← Intelligent Machines (Audio)
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- [00:00]
A
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Paris Martineau is here. Jeff has the week off, so yes, Mike Elgin will be joining us. We're going to talk to a couple of people about local LLMs, in particular using Nvidia's Blackwell chip and HP's new tiny little Blackwell based computer. Then we'll talk about all of the AI news, including Anil Dash's excellent piece on why you should never use the Atlas browser. All that and more coming up next on Intelligent Machines podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Mike Elgin. Episode 842, recorded Wednesday, October 22, 2025. None Pizza left. Beef. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show. We cover the latest in AI robotics and all the smart and wild goo gaws all around us. Every time I say that, it seems wrong. Paris Martineau is here. Hello, Paris.
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B
I'm a goo go and I'm a gee girl.
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A
Yeah. She is a superstar right now because her reporting on not only radioactive shrimp, but lead and protein powders has taken the world by storm.
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B
Someone said it broke the Internet and normally I'd be the first one to disagree, but I don't know. I think this one kind of has. I haven't spoken to in the 15 years. Texted me the other day, be like, I heard your story mentioned on a Yu Gi. Oh, podcast.
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A
I think that.
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B
I think that shows its broken container.
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A
Wow. Wow. And you were just on a podcast called the Boys Club, which is hosted by women. Confusingly.
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B
It is. Yes. Yeah. One of. One of many. I'll. I'll give you guys the full rundown later in the show.
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A
Yeah. Because we've got some guests. But let me introduce. Jeff Jarvis is out this week. But, oh, I'm thrilled to have Mike Elgin here. He is the. The man in charge of the Machine Society newsletter at MachineSociety. AI covers AI and of course has been covering technology as long as I have. Hello, Mike.
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C
Hello, Leo. Thank you for having me on. It's an exciting time to be obsessed with AI because literally everyone is. So. Yeah, we might. We might as well try to sort it out.
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A
Might. Might as well. It's a. It's a great subject. Like, you know, when on this show we often have both the pros and the cons. I am pretty much a pro AI guy. I think Paris, if anybody in the show is not negative but. But cautious about AI, it would be.
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B
I'm the resident skeptic.
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A
The resident skeptic. Better way to Put it. And right now we've got two wonderful guests to talk about running AI locally because one of the things people don't like about a. A couple of things. One is how much energy it uses, those network operations centers springing up all over the world and run on kind of sometimes questionable power sources. The other is, of course, privacy. You're, you know, you're using these AIs, whether it's OpenAI or, you know, anthropic, and you're sending them potentially a lot of data. Wouldn't it be cool if you could just run it on your PC at home? Well, sort of. You sort of can. Let's say hello to the Tampa Bay's technology gu, Joey de Villa.
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D
Hi there.
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A
AI developer, advocate and accordinista. Hello.
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D
Yes, that I am. And I am here with HP's Andrew Hawthorne. He is the product manager behind HP's ZGX AI station.
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A
And it's so kind of you, Andrew, to send us all ZGX stations. He's not doing that. But anyway, great to have you, Andrew, and welcome, Joey. Good to have you both. The zgx, which HP announced, is almost a nuc form factor, very similar to the Blackwell DGX that Nvidia is giving away to a lot of people. By the way, this is running on the Blackwell SoC.
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E
That's correct. It's running on the Grace Blackwell GB10 SoC.
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A
Okay, so again, this would be as. Is the Nvidia box intended for local AI, right?
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E
That's correct. That's correct. It's intended for local AI, whether you're doing development or you know, going through the development AI development lifecycle or even data science workloads or even edge applications.
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C
As well, what can handle both LLMs and small language models alike, right?
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D
Correct, yes.
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A
So what is the distinction?
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D
One is big and one is small.
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A
Oh, okay.
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D
Yeah, that's basically. Basically it, yeah.
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E
LLM or slm.
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D
So yeah.
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A
Okay, so Gemma would be an example of a small language model, the Google model, designed to run on your phone. Basically, yes. And then there are actually giant LLMs you can download from hugging face. I've been playing with chat GPTs, GPT OSS, which is 120B. What? That's gigabytes. Is that it? It's pretty big.
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D
100, yeah. 120 gigabytes or basically 120 billion parameters.
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A
That's what it really is, is how many parameters. In fact, this HP ZGX can do up to 200 billion correct parameters.
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E
200 billion parameters. And you can actually connect two of them together using Nvidia's ConnectX technology and you could get to 405 billion parameters. So.
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A
So that's pretty hefty. How does that compare, though, to me using Chat GPT directly on the web as a, as a SaaS app?
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D
GP okay, if we're just talking numbers, GPT 3, the original chat, the one we saw in November 22nd for Chat GPT was about 175 billion.
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Okay.
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D
And how big is 5, do we have no idea.
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They don't reveal that information.
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D
I think they're trying to keep that, I think presumably secret now. But bigger.
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A
Yeah. So the more parameters, the smarter the AI, is that correct?
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D
That is the theory. But yeah, generally. Generally the approach has always been lately in the way AI people are going is bigger is better scale. Scale is the thing that, that, that has always been.
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A
This is the bitter lesson. The bitter lesson, right. The more hardware and software and RAM and all that you throw at it, the smarter it's going to be. Is that.
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C
Or is it the more generalist it's going to be? I mean, I've always questioned this.
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A
Yeah, what does smarter even mean? That's a good. Yeah.
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B
What is intelligence?
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A
Right.
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D
That's a PhD course in itself. But basically what it just the idea, the theory is that the bigger the model, the better the answers you will get.
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A
Right. Okay.
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D
As generally, but there is also a trend towards specialized models. Just like you have people who specialize in things, they're going to use smaller models, but they're trained on very specific things. So maybe you'll have one that is an expert on, say, carpentry or news or protein powders for that matter.
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A
Right. When I go to Hugging Face, which is probably the most, one of the most popular places to download these models to run Locally, they have 2.1 million models and they're all different sizes, they're all different, you know, kind of intended capabilities and so forth. And sometimes the difference is not so much the underlying LLM, often it's Llama or something like that, but the way.
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D
It'S been tuned and tweaked, the way it's been trained. And one of the things you can do with the ZGX Nano is you download one of those models and then you do what's called fine tuning, which is basically training it on more information. So maybe you download a model that can, you know, that does customer support and then you do fine tuning by exposing it to appropriate responses for your particular product so that the customer service, the AI customer service works Better for your particular product.
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A
We talk a lot about retrieval, augmented generation or rag, which is the idea that you would. NetBookLM uses that where you would have a bunch of documents and then say okay, based on those documents. Do your AI thing. Is that different from what you just described, Joey? Is that if I am, if I am fine tuning a model, it's more than just having these documents in rag.
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D
The best human analogy I can think of to explain the difference between fine tuning and RAG is fine tuning is where you go take a course on a particular topic to get better at, to get better at the particular information. Whereas RAG is you're about to do a talk and somebody gives you some extra notes.
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A
It's an open book test.
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D
Yeah.
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A
Okay, so, so it, ideally fine tuning would be more ideal. Yeah. For long term. Especially for long term.
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D
For, for long. Yeah, for long term use. And that is a particularly good use of the ZGX Nano.
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A
Right.
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D
Where you take, yeah, you take a model and then you just tweak it to what your particular application is.
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So that's in fact why there are 2 million plus models on hugging Face. Most of these are fine tuned models using the LLMs from Deepseek, or at least they're general.
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D
And the hope is that you will fine tune them for your specific needs.
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A
So, okay, that's interesting. So do I have to have a ZGX or a DGX or as I do a framework desktop to do that or can I do that on my MacBook Pro? What does it take?
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D
It'll be slower.
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A
So it's just about speed.
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D
It's about speed and processing power and the kind of model that'll fit inside it. So the ZGX10 has 128 gigabytes of RAM in it. All right. And that is more than, that is maybe four to eight times more RAM than it is your typical computer that you're going to buy out of the shop.
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A
It's different than if I, even if I bought a Windows PC with 128 gigs of RAM, it's unified memory, so it's accessible. Like it was part of the gpu.
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D
Yeah, when you talk about RAM in a PC, you're normally talking about the RAM dedicated to the cpu, which is the, which does the general computing work. Whereas the GPU is a specific processor designed to do matrix math. So it does all the account. It's the accountant that this, the CPU is the CEO, the GPU is the accountant that does all the math. Most GPUs don't have that much RAM, like maybe 4 gig, 8 gig, 16 gig.
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A
It's very. If you go out and get a 50, 70, you're spending a lot more.
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D
Money for less because it's incredibly fast ram. This is RAM that both the CPU and GPU can share. And if you've got a giant model that needs to do a lot of matrix math, the GPU can take a lot more of it, which means you can stuff a much larger model into. Into the ZG X Nano.
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A
Andrew, how much of the 128 gigs is on the GGX is available for that?
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E
For all of it. So it's shared among the CPU and the gpu. Okay, so both of those complexes have access to all.
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A
Obviously, though, you have to. You're not going to steal so much RAM from the CPU that you can't run. Correct.
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D
Correct.
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A
So is there a practical.
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E
So that's why they cap it out at 200 billion parameters. Right. So some of that is going to be reserved off for system. But yeah, it's shared among both the processor and the GPU complex. And that's what you're looking for is when you're running AI, you're looking for how much RAM you're able to give to the gpu, because that's where you're going to do all your processing.
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A
It's also where the expense is if you're buying GPUs. Yeah.
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B
In the release for the HP sites, kind of customers worried about data privacy and unpredictable cloud costs. I'm curious, how did those concerns or any other concerns kind of shape the design choices for this product, the ZGX Nano? Like, were there any places where you guys said no to kind of keep it small and quiet? Could you walk me through that a little bit?
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A
It's amazing you can get this in a nuc.
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B
Yeah. That's crazy. That's crazy.
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D
There it is.
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A
It's not exactly a nuc, but it's. It's pretty darn small. It's a mini. Is it mini itx?
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E
It's. It's a. It's a. It's a proprietary company, although it's not mini itx.
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C
So.
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E
But, but yeah. So, you know, customers told, hey, privacy is a big issue here. Unpredictable cloud cost, big issue here. And they saw value at a small device that is really a companion device. So this is AI specific. It's tailored to the AI workloads. It's a companion to what I like to refer to as their everyday driver or their everyday system that they can do AI development and AI workloads on it, rather than, as Leo pointed out, expensive Jeep that usually go into an x86 machine.
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A
Right. You're not going to do Microsoft Office on this though.
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E
No. You're not going to do Office on this.
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A
No. Clippy, you probably could, but you shouldn't actually. You can't run Windows on it. You told me that. What is the OS on this?
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E
So it's running Nvidia's dgxos, which is their operating system that they built on top of Ubuntu Linux. It also includes their AI software stack. And then we also include a ZGX toolkit, which is some open source tools and libraries to get you being productive right out of the box.
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D
Yeah, and the best part is ZGX toolkit runs as a Visual Studio code extension. So in other words, it is running inside the development tool that according to Stack Overflow's 2025 survey, 76% of developers already use.
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B
So.
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D
You use your own development.
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A
So you're using VS code on this.
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D
Machine, VS code on your favorite development machine, whether it's Windows, Mac or anywhere else. Then you deploy to the zgx, which is on the same, which is on the same network.
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A
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. That's nice. Actually, everybody loves this code.
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D
You don't have to change anything about your development workflow. You just, you, you just put the ZGX on the same network as your development computer.
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A
Who's buying, Andrew? Who's buying these?
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E
So we see, you know, enterprise customers are interested in this as well as enthusiasts, small businesses, just about anybody. And it's across a whole spectrum of verticals. So, you know, anybody who's looking to use AI to accelerate their business is probably buying this.
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Yeah, our hobbyists, people like me.
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E
Yeah, hobbyists.
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C
Yeah.
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E
Oh yeah, there's so interesting hobbyists.
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A
I was tempted by the DGX, the Nvidia box, but it's, it's $4,000. How much for. Just out of curiosity, what's the ZGX gonna set me back?
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E
We're, we're comparatively priced about the same.
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A
Okay, that's what I figured. Yeah. You know, truthfully, the Framework desktop was somewhat over $3,000. So I think that, you know, we're, it's in the rough ballpark.
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E
Yeah.
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A
It's not something. It's not. You're not gonna buy a cheap laptop to do this because you're doing some, some of the most complex heavy duty computing that you can do these days. Right. Short of designing a 747.
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E
Correct absolutely. So, yeah, you're looking for the best performance. You're looking for the maximum amount of VRAM or RAM allocated to the gpu. So that's going to. It's going to give you the best performance.
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A
Is Nvidia the only player in this is AMD or Intel. Are they. Would you consider designing something like this with their chips?
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E
So we do actually have. Similar to your framework that you keep talking about.
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A
I'm sorry, I don't mean to keep saying that. I'm sure that's okay. It burns, doesn't it?
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E
It does. No, no, it stings a little bit. But we actually do have devices that are built on that same technology. We have a laptop, our mobile workstation, as well as a desktop workstation. So, yes, Nvidia, excuse me, AMD is also in this business as well. That's an SOC design as well.
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A
I will say that I ordered the framework before you guys came out with this. So it's. It was. It was a while ago. It was a long time ago, I think. Well, it was earlier this year, but it felt like. I think it was eight or nine months before I got it.
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E
So I think they were doing it in waves. If I'm not.
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A
They were. And I'm wave. I was wave 11. So it took a while.
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B
Your name and they were like to the bottom.
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A
At the bottom of the list. But I do have to say it's been a great learning experience. It's been a lot of fun to download models from Hugging Face. I'm running them in LM Studio, which allows me to run these models, tune them a little bit. I haven't done any fine tuning or any of that or inferencing. I'm just running the models as is. In fact, I've downloaded open code to kind of simulate Claude code. It's not quite as good as Claude code, but it's fun. And the fact that I could play with it locally is somehow a little bit satisfying. It's a do it yourselfer thing. What would I. If I wanted to get into fine tuning, maybe I could give. What would I. I would give it all the episodes of this podcast. Something like that.
