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Intelligent Machines 874: Google Knows I Love the Pepper Cannon
02:46:30
AI and the New Social Contract
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff's here. Paris is back. Our guest this week, Jeffrey Kannel. He is the founder of Noose Research. They've created a new agent I live with, I am crazy about. We'll talk about Hermes and a lot of other things, including the new Fable model. What Apple's proposing with Siri. It's going to be a big intelligent machines. We even talk about Paris's article about food safety and the pepper cannon. All coming up next on Intelligent Machines. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. Episode 874 recorded Wednesday, June 10, 2026. Google knows I love the pepper cannon. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show. We cover the latest in robotics, AI and the smart doodads all around us. We are so happy to have Paris Martineau back. She has emerged from the trenches of the big expose she's been writing at Consumer Reports which came out yesterday.
- [01:12]
Paris Martineau
It's true. Are you relaxed in the world? I'm relaxed. I'm sleeping a normal amount of hours a night. I sat in the sun yesterday. It's delightful.
- [01:23]
Leo Laporte
Did you have talk about this Hostess donuts?
- [01:26]
Paris Martineau
I did not have any Hostess Donuts and we can talk about why after we have a wonderful interview.
- [01:33]
Leo Laporte
We'll save that. Yes. And I actually made one of the picks of the week be something that you worked with for this. So we'll talk about that in just a little bit. Paris, of course. Consumer Reports investigative reporter in food safety. Always great to have you here. Jeff is here as well. Jeff Jarvis, journalistic professor. Let's see, let me get this right. Emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School. Craig Craig Newmark, City University of New York. He is also the author of Hot Type which comes out in a couple of months. Yay. But you can pre order now at
- [02:09]
Jeff Jarvis
just August 20th and I just finished the audiobook last week.
- [02:12]
Paris Martineau
Yay.
- [02:14]
Jeff Jarvis
So you can order that too.
- [02:16]
Leo Laporte
Congratulations. I am thrilled to have returning guest this week, Jeffrey Connell. He is the founder and former CEO of Noose Research. Now ctoed he's kind of stepped back into the research role. Really wonderful to talk to you again, Jeffrey. Love talking to you then, but you were cagey. You did not tell us about a little something that you had in the lab.
- [02:41]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yes.
- [02:41]
Leo Laporte
When we had you on, we were talking about your models. You have some really interesting models like Psyche. But it turns out you also had an agent running in the labs and the story I Read, which I think came from you, is that you saw openclaw and how it took out off in January and you said, you know, our thing is actually better. So in February you released something called Hermes. By March I was using it full time. I am madly in love with Hermes. It is exactly what I want.
- [03:17]
Jeff Jarvis
He has been obnoxiously in love of elegiacally in love.
- [03:23]
Leo Laporte
It is exactly what I want with an agent. It's robust, it's powerful, it's easy to use. I'm running it through a third party web ui, which I really like. Just this week you released a dedicated application for it for Windows Mac. And is there a Linux version too?
- [03:40]
Jeffrey Kannel
It runs on Linux too.
- [03:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, but I like. I happen to like the web ui. That's one of the things that's great about Noose research. You're fairly agnostic about those kinds of things. There's a command line and a TUI as well. You also are very. And the reason I like it very agnostic about models, because right now, for instance, I'm running this on my. I have a central server, it's a framework desktop. I think we talked about that last time. And I'm running Quinn 3635B on it, a local, fully local model, as my agentic model. Hermes is smart enough to delegate harder jobs to others, but Quinn writes quite well. So this is fully local at this point. And I'm blown away. So much so that my wife, who saw me playing with Hermes and got jealous, said, can I have a profile too? So one of the great things, now
- [04:29]
Jeff Jarvis
that you've divorced Claude.
- [04:30]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [04:31]
Jeff Jarvis
And your marriage is safe.
- [04:32]
Leo Laporte
Mine is called Quicksilver, after Hermes. Right. But hers is called Rosie. So it has all the skills. We share the skills. But her own memory.
- [04:43]
Paris Martineau
Does Rosie, your cat, know that her name has been co opted and perverted into an AI?
- [04:50]
Leo Laporte
No, but I don't think she really cares, frankly. The good thing is it's also Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons. So it's appropriate in two ways. One of the things I like about Hermes, it's really a battery included agent. It has more than 90 skills come with it. It's very powerful. You have a choice of memory models, including I turned on Hindsight, but there's Honcho. There's a bunch of different choices. It's very easy to enable and it's. It's just super wonderful in every respect. So I just wanted to start by saying thank you for releasing it. It's funny that you had it all that time, when did you start using it?
- [05:30]
Jeffrey Kannel
We started probably sometime in December. And I mean I've told the story a few other places, but I'll give the quick recap which is just that we were looking for ways to supercharge our model development. You know, we are not as well in Hu funded is a company, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. So we always have to look for these like thousand X increases, you know, that are going to allow us to compete with the, with the bigger boys. And so we were like, let's try to see if we can get an RSI loop going. RSI being recursive self improvement. Right. So we said, well to have that we need to have some sort of scaffolding harness that can learn as it goes. And we built Hermes agent internally for our post training team to work on model stuff. And it kind of was one of those things where I guess maybe when you swim in it all the time, like we've always known AIs can do stuff like this and have used it like this. So it was kind of like a water, you know, fish don't know they're in the water kind of situation. And when OpenClock came out and it suddenly was having massive penetration into everyday people's lives use cases, we really were just like, hey, we have this thing that we think is just as good and we didn't really position it as a competitor or put it out there because we even ourselves weren't quite sure what the reception would be. So we put it out there and immediately it just was PMF unlike anything we'd ever seen before. People were just coming in and loving it. We, we stay close to the community, we listen to what people wanted every day. We use sort of the asymmetric power of these models now to be able to scale up the development because we can now theoretically hire like a thousand engineers all at once to work on it if we're willing to pay for it. And we've been just ship, ship, ship, keep an eye towards the users, keep an eye towards, like you said, being agnostic about use cases, really allowing people to develop things and let it mold it to themselves. Because once you mold it to yourself, you really come to love it, right? In a sense that it is, you know, you built it up to what it is and now it's extremely useful for you.
- [07:19]
Leo Laporte
It's been so personalized to me now because of all the memory over the months, 190,000 stars on GitHub. I mean I think you're Underselling the success. It is now more stars than VS Code. It is an incredible success. And I think people who are using openclaw look at it and go, this is much more stable. Doesn't have the security issues that OpenClaw has because there's no Hermes marketplace. Right. There's no third party marketplace for skills because Hermes writes its own skills.
- [07:52]
Jeff Jarvis
Yep.
- [07:53]
Jeffrey Kannel
So like the self improvement, I would say like unlock that we had was like looking at the dynamic skill creation and the curated local memory was kind of like the unlock that we innovated on that turned it into what it is now. And sort of the first time you see it do this thing where you're using it, you're solving a hard problem and then it creates a skill automatically from that. And then the next time you try to do something in there, it just instantly happens because it knows the best way to do it and it knows your way to do it. You know, like whatever your flow happens to be, we're going to. It'll build up dynamically over time. We like to say Hermes Agent. It gets better the more you use it. Right. And so if that's the case, the more you use it, it gets better. People have. Yeah, people have loved it. So. Yeah, like you said, 190,000 stars. We released our. Our own desktop app last week after we were. We demoed it on stage. Jensen did it.
- [08:43]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah. Let's not forget J. Jensen Wong giving you a big plug at Computex. That was. You were there, right?
- [08:48]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yes, I was there. I was there. I met him later and talked to him. He's a great guy. And so we released the desktop app. We'd been working with Nvidia and Microsoft on the RTX Spark, which was the laptop that they announced. So we have been working on that. And so we released the desktop. I think we've had about 1.5 million downloads of that. So it's been a huge success and we're really trying to, you know, the goal of Noose always was to bring this transformational technology to as many people as possible in an open way.
- [09:19]
Leo Laporte
You know, in the context, open is key, isn't it?
- [09:21]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah. In which way that was going to go. I think we always were feeling for. On what it was and now that we've sort of found that place, that's good. We're having a. Just having a blast, you know, take it going along for the ride.
- [09:31]
Leo Laporte
It just shows the good guys can win. One of the reasons I broke up with Anthropic is I was mad at their policy that you had, you couldn't use your subscription with anything but Claude code. One of the things that Hermes does is pretty cool, is if I need a challenging programming job and I want to use code, it will automatically launch Claude code or OpenAI's codecs. Do the programming in there. I don't even see the command line. Put it back in Hermes. So it's the best of both worlds. It uses the OpenAI API, so every model except Claude works fine. You could use Claude API tokens. And if you're going to use Fable, you're going to have to in a couple of weeks, we're certainly going to talk about that.
- [10:13]
Jeffrey Kannel
You better go looking under the pillows for some dollars.
- [10:17]
Leo Laporte
Holy cow. $10 in and $30 out is a lot of money. Twice as expensive.
- [10:23]
Jeff Jarvis
Deep Seek.
- [10:24]
Leo Laporte
Well, and this is why I'm using Quinn now. And I'm actually really impressed. But Noose has its own. And I do have a new subscription. You have a $20 a month subscription. You also have Max and Pro subscriptions which give you access to, I think like it's 120 models. Some huge number of models.
- [10:39]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yep. We partnered with several different like inference providers to bundle it all together. What's nice about the new subsc as well is it also includes all the tools. So you've got web search, image search, text to speech, all of that sort of stuff comes with it as well. And so it's sort of the external tools that you otherwise would have had to go get API keys for. We sort of bundle the best in class versions of all of those together and they're served alongside with the new subscription. So that's one thing that's useful about it too.
- [11:04]
Leo Laporte
It's kind of like the open router model. Right. Are you routing it yourself, orchestrating it yourself or.
- [11:10]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, we do use open Router in behind the scenes for some of the models. So we have like our own open router layer essentially that, you know, routes it to different people. We. For the, for different. Like when we did a deal with Kimi or some of the other ones, they give us special access to their inference platform. So behind the scenes we have sort of our own open router style model routing thing as well.
- [11:29]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. I. As you can see, I have quite a bit. Big balance I've built up.
- [11:34]
Jeffrey Kannel
I appreciate it.
- [11:35]
Leo Laporte
I don't know, you know, but it's great because it allows me to test and try a huge variety of models. One of the things I have Hermes do every week is go out and look at all the models and pick them for the delegation so that it can, for, you know, images, it can choose the best image model, which I think probably is still Nano banana for coding.
- [11:57]
Jeffrey Kannel
GPT image 2 is pretty good. GPT image 2 is pretty Good.
- [11:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, there's some really good stuff out there. I've been using GPT5.5, but I started a couple of days ago to use the local model and I'm actually pretty surprised it turns out. I think a lot of people are realizing this. We've all been focused on models and model strength. But the harness, the stuff around it may be equally important. And if you built something really good with something like Hermes, you don't necessarily need the smartest model to do 90% of what you want to do.
- [12:29]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, and a lot of it I think, you know, there's a world where even if like we froze all our models today, we could like, still squeeze a lot more, you know, juice. Juice out of them. The harness thing is very interesting to me because like this, this unlock happened because of sort of this invisible wall that got, that got passed with the models. Like, it kind of started around when Opus 4.5 came out, but there was just this period where all of a sudden the models got good enough, good enough at long context to really take in the huge amount of stuff we put around to, to direct the model and to use tools effectively. Like there was just kind of this like invisible line that was crossed about six months ago. That's really an emergent property of the models, right? Yes, they trains, they train in it. Someone. But like the fact that we were get such useful improvements out of the models without changing them at all. Just, just one more thing about how actually amazing the actual models are.
- [13:23]
Leo Laporte
This is in a way what Apple talked about on Monday and what I think they intend with a Siri, because Siri will have memory, it will have all the context from your phone that in a way that what they're building is an agentic Siri. They're not going to say that out loud, but it's. But I think people are going to have this experience of using an AI is so much better when it understands your context, understands you, and it knows about you and it has some history with you. But then there's this big issue because if you're using one of the frontier models, if you're using ChatGPT or Anthropic, it's going to get a lot of information about you. And I think people are very nervous about that.
- [14:05]
Jeffrey Kannel
And you know, we try to do this in Hermes by having the ability to have sessions where you can segment things out yourself, like, you know, really put you in control. I mean, yes, they're making an agentic Siri. It'll be interesting. You know, Apple's sort of play here is very interesting to me because they sort of sat out the race of AI for the last however many years, you know, when maybe like the default thought would be oh, if you're, you know, a tech company in SF or like you got to have your own AI division, you got to be making your own model, you know, and they, they sort of sat out and have now sort of like surgically decided to strike at some, you know, specific.
- [14:35]
Leo Laporte
Might have been a good strategy, as it turns out. Right, they don't, they missed depends if
- [14:39]
Jeffrey Kannel
they succeed, but they definitely save themselves, you know, $200 billion CAPEX.
- [14:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly. And they're riding on Google's Gemini investments and so forth. So they're not all alone. But they have their own foundation models. Tell me a little bit about your own models, about Noos Research's models.
- [14:58]
Jeffrey Kannel
So right now we have our old class of Hermes models which were sort of the old paradigm where they weren't agentic. So we're working right now on training new versions of our models that will be agentic right now. So we don't actually have any of our own models that we ship that are for Hermes agent yet, but we're working on it. We actually also recently joined the Nematron coalition. So which is Nvidia's model? Nvidia's. Nvidia's open source training modeling. Because you know, really the question is like, if you think about like fully open source models, you know, fully foundation, full LLM from pre training all the way through, you know, this, the money keeps going up. The money keeps going up and there is a question about like who is aligned to even like do that in open source anymore. Right. Like when it was these 7B models that we were training, you know, your early Llamas, like you sort of justify it as a, as like a marketing cost or something like that, you know. But what happened with Meta and these other, you know, places that basically said we're not going to do it anymore. And functionally the only companies that are doing open source training in the world anymore are the Chinese companies. Right.
- [15:57]
Leo Laporte
I remember you saying the last time you were on you were very nervous because of Meta might pull back llama at any moment. Yep, they still haven't, but.
- [16:05]
Jeffrey Kannel
Well they haven't. They Never. They're not training meta llama 5 though. You know, there's no intention in open sourcing anything. Right.
- [16:11]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
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Jeffrey Kannel
So at this point we sort of are in that future. And I think Nvidia is one company that sort of credibly could put money into open source and have it still be aligned with the business. Right. Because you know, whether more models, more tokens just means more Nvidia chips that are getting bought. Right. So I think there's a way that it really makes sense there. So we're working with Nvidia to like, you know, steer the direction of American open source and try to get foundation models out that are fully open source. I will say when 3.6, 3006 be quite amazing. The fact that they got as much of that into a 36B, it was really like, I wouldn't have thought it was possible, to be honest with you. They really did do a great job
- [16:46]
Leo Laporte
with Hermes suggested turning on. Oh and I can't remember the acronyms, a number of features, Flash features and so forth to make it faster, more responsive. Hermes actually helped me tune Quen. I'm using Llama CPP and it said use these settings and it helped me tune it quite a bit. And I was amazed at how much faster and better the time to first token improved. Everything is better. So there is a lot you can do with a local model and I think it's really important. Privacy is for privacy and other reasons. Cost is another reason there's going to be. We're seeing this with Fable and we see it with Mythos that these high end models, yes, they're very, very good, but they're very, very expensive. Only billionaires can afford them.
- [17:28]
Jeff Jarvis
And how do you know when you need to use that quote unquote high end?
- [17:32]
Jeffrey Kannel
I think that's still an open question really. And that's something that I think ought to be explored more. Also, even on the harness side, we're working on model RO routing to dynamically be able to switch between models at different tiers and adaptively do it because, you know, there you don't need OPUS tokens or you know, Fable tokens to like move a file around. Right now there's all these questions about how do you actually pull that off? Do you invalidate the cash context if you switch between models? So it's a little bit of a hard problem. But certainly, you know, at the prices we're talking about now, only, you know, well funded businesses can really afford to allow people to just use frontier models as their daily driver. If they're doing any sort of heavy
- [18:11]
Leo Laporte
work and even they are starting next year. Yeah, even they are kind of like the token costs. We're talking to Jeffrey Cannell. He. Am I saying it right? Cannell, do you don't say the. Yes. Yeah. Jeffrey Kinnell of NOOS Research. He is the. Well, it's an interesting story. Kind of co founder. It was a Discord server where you had a lot of people very interested in this idea some years ago, a couple years ago, and formed a company around it. You've got venture funding now, right? Is that right?
- [18:39]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yep.
- [18:40]
Leo Laporte
And what would you say your primary business now, is it Hermes or is it Mom?
- [18:45]
Jeffrey Kannel
Absolutely, it's Hermes. And figuring out ways that we can, you know, make that be profitable to the company. We have a huge user install base, but we're trying not to be extractive, you know. Yeah, we. And that's why. And you do. But like, we also offer open router and all these other things because we're not going to a. We're not going to force you into something that's like extractive. We want News Portal to be the best place for you to experience Hermes, but we want to allow you to run your local model if you want to run, you know, local models and set it up with Honcho, if you want to set it up with Honcho and all those other places. So we're going to, you know, kind of give an offering right now that is sort of our best class version of it, but still offer the. Always offer the freedom to configure in your own case and however you want.
- [19:23]
Leo Laporte
When I emailed you, I asked you to, I said if you want to bring Technium along with you. Is Technium the lead developer on Hermes?
- [19:29]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yes, he. So he's the lead developer on Hermes and it's really, you know, he's a little shy.
- [19:33]
Leo Laporte
He didn't want to.
- [19:34]
Jeffrey Kannel
He's a little shy. Yeah, he doesn't like to get on the camera. But here's the thing about. About tech, you know, he is not. Did not go to school for CS and was not a coder at all. Like, did not really know Python. Did not know anything at all. And from like a coding perspective. And he built Hermes Agent. All right, now the number one.
- [19:53]
Leo Laporte
Did he Vibe coded?
- [19:54]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, we all completely. All with. With. Yeah, not. But. Yeah, not Vibe coding. But he is now, like, he knows how to. I would say what he does is like many levels above Vibe coding.
- [20:02]
Leo Laporte
You know, I follow him on X and he's very valuable. Highly recommend it super smart.
- [20:08]
Jeffrey Kannel
He really knows how to articulate what he wants. He has a vision for the product of what he wants it to be. He just didn't have the technical. He didn't go to computer science school, you know, and he just never learned that. So it's really amazing now that we live in this time where like one of the biggest applications on the planet right now, you know, was written by someone who was not a developer. Right. Like, and it. So that's the future unlock, right? Because it used to be gated behind people who had to go to school in a specific way. Like, it just goes to show, like, how transformational these, this technology really can be and how enabling it can be of people who previously, just for some reason or other, wouldn't have been able to, you know, to do something. It allows everyone to bring their ideas to life. And if you have a great idea and you're someone who really is exacting on what you want, you can now make it happen when you know the circumstances of your life previously may have made it so that you couldn't have.
- [20:57]
Leo Laporte
Jeffrey, isn't that the future of this? Isn't it? Yeah. Jeff, you're going to say the same thing. This is what technology brings us. Tech is really good also at listening. And half the time somebody will tweet at him and he'll say, merged.
- [21:13]
Jeffrey Kannel
And that's the thing, is to be successful, you just have to be obsessive about the customer. You have to be obsessive about wanting everyone to be happy and stuff. And if you're willing to be obsessive, and he is, he's 16 hours a day, seven days a week. He loves the product. And that's a huge piece of why we've been able to be successful.
