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IM 813: The Optimist - Keach Hagey, Twitter Leak, Skylight
02:55:43
Keach Hagey, Twitter Leak, Skylight
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris is still on vacation, but good news. Richard Campbell joins us as we interview Keech Hagee, the author of a brand new biography of Sam Altman. And just a little tip, next week, Cory Doctorow. We've got some great guests coming up next on Intelligent Machines, podcasts you love.
- [00:25]
Jeff Jarvis
From people you trust.
- [00:28]
Leo Laporte
This is TW. This is Intelligent Machines, episode 813, recorded April 2, 2025. The optimist. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we cover the latest in AI robotics. And those little devices, those doohickeys scattered all around your house that are watching you. I just want you. They're watching you and listening. Just want you to know Jeff Jarvis is here, Emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. How long do we have to do that?
- [01:10]
Richard Campbell
Oh, forever. Because I'm emeritus is forever. It's Latin for old. As long as I'm old. And here. Yeah.
- [01:16]
Leo Laporte
Currently at Montclair State University and Suni Stony Brook, author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis. The web we weave is the latest. So nice to see you, Jeff. I just had not cacio e Pepe, but a little homemade carbonara.
- [01:31]
Richard Campbell
Second best.
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Leo Laporte
Yeah. It's the next best thing.
- [01:33]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [01:33]
Leo Laporte
Now, Paris is still in Europe, probably eating carbonara herself. So we thought, well, who could we get to replace Paris Martineau for one more week? She'll be back next week. And lo and behold, we've got Richard Campbell, who happened to be around. He was in town for Windows Weekly and he's just sticking around. He is the host of Runners Radio, an expert on technology, but also on AI. We talk a lot about AI on the show and he is very much.
- [01:59]
Paris Martineau
And happy to do a double header doubleheader.
- [02:02]
Leo Laporte
We're calling him Old Leatherbutt because he's got to sit there for six hours. Don't want to tell you what they call me. Great to have you too, Richard. And we will get to the AI News in a bit. But as we've been doing on this show, we changed the format a little bit. We've been bringing in a guest every week to talk about all things AI And I am thrilled to get this guest. Keech Hagee is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. It's good to see you, Keech.
- [02:27]
Jeff Jarvis
Good to see you.
- [02:28]
Leo Laporte
She has written a book which comes out not till May 20, called the Optimist.
- [02:32]
Richard Campbell
But pre order it now, everybody. Pre order it now.
- [02:35]
Leo Laporte
We'll Want to. Because It's Sam Altman OpenAI and the race to Invent the Future, the first full length biography of Sam Altman. Keech, welcome to Intelligent Machines. It's great to have you.
- [02:47]
Jeff Jarvis
Thanks for having me.
- [02:48]
Leo Laporte
You say in the introduction, because I don't know, Sam at first was reluctant to have a book about him. Yeah. I think he's. He kind of helped you towards eventually. Right. It wasn't. It's not an unauthorized biography. But you said, I don't care if you don't help me because my last book was about Sumner Rebstone, a guy who was basically in a coma the whole time. So is there, is there any comparison between Sumner Redstone and Sam Altman or they seem like antithetical creatures.
- [03:21]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, actually there are. I've thought about this a little bit because everyone always asks me, like, what does Sam really want? Does he really want money? Is he motivated by money? And, you know, thing about Sumner Redstone, is he. Yeah, he's motivated by money, but he's motivated by winning.
- [03:34]
Leo Laporte
Winning.
- [03:35]
Jeff Jarvis
Winning, Right. The conquest. And I don't think Sam is quite motivated by winning in the same way, but he is motivated by building. So I think they're similar in that way.
- [03:45]
Leo Laporte
You say in the beginning that Sam doesn't need money, that one of the reasons Sam could take this job and tell the board, I'm not going to have any stake, any equity which was a condition of him sit being on the board, on the board of the nonprofit. But he could do that because he was already a billionaire.
- [04:03]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. So what Sam really is, is an investor. He is a brilliant investor and he made a ton of money being head of Y Combinator and then personally investing in all kinds of moonshot startups sort of on the side through his own venture funds, which he continues to do, although much less than he used to. So he made his money before he really ever became CEO of OpenAI.
- [04:28]
Leo Laporte
And Jeff and Richard, please don't let me hog Keech on this because I know you all have things to ask, but the thing that brought our attention to you, Keech, was the excerpt published last week in the Wall Street Journal from your book the Optimist, which tells the behind the scenes story. Jeff asked me last week we had Gary Riflin on who has a book called AI Valley about AI and talks a lot about Sam Altman. And Jeff said, now, did he reveal what happened behind the scenes when Altman was fired? And I said, not really. Well, guess who did great reporting on this? Really?
- [05:05]
Richard Campbell
Leo sent me the Excerpt from the Journal on the weekend when I was out shopping and I immediately went back, can we get key John now?
- [05:11]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Yeah. Because nobody really knew this, the whole thing. All we knew is the board was so careful about this. They said, well, we just don't have confidence in his candor. We don't feel he's been fully candid with us. But they never, later they kind of intimated stuff. But this is really, was actually a lot more than I thought. He, he really did lie to the board a lot.
- [05:35]
Jeff Jarvis
The combination of things, right. There's like a. I think there are long reasons and there are short reasons why he got fired, why the board decided to fire him. The long reasons are there was a power struggle and let's put the lying aside for a second. There's a year long power struggle about who should be on the board. And even though Sam didn't have equity in OpenAI, he had real power.
- [05:53]
Paris Martineau
Right.
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Jeff Jarvis
He had the de facto. And so this non profit board was realizing that every person they put forward, Sam would reject and then he would like counter with one of his friends, which they felt was not the kind of thing that allowed them to actually have oversight over him.
- [06:08]
Leo Laporte
The board was really there because it was a non profit to protect that mission. Right. Even to protect it from Sam. Right.
- [06:15]
Jeff Jarvis
And they've had this very sort of pie in the sky mission that our duty is not to shareholders, it is to humanity. Now it's pretty hard to interpret that mission, I would say, but leaving that aside. So there's a power struggle and then there's a series of things that the board felt that Sam had either omitted things or lied to them about that had to do with safety, a number of safety breaches. There was this deployment safety board that OpenAI and Microsoft put together to sort of review things before they went out because there was a lot of fear about what these tools could do.
- [06:45]
Richard Campbell
Right.
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Jeff Jarvis
I mean, that fear is what OpenAI was born out of. And there were several occasions where something bad would happen and Sam wouldn't mention it to the board or he would tell the board that things had passed it when they had not. So there's that. And then the short reasons, I would say one more big long reason is that There was this OpenAI startup fund that the board believed was like OpenAI, but in fact they learned that Sam himself owned it personally. And it took them months to actually get that answer out of the executives and Sam. And they changed the structure once that became public, but they really felt like, whoa, you went before Congress and said, you had no financial stake here and yet you own this little startup fund personally, that's challenging for us. And so then the short reasons had to do with two executives that came forward not long before he got fired with sort of receipts on what they felt made them lose trust in Sam. And one of them was a board member, Ilya Sutzkever, the chief scientist and co founder. And one of them was the cto, Mira Moradi, who both, which is interesting.
- [07:58]
Leo Laporte
Because she was the replacement for Sam when he was fired as CEO and also defended him. And defended him. Yeah, yeah.
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Richard Campbell
Weird.
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Jeff Jarvis
So weird, right? Yeah, so, so weird. So what was really wild and one of the things that revealed in that excerpt is that the Journal had reported before that Ilya Satskober had come forward with a list of, you know, dozens of reasons or instances where Sam had either lied or had had some toxic behavior, but we never really knew where they came from. But the in this excerpt I report that they mostly came from screenshots of Mira Moradi's slack.
- [08:36]
Leo Laporte
So, you know, where do you get those? Mira, obviously.
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Jeff Jarvis
Right, yeah. And Mira talked to, you know, the board members who ended up firing Sam at length about a pattern of behavior that she said, you know, Sam basically had a two part playbook. He would either say what he needed to say to get what he wanted or if that didn't work, he would try to undermine the person. And Mira says that she has given that feedback to Sam directly. So in her mind it wasn't like some huge revelation. But the board, she didn't stab him.
- [09:10]
Leo Laporte
In the back, she stabbed him in the front.
- [09:12]
Jeff Jarvis
Exactly. There you go. That's what my old journalism mentor used to say. Stab him in the front.
- [09:16]
Richard Campbell
So Mira is a technologist, Ilya is a technologist. They're all high level technologists. Sam is not. Right. So what was their pecking order in their views to him?
- [09:32]
Jeff Jarvis
So I mean, Sam did study computer science in college. But you're right, as I write in the book, he's really a fundraiser and a sort of a visionary. Right. He is not down there in the weeds doing running tests of training runs for LLMs at all. So Elias Elkiver, he is the sort of technical visionary of the company. He's the one thinking about what kind of training runs there should be. And then Mira's running the company day to day, deciding who gets the GP use. She's totally managing this Microsoft relationship that is the backbone of the company and where all of their computing power comes from. And Mira is the one kind of because she's making the trains run on time and all of that. She is experiencing the chaos when Sam tells two people. Yes, and that has to somehow be reconciled. Right. Or one of her big complaints was about the relationship with Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co founder who was on the board and was a really close ally of Sam's, but didn't really have direct reports and would sort of crash into people's projects sometimes. And people would come to Mira and ask her, please get Greg out of my project or please solve this problem. And then Greg would go to Sam to make it so that Mira couldn't really exert any power over him. So that became an untenable situation. And it's why Greg Brockman was removed from the board with Sam Altman when the blip happened.
- [10:57]
Richard Campbell
The other big question I have, and I'll show my cards here, I'm not a believer that AGI is going to happen. I follow the writing about TestReal and the odd philosophies a lot. And so the definition of safety to me has been mangled so that when you're talking to somebody, you don't know if it's stochastic parrots present tense safety, or if it's test real two centuries ahead safety. So when people talked about safety and open AGI, and that being a key issue that was raised, was the discussion way up in the future clouds, or was it down to earth in terms of how did. What was the definition that people were working with when they were worried about safety and OpenAI and thus Sam?
- [11:50]
Jeff Jarvis
So that is such a great question. And I also struggle to sort of pin that very thing down because I find it very slippery when you have these conversations. Right, you're right. I remember one of the very first interviews I had with Sam, I asked him this question directly, what does AI safety mean to you? And he said it would be. I'm paraphrasing here, but basically it's a world in which things would be better if AI existed than if they hadn't. Present tense, meaning that, like the net, you know, sort of like the net of everything is more positive than it is negative, which I found that a very startling answer. You know, I don't. At the time, this is when everyone was really freaked out about existential risk and something that, you know, Sam was talking a lot about existential risk. But that definition seems more like an economic place that we're laying.
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Richard Campbell
It's also a bit of a Zuckerberg answer in a way, like we're connecting the world, and it's all better because of us.
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Leo Laporte
The net is the interesting thing. You know, there might be some hardships along the way, but in the long run. Yeah, you. You actually begin the book with a warning from Peter Thiel to Sam Altman. And this was just a few weeks before Sam was fired. Thiel said, you got half of your company.
- [13:09]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
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Leo Laporte
Is. Is. Is worried about AI. He specifically referred to Eleazar Yudkowski, who Thiel said became extremely black pilled and Luddite. And Sam just kind of brushed off Thiel's warning. Thiel said, half the company's been taken over by the effective altruists. By the way, there's so much inside baseball here. If you've listened to the show, Jeff's explained this, what testrial means, why effective altruists aren't really altruistic, and a lot more. So there's a lot of shorthand in this, but the eas, which sounds on the face of it, and the same bank when Fried was also an ea, stands on the face of it like, well, what's wrong with that? They want to end global poverty. Right.
- [13:58]
Richard Campbell
But as you said, Keech, they changed their views.
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Jeff Jarvis
Right. Their goals. That's right.
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Leo Laporte
What was their new goal?
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Jeff Jarvis
To prevent existential risk from AI, you.
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Leo Laporte
Say you write prevent runaway AI from murdering humanity.
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Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. I mean, this is fascinating calculus, right? In that movement where all of a sudden the morally correct thing to do is to think about future humans, not present humans, because there will be so many more future humans. So if you're a utilitarian, the math is such that I guess assuming we don't totally destroy the birth rate, there will be more humans in the future. Right. So that became a completely different moral universe than I think most of us are used to operating with inside.
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Leo Laporte
Well, it also raises questions about, well, what about current day humans? Right. Are you not worried about us?
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Jeff Jarvis
So to answer your question though, going back to which version of safety people were worried about in the board fight, I do think while EA itself was not a driving force, there's this moment when the board got an early peek at GPT4 before they'd even released ChatGPT, and they got to watch it pass the AP bio test. And I think that was a sobering moment for these people who were like, oh, our jobs are actually really important. Right. This AGI thing might really be sooner than we think, and our jobs are really important and the board needs to be functioning well. And so that sort of sense of import of the imminence of AGI and the potential dangers of it, I do think colored how they behaved because they did not feel like it was okay to have a situation where they felt lied to.
- [15:42]
Leo Laporte
Stephen Wolfram was saying that a couple of weeks ago that even OpenAI really didn't kind of believe what was going to happen until they saw ChatGPT4 and then it was because this is what.
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Paris Martineau
OpenAI was formed for. Right. They were afraid of what Google Brain was doing and tried to convince all those scientists to go into the open. Including cescobar.
- [16:03]
Jeff Jarvis
Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. That's the great irony of it all right, is that OpenAI was born from this fear. It was partly a fear of, I think it was less a fear of AI risk was ultimately there than a fear of the concentration of power of.
- [16:18]
Paris Martineau
Google being Google having brought all the best minds together. So let's go get the guest for ourselves.
- [16:24]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
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Jeff Jarvis
Yes. When you hook up profits to this technology, that that would be like fundamentally problematic. Right.
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Richard Campbell
Which why would change that view?
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Leo Laporte
And of course that's what happened. And that's one of the reasons the board ousted him, I think, was this move towards making OpenAI for profit, or at least part of OpenAI for profit.
- [16:47]
Jeff Jarvis
I actually don't think that that is totally true. I mean, they'd already started the for profit, like subsidiary of nonprofit, so that had already been sort of cleared. But broadly, were they behaving more and more like a Silicon Valley startup that just needed to ship quickly, keep the momentum, do all the things you have to do. Right. To like to stay alive in a commercial world? Sure. And did that run me if I'm wrong?
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Paris Martineau
But weren't they staffed with Silicon Valley startup people?
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Leo Laporte
Yeah. What a surprise.
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Jeff Jarvis
Well, you know, there's an interesting thing about the tribes inside. Sometimes Sam would describe there being three tribes inside OpenAI and they were really different tribes. Right. So there was the sort of academic the researcher tribe, there's the AI safety tribe, and then there's the policy tribe. And I would say there's also like the startup tribe. And they are often different people. And a lot of the AI safety people really were like people who are close to or involved in effective altruism or at least the broader, you know, AI safety community. There were just like that company was full of these people and a lot of them were freaking out about cut corners that were cut.
- [17:55]
Leo Laporte
And a lot of them left and went to form anthropic. Right. That was the whole exodus there.
- [18:01]
Jeff Jarvis
Some of them did. But I guess what I'm talking about is even right before the blip. A bunch of them, sort of. After Sam was reinstituted, you saw, like, departure after departure of people, including Mira Moradi. Including Mira. Right. But Jan Leky, who was running the Super Alignment Team with Ilya Sutskever. Ilya left. Right. All these people.
- [18:22]
Leo Laporte
Is Brockman still around or is he on extended leave?
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Jeff Jarvis
He is around. He is back from leave.
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Leo Laporte
Okay.
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Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
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Paris Martineau
And when you say left, did they depart or were they pushed out?
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Jeff Jarvis
I mean, there were a lot of resignations, so they're all resignations. But I think that the company became an unwelcoming place for people for whom this was the top priority.
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Leo Laporte
The, of course, most notable departure was Elon Musk, who founded. Co. Founded OpenAI and had a split with Sam. He was very much on the side of the oh, my God, AI is going to kill us all. He called it summoning the demon. Weirdly, he's, of course, started his own AI venture, which is worth now $80 billion thanks to its merger with X. We'll get to that a little later on. He and Sam don't talk.
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Jeff Jarvis
Right at this stage.
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Leo Laporte
He's suing, though. He's suing.
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Jeff Jarvis
They are sort of mortal enemies at this point. They started out as really good friends, and they started out having these sort of private dinners together discussing these apocalyptic ideas, some of which were about AI, but the company was really born out of this panic and fear about existential risk.
- [19:48]
Leo Laporte
Right. You said something in the book that really kind of interested me. Elon has said many times he thinks we're in a simulation. Sam believes that, too.
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Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. I mean, Peter Thiel, if you ask Sam about it, he'll say, that's freshman dorm room talk, you know, but totally. Totally. And the one who personally says he believes it is Peter Thiel, actually, who's had this conversation with him. Because, you know, Peter Thiel loves to sort of think of these wild ideas. But I think what Sam would say is, if you do the logic experiment about is this a simulation or not, you kind of come to the conclusion that it very likely might be or probably is. But he would say you have to live your life as if it's not.
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Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, he's right.
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Richard Campbell
Geez, how Calvinist can you get?
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Leo Laporte
Well, but it also says that superintelligence has been created. I mean, that's part of that is. Oh, yeah, it's happened already. And that's why we're living in a simulation.
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Richard Campbell
So, speaking of which, as you very wisely asked Sam, going in to the definition of safety, have you had a Satisfactory definition of AGI or asi.
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Jeff Jarvis
It moves.
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Richard Campbell
Oh, yeah, right.
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Jeff Jarvis
The definition is. My understanding is it can do most tasks better than a human. Some of the best definitions make sure that it is a general intelligence, that it's not just about tasks, but that it can range over all types of tasks. So there's a better than a human piece of it, or as well as a human. But I would say the company is increasingly open about the fact that nobody really knows what it is and it's barely definable.
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Leo Laporte
Yeah.
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Paris Martineau
So we can declare its existence when we feel like it.
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Leo Laporte
I'll know it when I see it, Richard.
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Jeff Jarvis
So it's pornography, right? Kind of. And of course, it's very tricky because Microsoft has This deal with OpenAI where if OpenAI declares AGI, then Microsoft no longer has access to that IP after that point.
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Leo Laporte
Yeah. That's the financial destination.
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Paris Martineau
There's an interesting incentive for you that has nothing to do with a technical measure.
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Leo Laporte
Speaking of Microsoft, tell us about Microsoft's reaction to Sam Altman's firing.
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Jeff Jarvis
So again, there's like a short and a long one, Right.
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Leo Laporte
I want the deep spill the tea.
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Jeff Jarvis
Okay. So in the short term, I would say I think it was very public that Microsoft ran to be publicly supportive of Sam Altman after he was fired. Right. There was kind of a funny thing in the book where, like, the board didn't even have immediate plans to tell Microsoft. I think they ultimately would. But, you know, when they had this sort of plan, Amira Moradi looked at their plan the next day, who they were going to tell. She's like, why is tell Microsoft not on here?
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Leo Laporte
Yeah. Kind of big deal.
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Jeff Jarvis
So eventually, you know, Mira was the one who had to call before even Sam was alerted and say, this, you know, this is happening. They had to go pull Kevin's got out of a meeting and had to tell Satya Nadella that this was going down. So in the short term, Microsoft is super supportive and they offered OpenAI employees jobs. OpenAI basically got Sam back by having almost every employee threaten to quit. And what allowed them to do that is that Microsoft had said, we'll hire all OpenAI employees.
- [23:17]
Richard Campbell
Oh. So that created an outward pressure. Well, I hadn't thought of that before. By Microsoft doing that, Microsoft proved to the board that you could kill the company.
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Paris Martineau
Here we went through this on Windows Weekly in pretty good detail because it was during. It was the end of the Build conference too. So, you know, Nadella had just come off sort of his triumphant week of talking about how everything was Going so well. It's like on the Thursday, finds out that Sam's gone. And over the weekend there is much noise. And I think it was by Monday, they basically said, yeah, open inv. Every employee can apply to work at Microsoft. We're happy to hire you.
- [23:55]
Leo Laporte
And in fact, 770 employees signed a petition saying, if you don't rehire Sam Altman, we're going to Microsoft.
- [24:04]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. Microsoft had like, office space at the LinkedIn offices and for them and everything. Yeah, they were ready. I think that's a bit of a stunt, but they swear that was true.
- [24:16]
Leo Laporte
It was surprising to me because I didn't get the impression leading up to that point that there was this universal support for Sam Altman in the company in OpenAI.
- [24:26]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, there was universal support for the tender offer that he was organizing.
- [24:30]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it was a profit deal.
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Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. So the key thing of all of this is that the company was raising from investors at that time and a huge tender offer that would value the company at nearly $90 billion, up from 30 billion not that long before. And if you got in early, your strike price could be the 30 billion and then you'd make a ton of money. So the employees were looking at millions of dollars each. And all of them believed that this would not happen if Sam was ousted, because Sam was the one who has the relationships with the investors. This is what he does. He is a brilliant fundraiser. So it wasn't really hard for them to decide to sign that petition because they, you know, they figured, like, our equity is worthless if Sam leaves.
- [25:21]
Richard Campbell
Well, you really do a good job of showing the interlocking pieces of this puzzle.
- [25:27]
Jeff Jarvis
Thank you.
- [25:28]
Richard Campbell
It's fascinating. Yeah.