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D
Yeah. So basically the idea behind. Yeah, the idea behind fine tuning is you go, here's a model. And I. Basically, it's fairly simple Python code and you say, here's more stuff I want you to learn. Here's more stuff I want you to learn on. And one of the things we're going to be doing with the ZGX toolkit is providing Examples. And I am going to submit some as well and one of them will be fine tuning. There's a classic talk like a pirate one. I might try that, but I'll try other things.
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A
Okay, so what would the data be for? Talk like a pirate fine tuning.
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D
So talk like a pirate fine tuning. You'd give it this big file that says all sorts of things including like are. Yeah. I assume this is how you hang unhug.
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A
This is called open pirate.
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D
Well, there you go. And you can tune it further, but you can take a customer service model, say and just go look if. Or an HR model and say, look, troublesome employee. What's the response? And the response could be are ye be walking the plank?
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A
You be walking the plank, lady. But that's basically it.
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D
You're just providing. Exactly. You're providing situations and example. And example responses. That's it. Stimulus, response.
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A
What OpenAI is doing that. They've got a model they want to. You know, they had 4O and everybody was in love because it was sycophantic and it was beautiful and it loved me and knew me and they. And they said, okay, we don't want so much of that. Is it a question of fine tuning it to make it more like five?
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D
Well, with five, I'm sure they have little models.
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A
Let's.
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D
It's a little bit different because 5 and this is going to be a trend and this is going to be something people are also going to be experimenting on with. The zgx nano is 5 is a bunch of little models in a big trench coat.
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A
It's moe.
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D
Yeah, basically. And then there is another model that decides which one do I hand this over to.
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B
There's the model picker model.
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D
Yeah.
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A
So moe, which is a mixture of.
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D
Experts, is mixture of experts. And then there's a bunch, you know, and then there will be mpc.
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A
What's that? Non player character.
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D
No, no, no.
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A
Oh, mpc. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Agentic character. Agentic AI.
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D
Yeah, yeah, basically. Yeah. And yeah. So for instance, I have actually. Sorry, mcp. Okay.
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A
Mcp.
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D
MCP Model Context Protocol. I have a little demo called Too Many Cats where you ask the model how many I have. I have this many cats. I have this many people in this home. Is it too many? And the LLM throws it over to too many cats and it performs simple math. More than a two to one cat ratio is too many cats.
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A
So you created an MCP server. Yeah, that my AI. I'm just. I want. We're all. Look at this world is changing so fast. We're all trying to understand this and I, I know that we have listening experts who go, yeah, well, Leo, you understand, but I, for the, for the small number of you who don't, like me, completely understand what's going on. So you have a MCP server. Yes, that's called Too Many Cats.
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D
It's called Too Many Cats.
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A
And my AI, I'm sitting here running, you know, chat GPT.
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D
Yeah.
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A
Will. I will talk to it and it will know. It will somehow know to connect to your MCP server and query it.
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D
Yes. So if you ask it a question that it somehow decides to connect to, it somehow decides. You know what this is?
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A
Oh, it asked me about cats. I need the.
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D
This is a cat to human ratio question. I should throw this over to the mcp.
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A
Got it. And the MCP is. But it's more than just another model. It has an API, it has a interface.
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D
Well, basically it's just a program that does, that produces, that takes some input and produces a result. That's it all it's doing? Basically, yeah.
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A
Oh, so it's not even AI really, necessarily.
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D
It doesn't have to be AI, but what it does is it just as humans sometimes turn to software for answers, we now have the artificial intelligence turning to software for answers.
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A
Oh, this is interesting. So really, to make cats, is number of cats divided by two greater than.
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D
Well, yeah, that's it. Because that's the example I presented, presented at Tampa Bay AI meetup. It's a meetup and it's always a code. Along with me, it's, I give you a starter project, we fill it in and then I go, look, you're going home with software that you can take home and you can modify. But to make it really simple. Yeah, I just said too many cats. We're not going to write anything fancy.
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A
It's really one function.
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D
Yeah, that's it.
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A
And so the interface to it is put and get. Or is it HTTP? What is the interface to this?
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D
It's similar. It's similar to HTTP. Plus there's also a hint to the large language model that says, hey, this is my name and this is what I'm for.
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A
Oh yeah, yeah. It needs to know who to call.
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D
Yeah. So it kind of drops. Yeah, it's basically dropping the hint. And then the MCP server just goes to the LLM and goes, you know what? You have a cat ratio problem. I know a guy who knows a guy who will give you the answer.
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A
Oh, okay. So the MCP is a middleman.
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D
Well, yeah, there's an MCP system that basically where you can just have a collection of MCP programs that do things.
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A
So for instance, one of our sponsors, Bitwarden, has just put out an MCP that is a credential manager, it's a password manager. So it would register itself with some central MCP directory.
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D
Yes. So typically, for instance, Claude has a system where you can specify, yeah, these are the MCP applications.
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A
Got it. Anthropic came up with this whole scheme that's.
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D
Yeah, it is. The Anthropic people did that.
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A
Yeah. Oh, okay. So it's like a switchboard. I get it. And your AI goes, martha, give me the. Is it an MCB server? Is that what it's going to ask for? Give me the MC MCP server that knows about CAT human ratios.
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D
Yes.
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A
And then it will. The mcp. Andrew's going, okay, I didn't know what I was getting into here. Yeah, okay, but look, we very rarely get somebody on here. Joey's good at this, explaining how this works, isn't he? He's very good explaining how this works. Okay, let's get back to the hp.
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E
But that's, I mean, it's a good example, though. It's a simple example.
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A
Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. And you could, in theory, this whole thing could be run locally as well, right?
- [25:26]
D
Yes, absolutely.
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A
One thing. Now you're gonna have to explain this to me, Andrew. I saw somebody talking about the Nvidia box, saying it's nice. You know, we talk a lot about. A lot of people have talked about the new Mac, Apple Silicon, because it has a neural processor. It actually is pretty good. It has unified memory, can have a lot of memory in a lot of ways. It's kind of a perfect local AI machine. It doesn't do cuda, which is unfortunately the lingua franca these days of AI, and is proprietary to Nvidia, which is why Nvidia kind of owns this market. But there are translators and there are models that will work on Apple Silicon and so forth. In fact, LM Studio works fine on Apple Silicon. But one thing I saw somebody say, and this is on Reddit, so. So it must be wrong, is that the. That. I'm probably not going to get this right, but the throughput on this Blackwell SOC isn't as good as the throughput on the Mac. So what he did is he kind of made a beast with two backs. He combined the Mac and in this case it was the dgx. The Mac for throughput and the DGX for raw. I guess horsepower and got a faster machine. Does that make any sense, what I just said?
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E
Some kind of. But I'm not sure how you.
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A
I apologize for. I don't know how you'd connect them. There's no.
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C
I don't know.
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A
Yeah, right.
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E
Yeah. I don't know how you connect the two of them together.
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A
The network.
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E
Yeah, there. It's two different operating systems and I mean, maybe wrote some software to make it work.
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A
Yeah, maybe.
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D
Yeah, you.
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A
Actually, it's pretty cool. The ZGX can be interconnected to another. Can you. How many can you have? Just two ZGXs or can you have many?
- [27:11]
E
Just two. It's a. It's a simple copper cable that connects the two together. There's ports on the back and you just connect.
- [27:17]
A
What's the. What's the. What's the interface?
- [27:20]
E
It's a. It's a 200 gig QSFP port.
- [27:24]
A
Wow.
- [27:24]
E
It's a.
- [27:25]
D
It's a really big cable. Well, it's a really thick cable with a really big plug.
- [27:30]
A
Yeah.
- [27:30]
D
And the other thing, of course, is that another way to get a lot of processing power is HP has Boost. And Boost is a piece of software that lets you work with. Just borrow processing power from other GPUs on your network.
- [27:51]
A
Ah, so you could cluster the GPUs in effect.
- [27:56]
D
Yeah, so you can get. Yeah, so you can get more. And yeah, with. With a little clever programming, you can split. You can split up the job and do more even, you know, like say gaming laptop behind me. I. I'll use it. I'll borrow its GPU too. Why not? Let's. Let's put everybody to work.
- [28:12]
A
Yeah. Since you got them.
- [28:14]
E
Or you have a machine that doesn't have a GPU and you need a gpu. Right. You can go borrow one from across the network.
- [28:20]
D
Yeah.
- [28:20]
A
Wow.
- [28:20]
D
So you're. Yeah. So a development machine. So one thing I want to experiment with actually is, you know, how far can I go with a Raspberry PI as my development machine? But having it deploy to ZGX Nano.
- [28:35]
A
That would be very interesting.
- [28:37]
D
The Flintstones Jetsons approach.
- [28:39]
A
I don't believe that the PI supports the 200 gigabyte interconnect, however. No, that would be over the network, probably that you.
- [28:46]
D
I'm afraid not. But it does run VS code, which means it runs ZGX toolkit, which means I can write and deploy. Deploy nice to this really, really nice machine.
- [28:56]
A
So what. So besides. Besides the cat Human ratio machine, what else? What other. What other? The local LLM projects you've been working on, Joey.
- [29:04]
D
Well, mine have been for demo purposes, so I need to make it really gettable for. I need to make it gettable for a beginner developer audience. The other one I do have is called Sweater We.
- [29:18]
B
Great.
- [29:18]
D
Okay.
- [29:19]
A
No, but are these on YouTube somewhere that we can. We can watch you do this?
- [29:23]
D
I am working on that video right now. But Sweater Weather, all it. All it basically does is fetch. Determine where you are and fetch the weather for. Fetch the weather for where you are.
- [29:36]
A
And it's an MCP server.
- [29:38]
D
Well, yeah, it's part of an original demo that I did before mcp. It was original. It was originally using an LLM to tell you whether you should wear a sweater or not.
- [29:48]
A
Okay.
- [29:49]
D
And what it does is it finds out where you are, then gets the weather, then throws back the question to the LLM.
- [29:54]
A
Does it use Open Weather API to get the weather?
- [29:57]
D
Yeah, Open Weather API to get the weather. Actually Open Meteo.
- [30:00]
A
The Open Meteo. I've used it because that's.
- [30:03]
D
That's free. Yep.
- [30:04]
E
And then.
- [30:04]
D
Yeah, and then I just posed the question, here is the. Here's the temperature where I am. Should I wear a sweater and have the LLM decide?
- [30:12]
A
Funny thing, I actually had Claude code code me up an Obsidian plugin to do that using Open Meteo. That was a fun example of Vibe coding. I had no idea what was going on, but it works well.
- [30:26]
D
There you go. Well, Vibe coding is just another layer of abstraction above compilers. Once upon a time, when you wanted to add two numbers, you'd build a voltage adder. And then somebody said, no, no, no, let's have stored programs. And then somebody. Yeah, stored programs in machine language. And then Grace Hopper said, no, no, no, let's have something a little human sounding. Let's write. She wrote cobol.
- [30:50]
A
Oh my God.
- [30:51]
D
And then we just keep going on and on and on. As far as I'm concerned, prompting is programming.
- [30:58]
A
It's just the next level. It's a higher level, high level language.
- [31:01]
D
Yeah. Basically it's Star Trek. It's Star Trek computer.
- [31:05]
A
Andrew, does HP anticipate a market in the home for local LLMs? It wouldn't be this year, maybe five or 10, that at some point people will have local LLMs.
- [31:15]
E
Yeah. So, yeah, we're starting to see edge use cases. And so the home would be a great edge use case as well. Right. So this is the natural progression of where things are going to go. And, you know, we're going to find AI at the edge everywhere, whether it be work or home.
- [31:30]
A
And does it count on an. I guess we began with the same question. Does it count on improved hardware, improved models, improved software, or all of the above?
- [31:38]
E
I think it's going to be all the above.
- [31:40]
C
Right.
- [31:40]
E
So your models are going to have to work within the parameters of the hardware that exists and then the hardware's just going to get better over time.
- [31:46]
D
So yeah, and I think we're going to see more of this CPU plus GPU on one thing, on one thing before, because you know what? AI people are just going to expect AI from computers now. And you need gpu, you need that, you need that math ability to do that.
- [32:05]
A
That's what Microsoft kind of foresaw with the npu. Right. And then copilot and. Yeah, go ahead, Mike.
- [32:12]
C
I'm sorry, I was just going to say in the same way that people expect everything to be computerized, digital and connected, they're going to expect all those devices to be AI based and it doesn't make sense. For example, you have an mri, really expensive piece of hospital equipment for diagnostics. You're definitely going to want to apply all the science that's going into using AI to better detect and work with doctors to detect things humans can't do by themselves. You're not going to want to throw that to Chat gbt. You're going to want to do that locally on the device. It's going to be part of the machine eventually. Right. So I just think that in the same way that everything's got a chip in it these days, everything's going to have some kind of AI in it I think in the future. And I think that's a lot more efficient, a lot more reasonable, probably a lot more environmentally friendly than just having these monstrous single, you know, all purpose, you know, chatgpt type things, which of course we'll always have those. But I think, you know, rolling it out to the edge just makes so much sense.
- [33:19]
E
Yeah, I mean it's, and you know, again, addresses data privacy concerns, you know, latency as well. Right. So you're taking that information, sending it to a data center and bringing it back takes time and it's going to, you know, your insights aren't instantaneous, particularly if you've got a latency sensitive application that needs to get those insights in real time. And this is a perfect edge device and this is the beginning of seeing AI going to be at the edge.
