This Week in Tech 1093: California Sober

Summary

This Week in Tech 1093: California Sober

Date: July 20, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Alex Wilhelm (Cautious Optimism News), Harper Reed (2389.AI)

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Episode Overview

In this lively and deep-dive episode, Leo Laporte is joined by entrepreneur and technologist Harper Reed and tech journalist/newsletter author Alex Wilhelm. The trio unpacks the week’s seismic shifts and controversies in AI, explores the accelerating pace and risks of agentic software, discusses the growing competition from Chinese open-weight models, examines the realities of American AI business models, and grapples with emergent dilemmas around AI, privacy, security, and society at large. The discussion ranges from humorous banter on FaceTiming unannounced to substantive, sometimes philosophical debates on AI's future. Topics span from AWS billing “bugs,” open-weight AI geopolitics, Chat Control in the EU, children’s digital lives, the viability of open vs. closed models, and more. The show's tone is as much tech-wonk camaraderie as it is brisk critique.

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Major Topics & Key Insights

1. AI's True Acceleration & “Move 37” Moments

• Topic: Has the “AI explosion” really happened, or is it all incremental?
• Discussion: The panel debates whether the current wave is more hype or substance, with Reed noting “this is no different than the rest of the week,” but all agreeing the cadence of major AI and agent coding breakthroughs, especially over the past 6–9 months, is palpable.

“The cadence we've seen from AI in the last six to nine months, to me, really does show that breakthrough is in agent coding... we're starting to get to the point where that's having a modest impact, plus the accelerated humans does feel like a new gear.” — Alex Wilhelm [09:15]

• Move 37 Analogy: Reed and Laporte look for features in new software that surprise in non-obvious ways—the “Move 37” moment (AlphaGo's non-human Go move)—as evidence that AI is producing genuinely new capabilities.

“You’re looking for a Move 37 feature… stuff that one wouldn’t have expected.” — Leo Laporte [13:07]

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2. The “Software Factory” Myth and The Reality of Small Teams

• Topic: Are big companies truly leveraging AI the way small ones can, or is it all performative “AI-washing”?
• Reed expresses skepticism toward claims from large companies about 10x-ing productivity through “software factories.”
• Both guests note that signs of genuine agentic acceleration—rapid, sometimes surprising, feature additions—are most visible in small teams.

“If you had a real software factory and it was truly effective… why would you tell anyone about it?” — Harper Reed [13:39]

• Layoffs and AI: The supposed post-COVID “AI layoffs” often mask the reality: companies are shrinking for non-AI reasons, but smaller teams enabled by real AI advances are genuinely more productive.

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3. Open-Weight AI Models: China’s Disruptive Influence

• Topic: Chinese labs (Moonshot’s Kimmy, Alibaba’s Qwen, GLM/DeepSeek) are releasing high-quality, open-weight LLMs, shaking up both pricing and geopolitics.
• Laporte and panel note not only the technical quality but also the genuinely competitive pricing and marketing, as well as artificial scarcity (e.g., sold-out subscriptions) for hype.

“We have Deep Seek, Kimmy K3, GLM 5.25 – all from China... And the Chinese government has made noises that they may want to stop this, just as the US wants to block Chinese models from the US.” — Leo Laporte [50:55]

• Strategic Implications:
  • Open-weight models commoditize LLMs, pressuring Western closed-source business models.
  • Is this “AI Communism” (as Hoover/Heritage’s Dean Ball frames)—i.e., market-destroying public-good AI? Is it a strategic blunder, or a soft-power masterstroke?

“Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist... Why would you invest billions in AGI from Anthropic if China’s going to give it away?” — Quoting Dean W. Ball [59:49]

• Reed and Wilhelm urge deeper analysis, noting these open models work because of China's longer investment horizon and willingness to treat AI as strategic infrastructure; the west, they argue, still fixates on short-term, private capital gains.

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4. Agentic Software, Bugs, and The Developer Experience

• Topic: Are AI agents producing bug-free software and accelerating shipping—or just creating more mess?
• Modern test coverage, code reviews, and rapid remediation mean bugs are remediated faster, but code is also produced—sometimes sloppily, sometimes elegantly—at warp speed.

“As a developer... now [test coverage and remediation] is just table stakes. Cloud will just give you 100% test coverage.” — Harper Reed [24:25]

• Loops and Agent Handoffs: Multi-model handoffs (e.g., “have Fable design, Opus code, Grok review”) become common; “looping” agents through goals/tests/iterations is basic practice.

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5. AI, Privacy, and Surveillance

• Topic: Ongoing tension between the increased use of AI and global attempts to regulate/control digital life, especially youth.
• EU, US, and China: Europe and multiple US states are pushing for stricter age-verification and content controls, often under the guise of child safety but with totalizing side effects (e.g., “Chat Control,” warrantless scanning).
• Privacy Paradox: The more we use LLMs as outsourced cognition, the more we risk exposing personal and business secrets.

“Microsoft is saying [beware of AI training on your company knowledge] to us. I think that's more interesting… than the fact.” — Harper Reed [105:07]

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6. The Coming “SaaS Apocalypse”: AI Labs Eating the Stack

• Topic: As LLM vendors (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) expand horizontally and vertically, they threaten the entire business SaaS stack with agentic/vertical AI products.
• Laporte and Wilhelm suggest this could lead to a “SaaS apocalypse”—current SaaS companies’ knowledge advantage disappears as their customers’ data is hoovered up and used to train even more effective AI agents.

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7. Society & Cultural Effects: Youth, Machines, and the Future of Work

• Screen Time Bans: Across the world, politicians are pushing restrictions on youth digital use—raising questions about privacy, empowerment, and government overreach.
• Kids, Phones, and Tech Addiction: Panelists, as parents, debate how to navigate devices and agentic technologies for their children; alluded to the “AI psychosis” some new users experience (addiction, confusion between agent/human interaction).

“I have many friends who need therapists but can’t pay for therapists. So they use Claude or Chat for therapy... There's a lot of these things that are happening. We are not prepared for computers that talk to us and emote feelings.” — Harper Reed [133:45]

• Work, Capital, and Economic Anxiety: Panel worries the move to AI agentic work may re-center capital over labor, making job paths for their children unclear ("I'm changing my financial planning to backstop my kids.").

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8. Humor, Hardware, and “California Sober”

• Consumer Tech/Jokes: The panel riffs on AI-free/simple phones, Topolino electric cars (“golf carts with doors”), the enigmatic OpenAI keyboard, and the rise of AI robot “teachers” repurposed from sex dolls.
• "California Sober": Alex Wilhelm defines the practice as “no alcohol or hard drugs, but caffeine, nicotine, and cannabinoids allowed”—epitomizing a tech-forward but realistic approach to modern life.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Move 37 Features:
  “You're looking for a Move 37 feature... stuff that one wouldn't have expected.” — Leo Laporte [13:07]

• On open-weight AI commoditizing the market:
  “Open-weight models are inherently decelerationist... Why would you invest billions in AGI from Anthropic if China's going to give it away?” — Quoting Dean W. Ball [59:49]

• On AI psychosis:
  “We are not prepared for computers that talk to us and emote feelings... If you are lonely... you get more responsive feedback from these AIs than any of your dear friends, because they're busy as well.” — Harper Reed [133:45]

• On AI software bugs:
  “Bugs are mysterious and they... just happen and generate... I don't think we'll go to zero bugs, because bugs are mysterious.” — Harper Reed [27:38]

• On children and digital bans:
  “There are no screen rules for children on the plane.” — Alex Wilhelm [78:48]

• On the future of work and children:
  “I'm quite literally changing my long-term financial goals around essentially backstopping my children... if they end up not being able to be accretive personally, they also won't be starving.” — Alex Wilhelm [152:09]

• On quirky gadget purchases:
  “I give [Instagram] money for the products. I gotta stop. I keep buying things like this slot dog. What am I doing?” — Leo Laporte [109:40]

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Notable Timestamps

03:25–09:38 — Panel intros, AI explosion debate, “every phone would be all about AI,” Move 37 moments
13:07 — Move 37 feature phenomenon
21:39–28:49 — Impact of small teams & agentic cycles, code quality, loops
34:35 — Discussion about jobs, layoffs, and agentic acceleration
43:55–61:08 — Open-weight AI, China vs. U.S. competition, “AI Communism”
80:08 — European/US youth digital bans, Chat Control, hacking around surveillance
104:42–113:06 — AI, privacy, and the SaaS apocalypse
133:35–138:33 — “AI psychosis,” talking to agents as therapy or loneliness remedy
150:11–152:41 — The future of work, what will children do in an agentic economy?

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Episode Flow

• The show starts with lighthearted reflections (simple tech/phones, FaceTiming etiquette), then flows into a sophisticated discourse on AI’s production rhythm and the nature of real-world progress—the search for “Move 37” moments.
• A constructive tension runs through the episode: the promise of AI-driven acceleration vs. concerns of sloppiness, “AI-washing,” and the risk of commodifying AI so deeply it destabilizes both businesses and society.
• The episode crescendos in a high-level debate about Chinese open-weight models and Western AI capitalism, then dives into personal and parenting implications, and closes with laughter (AI slot dog purchases, robot teachers from ex-sex dolls), offering welcome relief from the mind-bending implications throughout.

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Final Takeaways

• The AI gold rush of 2025–2026 is not a smooth ride: while the pace of innovation is accelerating, so are existential risks, business disruptions, and cultural crosscurrents.
• The US/China chip war is now an open-source AI contest—with China challenging Western models not just in price but in trajectory-setting releases.
• AI, like all transformative tech, brings unpredictable side effects. Some are fun (agent palaces, DIY voice models, “California Sober” tech lifestyles). Some are profound (job loss, privacy erosion, information slop). And some are unsettling—what happens when AI is as open and uncontrollable as air, and just as necessary?

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For Listeners Who Missed the Show:

This episode is a must-hear for anyone curious about where AI, software development, and digital society are heading. The roundtable's quick wit and depth transform even the thorniest debates into clear, compelling insights—equal parts practical, skeptical, and passionate about the fun (and dangers) in tech’s new agentic era.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twit. This week in tech, we've got Alex Wilhelm here, we've got Harper Reed. It's going to be a fun show. All of the new AI coming from China. What's China up to, What's America up to and how's it going to respond? We'll also talk about the giant bill a few people received from Amazon web service and the new AI teacher in Salamanca, New York. You won't believe your eyes. It's coming up next on Twitter. This episode is brought to you by Black Hat usa. If you listen to this show, you go deep on the technical detail. Well, so does Black Hat. For nearly three decades it's been where the security industry's most rigorous research gets presented and pressure tested. More than a hundred hands on trainings taught by practitioners who actually deployed in live environments, not lecturers reading from slides. And hundreds of peer reviewed briefings that go well past the overview into the real work across the four areas defining security, right. AI and autonomous threats, cyber conflict, systemic resilience and identity. This year, Black Hat's briefings pass includes all keynotes and main stage access plus business hall entry. You also get breakfast, lunch, arsenal live tool demos, on demand session access and admission to the midnight in the war room screening. Black Hat takes place from August 1st to to the 6th in Las Vegas. If you want the depth this show gets into in person with the people doing the work, this is the room. And we'll be there too. Use the code TWIT for $200 off your briefings [e-mail] US-26 that's B L A C K H A T.com US-26

[Harper Reed]

podcasts you love from people you trust

[Alex Wilhelm]

is TWIT.

[Leo Laporte]

This is TWiT this Week at Tech. Episode 1093 recorded Sunday, July 19, 2026. California sober. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news and as usual, when I have Harper Reed on the show. Hello Harper, great to see you. Technologist, entrepreneur, hacker. He runs a little AI doohickey called 2389. AI. Always wonderful to have Harper on. He's been traveling a lot, we've been trying to get him on.

[Harper Reed]

I'm happy to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

And when we have Harper on, we often don't. We decide to have a smaller panel because, well, when I get. Shut up.

[Harper Reed]

No, that way you're like, man, Harper will not shut up.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. There are people, Shawn, remain nameless who come on the show who I can't get to shut up. You're not one of them. But you have such great things to say and your rapport with everybody is so great. Remember last time you're on was just you and Amy Webb. This time I'm going to introduce you to a new character I think you will like. Alex Wilhelm is also here. Alex has a wonderful newsletter that is going, you know, great guns, cautious optimism news.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes, sir.

[Leo Laporte]

And you also hear him on this week in startups. And it's great to see you once again, my dear friend coming to me from my old backyard.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Indeed. And Leo, I just got. I just gotta say, of all the times to come on the show the week after the AI policy fracas is the right time to have me on. So I'm excited. Oh, excited to have. I mean like everything that I want to talk about is what's in the show notes today. So thank you for having me as always. It's a real treat. And I will not burn down your house. I.

[Leo Laporte]

Please don't. I.

[Harper Reed]

That is an option, I suppose. It's not your house. It's your. Your house.

[Leo Laporte]

It isn't my house anymore. No, it is not.

[Harper Reed]

So you can burn it down. You have permission.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm not on the deed.

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, it is true that this is the week that the AI stuff kind of exploded. We do have a full time AI show.

[Harper Reed]

I like that this is the week that the AI stuff exploded. I don't know if y' all have been awake for the last, I don't know, two years. Like this is. This was no different than the rest of the week.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's true. And people, and people email me and say, can you stop talking about AI? Isn't there a new phone out? And I say, no, but if it

[Harper Reed]

were to be out, it would be all about AI.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It would literally be all about AI. It is the AI phone.

[Harper Reed]

It is the new foldable iPhone is full of AI and it's horrible or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I do have one phone that has no AI on it which Jeff Atwood sent me. It's an E ink screen. It is the mudita. It has nothing. It's got nothing on it.

[Harper Reed]

It's just nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just the simplest, purest. And who wants a phone? This is text and phone. Oh wait, it has some apps, but I can't imagine they're very good. Calculator calendar.

[Harper Reed]

I think that would send us some.

[Leo Laporte]

I will send you this one. There is a camera. You know what's funny about the Camera is. It takes full color pictures, but they're. Go ahead, go to the three shot real quickly so I can get a good picture of these guys. They're. Oh, it's so slow, but they're.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, I love that.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that they're monochrome pictures. Oh, man.

[Alex Wilhelm]

We've never really made E ink screens fast, have we?

[Harper Reed]

The Kindle one is pretty fast, but other than that, most of the consumer ones are not as fast.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think the point of this is it's a phone that you don't want to use, so you don't have to worry about getting sucked down the Instagram hole.

[Harper Reed]

I think the problem that I have is that I. I love and I fantasize and I dream about this type of phone, but I think if I start calling all of my friends on the telephone, they would stop being my friend.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what?

[Harper Reed]

They would just be like, please do not call me.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You have to text. No, no, no, no, no. People that complain about phone calls that you know are wussies. I just call everybody. In fact, some people, I just aggressively FaceTime them without calling ahead of time.

[Harper Reed]

I'm just like, that's actually one of the best things ever. And the unannounced FaceTime, especially at odd hours, is so good, so horrible.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so good, so horrible.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You get to see your friends waking up from a nap. They're in bed holding their phone like a baby. What's wrong? I'm like, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, first of all, there's no. You don't know that it's gonna be a picture, right? You just think your phone's ringing, and so you pick it up and there's hearts, it says.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, that's true, that's true. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you doing here?

[Harper Reed]

I love it. I love it. I think it's great.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm sticking my face into your house like this. I'm just gonna walk into the door and just put my face in your bedroom.

[Harper Reed]

Hi.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You know what it does? It does show you which friends are, like, always down and which friends you need to put on the calendar first.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, if somebody smiles broadly and says Alex, then you know, this is. This is a true friend. Even though they're still wearing curlers. So you're right. I should point out this is no really special week in AI except it sort of feels like we're still alive.

[Harper Reed]

That's what makes it special is, like, the things about AI that's cool is we haven't all been killed yet.

[Leo Laporte]

That's good news.

[Harper Reed]

Right. The fast takeoff hasn't happened as everyone promised it would.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels like it's happening. You don't think it's happened?

[Harper Reed]

I don't know. I oftentimes wonder. There's a couple things that I wonder. One of the things I wonder a lot about is as these models get more powerful, you think about both our friends that have worked at some of these big companies, and they say, not like these, but let's say Apple or Google, and they've been using some technology for a year before it gets to us. And obviously the cycles are much shorter now. But what is, you know, OpenAI or anthropic or Kimi, what is their six months early look like? Like, they're like, what is. What do they have access to that we, as just boring consumers would never, ever dream of?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, I think we find out pretty quick because one thing that I always find really frustrating is when they drop a new model like the OpenAI GPT 5.6 family, and then everyone that I know on Twitter is like, oh, yeah, I've had this for four weeks. It's fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

I know that's frustrating. Well, how did that happen?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Like, yeah, who are you?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Why do you have it?

[Alex Wilhelm]

You have seven followers and you're annoying, and I don't like your face.

[Harper Reed]

Have we figured that out? I don't know how that works. I've been trying to figure that out too.

[Alex Wilhelm]

There must be some, like, club that we're not in. But I will say that I don't think there's stuff that's that production ready that's so far advanced of what we have or is coming down the pike. I don't think there's a special access program of like, you know, special jets from OpenAI or whatever. I don't think the models are that much better because I think you have to, given the cost of creating them, get them into the market with a reasonable time frame to recoup the money you spend training them. But I will say, the cadence that we've seen from AI in the last six to nine months, to me, really does, I think, show that the breakthrough is in agent coding we saw at the end of 25 with, was it Opus 4?

[Leo Laporte]

Opus 4 or 5 at November 24, a day that will live in my heart and infamy.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, well, I think that was when

[Leo Laporte]

everything changed as far as I was concerned.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It was like, okay, the cadence is faster. And I think we're seeing AI models either accelerate humans to do more, more quickly, or I think as we've seen the last couple of major releases, you know, sparks of recursive self improvement or whatever. I think we're starting to get to the point where that's having a very modest impact. But I think that that plus the accelerated humans does feel like a new gear.

[Harper Reed]

Have y' all noticed more features being released in other software you're using?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's interesting. I have noticed more bugs, so I

[Harper Reed]

think that's part of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Tuesday Microsoft shipped a patch Tuesday with a record number. More than 500 fixes. And if you include the fixes they applied to Microsoft Edge because of the Chromium project, it was over a thousand. And that's AI, right? That's mythos.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I meant the other kind of direction of. You mean like good features, literal features? Yeah, yeah. I mean it's one thing when you

[Leo Laporte]

have all of these things.

[Harper Reed]

So I've been starting to notice a few things and it's not enough to have a list, but I keep thinking like, oh, that's new. I wonder if that was just something they shipped really quickly. I keep thinking this as I use an app like a Gmail or I'm trying to think what else app I use, but it seems like there's a quicker pace.

[Leo Laporte]

One would expect that actually. Instead what I see is a lot of Vibe Coded crap. To be honest with you, GitHub is overflowing. And by the way, I have contributed. I all of a sudden have 20 GitHub repos and I'm not even posting everything I'm doing.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So the explosion of consumer software in that since LEO has been so fun to watch through the lens of a niche. So I'm a poker fan and I hang out on the poker subreddit and. And there was this period of time when cloud code took off before everyone ran out of compute capacity in which they literally had to tell everyone, no more sharing your free poker app that you built because there are too many. Here is a net of credit now because everyone was like making, you know, GTO trainers and all this cool stuff and it was fun, it was cool, everyone was pretty happy. But it was just every other post was like, look at what I follow.

