironic.

[Paris Martineau]

Started ironic, it became earnest at a certain point where it all blurred and then I had to stop myself for a period. But perhaps I'm bringing it back.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it. Good to see you and welcome back. Speaking of Bringing it back, Mr. Jeff Jarvis, authors of where's your books?

[Steven Witt]

Oh, well, because I'm. Well, here's here. Here's the thing. I'm doing the bibliography for the current book. I don't know if you can see over there. Whoa, that entire shelf is filled with. That's. That's the bibliography for the hot type book.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. So I have like a library van pull up out front every morning and deliver books.

[Paris Martineau]

Sounds like a milkman.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's your. Here's your book. Good to see you. Welcome back. Did you have a nice trip?

[Steven Witt]

Yes, I did.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Steven Witt]

40 miles away to Montclair, New Jersey.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that was okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you were teaching?

[Steven Witt]

Well, I was. I was. No learning.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff is a professor of journal, professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

[Steven Witt]

Wait, it's back?

[Paris Martineau]

It's back.

[Leo Laporte]

Why not? Wow. It had a sabbatical like every professor and now.

[Paris Martineau]

This is why you review the show, people. Because you can affect real change in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I had to listen to all those five star reviews that said, bring back the jingle. Jeff is currently at Mount Montclair State University in New Jersey and suny, the State University of New York at Stony, Brooklyn, and is the author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, the Web We Weave and Magazine. And we thank you for coming home. I think you brought Stephen Witt to us. Stephen is a Los Angeles based writer, television producer and investigative journalist. His latest book, the Thinking Machine just came out. It's all about Jensen Huang and Nvidia. Welcome, Stephen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

I like your view.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's really nice here.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Beautiful view. There's a story behind it. We'll get into it later.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Is it. It's not fake. That's the story. It's real. That's no unusual.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, so. Well, we saw Jeff's bibliography right there. All the books that he's reading for the book he wrote. The bibliography for my book was extensive as well. I mean, you know, 50 or 60 volumes. And then seven days after I turned in. Oh, no, the manuscript for this book, my home in Altadena, burned down in the evening.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm so sorry. Oh, I'm so sorry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Including all my bibliography. So I. Oh, no, I don't own any books anymore. Except for a few digital.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you're free at last. Think of it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I'm totally free.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not to schlep those around anymore.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is a new place with a nice view and I'm lucky to have it. But I do miss my home.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm so sorry. Yeah, our friend Kevin Rose and the Heights as well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And David Remnick of the New Yorker called me shortly, actually, while I was driving around the burned out, kind of like landscape. It looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off in my neighborhood and a 10,000 structures burned down. I was like, yeah, yeah, I think my home is gone. And he's like, you're the third New Yorker writer I've talked to today who lives at home. And wow, isn't that crazy?

[Leo Laporte]

I am so sorry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That community was full of journalists, creative types, editors, producers. So I know quite a lot of people.

[Leo Laporte]

I go back in your bibliography. I've got to read How Music Got Free, which is the story of the MP3 and Napster piracy and all of that. Wow, I really want to read that. I wish we'd interviewed you then. But the new one is a little more topical.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

You couldn't get more topical than Nvidia. Did Jensen Huang cooperate for this?

[Jeff Jarvis]

At first, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Until he found out you were writing a hit piece. What?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I didn't write a hit piece. I like Jensen. He's really a smart guy. But Jensen has a terrible temper. Oh. As I've heard a great number of times that he sometimes explodes in anger at people.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, dear.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so this was kind of a theme that has followed Jensen for a long, long time. And everybody I talked to. But it's like, yeah, Jensen will occasionally just like explode at people, right? But I didn't think it would happen to me, you know, because I don't work for Jensen. But in one of our last interviews, I just kept pushing him about kind of the risk that AI poses to our species and the future of humanity. And I probably asked this question in different forms four or five times. And I think he just thought I was wasting his time.

[Leo Laporte]

He didn't want to talk about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He just erupted at me.

[Steven Witt]

What is, what is it? What is the Jensen Wong eruption sound?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a dressing down. It's humiliating. He questions your professionalism. He questions your ability. He questions why he's even talking to you. Why am I even participating in this if you're just going to waste my time in this way? It's loud, there's yelling involved.

[Leo Laporte]

So sorry, that sucks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's kind of like a. It doesn't stop. There's no. Once he blows his stack, you really have to let him completely like shoot steam out of his ears for, wow, 10 to 15 minutes of penetrating question. Like why? Why would you ask me that question? We gave you access inside our company. What kind of crappy book are you writing? Like, like, why are these questions so dumb? These are pedestrian questions. I expected more from you. I'm really disappoint as a journalist to be asked questions. So this went off for 20 minutes and I'm giving away the end of the book, by the way. And his PR people are there and they're just frozen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, how do they react? Do they ever. Do they unfreeze and try to corral the situation in any way or are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They just so, you know, nine out of 10 CEOs. Yeah, that's what would happen. 99 of 100 CEOs, right. But Jensen has trained his people not to interfere.

[Leo Laporte]

They're just as scared of him as you were.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're frozen smiles on their faces and they're watching him. I interviewed a former chief scientist at Nvidia about this and I was like, did Jensen ever yell at you? And he was like, well, the only time Jensen ever yelled at me is when he was yelling at one of my staff members. And he's just torturing this guy in front of like 30 people. And I felt like I had to step in. But that's like standing up in the trench and waving your arms at the machine. The machine gun doesn't stop shooting, it just turns and starts shooting at you. And so like nobody wants to draw fire. And Jensen has Created an environment in a world for himself where he can engage in what I would consider these almost like self indulgent, kind of like.

[Steven Witt]

Are people loyal to him? I mean, so how does that work? Is it, is it. Is it out of fear? Is it out of success?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's classic. It's classic cult leader tactics where everyone I talked to at Nvidia had a story where Jensen, they just felt so loved by him.

[Leo Laporte]

He feels in his keynotes very affable, very charismatic, genuine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So funny. And this dark aspect of him does not appear in public. He's careful about when he turns it on.

[Leo Laporte]

When I hear.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Only turns it on though, when there's an audience at his job. So he'll never just grab somebody and start screaming at them in the.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He waits till there's 30 or 40 people.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a humiliation thing. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, when I hear that, I think that's what his father did to him. I think it's something from his childhood. He didn't want to talk about that, did he?

[Jeff Jarvis]

He did not tell me much about that. But I will tell you, my impression is his father wouldn't do this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Maybe his mother would do something somebody did.

[Paris Martineau]

Where do you think this comes from? Yeah, I mean, obviously that's total speculation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I talked to his friend, his old friend Jens Horstman. I was like, did Jensen always do this? And he was like, well, I worked with Jensen in his 20s and he was not known for doing this. And I. It really started when he became the CEO. So whether this was some kind of like power trip, Jensen defends what he's doing. He's saying, well, I'm making a demonstration, an example of people because they failed in some way. And I can't just dress them down. The whole company has to see it. Everyone has to see it.

[Leo Laporte]

Steven Jobs technique, kind of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, so. So failure must be shared is one of his mottos.

[Steven Witt]

Wow. One time success.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The success is shared at Nvidia. And this is. You ask why people are loyal to him. If you've been hanging out with Jensen for 10 or 15 years, you have several hundred million dollars.

[Steven Witt]

Now there's that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So your belief in this guy and his ability has paid off massively. If you could put up with the. With the kind of abuse, like you have been compensated beyond your wildest dreams.

[Leo Laporte]

Do people in Nvidia feel like they're changing the world they're making?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they are, right. Every company says innovators who change the world. But you know, this company really did these days.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Right. This is the. This is the way AI companies train their models. They buy as many GPUs as they possibly can from Nvidia.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So the limiting factor, actually, in how fast AI can go is these microchips.

[Leo Laporte]

They can't make them fast enough.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They can't make them fast enough, and they sell them for $30,000 a piece. This has made Nvidia the single most valuable company in the world. Or they're right up there with Apple and Microsoft. I think, actually, today, they are the most valuable company in the world. Why is that? Well, if you look for demand for something like ChatGPT. Right. ChatGPT has eclipsed Wikipedia in terms of number of daily users. And users are coming to it with increasingly complicated requests. Executing those requests requires, like, quadrillions of what they call flops, individual arithmetic operations. Okay. So to execute quadrillion flops for every user in the world, multiple times a day, you have to build a giant supercomputer. A mega computer, the one they're building in Texas, costs $50 billion. So that makes it more expensive than China's Three Gorges dam and about 10 times as much as the James Webb Space Telescope. That's how much this thing costs.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that the groq, the XAI one?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a different one. And everyone's building them. So this is the thing. There's like, 40, 40 of these coming online. Okay. And you look at that $50 billion. Like, where does it go? Well, it goes to electric power and water and land and construction. But the single largest cost is Nvidia microchips.

[Leo Laporte]

So all of that, of this. Of this H100, this $30,000 chip, they bought 350,000.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And that's probably 30 grand each. So I think if you do the math, you'll get to a lot, you know, like $10 billion order, if not more, you know, and it all just goes right into Nvidia's pocket. And they earn, like, a 75% gross margin on these chips. So they earn more, basically income per employee than any company on Earth.

[Steven Witt]

Craigslist used to have a high. One of the highest because there were so few employees.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that might still be true, actually, but they're what? They're up there. Nvidia, for major publicly traded corporations, actually might be number one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think Elon bought 150,000. I don't know what these new plans in Saudi Arabia involve, but they're building. They're building network operations centers bigger than the entire country. Of Monaco?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. No, it's five square miles of computing equipment at a rumored cost of. Well, I don't know what the cost is, but it's going to be 5 gigawatts of energy power.

[Leo Laporte]

Unbelievable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Required electric power required to power it. So in context, 1 gigawatt of electricity is about enough to power Kansas City.

[Leo Laporte]

So I believe that's pronounced gigawatt. No, I'm just kidding. So let's go back in time though, because this company was originally made GPUs for gaming. That's how they started, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So this sounds like they were making toys, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And this is why nobody took them seriously. But the insider's perspective is consumer computer graphics are actually one of the very hardest things you can ask a computer to do. You're kind of tracing these 3D skeletons in real time and then painting them with textures. And it's just enormously computationally intensive. The amount of arithmetic you have to do. I can't remember the exact figures, I put it in the book. But to do one second of rendering, if you did it with pencil and paper, would take a human being something like 800 million years. Wow. And that's if you work 24 hours a day and never made a mistake. So that's kind of what has to compress, get compressed each second of rendering a 3D game. So it's very computationally intensive and it has to go super fast. And then the thing that really makes it special is that demand is infinite. No matter how well you render the game. There's a certain kind of video game customer who's going to come back and say, I want it better. This is going on. There's a certain kind of customer who will spend three to four thousand dollars on a gpu, build their entire gaming computer around it like it's some kind of hot rod car, just so they can render the pixels in the game a little faster than their competitors.

[Leo Laporte]

I've got an Nvidia, expensive Nvidia card in my gaming rig. I mean, there you go. That's how you had to do it. I mean, I go back even prior to that to, you know, other companies, but, but Nvidia became the champion. There's AMDs, Radeon and stuff. But Nvidia really became the, the premier gaming co processor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bit of history here when it started, there were 70 competitors in the, in the mid-90s. And Jensen kind of intuited or not intuited, but I would say logically reasoned that within five or ten years there would only be A couple companies left, probably just one, right? Yeah, he was determined to be that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So he was absolutely ruthless. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Battle Royale where the Japanese teenagers are stranded to it on an island and have to fight to the death. But basically it was that in the GPU space, they all had to just fight to the death.

[Leo Laporte]

The big, the. The big guy was 3DFX.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. And so Jensen did. He absolutely out competed and destroyed three dfx.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're gone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And along with his team, he would make lists of everybody who worked at 3D effects. Everybody worked at all his competitors. He put them on a whiteboard and then they would strategize on how to poach these people away from 3DFX. They called it brain extraction. So once they got that guy, the, the two or three chief engineers to defect to Nvidia, and they were very successful at doing this. You know, the company folded because it no longer had a brain. That was the end. So they conquered the 3D graphics space by maybe early 2000s, and they had their technology in the Xbox as well. And what started to happen is that scientists look at the intense computational density of these chips, what they were able to do for 3D graphics. And the scientists said, I'd love to get into that architecture myself so I can run my super complicated quantum physics calculation or my super complicated tomography, which is basically, you know, MRI. So I'm going to, I'm going to reconstruct MRIs, the higher fidelity, using these chips. And Jen. And they started actually hacking the chips, Jerry, rigging them to do these other functions. And Jensen saw this and he said, wow, this is like a whole untapped market.

[Steven Witt]

So he, he didn't see that before. He didn't have a grand vision before that said, this is the most powerful computing chip. Once it was demonstrated to him, that's when it started opening up to him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He was too busy winning the knife fight, so, you know, he was too busy trying to survive the battle Royale to focus on anything except being the dominant player in graphics. But they started to approach him and there was actually a Stanford, very famous Stanford computer scientist, Bill Dali, who wrote a paper talking about the arithmetic intensity or the arithmetic density of these chips. And this had not, you know, Jensen had not been deliberately building tools for scientists. But when the scientists saw it, they were like, God, we got to use this. And when Jensen heard that, he went to Stanford and met Dolly and was like, oh, my God, I have to serve the Scientific community with these cards. And so at great expense, he built this massive platform that would flip the switch on the graphics accelerator and turn it into a scientific high performance computing platform for quantum physics for. For breast cancer.

[Steven Witt]

What was that called?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was called cuda.

[Steven Witt]

That's Cuda. That.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I was just about to ask you about cuda.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Steven Witt]

That's good. Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is called Cuda Was the name of this plat described as the. The switch on the graphics card that you flick and it turns it into a low budget supercomputer. Now, Wall street hated this.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why?

[Steven Witt]

Scientists don't have money.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They don't have money.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not the market.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You scientists have a $10,000 research grant, maybe. Right. Like if they're lucky. And they don't necessarily show up with it next year. So they're not even necessarily repeat customers. And it was extraordinarily expensive to develop. So basically Nvidia was spending something like a billion dollars a year on R and D and then receiving a return less than a billion dollars in revenue from this market.

[Steven Witt]

Did he understand the business potential then or. Yes. Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, obviously that's why he did it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's a businessman. He's trying to make the stock price go up. But his reasoning was, I have to do this. He reasoned that because of Clayton Christensen's.

[Leo Laporte]

Model of disruption, the innovator's dilemma.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Innovator's dilemma, yeah. Which he. Which he actually assigned to all of his executives. And Christensen worked as a consultant at Nvidia for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Basically his thinking was, if I don't do this, someone else is going to jerry rig this and turn it into their own platform and erode our profits away from the bottom. And Christensen had this incredible quote in his book where he said something, I'm paraphrasing, but something like, sometimes it is right to ignore your customers and to ignore your investors and to invest in low margin, small market products that nobody seems to want. And that's what this was. It was the disruptors play. It was the count. And investors, they talk about disruption. They actually hate it when you do this.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They want you to keep making money the way you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They want you to earn profit margins.

[Steven Witt]

And you're coming and kill everybody who does.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're lowering your margins on a product that does not the even intermediate term promise to return cash flow to your company.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the interesting things about the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Way that a classic MBA, right. Or McKinsey type would run the company.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank goodness the stock price Actually went in the toilet.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For 10 years while they did this, they did not break through for a long time. And in fact, Jensen nearly lost his job because an activist investor came in and started writing, you know, schmuck, these morons letters to the board that were not very friendly. I actually like activist investors. Yeah, I think they play an important role in the capitalist ecosystem. And the guy who did this has actually a very good track record. He famously turned around Olive Garden. His name is Jeffrey Smith.

[Leo Laporte]

How's Olive Garden doing these days?

[Paris Martineau]

He's just three breadsticks in a trench coat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, so they have a whole breadstick strategy at Olive Garden.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I bet they do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the idea at Olive Garden. Here's what you do, okay? You go to the table and you always give the same number of breadsticks as there are people at the table plus 1, 1.

[Leo Laporte]

Let them fight over that last one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because people are either a very polite and they're not going to take the last breadstick. Right. If they eat all the breadsticks, they'll just ask for more. But if there's one left, it's actually hard to be the guy who goes and breaks up the last breadstick. Or if you're not with people like that and they just start consuming all the breadsticks and want more, it's more opportunities for the server to come and talk to the customers and maybe upsell them on more pasta. So it was this whole thing, but. But Olive Garden actually gotten away from this, and they were just dumping breadsticks on the table, and it was hurting. You know, the servers didn't want to keep going back to the table, so they would just put like 30 breadsticks out there.

[Leo Laporte]

So have all the breadsticks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that actually destroys the whole concept of the free breadstick.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anyways, this is Jeff Smith. Thank you. Very smart. Actually, he understands operational details company quite well. But he completely miss misanalyzed Nvidia.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, so how do we get from CUDA being something that potentially could tank the stock of this company because they're spending so much money in it to it being this kind of cornerstone to Nvidia. Nvidia's big pivot.

[Steven Witt]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So who is CUDA for? Well, it's not for leading research scientists because they can afford time on the massive supercomputers.

[Steven Witt]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's for scientists whose research is a little bit out of favor. It's for scientists who want to do things that can't really get funding. It's for mad scientists. Mad scientists. That's what's for. I mean, it's for scientists who have kind of wacky theories.

[Leo Laporte]

It ended up being their secret sauce. I don't know if it was the processors, it was really Cuda because it was proprietary. And as things became written for Cuda, you had to have an Nvidia chip.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's right. So, so these mad scientists may be the maddest scientists were this, this research group in Toronto. So this will be hard to even remember or understand for I think younger viewers, but there was a time where AI was a career graveyard. I mean, if you went into AI in the first decade of this century, it was kiss your career away, you're going to be working in academia the rest of your life and you're going to struggle to get a $5,000 research grant. Within AI, there was even a worse backwater called neural networks. So nobody even in AI like neural networks and almost nobody thought that they would work there. Viewed as a dead technology. Absolutely mad science. Just mad science. Jeffrey Hinton and his group in Toronto acquired two GPUs that was what they could afford, each of which cost about $500. And then they jerry rigged a low budget supercomputer in Alex Krasnodsky's childhood bedroom at his parents house. And they took one of these dysfunctional neural nets that nobody liked, not even within the AI community, and they trained it in this kid's bedroom basically. And at the end of a week, because of Nvidia's CUDA platform and their hardware, they had produced what was by far the leading AI in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

In a week was this ImageNet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In one week, this was ImageNet. AlexNet, sorry, AlexNet, it's called. But ImageNet was the competition that Alexnet won.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, okay. I interviewed imagenet in Toronto back in the day and Fei Lee might have interviewed Fei. Fei Lee, Yeah, I did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fei Fei described this moment as. It was as if the world land speed record had been broken by a hundred miles an hour by someone driving a Honda Civic. So this was the paradigm shift, as I say in the book. And the way to think about this is it's almost like the Wright brothers, right? Or two. Bicycle mechanics, Jerry rigging airplane. Right. And if you want to know what Jensen's role about that, he. It's kind of like he was building engines with propellers attached for 10 years, just waiting for someone to come along and find a use for this propeller wings on it.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, Jeff, this is Ilya Suskever as well, is in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was the third member. So Ilya, who is now obviously kind of was the one of the leading programmers behind chat GPT and now is a safe superintelligence is like omnipresent. He's everywhere. He's ubiquitous. He's ubiquitous in AI and he was literally there at the creation, including the.

[Steven Witt]

University of Toronto this last week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, this is like. This is like. It would be like witnessing the AI version of like witnessing the Trinity test basically to be there with this AI. So that percolated very rapidly, those results.