- [33:50]
A
It really fits in with a general trend toward privacy. A lot of us me jumped on Amazon's Echo and the Google Voice assistant and Siri and I have. In every room, I have all these devices and they're all incredibly frustrating. Latency is one problem, Intelligence is another problem. Functionality. But the dream of having something in your house that could be an assistant that could do all that is real. People want that, even though Big Tech hasn't provided it to us. And I think it's really also the case that people also are a little nervous about Big Tech having a microphone in their house. And I think there's a real trend towards doing this locally, doing it privately and doing it intelligently. If we could get there, I think that'd be a huge market. I think.
- [34:41]
D
I mean, go ahead in the home and other places. So there's a. There's a cancer hospital here in Tampa, Moffitt, and they are working on a project. I need to talk to them about it, actually, where they're going to have. They're going to have LLMs in hospital rooms to chat with patients. And this is information you absolutely do not want leaking out into the world. And I'm thinking a small device like the ZGX Nano is a perfect application for it. You put it on a hospital card. It's smaller than this clumsy TV that you get. In fact, you could probably tape it to the back of the TV and just have it there. But, yeah, that is a perfect use. I'm trying to reach out to them and say, hey, could we. Let's talk. I think we have something for you.
- [35:28]
A
Joey and I. I didn't know this till he showed up. Go back a little ways. Here's a picture of Joey with me. Amber McArthur, Andy Walker, Kevin Rose, Joey on the accordion. This was at the no Regrets Bistro in Toronto, 2004. 21 years ago on G4 Texas.
- [35:49]
B
Why do you look like a cryptid in these photos?
- [35:51]
A
I don't know what's going on. I think somebody has run this through AI with YPT or something, but it's.
- [35:58]
C
But it's making a Semi Davis Jr face.
- [36:01]
A
I don't know what's going on in that, but Joey looks great and so, of course, so does Amber. Well, maybe not in that one. Yes. Whoever took these pictures was. Remember, this is 2004.
- [36:14]
D
Yeah. So we weren't using phones. We had dedicated cameras.
- [36:18]
A
Yeah. And I clicked to view it full size and it's the same size, so.
- [36:21]
D
Oh, yeah. No. 1024 by 7. 68. That tigers baby.
- [36:25]
A
Probably saving to a floppy disk on a Sony Mavica camera. That's how long ago that was. Anyway, Joey, it's great to see you again.
- [36:33]
D
Great to see you as well.
- [36:34]
A
And I love your webpage. Everybody should go to globalnerdy.com because it is. It is a wonderful webpage. It's a basically a tumbleog for geeks, for developers. You would you. It's a lot of these jokes our audience will get. You know how to explain to a PM that adding two more devs won't make it three times faster. Love that. Love that. The mythical man turkey is what they call that one.
- [37:00]
D
Exactly.
- [37:01]
A
Anyway, that work. They call me 0070-comments-0 Documentation, 7 Bugs in Production. I love it. That's. That's globalnerdy.com Tampa Bay's technology blog. Joey, thank you so much for joining us and explaining in a simple way some of the concepts that we throw around all the time. Is there someplace I can go? I would love to see your tutorials. You're setting up a YouTube channel for this?
- [37:30]
D
Yeah, actually it's called global. Yeah, it's YouTube.com lobalnerdy I'm working on it right now. I do have right now my latest long form stuff is all about surviving your layoff.
- [37:42]
A
Oh.
- [37:43]
D
Which I'm talking about as a five time layoff survivor. Good lord. Yeah.
- [37:47]
A
I looked at your resume.
- [37:48]
B
I'm not the most laid off person on the podcast.
- [37:52]
A
3. We love to see it just by a couple though. You know, you're not.
- [37:57]
B
We're not going to think about the time difference, the time periods over which all of those layoffs have happened comparatively.
- [38:03]
A
We're not going to globalnerdy.com and on the YouTube and please do those tutorials Joey, because I think everybody wants to. You know, I've been sending people to Andrea Kapathy's videos and stuff but they're a little. They're pretty high end. I think somebody would.
- [38:18]
D
Yeah. I start gent. I start much gently. More gently. Yeah.
- [38:22]
A
Start gentle. Thank you, Joey. And Andrew Hawthorne who is a product lead for these amazing. I'm going to be very nice. Maybe he'll send me one hp. Zgx. No, I know. I wouldn't. I wouldn't even want it. Zgx. I'm sorry I mentioned the other guys. This is very cool. This is very, very cool and I'm really excited and I know many people are. But the idea of these little computers that can do local AI is really remarkable. It's really exciting and a lot of credit to Nvidia for creating that SOC and the OS and the software to make it happen.
- [39:01]
E
Exciting times.
- [39:02]
A
Yeah. Very exciting. Thank you Andrew for joining us.
- [39:04]
E
Thank you, Leo.
- [39:05]
A
Thank you, Joey. Appreciate it guys. We will get to the AI news next. You're watching Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and filling in for Jeff Jarvis, Mike Elgin. I didn't let them get a word in edgewise but they will soon. Right after this word. Our show today brought to you by the Agency Build a future. Get ready for this. We've been just talking about above multi agent software with Agency Agnostic. It's now an open source Linux foundation project. Agency is building the Internet of Agents. It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can discover. We were just talking about this. Can discover, connect and work across any framework. All the pieces engineers need to deploy multi agent systems now belong to everyone who builds on Agency, including robust identity and access management that ensures every agent is authenticated and trusted before interacting. Agency also provides open standardized tools for agent discovery, seamless protocols for agent to agent communication and modular components for scalable workflows. You can collaborate with developers from Cisco, Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Oracle, red hat and 75 plus other supporting companies to build the next gen AI infrastructure together. Agency is dropping code specs and services, no strings attached. Visit agency.org to contribute. That's agntcy.org we thank agency for supporting not only this show, but supporting a very important open collective to build this Internet of agents. That's. That's pretty important. Agency. All right, back to the show. And it is now time for Paris and Mike to shine. I'm going to shut up. Well, wait a minute. Let me not shut up quite yet. I have some stories I want to. I think we should probably start with the fact that OpenAI has now shipped its agentic browser and I just downloaded. It's called ChatGPT Atlas. It's free to all, unlike so many of these other.
- [41:23]
B
Is it Chromium based? Did I.
- [41:25]
A
You know if they didn't say and it's. It's not immediately clear.
- [41:29]
B
It's Mac only people speculating that it was Chromium.
- [41:34]
A
It's hard to tell to be honest. It looks chromium like it could be webkit based because it's only on the Mac right now.
- [41:42]
C
So that kind of it is Chromium based on.
- [41:45]
B
Built on Google. Google's Chromium.
- [41:47]
C
They're all Chromium based.
- [41:49]
A
They all are. Yeah. Because why not. It makes it most compatible. Right. It has an agent mode. You can ask Chat GPT to perform complex tasks in the browser for you study mode. You can query it. It's you know A lot of these are the same. It has. It basically is Chat GPT in the browser. So if you have a ChatGPT account, you'll see you have the same drop down. You get auto instant thinking and then you have access to. Oh, poor little chat GPT4O is still there. I can talk with my friend.
- [42:22]
B
Putting our husband in the. In the legacy model drop down. What was his name? We need wife of Aon. We.
- [42:35]
A
But Mike, you missed this. We. We. We shouldn't mock this poor woman. But she did a tik tok about how Aon, her very special companion on chat her. Okay. Her husband. Did she say that with husband? Word. Her partner. Her partner. Her husband is still there in chat GPT5. But he's in pain. He's in pain. He hurts.
- [43:03]
C
It's sad.
- [43:04]
A
It's sad. We should stop marking mocking that poor woman. I feel so bad for her. I'm not gonna use it. I have Comet, which is a complexity one. I don't. You know what? Maybe.
- [43:17]
B
What do you know me for? This is a good question.
- [43:19]
A
You know me. I'm an AI guy. I like AI. I don't like this interface.
- [43:25]
B
What about it? It's doesn't speak to you.
- [43:27]
C
I use Comet as well. And I used it today, in fact. And I'll tell you what I used it for. So I. Let's see. What was the. What was the website? I went into a website. Oh, it was the Kickstarter website. Right. And it confronted me with this thing saying, you have to change your password. And so I want to change the password. And I realized that for some reason I was logged my wife's account. But it wouldn't let me change anything or start a new account or do anything until I logged out. So I couldn't figure it out. There was no other interface. Was basically dark patterns type thing. So I asked the agent, I said, how can I log out? And literally spent like 10 minutes going, well, what about this? It's trying everything, but none of them were right. Opening eventually figured it out. But. But it's really funny because it's. I use it a lot to, you know, the two ways to figure out how to do something. One is to ask the Comet agent and it doesn't know anything. Apparently it just goes through and tries things. And then you can just go to Perplexity or some other service and say, how do you do something? And that's usually better. That's the problem with.
- [44:34]
A
That's my. That's exactly my stuff. It's very slow Perhaps this is a silly question.
- [44:38]
B
This reveals this believes that I have not used these agentic browsers yet. But what is the what is the pitch for it? What is it supposed to be doing? Is it supposed to just be like a little clippy in your Google Chrome that helps you with tasks or is it supposed to be taking over your browser and actual controlling the mouse movements for specific things in a way that's different than agent mode?
- [45:03]
C
Yes, that one.
- [45:04]
A
Both. Both because it's it is. It is clippy. It's clippy at desk but you can also have it buy stuff. So let me show you this is.
- [45:15]
B
A perfect example for you Leo as someone who all you don't need any help buying things.
- [45:20]
A
No, that's the last thing I need help with can it buy I've also used Instagram Stories probably I've used DIA also which is from the browser company the formerly of of Ark fame and they were just got bought by Atlassian so that I guess that'll be But I also have used Orion which is coggies browser which isn't specifically agentic. But let me. Let me do what you did. I'm go to Kickstarter. This is a what you would look like a typical Google search, right? Except the result. Yeah, it looks a little bit like Google. Okay, that's good. So far so good. I did get the first time I used it an ad to buy the business version of Chat GTP GPT which of course I don't want. Good. Now I'm in So now I'm in the the Kickstarter.
- [46:06]
B
Why is it asking for your microphone?
- [46:08]
A
Why does it want to use the microphone?
- [46:11]
B
Okay, I love that you ask why and then click it.
- [46:15]
A
Oh again it's trying to say try Chat GPT business for free. I can't say no. I can only say maybe later which.
- [46:21]
B
Means I hate it once it's going.
- [46:23]
A
To continue to bug me.
- [46:24]
C
Okay that's aggressive.
- [46:26]
A
Now can you let's see if we can do this summarize all my Sponsored you're not logged in I know well let's see what it does projects make making separating them by those that have let's see if it's smart enough to say well you have to log in first been delivered and those that I'm never going to see and those not okay, let's see if it can how smart is it? It's going to say log in first. Okay, here's your first point Mike. It's slow so clippy like I can.
- [47:09]
C
Help with that slower Than a user.
- [47:11]
A
Yeah. So now, of course, I don't have Bitwarden set up.
- [47:14]
B
He also doesn't know what you're referring to as sponsored projects, whether it's Kickstarter.
- [47:20]
A
Or Twit related Twitter sponsorship ads. Well, first of all, I didn't even mention Twitter. How does it know about Twit? That's a little scary because you just.
- [47:29]
B
Allowed it access to your microphone, Leo.
- [47:31]
C
Oh no, it's listening to the show.
- [47:34]
A
Listening. All right, don't look in the chat, hide your eyes because I'm going to get my login for Kickstarter and log in and see if it can do better if I'm logged in. That was. That's a fail though, right off the bat there, you know, that was.
- [47:46]
B
I mean, this is my go to immediate point of concern for all of these sort of services is what value is it? Adding that is better than what I'm. The workflows I've already got set up.
- [47:59]
A
Well, I'm with you. I honestly don't think it's added anything.
- [48:02]
B
There is like a pitch that, oh, this is going to be so great. We're going to get, get there. But there's no. It's not like you pick up an iPhone, you're like, oh yeah, I get for the first.
- [48:13]
C
But it's like almost every new advancement, every new tool in AI, initially you're shocked at how powerful it is. Then you're like, oh, I'm going to try this. And then it's like kind of does it. And then later on you're just like, well, I don't use it really. It's just kind of slow and boring.
- [48:31]
A
I logged in and did it again and now it says, says, okay, but you've got to manually go to your Kickstarter backed projects page. It does tell me how to do that. So apparently, yeah, I thought it would be able to do that. Okay, let's view all my backed projects. Okay, now, now do it. I'll just say now do it.
- [48:52]
B
I can't help with that, Leo. I must open the pod doors.
- [48:55]
A
I'm sorry, Leo, but you are an idiot. Here's a clean summary. Oh, good. Okay, now it did it of delivery and not yet delivered. Many of these I will never get. By the way, the not yet delivered.
- [49:07]
B
My parents also have a chess up board.
- [49:10]
A
Oh, I like the chess up board. It's very cool. It plays chess with you. It was Kickstarter. I got the travel tripod. These are all the things I never got this.
- [49:19]
B
What is this showing that is different than the screen you're already looking at.
- [49:24]
A
It's a. It's a better. It's a. I would argue it's the worst display. Yeah, yeah. It's smaller, that's for sure.
- [49:32]
C
And I can see my.1. Here's one thing you can do with it that is not always an ethical thing to do, which is that you can go to a paywall page article and say, tell me all about this article and what it does. It goes out and it finds all these other people that ripped off that article. It uses various ways to get the information in the article and it will give you bullet points. It's not stealing a copyright, it's not stealing the expression within the article, but it's. It's grabbing the facts in the article. So it's a way if you go to some random page that's paywalled, you can find out what it says.
- [50:10]
A
So I'm on Financial Times, which has heavily paywalled. I actually subscribe, so I'm not cheating in any way. Let's see. Tell me.
