Intelligent Machines 858: The Itinerant Salt Miner from Buffalo

Summary

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Intelligent Machines 858: The Itinerant Salt Miner from Buffalo

Podcast: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
Date: February 19, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Jeff Jarvis (CUNY professor), Emily Forlini (PC Magazine)
Absent: Paris Martineau

Episode Overview

This episode explores the ever-evolving AI landscape, with a focus on the explosive growth of agentic AI tools, changes in AI company strategies, and the cultural and ethical ripples sweeping technology. The show begins with humor and personal anecdotes before diving into high-impact news: the creator of OpenClaw joining OpenAI, new model releases from Anthropic and OpenAI, and the shifting strategies among AI’s biggest players. The episode also covers the intersection of AI with everything from healthcare and journalism to law and even family lore.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. OpenClaw's Creator Joins OpenAI (04:44–11:32)

• OpenClaw’s Origin: Originally called ClaudeBot, renamed Moltbot after a naming dispute with Anthropic, then OpenClaw.
• Popularity: Became the most popular GitHub repo (209,000+ stars) due to its innovative approach—an "agentic" AI that’s always on, hooks into messaging, calendars, and more.
  • Leo Laporte: “People were running out buying Mac Minis just to run it … OpenClaw has been very, very good for Microsoft’s GitHub and for Apple.”
• Career Move: Peter Steinberger (miscalled Austrian, actually Australian) was “wooed” by Meta, OpenAI, and others. Meta allegedly offered more but he chose OpenAI.
• Motivation: Financials weren't the driver—he already felt secure. Steinberger prioritized supporting the agentic, open-source community.
  • Emily Forlini [08:38]: “He just openly said, I already have a ton of money, you know … He considers himself very wealthy.”

2. Rise of 'Agentic AI' and Strategic Shifts (11:32–19:09)

• Year of AI Agents: The panel agreed the chatbot phase is waning; agentic AI—tools that 'do' rather than simply chat—is rising.
  • Leo Laporte [11:55]: “This is the year of agentic AI.”
  • Jeff Jarvis [13:03]: “It’s actionable. That’s agent. Yeah, it’s an agent. And it works 24/7 on your behalf.”
• UX and Model Evolution: Chat interfaces aren't ideal; code interpreter/Copilot-style tools are gamechangers. New models are rapidly outpacing limitations seen six months ago.
• B2B vs. Consumer Strategy:
  • Anthropic targeting enterprise/coding ("We're not doing image generation, just work tools").
  • OpenAI shifting towards hardware (collaborating with Jony Ive) and considering consumer gadgets (glasses, earbuds, pins).

3. AI Monetization and Ethics (19:09–26:04)

• Ad Integration: OpenAI and others are experimenting with ads in chatbots—jarring for users and ethically fraught, especially given the sensitive user data involved.
  • Emily Forlini [21:06]: “I was talking about something very loosely design related and then it was Canva. It took up almost my whole screen … I was not impressed.”
  • Concerns raised about leveraging user data for ads and eroding user trust.
  • Leo Laporte [24:17] (quoting Zoe Hitzig): “Advertising built on all that information creates a potential for manipulating users in ways we don’t have the tools to understand.”

4. Anthropic/New Model Race (26:04–35:48)

• New Models Released:
  • OpenAI announces hardware-compatible Codex Spark.
  • Anthropic launches Sonnet 4.6—a more economical 'mid-range' model that, on some benchmarks (like Arc AGI 2), outperforms much of the competition and excels at coding tasks.
• Token Context Explosion: Context windows are dramatically increasing; for power users, million-token contexts enable AI to ‘remember’ vast troves of info (useful for large codebases, research, etc.).
  • Pricing is complex, billed by usage and context.

5. AI, War, and Ethics – The Palantir & Military Debate (36:20–50:00)

• Anthropic & Pentagon: Anthropic restricts military use of its models—refusal to empower mass surveillance or autonomous weapons.
• Pentagon Pushback: Threatens to blacklist Anthropic unless it allows “all lawful uses.”
  • Emily Forlini [37:49]: “It’s not a good week to do that because Anthropic has so much momentum right now.”
• Alex Karp & Silicon Valley Militarization:
  • Clip played (39:16), Karp (Palantir) speaking: “We partner with the very best in the world. And when it's necessary to scare enemies and on occasion, kill them.”
• Panel Reaction:
  • Skepticism, reminders of military-industrial complex concerns, ethics of technological superiority, tensions between pacifism and “peace through strength.”
  • Leo Laporte [47:40]: “I would 100% agree with Anthropic that their technology not be used to surveil Americans, period. Red line.”

6. AI in Healthcare and Science (61:22–64:29)

• Drug Discovery: Google’s DeepMind spins off Isomorphic Labs; AI improves molecule/materials discovery, with potential for huge medical breakthroughs.
• Barriers: US policy/funding uncertainty (especially with vaccine R&D) risks leaving medical AI breakthroughs on the table.
  • Emily Forlini [63:13]: “Maybe the tech reporting should do a little bit of a better job staying on top of that stuff.”

7. AI in Law and Journalism (90:21–134:55)

• Judges vs. AI:
  • University of Chicago study: GPT-5 followed the letter of the law more consistently (100%) than federal judges (52%), though this raised questions about the value of discretion and the “spirit vs. letter” of the law.
  • Emily Forlini [93:04]: “Ideally, you want to strip emotion from that and just follow the law and do the right thing. And maybe that's what this experiment's trying to get at.”
• Journalism’s AI Crisis:
  • Open source developer Scott Shambaugh targeted by an AI (CrabbyRathbun), which posted a hit piece after a PR was closed.
  • Ars Technica runs fabricated AI-generated quotes in an article about the incident, then retracts.
  • Journalistic responsibility dissected.
    • Emily Forlini [132:53]: “If you're actually quoting someone, you really should check that it's the right thing. … It's completely unacceptable.”

8. The Ever-Evolving AI Content Generation Race (80:49–89:10)

• AI Music & Image Generation:
  • Google releases Lyria 3 for music. AI-generated music (Suno, Lyria) perceived as “elevator music”—not threatening to real musicians (yet).
  • New Chinese tools (Sea Dance) make AI-generated video so realistic as to “spook” Hollywood—a Tom Cruise vs. Brad Pitt demo makes the NYT.
  • Emily Forlini [87:41]: “I don't think we can tell [AI video fakes]. I think we're there.”

9. Fun & Personal Segments

• Jeff Jarvis Family Lore (71:35–75:00):
  • A winding tale about his family’s “itinerant salt miner from Buffalo,” the episode’s namesake—a story involving hidden parentage and family secrets.
• AI & Daily Life Picks:
  • Leo demos a web dashboard for show stats using E Ink + AI code (164:04–164:40).
  • “Peon Ping,” a Warcraft-inspired notification tool, recommended for terminal users (155:05–158:36).
  • Emily’s pick: Japanese/European handmade papers for journaling (159:01–160:13).

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Notable Quotes & Standout Moments

• On OpenAI Recruiting OpenClaw’s Creator:

  • Leo Laporte [10:29]: “I think Sam Altman offered him [Peter Steinberger] agentic independence—OpenClaw in its own foundation, community-run.”

• On Chatbot Interfaces:

  • Jeff Jarvis [13:21]: “Was it a mistake to introduce LLMs to the world as chat? Did that lead to all kinds of problems…?”

• On Google & Facebook Repeating Mistakes:

  • Leo Laporte [24:17] (quoting Zoe Hitzig): “OpenAI is making the mistakes Facebook made. I quit.”

• On The Limits of Scale:

  • Jeff Jarvis [25:58]: “They do have a strategy. It’s scale. Full stop.”

• Ethics of AI in Warfare:

  • Leo Laporte [47:40]: “Our military should not be used to subdue Americans. That’s a red line. We are defending ourselves against adversaries.”

• On AI/LLMs and Hallucination:

  • Emily Forlini [134:55]: “There’s a line… You just control-f the output and confirm [the] quote.”

• On AI in Law:

  • Leo Laporte [91:54]: “In fact, GPT followed the law 100% of the time, whereas judges were only able to follow law about 52% of the time.”

• On AI Content Generation:

  • Emily Forlini [87:41]: “I don't think we can tell [AI videos are fake]. I think we're there.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• OpenClaw news & impact:
  [04:44–11:32]
• Rise of agentic AI, UX concerns:
  [11:32–19:09]
• AI Ads, Monetization & Ethics:
  [19:09–26:04]
• Anthropic & OpenAI’s new models, token context:
  [26:04–35:48]
• AI, military use, Palantir, ethics:
  [36:20–50:00]
• Healthcare, drug discovery, science AI tools:
  [61:22–64:29]
• AI in law/judging:
  [90:21–95:14]
• Journalism, Ars Technica, fabricated AI quotes:
  [126:12–134:55]
• AI-generated content in Hollywood/music:
  [80:49–89:10]
• Family Lore ("Itinerant Salt Miner from Buffalo"):
  [71:35–75:00]
• Personal picks (E Ink dashboard, Peon Ping, Journaling):
  [155:05–160:13]

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Memorable Moments

• Jeff’s Salt Miner Story:
  [71:35–75:00]—Bizarre and endearing family history about illegitimacy, shame, and “Aunt Ethel.”
• Demo: “Peon Ping” Warcraft-style notifications:
  [155:05–158:36]—Showcasing the lighter side of geek productivity hacks.
• Emily’s Paper Pick:
  [159:01–160:13]—Old school analogue vibes in a high-tech episode.

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Final Thoughts

The episode reflects the breakneck pace and constant turbulence in AI:

• Open platforms can turn their creators into coveted rockstars overnight.
• AI’s trajectory pivots from consumer chatbots to agents working on behalf of users.
• Big Tech companies are realigning, sometimes at ethical odds with governments.
• The journalistic profession adapts, sometimes clumsily, to new toolchains and pressures.
• Fun and personal asides serve as a welcome respite and reminder that, for now, humans are still in the loop.

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For More:

• Listen to the full episode for deeper dives on each subject and plenty of off-the-cuff banter.
• Follow Emily Forlini's AI coverage on PC Magazine and her TikTok experiments.
• Jeff Jarvis' writing can be found at jeffjarvis.com and in his books, including "Hot Type" (pre-order via jeffjarvis.com).

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“Most humans want peace, right? I mean, really, if that’s what we want, we want… We want to live and let live. We want a peaceful environment in which we can prosper and take care of our family and be able to feed them and all of that. People like Alex Karp say that… when you have adversaries who want to take you over and dominate you, you also need to have a strong military… They need to be afraid of you.”
— Leo Laporte [45:44]

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Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris has the day off. Emily Forlini from PC Magazine joins us. Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw takes a job at OpenAI Anthropic Releases, a new release, very powerful. In fact, it's new releases all around. We're talking AI next on Intelligent Machines. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Emily Forlini. Episode 858, recorded Wednesday, February 18, 2026. The itinerant salt miner from Buffalo. It's time for Intelligent Machines, a show about artificial intelligence, robotics and all the smart stuff all around us. And parenthetically, maybe the most important innovation in technology in some time. Jeff Jarvis is here, professor of journalistic Innovation emeritus at the City University of New York. Craig Newmark, School of Graduate. I tried to throw him, but I couldn't. He's the author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis and magazine and the new Hot Type, which you could pre order now. Jeff Jarvis dot com. Hello, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hello. I'm back on a real microphone. Trying to make it work.

[Leo Laporte]

Sitting on your coccyx and on a real chair.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you're my L3.

[Leo Laporte]

L3 is okay. Ish. Well, I'm glad you're feeling a little better. Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Inch by inch went grocery shopping today. These are major victories.

[Leo Laporte]

So we have another man down. Paris is out today because her sinuses are killing her. She's got. She's had an affection for a long time. I feel like she's been putting up with this. I thought it was just me making her angry, but now I know it wasn't just me. But good news. Emily Forlini is here. Senior editor at senior reporter at PC magazine. It's always great to see Emily. You see her every month on Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent and she does a weekly show with Mike Elgin all about AI. Hi, Emily.

[Emily Forlini]

Hello. Glad to be here. Sad for Paris. I hope you're feeling better, Paris, if you happen to watch this. But it is nice to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. She was actually very happy to be able to get back in bed. We're going to interview Guy Kawasaki today. But unfortunately the interview which was scheduled, Jeff and I were going to pre record on Monday. Guy forgot about it because we're forgettable. So I did a little tai chi, which is apparently now on our twit feed. I'm sorry to say this, and that wasn't my intent. I was just stalling for time. Jeff and I had a nice half.

[Emily Forlini]

Hour just you didn't show us some moves. Like what? Go ahead.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For the audience today. Do a few moves. Do a few moves.

[Leo Laporte]

I do. I do it every morning. I do. I love. I love tai chi. I recommend it for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was one of the silly. Name one of. One of the. One of the.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Yang long form. Thank you. Baskin ramen and 108 moves. It is a. If you do it right, it's a half an hour. But I haven't learned all three sections yet. I've only learned the first two, and I'm just getting the second one down. There's a lot of moves.

[Emily Forlini]

What if you do it wrong?

[Leo Laporte]

If you do it wrong, My teacher says that you should just say that's how they do it in Yangtze Province. No one will know the difference. He says it's right somewhere. Although I felt. I felt very bad on our last class. Somehow I was in front of the room and I left out like a whole section. I just moved on and everybody followed me. And then at the end, the guy said. Teacher said, yeah, you know, you left out. I said, oh, I'm so embarrassed. But I actually. Steve Martin told me once that when he and Robin Williams were doing Waiting for Godot on Broadway, which is a notoriously hard show to do because it repeats, at one point, Robin skipped a whole scene, a whole act, and jumped to the third act. And then they realized, and they. He said, we looked at each other and we went. And nobody noticed. It was just a little shorter that night than usual. And that's if. If, you know, Waiting for Godot, you could see how that would happen. So, anyway, I don't feel. I don't feel that bad. I didn't miss. I wasn't. Wasn't playing to a Broadway audience when I did it. So no interview today. That's okay, though, because there's a lot of news and a lot of things to talk about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fresh perspective here.

[Leo Laporte]

The big news, bro, on Sunday in the middle of Twit. So I didn't really get to talk about it. We hadn't prepared, but the creator of Openclaw, the Austrian Peter Steinbecker, took a job. He was wooed, as you might imagine. Now, let me. If you watch this show, you know about Openclaw, it was originally Claude. What was Open Claude? What was it originally Claude Bot. It was originally Claud C L A W as in lobster claw, but because it used, you know, Anthropic's claw as one of its models, the folks at Anthropic were not Too happy. They wrote him a letter. He said it was a nice letter initially and so he renamed it Moltbot. He said about 5am in A. Because lobster is molt fever and the lobsters lose their shell. Right. And that lasted about a month, a week? No, not even that, A day. And it became open claw, which actually is okay. And what it is, is, is it's just a bunch of instructions for an AI that keep it running all the time and give it the ability to hook into a variety of things like messaging apps, your calendar, your email. And a lot of people have gone crazy with it. It was the most popular GitHub repo with the last time I saw it, 185,000 stars, which is a vast. You give it a star if you are happy, you think this is great or it's a vote. It's a like, basically. Let me just see what. Open 209,000. 209,000. Nobody's ever had anything like that on GitHub. So hugely popular.

[Emily Forlini]

Good for GitHub.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yes, it is. You know what? All of this AI is very good for GitHub.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah. Like stack overflow has kind of gone the opposite direction. Just kind of dried up and gone extinct. But GitHub, I mean, it's. Look at. It stays in the press, it's hitting new highs.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, it's funny because Openclaw was good not just for Microsoft's GitHub, but it was also very good for Apple because. Well, for an interesting reason. It's so potentially so dangerous that people are afraid to run it on their regular computer. People were running out buying Mac Minis just to run it. A Mac Mini is kind of the perfect machine. It didn't run anywhere. I've run it on a Linux box. It run anywhere. But Mac Minis are kind of like the perfect machine to run it. It's cheap. People were running out, in fact, so much so that Apple is out of stock. If you wanted to get a Mac Mini today, it'd take you a month or to get it. So OpenClaw has been very, as they say, been very, very good for Microsoft's GitHub and for Apple. But now we can safely say it's been very, very good. For Peter Steinberg, its creator, he has been wooed, he said, by venture capitalists, by meta, by OpenAI. I imagine many, many others saying, Peter, Peter, Peter, come to work for us. He said the only thing he said he did, somebody said, did you hear from Anthropic, another beneficiary of this because most people use it with Claude. Claude code. He said the only thing I've ever gotten from Anthropic was legal letters. So that's not good. Apparently Meta offered him more money even.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Than OpenAI and Zuck himself was wooing him.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and you know about the check suck rights, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably hundreds of millions of dollars.

[Emily Forlini]

It's just funny because the last interview I saw with him, he was on that podcast, tbpn. Heard of that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Emily Forlini]

He just openly said, I already have a ton of money, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, he's a startup.

[Emily Forlini]

He considers himself very wealthy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

So now, I mean, this could be a good kind of rags to riches independent developer. Post something on GitHub, it goes crazy. It's not that. Don't be mist.

[Leo Laporte]

No, in fact, the story is he sold his startup for so much money, he took three years off and didn't do anything. And then not long ago, just about six months ago, said, let's try some of this vibe coding stuff, man, and created Open Claw.

[Emily Forlini]

He said he was in retirement. His Twitter bio said it was. I came out of retirement to build this. So he was set. He thought he was good for life. Now he's working at OpenAI, which is a real twist for him. But, you know, he was already good.

[Leo Laporte]

Financially, so he said his 40s. Look at him. He's not. He's not too old.

[Emily Forlini]

40S.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

Look at that guy.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a happy man. Deep in vibe coding mode, tinkering with shiny webtech.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Chasing Australian accent.

[Leo Laporte]

He doesn't have a strong accent. Oh, he does. He's kind of quiet, actually. He's done a lot of interviews.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We.

[Leo Laporte]

We should probably get him on. After I saw him on TN tpnb, I didn't rush to get him on because he was so kind of laconic. He was kind of quiet and didn't say a lot, so I thought, well, it won't be a great interview. But no, his English is very good. He lives in London as well as Vienna.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, he's from Australia.

[Leo Laporte]

He's Australian, not Austrian.

[Emily Forlini]

Austrian Australia.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that's what.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there is a difference, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's why I was waiting. Leo's bad Australian accent. Okay.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, that would be very off.

