This Week in Google 801: Human Beans

Summary

Episode Summary: This Week in Google 801: Human Beans

Release Date: January 9, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau
Guest: Benito
Podcast: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)

---

1. Meta's Content Moderation Overhaul [04:41 - 22:09]

The episode kicks off with an in-depth discussion about significant changes unfolding at Meta Platforms, which encompass Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The hosts delve into the departure of Nick Clegg, Meta's Vice Prime Minister responsible for public affairs, and his replacement by Joel, a MAGA Republican. Jeff Jarvis shares his past involvement with Meta, highlighting the company's efforts in combating disinformation post-2016 elections, which, according to him, were largely ineffective.

Notable Quote:

Jeff Jarvis [06:56]: "Right? Like, well, screw you institutions, you know."

Leo Laporte and Paris Martineau explore Meta's shift away from traditional fact-checking towards a more "X style Twitter style community notes" system. They debate whether this move will genuinely enhance content moderation or simply replicate existing challenges, especially in regions where Facebook serves as the primary online platform.

Notable Quote:

Paris Martineau [07:27]: "I think Mark Zuckerberg decided to suppress or downrank the political content during a Democratic presidency and is going to allow it during a Republican presidency."

---

2. The Ineffectiveness of Traditional Fact-Checking [06:31 - 24:05]

Jeff Jarvis elaborates on why Meta's previous fact-checking initiatives failed to curb disinformation effectively. He points out issues like visibility of fact checks and the inadvertent reinforcement of negative perceptions towards checked content.

Notable Quote:

Jeff Jarvis [06:33]: "A few things. One, you didn't necessarily see them... Research that said that when people saw a fact check, it made them more likely, in some cases, not all, to like that which had been fact checked as negative."

Paris Martineau adds that while fact-checking can act as a "speed bump" against radicalization for new users, its diminishing returns occur once users are already entrenched in conspiratorial beliefs.

---

3. Transitioning the Podcast to "Intelligent Machines" [29:40 - 66:11]

Recognizing the evolving landscape of technology and the diminishing singular focus on Google, the hosts announce the podcast's rebranding from "This Week in Google" to "Intelligent Machines." This shift aims to encompass broader topics like AI, robotics, and smart devices, reflecting the current tech zeitgeist.

Notable Quote:

Leo Laporte [58:32]: "And we realized that being too specifically Google was a mistake. So we're going to call it Intelligent Machines."

The hosts discuss plans to incorporate moral panics, interviews with AI experts, and discussions on the societal impacts of emerging technologies. They also tease upcoming changes, including new album art and the retirement of the long-standing theme music.

---

4. Nvidia's Vision and AI Integration [38:49 - 55:56]

Jeff Jarvis provides a comprehensive review of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's keynote, highlighting Nvidia's advancements in AI hardware and software. He emphasizes Nvidia's role in developing digital twins for various applications, from autonomous vehicles to industrial robotics, positioning the company at the forefront of the AI revolution.

Notable Quote:

Jeff Jarvis [49:38]: "But what got me fascinated was he said that basically everything that exists, whether it's a car or a factory, there's three pieces... and then there's the digital twin where all of the scenarios are played out."

Leo Laporte expresses admiration for Jensen Huang's strategic foresight, underscoring Nvidia's transition from a graphics card manufacturer to a pivotal player in AI and robotics.

---

5. Spotify's Perfect Fit Content (PFC) Program and Its Impact on Musicians [74:29 - 77:02]

The conversation shifts to Spotify's controversial Perfect Fit Content (PFC) program, which replaces real artists with AI-generated tracks in popular playlists. The hosts criticize Spotify for favoring "cheap" musicians over established artists, citing a report that reveals Spotify's systematic replacement of genuine music with automated alternatives.

Notable Quote:

Paris Martineau [75:11]: "He didn't understand. So I think the problem is, it's so easy, is that General it is."

They discuss how this move undermines the livelihoods of actual musicians and contributes to the dilution of musical quality on the platform.

---

6. Public Domain Day and AI’s Summarization Capabilities [84:23 - 102:47]

The hosts explore the implications of Public Domain Day, celebrating the entry of works published before 1924 into the public domain. They debate the quality of AI-generated summaries compared to human-generated ones, referencing tools like Perplexity AI and Google's Gemini.

Notable Quote:

Leo Laporte [101:48]: "I feel like Google's way behind in this stuff."

Jeff Jarvis experiments with AI tools to summarize complex articles, highlighting the current limitations and discrepancies between different AI platforms.

---

7. Age Verification Laws and VPN Usage Surge [124:35 - 125:59]

A significant segment covers Florida's implementation of age verification for accessing pornography online, leading to an unprecedented surge in VPN usage—up by 11,050%. The hosts critique the practicality of such regulations, questioning their effectiveness and potential overreach.

Notable Quote:

Jeff Jarvis [125:59]: "Spotify pays on the basis of proportion of use, Right."

They discuss how platforms like Pornhub have responded by geo-blocking content in certain states, further complicating access and user behavior.

---

8. CES 2025 and Emerging Tech Gadgets [112:52 - 129:40]

The hosts review the latest innovations showcased at CES 2025, mocking the introduction of unnecessary gadgets like robot arms on Roombas and full-body scanners. They express skepticism about the practicality and genuine utility of such inventions, likening them to failed Silicon Valley concepts.

Notable Quote:

Jeff Jarvis [121:54]: "Imagine a Roomba, but with a giant kitchen knife stapled to the top."

The discussion underscores a recurring theme of technology sometimes prioritizing novelty over functionality.

---

9. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ethics and Societal Impact [07:00 - 27:43]

Throughout the episode, the hosts engage in a philosophical debate about AI's role in society, emphasizing that AI alone cannot solve deep-seated human issues like bigotry and hatred. Jeff Jarvis argues that the responsibility to mitigate these issues lies with individuals and society, not solely with tech companies.

Notable Quote:

Jeff Jarvis [27:07]: "We can't think that the Internet made us hate and we turned it off. Tomorrow we're going to be fine."

They stress the complexity of human behavior and the limitations of AI in addressing such challenges, advocating for a collective societal approach.

---

10. Closing Remarks and Future Directions [126:53 - End]

As the episode wraps up, the hosts reflect on the upcoming changes to the podcast, expressing excitement about focusing more on AI and intelligent machines. They also share light-hearted moments, including AI-generated theme songs and playful interactions about future guests and show formats.

Notable Quote:

Leo Laporte [67:28]: "This is going to be the year of grievances."

The episode concludes with a teaser for the next show, highlighting the continuous evolution of technology and the podcast's commitment to staying at the forefront of these discussions.

---

Key Takeaways:

1. Meta's Content Moderation Shift: Meta is moving away from traditional fact-checking to a community-driven approach, reflecting broader challenges in managing disinformation on large platforms.

2. AI's Dual Role: While AI offers significant advancements in areas like robotics and content assistance, it also presents ethical dilemmas and has limitations in addressing human societal issues.

3. Spotify's PFC Controversy: Spotify's initiative to replace real artists with AI-generated content in playlists raises concerns about the future of genuine musical artistry and platform integrity.

4. Podcast Rebranding: The transition to "Intelligent Machines" signifies a broader exploration of technology beyond just Google, encompassing AI, robotics, and their societal impacts.

5. Emerging Tech Skepticism: Innovations showcased at major tech events like CES often prioritize novelty over practicality, leading to skepticism about their real-world applicability.

6. Regulatory Challenges: Age verification laws for online content, such as pornography, lead to unexpected user behavior shifts, like massive increases in VPN usage, highlighting the complexities of regulating digital platforms.

7. AI Summarization Tools: Current AI tools for content summarization have varying degrees of effectiveness, with some lagging behind others in accurately capturing context and meaning.

---

This episode of "This Week in Google" offers a comprehensive exploration of the intersection between social media policies, artificial intelligence advancements, and their broader implications on society. Through engaging discussions and critical analysis, the hosts provide listeners with valuable insights into the rapidly evolving tech landscape.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twig this week in Google. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris Martineau. Big changes coming down at Meta Properties, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads. We'll talk about that and why it happened. Of course we talk about AI and a little bit of a change coming to the show next month. This week in Google. Coming up next, podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit Foreign. It's time for Twig this Week in Google. Episode 801 recorded Wednesday, January 8, 2025. Human beings. It's time for Twig this week in Google, the show where we cover everything but Google. Well, we might have a little Google in this one joining me right now. It's wonderful to have for our first show of 2025 the woman who was born on 25 but not in 25, but her birthday will be in 25. 25. Paris Martin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Entirely too confusing from the information.

[Leo Laporte]

25.

[Paris Martineau]

See if you can work that out. People who didn't listen to the pre show. It's a riddle. Happy 2025 guys. I missed you. I wanted to hear how your last two weeks went. Once we introduced that other guy, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually were scheduled for our year end, twit or no. The first twit of the year.

[Paris Martineau]

I know I've had a weird two weeks. I had to work over basically the entire Christmas week and then I got sick and it's been a. It's been a rough listen as, as the doctor said, when I had to call in for to get a prescription, they looked at my chart and went, Hey, 2025 can't get any worse for you, huh? And I was like, well, I guess.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You could say that if that weren't bedside manner.

[Leo Laporte]

If only that were true. That's Jeff Jarvis. He is a professor of journalism at Montclair State University and at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and of course professor emeritus at the professor of Journalistic Innovation, no less at the Craig Newman Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. And we only mention that because we have to play that damn jingle.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's tradition. Tradition.

[Leo Laporte]

Why are you wearing a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We were talking. So next week I'm taking a class from the rare book school. Oh, this is the. This is the hat that I got.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. That is what a press man would wear in the day, back in the day when they had fold up a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Newsprint and mix hats.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that maybe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's pretty disgusting stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

No kidding.

[Paris Martineau]

Have you guys ever seen the movie the Hudsucker Proxy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. I just tried to watch that the other day.

[Paris Martineau]

It's on Amazon, is where it's available.

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty horrible.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I like one of the best movies ever made.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. So maybe I.

[Paris Martineau]

People say, oh, it's, you know, one of the Coen brothers worst films.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little broad.

[Paris Martineau]

I'd argue one.

[Leo Laporte]

One of their best.

[Paris Martineau]

It's incredibly amazing.

[Benito]

That's an amazing.

[Paris Martineau]

It is a movie about securities fraud and a hot female business journalist. And so that's a, you know, a movie made for me. It's also themed around New Year's, so I timed it on my New Year's Eve so that Right when it was New Year's Eve in the movie and.

[Leo Laporte]

They jump off the building and they. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Mm. Which isn't a spoiler because it happens in the first second.

[Benito]

Jennifer Jason Leigh in. That is amazing. Jennifer Jason Leigh did.

[Paris Martineau]

And so this reminded me of. They work in old timey newspaper and are sitting there tip tap, tapping all of their little stories out and then yell, copy. And I was like, oh, man. I remember Jeff telling me about, see.

[Leo Laporte]

You now know that whole circle.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, now I know.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I love the Coen brothers. I mean, I love them. And. And they've made some weird ones. This was so stylized. It kind of turned me off, but maybe I'll walk.

[Paris Martineau]

It was very broadly stylized.

[Leo Laporte]

It was very broad, you know, so maybe like the whole fire in the office thing is like Jerry Lewis broad. I mean, it's so broad.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's. It's kind of style that's kind of stylized after, like his Girl Friday style. But that was a good Ball comedies.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that. I like screwball comedies, but they had. They were a little less. I don't know. Maybe I'll watch it again. I'll watch it again. Since you like it so much. I shall watch it again. So what the hell's going on at Meta?

[Paris Martineau]

A lot of things.

[Leo Laporte]

So Nick Clegg is out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He was Sir Nick to you.

[Leo Laporte]

Sir Nick the. He was in charge of public affairs, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he was President of Policy or some such thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And he was a progressive from England. Yes, relatively.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Relatively.

[Leo Laporte]

He's been replaced.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It wasn't labor, but he's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Okay, so he was a Tory, but not such a Tory.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, he wasn't a Tory. He was. He was in the. That's how he became Vice Prime Minister, because he was in the coalition.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

FTP, not fdp, whatever it's called there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Gdpr, Whatever. I don't know. We don't know. So he was deputy prime minister and then went to Meta to be responsible for their kind of outside world relations. He has been replaced by his deputy who is a MAGA Republican, I think. Joel?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Very much so.

[Leo Laporte]

And what people are starting to think at this point is that Zuckerberg, in a somewhat cynical business decision, has decided to take Facebook. What do what? I mean, they're eliminating so the fact that they paid entirely.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I was there at the beginning of all of this. After 2016, they went through a lot and that's how I raised money from Meta at the time for disinformation things and research things and all kinds of stuff. At the same time, they started paying for fact checking. There was a whole magilla where they had to figure out the structure with the official fact checkers organization of the world to pick the fact checkers and then the fact checkers would send stuff in and they spent a fair amount of money on this. It was never really effective. And I was just talking to a friend from actually Google.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you mean by not effective?

[Jeff Jarvis]

A few things. One, you didn't necessarily see them. There was debate about they got in all kinds of trouble if something was fact checked. When people were arguing, they were accused of censorship. And then there's research that said that when people saw a fact check, it made them more likely, in some cases not all, to. To like that which had been fact checked as negative.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right? Like, well, screw you institutions, you know. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But the idea was, I think in response to the accusation that Meta had been used to foster genocide in Myanmar and elsewhere, that the platform had a problem which is known as human beings.