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Leo Laporte
So what was Satya Nadella's reaction when they, when they finally did tell him? Oh, yeah, we fired Sam.
- [25:38]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
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Jeff Jarvis
I mean, he was obviously completely shocked. And he and Sam spoke, and Sam, at that point was completely shocked himself, didn't really understand even how or why this had happened. And Satya threw his weight behind Sam, supported him, stood by him, and is a big part of the reason why the blip was so short. That said, the blip really shook Microsoft, as you would expect. Right. This is our biggest partner, our most important partner, surely. And this is not something we can really count on. And so you saw, not that long after, they went and built a lifeboat in the form of hiring Mustafa Suleiman and buying Inflection AI, which is a rival of OpenAI, and trying to build out their own AI capacity.
- [26:27]
Richard Campbell
I'd be curious to hear you and Richard Compare notes on where you think Microsoft stands now in having seemed to have been over dependent upon OpenAI. And how is the relationship now?
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Jeff Jarvis
Well it is tense. It's tense and it is evolving. You know there were tough negotiations. We we've already reported at the Journal that there were tough negotiations in December as they were negotiating that carve out for Oracle to allow Stargate to happen. And if you just step back I think we can all see that their incentives are not as converged as they once were. So OpenAI has become a consumer product company which I didn't see that coming. I'm not sure anyone did. At the beginning of this it seemed like it was going to be an enterprise product that Microsoft is going to sell. So they are out in the marketplace with a very successful consumer product and in many cases they are competing directly with Microsoft. I don't think Microsoft. And there's all this tussling over GPUs. I mean if you look at now.
- [27:29]
Paris Martineau
While running on Microsoft hardware in Azure data centers.
- [27:33]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah And I don't know if you've seen Sam's X feed lately but he's basically just like openly begging for more GPUs.
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Paris Martineau
Yeah. At this point the thing that led to Stargate was they had this deal with Microsoft that they were going to go through Azure and everything and Azure's running out of capacity because they were demanding so much for the next experiment. So they finally had a point where it's like hey why don't you you want to experiment somewhere else because you know we're selling Azure for other things too. And that really opened the door for Stargate which was already in progress like they were, you know Oracle.
- [28:04]
Leo Laporte
That's the half trillion dollar deal with Oracle. Sam Sunson Masayoshi son of softbank that's a. That the president announced early in his. I guess he's still early in his tenure. Wow.
- [28:21]
Jeff Jarvis
First day, first full day of his tenure. Didn't waste any time.
- [28:26]
Leo Laporte
Oh my God.
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Paris Martineau
I could also would go back to Satchin Adela being shocked. This guy again had just finished saying we're betting the whole company on AI. Yeah we have a relationship with open A that week and he didn't know the board was going to fire him like then the observer seat appears so forth like it was a he's got to face his own board. Satya saying how did you not know this?
- [28:51]
Leo Laporte
But must also irk him that OpenAI has done so well with the consumer facing products. The fastest selling 100 million subscribers in one month. Nothing has ever done that? Two months. Okay. Nothing's ever done that before. And now just this week, with the new image generation, you're seeing another doubling or even more of subscribers. The public vision of AI is OpenAI. I mean, that's what the public really is aware of. And it isn't a business product. So that must irk Nadella a little bit as well.
- [29:26]
Jeff Jarvis
I think you're probably right. And you know that that tension is, is getting more awkward by the day, especially because there's this GPU struggle underneath it all.
- [29:34]
Leo Laporte
Where does OpenAI stand now? Because they've just made some big executive moves. I think Sam has kind of stepped back a little bit, hasn't he?
- [29:43]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, in general, they've, you know, they revamped the board, brought a lot more experienced corporate folklore.
- [29:48]
Leo Laporte
They fired the board. They started over. Because that's the board that fired him, right?
- [29:55]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
- [29:56]
Leo Laporte
Although Sutskever was around for quite. Is he still around? He was around for quite a while.
- [30:01]
Jeff Jarvis
No, he has started his own company.
- [30:03]
Leo Laporte
Everybody has kind of spun off.
- [30:05]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah. But look, big picture, what's happening is OpenAI is trying to turn into a more normal company. It was a very weird company and now it's just trying to become more conventional. They're in the midst of this attempt to convert to a for profit or something closer to a more traditional for profit. And that's going to require Microsoft's agreement.
- [30:26]
Richard Campbell
So talk about that. The, the, the negotiation for that cap table. Yeah, I mean, everything relies on every. Everything is up in the air now. Right. It's all new bet. So the dynamics are everybody is jockeying for their piece of that pie, right?
- [30:44]
Jeff Jarvis
That's absolutely true. And that is happening right now. And so you have this tension we've been talking about between the diverging strategies of these two companies and needs incentives of these two companies. You have the deep seek of it. All.
- [30:59]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [30:59]
Jeff Jarvis
Which is suggesting that maybe this model of money equals success. Isn't quite true. Right. The model that OpenAI was built on, which is whoever raises the most money, whoever gets the most GPUs, wins and deep seq really called that into question. And then the whole geopolitical swirl of it all adds a lot of intrigue. If really we're going to be building out this infrastructure in the US with building a bunch of data centers. And it's not entirely clear how possible that is, but all of that is pressing in on this negotiation.
- [31:37]
Leo Laporte
How much time did you spend talking to Sam? Were you able to interview him multiple times?
- [31:42]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, yeah, multiple times. In multiple coasts, I would say many hours.
- [31:49]
Leo Laporte
Has he read the book?
- [31:52]
Jeff Jarvis
He swear to me that he would never read the book because he, he, it's good.
- [31:56]
Leo Laporte
I kind of admire Sam's. Really interesting because he's at least the picture you paint of him is this kind of self deprecating guy. Like, yeah, I was in an ashram, I did the tech bro thing and you know, he's, he's, he's got a set and he says, I don't want you to write a book about me. That's, you know, I'm not the center of the story. And yet at the other side of it is he's kind of cutthroat business guy. He really, he does want to win.
- [32:22]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. I mean not only that, but he's also like pretty good at controlling a narrative.
- [32:26]
Leo Laporte
He's very good at it. He's exceptional at it.
- [32:29]
Jeff Jarvis
Right.
- [32:30]
Paris Martineau
It seems like he makes multiple narratives too. Like it's something he shows to the public is another thing he shows to his executive. And then this whole AGI thing seems to be a chant for recruitment more than anything else.
- [32:42]
Jeff Jarvis
I think that's right. It was fascinating to, to interview people, you know, in the sort of run up to the company or the early years of the company with this like litmus test of do you believe in AGI? Was sort of one of the first questions, right. In any, in any interview.
- [32:57]
Leo Laporte
And if you did not all of.
- [32:58]
Jeff Jarvis
Them did, forget it. Well, not all of them did, but obviously they're going to like go for the people who believed in it. But you know, I talked to some folks who like, honestly like had amazing resumes, didn't quite believe. But if you're hanging out with all these people who do, within a few months, they make you a believer.
- [33:13]
Leo Laporte
You get the religion.
- [33:14]
Paris Martineau
So I suspect the interview had to do with do you believe? Can we persuade you?
- [33:19]
Leo Laporte
And how much will it take? How many options?
- [33:22]
Paris Martineau
Indoctrination is necessary.
- [33:24]
Leo Laporte
What's your strike price? So tell us what your sense of Sam is at, at base. I mean, what kind of person is he really?
- [33:33]
Jeff Jarvis
I think Sam is, I mean as I think Tim's true superpower is as a fundraiser and he was the man for the moment because this particular technology needed an ungodly amount of money and there are very few people outside of Microsoft and Google, these gigantic tech companies that could do this. So the fact that he's able to be so nimble out in the broader VC world, yet amass the amounts of money that one might normally find inside a very Large company is really unique to him. And I. I think he's basically just a fantastic salesman.
- [34:11]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. He's even.
- [34:13]
Paris Martineau
No wonder with each other then. Right. Like they're kind of the same species.
- [34:19]
Jeff Jarvis
Yes. Oh, they. I do think they are the same.
- [34:22]
Leo Laporte
Oh, interesting.
- [34:23]
Jeff Jarvis
In a lot of ways they are emotionally quite different. Right. I mean, we saw the emails from the lawsuit where Elon would toss off like two minutes after someone emails him. He would toss off these angry emails. Like we have no hope of beating Google. We should all just go jump off a bridge now. And Sam is a cool customer. Most of the time he does get angry. It's not like he never gets angry, but he's more self controlled.
- [34:52]
Richard Campbell
Among all the people that you come across now covering AI, how do I ask this? If you found yourself in a Mexican resort happening to be with one of them.
- [35:08]
Leo Laporte
Over a margarita.
- [35:09]
Richard Campbell
Margaritas in a dinner. Right. Whatever. Right. Who would be not. Not for purposes of interviewing, but for just purposes of hanging out, who would be the most engaging or interesting to you?
- [35:27]
Jeff Jarvis
I mean, the thing about Sam is he is so much fun to talk to. He just has a fascinating mind. And that's why I wanted to do the book really, because, you know, it's kind of an unvarnished portrait. But he's just interesting. That's what he does in these meetings. Right. He knows. He's this amazing ability to like, know a lot about a million little things. So he will find something that he has in common with you, with anyone. He's done this like since he was in high school. Just random technological details of things. And he will form these relationships with people based on their like, shared loves that like never really go away. So yeah, I mean, he's really fun to talk to.
- [36:08]
Leo Laporte
That's kind of about. What I was about to say is the impression I got is actually of a fairly likable, certainly charismatic person that you would want to kind of spend some time with. Even knowing all of the stuff behind the scenes.
- [36:23]
Jeff Jarvis
Absolutely.
- [36:23]
Leo Laporte
He comes across quite likable.
- [36:25]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, he is likable. I mean, I don't think anyone would say that he's not actually like. I mean, several. A few people. Right.
- [36:32]
Leo Laporte
But Elon might not like him that much. Yeah.
- [36:35]
Richard Campbell
Who's the geekiest?
- [36:37]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, goodness.
- [36:39]
Richard Campbell
I mean, that's a hard tournament.
- [36:42]
Jeff Jarvis
That is a hard tournament. Probably Greg Brockman.
- [36:49]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Interesting.
- [36:51]
Jeff Jarvis
Well, I was fascinated that I would research everyone's background and almost every major character in this book was a math Olympiad or Mathlete of some.
- [37:03]
Richard Campbell
Were they also the AV Club Which.
- [37:06]
Jeff Jarvis
I know kind of seems like a joke. It is sort of like a joke. Right? Like, of course, they're all like brilliant nerds, so. Yes. But I think it takes something like a special kind of person to want to do that. Right. And all of them did it.
- [37:19]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. There's being interested in math and there's wearing the jersey and competitive.
- [37:23]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, wearing the jersey. I like it. They were wearing the jersey. But, you know, I mentioned this last week. It seems like there are two types of people who get into this. They're philosophy majors and then there's the math majors. And they need each other to make this happen. It's a really. I find this a fascinating beat. And this is a must read book. This is. I wish it were out tomorrow because I know that people listening would preorder folks pre order it.
- [37:49]
Paris Martineau
I got my order in.
- [37:50]
Leo Laporte
Keith Hege, H A G E Y. The book is called the optimist. Sam Altman, OpenAI and the race to Invent the Future. Norton books. Not till May 20, but you can read the excerpt last week in the Wall Street Journal and which I highly recommend. Kiche, thank you so much for your time. Sorry that the Journal put you in the Witness Protection Program booth, but.
- [38:18]
Richard Campbell
We.
- [38:18]
Leo Laporte
Were thrilled to be able to talk to you. And this was fairly short notice because we read the article, we said we got to get her on and you've lived up to our hopes. It's a fascinating.
- [38:29]
Richard Campbell
Thank you so much subject.
- [38:30]
Leo Laporte
Thank you for being here. I really appreciate it.
- [38:32]
Jeff Jarvis
Thanks for having me.
- [38:34]
Leo Laporte
So glad you're here. Richard. Thank you for taking the time. And I bet you're glad now because that was.
- [38:38]
Paris Martineau
Now that I've heard that Jeff is in the same space I am with AGI, I think this is going to be real fun conversation because, damn it.
- [38:44]
Leo Laporte
I gotta invite more acceleration as such.
- [38:47]
Paris Martineau
You know.
- [38:47]
Leo Laporte
Damn.
- [38:48]
Paris Martineau
Some of us actually look at reality and try and perceive it rather than.
- [38:52]
Richard Campbell
You know, acceleration is one thing, fiction another.
- [38:55]
Leo Laporte
I was in that camp, but the more I use this stuff, the more I'm going, I don't know, you know, I understand this is just, you know, tokens and probability, but something's going on here.
- [39:06]
Richard Campbell
Did you see Gary Marcus's April Fool's joke?
- [39:08]
Leo Laporte
No. When he.
- [39:10]
Richard Campbell
I just got back from a trip and amazingly, I got invited to see GPT5 and. And I gotta say, it did absolutely everything I wanted. I think AGI is actually here.
- [39:22]
Leo Laporte
Gary. Gary. Gary. All right, we're going to take a little break. When we come back, we have the AI news there's a lot, including a lot of AI OpenAI news. They've reorganized a little bit. But before we get to that, let me tell you about our fine sponsor, actually somebody new to our network. We're glad to welcome our friends at Outsystems and they are in the right spot because they are the leading AI powered application and agent development platform. They're not new to this game. They've been doing it for more than 20 years. The mission of Outsystems has been to give every company the power to innovate through software. You know, I know Richard knows this. Well, there is always that build versus buy decision in business, right? IT teams, you got the two choices. You could buy off the shelf SaaS products, you know, they'll get you up and running fast, but you lose differentiation with the competition, you lose flexibility. Maybe it doesn't just do exactly what you need or, or you can build it, build custom software, but that's going to cost time, it's going to cost money. Well now, thanks to AI, there is another path. The fusion of AI, low code and DevSecOps automation onto a single development platform. This is actually a relief. I mean we ourselves have gone through the build versus buy conundrum and there is no, there hasn't been until now a good answer. With Outsystems, your team will build a custom application. You'll use AI agents. It'll be as easy as buying that generic off the shelf sameware. But it will be flexible, it will be secure, it will be scalable and it all comes standard. With AI powered low code teams can build custom future proof applications at the speed of buying with fully automated architecture, security integrations, data flows and permissions. Now I know it sounds maybe too good to be true, but Outsystems has been doing this for 20 years. OutSystems is the last platform you will buy because you can use it to build anything and customize and extend your core systems. Build your future with OutSystems. Visit outsystems.com TWIT to learn more out systems. Outsystems. We thank them so much for supporting intelligent machines. We thank you for supporting the show by using that address so they know you saw it here. Outsystems.com TWIT.
- [42:02]
Richard Campbell
Great. That was just great. Thank you for.
- [42:04]
Leo Laporte
She was, she lived up to the excerpt we read. I mean what a great.
- [42:09]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, you made the staff work over the weekend to go get her.
- [42:11]
Leo Laporte
And thank you guys for Anthony Nielsen. Good get as they say in the biz. Really great yeah, we're glad we could get her on. Maybe we'll have her back when the book comes out. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [42:23]
Richard Campbell
Because the reaction to A, the reaction to it, and B, it's the, it's the author's problem. I don't know when she locked up the last corrections, but with this company, it's got to be tearing your hair out because everything's going to happen.
- [42:37]
Leo Laporte
Crazy to write an AI book, period. Because every week something different happens.
- [42:43]
Richard Campbell
This is the excerpt from my perspective. You can do it, but I think an AI news book. Yeah.
- [42:47]
Leo Laporte
This is the excerpt you can read now anyway, from the Wall Street Journal, March 28. Very good. The secrets and misdirection behind Sam Altman's firing from an OpenAI. And this is the first time I'd read a lot of, A lot of the details in this because last week.
- [43:02]
Richard Campbell
When we had Gary Rivlin on, as Leo said earlier, I did say, oh, you know what? I.
- [43:07]
Leo Laporte
What's the juice?
- [43:08]
Richard Campbell
What's the juice? What's the juice? And so then that's when Leo, when he saw the. The Journal Experts excerpt set up.
- [43:12]
Leo Laporte
Here it is right away. Yeah, yeah. And. And it took a real reporter really to dig and get that.
- [43:20]
Paris Martineau
It was so ridiculously vague. We have no confidence in his candor. Like.
- [43:27]
Leo Laporte
There was good reason for them having no confidence in his cander. No, he was lying to him outright. He didn't even tell them ahead of time before he announced chat GPT4. I mean, there were all sorts of. If I were on that board, I would have been just as upset and.
- [43:40]
Paris Martineau
Just as all the more reason the board should have been more direct on why he was let go.
- [43:44]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, well, but, but, but then they were stuck in this, in this vice where they could have killed it all. I mean, Richard, I'd love to hear a little more about Satya because he got really blind, blindsided as the least hugely blindsided.
- [43:58]
Paris Martineau
And you understand, like, AI is the thing he is going to be known for at micro. Everything else had come before he was in a cloud, was already a thing. All these other things, here's this new thing, it gets to be his thing. And he'd literally just come off stages saying, Microsoft is all in an AI. This is what this is about. Like, the timing couldn't have been worse. And for us, come on the outside looking in, like, this is when we first saw what we started to call dark Sacha. Like he's the yoga guy. Super chill. Right? We're making one Microsoft. Everybody needs to get along and work together. Then the other guy showed up.
- [44:34]
Richard Campbell
So it's in him.
- [44:36]
Paris Martineau
And I think part of it was he was so humiliated. Yeah, well. And also, like, what an embarrassment.
- [44:42]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [44:45]
Leo Laporte
Well, he got his way in the long run.
- [44:48]
Paris Martineau
Sort of work around.
- [44:49]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I mean, it does feel like the relationship is tattered now. It's not what it was. Right. But they both need each other somewhat. But Microsoft has its own models. They have two very strong models.
- [45:04]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [45:06]
Leo Laporte
Copilot. Yeah.
- [45:07]
Paris Martineau
Part of it is realizing, hey, now that we. Once we've built in this direct. First off is Microsoft is an aggregator, so every model that exists now is available through AI Studio. You can get Mistral, even Deep Seek is there.
- [45:20]
Leo Laporte
Right, right.
- [45:21]
Paris Martineau
So they're always. Microsoft hedges their bets and they're building their own. But also, I think they cut a bad deal in the first place with OpenAI because their goal was, hey, we're going to lend you money and you're going to give it back to us in the. Of consuming Azure. Like, that's awesome. Except that they started consuming more Azure than is possible. And suddenly you're in a trap where it's like, you told us you'd run all our stuff for us. Well, we keep making stuff.
- [45:48]
Richard Campbell
So the other part of this is the cap table part I'm just fascinated by because. Because the rules of the game are completely changed and how do you negotiate who gets what now?
- [45:58]
Leo Laporte
Well, now SoftBank is in the mix. Right. SoftBank, in this newest raise, which was this week, OpenAI is finalizing a $40 billion funding round. It would be one of the largest startup financings of all time. And SoftBank is expected to contribute 30 billion. That's in addition to 30 billion they're given Stargate.
- [46:20]
Richard Campbell
And don't forget that that's 30 billion only if it is converted to for profit. Otherwise it's minus 10 billion.
- [46:27]
Leo Laporte
It's funny because when SoftBank said we're going to put 30 billion into Stargate, Elon said, I know, I know. They don't have the money. He tweet. He tweeted. I don't. They don't have the money. Elon is really throwing grenades in all of this because it's. It's a competitive thing at this point for him.
- [46:44]
Richard Campbell
It's ego. Yeah.
- [46:45]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So the OpenAI funding, according to the Journal, is divided across two tranches. The company will initially receive $10 billion. It can receive another 30 billion by the end of this year if it competes, completes the for profit change.
- [47:01]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [47:02]
Leo Laporte
And if the restructuring doesn't Take place by the end of the year. It's just 10 instead of 30.
- [47:06]
Richard Campbell
So I thought it was pretty. Jeez. Wow.
- [47:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. So it's going to get 10 now and it'll get either another 10 or another 30.
- [47:16]
Richard Campbell
Well, plus, where are the court? I mean, Elon is suing to prevent the conversion.
- [47:21]
Leo Laporte
That's right.
- [47:22]
Richard Campbell
And he could drag this out through the end of the year and then Bye, bye, 30 billion.
- [47:26]
Leo Laporte
He's tried to tank it already. That was that kind of kooky offer he made.
- [47:30]
Richard Campbell
Well, he's hanging out with a guy who knows how to delay things in courts.
- [47:34]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Who's that? Peter Thiel. Oh, oh, the other guy. The, the redhead.
- [47:38]
Paris Martineau
The origin of the guy.
- [47:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, the other guy. He who shall not be named, by the way.
- [47:46]
Richard Campbell
So. So Trump said today, supposedly he told the Cabinet, don't worry, I'm not getting political.
- [47:50]
Leo Laporte
I just said, he who shall not be named. Okay.
- [47:53]
Richard Campbell
He told the cabinet, that's going to be gone in a few months. Of course.
- [47:57]
Leo Laporte
That was interesting. Yeah.
- [47:58]
Richard Campbell
But I had FTSE just has a headline, Musk says no, he's not leaving.
- [48:02]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, this will be interesting to watch. Remember trying to kick me out as a non. As a, as a consulting employee, not an official employee of the government. He has 130 days in that job. That ends end of May. Not coincidentally, I had picked. We had a pool back before. Right. I think was right after the election. And I had picked June 1 as the day that the divorce would happen. Some had picked sooner, but I'm going to stand by my prediction of June 1st. Elon is getting sued himself because a startup founder says, you stole the name Grok. Now, Grok, which is the name of the open air, rather the Xai Chatbot, of course, is named Robert from Robert Heinlein. Heinlein, right.