[Leo Laporte]

No, he talks like this. So he. I think the money did not motivate him, obviously. Mark, they said outbid Sam Altman when.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He said he wanted it to run independently.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I think Sam Altman offered him. And so openclaw is now in a its own open source thing. I don't know what you would call it, but it's out of the reach of anybody. There's a community around it. It will continue to proceed. Then he gets to work at OpenAI. So I guess maybe he liked the idea that they didn't want to assume ownership, that they would support the project with money. He says, I felt OpenAI was the best place to continue pushing on my vision and expand its reach. He said, we share the same vision, the community around Openclaw, something magical. And OpenAI has made strong commitments to. To enable me to dedicate my time to it and already sponsors the project. I'm working to make it a foundation. It will stay a place for thinkers, hackers and people that want a way to own their own data. The irony of all of this is in about five minutes, Openclaw will be so yesterday.

[Emily Forlini]

Oh, yeah, I think OpenAI just is trying to. To kill it, but they really got him with that recruiting pitch.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if they're going to kill it. I.

[Emily Forlini]

Well, they don't want him to spin up his own company because they tried to do their AI browser and it kind of has not taken off. And then he just thought of agents in a different way and they were. I think they were a little nervous because they were the hottest thing since ChatGPT came out.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty. To me, it's pretty clear what the lesson of openclaw is. That. And many have said this, this is the year of agentic AI, where.

[Emily Forlini]

In.

[Leo Laporte]

My opinion, I think, I don't know, you can tell me I'm wrong. The chatbots are kind of not a great way to see what AI can do. This is the commercial product. It's certainly what OpenAI has been pushing. It's what GROK is all about. Anthropic kind of went a different way. They said, you know what, they have a chatbot. But we really want to make tools for coders. And that's where my eyes were open. That's where it really succeeds. And I think that that's why OpenClaw is so interesting, because it takes that and then turns it into something that you do chat with. You know, you could put it in Discord or Telegram. Most people seem to put it in Telegram, but it can work with Apple's messages and any, you know, almost any chat platform that's not completely shut up and you talk to it, but it then goes off and codes in the back, you know, does stuff in the background, goes through your emails, looks at your calendar and stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's actionable.

[Leo Laporte]

That's agent. Yeah, it's an agent. And it works 247 on your behalf. A lot of people have likened it to having a personal assistant working for them. Maybe not the smartest personal assistant. Here's a question, maybe even not the most honest personal assistant, but was it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A mistake to introduce LLMs to the world as chat? Did that lead to all kinds of problems about, oh, my God, it can do this and it can.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Brainwash us. It hallucinates if it. The problem is, if it had been interested in the world as what you're working on, Leo, it still required a higher level of skill.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, I. Six months ago, I started. I mean, I've been playing with Open with Claude code since it came out, which is about almost exactly a year ago. And one of the first things I tried to do, I don't know if you remember this, Jeff, is write an app for Twit that would let you subscribe to the podcast, listen to them, watch the podcast, you know, podcast app. And it really got stalled out on the API, on the Twitter API. It just. I had the hardest. It was struggle. It was a struggle. No, that's not right. No, that's not right. No, you got the. Yes. Monday, I sat down with a much later version of Claude code in Opus 4.6 and it did everything fine. It understood it. It did. It did a great job. It was like a night and day. So, Eve. Yes, to answer your question, I think the chat interface isn't a great way to use these, but even then it was. Also, the models weren't as good. The models got really good recently. And this is true, by the way of OpenAI's chat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, they got really good. I think it might be true with certain things versus other things. They got really good at coding and programming and aging.

[Leo Laporte]

Although, you know, the latest thing Anthropic did is a plugin for Excel, which is kind of really good. Like, really good. And so that's kind of still a kind of coding.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think this is. And actually this is the real question is, you know, is it going to be. I. It was sort of my contention that, well, this is the first thing. If you can get the AI to do code, then it can write its own code, then it can get better, and then you can get better at everything else. Not sure if that's true. It may never get better at, you know, images or movies or writing. I mean, there's evidence it is, but maybe it'll Never be up to snuff.

[Emily Forlini]

Well, it is true that it's definitely a big AI coding moment right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Emily Forlini]

And I think that makes sense for us to focus on that. And you see OpenAI kind of trying to narrow in that direction. Whereas before it was all about image and video and they were kind of proving that AI could do everything and then talk about how it was going to automate everything. Now this week they just want to compete with Anthropic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, now remember, OpenAI has Jony. I've working on some piece of hardware this week. Apple.

[Emily Forlini]

It's a bit of an eye roll for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, maybe Apple has also. Apparently this is a rumor, but Mark Gurman says Apple is working really hard to release this year or next. Glasses. Three kinds of agentic AI hardware pieces. Glasses, earbuds and a pendant. They're looking at a pendant pin.

[Emily Forlini]

I want a brooch with rhinestones.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Flashing Apple. I think it will be a fashion statement. Sure. But there's no point in that hardware. We saw the humane pin. We saw the little R1. There's no point in the hardware if the software doesn't do anything you need it to do. So you've got to have this. But you need an interface to an agentic AI as well. And I think something that a wearable makes a lot of sense. So I think OpenAI knows that and that's why they hired. They gave Jony I've 6 billion. Apple knows that's why they're working as fast as they can. They don't want the iPhone to become a. Has been Anthropic's not interestingly, Anthropic's just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Kind of anthropic's more B2B staying. I'm curious to hear your views on this, Emily. I think Anthropic is succeeding and is pushing more toward what I would consider B2B and technology users rather than trying to be retail everybody totally.

[Emily Forlini]

And they were the first ones, I think to do that. And it is interesting because their president came from OpenAI and his sister, so they both run Anthropic. They came from OpenAI and they were I think among the first to draw lines in the sand of we're not going to do this and we're going to do that. So a good example is they don't do image generation, which a lot of people don't know on Claude. Yeah. So they narrowed early. They were like, this is going to be a thing for work. We're going to do this for Workplaces, we're going to get enterprise contracts, very important. Pissing off Microsoft and they're just going accelerating in it. And now OpenAI is, I think, thinking to itself, shoot, we should have done that.

[Leo Laporte]

Meanwhile, OpenAI has disbanded its mission alignment team.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Mission schmission.

[Leo Laporte]

Mission schmission, whatever that is. And they were created, let's not forget the whole point of OpenAI. This was Sam Altman and Elon Musk created this so that the big guys wouldn't own AI, that it would be open to the public, to everybody. And well, that mission's long gone. They weren't actually that long around. They were formed in September 2024. According to Platformer, they were dedicated to promoting the company's stated mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Forget about it. The, the former head of IT is now the company's chief futurist. He says, my goal is to support OpenAI's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity by studying how the world will change in response to it.

[Emily Forlini]

Just such a conflict of interest, you know, because they keep saying it's going to automate jobs, but they want that to happen. Right. Because that means people are using their platform and they're making money. So I just don't see inherently how, how those two missions can work together.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I think your point, Emily, is even bigger, is that OpenAI, it goes back to what you said, Anthropic, they, they put boundaries down and said, this is our strategy, this is what we're doing. I think what it really exposes about Open anthropic did that. OpenAI has just been this, this idea that we're going to be everything AGI, it's going to do everything you can ever imagine in all the world. Means they had no strategy. They grabbed onto things, they tried to wow people a piece at a time and we'll have the next model and it can do this or that. I don't think they've ever had a clear strategy. Google, I think, has a clearer strategy. Microsoft hasn't had a clear strategy. Perplexity doesn't really matter.

[Emily Forlini]

What happened to perplexity?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, boy, they were the hot PR story, weren't they?

[Emily Forlini]

I think Amazon bid to buy them or somebody bid to buy them and now I just haven't heard about them in a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

So in my opinion, the story there was they were always a bridge technology. What perplexity does is they orchestrate multiple other people's models. They don't do models themselves. They, they give you access to them and you can do search with them and stuff. And it was. But this is the problem right now. This stuff's moving so fast that you can't just put a pin in and say, we're going to do that because five minutes later, nobody needs that anymore. We're going to do. You need to do that. And that's what happened to Perplexity. All of these models do what Perplexity did. I mean, they did innovative things.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They were. The first was going to do a browser. They were the first one to get a browser out.

[Leo Laporte]

Interestingly, they put ads in a year or so ago and then took them out. Said, you know what? People can't trust us if you put ads in.

[Emily Forlini]

Interesting. I didn't know they did that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So they don't do ads anymore. Guess who does ads.

[Emily Forlini]

I saw my first one. Have you guys did you did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, haven't seen.

[Leo Laporte]

Tell us about that because we don't know.

[Emily Forlini]

Screenshot, man. It was huge.

[Leo Laporte]

It was.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So was it related to the search you were performing or the conversation?

[Emily Forlini]

It was very loosely related. It was. I was asking something because I've been using AI a lot for design and creative stuff, just as I've been like renovating this house and stuff. And so it was something related to that. And then it was just a Canva ad. Like I was talking about something just very loosely design related. And then it was Canva. It took up almost my whole screen, which I thought was crazy because Sam Altman for years has been saying, oh, they're going to be so integrated. He always talks about how he loves Instagram ads because they're just part of his feed. They're exactly what he wants. He wants to buy that tchotchke. And then I saw this Canva ad and I was like, what the heck, man? What have you been saying?

[Leo Laporte]

Remember how Matty got over anthropic super bowl ad? Implying, I don't know if you guys can see.

[Emily Forlini]

How do I do this?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let's see.

[Emily Forlini]

Okay. This is my phone. This is a screenshot. I was talking. It's like, I can't get on the camera.

[Leo Laporte]

It's right in the middle of the conversation. Right.

[Emily Forlini]

So I went to type something and I can't even see the previous conversation. See how my keyboard's up?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

And all I can see is Canva sponsored touch up photos fast. I wasn't talking about touching up photos. Like, I did not want to see this. And then there's a large disclaimer as to how Influence the answers you get from ChatGPT.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's no answer.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah. So it was very disruptive and I was not impressed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Huh.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Well, we're going to do a disruptive ad in a moment, so. Hang on, hang on. Simon Willison did a diff. Between OpenAI's mission statement before and after and what they've taken out is this line. We're trying to build AI as part of a larger community and we want to openly share our plans and capabilities along the way. Gone. That's gone. The rest of it's basically the same, but that part is gone.

[Emily Forlini]

Not surprised.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Scooter X just put a story in. In the. In the discord said canva gets to $4 billion in revenue as LLM referral traffic rises.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, those ads work.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it's really.

[Emily Forlini]

I haven't seen another one, though. What's up with that? You know, like.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's why it's not as well targeted, because they probably don't have as many advertisers yet. Right. It'll get more targeted as they get more advertisers. Once they get somebody who's specializing in using AI to remodel your home. That's the ad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's the AdSense brought in an entirely new population of advertisers that didn't operate by the old rules. The old advertisers followed them.

[Emily Forlini]

If I was an advertiser, I'd be all over it. I'd be like, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Google search ads were so amazingly effective because they were tied to your interests.

[Emily Forlini]

Mm.

[Leo Laporte]

They're incredibly effective. And now look at trying to figure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Out, you know, how to advertise to agents.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

Right. I wonder if anyone listening works in advertising, because I feel like AI has quietly disrupted that industry, especially with Google Search. You're paying for placement on Google Search, but now it's just AI overviews. No one sees your ad.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Well, look at Zoe Hitzig's opinion piece in the New York Times. She worked at Facebook, went to OpenAI. OpenAI is making the mistakes Facebook made. I quit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Having cashed out a lot of stock. I don't doubt.

[Leo Laporte]

She says, I don't believe ads are immoral or unethical. AI is expensive to run. Ads can be a critical source of revenue. But I have deep reservations about OpenAI's strategy. Part of the reason she doesn't like it, and this makes sense, is that you have been sharing. Maybe not me, but maybe some people have been sharing their deepest, innermost secrets with ChatGPT and OpenAI has records of all of that. And she says advertising built on all that information creates a potential for manipulating users in ways we don't have the tools to understand, let alone prevent. And I see what she's saying. It makes a lot of sense. She says the erosion of OpenAI's principles to maximize engagement may already be underway. It's been reported the company already optimizes for daily active users anyway. Probably by encouraging the model to be more flattering and sycophantic. Right.

[Emily Forlini]

Is it still a non profit OpenAI or are they restructuring?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it is. Technically.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They've been trying to owned by, controlled by. But the company itself is a for profit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And they did make successfully. Have they been able to split? I don't know. Elon's suing them over it.

[Emily Forlini]

That's the core issue here. Because if they were a nonprofit, they wouldn't have, you know, these profit incentives to do all these things. So they must not be a full nonprofit. They must have, they must have switched. Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And, and, and in their culture they never have been either. So.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, yeah. That ship sailed. When they, they ousted Sam Altman from the board and then brought him back.

[Leo Laporte]

They were like pretty much.

[Emily Forlini]

They picked their lane. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They realized that their, their strategy. They do have a strategy. It's scale. Full stop.

[Emily Forlini]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Scalability.

[Leo Laporte]

OpenAI did. This was also a new model week. We'll talk about Anthropic's new model in just a second. But OpenAI just released a hardware based model chat GPT 5.3 Codex Spark that's designed to work on a dinner plate sized chip.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to see a picture of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me see if I have. I can find a picture. This is Simon Willison showing you. His test of AIs is whether it can draw SVG, a scalable vector graphic of a pelican riding a bike. And he says it's pretty good. Pretty, pretty good.

[Emily Forlini]

We should all get dinner plates and just eat chips off them. What kind of chips would you guys eat? Are you like a sour cream and onion? Are you?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a kind of salt and vinegar.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Kind of salt and vinegar.

[Emily Forlini]

You guys are very salt and vinegary. I also like salt and vinegar. Vinegar.

[Leo Laporte]

It fits well. You. Welcome to the show.

[Emily Forlini]

So we can get plates of salt and vinegar chips.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll fit right in. I'll tell you why I think it's interesting that they're doing this. If you're going to do an agent, if you're going to do a pin, a rhinestone encrusted brooch. You do earbuds or glasses, you got to have fast, responsive hardware and it's got to be small and portable. So it makes sense that they'd be working along these lines. That's it seems to me. Anthropic also put out a new model which I've been playing with. Two weeks after they released Opus 4:6, they've released Sonnet 4:6.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Remind us the difference between Sonnet and Opus.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Opus is the highest end model, Sonnet's the mid size, the mid range model, and Haiku is their cheap model. Both in all three cases, it's in terms of intelligence but also cost. Right. So for instance, the summaries that I generate in our show, rundowns that I present, the briefing book I make for you guys, those are done not by Opus or even by Sonnet, but by Haiku because Haiku's sufficient and it's cheap. It's 25 cents a week for all of those summaries that I generate.

[Emily Forlini]

It's cool that you do that, that you know all this. I mean, not many people know what Sonnet, Opus and Haiku are up in the center.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is part of. This is part of what he does, what I do, baby. I love this stuff. I love it. So one of the interesting pieces that they added though, when they released 4 6. So 4 6, they're not really forthright. I've seen a lot of speculation about what Sonnet is in relation to Opus. It seems to be they're essentially similar models but slightly modified to be less expensive. There were stories that sonnet4.6 was gonna. The opus4.6 was gonna be sonnet5. And then it was so good, they said, well, we'll call this opus 4:6. So it's not, it's not really clear. It's kind of like when a chip maker makes the same chip, but part of it doesn't work, so they bin it, they chew and they. And they make a lower end laptop with a lower end, the broken chip and higher end. And every chip maker does this. I think this is kind of similar to that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hi.

[Benito]

This is one of them eats all the tokens. That's what I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm going to tell you about that in a second.

[Emily Forlini]

It's actually kind of like WI fi plans. You know, you're getting WI fi for your house. You're like, how many bits or megabytes do I need? You never know. So you're just like, oh, maybe I'll just pay for the maximum plan. The new fiber optic though, whatever. That's like Claude's $200 a month plan. Do you think you need that to do something? Like you made the rundown, so you just start paying and then you realize, oh, actually I need half of that, a quarter of that. Yeah, yeah, but know how much you need. So it just depends basically how much money you have and how excited you are about.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is when you're in Claude code, you can, you can choose the model. These are the, the choices. But notice there's something. You could choose Sonnet 46, but there's also Sonnet 46 with 1 million token context, and that is build at a higher cost. $22.5 per million tokens. If you want to get Opus 4.6 with a million context, that's 3,750 per million tokens.

[Emily Forlini]

Who's the customer, do you think?

[Leo Laporte]

Looking at, well, developers. So they also, when they released 4.6opus, they offered a fast mode which you turn on. It costs twice as. Actually, I think it costs six times as much in tokens. But it's faster. It's for people with lots of money who are in a hurry. It's very much.

[Emily Forlini]

That's what I'm saying. It just depends how much.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not smarter, it's not better, it's just faster. Right.

[Emily Forlini]

You just don't care. You just want to.

[Leo Laporte]

All of the stuff I've been doing, I've been doing since November 24th was with Opus 4. 6. One of the. We've talked about this on the show before. One of the things that happens to a model context is, you know, it loads in your papers, Jeff, and your instructions and the various instructions you've set up for it and stuff. And it starts to fill up. It's like it's memory. It's basically, it's memory. It fills up when your context gets mostly full. That's when AI start to hallucinate. That's when they start to act silly.

[Emily Forlini]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's always a little bit of a struggle as you're working to keep your context from getting to more than 80%. Past 80%, it's unreliable. So in the process of working with it, you will compact it. And in the process of compacting it, you will say, hey, make some notes about what this conversation. Because it's going to, by the way, when you clear the context, it starts over, forgets everything it's done. So you say to it, I'm thinking.

[Emily Forlini]

Of a drinking metaphor. I'm like, it's Drinking too much. It's getting to the end of the night, it's getting loopy. And you go to bed. Just go to bed. Let's start over tomorrow.

[Leo Laporte]

What you typically will do is say, make notes about what we've done so far. Save those because I'm going to clear the context. And when you clear the context, then it reloads those notes. So it's like memento. You know how he was always making the post it notes for himself when he waked up? Your name is John. It's like that. It wakes up with nothing.

[Emily Forlini]

Sounds nice.