[Paris Martineau]

The idea that it had a responsibility to not promote content that knew to be false and specifically disinformation in the sense that weaponized false information.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

And this also happened around the time that Facebook decided to, I believe in the wake of the 2016 election, deprioritize political news generally in the feed. And that's a principle that it is so far carried out, carried over onto things like Instagram and definitely explicitly onto threads where if you post links to political news, you those posts gets down, get downranged and they're harder to be seen by the people who follow you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we should say that. I shouldn't say Facebook, this is a Meta.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, this change.

[Leo Laporte]

So it applies to both Facebook and Instagram.

[Paris Martineau]

While the thing that got, I think the most news is the decision to do with fact checking in favor of kind of a X style Twitter style community notes. Another thing that also happened in this is they've decided to get rid of that rule on political content on Facebook.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're going more political.

[Paris Martineau]

Going to see. Yeah. More political content.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Whether we see more news and links. Have you seen this about the Paris. Have you seen anything with it? Because they have definitely downgraded news and links both. Have you seen anything? Whether that comes back up again or no, I don't know if it's probably.

[Paris Martineau]

Not news and links, but I know that it is political content, so I would assume that it applies to political links. And I think Mike Isaac of the New York Times rightfully pointed out, perhaps it was someone else, that it's notable that Mark Zuckerberg decided to suppress or downrank the political content during a Democratic presidency and is going to allow it during a Republican presidency.

[Leo Laporte]

I might argue that I don't think Zuckerberg is political, but is doing what's expedient at this point. He said in his video announcing this, the recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You see, that's the right wing trope. And the Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial praising him today because fact checking was censorship and was against free speech. And so allowing anyone to say anything bad is the right wing view of free speech. Stopping people from being harassed is the left wing view of free speech.

[Paris Martineau]

And specifically, I think it's worth noting that Zuck was very clear about kind of his motives even in this announcement. He said fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created. He also said he's going to move, I believe remaining the remaining moderator program from California to Texas to Texas because he's worried that Californians are too biased, which is also kind of a misnomer because it's currently. They currently have moderators in Texas already.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just bizarre that he thinks because they're in California, they're going to be biased anyway.

[Benito]

Objective in Texas, all of them. They're like totally objective over there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

By the way, you're subjecting yourself there to the laws of Texas that say that you can't take things down. If it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that's why I like Charlie Warzel's take in the Atlantic about this. His headline. We're all trying to find the guy who did this. Yeah, because Zuck acted as if all the things that had happened in the last few years, you know, had just happened. But he's the un moderate dictator of Facebook. He's got absolute control. He also Added the CEO of ufc, Dana White.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's almost the most absurd thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Who admits himself that he has no experience in social or anything else except building a brand. And I don't think Facebook really has a brand building issue at the moment. But anyway, probably a friend because Mark's into ufc. Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's macho Mark.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the macho mark. So you say that the content moderation was ineffective.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, the fact checking was ineffective.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Ah, that's true. We should mention that. We should point out two different things. Fact checking is when they would put information around a news story from people like such left wing zealots as USA Today. And who, by the way, says, we were blindsided by this. We heard about it when everybody else did in the announcement. They didn't tell us ahead of time. Other fact checking organizations pointed out that they could fact check, but it didn't have any effect. You know, Facebook didn't have to do anything about it. Community Notes works pretty well on X, I think. Yes or no?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I think it does.

[Paris Martineau]

So X is significantly smaller than any of Meta's individual platforms. It is a fraction of the size of any other social media platform that we talk about, even though we like to give it outsized attention because we're all kind of hopelessly addicted to posting there or similar platforms.

[Leo Laporte]

I like the new logo that Mr. Kotke suggested for the. It's not coming up. Come on. Redirecting you to Blue Sky. Come on. I don't know why. My Internet's just got slow, but. Oh, here it is. This is the new logo from kottke.org for Meta. It's Maga. But is it Maga or.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, it's paying obeisance in advance.

[Leo Laporte]

I think, but everybody's doing that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Everybody is.

[Leo Laporte]

Donated a million dollars personally. A million dollars to the Trump inaugural festivities. No. I have to point out though, a million dollars to a guy like Tim Cook is probably more like a thousand dollars or less to you and me. I mean, it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But he. It says something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's interesting. He did it personally. Not from.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think the company might have had more fits. Yeah. And it was more difficult for the brand. And this is. Musk just doesn't care. I mean, Musk doesn't care. Obviously Bezos doesn't care.

[Leo Laporte]

And a lot of corporate leaders have. Is that their employees may not be too thrilled.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Sundar Pichai's had some problems with Googlers. I know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Mask had a very good. A good piece about all this.

[Leo Laporte]

So before we go on to that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to stick with Facebook a little longer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what he's on. That's what he's writing about.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he's writing about. I'm sorry, what did he say?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So 997, the good, the bad and the stupid. He thinks that it's that the fact checking wasn't working.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Taking it down is fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The bad is that they're going to follow the Elon Musk playbook and probably screw it up. And the stupid was the timing.

[Leo Laporte]

Why is this. Why does he say, because, I mean, remember, Donald Trump thought Mark Zuckerberg should go to jail.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. Well, stupid, in terms of what Masnik might think, in terms of. You've shown yourself to be MAGA now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but we're, according to my watch, only 12 days away from inauguration. Probably a good time.

[Paris Martineau]

Some might say it's politically expedient.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it is.

[Paris Martineau]

The New York Times reported today, actually or yesterday, that Zuck has told executives close to him that he's like, really comfortable with the new direction of the company because he was never. He was like, adamantly against the involvement of outside fact checkers, academics or researchers in his company and has long seen many of the steps made after the 2016 election.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, he's.

[Leo Laporte]

He's really trying to find the guy who did that.

[Paris Martineau]

And I think this is, like, this is, I mean, a small detail, but I thought it was very funny and kind of notable. The Wall Street Journal, in its piece on this, had a fascinating little anecdote into Mark Zuckerberg's mind. Apparently last November, he got knee surgery. Like, he tore his acl. Yeah. And in November. So he posted a picture of him after surgery to repair a knee ligament that he torn doing mma. Wrote that he was like, still looking forward to it. Recovery. Some other stuff. The Journal writes. The post initially received anemic attention on Facebook as a result of an algorithm change that slows the spread viral health related content established after Meta staff determined such material was frequently false or sensationalistic. The rule had ensnared the CEO's innocent post, prompting Zuckerberg to personally demand a review of the rule and a potential overreach in other safety measures.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe he does believe in all of this, that this is not expedient. This is just something he thinks should happen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, a lot of people told him worry about this at the time is PR people, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, who does actually think that Mark Zuckerberg is doing this to curry favor with the president. The president The President? Yeah, he was asked at a press conference. Well, let me play the clip. They've come a long way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Meta Facebook.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they've come a long way. I watched it. The man was very impressive. I watched it, actually.

[Benito]

I watched it on Fox.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not allowed to say that.

[Leo Laporte]

Say it. Do you think he's directly responding to.

[Benito]

The threats that you have made to.

[Leo Laporte]

Him in the past? Probably, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Probably. Probably, yeah, probably, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I'm a powerful, strong person, Mark.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So people are having a lot of fun. I don't have a link to one of them. People are having a lot of fun saying. Putting up posts saying Mark Zuckerberg got a transplant of a rat penis and is married to and is dying at the age of 36. But, yeah, there's a lot of fact checking anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. So I dare you to take us down.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But honestly, you'd be better off because that's so obviously not true. Putting something that could be true and see what happens. Something that people would believe and see what happens. You really want to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are you encouraging people to do disinformation?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. I don't think it can make Facebook any worse than it is. This is. This would also impact threads. Right. I should have added threads to the list.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And people are leaving threads on threads. Yeah. Not many.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, according to Mark, as many people as are on Twitter. But that's because of.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that's a Instagram.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Benito]

I bet you. I bet you they count the threads. Posts that are in your Instagram feed.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, totally. Right? Yeah, totally. And the accidental clicks. Yeah, of course. So, I mean, there's. I guess the only real question is, is this a good. Will this make Facebook better?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. No.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I'd argue if you're talking about from user experience, Facebook's on a. Been on a downward slide for a while. It's like it's an incredibly bloated app. If you even just look at, like, the design of the website continues to get more bloated. Has long been losing users to Facebook's own products.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look, there we are on Facebook.

[Paris Martineau]

Whoa.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, see? Thanks.

[Paris Martineau]

Is it gonna be a recursive.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that. It's definitely gone down.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, we can.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's pretty funny. We're an inception now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

For those of you on audio, we went to Facebook. I'm now streaming to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter the show as of this week. And so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is you doing this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what sense. He just hit the words. Jeff Jarvis. Right above it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But weren't we already streaming? Oh, but you wanted to your massive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Well, let's see how many we got right now. Let's see. Let's go to Twitter.

[Leo Laporte]

We got one person watching your stream and it's you. Oh, yeah. And by the way, you know who that is?

[Paris Martineau]

Us.

[Leo Laporte]

Us. But I don't know what the. I don't know how Facebook works. How do I find.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have 1679 views of twig right now on my Twitter feed.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good.

[Paris Martineau]

Hi, people.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? Because that. Oh, on your Twitter feed.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My Twitter.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so you're doing it on Twitter as well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm doing on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, because that's the kind of company man I am.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, company man. So your attitude, Paris, is. Who cares? It's already in decline.

[Paris Martineau]

So, I mean, the thing that actually does matter, that's, I guess, talking from a US audience, for talking globally, Facebook does matter quite a bit because for many people, many users in many countries, Facebook is largely the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what Benito said.

[Paris Martineau]

Those are the areas where it's going to be a huge. This could have a huge impact. I don't know off the top of my head, the data on how fact checking affects, like, user behavior in those regions. But if it's Jeff.

[Benito]

Well, yeah, I mean, in the Philippines, like you said, like, Facebook is very, very big. It's the main social media. Everything happens there.

[Leo Laporte]

Benito grew up in the Philippines and was just back there.

[Benito]

So I still have to use that platform. You know, I still have to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's how you communicate back home.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Benito]

I mean, it's one of my address books.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Benito]

I basically use as an address.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So, yeah, I still have to go there was. Did Facebook contribute to political unrest in the Philippines?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, the argument is right.

[Benito]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what rearrasses us.

[Leo Laporte]

Duterte use Facebook to.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Benito]

Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. Like, his. His campaign was built on social media. Yeah, yeah. So Facebook definitely played a part.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Davey Alba, when she was reporting for Buzzfeed News, had a whole kind of series on how Duterte used Facebook to fuel the Philippine drug war.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that was the one where he was just kind of unilaterally beheading drug.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Lords and things when he was attacking Maria Ressa. So my argument that I made a year ago and put it back up, this whole thing is the problem isn't information. We journalists think that. Well, the problem is if disinformation, then we're information and we're the solution. People don't necessarily believe the crazy crap they say they are. And I've done this spiel before, but this is Hannah Irant. It's a crisis of belonging and they're alienated from society and they're made to be fearful of people who are othered. And that's a lot more than just fact checking and information. We can't fact check yourself out of. Out of bigotry and hatred. And so it's a much deeper problem now. Facebook, I think, could have years ago have said we're here to make strangers less strange. We're here to have a nice place where people can communicate. We're here to stop people from being mean to each other. They didn't do that. They said we're here for anything and then they weren't. And then they are again.

[Leo Laporte]

The genocide, the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar was widely considered incited by Facebook with disinformation posts from Myanmar's military. In fact, here's a New York times story from 2018, a genocide incited on Facebook. So we know that Facebook has been used that way in many countries. Is it now more likely or less likely to be used that way in the future?

[Jeff Jarvis]

But you know, you should answer that one. What do you think? What effect is this going to have in the Philippines?

[Benito]

I don't think it really matters. Yeah, it's going to be the same.

[Leo Laporte]

I think really that's what even Mike is saying is, well, but the fact checking really didn't do anything. I mean, I think ways around content moderation.

[Paris Martineau]

If we're talking about user behavior, I think that probably stays the same no matter what we're like. User behavior of people spreading misinformation. Yeah, that's going to stay the same before fact checking during and after. However, I do think that fact checking and programs like this aren't totally useless because they have a. They're kind of like a speed bump when it comes to radicalization, especially for new use. Like new adherence to these sort of conspiratorial ways of thinking. Like someone might be less likely to fall down a conspiracy rabbit hole or believe the lies spread by Duterte's government if it has a flag on it saying, hey, this is false the first time they see it. However, if that comes like the 20th post after you already believe something to be true, less effective. So I think that the main impact could be that it becomes more easily easy for new people to be radicalized by misinformation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal said social media companies never wanted to Aggressively police content on their platforms.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's expensive.

[Leo Laporte]

So now they don't have to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. That's where we are.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also, it's more than an expensive. It's almost an intractable problem. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah. Well, Mike Masnik's the Masdick impossibility Theorem. Moderating content speech at scale is impossible. And you remember the other thing that's been said about soc is that he went through a period of apology tours and that's over. So remember when he. I think the last moment of that was when he had a turnaround in the, in Congress and apologize to people there. He's not doing that anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting because the person who made him do that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Was Missouri's Josh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's his name?

[Leo Laporte]

Josh Hawley.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Blanked it out intentionally. So it was the right. That made him apologize.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Presumably they will no longer have to make him apologize.