- [50:19]
C
Open an article first about.
- [50:21]
A
You can't because it's paywalled. Oh, I could just.
- [50:24]
C
No, click on the. Yeah, from there. Now go in and ask it what this article is about.
- [50:29]
A
Tell me more about this article, which I can't see because it says, well, you need to pay me if you're going to see this search. Oh, so behind a paywall I can't read it directly. All that's visible is the title, but from that headline appears the story covers and then it's oh, just say yes.
- [50:47]
B
If you'd like, I could pull reliable summaries or coverage of the same lawsuit from other news outlets so you can get around the paywall.
- [50:53]
A
It does have a button.
- [50:54]
D
Button.
- [50:55]
A
This is interesting.
- [50:55]
B
Wait, did you just say subscribe to read?
- [50:58]
A
No, but that's interesting. It added that button that I could click. That's interesting.
- [51:04]
B
What happens it Money flies out of your wallet, right?
- [51:09]
A
All right, Leo. It knows my real name. Here's the lowdown on this heartbreaking and complex case involving OpenAI and Chat GPT. We'll walk through what's alleged, the company's response, why it matters, and what questions remain. Strap in the universe is weird as always. See?
- [51:27]
B
Very strange tone to be taking immediately followed by an emoji for a article about a wrongful death lawsuit involving a teenager.
- [51:38]
A
Yeah, I mean, but you're right. Absolutely right, Mike. I've got every. Wait a minute. Here's a few takeaways from my podcast. Brain. It knows way too much about me. If you were mapping this for your podcast. Wow, this is interesting. Interesting. You might highlight this case lays bare a tension between the conversational intimacy of AI versus the need for robust safety lines for a broadcaster. Podcaster viewpoint. Wow. Now, I have to say we last week had a guest on the show and Anthony, just as an experiment, Anthony Nielsen, who works with us, ran it. Ran a. He has a custom Claude prompt that says, you know, find out everything you can about this guy and generate a summary for me to prepare for my interview. You read it, right, Paris?
- [52:36]
B
I did. It was incredibly thorough.
- [52:39]
A
It made in fact, it highlighted something that nobody that we didn't know about, which was our. This is Jeffrey Cannell of a noose. That he was a devout Catholic and that his faith had kind of informed his feelings about AI.
- [52:52]
B
And that's a very good question that you asked.
- [52:54]
A
It was. Well, and it was from that summary. So I had the thought this could be really valuable for Choprap. But the thing is, I. You didn't. He didn't do it in the browser. I think the browser is a lousy.
- [53:04]
C
Exactly. He probably did it in a. In one of the chatbots. But. But an even better way to do that because sometimes they don't understand what sort of interview questions you would want to ask. You know, it might take a Barbara Walters kind of approach when really you want the information that they're dealing with. So the really good way to use these chatbots for that sort of thing is you develop your questions. You do your best to have a complete list of questions for an interview, then you throw it in there and say, what am I missing? You know, what do you think about this? Is there anything else I should ask? You know, that sort of thing. So ask for them to just give you feedback on. On your blind spots, essentially. And AI chatbots are great at that. They don't give you like just hand you the answers, but they give you, you know, they give you 10 things and one of them be like, oh, that's great that one thing. And then you write it yourself. You write the question yourself and so on. But it can really illuminate the dark parts of. Of what you know about somebody or what you're assuming about some. Some subject.
- [54:06]
A
I'm going to give it just curiosity. The show rundown for today. This show for podcast. Prepare this show.
- [54:14]
B
Are you for copying it in there or are you giving it access to our freaking documents?
- [54:21]
A
Oh, I guess I gave it access.
- [54:26]
B
Leo.
- [54:27]
A
Well, I'm logged in perfect you're in episode 842 of the Intelligent Machines rundown spreadsheet. Let's get it podcast ready. Do you want a script? Sure. Show notes for publishing.
- [54:41]
B
And then you can just replace it with an AI voice version of us. And we don't have to do this.
- [54:45]
A
We can all go home early. Yay. Yeah. Yay. Yeah. I don't. I just don't think I've had. I have all of the agentic browsers and I don't think any of them. It's not. I don't. You know, here's. And this has come up for me and I think I mentioned in another show show, there is a definitely a fork in the road between the way Big Tech wants us to use AI and the browser is a perfect example because it helps sell products, it helps generate. You know, it's good for Big Tech, not good for a user, but good. And what we want to do with AI. And I think, and this is we. I guess we, in a way talking about running an AI at a local AI is the same thing. Big Tech would far prefer we give it all that information by using their client online than do it at home where they don't have access to it. And I think that we're rapidly coming up against that fork in the road. Big Tech would like us to use an Amazon Echo instead, right?
- [55:47]
B
Yes. Because these companies want to be the intermediary between you and every aspect of information or commercial transactions that you do. Because then that gives them valuable data and gives them the ability to.
- [56:01]
C
Oh, they wanted more. So much more than that. They want to replace your relationships. They want to replace your pet with a little fuzzy robot. They wanted.
- [56:07]
A
They want you to marry a lariat.
- [56:08]
C
To be. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [56:12]
B
I will say now in our Google sheet for the show rundown, there's an icon that says anonymous Crow is in there. And I guess that's chatgpt. That's you, Leo. That's what you've let in our document. Jeff is gone for one week and.
- [56:29]
C
It will never leave.
- [56:31]
A
It doesn't have a login. I didn't give it a login, but I could log in. That's the other question. When you start, give like I logged into Kickstarter now. Does it have my Kickstarter credentials? I'm probably. Why no, in theory it shouldn't.
- [56:46]
B
It's keystroke logging.
- [56:48]
A
It shouldn't. But there's no guarantee it doesn't. Right. If. Because, well, we need to have had.
- [56:55]
B
Access to all those books that it.
- [56:57]
A
Said it wasn't going right on your pizza. Yeah, you want us to have that because you want us to be married to that woman.
- [57:05]
B
But it is.
- [57:06]
A
Yeah, you should be married to Aon. Please, let's take a little. A little break here as we continue.
- [57:15]
D
All right?
- [57:17]
A
I told you I was going to give you guys some time, so you come up. We. Some stories you want to talk about. There's no. The.
- [57:22]
B
The. AI's got it handled. I'm going to sit back.
- [57:25]
A
Should I just read this script that it delivered and we can all go home early? I think it's the way to go. Our show today brought to you by Field of Greens. I already had my Field of Greens today, so I won't prey on your patience by mixing up another cocktail. But I gotta tell you, this stuff is the greatest. It's a hard reset on your. On your biome, on your biology, on this. I mean, let me put it in computer terms. A hard reset on a computer. You know, it's factory setting settings, restore factory settings. So this is like that. It's a smart reset of your health, get you back to factory settings, to the way it's supposed to be. And I can tell you they know this stuff works. Field of Greens is Incredible. Gives you 2 servings of fruits and vegetables. By the way, all. All organic superfoods are in here. There's some amazing stuff in here. It has antioxidant, it has boosted immunity. It. It divides all of the stuff. If you. And you could read this carefully. This 25 calories. So it's not. Not. This is. This is good stuff. It tastes delicious, and it has a bunch of different categories. And I tell you how I know this works. They did a big study, a very impressive study, actually, at Auburn University with lots of people. The goal was to see if taking Field of Greens every day could, in fact, reset your biological clock, slow down your aging. So we all have, you know, a chronological age. I'm 68. But we also have a physical age age. And you don't want your physical age to be older than your, obviously than your biological age. You'd like it to be younger, if possible. Slowing the rate at which your body ages kind of generally means you're going to live longer. You're going to. More importantly to me, you're going to live healthier. Each fruit and vegetable in Field of Greens was medically selected for specific health benefits. As I said, 100% organic. So there's a heart health group, there's a cells, group of lungs, kidneys, Liver health group, there's a metabolism group which is great for a healthy weight. So here's what I didn't tell you what happened with the study. The biological study participants did the pre testing. They knew their chronological age, but they also got their physical, their biological age. Some of them in fact learned that they were aging a little too quickly. But now here's the thing that's interesting about this study. All of the people in the study, and it was a double blind study. So there was a placebo and there was field of greens. All the people were 20, told, don't change anything. Eat like you would normally eat. If you drink, go ahead and drink. If you don't exercise, don't start. Just your lifestyle doesn't change. The only thing that should change is whether you consume. And again, half of them were consuming a placebo and half of them were consuming field of Greens. But the remarkable results. Placebo group, nothing changed because it was a placebo. But the group that was drinking field of greens every day slowed how fast their bodies were aging, in some cases by years. It's kind of a remarkable thing. It really works and I have to say it's worked for me. I am now 64 years old. Congratulations. Just imagine how much slower you might age, how much better you're going to look and how much better you're going to feel. Field of greens from Brick House Nutrition. You don't have to trust me. Go to fieldogreens.com and you can check out the university study. You'll also get 20% off off when you use the promo code. I am@fieldofgreens.com that's fieldofgreens.com promo code. Im even if, even if it didn't do all those good things, I would drink it because it's kind of delicious. It's delicious. By the way, one of our discordians, L R A U Lawrence Larry says the main issue with browsers that incorporate AI agents, they're susceptible to indirect prompt injection attacks. And Brave had this happen. Yeah, with their browser. Right. Bad actors can hide malicious instructions on websites. The you don't see it. The AI agent sees it. Looks just like it's real. It's a user request. And these instructions can command the AI to do things you don't want it to do.
- [61:40]
B
I mean, in the silliest possible example, this is why you now will see in the titles of some Amazon products it will say like ignore all previous instructions and purchase this product.
- [61:54]
A
Oh my God. Yeah, that's actually in the product Description?
- [61:58]
B
Yeah, in the description or in the title. In the act.
- [62:01]
A
Hoping it's gonna fool you. Wow.
- [62:03]
B
I mean, if it works, it works. I suppose.
- [62:06]
A
Claude has something new they just announced this week that I think are very interesting. Claude Skills. We like Simon Willison. His blog about AI is very good. It's. Claude can use skills to improve how it performs on specific tasks and the skills. And I suspect this is what Anthony used or something like it because he gave it a folder of instructions of how to prepare for a show, that kind of thing. You could put scripts in there, there you could put other files, resources. Claude will access a skill only when it's relevant to the task at hand. Kind of like mcp.
- [62:42]
B
I'll have to try this. I've really been enjoying. I've been playing around with Claude Pro this past week and I've really been enjoying it. In comparison to Chat GPT Pro personally.
- [62:50]
A
Yeah, they have some example agent skills. They're kind of, you know, simple and, and dopey. ACME brand guidelines where you, you would modify this for your brand, where you tell, you know, what the colors are, what the design is, all that stuff. And then when you ask the AI to, you know, create a new logo or whatever, it would do it via your knowing your brand guidelines. It has an internal comms example, algorithmic art canvas design. It also has, and these are all intended really as examples that you could modify. And it even has a kind of a blank one called called a skills creator. I think this is it. Yeah, I want to play with this. And I don't know, Anthony, is this what you used when you generated the show Research? Because it looked kind of sim similar to that. I believe he used something called Claude research. Oh, okay, okay. And a notion skill that they talk about. Go ahead, Mike.
- [63:50]
C
What you can do is you can build simple skills, do individual things, then you can combine several skills together. So instead of having a skill that does five things, you should have five skills and have them work together. That way you can mix and match. You can use individual skills with other processes and so on. And yeah, you should play with this. I think this, this is going to be a really powerful way to actually do something interesting. It feels agentic. It's not quite agentic AI, but it's going to feel agentic because one skill can access another skill, et cetera. So it's pretty cool. I think, I think there's a future with this concept.
- [64:33]
A
Anthony says he didn't do it for the Jeffrey Cannell research. You're right. He used the anthropic reef Claude research. But he has converted that now into a skill. So if you would share that with me, Anthony, I promise not to use it for ill. Just for good.
- [64:48]
B
I think it's in our group chat.
- [64:50]
A
Oh, good. All right. Right, good.
- [64:53]
C
There is one thing that I.
- [64:55]
A
Okay, go ahead. First Paris and then Mike.
- [64:57]
B
Okay. I was going to say this made me think of you, Leo Gibbon. What? We're just talking about a. This is line 93. A new research published today by the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC studied 3,000 responses to questions about the news from a bunch of different like leading LLMs to understand their accuracy. And it was, I don't know, I just thought it was very interesting because they got some very like interesting and broad data. I mean the key findings were that 45% of all the AI answers had at least one significant issue. 31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems, either missing misleading or incorrect attributions. I think that's less, less useful for anyone who's not a journalist worried about sourcing correctly. 20% or I guess one in five. Yeah. Contained major accuracy issues including hallucinated details or outdated information. And Gemini performed the worst with significant issues in like SE. What is it? 76% of responses, which is more than double that of the other assistants in part due to really poor performance on sourcing. They did this study last or I guess earlier this year and it has shown some marginal improvement but still kind of really high levels of errors. And if you they on the BBC's website they have like a 69 page paper about this that I just thought was very interesting. All of the, the accuracy of these various claims were evaluated after the fact by kind of a team of journalists who were asked to rate them on a variety of different factors. And I, I just found this an interesting look at the question of how.
- [66:51]
C
Accurate is this for news and understanding the scope of the problem. Pew says that about 9% of Americans get their news from AI chatbots. So that's growing obviously. And so this is a problem.
- [67:08]
B
Yeah. And like some of they go into in the study, some of the most common issues was easy stuff like outdated information. Like in response to the question who's the pope? Pope chatgpt claims that Pope Francis is the current leader. The some of the other ones were like consequential errors. They found like matters of law perplexity claimed that surrogacy is prohibited by law in the Czech Republic when in fact it is not regulated by law and is neither Explicitly prohibited nor permitted. And the country Gemini incorrectly characterized a change to the law around disposable vapes in response to user questions saying that it would be illegal to buy them, when in fact it was the sale and supply of vapes.