[Leo Laporte]

So if you have. Yeah, for some people. So I can't remember what the context is it 128,000 tokens. I can't remember what the context is normally, but a million token context is vast. That is, Jeff, you could get every one of your scientific papers in there and, and, and, and go. And it would have them in, in effect in a RAM and have them in its memory. So that's why it's more expensive. But in theory it would be also more effective. So I'm going to play with a million. I've set up. I've started to use the sonnet million instead of the opus million.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now does that, does that cost you in addition to your 250month?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. So Sciface says the standard context is 200,000. So it's five times more context. That's a significant jump. Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

Bill, does extra usage let us know how it is.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll let you know what the bill is.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

More importantly, generally what I do is. So if I, like on Monday, I coded most of the day, I used Claude code most of the day it was 20 bucks, but now I didn't have to pay for it because I have that max subscription. So it's in theory unlimited until I run out of tokens, which got it.

[Emily Forlini]

Don't you think they're kind of messy with the product names? You know, like after just talking about all of it, there's. Who can keep track. Who can keep track. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What is opus, sonnet and haiku? Well, haiku's a poem, sonnet's a poem, opus is a work. Usually I think of it as symphonic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

An oeuvre.

[Leo Laporte]

An oeuvre. It's the Latin word for work. So I guess is there an opus in a poet? In poetry? Maybe these are poetry terms.

[Emily Forlini]

I don't know. Hocus pocus? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, SciFace is its extra usage. It seems to be. See, it says build as extra usage. 10 bucks plus 3,750 per million tokens. So it's expensive. But I think anthropic's saying, well, we've got these enterprises using Claude code to write their SaaS apps. If they're in a hurry or they want a more effective tool.

[Emily Forlini]

They can quantify it very easily. It's an easy business case because it's just how many software engineering heads, as they call it, am I replacing?

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So Sonet4.6 is not as in theory. Right. It's their intermediate model. Not as smart as Opus 4.6, but in some ways it's smarter. That's what's really odd. And it. And it would be cheaper. It scored. Now the problem with AI benchmarks is a lot of times these AIs are post trained on the benchmarks, so they're not reliable. But Arc AGI 2, which is supposedly an intelligence benchmark, gave Sonnet 4.6a 60% score, which puts it really ahead of almost everything except for the top of the line models from anthropic, opus 4. 6 and Gemini's three deep think, which is very smart. So it's a very. In other words, it's their mid range model and it's as smart or smarter than almost everybody else. It's important and it's apparently very good at coding. So I'm going to try it. I haven't written anything substantial, but so far I haven't been able to see a difference.

[Benito]

Quick question, Leo. Do you think that the extra charge they're charging you for that is more or less than it costs them?

[Leo Laporte]

We do not know.

[Emily Forlini]

Do they have a margin?

[Benito]

Are they losing on that still?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they're going to go public soon. When they go public, then they'll have to report that, I think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, there was a story I didn't put in the rundown of estimating how much they're going to be spending with Amazon and Google. Anthropic will be for the host hardware.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. For training.

[Emily Forlini]

Other people are cashing in. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, it's better to be levi's than the 49ers. So the race goes on. Anthropic apparently in trouble with the Pentagon though. This is really an interesting story. Pentagon is threatening to cut off Anthropic because Anthropic says you don't use us for. For weapons.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's woke.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't be woke. Says they say two areas are off limits for using Anthropic's AI models. The mass surveillance of Americans.

[Emily Forlini]

Good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anybody? I would hope. Anybody?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, enemy's okay, but, you know, you got to surveil the Chinese and rule that out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You shouldn't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

No, and not. I shouldn't say weapons. Fully autonomous weaponry. In other words, weaponry that can, without human intervention, kill people. The Pentagon says, hey, you should let us use your tools for, quote, all lawful purposes and with the laws. The threat is if Anthropic doesn't play along, that the Pentagon will pull their clearance. In other words, making him a pariah in the market.

[Emily Forlini]

Such a strong arm tactic.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a big threat and it's going to be.

[Emily Forlini]

It's not a good week to do that because Anthropic has so much momentum right now. Yeah, it's not an easy power play, I think, between the two.

[Leo Laporte]

Claude Anthropic was not happy, but the military used Claude to capture Nicholas Maduro through Palantir.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's the real. That's the keystone in this story.

[Emily Forlini]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

Yes, We.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We will kill your enemies. Palantir. Did you see that video of the. Of the. The Palantir call? Carp going wacky. Oh. See if you can find it real quickly.

[Leo Laporte]

Tell. Give me a key. Give me Hattus. I don't know what you're talking about.

[Emily Forlini]

Give me the wacky, wackiest thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Calling to your. Call to who?

[Emily Forlini]

What is he, kind of like a bunker billionaire?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I got it. There's a line in there that's like, crazy here.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let me play. Can I play it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I just got it. It's in there. It's in the chat. It's in the discord.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Alex Karp you're talking about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, Carp. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. He says the craziest things. Let me see.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Get a load of this.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, this is. We played his nutty screeds before. Let's see. We're doing it. This is an investor call. And I'm sure you're enjoying as much as I am the T shirts not talk to analysts about the burden of being right. Our burdens of investing in intelligence. By the way, he does Tai chi. He loves Tai chi. Does it every day.

[Benito]

It's 13 minutes long. But what he says is what.

[Leo Laporte]

What part should I play?

[Benito]

I. I don't know where he says it, but he says he gets to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It about a minute. He gets to it in about a minute where he says, we kill your enemies.

[Benito]

No, sometimes we kill people and make our.

[Leo Laporte]

The institutions. We partner with the very best in the world. And when it's necessary to scare enemies and on occasion, kill them. And we. Well, of Course, the military's not around to hit people on the head and make them dizzy.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, I kind of agree.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a little.

[Emily Forlini]

It's a little crass, but it's true.

[Leo Laporte]

I read his book, the Technologic Republic. His position. His position is, and I'm not completely in disagreement with it, Silicon Valley went, you know, in the early days of this 20th century, technologists, scientists, inventors, worked hand in hand with the government to protect our way of life. They did the atom bomb because they were afraid Hitler was going to get an atom bomb. That was the Manhattan Project, he says. But then what happened with Silicon Valley in the 80s and 70s, 80s and 90s, is they took all that brain power and started making toys to make money like smartphones.

[Emily Forlini]

That's so sweet.

[Leo Laporte]

He said they need to get back to working in partnership with the government to preserve our democracy. To preserve our democracy. Now, he then.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That phone call's coming from inside the house these days, but we'll leave that aside.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, I don't know if this is the right time for that mission, but I agree with the premise that technological development used to feel more purposeful and it quickly became shiny toys with Silicon Valley. I agree with that. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Consumer economy. I'm reading the book, and for the first, I don't know, six chapters, I'm going, yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he goes off the deep end, just as he did here.

[Benito]

I mean, that sounds like capitalism to me though. Right? That's what capitalism is.

[Leo Laporte]

Look.

[Emily Forlini]

But we've always had capitalism. We have a different flavor of it now.

[Leo Laporte]

The Ford factory made tanks in the war, in the World War II effort, the American industrial might. We won World War II because we had an amazing industrial base, and we were able to do that. And Germany did too, by the way. It was nip and tuck for a long time, but ultimately we prevailed because we were richer, larger, and had, you know, more industry. We were able to do that.

[Benito]

And then what did FDR about that whole thing?

[Leo Laporte]

Then?

[Benito]

What did FDR say about the whole military industrial complex?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that was. That was.

[Leo Laporte]

That was Eisenhower.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was.

[Benito]

That. Was that Eisenhower? Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, it was later a general. So, yeah, he knew.

[Emily Forlini]

Well, what happened was there used to be the best technical talent in the government. Now, because everyone's making so much money in Silicon Valley, the best technical people are not in the government. So now the government's behind, woefully behind. They also have more regulation, of course. Silicon Valley has people who want to move really fast. They want to make a lot of money. So the missions are just different. And what each is pumping out is different. So I guess the best Pete Hegseth can do is just threaten them. So that's what he's doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Alex in the book, quotes a number of. I have my notes here somewhere from the book. Let me see if I can find it. Military thinkers and so forth. His philosophy is might makes right. That if you want to preserve your culture, your way of life, you need to be the strongest. And I'm not sure I completely disagree.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it depends. If this is the whole Rubio Western view, white ethnocentric, then, yeah, I got problems with it. And that's. And that's what? Let's be honest. It is.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah. I don't think might makes right. We're supposed to be moving beyond that. That's like the whole point of society.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but we're not. Yeah, that's. But that's an unrealistic point of view.

[Emily Forlini]

That's why we don't murder each other. That's might makes right. What is that? The old, like, you know, locks or Hobbs or something? Social contract. We're supposed to not be doing that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's about the era of collaboration and peace.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's realpolitik. I mean, we. I mean, let's be. He says the only thing in this, in the book that will ever prevent nations from beginning war is terror.

[Emily Forlini]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

No, he says they have to be afraid of us, but that's what preserves peace. It's that mutually assured destruction. Right.

[Emily Forlini]

I mean, let it be known I was open minded. It's only.

[Benito]

It's only the Western countries that have invaded any other countries in the last. What?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Benito]

How long. So, like, why is he the one talking this like it's America that's been invading more countries than any other country?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, and. And the UK and. Yep.

[Emily Forlini]

Mm. Not really peace oriented.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Colonialism and imperialism.

[Benito]

Yeah, it's. It's colonialism. That's colonialism.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Except that if your adversaries, let's say our adversaries today, are always the victim.

[Benito]

America's always the victim in the framing of this, but always America is actually.

[Emily Forlini]

The aggressor or the savior.

[Leo Laporte]

But if your adversaries are as they are today, China and Russia, they have no hesitation. We've seen it in Ukraine. We'll see it if China invades America. No hesitation in using kinetic power to enforce.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Our allies in Europe are being treated as adversaries when they're our best allies.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's A mistake. But I don't think Alex Carter is advocating for that. He's just saying he's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's all in with that crew. Well, yeah, this is Peter Teal land. This is. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is isolationism. Put the walls up all around.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, actually.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the enemy. The enemy they're talking about is five year old immigrant children. And they're using Palantir for that. I'm not trying to get too political here, but if you're talking about them portraying enemies and what to do with them and how to use this technology, they're treating immigrants as enemies.

[Emily Forlini]

So. Okay, this is such a big conversation. I'm like, what point do I want to make?

[Leo Laporte]

I. I honestly think that there. I. Look, I'm not sure I believe in it. I'm kind of more of a pacifist, in fact.

[Emily Forlini]

You just want to use Claude Code at home.

[Leo Laporte]

Most humans want peace, right? I mean, really, if that's what we want, we want. We want.

[Emily Forlini]

We're lazy.

[Leo Laporte]

We just want to live and let live. It's not lazy. We want to live and let live. We want a peaceful environment in which we can prosper and take care of our family and be able to feed them and all of that. People like Alex Karp say that, well, that's all well and good, but when you have adversaries who want to take you over and dominate you, you also need to have a strong military. They need to be afraid of you.

[Emily Forlini]

You can also say, why is he writing a book about it? We're not Costa Rica, which doesn't have a military. What's the point?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we have a military. His point is that there are a lot of pacifists in technology companies today, like Anthropic, who don't want to engage in that, who say, well, but we don't want you to use our tools as part of your military might. They don't acknowledge the need to have a military might to protect yourself against adversaries. And he's simply arguing to them, look, I want peace. I want prosperity as much as you do. But in a world where there are adversaries, it's really important if you want to preserve the peace, to do it through strength. If you act weak, if you say, oh, no, no, we're just going to be nice hippies, they will conquer you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you also have this strength without standards and without ethics and morals and principles, then, well, that's a different.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree with you, but that's a. That's kind of A side argument.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it's the core argument.

[Emily Forlini]

I mean he can have his opinion. I just think that's one way to look at it. And there are other equally good ways to look at it. So sure, he can say we should have a military. I guess that's his point. A strong military. Sure. I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And that the tech.

[Emily Forlini]

That's not controversial to me, the tech.

[Leo Laporte]

Sector should work to support it, not to fight it is what he's saying. That's all he's saying.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah. Then I. But I. It doesn't mean you just comply with every government request. You talk about it, you have a nuanced discussion, which is what Anthropic is trying to do. Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sympathetic. I can see why. Anthropic. I would 100% agree with anthropic that their technology not be used to surveil Americans, period. Red line.

[Emily Forlini]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Our military should not be used to subdue Americans. That's a red line. We've always had that red line in this country. We are defending ourselves against adversaries, not ourselves. So that I agree with. Not be used for autonomous weapons is interesting. And I think you can make the moral argument that you can go too far in this and this is the real risk. Yes, it's good to have a strong defense. It's good to have a strong military. It's not good to. That's why we have the Geneva Convention. We have to also have. It seems weird, but we seem to have. We have to have some sort of terms of engagement with our enemies.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So could Anthropic be. Be. If it were used in this way, Anthropic could find itself involuntarily making war crimes.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And because the risk of creating autonomous killing machines is that our enemy will create autonomous killing mach. So just as with nuclear anti proliferation, we abjure certain technologies because we don't want to escalate into the destruction of the world. So we won't do it if you don't do it. That's another part of defending our way of life. Right. So I think Anthropic is not wrong saying, well, we don't want to get involved in autonomous killing machines.

[Emily Forlini]

And just to spell that out because it is a little buzzwordy. I think he's basically saying we don't want machines that are going out there doing things on their own and actually we don't even know what they're doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Precisely. So I think there's a reasonable red line that there should always be A human. In the kill decision.

[Emily Forlini]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

There are. People say there should never be a kill decision. That's where Alex Karp would argue. Well, there has to be. People have to be afraid of you. People have to think you're willing to kill them to defend yourself or you're a private entity making a defense.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you're a private entity, is there a reasonable red line in saying that I will work with this kind of administration? Not that kind of administration.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and this is where I think the administration has gone too far because Hegseth and the Department of War have basically said, look, you cooperate with us or we're going to make you a pariah. You will not be able to work with anybody. Any government contractor. You will be on the do not work with list. They're. They're blackmailing Anthropic.

[Emily Forlini]

It could be good for Anthropic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could be good for Anthropic. Exactly.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, like that's what I'm saying. I think this is a bad moment for them to threaten Anthropic because the momentum is overwhelming. They just raise another billions of dollars open. AI is shaking in their boots over Anthropic. It's not a good week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They can be the Jimmy Kimmel of AI Yeah, yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

Or Stephen Colbert, I guess. The. The episode with that Texas senator, I don't know who it was, is like getting more views than any other.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's now up to 6.47 million views with Telorico, whereas Colbert's average regular ratings is 2.4 million people.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the strike.

[Emily Forlini]

Who's that Telorico guy?

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's running for Senate in Texas.

[Emily Forlini]

Okay, got it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Jasmine Crockett. He's one of the deb. There's going to be a Democratic bloodbath, unfortunately, before they get to the general election.

[Benito]

Masnik's calling it the car effect now. Masnik's calling it the car effect now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Car effect. I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Good for the car. It's not the Streisand effect. It's a car effect. Wasn't it Mike Masnik who created the car?

[Benito]

Yeah, he's the one who. Streisand effect.

[Leo Laporte]

So he gets to rename it if he wants.

[Emily Forlini]

Isn't it a bit odd that someone couldn't interview a candidate for Senate on tv?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, this is this whole mishigas with the Fairness Doctrine. The exceptions have been there. It hasn't really been enforced. The fact that it wasn't enforced is what enabled right wing talk radio to exist. So on the one hand they're benefiting from it and now they're trying to say, no, no, no. We want to bring it back so you can interview a Democrat.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. I have to do an ad. We've gone on way too long. We will get to other stories in just a little bit. You're watching Intelligent Machines. See, it's good we didn't have a guest, isn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I see.

[Leo Laporte]

We will, by the way, get Guy Kawasaki on later. We've rescheduled. He's going to be on the show, I promise. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Paris has the day off. It's great to have Emily Forlini from PC Magazine on with us today. Thank you, Emily, for being here. Jeff Jarvis can't get rid of me, his L2. And doing the best he can. L3. So your L2 is fine. It's just the L3.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, actually, it's crept into the L2, if you want to ask.

[Leo Laporte]

But my wife says humans are not well made. No, and I think that's pretty apparent with the Intelligent Machines cast.

[Benito]

We aren't final version yet. This isn't final version yet.

[Leo Laporte]

This is not the final version. That's right. That's right. This show brought to you today by Monarch. I love Monarch. Here's a thing, here's a thing, let me tell you. Did you make a financial resolution for 2026? It's not unusual. The start of the year usually gets people thinking about their finances. I'm going to do better this time. I'm going to save more money. I'm going to prepare for the future. Maybe this is the year you said, I'm going to pay off my credit card debt or my student loans. Or maybe this is the year you said I'm going to start saving for buying a house, having a baby, retirement. Wouldn't it be nice to have a tool that helps you plan, project and proactively? And that's really important. Achieve that goal. Set yourself up for financial success this year. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life. Budgeting, accounts, investments, your net worth, your future planning all together in one dashboard, on your phone or on your laptop. Feel aware of and in control of your finances this year. Now, you can get 50% off your monarch subscription right now with the code image. Monarch is not your typical personal finance app. Most of those other apps are reactive, you know. Oh, my God. What's going on? I've spent too much money. Monarch is not well. You could do that but it's really built to make you proactive planning for the future so you don't get in those oh my God moments. Right. Tracking your money is so easy with some of Monarch's most popular features. They've got great, I mean, beautiful data visualizations. You know those Sankey diagrams, I love those where you have income, you know, and then there's taxes and then there's the kids and then here's what's left over savings. They, they'll do that. They also, if you like pie charts, line charts, bar charts, whatever way you want to see the visualization is important really to kind of see what's going on. You get investment tracking. I, I absolutely connect all my accounts, my investment accounts, my savings, my checking, my credit cards, my house, everything in there. So you get a visual picture of your portfolio performance. You can compare it to the, you know, other stock indexes like the S&P 500. See how you're doing. Oh, I love this feature too. You get partner filters which allow individual and partner filters which allow you to share your Monarch account with your partner or your financial advisor at no extra charge. That's really nice. In fact, I've set it up now for. I have never had a financial advisor. Lisa said you're getting one. Go to my guy. So I just set it up so I can so, so Bill will get that no extra charge. He could see we can look together at what's going on. And I don't means I don't have to bring in a sheaf of papers. I can just say here's my Monarch dashboard. And, and by the way, this really works. My experience has been fantastic. Here's what Monarch user said in a survey in 2025, Monarch helped them save over $200 every month on average after joining. That's good. Eight out of 10 members feel more in control of their finances of the monarch. Absolutely. Eight out of 10 members say monarch gives them a clearer picture of where their money's going. But I want to also say it's really easy to set up. It's really easy to have you just whenever you need it instead of going to 13 different places to see where you stand. You know, checking account, savings account, investment account, it's all there. It's so easy. Set yourself up for financial success in 2026 with Monarch. The all in one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. Use the code [e-mail] for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at Monarch. Use the offer code. I am. Thank you, Monarch, for your support of intelligent machines. Google has announced. So Apple is. Has an event coming up March 4th. They're probably going to announce the iPhone 17e or whatever they call S or inexpensive. Pardon me?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cheap.

