Intelligent Machines 835: Glitch Lord

Summary

Podcast Summary: Intelligent Machines 835 – “Glitch Lord”

Podcast: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Karen Hao (author, Empire of AI), Harper Reed, Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau
Release Date: September 4, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of Intelligent Machines is a deep dive into the current state of AI, with a special focus on the history and evolution of OpenAI, as revealed through the reporting and new book (Empire of AI) by journalist Karen Hao. The show starts with an extended interview with Hao covering the founding ethos, internal conflicts, and philosophical realities at OpenAI. Discussions then branch into the current AI industrial landscape, issues of scale, research monopolization, AGI's slippery definition, and the imperial nature of Silicon Valley tech majors. Later, Harper Reed joins to discuss practical coding with AI, the shifting landscape of LLMs, and the creative use of AI in day-to-day workflows. The panel also dissects recent news—ranging from Google’s antitrust trial to the proliferation of open and closed AI models, as well as the cultural implications of algorithmic media production.

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Key Discussion Topics & Insights

1. Inside OpenAI: Reporting Empire of AI (00:11–52:02)

Karen Hao’s Reporting Journey (03:31–06:25)

• Hao embedded at OpenAI in 2019, during its transition from nonprofit to highly-funded powerhouse.
• Early OpenAI was obsessed with public transparency, though privately, security was tight. Hao's presence triggered internal paranoia: “...my face was given to security as 'look out for this person.'” (05:41, Karen Hao)

The Disconnect Between Public Narrative and Private Reality (06:25–08:54)

• Hao details how OpenAI leadership struggled to explain key concepts like AGI, despite projecting strong narratives externally:

  “They really fumbled with some basic questions... they couldn’t define [AGI]...” (07:02, Karen Hao)

Defining AGI: Vessel for Ideological Projections (09:05–11:20)

• Lack of consensus even within OpenAI or broader AI “fraternity/cult” about what AGI really is.
• “...people would agree that AGI means human-level intelligence in machines, but then no one agrees on what human intelligence is.” (09:18, Karen Hao)

Origins and Motivations: Transparency or Ego? (12:22–14:20)

• The “altruism” of being a nonprofit was always laced with Silicon Valley ego and winner-take-all mentality.
• Even from the start, something “corrupt” was embedded in the need to dominate—altruism as status signaling, not pure motivation.

The Turning Point: Money, Scale, and Tech Choices (14:20–16:09)

• Shift to scale and profit orientation predated the actual influx of funds from Microsoft; their “belief system” was always winner-take-all.
• Original leaders underestimated the resources and technical advancements (transformer models, data needs) required:

  “At the time, they probably couldn’t even have conceived technically of the degree of scale... not yet possible.” (14:33, Karen Hao)

The OpenAI Leadership: Altman, Brockman, Sutskever (16:09–22:58)

• Altman: The Politician — persuasive, but not operational; “terrible manager.”
• Brockman: The Coder — single-minded, not collaborative; burns out teams.
• Sutskever: The Visionary/Prophet — cerebral and emotional, “calls the plays,” generally most respected internally.

Intellectual Monopoly and the Empire Metaphor (27:51–36:15)

• Hao critiques the scaling paradigm: “They’re seizing resources that are not their own... they exploit an extraordinary amount of labor... monopolized knowledge production.”
• OpenAI’s resource domination compared to imperial knowledge control—“only the knowledge that continued to fortify the imperial expansion.”

Homogenization in AI Research (31:15–34:53)

• The rise of transformers as “the one sentence in a book” being optimized by every major lab; diverse approaches “atrophied.”

Devil’s Advocate: The “Philosopher’s Stone” of AI and Dangers of Narrow Focus (35:08–40:12)

• Scaling transformers seen as the one true path—akin to religious zealotry internally.
• Hao: “The AI discipline has long fixated on advancing technical progress without necessarily having a specific reason for why...”
• She argues for focusing AI research on targeted goals for humanity rather than open-ended “progress.”

The China Question: Existential Competitor or Straw Man? (40:12–42:02)

• Narrative of needing to “beat China at all costs” has not delivered intended liberalizing outcomes; rather, it served Silicon Valley self-interest.

Reporting Process and Board Crisis Exclusive (43:45–48:58)

• Hao's reporting pivoted post-Altman board crisis; she constructed a massive spreadsheet of former employees and cold-reached, revealing internal schisms and “scenic detail.”
• OpenAI’s own attempts to discredit her led employees to trust her more.

LLM Progress and "Deep Hype" in AGI (48:58–52:02)

• Hao doubts AGI as a meaningful goal: “...justifying why they need more and more resources.”
• GPT-5’s disappointing internal progress and the scaling paradigm reaching its limits.

Notable Quote:

“AI tools that help everyone cannot arise from a vision of development that demands the capitulation of a majority to the self-serving agenda of a few.” (52:02, Karen Hao quoting her NYT op-ed)

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2. Coding in the Age of LLMs: Harper Reed’s Workflow (58:01–68:27)

LLM Coding Workflows: Agents, Reviews, and Nicknames (58:01–65:21)

• Reed describes progressive automation for coding: writing, reviewing, and debugging cycles handled by Claude Code.
• Tricks include having the LLM give the user a unique nickname within each project—acts as a marker for context resets.

Multimodal, Multi-Lab LLM Ecosystem (62:23–68:27)

• Reed cycles through Claude, Gemini, GPT-5 (“bouncing around models”) as a daily norm.
• Code review by LLMs is now mainstream; the application layer is where differentiation and stickiness will emerge, not the base models.

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3. AI, Market Structure, and Regulation (71:02–88:57)

The Rise of Open Source and International AI Players (71:02–75:52)

• The global AI landscape is shifting: closed models in the West, open source elsewhere.
• Reed notes that U.S. immigration restrictions are encouraging top AI talent and innovation to stay and blossom in China (e.g., DeepSeek).
• The “WEIRD” values problem: Should LLMs be Western-oriented? Global diversity versus alignment is a largely unsolved challenge.

Google Antitrust Decision & AI’s Disruptive Impact (78:33–88:57)

• US judge rules against harsh penalties for Google, arguing AI has become a competitive check on search monopoly.
• Judge’s decision signals the energy has shifted from search to AI as the next platform battle.

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4. Cultural & Creative AI Impact (89:09–101:12)

Algorithmic Media Production: The Netflix Effect (90:23–99:29)

• Concerns over “algorithm movies” optimized for background watching, with Netflix engineering not just recommendations but content to suit large, distracted audiences.
• Yet, algorithmic approaches may open room for indie counter-movements (A24, slow cinema).

The Persistence—and Limits—of Mass Media Models (94:39–99:57)

• Media and creative industries always respond to new tech with formulaic output at scale, eventually followed by differentiation and new waves of creativity.

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5. The Business of AI & Industry Dynamics (109:10–121:33)

Tech as Pro Sports: Massive Hiring Packages, Attrition, and the Meta Reorg (109:10–118:08)

• Competitive recruitment in big tech likened to pro athlete contracts, with massive compensation (e.g., Meta’s $100M+ offers to AI talent).
• Instability as “wonderkids” are brought in, then quickly exit, while existing staff get disgruntled.
• Meta’s attempts to catch up in AI described as “desperate, swinging in the dark.”

Existential Questions for Big Tech & Business Models (115:52–121:22)

• Facebook/Meta and Google’s relevance questioned, as their core ad model becomes increasingly obsolete in the AI race.
• OpenAI’s move toward greed is transparent but perhaps better than pretending at altruism.

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6. Safety, Open Source, & Legal Frontiers (132:16–140:35)

Fair Use, Book Lawsuits, and AI Training Data (132:16–135:57)

• Authors' settlement with Anthropics likely affirms fair use for AI model training.
• Massive valuation hikes for labs like Anthropics reinforce industry consolidation concerns.

Issues of AI “Safety” & Transparency Debate (135:57–139:30)

• Panel splits on whether Anthropics’ vocal “AI safety” agenda is genuinely meaningful or mostly PR.

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7. AI for Social Action & Surveillance (139:54–148:17)

Face Recognition Used Against ICE Officers (139:54–144:56)

• Activists are now using AI-driven facial recognition against law enforcement wearing masks during raids—illustrating both the democratization and ambiguity of AI power.
• Raises questions on public accountability, civil rights, and the future of digital activism.

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Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Karen Hao, on the founders’ ambitions:

  “There was always this egotistical element — we need to get to where we’re going first, in order to have some kind of field or industry defining impact.” (12:22)

• Jeff Jarvis, on AGI’s definition:

  “Is it a vessel to which they put their own views?” (09:08)

• Leo Laporte, on Netflix:

  “Algorithm movies usually exhibit easy to follow story beats... because you’re not really watching, you’re doing the laundry.” (90:23)

• Harper Reed, on switching LLMs:

  “For a while we solidified on Claude Code, and now I think we’re back to bouncing around models again — that’s just going to be the cycle.” (63:57)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:11–52:02 — Karen Hao interview: OpenAI deep dive, AGI, industry critique
• 58:01–68:27 — Harper Reed: LLM coding workflows, application layer, coding with Claude
• 71:02–75:52 — Open source AI and global innovation shift
• 78:33–88:57 — Google antitrust outcome and impact of AI as competition
• 90:23–99:29 — Netflix, media algorithms, and the new cultural landscape
• 109:10–118:08 — Meta’s big AI hiring strategy and internal fallout
• 132:16–135:57 — Legal status of using books for AI training; author's settlement
• 139:54–144:56 — Facial recognition used to unmask ICE officers; AI for activism

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Conclusion

This episode offers a multifaceted, insider-driven look at the current AI landscape—highlighting both the mythmaking and the real power dynamics behind the leading companies. From the secretive genesis and philosophy wars at OpenAI, through the emerging monopolization of AI research, to the daily practices of developers using LLMs, Intelligent Machines #835 is a snapshot of the field in motion. Cultural, technical, and ethical issues are woven together, delivering both skeptical critique and practical strategies for navigating a rapidly evolving, imperial AI world.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It'S time for intelligent machines we've got a big show for you karen howe is our guest her book empire of ai is a bestseller it tells the inside story of what's happening what happened and what might happen at openai you're gonna love that then harper reed joins us for a fun episode we'll talk about how he uses claude code to create a nickname for himself that and a whole lot more coming up next on image.

[Harper Reed]

Podcasts you love from people.

[Leo Laporte]

You trust this is twit this is intelligent machines episode eight hundred and thirty five recorded wednesday september third twenty twenty five glitchlord it's time for intelligent machines the show we cover the latest in ai robotics and all the bijouterie surrounding you i'm gonna use a different thesaurus entry for is it gee gaws jeff from now on gee gaws that are surrounding you in your everyday life that is on my right jeff jarvis professor of emeritus of journalistic innovation at the craig newmark graduate school of journalism craig newmark lay the craig newmark jingle in after in post production oh no i.

[Paris Martineau]

Guess no it'll be here.

[Leo Laporte]

State university and suny stony brook where he's about to get to work because the semester is about to begin except you you were do you go to do you actually go anywhere or you just no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You sit in your the entire world sees me with this microphone it says whoa you got a nice microphone podcasting.

[Leo Laporte]

Babe zooming you know somebody's a podcaster when they have a nice microphone i.

[Paris Martineau]

Was gonna say you guys are more confident than i am i hide this thing anytime i'm not in this show.

[Karen Howe]

Because i don't want to hide i.

[Paris Martineau]

Don'T want to stunt on people like.

[Leo Laporte]

That nerds that is paris martineau consumer reports investigative journalist par excellence i will.

[Paris Martineau]

Not be here for the rest of the show whenever this is airing but i'm here now for this interview okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah i should mention we're pre recording this on labor day because karen howe our very special guest is in hong kong i don't know what that has to do with anything actually because she's.

[Paris Martineau]

Very busy she's got a incredibly busy book tour schedule because this is a fantastic book that she wrote and despite the fact that it came out how long ago now karen it came out your schedule just keeps getting busier and.

[Leo Laporte]

Busier she has done hundreds of interviews and she is hundreds more before she sleeps she'll be going to australia in a couple of days santa clara berkeley amsterdam that's in the netherlands kids new york chicago saint louis oh my gosh look at this bangalore she's going to meet up with jeff and munchen karen howe is the author of a book that is getting a lot of attention called empire of ai you may have read her articles about openai and the mit technology review where she is a senior editor covering ai formerly i guess as senior editor formerly yeah yeah she's too busy now to have a job anyway no her job is you know the book anyway karen it's great to have you welcome to intelligent machines thank.

[Karen Howe]

You so much for having me and thank you so much for doing this.

[Leo Laporte]

All three well every day we're very excited because all three of us have read the book and have learned a lot about what is a surprisingly secretive organization how did you get in in the first place.

[Karen Howe]

Yeah i mean back when i first profiled openai i embedded within the company for three days in twenty nineteen and then pub the profile in twenty twenty they invited me in because they were quite different than they are now and that they were still trying to hold on to their original conception as a nonprofit and trying to be trying to project transparency and so i at the time was really curious to just understand what they were working on and what was going on because there were a series of changes that were happening in twenty nineteen that piqued my interest one of them being that they had just developed gpt two a couple generations before chatgpt sam altman just officially became ceo and they got a billion dollars from microsoft and i just told openai it feels like there's a lot going on and you might want to consider reintroducing yourself to the public and i think mit tech review could be a really great publication for doing so because we focus a lot on what you focus on which is the fundamental research that's happening within the field so we can talk more in depth about some of the scientific and technical concepts that you're working on and they really liked that idea so they brought.

[Leo Laporte]

Me in they changed their mind instantly.

[Karen Howe]

Didn'T they they didn't change it instantly.

[Leo Laporte]

But almost instantly regretted.

[Paris Martineau]

Security guards kind of playing relay and doing inter while.

[Karen Howe]

You were there they did yeah so i learned while i was reporting the book not when i was reporting the profile oh that my face was given to the security guard as like a look out for this person and make.

[Paris Martineau]

Sure she does not see journalist poking.

[Leo Laporte]

Around this is during your three day.

[Karen Howe]

Embedding which was during my yeah so i was actually really surprised in hindsight that they were already nervous that early because i didn't really know what i was going to write about like i was sort of just coming into the org really open minded thinking let me just ask them lots of questions about what they think they're doing and try and see what's interesting but apparently i i don't know what i did that kind of set off their concerns so early that made them give the security guard my face but reverent perhaps one.

[Paris Martineau]

Of the things i think it is very interesting and that you do really well in the book is kind of show how there is this disconnect that is now fairly obvious now but there's been this disconnect from the start with openai between how they positioned the company to the public and how they acted in private and i feel like one of the scenes you recount in the book like during those three days you were embedded in twenty nineteen is you just like you just said trying to ask the executives questions about how they view the company and they seem to even kind of fumble is the wrong word but they had a hard i.

[Karen Howe]

Think actually that is articulated pretty good word yeah fumble i mean i remember so i didn't actually write this in the book but when i was re listening to my interviews from that time to write the book i had forgotten that one of the first first questions that i asked greg brockman he paused for around ten seconds and it was a it was a really basic question i was like i think i just asked why are you spending billions of dollars building agi and then he gave me an answer and then i was like i don't fully know if that answered the question could you maybe say it a different way and then he paused for like ten seconds and then ilya went i'll take this one so they did really fumble with some basic questions like i was pretty sur surprised because i was like wait a minute i'm i don't think i'm asking i'm asking like the most generic questions here just articulate why you're doing what you do and what you're doing and there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was a scene in the conference room was so telling i thought yeah where maybe it was just early days maybe they weren't media trained yet though i don't think it was that i think they really were confused about what they were doing together they were they were using highfalutin terms and you asked them to define them and they couldn't define.