[Paris Martineau]

That was the, specifically the incident where Mark Zuckerberg turned around and apologized. He was apologizing to parents of children who had committed suicide after being served, like, some toxic slew of content on Instagram. And so I do think that the right will probably, it seems despite the fact that Kosa didn't end up going to a vote in the Senate at the end of last term, it does still seem like the one issue that both Republicans and Democrats are aligned on is they want to pass some sort of online child safety law.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They want to blame the platform. But I'm curious on your beat now, because I think that now Musk and Zuckerberg are both golden boys. And so the, the view of them is going to change pretty radically. The plan to blame them for everything might change pretty radically. It'll be really interesting to see how this plays out politically in the next two months or so.

[Paris Martineau]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

We should point out if you are struggling, there is somebody to talk to at 988. The suicide and crisis lifeline is really good. And you could talk by phone or text or chat. They're there. 988 in the United States. And there's similar lines everywhere in the world. I mean, everybody agrees social media is problematic. Nobody agrees on why is this. Is this just an impossible problem?

[Benito]

People.

[Jeff Jarvis]

People are impossible. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So are you, Jeff, More lesze Fair then do you think that it's not up to Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Sundar Pichai to fix this stuff, that it's up to us?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. That's what I've, I've said all along. Because because it's about. It's. The Internet is a human enterprise and in my book, the web we weave.

[Leo Laporte]

Which happens to be right to hand.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, actually it wasn't there. I have to put it back in my spot.

[Leo Laporte]

Put all those books right. There's magazine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here's the all. There you go. You know, I argue that we can't think that the Internet made us hate and we turned it off. Tomorrow we're going to be fine. We can't blame the technology companies for the way humans are. We can't expect them to fix that. And so the responsibility lies with each and every one of us as it has in society.

[Leo Laporte]

It always forever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Benito]

But shouldn't we expect them to at least not amplify the worst tendencies of human behavior?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Define worst. That that becomes the problem. Bonano. Right. That's. That's what got them into hot water is they. They were defining the things that they thought were bad and then they, you know, they got. They almost got accused of throwing in jail.

[Benito]

Well, there's stuff like it's defined by the law, not.

[Paris Martineau]

You think that. Jeff, do you think that if, according to everything you just said, would you be of the opinion that companies like Meta shouldn't be doing content moderation, then.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, I'm not saying that at all. In fact, what I'm saying is that again, I wish that Metta had at its beginning had a North Star. If. If Facebook at the very beginning had said, we are here to bring people together and we want people to have a safe space where they can talk about their lives with each other and we don't support hatred or nastiness among people. If they had said that and held people to it so that we in turn could have held people to it and said, this is what Facebook's supposed to be. It's what Leo can do on Mastodon. Yeah, Mastodon. Yeah, but you can do that on a small scale. But there was never that North Star to appeal to. So I think it's over.

[Paris Martineau]

I.

[Benito]

The Nazi bar analogy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, go ahead, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

In some ways it feels kind of like a tragedy of the common situation, but with corporations in the sense that, yeah, it would be great if all of these companies had decided from the very beginning to make wise and equitable decisions with regards to platform design, moderation and the like. But they haven't and have in many cases repeatedly shown that they will not make such decisions that are against their financial best interests unless compelled by threat of regulation. And I feel like at a certain point something has got to give. I mean I don't think the answer is widespread sense.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it just did.

[Paris Martineau]

But I think that I think it has given and I think it will continue to change and say like right now what it seems like what people like Mark Zuckerberg are doing are capitulating to the party that's about to be in power in the hopes of avoiding what could be the first like broad and sweeping regulation of the technology industry since the communications like section 230.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And they get a, they got a get out of trouble card for free, right? Well no, that's free speech now. Oh I'm sorry you didn't like when, when, when somebody called you that. But you know, free speech. What's America we believe.

[Paris Martineau]

I am curious as to your guys's thoughts on. I mean it's a topic we've talked about a million times, the age verification, social media. But I've been thinking about a lot lately over the last two.

[Leo Laporte]

You still think yachty is, is a workable solution?

[Paris Martineau]

Yodi? I think is. I mean it is a workable solution. I guess the only.

[Leo Laporte]

It's one way that does. You don't have to give your personal information out. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

And they have a variety of things to do. You could do everything from uploading, taking a photo and having them say do we think you're likely over 18 or not to actually uploading a photo of your ID and they'll check that with government database.

[Leo Laporte]

See I have a lot less problem with the former than the latter. I think that that is a non starter. You cannot ask everybody because it would be everybody to upload.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I agree but I mean then my question is how do you. Somebody posed it to me in this way and it's been rattling around in my head like we don't allow like a 12 year old can't walk into a bar and order some shots like in order to get in there someone's going to check their ID and when they don't have an ID they'll be turned away.

[Leo Laporte]

Why?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean I feel like if we apply what we're talking about with social media to the natural conclusion like well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why presume everything on a social platform is as bad as drinking alcohol?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean I don't think that's. It's a bit of a leap but you could buy alcohol on the Internet right now without uploading your id.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can't. No really, you can't get by like.

[Leo Laporte]

A case delivered, you can't buy it but then the delivery guy is going to ask for your id. At least that's been our experience in California.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But same Paris is to presume that everything on the, on a social network is bad and dangerous, which is. That's the leap that's being made here. If you, if you analogize it to alcohol or cigarettes, I think that's a bit of a.

[Leo Laporte]

There's also, it's. There is a difference because you're showing your ID to a person locally, it's not pro. It's not being stored in a database that is right now available.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, no, I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no, you know, there's a lot of. There's quite a bit of a difference. I think as a society though, we do ask, you know, you have to have. Be a certain age to drive. You have to be a certain age to drink. I understand that.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, this isn't something I've been thinking about as well with the anti pornography laws that are now in like a dozen states.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what these laws really are, by the way. I just want to point out these are anti social media and anti pornography laws. They know there's no real way to do this in my. So they're what they want. You want pornhub to disappear and they do in those states.

[Paris Martineau]

And my gut instinct is like, oh, that's so silly. Like, why would you make everybody upload an ID to go to pornhub? That's ridiculous. But I guess I could somewhat see in the sense like, you can't walk into like a, a sex rental video store if they still existed without showing your id.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think it's a bad idea. In abstract, the devil's in the details is how do you implement this and not create a giant database that will be eventually leaked of everybody's driver's licenses?

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I mean, people who are doing this say that they are. That data is all deleted. And I guess, oh, okay, we have to believe them. I don't know. It doesn't feel right to believe them. But also, if people are screaming from the rooftops, hello, My entire business model is making sure I delete your data so that people will give me IDs. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

What. Do you have problem with having a age restriction to viewing pornography? In fact, I think that's a very, very good idea. But I don't know about social media. There are other reasons why you might want somebody under 16 to be able to find a cohort of people who understand their personal condition. Maybe their parents aren't very Good. Or whatever. I mean, I think that there are reasons why having social media access is good for young people. People. So that's a little bit different. But I have. I mean, if you stick with porn. No, I don't think anybody would say, oh, yeah, 16.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But then, Leo, the next question is. Which is what? What Paris is. Is trying to report on here is then how do you do that in a way that doesn't violate all kinds of privacy, all kinds of put people at risk? That's the. That becomes the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a really. It's a difficult. It's a difficult problem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When I was. When I was in the. See here, ninth grade, I rode my bike from Garden City, Long island, into Hempstead, Long island, to a fairly sleazy newsstand there, and nobody was going to ask me for a. Id. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Pornography's gotten a lot worse than in our youth. Yeah, I know, but we should probably acknowledge that I. This is why we're going to move on. But this is why I think maybe Community Notes isn't a terrible solution to this because then it's us policing ourselves.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Yes. We're responsible for it together. And if you see something bad and you don't do anything about it, well, hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's my argument at the end of the web weave. We all have to make our own.

[Leo Laporte]

Promise with the Community notes. And it looks like Elon, by the way, does. But in a perfect world where you didn't mess with Community Notes, where just as anything is allowed as a post, anything is allowed as a community note. That's kind of what's happened at Wikipedia, by the way. It's one of the things that makes Wikipedia so good.

[Paris Martineau]

Can't Community notes, like, be brigaded?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah. Any system.

[Leo Laporte]

So we have to brigade it back.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's no easy solution. I mean, people who say, we'll get rid of anonymity, we'll do age checking, we'll have fact checkers, we'll have an algorithm check. No, no. We're human beings and we're screwed up.

[Leo Laporte]

So Mark isn't doing the wrong thing here. He's just trying another tack.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Motive matters, timing matters. He's not doing the wrong thing logically. But I think this is where Maznick is. Right. He could probably do it badly, and his timing is. Is. Let's just say that it's illuminating about.

[Leo Laporte]

It's suspicious. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think you could make the argument that the thumb is off. Right. That they've been forced to do this. And now they don't have to. So they're going to say, ah, we don't have to anymore. We've got a different way of doing it. I think it's worth a try. I. I guess mostly because I don't care about Facebook, Instagram and threads. I do care about people, though, and I do care if there are places in the world where people are going to be slaughtered or mistreated or raped because of these social networks and the lack of policing. But I don't know if there's a good answer to how to do this to make it work. We got a big problem. We really do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I just saw Adam Asari, who's in charge obviously, of threads on Instagram, said, as per Zuck's post yesterday about free expression, starting this week in the US we're going to be adding political content to recommendations on threads and adjusting the political content control to three options. Less standard, which is the default, and more.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good idea, don't you think? Yeah, I would say less. I do that all the time on bikini content. Doesn't help.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Doesn't help. You spend just a little too long there, Leo. Just a little. Stop.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't listen to what I. Listen to what I say. Now, what I do, Facebook, I can't stand. But I don't want to see it. I'm saying because I'm shocked and horrified.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

To make sure that I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing. Is AI going to solve this? No. No. Might.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you see Sam Altman admit in the last week that OpenAI's like pro subscriptions are really unprofitable, even though they expected them to be profitable. People just use too much AI.

[Leo Laporte]

They're using it more in a way that's a little humble brag coming there from Mr. Altman. Like, boy, we thought we'd make money on this, but you guys love this so much. Maybe it's also a preface to raising the price. I don't know, 200 bucks a month. But people love it because it works. I think we're on the cusp of pretty big AI revolution the next year.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I watched the entire Jensen Huang keynote.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Nvidia CEO.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Should I go to that? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, hold on. Actually, hold that thought. Let's go to take a break. We only have one advertiser, so we really got to give them a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And this is worth. Folks, this is a tease. You go through this commercial, you're going to hear Nvidia and Jensen Huang from Wah. That's what you're around for.

[Paris Martineau]

You'll also hear the official definition of AGI has now been established.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We talked about that earlier on Windows Weekly. But before we get to all that, let me invite you to take a look at something I think is a really great solution for companies that are trying to protect themselves. And they're finding it's a little more difficult than it used to be. This episode of this week in Google brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security companies, maybe like your company, and certainly like our company, spent billions of dollars on, well, you know, in aggregate, on firewalls, VPNs. We're trying to protect the perimeter. Right. But breaches continue to rise. In fact, There was an 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks last year. A $75 million record payout in 2024. And I think that that's not, that's, it's underreported. I think it's a lot more than that. Companies are spending a lot of money because their security tools aren't working. Traditional security tools actually expand your attack surface with public facing IPs. And the bad actors are out there now working faster and better than ever. And honestly, they're using AI to great effect. Plus these systems, you have this VPN and the firewalls and so forth, struggle to inspect encrypted traffic at scale. Why is that a problem? Because when the bad guys do get in, they start to exfiltrate your customer list, your secret emails, that kind of thing. They encrypt it and send it out. And your perimeter tools not only are looking the wrong way, they can't even inspect the traffic that's going, that's outbound. And then there's another thing that's even a bigger problem. Once you're in, whether you get through the firewall or you're using a vpn, you can move freely throughout the entire network. Lateral movement is a simple thing. And that's. Bad guys really take advantage of that. Once they get in, they have access to everything. They could start sending out data. They could start looking for places to encrypt with ransomware. Perimeter defenses are not enough. Hackers exploit traditional security infrastructure using AI now to outpace your defenses. It really is time to rethink your security. Do not let these bad guys win. They're innovating faster than you are. You need Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI. It stops attackers. It hides your attack surface, making apps and IPs literally invisible. It also eliminates lateral movement. That's the real benefit of a zero trust network. You don't assume that just because somebody's inside the network or coming in through a VPN that they're good guys. You can connect users only to specific apps, only with specific permissions. They don't get access to everything. Plus, Zscaler continuously verifies every request based on identity and context. It simplifies security management with AI powered automation. And when you're analyzing half a trillion daily transactions, it really helps to have AI to go through those and find the signals that really matter to your security. Hackers can't attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler, Zero Trust and AI. Learn [e-mail] Security that's Zscaler.com Security. We thank them so much for supporting this week in Google. We thank you for supporting us by using that address so they know you saw it here. Cscaler.com Security we are, and I should tell people this, and we've already had a conversation behind the scenes about this kind of reposition the show next month on. On Paris's birthday towards more AI. I don't want to turn into an AI show. I think that's a problem. But I think we're about to see a huge revolution in robotics in AI, that our machines are getting more and more intelligence. In fact, Ray Kurzweil called this the age of intelligent machines. So we're going to rename it. One of the problems, frankly, with calling the show this week in Google is it hasn't been just about Google in a long time. And Google's just not that interesting anymore by itself. Am I wrong? Jeff, you wrote a book, what would Google do? But in those days, Google was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does this mean you don't have to do the change log anymore?