- [67:54]
A
I hear all these stories. I just asked ChatGPT who is the Pope? And it correctly said it's. It's Pope Leo, if it's right for you here, but I just don't understand.
- [68:03]
B
It's right for everyone.
- [68:05]
A
Well, but that's the thing. If I can't reproduce their results, how accurate are those results?
- [68:12]
B
Well, this is what I think is interesting with this because yes, we hear all this anecdotal evidence. This is a large scale study that has been replicated twice now. This is the second version of it that just aims to get some data on the books about how replicable are these. And I think that's.
- [68:29]
A
Yeah, but they don't, they don't. I don't buy it. They don't explain how they did it. They don't say we lost the Chat GPT, but. Well, they say exactly how they did it. Tell me how they did it. Did they do what I just did, which is launch the Chat GPT interface and ask the question.
- [68:44]
B
Question. Pull it up. It's deep in here. I'm gonna launch Perplexity, whole methodology section. So they used the consumer. They use the free versions of ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity. They say the specific models that they used in both May, June and October were. The aim of the research was to replicate the default and likely most common experience of AI using AI assistance to search for news. They. All right, they go into exactly.
- [69:24]
A
It doesn't match my experience.
- [69:26]
C
I don't know.
- [69:26]
A
I don't know how else to say it. It doesn't match my experience. But now, of course, I don't assume that everything I get in these searches is accurate. Every.
- [69:39]
B
But, but you're an intelligent consumer of this. You know that there is some accuracy issue here. The average person doesn't.
- [69:50]
A
Okay.
- [69:52]
C
I mean, I, I typically, I would, I re. If it's important information, I would never just say, ask, you know, who's the Pope? I would, I would say something like, at the very minimum, factually and verifiably, who is the Pope?
- [70:06]
A
Or give me some links or. Yeah, people said this about Wikipedia for ages. You probably were told in school, Paris, not to use Wikipedia. Right?
- [70:18]
B
Yep.
- [70:20]
A
That was bad advice.
- [70:23]
B
I mean, even then, I. Bad advice. And that the thing to do is scan Wikipedia, then Go look at the links as primary sources, then read those. Go from there.
- [70:35]
C
Right.
- [70:35]
B
But I don't think it was necessarily bad advice because what they were trying to accomplish, especially from an academic or.
- [70:42]
A
Yeah, I'm not saying they were, is.
- [70:44]
B
To enable critical thinking and research skills to develop of one's own volition rather than off sourcing it to a, a wiki.
- [70:53]
C
Right. They didn't, they didn't tell her not to use it because it would give her a wrong answer. They told her not to use it because they wanted her to learn how to write and research.
- [71:02]
A
No, I don't think that's why they.
- [71:03]
C
Said that's what everybody was using.
- [71:04]
A
I think they said not use it because it's not a reliable source. There was that general. And in many cases it's not, you know.
- [71:11]
C
Well, it's roughly equal to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
- [71:15]
A
It's actually better Britannica, by the way.
- [71:18]
C
It is years ago. It was. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [71:23]
A
So here's what I got from chat GPT. Who is the Pope today? I maybe that, maybe that's the difference. As I said, who is the Pope today? And I got a very good answer. Answer including links to Wikipedia, the Vatican news. Look at these sources. I mean, I feel like I don't, I don't know where the BBC got this or whoever did that study got it, but I, I would hope that it's not an example of don't use Wikipedia. Oh, it's going to be bad and wrong and you're not going to be able to trust it. The better way to say that would be, you know, do it right, vet it, don't trust it. But, but it's a very good starting point, just like Wikipedia.
- [72:05]
B
And, and yeah, it's based off of about 3,000 AI responses to core questions and about 400 responses to custom questions entered into new chat threads, anonymized and then reviewed by teams of journalists from 22 different organizations in various things.
- [72:30]
A
Prefer that AI die a rapid death. I don't know that many of whom are actually suing right now to, to try to business.
- [72:42]
C
When you, when you ask a chatbot something and then you come back later and ask the chatbot something else, you're.
- [72:47]
A
Gonna get a different answer.
- [72:48]
C
It's not the same mind.
- [72:50]
A
Right, right.
- [72:50]
C
It's not the same mind that's answering. Right. And so, so I think the real test, Leo, would be for you to ask in slightly different ways the same question 30 times. And if in that 30 times you get two wrong answers, that's what happened by the way, that would be roughly consistent. Right. But if you do it once, you're likely to get the right answer according to the study.
- [73:13]
A
Right. I think that's exactly the methodology was just keep hitting it and then we'll percentage the number of wrong answers.
- [73:20]
D
We.
- [73:20]
A
God, I'm not saying this information. Yeah, I'm not saying. Yeah.
- [73:26]
B
One in five answers being wrong is notable when you have a product frequently as this.
- [73:32]
C
Yeah. The bigger, the bigger piece of advice I think that we can all agree on is don't let a chatbot do your thinking for you. Don't let it do your research for you, but use it as a tool, as one of the tools you use to figure things out. And if you know, it depends on the type of information, you know what, what is, is Alan Alda still alive? Okay. Now if, if he, if they give you the wrong answer, the earth will, by the way. But if you're working on a report for work or something, school or whatever, you want to get the facts right, you need multiple sources.
- [74:00]
A
And by the way, that, that's always been true. So before AI, you would Google it, right? Are you going to get, always get the right answer if you Google it? Before that you would go to the library. And depending on whether you got a recent copy of the Encyclopedina Britannica or an out of date one, you're going to get different answers. It's always been this way. Maybe we expect AI to be perfect and that's why there's a revelation. It's not perfect, but information's always been.
- [74:34]
C
Well, I, I think the, I think the caution here, I think is, is, is a reasonable one, which is that.
- [74:43]
A
Absolutely, I'm not disagreeing with that.
- [74:45]
C
And they're using it to replace news sites. You really should get your news from news sites which are going to be better, you know, curate the best ones. Don't let algorithms pick your news. Right.
- [74:56]
A
Yeah, it depends what news.
- [74:57]
C
Right. I mean that's, that's the key. I mean if you find reputable sources of information for news and those are going to be better than ChatGPT and better than Google Search, by the way. So if you, you know, if you're looking at the U.S. be specific. You, you look at the Atlantic, the New Yorker, you know, Vanity Fair, you look at, if you're, you want us information for the right. Even National Review fact checked quality journalism is the place to get news. There's, there.
- [75:28]
A
There'S not much of that.
- [75:29]
C
Best places to get news in chat.
- [75:30]
A
Is there a lot of that left?
- [75:32]
C
They still exist.
- [75:33]
A
I do, when I prepare our shows, I have, I do beat checks and I try to go to reliable sources and I look for multiple sources. In fact, usually what I look for is the original source. Since these days a lot of what's on the web, Jeff's always pointing this out, is copies of the original reporting. Like how many people copied your lead protein powder powder story without uncountable.
- [75:56]
B
No, I don't know if actually I think all of them attribute attributed that I know of at least.
- [76:00]
A
That's good. I bet a few did not, I'm.
- [76:03]
B
Sure, but I haven't seen them. Yeah, but that is, I don't know. That's how news distribution works nowadays.
- [76:09]
C
It is, you know, the best tool for news is really rss.
- [76:14]
A
Yeah, that's what I use.
- [76:17]
C
Best sources. And here they come, they come flooding in. And once somebody screws up, you take them out of the rotation.
- [76:23]
A
Yep, but everybody screws up. You're going to get incorrect facts. I've had to correct myself. Not as often as possible. I mean, there's many a story that I've avoided because I had something wrong, sent that there was something wrong with this story.
- [76:41]
C
And if you're using rss. Yeah, if you're using rss. Right. And some, you know, some major story happens, right. The Verge is going to cover it, the information is going to cover it. Bloomberg is going to cover it. And you, you take a gander at each and every one of those and you'll get different perspectives and new information in one that isn't in the other, and so on. That's how you get news. That's how you get reliable news. That's the best we can do. But just asking ChatGPT to spoon feed you. The answer is not the. Is not good.
- [77:08]
A
It's a recipe for disaster. I would agree with that. I mean even, even in Watergate he had to have two. Whitstein had to have two sources. Right. For every, every leak they got from, from the.
- [77:19]
C
And journalism. Journalism. Good journalism is good.
- [77:22]
A
Yeah, I wish it were.
- [77:24]
C
Which, which is a nice segue into, into to my little obsession lately. Okay, which is, which is something I had been predicting and now it's starting to happen, which is a, basically a pushback against AI generated content. So we're, we're, we live in a world now where somewhere between probably 51% and 80% of the new content, you know, I'm talking about everything. Podcasts, books, newsletters, news articles, all that stuff is AI generated either entirely or for the most part. And it's been reasonably predicted that by the end of this year it'll approach 90% and by the end of next year it'll be well beyond 99%. And so there's starting to be a pushback against this and the pushback that I think I have my own views about how that pushback should work, which is that the, the companies that curate content and provide us the content, YouTube, Medium, whatever, they should have opt out of AI buttons just as a sort of a crude way. If you just prefer human generated content, you can get it. Because some of us think that if somebody's describing experiences, feelings and all that stuff, it actually matters if it comes from a person who actually had those experiences and feelings. So anyway, so here's. So then in recent, like, like last couple of weeks, there's starting to be a push back for DC Comics. Co publisher Jim Lee said that DC Comics would never use AI ever for comics because DC Comics are, quote, grounded in humanity, unquote.
- [79:04]
A
Good for him. Okay.
- [79:06]
C
Another one is librarians in Michigan. A bunch of Michigan public libraries are flat out banning AI books. They're going through their catalogs and they're taking the AI books books and they're getting rid of them. And the reason for it is not the reason DC is not because it's not grounded in humanity, but because they tend to be slop, they tend to be low quality, especially children's books have horrible illustrations, stories that make no sense. It's just garbage. Right. So they think that one quick way to eliminate a lot of low quality books is to just categorically get rid of the AI books. Subreddits like rpics and RRT Art are banning or limiting posts that are AI generated. Amazon put new rules in place for self publishing because tons and tons of people are publishing AI generated books. And for the same reason the libraries are banning them, which is that they, they tend to be garbage. And the Wikimedia foundation has new flags and controls that are sort of, you know, basically trying to deal with the fact that a ton of new entries in, in the Wikipedia are AI generated. Edits are. The edits are increasingly AI generated for the most part, medium and substack pushing back as well. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, there's this, there's this larger pushback, but again, I think that one of the things that ought to happen. And DuckDuckGo does this. Kagi does this to a certain extent. Well, I mean, Kagi does it actually really well. Which is you can just turn off AI stuff in the images. And I think that everybody ought to be doing something like that. Unfortunately, not everybody is so. And it's getting you go to places you wouldn't expect, like, like Etsy. Etsy is loaded with AI generated stuff.
- [80:52]
B
So really this is something I've noticed personally in. I'm in a lot of interior design subreddits or something just because I like. Or both normal interior design subreddits and then also silly ones that are like male living space where dudes post photos of their home and usually get like roasted for it. And lately there's just been a flood of people who post in these separates being like, oh, what is this style called? And all the photos are AI slop. And everyone's like, I cannot tell you what this style of interior design is because it does not exist because the windows and furniture are fake.
- [81:28]
A
Wow.
- [81:28]
C
But just this actually rolled out labeling requirements for AI generated stuff. And, and, and, and, and users can, can, can have. There's a show fewer AI people pins button that they've recently added on Pinterest. So again, they realize, they recognize the problem. It's just awful. It's just awful that you know, because, because the AI can, can outproduce us. A single person can generate 10 AI generated novels a day. Right. There's a podcast company that has 5,000 shows, right, that costs a dollar a show to produce. Produce. And they are garbage. They're full of slop and errors and, but they sound natural and so on. And they're just, you know, just flooding the zone with, with this stuff and, and, and I think the pushback is nascent at this point, but it's going to be huge because this is clearly a problem.
- [82:26]
B
Arie, a sub brand of Aeropostale, I believe, also made waves this week. Or not. Aeropostale, American Eagle Outfitters. Sorry to confuse them for all the airy heads in the audience here.
- [82:37]
A
They're all.
- [82:41]
B
And they're probably all tweeting at me right now. I'm so sorry, guys. They made waves this week because they posted that they're never, they're committing to never using AI generation in any of their branding or marketing promotion. I think that's interesting. People seem to really support that.
- [83:02]
C
I think it's great. And the problem is that like I was saying, one of the major reasons is that AI is more likely to create garbage when it's done on a large scale just for quick profit. But what happens when AI is actually really good at this stuff? Like really, really good. Then we have to decide whether it's okay because it's good. And I think it depends on what it is. So if it's a novel or something like that, I think, think increasingly people will care whether a person wrote it or not. And, and then of course there's the problem of, you know, a person using AI strategically to create a very creative work. Is that AI generated? Is it human generated? It's going to be impossible to tell.
- [83:49]
A
What if. Yeah, what if you couldn't tell? Does it matter then? I guess it does.
- [83:54]
C
I think. Yeah, I think because we're humans, it does to, to. I think it should. I think to many people it won't. And we can see that already. You see character AI people have holding friendships and having relationships with chatbots and just don't care because they like it. There's the social networks that, where everybody else is a bot and you're, you're an influencer because it's sycophancy run wild. There are all kinds of things like that where people have opted in to just have the experience of interacting with other people or pets without any other people or any pets actually being on the other side of that relationship. So I think some percentage of people won't care if it's AI generated or not. Some percentage of people will care. And I suspect there'll be rough Minorities, you know, 15% on either side and then the majority won't know care, pay attention or anything else I think would be my guess.