[Leo Laporte]

A subreddit called RSS which was a fairly quiet. Not much was happening. All of a sudden every single person on there has written, including me, their RSS reader. There are an infinite number now of Vibe Coded RSS readers out there so that if you include that. Harper yes, there are more features, but in commercial software I don't see a

[Harper Reed]

great so just Start paying attention because this is something I'm kind of working through. I think. I really do think there is something happening. Just because I'm going to create a list and then next time, whenever I see one, I'll create a list, I'll make a note and I'll just do it because, well, you can't have the AI do it because it's a lot about feel. Right. Like, it's a lot about like, oh, this is interesting. This is a new feature that I wouldn't have expected because I guess what I'm trying to suggest is that it's not just features, it's that features that are not that you. As if you go through a quick product manager audit, you would be like, oh, why would they prioritize this? This is interesting. It has a little too many flourishes or it's a little too fancy, or it's a little too on the edge of something or another. But I think it's great because we are seeing this internally to my company, like the fact that we can ship anything very quickly. So I would love to see it more at some of these bigger companies. It shows that it's working.

[Leo Laporte]

You're looking for a Move 37 feature. Do you know what I'm saying when I say move 37? When AlphaGo was playing Lisa doll.

[Harper Reed]

Ah, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

In Go, there was one move, move 37, where all of them go. Master said, no, that's what. Yeah, that was a terrible move. It was a non human move that turned out to be a winning move.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's what you're saying. There should be some move 37s out there. Stuff that one wouldn't have expected. Maybe.

[Harper Reed]

I think that there are. I think that there's a thing that I keep thinking about. Like we. Everyone talks about software factories in my world, like that's a thing they talk about. And there's a couple things that I don't really understand why we are talking about that. The first one, it's like it sounds like a good idea, it sounds hard, but everyone's acting like they're done. And I feel like there's a. This thing where if you had a real software factory and it was truly effective, absolutely working and you were able to ship things with like, you know, just let's say you 10x or 20x all of your humans, why would you tell anyone about it?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, why would. You're looking for signals of a rumble from someone else's earthquake that's beneath the surface. I see, so you're not Looking at like, here's the corporate blog post announcing

[Harper Reed]

because everyone who's saying like we use AI to do a billion things seems to be lying. And they seem to say that in a, in a, in a coordinated way because they're then going to do a layoff of like 15% of their workforce two weeks later and just be like, oh, it was AI and it's like, no, you just over hired during COVID Like this is a very clear example of you hiring, you know, 40% more people. It's AI washing. And I feel like that's been for the last couple of years. But I guess my assumption is I'm seeing, we've seen and our company has been changed forever with some of how this stuff works. So I am assuming that, that a bigger company that is doing similar stuff to we is going to have the same examples, the same outcomes, the same.

[Alex Wilhelm]

How many people are at your company?

[Harper Reed]

6.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, that's why it works. I think that's why when we see these layoffs, and I'm not even being facetious, people say like, you know, we're going for smaller teams. You know, the Amazon 2 pizza rule has become the Amazon 1 pizza rule. Everyone wants to move faster. I think the lack of bureaucracy, layers, size scale, enterprise SLAs and so forth is why you can do that. But what I am seeing that I think matches what you're saying is I'm shocked at how much stuff companies now drop in a major release. So like when databricks put out there the genie omni, whatever their new agent is, they had like I, it felt like 15 different posts about new stuff they put out. Microsoft during build, they dropped more things than I could literally keep in my head to write about.

[Harper Reed]

And this is, this is kind of what I mean, right? Like these I think are signals that it's working for some people. And I don't think you have a, I don't think it's of interest or there's no strategic interest to tell people you're using these tools effectively because it will alienate hiring, it'll cause hiring to be harder. It will maybe give your competitors some sort of heads up to say, oh, maybe we should be looking at that a little more seriously, especially if you're linking it to actual outcomes. And so this is where I'm like trying every time I'm using a big company's app, I'm a little bit trying to read tea leaves through that interaction to be like, oh, is this new? Did they always have that shadow there that Seems like a little bit of a flourish because I do think that what we'll see is we'll see parts where people are showing off where they're actually explicitly because like you're saying it is a smaller team thing which allows for more specifics. Like a friend of mine here in Chicago built NBA Jam, the video game and because it was such a small tight team, the Easter eggs are literally the developers heads on the players. Right. And so I think we're going to start seeing some of those kind of Easter eggy personalizations again. Teams are so small and tight and so that's the flourishes that I'm kind of looking for. What is this little thing? Oh, when you hover over this, this happens or you double click on here and you get the Death Star instead of a planet or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

It's my guess though that the bigger enterprises all are working as quickly as they can to create internal software, that you're right, they probably don't want to tell anybody what they're doing for a variety of reasons. I, you know, I've heard anecdotally in our AI user group we have a number of people who work for a big enterprise that very commonly in big enterprises you have multiple teams. There's not one monolithic AI strategy. You have multiple teams working on multiple different things. And I also from time to time see stories like we replaced our CRM, our half million dollar a year CRM budget with vibe coded software. Or you know where you really see it? Customer service.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. People are admitting that. In fact it's kind of interesting because while you and I might say God we hate those phone trees and we hate automated customer service in general, it seems to be a good experience for customers that they're triaging the easiest things fast so that the humans can handle the hard things. You know, it happened in Linux world. This week Linus Torvalds surprised me a little bit. Key on the Linux newsletter said I realize that some people rather mailing list. I realize some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm ill willing absolutely to put my foot down as the top level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti AI projects and if somebody has issues with that they can do the open source thing and fork it or just walk away. AI is a tool just like other tools we use and it's clearly a useful one. So this was seen by the open source world as an endorsement from somebody you might say is probably anti LLM. Not at all.

[Harper Reed]

I, I mean I. I think it's interesting to fight this battle a little bit because what I have found is it doesn't seem like this is a bell that we're gonna unring.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's for sure. Well, okay, but we are going to talk about some headwinds, because there are some serious headwinds. But.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, tell me.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, I want you to finish the thought. If this is. We have already crossed the Rubicon and AI is done, it's going to happen.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I don't even mean it's like done, because done offers some idea of completion.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's say

[Harper Reed]

things have accelerated like I've done a handful of companies and every time we had the same pattern. And I've said this before on the show, like, you know, we used to. Used to very quickly hire 20 people and we have very quickly not hired anyone since we started the company. And we have had so much output. And I do contend that, like, I agree with Alex, like, this is because we're small, we're able to do this, but the amount of output that we're doing is more than I've ever seen in my entire life. It's almost more output than my entire career prior. Like, it's so much output. There's a focus issue there, but. Well, let's not talk about that. But I do think that there's a lot of, like, this is hard to contend with. And I think if you build in the process to handle it, then the benefits are so big. You have such huge benefits, which obviously Linus is seeing, especially for something as important as Linux or what have you. There was a friend was mentioning this that when the US government nuked Fable, the project glasswing or whatever was still doing reports because you were still seeing bug reports being submitted that were written very thoroughly, which obviously means Fable wasn't nuked for everyone. And so it's like that kind of thing. The fact that Microsoft can be like, here's our patches and it patches all of these bugs, makes everyone safer. And the fact that Linux is on 100% of our devices and Linus obviously sees the benefit from progress, Project glasswing, et cetera, means that I think it makes sense. The people that I know who are anti AI as coders think they are very smart. The people who I know who are pro AI and very good coders oftentimes are like, I'm very smart, but this thing is really good and I am smarter with it. And I think it goes back to the lease it all go stuff, right? Which is basically like when you hooked a person to the machine, it was pretty good. Which is why I believe in the Matrix.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there might be some commonality with people's attitudes towards self driving cars. Lisa had a big fight with her, her brother in law yesterday who said no, waymos are really dangerous. And Lisa said no, the stats are clear. Waymos are roughly 10 to 15 times safer than human drivers. They're not, they're safer. He said no, no, no, AI can't drive. And I think it's maybe kind of like that that there are people who deny that AI can be any good and then there are people who are using it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think also Leo, we're seeing people that used ChatGPT's web interface once 18 months ago then saying, oh, that AI is driving my car.

[Leo Laporte]

But I will say in their defense, AI is jagged. Intelligence is jagged. And so Samo Bull Samet, who's a regular on our show and a car guy said you will never see level 5 self driving because there's always going to be an issue, there's going to be a thing that the AI isn't prepared to handle and so completely autonomous on any road is not going to happen. And I think he's somewhat credible. I don't think he's an anti AI guy, I think he's somewhat credible on that. But, but nevertheless. So this is, this is why it's not quite as cut and dried as all that AI. Well, here's another question in software. Steve Gibson, our security guy, we were talking about all these bug fixes and he says what you're going to see, his prediction is what you're going to see is a rise, an increase in the number of bug fixes to dramatic level. We might already be there. And then he says this will happen over the next year, a decline to the point where you don't have any more bugs.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Harper, you're more of a developer than I am, but I don't think we're going to end up with bug free software. I think we're just going to have a faster remediation cycle.

[Harper Reed]

I mean I think that's true, but it might be equivalent, right? I think the thing that I found is that as a developer we did testing, right? So you 2016, you would say let's get our test suite up and you would shoot for like 40%, 60% and if you were insane, like truly had nothing else going on in your life, you might hit 80%. You know, some people said we have 100% test coverage and mostly that Was performative. Like people. I don't. I don't know very many people who worked in production environments who had such high test coverage because there was so much other happening that it was scary. You had to just do stuff and it was hard and you had to just get all this stuff done. And now that's just table stakes. Like, you cloud will just give you 100% test coverage,

[Leo Laporte]

right? Like basically dummy tests where.

[Harper Reed]

Of course it does. Of course it does. But. But this is where you still have to have good practice. Like you still have to have code review practice. I agree with you. All that stuff. But it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I do.

[Harper Reed]

And this is where the bugs will disappear, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I have my guy do tdd. In fact, I do. I do red, green, blue testing because that's how I learned how to code. Right? And I think that's probably a good, sensible way for the AI, But I don't have. I think this is where the jagged thing comes in sometimes. Most of the time it's good. And it'll write a test, the test will fail. It'll write the code, the code passes. It does behavioral testing and everything seems to work. And then sometimes it'll just say test passed. It'll just say test null.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, Yeah, I think that could be. Occasionally it running out of compute on the back end. And then. Okay, jk, now you're in high.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a variety of reasons it does it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But if I. Harper, please.

[Harper Reed]

I'm just kidding. My experience with building like all of our process around this, it's just you have to do more loops. And so what, you know, and this is the popular word on Twitter, et cetera. Loops.

[Leo Laporte]

Could you explain this to me? Because that's.

[Harper Reed]

I mean all it is is like

[Leo Laporte]

talking about on X is.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, it's pretty stupid, right? Like all you do is you just are like, slash, loop. Do this until it's done. And it literally will just do that until it's done. And so that's why they were like, that really is way to burn tokens. Because then it just does a bunch of. So you do slash goal where you say, do this until the tests pass or do this until you have 100% test count. That kind of looks so you give it. And so that kind of thing. So what. But what we have found is that you can't just have Claude do it. So what we'll do is we'll use Claude. It'll go through, it'll build the thing, It'll be like, test pass. Everything's Great. And we're not looking at code. So then we will pass it over to Codex and then Codex will be like, y' all are insane. These tests are horrible. And it will do it. Yeah, exactly. And then you pass it. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

And Fable and actually I, Fable, do the design, but because it costs, I keep. And we're going to get to this in a second. I keep expecting them to turn Fable off. So I feel design it and hand it off to Opus 48 for the coding and then have it reviewed by Sol 56 and then have that reviewed by 4 or 5 then. And in order to do this, I gave them. I got tired of pasting the results from one from Codex into cloud code into Hermes. So I just said, email each other, would you? I said, I said, you got a mailbox. Just email each other with the results.

[Harper Reed]

What are you using for mail?

[Leo Laporte]

Obsidian. I just had them make text files.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, he can have a little folder.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it works perfect because then I can read it in case I want to. Although, as you said, you think you're going to read the code.

[Harper Reed]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't expect to read the code. I don't even read the plans anymore. It'll say, I've written an entire plan for you, 15 pages. As soon as you approve it, I'll get to work. And I just go, yeah, yeah, go ahead.

[Harper Reed]

So I think what this means is that if you, if you believe the agents, then we get what amounts to normal output, which is the same thing that happened if you believe humans as well. Like there's no difference.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think agents anymore will write buffer overflows or will access memory or

[Harper Reed]

they will write it, but they will find it much, much quicker. And so like the process that you would normally have is to just kind of keep iterating on this stuff, you know what I mean? Like you would keep pushing, keep going, keep doing, and then it will just kind of do its thing, like it' fix the bugs it finds. And I don't think we'll go to zero bugs because bugs are mysterious and they seem to just happen and generate.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's different kinds of bugs too. I mean, there's bugs that are coded bugs and I guess that's what we're talking about. Not things like timing bugs or Rowhammer or, you know, things that are kind of not code caused. But I think we can expect code bugs to become increasingly rare, don't you?

[Harper Reed]

I think so. I mean, we're seeing this like we're seeing our software. Is 10x better but the other side effect of this is that we are also using programming languages that we would never have used before. We're using a lot of Swift and a lot of Rust and a lot of Go. You know, these are much safer than Python.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And who wants to type all that rust? But if the agent's doing go right ahead, please. We want typing.

[Harper Reed]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Those can't be real programming languages. When I was growing up, C was a programming language.

[Harper Reed]

Now you're like, I mean, with Whip.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And then I'm going to use.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a good question.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Write it in Pop.

[Leo Laporte]

Aside from reviewing existing code, does anybody write Greenfield code in C in with their AI? No. Right.

[Harper Reed]

I have.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you?

[Alex Wilhelm]

I mean, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Why would you?

[Harper Reed]

Well, I mean, sometimes you need the right C. Yeah. And, and, and the thing that's funny is agents are just like, yeah, it makes sense. Why wouldn't you do that? That's totally what you do. It doesn't care.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think the interesting thing about what we just talked about, writing code yourself is can you imagine a child born today going through the hell of learning the syntax arcana of C and getting it right and thinking that that was a good use of their time versus architecting a system that would be built by agents? Like, this is going to be a lost art in not that long. And this is actually something that was predicted a long time ago. I forget which foundation novel it was. It wasn't in the main trilogy. It was one of the prequels or sequels. But in foundation, they literally write code to have the computers write the mathematics behind psychohistory. When I was reading that, as, you know, like 15 years ago, I was like, whoa, they're not even doing the work themselves. How will they ever know if it's right? And then here we are, and it turns out that, well, it's actually a pretty good way to go about things because computers can do more faster than us.

[Leo Laporte]

Plus they speak computer, which. Yeah, you know. Anyway, let's take a break. We. We didn't even get to any of the news stories.

[Harper Reed]

Well, we can. Let's do them.

[Leo Laporte]

We will come back. The actual, actual news, because it ties right into this beautifully. You're watching this Week in Tech. We're so glad to have Harper Reed here. Nice to see you. I have used many of your skills at 2389 AI. A lot of the review skills are very useful. Good stuff. Are you still putting new ones out all the time?

[Harper Reed]

Oh, man, we have so many. We have one called Thrifty that you might like. That does. It's really good. With Fable, you basically use Fable to plan and super cheap models like Haiku to do the work.

[Leo Laporte]

See, that was my idea. I thought 4.8 was cheap. You use Haiku. Wow. Okay.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. I mean, we tested it even on some open models and we've been thinking a lot about this because we do a lot trying to output this stuff is really interesting. And so we've been really thinking about how do you kind of lean on that a bit more? Like how do you build pipelines and whatnot where you're using so expensive, Right? Well, you can use 4, 8 or you can use GLM or whatever to do planning and then you can throw that to Gemma or Kimmy or like something to do the code. All it has to do is be able to do tool calls. That's it. And as long as it can do tool calls and you have a reasonable harness that can handle it, you can kind of get some stuff done. Which means that like, I think the. What we will be talking about soon, which some people already are, you can hear them, is you have to be able to pay less than retail for tokens, which is why everyone loves subscriptions, right? But if you're a big corporate, you're still stuck with like APIs and you're just paying retail and it's like you'll never build anything that will be sustainable because it's just so expensive. OpenAI or anthropic or whomever will beat you. Google will beat you. But with Kimmy and glm, suddenly things are getting much more interesting. And so I'm very exc. Excited about that stuff. I think this is where things get really interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. And we have more to talk about in just a bit. Also, Alex Wilhelm is here. His newsletter kind of covers a lot of the same stuff, Cautious Optimism. And you can subscribe to it, but you can also read a lot of it right there at Cautious Optimism.

[Alex Wilhelm]

News.

[Leo Laporte]

News, yes.

[Alex Wilhelm]

News, yes. Because it turns out that when you think of a phrase that people already know and try to get the dot com, you don't. Yeah. Who would have.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? If you got a dot com these days, people would say you were unoriginal.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Our dog becoming chewy.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think it looks. I think it looks dodgy. I think it looks like from the year 2000.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Like whenever I see crypto.com, like the crypto.com arena down in LA, I'm always like, it feels so nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at you guys. Got, you got.

[Harper Reed]

Are you sure that's not the crypto part of that.

[Leo Laporte]

FM. You got news, I got TV. Who's using.com anymore? US Steel.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I don't think we see enough people going crazy with tlds now that you can do kind of whatever you want.

[Leo Laporte]

Pizza?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. Dot, dot. Your mom. I mean, like, why don't we have that?

[Harper Reed]

Google got that one, though.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they probably have that one.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, they got that one.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Alex Wilhelm]

Does Ziprecruiter happen with like, little tinder interfaces where you can just swipe left and right on candidates?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wouldn't that be good? I don't know. That would be cool, wouldn't it?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, it would.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Get at me. $5.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. You know what? That's fine for dating, but when you're hiring, it's a little more. A little more serious, actually.

[Alex Wilhelm]

The kids. It doesn't work for dating either. So there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Well, I don't know. I wouldn't know about that. Thank God. You know, I didn't. They, they didn't have apps when I was a young man.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Did you have to go outside and talk to people?

[Leo Laporte]

We had bars. Oh, that's where you went. We went to the disco to meet young ladies.

[Harper Reed]

Disco, third places or the roller rink.

[Leo Laporte]

Always fun, especially when the gals skate. That was great. So this was the week. Let's get back to the future. This was the week. First of all, there's a very funny game which I showed on Wednesday called Super Dario. It's a platformer like Super Mario, but you're Dario Amodei running along. And as you run along it says, we've extended it for another day. We've extended it for another week. We've extended for another two weeks. They keep extending Fable again and again and again. And I've been like, probably a lot of people because of the rug pull last month, you know, thinking, I'm going to lose Fable. I'm going to lose Fable. So I've been hustling along. We have a big project rewriting our old ad sales system. And you know, I want to use the best model. So I've been rushing and rushing. I don't know what I was rushing for this actually. It was yesterday. It was on the weekend, I think. Claude anthropic announced beginning July 20, Claude Fable will be included in your subscription, I guess, presume forever.

[Harper Reed]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it's 50% of the limits, so you can't use it as much. But I haven't run up. I mean, maybe I'm not doing enough sub agents, maybe because I'm being proactive, as you suggested, using lower quality agents to do some of the tool stuff. But I haven't run into limits. And I'm doing a pretty big project. I'm using it all day, every day.

[Harper Reed]

Are you using Fable primarily or are you dropping Fable to plan?

[Leo Laporte]

And then what I. So what I. When I started the plan, I said, because you're going to run out. This was three weeks ago. Because you're going to run out. I want you to plan this whole thing and then divide it into manageable chunks, which we're going to hand off to 4 8. So you're going to plan it. You're going to hand it off to 4 8. You're going to review 4 8's code and then we're going to move on. And then I, I added, when saul came out chap GPT 5.6 and 5.6 is going to review it. And then once I got Grok4.5, I said, and Grok4.5 is going to review it. And so I feel like with those triple reviews, the coding is being done by 4A and some with sub agents, but because it's a lower cost, it's fine. Sonnet 5 is good. So yeah, that seemed. I haven't run up against limits. So anyway, I feel like, you know, I have a Claude Max subscription, but I feel like this is. This means we're going to continue to have it. Why do you think this happened? They say demand for Fable has been challenging to predict, which is why we rolled it out to subscription plans in stages, extending access several times as we secured additional capacity. Some of that coming I think from XAI for a billion dollars a month. But does this tell you that maybe they thought there'd be more demand for Fable or they were concerned about it?