[Steven Witt]

When did Jensen. How did Jensen find out about that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Dolly brought it to him. Okay. So in 2013, if you watch Jensen's GTC presentation, he is in leather already. That transition is starting.

[Leo Laporte]

Famous leather jacket.

[Steven Witt]

How many jackets does he have?

[Leo Laporte]

Not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And he would actually. That one was not. It was so brief. Side note on Jensen's wardrobe because I know everybody wants to know. Jen's not like speak ups by which I mean he does not have one signature outfit that he wears every day. He's not an artist in that way. He doesn't have like an artistic vision. He's an engineer. And so what he does is he a B tests different items in his wardrobe. So he takes in a piece, he sees if it goes and then he. And you watch this, he's like actually constantly making subtle alterations to his wardrobe until he nails it. In 2013, he absolutely had not nailed it. He was right.

[Steven Witt]

I thought his last one, the sleeves were too long for him, but yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he was experiencing with snakeskin. That's kind of new. I don't think it looked a little too. Yeah.

[Steven Witt]

Anyway, sorry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, yeah, but he experiments.

[Steven Witt]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this one, he's wearing a motorcycle. Jackson. Anyway, long detour 2013, he does not mention AI one time. And Nvidia puts out a list of what CUDA is good for and it's all these scientific applications. AI is not listed. 2014, he goes out and he only talks about AI and somewhere between that 2013 and 2014 GTC, someone at his company was like, you got to look. I think it was Brian Catanzaro. I talk about this in the book. He said, you got to look at these AI results. You got to see what's happening here. Because I think it's big. And Jensen looks at it and he gets it instantly and he bets the whole company. Company wide email over a weekend saying we are no longer a graphics card company company.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We are now an AI company and we are going to put 100 of the resources in this company into AI that we can, or every resource we can. And he goes to Brian Catanzaro, who at this time is like a low level product manager. And he says, Brian, I want you to imagine I've marched all 8,000 employees of this company out in the parking lot. You are free to select any one of these employees to join your team and you can have as many as you want. And this is like. So he just deputizes this guy to run his AI effort. And this is like a low level researcher who had almost, he had bad performance reviews at the company. But basically field promoted this guy into running his entire AI strategy. And you know, within a year they were the dominant, essentially only AI hardware, platform and tailoring their chips to meet what they saw very early. And this is really Jensen's key insight that he saw before anybody, that to make these things more powerful, that would be just as there was infinite demand for the graphics, better graphics, there was going to be infinite demand for AI, infinite for more intelligence.

[Steven Witt]

Cuda is so important. And as we'll discuss later, as I said before we got on, I'm a connoisseur of Jensen's keynotes and it always strikes me he spends a good amount of time bragging about Cuda giving you the sequence, giving you everything in the importance of the company in his mind. Everybody thinks it's a chip company.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Steven Witt]

But it's also a platform and software company. Where does that balance in his mind and the company's mind in terms of the importance to its strategic value?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Well, it's all integrated. Right. It's a little bit like, it's a little bit like the iPhone. What's more important, the iPhone, the hardware, the software, you know, it's an integrated platform. It's a completely integrated platform. You know, I will say they view their competitive advantage as being software.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, so I talked to their lead chip designer, Arjun Prabhu and he was like, honestly, AMD can design the silicon just as well as we can.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's not a trade secret. Right. I can peel the chip off this silicon and I can expect it with a metallurgical microscope and tell you after a little while exactly what it's doing. So anything they put on as a physical object can be reverse engineered.

[Steven Witt]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So if they're going to have an advantage, it has to be at a layer above that and where the real advantage is. They have a lot of like kind of low level software, but their real advantage is actually that they go out and they embrace the scientific community and they will look for the hardest computing problems in the world and then they will lose money for years, sometimes forever, to build these scientists the tools that they need just so they know they're always on the bleeding edge. That's the secret of Nvidia, and I think it's something other firms have a hard time replicating.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's not just gaming and AI. The other part of Nvidia's business is chips for self driving vehicles.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a big business for them too, isn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it's going to explode. Right now their big business is selling data center chips. We call that the cloud. Cloud computing. What that means is I asked ChatGPT something and it takes my request on a broadband pipe and ships it to a mega supercomputer in Texas, processes the answer and ships it back to me. Great. But there's a lot of applications where we can't wait that long. If we're in a car and we're driving, I cannot wait for the car to communicate with the data center in Texas. It has to move right away. This is called edge computing. Not only do we need these chips in the cloud in Texas, increasingly as more items and things, especially robots and cars, become autonomous, we need edge computing chips that are directly in the car that can. It don't need to, you know, interact with the Internet to provide an answer.

[Steven Witt]

And this is the digital twin that's different. Okay. All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, okay. This is edge. This is called edge computing. Right now I don't think edge computing is a huge part of Nvidia's business. It would be surprised if it was more than 5% of the revenue. But Jensen is putting all his resources there because Jensen's Future World, where Nvidia's next $3 trillion of market capitalization is going to come from, is they're going to ship robots, cars everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Steven Witt]

And factory.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And they're all going to be AI enabled. And we can't have any latency. If the robots, let's say cleaning our dishes, it can't just pause constantly and have to go back to Texas and get answers. And its brain has to be physically located in our house.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. Now, the brain for chat GPT, it's not on your laptop, it's in Texas. It's in some data center somewhere. Right, Right. And every time you pump an answer, we ship it down to Texas for processing and we ship it back. Edge computing platform, they can't wait. Right. So robots and cars, they can't follow this paradigm. The brain has to be in the thing. And that's going to be a huge market in years to come.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember, and I don't remember what year it was seeing a GTC where Jensen was talking about, still talking about gaming, talking about AI, talking about cars. And it struck me then, this company's going places. This company is firing on all three cylinders.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, they are. Especially now.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, God, yeah, this was a long time ago, but it's come out to be that way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I asked, I asked Jensen, what's the next cuda, what's the thing? You're investing tens of billions of dollars and that's losing tons of money and everyone's screaming at you about it, that maybe five to 10 years from now might pay off. And this is Jeff's thing that he brought up, the digital twin. They call it Omniverse. And basically what it is is it's a high fidelity physics simulator of the real world of our universe. Okay, so why do you, why do you want that? Why do you need that? Well, think about it this way. If we want a robot to wash our dishes in the sink, right? There's kind of two ways we can train its brain. One, we can physically have it train a bunch of dishes at the sink or wash a bunch of dishes at the sink. It will break 10 million dishes in the real world while we do this. It'll learn eventually. It'll learn via reinforcement learning. But it literally has to do tens of millions of training cycles. It'll be a huge mess. So what if we replicate the dishwashing environment to sync in code, right? In a high fidelity physics simulation, which via GPUs and graphics, Nvidia already has some experience building these kind of worlds, right? If we get the fidelity high enough, then we can train the robot to wash dishes. If we get it's hard surface tension, certain dishes are fragile, certain are harder. Soap, it's slippery. It's just not an easy thing to do. But if we get all of that right, the surface tension, the physics, all of it, maybe we can train the robot to wash dishes in code in this kind of digital gymnasium that we built. Then once it's done, we're going to download its brain into a real world body and deploy it to actually in.

[Leo Laporte]

The edge, zero was taught to play Go. It played a billion games against itself and then made a human.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is in fact almost a large number. It's called reinforcement learning and actually goes back to the very beginning of neural nets. There's a great anecdote in my book about the first person to really get to work who was trying to win a backgammon game in the 90s. And, you know, he. He actually got a state of the art backgammon thing and he sold it via floppy disk off his website. His name is Frederick Dahl. It was inspired by the movie War Games, which is very funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But side note, anyway, yeah, so this is how we train things.

[Steven Witt]

So. So, Stephen, there's two things about this. One that, again, coming from his keynotes. So that's the extent of my expertise in this, is that the cars are going to gather data as they go, and that's part of how they teach, is that. But what's really struck me about the digital twin is that my joke is that it's the Matrix, but we're not in it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, precisely.

[Steven Witt]

That it's every permutation and computation of possible futures.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's right.

[Steven Witt]

Are being computed. And it really struck me most in a factory warehouse setting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah. So you can also do, like, very advanced AutoCAD layout stuff once you have this environment up and running. So in addition to training. But mostly it's for training robots, honestly. I mean, I think that's where, at.

[Steven Witt]

Least for now, he really believes robots is the thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, he is all he says.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He talks about that little cute Disney robot he brought on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You see how much he talked about AI in 2014 and 2015 before, it was like a big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She talks about robots.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to know a little more about Jensen Huang. What. What's his story? Where did he come from? He was an engineer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He was an engineer. So Jensen was born in Taiwan, moved to Bangkok with his dad, who was also an engineer. When they were young, his dad worked in an oil refinery. But his dad was determined to move the family to the United States. And so Jensen was actually sent ahead of his family to the United States, arriving In, I think 1973 in Oregon, and his uncle was taking care of him. His uncle thought that the boys should go to, like a prestigious boarding school.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you want to wrap up? Are you running out of time? Because we are coming up on a half an hour. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, my gosh. That's all we got.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, one last thing. You'd mentioned before the show that while we're on the topic of Jensen, that he doesn't like public speaking. Is that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. So the key to understanding Jensen, honestly, he might be the most neurotic person I have ever met in my life.

[Paris Martineau]

What you're saying the guy who Frequently yells at his employees, has trained them all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the thing that will not be clear to you if you only. And it's really explored in my book. This is where I really. I feel like I added a lot of insight. The guy who lectures at GTC is so polished. He is so charismatic. You think he was born to do this.

[Steven Witt]

And says he doesn't rehearse. Right? Says he doesn't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Doesn't rehearse.

[Steven Witt]

He really does.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was hanging out with Jensen in the green room before he had to go speak to a bunch of architects. Like, this is a meaningless presentation. 400 people. And he starts to rock back and forth on his feet and he starts to get like visibly, like agitated. Starts cracking all these jokes and talking really fast. And I was like, oh my God, he's nervous. He's got stage fright. He's nervous to go on here and give this meaningless lecture. And he turns to me, just goes, God, I hate public speaking.

[Leo Laporte]

Geez, you'd never know.

[Steven Witt]

Good at it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know why he's so good? He's terrified of bombing. Yeah, he's absolutely terrified that he's going to go out there and bomb. And so he does everything he can to avoid that happening. And he's constantly scanning the audience. This is why he doesn't use prepared remarks to see if they're bored.

[Steven Witt]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And if they, he'll completely change what he's talking about. Now that's not true. Like gtc, for example. But, but on, on like a. If he's speaking extemporaneously, he's read room constantly and recalibrating. But Jensen is totally neurotic. By which I mean not that like in a clinical sense, he's just totally driven by negative emotions. So much of Nvidia's success has come from Jensen being afraid, terrified that it is going to fail and that he personally will feel shame when that happens. It's why they survived. It's how he survived the Battle Royale. It's why they're so big today.

[Steven Witt]

It's like intel on steroids, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Andy Grove wrote the book Only the Paranoid Survive and Jensen has read that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Book and absorbed it. So Jensen's a voracious reader, but primarily of just a business books. His office, he doesn't use it. His actual office is a conference room. But he has an office complex at Nvidia headquarters and it's just filled with stacks and stacks of business books. There's a famous anecdote about Jensen when he was arguing with one of his executives about how much something should cost. And the NBA has some kind of idea and Jensen just breaks them off. And he's like, what are your three favorite books on pricing? And the guy like, sputters. You know, he can't name any. And Jensen rattles off three books on pricing. He's like, go read those books. And then when you're done with those books, come back, we can resume this argument.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Steven Witt]

Jesus, Stephen, I'm so. Respect how you're explaining all this because it's so complex. How did you train yourself in all this so that you could deal with the likes of Jensen Wong?

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know, Jensen is not my, my first tough customer.

[Leo Laporte]

I've.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I've done a lot of investigative reporting on CEOs, so. And many of the. I will say this about Jensen, it's true, he's brilliant. And I don't, I'm not a guy who walks around talking about how brilliant Silicon Valley guys are. But this, this guy is special.

[Leo Laporte]

He's not your typical billionaire, I gotta say that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. He doesn't have an MBA engineering background. If he, if he wasn't running this company, he'd be designing their chips.

[Leo Laporte]

As a teenage ping pong star, you say?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So not only that, but he basically did not play ping pong at all. Started threw himself into it, and within about four months was nationally ranked.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that interesting?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So his ability to rapidly absorb and implement new information and this is like a sign of intelligence, is maybe the highest of anyone I've ever encountered in my life. It's just extraordinary how fast he can learn things. And I think if we don't have much time, I'll give you an anecdote that I'll close this with.

[Leo Laporte]

We have all the time you want. I don't, I just don't want.

[Paris Martineau]

We're just trying to be cognizant of yours.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no, I can do this all day.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw the nurse came in to give you your shot and I just didn't want to. Yeah, no, I'm just.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. We're like, he might be running out of juice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jensen was asked to throw out the first pitch in a baseball game, okay. In Taiwan. And he gets up there and I don't think he's probably thrown a baseball in four years, if ever. And he just kind of is visibly like grimacing. And he gets up there, I swear to God, he's like, listen, I'm about to throw it, like on the mic to a stadium full of people. He's like, listen, I'm about to throw the first pitch, but I'm really bad at pitching. So I ask you all to turn away and not watch me as I throw this pitch, please.

[Leo Laporte]

Brilliant. That's so engaging.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you know, it wasn't very good. The catcher had to kind of like scoot up to catch it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so this is like a meaningless thing. Right. But Jensen, like for Jensen, this is an irresistible opportunity for self improvement.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so over the next six months, he gets his wife Lori, they've been married for 42 years, to go in the backyard of his mansion every night after running the most valuable company in the world and throw the baseball around with him. They're both 60s. They're both in their 60s until. Until he gets good at throwing a baseball. So the next time, and this like six months later, he's asked to throw another ceremonial pitch and this time he nails it.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course, that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is who Jensen is. This is. Jensen is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's a guy who actually like kind of lives in a mental torture chamber of his own devisement, who is constantly beating himself up for his perceived shortcomings and then creating programs for self improvement that will kind of recalibrate who he is to fit the needs of the moment.

[Steven Witt]

Jesus.

[Leo Laporte]

New York Times calls it a lively biography. Fascinating. James Surowiecki in the Atlantic. Framed as a biography of Jensen Huang, the book is also something more interesting and revealing. A window into the intellectual, cultural and economic ecosystem that has led to the emergence of super powerful AI. The book, the Thinking Machine. Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the world's most coveted microchip. Steven Witt, thank you for giving us your time today. I really appreciate it.

[Paris Martineau]

This is so great. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't wait to read the book. Yeah.

[Steven Witt]

Are you saying what you're working on next or are you wondering who doesn't say that?

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I'm trying to get. This pitch hasn't been picked up yet, but I'll just say it as if it's going to be. I think I want to write about Stargate. So Stargate is kind of the next generation of this. This is OpenAI's Mega. I mentioned this at the beginning. They're building these hyperscale computers that are just going to. Well, they're just going to be so big, it's almost unfathomable. So OpenAI Stargate Investment Program alongside Oracle and a couple other companies is going to schedule to cost $500 billion, which is more than all 17 missions of the Apollo space program combined. They're going to Spend more of this than we spent going to the moon six times.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. And it's just computing equipment. And basically all of it is going to Nvidia. But I want to.

[Leo Laporte]

This is in Saudi Arabia.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, this is one in Texas. Saudi Arabia.

[Leo Laporte]

Texas one is even bigger.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And there's like 30 or 40 of these coming online across the world to meet the perceived infinite demand for AI and smarter machines and smarter systems.

[Leo Laporte]

I think for Sam, it's not even the demand that's driving this. He wants to build a super intelligence.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh. Oh, yeah.

[Steven Witt]

I mean, they would read his essay this week and it's just.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we're going to talk about it. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Turn the moon into a supercomputer. I mean, they. And the thing is, like, you got to think it's got to be a more efficient way to do this. And like, maybe theoretically there is, but practically this is at least the most straightforward way to do this right now. And I think that's the other.

[Leo Laporte]

What's unproven is throwing more compute at it will make it intelligent. That's just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no. I think that is proven. So that has been the thing that has really turned the corner since 2017. 2018. It's called the Bitter Lesson.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, we've talked about it. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And so the thing that you can guarantee is more computing power. The thing that will absolutely happen, no matter what happens in AI software, is you'll have more computing power available down the road.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Steven Witt]

That may not get them where they think they're going to go. That's what even Sundar Pichai just said that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. It might not. In fact, we've had two big software breakthroughs in the past 15 years. First was neural networks on GPUs in 2012, and then it was the Transformer.

[Steven Witt]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Architecture in 2017. And so maybe we need a third one. I think most research scientists do think we need a third.

[Steven Witt]

That's what. That's what. What Leon says.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Although, you know, I don't think Elias Sutsk ever thinks we need a third one.

[Steven Witt]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And they are building the cutting edge things they're building.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what Rich Sutton said in the Bitter Lesson. He said if we've learned anything, it's throwing more compute at it, makes it smarter, not making it more complex, just throwing more compute at it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the way to think about this is the computer, the compute. It's not the brain of it, especially the training. It's more like the evolutionary conditions that led to the development of the brain. So if you think of your brain. It's quite compact and very good at what it does. And you think, oh, it's only three pounds in this, you know, $500 million computer. It's not analogous, but the brain is the product of 500 million years of evolutionary conditioning. It didn't just arrive. It's the inference engine for this 500 million years of evolution. And so maybe, or maybe even probably this is what, this is what is going to happen with these computers, with these mega computers as well. They're not really the brain. They're more like the evolutionary environment that produces the intelligence. And if you can make that more sophisticated and more complex, the things that come out of the bottom, the Intellig engines that come out of the bottom of that are, are better and better.

[Steven Witt]

Well, good luck with the next book.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I want to bring you back for the last book, but that's another story.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, anytime. I'm always free. I mean, that one's, that's a history book.

[Steven Witt]

Now, whatever happened to Smith the investor? Did Smith make money in the end?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Smith flipped out of Nvidia in 2013 and then regretted it ever since.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, at least he wasn't shortened.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he's trying to shake up. Is he in Intel? He's trying to shake up somebody else right now. I'm not sure he's in Intel. His investment returns are very good. Smith is very smart at what he does. And I, I, you know, I know people hate this kind of guy, this kind of corporate raider guy, but there's so many companies out there that just don't do a good job.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And squander investors money. There's also so much passive money in the stock market via, you know, like ETFs and Vanguard and basically like index funds, that if you don't have someone who's going to agitate on behalf of shareholders for better returns, capitalism isn't going to work that well.

[Leo Laporte]

Right now. Pfizer, he wants.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he's on Pfizer. He's big on Pfizer. And Pfizer, despite having come up with several fantastic vaccines for Covid, and also Paxlovid, has not performed well for shareholders lately. And so you know what, what Smith looks for is when CEOs or companies are wasting money and he tries to kind of reset them and put them on the right path.

[Leo Laporte]

If you like Stephen, and you like his style, there's a. He reads his own book on Audible. That would be a good, good place to get a copy of it, I think. Stephen, be great doing this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I love to say most people have already said in the discord they want to read it. There's a thing they've. No, they've already said they've purchased your book in the middle of this interview.

[Leo Laporte]

So should see a little tiny bump.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A little micro bump from the podcast. Audiobook is actually. I write my books to be audiobooks.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's awesome.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Going back, have you ever read the Cane Mutiny by Herman Wook?

[Leo Laporte]

Watch the movie?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Never read the book, actually surprisingly so. And I was like, God, I'm flying through this book. Why is it so easy to read? And it turns out WUK had actually started scripting radio dramas. I was like, oh, this is like.