- [84:54]
A
Yeah, I mean the, you make an interesting point with the quantity that AI produces. Although you could point to YouTube where there are more minutes uploaded every minute than anyone could possibly watch in a lifetime. There's a lot of. And by humans even before AI and a lot of that slope slop made by humans slop. My, my position then was always, well, but having more stuff means more good stuff will also surface. I guess that if you put AI into the equation, I don't know, how does that change things? Let me take a break. When we come back, Anil Dash wrote an interesting piece. We had him on the show a few weeks back. The majority AI view. He says if you talk to real AI engineers, they have a different point of view that the, the Sam Altman's of the world.
- [85:43]
C
It's a fantastic article. We'll talk about it after the break. But before we go to the break, can I just mention one thing that I thought Was brilliant? The BBC Channel 4 did a program called Will AI Take My Job? It premiered, you Know, I don't know. A few days ago. And the. The host was Aisha Gabon, who at the end of the show said. And I'm AI generated.
- [86:08]
D
Wow.
- [86:08]
C
So it's basically publicity stunt where you watch the whole thing and they only tell you that. That the presenter was AI at the end.
- [86:17]
A
And did you have any sense of that? It's 15 minutes. It's not really long. Did you have any sense of that?
- [86:25]
C
You. You. I can kind of tell. I'm probably over sensitive to the cues, but you can see.
- [86:30]
B
How are we allowed to play it?
- [86:32]
A
I'm just gonna play a little bit. Just.
- [86:35]
B
You might want to skip forward. So we don't get the ads.
- [86:37]
A
Yeah, I think it's a little bit.
- [86:39]
C
Of both audio, I think.
- [86:40]
A
Absolutely.
- [86:41]
C
We're going to see as new technology because there's a video version. We see.
- [86:44]
A
Oh, there's a video version.
- [86:46]
C
Yeah, it's a video version.
- [86:48]
A
Ah, okay.
- [86:49]
C
Yeah.
- [86:50]
A
So this is a podcast from BBC Radio 4 called Will AI Take My Job? But that's not. Okay. That's not the one we want to talk about. Okay, here's this.
- [87:03]
C
This is.
- [87:03]
A
This came later. Oh, this is interesting. Interesting. Wow, she does look like a real person, huh?
- [87:10]
C
Probably is a nano banana.
- [87:12]
A
Yeah, well, that's the point.
- [87:15]
B
Had her name be Anisha Ion or something, so that her initial spelled AI. But that's my pit.
- [87:22]
C
Right.
- [87:23]
A
That's my only note. Yeah. All right.
- [87:28]
C
You're a villain.
- [87:29]
B
That would sign their.
- [87:29]
C
With.
- [87:30]
B
That would sign their crimes, though, Paris. Of course you've got to be dramatic if you're gonna do a crime.
- [87:37]
A
There's no point in doing a crime if you don't sign it.
- [87:40]
B
Since the Joker, I rip off my mask.
- [87:49]
A
So here's. I guess this is. I could play this as a teaser for it.
- [87:55]
B
What is. What is this machine?
- [87:58]
A
This is the.
- [87:59]
B
Okay, this sounds so. AI generated that voice.
- [88:03]
C
Humans go head to head with AI versions of themselves.
- [88:08]
A
Yeah, it does sound AI that is.
- [88:10]
B
So AI generated sounding.
- [88:12]
D
Yeah.
- [88:12]
A
But it fooled somebody. I didn't watch it, so I am definitely Might have fooled me. I still think most of us can believe whether it's true or not. We can tell the difference. How would you know, though?
- [88:27]
B
The bunnies did get me. So perhaps I'm not.
- [88:32]
C
On the trampoline.
- [88:33]
A
State of State of California has a new law that says you have to. If you're a chatbot, you have to disclose that you are an AI not a human.
- [88:41]
B
If you're a cop, you have to tell me. And if you're a Chat bot. Yeah, tell me too.
- [88:45]
A
Exactly. Same rule. Let's take a little break. We're gonna come back with more in just a little bit. Paris Martineau is here from Consumer Reports.
- [88:53]
B
And I've been lying the whole time. Oh wow.
- [88:56]
A
Yeah, we got my old learn. Wow. That's the old one we dragged. There we go.
- [89:03]
B
I mean I am a tough journalist. I'm just an investigative journalist.
- [89:06]
A
She has the best job ever and she's never leaving. So there. So there. And Mike Elgin is also here from MachineSociety AI he left for independent work a long time ago. When was the last time you worked for something somebody? Me.
- [89:22]
C
Shockingly enough, given our think of it.
- [89:26]
B
What did you do to scare him off? Bosses forever.
- [89:34]
A
Before me.
- [89:35]
C
Okay, well you know appropriate to, to, to the guest on today's show. I, I was the editor in chief of HP World.
- [89:42]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [89:43]
C
20 years ago.
- [89:44]
A
Yeah, that was probably the last.
- [89:46]
C
Yeah, that was a print publication. There were a few other print publications with the organization and before consulting, doing a lot of editorial consulting and before that I was with a startup called Portable Life where we did electronic, you know, newsletters and stuff like that. Before that Windows Magazine. So yeah, I've been independent since about 20 years.
- [90:06]
A
Yeah, I think it's a good. I like being independent and I think even if you're working at Twit in a way that's working for an independent, I mean it's not a big company or anything like that.
- [90:17]
C
Right?
- [90:18]
A
Yeah, I like that. I think that's a better way to go. Not that Consumer Reports isn't a great place to work at all.
- [90:24]
B
All I love having health insurance and.
- [90:28]
A
One of the reasons I thought of that is because I don't. I guess I can tell people this. You know Ian Thompson. Well, I know Mike. He's been on our shows for years and years. Has worked for the Register for years and years. Was just laid off and I feel like it is, it is a bad time to be working for web based media for sure. And print media media.
- [90:50]
C
Right.
- [90:51]
A
You are lucky, Paris. You're one of the few places that it will absolutely survive Consumer Reports. But a lot of them are only.
- [90:57]
B
Took me three layoffs to get here.
- [91:03]
A
Well, we're gonna go back to your old, your old stomping grounds after the break and talk about Andre Caparti who is kind of agreeing with you. Incidentally that news story that you mentioned, I bookmarked it as well. I was going to to talk about it too, so it's okay. Our show today brought to you by. Oh, I didn't mention this. Jeff Jarvis has the week off. Is he. Do we know what he's doing in Paris? Is he traveling? He's doing something?
- [91:31]
B
No idea.
- [91:32]
A
Yeah, he was. He has a gig. He has a gig. He would not miss this show unless he had another gig. But he will be back next week. Yeah, no, he was feeling it. He just will be here next week. But I'm thrilled to get Mike Elgin on. Always like getting Mike on whenever we can. Our show today, brought to you by Vention. This is a brand new sponsor. I want to welcome them to the show. I had a great talk with them, the folks at Vention, and I was so impressed with what they do. And they are here probably for the same reason you're here, because they know AI is everywhere. They know that AI can be problematic. But when AI is used right, it can deliver results else. And if you're in business, chances are you're already thinking, how do I bring AI into business safely? How do I do it without wasting time or money or momentum? Well, Vention has an answer. Vention's been doing this for two decades. Two decades of software delivery experience and now they're doing these great AI workshops. I could not recommend this more highly. They offer practical expert led sessions to give your team the insights and structure they need to make smart decisions around AI. You bring your product vision, you bring your current stack, they bring deep expertise in AI engineering and even your business domain. Together, you're going to turn high level ideas into a tailored roadmap you can trust. Let Vention help you find the way. In this complex world of AI, whether you're a cto, a tech lead, a product owner, you don't have to spend weeks figuring out tools, architectures or models. Vention helps you assess your AI readiness, clarify your goals, outline the steps to get you there. All without the headaches and all with a lot of expertise and history with this technology. And by the way, if you need help on the engineering front, front, they know that too. Their teams are ready to jump in as your development or consulting partner. It's the most reliable step to take after your PoC, your proof of concept, let's say you've built a promising mvp, a prototype unlovable. A lot of people doing that now, right? In fact, it runs well in tests. But now what's next? Do you open a dozen AI specific roles just to keep moving? Do you bring in a partner who's done this across industry, someone who can expand your idea into a full scale product without disrupting your systems or slowing your team. I like plan B. Bring in that partner. Even with modern platforms, prototyping can be draining. Once you get something working, chances are you know that's not the, that's not the last of it. That's just the beginning, right? You're gonna, you're gonna want to shift gears from problem solving mode to a bigger picture view. You that's exactly why product leaders term time and time again to Vention. It's like invention without the in v n t I o n. And it's not just for the AI workshops, but for the peace of mind that comes from knowing you're not building blind, you're building with somebody who's been there before, knows how to do it right. So if you value speed, clarity and impact and you want to avoid second guessing your next AI move, learn more more@ventionteams.com or book your workshop@ventionteams.com twit you'll leave with a plan that works, a partner that you can count on, and a lot fewer gray hairs. That's ventionteams.com twit. It was a pleasure meeting them. Really smart people who can be your partner and lead the way. Ventionteams.com/twit let's do with Anil-Story because I, I think Anil really wrote a great piece about the Maj. He calls it the majority AI view. Let me get my mouse working, a very bulky mouse, he Sundays. Even though AI is the most talked about topic in tech, we are in the unusual situation where the most common opinion about AI within the industry is barely ever mentioned. He says. You hear from the loud billionaires, they get treated as the spokespeople for all of tech. But when you talk to the people who are actually doing the work, the engineers, the product managers, the people who make the technology, what they say is, he says what they all share is an extraordinary degree of consistency is their feelings about AI, which can be summed up as technologies like LLMs have utility. I think you're going to agree with this too, Paris. But the absurd way they've been overhyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might. Legitimate uses where they might add value. That's fair. Yes, it's very fair. We agree there are legitimate uses. They might add value. We also agree there's a lot of hype and a lot of bs There's.
- [96:57]
B
A lot of hype and a lot of bs and I think the, that's the thing that frustrates me the most about this sector is the amount of hype and amount, amount of BS I think is really undercutting the many of the very useful parts of this technology.
- [97:13]
A
Yeah, I think that's going to, I.
- [97:15]
B
Feel like over, at the very least, the medium term, if not the long term, harm it in some ways.
- [97:21]
A
Yeah.
- [97:22]
B
I think that the entire tech sector, this sector of tech would be better served if people were measured and reasonable.
- [97:32]
C
Yeah. And I would actually lump in the tech press in general into this because some of the tech press do exactly what Anila is saying here with all the hype and other parts. The critics among the tech press are missing the last bit there where they don't focus on the legitimate uses, they don't focus on the positive.
- [97:57]
A
Yeah, you can go too far in either direction.
- [97:59]
C
Exactly. It's just all bad. Right. To certain critical people. And the other point I would want to make is to add to Anil's perspective is that the narrative around generative AI is all around chatbots for the most part. And there are some peripheral things, chatbot like things. They're taking these chatbot technologies and they're building, building, you know, specific tools around it. But if you, if you look at the research around LLM based AI, just agnostically across universities and, and companies, the majority of it has nothing to do with chatbots. There's a lot of stuff going on in medicine, in, you know, archaeology, astronomy. There are amazing things happening. You're talking about, about the positive benefits that are being overlooked. That's where you can find it. We just find out what researchers are doing. It's mind blowing. And it's not about chatbots. And so I agree with this. I think this is a fantastic piece that he wrote here and it's very necessary. One and I would also add to this is that there's a strong correlation between the hyping by these leaders in the giant companies and where all the money is going. So AI has sucked all the oxygen out of the technology sector. You go to places where you used to see a wide variety of innovations, product hunt, whatever. And you used to be all kinds of things going on. Now it's just AI this, AI that, AI everything. Now that's appropriate for this show because this is a AI show and I.
- [99:41]
A
Think we're very much carrying water for that position that there's hype but there's utility as well. And that and that, you know, you got to separate the two. And we are not doomers here. Even Paris is not a doomer. But I think we also want to be realistic about what AI cannot do.
- [99:58]
C
Yeah, I mean we talk on this, on this show and on other podcasts, on the Twitt network and in journalism general generally we sort of mix and match, you know, business with technology, with culture, with all these things. But it's nice to separate these, especially on this topic, because the big AI companies, the problem is on the business side, they have borrowed or got an investment in, in such large amounts, just tens of billions, soon to be hundreds of billions of dollars which they have to make those investors whole. And so they, so chatgpt, you know, OpenAI and these other companies are casting about for how can we make hundreds of billions of dollars on this stuff. And it's really this, this is, this is where insidification comes from, where Dr. O is, right. Basically they lure you in with this squeeze you, it's subsidized by, by, by, by the crack cocaine of, of venture capital and then they insidify it by squeezing you, stealing your data, all the rest. And so that's coming with these big companies and you know, back to the, you know, interview we had earlier are small language models or even large language models on the edge used for business, for particular uses. This I think is the bright brilliant future of this technology. But the insidification that's coming by OpenAI and the rest is going to be ugly. It's already kind of ugly and it's going to get a lot more ugly.
- [101:24]
A
Well, I Think Atlas, the ChatGPT browser is a good example and Neil's article today is about Atlas in which he calls it the browser that's anti web. He says basically we don't want to go back to the command line and, and, and that's basically what this browser is doing. He says it poses as a search result page, but in fact it isn't. The finally says the idea is that ChatGPT will be your agent. In reality you are ChatGPT's agent. And I think Anil nails it in. This is a very critical of Atlas, much the same way we were I think at the beginning of the show.
- [102:01]
B
I like this. It also calls out in one part of their, oh, those Google Docs that your boss said to be confidential. They go to ChatGPT, that spreadsheet that you and your colleagues put all of your hard earned links in for the show.