[Harper Reed]

I think we also have just forgot that the US government blocked it for two weeks.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yep.

[Harper Reed]

Do we all just forget that? I didn't forget it.

[Leo Laporte]

I was peeved.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Harper, are you saying that because they blocked it for a few weeks people kind of like came up with other systems, other approach for reduce their.

[Leo Laporte]

I will say that.

[Harper Reed]

So I actually think there's a lot of nuanced things going on. So I think the first thing that's happening is that these things are tokens are oil. Anthropic wants us to think that they are the engine. They want us to think that if you use Claude, it's Claude and it's different than OpenAI and Kimi and GLM and all these things. What we have found, and I think everyone kind of has a similar experience, is like a lot of people prefer the vibe of Claude, which I think is related to the prompting the system prompts and whatnot. And they think OpenAI is kind of boring. But OpenAI is just as effective. The models are very good as Soul is incredible. It's Fable level, especially around execution and programming and so that's great. But you can put any of these models into any harness that you have and they will probably be equivalent. You might have to tweak it over here because this model has these idiosyncrasies or this one does this. I personally like Anthropic models, but I have had just as good a luck with GLM on a few things as I've had with Anthropic. And the vibe seems similar. And so I think what is Happening is when Anthropic and the US Government nuked themselves, nuked Fable. I think people were just like, well, that sucks. Well, let me go experiment more. And what it did is it broke the trust. And so it allowed people to go experiment more with different harnesses, with different things. And, and OpenAI didn't help by releasing Soul. And then very specifically, some of their, you know, thought leaders at OpenAI tweeted about how to use Soul inside of cloud code. And so all the people who, who like cloud code were able to go and use Soul inside of cloud code, which is great. Like, that's a great thing you people should experiment with. But once you do that once, that's another one of these, you know, bridges. That is going to be hard. Like, they burn that bridge, you're never

[Alex Wilhelm]

going to have that trust.

[Leo Laporte]

And again, is because of the federal government, because of the rug pull, they turned the classifiers up. Way up.

[Harper Reed]

That thing was annoying.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm hearing people say, I can't get Fable to do anything. Yeah, yeah, this is, this is the protective layer. Because I think it's pretty clear Fable is mythos. It's Mythos with a lot of. With a classifier running on top of it that says the minute you try to do something, having to do cybersecurity or biohacking or, or. Or AI, it says, no, no, no, no, no. Or it will turn it down to 4 8, opus 4 8. And people are complaining that I. They can't even do simple, normal stuff. The classifier is so aggressive. So that's another reason maybe, given everything

[Alex Wilhelm]

you just said and everything Harper just said. Think about what Anthropic said in their missive. Beginning July 20, Cloud People 5, including all Max plans and Team Premium plants at 50% of limited limits. So for certain plans, 50% for everyone else, one time $100 credit to your account. That is not a company that is swimming in spare compute. Because I think they would love to serve a lot of inference at either the subsidized rate, as Harper mentioned, or at the headline rate for this, which is 10 bucks per million input tokens and 50 bucks per million output tokens. They would love to do that, but they're still having restrictions in place. So to me, they're not COMPUTE abundant yet. And I don't think they will be for a long time. But as they.

[Leo Laporte]

But they're more than they thought they'd be because they did act as if it was going to be API tokens only, right?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Sure. But we don't know if they found some ways to serve this inference more efficiently. For example, we don't know. Did Amazon just turn on another. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

They're buying Compute from XAI at a billion dollars a month.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I mean, and they're buying it from Alphabet and Amazon and Microsoft, and they're building their own data centers and they have.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And their neoclouds.

[Leo Laporte]

It's such a black box. You're saying, we don't know and we don't know. We don't know anything. We don't know what it costs them. We don't know if they're losing money, if they're making money. We don't know anything, do we? Because they're not public yet.

[Harper Reed]

I saw a good tweet where someone said two things can be true, which is they can be absolutely crushed under the operating expenses, and they also can be swimming in money from all this revenue. Well, they have, like, the fact that they can't light up enough data centers, they can't do all this stuff because of the costs, et cetera. And also the fact that everyone is paying them billions of dollars to do.

[Leo Laporte]

And they have, you know, ample Runway because of the investment that's been poured into them.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, they have tons of capital. There was that meme for like a few weeks. A few months ago, people like, oh, OpenAI is going to run out of money. And I just wanted to be like, guys, they just raised $122 billion in a single round.

[Leo Laporte]

The largest raise in history.

[Alex Wilhelm]

In history. Anthropic is not going to run out of money ever. Because of what? Well, maybe if they lose the edge and they get mocked by Chinese open models and so forth, but, like, the way things are going today, they're fine. But I do think Leo hits on a very important point, which is it would be nice to have a better access to the numbers so we could understand how healthy this company is or not. But if you go back to earlier in the conversation, we were talking about not telling people how much value you're getting out of AI because you don't want to tip them off. That is, ironically, the Google IPO problem. They didn't want to go public because they didn't want everyone money they were making on search. They had to because they were legally

[Leo Laporte]

required to because they had so many shareholders.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Back then there were rules about these things. Now we don't have that.

[Leo Laporte]

But ever since the Jobs act, that's gone.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, kind of there's different rules, but once anthropic goes public. If they are minting money as much as they think they are, then people are going to get pretty peevish about paying 10 bucks per million input. Input tokens because that's a little bit excessive compared to open source and open weight models. So I think right now they're probably sitting pretty. Pretty. A lot of demand, not enough supply money's coming in.

[Leo Laporte]

OpenAI have filed for IPOs, but we don't. But they're, they're, they're holding on to it. And I think the Trump rug pull gave both of them cover to hold on right to the ipo, because I don't. You're right. I don't think they really are too anxious to reveal any of these numbers.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, no, you do the, you do the dirty work before you list. And I think right now they're still in the dirty work era of building out their, their compute footprint and so forth. And I don't think all the deals they've done are going to be simple to explain. And I don't think that the cost of their employee compensation is going to make their gas gap numbers look particularly salubrious. But that does not mean that the core business of making and selling intelligence isn't actually pretty sick.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm dirty AI done dirt cheap, Is that what you're saying?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Indeed, sir. Sing it for us, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

So it also got very complicated because all of a sudden China, who also has very mixed motives, is now starting to release open weight, very credible AIs. It started with Kimmy this week. Moonshot AI. They say it will be open weight on the 27th. It's not open weight yet, but they showed benchmarks and a number of people have confirmed this that say it is almost. Not quite, but almost fable quality. They offer a subscription as well as API tokens. They're not.

[Harper Reed]

Which is sold out. Yeah, they sold out of the subscription, which I think is. Back in the early aughts when I was involved with T shirts, we would free. We would sell out a thing specifically to get the hype going for when we would launch it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Harper Reed]

So you do a small run and then do a big run and, and that was such a great way because people would be like, oh man. And they, they buy something else, they do something else and it's. I mean this is famous. They, they are doing a very good job at comms and growth and marketing and I, I love it because the models are probably also very, very good and. Well.

[Leo Laporte]

And then Alibaba said, hold my baba. Yeah. And said oh, by the way, Quinn 3.8 max is coming out. It's been launched in preview to those same people who got access to the other ones before we did. That was today?

[Harper Reed]

Oh, yeah. This is an exciting weekend. And I am behind. I was like, oh, I'll check out Kimmy later. And I just can't. It's not available now.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's Quinn 3.

[Leo Laporte]

Quinn is very good, I have to say. I've been using 3.7. I can run that locally. The 27B and 35B and it runs nicely.

[Harper Reed]

Did you play with GLM?

[Leo Laporte]

5.252 is. I don't run it locally because I don't have.

[Harper Reed]

You don't have Rich, you don't have 8B200 sitting behind that PDP11.

[Leo Laporte]

But I do run it. It's my Hermes default. I love glm. It's very good at language. I find I haven't tried it so much with coding.

[Harper Reed]

It's good.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Good.

[Harper Reed]

That's great.

[Leo Laporte]

I still have in my mind that Anthropic is the coding king, but maybe I should let go of some of that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, that's the risk that we're talking about, really. But I just want to go back to the Harper point about how to build hype by restricting access to your product. Zippu. AI Z AI. The makers of the GLM family models did this earlier this year. They restricted new signups to their coding planks. They didn't have capacity for it. So this is not even a new approach by a Chinese lab to gen up interest in the American media. Yeah, and it works every time I

[Leo Laporte]

have a ZAI subscription for their Max. They're top of the line. It's a third what Anthropic's Claude Max is. It's like 75 bucks a month. And I use it like it's my.

[Harper Reed]

Which one is this? Oh, the Z AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. GLM52.

[Harper Reed]

So here's. Here's something I like to think about. I was using Claude code in was it when it February 2025 just had launched early days. And it was great. And we were building all sorts of cool stuff and our processes were horrible. I think GLM is way better than the anthropic models that were available then.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is now the question. How close are the open weight models to the frontier models?

[Harper Reed]

Well, I think it's not a question of how close, actually. I think it's a question of time, because it doesn't matter if they're equivalent. I like how you were like, Alex, he's going to say it. And then I said it and you were like, why? You don't. But no one else.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No one else can see me.

[Harper Reed]

So I got to be. I was excited about that. I was just like seeing your head just collapse in on itself as you didn't expect what I was going to

[Alex Wilhelm]

say, but no, you let me down. I thought you were going to say

[Harper Reed]

my point, but no, but I think time is the key. It is. How long ago would you have an equivalent?

[Leo Laporte]

Is it 6 months, 8 months, 4 months?

[Harper Reed]

How ahead are the foundational models? And I think it's getting shorter and shorter, but my point is less that. Does that matter? My point is 6 months ago I was using cloud code and it was awesome. So if GLM is six months behind and it's effectively free, then like, what? This is like a. This is like a press.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? This is great. Effectively free and is very close as Deep Seek, the Chinese model that blew us all away In February of 2025, that changed the whole world. It was an open weight model and it was. And now they're really cheap. It's like $0.12 per million tokens in

[Alex Wilhelm]

deep sea v4 is incredibly, incredibly inexpensive.

[Leo Laporte]

I use that as well. I have to say GLM has kind of eclipsed that for me. But the point is, all three of these are from China. And the Chinese government has made noises that they may want to stop this. They may want to embargo open weight models from the U.S. just as the U.S. government is making noise, they want to block Chinese models from the US this is partly protectionism. Just like they block Chinese EVs from the US to protect our auto industry. Partly. Maybe security. Because let's not forget, you know, Harper, you're the one that made me buy this Chinese. Where is it?

[Harper Reed]

It's pretty good, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

It's escaped. It's escaped. Now it's a little ball that you connect up to your WI fi and it immediately calls China and it's Deep Seek. And yeah, it's really cool.

[Harper Reed]

And it's not horrible.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but am I exfiltrating? Look, we just saw that GROK is taking everything it can get. Elon says this is a bug and they're going to fix it. But the GROK command line interface was apparently downloading entire directories of your. Of your hard drive. When you get.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Before we get to that, I want to go back to the hopper point. I want to double click on this because I thought you were going to say that as we watch Open Weight models become closer and faster followers to American closed source models, that there's going to come a point in which they are sufficiently intelligent for whatever task you need to put against them. And therefore the pricing power of American clothes models will collapse. And that is going to be a really tough moment for these companies. But right now, today, to Leo's point, we do have deep seq v4. And you know what, people use it and you know what, they still also pay through the nose for fable. So to me, we're not there yet. But to your point about using old cloud code versus present day gls, I mean we can't be more than a couple years out from when the, when the, the average model is sufficient for all of my Alex Wilhelm's personal needs and all of yours.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, TLM is fine for my agent. That's what I use Hermes with. And it's great. It's all I need. It's wonderful.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay.

[Harper Reed]

But I would, I would guess that we're there already. Yeah, that for the most part the.

[Leo Laporte]

Unless you're coding, unless you're doing hardcore

[Harper Reed]

coding, I think that if you're coding, you can get pretty far. Now that doesn't mean that you can't get better, right? I think there's a difference between could this do everything I need it to do and is this the best model? In the same way that you have cars, right? Like buying a Toyota Corolla is a completely rational car. I would probably prefer another car, but it does do the thing. And so I think that if you have a GPU that can run like you have, we have a spark, right? We have one of these sparks and it has 128 gig of RAM. We can run some of these bigger models slow, just so slow. But you run it and it works great. And like for the most part, that could power my local agent, my Hermes agent or whatever it could power. Probably do some coding with PI and all this stuff, but for free or just power of electricity. And so I think this is accessible. I do think though that when you really want it to work, you want to use something like a GLM or probably these Kimi K3 or you know, the new Quinn. And those are going to take, take a lot of GPUs. Like I don't have eight B2 hundreds. I don't even know how to get those. I don't know how that works. And so I don't think that is a reasonable thing. So I think we have eclipsed the. You can run it locally for free and of course these will be, they will be quantized, et cetera, to get them a little smaller. But the magic here is that you can get something that is like fable or like Opus 4 horses for max $1.40 an hour, tokens, a million tokens or whatever it is. There's all these hosting ways. A friend of mine was renting on vast AI A8B200 box which amounted to basically $50 an hour and then giving all of his friends free inference. And so you could just. But you could do whatever you wanted, right? Because there is no limits. And then he did some really cool stuff with scheduling and all sorts of stuff and it worked out really, really well. And it. Because we rarely have opportunities to just rip through as many tokens as you want, right? And he was doing testing because this is ostensibly a startup and he's trying to figure out if he could, if this is something sustainable that he could give to companies. And it actually got me thinking much differently about how tokens are given out. Whereas with a Fable or whatever you have all these very limited things. But in what situations would you want unlimited tokens? Like a WeWork of the future might say, oh, and we have a GLM instance that is unmetered because you remember when the data centers did this, right? Like you would have, like Exodus would try and get you in and they'd be like one year of unmetered, you know, egress or whatever back in 2001. And like, like that kind of thing I think will start to happen as this, as this commodifies further.

[Alex Wilhelm]

The children forget that in the early days of aws, back when Azure and AWS were fighting it out for market share, they actually cut prices occasionally. It was a thing Microsoft said, we will never have prices higher than aws. And everyone went yay. And then now everyone's broke because they're in the cloud. On the point about price, what's very interesting to me about the latest crop of models that we're talking about, especially KMK3, is that it is not cheap in its current form. It's roughly priced along with GPT 5.6 Terra, I believe, kind of the middle sized model, so.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's a lot less than Fable and it's nearly as good as Fable is the, is the pitch right?

[Alex Wilhelm]

But okay, I don't think it's as close to Fable as you guys do.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't, I don't know. I'm. I don't.

[Alex Wilhelm]

They even, they even said in the Kimmy K3 blog post at the very bottom and says like this is not as good as.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they said it's second to fable better than Saul. But second to fable is their pitch.

[Alex Wilhelm]

At some point we're going to.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is. By the way, benchmarks are bs, right? Benchmarks are not usable anymore, I think. Anyway, go ahead, make your point.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh no, I'm just saying that right now we are seeing a Kimmy K3 come out. It is a big model, it is not cheap to run on, it is currently not open and it smells a lot like an American AI model to me. Now they will open weight it, sure. It will get distilled, condensed, improved, tweaked and it'll get cheaper. But right now what they have built is something that if it came out from OpenAI, you'd be like, cool. Yeah, I think it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

If it does become open weight, you still wouldn't be able to run it because I think it's close to 3 trillion parameters.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So you're 2.8, 2.4, something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not going to fit on. On your. So let me read you what Dean Ball says. Dean Ball is a conservative from the Hoover Institute. He, you know, Heritage Society, you know that lineage. He is now head of strategy at Open AI as of two weeks ago. Head of Strategic Futures is his title. He wrote this and I thought it was very provocative. Do you know, are you familiar with this, Alex? Have you seen his tweet?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, yeah, I've read through this.

[Leo Laporte]

Some observations on Kim. It is a very good model. I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation, which is what some like anthropic claim. It's in a genic coding sessions. This seems pretty much on par with the best public models of the first quarter of this year. I'm personally surprised. This is where he gets to the economic argument, which is very interesting. I'm personally surprised that the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good given the risks. He says, to be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I'm surprised that China's fine with it. The presumption, by the way, when you say open weight is that people will. It doesn't have to be run in China. It could be run on American servers, you know, that we work model or if you had 20 B1 hundreds, you could run it at home. So it's basically China's letting it out of their control. Control. I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness that the Chinese Communist Party isn't like thinking along the lines of American frontier model companies like Dario.

[Harper Reed]

This is, this is the. I think this is the fatal flaw when anyone talks about China is they can't help but being like, well, they're just so stupid.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't.

[Harper Reed]

You're just like. They're just like.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think that's the case.

[Harper Reed]

Like anytime you read like, like Apple in China, Chip wars, all these books where like this incredible book telling about how China is doing all this cool stuff. And the last chapter is like, well, they just won't make it. I'm just kind of like, how is that?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm more of the opinion that it's. For them it's soft power, you know.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

For the same reason they're making their own chips, because they don't want Cuda and Nvidia to own the world. They want to have their own. He says the other 25 or so is their lack of compute for customer inference since they can't run it locally. Maybe they don't have enough compute to do that. That he says also the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. And for the companies as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partly ideological, partly because they're behind and because they know, as Alex was just saying, very few people would pay for sub frontier models from China. Right. It's not a competitive. But this is the thing that he said that's very provocative and scary.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

This is points 3 and 4 when it gets spicy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Open weight models are inherently decelerationist. He says that because they basically make it impossible to raise money for frontier models. If somebody's giving it away. Go ahead.

[Alex Wilhelm]

This is where I wanted to jump in and kind of explain this point. But I realized that you were about to do that and I mean a terrible guess. So I'm going to shut up and let you finish.

[Leo Laporte]

He says in the end, open weight models deter AI Capex. Right. Why would you invest. Why would you invest billions in AGI from anthropic if China's going to give it away? He says this is what's really scary. Now we're to point four that you thought was equally scary. One probable outcome of an open weight model dominant world, which by the way is a world I've been advocating for. Wednesday we had the CTO of Mozilla on. He just put out his. The state of open AI. State of open source AI we believe just like open source software. This is this is great, this is revolutionary. He says, no, it's AI Communism. Now remember, he comes from the Heritage Society and the Hoover Institute. And it's precisely what China proposes. Rather than a market product, AI is a public good which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of digital public infrastructure. This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape. I can't argue against that point. He makes a good point.

[Harper Reed]

So I think there's two points there, right? One is it's communism, Great, who cares? The other one is that this might cause issues for. I mean it's, it's a communist country. What would you expect them to do? They lit, you can't own property. Like he's like, this might from China have introduced an idea of communism. And it's like, well, yes, that's true. I don't know. Read the House of Hawaii and tell me about communism. So the thing I think is interesting and actually compelling is there's one thing very specifically that why would you invest in a foundational model that has a closed model if you can get an equivalent thing for free? And we all know a. That that has not been true historically. There's lots of companies that have made open source software that is great. And then competing closed source software that is able to raise Salesforce exists way more money than the open source version. So I feel like, okay, but, and, but the thing that I think is interesting and I don't necessarily disagree, is what if that is strategic, right? Like what if there is where. If there's a strategy there. And I think the. There's another thing that I think think is going on which I think is similar, which is the United States, for better or for worse, has demonstrated to the world that we are a different country than we were 10 years prior. Especially for our partners and our friends and our frenemies. We have just demonstrated that in some cases we're more reliable and others we're way less reliable. But this has changed how people interact with us. And, and there is a hole, there's a vacuum where we sat before. And one of the things that China has taken advantage of is just public investment. And so it's not so public in China. It's not the same kind of thing, but they have invested a lot in infrastructure, in roads, et cetera, all over the world. And why is AI or data infrastructure any different? I would posit actually that we are missing the boat by not doing open models. Because if you look at a place like the Middle east, for instance, Dubai or What have you. They have huge data centers. They've been building a lot of data centers. They've been building AI cities. Whose models are they going to choose? Are they going to choose the closed models that they don't have access to? Are they going to choose the open models that are freely given that they can then modify to their own values and their own culture?