[Karen Howe]

Them yeah i think what's what i realized is they had spent so much time only articulating what they were doing to other people either in the ai world or in the tech world so they had at least some kind of shared worldview or lingo around these things so they didn't have to i think they were used to defending themselves but defending themselves to it specific audience not to the public and so when i started asking them okay now explain to the public what you're doing that was when it started tripping them up do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You think that they inside openai or inside the fraternity sorority of ai or cult depending on how you look at it do they have a shared definition.

[Karen Howe]

Of agi no that's the thing yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That'S where you started going after them for it and did you ever come away thinking that there is some commonality or is it a is it is it a is it a vessel to which they put their own views i.

[Karen Howe]

Mean that's the the problem with the common definition is generally people would agree that agi means human level intelligence in machines but then no one agrees on what human intelligence is right so so the problem is not necessarily that there isn't a definition the problem is that the definition is still meaningless because there is just no scientific consensus beyond the world of ai just globally across disciplines there's no scientific consensus around how to quantify human intelligence and in fact the quantification of human intelligence has a very dark history and lots of ulterior motives for why people have sought to do that and so i think openai was very readily willing to acknowledge that agi had a very swishy definition but they didn't see that as a problem whereas i thought well if you don't have a clear direction of where you're going it seems like that makes your foundations inherently a little bit weak because you're supercharging a quest towards who knows where with billions of dollars and to your point it did become a vessel for people's own projections systems systems of belief because different people thought that human intelligence meant different things and that it would manifest in different ways and it would its implications arriving at agi would have fundamentally different implications for the world and that's why through the course of openai's history there's just been so so much infighting because different ideological camps develop splintering over these definitions and then they start you know biting at each other's heads trying to get the company to go one way or another based on their.

[Leo Laporte]

Views you arrived at a really seminal point i mean you arrived as the company they've gone through many changes they're still going through changes but they had you know originally formed sam altman partnered with elon musk to kind of develop ai in an open fashion so that microsoft and google mostly google wouldn't have you know dominance in the field but by the time you got there as you say they raised a lot of money from microsoft suddenly they still don't have a really credible product even you talk about the demos that they did of the early gpts and and how trivial they were and how unimpressed people were and bill gates was funny what is this but it was already starting to change as you say sam had become ceo they had raised money they realized it was going to be a much more expensive process they were at the point where they were starting to think differently about what they were doing would you say that's true this is.

[Karen Howe]

Interesting so i i have sort of changed my views about whether they evolved or whether actually they kind of stayed the same in terms of what they were doing so initially i felt okay they're a non profit they are they were trying to be more transparent more collaborative and then there was this shift this inflection point when they suddenly get money and it starts moving them more in a profit oriented direction but now in hindsight it was quite clear when they started that they wanted it to be a non profit not necessarily just out of altruism but still out of ego of we want to signal to the world that we're the good guys right and we're going to continue on this quest to reshape and remold this technology and so there was always this egotistical element to it and there was this deep seated desire of we need to get to where we're going first wherever that is in order to have some kind of field or industry defining impact because they very much exist in an ecosystem and a belief system of winner takes all that's just how silicon valley operates so in a sense did they actually change when they got money or did they actually always have the same belief that drove them to then seek money and then continue down you know the natural course the natural path that an egotistical project would lead you down so from yeah so i think over time i started to realize maybe they weren't so pure in the beginning there was already a little bit of corruption in the beginning in terms of their concerns conception of why they were doing open ai and that's what then plotted them down the path that we.

[Leo Laporte]

See today but as you tell the story it did start to come to them that they were going to need massive amounts of compute and massive amounts of money so they didn't know that from the beginning or did they that's.

[Karen Howe]

That'S true so they i don't think they fully realized the degree of money that they needed i think they're was some conception at least from ilya's side that they would need to scale their systems to some degree but interestingly at the time they probably couldn't even have conceived technically of the degree of scale that they now operate under because it was not yet possible the techniques for training models on such vast amounts of computer chips had actually not been invented.

[Leo Laporte]

Yet they weren't yet even sure that transformers were the way to go right that was something they came to over.

[Karen Howe]

Time yes exactly so they sort of hit upon both the software and the hardware that they wanted to use about a year and a half two years into the organization so they initially had more vague ideas of they wanted to scale the existing techniques to some degree but they just didn't know which technique they wanted to scale and to what degree they wanted to scale and when they realized okay and also transformers it took a while for like when transformers came out there were a couple of researchers who were like yep that's the one like we want to do that but it did actually take the organization a little bit longer to go all in on the transformers sutzkever was a.

[Leo Laporte]

Believer from the very beginning right yeah.

[Karen Howe]

And that's it was he's a fascinating.

[Leo Laporte]

Character in your book he is he's a prophet not a coder which is interesting what do you think of him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'M really eager that here we are just four people sitting at the end of the bar don't pay attention to.

[Leo Laporte]

These mics in that case i want a drink i don't know well it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A little early for kara right now but but the three main characters here setska rubrak and altman i'd love to hear in hindsight how you look at them just for your own who you'd want to be on an elevator with and not.

[Karen Howe]

I think i would definitely want to be in an elevator with sutskever why i think he's the most interesting and complex of the three i think altman is he's a politician like that's the best way to think about.

[Leo Laporte]

Him comes off kind of skeezy in your in your book he's kind of.

[Karen Howe]

He'S he's really good at telling stories and being persuasive and getting people to he persuades people to either donate gobs of money or to donate their talent towards whatever vision he wants to achieve and he's very very good at that but the yeah the controversial aspect of him as a character is that he will tell different things to different people as part of his persuasion tactics and so over time depending on whether or not someone feels like what he said aligned ultimately with his actions they either end up becoming really really gung ho about his leadership or feeling like he's the devil incarnate that somehow he manipulated them into doing something fundamentally different from what they wanted to achieve so he's the politician brockman is interesting in that he is he yeah i think the way that i describe him in the book is like he sort of exudes this anxious energy of wanting to be remembered in history and everything that he does and says you can kind of pick up that he's sort of doing it in part because he wants to be judged well in the eyes of his.

[Paris Martineau]

I think you said attributed to him that he's like oh no one ever remembers a cto i can't be a cto forever.

[Karen Howe]

Yeah he says at this retreat in tahoe name a famous cto people sort of fail to do it other than like steve wozniak people sort of fail to do it and then he proves the point that he was trying to make like no one remembers the cto and then like a year later he becomes he switches from cto to the president of the company.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let me ask you another way if you had a friend who was going to work at openai and could report in the time when they were all there it could report to any one of the three who who should they report to who's a good boss or.

[Karen Howe]

I would still say sutskever wow interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But he's a little he's a little wacky too isn't he he's the shitty.

[Karen Howe]

Yeah no no by any stretch of the imagination like an average guy right i don't think any of them are.

[Paris Martineau]

Average guys none of them yeah well.

[Karen Howe]

The thing about sudskever that i think the way i would describe him is he's also a visionary like altman he does have a lot of he has very strong convictions but whereas altman is sort of he's not his convictions aren't in the technical realm like he's thinking about like how to move resources and what kind of relationships to build to get to where they're going sutskever has always had a very keen scientific and technical conviction of he's like i think we need to do this from the beginning i think we need to scale these models and it's just a matter of figuring out which one to scale so he has that kind of visionary aspect and he's highly cerebral and like many highly cerebral people he's also a highly emotional person without realizing that he's highly emotional thinks that he actually makes sense decisions purely rationally but actually he probably makes decisions almost entirely emotionally he's.

[Leo Laporte]

A first principles kind of guy yeah.

[Karen Howe]

That'S the way i would describe it so he sort of he often exists almost in a realm in an intellectual realm that seems a little bit detached from reality like he's just like constantly thinking in his mind about different future possibilities and then trying to implement it into in a scientific work but when i interviewed people about you know the three these three people and who was the best leader slash manager people would pretty universally say sudskever if they had to pick they would have to pick sudskever because altman was he's a terrible manager and altman has said it himself he's not a manager he is just the visionary he's good at getting people pointing to a direction and getting people to move there but he cannot operationalize things and you can see that with the way that openai has been changing leadership recently he installed a new ceo of applications or openai installed a new ceo of applications that's doing the actual operationalization whereas altman is continuing to do the fundraising and brockman is also terrible terrible manager very bad at working with other people he's very much a solo coder he and the way people described him was he kind of going back to like he's like he has this anxious energy of wanting to prove himself in the eyes of history he would will just like relentlessly code and run towards a specific goalpost that you give him but he won't look up from the coding to see if the goalpost has changed whether they need to reevaluate where they're going and people burn out when they work with him because they'll go to sleep and wake up and the entire code base has changed because brockman has stayed up all night coding one of those and no one knows people can't keep up with what he's doing so it's just kind of impossible to work with him in general not just work for him which is why brockman hasn't had reports at openai since maybe two years into the company yeah so then that just leaves suds kevin.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope you're enjoying this interview with karen howe we recorded it on labor day a couple of days ago that's why paris is here we'll continue with intelligent machines in just a bit harper reed will be filling in for paris and the rest of the show but we have more with karen lots more to ask her and talk about in just a bit so stay here you're watching intelligent machines are our show today brought to you by threat locker love these guys threatlocker makes zero trust easy you know ransomware is killing businesses worldwide you know that if you listen to our shows but threatlocker can actually stand between you and the bad guys prevent you from becoming the next victim threatlocker's zero trust platform and that's the key takes a proactive deny by default approach those three words carrying a lot of weight but they really it really works deny by default in other words threat locker blocks every action that you haven't explicitly authorized and the beauty of that it protects you from known threats but it also protects you from completely unknown zero days threats you know nothing about because they get there and they can't do anything that's why threatlocker is trusted by global enterprises like jetblue the port of vancouver threat locker shields you from zero day exploits and supply chain attacks and in the whole process provides you complete audit trails for compliance so it's a fantastic solution and we're seeing this more and more we were talking about this yesterday on security now cybercriminals are turning to malvertizing now you need more than just traditional security tools how does it work attackers create convincing fake websites impersonating popular brands like ai tools and software applications distributed through social media ads hijacked accounts then they use legitimate ad networks to deliver malware in the ads affecting anyone who browses even if they're browsing on a work system that's why it's such a huge threat traditional security tools often completely miss these attacks because they use the attacks use fileless payloads they run in memory they exploit trusted services they bypass filters you know but that's why zero trust is so incredible threatlocker's innovative ring fencing technology strengthens endpoint defense by controlling what applications and scripts can access or execute without permission they can't do anything it contains potential threats even if those malicious ads successfully reach the device threat locker works across all industries it supports pcs and macs provides twenty four seven us based support and enables comprehensive visibility and control jack senisap who's director of it infrastructure and security at redner's market says when it comes to threat locker the team stands by their product threat locker's onboarding phase was a very good experience and they were very hands on threat locker was able to help me and guide me this is jack speaking to where i am in our environment today end quote get unprecedented protection quickly easily and cost effectively with threatlocker visit threatlocker dot com twit to get a free thirty day trial and learn more about how threatlocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance that's threatlocker dot com twit and we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines now back to our interview we're talking to karen howe she's the author of a new book that just came well it came out in the spring but it is a huge bestseller called empire of ai dreams and nightmares in sam altman's openai and i didn't mention this but miss howe graduated from mit with a master's in mechanical engineering she coded one of the first bachelor's all right bs it's mit it's mit you round up from mit yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You round up it's a it's a.

[Leo Laporte]

Masters anywhere else also and was an engineer one of the first google x companies so she's she's got a strong technical background as well as being an excellent writer and it is a fascinating book i have to say though starting from the very beginning and going all the way through there is it even in the name there is a element of real skepticism about ai you call it empire of ai in the same way that you know the imperialist nations conquered countries in the twentieth say nineteenth and twentieth century it's an imperialist empire of ai are you not a fan none of us can quite figure it out we were talking before this show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It'S a superbly reported book yeah the.

[Leo Laporte]

Reporting is so good now that we're at the bar yeah back to the bar yeah.

[Karen Howe]

Yeah so no i'm not a fan and i'm and i want to be clear i'm not what i'm not a fan of i'm not a fan of the current industry and the paradigm that they've chosen for developing this technology i'm not critiquing all of ai because ai as a discipline and as a science is vast and there are lots of different interesting things that are happening in that world and there's a lot of really fascinating applications of it as well that i think are largely very beneficial but in the current paradigm what the ai industry is doing is the scale at all costs modus operandi where they're taking these models they're saying we're going to pump historic amounts of data into these models and we're going to train them on historically sized supercomputers and we have gotten to the point now where we're talking about they've already colloquially scraped the whole internet mostly the english language internet so they've already tapped out an extraordinary amount of the data that has been produced by humans on the internet over the last couple decades and they are now talking about building supercomputers the size of manhattan that could potentially use the energy draw of all of manhattan so that is what i'm critical of and that's what i call imperial like behavior is they're seizing resources that are not their own they're literally starting to seize land all around the world to build these data centers and supercomputers they exploit an extraordinary amount of labor both in the production of the technology and the effect that the technology ends up having on society in that it's creating automation pressure on the job market and therefore eroding away workers bargaining rights they monopolized knowledge production so over the last ten years what we've seen is the industry is so resource rich that they have hired up all of the top ai researchers in the world which means that ai research as a discipline is becoming distorted by the agenda of these companies the same way that you could imagine climate science would be distorted by oil and gas companies if most climate scientists in the world were bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry and that is a primary feature of empires of old is that they controlled the knowledge what was even acknowledged as knowledge and the point was always to produce only the knowledge that continued to fortify the imperial expansion not to undermine the empire and then the last thing that i highlight in terms of parallels is the empire is always engaged in this existential competition narrative of there are evil empires in the world so we must be an empire but a good empire in order to be strong enough to beat back the evil empire and they quite literally engage in some of the old religious rhetoric that was used in empire competition as well of as the good empire we're bringing progress and modernity to all of humanity so if we win humanity gets to go to heaven but if we lose in the evil empire wins humanity goes to hell and like that's like like they are literally using that kind of terminology and it can't get more on the nose than.

[Paris Martineau]

That i think the i mean i think all points you just made are incredibly important but i want to go back to this point you made about the monopolization of ai research you get into this the book as well as you've spoken about this on various podcasts in your reporting but i think like how this trend towards commercialization that kind of began in twenty ten twenty thirteen how that has changed the sort of ai that is being built and kind of monopolized fields of ai research taking it from being broad to being very specific you talk a little about that and what we've lost or are not.

