This Week in Tech 1019: Nickel for Your Thoughts

Summary

Podcast Summary: TWiT This Week in Tech 1019: Nickel for Your Thoughts

Release Date: February 17, 2025

Hosts and Guests:

• Leo Laporte (Host)
• Brian McCullough (Techmeme Ride Home Podcast)
• Ian Thompson (TheRegister.com)
• Wesley Faulkner (Influencer, Wesley83.com)

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1. Welcome and Guest Introductions

The episode kicks off with Leo Laporte welcoming his guests—Brian McCullough, who is celebrating the milestone of his 2,000th episode on the Techmeme Ride Home podcast; Ian Thompson, recently promoted at TheRegister.com; and Wesley Faulkner, an influencer focusing on representing the "regular Joe in technology" (00:00-01:32).

2. TikTok's Return to App Stores

A significant topic discussed is the reinstatement of TikTok on both Apple's App Store and Google Play. Originally removed due to a U.S. law upheld by the Supreme Court, TikTok's return raises questions about the assurances provided by Attorney General Pam Bondi that the ban wouldn't be enforced immediately (02:05-05:50).

• Leo Laporte: “So TikTok never really went away... now I guess they have assurances from the Pres.” (02:21)
• Brian McCullough: “The fines for that as it's written in the law are so they're like, they would amount to like something like $10,000 per user.” (04:28)

3. Doge Website Breach

The hosts switch gears to discuss a security breach involving Elon Musk's Doge website. The site, hailed as a "coding disaster," was easily hacked, allowing unauthorized users to push updates and deface the page. Experts noted the lack of proper security measures, highlighting that even knowledgeable individuals failed to secure the site adequately (07:17-10:19).

• Wesley Faulkner: “I think this shows that being smart in one domain doesn't necessarily mean it translates to another.” (08:17-08:26)

4. Intel's Potential Selloff of Fabs

A major portion of the discussion centers on Intel's financial struggles and the possibility of selling off its manufacturing fabs to TSMC or Broadcom. Intel's foundry business has been losing money, and despite recent quarterly results, the company may not sustain itself without significant restructuring or external investment (32:25-54:59).

• Leo Laporte: “Intel's quarterly results weren't awful, and the stock did all right... but they are selling off their fabs.” (38:14)
• Brian McCullough: “So, so the key is that there are laws that say the for profit has to be compensated fairly.” (22:35)

5. IRS's Investment in AI Supercomputing

The conversation moves to the IRS's acquisition of Nvidia's Blackwell processors to enhance its machine learning capabilities for fraud detection and taxpayer behavior analysis. While this investment signifies a move towards advanced AI within governmental operations, concerns about the implications for privacy and data security are raised (11:12-15:51).

• Wesley Faulkner: “If they're actually purchasing these for ownership in their own data centers... That's a very good thing for some.” (14:28)

6. Elon Musk's Bid for OpenAI

Elon Musk has made an unsolicited bid of $97.4 billion to take over OpenAI, stirring significant debate. The bid is perceived as part of Musk's strategy to control AI development, potentially driving up OpenAI's valuation and complicating its transition to a for-profit entity. This move has been characterized as trolling with tangible consequences, aiming to disrupt OpenAI's governance and financial stability (20:00-26:49).

• Brian McCullough: “It's likely trolling, but trolling with a consequence 100%.” (23:24)

7. Data Privacy and AI Regulation

The episode delves into the complexities of data privacy in the age of AI. Discussions highlight legal battles, such as Thomson Reuters' successful AI copyright lawsuit against Ross Intelligence, emphasizing the challenges AI poses to intellectual property rights. The necessity for comprehensive privacy laws in the U.S. is underscored, with concerns about data brokers and identity theft (64:39-84:27).

• Wesley Faulkner: “We cannot trust him and he can't even sit there... there's no accountability.” (28:26)
• Leo Laporte: “I'm just hoping there's a national federal privacy protection act. And I don't think we're ever going to get one.” (84:29)

8. YouTube's Dominance and Streaming Trends

Leo and guests discuss YouTube's growing dominance over traditional TV, with YouTube now being the most-watched platform on TV screens in the U.S. They explore the platform's evolution, including the introduction of AI-powered features like video summaries and auto-dubbing, enhancing user experience but also raising questions about content quality and monetization (90:00-122:53).

• Brian McCullough: “YouTube is the most powerful thing in media... they don’t have the production budget that they don’t have any production.” (94:59)
• Leo Laporte: “Plus they are making money off the ads.” (07:17, later timestamps)

9. Advancements in Quantum Computing and Fusion

The hosts express optimism about breakthroughs in quantum computing and fusion energy. Despite skepticism from industry leaders like Nvidia's Jensen Huang, who predicts quantum computing is decades away, discussions reveal genuine progress and the potential transformative impact of these technologies on society (131:00-157:00).

• Wesley Faulkner: “Quantum computing uses the way nature works to get an outcome... it's how it harnesses nature to get your answers.” (131:03)
• Leo Laporte: “If you could have one invention that would change the world... it's fusion.” (157:00)

10. AI's Role in Content Creation and Deepfakes

The episode touches on AI's advancements in content creation, such as Meta's AI-powered Echo capable of mind-reading with 80% accuracy. While these technologies promise significant benefits, they also pose ethical dilemmas and risks, including the proliferation of deepfakes and misinformation. The discussion emphasizes the need for robust regulations and ethical frameworks to navigate AI's evolving landscape (160:35-165:00).

• Leo Laporte: “It's going to be more than that. It's gonna have a consciousness of cells from what you say... hmm.” (Earliest relevant timestamps)
• Wesley Faulkner: “Sounds like doggy telepathy.” (157:11)

Conclusion

The episode wraps up with reflections on the rapid pace of technological advancements and their societal implications. The hosts advocate for informed and proactive engagement with emerging technologies to harness their benefits while mitigating associated risks. Membership promotions and upcoming show announcements conclude the discussion, underscoring TWiT's commitment to delivering timely and insightful tech news.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Leo Laporte (02:21): “So TikTok never really went away... now I guess they have assurances from the Pres.”
• Brian McCullough (04:28): “The fines for that as it's written in the law are so they're like, they would amount to like something like $10,000 per user.”
• Wesley Faulkner (08:17): “I think this shows that being smart in one domain doesn't necessarily mean it translates to another.”
• Brian McCullough (22:35): “So, so the key is that there are laws that say the for profit has to be compensated fairly.”
• Wesley Faulkner (14:28): “If they're actually purchasing these for ownership in their own data centers... That's a very good thing for some.”
• Leo Laporte (26:18): “They don't have anything that they have to worry about when they publish it on YouTube themselves...”
• Wesley Faulkner (84:27): “Remove the penny and they removed the nickel and made a brand new seven cent piece.”
• Brian McCullough (94:59): “YouTube is the most powerful thing in media... they don’t have the production budget that they don’t have any production.”
• Wesley Faulkner (131:03): “Quantum computing uses the way nature works to get an outcome... it's how it harnesses nature to get your answers.”
• Leo Laporte (157:00): “If you could have one invention that would change the world... it's fusion.”
• Wesley Faulkner (157:11): “Sounds like doggy telepathy.”

This comprehensive summary captures the breadth of discussions in episode 1019, from major tech company strategies and AI advancements to data privacy concerns and the evolving landscape of digital media consumption. Notable quotes provide direct insights from the speakers, enriching the narrative and offering context to key points.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for TWiT this Week at Tech. Brian McCullough is here from the Techmeme Ride Home podcast. Ian Thompson from Thereegister.com and our good friend Wesley Faulkner in the news, TikTok. It's back in the App Store. How did that happen? Elon Musk's Doge website has already been hacked and it looks like we're ready to sell off intel for parts. Aw. It's all next on Twitter. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech, episode 1019, recorded Sunday, February 16, 2025. Nickel for your thoughts. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the weeks tech news. And here I thought we were, like, amazing, because we've been doing this for 20 years and we have 1000. This is episode 1019. And along comes Brian McCullough of the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast, who is about to celebrate 2,000 episodes.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, yeah, but if we strung together all the episodes for all your shows.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I guess.

[Brian McCullough]

Have you ever done that counting?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's more than 10,000. Yeah, I figured it's a lot. It's enough that if I really wanted to retire, I could have an AI ingest them all and I wouldn't have to do a show a lick of work for the rest of my life. Great to have you, Brian. Welcome. Also here, Wesley Faulkner, Influencer, Wesley83.com he's decided he doesn't want to talk about work anymore. He just wants to be an influencer.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I want to be a person of the people. I just am here representing the regular Joe in technology.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it. What does that make us? The princes of technology? We're all regular Joes here.

[Wesley Faulkner]

You're the platform.

[Leo Laporte]

Upon which you are boot dancing.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yes. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ian Thompson's also here from the Register. Great to see you.

[Ian Thompson]

Pleasure.

[Leo Laporte]

He has been promoted to reporter.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, honestly, the writing is the fun stuff, so. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Nice. It's great to have all three of you. So I've been out of town for a couple of days, went to Tucson to buy a hat, and oh, my word, I got the hat. But I missed the news. So apparently while I was gone, Apple and Google both put TikTok back in the App Store. What?

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah. That's surprising.

[Brian McCullough]

It's.

[Ian Thompson]

It's kind of. Yeah, yeah, we passed a law. Yeah, we're gonna just ignore that one for the moment, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

So TikTok never really went away, but you couldn't download it all because of the law that was not only passed by the US Congress, signed by the President at the time, it was also upheld 9 to nothing by the US Supreme Court. But then President Trump said, ah, hold on. He signed an executive order saying, you got, we're going to give you a 75 day extension to find a buyer. At the time, both Apple and Google said, yeah, but the fines are pretty steep. If, if, if that doesn't work out, we don't want to take that chance. So they didn't put it back in the App Store. They took it down on January 19th. But now I guess they have assurances from the Pres. I don't understand what's, what's changed.

[Wesley Faulkner]

One thing is that the statute of law is five years, which means the penalty can happen outside of this administration, so the next administration can enforce those penalties. And so them saying, we hope that you will do the right thing, President Trump or Congress to actually pass a law to repeal the law, which is what they'll need to do in order to make sure that they're out of the woods. They're putting a lot of hope and that it won't come back to bite them.

[Brian McCullough]

So, because also remember the fines for that as it's written in the law are so they're like, they would amount to like something like $10,000 per user. So if you do the math on the hundreds of millions of users, just.

[Leo Laporte]

The people who follow my son alone, it'd cost you billions.

[Brian McCullough]

But supposedly they got a letter from who's the AG now, Pam Bondi. Right, right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

This is according to Bloomberg sent him a letter assuring them that a ban wouldn't. Now this does not seem very assuring immediately be enforced.

[Ian Thompson]

I think it's a question of can they find a buyer. And Larry Ellison is reportedly very keen. You know, I'm sure Elon would throw some money at it because that's what he does.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there was a rumor that Musk was going to buy it, but then he denied that. Yeah, it'd be interesting if he bought it because he would then really control two of the primary social networks that people use for news.

[Wesley Faulkner]

But TikTok never said affirmatively that they're willing to sell. Right?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

They have not actually said yes, as soon as we find a good agreement of who we can sell it to, then we'll, we'll do that. They have not seen said anything into the affirmative is that they're moving in.

[Brian McCullough]

That direction, which is there were also the rumors, sorry, there Were also rumors, though, that the Chinese government might like Elon to do it. Right. Ah, so if. What if. What you're saying, Wesley, is that TikTok never said we're gonna sell, which we also assume the Chinese government says we don't want TikTok to sell. But if the Chinese government is okay with Elon, then in theory, that could happen.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very confusing. Although I think a lot of the rationale for banning TikTok is moot because security has just disappeared inside the government's computing. And it's just. I feel like that's the least of your problem. If you're worried about security or even propaganda, TikTok is the least of your problems. Anyway, who knows? It's very weird.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, the weird thing has been people moving from TikTok to RedNote, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

That was just a. Yeah, I mean.

[Ian Thompson]

I did a deep dive into RedNote Security this week, and my goodness, it's bad. They're still using HTTP. You know, they're not even encrypting traffic going, yeah. I mean, the security on that app is terrible. And I spoke to somebody at Citizen Lab, and they're saying, look, we don't think it's there for espionage. It's just really bad coding.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Sloppy code. It feels to me like there's more. There's something else that went on under the hood that we don't know about, because a letter from the Attorney General saying we're not going to do anything immediately doesn't seem sufficient to get both Apple and Google to take the risk. I'm sure their lawyers are saying, well, there's a lot of risk. There could be huge fines. I just. I think there's something else under the hood, don't you? There can. There must be some other assurance beyond just. Yeah, we're probably not going to prosecute you immediately. That's fair.

[Ian Thompson]

Probably. But it's nice to have the sort of Damocles hanging over your head, you know, making decisions. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, we should mention that the Doge website was hacked almost immediately.

[Ian Thompson]

Smartest guys in the room.

[Leo Laporte]

This is from the new republic. The doge.gov website is such a coding disaster that pretty much anyone can take over. 404 Media broke the story. Anyone can push updates to the Doge Got Gov site. Two sources independently found the issue. One made their own decision to deface the site. The defacement was these experts in quotes left their database open. Row, row. This is in the. On the page, it says, meet the US Government Trace Your tax dollars through the bureaucracy, US Government, executive branch, small independent agencies, and these experts left their database open.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Row.

[Leo Laporte]

Row.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I think this shows that being smart in one domain doesn't necessarily mean it translates to another.

[Ian Thompson]

Absolutely.

[Wesley Faulkner]

That, that they, even if they are experts and they're smart in my, in Tesla's or Elon's companies, that expertise doesn't translate to everything. You can't just say you're a smart person. You can figure it out there. There's years, decades of knowledge that our government employees have done to and like stacks and stacks of regulations and checks and balances to make sure that this stuff doesn't happen. And if they're not following those and they don't have any respect for any of those, stuff like this is going to happen over and over and over again.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I'm. I don't know how smart I am, but I would know better than using a WordPress theme placeholder page for waste.gov it was. It's a placeholder. They use the. Just in case you want to make it look just like your site look just like that. They. The rest of the webpage is about an imaginary architecture firm called Etude pulled from a sample webpage for a default WordPress theme called 2024. I used to use 2024. It's a nice theme. This is from Jason Keebler, writing for a 404. So not only was the doge.gov site hackable, the waste.gov site that it was set up was not even done. It says Etude is a pioneering firm that seamlessly merges creativity and functionality. Also, Waste does not comply with executive orders issued by Donald Trump McKinsey. It contains the word diverse, but that's left over from the old architecture site.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, this is no checks, no balances. Do what you need to do. Throw something up. We'll just.

[Ian Thompson]

We're moving fast, but move fast and break things. Yes.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, it takes. It's okay to sit back and just like, well, how do we want to approach it? What makes the most sense? Because you're going to have to be doubling back and re. Like, it's confusing people. And that's okay. Apparently in this administration to just move forward and see what happens.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the old Silicon Valley motto, Meta's motto was move fast and break things, actually.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yes. But this is move fast and kill people.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the thing. When the government breaks things, it's a little bit more than when Meta breaks things.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And it's not just rolling back a change. We're talking about, especially if we're talking about firings and we'll move, probably get into that later. These are career professionals with decades of knowledge that we'll lose them and we won't get them back. You can't just fire people or let people go and then replace them with anyone that doesn't have that really ingrained institutional knowledge.

[Leo Laporte]

And so I understand though the urge, I mean, look, it's pretty clear that government is bloated. There's a lot of waste. I understand the urge, the need in fact to find that waste and get rid of it. I don't think that's a bad thing. It's being done extraordinarily.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Waste another person's livelihood.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Can't just some things that. And there's waste like the. Let's talk about usaid. Let's say that it's wasteful to give this, these benefits to all these other countries. A lot of the wheat, a lot of the rice, all the products that were shipped overseas were basically a subsidy, subsidy for our farmers.

[Leo Laporte]

That $2 billion a year. Two billion a year.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And so you might say, oh, that's wasted or that's someone's pork project or whatever, but that doesn't mean that it's worthless just because people feel it's waste. And you have to understand the reasoning behind this. And if you're not doing the work, even like whatever the $50 million for condoms for Gaza or whatever they said.

[Leo Laporte]

It actually wasn't for Gaza, turned out Mozambique.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes.

[Wesley Faulkner]

If you don't ever ask why.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Then you never understand the root of why that decision was made and why.

[Leo Laporte]

It was like, well, this is what you get. This is what you get with Elon and this is apparently what, what he wanted. I have to say I'm sad because one agency that is not eviscerated is apparently the irs. They've just purchased an Nvidia supercomputer. According to the Intercept, the IRS is set to purchase The Nvidia SuperPod AI supercomputer 31 servers with Blackwell, those very fancy giant Blackwell processors. All of this to enhance the IRS's machine learning capabilities for fraud detection and taxpayer behavior analysis. Well, it's a revenue generating arm of the government. Right.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, we have to pay our taxes, you know, it's the price we pay for a civilized society. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

248 Blackwell processors to be exact.

[Ian Thompson]

They finally got them. They were delayed for so long.