[Leo Laporte]

A. I'm gonna have to read it. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Form of writing. If you link it to audio, people can't put it down. And you, as you read it aloud, you will see the parts where you as the reader get bored. So you just cut those parts out and then you've got a script.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like Jensen Huang.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So in fact, I find this part of Jensen very relatable because I am totally paranoid of my audience being bored. I'm absolutely paranoid about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, all the reviews say it's a lively read. Actually, along these lines. I wasn't going to mention it, but the woman who basically created the audiobook industry passed away this week. Barbara Holdridge. She founded Cadman. You may remember, Jeff, you're old enough. I had this when I was a kid. The recording of Dylan Thomas reading A Child's Christmas in Wales.

[Steven Witt]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And this, this was a. Sold 400,000 copies in the United States in the 50s. We had one. And it. I think I love audiobooks because I grew up listening to this. They went on and recorded T.S. eliot and many other of poets. She and her partner in this enterprise both passed away in the last year. She was 95. Barbara Holdrich. So audiobooks kind of began in 1950s.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the original audiobook was actually the Odyssey. Right. They read it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was. That's her point is. But yeah, books, literature was read, was spoken aloud. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

From the very beginning, especially if you're trying to compute. So, so my perspective as a writer, to some extent, I have competition, obviously from other writers, but my, my big competition is Instagram. Right. Like, why are you not going to put this book down and scroll your feed? You gotta.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a smart point of view. That's a modern point of view. But I think you're right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I mean, I know it from my own life. Like, if a book doesn't grab me, I'm in posting, you know, scrolling my doom scrolling. So your competition is like, you know, these algorithmic systems that are designed to hijack someone's attention span and direct it towards Mark Zuckerberg's bank account. And so it's, you know, I have to do that too, except direct it to my bank account.

[Leo Laporte]

As we have learned from your book, you can start a company in Denny's and become the most valuable company in the world if you've just got a great idea. Thank you. It's been a great pleasure talking to you and I look forward to seeing you again. I hope. The thinking machine, Jensen Huang Nvidia. And the world's most coveted microchip, Steven Witt.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you so much.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let me. We'll take a break, we'll come back, we have AI news and more. Lots. This is Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. This episode brought to you by Agency. Let me spell that for you. Agentcy Buildings multi agent software is hard. Agent to agent and agent to tool communication. Still the wild west. So how do you achieve accuracy and consistency in non deterministic agentic apps? That's where the agency agntcy comes in. The agency is an open source collective building the Internet of agents. And what's the Internet of agents? It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other 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. Build with other engineers who care about high quality multi agent software. Visit agency.org and add your support. That's agn t c y.org thrilled as always to be able to promote an open source collective trying to create these standards. It's really important that they be open standards and agencies doing it. Thank you, Agency for supporting intelligent machines. We're gonna let Paris. Oh, she's back. Okay. Hello, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

I know how to time my beverage breaks for the podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

You're good.

[Paris Martineau]

I saw you getting towards the end of the ad read and didn't put the the carafe of water back in the fridge so I could hustle back over here.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, I'm glad you're gonna have warm water now, but I'm glad I will.

[Paris Martineau]

But I do it in service for the podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Steven Witt]

Did you get a cold tortilla while you were at it?

[Paris Martineau]

No, but I did buy more tortillas today and there it's you know, it's always.

[Leo Laporte]

So I, I wanted to show you this because there was an interesting post on Reddit this week that I mentioned. But this is the list of companies that by the end of that last year that bought Nvidia's $30,000 H100 GPU Meta by far more than three times the next with 350,000 X I think actually has gone up to 150,000 but they have 100,000 as the end of last year. Tesla only 35,000, Lambda 30,000 Google 26,000, Oracle 16,000 and down.

[Steven Witt]

Tell me something Leo, the difference between an Nvidia chip and a Tensor chip, does Google have its own stuff? It doesn't need as many does.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think the key is Cuda. One of the real lessons of this, and it's something probably we should pay more attention to just in general and technology is that software lock in can trump everything else.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And because you have a. The software lock in with Cuda, that's real. I think I got the impression Stephen might have thought this too. That's the secret sauce.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah, I think it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, that's what keeps them.

[Steven Witt]

When you listen to Wong as I do, that's what he spends time on.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Steven Witt]

He does the look at our new chip and isn't it cool and isn't it wonderful and he talks about huge server farms that are going to build on top of it. But then he really spends time on Cuda and it's and its evolution and what it can do.

[Leo Laporte]

And the thing I don't like about it, it's fully proprietary, so.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh it is?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Nvidia solely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

So what are the alternatives that are not Nvidia?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I mean many people think that the Apple silicon chips because they have so much ram, you know one of the things that makes these Nvidia GPUs expensive is the amount of memory they have in them. More memory means a more powerful AI. But Apple has this unified RAM architecture that lets you can buy like my M4 over here with 96 gigs of ram that would cost you probably 10 or $20,000 in Nvidia. So Apple has a great platform plus they have built in neural processing units.

[Steven Witt]

But they don't have what's their software? They don't care.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the problem. They don't have.

[Steven Witt]

What about Google?

[Leo Laporte]

They have metal. Google has its own code. Go ahead, Bonito.

[Benito]

So we use Cuda for rendering video. Also rendering video in Premiere or Render video.

[Leo Laporte]

You use Cuda So we have to buy Nvidia cards.

[Benito]

No, no. But for Mac, it's metal. So, like, they do have their own thing, but I don't think it's not as good and it's not as picked up. Like, people don't use it.

[Steven Witt]

So, you know, you're using. I thought Cuda was kind of a really high level of the stack or.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is.

[Steven Witt]

I mean, you know, you're using it, but, you know.

[Benito]

Yeah, yeah, we're using it for rendering. You use it for rendering a video.

[Leo Laporte]

There are projects, there's. This is one on GitHub for CUDA to metal. The idea being maybe you could take these Cuda instructions, these dedicated instructions, and translate them in a way that you could use a Sun Metal. Because, look, there's a lot of pressure to do this because the Apple products are much cheaper than the Nvidia products and theoretically is capable. If you had Cuda.

[Steven Witt]

This is a dumb question. Are you buying. Do people buy Apple chips for racks?

[Leo Laporte]

No, you have to buy the whole thing.

[Steven Witt]

You do have to buy the whole thing.

[Leo Laporte]

But you can serve. You could turn them all into servers. You know, they're not. They're not doing the Nvidia play at all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All.

[Benito]

You know, one thing Stephen didn't really mention, though, is like the role of Nvidia in the whole. The bitcoin, Whole bitcoin thing, because. Oh, I forgot to ask Nvidia also.

[Leo Laporte]

It was. It was it that I forgot that drove.

[Paris Martineau]

In what way?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you had to have an Nvidia card again because of Cuda, to do the bitcoin.

[Benito]

All the bitcoin miners had to use Nvidia. That's what caused the video card shortages back then when all the gamers couldn't get video cards.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So in a way, he's.

[Leo Laporte]

What he's done. I wish we had. I forgot to ask Stephen about this, but he's very wisely leapfrogged from an industry as it was going up to the next thing. And that's what Jeff Smith was pissed off about. But he leapfrogged to bitcoin and then leapfrogged to cars and leapfrogged to AI. And at each moment, he's caught the wave as it's beginning.

[Steven Witt]

Robotics. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And now robotics. So really his genius probably is in his business timing. He's very sharp that way. I don't think necessarily it's technology, believe it or not.

[Paris Martineau]

Were Nvidia chips what was powering the early wave of bitcoin adoption and bitcoin Boom. Or was this recent?

[Steven Witt]

All of it. Okay, that was. That's what I remember.

[Paris Martineau]

I just wanted to make sure that I could state.

[Leo Laporte]

You could use.

[Paris Martineau]

You could use other cards to purchase of a redacted amount of fake IDs and redacted year was powered by Nvidia.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything.

[Steven Witt]

I'm ashamed.

[Paris Martineau]

The statue of limitations has expired, my friends.

[Leo Laporte]

Were you working in the cellar with 100 servers pumping out bitcoin?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I just had to go through a lot of hoops to buy bitcoin at a time when buying bitcoin was not like I. No, because I was an idiot. It was just like, I. I was foolish and I was like, oh, I should with it. I bought like, $3,000 worth of Bitcoin at a time when that got me multiple, many multiples of bitcoin, and then used it to buy fake IDs for me and my early college friends so that we could drink in the city that we wanted to.

[Benito]

Hey, that's a sign. That's how you're supposed to use that stuff, man. That's how you're supposed to.

[Paris Martineau]

That's how you're supposed to use that stuff. Stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the problem.

[Paris Martineau]

The issue was, at the time, you could not just. It wasn't super easy to buy big. Like, I had to go to a. I did, like, go transfer money in person. I had to go to a Moneygram. But in the town I was in at the time, they didn't just, like, have a Moneygram place you could go to. I had to go inside a cvs. And I was like, where is the Moneygram? And the woman just points to a red wired phone, like a corded landline phone. She's like, pick it up. Someone will answer. And I'm like, what? What do you mean? So I did. Someone I explained that I wanted to buy was using this to buy a bunch of bitcoin, and they denied my purchase because they thought I was being scammed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh.

[Steven Witt]

Oh, that's fascinating.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really interesting. Yeah. So let's talk.

[Steven Witt]

That was a great conversation. I'm glad we had that. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Oh, he was. He was fantastic.

[Steven Witt]

Good.

[Leo Laporte]

Good booking. Let's talk about Sam Altman's little blog.

[Steven Witt]

I have a annotated version if you want me to email it.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that would be great. The post is called the Gentle Singularity.

[Steven Witt]

Oh, Jesus.

[Leo Laporte]

We are past the event horizon. The takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital super intelligence. Wait a minute. I need some reverb to do that to do that completely.

[Paris Martineau]

Digital super intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

Digital super intelligence. That was a very good reverb.

[Paris Martineau]

It was pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

He says robots are not yet walking the streets, nor are most of us talking to AI all day. I personally am. People still die of disease, we can't easily go to space, and there's a lot about the universe we don't understand, but we've recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways.

[Steven Witt]

Stop right there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Steven Witt]

No, that's just false. That's just false. No, he's defining smarter.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Steven Witt]

And is a calculator smarter at me? At certain tasks, yes. Is it an amazing machine? Yes. Can it do a lot of fat functions far better than I can? Yes. But to then make the next leap then that it's smarter than us is.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a poor choice of words.

[Steven Witt]

Oh, well, he has tons of them in there. A species hubris that's beyond.

[Leo Laporte]

He says. And by the way, this was the week they released the new O3, what do they call it? O3 deep research model that so far looks extremely good. He says the scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT4 and O3 were hard won, but will take us very far. He also reassures people that don't worry, you're not killing the environment by using AI.

[Steven Witt]

I sent you my, my. And I have my annotated in red version of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, we can wait.

[Paris Martineau]

Where is that?

[Steven Witt]

I email it to you both.

[Leo Laporte]

I will, I will pull it up here. People are often curious about how much energy a chat GPT query uses, says Altman. The average query uses about 0.34 watt hours. That's what an oven would use in a little over one second or a high efficiency light bulb would use in a couple of minutes. And it uses 0.000085 gallons of water, 1 40th of a teaspoon.

[Steven Witt]

Where's, where's the footnote for that?

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think he's lying?

[Steven Witt]

Oh, I think it's. It's funny math. It's open math.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, look, even if it's accurate math, what it doesn't say is we'll take that number and multiply it by a billion queries a day.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah, yeah. The worst line to me, in some big sense, ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived. The ego of that, the hubris of that, it's just ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what you can say now is that he's a salesman and he's over. That's all he is, typing it.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah, but that's, that's the problem. That's what I think is ruining the technology that I do admire and use and like and root for is that this kind of crap is what not only oversells it, but. But puts a regulatory target on its back. It's going to dissipate point people. In the long run, it's going to cause another AI winner because he's not going to deliver this stuff that he talks about about.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, here is the copy of Jeff's annotated version in red ink. He writes not smarter. Something about Taylor Swift. I don't know.

[Steven Witt]

It's Taylorist. It's Taylorist. He's talking about how that's. That's the efficiency expert of years gone by.

[Paris Martineau]

This is so funny, Jeff.

[Leo Laporte]

I love this. I wish you were my professor. AI will contribute to the world in many ways, but the gains to quality of your life from AI driving faster scientific progress and increased productivity will be enormous. The future can be vastly better than the present. Why don't you shout your annotation? As I read this, scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall and science is being attacked in some sense. ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived.

[Steven Witt]

The hubris.

[Leo Laporte]

2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, period.

[Leo Laporte]

But the world wants a lot more of both. And experts will probably be much better than novices as long as they embrace the new tools.

[Steven Witt]

Gee, thanks, Sam.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but that's good. Don't you. I mean, I've always said AI plus human equals something special.

[Steven Witt]

I'm thinking of myself, but he's putting it above us. Wait till we get to Ilya later.

[Leo Laporte]

People, by the way, good news will still love their families, express their creativity, play games and swim in lakes.

[Paris Martineau]

Was it ever a concern that people wouldn't love their families or swim in lakes?

[Steven Witt]

I think he's projecting there.

[Paris Martineau]

He's like, I don't need my bunker. People don't need to find out about the bunker.

[Leo Laporte]

It's gonna be okay.

[Paris Martineau]

You don't need to talk about the bunker.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no bunker. What bunker? We do not know how far beyond the human level intelligence we can go. But we're about to find out.

[Steven Witt]

No basis for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Intelligence and energy are going to become wildly abundant.

[Steven Witt]

No basis for that either.

[Leo Laporte]

With abundant intelligence and energy and good governance. Solve for Trump there, we can theoretically have anything else.

[Steven Witt]

Define intelligence already.

[Paris Martineau]

I love Solve for Trump as a comment. Talking about and good governments and parents. Parentheticals.

[Leo Laporte]

So Admittedly, we have an administration in Washington D.C. right now that is somewhat anti science.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But on the other hand, they are also lifting, thanks to Elon. Maybe this will change now that they've had a falling out. But they're lifting the lid on AI. They're eliminating regulations statewide on a nationwide. On AI. So it's a pro AI administration.

[Steven Witt]

Maybe it's a pro big AI company. But I think I want to see more open source stuff and that's not here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Trump also is pretty much killing NASA or the. Maybe I shouldn't say Trump. The big awful bill or whatever they call it is pretty much gutting NASA.

[Steven Witt]

Jared, the guy, he.

[Leo Laporte]

Jared Isaac man is gone.

[Steven Witt]

He's from my town.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, so there.

[Steven Witt]

He dropped out of high school because he started his business.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. Advanced AI is interesting for many reasons, but perhaps nothing is quite as significant as the fact that we can use it to do faster AI research.

[Steven Witt]

Well, that's his business model.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a larval version of self recursive self improvement. Yeesh. This is fun. You've got a lot of red here.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the. I mean seriously, what's the worst thing?

[Steven Witt]

The worst is the better than any human in history.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Steven Witt]

This cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. It's so anti humanistic. It acts as if. And again, we're going to get to this with Ilya's speech. I hope later. It acts as if we're nothing but a machine. It's mechanistic. And then there's. We probably won't adopt a new social contract all at once. That's so. So Zuckerberg, after a sophomore lecture.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Sometimes this does feel like, you know, late night college kid bs.

[Steven Witt]

The worst. The worst is down on page six of eight.

[Leo Laporte]

Number one. I'm here. So the best path forward, he says, Sam Altman says might be something like this one. Solve the alignment problem. Meaning that we can robustly guarantee that we get AI systems to learn and act towards what we collectively really want over the long term. Bs.

[Paris Martineau]

There's so many things wrong with that sentence, I don't even know where to begin. First of all, robustly guarantee a lot to unpack there.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, maybe we. Maybe you feel like we can't, but that's certainly a goal, isn't it? It.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, but wait, wait. So one is robustly guaranteed.

[Steven Witt]

It's like very unique.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah. Secondarily that we could get these systems to learn and act towards what we collectively really want over the long term. We As a collective, agree on nothing.

[Steven Witt]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

We have no shared goals or wants that we can.

[Leo Laporte]

Spice Girl said, tell me what you want.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What you really, really want.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Thank you, Golia. I stole her joke. Yeah. I mean, but I think that is something. It would be nice. I mean, this is impossible.

[Steven Witt]

But that's my own view.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This is the alignment problem, though, which is that, you know, it's the. The. You know, Nick Bostrom's paperclip conundrum.

[Steven Witt]

And is that Bostrom or is that. Is that. That's. No, that's what's his name? That's Sutzkiver. No, that's not Suskiver. That's what's his name. That's the other one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

One.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. It's what's his name's problem.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What? So we had somebody on who brought up a really good example of AI kind of misunderstanding the task in the case of finding landmines. Right. It was supposed to diffuse landmines, but what did it do instead? Found the ones that didn't go off, I think, or something like that.

[Steven Witt]

It doesn't want to get killed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's alive. So it's tricky, let's put it that way, to get an AI to do what you want, what you really, really want. Number two. Then after we do that, let's focus on making super intelligent, cheap, widely available, and not too concentrated with any person, country or company.

[Steven Witt]

Then. Open source it, Buster.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, open source. The weights. Well, that was AI's OpenAI's original plan.

[Steven Witt]

That was the exact.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why they were founded. Yeah. I wonder how committed he is to that point given.

[Steven Witt]

No, not at all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so that's just kind of BS he just threw in there.

[Steven Witt]

But what's he. What's he building, Leo? What are he, in the industry building?

[Leo Laporte]

We, the whole industry, not just open AI, are building a brain for the world.

[Paris Martineau]

The hubris, you know, he had to think of that line and, like, be like, I got it. I got the block.

[Leo Laporte]

He didn't think of it. Douglas Adams thought of it in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when it turned out the entire Earth was a giant computer the mice had made to solve the problem of life, the universe and everything. Actually, that's cool. It's a nice. It's actually a nice parable in this case because the super geniuses built a computer to do it. And they said, what is the answer to life, the universe and everything? The supercomputer said 42. So then they had to build an Even bigger computer to answer. Well, what the hell does that mean? So you see, it's kind of big brains all the way down.

[Benito]

That's exactly what this is though, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Like that's what he wants.

[Steven Witt]

That's what he's insisting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he didn't even make it up. Building a brain for the world. It sounds like, like the mice are at it again. We are a super intelligence research company. Yeah, why is that? Pr? Why? That's exactly what they are.

[Steven Witt]

A, if you, you got to buy into the super intelligence bs, B, they're calling themselves a research company. What he really said above is look at the, look at what we really got going with building server farms. That's pr.

[Leo Laporte]

A trillion dollars worth of pr. Yeah, well, intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp.

[Steven Witt]

I lost my place.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not that cheap. I mean, it's 20 bucks a month and you could pay even 200 bucks a month. So it's not yet too cheap to meter. That may sound crazy to say. He says, but if we told you back in 2020 we were going to be where we are today, that's probably true. It sounded more crazy than our current predictions about 2030. You know, I've, I've given up.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it sounds crazier than the current predictions about 2020, 2030. I feel like if you told me.

[Leo Laporte]

In 20, that's a pretty crazy one.

[Paris Martineau]

At where we are today, I'd be like, huh, that's kind of wild.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

But I wouldn't be like, yeah, we're gonna be all have robots in our blood. Sounds does not sound less crazy than that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's a lot of sci fi in this post.

[Steven Witt]

Oh, there is.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of computronium in this place. Finally, the coda to all of this. The last sentence. May we scale smoothly, exponentially and uneventfully through super intelligence.

[Steven Witt]

Oh, amen.