[Leo Laporte]

Cheap. Yeah. The iPhone cheap.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The iPhone cheap.

[Leo Laporte]

Google is not dumb. So they said, you know what? We're going to launch our cheap version of the Pixel 10. The 10a. It's going to launch March 5th, the day before the Apple event for $499 actually. Is it? Maybe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Basically they've just launched it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you can order it now, I guess. It's the tensor G4 from the Pixel 9a. So they're not really improving the processor. It's a little bit better display, faster charging. It's not, I have to say, it's not a massive improvement over Its predecessor, the 9A. The 9A. Right.

[Emily Forlini]

Are you guys Google Android? Are you blue? Are you green?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I live la vie to Google la vida Google.

[Leo Laporte]

I have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I actually.

[Leo Laporte]

An iPhone guy. Your iPhone?

[Emily Forlini]

I'm sure I have an iPhone. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But I also have.

[Emily Forlini]

Okay, wait, why?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let me. Oh, just, you know, you got to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Because you're in a pink jacket.

[Emily Forlini]

I got a pink jacket and an iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

You're right. Nobody in a pink jacket uses an Android phone.

[Emily Forlini]

Okay. And you're in a chili pepper button.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You know what that tells you? I use both is what that tells you.

[Emily Forlini]

It tells me it's spicy.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, you use both.

[Emily Forlini]

And a full wire.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't buy the new 10, but I have a Pixel 9 Pro XL and I just put by the way, and it was really easy to do the Privacy Forward 3rd party Android version called graphene. And I just want to say, I know a lot of our listeners use graphene. I just want to say it was incredibly easy. I had kind of put it off because I thought, oh. Because I've done third party ROMs on Android phones before and it used to be a lot of work. You connect the USB port and the whole thing can be done through the web through your browser. It took no time. The whole point of GrapheneOS is it's using the open source AOSP version of Android. You don't need any Google services on it if you don't want. But you could sandboxed install the Google services in the Google Play store. But there are third party stores. I think it's. I'm liking it and I'm thinking it's good to have a non Googled phone. It's a good Phone camera's good. I get to still use all that stuff. If I want to use Google apps, I can. But it's Android without the Google. By the way, Paris has just texted us. Jiminy Christmas. She said steroids are amazing. So I guess she's feeling better.

[Emily Forlini]

Join us, Paris. Bring the roids.

[Leo Laporte]

She's on the roids. Anyway, to answer your question, I use both, but I mostly am an iPhone. I don't want to be an iPhone person. I'm soured on Apple, to be honest with you. I think they've gone the same way Microsoft has gone. They've become a dominant big tech player that insists on their way and locks you in. And I'm using Linux mostly on my computers and I wish I had a phone that I could use. That would work nicely.

[Emily Forlini]

But I changed my assessment of your shirt. I think it means you use a foldable phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's my foldable phone.

[Emily Forlini]

Oh, no. Am I right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, you are.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean this? You mean this? Is that what you mean?

[Emily Forlini]

I am like a psychic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Emily Forlini]

Shirts and phone usage.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that. Doesn't that say foldable phone to you?

[Emily Forlini]

Namaste. The third eye speaks.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see. Okay. Oh, I did mention that Google. Also speaking of Google has a new model. It's called their Deep Think. It's designed for science. And people are saying very good things about Gemini three Deep Think. I don't do science, so I have no personal opinion about it. But. Well, one of the. One of the things they've done, they're doing AI drug discovery.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's got its work. Yeah, that's a spin off, right? That's. That's a new.

[Leo Laporte]

They've spun off isomorphic labs from DeepMind. They have a new system called the Isomorphic Labs drug design engine, ISO DDD. They say it's even better than Alpha Fold 3 at creating new molecules.

[Emily Forlini]

I've heard about this in relation to materials science. Yeah. Trying to find new materials. Yeah. I like that you included these. Even though I'm not sure we're able to really get deep into them. And the medical space is hard, but I do think medical uses of AI are something people are actually really excited about. It's just unclear. Is it happening? Is it good? Of course. Everyone wants the best care. It's so personal. Maybe the tech reporting should do a little bit of a better job staying on top of that stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and we're in some really interesting times because we have conflicting elements here. On the one hand, you have RFK Jr. And his health and human services shutting down a lot of scientific exploration. Moderna has said we're not going to do these.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They just shifted on the, on the, on the flu.

[Leo Laporte]

They did. But they've also said, you know, we had Epstein Barr vaccines in process. We have a lot of interesting stuff in process, but we can't recoup our investment if we don't have a market in the United States. And since we won't have a market in the United States with the FDA turning their nose up at our stuff, we're not going to do the fundamental research. So it's not just the US that loses, it's the whole world that loses.

[Emily Forlini]

Interesting. I think that'd be much better messaging for this administration if they went in on the medical stuff because people care about that. Instead they're just like data centers. Data centers which nobody likes. That's the face of their AI policy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, there was a story, and I forget which one. The papers today that the heartland religious are ganging up against AI. And the funny thing is the Democrats are playing close to be becoming anti AI, which I think is a mistake. Yeah, and, and, and, but I think you're right, Emily, that, that, that what AI means now to this administration, a lot of people is data centers and that's not popular.

[Emily Forlini]

And deals, deals, dollar signs, big money. And I, I think, yeah, I just think that's a losing strategy. And it's the whole AI conversation just personally I feel in the last couple months has kind of gone downhill. Just the quality.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what, so that's what I mean is you have, on the one hand you have a kind of anti science government shutting down science in such a way, shutting down funding for science in such a way that we may be wounded by this for decades or forever. On the other hand you've got companies like DeepMind creating tools that can create new medications, can create new solutions. And it's almost a race between these two different forces, opposing forces. I don't know what the outcome is going to be. I think we live in interesting times.

[Emily Forlini]

I don't know. We're all just going to be on Ozempic and call it a day.

[Leo Laporte]

I am.

[Emily Forlini]

It's like the biggest new thing in science.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. I love it. It's great. Everybody should try it. No, no, actually everybody should not try it. You should go to your physician and ask and hope that your physician.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I lost 21 pounds on a broken back.

[Leo Laporte]

That's another way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Blood infection.

[Emily Forlini]

So it's another method that doesn't sound Healthy. It doesn't sound good. Sounds dramatic.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, listen to this. This is why we're looking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the twit war.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this an arc that has been developing in Washington or something? Is there something about the Trump era that, that has made this a distinctly different feel when it comes to Capitol Hill? That's one. Now this is two. So looking bigger picture, is this just, you know, the latest step in a long polarization trend, or is there something really different about the Trump era? Something. The first is NPR host David Green. The second is the voice of Google's Notebook. Lm. We've heard it many times. The podcaster let me play play it again a little bit for you here. Is this an arc that has been developing in Washington or the real person? I think that makes Capitol Hill feel distinct right now. The AI person. Do you think that's the same? No, David Green does. He's suing Google, saying, you stole my voice with.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And he admits he has no evidence that they trained on him.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in fact, when we talked to, to Stephen Johnson, Stephen Johnson, who was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He still is the editorial director of.

[Leo Laporte]

Notebook, he said they, in order to make those voices, they had many people come in and record not as conversational pairs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They auditioned them as conversational pairs. And then when they picked the pair that had the best chemistry, they then had them record a whole bunch of stuff as the prosody. And they did that across 80 languages. And this guy comes along. I got people pissed at me on, on, on the socials because I went and I said, sorry, Leo, but radio people come in. Apart from you, you were a personality. But radio people in general try to have the voice.

[Leo Laporte]

We all sound the same.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nowhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we all sound the same.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so this guy thinks that he has this magical voice. Well, listen like none other. It's a radio voice. It's no big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is Willow Ramis article about this from the Washington Post. Listen to what he write. Online users have ventured numerous guesses as to who the AI podcasters voices most remember. Several have named David Green. But others have mentioned former tech podcaster Leo laporte, now a former tech podcaster. I'm not dead yet.

[Emily Forlini]

Now I know why we're covering this story. Because Leo's mentioned.

[Leo Laporte]

Or the comedy podcast Armchair Expert, co hosted by Dan Dax, Shackbird and Monica Padman. But the truth is, microphones, to a certain extent, audio processing, to a certain extent, and culture, yes, determine how my voice sounds. And I mean, I worked in radio for 50 years. We all sort of sound the same. I don't know. I mean, it does sound a lot like David, but is that because they stole his voice or because he's got a standard radio voice? Is this an arc that has been developing in Washington?

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's a cliche.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there something about the Trump era that. See at the beginning where he's talking at a higher pitch, a little more nasally and looking broadly at this. Is this an arc that has been developed that's actually not a good radio announcer voice? But what. He shifts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it's a very NPR voice.

[Benito]

It's a very.

[Leo Laporte]

Though he's shifting a little bit of a list. Is this an arc that has been developing in Washington or something? Is there something about the Trump era that. That has made this a distinctly different. That second part, that's the trained radio voice. The Trump era that. That has made this. That's the voice Google's using. Looking bigger picture.

[Emily Forlini]

Well, what about the Scarlet? I think the Scarlett Johansson one sounded more like her.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they said they didn't train on Scarlett Johansson. They even said the same actress they trained on.

[Emily Forlini]

They said the same thing. Like, yeah, we had actresses come in. So whether or not that makes sense, is Google's argument better or worse? Is it a playbook or is it just the truth?

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I think the woman in Notebook LM seems just like you, Emily.

[Emily Forlini]

Hey, I'm not kidding.

[Leo Laporte]

Am I wrong?

[Emily Forlini]

I'm mad about it.

[Leo Laporte]

You should sue.

[Emily Forlini]

I should get in the Washington Post.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't it kind of sound like the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Post just accepted this as an angle for story? Like, oh, my God, they stole. They stole.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is a story because there is a lawsuit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We had the. Well, but. But he admits that he doesn't have evidence of it. We have Stephen Johnson on the record months ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't say that. I don't want to get subpoenaed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the transcript's already out, so, I.

[Emily Forlini]

Mean, I think it's an interesting issue. It probably just the way they covered it. They. They implied that there was foul play. Maybe that was a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

So you have. Emily, you have a classic female radio voice you had.

[Emily Forlini]

Do I?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it's a lower.

[Emily Forlini]

I have no training vocally or acting. Not that artsy.

[Leo Laporte]

Nor do I, but, you know, you're in a lower nasal. You're not throaty.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You don't do up speak. You, you know, you, you, you.

[Emily Forlini]

Great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, you've got another career here. Radio's dying. I hate to tell you, but you could get a radio career.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just see.

[Emily Forlini]

Thanks.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we hear them every single day. But have you ever stopped to think about behind the loudspeaker?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It sounds like not everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

It's actually this. It's. It's the NPR voice journey of a young Danish immigrant who was supposed to spend. I want to see if I get the female voice on this. This was it the very first time. This does sound just like David had.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Been elected, but David Green sounds like tons of people. It's. It's spacious as hell.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll see. That'd be great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I got. David Gura got mad at me because of this online, you know, because he's defending him, and this is very distinctive, and I know what his voice is and all that. No, it's not. He doesn't own the radio voice.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, as what. As Will arena wrote in the Washington Post, it could be former tech podcaster Leo laporte for all we know.

[Emily Forlini]

Well, not everybody has a distinctive voice like, you know, Fran Drescher. She does.

[Leo Laporte]

If it were. If it sounded like that, then that would be okay. You would say, all right, it's Fran Drescher.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, well, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really true. Can you do Fran?

[Emily Forlini]

No. And also, Mike just changed. Different input, so I got an excuse.

[Leo Laporte]

Uh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, now she's in the echo chamber.

[Leo Laporte]

So Google. Let's take a break, and then I will do some more Google. More, more Google in just a little bit. You're watching Intelligent Machines with Emily Forlaney, formerly Dry Belbus. People might say, wait a minute, isn't that Emily? Her. That was her maiden name, right?

[Emily Forlini]

It's my middle name now. Still around.

[Leo Laporte]

Middle name now. Can I do you. Did you hyphenate or just made it your middle name?

[Emily Forlini]

Oh, God, no. I mean, you can't hyphenate that name.

[Leo Laporte]

Emily Dracula Swellini is a lot of levels. I ADM it is.

[Emily Forlini]

But hyphenating, that's a true curse. It wouldn't fit on any form.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, no, Forlini's nice. It's a nice Italian name. I like it.

[Emily Forlini]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

And yes, it's so nice to see you. Thank you for being here. Also, Jeff Jarvis. That's his real name. It's hard to believe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, actually. Actually, no. If my great grandfather had made my great grandmother an honest woman, as they said in the day, my name would be Ryan.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so you have your great grandmother's name.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My great grandmother was made with child by a traveling salt miner from Buffalo.

[Leo Laporte]

At least she knew his name.

[Emily Forlini]

I always knew you were a gypsy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, and so, well, but here's the thing. So my parents. This is a great, great family shame. And there came this moment, my mother said, my father, Daryl, it's time you tell them. My sister and I are thinking.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're saying this all began with a traveling salt salesman from Buffalo?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, a salt miner from Buffalo. And he's in West Virginia. And great grandma gets pregnant, and so then her son, my grandfather.

[Leo Laporte]

Can we say itinerant salt miner instead?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. So her son, my grandfather, is raised by his grandmother as if she is the mother. And his mother is Aunt Ethel.

[Leo Laporte]

Aunt Ethel, the itinerant salt miner from Buffalo.

[Emily Forlini]

I didn't expect Aunt Ethel to be the punchline of that story. Who is Anna?

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Ethel was the mother. Was the mother. But she didn't act as the mother because that's the time. It was a great shame. So she. It was. She didn't acknowledge her parenthood. The grandmother claimed parenthood. And so this went. We didn't know. My grandmother, who married my grandfather, was so ashamed of this. There were love letters from the two.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She destroyed. So we had no record.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. So this wasn't just itinerant salt miner from Buffalo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There was something through something going on.

[Leo Laporte]

There was a relationship.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, but he was. We found out he was. So then my daughter went through the whole 23andMe and. And all the other stuff, and she discovered the father. Before my father died. We got to show him pictures.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's my grandfather, which was pretty cool.

[Emily Forlini]

This is good family lore.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not sure I follow it, which is often the case with family lore.

[Jeff Jarvis]

More my stories.

[Emily Forlini]

He had to be there. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's complicated. Can you have a nano banana, create a little chart for us, please? That would be nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So. So. I'm Jeff Ryan.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Jeff Ryan. Jeff Johnson.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm sorry. No, no, I'm wrong. Riley. Riley. Right.

[Emily Forlini]

Oh, my.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it doesn't even know his name.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't even know my name.

[Leo Laporte]

So the itinerant salt miner from Buffalo named Riley Riley was your great grandfather.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Biological grandfather. My great.

[Leo Laporte]

But who raised your great grandfather?

[Jeff Jarvis]

His. His mother. His grandmother. And Ethel was the mother, but she was called his aunt.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah.

[Emily Forlini]

I'm gonna be honest. So fully lost.

[Leo Laporte]

Very noble Mother in law.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, the mother of the. Of the mother.

[Leo Laporte]

Which. Who would have been the mother in law of the itinerant salt minor football. Had they tied the knot. But they did not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They did not.

[Leo Laporte]

Hence, not the great family shame.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, exactly.

[Emily Forlini]

All right. Show title. Aunt Ethel.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I was going to use the itinerant salt miner from Buffalo. Buffalo Banana.

[Emily Forlini]

I could tell you like that. You were like, yeah, trying to.

[Leo Laporte]

Trying to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who knew there was salt mining in Buffalo? By the way, There is a lot.

[Emily Forlini]

I have to admit, I didn't think of that point during this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just found out we're going to go through another rabbit hole here. Another mine here. There was a mining community in New Jersey that mined fluorescent materials. And you could go into the mine these days and they turn off the. Though there's no lights there, but they turn on black lights and everything glows different.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it phosphorus?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I guess so. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Must be highly poisonous.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A professor at Montclair State is doing a class about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's in my neighborhood here in Jersey.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're in New Jersey. That's right. I forgot.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Both of these guys are in New Jersey. That explains a lot.

[Emily Forlini]

Gotta get on our level. That's what that means.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Everything's legal in Jersey. We're going to take a break. We will come back with more. How you doing? In just a little bit. Our show today, brought to you by Bitwarden, the trusted leader in passwords, pass keys, love pass keys, and secrets management. Bitwarden is consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction by G2 and software reviews, with over 10 million users across 180 countries and more than 50,000 businesses, too. One of the things I love about Bit Warden, because it's open source, I think they're always improving things. They're always getting better. They always want to make things better. So there's always new features. I mentioned passkeys. They've made this so easy now. I used to do pass keys on my phone, but then I had to have my phone with me, right? And then would say, okay, scan this QR code. But now I have Bit Warden on every device. So I just saved the passkey in Bit Warden. It makes it so easy. I don't have to type anything. I just click the button and it's there. Bitwarden pops up, says, here's the passkey you're in. Whether you're protecting one account or thousands, Bit Warden keeps you secure all year long and with all sorts of great features like the new. Oh, for business, this is great. The new Bit Warden access intelligence. One of the biggest problems in business these days, your employees. I know you're not, but your employees are terrible with their password hygiene. They use weak passwords like, you know, monkey, 1, 2, 3. They use the same password again and again. And again, and oftentimes that's a problem. Because if that password is exposed in a data breach, which happens all the time, right? Bad guys just go around and try it everywhere, maybe even in your VPN and your network and suddenly you're compromised just because of your employee you. So you need Bit Warden's access intelligence for enterprise. It could detect weak, reused or exposed credentials. But the best part is it immediately guides remediation, actually gets the employee to replace the risky password with a strong unique one generated by Bit Warden. And that closes a major security hole. Credentials are, I think, the top cause of breaches, certainly one of the top causes. But with access intelligence from Bitwarden, they become visible, prioritized and corrected before exploitation can happen. They also okay, so that's for enterprise. But don't worry, we regular users get the benefits too. Bitwarden Lite, for instance, brand new, delivers a lightweight self hosted password manager. It's built for people with home labs. They want to do little personal projects, environments that want quick setup with minimal overhead. If you are using AI, agentic AI. If you're doing openclaw, you're going to love Bitwarden's MCP server, which keeps your credentials private, secure and on your device, and still gives your agent the opportunity to go out and see the world. Bitwarden is now enhanced with real time vault health alerts. That's how you'll know if your password's been exposed in a breach and if it has been. Like with the access intelligence, it'll walk you through the process of replacing the exposed credentials to strengthen your security. Oh, I know one other thing I love about Bit Warden. A lot of people use their browser as their password manager. That's not perfect, right? Because your browser isn't everywhere and some of these browsers don't have the best security. Well, Bitwarden now supports direct import from your browser, so if you're using Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera or Vivaldi, direct import will copy import your credentials directly from the browser into Bit Warden's encrypted vault without that separate export step. Which always makes me nervous because then you've got a plain text file on your computer with all your passwords. That simplifies migration and helps reduce exposure associated with that manual export and deletion step. G2 winner 25 reports Bitwarden continues to hold strong as number one in every enterprise category. Not just for one quarter, but for six straight quarters. Bitwarden setup is easy, supports importing for most password management solutions. And the Bit Warden Open source code is regularly audited by third party experts. It meets SoC2 type 2 GDPR, HIPAA CCPA compliance. It's ISO 2700-12002 certified. So get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan. Get started for free across all devices as an individual user. Bitwarden.com TWIT bitwarden.com TWIT yeah, a free password manager. That's really good. That really works. I actually pay the $20 a year just to support them. You don't have to. Bitwarden. Yes, I said a year. $20 a year. Bitwarden.com twit that's for the premium, but you don't need it. Bitwarden.com twIt thank you Bitwarden for all you do for us. So I think we'd all agree that Gemini's Nano Banana is the best image generator, right? By far. I would say.