- [48:46]
Paris Martineau
It's the stranger in strange land.
- [48:49]
Leo Laporte
But, but there is another company that has the trademark. And in fact, the US Patent and Trademark Office says we're going to suspend Grok's trademark application because the agency argued the name could be confused with that of two other companies. AI chip maker Grok, with a Q. And software provider Grokstream. But now a third company called Bisly says, no, no, we've got Croc. Where's Heinlein's estate in all of this? Bisley says, yeah, he came up with the name during a brainstorming session with a colleague who used the word as a verb. As I have. As we all have in our sophomore dorm.
- [49:31]
Richard Campbell
Not even, probably not even trademarkable for that reason.
- [49:34]
Leo Laporte
Is it? I don't know.
- [49:35]
Paris Martineau
As it was defined by Heinlein in his book in the first place. It was all verb.
- [49:40]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's the Martian verb to understand. So really, maybe the Martians have prior claim.
- [49:47]
Richard Campbell
Well, that's why Elon's gonna go up there to negotiate with them.
- [49:50]
Leo Laporte
Shaw says he tried to trademark it in 2021. He was in the midst of launching an AI powered app for meetings called Grok when Musk announced his chatbot with the same day name. It was the day I'll never forget. Shaw says, I woke up and looked at my phone and there were so many messages from friends saying, did you get acquired by Elon? Congrats. Anyway, the whole thing is in limbo now. Not just because of this, but because the USPTO says, well, there's this other. These other two people.
- [50:25]
Paris Martineau
Also the nature of trademarks, that's nothing weird, right? Trademarking is a hard job.
- [50:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. We have the Twit trademark for another few years. And there was some concern about Twitter when a couple of years after we trademarked Twitter decided to make that the name of their social network. We weren't happy about it. We talked to them sternly, and that's all I can say.
- [50:55]
Paris Martineau
You're required to defend your trademarks. Right? That's the deal. You defended us. Show that you sent the letter, we.
- [51:00]
Leo Laporte
Care, or you give it up. More than a letter, let me tell you. Anyway, Elon did do, actually. Very curious. And Richard, you're the. As the autodidact. Maybe you can explain this. It seems apparently to be a violation of SEC rules because the same financial outfit was on both sides of this transaction. Elon said on Friday he'd sold X sold big air quotes on that 2xai, which he also owns in what the New York Times called an unusual arrangement.
- [51:43]
Paris Martineau
This is asset propping. It's a pretty normal thing when your values have been tanking like crazy.
- [51:48]
Leo Laporte
That's the point, isn't it? The all stock deal valued XAI at 80 billion and X at 33 billion.
- [51:55]
Paris Martineau
Right. Well, more importantly, now you. Now you get a year to restate in the merge, so you get a year to write your ship.
- [52:04]
Leo Laporte
Interesting. Yeah. Because neither is worth anything really right now.
- [52:09]
Paris Martineau
Really, it's all fiction. Right. And it's all like.
- [52:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And both are losing money.
- [52:15]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. Even if the. If you know somebody kicked off a lawsuit for an audit, you've got a couple of years. So again, just munge the math together now. Nobody can assess value for a while. Until new things are done, you buy some time.
- [52:29]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [52:30]
Richard Campbell
What about the impact on Tesla?
- [52:33]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's because you're talking about the fact that it's thought. It's that Elon financed his purchase of.
- [52:40]
Richard Campbell
That's what I've read somewhere. Yeah.
- [52:41]
Leo Laporte
By borrowing $13 billion using the Tesla stock as collateral.
- [52:47]
Paris Martineau
In general. Yeah. Well, and it's still got an issue. Without a doubt.
- [52:51]
Leo Laporte
But there still could be a call.
- [52:54]
Paris Martineau
He's always going to risk of a call. It's not just the, the Twitter purchase, it's also how he lives.
- [53:00]
Leo Laporte
Right, right.
- [53:02]
Paris Martineau
Routinely.
- [53:03]
Leo Laporte
It's all.
- [53:04]
Richard Campbell
This is also late breaking here from the FT. Trump is kicking off a sale of $2.3 billion in truth social stake.
- [53:11]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, he's going to cash in. Yeah, he's going to cash in.
- [53:17]
Paris Martineau
What was that a moments clause you people have? What was that again?
- [53:22]
Keech Hagee
That's only for peanut farms, Peter.
- [53:26]
Leo Laporte
Oh, the emoluments. Yeah, we don't do those anymore. That, yeah, that's a, that's very.
- [53:30]
Richard Campbell
A quaint era.
- [53:31]
Leo Laporte
Very 1776. We don't.
- [53:33]
Paris Martineau
It's not my document, but I've heard you guys have one.
- [53:38]
Leo Laporte
This quote from the New York Times, I love this. Linda Yakarino, X's chief executive, wrote on X of the deal, the future could not be brighter. X declined to comment. It feels like they've left.
- [53:54]
Paris Martineau
Isn't she the CEO? X doesn't she? Isn't she?
- [53:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't know who X. It feels like these are redacted documents, but no, this is an actual sentence in the New York Times.
- [54:05]
Paris Martineau
Now this, this Sounds like a chat GPT2 sentence. That's what it sounds.
- [54:11]
Leo Laporte
X has declined to comment. Probably sent out a poop emoji. If I know X, that would be the logic.
- [54:18]
Richard Campbell
Anybody there to do that anymore?
- [54:20]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, you can get a stochastic parrot for that for sure.
- [54:24]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. Andrew Verstein, who's a professor at UCLA Law School, quoted in the Times, the Elon version, in other words, the version of the deal that Elon is saying is it does seem to say, I have a company, maybe not bankrupt, just not my crown jewel. I will buy it in a way that makes it look like a success using one of my other companies, which incidentally is pretty deep in the hole too. Anyway, X's financial outlook has declined, but it's recently gone up quite a bit. Remember, the banks wrote off a lot of the debt.
- [55:04]
Richard Campbell
So what happens if you've already written off the debt and now you're getting.
- [55:08]
Leo Laporte
I think they're out of luck. I don't know. Do they still have the collateral? I don't know. It's un. This is why I was hoping, Richard.
- [55:15]
Richard Campbell
Being a financial genius, it's a tax thing.
- [55:19]
Leo Laporte
It's not even that.
- [55:20]
Paris Martineau
The write down, you get a tax break, you can't take it back because.
- [55:23]
Leo Laporte
You can't take it back.
- [55:24]
Paris Martineau
It's done.
- [55:25]
Leo Laporte
I mean everything, this is our loss.
- [55:27]
Paris Martineau
Everything's fixable with enough lawyers, admittedly like you can. But would you like you've drawn already.
- [55:34]
Richard Campbell
Did the lenders for Twitter get actual money out of this?
- [55:40]
Leo Laporte
They got stock. They wouldn't have gotten money. They would get stock in the combined company and it was the 3070 split. So 30% x 70 xai.
- [55:51]
Paris Martineau
So this is also a private deal. Right. So they don't actually have to file with the sec. Like nobody really knows. There's whatever they decided to say in the public, they're not required to say anything. They're not on any governance.
- [56:03]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, there's at least some governance because again, there is apparently a rule that you can't use the same bank for both sides of the transaction, which I presume is to protect investors. Nobody's going to enforce it.
- [56:20]
Paris Martineau
Well, that's also just played old fashioned kiting too. Right? Like you're just playing games with money at that point.
- [56:25]
Leo Laporte
Right. Repl Dot's CEO Amjad Massad says learning to code is a waste of time. He's very vibey. Replit was a great place to code because it had many, many languages and you would host the coding engine and it was, it was really a kind of a cool company for a long time and then they got into this AI thing and now it's an AI coding tool. And of course as a result, Replit CEO is saying, don't study to learn. Don't study coding. Now it's a waste of time. How do you feel about that, Richard? Should I learn to code? I was thinking of going back to school.
- [57:14]
Paris Martineau
I think you still have to express your intent. That gets generated into code whether you write it or not.
- [57:20]
Leo Laporte
Good point.
- [57:21]
Paris Martineau
Still the thinking, right? And yeah, you know, Andre Kartha Karthopathy, who originally coined the term vibe coding, was talking about coders experimenting with the language tools to generate code. Because it's an experience, it's not quality code and it's not necessarily good outcomes. You'll often have rabbit holes. But it is an experimental approach, you know, challenging an idea, seeing some possibilities, maybe that stimulates some ideas for you to write something Usable in code.
- [57:53]
Leo Laporte
We talked about this on Windows Weekly earlier and he said it's good for weekend projects. Which you point out means, well, obviously if it's good for weekend projects, you're a coder. Because nobody's not a coder doing weekend projects. I can give you Karpathy's tweet here. I think I pulled it up for Windows Weekly. I asked who coined the term vibe coding of my perplexity and came up with this tweet. Where is it? Here we go. Do I have to? Oh no, I'm not. I'm not running the board. You are Bonita. It's a new kind of coding. Andrej Karpathy says. I call it vibe coding. By the way, Karpathy was one of the founders of OpenAI. Worked for a long time at director of AI at Tesla. So you know, he knows a little bit about wherever he speaks. There's a new kind of coding I call vibe coding, where you fully give into the vibes. Wait a minute, I'm doing the wrong voice. Embrace exponentials and forget that the code even exists is possible because the LLMs are getting too good. Also, I just talked to Composer with Super Whisper, so I barely even touch the keyboard. I asked for the dumbest things like quote, decrease the padding on the sidebar by half because I'm too lazy to find it. Yeah, he says I accept all always. I don't read the diffs anymore.
- [59:30]
Paris Martineau
Wow.
- [59:30]
Leo Laporte
When I get error messages, this is a good one. I just copy paste them in with no comment. Usually that fixes it. The code, and this is what's scary to me, grows beyond my usual comprehension. I'd have to fully read, really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug, so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. All right, I'm done here. I'm going off to Burning Man. Have a great weekend.
- [59:59]
Paris Martineau
You left off the polls on the bong in that.
- [60:01]
Leo Laporte
But yeah, I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff and copy paste stuff and it mostly works. Dude, Karpathi does not sound like that at all. In fact, he's a pretty hard headed engineer. But this was a. This was in February. I mean it's all. Things have changed since then.
- [60:19]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, probably should have been published April 1st, but still.
- [60:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, maybe. But I have to say, Dario Amade of anthropic says 90%. 90% within six months of all code could be generated by AI. 90% bet doesn't mean it'll be good Code.
- [60:40]
Keech Hagee
I'll take that bet. I'll take that bet.
- [60:42]
Leo Laporte
You want to take that bet?
- [60:43]
Paris Martineau
You wander on GitHub, 90% of all code, not so good.
- [60:46]
Leo Laporte
Well, that seems a little.
- [60:48]
Keech Hagee
If he's suggesting that so much code is going to be generated from now, between now and six months, that it's actually 90% of volume more than we have now.
- [60:56]
Leo Laporte
It's crazy.
- [60:57]
Richard Campbell
But, but, but, but, you know, isn't there a new definition of code potentially, that anytime you ask an LLM for something, in essence it's creating code, you just don't see it?
- [61:06]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, well, try a no code solution like Power Platform or any of the others. There's still code you just don't see.
- [61:14]
Leo Laporte
Just don't see it. Actually, Karpathi, I, I watched that three and a half hour video. Have you ever, have you ever watched that yet, Jeff, that.
- [61:22]
Richard Campbell
I tried to get through it all and couldn't.
- [61:25]
Paris Martineau
Long.
- [61:25]
Leo Laporte
It's very long. It's very good. And we were talking about it also on Windows Weekly. I think it's the best description of how losing.
- [61:33]
Richard Campbell
Did you watch the whole thing, Richard?
- [61:35]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, I did.
- [61:36]
Richard Campbell
Oh, you're a better, you're a better man than I. Or you have no life. One of the two.
- [61:42]
Leo Laporte
In any event, one of the things he says, which I think is interesting, is that often the best thing to ask an AI to do is generate code. For instance, you know, there's that famous story where you say, how many Rs in strawberry? And I learned this from Karpathy's video, because the LLM doesn't actually have words in it, doesn't have the word Strawberry in it. It has tokens that may represent more than a word, maybe represent multiple words or parts of a word. So when it sees Strawberry, it doesn't see three Rs, it just sees a token. So it often says two or one or five or none. But if you and Karpathy uses an example, if you say generate the code, or he just actually just adds the phrase use code, then the LLM writes Python code that takes the word Strawberry, counts the R's and returns the right result. And that's a really good example of how an LLM is ignorant but can write code and often can give you the right answer if you ask it to use code.
- [62:50]
Paris Martineau
One of the advantages that code has is that the source of it is places like GitHub where it has already been compiled and it's already been validated. Like, in general, the quality information on GitHub and code is higher quality than the information on the rest of the Internet.
- [63:05]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [63:06]
Paris Martineau
So the LLM is a much better chance of rendering something useful from its data set.
- [63:12]
Leo Laporte
I, I do think that the interesting goal is to come up with code that hasn't been written before to. And, and, and I, I was it. I, I think it was Stephen Wolfram who said this. In fact, I know it was, is that one of the things LLMs can do, they. They work on patterns, they notice patterns and they repeat patterns. But one of the things they can do because of the depth of their knowledge, the speed of their computation, is they may spot patterns humans do not. Sure. And so as a result, they may actually write code based on what they've seen before that a human has never written. That a human may never normally write.
- [63:55]
Paris Martineau
Well, we're seeing this in medicine now too, right? The fact that they're able to take all the telemetry of a trauma room, all of the cameras, all of the instrumentation, and consolidated in a generative AI model, they're finding trends in actions that people didn't pick up that are improving outcomes.
- [64:13]
Leo Laporte
Exactly.
- [64:14]
Richard Campbell
That's the power of it.
- [64:15]
Leo Laporte
And I think that's exciting. Yeah. Is it AGI? No, it's just.
- [64:18]
Paris Martineau
Well, so there's this argument that the side effect of our current information system world that's built up enough knowledge that we no longer can manage it, we've now started to make tools that can manage it when properly utilized, so that we take advantage of what we've built.
- [64:35]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [64:36]
Richard Campbell
So, Richard, for the benefit of our audience and me, because we agree with each other and I want to have ammunition, tell me why you back here?
- [64:45]
Leo Laporte
Do you?
- [64:46]
Richard Campbell
Tell me why you think AGI is a long way to say bs?
- [64:51]
Paris Martineau
Well, because.
- [64:51]
Leo Laporte
Don't put words in his mouth.
- [64:53]
Richard Campbell
He already said it. He already said it.
- [64:55]
Paris Martineau
He said, we agree because token assembly is not thought right. Like, let's be clear. And. And the smart people, like hint and so forth, have already said as much while quietly cashing their checks. I'm not that clever. I've just read good books that have talked more deeply about what consciousness and thinking and logic processing actually represents and said, hey, the software we're writing isn't these things.
- [65:20]
Leo Laporte
So here's my counter to that. And by the way, the jury's out. I don't know. No one knows.
- [65:27]
Richard Campbell
I wish I had some sand with me. Go ahead.
- [65:29]
Leo Laporte
But the counter to that is, what makes you think we're anything more than a token analyzer and a probabilistic. Probabilistic prediction machine? What are we doing that is. That is better.
- [65:45]
Richard Campbell
Mark Twain thought we were just.
- [65:47]
Paris Martineau
We're summarizing. Yeah. We project with few samples. We summarize off of projections. We can order. Order probably order sets of steps with incomplete information. Like.
- [66:00]
Leo Laporte
Well. But I would subm. That what we do is based on.
- [66:03]
Paris Martineau
Data and reduce them.
- [66:05]
Leo Laporte
But it's based on our life experience. We are the sum of our life experience. Absent that, are we anything. I mean, sure. Ingesting the Internet.
- [66:15]
Richard Campbell
So. So there's a wonderful book that I probably talked about a few years ago that I wrote about called How History Gets Things Wrong by.
- [66:21]
Paris Martineau
Excellent book.
- [66:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [66:22]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's a wonderful book. And. And the argument is that. That the theory of mind is bs so trying to track after the theory of mind and computers is all wrong because that's not how we operate. We basically have a huge VCR in our head and when we hit a circumstance, we play a tape and we go down the path. That's right before.
- [66:42]
Leo Laporte
Right, Just like an LLM.
- [66:44]
Richard Campbell
Well, no. So let me ask this question to both of you.
- [66:48]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [66:48]
Richard Campbell
A whole bunch of talk about how I had this discussion last week with Jason about reasoning models, and all they're doing is cutting up a task into slices. Is that reasoning?
- [67:08]
Leo Laporte
I'm gonna let Richard start.
- [67:10]
Richard Campbell
He's. He's actually. Which is rare on this show. We don't do this usually.
- [67:13]
Paris Martineau
Richard had a bonk. You gotta say it again. Sorry. I had an Internet bonk there.
- [67:18]
Richard Campbell
Oh, okay.
- [67:20]
Leo Laporte
We are getting.
- [67:21]
Richard Campbell
See, profound thought.
- [67:22]
Leo Laporte
We are getting some hits on Rich's Internet and I apologize. We're talking about the reasons we're out of sync and things. Yeah.
- [67:27]
Richard Campbell
Reasoning. All the models say we have a reasoning model. Reasoning model.
- [67:31]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [67:31]
Richard Campbell
What I'm questioning is what is reasoning? It seems to me that it's more than just slicing up a task into multiple parts.
- [67:42]
Leo Laporte
Well, you would think that.
- [67:44]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [67:44]
Paris Martineau
No, they're abusing the word reasoning there because it's good for marketing.
- [67:48]
Richard Campbell
I love Richard. This is why I'm so glad.
- [67:50]
Paris Martineau
Which is normal. Start with the fact that artificial intelligence was coined by a guy who's trying to raise money from the military. It's always been a marketing firm.
- [67:58]
Leo Laporte
That's really true.
- [67:59]
Paris Martineau
Artificial. And it's not intelligent. Like none of that has been true. Right. We're just abusing words here. There are larger concepts to reason and they tend towards more philosophical than they are technological.
- [68:13]
Leo Laporte
So the reason to me, the reasoning, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the. The. The difference that happened with deep Seek and other reasoning models was they started using reinforcement learning more. And that's actually very a very interesting slant on this because you take an LLM which is basically tokenizing a vast amount of information and figuring out the probabilities of the next token and it is completely stochastic. But then you don't stop with that because that gives you nothing to get a chat. And this is what Karpathy talks about in this video. To get a chatbot now you have to tune it. One of the newer tech, it's actually not new, but one of the hot techniques right now is this reinforcement learning. And this was what was used with AlphaZero. DeepMind's really first success was this chess playing computer Alpha Alpha and then AlphaGo. But both of the first ones were rules based. They gave it a lot of games and said this is what a game looks like. Just as you might if you were doing radiology, say here's a bunch of X rays, these have cancers, these do not. And generate a rule set out of that. That's the LLM way. Reinforcement learning is more like AlphaZero where all they told AlphaZero was these are the rules that go now play a billion games it did. And in just a matter of hours it played itself almost a huge vast number of games and learned from the games it played itself.
- [69:49]
Richard Campbell
Is that reasoning or is that just the big.
- [69:51]
Leo Laporte
Reasoning is a fuzzy. That's a word we use. That's what these reasoning models are doing. Is this so called reinforcement learning where they get to the end of the game and it was bad computer you lost or good computer you won. And after a series of those it actually became better than any human. Furthermore could come up with moves no human could come up with. It wasn't trained on human games, it trained itself. So that's.
- [70:15]
Paris Martineau
And the GO players that played it said it played weirdly like it did.
- [70:19]
Leo Laporte
Not human human, it was non human.
- [70:21]
Paris Martineau
But either way you're training a set of weights into a neural net. So what you have is two different training strategies. Essentially an adversarial trading strategy which was take the rules and play against yourself and an analytical or more, you know, generative approach where you learn from the existing data set of games. But either way you're just trying to generate a set of weights. There is no reason. Right.
- [70:46]
Richard Campbell
Richard, to your point about Brand, I just put in the rundown something I. I recommended this guy for a future guest. Thomas Haig, I think it's pronounced, is a computer historian, line 94. He has a wonderful PowerPoint for a lecture about artificial intelligence. The history of a brand.
- [71:04]
Paris Martineau
I love it.
- [71:06]
Richard Campbell
And he says it's not pejorative. A brand is about ownership. A brand is about promotion. A brand is about marketing. Right, right. Exactly what you're saying. And to go back through the history here, he was the historian in residence at the Computer History Museum, sessions about the birth the pioneers of desktop publishing. So I just looked him up because he was really interesting and this is his perspective about trying to look at AI Gary's book.
- [71:36]
Leo Laporte
By the way, Gary Rivlin, our guest last week, AI Valley covers a lot of this as well.
- [71:42]
Richard Campbell
Yep.
- [71:42]
Leo Laporte
This is true. But I. Okay, it's. I think you use this as a way.
- [71:47]
Richard Campbell
It's not wrong. It's just saying that. That I think it's Richard's point is that. That we've. We've given it this name.
- [71:53]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [71:53]
Richard Campbell
That their name is meaningless.
- [71:55]
Leo Laporte
But. But when we say reasoning, what are you doing? What's the. That's your branding for what you're doing, which isn't necessarily reasoning. I mean.
