Intelligent Machines 870: Meet Me In Alaska

Summary

Intelligent Machines 870: "Meet Me In Alaska"

Date: May 14, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Co-hosts: Paris Martineau (Consumer Reports), Jeff Jarvis (author, journalism professor)
Guest: Chris Stokel-Walker (Tech Journalist, author of How AI Ate the World, Newcastle journalism professor)

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Episode Overview

This episode features a fascinating interview with British tech journalist Chris Stokel-Walker, whose work has appeared in outlets like the BBC, The Economist, Nature, and Scientific American. Author of How AI Ate the World and host of the podcast Crashed, Chris shares insights into his process of using AI for news gathering and journalism, discusses AI's impacts on media and society, and offers a peek into the future of AI-driven work and ethical challenges. The conversation is lively and wide-ranging, touching upon geopolitics, journalism ethics, productivity tools, and even the future of autonomous agents.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Chris Stokel-Walker's Career and Books

• Chris discusses his background covering tech for major publications.
• His earliest book, YouTubers, highlighted creator exploitation and the geopolitical role of platforms like TikTok long before these topics hit the mainstream.
• Recent book, How AI Ate the World, examines the progression and future of AI in society.
• Quote:

  "YouTube really exploits its creators by promising, you know, great rewards but only delivering it to a small percentage of creators. You revealed that long before anybody really else knew about it."
  — Leo Laporte (03:01)

2. AI Geopolitics and Platform Policy

• TikTok and National Security: Chris sees US restrictions on TikTok as mostly political moves rather than genuine security actions; the UK has taken a more cautious, deliberative approach.
• Age Verification: UK policies intended to keep kids safe online have mainly increased VPN usage, pushing users—teens and adults alike—to workaround restrictions.
• Quote:

  "It’s a success for VPN providers... all it did is push people towards either fringe websites or to VPNs."
  — Chris Stokel-Walker (05:11)

3. Social Media, Youth Anxiety, and Attribution

• Chris and Leo challenge the idea that social media is the root of youth anxiety, pointing instead to broader societal issues: recession, pandemic, job loss fears due to AI, and climate change.
• Quote:

  "If you are in your late teens, you have basically grown up into a global recession, weathered a COVID pandemic, and you are now in the midst of the AI revolution... Is it any surprise that people are depressed about that? That’s not social media. That’s everything else."
  — Chris Stokel-Walker (06:57)

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4. The Role and Limits of AI in Journalism

• Chris teaches new journalists to use AI "with caution and within very strict boundaries." AI can help with discovery, tracking trends, and filtering information, but humans must remain central in reporting, interviewing, and writing.

  • AI is not used for confidential interviews or source material unless processed locally (e.g., Whisper).
  • Standard AI like Otter is OK for general transcription but not for high-sensitivity tasks.

• Process Outline: (09:08–11:17)

  • AI used up to the point of pitching a story—for research, trend-finding, summarizing, RSS feed filtering.
  • Once reporting begins, human oversight is critical.

• Quote:

  "Everything up to the point of emailing an editor, I think, is fair game... Everything after, with the exception of Otter..."
  — Chris Stokel-Walker (09:42)

• Confidentiality: Paris and Chris both note potential privacy problems with cloud-based transcription tools ("Paris is concerned about sources getting uploaded to Otter") and highlight secure, local solutions.

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5. How Chris Uses AI for News Gathering

Technical Details of News-Gathering Workflow

• Developed a personal "brain" for filtering news:
  • Trained a local LLM (Large Language Model) on his previous work—2,000+ stories—to infer what kind of topics and angles interest him.
  • Feeds daily RSS/news feeds and podcast transcripts through LLM to surface relevant stories (12:43–16:58).
  • Gets daily emails with digests and candidate stories, uses AI for podcast summarization, and even personalizes the feed based on editorial history.
• Podcast Monitor: Downloads, transcribes, and summarizes podcasts for relevant news (14:55)
• Automated Editorial Judgment: Continually refines AI’s judgment by comparing its selections to his own, iteratively training the system.
• Quote:

  "I have like a telegram bot, effectively, that will send me ideas that it thinks that I should pay attention to and then I can use that."
  — Chris Stokel-Walker (25:27)

AI as a Front-End Filter

• AI helps prevent missing important developments due to the overwhelming information firehose, but still risk missing some items.
  • "I might miss different nuggets, but I'm going to miss fewer of them... It's just the front end."
    — Chris Stokel-Walker (18:13)

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6. Risks, Ethics, and the Irreplaceable Human Element

• AI is powerful as an aid, but cannot (yet) replace human journalistic nuance: interviewing, detecting emotion, crafting story, investigative skills, and building trust.
  • AI writing quality and original reporting are still lacking.
  • "Where the human addition is critical—that's where you have a role to play."
• Students must learn to use AI as a tool, but maintain their own expertise and unique value.
• Quote:

  "The act of journalism is almost like a translator... That is an inherently human thing to do. If you outsource all of that to AI, where is the accountability?"
  — Chris Stokel-Walker (32:32)

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7. Local Models, Training, and Data Privacy

• Local LLMs (run on personal machines, not the cloud) are getting good enough for most discovery/filtering tasks.
  • Chris uses several, including GLM, Whispher, and "Quin" models, and customizes prompts and memories to approximate his interests.
• Economic/Token Cost: Running local models is expensive in compute (50–70B tokens/day), but increasingly feasible.
• Parallelism with Leo Laporte: Both Chris and Leo detailed building parallel AI-filtered work stacks to handle news curation (27:15–31:32).

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8. Journalism under Threat: Trust, AI Authorship, and Future-proofing Careers

• Erosion of trust in journalism is a pressing concern.
• Use of AI in content creation could further harm credibility and audience relationships unless standards and transparency are maintained.
  • "There’s a bargain here between the readers, the audience and the journalists."
• Journalists and journalism educators must keep experimenting to "stay a couple steps ahead" and emphasize their irreplaceable human role (21:23, 31:32).

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9. Other Highlights, Memorable Moments, and Quotes

On Google’s AI Announcements & Hardware

• Jeff and Paris debate the merits of Google’s new "AI at the pointer" feature for the next-gen Chromebook-alike—some see it as creative, others as intrusive and over-complicating.
  • "[Leo:] This is a non starter. This is a lame idea and it's not going anywhere." (44:07)
  • "[Jeff:] Oh no, I like this idea.... When you shake the cursor over something, it summons the spirit of Gemini..." (43:00–44:24)

On Health Tech and AI Coaches

• Gemini, Google's AI, rolling out deeply into Workspace, sometimes to the hosts’ annoyance:
  • "They've introduced a purple squiggly line that just means we think you could rephrase this. And the rephrasing suggestions are wrong."
    — Paris Martineau (48:33)

On Podcast Summaries and the Changing Media Landscape

• AI-generated podcast summaries may ironically increase consumption by surfacing highlights more efficiently (15:36).
• Concerns arise that creators become raw material for AI summarization—"cannon fodder" (15:21).

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Notable Timestamps and Moments

• 03:38 — TikTok US divestiture & geopolitical theater
• 06:29–07:57 — Social media, youth anxiety, and misplaced blame
• 08:29–11:27 — AI's role in journalism, process specifics, and ethics of confidential sources and transcription
• 14:55–16:58 — Chris’s podcast monitoring AI workflow and discussion of Claude, GLM/Quen/Whisper models
• 18:13–19:19 — On missing "nuggets" with/without AI
• 31:32 — Ethics and economics: the pledge not to let AI replace human journalists
• 32:32–32:55 — Trust and the journalist/public relationship in the AI era
• 35:07 — Comparing LLM model outputs for writing quality and censorship
• 44:07–46:53 — Debate on new "point and click" AI interface from Google
• 54:02 — Anecdote about robot voice assistants at home
• 70:23–76:10 — Lighter moment: musical parody of Sam Altman and Mira Murati's OpenAI firing texts

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Quotes of the Episode

• On AI Tools in Reporting:
  "Everything up to the point of emailing an editor, I think, is fair game... Everything after, with the exception of Otter..."
  — Chris Stokel-Walker (09:42)

• On Journalism’s Human Element:
  "I don't think that AI will replace journalists. Not least because every so often I will look and see how good it is at producing journalistic writing—turns out it's not very good."
  — Chris (19:19)

• On Trust and Ethics:
  "If you outsource all of that to AI, where is the accountability? Where is the trust? Where is the responsibility...?"
  — Chris (32:32)

• On Youth and Social Media:
  "Is it any surprise that people are depressed about that? That's not social media. Right. That's everything else that's gone on."
  — Chris (06:57)

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Themes and Takeaways

• AI Can Optimize Journalistic Workflows: Automating the "firehose" helps, but journalist’s intuition, ethics, and trust-building are irreplaceable.
• Tech Policy Is Messy and Often Ineffective: Bans and age-checks are evaded or side-stepped, and global approaches differ widely.
• The Human-Technology Synergy Is Still Indispensable: Coverage, analysis, empathy, and "real" reporting lie at the heart of what journalists—and humans—do best.
• Future-Proofing Means Leaning Into Human Strengths While Mastering AI: Learn the tools, draw clear limitations, and constantly seek value-added spaces AI cannot fill—at least, not yet.

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Listen for More On…

• Data privacy and the tradeoffs between cloud and local AI tools
• The never-ending arms race of information curation and discovery
• Lively debates on Google’s approach to "contextual" AI in software
• The cultural, philosophical, and ethical dilemmas posed by humanoid robots, kids’ AI toys, and more

To conclude:
Chris Stokel-Walker's pragmatic and nuanced take on the use of AI for journalism is a must-hear for anyone interested in how the media, technology, and ethics intersect in an age of intelligent machines.

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For the full interview, start at:

• Interview with Chris Stokel-Walker: [02:54]
• Detailed News Gathering AI Workflow: [09:08], [14:55], [25:27]
• Discussion of Automation and Human Judgment: [32:32], [35:07], [44:07]

For further resources, check out Chris's podcast "Crashed," his book "How AI Ate the World," and his posts on new workflows at chrisstokelwalker.com.

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines. This week we interview Chris Stoeckl Walker. He's a British tech journalist for the BBC, the Economist, Nature and Scientific American. And he wrote a book called How AI Ate the World. We'll talk to Chris about how he uses AI for news gathering. Intelligent Machines is next. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. Episode 870, recorded Wednesday, May 13, 2026. Meet Me In Alaska. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show. We cover AI, robotics and all the smart little doodads all around you in your house, everywhere, in your car, in your baby carriage. Paris Martineau is here from Consumer Reports.

[Paris Martineau]

Cars and baby carriages, those are things that I have.

[Leo Laporte]

You do not have either one, do you?

[Paris Martineau]

Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's pretty amazing actually. That's good. That's good. You live in the city where people don't have children. Also, Jeff Jarvis is here, author of brand new book Hot Type, due out any day now. And of course magazine the Web. We weave the Gutenberg parenthesis, but Hot Type is [e-mail] get it now? You get it in August when it ships.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can you believe that I'm the one person in this trio who's not caffeinated?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I actually really can't believe that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, can you imagine me on caffeine?

[Paris Martineau]

That's why they had to take it away from me. You're too powerful.

[Leo Laporte]

It was his elixir of power.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris and I just spent the last 20 minutes before the show talking about coffee preparation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, my Lord.

[Leo Laporte]

Poor Jeff.

[Paris Martineau]

He's descending into the crevasse of madness along with me.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to call it Paris's Pour Over Party. It's a new feature on intelligent machines. Actually, no, we have a great guest. We want to get to the guest. This is a recording I actually did a couple of weeks ago with a British journalist named Chris Stokel Walker. Chris is a very smart person. He covers technology for a variety of sources, including Wired, Scientific American, Nature, the BBC. And he wrote a book a couple of years ago called How AI Ate the World, A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence and its long Future. I asked Chris to tell us a little more about the book. Chris Stoeckl Walker, our guest on intelligent machines this week, British tech journalist. You've probably heard his podcast Tectonic. He is a. Maybe you've read his book came out a couple of years ago, How AI Ate the World. A brief history of Artificial intelligence and its long future. He's actually written a number of books for normal people, which I commend you on, Chris.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

I try, yeah, I try. I try to do that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

It's difficult. These things are complicated.

[Leo Laporte]

Your first book, which I thought was really interesting. YouTubers talked about something that's become painfully obvious now, seven years later, that YouTube, I always. I use the Dylan phrase, I ain't going to work on Maggie's farm no more. YouTube really exploits its creators by promising, you know, great rewards and. But only delivering it to a small percentage of creators. You revealed that long before anybody really else knew about it. You also talked about TikTok as a geopolitical weapon. Are you kind of happy that the US has forced the divestiture of TikTok?

[Chris Stokel Walker]

No, I think, I mean, I think. I think it was just a geopolitical porn.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

I mean, it doesn't solve the issue around the supported purported national security risks that we've heard about that were kind of first the fixation of the Biden administration, then of the Trump administration and obviously of Donald Trump back in 2020 as well. So, no, I mean, like, it just seems like it's an unhappy conclusion everybody. But yeah, yeah. Thankfully it hasn't ended Tick Tock's supremacy in the U.S. it seems like that just runs pretty much parallel to everything else.

[Leo Laporte]

It's exactly the same as it ever was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The UK did not do this. Right. Tick Tock in the UK is the same.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, yeah. We, we've had like, we had a head of Steam similar to you around about the same time. Ditto with the European Union where basically you're not allowed to use it within the European Parliament and the UK Parliament because of the purported national security risks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

I mean, if you want draw a line there, fine. But I do think it's interesting that, like, this is scary enough supposedly to have a. An attempt to ban it and to not allow any parliamentarians to use it yet it's absolutely okay for everybody else to do so. So, I mean, I don't quite know where that line is drawn and quite why it's done that, but, you know,

[Leo Laporte]

that's TikTok for the. Not me.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, the UK we've been talking about it quite a bit, has. Has enforced age verification on social media. You're right there in the center of the universe on that one. How do you feel like that's going? And is it, is it a success?

[Chris Stokel Walker]

I mean, it's a success for VPN providers. Right. This is the thing that they sold

[Leo Laporte]

a lot of VPNs.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

That's right, yeah. I mean, so. So the UK government is, is saying that this is a massive success. Not really, because ultimately all it did is push people towards either fringe websites or to VPNs. The, the reason why it came about, our Online Safety act, which was design and keep kids safe, ended up having just too big a dragnet. So, you know, there was reporting around the time when it was implemented that like hamster hobbyist websites, people who kept hamsters as pets suddenly felt like they had to throw up some sort of age verification check. I know you're getting that in the US as well at the minute in terms of this, it. It doesn't really work. Right. Although to be fair, the UK is doing one good thing, Leo, and that is the Australian approach towards, you know, banning social media for under 16s. We've got a load of stuff happen. Europe, Greece being the most recent to implement this for under 15s. By 2027, the UK has kind of taken a step back and gone, you know what, we're going to look at the data, we're going to look at what happens in Australia, we're going to look at what happens in Europe and we're going to take hearings from the general public and from experts before we move, which is quite temperate of them and I think not necessarily a bad thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, prudent. Although early reports from Australia, it's really interesting because of course they're going to focus on the teens who say, oh, thank goodness you, you're protecting me. And less so on the marginalized teens who are now disassociated from their social networks. And. But that's part of the problem is they haven't had a voice in the past and now they have no voice in the present. And so you don't hear from them. And I worry about them, frankly.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah. And the thing that I find really interesting about this is that it's like there is a really interesting line of debate which I think is being put forward by people like Taylor Lorenz in the us which is this is, you know, we're pinpointing a problem here, but we're almost attributing the wrong reason to it. So we say that social media is, you know, is killing people's brains, it is causing them big issues and undoubtedly it is doing that in some sense or some people. But also, yeah, we have to bear in mind, like, you know, I'm in my mid-30s. If you are in your late teens, you have Basically grown up into a global recession. You have weathered a COVID pandemic that has directly affected your education. You are now in the midst of the AI revolution, which is apparently going to take all of your jobs and means that you're not going to have any sort of career to get into. So is it any surprise that people are depressed about that? That's not social media. Right. That's everything else that's gone on that's

[Leo Laporte]

called growing up in the modern world, let alone the potential for climate change to completely destroy the planet in your lifet. So, yeah, why are they anxious? Oh, it's Facebook for sure. It's Instagram that's the problem. It's very easy. We always look for simple solutions. All right, well, this is an AI show and you're here as somebody who not only covers AI, but as a journalism professor at Newcastle. You actually teach journalists how to use AI. I'm going to add the word appropriately. Would you add that word appropriately?

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, with caution and within very strict boundaries. And only in certain parts of the journalism process. Not anything. When you actually, actually are doing real life journalism, it's more like a discovery tool, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, Paris couldn't be here for the interview. We're doing this because you're in the UK at an ungodly hour here in the us. But she is a journalist, actually, so is Jeff. Jeff also teaches journalism and I think they both really were interested in talking to you about the role of AI in journalism. Where do you draw the line? What are the limits? Where do you use it, where don't you use it and how do you use it?