[Leo Laporte]

But yes, a single superpod system is $7 million. But I'm not the exact Cost is not specified in the acquisition document, so Maybe it's only $7 million. It will feature enhanced memory upgrades. Yeah, you want to get all 64 gigabytes of RAM. I'm sure it's a lot more than that. Providing substantial computing power for the irs Research Applied analytics and Statistics Division, RAS to operate large scale machine learning models as part of their compliance data warehouse project.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I would love to see it confirmed. If they're actually purchasing these for ownership in their own data centers. I. Because of the way the things have gone, pushing towards private industry. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a contract in which they're purchased through another entity to have this, a third party, and then they have access to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And so basically, I don't know if we're for this. This is going to be an XAI data center and.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's going to be installed at the IRS Computing center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, just up the road from you.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Okay, good. All right. That makes me feel a little better. At least we'll own this. Yeah, I wonder how long it'll be relevant for. But yes, this sounds great.

[Leo Laporte]

The IRS has 68 different AI related projects underway. It makes sense. If you have to process tax returns from hundreds of millions of people, you're going to need some pretty hefty computing.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, on the other hand, they did have the IRS system which was a free tax return essentially where you know, they would estimate your taxes and send it to you. And that was one of the first things that was killed. It's a rather system in its way.

[Leo Laporte]

Elon said that I saw his ex post, so I wasn't sure if he meant the free file system. Remember that the IRS trialed last year so that you don't have to pay $60 to TurboTax. It's free, except as soon as you want to file, you have to pay them for the free tax return. So the government trialed this last year to great applause and they were going to do it this year. As soon as I saw Elon say it's. He said deleted. I checked and I was able to do it.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, right.

[Leo Laporte]

So I don't. This is the problem. It's. I don't even think Elon knows what's deleted and what's not. The free file system, the last time I checked, which was a few days ago, is still up and running.

[Ian Thompson]

Okay, Well, I mean, it makes sense. It's the way that everyone else in the world does it, every country. I mean, it's. I had Never had to file a tax return until I came to the US and it was just like, it's taken out your paycheck, easy job done, nothing to worry.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't understand Americans over here.

[Ian Thompson]

Fifteen years, I think I'm getting there.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't trust the government to tell us what we owe. We got to figure that out for ourselves, right? I think Americans really. I mean, you know, in Sweden, you get a postcard that says, hey, we took the money. Thanks so much. See you later.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, in Norway, all public, all tax returns are public, so you can see exactly what everyone earns. And that goes political leaders all the way down. And yes, that would never play here. And I'm not quite sure it would work, to be honest. But it's an interesting idea.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I talked to Matt Cutts about this specific topic when, way back when he was in charge of what is now called Doge.

[Leo Laporte]

It was then. It was the U.S. digital Service. Have a meme name?

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yes, yes. And for this issue, he said that he personally was really trying to champion this to happen, and that they were working on building APIs into different parts of the government so that they could, if. If a law did change to kind of like do the pipe work, piping to bring that all together. So my guess is that they might be ready for this to be able to do audits with a large supercomputer to figure out what's missing, what's not, which would be a good thing for some. But then there's a. With the way that this administration selectively applies the law to who they feel is the people that don't agree with them, I would be afraid of it being weaponized in that way.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, they're talking about, oh, we're the smartest people in the. In the room. But having access to that amount of data is distinctly worrying. Without any controls or background checks. I mean, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm actually. Maybe somebody can explain it. Elon tweets like 100, 200 times a day. He is a champion in two video games. He's running Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company, and Neuralink. I'm sure I've left a few out. And he has time to do this. When is this guy. Oh, and let's not Forget he has 13 children. When does this guy sleep?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, it's interesting, I was talking to somebody at SpaceX, and distinctly off the record, and had a sort of more relaxed situation, but they were saying, Honestly, SpaceX works best when Elon's doing other things and he's not Sticking his finger in the whole time. Know, it's like, let us get on with the engineering. This is what we do best. Yeah. You go and raise money and the rest of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, even if you. Okay. Even if you take SpaceX, Tesla, Mr. Boring Company, Neuralink away. I couldn't tweet 200 times a day and still get anything done. What is going on? Is this guy. Is there. Are there ten Elon Musk's? Really?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I'm sure he has people for it. You know, it's kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels like. I mean, unless he's got somebody hired to do dad jokes, it really. It feels like it's in his voice. Don't you think?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. On the other hand, he does. He is dad to a lot of kids. So apparently with an influencer, we've just learned this. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

New kid, two new kids. We also learned that he's not actually. Forgive me for getting vulgar, he's not actually sleeping with these women. So this is another activity Elon's got.

[Ian Thompson]

He's.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. I don't even want to go any farther. We're just gonna stop now.

[Ian Thompson]

Let's justice.

[Leo Laporte]

He sends out vials of his sperm to people.

[Ian Thompson]

How romantic.

[Leo Laporte]

It's romantic. I would, you know, I want. If it came with a contract that said I will support you and this child for as long as the child's will.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Oh, bad choice of words.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Why? What do you mean?

[Wesley Faulkner]

Nothing. Bad joke.

[Ian Thompson]

Just.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Let's just move forward without acknowledging the words that you use.

[Leo Laporte]

It's right over my head there. It must be the hat. All right, let's move on. It's just I. It's a little baffling. By the way, another thing Elon did this week. He put in a bid for OpenAI of $97.4 million, which feels, in Elon, it must mean something, right? Everything's 420 or 69. It's all dad jokes. Does anybody know what $97.4 million. Billion.

[Brian McCullough]

Billion isn't?

[Ian Thompson]

97.4 the average temperature of the human body?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think it's 98.6. Unless it's changed. I don't know.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I feel like it's a radio station he listens to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

The way things are at the moment, you wouldn't put it out of the box.

[Leo Laporte]

He's also suing OpenAI because they're doing a transition from a not for profit to a for profit. When he co founded it with Sam Altman, the old idea of OpenAI, and it was an I think an honorable idea back in 2015 was let's create. We don't want the big companies like Google and Microsoft to dominate artificial intelligence. It should be open, it should be for the people. So we're going to make an open research project called OpenAI. Of course, a few years later, Elon we now know, because the emails have been released, threatened and said, I want to take it over. And if, if you, if you don't let me take it over and run it for profit, I'm going to go after you. And they said no. And Elon was forced out. But it turned out they needed a for profit division because it's hideously expensive to generate these large language models. So they had this kind of weird dual structure of for profit, not for profit. Now they're trying to say that forget the non profit part, we're just going to be for profit. Elon Su he's currently suing and then made an unsolicited bid. It's widely believed that it really was more about setting a price way above what they're worth to anybody else who might want to invest.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, not necessarily what they're way above what they're worth because one of the things is there are laws that say if a for profit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, below. I meant below, not above. It's well below the valuation.

[Brian McCullough]

That's what I was going to say. So, so the key is that there are laws that say the for profit has to be compensated fairly. And there were numbers floating around that okay, they would compensate the nonprofit at x dollar figure. So he did come in above what those rumors were. And so the idea here is what people are suggesting is, hey, if Elon could take over controlling interest of OpenAI for $97 billion, that seems cheap, but at the same time that drives up the price of what OpenAI would have to pay to the nonprofit to get out from under the governance. Also keep in mind that so it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Trolling, it's trolling, but trolling with a consequence 100%.

[Brian McCullough]

Because also remember you have other investors like say Microsoft, that they would be interested in what the value of their holdings are. And at the same time we know that OpenAI is in talks with Masaan and SoftBank to have a $40 billion investment round, we think the numbers will come in at. So again, if that's the case, if Elon drives up the price of what they would have to pay to the for profit like OpenAI does not have $97 billion to compensate the nonprofit. And so again, and even $40 billion won't cover that. So if he can jack the price up, even if he doesn't take over OpenAI, he screws over Sam Altman, who no less than President Trump has animated. What was the quote? He said something. He doesn't. There's a guy that he hates or something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's not a fan of Elon. No.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The funny thing is he ended around. He did an end around on Elon when he kind of snuck Larry Ellison and son son Masayoshi, son of SoftBank into the white House and got the President say, yeah, we're going to spend $100 billion to create Stargate. Do you see Elon anywhere in there? No. So there's this, there's this internecine, almost childish war between these two.

[Brian McCullough]

I totally jinx that. By the way, if you look at my Monday show title, it's Sam Altman outmaneuvers Elon Musk.

[Leo Laporte]

He did.

[Brian McCullough]

And then the very next day Elon does this thing. So I said on the show, I was like, oh, sorry Sam, I jinxed you. Because yeah, Elon, it's a slap fight. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is between billionaires. By the way, the board rejected the take.

[Ian Thompson]

I understand. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Because they knew, in fact they even said it's not a serious. We know it's not a serious bit. It's really. And by the way, Elon has a closed source AI company called Grok or xai. Right.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, see that's the other aspect of this is let's say that he drives the price up so high that they can't do this for profit transition. In theory, then OpenAI cannot raise any more money and then in theory would go out of business. Right. So that would be the ultimate third degree level of this trolling. It's just wild because as you said, it's eye wateringly expensive to train these models and things like that. But it's sort of a heads he wins, tails Sam loses sort of thing. So it doesn't really matter.

[Leo Laporte]

Basically, it is amazing to watch these infinitely rich people. I remember when Bill Gates had a billion dollars worth of net worth. He said, for all intents and purposes, I'm infinitely rich. I have so much money I could not spend it in a lifetime. So everything else doesn't matter.

[Ian Thompson]

Post economic as the phrase is at the moment.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you're postecon. So Elon, by the way, has fired back, has announced that Monday tomorrow As we record, Xai will release its quote, scary smart grock 3. Did you ever think we'd live in a World where there was a government agency named after a meme coin, an AI named Grok. That was scary smart.

[Wesley Faulkner]

President's Day.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's on President's Day.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

George Washington must be just, you know, reaching about 45.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. Revolutions per minute in his grave. Yes. The. It has been a remarkable week. I have to say, Elon bringing his kid into the Oval Office was quite something. I, I don't think Donald is a big fan of children, except in the abstract.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty clear as X, as the child is named, that's his nickname because no one can pronounce his full name. As X approached the Resolute desk and the President. You can watch the tape. President Trump's like offending him off. He's like getting. And then, and then the kid who was three years old so doesn't know any better, picks his nose, wipes it on the desk.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And tells the President, shut up. You know what's sad about that? I was talking before the show with Wesley, who is also a parent, is, you know that he says this three year old says shut up. Because he's told that all the time.

[Ian Thompson]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. He. That's like his vocabulary. It's actually very sad.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It was just a weird. See, I feel like we're living in, in. Maybe Elon's right. It's a simulation. And then something's gone wrong with the software because it's just weird. What's going on.

[Ian Thompson]

SimCity with a disaster menu turned up to max. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I thought actually Elon was fairly coherent and logical in that talk. He made some sense. Some of the stuff he said was made up, I think. But I'm not against the idea of cutting government waste. There's clearly a lot of it.

[Wesley Faulkner]

It's just that we can't trust him and he can't even sit there that you can't trust him. And so he needs to bring actual receipts instead of a website that he curates and he is able to say, like put his own spin on it with, with no checks and oversights. He's. There's no accountability, which means he controls the narrative and that is not how we are supposed to run. He could be 100% right. And I hope that he is for all of our sakes. But the, the. But we already know that he himself says that he's not. And nor can we. There's no change log. There's no, no commit log to look to see exactly what he's done.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't retract it. Maybe you could. I don't know. I hope they're. I hope they keep writing, taking notes. Elon says that the Grok team is working all weekend right now. As we speak they are. I wonder if Elon's still tweeting though. But as we speak, they are working hard to get Grok out. On Monday, he said it, he told Summit, World Economic Summit in Dubai by video call because he couldn't get to the world Government summit earlier this week, that they were still a week or two away from releasing the product and he didn't want to be hasty, but he seems to have decided to press ahead. He posted on X that he would be honing product with the team all weekend and that he will be offline until then. I think so. I think if you've been looking for Elon's posts, it's. He's busy.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, remember they. They spun up, I think it's the largest supercluster or one of the largest superclusters in existence. And they did it in like record time. So I think it's specifically, it was to train this model and.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know what? Maybe, maybe when he said I'll be offline, he meant just mostly offline because he did just post an hour ago. I see here. And then before that it was. It's been a few hours and. And you know, retweeting doesn't count.

[Ian Thompson]

Interesting that Andrew Tate comes up in the suggested things for Elon Musk these days.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they keep trying to me to get me to follow Andrew Tate. I. Tucker Carlson and I just chinless wonder.

[Ian Thompson]

That beard is fooling nobody in the style.

[Leo Laporte]

This is. This is Elon's post in the style of Eeyore's ring verse, introducing the origin of rings. Assign engineers to work on an advanced LLM with search the verse of the engineers. Oh, I'm not gonna. No, I'm not gonna read this. Three minds for the search kings, keen and precise under the cloud where vast data lies. 7 for the agents with choice to devise in halls of code where their logic flies. Nine for the memory weavers Keep. This is. I'm sorry, that's sacrilege. I'm not going to go on.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, hey, by the way, you were asking if maybe he has people tweet for him. But have we not considered the idea that he's trained for him? That's what I'm saying.

[Ian Thompson]

That's a possibility. I mean, it's. It would explain an awful lot as well, because we don't like to say that AI is wrong. We call it hallucinating, which is just a way of saying it's screwed up. So, you know, I mean, it's possible. I wouldn't put it past him. Put it that way, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that's the solution. We know he's actually using other people to play his video games.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, that was just, you know, everyone does it. No, amazingly enough, a lot of people don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I share my account with 20 people in China. Yeah, doesn't everybody? Sure. Let's take a break. We come back. We actually have some other news. Big news. Will intel be sold off for parts? It looks like that might be coming. Brian McCullough is here from the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast. Wonderful to have you. You're still a little pink, my friend.

[Brian McCullough]

I'll work on that during the ad break.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if that's your natural color. Wesley Faulkner is also here. Great to see you, Wesley. Wesley83.com is the website and Ian Thompson, actually, Wesley, we might have reported for the Register. We might have just lost Wesley. He was warning us. He lives in Northern Virginia and there's some severe windstorms going on right now.

[Ian Thompson]

Ooh, nasty.

[Brian McCullough]

Oh, that's the stuff that just went through Kentucky.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right. So he was a little concerned that he might get blown away. Stay tuned, stay tuned. Our show today, we're very pleased to say, brought to you by Shopify. When you think about businesses, I'm just, I love Shopify because without Shopify, my son would still be getting an allowance from me, let's put it that way. When you think about businesses whose sales are rocketing, we're talking all birds. Untuck it. Salthank.com you think about an innovative product, a progressive brand and button down marketing. But often the overlooked secret is actually the businesses behind the business. Making, selling, and for shoppers, buying simple. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify. There it is. That's that sound. When Henry said I, you know, he was a TikTok influencer, Instagram influencer. Millions of followers making those sounds, sandwiches. He said, I want to, you know, sell salt. Because salt Hank is his brand and he set up a site to use Shopify made it easy for him to sell the salt. Now he's selling pickles. Nobody does sales better than Shopify. Home of the number one checkout on the planet. And I can tell you, Henry loves them. The not so secret. Secret Shop Pay shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%. That means way fewer carts going abandoned, way more sales Being made. I love that sound. So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web in your stories. Opening a restaurant in New York City, you better believe Shopify will be there in their feed and everywhere in between. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. You don't have to convince me. I've watched it happen. Upgrade your business. Get the same checkout that Salt Hank uses that Allbirds uses. Sign up for your $1 a month trial period shopify.com TWIT that's all lowercase. Shopify.com TWIT to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com TWIT another sale. Thank you, Shopify, for supporting this week in tech. Did. So you were saying something? Benito, did we lose Wesley? Oh, there he is. We just got him back. Yep. Winds are howling in Nova. Are you okay?

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Hopefully it will not. We won't lose it again. So it's. It's been kind of all over the place with. Yeah, no, I lost it for a day and a half last week.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And so it's. It was. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. That's a bummer when you lose your Internet for a day and a half. Who's the provider?

[Wesley Faulkner]

We use Cox Internet, but there are so many trees here, and we are in the mountains as well, and so it's. The terrain is not good. There are a lot of trees that can fall on lines, and since it's the. The. The incline, it makes it hard to get service. Roads get blocked off really easily. And we also had torrential rains yesterday and today, so there's flooding as well. So it's just not the best. I'm. I'm. But we haven't. We've gotten brownouts, but haven't lost power.

[Leo Laporte]

For a long time, so stay safe.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Sorry about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, don't apologize. Just stay safe.

[Ian Thompson]

No, it's. It's the same over here. It's just like, you've got to have a couple of. I've got a couple of, you know, battery packs ready, which should theoretically give us a couple of days laptop use, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you in. You're in San Francisco?