- [72:07]
Paris Martineau
Oh. I mean, part of.
- [72:08]
Leo Laporte
What do you know you're doing anything.
- [72:09]
Richard Campbell
I'm not even saying the reason is the thing that we should expect them to do. That. That's the wrong.
- [72:14]
Leo Laporte
We don't even know what reasoning is.
- [72:16]
Keech Hagee
Well, there, you just nailed it, Leo. We don't even know what reasoning is. So how are you saying that the AI has reasoning then? How are you claiming.
- [72:22]
Leo Laporte
But how are you saying it doesn't? Because what is. What is.
- [72:27]
Keech Hagee
To prove the positive, you can't prove a negative. You have to prove the positive.
- [72:30]
Richard Campbell
It's the.
- [72:30]
Leo Laporte
Well, no, it proves itself. It proves itself by producing output that we would say if we produced it was reasonable. That's how it proves.
- [72:40]
Paris Martineau
Now you're getting into that Turing test game, which is I'll know intelligence when I see it. And yet I keep saying faces and bowling balls and cars.
- [72:49]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [72:49]
Paris Martineau
Like humans are predisposed to anthropomorphize because it's a good survival strategy.
- [72:56]
Leo Laporte
I agree. And I would also submit that we. We have a self. Inflated. We have an inflated sense of self.
- [73:03]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [73:04]
Leo Laporte
And we imagine that what we are doing, this magical thing inside this gray matter is somehow superior to what a machine could do. And.
- [73:14]
Richard Campbell
Okay, well, there we agree we're setting the wrong standard here. We're saying, replicate us. Why limit yourself to us?
- [73:20]
Leo Laporte
No, we're not. No, I. That's what a super intelligence is. It's far better than us.
- [73:24]
Paris Martineau
Well, but only in science fiction.
- [73:26]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, so far. So far.
- [73:30]
Paris Martineau
You know.
- [73:31]
Leo Laporte
You know what? When. When the Wright brothers said, you know, we think we could fly in this thing, people.
- [73:38]
Richard Campbell
There's a definition of flying. Yeah, There's a clear definition of flying.
- [73:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [73:43]
Paris Martineau
People were flying before the Wright brothers. With the Wright brothers Jazz, which was. Showed powered flight over a distance more than the energy that was in entered it when it lifted.
- [73:52]
Leo Laporte
They weren't gliding. They were flying. Yeah, that's right. But people thought they were crazy.
- [73:58]
Paris Martineau
No, no. Anybody would get into a contraption that looked like that was fairly nuts.
- [74:03]
Richard Campbell
Yes, yes. It's like getting into a Tesla right now on autodrive. Yeah, yeah.
- [74:08]
Leo Laporte
There you go. Here is what Perplexity says a reasoning model is. The core components of reasoning models are structured formats like semantic networks, ontologies, and graphs. That's a knowledge representation. Then there's an inference engine, and then there's a learning algorithm.
- [74:28]
Richard Campbell
It's on tautological as hell.
- [74:29]
Paris Martineau
Yes, it is.
- [74:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, abductive reasoning.
- [74:34]
Paris Martineau
And yeah, they've really built a bit of software there to create. To trigger the anthropomorphic perception of reasoning from the software.
- [74:42]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [74:43]
Paris Martineau
It's showing you words, whether they're accurate or not.
- [74:46]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [74:46]
Paris Martineau
That. That appear to present a chain to the outcome you wanted. That's reasoning.
- [74:52]
Richard Campbell
And I'm not even sure that that's actually part of the process that results in the end. End.
- [74:57]
Paris Martineau
That's. I tend to agree with you. This is. It's almost a kind of progress bar.
- [75:01]
Leo Laporte
It's.
- [75:01]
Richard Campbell
Well, it's not necessarily progress to what it's actually doing. It's. I'm gonna. I'm gonna occupy you.
- [75:07]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. Instead of putting up a spinning ball or a spider, I'm gonna spit out text.
- [75:12]
Leo Laporte
Because I think that's what I mean. That's true. Yeah.
- [75:14]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [75:15]
Leo Laporte
I do think there is something going on behind that as well.
- [75:17]
Richard Campbell
But there's something. But I don't think it's. I don't think it's. That's displaying.
- [75:21]
Leo Laporte
It's breaking down currency. What it's doing is breaking down the. The proposed problem into smaller bits that it can.
- [75:28]
Paris Martineau
Or at least creating a perception that you're seeing the problem.
- [75:31]
Leo Laporte
It's not doing that. All right. Bloomberg has been using AI for summaries, but the New York Times is quick to point out that it has had a rocky start with AI summary.
- [75:44]
Paris Martineau
I mean, this is one of the most popular features of these LLMs right now is summarization.
- [75:49]
Leo Laporte
You'd think it could do that pretty well. Bloomberg has Issued according to the Times. Again, a competitor.
- [75:53]
Richard Campbell
There's no sense of meaning mean well.
- [75:55]
Paris Martineau
And the question has always been, if the summary of the meeting was in was bad, how would you know? Because you only read the summary.
- [76:04]
Leo Laporte
I am on the wrong show. I thought this was a pro AI show. All right, fine.
- [76:09]
Richard Campbell
Oh, no, I'm pro AI.
- [76:12]
Paris Martineau
We truly are.
- [76:13]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [76:15]
Richard Campbell
When I was a TV critic, I said my job was to expect the best of tv.
- [76:21]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [76:21]
Richard Campbell
Right. And so I was. I was gonna be more disappointed than anyone else when it was bad. So Richard and I love AI and want it to work, but we can't stand it being taken over by this bs, Right?
- [76:32]
Leo Laporte
Well, how do you know it's BS until it happens? You. You're just decided I'll know BS when.
- [76:38]
Paris Martineau
I see it, right?
- [76:40]
Leo Laporte
I don't know how you would know it's bs.
- [76:43]
Paris Martineau
It's a pretty simple set of tests, really. Right. Like, you have to walk through this. You have to walk through the sequence and take all the different.
- [76:50]
Leo Laporte
I would say there's a kind of a strong current of proofs of success in AI. Here's an article from the MIT Technology Review. The first trial of generative AI psychotherapy shows it might help with depression.
- [77:12]
Richard Campbell
This comes after last week's story in which OpenAI opened itself up to that kind of research and said, well, it's a problem. Which. This is research. This is normal research.
- [77:22]
Leo Laporte
They.
- [77:22]
Paris Martineau
They do point out, you know, hello, Eliza from vine bomb in 1968.
- [77:28]
Leo Laporte
Come a long way since that, though.
- [77:30]
Paris Martineau
And yet people talk to it for hours.
- [77:32]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's true. They say it does not. This research does not validate the wave of AI therapy bots flooding the market. This is a clinical trial of a therapy bottle that said or suggests it was as effective as human therapy for participants with depression, anxiety, or risk for developing eating disorders. The team was led by psychiatric researchers and psychologists at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. They built a tool called Therabot. The results came out end of the month, last month, in a journal. Oh, yeah, the note. England Journal of Medicine. Not a bad journal. Peer reviewed, I presume.
- [78:18]
Richard Campbell
If you might want to go from there to line 83.
- [78:24]
Leo Laporte
Let me finish. To test the bot.
- [78:25]
Richard Campbell
I'm sorry, I thought you breathed. You see, you took a moment and I thought that was it.
- [78:29]
Leo Laporte
To test the bot, the Researchers ran an eight week clinical trial with 210 participants who had symptoms of depression or generalized anxiety disorder or were high risk for eating disorders. Half had access to Therabot and the control Group did not.
- [78:44]
Richard Campbell
I want to see the approval memo that was written at the university for that test.
- [78:49]
Leo Laporte
You're on your own.
- [78:51]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. Hey, let's face it. Why was Chat GP so popular? They got 100 million users in the two months. Well, they ran it over Christmas where everybody's depressed anyway, and they wanted something to talk to. The software was close enough. Like they could have gotten a dog. They would have had a better outcome.
- [79:07]
Leo Laporte
Participants responded to prompts from the AI and initiated conversations. So you'd get a prompt and then you would respond and initiate a conversation averaging about 10 messages a day. Participants with depression experienced a 51% reduction in symptoms. The best result in the study. Anxiety, 31%. Eating disorders, 19% reduction in concerns about body image and weight. These are all self reported through surveys. Okay, okay.
- [79:36]
Paris Martineau
So questionable survey, but also, isn't it amazing how when you get a chance to talk to someone about your problems, you feel better?
- [79:43]
Leo Laporte
Even. Even something.
- [79:44]
Paris Martineau
As it turns out, that doesn't matter. I just voice it.
- [79:48]
Richard Campbell
It's kind of like being on a podcast.
- [79:50]
Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.
- [79:52]
Leo Laporte
You are talking to someone here, though. That is. It is.
- [79:56]
Richard Campbell
It's a matrix.
- [79:57]
Leo Laporte
Wait a minute.
- [79:58]
Paris Martineau
You don't really know.
- [79:59]
Leo Laporte
Okay, correction. The study was published in N A jmai, a journal by the New England Journal of Medicine, not in the New England Journal of Medicine. Okay. I don't know if it's even peer reviewed. It's just something they publish.
- [80:16]
Richard Campbell
They have a link to it.
- [80:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, just to go to the mit.
- [80:20]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I meant a link to the actual study.
- [80:22]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I don't know. This is line 31. As you are want to say we're.
- [80:29]
Richard Campbell
Going to trade lines here. I'll see you.
- [80:33]
Leo Laporte
Here's a line for you. China's already testing AI powered robots in factories. You care about that?
- [80:41]
Richard Campbell
Wait, wait, wait. You skipped my other link.
- [80:43]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you wanted. You. You thought this is democracy. Is that what you thought? All right, what line? What line? Go ahead. No, what? Wait a minute, hold it. Because I gotta do an ad anyway, and then your line.
- [80:55]
Richard Campbell
You're gonna want to come back to hear mine because my line is good.
- [80:57]
Leo Laporte
We will answer the question. Whose line is it anyway?
- [81:01]
Richard Campbell
Paul was shocked the first time he was on the show about how we talked to each other.
- [81:05]
Paris Martineau
I just like the podcast clickbait that's going on. That's the best that.
- [81:11]
Leo Laporte
You can't have clickbait within the podcast. They've already clicked. There's nothing, nothing we can do to increase the clicks at this point. You're watching intelligent machines. It's great to have you, Richard Campbell. A nice foil. I didn't realize you were going to team up and gang up, but okay.
- [81:30]
Paris Martineau
Jeff telegraphed his hand right at the beginning. It's like, that's my man.
- [81:33]
Leo Laporte
I know where I'm host of radio and damn it. A man whose intellect I respect, gosh darn it. He is of course a regular on Windows Weekly and is sticking around for a long Wednesday. But when you're in Vegas and you don't have anything to do, what better.
- [81:49]
Richard Campbell
It's a boring town. There's nothing to do there.
- [81:52]
Paris Martineau
Especially if you're any good at math.
- [81:56]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Probability. You understand it. Oh, you're in the wrong place. Yeah. They didn't build those hotels based on all the money they were given. Winners.
- [82:04]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [82:06]
Leo Laporte
Also with us, Jeff Jarvis, emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Norma Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Now at Stony Brook. Great school. SUNY Stony Brook and Montclair. No teaching duties though this spring?
- [82:21]
Richard Campbell
Not right now. Not right now.
- [82:24]
Leo Laporte
Maybe in the fall. Or do you just undergraduate types, huh?
- [82:29]
Richard Campbell
I'm writing syllabi. I'm working on syllabi.
- [82:32]
Leo Laporte
So are you writing a book is the question. I think you are.
- [82:35]
Richard Campbell
Oh, I think yesterday I got got a draft.
- [82:39]
Leo Laporte
This is the AI book you were editing?
- [82:41]
Richard Campbell
No, no, no, no, no, no. This is. This is the cultural history of the line of type.
- [82:47]
Leo Laporte
And you're editing a book on AI.
- [82:49]
Richard Campbell
Very cool. That's very busy. That's not announced yet. That stuff will come. It's all right.
- [82:55]
Leo Laporte
I know nothing. Our show today brought to you by Big id. I do know that the next generation AI powered data security compliance and privacy solution. Now whatever you think about AGI, it's clear AI is transforming businesses. But there's a dark side data risk the problems with bias compliance challenges. The real question is, are you adopting AI responsibly? See, Jeff, you're going to like this. Sponsor BIGID delivers end to end AI and data governance to help enterprises manage risk, enforce policies and ensure responsible AI adoption. Ensure AI only accesses safe to use relevant data. Right. You don't want it going through all your stuff automatically tags sensitive information by policy and by type. BIGID is the only leading solution to uncover dark data through AI classification to identify AI risk to manage the data lifecycle and scale your AI strategy. And the beauty of this all. It integrates with your existing tech stack with unmatched data source coverage. It allows you to automate privacy and security workflows. You can take Action on data risks. With automated remediation orchestrations, you can automate privacy management, regulatory compliance, data rights requests. Right? That's nice. And More partners include ServiceNow, Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft, Google AWS. With BigID's advanced AI models, it's interesting you're solving this problem. With AI, you gain visibility and control over all your data. It's the platform intuit named number one for data classification in accuracy, speed and scalability. Now you may wonder, well, who uses Big id? Somebody with a lot of data, right? Somebody who's got data that you would want to use in your AI and some that you wouldn't. Well, how about the US Army? That's a pretty good customer. Pretty good reference. The army uses Big ID to illuminate dark data. And I bet they have data in all sorts of nooks and crannies to automate data retention, which is of course required. Here's a quote, great quote from US Army Training and Doctrine Command. The big boys, they say the first wow moment with Big id. This is a quote, a direct quote. The first wow moment with Big ID came with being able to have that single interface that inventories a variety of data holdings, including structured and unstructured Data across emails, zip files, SharePoint databases and more. To see that mass and to be able to correlate across those is completely novel. The U.S. army Training and Doctrine Command continues. I've never seen a capability to bring this together like Big ID dust. Talk about an endorsement. That's awesome. Imagine all the different disparate data sources the army has. Cnbc recognized Big ID as one of the top 25 startups for the enterprise. They were named to the Inc 5000 and the Deloitte 500 four years running. The publisher of Cyber Defense magazine says BigID embodies three major features we judges look for to become winners. Understanding tomorrow's threats. Threats today. Providing a cost effective solution and innovating in unexpected ways that it can help mitigate cyber risk and get one step ahead of the next breach. Well, I hope I've at least intrigued you. If not convinced, you start protecting your sensitive data wherever your data lives, no matter what it even zip files, folks. BigID.com IM that's the address to go to. That way they know you saw it here and you as a result will get a free demo to see how Big ID can help your organization reduce data risk and accelerate the adoption of generative AI. Again, that's B I G I D Bigid B I g I d.com and don't forget the IM. There's also a free guide there to help you understand the risks of generative AI and data driven strategies to ensure responsible and compliant AI adoption. @bigid.com Im we thank them so much for supporting intelligent machines. See, this is an enterprise after your own parts. Use AI, but use it responsibly. Yes, because it is. I mean, we all agree it's a useful tool, right? I mean, it's not.
- [87:38]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, we're still trying to figure out exactly what uses.
- [87:41]
Richard Campbell
Well, that's where you might want to go to line 83 for, I think, a very useful tool.
- [87:45]
Leo Laporte
What a. You guys. Are you working in concert now? Like you gotta. Did you send out a memo to each other? What's going on?
- [87:52]
Paris Martineau
Listen, the professor knows how to. Pick up a second. It's sitting there. He grabbed it and he ran.
- [87:56]
Leo Laporte
He picked it up. Clickbait. It's clickbait. Is this the story about Tinder?
- [88:01]
Richard Campbell
Yes.
- [88:01]
Leo Laporte
They want you to flirt with an AI bot before you talk to a human. I love the name of this. It's called the game. Game. You got game. OpenAI built it for him. It lets you practice your pickup lines. It's to speech.
- [88:19]
Richard Campbell
AI technology that creates voices and scenarios so ridiculous you can't help but laugh. Taking the pressure off and making it easy to test your game without overthinking it.
- [88:29]
Leo Laporte
Oh, this is from April Fools.
- [88:32]
Richard Campbell
Is it?
- [88:33]
Leo Laporte
It was launched yesterday.
- [88:35]
Richard Campbell
Oh.
- [88:36]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it says it's no prank. This is from Fast Company using. Yeah, okay. They say it's not an April Fool's.
- [88:42]
Richard Campbell
Joke, though, because of course, I don't have Tinder, nor am I going to.
- [88:47]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, your wife wouldn't like that so much. Well, I'll sign up. Lisa trusts me. No, maybe I better not. I was gonna say something, but I don't want to get in trouble. Our son signed up for Tinder. We were very happy. We said, yeah, go get her. Swipe right. So. So the goal is to blur the line between digital and the real world. Something Tinder has been exploring with events like the single summer series, Chaotic Singles Party and swipe off. I guess I'm just left. I'm not part of the crowd here. No, I don't understand anything that they're saying.
- [89:33]
Richard Campbell
This is the story we need Paris for.
- [89:35]
Keech Hagee
We need Paris for this story.
- [89:36]
Leo Laporte
Paris. We need a young person.
- [89:37]
Richard Campbell
Yes, we do. We'll hold up to next week. We'll do it again. Again, Right.
- [89:40]
Leo Laporte
A young single person. So. Fast Company. Eve Upton Clark, writing for Fast Company, said she went to the launch event which was hosted by OpenAI by the Way or at OpenAI's New York City office. She said I got to try the game game myself. Let's just say my gym meet cute didn't exactly end in a rom com style kiss in the rain.
- [90:06]
Paris Martineau
You know the thing that this story brought to my mind was something Professor Scott Galloway was talking about if that he found some stat about more than half of young men had never asked a woman out in person. And so depressing that just sort of, you know, he's.
- [90:21]
Richard Campbell
Anymore. This is where. This is where he drives me nuts. He expects, he wants it all go back to 1960.
- [90:27]
Paris Martineau
Exactly.
- [90:27]
Richard Campbell
They don't do that anymore.
- [90:28]
Paris Martineau
But he also see that this might be a tool to encourage you to at least experiment in a way that won't get you slapped in the face and. And maybe have.
- [90:37]
Richard Campbell
Unless it encourages you to be a jerk.
- [90:40]
Paris Martineau
Who knows There's a whole, you know, there's a whole other direction there. The nagging direction if you want to get ugly. But yep, yeah, hopefully the software. Thank you, Leo.
- [90:50]
Leo Laporte
That was a good story. I liked it.
- [90:52]
Richard Campbell
It's a good story, it's fun and it was related. You see there was a, there was a flow to the show.
- [90:58]
Leo Laporte
Would you guys please use your, your you know, investigative noggins to tell me if this is bs, an April Fool's joke or true? This came from a site I am not familiar with called hackread. X was hit by a 2.8 billion profile data leak. The story is that a disgruntled employee on his way out the door. Part of the mass layout so far.
- [91:26]
Richard Campbell
Incredible as can be.
- [91:27]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's yeah, disgruntled employee, but it's also all over everything now. So.
- [91:31]
Leo Laporte
Okay, so this was the first place I saw it, but now it is confirmed now.
- [91:35]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, Forbes has got it. I presume we'll hear it from Troy Hunt soon enough. As soon as the data set shows up on the dark web.
- [91:42]
Leo Laporte
The original post, by thinking one states that the data around 400 gab worth was exfiltrated during messy layoffs at X. The poster claims they tried contacting X through multiple methods but received no response. Join the club. Did you get the poop emoji? Frustrated with the lack of acknowledgment from X and the general public, they decided to merge the newly leaked data with another infamous data breach from a couple of years ago. And now there are billions of names and information. What would you get? Well, it's just the information Twitter had which is account creation dates, user IDs, screen names, profile descriptions and URLs. Location, time zone settings, display names, follower counts, tweet count, friend count, source of last tweet, status settings. It's not. I mean, you don't get phone numbers, I guess. Even though Twitter does have those from a lot of people. They say, well, wait a minute, how do you get 2.8 billion when there are only 335 million monthly active users?
- [92:53]
Paris Martineau
They're all bots.
- [92:54]
Leo Laporte
They're all bots. They're all bots.
- [92:58]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. So many bots.
- [93:00]
Leo Laporte
So many bots. X has not confirmed. X has not said anything.
- [93:07]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, no, you know what? I'm not going to trust them. I'll trust Troy Hunt. I'll watch. Have I been pwned?
- [93:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, watch it with interest. Although, did you see that Troy Hunt got pwned?
- [93:15]
Paris Martineau
Yep. And. And immediately published it too.
- [93:17]
Leo Laporte
You know, good for him. We talked about it yesterday on Security. Now, he fell for a phishing scam and emailed a purported to come from mailchimp, which is his mail service provider, saying, hey, we had to close your account because of spam. This is a very common email you might get log into your account and.
- [93:39]
Paris Martineau
Use the link instead of going into mailchimp by hand, which is the right thing to do.
- [93:42]
Leo Laporte
And he thought he was safe because he clicked the button, it asked for the password log and okay, fine, but he had two factor on it. Right? That's supposed to protect you. But here's the problem. Bad guys now are using automation with these attacks so that they can act so quickly that they can redirect your two FA code log in. They downloaded his entire database of subscribers and logged out before Troy, who almost immediately realized, oh, my God. Because nothing happened when he finished the entry. Nothing. He didn't log in. He went, oh, God, this is phishing. So he immediately logged in, changed his password. It was still too late because they're automating this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And good on him. For. I mean.