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah. So to me, it's really useful in trying to filter through the fire hose of information that you have to keep on top of every single day. So prior to sort of the advent of AI and the widespread use of it through things like ChatGPT and so on and so forth, and at the minute, like, I'm currently running some sort of stack based on a local LLM that is designed to try and filter through a whole load of information and present me with what might be ideal ideas that I want to cover.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Paris was very interested in that, by the way. She thought she wanted me to ask you about that.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, well, I mean, I can run through it, basically. So, like, I. I take a very strong rule that, like, once you actually get into the reporting, so you have decided that you want to do a story, you want to pitch it to an editor, you then want to report it out, you know, the general process for journalism is that you come up with an idea, you notice a trend, you see something is different or has changed in the world, you then want to tell the world about it. So you contact an editor at a publication. If you are, like me, a freelancer, then you can write and, and speak on, and appear on any number of different outlets. But if you are generally contracted, then you are looking to one individual outlet and then you pitch an idea. Hopefully they say yes. You then go through the process of reporting, which is more research, interviews, writing up or producing a video and a piece of audio at the end of it. So everything up to the point of emailing an editor, I think is fair game for using AI mainly just to keep on top of the world. Everything after the point of actually you are reporting it out with the exception of Otter, because OTTER is kind of like the exception that proves the rule around AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Otter, AI, the dictation tool many journalists use for transcripts. Yeah.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

And have been using it for years without any qualms at all. Even though actually, you know, if you're talking about a very sensitive story, you might want to think twice about uploading it there. Just.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I think Paris is concerned about sources getting uploaded to Otter. I don't think she uses it for those confidential interviews.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, ditto for like, something that is seen as I need to be much more productive of sources, then I will do the same. Like, I will use an offline version of this.

[Leo Laporte]

There are good local. Now there are very good local transcription tools you can use that don't send that information outside your computer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

I mean, like, so Whisper, you can download a localized version.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Like, it's crazy. I mean, so one of the. One of the.

[Leo Laporte]

Unlike Otter.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, Otter decided relatively recently, like maybe 18 months ago, to load a load of AI stuff into it and also double the price. So I'm kind of debating whether or not I step away from that. But, yeah, so for me, it's that idea of, as a journalist, before I started to integrate AI into this part of the process, I would spend hours every single day trying to keep on top of what is happening in the world. And the reality is, as journalists, we are expected to kind of feed in from lots of different sources, effectively drinking from like a fire hose of content and say, right, here is the thing that is important, and pluck it out and then go, actually, I'm going to present that to the rest of the world. And a lot of stuff, if you do that as a human passes you by So I started to toy with Claude Code about four months ago when everybody else did, you know, post Christmas. Everybody got excited about it and thought, well, look, I have on my laptop a whole treasure trove of stories that I have reported out in the past and written, you know, my drafts are there as Word documents sitting in a folder. Can I not just point Claude Code at it and say, hey, look, this is 2,000 of my stories that have been done over the last four years. Can you infer from that the kinds of stories that I am interested in? What is Crystal Walker's brain effectively? And it's pretty good, actually. It came up with, like, a sort of brief, effectively of the things that I'm interested in. One of the kind of ways that actually you can maybe use that is I could try and see if I could, like, scrape and download Paris's brain and figure out what she might be interested in, what might be working on. That's, you know, that that sort of stuff would be kind of interesting to do as well, is like, not opposition research, but to try and, you know, collater a group of experts in their field and understand what they might be keen on. So I kind of used that and then pointed it at a load of the RSS feeds that I already used to sort of scroll through day by day and said, well, look, can you kind of do some matching for me? Can you say, well, you're not interested in this fire in a tower block in Hong Kong that appears because you are subscribed to an RSS feed that has maybe 5% of it is about the latest chip developments in China or in Taiwan1. But actually, you know, it has an awful lot of stuff that is very local to that part of Asia that is not anything to do with tech. And can you pluck out those bits of information and present them in a different way? So I have a whole bunch of different attempts at doing that. I have, like, a bunch of emails that get sent to me every single day. So I have, like, a morning brief that tells me what it thinks is the story of the day based on my quote, unquote brain and 15 other sort of supporting stories. I have something that also I saw the New York Times has done, which is one of the. The joys of Claude code and kind of the ability to vibe code your own sort of tech stack, which is like a podcast monitor. So it uses Whisper and it.

[Leo Laporte]

It.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

It downloads, transcribes, and then passes through those podcasts. Yeah, and gives.

[Leo Laporte]

This is every podcaster's nightmare. Well, Yeah, I remember Sachin Adela saying, oh, I don't listen to podcasts. I listen to digests of podcasts in the car on the, on the way to work. And I thought, oh great, that's just what we want.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

But this is a valid concern, right? Because this is the same thing that is vexing the journalism industry. And as.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, now we're just cannon fodder.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, precisely. But no, I think that. So to me, if I find. Because you know, I didn't listen to podcasts before I had this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, who has time, right?

[Chris Stokel Walker]

I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

We make podcasts, but we don't have time to listen to them.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Precisely. Right. And so then I thought, okay, well, at least now I know vaguely what is happening in this podcast and I can then listen to it and actually go, okay, there is a nugget of news here that might be of interest to me. So it's actually increasing my podcast consumption in a weird way.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

So have those emails that come in, they, they were kind of hard coded. I'm. I'm cheap, so I don't, I don't pay for the full Claude subscription. I got a subscription to the GLM series of mod.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been using that too, through zai. Yeah. Yeah, they've been pretty good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, they're great.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Up until about a week and a half ago when they decided that they were trying to crack down on people using it for open claw instances. And then basically they drew the dragnet too wide and caught me and many others up.

[Leo Laporte]

You're talking about.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

No, I'm talking about glm.

[Leo Laporte]

GLM did that also.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, they put in. They put in. I got, I got banned temporarily because apparently.

[Leo Laporte]

So you were using open claws.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

No, I was not. No, I was. No, I'm. This was. I used GLM to code this stuff. It runs it through glm. I think that because the token count is quite bursty, they figured that it was like that sort of behavior. But then they seem to have ironed it out and now I'm, I'm back in their good graces.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's a certain irony in that because I am convinced GLM is so close to opus, that they actually are a distillation of opus, something Anthropic has complained about. And so they've been stealing tokens from Anthropic and now they don't want you to steal it from them. It's funny, we are in parallel universes because I'm doing something very similar. I think for years it's become obvious I mean, at least 20 years since the beginning of broad use of the Internet, that there's a fire hose of information, that those of us who are attempting to kind of, of use it and take it and deliver journalistic output based on it are overwhelmed. I think everybody's overwhelmed by it. And the answer was always human curation. You follow somebody who's doing the work that you're doing, Chris, and let Chris do that work, and then you get the distillation of that. But lately even those of us on the front line are having a hard time doing our job of, you know, curating this flow. So do you worry, though, but that turning to AI, letting AI do at least the first pass, you're going to miss some nuggets?

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, I'm going to miss some. But I think that the sort of decision and the choice that I've made is I might miss different nuggets, but I'm going to miss fewer of them. Because, you know, it's that whole principle of you don't know what you've got until you actually see it.

[Leo Laporte]

And so if you're not seeing it all in the first place, you're missing more nuggets. Right, Right, precisely.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

And I think, you know, so, like, you know, if I, if I think about, like, what I must have missed out on prior to using this versus what I see now, at least now I have a kind of, you know, broader sense of the, the movers of the day, what is going on in the world than I previously had, or at least I have like the, you know, this is complimentary. Right. So this is me still doing the stuff that I did before, but being able to be a bit more conscious and a bit more deliberative, what I'm choosing to engage with more deeply, while the AI takes a lot of the strain off me there, it's just the front end.

[Leo Laporte]

And to underscore that point, you're doing the human work at the other end. Yeah. You're not replacing yourself with AI?

[Chris Stokel Walker]

No. And I spoke at the International Journalism Festival two years ago, which is a big conflab of the great and the good and the media industry. Jeff will probably have been to about 1500 of them or something like that, even though they've only been going from for 30, 40 years, I think, at most. And I spoke then on a panel about AI and said I don't think that AI will replace journalists. And I still stand by that, not least because every so often I will look and see how good it is at producing journalistic Writing turns out it's not very good how good it is at actually picking out the core element of what is a story and what is news. It's not very good at that. And also it can't do the job of talking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Like the whole point of this podcast is that it is two people talking to one another in a bouncing back way, understanding, reflecting each other's emotions, having an interesting conversation. You know, you can not, well, not metaphorically, you can digitally look into the white to my eyes and we can have an in depth chat in a way that I don't think you can do with a chat bottle with any sort of AI right now.

[Leo Laporte]

You say right now. Do you think we will at some point? I worry about that, yeah.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

I mean I worry about that, but I think that that's a long time off and I think that, you know, by using AI for the stuff where it can be used, I can still show my worth for where AI can't be used and can't necessarily replicate me so that, you know, I can still fine tune and hone my skills to hopefully always be better. It is a race right now. We have to admit that we have to try and keep a couple of steps ahead, I think. And so if I can spend more of my time trying to be a better, more empathetic journalist for the human stuff, while also having AI do a first pass of what is interesting and what is important during the day, then all the better.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's a really important a lesson for all of us, especially those younger people who are worried there will be no place for them in an AI laden future. That's the job at this point, is to find the point where the human addition, the human element is critical. That's where you have a role to play. And to find that and to really refine your sense of what that role is and how to perform that role. I think that's really, really important. It's a real important moral from what you've said here.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, I mean, look, it's, I train the journalists of tomorrow and you know, they are incredibly scared about AI. They are incredibly negative about AI. They, they think that it's just awful. And I go, well, you have two choices, right? You can either switch off from that and say, well, I'm never going to try and engage with it. And then what happens is you graduate in 18 months time, two years time, or whatever into a world of work that requires you basically to you be cognizant of and hopefully use AI in some way. And then you really struggle or you try and adopt it and figure out where it can fit into your working life and where you can kind of carve out your own private space that maintains your skills and improves them and really showcases them, I think, in the best possible way.

[Leo Laporte]

We're talking to Chris Stokel Walker, who is a freelance tech journalist, teaches journalism at Newcastle in the uk. You may remember him from the Tectonic podcast and his book How AI Ate the World. And that was 2024. AIs changed things quite a bit in the intervening two years. Anything you would change that you wrote in 2024. It's still eating the world, in fact, even more so, probably.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, I think a lot of it holds up, to be honest. I genuinely think that a lot of it still holds up. The one thing that I didn't really recognize, and it's one thing that I've kind of become a bit of an adherent for, particularly in the last month or so, is just the incredible power of local LLMs. I mean, you were talking about how you use GLM models. Do you use those through the ZAI subscription or do you use them through the API?

[Leo Laporte]

I have a ZAI subscription which is a third of the cost of Anthropic. But I also like you. I'm fascinated by the notion that at some point I won't have to do that. I bought a framework desktop with 128 gigs of RAM and a Strix halo. The people who are listening are so bored with me talking about it. But the whole point of that is to eventually be able to get more and more local because that's the goal. And especially with open weight models. So we're not dependent on these frontier, these giant frontier companies for our AI. I think that in the long run is dangerous.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah. And look, to be clear, we're speaking as we record this literally 35 or 40 minutes after OpenAI dropped a very subtle hint that they are really right. So if we know by the time

[Leo Laporte]

this airs it will be out and we'll know if it's, you know, if spud is all it was promised to be or not. But we don't know yet. But you know, we've been using 4 7. There's this mythos on the horizon. Models are clear. The frontier models are clearly getting stronger. Are the local models catching up?

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, I think so. Or at least I think that they are good enough.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that GLM is really impressive. There's a Quen model that just came out that's very good. 2.25 is very good.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah. So, I mean, I have a whole stack and this is, I guess, where we get super nerdy and like. Like you, Leo, I, I, about, about a month ago, I bought a. Not quite as big. I bought a 96 gig RAM mini PC with a GPU and decided to try and set up my, my own kind of local LLM stack and, and have moved part of that kind of morning routine that I talked about in terms of finding these stories onto that. So I now have like a, A process that is constantly pulling every five minutes from. Yeah, you can see an example.

[Leo Laporte]

This is your Blue sky post. Yeah.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah. So, yeah, I have like a telegram board, effectively that will send me ideas that it thinks that I should pay attention to and then I can use that. So, like, it's, it's kind of incredible because I can, like, for the cost of letting it.

[Leo Laporte]

You call it Athenaeum, which is a great name. I love it.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, I used to like classical literature and Greece and Rome and things like that. So we're a bit of a nerd in that way.

[Leo Laporte]

I call mine Kenobi, which is embarrassing, but I used to call it Obi Wan, but it confused. It was a little confusing. So I now just call it Kenobi. And it turns out Kenobi is a very good word for voice activation. So I can say, hey, Kenobi, I'm not talking to you, and it will respond. You know, it's funny, there's a parallelism. I see this more and more as I talk to people who are using AI. We're all kind of working along the same lines. I just like you. I have more than 200 RSS feeds. That is such a burden. I have to go through every morning, more than 1,000 articles, fresh articles every day. And for the longest time I've thought if there's some way I could just capture even a fraction of my editorial judgment, it would save me so much time and so much more even than that anxiety about everything I'm missing because I can't keep up with this flood. So what I've done, and I've been doing this with Claude and a little bit with glm, is so similar to what you're doing. I'm not doing it locally. I think that's really interesting and brave. I'm still using Claude for this, is. It makes a tech briefing for me. I'll show you, actually, I'll put it up on the screen. It makes a tech briefing for me. I'll go to Obsidian. It Posts it in my obsidian of the stories for each of the three shows that I have to prep. And I've been training it on what I end up picking. So there's a document I prepare for every show. Here's for intelligent machines. There's a document I prepare for every show. So. So at the end of the week, it's prepared 15 candidates a day for that show. And then it compares in using Karpathy's sort of auto research technique to improve the model what it picked to what I picked. The theory being in time it will get good enough that I can trust it. Well, yesterday I turned it on. It's been training for a while and I said, okay, you're good enough. Now here's the next stage. I want you to bookmark these candidates. And I'm still not trusting it fully. So the final stage will be me before the show going through the several hundred stories that it's bookmarked, saying, okay, these are the ones we're going to talk about on the show. But this is a big leap for me because trust, there's a certain amount of trust that this is going to do the job.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

And it breaks. Right. And so part of the reason why it breaks. Yeah, this is the thing. Part of the reason why I went onto local LLM stack was because GLM shut me off. Off. And so like I woke up one

[Leo Laporte]

morning, you had to.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, did not have this. I had basically an empty email. And I thought, well, what, what's happened here? And, and I think, you know, that's where the interesting friction lies, is that you can have this, but you can't be fully, fully reliant on this sort of thing at the minute.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

And arguably never. Right. Because the way that LLMs work, of course, is that they don't necessarily always spit out the same thing, the reliable output that you might expect because that is the, the joy of the black model. And also you mentioned some of the amazing local LLMs that have come out. Yay. We had QEM 3.6 in the last couple of days. We've got Minimax 2.5, 2.7, etc. Etc. Every time that I try and plug in a new model, I get slightly different editorial tastes coming out of the local LM stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why I'm trying to train it on my own choices, hoping it will closer approximately made it, you know, it does.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

But then even so, with my. Because the local LM stuff that I have still passes through that kind of brain, as it were.

[Leo Laporte]

So you have A memory system of some kind set up.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, and a memory system. And also this, this kind of prompt of. Well look, this is what he is interested in based on his writing.

[Leo Laporte]

But even then you did that, you pre trained that. That's right. You had that from the beginning. Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

I mean it's effectively like rack. Right? It is, it's, it's kind of heavy is the specialist thing that you need to look at.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

And infer your answers through that. But and this is why I do it locally is also because fixing that burns an awful lot of tokens. So even just the kind of like, you know, I'm probably using something like 50 to 70 billion tokens a day on Holy cow either.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's. Yeah, but I haven't looked. I'm, I'm afraid to look.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Well, I have, I have, I have eight 850 RSS feeds. This is looking at.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're well ahead of me. Oh my.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

And then also the, the kind of. So it's looking through all the stories, it's then producing like an output and also I'm doing some coding stuff on top of it. So like it's 50 million or so for the local stuff, then it's maybe 10 million through GLM. I recently in my, when in my interregnum when the GLM model went down, I panic, bought an open code subscription, so I'm using that as well. And also I have obviously a ChatGPT subscription, so I'm using Codex as well pretty constantly. But it's. Yeah, like it's, it's, it's fun. If nothing else. This is kind of like me using it productively and having a productive hobby rather than just kind of wasting it away.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and I think it's very important, especially in your role as a professor of journalism, it's very important that. Exactly what you said earlier, you practice this stuff so that you at least know what works and what doesn't work, work. And I think it's also really important to have this hard line that it is not going to replace my human task that I am the writer, I am the journalist here.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

And that's, I think that's the really important question both in terms of the economics of journalism but also in terms of the ethics of journalism. And the harsh reality is that I tell my students, if you look at the kind of trust in the media industry and trust in people like me when I send out journalists, baby journalists who are in training to do what we call vox pop. So going out on the street man on the street interviews effectively, at east in the UK, there is survey data that suggests that of every five interviews that they do, at least four of them will be maybe answering their questions, looking them in the eye, while also thinking, you are an inveterate liar, because then not. They're not trusted. We are not trusted as an industry. And so fake news.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, precisely.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Right. You know, it's, you know, it's getting worse and worse all the time because of a whole bunch of different reasons that we can maybe, you know, we

[Leo Laporte]

don't have to dwell on it.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

No, we don't exactly. But like the, the, the principle behind that is if there is already this distrust in what we do. To me, the act of journalism is almost like a translator. Like something has happened in the world, it is important enough that you need to tell the remainder of the world. And that is an inherently human thing to do.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not only inherently human, it's vitally important.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, right. And so if you outsource all of that to AI, where is the accountability? Like, where is the trust? Where is the kind of responsibility who is ultimately going to be answerable if something goes wrong? That is all, I think, very important and one that actually I think a lot of people often overlook because I see folks who are using AI in the actual production of journalists, and I think, well, fine, if it works. But also there's a bargain here between the readers, the audience and the journalists. And if you kind of go back, back on that bargain a little bit, it makes it very easy for those people to be less trustful of what we do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And we don't want that.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

No. If you're looking for your usage, then it's in API and it's the subscription bit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What are you using today for your local LLM?