[Ian Thompson]

East Bay, but. Yeah, but we're half a mile away from the Hayward fault lines, so we have off water, we have our camping supplies, and we've got battery power backup. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing. Yeah, amazing.

[Ian Thompson]

It is quite bizarre, though, when you invest your life savings in the house that close to a fault line.

[Leo Laporte]

Where are you in the Bay Area. I forgot where you are.

[Ian Thompson]

El Cerrito area.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I know you are in. Where's Brian?

[Brian McCullough]

I'm in. I'm in Brooklyn.

[Leo Laporte]

Brooklyn? Yep. Well, nothing bad ever happens in New York.

[Brian McCullough]

You're fine, by the way. Now, I think I look blue, but.

[Leo Laporte]

You can tell me you're not getting more. I don't know what's going. What kind of camera are you using?

[Brian McCullough]

No, it's not the camera. It's this new light that I'm using. And theoretically you can change the color temperature and I don't think it actually functionally works.

[Ian Thompson]

We're talking a smart device, which isn't that smart.

[Leo Laporte]

What a shock. Well, the power broker is perfectly white balanced, so you're safe. All right, let's continue on. Intel has spoken with the Trump administration and TSMC over the past few months about. Get ready for this. This is a shocker. Selling off its fabs to csmc. You know, Intel's quarterly results weren't awful and the stock did all right. I think I remember last week, right. Tsmc, of course, is the Taiwanese company that makes the chips for Apple.

[Brian McCullough]

So wait, I got some stats for you. If you're just mentioning versus TSMC. Intel's foundry business lost $13 billion on $17.5 billion in revenue last year. Just last year, 2024. Meanwhile, TSMC had $41.1 billion in profit on $90 billion in revenue over the same period. So comparing. The comparisons are not Great.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Intel's fourth quarter revenue down 7%. This is the most recent quarter, year over year, full year revenue down 2%. So intel, you know, struggling. I think nobody doubts that. So here's the plan. They're going to sell the fabs perhaps to tsmc, which would help TSMC because many of those fabs are in the U.S. right. And that would give TSMC, who already has a foundry in or a fab in Arizona, to become more of an American company, which I think they would like to be. Meanwhile, Broadcom is also in the mix broadcast. Now, this is Broadcom's. Where are they based? Singapore, Taiwan. I've forgotten. They've joined TSMC considering deals for parts of Intel. According to the Wall Street Journal.

[Ian Thompson]

It is very sad to see how low intel has fallen. You know, I mean, if. If the board had chosen Pat Gelsinger in 2005 rather than Paul Otolini, intel would have saved itself 20 years and billions of dollars in stocks buybacks and actually invested it in, you know, making TSMC a competitor, if not outclassing Them, but they sat on their laurels, they took the money. And now we're looking at one of the great American chip companies being scrapped and sold off for parts.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess Broadcom would take the foundry. What part would Broadcom tip. Go ahead, go ahead. You wanted to clarify.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I was going to say they cannot 100 divest because of the money that they got from the, from the government Chips Act.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And so even a cell would be a partial sell. It wouldn't be 100.

[Brian McCullough]

To answer your question, Leo, Broadcom is looking at the chip design.

[Leo Laporte]

They want the design.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, business.

[Leo Laporte]

And TSMC wants the plants, but they're not working together.

[Brian McCullough]

According to the Journal, which you would think because you know Broadcom would want somebody. If they don't want that part of the business, they would want somebody to take it. So maybe they should work together to talk to Intel.

[Leo Laporte]

But a White House official told Reuters on Friday that the administration might not support Intel's factories being operated by a foreign entity, tsmc. They're unlikely. The White House official said the Trump administration supported foreign companies investing and building in the US it was unlikely to support a foreign firm operating Intel's factory. So maybe it doesn't solve TSMC's tariff problem.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean TSMC has a very mixed bag when it comes to sort of investing in US Fabs anyway. They've had to import an awful lot of workers from Taiwan with our existing facilities over here.

[Leo Laporte]

Arizona plant.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So whether or not they could take over Intel's, you know, fab factories and actually make them run in the way that they would like is a very mixed game, put it that way. On the other hand, Taiwan, given China's stance, looks like somewhere to get out of. So it could be an interesting exit route.

[Wesley Faulkner]

But is importing of workers is because we don't have the knowledge right here for that industry? Well, it's not like they, they, it's not like we, it wouldn't transition into mostly a, an American.

[Leo Laporte]

It wouldn't add jobs. I'm trying to remember that. I think the Arizona plant only had a thousand U.S. jobs. Part of that's not merely we don't have the brains. We do have the brains, but they're very, they're much more expensive. The PhDs who are working at the TSMC plants in Taiwan make around $65,000 a year. You're not going to get a high level PhD expert working for you in Arizona for that price.

[Brian McCullough]

But it also is the institutional memory stuff. If, if we haven't had people doing this domestically for 20 years or more.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Brian McCullough]

Then you don't have people with 20 years experience doing it that you can just pull off the shelf.

[Ian Thompson]

Absolutely. I mean, it takes time to spend. I mean, I'm glad was that you brought up the CHIPS act because, you know, it's like it's all very well and good. Yeah, let's build chip fabs in the US but it's going to take four to five years to get those on stream and you need the skills base there and you need to be training people from day one on how to work it and all this sort of. Well, you know, we'll just tariff everyone and you know, we'll develop our own manufacturing. But it takes a hell of a lot of time and that interim period is very dodgy.

[Brian McCullough]

But also vis a vis the CHIPS act, one of the things that was reported on was that a lot of that chips money that was funneled to intel on the way out the door, the Biden administration was trying to get as much of it out the door as possible in fear that if the Trump administration did not follow through on delivering that money, Intel's basically reliant on it at this point. And so if it doesn't come through, then Intel's kind of goose is cooked and thus back to Leo saying sold for parts.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. As you know, after the election, shortly after the election, the Biden administration finalized a $7.86 billion award to Intel. But you know, what if the check's not in the mail? Yeah, I wouldn't cash it. Let's put it that way. Let's hold off. There are also milestones that you have to achieve to get that money. Intel has met some initial project milestones and was to receive a billion dollars by the end of December. There was a grant reduction because it was going to be more than 8 billion down. 8.5 billion was announced in March. Yeah, I think Intel's just really at this point, these are early conversations, according to the Wall Street Journal, that they haven't been, they haven't gone too far. Broadcom TSMC way possible intel deals that would split storied chip maker. This would be the last chapter in the story of Intel.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, from a national security perspective though, you do want a chip maker who is domestically based and who is doing the best stuff. Selling it off to a foreign company doesn't seem like the best strategy.

[Leo Laporte]

So for some reason I keep thinking Broadcom is not based in the U.S. do you know, Brian?

[Brian McCullough]

All I know is that they were the most recent people to pass a trillion. A trillion dollars in market cap.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think they're from Singapore. Yeah, they're multinational, so they're one of.

[Brian McCullough]

Those ones where you would know them.

[Ian Thompson]

From previous names and headquartered in San Jose.

[Brian McCullough]

But yeah, it says American multi. Net. I'm on Wikipedia. American multinational designer, manufacturer, developers.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, okay.

[Brian McCullough]

They used to be known as Avega Technologies.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Avago.

[Brian McCullough]

Avago.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they were flashing back to silly, wasn't he?

[Ian Thompson]

Aviato.

[Brian McCullough]

Okay, wait, first HP Associates, then Agilent and then.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Agilent, I remember.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, yeah, there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

So Broadcom has been really kind of a conglomerate of all sorts of stuff. It's interesting because AI has just been such a boon for Nvidia. It feels like Intel. You're right, intel kind of had. They started making better GPUs 10 years ago. They might be the ones in this position now. Arm, which has been up to now a completely design, a fabless company, a design firm, has said we're going to start making our own CPUs in house.

[Ian Thompson]

No, because I've read through this and we've been discussing it in house. I mean it seems like they're going to still be using TSMC to actually make the chips themselves. They're building their own fabs.

[Brian McCullough]

Yes. So, yeah, but the point is, is that they've never. They've always been the Switzerland.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. They sell the design to Apple or Qualcomm or.

[Brian McCullough]

But even if nothing else about the story, the idea that they are going to risk that, you know, now maybe they're seeing the writing on the wall because everybody from Meta to Apple already does it to. Everybody's trying to get their own chips in house. Right. And so maybe it's not as risky for them to be like, okay, we also now have our own chips. Chip that is branded by us, that, you know, designed by us, all that stuff, as opposed to just licensing the designs, which is what they've done their whole life.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Have they said whether or not they're going to license whatever they create for Meta? Is that going to be part of their. Now there's their reference SKU where they can say this is what we, we have. And now anyone else can have it.

[Brian McCullough]

Supposedly Meta is the exclusive partner for this first job.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, okay. Well, they've got money to throw around. I mean they've been trying to get the Metaverse to take off for years now and it really just isn't going anywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's all over. We're doing AI now. Come on. Get rid of the picture. Unbelievable.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, it's. I don't know, it's a sad end for Intel. I do. I mean, I, I was going to intel developer forums 20 years ago and they were doing some marvelous things and it just, they got basically market domination and got lazy and someone else came up and took their lunch. It's, it's a sad thing, but it's the way competition is.

[Wesley Faulkner]

They. They were too comfortable with trying to like, be the leader in the industry in a way that was in a direction that they, People didn't want to go. But since they were the, the, the biggest player in this game, they thought that people would just follow them. We've had conversations about Optane and how.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God, yes. What was it? U. Yeah. Unobtainium.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I mean, basically it's just like you don't, you don't need a crossover 32 to 64 bit chip. We'll just go, 64, go for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ian Thompson]

And I was sitting in that keynote and it was just like, my goodness, you're gonna get your lunch eaten on this one.

[Wesley Faulkner]

You know, and they had that video card that was based on x86 technology. Yeah, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

And the show that they thought was going to be a mobile processor, it was just like madness.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Just. They sunk too much money into these, these, these things that they're like, well, this is going to benefit us the most. And so that's why we're going to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

The conventional wisdom industry was that they always wanted to be an integrated company where they both designed and manufactured the chips. And that made a lot of sense until TSMC came along and showed that it's much more efficient to make the chips that others design and sell it to them. And they got, they kind of got their lunch. There were a lot of reasons, I guess.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, they went down the wrong, the wrong road in terms of chip design and chip fabrication. You know, they had real problems dealing with the smaller nanometer chips. But yeah, I mean, they just should have invested and they should have kept engineers in charge.

[Leo Laporte]

That was that. You know, we were talking about this before the show and I guess that was my question is, had they known 10 years ago? You know, Tim Cook started meeting with TSMC 10 years ago, we now know, because the chairman of TSMC wrote his autobiography and he said, I started meeting in 2011 with Tim Cook because Tim was worried about the direction intel was taking and started to talk to us about making chips first for the iPhone and then later for Macs. Says long ago, as 2011 but I wonder if intel knew that, had that information, could they have done anything differently? They were kind of caught up in the innovator's dilemma, right. To take a, at that time, highly successful, highly profitable business and completely change it is very difficult. It's hard to convince the stakeholders, oh no, you know, 10 years down the road this is going to be a problem. We got to change now.

[Brian McCullough]

That's what happens to miss two of the most historic, you know, secular shifts, mobile and the GPUs. Yeah, didn't they, you know, and, and they missed GPUs even before AI because GPUs got hot because of, of crypto.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, so before that gaming, they could have known, right? Nvidia made gaming GPUs, they could have known at the time. I remember seeing, I remember seeing that Intel's GPUs were used in cars, they were used in gaming, they were used in crypto and they were used in AI. And I thought, this is a company that has irons in every important fire of the 21st century and as a result this should be a good company. Whereas intel just couldn't do it.

[Ian Thompson]

No, I mean they tried buying in GPU talent and didn't particularly work. It was just, they were locked into the x86 platform and it infected everything else. And yeah, it was great for a while in data centers, the Atom, they couldn't scale down for mobile processing, so they just abandoned that, the GPUs. They 14 other companies and then that didn't quite work. And it just seems like a lax state of innovation, let's put it that way.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, in some ways they were saved and shouldn't have been. When Itanium was a flop because it was too hot, it really wasn't a good chip. They were lucky, it was huge. They had a little skunk works in Israel that was designing an X86 chip which ended up being the core chip. And they were able to just. Cause they had this company kind of these engineers off in the corner doing something, all right, toss out the Itanium, bring in core. And that kept them going for another 10, 15 years. But maybe it would have been better had they had really said, oh no, we gotta do something here. I don't know. It's easy in hindsight to say they should have done better, they should have known better.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, but look at the. You said somebody said they're the x86 company and remember that their partner for the duopoly all those years was Microsoft. And the joke on Microsoft was. They think they're a Windows company, not a software company anymore. And so look at how Windows has turned itself around.

[Leo Laporte]

No, there's the counter example.

[Brian McCullough]

Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft has done an amazing job. But that's the example that proves. That's the exception. That proves the rule, isn't it? Because so many companies struggle to make that turn Amazing.

[Brian McCullough]

And also Microsoft also did miss mobile.

[Leo Laporte]

And yet they almost missed the Internet. Yeah, Bill Gates thought the Internet was just a fad.

[Ian Thompson]

No, no, I have a copy of the Road Ahead in the bookcase, actually. But it was just like. It's like the CB radio for his age. And then all of a sudden it was like. He gave an interview recently where he said, that book came out two months before. I basically had to go to the company and say, look, we need to reconfigure for Internet. And they rushed it and they implanted Internet Explorer, got themselves a huge antitrust problem. But they were panicking. They were late to the game. But Microsoft has reinvented itself. I wish intel could have done the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it Ray Ozzie who wrote that famous memo to the Internet tidal wave memo?

[Brian McCullough]

No, it was Ozzy. I can't remember. It's been too long since I wrote my book. But, you know, the funny story about the Gates book is that if you have the hardcover, because I bought both the hardcover and the softcover, did research for the book. If you look in the index, the Internet has like six citations in the hardcover. If you get the paperback, there's like 200. So yeah, Ian, if you can find the hardcover and the softcover, there's a difference between the two. Significant.

[Ian Thompson]

Okay, I'm just looking around for the hardcover at the moment. But yes, I didn't get the softcover. They basically had to.

[Leo Laporte]

So they kind of went in after the fact and said maybe this Internet thing is.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, nobody likes to make it to be, you know, called out on what they predict.

[Leo Laporte]

But I'm actually really looking forward to the Bill Gates autobiography. That's due soon, isn't it? He's been doing a book tour.

[Brian McCullough]

He has been a four part.

[Leo Laporte]

It's four.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, good Lord. Because yes, he's just on his early years.

[Wesley Faulkner]

It's three parts. He's separating. The first part is coming out.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, he's doing the Bill Gates, the early years.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. He did admit. And I saw this. I think he was on Fallon. You remember that famous scene at All Things D. You got Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Sitting in those red chairs and they. What a. What a. What a coup. They got both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on stage to talk these historic rivals. And Steve says, yeah, Microsoft never had any taste. He said, I don't trust anybody who didn't take acid. They should have taken acid. Bill Gates is unfiling. He says, I couldn't say anything at the time because I was the CEO of the company, but I took acid. I've taken acid.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, he was wild back in the day.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes, I took acid. It didn't help.

[Brian McCullough]

I guess there's that famous mug shot because he used to drive. He had so many speed tickets that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

He also bought one of the. I think it was the Porsche 959, imported it and then couldn't drive it for 10 years because it wasn't street illegal. But he does like to go fast. And I see Steve had the right.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Jobs had the right idea. He would lease a Mercedes. Every few months he would lease a new one because you could have a car for three months without having getting a license on it. And. And so he didn't want it. Once he had to put a license plate on it, he didn't want it. So he kept getting a new car every three months. So his Mercedes never had a license plate on it.

[Ian Thompson]

He also used to park in the disabled parking spaces of Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

Whip right up. Yep. Yeah, that's my spot. Yeah. You know, to be fair, they should have had a CEO spot for him. Yeah, I mean, it's too hippie. Californian. And so he said, well, I'm just gonna take this one. That's closer anyway. All right, let's take a little break. More to come. It is, it is. I think we will be. I don't know, we'll be. We'll be eulogizing intel or will intel survive in some form or fashion?

[Ian Thompson]

I think. Sorry.

[Brian McCullough]

I was going to say they'll survive in the same way that HP has survived in different names and forms and pieces.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, it's a very good way of putting it.

[Leo Laporte]

GE is basically been split into parts.

[Wesley Faulkner]

General Electric or they survive the way Nokia survived. HMD parted out to whoever wants it.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Ian Thompson]

I very nearly moved out to Finland with Nokia in 99. And it's just looking at the way the thing's gone now. It's like, yeah, good, good move. Not.

[Leo Laporte]

So one of our regular chatters still works for a Nokia and he says it's a good job. So I'm not going to. I'm not going to.