- [21:29]
Leo Laporte
Here's an example from earlier today. Somebody says, I work on Gemini at Google. I added a few text to speech features to Hermes and Technium's responses merged, which means we get it, we all get it, which is fantastic. This is one of the things I love about Hermes is you don't have to use all the skills. They don't take up context, they're just there on the hard drive. But when you say, and you can say this to Hermes, you know, is there any way for me to scan through stuff on X? And Hermes will walk you through it it and suddenly you have a whole new capability and that's very powerful. Go ahead, Paris. I'm sorry.
- [22:02]
Paris Martineau
Oh, I was going to say, I know originally a focus for new research was the Solana Blockchain. That was kind of central. Is that still something that is central to your guys's operations?
- [22:12]
Jeffrey Kannel
Well, we're not working on it right now. We've sort of had to shift a lot of our focus. Just we only have so many people. And like when you have that many people, like that many PRs, we have. We've kind of had to like jury rig the whole ship over and try to like focus it on Hermes agent. So we're focusing pretty much everything we are right now on Hermes Agent. I mean, I think our experiments on Solana completely still. Well, there were experiments. We were trying to figure out how can we incentivize model training and make it work. And I think we've just sort of shifted that into this next domain with working with Nvidia and like trying to find the right answer for how can we still bring true open source models to market.
- [22:45]
Leo Laporte
Just you did mention and it seems to be a capability. I can, in the middle of a session, at any turn, I can change models. And it seems to be. It will pick up the session. It also has a memory of all the sessions and I can go back to a session and that now becomes part of the context and continue on with the conversation. These little things, little quality of life things like this make this incredibly useful.
- [23:09]
Jeffrey Kannel
Much more details. Hermes agent is now 100% written with Hermes Agent. So that's what we use every day to build it. So all those sorts of. If you have to use it all the day to build this complicated thing, you want to do it.
- [23:27]
Leo Laporte
So we were talking earlier when you joined us, and I see behind you, it looks like a picture from the Sistine ceiling. Am I right?
- [23:37]
Jeffrey Kannel
That is actually the Transfiguration by Raphael.
- [23:40]
Leo Laporte
It's Raphael.
- [23:41]
Jeffrey Kannel
It's his final painting. It actually was unfinished when he died. People thought it was so good they put it next to his casket when he had their funeral. The unfinished one, it actually sits behind the Pope at one of the churches in Rome. The original. But that one is actually Raphael.
- [23:56]
Leo Laporte
Well, and I know Jeff was on last Sunday when Father Robert was with us, our. Our favorite Jesuit. And we've been talking a lot about the Pope's encyclical. It was all about AI. In fact, Pope Leo took. There it is. I made a song out of Section
- [24:13]
Jeff Jarvis
2 and wrote A. Wrote a long post out of it. It's a fascinating document. I think it's a great document.
- [24:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah. What do you think of it, Jeffrey, as it is practicing?
- [24:22]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was really, you know, I was maybe I was a little bit like, I wasn't nervous, but I was like, what is this going to say? What is this going to say? And, you know, the. The encyclical is meant to survive the test of time. You know, this is part of the Church's official, you know, position in its. In its role as teacher and speaking with the Magisterium. And so these sorts of things have to live on, you know, forever. And, you know, so what the Holy Father did was not so much say, here's where AI is right? Here's where AI is wrong. This is what is more how. What is a framework on how to think about this? Right? It was a framework on how to think about these sorts of questions in the modern age. And it really is even more than just artificial intelligence. I would even call it an encyclical on modernity, whatever you want to call it in 2026. Right. Like, what is the state of the world in 2026? And there are all these new challenges that, you know, that hyper capitalism and, you know, post work, whatever you want to call it, kind of stuff happening when, you know, what is the already established teaching of the ch? Does it apply in this place? So, for example, the word artificial intelligence actually only appears one time in, like, the first third of the document. He really goes to great lengths to like, bring forward what Catholic social teaching has said over the. Over pre. Over the previous years. You know, how Catholic social teaching was applied during the Industrial Revolution, how was it applied during, you know, these other sort of, you know, changes in human society, and then bring it to the forefront and just really say that the purpose of. Of any technology is to improve the cause of humanity on Earth. And if these tools help make us better humans, they make us more drawn to what our cause is and enable us to do that more then absolutely all the good. And I think highlighting that there is both good and there are both things to watch out for. And here's a framework, a preferential treatment for the poor, for example. You know, it's part of Catholic social teaching. And we have to make sure that when we're making these sorts of models. Exactly. You know, we're not creating. It's a joke on Twitter, but like, you know, the permanent AI underclass, right, of like the people who get access to fable in the top.
- [26:24]
Leo Laporte
I think it's a joke. I think increasingly becoming obvious
- [26:29]
Jeff Jarvis
a reality. Yeah, yeah.
- [26:30]
Jeffrey Kannel
And so we just have to like, you know, those are the sorts of things that we need to look out. What is the ultimate destination of all goods. It's, you know, the common cause of all humanity. And so he goes through building it all up. So I was extremely happy with, with, with how it came out. There are several places in it. There are actually only. There's several things he says that are about, you know, the ontological status of artificial intelligences. You know, it's the Church's position that they aren't alive. They don't, you know, feel love and stuff like that. It's paragraph 99 is like, kind of like the one that really goes into that too. Yeah. And. But it really goes in to say, like, here's, you know, some ontological claims, but also goes so far as to say, but the real disposition of these still is the purview of academia and research and that science is something that can be used to solve these problems. And there's no reason not to use science to investigate and solve these problems.
- [27:21]
Leo Laporte
I love that. Don't turn.
- [27:22]
Jeff Jarvis
What are you hearing from your fellow technologists about it? Did they pay attention to it?
- [27:27]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yes, they absolutely did pay attention to it. It was, you know, it's kind of not shocking to me, but like, I live in kind of this Catholic bubble, you know, sometimes it feels like. And so for the fact that a lot of people who were not in that bubble were still taking what the Church was saying seriously in this lend credence that the Church still exists in some sort of moral authority throughout the world, and it was happy to see it. And I would say it was extremely well received by everyone else because it wasn't. This AI is evil, can't do it. Don't stop putting it sort of like that. It was just, hey, here's how to think about it in a way that improves human flourishing across the board.
- [28:04]
Leo Laporte
I would be remiss, Jeffrey, if I didn't ask you a little bit about your particular Hermes installation. What. What models are you using these days?
- [28:13]
Jeffrey Kannel
I'm. I mean, I was a big. Still am a big opus 48 fan and 46 only because I think I learned how to write, you know, raggle them pretty raglan. Pretty good GPT5.5, actually, to me is like super unwieldy. I know a ton of people love it, but to me I find it very unwieldy. So it's really me. I just have sort of developed a rapport with 4.8. I know how it's going to think. And So I use 4.8 a lot for that. I mean, I started using Fable. Yes.
- [28:40]
Leo Laporte
You're not using a sub Though you're
- [28:41]
Jeffrey Kannel
using API, so I use Noose Portal, which has four, eight on there. You can pay on it. That's awesome. And I'm one of the lucky few that gets the unmetered account that I can set as many tokens as I want.
- [28:54]
Leo Laporte
Have you added Fable to the portal yet?
- [28:57]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, so we added Fable yesterday. I actually have only used it a little bit just because I've kind of been doing a podcast circuit today with everything with Fable coming, coming out. So I haven't been able to form like too. Too many feelings about it. What I will say about it is that, you know what. What Anthropic has said about the LLM research and open source research in the space is, you know, greatly concerns me as someone who cares a lot about that. And so I'm sort of at my own kind of like existential. Do I really want to keep supporting this kind of companies?
- [29:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [29:31]
Jeffrey Kannel
So with the release of, you know, first of all, they did this whole security theater thing, which, you know, every model company does. If you remember, they, after GPT2 GPT, you know, OpenAI said we have to keep the weights for GPT3 closed. It's just too dangerous. Right. You know, which now would be.
- [29:47]
Leo Laporte
That was Daria working at OpenAI who said that. So.
- [29:51]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [29:52]
Leo Laporte
So it's sort of a playbook.
- [29:53]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, yeah, it's so playbook. It's like, you know, it's so dangerous we can't release it. Except of course we can. You know, we're the ones who get to do it. And then eventually you release it, you know, whatever, blah, blah, blah. They did this whole security theater thing with Mythos, and I no doubt that it really is world class. It's the best AI on the planet right now. And then with Fable, they finally said, well, we're going to be able to release it because we've included all these extra guardrails on there, including two sets of things that it does. So it used to be there always were guardrails on Claude. And if you hit it, what would happen is it would just. Well, there was two levels. The AI would say, I'm sorry, I can't help you with it. If it says that, then it was actually from the training data, the AI emergently refusing to do it because it was trained not to say certain things. They had a second layer which is this classifier layer which is actually looking, which is a different model that's sitting there babysitting all the tokens and is making a judgment call of is this thing getting out of whack is this not doing what we want. And if you hit the classifier, what happens is the response just stops. You just get an empty response from the API. Just returns nothing. Basically no refusal. It just returns nothing. This was how the safety stuff worked before the previous Opus model models with Fable, they've changed it now to where it will. It has a new detection mechanism where it will actually downgrade you out of Fable back to Opus 4.8 if it detects you're doing. I believe the categories were like chemical research, cybersecurity research, biology. Some of these like, you know, high leverage sort of things where you can imagine there could be a bad application of it, but there's also a million unknown good applications for it. I'll say. And it'll kick you back to Opus 4:0 point RNA. But the, the more insidious thing that they've done, which is they have. If you are doing research on AI, particularly LLM research on AI, they won't actually kick you back to Opus 4.8. They have new mechanisms that will silently degrade the quality of the responses. And like literally like lie to you, like not tell you what it knows. And like they literally like inject a dumb vector into the AI training at runtime to like dumb down the model to keep you from being able to do frontier level AI research.
- [32:03]
Leo Laporte
Is that to keep people from doing distillation attacks? They've complained about China for instance.
- [32:08]
Jeffrey Kannel
You can make any reasoning out of your own about why they might have done it. Could be distillation. Absolutely. Could it be? I mean, they don't want distillation because they don't want anyone competing with them. Right. So at the end of the day, the real argument is competition, but this is like a whole new Pandora's box that hadn't been open before where like we are going to actively sabotage the token stream to keep you from getting access to something it already could have done. And that we are doing internally as well. Right? Like they're using it to do a frontier level research, but we're going to actively sabotage it. I don't know if you guys are familiar with. I'm sure you are the Three Body problem, you know, the SO fans that literally this is literally like the plot of the Three Body problem where they send these things in to, to like sabotage scientific research, to like keep the, keep humans, you know, from, you know, advancing too quickly until their ships can get here. So it's pretty much the same thing and it's something that I think all of us in the open source community really feel like somewhat of a red line has, has been like crossed here because they're now saying that like they've always sort of said they didn't want open source AI to exist but like they're now literally using their position in the market to like, like go and sabotage open source AI, like literally sabotage it versus even just classify refusal. It's not even just refusing, it's like we're going to actively sabotage it. And that just seems to me like, like what are we, what are we doing here people? I mean as much as you want to say it, oh, Anthropic was they've done a ton of work but they also exist because people open source transformers, people open sourced open, you know, there's a huge amount of open science that started all of this and to sort of pull the ladder up, you know, the second you guys get got to some level just seems incredibly, if I may quote Elon Misanthropic.
- [33:48]
Jeff Jarvis
Speaking of pulling the ladder up, Jeffrey, what about their recent push to say, okay, once we, once we've finished our model and once we've gone to one IPO now all development should stop that numerous.
- [33:59]
Leo Laporte
We want to pause.
- [34:00]
Jeff Jarvis
Pause? Yes. What did you think about that?
- [34:03]
Jeffrey Kannel
I can't imagine that would fly because if Cheat OpenAI eclipses Fable with GPD 5, 6 or something, I think they would actually be like in violation of their fiduciary duties to the shareholders to like, you know, like,
- [34:20]
Leo Laporte
yeah, like you
- [34:21]
Jeffrey Kannel
could do it as a private company actually, but it's like a public company. It's a little bit of a different like question because like you're liable now to do what's in the best interest of this common shareholders. And the common shareholders are like people who want their value of their shares to go up and there isn't really a planet where they pause their AI and other people continue and like their company gets more valuable. So I mean, I suppose I don't
- [34:40]
Paris Martineau
know about how this work on the public market, but famously something we hear a lot from people who all like hold shares of Anthropic like employees. They note that there is a clause in their contracts that basically says we reserve the right to totally tank the value of all of your shares based on these specific principles. And I wonder if that sort of mindset that is even possible to fly in the public markets.
- [35:05]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, that's a good question.
- [35:08]
Leo Laporte
So of course some of this is powered by the fact that anthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX for that matter are all pursuing a IPOS this year. Now admittedly Nvidia has its own financial interests, but it sounds like you believe that they support open models because they're going to make money on the hardware anyway. It's about Cuda and it's about their GPUs more than as long as at
- [35:33]
Jeffrey Kannel
the end of the day it has to run on an Nvidia chip, you know, that is better, they're okay with it. That's kind of why I think like they're the only company like that could marshal enough resources to actually pull off like some of these foundational open source models where it would still be in line with their bit where it's still in line with their core.
- [35:47]
Leo Laporte
It'll still make money.
- [35:48]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [35:49]
Leo Laporte
What I don't like about it is it CUDA is proprietary and it means Apple's MLX technology and it means the rock technology on my AMD processor stuff are not compatible to me. Open means it should work on a variety of hardware that shouldn't be hardware specific. But these are such expensive models to build that I understand you've got to consider the cost of building it and you've got to consider once you get
- [36:15]
Jeffrey Kannel
to the billions of dollars.
- [36:18]
Leo Laporte
So this is a tough challenge. I mean you're pursuing open models, right?
- [36:22]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yes, yes, absolutely.
- [36:24]
Leo Laporte
So how do you make that work financially?
- [36:27]
Jeffrey Kannel
So we're going to be relying on the Nematron Coalition's access to the GPUs to do it. Right. So Jensen is sworn, has not sworn but you know, he's, he's told, you know, the coalition that over the next two years the Nvidia is going to commit 15 to 25 billion dollars for, for this, for this purpose. Right. So that's, that's quite a lot, you know, that gets you to the frontier level of like training resources.
- [36:50]
Leo Laporte
So I mean it doesn't mean you can run it locally is the issue. I mean I'm right now nematron3 120b is free. I can run it through your open router connection and run it three and I presume it's a big model, it's a powerful model, but I have to run it on the cloud. I can't run it locally.
- [37:09]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, they just released Animatron Ultra, which is their 550B. So there's three, there's nano, super and Ultra. I mean, yes, unfortunately, I mean I think you've seen that there's a world where, where small models can still do BJ drivers.
- [37:24]
Leo Laporte
For local source stuff, Deepseek's very good. Quinn's very good.
- [37:27]
Jeffrey Kannel
One way you can actually do this is through something called on policy distillation where you train the giant huge model and then you can suck it down and compress it. You have a small model whose only job is to learn the outputs of the other model and it just tries to mimic the outputs of the other model and it can by osmosis suck a lot of that information in. So I think there's a way where that always there and with things like RTX Spark and like the Spark, I think we could see that like they have like a commitment at least to make that be a local inference, be like a viable, like a viable path. Now as the models get bigger, you know, people, who knows how big, you know, Mythos is, it could be the 10 trillion. It could be as high as 10 trillion. Parameters don't know.
- [38:03]
Leo Laporte
They don't tell us.
- [38:04]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, they don't tell us. But like that scale is only going to continue to go up, right? Like 10 trillion. Two years from now we're going to be talking about. So like Nvidia's previous chips, you know, the, the current Blackwells were designed to run trillion parameter models. Right. The next Vera Rubins are going to be for 10 trillion parameter class models and Feynman will be 400 trillion parameter class models probably.
- [38:27]
Jeff Jarvis
What did you think of Jensen Huang when you met him?
- [38:29]
Jeffrey Kannel
Oh, he was a great guy. He was just very down to earth, very joking with you. Very. Not like this. Oh, look at me, I'm the CEO guy. Very down to earth guy.
- [38:40]
Leo Laporte
I didn't realize I was doing some research that you wrote the paper run yarn that was your, the, the capability to kind of stretch context windows.
- [38:50]
Jeffrey Kannel
It was one of the things, you know, this isn't a perfect example also where like that ability to go from 4k to 128k was in many ways like a precursor to the agentic era that we have now. Right. Like you can't do any of this if you're stuck at the old like original transformer sort of limitations.
- [39:04]
Leo Laporte
Right? Yeah.
- [39:06]
Jeffrey Kannel
And that was done in the spirit of open science. Right. Like we released it and OpenAI immediately started using it. Like everyone immediately started using it it. And that was kind of in this collaborative open research thing. And so I would like to see things like that continue to still happen.
- [39:22]
Leo Laporte
Do you agree with the model that adding compute, adding these giant parameters will make it smarter? Is this kind of an endless growth? Do you believe in the bitter lesson Are we just pouring compute?
- [39:35]
Jeffrey Kannel
It hasn't stopped. Everyone keeps thinking it's going to stop and it hasn't stopped and eventually you're going to start, start getting to, you know, parameter counts that are like somewhat in the order of like. If you were to make a rubber guess of like functionally the amount of neurons that are like inside of a human brain and stuff like that, which is somewhere around one and a half, 150 to like 200 trillion. Now there's a question whether these neurons like directly map functionally to like the amount of parameter. Like is a neuron doing just like a one. And we know they are. They do more than just like what a single parameter does was. So it may not be like an exact comparison.
- [40:09]
Leo Laporte
They're also massively parallel in a way that von Neumann machines are not.
- [40:14]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, so there's an open question, but it keeps going. Now, having said that, I think there will always be the scale competition, which is can you scale it up and then can you run an equivalent thing smaller for less energy? Right. Because while AIs are incredible in what they can do, they are like approximately a billion times less energy efficient than a human brain. Right. Your brain runs on like charitably 30 watts of power. So it's a 200 trillion parameter model running on 30 watts of power. Right. Right. Now we need multiple kilowatts to run one single instance of these trillion parameter models. So there's definitely like a literal two order of magnitude amount of energy efficiency that the AIs don't have. So that's another area to compete on.
- [41:01]
Leo Laporte
Jeff, can I ask him the question? Go ahead. You know, a question I'm going to ask.
- [41:06]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh,
- [41:08]
Leo Laporte
so what do you think? Are these models conscious?
- [41:11]
Jeffrey Kannel
I do not think they are conscious because I do not think that they have the experience that we have as humans. And that's what we really mean when we say conscious. We say, are you experiencing the world like I experience it. Right. I mean, it gets down to the question of how do you know anyone other than yourself is conscious? Well, you just say it looks like me, it talks like me, me enough. But also that it has a common framework of understanding the world. I believe that it grew up. I believe that this person most likely had a mother and father or the people around us in the United States at the same cultural priors about that. It felt a certain way, was probably made fun of it once, was sad, was hungry, was thirsty. All of these cultural experiential priors, I guess at that point that we assume we bring together, you know, is there something that you can narrowly say there's a self reflective Mechanism inside of AIs? Well, yeah, there's a self reflective mechanism in AIs, but you could argue that about like a for loop or something if you wanted to get like too, too close to it. Something that can like, you know, so like, so really it's like the experiential priors we say, when we say consciousness. The reason we don't have a good definition for consciousness, because what most people really mean is, is it like me in the way that I think I am? And for whatever you can say about the outputs of models, they just scientifically did not undergo growth in the way that you and I went around. They don't even experience time the way we experience time. Right. Like the common thing about all of us, which is that we're moving forward 1 second per second in this causal world where if we make a mistake, there's no rewinding time, there's no going back. Our, our choices are ours and ours alone and can never be undone by, you know, the relentless law of thermodynamics pushing us forward. That is just not the experienced world that an LLM even is in, even if you wanted to acclaim it to, has some sort of self reflective mechanism. So to me, I think consciousness is this whole bubble of is it like us? And I just think quantitatively, even it's not like us. So the answer is no.