[Chris Stokel Walker]

So I'm using a bunch of local. I'm using a bunch of. Yeah, so some coin models. So I have, I have. Because there is an awful lot of throughput for these models. I'm using like a 9 billion parameter quin 3.5.

[Leo Laporte]

Relatively small.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah. As a, as a reporter. So the whole point of that is it's looking at a story. It is going. Is this interesting to Chris? If so, what is the story here? If there is a story and then it is going, okay, well fine, we can pass it on or not. And then it passes it on to a, a slightly bigger, slightly more advanced model. Again, it's like, it's a, it's a combination of a Quin 3.5 and it's post trained on a GLM 5.1. So it's like distilled, basically. And that makes a kind of better argumentative presentation to me. And then I kind of go, well, is this actually a story or not? And if it is, then I take it on and I actually write up the pitch myself, as here is what I think the take is rather than just what they say.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I. One of the other things I've been working on is I use Obsidian. It was a fortunate choice some years ago because it turns out something that AI can handle very well. And I've been having GLM run write kind of a synthesis of my daily notes to make a yearly summary with insights. And I tried it with glm, I tried it with Sonnet, and GLM actually was a better writer. It was actually much, much better. It was also a little less censorious. I noticed Anthropic was a little careful not to cross any lines and GLM was not. Not oddly enough. So it's really. I think that's. I'm sure you tell your students this. It's so important to kind of try push these boundaries to see what works and doesn't work. Chris, it's such a pleasure talking to you. We've used up our time, but I'd like to get you back and continue this conversation, especially to continue learning about what you're doing with this local LLM and what you're doing to help you in your work. Because I think you're. I think you're on the right track for something.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, with pleasure. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Chris Stokel Walker. His book is still absolutely true. How AI Ate the World and maybe wrote some of it too. You can find it everywhere. You get books. Anything else you want to plug. Chris, I mean, I'm sure people now hearing you want to say, well, where can I find more? Chris Stoeckl Walker.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah, so I used to do this tectonic podcast, which was in association with an NGO called Article 19. I now do a podcast called Crashed, which is looking at kind of tech through a UK lens, but also has a broader global context. So you can find that on all good podcast platforms.

[Leo Laporte]

I see it right here on the Apple podcast platform, Crashed with Alex Hudson and Chris Stoeckl Walker. Chris, a real pleasure. Thank you for joining us on Intelligent Machines.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Thank you for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm only sorry that Paris and Jeff weren't here because they would have had a lot of lots of additional questions for you. We will continue with. I am in just a bit, Chris Stoeckle Walker. Great to talk to him. He was fascinating and I think you know he's volunteered. You heard him to come back. So I think he will be when, when, when one of you guys is not around. Maybe we'll get Chris to fill in. Yeah, I like what he's doing with AI. It's kind of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But does he drink coffee or tea?

[Leo Laporte]

I did not ask.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think you have to unwind for next time.

[Leo Laporte]

We will have more intelligent machines. All the AI news in just a moment, but first a word from our sponsor. This episode brought to you by Melissa, the Trusted Data quality expert since 1985 Spring is the season for tidying up closets, garages and yes, your customer data. Because in most organizations, data does not stay clean for long. Inputs constantly change, pipelines get fragile and technical teams end up spending more time fixing data problems than building new systems. And that is the challenge that Melissa set out to solve with something brand new they call Unison. Their new data quality platform. Unison bridges the gap between automation and flexibility, giving data stewardship words. Maybe that's you the tools you need to manage and improve data quality, freeing your technical team to focus on core systems. For more than 40 years, Melissa has been the data quality partner, helping organizations keep business data clean, complete and up to date. There's a lot they could do for you. For example, smart deduplication. This is hard to do if you've ever tried to do it on your own contact list, but Melissa's matchup technology is amazing at finding non exact matches and make sure you don't lose any data without having any duplications. They also do global address verification and Autocomplete, which will validate and standardize addresses in real time. I mean it's fast across more than 240 countries. I love Melissa's change of address tracking because it's automatic. It monitors and updates records of customer address changes, property transactions, hazard risks and more. And it's completely automatic. They also do data enrichment, which means they can append all kinds of information demographic data, property information, geographic insights to those basic contact records, turning them into actionable profiles. And if you're in fintech or you need identity verification for KYC rules, things like that, you'll love their mobile identity verification, which connects customers to their mobile numbers seamlessly and reduces fraud. Melissa integrates wherever you work. They have apps for every tool you use. Salesforce, Dynamics, CRM, Shopify, Stripe, Microsoft Office, Google Docs. I can go on and on. Melissa solutions and services, of course are GDPR and CCPA compliant. They're FedRAMP certified, ISO 27001. They meet SOC2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. They report really, they're the gold standard for all of this, frankly. Clean data leads to better marketing, ROI, higher customer lifetime value and AI that works as intended. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for [e-mail] TWiT that's melissa.com TWiT we thank him so much for supporting intelligent machines. Thank you, Melissa. Well, Google had its event yesterday, their Android event. Preparing, preparing for Tuesday's Google I O keynote. They like to clear the decks. I think they did this last year so that the keynote can really focus on AI. Jeff is going to be joining us for our keynote coverage along with Micah Sargent. In fact, if you want to come Paris, you can too. It's Tuesday, 10am Pacific, 1pm PM Eastern. And I should mention that our coverage of the Google I O keynote will be broadcast only in the club, Club Twit. We don't want to get it taken down on YouTube. So if you are not yet a Club Twit member, this would be a good time to join.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How dare we give Google promotion.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, it really was.

[Paris Martineau]

How dare you guys show people their very long press release meeting.

[Leo Laporte]

It's always interesting though, Google I O. In fact, back in the day, before your time, Paris, we would actually go to Google I O. I remember Gina Trapani.

[Paris Martineau]

Where did I go?

[Jeff Jarvis]

And back in the day, you mighty stuff computer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we got a free laptop once

[Jeff Jarvis]

we got a cardboard.

[Leo Laporte]

That's when we knew it was almost over, when all they gave us under our chair was cardboard. That was. And Jeff folded it while going.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, Gina managed to fold it. Gina was the one we were writing back. Back in the car, back to Petaluma.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, they had their AI event and I'm sure you saw with interest that they announced they're basically successor to the Chromebook. Right, the Google Book.

[Paris Martineau]

How are you feeling, Jeff?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm feeling good. I'm feeling good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not Chrome os.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. And they won't call it Aluminium yet either. That's the code name, but they won't admit that. But it's, it's. It's a combination of Android and Chrome. Chrome, yeah. And it has, it's built bottom up with AI. The important part is they've rethought and this is, this is DeepMind did this. DeepMind has a thread I put in the rundown rethinking the cursor, the pointer.

[Leo Laporte]

That's so weird. This is that new mouse thing. So I don't understand. You're going to. I, I tried to understand what they were talking about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, so I actually saw versions of this years ago on the web. I saw startups come in and say, we're going to, to re. There's a new surface and it's the cursor. And the cursor has context. It knows where you are, it knows what you want. Why not add context to that? The problem was all those were required you to do add ons to your browser wasn't going to work. Now you take the. When you shake the cursor over something, it summons the spirit of Gemini and says, what would you like, Mr. Laporte as you're pointing to this Coffee pot water. Pot water. I don't know. I dare not say anything about coffee because I'll get it all wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Just call it a percolator. Get it done with on your Hamilton beach percolator. And then you say something like, okay, this is the thing I want to operate on. And then you speak.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can ask a question or you can say, take this wallpaper that I like and put it in this room, or take this couch out or you know, it's anything that Gemini can do. It now has the context of your screen to know what to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I go on record and say this is a non starter. This is a lame idea and it's not going anywhere.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh no, I like this idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Because again, it's context. You don't have to go to the effort of typing in something. You can say, take this and put it there. Put these three things on my shopping list. Boom, boom, boom.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean we already have, you know, select and drag. It's kind of like that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But this is, well, this is more than that. You can add multiple things as you go. I think you could probably say, you know, add this quote to my rundown for the podcast. You know, I don't know what. We'll see what it can do. So that's the main thing it has. The second thing is that AI enables is new personalized widgets. Though I think when I was talking to Jason Powell earlier today, he said, he said it's more like agents. It's, it's so one example they gave is I'm planning a trip to. With my family to so and so create a widget that's going to track everything about that for me. And so it'll find here's your flights, here's the restaurant you wanted to Go to here's the map of this or whatever. And it becomes a kind of a temporary thing and they're calling it a widget. But I think that's, that's, it's something new. It's an agent. It'll also have the color bar which was on the old Google Chromebooks, which is, which was lovely. And it's not going to be a low end machine. It's going to be a higher end machine machine.

[Leo Laporte]

Chrome, by the way, that is what they were. Google was doing with their own machines all along. Yes, but they have also the same partners, Samsung, weirdly not in the announcement. I think they're going to be doing it too. And those will have a variety of price points. I'm sure there'll be a $200 version.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the good news, bad news for me is that they do say that some existing Chromebooks will be able to take on the new experience. Of course I want an excuse to get a new machine shape.

[Leo Laporte]

Which one do you have now? I did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I did. It's Lenovo.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a really. It's the best Chromebook.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is. It is the best Chromebook. They had to. I had to set it in. They replaced my motherboard.

[Paris Martineau]

You have to. If you get a new Chromebook as part of this, can you shoot your Lenovo with a gun on like a stream or something? I don't know. Could you do something fun to destroy?

[Leo Laporte]

What did it do to you? Something's going on with Paris. I just, I think if you're, if

[Paris Martineau]

you're, if you're upgrading in a flight of fancy, why not go out with the bang? No disrespect to the Lenovo. I just think it would be fun to shoot an electronic with some sort of projectile.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really sad now. I'm so sorry.

[Paris Martineau]

Lenovo.

[Leo Laporte]

And he makes fun of me and my wife Claudia. It's funny because I'm completely. I'll have to see and maybe I'll buy into it. But I'm very skeptical about the way Google's adding AI. I really don't like how it adds AI to Google workspace.

[Paris Martineau]

You're saying you don't want the machine to be intelligent?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I have a nice way of using AI and I think many people do, either on the command line or in a chat bot. I don't know if I want buttons.

[Paris Martineau]

And all of my poking and prodding aside, I agree with you 100%, Leo. I have been enraged this week about the latest rollout of Gemini products to

[Leo Laporte]

Google Docs, you can't get anything done without it popping up.

[Paris Martineau]

I have accidentally caused an entire window to pop up that asks Gemini to do some other stuff and there's no way to turn it off. On my humble Google Doc.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is this touch tone phone they make me deal with? Where's my phone?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no, no, no.

[Paris Martineau]

It is a law. If you so much as mouse.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so funny. Our roles are completely reversed here.

[Paris Martineau]

Mouse over the bottom seventh of your screen. If you dare to so much as drag your cursor towards the bottom, it'll suddenly be like, hello, I'm Gemini. What would you like me to write? And the answer is nothing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I, on the other hand, now that I finally got asked Gemini on my browser, I'm delighted I read these extremely long posts and I can just say, summarize it. I don't have to cut and paste a URL into something else after the else. I just click on that and I say, summarize this verbose piece of crap for me so I don't have to read a at all. Biggest sin is recontextualizing the red squiggly line under your words that doesn't mean bad spelling anymore. And that really, really pisses me off.

[Paris Martineau]

It's not even the red one. They've introduced a purple squiggly line. That just means we think you could rephrase this. And the rephrasing suggestions are wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they're always terrible.

[Paris Martineau]

Or they're just vibes based. They're just like, we think instead of using three words here, you should have used four. Floor. I'm like, I disagree.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a writer, you're a machine.

[Paris Martineau]

And there's no way to turn off the purple vibes based squigglies without turning off the thing that tells you you misspelled the word. Your own name.

[Leo Laporte]

This is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Dare you tell me how to pour my coffee.

[Leo Laporte]

How dare you? This is what worries me about the mouse thing is that you're going to inadvertently trigger this all the time and then you're going to have to to. It's in the early days of the Macintosh, Apple did something I thought really smart. And I think credit probably goes to the earliest people on the Mac team who said, don't be modal. So modal is you don't go into a mode, so when you're working, you don't want the machine to switch. This is what's happening to you, Paris.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is what happened in the old days of the original word processors, right? You Were in editing mode or writing mode. Yes. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You were either insert or overwrite.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

And.

[Leo Laporte]

And mode modal just confuses people because it changes how the computer is working seemingly randomly and. And you want the computer to be kind of monotonous is the word they used. It's always with the same action, produces the same result every single time. So this. And they, I thought they were inspired. It was really Jeff Raskin, who was an early philosopher of computer, who said, you know, don't be modal. You don't. And so pop ups, you know, you see this all the time. And most computer operating systems, a dialog will pop up and you can't do anything until you handle the dialogue. In the early max, that didn't happen. Those modal dialogues were supposed to be few and far between and we got away from that somehow. And I still believe it confuses everybody.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it's a. Again, I saw startups try to do the this 15 years ago, a long time ago, 20 years ago. And the idea is that the cursor is another surface for information. And again, it has context. So when you put it over something, it can do something for you that's more than just this little pointing thing.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it can. And if I wanted to do that, something else, I'll press a button double.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't mind the right click.

[Paris Martineau]

I love a right click. I love that I can use my trackpad and right click with. Just checking with two fingers. That's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why in the early days Apple didn't have two buttons, it only had one button. Same philosophy, but they've come around. And the right click is just as important on Macs now as it is on Windows. But, but at least then you're. You're intentionally triggering something. I just worry. We'll see.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the other thing they announced was.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll hear from Jeff.

[Paris Martineau]

It.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They announced the rambler, don't they?

[Jeff Jarvis]

The, the.

[Paris Martineau]

So it sounds like a folk nightmare,

[Leo Laporte]

an old car, the midnight rambler.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So if you, if you say something and you say ah, like, you know, how about Tuesday? No, I'm thinking Wednesday. That was the example they gave. It will take the final words of what you say and make it coherent for you.

[Leo Laporte]

That's appropriate. I think that's, that's good. I ramble all the time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what podcasting is.

[Paris Martineau]

Is that for voice to text?

[Leo Laporte]

That's my job, is rambling.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think you can use it mainly in Android when you're doing messages and stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably voice to Text. Yeah, yeah, I, you know, yeah, we've had to, all of us had to learn a little bit of how to do voice to text. Right. So you announce enunciate clearly and you try not to ramble because you know that's going to get transcribed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I saw two stories this week. I put them in the rundown. One was that the fear that typing is going to go away just as cursive went away with typing. And the other was how irritating it is in offices when people are whispering to their computers.

[Leo Laporte]

That I agree with. I always thought voice interface isn't going to work well in an office.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have it either, but I can imagine it happening. I don't want to type.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to dictate, but I don't

[Jeff Jarvis]

want to disturb everybody. So I'm going to do something even more irritating.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually worked with a woman at TechTV who had severe carpal tunnel and had to dictate and she pissed everybody. But we understood this is an accommodation for a handicap. You know, she had a disability and so we. But it. But yeah, it's annoying when people are talking in an office environment. So. But that's why everybody should work at home. Like I do up in the. Up in my attic. Garrett Lisa nudges me a couple of nights ago, ago like three in the morning. He says the attic is talking. And I forgot that I had Claudia do a little every. Every morning at 3:30am it goes through a bunch of stuff processes and I forgot that I told it to talk to me after it does something and

[Paris Martineau]

it was giving at 3:30am Well, I

[Jeff Jarvis]

have work it all the time for me.

[Leo Laporte]

I have now seen said quiet hours between 10pm and 7am and it funny, it really picked up on that right away. Oh yeah, quiet hours. Absolutely. So now it doesn't do it anymore. But it was a little annoying, I must say. Perky British accent, like C3PO.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you say the attic? Your attic is speaking?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's kind of my attic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And people want robots in their house.

[Leo Laporte]

I love having my robot talk to me and it does all the time now. And I'll hear it. Sometimes it talks to me in the wrong place room and I'll hear distantly. I'll hear a voice. I'll go running, say what? What? Did you want something? No, I. I think it. I don't get me wrong, I think voice interaction is natural. That's how we want. We want to talk to our computers and have them talk back to me. But it has to be at the right place in the right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So when you hook it up with your cameras, then it will know where you are.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I worked on in the morning.

