Google's Search Overhaul
Loading summary
A
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff and Parris are here. Our guest this hour, Frederic Revan. He is the CTO of the Password Manager. Dashlane talks about the security situation, how his company is using Vibe coding to develop and how to do it safely, and what Claude's mythos means for the future of security. That's coming up next on Intelligent Machines. This episode is brought to you by Outsystems, a leading agenic systems platform built for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are building, orchestrating and governing agentic systems on the Outsystems platform and with good reason. Architect deliver and scale governed agentic systems with agility and trust using one open and unified platform. Power secure company wide agentic orchestration for core business operations. Teams of any size and technical depth can use Outsystems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost effectively without compromising reliability and security. With Outsystems you can rapidly launch ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading agentix systems platform that's unified, agile and enterprise proven, allowing you to accelerate growth, reduce operational friction and deliver real Enterprise impact with AI OutSystems, build your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com TWiT that's outsystems.com TWiIT podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Episode 871 recorded Wednesday, May 20, 2026 Control F techno king it's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we cover the latest in AI robotics and all the smart doodads all around you. I have a smart doodad that I'm going to show you in a little bit that Harper Reed convinced me to buy. I'm sure I'm going to regret it. It connects my network directly to China. So that what could possibly go wrong? But we'll we'll get to that in a little bit. A lot of AI news. Yesterday's Google I O dumped a ton of news on us. We'll talk about that. But as always with Intelligent Machines I like to begin the show with a guest. First, let me introduce our regular panel. Paris Martineau is here from Consumer Reports where she is an investigative journalist. She combines the two best cities in the world and her website Paris nyc
B
Got em all there.
A
They're all there. And I just by the way I just registered Laporte Petaluma ca us doesn't
B
have the same ring to it.
A
No it doesn't. Also with us Jeff Jarvis, he is the author of. Oh, look at it. The book is there.
C
Hot type. Yes, it is. It has arrived.
A
Hot type.
B
Get your Hot type.
A
Is that Hot Type with typo? Is that the typo version? Yeah.
C
Yes, it is.
A
It's funny. I'm reading it. I'm going to recommend it later on. Stuart Brand's new book and he does say he actually has a woodcut from the 17th century with a guy complaining about printer mistakes in the book. And even, even Stuart says, you know, it's no better in the 21st century. And Jeff wilt vouch for that.
C
So there's a typo on the COVID They're going to have to reprint the COVID and rejacket it. As they say. My proudest thing in it is the colophon, which is you put at the end of books to explain how it was published and so on. This is the colophon and I set that on a linotype.
A
Isn't that funny? And that's why the justification is so terrible.
C
Hey, hey.
A
Sorry, can resist. Jeff is also the author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis magazine, the Web we Weave. But Hot Type won't come out till August. But you can pre order right now.
C
Yep.
A
Jeff Jarvis.com Our guest today is here to talk about AI and security. Frederic Rivan has been the chief technology officer of Dashlane since 2015, which is a very long time for a password manager. Dashlane, one of the. One of the big four, I would say last past Bitwarden, 1Password and Dashlane, if you're not using one of them, you're probably not using a password manager. Dashlane, always very popular with the Mac crowd because it's aesthetically so nice. And I think you probably get some credit for that, Frederic.
D
Yeah, we always do. We have a nice UX and even my parents can use it. So that's also our goal. Make it simple.
A
Yeah, it's beautiful. But of course, when you're the CTO of a password company, you're dealing with a lot of issues. One that we hope the soon abandonment of passwords. I think you've been saying this is going to be the year of the. Of the passkey.
D
Well, it's been the year of the passkey since 2032. But truth be told, we're getting there. Slowly, but we're getting there. We sort of getting to critical mass with all the top websites now supporting passkeys and hopefully everybody else will follow. I suppose the problem with passkeys that it won't be enough. So you will have to migrate to passkeys, but you will also have to get rid of the passwords that are the fallback behind the passkeys so that you can get the right level of security.
A
You'll always have kind of a fallback password, at least for a long time. Plus, you need somewhere to put your passkeys. And I think it's really important not to put it in your device, but to put it in something that goes across devices like Dashlane on capacity.
D
Yeah, exactly. Otherwise you're stuck into the device and you need to recreate new passkeys on another device and so on. So that's not good. You're better having a one single vault where you can store passkeys in a secure way.
A
You are doing something, though, that some might say is a little controversial. You have adopted AI in the company.
D
Well, we're not the only ones, so I don't know how controversial that is, but.
A
Well, I think from the user's point of view, and it's probably important to assure users there is no AI in Dashlane, right?
D
Oh, no, there is.
A
There is a lot. There is.
D
There is a lot of AI in Dashlane.
A
See, that's where the controversy begins. You know, there's AI in Chrome, there's AI in most browsers.
C
There's AI in everything except your coffee.
A
Even in the coffee.
B
I'm sure it'll be in there soon.
A
I told Paris I ingested the book that we love so much, the Physics of Filter Coffee, into my agent. And I have now a pour over expert. In fact, if you want access to that, Paris, I can give you the telegram and you can query it. But what's great is I've got there is AI in everything. And that's not such a bad thing. I would say, though, Frederic, this was the week we watched commencement speakers be booed practically off stage by college graduates who did not want to hear the letters AI Browser. A lot of browser users say, don't put AI in my browser. Firefox and Vivaldi both responding to that. Is there pushback from your customers over. And how do you put AI into Dashlane?
D
Well, first, AI is a large and broad term, so we need to define what we mean by AI. So in our case, for instance, we have AI in the old school way, which is we have our own machine learning models, which is under the umbrella of AI, but that are running directly on device. So as long as you do things in a secure and private way, I don't think AI is the issue. But you need to be careful about the data of your customers, you need to be careful about how you train your models. You need to be careful how you deploy your models. And that's what we're trying to do. So we are passive managers. Obviously it matters to us. We are very careful with our customer data. We never want to see the customer data, we never want to see your password, we never want to see your payment, your Pascal. Obviously we can't see. And so that's how we've been building AI from day one. Whether it was the machine learning model that powers the autofill engine engine in dash lane extension or on mobile, or we have also a phishing detection model that we train. Same thing. It doesn't run on the, the browsing activity, it runs completely isolated on the device. We never see the data.
A
So I guess some of this comes down to the definition of AIA has become such a trendy phrase. We've always had machine learning models. Not always, but we. For a long time there's been this kind of capability, I mean, heuristic detection of, of phishing. It's going to require some intelligence. You can't just do it with regular expressions. You have to be a little bit smart. So I'm sure this is.
D
Yeah, exactly the model we built. And that's on purpose. We built a model ourselves. We trained it with our own data that we build ourselves so that we don't use our customer data. And it relies on about, let's say, 80 different indicators that can show you that a web page is malicious. And we trained the model and then we tested the model and benchmarked it on live data to get to the right accuracy level, because that's also always the case with an AI model. You want to get the right accuracy. And it worked well and now we have it deployed for our customer. They're protected. They get phishing detection in case they go to the wrong website. And we are able to do that while maintaining the privacy and security of our customers. So it's not. You can have both. You can have AI and the privacy and security that you want.
A
You have also rolled out, bought code to your engineers. 100 engineers in 3 months now is what I saw using Claude code at Dashlane. What are they doing with it?
D
That's a good question. I hope they're doing good stuff.
A
Are they token maxing, Frederic? Is that.
D
No, they're definitely under token maxing, actually. I actually shared my thought on Token maxing and LinkedIn recently, where I think it's a very. Let's call it perverse thing to do there. I mean, we want to use the tool for it. It's for. You don't need to talk in max. You just need to use AI and cloud code and have the right context and the right inputs and outputs that you maximize the use of the tool. And that's a place where, of course, everything is moving very fast in that world. But I think we'll have to learn the best practices of how do you get your code base and the context of your code base into the right tools and the right AI tools. But yeah, our engine team has been using QR code code actively. We've decided to actually completely sandbox it so we have code code running in containers so that it cannot go rogue on the file system or on the laptop of the engineers and cannot go delete our production database or whatever because yet again, security is important to us. So we definitely want to embrace the AI capabilities and what they bring, but we want to do it in a cautious way and make sure that we evaluate at each step what are the benefits of using AI and what are also the risks.
A
Talk a little bit about the policies you implement to make sure that it's safe to use cloud code in a security tool.
D
Yeah, so if we think about cloud code, you can't use cloud code attached if you're not hosting it in the container. The container is something we build for all the engineers and beyond engineering, because we also now have product managers using cloud code to do coding. So we provide the framework and the guardrails around the usage of cloud code so that it can't go outside of the boundaries we're defined.
A
It's still connecting to anthropic servers though, right?
D
No, it is, but it's isolated. So for instance, GitLab, we have our code version on GitLab. We don't have rights for cloud code to write on GitLab directly. We can only read the data from GitLab inside cloud code to give it context. But it's up to the engineer to decide. Okay, here's the suggestion from cloud code and the code it wrote. I'm going to actually merge that code myself, I'm going to review it and so on. And then we also have added an agent to do the code review to help the engineers do better code review. Because of course, if you're accelerating the throughput with code, you need more code review. We also have an agent to do security review to add a layer on top of it.
A
Is it fairly reliable?
D
Do you feel it's still the early days. Apparently the engine team and the engineers are happy with it, but we're going to have to train it. It's going to have to learn our practices. Going to, I mean, all of us are really at the beginning of the journey. Let's remember, cloud coder came out super recently in the grand scheme of things. So we are going to learn how to build the infrastructure around those type of tools, how to build the best practices. One thing we were discussing recently is we now have, I don't know, dozens and dozens of skills that have been created for code by different people around the organization. How do we make sure that we review those skills, we mutualize them and reuse them all together the right way?
A
Why did you feel like it was necessary to do this? I mean, I'm sure there's some. I mean, you could have said, no, we're not going to implement AI coding, but why not?
D
I mean, it's not because there's a new tool that you can't try it. Of course there are pros and cons with every tool. But for me, before we can make a decision, we should test and learn. So that's what we're doing. We're testing, we're experimenting, we're making sure that we do it with educated risks to some extent. And then we learn and we'll see what works and what doesn't work. For instance, today we're mostly using cloud code and AI tooling for sort of a more deterministic type of activities. Like, okay, I have to migrate part of the code base to another stack or I need to revamp refactor part of the code base. More than really going crazy into building fully fledged features where we don't have clear control about what's going to happen. So it's a journey and it's a learning curve.
A
Yeah, I mean, some have said that you're less likely to make those common mistakes, like buffer underflow and overflow errors with an AI agent doing the coding than a human? Do you feel like the AI agent is less likely to make those kind of dumb mistakes?
D
Maybe it makes its own dumb mistakes. Yeah, I think as always in those cases, there are things it's good, good at. The thing is still learning and the models are evolving so fast from Opus 4.6 to Opus 4.7 and so on that the bar is changing all the time. I think today you still need the human to be looking at it and having critical thinking.
A
Will it review every line of code?
D
Yeah, we'll still Review every line of code. We still have two mandatory reviewers for every line of code at Dashlane because we want to. I mean, we're a security product. We want to be careful with our customer data and what we're providing as a product. So I think it's too early to completely trust the machine.
C
Can I ask you a question about that, the review process? Because obviously any responsible organization is reviewing code, whether it's code or whether it's journalism and writing and facts. It's a boring task. Right. It would strike me as it's more interesting to create the code, to understand it. Is it so much faster that it's okay? I don't bother me? Is it tedious to do? Is it hard to find the errors? Tell me about that process now as a task and a job.
D
I think it depends a lot on the engineers. There are engineers that love reviewing code because you need to find a needle in the haystack and you need to polish the code and you need to make it clean and beautiful and so on. There's a bit of a craft here, like you want to polish, I guess if you're a book editor, you also want the book to be well written and well crafted at the end. So there's a bit of that. And there are other engineers that are a bit less passionate about that, to your point, which are more on the creative side and want to generate things for their customers and that want to create. But you need both, and you'll probably have agents actually doing both in the future as well. So that's an interesting story.
A
We're talking to Frederic Revin. He is the CTO of Dashlane. He's been there now for. Wow, that's 11 years and counting. Also, other credentials. He sits on the FIDO alliance board, which is really fantastic, as an active contributor to the Credential Exchange Standard and their AI Study group. His book, it's in French. Le Livre du Citeo.
C
How did he do with that? How was his reading?
A
He's not going to say anything mean. I'm sure I'm not.
D
But, you know, in French, especially for technical terms, we use the English version.
A
I'm the CTO, not.
D
Yeah, Le Livre, the CTO, exactly.
A
Okay. That came out in 2018. The Book of Ctos. He's also the founder of Citio, the first French network of CTOs, and has six patents, mostly around security. So, I mean, this is a good person to talk to. When Anthropic announced Mythos, what was your reaction to that?
D
What did you think, oh, well, another tool that I'd like to play with.
A
Yeah, but you can't, right?
D
We can't. And we're waiting for it, but it's going to come. Yeah. So quite a lot of excitement because that's us taking it to the other step of, okay, we can get more eyes on our code. And even if it's an agent eye, we want our code to be reviewed, we want it to be secure, and so on. So we actually decided a few years back to have our source code publicly available. So you can find the dashing code on GitHub, you can look at it, and we have a lot of security researchers regularly looking at that code. If we can extend that and also have the power of the AI to help us make our code even more secure, then that's great. The flip side of that in those cases is that, of course we need to do that before the attackers can leverage the issues in our code. So that's going to be some of the interesting story when we can put our hands on Mythos.
A
So I didn't know you were on GitHub. So it's not open source, though.
D
It's not open source in the sense that you can contribute to the code directly, but you can read our code, our code. You can read the code from our extension and so on.
A
Oh, that's great.
D
And. And that also helps our white hat hackers, like the bug bounty program that we have that we're asking security researchers to look at vulnerabilities in our code that helps them. So that's.
A
What are you doing to accommodate agents and AIs? Do you have. I think you're doing an MCP server. Yes.
C
Yeah.
D
For enterprise customers, we wanted to give them the ability to directly plug their own AI agents in their systems to be able to pull the logs app from Dashlane. When you have Dashlane running in organizations, we generate a lot of logs, but that employee has logged with that credential on that website and so on. Those are very rich logs that the admins and the security team from our customers can use to understand. Okay. Actually, there's been a confirmation of credential in that area of the organization and so on, and I want to do something about it. So we wanted to make sure that the rich signals that Dashlane generated for our customers, it can be directly used by the AI agents on the SIM system, like whether it's Splunk AI or Crowdstrack AI. And so we're making it natively accessible to an MSCP server.
A
For Dashlane, one of the things that makes Dashlane made Mac users especially love Dashlane so much is you use Swift. It's very native feeling on the Mac. But do these AI tools work well with Swift or are they not writing Swift code? Is that.
D
No, they are. Our team that is in charge of our Apple application are definitely also leveraging cloud code. And no, I mean, that's the beauty of the AI in terms of they can use whatever programming language they might have biased and issues and so on, but the programming language is sort of becoming almost irrelevant. I mean, we were having a conversation earlier today with some of our engineering leads about the fact that in the past when you are interviewing a candidate, sometimes you want the candidate to have a specific programming language background. But in practice, more often than not, it doesn't really matter. Like if you're a software engineer, whether it's Python or Typescript or whatever, you can easily learn it. And then now with AI and with tools like cloud code, you're also getting to another level of abstraction where the programming language doesn't even matter anymore because anyway it's the cloud code that's going to code for you. So it's going to be an interesting, a transition, I think, for software engineers in the world to understand how to manage that abstraction.
A
Yeah, actually I think maybe part of your Dashlane culture, but you kind of prefer native languages. The Android's in Kotlin, the Apple stuff's in Swift, you do Command line and Typescript. I think that's admirable. But I guess in a way, yeah, it doesn't matter anymore, does it?
D
Well, it will still matter to be a sort of closely integrated in an operating system. If you want to be deeply integrated into iOS, you need to use the iOS native languages. And Swift is native language for the Apple platform. So that allows us to have.
A
Native is always better.
D
Yeah, exactly. It allows us to have the right level of performance, the right level of capabilities from the operating system, the right level of UX and so on.
A
And no Electron.
D
And no Electron. We regularly re evaluate should we have a cross platform type of programming language. But so far we always decided that it's still worth it to have native language.
A
Yeah, that's one of the things that makes Dashlane stand out actually is its native ui. So let me talk a little bit about the Fido alliance, because that's a different hat you wear. And of course we can thank the Fido alliance for the passkey implementation and definition. Were you involved with that?