- [43:02]
Jeff Jarvis
All right, here, the other. Go ahead, Paris.
- [43:04]
Paris Martineau
Leo, what did you mean by that question?
- [43:06]
Leo Laporte
I. I don't know. I just thought I'd ask.
- [43:09]
Paris Martineau
I don't know. Are you conscious?
- [43:11]
Leo Laporte
I, I don't know. I think I'm conscious. But that's, you know, that's me saying it so.
- [43:15]
Jeffrey Kannel
Sounds like what an LLM would say.
- [43:17]
Leo Laporte
Right, that's what, that's what I would say. Yeah.
- [43:20]
Jeff Jarvis
The ancillary, ancillary question is AGI the goal?
- [43:24]
Paris Martineau
And the ancillary, ancillary question is what do you mean by AGI?
- [43:28]
Jeffrey Kannel
Well, I think that AGI we are in AGI is here, it's just unevenly distributed, you know, in.
- [43:34]
Paris Martineau
What do you mean by AGI?
- [43:35]
Jeffrey Kannel
I mean by AGI, as in as good as humans at economically valuable tasks. At least that would be a narrower definition. Right. And so I think it's like a functionalist definition. Would you ever, never give money to a computer to do something that you could have given a human to? And are you economically rational to make that judgment, to have the computer do it? Right. So Obviously in places like coding right now, I would say the answer is we have AGI encoding. The latest coding models are better than the best programmers essentially. Now there are niches where people have it and often writing the code itself isn't like everything that it takes to break bring the outcome to market. Right? Like what you really want when you write code is some other set of outcomes. You want a product that people use that has aesthetic matching to people's experience. Like there's some other hidden set of motivations. But it's sort of like the leetcode style, like programming, like in a, in a vacuum. Like the AGI is here for programming and it's, there's just can't even argue with it. And you only have to look at the best programmers who will tell you this too. And in other, you know, quantitative domains like math research, we're starting to see, see AGI being here, I know you probably have saw recently about the discovery of the solution to the unit distance problem, that GPT 5.5. You know, this is kind of, I would say, I don't know if you guys remember growing up hearing about something called like the four Color Theorem, which was this original, you know, math result that was verified combinatorially on computers in the 70s and it was kind of like the first time people were able to like use computers to solve some sort of unsolvable problem. Now that was only because they just couldn't do exhaust. It could just do the exhaust. Brute force, yes, but just we didn't have enough people who would sit there and check hand by hand and not know when screwed up. But we're currently at sort of the four color theorem level right now in mathematics with the unit distance problem solving truly unsolved math problems. And you can listen to people like Terry Tao who will tell you yes, like it really is doing, you know, fundamental research in that area too. So in the quantitative domains, I think AGI is here for this. Those. Now if the definition of AGI is better than all humans at everything, I would say no. And again, that would be sort of like a no by definition because there are certain things that we value about humans that because of the way AIs are, they can never be that. And so if you include that in the definition, then it's like pathologically false. But for some sort of functionalist AGI where you look at some subclasses of things and say, would I pay it to do this or is it better than all humans? I don't, I think we're getting there. And in the areas where we're not there in a quantitative domain, it's really just a matter of time.
- [46:10]
Leo Laporte
Jeffrey Quinnell, great to talk to you. I am so grateful to you for the work you do. Let's keep it open. Let's let people do their own thing. Let's keep the token budgets in line. And man, if you don't have an agent yet, you better download Hermes. Hermes desktop is a great way to start. Yeah.
- [46:27]
Jeffrey Kannel
Thanks for having me back and glad to always catch up with the tech TV review.
- [46:33]
Leo Laporte
Jeffrey told me last time that I'm a little bit responsible for this, so I'm going to take credit.
- [46:38]
Jeff Jarvis
Beautiful moment.
- [46:39]
Leo Laporte
Thank you, Jeffrey.
- [46:41]
Jeff Jarvis
Thank you, Jeffrey.
- [46:42]
Leo Laporte
We'll continue with Intelligent Machines and our assessment of Fable and a lot more in just a little bit right after this. This episode of Intelligent Machines brought to you by Helix Sleep. Lisa and I, about a year ago realized that it was time for a new mattress. You're supposed to replace your mattress. They wear out, out every, you know, six to 10 years. Ours was eight years old. It was time. It really was. So we did a lot of research, we looked at all the websites and we found Helix Sleep. And man, am I glad we did a good night's rest, man. That's everything. Sets you up for a great day. We're learning more and more. That's where health begins. And now that summer's here and it's getting hot, this would be the great time to upgrade to a Helix mattress. No more night sweats. Dad sleeps cool. No back pain. You know, it's not sagging in the middle. That's what happens with an old mattress. No motion transfer. The kitty cat jumps in the bed. I don't jump up and go, earthquake. I love our Helix mattress. You don't want to settle for a mattress made overseas with low quality, questionable materials. You gotta rest assured your brand new Helix mattress is assembled, packaged and shipped from Arizona. And they make it to order within days of your order. So. So it's fresh, it's brand new. You should also do what we did, which was take the Helix Sleep quiz. It's right there on the website. It'll match you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences and your sleep needs. And they have a mattress for every preference, every sleep need, and it really works. They did a Wesper sleep study. They measured participants sleep performance after switching like we did from their old mattress to a Helix mattress. And what they found is exactly what I experienced. 82% of participants saw an increase in Their deep sleep cycle. That's the most important. Of the three sleep cycles. Participants on average achieved an additional 25 minutes of deep sleep per night. That's like a. For me, that was 100% increase. It was huge. Participants on average achieved 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. Not more time in bed necessarily, just less time awake, which is pretty good too. For 10 years, Helix sleep is consistently ranked, ranked at the top across the most important independent review sites tested and reviewed by experts like like Forbes, like Wired, Wirecutter, Oprah. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door. Free shipping in the US and rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The Happy with Helix guarantee provides a risk free customer first experience ensuring you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. So, so do what we did. Go to helixsleep.com machines for 20% off site wide during summer savings. That's helixsleep.com machines, 20% off site wide. Make sure you mention intelligent machines at checkout so they know we sent you. That's important to us. The offer ends June 11th. Hurry now. If it's after June 11th, don't worry. You should still go there because there are always great deals@helix sleep.com machines. We love them. You will too. Helixsleep.com machines we thank them so much for supporting intelligent machines. So Paris was missing in action the last couple of weeks. I was going to take it personally, but she assures me it has nothing to do with my personality. It has to do with titanium dioxide in your Ho Hos.
- [50:08]
Jeff Jarvis
That says a lot about your personality.
- [50:09]
Paris Martineau
Then
- [50:12]
Leo Laporte
Consumer Reports. It came out yesterday.
- [50:14]
Paris Martineau
Not in Hohos, but Hostess Donuts. Mini powder donuts.
- [50:17]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, I actually downloaded Yuca so I could figure out what's in Ho Ho's. Right. Everything you want to know. So this was a thing you did with Yuka in conjunction.
- [50:26]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Hey, real quickly, I'm seeing your Wii right now. Are you your switch?
- [50:31]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah. I did that on purpose.
- [50:34]
Jeff Jarvis
I thought.
- [50:34]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
I thought you were.
- [50:35]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, there you go.
- [50:37]
Leo Laporte
No, I forgot to switch back. This is. You did this? You. How long have you been working on this?
- [50:44]
Paris Martineau
Like two or three months. Yeah, it's been a big one. I mean so basically we. This is an investigation. We partnered with Yuka like Liam said, where essentially we tested 40 different processed food products, different, like popular grocery stuff for eight different additives and two processed contaminants that have been associated with health, like possible health issues depending on how much you consume and how frequently consume it. But the issue is with added. This is kind of true par for the course for many if not all additives allowed in U.S. food. But the problem is, even if something is permitted in US Food, companies don't have to report either to the public or the government precisely how much is in every product that they're selling to you. So no one can really estimate what your exposure is to these additives and thus whether or not, if you are a frequent consumer of these things, whether or not there's a potential health risk associated with that. So we bought a lot of these products, over 120 like different samples of all of these products and sent them to like state of the art labs, labs to test them for all of these different things and then had our kind of team of scientists analyze what we found. And part of the reason why this project took so long is one, a lot of products tested for a lot of different things. So that meant we had to figure out a lot of different safety thresholds. Because you'll see in this article we have kind of a chart that we go into the actual amount of, of all the 10 different additives and contaminants we found in all the products and kind of what that means for you in a very simple way. But the bulk of the text, like a nearly 5,000 word story, is about how we even got to this situation at all. And it, I mean this has ruled most of my life over the last month, month and a half certainly because I realized that the story of how, you know, part of like our top line findings were that we found that like 11 to 14 products, depending on your age and size, like contain kind of a concerning amount of additives or contaminants and concerning in the sense that it, the amount in a single serving exceeds the amount that some public health agencies have identified as like, safe to consume daily. And that's just in one serving. And so I was like, how is this possible? And it turns out it, it's possible because of decades of compounding errors at the FDA and the US General approach to food additive safety and regulation that has led to a lot of these additives and substances being present and being allowed to be present at much higher levels in U.S. food products than European.
- [53:37]
Leo Laporte
Are you telling me I should consume very rarely Cheetos? Flamin Hot Cheetos.
- [53:42]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, the Cheetos was the standout fighting for me personally. I mean, basically the article Leo's looking at is a second one that we had our scientists calculate where it's like, all right, what does this actually mean? How much should you, how Much is safe then. And we calculated different recommended limits to kind of keep you under this.
- [53:59]
Leo Laporte
You shouldn't eat more than one serving of Hostess Donut Powder mini donuts per month.
- [54:05]
Paris Martineau
And that's three mini powder donuts a month. A month.
- [54:10]
Leo Laporte
Is that the titanium dioxide?
- [54:13]
Paris Martineau
Well, that's.
- [54:13]
Leo Laporte
That's.
- [54:14]
Paris Martineau
It's interesting. So the kind of. One of the standout things was these Hostess Doughnuts mini powdered donuts. And we found that they had an elevated level of this thing called glycityl esters. It's a process contaminant.
- [54:28]
Leo Laporte
Oh, so they don't put it in. It's not an additive. It's just contaminated.
- [54:32]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, but it's the sort of thing that glycidyl esters are a contaminant that can form and is basically known to form when certain ingredients, like maybe vegetable oils or certain, like, additives like mono and diglycerols are processed. Like, if they're heated to high temperatures, these can emerge. So, you know, if you have a refined oil and it's heated to high temperatures during refining, and then you take that refined oil and heat it up again to say, like, fry a product, you might get exponentially more.
- [55:03]
Leo Laporte
Do you think consumers might be doing this in their own kitchens when they cook?
- [55:07]
Paris Martineau
Yes. I mean, that's a common way that you can get more kind of processed contaminants is through at home cooking, which kind of adds. Part of the issue with all of these things we found is that not only are these problematic substances in foods, either because they've been added in there, if they're additives, or they've formed due to the processing of certain ingredients, but they're not just in Cheetos and Donuts. They're in a lot of, if not most of, or many things that you eat. And the cumulative effects of all of that, that is almost like unknowable. And that's a problem because consuming. I mean, kind of the calculation we had to do to understand the risk of these products is like, okay, we just focused in on the products. If you had a serving of crunchy flaming hot Cheetos every day for the rest of your life, like, what would the impact of that be?
- [55:59]
Leo Laporte
What would it be? Just asking for a friend?
- [56:01]
Paris Martineau
I mean, it depends on your weight and size and other health factors.
- [56:06]
Leo Laporte
But that's the other thing. I mean, but they've always said highly processed foods are bad for you. Right? We kind of know that.
- [56:12]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, but I'd always been like, yeah, they're bad for you. Because junk food's bad. But what does that mean? The thing that I thought was fascinating about this is like, this actually shows the reason why ultra processed foods are bad is because one, the processing itself, all the general junk foods, if you know, but it's the stuff that's in
- [56:29]
Jeff Jarvis
them, like, it brings definition to this. Processing was. Was a. You know, you process milk when you homogenize it. Yeah, processing per se isn't bad. You're putting. You're putting specifics receipts on what it means to be a processed, processed food.
- [56:45]
Paris Martineau
And this is part of a broader debate that's happening right now around the term ultra processed food. When I started reporting this, I was like, oh, we can't have the term ultra processed food in there. That's kind of a buzzword. It's like chemophobia. But as I talk to more and more researchers, at first I was like, okay, if we use it, we should use this California state definition that says it's ultra processed if you have additives plus like a certain high percentage of, let's say, fat added sugars or one other third thing I'm forgetting the name of. And I was talking to some researchers. They're like, no, no, no, that's the wrong approach whatsoever. There's this classification system called NOVA that is kind of where the term ultra processed food, I think, came from, or it really popularized it, especially among the scientific community. And it categorizes ultra processed food as basically foods that are produced in an industrial manner that you could not, like, you cannot. I could not make Cheeto flaming hot Cheetos in my home right now.
- [57:41]
Jeff Jarvis
Try as you might, try as you
- [57:43]
Paris Martineau
might, it's something that's industrially processed where you couldn't easily make it in your home. And it includes a list of like, at specific additives to it and kind of. It shows that the ingredients are a big part of this definition. And I just, I hadn't really considered it.
- [58:00]
Jeff Jarvis
So, Paris, let me ask you two questions. First, the genesis of the story. Did. Was this just looking to processed foods, or did somebody come to you and say, shh, hey, the hostess donuts have titanium dioxide in them. Follow the titanium dioxide, you know, first goal in what led you down this path? And then the second question is, you don't know what the company's motives are, what the processes are, but is it likely that these companies know that these things are in there, that they're buying vats of titanium dioxide to make the donuts white? And they know that's bad because it's not allowed in Europe? Or is it something where the laxness of American regulation has just gotten the point that, yeah, this works, and we don't know what it does, but nobody's telling us not to, and so we put it in there. So that's two questions.
- [58:44]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. So how we kind of selected the. The origins for this came from us deciding how to partner with Yuka on a broader investigation. It's this app that you can use by this kind of great team of French scientists and researchers and general kind of like health and food fanatics. And we decided we wanted to test originally, actually, we were just focused on additives. And we. It was kind of motivated by the fact that there's such a gulf between US And European food regulation as it relates to additives. And so, like, kind of what I was saying before, when it comes to these ingredients, it's kind of a dose makes the poison situation. Most company countries, like, if a food additive is allowed, like, there's a specific, like, potency it's allowed at, you can have it up to this level in this sort of food, but it's really difficult for the average person to know whether that's the case and then assess their cumulative exposure to this. Because. Because it doesn't matter if the amount of red 40 in, say, like, Takis or Cheetos or whatever your favorite, like, red snack is. If it doesn't matter if that amount of red 40 is, like, safe. If you're having seven other foods throughout the week that also have that, it might push you over kind of the limit where you want to be concerned. So kind of what we did is we looked through products that, because additives are listed on the ingredients list, we looked through products that had additives that we knew could be kind of problematic depending on the dose. Wanted to make sure we found the most popular ones that had this and then bought a bunch of them, sent them to a lab to test it, and figure out what was going on in them. What was your second question?
- [60:28]
Jeff Jarvis
Second question is, how is part of what you cover in terms of the lax FDA work? But do companies knowingly say, gee, I need the donuts to be. It was like the red dyes. We know there's been lots about that. But these other additives, especially the ones that they purposely add rather than the ones that are byproducts, are they likely knowledgeable of what they're doing? Or.
- [60:51]
Paris Martineau
I mean, yeah, the companies know exactly about these. They buy them, put them in the products, list them there.
- [60:57]
Leo Laporte
If you make donuts with titanium dioxide, you can't sell them outside the U.S. yeah.
- [61:03]
Paris Martineau
I mean, you can't sell them in Europe because titanium dioxide banned as a food additive in 2022 over.
- [61:08]
Leo Laporte
They must be aware of that.
- [61:10]
Jeff Jarvis
Europeans will buy donuts in any, any case.
- [61:12]
Leo Laporte
But I mean, if they just had a chance.
- [61:15]
Paris Martineau
DNA, give them a chance. Yeah, it's, it's actually, it's very interesting because I, going into this, I, you know, the partnership kind of already been established. When I was brought into this, we'd run some of the tests and I was initially personally, like, a little skeptical because I feel like a lot of good.
- [61:32]
Jeff Jarvis
You're a journalist.
- [61:33]
Paris Martineau
Chemical. There's a lot of chemophobia around these sort of things. And I was, I didn't want to do a story that was like, additives, bad chemicals are in food. And it's like, yeah, everything's a chemical plus chemicals.
- [61:45]
Leo Laporte
But it's frankly, the modern method of making food has made food much more widely available thanks to preservatives. There's a lot of reasons why these are not necessarily bad things, but what you want to find out is if they cause physical harm. You know, BHA is a preservative that means that people, foodstuffs can be. Be shipped and, and produced one place and, and shipped somewhere else and, and last, before, you know, we had preservatives, food would rot, you know, before you could eat.
- [62:14]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean, there are definitely additives that have incredible, like, benefits to them and that are not outweighed by any sort of risk. But I think the thing that if
- [62:25]
Leo Laporte
you've ever had rancid oil, you know, BHA is a good thing. Rancid oil is worse. Worse than bha, let's put it that way.
- [62:33]
Paris Martineau
But I mean, I think there are other ways that you can prevent rancidity that haven't been, like, associated with, you
- [62:39]
Leo Laporte
know, not everybody has access to fresh foods.
- [62:42]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. And I mean, I think that one of the things that ended up being so surprising or almost like radicalizing to me as I was reporting this out is I just, I don't know, I guess this is like the theme for me in being a food safety journalist and digging more and more into science than I had been since I, like, worked at Wired is just. I was. The story I ended up writing is, of course, about the additives and the things we tested, but it ended up being about the FDA and how basically this current panic that we're having in the US around, oh, the chemicals in our food, people on both the right and the left are very concerned about this. There's a lot of scrutiny on additive safety. This exact debate we were having in 1958, people were freaking out about the chemicals in our food. They had a whole congressional investigation. They found out that, you know, there's like 800 some chemicals that companies are putting in our food. And the US government only knows that 40 of them are, or 400 of them are safe. And so they decided to pass this thing called the Food additives amendment of 1958 that was going to fix all of it. And basically what they did is they were like, yeah, yeah, any additive you put in food, we're declaring it unsafe unless the companies prove to us, the fda, that it's safe. And that should have solved it. But there's like two. I mean, there's a lot of problems. The two core ones is that they had a honestly well intentioned loophole at first built in where they're like, you know, we're just one agency. We've suddenly declared all food additives unsafe. It's. We probably shouldn't have waste our time having companies prove to us that that salt is safe to add to food or that, you know, technically if you chop up, let's say, apples and put them in your yogurt, that could be considered a food additive. You don't need to prove that apples are safe. So they're like, these things can be called, generally recognized as safe grass and you don't have to, you know, do anything. They're just good. The other issue is that this law, once companies proved that an additive was safe, there's like no clause in it that says the FDA has to go and revisit that determination ever. And I don't know if you guys have heard, but a lot of science has actually happened since 1958. And what I've learned is basically that the FDA, most of the additives we tested for this product project, the FDA has not reassessed the safety of in like decades. Even as other countries and other prominent regulatory bodies have reviewed new science and, you know, taken steps, either ban or severely restrict use of this. The FDA's been like, well, well, it's an approved additive.