[Leo Laporte]

And you write, may the force be with us. I, I love his posts, by the way.

[Steven Witt]

Oh God, can I, can I. I know it's not a democracy, but can we segue into Sutskever's One minute of Sutskever in Toronto?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So he was, he was giving in 86. He was giving the valedictory address at his university. He went there.

[Steven Witt]

Right there. Yep. Yeah, well, that's where, that's where all the things happen in the bedroom was in Toronto that Stephen told us about.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. If you missed the interview earlier, he's talking about a computer that was built in the kids.

[Steven Witt]

It was in the kids bedroom.

[Leo Laporte]

But we're called Alex Nest. Yes. Start at 55. 50. All right, ready? Let me turn up the sound. Ladies and gentlemen, just a little background.

[Steven Witt]

Just a minute here. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Ilya Sutskever, we talked about him. He was at the University of Toronto, created Alexnet with two others, including Jeffrey Hinton, which solved the. Actually proved to people who did not believe it that convolutional neural networks were indeed a valid way to pursue AI.

[Steven Witt]

A big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

A big deal. Everybody else, including, by the way, I have to point out, when Stephen Wolfram was on, he said, no, no, I still think symbolic logic is going to end up. You know, he. He even still was not convinced that neural nets were the be all and end all. So there's. And he comes from that era of symbolic AI. So here's Ilya speaking to the University of Toronto. He's a recipient of an honorary doctorate. This was just a couple of days ago. Slowly but surely, or maybe not so slowly, AI will keep getting better. And the day will come when AI will do all of our. All the things that we can do, not just some of them, but all of them. Anything which I can learn, anything which any, any one of you can learn, the AI could do as well. How do we know this, by the way? How can I be so sure? How can I be so sure of that? The reason is that all of us have a brain, and the brain is a biological computer. That's why we have a brain. The brain is a biological computer. So why can't the digital computer, a digital brain, do the same things? You want to answer that one summary?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I don't even know at this point.

[Leo Laporte]

What would. What would Jeff be shouting in red right now if he were?

[Benito]

Substrate dependence.

[Paris Martineau]

Exclamation point.

[Benito]

Substrate dependence.

[Steven Witt]

Anti Humanistic. It's. It's. I talked about this with Jason earlier.

[Paris Martineau]

Today, but you're too high in your own fumes.

[Steven Witt]

Amen. Amen. And when the telegraph started, it was analogized to our nervous system. When the Internet came along, our brain was analogized to a network. Now our brain is called a computer. Ergo, if I can build a brain, it can do everything and more that we did. And I'm the really most powerful person because I built it. And it's living by a metaphor that that is false.

[Leo Laporte]

I love this dependence. I want Benito to explain what he means by that.

[Benito]

It means that, like, what we know of how our brains work might depend completely on what we're made of. We don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

It might not be so reducible that A silicon device could do it.

[Benito]

It might have to be. Might have to be wet works like what we're made of. It might have to be that. We don't know.

[Steven Witt]

Uh oh, they're going to tear us apart just for our brains. It's the intelligent version of Soylent Green.

[Paris Martineau]

I need your little people pods, you see in matrix.

[Steven Witt]

They're harvesting substrate.

[Leo Laporte]

This is where, you know what is normally a computational question or an engineering question verges into philosophy. Because we don't know what consciousness is. We don't know what we're doing when we think it. I think it's completely possible that we are pretty much indistinguishable from an autocorrect on, on steroids. That we are the sum. Well, think about it, Jeff. We are the sum of our experience. Everything that comes out of your mouth, every, every thought you have is the sum of all the things you've experienced up to now. Do you think there's something else contributing to that? Yes, that's the question. Genes, biology, genes.

[Paris Martineau]

Your percept. The way that you perceive your experiences is different than the way I perceive my experience.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I agree with that. But. But I saying. So this is really another version of the nature nurture argument. I'm saying. I'm not saying that you and I have the same process by any means, but your process, is it not possible? Your process, every word that comes out of your mouth next is merely the conditioning of all the sum of your life's experience.

[Steven Witt]

How deterministic are you?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I don't know. This is a problem. We don't know the answer to that question.

[Steven Witt]

This goes back to a book I've mentioned a few times over the years, how history gets things wrong. And that there isn't a theory of mind. The theory of mind is wrong. We don't balance needs and desires. That instead, yes, we are a big videotape and we play it back. And that we are our own digital twin. What are the paths here? What we could do. But Leo, what really struck me is that you have argued that we shouldn't. I'm going to get this wrong now. You've argued that we shouldn't expect the computer to be anything more than our brains are. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Steven Witt]

That our brains are imperfect. So the computer is imperfect. But he's doing a weird variation on that argument that says that because our brains are computer, it will be as good and better than our brains. And you're saying accept it to be less than our brains. That's okay. And he's saying it'll be more than our brains.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, here's. Okay, so here's. And again, I don't know the answer to this. I'm just making the argument that is, I think, a legitimate argument. But we don't know the answer to if you and I and Paris are the sum of our experiences and some sort of mechanistic thing that creates thoughts and words and actions based on all that we have learned in our lifetime, if something could learn a lot more than us, if something could encompass all the learning in the world, would it not be a superior thinking? I mean, it's still an autocorrect, but would it not be a better one?

[Benito]

I don't think that's quantifiable.

[Leo Laporte]

I. Yeah, I know there's no answer.

[Paris Martineau]

And I think that's also, I think trying to compare something that in general ingests large amounts of data, be it written or visual or otherwise, and then is capable of outputting responses and response is not a one to one comparison with human learning or the human experience. Like, part of the reason why we are the people we are is because, as you say, we are the sum of all these experiences we've had. And those experiences are things that are not just ingesting all the text in the land or or ingesting all the YouTube videos and Reddit comments. You can they are experiences. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that this we could eventually get to the point. Admittedly, the current AIs don't have all the experiences we do. That's one of the reasons robotics is important, so they can have the experience of physics. But it's conceivable if that is true, that you could create a situation where a machine would have all those experiences.

[Paris Martineau]

Mr. In the chat just brought up a point that I've been trying to articulate throughout this conversation, which is is Mr. Met says I think one of the things that makes me so uncomfortable with all of this is all of this dehumanizes actual humans and starts looking at everyone as a version of a robot. This makes it so much easier to dehumanize people to say wipe out millions who are not out up to snuff. And I think that's a really important having especially we don't want our kind of political I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

In order to not that's not. But that you still have to tell.

[Paris Martineau]

The truth to have that not happen. I do think that that purposefully we need to be centering our conversations around these topics to not dehumanize people like I Do think that's something you have to keep.

[Leo Laporte]

But what if it's true?

[Paris Martineau]

Ignore it. But what if it's the truth that humans are not. That we're just none of our.

[Leo Laporte]

Say we're not valuable.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that that's the truth anyway. I think that nothing that humans do is particularly unique when you think of the entirety of the universe. But we consider ourselves unique solely because we prioritize our relationships with other and have created this kind of society that is arranged around the idea of individuality and life having meaning.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, I. I believe this is the same thing. People say, well, if you don't believe in God, then how can you have a morality? I believe that you could be moral and not kill other people just because you recognize that what we do is essentially mechanistic. I don't think those are two related processes. Some people might use that. Now, I don't know what the answer is is. But I have to say if we're not some deterministic mechanistic process, then you have to presume some magical process. Roger Penrose would say magic.

[Steven Witt]

Is that what you can't explain? It's like an accident, something we can't explain.

[Paris Martineau]

But you have your magic by that.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to conjure up some sort of special thing that we are that's distinctive from a mechanistic deterministic machine.

[Benito]

You always.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe there is. That's the soul or whatever. Maybe that exists. I don't know.

[Benito]

No matter how far we push science, though, there will always be that edge. God. That's why they say God is in the edges. Like it's always going to be there. There's always going to be something that's a belief.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand that. And that's a good belief. Also. Some people believe in God and some people believe in the spirit and the soul. I'm not making a case here. I'm just saying that's what you have to presume is that there are some sort of process over and above this mechanistic process that makes us special that a machine could not do.

[Steven Witt]

No, it's what Anthony said. I mean, sorry, it's what Bonito said. It could be that we're presuming it's a process analogous to a computer when it could be that there's other stranger things going on that we just can't explain.

[Leo Laporte]

Could it make it better?

[Steven Witt]

Make it above?

[Leo Laporte]

Could be, but we don't know.

[Steven Witt]

I'm going to read from Mark Twain's really weird book, the Mysterious Stranger.

[Leo Laporte]

Love that book. Love that book.

[Steven Witt]

This is the spoiler of all spoilers. There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought, a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.

[Leo Laporte]

He never finished that book, by the way.

[Steven Witt]

How do you beat that? Paris, is that dialectic for you?

[Paris Martineau]

It's great.

[Steven Witt]

I think it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a. It's a. It's. It's. Now we're in a philosophic conversation, right?

[Steven Witt]

Yes, we are.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess my only point is we just don't know.

[Benito]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And I don't think it's impossible, even if we don't like it, that we are purely deterministic, mechanistic creatures.

[Steven Witt]

It is possible.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's possible.

[Benito]

But Sitsgaver is saying that that's what is. That's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

He doesn't know either.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, but no one knows.

[Benito]

He doesn't know, but he's saying he claimed to know. He's claiming to know.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it's just a very uninteresting world to sort of state that you know something like that as a fact and that not only do you know it, but you know that you're going to build something even better than it.

[Steven Witt]

Once I do know, describe for all time I've done it. There's the answer.

[Leo Laporte]

I know we need to take a commercial break. I also know that the next topic will be this Apple paper on the illusion.

[Steven Witt]

It's a philosophical day.

[Paris Martineau]

Before we get there, can we do a brief, you know, 10 minutes on WWE DC and how stupid some of the stuff is there.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's your point of view, is it, young lady? All right, okay, wait a minute. I got to take a break. We got to take a break.

[Steven Witt]

I come back to this argument after.

[Leo Laporte]

This break, after this message, of course. That's a great conversation. It's not exactly. I am. I guess it is because they talked about AI. Okay, okay, that's coming up with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. You're watching Intelligent Machines this episode brought to you by Smarty. Now here's something I do know know. Smarty is the trusted leader in cloud based automated address data solutions. They power real time validation, autocomplete enrichment, and the way they do it is the right way, lightning fast APIs. With Smarty's address validation APIs, you can instantly, and I mean they're fast, verify and standardize addresses across any system from customer forms to massive databases, ensuring accuracy and deliverability at scale. Smarty's Autocomplete API. This is great. You've probably encountered it already when you're in a, you know, shopping cart and you're typing your address and you notice how quick, how quickly it figures out what the rest of that address is. That's probably Smarties Autocomplete API. Now here's the nice thing. You know there are people who use like Google to do this. But unlike Google, Smarty's API only offers valid address address solutions to your forms in real time. No hallucinations. Making form filling and checkout quick and easy for your customers. And keeping your database filled only with valid addresses. That's pretty important. You don't want to ship to an address that doesn't exist. You know who loves Smarty? Fabletics. Companies like Fabletics have drastically increased conversion rates for new customers. And one of the things Fabletics does is a U.S. company. But they sell internationally, right? Right. This been so helpful with Smarty. For deeper insights, Smarty's Property Data API appends 350 plus property details to address records. You can enrich your database with location, structural financial insights automatically. Faraday and other you by the way see all these testimonials right there on the Smarty site. Faraday needed a turn key way to standardize and blend address data from various sources to feed their customer behavior prediction models. The CTO of Faraday said, quote smarty helped us scale our business and focus on our core competencies and their technology has kept up with the cutting edge. Even 10 years later, smarty still has the best address API on the market. Still, they're getting better every year. Smarty is a 2025 award winner across many G2 categories. Best results Best Best Usability Users most likely to recommend High performer for small businesses. Yeah, it's not just for big enterprises. Also, you'll be glad to know Smartie is USPS CAS and SOC2 certified and HIPAA compliant. So whether you're optimizing user experience, cleansing legacy records, implementing identity verification or scaling data pipelines, Smartie delivers enterprise grade performance with unmatched speed. Can you say 25,000 plus addresses a second? You can even get things like rooftop level precision, which in some areas is really critical to delivering things. The door is there, not there. And easy developer integration. It's so easy. This is a great API. Smarty makes it simple to add accurate, reliable address features right into your product or platform. With powerful APIs designed for speed and ease, you'll have address data that works no matter what you're building. I hope you're interested. Try it for yourself. Get a thousand free lookups when you sign up for their 42 day free trial. Visit smarty.com TWiT to learn more that smarty.com TWiT we thank Smarty so much for supporting this Week in tech. No, well, twit. But I am specifically thank you all of twit. It. They buy it. They bought the whole network. So Paris, you were. You were unsatisfied with Apple's wwdc.

[Paris Martineau]

We just need to be talking about Liquid Glass, which is the design rollout that Apple has announced. Well one, this also is coming at a time where Apple's big change is that they're changing their iOS numbering from just being numbers to being years. Which I guess makes sense, but it's just ridiculous to go from whatever number iOS we were at before, whatever it was like.

[Leo Laporte]

Well that's the problem. You don't want.

[Paris Martineau]

But why do I need to know, Leo? I don't. That's not a number I need to have. And it's dumb for it to be.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to look it up.

[Paris Martineau]

It's just the year it's I was 25 or it's iOS 26 but it's coming out in 2025. I don't like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Secondly, well, your new car, when you buy it in September, you get the 2026 model. You have a 2026 VW.

[Paris Martineau]

That's wrong and dumb too. And it doesn't mean that Apple should do it as well. But Liquid Glass one terrible name. It sounds like it's the name, the name of a style of T shirt that would be sold by Guy Fieri.

[Leo Laporte]

2. I do have to agree with you.

[Paris Martineau]

It looks that that you don't think it's pretty together. Not really. Like it seems busy. It might be pretty in some of the photos that they're showing.

[Leo Laporte]

But imagine having that.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I use a Mac. Imagine having that busyness on all of your screens all the time. 24. 7 I don't want that sort of visual clutter. I don't like that a toolbar will be floating always and then vaguely reflecting what's under it. It just doesn't. It doesn't seem useful. I remember seeing someone doing a long Twitter thread on like. I assume that that uses. I'm going to probably describe it wrong. Some sort of computing power or like memory in the same way that like, like motion effects on the iPhone also uses.

[Leo Laporte]

They even said they Couldn't do this until recently that they pro. And in fact, by the way, Microsoft tried to do this in Windows Vista. They called it Aero Glass. And it didn't. It was terrible because there wasn't enough horsepower to do it. So Apple believes there's enough horsepower in the modern phones and.

[Paris Martineau]

But it's like from a company that is already building a phone that like, within a year of me getting whatever new iPhone, my battery power is already, like, I'm already losing, losing 50% of battery by the time 2pm rolls around. I don't need any more doodads and gizmos making that worse. Just for vibes and not even particularly good vibes.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you. Did you put something in her cereal? She's sounding like you, Jeff.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah, yeah. I'm standing back watching.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm interested in unnecessary visual clutter from the company that's supposed to be Mr. Design. No, I'm not. I'm not willing. I'm single right now. I can't have an Android. This is also. I will say this is something I've noticed.

[Leo Laporte]

A blue bubble. Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Unfortunately, this is a data point I've learned from. I will say there's probably like at least three people that I've gone on dates with in the past. All men in the past six months that have said they've switched from Android to iPhone because they thought the social stigma was impacting their dating prospects. I realized this the other day because I was like, on a date with somebody.

[Leo Laporte]

Boys don't Google girls.

[Paris Martineau]

He was showing me a Notes app and I was like, what Notes app is this? And he was like, oh, Google Notes. And I'm like, oh, so you were an Android user? And he's like, don't judge me.

[Leo Laporte]

I did.

[Steven Witt]

Did you judge him? Did you?

[Paris Martineau]

Just a little bit. I thought it was kind of funny that he switched to Apple just for the. So I judged him a little bit for that instead.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to ask my daughter about this. She's a devout Android user. She hates Apple. She thinks Apple's the devil.

[Paris Martineau]

That's like, that's a class of Android users. Well, I mean, I don't have any strong feelings about either. I just think that Apple has done a good job of what they set out to do, which was apply unnecessary and unwarranted social stigma to using an Android device. Direct was their settings and they've. They've accomplished that.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's. Since we are in a mystery, my.

[Paris Martineau]

One talk, my one pro for WWDC is I think it's Great. That they're doing. You can do polls in group chats. Yeah, that'll be really.

[Leo Laporte]

Start doing them the minute that arrives. Yeah, I'll do we have a group chat.

[Steven Witt]

I don't care. I'm fine. I'm happy with my Android. I live la vie to Google.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. I don't know what will happen if we do a poll. You might not see it. You might not get to vote.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, maybe that's the thing. I will say having Jeff in our group chat as an Android user does mean that I keep getting strange impacts where it keeps saying that I renamed the group chat, but I didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. I've been renaming the group chat as.

[Paris Martineau]

You should I listen, I knew it was probably you, but I was like.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't, you know, I decided on human beings.

[Steven Witt]

How is that my fault?

[Paris Martineau]

It seems like it's probably your fault.

[Leo Laporte]

Because you're in there as an Android user because you're green bubbling. He's not a green bubble. We're all the same color bubble.

[Paris Martineau]

You guys keep saying this. My bubbles are all green in the group chat and that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Mine are green. My bubbles and all the rest of you are gray. Right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, but that's what I mean by green bubble. It's a green bubble based message. It's a shorthand for what is now rcs. But that doesn't matter because RCS is fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, because it has to be rcs. Because one of us is an Android user. We can't use. What.

[Steven Witt]

What was this show called for? For 100.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know what you're talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, by the way, by the way, the new Android 16 came out this week. Are you excited? Jeff? It's really not that interesting. You won't even see it, sign it or anything. This just works.

[Steven Witt]

That's the thing. It's not worth getting upset over.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I, I think that's one of the reasons we don't have to a show about Android anymore is because it's just a tool. It doesn't spark debate or not even anything, any emotion. It's just like. Yeah, it's like a hammer.

[Steven Witt]

I'm. I'm happy as hell because I got. I got an invitation to next week's Chromebook event, but there's.

[Paris Martineau]

Are you going to take them to the cleaners with concerns about Google Workspace?

[Steven Witt]

Well, there's that. Yeah. I just yelled at two Google people about that today.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. So there is. They're announcing new Chromebooks or what's the deal?

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In New York.

[Steven Witt]

Mondo One? Yeah, New York.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's exciting.

[Steven Witt]

I'll fill you in next week.

[Leo Laporte]

So I, I was very. So I thought Apple had a threaded needle. You remember last year at their developer conference, they announced AI features They never delivered. They still haven't delivered, particularly Siri. They, they really felt like the world was going towards AI chatbots. And they, they were the original chatbot. We, Siri should be able to do it, but Siri couldn't do it. They've admitted since then that Siri kind of did it, but it made enough mistakes that it wasn't something they were going to put out. So they had, they had a big ad campaign. They killed. They just, they, they, they said, sorry, we're not going to do it. And so everybody was wondering, what are they going to say on Monday? Are they going to say, oh, we blew it? Are they going to not mention it at all? Are they going to forget AI exists? And I think they did the right thing, which was instead of focusing on a chatbot, which they still don't have, they said, you can use OpenAI, you can use other chatbots if you want. They incorporated, for instance, Chat GPT into their very pathetic image playground image design thing. But mostly what they did is they said AI should be in the background. It should help you without being a.

[Paris Martineau]

Big AI thing, without being a transparent, slightly shiny overlay.

[Leo Laporte]

The design is separate from the AI. The design is just.

[Paris Martineau]

Sorry, I'm cheated. I'm not gonna let it go.