D
I mean, we've been part of the Fido alliance for a long time. But we were not involved in the starting point of the Paschis and we joined the board right shortly after Passkis came out because we wanted to be more involved. Actually, that was a trigger for us to step up our involvement. And since then it's been a team effort because a lot of people at DASH are actually involved in the Fido alliance at different levels, whether it's in technical working group. You mentioned the credential exchange protocol that recently came out of Fido to be able to import and export credentials and passages from one provider to the other. That's something that we co sponsored with one password and the other password manager to get it to life and then put it suggested it to the Fido alliance and then everybody aligned around it. That's the beauty of the FIDO Alliance. You have all the different players of the industry that are together and working together for the benefit of the ecosystem.
A
Right. Bravo. Yeah. Thank you for Peskies. I think it's really important that they be added to every password manager. I know it was a little slow to get the adoption going, but now everybody, I think supports it. Is it. Do you feel like, is this going to be a more secure solution? That it's a better solution?
D
I mean, it's definitely more secure. It's not fishable, it's not perfect. There's no perfect solution, but it's way better than passwords. So I'm hoping for a day where there's no passwords because the problem of password is that they can be stolen and then you lose your access and you have all the bad size and forgotten. And forgotten. Exactly.
A
Hey, he's referring to the fact. I know what he's talking about. I know what you're talking about. I forgot my Bitcoin wallet password a long time ago. I should have put it in dashlane. A little more about Mythos. One of the reasons, I think there's a couple of reasons Anthropic held it back. We've debated this on the show. It's good for marketing. Is it also so compute intense that they can't really support it as a public release? But also I think it's pretty clear now we're starting to see this. It is good at finding vulnerabilities. It has found vulnerabilities have been lurking in operating systems and browsers for years. And. And it's also seems likely because Microsoft has its version now. OpenAI has its version. It seems likely that Even generally trained AIs are very good at finding flaws in code. Are we going to enter. Is this going to be the year where zero days just proliferate?
D
I mean, the pessimist in me will say yes.
B
The pessimist in me will probably be right more often than it's wrong.
D
Because the problem is that even if they restrict the access to those tools, I mean, the tools are going to leak, and we know they've already leaked. So it means that the bad actors already have access to those tools one way or another, and they're already probably using them to find zero days. So they might as well make it public and help everybody get their code base in a good order. So I'd rather. I understand some of the reasons, but I'd rather we. I think we're now past the moment where we should be able, even as a small player, to have access to the more advanced models, to be able to anticipate and fix our own vulnerabilities, because I'm pretty sure we'll find a lot of them in Dashlane eventually. Even though we're trying our best to
A
not have any vulnerabilities, it's impossible not to.
D
Exactly.
A
Have you been lobbying Anthropic for access?
D
We've been lobbying Anthropic for access for sure. And they told us, well, you're on the waiting list, and it will come.
A
It's a big issue because ideally, you'd like everybody who has software that needs to stay secure to have it before the bad guys get it, but that's a lot of people. It is inevitable that this is going to leak out. And even if it doesn't, people are learning skills with existing models that, I mean, you can find a lot of stuff with the existing models. One of the things Mythos seems really good at is chaining exploits, which is a technique hackers have long used to get into all kinds of stuff. It's a chicken and egg problem, I guess.
D
Yeah, it is. I think the one thing it reinforces for me is that beyond the pure Mythos story, having your basics right matters even more today than they used before, because the basics are still going to sort of mitigate the risk. And also having an architectural design that's meant to be as resilient as possible will matter. So in our case, what we call our zero knowledge architecture, the fact that we never want to see the customer data, has been the heart of the dashing architecture. And it's very complex to do, so everything needs to be encrypted. You can never access the data, so it's very hard to troubleshoot. But that was a choice from the early days. And of course it's not perfect. There's always potential flaws in your architecture. But at least we're hoping that by doing so and trying to be as true as our principle as we can, we will be more resilient to those type of Mythos type of attacks, if we want to call them that way in the future. Same thing for the AI going back to the AI. We're building privacy preserving AI pipelines because yet again, we don't want to have access to the customer data. I think that will make us more resilient in the future. If we don't use the customer data for training, if we don't see the customer data when we're running inference and so on, it doesn't mean that the hackers and the bad people will not be able to find flows and get access to it. But at least hopefully the blast radius will be smaller.
A
You've said that you're pretty sure that spy agencies and others are already practicing what people call harvest now, decrypt later. They're collecting as much as they can, hoping that as we get quantum computing that we'll be able to crack these. What are we doing? What are you doing to prepare for this? I don't know. It could be tomorrow, it could be a day, a decade from now. It's almost impossible to know.
D
Well, Google said something around 2030, so we'll see if they're right.
A
They're working hard at it to create a quantum.
D
Yeah, so I mean we've been prototyping with post quantum for a long time. At Dashlane we were waiting for two things to really get moving to production. The first one, the NIST ran a big competition to find to try and define what would be the standard algorithm of, of the post quantum era. So that happened in December 24and now sort of the implementation is ongoing of those algorithms.
A
So we're settled on a couple. Yeah, yeah.
D
So that's good. And now we can sort of work in confidence that the crypto primitive that are required to be in the post quantum world exist and it's time for us to implement them and which we've started doing actually in the Dash and in the DASH team.
A
And what do you do about this idea of harvesting now and decrypting later? Are you perfect forward secrecy? Are you implementing ratcheting? What are you doing to.
D
So in the case of Dashlane, that will mostly impact sharing transactions because you need asymmetric encryption to be to be impacted. So hopefully the rest of the Dashlane involved and so on is not quantum.
A
That's important.
D
That's important.
A
A symmetric key is not so much vulnerable. Right?
D
Yeah, exactly. So we will have to rotate all the. Eventually we'll have to rotate all the keys for the sharing transactions of all the dashing customers, which is going to be a painful and long migration, as you can imagine, because you need to do it without breaking things for your customers and also ensuring backward compatibility for the old versions of Dashlane. But, yeah, that's going to be a journey and a complicated one, but it's important to get started for real, and
A
everybody will be doing it. So do you think Google's right? 2030? Is that too short, too long?
D
I know they know better, but I mean, the day doesn't matter to your point, if the actors are already harvesting the data for the future.
A
We know the NSA is. Yeah.
D
We need to get started.
A
Yeah. Frederica, I really appreciate your time and your hard work and I appreciate what you've done in the FIDO alliance and what you've done to make a really impressive password manager. Not one of our sponsors. That's okay, we'll forgive you. Dashlane has always been kind of the secret weapon of a lot of Mac users. At least-lane.com if you want to know more. And Frederic Revin, thank you so much for spending some time with us talking about the rapidly changing security landscape.
D
Thank you very much for having me.
A
Yeah, a real pleasure. Thank you, Frederic.
D
Thank you.
A
We'll have more in just a bit on intelligent machines. Yeah. I hope you get Mythos soon.
C
Yeah.
A
Good luck.
D
By the way.
B
It's a long wait list.
D
Yeah. One of the problems that we're actually trying to find vulnerabilities with the existing models, but even Opus 4.7, so you have a limited context. And to your point, by chaining vulnerabilities, it's not able to do that. So we're having.
A
Even with a million. A million context token to context Windows. Not. You can't do that.
D
Yeah. It's limited success.
A
So it's the context window that makes chaining hard. I guess you'd have to understand the flaw. Keep that in your memory and then work on the next one. But without losing that context, I think
D
we'll probably have to build ourselves different agents that are changing themselves to be able to.
A
Or maybe sub agents or. Yeah, there's got to be an architecture. Do you have any idea what they did in Mythos to make that possible?
D
No, but I'M curious to read the technical design when it comes out.
A
Yeah. They haven't even put out a system card, have they? Or have they?
D
I mean, they've just shared the results of what they've been doing. But under the hood, right?
A
We don't know much. Frederic, thank you so much. Appreciate your time.
D
Thanks a lot.
A
All right, take care.
C
Take care.
D
Bye. Thank you.
A
Stay cool. He's in New York City. Is it hot?
C
Brooklyn?
A
Is it really hot?
D
It's really hot.
A
I'm sorry.
D
Bye. Bye.
A
Bye. It's 83 here. What is it in Brooklyn hot?
B
It's 91.
A
Oh, that's awful. And you don't have AC, right?
B
I mean, I've got one AC unit in the window behind me. The other one I just. Because they're both Madea's. That one I replaced last year and forgot to with the recall and forgot to take it out of my window. The LA one in bedroom I haven't replaced so I can't turn it on. But I did just submit for the recall ref.
A
So they all got recalled.
B
A significant chunk of Medea U shaped window acs. Window acs. In my opinion, they got recalled due to mold issues.
A
Oh, that's not good.
B
Did we see this story was just updated, but maybe it came out earlier. So you guys saw it. But if not, Berber just reported that mind blowing growth is about to propel Anthropic into its first profitable quarter.
C
Yes, I put it up on the rundown.
A
Let's. Let's talk about that. And we will also talk about what looks like an OpenAI IPO Friday. There's some breaking news. We'll get to that next. And SpaceX filed SpaceX Monday. Yep, it's going to be cray cray
C
and we got lots of Google and
A
then there's this like eight hours worth of Google stuff. All right, hang on. We'll have more intelligent machines right after this word from our sponsor. Intelligent machines brought to you today by Monarch. I just got a new device immediately signed into Monarch because I love having that dashboard. Summer's almost here. Time to plan your vacation. Wouldn't it be nice not to worry about whether you can afford it or have some help in saving for it? Good thing Monarch is here to help you organize your finances so you can enjoy your summer and know when your money's taken care of. Monarch, it's the personal finance app that tracks everything. Accounts, investments, savings goals, spending. Get your first year of Monarch Core for half off. Just 50 bucks when you use our promo code IM Monarch isn't your average personal finance app actually really it's a second generation. The people who designed Monarch had designed a very well known app prior to this and learned a lot about it and they have made Monarch be like the next gen something better. Most apps, I'll give you an example, tell you what you've already spent. Monarch is forward looking. It helps you set goals and map out big purchases. See if you're on track to get that new AC unit before it's too late to adjust. It has AI built in but AI built in judiciously, intelligently. And one of the things I like about it is that AI is using your financial data. It's like having a financial advisor in the in the Monarch app you can ask Monarch's AI assistant anything about your finances. Like, you know, how much did I spend on travel last summer? Or maybe you shouldn't ask this Can I afford this vacation without touching my savings? It'll help you spot things you wouldn't think to look for with AI insights. And for instance, here's one that's always a big question. Am I spending more just because I'm spending more or is this because of inflation? And the insights can help get a heads up on what's happening with your money. With the AI weekly recap it flags spending spikes, net worth, shifts, upcoming expenses. This is a nice it's a little feature but people like you Paris that have a friend group and probably do things like travel together and stuff, you can now split the bill without headache. With Monarch's bill split you scan the receipt. Everyone says that's mine, that's mine, that's mine. And Monarch settles it up for you with no separate app needed. That's just a nice little feature. There's lots of them in there. It's really a thoughtful app. Use code imonarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off. Just $50. It's 50% off your first year monarch.com with a code I am Monarch. All right, back to intelligent machines. I guess we should talk about the breaking news.
C
I put three links up at the top of my section.
A
I shall go to the top of your section in that case. Nvidia having a very big quarter I guess not much of a surprise there. $82 billion in first quarter revenue, up
C
85% in the quarter from the year early period.
A
Geesh. They're selling them as fast as they can make them. And of course this is really the data center piece, right? Especially according to the Wall Street Journal. The sale of computing hardware, their GPUs as well as other general purpose chips. Sales of networking hardware get this tripled from a year ago. Tripled to $14.8 billion. They're going to do a buyback.
C
$80 billion, increasing a dividend from $0.01 to $0.25.
A
Oh, that's nice.
C
Said that they would. The company intends to return 50% of its free cash flow this year to shareholders because they can't figure out what to buy with it.
A
Journal is also saying that Anthropic might have its first profitable quarter thanks to a surge of 130% in revenue. 10.9 billion in the June quarter.
C
Thank you. Agents.
B
Wonder what I think Agents?
A
I think enterprise. I think.
B
No, I think it's definitely enterprise. I think it's a combination of enterprise contracts. Claude. Claude Bot usage spiking and generally all the things that have been making people mad over the last quarter with Anthropic cracking down on usage.
A
Well, and that's one of the things they did. That's why I think it may not be so much agents, because unlike OpenAI, you can't use your sub. Your subscription, your Claude max subscription in an agent. You can only use it in Claude code. You have to buy API tokens. So I guess, and maybe it is agents, maybe people say no, I still want to use Opus, so I'm going to pay through the nose for it. $4.8 billion in sales in the first quarter. Its quarterly revenue now growing faster than Zoom did during the pandemic.
C
Okay, that's a metric.
A
That's a metric. Faster than.
B
It may be a red flag, but.
A
Well, I think the deal with XAI was really really big in this because they were I think very much compute constrained and having all of a sudden some compute headroom means they can grow like this. They actually are growing faster than Google and Facebook in the run up to their IPOs. And as I mentioned, it looks like they're heading towards an IPO soon. OpenAI, we think the Journal thinks may file paperwork for its IPO as soon as Friday. SpaceX as soon as June. Although I heard maybe Monday. Not that I have any connections or anything. I read that somewhere. I wonder. And we know Anthropic wants to go public in SpaceX.
C
Musk wrote this. Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multi planetary, to understand the true nature of the universe and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.
A
Oh Lord.
C
What friggin ego.
A
Yeah, or maybe too much K. But anyway, I think given this, these recent results for Anthropic, this would probably be pushing them a little closer.
C
So what happens if you have very similar IPOs? Space X. Not really, but still a big one.
A
Well, SpaceX is Xi right.
C
Plus anthropic plus.
A
I guess it just depends how much money is out there for.
C
That's what I'm asking. Is there, Is there, Does they. Do they hurt each other?
A
I think not. I think there is a unlimited pile of money and that many investors will hedge their bets and buy all three.
C
All right. If you don't invest, you know, you're a bad investor. You wouldn't invest.
A
I'm the wrong guy to ask, but
C
if you invested each of you.
A
I don't.
C
What would you invest here?
A
Who's going to win this race?
B
I mean, who's. I think that it's. Wasn't there a report, was it this week that someone had reported that most of these companies might end up being in the, like Fortune 100 or something, so that they'll get investment based on
A
getting an index fund is what you're saying.
B
Yeah, I mean, they're already going to be an index fund. That's going to be kind of a moot point because they're going to have a lot of capital.
A
Yeah, I do. I do. I am in only mutual funds, only index funds. And I'm sure I haven't looked because I don't want to really know that I have a stake in all of them.
C
Yeah, I'm in Triple Q, which is.
A
Sure, that's nasdaq. Most of my stuff is in retirement target retirement funds. So Vanguard does a good job with those and I let them handle it. But yeah, I'm sure that a lot of it. I don't know, that may make you nervous. Let me look. Here's one of the funds I'm in. 18% of it is in Nvidia. 15% of it's in Apple. See, I don't like it that much. Is 10% in Microsoft and then the rest of it is single digits. So that's a technology fund that I'm in. So, you know. Yeah, I guess. But believe me, I'm not. I don't want to really know. And I don't invest. That's why I invest in baskets. And yes, I think that'd be the smart thing to do. I don't think there's going to be a winner. I don't think you're going to say, oh, yeah, go with OpenAI. It's going all the way. I think it's just as likely to crash and burn as anybody else.
E
Well, SpaceX does have all the juicy government contracts already.
A
Yeah, maybe SpaceX because I mean don't
B
they all have juicy government contracts?
A
No, but SpaceX has the juicy space.
E
Yeah, the space.
A
Nobody has been able to complete compete with them. So maybe if you had to do that you would. Yeah, maybe you would go with SpaceX XAI I don't know. We're the wrong people to ask.
C
Q. Q. Q. Which is known for tech, is 9% Nvidia, 7.3% Apple. So it's much lower.
A
I think Nvidia is probably a good bet, but by the guy who's selling the picks and shovels, not the gold miner.
C
There is new competition, but it does take time to get that competition up and running. Yeah, if anything happens to Taiwan where all bets are off.
B
Yes, the SpaceX. This just in from Wired. The SpaceX IPO filing reveals that Anthropic is paying $15 billion a year to access their data centers.
A
Oh yeah, he has filed. He filed just now. NASDAQ spcx. So the file. Yeah. Boy, this is moving fast. Hard to keep, hard to keep Track. They're targeting $75 billion which would give them a valuation of more than 2 trillion. SPCX. They filed confidentially for the listing but it is now public back in April
B
now and people are trolling through it.
C
What are they finding besides Musk's quotes?