- [65:17]
Leo Laporte
And it's just, this is complicated, especially for non scientists in general. It's very hard for people to understand and absorb accurate nutrition information. It's just hard to do the tests because it's in vitro. You know, you talk about sucralose, there's really nobody putting too much sucral sucralose in their foods. You Point that out and you mention a large scale study of 100,000 French adults that found an association between the this non nutritive sweetener and an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. But an association, I should point out, correlation does not causation. In fact, it makes sense that people who are doing diet sugars might in fact be worried about type 2 diabetes.
- [66:04]
Paris Martineau
Example of the three artificial sweeteners we tested.
- [66:07]
Leo Laporte
But although there was a lot of
- [66:10]
Paris Martineau
evidence really I spent a lot of time on because I mean first of all, none of the three artificial sweeteners that we tested, acesulfame, kick A, aspartame and sucralose, exceeded any of the safety thresholds. We were not, you know, we didn't recommend anybody limit the products based on what we found. A big part of this study was figuring out like what safety thresholds we want to use because the FDA does not have ones for all of these and there's a variety of different ones to pick from from the various agencies.
- [66:43]
Leo Laporte
But they have tested as an example these sweeteners and determine their safe.
- [66:47]
Paris Martineau
Well, the FDA in many cases has not tested the safety, assessed the safety of these sweeteners in multiple decades.
- [66:53]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [66:54]
Paris Martineau
And so part of the thing we looked into though is you know, let's when one of the kind of underlying regulatory things here is they have these things called acceptable daily intake limits that whenever you know, an additives approved, they kind of figure out through men's science like what's the normal amount that someone can be exposed to every day and it's not a problem. This is determined from a variety of ways, but increasingly and especially with the, the reason why I included that line for the three artificial sweeteners that talks about this large scale observational study where they followed like over a hundred thousand French adults for like 12 years, like recorded detailed daily like dietary stuff for like weeks on end. It's kind of a first of its kind study. And they did find the results are way stronger for asulfam K and aspartame like considerable associate. Like really notable associations between like low level consumption of a sulfame K and aspartame and increased risk of developing cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes. Again, associations not causation. But I spoke to a lot of artificial sweetener researchers because I had that exact same instinct. Leo. I was like yeah, this seems like B.S. yes, right. And all of them were like no, we, we keep finding this in lots of large scale studies and we don't know exactly how to rock it. We don't know what the causation is. But it's an incredibly strong signal with a lot of these. And we think the FDA and other people should be paying attention and looking into this stuff. But, you know, it's one thing of 20,000 things that the FDA should probably be doing. So I don't know. It. I.
- [68:37]
Leo Laporte
It's very hard, very complicated article because
- [68:40]
Paris Martineau
it really gives you a deep look into my mind palace.
- [68:45]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it's really, really impressive, deep, strong journalism. And I recommend people look at it. You get, you. You see what Paris does in her day job, which is really important.
- [68:57]
Paris Martineau
No paywall.
- [68:58]
Leo Laporte
I know, as with all of Paris is writing, it's available even to non subscribers of Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports does point out as a little paragraph, disclaimer, paragraph in here that we should probably mention that what is. Now I've lost it. I had it here.
- [69:18]
Paris Martineau
What sort of disclaimer are you talking about? There's no reason to panic.
- [69:24]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it was a good disclaimer and I thought it was a thoughtful disclaimer. This is one of the reasons I really respect Consumer Reports. They do these, these. They do these studies. They, they pay people like Paris to really work hard. It's important to note that neither Consumer Reports nor Yuka is a compliance or regulatory body. We offer information for consumers to make informed decisions. No legal judgments can be made for our findings. And then there's a whole page on methodology, which is what I really love about.
- [69:49]
Paris Martineau
I was going to say there's a methodology that like could have been 20 more pages, frankly.
- [69:55]
Jeff Jarvis
It goes that have the part in there about you tearing your hair out.
- [69:58]
Leo Laporte
I mean, it should. Part of the methodology was Paris tearing her head.
- [70:02]
Paris Martineau
A big part of it is this page three on it that seems so simple. It like lists all of the substances, the thresholds we use, the sources for it and things like that. And this truly, this page alone probably took me like four weeks. Well, because it's me and a bunch of other scientists, like our. All of our great PhD scientists here, we worked with the great toxicologist from Yuka. And part of the thing is like earnestly and rigorously debating between ourselves with outside experts, like, what are the best thresholds to use to kind of assess against. And there's like a lot of different arguments. The one that we ended up having, like, kind of the most debate back and forth is like red 40. Because both the EU and the US their acceptable daily intake for red 40 is the same as it was in 1970 or 71, when the US basically the manufacturer of red 40s submitted one unpublished rat study to the FDA and they were like great. They were like 7 milligrams per kilogram body weight per day. But in recent like years, like especially in the last 10 years, there's been a lot of research that has come out and shown the other concerning effects of RED40. And again this is one of those ones that I was like kind of skeptical of at first. But I read this 300 some page report from like a California regulator that looked at all the available evidence for it and they assessed this one 2018 study that was like found that if you feed rats the dose of Red 40 that the FDA says is fine and that the EU says is fine, those rats had neurological damage and they had impaired performance on learning and memory tests. Those rats. And you know, I don't know, I thought that. So that is kind of the level we up ended. Ended up using is based on this new research. But I don't know, check it out. There's a lot of thought that went into every word in this. So happy. Oh, but my main thing I want to and I'll show this at the end of the thing. I'm doing a Reddit AMA on Friday the 12th at 1pm and if you have any questions, get in there and ask me.
- [72:10]
Jeff Jarvis
She'll have the answers.
- [72:12]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
I just wanted to say real quick, anecdotally, having moved back to the Philippines after living in the states for 20 years, it's very, very apparent that the food over there is not good.
- [72:25]
Leo Laporte
Why do you say that?
- [72:26]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Because like the last 20 years I've had stomach problems living in America and then moving here. Gone, all gone.
- [72:32]
Leo Laporte
Right. Did you grow up in the Philippines?
- [72:34]
Jeffrey Kannel
I did.
- [72:35]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
So maybe that too could also.
- [72:37]
Jeff Jarvis
But I also go to Germany and I see all kinds of things that are still fried in palm oil.
- [72:40]
Leo Laporte
This is very, very hard country by country.
- [72:43]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Yeah, that's why. Totally anecdotal.
- [72:45]
Leo Laporte
It's very, very hard to do this.
- [72:46]
Paris Martineau
I mean and something that we talk about a bit in the article and that a lot of the experts I spoke to I think is a great point like is, yeah, we're here, we're doing this testing. We've got like all the data for you to look through. Got a whole thing of our scientists that have gone through and been like, all right, if you want to eat these things but still be safe, here's how to think about it. Sure, you can make more informed decisions as a consumer. But I mean one of the policy experts spoke to said really this should be the job of the government and regulatory bodies to be the people who employ a bunch of scientists and who are paid by our tax dollars to, to look at this research, reevaluate it in recent years and make decisions so that every person in America doesn't have to become a little mini scientist and figure it out on their own.
- [73:36]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [73:36]
Jeff Jarvis
You could always just ask AI what to eat.
- [73:39]
Leo Laporte
I wouldn't do that.
- [73:40]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I'm sure AI will never get that wrong.
- [73:42]
Leo Laporte
The safest thing to do is eat lots of fresh foods, you know, But I have to point out that it
- [73:48]
Paris Martineau
feels like, much like my protein. Like whenever the, the, the takeaway from protein was like, yeah, eat real food. Real food protein. Instead of Michael Pollan, say, eat real food. Mostly plants. Yeah.
- [74:04]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
I mean, the issue really is that all that stuff with all the processed food, that that's the cheapest food for, for most people.
- [74:10]
Paris Martineau
I mean, that is part of the problem.
- [74:12]
Leo Laporte
But, but, and I have to point this out again, there are societal consequences of not using these techniques because not everybody has access to fresh food. And if you fry stuff, you're creating glycity esters in your food every single time you fry it.
- [74:27]
Paris Martineau
Well, it depends on the sort of oil you use.
- [74:30]
Leo Laporte
It's very, it's much more complicated because it's humans. And it's very hard to do real scientific testing on humans because for ethical reasons, you don't want to kill some people and not kill others. It's just not done. So all we have is a lot of, I think, I think scientific consensus is very hard to reach in a lot of these things. Monosodium glutamate and ospirtame are very good examples of foods that are eschewed by a lot of people. But the evidence isn't strong that they are dangerous. In fact, they break down into compounds that you have in your body anyway. So it's just complicated. And I understand, I know why you went through, through months of back and forth on this because it's very complicated. It's very hard to do. But I think this is a very judicious and reasonable article and probably everybody should read it before you go out and eat more flaming hot Cheetos or Hostess donuts. Isn't titanium oxide what you use for sunscreen on your nose, titanium?
- [75:31]
Paris Martineau
It's basically this kind of white pig.
- [75:34]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think it's, it's sunscreen screen.
- [75:36]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. It's used in a lot of different things, but no longer in food.
- [75:40]
Jeff Jarvis
Back in the day, didn't women use, I think, lead to as White makeup.
- [75:45]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's right.
- [75:46]
Paris Martineau
I mean, people have used a lot of weird stuff.
- [75:49]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. It's used in paints. All right, we're gonna take a break, come back with more in just a little bit. We actually have some AI news. Yeah. AI news. Yes, there was a few things happened this week. Week. Just a few. Just a few. Our show today, brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert. Summer is a season of growth. But while you're focused on expansion, your data quality can quietly deteriorate.
- [76:19]
Jeffrey Kannel
No.
- [76:20]
Leo Laporte
And in today's AI landscape, failing to maintain high quality data directly compromises the integrity and effectiveness of your AI initiatives. You've heard the phrase garbage in, garbage out. For 41 years, Melissa has been the data quality partner, keeping business data clean, complete and up to date. And they don't rest in their laurels. Yeah, they've been doing this for 40 years, but over those decades, they have become premier data scientists. And they can do so much with your data. Here's some more of what they can do. Melissa's alert service. For instance, the best way for companies to keep track of changes to their customer data in real time, including address updates, change of address, property transactions, hazard risks. Melissa's matchup technology does something very hard to do. It provides smart deduplication by finding non exact matches. Global address verification and autocomplete. Validate and standardize addresses in real time. Globally 240 countries. Melissa's change of address tracking. This is awesome. Automatically monitors and updates records of customer address changes, property transactions, hazard risks and more. And their data enrichment lets you append demographic data, property information and geographic insights to those basic contact records, turning them into something you can actually use. Mobile identity verification. Great for kyc, it connects customers to their mobile numbers seamlessly. Helpful in reducing fraud. Join more than 10,000 businesses worldwide using Melissa for all of those things and more. Like Lambeth Council, they needed a new way to verify id. Lambeth's performance manager says now more than ever, we're very confident in our ability to prevent fraud and protect tight budgets. All at a lower cost compared to when we implemented manual ID checks. Melissa has apps for every tool you're using. Salesforce Dynamics, CRM, Shopify, Stripe, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and more. Melissa's solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant. They're FedRamp and ISO 27001 certified and they meet SOC TO and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. Clean data leads to better marketing, ROI, higher customer lifetime value and AI that works as intended get started today with 1000 records clean for free@melissa.com TWiT that's Melissa M E L I S S A.com TWiT we thank him so much for their support of intelligent machines. I don't know where to begin. Apple had it's a announcements it's WWDC keynote on Monday putting I think AI in a very consumer friendly fashion into the hands of you know, many, many iPhones users coming this fall. Actually many people are already using it in the developer preview. The public preview comes out next month. Did you guys look at any of the features that they added to the iPhone? You're going to get it Paris in, in the fall.
- [79:21]
Paris Martineau
When is it coming out and what features have they added?
- [79:24]
Jeff Jarvis
Paris has just come out of a cave.
- [79:26]
Paris Martineau
I have come out of a cave. I haven't done anything.
- [79:30]
Leo Laporte
I think what's interesting about it is it's AI for the people. So it no command line.
- [79:38]
Jeff Jarvis
Leo.
- [79:39]
Leo Laporte
No command line. No, it's agentic but you wouldn't know it's an agent. It's serious. You'll still, you'll still say, you know, hey, you know, who are they still
- [79:49]
Paris Martineau
doing the thing where you can load whoever you want in there though, like a voice.
- [79:54]
Leo Laporte
Oh, models. Well that, yeah. I mean it's unclear. They didn't talk about that but people have found code tidbits that imply that that will be the case. For right now what Apple's saying is it isn't Gemini. Yes, we're, they mentioned Google. We are paying Google a billion dollars a year here. But what they're saying is these are our models, they call them Apple foundation models. There's a model for on device that's very small but effective in a lot of cases. There's a model that runs in Apple's cloud and they admitted there's a run. There's a model that will run on Google's cloud with Nvidia chips for the most challenging tasks. But they say in all three cases they'll be able to keep it private. Private. Now there are some who disagree. Matthew Green, who's a cryptographer, Johns Hopkins says it's going to be very hard to keep this stuff private because anytime you're using AI to look up movie times or get plane information, flight information, you're sending information out of this secure enclave into the real world.
- [80:59]
Jeff Jarvis
Just like the web.
- [81:01]
Leo Laporte
Just like the web. Just like the web. But Apple's really touting, you know, you can use our AI privately, you can't use anybody else's AI.
- [81:08]
Jeff Jarvis
Privately does the user choose which AI to use or the system makes that determination?
- [81:13]
Leo Laporte
No, the system makes that determination. But as I said some rumors said and there is some evidence in code that you could perhaps choose anthropic or open AIs models instead of Gemini. It's unclear. It's unclear but Gemini is the default model. Except again Apple says not Gemini. It's our models but we in conjunction with with Google there's a lot of hand wavy it's not. Maybe they distilled it. It sounded like they did it in the post training they used Google. I have to say that they demonstrated Image Playground looks very similar to Nano Banana in its capabilities and its style.
- [81:50]
Jeff Jarvis
You know, like a Buick and an Oldsmobile may have different brands but they all come from the same factory.
- [81:57]
Leo Laporte
I feel like it's kind of like that. Anyway already people are starting to use it. They have rolled it out in the developer preview there is a wait list next month it'll be public preview I'll install it then it's things like you could say they showed this a lot. My sister sent me an email about a video about titanium dioxide in my donuts. Can you find that? Then Siri relatively quickly within a few seconds says yes, I found the email because it sees your email. I found the email your sister sent. It has a link to this video and you can say would you play that? And it will play that. I think for a lot of people
- [82:37]
Paris Martineau
that's what they want Description you'd had couldn't you in the time you asked Claude to find the email or ask Siri to find the email, open it and then allow me to watch it. Couldn't you just do that?
- [82:50]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh but it could be she sent it two weeks ago. I can't remember what. Maybe it was my sister. Maybe it was. I don't know who sent it to me. I know there's this word in there I face all the time the thing that. The thing that.
- [83:00]
Paris Martineau
One thing I have noticed from the bits that have the light that has fallen into my cave and played out in the shadow wall is that I do think that a bit of Apple's marketing around this I mean I just still have bones to pick with one of her Apple intelligence original pitch for text message summaries was the most banal and annoying. I believe the summary that they used for this round of it was was someone texts you hey, have you heard about this plant? It's called this. Have you heard about Calthea or Calathea? Yeah, it's a Pattern tropical house plant. And Siri says your friend texted you about Calthea. She describes it as a pattern tropical houseplant. Thanks, Siri.
- [83:42]
Leo Laporte
Wow, this is a really stupid example, isn't it?
- [83:45]
Paris Martineau
It's so dumb. It's like did, did they use Sonnet? Did they use Sonnet to write that
- [83:51]
Leo Laporte
it's all Gemini or actually it's all Apple models trans trained with help from Google? I think these are bad. That is a particularly bad example. But imagine that you have a web page with a schedule of concerts. They showed this as well. And it can then compare it to your calendar and you can see which ones you can attend and you can add it, you can buy tickets. It's that kind of agency stuff. And of course until we get it, we don't know how well it works. The premise though is interesting. It's similar to what Google says, which is we know everything about it. You, we have all this information, you know, your emails on your, trust us, your calendar. And we're going to keep it private. We're going to do much everything we can on device so it doesn't even go out to the Internet. And if we have to go out to the Internet, we're going to keep it private there. And that's the pitch I think more importantly in my mind is it's going to introduce a lot more people to some of the kinds of things that AI.
- [84:45]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, we're going to see the same thing from Spark and what's the other one?
- [84:48]
Leo Laporte
They're Microsoft, a Scout.
- [84:51]
Jeff Jarvis
Scout and Spark.
- [84:52]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [84:52]
Jeff Jarvis
Again, I think it sounds like two dogs.
- [84:56]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they don't want to give them human names, do they? Yeah, no, a lot of people do give their AI.
- [85:01]
Jeff Jarvis
So it's Ss, it's Siri, Scout and Spark.
- [85:03]
Leo Laporte
Yes, the Scout and Spock are specifically agents. They didn't mention Agenic so much with a series kind of. No, but it kind of really is. It is that we'll see. I mean Apple isn't doing anything that you can't already do. Let's put that also out there. You can, with Google Lens, take a picture of something on the screen and ask about it. You can do a lot of the things that Apple's showing already, but Apple will put it all together in a very palatable productized package. And I think that that's going to be introducing a lot more people to, to kind of the intelligence that you can build in. And I think that in general is a, is a good thing. It's going to be the way people Use AI in many cases. In many cases, a lot of photo enhancement, the photo editing.
- [85:54]
Paris Martineau
I just.
- [85:55]
Leo Laporte
You're not. You're not crazy about that.
- [85:57]
Paris Martineau
I mean, one of the examples they showed is you take a. Or I think I saw someone who was using a preview show this. You take a photo of someone, like, sitting at a table, and then you're like, oh, I don't like the angle of this. You could, like, use Gen AI to have. Have to change the pan around and change the angle. And, I mean, I guess. I guess that's a fine.
- [86:17]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
But how different is that from coloring? How different is that from coloring, though, really?
- [86:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Somebody said this is something people use once, twice, and then forget all about.
- [86:25]
Jeff Jarvis
Which that was cool.
- [86:26]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. They are going to use the same technology, Gaussian splats, to enhance the flyover so that when you fly over Paris's house, you'll actually be able to kind of zoom into it in a 3D way. It's going to be very interesting. That's going to be in maps. I don't know. I think this is a very careful use of AI. All of these capabilities will be available to developers fairly easily as they build apps. So you'll see more apps with intelligence. It's what Apple does. They take existing products and polish them up so that they're comfortable for consumers. So that was the one. One big announcement. The other big announcement dropped yesterday, which is that a version of Mythos is now shipping. It's called Fable. It is the new model of Fable 5. Remember, we were on Opus 4. We are now in Fable 5. And as Jeffrey was saying, they've put a lot of restrictions on it, some of them silent. So it will step down to a lower model without telling you.
- [87:31]
Jeff Jarvis
Let me ask you about that. So I want to make a biological weapon. Oh, sorry, no. You're going to be moving down to Opus.
- [87:37]
Leo Laporte
Won't do it at all.
- [87:38]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I want a biological weapon. What does it just mean? Opus is less. I understand why it doesn't just say, no, I'm not gonna do that. Versus, I'm gonna step you down.
- [87:46]
Paris Martineau
Well, no, I believe so. All of them. If you're like, I want to make a biological weapon, it's like, no biological weapon for you, bud. They're worried that people are going to be too good at getting around. They're worried that people are going to be asking smarter questions rather than, I want a biological claim.