[Ian Thompson]

It was a fantastic company. I mean, seriously. I mean, you go into the canteen and everyone ate there. The CEO, CTO would be on the next table. It was a very egalitarian structure. Their engineers were great. Their management, however, just missed the boat. One of those things.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope we're not. I hope we don't have to do the intel eulogy at any point. But usually these companies just fade away, right? They just. They don't. They don't die. They just fade away.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Like General McCarthy, I'm just going to say, generally, as a person that used to work for amd, intel was a big bully, and they would not be in this mess if they didn't do the shenanigans that they pulled and really try to compete on their own merits. And that's my personal opinion. I'm not speaking.

[Brian McCullough]

So, Leo, if you ever have to do. If you have to do a eulogy, you got to get Wesley on to give the rebuttal.

[Leo Laporte]

They were glad.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, I'm glad they're gone.

[Leo Laporte]

Glad, I tells you.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, they. I mean, they did bully suppliers when it came to Opteron, which was a clearly better chip. And it was just like, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft was the worst bully of all.

[Ian Thompson]

Right, well, the Wintel Alliance, Google is.

[Leo Laporte]

In trouble now because they bully people over Android. I mean, this is how you become a success. This is how big. This is the story of big tech. They're all bullies.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, well, you know, it's like you don't want free market competition because Monopoly is an awful lot more profitable.

[Leo Laporte]

So good, isn't it? So good. Let's take a break. We're gonna come back with more. Ian Thompson. So nice to see you. I hope you're all doing well and keeping the lights on there in beautiful East Bay, California. The [e-mail] Also, Wesley Faulkner and Nova, is it?

[Wesley Faulkner]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you in Nova?

[Wesley Faulkner]

I'm in Roanoke. Is that Nova is north of Virginia.

[Leo Laporte]

North of Roanoke, Yeah. You're where. You're the original. That's where the original America was born, in Roanoke.

[Wesley Faulkner]

This is the second Roanoke. The first Roanoke is the last colony of Roanoke.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't even know where it is.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, that's St. Augustine oration.

[Leo Laporte]

What's St. Augustine?

[Brian McCullough]

St. Augustine was the first in what is. In the continental United States. It was the first settlement, I'm pretty sure, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I thought the Roanoke colony was.

[Brian McCullough]

I think St. Augustine was like 15, 10 or 20 or something like that. And Roanoke was like early 1605.

[Leo Laporte]

85, it says.

[Ian Thompson]

Okay, okay.

[Brian McCullough]

And then where's Roanoke? So if I'm wrong, correct me now.

[Leo Laporte]

The Lost Colony.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. England. Said, take your point, take your square toed shoes and bugger off to the colonies.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I was told there would not be history on this.

[Leo Laporte]

You live in Roanoke, Dude.

[Brian McCullough]

It's just Wesley, you're right. Almost about the same time. 1585. So you know, six and one half dozen of the other.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I'm sure the Native Americans had something to say about that. But yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And also, also our historian, he is the Internet historian, Brian McCullough from the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast. That book he's talking about, a history of the Internet. Right.

[Brian McCullough]

How the Internet happened. It's up there somewhere. Yeah, there's been talk, but I have no current plans to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

I think somebody's got to write a book about AI, but you got to be taking notes because it's moving very, very fast, actually. Very fast.

[Brian McCullough]

There are a couple of those in the works. I couldn't. I forget who the writers are that.

[Leo Laporte]

Are doing that, but yeah, books, maybe not the maybe aren't timely enough to really reflect what's going on.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I was talking to somebody who does security training and it's like if it's in a book, it's out of date.

[Leo Laporte]

It's too late. It's too late. Yeah, I know because I have 13 of them that I wrote that are so completely useless on my bookshelf. Wesley Faulkner is also here. Wesley83.com. I tried to plug you and you had disappeared. So now I'm going to give you the plug. All right, Our episode this week, somebody pulled the plug. Was it Cox or was it your electricity?

[Wesley Faulkner]

It was Cox.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, yeah, this Internet is hard.

[Ian Thompson]

I'm tempted to make an off color joke here, but still.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Ian Thompson]

Something about pulling out things down.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, to be fair to Elon, we're comcast here, but I have a Starlink right above me, a satellite dish just in case for failover. That's. And it's been useful several times during shows. Our show this week, brought to you by Oracle. There's a name you ought to know, right? Even if you think it's a little bit overhyped. AI is suddenly everywhere, from self driving cars to molecular medicine, even business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming fast. But AI takes a lot of speed, a lot of computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? It's time to upgrade to the next Generation of the Cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OCI OCI is a blazing, fast, secure platform for your infrastructure, your database, application development, of course, all your AI and machine learning workloads as well. OCI costs 50% less for compute, 80% less for networking, so you're saving a pile of money. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded oci, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters and Suno AI. Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new US customers with minimum financial commitment. Offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at Oracle. That's Oracle.com Twitter we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. And when you go to that address, you're supporting us too, because then it lets them know you saw it here. Oracle.comTwit this is a big deal and actually I thank you Brian for bringing it to my attention. Thompson Reuters we just mentioned them won the has now won the first major AI copyright case in the US and honestly I didn't think they would win this one. I didn't think anybody the New York Times is suing, Publishers are suing. In 2020, Thomson Reuters, which is a big media conglomerate, filed an AI copyright lawsuit against Ross Intelligence, which is a legal AI company. In the complaint, they claimed that Ross reproduced materials from Thomson Reuters legal research firm Westlaw. If you're an attorney, you know those names. A judge ruled this week in Thomson Reuters favor, finding that the company's copyright was indeed infringed by Ross. The judge, Stefanos Bibas U.S. circuit Court Judge wrote, none of Ross's possible defenses holds water. I reject them all.

[Brian McCullough]

Can I give you some important context here? Yes, this was not an LLM. This technology in question that they were sued over was prior to this current generation of AI. But what's key here is it was the fair use part of it that the judge did not like. So even though this is not striking down LLMs or the current types of models that people use, it is about how you train and the judge is essentially saying you just hoovered up their stuff and that's not fair use.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Ian Thompson]

And then sold as commercial products. Yes, I mean it was a fascinating case in terms of and I think it's going to have an important knock on effect for the rest of the cases that are going on along this. It's quite amusing as someone you know who started writing in the Napster years and it was like oh no, copyright. You know, all our products are very carefully you know, need to be carefully conserved. And then now, yeah, just slurp up that data and fight it in the court.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, and also, like, what they, what they did is they rewrote, they ingested all of the data, and then there were specific things that Westlaw used and then had recategorized and had headnotes and summaries and things like that. And so essentially what the argument was is that, well, you just regurgitated that verbatim. And so again, this is what I'm saying. Number one, it probably is not a good thing for the current wave of AI startups, because if it's saying that ingesting is not fair use, that's bad. But it is important to note that what they are specifically saying is you were surely plagiarizing, you were regurgitating word for word stuff that we did.

[Leo Laporte]

So that is not how current LLMs work. And I think that's the defense of LLMs. LLMs read it in kind of the same way we would read it. You know, I might be able to quote verbatim a word or two from a book I've read, but I don't keep a copy of that book in my head, nor do LLMs. They tokenize it and they give weights to the tokens, but the actual text does not survive in the LLM. So there is something called the right to read. In fact, if Kathy Gellis, our attorney, were here, she would be arguing very much in the favor of the right to read. You and I have the right to read a book that's copyrighted material, that's owned by somebody. You go to the library to read it. You could buy it. You could even go to a bookstore, read it, put it back on the shelf. You don't have to give the company money to read it, but you have the right to read it. You don't have the right necessarily, and this was a Google case, to Xerox it and then sell it, but you have the right to ingest it. And then if somebody asks you to regroup, you know, to give them your understanding of what you just read, that's what an LLM is. Much more analogous to what it is.

[Brian McCullough]

Sorry, I couldn't remember the term. It's non generative AI. Okay. So that's the key term that I couldn't bring to my head. Yeah, it's, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

So, by the way, Ross went out of business three years ago citing the cost of this litigation. So they're gone. Yeah. So this is really an old style kind of A. I don't even know if you would call it AI in this. In the.

[Brian McCullough]

So the question is, does this mean that it's not fair use to ingest or does it really not settle it yet? Because if it's generative, then you are regurgitating it in a different way. And even not regurgitating, that's not the right word. When it comes. The output is not the same as the output from this case, which was basically word for word, line for line, identical.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I think the difference is that LLMs today, generative LLMs bring in a lot of different sources. But if you're training on one source, then whatever you're regurgitating is going to be based on that same source. It's not going to be a transformative.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Wesley Faulkner]

So if they only looked at Westlaw and only got the opinion of Westlaw and only talked like Westlaw because they only trained on this law, then that's basically just. Even if you remix it, you're still using the. It's all distilled from that information. If you were only, let's say looking at movie reviews from one person and looked at their whole entire history and just say, what do you think about this movie? And it only shared the same opinion of that one person every single time. You're always hitting their work that they created, then that's not generative. That's not unique. That's only. Maybe the words might be different, different orders, but you're saying the same sentiment.

[Leo Laporte]

I still think you'd have.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Pulling in a lot of different information.

[Leo Laporte]

Like you'd have the right to do that. If you read. If, if you read Roger Ebert's review of a movie and then somebody asked you about that movie and you said, well, I don't like it because and. And paraphrase Roger Ebert, I don't think you would have. He would have a. He's passed away. But I don't think. But if you only case against you.

[Wesley Faulkner]

If you only had your opinion based on Robert Ebert's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And maybe you sold. And then you sold that opinion and.

[Wesley Faulkner]

You only did that and not and said that these were the things that they did wrong and things that they did in terms of the movie and the creation that they did right, which is very opinionated. Right. Someone else has. Has a different flavor, what's important to them. And you always had those. These are the bad points. And it really like one to one matched the history. Then that's not generative at all. It doesn't diverge at all.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Of Course, courts are, you know, for instance, the New York Times has sued OpenAI. And that's the crux of their case, is that they were able to, with going a lot of effort, persuade OpenAI to regurgitate paragraphs of verbatim text from the New York Times. And it's their contention that's not fair use because it undermines the New York Times ability to monetize because you wouldn't have to buy the Times to read the Times. That is a very flimsy case and I think that I hope the courts will see through that. But that's different than this. In other words, by the way, I really want to recommend, I, while I was on my three day vacation, spent three and a half hours watching a video from a YouTube video from a data scientist named Andre Karpathy. He was one of the founders of OpenAI. That literally in three and a half hours, explains how these AIs work. And I learned a lot that I didn't know before, including the fact that AIs don't store text. So. Which explains, remember the people were laughing at OpenAI@chatgpt, because you would ask it how many Rs in the word strawberry? And it would say two or three, five. Or it would get it wrong. He explains it. He says, well, that's because it doesn't store the word strawberry. It tokenizes everything and then assigns probabilities to succeeding tokens. That's basically how an LLM works. It's worth watching. I highly recommend it. I know it's a long video, but I really got a lot out of it. He explains it very clearly, very knowledgeably, and it convinced me that an AI is not doing. It's not stealing any more than you're stealing when you read something. It's working from its memory of the stuff it read. Now, it did ingest the entire Internet.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, there's two things about that. If you memorized all of Shakespeare and you just from rote memory said all of Shakespeare, now Shakespeare's not under copyright anymore, so that's not a good example. But any movie or anybody's book, if you memorize line by line, word by word, and you regurgitate it, like, that's clearly copyright infringement. But if what they're doing is churning out the thing that I did, memorize it. And I'm telling you, based on memorizing everything in the world, what I think like that in a way. Ian's shaking his head, but in a way. Go ahead.

[Ian Thompson]

No, no, no, I'm. Please carry On, I mean, I just, the situation is developing so rapidly at the moment that I, I'm, I'm not quite sure that as you say, coming back to what we said earlier, we're in the move fast and break things scenario and I think there's an awful lot of terminology being thrown around. There's an awful lot of hype being thrown around. Give me concrete results, I'm there. But, you know, it's. I, I'm a professional cynic. It's what I do well.

[Brian McCullough]

And also you make a good point because it's functionally not going to matter because this is the Uber model. The Uber model was. As we go from city to city and, and if we can spin up fast enough that within six months people are using it and loving it, what are you going to do? Tell people, hey, you can no longer use Uber? So by the time this gets through the courts, what are they going to do? Shut down the models? I mean, they can still find the companies and put them out of business. But, but all of these companies, big and small startups and mega trillion dollar companies, have made the calculation that if we don't take the gamble, we're going to be behind and then we're dead anyway. So that's it.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I was right before the show, was going to write a post about four different ways that big companies in this space are going to go out of business. And one of them was talking about the Uber model. The thing is about Uber is people were paying for Uber and then they slowly ratchet up the cost.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Unfortunately, in the AI space, most of these models are free. There's a free tier for everything and try to convert someone from paying nothing to anything. And at the same time, most of the cost is to train these models and create them. And there is also a lot of cost in the inference, but that's marginal compared to the training of these large models. And so let's say OpenAI is the number one person here and they decide, hey, we are no longer going to have a free plan. People are just going to go to the other thing that's free.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's too much. And now with Deep Seat.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, yeah, I mean, Deep Sea case in point. Yeah, I mean, apparently the CEO of Deep Seat was called in to see Winnie the Pooh. Sorry, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks a lot. You just got us banned in China.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, come on. Being banned in China is a mark of pride. But, no, but, yeah. I mean, basically he's pulled in the CEO and said, great job and he just wiped billions of dollars off valuations for American companies. And you may have changed the market.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, if you were conspiracy minded, you would say, and I think this is probably the case, Deep Seek misrepresented how much it costs for them to make their model. It was subsidized by the Chinese government and it was launched as a missile at the US AI industry to, to tank them at the stock market, which it did. Now the good news is because it's open weights, you can in fact run Deep Seek without sending your data to China. If you run it off Deepseek AI or use the Deep Seat, that's not the case, but you can go to Hugging Face, for instance, and many other places where they're running the full Deep Sea model and you can use it without it ever leaving the United States. And it's a very interesting world we're in right now.

[Brian McCullough]

It's not just that the Chinese came up with a way to do it cheaper, which they did, probably because we don't know. Right? Or if they did it was because they had to be resourceful because they didn't have access to the chips. But that S11 that they claimed was trained for $6. The reason that that happened, and again you could say, oh, but this is fiddling with definitions, but the reason that that happened is because they used an open source model and they used new techniques. Essentially they took an open source model that they didn't have to train from ground zero and they used new techniques that were like, okay, you already have this baseline of knowledge and can we tweak you to be smarter by doing different prompting, doing different data sets and things like that. So the real secret to things coming down will be the open sourcing of it because then all you have to do is change the recipes and change the training because once the expense has already been paid for the models, then it's about getting them more efficient and cheaper.

[Leo Laporte]

So again, I'm going to refer to this Karpathy video because it really opened my eyes as to what's going on. The most expensive thing is taking basically the contents of the Internet, whether it's from Common Crawl or other databases, tokenizing them and then churning on it. And it's very expensive using high end GPUs to create these giant, you know, base models of LLMs. But a base model LLM and you can play with them isn't very good. It's not a, it's not a chat agent, it's not a GPT yet. It then has to be trained in a secondary step that's much less expensive, involving humans. So all of that, by the way, those models are out there. They will continue to get better as they expand the number of tokens they can handle at once as we throw computing power at it. Basically more memory, more processors, more GPUs. They will get better. But the really interesting advance that Deep Seq did is at the other end with something called reinforcement learning. And Karpathy explains this in, I think, a very good way. You remember when Google's AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, one of the best Go players in the world, in something, you know, chess had been conquered years earlier, but most experts thought Go is too complex to really be solved by a computer. What AlphaGo did is a little different from what a LLM does. It used reinforcement learning. It played itself billions of games over and over and over and over again. And it did this reinforcement learning where it said, well, that move worked. That move didn't work. That move worked and refined itself until it became better than the previous models, which were done solely in the manner of, you know, an LLM and in fact got better than human players. Significantly better. And there's a. Karpathi talks about this. There's a moment in one of the games between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol. It's very famous move 37 where the AI AlphaGo makes a move no human would make. And all the GO masters you're looking at say, that's a blunder, that's a mistake, that's horrible. It won the game because it wasn't. It actually improved on human play. And that's what's happening with Deep Seek. That's what happened with these, what they call, these research models. They're using reinforcement learning and they've. And they. And it's the same thing with OpenAI's newest models. They're going a step beyond what LLMs have done. In fact, I've been using a. This is the story from VentureBeat. Perplexity is now making an AI research model available. I pay for Perplexity 20 bucks a month. And one of the things I like about Perplexity is it lets you choose from a variety of different models when you ask it a question. So I can choose from.

[Ian Thompson]

It's also very good about citing sources.