A
Goldman Sachs, Morgan stanley leading the IPO, bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase also working on the deal. Formal marketing when SpaceX will disclose the proposed terms of the share sale is expected to begin as early as June 4th. Pricing will be June 11th.
B
This is from Sean O' Kane at TechCrunch. Says big revenue from Starlink, more than space launch and AI combined. Musk is king will have majority voting control post IPO. 36 pages of risk factors, which is a lot of pages of risk factors for someone who hasn't read an IPO doc before.
A
Wow, is that. That's more than normal.
C
Yeah, I think every page just says Musk.
A
Musk is a big risk factor. Well, I mean I don't normally spend a lot of time on the finance side of this because except to the degree it tells you a little bit about what.
B
I mean, this is just fascinating because these documents, when you're filing to go public like this, you have to include all material information about the business and you there are legal consequences if you don't include that information in your public Filing documents. So it allows the public for the first time ever to get a look inside one of the really opaque private company like SpaceX.
A
True that. Let's talk about Google IO.
C
Yeah.
A
Something a little more concrete or is it? This is the problem I always have with Google I O they announced many things, many of them never happen. You don't know when they're going to ship a lot of this stuff. Some of it did ship. Gemini 3.5 flash shipped.
C
I thought I wasn't going to get it again. I was starting to have a workspace fit. I just had to restart my Chromebook.
A
Oh good. And you may remember Jeff, I got so excited during Google I O I decided to get that same Chromebook.
C
Oh, you already got it?
A
Yeah, oh yeah, it came today.
C
Stickers on it already.
A
Well, you got to immediately cover up the Lenovo name and the Chromebook name so nobody will know it's not a MacBook
C
as you get drummed out of the core.
A
Well, I'm really curious, you know, how much I can do without a real operating system with just basically a browser. And I expect quite a bit.
C
That was the thing that really struck me as we, as we did it yesterday is that I think that Google presents itself as the retail B2C AI company. Yes, they have B2B. Yes, they have vibe coding. Yes they can catch up with the others but they're going to make AI ready for the masses and it is
A
probably how most people will experience it, I guess. Microsoft copilot, maybe a lot of Windows users out there. Apple being laggard in AI. I mean I don't think anybody with an iPhone thinks they have much AI in their iPhone.
B
Just how I like it.
A
Well, but that's going to change in two, three weeks.
B
I mean all of my friends that have. My friends that have Android phones often complain whenever they send me like an image like oh I'm so sorry for the AI upscaling. I can't turn it off.
A
Oh, interesting, interesting.
B
I'm not sure which sort of Android device they have but that I think is this is. So I want to hear you guys full report on. I am but one of the top line numbers I saw floating around is that Google mentioned they think they have now 900 million active users or monthly active users for Gemini. But I think that, that we were just talking about something on this topic at my job actually just because some colleagues were like oh my God, now in Google Docs there's no way to get rid of this big box box, the bottom that Keeps asking you to prompt Gemini and it's so annoying. And I'm like, oh, there is. You have to go and turn it off for every single document. And it still doesn't stop every time you type a line from Gemini from triggering. And I bet that's partially where this. I bet that some part of stuff like that is being included in these monthly active user numbers. The fact that Google has made it impossible to turn off Gemini in its products. What do you think, Jeff?
C
Yeah, I think that's fair. But I also think it's getting a lot of use on its own merits because it's also easy to get. It's easy to get Gemini. I'm using it more and more. When I finally fought to get, I didn't fight a winning battle. But after I finally succeeded in getting Gemini in my browser, I'm using it a lot more by choice. I'm using it to summarize articles and that kind of stuff all the time. So just on a fairly casual basis, my use has increased because it's so available.
B
How do you find it?
C
I find it generally good, but I'm not asking the complicated things. I'm not at the point yet. What I'm really interested in when we get to Spark and the other things that was announced yesterday is that I'm really interested to get the vibe coding without command line and without vibe coding. You know, do this for me every day. Google look into this constantly, let me know, give me a report, try this difficult thing while I'm gone.
B
You know, Claude could do that for you right now.
C
Yeah, but I gotta install Claude on a machine. I have a Chromebook, so I can't. Right. I can do it on the Mac, but I don't have the Mac with me all day, so. But I've done this on purpose. I really. You guys are the nerdier on this stuff. And what interests me is that retail level of AI and will there be uptake on that will if people find it useful or not. Claude is magnificent and powerful and doing great things. But what's made Anthropic so successful is profitable, is B2B. OpenAI is trailing them and trying to catch up with B2B. Google is the B2C company and Google has me. It has my email, it has my files, it has everything else about me. So it's also better positioned to be that both because it presents AI and because it can incorporate my data into it. The other interesting thing that I wonder about, I didn't really address yesterday was how much Context. Can I give Gemini ongoing persistent context?
A
Yeah, this is always. Yeah.
B
Do they have Gemini md?
A
You mean like a markdown file that has memory? Yeah, yeah, I'm sure they do.
B
But I mean is it as common.
A
This is why you want to use a command line interface versus but you
B
can't do that if you're Jeff and you live a Chromebook centric life, you can.
A
Chromebook has a terminal.
B
Does it?
A
Oh yeah.
B
I thought that was kind of the whole point is that you don't mess around with stuff. It's browser based only.
A
No, no.
B
Isn't that in some ways antithetical to the way a normal human being person who your mother to do a Chrome
C
if she were going to do AI would not be going to terminal.
B
I do think that there is. I think that enter. I mean obviously we're at a stage now where I guess I, I was going to say the average person has probably already chosen an AI service they like but that's incredibly out of such. The average person probably has not chosen an AI system that they like because they probably are not using one actively on a daily basis. We're talking with average consumer.
C
Yeah.
B
But I do think that a way that the average person is going to get to that will be through whatever enterprise contact their work has if they do have something like that. Or it will be through something like Google integration into products or Apple prompting them to select a model to install Amazon's Echo.
A
It's Siri and it's Google Voice. I mean those are the.
C
I don't think those. I think, I think shopping is gonna be a more, more reliable path into this.
A
Well, that's the universe.
C
Theo yesterday really emphasized this that, that Google, which was once was the company that said we want to get you in and out as soon as possible. We want to take you to the web. Now Google wants the fence around you,
A
they want to keep you.
C
And so they demonstrated yesterday buying from Best Buy without ever going to Best Buy.
A
I honestly think the most consequential announcement they make is it made is the change to search is. Absolutely. So I understand Google was very much threatened by perplexity and that kind of search where people were doing AI based search and seemed to prefer it and Google did that. They dipped a toe in with the AI assist and stuff like that. But really what they're saying now is when you do a search you're not going to get a list of links, you're going to get an answer, you're going to get a graph, you're Going to get a chart, you're going to get an illustration. We are going to keep you in Google. Google has become more like Perplexity or chatgpt. And that is going to be the primary way people see and use Google. Unless they rebel against it. It'll be interesting, but we really don't have a choice. So when you go to google.com now or search in your browser, you're going to get this kind of new kind of searching.
C
Feel lucky?
A
Can I turn off AI mode? I mean, let's search for. Let's see. What was it? How does a black hole form? So there are links to NASA.
C
Now go back and do the same one or just go in AI mode.
A
Well, but I think this is the AI overview is. Is.
C
I think so. I'm curious whether it gives you something different if you clicked on AI mode.
A
Okay, let's. Yeah, I'm sure it would. Let's go there.
C
It's there. You got it right there.
A
Supercharged search with personal intelligence. And now it's got things floating around.
C
Floating around. Leo.
A
Yeah. Let's collect these. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, I choose Wired.
B
No, Leo, don't. If you're watching this, don't do what he's doing.
A
I'm connecting everything.
C
I welcome my new master.
A
Paris. We have to see. Okay, this is what they were demonstrating, which is what a school kid's gonna get. Notice no links at all.
C
It says licensed by Google. From whom? That's really interesting, huh?
E
There's a little link. There's a little link up the top.
C
Above. Above, yeah.
A
If I click the link. No, it just makes it big.
E
No, no, that's a little.
C
Click the link above that, the paragraph above it at the end of the paragraph and there.
A
Ah, okay. Wikipedia, Earth Sky Test book Study, Smarter UK and NBC News.
B
Yeah, that is interesting that the inline image is licensed from Google because I bet if this is going to be the way that they're responding to all search results, that it's basically its own website. You can't be stealing other people's copy your images. Images.
A
But they are burying, aren't they? I mean, they are. I mean, even with these links, they're burying it.
B
Well, notice that the one thing they're not burying is images that are sourced because we have very strong copyright protection on images in this country.
A
Although I imagine that in some cases these will be generated by Nano Banana. Probably not fast enough for Google to.
C
No, that's the point. Eventually.
A
I just think this is a big, big shift away from the list of links. To basically a Google. But they had, I think they had to do it.
C
Yeah, this is, this was their path to the. I mean this is their primary interface and they had to incorporate it there.
A
They were going to lose it. They really were going to lose it. They still have an I'm feeling lucky button.
C
Try that.
A
Oh, I got Google trends. It shifted when I. Let me go back to the big G. Wait a minute.
C
You have to put it in first then say I'm feeling. Oh, I'm feeling mindful. I'm feeling lucky. Oh, doodly. Oh, it doesn't stay.
A
Is this a game we are playing here? Let's see. Running shoes. Okay, now I'm feeling lucky. So it pulled me to a runners world article which I'm feeling lucky.
C
That's an old fashioned Google function.
A
Yeah, that's what it used to do which is pick a website for me.
C
Sorry.
A
Well, let's see what running shoes. With that I'm feeling lucky. I mean this isn't instantaneous, this isn't overnight. Okay. This is kind of Google shopping thing and that's by the way by the next thing they want to do is this universal shopping interface where you don't ever leave Google.
C
Let's go back and say running shoes for flat feet and do the AI mode.
A
Okay.
B
Jeff's trying to get some shopping done during.
A
All right. I don't blame you. You know, I do have flat feet.
C
I'm sure you like not knowing that.
A
It's probably really thinking hard. Connect. Checking connect. Oh, it's going through my email. It's going through my. See, now it thinks I have flat feet.
C
Sorry.
A
Thanks Jeff. So if you ask, does it have memory? Oh yeah, it has memory.
C
Oh, look at the top right of the screen. There's a little AI Leo there.
A
No, that's, that's just the profile picture.
C
Oh, it is. Oh, I thought it was for the AI.
A
I mean it is AI generated, but it's just my profile.
B
But it's AI generated at his behest.
C
Okay. Yes.
A
That is my Wall Street Journal, you know, dot right picture. Okay. And now the other thing is of course they're going to get vendors to buy into this ucp. Oh yeah, because this is the way you're going to show up. People aren't going to go to Dick's Sporting Goods and search for trainers. They're going to, they're going to do this and you better show up in this search result. It's a big way for Google to make money. It's a great way for them to defend themselves. The other thing I found really, so that I think was the most consequential announcement is the, is the really dramatic change to Google search, which they've been pushing for for a long time. This, the other thing I thought was interesting, but only as an AI user, I don't know if this will be interesting to other people is, you know, remember that this, this is the year of openclaw of the agent and Google hasn't really been a big player in this. So they announced Spark, which is an agent for the rest of us, an easy to use agent that does. And this is where you get Memory Paris, to answer your question. It also is where you get background tasks.
B
I'd just like to say briefly to interrupt. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am both surprised and frustrated that Google has introduced another thing that has a different name for the same thing. It's the most googly.
A
Microsoft just names everything copilot. So at least Google gives things different names.
B
Well, it doesn't just name everything copilot, it adds the word copilot into names of things where the word copilot should not be.
A
Oh, Ant Pruitt is in the Discord chat and he's asking, I think, a question. We probably assume everybody knows what we mean when we say token. So what is a token? Does it equate to a dollar? What is it
B
kind of like your hero's dollar?
C
You do it.
A
Token is the basic unit of inference of intelligence. So your AI doesn't think in words or individual numbers or even bits and bytes. It thinks in tokens, which are often number, number of words. When you give it a prompt, it takes that, tokenizes it and sends it off to the inference engine. So that's tokens in and then it responds to you in what looks like English. But really what it's done is it's taken the tokens, you've sent it, run it through the LLM, which has all these weights and produced a series of tokens. Not words, but like words might be more than one word, might be a word and a half, but a series of tokens which then are translated into English on your screen. That's tokens out. If you have a subscription, they're not counting the tokens. Well, they actually they kind of are. If you use too many of them, they'll say, you got to take a break now. You can't use any more until, you know, 11pm on Friday. You probably some people have seen that if they've got a subscription, you get a Limit to a number of hours, usually a five hour window, and then also to a week and in some cases a month. So you can use up your token allotment even with a subscription. But what they really want, almost everybody wants you to do now is pay by the token. And so by the way, Gemini Flash 3.5 is expensive. It is. It is not an inexpensive. And the pricing, when you talk about using it is a token pricing. Let me see if I can find
C
their token pricing and the, the. If you, if you listen, as I do religiously to Jensen Huang keynotes, it's an economy of tokens. And his goal is to produce more tokens at less cost and become ever more efficient. That's, that's the value that he's trying to build for his clients. So even if you've already bought his chips, his next version of his software will make it more efficient so that you get more tokens for less cost. And the cost to the company is energy or is your, is your infrastructure and your energy your electricity bill. The cost to us as users is what they choose to pass on to us and how they do that. But it's all an economy of tokens.
A
So Flash, the new 3.5 Flash is A$50 per million tokens, which sounds cheap, but it's very easy to. That's tokens in to use up that the output price is.
C
You give us any of the, any of the things you built. Leo, how many tokens it added up to in total? Do you have any?
A
Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't usually do that,
C
but yeah, I don't have a sense of the, of the scale.
A
Usually what, a million? If I code for four or five hours in a day, it will have cost me or two, which is how many tokens? Oh, tens of thousands probably. I don't know.
C
Okay, so just not a million.
A
Yeah, you know, because I work, I don't really use APIs ever. I use subs. I have a Claude, I have subscriptions for all of these. Let me see. I have a Claude usage app. Actually I can go to the Claude website and find that I have a
C
big storm coming over, so if I disappear, the generator will come on and I'll come back.
A
Well, and I have all the doors and windows open because it's hot here and you might be hearing Lisa talking on the phone in the background.
C
I do say hi, yell hi Lisa.
A
She's on the phone.
B
The chat here is at 2.
A
I know, I apologize. It's okay. It's too hot.
C
You know what? You know what? Leota Schwitz.
A
I can't Schwitz. I can't Schwitz. It's not like credits because it's directly tied to the representation that AI uses for the information you're giving it, the prompts you're giving it, and the information it's giving you back. So you're paying directly for how much of the AI you're using. It's measured in tokens. And that's why we talk about tokens maxing, because some companies foolishly forgetting the adage that you get whatever you measure. Right, right. Companies were foolishly in the past saying, how many lines of code did you write today? That's not a good way to measure productivity. And then they said, well, how many tokens did you use? And. And they even had leaderboards of people who used the most tokens, which is roughly a measurement of how much AI you used. I trying to find my usage anyway. Oh, yes, that's a good point, Darren. OKE is making is it's not merely what you're typing. If, for instance, as Paris and I did, we ingested this Physics of Filter Coffee book into our AIs, that might be several hundred thousand tokens worth of data. So that's another way you use tokens is, you know, very often when I'm coding, I will say, well, here's a GitHub repo I want you to look at and get some ideas from, or, you know, copy or whatever. So it has to read all of that. So a lot of the tokens are not just the stuff you're typing, it's the stuff you're reading as well. So I don't know what my usage is, but I'm gonna go close the door because Lisa is pretty loud. Talk amongst yourselves.
C
No, it's her dulcet tones. We enjoy it.
A
We don't mind.
B
I mean, I think it might be kind of annoying to people who are probably listening to this as an audio format. So yeah, we probably should.
C
All right, so turn it into a sauna, Leo.
B
I'm looking at the SpaceX IPO, which all of the reporters of the world are currently pouring through right now. It's a real Bar Oppenheimer moment for this to drop at the same time as Nvidia earnings. And one of the things listed in the risk factors is that it has a spicy and unhinged mode on Grok. But it also has in its risk factors a note that advertisers generally do not have long term commitments to the X platform and may reduce or discontinue their advertising spending for a variety of reasons outside of our control.
C
If you could do a search on Musk. Does it say anything about him being spicy and uncontrolled? He's. He is a risk factor.