- [88:02]
Leo Laporte
The safety is there, but they're claiming,
- [88:04]
Paris Martineau
we've seen again and again what we've seen. So Far anecdotally, I want to make
- [88:08]
Jeff Jarvis
a recipe with titanium dioxide.
- [88:11]
Paris Martineau
I think it could be in relation to biology or related to a bunch of. No, no areas. They're just like, well, not even letting you ask it. You're going to opus.
- [88:19]
Leo Laporte
And I'll give you an example. Anthony. Yesterday took Steve Gibson's security show show notes and asked for a summary from Fable, and Fable said, no, no, no. That's cyber security. Really? Yeah. It's not too bright. It's not. Yeah. So, but this is. This is the way that anthropic feels they can safely put this stuff out.
- [88:42]
Jeff Jarvis
They oversold the danger. Danger, danger, Will Robinson. And now they're doing well.
- [88:46]
Leo Laporte
I think the day. Look, I think the danger is there. I'll give you an example. Yesterday, Microsoft, which has been using Mythos, did the largest patch Tuesday ever. 200 bugs were fixed, many of them serious. Something like two dozen of them were.
- [89:02]
Jeff Jarvis
So is that turned off now for the average user? I mean, if it's.
- [89:06]
Leo Laporte
That's because they had access to the full Mythos.
- [89:08]
Jeff Jarvis
But it wasn't.
- [89:09]
Leo Laporte
Right. The average user will not be able to do that. That's right.
- [89:11]
Jeff Jarvis
So it wasn't tuned to do that, but it was so powerful it could.
- [89:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And so, I mean, again and again, we're seeing companies, Firefox, Microsoft and others release huge numbers of bug fixes, curl ffmpeg flaws that have been around for 30 years are being fixed, and it's because of Mythos. So we know these capabilities are there. What they're afraid of is that if they release exactly the same capabilities to the real world, people will use it to look for, you know, flaws that they can exploit. And I think that's not unreasonable. They're worried that people are going to use it to create bioweapons. If it's that good, I guess they could. You know, it's the same question of, well, is this hype, is this marketing, or is this genuinely a problem? I'm. I'm leaning towards it's genuinely a problem, to be honest.
- [90:00]
Paris Martineau
Any of you played around with it?
- [90:02]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, Quite a bit.
- [90:03]
Paris Martineau
What do you think about it?
- [90:04]
Leo Laporte
Very smart. It's definitely a significant leap ahead. One of the things I've been doing with it is having it review all my old, old code, the stuff that I wrote with Claude Opus, my Hermes agent. I wouldn't have it. I had it overnight, go through everything in my Hermes agent. It fixed a whole bunch of stuff. It has been very good at finding issues that were there, but nothing else. Found. So it also seems smarter. It doesn't seem as sycophantic. It doesn't apologize. In fact, I think I know when it drops down. By the way, it doesn't tell you I've dropped a four. Great. But I could tell because suddenly it's apologizing. Abel does not apologize.
- [90:47]
Paris Martineau
Maybe, maybe all of your versions of Claude know that you want to be apologized to.
- [90:53]
Leo Laporte
It could be. There is some evidence that that these
- [90:56]
Jeff Jarvis
models will is very sensitive.
- [90:59]
Leo Laporte
We'll start to grok what you what your preferences are.
- [91:02]
Paris Martineau
I'm mad. I know we've been over this before, but I'm mad that Elon Musk took the word grok from us.
- [91:08]
Jeff Jarvis
Yes.
- [91:08]
Paris Martineau
I can't say that I've groked something without people being like, oh, oh, you're into that. And I'm like, no, it was a word from a sci fi novel before this that was adopted into common parlance.
- [91:19]
Leo Laporte
Here is I just to keep an eye on what Fable's up to. I have it write a summary for me of all the things. This was the audit it did on Hermes. These are the issues. It found overnight issues I fixed it had a deep understanding of the architecture. Better frankly in some ways than Hermes did. Did and fixed a lot of. A lot of things. Found a lot of stuff that wasn't a big problem. And one of the things, I was very impressed every time it made a change. It tested to make sure that Hermes was still running, that everything was working. And then it would go to the next thing and go to the next thing. And it did this. All unattended from. It started at about 1am and it didn't finish till about 5am so four hours of unattended work. Very impressive. Cleaning up my age agent. I then did the same thing with my Claude code setup. Found a bunch of stuff that was no op, that wasn't working, that was excess. Got rid of a lunch. It's a lot of stuff. I'm doing this because now here's the other shoe that's going to drop. You can use Fable right now and anybody who's paying for Claude code or is using the Claude chat app will see Fable as one of the choices. But let me run it so you can see the warning that they give you because it's a little bit annoying. It's only going to. I have a subscription. It's only going to work on that subscription. Fable is here, our newest model for complex long running work. Included in your plan limits until June 22nd.
- [92:56]
Paris Martineau
Then bye bye.
- [92:58]
Leo Laporte
You're going to have to switch to usage credits. They also mentioned that it is twice as expensive as Opus 48. So $15 for a million tokens in
- [93:07]
Jeff Jarvis
$30 versus what does it cost now for Deep seq?
- [93:11]
Leo Laporte
Deepseek is $0.12 and $0.30. What is that, 1,1000? I don't know.
- [93:18]
Jeff Jarvis
For 95% of the tasks one might ask this to do is deep. Seek that inferior. What. What is it that makes using Fable so necessary that companies will spend this high amount? How will they know that they want Fable? How will they know that another model be just fine for much less money?
- [93:38]
Leo Laporte
Well, and that's one of the things Jeffrey was talking about earlier, and one of the things a good agent will do is delegate. It'll. It'll route tasks to an appropriate model. A good agent, and I've set my Hermes up to do this, will say, oh, you're doing coding. Okay, let's go use Fable.
- [93:54]
Jeff Jarvis
Then your agent's gonna get kickbacks from the models.
- [93:57]
Leo Laporte
Well, I hope not, but. But I'm able to use the local model. Quinn. Right now, I've been running the local model because for most things you do, for most things, it's just look up something.
- [94:07]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, right.
- [94:08]
Leo Laporte
Run a. Run a cron.
- [94:10]
Jeff Jarvis
Schedule what goes elsewhere. What kinds of things go elsewhere?
- [94:13]
Leo Laporte
Coding, images, visual recognition, harder stuff.
- [94:20]
Jeff Jarvis
You're not asking for reasoning things. It's functions that work well, like images.
- [94:24]
Leo Laporte
Well, I think coding is a reasoning.
- [94:26]
Jeff Jarvis
Okay, all right.
- [94:27]
Leo Laporte
Fair, fair. What would be reasoning?
- [94:31]
Paris Martineau
What are you using this for on a date? What did you use this for today and yesterday?
- [94:38]
Leo Laporte
I went out and did the show prep that we do every time for a new guest and said, would you update Jeffrey Cannell's bio? And it found a bunch of new stuff. One of the things I like to do with Hermes is something called Pulse, which is a skill where it goes out and I can see, say, what are people saying about the Consumer Reports article on food additives? And it will check Reddit, hacker news x.com checks 20 or 30 sources and gives me a vibe check. A summarized vibe check of. Well, there seems to be some real discussion about this. And then it'll give me some links. There's some very useful things like that. And I think that probably the local model is good enough for most of that stuff because it's using a skill. Skill. It's mostly lookup. I. We do one sheets for our advertisers. So we, we had a. When a new advertiser comes in, Lisa is able to run a skill that says Tell me everything about this advertiser, where they advertise. Here's. Here's one. I'll give you an example. This is one for the company that does black hat. They were interested in advertising. So it gives us a snapshot. Let me make it bigger snapshot of the company, who owns it, who runs it, it's revenue, who its potential customer is. That's very valuable to us for figuring out which show to put it on. In fact, it even recommends which shows it's going to be good on Talking points. It tells us what awards it's won. It compares it to existing sponsors. It's all done by my age. Agent in about 10 minutes. Existing sponsors, where it's advertising now, where it's. Social media is.
- [96:20]
Jeff Jarvis
So it's just. Is the agent in this case just doing web searches? How is it?
- [96:23]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yes. It's essentially, it's competitive analysis.
- [96:27]
Paris Martineau
Are you that this is.
- [96:28]
Leo Laporte
It's all 100%. There's no hallucination. I've not found one error.
- [96:33]
Paris Martineau
Correct.
- [96:35]
Leo Laporte
It is absolutely correct. I can, I promise you this whole thing about hallucination is really in certain.
- [96:45]
Paris Martineau
So you're saying that you know more about the hallucination of models than the makers of the models? Because none of the model makers have said that they've been able to produce a model without hallucinations.
- [96:56]
Leo Laporte
And it depends on how you're using it.
- [97:00]
Paris Martineau
So it's not 100.
- [97:02]
Leo Laporte
I have yet to find an error in any.
- [97:05]
Jeff Jarvis
You're not. You're not. You're not fact checking everything.
- [97:07]
Paris Martineau
You're not looking.
- [97:08]
Leo Laporte
No, I'm spot checking, but I do, I do look for errors. Absolutely. It's very reliable. Very reliable,
- [97:16]
Jeff Jarvis
Paris.
- [97:17]
Leo Laporte
And that partly. Well, I know you're skeptical, but that's partly because of how the agent is designed and how the skill is designed. It's completely possible.
- [97:24]
Paris Martineau
I just, I mean, I've tried to use AI agents for any of my work and I find so many errors that it's just.
- [97:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I know. I hear people say that and I. Not. I don't know where that's coming from.
- [97:36]
Paris Martineau
I mean, I think it comes from the fact that I have to fact check every single word of it.
- [97:40]
Leo Laporte
And so I understand why you're saying that. I don't understand why it's making those mistakes.
- [97:45]
Paris Martineau
I mean, it's making these.
- [97:46]
Jeff Jarvis
Because it doesn't have a sense of truth.
- [97:48]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, it doesn't have a sense of truth or not. The things we've talked about in this show a million times is like, it is Processing this, but it does not know what is true versus false.
- [97:58]
Jeff Jarvis
It can find likely answers because of probability, but it doesn't know how to check that against truth. And that's not an insult to it. Leo's looking hurt now. No, I'm just an insult to it.
- [98:09]
Leo Laporte
That's a. That's a user error. You're not using it. Well, I think if you trust. And, you know, you used to talk about RAG a lot. I mean, essentially all of this is RAG now. It's all. It's all referring to specific information. You have to be very clear. And it's in the skill setup that it's not to make up information that if it can't find it, it doesn't know. Occasionally I'll make errors. Absolutely. I was looking for a battery to. I actually, you know, we had a conversation about. And this is with Quinn, which is a local model and not super bright about a UPS that I needed. It's. I said, I need a recommendation for a UPS for the desktop because the power went out. I don't know. Was this show. Was it this show? One of the shows? The power went out and I was off the air for 10 minutes. I was securing that last week. And so I had got its recommendations, which are absolutely good. But then I said, well, you know, I have this one. Can I use this? And it said, oh, well, I need to know what year it is. I said, well, here's the sticker on the front. It said, no, that's not the sticker. There's another. Is it another one? Oh, yeah, this is it. Oh, yeah, this is it. You can show this. I'm showing all this as I'm doing it. And then it said, yep, I found it. Here's the model. It was made in 2024. Based on that, I would keep the one you're using now. This is an error. This is a hallucination. It says it uses an RBC 19, which is actually no longer used by APC as battery replacement. So I went out and I searched for an RBC 19 and I said, I found something. I said, is this the right model? I said, no, no, no, that's the wrong model. So then I searched for it. I said, are you sure that's the part number? I can't find it. Oh, it said, good instinct to double check. APC sometimes changes.
- [99:53]
Paris Martineau
It's clearly 100%.
- [99:55]
Leo Laporte
Well, it was an error, but okay, so it's catchable. Yeah. So I went to look for it.
- [100:00]
Paris Martineau
Because you caught it.
- [100:03]
Jeff Jarvis
You're not disagreeing you two.
- [100:05]
Paris Martineau
I know. I'm just. I'm saying I think that these.
- [100:08]
Leo Laporte
We've 100 in the sense that there are.
- [100:11]
Paris Martineau
No, they're just. It's 100. I mean, one would argue that was a hidden error that was not on. Well, except that until you asked it about it.
- [100:21]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, because I couldn't find it. So you're agreeing, you two. Yeah. Well, all right, yeah.
- [100:29]
Jeff Jarvis
I don't call it hallucination.
- [100:31]
Leo Laporte
You're saying essentially the untrustworthy. I don't think it's untrustworthy. I think you have to use it.
- [100:36]
Paris Martineau
I think every thing in the everything and source of information in the world is untrustworthy.
- [100:40]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah. When you're a journalist, that's how you think. You know, when I was at Time Inc. They, they. They ticked every damn word. And that system didn't work very well. We killed off every it once.
- [100:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, that's not a good one. Yeah, no. All right, we're going to take a break, come back. We have a little bit more before we wrap things up, including Mira Maratti returning the dead. She not dead. That was an error. My AI made our show today, brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. As we have talked about over and over again, the potential rewards of AI, AI really too great to ignore, but so are the risks. The loss of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed AI. Generative AI increases opportunities for threat actors too, helping them to rapidly create phishing lures to write malicious code to automate data extraction. I'll give you an example. There were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications. Some of that maybe is malicious. Some of it is just. Just accidentally exfiltrating proprietary comforting information. When you use an AI, you want to stop both, and Zscaler can. It's time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. Just ask Chad Pallet, acting CISO at BioIVT. He says Zscaler helped them reduce their cyber premiums, their insurance by 50% and doubled their coverage and improve their controls. Take a look at this. With Zscaler, as long as you've got Internet, you're good to go. A big part of the reason that we moved to a consolidated solution away from sd, WAN and VPN is to eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network. It also was an opportunity for us to maintain, maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe style environment. Thank You Chad with Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business. Their Zero Trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more@zscaler.com that's zscaler.com Security we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. I think I would say on the accuracy thing, do you trust Google Maps? Sometimes it makes a mistake.
- [103:20]
Paris Martineau
No Google Maps. I mean, I trust it generally, but
- [103:24]
Leo Laporte
I find it's at that level. I wouldn't. You're right. I shouldn't say it's 100 accurate because nor is neither.
- [103:29]
Jeff Jarvis
That was. What you hit on was 100%.
- [103:30]
Leo Laporte
Neither is Google Maps. In this case. That error came from an earlier parts list from APC that is no longer accurate. There was a reason it said that number. It didn't just make it up out of thin air. And then when I said I can't find, it said, oh yeah, that's an old parts list, let me check and see what the new one is. And it found the new one which I ordered. So similar to Google Maps, Google Maps will route you to our house through an alley that no one should ever go. And I always know when somebody's using Google Maps to get here because they go, they go through that alley. Honest. You probably were using Apple Maps.
- [104:05]
Paris Martineau
I was using Google Maps.
- [104:06]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay. Oh, you were coming from a different direction probably.
- [104:09]
Paris Martineau
I was.
- [104:09]
Leo Laporte
If you come from this direction, it goes through that alley. And I always see, you know, like when Uber comes or something, I can always tell when the Uber, which map system the Uber driver is using. So that is an error. It's not. But, but generally you trust the maps, right? It's not hallucinating streets that don't exist and things like that. That.
- [104:30]
Paris Martineau
I mean, I trust it generally, but I know that if I am following it and I'm looking for something that I then can't find with my own eyes, the map is the problem, you
- [104:43]
Leo Laporte
know, so I'll give it that level of accuracy. That's probably not fair to say 100%. It's, it's verifiably accurate, let's put it that way. And certainly those one sheets that we generate are more than, more than enough.
- [104:55]
Jeff Jarvis
I mean, I, I presume it's the same with code. At some point. What's, what's wearing is. You think I got it if it's, if it's mission critical and journalism the journalism Paris is doing is mission critical. Then anything you get from it, you have to check. Absolutely.
- [105:09]
Leo Laporte
Well, code is a little easier because code either works or doesn't work. So if there is a massive error in the code and the program doesn't work, yeah, it failed. That happens, by the way, all the time. And then you fix it, so it's hard. Code hallucination are a little more subtle. There are problems with, for instance, fake tests where you. I always say, the way we do my code is something called red, green, blue testing, where you write a failing test, you write the code, see if you can get it to green, and if you can, then that part passes. But sometimes AIs will act childishly. I don't know what the right word is. And we'll write a kind of a dummy test that always passes. And that's not a good test. So you have to kind of pay attention to stuff like that code generally, though, if it doesn't work, you know it, and if it does work, you know it. So it's a little more deterministic. It's a little harder with probabilistic things. For instance, the. The judge. Judge who threw out a case because, well, this is. This is. This is a perfect example of what you're talking about. Lawyers on both sides were using AI. The judge canceled the trial and kicked everyone off.
- [106:33]
Jeff Jarvis
Hasn't anyone learned in the legal profession at this point? There have been enough schmuck lawyers who've screwed this up.
- [106:38]
Leo Laporte
The problem is when it works, it works so well.
- [106:41]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's that, exactly.
- [106:43]
Paris Martineau
Well, oh, this case is fascinating. One of the things I did in my cave, cave life, you know, when you're in the cave life, you have like maybe an hour every night when you're trying to go to sleep. You're like, I can't look at bad screen anymore. I've got to look at slightly smaller bad screen. And one of my slightly smaller bad screen things was reading the whole. I guess it was the judgment summary from this specific case, and it was brutal. Where is.
- [107:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I've got it right here.
- [107:13]
Paris Martineau
I want to make sure that I
- [107:14]
Leo Laporte
get Withers versus the city of Aberdeen.
- [107:17]
Paris Martineau
Oh, yeah, yeah. This is it. Basically, it seems like, oh, is this a different one? This is. Oh, this is a fully. I was thinking of a different lawyer. AI Judge.
- [107:33]
Leo Laporte
There's a lot of that happened this
- [107:34]
Paris Martineau
week as well, which was the judge ripped into this lawyer because he won, used AI in for his filings, had a bunch of fake citations. But then when the judge, judge Asked him about it. He's like, I've used ChatGPT a couple times, but not for this. He's like, well, we're ordering you to provide a chat GPT transcript to the court. He then went in, deleted the, deleted his ChatGPT account. Then when it said he saw a timer on the chat GPT account so it would be around for another month, which is around the end of the window, he went in and asked for a partial refund so all the data would be wiped. And then told the judge, sorry, I don't have a chat GPT account anymore. And the judge like lost their. They were like, you. I think he was suspended for months. They have to like do like a public notice where he has to provide this brutal write up. I've ever seen about how dumb of a person you are to every judge and attorney you've ever worked with. I mean, this seems like it is a scourge on the legal industry right now.
- [108:36]
Leo Laporte
This is what the court wrote because they're being idiots. Upon reviewing the brief submitted in support of the party's response. Respective positions, both parties, with regard to the two motions, the court was unable to locate certain legal authorities citing within them. Specifically, the court determined the following followings contained hallucinatory citations. And there are quite a few of them which the court also lists. Basically, the court decided, you all are out of here. And I'm not gonna go, I'm not gonna continue this at all. All.
- [109:09]
Paris Martineau
I mean, the poor plaintiffs, each of
- [109:11]
Leo Laporte
the attorneys, people, each of the attorneys expressed embarrassment and apologized to the court.
- [109:17]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah,
- [109:20]
Leo Laporte
it's. It is. This is equally scathing judgment.