- [94:30]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, for. Yeah.
- [94:32]
Paris Martineau
There's one thing about Troy Hunt is not. It's a hypocrite.
- [94:34]
Leo Laporte
Like his own breach is now listed in have I been Published?
- [94:37]
Paris Martineau
Right there. Yeah. Oh, man. For him.
- [94:39]
Leo Laporte
Painful.
- [94:41]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. And he did. And he was dealing with it from Iceland too.
- [94:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. He says he was. Jet lag. He had lots of good reasons for it. But it's. But look, if somebody who's Troy Hunt runs a site about data breaches, he advises people on security, his site will tell you if you've got a password that's been used before. I mean, it's a re. It's. It's been used by Google and, and Firefox to. And all the major password to folks to see if your password's been in a breach. It's a. It's. He's. He's the guy, he's the man and we all. He's also a damn fine looking Aussie and still he's a proper super dude.
- [95:18]
Paris Martineau
No two ways about.
- [95:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, he fell for it.
- [95:20]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, we all have moments of weakness. None of us is perfect all the time. Even when you're in the profession.
- [95:25]
Leo Laporte
Oh, God, that's got to be embarrassing.
- [95:27]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's tough.
- [95:30]
Leo Laporte
Good list on TechCrunch. I hope they keep this up to date. This is dated March 30, so it's two days old. A list of all the models released this year and what they're good at yet. So if you've been looking around for which AI model to use, I hear a lot of. I haven't used Gemini 2.5, but a lot of people saying good things about this. And in fact, on the most recent leaderboards, it's coming in on top.
- [95:59]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. The Diana Rocks episode we're publishing tomorrow is talking to Dr. Burchell about measuring the quality of LLMs. Ah, exactly. That problem. Like I asked that question all the time. What's your. You know, what one are you using? Oh, this one. It's the best. It's like, how do you measure best?
- [96:15]
Leo Laporte
Best?
- [96:16]
Paris Martineau
Like, what is that to you?
- [96:18]
Leo Laporte
Ask him about AI Arena. I wonder if he. If that's a good place or not for seeing this. This is the one. A lot of. I think this is it. No, this is the wrong. Oh, this is cool, though.
- [96:30]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [96:31]
Leo Laporte
Ooh, look at that. I'm sorry. Got distracted.
- [96:38]
Paris Martineau
Look, it's reasoning.
- [96:41]
Leo Laporte
What am I thinking? Never mind. It's looking at me. You're looking. Stop looking at me. So anyway, the list. Let's go. Let's go back to the. Let's go back to the list. For those of you not watching the video, I went to the wrong site and I got a robot that was following the mouse and I couldn't stop. ChatGPT4O the image generation. That's the one you cannot get away from. Studio Ghibli.
- [97:04]
Paris Martineau
Extraordinary, though.
- [97:05]
Leo Laporte
But it is amazing, isn't it?
- [97:06]
Paris Martineau
It's really beautiful. Beautiful, yeah.
- [97:08]
Leo Laporte
So good that Sam Altman had to go on X and say, please stop using it. You're killing us now.
- [97:14]
Paris Martineau
They're running out of money. And it's all going to Microsoft.
- [97:17]
Leo Laporte
It's burning up the servers.
- [97:21]
Richard Campbell
Well, they limit. They limited it to what, three a month or something? Three a day?
- [97:24]
Leo Laporte
Three a week. Must be more than three. Maybe three a day.
- [97:27]
Richard Campbell
Three a day.
- [97:28]
Leo Laporte
I got rate limited pretty quickly, but it's really.
- [97:32]
Paris Martineau
How much did you make?
- [97:33]
Leo Laporte
I don't know. Let me go look.
- [97:37]
Richard Campbell
Our. Our discord alone is. Is burning it up.
- [97:41]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah.
- [97:42]
Leo Laporte
They've been doing quite a. Quite a few fun things. Let me go. I did get a reject image. Wait a minute. Now they're advertising it. Image creation just got better chat. GPD now thinks a little longer to make more accurate images. Okay, try it. So now you get the Create image command. So I did get a rejection because I asked it. Oh, wait a minute. It looks like it did. Anyway, I said, paint me like you're French girls. And it. You're right about Tiger Titanic. And it says, I couldn't generate that because request violates our content policies. But now it's generating it. I think I found a workaround, my friends. I'll show you the stuff. While it's doing that, I'll show you the stuff I did the other day. This is the twit logo done in a Renaissance painting style.
- [98:36]
Paris Martineau
Nice.
- [98:37]
Leo Laporte
Not so interesting. I did say. And this is pure text. Use the disaster girl meme and make it look like Disney drew it.
- [98:44]
Paris Martineau
Wow. That nailed it.
- [98:45]
Richard Campbell
That's pretty damn amazing.
- [98:46]
Leo Laporte
Nailed it. This is the house on fire. The girl's looking arch.
- [98:49]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, she's got that little look.
- [98:51]
Richard Campbell
So I had this discussion with. With Jason. Is there anything wrong with doing something in the style of. Is that theft?
- [98:57]
Leo Laporte
No.
- [98:59]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [98:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I think TechCrunch interviewed a bunch of AI. AP. Sorry. IP attorneys who said you. It's really almost impossible to attack somebody who's stealing your style.
- [99:11]
Paris Martineau
That's a look and feel thing, right? Yeah.
- [99:13]
Leo Laporte
Well, there's trade dress, and there have been a successful trade dress law lawsuits, but apparently the courts pretty much say, you know, you can't say that's. I mean, you could look at it and know that this is Grumpy Cat in the Studio Ghibli style. But how would you. How would Studio Ghibli.
- [99:31]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, who's suing you? Grumpy Cat or Ghibli?
- [99:34]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, maybe. Here's Mona Lisa in the style of Vincent Van Gogh. I'm pretty sure he's not going to come after me.
- [99:40]
Paris Martineau
You can't hear you anyway.
- [99:41]
Leo Laporte
No. Let me see. Let me go back to my rejected image. It's still working on the French girls. No.
- [99:46]
Keech Hagee
I think that's where it stops teasing. I think that's where it stopped working.
- [99:49]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [99:49]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. Oh, I get it.
- [99:51]
Richard Campbell
It said, I. I'm not doing this. You can't make me.
- [99:54]
Leo Laporte
Because it didn't give me an image at all last time. It just gave me the text. I'm sitting on this Benito.
- [99:59]
Paris Martineau
I went as far as the eyes and stop. That's brilliant.
- [100:02]
Leo Laporte
It realized there. I don't know. I don't know what it realized. That was the famous line from Titanic that Kate Winslow. It said to Leonardo DiCaprio when she removed her bodice. Stability AIs. We haven't heard about them in a long time. Stability AI's stable virtual camera. We're going back through that TechCrunch list of the new models released this year. Image generation startup Stability AI has launched a model that can create 3D scenes and camera angles from a single 2D image. You can use it on hugging face because it is open weights. Cohere's Aya aavision, a multimodal model called eyeavision that claims it's the best in class at doing things like captioning images. That, by the way, is a really good use for AI. My blogging platform, Microblog, when I post an image, there will generate an AI generated description of the image which is invariably better and more detailed. Detailed than the one I would have.
- [101:09]
Paris Martineau
Written and talk about. Like the classic that that was impossible 20 years ago. Right. They were they, you know, five years ago.
- [101:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. You'd say, what's in this image? And it goes, is that a hot dog? I don't know.
- [101:22]
Paris Martineau
But the imagenet competitions that really kicked off this thing with.
- [101:25]
Leo Laporte
That's right. That's exactly 2011.
- [101:28]
Paris Martineau
2012. Right. They had it nailed by 2015 when.
- [101:32]
Leo Laporte
I. I wish I could find the video of this when I was doing Call for Help in Toronto because a lot of this was happening at the University of Toronto.
- [101:39]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. Yeah.
- [101:39]
Leo Laporte
This is.
- [101:39]
Paris Martineau
That's where Hinton was in Susquehann.
- [101:41]
Leo Laporte
Yep. We had two people talking about Imagenet. This must have been 2007. I mean, it was very early showing us and it was the cat thing where they could distinguish different kinds of cats. It was very impressive.
- [101:55]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [101:56]
Leo Laporte
Could very well have been suitskever. I don't know who it was. If I could find the video, it was pretty. I think Amber found them. It was really impressive. And that was many moons ago. That was 18 years ago.
- [102:10]
Keech Hagee
So captures and now it's better.
- [102:13]
Paris Martineau
What I find interesting is that most people take for granted that. That their images will be auto captioned now.
- [102:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, of course. Well, it's really important for alt text, right When I post on a social network and, and I know you hate this, Jeff, when Mastodon says you didn't put alt text on your image.
- [102:30]
Richard Campbell
No, I'm good about it. I do it. I do it 99.9% of the time.
- [102:34]
Leo Laporte
Blind users, they're using screen readers. They don't know what your image is, but the screen reader will read alt text.
- [102:40]
Richard Campbell
The thing I wonder is, are the people who scold me people who it matters to or not, are they doing it on behalf of others? I mean, it's okay if they are, but I'm just curious sometimes, I don't.
- [102:51]
Leo Laporte
Know, probably on behalf of others. I actually have a bot running on my Mastodon that will annoy me. It will say, hey, you just posted something without alt text.
- [103:02]
Richard Campbell
Although that's. That's. That's now a Mastodon policy.
- [103:04]
Leo Laporte
Is it a. Yeah, well, no, it's a policy, but I actually.
- [103:07]
Richard Campbell
Oh, you. You implemented it on yours.
- [103:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. This is for free on WhatsApp, the IOV Vision, OpenAI's chat GPT 4.5 Orion. This is the one with emotional intelligence. I think we lost Richard. He'll come back in a minute, I'm sure. There he is.
- [103:22]
Richard Campbell
There he is.
- [103:23]
Leo Laporte
Little blip on the. I'm back on the Internet. This is the one with emotional intelligence. Not as smart though, right? Isn't it always that way in life?
- [103:33]
Paris Martineau
I appreciate the quotes around it at least.
- [103:36]
Leo Laporte
Quote emotional intelligence sonnet 37 from anthropic, the hybrid reasoning model because it can both fire off quick answers and really think things through.
- [103:47]
Richard Campbell
Isn't this kind of like phones? They're. They're not that different from each other.
- [103:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I, you know, I think people who use it a lot. I was asking Darren, okey this because Darren uses AI to automate a lot of his sysadmin stuff. He has it right. Z Shell and Python and stuff. And so I asked him, well, what model are you using? He said, well, right now. What did he say? I think he said, what is it you're using, Darren right now? I think he said the name New Gemini. But of course, for a long time, code was best with Sonnet 3.7.
- [104:24]
Paris Martineau
Well, Microsoft folks have been asking what they're using and it's been Sonnet 3.7.
- [104:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, he says Gemini. The new Gemini. Also new Grok 3, of course, from Xai, the one that he bought 100,000 H100 Nvidia cards and he's going to buy another 100,000. It's 50 bucks because you have to buy an X premium account. I have one. I have not found Grok to be that good. After One study found Grok 2 to be left leaning, Elon pledged to shift it more neutral, neutral, neutral. All I know is I see people generating some pretty nasty memes with Elon and the president, so I don't know how neutral it is.03 mini the reasoning model for STEM deep research. Another one of these, you know, thinking models, Mistral's lechat, which is very confusing because Mistral's friends. And it should be Le Cha, but then that would be the cat. And so it's Lechat. Tests from Le Mans found Lechat's performance impressive, although it smells of elderberries. OpenAI operator is meant to be a personal intern. Has anybody tried that?
- [105:47]
Richard Campbell
No.
- [105:47]
Leo Laporte
You have to pay 200 bucks a month for it. Yeah, yeah. I really want to have something like that. As you know, that's why I wear this bee all the time. A Washington Post reviewer tried it. Says operator decided on its own to order a dozen eggs for 31 bucks and paid with his credit card. With the reviewer's credit card. Thanks, operator. Hey, you're paying 200 bucks a month for me? You can afford a $31 box of eggs.
- [106:17]
Keech Hagee
Hey, that's a pretty good test, actually. When would you allow AI to have.
- [106:21]
Leo Laporte
Your credit card buy something?
- [106:24]
Richard Campbell
Well, I'm old enough to remember when people said no, nobody's ever going to buy anything on the Internet, especially not expensive things.
- [106:30]
Paris Martineau
No, don't.
- [106:31]
Keech Hagee
Are you ever going to authorize an.
- [106:32]
Leo Laporte
AI to buy stuff for you to spend your money?
- [106:34]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I think it's.
- [106:36]
Leo Laporte
This is Jeffrey Fowler. This is from last month. I. I missed this story. He. He said he asked it to find cheap eggs in his neighborhood in under 10 minutes. Operator bought a dozen eggs and paid a human to deliver it to my house all on its own.
- [106:53]
Richard Campbell
Hey, ask the AI for the tip. It's not up to me.
- [106:57]
Leo Laporte
This is the pay per click scenario, right? Because it says, said find cheap eggs. He said, find cheap eggs. And the AI said yes, and I will buy them and deliver them to you because you told me to. Would you like some paper clips with that?
- [107:10]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, make some cheap paper clips.
- [107:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. 31.43 he says. I was a little frazzled when I realized what had happened. A bad AI decision had cost me real money.
- [107:25]
Richard Campbell
I want to be There when he hands in the expense account.
- [107:28]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, it's.
- [107:28]
Paris Martineau
It's research.
- [107:30]
Leo Laporte
Jeff Bezos can afford it.
- [107:31]
Paris Martineau
Remember the whole reason Amazon made the voice devices was so people would order with their voice. And they didn't do that either.
- [107:37]
Leo Laporte
I did it all the time. I did it. I'd be shaving and I say, hey, a word. Buy me some shaving cream. I'm out and say, what's your PIN number? And I tell it and I get shaving cream the next day. It's a great thing. Incidentally, Jeff, you'll be proud of me. Look at my Washington Post page. It says, hey, your Access ends on December 28, 2025. You want to resubscribe? No, thank you.
- [108:04]
Paris Martineau
You know what? Mine looks exactly the same, Leo.
- [108:08]
Leo Laporte
That's because you're in Canada.
- [108:10]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, no, I cancel my subscription too, until the end of the year.
- [108:14]
Leo Laporte
I was so angry. Yeah, but I had bought it.
- [108:16]
Richard Campbell
I'm subscribing.
- [108:17]
Paris Martineau
I spent. I. I went and spent it on the information instead, which is more very good.
- [108:22]
Richard Campbell
Well, you had. Well, that. That got you, what, two days worth.
- [108:28]
Leo Laporte
$400 a year for the information.
- [108:31]
Paris Martineau
My subscription price a little bit.
- [108:33]
Leo Laporte
Well, now, you know what? It's worth it.
- [108:35]
Richard Campbell
Amazon's got to save the money because they're going to buy it.
- [108:38]
Paris Martineau
Doesn't seem like a good time to be reading news from America anyway.
- [108:41]
Leo Laporte
All right, let's talk about TikTok. I won't go through all of the other AI models. We did all the ones for this.
- [108:46]
Richard Campbell
The models are boring, brain.
- [108:47]
Leo Laporte
I think it's fun to learn what's new and different and exciting in the world.
- [108:52]
Richard Campbell
It's like The. The new LeSabre. It. It has heated seats, it's got fins. Yeah.
- [108:57]
Leo Laporte
You know, chrome on the front. Imagine that. Tick tock. Yes, the. The deadline is sneaking up any day now. I can't remember. What is the deadline? You remember nine days off, Something like that. That. That's. Remember what? Previously on the TikTok saga. The United States Congress passed a law banning TikTok, saying they had to be sold by January 19, 2025, or shut down operations in the United States. As that date approached, Apple and Google both removed TikTok from their store. But then the President issued a. A. I don't know what you call it. A memorandum, a note, an executive order saying fast, A fiat, A decree, a papal. What do they call that but when the Pope does it? A papal something.
- [109:55]
Richard Campbell
It's not a nuncio, that's something else. Decree.
- [109:59]
Leo Laporte
No, come on, you can Help me. You know, a papal.
- [110:03]
Richard Campbell
It's a papal bull.
- [110:04]
Leo Laporte
A bull. Thank you. I like that word. I love that. That.
- [110:06]
Richard Campbell
It is nice. Yeah.
- [110:07]
Leo Laporte
A papal bull from the President.
- [110:10]
Richard Campbell
Martin Luther Burns.
- [110:11]
Leo Laporte
The one to him saying, oh, you got 75 days. We'll figure it out. Apple and Google said, you sure? Really? Because the fines are big. And. And then weirdly they got a note from Pam Bondi who said, go ahead. So they put it back in the store, which is weird, but Pam Bondi is the Attorney General. But anyway, the deadline now approacheth. The President put the vice president in charge, which even as I say it sounds funny, of finding a buyer. So you mentioned, and I think this is interesting, that there are a number of people popped up, including Oracle, Amazon, Anthropic. I'm sorry, not anthropic. Perplexity. Thank you. And you asked whoever heard of this app.
- [111:06]
Richard Campbell
There's one more. There's one more. Leo.
- [111:09]
Leo Laporte
Oh, who else?
- [111:11]
Richard Campbell
Andreessen Horowitz.
- [111:15]
Leo Laporte
Now and then. If we didn't even mention the. The bid from the guy who's got. I got $20 billion right here. I'm willing to write you a check. Today. The guy who owned the LA Dodgers. Anyway. Who, who's What?
- [111:32]
Paris Martineau
Huh?
- [111:33]
Leo Laporte
Frank McCourt. Thank you. Yeah. Who's the inside track? Frank McCourt.
- [111:38]
Richard Campbell
Trump is. Who knows Trump. There's already is one. We don't know it. Trump's meeting with them now. Today, which is today. Okay.
- [111:46]
Leo Laporte
Was it this weekend? I thought it was today.
- [111:47]
Richard Campbell
I don't know.
- [111:49]
Leo Laporte
So Amazon has the money. Last minute offer, according to three people familiar with the talks. This is from the New York Times. The deadline is Saturday. That's why they have to resolve this.
- [112:01]
Richard Campbell
But who knows whether China's gonna sell.
- [112:04]
Leo Laporte
Well and who knows whether anything's gonna happen Sunday?
- [112:07]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [112:09]
Leo Laporte
The bid came from an offer author via an offer letter addressed to JD Vance from Howard Lutnick. The Commerce. Oh, and Howard Lutnick. I thought they were cars. It was on. You might have seen it on signal. I don't know. The Commerce Secretary. Amazon's bid highlights the 11th hour maneuvering in Washington over TikTok's ownerships. Right. Who knows if China is going to sell? Except China doesn't. Diana doesn't own TikTok jazz.
- [112:36]
Richard Campbell
Well, China can say yay or nay.
- [112:39]
Leo Laporte
They've already said we're not selling the algorithm. Whatever you get, it won't be the algorithm. You just get the users.
- [112:46]
Richard Campbell
Meanwhile, did you see the new Tick Tock on Blue Sky Mark, backed by Mark Cuban.
- [112:53]
Leo Laporte
What?
- [112:54]
Richard Campbell
Yes. Hold on a second. It's pretty good.
- [112:56]
Leo Laporte
It's on Blue Sky.
- [112:58]
Richard Campbell
It's written on the A.T. protocol.
- [113:01]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's interesting. No, you know, no. Up to now no one has really done much with this so called federated protocol.
- [113:09]
Richard Campbell
So this is the first one. And Cuban backed protection. It. It's called. Oh, hell, where is it?
- [113:15]
Paris Martineau
Skylight.
- [113:17]
Richard Campbell
Skylight. Thank you.
- [113:18]
Paris Martineau
Skylight.
- [113:19]
Leo Laporte
Skylight. Not to be confused with the many other attempts. Didn't, didn't.
- [113:25]
Richard Campbell
No, there's not been many. This one's. This one's. This one is very much like it. Now, whether the algorithm is there or not, I don't know, but.
- [113:32]
Leo Laporte
Oh, well, it's not the algorithm that you need, it's the people.
- [113:36]
Richard Campbell
It's a bit. It has some stuff here some people are putting up.
- [113:39]
Leo Laporte
So is it an app?
- [113:41]
Richard Campbell
It's an app, yep. And you have to use your Blue sky sign in, whatever that is.
- [113:45]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I like that. And so it's built on the federated protocol.
- [113:49]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. On at. And Cuban said, if somebody does this, I'll back it. And young woman said, I will. And he did.
- [113:57]
Leo Laporte
Tori White is the CEO, Reed Harmeyer, the cto. It's built on the AT protocol. Videos posted on Skylight can be seen and engaged with with by users on Blue Sky. Oh, that's interesting. And there is a.
- [114:16]
Richard Campbell
To Mike McHugh. There's going to be other places, these protocols you're going to be able to get things, which is going to be a big advantage.
- [114:22]
Leo Laporte
I think this is, you know when, and we've talked about this. Blue sky was originally funded by Twitter, by Jack Dorsey as a kind of a side project to create an open federated version of Twitter. Then Dorsey left Twitter, but the $15 million funding had already happened. Blue sky got launched. It looks, it's very much like Twitter. It's kind of like the old Twitter experience with some nice features, but it's based on a protocol that could, in theory, just like Mastodon, spawn a number of instances that would all be seen by one another that never happened. What's interesting is, even though that was the premise, what ended up happening with Blue sky is there have been all of these kind of non Twitter like iterations like this. There's something called Flashes, which is a photo app, kind of an Instagram clone. I think that's kind of interesting.