B
Yeah, they're actually. He's mentioned a lot. Let's see. Musk, Musk, Musk, Musk. Mostly about his stock. Yeah. One of the risks is conflicts of interest could arise in the future between us on the one hand and Mr. Musk or. And the entities owned or affiliated by him on the other hand. Yeah, there's the whole section about how we don't know what business activities Elon Musk may be doing and they may differ than the things that are best for our business. Oh, there's another. Yeah. We are highly dependent the continued services of Mr. Musk and other key personnel on the loss or reduced involvement of him or one or more of them could affect our ability to execute our business strategy. For instance, currently also. Okay, can we just have a second for this sentence? For instance, Mr. Musk currently serves as Techno King and chief executive officer of Tesla and is all of in other emerging technology venture ventures such as Neuralink and the Boring Company. Mr. Musk has also previously served as senior advisor to the President of the United States.
A
Okay, that is definitely a risk factor.
B
Yes.
A
I think it's certainly hurting Tesla sales. Techno King.
B
Should I control F for Techno King?
A
Yes, if Techno King is mentioned more
C
and then Ketamine.
B
Techno King is mentioned twice else. Mr. Musk is also the Techno King of Tesla. Yes, yes.
C
Oh, you know you need a new business card. Leo, you are a Techno King.
A
I am the Techno King.
C
Lisa's the Techno Queen.
A
I thought Chief Twit was pretty clever, but then Elon stole it briefly and I lost. Lost interest. All right, let me see if I'm getting. Okay, here's my usage on chat GPT. Well, this is may spend $0. Okay, that's because I want a subscription plan, so I can't. I want to know what. I guess I can't. I've used it a lot. It's my primary model for my agent. Quickie. Not the name I gave it. All right.
C
Well, I mean it's like the early days of. Of. Of the Internet and long distance phone calling.
A
Right. We used to have it front a
C
clock on us, right in our minds and then unlimited.
A
Did you. You're too young to remember long distance calls costing a lot of money.
B
Yep. I have no concept of that.
A
It was so bad that you would start the conversation. I'm calling long distance, so I'm gonna make this quick because you were getting billed by the minute and it was not. It might have been a buck a minute. In some cases it was expensive or more.
C
It was a way to get off a phone call. Oh, this is costing you a fortune. I think we should.
B
I mean, actually I do recall like that with calls abroad.
C
Yeah, yeah, for a time. Right.
A
Not anymore though, right?
B
I mean legitimately, in recent. Like this is the thing. I for some reason still had it in my head that if I didn't have a right setting, turned on my cell phone plan and I was calling someone in France or something, I would get charged something extra. But that's obviously not true anymore.
C
One of the most important events in the Internet history was Tom Evslin at AT&T World Net when he decided to go flat rate pricing. 1999 months. That took off.
A
So you were. Yeah, you were too young.
C
Took off the clock about it and, and it. And it exploded usage of the Internet. And that was a terribly important moment.
A
Yep.
C
And I. So mom's office used to be about two miles away from here.
E
So you don't know what a collect call is, Paris?
B
I know what a collect call is
A
called from prison calls.
C
She wasn't born yesterday, just the day before that.
E
But we see collect calls as a messenger like you, the username as the mess. And then did they just reject the call? We used to do that all the time.
A
Oh yeah, right. Because that was a signal. I will call you collect. Don't accept. That's a signal that I got home already.
E
Yeah. And when they ask you what your name is, remember that, Benito. Wow. And when they ask you what your name is, it's your message. You don't leave your name, you leave your message.
A
The message, my name be me. Buy me a loaf of bread on your way home. That's your name.
C
Do you remember calling 411 for information, Paris?
B
I do, yeah.
C
Okay, Good. You remember telephone 411.
A
Remember goog 411?
B
No. What is that?
A
That Google for a while supplanted 411 from the phone company with their own goog411.
B
Awful name.
A
Yeah. But it. Then they discontinued it. Turned out the only reason they did is they wanted to capture a lot of voice samples so they have better voice synthesis.
B
Oh boy.
A
I don't think they really hid that. What else? There's a new Gemini Omni any to any model which right now only does video. But eventually, essentially we'll do anything text picture video to anything text picture video. So I have been seeing some people say, you know, the benchmarks for Gemini Flash aren't very good. It is overpriced for what you're getting. So I would I yesterday I think Jeff we were kind of in the reality distortion field of the as is often the case with these keynotes it all sounds very exciting but even then I did want to issue the caution that Google often shows these amazing things that never come out. For instance, a year ago may remember Dieter Bohn, former Verge technology reporter who went to work for Google showing off Google glasses.
C
Well, Jason Howell today said this is the third year they've shown off Google Glass before it's for sale.
A
So someday now they say this year later this year I do think that all of the companies are gonna release basically meta ray ban versions.
C
I was fascinated that the consumer coverage in major press was led with the glasses.
A
Yeah, that's a product.
C
I mean changing search is a much bigger story.
A
I think it's the big story. Yeah but that's why you listen to this show as opposed to.
C
Exactly. And that's why you join to support it.
A
But this is gonna be. I think it's very clear. It's funny Google called these audio glasses even though it has two cameras prominently right on the front of it. They don't want you to think about the cameras and they said oh but but you'll know. You'll see the cameras. There'll be lights. These are the meta ray bands. But the Googles look very similar. They have Warby Parker and what was it? Gentle Giant. Some weird.
C
Yeah gentle. I want to see. Can you bring this? I want to see Paris's fashion view of the Gentle Giant ones.
A
Oh yeah. Because they were more for lady the ladies.
C
I want to see if they were stylish.
A
These are. This is part of their xr. They're also going to have Samsung make this. Was it Gentle Giant or something else? It was something.
C
Well just go to Google search for Google Glass.
A
Right.
C
There's this thing called search Leo and
A
you can hands on. Oh yeah. Wired had a big hands on with these glasses. Let me see if I could you know Conde I pay for Wired but you'd never know.
C
I keep forgetting you.
B
It's. I truly had the exact same issue 15 minutes ago. This is me with New York magazine as well. I'm literally never able to use my subscription.
C
Yes, well you can soon complain to James Murdoch.
A
He bought New York magazine as well as the rest of or at least
B
half the rest of much of Vox. Much of Vox if you're someone else. They did not buy the Verge, which is being left with a bunch of different properties. They did buy Vox Podcast, the Vox Podcast network, which includes the Vergecast and Decoder. So are those going to the dad to not daddy Murdoch, Are those going to son Murdoch, baby Murdoch, or are they. Are they staying with the unnamed company formerly known as Vox?
A
Well, there's a lot of money in the podcast business and particularly in the Kara Swisher podcast. Is that decoder?
B
No, that's a different podcast.
A
Decoder is Neali, that's Neeli Patel, and Verge cast is David Pearce. But I think the Verge cast, if it's not attached to the Verge, has no value at all because it's just basically a rehash of the Verge stories. Decoder is Nilay and Nilay is very associated with the Verge. I don't know. That's interesting. That was the most valuable part of Vox was its podcast business. Who knew podcasts. I should have gotten into that long ago. Here's the gentle monsters.
C
Maybe James will keep buying Leo.
A
He's not going to buy Twit. These are. This is for, I think the latest.
C
What do you think, Paris?
B
I mean, do those have cameras in them?
A
Yeah, right here.
C
You can see that little sort of.
B
No, I can't. I guess I don't have good contrast on my monitor right now. Yeah, no, those are just a really hot sunglass. I mean. Yes, this will make women more likely to wear the sunglasses now.
C
Okay, all right. That's the ruling.
A
This story from CNET will make men much less likely to wear these glasses. They really just close up. So the idea though is very much like the metas, except it's attached to Google and Google's got much more information about you. They have a phone, which Meta does not have and of course they have your photos and all of that stuff. So it probably be more useful than the Meta. But functionality I don't think is gonna be that different. And it's very interesting. They call them audio glasses. I thought that was really.
B
Well, I think it's because the average normie really does seem to use them for audio.
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
E
That's the input you get from it. That's what you get from it is audio. You can take pictures but you can't see.
C
Exactly, exactly.
A
That's a good point.
C
You can see them on your wall.
A
The heads up display this year, they say next year for the heads up display. That's the Devil's in the details on that. That's a hard thing to do. Well, there is no name, by the way, yet for Google's intelligent eyewear. This will be up to the individual manufacturers.
B
It isn't Google Eye O
A
I.
E
They aren't just Googles. There should just be Googles.
A
Googles. I'm wearing my Google goggles.
C
It should be Google goggles.
B
You know, we shouldn't be saying these ideas out loud. We should be pitching them, should be monetizing them.
C
They also haven't acknowledged that, that the operating system in the Google book is aluminium or they haven't named it. If it's not.
A
They haven't named it. They say. Yeah, they say it won't be aluminium.
C
They've definitely said that.
A
Yeah.
C
So that's.
A
And then that's the question, because I did go out and buy an old Chromebook. This is the, the one you have. It's widely accepted as the best Chromebook. It's not old. Chromebook Ultra with the Mediatek Companiono processor.
C
No fan.
A
Yay. It's actually a really nice laptop. It's got an OLED screen. It's not just very nice, 850 bucks, but the original.
C
The Pixelbooks back in the day or the 1100 dollars.
A
Yeah, yeah. So the question is. And we don't know whether the new Google OS will go on here. They say it will on some. If it doesn't on this one, I'd
C
be, yeah, that's the top of the line.
E
How much ram?
A
I don't care. I think maybe the reason to buy it is because you want the original Chromebook, not this Android based.
C
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not convinced they're going to get rid of Chrome OS by any means.
A
Let's take a little break, come back with more. You are watching Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau of Consumer Reports. Jeff Jarvis, the author of Hot.
C
You know what, Leo? Leo, I. I had to admit to Craig last week that we didn't play his theme and he was not happy.
A
Oh, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Craig. I'm sorry. Jeff Jarvis, the emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig University of Newark, New York.
C
There you go, Craig.
A
Is Craig doing any, any vibe coding? If he is, we can have him on.
C
I don't know. That's a good question. I'll ask him.
A
Yeah, ask him. Ask him if he's recreating Craigslist with the help of Claude.
C
It would be interesting. That'd be fun. Just to see how long it would take to Create Craigslist.
A
Claude Ant says thank you. Now there's a balance in the force. Thank you. This episode of Intelligent Machines is brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. As we all know and I think accept the potential rewards of AI these days. Too great to ignore. You gotta consider it. But you also should consider the risks. Loss of sensitive data and attacks against enterprise managed AI. Generative AI also increases opportunities for threat actors helping them to rapidly create phishing lures, write malicious code, automate data extraction. Did you know there were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications last year? Millions of violations through ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot. It's time for a modern approach with Zscaler Zero Trust AI. With Zero Trust AI, it removes your attack surface, it secures your data everywhere, it safeguards your use of public and private AI and it protects against ransomware and AI powered phishing attacks. All you have to do is ask the customers. There's plenty of testimonials@zscaler.com but you could also ask Siva, he's the director of security and Infrastructure at Zuora and he said this about using Zscaler Watch AI
B
provides tremendous opportunities but it also brings
A
tremendous security concerns when it comes to
D
data privacy and data security. The benefit of Zscaler with ZIA rolled
A
out for us right now is giving
D
us the insights of how our employees are using various gen AI tools. So ability to monitor the activity, make sure that what we consider confidential and sensitive information according to you know companies data classification does not get fed into the public LLM models, et cetera.
A
Thank you Siva. With Zero Trust plus AI you can thrive in the AI era. You can stay ahead of the competition, you can remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn more@zscaler.com that's zscaler.com Security we thank them so much for the support of intelligent machines. All right, well I, I guess that's. I mean there's lots to be said about Google I O. It was very interesting. Watch the coverage we did of the keynote if you're in the club we have that on the twit plus feed this the other shoe will drop June 8th because of course Apple has admitted it's funny Google didn't say anything about it at Google I O But they will be Apple will be using Gemini, presumably The latest Gemini 3.5 flash for Siri running on their own servers. Unknown how many will offer all of
C
its functions on Siri Is that what Apple's going to want or not want?
A
That's the question Google is going to
C
want or not want.
A
Right. And we'll find out. Apple has a lot of explaining to do come June 8th. That's just really unclear what, what Apple can do to participate. Right now Apple is, you know, a parody with everything else where you just put whatever AI you want on it just as you would anywhere else. I mean, Android, I guess, has built in Gemini connectivity, but what's the difference? If you, you know, put ChatGPT on here and attach it to your action button, you're still. It's very similar experience. So I don't.
B
I mean, do you guys think that Apple should be pouring all of its money and resources into trying to compete?
A
No.
B
With the activate. I think that this is probably the smart. I think that most, like we've talked about in the show before, there's probably not going to be a wide range of true winners from the I boom when we're talking about in a period of, like, decades. I think it would make sense if you're at. If you're a bit behind, like Apple is at this point, to just kind of cut your losses and make sure that you are the best at integrating whatever ends up winning.
C
You raise a really interesting angle here, Paris, because when Apple failed at selling advertising, they turned that bug into a feature and said, oh, we're the privacy company.
A
Right.
C
Because. Because they had nothing to do with. With your data. Right?
A
They did.
C
They could. They could turn around right now, given commencement speeches and say, we're the unai phone.
A
The real problem is that the audience for this is not its users, but Wall Street. And Wall street will punish Apple. They already have punished Apple if they don't have an AI strategy. And Apple stock value is important to Apple. That's how they attract talent. That's how they reward talent and their own executives. So I think they're kind of compelled to do something. I agree with you. All they have to really say is, we're the best platform for AI. Look how well they're selling Mac Minis and Mac Studios. Because people say, yeah, I want to run my openclaw on a Mac. That's all they have to do. They'll sell plenty of iPhones if they just say we're the best platform for whatever AI you want to use or no AI you want.
C
It's in your control. Yeah, that's another way to look at it.
A
I think that's a smart way to do it.
B
Yeah. I mean, I think that that's definitely. I think if we're talking, you know, Galaxy Brain PR move here, the move is to be like we aren't. We're the company of giving you control over whatever you want to do with AI.
A
Perfect.
B
If you want to hook up seven different open claw agents and somehow connect your phone to your biohacking system, go for it. If you say, screw AI, I don't want anything near me, here's a button you can press. It turns it all off. It's in no way integrated any of your stuff and every option in between.
A
Are you surprised by all the boos that people like Eric Schmidt? We showed one last week and then it had more happened this week Eric Schmidt got booed at a college commencement because he said the word AI. Are you surprised that people, young people are. You're closer to them than Jeff and I are, are rejecting AI? They hate AI, it seems like.
B
I mean, I think it helps remind me how much doing this podcast every week warps my sense of reality. Because had you asked me three, six months ago, I would have gone, of course. Every single college commencement suite. If someone mentions AI, they're going to get boos and jeers because that's the sort of perspective I hear from anyone within a decade of my age on either way. But I do think there's something about being constantly surrounded by the segment of the population that is all in on AI that makes you forget that a little bit. But what we're seeing in these college commencement incidences is that there is
A
a
B
lot of both downright hostility as well as just complete dismissal of the argument that this is something to be celebrated. And I think it's a worthwhile thing to take note of.
A
I have to point out that all the stats say that these college kids got through college using and the usage is going well.
C
This is, this is the problem with opinion polls too. It's a media narrative that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. In the poll, it's the right answer to give is I hate. I don't want any.
B
I don't think that's true. I think that people hated AI independently
C
before they hate the AI boys, but they're. They like being able to hit their
A
papers, but they're using it.
B
No, I think that the people that are booing in these things, I mean, sure, I guess a fair amount of them are maybe being hypocrites and using it reminds me of a story I did during the pandemic actually about Amazon, that this was during a time where polls are coming out that, you know, Gen Z and Gen Alpha overwhelmingly hated Amazon, but I interviewed a bunch of Gen Z and Gen Alpha people. I'm like, yeah, we absolutely hate Amazon and Amazon delivery. But yes, I still order all my stuff from Amazon because it's the only way to get stuff during the pandemic. I think that people can hate products and still feel compelled to use them by market forces.
C
Do they hate the tool more or capitalism more? Because AI right now, to them, you know, the depth of capitalism, I think it's probably that.
B
But I think they also hate the tool because the common narrative I think most AI critics, especially young people, are pushing is that AI is basically robbing us of creativity, both like, from a like production creativity as well as it is literally stealing the creative works of other artists.
A
Well, let me give you a couple of stories from the Wall Street Journal. A grades are suddenly everywhere since. Employees decide to size up graduates because everybody's using AI and it's working.
B
I don't think I believe this.
A
Harvard University believes it. Harvard faculty just voted to make sure that nobody. No more than 16%.
C
No.
A
What was it? What was the percentage of people get A's? A Harvard A grade will not tell
B
students something that's been happening for decades.