[Steven Witt]

Did you have some Red Bull today, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

I truly did not. I will say, coming into this podcast, I was like, wow, I'm a bit low energy. I like, didn't have much coffee. I don't know, I didn't realize that I had this passion for liquid glass until I start. Apparently, that you can see I'm turning red.

[Steven Witt]

It's kind of. You're, you're kind of a. Your volcano behind you. You're. You're living.

[Paris Martineau]

I am, yeah, I am.

[Leo Laporte]

That's good, that's good.

[Paris Martineau]

It's bubbling.

[Leo Laporte]

I appreciate the passion.

[Steven Witt]

You are a lava lamp.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple's decision was we really want to focus on stuff with our models that you can do on device. That's good for the, you know, for those of you who are worried about the environment, that's good because it's your device. Not, not, you know, some big server farm. It's people worried about privacy. That's good because only you see what you're doing. It is a little limiting. Right. That's going to be the question can their AI do the things they've promised on device? But I think it's a smart move. I think it, it puts them in a different venue than Google and OpenAI and Anthropic. They're going to do their own thing. They're going to say if, you know, if you really want Google or Open Air Anthropic, you can do as I have done. Put one of those apps on your phone and use that on your iPhone, that's fine. But we're going to keep it private, we're going to keep it to ourselves. And I think that's an interesting play. I think they're smart.

[Steven Witt]

So what does Johnny I've do remember.

[Leo Laporte]

He'S doing a hardware device with Johnny.

[Paris Martineau]

I've gets $70 billion to stand in a cafe with Sam Altman while wearing.

[Leo Laporte]

Six and a half billion. There's a big difference. Difference.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually there's no difference from your point of view of your lifestyle. It doesn't matter. Anything above 1 billion, it doesn't matter. Yeah. No, I think that's the point is that OpenAI thinks it's going to be about chat.

[Steven Witt]

Is this, is this an application or a platform? Is AI an application or a platform? I'm coming to think more and more that it's a platform. It's just like the Internet and AI is going to do stuff and what you're going to want is what's built on of top top of that. And that's exactly Apple's Notebook lm.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly Apple's point of view. Actually Notebook LM is really interesting. Apple doesn't have anything like that. I was just reading a very. I was kind of a little bit surprised a piece by a guy I really wouldn't think of as being a Notebook LM fan but who puts all of his articles and research into it and then queries it. He says the rag that retrieval augmented generation, the ability to have the AI only work on the documents you provide is really powerful. So are you using it Jeff, for your books?

[Steven Witt]

No, but what I've decided to do this is why I bought a tablet recently is and that's why I could annotate Sam's piece because I'm trying to get in the habit of it is for the next book about mass I want to put. I want to keep everything in PDF so that I can then play with Notebook Ella not to write anything for me but to find the.

[Leo Laporte]

To query it.

[Steven Witt]

To query it. Yeah. And because I'm Writing this time a very big topic and so I need to try to start to organize it in my head and I wonder what help it'll be or not. I couldn't do that in the last books because you know, I showed you the, you know, not only are there is there a ton of books there but there's also a ton of. There's you can't even see it. There's thousands of pages of papers that I've printed out.

[Leo Laporte]

Won't it be nice when everything's digital and you could put it into.

[Paris Martineau]

It's not fun. I feel like I don't like having my resources be digital.

[Steven Witt]

It's going to be hard for me to get used to this. I might give up.

[Leo Laporte]

Ferris, you crack me up.

[Steven Witt]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

You should have been born in the 30s.

[Steven Witt]

Where do I put this?

[Paris Martineau]

1 of 3 I just created something new to have in my book.

[Benito]

You can't control F that though, you.

[Paris Martineau]

Know, like I mean that is the one problem problem But I think when it comes to first pass research for me, like going through primary documents I've perhaps like already scanned realized are useful to whatever query I'm doing I feel like I engage on a deeper level with the text going through it IRL.

[Steven Witt]

I I as you can tell I like to annotate things, I underline things but I'm going to hope that that makes some difference. The other thing is that with books on Kindle, this is what Steven Johnson did, one of the editorial director of Dobrok LM is that he's so damned organized he's written 15 books. When he reads books he marks them. I think it's Kindle he reads and then all of those snippets get saved and then his first use case for NotebookLM was to put all those snippets into a queryable database so we could say well who else said this? Or who disagrees with that? And so we got those pieces of books. Now I use a lot of books that are old and that's a little bit difficult but I can scan them in. Is it going to be worth the effort? I don't know. But I'm really interested in playing to see what impact Notebook LN might have mainly on my research and organization. I'm hoping to submit the manuscript for Hot Type as soon as next week and then once I do that I'm going to put that whole thing in Notebook LLM just after I've already handed it in just to see what it does.

[Leo Laporte]

I should point out I'm Not a huge fan of Gemini. I should point out that that kind of rag capability is available in other tools. Chat GBT has a, has added a project feature. I think 03, the new O3, is actually the smartest AI I've used. It's really, really good.

[Steven Witt]

That's, that's, it's, it's hard for what I'm doing. How much smarter is smart? You know, I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Steven Witt]

The other thing about Notebook lm, they just announced. I don't know if you talked about this last week in my absence, but you can now share public Notebook. Yeah, and I think I can imagine that for journalism. I mean, imagine, Paris, if you were able to put in tons of raw documents from a investigative piece and share that with the public and see what they asked of it and what they.

[Leo Laporte]

Found in it, wouldn't that be interesting?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that is a thing that I think a lot of investigative outlets are now. Not a lot, but some investigative and collaborative outlets are now kind of trialing as a tool is like. And this is also something you're starting to see in newsrooms is it has to come with a lot of caveats saying like, hey, this is an alarm. So like, it may be producing answers that are not grounded reality. But if you are interested in this as a potential surveying tool, like use it, ask some questions and see what you get, which I think is interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

You may want to use Google's AI because ChatGPT is facing a little court action. We're going to talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Nice to have you. Our show today brought to you by Monarch Money. Oh, I love this thing. I love this. Finances can be messy and confusing. Monarch Money is kind of like your personal cfo, giving you full visibility and control so you can stop earning and start growing. It's more than, you know, just your average budgeting app. Monarch Money is a complete financial command center. I put everything in it. My accounts, my investments, my, my property, my cars, everything, everything you have in it. And then you add your goals. So now you're not just, you know, managing this stuff. You're starting to build wealth right now. 50% off your first year for our listeners, just for me, seeing in one place a dashboard of, you know, how much I lost in the stock market or how much I gain in the stock market, how much my house has gained. All of that in one place is a very useful tool for figuring out what I could do, what I can afford. I'm saving up for, you know, travel because that's one of my favorite things to do. Can I put more away? Can I put less away? It's so valuable to do and, and because I could do it with Lisa, with my partner, it makes it even more powerful. Start managing your finances to build the life you actually want. You see, without a clear financial picture, those financial dreams can easily feel out of reach. Monarch makes managing money simple, even for busy lives. With all your accounts, your credit cards, your investments in one place, you'll always know where your money stands. No hassle, really. No data entry. It tracks your spending, your savings, your investments, effortlessly auto categorizes. You can focus now on what matters most, making your biggest life goals a reality. It's a financial tool people actually love. Join over 1 million households using Monarch Money, named Wall Street's journal's best budgeting app of 2025. I would agree. The top recommended personal finance app by users and Experts with over 30,000 5 star reviews. Get control over your overall finances with Monarch Money. Use the code I [e-mail] in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year. That's what I did. @monimalmoney.com please use our offer code. I am monarch money.com offer code IM we thank Monarch Money for their support and for keeping my finances in order because it's not easy. Open AI is has been ordered. This is in the New York Times at all against Open AI. They're claiming it of plagiarism. The judge ordered them to save all their chat logs, even the logs of those people who told chat GBT we don't remember this. Whoa. This seems like a bad idea. In the filing the response Open AI alleged the court rushed the order based only on a hunch raised by the New York Times and other news plaintiffs. And now without any quote just cause and quote OpenAI argued the order quote continues to prevent OpenAI from respecting its users privacy decisions. This includes Chat GPT, Free plus and Pro if you use the API. Same thing.

[Steven Witt]

Thank you New York Times.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice job New York Times. Well, and I gotta blame the court on this one.

[Steven Witt]

Well no, New York Times asked for it. I blame the New York Times.

[Leo Laporte]

They're looking. It's like a fishing expedition. What are they going to do? Go fishing for all of our, all of our prompts, all of our responses looking for a sentence that appeared in the New York Times and the Times.

[Steven Witt]

Was objecting to OpenAI asking how did you. What. What A hundred questions. Did you ask to get it to repeat a paragraph?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, we saw what one of the. It was in the pleading. One of the things they did is they. They gave it the first two paragraphs in an article and then said what would come next. Well, yeah. So normal. This is not unusual. See, this is why the court got confused. It's. It's normal in a lawsuit like this to tell the company being sued. No, you can't delete emails, you can't delete any communications. You have to preserve everything for discovery. That's normal. This is different because it's not.

[Steven Witt]

It's us.

[Leo Laporte]

It's us. It's our material. All right, I just thought I'd let you know. Maybe you want to use.

[Paris Martineau]

There was yet another. There was another lawsuit that just broke today, like while we were recording this. Right. News of, I think Disney and others suing Mid Journey.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

In particular, they. Disney and Comcast Universal filed a copyright lawsuit against Mid Journey today, calling its popular AI powered image generator a quote, bottomless pit of plagiarism for its use of the studio's best known characters.

[Leo Laporte]

There's Shrek. Look, there's Darth Vader. Look, there's Spider man and whatever those things are.

[Steven Witt]

Look, I have to insert here, just as an egotistical aside, you know that Murphy Brown once called me a bottomless pit of hate. I just wanted to throw that out.

[Paris Martineau]

That's lovely.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not wrong. Mid Journey could, as some other AIs do, say, no, I can't do any copyright material. I frequently ask Chat GPT to take a picture in my photo album and turn it into a Disney cartoon. And I love it.

[Paris Martineau]

And Disney hates that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, there's no white. Doesn't appear in fiction.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I, you know, for instance, I asked it to. I had a picture of my piano where I play and I asked it. Let me see if I can find it. I asked it to take that picture and make it in the style of Disney with little bluebirds singing around it. Like, you know, Snow White had those little bluebirds singing around it and it turned it into this. I think that's pretty cool. Yeah. Made me feel good about practicing. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

When are we gonna have a performance in the podcast?

[Leo Laporte]

The bust is a bust my. My piano teacher gave me of Chopin. Ah, it's not a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We do want.

[Steven Witt]

We do want the recital. Leo, you're not getting off this.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. We are gonna need you to perform for at least an hour or two of the 24 hours you understand? I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just learning, right?

[Steven Witt]

Oh, yeah. That's why it's all the. More.

[Paris Martineau]

By the end of the two hours, you're gonna be getting really.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I'm gonna play and you can sing along the famous Irish song Cockles and Muscles. Would you like to hear it?

[Paris Martineau]

Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, Cockles and Muscles. I. I once met a girl named sweet Molly.

[Paris Martineau]

I didn't realize a real song, to be honest.

[Leo Laporte]

She rolled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow Singing Cockles and muscles Alive, alive O. I'm a beginner. Thank you very much.

[Paris Martineau]

That was really great.

[Leo Laporte]

I appreciate all the applause. I don't. Yeah, I kind of feel. I kind of. No golf claps, please. I kind of feel like. I hate to say it, but Disney and. And Darth have a point here. That Mid Journey is in fact a quintessential copyright free writer and a bottomless bit of plagiarism. That's why we love it.

[Steven Witt]

But. So you can be inspired by Van Gogh, you can be inspired by Disney. How did you see?

[Paris Martineau]

They're not inspired. They are copying it.

[Leo Laporte]

On the right are actual pictures from Star wars of Darth Vader. On the left, the generated pictures of Darth Vader. That's a little more than inspired.

[Steven Witt]

It's a little. Yeah, I think it's better, actually. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It is actually better. And by the way, at the same time as they're suing, a lot of high Hollywood producers are using these tools to make pre visualizations and storyboards for their upcoming, upcoming movies. Has become the all the rage. Here is. Here's. Is this Elsa in Frozen on the right, the actual image of Elsa is slightly different. On the left, she looks a little different. That's the AI version. So I think Mid Journey did. Perhaps it wasn't as cautious as it could be about reproducing copyright material. Here is Homer Simpson in reality on the right. And actually a much better Homer Simpson.

[Steven Witt]

Actually it is. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I have an embarrassing admission which is that I've never seen all the Star wars movies and it's gotten to the point where now I feel like if I see them, I shouldn't just watch them in my home. I should do a bit out of it. If Club Twit is ever interested in watching the Star wars movies with me for the first time. Time, let me know. Oh, I don't know if we're allowed to do that in the club.

[Benito]

So which ones have you.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Benito]

Which ones have you seen?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I haven't Seen any of them. I don't know why I phrased it like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Any of them. Well, how do you expect to date men if you haven't seen Star wars movies?

[Paris Martineau]

I can explain as to why I have not seen any of them in more detail when we're not on a podcast. But honestly, people keep showing me the Star wars movies, and then we end up talking about something else, and then I don't finish the Star wars but movies.

[Leo Laporte]

I hate to admit it because it's bad for my geek cred, but I never like them. They. They're childish.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I mean, this is the thing is I hear mixed opinions, and then so I'm like, should I be devoting my time to watching? Catching up on Andor is really good culture. I know, but telling me Andor is really good. But I can't just go into Andor having seen a single Star Wars.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you can't. Oh, wait a minute. Andor precedes all the movies chronologically. You can, in fact, if you were to watch them in order.

[Steven Witt]

Oh, this is.

[Leo Laporte]

Start with Andor.

[Steven Witt]

So, yeah, that. She's. She's a. She's a Star wars virgin.

[Paris Martineau]

It's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Where should she start? Chat room. If she's a Star wars virgin. Not with Episode four, clearly. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

What is that? What's the first one that came out chronologically?

[Leo Laporte]

Episode four.

[Paris Martineau]

That's. Why not. Why wouldn't I watch the first one they ever made?

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's out of order.

[Paris Martineau]

But it's not out of order if it's the first one that came out.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the order that Lucas made it in. But then he went back and did 1, 2, and 3. Unfortunately, that's where Jar Jar Binks appears, and that's not the highlight of the show.

[Steven Witt]

Patrick Delahonte, start with end.

[Paris Martineau]

See, I knew that this would get people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the issue.

[Paris Martineau]

Every time I ask people about this, they give me, like, 75 tasks I have to do, and I'm like, that's a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

The other. The problem with doing it in. In the order that they occurred in this imaginary space is the technology will be really, really good at the beginning and then go way down.

[Paris Martineau]

But isn't that the true fan experience? Isn't that how you guys all experienced it in terms of increasing.

[Leo Laporte]

Start with episode four. Shouldn't she be needo. Start with.

[Benito]

There are two ways you could think of. The way I think about this is that only episode 456, 123 are real star wars, because those are made by Lucas Those are made by the actual.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are the Lucas ones.

[Benito]

Everything else is fan fiction. Everything else is fan fiction.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you asked the wrong guy. Oh, my.

[Steven Witt]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

So she should watch 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3.

[Benito]

She should only watch 4, 5, 6.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I think.

[Paris Martineau]

That's. Listen. That's the most.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are the three best. And it's easier for you. It's only six.

[Paris Martineau]

Chad is blowing up.

[Benito]

Yes, I know. That's a hot take. And I'm gonna get blown up on the Internet for that. I never put that out on the Internet before, but that's what I believe.

[Leo Laporte]

And. Or Rogue One, then A New Hope, Episode four.

[Benito]

I'm not saying the new stuff is bad. I'm just saying it's fan fiction. It's not the guy, Luke, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Everything I've seen of the new stuff seems like it's fan fiction. There's like.

[Leo Laporte]

So you've seen baby. You've seen clips. You kind of know.

[Paris Martineau]

I know that Yoda's a baby and that's weird, but it's also not. There's something called Grogu. I don't really know, and I don't care to know.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't watch the Mandalorian. I don't.

[Steven Witt]

Jammer.

[Paris Martineau]

I have tried to watch them. I. Somebody showed me one or two episodes of the Mandalorian and I wanted to shoot myself, to be honest.

[Leo Laporte]

Honest. That's not a good Netflix. And chill.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it was not.

[Steven Witt]

Jammer. B says andor is right before Rogue One, which is right before Episode four.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Andor is the earliest. It's when they.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you have any strong opinions on the Star Wars?

[Benito]

Everything is based on 456. So, like, that's kind of.

[Steven Witt]

Because I haven't seen one in 20 years.

[Leo Laporte]

C4 almost like you, I think. I think Bonito's right. C456. Those are the first three that came out.

[Benito]

And if you don't like those, you.

[Steven Witt]

Don'T have to watch Real World.

[Benito]

If you don't like those, you don't have to watch anything else.

[Leo Laporte]

You can stop. You'll then be up on the lore. That's all you need. Right?

[Paris Martineau]

This has really come to a fruition because one of my favorite podcast, they sometimes on their off weeks, we're not. They're not doing like, DND comedy stuff that I like. They'll do, like, movie reviews or, like, weird TV shows. And normally when they're watching obscure or weird stuff, they start the episode before they get into their funny bits. By recapping what it was. They just watch for people who haven't seen an obscure cartoon from the 80s, but they've been watching, like, the new released, I guess, like Star wars movies that have been in theaters lately. And they don't give a recap because, like, oh, everybody knows Star Wars. Some of us. Some of us want to know what you're talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

What kind of idiot wouldn't have watched that?

[Steven Witt]

Leo, do you have any Star wars imitations in your repertoire?

[Leo Laporte]

Misa don't like a Star Wars.

[Steven Witt]

I know he would.

[Leo Laporte]

I do know that Lisa thinks I was stupid.

[Paris Martineau]

I do know that floppy guy.

[Benito]

Also, these movies, Movies are made for children. They are made for children.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they were made for children. And I was an adult when they came out. And that's really the big difference. So the first one came out in 77. I was already 21. For me, it was like, it was good, but it was like, I like 2001 A Space Odyssey. I thought there were better sci fi movies out there. And it is kind of a. It's kind of a fairy tale.

[Benito]

It's not sci fi. Yeah, it's not sci fi. It's fantasy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Witt]

2007.

[Leo Laporte]

1977.

[Steven Witt]

Thank you. Okay. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So you were. You were not only an adult, you were like middle aged.

[Steven Witt]

I was a columnist in San Francisco.

[Paris Martineau]

You're like, there's no reason that I'd be watching this child's movie.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a movie for children.

[Paris Martineau]

I think I. I'm the most eligible bachelor in San Francisco. I'm not gonna be watching.

[Leo Laporte]

Who'S Afraid.

[Steven Witt]

Of a Virginia Woolf? I'd rather see that.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I do think the incest potential plotline could be intellectually stimulating. All the lightsaber effects. Not my speed.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is kind of based on the hero's journey. It is a little bit.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I'd hope so. It's a.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a big budget movie. I hope there's a big movie.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's a classic example of the hero's journey. Luke Skywalker's story of redemption. And then he falls in love with. With. Oh, should I tell her now or. No, no spoilers.

[Benito]

No, no, let her. Let her find that stuff out if she doesn't.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I vaguely know he falls in love with his sister. Right. That's why I said the incest plotline.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Say that.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Do we want to talk about the.

[Paris Martineau]

Apple illusion from a very on topic.

[Leo Laporte]

Thing or do we care?

[Steven Witt]

I want to hear what you have to say. About it.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm curious.

[Steven Witt]

There's Osky on it was really good. A few different futurism was good. There's, there's comment on it.