[Leo Laporte]

That's the real reason. No, I just. I mean, the changelog even became kind of this list of boring, trivial changes. Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Google still does interesting things. It's still, it's still smart. It's the center of AI. But it's not alone. There's a lot of companies that are doing a lot of interesting things.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think you could argue OpenAI is doing much more interesting things than Google. In fact, we were talking about this on windows weekly. OpenAI really took the best people from Google and they left.

[Jeff Jarvis]

OpenAI is better at PR than Google.

[Leo Laporte]

I think their AI is better than Google. I'm not, I'm sorry, but Gemini is not knocking my socks off. But I think some of the things OpenAI is doing are really remarkable.

[Paris Martineau]

Like Leo, they finally come up with the answer we've all been looking for. What is AGI?

[Leo Laporte]

What is it, Paris? How do we define it?

[Paris Martineau]

So my colleagues, the Information, the day after Christmas, wrote this nifty little article explaining this. Basically, last year's agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI, said AGI would be achieved only when OpenAI has developed systems that have the capability to generate the maximum total profits to which its earliest investors, like Microsoft, are entitled. Those profits would be about $100 billion. So whenever OpenAI figures out how to make $100 billion, that's when they'll say they have AGI.

[Leo Laporte]

We talked about this on Windows Weekly, because my question was, well, who came up with the number 100 billion? Was it Microsoft or OpenAI? What you have, what you actually really have to understand is that contractually it says in their deal that once OpenAI creates a superintelligence, an AGI, they're no longer beholden the Microsoft.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But wait a minute, wait a minute.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft gets a piece of OpenAI up to that point. Now, I'm sure Sam Altman put that in and Microsoft said, yeah, yeah, good luck, kid. Well, I think at the start of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Every contract you've ever read, Leo, it starts with definitions. I can't believe that's a real clause in the contract unless there is a definition of it. And if that definition is purely monetary, as Paris says, the.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is now. Or maybe this was like, this was Stephanie Palazzolo's scoop in the information. Did you. Have you talked to Stephanie about this? Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

Not this particularly, but we've all.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know her.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I'm just curious. She discovered this, but it's not a new clause. This is the old clause, or is it?

[Paris Martineau]

This is part of last year's agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI.

[Leo Laporte]

So. And I think the documents they said, that is, Microsoft said, well, good, we get to keep you forever because you're never going to make 100 billion.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, these companies are all betting that they will make $100 billion. That's why they invested, is to make $100 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but they're going to get, I.

[Paris Martineau]

Think, to make a percentage of $100 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

They make a percentage up to that point. I think from OpenAI's point of view, they see Microsoft as like the rocket fuel in a rocket. They need a huge amount of money and Azure credits to get off the ground. And so they were willing to make a deal with Microsoft, but they did want to Put a limit on it. Because I think the upside if OpenAI does come up with AGI or Super Intelligence or maybe a more pragmatic definition of it would be an AI that's capable of doing the work of a high level white collar employee, you know, maybe isn't able to walk down the street without falling off the curb, but it could maybe do some corporate accounting or something once they get to that point, the trillions, we're talking trillions in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Revenue, well then Microsoft's equity is worth a lot. Which also goes to the point that right now they're renegotiating the cap table because of OpenAI going to a for profit company.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Everything's going to get renegotiated around this. And so whatever was the agreement gets renegotiated now.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's the tug of war. OpenAI needs the money, but they don't want Microsoft to get everything forever. Microsoft says, well we'll give you the money but we want to get a payoff. And they found a number. But I don't think the number really means AGI. I think the number, what they're really.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Saying, yeah, it's just a number.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a number because, because as you say Jeff, they need a definition. But it isn't, it isn't really intended to be a definition. It's just intended to be a shutoff valve so that once we get into orbit we don't have to pay for the rocket fuel.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so they're not the only company. If I can go to Nvidia, if I may.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, you watch that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I watched. Jensen Wong is now the king of presentations. Two hours solid, not bringing other people on, not going for applause lines, just presenting what's happening.

[Leo Laporte]

And was he pretty engaging?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was it very, very and, and clear. And he wears a great jacket. Always the same style, but the different one, this one was quite shiny. And so at the beginning there was hardware stuff, at the end there was hardware stuff. Beginning, there was chip stuff. At the end there's the project digits which is a Mac mini sized box on your desk that is a Blackwell chip, a modified Blackwell Grace Blackwell chip in that box with the entire, and this is the point, I'm going to get to the entire stack of OpenAI models. And I mean, I'm sorry, Nvidia models.

[Leo Laporte]

And such, 200 billion tokens. It's not as, it's not still not as capable as the next generation OpenAI model.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, but it's, it's, it's amazing to have this on your desk for $3,000. So what, what, what keeps on striking me about Nvidia is the middle of all this is how much they are a software company and a model company. And he talked a lot about agents and that you get an agentic library of vision languages, animation, biology and physical, which I'll get to. He argued that, that, that your IT department is going to become the HR department for digital employees. Which sounds kind of ridiculous, but you get it. If your agent is actually able to do tasks, they're going to vet them and they're going to work with that.

[Leo Laporte]

To me, that's the key. That's what we are going for. We don't need it to be generally intelligent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. He said every software coder in the world is going to have a model as a helpmate. And I think that's true at all. The shipstead, the newspaper company has an editing buddy for their journalists before they show it to their editor and get embarrassed.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like a copy editor in a box.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but here's what got me fascinated was he said that basically everything that exists, whether it's a car or a factory, there's three pieces. There's the training piece, the models, there's the hardware that exists in place and there's the digital twin where all of the scenarios are played out and there'll be a digital twin for every factory, there's a digital twin for every car. And that's how it plays out and decides what to do next because that's what models do. And so what they. What he announced too was a big push belief in robotics. And he includes cars in that. He says it's going to be the biggest industry there ever was. Multi first, multi trillion dollar industry.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, if you think about it, autonomous vehicle is a robot, isn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a robot.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just a robot with seats.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the key here is what they announced was Thor, a universal robotics computer. That's the hardware that goes in the car. But they also talked about Cosmos, which is their rag ground truth for physical world. He said, you know, an AI looks at a ball going over the other table and it doesn't know that it's still the ball still exists. So they've trained it on how many 20 million hours of video to train it on these things. And he showed how for cars they use this training, they use these models and then they, they, this is where, where synthetic data comes in. They'll take a known track and they'll put add construction to it or they'll Add snow to it or they'll add this so they can have more training of the models. And so he argues that this gets to, this is just like rag, that it gets you to ground truth in the physical world versus what happens in generative AI in the textual world or the visual world. And so he's arguing that that's going to be the huge business for them. So it was interesting to me that it was about software, it was about agents, it was about Nvidia being a provider of models. It took Llama and added on its own work on top for Nemotron. I don't care which one that is, but it's using open models, it's providing these models to, if you get, it's not just a chip, you're getting the whole stack. And I think Nvidia is in a very important position then that keeps on impressing me. And so far I like Jensen Huang. I've been fooled by other tech moguls.

[Leo Laporte]

They're all great until they, you know, take that red pill or whatever it is that they take.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But he seems, he's not talking about AGI, he's not talking about doom, he, he's not talking about super intelligence, he's talking about real things that happen in this way. I see him as like Yann Lecun. They're bringing it to a practical level of what can this do now and what can this do in the immediate future and what's our path for where we're going? So I was very impressed watching all of this and. Are you going to buy a project digits $3,000?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, it's. It's funny because the CPU is a MediaTek CPU. It's not a very high end CPU.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, really?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is a, this is a machine very much dedicated to doing AI and nothing else.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Whoa, my microphone, I need a smart microphone. Just fell off my desk. No, but you know what? I, if you'd listen to our shows. A couple of years ago, we watched the Jensen Huang keynote. I think it was a 2019, 2020. And the reason we covered it, the reason we reported it was I really felt like at that time Nvidia was firing on multiple cylinders of that were going to be ultimately very, very important. You know, they started as a video game graphics card company, but it became very clear they were in cars, they were in AI, they were in every area, the best growth areas for technology.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here's the question.

[Leo Laporte]

If you had listened to me three years ago, you would be rich now because you would have Bought Nvidia's stock.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Which unfortunately I. Not unfortunately, you don't. Fortunately, I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The question I keep on wondering, Leo, is in those early days, did they know what their fate was going to be? That they were going to be on the top of this?

[Leo Laporte]

I think they did wave. And that was Jensen's genius. His story is fascinating. That was his genius, is he realized what he really had. Any other company and many other companies did, would have said, hey, yeah, we got the gaming market sewn up. But he realized there was so much more you could do with these things. And he saw lots of areas where he basically saw that AI was going to be real and that it was going to be used in cars, in so many things. And he said, you know, we should make the chips for these. This is where the money's going to be. He was quite right. I think he's very smart. And this. And this, you know, the digits thing. I think Jensen's smart because he understands that a lot of what he's talking about is abstract.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So he puts something physically concrete. He showed that big Blackwell board last time and, you know, I think he put something physically concrete in there so people can grab onto it. But what's going on is really much more abstract and powerful. And, you know, Nvidia has been kind of punished in the stock market in the last few days.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It hit an all time high. Before his talk, a lot of that was also because of not fission, not fusion. What's quantum computing? Quantum computing, yeah. He was. He kind of threw a little cold water on. On that, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, you know, you never know with these guys. He may well have a skunk work, something going on in the back.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But. But here's the big thing that struck me, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

In Paris was that, you know, we joke all the time about, are we living in the Matrix? No, we're in the real world. But there is a matrix. It's all those digital twins. They're constantly playing out the scenarios for the future that we don't necessarily see. And based on what it reads from our world, it then decides what to do next. So that we don't hit the deer or we don't hit the robot, but that's the Matrix. Matrix has all kinds of unlimited possibilities that we don't see.

[Leo Laporte]

You've mocked me, but this is what I've kind of been saying all along, is that we are. Oh, you're muted.

[Paris Martineau]

It is not what you've been saying all along.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, okay, you're right. No, you're Right. At first I thought this is all bs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was it Jenset on the beach? Were you with Jen Set on the beach?

[Leo Laporte]

Once I really kind of got my head around what was happening. All I've said all along is we are gonna. This is gonna be a very interesting few years and I don't think we can predict.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I'll agree with you there. It is going to be a very interesting few years.

[Leo Laporte]

I think AI is going to surprise you. I'm not sure I'd agree with Sam Altman that he's got super intelligence in his back pocket and he's just waiting to release it. But I don't think he needs to. I think a lot of what AI's promise is already. That song I played for you was generated in a minute by a computer is. And if you heard what two years ago these tools were doing, remember Jeff, we'd play these Google projects with the music. AI music. They were awful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

AI is amazing. It's doing phenomenal things. It just ain't AGI. It ain't super intelligence. I think all of that bs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And getting dumb VC money is hurting where we go otherwise.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't think we should focus on that. So that by the way. But they do segues into what I think this show is going to become. Starting next month. We're going to rename it a name that's kind of agnostic. We realized that being too specifically Google was a mistake. So we're going to call it Intelligent Machines, which is really all of the things we've always talked about computers. But it's also robotics. It's a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're the Intelligent Machines.

[Leo Laporte]

We're the intelligent Machines.

[Paris Martineau]

We're still going to be talking about big tech and it's true. And all the social stuff we do.

[Leo Laporte]

But I do want to get moral panics. I do want to. If we can help, help people get to the bottom of what's going on with AI. And so I think part of the show will be to talk to people who are doing interesting things or maybe people like Tim, Nick Gebru who have dissenting opinions. I think that's. That's going to be part of the show as well. So that will start next month. Intelligent Machines. It'll be the. You don't have to do anything about it. The subscription feed will be the same and all that. We'll have new album art. We will finally get rid of those horrible flutes or recorders or whatever they are that we've been subjecting to. You YouTube to the last 15 years. Eight years.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How many years?

[Leo Laporte]

800 episodes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, 800 episodes, right.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're going to get rid of a lot of that stuff. That's about 16 years, I think.

[Paris Martineau]

Guys, happy. 800 episodes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

You guys have.

[Leo Laporte]

You too.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, Leo, you've done a lot more, but together you guys have recorded 800 episodes of the show.

[Leo Laporte]

It's mind blowing, isn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is. 800 times 5 hours each is how long.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you ever think it would go this long when you guys decided to do this?

[Leo Laporte]

Patrick can tell us how many hours.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, exactly.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, we went on this last time, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I kind of thought we'd be doing this for a long time. This is my retirement plan.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not to be doing this in retirement.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember you knew you were signing.

[Paris Martineau]

Up for 15 years.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I didn't. 15 years. But we.