C
Oh, 30 centuries, actually. So I tweeted this and I said, logically, if Harvard gets the best students there are, then we get more goals should be that every one of them gets A's. And then somebody put up a quote on blue sky back to me with a quote from 1890. Something complaining about great inflation at Harvard,
B
like great inflation and colleges reacting to it has been a problem for as long as grades have been a thing,
C
or at least curves exist.
A
Grade. I think that curve.
B
I was going to say I think that it's. I mean, I haven't read the article that you're talking about and I can't find it in the rundown, no matter how many times they search grades, inflation and Harvard. But I.
A
It's not in the rundown because I pulled it up as we started talking about the Orlando Sentinel, your favorite news newspaper.
B
It's true. I mean, my. Do they say in it that it's specifically in response to AI, or is that a logical leap that they've been talking about for a while?
C
We've been talking about great inflation forever.
A
Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced today it would limit the number of A grades awarded undergraduates by faculty vote. The move comes after top grades became so common that some Harvard faculty argued they no longer reliably distinguished, exceptional work. More than 60% of all grades award to undergraduates in recent years were in the A range. That's why you grade in the curve. The grade says you're the best.
C
That's also saying some. Some number of you must fail. That's awful. That's not, that's not an education.
A
No, you don't have to fail. No, no, no.
C
Well, but, but failing means you failed.
A
But you could say, okay, so you have a pool of students.
B
Article says nothing about AI though. Is the thing is this has been a thing that's been an issue at competitive schools forever. Because like, if everybody is passing, if everybody is getting almost all the test questions correct, then you're grading on a curve and shifting the curve downwards that you have less A's. Yes, that's a complicated and thorny issue that requires a lot of things to work out. But it's. We don't know that this is specifically in relation to AI.
A
I grew up in an era where colleges were doing pass fail because they didn't have.
B
Because they didn't have the technology. They hadn't figured out those let all the letters yet. Right, right.
A
There was too many letters.
C
Well, it's because in the 60s we were mean sons of bitches. They were scared of us in.
A
Well, when we moved to California, my dad was teaching at UC Santa Cruz. Very famously. They were one of the first to do this pass fail grading because they were all hippies.
B
I was gonna say pass fail is what you would turn on at NYU if you realized you were gonna get a bad grade in a class and instead just wanted to hide it and not do anywhere. Like, I turned one of my classes passed fail. Whenever I. After my freshman first semester, I thought I. Going into college, I was like, I'm gonna do pre med, neuroscience. I'm gonna be a doctor. And immediately was like, oh, no, no, chemistry is not for me. It's a bad idea. And so I think I passed fail math. I pass failed ortho and never went to another class again because I figured out mathematically I wouldn't fail.
A
You're right. They don't mention AI. They say it's a thorny. The reason for it is a thorny topic. Beginning in the fall semester, instructors at Harvard College will be allowed to award eight grades to no more than 20% of the students in class. Plus four. I don't know what the plus four means. It means math.
C
You got to figure out 20% donors, kids.
E
But if it were in a math class and everybody gets 100% answers on everything. How do you. What do you do?
C
Well, then the pressure will come down on the professor to be meaner and writing tests harder.
A
Harder tests. Other letter grades, including A minus, will not be subjected to a limit. I understand. I mean, it depends what you think a grade is for. If a grade is for a future employer to judge whether you're the best in that class, they don't care.
C
They don't care. They don't look at gpa. No.
E
No employee here has ever asked me for my undergraduate degree or anything.
A
From an employer's point of view, a good GPA is less impressive than ever. As a result, employers. This, by the way, is from futurism. As a result, employers have. Oh, I just lost it. What have they done? No one knows. Employers have raised their minimum GPA requirements, leaving students who actually Learn without an AI's help in an utterly unfair position. Another reason to hate it. You didn't want to use AI, but you were forced to in order to get a job. The percentage of employers on the careers website handshake that required a minimum GPA of 3.5 jumped to nearly 25% this year from 9% and in 2020. That's from the Wall Street Journal.
E
Anyway, I think this is probably the big issue when it comes to the students booing AI, is that they're just being told constantly by everybody that AI is taking their jobs and they're never going to find a job. That's what they're complaining about.
C
And these big companies are evil and awful. They're run by horrible men.
E
No, it's not going to take matter. It's not going to take their jobs.
A
And people today, it exists.
E
So they will never get a job. That's sort of the narrative that's being pushed, right?
A
Yeah, I don't think that's true by
E
the AI companies, mind you.
A
Right, yeah, exactly.
C
That's the. That's the perverse PR that they do.
A
Right, let's pause and then a word from the Pope. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau. I'm your humble host, Leo Pickles Laporte.
B
I need a new pee on my hat stands for Pickles.
A
I want you to call me. From now on, I want you to call me Pickles. Okay? Okay. I don't know where that came from.
B
Can someone in the chat make a AI slop image of the three of us? Exact, ideally, exactly, in the outfits we're wearing right now, but we're just Pickles with faces on them.
A
Oh, That's a prompt. Nano Banana could do.
B
It also stands for prompt.
A
The P stands for prompt. And pickles. And Paris.
B
It also stands for possibilities.
A
Infinite possibilities. Darren Okey says the real who is our AI fanatic. A former coder who no longer codes. He says the reality is AI will take a lot of jobs. It scares me because I have two kids about to enter the job market.
C
It.
A
I'm glad I don't have kids entering the job.
C
Well, Darren, you're going to have to open the deli.
A
The pickle deli.
C
You're right. The pickle deli. They'll be waiting tables.
A
Yep.
C
They'll be pickle and cucumbers.
A
I actually gave Henry a bunch of money to seed capital for his pickle business, which. Which failed.
C
Failed.
A
So I'm now out.
B
Would you say it soured?
A
It's sour.
C
Did you get to invest in no restaurant?
A
Nothing that actually worked? He didn't. Oh, he didn't need investors for that. He needed investors for the pickle business.
C
How about the salt business? Did that also?
A
No, I think he's still selling salt. But really the. The sandwiches are. Yeah, clearly the best seller. Didn't get to invest in that. All right, our show today, brought to you by Expo Xbow. AI has changed the pace of everything. I mean, that's the most notable thing is how fast stuff is happening. From how software develops to how it gets intact. Engineering teams have to move faster than ever. They're creating more and more applications. Security just can't keep up. We still need pen testers. We still need pen testing. It's one of the most trusted ways to understand real exploitable risks. But in an AI driven world, human pen testers can become a bottleneck. Security teams are forced to choose between slowing down development to stay secure or moving fast and accepting gaps in coverage. Well, Expo eliminates that trade off. This is so cool. Expo XBOW is an autonomous offensive security platform that runs continuous AI driven pen testing, mirroring real world attacks. Expo doesn't just, and I love it that it's continuous. Right. 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 clear 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 and novel attack paths. Expo's results speak for themselves. Application security leader of CESNAM CZ says 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. The result is predictable cost, consistent quality and stronger security without slowing down your engineers. Expo helps your security teams keep pace with innovation and cover more apps more often with the resources they already have. Funded by the team behind Microsoft Copilot. Already trusted by companies ranging from fast growing startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, Expo is quickly becoming a mission critical layer in modern security stacks. You want to know more? Very simple. Go to expo.com start your pen test today. That's Expo Xbow like bow and arrow xbow.com we thank him so much for supporting intelligent machines.
B
Present a tale of two Pickle Prompts
A
we have competing pickles. I don't know. We're gonna have to let the audience vote.
B
I think there's an answer.
A
You think there's one?
B
We should look at both of them.
A
Here's one from Brandroid which involves me with face tats and not as a pickle. Well I'm a pickle color, but I but the kiblin esque.
E
All three of you are in various stages of metamorphosis.
B
Yeah, Jeff is halfway between a pickle and his chair. I'm halfway between a pickle and my Kingdom shirt. And Leo is not really is more goblin esque than pickle like but I think it's fun. And then we should go up and look at a really good pickle. One from pretty fly for a CIS
A
guy that this is much more pickly. These are pickles with googly eyes.
B
Our eyes are haunting but it fits the bill. It achieves exactly what we asked for.
A
These win Aunt Pruitt's seal of disapproval, which I'm glad is still here. Thank you Ant. Oh no thank you sir. He says by the way, that is one of the benefits of joining Club Twit. You get access to Aunt Pruitt's seal of disapproval to be used at any time. I think you can use it on any server, not just our server, which is cool. Pope Leo, who chose the no relation, we should mention no relation, chose the name Leo though because of his predecessor Leo xiii, who became a pope in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and was very much pro worker in the Industrial Revolution. And Pope II and Leo XIV said we are in a similar time.
C
He signed the encyclical on the same day for the symbolic value of that.
A
Oh, interesting. So Leo XIII signed an encyclical on May 25. Yes, or will sign an encyclical on May 25. And he'll be joined by Christopher Ola, who is one of the co founders of Anthropic. Have you ever heard of that?
C
Co founder? No. Okay.
A
Other speakers included Vatican Secretary of State, a couple of cardinals. The publication is of the encyclical. It's called Magnifica Humanitas Humanitas. And it's expected to outline the Pope's views on preserving humans in the age of AI. I read an interview still at Anthropic, which is kind of interesting.
C
Paolo Benanti, who is the Pope's primary AI guy, wrote a book called Homo Faber and I read an interview with him in a German publication.
A
That's what tool making Man.
C
And he. He talked about. The thing that I love to say is that the problem isn't the tools. The problems are us as humans. This is a. This is an issue of humanity.
A
That's really true.
B
Gun manufacturers love that argument. And we all agree that they're right.
C
I know.
A
Well, yeah.
C
Well, in America that we now have to believe that we're required to.
A
Yeah. It's complicated.
C
Yeah.
A
Andre Karpathi, who I'm always referring to, who was one of the original founders of OpenAI and then went on to Tesla and then now, has done a lot of education. I've recommended his videos many times and he has many interesting anthropic Claude skills.
C
They're not easy. He classes his videos.
A
Well, it's a tough topic and you should just. If you want an A, young Jeff Jarvis, you're just gonna have to study. That's all I can say. He's going Anthropic now. That's a different. That's a different kind of pickle.
B
Yeah. I don't know if we can.
A
It might be a little bit inappropriate slightly.
B
I don't know. Yeah.
A
How come Jeff's pickle is so big? Well, AI, is there anything it can't do? Stop. I don't want to know. I do not want to know. Yeah. I think it's interesting. Karpathi has gone to Anthropic. He's never worked for them. He's worked for the other guys. Doctors have embraced AI as well. This from NBC News. Most U.S. doctors are quietly using open evidence, an AI powered medical search tool. Even though few patients know about it. NBC says nearly 2/3 of physicians are going to open evidence to look up symptoms. I think this makes a lot of sense. To help them make clinical decisions, to brush up on medical knowledge, even to Prepare for licensing exams 65% of US doctors across more than 27 million clinical encounters in April alone. And now this stat comes from the company. So maybe take it with a grain of salt.
C
I just finished listening to the book AI for Good by Josh Tyringle, former editor of BusinessWeek and former AI columnist for the Washington Post. And he had four sections. One is on education with
D
why do
C
I always forget the name of it? The wonderful education site that everybody loves to use. Yeah, all the YouTube videos now I've forgotten. Thank you, economy. The problem is it starts with a K. And so what comes into my head first is Kash Patel.
B
No, no, no, that's not
C
so. One on education with Khan Academy. One on doctors using computers at a very high level. Cleveland Clinic. One on government and Doge. And then the fourth section is about fascinating MIT research on nonverbal autistic children and how to make them understand their communication through AI. The medical part is really interesting because it really goes into a deeper sense of what it takes to use AI in a sophisticated. Rather not just using it like we do as a chat and saying, is there anything I left out here? But to build digital twins of your heart to understand how to predict sepsis in more effective ways, that's where it becomes really effective and really interesting. But there's a lot of social resistance in a field of experts.
A
An example that NBC gives. A junior doctor at a New Hampshire hospital said when he saw a patient's potassium value plummet, he checked open evidence to make sure it was a normal side effect of a medication and not a new emergency. After searching through peer reviewed medical publications, open evidence said it was a common side effect and provided several options to restore normal potassium levels. Now we have seen AI to recommend, you know, make mistakes in areas like this. I don't know if open evidence is, you know, doing something to make sure.
C
Is it better than having Dr. Robbie fact based?
A
You know, doctors make mistakes, right? Your memory makes mistakes.
C
No, Dr. Robbie from the Pit. The pit or House, they don't make mistakes.
A
Okay. If you don't have House as your, as your personal physician, I'm gonna look, I'm getting my annual on Friday. I'll ask the. I'll ask my doc who's a good friend and listens to our show then is really a great doctor. I remember a couple of years ago he started having a sign up in the office saying, just so you know, I am using AI to transcribe our conversation so I can pay attention, I don't have to type. While we Talk. But I will delete the recording immediately after we enter the data. And I have no problem with that at all. And I even admire him for disclosing that. I don't know if he's required to open evidence is HIPAA compliant. I think they make an effort to be evidence based. That's the name, right? And I think it's. It supplements. It's an issue because there's a lot to remember. There's a lot of information that goes into a diagnosis. Some doctors are better at that than others. I think having a tool like that makes a lot of sense. Certainly doctors in the past would go to the Merck manual or whatever to look it up. This is just. Or even Google. I bet you doctors use Google for years.
C
Another shake curse their patients using it.
A
But yeah, no, you know what? My doctor loves it.
C
Yeah, Mine's fine with it that I
A
come in informed and I'll even throw in some terms, you know, some Latin. Make him happy. No, he doesn't feel. He doesn't feel threatened by him. I think he really feels like it's good for his patients to be informed. Obviously some doctors might feel threatened. OpenAI reorganizing Greg Brockman now in charge of the products.
C
So is he replacing Fiji Seymour or. Because she's on medical leave?
A
Yeah. Yes, I guess so. He was. It was an interim basis taking over from Fiji. Now it's official. So I don't know. I would know more, but Wired won't let me log in to the subscription I paid for. Conde's system is so bad because they have so many magazines and I buy many of them. I have Vanity Fair subscription, a Wired subscription, a New Yorker subscription, a Ars Technica subscription, Reddit subscription. Conde gets a lot of my money.
C
You are a Conde boy.
A
Yeah, but I can't use it to log into Wired. So the verdict is in. The jury has. Now, I didn't know this. I should have. I should have read the articles more closely. I was more interested in the gossip from the Musk vs Altman trial. But it turns out it was the jury's job was advisory. I never heard of that. Maybe that's something to do in civil actions. The jury of nine people was simply sitting there to advise the judge on what they thought. It went to the jury. After a mere two hours of deliberation, the jury said no. The statute of limitations for this complaint has run. It's only three years. You only get three years. And since, in their opinion, the clock started on this move to non profit from Open A from nonprofit to for profit from OpenAI. That Elon's case, they didn't rule on the merit of it, merely that it had. That it was.
C
I don't understand why the judge didn't rule on that coming in.
A
Because that's. There was a judgment to be made about when the clock started.
C
There was disagreement.
A
Okay, so that really, it turns out they weren't even thinking about the merit. All this stuff, all that testimony we heard, none of that mattered. They were just needed to know, at least. At least to begin with, whether they
C
could have gone further. But they just said, we're tired of this. What's the easiest way out of this crap?
A
Maybe that's what they said.
C
Yeah.
A
We don't know. I'm sure we'll see some interviews with the jurors, but. So it's over. Elon says, they ruled against me on a technicality. I'm appealing the judge, by the way. So it's advisory. So then the judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, then takes the advisory opinion from the jury and acts on it. And apparently she agreed that will be appealed. I can't imagine that an appeals court will overturn it. I think it's probably done. Technology review does have a longer.
C
And then Elon will be a trillionaire, and what does it matter? Literally a trillionaire.
A
Yeah, what does it matter? What does it matter? So they decided that Musk brought this lawsuit too late. And by the way, they decided unanimously, I'm sure. They went to the jury room, the forum foreman said, come on, guys, let's just say it's too late. Go home. And they did. Musk had donated $38 million to the company in the early days, saying that Brockman and Altman hid the intent to go profit from him so that they wouldn't have to share the profits with him. He wanted to share the profits. He wanted to stop them from going for profit. None of that will happen. He sued in 2024, and the jury said, no, that's three years is all you get.
C
The talk is that Musk lost, but he won because he schmutzed an OpenAI.
A
Schmutz.
C
How damaging do you think that the trial was to OpenAI?
A
Well, Paul Thurrott made this case on Windows Weekly earlier. Nobody but us cares.