[Leo Laporte]

So what they did in this Apple thing I, I think is I'm, I'm not crazy about the what they did but anyway what they did.

[Steven Witt]

Let me, let me do a preamble if I may real quick because what strikes me here is that when Apple couldn't conquer advertising.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Steven Witt]

Said that, oh, we're the privacy company because they couldn't do it and they couldn't sell advertising and now they can't conquer AI So this is kind of the way they're shooting AI in the foot.

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly, these, these guys are researchers. I doubt they're carrying water for Apple's corporate marketing but corporate marketing is giggling. Corporate marketing didn't mind it. So they're testing these new large reasoning models. Right, These ones that are thinking now unfortunately when the air quote was done.

[Steven Witt]

Reasoning.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, when the, when the paper was done it was, it was Claude 3:7 it was ChatGPT01 and 03DeepSeek R1. So there's newer stuff but what they did is they gave it classic problems in not exactly even computer theory. Like the Towers of Hanoi. You know the Towers of Hanoi, right? That's the one where you got three pegs and a bunch of disks and you're to move the pile of disks from the first peg to the third peg without ever putting a larger discount on top of.

[Steven Witt]

I'm so bad at. I am not AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve talked about this yesterday and I actually went out and bought because I grew up with the Towers of Hanoi when I was a little kid. So I said I gotta have another one. So it's. Once you figure out the algorithm, it's, it's pretty simple. A human can solve it, a kid can solve. I solved it when I was a kid and in fact I think probably this is before I did any computer programming, before we even knew about computers practically. I think it helped me when it did come time to kind of learn how to program, I kind of understood algorithmic solving because essentially what you're doing is repeating something over and over.

[Steven Witt]

Spoiler. Leo, are you going to spoil it for me?

[Leo Laporte]

No, just look for the patterns, Jeff. Look. Okay. Anyway, it turns out that what you can do quite well, these reasoning machines fail at miserably. So this first graph on the left along the x axis is the number of disks. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. You can make this an infinite number of disks, they went all the way up to 20 disks, which for a human once you've solved a 3 disk would be trivial because you just do what you did for the first three over and over and over again to get to 20. And in fact, up at the top here you're looking at Claude 3.7 versus the thinking version of Claude. Both did Fairly well, nearly 100% solutions for the first three disks. After three disks, Claude3.7 fell off the map. Its accuracy went way, way down and finally got LEO.

[Steven Witt]

It had a complete accuracy collapse.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, by 8 disks it could no longer solve it. The thinking one did go a little farther, but again by 10 disks, same thing. Let's see, response, length, position. Yeah, that's less important. I mean the main point is they couldn't do it as it got more complex. They just failed. So are they thinking? I don't know. I'm not sure what we learned here except something that anybody who's used AI much knows that it's not. Not it's going to fail. It's not always perfect.

[Steven Witt]

Well, here's, here's the question I was thinking about earlier today. Does it know the definition of failure?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's to me a more interesting result that a lot of studies are having. What's very clear is if the AI is not given enough information to answer your question, if Notebook LM doesn't have enough documents to answer your question, it will hallucinate.

[Steven Witt]

That's where the trouble comes. Because it wants to please you. It is written to please.

[Paris Martineau]

Because it's understanding of failure is not producing an answer. Your barometer for failure should be if.

[Leo Laporte]

The answer is incorrect, you're both answerable. All it's doing, remember, is it's putting one token after another.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

If it has, you know, information, it'll put it there. It will do the best, you know, it will take the best token. Absent any information, it'll just take whatever.

[Steven Witt]

It comes up because it has no meaning. It has no.

[Leo Laporte]

It's meaningless. It's just one token after the other.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And if success or failure, if it runs out of, you know, use useful tokens. It's got a bunch of crap. It will just put that in there. It's, there's no. So that's why it hallucinates more. And I mean it. I think it's pretty straightforward. They did checker jumping, they did blocks world, they did river crossing, similar problems. Let's go down to the. They did a lot of this. Oh my God. They did it over and over. And over again. Again. Let's see that.

[Benito]

Being a researcher, that's how you do science, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. You keep doing. Feels fairly like a fairly trivial study. Where's the conclusion? They don't even.

[Steven Witt]

It's in the paper itself, isn't it? Down there? I thought it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. By the way, one of the things they didn't do which everybody uses AI knows you can also say think harder or even better, write code. Had it been asked to write code to solve the tolerance at Hanoi, I think it could have solved it perfectly forever.

[Steven Witt]

Because that's 11 of the paper is the conclusion. We systematically examine frontier large radiation models through the lens of problem complexity. Our findings reveal fundamental limitations in current models. Despite sophisticated self reflection mechanisms, these models fail to develop generalizable reasoning capabilities beyond certain complexity thresholds.

[Leo Laporte]

That's valuable, I think, actually.

[Steven Witt]

I think it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So they can't think. In other words, what was interesting kind.

[Benito]

Of quantifying what we can ask them.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Benito]

Like that's, that's kind of what I'm saying. Right.

[Steven Witt]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

To me, that's what you want to learn. That's what this show's about. What can, what can you reasonably use AI to do? And what is unreasonable to ask of it.

[Steven Witt]

So then there were reactions to it which I, which I enjoyed more. Steven Sinofsky came out of it and said that the problem here is the anthropomorphization.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Steven Witt]

And that. And that this is the, the argument I have about things like Sam Alton's sophomore essay is that it. It presents a view of this stuff that's just not accurate. And it. And it's not fair to the technology and what it can do. This is where we get ourselves in trouble.

[Leo Laporte]

The person who probably did the most work was the intern who is listed. So good job Parshan Shojay, because I think you probably did all the work. This was the first name in the authors and he's an intern. Yeah. I think anthropomorphizing is definitely, you know, the flaw.

[Benito]

That's surely the problem that's happening in the general public.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, and certainly Sam Altman has encouraged that. No question about it.

[Paris Martineau]

Now futurism says beautiful brain.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple researchers just released a damning paper that pours cold water on the entire AI industry. I think that's going a little far.

[Steven Witt]

That's just as bad. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And then it has a robot with a dunce cap just to. Okay, I do like that drive at home.

[Paris Martineau]

That's good. That's a good It's a good art.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It went to Getty to buy it, but anyway, they got it.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel, I wonder if they AI generated that, to be honest.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it kind of looks a little like that.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, yeah, I don't feel like it's a great insight, but it's true and it's good to know.

[Steven Witt]

And it got a lot of response to me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Let's see. Could AI make a Scorsese movie?

[Benito]

So dumb? Only Scorsese can make a Scorsese movie.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, yeah, I was just say, because AI is not Scorsese, so by definition it would not be a Scorsese movie.

[Leo Laporte]

So. And Darren Aronofsky, the director, join hands to make a movie. They met in 1999 when they were to give a speech on the future of storytelling. The CBIUS was a video game developer. He's very smart gaming. He's a chess master. He's the CEO of DeepMind.

[Steven Witt]

That does not surprise me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. He was a very good chess player. Aronofsky, of course, created PI, Black Swan, the whale. And now they're going to do together short narrative films using AI3 are already in the works. I don't think that's a Scorsese movie. It's not too short.

[Steven Witt]

What really strikes me is last week there was a story about advertising. When Meta was throwing all of everything in advertising, creative and media into AI and in the meantime the head of WPP quit, stepped down. It wasn't because of that alone, but advertising is freaky making. It is not difficult to imagine this stuff making a 30 second creative on a commercial. That will be amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

They already have. Certainly last Christmas Coca Cola had an excellent ad that was AI fully AI generated because it. I mean you had to be. Was polar bears and. Right, right. And it didn't. They didn't even try to hide that. I mean, it looked like it was done in AI.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah. And so I think we're going to find it's kind and. And the art, so to speak. The technology has advanced immensely since then.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Steven Witt]

What we saw out of I.O. was amazing. So that's. That's where the frontier is going to be, I think. And then advertising does lead the aesthetic.

[Leo Laporte]

Culture in that way, as does pornography. And we're seeing quite a bit of AI pornography.

[Steven Witt]

Well, I'm not Leo. Maybe you are, but I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I. I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

Jeff has never seen a pornography AI or otherwise.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know where you go to get it, to be honest. I've tried, actually. That raises an interesting question. Oh, if no human is involved, it is interesting question. It's just created in the mind of a computer. Is it exploitation?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, well, it depends what you're talking about. I would argue pornography generally as an industry, if it's consenting adults, would not be considered exploitation. I think if you're talking about child sexual abuse material, it's still exploitative and probably not something that we should condone as a society to be created in any form, whether it be from a computer.

[Steven Witt]

That's a good answer.

[Paris Martineau]

Otherwise.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And actually truth, even truth with adults, the. The problem with pornography is it dehumanizes sex anyway. And so now you've even more dehumanized it and it's kind of. It's the wrong take on sex. Right, It's. And so it's kind of training people.

[Steven Witt]

To think there's debate about that. I mean, that's. That's just like. Does video game violence turn us all into murderers?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Steven Witt]

Right. So I think there's a. There's a presumed cause and effect there.

[Leo Laporte]

But Leo, it doesn't take pornography conditions.

[Steven Witt]

Because in a deterministic world, you're already going to do what you're going to do, so it really doesn't matter.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true. We are just one big computer brain.

[Leo Laporte]

We're sarcastic. So I'm not saying. Saying we're not stochastic. We are stochastic.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm a parrot, personally.

[Leo Laporte]

By which I mean you don't know what's gonna. The next step is gonna be in the whole complex. It's complex and it's probabilistic and maybe there are multiple steps and it's an even choice. I'm not saying you know what's gonna happen next. I'm just saying what happens next comes out of what happened all the way up to the point.

[Steven Witt]

But it's like my friend David Weinberger said, an accident is not an accident. It's something you couldn't explain. Explain.

[Leo Laporte]

True. Like magic.

[Paris Martineau]

I asked Chat GPT to make us into Star wars characters and I don't understand the references, but the image is pretty good. I thought I mention I recently upgraded. I added. I added you in the discord. It's kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

This is. Is this what you gave us?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I did not. It's. Let me see if I can at you again.

[Steven Witt]

Pretty 54 cis guy did a version.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's very good by the way with this though. Oh, I like it.

[Paris Martineau]

Right. So I recently upgraded ChatGPT to try it out in the pro version, and I've honestly been fighting it.

[Steven Witt]

Did you spell with two GS?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I did not. I just took a screenshot. It did. I took a screenshot of the show and it had it spelled correctly in there.

[Leo Laporte]

But I love making images with. With. With Chat GPT. I gave it. I know I'm. I know I'm probably doing harm to the environment in the world I told you about.

[Steven Witt]

It's only. It's only a third of a teaspoon.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right. It's a fifteenth of a teaspoon. No big. I told you about the piano thing. I did. Let me see if I can find the one I did. This was yesterday.

[Steven Witt]

You should also go up to. I took a pretty fly for.

[Leo Laporte]

This is from a picture of a protest that we went to. And I thought, yeah, I said, make that a cartoon. And then I said, and add a biplane. So that's invented.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a few things don't make a lot of sense, but it's, you know, like, defend oligarchs, grifters. Elon. That guy's definitely angry.

[Benito]

Like, just gop.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't know what the GOP is either. None of those signs were in the actual picture I sent them. But.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they're all.

[Steven Witt]

People look unhappy in the front line.

[Leo Laporte]

The people are angry and they're all wearing sunglasses for some reason.

[Paris Martineau]

I like the guy who's just wearing a shirt that just says Go.

[Leo Laporte]

Go.

[Steven Witt]

Or does it say GOP or.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think they did something with gop. I think this is why I kind of find AI Fun.

[Steven Witt]

Fun.

[Leo Laporte]

You never know what you're gonna get. I. I took a picture out my kitchen window and I said, make this a. A country scene in a cartoon. And it's. It's a. It's exactly what the picture contained.

[Steven Witt]

Belly and Cat is going to figure out where you live based on that.

[Paris Martineau]

So I. Yeah, we might want to not include that.

[Steven Witt]

You might want to check that out.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet that would be an interesting challenge.

[Paris Martineau]

1 like. Don't challenge the Internet, Leo. They 1000% will know where you live. If you. If you both show them that image and give them that challenge, you'll be doxed immediately.

[Steven Witt]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think so.

[Paris Martineau]

Don't play this game with them, Leo. Don't play this game.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, so you've bought. You're spending 20 bucks on chat GPT.

[Paris Martineau]

I spent it because I wanted to. I don't know. I felt like your job. I also just had some Problems with using it, the free version that I wonder if it's going to be any different. I will say so far some limited success. I was trying to. I've been reading a lot of like nonfiction books lately on various topics relating to like a job I'm interviewing for. And I was looking for suggestions of new books that I hadn't already found from like the past three years and, and related to these one or two very specific things. And so I paid for it and asked like whatever the Deep Research 4.5 for recommendations. And honestly it recommended like the perfect book from within the past like six months.

[Steven Witt]

That association it can do.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, because I was like I. There should be a tool for me to easily check like all the boxes of categories of type of book plus the release year and then go through it myself on some website. But like Goodreads doesn't have that, Amazon doesn't have that. I don't know where to do it. So I was like, I'll ask ChatGPT. And it was quite useful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Useful.

[Steven Witt]

By the way, I want to scream about Google for a minute, if I may, just because I need to.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, we've got to. We can balance it out with.

[Steven Witt]

I got a bill. I got. I just got my bill for the friggin frickin, friggin, what do you call it? Work group thing. 62 bucks a month.

[Leo Laporte]

Whoa. Yeah, whoa.

[Steven Witt]

Because of. They said the excuse was because of AI. Well, I can't get to your AI thing. You just released everybody else in the world for free and you're charging me for your freaking AI? Google, what have you done?

[Paris Martineau]

I asked you bring this up with the Chromebook. What have you done when you meet them?

[Steven Witt]

I'll bring up everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of Google, YouTube has loosened the rules guiding moderation of videos. Hey, content moderator. We favor freedom of expression over the risk of harm. So go ahead, promote Ivermectin. Who needs vaccines? Masks, they don't work as long as the videos are considered to be in the public interest.

[Benito]

I mean, I have noticed a lot of YouTubers self censoring themselves certain words because.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Benito]

Because YouTube pushes them down. Like if you say suicide, like what you say kill or anything related to like that kind of stuff, they push the algorithm.

[Steven Witt]

Algorithm.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks for screwing up our bonito.

[Benito]

We got subs.

[Leo Laporte]

Great. Now nobody will see the show. All right, we're going to take a little break. You're watching Intelligent Machines, many of you watching live. I love it. Thank you to the folks of course in our club, Twit, Discord who are watching in the discord itself. Also the general unwashed masses watching on YouTube and TikTok and X.com and Facebook and LinkedIn too.

[Steven Witt]

Too.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh?

[Paris Martineau]

You can live stream on LinkedIn.

[Leo Laporte]

Live stream on LinkedIn. Yeah. And favorite. Hello, Gizmo.

[Steven Witt]

Hello, Gizmo.

[Paris Martineau]

Are you a generally unwashed mass? Yes.

[Steven Witt]

Gizmo looks like a Star wars cat, I think.

[Paris Martineau]

Gizmo, can you hear that You're a Star wars.

[Leo Laporte]

To Paris. Why she was wearing that big cat headdress.

[Paris Martineau]

Someone, someone sent a gift that I guess kind of says like some person has got two lightsabers. I don't know. I don't come at me in the comments for my lack of knowledge about Star Wars.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's refreshing.

[Paris Martineau]

That's what I'm saying. I'm just a refreshing person.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, we are going to launch the Leo laporte only fan site any day now. So when I, when I do porn, it's not dehumanizing. I just want to say.

[Benito]

Only Fans isn't just for porn. You know there are celebrities using that to monetize a lot of stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

No, in fact, I think it's right. I think that's the really interesting guys.

[Paris Martineau]

We should be doing live on Only Fans.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? But don't. Yeah. I feel like there is the assumption that if you're on Only Fans it is kind of adult. Right.

[Steven Witt]

I'm. I'm gonna unbutton my button now.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

I was gonna say this is why Jeff isn't wearing a long sleeve shirt today.

[Leo Laporte]

How exciting. Our show today and they are so sorry. Our show today brought to you by. No, they're. I, I love this company Spaceship. They are. This is so cool. They are the modern way to get your domain name and to put your site up on the web. It takes the pain out of choosing, purchasing and managing domain names and web products and they have them all shared hosting, virtual machines, business email. And I love this below market prices for domain registrations and renewals. They also have some pretty fresh ways to deliver simplicity. I like Unbox. You can connect your Spaceship products to your domain and configuring it all in just a few steps. I wish my daughter had this. She was going I have my domain name and I've got my Shopify and how do I connect them? And oh my gosh, with Unbox it's a click. In fact, I'm using Spaceship's new encrypted messaging platform Thunderbolt, which is tied to my domain name. I registered a domain name for Four bucks. Leo's IM Spaceship. And then I pressed a button in unbox and connected it to my messaging and that's all I need. It's Paris. You should look into this. You don't have to give me your phone number. You don't have to give them a username, just a domain that you control. Very cool. And Unbox makes it super easy. And if for instance, you're like my daughter and saying, help me, dad, I could just say, go use alf. ALF is their very own Spaceship's very own AI assistant. ALF likes doing the stuff you don't like, like show main transfers and updating DNS records. The other thing I love about Spaceship, they're very open to your ideas, they love their customers and, and they have a place where you can go to vote on new features and products. They call it Roadmap. You can explore their roadmap for the future, make suggestions, vote on new features. In fact, that's how Thunderbolt happened. The messaging came out of customers asking them for it. So customers in the tech community get what they really need. Visit Spaceship.com TWiT to discover exclusive deals on domains and more. Spaceship.com/TWiT Spaceship.com/TWIT thank you, Spaceship. Spaceship.com TWiT.

[Steven Witt]

IM doesn't stand for instant messaging, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

It stands for what? Intelligent machines. Yeah, that's right. Leo's I am. I didn't even think of that.

[Paris Martineau]

Apostrophe s. I am.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the IMTLD probably stands for country. Let me see here. It's the Isle of Man stands for.

[Paris Martineau]

It's mine.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the Isle of Man, Leo.

[Steven Witt]

Therefore I'm the Isle of Man.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a pretty. That's a metal TLD.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a metal TLD. Thank you very much. Dustin says he took him 30 seconds to get up and running on Thunderbolt. And the thing is, it's completely secure because you, you. It's only a domain that you control that can then be used as your. As your messaging thing. And that domain can be anonymous. It doesn't have to say your name or anything. It can, it can be an anonymous. Like it could have Scoops for Paris or something like that. O. Let's see, what else?

[Steven Witt]

What do we got?

[Paris Martineau]

I know we've not paying seven to nine figures for new AI researchers to try and join Meta.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? Like a bonus.

[Paris Martineau]

No. He is personally trying to recruit and steal AI researchers and executives from other companies and they're so desperate. Jensen Huang did right anywhere from, from, you know, Seven figures to nine figures of.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, seven figures is in the millions. Nine figures is in the hundred million hundreds of millions.

[Paris Martineau]

And that's just cold hard cash, if I recall correctly. That's just like.

[Steven Witt]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Man, I blew it in college. I studied Chinese. What was I thinking?

[Paris Martineau]

You're a fool.

[Leo Laporte]

I should have known I'd be a podcaster instead of a multi millionaire AI researcher. Hundreds of millions.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow. There's a New York Times article about it.

[Leo Laporte]

This is for their super intelligence lab.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I think this is as news has been coming out that they are, you know, falling behind competitors.