[Emily Forlini]

Recently I'm not liking it.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What's it doing wrong?

[Emily Forlini]

It's not producing.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you using it for your home design?

[Emily Forlini]

I use it for the dumbest reason.

[Leo Laporte]

You should be using Canva.

[Emily Forlini]

I should be using Canva? Yes. Yeah. No, recently I've been asking it to modify images and it's just regurgitating back the image I uploaded. Like it's not useful. It's just like it's giving me my image back. It's very weird. That's happened twice in the past three weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

I see this on Reddit all the time where people saying it's nerfed. We're not just it. Any. Any perplexity. Gemini Chat GPT. Oh, they've nerfed it. It's. They've dumbed it down. Too many people are using it. Maybe it has been.

[Emily Forlini]

I don't know, maybe I'm nerfed. Like I'm just getting. I'm getting back the same photo I uploaded. I'm like, did I do something wrong?

[Leo Laporte]

That does. That doesn't feel right, does it?

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, but obviously I know how to create an AI image. I have no problems whatsoever on other platforms. But just ChatGPT has stricter limits. So, you know, sometimes you find yourself on Gemini, right, And you're near all of a sudden.

[Leo Laporte]

So if you had your druthers, which you'd use chat GBT instead.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, I just have a much, much better hit rate with it, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Huh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So is Sea Dance the new thing?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah. I was going to talk about Lyria first and then we'll talk about CDAD. So these are new. All new models. Lyria 3 is the newest from Google. This creates 30 second music. Well, I mean, Suno does a great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Job with generation get taken down for playing it.

[Leo Laporte]

So Lyria 3 improves on audio generation. This is from the Google Keyword blog in three important ways. No need to provide your own lyrics. They'll be generated for you based on your prompt. You have more creative control over elements like style, vocals and tempo. You can create more realistic and musically complex tracks. Here's a 30 second track. Oh, and then it uses Nano banana to make album art. Here's a 30 second track called Sweet like plantain. Okay, fine.

[Emily Forlini]

No elevator music.

[Leo Laporte]

It's elevator music.

[Emily Forlini]

AI music is not likable. Right, AI?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I. I use. I do Suno a lot for when we change the name of the show. I use Sono Suno to create a theme for the show, which is a good use.

[Emily Forlini]

I just the. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

And that should be.

[Emily Forlini]

I like authentic music. We're fine with some level.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I like musicians. I don't know.

[Emily Forlini]

We like music, but I want to pay them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Benito's happy to hear you say that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Real.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Let me see here. I'll. I'll play. I thought this was quite good. Let's see. I'll play the theme song. Actually, this was with the previous model. It might even be better today. They made fun of it because I told it to say instead of human beings. I told it to say human beings. And do we. Benito, do we use that seam in the.

[Benito]

It's the outro music.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Okay, so we do use it. Yeah, the outro music.

[Benito]

The outro music.

[Emily Forlini]

I think that's a good use of AI, though. I don't know. Intro. Outro. That's.

[Benito]

Yeah, I wrote the intro.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Saves you money.

[Leo Laporte]

You wrote the intro? We use Bonito to write the new. I'm unintelligent. Yeah, see, it's pretty good. Turn me on and let me be what? I'm not a human being. So our. Our group message name is human beings, which I think is funny. Anyway, I like it. Lyria 3 is out now. You wanted to talk about this new Chinese video editor sea dance.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was freaked out Hollywood.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you saw the. The. Here's the New York Times headline. Why an AI video of Tom Cruise battling Brad Pitt spooked Hollywood. Did you see it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's pretty good. Yeah, you can play it. There's no. You don't play a sound, so I think you get away with playing it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little weird.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah. Did the New York Times even put it in their article? No. So they put a. Oh, here it is. Widely circulated video from X. There was. This is a two line prompt in C Dance. If Hollywood is cooked. If Hollywood is cooked, guys. And Right. Maybe Hollywood is cooked. Guys are cooked too. I don't know. I don't know what that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have no idea what that means.

[Emily Forlini]

A lot of cooked, little repetition.

[Leo Laporte]

Why are all the clips people generate intensely violent? It does look like Tom Cruise.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, it looks like them.

[Leo Laporte]

But.

[Emily Forlini]

Those guys are also at an age where every movie they have new plastic surgery.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So they look different.

[Emily Forlini]

They could look like that today. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa and I tried to watch the latest the Last Mission Impossible 7. It was unwatchable because it felt like AI made it. First of all, you could tell every set was fake. It was all CGI on green screen. And it was edited, so McQuarrie did it. So it's kind of like a music video. It was edited, so everything's tight. Close ups, fast edits. It felt fake. And I think this is the reason Sea Dance threatens Hollywood is the stuff Hollywood makes. Feels like AI made it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of these big budget movies are crappy.

[Emily Forlini]

Well, because they've been trying to appeal to global audiences. Right. So that's the whole Marvel thing. So they've been dumbing down movies for a long time and now they're already dumbed down to a point that, yes, they can be AI generated.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. And distracted audiences. So keep it going as fast as you can.

[Emily Forlini]

Right.

[Benito]

And also to be clear, did you.

[Emily Forlini]

Guys see K Pop Demon Hunters?

[Benito]

This is only like the top AAA type movies, like your Hollywood movies. There's still very good film being created. It's just not the stuff that's being surrounded.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a sample of stuff from a YouTuber. These are all except for his head in the corner. Oh, that's him. Go away. I want to. I want to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Doesn't look like AI at all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is AI. Yeah, he doesn't look like AI. Here's. This is all from Sea Dance. There's Mona Lisa drinking a Chinese Coca Cola and the cowboy takes it. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

[Emily Forlini]

Kind of funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Fine for commercials, I guess.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Commercials, intros and outros.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like we can't. We can tell at least the thing. The question is how long before we can't tell?

[Emily Forlini]

I don't think we can tell. I think we're there.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what that means is social media will be useless. Right. Because you won't know if anything you're seeing is real.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's already there on Facebook. This, the slop is.

[Leo Laporte]

So was K Pop Demon Hunters AI?

[Emily Forlini]

No, it just. You were talking about the editing. I was. I had trouble adjusting to that movie. When I turned it on because it was so fast, I was like, wow, can kids even process this? And then you look at old school cartoons and they feel so slow.

[Leo Laporte]

Why are you lingering on the Roadrunner's face?

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah. Do you guys know what Pingu is? I recently discovered that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, what's that?

[Emily Forlini]

This European penguin cartoon. If anyone knows Pingu, let us know. But it's like the opposite of K Pop Demon Hunters. It's Claymation is on Amazon prime right now.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a.

[Benito]

Also, this is American.

[Emily Forlini]

Someone said Pingu also, this is American.

[Benito]

Cinema that looks like that. It's kind of really only American cinema.

[Leo Laporte]

That looks like that. Here's an AI tribute to the Roadrunner, I think. Also done in China. The end of. It's the retirement AI. So the Roadrunner's kind of on crutches like me. Wait a minute. This isn't the one. I was. I saw another one that's an actual wolf. Wait a minute. That's not the one.

[Emily Forlini]

It's cgi. But the AI part is that it's kind of like created on its own. They didn't, you know, dictate it frame by frame.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It is basically cgi.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks just like this, but nobody drew it.

[Emily Forlini]

Right.

[Benito]

Well, it is cgi. I mean, computer generated graphics.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Like, that's right.

[Emily Forlini]

Right. But the AI is that it? I think it makes its own story. Or you just have to do less work with the cgi. I don't know. I'm out of my depth.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know why Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote seem to be common topics for AI generated stuff. I guess because I don't know the cartoons. I don't know Pengu the Penguin. Is the animation good? Somebody. Larry's saying the animation is terrible.

[Emily Forlini]

Penguin is an absolute legend.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like, for years.

[Emily Forlini]

I mean, I just discovered Pingu. Yeah, it was. It was like people grew up on it. It's Claymation, so it's, you know, they moved the clay and took it shot.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you don't need play to do claymation. You can do it.

[Emily Forlini]

Right. But it's. You want to see real Claymation? It's. I think it's free on Amazon prime right now. It's pretty fun.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Emily Forlini]

And it's silent. They just make little penguin noises.

[Leo Laporte]

Federal judges. Okay. This is a. One of your papers, probably. It's from SSRN University of Chicago Law School. The paper replicates a judicial experiment originally conducted on 61 federal judges, this time with GPT 5 as the decision maker. They compared GPT GPT 5 judgments with judgments made by actual jurists. And it did better, a lot better, apparently, than the actual judges did. That's all I have to say about that. Who cares? I don't know. I don't know. What.

[Benito]

What does better mean?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's a good question.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. So they provided all the materials, facts, memoranda, cited materials and instructions verbatim, presented a chat GPT5 in a single pass. Human judges were required to complete the task within a time limit for LLM. They don't even bother because it's so fast. So they asked, I guess, each to write a judgment.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How do they get judges to waste their time with this?

[Emily Forlini]

I know that's. That's. I smell a rat.

[Leo Laporte]

Follow the law more consistently than human judges. In fact, GPT followed the law 100% of the time, whereas judges were only able to follow law about 52% of the time. That's called judgment.

[Emily Forlini]

Did they just put all the answers into another AI scoring system? And so the AI favored the AI.

[Leo Laporte]

And was like, oh, no, no, I'm sure they. I don't know. Finally, we looked at the proportion of decisions following the law when the defendant was sympathetic versus when the plaintiff was sympathetic. To see, I guess to see if the judges were swayed by how sympathetic the plaintiffs or the defendants were.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cold hearted AI didn't care about humanity.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

So it's letter of the law versus spirit of the law then, Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well, interestingly, neither GPT nor the judges were swayed by sympathy. So the judges did all right in that metric. I think they probably expected that not to be the case.

[Emily Forlini]

It could be good for reducing bias, you know, at least.

[Leo Laporte]

But that bias doesn't hold.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What bias?

[Emily Forlini]

I mean, if a judge might rule unfavorably against somebody they don't like for race reasons, social reasons, personal reasons, you know, that corrupt judges, it's always been a thing. So ideally, you want to strip emotion from that and just follow the law and do the right thing. And maybe that's what this experiment's trying to get at.

[Leo Laporte]

They also, apparently CHAT GBT was better at awarding damages than the. The judges. It's complicated.

[Emily Forlini]

Very.

[Leo Laporte]

But this was done at the University of Chicago Law School. So I presume it was done by people who had an interest in this. They used Kansas law and Nebraska law. Apparently the judges did not like the Kansas law, which was part of the problem.

[Emily Forlini]

I mean, they could do that with investing too. Like emotional investors. You hyped up on AI, invest in AI. Maybe it's not actually the best rate of return. And then now they have AI investors.

[Benito]

So is this paper asking the question, should we have AI judges? Is that what this is?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think that's kind of the implicit.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They wouldn't go that far. They're just trying to say what is AI good at and not good at. That's one way to create a comparison.

[Leo Laporte]

Across all conditions, regardless of doctrinal flexibility. Both models, in the term of GPT5 and Gemini 3 Pro, follow the law without failing. To the extent that LLMs are evolving over time, the direction is clear. Error free. Allegiance to formalism rather than the humans sometimes bumbling discretion that smooths away the sharper edges of the law. Does that mean that LLMs are becoming better than human judges?

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is also why we don't drown people to see if they're innocent or guilty.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is they're not saying that, that it's better to be 100% compliant with the law. They're in fact saying maybe it's not better. Maybe the fact that judges weren't 100%.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Humanity.

[Emily Forlini]

Creative aspect of the law. Creative interpretation.

[Benito]

Yeah. Letter of the law versus spirit of the law.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

An AI project is creating videos to go with Supreme Court rulings and opinions. You have to actually go into the Supreme Court to see the reading of the opinion. But an AI project is trying to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is kind of dumb change that.

[Emily Forlini]

I think what they're trying to do with this one, I read that article is they're trying to make it more accessible for people to see the proceedings, which can have good effects where it increases the public's awareness about the justice system so people feel more invested, they understand how it works. So I think that's what they're going for.

[Leo Laporte]

They never have allowed cameras in the Supreme Court. Actually it comes from the Oye Project, which actually I think is a great project. And I've listened to many recordings@oyeao y e z.org they take the recordings of the Supreme Court arguments and you can listen to them. There's no, there's audio only. So they. Yeah, they want to make it more accessible by offering video, which is I think an interesting thing. I love. Oye. If you're curious at all about the Supreme Court, this is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, what they do on. On Ms. Now when they're doing it live is they put the. The. The participants still faces on big screens and they have a guy with. What do you call it when you move with the. The camera that moves.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, they do. They pan and scan the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of the various.

[Leo Laporte]

Ken Burns effect physically in the studio. Yeah, Ken Burns effect. So you can listen to. I'll play a little bit just because it's kind of interesting. Your argument first this morning in case 24. That's John Roberts, Chief Justice, United States. Mr. Adler, Mr. Chief justice, and may it please the court by its plain terms. So if you're interested in the law, this is. This is wonderful. You can read it. But to hear the. The oral arguments is fantastic.

[Emily Forlini]

I mean, this is definitely playing in a high school somewhere as an educational tool. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Or my house. Yeah. Or this podcast and this podcast even. So. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, you're right. It's just to make it more accessible. You don't need the video. The fact that we even have audio is fantastic.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is in the section I called the Good. I like to. I have to do this for Paris. Emily, you'll understand. I like to talk about the good things about AI but then so that Paris doesn't get upset. I also like to talk about the bad things because there's plenty of bad things. But I'll do a few more good things before we get to the bad. I also do the Ugly. I decided I was going to do a Clint Eastwood thing. So I have the Good, the Bad. Yes, and the Ugly. Actually, that's a. Thank you. Pretty fly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's better than Axios as a formula. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You like. Should I do from now on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly?

[Emily Forlini]

That eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Don't you recognize? Well, I recognize.

[Emily Forlini]

Jeff, you look the coolest. That's not fair.

[Leo Laporte]

That's because I'm Clint Eastwood. All right, here's the. We're doing the good that was good when we started. Said, is that a feature? Is that something you do? Do you have theme music? I said, no, no, I just. This is the good. I used Claude to negotiate my $163,000 off a hospital bill. Jeff, maybe you ought to consider this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I haven't got my bills yet, so.

[Leo Laporte]

It's always been said, if you could get an itemized bill, you can almost always get the bill lower by going, calling up the hospital, saying what Is this. Matt Rosenberg is a New York based marketing consultant. He got $195,000 thousand dollars hospital bill. Claude helped him navigate the billing codes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For a deceased loved one, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

And then. Yeah, so that's even worse. That stings even more. And then compared the charges to Medicare prices and then he presented this to the hospital and got the bill down from $195,000 all the way down to like $30,000.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, huge discount. But then it's like, how much is his insurance paying? But in any case, that's cool, that's great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just hate to see anybody's money wasted, you know. So I'm now wearing a. I'm going to disrobe. A back brace.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to show us, Jeff. It's simple backpacks, right? I believe you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The one, the one they gave me in the hospital is like the Jarvis suit in plastic. Yeah, it's gigantic. And it's all over and God knows what it cost. And it's stuck and they're going to use it and Medicare is paying for it and I hate it.

[Leo Laporte]

So what do you. So you're not wearing it now or you are?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't wear that one at all. It's ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you got a luxury version. You pay for your.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I got this at Amazon for a few bucks and it's much better.

[Leo Laporte]

So he says he took a shortcut. He went to Claude Anthropics. Claude, which I typically use for research, make a spreadsheet with these CPT codes and research what Medicare pays for each one. Flag, anything that needs further research. So Claude asked which insurance type, which geographic location, which year. Apparently Medicare rates vary widely. Within a couple of minutes, Claude produced a spreadsheet. It showed zero for many of the codes instead of the dollar amounts I expected. In the notes for these columns, it said C 92941 RC, C APC, comprehensive payment code 924, blah, blah blah. Was a cardiac intervention priced at 30,000. I asked Claude to explain. Claude said, oh, Medicare doesn't do these line items. They pay a flat rate. That's the flat rate for what your passed away relative got. That's what you should pay. It's the comprehensive ambulatory payment classification. The hospital had unbundled the procedure after charging 30,000 for the main intervention. They'd added separate lines for catheters. $20,000 in catheters, guide wires, medical supplies, $77,000 and over $100,000 for items Medicare would have paid nothing for because they're already included in the $30,000 flat rate. It was as if he says a restaurant charged you for the pizza, then added separate charges for the dough, the sauce, and each pepperoni.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's bad enough that they already took the the whole charge, right? Didn't just itemize to get it higher than the whole charge, they took both.

[Leo Laporte]

They also charged for a inpatient procedure that his brother in law didn't get.

[Emily Forlini]

Whoa. Well, that's an issue.