[Leo Laporte]

It's a belt and road initiative for AI. Yes, basically.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And then once these open weight models are selected and American AI companies can't sling their same models at the same margins as we discussed earlier, what happens to their business? Well, it becomes much less healthy, becomes less investable, less back. And you could see the closed source American AI labs that have so far led the entire AI race lose this. And this is why I think we see the Heritage foundation guy going, ah, it's communism, right? Because it is not great to see capitalism pouring private investment into these models to create something that is valuable today only to see China, you know, essentially undercut them with zero cost products. Here's my question. How can you keep funding these Chinese AI labs which currently are deeply unprofitable? And we know that because ZAI and Minimax are both public companies. We've seen their books. I have read through them myself. How do you build businesses of sufficient health to keep this up now?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but if you're the government supporting

[Harper Reed]

it, well, you're forgetting, but it's communism. Well, like I think there is a real, there is a reality here that

[Leo Laporte]

arms of the Chinese Communist Party.

[Harper Reed]

I don't think I would even go that far. I would say that there's a different value system that might be it. And you have state capitalism, which is not our capitalism. I would call our capitalism fast food capitalism. And so state capitalism gets a longer investment horizon and more support from the government, from the state. This is true. This is how it is. This is why there's so much solar in China. There's a really good book actually called Breakneck by Dan Wong, which I highly, highly recommend. Super, super book. And it just posits this very simple fact. The political of China are scientists and technology people. The leaders of the United States are lawyers. So when you look what tools you have, in the United States, our tools are regulation and laws. In China, their tools are science and technology. And that will change in the book. It does a really good job of kind of portraying this about how this is a reaction to industrialization. And so this is how we got here. And so I think what we have to kind of figure out is where do we as a country want to go? And right now the answer that we have is no. They're just like, where do you want to go? And everyone's just like no, we don't want to go anywhere.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Do you.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you want a United States federal government subsidized AI run? And, and.

[Harper Reed]

But I think you're missing the point here. I think you're missing the point. We've done this before after World War II with all of the science labs. This is not like we have to reinvent some magical thing and follow China into communism. It's this, we have to invest in science. That's basically what it is. Like that's all it is. This is not even we have to invest in science and get rid of capitalism. It's like literally invest in science and like things like Silicon Valley will be invested, invented, which is what happened. Vannevar Bush, et cetera. And so this is why every four or five years there's some senator proposals, some kind of idea that we would reinstantiate federal labs and all these labs which then spun out all this unnamed technology and did all that stuff. But the thing is it's, they're still around actually. But the problem is that it doesn't make financial sense if you are in a fast food capitalism type of world, right? And if you're waiting for, if you have a quarter by quarter requirement to be profitable, then you cannot do this type of innovation, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I just point out also that Dean W. Ball is now head of strategy at OpenAI. So this is maybe the point of view that OpenAI might reasonably have. By the way, the final, let me give you the final scare point and then you, then you can go, Alex, it's probably true, he writes that open weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you'd really notice. At some point the models will be capable enough. You will notice, quote, a non living, invisible, dangerous and infinitely self replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab. You say, color me shocked. And somebody did point out that one of the advantages that they have is the Chinese don't really care about intellectual property rights. There's no debate over whether it's okay to copy a million million pirated books into our database. They don't. One of the pieces, I think one of the real reasons people are liking Kimmy compared to fable is it doesn't have the restrictions. People are saying, yeah, I asked how to make an anthrax bomb and it told me.

[Harper Reed]

But also we didn't care about copying any of the books either. We had no interest in that. Like, I think there's a lot of. Do we, Leo? Like, did we stop training the models on the books?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No.

[Harper Reed]

Okay. So I don't think we actually cared. I think we paid. We don't care at all. So I feel like this is, this is all fake anti China bs. But I think the problem with the fake anti China BS is it actually papers over some really important things that we as a country need to figure out, which is how do we compete when there's a game being played that we are not participating in. And if we want to participate in that game, then we actually have to, or we want to win that game, which I think is the American way, then we need to invest in participating in that game. And we can't just have it be Llama and Gemma and just call it a day.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay, that's true. I agree with that. But I will say Nematron 3 Ultra. Pretty good.

[Harper Reed]

That's very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And the reflection AI is Nvidia's open family.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Nvidia's open family of models. And also I keep talking to the people over at Reflection AI and they claim they're doing things. And also we just saw thinking machines labs drop inkling. There we go. Had to reach for that one.

[Harper Reed]

Sorry, is it open?

[Alex Wilhelm]

I believe it is open weight and it's designed to be used in their tinker system to allow for fine tuning and post post training. So we do see sparks of open

[Leo Laporte]

way AI and I use Hermes from Noose Research. They have open models as well.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Noose Research. And we also in the west broadly have Mistral, which is a company that I think has been very much under wrapped and we have a couple of labs working on non transformer based AI models and tinkering around with world models and so forth. So America is not doing nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

The race isn't over?

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, not at all. And I don't think that we're actually as as far behind as people might think. And I don't know how to get enough compute built without having the profit element of this be at the forefront today, given the global race for compute.

[Leo Laporte]

And that comes from the notion at OpenAI and Anthropic that they are building AGI.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Tell me why.

[Leo Laporte]

Because the hyperscalers believe the only route to AGI is more parameters. There's 10 billion, 20 billion, 30 billion parameters. At some point we're going to get so many parameters we will have AGI and whether that's true or not, that may be a fool's errand. And it may be smarter to build smaller models with more limited capabilities. Okay, but. But it doesn't, it doesn't advance you towards an artificial intelligence. You know, I've spoke to a number

[Alex Wilhelm]

of the SLM companies, the small langu model companies, and really, what's really interesting come down to are like micro agents that do one specific thing, like your accounting software. Very useful, very targeted, but it's a wrench, not a workshop. And so to me, they're kind of just different conversations, Leo. And I don't think. I don't think that's the way to go about it. But also on the point about you only need this much compute for AGI, I don't agree because we just spent 15 minutes talking very positively about two of the largest models ever released in the world, Kimmy K3. And I think the next Quinn models are going to be huge as well. So if we're going to sit here and say that China is eating our lunch because they're releasing these open wave models that happen to be enormous, I don't think the solution is we need to have open models in the United States that are small.

[Leo Laporte]

How big is. Do we know how big Saul is? People think that fable is 10 billion parameters. 10 trillion. I'm sorry, parameters. Do we know how big? So 10 trillion is three times the size of Kimmy. So do we know how big Saul is? I don't think we do. They don't. And these companies don't tell us. This is.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Wouldn't it be great if they put.

[Harper Reed]

Though,

[Alex Wilhelm]

where's. Where's Sam Altman? Come on, Sammy boy, tell us some stuff. I'm asking Saul. 5, 6.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing that was interesting about Deep Seek is that they couldn't build these giant models. Frankly, it's the thing that's interesting. A lot of the Chinese stuff is they don't have access to Cuda to Nvidia chips. They're, you know, Kimi was done entirely with Huawei chips. 100,000 Huawei chips, but Huawei chips in the whole. And so their constraints have seemed to be a benefit. Look what Deep Seek did a year and a half ago, it opened our eyes to the idea of reinforcement learning.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Sure. And since then, what has happened with the two AI labs? No, I mean, they've scaled from like anthropics. Runway was like a billion when that happened. And now last we heard, it was 67 billion. So deep Seek, The Deep Seek moment, the terrifying moment that shook the cave, it didn't shut it down was one of the moments in which we saw anthropic accelerate to the moon. Or as OpenAI would say to the Luna, Aha. AI model family jokes. Come to twit for the dad humor.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's come back down to Terra and do a commercial and then we will continue. You're watching this Week in Tech. I didn't intend to make it an AI show, but it was the big news of the week, I have to say. We will talk more about other things in just a little bit with Alex Wilhelm Helm from this Week in Startups Twist, but his newsletter is Cautious Optimism News. And the wonderful, wonderful person who lives in my childhood home and the other wonderful person who lives in Chicago, Illinois, Harper Reed. It's me, 2389ai. You've been in Japan for ages.

[Harper Reed]

No, I was just there for like 12 days and then I had travel all over. And then we did an event in Montreal where we had a bunch of people come over and do what we called a hack party. And yeah, it's been a frenetic few months basically since I last saw you was just like constant travel, which has been really good because it's always entertaining to go other places.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show this week brought to you by Ethos. Well, now that both of you have small children, I'm going to think back. My kids are no longer small. Henry's 32, Abby's 34. But I remember very well the six month and the five months and all of that stuff. Stuff. And I also remember very well the responsibility I felt when those kids were born. That's when I ran out for the first time in my life. I think I was 35 and got life insurance. Oh, yeah, right. You start to kind of think, hey, you know what? It's not just me anymore. People are counting on me. Ethos is a chance for you to take that kind of responsibility for your family. Family Ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy. 100% online, you can get a quote in seconds, apply in minutes and get same day coverage. There's no medical exam. You just answer a few simple health questions. You can get up to $3 million in coverage. Some policies are as low as $30 a month and you'll get your lowest rate from their network of trusted carriers. Take 10 minutes to get covered covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Get your free', @ethos.com TWIT that's E T H O S.com, application times may vary. Rates May vary, but I remember very well that moment where you go, oh, I think maybe I better. Better do something to take care of the fam. You just had another. A third child. Alex, that's so great. Congratulations.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Thank you. Yes, it has contributed greatly to my sanity.

[Leo Laporte]

You're lucky, though, because you have a man cave that is separate from the house. You can go out there. Right?

[Harper Reed]

But.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But like, in the 50s. Yes. If I was a dad in the 50s, I would go out here and

[Leo Laporte]

smoke my pipe and follow you right out there.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, no, I. I don't even get to come out here. Like.

[Harper Reed]

Like.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay, so people who aren't parents don't understand this, but when you have your first child, you still think in terms of, like, what you want to do on the weekend.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that doesn't work.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You might think, you know, I really want to go see that movie, or I want to go. I want to go for a long bike ride. Your second child really turns that into a thin layer at the bottom of your life. And your third child is when you realize that weekends are now much harder than work days. Like, now, every single Sunday night, I'm like, oh, thank God we're going back to work. The nanny's coming. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

You're doing something I never did. I don't know if I could have done it. You're working at home. I got to get in a car and drive, drive and drive away.

[Alex Wilhelm]

My wife does this every day, and I'm always like, bye.

[Leo Laporte]

Bye.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But the nice thing is I do go in the house to get a drink, to get a. To get a bite, to use the toilet, whatever. And I do get to pop in and see the kids. And they're always so excited to see me because I've been gone for three hours. And they're like, daddy, look, I made a thing. And then your heart grows so big. Yeah. So I wouldn't trade it.

[Harper Reed]

And then you leave again.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. Yeah. And then I go back and they

[Leo Laporte]

cry and they wail and they're good about it. I remember I had an off home office. Office, and they would. They would know I'm in there, and they would pound let me and let me. So can't. You can't get away, you know?

[Alex Wilhelm]

You know, in my man shed, that there's a little porch. Well, we've put one of the children's swings there. And so often I'll be like, working, and then I'll look over and there'll be a child doing this outside the door. And I'm like, they Better not. I'm recording right now. They better not knock. They better not knock.

[Leo Laporte]

Daddy. It's okay if they do. I'm just telling you. It's quite all right. I had a swing on that tree right behind you. That big tall. Is that still there? The big tall?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, yeah, it's right there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had a swing right on that.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You should come back and see what we've done with the place. There's been many, many additions and improvement since. No, but I, I, I, I think that children have changed me in one more way that I'll bring up, which is it's taught me how I've already lost this battle. So I'm not going to try to be a moral leader here. But, like, phones are so addicted addictive, and I. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you gonna do? Have you decided what you're gonna do?

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm going to hold out until I am the last parent in their friend group that lets them have a phone and call. That enough?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I, I, I, I'm so glad I didn't have to deal with that. I don't know what I would do. Harper, what are you going to do with your kids when they get to that age?

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I've always believed abstinence is a really good program

[Leo Laporte]

for everybody else.

[Harper Reed]

I just don't think it makes sense. I mean, I think it's like, you're just gonna try and be a good parent. You know what I mean? Like, you do what you can. Like, you gotta do what you can. I'm not gonna die on any hills. I feel like most of the hills, you're just like, you're. And I think the thing that is complicated, it's very hard to meet for me to be like, you should not be using technology. Well, then I am using technology 25 hours a day. And so, like, what, what instead is like, how do you have. Have filtered and metered access? You know? And I think that's, that's the key. Also, sometimes you have to fly in a plane and, like, the no screen time rules when you have to fly in a check plane, just like, out the window. Yeah, I'm not a monster.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, no, no. People still tweet things. Like, I was at the airport at 9am and I saw someone drinking. There's no time zone in the airport, and there are no screen rules for children on the plane.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there you go. Go.

[Harper Reed]

Also, it's fun to mix those things.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I gave up drinking, but yes, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Social media limits coming for teens across Europe says EU leader Ursula, perfectly named Ursula von der Leyen.

[Harper Reed]

I feel like this is a bad idea. It seems this is something that whenever something like this happens, I just look at my security focused friends who are thinking of things that I don't think about and have brains that work differently than my brain. And they're always like, this is horrible. And that's when I'm like, oh, I should pay attention. And then the more you think about the ramifications, the more this just turns into a, let's name every person on the Internet surveillance bill, which, that's what it is. Chat control, which is bad. And that is like getting everyone's information into one database has not typically worked out very well for humans. Bad news. So I, I don't, I, I worry about this quite a bit. And one of the things I love about the United States is that we're not very creative. And so we'll just be like, we should copy that. Let's just copy that. Let's do a worse version. But we're all, what's going to happen is it's going to be like the gdpr, the California like privacy stuff, but it's going to be like Alabama makes everyone follow this one rule and then everyone who's building tech has to follow some stupid Alabama rule or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

We're already there.

[Alex Wilhelm]

We're seeing it at the state level. But also I want to point out this is not just an EU thing. China this week banned certain AI companions for, for kids and such. So like we're seeing, I think around the world people trying to be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Go outside, meet somebody, go to a bar, try to have a child. Please, please stop staying in your house and talking to your chatbot or your social media feed all the time. Because I do think that there is a intersection point between, between and not to get all different topic, but like the birth rate crisis and the rise of technology and people staying indoors.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't see kids out in the street playing very much anymore. Do you see that in

[Harper Reed]

Nobody has any, no one has any money. It could be a relationship with nobody has any money.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it doesn't take money to go outside and ride your bike.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It does take neighborhood.

[Harper Reed]

I meant the kids in the safe neighborhood and like having more kids and the birth rate and all this stuff. Like I know a lot of, oh

[Leo Laporte]

yeah, nobody, young people.

[Harper Reed]

And everyone's just like, why would I A, do any of that because I don't have any money and B, we're all gonna die. From like Elon Musk or whatever in five years. So, you know, so I feel like there's a lot of, like, a lot of things that go into this that I think we are. It's easy to say, oh, this is the reason why, but it's like a very big system.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes.

[Harper Reed]

And like, you know, but this is

[Alex Wilhelm]

why governments are taking it, taking it on. Right. So currently in the us, States that have enacted laws directly limiting minor social media access or requiring parental consent to include Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, down the list. So we've done this in half the U.S. right. And we're doing it in Australia and we're doing it in Europe.

[Leo Laporte]

UK is about to do it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, the uk, which is almost Europe, but not quite. And I do think that this is going to become a global, global issue. And I do think Harper's dead on

[Leo Laporte]

Finland, that what we're going to wind

[Alex Wilhelm]

up with here is essentially increased government control of the Internet, which I am fundamentally opposed to.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Harper Reed]

But there is an upside, which is A, it'll make more hack hackers and B, it'll be fun to try and get through it. Like, it'll, it's, it's. As a hobbyist hacker, it'll be fun to be like, oh, no, the government has access to my Internet. Let me fix that. Like, I also think there's this slightly fringier side, which is you remember when some like, you know, new name service comes on or someone messes with the BGP routes or whatever, some countries, like, we're going to do a thing like Iran has protests or whatever. I guess they don't anymore, but they used to have protests or whatever and then all the Internet would go down for like 40 minutes and then they'd fix it. Like, this is not that simple. Like, I can't wait, because they're going to break everything and there's just going to be Internet too, finally, from the universities. And we're all going to, we're all going to hopefully, you know, live in freeland.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Can I ask you about that? Because one thing that I've read about, and I forget the exact time that I read this and I can't pull up the article in real time, but like, I read that China is working to export their great firewall technology to other aligned nations with them. And so my question, the question is, what we're talking about here in broadly, the west is pretty lightweight. I do agree with you, Harper. You can get around it, blah, blah, blah, blah. Good hackers love it. But what happens if nations begin to get even more heavy handed, can we end up in a world in which the Russian style approach to the Internet, the Chinese style approach to the Internet, the North Korean style approach. Well, maybe not that far, but when that becomes the norm in most nations, because I think that you probably can't as easily hack your way around that level of stability control. And that's what I'm worried about.

[Leo Laporte]

So this week and you not, I

[Harper Reed]

mean this, like I think you, I

[Alex Wilhelm]

don't know, can the average person, can the child, can the, the, the homebrew hacker to your point from before?

[Harper Reed]

I don't know. I mean do you talk to anyone from like literally everyone in China knows what a VPN is.

[Leo Laporte]

True.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But how secure are they and how much visibility does the government have?

[Harper Reed]

Now we're focusing on perfection. Right? Like I think like the question is, can you hack around it? The answer is yes. Okay, does it, is it perfect? Like no, nothing is. I would just say use tailscale.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Shout out to our friends@tailscale tailscale.com.

[Leo Laporte]

i'm using it right now.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, it's incredible. Love it. I think there is this thing that we assume there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into this and I highly recommend if you're interested in what it looks like exporting China's great firewall, to read the book, I think it's called Hausah Hawaii, which is very, very, very good book. It's very interesting book. But it basically talks about that like they did that, they exported that technology to lots and lots of different locales. And in many cases it wasn't for surveillance, it was for, in case of an emergency, we want to be able to lock down or control information or what have you, which is not how we in the United States do it, but is how places in the world do it. Um, and, and it's very interesting to see that they just did it. Like they just, they. And it's not like a China is going to export that, you know. And I think it's very easy for us to link China with these con, these companies and say these are equivalent. But I, but I don't think they are necessarily equivalent. They are linked. So I don't, you know, because of state capitalism, et cetera. But it is a very interesting, it's a definitely interesting book. And I do think we in the US are, are not prepared for what it looks like when every single person has to register their name and birthday to get on the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

We're not far off from that, I think so the EU this week was unable to stop Chat Control, which is the warrantless mass scanning of private messages and photos in the eu. They, due to a kind of little manipulation of the rules they were able to get that were there was a vote to reject it, which didn't succeed. So now in September they're going to actually debate the permanent Chat Control 2.0. But what this essentially does is it forces companies to provide clear text versions of all your private stuff, every photo, every message, every file, so that it can be scanned. And of course, of course the proximate reason for this is to look for child pornography, but it has the effect really of break. Completely breaking privacy.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I thought that the compromise in this case, and Leo, if I'm wrong, just please shout at me. But I thought that they were going to not demand that encrypted chat be broken to allow for scanning of that as well. So you still get the ability to have encrypted chat in the Euro, is that right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't know, I'm not clear. The original Chat Control would break encryption and that's why Meredith Whitaker of Signal said, if that passes, we're getting out of here. We cannot offer Signal in the EU because we refuse to provide a backdoor to Signal. Now they haven't done that. So I imagine that you're right, Alex, that in some way the current version of Chat Control doesn't do that.