- [115:19]
Richard Campbell
It really is.
- [115:20]
Leo Laporte
It's not how I thought it would happen. All right, I'm gonna download it. Skylight, huh?
- [115:26]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Just sign in with your Blue sky.
- [115:27]
Keech Hagee
And you're In Darren in Discord makes a good point about how TikTok had copyrighted music. They had a deal with all the record companies and these guys won't have that.
- [115:39]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a big difference. In fact, that really was when TikTok took off, was when they bought Musical Ly.
- [115:44]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [115:45]
Leo Laporte
Which was a site where people were lip syncing, brought all those people over and then said, and by the way, use music. My son uses all sorts of copyrighted music in his TikToks. But you can do that on Instagram too, I notice. Right.
- [115:57]
Keech Hagee
Well, they probably have, they probably deal with the, with the record labels too.
- [116:01]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. There are so many skylights I can't find. Is it in a test flight or is it available?
- [116:08]
Richard Campbell
Doesn't that story tell you where to get it? Hold on.
- [116:10]
Leo Laporte
That story, I don't read no stories. Skylight Social. It must be a test flight because I don't, I don't see it on here. So let's see, I'd be, I'd be open to a replacement. I actually deleted TikTok Deep Seek, all the Chinese apps. I've deleted Instagram because I kept buying stuff in the middle of the night, but I kept Blue Sky. I thought, well, I'll have one social network. And Reddit is kind of a social network. I, I, I find Reddit very valuable. I don't know, I'm looking at, I'm looking at the TechCrunch story. The alpha app is in beta on the Google.
- [116:51]
Richard Campbell
If you go to Skylight Social.
- [116:53]
Leo Laporte
Oh, okay, so I can go here.
- [116:59]
Richard Campbell
Get in, loser. We're decentralizing.
- [117:02]
Leo Laporte
Is that what they're saying?
- [117:03]
Richard Campbell
That's a direct. That's the unbannable short form video platform.
- [117:10]
Leo Laporte
It does. It literally says get in, loser.
- [117:13]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. I don't know.
- [117:14]
Leo Laporte
Why would you call your prospective customers losers?
- [117:18]
Richard Campbell
I don't, I don't get the joke, but fine.
- [117:21]
Leo Laporte
Get in, loser. It must be. You know, I'll have to ask Taylor Lawrence.
- [117:24]
Richard Campbell
It's got to be, it's got to be a reference to something.
- [117:26]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [117:27]
Leo Laporte
Oh, there's a Mac version of it.
- [117:30]
Richard Campbell
I've got the Android, obviously.
- [117:32]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, actually, the Mac version will be kind of nice. The Android's nice. Show people stuff. No, I mean for us, for the show. I can, I can put it on screen. It looks like it says, follow your favorite creators. And it has a picture of the Beatles. Are the Beatles back? Oh, it's, it's just George and Ringo.
- [117:53]
Paris Martineau
Only an AI.
- [117:54]
Leo Laporte
Oh, maybe it's the AI version. All right. Well, good. All right, that's. And this is. This is Who's. Who's put money in on this.
- [118:04]
Richard Campbell
Mark Cuban.
- [118:08]
Leo Laporte
He's turned out to become the.
- [118:10]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. The Surprising Good Guy.
- [118:12]
Leo Laporte
Surprising Good Guy.
- [118:14]
Richard Campbell
Where's the story here?
- [118:18]
Leo Laporte
Leolaport Me. That's my handle on Bluesky. Okay, well, I'll sign up for it while you. Let's do another story while I'm wasting people's time signing up for this.
- [118:34]
Richard Campbell
I picked the last one. Richard, you can pick one.
- [118:37]
Leo Laporte
Richard, do you see the list? The rundown? I know we in enlisted you at the last minute.
- [118:45]
Richard Campbell
Richard's in the rundown.
- [118:47]
Paris Martineau
All right.
- [118:48]
Leo Laporte
Copying my password. Signing in. Wrong identifier or password.
- [119:02]
Richard Campbell
I used my email address for the identifier.
- [119:15]
Leo Laporte
Okay, so this show is ground to a halt. All right, let me. Let me find another story real quick. Oh, wait. Here we here. I finally am in. I'm in, man. As the hackers say in the movies, I'm in. And there's a picture of Joe Biden and Zelensky. That's not Joe Biden.
- [119:33]
Richard Campbell
No.
- [119:33]
Leo Laporte
Who is that? That's somebody else. Norwegian President, Prime Minister Jonas Gar story. Okay, well, this is. This is not Tick tock. Well, you're gonna be another one. How do I swipe? Oh, there we go. Stitch. Incoming Mark Cuban video.
- [119:53]
Richard Campbell
Oh, let's listen to this.
- [119:54]
Leo Laporte
This is a TikTok, though. See that?
- [119:56]
Richard Campbell
Well, so there. So people are copying them over, because you can do that. But let's listen to. To it.
- [119:59]
Leo Laporte
Oh, no, you want to listen to it.
- [120:00]
Richard Campbell
You're Cuban. Yeah.
- [120:01]
Jeff Jarvis
Remember this Mark Cuban video?
- [120:02]
Leo Laporte
So I appreciate everybody reaching out to me to try to come up with.
- [120:05]
Richard Campbell
A tik tok alternative.
- [120:07]
Leo Laporte
I would be open to investing and supporting anybody or somebody who creates a tik tock replacement built on the AT Protocol.
- [120:18]
Jeff Jarvis
Following along that my bestie Reed and I. Skylight Social.
- [120:22]
Leo Laporte
That's awesome.
- [120:23]
Richard Campbell
You didn't even cut our shears. The woman doing it, you cut her off.
- [120:26]
Leo Laporte
Well, what is she going to say? That's.
- [120:27]
Richard Campbell
She's the one doing it. She's the one doing it. She's.
- [120:29]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's the. She's the guy. She's the. Oh, never mind. All right, let me. Let me. I apologize. I thought she was just some random rando.
- [120:38]
Richard Campbell
Worst scroller there is. Oh, my God, you're terrible at it.
- [120:46]
Leo Laporte
So she's not just some rando. She's actually the one who wrote this. Yes, Tori. This is Tori. Well, I want to follow her. Let me. How do you add people? Well, we Already heard that.
- [121:00]
Richard Campbell
You didn't hear her. You cut her off again.
- [121:03]
Paris Martineau
Jeez.
- [121:04]
Jeff Jarvis
Got a ton of new users onto Skylight Social today, so I just wanted to hop on and say hello and welcome to Skylight. She's adorbs building this unbannable tick tock for the last two and a half.
- [121:15]
Leo Laporte
Unbannable tick tock.
- [121:16]
Jeff Jarvis
So excited and grateful that you're here.
- [121:18]
Leo Laporte
I'm in.
- [121:18]
Jeff Jarvis
Fun things to know about Skylight off the bat. You can double tap the screen to like. If you hold down on the left or right side of the screen, the video will play in 2x speed and you can put links anywhere. So you can put a link in your bio, you could put a link in the video description or you can even put a link in the comments that way.
- [121:34]
Leo Laporte
Hallelujah.
- [121:35]
Jeff Jarvis
Let's say a little snippet of a podcast. You could link to the podcast right in the description.
- [121:39]
Leo Laporte
Thank you.
- [121:39]
Jeff Jarvis
Tori on the app is truly just the beginning. Reed and I are going to continue to build every single. Continue to update you as well with Tori.com. so drop a comment, say hi. I can't.
- [121:50]
Leo Laporte
It feels like just a normal person.
- [121:52]
Jeff Jarvis
You're a content creator and you upload something nice. You can link to that video in the comments too so that I can.
- [121:57]
Leo Laporte
I am. I am rooting for this. Nice job, Tori.
- [122:00]
Richard Campbell
So I can find her. What's her username?
- [122:02]
Leo Laporte
Tori?
- [122:03]
Richard Campbell
T O R. I. I'm searching Skyline.
- [122:06]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's the very first thing that came up. So I. Maybe you. You've followed too many people. Oh, she's got a lot of posts.
- [122:14]
Richard Campbell
She's been testing for a long time.
- [122:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah. Look at all these. She incorporated.
- [122:22]
Richard Campbell
Benefit. It's a public benefit corporation.
- [122:23]
Leo Laporte
Oh God. I. Please.
- [122:25]
Richard Campbell
Isn't this beautiful?
- [122:26]
Leo Laporte
So buildwithtory.com that's it.
- [122:29]
Richard Campbell
Okay.
- [122:29]
Leo Laporte
Thank you. And I'm gonna follow her. There's also a link to her blue sky, which is nice. So you can also do that. That buildwithtory.com on. On Blue Sky. This is fantastic.
- [122:41]
Richard Campbell
It's at finally federated.
- [122:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. 55,000 users in its first 24 hours. That's pretty impressive, I would say. Yeah. Wow. You've. You've actually brought us a story I care about.
- [122:56]
Richard Campbell
Hey. Hey.
- [122:59]
Leo Laporte
They built it in 10 weeks.
- [123:02]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. It's wonderful.
- [123:06]
Leo Laporte
Sorry you have to be here for this, Richard.
- [123:08]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I know it's hard.
- [123:09]
Leo Laporte
We're just like a bickering old couple.
- [123:11]
Richard Campbell
Paul was shocked. Just shocked. This is how you treat each other.
- [123:16]
Leo Laporte
So I do hope that first of all, I hope Torres and Reid succeed, and that Skylight becomes the next TikTok. And I, I will tell you right now, Twit will put. We'll start putting our videos on this. Not TikTok, but on this. Okay.
- [123:33]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [123:33]
Richard Campbell
Should we try to get them on the show?
- [123:35]
Leo Laporte
Yes, absolutely. And I, at this point, that makes me hope that nobody buys Tick Tock, especially not Marc Andreessen.
- [123:46]
Richard Campbell
This scares me. It really does.
- [123:50]
Leo Laporte
The Conehead should not own Tick Tock. I'm just. I think it's wrong. I would be as bad as.
- [123:56]
Richard Campbell
His latest pronouncement is that we should kill universities.
- [123:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah. And they never liked it, even though he made his name at the University of Illinois Champagne Urbana. I mean, that's where he wrote Mosaic and made his money. So I.
- [124:16]
Keech Hagee
No, he built himself. He's all self made, Leo.
- [124:19]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. He's all self made, right? No, no, no. University helped him.
- [124:24]
Keech Hagee
No help.
- [124:24]
Richard Campbell
He didn't drive to work on.
- [124:27]
Leo Laporte
Pulled himself up by his own bootlaces so he would be one. He. You know what this is? Musk envy.
- [124:39]
Richard Campbell
Yes.
- [124:40]
Leo Laporte
Mark looks at Elon and. And how it's worked out for him with X and says, okay, I'm going to take TikTok, but remember that X has become a cesspool of right wing blather and propaganda and most importantly, disinformation and misinformation.
- [124:58]
Richard Campbell
And Andreessen's jealous of that, too. The funny thing is, Dreeson blocked almost everybody on Earth. I was blocked ages ago. I don't know what I did. Everybody was blocked by Andreessen. He blocked, blocked, blocked. Then suddenly, of course, Musk killed the blocking feature. And so now everybody can read Andreessen. Like, care.
- [125:16]
Leo Laporte
Who cares?
- [125:17]
Richard Campbell
I don't care.
- [125:18]
Leo Laporte
You can't block Elon. That's the real problem. So today, the president is holding a meeting with aides about possible investors who could buy a stake. So this is from the ap. Details of the meeting were confirmed by a person familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, but didn't tell us much at all, except that there is a meeting going on among possible investors, Oracle and the investment firm Blackstone. Gotta add Andreessen Horowitz. Gotta add Frank McCourt. Gotta add app Annie. What was it? App. What was the one?
- [125:57]
Richard Campbell
That's the press. The Pretzel place.
- [125:59]
Leo Laporte
Pretzel Annie's. If Pretzel Annie's bought TikTok.
- [126:04]
Richard Campbell
Yay.
- [126:05]
Leo Laporte
I might change my tune.
- [126:06]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [126:09]
Leo Laporte
Amazon. Do you see the Amazon? This is very Bizarre Amazon. Well, actually, before we get to that, let's take a little break. You're watching Intelligent Machines, Jeff Jarvis and very kindly Richard Campbell, who's wondering what the hell he's agreed to. Host of Windows Weekly Runners Radio, who's joining us this week filling in for Paris Martineau, who will be back next week. It's nice to have you. Richard, do you have a cat or anybody, anything in the hotel room with you that you'd like to.
- [126:39]
Paris Martineau
No, not a thing. Not even a bottle of whiskey.
- [126:43]
Leo Laporte
Gizmo. Hey, prime members, are you tired of ads interfering with your favorite podcasts? Good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad free top podcasts included with your prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon music app for free or go to Amazon.com adfreepodcasts that's Amazon.com adfreepodcast to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.
- [127:11]
F
Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile helps keep you connected from big cities to your hometown on America's largest 5G network. Switch now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off at the $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com KeepAndSwitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualified unlock device credit service port in 90 plus days device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required card is no cash access and expires and sex month.
- [127:41]
Leo Laporte
Amazon. Okay, on with the show. Amazon is planning to release 14 movies a year into theaters.
- [127:49]
Richard Campbell
Theaters? Yeah. Well, they fix it's Hollywood and then.
- [127:51]
Leo Laporte
Wait 45 days before it goes on to streaming.
- [127:54]
Richard Campbell
Everything old is new again.
- [127:56]
Leo Laporte
This is a. This is unaccountable. Yeah, they're going to spend billions of dollars for producing these movies. Right? Movies are very expensive these days. They've got a stream of a list stars, Ryan Gosling, Ben Affleck, Chris Hemsworth. Because all of these guys will go anywhere there's money. Anybody will write a check. MGM Studios, they bought, remember, so it's going to be Amazon, MGM releasing 14 big broad commercial films a year to theaters nationwide. And then, then much later they'll release it. And you know that this is, I'm thinking about this now. This is an appeal to Hollywood, to directors and movie stars who hate it, that their movies go direct to streaming. Their egos and the Academy Awards.
- [128:49]
Richard Campbell
You think that's what the cause of this is, though?
- [128:50]
Leo Laporte
Yes. This is how you get the big Names to sign up and you still get them for streaming. You just get it later.
- [129:00]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [129:00]
Leo Laporte
On Prime Video.
- [129:01]
Richard Campbell
Well, you always get it for streaming eventually.
- [129:03]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.
- [129:04]
Paris Martineau
I don't know. The movie theaters are going to go for short runs for years.
- [129:10]
Leo Laporte
The company's released. This is the New York Times again, five to eight films theatrically. But it was never clear how long they'd stay in theaters before going to prime Video Air starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon received a 37 day exclusive theatrical release. Red One with Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans hit prime just weeks after it debuted. Now Amazon is committing to 45 days in the theater before hitting pay per view first and then prime. There's a financial stake because box office is often tied to compensation for the directors and stars. There's an ego thing because you know, you get your name on a big marquee outside of a theater. There's also the Academy Awards which prefer theatrical releases.
- [129:56]
Paris Martineau
The question is six weeks enough to make any money?
- [130:00]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [130:00]
Richard Campbell
Well, the thing is, Richard, I wonder for most movies, I think they don't last that long now.
- [130:06]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's really the fact that the, the weekend takes drop dramatically pretty quickly.
- [130:11]
Richard Campbell
Faster.
- [130:12]
Keech Hagee
So you're not this weekend DVD sales are gone.
- [130:16]
Leo Laporte
There is no dvd.
- [130:19]
Richard Campbell
What's a dvd Uncle? But you know, I think I've heard of it.
- [130:22]
Paris Martineau
It's like a VHS tape, only difference.
- [130:24]
Richard Campbell
Oh, okay. Is that Sony or is that.
- [130:31]
Keech Hagee
But that used to.
- [130:32]
Leo Laporte
This is really interesting.
- [130:32]
Keech Hagee
The main source of revenue actually for most studios is.
- [130:35]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah. After theatrical release was selling and global sales. Global DVD sales and global release.
- [130:40]
Richard Campbell
Ain't it amazing how things change?
- [130:43]
Leo Laporte
Well, and you know the real question is, will there be any movie theaters for Amazon to release these movies into?
- [130:48]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [130:50]
Leo Laporte
Theater owners say they hope Amazon will fix one of the major problems plaguing their business. Scarcity of wide release movies. Have you looked? I just walked by our local theater and looked at all the posters. They're all horror movies.
- [131:04]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [131:04]
Leo Laporte
Scary sci fi. I guess they probably reflect the kind of the national, you know.
- [131:11]
Richard Campbell
No, it's also, it's also. It's the same thing as having tv. It's post mass.
- [131:15]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [131:16]
Richard Campbell
You're not going to get, you know, a real blockbuster anymore. And so TVs broadcast TV has been crap for a long time. Streaming is going crap and movie theaters are crap.
- [131:28]
Leo Laporte
Well, we shall watch to see each of you. Saw in the theater.
- [131:34]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Was it, was it Oppenheimer?
- [131:37]
Leo Laporte
Oppenheimer, yeah. And that was because I wanted to see an imax.
- [131:43]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [131:44]
Richard Campbell
I haven't seen one in five years.
- [131:47]
Leo Laporte
I'm very happy to watch them at home. More and more people have broadband big screen tv, surround sound systems. I have theatrical seating with you, Leo.
- [131:57]
Paris Martineau
There's some films you want to see on imax or you see it in your home theater or I watch it on an airplane.
- [132:02]
Leo Laporte
Like, yeah, some of the airplane's fine.
- [132:04]
Paris Martineau
I'll wait for airplane on that fly.
- [132:06]
Leo Laporte
Enough that you need to save some for the airplane. Absolutely. I, the Brutalist was a good example. I, I really wanted to see this film, but there was no way I was going to go see a 3 hour, 20 minute movie in a theater. I'm not going to sit in a theater for three. And there was a required 15 minute intermission. I mean it was, it was, it sounded like hell. Very comfortably watched it over two nights in my home and I loved it. It was a great movie.
- [132:34]
Keech Hagee
We've lost the 90 minute broad comedy and that's the best theatrical experience, you know, like watching Austin Powers in the theater with other people laughing. Exactly.
- [132:42]
Leo Laporte
You know, Paul was talking about this earlier on Windows Weekly about Spaceballs.
- [132:47]
Paris Martineau
Oh God, yes.
- [132:48]
Leo Laporte
Was it you who saw it in the theater with the. No, it was Paul who saw it.
- [132:52]
Paris Martineau
Right, right, yeah.
- [132:53]
Leo Laporte
And just everybody. It's a communal experience.
- [132:56]
Richard Campbell
Here's the question. Now that you have the big cushy seats and the, and the delivery of food and all. Yeah, yeah, it's different.
- [133:03]
Leo Laporte
Plus the teenagers, they have kids these days have no social graces. They talk, they throw popcorn, they laugh at my clothes. I don't like it.
- [133:16]
Paris Martineau
And then, and to Anthony's point, like there's. There are new rom coms, right. Like anyone but you, Sydney Sweeney, like.
- [133:22]
Leo Laporte
That'S, but they're all on stream, they're all ghost go straight to streaming.
- [133:25]
Paris Martineau
Well, that one, that one I saw on an airplane.
- [133:27]
Leo Laporte
But you know, okay, straight to airplanes.
- [133:31]
Paris Martineau
I fear for the multiplex with 12 theaters because they end up running four movies, three each in a theater. So you can watch one every hour.
- [133:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, so actually my screen at home is bigger than the smallest screen at the multiplex.
- [133:45]
Paris Martineau
But I think, you know, what's, you know, what's interesting about this Amazon is at least trying something thing.
- [133:50]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, good for them.
- [133:51]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [133:53]
Leo Laporte
I mean if you love, I love movies. I think movies are the, one of the greatest creative creations of humanity.
- [133:59]
Paris Martineau
But I tell you many of the, like the Mandalorian and Ro and, and andor like the miniseries back in that format, that there are stories that take 12 hours to tell. And you need. And you need to binge them over several days.
- [134:16]
Leo Laporte
Do you think those are better than the movies?
- [134:20]
Paris Martineau
I think the Mandalorian, with the new equipment that Favreau developed really changed the game. Where now TV price. They're able to do those great special effects.
- [134:32]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And there's certainly stories that you can't tell in two hours.
- [134:38]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. And it's. The thing is like give us a worthy story. Right.
- [134:42]
Richard Campbell
But TV went whack with. I was. I was the TV critic at People during the Mondo miniseries period.
- [134:50]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [134:50]
Richard Campbell
And they were stretched. The worst. The worst torture I ever endured was AD 14 hours. Oh my. And I had. I had an ethical view that I would not fast forward.
- [135:01]
Paris Martineau
Of course. You're. You're literally a professional. How can you. Right.
- [135:05]
Richard Campbell
Exactly.
- [135:06]
Paris Martineau
What was Richard Chamber when we just lost him. But he did one of the original miniseries. Was it Showgun or.
- [135:11]
Leo Laporte
It was Thornbirds first and then Shogun. He was in both Shogun.
- [135:15]
Paris Martineau
But, you know, those were big stories.
- [135:17]
Leo Laporte
Thornbirds was huge.
- [135:19]
Paris Martineau
Oh yeah.
- [135:19]
Richard Campbell
The Holocaust was amazing. And there were Roots was probably the.
- [135:23]
Leo Laporte
Most watched TV show of all time. Brothers recently. Band of Brothers. Great show.