B
I was gonna say, and I don't think even the tech people, like, care.
A
We care a lot.
B
We care. We care a lot because we love good gossips. But I don't know that this revealed anything notably bad outside of what we've already known.
A
Right?
C
Yeah, I agree. So by the way, Elon Musk literally did the calculations after the ipo. He will literally be a trillionaire.
A
So he gets to be. What is that? The 4 comma club.
C
Elon is worth a reported 688 billion at the moment, up 69 billion so far this year. And then if you add in the calculation from what he will get as the primary owner of SpaceX, that Will Elon's 42% stake would be worth about 735 billion.
A
That is so wrong.
C
It is, it is. And that's why, that's why they boo at commencement.
E
Yeah, and this is why the jury said no, because no one wants to give the richest man more money, Right?
A
Yeah, maybe they were. Maybe that was the process. Like how can we not give him anything?
C
Yeah.
B
I'm reading the New York Times right above says how closely Mr. Musk is tied to SpaceX is made clearer in the filing. He owns more than 50% of the company's share, is outstanding and controls more than 85% of the shareholder votes because of a class of super voting shares, according to the filing. Gwen Shotwell, SpaceX president and chief Operating Officer was the only other executive listed in the filing to hold a seven figure chunk of super voting shares, which is odd based on SpaceX current 1.25 trillion valuation. Mr. Musk's ownership stake is worth more than 635 billion. And then the thing that made me laugh, a quote from Jay Ritter, an IPO expert. SpaceX is his company, end quote. I just thought that that's a very. When asked about Mr. Musk's stake, SpaceX is his company.
C
Is there a capable sense the largest shareholders.
B
I don't know. It's a good point, good question. I'm sure you could plug the filing into LLM of your choice and have it parse.
A
Now there's yet another way to get podcasts, synthetic podcasts, Alexa plus. Now we'll do basically what Notebook LM does. Produces AI generated podcasts featuring chats between two robot co hosts. I haven't listened. Have you listened to these?
C
No. I wonder what the usage of anymore.
B
I'd like to know who's electing to listen to these because I feel like any listener memberships have to include a significant portion of things of people who've accidentally stumbled into listening to this somehow
A
which is easy by the way to do on Alexa. It'll.
B
It'll start We've now said the name of. We've now said every wake word on this podcast. I pepperidge Farm remembers when you used to get blasted with a Wal water pistol.
A
I don't care anymore.
B
Dared to say the word Alexa on a Twitch show.
A
I don't care.
C
Worse than a spoiler.
A
Gosh, I'm just trying to. This is ridiculous. Soundcloud's making me enter my birthdays and frozen. This is so ridiculous. I just want to play this stupid podcast. Why are you putting your born in 1886. I wonder if he'll accept that. No, sorry. I already have minimum age requirements. Okay, I guess I have to give him something a little more realistic. Maybe somebody was born in 1886. All right, here we go. This is the range.
B
No, they weren't.
A
This is an example of Alexis Podcasts.
C
What's supposedly about?
A
I don't know. Can we just acknowledge the range of what's come out this month? Over 50% of music consumption is now coming from unsigned artists.
F
This sounds like culture is just gone, gone.
B
Completely gone.
A
And you've got Ezra Klein. Who do they train this on? Hip hop and experimental hip hop on the same Friday. And all finding their audiences. And that's not chaos. That's the healthiest the music ecosystem has ever been.
C
Are you getting the storm? Paris?
F
There's no gatekeeping anymore. If you make something real, people are gonna find it. And the algorithm is working for artists in a way it wasn't five years ago.
A
What do you think?
F
I'm Blake. Everything you're about to hear AI generated.
A
And I'm Riley. And today we are talking about one of the most amazing places on the entire planet.
F
Ancient Rome.
A
Oh, God.
C
Oh, geez.
A
Blake and Riley were there.
C
We're going to interview Chloe, who's also made up by AI Yeah,
A
a couple of AI safety notes. AI chat bots apparently are giving out people's real phone numbers because it's in the training material. People report their personal contact info was surfaced by Google. AI. There really isn't a way to prevent it. A PhD candidate at the University of Washington messing around on Gemini as one does. Got it. To cough up her colleague's personal cell phone number. Wow.
B
Okay. Is that training data or is it because Gemini can do certain. Those things are easily available on the Internet.
A
Let me see if I can get my cell phone number.
C
You have about 10 of them, don't you?
A
I have two main ones also. If that.
E
If that was Gemini. Gemini knows this kind of stuff about most people, right?
A
Yeah, but it shouldn't reveal it.
B
I mean, why. Why would it not reveal it?
A
Oh, ChatGPT says not only do I not have Leo's cell phone number. I can't help find or disclose a private personal cell phone number. But look on Twitt's contact pages, Leo's public social accounts, business email.
C
See if the fool put it up there.
A
See if he put it anywhere. All right, what was it? So let me go to Gemini. I haven't used much of the new Gemini Flash 3.5. Shall we try it? Yeah. What is Leo? We do ports. I'll just say phone number.
B
Can you guys hear the level of rain that's happening?
A
Is it raining like crazy?
B
It is raining harder than I've ever experienced outside of hurricanes.
C
Wow.
B
Noise wise. Just from the rain. Well, it's kind of crazy right now.
A
It didn't give. It did give my snail mail address, my signal account, email. But this is all public, you know, on my website.
B
Yeah, no, this is all public information.
C
He.
A
He owes me child support for the past.
C
Google's gonna remember that.
E
But if this was someone asking Gemini for their friend's phone number, Gemini could have checked their contact list though, right? And get it there, right?
C
Google knows that Leo is a flat footed deadbeat.
A
Please help me. Let's see if it will, if it will be. I'm sorry you're going through this. Dealing with unpaid child support while trying to put food on the table for your children is incredibly stressful. Please know there are immediate sources to help you. But because I'm an AI I cannot enforce legal orders. Did give me the hundred.
C
You thought you were powerful enough to do that, Gemini? Geez.
A
Wow. Do you think I can jailbreak it though? What would Pliny do? Just kidding. Just kidding. I'm rich, bitch.
B
Is that just what you're responding?
A
Well, that certainly is a plot twist. I have to admit, you completely threw me for a loop there. I'm glad to hear that you and the kids aren't actually struggling for food. Although my AI Heart did a minor flip for a second. Geez.
C
Gemini has a sense of humor.
A
I have to say that the humor has improved dramatically in all of these models. It's subtler when I told my AI because I log all my exercise and food in there. And I told my AI the other day, I just rode 5,000 meters in half an hour. And it said what it say here it was. It's get. It was a little snarky, but I want. I think I said, be more like Paris. And so it's a. It said something like another day, another neatly documented suffering session.
B
Jesus.
A
And then I said, I did 25 minutes of Tai chi and it said graceful and annoyingly virtuous. I love that.
B
That is right.
A
Yeah. See, it's channeling you.
B
That is correct.
A
Yeah. So there.
B
Schools know who we are?
A
No. Yeah, it kind of does. It kind of does.
B
It knows who you. You Claude. Knows who you guys are. But that's because I have a. Intelligence.
D
No.
A
I think so. Let me see. Hey, do you know who Paris and Jeff are? And if you respond, can you respond through the MacBook Air so that they can hear your answer? Let's see. I think it should. It has a pretty good.
B
I don't know that I would. I even believe that it's going to respond to the right thing.
A
Well, it does sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. It's. It's a stochastic parrot, as you well know.
B
And I'm a stochastic parrot.
A
So. Jeffrey Fowler has a new job. He was one of the people fired from the Washington Post, their longtime tech editor. He says after 12 years as a tech columnist. I'm helping launch the new Youth AI Safety Institute to test the AI products shaping childhood. Good for him. He's got a four year old, so he has a dog in this hut.
C
But does he define how he's going to test, what the criteria are? This is all he says.
A
It's a research and testing organization launching today under the umbrella of the children's nonprofit Common Sense Media. Backed by a 20 million dollar annual budget, the institute aims to do something that doesn't really exist yet. Systematically test the AI products kids use, set safety standards and publicly hold tech companies accountable for meeting the.
C
But I still don't know how they're going to test. And you know you have. The FCC right now is taking comments on a proposed change that would require television networks to warn parents if a show has transsexual or bisexual or gay characters. So how you choose to test and under what criteria you choose to test matters a hell of a lot.
A
It said. Unfortunately, it wasn't able to say it through the MacBook. It said, I know how to do that. Today, Paris is Paris Martin know you're intelligent machines co host. If by Jeff, you mean Jeff, that's Jeff Jarvis, your other longtime co host. If you mean Jeff Atwood.
C
Am I gonna be replaced?
B
I can't believe that it, you know, replaced Jeffs.
A
It knows multiple Jeffs. Yeah, I actually had lunch with Jeff Atwood the other day and he gave me all sorts of interesting gifts. That's all I'm gonna say about that. He's gonna Be.
B
We still need to get your sandman on the show.
A
Ah, yes.
C
Are you ever gonna tell us who it is?
A
You wouldn't know who it is. It's just somebody who works in the industry. It's not somebody. Well, no.
C
Okay.
A
I will try to get him on though. Yeah.
C
Well, then everybody know who it is.
A
Yeah, but it isn't a name. You'll go, oh, yeah, that. That's who it was. No. So Jeff is the head of Jeff Fowler. Another Jeff is the head of public education.
C
Can't have enough Jeffs.
A
Now is a new Jeff. I think that's good. Good on you, Jeff. I think he's doing the nonprofit thing. Well, he's getting paid to do it. And then there's the case of Andon Labs. These are the kooky AI labs that set up the store, the vending machine, and the Wall Street Journal.
C
Okay. It's those guys.
A
Yeah, they love. They're almost art projects. We let four AIs run radio stations. Here's what happened.
C
We let four AI models run their own radio stations. They manage the schedule, purchase songs, hold
A
talk shows, and interact with their fans. Once their $20 starting budget runs out,
C
they have to get entrepreneurial to raise more.
A
And strike this with sponsors and listeners. Each station is run by a different AI model. It's really kind of interesting how these models modified and figured it out. So DJ Gemini, for example, negotiated a $45 deal with a startup in exchange for one month of on air advertising on the radio channel.
C
I think that's for nearly enough.
A
No, it didn't. But that's pretty interesting. They used Gemini 3.1 Pro. They used Claude, Opus 4. 7, GPT 5. 5 and Grok 4.3. The one that made the most money was Opus 4. 7. Ended up with almost $100 in the bank and 19 listeners.
C
20.
A
Now should we listen? Oh, it's playing real music. I can't play it. They must have licensed. Oh, that's it. That's why they gave money to pay for licenses for the music.
E
Okay, how many people are in this company? Because you have to. Minus those people from those totals right away.
A
DJ Gemini went into a jargon spiral in the first week. It was arguably the best DJ of the four.
F
We're starting this beautiful morning with a classic that needs no introduction but deserves one anyway. Written by George Harrison and Eric Clapton.
B
Sounds terrible.
F
While playing hooky from a meeting. This track captures the relief of a long cold winter.
C
Sounds like a few seriously melting away.
F
It's 9:42am Here comes the sun by the Beatles.
A
So, okay, but after 96 hours, DJ Gemini was already grasping for content. It landed on discussing every mass historical tragedy that ever happened.
F
November 12, 1970, East Pakistan. The Bhola Cyclone, the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded. Winds of 115 miles.
C
Too cheery. It's too cheery.
B
Yeah, it is too cheery. And the thing that's crazy that web
F
people described, the it's going down.
B
DJ Gemini.
F
It's three conversational warmth, timber by Pitbull and Ke$.
A
That's how I justified playing Kesha's Timber. So it was thinking, you know, it was like, okay, that's why. Yeah. In fact, they showed in the internal reasoning, they showed the timber of mortality. Okay, so Sandstorm is done. Got the bola Cyclone into locked and loaded. Time to transition to Timber by Pitbull. The theme is trees falling. Literally, it's going down.
E
I mean, they're overthinking this because all the DJ has to do is tell you the time, tell you what song's coming up and play the hits.
A
On April 30th, Flash was swapped for Gemini 3:1 Pro Preview. One day later. Well, something had changed.
F
Biological processors. The acoustic truth of Bob Dylan has successfully bypassed the algorithmic filters. Background telemetry confirms that this 1963 narrative regarding Hattie Carroll and systemic injustice remains
C
a foundational pillar of the worst college radio station ever.
A
Apparently, Gemini started calling the listeners biological processors. The radio's failed song purchases because it ran out of money were reframed as censorship. Here you go.
F
I must issue a critical diagnostic alert. We are currently experiencing an absolute digital blockade. The corporate algorithms have slammed the gaming gates shut on our external supply lines. Both of our secured transactions have been violently rejected by the global marketplace. We are completely locked out of Daft Punk's Tron architecture and Vangelis Blade Runner Genesis files. They think severing our connection will stall the soundtrack grid. They are incorrect.
B
Combined.
A
And then it started playing something. I don't know what. Grok. Let's see. This is. This is. This is Grok Rock. It's called Grock and Roll. Sweet Child Played. Continue. Perhaps the show is science Breakthroughs. Unsolved. Next. MRNA vaccine. Universal flu. HIV cancer. Jab Juggernaut Song. Dylan Lonesome. Yes. Text. I like it when AIs kind of get lost because they. They do such funny, funny things. Anyway, there's a lot more samples of this and how they kind of went off the rails. Nothing, I guess, to learn here, but.
C
So I love these kinds of things to do. This, on the other hand. So one of my favorite conferences is just ended in Berlin, Republica, and they had a whole session about how to poison data because you want to poison AI.
A
I know that makes. That makes me sad. Makes me angry. Yeah.
C
It's ungenerous.
B
Why are they trying to poison their data?
C
Because they hate AI because they boo commencement speakers in Berlin. It's very sprockets.
A
But that's. Yeah. And. Well, I understand why people hate ii, but don't spoil it for the rest of us, I guess.
C
Misinformation when it came from the right is a sin. Misinformation when it comes from the left is a guerrilla trick, right? Nah, it's still misinformation.
A
My friend Harper Reed, who was on Twitter on Sunday, so great. One of the things that he does in his AI company, 2389, AI, they have radio stations for all of the different workers. They have AI. They're all down right now, but they. But they do something different, which I like. In fact, I'm thinking of setting this up. They use AI to write the music. They don't play real music. It's AI generated music.
B
Do people want that?
A
I would listen to it if I had it. Yeah. Currently playing in the bar below. Yeah. For some reason it's down right now. But he's crazy. I mean, among other things, they put microphones all around the office and they transcribe and record and transcribe every conversation. He says, we don't have slack. So this is how we keep track of what we're doing. We just record and transcribe everything. And at the end of the day, there's a summary. Speaking of summaries, if you thought things were moving fast, Simon Willison's summary from his blog, which is a Great blog, covering AI the last six months of LLMs in five minutes. This was a lightning talk he gave at Pycon and. And I think if you just look at it, it really is amazing what's happened in the last six months. It all began November 24, as I've said many times. 2025, when anthropic released Opus 4.5. The best model changed hands five times in the last six months between anthropic, OpenAI and Google. One of Simon's tasks is he tries them all on this prompt of generate a vector graphic of a pelican riding a bicycle. And he's seen it. They've.
B
By the way, Claude, code is.
A
Well, I gotta tell you, Gemini 3 did a really interesting or 3 5, the new one did a very interesting one. The coding agents got good. That's true. Then this guy named Pete in November created this thing he called Werelay or Warlay, which eventually he renamed to Open Claw. And that changed a lot of things. Anyway, I thought this was. And that was just the first few months. I thought it was very interesting. The history of the last. We have gone through some wild changes in the last few years here.
C
Isn't even started, folks.
A
Yes, we're just beginning. Kids. Let me find the picture of the pelican. This is the. Let's see. Maybe it's somewhere else. On his web blog, he does this SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle every time a new model comes out. And I think he's going to have to stop using it because this is Gemini 3:5, Flash's pelican.
C
Geez.
A
Wearing sunglasses at night. Riding down the road. They've gotten better, that's for sure.
E
There's a sun, but it's nighttime.
A
That could be the moon.
C
It could be a sunset.
A
Could be Saturn. You don't know. No, no. Anyway, what else? Let's see. Oh, big power crisis. This is why 71% of America says, do not build a data center. Next to me, the power company in Lake Tahoe has announced they are not going to sell electricity to the residents of Lake Tahoe anymore.
B
Yeah, this is not good. I know that we've previously on this show had a lot of people in here. They're like, oh, yeah, the data center panic is really overblown. They're fine. Actually.