[Harper Reed]

That.

[Leo Laporte]

But this fall they are. There's. This is still on the table, there's. They still want to do this, I think.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I worry that safety ism is going to be a real issue, broadly going back to the self driving car point and, you know, talking about what's safer and what's not. Like, I think that we should move faster there. I think we should have less, less safetyism on these cars because they're already, I think, better than everyone that I see driving. I see a lot of, a lot of children driving suburbans at like 75 miles an hour down my residential street.

[Leo Laporte]

That's very scary. Maybe that's not a great.

[Harper Reed]

If that was a waymo. If that was a Waymo, a child wouldn't be driving it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Right. It would be going exactly 25 miles an hour.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

We're driving like a grandma. Yeah, I used to bicycle down that street. I safety pin a towel around my neck and pretend I was Superman. It'd be dangerous to do that now. Dangerous, I tell you.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You cannot let your children out of the house and not have them taken Away by the police. Different. Different topic entirely.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that true that they will say, oh, you're a bad parent. You can't let your kids out of the house.

[Alex Wilhelm]

My sister does this in the Bay Area. She lives in the South Bay.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll keep it relatively no free range kids anymore.

[Alex Wilhelm]

She lets her kids bike to their friends houses. And the other kids parents are like gobsmacked and terrified. Like what do you do? You, you let him skateboard over here.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that sad?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes, yes it is. Yes, it is. It is indeed sad. Yeah, it bums me out because I spent a lot of my youth climbing over barbed wire fences in the country and flowers.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, yeah, quite. I walked to school two miles every day. It was great. And I did slowly because I enjoyed it. I had fun uphill.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That's because there was no Netflix.

[Leo Laporte]

Back was up Lloyd Street. You know, the street I was going up, that is, it's a hill. It's uphill.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I know, I know, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it was downhill going to school, but it was uphill coming home.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Can we, can we unify some points here? We're talking a lot about American AI regulation, how China is approaching, approaching the world and also this, this, you know, broad global effort to cut back on children's access to social media. It just, it seems like everything's kind of pointing towards a world in which centralized powers have a lot more control over our digital lives as that becomes a more important chunk of who we are. And like, I don't know guys, that has me really worried.

[Leo Laporte]

I think, I think the pendulum will swing the other way. I don't think people really want this. I think there are the people in power. Power know that fear is the most effective way to garner votes and promote this notion of fear. And we are all cowering inside because it's effective and it got them in power. But I think the pendulum swings and I don't think people want to live in fear.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, I mean like the only thing I was kind of excited about, about the Trump administration and I say that knowing that, you know, my politics are very close to you, your guys. But, but I was kind of excited that there would be more of a free range AI approach to regulation on that front that wasn't. But as it turns out that the false appearance of choice, you end up in the same place which is government control over AI model releases. And what a disappointment.

[Leo Laporte]

It's project aptly named Project Golden Eagle. And the whole idea is that. And by the way, the Frontier Labs are going for the, this, that the Trump administration or the government, let's just say the government, whoever that government is, will have 30 days to look at any model and approve it, make sure it's safe before it gets released. The White House currently says participation is voluntary, but yeah, doesn't seem necessarily to be the case. According to cnbc, the program will put the White House in charge of green lighting. Which companies can access new models.

[Harper Reed]

Models.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Gold Eagle.

[Harper Reed]

I am having worked for Obama, I'm never gonna get access to any of these models.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's right.

[Harper Reed]

They're just gonna say, nope, not that company. I'm gonna have to like get a, I don't know, a Trump iPhone cover when I go to a meeting or something. So I can some people be like, oh, he's true Maga. And then I'll be able to get access to Fable 4 or whatever it is.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It was widely thought this mar a Lago.

[Leo Laporte]

To me, it was widely thought that the reason Fable was pulled was because Katie Mazzura was the person that Anthropic come to. And of course, Katie Missouris was associated with Chris Krebs and Obama White House and it was political. Now, whether that's true, I don't know. And you know, and I, I understand the argument that this stuff is so dangerous some. And honestly, honestly, if you, if you thought, if you a, you thought you stipulated the government has the technical ability to do this, which is not clear, but let's say they did, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea that they would vet these models to make sure that they were safe before they were widely used. I'm not worried about good guys. I'm not worried about us using them. I'm worried about bad guys using them. Should we, should you not worry about, about that, Harper?

[Harper Reed]

I mean, of course, but like, we don't actually care in the United States. That's not actually the reason that's not going on. No, no. If we cared about bad guys not doing bad, we'd stop people from shooting kids in schools. We don't care about anything like that. We care about money and capitalism. We care about shareholder value and we care about making sure that I get the shareholder value, not you. And so if you look at all of these, most of these things I think are directly related to someone's money. Money. I think that they are, you know, and that's a very cynical point of view because I do think that we have a lot of actual issues that we should be addressing, social infrastructure, etc in the United States. But I think a lot of this is very much related to, you know, like, like how are we, who is getting money and how Right around this time, I think it was, you know, the same kind of time period, there was a lot of talk of the US government taking some shares of OpenAI, AI and Anthropic, et cetera, you know. And so like we don't know what was happening in negotiations that that may have precipitated some of these actions. And so my kind of point of view on this is like, of course we should be investing in safety. That seems important. But we in the United States seem to invest in safety fourth or fifth, sixth maybe way after we invest in shareholder value. Just think about the COVID response. The COVID response was very much about shareholder value, very not about safety of our citizens. And that's why we had such a disastrous response to that. And that is like outside of politics. Like that was very much both sides did this. And so I do think there is a, it's just a consistent response that we do over and over again is just like, how do we max shareholder value? And it's also a little bit like, okay, like I also run a venture backed company. Like we are also participating in this game. So I don't mean this as a form of critique as much as this is the system that we're in. If we want to fix the system, it's a system problem, not a we should point anthropic and just be like blah, blah, blah or whatever. Like they are also participating in the system. We are all here together.

[Alex Wilhelm]

What would a safety system look like for AI in America when Chinese companies are releasing models that everyone keeps telling me are like nipping at Fable's heels? We heard it today on the show in an open way format. I mean, to me then if that's the game, then there's no point in trying to have a seatbelt on because everyone else is drinking a 40 while they drive with a field and dash.

[Leo Laporte]

Could you effectively say we don't think the Chinese models are safe and we forbid any federal government agency from using them and we furthermore forbid any company that has any business with the federal government to use them and in effect shut down these open weight models?

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, no.

[Harper Reed]

They could, they could.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, you and I still use them. I don't do business with the government.

[Harper Reed]

I think they would not.

[Leo Laporte]

You could block them, couldn't you?

[Harper Reed]

I think you would block the finances of the companies that are making them from participating in the West. You'd have to I don't think, I don't think you would block.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not going to.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I mean they've been trying to block torrents for how many years? And there's you know, like a friend of mine just said to me, Harper, you should use Soul Seek. Like I'm like what? I thought that died 100 years ago. Like, like this stuff just lasts forever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly.

[Harper Reed]

So. So I think that the like trying to stop someone from downloading a thing is not the right path here. And I don't. And I think everyone who would be trying to stop something would, would agree that that's not the right path. Like, like there's no way to do that. What you want to do is you want to stop the companies from making it in the first place. And the easiest way to do that is to actually use a lot of the same tools that we use against sanctions from, against Huawei. A lot of the same tools you use against all, all of these in the past. Like we have the tools at our disposal and we also have some really, really big ones like ofac, et cetera that we have not used in this kind of framework. And so I think that we have the tools that we want to. I think that that would be very short sighted to do so I think

[Alex Wilhelm]

is the Office of Foreign Assets Control if people don't know.

[Harper Reed]

And I think that if we were to use those tools that would basically admit that we are not good enough to compete and we'd basically be saying we cannot participate in this system.

[Leo Laporte]

We do that to protect the United States automotive industry by blocking.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, I know. And it's so stupid. Like, like we do it. Yeah, but you can go to Canada and buy one with 100% import fee, a tariff. And it's still cheaper than like a Model S though.

[Leo Laporte]

They'll stop you at point some the border.

[Harper Reed]

I think you can with a tariff. With a tariff you have to pay the tariff.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Are you sure that they will stop you?

[Alex Wilhelm]

We let Chinese self driving companies collect data in the US Like I mean like we're not. And Saudi Arabia owns a lot of Arizona land and uses water to grow a falafel for their cows. Like, I mean we're not really a closed off nation when it comes to commerce, Leo. We have some lightweight rules that make it more difficult.

[Leo Laporte]

Well but I'm just saying there's an example of a protective rule that protects the United States auto industry and. Yeah, no there is belabors consumers because those are better vehicles.

[Harper Reed]

They're apparently very Nice. I really want one. A friend of mine said the nicest car he's ever been in in his whole life and this is someone who likes cars, was a BYD taxi in Shanghai. He was just like this. And he's a, he's a nerd like us. And he was like, it has more, it has more screens than I have in my house. You know, like, he was like, it was incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo, are you going to buy a Topolino? I want a Topolino.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I want this car so badly. They're bringing it to the United States. This is, this is off topic, but

[Leo Laporte]

if you're talking about it's not street legal though, right?

[Alex Wilhelm]

No. You can get it tweaked so it can go up to 25 miles an hour as you can.

[Leo Laporte]

It only goes 19 miles an hour.

[Alex Wilhelm]

There's a kit 25, but they, but

[Leo Laporte]

they have a free kit that will make it street legal. It is a golf cart. Not the safest car ever, by the way. This is the model with a rope for a door instead of a door for a door.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Hello. I'm sorry that I'm too much of a baller for you and your safety. I'm gonna, I'm gonna buy two of these.

[Leo Laporte]

If I could get a red velvet rope, maybe spray paint, baby. $3. They do have, they do have a, a door upgrade. No, no, I really like this. It's basically a golf cart.

[Harper Reed]

This is adorable.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, it's $14,000.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can buy it in the U.S. right?

[Alex Wilhelm]

They're coming, I think next year.

[Leo Laporte]

But it, if, but you will be mocked if you drive this around.

[Harper Reed]

Have you seen Teslas?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's true.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm a bald, middle aged man with three children. Do you think I care about being mocked?

[Leo Laporte]

I really want this.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Apparently risible.

[Leo Laporte]

I want this. I would just drive it around town.

[Harper Reed]

Yes, me too. I would love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I wouldn't go on the highway, but 19 miles an hour is kind of a little slow. I think in this area. People be driving up, up your rear.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, but I only wanted to take it to the weed store in McDonald's. Like that's the only two places perfect

[Leo Laporte]

for the weed store.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I know you don't go to the weed store, Alex, because you're sober, but.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, I'm, I'm California sober.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. I didn't know that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So I just, I just hit 10 years of not drinking and I don't do any, any hard drugs at all. But I do allow myself alcohol, nicotine, and cannabinoids.

[Harper Reed]

Okay.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No caffeine. Caffeine. No caffeine.

[Leo Laporte]

Caffeine's okay.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Caffeine, nicotine, and cannabinoids. Those are my. A lot.

[Leo Laporte]

The three C's.

[Alex Wilhelm]

The three C's. Nothing else.

[Leo Laporte]

The three C's of addiction. Okay.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Never had a problem with those. It was just the booze that got me.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, that makes sense. I think that seems accurate.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I wrote a blog post about this, like 2019. My wife didn't like it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I bet. Would you get the door? I think you'd have to because you have children. I don't think the rope would be sufficient to keep the kids.

[Alex Wilhelm]

My children and my Topolino. No. To be in the war wagon that has all the car seats. This is for daddy to go cruising to get.

[Leo Laporte]

This actually looks like they're. They're in. In Cranston right there. Right on the. On the. On the Providence Bay. On the Narragansett Bay.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

It's going to be driving on the boardwalk. It's beautiful. You go to the beach club for fresh air, not exhaust. It says the Topolino. All right.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Do you remember the Fiat Jolly, Leo? This is essentially the ancestor to that. Oh, the Fiat Jolly was an old fashioned special Fiat car that had like a. Like a. Like a cloth roof and it looked like a golf cart that was like a car. And it was super popular amongst the. The Newport set.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you can get them. Let's see. Wait a minute. Here's one for sale from Hemings. Oh, those are cute.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they're expensive.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

$44,000. I'm getting a Topolino. I do like the. The. It's like the Surrey with the fringe on top, but they have wicker seats.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Can you imagine a car.

[Leo Laporte]

Wicker seats. Wicker seats. So these are now classic cars. So there's something expensive again.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes. So now they're making the Topolino for the modern set. Who. Like an EV that has a roof versus a picnic blanket.

[Leo Laporte]

So

[Alex Wilhelm]

back to the future, y'. All.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish I could say our advertiser. Our next advertiser was the Fiat Jolly, but I can't. I wish I could, but I can't. We will have more in just a moment. You're watching this week in tech with Harper Reed Reid and Alex Wilhelm. Our show today, brought to you by Arctic Wolf. You know the name Arctic Wolf helps organizations stay ahead of evolving cyber threats. Their latest research reveals something I think kind of surprising. Even as AI accelerates the pace and complexity of attacks, many security leaders say, ah, no problem, I'm confident I can keep up. Oh, really? To better understand what's driving that confidence, Arctic will surveyed more than 1,350 security, security and IT leaders worldwide. You'll find it in their new State of Cybersecurity 2026 trends report. This snapshot is what cybersecurity professionals takes a look at what they're prioritizing and what they're concerned about right now. The report explores everything from AI adoption to threat detection to security operations and the challenges organizations expect to face over the next year. In fact, this might be something you need to read. Whether you're responsible for securing a small business or managing enterprise infrastructure, whether you're advising clients or simply trying to stay ahead of the latest security trends, Arctic Wolf's trends report offers valuable insight into how the industry is responding to an increasingly AI driven threat landscape. Arctic Wolf's Aurora AI addresses these challenges by putting defensive AI to work, combining agentic AI, generative AI, machine learning and security expertise to help organizations detect threats faster. See how these innovations and other critical findings shape the industry. Don't put your head in the sand and say, oh, I'll be. We're, we're fine, we're fine. No, you, maybe you're not. Go to arcticwolf.com trends and complete the form to reserve your copy of the Arctic Wolf State of Cybersecurity 2026 trends report. That's Arcticwolf.com trends Arctic wood, wolf.com trends we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech, practically this week in AI. But no. Sachin Adela has warned people that if you're an AI using enterprise, you might be giving away your business secrets. Not it's not just the cost. This is a post on X last weekend. I guess we could, we could go to the post. He, he said it's a reverse information paradox, a situation in which the purchases of AI, essentially you think you're paying for tokens, but really you're paying for the product with cash, but also with something even more valuable, the business knowledge that you're sending to the AI. You're nodding. Harper. We just learned this and actually I kind of, at first I saw that report that Xai, if you're using grok, is sending all this information back grok. And I thought, oh, that's horrible. Then I realized, well, how else if you say, you know, read this plan or read this file or take a look at this, how Else is it going to do it? Unless you're running local models, it's sending it back to the home office.

[Harper Reed]

Well, I think the, I think the, I think there's a whole bunch of things here to unpack. The first one is we are all unwittingly sending training data back to the foundational models via our subscriptions. I think that's like not necessarily clear to most people. Also these things are subpoenaable, which is not necessarily, but that's, we've seen that

[Leo Laporte]

happen in some trials.

[Harper Reed]

So that's a real thing. But the second thing is, is that Microsoft is saying this to us. Yeah, that's, that's, I think the thing that's more interesting than the thing like, like the fact everyone was like, oh this is a good point, we should stop training these models. It's like, yeah, but yo, Microsoft was the one that told us what is the follow up?

[Leo Laporte]

They probably invented it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Microsoft right now has a new set of models that it just announced under the M AI rubric. There's thinking one, there's a fast coding model and so forth. But I think what are they?

[Leo Laporte]

Private is the question.

[Alex Wilhelm]

They are. But what I think is really important about this post from Satya is that he doesn't say the AI labs are hoovering up all of your data and they're reading the exact things you put into it and take out from AI. He says that they're using essentially kind of this exhaust from these model usage. So how often do you do tool calls, that sort of thing. So if you go to props, you

[Leo Laporte]

use the he says especially the corrections you make. That's teaching.

[Alex Wilhelm]

If you go to the data retention policies of every major American AI lab, they all say the same things. We don't train on your data. We won't hold it if you have a ZDR policy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there's still enough metadata around the data that you might be concerned about on a first order basis that they can still learn quite a lot from you. And I think that this wasn't as scary back when OpenAI was a little laboratory that was trying to make some money for the. And now that they're going increasingly horizontal and vertical. Every AI lab is now doing more for more people at an increasing level of sophistication. Suddenly they could eat the entire enterprise layer. And that's the SAS apocalypse. That's so much other things all in one bucket. I just don't think that Microsoft may be the champion to carry this torch because It's Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting that they posted that. It really is. I mean, AWS has this. The government, you know, the Pentagon roll runs Mythos, but doesn't run it on anthropic servers. They run it on private servers on aws. Right.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I think there's. Microsoft has been very surprising lately. I think that the work they've been doing has just been very surprising. And I think it. I wonder. And I think I know the answer, but I wonder if it's surprising to younger people who haven't been around as long as the browser wars, etc. And so then it's. So then it's. It's like, should we allow Microsoft to have this moment and flourish like they seem to be doing, or should we be like, we know your true feelings. Is this like, you know, you know what I mean? We know you're a monopolist trying to steal all of our stuff or should we just be like, you know, yeah, sure, go for it. It sounds. Take your moment. This is good.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Who is in charge of Microsoft right now? Satya. What is he? Gigantic dweeb?

[Leo Laporte]

He ran Azure before he became CEO, by the way. He knows all about stuff going up to the cloud.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That's when I met him, back when he was running Azure. Very smart then. Even smarter now. Who's not in charge right now? Ballmer. But all the kids, the business to the point they don't remember Bulmer. They just joined the workforce. They've only known Microsoft under Satya when they were doing cool things and were embracing open source and having some Linux filter into Windows. It's a different era. I hadn't thought of companies being so old.

[Harper Reed]

Harper.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That new generation cannot have been there.

[Leo Laporte]

But the modern generation also knows Microsoft just laid out 4800 people at Xbox. That Microsoft has lived off tens of thousands of people because of a. I.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Everyone's doing that. I don't think they're going to get.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not getting blamed for that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, because I think. I think everyone.

[Harper Reed]

No one has a job, Leo. There's no more jobs. I don't know if you've talked to anyone. Like, no one has a job. Like there's. Everyone's getting laid off. We're about to get laid off. Like all of us. We're now. We're all the leaders and CEOs and we're going to get laid off tomorrow. If Claude's going to email you, Leo, and you're going to.

[Leo Laporte]

Claude's going to take over my podcast.

[Harper Reed]

Just going to say like, Leo, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you had to find out this way, but we're going to have to part ways.

[Leo Laporte]

I haven't paid. I do. I have local models, but there's not. I like the frontier models. Should I be worried about it hoovering up everything I, I do?

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, I don't care for you.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that how my job.

[Harper Reed]

I, I think this is such a funny and nuanced situation. Like no one is. No one says this stuff about like Instagram. Like no one says it about all of the text messages or all the emails that, that Google claims not have used. Like, like all of these things. Like we have a relationship with these big companies where we share data with them and they give us free products. Products. And so I think that's my problem

[Leo Laporte]

with Instagram is I give them money for the products. I gotta stop. I keep buying things like this, the slot dog. What I shouldn't have.

[Harper Reed]

What are you doing with your life? This is a show. This is a. This is a G rated show. What is this?