- [135:29]
Paris Martineau
But you know, compare that to Saving Private Ryan, which they're basically derivative of each other. Band of Brothers. I mean, one awards for a reason. It's still Spielberg. A band of brothers told a deeper story.
- [135:42]
Leo Laporte
A deeper. That was the difference. You have the time to take your time and tell the deeper story.
- [135:48]
Richard Campbell
Characters and. Yep.
- [135:49]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I. I've become a fan of the miniseries. Together they're different mediums.
- [135:54]
Paris Martineau
They really are a different story to tell.
- [135:57]
Leo Laporte
The thing I've said all along and I. Nobody ever pays attention to this. And I hope that this gets memorialized somewhere so that people can look back and say, Leo was right. Is that really the first VR and the best VR to this day remains a movie theater. A darkened theater screen that fills your vision. Music that is big and fills the room and invokes emotions. And if you're watching a great movie, you forget that you are in a theater. You are in the film. That is real VR to me.
- [136:27]
Paris Martineau
Sticky floors, man. That's the best part.
- [136:29]
Leo Laporte
Well, and the kids move so fast on the stairs. I'm afraid they're going to bowl me over every time. Game.
- [136:39]
Paris Martineau
That's the original virtual experience I missed.
- [136:42]
Leo Laporte
It is, isn't it? It's VR and it's much better VR than putting a thing on your face. And it's so much better. It's real.
- [136:51]
Richard Campbell
I miss popcorn badly. Have not been so I Went to the theater, and I said, can I just take a small and take it out? $8?
- [136:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, $8 they charge for the popcorn.
- [137:02]
Richard Campbell
$8.
- [137:03]
Leo Laporte
I just put popcorn in my purse, and I have some Smarties in my pocket, and I'm set. I don't buy the theater popcorn, but.
- [137:12]
Keech Hagee
I mean, that is another thing. Like a family. Take a family out to the movies. Like a hundred dollars.
- [137:16]
Leo Laporte
Expensive. Yeah, I know. Lisa yells at me because I. Look, you know, nowadays, when you want to watch a recent film on itunes or whatever your streaming platform is, it's like $20, $30 to buy it. And I go, oh, I can't buy. She. Lisa goes, it would cost us twice as much to go see it in the theater. What, are you crying crazy? Just buy the damn movie.
- [137:37]
Paris Martineau
And they go, some popcorn.
- [137:39]
Leo Laporte
Popcorn's much better. At home. I make an excellent. It is excellent popcorn, but you don't get the warm Milk Duds in the. In the home.
- [137:49]
Paris Martineau
The warm Milk Duds bounced off your head from the guy five rows behind you. That one. Okay, that's excellent.
- [137:54]
Leo Laporte
You teenagers.
- [137:55]
Jeff Jarvis
Not enough.
- [137:57]
Richard Campbell
So in 1948, the critic Irving how said that mass Basque culture must provide amusement without insight and pleasure without disturbance as distinct. Distinct from art, which gives pleasure through disturbance. In 1948, he called the movie theater, quote, a dark cavern, a neutral womb. That is one of the few places that provides a poor man with a kind of retreat. Here at last, he does not have to acknowledge his irritating self.
- [138:27]
Paris Martineau
Good Lord, that's beautiful. And air conditioning critics.
- [138:31]
Richard Campbell
Purple Pros, 1948. Yeah, they probably did have air conditioning.
- [138:35]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, the theater would, but they, you know, home wouldn't.
- [138:39]
Leo Laporte
You went to the movie signs come in. It's cold inside.
- [138:42]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. Yeah, because they had.
- [138:43]
Richard Campbell
Otherwise, the projectors burned up. Yeah.
- [138:46]
Leo Laporte
If you miss the scooter exchange log, and I know many of you do. Stay tuned.
- [138:51]
Richard Campbell
Have you been hearing it, people? People been calling?
- [138:54]
Leo Laporte
No, not. Not one. But if you do, and I know there's somebody out there who does, somebody just said, I'm unsubscribing. This is because. A curmudgeon fest. Well, we'll return with Curmudgeonfest. More of Curmudgeonfest in just a moment. You're watching Intelligent Machines with a couple of intelligent guys. Mr. Richard Campbell from Runners Radio, and of course, our very own Windows Weekly. And Professor Jeff Jarvis from jeffjarvice.com. great to have you both. 25 years ago, a small group of business and government leaders met in Washington, D.C. d.C. They envision the creation of an independent nonprofit organization with a mission to help people, businesses and government mitigate the growing threat of cyber attacks. Today, the center for Internet Security embodies that vision. For 25 years, it's worked with a global community of IT and cybersecurity experts to develop the CIS benchmarks and CIS critical security controls. These proven security best practices practices defend against common cyber threats and streamline compliance with industry frameworks, regulations and standards. Today, CIS provides cybersecurity services, threat intelligence and critical resources to help public and private sector organizations alike strengthen their Cyber defenses. Visit cisecurity.org today. That's the letters cisecurity.org to find out how CIS can help your organization as we create confidence in the connected world.
- [140:28]
F
Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile helps keep you connected from big cities to your hometown on America's largest 5G network. Switch now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off at the $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualify and unlock device, credit service port in 90 plus days device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required card is no cash access. It expires in six month.
- [140:58]
Leo Laporte
From by.
- [140:59]
Richard Campbell
The way was from the Goodberg parenthesis. Just want to throw that in.
- [141:02]
Leo Laporte
Say that again. What was the quote?
- [141:05]
Richard Campbell
Parenthesis?
- [141:05]
Leo Laporte
Yes nice see you bring up these.
- [141:07]
Richard Campbell
Classic I find these things they're in.
- [141:09]
Leo Laporte
My head still gems.
- [141:11]
Richard Campbell
Anything to sell the book out now in paperback, but go ahead.
- [141:15]
Leo Laporte
Yes, affordably priced less than a dozen eggs home delivered even from the scooter exchange log. Get ready Coachella 2025 live only on YouTube. It's coming not so long from now. Nine days away. Six. Count them, six concurrent live streamed stages on YouTube and how much are they charging for that? Plus a vertical live stream. How to watch you got to go to the official Coachella YouTube channel. Do they charge for that? I don't think so. Of course you get a lot of ads if you don't pay for YouTube Premium sponsored by Colgate, Optic White, Jimmy John's and NYX Professional makeup in the US plus Spark now New Zealand NYX professional makeup in Canada weekend two turns back the following Friday, April 18th at the same time sponsored by NYX Professional Makeup Ryan Cooper Googlers Sinners just out from Warner Brothers and T Mobile in the US Spark New Zealand and NYX Professional Makeup in Canada. So I guess, I guess you don't really have to pay for it because they have. I shouldn't knock it if I would. I wish we had Colgate. I would gladly do an ad for Colgate. Optic White. Ding. Do you guys go to Coachella? Would you go to Coachella? You don't have to after Burning Man.
- [142:51]
Paris Martineau
I'm too tired.
- [142:53]
Leo Laporte
I know. It's so exhausting, all that dancing around naked. It's interesting, isn't it? I mean, YouTube is really kind of hip with the Youngs.
- [143:04]
Paris Martineau
I think they're trying.
- [143:05]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, because they.
- [143:07]
Paris Martineau
All the Youngs went to Tick Tock.
- [143:10]
Leo Laporte
Oh, well. Okay, get ready for this because not only are there these six vertical streams, there will be a ver. I mean, horizontal streams. There will be a vertical live stream for those of you watching on your phone.
- [143:24]
Richard Campbell
Perfect.
- [143:26]
Keech Hagee
This is actually for the olds because the Youngs are there.
- [143:29]
Leo Laporte
The Youngs are actually at the event.
- [143:32]
Keech Hagee
This is for the old who know, like, one or two artists who want to see them.
- [143:35]
Leo Laporte
Right. Is Elvis gonna be playing Coachella this year? Amazon's Nova Pro. Try it for free. Built on Amazon bedrock, this is. I guess Amazon says, hey, we. We can do this. We can do AI. We got it. We got it right here. It's got a image generation. Let's see if I can. Let's see. Draw Disaster Girl. Let's try it. Let's see if it's as good in the style of. Who should I do? I'll do Disney. Let's see.
- [144:16]
Paris Martineau
Let's.
- [144:17]
Leo Laporte
Let's do an Apples to Apps. Oh, cannot process that request. It goes against Amazon's content.
- [144:23]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it wouldn't let me. It wouldn't let me draw Gutenberg.
- [144:26]
Leo Laporte
What?
- [144:27]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [144:28]
Leo Laporte
Are they worried about the Gutenberg estate?
- [144:31]
Richard Campbell
I guess so.
- [144:32]
Paris Martineau
It's been dead 500 years.
- [144:35]
Leo Laporte
What the hell? Oh, I can't do that. Draw a shirt with a pattern of a variety of dog breeds. Let's see if it matches my fine shirt. Okay. It's just as slow, I have to say, as OpenAI. Oh, that's cute. I would. That's cute, but don't wear it, Leo. Well, I like the one I got, by the way, I've ordered some new shirts from the same source, including. I'm excited. I will wear it on the next im. Elote Ears of corn. You like my avocado shirt, Jeff?
- [145:21]
Richard Campbell
When you see elote street corn or raw?
- [145:25]
Leo Laporte
No, just ears of fresh corn.
- [145:27]
Paris Martineau
No mayonnaise.
- [145:29]
Leo Laporte
There was one that was cherry tomatoes, and I did not get that one. But I did buy succulents, so you'll be. You'll be glad about that. All right. I think we're running low on stories here. Perplexity AI, which is my favorite AI, some are saying is disintegrating behind the scenes. I do not feel that is true.
- [145:54]
Richard Campbell
I don't feel it's true either. There was one report that they were running short on money and so then they felt they had to out and respond to it. So then that makes it a story.
- [146:03]
Leo Laporte
And when I go to Perplexity, the choice of models has changed a little bit. I used to have a broader variety. Now I have Auto Pro, Deep Re. I'm a paid user, by the way, Deep research reasoning with R1, reasoning with O3 mini and Gemini 2.0. AI XAI is gone. It used to be used. GRO2 used to be there. And they favor kind of their own models. And that I think was what also led to this story or the story. This is from Futurism. Perplexity AI CEO denies rumors. Our goal isn't to save money and scam you in any way. I really like Perplexity. The original trash talking post from Nothing Ever Happened alleged per a campus strategist. They know that Perplexity had paused all funding for marketing and partnerships. They also claimed the wannabe Google competitor is going public on the stock market, a move they wagered would only happen if Perplexity needed a massive cash injection. I think this is all just.
- [147:08]
Paris Martineau
It's Reddit, it's lies.
- [147:11]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think Perplexity's very good. You know, I did a. I've been playing with, thanks to Darren Okey in our discord, the idea of local AIs. You know, I had an Olama installed and I've been trying some of the newer models and I have to say the local AIs leave a little bit to be desired. If I ask Perplexity, as I did, I said, tell me, what do you know about the Twit podcast network? It pretty much nailed it. Let me make this text bigger so you can see it. I don't know how to do that. Maybe I can't. Oh yeah, there it is. Font. Let's choose a giant font. And it's not changing. Okay, I'll have to read this to you. So I tried a few others. Google's Gemma, which is that a small one designed for phones. Gemma 3, brand new 27 billion token version. I said the same question. What do you know about the Twitt podcast network? It told me some interesting things. For instance that the tech guy show Was hosted by a guy. A guy. Not me, but by a guy. A listener. Call in show hosted by Kurt Knappenberger. Then I said, well, who's Kurt Knappenberger? It said, kurt Knappenberger is a prominent figure on the Twitt Podcast network, best known as the host of the Tech Guy. So I looked up Kurt Knappenberg. As far as I could tell, there's only one. He's a 71 year old orthopedic surgeon in Topeka, Kansas and as far as I know, he never hosted the Tech Guy show. It says he's been with the TWIT Network for a very. And it emphasizes very long time time becoming a consistent and reliable presence. He's one of the few original hosts who remains with the network. This is Gemma locally. Then I asked llama32, do you have any information about the Twit Podcast Network? They said the TWIP Podcast Network is a network of podcasts hosted by Markiplier.
- [149:32]
Paris Martineau
Mark Plier, the YouTuber.
- [149:34]
Leo Laporte
Yes. You know Markiplier?
- [149:38]
Paris Martineau
I've seen his videos, yeah.
- [149:39]
Leo Laporte
It says Markiplier launched the network in 2019.
- [149:42]
Paris Martineau
That seems unlikely.
- [149:43]
Richard Campbell
Jesus, have you been bought? We didn't know it.
- [149:47]
Leo Laporte
Markiplier aims to create a space where creators can come together, share ideas and support each other. The network features a diverse range of podcasts, including comedy, news, interviews and storytelling. Some popular podcasts on the network include the Twitter Quit podcast with Markiplier, Comedy Gold Mine and the Rewatchables. All shows I wish I were doing.
- [150:10]
Richard Campbell
What the hell?
- [150:12]
Leo Laporte
That's Llama. So it is the case that you can often get hallucinations or mistakes or just Jesus crap from these.
- [150:22]
Paris Martineau
If you just swap the names out to Leo Laporte. It wasn't.
- [150:25]
Leo Laporte
I think that's. I think that it's actually true. The. Whoever this other guy is, Kurt Knappenberger, everything except for the name worked, right? He's a longtime tech enthusiast, self described helpful geek. Many listeners describe him as. Oh come on. Genuinely kind and approachable person. I think they're talking about Kurt Napper.
- [150:49]
Keech Hagee
Where did it come from though? Like, where did the name come from?
- [150:51]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's what's weird because I thought, well, must be Markiplier. I understand because There's a. You YouTube guy, so. Yeah, but this guy is an orthopedic surgeon in Topeka. Anyway, Mark, if you're. I mean, Kurt, if you're a listener, I love you. Appreciate all you've done for the Twit Network. It says he's been a Reliable presence on Twitter for years, building a loyal following.
- [151:14]
Paris Martineau
I appreciate all his efforts.
- [151:15]
Leo Laporte
I appreciate the efforts. Meanwhile, Perplexity gets it right. Because I think Perplexity is connected. It's not a local model running locally. It's connected to the outside world.
- [151:24]
Keech Hagee
Yeah. Something tells me this isn't the right application for local models.
- [151:27]
Richard Campbell
Models.
- [151:28]
Leo Laporte
No, no, Nothing current. Although we have been around for 20 years. Anyway, I. Kurt, give me a ring. I think we need to hire you.
- [151:41]
Richard Campbell
Or you can buy Twin. That could be the other thing to do.
- [151:46]
Leo Laporte
You had Darren had a llama run Mistral and asked the same question. He says as Mistral. The French lens says. As of my Latest update in October 2023, I don't have any specific information about the Twit podcasting network. It could be a new or niche entity that hasn't gained widespread recognition yet.
- [152:06]
Paris Martineau
Well, someday you'll make it.
- [152:08]
Leo Laporte
Someday, I hope. Yes. I love all of Kirk Knappenberger's episodes as well. All right, one last break and then we're going to wrap things up.
- [152:19]
Richard Campbell
One story you might enjoy.
- [152:19]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you. Yes, please. I'm sorry. I'll give you a chance.
- [152:22]
Richard Campbell
One line 91.
- [152:24]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [152:25]
Richard Campbell
It's an AI story.
- [152:27]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's good, because this is intelligent Machines.
- [152:30]
Richard Campbell
Machines.
- [152:31]
Leo Laporte
A recent conversation. This is a crisp, crisp AI accent conversion.
- [152:39]
Richard Campbell
So this is kind of like. So it takes Indian and. And. And Filipino. I'm curious what.
- [152:47]
Leo Laporte
And makes them sound like they're American.
- [152:50]
Richard Campbell
Yep. So if you go below, there's a demo there. You can scroll down and you'll get the demo.
- [152:55]
Leo Laporte
Because I, you know, this is true that I often get customer service. I was calling Chase Bank. They blocked my account. I called once. I got somebody with a Hispanic accent. I called and they. And they couldn't help me. They said, you have to call again in 5 to 10 minutes. Experience this issue. So then I called again, and I got somebody with an American accent. And then I called a third time because it didn't work that time either. And I got somebody with an Indian accent. So I think they actually were outsourcing these to all over the world.
- [153:28]
Paris Martineau
Sure.
- [153:29]
Leo Laporte
But they were funny because they were all named Chad, which, you know. So. Experience the magic of AI Accent conversion. Wow. So let me try. This is the Indian English accent. Hello, everyone. My name is Ishika and I'm a call center agent from India. Clear communication is vital for my customers and me, but accent barriers can sometimes make it challenging. That's where crisp accent conversion comes in. Let me show you the voice preservation mode. In action. So now that's good. This mode keeps my original voice intact while softening the challenging parts of my accent. It helps customers understand me better. And it makes me sound like a robot.
- [154:12]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah.
- [154:14]
F
Improving satisfaction on both sides of the call.
- [154:19]
Leo Laporte
All right, here's Filipino. Hello, My name is Manoj, and I'm a call center agent from India. Clear. Oh, wait a minute. That was another Indian. Here's an. Here's a Filipino. Okay. Hello, my name is Anna, and I'm a call center agent from the Philippines. Means clear. Communication is vital for my customers and me. But accent. All right, let's hear the translation. This mode keeps my original voice intact while softening challenging parts of my accent. It's interesting they said softening because it doesn't eliminate it.
- [154:51]
Richard Campbell
No, no, it doesn't.
- [154:52]
Leo Laporte
Which is fine. I mean, I don't mind the accent. As long as I can understand somebody. I don't have a problem with it. But I think probably a lot of Americans might.
- [155:02]
Paris Martineau
Well, they don't. I mean, we're not that far from full voice replacement anyway, so.
- [155:06]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. That. We're not going to be talking to humans much soon.
- [155:08]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. And, yeah, you're right. It could. We can fully bop this.
- [155:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's.
- [155:13]
Paris Martineau
This almost seems like a product made to keep those call centers still running before the software takes over.
- [155:18]
Keech Hagee
There you go.
- [155:18]
Richard Campbell
That's.
- [155:18]
Keech Hagee
That's what I was about to say. He's like, that's the plan. Like, this is the software in between. Software between AI taking over and now.
- [155:27]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. You know, the. The remote data center thing happened because of all that cable, that fiber that was laid during the dot com boom that all went bankrupt and was bought at 10 cents on the dollar.
- [155:38]
Leo Laporte
It's very cheap to have somebody calling.
- [155:40]
Paris Martineau
Them because anywhere in the wire, cost became irrelevant.
- [155:43]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [155:43]
Paris Martineau
But you know what's really cheap? GPU's in your closet.
- [155:49]
Leo Laporte
Do you think Kat Abogazala will become a member of Congress? She's a YouTuber.
- [155:58]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. It's barely a story for us, but she is a YouTuber.
- [156:01]
Leo Laporte
She's running for.
- [156:02]
Richard Campbell
She's running. Yep. So that's.
- [156:04]
Leo Laporte
I'm gonna vote.
- [156:05]
Richard Campbell
Can come from.
- [156:06]
Leo Laporte
She's 26. She lives in the north side, Chicago. She's challenging an incumbent Democrat, though, because Chicago's pretty blue.
- [156:15]
Richard Campbell
Very incumbent.
- [156:16]
Leo Laporte
Oh.
- [156:17]
Richard Campbell
Been there a long time.
- [156:19]
Leo Laporte
You know, their representative has been there since. Since she was born. Was born 1999. Has not lost an election since. Well, I think we should get more younger. Look at aoc. I think it's good to get more younger people.
- [156:33]
Richard Campbell
Mallory McMorrow announced for Senate today. I think she's amazing.
- [156:37]
Leo Laporte
Good. When the young people. You need to take over enough curmudgeons.
- [156:42]
Richard Campbell
Either that, Richard, or you. Please, would you let us hide in your basement?
- [156:48]
Paris Martineau
My goodness. I can't tell you how many emails I have.
- [156:51]
Richard Campbell
Really?
- [156:52]
Leo Laporte
Friends who say, hey, Rich.
- [156:54]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. So how hard is it to immigrate?
- [156:56]
Leo Laporte
Actually, I think all I need is a Canadian sponsor. Hint, hint.
- [157:00]
Paris Martineau
Now, I've gotten to the habit every over every election of just having the documents handy so I could just cut and paste because I get a lot of them.
- [157:07]
Leo Laporte
Just between you and me, Jeff, even better than Canada. Rich has family in New Zealand.
- [157:12]
Paris Martineau
That's true. Yeah. I've got both passports.
- [157:15]
Leo Laporte
Oh, whoa. New Zealand. Whoa.
- [157:22]
Richard Campbell
Pretty soon Canada is going to be part of the eu. So that gets you to a lot.
- [157:25]
Paris Martineau
There you go.
- [157:26]
Leo Laporte
Is that what's going to happen?
- [157:27]
Richard Campbell
There is. There is half joking speculation.
- [157:31]
Leo Laporte
Canada is part of NATO. Yeah.
- [157:34]
Paris Martineau
So is most of the eu.
- [157:35]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So is Greenland. Hint, hint. Yeah. I'm not sure I want to move to Canada. It might be. Might be a dangerous place to live, especially on the border where you are, Richard.
- [157:49]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, well, no, they got to take a ferry to get to me.
- [157:52]
Leo Laporte
This is all fantasy. This is fantasy land. This is. Pay no attention to the tax cut land. All right, we're gonna take a little break. And final. Unless you guys have a story you want to do. Final words coming up. You're watching Intelligent Machines with the curmudgeonly trio of Richard Campbell, Jeff Jarvis and me on what do you call it?