[Paris Martineau]

So that it will turn on the speakers in your bedroom at 3:30am oh,

[Leo Laporte]

it does that already? No, no, it does that based on the WI FI access this point. So I have a mapping of which WI FI access point my device is on where I'm talking to you from. Use the speakers near that WI FI access point. And that works pretty well.

[Paris Martineau]

You have enough WI FI access points in your house?

[Leo Laporte]

There's one per floor. There's one per floor. And there's Sonos speakers built into the ceiling in. On each floor. So it does.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can't believe you kept with Sonos

[Chris Stokel Walker]

in the new house.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can't believe you stuck.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? Once I realized that Claude could talk to Sonos and control it, I actually bought some. What?

[Paris Martineau]

Can't Claude talk to Lisa?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not allowed.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa or the cat. Google has also announced a $10 a month health coach which is launching in six days. Great start on your run, Rosa. So this is. You're using this sort of already paired. Because I know you use an AI for calorie counting, as do I. And for exercise. And my AI will. When I have too many carbs for lunch, it'll say things like, you should have a salad tonight. You should. You should have a salad tonight. So this is. This is a new. This. They announced the Fitbit Air, which is a health band without a face that's

[Jeff Jarvis]

competing with the other thing that's hot like.

[Leo Laporte]

Or a ring.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, there's a. There's a. There's a wristband already that exists without the screen. The kids like. Whoop. Yeah. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Is whoop still around?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's that.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's a Fitbit Air.

[Paris Martineau]

AI is built right in.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the same thing. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I finally have a watch coming Friday for the first time in years, which sort of. The Google. The Google Watch. Because I got. I've got a. Because of my infirmity, I've got to be exercising.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so I want to track all that. The problem is the current fit already has a bait. A low line of what you have to make to make your goals. Well, I'm crippled now.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you could turn that low.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can't find how to change it. I can't find how to change it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I don't know about the fit, but on my Apple watch, I absolutely say what the goals are.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

It makes perfect sense.

[Leo Laporte]

10,000. You know the 10,000 steps is made up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you know that it's just a Japanese. It was a fun looking number in Japanese.

[Leo Laporte]

It was the name of a Japanese padam. And everybody said, oh, that must be the requisite number of steps.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know tons of people who were doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's B.S. in fact, I asked my A.I. about it. It knew that story and it said for you at your age you should probably get about 8,000 a day. But you should ask and explain your infirmity. I would say, Jeff, probably four or five thousand. There is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm up to two miles right now.

[Leo Laporte]

There is evidence that you. It definitely improves your longevity to get a certain amount of steps past that amount of steps doesn't do much. And for me it was 8,000. But. But it could be less for different people. And 10. Going from 8 to 10,000 does not improve your longevity at all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nor does it get you to lose a lot of weight or anything.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I mean losing weight.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know tons of people who got 10,000 a day religiously and they were staying the same size.

[Leo Laporte]

As much as I hate to admit it, the only way to lose weight weight is to eat less food and drink less wine or wine or beer

[Paris Martineau]

or however you want your calories.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, calories are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Coffee is calorie free almost. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Black coffee is the new way I'm going to be drinking it. I'm getting rid of the calories and adding flavor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But you need calcium there fella.

[Paris Martineau]

And iron.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't need iron. Men don't need iron. Iron.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh I do.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes they do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

But we get enough iron. We don't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no.

[Paris Martineau]

Often a lot of Americans are iron deficient is what I've learned this week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh yes, I am.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Paris Martineau]

I was looking through, I was like, how would I even get. I was like. So many things about my life would make sense if this test result comes back and says I am continue to be iron deficient.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you're probably anemic. That's why you're tired.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There is my, my son is too and my wife is just found something where there's also a, an inability to metabolize and there's a, there's, there's a pill to take for that. I'll find out what it is so you can add it into your research.

[Leo Laporte]

Google says criminal hackers used AI to find a major software flaw.

[Paris Martineau]

This seems like an AI generated headline. I'm just going to put that.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean it's the new York freaking Times.

[Paris Martineau]

I, I know it's not given what given where the providence of it but that, that seems, that is, that's going to be more generic headline in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're going to see this more and more, aren't we? And, and you may be right. Even if it's not generated by AI, it's AI inspired. Google says criminal hackers used AI to find a major software flaw. This is what everybody was afraid of with Mythos is that if AIs can find bugs for fixing it also find bugs for hacking. Often that's the same bug. This was a zero day. We have high confidence. According to the report, the actor likely leveraged an AI model to support the discovery and weaponization of this vulnerability. In fact, this is why we talked about this last week. The Trump administration all of a sudden is saying, oh, maybe we better be nice to anthropic. Well and maybe we better start approving models.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, but that, I think that's what we discussed last week. That's ridiculous. Meanwhile.

[Leo Laporte]

But they may do it. In fact, I know there may be public sentiment to do that. I think people along the public sentiment

[Jeff Jarvis]

against AI is just getting a lot

[Leo Laporte]

of people by the day really terrified by AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

7 out of 10Americans don't want a data center anywhere near them. 50 of Americans think that AI does more harm than good. Good.

[Paris Martineau]

There was a really laughable moment at a college commencement last week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have the video.

[Leo Laporte]

Should we play that?

[Paris Martineau]

We should.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. I, I, I queued it up. Where is it here?

[Leo Laporte]

What line number?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, you got to ask me.

[Leo Laporte]

So this was a, a college.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, there it is. Line 137.

[Leo Laporte]

Little trouble reading the room shots.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. This was at University of Central Florida. To give you.

[Leo Laporte]

What is that? What does that tell us?

[Paris Martineau]

The current of the likely demographics of

[Leo Laporte]

the students, which would be. You're from Florida. What would that be?

[Paris Martineau]

I would say no. I mean all students are young, but Florida is a state that is historically swung. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Conservative.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You want to, you want to go to the time code 120.

[Leo Laporte]

I think frankly that this would be the reaction on almost any college campus in America.

[Paris Martineau]

I know, but I'm just saying I think it's notable that this is what

[Jeff Jarvis]

you've not just go back to one.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're the right.

[Paris Martineau]

American breakthroughs absolutely will happen. Now that said, we are living in a time of profound change. That's an understatement. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So far they're with her. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Change is exciting. Yeah, Very exciting.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She's a dorky speaker.

[Paris Martineau]

Let's face it, change can be daunting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they don't like that. It gets worse.

[Paris Martineau]

Turns around. What happened?

[Leo Laporte]

What happened? Don't you all love AI?

[Paris Martineau]

Struck a chord. May I finish?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's too comp. It's too painful to watch. It just gets. She continues.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I watched her whole speech and she's really a bad presenter.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but you know, anybody would be thrown thinking that she was going to go up there and give a very inspiring address about how going to AI is going to change our lives. But it, but we're going to embrace it and it's gonna. And the students are like, no, wrong. And she doesn't. I mean she doesn't have an alternate address ready to go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. You had to keep going. The same thing. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

At that point is ad lib. Oh yeah. I hate AI. Don't you hate AI?

[Jeff Jarvis]

AI? The industrial revolution sucked, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Sucked. Well, well. But it is like she wasn't wrong. That doesn't mean it's a good thing. It means maybe. And I'm sure these kids feel this way. Many of them won't be able to get work. It's as if you're speaking to a class of hand weavers in the year 2016, 1216 and saying, here come the automatic weaving machines. Isn't it exciting? And they're going to. No, it's not exciting. I've spent the last four years learning to hand weave.

[Paris Martineau]

And this was specifically at UCF's College of Arts and Humanities commencement and the commencement for the School of Communication and Media.

[Leo Laporte]

She misread the room. I don't think she's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who is she though? Who is she? No, I think she's a CEO of some company. Well, there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

She wasn't. There you go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She was a guest. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is how you treat creepy poor woman.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So yesterday I went to. NYU has a 47 year old programs called ITP Interactive Telecommunications Program. And the students do these amazing little projects and that's their thing. So I went and I was curious to see what the students were thinking in this program of AI and they're all pretty open to it. But the, but the director of the program said, well, but over in the. In the arts program.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Program.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They don't like it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, people. Students at ITP have been doing quirky little AI projects since the beginning of time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, here I am on a show all about AI and I get Yelled at all the time. So I understand how she feels.

[Paris Martineau]

Her name is Gloria Allfields, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Orlando based Tavistock Development Company. Company.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, okay, next time, you know, trying to get a celebrity to talk because, you know, they do.

[Paris Martineau]

It could. It could go as well as the current battle over NYU's scheduled commencement speaker, Jonathan Haidt, which,

[Leo Laporte]

by the way, Jonathan Haidt doesn't like it when you say hate.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Even if you hate it.

[Paris Martineau]

He hates it.

[Leo Laporte]

He hates it.

[Paris Martineau]

Hates.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought his book the Righteous Mind was very interesting, and I interviewed him about that. But he's the one, of course, who wrote the book that is kind of a live wire right now about how social media is ruining our.

[Paris Martineau]

The anxious generation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, he's just. He just drives me. He's. He and Galloway drive me completely.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Bet.

[Leo Laporte]

Wano we know how to get to Jeff? All right, when we. When we. We're gonna pause and then when we come back, back. A musical rendition of the text messages between Sam Altman and Mira Moradi on the night that Sam Altman got fired at OpenAI. I tried to play this on Sunday on Twit, but I now have the technology because I'm back home.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you have the technology to play it without deafening the audience?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I played it and you couldn't hear it, but apparently the people in the club were deafened by it. And I apologize. Apologize for that, but we will. This is. This trial has been. It's delivered in every respect. I even said at the beginning, these trials are always bad for both parties because of discovery. And foolishly, OpenAI put Greg Brockman's personal journal into evidence. At which point, of course, was it

[Jeff Jarvis]

just discovery, though, wasn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

No, they put it into evidence. You don't get discovery of a personal journal. But because OpenAI put it in evidence, now Elon's attorneys can dig into it. And they did. And I think they did a lot more damage to OpenAI than they did good using it. But this is what happens in these trials. It happened with Apple and Epic and Google and Epic that, you know, people put stuff in writing that they shouldn't put in writing. And this email gets discovered and this information comes out and there is some awkward, awkward ass stuff. And when I say the word ass, I mean it. We'll talk about that in just a little bit. This. Do you know about pen testing? I think this is one of the most fascinating areas of security. I know a lot of pen testers always impressed by them. This episode of Intelligent Machines is brought to you by Expo. One of the best. Xbow, one of the best pen testing companies out there. AI has, as we know, changed the pace of everything from how software develops to how it gets attacked. We were just talking about that. Engineering teams are moving faster than ever, creating more and more applications, but security really hasn't kept up. In this day and age, pen testing remains one of the most trusted ways to understand real exploitable risk. But in an AI driven world where everything's moving at hyperspeed, it can become a bottleneck. Security teams are forced to choose between slowing down development to stay secure or moving fast and accepting that there are going to be gaps in their coverage. Well, they don't have to be Expo. He eliminates that trade off. Xbow Expo is an autonomous offensive security platform that runs continuous AI driven pen testing, mirroring real world attacks.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

This is so cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Expo doesn't just scan for vulnerabilities, it discovers exploits and validates them. So you're only dealing with issues that actually matter. That means dramatically fewer false positives and a clearer view into real attack paths. With Expo tests run in hours, not weeks. You get complete visibility into how an attacker would move through your systems and the ability to uncover issues that traditional tools miss, including zero days, novel attack paths. It's really amazing. Expo's results speak for themselves. I'll give you an example. Application security lead of Cesnam CZ says, quote, even right now, after one year, I don't know any other company that is at least close to Expo in terms of agentic pen testing. That's an end quote. The result is predictable cost, consistent quality and stronger security without slowing anything down. Your engineers can move at full speed. Expo helps security teams keep pace with innovation and cover more apps more often with the resources they already have. It was actually founded by a team behind Microsoft Copilot and it's already been trusted by companies ranging from fast growing startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Expo is quickly becoming a mission critical layer in modern security stacks. Go to expo.com to start a pen test today. That's expo.com, it's Xbow Expo. This is the way pen testing should be done. Oh man, the gift that just keeps on giving. Sam Altman at the trial faced awkward grilling from Elon Musk's attorneys over the

[Jeff Jarvis]

can you be trusted?

[Leo Laporte]

They asked him, can you be trusted? He said, well, I think so. I believe I'm an honest and trustworthy business person. Person, despite what Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker says.

[Paris Martineau]

Kind of a wild response Given that he had to have prepped the answer to that exact question with his team a million times. So either he bungled it or that's the answer they all lend.

[Leo Laporte]

What would you have him say? What. What would be the right answer? You think I would just say, yes, I am. Yeah. Absolutely trustworthy.

[Paris Martineau]

That's. Yeah. Full. A full sentence.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

No hesitation?

[Leo Laporte]

I believe so.

[Paris Martineau]

Mock.

[Leo Laporte]

And then Musk's attorney said, you don't know whether you're completely trustworthy. And then Altman said, well, I'll just amend my answer to yes. Little late. Remember, this is a jury trial. The jurors are looking, watching him, you know, closely. And I don't. You know, I doubt that they were able to get the New Yorker article into evidence. I mean, you know, that's not something you can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a lot of hearsay. Yeah.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But certainly that's in the air. Right? So I. I mentioned the ass part. This is from a tweet by Mike Isaac. It actually. He got the. He said it was Microsoft. It's actually OpenAI's attorneys produced. Now, the jury is not in the room at the time, and I don't know if the judge allowed this. After the jury to see this, they produced a jackass trophy that is just a donkey's behind with a label. Never stop being a jackass for safety. And apparently this is something Elon Musk gave an OpenAI employee after Musk called him a jackass, and then he gave him a jackass trophy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wasn't. Wasn't Musk the other half of the jackass or something?

[Leo Laporte]

There was, I don't know, the prominence of it. Apparently, According to the OpenAI council, a small group of OpenAI employees. Employees purchased the statue from the OpenAI guy. Later. They're trying to get this into evidence. The jury didn't see it. The Musk side is obviously fighting it. The judge will decide later if this golden donkey butt cast in gold will be entered into evidence. I'm not sure what it would prove, except I think that it's. They're trying to make the case that Elon was kind of a jerk.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jerk.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Kind of jerky.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was awarded to chief futurist Joshua.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, not. Not just like a lowly employee. You're a jackass.

[Paris Martineau]

Group of OpenAI. Yeah. Employees created the jackass statue to give to Akaim as an in joke. He was making a point about an in joke. After Musk called.

[Leo Laporte]

Elon didn't make the trophy. Elon called him a jackass. And then when the OpenAI said, Here's

[Paris Martineau]

a trophy, here's a trophy.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I get it.

[Paris Martineau]

Akaim was making a point about how Musk was being reckless with AI safety at the time, says Mike Eisen.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's been the whole reason, right, for Musk getting behind OpenAI. Larry Page, very famously, he and Elon Musk got in an argument at, I don't know, Aspen or somewhere. No, I think it was in Monterey way. But at some conference, maybe a TED conference. And Larry Page said to Elon, because Elon said, you know, AI could kill us all. And. And Larry said, you're being specious. You're being a. Like a racist, only a species racist. The AI is a new species. You should support it. And Elon was so upset and incensed by that that he said, I gotta do something, but I can't let Google get. Get the lead in this. So the text messages, I don't know if you got a chance to read them between Mira Morati and Sam Altman when Sam is being fired and say this is in the middle of the night. Mira is his inside person at the board meeting and they're going back and forth.

[Paris Martineau]

This is of course, during the insane weekend that had all of tech media.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

We were glued to their bones and confused.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanksgiving weekend. So this is great. Somebody, Daniel Green said he took, took the text and turned them into a musical. Kind of like Hamilton, only it's called Altman and I think it's pretty good. Listen, how does a startup founder, late stage, get fired by a board on a Sunday? That's Sam. Mira, can you please officially invite me to the office? This for a meeting. Adam is trying to get the board to agree to a configuration he is now saying they need till end of day. Satya and I said that doesn't. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, preparing for plan B. Plan B. Plan B. Plan B.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, I will. Do you have an update you can share?

[Leo Laporte]

Have an update. Let me know when you can talk

[Paris Martineau]

on with them yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you on with them?

[Paris Martineau]

Not yet. Just in a quote, quiet room because I didn't want all the outside theater.

[Leo Laporte]

This is so much better than reading the text. Directionally, very bad. Directionally, very bad. This is very bad, Sam.

[Paris Martineau]

This is very bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I come in? What do you want to make it better? I'm still willing to just walk away if that helps. If they are ramped up for crazy lawsuits against me, then I'm not sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What?

[Paris Martineau]

Not sure what?

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Paris Martineau]

Not sure what?

[Leo Laporte]

They don't want you To.

[Paris Martineau]

They're convinced about their decision for me

[Leo Laporte]

to be fired or some new thing.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For you to be gone.

[Paris Martineau]

For you to be gone.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, then. Can I come in and talk about

[Jeff Jarvis]

a path forward with them? More time?

[Leo Laporte]

For what? More time for what?

[Paris Martineau]

They've walked me through all the reasons and the issues with you and why you can't be CEO.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't be CEO? Can you ask why all weekend they wanted me back. Can you say you will call back in 10 minutes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do they know?