[Leo Laporte]

This was a part of the second generation of Twitch shows. The first generation, obviously, was this week in Tech, a roundtable that covered all tech news. Then we started very quickly. We did Security now with Steve Gibson. And it was mostly just people I knew. It was my friends. Amber McArthur and I did a show about the Internet that sadly did not continue on. I should have learned a lesson at that time. But the second generation, we were thinking, it was actually Elaine, my producer, Elaine and I at the time, trying to think of what's the next big thing going to be? And you could see how 15 years ago you might well have said it's going to be Google and that there's enough going on with Google because we had Mac Break Weekly, we had Windows Weekly, we had Mac and Windows. So what's the next thing. It was Google. And I just think we missed it a little bit. But I think what we're seeing, and I'm. To be honest, I've been covering tech for. Since the early 80s, so almost 50, 45 years. I. I don't think there's anything been as exciting. The Internet was pretty darn exciting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But it was a gradual progression. What we didn't. Here's what we didn't anticipate, Jeff. We didn't realize that a couple of things were going to converge, that we would start creating machines with massive amounts of memory, massive processing power, massive amounts of storage. And then on the other hand, we would, over a period of a couple of decades, pretty much put everything online right? Every human thought, every word, everything. Every book, even old books were all online, available to be scraped, which was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Tim Berners Lee's original view behind the web that you could get to everything. And that's why I see the Internet and AI as a continuum. Because without the Internet you couldn't have AI.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. The Internet provided the training material. So that, and then the hardware was there. And by combining the two. And now what's going to happen, by the way? Because we are running out of material to train with. That's where there's a struggle going on between creators and AI companies. But what is going to happen is, and this is where Jensen Huang is right on. We're going to see Moore's Law continue. We're going to see exponential growth in human computing power. And that is going to take us to the next level because it's got all the information it needs. That's kind of the point. And I read a. I don't know if I put the bookmark in here. I probably did a really good piece. It was written in 2019 by a Canadian AI professor, one of the, one of the well known names in AI, in which he said, you know, you should give up trying to duplicate the complexity of the human mind. That's a fool's errand.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Amen.

[Leo Laporte]

But you don't need to. What we kind of didn't understand. You know, I remember, gosh, when I started covering this, there was a woman, I can't remember her name, who had hired hundreds of people to manually enter the world's knowledge into a computer. She had the right idea, if we could just get enough data in there. What she didn't realize is that was going to happen with the Internet, that we'd all, in this giant volunteer project, dump every possible bit of stuff in there. And now all it's going to take, he says, and I think he's right, now this was written five years ago, is more power.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is Rich. It's in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Rich Sutton. That's it. Is in there. Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The bitter lesson.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he calls it the bitter lesson because so many AI scientists have tried for so long to duplicate the way we think and all of that. And Rich says the biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective and by a large margin.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But there's, there's a different thing in there. This is. My friend David Weinberger has been teaching me this through his books, is there's a difference between trying to replicate the rule bases that we see in life and the computer just figuring out what it figures.

[Leo Laporte]

Let it do it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The data it has, let it do it right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so it's, it's. And I don't want to give out any more what David's working on right now, but he's really taught me about this and that's unsettling to us because we expect, you know, you go to school, you learn the rules, you apply the rules. That's how the world works.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a natural human tendency to try to duplicate yourself. Yes, yes, but this isn't the way to go. He says the second general point that we learned from the bitter lesson is that the actual contents of minds are tremendously, irredeemably complex. We should stop trying to find simple ways to think about the contents of minds. All of these are part of the arbitrary, intrinsically complex outside world. They're not what should be built in too much complexity. Build in the meta methods that can find and capture this arbitrary complexity. Essentially, he says we want AI agents that can discover, that can learn as we can not, which contain what we have discovered.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It'd be interesting to have Rich Sutton on.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll get him. We'll get him. That's a good one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What? He's changed. If what, if anything, has changed his mind.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the kind of person.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Five years.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the kind of person we want to. To get on the new Intelligent Machine show. So I. I hope you'll enjoy the show. It's going to be pretty much the same show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Paris is still going to make fun of us.

[Paris Martineau]

Maybe instead of the Google rundown or Google Changelog, we'll do something about AI and eventually, maybe in 15 years, we'll regard that AI change log with as much derision as we did the change log.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn't that be funny? Well, I look forward to the day we introduce our AI co host.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

No, not going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

That's going to happen within five years, I guarantee.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. No. You don't think so? And now Otto Paris joins the show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, we have your. It has to be dev null. It's dev null.

[Paris Martineau]

It does have to be devnall. I'll accept only devnall.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, exactly. As irritating as devnall.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, he was pretty irritating. I admit.

[Paris Martineau]

Famously, your co host said, I just hate that dev null or something. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Are you still working with that vile little puppet man?

[Paris Martineau]

My little puppet man is such a good description.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. I think her mother was a writer, actually. Yeah. You're watching this week in Google? Well, sort of. Still, I like that. Do you like the name Intelligent Machines? I welcome input. We Thought intelligent. First we thought this week in Intelligent Machines. And I was told that's too long, won't fit on the COVID And then I thought, well, what about Intelligent Machines Weekly? And Lisa said you were so old fashioned, you don't need podcasts. No longer say how often they're on in the name of the podcast. The idea of Weekly, it's like. It's like the Daily Zeitung. You don't need to say that anymore. It's just Intelligent Machines.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The one thing I request is. Yes, not such crazy cover art. That's what everybody does.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that. No, we got the very talented Anthony Nielsen working on some really nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anthony's gonna work. Oh, good. So that was just you playing around with.

[Leo Laporte]

I was playing around and the machine. And by the way, the song. Benito is going to write us a song. It's not going to be a machine song, although it may.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you want to play a little bit of the song now?

[Leo Laporte]

Did I not play it on the show yet?

[Paris Martineau]

No, it was pre show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Should we explain to people the word or wait till after they hear it?

[Leo Laporte]

No, don't put it in their head.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay. Hear it first. Okay. Here.

[Leo Laporte]

So I used a. An AI song generator called suno. We played it before, we've talked about it for S U N O AI. Their Model 4 came out recently and is actually kind of remarkable and I've been using it to mess around with some songs. Let me just. This is the one I thought might be the best. I did write the lyrics. The AI did not. Although you might wish the AI had when you hear the song. The other thing is, understand this is in complete reaction to 15 years of recorders going.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Perez.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is a nice hard. This might be passe now. Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Machine A heavy metal thinking de.

[Paris Martineau]

Turn me on, let me scream Turn me on, let me be. That better be the art for this week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I like the Prague rock sound. Electric machine. A real life electric be turned. So. So we're getting some no votes on the song, but I. I think Benito is going to do a better job.

[Paris Martineau]

What led you to sit down and be like Bean? This song needs to be bean heavy.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. It's being. But computers are not notoriously good at enunciation. Let's see. This is the closing theme. Let's see if it's clear.

[Paris Martineau]

It very clearly says B E A.

[Jeff Jarvis]

S. Yeah, he did that on purpose.

[Leo Laporte]

Bean, let me be. I wrote Bean because I didn't want to say being. But as it turns out, once you hear Bean, that's all you're here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There is a company that is beans. AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there you go.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Comes from beans with a Z. But anyway, that's not to be. That's not. Neither here nor there. And honestly, we're going to get a much better theme from a human being. But I was very impressed.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm sorry, a human what?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Human being.

[Leo Laporte]

The human being. I honestly am impressed. Now, Benito, what do you think? Because, Benito, you were kind of negative on Suno. Do you think 4O is better? I mean, more musical?

[Benito]

It seems like it sounds fine. Like it's. It's fine. I would just never like choose to listen to anything there, you know what I mean? It's not like something I would go to.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, do you use Spotify?

[Benito]

No, I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Because there is a bit of a scandal brewing with Spotify. Apparently a couple of years ago they decided paying artists is so 2020. And they have started to. Especially when you ask for a playlist, that's a feeling like I want, you know, focus playlist or ambient sounds. They don't put real people in there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because they don't have to pay them.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't have to pay them. They go out, they contract for kind of generated music. There's. There's a book coming out. There was quite a good article in Harper's about this. That is an excerpt from a book that is coming out later this month about this scandal. We first started hearing kind of notes about this in a couple of years ago, but Liz Pelly has really gone out and done the work and I think has discovered. Whoops. Discovered that it is Spotify. Denied it until recently, but she's got some sources that really have confirmed that. In fact, the front cover of Harper's this month is Ghost Music, Liz Pelly's book, the Ghosts in the Machine. This is an excerpt, actually. Let me see what the book's name is. I'll scroll down to the bottom of the article. The book is called Mood Machine the Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect playlist. That comes from something Spotify calls the pfc, which is basically a program to generate music at a lower royalty. Often they have musicians doing it, but they contract for it. And they don't have to pay them the same royalties, as low as they are, as they already pay others. Plus they don't have the problem that they had with people like Neil Young saying, I don't want my music on Spotify because they have Joe Rogan, none of these complicated artists to deal with. So if you Ask for a playlist of ambient content or lo fi beats, classical compositions, deep focus, look at the names of the artists. In all likelihood, they're fake. Highly recommend the article and maybe we'll get Liz Pelly on to talk about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Spotify is just a bad company. They ruined podcasting, they're trying to ruin music.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like they're kind of stuck between a rock. Have ruined. Have ruined the music have ruined me. But they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. I mean they did not want to be at the mercy their rock. But part of the problem is the record industry, right. That the records enter this.

[Paris Martineau]

I understand part of the. Yeah. Is paying artists, but there's only.

[Leo Laporte]

There's really only three big labels. Right. And so they have so much clout negotiating with Spotify, and Spotify is very aware that they could kill them at any point. The PFC stands for Perfect Fit Content Program. Why pay full price royalties if users are only half listening for a lot of what people use Spotify for is just a basically wallpaper. A playlist. A wallpaper playlist.

[Benito]

And that's the real sad truth right there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the real truth. They couldn't do it if people cared.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, if Muzak. If the company Muzak had done this, which basically they did, but they. They licensed tunes you knew and played it in horribly smarmy ways. If Muzak had done this for elevator music and dentist office music, would anybody have ever complained? I don't think so.

[Leo Laporte]

No, of course not. And in fact, that's what Spotify found. They slowly added more and more people didn't complain. So by now it's almost entirely made up stuff. Spotify denies that staffers were encouraged to add PFCs to playlists and that playlist editors were discontented with the program. But Liz Pelley writes, By 2023, several hundred playlists were being monitored by the team responsible for PFC of 150 of them, including ambient relaxation, deep focus, 100% lounge, bossa nova Dinner, if you playing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, can we go on Spotify and play one of these things now? Can we play one of those?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think we can because ironically.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We'Ll get taken down for.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but if you're picking a playlist called Bossa Nova Dinner.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, who wants associated with that? But you know, if they paid you a fortune to write for Bossa Nova Dinner, would you.

[Benito]

Yeah, all you have to do is write like 10 different versions of Girl from Ipanema. Yeah, that's all they want.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all it is. So she interviewed some people who are creating the content. They aren't told why they're creating the content. They could negotiate very low fees for it. But there's a lot of musicians out there in the world who, you know, are happy to get paid to make some music.

[Benito]

Yeah, See, so that's the thing. It's the. It's the playlists that are being propagated. Like they aren't including any, like actual musicians. They're in. Well, I mean, I guess the people who make the slop are still actual musicians, but they're not making it for. I guess they're making it for those purposes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just you can't knock Kenny G because his music sounds good at dinner. Well, but it isn't. It isn't.

[Benito]

No, no, but they're. But they're preferential. They're treating. They have a preferential treatment for these people who are. Because they have a general license with these people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Benito]

There's like one person who will generate 500 songs for them.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Benito]

To put on various playlists. And those are the songs that are going to get on playlists and not the ones that people might actually want to hear.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things Liz says is Spotify rigged its system against musicians who knew their worth. So it favors musicians who are cheap. Right. And Taylor Swift knows her worth.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That makes her very expensive. So she talked to one person who signed a one year contract to make anonymous tracks for a production company that would distribute them on Spotify. He called it his Spotify playlist gig, a commitment he also called brain numbing and pretty much completely joyless. And while he didn't understand. She interviewed this guy. While he didn't understand the details of his employer's relationship with Spotify, he knew that many of his tracks had landed on playlists with millions of followers. Quote, I just record stuff and submit it and I'm not really sure what happens from there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He told me, why do they even need musicians?

[Leo Laporte]

I think now they probably could use AI, right?

[Benito]

I think there probably is a considerable amount of AI in there already.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. He says, honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch. And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. It's usually just like one take one, take one, take one take. You knock out like 15 an hour. In an hour or two. Christ, yeah. A typical session starts with a production company sending along links to target playlists as reference points. He Says he then charts out new songs that would stream well on those playlists. Honestly, for most of this stuff, he said, I just read out the charts. Oh, I said this while lying on my back. The goal for sure is to be as milquetoast as possible. I mean, I mean, obviously if you're a. If you use Spotify, you might say, oh, that's too bad. But it's not like you complained. It's not like you didn't listen to bossa nova dinner over and over.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Spotify pays on the basis of proportion of use, Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Normally they pay royalties. These are all flat fee.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, but what I'm saying is the more that this crap was listened to, the less had to pay others.

[Leo Laporte]

Artists, real artists.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. So it was a double, double pronged business benefit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You're watching this week in Google with Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau, Leo Laporte, Benito.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And we're Chubby Beans.

[Leo Laporte]

Chubby, the cat who is now cooking. This is another example of how far we've come with AI. This is some who one of you posted.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I put this up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is a cat. Looks pretty real.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, the carrots coming off the carrot don't look real.

[Leo Laporte]

Getting there, though.

[Paris Martineau]

This is what we're destroying our environment for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cat has put it. Yes, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look, there's carrots appearing out of nowhere. Yeah, out of nowhere.

[Paris Martineau]

Cats would not like carrots.