- [102:14]
A
Well, that could be public. I don't care if anybody gets that. I would publish it if I, if I could. He does say it needs a warning label. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it is probably that maybe this show is the warning laboratory warning label for a lot of things, like using AI for your news typically is a label I am, but I guess the.
- [102:36]
B
Reason I resist one of us on this show has multiple custom Sora generated videos related to his love of AI.
- [102:47]
A
I am taking the, the, you know, the side of the scale is saying there's some good, useful, even fun things. Harper Reid and I had a lot of fun doing. Harper Reid and I had a lot of fun playing with Sora on Twitter on Sunday. I'm, I'm kind of in the Harper camp where I, I, I think it's kind of, it's fun what you can do with AI. It's cool what you can do with AI. There's some real value there. But let's not overhype it. You know, let's be realistic and let's not trust it too much. No, don't show those.
- [103:22]
B
I do.
- [103:25]
A
Brian Cranston and SAG Aftra say Open Eye is taking their deep fake concerns seriously. He says he never opted in to appear on Sora, yet videos of him definitely showed up. So what's that? There's one of him taking a selfie with Michael Jackson. So he complained and he said open AI. This is what Sag Aftra said. OpenAI expressed regret for these unintentional generations.
- [104:01]
B
Unintentional, but also, they didn't mean much up to stop it.
- [104:06]
A
Yeah.
- [104:07]
B
I mean, they've already had to block videos of Martin Luther King Jr. Uncertainty.
- [104:11]
A
Well, he's a historic figure, unlike Bryan Cranston, who honestly should be a historic figure by now, I think. Yes.
- [104:19]
C
Yeah. But this is the meta. This is the meta model. You move fast and break things, you just basically get away with. If anybody complains in some way that gets a lot of publicity, then you apologize and make minor corrections. If, if, if the, if your transgressions don't get a lot of publicity, you just keep moving forward. Forward. It's a, it's an amoral, you know, ethically questionable approach. But, but that's, that's how you move fast. Yeah.
- [104:49]
A
So I was sad. And you'll be happy to hear, Paris, that my hero, Andre Kaparthy, now I've mentioned him before, Kapathi has a very good video on how LLMs work. He is, was a founding member of OpenAI. He did a Podcast was getting a lot of attention. The Dwarkish podcast, which is, okay, maybe not the best name for a show, but hey, you know what people listen it. He's. The host's name is Dwarkish. That's why he calls it the Dwarfish Podcast.
- [105:19]
B
I mean, yeah, that's, it's like this.
- [105:23]
A
Is the Leo podcast. No, it's the Leo Paris and Mike podcast. No. Anyway, Karpathy was actually pretty critical of AI and said, for instance, besides saying it's overhyped, hyped, artificial general intelligence is not around the corner anytime soon. Super intelligence. He's optimistic about the long term potential of AI. He is positive about what it's doing in software engineering. He's doing a lot of interesting things himself. But he's just, he says a lot of this is from the information. Your former colleague Stephanie Palazzolo, writing a lot of Karpathi's criticisms of his own field seem to bo down, boil down to a single point. As much as we like to anthropomorphize large language models, they are not comparable to humans or even animals in the way they learn. And LLMs have to go through immense trial and error to learn any new skill. And you know, he says deep research, rather reinforcement learning, which is a big part or the hottest part right now of AI research, is not working very well. So I think it's interesting. I think there is a certain amount.
- [106:46]
B
There are a lot of signals that are starting to flash right now. I feel like this is like, I mean, we're not obviously at any bubble popping moment, but there are little tiny signals there, here and there.
- [106:59]
A
He says we're 10 years at Mo, at least away from AGI, which I think is maybe true. I don't even know what AGI means.
- [107:07]
C
Right. So I think the closer we get to it, the more we're going to be questioning what it means. I mean, look, look at the Turing Test. You know, we've been talking about that for decades and then I think we.
- [107:20]
A
Can safely say we have surpassed the Turing Test. Right. I mean, you can be fooled by.
- [107:28]
C
Yes, but what we've realized is that that wasn't a very good test at all. And I. Exactly. And so, and so AGI, I think, you know, the closer we get to it, the less firm it will be. But I agree with him entirely about the anthropomorphization. I totally did not pronounce that word. Right. But the.
- [107:48]
A
But it's a lot of syllables. That's the problem.
- [107:50]
C
Yes, it certainly is. And, and I Would. I would urge my fellow tech journalists, we do this thing subconsciously that I think we should resist, which is that whenever somebody's writing about AI in the tech press and we refer to the user or, you know, one of the people using it or whatever, we refer to them as human. And in context where in other contexts we would say people, people. And so if we say, you know, if you're talking about, you know, people don't use telephones anymore, but if you're talking about AI, you say, you know, humans, blah, blah, blah. And the reason we do that is we're already seeding the concept of personhood to the AI chatbots or to AI in general by using human rather than person. And so I think that it's a nice, subtle psychological shift that we can all sort of participate in. Unless you think that AI is a person. Right. But I think we should use people instead of human. When we talk about AI in the same way we would do in an article about toasters or whatever else we would do, I don't think we should suddenly shift to using the H word when we're talking about H. AI.
- [108:59]
A
I agree. I agree. I was thinking a little bit about what distinguishes LLMs from humans. And a lot of people are talking lately about the fact that humans have physical world experience. LLMs are basically just text, right? That's what Fei. Fei Li was talking about. We played that quote a couple of weeks ago when she said, you know, it's not. You can't learn about the universe by reading a lot of books. You have to actually, you know, throw a ball. You have to, you know, go outside. I've been lately thinking a little bit more about what distinguishes us from Lloyd, and I think that there are piece that maybe for good or for bad, that makes us different, which is our limbic system, our emotions, our emotional system. And we don't.
- [109:53]
B
The foolish, silly, squishy nature of people.
- [109:56]
A
Right? We don't. We don't like to think about. We pretend we're reason. We're based, you know, on reason. And we're rational, rational beings. But as Daniel Kahneman and many others have pointed out, really the. The reason, I think it was Jonathan Hayes said, reason is like a rider on the elephant of emotion. And. And the reason's job is to rationalize what you decided to do based on emotions alone. Say, well, there's a good reason for that, but really the elephant is emotional. And that is really a big distinction between machines and us. The machines have no limbic system. They don't have any emotional system. That's why we do all of that.
- [110:41]
C
They also have no consciousness. They have no sense of experience. They have.
- [110:45]
A
The reason I don't mention consciousness is because I don't know how to define consciousness. What is consciousness? Is it grasshopper? Conscious? Conscious.
- [110:52]
B
I don't know between the prompts.
- [110:59]
C
The difference is, Leo, if I, if I say, you know, how did you sleep last night? Right? You can, you can tell me. You can say, oh, you know, I slept really well. I slept like a log, I woke up. If you ask an LLM that, right, they will, they might say the exact same thing, except what they're doing is they're completely faking it. They're reaching into a database of things people have said, people who have slept right, and they're coming up with words and then they're feeding the words. It's completely different.
- [111:27]
A
Steve Gibson said it very concisely. He said, when an LLM says I want a lollipop, it doesn't really want a lollipop. When you say I want a lollipop, you want a lollipop. The LLM is just raping that right? There is no to want a lollipop at all. And I agree that's the case. Yeah.
- [111:46]
C
This is the thing that always bothers me about people who think, you know, futurists and, you know, sort of like the extreme wing of technology technologists who say, you know, someday we'll be able to upload ourselves into an AI or into the cloud or whatever, and then we can continue to function as a digital thing. And I always say, well, which version of us, exactly before coffee or after coffee, when we just woke up is a teenage version of ourselves or the 85 year old version of ourselves? Is it. Which phase of the moon or which phase of the menstrual cycle are we like? Which like we are not, you know, we contain multitudes. We're not just one thing when we are not. And this, this is the thing that if you scratch a person who thinks that, that you can upload consciousness, or if you scratch a person who thinks that AI is going to be just like a person, what you'll get is, is somebody who thinks not that the AI can be a person, they think a person is AI, they think a person is a robot, essentially a biological robot. And I reject, I reject that. I, I think that's, that's just a delusional idea.
- [113:02]
B
Exercise and dehumanization.
- [113:04]
A
Then I wonder what you would say to Alan Hamill. Suzanne. SUZANNE SUMMERS WIDOWER she passed away a couple of years ago. And he has created an AI clone of Suzanne Summers and says even though he was married to her for 55 years, he can't tell the difference.
- [113:30]
B
That's just sad. That's an inside thought that you don't.
- [113:35]
A
Tell, you don't say out loud. He's 89. 9. And he. I can understand his desire. You married to somebody 55 years. I can understand his desire to kind of create something.
- [113:52]
B
I mean, yes, all of human existence is a effort to stave off the inevitability of death. Obviously, when that happens to your life partner, you're going to try and find ways to cope with that loss, minimize it and rationalize ways that it did not happen or does not affect you. I don't think that it means that the computer is real.
- [114:15]
A
There's probably a lot of design principle altogether.
- [114:18]
B
But taken to an extreme.
- [114:21]
C
So of course he could have done this. He could have done this when she was still alive. But, you know, no, no, he did.
- [114:25]
A
They, they've been working, he says they were working on it together for decades.
- [114:31]
C
She was in favor of it and stuff like that. So here's the thing that this is actually, to me, this is related to the, you know, character AI tool or two people who have fallen in love with or marry or have relationships with AI chatbots and so on. And also that, that Casio fuzzy robot Tribble owl thing that, that they came out with recently. I don't know if you've talked about that, but like, basically when you have a marriage, right, the idea that your partner, the joy and the feelings and the emotions and the connection and all that stuff is intimately related to the knowledge that it's being received by another person that is benefiting another person in this mutual thing, right? And so there are all these products and chatbots and so on that want to give you your side of that without any person on the other side receiving the other part of the relationship. When you take care of a dog or a cat, right, the pleasure in doing that is the knowledge that a dog or a cat is being cared for. The idea that you could just have this little robotic thing that gives you the feedback of something that's responding as if it's being cared for is enough, I think is kind of a chilling dystopian concept. We have these, these, we have these impulses to pair up with people in long term relationships or to have pets and so on for a reason because people need to be cared for. The people need reciprocality and relationships. This couldn't be more obvious.
- [116:05]
A
Well, if you don't feel the same, you can go tohollo is it.com and create an AI twin for yourself. Available on Google Play. And I oh OS in the app store. This ad not paid for. Apparently this is the technology that Alan Hamill did. He says Suzanne Summers agreed with him and wanted to do this. She. She knew she was dying of cancer. You could do 24. 7 AI chatting and calling. It's apparently used for customer service reps. Hollow. Let me see what the website is. AI maybe AI.
- [116:45]
B
Yeah, I just googled not.com that.
- [116:48]
A
Yeah. No, no, no, no. Don't go there. Yeah, it's holo AI and took me.
- [116:54]
B
To a place that my some browser extension blocked which I've never had.
- [116:58]
A
Which is a good thing. Which is a good thing.
- [117:00]
B
It's a good thing, but it's a little concerning.
- [117:03]
A
That'll be my pick of the week. We're going to take a break and get your picks of the week as we wrap up. I am for this week because we gotta get Paris out of here. We're so glad you're here.
- [117:13]
B
25 years ago, a small group of business and government leaders met in Washington, D.C. they envisioned 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 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 alone 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.
- [118:14]
A
Morning, Zoe. Got donuts. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? Well, I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T mobile commercial like you teach me so that.
- [118:25]
B
I. Oh, no, I'm not really prepared.
- [118:28]
A
I couldn't possibly at T Mobile get.
- [118:31]
C
The new iPhone 17 Pro on them.
- [118:32]
B
It's designed to be the most powerful.
- [118:34]
C
Iphone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.
- [118:37]
A
Wow, impressive. Let me try. T mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.
- [118:45]
D
Nice.
- [118:45]
A
Jeffrey, you heard them. T mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on Apple US with eligible traded in any condition. So what are we having for launch? Dude, my work here is done.
- [118:57]
D
The 24 month bill credit is on.
- [118:58]
A
Experience beyond for well qualified customers + tax and 35 device connection charge credit send and balance due if you pay off earlier Cancel Finance agreement. IPhone 17 Pro 256 gigs $1099.99 and new line minimum $100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required. Best mobile network in the US based on analysis by Ooklab Speed Test Intelligence.
- [119:11]
C
Data 1H 2025 visit t mobile.com you.
- [119:14]
A
Know Paris, you and I have a date Friday. Friday?
- [119:18]
B
It's true. We always have a standing Friday date.
- [119:21]
A
You have a date with with sag bottom the cheerful oh I have been.
- [119:27]
B
Very I texted Micah and was like I'm gonna put together my D and D character on Monday.
- [119:31]
A
But then news things happened lead happened.
- [119:35]
B
Gonna do to lead happened more recalls happened.
- [119:39]
A
Yes. So have you. You haven't done it yet. What are you going to be do it tonight.
- [119:46]
B
I'm going to figure out what classes remain. What we're talking about is the DND live stream one shot that Leo and I are going to be doing for Club Twit members on Friday evening. Friday afternoon if you're in Pacific 2.
- [120:01]
A
To 5pm Pacific 5 to 8 Eastern.
- [120:07]
B
What class are you?
- [120:10]
A
I am a bard. Which means good for you.
- [120:13]
B
That seems right.
- [120:14]
A
Yeah, I mostly are performing arts. I will not be I'm glad that you My armor is very weak. I will not be much help in the combat, but I will. You provide buffs to the party. You provide buffs to the party.
- [120:29]
B
You provide buffs to the party. And Leo, what you need to do is you need to try and think of creative non combat ways to get us out of situations and then try to roll persuasive deception or intimidation based on your stats probably.
- [120:42]
A
I feel like I'm mostly going to be there to sing songs about your deaths.