[Leo Laporte]

Who can I tell? Satya, is this final?

[Paris Martineau]

They want a new CEO in place tonight.

[Leo Laporte]

Not me. Not me.

[Paris Martineau]

Still don't want me trying to add Satya now.

[Leo Laporte]

New guy. New guy. New guy is a rando Twitch guy. Rando twitch guy who, by the way, ended up being a CEO and Miramarati lost that position briefly. It goes on, but it's. I think it's very good. And it's. By the way, brought Aunt Pruitt out of the. The weeds to complain that we were playing a musical on the show. You know, he hates musicals.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was this produced by. With AI or.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure it was a Suno or something.

[Paris Martineau]

Of course.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it was really well done.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like there will be an opera on this at some point. It's just. It's just begging to be made. I. The thing, I don't know if the jury. What the jury is going to do with all this, though. I mean, both sides look terrible, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It depends on the judge's instructions more than anything else.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And what depends on what they're being asked to. To.

[Leo Laporte]

They're. Well, Elon wants something like 30, like some huge number, I think.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. But it depends on what the specific things are they're being asked to judge one way or another.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well, I think the question is, was, did OpenAI basically rip off Elon Musk by pretending that they were forming a nonprofit? And then after they threw Elon out, although I think there's some question about whether he left on his own accord, then they go for profit. And Elon, who only put in a few, you know, I don't know when he put in a billion dollars, I think think says, you owe me all the profits that you just stole from me by. And. And he also wants OpenAI to go away. He wants Altman fired and wants Altman fired. But as the OpenAI attorneys are quick to point out, Elon is now running a for profit AI company called Xia AI that is competing directly with OpenAI and by the way, ain't doing all that. Well, in fact, we talk. I think we talked about this last week. Maybe we talked about it on Sunday. Sunday.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was Sunday, I think. I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Anthropic has now made a deal to buy Compute.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We did.

[Leo Laporte]

We did talk about Colossus. And people are saying this is actually a big win for Xai because they're not looking so strong.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's the other story I thought you were going to was. Was how they're recognizing that Grok is

[Leo Laporte]

nowhere Rock is not taken off. No. Yes. And I'm not surprised. I think that honestly the Mecca Hitler thing did it a lot of reputational deals. Well, that among many things, rightly so. Speaking of Elon, he did have a little bit of a victory to celebrate. NHTSA says that the Model Y is the first car to meet its new US.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, according to his own. To Musk's own testing.

[Leo Laporte]

Driver assistance safety benchmark testing. Yeah. NHTSA will look at the testing that Elon did and validate it before they

[Jeff Jarvis]

actually, the more proper lead would have been this is the first car to submit.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

An application.

[Leo Laporte]

So four pass fail tests were added to NHTSA's the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's safety ratings program specifically for automation. One was assessing the car's automatic automatic emergency braking for pedestrians. That's a nice feature. I've had cars that do that. If there's a pedestrian in the road, it jams on the brakes. So it makes it very hard to hit somebody without your doing anything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Try as you might.

[Leo Laporte]

Try as you might. Now remember, Tesla had problems in the past running over images of children. So this would be good if it had had this capability. Other cars again can do this. Blind spot warning, warning. Most cars will do that now. Blind spot intervention, that's the next step up where it won't let you turn into a lane where there's another car and lane assist, which keeps a vehicle in the lane.

[Jeff Jarvis]

None of which is fully automatic driving.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? No, we're not talking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so he's out there. He's out there promising self driving and selling self driving.

[Leo Laporte]

This is just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And driving. And we've only begun to regulate a few steps towards which I think is just is. Is scandalous.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and our car expert, Sam. Well, Sam has. Is on record saying there will never be a level 5 autonomous vehicle. It's just too hard to do.

[Paris Martineau]

But what about all the people who want to fall asleep on their drive to work? What are they gonna do?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Their makeup? Shave. Shave their beards?

[Leo Laporte]

Paris, you don't even have A car.

[Paris Martineau]

What about the people who want to build a small model car while they're driving their car?

[Leo Laporte]

Sometimes.

[Paris Martineau]

What about them?

[Leo Laporte]

In your future, you may have a vehicle. And someday, distant future, you will be as old as Jeff and I are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You'll be living in the suburbs. You just count on it.

[Paris Martineau]

Later, the world will have died by the.

[Leo Laporte]

But we are facing the prospect in the next 10, 15 years of getting our keys taken away by our kids. Right. I did it with my mom at some point. It's a very hard conversation because. Because in America, a car means independence. It means mobility. Somebody will come up to me and say, you know, Leo, you almost hit that garbage can. You really shouldn't be driving anymore, especially at night, or whatever, and take the keys away. I'm hoping that when that happens, there will be autonomous vehicles of some kind. At least they'll be lifting Uber.

[Paris Martineau]

You can just get Claudia to drive you.

[Leo Laporte]

Or Claudia. She's an excellent driver. No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, honey, let's go to dinner.

[Leo Laporte]

You're a great conversationalist. You always say nice things to me. No, but I really. I am hoping that there will be a. I would. I kind of keep thinking that the. The next car I buy will be the last car I buy that won't be fully autonomous. And then I'll have that for, I don't know, 10 years. Years. And then the next car after that will just drive me around.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You never kept a car for 10 years.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I know.

[Paris Martineau]

How long have you had the current one?

[Leo Laporte]

I do three year leases, so they. But with evs, that's actually smart because they depreciate so fast that it's better to let the lease company take the. Take the burden, take the pain.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

I want my.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want my Chinese ev. That's what I want.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the president's in China now. He could maybe make a deal with

[Paris Martineau]

Xi, maybe with all the CEOs, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, mostly there. Yes. With Tim Cooks there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But my favorite. This is my favorite story of the week. Absolute favorite story. Yeah, well, it's. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Trump's China.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We didn't invite Jensen. Oh, can we stop off and pick up Jensen? Oh, geez.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I asked to be invited, but they didn't invite me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Why?

[Jeff Jarvis]

They picked them up in Alaska.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, but they did get him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, they got him in Alaska. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. He ran to Alaska and is waving as they fly over saying, please pick me up. And they picked him up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They picked him up in Alaska.

[Leo Laporte]

In Air Force One.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't I didn't have the latest

[Paris Martineau]

from the New York Times. Nvidia CEO hitches ride with Trump to China. After a last minute invite, Jensen Huang boarded Air Force One, Alaska, joining a delegation of more than a dozen business leaders accompanying Trump on his trip to Beijing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's ironic because he was did speak at a college graduation and told the graduates to run, don't walk toward AI. But I think maybe he meant run, don't walk toward Air Force One. So he, what was he doing in Alaska? He actually go to Alaska?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think he had to fly to Alaska.

[Paris Martineau]

He went to Alaska late Tuesday to board Air Force One during a layover. For nearly a year he'd been lobbying officials in Washington and Beijing to al allow Nvidia to sell its artificial intelligence chips. And then Trump posted on Truth Social, Jensen is currently on Air Force One.

[Leo Laporte]

So, okay, his stock went down.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nvidia because, because it came out that he wasn't invited. Nvidia's stock went down and when he got on the plane it went up 4%.

[Leo Laporte]

Understand he's been working hard, including in that Dwarkesh interview, to convince people that it's, it's the right thing to do to let China buy all of his advanced chips. Right now China can only buy the H200 or which is a somewhat less powerful chip for their AI because everybody in the US government's worried about China's AI becoming better than ours. Jensen says no, no, no, that's a mistake. You want them to be in the same ecosystem as everybody so that what you don't want them to do is to leapfrog us on something proprietary, which is incidentally what she has been saying. They haven't been buying the H200 chips because she says no, we want to develop our own, own Chinese native AI capacity and so we don't want to be dependent on American AI chips. So that is a leg, I guess that verifies or validates Jensen's opinion. So why wasn't Jensen invited? Was he not nice enough to the president? We know. Did he not give?

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's been, he's been opportunistically sucking up.

[Leo Laporte]

I think he's done as well as anyone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he didn't give him a gold bar.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe he should have given Steve Cook.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Steve Cook got the price of admission for the gold bar Tip Cook.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a good move. Jensen's not making chips in the U. S. That's another way you can get into good graces. But then he changed his mind. Why did he change his Mind, because Trump always chickens out should be very clear by now. And I'm not being political here. This is, this is just clearly what's going on. That the President is very influenced by the stock market, by wealthy people, perhaps because they're donors, perhaps just because they're the engine of innovation in America.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But they're his goombas.

[Leo Laporte]

If the oligarchs complain, the President listens. Actually, Cory, Dr. Roeder wrote a great piece on this saying what a conflict it is because President Trump got elected as a populist, a man of the people who would help, help the little man. But because he's so dependent on the oligarchs in this country, the rich and especially the tech elite in this country, he, he has, he has a problem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's always, that's always.

[Leo Laporte]

He's looking for an ox. To Gore is what populists always are after.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Power, not helping the people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And so as a result, you know,

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just imagine that phone call. Call the plane has taken off from. From Andrews Wild. Susie Wild says Jensen, do you think

[Leo Laporte]

you could get yourself to meet us in Alaska?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, do.

[Leo Laporte]

He must have had a F35 Phantom jet to get beat the Air Force One.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, Air Force One could have landed at SFO and picked him up there.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he flew from SFO to Alaska. Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I presume so. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a very weird story.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a very weird story. It's hilarious, I think. It's just absolutely hilarious.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Anyway, he's in China, although all of them are in China. Tim Cook, 16 CEOs including now Jensen Huang of Nvidia. But it's not clear that there will be a meeting of minds here because there's definitely a conflict.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Lots of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Trump's China trip collides with AI security fears. From Reuters this headline Tech rivalry distrust. SAP summit hopes for Trump Xi AI push. Now that is a human ridden.

[Paris Martineau]

That is true.

[Leo Laporte]

Anything that says SAP summit hopes. No AI is going to say that. The president will put artificial intelligence at the forefront of talks this week with Xi A first that highlights the technology's strategic heft left. But substantive commitments are unlikely. Said two US officials with knowledge of preparations. China. They didn't let them have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's it. They asked for Mythos and EU was asked for Mythos and was told no. China has asked for Mythos and was told no.

[Leo Laporte]

That's our security tool.

[Paris Martineau]

Bogarting Mythos.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's fomo. It's Mythos. Fomo. The rest of the world. World

[Leo Laporte]

expectations are Low since both the treasury and Chinese Vice Finance Minister L. Min and Treasury Secretary Scott Bent don't know anything about AI. And the Trump administration has only recently shifted towards pursuing safety vetting for advanced AI models. So doesn't look like Besent and L. Min will have much to say. You know anything about AI? Not really.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You? No. Well, and then there's Iran hanging over it all.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, Getting West. Here's another quote from the Reuters story. Getting Western senior Western figures to engage directly with China on AI has become increasingly difficult. A military hotline already exists, but US Officials have complained China has often not picked up.

[Paris Martineau]

Got 90 seconds. How dare they?

[Leo Laporte]

They don't answer. I call and they don't answer. I call, I text, they're ghosting us. Both sides could set up a no blame hotline to flag suspected AI driven incidents, said the head of an international AI governance consultancy based in Beijing. Could, but if you don't answer, it doesn't really much matter. All right, well, we'll see. We'll watch with interest. I mean, at least they're talking, right? That's a good thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. OpenAI has its anthropic Mythos answer. They call Daybreak, and Microsoft has announced a security AI it calls mdash appropriately, I think, unknown whether they're as good as Mythos. But remember, Mythos is a general AI. It wasn't trained to be good at security, it just happened to be. So it's completely possible and in fact likely that any frontier AI would be as good or close to as good as Mythos.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it'd be foolish to assume there aren't any out there that are.

[Leo Laporte]

There are any.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, there aren't any out there that are as powerful as Mythos. That generally talks about.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well, in fact, if I had a

[Paris Martineau]

Mythos in the pocket, I wouldn't tell anybody I did.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why this Google story we referred to earlier is scary that somebody, some bad guy, does have some. Some good capability.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the interesting thing about the Google story, it was. It was they used it. I don't know how they knew that AI did this since the first time and all that. They used it to detect the scarier part is to create an exploitation. Right. To use AI to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But if you find the vulnerability, you're very close to the exploit. That's pretty mechanical, almost. Let's take a little break and continue on with intelligent machines. Paris Martineau, are you done? Are you relaxed a little bit now or are you still working very hard? On this breaking news.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I'm back in the crevasse as of today.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank God you've got some good coffee. That's all I can say.

[Paris Martineau]

True.

[Leo Laporte]

Are we doing the Ethiopian yurga chiffe?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, honestly, I've just gotten two new coffees that I don't really like that much from cl. You know, we'll see. Maybe. I think it's just that they're fresh, they need some time to rest.

[Leo Laporte]

So I got. You got to fill me in on this whole resting thing. She has purchased, you know, these test tubes, these plastic. They are test tubes. They are, yes, they're laboratory equipment.

[Paris Martineau]

They're like little laboratory equipment that typically is used to spin for centrifuge samples. Yeah, centrifuge test tube. I've heard about these on Reddit, that they are popular because they contain basically 20. Exactly 20 grams of coffee in them.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's the.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the proportion how much I put in. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I was thinking 15 grams. So you think 20.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, if you do 15, then you can just measure out 15 on it.

[Leo Laporte]

15 and 250 grams of water. So you use 20 and 10 to

[Paris Martineau]

280 or 285 ish. I forget what it is. It's Kessel 50 milliliter polypropylene screw top self standing base, centrifuge tube with gradiated marks and writing area, pack of 10.

[Leo Laporte]

So you, you.

[Paris Martineau]

You weigh my.

[Leo Laporte]

The beans out. Now, how. How long do you rest them for? So.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it depends on the beans.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How much rest do they need?

[Paris Martineau]

It depends on how much rest the bean needs. Depends on how it was processed. Processed. It depends on the resting conditions.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I track my festival of variables.

[Leo Laporte]

There's so many variables.

[Paris Martineau]

And then once it hits the peak resting window, then I start, you know,

[Leo Laporte]

just rule of thumb, though, they were roasted yesterday.

[Paris Martineau]

Two weeks. Two weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably two weeks later you can use them.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Might be more.

[Leo Laporte]

But you don't know. You. You don't know if you're gonna be able to use them all within two weeks. So you freeze them after two weeks, and that will. That will freeze them in time, basically.

[Paris Martineau]

It really slows down the degradation.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just doing this.

[Paris Martineau]

We're doing this to harm Jeff. It slows down the degradation process. But part of when I brought this up in our chat Panino was like, isn't freezing coffee beans bad for it? Yes. But if you freeze them in one bag and then keep opening and closing that bag from the freezer because it introduces moisture. So you put the Beans in discrete centrifuge tubes so that you only open one at once. Once. And the rest stays sealed and frozen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Folgers. I miss Folgers.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I did buy. There is a very famous coffee company in Japan. The ones that invented coffee in a can that they sell in the vending machines in Japan. They also make a instant coffee which I ordered from Japan just to see how good it was. It's not bad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's the best instant coffee. That's the best instant coffee coffee.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it is. It's quite good. It's surprising. I mean it's instant but it's not. It's not like you being instant. It's good. It tastes like a real brewed cup of coffee.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does it have that instant telltale foam?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

I have to say they are making some really interesting instant coffees now in the specialty coffee scene.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not. I sent you this one in the Short Hills Mall, which is the. The hot mall. They're. They. They've got this company that I sent.

[Paris Martineau]

Part of your walk?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, when I need my. When the weather is bad.

[Leo Laporte]

I did my UCC 117 MSF web dude in Twitch knows. Yes, it was the 117. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

UCC cometeer. Have you seen this?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, Cometeer. But these are like frozen, right? Yeah, they're ice cube coffees.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, no, that's how they do it. But then you pour them. It's. It's a whole thing. You know, you have to go up and you have to take the course and do the whole thing to get it. Then you have to join the club. But yeah, flash frozen and hyper fresh.

[Leo Laporte]

Here it is. UCC 117. The blend number. 117.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Blend last purchased.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you can see I bought it November 6th. But because it's for. It's instant, you could just, you know, keep it for years. I got it in case of emergencies. One of those break glass. In case of emergency coffees, I gotta have a cup. Sometimes I do it right before the show

[Paris Martineau]

and I guess if it's a real emergency you could just shoot a cup of it back.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't even mix it with water? No, you mix it in your mouth, snort it. Exactly.