[Leo Laporte]

Cats wouldn't wear aprons and they definitely wouldn't use a spatula. They just bat it with their paws.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, in a moment the cat is going, look, the cat has its paw on the. On the hot pot.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they don't know. What do they know? They're just kiddies.

[Paris Martineau]

I do think that cats would like to smoke cigarettes if they were made. That's my take.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is pretty impressive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The dish looks terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's not cabbage and carrots. No. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you want? You want a cat cooking or you want a cat carnivores?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I want something cat can use.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Chopsticks. Very impressive.

[Paris Martineau]

I want to drill into the narrative.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you for that cat interview.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought you'd enjoy it.

[Leo Laporte]

I do appreciate it. If you have a locked AT&T phone, we're here with bolt cutters. T Mobile will help pay off your locked phone and give you a new 5G phone for free. All on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com carrierfreedom Be a virtual prepaid MasterCard in 15 days. Free phone up to 830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax and a $10 device connection charge. Qualifying port in trade and service on Go5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on required finance agreements. Due bill credits and if you pay off devices early. If you're a maintenance supervisor for a commercial property, you've had to deal with everything from leaky faucets to flickering light bulbs. But nothing's worse than that ancient boiler that's lived in the building since the day it was built 50 years ago. It's enough to make anyone lose their cool. That's where Grainger comes in. With industrial grade products and dependable, fast delivery, Grainger can help with any challenge, from worn out components to everyday necessities. Call click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I forgot before, since we're going to do a little oddity here. Hank Green's test for AGI. Did you see that online?

[Leo Laporte]

No. What is his test for? Let's go. Let's go to Blue sky, where everything good is Hank Green, who is. Tell us who Hank Green is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hank Green is. Hank and John Green are the magnificent vlog brothers on YouTube who do great things. And Hank did a video recently that was very nice to my book, the Gutenberg Parenthesis. I've always been a fan of Hank, but now, ever the more so. Hank is damn smart.

[Leo Laporte]

After further, he writes. After further inter, he skeets. I should say after further interrogations and suggestions. In the spirit of the Turing Test, I propose the Cripslock test. No system can be called AGI if that system cannot reliably determine whether or not it is spewing absolute bs. Named for Sacharissa Kripslock, who is somebody I guess Hank knows. That sounds awfully tautological.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the problem will be that you'll ask it. And it's like the lawyer who used it to make the case citations. When he went back and asked it, are these real? It said, well, yes. Oh yeah, because it's meant to.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, there is an interesting phenomenon these days with prompts where, for instance, you have an AI write some code and you say, can you make it better? And it does.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And again and again you can do that. So it's very weird.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You had the rundown. It's. It's public domain day, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. It was January 1st. Was public domain January 1st.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. So I took. I tried to take a couple of them. I put them into Notebook LM and I said, write me a one hour TV script. It didn't do very well.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. So, as you know, works from 20. Sorry. 1929 are now public domain sound recordings from 100 years ago because they get a little special deal. 1924 are now public domain. That means I can play them without fear of taking. Getting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, you're still going to get taken down. You think it's still gonna happen? Try it.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you know what January 1st also is, though? While we're loading this? It's the official birthday of every horse in America.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, a funny thing happened in my calendar. I had 128 birthdays on January 1st.

[Paris Martineau]

All horses.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not just horses. It's anything that doesn't have an official birthday. So I was. It was the. I'd never seen this before. I have never seen it in January 1st.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like for what? For your. Your toaster.

[Leo Laporte]

It was software. It was all bunch of stuff, I guess. I guess. I don't know. I use a program called cardhop and I do have birthdays in my calendar. I don't know. Here, let's. I think I can show it. I don't think there's anything completely private in here. Oh, I have to turn on. I turned off birthdays because it was so annoying. Let me turn them back on. Yeah, I think it just. By default, it was a weird thing. It just added. There's birthdays. It just. I guess if it didn't know a birthday, it added it in. So I'm now adding in all the birthdays and then January 1st. Wait a minute. I still don't see those. Huh. But literally, trust me, they were there. And it was uncommonly difficult to use my calendar on January 1st. It was jammed. So what is in the public domain domain? This song. Now here's the key, by the way. The rights are held by both the music publisher, the artist, the performance is copied. So what you have to do is something. A song that is in the public domain and the performance is 100 years old. So here, for instance, is Jelly Roll Morton playing the Shreveport Stomp from 1924. A day that did not have good recording technology.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But it was amazing in its time.

[Leo Laporte]

And I can play it.

[Benito]

No, I bet you it sounded good originally just someone. This was someone's favorite song. So they played out the record.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you think the record's played out? Well, you'd think that the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It wasn't as good as it going to be today.

[Leo Laporte]

How about Marian Anderson? This is from the Library of Congress. That ought to Be a good recording. Let's hear. It's a little scritchy. So do you ever wonder when you look at old movies or hear old songs or look at pictures of old people from a hundred years ago, like, were they like us? But they just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, to say this, as a radio guy, if you were taught in radio in 1930 to talk like this. Exactly. An entirely different voice.

[Leo Laporte]

But the person inside talking in that funny voice would be like me. Like a human.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like a bean.

[Leo Laporte]

Like a human being.

[Paris Martineau]

Like a human being.

[Leo Laporte]

Books. A Farewell to Arms. Ernest Hemingway's. So it's gonna be early Ernest Hemingway, early William Faulkner.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I put Solomon Fury into NotebookLM and had it write a script and then realized, of course it uses the N word. So I killed that immediately.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I really liked that novel. I wrote a paper about that in school.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I put All Quiet in the Western Front in. And there wasn't enough dialogue for it. So it doesn't know how to make the dialogue.

[Leo Laporte]

Some. Some early Mickey Mouse.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, some. The earliest was last year, but now there's more Mickey Mouse this year.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. In fact, the first Mickey Mouse talking.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Is now in the public domain. He first talked in a movie called the Carnival Kid. So here it is. From the Wikimedia Commons. Can I play this? I feel like Disney's gonna go after me anyway. The Carnival Kid. Guess it's a silent movie. There we go. Now I have to say, I do like seeing these old movies. Here's Mickey. He's giving Minnie a hot dog. Some weird frog. Freudian.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She raised her skirt to give money. This is. This is too much for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Stocking. He's making the universal symbol for. All right. That's now in the public domain. Aren't you glad? But I imagine in 1929 this was. Was kind of amazing to hear these. I don't know. I don't know what people were like back then. They were. They like us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, somebody like you walked on the beach with somebody like Walt Disney and he said, you won't believe what's going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Make music.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Benito]

These were the first cartoons. I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Like they're really.

[Benito]

Those for the first time would have probably been pretty mind blowing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Can you imagine? Yeah. Very cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But there was a moral panic. Nickelodeon. The city of Chicago Claw shut down. Nickelodeon's Chicago Tribune insisted they had to be banned because they were. They were trading out criminals of our youth.

[Leo Laporte]

Making bad people for our ute. All right. All right. I think we should take another pause and come up with something else interesting. You're watching the show formerly known as this Week in Google with Jeff Jarvis, formerly known as professor emeritus at the school there in CUNY.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Places. Places.

[Leo Laporte]

@ the places. Yeah, you know the places. Writes for the weekend at the Information. What are you working on right now, Paris? What are you working on? Something secret. Something good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're muted.

[Paris Martineau]

We'll be able to talk about it next week. Oh, exciting stuff. I keep muting myself to sip beverages and then forgetting to unmute myself, so apologies. I just don't. I don't know that people need. Need to hear my sounds of swallowing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But, you know, Tiny Tim thought it was awful to. To eat in front of other people.

[Leo Laporte]

He had misophonia. So there. There's not an uncommon. I've learned it because I. I often would eat during the breaks of my radio show, and it really upset people because they had misophonia, which is the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can't stand. I cannot stand open mouth chewing. It drives me crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't like the sounds of chewing?

[Jeff Jarvis]

God, no.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay. The sound, specifically, the vision, like looking at someone chewing. Does that really stand?

[Leo Laporte]

But it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And there's all these videos now where that's what they're doing. They go get the pizza and they. Right in front of the camera.

[Paris Martineau]

A mukbang. Yeah, we don't like that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A mukbang. What's that?

[Leo Laporte]

What the hell's that?

[Paris Martineau]

That's a video where someone, usually a young woman, eats a comical amount of food in one sitting. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no.

[Paris Martineau]

Sorry, sorry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm just talking about guys going to test the best hot dogs.

[Benito]

It's a genre of YouTube video.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it is kind of sexual.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't want.

[Paris Martineau]

Arguably, yeah, no, we're not looking at mukbang. You're gonna get the weirdest. This is going to replace all the bikini content in your Facebook.

[Leo Laporte]

It can't be any worse. All right, Mukbang.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, Paris, how do you know these things?

[Paris Martineau]

I truly don't know. I think it's just through osmosis. I couldn't tell you why I know what a mukbang is.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, because she saw this on CBS Sunday Morning.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what you eat goes that familiar expression. But we promise you, there's nothing familiar about this story from day it came out of Jane Paulie's mouth.

[Leo Laporte]

No. David Pogue did it.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, God, I love CBS Sunday.

[Benito]

I mean, mukbang is a Korean word. It's a Korean word.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a Korean term. Refers to YouTube videos of people eating and talking about Their meal. David Pogue talked with mukbang celebrity Bethany Gaskin. 2.3 million subscribers on YouTube for eating. Gosh. So those people. I guess people enjoy that. Do not have misophonia. You are watching this week in the show, as I said, formerly called this week in Google, soon to be intelligent machines on the Twitter podcast network. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to Libsyn ads.com that's L I, B S Y N ads.com today. Do we care about CES? Do we want to talk about HDMI 2.2?

[Jeff Jarvis]

There wasn't much and I only looked every day and there's just not much.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we could talk about.

[Paris Martineau]

Believe we're still doing this. I can't believe people are still going to ces. Coming back with a bunch of wacky products. I saw someone touting. They were like, wow. They unveiled an AI body scanner that will use light to scan every fabric of your being at once. And I was like, no, they won't. That's not happening. How. How have we gone through so many years of CES companies promising ridiculous, futuristic products that never end up materializing?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jason's there now with a team.

[Leo Laporte]

Did he get with a team?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, from Tom Merritt.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's doing stuff with Tom Merit now.

[Leo Laporte]

They're doing better than I thought.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Really? He's got four people. There are four people there we can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Afford to send me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Well, good on Jason and. And Tom. That's great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. There's. So there's a Withins Omnia full body scanning health mirror. To your point. There's a Pawport automatic pet door opener. These are the things I found. And Roborock's Roomba competitor gets a robot arm.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. There were a couple of robot vacuums with arms. They have arms.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It'll pick up your. Your socks.

[Leo Laporte]

Stupid.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it's so stupid.

[Paris Martineau]

And put them where I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

But it'll pick them up, fling them behind it.

[Paris Martineau]

Human like fingers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Videos there. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, I'm sorry after talking so much crap, but cs, I do want to see.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now you're curious.

[Paris Martineau]

I want to see the full human hand attached to a Roomba.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, this is.

[Paris Martineau]

It's kind of like. Do you guys remember that DJ Roomba that just had a knife attached to it?

[Leo Laporte]

This is the dream. It had a knife attached to it.

[Paris Martineau]

Imagine a Roomba, but with a giant kitchen knife stapled to the top.

[Leo Laporte]

They could also play music. Dream with an E. It is now opening its hood. The arm is emerging. There's nothing to pick up, though. So it's just gonna say, hello, should wave at us. This is just creepy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's not. It's just dumb.

[Paris Martineau]

I just don't see the need for this.

[Leo Laporte]

No, me neither.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, there are a few of these. This is a year four roll.

[Paris Martineau]

That arm's gonna get stuck in there. Unfortunately, the thing can't grab anything is what the line of text on that article just read.

[Leo Laporte]

I wasn't showing it. Grabbing something. Okay, thank you. Well, we appreciate the reporting because poor Carissa Bell for Engadget had to go to CES and to suffer at CES will probably come back sick and all that for not much. Here's another robotic vacuum with a robo arm. The roborock. Oh, there's some socks at least. Yeah, Saros Z70. There comes the arm. It's going to get a sock. Or is it now? What does it do now? That's what I really want to know.

[Paris Martineau]

Where'd the sock go?

[Leo Laporte]

They don't show that. They cut away.

[Paris Martineau]

What's going to happen to the sock?

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're concerned about the fate of the sock?

[Leo Laporte]

I guess it moves the sock, but it doesn't put away the sock. You know how to move the sock, but you don't know how to wave.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here comes the exciting ending. This could be a Dana wall here. No, it puts the sock down on the floor again. And yes, AGI is right around the corner, folks.

[Paris Martineau]

AGI is right around the corner, and it's going to pick up the stuff you leave in the floor and hide it from you.

[Leo Laporte]

This is kind of my point about it, because it's smarter than.

[Benito]

Yes, but that's that stuff that we want AGI to do. Pick up our crap.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, if they could pick it up, wash it and fold it, then put it in my drawer, I'd love that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We also had at ces, LG Unveiling affectionate intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

No, No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't want the robot to hug me.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How many times have we heard this one? The new AI powered Samsung refrigerator will, guess what? Allow direct grocery ordering with Instacart for years.

[Leo Laporte]

They've.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Years before this. Years.