[Leo Laporte]

The base model uses the Internet, so it's up to date. So it now has a deep research model. It's slow, but it's significantly smarter. And you can watch it work, which is one of the things that made deepseek very, very interesting. OpenAI does not show its work in the same way because they don't. They consider it proprietary. Deep SEQ didn't care. And so you can watch it think. I hate to use those anthropomorphizing words because it's not thinking, but you can watch it go back and forth with the model to get a better result. These things, it's much slower but the results are much better. I've been playing with it all weekend and it's quite fascinating. So Deep Seek changed our the way we understand how AI works. It wasn't something that others didn't know, but it's certainly it's a new direction that others are going to take. This is one of the things we're going to be covering a lot in our new show, Intelligent Machines, which is taking over from this week in Google. It's all about AI and I really am fat. I'm very bullish about this. I think we're making some really interesting strides in this stuff.

[Wesley Faulkner]

To go back to what I was saying though, you cannot have a company that's losing billions of dollars every quarter and them also saying they're going to make it up in volume, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Like Uber, right?

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, yeah. They're going to go out of business. These the. There's almost going to be a cross where the open source models will be better than these proprietary models. And once you can do the inference locally, then what is the source of revenue?

[Leo Laporte]

Right now there's a race at the bottom.

[Brian McCullough]

You're talking about the commoditization and Wesley knows that I'm more bullish on this than some, but you're literally putting your.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Mouth where your money where your mouth.

[Brian McCullough]

Exactly. But the argument that you could, if you look at it through a different lens, this is just a new type of compute. Listen, you have all sorts of programs to help people communicate. Some have fancier wrappers than others. Why did Slack win when a different type of communicator, if you think of it through that lens of this is just a different style of compute, people will pay for it. What differentiates isn't the underlying commodity could be the intelligence, but then how you deliver it or the underlying terroir or secret sauce of the data could make a difference. And so that's why I'm bullish on it, because I don't see that this is any different than any other software that's ever been created since software existed.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Well, the thing is people could pay for it, but also there's the option not to pay for it and still get all the benefits. And that's as long as that's been the option of this has been true.

[Brian McCullough]

For open source software from day one of Open source software.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the tweet.

[Wesley Faulkner]

But you're talking about the same thing that's on the web is going to be the same thing locally. Like if you think about, like what's going to be shipping with all versions of Windows with local models and the same with other PCs from Apple, that you have local models that you can use, that you can use offline, even then why would someone pay for service when they can just run it locally? That's going to be quicker, more reliable and work offline. And even if a company, a company finds value in this, what is preventing them from just deploying their own servers to make sure that their data is housed locally, making sure that it doesn't go out to any proprietary third party and just be able to do the inference locally as well from a corporate standpoint.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're not there yet. I mean, if you've used Apple intelligence, you see that the drawback of trying to do everything on the device, right.

[Wesley Faulkner]

We are not there yet, but we are moving that direction. Oh, I agree that we're accelerating adoption.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the tweet from the CEO, the founder of Perplexity AI, Aravan Srinivas. He says, thank you for open, thankful for open source. We're going to keep making this faster and cheaper. Knowledge should be universally accessible and useful, not kept behind obscenely expensive subscription plans that benefit the corporates, but not in the interests of humanity. Let's not forget that these models are trained on the public Internet, that they can exist because the public Internet exists and because all of us have been pumping the contents of our brains onto the web for the last 15, 20 years. Right.

[Wesley Faulkner]

More than that, let me give a different argument. Let's go to the other side of the curve. Let's say these huge companies are super like advancing AI. Let's say we have agentic AI, right? And agentic AI, that, that's general intelligence and can do anything a human could do. And so we have companies that are going to be hiring less people because they're able to use these agents and this AI that's so smart that they can hire these people, sorry, these digital people instead of physical people, which means that less people will get jobs, but more people will start their own company because instead of having to hire huge staff, they use these digital employees. And so now we're going to have A lot more competition of different properties and different companies out there with different AI tools. But we're not growing the consumers. The consumers are going to be constrained, which means there's going to be less and less people to even buy the stuff, which means that these mega corporations cannot be sustained on the revenue flow from it being diversified between all of these other companies that are going to go.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that analogous to what happened in the music industry where 30 years ago you had platinum artists, a handful of people who made billions of dollars, the all Taylor Swifts, to a time when there were a lot of artists who could make a living, like 100,000 a year, not make the mega bucks that the big superstars did in years gone by, but a lot more artists can make a living as a musician. Is it like that?

[Wesley Faulkner]

Or. Think of the largest streaming platform we have is YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's a really good example. Yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And now everyone is.

[Leo Laporte]

Not everybody's a Mr. Beast, but there are plenty of people who can make a living. We're an example of that. You know, it can make a living on it. Actually, there is a related story, which I'm going to get to in just a moment. We're going to take a break. YouTube's CEO Neil Mullen came out with his annual letter this week with a surprising statistic. But we will hold off on that. But.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, you tease.

[Leo Laporte]

Hold that thought, Wes, because I think you're onto something here. Wes Faulkner is here. Wesley83. He's an influencer. Wesley83.com? Yes, he is. We won't talk about his job because we don't want to talk about his job. He's an influencer. He doesn't have a job. Well, he has a job, but he doesn't need a job. He doesn't want a job, but he has a job. So don't worry about it. Okay. He's fine. Right. Is that approximately right?

[Wesley Faulkner]

I want you to love me for me, but not who I am.

[Leo Laporte]

Love him for who? You know what, Wesley? It's always been that way from day one. Right.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Since I met you at South By. Are you going to go to south by this year?

[Wesley Faulkner]

Unfortunately, no, I am not. This is going to be the first South By I've missed since 2007.

[Ian Thompson]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a big deal, isn't it? You used to live in Austin, though, so it doesn't. Yeah, the first 10 years I was.

[Wesley Faulkner]

On the advisory board for south by. So, yeah, for 13 years.

[Leo Laporte]

Amy Webb is doing her annual talk there. She's going to be on with us the week after. So we'll get a south by report from Amy. They're going to miss you, Wesley.

[Wesley Faulkner]

They're also going to miss the convention center. They're tearing it down. What?

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Wesley Faulkner]

So that's. It's going to be a little bit of a chaotic.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it all going to be at the Driscoll? Where are they going to do it?

[Wesley Faulkner]

I have no clue of where they're going to.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Wesley Faulkner]

And it's going to be in multiple places.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably. Yeah. Spread out. Great to have you. Ian Thompson also here from the Register. The snarkiest news operation in the world.

[Ian Thompson]

We try.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it's good, it's good. It's always nice to have you on, Ian. And no, it was a pleasure.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And a good friend. It's not over yet, Ian. Don't get your hopes up. We still have many more stories.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, no, no, Lots more stories and oh, I thought you were talking about the nation itself.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was many more commercials as well. Yes.

[Ian Thompson]

You're welcome to join the British Commonwealth again if things get a bit. A bit sketchy over here.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what I've been thinking lately is I think humans like kings. We like it. We like having a guy. You know, there was this brief period in the United States where, you know, we were anti monarchy and we were like independent and we weren't have a self governing. But that's a lot of work. I think maybe we just want a king again. Not Charles, he's a buffoon.

[Brian McCullough]

But.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, come on. I mean you, you had George G.W. bush, for example, the son of a former monarch and wasn't the smartest tool in the box. You would have had another.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's put it this way, it's a work in progress. We're looking for a king. I'm just saying that Brian McCullough is also here. He's a historian. He knows. He knows what I'm talking about. Host of the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast. Great to have all of you and all of you watching. Thanks especially to our club. Twit members make this show possible. Yes, we have advertisers, but it's the club that keeps the lights on because the advertisers don't cover the costs of all the shows we do. I think now more than ever our mission is important as AI is about to change everything. We are covering stuff that's making a big difference. Used to be when I started tech was the toy store. Right. You were covering gadgets and gizmos. It didn't make much difference. That's all changed. That's all changed. And to keep up to date with what's going on, I think you need us and we need you. So if you're not yet a member of the club, I'd love to get you in it. All you have to do is go to TWiT TV club TWiT and sign up. Seven bucks a month, very affordable. Gets you ad free versions of all the shows, access to our wonderful Discord, a special program we don't put out anywhere else. TWiT TV Club TWiT. Thank you in advance. Our show today, brought to you besides by the club by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. See, it's the it starts with, frankly, what enterprises are doing these days. They have spent billions of dollars over over the last 10 years or so on firewalls, you know, perimeter defenses and VPNs because you need something to allow your employees into the perimeter defenses. How has that worked out? Not so well. Breaches are going up like crazy. There's an 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks, a record $75 million payout to ransomware in 2024. See, it turns out these traditional security tools aren't really protecting you like you'd like them to be. For one thing, the VPN expands your tax surface because you have public facing IPs and bad actors have something to latch onto. In fact, they're doing it faster and better than ever before thanks to AI. Plus, these VPNs struggle to inspect, as do the firewalls. Encrypted traffic at scale. What does that mean? Well, once a bad guy gets into your network, it's presumed he's a good guy, he's an employee. So lateral movement is you can access all your data, anything, every app. And that means the bad guy is going to be able to find your emails, find your customer information and exfiltrate it. They encrypt it and exfiltrate it and your firewall can't see it, doesn't know what it is, and lets it out. So you're getting data loss via encrypted traffic and other leakage paths. And bad guys are just exploiting your traditional security infrastructure like crazy. They're using AI to outpace your defenses. Really, the time has come to rethink security. You can't let the bad actors win. The perimeter defenses are not enough. Those bad guys are getting through, they're innovating, they're exploiting your defenses and they're using AI to do it faster than ever before. That's why you need Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI. This is a solution that transforms your security. It does in a few ways. It hides your attack surface. Your apps and IPs are no longer visible to the public Internet. They can't see it, they can't attack it. It also eliminates that lateral movement because users can only connect to specific apps, apps they're explicitly approved for. They don't get access to the entire network. And Zscaler continuously verifies every request based on identity and context to make sure that person is the right person to access that data. Zscaler+AI also simplifies security management with AI powered automation and detecting threats. Using AI, they analyze over half a trillion daily transactions, half a trillion transactions every day. They go through them all to find, find the danger zone. Right? The, the needles in the haystack that could, that could poke you. Hackers can't attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler Zero Trust and AI. Learn more at Zscaler.com Security Z S C-A L E R.com Security or for you, Ian, Zscaler.com Security we thank you so much for your support, Zscaler and and we thank you for supporting us by going to that address. Cscaler.com Security Two interesting statistics this week. One, the Super bowl, and I know you guys probably didn't watch it, was the most watched TV show of all time last Sunday, the most watched TV show of all time. But according to Neil Mullen, YouTube CEO, more people are watching YouTube than anything else. TV screens have overtaken mobile as the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S. more people are watching YouTube on TV sets than any other device here in the U.S. wait, wait, wait, wait.

[Brian McCullough]

You're conflating two things there. Number one, YouTube in terms of streaming is bigger than Netflix. They're by far bigger than everybody else. But the second statistic there is that.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you're watching on your TV on your big screen. Yeah. You're not sitting here in the line at the grocery store laughing at your YouTube shorts. You're sitting, by the way, they're very funny shorts. You're sitting in your sofa watching it on the big screen. So I mean, it's, it's two different trends. But I think they're related, Brian, because we are watching tv, traditional tv. We watch the super bowl like crazy. But every other day of the year, I think everybody's watching YouTube on those big screen TVs right.

[Brian McCullough]

I say all the time on the show that YouTube is the most powerful thing in media, that people continue to undervalue and underestimate their power. Everybody talks about Netflix and Netflix's only competition is sleep. But Netflix's real competition is YouTube. And YouTube is. If you just look at the amount of minutes, timeshare, whatever, however you want to do it. YouTube is bigger and they don't have the production budget that they don't have any production.

[Leo Laporte]

But. Well, I mean, they might have a token production budget, but. But really, the people who post on YouTube, we're paying our production costs, not YouTube. Right. So YouTube's getting it for free, basically. So 128 million people watched the Super Bowl. That was a rating of 49.1. Almost all the households with TVs were. Half of them were watching the Super Bowl. That's a pretty amazing thing. But again, those events are few and far between.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I wanted to say one thing about the YouTube thing, though.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Is that I use YouTube, but I watch YouTube a lot on my desktop or on my phone. I turn off autoplay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Wesley Faulkner]

On the television.

[Leo Laporte]

You leave it on like a hassle.

[Wesley Faulkner]

To do a search. So autoplay goes on. So I wonder how much of those are just. They like background and running. Even overnight someone's falling asleep or just. It's easier to. You don't have to channel surf when the TV is just choosing new programming. So that could be also the part of it is that the habits are dramatically different for how people use it on a tv as opposed to.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, but that's the. That's the genius of YouTube versus everyone used to complain about the boob tube. And when we were younger of, oh, people just sit there and mindlessly channel flip. The genius of YouTube is you don't even have to hit the remote button.

[Leo Laporte]

Let us choose for you.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

YouTube has announced also that premium members and I imagine soon everybody will have access to AI if the videos are too long, you can get summaries of the video, highlights and summaries of the video thanks to the AI built into YouTube. There's going to be a new button underneath. They also have auto dubbing using AI so that your YouTube video can be in multiple languages. That's going to become available later this month for all creators in the YouTube Partner Program.

[Brian McCullough]

And the one in.

[Leo Laporte]

Are we in the YouTube Partner Program, Benito? Because I would love to have this. This show be available in Spanish and Chinese and Japanese and tag along.

[Wesley Faulkner]

They're paying for your content. You know, they're paying for your.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so we don't want to be a partner.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, they also.

[Wesley Faulkner]

There's probably a lot of exclusivity stuff going on there too. You can only be on YouTube kind of stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, okay, never mind.

[Brian McCullough]

But the other big.

[Leo Laporte]

The only YouTube. I like being on YouTube.

[Brian McCullough]

The other big AI announcement in that letter from Owen is they're going heavily into the creation aspect of it. So you can type in I want to be on a beach in front of a beach in Hawaii or whatever. It's that sort of stuff that they're going heavily into now too. Or I want my shirt to look different or I want. All of that stuff is especially for the stand in front of my phone and do a talking head YouTube short or whatever. You could just immediately judge that up as much as you went with AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and that is, I think an important point is that for most people, I'll include myself. It doesn't you creating. I mean, you look at somebody like Marques Brownlee or Mr. Beast and those standards are so high, it doesn't feel like you could be a success on YouTube.

[Brian McCullough]

Have you ever been to his studio? Because I recorded something there once. It's a huge warehouse. If you're ever driving up i95 or down to the airport in Newark or whatever, there's all these warehouses along the water and he has a big one. So if you ever see his videos where he has the car outside in the parking lot, it's right outside. But yeah, it's a huge, cavernous thing with like, maybe it's a cheap warehouse or something, or whatever. But yeah, it is a. Oh, it's not cheap.

[Leo Laporte]

He's got money. He's got lots of money.

[Brian McCullough]

Leo, it's not a studio, it's a campus. Like, it is cavernous and Right. So to have this, the thing that. Again, we're coming back to the AI argument. One of the things that I always say about AI is right now, I mean, maybe it'll cure cancer tomorrow, but right now what it does is it takes away the busy work. And so for a creator to not have to have a cavernous studio, to not have to do all of the editing, all the. If AI can take away that stuff and say, say, hey, Leo likes to wear Hawaiian shirts, but right now he'd rather be naked. So let's have AI put on the Hawaiian shirt for him.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you know we're not doing that? How do you know?

[Ian Thompson]

Don't stand up, Leo, please.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is point four in Mohan's letter AI will make it easier to create and enhance the YouTube experience for everyone. Last year we rolled out Dreamscreen and Dream Track, which generate image backgrounds, video backgrounds and instrumental soundtracks for shorts. We'll continue to invest in those features, including integrating VO2, which is, that's the. I think that's the Google video generation AI into Dreamscreen soon. It is remarkable. His point is YouTube is not the future of television, it is television also. He does point out though, there are a few creators who are building their own studios. It's not just Marques Brownlee. There's new studios, he says. Alan Chicken Chow's 10,000 square foot studio in Burbank. Congrega Dayon. I'm saying your name wrong because I'm not. I don't know how to say their names. Is building a studio in Birmingham, Alabama last November. The creators behind the channels Mia plays, which is probably a 12 year old. Right. And Kumon opened their studio in North Vancouver. I'm sorry, go ahead, Wesley. I didn't mean to interrupt.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Oh, I was just saying that this is going at the same time where streaming services are either ratcheting up the costs on the top end or adding ads at the bottom end. And so it's becoming less attractive to use these streaming service or to use multiple streaming services.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you all pay for YouTube Premium? I'm just out of curiosity.

[Ian Thompson]

Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no.

[Ian Thompson]

Absolutely not. No.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, watch all those ads.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, you just skip over them. I mean, it's just, it is. It also. It's kind of. Maybe I'm being a bit too ornery about this, but I. You notice in the last couple of years, they've really ratcheted up the ads and it's just like to push people onto Premium. I refuse to play that game. You know, it's like, oh, I've got to sit through an ad for some hoodie or something. And it's like words, it's, it's, it's not that big a deal.

[Leo Laporte]

So you just sit through them.