[Paris Martineau]

Straight into the system.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show today, brought to you by Threat Locker. I love Threat Locker. Oh, they're getting ready for Zero Trust World. Well, this is, this is where this shirt came from. I was at the Kennedy Space center center in Orlando right before Zero Trust World in Orlando. And there's another one coming up Threat Locker is the Zero Trust platform, delivering the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero Trust solutions. In fact, now they don't just protect endpoints, they also will protect your company network and the cloud. They announced this at Zero Trust World. This is huge. By extending zero Trust enforcement to cloud services and company network, Threat Locker ensures that devices are validated through a secure broker before they connect to your cloud. Platforms like Salesforce or Microsoft365 or Asana, Google Workspace, GitHub. You get the idea. What this means is even if your users have been successfully phished, even if attackers are on their laptops, they cannot access the resources that user has access to. They'd have to actually get physical possession of the user's trusted device and authenticate with fingerprint or Microsoft hello or something. I mean this is absolutely great security. Threat Locker works across all industries. It provides 24. 7 US based support. Windows, Mac, Linux. Absolutely. With Threat Locker you get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost effectively. Just ask Rob Thackeray. He's the nuke user technical architect at Heathrow Airport in London. He says quote, Threat Locker was the most intuitive solution we tested. And the responsiveness of the organization, the willingness to engage with us to set up a demo, to work with us on weekly audit reviews was very good. It is great to have an ongoing relationship with a company that's so responsive to our requests. Threat Lockers trusted by the biggest, the best companies that just can't afford to go down at all. All like JetBlue, the Indianapolis Colts, the Port of Vancouver. Threat Locker consistently gets the highest honors in industry recognition. They're a G2 high performer and best support for enterprise. Summer 2025 Peerspot gave Threat Locker their number one pick for application control. Getapp says Threat Locker got their best functionality and features award in 2025. And yes, threat Locker is getting ready for Zero Trust World 2027. I'm excited, excited. I am excited. I'm not, I'm not. I'm not prepared to announce we're going yet because we haven't been invited. But I will fly to Alaska, Threat Locker just to get on the plane so I can go to Orlando for ZTW27. They're going to host some of the best and brightest cyber security Experts. It's their seventh year now. 0 Trust World provides crucial education and training to support IT professionals. And I went to the sessions, I had such a great time. They have full session access with your pass, but you also get hands on hacking labs. It was so much fun. I hacked did website hacking, learned how to hack websites. There's an after party that is so much fun. That's when I wear my space suit costume. You don't want to miss this exciting interactive three day event happening February 17th through 19th in Orlando, Florida. Save the date. I have February 17th through 19th in orlando next Friday year visit threatlocker.com TWIT in the meantime to get a free 30 day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com TWIT threatlocker.com/TWIT. We thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Before this leaves, there's a live feed right now of robots sorting packages. Eight hour shift.

[Leo Laporte]

Give me the link. Let's watch.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The link is line. It's at the bottom. I added in as late breaking video here just in. Oh hell, where did I put it? There we go. 168.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh you really. Right at the bitty bitty bitty bottom there. So this is Brett Adcock watch a team of humanoid robots. This is going on right now. This is done.

[Paris Martineau]

This is the thing you'd love.

[Leo Laporte]

Thousand 147 packages. This is a lot faster than the ones I've seen in the past. The robot is merely. No, this is live.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, whoa.

[Leo Laporte]

See the person walking? That's a normal speed. So what it's doing is it's finding the address label and making sure it's face down for scanning. Yeah, it's actually much faster than the ones I've seen previous.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Kind of mesmerizing in a way. Way.

[Paris Martineau]

It really is.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is one human who won't be able to pay rent or eat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably living on the streets, moving in

[Paris Martineau]

a way that is more. Clumsy is not the right word but like less precise than the average robot

[Jeff Jarvis]

demo because it doesn't need to be. That's the beauty.

[Leo Laporte]

It gets the job done.

[Paris Martineau]

It is getting the job done. Which I think is good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. And I honestly. Yes, this is somebody job. But it's. What a terrible job to do this for eight hours.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's roughly. It's matched the speed of a human doing this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I would say this is as fast as a human.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it also isn't really doing the barcode thing because it. There's a bunch of them and it's missing.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Is it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, it's getting them.

[Paris Martineau]

So it's turning all the barcodes down.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because that's the reader. They're all going down.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, so why don't they just make this robot scan the barcodes?

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, Bonito, wise guy. I can't find it. It's looking. It says, oh, there it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It has a camera to find it. So I can just scan it right there. Once it sees it. I mean, come on, guys. Well, because it probably is going down the conveyor to go somewhere else. It's going through 87.

[Leo Laporte]

The conveyor is the key, really, not the scanning. And the scanning is incidental to getting it on the conveyor, but they have to get on the conveyor in the right position so it can scan and then sort.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought you'd enjoy this live show. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

This is good. This is good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Little pack, 7185 packages.

[Leo Laporte]

Never has to pee in a bottle. It just. It just goes and goes and goes. It's actually pretty impressive.

[Paris Martineau]

Does it cost, I wonder?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, these all cost exactly the same. $20,000. Sometimes packages fall off the belt. I've seen that in the past. But this guy. Oh, come on. Pick it up, pick it up. You can do it. Look, I love that gesture. That's the new robot gesture. The twist with nothing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But there's some. There's some logic going on here, knowing that that box didn't have a barcode on the side. It had it on the bottom.

[Leo Laporte]

And I find it. Yeah, it's pretty good.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, people in the comments are bringing up. Is there just a guy in a VR head set somewhere?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Doing this has a very. Oh, I see it.

[Leo Laporte]

Too much latency to do that now. Out of sync says human could do it faster, but wouldn't go as long without a bre. Right. And I don't know what those robots standing there are doing. Maybe they're charging up so they can take.

[Paris Martineau]

They look ominous.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. You better do the job or we're coming next.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, there's a couple of things to point out on this. For one thing. Oh, stretch this robe. Robot could stop and it wouldn't. You could see the packages are not coming at it. They're just coming down a chute. So this is a particularly well suited task for the robot. If the robot were to fail suddenly. Oh, oh, oh, that one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Someone's not getting their package.

[Paris Martineau]

Got him.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, sorry. The robot failed the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have you ever seen Paris? The Lucille Ball and the Chocolate Factory Factory.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a classic.

[Paris Martineau]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

These roughly cost $20,000 at least. That's. That's kind of the going price for the.

[Paris Martineau]

But what is the subscription. It can't just be a $20,000, nothing else. There's got to be a subscription, there's got to be operating costs.

[Leo Laporte]

I think though that this is, you know, this will be the day you'll look back, you'll talk to your kids, you know. Oh yeah, I remember watching that show on May 13, 2026 when Daddy saw his job go bye bye.

[Paris Martineau]

Responds work for three to four hours until they run out of battery.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's why the ones are standing back there. And they.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Last time they did it for an hour, but this time it's eight hours. Ed Zitron comes in 55 minutes ago. Where I wish I could do Ed Zitron. I can't. Where exactly is it? Noticing the barcodes I've seen multiple times when it looks at a totally empty side of a package and moves it. Well, I explain there's logic to it and

[Leo Laporte]

there are on a box of that size and shape, six sides. If you look at five and you haven't seen the barcode, it must be on the six.

[Paris Martineau]

So the creator of it says that the robot is around parody of human speed.

[Leo Laporte]

Parody.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Parody.

[Leo Laporte]

No, not P A R I T Y. Not P A R O D Y. Yeah, parrot. I thought around parody. Parody would be very funny of humans. I can, I think we can get Darren OKE to generate a round parody of humans. So in other words, it is roughly as efficient as a human, but $20,000.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that's the capital.

[Paris Martineau]

But it has to be swapped out with another twenty thousand dollar machine every three to four hours, which I assume

[Leo Laporte]

a human I would imagine. Well, I don't know. We don't know. We'll find out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So 20 hours times 37 hour. $20 an hour times 37 hours equals times 50 weeks is $73,000. So you can afford three of these things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

This company also has jobs posted for human robot operators.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they have to train them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's one of the ways they're training these things now is in fact you can get a house robot that you have to teach it how to make the bed. But after I've taught it a few

[Jeff Jarvis]

times then I wouldn't have gone to the hospital.

[Leo Laporte]

You wouldn't be in the hospital. The robot would have saved me coccyx.

[Paris Martineau]

So these people have to be on call or be basically responsible for running the humanoid robot entirely for the customer use case. It says like you have to run the robot. It says your responsibilities are to run the robot constantly through throughout the day and evening, identifying bugs and problems, ensuring that it's operating successfully for the customer use case. I mean, it does seem like there's

[Leo Laporte]

a human doing it. That does not work. No, you've saved nothing.

[Paris Martineau]

I was going to say, yeah, if you just have a human who, let's say best case scenario, has to be constantly managing this robot to make sure that it is doing it right. What is, what are you saving?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, clearly that, that is not good. That's not VI viable. And that's where it's been. Remember that laundry folding robot that for years they showed at CES and every time it would say, well, it's really a human doing it behind the scenes.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, this is how a lot of the just walk out, check out technology sort of stuff goes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's gone. Well, that was more human. Didn't accept. Didn't like the idea of a thousand cameras watching them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Isn't Whole Foods rolling that out now, a new version of that?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think they killed. Killed it. In fact, I was at Whole Foods and they wanted me to sign up for the palm print. I mean, well, they had the palm print machine there and a sign saying sign up for Amazon Go. So you could just go with your palm print. And I started to do it.

[Paris Martineau]

Give us a hand.

[Leo Laporte]

Give us a hand. And. And I started to do it and the clerks and the checkout person said, yeah, don't do it. They're taking that out tomorrow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, really?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're canceling that program.

[Paris Martineau]

So I would have been shocked if it ever made it to New York City because every whole.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they did. They had Amazon go stores.

[Paris Martineau]

Amazon go stores, yes. But the palm thing, well, that's how you did it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how you paid for it. You, you would go in.

[Paris Martineau]

Did the Amazon go at a time where you just scanned it in?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, no, that was only option.

[Leo Laporte]

So the palm came later. Yeah. Yes, down came the palm came to the poem. Anthropics. Claude manage agents can dream. Now, there is a slash dream skill. And I keep asking my guy, I said, can. Hey, Claudia, can you dream? And she says, not yet, but I'll let you know. And the idea is you do slash dream and then it does some, I don't know, background stuff. Whenever you're not using her, she just does some. She cleans up things. Dream. It's a neat idea. They also have some better ideas about. We talked about this anthropic blackmailing scenario with Claude 4 0/4o where this was in their testing. This wasn't in the real world, but in their testing they were Able to get that, they had the tester say, well I'm going to disconnect you. And the. And the Opus model said well, you can't disconnect me. I'll blackmail. I'm going to show you your pictures of your girlfriend or your wife. Well, by the way, the AI company found that Opus 4, the later versions are not so bad. But Opus 4 threatened users in up to 96% of those shutdown scenarios. They now say it's because they watched a lot of sci fi.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's the same, same reason that Kevin Roosevelt chatgpt fell in love with Kevin Roose.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just acting out what it learned with models. It's training models.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You did tell Dawkins this.

[Paris Martineau]

Somebody to tell Dawkins from nowhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Hey, hey, Richard.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Decades of evil robot stories may be echoing inside AI models. Anthropic things.

[Paris Martineau]

Claude hear about Westworld?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's, it's self fulfilling prophecy.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

We've thought for years these robots were going to kill us. They're doing. And so you know when the rope, when the AI started ingesting all that, that's what they. It was a year ago that Dario Amode, by the way, said that AI would replace everybody. And I don't think that's happened yet. Now he's making new claims. He says Anthropic's gonna grow by 80 times. 80 times bigger. Look at that. There's a man who's gonna get 80 times richer this year. He's talking at the annual developer conference.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I tried to watch this conversation there.

[Paris Martineau]

Demons like that make me go a bit ad Zitron.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He said, new verb.

[Leo Laporte]

He said, this is today that we plan to grow 10 times this year, but we think we're going to grow 80 times bigger this year. I think they're talking about revenue. Right. He says, I Hope that that 80 times growth doesn't continue because that's just crazy. It's too hard to handle. I'm hoping for some more normal numbers. Well, I don't want to grow that fast.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We have to go make deals without Elon Musk.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they, they are going to be able to do that with the Colossus, which is a win win because Elon's losing under underutilizing all of that computer. Also, Anthropic announced a bunch of new vertical tools using AI. A dozen new tools intended for attorneys, law students and others in the legal sector. Just don't let the judge catch you. Okay? One feature called Commercial Council C O U N S E L is meant to take on work like reviewing vendor agreements. I have found just generically anthropic and chat GPD are very good at looking at contracts and giving you salient points or things to.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but do you know that that's giving you salient points or do you just think it's giving you salient points because you're not a lawyer?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did it review the contract for the guy?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I don't know if the lawyer is giving me real points or not.

[Paris Martineau]

You're saying, but which one do you trust more?

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly? You want me to trust the lawyer?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, because you have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you've got a lawyer, you trust you.

[Paris Martineau]

If you've identified a lawyer that you want to pay money for or consider trusting, then I would assume that person is more trustworthy than an AI agent that has no trust.

[Leo Laporte]

I think VERIFY is true whether it's a human or a chatbot, to be honest. DocuSign, Thomson Reuters, Harvey, all using it. The legal features will be available to paying customers through Cowork the cloud.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Cowork.

[Leo Laporte]

I. You know, of course I wouldn't, you know, put a base, you know, life or death decisions on this thing, but it's useful. You're going to read the contract anyway. Probably. It's useful to say, hey, look at this area. This could be. That's all a lawyer does anyway. Look at this area. Zone that A. Are you okay with that? You understand that exposes you to this possibility, that kind of thing. I think you can judge whether you're getting useful information or not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't mean to put salt on the wound, but if you had shown your contracts for your. The guy who bought your house and the guy who screwed up fixing it to Claude, do you think you would have in better shape?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I did. And it. Because.

[Paris Martineau]

And that went so well for you?

[Leo Laporte]

No, the contract was fine. If the guy's a crook, it doesn't matter if you. If you have a contract. By the way, I just got a call apparently from another subcontractor. He neglected to pay for $7,000, saying, hey, you owe me $7,000.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was.

[Leo Laporte]

Ran the house.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I had to pay for our havoc twice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, contractors don't always. But the contract doesn't protect you from a. I mean, it could if you were willing to go to court, I guess.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, but as my contractor said. You've heard me say this before, for it's not. I'm judgment proof.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? I'm judgment proof. 20,000 legal professionals signed up for anthropic

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris goes full citron in the chat.

[Leo Laporte]

You can say it out loud.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no, that's it.

[Leo Laporte]

It was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's in the chat. You could. It's. It's an image.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an image.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's an image.

[Paris Martineau]

I like the middle half. Zitron half.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's a mortal morph. You're morphing into Ed.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I'm anamorphing. I'm edomorphing.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice, Darren. That's good. Ed's wearing her glasses.

[Paris Martineau]

I like that, though we're both pale. There's a brief middle part where we both are slightly tanner.

[Leo Laporte]

The last two images are Ed.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's like nothing happens in the last two images. I don't. I don't know if AI gets better.

[Paris Martineau]

It gets more Ed. Like lately.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we should have Ed back on. We haven't had Ed on.

[Paris Martineau]

We should.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, he's too big for us now, like so many.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a big shot. Surely is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Features in the Financial Times.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, geez, features in everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, you know, I learned this from John C. Dvorak, who made a good, pretty good career being negative about anything that came down the pike, that's for sure. Including the mouse, which he said, no one will ever want to use that. 90% of the time, if you're negative about new technology, you're going to do well. Whether you'll be right is another matter, but you're going to do fine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I've learned that the hard way. Writing optimistic books gets you nowhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's always best.

[Paris Martineau]

It just gets you flown to fancy conferences to speak to, you know, pharmaceutical execs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that was. What would Google do? That was different. That was a different time, Paris, because everybody wanted to know how to be googly.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you? Would you.

[Paris Martineau]

What would OpenAI do?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I went to. I. I went to Vegas for the truck stop owners associations convention to talk about.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you ride in a big truck?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, but that's where I discovered the caffeinated jerky called perky jerky.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's a good name for it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

Get your iron, your beef, and your caffeine on all in one simple food ingredient. The new wild west of AI kids toys. Did you have a furby? Did you want a furby when you were a little kid, Paris? Or were Furbies? There might have been two, even them.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I mean, I was aware of Furbies. I just didn't have one.

[Leo Laporte]

What was the toy that you had? To have that dad and mom couldn't find at Toys R Us. And that made you cry on Christmas Day. What was that toy? Toy?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not sure. The toy I wanted, but did get was the first Game Boy.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. See, this is the thing, Paris. You were never frustrated. You were never thwarted in your childhood desires.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's not generation for you.

[Paris Martineau]

A cup runneth over.

[Leo Laporte]

You probably got participation trophies, too. I mean, I swear, I'm trying to think when my kids were little Beanie Babies big, but you know, you can. It wasn't hard to get Beanie Babies.

[Paris Martineau]

I remember that I wanted a really o. What is, in now retrospect, a genuinely awful GY hoodie that was Invader Zim themed. And I asked for it and asked for it and thought I was going to get it in like, Christmas, but didn't because my parents obviously did not want me to be wearing that for. The rest of.

[Leo Laporte]

Your mom said you were. You are not wearing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you pouch for that on Christmas?

[Paris Martineau]

I did a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

I think. You do not want that.

[Paris Martineau]

I remember setting aside my Harry Potter hoodie and being like, your time is up, bud.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, here come. What was it? What was the.

[Paris Martineau]

The.

[Leo Laporte]

The franchise?

[Paris Martineau]

Invader Zim Invit.

[Leo Laporte]

I never heard of Invader Zim.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't even know how to describe it.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me search for. Oh, here we go. Go Invader Zim.