[Leo Laporte]

So the sad thing is, the only way. I mean, they're probably never gonna do it, right? Samsung's a company that, by the way, put out a refrigerator with a screen and a browser in it. That no longer works because they can't update the browser. So now people have refrigerator. I know. I have a friend who has a refrigerator with a screen in it, but doesn't. Can't do anything with it. So this Samsung refrigerator will have the ability to restock groceries.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And finally, Google tv. This is our kind of CES change. Like, Google TV is getting Gemini. You know what I was thinking about it? Having AI in your toaster is stupid and your robot is stupid, but on your TV set kind of makes sense, you know, it's a screen. It's an information screen. You can use it for.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I use Siri on my Apple tv, but it'd be nice if we're a little smarter.

[Paris Martineau]

For what?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I usually there's a couple of commands I like. One is, what the hell did she just say? And then. And then. No, this is a good one. Then really backs up 30 seconds, turns on the captions, and plays it again.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's pretty good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the old man feature. It's really. Oh, what did. What did she just say? I use that a lot. And then you can also.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is that a standard canned feature?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, it's been there for years. You can also say, you know, say wicked, and then it will show you all the ways you can stream Wicked. Something like that. But an assistant would be nice saying like, I don't know, I'm kind of tired. I just want to watch something light and funny. Maybe between 30 minutes and an hour. What do you got? That would be cool if it actually came up with a good answer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Can we do it? Since one more. One more. Since maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe we're getting our.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Maybe this is the last Google change log ever. Line 80. Have you turned on this feature?

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, let's see. By the way.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, do we want to do the Google change log?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

Theme.

[Leo Laporte]

No. For the last time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sure. One last time.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead.

[Benito]

Sorry, it's not available at the moment.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You killed. You killed it already.

[Benito]

Hey, we're not changing the name until like, like the fifth so we got another, we got another couple of shows.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is actually a post from. That's what I did. I went to Google Gemini and said, make me a theme song with recorders. It sounds like that. And it did. Google change log.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now. We needed to play Taps video.

[Leo Laporte]

So you picked a story from the New York Times.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then I actually. Right. And then I, I did it. I installed it. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is some sort of summary.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it came and asked me, do you want to install this? Okay, sure.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's a Chrome extension called Help me read.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's just, it's just part of Chrome. And if anytime I'm on any page and I double click, I two finger click, it'll come up and ask me whether it wants me to summarize that page.

[Leo Laporte]

That's cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so I did that. So I did it with so so Rich Sutton's piece. I looked at it and I said, oh, do I really want to read all this? I thought, no, I have a new feature. So I summarize this with Help me read, which makes me feel stupid.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it comes up with a one paragraph. The article highlights the importance of general methods that leverage computation and AI research. Doesn't tell me anything. It gives examples from computer chess. Okay, so. So, so it doesn't really get to the essence of it. The article emphasizes the power of general purpose methods.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like Google is way behind in this stuff. I. Because I can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the Google can install this wherever we are now. That's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So now on Google search and on Google, every page, every web page I bring up, I can now use this. That's the power of Google. You don't have Chrome, so you can't see it.

[Leo Laporte]

No. I'm kind of intrigued if I feed this to Perplexity AI. Let me try this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, if I fed the same thing to Gemini itself, it'll probably be much better. This is their Help me read feature, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what I'm saying. Google's way behind. That's exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I'm saying if you compare apples to apples, Gemini to Perplexity.

[Leo Laporte]

So here's Perplexity's ants answer to this question about the bitter lesson that we talked about. The main argument is that general methods leveraging computation power, ultimately the most effective in AI. Oh, that's actually said it better than I did. Did a better job of summarizing than I did. You know what? This is excellent.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a more thorough summary than I feel like these things normally Perplexity is.

[Leo Laporte]

I use all the time now for research. I will just say, you know, what is the source of headaches or something and you know, or whatever. And it's very useful. The thing that it does that I really like is it gives you footnotes. It's kind of what Niva used to do. It gives you footnotes so you can go to the original source. It's not just making this stuff up and then you can ask follow up questions and so forth.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think you use Perplexity Discover for news.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, sort of. Yeah, same here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Same answer here.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm very, I'm very impressed with Perplexity. I find it very useful. And the thing that makes it more useful is it's connected to the Internet now. So unlike some, you know, chat GPT which whose models are more than a year old, you get current information which is I think really good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this may be a fun. Have you tried Deep Seek?

[Leo Laporte]

No. What's that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Deep seek is line 75. It got a lot of attention right before the end of the year. And it's a Chinese model that was built on 1/10 the compute of the major models out now.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Supposedly can meet their challenges. And if you go to Deep Seek, I think you have to go prove you're human or something. Hold on, Deep. I can't type. I got a computer. I'll type on my keyboard.

[Leo Laporte]

But you can use it in English.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh yeah. So if you go to Deep Seek.

[Leo Laporte]

I've already remember the Chinese are somewhat limited because of U.S. sanctions.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's what's interesting. So if you go to it, you have two choices. You can, you can ask it a question and you can either have it do Deep think or search. So go to deep sick deep deepseek.com or chat.deepseek.com and but do the deep think first because it's funny how it comes back. You got to start now. You got to. You just go up, start now, start now. You got to do that. It's going to ask you to do whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh well, we don't want need to do this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh well that may be interesting enough.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I'm going to be on an AI shot. Okay. I need help. I need help. It says click on the smallest yellow triangular right pyramid in the picture.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There it is. There's only one. So you can argue with it then.

[Leo Laporte]

And then it gives me not found.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, because you failed the captcha.

[Leo Laporte]

But I can pretty print this for some reason I don't know what I'm I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

I would say, yeah, I was going.

[Leo Laporte]

To use login with Google. That's when it wants this yellow cone.

[Paris Martineau]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

And the login with Google, well, it's not working.

[Paris Martineau]

It's not happening today.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, I will leave this as an exercise for the listener and viewer. Deepseek.com what happens is just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I went in and I asked. I came over when I asked it, I sent it all to Jason. It in kind of hazy text. It was oddly humble. Well, let me think about that. I'm thinking about this. It could be this, it could be that it's trying to act like it's thinking before my very eyes. And then after a few screen loads of this supposed thinking, it gives me the answer. I couldn't copy and paste the thinking text, only the answer text. But it tried to present some kind of humility as brand. Then if you instead search instead of deep thinking, it'll just go to the web and get you the answer and come back and it's kind of okay. But the reason it got all this attention is because it could be showing A, how much cheaper it could be to train models. I'm not sure how it did it, but B, it's in China, so. Oh, right. Oh.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

How did you find out about this?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Benedict Evans, who I quote constantly, said at the end of the year, he said, oh, deep sick came in with the kind of the under the wire end of the year, big AI news and people aren't paying attention. So.

[Leo Laporte]

But did you also notice in this article that when you ask Deep SEQ what model it's using, it says Chat GPT?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's the question. So here's the funny thing. If it in fact is learning from ChatGPT, is ChatGPT going to have the same complaint against Deep Sync the publishers have against Chat GPT or is it just.

[Paris Martineau]

It's just chat like it is an API of Chat GPT. It just said the model is ChatGPT.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The model is.

[Paris Martineau]

That's what Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo just says, I'm chat. It doesn't even say the model is. It says I am chat GPT.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oops. Oops.

[Paris Martineau]

Specifically, I'm based off the GPT4.

[Leo Laporte]

In this article, it says it mistakenly identified itself, but. Well, I don't know if that's a mistake. We've seen this, by the way, in other people with phony AIs that are really just links to Chat GPT. So I'll believe it when I see this. Is part of the problem is it's hard to verify that. Right. How do you know? How do you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just asked it and it says I. Hi, I'm deep seek v3.

[Leo Laporte]

Fix that bug.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, of course. An AI assistant independently developed by the Chinese company Deep Seek, Inc.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. ME thinks they doth protest too much. So what did Sam Altman say in his reflections on the New Year?

[Jeff Jarvis]

How pissed he was at everybody who screwed him over, in his view, on that weekend. Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is going to be the year of grievances.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's absolutely his grievances. Yes, absolutely.

[Paris Martineau]

Grievances and gripes.

[Leo Laporte]

Sons of guns.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then he says, it hasn't been.

[Leo Laporte]

Easy, the road hasn't been smooth, and the right choices haven't been obvious.

[Paris Martineau]

For instance, I got fired at one point and then rehired.

[Leo Laporte]

Getting fired in public with no warning kicked off a really crazy few hours and a pretty crazy few days.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is where he drives me nuts. Toward the end, we are beginning to turn our aim beyond that to super intelligence in the true sense of the word. There is no sense of the word.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all a lie.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's all false. Like, now he's beyond that.

[Leo Laporte]

A precursor to super intelligent. Like, yes, after you get AGI, which is, like, just as smart as us, you get something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're the average bean, and then you're a superfood. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. Oh, Jesus, just scare me. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Super intelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we're capable of doing on our own, and in turn, massively increase abundance and prosperity. At the end of this two paragraphs, given the possibilities of our work, OpenAI cannot be a normal company. No, we're a special company.

[Leo Laporte]

I might have to get this paw port for our cat. Is this an AI cat? Oh, look, it opened right up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It opens up. You were wearing a thing and it knows you're coming.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Our cat is chipped and we have a kind of traditional cat door that will only. It won't. It'll open to anything. Anything that wants to get out, but it will only open to the cat to get in. Because in case something critter gets in, you want it to be able to.

[Paris Martineau]

My parents need that because they. They have a dog and recently they found a cat in their house.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you convince them to keep the cat?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this one tries to wear it.

[Paris Martineau]

But my dad threw it out. The doorstep. I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the dog's gonna save them. There was a huge fire burning. Maybe this was. By the way, no levity about la. Many friends down there who have lost their homes, who've been evicted.

[Paris Martineau]

Incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

Very sad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's really terrible. Yeah, no rain for eight months. I mean, Jesus.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we've had a lot of rain up here, I guess. I guess they didn't get it down there, which is too bad. All right, I think we take one more break and then get your picks of the week. What do you say?

[Paris Martineau]

Sounds good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching this week in Google with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. We're glad you're here. Before we go on, just a quick note. We would love to have you in our club, Club Twit. It is one of the ways we. We keep this network on the air and keep the lights on. It's a very important way. Plus we give you, I think, lots of benefits. $7 a month. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the wonderful Club Twit Discord and special events that go on in the Discord. We have Stacy's book club. It's going to be coming up in a little bit tomorrow it's going to be Chris Marquardt and his photo assignment. We'll do a photo review and talk about photography. We also have Micah's crafting corner and a whole bunch of other stuff. Honestly, the benefits are great, but the real reason to join Club Twit is to support what we do. If you Enjoy our shows, $7 a month, we keep it affordable. Visit TWiT TV ClubTWiT and join the club. We'd love to have you also while you're there. Another way you can help us is by doing the survey. Twitter TV survey. Should only take you a few minutes. It's one of. Well, it's the only way really that we get to know you. And in aggregate we take the information we get from that and it helps us sell. For instance, we now know that 80% of our audience are IT decision makers, that kind of thing. And advertisers are always anxious for that kind of information. Information, no, personal information. I promise you. We don't aggregate, we don't track anybody or anything like that. We, we have no interest in that. We do aggregate the entire survey results and give them percentages and things like that. It is helpful to us. So if you haven't done it yet, you have till the end of the month. TWiT TV survey. If you have a locked AT&T phone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're here with bolt cutters.

[Leo Laporte]

T Mobile will help pay off your locked phone and give you a new 5G phone for free. All on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com CarrierFreedom via virtual prepaid MasterCard in 15 days. Free phone up to 830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax and a 10 device connection charge. Qualifying port in trade and service on Go5G next. And credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on required finance agreements. Deal bill credits and if you pay off devices early. All right, now let's see. What else do we have on the agenda today? I do love this story about the tech entrepreneur who got trapped in a Waymo and nearly missed his flight. Started going around in circles. That is straight out of the TV show Silicon Valley, by the way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And he's a tech guy, so he thinks, well, I got pawned. I know all these tech guys. Somebody did this to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. So first he thought he was on the phone seeking help from the company. I have my seatbelt on. I can't get out of the car. Has this been hacked? What's going on? Somebody playing a joke on me? I've got a flight to catch. Actually, I can play a little bit of this video. He's just going around.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's getting dizzy. Circles.

[Leo Laporte]

Hi there, Mike. This is Gab. I'm calling from Waymo Support.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm just calling because I received a notification that your car might be experiencing some routing issue.

[Leo Laporte]

Some routing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Catch. Why is this thing going in a circle? I'm getting dizzy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. Look at what it's doing. I understand. I'm really, really sorry, Mike. We're currently working with the situation of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The vehicle, but I have to read a script. This is going to take longer than you want. Circling around a parking lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't they have a. Don't they have an emergency stop button?

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's going on? I think they have to file a report first. Is somebody playing a jump?

[Leo Laporte]

They should have a big. No, he should have a big red button that says let me out of here. Here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I understand, Mike. I'm really sorry for this.

[Leo Laporte]

We already work.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's my script. But, Chance, do you have an access to your Way More app right now?

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, now I'm gonna be pulling the car over while we are trying to assist. Let me out of here.

[Paris Martineau]

It continues to go in circles.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, my goodness.

[Leo Laporte]

I just wait for the flight.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You guys are gonna take Care of the flight.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, boy. Anyway, we won't get into the grievances there, but.

[Benito]

Wow, that call center was in the Philippines.