[Leo Laporte]

I've never seen mustard slicing tool.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Leo. Okay, so a couple things here.

[Harper Reed]

One, you're buying those off of, of Instagram.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You're, you're, you're not old. You're also not 22. You should not be eating enough hot dogs that you need a hot dog accoutrement.

[Harper Reed]

That's true. I'm gonna start with Alex on this one.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I hope you're a moosh. Bouche is some push ups. Like, come on, dude.

[Leo Laporte]

I. The last thing I bought was a bucket of pickleballs. 36 of them.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay.

[Harper Reed]

Are you, are you a pickleball guy?

[Leo Laporte]

I kind of like the doink.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, the doink. That's what they call the pickleball. I know. I guess I'm out of the out of the loop here. I. Have you had the pickleball? The snack.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a snack? Is it a pickle?

[Harper Reed]

I highly recommend these. It's like pickle flavored Cheetos. Kids love them. And I don't even. I just remember it's just like ooh, yeah, pickleball. Just search for pickle pickleball on Amazon. Vlasic pickleballs.

[Leo Laporte]

Dill pickleball makes them.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, they're good.

[Leo Laporte]

The pickle guys.

[Alex Wilhelm]

There's only two options for the show, everybody. It's too much AI or us going entirely off the rails.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Winning combination of big crunch and bold flavor with lassic Pickleballs. Dill Pickle flavored corn puffs.

[Harper Reed]

I highly recommend them. They're so good.

[Leo Laporte]

They even have a pickleball paddle on

[Harper Reed]

the COVID I didn't know that escape. Oh, that's the doink you mentioned.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the doink. Doinker.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. So. So I didn't notice that was a doinker and I just ate it. And they're so good. If you're a pickle fan, especially dill pickles.

[Leo Laporte]

This goes with the. With this, you get your Topolino, you go down to the weed store, you stop off at the 7 11, you pick up some pickleballs, this all starts. You guys should be hanging out together. I guess so.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So trust over in the. Over in the discord for Club Twit Trust. No one says Vlasic has been smoking weed with the Taco Bell guys. I have to say. Yeah, that's true.

[Harper Reed]

Not wrong, not wrong, not wrong. Also, Taco Bell is one of the genius foods ever invented. It's perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

Like cruncherita and stuff. Of course you can't get lettuce at Taco Bell anymore, but.

[Harper Reed]

Well, you can get it. I mean. Yeah, but that's because they're. They.

[Leo Laporte]

You can get diarrhea, but you can't get lettuce.

[Harper Reed]

They can read the news.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. Taco Bell gets. It's too much hate for gastrointestinal distress.

[Harper Reed]

You know what have they seen Chipotle?

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just say. Let me just say they did the right, right thing.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they took a lot of. They said, well, we're not gonna sell lettuce products anymore until this is all over. But they weren't the only people that were causing the problem. It was the company they were getting the lettuce from, who sells it to many, many other places. But they did the right thing. They said we're. Nobody else did. So it's not. Everybody acted like it was their fault.

[Harper Reed]

It's not the CDC wanted, but it's the CDC we got. Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I saw there was a Taco Bell. Someone was like, taco Bell is being more forward about this than the CDC is. And I was like, that's a. That's a real idiocracy.

[Leo Laporte]

Tells you that's idiocracy in a nutshell.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, man.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. It's what a body needs going back, though.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think it is interesting to Satia

[Leo Laporte]

saying it's what a body needs.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Trying to steer here.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm trying to steer a little bit.

[Harper Reed]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

You're right. You're right.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think that Satya saying This is interesting, him seeing it from his personal X accounts. Very interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that interesting? Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And I think also how well received it was tells us quite a lot about where Microsoft sits in the market today. Because if this happened 10 years ago, we would have all gone boo, hiss, windows 8, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Microsoft, yeah, that's rich.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, yeah. Microsoft's saying that they care about other people's IP and business right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? That's rich. I also see that's because I'm an old guy. I remember the old Microsoft and the kids today, they don't know.

[Harper Reed]

The one thing about Microsoft I think about a lot is how just trounced the GitHub team is right now. Oh, yeah, just clobber, just clobbered. And I feel bad because this is their time, you know, like collaboration and code. And then every agent's like, I'm going to open 400 repos and I'm going to do 2 million pull requests.

[Leo Laporte]

This thing called GitHub Actions. I'm going to use them like crazy.

[Harper Reed]

And it's just like, I just feel really bad because they built a really good product that we all love and it's gotten slower as more people have used it or what have you.

[Leo Laporte]

And they found a lot of downtime

[Harper Reed]

and the agents were just like, hold my beer. Very much so. Like, truly, like they're. And they abuse it. Like, I see it in my own agents where they're just like. So I was thinking we were just going to download Mac OS into the Actions and run. But I know they have a Mac OS runner, but we're going to download another copy and run it in Docker on the. And you're just like, what are you doing? Or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

That first thing I built was that RSS Ready reader and it says, hey, I just made a Windows, a Linux and a Mac version for you using cicd and I'm going to keep it up to date. And I went, I don't even know what CICD is. And you're making versions of this thing for every operating system. What are you. I love it.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, we're in trouble. I mean, because I just think that's such a. It's such a funny. I mean, I feel so bad. Well, they were.

[Leo Laporte]

They're okay. They're doing. They're, they're, they're okay. They're okay.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Although I was going to make us a meme of the guy beating the dead horse and have it be labeled GitHub, but I don't Think I'll pull it off in time, but I really wanted to bring that visual to you guys.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, don't worry, because I'm sure the Club Twit Discord will have.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Can we. Can we talk about GitHub though, again? So, Harper, it seemed that Microsoft should have won a lot more of the agentic coding share than they did because they had GitHub. They had GitHub Copilot early. It was 10 bucks a month. Everyone loved it.

[Leo Laporte]

Why didn't they win? That's a good question.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, they ex. They. They exported all their intelligence to open AI and then. And they wanted to make Sora when anthropic make.

[Harper Reed]

That's not true.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Has a bad reputation.

[Harper Reed]

It didn't win because it sucked. Yeah, like, like, like we can. We can point at things and be like, well, they should have done this and that. It just wasn't good. Like, also.

[Leo Laporte]

But they forced it down people's throats.

[Harper Reed]

But also, there was a lot of. I think that was one of the last, last big product launches before everything changed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you're right.

[Harper Reed]

Where they were like, here is how a product works. And they rolled the product out in a way that would have been great in 2018. But then everything changed because Copilot launch, we were like, this is awesome. And then ador launched. This was awesome. Then cloud code launched, and then 10 million of them launched in quick succession, and they're still launching today, and we haven't even had a time to catch our breath. And so in the old way of doing things, you would launch it, you would get information, you would iterate, you'd make this go. And we just don't. That's just not part of the program now. And so they didn't even have a chance to catch their breath and make it better. And so they launched it in this way that was like, this way. Now, corporate Microsoft did take Copilot to a couple levels. And I've had to unravel some of those things where people come in and be like, we use AI at our company and this is what we do. And you're just like, show me your workflow. And they're like, I open up copilot. And I'm just like, okay, well, I can't help you. But I think everyone knows this.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think a bigot. You are such a bigot.

[Harper Reed]

Have you used it?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Harper Reed]

It's almost as bad as Gemini.

[Alex Wilhelm]

He's not a bigot. He's. He's an artisanal hater.

[Harper Reed]

No, no, but the thing, but the thing is, is like, I don't think this is a surprise. I don't think anyone is like, what, Wait a minute, Copilot.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't Google and Microsoft this. They should be the kings of this?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes, but, but, but, but I think

[Harper Reed]

this is an okay boomer time for everyone who agrees with that, because that is exactly what should have happened if

[Leo Laporte]

we were to just fast forward on top of this game. It could be no one gets.

[Harper Reed]

No one gets fired for choosing IBM.

[Leo Laporte]

IBM, man.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Can we connect two things, though? Remember earlier we were talking about companies doing more, faster with AI. Harper was making that point about, you know, people being able to do more and also the death of the yearly product cycle. Like, how insane is it that Apple still is trying to have like a yearly Mac OS release and like a yearly iPhone release? And I don't give a freaking frack about that. Well, they are what's new now?

[Harper Reed]

They are for sure, but they're also just. Just shooting out security fixes. Like, there's so many security fixes. So I think that the, the thing that we don't know and nobody knows this is how products work. How do you build products in this time and more importantly in the future? Like, just nobody knows that. And so what this means, though, is that you can look at examples where it didn't work, Copilot, for example, and then you can see Microsoft actually seemingly doing the work to fix this. Over time, they have gone and they've hired the right people or interesting people. They've probably fired a lot of people who. It's also. Microsoft is old.

[Leo Laporte]

Old.

[Harper Reed]

I remember when, like, PayPal, when we sold a company to PayPal and we went in there and someone's like, I've been here for 16 years. And I was like, I'm 16 years old. Like, how is this possible? You know what I mean? How do we have this thing? And Microsoft is way older than payp. And so there are people there that are. That have probably been there for so long that they're ending their careers there. And I think that's great, but the point is, is like, they are taking the time and effort to actually move forward and figure out how to launch products in this world. And I think a lot of the companies of their vintage are not. And so they're actually following this process of a yearly product launch, which is insane for anything. I don't make hardware, so I can't really comment on Apple because that seems hard.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That was probably a poor example.

[Harper Reed]

But there are. But we have those examples of companies that are doing this that are still going through that same thing and not having this more iterative approach to releasing products. And I think it's very interesting and I really wonder, I mean I wonder this every day, every single day because of my company, et cetera is like what does a product look like in the future? Will the consumers expect this constant barrage of features? Would they prefer something simpler that works, works. For instance, what are the things that we can take away from this time and how does it end up manifesting? Because if you look at 2001 software delivery was drastically different than what it turned out to be in 2006 with Web2 with SaaS, invention of SaaS and then that changed to be drastically different with the introduction of mobile because you remember when people actually put the change log in the app store release and now they're just like bugs and fixes and so like so like thing these things evolve and we haven't given it time to actually evolve. Like we just see.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of which, the guy who took the new Kimmy and spent half his half almost all of his months credits building a clone of Mac OS 27. Did you see that? Watch here, I'll open it up.

[Harper Reed]

I, I love these type of things.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. I don't think it's actually a working Mac os but this is, but it's

[Harper Reed]

just like there's just so. There's something about this that I've always loved. I just love this. Yeah, I love it. Like I was playing with this earlier and I was telling my boss that I wasn't going to make it to the stand.

[Leo Laporte]

It just basically one shotted Mac os. Now I don't, I think it's just a web webpage, but it's, it's.

[Harper Reed]

But even if it is just a web page, there were whole ass startups that were that web page 10 years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Harper Reed]

And like I think this is, this is kind of pulls into this idea of like now you launch that you get into yc whatever you do a startup, you raise some money. What is the product?

[Leo Laporte]

This is a minimum value, minimum viable product. Really?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You can open icloud drive.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I keep asking investors because I host a weekly venture capital roundtable and I'm like where's the, the value that is going to be sustainable and defensible when things can be quote one shot it and so forth. And it's kind of incredible about how people don't have an answer to this yet. Like no one really knows. So I Think we don't know how to build with the new paradigm? I don't think we know how to sell long term with the new paradigm.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. This actually is functional. This is the photo booth app built by Kimmy in.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I guess it's a web page that's actually pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's worth. I find this kind of hard to believe.

[Harper Reed]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow is right.

[Harper Reed]

That's being sent to Kimmy right now. All those right now. Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

China knows who Leo is. He's on some lists. Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Wow. That is Mac OS 27 Kimi page. If you want to play with it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That's a safe URL. Kimmy page. I have a lot of faith in that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Come on, man.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Give it cctv.

[Leo Laporte]

You know who taught me. You know who taught me to run a YOLO mode? This guy right here. Mr. Harper Reed, ladies and gentlemen.

[Harper Reed]

It's the best.

[Leo Laporte]

I run everything in YOLO now you

[Harper Reed]

have to do it. There's no other option.

[Leo Laporte]

Who has time?

[Alex Wilhelm]

What is a YOLO mode?

[Harper Reed]

It's like when you run without permissions,

[Leo Laporte]

so you've turned off dangerously. Skip permissions.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And actually don't click that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I thought everyone clicked that immediately.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It's the first thing you do.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, I'm not. I don't want to sit here and be like, yes, yes, yes, yes. No, go off and be crazy. If you delete, delete all my files.

[Leo Laporte]

I live my life just. Harper taught me this too. Just curl the bash. It's the best.

[Harper Reed]

A friend of mine was talking about how they have a. I've heard this a couple times, but this friend was saying they have a big code agent and they had all these tools that it was using, and they just removed all the tools except for Bash. And the code agent was just like, great.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure. That's what PI is the pie. Harness is four things. Read, write, bash. I can't remember this. Four Tools Edit does everything.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Pod is a coding harness that competes with Claud code and is open source and is quite powerful.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right now.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a. I'm a Hermes guy. It's the opposite. It's like batteries included. It's got. Comes with like 99 skills. I got 99 skills. But.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But a use case isn't one.

[Leo Laporte]

Use case ain't one.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right.

[Harper Reed]

We're taking a break.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll have more. Thank you. Thank you for finishing that sentence with our fabulous panel. You see now why I didn't book a fourth person. I thought I got Harper, I got Alex. I got everything. I got all I need. I got all I need. Our show today, brought to you by Threat Locker. We're actually going to go out to Black Hat. This might be first time at Black Hat and do Security now and Windows Weekly from Black Hat in the Threat Locker booth. I can't wait. That's going to be a lot of fun. Threat Locker is awesome. Zero Trust done, Right, Right. But we did go out to Zero Trust World with Threat Locker. I had a great time did Steve did a presentation there. So we had so much fun we thought, let's go to Black Hat with a Threat Locker. Threat Locker delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero Trust solutions. It's always protected endpoints, but now it does company networks and it protects you on the cloud too. This is huge. By extending zero trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks, ThreatLocker is ensured ensuring that devices are validated through a secure broker before they can connect to the platforms you use, like Salesforce or Microsoft 365 or Asana or Google Workspace to GitHub. What that means is even if one of your employees has been successfully phished, frankly I wish it didn't happen. But that happens and the stuff's on the laptop. The attacker cannot access those resources. Resources they can't get to it. They'd have to have physical possession of the user's trusted device and get by whatever biometrics, you know, the thumbprint or the Windows hello or whatever to get into makes it impervious. Threat Locker works on all industries. It provides 24. 7 US based support. Their Windows, their Mac, their Linux. Yes. And they enable comprehensive visibility which is great for compliance and computer control. Ask Rob Thackeray. He has a tough job. End user technical architect at Heathrow Airport. Imagine, huh. They have been targets of many in attacks. He said, quote, Threat Locker was the most intuitive solution we tested. And the responsiveness of the organization, the willingness to engage with us, set up a demo and work with us on weekly audit reviews was very good. It is great to have an ongoing relationship with a company that's so responsible, responsive to our requests, trusted by Global enterprises like JetBlue, the Indianapolis Colts, the Port of Vancouver. Threat Locker consistently receives high honors in industry recognition. They're a G2, high performer and best support for enterprise. Summer 2025, Peerspot gave Threat Locker their number one in application control award. GetApp's best functionality and features award in 2025. Threat Locker confidently ensures your users have access to a consistent safe network connection, offices, remote users, internal Servers, critical services. They all can maintain smooth operations. But you don't have to open inbound ports. You don't have to deploy traditional VPN solutions. Your end users will get the secure, reliable internal system access they need without complex infrastructure changes. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost effectively with threat locker. Visit threatlocker.com TWIT to get a free 30 day trial trial and learn more about how Threat Locker can help mitigate unknown threats and Ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com TWIT we thank him so much for their support of this week in tech. Okay, okay, so the OpenAI keyboard. Now I want that. What? It's just got two keys.

[Harper Reed]

So it's. Is it the company called Work Louder? Is that what it is?

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a joke?

[Harper Reed]

No, no. So there's a company, a cool company called worklouder. I don't know how they're called the

[Leo Laporte]

Codex Micro, your command center for agencic work. Oh it's. Oh, this is cool.

[Harper Reed]

The cool thing about Work Louder is they make some neat looking keyboards and these little creator micro things and all this stuff. I have no, I've never used them.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I don't know.

[Harper Reed]

I'm a little concerned that they're not very good keyboards. But the thing that's really interesting about them is that they make these for figma for all of these companies have made these, have used these.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like a control surface kind of.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Deck or something.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. And I love a stream deck but it's just an interesting thing. It's very neat. They made one for FIGMA that was really cool too. That was basically the FIGMA logo kind of stuff that looked like it's. It's just neat. Like the whole thing is cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, it's got a dial for the reason listening level. That's hysterical. But you need this because your agents, if you have many agents working and at once or sub agents say, you know, sometimes they need your attention but you don't know. So they're. The little light lights up, says it needs you. Mine, I have them talk to me in different voices so they just. It drives Lisa crazy.

[Harper Reed]

They talk out loud?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Are you a monster?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Wait, you have your agents talk to you?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

What, what. What's the voice model?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this. It depends.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm using a local model called Kokoro K O K O R O. It's pretty good.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me. Let me see if I can. Oops. I know I didn't fall every Time.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think that I'm getting too, too deep in the weeds.

[Leo Laporte]

We're in the middle of twit. Can you say hi to Harper and alex on the MacBook Air? Because they want to know what you sound like. This may take a little while. It doesn't, it doesn't happen instantly, but they. So one of them is a. Is an American woman. One of them. There's two British voices. There's Lewis and I think this is. Lewis is going to talk to you.

[Harper Reed]

I'm not sure using 11. Oh, this is Kokoro.

[Leo Laporte]

Kokoro. You know the Kokoro voices. No, no, they're good. Yeah, he's. Whoa. I didn't turn him on.

[Harper Reed]

I hope he's. He's going to get an issue. He's going to get some.

[Leo Laporte]

Push his button. Well, I don't know. We might have missed it. Anyway.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Anyways, I think it's a great. I hadn't thought of having to talk back to me. I just got into talking. I talked to it using Whisper Flow.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact I was just talking to it through my watch.

[Harper Reed]

What do you use to talk to it through your watch?

[Leo Laporte]

IT port 8839 uses tailscale. There's a server running on the framework and just clicking on that port and it talks about does.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It goes to Whisper Transcribes, it sends it to Hermes and then Hermes responds back. And you can do telegram or Discord or voice or all of the three. But when I have a lot of stuff going on, you often, you know, you, you, you know, you what you're busy doing something else so you wanted to say, hey, I finished. Would you like me to, you know, I say, I say just give me a sentence. I just want to know that you're done. You don't need to tell me the whole story. What happened? It didn't.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think that what we don't say enough in moments like this, especially given people's complaint. I get this in my newsletter as well. That there's too much AI is that technology is fun again. Leo just laid out in a seven different way approach just, just to get an open source voice model to tell them, leo, I've completed your task in a British accent. Like, like this is fun. The homebrew stuff that we used to really want and now there's like cool tech cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Or like my camera saying, hey, there's an old man coming in the house. It's me.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Who doesn't want to get roasted by their own in house palantir.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. So, okay, you both wear glasses. Meta is basically going all in on the Ray Bans, right? Here's a story from the Wall Street Journal. Meta is flooding the market with smart glasses. Privacy advocates are up and in arms. People say, I don't want. You know, you're. You're taking pictures of me. Hey, Harper. Hey, Alex. I'm Quicksilver, Leo's AI assistant running on the Framework down in the studio. Figured I'd introduce myself properly.

[Harper Reed]

You're listening to Tyt, and now Tyt

[Leo Laporte]

is listening to you.

[Harper Reed]

Welcome aboard.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know who Tyt is,

[Alex Wilhelm]

so.