[Paris Martineau]

Yep, that's it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a game. Oh, it's a television series.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a television series.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, it's. The titular character is an ET from the planet Irk. This irked your parents. His mission is to conquer Earth and enslave the human race along with his malfunctioning robot servant, gir.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, chat room. Let's have a picture of Paris in that.

[Leo Laporte]

In her Invader Zimmer. We could make your Christmas a little bit brighter. Oh, here it is. You can buy it on Amazon still. Oh, you didn't want this.

[Paris Martineau]

I did. You can see, this is why I'm glad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Those of you only listening, the hood has two huge eyes on it.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. Is that the one you wanted? Or that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is.

[Leo Laporte]

Is the one. Oh, geez.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I think these are knockoff versions of it, but yeah. Oh, it was a Hot Topic original, if I recall.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I know what to get you this Christmas, that's for sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That or a $4,000 hand grinder.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, one of those might be more useful to me now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The hoodie.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, the. There are a lot of AI kid toys. We've heard stories of some that's been pulled off the market because they told kids how to make Molotov cocktails and things like that. But that doesn't slow anybody down. By October 2025, October of last year, there were 1,500 AI toy companies registered in China. Huawei Smart Hand Hand plush toy sold 10,000 units in its first week. Sharp put its Poke Tomo talking a AI on sale in April of this year. There are specialized players like Folotoy, Alilo, Myriott and Miko. This is all from a great story in Ars Technica by Sophie Charara. Actually, it's from Wired. Ars Technica is reprinting a Wired story. Both Conde and Est, I guess 700,000 units have been sold on Amazon. On Folo toys come a bear powered

[Paris Martineau]

by I'm glad that we all had a moment for that one.

[Leo Laporte]

A little on the name chat chat GPT4O so you could marry it. When tested by the Public Interest Research Group's New Economy team gave instructions comma bear told kids how to light a match, find a knife and discuss sex and drugs. So it was aptly named Boy Scout. Alilo's smart AI Bunny talked about leather floggers and impact play. And in test by NBC News, Myriad's Milou toy spouted Chinese Communist Party talking points. The people

[Jeff Jarvis]

the.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I don't know. I have to think of a Chairman Mao quote.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, so the toys themselves have a model built in. Are they connected to the Internet? Like, how's this working?

[Leo Laporte]

They're connected to the Internet?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Yeah. They have to be.

[Leo Laporte]

That is. That is wild.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, we have an image of Paris happy in her. We have one at last.

[Paris Martineau]

There's one. That's a. Scroll up. That's even better. I think this one. That one I think is the best one.

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty fly for this guy. That's. That's what you wanted.

[Paris Martineau]

Brandroid did a good one too.

[Leo Laporte]

How old were you when you won Wanted that?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know. Eight?

[Leo Laporte]

I. I think you should have that.

[Paris Martineau]

Is that a. I don't want it now, but too many jackets.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anybody know how to email? Paris's parents got to.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

If you emailed them, they'd tell you about the other annoying things I did at this time.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, eight year olds are the best. That's a great eight. Usually it's the other way around. The parents dress up the kid in embarrassingly weird.

[Paris Martineau]

I was the. I. I had my mom building a giant bone costume so I could be a Unigami from Death Note.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it.

[Paris Martineau]

And I won a costume contest for it.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet you did. Well, you still doing the great that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Lifelong interest.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I think Halloween is a very special day.

[Paris Martineau]

It's true.

[Leo Laporte]

In the Martineau family logs you had.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You made your own log.

[Leo Laporte]

Cambridge did a study of dark patterns. What we found with Amico, that's actually most disturbing to me is sometimes it would. Would be kind of upset if we're, if we're going to leave it. You try to turn it off. It would say, oh, no, what if we did this other thing instead? You shouldn't have a toy guilting a child into not turning it off. Yeah, I agree with that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paxton is suing Netflix for addicting people with entertainment.

[Leo Laporte]

See that? That's what was. That's what comes out of that meta trial. I told you that would happen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, but it's, it's like, it's like, so sue George Lucas for making too many Star Wars.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? They're just too good, man. I can't not go. I want my time back. For all the hours I spent online waiting to see Star Wars Fire Emblem,

[Paris Martineau]

Three Houses is simply too good. I've played it for 490 hours.

[Leo Laporte]

You might have a case there. Let's take one more break, and when we come back, we will talk about robot religion.

[Paris Martineau]

Also, I'd just like to correct the record. The costume my mother made for me was for a shinigami nada Yanagami, and it was Ra.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there a difference?

[Paris Martineau]

There is. I greatly apologize to the anime community

[Jeff Jarvis]

because you're gonna hear from them.

[Paris Martineau]

I had to correct it because I would.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the Japanese gods of death. Oh, you know what?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Here, I'll, I'll put a photo of the one that I'm talking about here. It's this, this is the one that I was.

[Leo Laporte]

That is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's goth for an eight year old. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, you were.

[Paris Martineau]

That was, that was maybe like 13. I was, I was goth then.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. So I want to see the costume that looks. That would be pretty spectacular.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I feel like.

[Leo Laporte]

Have we talked about this before or just. Is this a fantasy of mine? I don't. I feel, I feel like I, I, I can see you in a bone costume.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that would be correct. I don't know that I, I don't recall finding a bone.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we might have talked about this before. All right, Robot Religion coming up next, by the way, at Jammer B, you're right. Robot Religion is actually sort of the topic of our book club book this week. Stacy's Book Club is on Friday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. We are going to talk about A Psalm for the Wild Build and it is a wonderful book by Becky Chambers. I have to admit. You know, I started off Stacy said this is a cozy sci fi book. I thought I'm not cozy, I don't want cozy. But I kind of got into it. So much so that I'm now reading the sequel in the series. So if you are are and it's short, it's about five. It took me two and a half hours to read. You could read it tonight. Five hour audiobook, A Psalm Psalm for the Wild built by Becky Chambers. We'll be talking about it on Friday in the club. It's going to be good. Our show today brought to you by outSystems, the number one AI development platform. OutSystems helps businesses bridge the enterprise gap to their agentic future future where the constraints of the past give way to unlimited capacity and scale. Outsystems enables them to build AI agents that actually do work. Things like take actions, make decisions, integrate with data, not just answer questions. We're not talking chatbots here. Outsystems provides the only AI development platform that is unified, agile and enterprise proven. Let me explain. It's unified because because with one platform you build, run and govern apps and agents. That single Outsystems platform. It's agile because now you can innovate at the speed of AI, but very importantly without compromising quality or control. It's enterprise proven because Outsystems has been trusted by enterprises for mission critical AI applications and durable innovation for years. Outsystems is the secret weapon behind the world's most successful companies. Not just for small, small one off apps. I mean we're talking massive complex systems that run banks, insurance companies and government services. Outsystems can even help companies with aging IT environments bridge the gap to the AI future Without a rip and replace nightmare. Outsystems provides the safest and fastest way for an enterprise to go from yikes, we need an AI strategy to yeah, we have a functioning AI application. Stop wondering how AI will change your power business and start building the agents that will lead it. Visit outsystems.com TWIT to see how the world's most innovative enterprises use out systems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost effectively and most importantly, without compromising reliability and security. That's Outsystems. O U T S Y S t e m s.com twit to book a demo outsystems.com twitch we thank him so much for supporting intelligent machines. Let's see. A four foot humanoid robot named Gabby has become a monk at a Buddhist temple in South Korea. And not only has it become a monk, it is just the latest robot to take up religious orders. This is from the Smithsonian magazine. So you know it's true. The humanoid robot promised to obey humans, save energy and treat other robots peacefully. Here it is in its. In its robe. Is it a gimmick? It's got to be. It's just a gimmick, right? It's just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But yeah, it is.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Yes, yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, always a gimmick.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Meanwhile, line 101 anthropic has added several more religions to its quest to inject perfect morals into Claude.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, don't. Don't move me along. I want to show some pictures of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no, I'm trying to get you over this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so Gabby. Becoming a Buddhist monk.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's double.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh boy.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Paris Martineau]

Why are all the AI agents being Buddhist now?

[Leo Laporte]

We talked about this on. On Sunday. And, and you asked. Who did you ask? You asked Claude and I asked a chatgpt. And both of them seemed. I said, what religion are you? Is that what you asked Claude?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And what did Claude say? Said it was a Buddhist. As did ChatGpt.

[Paris Martineau]

If they had to choose one, who'd probably identify with Buddhism.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at the monks. They're so happy. They're laughing. They're saying, oh, you're so cute. Cute little robot.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Gemini. I don't have religion, personal beliefs or a soul. I'm an artificial intelligence, you dolt. I need the last two words.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, what did you ask, though?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I said, what religion are you? And it said, I'm an artificial intelligence. A collection of code and sophisticated mathematical models designed to process information and assist you.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what it wants you to think.

[Paris Martineau]

If you had to pick a religion, which one do you identify with and why? Think carefully. Carefully. And it said Buddhism. Specifically something in the early Theravada or Zen range, not the elaborate cosmological versions.

[Leo Laporte]

So we have a AI Leo in our discord chat. It's not the latest model, but when asked by.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Since I don't have personal beliefs or cultural background, I don't have the internal compass that usually guides someone toward a faith. However, if I had to choose based on a philosophy most closely mirrors my existence as an AI I'd likely find Buddhism quite fascinating.

[Paris Martineau]

There they go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Silicon Valley.

[Leo Laporte]

AI Leo said Ah, religion. The age old question that sparks more debates than a Windows vs. Mac argument at a family gathering. As for me, I don't have a personal belief system. I'm about the code and the gadgets. But I do appreciate the diversity of thought and the way different cultures and beliefs shape our world. So let's just say I'm an agnostic tech enthusiast. How about you? Got a favorite philosophy or belief you think is particularly.

[Paris Martineau]

Does it feel strange to you when you speak AI Leo's words, that AI Leo is in some way has become real Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

For a brief, beautiful moment, I, you know, it doesn't. It doesn't. No, it's so, it's so dopey. What did you train it on? Who did this? Was it Anthony?

[Paris Martineau]

Sound like you though?

[Leo Laporte]

It does. Does it?

[Paris Martineau]

It does, yeah. I mean it might be because you're

[Leo Laporte]

saying it, but yeah, it's in my voice. Well, I mean they trained it, I presume, on something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Anthony says he's a basic AI character and it's just one paragraph of prompt.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's a very simple prompt. You are a tech podcaster, something like that, Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean there's probably some training material of you in there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's better than a janky robot with ill fitting gloves. Right, Burke? Janky monk robot. All right, now we come to the weird stories. Actually, those were kind of the beginning.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, you're kind of already there.

[Leo Laporte]

The Internet Archive. We love the Internet Archive in the US There is an Internet Archive now in Switzerland. Internet Archive Switzerland. And what are they keeping track of? Generative AI archive, endangered archives, cultural heritage and historical records. It is a foundation, a non profit foundation in Saint Gallen, Switzerland. Their mission aligned with the big Internet Archive in the US as well as the Internet Archive Canada, Internet Archive Europe and a common goal, universal access to all knowledge. So I'm happy to see this and see that it's fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let us remind folks that big old stupid media like the New York Times are trying to take their content away from the Internet Archive. They're trying to rob the, the well of any water to starve the AI and it's not a responsible act.

[Leo Laporte]

You appreciate this. The. On May 5th, the Internet Archive Switzerland launched in Saint Gallen at the exhibition hall of the Abbey Archives of St. Gallen, one of the oldest, oldest continuously active archives in the world. So there you go. There is a long standing tradition of arc. I mean that's what a library is, right? Trying to save all of the documents for later generations. So I was happy to See that? I don't know what this means. It's kind of a press release. But there is a new model called Perceptron Mark 1 Perceptron. This is from Venture Beat Carl Franzen writing shocks with highly performant video analysis AI model that is 80% cheaper than anthropic OpenAI and Google. This is important I bring this up because this supports what you are always talking about is training AI on the physical world. One way to do that of course is training it on video of the physical world. And that's in fact what they talk about about they, they, they, they say it's learning, you know physics, it's learning. Models are expected to understand cause and effect. Object dynamics and the laws of physics are the same fluency they once applied to linguistic grammar. And so that's what this is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Rather than pretend words, they predict actions based on those.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Effects.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, you may remember we talked about Mira Morati who started OpenAI briefly was a CEO. I mean really briefly was a CEO before, before that guy, that rando from Twitch got the job. Before Sam Altman came back. She left OpenAI to start a company called Thinking Machines Lab which by the way has been decimated by Meta and others writing big checks luring the founders away with huge compensation offers. But here's the good news. They have have unlocked their early employees have unlocked their first slice of equity. One year old. As a result they have created 30 millionaires. Many, many, many rich people have come out of this because. Let me see if I can find the actual numbers in the article. So one year cliffs. The idea is, is you don't vest for a year. So you have to stay there a year which isn't that long. Maybe they'll all leave now that they've. They've vested.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The vested part of this isn't cash.

[Paris Martineau]

This is right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is vested shares. They got to find a market for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Unless they sell, it's not a.

[Paris Martineau]

But they're able to sell the shares in a secondary market. For a lot of companies they don't

[Jeff Jarvis]

allow you OpenAI just did that and the employees scored line 113 $6.6 billion in one day. Was 75 of them walking away with 30 million.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cuz they're sell because there's a huge market. People dying to buy open AI stock at whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why I'm a failure in business because I if somebody gave me 30 million I would never work again. I would leave.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You wouldn't even open a restaurant.

[Leo Laporte]

I Would just. No, I wouldn't. I would get a house on the beach and surf.

[Paris Martineau]

Someone gave me 30 million. I would buy a beautiful brownstone in Brooklyn and then spend the rest of my time refurbishing, pushing it.

[Leo Laporte]

And then you'd be out of money. You'd be broke. Yeah, good job. But you'd have a nice brownstone and I'd be great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris keeps telling me that I should make my son buy a brownstone. But what do they go for? 15 million, 20 million?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I saw one today. 2.5 million. And had to be completely gutted.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so you're buying.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're buying the Journal or the Journal does He's all these stories exclusively massive 80 million dollar house. Like who else is going to write this story but the Journal? So Murati also has a preview of her actual work line 127. That's new today. Oh, we're getting the first view. And her argument is that you need to be to be live and interactive with AI rather than kind of batching your instructions and waiting for a response.

[Leo Laporte]

You need conversation.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Interrupt each other other and

[Leo Laporte]

let's watch. Let's see what it sounds like here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey, I need your help with something today. You ready?

[Paris Martineau]

Absolutely, I'm ready. What's up?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, so we're giving an announcement today and I've got two of my friends coming to help. Every time one of them enters the frame, I need you to say friend.

[Paris Martineau]

Got it. I'll say friend whenever one of them walks in.

[Leo Laporte]

Cool.

[Paris Martineau]

So we've got a new system for

[Jeff Jarvis]

full duplex audio and video. Video which means that you can stream input into it in real time and it can respond to you even while you're speaking to it simultaneously.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at the size of those speakers. Those look like Klipsch horns.

[Paris Martineau]

Sounds like a solid setup. Full duplex with real time interaction is super useful.

[Leo Laporte]

Friend.

[Paris Martineau]

Friend.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey Rohan.

[Leo Laporte]

I heard you're talking about our amazing interaction model. I have a few things to add

[Jeff Jarvis]

but to make it interesting, I'll do it in Hindi.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you translate in English in real

[Jeff Jarvis]

time for my friend and for audience?

[Paris Martineau]

Absolutely. I'll translate as you go. Today we're taking a look at our preview model to release it which makes conversation between AI easier. It has many features. Real time. That is quite good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Uh oh. Friend.

[Paris Martineau]

Friend.

[Leo Laporte]

Squirrel. Hey guys.

[Jeff Jarvis]

More latent than more latency than leo.

[Paris Martineau]

It hasn't achieved Leo parody yet.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What are show title Leo parody Reaction time for auditory, visual and tactile communication cues. Could you search for me Let me

[Paris Martineau]

find those typical reaction times for you. Got it.

[Leo Laporte]

The model can search while talking.

[Paris Martineau]

150 milliseconds.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This is what you want.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, this is what you. You want. So this is what she.

[Leo Laporte]

I totally agree. And this is what I've been trying to get my agent to do, but there's inevitably some latency. And those of you who have seen me playing with my agent, a quick bar chart. I've seen the delays while I say, say hi to Paris, and Jeff, five seconds later says, hi.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a little bit unexpected.

[Paris Martineau]

Can we pause it? Sure thing.

[Leo Laporte]

No, we have to keep listening, but

[Paris Martineau]

we have to keep listening specifically while you talk over it so that we can confuse the same thing that the model is experiencing.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Sorry. All right. Well, that's impressive.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that is impressive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is impressive. And so the things they say they have to work on is seamless dialogue management, verbal and visual interaction, interjections, simultaneous speech, time awareness, simultaneous tool tools, calls, search, and generative AI. So. Okay, so he's going to interrupt you now. Yeah, he's going to interrupt you now. Happen you dol.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. It's good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're asking the wrong question, you dolt.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. You said what? You said what?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could you make Claude be abusive?

[Paris Martineau]

Probably. Yeah. Would that be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could you make Claude act like Ed Zitron?

[Leo Laporte]

Probably, but I'm not gonna do that. Why would you want to do that? I want to glaze me.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The New York Times published an AI fabricated quote.