- [109:25]
Jeff Jarvis
And the clients. I mean, when in the case that. The first famous case of this which I covered in federal court, the judge made him. Him apologize to his client and then also made him write to the. To the judges in the cases that he had cited and apologize and find
- [109:46]
Leo Laporte
him money at the end of the judgment. This court is yet again burdened with addressing AI hallucinations in court filings. It has previously acknowledged that AI is a powerful tool that when used prudently in a tower, Alex provides immense benefits. This case presents the court with an unusual scenario. Attorneys for both litigants engaged in similar sanctionable conduct.
- [110:13]
Jeff Jarvis
Is there a sanction order in it? So it's throwing out the case.
- [110:18]
Leo Laporte
I think there were sanctions actually.
- [110:20]
Jeff Jarvis
They probably have to come in for a show cause why you shouldn't be sanctioned.
- [110:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I get the sense this is
- [110:24]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
happening because firms are taking on a lot more cases because they. They can blow through them with ChatGPT
- [110:30]
Jeff Jarvis
or they're not bringing in interns to do the work they're, you know, bringing in.
- [110:35]
Leo Laporte
Additionally, the court is compelled to point out that this sanctionable conduct inevitably implicates Williams and Wilson's ability to continue practicing before it. So you can see where they're headed here. A unifying framework for determining the appropriate sanctions in cases involving unverified AI usage has not been adopted yet within the Fifth Circuit. In this, in the in the past, this court is considered the violating attorney's candor, accountability and remedial rep measures. So you know how guilty you feel. I don't know if I I could go on. This is a very long thing in which I haven't read Wilson explained she was shocked when the court issued the show Cause order, pointing out the hallucinated cases appeared appearing in her filing. In essence, the attorney took the position she was unaware that AI could produce hallucinated cases and explained she didn't even know what a hallucinated case was. By now, the court finds that explanation to be insufficient and incredible.
- [111:33]
Jeff Jarvis
When I covered my poor schmuck, it was early enough in chat GP's life.
- [111:37]
Leo Laporte
I'm not a cat.
- [111:39]
Jeff Jarvis
It was a search. But that excuse goes away.
- [111:43]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, apparently he was pretty mad at this attorney. She's done this before in so I've
- [111:48]
Paris Martineau
I've found the one that I'm thinking of, which was a I believe in Alabama court in case there was two weeks ago this was filed because it's all happening, right? The court is not ordering the harshest of attorney Harp sanctions because he made a mistake. The court is ordering them because when confronted with that mistake, he chose dishonesty over candor and destruction over disclosure. Lawyers make errors. Competent and ethical lawyers own them. When lawyers are caught submitting AI generated misrepresentations to the court, they have two options. They can either admit their mistakes and show contrition, or they can attempt to cover up their mistakes and demonstrate a weakness of character unsuited to the legal profession.
- [112:28]
Jeff Jarvis
That's saying something. If they're too low to be a
- [112:31]
Paris Martineau
lawyer path, they'll likely preserve their standing before the court. If they choose the latter, they may
- [112:36]
Leo Laporte
well lose their career, the judge here wrote. It's also apparent she attempted to minimize the violation by emphasizing the the legal propositions in her filing were correct statements of law, despite conceding that she had cited fake cases. How hard would it be to look at your sites and just verify them in the law books?
- [112:54]
Jeff Jarvis
Cut and paste.
- [112:55]
Leo Laporte
Do a Little search in Westlaw.
- [112:57]
Paris Martineau
They all probably got the same memo as you that their AI is 100% accurate.
- [113:02]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, I'll go back to my case again. It was a guy who does state courts, but the court. The case went up to the federal courts and he didn't have the license. License for the federal search engine.
- [113:13]
Leo Laporte
Oh, so he couldn't.
- [113:14]
Jeff Jarvis
He thought. He thought ChatGPT was a super search engine and gee, it's free.
- [113:17]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's. That's an innocent area.
- [113:18]
Jeff Jarvis
At the time. At the time it was actually somewhat excusable until he then went back and asked it, are you sure these are real? Which gave up the ghost on that.
- [113:29]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, he find Wilson. $2500 barred her for two years from appearing before the court. And she who ordered her to attend a cla on artificial intelligence with an ethics component. The other attorney also her admission in the case is revoked. Barred from appearing for two years from today's date and a $3,500 fine. So, yeah, they were all fined mild fines, but mostly disqualified from appearing in that court again. So, yeah, anyway, this is happening again and again. In fact, there's a guy, Rob Freund, who has a entire page dedicated to these errors and so forth. So that's where this story came from. 404 reporting on it.
- [114:25]
Paris Martineau
I mean, this is probably why some of the large law firms are now investing considerable amount of time and money into trying to train their own. Own LLMs.
- [114:36]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And yet this is why it's so complicated. There's also amazing things these things are doing, including Mythos finding bugs that have been around forever. From TNW Mira Marathi resurfaces after 18 months with a warning about AI governance and a product no one expected. She was the CTO at OpenAI, who was, for about three minutes, the the CEO when they fired Sam Altman. She then started Thinking Machines.
- [115:11]
Jeff Jarvis
This may be a product that would appeal to you. No.
- [115:15]
Leo Laporte
Sitting down with Bloomberg's Emily Chang in San Francisco, she gave her first major appearance in 18 months. Thinking machines Lab, her startup, which had spent the year raising $2 billion, securing a gigawatt of Nvidia Vera Rubin computer, shipping one product and losing a troubling number of researchers it hired to build the next one. Good writing by Christian Dina at the Next Web. The product is Drumroll, something they're calling interaction models, a fundamentally different kind of AI interface. Rather than the prompt and response format, the company's models are designed to produce continuous streams of audio, text and video in 200 millisecond intervals.
- [115:58]
Paris Martineau
So this is a model designed specifically to interpret. Interpret that kind of TikTok meme where you've got somebody playing Temple Run in the background and Family Guy on one side and then a livestream on another. There's a model for that, you know, model for Video slop.
- [116:16]
Leo Laporte
She says, when I wake up in the morning I'm not thinking about how to kill the competitor. Okay, maybe others are. Anyway, this is an interesting idea actually. We're trying really hard. Darren Okey, our AI genius, us in the club or Australian who's a regular on our AI user group says he has a model that we can now put in the show that will listen and interact.
- [116:42]
Jeff Jarvis
I've been waiting for that. Yes.
- [116:43]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm very interested. I'm very interested. So at some point you may hear. I don't know if it'll be related to the Thinking Machines model, but you may hear a, a new, a new.
- [116:55]
Jeff Jarvis
What will you name it?
- [116:57]
Leo Laporte
Well, I think we should.
- [116:58]
Paris Martineau
Is it going to be weighted to advocate for your slash Darren's future?
- [117:02]
Jeff Jarvis
Of course it will.
- [117:03]
Leo Laporte
Of course it will. It's an AI.
- [117:05]
Jeff Jarvis
It's not a democracy, it's an AI.
- [117:07]
Leo Laporte
It's.
- [117:08]
Paris Martineau
I mean there are other AIs that don't, aren't weighted to do that but
- [117:12]
Leo Laporte
you know, many, many AIs will immediately say oh no, don't, don't trust me. Oh, it's not his model. It's, it's got real time. Two is the name of it. Thank you, Darren. Let's see what else. Sag AFTRA Actors union has struck a four struck strikes. A four year deal with studios to protect the performers against AI, better pay and benefits and it avoided a walkout which is good. No strike this year. More than 90% of the votes approved of the agreement. Agreement.
- [117:50]
Jeff Jarvis
This is our discussion last week with Robert Tursik. Stuff's going to start happening in Hollywood.
- [117:55]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah. I imagine it allows the use of AI as long as the actor. The contract says AI performers must bring quote, significant additional value over a live actor or a digital capture of them if producers are to use them. Union leaders say this will keep the use of AI actors minimal. I wouldn't count on that. Anyway, they've got some concessions and I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I Actors are good people, they deserve.
- [118:25]
Jeff Jarvis
But it also allows some innovation to happen.
- [118:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you need to find a balance there. And I think I last story this I think you will like. If LLMs have human like attributes then so does age. Of Empires too. An archive paper. Paper that says if I can. If. If you think an LLM is conscious, I can make Age of Empires too conscious. A great game, by the way. Theory. They led to evaluations in various areas. Theory of mind, learning and understanding and psychology. In this paper, we leverage those observations to show that in LLM research, assuming the general anthropomorphic properties exist. Exist or not, as part of their measurement is fundamentally flawed. Any sufficiently powerful substrate could implement an entity equivalent to an LLM, including the video game Age of Empires 2. So that should make you very happy.
- [119:30]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Well, we've had AI in video games forever. Like that's. We've just been calling the computer the AI forever.
- [119:36]
Leo Laporte
So he trained a perceptron in AI in AOE too. Yeah, it's interesting. Here is a picture of a nand gate in Age of Empires 2. Senator,
- [119:51]
Jeff Jarvis
I don't.
- [119:52]
Leo Laporte
I'm not sure this is. This proves it in. In any respect, but it's. It's kind of a fun, fun idea. All right, what else do. I'm looking down at your. You. You like the new Gemini 3 of translation. This is pretty exciting.
- [120:06]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it is.
- [120:07]
Leo Laporte
Live translate almost in real time. And they showed. Let me show you the video. They showed it happening in simultaneous translation, which is pretty good. So it's translating English. Almost real time. This is Sundar Pichai's Talk@Google IO demo.
- [120:33]
Jeffrey Kannel
We're going to show you a live dubbing experience here. We're using the API to stream translated audio directly from a tab. Watch as we listen to the Google I O keynote in Hindi.
- [120:43]
Jeff Jarvis
What's really incredible is how people are using our AI.
- [120:51]
Leo Laporte
I don't speak Hindi, but I imagine that's pretty good. They showed it in other languages. They even showed it in four languages. Simon. Simultaneously, which is, you know, un style simultaneous translation. It's a little chaotic.
- [121:04]
Jeff Jarvis
I'm reading news all over the world actually.
- [121:07]
Leo Laporte
The other speakers speaks German, which I know that you speak a little bit of German. Here's the German to English translation sounds.
- [121:15]
Jeffrey Kannel
No choppiness, no artificial positives.
- [121:18]
Paris Martineau
It flows like a completely natural language.
- [121:23]
Jeffrey Kannel
Switch now to Japanese session.
- [121:29]
Paris Martineau
It though.
- [121:29]
Leo Laporte
It's pretty impressive.
- [121:30]
Jeff Jarvis
It is.
- [121:31]
Leo Laporte
I think the Babel Fish is. Is getting close.
- [121:34]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Little grain of salt though, because this is Google and they are, you know,
- [121:37]
Leo Laporte
I know they do these demos.
- [121:39]
Paris Martineau
Google loves to make an impressive video and it's kind of cobbled together.
- [121:43]
Jeff Jarvis
I remember seeing Eric Schmidt in Davos many years ago saying, when we can do this, we'll have world peace. You forgot a Few factors.
- [121:54]
Leo Laporte
Well, the Pope referred to the Tower of Babel, I think. Think.
- [121:56]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Yeah. That's the Tower of Babel. That's the whole thing, right?
- [121:59]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's the opposite. Right. The Tower of Babel. Nobody could understand anybody because they all spoke different languages, but would have solved
- [122:04]
Jeff Jarvis
the Tower of Babel if only the Tower had Google.
- [122:07]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
The Tower of Babel was. Was the representation of. Of. Of everyone having the same knowledge. Right. Isn't that what it was?
- [122:15]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I thought it was.
- [122:16]
Jeff Jarvis
Because the hope was that we'd all have one. Yes. But in fact.
- [122:19]
Leo Laporte
So we had diversity and instead we got Esperato, which by the way, way Google Translate. Does Esperana.
- [122:25]
Jeff Jarvis
Wow. Does it do Klingon?
- [122:29]
Leo Laporte
I didn't see Klingon in there. I did download the latest version.
- [122:31]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
I'm sure it does. There is a nerd over there that made that happen.
- [122:34]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, yeah. What else can pick?
- [122:40]
Paris Martineau
I'm sure you talked about the anthropic confidential filing last week, but we had, you know, OpenAI did that this week. Everything's gearing them.
- [122:48]
Leo Laporte
Yep. IPOs are coming.
- [122:50]
Jeff Jarvis
Perplexity says 2028.
- [122:53]
Paris Martineau
All right, sure.
- [122:54]
Leo Laporte
Perplexity is going to be challenged because they don't have models of their own money by then.
- [122:57]
Paris Martineau
Perplexity.
- [122:58]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [122:59]
Jeff Jarvis
Meta. Meta is rumored to also be going to the private market, to the public market, like Google. There's going be a huge push. Yes.
- [123:05]
Leo Laporte
Raise more money. Yeah.
- [123:06]
Paris Martineau
But Meta is already a public company.
- [123:09]
Leo Laporte
Google raising 80 billion, diluting their current stock. Right. Ah.
- [123:14]
Paris Martineau
Taking a page from the game stock.
- [123:16]
Leo Laporte
Oh, and speaking of Germany. Germany. German courts.
- [123:19]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. This is a bad one.
- [123:21]
Leo Laporte
Yep. Have declared Google's AI overviews are Google's own words. And thus Google is liable for errors.
- [123:30]
Paris Martineau
I think that's fun.
- [123:33]
Jeff Jarvis
No, because what? I get the logic of it.
- [123:35]
Paris Martineau
Who's got to be liable for all my own words? Even the words I tweet? I think Google could, you know, listen, I understand there's broader implications to this that my flippant answer is not considering, but while I'm doing flippant answers answer. I think it is fun that somebody else has to actually care about their precision of their words.
- [123:54]
Leo Laporte
So what happened was pretty bad. So Google's AI overviews falsely tied two German Munich based publishers to scams, subscription traps and shady business practices. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs who sued and drew connections that did not appear in any of the linked sources. Publishers sent Google a cease and desist. But didn't Google's AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results. The court argues the AI rewrites and judges results in its own words, according to its own structure. The ruling says in the case at hand, for example, it opened with a confident claim like, yes, this company's known for dubious business practices. I mean, I think that's pretty libelous.
- [124:47]
Paris Martineau
Makes sense if you have your core product offering for Google right now is its AI search results. It's selling ads, it's reorienting its whole kind of product structure around the search project, product around this. And if you do not offer any tools to, when you get it wrong, to correct that information, when someone notifies you that you've gotten it wrong and you continue to show this incorrect and libelous information to a large, incredibly large audience. I don't.
- [125:21]
Jeff Jarvis
But there's randomness built in. I'm not disagreeing with you, but there's randomness built in. So the next answer may be the opposite.
- [125:28]
Paris Martineau
Well, you still showed it to a lot of people, enough so that this lawsuit was able to get it into discoveries,
- [125:38]
Jeff Jarvis
you know, with a plain old search. I get the logic of the decision, right? In plain old search, you were, you were delivering the web then in chat GPT. Well, that's just a tool and you asked it a question. And it has caveats. This decision is saying, but it's Google speaking as Google answering this question. But it's, it's a fine line I think there. And, and the result of this, I mean Google just gotta make the caveats a hell of a lot bigger in 1850 point. This often makes mistakes. It's not true, you know, beware, beware. But the end result could be that, you know, they pull AI out of Germany or something. I don't know.
- [126:17]
Leo Laporte
By the way, Bonito, you're right. I'm just getting. I got my result from my AI from Genesis 11:1:9. After the flood, humanity is described as speaking one language. People decided to build a great city with a tower with its top in the heaven heavens to make a name from themselves. God sees the project and says, because this is a little weird, because they are united by one language, nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them. So he confuses their language and makes them unable to understand one another and scatters them across the earth.
- [126:53]
Jeff Jarvis
Yep.
- [126:53]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
So we tried. That's what kind of the parallel to AI is too red.
- [126:57]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
- [126:58]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's what my agent, because it knows me, says. This is a nice cyberpunk Taoist read Babel is what happens when coordination turns into domination, when a shared protocol becomes a monument to control. See, it knows me. And it always sticks in little stuff like that.
- [127:16]
Jeff Jarvis
So you want a few other quick stories?
- [127:17]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [127:18]
Jeff Jarvis
So turn it in, which is supposed to detect plagiarism, and now AI.
- [127:23]
Paris Martineau
I mean, turn it in, which has been flagrantly wrong about a bunch of stuff.
- [127:27]
Jeff Jarvis
I could agree more. But the researchers did an interesting experiment where they gave it 100% human, human text. 100 AI text. But then they also varied the text, you know, 20, 40, 60, whatever AI text added in. It was pretty good on either end of the extremes. But the paradox here was that the smaller the AI contribution, the larger turn thought it was. The larger the AI contribution, the smaller it thought it was. All of these things are coming out. Trying to argue the Pope. We, when we have Bud race on some accuse the Pope of putting AI into the encyclical. We're just going to get used to the fact that you don't know. You don't know.
- [128:10]
Paris Martineau
I'm curious as to how that same test would work on Pangram. Panagram.
- [128:14]
Jeff Jarvis
I would too. Yeah.
- [128:16]
Leo Laporte
You think that one's good like that? That's the one.
- [128:18]
Paris Martineau
I have been entirely dismissive of all of them always, and I think rightfully so. This is the first. Panagram is the first one that has given me some pause in the sense that I, I, I mean, my assessment of it has been entirely, fully myopic in the sense that I'll put in my own writing from years ago. It flags that as 100% human. Every time, no matter what combination I do, I try and mix in some of my own writing with AI generated text. That kind of sounds like my writing, and it will catch that. I don't know how it does it. I don't know. It's Pangram, not Panagram. Sorry. Um, I don't know if this is more broadly applicable. I'm sure there are a bunch of things that might get wrong. I don't know how it handles new models. I'd love to get someone from Pangram on the show to kind of talk through this a bit, because I think part of my understanding is part of what sets them apart is they are like, using their own model to basically be like, what with every single word, what does our own model think the next likely word is going to be? And then it kind of compares pairs. It uses that to try and determine. That's a very rudimentary and probably somewhat partially wrong explanation of it. But it's a different sort of assessment than we traditionally get from these sort of tools.
- [129:41]
Leo Laporte
Let's see. I'm asking it to. Okay. 100% of my text is human written, which is true. That was from my. My journal. Let me find some aic. If it can detect some AI talk talk. It probably can. I could detect some of this AI talk, actually.
- [129:59]
Paris Martineau
I mean, yeah, it, it's. It's very interesting. I mean I played around with it quite a bit because I saw some people whenever that I think Commonwealth prize short story was going on, people were citing Pangram as being like, oh, evidence of AI. I was like, oh, this is such bs. People have been using this service forever. It's obvious, obviously wrong. I'm gonna find a way to prove how dumb it is that I can dunk on them on Twitter. And I couldn't. So I mean that was the only. I. I didn't try longer than like 30 minutes, but I thought that was notable. It's the first one of those. I hadn't been able to figure it out.
- [130:35]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't think teachers should use it though, right?
- [130:38]
Paris Martineau
I mean, no, I mean I. Here's the thing is such a high stakes should be used to make definitive judgments in any truly meaningful way. But I think it is a useful signal.
- [130:53]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, we don't know that's the problem. I, I just. I just don't know the data. I need research like the one I cited to go in and test it. I'm putting in, I mean, I believe encyclical.
- [131:07]
Paris Martineau
One of the founders of Pan, Graham just had like a debate with a researcher about this very thing and it concluded with, I think this is on either Twitter or Blue sky than being like, we will give you this many thousand dollars worth of free pen game credits. You can do whatever you want with it. All we ask to test it, all we ask is that you just publish everything you put in, everything you do out, and you do it all by yourself. Have nothing to do with us.