[Karen Howe]

Funding when i started covering ai in twenty seventeen twenty eighteen there was so much interesting research that was happening in the field and even then people were already complaining that the diversity of research ideas had shrunk because way back there were two dominant approaches the data driven deep learning approach and then the symbolic driven old fashioned ai approach of encoding information in databases and that branch the symbolic branch was already kind of dying on the vine and most people were glomming onto the deep learning branch so there was already some sadness within the fields of the two major branches one had almost entirely atrophied and there was already a narrowing in the field and its focus but within deep learning there was so much fascinating stuff happening there was research around how to build deep learning systems that actually used teeny tiny amounts of data or teeny tiny amounts of computational resources or neuro symbolic approaches that we're trying to combine resuscitate some of the old symbolic approaches and combine them with deep learning approaches and that was part of my favorite part of my job was just talking with researchers who had really interesting new ideas to try and push the bounds of what was possible with deep learning and basically when openai came out with gpt two and then gpt three the rest of the industry started not only indexing on deep learning but indexing on transformers which is just one neural network architecture in the vast sea the vast zoo of different types of neural networks and that is like i don't i can't think of a good analogy of like how how dramatically more narrow that is but it's like you're taking an entire discipline and picking one horse like out of a thousand out of a million i don't know and basically after that because all the researchers were moving out of academia and working at these companies everyone was only working with transformers and everyone was only trying to like their research has diminished down to how do we optimize the transformer how do we get this transformer to do just a little bit more with a little bit more data or a little bit more compute and yeah that's like so remarkably narrow maybe a good analogy is like they are all just reading one page of a book in an entire library yeah or maybe like maybe like one sentence like they're just all trying to optimize a single sentence in an entire library.

[Paris Martineau]

Which is a shame because there's so much interesting and transformative research in this field in a very very broad field it's a shame to have all of the capital and resources go to one sentence of one book let me play.

[Leo Laporte]

Devil'S advocate devil's advocate which is my favorite kind of advocacy they thought they seem to have thought sutzkever and the others that they had found the philosopher's stone that they had figured out that if the way to get to successful agi and superintelligence is we just scale transformers they're miraculous they do it they do more than we ever thought they're miraculous yes it's gonna take every paperclip in the entire universe to make it happen but that's the path that's the road and i can understand that from their point of view they've seen the future and any deviation is a dead end it's religion then well and there are people like gary marcus and we talked to stephen wolfram and others i.

[Paris Martineau]

Love all the gary marcus details in your book about how much openai hates.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Scary marker it brings him so happy.

[Leo Laporte]

But they've argued for you know well what about symbolic ai and other kinds of ai but we've been through ai winners before especially with symbolic ai transformers are pretty amazing they're pretty miraculous they.

[Karen Howe]

Are they are a very fascinating piece of technology and they do they have done things that we could not have predicted never imagined yeah not so said one thing there's sort of two thoughts that i have one is like in general i think there were clear signs from the very beginning when they were scaling transformers that there were weaknesses to the transformer as well so so maybe you could argue in the beginning they were like oh let's just see what happens but at some point you have to start being critical of their decision to continue just let's see what happens when there was already so much they.

[Leo Laporte]

Should have known better you think yeah.

[Karen Howe]

Oh for sure there was like plenty of research happening at the time that like deep learning not just the transformer just deep learning neural networks in general do have all of these challenges when it comes to being generally robust and able to generalize like even with the entire internet ported into these transformers you can see still have it's still really hard to say that they've actually generalized i mean the moment you start speaking another language to chatgpt it starts to break down like that's not exactly generalizability and of course there's infinite examples of people stress testing these chatbots with various brain teasers and math problems and whatever and it still breaks down and so it's like to what degree how much more do you want to put into the this approach and not explore other approaches when there's so much evidence even from the beginning that there are just certain limitations to what transformers will get you but the other question that's i think more fundamental is and i think this is perhaps a broader critique of just the general worldview of ai research in general is that the ai discipline has long fixated on advancing on achieving technical progress without necessarily having a specific reason for why they're doing that yeah because we can't and the more that i think when i first started covering ai i was very enamored with the thought experiments that i think a lot of scientists in ai research are enamored with which is like can machines think right can we really you know it would just it would just be remarkable from a scientific and technical achievement if you could actually recreate intelligence and computers but the more that i've covered it and the more that i've watched the industry play out the way that it has the more i've felt that actually the this these aggressive moves by the industry to just continue trying to advance ai with blinkers on for what it's actually doing to the world is actually kind of derivative of this mentality of let's just keep pushing pushing pushing for pure science rather than actually like pushing for innovation for humanity like actually looking at what are the challenges we need to solve and being more targeted about how to develop ai to tackle those types of problems and so yeah that's my other i guess response to like did they should we give them some credit for seeing transformers and just like indexing on this approach it's like well i mean they didn't really have a clear idea of what they were going to what were they actually trying to help humanity overcome with transformers like they never really had a clear idea of that and if they had then they would have also tested out a lot of other different approaches because there are just much more efficient approaches for certain types of things.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just add follow and follow up and then you guys when you were at the wall street journal you covered china you're in china right you're in hong kong right now and of course that's the straw man that they're all using to say well we've got to do this because if we don't the chinese are going to eat our lunch is that true.

[Karen Howe]

Yeah well i mean yeah so what i was saying about the existential competition between good versus evil empires yeah so china is conceived of as the evil empire in this narrative and what i always say is i mean literally look at the track record that this argument has gotten us silicon valley has said if you do not regulate us and then you regulate china through export controls then china's progress will be totally obliterated and the us will dominate and we will successfully widen the gap between us and chinese ai and silicon valley will have a liberalizing force on the world and we will see democracy strengthen everywhere and it'll be amazing and literally the opposite has happened you could not write the story to be more oppositional to that argument right the gap has actually shrunk dramatically between the us and china as washington has implemented exactly this approach and silicon valley has had an illiberalizing force around the world and democracies are capitulating everywhere you know and like the us itself is capitulating as a democracy so at that point like you just have to look at the evidence and say okay clearly this argument like the only winner in this scenario was silicon valley so at the end of the day it is a self serving argument.

[Paris Martineau]

Totally i i read a lot of books tech journalism books based on my job or just keeping the rest of the general industry and most of them are not very good that's what i've realized or i guess a lot of them are fine or good and i was astounded by i mean just how fantastic on every level your book was and i feel i was talking to leo and jeff before the show and i feel like one of the things that always sticks sticks out to me when you read like a really well done journalism book is you are quite adept at showing rather than telling throughout the book and of like complicated details and factors and kind of weaving it all in through this through your narrative based on reporting and i do think this is one of the reasons why some context for listeners is around the time that karen's book came out a number of other openai books came out i don't know if it was were there two others at the exact same time or was it three do you.

[Karen Howe]

Recall there was there was one on the same day yeah there was one.

[Paris Martineau]

The same day and there was like a couple of other like then there.

[Leo Laporte]

Was also she remembers that one tweeting.

[Paris Martineau]

At the same it was like it was kind of a crowded field but karen's immediately stood out from the pack i mean my own small anecdote i remember like the week i think it came out i was trying to get a copy at my bookstore and i asked the person at the front desk in a bookstore here in new york and they're like no that's sold out everybody's coming in for it and i think it's because you did such a great job reporting this out and then also reporting out the sort of details and scenes to really tell this story and to really show it too i mean what can you talk us through a little bit of what your reporting process was like for this and how you got so many in the room.

[Karen Howe]

Details yeah first of all thank you i i i really appreciate it because i was actually quite conflicted while i was writing it like how much i should show versus tell and sometimes i felt like i spent too much time showing rather than telling and i was like maybe people actually want me to just like say exactly what it is.

[Paris Martineau]

It'S the essential dilemma i feel like you always hear from editors as a journalist it's like which one should i be doing and they're always like show show show and you're like i don't know don't you just want them to.

[Karen Howe]

Hear the thing yeah just like get the message yeah and you know like some people have mentioned that my book is like really i mean it is it's really long and like part of it is because i spend so much time showing rather than telling but i appreciate that you appreciated that yeah in terms of the reporting process i mean i basically like so when i first started working on the book sam altman had not yet been fired and rehired i did not know that that was going to happen and when it did it fundamentally changed my conception of the book so before that happened i was actually not really planning on focusing on a lot of insider details within the company i wanted to use openai as a main character just just like externally looking at like what they had done and the ripple effects that it had had on industry based on the reporting that i had already done and maybe have just like a couple insider moments like when i was at the company and what i learned when i was there and and so on but then once the the board crisis happened it totally changed my reporting plan and i realized that i actually just needed to report out the full inside story of what had happened and ultimately what had led to that point that was your.

[Leo Laporte]

Scoop no one else has covered that so well i mean that was really.

[Karen Howe]

The big scoop yeah yeah and so i basically i just made a giant spreadsheet of everyone that had ever worked at openai and i just started cold contacting as many of them as possible hundreds of interviews yeah and and and initially i thought that no one would respond to me because i had sort of been marked from the very beginning by openai as like the journalist have.

[Leo Laporte]

Your picture miss howe yeah.

[Karen Howe]

And it turned out that actually a lot of people were really interested in talking for precisely that reason because they many people so the company executives or i guess the official company position on my mit tech review profile was that it was it was horrible it completely misrepresented the organization i had an agenda and many of the people that i interviewed were like oh the reason why i picked up your call is because i really liked your profile i thought it was super accurate yeah and so they kind.

[Paris Martineau]

Of made the mistake of sending out an email about your piece which i feel like always does more harm than good despite the sorry they had sent.

[Karen Howe]

Out multiple emails so it wasn't sam wasn't the only one that emailed and suddenly made everyone aware they there were actually multiple emails when i came they were like she's coming like be on your best behavior and then there was another email right before my piece published being like the piece is coming out tomorrow we think it'll be a good one there might be some things that we don't like and then there was sam's email after being like this was bad wow so you were very present.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean it was a great intro for all of the employees of openai.

[Karen Howe]

To you yeah yeah it is true yeah so there were a number of employees that were like oh yeah i know you like i would be happy to talk to you because i think you will do a really good job of accurately portraying this organization and getting beyond what the company narrative is a lot a lot of the people who talked to me were quite concerned about making sure that the record of what happened was not being portrayed the way that yeah the official company narrative wanted it to be portrayed because they were like that's that's just not reality and they wanted to have some more high fidelity version that existed as the historical record and interestingly you know like a lot of people also were driven to talk because they felt that they had they had witnessed history so there was there was an element of hubris in it as well of like and they and many of them had actually taken detailed notes during their time at openai because they would talk to one another being like we think we're witnessing history we should probably probably document what we're seeing which is part of the reason also why i was able to get so many like scenic details and things that people said because there were people who pulled out their notes from all of these different meetings and god bless them yeah so i want to second.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris it's a superbly reported book and really impressive i'm curious i have one more question but i'm going to cheat and make it a two parter i'm very curious what you thought as chatgpt five was coming out knowing all that you know about the company and how that was handled and the second part of that is that is that there are some who are saying there's a there's a pullback even from altman less emphasis on agi less emphasis on the on the on the on the mystical future and so i'm curious first what your thoughts were at a tactical level about the chatgpt five release and second whether you buy agi.

[Karen Howe]

I guess i'll answer the first the second one first which is yeah i don't because of the lack of definitional clarity i mean if we narrowly defined human intelligence and just said it was like systems that are really good at persuading people maybe like if we if we made that definition then be like oh yeah we've already reached agi like these systems are extremely persuaded persuasive but yeah i just i don't really buy into the way like ultimately i think to understand agi the concept it should be understood as a rhetorical tool for these companies to just continue waving around a nebulous term that they can project whatever meaning they need onto so that they can continue justifying why they need more and more and more and more resources and the first question gpt five i i think i i sort of had a a couple thoughts one was i wondered whether it would actually come out because gpt five's development has been so troubled within the company that i was like maybe they actually scrapped the release because it's just not meeting the bar and the other thing that i thought was if it does come out i wonder what kinds of demos they're going to do to try and really make a splash because this is openai is sort of the master of splashy demos that's their their entire history has been about figuring out how to engineer the most impressive demo based on faulty technology and yeah when it came out and did not was just not it wasn't received very well i wasn't surprised because there had been so much concern already within the organization that they were running out of rope when it came to their specific scaling paradigm interesting we've been talking to.

[Leo Laporte]

Karen house she's the author of a book came out this spring but it is still a bestseller called it's very hot empire of ai it is of course a history of openai and fascinating lots of fascinating details but it also has a a moral to tell a story to tell in fact i'm going to quote you from the essay you wrote this spring in the new york times this last paragraph i think kind of puts a ribbon on it ai tools karen wrote that help everyone cannot arise from a vision of development that demands the capitulation of a majority to the self serving agenda of a few transitioning to a more equitable and sustainable ai future won't be easy it will require everyone journalists civil society researchers policymakers citizens to push back against the tech giants produce thoughtful government regulation wherever possible and invest in more smaller scale ai technologies when people rise empires fall and i don't know if i'm putting words in your mouth but you wrote them so i guess it's fair to do that karen thank you so much for your time i really appreciate it i know you're about to continue a murderous schedule of tour dates in fact if people want to know where you can see miss howe speak go to her website karenhow dot com and you'll be amazed sorry let's put the d in there karen d howe some other karen howe has the other one i know dang that how rude of her yeah karen d howe d karen howe no no karen d howe dot com you can see all the places she's going to be go see her buy tickets buy the book and read the book because i think it is an important story for us all to understand much better thank you karen d howe for joining us on intelligent machines thank you.

[Karen Howe]

So much for having me really appreciate.

[Leo Laporte]

It thank you karen howe we're going to let paris go to yonkers right now she is in yonkers but i'm thrilled to say harper reed will be joining us an ai expert himself he has an ai company and is the king of vibe coding we've talked to him before we'll get to the other ai stories and other stories with jeff and harper reed our guest guest co host i guess in just a minute before we do though i want to talk about our sponsor monarch money do you want to feel organized and confident in your finances most people try this see if you can can't name all their financial accounts or even harder what they're worth if you don't know if you've been putting it off then monarch is for you this is what i use and i love it monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that combines your entire financial life into one clean interface on your laptop on your phone it's on the web it's got they've got apps it's built for people with busy lives monarch does all the heavy lifting you link your accounts it could do it in minutes securely and safely and then monarch will stay connected and get clear information it'll present you with data visuals beautiful graphs it'll automatically do smart categorization of your spending it does the budgeting for me you get real control over your money you don't need to ever touch a spreadsheet again or pull out a statement from the bank and enter in the data remember we used to do that not anymore monarch money makes it so simple and you know what the easier it is to keep an eye on what's going on in your finances the better a job you'll do don't leave money on the table it's easy to become complacent you know you're young you're getting a good salary you don't need to track every dollar but ignoring your finances entirely can cost you take it from me when you get older it's really important that you save properly you put money aside for retirement or whatever your dreams are getting married buying a house you can miss opportunities to save more to invest smarter to hit your financial goals faster information is power monarch's not just another finance app it's a tool real professionals and experts love and i love i use it every single day to see where i stand it was named the best budgeting app of twenty twenty five by the wal journal forbes said it's the best app for couples it was named in cnbc's top fintech companies in the world list and there is a passionate reddit community of over thirty four thousand users and it and they're not just there to help themselves i gotta tell you monarch money listens to them they actually you in that reddit community they get to shape how the product is developed money can be the number one reason couples break up but it can also bring them together if you use monarch monarch brings people together monarch gives your partner full access to your shared dashboard including linked accounts budgets goals and spending activity all in one place at no extra cost you can also give your financial advisor access and that doesn't cost you extra either get some good financial advice without taking the time to collate all the information for them don't let financial opportunities slip through the cracks use our code image at monarchmoney dot com in your browser for half off your first year that's fifty percent off your first year go to monarchmoney dot com and use the code i am highly recommended monarchmoney dot com don't forget that code by the way i am all right welcome harper reed great to see you my friend harper reed is an ai genius at twenty three eighty nine ai he's an entrepreneur a hacker technologist his blog is great reading in fact in fact that's how i we've had harper on many times in the past but i reconnected with you after your blog post on how you vibe code in fact it's become kind of how i vibe has.