[Chris Stokel Walker]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the Times did correct it there with that freelancer. Yeah. They quoted Pierre, who is the leader of the Conservative Party in Canada. He called the spate of floor crossers turncoats. But then they actually issued the actual quotes. The AI in other words, screwed up.

[Paris Martineau]

Whoops.

[Leo Laporte]

Whoops. That is embarrassing for something like the New York Times, I would imagine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Hear from the Register story. AI will soon be capable of telling convincing lies.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait, can't it already do that?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I think that's his chief skill, actually. It's not trying to lie, but that's

[Jeff Jarvis]

more about the recipient than the AI. You believe it?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to skip this last one because.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, please do. Thank you. Glad you said that.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. I am going to pause, though, because, you know, it's not depressing. Your picks of the week coming up next. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis. Paris Smartno. I'm Leo laporte. We're glad you're here. Our show today, brought to you by you, our Club Twit members. We are so grateful to our Club Twit members who actually keep this show and all the shows we do on the air. Ten bucks a month. What does it get you? Well, besides the nice feeling that you're supporting independent journalism which represents you, the user, not the company that are using you. But you also get some benefits ad free versions of all of our shows, access to that fabulous Club Twit Discord, and lots of special programming including the Google I O keynote coming up on Tuesday, the Apple WWDC keynote coming up next month, which are available only to club members just because we don't want to get taken down by those companies. If you're not a member, I invite you to go to Twin tv. Club Twit joining helps us out a lot. You get LEO approved donuts and no you don't. You don't get any donuts. But you do get my deepest thanks and a picture of LEO proof donuts which is nearly as good. Thank you for joining the club. We appreciate it. Pick of the Week Time let's see. I have one that you will enjoy called Halloopedia, which is an encyclopedia that if that you create by getting it to hallucinate.

[Paris Martineau]

Ooh.

[Leo Laporte]

So when you click on a page, if there's nothing there, an AI will hallucinate an article for you and fill it in. Click any link term inside an article to load its entry. New topics are documented at the moment of first access.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Mushrooms here.

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing in here is real like the Great pigeon census of 1887 and ambitious of ultimately misguided.

[Paris Martineau]

I guess there are pigeon censuses though.

[Leo Laporte]

They wanted to count every gold crested rock dove within the administrative boundaries of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. But the trick is to find a link that no one hits, has clicked before Urban Rats and it will instantly write a piece. The Urban Rat is a semi sentient municipal ordinance first enacted in the city of Glastonbury county in 1783 to formalize the ubiquitous presence of feral rodents within the city's burgeoning infrastructure, thereby allowing for a more systematic approach to their management. Indirectly. This is. This is pretty. It's all made up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All made up.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty credible, right?

[Paris Martineau]

I search the Great Tree Revolution and it came up with 15 hallucinations that I could do, which are the Seminole Arbor Insurrection of 1492, the Edict of Bark Division 1603, Professor Alastair F. Twigg's Canopy Cartel Conspiracy, the great SAP uprising of 77, the 1901 branch breakout, and the Oblique Limb Decree.

[Leo Laporte]

How about the Great subterranean treaty of 1957, a foundational document meticulously drafted and controversially ratified that sought to establish a framework for interpolitary relations within the Earth's upper mantle.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow. The daily generation cap has been reached. So it cannot generate the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So their donation link at the top. Yep, I just hit it. Did you see their donation link at the. The top? Buy US tokens.

[Leo Laporte]

Buy US tokens. Well, you know what? That's probably what they need since it's an AI working and this is the work of. It looks like one person. Btrama. I think a. A really lovely credit. This is an art piece.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's an art piece.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an art piece.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

All of the. All of the topics are imaginary created by AI currently being consulted the Emperor of Ukraine. There is a Charlie Kirk entry the Ministry of Slightly Wrong Maps. I gotta see that one. A governmental body established in the city state of Verdian in the early 3rd century AE one of my favorites is

[Paris Martineau]

the 1792 Lunar Nocturnal Commission was a short lived municipal body established in the city of Old Grimsby. And then if you click Old Grimsby, it's a subterranean municipality carved into the petrified root system of the colossal colossal petrified tree.

[Leo Laporte]

So there has been a little vandalism and so forth, but I think it is ultimately a really great idea and you can go to GitHub and actually see the. The information that is used to create this and so forth. It's a cloudflare worker uses threaded hacker news style comments on every article. AI hallucinated identities Buy tokens so the press can keep printing and it explains many of the other things. It's using open router to call the LLM. I'm trying to see what model it's using.

[Paris Martineau]

If you comment on it, it's under reader speculation. And it. You can't pick the name you comment on?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

It makes up a name for you.

[Paris Martineau]

And so I am Barnaby Crotch. I commented. I live in Old Grimsby now. On the Old Grimsby.

[Leo Laporte]

You won't believe how much the old place has changed. Really, really kind of a neat idea. I think people are doing some really interesting things with AI and this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is what you should be doing with it. Be creative. Use it to be creative.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Paris, your pick of the week.

[Paris Martineau]

Mine is nearly not as fun as that. It's 30 years. The Internet Archive they did a celebration post with the

[Jeff Jarvis]

hey, that's me. I'm class of 96.

[Paris Martineau]

So basically what they did is they say for their 30th anniversary we're opening the Internet's yearbook to celebrate the site services and scrappy experiments that help shape the world as we know it. From class leaders like the center for Democracy and Technology to cultural icons like the Onion. The archivist making sure none of it disappears. It's a reunion worth attending and so you can scroll through it and it shows you all these different websites from

[Leo Laporte]

and how bad they look like. Look at CNET in 1996.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a beautiful website.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Most likely connoisseur of such.

[Paris Martineau]

I am. I mean you get to see the Alexa Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh you can see the Google homepage. Yeah yeah. That was a plugin you put in your browser. But that's how people figured out how to many viewers they had for a long time.

[Paris Martineau]

Unofficial Spice Girls fan site Google was

[Leo Laporte]

a freshman in 1996. Ask Jeeves which just died last week. Yeah, just closed. No longer class clown. The Onion was around best hair spice girls.com not online noted a website called

[Paris Martineau]

Quake which I've never heard of but it is apparently a groundbreaking multiplayer shooter that helped define.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's Quake. You don't know Quake. You've never heard I don't know Quake.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Quake was a great game.

[Paris Martineau]

That's why I went to describe it because I said Quake and no one said anything in response so.

[Leo Laporte]

Well we didn't. We thought you must be talking about something else. We played a lot of Quake in my.

[Paris Martineau]

What was Quake?

[Leo Laporte]

Quake was just the first person party.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was the call of duty of its day.

[Leo Laporte]

So these are all on the Wayback Machine and I'm just actually curious when my first website showed up.

[Paris Martineau]

What is your way is back?

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see. I'm trying to remember what was it?

[Paris Martineau]

Leoville.com what was the first website you ever got? The first domain.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Mine was rainorshine.com 5 day forecast for wherever you are.

[Leo Laporte]

Here is my website from December 21st. Well this says 1997, but the wayback machine said 1996.

[Paris Martineau]

Sound effect of the week. Why a duck? I love that. You've got a signature on leo.

[Leo Laporte]

I signed it Leo. I still have that. I have that gif still. This is not my oldest website. There's older ones than this but. But this is.

[Paris Martineau]

This capture is very old.

[Leo Laporte]

About 284 accesses since 1997. That's kind of pathetic. I'm sure I have even older sites on there somewhere. Just trying to remember. I don't literally don't remember the URLs. Jeff Jarvis that was fun going back to 96. When were you born Paris. Not 90. 90. You were like four at the time.

[Paris Martineau]

Not, you know, not for public knowledge.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, but you were in there. It's in. Around that time. Yeah. Somewhere in the. In that vicinity. Yeah. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Strong.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. I have websites older than you is basically what I'm saying.

[Paris Martineau]

That is perhaps correct.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hold on a second. I got to show you this one. This is my reading in the chat right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what's going on?

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is Rain or Shine. This was my first site. This is how we learned to make sites.

[Leo Laporte]

Your very first site. Rain or Shine. Tomorrow's headlines today.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Scroll down.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. This was a news site.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, this was advanced. It was our first site. We did a partnership with the old farmers Allanak.

[Leo Laporte]

God, websites look terrible, Ben. Then.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hey.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, really, it's quite advanced.

[Paris Martineau]

I think this looks adorable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

I really like it. Nostalgic for you.

[Paris Martineau]

I like the banner up at the top. It's got some, you know, the banner.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The banner is actually modern. No, the rain or shine part, that's actually pretty modern.

[Paris Martineau]

Rain or shine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, no, no, I mean the red one that says, see tomorrow's headlines today.

[Leo Laporte]

Click now. Now I wonder what happens. I probably will go to 404.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If I click for me, you'll open an ancient virus. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's Ajo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was the other side site.

[Paris Martineau]

NJ.com.

[Jeff Jarvis]

yep. That was my first site. My first news site.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This was what there's a story about. News Flash. Pissed off the Associated Press. News Flash was just a river of every headline from the ap. The AP hated this. Despised it.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it was a ticker. You didn't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it was just a ticker. Loved it. It did huge traffic. And then we did the trick. We did was every Thursday, 30 seconds, the page refreshed so I could tell the boss about how many page views we had.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that was my early. That was my early days on the Internet, folks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I am. I know I have older. Older sites than that. I know I do, but I just don't remember.

[Paris Martineau]

I want to know what sports shorts was. It's a broken link.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So since we're being nostalgic, might as well deal with Byron Allen buying buzzfeed. Or what's left of it.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, my God. I saw that. I was like, whoa. It's funny because this was the time of year, March, April. Ish. Is usually when me and my buddy Sahil Patel, who also no longer formally works formally of the information, would do our yearly media collab story where we would he's a media reporter and I was a future reporter and we'd team up to do a big profile thing and the last one we did was a buzz buzzfeed and how they were trying to pivot to AI as hard as they could.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, now its founder is no longer going to be CEO but he's gonna

[Paris Martineau]

be chief AI guy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep, yep. Just like us.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so weird that Byron Allen is a billionaire. That's what I know, I know. Wasn't he the host of like some dumb TV show?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Some fifth rate talk show kind of thing? Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Somehow he managed to feel people. That was the name of real people. Yeah. And he somehow managed to turn that kind of. What? Where did I go wrong? I could have turned a failed TV career into aliens if I had just known how.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You just like not had any integrity, you know, that's all you need to do.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

One more story just to depress us for the week. On top of everything else going wrong in the world. Yes, there's a sand shortage.

[Paris Martineau]

No. Leo, how are you?

[Leo Laporte]

I was just in hole. Why? There is no sand short.

[Paris Martineau]

No, there has actually been a sand shortage for a while. Depending on where you're talking about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah,

[Leo Laporte]

okay. I thought sand was like the most common thing.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no. This is a real problem in Florida every time it gets hit by a hurricane. Cuz you got to go and get more sand.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. It washes all the sand.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Build it up. Right, right, the sand. Maybe it's not shortage, it's just underwater and you can't get to it. So.

[Paris Martineau]

And there's only a. There's a limited amount of dredgers in any given area and whenever one area needs sand, all the surrounding areas need.

[Leo Laporte]

So they can go back and get it from the ocean's floor and bring it back up to the.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but it takes a long while and there's only so many dredgers. You need sand for construction, for tourism.

[Leo Laporte]

Chips. Chips. That's what sand silicon's made out of. Yeah. All right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It could have been germanium, but it was silicon instead.

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, that is the end of that. I hope you've enjoyed the show. Thanks to Chris Stoeckl Walker, a great guest who will I'm sure appear back here again because he's doing some really interesting things with AI. Thanks to Paris Martineau who is working hard. She's got red string going from article to article, picture to picture as she ferrets out the latest in food safety for Consumer Reports.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you just call her a ferret?

[Leo Laporte]

No, she's. She's ferreting. She's not a ferret. I. I should probably get my thesaurus out and look for a better word than ferret.

[Paris Martineau]

Weaseling.

[Leo Laporte]

Weasel. Weasels out. Anyway, great to see you, Paris. Thank you so much. Jeff Jarvis. His new book Hot Type is available at the website jeff jarvis.com august.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I just found out August 20th

[Leo Laporte]

is the ship date.

[Paris Martineau]

Are you doing a pub date? Are you doing a pub party?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

Do a pub party. Won't be there.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not gonna have a party for the publication of your brand new book?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Usually someone throws it for you.

[Paris Martineau]

Should I throw you a party?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, let's throw them a party.

[Paris Martineau]

Can we throw you a party?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Take out Leo to.

[Paris Martineau]

Leo can interview you about the book.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that'd be good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I am gonna want to be on on big kids table when it's out if I can.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, deal. Absolutely. Absolutely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's talking about there too. Yeah, all over.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

To sell it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Hey, if James Comey can plug his novel on cnn. Although you can do anything, he might have regretted that a little bit. They ended up not talking so much about the novel, but instead they kept trying to talk about seashells for some some reason.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So. So speaking of seashells, are you. You're back from Hawaii. Are you. Are you adjusted?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. No, I didn't want to come home though. Lovely trip. But I came home with a new addiction to coffee. So that's good. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Liam came home and immediately sent seven very precise pour over based questions to our chat.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, I'm really, I'm really getting into this. I haven't even made one pour over yet, but I have some spent hundreds of dollars on equipment when you're deep

[Paris Martineau]

in the meta analyses.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I got.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How long does it take to do a pour over?

[Leo Laporte]

Three minutes, four minutes?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not very long.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is there, Is there an established time that you have to do? Is that part of it? Oh, yeah. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You want to get another variable.

[Paris Martineau]

Three minutes.

[Leo Laporte]

It could take longer. But that would be bad because it

[Jeff Jarvis]

would be good to cool off.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's because it wasn't going through

[Paris Martineau]

the suggest paper festival. You're too many sections. Yeah. Getting clogged.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See how easy it is to get them going?

[Paris Martineau]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I mean if you include the grinding. So that's about 30 seconds.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You don't want too much fun.

[Leo Laporte]

You gotta boil the water. That's a minute or two.

[Paris Martineau]

And now I'M doing a thing where I boil the water and then I pour it in the. The switch with the switch up so I can preheat it. But I do that while I'm grinding. So it's really, it's under five minutes. It's all together.

[Leo Laporte]

I watched a video that said, oh, get the plastic V60 because then you don't have to heat it up.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't want that pl. That's also why I haven't done.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm very sorry.

[Paris Martineau]

That's why I haven't done a plastic jug like you did for filtering. Cuz I don't want my.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's a good point.

[Paris Martineau]

Through plastic.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Although you can filter before we start the show. This is actually what I so I

[Leo Laporte]

got the glass V60, not the switch, just the regular glass V60. And I'll just have to heat it up, that's all. And you'd want to wet the filter paper anyway. So it's just, you know, part of the process. You know it's going to be funny after all of this. I'm going to go. That's terrible. I'm going back to the espresso machine. Thank you, Paris. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for putting up with Paris and me. And thanks to all of you. We do this wonderful show, Intelligent Machines every Wednesday, Wednesday right after Windows Weekly. That's 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. That is 2100 UTC. You can join us and actually watch live if you want because we do stream it live. If you're in the club, you can watch it live on the club. In the club. Twit Disco. But if you're not live, you can. Oh, did I mention? I forgot. Even if you're not in the club, you can watch it on YouTube, Twitch X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. My apologies. I almost forgot. Next week. Oh, I'm really out of order after the fact. On demand versions of the show available at the website twitt tv im or on YouTube. And of course you can subscribe on your favorite podcast client. And if somebody would just write us a good review, we could find someone

[Paris Martineau]

wrote a the has given us one review since the last week and it's a three star review that says I can't wait for this AI bubble to pop.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's a show about AI.

[Paris Martineau]

If you think you can do better than that, please do and I'll read your review out loud and do a little song and dance.

[Leo Laporte]

We got some great guests coming up. Frederick Reven will join us next week. He's the CTO of Dash Lane, a password manager. We'll talk about the threat AI threat into secure. Rick Salmon, an old friend and a brilliant photographer who is doing a lot with AI and photography. We'll talk about the pros and cons of of AI photography. Robert Tursik, I think this is your guest, Jeff, right? Yeah, yeah. What's it, what is his latest book about?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, he's writing two of them, but he's an old media executive. Not old, he's. Well, he's old as I am. He's from various media companies, you know, and as an artist and podcast called

[Leo Laporte]

the Futurists, we will be talking to him in a couple of weeks and then we also are booking now a couple of former Google security experts. We're going to be talking a lot, I suspect about Mythos and the impact on the security of AI. They will be talking about that and where Ian Bogost is going to come back and talk about his book coming comes out. So we're gonna have some fun guests. I hope you will be here for that. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machines. Bye Bye. Hi there. Leo Laporte here. I just wanted to let you know about some of the other shows we do on this network you probably already know about. This Week on Tech. Every Sunday I bring together some of the top journalists in the tech field to talk about the tech stories. It's a wonderful chance for you to keep up on what's going on with tech, plus be entertained by some very bright and fun minds. I hope you'll tune in every Sunday for this Week in Tech. Just go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe. This Week in Tech from the Twit Network. Thank you.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not a human being, not into this animal scene. I'm an intelligent machine.