[Leo Laporte]

But they. Isn't it interesting because they own more H100 GPUs by like 3 times as many now.

[Steven Witt]

What are we going to do with them?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they just bought them and now we'll figure it out. Seven to nine figure compensation packages.

[Paris Martineau]

Meta has recently grappled with internal management struggles over AI as well as employee churn and several product releases that fell flat. So Mark Zuckerberg is personally joining the fray and like trying to personally recruit people. As much as I'm a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

Money, as much as I hate Meta, and I will give you a reason to hate meta a 2 in just a second. I love it that they at least make llama open weights. Yeah, I mean why not? They're, you know, we're number two. That's.

[Steven Witt]

And that's. That's Yan Leon.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is it. You think it's his. He was the one who really.

[Steven Witt]

He believes in that.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. All right, well that's, that's good. I'm glad to hear.

[Steven Witt]

It's also kind of an Android strategy too. We're not gonna be open AI, but.

[Paris Martineau]

We can yeah be place this Meta team. Zuckerberg. This is from Bloomberg. Zuckerberg aims to hire around 50 people from the new team, including a new head of AI research, almost all of whom he's recruiting personally. He's rearranged desks the company's Menlo park headquarters so the new staff will sit near him. The people said, that's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Sit near me and make $100 million. Now how much? So Meta got caught big time, breaking Android's privacy. Meta and Yandex, the Russian search engine, put code in their software to bypass all the cookie blocking all the third party tracking. All of the ways that you tried to say, don't spy on me, bro. This research and Ars Technica has a story refers to Android users and their web browsers. But there's reason to believe this would be for every mobile and Even maybe desktop devices, if you're interested in the. The nitty gritty Steve Gibson covered it yesterday on security. Now, the COVID tracking implemented in the metapixel and the Yandex Metrica trackers allowed and I put this past tense because as soon as this research came off, came out, they turned it off immediately, like that minute. So that means they got some other way of doing it. Allows Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protection provided both by the Android operating system and the browsers that run on it. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning don't work. They opened up ports on your machine, established local host connections so your machines could exfiltrate information. It was really kind of awful what they did. It is fairly technical. Here's the graphic that explains it. But it was a very sophisticated technique. There was no. There would be no other reason to do this than to bypass your privacy protections and your security protections. There's no technical reason to do this otherwise. And the minute the research came out, both companies immediately turn it off without any response. Meta's response did not answer to ours emailed questions, but provided the following statement. We're in discussions with Google to address a potential miscommunication regarding the application of their policies. Upon becoming aware of the concerns, we decided to pause the feature. While we do work with Google to resolve the issue, Yandex said, oh, we're discontinuing the practice in Russian, of course. Yandex strictly complies with data protection centers. It does not de. Minimize user data. Unbelievable. Yeah, unbelievable, but also kind of believe, but totally believable. So on the one hand, while I appraise Meta for having open weights on Llama, they're not a good, nice company. They're not nice people.

[Paris Martineau]

That Llama will spit on your face.

[Leo Laporte]

They are not nice people. And okay, so they're trying to go for super intelligence. I hope they don't get it, because what are they going to do? Use it against us? This is the problem, by the way. I'm not worried about the AI. I'm worried about the people who make.

[Steven Witt]

Well, that's what I've been. That's why I wrote a book about that. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

You're exactly right.

[Steven Witt]

Right. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazon is testing humanoid robots to deliver packages.

[Paris Martineau]

Do we need the robots to be humanoid? Is that. Is that a useful component of it?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, apparently, if you're working in a factory design for humans, yeah. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

I guess. Wait, but why. If the robots are delivering packages, why are they at the factory? Because that's not where you deliver or the warehouse. It's not where you deliver packages.

[Leo Laporte]

They have an indoor obstacle course used for testing at an Amazon office in San Francisco. The report says it's about the size of a coffee shop. They hope this is what they want to do. They want to, you know, they have those Rivian electric vans. You may not see them in New York, but we see them in town here. Yep. They drive around. They've got a real. They still have a driver, but when the driver pulls up, the robot will hop out.

[Steven Witt]

Well, they were going to do that with, with drones. They're going to do that out of a single van. Now they're going to do the robots instead.

[Leo Laporte]

Even with a human driver behind the wheel, a robot could theoretically speed up drop off times by visiting one address while the human employee delivers to another. Oh.

[Steven Witt]

I can see people tripping the robots.

[Paris Martineau]

Someone's gonna shoot that robot with a gun.

[Leo Laporte]

Unfortunately, I did see, and I don't know if it's true, are the robots.

[Paris Martineau]

Good with fending off dog attack?

[Leo Laporte]

That's a robot. How about robot dogs or porch pirates?

[Benito]

Like, they don't need to, like, wait outside, they just need to mug the robot.

[Leo Laporte]

I did see this and I, again, I'd love to see if I could validate it, but according to this video, 75% of Amazon orders in the warehouse are now fulfilled by robots. Here's what it looks like.

[Paris Martineau]

That's been the case for a while. This has been, this was a major shift. They've rolled out, I feel like over.

[Leo Laporte]

The last five years the pickers are no longer humans, which is probably a good thing.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. And so you see these big racks that you're seeing behind here. This was a major pivot that Amazon.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Paris Martineau]

This was accomplished over the past like seven years or so. Just because it. For a while, a lot of the complaints about Amazon worker treatment in particular were that the warehouses were giant and gargantuan. So in order to get something, you'd have to have a person walk all the way over that. They invented, invested, I believe, actually bought the company that makes those little floor robots. So how those big stacks move is. It's like a huge stack on top of. You can see in the bottom of the video, little robots scooting along the floor. Those kind of all move in tandem and will, whenever a picker is standing basically at a station, whenever the next thing comes up, the robot will move that big stack over to them and say, oh, you need to grab whatever in quadrant 3C. So you go over three down and like down three.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I want to meet the robot from Amazon that when I ordered this, was at an Accenture Talk, actually for a fortune talk. So I guess it's true. I want to meet the robot that, when I ordered a synthesizer from Amazon instead delivered a succulent planter.

[Paris Martineau]

It probably. So probably what it was is the synthesizer was in one of those cubbies and next to it was a succulent. And either they had the sort of thing that had a robot grabbing it or just the person grabbed the wrong one. I'm still in a lot of, like Facebook groups and other employee groups for Amazon warehouse workers. Sometimes it'll show up on my Facebook feed. They're just kind of like social media groups. And it'll always be things like whenever, I guess people order sex toys from Amazon and don't realize that that means a human being then has to look at a picture on a screen of your strange dragon dildo and then pick it from a cubby and put it in your box. But there's a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

So I dominates over and over again. After a while, it's just old hat.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, after a while, they all. All the. All the together.

[Leo Laporte]

Blur together. Exactly. That's hysterical.

[Steven Witt]

On aisle six.

[Paris Martineau]

Sorry, should I grab the succulent or the suckerland?

[Leo Laporte]

I just thought it was funny that I. I mean, it's. It was this big, heavy, heavy metal succulent.

[Paris Martineau]

How small was the box that you got?

[Leo Laporte]

It's huge.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

And heavy.

[Benito]

Oh, is that when you ordered the cork?

[Leo Laporte]

So what? No, I ordered. Yeah, it was a little. One of those little akai things. I wanted something that would be more portable that I could practice on and carry around. It was only 150 bucks, but I also ordered a baking steel which was big and heavy. And they said they both came in the same box. Neither one came. Just a succulent planter trying to convince Amazon. I returned the succulent planter. They said, okay, well, we'll credit you for the steel. We won't credit you for the synthesizer. No, no, it was the same box, but it didn't get. Anyway, I don't know. Probably a robot did it.

[Steven Witt]

Google has a problem you wouldn't expect.

[Leo Laporte]

What's Google's problem?

[Steven Witt]

Foxes.

[Leo Laporte]

Like foxes.

[Steven Witt]

The roof of their London, New London headquarters.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, London has a huge fox problem. Foxes are everywhere in this town.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Paris Martineau]

You take the thing I've learned like people, when I've had co workers in London, they'll be like, out in the garden, taking a zoom call and be like, the foxes have arrived. I must move inside.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm like, what? I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

But foxes are like. Foxes are like.

[Steven Witt]

Well, they like to hunt them there. I guess they're just not very good at them.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's what happened. They chased them into the city is what happened. All those fox hunters jumping over the hedges. They just chased him into town.

[Steven Witt]

But I want to know how did the foxes get on the roof of Google's new building, line 130.

[Leo Laporte]

Does it answer the question or is.

[Steven Witt]

It no, I don't know. This is King's Cross. I can't figure it out. No, it's King's Cross, right next to the garden.

[Paris Martineau]

They're everywhere. They could probably just climb up.

[Leo Laporte]

Foxes have begun to dig burrows. Oh, it's because they have a rooftop garden.

[Steven Witt]

But how do they get up there?

[Leo Laporte]

So it's. They say this elevator. This is nice. We take the elevator up. It's nice. Well, you can see the trees. They climb the trees and then they leap from the trees to the headquarters. Those are beautiful foxes, by the way.

[Steven Witt]

They're gorgeous.

[Paris Martineau]

I might be spreading misinformation, but I have a memory of like a big thing in London having to be. They had to design trash bins that were like, fox proof. And it was like a difficult. Like, foxes were like a huge problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Oldest cities in the world. And it's so you could see why foxes might love this building.

[Steven Witt]

Oh, yeah, look at that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. That's like a view trail for foxes with a view and everything. How did they get up there?

[Steven Witt]

I don't know. That's what. That's what? That's what I want to know.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they walked up.

[Steven Witt]

That's right.

[Paris Martineau]

I assume in the movie Fantastic Mr. Fox, they kind of just use zipline gear.

[Leo Laporte]

The rooftop garden has 40,000 tons of soil and 250 trees. They. They think that the. The foxes might be living off rats. So which would you rather have?

[Steven Witt]

The foxes of the rats? Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I would prefer the foxes. Yes.

[Steven Witt]

Foxes are cute until there's a rabid rat and all this.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know that it's called a skulk of foxes?

[Benito]

I have a feeling foxes are kind of dangerous though, right? Aren't they dangerous?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, only if they're rabid.

[Steven Witt]

I don't know. There's. There. This is wrong. You should not make a fox a pet. But. But for people who do, there's videos of them. They, like, giggle when you scratch them.

[Leo Laporte]

Foxes make the weirdest Sounds, they don't make sense.

[Benito]

Yeah, there was that song. What's that?

[Paris Martineau]

Can you give me your impression of a fox?

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder what the fox.

[Paris Martineau]

What does the fox say?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'll play you a fox sound.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, from. From your mouth, Leo. I want you to. I want you to try and give.

[Leo Laporte]

Us some Foley work here in our neighborhood. I hear that. That's a fox.

[Benito]

You don't have a. We're not hearing it. You got to turn on Original.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to press the button.

[Steven Witt]

We didn't hear your piano before, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you did.

[Paris Martineau]

No, we did not. That's why I was singing, because I was like, what is meaning? I thought.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought you were just mock.

[Paris Martineau]

I thought you were just doing a piano.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah, I thought you were mocking yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I. Oh, all right. Now I have to play the piano for you guys again. If I had my $140 Akai synthesizer, I wouldn't have to fake it. I'm gonna. I'm gonna.

[Steven Witt]

Where are the foxes?

[Leo Laporte]

Did you hear the foxes? I told.

[Paris Martineau]

No, it just sounded.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's not a fox. No, this is a fox. Ready?

[Paris Martineau]

Actually, that sounds like the waves.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a fox.

[Paris Martineau]

That sounds like a dog being attacked.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. That's their normal sound. They sound like somebody's dying.

[Steven Witt]

This is better. I'm putting this in the chat right now. This is what. This is what I'm talking about. Hold on, hold on. Here we go.

[Leo Laporte]

Better than that.

[Steven Witt]

These are. These are like pet. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Pet foxes.

[Steven Witt]

Giggling fox. Yes, it's a. Oh, God, they're cute little suckers.

[Leo Laporte]

What have we done? Oh, wait a minute. I still have the other fox. This is 11 labs you just, see sent me.

[Steven Witt]

No, I didn't. I sent you giggling foxes. Well, how the hell did that happen? No, no, there it is. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, wait a minute. I got the other foxes open. I gotta close the other foxes. Okay, giggling foxes, get ready if you need a laugh. Boy, do we have one for you. The nine News is gonna take us down. They have the copyright on the foxes.

[Paris Martineau]

45 seconds of fox sound from various.

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty much what's happening. Thanks.

[Steven Witt]

And I love it on the page. Related topics. Female fox laughing Baby fox laughing fox laughing gif. It's like fox porn.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, now we could go 20th Century Fox, only fox.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I am going to play for you the actual song now. You can hear it. This is Cockles and Muscles. No, that's Foxes. Can you hear that?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Steven Witt]

Yes, that's me.

[Leo Laporte]

This is good.

[Steven Witt]

How much.

[Leo Laporte]

A Lot.

[Paris Martineau]

Enough that they gave him a bust.

[Leo Laporte]

You want to hear the one I'm learning right now? Says fun, right? A little bluesy. Yeah, it's fun. I enjoy it. It's. It's a pastime. I'm never gonna, you know, be on the stage, but, you know.

[Steven Witt]

You want us to disagree with you?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I know the truth. I'm not. I'm not fantasist. I'm not Sam Altman. I don't think AI is going to suddenly teach me how to play piano perfectly. You are watching intelligent machines. If you are watching not in the club right now, I want to urge you.

[Steven Witt]

Shame on you.

[Paris Martineau]

What are you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

Now? Here's the reason the club exists. There was a reason. Four years ago, you might remember, there was this thing called Covid. Advertising kind of dropped off and we thought, we are in trouble. We need to survive. We did. We survived. Here's a picture of me playing the piano. I got to put that in my obsidian. The way we survived was we went to you, our audience, and we said, can you help us out? We passed the hat. But it's become more than that. Four years later, we're thrilled. Five years. Is it five years? Wow. Well, no, five years for Covid, but four years for the club. It has taken off beyond our wildest dreams, which is fantastic because now you're covering 25% of our operating costs. And that's good because advertising is only covering 75%. So because of you and your support in the club, we can now continue to do our mission and make shows and make new shows, and we would really like you. This is, by the way, an example of the kind of stuff you get in Club Twit. This is in the Club Twit. Discord. What do you get for 10 bucks a month ad? Free versions of every show we do, including special shows only in the club. All the keynotes, for instance, from last week, the Microsoft build, the Google I O, this week's WWDC keynote, all of those were in the club only and you can still get them on the TWIT plus feed. Stacy's Book Club. Chris Marquis. Coming up on Friday, we're going to do our photo show. We do that every month and more and more. Lots of stuff like that. The Untitled Linux Show. Home Theater geeks. We do it in the club. And that's kind of our thank you. Our way of saying thank you for supporting what we do. We really appreciate it. If you're not a club member, I would love you to be in the club. So we can chat in Discord. And, you know, you get all those benefits go to Twit tv, Club Twit. And I thank you so much, all the club members, for your support. It's. It's really been amazing. We appreciate it. I'm looking. So you notice I got a new clock?

[Steven Witt]

Yeah, I did.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I'm really happy about this thing. This is from a company called Mitzella. M I X M I T X M I t x e-l a dot com. I think he's actually a YouTuber. M I t X E L A. Yeah, Midzilla. So he. He does projects and kind of fun projects. The most recent being, you know, you see quite a few of them, but the most recent being this clock. It's the precision clock machine four. And I saw the YouTube video and I said, this is the coolest thing ever. This uses GPS to set the time, so it is absolutely accurate down to the millisecond. I didn't tell it where I was.

[Steven Witt]

That's good because you always start this show exactly at the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. People for some reason want a clock and I think it's their timing something or I don't know what it is. Anyway, so we get the date and time for this. It's kind of cool. It stretches out so it's like a clapper, like on the. On the movie.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh.

[Steven Witt]

Oh, cool.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

He did some really cool things as an ambient light sensor. The gps, if it can't get a signal as the time gets less accurate, will do. Show fewer and fewer, you know, tenths or hundreds or thousands of a second. But right now it's got a lock, so it's showing thousands of a second. Second. I thought it was really cool. Anyway, if you see this and want one. M I T X E L A dot com.

[Paris Martineau]

But this website has some cool stuff, such as LED industrial piercing earrings.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Well, you should go out and get them. Or maybe get this Euro rack knob. I don't know what that's.

[Benito]

That's for me?

[Leo Laporte]

That's for. That's for Bonito.

[Paris Martineau]

Something for everyone on your podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's crazy, isn't it? Motorized cam or. Oh, that'd be good. I should get that. Oh, is this what you want, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Industrial light piercing.

[Paris Martineau]

That seems cool.

[Leo Laporte]

The world's smallest smitty synthesizer.

[Paris Martineau]

I like that. There's a UV protection amulet, a magical pendant that warns you about ultraviolet radiation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This guy's so cool. Anyway, he shipped it out right away. He's in the uk I was very grateful. And so I wanted to.

[Steven Witt]

What was the. The tariff on that?

[Leo Laporte]

There was no tariff.

[Steven Witt]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know how he did that magically. Anyway, so I don't have the clock above me now. I just have like a. That's. That's a sound. You know, it's. It's hearing me talk. A little sound thing.

[Benito]

Spectrum analyzer. Spectrum analyzer.

[Leo Laporte]

Spectrum analyzer. Thank you. But I. I want to put, like, club membership numbers in there or something like that. In fact, what I was really thinking is when you join the club, you could send me a text string to put in there briefly. So every time we get a new member, we get a new member.

[Steven Witt]

It's like the brick.

[Leo Laporte]

Like the digital brick.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah. Or if somebody does, like, a super chat in one of the things, it, like, pops up on there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's kind of a twitchy kind of thing to do. So that's the plan. We're thinking. We're thinking maybe doing that. That'd be kind of fun.

[Paris Martineau]

That'd be fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Gotta write some code. But, you know, I have a little AI friend who's pretty good at that. That. All right, you guys pick something. We've done a lot of these stories. 23andMe is being sued to not sell the genetic information as meanwhile, the purchase price is going up, up, up. A company called Regeneron. Pardon me.

[Steven Witt]

And Wojcicki has stepped back in.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah. She says 264, 256 million is not enough.

[Steven Witt]

She's made a bid of 300.

[Leo Laporte]

She's bid 305 million. She wants to buy it. Wow.

[Steven Witt]

It dwarfs her previous offer to acquire the company for 40 million just ahead of the March bankruptcy file.

[Paris Martineau]

Jesus.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're pausing the sale process. Regeneron, we thought was going to get it. This is a pharma research company. And they, I guess, wanted the data.

[Steven Witt]

If they want it still.

[Leo Laporte]

They've got drugs.

[Steven Witt]

10 million more.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Yeah, because the bankruptcy court will send it. Sell it to the highest bidder. Regeneron gets the last look. Losing bidder gets a $10 million breakup fee. So maybe she's just going for the 10 million.

[Steven Witt]

It's a little risky, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's weird to. That's interesting.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, her involvement in this whole process has been very odd.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

This was also the case where basically the entire board resigned, if I'm recalling correctly, due to her how she was handling the sale and potential bankruptcy process.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, we'll watch with interest. I have already deleted my data, 3 and me. Oh, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you do that?

[Leo Laporte]

My whole family did it.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you delete your data?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

You're just cool with whatever pharma company having it?

[Steven Witt]

What, are they going to clone me?

[Leo Laporte]

They can't. That's not enough.

[Paris Martineau]

What are they going to do, clone me? Says man. Who has clone.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd be pleased.

[Benito]

They would charge more insurance to all of your descendants.

[Leo Laporte]

No. No.