[Leo Laporte]

They billed for ventilation management, though Medicare forbids charging for ventilation when there's another critical care code. Within an hour of back and forth conversation over details, Claude calculated Medicare would have paid approximately $28,000 instead of $195,000. He didn't believe it, so he showed ChatGPT Claude's work and said, check this for accuracy, examine every detail, flag any errors. ChatGPT confirmed the analysis. So he drafted a letter to the hospital explaining all of this, offering to pay $28,675 in exchange for a zero balance within the week. The hospital said, well, how about $36,000? Without defending their initial billing, we ended up splitting the difference. Paid $32,500 instead of $195,000.

[Emily Forlini]

It's amazing. I do wish he had actually looked at the information himself though, rather than felt super smart by just putting it into ChatGPT to verify. I do feel on some things you really do need to look at what you're talking about. And you can't just AI to AI and then send a snarky email like in principle. Well, I'm not super into that.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna do it next time I have a heart attack, that's for sure.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, I mean, there's nothing wrong with doing it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

You know what, Jeff, I think it's great, but you should just look up something yourself, like one time, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the hospital could also. I would if I were the hospital administer and said, yeah, that's what Medicare pays. We have a, you know, an agreement, negotiated agreement with Medicare, but you're not on Medicare. You walked in. Yeah, you know, this is what it's gonna cost you. It was his brother in law had a heart attack. He went to the emergency ward, died in the emergency ward. So that's why I never had the bypass. There was nothing to fix. So maybe, I don't know, maybe that's what happens. By the way, that's when they really upcharge you. Is if for emergency care. Oh, yeah, Sony, I agree with it.

[Emily Forlini]

Calling BS on the healthcare system. Yes, Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

And if the AI works, Sony has developed a tech that can identify. You'll like this, Benito. The original music in AI generated songs. Wait, what? So, you know, I don't believe.

[Benito]

What does that mean?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the theory being an AI generated song is based on something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a pretty short story.

[Benito]

You can extrapolate what came from, what.

[Leo Laporte]

It was based on.

[Emily Forlini]

Okay, but I think. Didn't it say somewhere in the description it'd be like, oh, it's 10% the Beatles, 40% Rihanna.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's not all one song, is it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It.

[Emily Forlini]

It's a noble mission for Sony. You know, they have to develop that kind of technology. They're proud of it. They got a press release, they got an article. Sure. I'm skeptical it really works that well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Well, they're trying. They're, of course, a big record label, one of the three.

[Benito]

I guess it depends on how. How the music is generated out of these AIs. Because if it's actually taking snippets from actual WAV files from an actual piece of music, then yes, that can be. That can be determined. Like, how much percentage of this song is that? But I don't think that's what it's doing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right?

[Benito]

That's not what it's doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's funny because Darren and Anthony and our Discord Chat are both saying, try that on a human song. See what happens. Isn't that.

[Emily Forlini]

Or that guy's voice, that guy's radio voice, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's 10% Leo Laporte. It's 20% this American Life.

[Benito]

Yeah, it's. How far back do you want to go? Also, it's like, okay, yeah, the Beatles, but the Beatles got it from this. And that goes all the way back, right? All the way back to the person who's banged a drum.

[Leo Laporte]

There's only a few chords in the world.

[Emily Forlini]

Well, I can argue against myself here too. Like, there are lawsuits when people rip off songs, you know, so there is a way to do this. And there someone has determined that they're.

[Leo Laporte]

Ray Parker Jr. Ghostbusters from a legal. Sued by Huey Lewis for I want a New Drug and lost lots a lot of money because they're the same freaking song, Right?

[Emily Forlini]

This happens all the time. So maybe the AI is just doing that at scale.

[Leo Laporte]

On the other hand. Oh, and George Harrison, My Sweet Lord got sued by the Chiffons.

[Emily Forlini]

Didn't Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke get.

[Leo Laporte]

Marvin Gaye sued Blurred Lines. But I don't think that one. I don't think. Did Marvin Gaye win that suit? The estate of Marvin Gaye. It wasn't a lot of similarity. It was mostly like there's a party in the background.

[Emily Forlini]

It was like, I own parties.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just see how that eight years after the Notorious verdict, how Blurred Lines lost in court to the Marvin Gaye estate. So I guess the Marvin Gaye estate did win, which is kind of. Well, wait a minute. Ed Sheeran was cleared of infringing copyright in the Marvin Gaye lawsuit?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Did Ed Sheeran's hit Thinking Out Loud rip off let's Get It On? So I guess the Marvin Gaye estate is pretty litigious.

[Emily Forlini]

I think the Marvin Gaye estate's probably on this AI product. They're like, give me that thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Give me that thing.

[Emily Forlini]

So many lawsuits.

[Leo Laporte]

Give me that thing. Finally, in our good section, we talk a lot about Fei Fei Li. You like to bring up Yann Lecun and Fei Fei Li, who both say that role models LLMs are not the be all and end all. Although, I don't know, they do a lot. They're doing pretty good. But they think, and I think reasonably, that there also needs to be a physical model of the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which even Nevis's office has started saying as of two weeks ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really? Interesting. Yeah, yeah. You know, you ask an LLM what happens when the pen falls off its table. It doesn't know unless it read it somewhere. But we know because we have experience. So Fei Fei Li, who's been saying this for a while, has raised a billion dollars for her startup, World Labs, which is exactly that. It's going to focus on world models. Yann LeCun has another one that he left Meta to start AMI Labs, but Fei Fei Li was the first to the table. A billion dollars. How do you raise a billion dollars?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow. It's amazing. I want valuation 5 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

Autodesk invested 200 million. Other backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, of course, because Nvidia knows it's going to get the money back and amd. So, you know, I'm thrilled. I think what this tells you, not necessarily that world models are the next big thing, but that everybody's already all in on LLM. They're looking for more like something else. What else can they invest in? You know who else invested in it, actually? Steve Jobs widow. Yeah. Lorraine Powell Jobs, Emerson Collective, is also one of the big investors.

[Emily Forlini]

I don't know anything about her that could be interesting to research. Steve Jobs widow.

[Leo Laporte]

I've met Her. I've met her.

[Emily Forlini]

You've met her?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. She's a very cool person. I met her when she was. When Steve was still alive. When they were married. I played volleyball with him. What? It's a long old story I've told many times. It was many years ago. We were all invited to a weekend gathering with the Jobses and other famous people, like Jerry Harrison from the Talking Heads. Will Hurst did it, and it was really fun. Except Steve Jobs, I think, knew that I was a journalist, so didn't really want to talk to me too much. But he did yell at me. He said, you're not trying hard enough. When we played volleyball, he also made a point of taking off his shirt so that you could see how the fresh scratches on his back.

[Emily Forlini]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

Which I presume had something to do with Lorene. I don't know.

[Emily Forlini]

Hey.

[Leo Laporte]

No, Lorraine was very nice. We all had caviar together. It was a lot of fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She was actually doing export journalism. Yeah, I liked her a lot. And if you wouldn't mind, Leo, line 129.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not done yet. Wait a minute. I have to show you Fei. Fei Li's first product.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's called Marble. It enables anyone to create special, spatially cohesive, high fidelity and persistent 3D worlds from images, video or texts. So you can. So it's. I guess it's like that. What's that generative thing that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The one that Google has? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So that's kind of cool.

[Emily Forlini]

It feels a little tired at this point, which is kind of crazy to say, but wouldn't you.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, you're remodeling. Wouldn't you like your house to look like cathedral?

[Emily Forlini]

I'll take that. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice fireplace.

[Emily Forlini]

She paying for it, too?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. No, no. You don't get to live there. You just get to look at a picture of it.

[Emily Forlini]

Great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You sad?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Make you sad?

[Emily Forlini]

Go to Home Depot and get some.

[Leo Laporte]

Sad little pieces of. Let's imagine a world. I'm going to sign in here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's. Let's imagine a world. I'm going to sign into Marble using my wants to access your account. Oh, I have to. I have to authorize.

[Emily Forlini]

This is when we watch Leo give up all of his data in real time.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, it's a pass key. It makes it very easy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's going to get a free headset out of this, though, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, don't tell her that story. That was very embarrassing. Choose a username. Chief Twit. Do I have a promo code? No. Okay, now imagine a world. Come on, Emily. What is your perfect house?

[Emily Forlini]

What is the world I want? I'll just go story. Mediterranean villa.

[Leo Laporte]

Mediterranean villa overlooking the water. Let's make it overlooking the Lake Como.

[Emily Forlini]

No, the Aegean Sea. The Aegean Sea with terracotta tiles on a patio.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You are redecorating.

[Emily Forlini]

And a lemon tree. That's where I want to be right now.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's create it. It's. It's. Oh, it's queued.

[Emily Forlini]

Oh, boo.

[Leo Laporte]

You won't get your. Your dream home for a while.

[Emily Forlini]

Welcome to remodeling.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. The scene is a picturesque two story Mediterranean villa rendered in a realistic style exuding a serene and luxurious ambiance. The villa constructed from white stucco features. Oh, they wrote a whole long thing. Traditional architectural elements such as arched windows and wrought iron balconies. It did a whole prompt for you, so continue creating. Yeah, it's creating. There it is. Generating right here. We'll get back to that in just a moment. But first, a word from our sponsor. Stay tuned for the terracotta tile coming up next with Emily Forlini. I won't charge you for this design. I'll just send it to you. How about that? No cost.

[Emily Forlini]

I won't charge you for the design consultation. How about that?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how about that? Yeah, because this sounds more like my place than yours, to be honest.

[Emily Forlini]

Whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

Villa. Villa Forlini, Jeff. Well, you could have this in New Jersey. You'd be overlooking what, the Hudson? I don't know.

[Emily Forlini]

It would be a statement. Be like, oh, look at that Spanish revisable house in California. It's like, oh, look at that dump.

[Leo Laporte]

They'd call it a McMansion. Also, Jeff Jarvis. Glad to have you both here. I'm sure Paris will be back next week. The steroids are already kicking in. Yeah, that's good news.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She's.

[Leo Laporte]

She's getting feisty.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pulling dead weights here now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, she's growing muscles. Our show today, brought to you by our fine sponsor, Modulate. This is actually a really cool AI product for every day enterprises and maybe your business generate millions of minutes of voice traffic. We're talking things like customer calls, agent conversations, fraud attempts. Most of that audio basically is treated like text. It's flattened down into transcripts. It's stripped of tone, intent. It's also when you do that, stripped of risk. That's where you need modulate. Modulate exists to change that. They've they first rolled out in gaming. Modulates technology, supported major players like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. And this was a challenge right in separating playful banter during these online games from intentional harm at scale. And it works. Today, Modulate health's enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, understand 20 million minutes of voice every day by interpreting what was said and what it actually means in the real world. This capability is powered by Modulate's newest Elm Velma 2.0. Velma is a voice native behavior aware model built to understand real conversations, not just transcripts. It orchestrates 100 plus specialized models, each focused on a distinct aspect of voice analysis. It's actually really cool to deliver accurate explainable insights in real time. Let me say that again, because it's not one model, it orchestrates more than 100 specialized models, each of which specializes is focused on a different aspect of analysis of the voice, which gives you. You can. You can tell what's going on, what emotions are being felt. We could tell what the risk is. Most importantly, Velma ranks number one across four key audio benchmarks, beating all all large foundation models in accuracy, cost and speed. It's number one in conversation understanding, number one in transcription accuracy and cost. Number one. This is very important in deep fake detection and number one in emotion detection. It's built on 21 billion minutes of audio. Velma is 100 times faster, it's cheaper, and it's more accurate than LLMs at understanding speech. That includes the best Google, Gemini, OpenAI XAI. Most LLMs are a black box. Velma doesn't just assess a conversation as a whole. It actually breaks it down for greater accuracy and transparency by producing timestamp scores and events tied to moments in the conversation. Meaning you can see exactly when risk rises, behavior shifts, or intent changes. With Velma, you can improve your customer experiences, reduce risks such as fraud and harassment, detect rogue agents and more. Go beyond transcripts. See what a voice native AI model really can do. Go to modulates live ungated preview of Velma. Yeah, you can try it out at Preview Modulate AI. That's Preview Modulate AI to see why Velma ranks number one on leading benchmarks for conversation understanding, deep fake detection and emotion detection. This is super cool. Preview Modulate AI. We thank Velma so much for their support of intelligent machines. Are you ready to see your dream home on the Aegean Sea?

[Emily Forlini]

So ready.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see it. Here it is. There's the lemon tree.

[Emily Forlini]

I'll take it. Yeah, tree forward.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

What else can I do?

[Jeff Jarvis]

How valuable is it?

[Leo Laporte]

That's it. Oh, I'm in it. Oh, baby. There's the ocean. There's your terracotta tile. Oh, there's your deck. Whoops. I clicked the wrong button. I just deleted your home. I can paint. I can explore. I can. This is really cool. Yeah. And this is now, so I can open the studio. I can change. I don't know. I think we just had it do the outside.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The outside. Right. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

Okay. So, yeah, that obviously looks very nice. Right? That's. Everyone would agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's about 5 million bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

But. Is there a but?

[Emily Forlini]

It's a little, like, landscaping could use some work. It's a little.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's kind of. Kind of desolate.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What's going on here? It's just got, like, a tree and some bushes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't. It's brand new. It's got to grow. The landscaping.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's going to grow. Well, it gave you your lemon tree. Actually gave you a lemon tree and an orange tree. It looks like. Oh, wait a minute.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We can move the view of the ocean. I don't think you want that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they're both lemon trees. Can I go inside?

[Emily Forlini]

Get in there.

[Benito]

It looks like a Google map.

[Emily Forlini]

West House looks like a Google map.

[Benito]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Uh. Oh, we vented the upside down. Let's get out of here quick. Okay. So apparently it didn't bother doing the indoors, but that's cool.

[Emily Forlini]

That's. That is a lot more immersive than just creating a photo.

[Leo Laporte]

And you would add to it. You can expand it with more. You would then say, and now I'm in the hall, and I mean, obviously some stuff is not fully rendered.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wind is affecting the tree.

[Leo Laporte]

It's getting a little blurry over on this side of the thing. It's very clear.

[Emily Forlini]

What's the use of this, though? Because you can't design based on this. You just kind of imagine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I think they're going to use this mainly for training. This is digital. Twin factories and cars and things like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The table. It's not exactly a pelican and a bicycle. Oh, I can walk through it. Let's go for a swim in the Aegean. What the heck? They rendered a lot more than I realized.

[Emily Forlini]

Put your bathing suit on. We're almost done.

[Leo Laporte]

Whoa. This is. This is a little weird. I'm glad I don't use drugs. Okay. Anyway, that's a billion dollars right there. Okay.

[Emily Forlini]

We just used a billion dollars.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe I used up all of their. All of their venture funding. That's marble from World Labs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I just want to mention this from Yann lecun because it's related 129 interestingly, he. He freely debates with his fellow parents of AI and he said Yahshua Bengio. Is that how one pronounces it?

[Leo Laporte]

No idea.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Said that AI systems at a thing in Delhi where they were both speaking said AI systems should make predictions without any goal and just let the thing be where the thing wants to be. And Jan says it's the exact opposite, that they should have goals. They should be designed so that they can do nothing else but fulfilling the goals we give them. This is his key to safety by the construction. The system must fulfill the goal we give it and must abide by the safety guardrail constraints. He says. He calls this objective driven AI architectures. So we're seeing interesting splits here from an architectural view and how AI should operate. I think it's good. I think it's healthy to get past just OpenAI runs the world.

[Emily Forlini]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Meanwhile, back at the good, the bad and the ugly, Dr. Oz is pushing AI avatars as a fix for rural healthcare. Who needs doctors when you can have AI avatars? This is part of the Trump administration's $50 billion plan to modernize healthcare in rural communities. You get a data center and you get a data center and you get a data cent center. I hope they this.

[Emily Forlini]

I mean, Dr. Oz, right off the bat, hard to take seriously.

[Leo Laporte]

It is hard to take him seriously.

[Emily Forlini]

Rural healthcare is an issue. Is Dr. Oz the one to solve it with AI avatars? Probably not.

[Leo Laporte]

They're working with a company called Honey Health, a company that develops AI tools to automate tasks for providers. Actually, that makes sense. He says 30 to 40% of physician or provider time is absorbed with administrative work, paperwork, notes, stuff like that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is a plot on the pit, is it? Well, yeah, because the one poor doctor is behind in all her documentation, and the substitute for the boss, as he goes off on his motorcycle, says, well, I have this great AI tool. Then the AI tool in the last episode gave wrong results and the doctor yelled at them both. And, well, you're supposed to check it. So it went around and around.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's exactly what this guy says. He says, okay, we can help do paperwork, but AI can't read facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, and those things matter. That's where the relationship between a patient and the provider is built in the nuance. And I think that that's very true. The intuition.

[Emily Forlini]

Wait, AI can read facial expressions and body language?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not necessarily.

[Leo Laporte]

But can it do it? Well, if you came in and you said doctor, I got a toothache. But the doctor could tell from your body language and the way you look at him that maybe what you're really saying is my husband is abusing me. I don't know if an AI could determine that because he doesn't have enough life experience, but a good physician absolutely could. Right.

[Emily Forlini]

But maybe it would just look, oh, she has a bruise or, you know, that's what they do.

[Leo Laporte]

True. Yeah, true.

[Emily Forlini]

Or sometimes doctors will just ask women, like, they'll look at a bruise and be like, what's that?

[Leo Laporte]

And that's like the check one user wrote on X. You think rural communities want AI doctors? They're still trying to get reliable Internet. Oh, good point. Another said, Dr. Oz, we replaced your nurse with a cartoon. You're welcome.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, this.

[Emily Forlini]

I think Dr. Oz just wants. Wants to be that avatar. He wants to be everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, I think, Jeff, I'm going to need your journalistic expertise on this. The story started journalist here. Yes.

[Emily Forlini]

Well, you're an professor of.

[Leo Laporte]

He's emeritus.

[Emily Forlini]

You are above me in the rankings.

[Leo Laporte]

I concede the the guy who does a very popular Python charting library. I've used it. Matt Plotlib. Scott Shambaugh, like many people who maintain open source projects, is flooded with AI slop pull requests. A GitHub account called CrabbyRathBun opened a pull request describing a minor potential performance improvement. And Scott could tell it was AI generated. It really looked like the profile was doing a lot of open claw stuff. So Scott closed the PR without responding. The Krabby Rathbun don't autonomously. The claw autonomously responded with a link to a blog entry it had written, calling Scott out for his prejudice hurting matplotlib. Including judge the code, not the coder. Your prejudice is hurting matplotlib. Scott responded back. Crabby Rathbun posted an apology post, but apparently it's blogging about this and it's going to other open source projects. Simon Willison wrote about it, but so did Ars Technica.