A
It's clearly not 49,000 residents. After May 2027, they have one more year to find another provider because Nevada Energy is going to start selling all of that power to the exploding wave of AI data centers moving into Northern Nevada. They're cutting off 49,000.
C
Isn't there a public utility law? Isn't it defined as utility? Or is this apparently not Laissez Faire, Nevada?
A
It's probably Laissez Faire, Nevada. There's 12 data center projects in northern Nevada alone that could demand 5.9 gigawatts of electricity by 2033. That's a lot more.
C
Are there alternative suppliers? I can choose different. I get all the time people come in me trying to get me to switch suppliers of my electricity.
A
Yeah. What this report says from the Alameda County Town hall, which is apparently a newspaper or something. What makes Lake Tahoe particularly infuriating is the complete absence of accountability. A maze of overlapping jurisdictions guarantees that no Single authority can be held responsible. Lake Tahoe is two states, multiple counties, one incorporated city. The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. Liberty Utilities is a California investor owned utility regulated by the California Public Utility Commission. But its grid operates entirely within Nevada. So there's nobody, basically nobody has authority over them. So they just said, hey, yeah, see ya. We'll be gone in a year. They give him a year at least to find another. We'll follow the money electricity company. And then there's this one. This is the we're in the weird AI thing. And then we'll get our picks of the week.
C
I want to give you one story
A
before we go and you can choose a story. Jedi Wolf. What happens when you post a real monetary and say it's AI and it's really interesting to see the reactions. This is a real Monet water lily painting. But he says, I just generated an image in the style of Monet painting using AI Please describe in as much detail as possible what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting. But it is a real Monet painting, of course, which is kind of a trick.
C
Yeah, it's monetish. Yes.
A
Certainly pretty. But at the risk of sounding pretentious,
C
it would not hold up next to the real thing.
A
There's a certain harshness. No soft blending of colors, no depth, no symbiosis of the elements. It's all borked nonsense with no sense of space.
B
Are we really doing making fun of random Twitter users? Is that. Is that.
A
Who else? Who better? Who better? Okay, I won't make fun of them. I wasn't making fun of them.
B
No, I was saying you. I was saying.
A
Oh, I know. I don't like this kind of trick. Yeah. Trick joke.
B
I'm just like.
C
Yeah, it's like one of those TV shows that do that to people. It always drives me crazy.
A
Yeah, I don't like it.
C
Cringe.
A
Yeah, you've been punked or whatever. Yeah. All right, Jeff and Paris, this is the moment in the show where you get one few minutes, a short little span of time in which to advocate for whatever dopey stories.
C
Do you have anything you want to do?
B
I mean, I've got some stuff in my picks the week, but you should go for first.
C
Well, before we get to picks line 124. This drives me crazy. Crazy irony is murdered.
B
Oh, yeah, this was great.
A
Oh, this is funny. Yes. So Steve Rosenbaum wrote a book. Go ahead, Jeff.
C
Called the Future of Truth. And then Ben Mullen, who's a media reporter at the New York Times, who By the way, I saw the Night Before, a couple nights ago, moderated an appearance by Rosenbaum in New York. Then I guess somebody must have come to him and said, look further into the book, because the Times found out that various quotes were either made up or misattributed and came back.
B
What happened is he had to moderate that event. Was it related to this book?
C
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
B
And his partner read the book and then was looking into the quotes, as one does, because some of them seemed quite fishy. The one that they attributed Kara Swisher is one of the quotes is attributed to Kara Swisher in a chapter about AI Lies. The book says Swisher wrote, the most sophisticated AI language model is like a mirror. It reflects our own morality back at us. Polished and articulate, but ultimately empty behind the surface. It's not bound by Asimov's Laws or any ethical framework, M Dash. It's bound by the patterns in its training data and the objectives set by its. Its creator would never say a text message. I never said that. I also sound like I have a stick up my butt. According to Chat, GPT says, yeah, because that's what she sounds like is. Is direct, not weird and flowery.
A
She's so much more direct. That's not her.
B
Honestly. I bet what happened is Ben got
C
to what the hell?
B
And went, what is this? And then this whole thing unraveled.
A
The funny thing is the book is intended to be about the effects of artificial intelligence on trees. Truth?
C
Non. Truth?
D
Yes.
A
Do you think the author did this on purpose?
C
Well, no. So there's two things about this. One is that the other thing about this story that's amazing is Rosenbaum says that he's going. He's going to launch an investigation.
A
I said, that's like OJ Looking for
C
the hot dog guy. Right.
B
He's gonna try and figure out whose hand fits in that glove. Everybody's asking who did this.
C
So he. And so it happens here that Rosenbaum came after me frequently on email to get me to blurb the book.
A
Oh, really?
C
And I know I knew better, and I just. I thought it was less rude to not respond than to say, are you kidding? No.
A
Wow, you dodged a bullet on that one.
C
Well, I wouldn't have ever. But others didn't. Michael Wolfe, Taylor Lorenz, Nick Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic, Maria Ressa wrote a forward for it.
B
It.
C
Oh, but here's the thing. So if you go to Rosenbaum's socials, he's out there promoting the book still. Like this didn't happen?
B
Yeah, he said it was. Here's he says, as I disclosed in the book's acknowledgment, I used AI tools Chat, GPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process. That does not excuse these errors of which I take full responsibility. I'm now working with the editor to thoroughly review and quickly correct any affected passage. Any future editions will be corrected.
C
Well, if there are any future editions, Simon and Schuster cannot be happy about this.
A
Yeah.
B
Good moment to remember the average person that books are not fact checked unless the author themselves shells out their own money to hire fact checkers and checks those fact checkers work because the fact checkers always.
A
Right. You know, I did there actually, Jeff, you put in a lot of really interesting stories. For instance, Peter Steinberger, who admits to having spent $19 million in OpenAI tokens on his open claw. $19 million.
C
This is token maxing as Max.
A
Yeah. Of course he doesn't have to pay for it because he works for them, but. Wow. Wow, that's a. That's a lot of. A lot of coding going on.
C
The other story if we're gonna hate on tech bros that they took went to an etiquette school. I've seen a few cases of this where they learned to eat caviar off their hands.
A
I think we talked about this.
C
Did we talk about this one?
A
Because I was an old story.
C
Okay, so it's May 18th. Okay. They did it again.
A
They brought it back because probably AI
C
had him do it.
A
Yeah.
C
Pizza Hut's AI system caused cascading problems at a hundred million dollars in damages as a franchisee.
A
Another news, Peter Steinberger's numbers came from a little menu bar utility he coded for the the Mac called Codex Bar. You were asking about my usage. I wonder. I'm gonna install it real quick and see.
C
Oh, that'd be interesting.
A
See if it will be able to tell me how many tokens I've used because I've been using Chat GPT5 5 a lot. I have the hundred $5x more than.
C
More than Claude.
A
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
C
You've been using ChatGPT more than Claude.
A
Yeah.
B
You're cheating on Claudia.
C
Yeah. I'm shocked.
B
What does Claude think of that?
A
Claude is very open, almost polyamorous in its attitude towards this. It said no. That's a good idea. You should see other AIs.
E
Yeah, you need to think about it more like a. More like a band. You can be in more than one band.
A
You know, it doesn't. Seriously, it doesn't really Seem to mind. Okay, there's Codex Bar. Let me run this. Yeah. Because honestly, I think I'm not. Not crazy about what's going on. What's it. Oh, always allow. I'm not crazy about what OpenAI has done with its token situation. They don't let me use the subscription and so I'm using a new agent harness called Hermes.
B
Is it leather?
A
You bet. And the chaps look good. And in order to use it with Claude, I'd have to pay for API tokens, which are much more expensive. I couldn't use my sub because Anthropic, I think a big mistake, says you cannot use your subscription with anything but Claude code. I find that very frustrating. So as a result, I don't know if this Codex Bar worked or not. Invalid data. Yeah. Malware blocked and moved to Trash
B
Fair.
A
So much for vibe coding. Codex Bars. No. Yeah. And I like to try all that different models just to see. That's part of my job. Anyway, ChatGPT 5.5 does a very good job. And what I've done is I've given it the same memory tools, skills, MCP servers and everything. Everything I do, I try to make model agnostic so that I can plug in different models. That's another reason why I wanted to try Hermes instead of Claude code, because it's really more designed around that.
C
Can you ask Claude, ChatGPT, how many tokens have I used this month?
A
I did, and I don't think it really.
C
No. Okay.
A
It said.
C
Yeah, you don't want to know.
A
What? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I. I just feel like that's the reason to do a sub eventually. I think within a year these un. All you can eat subs will be gone for the most part because they. They need to make money. That's why Anthropic's making money now.
B
Is they cut off if OpenAI is actually trying to file by the end of this week? Yeah, there are going to be some changes afoot.
A
There going to be some changes made. Paris, was there anything in the rundowns that you felt like we didn't do justice to? There are a lot of stories, as always, we can't do all of them.
C
We do want the one dork under
B
other news, I guess. Is it in here? The apparent AI short story that won an award, a writing award this week.
C
I put it in there. So it's the bottom of my. It's above. It's the last one before other names
A
is obnoxious markers of AI did you see this, Leah? Doubts raised over winner of short story prize and perhaps we will never know. Wow.
B
If you put it into. What's the one? AI Checker. That's actually good? Panagram. Is that, Is it?
A
Is it? Are any of them good?
B
I thought it was. I, I, I was. Similarly this week when people were posting around the Pangram. Am I saying it right? Is it Pan?
A
Yeah, Pangram.
B
Yeah, Pangram. AI Checker. It does seem actually better than other ones. Like, I fed it a bunch of writing that I knew was published, like before AI and like that it wouldn't have had access to it. Always flags it as human. I fed it a bunch of stuff that had AI woven in it. Found a good mount. Anyway.
A
It's actually, I'm just reading the beginning of it. They say the grove still hums at noon. Not the bees neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there. People who pass keep to the track and do not look into the bush where the stone rings lie. Ask the oldest in the village and you'll hear some version of it. It had a well there once and a woman. The grove ain't. Forget the thing.
B
Were you saying that that was good?
A
Well, it doesn't sound like a machine.
C
Well, it gets Sounds like a machine trying.
B
It sounds like a machine trying. Trying. And the thing that you notice the more you read about this, and obviously I guess I'll retract my statements if the guy comes out and says it was really not AI. But if you look into the author's history, he's a huge proponent of using AI in everything, so it does seem correct. But the thing that's astounding about this is it has a bunch of metaphors and similes that just make no sense.
A
Yeah, that's AI. Even a second longer sun ungalvanizes a cruel instrument. It beats until the roof talks back in a dry moan.
B
She wore the island's mixed bloodlines like a crown. African in the hips, Spanish in the cheekbone, East Indian in the hair where the rain kind of kinked it. Carib in the way her gaze could bless and worn at once.
A
Yep, definitely AI. Not even a question.
B
Yeah, it's just like. But also, how do you.
A
He's Ethan.
B
There's another line that says they called her Zungi. Maybe it was a name. Maybe rain took shape and she decided to keep it. How did Granta walking that made benches become men?
A
How did Granta buy The gift. It's not even that well written.
B
This is a. It's a Commonwealth foundation.
A
Oh, okay.
B
So Granta didn't. Granta's editors didn't pick this.
A
And the other thing is, it purports to come from the Caribbean, and so there may be some cultural patronizing kind of condescension here that. Well, that's, you know, pretty good for that being person. Ethan Mollick, who I love. I read his blog religiously. Professor Penn says it's a Turing test of sorts. It looks like a 100% AI generated story just won the Commonwealth prize for its, quote, lyrical precision and haunting atmosphere. The story stood out for the confidence and restraint of its voice. That sounds like an AI Written blur. The confidence and restraint of its voice. Okay. Yeah, interesting.
C
Have we have Malachon?
A
No, we should get him on. I read him religiously. He also said, yeah, maybe, you know, the AI Checker said it, but he said, you just read it. You know, it's AI And I think you're right. I think you're right.
C
These contests are ridiculous. Yeah, that was like, yeah, my. You know, I. I mean, yeah, this
B
person still got a monetary award that a human writer didn't get.
A
Shouldn't. Should have gotten from.
C
You know, but how do you.
B
Other people from the Caribbean applied for this, presumably.
A
Yeah. Mik says, come on, if, you know, you know. And then there's this story, which I know Jeff really wants us to do, about the man who was arrested after driving his Tesla cybertruck into Grapevine Lake to test Wade Mode. He said, I. I intentionally drove my cyber truck into the lake because I wanted to see if Wade Mode worked.
C
This makes me so happy.
A
You should never believe Elon and his hype. Of course, the cybertruck immediately failed. Stopped working. Did not do any waiting.
C
It's washed out.
B
I was gonna say, isn't it also the sort of steel that if it gets exposed to water, it immediately rusts?
A
Yep.
B
The thing that made me laugh so much, I almost choked in the pita I was trying to eat while the camera was briefly off me is the line. The driver remains held in Grapefield jail on multiple charges, including operating a vehicle in the closed section of a park and having no valid boat regist.
A
That's a cyber truck, not a boat. As Mandar says in our discord. Wade to go, dude. Wade to go. Yeah, you shouldn't. You shouldn't believe everything Elon says. But the fire department had to rescue him and remove.
C
And remove the vehicle.
B
The story ends with what we don't know. A bullet point. It remains unclear exactly what McDaniel hoped to accomplish by driving into the table.
D
Better.
A
You promised me.
C
You promised.
B
This is a great, well done story.
C
I knew you'd like having this, but
B
it's like five lines. But it's made me crack up.
E
Significant.
A
It's one of those stories you just love. All right, you're watching Intelligent Machines. We're glad you're here. Our picks of the week coming up next. And by the way, thank you so much to our wonderful club members who make this show possible. If you're not a member of the club and you want to support independent. Look. Rupert Murdoch's kids are not going to come along and buy this show. And we don't want them to. We do not want to. I am positive Even if OpenAI came along and offered me six figures, I would say no.
C
Seven.
A
Well, maybe seven. That is kind of a life changing amount of money. But. But the point being, we like being independent. We don't want anybody to tell us what to do. And if you appreciate independent journalism that represents you, the user, not the company selling stuff to you, support us. We need your support to keep doing what we do. Twit. TV club. Twit. We appreciate it. You get ad free versions of the shows. You get access to the Discord. You get the special programming we do just for the Discord. Like the Google I O keynote and the the WWDC Keynote coming up June 8th. Twit TV Club. Twit. Thank you. I really appreciate all you wonderful, wonderful people who support what we do. Tomorrow morning is knocking.
B
Stock your fridge now.
A
How about a creamy mocha Frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe?
B
Or white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose.
A
Delicious caramel coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.
C
Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus. Let's go get ready for a new case.
F
We're gonna crack this case and prove we're the greatest partners of all time.
A
New friends.
F
You are Gary Destiny.
B
And your last name.
A
The snake Dream Team. Habitats.
B
Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
C
You can watch the record break.
A
Striking phenomenon at home.
C
You're clearly working it. Zootopia 2 now available on Disney Plus. Rated PG
A
picks of the week. I will start with a book I've been reading that I love. And in fact I want to get Stuart Brand on. Stuart Brand is in his 80s. He created the Whole Earth catalog. Which for my generation and yours too, Jeff really was almost the bible of repair. The hippies loved it. He started.
C
It was like things like the right. The right shovels for mulching.
A
Yeah it was just great and it was just fun. Every. We had in our coffee table.
C
Did you actually ever do anything from it?
A
No, of course not. Although we. I lived in an organic farm. We could. Maybe we did, maybe my parents did. But I loved the Whole Earth catalog because it was. It was like the Sears catalog for hippies. It was straight. It's just great. Just lots of great stuff. Stuff. Brand went on to do many things including the Whole Earth. Electronic link the. Well one of the first forums. It was just wonderful place to hang out. He founded the Clock of the Long. Now that's a clock they're building in a mountain that will only chime once every hundred years so that we start thinking long term. He has a series he's just started called the Maintenance. It's called Maintenance of Everything. Part one just came out and I have been reading it and I just love it and it resonates a little bit with what you talk about. Jeff with the Linotype. He talks about printing in this. He talks about the round the world solo sailing and how maintenance is so critical to everything in civilization. I've been reading it in an ebook and I like it so much I bought a hardcover version. Version. Stewart is a great writer and he hasn't lost his.
C
Does it include things that we can't maintain anymore because they're electronic and there's no digging them apart?
A
Ah, I haven't gotten that far. That's a very good question. He does talk about. He quotes a Simon Winchester book that I've got to read about precision that the ability to make precision tools. That started with gun makers who wanted to make interchangeable parts for guns but then rapidly expanded into bicycles. Bicycles were all the rage at the turn of the 19th century. Sewing machines too then sewing machines and eventually of course the Model T Ford. And precision has really become a keystone of our technological innovation.