[Ian Thompson]

Sit through and skip. Yeah, you know, I mean, it's a minor inconvenience and better that than getting. Paying for an endlessly. As, as you were saying, Wesley, the prices are ratcheting up and up and up and they're spamming more and more ads out there. It was a bad moment when they started running ads when you pause a video on YouTube. Oh, that was kind of like, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God, that's annoying.

[Ian Thompson]

It's like I paused to go and, you know, do something in the kitchen and Then all of a sudden I'm getting another ad.

[Leo Laporte]

But others, the streaming channels are starting to do that too. I think Hulu is so annoying. It's starting to do that. You're paused. You know, this would be a good time to go buy some new shoes.

[Ian Thompson]

Yo, I saw you looked at look looks a new sofa last week and maybe you'd like to go to sofa.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just jealous because we haven't figured out how to do that. We probably would if we could. You can close us.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, for some reason I keep on getting spammed with extremely inappropriate ads. You know, it's just like bras for small. For the small chested woman and you're gonna. Well, they're not that big.

[Wesley Faulkner]

But you know the bad things about the ads for those services too is they're super repetitive.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, they don't have enough advertising.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Ads over and over the same exact thing and.

[Brian McCullough]

But, but Leo, you're right. Everybody that swears by paying for it, like they love it. But what I know when someone tells me that is, oh, you watch more YouTube than I do. Because if I was watching an hour or two a day then for sure it would be worth it. I'm not saying there's any, I'm not being negative about YouTube or people that watch a lot of YouTube or whatever, but I don't watch enough for it to be worth my while. That that's how I know. Oh, you watched an hour or two a day. I get it.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know how much I watch. I watch a lot. I just watched that three and a half hour video. But what's amazing is here's this guy Karpathy who's an expert in AI. There were no ads. Maybe there were ads. I don't think he did it to make money. I think he wanted to actually teach people about what he's doing. So he made this three and a half hour, incredibly well done video. Not, not production wise. He didn't have a crane zooming in and animated graphics and things like that. But it just was, the content was very well produced and I think he did it. It's kind of the way the Internet was created, right, to just to create some content.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean I think it's very good in a way certainly from the advertising perspective for as you say, sort of these extended form documentaries or talks. I watched a lot of the naval college talks, for example, a fascinating one on what's going to happen to Taiwan if China, if China invades. And that's an hour and A half. And there's no adverts in it, so, you know, it's, it's a good deal. And Sarah Payne, whenever she's on. Fantastic. Strategic.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that though? Maybe that's part of the problem. At least it's. The problem, I find, is that at least with a streaming channel, there's this kind of a way of finding stuff. There's a limited amount of content. You can search through it, you may not find what you want, but you can look and see, feel fairly confident. You, you know, you know what's there with YouTube. It's infinite. And does that. Or maybe that's just because I'm old school, old timer and I used to have three channels on my tv. Does that put you three Luxury.

[Ian Thompson]

We used to have two.

[Leo Laporte]

Does it? The fact that there's so much content on YouTube, is that an advantage or a disadvantage?

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah, but they've solved that with the algorithm and the recommendation and the continue playing. Like, what I've realized is like, I mean, this, this is true for Netflix to an extent too. Like, if you go to your Netflix homepage, you'll see different content recommended than I would get recommended, but wildly different. The times that I've seen, you know, like my brother's YouTube when he's on his laptop or whatever, and I'm like, oh, it's all car stuff. Which I get it. Like, and so then he has his five or six car shows that he goes, mine is tech and computer games and history and stuff like that. And so, and Ian's is, is, is naval college stuff. Like, they've solved that because it, it's, it's like, it's like, tick tock. All you got to do is give it enough information and then it's like, all right, you're in this box and here you go.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. Breaking out that box is quite tough sometimes.

[Brian McCullough]

That's true too. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you see the Warner Brothers is now releasing movies on YouTube for free?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. To be fair, really bad ones. But.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they all really bad or they're just.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, maybe not all. I'm sure somebody loves, loves them somewhere. But it's an interesting mantra strategy from them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're full movies. Michael Collins, Mr. Nice Guy, that's been watched 16 million times on YouTube. The window.

[Ian Thompson]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Some of these were.

[Brian McCullough]

I mean, Michael Collins wasn't bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando, Mr. Christian, widow Nash. Yeah. The Bonfire of the Vanities with Tom Hanks. So I'm not sure I. Is this a tax write off? Why is Warner Brothers doing this?

[Brian McCullough]

Well, right, because remember, they're the ones that shut down actual movies and putting them in theaters for tax write offs. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Waiting for Guffman was hysterical.

[Wesley Faulkner]

They don't have anything that they have to worry about when they publish it on YouTube themselves. They can just put it out there. And if someone wants to license it, they still have that ability. So they can. Instead of it's sitting in a vault somewhere where no one wants, they can just put it out here. Maybe it'll create a viral hit. Maybe there'll be a campaign for someone to make a sequel to one of these movies. Maybe someone will make this a meme and. And then show it and then it'll go viral. But they're making money off the ads. Why wouldn't they do this instead of it sitting in a shelf somewhere?

[Ian Thompson]

I've got to say, also, Bonfire of the Vanities is famous for one particular scene. Melanie Griffith, I think, had breast implants halfway through filming. So she goes out of a door and then comes in and she's significantly larger in the chest area.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I gotta watch it.

[Ian Thompson]

That's like.

[Brian McCullough]

That's like. That's like Bill Gates book. With the Internet, you get one copy and it's different the next time.

[Leo Laporte]

The index got a lot. Melanie's index got a lot longer.

[Brian McCullough]

Show title. Show title.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, I. I mean, I doubt Warner is doing it altruistically, but it kind of feels like it. Like, well, why should these movies be buried? Let's just put them on YouTube where everybody can see them. Maybe there's some incremental income. But I don't think they're doing it for that reason.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I think it's these. I think these might be the first time these all come out digitally. These might not exist anywhere else.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, but that's been a problem. Right. If you. If you don't have a VHS player and no town has a movie store anymore. Right. I think there's one Blockbuster left in Seattle, Washington. And that's it.

[Brian McCullough]

No, it was Oregon or something.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it Oregon? Yeah, there's one left.

[Ian Thompson]

I thought it was Alaska.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, okay. Somewhere. That's all I know. It's a long way to go.

[Ian Thompson]

And to think they could have bought Netflix for. How much? Was it? 50 million? They were asking. They were offered.

[Brian McCullough]

It was like 30 or 50.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but. Yeah, but that was the red envelopes days of Netflix. And if you think about it, you might have thought that there's not a lot of future. Future. Netflix is a good example of another. There you go. Now there's two companies that have pivoted. They made a very risky pivot to digital only. And at the time, remember this, there was a huge stock sell off. People thought, this is nuts. You're getting rid of the Right. Flixter, Quickster. Quickster, that was the name we're trying to do.

[Wesley Faulkner]

They're spinning off their DVD business and.

[Leo Laporte]

They changed their mind on that.

[Wesley Faulkner]

You would go to Qwikster. Yeah, instead of Netflix.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. But it turned out like that was a good pivot. They, they made it successfully turned the corner.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I got a question, like if, if the Office wasn't on Netflix, do you think it would have taken off still? Because it was really. Everyone was watching the Office. That was what happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, we were watching it on network television.

[Wesley Faulkner]

No. Yeah, people were re watching the Office on Netflix. That's what Netflix is primarily for.

[Leo Laporte]

People still are.

[Brian McCullough]

Okay, don't make me put my history hat on, because I could go for a half an hour on this, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Put the hat on. I'll put mine on. You put yours on. Okay.

[Brian McCullough]

The reason they tried to sell to Blockbuster is because it was a transition to DVD. So initially Blockbuster didn't want to have VHS's. They didn't want to do DVDs because they had been burned by LaserDisc. Okay. That's number one. Number two, then when, when smart or TVs go flat screen, remember they would give you in every box when you would buy your smart TV or your flat screen tv. Hey, here, try Netflix for free. Right? Here's something you can do with your DVD player, whatever. Then the third thing that they did was when smart TVs came around and you're like, well, what am I going to do with an Internet connected tv? That's when they launched streaming because then it was like again. So three times. They were like. They took advantage. Advantage of a shift in media consumption. Exactly.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean it was, it's been a fascinating ride and I think they, they caught, they, they surfed the wave of technology really well in a way that other companies just got, you know, pushed down into, in, into the. Well, crushed by the waves, as it were. But yes. Yeah, no, I mean they've, they've done it really well.

[Leo Laporte]

But coming towards this point, I mean, credit for that. Is he, is he a genius?

[Ian Thompson]

He doesn't have this hat.

[Leo Laporte]

I could tell you that right now.

[Brian McCullough]

By the way, if that's the official history hat, then I need to find out where you got that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's A good hat. I don't know if it's a history hat. I got this at the Tucson International Gem and Mineral Show, Tucson, Arizona.

[Ian Thompson]

So you need a flat cap. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I have some of those too. I have all kinds. This is just one more. Does Reed Hastings deserve all the credit, Mr. Historian? Brian McCullough for sure.

[Brian McCullough]

Because he also wasn't the founder. He wasn't the founder.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Brian McCullough]

Remember, the actual founder came out with a book a couple years ago, but Reid, like Elon, was someone that was not necessarily the founder, but came in and was like, hey, this is a great business, and I think I can take this much further than you all are taking it.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Ian Thompson]

Although Elon did, you know, go to court to have him.

[Brian McCullough]

I was going to say. Let me retract. That is the founder of Tesla.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Even though he didn't found it. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's not make any mistakes.

[Wesley Faulkner]

He found it like Columbus found the United States.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

This is a very good analogy.

[Leo Laporte]

There was no US or North America. Columbus came along. Exactly.

[Ian Thompson]

The Vikings would disagree, but. And the Native Americans. But yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I better take this hat off because I got to do an ad and I don't think ZipRecruiter wants me to wear a watermelon hat during their ad. You're watching this Week in Tech. Great panel this week. Lots more to come. Our show today, brought to you by Zip Recruiter. According to research, a major challenge that many employers face, the pressure to hire quickly. Boy, I know that from our own experience. You know, when somebody leaves, that leaves a big hole in your company. A small company like ours, for sure, means we got to work harder and we got to find somebody fast. That's a tough hurdle to overcome. It's so time consuming normally to search for great candidates to sort through those applications. If you're an employer who can relate, I've got one question for you. Because we did this and it transformed our experience. Have you tried ZipRecruiter? ZipRecruiter has figured out how to solve this problem and it has worked so well for us. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate on day one. And in our experience, it's usually within a few hours. You could try ZipRecruiter for free right now. Ziprecruiter.com TWIT it's the hiring site employers prefer the Most based on G2. So how does that work? Because when you post to ZipRecruiter, you're posting to 100 plus job boards and all the social networks. You're casting the widest possible net. You might say, oh, gosh, I don't want to be inundated. No, don't worry. It all goes into the ZipRecruiter interface. No calls, no emails. In fact, they reformat all of the resumes so it's easy to scan through them. You can have screening questions, true, false, multiple choice, even essay questions. So you can eliminate candidates who just don't make the cut, then zero in on the candidates who are great. But then something amazing happened. Something amazing happens. ZipRecruiter uses it has, by the way, because people come to it looking for jobs. It's got more than a million current resumes on file. They go through those resumes and match the qualifications of the applicants to your job and send you a list of. Here are some candidates that match your qualifications. You can look at them, scan them, do all that screening, pick the ones that seem the best match and invite them to apply. And I gotta tell you, when you get an invitation from a company to apply for a job at that company, that company goes right to the top of the list. Right? It's how you can get ahead of other companies because we're all competing for the best talent. Just because you asked. How fast does ZipRecruiter smart technology start showing your job to qualified candidates immediately? How fast does it deliver qualified candidates to you? Well, certainly within a day in our experience. You know, Lisa's kind of worried we're at breakfast, oh, we gotta hire somebody. This is gonna be awful. She posts it within an hour or two. She's saying, oh, here's a great candidate. Oh, we got another one. So relax, let ZipRecruiter speed up your hiring. You can see for yourself again for [e-mail] TWIT. Try it right now. Free. The same price as a genuine smile from a stranger, a picture perfect sunset, or cute dog running up to you and licking you on your hands. Ziprecruiter.com Twitz ZipRecruiter. The smartest way to hire, personally vouch for it. All right, let me see. I scrolled up. Let's go back. Oh, it's now the Gulf of Mexico. Both Apple and Google say it is the Gulf of America. Did I say Gulf of Mexico? I'm sorry, Gulf of America.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I tweeted that out when it first came out. It's like, could everyone around the world just. Why? I didn't actually tweeted it. I blue skyed it. Because I don't really go on Twitter that much anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

You skeeted it out.

[Ian Thompson]

I hate that phrase, but. Yes, but asking people around the world and yeah, I mean, Google really bent over and kissed the ring on this one. And I'm not quite sure which one.

[Leo Laporte]

And Apple did too, by the way. Apple's done. They are off the hook because they say, hey, no, we follow the Geographic Names Information system gnis, and as soon as it changed in gnis, we changed it in the US now, users in Mexico will continue to see Gulf of Mexico, but everywhere else in the world, it'll be Gulf of America, brackets Mexico, brackets Mexico, think area.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Also in the world they'll see Gulf of Mexico. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Brackets America.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not confusing at all.

[Ian Thompson]

It's. Well, what with that and taking the, you know, pride stuff off, there are a lot of very peeved people at Google at the moment.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really? Oh, that's.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, yeah, yeah. There's. I mean, the, the mapping thing all well and good, but it's taking away things like pride and, you know, international.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, it's a Black History Month. It's not saying that in the calendar anymore. They said it was just too much trouble. Was too.

[Ian Thompson]

It's a political decision, you know, I mean, and it. One could argue that actually including it was a political decision, but I don't quite believe that because a lot of people at Google, this is a really important thing for them, you know, that they are on the side of the good guys, as it were. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's the pretty shameless kowtowing the quote that they used.

[Brian McCullough]

The spokesperson said it didn't scale. And I was like, wait a minute, you've been able to scale for years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Brian McCullough]

Trillions of search queries a second. And you've also had doodles on your homepage for 25 years. So scale, I guess, means something different.

[Wesley Faulkner]

But okay, undid work. So even if they were having issues, the work was done. So they're rolling back things.

[Leo Laporte]

It is odd, isn't it?

[Wesley Faulkner]

So that work had already scaled. They already scaled it and now they're undoing. But I will say about the map thing, I don't, I don't understand why that's such a big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

Which. Which changing it to Gulf of America or not changing it to. Yeah, why not?

[Wesley Faulkner]

Why is it a big deal that they did change it?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, because the Gulf of Mexico is also on Mexico. Right. And it's always been the Gulf of Mexico.

[Wesley Faulkner]

But I mean, it's just A name. I mean, it's that big of a deal.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, Hawaii used to be known as the Sandwich Islands when we owned it. So, you know, I mean, it's just. It's one of those things, but it just seems. Just pandering, you know, I mean, because it is. Yeah, exactly.

[Wesley Faulkner]

That's what they're gonna do. I think when you're saying the inauguration and sit behind the president's family, it's just like, that's.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. I mean, the inauguration, it was very much like, here's my trophy hunting cabinet. Yeah. Make them sit up there so they can all see and pay homage, you know, it was kind of embarrassing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah. And I guess you have to pick your battles, right? Yeah. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, if they call it the Gulf of America and then they get a massive tax break down the line, you know, it's good business.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Right. I think I talked about this on a different show, but it's a carrot and a stick. So the stick is you don't want to get the ire of the president, make him, like, attack you.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Wesley Faulkner]

But the. The carrot is there's still a ton of government contracts to be had, and you want to be able to be in good favor to get some of that windfall of cash, especially removing parts of your AI Ethics parts, saying that we won't use it to kill people. There are reasons why they're making these changes, and it's just for money. And it's, It's. And that's what they feel that.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw a meme that really would be. It's more a. They wanted to call it the crypto.com presents the Gulf of America, brought to you by Amazon. Something like that might be. Might be more appropriate, kind of.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, Associated Press has been banned from the White House and Air Force One because they're still using Gulf of Mexico. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a little bonkers. That's just a little petty.

[Ian Thompson]

A little. I mean, that's a huge amount of pettiness. It's not like AP is exactly, you know, a firebrand of left wing politics. You know, they are actually very accurate now.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, speaking of petty, Scarlett Johansson is asking the government, whoever that might be, to limit AI After a fake video of her opposing Kanye west goes viral. She's urging US Legislatures to, you know, this AI such a bad idea. You see what they did with it? She wants them to place limits on artificial intelligence.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, good luck with that.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Sue the person who did it.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There ought to be a law just.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Sue the person that did it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, well, I mean, what was it last year? Tom Hanks came out because someone did a deep, deep fake of him talking about diabetes, which he suffers from. And you know, I mean, this stuff is going to happen. And I don't think honestly saying, well, we need to limit the entire technology just because I'm getting deep faked is going to work in any way, shape or form.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, not to mention that even if the United States outlawed AI that everybody else is going to go full speed ahead.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It's the new arms race.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems a little bit like self centered to say, well, you should stop AI because they're making fake videos of me. It's a little bit.