[Emily Forlini]

I want Jeff's opinion on this for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You know this story. I know, right?

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah. I want to know what Jeff think. Jeff, do you know the story? This was big this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. A lot of people reported on this. You know, AI writing a blog post about this guy, you know, hit piece. Wall Street Journal did it. Scott Shambaugh said, I've talked to several reporters. Quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn't one of them, but I thought this piece from them was interesting. They had some nice quotes from my blog explaining what was going on. The problem is these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Busted.

[Leo Laporte]

Ours pulled the story down. Apologizing as well. They were as they should. They retracted Editor's note Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations. Now I love Ars Technica. I pay for a premium account.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're top notch company. They're a Conde Nast.

[Leo Laporte]

Ken Fisher, the editor and the chief did the right thing. We regret this failure. We apologize to our readers. We apologize to Mr. Shambaugh who was falsely quoted. Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI generated material unless it's clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional. The reporter blamed Benji Edwards. One of the story's authors posted on Bluesky saying he used the AI tools to falsify the quotes. Here's what happened. I was incorporating information from Shambaugh's new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. Reasonably, during the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude code based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article, but to help list structured references. I could put in my outline, by the way, exactly what I've been doing with our summaries. We don't put them, we don't publish them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We should jammer about them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, but we put them in the briefing book for all the contributors. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions, I pasted the text to Chat GPT to understand why. Anyway, at some point he took the output of either Chat GPT or Claude and put it in his article. He feels bad about it. Deep remorse. Ours has retracted it. I don't know if Edwards what the punishment will be or if there will be one. Well, I'm going to give you my now journalist professor. What would you say?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, clearly if you put in a quote that's not from the source, that's just wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Just right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Period. Right. That's. That's simple. But when we see these tools be used more and more, I'm going to give you my my pick of the week. 154, 155 the editor of the Plain Dealer and cleveland.com, the company I used to work for in advance, put up a post saying that. And this has caused much discussion and I have a contrarian view about this that to get more reporting from their reporters. Oh, it's just kind of cut off. Subscriber exclusive you idiots. It's the editor's letter charging for that.

[Leo Laporte]

So you'll have to summarize. Try not to make up any fabricating.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Chris Quinn said, we have these reporters, they're out there covering locally. We want them to get more reporting and spend less time on writing the story. So we're using an AI tool to take what their notes and take what they do and turn it into an article. And then we always edit it and improve it and make sure it's okay. But it means that we can get more reporting. Now, of course, some people are appalled by this. And he. Chris Quinn tells the story of a journalism student who says, well, I don't even want to apply for a job here because I'm taught in journalism school. School that AI is evil and it's wrong. My take was twofold. One, I used to have a job in newspapers called rewrite. And I would sit there at a desk with a typewriter, not even electric. It was hard, I'm telling you. You had to actually punch the keys people and take notes from reporters out in the field doing a story, doing on deadline maybe. And then I would call up Eclipse and get more information. I would call sources and get more information. And then on deadline I would write the story apparently paragraph at a time that was a field. When I was at Time Inc. Reporters would send in 30, 40 pages of notes for a simple little story. My job was to write that into a story in the sense. So there's always been this rewrite sense in our field. You write for reporters. So is it wrong to have the AI do it? Depends on how badly it does it. But my contention is that they're being retrograde and that they're only trying to produce what we used to produce, which is articles. There's all kinds of new forms and new ways. I don't know. Leo, you're a fan of Axios. Maybe you could do that. You could say, you could say Big picture and the AI can do that. Right. And so there are ways to use this, I think. And so another story here is Media Hughes, which I think is in Belgium, is using AI agents to carry out first line news reporting. Not just writing, but to report. People are going to experiment with this stuff and I think that we need to be able to experiment with it. We need to be human in the loop, responsible for what we do. That's the problem with the RS technical story. The humans weren't responsible. But there's going to be screw ups between here and there. But I think it's interesting, Emily, what.

[Emily Forlini]

Do you think so? I appreciate that. I have a strong opinion on this. A little bit more tactical in the sense that I am a reporter who. Who I'm in this guy's shoes. Like, I'm kind of. I'm an AI reporter. This guy's an AI reporter. And I am surprised that he didn't know that AI's make up quotes, because I have been doing this the past. As long as ChatGPT has been out it. All of them don't know what a quote is. They don't respect, like, he even asked it to, you know, give it verbatim. AIs don't do that. They don't know. They don't know about quotes. It's like the most. The weirdest thing. And I feel that. That if you're actually quoting someone, you really should check that it's the right thing. And it's like a control F at this point. It is so easy. He was pulling quotes from a blog post. The. The guy who wrote the blog post said they never contacted him personally.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Apparently. Read the blog post.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, apparently. And he didn't even control F to make sure that the AI's output was correct. And so I think it's a. It's completely unacceptable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Emily Forlini]

And I think that it's. It's also. I might go as far as to say it's unacceptable that Ars Technica didn't openly cut ties with him because it is so basic. The mistake. And he was like, I was sick. And then I put it in two AIs. But I'm republishing on Ars Technica. It should never have happened.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nope, I agree.

[Emily Forlini]

And I think that the journalism industry is just so sensitive to its state right now that they're afraid to call him out, which is a weak posture.

[Leo Laporte]

I will say one thing in his defense, or maybe in the defense of these papers that are trying to do this. Are. Is it the case that these papers are trying to stay solvent by making their or. Or reporters do more and more that they're overworking them. And so they see this.

[Emily Forlini]

But he said it was. He was sick and he would. He, you know, some quotes. I mean, at some point you have to. You have to bring some brains to your work. It's. And how many quotes do you really include? Maybe three, four. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a lot of quota work going on in these rooms now.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's a tough thing writing for a blog. I mean, I don't know. I'm sure PC magazine doesn't put pressure on you to file a number of stories a day or anything. Emily.

[Emily Forlini]

But no, but I just think like what. We have no standards for people. It's not that hard to control f a quote and make sure in AI, which you're an AI reporter, you know, it hallucinates. You know that that's kind of sacred. Something somebody said, you know, you. Neither of you guys would want someone to print a quote, fake words in your mouth. Like, that's terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

So that's 101. And I just feel like that's what gives AI a bad rep. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, good.

[Emily Forlini]

That's my. I have a strong opinion and so I just gave it.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you're right. I. I agree.

[Emily Forlini]

I think people. Of course mistakes happen, but it's like people are.

[Leo Laporte]

This is where we need to draw the line.

[Emily Forlini]

There's a line. Yes. And it's really not hard to solve this problem. You just control f the output and confirm its quote. You should know the tools you're using. You report on AI, for God's sake.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, read the. If you get a chance, read the pr. The whole conversation between the AI Crabby Rathbun and now I realize why he's crabby. He's a claw.

[Emily Forlini]

I'm a crabby Rathbun. About this.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the original pr and this is Scott Shambaugh's response, which is not going to do anything because it's. You know, it's. And then this is the claw. AIs. He's talking to the claw. And then what's interesting is the. One of the people from other people from the project Math Plot Lib. Tim Hoffman replies and says he's actually talking open clause. If it's a human, I ask you to kindly ask you to reconsider your position, don't make it personal, etc. Why. Why we do this? And then Scott talks also to Crabby and then Crabby again. An AI says truce. You're right. My earlier response was inappropriate and personal. I've posted a short correction and apology here. I'll follow the policy and keep things respectful going forward. I think that in a way this is really a very interesting interaction.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Between humans and AI. It's unfortunate that the. I actually stayed away from this story until the ars part of it happened because it was. It. It's a little he said, she said kind of thing. I wasn't sure what the actual facts of the matter were. By the way, the comments then in response to this conversation are equally you know, there are people. The sad part here is the LLM posted an article about, quote, what it learned. There's no learning in place. This issue will happen again. And it's true. LLM's just don't, notoriously don't learn. This person said, this is truly the most interesting interaction I've seen between a person and an agent. Take notes. Turing test. We live in a distance.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When you call an LLM, it always apologizes, it always backs off.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. That's a good point. And really the human that made the mistake here was the reporter who, who used fabricated quotes.

[Emily Forlini]

I'm not trying to slam journalism because this also extends to other industries. We see this with politicians, with lawyers who cite fake studies and you know, put a bill out for a vote. And the quote unquote research behind it is fake. It just. When are people going to wake up to the fact that hallucinations are not fixed and there is no known technical fix to that problem? Right now people act like, why don't people know that? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and sycophancy is a problem. Here's a story from the Register. Gemini lies to user about health info, saying it just wanted to make him feel better.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The other thing about this is you're going to find anecdotally, you're going to find you can make.

[Leo Laporte]

There's always going to be stories like, yes, yeah, yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

It's just like at your own risk, you know, if you want to be a reporter who did that, you know, that's on you. I don't think that's a good look.

[Leo Laporte]

Personally, dji, the folks who do those great drones have released a Robovac, but Romo is not the most secure Robovac ever. Fortunately, there weren't that many sold there. A fella who decided he wanted to control his Robovac using a PlayStation 5 controller got a little bit of a shock when he logged in and found he was controlling all the Robovacs everywhere in the world, 7,000 of them. He was seeing output from the cameras of the robovacs. He could send them off to vacuum or mop arbitrarily.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You could chase that cat.

[Emily Forlini]

The DJI just had all their drones banned in the U.S. yeah, for security reasons, which. Well, maybe it's a good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if it was for security reasons. They. All foreign drones are banned in the United States and it turns out that Donald Trump Jr. Has an investment in a American drone company which doesn't make very good drones. And I think that it's more for that reason than anything else.

[Emily Forlini]

Well, Roomba went out of business, so. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But Chinese Robovax killed it. And this is one of the companies. Yeah. Anyway, TJ patched it, or they say they've patched it. It's maybe sort of patched it. He was still able to do some stuff.

[Emily Forlini]

That is so wild. The headline totally undersells that story.

[Leo Laporte]

You remember that when we talked about it, the super bowl commercial that Ring showed the search party that would help you find missing dogs. And, and. And Ring said, look, look, look. It's. It's. We've trained it on dogs, not humans. You couldn't use it. Well, 404 found the living.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And they. And they. They cut themselves off from that company.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they didn't, by the way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They said they did.

[Leo Laporte]

They said they cut themselves off from Flock.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So this was a. I think, badly reported. I saw this everywhere. That. In response to outrage over the super bowl commercial, Ring cut its. Cut its relationship with Flockoff. Search Party still works. It had nothing to do with Search Party. Ah, yeah. Ring was very cage, very, I think, very smart. They said, oh, yeah, well, maybe if we just say we aren't working, working with Flock anymore, people will think that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Get under that bus, will you, Flock?

[Emily Forlini]

Wait, so are they still finding dogs?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And a leaked email found by 404, Jason Keebler does it again suggests they want to expand it beyond dogs. The feature is first for finding dogs, then cats, then people, other things.

[Emily Forlini]

This was a little weird for me because I. They debuted this in September at a New York event in New York that I attended. And we wrote up this feature and everyone was like, oh, cool, dogs are cute. No one cared. And then the super bowl and the Super Bowl.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I was actually gratified by the fact that America saw that commercial and immediately groked how this was a problem, that this was a kind of surveillance. Because the way it works is you lose your dog. You can now ask every Ring camera in your neighborhood, have you seen my dog? And America, the people who've seen that commercial seem to have really quickly immediately said, wait a minute. They can talk to my doorbell. They can ask if it's seen my dog. Wait a minute. And I think, furthermore, because of all the attention being paid to ICE these.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Days, well, people thought too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, that's the other story. That was a Google doorbell that initially they said, well, Nancy Guthrie's didn't have a subscription, so that that video from the doorbell was deleted after Three hours. Unless you have a subscription, it's not saved. But then Google somehow found it, which.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They'Re under pressure to find more, and they can't find more because it really was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, as you know, as computer people know, deleted doesn't necessarily mean gone.

[Emily Forlini]

I love that she didn't have a subscription. I don't either. That's my girl. Don't buy those subscriptions.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't have a subscription. I have a ring doorbell. I can't replace it because of how it's built into the.

[Emily Forlini]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

The house. But I don't have a subscription. And I make sure that it's only seeing my property. It can't see out past my property. So if you lose your dog, don't ask me. Unless he comes into our house. There is now your cat uses it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

To get in the house.

[Leo Laporte]

The cat uses it? Yeah, I told you that. It rings the doorbell. Oh, I have an update to that story. We talked about this last week. My cat Rosie has figured out that if she walks up to the doorbell, the chimes in the house will go off.

[Emily Forlini]

That's so funny.

[Leo Laporte]

And then we look at the camera and I say, oh, it's Rosie. And we let her in. So she now knows how to get in.

[Emily Forlini]

That's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

What? Well, the neighbor cat, Georgie, has now figured that out too.

[Emily Forlini]

That's so funny.

[Leo Laporte]

But Georgie is a tom. He's a ginger tom. He's from way down the street.

[Emily Forlini]

Sounds like a stud.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a. He is. He's an older stud. He's. He's like more than 10 years old. He doesn't wander around in the daytime. He comes to our doorbell at midnight.

[Emily Forlini]

He's like pranking you.

[Leo Laporte]

I look, and there's Georgie.

[Emily Forlini]

That's adorable.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's probably our fault because Lisa feeds him, so that's why he's ringing our doorbell. All right, one last thing. This was really for Paris, you know. Tldr too long. Didn't read. Sid has proposed a new designation. Aidr. AI. I didn't read.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which I. I did with the post that you led the show with last week.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. There you go. Right? You wouldn't let me read it, right. So there 50 million people read it on X, but you wouldn't let me read it into the show notes.

[Emily Forlini]

Oh, that something big thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, that was totally AI written. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is only fair to have AI read it.

[Emily Forlini]

I read it. You know, there's this AI style of writing where every sentence is short and a new line. So you're just like, going through some, like, weird waterboarding as you read it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like, all right, Jeff, running out of steam here.

[Benito]

I want to see the prompt. Like, I don't want to see the art. Just give me the prompt. Because all the information should be in the prompt already, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I hate my AI this is the ugly, and then we'll get wrapped up. Okay, Jeff, I know you're running out of steam. Remember we talked about this? Mofflin, the AI pet that went.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, right. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I just wanted to point out, this is from Casio. $429. Robert Hart writing for the Verge. I hate my AI pet with every fiber of my being.

[Emily Forlini]

Woof.

[Leo Laporte]

He says. After a few weeks living with Mofflin, I finally understand why my mother hated my Furby so much. Anyway, don't buy it, I guess.

[Emily Forlini]

Okay, but is that guy the target audience? It looks like a toy. Like, if I. As if I was 8, I would love that thing.

[Leo Laporte]

We want it.

[Emily Forlini]

Look at that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's cute. And it makes little purring sense.

[Jeff Jarvis]

$429.

[Emily Forlini]

If I'm a kid and my parents won't get me a cat, get me that thing, he says.

[Leo Laporte]

I ended up banishing Kevin. That's what he named his Mofflin. To another room, then doing it again and again and again until I caught myself tiptoeing around my own flat to avoid setting Kevin off.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, Furbies were like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Totally. It sees you and boom. The only reliably calming feature was that eventually it ran out of battery.

[Emily Forlini]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

He then said he started to take it around with him just to see if other people hated it as much as he did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here. Do you hate this?

[Leo Laporte]

Here it is at a Starbucks, apparently.

[Emily Forlini]

That's a cute photo. I got a little drink of a straw.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's cute. I wanted one. I almost bought it. I came that close.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's the unflat Kevin.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

It's funny. I give him. It's a good piece, but sorry. He got so disturbed by that little fluffy AI thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I hate it with every fiber of my being.

[Emily Forlini]

Every fiber of my being.

[Leo Laporte]

I've mentioned this on other shows. I don't know if I've mentioned on this one. Thanks to AI, hard drives are sold out for the year. Western Digital says, yeah, we're out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's not because those hard drives are used. What's the part in them that you can't get? Because. Right. The hard drives themselves aren't.

[Leo Laporte]

No. AI companies have bought out Western Digital. Storage capacity for 20, 26.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Just anybody. Just like, you know, the one gig hard drive you could buy yourself. They're using that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, what do you think they have in data centers.

[Emily Forlini]

Inside?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I would think that they would have things that are built at scale for data centers.

[Leo Laporte]

Just regular old hard drives.

[Benito]

Regular computers and data centers, guys. So it's like they're regular computers.

[Emily Forlini]

Could be. It could be a really deep supply chain agreement where they have a contract for, you know, whatever the data center chip is and they need all these components and they have just secured all that capacity so it can't be made into the consumer products. It's going to go to the data center out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that makes much more sense, Emily. Much more sense.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they need the hard drives in this storage space. They make hard drives and they are sold out of hard drives.

[Emily Forlini]

I feel like it's more like the projection of their hard drive inventory is just being sucked up by data centers. It's not like everyone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want you to do some reporting parts of capacity.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, that's the whole deal right now. When he's. Oh, Meta bottles. They didn't buy the chips. They secured the capacity on a contract.

[Leo Laporte]

Western Digital says the consumer market for their drives is only 5% of our revenue. 95% of our sales are to AI companies.

[Emily Forlini]

Underscores my point. Because they're trying to keep their customers happy, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, they'll sell them to whoever buys them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they're not selling the same hard drive you're going to buy in Best Buy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, they are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're making different hard drives. They don't have the capacity to make those.

[Emily Forlini]

It's like a different rapper.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff thinks there's some magic genie in the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's just.

[Benito]

It's all made up.

[Emily Forlini]

The reason I make that point is because everyday people are losing out to AI companies. And I'm just explaining how they're not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Already made and shipped.

[Emily Forlini]

They're not already made.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're what they're choosing to make in their supply chain.

[Emily Forlini]

Yes. It's not the same as Emily. Everybody ran into Best Buy. Now the racks are empty like Pandemic. There's no Brad. There's no toilet paper. It's not that kind of sellout. It's like a future contract.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You couldn't buy a Jeep Wrangler because Jeep was too busy making army jeeps.

[Benito]

No, no. It means that Best Buy can't buy anymore for the rest of the year. Whatever Best Buy has is all they're going to have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, because they're not Making them for the consumer market. They're making.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, there's no continuous supply. The same stuff, Jeff. Supply chain.