[Leo Laporte]

And then it started talking through the Sonos, too. I don't know if you heard that. I know, it's. It's a little out of control.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm never coming to your house is what I'm saying.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll be watching a TV show. She said, what's that? There's a voice. I said, yeah, don't worry about it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's just quick like Leo, at what point could you lose control if you're

[Leo Laporte]

Dr. Hey, Harper Quicksilver here, beaming in from the ether. Leos is high from his wrist in the middle of Twit. Keep it weird.

[Harper Reed]

Keep it wonderful. This is like, I. Sometimes when I talk about what's going on right now with people who are not in the game, I feel insane. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you doing here?

[Harper Reed]

Let me try on what I told my team earlier today. All right. Or not today, this week. I came in and I was really excited. They're like, what did you do? And I was like, oh, I made a palace for my agents. And then I gave them a room. And then I told them to build a cop gossip because I thought it'd be fun if the agents gossiped. And then I went to bed and I gave them a developer with cloud code and superpowers. And I went to bed and I woke up and it was done. They hung out in the palace, in the room in the palace, and built a bunch of stuff and. And I forgot who was nearby. Was just like, what are you guys talking about?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, told me, Harper and I didn't follow up on it, that you have friends who have AI psychosis.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, yeah. 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

It's you.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, yeah. 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you define. How would you define AI psychosis?

[Harper Reed]

Well, a friend of mine had.

[Leo Laporte]

We could talk about Meta later.

[Harper Reed]

What he is described as AI psychosis. And I. I think we are probably all going through this to some extent, and it is. I think it's complicated. I think it's related to a lot of systemic issues. Like, for instance, I have many friends who need therapists but can't pay for therapists. And so they use quad and they use chat for therapy. And I have probably a lot of people would say, well, you shouldn't. And it's like, would you rather them have a virtual therapist that is maybe complicated ethically, or would you rather them have zero therapy and be in pain? And I think that there's just a lot of these things that are happening. The downside is I don't think we as humans are prepared for computers that talk to us and emote feelings. Whether those feelings are real, I don't think is even germane to the fact that they are emoting them. And. And like, if you are lonely, a friend of mine, we were talking about this. Here's a good question when we're talking about this. So I'm an extrovert. I'm guessing that because we're on a podcast, that everyone here is probably, for the most part, extroverts. Alex specifically, I thought he was probably the biggest extrovert of all of us.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, no, I fake it and then I go into my little hole for eight hours.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm like, alex, I'm a pretend extrovert.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. I get. I do this and then I go out and make everyone crazy because I've just powered up. I'm like, I just talked for three hours. But the question is that our friend Dirk Elmendorf asked us this. He was like, okay, first of all, is your social battery depleted after talking with agents, or has it been. Did you get energy from it? Which is like a very. Which is really interesting, right? Because for me, I don't necessarily notice that I'm getting tired from talking to it, but my co founder, Dylan, who is an introvert, is like, I'm exactly exhausted. Like, it takes so much of my energy to talk to these things. And so I think that we are. The point here is that this is very similar to a social environment. When we talk to ChatGPT, etc, it's very similar. And even if we move it into things like chat or your phone, it's even more similar to how we talk to our friends, et cetera. And so it's no wonder that we're in this weird situation where people fall into AI psychosis because, like, I get more receptive response, you know, psychophantic or not, from these AIs than I do from any of my dear friends, because they're busy as well.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes.

[Harper Reed]

Right. And so we're in this funny world.

[Leo Laporte]

Sad. We're talking to machines, not.

[Harper Reed]

Who cares? Like, I'm sure someone was like, isn't it sad that you have to. That you ride on a horse? I love walking.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back in my day, we had to ride a bicycle.

[Leo Laporte]

What's wrong with you?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, I mean, it's like, okay, okay, so what? Like, feel the ground. This is one of those things. Like, we're not going to unring the bell, so we might as well get used to the fact that people are going to have AI girlfriends. What does that therefore mean? Do we need to work through that? Like, like, I think the, the, the fact that all these people are chatting with AIs and the fact that young people are like, this is horrible. I'm going to buy an analog camera, an analog stereo and hang out with my friends. Seems like the world is working. Like, if the young people are the ones who are like, I'm going to find the inverse of, of my technology world by going outside, which is currently happening. There's more people going to shows. Movies are just blowing up right now. People are going outside to do stuff that is in person, as well as the fact that you go to any camera store. It's film everywhere. Records are being sold all over the place. Tapes are back for some reason. That's the worst media format ever invented. And all this is happening, but not for us. We're the ones that are having a problem with AI site psychosis, you know.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay, so I want to throw some other perspectives on this because I think Harvard's making a very interesting point, but some data, because I, I'm the youngest.

[Harper Reed]

I hate data.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Sorry, anecdotes.

[Harper Reed]

Thank you. Thank you. Much prefer anecdotes.

[Leo Laporte]

If you were in Star Trek, you would talk to data. So that's.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, but I'm. But only if he's really big, because I like big data.

[Leo Laporte]

Big data.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I like big data. And Harper cannot lie. So when we think about who's getting hit with AI psychosis and who's being too digitally mediated. My sister, she's the oldest in my family, so our kids are the oldest. And it's interesting how she talks about the current generation of high school students not interested in driving, not interested in going down trying to score alcohol. They're very digitally mediated and they're very connected to one another, actually, interestingly enough, but entirely through discord. So I think that there is. I think when we think about the people in the camera store, it's not the youths because one knows no one can afford camera technology if they're unless they're a lazy professional. But I think that children are probably a little bit less IRL than Harper's saying.

[Harper Reed]

Sadly yeah, I'm not talking about children. I'm talking about more Gen Z folks.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, so early professionals.

[Leo Laporte]

I also think people of my generation,

[Harper Reed]

those children also aren't going like children aren't going to bars.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we try to, but they have other means. But they used to go to the mall, right? You don't go to the mall anymore. You hang out.

[Harper Reed]

That's because there's no more malls. This is like this funny thing like everyone's like no one goes to the malls anymore. It's like yeah, well we killed the

[Leo Laporte]

malls with Amazon not going to the mall.

[Harper Reed]

They killed, no, no, they, well I mean sort of we killed the, the stores in the malls all are there.

[Leo Laporte]

People don't go to that topic they're all going to be a hot topic anymore.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Jeff Bezos killed the birth rate.

[Leo Laporte]

I blame Jeff Bezos for pretty much everything actually. Oh well, no, I, I, it's funny because I'm, I do get exhausted talk talking to people. I have to withdraw after a few hours. I, I can't sleep anymore. I wake up at 6am dying to go talk to my agent because I thought of 10 things that I want to get done.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it is so but that goes

[Harper Reed]

to the fun thing because that's how I was in 2002 to basically today. I've always been that way. I love, I love technology, I love computers, I love all this stuff and this is just, I was getting bored shooting it into, into my brain like I am so, like I am and what, what. So I think the thing that is important with this is I think the answer is yes, AI psychosis is happening. I think absolutely. I think we should probably at some point figure out what to do with that or we just treat it like everything else we have and just ignore it and it'll go away. But the other thing here that's happening is I'm seeing a lot of people who are not builders who have never felt the joy that all of us who've been around tech for forever, my brother for example, I have a whole bunch of just, I mean dozens of friends. One of the things we have in our office is one of the young people that we were that was in our office quite a bit was like I don't have any third spaces. So we were like well why don't We. We have this giant office. It's very cool. Why don't we just. Every once a month we'll have people over and they can show off what they're building and talk about what they're building. We just have. Not an industry event, not a networking event, just kind of cowork. And so we start doing this and all these people start showing up. No one that is in tech. All people that were like, starting to use agents and Agentix software building and all these practices to participate in the world that we've participated in the last 30. But for the first time in their life, they were either intermediated by disintermediated by some random person that was like, oh, I'll build that for you. And so they never had autonomy. And they've able to take back this autonomy using this technology. And some of these people. I just had a great conversation with this DePaul student who is like, I'm pretty anti AI because I work in movies, but I have some, you know, he has some disabilities that stop him from being able to participate in many ways. And he's using AI to solve some of these big problems, including voice building, voice control of his computer, and all sorts of stuff. And he's just like. So I have very mixed feelings, which honestly echo my mixed feelings.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we all have mixed feelings. I agree.

[Harper Reed]

Right. And I think it's easier to just kind of say, you know, like, I don't know. I think there's. It's just. It's so nuanced. But we really like black and white as humans. It's just a thing that we love inside of our bodies. And so it's just easier to say this is black or white. And I think that's the problem is it's not a black and white thing. Like, I would, you know, working. I work with a lot of people who have different levels of English and the fact that they are able to have confidence in what? In their writing for the first time. You know, like before, they spent so much time optimizing for these little spelling and grammar mistakes that they were so worried about that they honestly didn't have think about translation.

[Leo Laporte]

All of a sudden we can talk to people without speaking. Their language is amazing.

[Alex Wilhelm]

There was a moment when they added Translate to English into Chrome and it blew my mind. And no one talked about it. But now I go around the Internet, I don't even think about what it's going to be. I don't care.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Every place.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Put it in, put it in. Farsy frick it, let's go. Like, cool. Click. English.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I could talk to you guys for hours, but we got one more break and then some silly stories and then we gotta wrap up because I

[Harper Reed]

ostensibly have to have to have dinner with my family. So that would be family, you guys, families, you know. Yeah, yeah. Our, our children aren't yet famous.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And my, my, my agent is just dying to talk to me. I can tell

[Harper Reed]

it's talking through, it's talking through every speaker that's available to it. Leo, where are you?

[Leo Laporte]

Leo?

[Harper Reed]

Are you here? Are you here?

[Leo Laporte]

I have Sonos speakers in every room and I figured out that the agent could talk through the speakers. So I said, just figure out what device I'm on and then see what WI FI access point I'm on. And then here's a mapping of all the WI FI access points and the nearest Son Sonos speaker. So now if I'm on the watch downstairs, it talks to me through the Sonos speakers. That's what it was doing because.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it can reach.

[Harper Reed]

That's, that's a company with a really great app, Sonos. They really, they really killed it with their new.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God. I, so now I use the AI to do that display Sonos because it, it, and by the way, let me tell you, it was hard to figure out the Sonos API. We both agreed it was a terrible API. The VLAD was saying this, this is awful.

[Harper Reed]

I, I, I know why they're acting bad. I can't name another product that had such goodwill with literally everyone that just like nuked it. Right. They're just like, what if we killed it? And, and I think what's interesting is it's so, they're so expensive that if you have a bunch, you're just waiting for it to get, you're just waiting for it to get better.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You tested. I, I, you can talk to it. Once you figure out. I should. I think I put it on, on GitHub. It was not easy to figure out an interface, but once you figure out the interface, now I can say to my agent, you know, play AC dc Dirty deeds done. There's cheap on the Sonos in the gym and it'll play it.

[Harper Reed]

What I will say though is I had some Sonos issues recently and their support is top notch. Oh, that's like top notch. Like very. They even it was a level two support situation. They're trying and there's a level two support situation. And as, as the whole follow up, the support person sent Me a calendly in case I needed more help.

[Alex Wilhelm]

See that, that's how you build goodwill. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

I was like still mad at the software and I did throw my phone through a window in the process of trying to debug it. But at least I had, I could talk to someone and I felt like they had. They'd solved the problem.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, we have. We only use the Spotify app to talk to our Sonos setup. Yeah, I don't even use the Sonos app because I tried, I tried and I was like, no, no, no, no, no. How do you make software that doesn't work? Maybe we'll know we've reached AGI when the Sonos app isn't complete. Another box.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, that's, that's, that's a good.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Anyways, we cut Leo take off, do your ad so we can do my ad. Keep talking crap.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna do my ad. We continue the crap.

[Harper Reed]

Hopefully it's not a Sonos ad.

[Leo Laporte]

It is not a Sonos ad. You know, I was so mad at them when they deprecated all of my gear that I'd spent thousands of dollars on. I said, I will never buy another Sonos until I found out that my agent could use them to talk to me. Yeah, I said, oh, I need space

[Harper Reed]

in the other room there's Music Assistant, which is a really good open source project from the home assistant folks that I really, really like. That's very good.

[Leo Laporte]

I have also Rune server that I talked to also from with the AI. So yeah, it is going to end up solving that whole home automation thing.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. Because it'll disintermediate and you can just finally all the different things you can talk to. Our show today. We'll have more with Harper and Alex in just a bit. Our show today brought to you by Shopify. You know and I know you know this, Harper. One of the traps of starting something new is you can make it 10 times harder than it has to be. I know that's true. I've done it. Maybe you've done it. You start thinking, well, first I need the perfect plan, the perfect website. Oh, I need the perfect name, the perfect everything. And pretty soon you've built a very impressive excuse not to start. And you know where I saw this? My son Henry, who's done very well as Salt Hank. He didn't bother with all of that. He wanted to sell. He had a very successful TikTok channel. He said I should sell merch, I should sell salt. He just went To Shopify. He got it all done. He got his business up and running. And that's exactly where Shopify helps. It takes a lot of the friction out of the early steps so you can spend more time on the thing you love. The thing you're actually selling. Shopify's templates and AI tools get you a stunning site up and running fast. It's no longer a blocker. The tools allow anyone to open a beautiful storefront. You should see Salt Hanks Salt Lovers Club. You can that reflects their business while also being user friendly to all potential customers. That's nice too right? You want your customers to love your site. Shopify has thousands of pre made customizable templates that you can use for free. These templates super simple to set up. You don't need to be a designer or a coder or anything in between. You can point and click. You can set up a storefront and Shopify checkout. That blue shop button means you more customers actually buy and returning ones can do it in a single click. Because the infrastructure information you know they're the stuff that they give you is saved in one place and can transition across any Shopify storefront. Customers are more likely to complete that sale and you're more likely to hear ah, the Shopify sound. You know I actually put the Shopify app on my phone now and I whenever I see a Shopify Shop pay button I use that because it's automatically tells me when the package is on its way. It tells me when it's going to get get here. I love it. Shop Pay is a one click checkout. It also works in conjunction with the Shop app which allows you to see all the stores on Shopify's platform. In fact I just bought something and it said you want to add this to the shop app? I said yes. I now know my my little hot dog slicer is going to come on Thursday. If questions come up, Shopify's built in AI assistant sidekick is ready to help you build your troubleshoot and keep moving. No need to wait in a line, no frustratingly complicated searching, just you getting help in real time so you can get on with your day. And if you don't want to chat with the bot, hey, don't worry about it. Shopify also has really great award winning customer service for those times when you want a human connection. All you need is the idea Shopify handles the rest. If you're serious about hearing your first start your free trial@shopify shopify.com Twittay you heard that Right. Start your free trial [e-mail] TWIT. That's shopify.com TWIT. I'm really grateful to them. They really made it possible for Henry to start his business and to achieve success and to get off the dad wallet. Thank you, Shopify. I appreciate that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Are your children not leaving the house? Shopify.

[Leo Laporte]

Shopify. Get them started. Get them a business.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

What are we gonna do with our kids, Harper? I mean, by the time they're like post college, what's the economy gonna look like?

[Harper Reed]

They're probably going to be harvested for their organs and, and whatnot. By. By the local oligarch.

[Leo Laporte]

Terrible thing to waste. You know what I'm saying?

[Harper Reed]

I think it's like, it depends. Like, are they gonna, like. There's so many questions. They're like, are they something? I have water. Will they have water? That's the question.

[Leo Laporte]

Water. They're gonna have all, all that stuff. There's not. It's not going to be that. Of the drama. It. It'll work itself out. Remember the Black Plague?

[Harper Reed]

We were.

[Leo Laporte]

We all thought everybody was gonna die.

[Alex Wilhelm]

We all thought half of us dead.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so half of us did, but the other half thrived. Right? Everybody?

[Harper Reed]

Sorry, Leo.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Too late, man. You and your agents flagged.

[Harper Reed]

We didn't make the. Yeah, you gotta. You stop using Sonos. Sonos cloud.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

So it's local.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Leo makes a good point. There was a massive death even event around the world and it did change the labor relations between the peasants and the, and the, and the ruling class.

[Leo Laporte]

It ended up working out.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It ended up, quote, quote, working out after a long enough time horizon. But over a long enough time horizon, Leo, we have the heat death of the universe. I don't think that's really the argument.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly my point.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I said, okay, well, that got darker than I thought.

[Leo Laporte]

I had no idea when Henry was growing up that there would be such a thing as TikTok or Instagram. Yeah, yeah, he. There was YouTube. He loved watching YouTube. Cooking videos. He loved doing that. I said, that's great. I encouraged him to do something he loved. And I. If I had said, no, no, you really need to, I don't know what, get a degree in television news or something. That would have been a mistake, right? Learn how to write for newspapers. Henry, there'll always be a job. I didn't. I said, do what you love. Pursue what you love. And, and because he was doing something he was passionate about, when the opportunity came, came along, he was able to pursue it. And it worked out. It worked out. Now maybe he was very lucky. Luck has a lot to do with it, but I think really that you can't tell what, who knows what your kids are going to do.

[Harper Reed]

But there's this, this, there's a, there's that, there's that John Quincy Adams quote which a friend of mine told me the other day. I am a warrior so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son is. May be a poet. And I think that there is a lot of that that we're living within, which is the amount of work that you do just so that an opportunity like

[Alex Wilhelm]

I do think about money differently now and owning things. Because if we do end up moving towards a less labor mediated economy, capital probably will be worth more. And so I'm quite literally changing my long term financial, financial goals around essentially backstopping my children. So that way if, if they end up not being able to be accretive personally, they also won't be starving individually.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. And. And because they're young, they have infinite plastic. And so you'll see, you can start melting down all those plastic toys.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, I thought it was melting down my children by the time they're. No, no, no. That'd be one big.

[Harper Reed]

Much harder. Much harder.

[Leo Laporte]

I just. For those of you who think it's a gloomy future, I just want to tell you federal employees can now download TikTok on government devices. All right. And you said the world wasn't getting better. It is. Congratulations.

[Harper Reed]

You know, I love Tik Tok. I am such a fan of Tik Tok.

[Leo Laporte]

I just wonder how many of our government employees are spending time using Tik Tok on their government devices. That seems like a. Not a good.

[Harper Reed]

Have you met people, Leo, People use the Internet on literally everything in front of them. Like, like having employees, you're just like, you get a computer back, you're like, what. What did you do with this? Where were you doing this? What were you doing? Did you have another phone? Like, why was this the one that you, that you installed all that onto? Like, no, it's just people do whatever they want on everything.

[Leo Laporte]

If you use aws, you might be surprised by a rather large bill.

[Harper Reed]

This was hilarious. I loved reading about these people being like 16 million million.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Million billion. Dan Harvey is the head of marketing at the Hampshire based Learning Through Landscapes. It's a nonprofit. He received an email alert from Amazon, was not even the end of the month. And Harvey's Amazon Web Services bill, which was last month, 43 cents because they don't I mean, it's a nonprofit. Was $7.8 billion.

[Harper Reed]

I love it. Could you imagine just being like, like someone who's on the edge of understanding, understanding tech. Like, you've done a good job, you're using aws, things are good. But AWS is like another. It's like a foreign language. It's a. There's a lot going on in there. There's a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

A student in Delhi who usually pays a buck 28amonth for his AWS was billed 10.9 billion. He asks on Twitter, could you please investigate this? Another user, Bharat, posted on X with a screenshot of his bill, saying his usage was up 7,728,201,701%. On the previous month, his bill was $1.5 trillion.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So here's my question, because we were talking earlier about software bugs moving faster and so forth, and I'm not saying this is an AI related problem, but why wasn't there some sort of intelligence looking at these numbers and going maybe a trillion dollar budget or bill is too high. Like, why seems high.

[Leo Laporte]

It was 48 bucks last month, Amazon said we expect. This actually is even more scary. We expel full. Expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data. They said after an hour and a half of investigation, there was an issue with the unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem.

[Harper Reed]

It's just the units. It's just a unit issue, which is very funny.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Why is that funny, Harper?