[Brian McCullough]

Right. The quote should be limiting AI deepfakes.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, yeah.

[Brian McCullough]

As a person.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think he even should do that. That's free speech, you know.

[Brian McCullough]

Well, as a public figure. But again, the problem is, is that limiting AI as a top priority is the quote a bipartisan issue.

[Leo Laporte]

But should there be a law against Kanye West?

[Brian McCullough]

Well, should there be a law?

[Leo Laporte]

You can't make a law. You can't. That's not how it works.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, I thought defamation would work quite well here, you know, if you're actually, we already have that law. Yeah, exactly. So we've got, you know, we've got the rules in there. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The problem, and this is the big problem with the Internet, I think you should ban the Internet is it's possible to do something completely anonymously and never get caught. So ban the Internet because you don't know who to sue.

[Brian McCullough]

And keyboards and cameras.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God, yes. Oh, let's just go back to horse and buggies. You know, the Amish had it, had it pretty, pretty good. They were pretty smart.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, yes.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I mean, what would the law be? How would you even write it? Like. Yeah, it's just impossible to even like wrap your head around. It's just like she's like, you do all the other work. If you feel you were harmed, go after the person who did it.

[Leo Laporte]

You were defamed. It's going to be John Doe because no one's ever going to catch that person.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah. And at the same time, you, it's, it's. What is it? It's not just harm, it's intention. And then it's also the, the magnitude of the harm in terms of financial, like, did she lose a contract? Did she get.

[Leo Laporte]

No, because everybody knows it was fake. Nobody is fooled.

[Wesley Faulkner]

What was the actual harm that she would need to, like, quantify to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Only look. Okay. Some not so bright people might have been fooled by Ian, but really? Well, everybody knows they're deep fakes.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, this is the problem. You know, I think as the technology gets better, a lot of people aren't going to know that it's a deep fake. And, you know, the old aphorism from Terry Pratchett, you know, a lie can go around the world three times before the truth has got its boots on. You know, I mean, this kind of stuff is going to be really important going over in the next few years as the technology improves.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I saw this video. This, this, this. This thing that was being sold. It was a ring that you could slide on, and it was an extra finger.

[Leo Laporte]

The extra finger ring. I love that. Yes. That's hilarious.

[Ian Thompson]

It's a marvelous idea.

[Leo Laporte]

The idea being that by doing that.

[Wesley Faulkner]

You make mental deniability, saying, like, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Could say, well, that wasn't me. That was a picture of AI. Yeah, that was made by AI.

[Ian Thompson]

It's a marvelous idea. I do admire the spirit.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody's got to be selling these. Probably Shein and Timu Alibaba will have. Have you can buy a dozen of them.

[Ian Thompson]

Good to say. I'm tempted.

[Leo Laporte]

So for people not seeing the video, it's a ring you put on your finger that has an extra finger. So it looks like you've just got an extra finger sticking out of your ring finger, which means obviously, that this is an AI generated photo.

[Ian Thompson]

I would like to meet the person that came up with that idea, because that's smart. That's really smart.

[Leo Laporte]

We've actually, for a long time talked about things you could wear that would confuse an AI Like.

[Brian McCullough]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

But, you know, in fact, I remember way back in the cottage days, like 15 years ago, our chief of engineering, Colleen Kelly, was gonna make because. Because my wife at the time didn't like to come to the studio. She didn't want to be on camera. So she was gonna make her a ring, a necklace she could wear that had invisible LEDs that would blind a camera, but you would. No one would be able to see it. It wasn't visible light, but the camera, you would just be a glowing blob. Good idea. We should all have that necklace, walk around.

[Ian Thompson]

Didn't they have the scarf that was. It was like a sort of 300 bucks anti paparazzi scarf? Yeah, yeah. Abramovich, the Russian oligarch, took it even one stage further with one of his smaller yachts. He actually had camera detectors. So if Somebody was aiming a digital camera at you, then it would. They'd try and flash out that, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

What if, what will happen? And it will certainly come in the next few years where you just. Nothing you see, you could trust, like anything could be generated. What will the upshot of that be?

[Ian Thompson]

I think we'll go slightly mad, to be honest. I mean, if, I mean, I was, I was talking about this with someone the other day and it's like if you think the 1960s and 70s, most of us got all our news and information from a very limited number of sources, a few TV channels and newspaper, maybe the local radio station.

[Leo Laporte]

As a result, we were all on the same page, or mostly sort of.

[Ian Thompson]

Sort of on the same page.

[Leo Laporte]

And now at least had an agreed upon set of facts we were working off of.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. And now at the moment, you can find whatever facts you want which fit into your worldview. And I don't know, I. There is talk about getting watermarking schemes and that sort of thing going, but I'll believe it when I see it.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I think. Sorry.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah, it was just. Sorry I interrupted. I was going to say that's why we have influencers, because they.

[Brian McCullough]

I was just going to say that too.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Why do we have influencers?

[Wesley Faulkner]

Because people trust this person. Instead of trusting a media or an organization, they're like, I'll just talk to my.

[Ian Thompson]

What?

[Wesley Faulkner]

You would go to your neighbor and they would tell you about something that was going on downtown or something that happened at their job. You were just, you would take it as fact because you trust the person and thus you trust the information they're saying. By the way, that's probably why I'm an influencer now.

[Brian McCullough]

Right. Because we all trust you.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah. Once you trust people, then what you hear from them is the thing that you put trust in rather than an organization.

[Brian McCullough]

Right. It's not. I mean, obviously the algorithms have had a lot to do with that. But. But I've said that for a long time that half of what the influencer economy is is you find your crew and those are the people that make you laugh. We've always done that for the actors, the comedians, the musical artists we like. But what's changed is you do that for information now, you do that for news now, whether those people are trustworthy or not. That's where you get into the weird dystopian of like, well, my truth is different than yours and no, no truth overlaps. That's. That's where the problem may be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, as a Journalist. This is particularly concerning because it's, you know, our whole business is facts and, you know, when people can make up their own facts, then how do we get reasoned and intelligent Debate Another technology.

[Leo Laporte]

On the horizon, according to Sundar Pichai. He says the CEO of Google, of Alphabet, actually useful quantum computers are five to 10 years away. Just like fusion, just around the corner, just like the singularity and everything else, everything is five to 10 years away.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, I've been hearing this about fusion for, you know, decades, and we've been hearing this about quantum computing for a while. But I don't know, it does look like it's coming together slowly but surely slowly coming together.

[Leo Laporte]

Jensen Huang of Nvidia said very useful quantum computers are likely decades away. Pichai said, well, here at Google, he knows, right? They've made breakthroughs in quantum chips that have allowed researchers to calculate in five minutes, a problem that would take existing supercomputers longer than our universe has been around. Pachai, who was rarely excited by anything, says the progress in quantum is palpably exciting.

[Wesley Faulkner]

It is amazing. It's pretty great technology. I can't wait for it.

[Brian McCullough]

Is it.

[Leo Laporte]

You believe it? It's true. It's happening.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yes. Well, let me explain quickly. Quantum computing, I hear when people try to explain it, they talk about bits and qubits and being able to be in multiple states. Think of it this way, way quantum computers use the way nature works to get an outcome. If you're standing on top of a hill and you're looking down and you're saying, from this point, what is the quickest path to get to the end? You could do measurements, you can run around trees, you can run around the, the, the humps and the, and the dirt and the, and the rocks and, or you could take a vial of water and then start, start pouring it down and see which way it goes. And that's kind of what quantum computer is like. You're able to use the way the nature finds its easiest path to get to that to find and do those calculations. So that's just think of it that way. It's how it harnesses nature to basically get you the answers that you're looking for. And so when you get enough of these quantum bits, you're able to create more scenarios and more simulations in order to get, to be able to, to be able to use that same force to get your answers. And so, yes, this is real. Yes, it's happening. And yes, as we able to deal with the error rates, which there are breakthroughs all the time. This will be something that'll change all of our lives.

[Leo Laporte]

Just for giggles, I asked my AI to explain quantum computing to a dog. It said, woof. Let me try to explain quantum computing to you, my furry friend, in a way that might make sense to a dog. Fetch, but with many balls at once. Imagine you're playing fetch, but instead of one tennis ball, your human throws a whole bunch of balls at the same time. Now, here's the magic part. You can chase all the balls at once. It's like you're in many places at the same time, sniffing and grabbing every ball simultaneously. Careful. That's kind of what quantum computing does. Computers do. They work on many problems at the same time. And then it goes on into something a dog does not understand, which is superposition entanglement, which it calls magic doggy telepathy. It's what you were saying, actually. Exactly what you're saying, Wesley.

[Brian McCullough]

I was going to say Wesley, though. That's the best. Forget the AI answer. That was the best explanation that I've heard. The water. That. That's. That was the best that I've heard.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like nature. Quantum computing. It's like nature. Okay.

[Brian McCullough]

Be like water, my friend.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a cryptocurrency wallet with almost 8 bitcoin in it, and I'm just waiting for quantum computing to crack the password, which I have long forgotten. Do you think that'll happen? Is that possible? In my lifetime?

[Ian Thompson]

Technically, yes. I mean, five to ten years.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah. How long you plan on living?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, but also the edge. It could be worse, Leo. At the moment, there's a guy in Wales trying to buy a landfill site.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Ian Thompson]

He's. Yeah, he still can't find going on that. It's just like there's 400 million in Bitcoin in this landfill site. Just please let me find it, please.

[Leo Laporte]

I know it's here somewhere.

[Wesley Faulkner]

He's lost the marriage, the garbage, nicked it and now using it at home. Perfectly good computer.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes. Every time I've taken something to the tip, the person running is just like, yeah, I'll take that. And I'll take that. And you can throw the rest in. It's just like, yeah, somebody's got very rich out of that. This is back.

[Leo Laporte]

We should explain that. In Great Britain, they call landfills tips.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, yes, of course, sorry. Two great countries separated by common language.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that because you tip your garbage into it?

[Ian Thompson]

Exactly. That's. That's exactly the name behind it. So, yes.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Oh. So when they come over saying, hey, you Want to give me a tip? That's.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, there's another thing also. We don't tip as much in the uk. The very idea of the first time I came over here and bought a drink at a bar and paid with the exact currency and the bomb was like, you're from England, aren't you? Over here, we tip when you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, tipping. There's two things we're never gonna get rid of in the United States. One is tipping, the other is pennies. Except the President has directed the treasury to stop making pennies.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I can't help but agree. It's a ridiculous form of.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, well, here's the problem, okay? So he says, and he's quite right. It costs us more than a penny to make the penny. The penny is not made of copper, it's made of zinc. It literally costs more than 2 cents. Trump wrote in a post last week on Truth Social. I've instructed my secretary, it's his secretary of the U.S. treasury, by the way, to stop producing new pennies. However. And by the way, The Mint did lose $85.3 million last year making pennies. Every penny costs.037 cents. No dollars. So that's 3 cents. 3.7 cents per penny.

[Wesley Faulkner]

The problem is the EI. Because of the color of the penny.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it's copper. We don't like that. No, the problem is retailers are pointing out if you get rid of the penny, then we're gonna have to round to the nearest nickel. And it turns out nickels are even more expensive to make than pennies.

[Brian McCullough]

Now, how did they solve that in Britain, Ian?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, we haven't, to be quite frank, you can still get pennies, although they are slightly more. They are slightly made of copper. There is the old joke that copper wire was actually invented when a Yorkshireman and a Scotsman were fighting over a penny. But, yeah, I mean, we still have them, but honestly, as we're moving away from a cash society, you know, I mean, the fact that it's costing more than a penny to actually make these things, that's ridiculous. I think it's. Is it. Canada has now got rid of them and is randomly. There is five.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

And I think. I think the same is going through in Australasia somewhere. And it seems logical retailers would like it because they could jack up their prices a bit. But speaking of someone who, you know, my credit union, thankfully, has a coin sorting machine because I hate carrying coins. So something like that is, you know, is really useful.

[Leo Laporte]

It should just all be digital. Right. Except that.

[Ian Thompson]

Except that digital isn't anonymous. Exactly, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I mean, privacy advocates say this is one way we. The last way you have paying for something. Because we know now that crypto isn't private either. This is the last way we have of paying for something anonymously is they.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Remove the penny and they removed the nickel and made a brand new seven cent piece.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, come on. No one's going to make it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Of something really cheap. Make it out of wood. US Mint says every penny. Trump got it. Trump underestimated. Every penny costs 3.7 cents to make. But if we replace them with nickels, every nickel costs 13.8 cents to make. Nickels are more than. It's ridiculous.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Okay, then we just make pennies. Cost worth 5 then, right? We just make pennies, but we make them worth five.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, make pennies, be a nickel.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Problem solving, seven cents.

[Ian Thompson]

Thinking outside the box.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Get rid of both. Make it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's brilliant. And if you have been collecting pennies, you just multiplied your fortune by 5.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean it's $50, not 10.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean the whole 7 cents thing, I'm guessing arithmetic is not really a strong point over here, considering that a lot of people thought that a third of a third pounder burger was in some way more a pounder.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right, yeah. A third of a pound is less than a quarter of a pound.

[Ian Thompson]

Exactly, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Three is less than four and everybody knows that.

[Brian McCullough]

Wasn't it like 25 years ago, stocks were still traded in like sixteenths and things like that. Like, I know that most of that was done digitally and again, something we inherited from Britain, Ian. But yeah, but they managed that transition and it didn't blow stuff up, you know, again, digital, it's not the same.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, Britain went decimal in 1973. So up until that point you got 20 shillings to a pound. Don't even get me started on guineas and groats, you know, I mean, it was a complete mess.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I love it though, the metric makes sense.

[Ian Thompson]

One, ten, hundred thousand.

[Leo Laporte]

It's prophets for your thoughts.

[Ian Thompson]

No, I mean a guinea was something like. It was like £1 20 or something. It was, it was a bizarre, bizarre thing. I'm very glad I was brought up in the metric age. And then I come over here and you've got imperial you units and.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, don't get me started, Guineas, to be honest.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, I wrote a long rant about this about three years ago, but the idea of the cup as a unit of measurement or, you know, the, the pint, you know, and it's a different pint from the UK pint, which always pisses off Brits when they come over here. The pint in the UK is 16 fluid ounces. Here it's 14. So you've got to drink six pints to get the same effect as five. It's that has led to some interesting drinking competitions.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't need an AI to understand any of that.

[Ian Thompson]

That's it. The US has a totally unique system.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take one last break to let your brain cool off. And we will end the show with Ian's story about privacy.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, yeah. Land on a high note, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Why not? You're watching this week in Tech. We're so glad to have you here and thanks to the club, many of you are watching live. I have 1,276 people watching as we do the show on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, tikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kik, and of course our club members are watching in the club Twit, Discord. Thanks to everybody watching live. Of course, you don't need to watch live. Most people don't. You can always download the show after the fact, as I'm sure you did right with your favorite podcast client or on our website. But. But it's nice to have the live audience too. We're watching the chat and trying to pretend they're not yelling at us right now. Our show today, brought to you by Delete Me. Have you. Oh, man. Have you ever searched for your name online? Don't do it. It is horrible. You won't believe how much of information you thought was completely private about you is right there online. Maintaining privacy is not just a concern for individuals, it's a concern for businesses. We started using Delete Me when our CEO was impersonated. They knew her phone number, they knew her name, they knew her direct reports, they knew their phone numbers, all because this stuff's all online. And they were able to craft a spear phishing campaign that targeted us. We immediately signed Lisa up for Delete Me. And you know, it worked when that national public. What was it? NPD database, the National Public broker database was scammed. 100 million Social Security numbers made public. Steve Gibson and I both searched for ours. We found it in the database. There's my social right there. Then I thought, let me look for Lisa because we've been using Delete Me. She wasn't in it. She wasn't in it. Maintaining privacy, it's important for companies. It's important for Individuals. It's also important for families. With Deleteme's family plans, you can ensure that everyone in the family feels safe online. Delete Me reduces risk from identity theft, cybersecurity threats like those spear phishing attacks from harassment. It really works. Delete me experts will find and remove your information from hundreds of data brokers. But that's not enough, by the way, because then they will go back out and continue to scan on a regular basis. Because these guys are scummy, these data brokers. They'll just start putting stuff back. And there's new data brokers every day, there's new ones. Hundreds of these companies, they will remove it and continue to remove it. And with easy to use controls, the account owners can manage privacy settings for the whole family. They've got similar plans for companies, which is really great. Delete Me will go out there, remove your information, including addresses, photos, emails, relatives, phone numbers, social media, property value, and I can go on and on. Yes, including Social Security numbers. Protect yourself. This blew me away. It is not illegal to buy and sell people's Social Security numbers like a data broker. That's not. They. It's not illegal for them to get your social and then sell it on to the highest bidder, including foreign governments. It's legal. Protect yourself. Reclaim your privacy. Until we have a national federal privacy protection act. And I don't think we're ever going to get one. One we gotta have. Delete me. Go to JoinDeleteMe.com TWIT if you use the offer code TWIT, you'll get 20% off. JoinDeleteMe.com TWIT I keep checking every once in a while the data, the national public database breach to see if Lisa's in there. She's not. It's amazing. Joinedeleteme.com TWIT don't forget the offer code. TWIT for 20% off. So it is 10 years since Bruce Schneier. Tell us about this. You wrote the story. Why am I repeating your work here?