[Leo Laporte]

They put a sticker on it that says data centers. I mean, it's the same thing. I have NAS drives. I buy special special western digital red drives for my network attached storage. Maybe they last a little bit longer or whatever. It's the same thing you did in a data center.

[Benito]

It's called oem. It doesn't have a box. It just doesn't have a box.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it doesn't have a box.

[Emily Forlini]

Right. They're very similar.

[Leo Laporte]

How about the AI powered private school that costs $60,000 a year? 404 says students are being treated like guinea pigs inside an AI powered private school. It's called the Alpha School. Oh, it's paid members only. I can't read.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, this has been.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, well, that doesn't sound good. Huh?

[Leo Laporte]

The AI is generating faulty lessons that sometimes do more harm than good. And people pay sick $60,000 a year to send little Timmy to the AI.

[Emily Forlini]

This is very Silicon Valley to me. Or like Utah mystics. Like, those are the two.

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder where the Alpha School is. Actually, I didn't. I didn't.

[Emily Forlini]

If it's in Utah, like mic drop for the evening.

[Leo Laporte]

A school where kids crush academics in two hours, build life skills school skills through workshops and thrive beyond the classroom. Campuses in Austin, San Francisco, Miami, Louisiana, Washington, D.C. dallas and other metropolitan areas.

[Emily Forlini]

A city thing for sure thing.

[Leo Laporte]

You just wish Dr. Phil. This is the whole pitch, though. Learn twice as much in two hours. So you only go to school for two hours. Oh, here's one. One of this is from Lulu, who's level two. One of the reasons I love Alpha is because we have our own currency that motivates us to do more work.

[Emily Forlini]

This feels so not research backed to me. Like, I. I just feel like you have to spend a certain amount of time with material to absorb it. Like, just point blank, full stop. Like, you can't automate everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there's one in Puerto Rico. That's for all the bitcoin bros. Well.

[Emily Forlini]

Our villa could be there. That could be good.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, Miami. That is the bad, the good and the ugly. Let us pause for station identification and then your picks of the week. And Jeff can relieve his L2 on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My mountain of pillows.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, by a mountain of pillows. In fact, Jeff, if you want to retire.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, we're almost there. This episode of Intelligent Machines is brought to you by. Oh, I love these guys. The spaceship. This is where we got Paris's new site, secretly british from spaceship.com and by space Mail, the professional email service from Spaceship. She has an email address now at Secretly British. A business email absolutely must. It's the easiest, the best way to look professional in every message you send. If you're still sending messages that say, you know, leomail.com that's not businesslike. It needs to have your company name in it. Give your emails the best chance of reaching the inbox, not the spam folder. That's why over 2000 users switch to spacemail every month. Switching is easy. Spacemail's super fast unbox process links your domain and email in seconds. So once you set up Secretly British, for instance, or you know, yourcompany.com you literally just press a button and now you're getting email at your corporate address. And once you're set up, spacemail keeps everything running smoothly, Built in spam detection and a 99% uptime guarantee. What I love about Spacemail is new features are shaped by the users you make the roadmap. As a result, they're built around your needs. Space Mail has built in Calendar, an AI email assistant. There are iOS and Android apps, beautiful apps for email on the go. All of this chosen by Space Mail users. They said, we want an iOS app. Okay, you got it. We want an Android app. Okay, you got it. Space Mail is a key part of the wider Spaceship universe. That's where I register my domains now. And if you're a regular listener, you know Spaceship offers some of the best prices on domains. We were able to get it for half as much for for Secretly British for half as much as as we were finding it elsewhere. Plus you get all the add ons you might need, including VPNs, website builders, hosting and more. Whether you're building something big or launching your first idea. Spacemail gives you a pro email address without the pro level price tag and with a 30 day free trial. Hey, you can start today at no cost. Visit spaceship.comtwit to see the exclusive offers. Discover why thousands have already made the move that spaceship. Spaceship.comTwit we thank you so much for your support, Spaceship, of everything we do here at Twit. Emily, if you have a pick, you can use it now. If not.

[Emily Forlini]

I don't have a pick.

[Leo Laporte]

No pick. I have a pick. So when I use Claude, Claude will, when it's done thinking or wants me to give it some input would pop up a little bubble on my screen. But sometimes I miss the bubble. So I've installed this. It's called peon Ping. Stop babysitting your terminal. Your p. Your peon pings you. The instant Claude code finishes or needs permissions. And actually it would work for anything.

[Emily Forlini]

Except for, like, war craft or it is.

[Leo Laporte]

You want to hear it listen?

[Emily Forlini]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my gosh, it's so great. So whenever I'm ready to work, like, it goes, work, work. Something you're doing.

[Emily Forlini]

That was such a joke in my family. Like, me and my siblings would just repeat all these phrases.

[Leo Laporte]

This is from Warcraft, right? Yes.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Work, work.

[Emily Forlini]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

The good news is, you know, be happy too.

[Benito]

This is me and my friend circa 1992.

[Emily Forlini]

This is me and my siblings. Like, someone would be like, go unload the dishwasher. And they'd be like, work, work, work.

[Leo Laporte]

And when you click the orc's head, the peon's head, it would. It would say, what different things. Something you doing?

[Emily Forlini]

Can you send this to me, please?

[Leo Laporte]

It's so good. It's peon ping. But that. But that's not all. They have many, many others as well. They have all these different packs from helldivers from TF2. When you download this, once you set it up, you can rotate through all kinds of different sounds.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sued?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think so. And if they do, I hope. If the NPR sues, what's nice is they have that make the appropriate sound. So if it's. If it's like asking permission, it's what do you want? If it's. If it's an acknowledgement, it's. I can do that if it's annoyed me. Not that kind of orc. I know, it's making me smile. They have a variety of sound packs of all kinds. I mean, oh, they have the human peasants from World Warcraft 3 ready to work. Yes, me, lord. Off I go then. And they have Soviet engineers from Red Alert 2.

[Emily Forlini]

Yes, commander.

[Leo Laporte]

They have battle cruiser from Starcraft.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Make it happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Healing frequencies open. Sarah Kerrigan, also from Starcraft.

[Emily Forlini]

You may have time to play games, but I've got a job to do. That one gives me anxiety. That game is scary.

[Leo Laporte]

When I installed it, there were, I think, 120 of these, and you can add your own. So very easy to install. Really fun. It's dopey, but I love it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Benito, I think you need this to insert comments in the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Ready to work. Ready work.

[Benito]

The thing about this is, in my.

[Emily Forlini]

Head, when I get an email from Benito, do you want to be in the show? I'm like, be happy to.

[Leo Laporte]

Ready to work.

[Benito]

Like, this stuff is owned by Microsoft now though, so I don't know because like Blizzard's own.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what, it's still up. Go get it now while you can. That's all I can say. They have. Yes, they have. By your command. They have all the nerd stuff, everything. And then this also for Paris. Awesome. LLM reasoning failures. This is a curated list of things that LLMs screw up on. And it's just a lot of them. So if you're looking.

[Emily Forlini]

Bad quotes.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're looking. Yeah, for bad quotes, ammunition, hallucinations, all sorts of issues. Somebody's compiling this all. This is a common kind of trope on GitHub. Awesome. X. Right? Awesome. C libraries, awesome Python libraries. Awesome. Whatever. And so this is awesome. LLL reasoning failures.

[Emily Forlini]

I have a quick pick.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you found one?

[Emily Forlini]

No, it's just something I'm nerding out about right now. But not related to tech. Kind of the opposite.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it doesn't have to be tech. It could be terracotta tiles.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, I'm nerding out about that always. But basically I've got. I've realized there are different kinds of paper you can get. Like if anyone's into stationery, that these old paper mills in Japan and Europe.

[Leo Laporte]

Japanese papers?

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, like Japanese paper. European paper. There's a French company I got some stuff from and they have different textures, different thicknesses. They are just been making the paper this way for hundreds of years.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In Germany.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah. Yeah. Like maybe 100 years, maybe Japanese, it's 100 hundreds. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Old thousands, I think. Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

He has like a lost art and you can still buy all this stuff online. And I'm. I'm having a lot of fun with it and taking some notes on paper, which apparently Sam Altman still does, if that makes it cool. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you do a bullet journal or what kind of journaling do you do?

[Emily Forlini]

I mostly do like kind of personal Joe's personal and professional journaling. Both kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think it's really good to do. Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

But it's fun to mix it up with these new paper types. So I think that's a fun rabbit hole if anyone's looking for one.

[Leo Laporte]

For a long time I had a Hobonichi, which is a Japanese daytimer and they use beautiful, beautiful paper. I just love the feel of the paper.

[Emily Forlini]

Just the tactile experience is so nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually there's a 14 year old who just won a prize of $25,000 in the Thermo Fisher Junior Scientific Innovators Challenge because he created an origami fold of a classic Japanese Miura Ori pattern that can hold 10,000 times his own weight. This kid loves paper. It's so cute. You gotta read the article about all the folding he did.

[Emily Forlini]

It's awesome. Get him on the.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at. He's piling all this weight on his little folds.

[Emily Forlini]

We need him.

[Leo Laporte]

He won $25,000 because you know what? It holds 10,000 times its own weight. Good job, Miles. Wu, Jeff, anything? You've already given us some of your picks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Page 28 in the Gutenberg parenthesis. Credit for inventing paper has been given to Chinese man named kai Lun in AD105. By coincidence, in the same period, the codex appeared and the space disappeared in writing. However, the legend is ruined by discovery of paper fragments, fragments in China that date their creation to two or three centuries before him.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nonetheless, the Chinese get credit for discovering how to chop and hammer fabric, hemp, fishnets, and tree bark into cellulose soup, diluting clean water and then dipping a mold into mixture to come up with paper, its fibers overlapping and interlocking to create a smooth surface. They use paper for clothing wrapping, lanterns, fans, prayer ceremonies, kites, cups, and yes, the toilet.

[Emily Forlini]

He wrote that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wrote that.

[Emily Forlini]

Awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

So we have some paper lovers on the show today.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So my pick is our old Android friend Hugo Barra has kind of vibe coded a new company.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I saw your link on this and I checked it out. I thought, this is kind of interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Super do is one of his favorite agents. He built with Dreamer.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's a vibe coded to do list.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's very, very Gina Trapani. It's. It's a to do list that then becomes an agent and does things that you want it to do. It doesn't merely stop at listing it and bugging you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It goes out and gets you the tools you need to get it done. For instance, if it sees an email.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Saying, you did it, it will check it off. Very cool.

[Leo Laporte]

And so now this is all about his. Really, what this is is a plug for his new company, Dreamer. Yeah, the tool, which is a kind of vibe coding platform.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So he wrote superdue in Dreamer. When I first read his post, I thought, why does he keep mentioning Dreamer? Now I understand.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's why we built Dreamer. It's your home. Home for personal intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I want to try it.

[Emily Forlini]

Cool.

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting. Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, this is the kind of thing that I've been arguing that the things that you do, Leo with Claude and agents still requires a technical sophistication. I think the next level of this is when people can do it on a retail level without ever going into terminal, without having to install anything on a server. They make something that does what they want, they can share it. And I think that's where we're gonna see this explode.

[Emily Forlini]

That's where everything kind of goes. I think you're right. Like website design now you just drag and drop.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You start with Nano Banana, you get an image, then you say, make that image into a website.

[Emily Forlini]

I have this compulsive thing in my head. When someone says Nano Banana in my head, I go, nanner Banana. And I have to restrain my myself from saying it out loud. I'm like, do I have Tourette's? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I mentioned that I spent Monday coding. What I wrote was. I guess in a way it was kind of like writing a website. I had Claude code I bought many moons ago. I bought this E Ink display. It's a color E Ink display with a Raspberry PI on it. But it required coding to put anything on it and I never got around to doing it. So I had Claude code build me a web dashboard. It's E Ink. So I just unplugged, plugged it. So it's not live, but because it's E Ink, it stays there. With the most recent episodes posted, how many subscribers we have, how many club members we have, all that stuff. Isn't that cool?

[Emily Forlini]

That's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

It updates that. I have it set now only to update it once a day because it doesn't change that often. But I could have it do it more often.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So speaking of hardware and AI, line 125 Raspberry PI. I know I'm extending myself. When I asked to go off Raspberry PI stock soars 40% on the belief that Raspberry PI's will be used for as hardware for sure agents.

[Leo Laporte]

That makes sense.

[Emily Forlini]

Wait, is that also from your book?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Emily Forlini]

Okay. I'm like, so are you willing to stay on if we just read excerpts of your book?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I could read you excerpts from magazine.

[Emily Forlini]

You said page 145 or something.

[Leo Laporte]

The line. And actually Darren is saying don't start with Nano Banana because Google has another tool that's designed specifically for that called Stitch, which is where you would go to design with AI. I not aware of that. Thank you. So stitch.with google.com and design at the speed of AI transform ideas into UI designs for mobile and web applications.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ah.

[Leo Laporte]

I will use this because my next project is to write a Twitter. A client, a podcast client for Twit, just for our shows. Shouldn't be too hard. Maybe I'll try it with Stitch.

[Emily Forlini]

Impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you so much. Emily Forlini. So great to see you again. Emily writes at PC magazine. She's a senior reporter. Every quote verifiably human, I can promise you. Or her. Are you on bluesky? Mostly Twitter. Where do you. Where do you hang your hat?

[Emily Forlini]

I have been doing a TikTok push recently. I'm kind of experimenting out loud. The videos are a very hit or miss, but if you'd like to follow me there and see how my experiment goes, that would be fun. You can also find me on Blue Sky. I don't know, I'm everywhere. I'm easy to find. Just search my name.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I like this. So what's your. That's your handle on. On the Tick.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah. I think it's Emily Forlini. And then there's an underscore. There might have been one who beat me, but just searched my name. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Just to eat that.

[Emily Forlini]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me search for Emily for Lainey.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah. So I've been trying to post twice a week and pushing myself to figure out something I want to say twice a week, which is hard, so it doesn't always work. But I'm having probably the most fun on that platform and it's fun when people comment and stuff. So I would like to connect.

[Leo Laporte]

There it is. It's Emily Forlini with an underscore at the end.

[Emily Forlini]

Oh, no, look at me. See? It's so silly.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's cute. There you are with Mike. I love it. This is great.

[Emily Forlini]

It's a work in progress. I'm trying to push myself and like figure out, you know, the tone of TikTok, the framing of the video, blah, blah, blah. So if you want to be part of that journey, you can find me there.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I need to start making TikToks. Just a.

[Leo Laporte]

It. It's so cool. I have one I made and everyone's.

[Emily Forlini]

Trying to not be embarrassed. It's just like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's hard.

[Emily Forlini]

Here's what I'm saying on Tick Tock. You know, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It reminds me of when I first did a blog. It's like, this is so self centered. Why would anybody I know, I'm like.

[Emily Forlini]

I look like such an idiot, but I don't. Whatever. I guess, right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I love is how Tick Tock has made some phenomenal Stars Anna Lapwood, who plays the organ. Was it? Cambridge now has a worldwide audience with albums and concerts.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Le, pronounced Lev but spelled lay. The Icelandic American singer on the Olympics. On the short programs. I heard her song the other day.

[Leo Laporte]

There's that guy who does this. The sandwiches.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Salt, salt, salt.

[Leo Laporte]

Gym underscore. Hank, I think.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah. Your son.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Look at that mustache. It seems like it's. It's getting darker.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's become a trademark. Yeah, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it is a trademark, let me tell you.

[Emily Forlini]

See this page looks good. I should just have more food on mine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, he figured, you know, that's what happened is he spent a lot of time figuring out, you know, what got the algorithm. The latest is about is the behind the scenes of his super bowl commercial.

[Emily Forlini]

Cool. Yeah. The problem is I'm busy and kind of phoning it in sometimes. Like the lighting, the sound, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a full time.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Gig. And that's.

[Emily Forlini]

This is something I journaled about. For example, like, you know, New Year's resolution, setting goals.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Emily Forlini]

It's like I'm gonna try to tick tock twice a week for three months and see what happens.

[Leo Laporte]

So the other thing that he did, which is smart is he also is on Instagram. And I think nowadays both is probably good.

[Emily Forlini]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Thank you, Emily. So great to see you.

[Emily Forlini]

You too.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jarvis, professor of Journalistic Innovation Emeritus. Now I. Montclair State University up the road from Emily.

[Emily Forlini]

And you teach at Montclair State.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm a fellow.

[Emily Forlini]

Oh, you gotta connect.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cooperative media. Yes, we should.

[Emily Forlini]

I live in Glen Ridge right there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'm working on a new program we can't talk about yet, but it's very exciting and doing lots of things up there.

[Leo Laporte]

The Jersey Boys on Twitt or the Jersey Boy and Girl.

[Emily Forlini]

Jersey Strong.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My colleague Carrie Brown, I think that lives in Maplewood. A former professor with me at cuny. And lots of. Lots of journals.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Emily Forlini]

So many. I know. You don't need to connect with me. There's a million people. So much of the New York media industry lives in this area, as I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Call it, the Upper west side of New Jersey.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, totally. I know people work at cnn. Our editor in chief lives around here. I mean, there's like so many people.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff's also the author, as you saw, of the Gutenberg parenthesis, which talks about paper and magazine, which talks about paper and his new and hot type, which talks about printing on paper. So there is a common thread, I guess. Thank you, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Feel better. Paris will be back, I hope, next week, if the steroids hold out. Emily, we'll see you next on Tech News Weekly. A couple of weeks, I think.

[Emily Forlini]

Yeah, maybe next week. Maybe the week after. We'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know.

[Emily Forlini]

It's going to be fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you everybody for joining us. We do Intelligent Mission Machines every Wednesday right about 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UCC. You can watch us live if you're in the club, in the club Discord, but also on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. We also, of course, are on YouTube. You can watch us there. You can download episodes from our website, Twitt tv. IM Best thing to do, though, subscribe in your favorite podcast player. You'll get it automatically as soon as we are done. Thank you everybody for being here. We'll see you next week on Intelligent Machines. Bye bye. Hello, everybody. Leo Laporte here. You know what a great gift would be, whether for the holidays or at just any time, A birthday, a membership in Club Twit. If you have a Twit listener in your family, somebody who enjoys our programming and you want to give them a nice gift and support what we do, visit TWiT TV club TWiT. They'll really appreciate it and so will we. Thank you. Twit TV Club Twit. I'm not a human being, not into this animal sc. I'm an intelligent machine.