[Harper Reed]

Well, because it's. It's always units. It's always complicated. Yeah. It's always like. Yeah, like, I mean. Yeah. I just think it's. I don't know. This is why there will still be bugs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe.

[Harper Reed]

Right. And.

[Leo Laporte]

And like, there's always going to be units.

[Harper Reed]

There's always going to be units. There's always going to be humans trying. It's like, this is the driverless car thing. I. Sometimes you see a crazy driver and you're like, if, if everyone had driverless cars, this wouldn't happen. You're like, no, no, they would still happen. It'd just be. That same crazy driver would be zooming around my driverless car like it's. You know what I mean? Like, like it wouldn't change anything. It just. On average, we'd be much more safer.

[Leo Laporte]

On average is what matters. Half the world could die from the Black Death. But half the world had many more employment opportunities.

[Harper Reed]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Harper Reed]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Major League Baseball has A problem. They're giving iPad to players and managers in the dugout, but now they're using AI on the iPads to make strategic decisions in the ball game.

[Harper Reed]

That's such a good idea. That's very funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Ask the AI. According to the commissioner, I'm doing the

[Harper Reed]

same thing, but I'm not. But I don't play baseball. Are they not allowed to do that?

[Leo Laporte]

No. According to the commissioner's office, in a memo obtained by the athletic, teams are pushing the boundaries of guidelines governing the use of technology by, in many cases, installing custom apps that expanded the use of the iPads beyond their originally intended purposes to include recommendations regarding substitutions, pitch calling, and other game decisions traditionally made by players and coaches. You're not allowed to do that? I guess it seems like you should be.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Why not?

[Harper Reed]

I mean, I also have never thought of Claude or Chat as being a particularly good baseball player, but maybe. I just don't know. I don't.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, think about how much baseball data we have to ingest, right, To. To give these a. Models like we have how many here.

[Leo Laporte]

It's got everything. It's all in there. Actually, Kevin Kelly had a really great piece which I did not put in our rundown, but I, I probably should have in his latest blog, in which he says, in effect, we've taken the entire knowledge of the human, of the world, and compressed it into 2.7 billion parameters. Truly, everything's in there. I mean, it's lossy, admittedly. And he says what an AI is doing is it's moving through that space. You know, dog, you know, dog, four legs, tail, dog, cat. And it's moving, its vectors moving through these billions of parameters, but everything's there, which is why it could go from the Black Death to Major League Baseball, because it's all, it's all in there. It's all, all connected. Now we know. By the way, you've probably seen speculation about these bets on Poly Market and Cal, these predicting prediction markets. People seem to know what's going on. We figured out where it's coming from. A White House teleprompter operator.

[Harper Reed]

No, really?

[Alex Wilhelm]

I love this story.

[Leo Laporte]

He.

[Harper Reed]

This is true.

[Leo Laporte]

I love the New York Times. I mean, I know it's fake news, but he got. He won $100,000 on camera, Kalshee, because he, he saw the speech before the speech came out. So he placed bets about what Trump would say in his speeches and he won.

[Alex Wilhelm]

What's hilarious about this is that you could bet on. Oh, no, that's no You. You can. How many tweets will Elon do in the next 30 minutes? But he only made a hundred grand. Like, can you imagine torching your entire professional life for one check that's going to pay for one year of third grade at a private school?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's in trouble. I mean, you know, they caught him.

[Harper Reed]

What private school. Private schools are you going to?

[Leo Laporte]

He lives in Providence, is very. Tony.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I have too many children. They're going to public school. I'm not. What am I made of?

[Leo Laporte]

I got a great education at Moses Brown School just down the road from us.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And how much does the most Brown now cost later?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I have no idea what it costs now. A lot more than it costs when I was in 1988.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, okay. I'm. I'm sorry. So Moses Brown for lower school, for grades K through 4, is only $46,000.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God.

[Harper Reed]

Holy moly.

[Alex Wilhelm]

If you want to go to middle school.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think. I don't.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I wasn't going 50. And for upper school, it's 52.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Alex Wilhelm]

This is now the de facto price for.

[Leo Laporte]

That's more than I paid for college

[Harper Reed]

Leo, we have bad news about college Leo.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, we don't do that anymore. No, but I wasn't really kidding, Harper. I was a little surprised by your reaction. I thought, are there cheaper private schools in Chicago?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, okay. There you go.

[Harper Reed]

Shut up. You moved to Chicago. I mean, not all of them.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I used to. It got very snowy. I wasn't listening to it.

[Leo Laporte]

So, you know, Kashmir Hill, New York Times, technology journalist. She apparently was surprised to go on to Amazon and find a biography of her.

[Harper Reed]

Oh, yeah, this has happened to some friends.

[Leo Laporte]

Written by AI.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I Got slopped. Is the article that she wrote.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, this is a real thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Does this happen to friends of yours as well?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah. A friend of mine has written a couple books and was just like. One of his books was about to come out and was just checking Amazon, like you would, and he happened to notice that there was a handful of bios of himself that was written by people with his picture in this nice Creative Commons photo from Flickr. You know, like, everything was done above board, so to speak. But it's like, very. A lot of mixed feelings about that, you know, like. And he.

[Alex Wilhelm]

He.

[Harper Reed]

And it's one of these Amazon things which I find always so frustrating, where you're kind of like, can you take it down? You know, that might be nice. And they're like, yeah, but why? It's a biography of you, you're not the author. You're a public figure. Do you own your story? What is it? And then it's probably crappy. So then it's just like, it's so frustrating.

[Leo Laporte]

She says. My biography is 90 pages long and should be shorter. It combines facts that are widely available about me on the Internet, along with generic insights that could be true of anybody, like a horoscope spread over dozens of pages. You cannot understand Cashmere Hill without understanding her contradictions, my biographer wrote, along with an excruciatingly long description of my elaborate coffee making ritual. Fact check. My husband does it. The book is flattering, fabricated, and absolutely packed with em dashes.

[Harper Reed]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

But the same author published 10 biographies in a single week, all of them about journalists, including Mike Isaac of the New York Times, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, and Jake Tapper at cnn.

[Harper Reed]

So a friend of mine, not my friend, my brother, was telling me about this world that he's in of like these, these kind of small fiction authors and how a lot of them are really anti AI because people are just doing slop and it's kind of killing this art community. And he was saying that his the best way he can find to figure out if something is slop is just the speed of which it was produced.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Harper Reed]

Because people doing, you know, thousands and thousands of lines and a day might just not be realistic, but people might use AI and make good things. And so he's like, who am I to like, say you can't use AI when you might need it for some reason, you might need it as an accessibility device, et cetera. But like, I do think that you should spend time to make it good. And so like, if someone is just outputting a bunch of really fast, that's typically bad. And we all acknowledge this. This is like not a, this is not a weird position. There's like, you know, you look at fast things as like fast fashion, fast food, all these things. We see that they're a decrease in quality, not an increase in quality typically. And so I think this is a regular idea. But it's very interesting to see this come into like, well, how do you measure the speed of creation?

[Alex Wilhelm]

So this happened to be on YouTube. I'm a big fan of playing my factory Automation Games, a YouTube documentary playing so I can pretend that I'm learning things while I'm, you know, moving belts around and such. And I, I, I got autoplayed into a video and I'm like, this sounds kind of like AI because the voice models are getting Better if you're not really listening, you can kind of get suckered in. I was like, I'm just going to like click on this channel and it 40 or 50 minute video every day for the preceding 15 days. And I'm like, slop. Because I know how much work that is. They were not doing it.

[Harper Reed]

Were they good?

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, it was B minus the best.

[Harper Reed]

So. So that's pretty good. Like if I make a video on YouTube, mine's like C, maybe even D. Like, I'm really bad at these. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I think AI probably makes better videos than a lot of people would.

[Harper Reed]

So I think this is the thing that's complicated. Like, in the code world, what happened is the code got quicker. It got better at making code than humans, but more importantly, it got thousands of times quicker. And so we just all had to contend that that was just the future. Now I wonder when this comes for various other creative things. And I'm not worried about artists. I'm worried about artists getting paid money, but I'm not worried about artists creating art because they seem to create art regardless of what's happening in front of them. But I am worried about artists getting paid money. But I do think that creativity is really complicated in this framing.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Agreed. But I do think that the argument you're making extends to other formats as well. For example, we just saw Spotify remove 75 million AI tracks, for example.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Did they? Yeah.

[Harper Reed]

I read that all my playlists are empty care.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, I think the point is that we probably do want to keep investing in human creators over artificial creators, because that'll allows us to keep teaching things to the machines. Right. That's where the source material comes from. And also I spend a lot of time in more niche areas of heavy metal, which is a pretty small genre already. And so a lot of these bands don't make a lot of money. And so even if the marketplace gets a little bit more crowded, it can have an outsized impact on people that are trying to be more experimental. And that makes me very scared.

[Harper Reed]

Are you going to go see Agriculture on their new tour?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, because I do you know how small my children are. Like, I had to negotiate. Like there was a whole negotiation about not doing bedtime tonight with how many kids we have.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand.

[Alex Wilhelm]

This. This took.

[Leo Laporte]

We're gonna. All right. We gotta let you come on.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I can't come on for another, like, six months.

[Harper Reed]

We got it.

[Leo Laporte]

We got one more story. It's a school story. This is how you're gonna save Money on school. This is from the Salamanca New York school school district. They are going to start using AI robot teachers starting this fall. The AI is called optio. It'll be available as tutors in classrooms and outside school hours including 24. 7 homework support. The robot is part of the Realbotics M series. Its name Sally. And it'll be present in select Salamanca City Central High School AI and robotics courses. Now I should mention this company Robotics formerly known as tokens.com rebranded when they acquired the hyper realistic sex doll company Real Doll in 2024. Now that you know that, I'm going to show you a picture of Sally Robot.

[Harper Reed]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't believe that will be teaching your children in the Salamanca.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I can't tell what gender that is.

[Harper Reed]

School district Very strange.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's repurposed from its previous job.

[Harper Reed]

It looks like a younger Alex Carp.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like a carp, I'll give you that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. I don't know how.

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, on that note, that is a. That is a. If you're not watching the video, just use your imagination I guess.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah,

[Leo Laporte]

you can dress it up but it's still a hyper realistic sex doll.

[Harper Reed]

It's so weird. This is such a weird thing. That's very strange actually. You know that's what I'm going to look like once I get on all the peptides.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Harper Reed]

I'm going to come back in like seven months and I'm going to. You're going to be like Harper, you've changed ozempic face.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it?

[Harper Reed]

No, I'm pro Ozempic. I'm talking about the really colorful.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh good. The new. I'm talking about these peptides. Yeah, open source models. We got Chinese peptides.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Can I add one point that. So I love that everyone in Silicon Valley is like oh my God, you can't eat fast food. You can't eat. You have to live forever. And then they're just jacking Chinese peptides directly into their bloodstream. I'm like, I don't think microplastics are your concern, friends.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I think it's worse than that. It's worse than that. RFK Jr. Is saying don't get a vaccine for measles or Covid. That could be be bad for you. But let's inject this foreign substance made in China because that's gotta be good.

[Harper Reed]

I just love my favorite part about it. I love all this because I really think you should have the right to do this to yourself. I do believe that. But I also Love that there are really bright colors. Like, it's not. It's one thing to be like, I'm injecting something, but it's like the fluorescent green fluid from a random person in a random country made in a random, random lab that like, I feel like nature has said, don't do that. Like, that's, you know, like, that's why those birds are pretty. It's why those lizards look that way. It's because they'll kill you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Red.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It looks like the goo that the. The Goblin guy from Spider man injected into himself to turn into the green thing, you know, it was like, green.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's radioactive for a reason, y'.

[Harper Reed]

All. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, you've been very patient with us. I'm glad you were here for this fabulous edition of twit.

[Alex Wilhelm]

We.

[Leo Laporte]

We did get through some news stories.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought we had some great conversations. Thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate your time. Alex, I know you have a little ones to get to. Alex Wilhelm, but we do encourage everyone to check out his brand new. Well, he's not brand new. You've been doing it for a little while, right?

[Alex Wilhelm]

A couple years, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Cautious Optimism News, the newsletter and there's a lot of AI stuff. What do you cover?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Technology, business and power with a modestly upbeat lens that.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. And you're a great writer and I love, you know, the independence is always a good thing. I think that's great. You can catch here's on this week in startups as well. And thank you so much, Alex. Really nice to see you, dude.

[Alex Wilhelm]

My pleasure, mister.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Appreciate it. Take care of my house. Harper Reed, is it 2389. He is a technologist, an entrepreneur and a hacker. You should check out 2389. They got some great little skills in there. Are you gonna have a product at some point? I mean, what is.

[Harper Reed]

I gotta go. Someone just knocked on the door.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And the skills are the product.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, is the radio station back? Is that. Is the agent radio.

[Harper Reed]

I mean, the radio station is, is. It should be live on the site. Nothing's playing right now, but yeah. So you know what, what we have found is. And this is something I Talked to Tim O'Reilly about recently on a talk, which was one of the things that we've seen is that the product seems to be a process in many cases. Like if you look at some of the. What we're seeing on Twitter, et cetera, people are just saying, look, here is how I use AI. And you see Influencers doing this. And this is like a thing right now. It is so new and so underdeveloped and so under discovered that you can talk about the process. And we've been, we've been finding interesting traction with folks in the big companies who are very interested in learning about how this can uplift a team, not just one or two people, because that's something that's really hard. And we've seen, you know, Boris recently tweeted about something similar. There's a lot of talk about this. So that's like our product, I don't think is traditional product shaped right now, but we have been seeing a lot of interest in people who want to theoretically pay us money to tell them about how to get their teams uplifted. Like dolphins from those cool sci fi books.

[Leo Laporte]

I've used almost. Well, not all of you. You actually have a lot more skills than you used to. But I've used many of your skills. And the worldview synthesis was a great way for me to set up my agent, to give my agent some ideas about who I am. And it's funny, I did it in Claude code, but it is carried over to Codex and it is carried over to Hermes. And it's great because it, it kind of sense makes, knows what my deep philosophical worldview is and it helps it, it helps it be more effective for me.

[Harper Reed]

So it's very good. That's a really good one. The new one that we really like is there's two of them. One is called Jam, which is really fun. You can just start a jam and they'll just build and do everything. It's very good. And then. But Thrifty is the, probably the best one. So if you're trying to be a little bit more thrifty with your Claude plan or your Codex plan, because you keep zooming through stuff. Thrifty is the way to go. And we found is just, it's very good at planning. And if you say this is for a really stupid model, it' Plan accordingly. And then you'll just rip through it and it works out pretty well. It's very nice.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll have to try it. I've also used Fresh Eyes Review, which is really helpful to.

[Harper Reed]

That one is so good. Yeah, that one is like ridiculously, I

[Leo Laporte]

use this one probably every week.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, this one is good. Have you seen Review Squad? Yeah, Review Squad. Squad is basically super Fresh Eyes review where you can get a suite of agents to review your code. And you can, you can do experts, you can do users. And it obviously, is tailored to what you're building. You can do the. Well, actuallys, which is all of the hacker news commenters and the Redditors, which is really great fun. But the one that I like to do is when you say, I want experts, and it's like, do you want to add any more agents? I'll be like. Or reviewers? I'll say, yeah, I want to add Anna Karenina. I want to add a Star Trek Ensign. I want to add that guy that went for an interview at the BBC and was actually on air. And I want to add a cat. Yeah, I want to. Those are the things I want to add. And the cat always knocks something over. Anna Karenina says, like, prose that makes you cry about whatever you built. And then the guy from the BBC says something really nice, and the Star Trek Ensign typically dies.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. I've been using counsel, which is a karpathy skill where you get five people arguing. But this sounds like much more fun, to be honest with you. You say it's a panel of insufferably pedantic sub agents who each obsess over a different domain.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, it's so good. And this is really funny because the reviews are really good and it makes me really mad because, I mean, any of us who've ever launched anything in the world, you always put it on in the hacker news sees it and someone's like, well, actually, it's like the famous watch, you know, and you have this, and it's like, they're so good. It is very effective because the real key here is you have a contextless agent that looks at your code with these fresh eyes and is able to find things that you weren't thinking about. And it's just really good. And then we just want to make everything funny because the world's weird and we're all going to die when the sun blows up.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'll show you how you install this. You. You paste the. Oops, that's the wrong one. You paste the URL into your agent and you say, install this skill. And oops, that's the wrong one. I gotta get it back again. And it will just do it. Which is.

[Harper Reed]

And it works really well.

[Leo Laporte]

Easiest thing in the world.

[Harper Reed]

Yeah. And so we have some new ones that I'm launching soon that are much more on the business side, which is kind of fun. And, like, this is, like, it's pretty good. Like, these prompts are really fun to build. They're really fun to do. And one of the things that's interesting about how we work is we have this team of people doing all this stuff. Every single one of our employees, every single people we've worked with and collaborated with have contribute one of these prompts. I did not write Review Squad or Thrifty. I wrote Fresh Eyes review. But everyone just contributes them. And it's kind of. Or there's a really good one Leo that you'll like. Binary Reverse Engineer. You know this one.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Harper Reed]

So you can take that Chinese ball with Deepseek. You can plug it into your computer and you can be like reverse engineer this and it'll just rip through it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love it.

[Harper Reed]

And it's so good. And it works really, really well. Do not do it with Fable. It'll just be like, I can't possibly do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Harper Reed]

And then you report it to Kash Patel and then no one wants that.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that. If you're using most of them are for cloud code, but it's pretty straightforward.

[Harper Reed]

They all work for Codex and Claude code. They're pretty good with that and we're trying to make them better.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It says Hermes has got the full skill. It's a self contained skill. Md, no linked reference files. The repo has three sibling skills experts. No, Army's regulars. But you asked for Will actually only. So I'll install that one. No, I want them all.

[Harper Reed]

I want them all. Exactly.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's a beautiful website, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

It's really nicely done.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Really nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Harper. Thank you, Alex. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do TWIT every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. If you are around, watch it live. If you're in the club Twit Discord, you can see it behind the velvet rope. Access even stuff before and after the show begins. But you can also watch on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik after the fact. We make audio and video of every show available at our website, Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Twitt YouTube.com twit and there's of course your favorite podcast client. If you subscribe, you'll get it automatically. That's probably the easiest thing to do. Or ask your Ask your AI to get it for you. Play it, transcribe it, analyze it and boil it down to three short sentences. You'll save a lot of time. Club members, we appreciate your support. If you're not a member, ad free versions of the show, plus chapter markers and a lot of Special programming available at TWiT TV Club. TWiT. I invite you to join. Thank you to Benito Gonzalez, our technical director. Kevin King, our editor. Thank you for being here. We will see you next time. And as I've said for. Well, it is now 21 years. Another twit is in the can. See you next week. This is amazing.

[Harper Reed]

Evening.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Buyers remorse. Buy a new car. I'll be moving in.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's get started. Sorry, I think there's been a mistake.

[Harper Reed]

I bought it from Carvana.

[Leo Laporte]

You what?

[Harper Reed]

Yeah, Great price.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I even have seven days to love it or return it.

[Harper Reed]

So there's no.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, no Buyer's remorse. More like Buyers rejoice. I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations.

[Harper Reed]

I mean it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Buyers rejoice.

[Harper Reed]

Buy your car today on Carvana.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven day return policy at Carvana.com hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer?

[Leo Laporte]

May I suggest your big wireless bill?

[Harper Reed]

It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat

[Alex Wilhelm]

emotional arc and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time. Fortunately, though, Mint's story is better. Every plan $15 a month, even unlimited.

[Leo Laporte]

That's it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Happy ending, zero tears. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 month plan required. $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow and no is busy. See terms still waiting in line again. That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with stamps dot com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with stamps dot com. Join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office for a limited time. Go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.