[Leo Laporte]

You could tell from her accent?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. Yeah, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Her English was good. But there was. But there were some pronunciation and accent issues. Yeah. Interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you want to choose your Silicon Valley think boy, or is that too.

[Leo Laporte]

Choose yours. That was gonna be my pick of the week. Oh, choose your. No, I wasn't. Choose your Silicon Valley think boy. Curtis Balaji, Ray, Eliezer, Jack. These are all real people, Peter.

[Paris Martineau]

They're all think boys.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pick Peter, for example.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you can actually pick him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I'm just saying less facial emotions than a lizard.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, these are all real people. Aren't they nice? I'm sure Jason Calacanis is miffed that he's not in this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, what about me? I'm a thick boy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I accidentally watched a Jason video today. It just came kind of came up and I don't know why. And he's skiing, I'm sure the most amazing place in the world. And he has to pick more of that pow, pow. It's powder, Jason.

[Paris Martineau]

Just say powder.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm gonna go get some more. Pow, pow. Oh, Jesus, you infantilize yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

If I ever start doing things like that, will you just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, you know, we're gonna slap you.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, good. It is time for our picks of the week. Let's start with Paris's thing. A post mortem.

[Paris Martineau]

So some people have been. Actually quite a lot of people have been messaging me on Blue sky asking for me to talk about what happened with nickvember. So I did a little thread whenever I was trapped at an airport for like seven hours over the holidays and then on a plane for a while. So I went through some of the. Of my favorite movies from Nickvember. For those who don't recall, Nickvember was my attempt in November to watch one Nick Cage movie a day. Or about 30 Nick Cage movies. The TNCR is. I didn't hit that exactly because I ended up getting sick and then the election happened. But, you know, I did like one every other day, which I think is good.

[Leo Laporte]

But I want to say you said one of the.

[Paris Martineau]

Face off is the reason I did nickvember.

[Leo Laporte]

I like your.

[Paris Martineau]

It got me back into movies. I saw it in theaters once like a year ago and decided to, I don't know. And then decided seeing movies in theaters is the way. And I was not wrong. Face off is fantastic. A phenomenal film. The, I feel like, pinnacle of big dumb action movie, but also it just really holds up on a rewatch. Like, it's great. Highly recommend. But I. Starting November, I wanted to kind of go through Cage's whole oeuvre. So I started with his first ever appearance in TV or film, which was this pilot from 1981 called the Best of Times. Cage is 17 in it and plays a meathead named Nick. And it's honestly fantastic. It's a, like, weird kind of after school special. All the other kids in it are kind of normal. They're like, weird musical elements available for free on YouTube. But Nick Cage, for some reason, plays a meathead who's haunted by the shadow of war and that he could one day be drafted and is just like. Is already, like, doing the juicy together. Yeah, like, you could play a clip from that. I don't know if they'll take you down. It's on free full on YouTube. But.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, like, I'm registered. They called the giraffe. I'm in there, man. Man, that says it's my patriotic duty. But shoot. I mean, shoot. You don't even get to choose a nice place.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, why.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why do they have wars in Vietnam and Korea anyway? Why not someplace real neat, like. Like the French Riviera or Bermuda?

[Leo Laporte]

That would be nice.

[Paris Martineau]

Great question.

[Leo Laporte]

Stay tuned.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it could soon happen.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you feel about Denmark, Nick?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah, Valley. Or anywhere, for that matter. Anywhere in NATO.

[Paris Martineau]

Valley Girl, he was the male lead. That good movie. Birdie came right after Valley Girl, which.

[Leo Laporte]

Is a big one.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it was his first, like, dramatic lead.

[Leo Laporte]

Very weird.

[Paris Martineau]

Cage and Nick Cage and his childhood best friend, who's obsessed with birds, get drafted to go to Vietnam and end up haunted by it. But his friend deals the trauma by progressing to believe he's a literal bird. And Nick Cage is tasked with trying to get him out of the psych ward. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't believe 1984. Wow. This has been going on for a long time.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay. A real early banger that everybody should watch is Peggy Sue Got married in 1986. Movie. Francis directed it. This was. He had changed his name from Nick Coppola to Nick Cage at this point, but Jim Carrey is also in this movie and there's just like. But as like, a side character. So there's a scene of Nick Cage and young Jim Carrey before either were famous. DOO whooping. It's great. Really recommend it.

[Leo Laporte]

Francis is good at that. Raising Arizona Classics.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, Raising Arizona Moonstruck. I mean, everybody knows those are great.

[Leo Laporte]

We're not going to go through them. But there's some good stuff here. This is good.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, I'll give. I'll do exactly Two more. Zandali, 1991. Worst movie I've ever seen.

[Leo Laporte]

Never heard of it.

[Paris Martineau]

One of my. Don't watch it. It's bad. Vampire's kiss from 1998. It's like American Psycho, but vampires. Phenomenal.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris, I need another report from last year.

[Paris Martineau]

Mm.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I need to know what happened at the White Elephant party where she was handing us. We had a role here. You deserve to know.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, so White Elephant party for the Bourgeois Ski. We went to hometown Hot pot and barbecue in Chinatown and all ate a bunch of meats and then put our presents on the table and did White Elephant. What did I end up getting? I ended up getting an oyster candle, which is just normal. But by and far, by and large, the winner of the group was my box of weird stickers. Everybody was obsessed with it. Everybody wanted some.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Everybody could have some because there were so many of them.

[Paris Martineau]

There were some. There were hundreds of them. People stole it. People then afterwards asked for. People put the stickers in their phone. They loved it. It was a great, great.

[Leo Laporte]

What was the most. You had shrimp. You had freshly baked.

[Paris Martineau]

Whatever I said you freshly.

[Leo Laporte]

Freshly.

[Paris Martineau]

Fully cooked. Fully cooked.

[Leo Laporte]

And hot Italian, which was the most popular.

[Paris Martineau]

I think everybody had a bit of a mix. Some people really like shrimp. Some people were like, I'm a hot Italian, and other people were like, I'm fully cooked. So, you know, there was really something for everyone.

[Leo Laporte]

Something for everyone.

[Paris Martineau]

That's what the only other sleeper kind of hit at the thing was someone. For some reason, the Bourgeois Ski has this, like, long running gag where whenever someone posts a kind of innocuous photo in the group chat, someone will send it back to the group chat, but with a, like, cartoon gun just included somewhere very tiny in the photo that you can't really see. And so someone got a gold necklace with a tiny little gun on it. And that was. That was a good one.

[Leo Laporte]

We should explain to people new to the show that the Bourgeois Ski is Paris's skeeball team.

[Paris Martineau]

It is my skeeball team. Yes. That's my core friend group.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's a very clever name. Is it spelled with sk E e at the end? Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Bour Ski.

[Leo Laporte]

Very good. It's a good name.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who came up with the name?

[Paris Martineau]

My friend Maya, who's the skeeball captain.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you should give. Oh, crap. Captain of the skeeball team.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

She get a special little C on her.

[Paris Martineau]

She does in all of our. In all of our hearts.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jarvis, your pick of the week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I could go high brow. I could go low brow.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, go both ways.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Highbrow is that Google has created with DeepMind the Habermas machine.

[Leo Laporte]

What you talk about Habermas, but I forget who.

[Paris Martineau]

What is that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jurgen Habermas of the Frankfurt School. Still alive. German philosopher. Difficult to read. Oh yes, he is. Wow. Who. Who theorized about the creation of the bourgeois. There we go. Paris public sphere in the. The coffee houses and Salons of 18th century Europe and known as a kind of. He thought that there was a public discourse that was higher then and then media and everything else ruined it. So the. The. The Habermas machine, the idea is that we'll take arguments in a disagreement and then it will create something that both sides could maybe agree upon.

[Leo Laporte]

So Habermas thought that if you got people. Habermas was nuts. Thought that if you get people together and the conditions are right, they will agree more than they disagree. Habermas obviously comes from a different.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I write about this at some length in both my Gutenberg book and my magazine book, by the way, both on sale now Gutenberg and paperbacks cheaper than ever. But it's also kind of a joke among people that Habermas is the most. Is an impenetrable philosopher of the current.

[Leo Laporte]

So now they call it the Habermas machine. But is it. But the idea is it digests the opinions and comes up with a compromise. It's. They could have called it the Solomon Machine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could have, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So that's the high brow, the low brow. Yes, the low brow. Is that as soon as. To Paris's point earlier, as soon as Florida required age verification for porn within hours, according to VPN monitor, The requests for VPNs went up 11,050%.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a rather large increase.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. There's the.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, gotta have it.

[Leo Laporte]

Because you can be in any state of the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So it got. Pornhub is now blocked. Geo blocked in 12 states.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, gee, by GEO blocked. Inaccessible. Unless you do ID verification. But yes, effectively.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They just said this.

[Leo Laporte]

We're not going to do ID verification.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're not gonna do it.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're not going to be available in those states because we.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, there's no way to do Pong for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Y. Actually, it's a principal.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh yeah. I guess this is the thing. They replaced it with a video of a porn actress explaining fully clothed why pornhub has decided to remove itself from this.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. So you do get that. I don't think that's what you were looking for, but you do get that. I honestly think the people, these legislators aren't unhappy about that. I think their whole goal is to ban porn. But anyway, yeah, VPN is going to make it impossible to do what they want to do. Interesting. And probably pornhub knows that. Right? Gizmo appearance by Gizmo the cat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're gonna see the. The. The rear end here.

[Paris Martineau]

No, she's got her trying so badly.

[Leo Laporte]

Her locks really trying to show. I want the catato. What I've been up to, ladies and gentlemen. You have been up to a. A brisk hour and all right. Two hours of conversation about all things technology. We are going to keep doing that. We're going to refocus a little bit on intelligent machines, on AI or robotics and. And our smart devices. Whether it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And the advertisers are going to just flooded.

[Leo Laporte]

They're gonna eat it. Watch you watch. We'll have many more.

[Paris Martineau]

We're gonna be able to have a show for months. We'll tell you months.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually like the rebranding and it's finally a way to get rid of that horrible theme.

[Paris Martineau]

And guys, if you're worried that the show's gonna be all boring discussion about A.I. oh, not gonna happen. I would fall asleep.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's gonna be basically the same show. We're just changing the name to fool the Advertiser.

[Paris Martineau]

Don't tell that.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think we. I think there's an opportunity to get some interesting guests on. So we will do that. We don't want to compete with your show. Jeff. Jeff does AI Insider with. With our own Jason Howell. And that's a great show. And. But. So we're not going to be like that show. I think so, no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because we go through kind of the week's new real news.

[Leo Laporte]

AI news and stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. We don't get distracted as much as we do here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This is more going to be different.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the philosophical discussions here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, stuff like that. Paris Smartno has a very important story that will be breaking on the weekend.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sometime in the next week.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it going to be a weekend publication or sooner?

[Paris Martineau]

Perhaps sometime in an upcoming weekend near you?

[Leo Laporte]

An upcoming. Well, I'm a paid subscriber to the Wonderful Information. I think the information.com is a must. Very, Very astute coverage of technology and.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Also such a paid subscriber.

[Paris Martineau]

I had to go through four efforts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

To get my credit card to clear with them.

[Paris Martineau]

If you're interested in more AI news but don't want to subscribe, we just launched a new AI newsletter called Applied AI It'd be our second AI newsletter. That's free and you can read all the stuff you want there.

[Leo Laporte]

See? Jessica knows how to get the advertisers interested. She knows what she's up to. Very smart art. Thank you, Paris. Great to see you. Jeff Jarvis. Congratulations. When do you start your teaching assignment?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm probably going to work more on curriculum development.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm working on a degree that's related to AI and other fun stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

I did see that the Gutenberg parenthesis is going to be used as curriculum material. As I said.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. It got an award for. For an outstanding academic publication from the publication. From Choice. Publication of the. Of academic librarians. I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not a real academic. Don't tell him.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you. You know what? You're as much an academic as anybody. You count what makes you an academic? A funny hat. You. You got it all, you know, you.

[Paris Martineau]

Got so many funny hats.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Jeff Jarvis, former professor. Professor emeritus. Always be a professor emeritus at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University. Can never lose that theme.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, we can't.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet Craig has things to say about AI Maybe we can get him back on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, I also.

[Paris Martineau]

AI is right there in his name.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you can't spell Craig without AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Plus, we want to get Craig and Stacy on because Craig gave you granted to the work that Stacy does, right? That's right. Reports. So we should come on and talk about that as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's a great idea. We will absolutely get to work on that. Thank you all for joining, as we do this week in Google. Every Wednesday, right after Windows Weekly. That's usually around 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. You can watch us live on all of those eight platforms. Discord, if you're a club Twit member. But also Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, Twig. No, there's no such thing as Twig. Tick tock. That's it. LinkedIn, Facebook, Kick and X.com there. All eight of them. I try to do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm not going to call this twig anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Figure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So what is it? I am where I'm twim. Well, no, it's this week. So it's him or I'm. It's like. It's like 60 Minutes. The I'm, as they call them. Oh, I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm Bob Wallace.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I'm Marvin Kremsky. And this.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm. I'm 60 Minutes.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What kind of bean are you?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a human being.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm a lima bean.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm a black bean.

[Leo Laporte]

I like my Blackbeard.

[Paris Martineau]

Controversial.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. We don't talk about race here, Jeff. Thank you, everybody, for being here. We'll see you next time on this Week at Google. Bye.