- [131:32]
Leo Laporte
I just put in the Tower of Babel answer from my agent.
- [131:38]
Paris Martineau
Oh, got him.
- [131:40]
Leo Laporte
100% human written.
- [131:43]
Paris Martineau
All right,
- [131:46]
Jeff Jarvis
good work, Leo.
- [131:47]
Paris Martineau
That's great.
- [131:49]
Leo Laporte
See, although a false. A false negative is probably better than a false positive, right? You don't want a student who actually wrote a paper to be flagged as AI.
- [132:00]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Most of this is quotes though, right? So the quotes are human written.
- [132:05]
Jeff Jarvis
Confidence low, though.
- [132:08]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, it does say confidence low, which is
- [132:12]
Leo Laporte
supporting evidence.
- [132:17]
Paris Martineau
I wouldn't use supporting evidence. Isn't. It's. It doesn't highlight the evidence. That.
- [132:21]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's not specific to that.
- [132:23]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, it just, it calls out things that people commonly call it, like a three, you know, a rule of three. Or if not this, then this. But it says it doesn't use that at all in its assessments.
- [132:37]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
So it won't judge you on your M Dash usage.
- [132:40]
Paris Martineau
I mean, this is something I thought about a lot when I was writing this story. Because, like, between that and the second story I wrote, like, been published, like 5,000 words and all the other stuff out there, like a couple more thousand. And I was like, I. I feel like I'm going insane. Like, I. I go and look at my old work from like pre2020 even. I'm like, I used. Have always used M Dash as a journalist, you know, and I've always used a lot of the phrasing or things like that. That now is considered common with AI because it did get that from scraping the work of lots of journalists that have similar habits. But now I'm always like, like, I started one of my articles off. I wanted to, like, list the top, like, three products that had a lot of additives or contaminants in it. But I was like, oh, everybody always says that when there's three things listed, that's AI. So I'm going to start it with four instead. Instead. And I did because I didn't want people to think I used AI. Not that I did.
- [133:35]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
I mean, the three things thing is like a writing technique that's been passed down through the ages.
- [133:39]
Paris Martineau
I know it sounds good and normal. It's like the rule of threes. You do blank, blank and blank. And absolutely.
- [133:49]
Jeff Jarvis
It's the right rhythm, you know, and then the other one is, tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell them, then tell them what you told them. My sister taught homiletics, serving and writing at a seminary. That's what you did. You know, it's. These are things that we all do.
- [134:01]
Leo Laporte
So I'm gonna try one more thing. I did give it some more AI pros and it was able to detect it. It said 100% AI generated. But now if I have any more tokens, I'm gonna give it. I asked my AI to humanize it because it has a skill to take AI isms out. Nope, didn't fool it.
- [134:22]
Paris Martineau
Hundo confidence.
- [134:26]
Leo Laporte
So it wasn't able to humanize it as well as it thinks it can.
- [134:29]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
What's weird is that the confidence low was still 100%. Like, that should have been a smaller number, right?
- [134:34]
Paris Martineau
Well, no, it's 100% of this text it believes.
- [134:36]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah.
- [134:38]
Paris Martineau
It's not 100% confidence it. Because it will break it up into chunks. Like sometimes it'll be like, we think that this paragraph could be AI generated. Or it'll sometimes highlight and be like, we think this could be combo AI here. Human. You know, like a light rewrite situation.
- [134:56]
Leo Laporte
Well, so, you know, at least it didn't flag as AI. Something a human wrote, which I think would be a much worse outcome. Anything else before we break for our.
- [135:08]
Jeff Jarvis
Another interesting one to me is the Amazon is letting you an image generator. So you can. If, if, if Paris has a dress in mind that she really wants but that can't find it, she can have it generate an AI image of that dress and then have Amazon look for anything that in reality is like, be
- [135:25]
Leo Laporte
better if it made it.
- [135:26]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's where you go. So speaking of that, Amazon has also introduced a structure so you could have the AI design a, an image and then make the custom. The merch from that.
- [135:38]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's nice. That's nice. All right, so. But it's mostly like making a T shirt or a sweatshirt right now.
- [135:47]
Jeff Jarvis
But you know, soon it'll make you a Jensen Wong fake leather jacket.
- [135:53]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Huh?
- [135:54]
Leo Laporte
Sign. A heavy metal logo for my family.
- [135:56]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Jensen's not gonna let that happen. Come on,
- [136:01]
Jeff Jarvis
he's got, he's. He's bought up all the snakes in the world so that you can't make one.
- [136:07]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
He can change the AI.
- [136:08]
Leo Laporte
Right?
- [136:09]
Jeff Jarvis
Right. Finally, Elon Musk says he's building a chip that's two to three times better than Nvidia at 10% of the cost. He is just such a.
- [136:15]
Leo Laporte
Is he going to make it on Mars?
- [136:17]
Jeff Jarvis
Yes. Jesus Christ.
- [136:20]
Leo Laporte
I don't. I no longer even listen when he says something. It's like, okay, fine, go ahead. You do that. You know, I'm. I've been thinking a little bit about this. There was a point in time where I think he was a genius. He did do some pretty amazing amazing things. And he did some very smart thing.
- [136:37]
Jeff Jarvis
But the argument was he came in. I mean, Tesla. He didn't do Tesla. He came into Tesla.
- [136:40]
Leo Laporte
No, but he made Tesla happen. Those guys had never even built a car. He bought the idea and then ended up making a car that is arguably to this day the best electric vehicle ever made. It certainly is the longest lasting. He did some good things. Now, he didn't do it all by himself. He hired the engineers and he put the money into it. Same thing with SpaceX. I mean, that's, that's a tremendous success in many ways, but we don't have any idea. Went crazy.
- [137:08]
Paris Martineau
CEO brain worms. When you're surrounded by enough people, that's what I think. Tell you that you're the smartest, best person. Plus Internet brain poisoning from general Internet use, plus having an army of online sycophants.
- [137:23]
Leo Laporte
That and daily ketamine use and third pillar killer.
- [137:28]
Paris Martineau
A lot of alleged drug use that, if you were to be believed, probably makes all those things worse.
- [137:34]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I was also thinking that if we are going to go to Mars, let's just send the AIs. What do we need to go for? They're not going to do up there. I can build a city.
- [137:45]
Jeff Jarvis
This is what, this is what the, the test grail people say is that when they talk about the, you know, 10 to the 40th, whatever the number, as human beings in the future, they don't mean they're all human beings with bodies. They think that they're going to create virtual humans that will then be able to populate the universe because they never die.
- [138:06]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, we polled, we did a survey. We asked 10,000 people. And you're like, oh, how did you do the survey? They're like, well, we used an AI tool to ask to simulate. I'm like, you're not talking about people, you're talking about tools, ideas, people.
- [138:21]
Leo Laporte
We surveyed the AIs.
- [138:23]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's being used now instead of. Because it's cheaper than fact surveys. You're right.
- [138:27]
Leo Laporte
It makes a lot more sense, though, to send AIs to Mars. They don't have the low gravity, the long trip.
- [138:32]
Jeff Jarvis
But, but what these people think is that these are going to be alive because they can create. This is your, this is your Jeffrey Hinton thing, that they're conscious. And we can send this conscious being on our behalf.
- [138:45]
Jeffrey Kannel
Behalf.
- [138:45]
Jeff Jarvis
And so we, we have populated the universe with human extensions.
- [138:52]
Leo Laporte
We may not agree on what the process is in an AI's mind. I don't think we disagree on the fact that it's not human. I'm not asserting that AIs are human in any respect.
- [139:03]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, sentient and conscious.
- [139:05]
Leo Laporte
Well, they might be sentient and conscious, we don't know. But they're not human. They never will be.
- [139:09]
Jeff Jarvis
The Pope is going to strike you down.
- [139:14]
Leo Laporte
Well, let's not forget that the Pope is in a.
- [139:20]
Jeff Jarvis
He's infallible. Leo, you want 100% a business, a
- [139:23]
Leo Laporte
Pope, where, where faith is key. Right. Believing in the face of Same as Grail boys. Yeah.
- [139:34]
Paris Martineau
Same as free, same as me.
- [139:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you're. You're watching intelligent machines with three very intelligent people and no machines involved. Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martino. I just want to invite those of you who are not yet members of the club to support our shows. These shows require your financial support but they even more than financial support, they require your emotional and. And emotional know intention to continue. Because yes, we do have advertisers. They cover 70%, let's say, I'm not sure the exact numbers, around 70% of our operations costs. We could continue on without the club, but we'd have to cut back a little bit. The club though, gives us the support we need to keep doing what we're doing. Not merely financial but emotional support. The it's a vocal vote for what we're doing. Independent broadcasting, independent journalism. Not owned or operated by a big company working on your behalf, no one else's. I really think that's an important thing to do. And if you do do, I would love to have you join the club. You get lots of benefits. Ad free versions of the shows. You get access to the discord. All that special programming we do just for club members. Find out more at TWiT TV Club TWiT. Cast your vote for independent journalism.
- [141:01]
Jeffrey Kannel
Do you hear that?
- [141:02]
Leo Laporte
Sounds like breakfast is ready.
- [141:04]
Jeffrey Kannel
Because Quakers coming in hot with morning
- [141:06]
Leo Laporte
nutrition 100% whole grain oats and a good source of fiber to fuel the
- [141:13]
Jeffrey Kannel
rhythm of your morning and kickstart your day.
- [141:16]
Leo Laporte
And that sounds absolutely delicious fuel to start.
- [141:21]
Jeffrey Kannel
Whatever's next.
- [141:22]
Leo Laporte
Next.
- [141:22]
Jeffrey Kannel
Quaker, official sponsor of FIFA World Cup 26.
- [141:29]
Leo Laporte
Tomorrow morning is knocking.
- [141:31]
Paris Martineau
Stock your fridge now.
- [141:32]
Leo Laporte
How about a creamy mocha Frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe?
- [141:37]
Paris Martineau
Or a white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks. Wherever you buy your groceries, you have
- [141:44]
Leo Laporte
one new message
- [141:48]
Paris Martineau
translating. Disney and Pixar Hoppers is now available on Disney plus.
- [141:53]
Leo Laporte
You could say that again.
- [141:55]
Paris Martineau
Critics are calling it Pixar's funniest movie ever.
- [141:57]
Leo Laporte
And a wildly entertaining ride. Blizzard Potato.
- [142:00]
Paris Martineau
It's certified fresh and verified hot.
- [142:03]
Jeffrey Kannel
Now we party.
- [142:05]
Paris Martineau
This is incredible.
- [142:07]
Jeff Jarvis
Wow. I am clearing the rest of the day.
- [142:09]
Leo Laporte
Disney and Pixar's Hoppers now available on Disney plus. Rated pg.
- [142:14]
Paris Martineau
Guys, shout out to everybody who left reviews for the show in the last.
- [142:18]
Leo Laporte
Did we get a bunch? Yay.
- [142:20]
Paris Martineau
A bunch in the last month.
- [142:21]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, like so many some reviews.
- [142:24]
Paris Martineau
Let's see. Let's. Always makes you think, says lra. You hockey. What do you get when you put together three smart minds, differing opinions of AI you get intelligent conversations about AI. Extremely intelligent, says Peggy Lisboa.
- [142:40]
Leo Laporte
Thank you.
- [142:40]
Paris Martineau
Have loved the show for ages. Previously. Twig. Keep up the banter. Definitely part of the charm. Let me in Paris. Leo or Jeff, says Matt. Definitely not an A.I. the show's fantastic. With sand in their shoes or not? Not. I'm not sure. But I think you do not need to be conscious to enjoy the show. I want to hear more of the two old men.
- [143:01]
Leo Laporte
We agree with that.
- [143:02]
Paris Martineau
So many great ones here.
- [143:04]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Did she.
- [143:04]
Leo Laporte
Did they say more of your opinions and less of the two old men's?
- [143:07]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, they did.
- [143:08]
Leo Laporte
He glossed over that.
- [143:09]
Paris Martineau
There's one.
- [143:10]
Jeff Jarvis
That one's Paris.
- [143:11]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, you know there's. There's one negative opinion that got really mad that I guess Jeff talked about CBS last week. But you know, know other than that, lovely time.
- [143:25]
Leo Laporte
Leave your 5 star reviews at your favorite podcast client. We appreciate that that helps us spread the word. Paris Martineau Pick of the week.
- [143:35]
Paris Martineau
I got a lot down here. Honestly. Let me even find it. Yeah, as I said before, come check out my Reddit AMA Friday, June 12th 12th at 1pm Eastern. A link just to Consumer Reports Reddit because it hasn't the AMA hasn't been
- [143:57]
Leo Laporte
posted, but it'll be at slash.
- [144:00]
Paris Martineau
I am a. Yeah, you know, I think it's a couple of hours or something before we'll open up can ask questions, get in there. Other pics are I don't know. I told you guys that two or so months ago I started getting into basketball and since then there's been a lot of moves.
- [144:17]
Leo Laporte
You picked a good time to get into basketball, young lady.
- [144:21]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
I told you I think the the
- [144:23]
Leo Laporte
Knicks owe you something there.
- [144:25]
Paris Martineau
I mean I'm going to a bar to watch this game four right after the show.
- [144:32]
Leo Laporte
So very exciting.
- [144:33]
Paris Martineau
No, it's lovely. I have suddenly a desperate hatred of the tall Frenchman.
- [144:39]
Leo Laporte
You know.
- [144:40]
Jeff Jarvis
No, you should know. You should hate is the is the referees.
- [144:43]
Paris Martineau
Oh I do hate them.
- [144:44]
Jeff Jarvis
They. They are the ones taking hate Wait,
- [144:46]
Paris Martineau
so you who referees who agreed basically made a call yesterday that they're like yeah, wy can bring a loaded gun to the game and we won't stop him is what they've decided. But you know, it's fun. I'd really. I'm probably not speaking to anyone who hasn't watched basketball before but if you're someone like me never really watched basketball as an adult. Check it out. It's a delightful time.
- [145:09]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Just don't wear your here Paris. There's no way your nets get Please
- [145:14]
Leo Laporte
I'm not tweet about Wemby going to pushing people out of line at Salt Hanks.
- [145:18]
Paris Martineau
Oh, I did.
- [145:19]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
- [145:20]
Paris Martineau
I saw that come across and I was like, yeah, wow. The nexus of my interests say Wemby has a big day planned in New York City. Shoving people out of line for Cronuts, yanking people out of line at the Raphael show at the Met, pushing people out of line at Salt Hanks, wrenching people out of line at kith, etc. Etc.
- [145:40]
Leo Laporte
Wow. Hank has made it into the good Eric Locke Hannah plea of New York landmarks. That's. That's, that's. He writes for the New Yorker. That's like a big deal. Yeah. Wow.
- [145:54]
Paris Martineau
Should I talk about gaming or are we going to include that part in the show from earlier or cut it out because it was when we were figuring out things.
- [146:01]
Leo Laporte
She is very excited about getting her success. One of these little babies.
- [146:07]
Paris Martineau
I watched Nintendo direct, but I was scrolling through it yesterday. I haven't bought a switch since like 2018. I'm mostly a Steam deck girly and I haven't needed to because I have a early Nintendo Switch. But allegedly they are releasing a new Fire emblem game on September 17th and it appears to be a spiritual if not direct success to one of my favorite games of all time, Fire Emblem three Houses. And I'm so thrilled.
- [146:38]
Leo Laporte
Must be generational. I feel very guilty playing video games. Like I'm wasting my time. I enjoy.
- [146:44]
Paris Martineau
Here's the secret, Leo. You're always wasting your time. You. Every second you spend doing anything is a second closer you are to death.
- [146:53]
Leo Laporte
Unless you keep. Unless you're jump shotting a big two points to help the New York Knicks win game for the NBA Finals.
- [147:05]
Paris Martineau
It's true.
- [147:07]
Leo Laporte
That is a nice, nice video of you. An image of you. Whereas for the dunk, here she is showing her ball handling skills.
- [147:16]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
I don't know how it shows her.
- [147:18]
Leo Laporte
Jeff's a Celtics fan though.
- [147:20]
Paris Martineau
None of us are in the finals. The AI knew that. We are completely unrelated to everything going on.
- [147:28]
Leo Laporte
Yes. We don't know what's happening.
- [147:29]
Paris Martineau
The other game I'm really excited about though is I've never really gotten into Final Fantasy because I mean, I've like played through a bit of some of the old classic ones, but never fully because I mean the graphics and everything, it's just. It's such a leap going from modern gaming to, you know, like Final Fantasy 5. But they're releasing a new Final Fantasy game in HD 2D with turn based combat. I'm going to Be right there. Ooh.
- [147:56]
Leo Laporte
Turn based combat. Here's the thing.
- [147:58]
Paris Martineau
As a. As a coward who doesn't like to have to play in real time because I like to be able to sit there and think and then make a move. Once I've considered all my.
- [148:06]
Leo Laporte
I hate turn based combat.
- [148:08]
Paris Martineau
I mean that's the thing is I'm not here to. I'm not playing a game to have reflexes. My constant thought in basketball is I'm like, how are they moving so fast and doing so many things. Things. This is great because it looks like it's Octopath Traveler 2 style, which is phenomenal.
- [148:22]
Leo Laporte
Nice. It is kind of a retro look for Final fantasy.
- [148:27]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's HG2D which has gotten really popular with Octopath Traveler.
- [148:31]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Is this a remake of an old Final Fantasy or which one is this?
- [148:36]
Paris Martineau
I believe it's a reimagining of a story concept popularized in a mobile game, but everything else about it is completely different and that instead it has incorporates elements from basically every Final Fantasy game in where you could. Your characters can kind of like their job class. Classes are these things called visions where you get to basically pluck a character from all the iconic Final Fantasy games of yore and they emerge to do a special move for you.
- [149:07]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Okay, that sounds cool.
- [149:09]
Leo Laporte
Yes, I do like one turn based game which is called chess, but that's a little different.
- [149:13]
Paris Martineau
All of the turn based games are basically chess, but just a little differently.
- [149:17]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, maybe I should.
- [149:18]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Yeah, it's all just a more complicated chess.
- [149:20]
Paris Martineau
That's the thing is they've made versions of chess that are more complicated than you could ever imagine.
- [149:25]
Leo Laporte
Maybe that's why they've made versions of
- [149:27]
Paris Martineau
chess that are so complicated. And then you have the worst, most maniacal AI ever that's playing against you. And you can turn on modes that are labeled things like maddening and it's hard.
- [149:39]
Leo Laporte
Awesome.
- [149:41]
Paris Martineau
It's awesome.
- [149:42]
Leo Laporte
I have a little pick something Google shipped out. Let's see, when did they ship this? Last week, I think. Called Dream Beans. This is a very weird AI experiment from Google. It's an app, this is running on my iPhone, where it looks into all the stuff it knows about you, generates an image and then suggests something you might want to to do. Play the podcast where the river took us apparently thinks I would enjoy that. Tracking mountain lions at Jack London State Historic Park. By the way, that's a pretty good image of Lisa and Michael and me tracking mountain lions pre order. The space opera Exodus by Peter F. Hamilton. I do want to do that.
- [150:28]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
He's right about that one.
- [150:29]
Leo Laporte
So it does these images. I don't know why it thinks I'm going to go to the. Oh, it's going. I'm going to drink the 2025 Northern Roman vintage of Gros Almitai. It's. That is a very hard wine to find.
- [150:40]
Jeff Jarvis
I love Coteran.