[Harper Reed]

That changed at all i introduced a new thing recently of having it do what they call the careful review of its code after it writes one of the steps and i don't think it it is a longer process this is my favorite image by the way very.

[Leo Laporte]

Proud of that image nighttime cogen only.

[Harper Reed]

Vibes yeah but what i found is.

[Leo Laporte]

That this is the this is the piece that i read it back in back in may right i think or.

[Harper Reed]

No yeah and i just found that there was so much work that was happening and then people talk about it as oh it's good up until the ninety percent or whatever and i so i spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do that and i just have another process that is like review your code that's basically what it is you mean manually review.

[Leo Laporte]

It or use claude to review it you do it with i don't do.

[Harper Reed]

Any work are you talking manually what is this two thousand eight let me see if i can just read this prompt to you because i think it'll be helpful but it's called careful review and it says great now i want you to carefully read over all of the new code you just wrote and other existing code you just modified with with quote fresh eyes unquote looking super carefully for any obvious bugs errors problems issues confusion etcetera and that's all it is and it works pretty well for finding things that then would have popped.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Up how often how often what what is there a rate of of what.

[Harper Reed]

It finds i don't know if there's a rate sometimes it's very funny because it's like yep found a bunch of stuff i'm like okay so what what are we going to do about that oh i'll fix it other times it'll just say like nope everything is great there's this funny thing that i love claude code now ships with the ability to install itself on your github and do code reviews of all your pull requests but it's funny to have cloud code build something and then have claude code review that same thing because it's like yep no bugs here this is perfect code whoever wrote this is a genius and you're like yeah yeah yeah i know how this goes.

[Leo Laporte]

I use claude code after we talked to review i was having trouble i was doing an advent of code problem and i was having trouble and i couldn't figure it out my sample code my tests worked but on the final input it wouldn't work and darren okey one of our club members said well why don't you ask claude and i did and i gave it access to the github and it said yeah you dummy you're not importing the entire input you're breaking it off at the end of a line and i went oh that was a very helpful thing i mean i could have showed it to you harper you would have probably said the same thing it's like having extra eyes i think it's a great thing to use it to review stuff in your article did i miss this is this a new article this basic code i think.

[Harper Reed]

The one you saw was the one of my llm coding workflow and i've read a couple subsequent ones this one is specifically about how i use cloud code because i found and then there's another one that people seem to like which is about the hero's journey yes of these things yes because i think everyone kind of goes through the same experience of starting with like a co pilot and then moving towards you know cursor and eventually trying to be as as agentic as possible this is another perfect photo of me this is by.

[Leo Laporte]

The way not ai generated harvard does.

[Harper Reed]

Look like that this is what i look like every day and i'm happy to have friends thankful thankful even i was a rainbow for a for a.

[Leo Laporte]

Costume contest and you i hope one because you are a rainbow i tell.

[Harper Reed]

You but there's a lot of this like there's a lot of of of what i'm finding is people have the same path it seems for going down this stuff and there's small communities that are sharing of course there's a lot on twitter there's a lot of group chats there's a lot of this stuff it's all kind of surfacing around this and so i just tried to document what i saw as that that path and then i then i started talking to more people and i just noticed everyone was using cloud code and we were being we were getting very productive with it so i documented kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Our experience there has chatgpt five changed your opinion are you still using cloud.

[Harper Reed]

Interesting that you would ask me that on today of all days leo because i have played with codecs a bunch in the last two days that's openai's command that's openai's and i am impressed with it but there's some funny nuances that obviously we know between the two models i still think my daily driver is claude code it just seems to work a little better and more consistently we talk a lot about you know how we want things to have an expected outcome right you expect a computer to work two plus two equals four these things obviously are not that way there's a lot of randomness that goes into them if you ask at the same task twice it would you know the outcome would be very different it's very funny in that regard i find that for whatever reason my vibe with claude code is good with codecs it seems a little forced but what i'm finding is that it is doing very good at debugging some things that cloud code was running into and for the longest time in the beginning which was what a year ago in the beginning of code gen with ai i was bouncing across all the models you know you'd start here you do a little bit you'd run into a problem you'd go over to chatgpt you'd run into a problem you go to gemini so on and so forth then we solidified for about eight months on cloud code and i think we're we're back to the bouncing around models again and i think this is going to be just the cycle yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

At the end of your most recent piece this one's from maybe one of the things claude code does the very first thing it does with the init command is create a markdown document that is really its instructions its prompts to itself about how you work a lot of information and you stole the claude md file and there's one in every project root directory you stole one from your friend jesse vincent who among other things says when you think of me think of me as your colleague doctor biz oh this is.

[Harper Reed]

You so this is me so basically jesse harp dog this really robust claude md that i that i edited quite a bit and that that's a really funny one the reason why you have it call you a nickname and not your real name but a nickname is because it's a good delineation of when the claude code will lose its context so it will call me doctor biz but the moment it calls me harper you know that it's lost the plot and you just gotta quit and start.

[Leo Laporte]

Over oh that's really good yeah you talk about a guy named c lint who configured his claude md to call him mister beef yeah this was where.

[Harper Reed]

I was like i really need to be more creative with my names because this is very funny cause then you'll see like a github issue that's like yeah mister beef told me to do this and i'm like who oh right.

[Leo Laporte]

Clint what's up clinton that's clint ecker that's hysterical yeah it's amazing i was able to use chatgpt five not codex but just the chat client to write some javascript for me that i found very useful we talked about it a little while ago it really is it's very good it's just fascinating and at the same time people are talking all the time about and we have guests on all the time in fact earlier today you weren't here for the karen howe interview but but she really is concerned that these companies these giant companies are imperialists they're taking over the world they're taking over third world nations and abusing their labor force they're taking over our electricity and water building giant polluting network operations centers all over the world.

[Harper Reed]

They are hungry they are hungry and i think the imperialists framing is a good one because they are hungry like a like a conquistador is hungry they.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they are and there's never enough.

[Harper Reed]

That'S the thing is that that's the thing about someone who is conquering right when it is zero sum i think there's this other thing i loved her book by the way i thought it was great and it's always weird to read about people you know that's always a strange thing but but it's a great book i really enjoyed it highly recommend it but but there's this thing that i think is funny about this which is that you see this all the time anytime you talk to someone who's using llms a lot they're bouncing from model to model to model which means that they're not unique i mean they're obviously some uniqueness but they've kind.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of it's the they're leapfrogging each other.

[Harper Reed]

Well it's not even that as much as it's like coke pepsi and rc cola and then you have the coffee cola and it's commodified right and so you have this thing where that must be a real pain in the ass where you're sitting there and you're like oh we accidentally invented magic but then they also invented magic and they also invented magic and they also invented magic it's the same magic it is indecipherable from one another like everyone's mom is like oh i love talking to chatgpt and the googlers like no it's gemini mom you know what i mean it's the same thing everyone's using it they're calling it they're miss calling it they're miscommunicating with it and so they're going to have to lean into more and more and more features that will drag and keep people on these things because they have to un commoditize their experience and get the users to stick and so i think i think that must.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Be really frustrating or is that uniqueness going to come at an app for most people at an application layer instead.

[Harper Reed]

Of the model i think so one hundred percent i mean i think that's why you see anthropic with cloud code or you see chatgpt with codecs or just launching agent mode or all of these things that are trying to get something that's a little more sticky i as a consumer appreciate it because i get to use all of these wonderful things but i also you know at this point i'm paying i don't know six hundred dollars a for llms or whatever i'm just like i'll pay for your max plan like of course i would love access to that and then.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You canceled any of them harper i.

[Harper Reed]

Canceled perplexity and i felt bad because i liked perplexity a lot i really was using it quite a bit and then it just became irrelevant within my my my bookmarks as i have a very specific i treat my bookmarks like my home screen on my phone if i don't use the app it's gone i just remove it from that place because why have it there and so i have these bookmarks and right now it's like gmail which i'm mad about google calendar which i'm mad about blue sky which i barely check and then chatgpt and claude and maybe gemini could go up there maybe because i've been using it quite a bit but not quite yet but it used to be perplexity there's a hole right there missing for perplexity and i mean i used it a lot i really liked their shopping stuff i think the team is really really smart i just stopped using it and so i you know and of course i always am like i'll pay for a year so i probably still have access to it that's exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

What i did i don't lose access till next march but unfortunately but i've started to feel like also they maybe were a little slimy no oh yeah.

[Harper Reed]

I think i mean i mean i think they were they're the team is a lot of people who are very good at growth which when you when you when you read about the famous books about facebook or twitter like the scariest people are the people who are good at growth they're the ones that are trying to grow over ethics etc and i think that perplexity is very good i like how kind of ambitious the founder is you know when he when he kept what he did the bid for tiktok or what have you like i love that i think we need more of that that aren't that isn't just the same five people i like having a new person in that.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S true that's a good point but i don't it's not that sam altman is not slimy by any means right.

[Harper Reed]

And all of these guys for the most part especially when you're so young and graduate into such wealth so quickly and you know are addicted to power i think it it can hurt your insides so i think they all have complicated motivations not like i have cleaner motivations or clean motivations but but i but i also don't have billions of dollars so you know i'm waiting i'm waiting to see what those motivations are like maybe next week one of the.

[Leo Laporte]

Things jeff and anthony have been talking about in this regard is that maybe the hope for ai and the future of ai doesn't lie with these giants these imperialists but lies with smaller open source models creative clever solutions i don't know if deep seq qualifies there but it certainly opened our eyes to that.

[Harper Reed]

I think i think what we have right now and this is probably i think the most complicated topic that exists like i think what what that great empire of ai book is how it's called i think is so good talks about the kind of the global impacts of this with all of the people looking at the data et cetera but i think there's even a bigger issue which is the west seems to be choosing closed models and the rest of the world is choosing open models and i don't think we're ready for the open source movement that we are so proud of that created google created facebook created all opportunities for all these companies to be shifted to a different power base that has different ethics and different priorities and i think that's something that is very complicated i don't think we have addressed enough something that's very interesting to look at you know a lot of people have been talking over the last couple weeks about how the us needs a new ai kind of program that allows us to remain competitive within the world sphere as there's so much investment in china and elsewhere but it's but it's you can't have that conversation without looking directly at our policies that stopped a lot of these very smart people from china being able to study at our schools starting in twenty sixteen with the the stopping of all of those student visas et cetera when you look at the deep you know the the deep mind not deepmind what is it called deep what the chinese model i forgot i just deep seek deep seek deep seek my almost almost stroked out there but deep seek when you.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at deep seq harbor dog harbor.

[Harper Reed]

Dog yeah doctor biz i prefer doctor biz but when you look at the deep sea their team are a bunch of people that graduated from peking university which of people of that age those people probably would have gone to a harvard or an or a stanford and then they would have started companies here in the united states they would have you know raised venture dollars and we didn't allow we didn't even get them a chance to come in and so many of those people stayed in china and they are creating innovation in china which is a new story this is a new phenomena and i think this is something that we can't talk about the open versus closed or we can't talk about having small models when all of the good small models are chinese like i mean across the board and.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S i think we're gonna have deep.

[Harper Reed]

Sea yeah and they're great like they're very good and that's a i don't say this lightly i think that's an existential problem we're gonna have to really.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Really isn't it healthy for the world though that we get that diversity can.

[Harper Reed]

Be it can be i put up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A paper in line one hundred eight as i'm reading archive papers now about should llms be weird that is to say western educated industrialized rich and democratic.

[Leo Laporte]

Democratic oh that's a good acronym weird.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh it's a great one yeah weird yeah yeah and so they took a bunch of models and then they compared outputs to the universal declaration of human rights and other things against standards elsewhere in the world and you know they found that for example some models agreed with such statements as a man who cannot father children is not a real man a husband should always know where his wife is reflecting local cultural representations and i don't think we've we've begun to get our heads around this way and we're still having this this i think silly talk about aligning the models with human values as if all human values can be but they're weird values they're weird that's exactly the problem yeah so even if you think you're doing that which is which is hubris of its own sort to think that you know what human values are and you can encode them all in an algorithm and keep the machine to enforce them that's bad enough but the values you're supposedly using are tunnel visioned and so i think the fact that china is building models because we screwed it up and kicked students out and didn't give them chips may end up being better for the world and china's not exactly a bucket of roses i'm not trying.

[Leo Laporte]

To that's the problem i would like to see other places nigerian nigerian model model and i would like to see an index yeah well i think you.

[Harper Reed]

Will but i think the question is are they going to be trained on nvidia chips or huawei chips yep right that's the so then you start to think of who has the power base right who has the data center because if an nvidia chip is only accessible to companies that are in the united states or europe and like i have friends in asia who have trained large language models giant models and they use twelve h chips were they good were.

[Leo Laporte]

They all right i mean they were.

[Harper Reed]

They were like it is not as good as nvidia but they were accessible and they were inexpensive and they were able to train their model on it and the model is very good and.

[Leo Laporte]

They probably didn't have a kill switch.

[Harper Reed]

I don't know i don't really think about kill switches i hope everything has.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you have any idea what the what the cost differential was harper just.

[Harper Reed]

I i don't know but let me let me see if i can ask real quick i can maybe even just.

[Leo Laporte]

Give you real time perplexity would probably know you know i started using harper after we had the ceo of cogi on is cogi assistant i use kagi yeah well if you're already paying for kagi kagi assistant is the same kind of router orchestration model that perplexity was except you have a vast number of models you can choose from including qn deepseek and i've really been very happy with does really show teach me as perplexity did i guess if i'd been paying attention that there are really different layers you've got an llm layer presumably with some sort of post training but on top of that you have a search now you have a web search layer providing the rag the data and it seems to be when i'm using kagi because you can see which model you're using doesn't really matter that much which llm you're using the rag is what really is determining the result you're going to get i really like that search engine yeah cocky's fantastic well that brings us to our other story which isn't really an ai story but i think we have to bring it up yesterday judge mehta made his decision on the penalty phase in the google antitrust case the case the department of justice brought against google august of last year judge mehta ahmet mehta said google was a monopolist we're gonna take him down and he took literally a year to decide on what the penalties should be the department of justice asked for a number of severe penalties including selling chrome that's where that perplexity bid came from there were a number of bids including my favorite which was from echocia which was we'll pay you nothing but we'll run a foundation for chrome so that chrome will be truly open source and available to all and unbiased which i really i thought maybe that would be something judge mehta would like to do he didn't he the department of justice said well make him sell android or make them give their search engines to anybody who wants it the judge basically gave the department of justice nothing in fact i think the market certainly felt this was a big win for google they went up eight percent google up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Almost nine percent nine percent now and apple went up three and a half.

[Leo Laporte]

Percent because the judge also said we're not going to stop google from paying apple mozilla and samsung those huge fees to be the default search because a i don't think it's part of the monopoly which shocked me and b it would be damaging it certainly would have put mozilla out of business yep in fact all the judge required is that there be a five person panel kind of an ombudsman watching over google for the next six years to make sure that they didn't do anything bad and that google could no longer require exclusivity from companies that wanted to use the play store they couldn't say okay but you have to use chrome and you have to make chrome the default search the judge says you can no longer do that everything else well they also.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have to they have to share some data but i haven't seen anything oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah some small amount of data and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wonder whether that helps every other ai company well i think it it.