- [158:17]
Richard Campbell
Curmudgeonly.
- [158:18]
Leo Laporte
Begging you young people to slow down on the stairs. I'm walking here. Hey, prime members, are you tired of ads interfering with your favorite podcasts? Good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad free top podcasts included with your prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon music app for free or go to Amazon.com adfreepodcasts that's Amazon.com adfreepodcast to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.
- [158:51]
F
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- [159:22]
Leo Laporte
All right, picks of the week. We like to do this at the end of every show. Usually the end of winners weekly. Mr. Campbell picks a lovely whiskey. Had a good one this week. Highland park did the Highland park looked quite good. Little Touch of Pete. Touch of Pete. But and I will let you think if you want to do something while Jeff tells us his picks of the week.
- [159:48]
Richard Campbell
Well, we could go to the versed cursor.
- [159:54]
Leo Laporte
Is this versed as in liver Verse as in.
- [159:59]
Richard Campbell
Well, I don't think liver versed work so well but other verse will work well.
- [160:02]
Leo Laporte
Oh, how to use a sausage message touchscreen. Yes, everywhere.
- [160:08]
Jeff Jarvis
And everyone, as they have a habit of doing in winter, is getting really annoyed about the fact that they can't.
- [160:14]
Leo Laporte
Use their smartphones while they're wearing gloves. This is a BBC yes segment. They resort to using something else.
- [160:23]
Jeff Jarvis
Sausages. Lots of people.
- [160:26]
Leo Laporte
That is hysterical.
- [160:29]
Richard Campbell
So she's going to actually use.
- [160:31]
Leo Laporte
Actually works. And this is kind of an old story. We've known this for years, but it actually works.
- [160:37]
Richard Campbell
So she later does a pickle.
- [160:40]
Leo Laporte
I'm writing with a sausage.
- [160:44]
Keech Hagee
Wait, but you can't write with the sausage if you're wearing gloves though.
- [160:47]
Leo Laporte
That won't work. Oh, that's a good point. You have to take off your gloves to hold the sausage.
- [160:51]
Jeff Jarvis
And this is where it's got me.
- [160:53]
Leo Laporte
How many times have I said that this popular.
- [160:57]
Jeff Jarvis
But one sausage manufacturer said that Stacy's not here.
- [161:00]
Leo Laporte
Oh my God. I'd be punched black and blue sausage.
- [161:04]
Richard Campbell
So there's that. And then we could look at the.
- [161:06]
Leo Laporte
Okay, that was a good one.
- [161:08]
Richard Campbell
The fastest, most accurate food drive thrus. There's a company that checks this regularly.
- [161:15]
Leo Laporte
Oh, interesting. Because you wouldn't want to get your order wrong.
- [161:18]
Richard Campbell
No.
- [161:19]
Leo Laporte
As you're driving away. And I hope it's not Chick Fil A.
- [161:23]
Richard Campbell
Well, the line length there is the worst.
- [161:25]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, look at that. This is. This is a Chick Fil A Longview, Texas in 2012. Well, come on. Well, that's before they added AI which really sped things up.
- [161:38]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. So line lengths. They have the most likely to get your orders right. Chick Fil a is right up there. Oh, KFC's at the bottom.
- [161:47]
Leo Laporte
This is. But look at the total minutes to get food. Chick Fil A's hovering around seven minutes to get your food.
- [161:54]
Richard Campbell
That's completely unacceptable. Of course.
- [161:56]
Leo Laporte
Unacceptable. Look at McDonald's Taco Bell. Your favorite. Only five minutes to get the food. If you're hungry and in a hurry, I think the choice is clear.
- [162:04]
Richard Campbell
It's very clear now. Line length, cheese, black bean burrito is a wonderful thing, folks. It's a new item.
- [162:13]
Leo Laporte
Okay, so the line length is best at kfc, which is now closed in Petaluma, so I won't be going.
- [162:19]
Paris Martineau
Their accuracy is lowest. I guess this might be a correlation.
- [162:22]
Richard Campbell
Oh, screw up my order.
- [162:25]
Paris Martineau
The longer the line, the more accurate food.
- [162:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, huh? Yeah. KFC has the least accurate. Duncan. Then Wendy's, then Taco Bell, Arby's, McDonald's, Burger King. I would have thought McDonald's would be better than Burger King. I thought they had quality control. And the Southwest is America's drive through heartland.
- [162:46]
Paris Martineau
Nobody wants to get out of the air condition.
- [162:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's because of heat. Notice. Arizona is the top, top state for that. Interesting. All right, you remember the. I have a pick. We'll give Richard a little more time to. To think. Do you remember we. I showed a website that was called Radio Garden? That was the idea, was it was gonna. You could click anywhere in the map and you would see or listen to a radio station.
- [163:23]
Keech Hagee
Yes, I listen to radio stations to the Philippines through that still.
- [163:27]
Leo Laporte
It's awesome, isn't it? Yeah.
- [163:28]
Keech Hagee
Yeah.
- [163:28]
Leo Laporte
Well, hold on to your hat, Benito. Here's TV Garden. You select a country and you can watch TV from that country.
- [163:38]
Richard Campbell
So illegal, I'm sure.
- [163:40]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I don't know. Here's some Russian television. This is from Moscow. This is what the. You see? This is what people are watching in Moscow. Let's see, there's quite a few stations. Here's Dag Music. Do you think this is illegal?
- [164:04]
Jeff Jarvis
Oh, yeah, has to be.
- [164:05]
Leo Laporte
Oh, here's cooking Culinar tv. It sounds like Spanish, though. It doesn't sound like Russian, I guess. Russian Portuguese.
- [164:15]
Richard Campbell
Sounds like Russian to me.
- [164:16]
Keech Hagee
Like, I'm sure there's. I'm sure there are paid services to have access to this stuff. You know this.
- [164:21]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but I think there's a lot of public streaming also.
- [164:24]
Richard Campbell
Switzerland. Switzerland.
- [164:26]
Leo Laporte
So let's. A to Z. You know that channel in the Philippines?
- [164:29]
Keech Hagee
I don't actually.
- [164:30]
Leo Laporte
Let's see what they're streaming. Well, that's like a kids channel, right?
- [164:39]
Richard Campbell
What time is it there now?
- [164:40]
Keech Hagee
Yeah, it's early in the morning over there, so.
- [164:41]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Yeah.
- [164:42]
Leo Laporte
So here you go. Philippines news. Morning. Washington States, America.
- [164:49]
Keech Hagee
Talking about us.
- [164:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, I recognize Washington States, America. So I don't know. I think I would want. Benito, I wanted to give us Your opinion. Now, I have to say, when I go to the United States, I get a. A lot of.
- [165:09]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [165:10]
Leo Laporte
Weird stuff. I don't. I'm like, here's. It says, please wait for commercial break to end. That's something our. Our audience sees quite a bit. 24 hour free movies. Oh, there's a movie I want to see. Realms at war. And together they have been slaying the titan. This is the worst. The worst movie I've ever seen. Holy cow. Anyway, I just thought I'd pass this along if you're bored. It's late at night, you got nothing to watch. You got 230 countries all around the world. Here's Antarctica TV.
- [165:46]
Richard Campbell
Oh, no channels.
- [165:47]
Leo Laporte
No channels, no. How about Greenland? What do they got? We can watch a couple of. Couple of stations in Greenland.
- [165:53]
Richard Campbell
They're off the air.
- [165:55]
Leo Laporte
They're off the air because nothing. Nothing's happening.
- [165:57]
Richard Campbell
Nothing's happening. It's great.
- [165:58]
Leo Laporte
It's. It's the same. Same picture on both. So there you go. It's limited. It's funded in whole or part by the Greenlandic government, I think. So I suspect that's what a lot of these are.
- [166:08]
Keech Hagee
Yeah, it's all public channels.
- [166:09]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're mostly public channels. Yeah. But you know, if you miss, you know, you miss your native tongue, you'd like to hear a little more Armenian on your computer. I think it's. I, as a TV buff and I. Jeff, you might be the same. I'm fascinated by the graphics packages, the styles, the lighting. I just think it's really interesting to see what they're doing in other parts of the world. You know, it's kind of. Kind of fun. I can't travel right now, so at least I can watch Armenian, Eurovision.
- [166:43]
Richard Campbell
And you're gonna get taken down for Armenian music.
- [166:45]
Leo Laporte
Wouldn't that be funny if I got like a takedown?
- [166:51]
Paris Martineau
I got a copyright strike for Armenian music.
- [166:54]
Leo Laporte
Did you? No, but that would be something to put on my. On my wall resume. I like it anyway, that's my pick of the week. What do you got, Mr. Richard Campbell? Anything for us? Oh, he's.
- [167:10]
Paris Martineau
He's.
- [167:10]
Leo Laporte
He's lost his Internet.
- [167:11]
Keech Hagee
I think we've lost him.
- [167:13]
Leo Laporte
We've lost him. Well, that's okay. It's kind of mean.
- [167:17]
Richard Campbell
The computer knows.
- [167:18]
Leo Laporte
It's kind of mean to. Oh, there he is. He's back. Yes.
- [167:22]
Paris Martineau
Yeah, yeah. So I just. I've been working on a bit for Windows Weekly, probably for Christmas. I read the book the Old Fashioned, talking about sort of the origins of cocktails oh. With the intent that I would make one on the show. We'd go through the whole thing. So I thought I might give you a little.
- [167:39]
Leo Laporte
A preview, a taste.
- [167:41]
Paris Martineau
Well, just because the interesting. The question is, where did the cocktail even come from? Why is this important? And. And the first time we see the words cocktail, it's literally like the beginning of the 1800s. Like 1806 is the first time it's in print. So it already been around before that. We can talk about the etymology, but that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is thinking about what the composition of an alcoholic drink was in the early 1800s. Because there was no ABV. There was only proof, which was really a rough measure of. Is there enough alcohol in this barrel to be considered a spirit? So the real job of a bartender when trying to make you a drink was to try and not poison you.
- [168:25]
Leo Laporte
That absence can really do a number on you. That's true, absolutely.
- [168:30]
Paris Martineau
So to take a grain whiskey, what we now call it, you know, call a whiskey a grain alcohol, and then it's been sitting in a barrel for some length of time. Although aging in barrels wasn't popular at this point. It was just storage in barrels. The. The cocktail maker's job actually is to balance flavor so that it's not too alcoholic, it's not too bitter or sour, which often those old alcohols were. And. And so the basic combination is the spirit water to manage the alcohol levels. Some kind of a sweetener, typically sugar, although at that time it would be a coarse sugar or a hard sugar that they'd have to crush up. And then bitters was introduced early in that cycle as well, which was a byproduct of alcohol making anyway.
- [169:19]
Leo Laporte
So did people not drink straight liquor in the olden days?
- [169:23]
Richard Campbell
They did.
- [169:24]
Paris Martineau
It just hurt them.
- [169:26]
Leo Laporte
It was very. Could be very strong or very, very potent.
- [169:31]
Paris Martineau
So a good butler or a good servant knew it with water and to add sugar to it and so forth. And the reason an Old Fashioned is called an Old Fashioned, it was the old fashioned way of making a drink.
- [169:43]
Richard Campbell
Oh.
- [169:44]
Paris Martineau
And it was process that you would take. You take this hard block of sugar and you'd break it down, you dissolve it because it's not. It's not nicely powdered sugar. That's before this. So you take this sort of molasses, hard sugar, and you put a little water in it and you hammer it with a muddler until it turns to a paste. And when there was bitters, you'd add little bitters to it as well. And that would be a base you'd work from. You might make two, three cocktails from that. And then you'd take the spirit you're working with and you'd use your spoon to taste it, see where it was added. You'd add water and a bit of that combination until you got to something nice. And if you had citrus available to you, you'd use a little of the orange because it would take away the acrid smell of the whiskey. So it smelled good too. Too.
- [170:31]
Leo Laporte
So this is, so this is the invention of the cocktail, basically they said.
- [170:35]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. And it was a way to stabilize the consistency of any alcohol was to combine these basic four ingredients. The spirit, the sugar, the water and a bitters of some kind. Bitters is very old.
- [170:48]
Leo Laporte
To, to getters are basically an herb mixture. Right. They're an herbal flavor.
- [170:53]
Paris Martineau
Well, they're almost dregs of barrels that you add other things to too. So they've got alcohol in any way, but they're usually just. Yeah.
- [171:01]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I thought they were purpose made infusions. They're not.
- [171:04]
Paris Martineau
They eventually were that, that you know, in this the they they exist in almost time immemorial going back to the lambic stills of a thousand A.D. you had these bitter solutions. Right. But Peshod starts making his bidders in the 1700s for pirates because it was a flavorant for water.
- [171:25]
Leo Laporte
Wow. Well, yeah, they couldn't drink. I remember that the British Navy didn't serve straight rum. That would kill the sailors. They would water it and sugar it, maybe put a little cinnamon in it.
- [171:36]
Paris Martineau
Or something cheaper to transport that too. Right, right. The other thing is that you're not barreling for age and bottles are too expensive. Like commercial bottles don't come along till the 1900s. So everything's stored in barrels. Which means it's getting worse. The barrels leak, there's things getting into them, the quality alcohol calls questionable and it's inconsistent. The job of a bartender or cocktail maker was to make a consistent drink out of like an inconsistent product.
- [172:06]
Leo Laporte
I think that's great. Now are you, at the end of the year you're going to do a little demo?
- [172:11]
Paris Martineau
So I've been, I've read up, I've got like a half a dozen different styles of old fashioned spanning over, you know, a century. And so I, I figured we'd use a two camera shot and I could show you making one and we'd walk through the improvement in the ingredients.
- [172:24]
Leo Laporte
I got a better idea, Richard, why don't you come up here, join me in the Attic for that special. Very special.
- [172:34]
Paris Martineau
I like that idea. I'll fly down where it's warm and we'll do it there.
- [172:38]
Leo Laporte
That sounds great. Richard Campbell, runasradio.com He also hosts.net Rocks with Carl Franklin. You'll find both@runasradio.com and of course, Richard joins us every Wednesday morning at least morning my time and his time for the fabulous Windows Weekly program. Thank you so much. Thank you for sticking around.
- [172:58]
Paris Martineau
Great to hang out with you, man. Yes, really good time.
- [173:01]
Leo Laporte
I adore Richard, Jeff, because he's an autodidact and there is. There are very few subjects. You can't ask Richard.
- [173:09]
Richard Campbell
I adore him because he disagrees with you and agrees with me, so.
- [173:14]
Leo Laporte
And he thinks AI is B.S. not B.S.
- [173:16]
Richard Campbell
No, not AI AGI.
- [173:19]
Paris Martineau
Yeah.
- [173:19]
Leo Laporte
You're gonna be sorry when the machines come.
- [173:21]
Richard Campbell
G stands for B.S.
- [173:23]
Paris Martineau
Yeah. You know what? I'll. I'll happily walk into the stream of bullets at that point. I don't want to deal with it.
- [173:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, maybe you don't want to be around. Yeah, maybe you don't want to be there. I'm looking forward to it because I've just. I, you know, I've been storing up everything that happens including, by the way, your guys disbelief, your skepticism in this little thing.
- [173:44]
Richard Campbell
No, we were pretty amazed. It was fun.
- [173:47]
Leo Laporte
No, it's fun. In fact, it's really important, I think, to do this show that we reflect the various points of view about AI which is why I've chosen the position of accelerationist.
- [173:57]
Richard Campbell
I sold one to a friend of mine who is. When I found out that she is. Yes. Because she's a. I'll say her name, Eve Perlman started this thing called Spaceship Media, which is a brilliant way to reconsider journalism. And it turns out as we were talking last time, she's a journalist and she wants to kind of play with the journals. Perfect for that, figure out what to do. And I said, oh, well. She said while we were on the call, she immediately bought it.
- [174:21]
Leo Laporte
It's auto journalism based. Auto journaling.
- [174:24]
Richard Campbell
Journaling.
- [174:24]
Leo Laporte
Basically.
- [174:25]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. I want to journalism that too.
- [174:27]
Leo Laporte
When I find journalism journaling journalism, what's the difference? I actually thinking I should really learn the. It has an API because I would love it to just automatically import it into my day one journal. And then there would have to be no intervention at all. I just could have it do my journaling for me.
- [174:44]
Richard Campbell
But then does it do it? Well, do you have the choice of talking about you in first person or third person?
- [174:50]
Leo Laporte
No, but that's where computer code can be so handy.
- [174:54]
Richard Campbell
I see.
- [174:55]
Leo Laporte
I leave you my friends with this last Skylight video. Camouflaging myself to turn off my husband's game. Who needs TikTok, I ask you. Go ahead, sell it to anybody you want. Because this. I got Skylight, ladies and gentlemen. I got Skylight.
- [175:19]
Paris Martineau
It's so funny.
- [175:24]
Leo Laporte
Thank you for joining us. We do Intelligent Machines every Wednesday, right right After Windows Weekly, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern 2020, 100 UTC. You can watch us live on all of the eight streams we stream on. For the club members, there's Club Twit, Discord, but there's also YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. Watch the show live if you wish, but you don't have to. We have on demand versions on the website at Twitter TV Im also available at YouTube. There's a dedicated channel to the video. That's a good way to share clips if you want to share a little clip with somebody. And of course after the fact, you can always download a copy using a podcast player. Best way to get it. And if you would, whatever player you use, itunes or Pocket Cast or Overcast or Android, whatever, please leave us a review. Give us a five star review. Help spread the word about the brand new version that's called Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis, emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, author who of the Gutenberg parenthesis and the Web we weave@jeffjarvis.com Such a pleasure. Thank you for being here. Richard Campbell run his radio dot com. You are a champion.
- [176:39]
Richard Campbell
Eight hours. You deserve eight hours.
- [176:42]
Leo Laporte
Have a great evening. He's.
- [176:43]
Richard Campbell
He's the Cory Booker of podcasting.
- [176:46]
Leo Laporte
That's exactly right. And to all of you who watch, especially our Club Twit members, thank you so much for being here. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machines. Bye bye. Great interview. That was good.
- [176:58]
Richard Campbell
Great having these journalists and authors were actually no things.
- [177:03]
Leo Laporte
I think it's you. In some ways it's better, isn't it?
- [177:05]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it really is. So are we still streaming?
- [177:10]
Leo Laporte
Yes. So don't say anything private.
- [177:12]
Paris Martineau
No, I have a picture of the baby to show but I'm not allowed to show it on social media.
- [177:16]
Leo Laporte
Oh, good for you. Don't. But. But as soon as we cut the stream, we will.
- [177:19]
Paris Martineau
I would love to see it. Katie just sent it to me because she says it looks like me, so I think that was funny.
- [177:26]
Leo Laporte
Richard just had his first grandchild Yay.
- [177:28]
Richard Campbell
Mazel.
- [177:29]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Exciting. We do not have grandchildren yet, right, Jeff?
- [177:34]
Richard Campbell
No.
- [177:35]
Leo Laporte
No.
- [177:35]
Richard Campbell
I thought. Well, Leo, we could try.
- [177:39]
Leo Laporte
We haven't yet. We haven't spawned any grandchildren. I don't know if we ever will, to be honest.
- [177:45]
Paris Martineau
No surprises.
- [177:46]
Leo Laporte
I don't know if I ever will. Let's put it that way.
- [177:48]
Richard Campbell
So I might not be here next week.
- [177:50]
Leo Laporte
Week. Okay, let us know. I know.
- [177:52]
Richard Campbell
I know.
- [177:52]
Leo Laporte
You're trying to get out of it.
- [177:54]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I'm trying to get out. I don't want to go, but.
- [177:55]
Leo Laporte
But just let us know. And we do have Paris back.
- [177:58]
Richard Campbell
Yep.
- [177:58]
Leo Laporte
And who knows, maybe Richard will make his return appearance. I try not to do that to you, but it was really nice to have you. Thank you.
- [178:07]
Paris Martineau
That was really fun. I really enjoyed myself. And thanks for getting. I love being. You know. The interview was fantastic.
- [178:13]
Leo Laporte
Isn't she great?
- [178:13]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, you were. And you were great to have on with her because you brought more perspective.
- [178:17]
Leo Laporte
Because of the Microsoft.
- [178:18]
Paris Martineau
The Microsoft angle. Definitely. Later.
- [178:20]
Richard Campbell
All right, time for dinner. Bye. Bye.
- [178:23]
Leo Laporte
Bye, guys. Take care.
- [178:24]
Keech Hagee
Thanks, Richard.
- [178:25]
Paris Martineau
Do you want this picture, Leo?
- [178:27]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Okay. Wait a minute. Thank you, everybody. Before you do that, I have to do my goodbyes and then I will. I will stay on Y amigo.
- [178:35]
Richard Campbell
Hasta la vista, baby.
- [178:38]
Leo Laporte
We say goodbye.
- [178:39]
Richard Campbell
Love you.
- [178:39]
Leo Laporte
Bye. Bye. Exit stage left. Bye for now. Thanks, everybody. See you next time. Oh, tomorrow. Chris Marquardt, photo time.
- [178:48]
Paris Martineau
Bye.
- [178:49]
Leo Laporte
Okay, now stop. Can you stop the streams without hanging up?
- [178:53]
Keech Hagee
I'm gonna stop the stream, but I need to start the recording again because.
- [178:57]
Leo Laporte
I'm not a human being, not into this animal scene. I'm an intelligent machine.
- [179:07]
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- [179:37]
Leo Laporte
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