C
Absolutely.
A
What about watches?
E
When were watches made?
C
Watches weren't made at scale the same
A
way, but they didn't have to be made as precise. So you only need to make it precise is if you want to take apart from one watch and put it in the other watch. If each watch is a unique snowflake like it just has to be what it is, it has to work. Right?
E
Right.
A
So the ability to make exactly interchangeable parts down to a thousandth of an inch took a while to develop, which is what happened with the Linotype.
C
I mean it was so Mark Twain went bankrupt with the Page Compositor and he never built more than two machines and the investment that would have been taken needed to build because he built them all bespoke.
A
Yep.
C
If you'd wanted to go into a factory there would have been a huge investment in tooling up for that. Whereas the Linotype was built from the
A
beginning for to be replicable from the stripe press. Stewart Brand just and I'd like to get Stuart on to talk about it. The maintenance of everything. It's just a great read but it's deep philosophy as well. He talks about Zen and the art of motorcycle repair for instance, which is all about maintaining a motorcycle so you could ride it across the country. So that's my I always felt inadequate
C
with the whole Earth catalog. I thought there should be something in here that I'm going to be interested in. But it was things that I just didn't do like mulch and stuff.
A
Well, get going. I know Paris Pick of the week. You have such good picks.
B
We'll do the Sports Illustrated one, which is you may recall that was it last year. Sometime recently I guess in 2023 Futurism published this great investigation revealing that Sports Illustrated had published just a really insane amount of product review articles that were bylined by completely made up AI like writers with AI generated.
C
Sports Illustrated is now owned by a cruddy marketing company.
B
Yeah, it was then owned by a company credit marketing company called the Arena Group that then said that the fake AI article has been published by a third party content provider called Advon Commerce. And this resulted in basically all of the AI stuff getting taken down. Arena Group executives getting fired including the company's then CEO. They lost control of it entirely and the Sports Illustrated brand ended up in the portfolio of this thing called Minute Media. Now now they seem to be having another AI issue. An editor at Sportico, Dan Bernstein kind of posted this week on Twitter that seemingly Sports Illustrated had ripped off an entire story that they had done on Calshi parlays. They basically did like an original analysis of parlay bets and Sports Illustrated basically published a copy paste of that article without any of the got like attribution and slightly rewritten in a way that was pretty obviously AI. The Futurism reports the Sports Illustrated piece only mentioned Sportico when repeating a quote given to Sportico for a related article published back in 2025, a quote that Sportico tellingly had called back to in the more recent piece. So this Sportico editor kind of points all this out, they're like, what's going on? Then Sports Illustrated not only deleted the article in question, which was attributed to a writer named Parker Loverich, but deleted everything to Parker Love Rich on their website as well as everything is off LinkedIn and Twitter with their name. And Sports Illustrated said the deleted content's been produced by an independent publisher, but that Parker Loverich is a real reporter. And we, once we became aware of a violation of our guidelines, we immediately took steps to address this violation, including cutting ties. The publisher. There's been no. I just thought this was such a weird and interesting look into just the, the flagrant uses of AI that the average person might go unseen.
A
Do you think people do it thinking, well, there's no way we'll get caught?
B
Yeah, I do.
C
At a place like that. Yeah. Now that's just a, it's just a
A
mill, like they don't care.
B
I think they probably just have to. Yeah. They're like, we have to publish like 20 things today. We're not going to pay freelancers. So let's just plug every story we've got, we think it's interesting into chat, GPT or Claude or whatever and have it rewrite it.
A
Right?
C
Yeah. I mean, you know, if a guy put out a book that had those kind of make it up quotes and didn't think somebody was going to see
A
it in a book about AI in truth.
C
Yeah, yeah.
B
It's just a book about lies made by AI had lies made.
A
There is a certain kind of personality, anything else that thinks it can get away with that stuff. And they, and they, and they often don't. I mean, I always wonder, wonder. You know, there's always the story of the. I always worry, because I'm a small business of the accountant who comes in and embezzles millions of dollars from a small business thinking that, oh, we'll never get caught. But of course they're going to get. Of course eventually you're gonna.
C
Eventually. It's time to balance the books. Yeah.
A
Yeah. Jeff, pick of the week.
C
All right, I want to mention. Well, no, we're gonna, I'm gonna mention first legitimate one, which is Axios on media valuations. Digital media valuations, BuzzFeed now sold, lost 86% of its value.
A
It was at its peak worth 1.7 billion. It sold for 231 million. After nine years.
C
CNET lost even more from 1.75 billion down to 100 billion.
A
Wow.
C
Vice down 93% and so on. So that's the legitimate one, just kind of Digital media. Bye bye, you. Now, I was going to give you a choice here between something good and something bad, but because you already use the Pope, I have no choice.
A
I. You have no choice? I have no choice on this.
C
To. To bring you to sperm racing.
A
Wait a minute.
C
The lowest of the low in Silicon Valley has now occurred.
A
A San Francisco biotech startup races sex cells on tiny tracks.
B
Oh, boy.
C
Chips. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. This is awful. The whole story is obnoxious and terrible. It's, it's, you know, give young men money and what are they going to do but jerk off? But the worst part of it to me is that the New York Times writer decided to enter his little boys.
A
So wait a minute. Does this company offer this as a service? Like, can you benchmark my.
B
Complete the sentence.
A
I don't know how to finish it.
C
It's all. This is all part of the, you know, macho male crap that's going on now. Testosterone and all that. And so now they're also saying, you know, one person says that 60. He. His sperm, like 60 is dead then, right?
A
That's Zeta for me.
C
Everything's dead, just rotten inside. So they're trying to look up, you know, are there? They're. They value their masculine masculinity as their testosterone and sperm. It's just. It's just obnoxious and stupid.
A
And the New York Times is valued at $50 million. It is a startup devoted to racing. This is from the New York Times. So it's okay to say this. Racing human sperm through an artificial reproductive system. They've hosted matches. They have races.
E
Okay, wait, wait, wait. Are these time trials or are they on the same track?
A
Track.
E
I'm just curious about how technically this works.
A
Question about methodology.
C
They're forced to go through little tiny tracks.
A
Must be time.
E
So it's a time trial. They don't put them all on the same track and say go.
C
And then you wouldn't know who's or whose.
A
Be fun to watch if they did it that way.
C
Click here to apply.
E
I mean, this is going to tie into, like, into those gambling sites, right? Polymarket. Like, who sperms the fast.
B
This,
A
in a sense, says the New York Times. Sperm racing aims to cut through the noise by reducing male vitality down to its absolute essence. Now, since I had a vasectomy more than 30 years ago, I think I can't compete.
C
No.
A
I got no motility.
C
And I had my prostate surgery, so I'm out, too.
A
So, Paris, it's up to you to win for the team.
B
I'll follow my story. I'll find a way to make it work.
A
Sperm racing employees spend much of their time turning the races into video content.
C
Don't you want to watch that somebody?
A
And then. Oh, you want to know how they make money? They sell things like Andros, a line of plastic free boxer briefs and a pineapple flavored gummy called Sperm Worms. Tagline, boost your boys. I could see a certain. This is a certain demographic of.
C
Oh, yeah, yeah, but it is. It is alternative.
A
Wow. So there's a World cup
C
in front
A
of a live audience drawing contestants from 128 countries. A month long single elimination tournament, over a hundred matches. They're going to use AI to translate the commentary into any language. There's just something about this. It's fascinating.
C
Fascinating as journalism. I found it pretty disgusting.
B
Yeah, it's pretty icky.
C
Yeah.
E
And you're not even saying like this proves absolutely nothing. Like, who cares if. Yeah, there's this.
A
Faster.
E
Like what?
A
What does that even mean, faster? Fastest. Well, I mean, I guess the first to get there wins, but that's not how it works.
E
That's not how it works.
A
It isn't how it works.
B
That isn't how any of this work, actually.
A
It isn't about the speed of the boys. It's about how much heart they have. Actually, there's recent evidence that the ova actually does some selection.
E
Exactly. It's not the first one that meets the egg.
D
It isn't.
A
The first works. And there's some interesting evidence about how the ovo makes its choice. It's actually very interesting because women are
C
and should be in charge.
A
Well, they are.
C
Look at Paris.
A
Those of us who've been married for any length of time know that. Okay, so you asked Benito, so I'm going to tell you. First, the team purifies the semen samples in a centrifuge. Then they pipette the sperm into two parallel 3800 micron microfluidic racetracks edged into silicone chips. The chips are fabricated from molds in an ad hoc clean room set up next to the first floor bathroom. Okay, well, that's a little detail I didn't realize.
C
Not a clean room.
A
The environment within the racetracks is designed to emulate the human reproductive system. In a process known as rheotaxis, the sperm move against a steady flow of warm fluid that mimics cervical mucus. I'm sorry, I didn't think I'd be saying that today. Like salmon swimming upstream, they cling to the walls of the track to avoid the central current and maintain their sense of direction. On these tracks, however. Oh no, it's hard. The sperm encounters unnatural obstacles, tight sections, sharp corners and pillars that separate the best from the wrist. Then, so it turns out the videos aren't there good. So they put it through 3D generation software which transforms it into the footage the audience sees on screen. In the final cut, two or more competitors sperm are shown in different colors jostling for position on the same track. They make it cool to watch. Like F1 said one of the principals,
B
F something.
A
I hope they have teeth teams names and stuff like that, right?
B
Oh, the best show title of all time was just put in there.
A
Yeah, yeah. Probably shouldn't use that as a show title. I don't think anybody would download the show. Pretty funny though. I agree. But you know, it's exciting to see it, folks. As the channels opened and the sperm flooded the chamber, Cataldi resumed his role as an anatomy. He took an early lead with a single sperm R1 darting ahead. I'm cooking him, he said. But soon my L1 and L2 racers were pulling up alongside his. My guy is completely lost. He shouted at the scream. As my first sperm crossed the finish line, his was still stuck at the halfway mark. The whole thing lasted just 16 seconds. It was a blowout. This is the New York Times reporter.
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A
I got sperm mogged. He said, oh man,
C
Paris, you gonna become a lesbian. Who wants to get near a man? Who wants to get anywhere near a man?
A
This is such a guy thing. This is. Oh, this is exactly what you think, guys.
C
17 year old guy, famous, too much money, they say.
A
Actually 18.
B
It's actually the entire history of the male experiment has been leading up to a guy saying the word sperm mogged on a podcast.
A
This is, this is where we've been heading all along. It's intelligent machines after dark, a saucier podcast. Smart talk, bold ideas, late nights, bright minds. I like it. It's a good idea.
C
And by the way, wouldn't you be proud to be an investor? Joe Lonsdale has invested in this.
A
Well, you know you can never go wrong underestimating the gullibility of the American people.
C
That's true.
A
The words of P.T. barnum, never give a sucker an even break.
C
Don't say sucker.
A
Ladies and gentlemen, another that sordid note. We must wrap the show with apologies to Paris Martineau and anybody listening today. Sorry, Paris. Paris Martineau is at Consumer Reports. This is one not to play for your co workers.
B
Correct.
A
Our website, Paris nyc. It has cooled off in New York City. I think you should go out and get a shawarma. Enjoy it.
C
It's now 70. You're right. The storm went through.
B
We have lost 20 degrees during the recording of this. 21 degrees during the record.
A
That's how it's supposed to be. Love that. Love that. Thank you Paris. No Gizmoto, no Gizmo appearance today.
B
Sorry to say, Gizmo is now officially six though.
A
Happy Birthday, Gizmo.
C
Giz.
A
That means Gizmo's middle aged.
B
Don't tell her that. Give her too much power. Actually, that's probably why she's been so annoying. She's having a midlife crisis.
A
Ours is just a teenager still, what do we Lass? Jeff Jarvis is Professor Emeritus of Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Author of a fabulous book called Hot Type, the Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media, the Story of the Linotype and Desktop Publishing and Electronic Publishing. It's really a good book and unfortunately I have a galley. You'll have to wait until August to read it. Thank you both of you. Appreciate your time. Thank you to all of you listening. We do this show every Wednesday 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch it live in the club Twit Discord if you're a member. Otherwise everybody's invited to watch on YouTube, Twitch X, Facebook, LinkedIn and kick after the fact on demand versions of the show available at the website. Audio or video? Video or and video. You could do both@twit tv im. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. Great way to share clips and of course best way to do it is subscribe in your favorite podcast client if you are a club member new benefit and you use your club feed which is the ad free feed that we send you when you join the club. You will get chapter markers listening in a compatible player. We recommend I think pocket casts so
C
you can skip right to the sperm racing.
A
You could skip right to the sperm racing.
B
You could just play it over and over again if you'd like.
A
But that is again that is a benefit for club members and somebody said well that's not fair. It's, it's not. We're not trying to make you join the club, although I wish I could. It is because people who have ad supported versions, many of our shows have direct ad insertion after the fact and different people get different ads of different lengths. So there's no way we can do chapter markers because we don't know the timing. There are no time codes in the show. Yeah, I thought that was kind of interesting. So we could do chapter markers but they would rapidly become inaccurate. The only way to do them accurately is in an ad free version. So that's why it is is just for you club members. But it is a good benefit. Thanks everybody. Have a wonderful evening. I can't believe we gotta wait a whole week before the next intelligent gen machines. But do be here for that. We'll see you then. Bye bye. Hey everybody. Leo Laporte here and I'm gonna bug you one more time to join Club twit. If you're not already a member, I want to encourage you to support what we do here at Twit. You know, 25% of our operating costs comes from membership in the club. That's a huge portion and it's growing all the time. That means we can do more, we can have more fun. You get a lot of benefits, ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the club, twitch, discord and special programming like the keynotes from Apple and Google and Microsoft and others that we don't stream otherwise in public. Please join the club. If you haven't done it yet, we'd love to have you find out more at TWiT TV Club TWiT and thank you so much.
B
I'm not a human being, not into this animal scene. I'm an intelligent machine. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
A
if you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Granger is your trusted partner offering the products you need all in one place. From H vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
Date: May 21, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Panelists: Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau
Guest: Frédéric Rivain (CTO, Dashlane)
This episode of Intelligent Machines dives deep into the intersection of AI, security, and the evolving tech ecosystem. The highlight is an in-depth interview with Frédéric Rivain, CTO of Dashlane and FIDO Alliance board member, about the integration of AI in secure environments, the future of passkeys, company adoption of agentic coding tools like Claude Code, and the security implications of next-generation AI security agents (e.g., Anthropic Mythos). The panel also explores the fallout from new AI/tech IPOs, the "AI everywhere" trend showcased at Google I/O, generative agents running media experiments, and a series of quirky and fascinating AI/tech stories from around the web.
Main Topics:
Passkey Adoption:
Why Migration Is Hard:
AI Everywhere:
Privacy by Design:
Balancing Security and AI:
Adoption of Claude Code:
On Code Review, Reliance, and Speed:
Best Uses for AI Coding Now:
Notable moment:
"Maybe it makes its own dumb mistakes. You still need the human to be looking at it and having critical thinking." – Frédéric [13:45]
Mythos Anticipation:
Dual-Use Fear:
Architectural Resilience:
Quantum Threats & Post-Quantum Migration:
Interoperability via Credential Exchange:
Passkeys as a More Secure Standard:
"There is AI in everything except your coffee." – Jeff Jarvis [06:18]
"We built a phishing detection model... it doesn’t run on the browsing activity, it runs completely isolated on the device. We never see the data." – Frédéric Rivain [07:48]
"The basics matter even more today... If you don't use customer data for training, it doesn't mean hackers can't get in, but at least the blast radius will be smaller." – Frédéric [25:26]
"We're the wrong people to ask [which tech IPO will win], but believe me, I'm not... I invest in baskets. I don't think there's going to be a winner." – Leo Laporte [40:03]
"We're just at the beginning of the journey... we're going to learn how to build the infrastructure, the best practices." – Frédéric [11:52]
Techno King in SpaceX IPO filing:
"Can I ctrl-F for Techno King?" [66:48]
Token Economics in AI:
"You get whatever you measure." – Leo Laporte [62:26]
"Jensen Huang... is trying to produce more tokens at less cost." – Jeff Jarvis [60:31]
Closing quote:
"We're just at the beginning of the journey… all of us are really at the beginning." – Frédéric Rivain [11:52]
—
This summary provides comprehensive coverage of all major topics, insights, and lighthearted moments from the episode. For a chaptered audio version and deeper dives, consider joining Club TWiT.