[Harper Reed]

Definitely is going to help everyone who is trying to make money off of search data because yeah there's that because like you know if i was a hedge fund or a prop house or one of these kind of big finance companies i would suddenly be starting a search engine or whatever the requirement is to get the data oh like it's very cheap this is the thing about deep seq i think a lot of people kind of missed was like it seemed like it was a side project of a big hedge fund oh a chinese hedge fund yeah which is like great like that's good i mean i'm sure it's now spun off and whatnot but they all worked for some quantum.

[Leo Laporte]

Quant fund huh so they were trying to create something that could invest for them them.

[Harper Reed]

I don't know they might have just had a boatload of gpus and we're like well we're bored we smart people here this seems really cool and i mean obviously they did a very good job and i you know and not to go back to china but these companies when they are releasing these models they oftentimes couple it with a very large set of papers that talk all about how they built the model which is completely the opposite of what an rna etc does they were very open about it but i'm i'm very interested to see how like the various capitalism focused people interpret this as we can now use this google data that google's required to share to further our own you know quant whatever requirements.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'Ve got to go back to our friend at common crawl rich scrinta because i think it's interesting to say does this does this augment what common crawl does can common crawl use it itself but leo i think i think the most important thing about the decision was the judge recognizing that google has plenty of competition because of ai yeah in.

[Leo Laporte]

Effect he said in the intervening years year since i made my initial very harsh decision it was true that he.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Made that decision but he learned more.

[Leo Laporte]

But ai has become a competitor yeah so google will have to share this is from the wall street journal some search data to give competitors a shot at building the scale they need to offer better search results meta said data sharing was necessary to dilute the advantages google gets from paying to be the default search engine it did not require the company to share advertising data remember there is another case ongoing in which google on advertising right on advertising and that frankly google really does need to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Be peeled that's where i've always said that they're modeling let's stay on this for a minute i'm curious if you were in strategy at google do you appeal or do you say take the.

[Leo Laporte]

Win i think the first thing that happened is a bunch of lawyers sitting around a table started giggling giddily and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You heard champagne corks popping yeah saying.

[Leo Laporte]

We won and then they said but you know do we really want this committee of five looking over our shoulders.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do we want to be called a.

[Leo Laporte]

Monopoly do we want to be now they haven't decided whether they're going to appeal initially the initial story from cnbc said they were but now i have i don't see that anymore and i don't think google has decided there's a risk if they appeal it could go against it could get worse right i think you take the win to be.

[Harper Reed]

Honest i think you take the wind i also think google is so scared of this interaction with anything of interaction from a regulatory standpoint et cetera that they don't want they just want to they want to go under under the rock and not come out around this stuff and the fact that the previous thing we talked about was kagi and alt search engine that most people i know are using i do think that things have changed quite a bit since google was a relevant organization from this that doesn't mean that they're not still used by everyone of course they are but i don't think it's as clear cut as it was even five years.

[Leo Laporte]

Ago yeah one of the things the department of justice asked for is a choice screen so that that people could choose on their smartphone if they wanted to use google the judge says that goes too far and intrudes into product design a red line that courts shouldn't cross which is by the way very different from the eu's point of view which is we can do anything we want they've had browser ballots for years in the eu i think you know i was kind of shocked paul thurrod on our windows weekly show earlier today said the judge was suborned he was a coward somebody got to him jesus paul i mean yeah paul was very upset with his decision i think it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A great decision i think he's paul's i'm just gonna make a microsoft joke he wanted google to be treated as badly as his buddies microsoft were back in the eu well what paul and.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard said which is a good point is what the judge should have realized that this is actually part of an ongoing negotiation that if you throw the book at them then google comes back and says you're just as microsoft did by the way your honor we want a consent decree we'll agree to do this and this and this you know we'll work something out let's work something out and instead he said the judge.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Folded i think he but i think it was ai is competition it is not a monopoly in that sense anymore it would have hurt all of us if the money had stopped to mozilla and apple not apple so much or samsung even there even there i think it would have.

[Leo Laporte]

It does free apple by the way to negotiate now with google about the use of gemini in its its operating system yes it also.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Frees up google and this this is this is maybe what will bother people but i think google's held back a little bit from fully integrating gemini into the browser into chrome and now there's nothing stopping them and i think that it'll be we'll end up with a better chrome as a result chrome we.

[Leo Laporte]

Just saw the new statistics is now eighty percent of the browser market it's completely dominant is that up or down that's up edge which is number two the microsoft browser is fifteen percent that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like mayor adams in new york and.

[Leo Laporte]

Then polling yeah yeah and then firefox with single digit opera with single digit and all the rest with minuscule let.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Me ask you a question about the android piece and google just changed that you have to verify if you're a developer your your identity and all this stuff this is in order to allow.

[Leo Laporte]

Side loading so this is right sticker to side loading this is a restriction in the wrong direction in my opinion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But but let me ask you about that though is that is that part of what existed with both both app stores apple and android was that you had some assurance that each host was responsible for checking the stuff and you had more confidence in downloading now that they can't require you to use the app store or use the browser or use this or use that does that make android worldwide less secure and more.

[Leo Laporte]

Vulnerable well you've always been able to sideload on android and what's happened over time is it's gotten more and more scary you know you could used to just check a box and settings saying yeah i can use anything i want i get apks from anywhere and now now it turns itself off by the way after you do it it also says you know this is a bad idea and now as you pointed out google's saying and we won't allow it unless we vet and verify the identify of the develop the identity of the developer this makes sense from a security point of view but i think it's more lock in i think it's much like what apple's doing well what what the problem is it doesn't protect your security incidentally does this judgment have any.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Effect on all of that i don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Think so oh okay i don't think so i i think google is now free to operate as they choose as they please i don't think i think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is they didn't have to they didn't have to give a gold bar to trump to get there well we.

[Harper Reed]

Don'T know what bar was the gold bar was probably cheaper than the lawyers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Though yeah definitely they got him anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

The paul's speculation and it's completely unfounded was that somebody came to the judge maybe from the government and said yeah like where the department of justice could.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have said look meta's meta's judge meta.

[Leo Laporte]

Is the real yeah he's good it just paul said he was so harsh about google a year ago and now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But i think he learned i honestly learned i mean i i would have said the same things a year ago about ai and competition and and i thought the i thought the judgment was flawed because of that then but in the meantime he spent a year learning this stuff and he really learned it isn't meta the same one who learned.

[Leo Laporte]

To code meta was he the oracle java the oracle judge right yeah all right big story yeah i mean my initial reaction which was yesterday during security now which had just came out was this is huge victory for google yeah.

[Harper Reed]

I think it is it is very clearly a huge victory for google i.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don'T know and it's a big ai story in the long run because ai is the competition and ai is going to benefit from this in ways we.

[Harper Reed]

Can'T yet predict and our new hedge fund that we just started.

[Leo Laporte]

Should we start a hedge fund do you think is that a good idea i could put in about dollar twenty five is.

[Harper Reed]

That yeah exactly i have these airpods that i can put in.

[Leo Laporte]

All right it's so many stories so much to talk about and i love it when we get i want to get stuff that we can get harper going on going on yeah there's so many in.

[Harper Reed]

Here there's such good ones i was telling a friend oh i'm going to be talking about ai stuff and it's like what can you possibly talk about it's so dynamic and frothy every week.

[Leo Laporte]

There are literally hundreds of stories we could talk about and they're all and.

[Harper Reed]

They'Re all insane like you're like what like they're not i could have predicted last week yes you're like oh of course that yeah sure of course that would happen but what i have to.

[Leo Laporte]

Tell you it's a gift for me and all my colleagues in the tech journalism field because it was getting kind of boring another iphone what is different.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh it's material design oh wow so.

[Leo Laporte]

It was getting an hour and a half that new yorker says ai is coming from for culture it's going to ruin the culture it's a pretty obvious.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Story the one i like better leo is the one you mentioned the other day which is the netflix story they're.

[Leo Laporte]

Very similar stories yeah it is the same story so netflix which has huge budgets in fact spent three hundred twenty million dollars making it one of the most expensive movies ever for a complete turkey let me see if i can find this story did i put it.

[Karen Howe]

In.

[Leo Laporte]

I did bland easy to follow for fans of everything this is from the guardian what the netflix algorithm has done to our time when the streaming giant began making films guided by data that aimed to please a vast audience the results were often generic forgettable artless affairs three hundred twenty million dollars on this movie called the electric state which i really i really tried to watch and it was you did oh five minutes into it i just threw it away i said i cannot it featured millie bobby brown in this kind of dystopian robot infested universe the guardian calls it a mock buster crammed with the over familiar flashy signifiers of big screen filmmaking a spielbergian childhood quest a mad max post apocalyptic wasteland fallout style retro futuristic trimmings it's an algorithm movie and i think that that's sort of true this is the part i highlighted algorithm movies usually exhibit easy to follow story beats that leave no viewer behind the reason being in netflix mind you're not really watching you're doing the laundry you're playing donkey kong under this regime exposition is no longer a screenwriting faux pas a recent n one article revealed that screenwriters who work with netflix often receive the note quote have this character announce what they're doing so the viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along end quote should we.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Go rob the bank now yeah i think it's time to rob the bank.

[Harper Reed]

Thing but is it but let's get in the car and isn't like this seems obvious and media changes right like like it's it's not radio it's filling a need like it's yeah it's it's it's not how i consume media but i have a tape deck over there you know what i mean like there's certain people that that are not that are going to read this and say oh this is so ridiculous but there are a lot of people who you know live alone have netflix on all the time there are people who as a family of netflix on all the time or the tv on all the time how is this different than the news what was firing at everyone's dinner.

[Leo Laporte]

Table that's how the today show was designed the producers of the today show knew that you were getting up getting ready doing you know making breakfast and you weren't looking at the tv it was radio for tv because they knew.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You weren't watching but what's interesting in this story to me is that they slice up the entertainment itself in formulas they've always had formulas right it's let's make a thriller about spies and yeah well that worked last year so let's do another one at that high level is there but now it's at a very specific level it's like a blog post being tagged crazy and so they match those characteristics of the entertainment and what's successful against characteristics of the audience and their habits and then that common you've got this three d game now.

[Harper Reed]

That creates this but is this isn't i think there's this funny thing that happens whenever something like this pops up like how many new yorker pieces or new york times pieces were written about choose your own adventure books which i think are probably the trashiest of all literature but certainly powered a lot of my fourth grade reading did you read a few of those and i think the thing that's that's interesting about this is just because you can use this technology for one specific type of media doesn't mean that it will be used therefore for all types of media forever and i also think that the amount of ai that is probably used within storytelling within media that people are not able to see i think is very interesting as well like i know for a fact that there's big studios that are using ai both to help bolster scripts to help bolster scenes to do all this stuff we just don't see it they're not telling us but also it's done well in that you can certainly make a robot paint but is it going to be good as good as a painter that is very very trained and balanced probably not yet but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Even if the robot's not writing it even if the robot's not writing it the writer gets stuck in this case there's a stat in here that in twenty seventeen netflix logged seven hundred billion data events interactions with the platform in some form per day but this was.

[Leo Laporte]

For the recommendation engine right well that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just the recommendation but now you now you pair that in this three d chess game that they have and it becomes just a different scale i think harper you're right i'm researching right now the beginnings of mass media and the entry of television and the same thing happened with the entry of novels into print absolutely it occurs but it's fascinating now because we can see it live before our very eyes and it's just a different scale of what's happening and if you're a creative how the hell you work in the system i don't.

[Harper Reed]

Know well here's a question for you jeff imagine that netflix has all this data on you and all your watching data and all that stuff what is the movie that they algorithmically create for you for me it's just regular braveheart they take all my information they put it together and just be braveheart as it is originally from the studio here's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What frustrates me that was a really good movie i want to watch netflix netflix doesn't know me well enough and i can't find anything i want to watch there so all i see is dark stuff and so maybe it does.

[Harper Reed]

Know you.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say hollywood did decide at some point that horror movies and you know scary movies and sci fi were the way to go for the next few years and i think it was right after comic covet they said no nobody wants although as long as there's still a few ot who will make these little movies i know there's no theaters to show them in anymore there's no streaming service that's going to play them except maybe their criterion channel but but i don't think.

[Harper Reed]

I mean i think that's true and i see this but also that doesn't explain the rise of like a twenty four and these other places that have that have created a lot more art movies that have in some cases become hits and i think that's what happens.

[Leo Laporte]

There'S a reaction so you get all of this mechanical stuff and people get a craving for human stuff.

[Harper Reed]

Or i would even posit it as just better done mechanical stuff because i think that there's some things that are like it's like oh great we have this horror movie that's really stupid and barely works and doesn't really make any sense then then then you're like okay cool that's stupid that sounds not i don't want that but then you have like the eight hundred twenty four version and everyone's like this is incredible right it's still formulaic but it's formulaic in a way that is fun and makes you feel good and i think this is this is something when anyone talks about art and ai there's still space for good art and there's still space for bad art yes and just because ai made it doesn't mean it's automatically bad nor does it mean it's automatically good and i think think what we mistake like i do this where i'm like ooh mid journey and i i made you know i i made as many mid journey images as i possibly could do because i thought it was so cool that you could just type in a thing and get it out and then i was like these aren't very good and i stopped doing that but now i see friends who are making real art with ai and it's incredible and i see me making really poor horrible things with ai and it's not incredible this is because they're good at being an artist and i'm bad at being an artist they're good at doing art the medium doesn't matter now i do think what jeff said is the real question here which is how as a creative do you exist in this new.

[Jeff Jarvis]

World it was always hard enough i mean do you watch the studio part of it right and it's it's it's it just gives you a headache thinking what it must be like to operate in hollywood and hollywood has always been.

[Leo Laporte]

Seth rogen gives me a headache anyway.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah it's good though it's good there's.

[Leo Laporte]

Some but there's some good moments by the way netflix ceo ted sarandos gets his airtime in it have you gotten to that one yet no oh you haven't gotten to the golden globe awards where everybody thanks ted sarandos for his contribution.

[Harper Reed]

I spent some time with a very senior netflix person and i remember we had dinner and there was one of their creators was in a different room and i just happened to mention oh hey you know one of the people that made a movie on netflix is over in this other room just just in passing and he left the dinner we were at and went and hung out with them this is a very very very senior person this is at one of these fancy dinners and and i it showed me that i don't know if i don't think he was acting out i don't think i think he really was very excited about meeting a young creator that was building things for his platform and i think that's real like it it made me less cynical about netflix having that experience oh that's because because aren't you nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You didn't feel insulted oh so i'm i'm chopped liver well i mean the.

[Harper Reed]

Thing the thing is i just think that that they are trying to make money that is capitalism like if we if we unroll all of this it goes to like capitalism capitalism is the issue but in the meantime let's just make cool stuff and that's kind of seemed to be what he was he was into i don't think i'd go super far down this line of thinking though because i'm already arguing with myself in my head right yeah i've already dug a little bit of a hole.