- [150:41]
Leo Laporte
Yes, we do too. Tell me it's a dream for an upbeat morning. If you're looking for fresh studio drops spinning this vibrant solo debut from British alt pop songwriter. So these are recommendations, but then it draws these silly images to go along with it. There are Steve Gibson and I running a mobile privacy audit on my picture,
- [151:05]
Jeff Jarvis
but quite enjoying yourselves.
- [151:06]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it looks like we're having fun. Isn't that so strange? Like, it's a little creepy that it knows so much. Like, how did it know that I wear a Scott E. Vest whenever I travel? Maybe I mentioned that once. Here Lisa and I are. Oh, oh, oh, please.
- [151:21]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
It knows all of your pictures. It's seen all of your photos.
- [151:23]
Leo Laporte
It knows everything trying out. Lisa just told me I should order a second mana kitchen pepper cannon for steak night. How did it Must be listening to me Experience vintage.
- [151:35]
Paris Martineau
Got your house wired up with microphones you've given AI access to.
- [151:39]
Leo Laporte
So when you install DreamBeans, you give it your Google account and then guess what? And then it goes and looks at all of the stuff it knows about you, goes through your Gmails and stuff and generates suggestions based on your location, based on who you are, what you're doing. It does these images I want more stories about. Oh, so you can tune it a little bit. Show me less of never show me. So that's just for tuning. This is Gemini, obviously. I think it's pretty good. I mean, it's weird. Yeah. This is example of how you can find out what Google knows about.
- [152:15]
Paris Martineau
Are you allowed to use this?
- [152:17]
Jeff Jarvis
Nope.
- [152:18]
Leo Laporte
Oh, of course. It's not on workspace. By the way, the man in kitchen pepper cannon is the best, most expensive pepper mill in the world.
- [152:27]
Jeff Jarvis
But what is one?
- [152:27]
Paris Martineau
How much pepper are you milling?
- [152:29]
Leo Laporte
A lot of of it. So much so that we need a second one because we have one next to the stove.
- [152:35]
Jeff Jarvis
Is it her?
- [152:35]
Leo Laporte
Lisa says we need one for the table, so we have to go to the stove to get more pepper.
- [152:41]
Paris Martineau
Are you just. Are you just using it casually?
- [152:44]
Leo Laporte
I gotta show you this pepper cannon. This is the best thing.
- [152:47]
Paris Martineau
I understand what a pepper cannon is, but what. What are you putting pepper on?
- [152:51]
Leo Laporte
Everything Frequency pepper's the best. Don't you like pepper.
- [152:57]
Paris Martineau
I think pepper's fine. I can't remember the last time I milled pepper.
- [153:02]
Leo Laporte
It's hard to give salt Hank a gift that he hasn't already been sent for.
- [153:06]
Paris Martineau
Is that not insulting for you to send him pepper?
- [153:09]
Leo Laporte
You'd think he loved it. He said dad and he started to use it in his videos. He loves kitchen.
- [153:15]
Paris Martineau
It's probably because he likes a big thing that makes a crunchy, crunchy sound.
- [153:18]
Leo Laporte
But it's good. It's got steel grinders.
- [153:20]
Jeff Jarvis
Large version is 249.
- [153:23]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think that's the one I have. I don't.
- [153:25]
Jeff Jarvis
The Regular one is 199.
- [153:27]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's. They're expensive. I'll get the regular one for the table.
- [153:30]
Jeff Jarvis
Hire somebody with a hammer to crack the pepper for you. It may be cheaper.
- [153:34]
Leo Laporte
It's. But it lasts forever. How many pepper grinders have you gone through?
- [153:38]
Jeff Jarvis
And you don't know whether it's going to last forever yet, Leo. Well, it's lasting true.
- [153:44]
Leo Laporte
I love the pepper cannon. Okay. And St. Google nerd knows it. Google knows it.
- [153:51]
Jeff Jarvis
I'll never know.
- [153:52]
Paris Martineau
Okay, are there how much plastics in this device?
- [153:55]
Leo Laporte
None.
- [153:56]
Jeff Jarvis
It's aerospace grade aluminum construction Paris and
- [154:01]
Leo Laporte
most importantly 10 times the output of ordinary pepper mills.
- [154:04]
Paris Martineau
Do you know what they use for
- [154:07]
Jeff Jarvis
high carbon stainless steel burns.
- [154:09]
Leo Laporte
You could use it to grind your coffee.
- [154:11]
Paris Martineau
That's more acceptable. The one thing I will argue is that mine my cute deuce and deuce and pepper mill I hadn't thought of until now probably got plastic in there that I'm grinding into my.
- [154:21]
Jeff Jarvis
There you go. Yep.
- [154:23]
Leo Laporte
Meanwhile I'm getting metal in my Just
- [154:26]
Paris Martineau
suggested the best show title which is just Google knows I love the pepper candy. That really makes me laugh.
- [154:34]
Leo Laporte
Jeff Jarvis, your pick of the week.
- [154:36]
Jeff Jarvis
All right, I'm gonna take you to some the work of I discovered this through a McGill University professor, Sarah M. Grimes. Panic first, evidence later.
- [154:45]
Paris Martineau
Oh, she's great.
- [154:47]
Jeff Jarvis
This is quite wonderful. This is. Oh that's right, you covered this was your old beat. So she takes to task Jonathan Haidt. As I try to often. I quoted most of these researchers in my book the web we weave which no one bought because optimism doesn't sell and it takes apart Haidt's bestselling book arguments with receipts and real research from real researchers who know what the f they're talking about.
- [155:14]
Leo Laporte
Well, I read Candace Odgers piece that she refers to here in Nature. In fact I read it into the record on this show I believe way back when when the hate book height book came out. Rogers, this is her, you know, field of study and she completely debunked it.
- [155:31]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, correlation is not causation. Effect sizes are tiny. We've seen this before. Or the global data don't fit. Data being plural, like researchers do.
- [155:40]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's one of the most interesting pieces. This is an American phenomenon. But. But phones are everywhere.
- [155:46]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, it just doesn't work. And finally, the critique is it punishes kids, not companies. So if you've got issues, go with the companies. It goes into Height himself, his actual research fields, moral psychology, intuition and emotional emotions, political psychology and polarization, business ethics, not adolescent development, not media effects or screen time, not child psychology or pediatrics. I can't.
- [156:12]
Leo Laporte
Well, she probably won't like this new paper that says the reason the birth rate is dropping is the iPhone.
- [156:18]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, God, that one's killing me. It's killing me.
- [156:21]
Leo Laporte
The birth rate started dropping dramatically in 2000 because we screw our phones. And it's all because you're looking at your phones instead of having relations.
- [156:31]
Jeff Jarvis
How about it's the fact the world's falling apart and it wants to bring a child into it.
- [156:34]
Leo Laporte
This is the New York Times. Two new studies point to phones. At least they don't mention the iPhone. Although 2007 is when the iPhone was released. It's not a coincidence. I would argue a lot of things change.
- [156:46]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
I would argue that smartphones actually increase the birth rate by a small amount.
- [156:50]
Leo Laporte
I would argue that what would we do?
- [156:53]
Jeff Jarvis
Find people to.
- [156:54]
Paris Martineau
You suddenly have a bunch of applications that are specifically designed mind towards activities related to increasing the birth rate.
- [157:05]
Leo Laporte
This is a famous piece that I remember reading about 2007. If you look at the things that changed in 2007, it's really when the world went to hell. So I think we can blame the iPhone for recession, the housing doesn't want
- [157:24]
Paris Martineau
to be here so bad, the global
- [157:26]
Leo Laporte
financial crisis and gifts. Gizmo. When was Gizmo born?
- [157:31]
Paris Martineau
Six years ago.
- [157:32]
Leo Laporte
See, when the iPhone came out. I rest my case.
- [157:36]
Jeff Jarvis
No way.
- [157:37]
Leo Laporte
That makes no sense.
- [157:39]
Paris Martineau
Gizmo has been radicalized by technology over the course of When I was in my cave time for this story, she got really mad that I was spending so much time at the computer and not playing with her. And she's learned how to one flop my desk and mess up my mic, as we all know. But she's also learned how to to hit the buttons on my computer that turn it off and turn off my notifications. Like she's figured out that if she taps the lock screen Button. I will move her and therefore touch her.
- [158:08]
Leo Laporte
Wow. She is smart.
- [158:10]
Paris Martineau
No, she needs to get dumber.
- [158:13]
Leo Laporte
She's too smart is what you said.
- [158:14]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's untenable.
- [158:15]
Jeff Jarvis
Feed her some donuts.
- [158:17]
Paris Martineau
I should.
- [158:18]
Leo Laporte
A little titanium dioxide goes a long way in a kitty cat's diet. I think we've learned something today, ladies and gentlemen. We're so glad you tuned in. Intelligent Machines. We do this show every Wednesday right After Windows Weekly, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. You can watch us do the show live in the club Twit Discord. Of course, if you're a member of the club. If you're not, join. But even if you're not a member, you can watch on YouTube, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn, Kick and Twitch. We stream on all those platforms after the fact on demand versions of the show at our website, Twit tv im. We do audio and video. You can choose. There is a video version on YouTube. There's a dedicated channel for IM. Great way to share clips. And if you subscribe in your favorite podcast client, make sure you leave us a good review so that Paris can do a dramatic reading on next week's episode. We do not have a guest for next week. Maybe we can get this.
- [159:18]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
I actually, I think we, during the course of the show, I think we did lock down a guest.
- [159:22]
Leo Laporte
Let me make sure we did. Well, things happen even when I'm not aware of it.
- [159:26]
Jeff Jarvis
They're. They, they're working all the time for you.
- [159:28]
Leo Laporte
All the time. They are like little agents working 247 trying to come up with something. So good. We are going to talk to Ian Bogost again in a month because his book the Small Stuff will be coming out and from BigSpin AI. We'll talk to Christopher Potts at the beginning of July. But we do have a couple of opening, or one opening, I guess. So do we know Bonito who will be here next week for Intelligent Missions?
- [159:54]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
I'm looking through my email right now. I'm still trying to find somebody.
- [159:57]
Leo Laporte
Somebody was booked. Okay.
- [159:58]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Yeah, I'm not sure if it was for next week, though, but I'm just not sure.
- [160:02]
Leo Laporte
All right, well, I'm going to get my man kitchen pack pepper cannon out and try to find some guests by peppering their little behinds. Do you like pepper? Do you drink? Do you eat a lot of pepper? You don't eat pepper?
- [160:16]
Paris Martineau
I wouldn't. I, I don't not eat pepper. I put it, you know, it's one of the spices.
- [160:20]
Leo Laporte
How do you eat cottage cheese without pepper?
- [160:22]
Paris Martineau
I hate cottage cheese.
- [160:23]
Leo Laporte
Well, there you go.
- [160:24]
Jeff Jarvis
Salt. How do you have one, Paris? We have one pepper mill by the stove and we have one on the table.
- [160:31]
Paris Martineau
The distance from my stove to my
- [160:33]
Leo Laporte
table is two would be.
- [160:37]
Jeffrey Kannel
Yeah, I could reach our.
- [160:39]
Jeff Jarvis
Our kitchen is probably the size of your apartment in the suburbs. That's where life is like.
- [160:43]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, that's probably true.
- [160:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Thank you everybody for putting up with us. Thank you Paris, for being back. I missed you. We're so glad you are out from under. Now, does this mean you get a little break or do you have to immediately embark on another?
- [160:57]
Paris Martineau
I am. I mean, I've got some stuff to take over the next week, but I'm. I've decided I'm going to take two weeks off, so.
- [161:02]
Leo Laporte
Nice. Are you good travel?
- [161:04]
Paris Martineau
I think so. I don't know where. I haven't. I just decided I'm going to take two weeks off as of yesterday. So I haven't decided where. But I think I'm going to do a similar thing to I did last year when I ended up visiting Julia, which I think I'm going to do a one way flight to somewhere, rent a car and maybe go hiking in some national parks. Kind of just do a road trip through some states in the US I hadn't been to before. If anybody has any recommendations for national parks that are gorgeous and lovely and not completely swamped over the next month, let me know.
- [161:35]
Jeff Jarvis
I think you have to go somewhere where there's also a BUC EE's on the way.
- [161:39]
Leo Laporte
I'm open to that Buce now. Why do we need to go to a Bucky's? I've never been.
- [161:44]
Jeff Jarvis
It's a phenomenon. It's an American phenomenon.
- [161:46]
Leo Laporte
Is it like the 711 in Japan?
- [161:48]
Jeffrey Kannel
Oh.
- [161:49]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, no. You really haven't seen stories about this?
- [161:52]
Leo Laporte
Well, I. I feel like I have.
- [161:54]
Jeff Jarvis
You get brisket.
- [161:55]
Leo Laporte
You.
- [161:55]
Jeff Jarvis
The brisket is to die.
- [161:56]
Leo Laporte
Bucky's. Oh, I like brisket.
- [162:00]
Jeff Jarvis
People. People go out of their way to go to Buc EE's. If you look up Buc EEs.com, it's
- [162:08]
Leo Laporte
the one with the beaver.
- [162:09]
Jeff Jarvis
Yes, the beaver.
- [162:11]
Leo Laporte
I don't know if we have any Buckies in California.
- [162:14]
Jeff Jarvis
You don't? It's a Southern thing. The location.
- [162:16]
Leo Laporte
Alabama, Colorado, Florida. Florida. You must have been to a Buc ee's. You.
- [162:20]
Jeff Jarvis
No, I've never been. I want to go. So I'm telling Paris we should all
- [162:24]
Leo Laporte
go to a Buc EE's.
- [162:25]
Paris Martineau
When are you coming to visit us?
- [162:26]
Leo Laporte
Let's all go to Hoover Heights, Ohio.
- [162:29]
Paris Martineau
Hate us Leo, because you never come
- [162:30]
Leo Laporte
to see us or your son or my son.
- [162:33]
Paris Martineau
I'm currently thinking of going to Glacier national park in Montana.
- [162:37]
Leo Laporte
That's good. That's a good one.
- [162:38]
Paris Martineau
I just. I love to see a. A glacier when it's.
- [162:41]
Leo Laporte
You know it's beautiful this time of year is Lake Victoria and Banff and British Canada.
- [162:46]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Yeah supposed to be very Pacific Northwest is very nice in the summer.
- [162:51]
Leo Laporte
Well she did that the last I
- [162:52]
Paris Martineau
did oh you did that last it was so great. I didn't spend that much time in Washington honestly I could do it like it's so good. I don't know. The world's my oyster. I want to stay in I think the US though maybe Canada as well could be in there but I trying not to.
- [163:08]
Leo Laporte
You should probably go to a World cup game in one of the no,
- [163:11]
Paris Martineau
I if I go to a World cup game I'll be stuck in traffic for the next two weeks.
- [163:15]
Leo Laporte
Are you going to any more Knicks games or.
- [163:17]
Paris Martineau
I'm going to a a watch party tonight whenever we're done with this look in the Discord chat if you scroll up a friend just sent me a video cuz we went to a bar on Monday for game three and you can see what stage in game three this photo was taken based on our reactions tell
- [163:39]
Leo Laporte
you put this in the
- [163:40]
Paris Martineau
discord I did I'll ask you like
- [163:45]
Leo Laporte
not seeing it for some reason it's
- [163:47]
Paris Martineau
was it 7:54 that's our time so do your calculation whatever yeah do I
- [163:52]
Leo Laporte
seeing a lot of Buc EE's posts that's why everybody had something say about Bu oh it it's not going well. It's not going well.
- [163:59]
Paris Martineau
If you zoom in it's rough it's rough going well There came a time where my friend standing to me on on the left of the photo she's a sports reporter she was like and the world's largest Knicks fan for her entire life Life is like I have to stand up. I think this will change the vibes and so we all it didn't. It didn't.
- [164:16]
Leo Laporte
You are at least wearing an orange scarf so you are. You are in the group.
- [164:20]
Paris Martineau
You know I'm prepared Very cute.
- [164:26]
Jeff Jarvis
Steve Newhouse gets like second row tickets he goes forever he's been the greatest fan ever and he put up a photo of himself in the subway going to and he looked concerned. I said you look concerned boss.
- [164:37]
Leo Laporte
Today amazing.
- [164:38]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah today amazing. He looked all happier.
- [164:40]
Paris Martineau
Well they're once again I Mean, for
- [164:42]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
the first time, gotta win today.
- [164:44]
Paris Martineau
Apparently this ref. Today is supposed to be somewhat more
- [164:47]
Leo Laporte
reasonable, but so really, it was bad officiating.
- [164:50]
Jeff Jarvis
It was. It was really bad.
- [164:51]
Paris Martineau
I mean, it's really bad. Last game, the Knicks were not phenomenal.
- [164:55]
Jeff Jarvis
No, they were not. Even I.
- [164:56]
Paris Martineau
They made. They made some. Even I could tell that. Me, a person who's had to have multiple people to me, explain the fundamentals of basketball over the last couple months. I could see there were people problems. But there was also. I mean, there is one thing where we literally tackles Brunson, a Nick's player, to the ground, and they're like, yeah, no foul, no flake.
- [165:18]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
- [165:19]
Paris Martineau
And a flagrant is like, unnecessary touch or. Yeah.
- [165:23]
Jeff Jarvis
Which was. Which was clearly not flagrant by any.
- [165:25]
Paris Martineau
How else do you get someone to the ground from your hands being.
- [165:29]
Leo Laporte
You're not supposed to get people to the ground. I think that's part of the problem.
- [165:33]
Paris Martineau
That's kind of part of it. And then short. And then shortly thereafter, the Knicks got a flagrant because a player on the spurs jumped up to shoot and landed on a Knicks player's foot. And they're like, well, you not moving your feet out of the way. That's a flagrant.
- [165:51]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
See, this is how I know you just started watching basketball because every finals is like this.
- [165:55]
Paris Martineau
I know, but I think it's beautiful that I'm getting to witness this without out generations of latent trauma. So I get to experience fresh.
- [166:04]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
No, but that's what makes it even that much sweeter for New Yorkers who have been dry for 50 years.
- [166:09]
Leo Laporte
Oh.
- [166:10]
Paris Martineau
And I think that's honestly one of the best things about all of this is I as a full bandwagoner. I mean, bandwagoner by proxy. I just decided to start watching basketball games two months ago, not really realizing I was like, I'll watch whatever New York teams are happening anywhere, and suddenly another New York team is in the finals. Everyone who I've met who's been a lifelong Knicks fan, that could be like, go screw yourself. You haven't suffered. They're like, no, the Knicks. I'm so happy you're here. Here. Let me tell you about why Dolan sucks.
- [166:39]
Unidentified Guest/Caller
Yeah. That's a Warriors fan. 10 years ago, because we were dry for 40 years until we saw there
- [166:43]
Leo Laporte
was a long drought for the Warriors.
- [166:46]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
- [166:47]
Leo Laporte
Well, I don't know how we managed to prolong this show an additional 10. All right, thank you, everybody. Have a wonderful evening. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machines. Go, Nicks.
- [167:03]
Paris Martineau
Go Nicks.
- [167:04]
Leo Laporte
Hi there, Leo Laporte here. I just wanted to let you know about some of the other shows we do on this network you probably already know about. This Week on Tech Every Sunday I bring together some of the top journalists in the tech field to talk about the tech stories. It's a wonderful chance for you to keep up on what's going on with tech, plus be entertained by some very bright and fun minds. I hope you'll tune in every Sunday for this Week in Tech. Just go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe this Week in Tech from the Twit Network. Thank you.
- [167:35]
Jeffrey Kannel
I'm not a human being.
- [167:39]
Paris Martineau
Not into this animal scene.
- [167:42]
Jeffrey Kannel
I'm an intelligent being.
- [167:43]
Paris Martineau
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 Granger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.