[Ian Thompson]

Well, Yeah, I mean, 10 years ago, Bruce Schneier, who's, you know, literally, he's.

[Leo Laporte]

Been on the show. Absolutely. Yep.

[Ian Thompson]

Marvelous chap. He wrote this book called Data and Goliath. Now bear in mind, this was, you know, 2015, we just coming into the Snowden era where we'd actually found out what was being collected. Or Scott McNeely memorably put it, I said privacy was dead. I didn't realize quite how right it was.

[Leo Laporte]

He was right. He really was right.

[Ian Thompson]

I Mean, it was written in a reaction to that, but yeah, I mean he was predicting that exactly the kind of situation we're in now where as you say, data brokers can hold enormous amounts of information on individuals and there's really very little that any, anyone can do about it.

[Leo Laporte]

So you interviewed Bruce, which is great. I just, he is a legend. Just really fantastic.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh absolutely, yeah. And he, he's one of those infuriating people to cover as a journalist because he's kind of like Cory Doctorow in that they give such good quotes. It's just like eventually, you know, the temptation is just to quote it entirely. But.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you did that, which is great. It's an interview and it's, it's nice that it's on there. It's fantastic. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

But I mean we are as in a sort of a post privacy society at the moment.

[Leo Laporte]

He is advocating, as I have for years, that we need a comprehensive privacy law in the United States.

[Ian Thompson]

Yep. Yeah. I mean California's got a pretty good one, Illinois's got a pretty good one. The fear is with the federal privacy law then they might be watering down the standards that others have said.

[Leo Laporte]

Senator Maria Cantwell did propose a national privacy law, but it turned out the whole point of it was to over override the state laws.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah. And presumably weaken them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean there's an awful lot of people in the, in the tech industry who do not want a federal privacy law because it really upends their entire business model.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, he said something that's devastating to me. I don't like Bruce Schneier. I don't use Gmail, I don't want Google to have my email. But he says it doesn't matter. Google has more than half of my email because over, over half of my correspondents do use Gmail and I hadn't really thought about that. But they've got their end of the conversation.

[Ian Thompson]

You really can't opt out, you know, I mean at this, at this point it's, I mean I would love to see something like GDPR that we have in Europe applied to the US but it's, it's not going to happen based on the current legislative agenda it seems.

[Leo Laporte]

What does he say? I feel like people gave up with like I don't care. It's like I'm wearing, I'm wearing on my wrist. We're going to interview these guys on Wednesday. This is an AI device that records everything, sends it to an unknown because they never, they don't say unknown AI for an analytics for transcription and analysis. And then puts on my phone, puts notes from my day. It's great. Tells me what I agreed to, what I did. It's like a diary that some, you know, third party is making. But I gave up. Like, I don't know where this is going. I don't even care anymore.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, it's not like Big Brother, whether the state enforces that you have these things.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I'm wearing it.

[Ian Thompson]

You actually buy them? I mean, I don't know. I mean, Leo, I know that you have smart devices in the home. Brian and Wesley, do you as well? Because I refuse to have them in here.

[Brian McCullough]

I mean, yeah, they're probably not plugged in, unless, you know, my smart TV is still.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't use Amazon's Echo?

[Brian McCullough]

No, no. But, hey, aren't they about to release one next week or something?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, 26th. Wesley, do you have an Echo or a Siri or a Google Assistant?

[Wesley Faulkner]

We have. We have the homes from the Jeep company. But I was just thinking that with. With Meta's influence with the. The new administration, I know he was regulated. He was saying, like, please regulate us, so maybe he can use his influence to pass some privacy laws. Because that's what he wanted, right?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I guess. But my sneaking suspicion is, yes, he wants a privacy law, but he wants one that he writes, you know. Well, I would prefer having the FF.

[Leo Laporte]

Right one or something that regulatory capture. That's where you're big enough to survive this threat. But it'll keep all the little guys from becoming competitors, right? You're pulling up the ladder after you, and I think that's what Meta is doing. They're saying, oh, yes, please pass a privacy law, but we already know everything about you. So it just keeps the new guys off the block. That's all Amazon is going to do, we think. An AI upgrade. They, they. They were supposed to decide Friday, and I don't know yet whether they did, so they were gonna have an all. You know, all of the people working on the AI were gonna get together on Friday because it was famously not working very well. Oh, here it is. According to internal messages seen by the Washington Post and an Amazon employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity, they have decided to push back the release of the AI Alexa for more than a month after. So they're still Gonna have a February 26th event. Poor Panos Panay again is gonna have the rug pulled from laundry. He won't get to announce what he wanted to announce.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, he'll show his pictures of his children, though. He always does.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he actually one time he did it when he worked at Microsoft. He was in charge of surfaces. He did it from his house and his daughter showed up in the middle.

[Brian McCullough]

I remember that was so inside baseball of all of us to laugh at people.

[Leo Laporte]

So ridiculous.

[Ian Thompson]

Honestly. I remember the Surface days when he made one of them into a skateboard. And that was just like you were sitting there in the press conference going, my goodness.

[Leo Laporte]

People say, who was it that we had on? It was Daniel Rubino from Windows Central who said he's had private briefings from Panos when he was at Microsoft. He's exactly the same, even if it's just one on one. He's always pumped, but he's really enthusiastic. He really loves what he did. I think it was a smart move for Amazon. They hired him, put him in charge of this, you know, thing that everybody has. They've sold millions of them, hundreds of millions, but nobody really uses for anything but cooking timers and music devices and, and to turn it into something useful. The smarter and more. According to the Washington Post now, after that Friday Valentine's Day meeting, the smarter and more conversational version of the Amazon Echo will not be available until March 31 or later because it's just not.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Smart and it's not gonna get smarter between now and when it's released. I know, maybe marginally, but this is.

[Brian McCullough]

A waste because Wesley, clearly a month might be enough.

[Leo Laporte]

It might get better in a month. They want to charge, they say, 5 to $10 extra for the Smart Echo. You could still have the free Dumb Echo, but they figure everybody will buy the smart one.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Just like Apple Intelligence, where, yeah, it's very disappointing. It's just going to be making things.

[Leo Laporte]

Up and Apple's still pushing it off. Now it's 8, 4 or whatever. Is this 18? When is the iOS 4?

[Ian Thompson]

Considering how Apple butchered the BBC's headlines and I think they've got a long ways to go. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I, you know what? I turned on the summaries, the AI summaries for my notifications because they're hysterical. But you know it's not true. You know, my ring doorbell says many people came to your door. It's like, it's, it's just funny.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, you say that, but I mean, a friend of mine's a teacher and this is a real problem in school at the moment. It's like, well, where do you get that fact? Well, ChatGPT told me and it's like, well, it's Wrong. Well, no, it can't be because ChatGPT told me and it's just that trust is bad.

[Leo Laporte]

It says there was a person at your front door multiple times. It's this, you know, I mean, over a period of 24 hours probably anyway, it'll be like, I guess, I don't know. That's the problem. If you really want an AI to be good, it has to invade your privacy. It has to. You have to wear it on your wrist, has to be listening to everything you say, know everything there is to. I gave it my Gmail, my calendar, my contact list, it's all in there.

[Ian Thompson]

And you've got to trust the company that's holding that data as well. You know, whether or not I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Even know who they are.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But I'm gonna interview them on Wednesday and we'll find out who they are. Who are you guys after? No, but I love it, Honestly, I love it. But we'll talk about it on Wednesday on intelligent machines. So according to internal documents seen by the Post, the new features of the subscribers cyber only AI powered Echo could include, could possibly, if we can get it to work, include the ability to adopt a personality, recall conversations, order takeout or call a taxi.

[Brian McCullough]

But just like Apple Intelligence, I thought we already had those things and they didn't work very well the first time and so call it a different name.

[Leo Laporte]

And okay, you know, it's too bad if you know what you're doing. AI is amazing. If you're sophisticated enough to use the right ones for the right job and to use it appropriately, it's amazing. But most people's experience of AI will be this or will be the dumb Apple Intelligence. And I think most people are just going to say AI is just a joke, it's stupid.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean we're in the hype cycle curve at the moment. It's like when Microsoft's put 10 billion plus us into this, they've got to be able to show something for it. And so yeah, you now have to buy an AI PC and you get paying a subscription and they'll bring in some money. But yeah, I think for the general public who don't know how to use it properly, it's just an enhanced search engine at the moment at least.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the only silver lining to all this. According to the Washington Post, Amazon's Echo when asked to identify the tallest mountain peak in Alaska, says Denali, when asked what body of water borders Texas, it said the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe it's not good to Be hallucinations.

[Brian McCullough]

Clearly hallucinations.

[Leo Laporte]

Clearly hallucinating.

[Ian Thompson]

But you see, this is why AI. I remember when ChatGPT first came out, I was talking with a fellow journalist and he said, you just know the publishers are going to be looking at this and saying, right, let's get rid of the journos and install AI. But AI can't break stories. AI can't interpret stuff, and it hallucinates the whole time. And until they solve that problem, then it's widespread adoption. Without the specialized knowledge, it's not going to happen again.

[Brian McCullough]

The thing that somebody smarter than me, and I can't remember who it was said recently is like, okay, yes, it's the greatest intern you've ever known. It's ingested all of human knowledge that we've put online, et cetera, et cetera. But have we yet seen one thing where it's like, hey, this is a new compact. And I know that there are startups.

[Leo Laporte]

That believe that they have.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I mean, they have. It has created theoretically theoretical new compounds. But at the same time, this is kind of controversial because some scientists are saying, actually, that's never going to work. Just because you say it's going to work.

[Leo Laporte]

No, most of it may not, but some of it may. We're doing. They're doing protein folding. Remember, when you.

[Brian McCullough]

Okay, but when you sign up. But Leo, what I'm saying is that that's still pattern matching versus something that is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Moose 37. 7. Okay, we are breaking through now. And that's exactly the point of this. Reinforcement learning is getting past the regurgitation point to the point where it can do creative generative stuff. And I think we are. This is debatable, but I think we're.

[Brian McCullough]

Starting to get there to bring it back to fusion. Okay, I need the AI to say to me, okay, by the way, the reason you haven't figured out fusion yet is because you. You all haven't thought of this and that and the other thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right, right. It has to do something that a human hasn't done. That was the whole point of that go. Anecdote is that move 37 was something no human would ever have thought of. But by using reinforcement learning, it could actually create and do something that a human hadn't done ever before.

[Brian McCullough]

All right, I await fusion.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I do, too. You know what? If you could have one invention that would change the world. World. It's not quantum computing, it's fusion. It's fusion for sure would change everything.

[Wesley Faulkner]

The echo devices aren't Going to do that though.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn'T it be funny? Echo, how do you do fusion? Oh, I'm glad you asked. I've had that. I've been waiting for you to ask.

[Brian McCullough]

Wait, we're underestimating Panas. Panay, listen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, he's pumped. He's going to announce it. Actually, there is one interesting thing. We'll see. We've talked about neuralink, Elon Musk, a brain implant technology. Several people have had their brains implanted and with some success. Meta has now created a device using AI that can read your mind. This is the paper from meta. With some 80% accuracy. You can type just by thinking.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I'm just gonna say it could read a mind.

[Leo Laporte]

One mind. Well, you have to start somewhere.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Somewhere, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So brains and actually this could be of huge value to a variety of people with variety of problem. You know, neuro linguistic problems. Here's a terrifying video from Meta of a woman getting her mind read. She's got a giant thing on her head. Look, this isn't going to scale yet, but that's a big breakthrough. Okay. I think there's stuff going on. Stuff is changing. It all starts very rudimentarily. But eventually these little steps become milestones. I'm hopeful. I'm excited about the future. I don't want to be like you, Ian. Just, you know, a curmudgeon. Denying, cynical about everything. Do you get optimistic at all, Ian, about any of this stuff? Oh, you're muted. I see. There we go. Yeah. Nope, you're still muted.

[Ian Thompson]

You just.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what's going on.

[Brian McCullough]

He's so.

[Wesley Faulkner]

I was gonna say, like I have ADHD and if this was hooked up to me, it would just be printing random things all the time and would not make sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, but it'd be great, wouldn't it? You could be like that dog with the 40 tennis balls. You could. You could write two novels at once.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yes, but there's some editing that happens that in order to be understandable. Which. That's why I was saying it doesn't it. It read a brain.

[Leo Laporte]

It may not work on everyone. Wesley, it's great to see you. Wesley Faulkner. Wesley83.com thank goodness. The lightning. Thunder, Lightning. Very, very frightening. Didn't take you off a second time. We're glad. Glad you were here. Appreciate everything you do. It's great to see you, my friend. Sorry you're gonna miss south by. There'll be a lot of people in Austin disappointed.

[Brian McCullough]

Yeah.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Oh, I'm sure they'll be fine. I'm more curious about how would. How it's gonna be as an event over the next few years. Because the convention's not supposed to be done until 2029, maybe. Yikes. So maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess you can't change Southwest by to another venue. You can't move it out of Austin. In other words, you couldn't.

[Ian Thompson]

Could.

[Leo Laporte]

Could you do it in another city? Would it be the same?

[Wesley Faulkner]

I mean, think about the amount of miles and steps you have to put in just to go.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Wesley Faulkner]

In any way. It would be better if they just like, let's just do it in Vegas or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Move it Just. Just until the center's done.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because I got to get my queso.

[Wesley Faulkner]

Man, man, you can still go to Texas.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point. I don't have to wait. All right. Thank you, Wesley. Great to have you. Ian Thompson. It's so nice to see you. The Register.com. he's still muted, but, you know, sometimes.

[Brian McCullough]

Give him time. Give him time.

[Wesley Faulkner]

It might be a hardware mute to see if there's a switch.

[Leo Laporte]

This is not how I.

[Ian Thompson]

How's that?

[Leo Laporte]

That I dreamed of. Perfect. Yes.

[Ian Thompson]

Bingo. Sorry. New set of headsets, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's good. It's like new boots and panties. It's time to celebrate. I think that's one.

[Ian Thompson]

Okay. I haven't heard that expression before, but I'm hoping it isn't relevant to me.

[Brian McCullough]

It's for.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought it was a Britishism. All right, never mind. It was a different. Ian. Ian Drury. Never mind.

[Ian Thompson]

Ah, yes, and the Blockheads.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, and the Blockheads. Hit us with your rhythm stick. What should we. What should we look for? Ian Thompson in the register.com in the near future?

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, well, I mean, we're. We're keeping an eye on what's going on in government, obviously, because that's kind of weird, but on the Enterprise side, we've got a lot of big announcements coming up from the chip makers, and I suspect there's going to be some really interesting news coming down the line in a couple of weeks time.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, very good. A little tip from Thereegister.com. thank you, Ian. Brian McCullough. Every day Tech Meme Ride Home podcast. It wasn't supposed to be the weekends, but you just couldn't stop, could you?

[Brian McCullough]

Well, only 2,000 times. We're gonna do it a week from tomorrow. Our 2000th episode, if you like. Tech news in 15 minutes. A little pill, a daily dose.

[Leo Laporte]

February 24th. Tune in for episode 2000. Congratulations. That's a big milestone. Stone, well done.

[Brian McCullough]

Thanks. Yeah, we'll do something special for it. Not on that day, but because we got to do the news that day, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, gotta do the news, just like us. Except we don't really care about the news. We just do whatever. Whatever suits us. I will be back again Tuesday for Mac Break Weekly Security now with Steve Gibson, Wednesday, Windows Weekly, and of course, the brand new intelligent machines. We've got a great guest. We're going to find out where all of this stuff is going, what AI is analyzing all this stuff coming off of my wrist. I hope you'll join us for that. We do Twit every Sunday afternoon, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. That's at 2200 UTC. As I said, you can watch us live, but really it's a podcast, so get your copy, audio or video. Sunday night after we've edited it all up. Thanks to Kevin King for doing that. You can get it at the website Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this week in television. And of course, the best way to get it is subscribe in your favorite podcast client. So you get it automatically, just in the nick of time for your Monday morning commute. Thank you to our technical editor or technical director and producer, Benito Gonzalez. Is Kevin editing it tonight? Benito? I think so. Kevin King, our editor, executive producer, my dear wife, Lisa laporte. Thank you all for joining us. As I have said, now, you know we don't have 2,000 episodes, Brian, but we are going to have our 20th anniversary in April. 20 years doing the same damn thing. Boy, is my butt tired. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can.

[Brian McCullough]

He's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing the twit. Doing the twit. All right, this podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. You know, when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself, talking to someone who.

[Brian McCullough]

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