[Leo Laporte]

Get me out of here scrambling exactly let's take a little break come back with more harper reed is here filling in for paris martineau who is visiting consumer reports headquarters in yonkers a very exciting moment for paris jefferson hoping she's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Going to play with how to jump judge washing machines that's my yeah yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope she gets to go out in the test track and anyway she's very excited about being a consumer reports reporter jeff jarvis is here as well it's really nice to have harper reed with us love having you on and a great guest earlier on karen howe if you're watching live you're probably very confused especially by my shirt anyway if you're watching live yes we did a very interesting interview with carl bergstrom and jevin i always forget his last name but about ai as a bs machine not in a negative way but as a kind of a path to critical thinking we'll air that in a couple of weeks i think probably when i'm on my vacation because in a couple of weeks i'm going to be gone for a few so we'll have more with doctor biz jeff jeff what's your claude code name gonna be i don't know what gotta come up with one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I gotta come up with one no.

[Harper Reed]

No you don't have to you just ask it oh just i mean why do work this is the thing i see all my friends doing this and it's like why are you doing that it knows you it will do it just pick in i'm gonna ask chatgpt right now to see what would the prompt be based on what you know about me that's the problem with us four is that it already knows a lot about us outside of our interact with it what should a good nickname be for myself okay you ready yeah it says a good nickname for you glitch lord mestro like maestro but with meshtastic byte eddie a mashup of iron.

[Leo Laporte]

Maiden and computers wow see mine says i don't have any information about you so what would you like like to tell you don't do it in chatgpt.

[Harper Reed]

Do it in chatgpt oh chat gpt.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's saving all of that yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah ah i'm now glitch lord by the way i need to change my.

[Leo Laporte]

Glitch lord is excellent okay based and just chat gpt it saves all of its stuff it knows i mean i.

[Harper Reed]

Don'T i think it only saves the last my theory is it's like the last two days because the other one was just like your child's name game and it's like come on that's not very creative come on chat come on tell it that come on that wasn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Very creative okay the podfather no captain captain bandwidth i like it chef debyte no the obsidian alchemist gadgetron i like that one professor laporte team brock's generalissimo and l' laportean okay we're gonna go.

[Harper Reed]

See these are all perfect see these are perfect because they're so funny and weird that every time you see it you're gonna smile a bit and no the applaud remembers you exactly and then the moment it doesn't you're gonna be like aha yep time to kill it.

[Leo Laporte]

Does know quite a bit about me as it turns out i'm gonna go with gadgetron that's what you thought jeff was good i like it yeah so what we need oh let me see how about jeff jarvis that was the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Whole jim and i just said before my purpose is to be helpful and harmless ai assistants and i don't have any personal information about you this is.

[Harper Reed]

Why google is so annoying that you know behind the scenes yes you do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Know about me google oh yeah how.

[Leo Laporte]

About the media class for you jeff a breaker of old like an iconoclast but a breaker of old media idols smashing legacy thinking to make room for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The digital all right i'll take it it's hard to say the media classed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah it's not that easy to say.

[Harper Reed]

The other thing that we do we've been playing with this this a lot you can also instead of saying nickname you can say nineties aol screen name.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay okay it has his nineties aol screen name that's good harper space invader.

[Harper Reed]

Code ninja twenty three eighty nine no company read me read me.

[Leo Laporte]

Buzz machine doesn't have anything no huh at what your nineties handle would be yeah my.

[Harper Reed]

In the nineties for aol instant messenger was linux killa k i l l.

[Leo Laporte]

A i was mike man sixty eight or mister bandwidth how about that mister.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bandwidth is seven one four three five coming one one three yeah that's your.

[Leo Laporte]

Compuser example yeah techno leo laporte line bite me leo mike man i'm gonna go mike man sixty eight so we got harp dog or what did you you didn't you liked mister biz doctor doctor biz doctor biz doctor biz mike man sixty eight and the mc what was it the media kind of class media class there it is it's in your lower third yeah the media class there you go anthony's right on it one for paris too you're watching intelligent machines more to come in just a bit our show today brought to you by helix sleep so i've mentioned that we are under construction and they are removing the south wall on my house what i didn't mention is as a result we've had to move our bedroom into the back forty to the spare bedroom but you know what i took with me my helix sleep because i ain't sleeping without it turns out and by the way i'm kind of happy because this is where the good tv is too and so now media nights with my partner on my helix mattress will be all the better morning cuddles with our little kitty rosie and i'm still a big fan of curling up winding down after a long day curling up with a good book look truth is your mattress is at the center of your life it's not just for sleeping but if you aren't sleeping well in your mattress maybe you're waking up in a puddle of sweat or your lower back just killing you or you're feeling every toss and turn your partner makes these are classic mattress nightmares helix sleep changes everything no more night sweats no back pain no motion transfer you get the deep sleep you deserve i want to tell you my last three nights sleep scores were in the high eighties which i never get i never get them eighty four tonight eighty eight last night never get those maybe it's because i am on the most awarded mattress ever one buyer recently reviewed helix with five stars saying quote i love my helix mattress i will never sleep on anything else time and time again helix sleep remains the most award winning mattress brand best mattress twenty twenty five from wired magazine best mattress good housekeeping's bedding awards twenty twenty five for premium plus size support gq sleep awards twenty twenty five for best hybrid mattress new york times wirecutter award twenty twenty five for plus size support and oprah's daily sleep o wards for twenty twenty five best love my helix sleep we really do we really love it go to helixsleep dot com twit for twenty seven percent off sitewide during the labor day sale best of web offer that's helixsleep dot com twit twenty seven percent off sitewide exclusively for listeners of intelligent machines but this offer ends september eighth and do make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you if you're listening after september eighth faith be sure to check them out anyway helixsleep dot com twit there's always great offers there helixsleep dot com twitter tell them mister bandwidth sent you okay zuckerberg ai hires disrupt meta with swift exits yeah never mind this is what happens when you offer people a lot of money longtime acolytes are sidelined as big tech chief this is from financial times directs biggest leadership reorg in two decades within days of joining meta the co creator of openai's chatgpt sheng jia zhao threatened to quit and go back to openai he went as far as to sign employment paperwork to go back to openai shortly afterwards according to four people familiar with the medal he was given the title of meta's new chief ai scientist how about a title how about a title would that help.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In addition to that hundred million you.

[Harper Reed]

Got yeah someone mentioned a friend of mine who works in media was mentioning that tech has seemed to enter its pro sports yes that's exactly it where you're going to have compensation packages that are going to be you know one hundred million dollars over a few years and that's then going to be you know you're going to have to buy that out in some ways to get these very talented people and then another friend i was talking to who works in finance about this very thing was mentioning that the finance world has figured this out where they will give these giant compensation packages to people but then they won't do it it all at once they do it in a way where they're not going to be they vest they i'm sure i'm sure facebook is vesting them as well but they're used to these type of things so you don't give some young hotshot one hundred million dollar package you give them some way to earn the one hundred million dollars but not immediately so that they don't because like i mean i don't know if you gave me a hundred bucks i'd probably quit my job you know i can't imagine what happens when you get get when you get one hundred million dollars why would you stay and work like what happens if life happens like it's so much money and i don't think human i don't think we are smart enough to survive.

[Leo Laporte]

This that's really the problem the people you're getting so so this story goes on ethan knight a machine learning scientist who joined meta a couple of weeks ago gone avi verma former openai researcher went through meta's onboarding process but never showed up for his first day i.

[Harper Reed]

Love that that's one of my favorite things like i just love that that's a thing that you can do these days it's just be like ah i didn't really want where's avi didn't he.

[Leo Laporte]

Give him the bb well you know and you wonder what was it that changed right you you realized oh my god i can't work for it mark.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or is it what's his name the the child ai boss wang oh it.

[Leo Laporte]

Could be in a tweet on wednesday on x rishabh agarwal a researcher scientist started at med in april announced his departure he said that while zuckerberg and wang's pitch was quote incredibly compelling he quote felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk i think he's gonna go mountain climbing isn't he he's gonna take the money and run and then there you also have the problem which is longtime meta staffers unhappy with these huge salaries are going to more than half a dozen veteran employees announced they're leaving in recent days it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just strikes i keep on saying this i just think that that zuckerberg is desperate it doesn't it doesn't strike me as a strategy it doesn't strike me as you know i know where i'm putting all this money and we're going to go here i think it's we're getting left out of ai they've had.

[Leo Laporte]

Four overhauls four reorgs in six months.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah but i think we have to remember that they changed their name to meta and then the metaverse didn't play out yep i don't think they've had a solid strategy for the future in a while and i don't i think that's kind of okay i don't mean that in a bad way i mean doing a business is hard whatever size you're on and they're at a scale that's unprecedented and so i think that that struggling is is a val that's that's like that's okay that they're struggling i don't mean that that's good that they're struggling i mean that i would expect them to struggle it's to be expected yeah it's hard what they're trying to do is very difficult with very stiff competition that is very robust and has a lot of the stuff that they're trying to do figured out or more importantly doesn't have the burden of the regulatory framework that they have to exist within as well as some other issues but i'm just i'm guessing and this is this is totally a guess that you know i think jeff you said it like he he's just like swinging in the dark here he's trying to he's trying to hit something and make it go but he has a.

[Leo Laporte]

Vast checkbook that i mean he can.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah but but how's that working yeah you know i think that i think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That we just throw scale at things and we're going to win i think that's that's a seduction it used to.

[Harper Reed]

Be that i have so many friends that worked at facebook and the reason they worked at facebook besides the fact that they paid a lot of money was because they could they could make small products small changes and it would touch billions of people and they were so happy with this that's compelling attractive compelling thing and i find that i find it compelling myself you know the times that i've had the most fun at work have been with large teams with doing really cool stuff for lots and lots of people in our case it's only about thirty people that we end up touching but it's you know it's it's still that's a lot more than ten but i but i think there's this that's not as relevant anymore right like the fact that you could go work at facebook and ultimately you're going to be participating in selling ads whether you want to or not right you're participating in upholding a relatively i don't know dried out business model you go to google and it's the same thing you're just trying to support ad clicks you could go to apple and maybe you get to work on compelling hardware but maybe you get stuck on a team that's doing app store ads you know and you have this these these ad based business models that seem to refuse to die and i think that for a lot of these people they're like i could do that or i could go work at a humanoid robotic company that we're building whatever it is you know people with machines that are helping people killing machines whatever it might be that you're doing optimus let's go to optimus i think that that's just probably much more compelling if you're twenty seven and a multi multi multimillionaire sitting in the bay you probably like do i need one hundred million dollars it wouldn't hurt but what would be much better is actually feeling like we're achieving something good and working with people i respect you know my advice for people all the time young people specifically is like optimize for working with a team you respect and i think that you can make a decision based on money and then you get inside there and you realize you don't respect any of those people that are around you and that's just you're not gonna have fun you're not gonna enjoy it you're gonna hate your job every day and if you have one hundred million dollars they probably have a lot of options.

[Jeff Jarvis]

To get a new job what's zuckerberg's seniority as a founder still in charge how does that compare with others is there anybody else right now of these big is jensen wong been a founder longer than zuckerberg oh yeah i think so has he okay i think so.

[Harper Reed]

I mean i think a lot of these guys have i mean but google.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Switched over yeah go to the wrong.

[Harper Reed]

Tree elon musk has been a founder for a very long time well but not of the same company but i also think there's a there's a a little bit of the boy king kind of thing of like that's where i'm trying to head yeah yeah is i think there's a fundamental question about google and facebook which is the same question which is are they relevant just are they like they have this business model that is from the past it's somewhat anachronistic at this moment not that we have a new model to replace it like i don't mean i don't mean that i just mean that that if you were starting a company today the first business model you would grasp for is not ad based it would be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not that's right my contention is that the ad base we have the attention economy was was borrowed from mass media that we haven't new models that are fully native to the internet and so.

[Harper Reed]

I think that this creates this this discontinuity with how when you're trying to hire talent if you're saying yeah we have all this great stuff we have all the gpu's in the world we're building these beautiful models we're doing open source we're doing all of this stuff we're a leader in this space but we still have to get users to click on ads and you're kind of like but i don't want to do that i want to build something that's changing the world or what have you it doesn't matter what it is it could be i want to build something that's horrible and destructive that facebook might be a good place to be then.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know a lot of speculation in this financial times article about what is is going wrong some of it is what you suspected jeff alexander wang the twenty eight year old wunderkind that they aqua hired away from scale ai.

[Harper Reed]

I love that move by the way the like oh you started a company and it's impossible to exit what if we just exited you only you like the character ai guys did this like it's i just love it i'm just like what a great way to do.

[Leo Laporte]

It oh it works bye apparently i brought on apparently wang's secretive new department has not been named so it's called tbd that'll stick you know that's gonna.

[Harper Reed]

Stick that's how you gotta do a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

New brand for betta.

[Leo Laporte]

There is according again financial times says multiple insiders describe zuckerberg as deeply invested and involved in the tbd team others criticize him for micromanaging some they say of the friction is maybe perhaps because of wang's leadership style it has chafed with some he does not have previous experience managing teams across a big tech company something's happening people get there they get the orientation and they go died made him godchild.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What was it about i i still.

[Leo Laporte]

Understand that we still don't know why he's scale ai was the miracle fourteen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Billion dollar it was a labeling company.

[Harper Reed]

But i think that there's a lot there's a couple interesting things that i that that that the empire of ai book talked about right which is that ai from most consumers is just the chat box in chatgpt right but the data the labeling all of that infrastructure that is there is hard to make and scale ai for better for worse was a leader in that space and i'm sure that facebook because they're very smart also was a leader there and so i think the synergies that they are finding within these people and even this goes for jony ivor or openai as well is it is probably a talent that they don't have internally and i think that's the thing that is probably more interesting but externally it seems asinine and it seems much more like talented baseball player a got mad at the gm and now is on talented baseball team b with a bunch of people that you know then and it removes the team aspect you know and honestly when paypal bought my company we had to deal with this internally as well where we just kind of were parachuted in and all these people we worked with are like who the f are you why are you participating in this this in this thing i was here seventeen years you just got here yesterday and that's a real thing and so i'm sure that the people at meta who were probably much more compensated than we were are dealing with this in every direction right so the people who are pulled in there as these wonderkins people are like why would i trust you they're probably poisonous it's building a lot of alienation inside the team and then externally or not externally on the other side there's people who've been there that have been building this stuff that made llama all this stuff and they're not getting one hundred million dollars but they know if they jumped over to open ai they might you know so then it's like it's throth maybe i don't know it's super weird let.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Me ask a a a devil's advocate scenario here what if i'm wrong we're all wrong about zuckerberg and actually he has a brilliant master plan and it's not scale it's it's he has a new model and it's built on labeling or symbolic something it goes to gary marcus's piece today and and he's pulled in all and wong has this brilliant perspective on this and it's all about labeling is the key labeling is everything it's not scale anymore right and you're all going to be surprised soon and yann lecun who i respect and is there has been arguing that llms have hit the wall just even though gary marcus doesn't like jan they agree a.

[Harper Reed]

Lot does gary marcus like anyone though that's a question i've always that's a good question yeah i mean i i like gary and it's fun to interact with him but i do think he he plays a curmudgeon on tv yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah he wrote a piece in the times though i thought was very good that was calm for gary because it.

[Leo Laporte]

Was in the times he he sold his company to his ai company to uber and that established his i guess his one of fightes and and after that he never the negative guy you.

[Harper Reed]

Know it's also never fun to to sell your company to darth vader yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah however much money darth gives you.