[Steven Witt]

So I had this discussion with Esther Dyson once when she did her. Her. Her genome. And I said, esther, my. My son's. The fact that I had prostate cancer and my descendants are gonna. She said, get over it, Jeff. Everybody gets it.

[Leo Laporte]

She very famously gave her entire genome to George Church's project, the personal genome project. I tried to.

[Paris Martineau]

And they were like, we don't want this.

[Steven Witt]

We don't want help.

[Leo Laporte]

They rejected me. But then I later. George then now has a commercial version of that, which I did sign up for. And I got.

[Paris Martineau]

You were like, I want to give it to someone. Could make as much money as they want from my genome.

[Leo Laporte]

Why not? Yeah. No. The price has come down dramatically. I think when it was the personal genome project, when Esther did it, I think it was like $10,000. It was around a thousand to do it with. What was the name of it? I can't remember now.

[Paris Martineau]

George Church sequencing would cost a thousand dollars.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So what 23andMe did for only a couple of hundred bucks was a partial sequence. And then the results, it wasn't what kind of. They implied, like you're getting your whole genome. But what Church is doing with Nebula genomics, that's the name of it. Is they scan the whole thing and you can download it. And by the way, it's a lot of data. It's gigabytes of data. And then you can send it off to. There are a lot of companies around that if you give them, your genome will say, okay, you have markers for this cancer or this health condition or brown hair or whatever it is. A lot of biome companies and stuff. So this is. Yeah, I did this one. Now, I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but it's more complete than what I got from 23andMe. I interviewed George a couple of years ago on triangulation. That's what started the whole thing. It's very. It's kind of interesting. All right. I think we could go to the picks of the week, don't you? Do I need another break, Benito? I haven't been keeping track.

[Benito]

No, we're good.

[Leo Laporte]

We're good. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you for watching the show. And now ladies and gentlemen, I give you Paris Martineau and her pick of the week.

[Paris Martineau]

And if it's foxes, my pre pick is. Last week I told people to leave a five star review on our podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how's that going?

[Paris Martineau]

Your favorite thing. If you have a comment that would be fun to read in the show and people did. People did leave some good ones. I thought one of my favorites was by PJA in SC four days ago. The review said says got the Bug. This is the only podcast bold enough to review the 1975 movie Bug. I saw this as a double feature with phase four. Bug is only surpassed by the killer cockroach scene of 1977's Damnation Alley. Thank you. Even though technically the movie I referred to was the 1978 movie the Nest, I did see a different cockroach movie called Bug this week and it was not as good as the Nest Nest, but still a good roach bug.

[Leo Laporte]

You made him an honest reviewer. We have now reviewed both Nest and.

[Paris Martineau]

Bug and on a similar note, someone wrote entertaining and educational. Really enjoy the show. I learned a lot about AI at understandable level. Three hosts are smart, witty as they banter over sometimes very silly topics. Love the picks the week. Well maybe except the Roaches and Rats movie series. Your opinion is noted.

[Steven Witt]

Good.

[Paris Martineau]

But I do not value it to be honest. Those are my highlights from that.

[Steven Witt]

So more next please.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I will.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, go to your favorite podcast client, review us and rate us. Give us a good one.

[Paris Martineau]

Five stars. We gotta get our rating up. We've had some weird review bombing over the years that's brought it down. This should be a closer to five stars podcast. So get out there. If they're funny, we'll read them on the show. My pick of the week is I saw the Phoenician scheme which we had watched the trailer for on the show at some point. I saw that last night. Good movie. Would recommend it if you're at Wes Anderson fan. It was fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's Wes Anderson. Yeah, it was.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I would just say it was like fun. It was delightful. It was like just a very funny movie actually, which I think like is.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you a Wes Anderson? Like whatever he does, I love it. Fan or.

[Paris Martineau]

Well no, I watch everything he does, but I don't always. I hated the French dispatch for to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I thought this was going to be a lot like that one.

[Benito]

This one looks like a looney T. This is like he's just no this.

[Paris Martineau]

One is, it's like, it's a, it's a globe trotting quad, I guess, criminal business mastermind who keeps getting people keep trying to assassinate him. And so he keeps getting caught in near death experiences like plane crashes or being shot in the chest. Chest or things like that. Meanwhile, he's trying to connect with his daughter Liesel, who. So slapstick, a little bit slapstick in a Wes Anderson way. Michael Sarah is in it as well and really does a great job.

[Benito]

Yeah, that's why I say Looney Tunes. Like, this is kind of a Looney Tunes kind of movie. Like the comedy is kind of Looney Tunes.

[Leo Laporte]

I love the Royal Tenenbaums. I will say. Fantastic.

[Paris Martineau]

Mr. So the movie also, it kind of explores or like relationship between a absent father and his daughter. And I think the themes, if we're extrapolating are like about faith and legacy in the sense that it did remind me tonally of what movie did you just say? Tenenbaum.

[Benito]

They're all love this film in the.

[Paris Martineau]

Sense that it's a patriarchal relationship.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

My other pick is I just remember this when someone mentioned TikTok earlier, I saw this really cool TikTok of a woman who's somehow used code to make like her hands in videos control the vocal production and like production of songs. And it's all these cool videos of like if you play it like her doing different hand gestures, like creates whatever is like it controls like a MIDI board in a really.

[Leo Laporte]

She's got a Python program called MIDI Cam that is a camera watching what she's doing. Here, let me play this.

[Paris Martineau]

It's her own song, so we shouldn't.

[Steven Witt]

Do this instead of the piano.

[Paris Martineau]

And like each hand gesture creates something else going on in the thing. And she has a bunch of other videos of how it works. I just thought it was very interesting. And I don't know, someone who's more technically inclined than me could probably explain how it's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty cool.

[Benito]

It's pretty simple. It was very, a little gimmicky in my opinion. These can just be petals.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

And show.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But it's neat.

[Paris Martineau]

It's neat.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

It's just reminded me of the show this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Steven Witt]

Those are my museum technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff, what's your stuff?

[Steven Witt]

Well, I could do a rant about my favorite topic, the death of mass media, but I thought I would ask unless you talked about this last week. Did you talk about Mountain Head?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if we talked about on this show. Did we, Paris? I don't think we did.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think so. What did you think of it, Jack?

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff?

[Steven Witt]

I liked it a lot.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay.

[Steven Witt]

I think it was. I think it was. You know, it had its weak moments sitting there talking.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's explain this. This is a movie. Is it on Netflix? I can't remember.

[Paris Martineau]

Hbo.

[Leo Laporte]

Hbo now. Hbo. Max, that's not confusing enough. Starring Steve Carell, written by the guy who did Succession, Jesse Armstrong. It's four of the richest men in the world. Well. Well, three of the richest men in the world and one guy who only has a few hundred million in a. Where are they? They're in Utah. Yeah, they're in Park City, near the likely place for multi millionaires in a big house. And the world is falling apart.

[Steven Witt]

Thanks.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks to the guy who owns Tram T R aam who is the richest man in the world worth several hundred billion dollars. He has created. It's basically Facebook. He has created a AI image generator that's so realistic that people are believing it and it's causing huge religious strife, civil wars, killings. It's a mess. And they're up there in their mountain area watching the news and it gets kind of crazy.

[Paris Martineau]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny. It stayed with me more than I thought it would. I thought it was very wordy. It was just a lot. You know, they shot it in a couple of months.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. From what I haven't seen it because I feel like a lot of my film friends are like. Said it seemed like it was definitely a product of a incredibly tight production schedule with kind of first thought, best thought. But I do agree that it seems like the sort of thing I would like.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of jargon in it.

[Paris Martineau]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

From the stuff we talk about.

[Steven Witt]

Well, it makes me very happy. Because they skewer longtermism and transhumanism.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Yeah. You see all the stuff that we talk about. Somebody in the chat room. Brandroid says the primary flaw was that all the main characters are terrible, terrible people. I would agree with it. Exception. That's true of succession as well. There were no heroes in succession. And you still kind of. You still were kind of in there rooting for him. You're right, though. There was nobody to root for in this.

[Steven Witt]

But that was the whole point. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

At one point they. I don't know. Should I have any spoilers? Maybe I'll leave the spoilers out. It goes. Gets very dark.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's put it that way. I didn't like it after I finished it and then I've been thinking more about it. I think maybe I liked it in an abstract way.

[Steven Witt]

I'm gonna spoil one line because I just loved it so much. SCREAMING I take Kant very seriously.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Steve Carell, he, the older. He's basically Peter Teal. He play or, or maybe Paul Gramer.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He's an older VC who's kind of funded all of these guys, the other three guys. And he, he's the, the wise one, the former professor, you know, who apparently loves to quote K and ni and it's very, that part's very funny. It's very pretentious, very pompous.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And then they're constantly saying first principles. First principles. Yeah. The more I think about it, the more I like it.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah. I'm curious. So even while that is made and even though, while we have a little bit of kind of mass media left, there's just a bunch of things here. So Warner Brothers is going to split off. Warner Brothers Discovery is going to split off its cable companies as Comcast, Universal, NBC.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of letting the lifeboats go.

[Steven Witt]

Cable has cooties.

[Leo Laporte]

As the ship sinks, it's cable cooties. Yeah.

[Steven Witt]

Anything, Anything alive.

[Leo Laporte]

They're keeping the movie studios, but they're getting rid of all the cable stuff.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah. Right. And then. Interesting. The Guardian says that user generated material will eclipse the ad revenue attracted by professional media from TV networks, cinemas and news companies very soon.

[Leo Laporte]

Any day now. The creator apocalypse.

[Steven Witt]

Yep. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, as a, you know, we're in that creator space, kind of old school version of that creator space. It, you know, I, I just saw a study that said podcasting is taking off.

[Steven Witt]

Wait for me, wait for me.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been here. Where are you going?

[Steven Witt]

For a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

The. I can't remember if it was Netflix. I think it was Netflix as a, a, A biography documentary of the. Call her Daddy. Alex Cooper host.

[Steven Witt]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the big, big. It's interesting how podcasting has changed since we started way back.

[Steven Witt]

Content creators are expected to see their revenue through ads, brand deals and sponsorships increased by 20% this year according to WPP. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

The Pro. I'll be honest, the problem is it's not us, it's influencers. So there are all kinds of creators. But, but influencer.

[Paris Martineau]

It's going to all the people on Love Island USA right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's also, I mean, my son is benefiting from this. He's an influencer.

[Paris Martineau]

When's his sandwich shop opening?

[Steven Witt]

Saturday's the latest.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, really? Leo, are you coming?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I, I, you know, he Leo.

[Paris Martineau]

You'Ve got to give Jeff his switch.

[Leo Laporte]

He doesn't. He doesn't. Oh, that's true. I do have the switch for you. He doesn't, I think, want me there. His mom talked him into letting it. Letting her come out because she said, well, somebody has to be there. But he's really. He doesn't want to focus on us. He wants to focus on his thing, what he's doing and all that. So I'll go out next month.

[Steven Witt]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And we're gonna do it. We're gonna do a festival, right?

[Leo Laporte]

We'll go. Yes, we'll go. We'll have fun there. Yeah, but I wanted to give him a chance.

[Steven Witt]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Salt Hanks.

[Steven Witt]

Salt Hanks.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'll be there on Bleecker street next to John's in the beautiful West Village. You could walk there pretty practically. You take the subway and walk the rest of the way.

[Steven Witt]

Well, I mean, you can do that all over New York.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's.

[Steven Witt]

It's amazing what we have.

[Leo Laporte]

I miss New York. Yeah. He doesn't. I think it's normal. He doesn't. He doesn't. He doesn't want. Have to worry about us. He just wants to have fun and pay attention to what he's doing. And opening a restaurant is high stress.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, no, I mean, I think it could be hard to.

[Leo Laporte]

He's.

[Paris Martineau]

What, not focus on.

[Steven Witt]

Let's. Let's go to salthanx.com and at least give him. Call a good plug. Grand opening doors open May 31st. 280 Bleecker.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they still say May 31st. Yeah, because he had a soft opening last weekend, but he decided not to open right away, so. Because they still had some stuff to do.

[Steven Witt]

I just signed up.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. Drop your email as this menu. Yeah. See that sandwich?

[Paris Martineau]

What should I get?

[Leo Laporte]

Get that sandwich. I said, would you name a sandwich after me? He said, yeah. So I don't know. Maybe there will be, maybe there won't be. I don't know if he's there.

[Paris Martineau]

Should I tell him that I do a podcast with his dad?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, definitely. Oh, no. Say.

[Paris Martineau]

Or will he be embarrassed?

[Leo Laporte]

Say, no, no, say, hey, it's Paris. I do intelligent machines formerly this week in Google on Twitter.

[Benito]

You've met him, Paris. Haven't you met him before?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, she's met him. Yeah, he's been on the show.

[Steven Witt]

He was on the show.

[Paris Martineau]

No, he wasn't here. I wasn't here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, he was on Twitter.

[Benito]

Right. He Was on Twitter.

[Steven Witt]

He was on Twitter.

[Paris Martineau]

He was, I think on this show, but when I was, like, on vacation or something.

[Steven Witt]

So we're gonna go in and tell him how hurt we are that he didn't come on our show.

[Paris Martineau]

Mm.

[Steven Witt]

Hank.

[Leo Laporte]

Hank. Well, go. Yeah, I. I'd be very curious if you have a sandwich. He's. It's been fun. If you watch his vlog on Instagram, Salt underscore. Hank. He's been showing how he chose the breads.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, he's got some good. He's got a great bread that he just cracked for the.

[Leo Laporte]

That bread looks so good. It's one of the reasons I can't go. I shouldn't go.

[Steven Witt]

You're gonna poison your dad.

[Leo Laporte]

They just did a festival where they sold thousands of sandwiches at the look at. And the thing is his sandwich.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I did. I did hear about this festival, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, Chef. Yeah, his sandwiches are juicy as heck. They're just messy. So that's why his cookbook's called A Five napkin situation. Let me see if there's anything else.

[Benito]

So what would your sandwich be, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I told him that I really like Reubens, so maybe he'll do a Reuben.

[Paris Martineau]

I love Rubens.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, he's got an industrial onion slicer.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God. Does he have an assessment? Oh, my God. Because a lot of what they do is. Is pickles. Right. Pickled stuff. So, yeah, it's. It's gonna be. It's gonna be.

[Paris Martineau]

What's it like being. How is he handling restaurant ownership so far?

[Leo Laporte]

It's. I think he's fairly stressed. It's stressful.

[Steven Witt]

He's the new bearer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's. There's a lot to do. There's. This is the restaurant. This is why it's not open yet. They're still kind of working on it. Although I think this was a little while ago. He's gonna. So that's like the bar where you go up to buy your sandwiches, and the kitchen's in the back, but he's gonna be. Be making sandwiches there in the window. So the people who are in line to John's Pizzeria will see him and one hopes, come in. Don't. I don't. Don't name the ziti sandwich after me. That's all I ask. Look at that rack of la.

[Steven Witt]

My dad. The ziti.

[Leo Laporte]

My dad loves a ziti. Anyway. Yeah, I'm very proud of him. And he's. So all the ad deals are going that way. He's got deals. Wow. I mean, the amount of I don't even. It's unbelievable.

[Steven Witt]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All the stuff that we would love to get is going to him, but I gotta say, this show, thanks to the new focus, has, as you may have noticed, really picked up in both audience and ad revenue. So I'm very pleased with that.

[Steven Witt]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

We get a lot of the B2B stuff and. And for this show, we get a lot of the AI companies. So I'm. I think we're gonna make it.

[Steven Witt]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

And thanks to the club. I gotta tell you, the club is amazing. Really.

[Steven Witt]

Bless you all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Thank you all. We appreciate all your help.

[Steven Witt]

Ladies, let's all do a thanks for the club, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, club.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

I won't play the piano ever again.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll only eat loud, crunchy sandwiches into the mic.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man. So that's from French. Yet Mr. Met, who is obviously a New Yorker, says the Frenchte is fantastic. We go there a lot for the food as well as the bread. Yeah. I hope Henry will become a regular stop for people.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll check it out and I'll bring my influencer sister.

[Steven Witt]

I might go. You know what, next Tuesday when I go in for.

[Leo Laporte]

Stop by the Chromebook. Yeah, yeah. Where's the Chromebook event?

[Paris Martineau]

Let me know when you're in. We can hit it up.

[Leo Laporte]

So Google New York, Is it. Is it a big deal event or is it just.

[Steven Witt]

No, no, no, no. It's not just me, but it's. I had to sign up.

[Paris Martineau]

Now I want a sandwich.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, I'm starving.

[Steven Witt]

I also. You have to come for the American Burger place. I'm telling you.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, all right.

[Steven Witt]

Oh, all right. It's amazing. And.

[Leo Laporte]

And give us a report when it's Tuesday. So next week, report on the Chromebook of BET from Jeff Jarvis. It'll be good. Who is our guest next week? I should ask?

[Steven Witt]

Oh, this is my friend, Matthew Kirschenbaum.

[Leo Laporte]

Great. Tell me about him. Well, he wrote that incredible book, Track Changes.

[Steven Witt]

Track Changes, which is about word processing. He's writing a book about the textpocalypse. He's on the Modern Language association task force for educ. AI in the classroom. And just announced. Announced. Just announced. He was just appointed to a. He's at University of Maryland now. Next January, he will have a chair in AI and English at University of Virginia.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paris Martineau]

That's great.

[Steven Witt]

So he's. He's really brilliant. He is. Is a friend and a mentor of me and really amazing. He also runs a book lab where he teaches students how to make old fashioned print.

[Leo Laporte]

I love this picture of him with all these old computers, the old Macintosh, the Apple 2. Look at that. That's awesome.

[Steven Witt]

He sent, he sent me some topics I'll send to both of you that, that he can talk about because I talk to him and he's a wonderful guy and brilliant and yeah, I think we'll have fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. Matthew Kushner bomb next week on Intelligent Machines. Don't you dare miss it. We do the show every Wednesday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live if you choose. As I mentioned, on all those platforms, Discord, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kik. But the easiest way to watch is after the fact. Go to our website, Twit TV IM. There's a YouTube. You'll find a link there to the YouTube channel. It's a great place to see the video, but also to clip the video. If there's something in particular you saw you'd like to share. And of course, subscribing and your favorite podcast player might be the best way. Leave a funny review, five stars please, so that Paris can read it next week on the show. Thank you so much for being here. Paris Martineau, I don't know what's going.

[Paris Martineau]

To be out there reading the reviews. She's the greatest.

[Leo Laporte]

She's a, she's an investigative reporter. Give her a scoop. Let her, let her yell at the CEOs in your life.

[Paris Martineau]

Let me eat a large scoop of ice cream.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris nyc. And of course, Jeff Jarvis. I'm not. You can't get rid of the whole thing. The emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in the city.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

We're eating twice. Twice. And the author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis now in soft cover. What would Google do long time ago, the web we weave, which is a really great read about how we got here and what we should be doing going forward. And of course, magazine about his history and the history of the magazine soon.

[Steven Witt]

To be an audiobook.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. With a special announcement by Paris at the beginning.

[Paris Martineau]

It's true. And yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you guys. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machine. Bye bye.

[Jeff Jarvis]

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[Paris Martineau]

Thanks.

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I feel like I have to give.

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You something in return for karma. That's okay. I don't really have much in my purse. Oh, let's see.

[Paris Martineau]

Hand sanitizer.

[Leo Laporte]

It's lavender.

[Jeff Jarvis]

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Let me check this pocket.

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Oh, mints. Really, I'm fine. Oh, I have raisins. I'm a mom. Wait, wait one sec.

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I've got cupcakes in the car.

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