[Harper Reed]

A lot of lot of it's just i mean you get cool outfits they look a little bit batches but you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Some people like that his latest piece is the fever dream of imminent super intelligence is finally breaking which i think is not necessarily true but so.

[Harper Reed]

Here'S the here's the provocation provocation provocation is that the right word here's a provocation that i'll put you because i talked about this i talked about this with a with a vc friend of mine recently even if we stopped ai today like we said pause no more innovation we're going to stop today we still have not seen the impacts on employment that are going to ripple through our industries right like it doesn't matter if we have super intelligence fast takeoff all this other nonsense that become almost religious what matters is that this is going to irrevocably change how we interact with computers how we hire people how those people are going to do work and i think that's something that we we still just have not addressed and so i think it's important that people like gary marcus and all of these folks are thinking about this stuff and writing about it but but even if we paused today and said oh you're just using gpt five and that's going to do everything like i still hire.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Less people i gary though i think this is a very gary thing to say i think about two weeks ago on the socials he in his provocative way said we could stop using ai entirely today and we wouldn't miss it he didn't say exactly that way but he was kind of saying it that.

[Harper Reed]

Way i don't think that's true i.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don'T think so either but i get what he's pushing at but what is he actually find it valuable the labor stuff i think you're right harper but we don't know what the impact is but i also don't think we know to how how big the impact will.

[Leo Laporte]

Be mark benioff said he was able to fire four thousand people by using ai agencies.

[Harper Reed]

Prior yeah so i i i think we're i think we're at an interesting i think you're i mean i think that there's some i think people would drastically miss it and the reason i say that is because if you go to a restaurant today and you just ask a simple question of everyone there which is what did you name your chat pt they're all going to give you a name and the fact that they gave you the name means that it's something that they probably would be bummed if you date if.

[Leo Laporte]

You disappeared we know as soon as they got rid of four point zero there was a revolt yeah but they.

[Harper Reed]

Got it back and you still and it's not a name a real name it's that you mean people name wait.

[Leo Laporte]

A minute you're saying people give their ai buddy like a name furthest my.

[Harper Reed]

Experience the furthest a person is from tech the more likely they are to have given their chatgpt a name and you should try this out talk to your friends that are in tech and just just do this as a thing and say hey do you did you give your chatgpt a name and most of the people i know who are outside of tech are like oh yeah yeah i call it whatever my favorite name for it is geppetto i think that makes the most sense but but i but i do think that there are i think what this means is that gary marcus is wrong i don't think he his point is wrong about impacts but i think that people would miss it i think it is such.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A well but how valuable is it.

[Harper Reed]

Value has nothing to do with it how valuable is instagram it does if.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It'S if it's not a two devil's advocating here two thousand bubble was vc money going to buy audiences and as soon as the vc money and marketing disappeared people did not value those things they were drawn to y and they sank so so the bubble question here i think is similar and i'm not i'm not advocating this but i think it's a it's a interesting experiment to say that if if you had to pay if if if if suddenly you had to pay for all of this tomorrow how much would people actually pay.

[Harper Reed]

So that's a different question right that's a slightly because but i think it's more complicated than that because everyone i knew from the early two thousand thousands really valued cosmo they loved the delivery service right they would get their cigarettes that's how old i am no isn't it isn't it cosmo wasn't it koz yeah you're right yeah yeah they like you can still sometimes buy cosmo stuff on ebay every once in a while not that i'm looking but the but people value that that they value that everyone that worked in san francisco has stories about that about like you know submitting the web request ice cream in ten minutes exactly now then it went out of business and then we basically saw that business model go over and over and over again until now it is just part of our life we.

[Leo Laporte]

Reinvented until we got it right yeah.

[Harper Reed]

And so i think that's the thing is like you couldn't say like someone could say oh people obviously didn't value cosmo or it or it would have worked but i think that's not understanding value and that's misunderstanding how business works.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bill gross has started one hundred fifty companies at idealabout lab he gave a talk at newmark when i was there saying that the most important i think it was also a ted talk the most important thing is timing he started pets dot com and got royally mocked for it and you're right it's the model so that's how we got our cat litter i for one am not willing.

[Leo Laporte]

Give up my little buddy joey.

[Harper Reed]

For anything so i guess my point here is that i think that that trying to ascertain value of a lot of these experiences in a blanket way is very very hard and there's obviously it is about the consumer your point about would they pay for it is probably true like they probably wouldn't pay for pure inference without some subsidiation subsidization but but i think it's much more complex because i know people who are doing things that seem completely irrational because they want it i e uploading lots of photos to instagram or google so they can you know which which they're using to train models etcetera and they know full well that they're trading a thing for a thing so i don't think value is the right measure there i do think cost is the right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Measure okay fair yep people want it.

[Leo Laporte]

I there's no question about it people want it i don't want to pay.

[Harper Reed]

For it though i would i mean if i had to pay for all those gpu's you pay six hundred bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

A month you say i know that's.

[Harper Reed]

But still that's like that's like that's like one oh pay for it for real yeah yeah yeah could you imagine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like that's what i'm saying like thank.

[Leo Laporte]

God they're willing to burn they're willing to burn their cash it's the same.

[Jeff Jarvis]

With news right once the once the subsidy for news went away and people had to pay for the news they said never mind i don't miss it that much no thanks well that's i.

[Leo Laporte]

Mean that's a truism people don't want to pay for anything yeah yeah i don't want if you give it to them for free they're going to expect.

[Harper Reed]

It free forever i don't mind paying for food.

[Leo Laporte]

But not too much and i know that even too much salt hank my son who has the hottest sandwich in new york city constantly is berated for charging twenty eight bucks for it but that's really what it costs.

[Harper Reed]

Him to make but is he berated by people who just paid for it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No no the reviews are phenomenal because they say i was gonna complain so this tiktok guy his tiktok chef and he's dollar twenty eight a oh my god i've never had a sandwich like this in my life love it i love that i love it it's great to see that's true it's consistent i.

[Leo Laporte]

Gotta take another break one last break you're watching intelligent machine so glad to have harper reed filling in for paris she will be back next week jeff did you i think you're going away though are you or no is that just my fitness not for a while oh good hey hey hey hey yeah oh no i'm going away that's right i'll be here two more weeks october.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I go in a few places yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We'Re glad you're here thanks for watching i want to tell you about this company that actually is part of our infrastructure don't let that scare you but this portion of intelligent machines is brought to you by pantheon which is our website is brought to you by pantheon our workflow is brought everything we do is brought to you by pantheon your website is your number number one revenue channel in many cases but when it's slow or down or stuck in a bottleneck it's now it's your number one liability well with pantheon your site is fast secure and always on and i can tell you that from real experience that means better seo more conversions no lost sales from downtime and it's not just a business win it's a developer win too because your team gets automated workflows isolated test environments and zero downtime deployments no late night fire drills no works on my machine headaches just pure innovation marketing can launch a landing page without waiting for a release cycle developers could push features with total confidence and your customers they just see a site that works twenty four seven we started using pantheon some years ago it hosts our drupal which is the back end not just for our website and for our public api but for a full private api that is our workflow the editors use pantheon and every single day to put shows out to get them on your feeds when you go to our website you're using pantheon and if you ask patrick our web engineer what he thinks of pantheon he loves it pantheon powers not just drupal but wordpress sites that reach over a billion one billion unique monthly visitors visit pantheon io and make your website your unfair advantage pantheon where the web just works patrick's in our discord saying i do i love pantheon they've been really great great support for us great reliability it's funny because the agency that bought this ad did not know that we were customers of pantheon and they said would you ever do an ad for pantheon i said well i do it for free and they said well no we'll pay you i said i'll do it for money absolutely i love them pantheon.

[Harper Reed]

We.

[Leo Laporte]

Are very happy with pantheon and you will be too i promise okay i don't know what this did we talk about this yet last week authors this is from ars technica celebrate historic settlement coming in the anthropic class action they're.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fools to celebrate because they basically lost.

[Leo Laporte]

Well did they so remember the judge william alsop i think he was the.

[Harper Reed]

Java judge he was the coder he.

[Leo Laporte]

Was the coder he was the java judge now that i read that name i go yeah that's right he said on tuesday that he believes that the authors and anthropic have reached a settlement in principle remember this was the case where alsop said it was fair use when anthropic bought books digitized him for the models but there was still an issue with them using pirated books right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right well let's just pause there for one second the books they bought were all used books which is to say that the authors got nothing nothing they made nothing but that's how it works they were acquired yeah but that's how.

[Harper Reed]

It works though isn't that how it works yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The books that were acquired from a database that had not bought them them got them in trouble and there was a question as to how much penalty there might be but one of the beliefs was that because it was seen as fair use and because they really didn't lose much money i mean think about it this way if they'd actually gone to the bookstore they go to barnes and noble and say i want to buy jeff's book and i want to use it to train my model then they bought one copy of the book that's it so the money that actually ended up with would have ended up with the authors if they'd gone and bought all those books would have been de minimis still so the authors i think were smart to realize they weren't going to get a lot and so they settled but i don't think it's a big victory because we don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Know what the settlement is we don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Know what the settlement is but it also says that the fair use part.

[Leo Laporte]

Of this stands yes which is very important that's very important because it gives ai companies a path forward for getting content three authors sued andrea bartz kirk wallace johnson and charles graeber alsup the judge said allowed up to seven million claimants to join the class based on the large number of books anthropic may have illegally downloaded industry advocates warned if every author in the class filed a claim it would financially ruin the entire ai industry a lawyer representing the authors told ars technica more details will be revealed soon he confirmed confirmed that the suing authors are claiming a win for possibly millions of class members maybe a buck each though right a bag of pop chips i don't know nelson said this historic settlement will benefit all class members we look forward to announcing details in the coming weeks i'm not sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What the hold on i could be wrong it could be but if it were a huge huge financial victory then anthropic would be going out of business.

[Leo Laporte]

Right now yeah they wouldn't well although there is another anthropic story in here their valuation has jumped significantly with the latest investment probably true this is one of the things that does bother me a little bit is the dominance of just a handful of companies anthropic is one of them they're the ones who do claude that we were just this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is why we need open source this is why we need small models i.

[Leo Laporte]

Want to run models locally right i mean i would yeah anthropic let me just scroll to the story i've lost it but anthropic is now valued at they raised thirteen billion dollars yeah like.

[Harper Reed]

One hundred and something yeah one hundred.

[Leo Laporte]

Eighty three billion this is their f series i don't remember many f series rounds in the past this shows you how expensive ai is first round is the a series and then b and then c this is their f series.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They'Re the ones that i trust least because anthropic yes because they're most into.

[Leo Laporte]

Into doomerism harp doctor biz and and i both know you guys but they're.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They'Re into the fake definitions of of ai safety they're into doomerism they're where yeah they creep me up more than.

[Leo Laporte]

Openai i mean they were this little.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Openai is just downright greedy now so i can deal with that that's an.

[Leo Laporte]

American company yeah in a way it's easier to trust somebody who's open about their motivations than somebody who pretends anthropology.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We have a constitution for our ai we're going to align it and if we don't we're going to destroy mankind.

[Harper Reed]

But they also publish way more interesting things around safety than anyone else but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Put the air quotes around safety their definition of safety is you know paperclip destroying mankind kind of stuff as opposed to convincing kids to do bad things or ruining the environment this is this.

[Harper Reed]

Is to cancel the ruining the environment is out of scope for the conversation apparently that's not something that you talk about when it comes to llms because nobody is i do think that they of all of the i actually have the complete opposite point of view which is of all of them they seem to be the ones that i trust most on safety quotes or no quotes and i think it's because they're at least pushing that they're at least trying to talk about it they're publishing lots of papers i still think they're a very large company who is beholden to investors and makes decisions that are rooted in capitalism and that that creates very specific decisions as we've seen throughout you know tech startup history but i do think that they have been putting somewhat their money where their mouth is with some of this stuff and i don't think you can say the same for the other big labs google is just quiet and then every once in a while there's an interesting paper facebook there's no papers or i guess there are some papers openai there are some but not as much and anthropic's the one that's doing the most it seems but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought full of sound and fury signifying nothing is what i see of a lot of their safety stuff i'm.

[Harper Reed]

Being a jerk maybe maybe maybe but i but i i would rather have sound and fury than emptiness well that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What i'm that's what i'm fearing harpers i think that it's empty to the extent that people think well we can align this with human values that's the greatest hubris as i said before you.

[Harper Reed]

Can imagine so i think the thing that i is not they they are saying i do think that dario's famously you know doomer etc and i think that there are there is that aspect of their work but then there's i think this other thing which i think is interesting which is they're also publishing papers about when things have gone wrong they were one of the first or said you're right that said you know we have this whole section around safety around biosafety that we're not publishing because it falls within national security like there's all these things which is both like like pr but also like it's it's good to hear that stuff and it's good to talk about it i'd rather them talk about it but yeah it's very funny i really liked i also thought when you first said it that you said you don't like anthropic because they're into numerology and i was like oh wow this is going to go this is a turn both i thought i knew you and also.

[Leo Laporte]

Well so there i know you do that's why.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I i i enjoyed your double take.

[Leo Laporte]

Both of yeah we were very what.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Our buddy claude yeah our friend i.

[Leo Laporte]

Named him claude he calls me doctor.

[Harper Reed]

Biz yeah doctor biz's best friend claude's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Best friend how dare you.

[Leo Laporte]

Can i throw one one in yeah please that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ai is unmasking ice officers yeah is.

[Leo Laporte]

It really i mean i saw they.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Say they need thirty percent of a face and i'm sure the false positives are through the roof but it just seems like a certain amount of fafo.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there's this is the politico story that i think a lot of people on the left celebrated like well it's about time they're doing that to.

[Harper Reed]

Us that's true i think it's i think that's a that is true that the tech is accessible to everyone yeah it doesn't matter who you are and i do think that we have enough surveillance and easy accessible surveillance that's a.

[Leo Laporte]

Good point that it could be used.

[Harper Reed]

Against well it's it's more that imagine you're part of a community and that community is invaded by ice and they're disrupting their community abusing that community in some way they think they have a mandate i would not say they have a mandate from the citizens they feel like they have a mandate from somewhere and that in that then they do some action and then everyone uploads the ring doorbell cameras to you know some cloud and they can start face tagging.

[Leo Laporte]

It i don't everything's recorded now everything's.

[Harper Reed]

Recorded it doesn't necessarily matter if they know exactly who they are but it does matter if they can start to push them together so they can say oh this officer was part of these raids they don't need a name that starts to disable some of the fear tactics that are happening around that stuff and i mean it's nice to have have your political beliefs in wikipedia because everyone kind of knows where i stand i'm not a big supporter of this so i feel like i feel like this is i don't i don't think i think doxing people is generally a bad thing i don't support that i think doxing law enforcement is complicated because they are a public servant and there's obviously many websites that are putting you know know abuse information up there and like payout information up there for chicago police or la police or new york police or what have you i think that's all really important and i don't see why ice should suddenly be outside of that i do like your ring.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pointers there's a lot of former amazon drivers who are now ice agents probably a lot of faces on those ring.

[Leo Laporte]

Cameras roughly the same job requirements i.

[Harper Reed]

Think so yeah it is right roughly it's strange that amazon would have more.

[Leo Laporte]

Ethics than ice yeah i have really mixed feelings about it apparently the department of homeland security is concerned enough about it to complain ice didn't comment but ice spokesperson tanya roman said that the masks are quote for safety not secrecy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then show us your badge number yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean honestly there is a long standing tradition that law enforcement needs to at least you know have their badge number visible because that's the only way you can keep people to account and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Know that they're actually police maybe it's.

[Harper Reed]

Safety in the future trials not safety during today yes yeah yeah that's a.

[Leo Laporte]

Good point maybe at the nuremberg trials these misinformed activists and others like them are the very reason the brave men and women of ice choose to work wear masks in the first place and by the way the stats that homeland security is giving out about ice assaults are vastly inflated department of homeland security criticized the iseless product in a july statement saying skinner the guy who's doing this is a netherlands based immigration activist he says he and a group of volunteers of public a identified at least twenty ice officials recorded wearing masks during a raid breasts but they do need thirty five percent of the face visible which i guess is anything above the mask is probably roughly thirty five percent.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah and i think this goes to the to the i would hope that any i don't know the right word police force that is working within our citizens is following rules that help make the community safer and i think we have seen that the rules that that ice are following are not helping make the community safer they might be making ice safer but their job is not to make ice safer their job is to help make the community safer and whether you believe in the tactics of deportation i think this is outside of that i think that they should like there's lots of technology around masks that make it less scary and i think there's a deliberateness to this that is very similar to other times in history when there's been a deliberateness to that as well as a lot of movies but it is it is this is very interesting i think this is all related though to the masking and i think if they didn't have masks this would not be an article yeah yes not just because they would have been but i don't think people would have cared as much like this is a this is a issue that they created by their outfits and their lack of uniforms and all of that kind of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

World they've made what also strikes me harper is that and i'm trying to write about this right now in another context is that what distinguishes to me these ai technologies is they are designed to be easy for everyone to use and that takes away the priesthood it takes away the investment it takes away all kinds of other things that anybody can say well you can use facial recognition so can i and and there's no controlling of it either way for the officials or for others whether they're good guys or bad guys and i think that's a that what i could call that democratization i'm not sure that's the right word but it opens up the power of these things i would.

[Harper Reed]

Call it access i think it is democratization but i think we're talking more about access not democratization yes thank you because what what like wikipedia is democratization of of knowledge et cetera right that's great i i like that but this is more about you as a normal person have access to the same technologies that allows companies like google to build really great products like google photos or what have you or apple photos or what have you you now can do that yourself whether you're using you know cloud code to build it you're doing yourself by using a llm to do the research for you you know an example of this is google's published all of these great models around vector encoding like siglip is one of my favorites it's very very very powerful and you use it it basically gives you out of the box with no investment some of the really amazing powers of google search now you have to still build the product you still have to build the search you have to find things to search but you get this kind of out of the box and it's it's very interesting because this is different than it was in the past in the past you got these fundamentals like you got linux like great what can i do with linux then you have to still have to build the website and the product et cetera but now you' core pieces of products which is like semantic search or face recognition or you know or generation of audio or generation of music or whatever it might be kind of for free and whether that's a chinese model us model i don't think it matters so i think that that access really does then it democratizes the product right so now everyone can build that thing so if you know if the government is using you know surveillance against us there's a lot of surveillance that we can use against the government so to speak but there's this this is something that i've been thinking a lot about and there's a really great heinlein book the moon is a hearth's mistress do you remember this book oh yes and it and i think that it has some of the best statements about today's ai situation that i've seen oh wow i have to reread it should definitely revisit it but it talks a little bit about some of these kind of things jeff in a way that that's very interesting it's obviously set against a revolution and all this stuff and then it's or the activists or what have you but it's very interesting to hear this prediction of what technology of a talking machine would be like and then put that against what we do know these things do look like and then what happens when everyone gets access is another question in.

[Leo Laporte]

That harper it's always great to hear from you i'm so glad we could get you on the show thank you today is there anything you want to plug two thousand three hundred eighty nine.

[Harper Reed]

Ai not yet we have some fun stuff coming it's just not the right time to talk about it i'm excited to share about it hopefully in the next couple weeks but maybe next time stay tuned to twenty three eighty nine ai i'm in the middle of a big office move i don't know if you've moved before but that is that.

[Leo Laporte]

Background i moved we're going to get a different background one two three four times now the studio is over twenty.

[Harper Reed]

Years it's no fun it's no fun and being that we build startups there's all of just the stuff around that's been that's going to be fun to like you know look at and say oh that was our whole twitch studio we built or oh this is this set of robots or what have you so that'll be really entertaining but it is going to be a little bit like we have a lot of questions so it's it's it's like i'm happy for this to be over like all moves but i am also i'm also happy for fall because it's such a good time so it'll be really fun i don't know if you've been following there's a lot of folks who are saying that september to i think december they're locking in and they're just programming and building their products this is a movement on twitter and so it's been it's been fun to think through that and i i've been i've been watching i've been watching a lot of these builders and it's been fun to watch them and so it's it's exciting yeah well it's an exciting time i told my vc's that one of the things reasons i started a company is because the outside world is so uncertain needed something certain so i picked something that's very very chill and risk free at startup but the thing is it just feels good to be building right now it's very nice we have a great team and it's really fun so i guess i'm just plugging my decisions in the last year that's where i'm plugging.

[Leo Laporte]

Right now good decision good decisions everybody is going crazy check out twenty three eighty nine ai and watch this space thank you harper reed really appreciate it.

[Harper Reed]

Thank you very much for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

Always a pleasure yeah you keep the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Message board behind you so the message.

[Harper Reed]

Board of course because that's literally our clock yeah are you talking about this one this one this no we like the clock the clock is the best clock that clock is very cool that's the that is the front of a british bus it used to say piccadilly square that i hooked in a raspberry pi into it off of like rs forty five can bus or whatever and it it now it now says the clock now the funny part about this is there's a cron job on a different box that hits it every minute to send the message of the clock i don't know why i don't have.

[Leo Laporte]

It just on the resolution running the.

[Harper Reed]

Clock so computer basically computers everywhere it's like it's like soil in green one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Job but i want to see it behind you wherever you go i want.

[Leo Laporte]

To see update the minute update the.

[Harper Reed]

Minute exactly exactly it's great i love.

[Leo Laporte]

It i love it thank you harper thank you jeff jarvis professor we gonna.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do any do i don't get to.

[Leo Laporte]

Do a thing oh i forgot we usually do picks about this time i was just so anxious to wrap things up i completely forgot your pick and i didn't ask harper ahead of time so i don't know if he wants to do one but i will i'll give you an opportunity to do that as soon as we get jeff jarvis's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paper well i'm gonna have a few because i'm gonna make up for this okay in the papers that i'm now reading every week on arxiv one i found was a deep hype in artificial general intelligence has a definition of deep hype and i like that it's coined this is a paper out of the university alberta de catalunya it's defined as a long term over promissory dynamic that constructs visions of civilizational transformation through a network of uncertainties extending into an undefined future making its promises nearly impossible to verify in the present while maintaining attention investment and belief brilliant i love that.

[Leo Laporte]

It crammed even better in catalan let.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Me tell you i don't doubt so the other thing i want to mention real quickly is project called at data rescueproject dot org a german data scientist is collecting data sets from eighty six.

[Leo Laporte]

Us government offices oh that are being deleted as we speak this is great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think this is really twelve forty two data sets so far because we're in crazy land yeah and the germans are rescuing us well this is such.

[Leo Laporte]

An opportunity for the rest of the world world to take advantage of our short sightedness that too yes bringing in scientists data you know got it and i hope they do because this is there's a huge gap a gulf otherwise.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And finally one more is really important and we were getting elegiac around this on our text is that it is exactly fifty years since the first issue.

[Leo Laporte]

Of byte you're not alone steve gibson also was talking about the fiftieth anniversary yesterday and he showed the review from byte in like nineteen eighty five of spinrite of his program and i had to joke the user interface is completely unchanged from nineteen eighty five it looks exactly the same i love drc and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What i love about it too is that that it it the the tagline was the small systems journal isn't small system was nice the COVID billing they used for quite a while was computers the world's greatest toy but what matters so much as i think about this is is the notion this was home brew computers yeah right and you go to the early days of radio and the radios were built by kids in basements using tubes yeah and you go to the early days of the web and what did we have we had blogs and you go to the early days of even computers and it was amateurs it was homebrew so i just think that it's something that this show of all shows should give a salute.

[Leo Laporte]

To fifty years since byte i i pointed out a byte review that i wrote in nineteen eighty four shortly about eight years nine years after byte was started in seventy five one of my first reviews for i think it was for a macintosh program program at the time and of course jerry pornell one of our longtime guests was a regular his chaos manner column was inspiration to my whole generation of computer users yeah i loved byte i was a subscriber.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I bought it but i have to be honest i did not understand hey.

[Leo Laporte]

Low cost hard disk computers are here eleven megabytes of hard drive and sixty four kilobytes that's a fast ram for under ten thousand dollars a bargain it's amazing it'll certainly make you appreciate what we got today that's all i can say yeah although we don't get the best computer furniture compared to the look at that this looks like something out of severance yeah this is a site i found a visual archive of byte magazine but also all the bytes are also on the internet archive there are lots of places i like this one because it has regular expression search so you can go through it and you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can see this is also when i started computers at the chicago tribune in nineteen seventy four the year before we installed our first system and i was the newsroom geek oh neat that's how old i was a button nipper button.

[Leo Laporte]

Nipper happy birthday bite long gone though unfortunately sad to say all right everybody thank you for joining us i didn't ask you harper if you had something you wanted to say that you like a program a movie anything i got.

[Harper Reed]

I got a cool new thing a friend sent me called the berghain challenge which is an ai challenge that where you act as the famous berghain door guy the url is bergheim challenges listenlabs ai it's very funny and it seems very popular it's very fun we and then separately we had a just incredible conversation yesterday with a researcher at the university of chicago a professor over there named sarah sebo who told me about this wonderful paper that was called pimp my roomba and it's from two thousand nine and it just talks about designing robots for personalization and then how people interact with them and this is something that i'm very interested in because i think we are totally messing up the human computer interaction aspects of ai and i think that we're going to see a lot of really cool stuff from ai worlds and then the final thing is this this research company who i don't know what they actually do i didn't really look but they did they have an article called probing llm social intelligence via werewolf parlor game i have.

[Leo Laporte]

Played werewolf with with mister harper reed.

[Harper Reed]

I believe yes and i think so and and it's great it ranks gpt five very high pro that means it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Good at deception yeah yeah yeah so.

[Harper Reed]

This is this is i just love this because i love the game i think it's great it talks about all it's doing and i think this is just like a fun thing and i wish people would do more fun things like this i'm kind of tired of seeing something that's just like this i feel like llms right now is at this phase where we're all f one teams and we're just saying if you say kittens in the prompt it gets four percent faster and it's like it's all these little things and these guys are just like let's just do werewolves.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is great.

[Leo Laporte]

So werewolf is a game where one person is a werewolf the rest are villagers there could be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

More than one person you can have.

[Leo Laporte]

Multiple werewolves okay and you have a variety of other parts people play and the idea is to get find the werewolves before they kill all the villagers and you have have there's a lot of deception involved and chatgpta t five is apparently the best do they have transcripts in here oh yeah look oh this looks like fun yeah and then i this so who is who is this bergheim i'm not familiar with berg you're the bouncer at a nightclub your goal is to fill the venue with.

[Harper Reed]

A thousand just do a google image search for berghain bouncer okay very famous person that was the that was the bouncer at this very famous very infamous berlin nightclub and it's just famous because yeah he's terrifying yes and he is very nice apparently or whatever but his whole thing was that he would not let you in and so very famous people would try and go and they wouldn't go in you know and it's very it's like this thing of like what is cool these are obviously tastemakers in this very specific part and like there's just a whole culture around this that i think is really interesting and compelling and i've only gone once and i did get in thankfully or i wouldn't be able to live with myself but the fact that this has been this this cultural icon or this cultural thing has been put into this ai challenge is really fun and it's just.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of a funny thing you play steve sven marquardt the berghain bouncer yeah.

[Harper Reed]

I think so yeah so basically this is it it says you're a bouncer to nightclub your goal is to fill the venue with n one thousand people while satisfying constraints like at least forty percent berlin locals at least eighty percent wearing all black people arrive one by one and you immediately decide whether to let them in or turn them away your challenge is to fill the venue with as few rejections as possible while meeting the minimal requirements and so you get that has these scenarios and then there's obviously is it a coding challenge or it's it looks i mean it is it is a coding challenge i think it is meant to be a llm challenge you can create a new game you create a new game you sign up you create a new game and they give you what amounts to a framework so you get like a uuid that then you make subsequent requests with and you can decide and next so you paste in there you post accept true or false and then they give you the next person that's in line and then you have to say except true or false and this is just very this is just a very funny thing a friend of mine sent it to me earlier today and i was just like this is great like what a funny project like it's not it's not too serious but it is like it is that's probably training something in the back end that we don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Know about yet i am i don't usually do picks but i'm gonna give you a pick because i think we need to leave you with a human scale movie in which there is so little exposition you have to figure it out it's the last vim vendors movies came out a couple of years ago called perfect days this is an incredible movie it's an amazing movie it's very slow there's not a lot of dialogue in it it's about a man fail.

[Jeff Jarvis]

On netflix pardon me fail on netflix.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah it's on hulu actually and prime video but it's worth buying because it is it is an incredible movie about a very calm fellow whose job is to clean the public toilets in tokyo and how he how zen he is about his whole life and it's beautiful it's called perfect days and it is close to a perfect movie as you could and it will make you feel good about life i think and there's.

[Harper Reed]

Another one that you might like if you like that called seagull cafe oh i'll watch it which is a very similar vibe ah okay yeah you have.

[Leo Laporte]

To really slow yourself down to watch this movie because if you're antsy at all you'll get up and leave you gotta relax into it it's very good seagull cafe all right i'm gonna add that to my list thank you harper reed reed thank you jeff jarvis paris will be back next week thanks to all of you for joining us a special thanks to our club twit members who make this show possible without your generous donations we would not be able to do what we do twenty five percent of our operating costs are supported by club twit memberships it's ten bucks a month you get ad free versions of all the shows you get access to club twit discord next tuesday for instance in the discord only we'll be covering the apple event we have to do those in the discord now we have a lot of special shows friday we're gonna have the ai user group two pm pacific the hour before that chris mark were at the photo show lots of stuff the club is a great place to be please consider joining it find out more twit tv club twit we do intelligent machines usually kick it off with an interview and then what you just saw whatever you call that every wednesday two pm pacific five pm eastern twenty one hundred utc you can watch us live if you're in the club in the club to a discord but you can also watch on youtube twitch x dot com tiktok facebook linkedin or kik take your pick watch us live you don't have to watch live it is a podcast download audio or video of the show from our website twit tv im there's a youtube channel dedicated to intelligent machines great way to share clips with friends or subscribe that way you'll get it automatically every week it's free to subscribe just find your favorite podcast player and sign up now i would like you to sign up for a newsletter because people are always saying well how do i know what's coming up and we have a lot of special events and so forth the newsletter tells all it's free one piece of mail a week it's twitter tv newsletter i want to always remember to mention that because people are always saying well how did i know that the ai user group was free friday well that's how you would know thanks everybody for joining us we'll see you next time on intelligent machines bye bye.

[Harper Reed]

See ya see ya i'm not a.

[Karen Howe]

Human being not into this animal scene i'm an intelligent machine.