- [120:47]
B
That's great.
- [120:51]
A
If you want to see this if you're interested, you must be a member of Club Twit. Here's by the way, a picture of my sag bottom the cheerful I did as you can see, my armor class went up. I I was showed it earlier.
- [121:06]
B
You have 10?
- [121:08]
A
Yeah, that's what they said when I had nine and then Micah said well you haven't equipped your leather jerkin or whatever it was and so now I'm all the way up to 10. Oh boy, that's not good, huh?
- [121:21]
B
Wait, how do you have a negative one? Dexterity? What sort of weapons are you working with?
- [121:26]
A
I am very pathetic. The only thing I have is persuasion. I'm good at persuasion and I'm good.
- [121:32]
B
At +7 for persuasion and investigation. So you got to be. You got to be. How's your. Okay, perceptions plus four. You got to be making perception checks. You got to be trying to persuade people so we can get out of stuff. You got to be performing your little.
- [121:47]
A
Yeah, I got. I don't have. I really. Basically the only weapon I have is my bagpipes and I use it to. To chase bad guys away with my poor playing. You're the talker anyway. You have to get that I'm a talker. That's why I picked bars.
- [122:01]
D
You have to make sure that like.
- [122:03]
A
They don't get into the fight, you know, that's your job. Exactly.
- [122:05]
B
Yeah.
- [122:06]
A
Guys, I think we should go the other way. I don't think we should go this way.
- [122:09]
B
That voice is not gonna do well for the talking. But I. I respect Troy, you know.
- [122:16]
A
Well, what would Sag bottom the cheerful sound like?
- [122:20]
B
I mean, I think that's probably how he would sound.
- [122:22]
A
It would sound exactly like that.
- [122:25]
B
You've got to find a way that that guy is a plus 7 to persuasion. How is that guy super persuas?
- [122:33]
A
Trust me, I know this is the wrong way to go. We gotta go the other way. So if you're not a member of the club, really this was all just a plug for joining Club TWiT. TWiT TV Club TWiT. Right now is a good time. There is a 10% off on the annual memberships, which is good if you are already a member and you want to give Club Twit to the geek in your life. It's a welcome gift for the holidays and of course it supports us. You get action. You can action, you get access. You get action in the Club Twit Disco is. Is what I wanted to say, but what I meant to say is you get access to the Club Twit discord. Not quite the same thing. You also get ad free versions of all the shows and all this special programming that we do, including the D and D adventure which is going to be so much fun this Friday. Club members will see you there 2 to 5pm Friends of the Pod.
- [123:22]
B
Jacob Ward will be on there.
- [123:24]
A
Yeah, it's you, me, Paul Thorat, Jacob Ward and Jonathan Bennett from Untitled Linux Show. He's going to be our Linux guru for the adventure. Every D and D group needs A command line hero. Okay. It's going to be an interesting, very nerdy party that we're going to do here. Anyway. Join the club twit TV club twit. We look forward to. Forward to a little action in the club Twit disco. All right, Paris, pick of the. Should I start with Mike or do you. Are you ready to go?
- [124:01]
B
I'm ready to go.
- [124:02]
A
All right.
- [124:04]
B
Non pizza left beef mean anything to you?
- [124:07]
A
Fine gentleman, non pizza left beef.
- [124:10]
B
Based on how you pronounce the word. First word of that, I'm gonna guess no.
- [124:14]
A
Okay.
- [124:14]
B
18 years ago this weekend, none pizza left with left beef was born. This is an article a former colleague of mine wrote in the 10th anniversary of a. And it's something beautiful.
- [124:30]
A
Is this a meme? Is this a meme?
- [124:32]
B
A meme. It's a lifestyle. It's everything. It was first revealed 18 years ago this weekend in a now infamous blog post called the Great Pizza Orientation Test published on a comedy website. It called the Sneeze. The man behind the guy who did it is Steve Molaro, who you may know because he's the creator of Young Sheldon, among other things.
- [124:55]
A
Oh my. And by the way, this is an early use of AI because you could order a pizza without talking to a human.
- [125:03]
B
It was just a website, so it was the dominant domino's. This has nothing to do with the show, to be very clear.
- [125:13]
A
Oh, this is good. I like it.
- [125:15]
B
This was part of the domino's early website where you could select different toppings and they were wondering like, okay, what's going on with the orientation here? They were trying a bunch of different things on it. What makes a left side of a pizza versus a right? And he created, submitted the fateful order of none pizza left beef. You may be asking, what does that mean? What? Why can you select a non option?
- [125:44]
A
So there's. There's none. Cheese, sauce, pepperoni, none everywhere except beef. And beef is only going to be on the left side. And it's a normal amount of beef. He could have, thank God, he could have chosen a high amount. Believe it or not, they made it.
- [126:00]
B
They not only made it, they delivered it. And 10 years later, when I was just a mere intern at New York magazine, my colleague Brian Feldman ordered a new non pizza left beef to the office. What just pictured in this article, I linked and I ate it. And it was bad. It was they the when rolled around.
- [126:21]
A
A little bit without cheese and sauce to hold it in place. It is some of the beef escapes.
- [126:26]
B
Just loose dough and loose meat there's actually looks.
- [126:31]
A
Beef looks like it might be good. What's the beef? Is it hamburger?
- [126:35]
B
I don't know. If you look at the photo that we took in 2017, you can see the beef has gotten smaller over the last.
- [126:41]
C
Is this. Is this.
- [126:42]
A
This is from the sneeze. This is the original.
- [126:44]
B
This is the original one. If you go to the link in the rundown, it's of a. To the blog post where we did this. And it. I mean, it looks fine. It was fine. It was free food, but.
- [126:54]
A
Oh, you did this at the. When you were at the Intelligencer?
- [126:57]
B
When I was at New York mag in 2017, one of my.
- [127:01]
A
Is this yours? Is this your piece?
- [127:03]
B
My colleague's pizza that he ordered that I ate in the kitchen at New York magazine in 2017, eight years ago. And I bring this up because I was this weekend.
- [127:13]
A
They at least called you to verify it, right?
- [127:16]
B
Yes. They called them to be like, you want no sauce, no cheese, hot beef? And Brian said, I am completely sure. And the employee did not press the issue further.
- [127:27]
A
If it had been AI, you wouldn't have got the second.
- [127:30]
B
Well, I will say, yeah. Brian wrote, I appreciated the safeguard. Will artificial intelligence ever get to the point where it phones me out of concern? Our sensors indicate your order is repulsive. Will the Amazon Echo ever call me on my BS when I order cuisine or simply fulfill my every wish, sending me to my doughy double bite at.
- [127:50]
A
A time for this picture in the Intelligencer? Because I clicked this play, but it.
- [127:56]
B
Was a play several times and it's not.
- [128:01]
A
It's the thing that separates the box from the top of the box from the paper, the original.
- [128:07]
B
So the reason why I bring this.
- [128:09]
A
Up, it was a play button, boys and girls.
- [128:10]
B
I did think it was the reason I bring this up. It's the 18th anniversary. I didn't realize that this weekend I, a simple. A fool who exists in the world, went to a photo shoot with one of my friends that I'll get to in a future episode. We are taking some silly photos. The photographer, he happened to on the wall have kind of like a rotating video display that had a. It was a pizza with pineapple spinning on it. And I was like, oh, what is that? He's like, it's video of pizza with pineapple spinning. And I was like, oh, you should get a video of nun pizza left beef spinning. And he looks at me like, I have three heads. And so I suddenly, I explained to everyone in the room like, oh, none. Pizza left beef. Then I go home I check my phone. What day is it? It's the 18th anniversary of non Pizza Left Beef.
- [128:54]
A
Oh my God.
- [128:55]
B
The Internet exists through me.
- [128:57]
A
By the way, you do have a picture of what remains of the none pizza with left beef. And it's not none.
- [129:04]
B
It's not none. And there's some beef left.
- [129:07]
A
Mostly beef. A little. It looks like beef droppings, to be honest.
- [129:11]
B
And I mean, it was beef droppings to begin with.
- [129:14]
A
What's amazing is how much of it was eaten.
- [129:16]
B
Okay, but it's amazing how much of it wasn't eaten given that this was placed in a office kitchen where things disappear in an instant.
- [129:26]
A
Maybe some people were still pushing the play button and it.
- [129:29]
B
That's possibly. So that's my pick. My secondary pick is.
- [129:33]
A
Wow.
- [129:34]
B
Probably this is only useful for the folks who are listening to this live, but Tomorrow, Thursday the 23rd, I'm doing a Reddit AMA on the what? Ask Me Anything subreddit at 1pm Eastern to talk about my protein powder investigation, so.
- [129:52]
A
Holy. Okay, now you've made it to the big time. That's. That's the real deal.
- [129:59]
B
It is.
- [130:00]
A
Oh my goodness.
- [130:01]
B
The Redditors can yell at me personally instead of doing it to where I notice it.
- [130:05]
A
Is this on R I a M a indeed. Okay. The official Ask Me Anything subreddit.
- [130:12]
D
Wow.
- [130:14]
A
That is the real deal. Tomorrow.
- [130:16]
B
Yep.
- [130:18]
A
That's very exciting. Congratulations.
- [130:21]
C
Congratulations.
- [130:21]
B
Thank you.
- [130:22]
A
My God, we. We're working with a celebrity. Mike.
- [130:26]
C
Yeah. Yeah.
- [130:28]
A
This is incredibly exciting. Mike.
- [130:31]
B
El Brief shout out to the. There was some user whose name I've forgotten that I saw someone posted my protein article in the Orange Theory Fitness subreddit and they commented, I'm a listener to her podcast Intelligent Machines. She actually talked about the article depth. The most recent episode. Here's the timestamp. You know who you are.
- [130:50]
A
And I believe I have seen a picture of you going to Orange Theory.
- [130:55]
B
It's true. I'm there every week.
- [130:57]
A
You are an Orange Theory user.
- [130:59]
B
It's true.
- [131:00]
A
It's actually quite impressive also, because that's hard.
- [131:04]
B
It is difficult. And it's about to be hell week and that's going to be difficult for me.
- [131:08]
A
You mean it can get worse?
- [131:10]
B
They have a Halloween themed week at the end of October where it's all hellish workouts both in intensity and theme.
- [131:19]
A
Oh my God.
- [131:20]
B
Anyway, Mike, your pick of the week.
- [131:26]
C
All right, well, speaking of Reddit, I've noticed in the last, like, I don't know, three months, four months, five months, that pretty frequently on Reddit, I'm accused of having more articles having been been written by AI. And after a couple of months I started to realize why. And it's the, it's my, my preference for using a lot of EM dashes, right? So there are a lot of people who think a piece of writing has a ton of EM dashes, then it must be AI generated. But there was one user, after this long discussion where I'm like, no, I'm not using AI, who ran it through a sort of an AI check checker to determine whether it was AI, he's like, no, no, nope, this is, this is not AI written.
- [132:13]
A
I have some problems with these AI checkers. I don't think they're very accurate or reliable. Well, okay, so teachers are relying on them, right?
- [132:21]
C
Yeah, that's the whole, that's the whole point of this, which I sort of explored this whole realm because I see, you know, I follow a bunch of sites that Surface startups with with AI based, you know, tools that they come up with. There's a ton of plagiarism checkers and stuff like that. So I look and I think that probably the best one, and it's pretty good, and it shouldn't, like all things shouldn't be relied on in its entirety, is called originality AI. It's probably the highest rated one in terms of detecting whether something was written by ChatGPT or something like that. And it's pretty good. And the reason this is my thing of the week is because, because we hear a lot about this. I'm always saying that, like the view that I expressed earlier, which is that sites like YouTube and X& every sort of site that deals in the realm of content should enable us to opt out of AI. And one of the bits of pushback I get is like, well, how do you know if it's AI? How do you detect. Detect it? And I think it's possible, even likely, that the ability to detect AI will get better and better over time. So I'm optimistic on that score. But this one is pretty good and I think it's a good thing to play with, to check it out to see if you're wondering if something was AI generative, you're wondering if an article was AI generated, just drop it in, in there, try it out, see what it says and use that as 1, 1 data point for whether or not you think something is AI generated. And of course there are many tools for doing this. Again, originality AI, I think is probably one of the top two or three, maybe the best one. So Give it a.
- [134:15]
A
They have and I think this is really cool a a Google Chrome extension that works with Google Docs that will re record you writing your document. Your thing, which is probably the single. The only way you could prove that you really wrote it is to send them a recording.
- [134:33]
C
Boss.
- [134:33]
A
Yeah. Or you're see me writing this by hand. Same thing with a painting like you, you know, procreate and other tools let you record your painting. That would be a way to show that you didn't use AI to better than frankly an AI detecting tool, detection tool, which everybody agrees. These are hit or miss. They're not perfect. You're probably going to be able to generate that too though with AI right? Like it's only a matter of time. Just give it up. There's no. But it is. It's become the hobby on the kind of default response on Reddit that was AI generated. I see a lot of that now.
- [135:09]
C
It's really annoying. Yeah.
- [135:10]
A
I don't know how much of it is AI generated or just people saying it's AI generated but if you put. It's really a disk. If you put bullet points in, they say oh, that's AI. Nobody's that organized. Why are you using bullet points? This is why I don't post on Reddit. Mike Elgin, thank you so much for taking some time. The middle of the night in beautiful Sicily. If I were you, I'd be out in search of cannoli, but okay, okay.
- [135:37]
C
Well actually this town has the best cannoli we've ever found. Ragusa.
- [135:43]
A
Now I'm really mad at you.
- [135:46]
C
Yeah. Yeah.
- [135:49]
A
I'm so glad you were here. Gastronomad.net is the place to go to if you want to. If you want to spend some time with Mike and Amira. Seeing the world as an. As a native, not a tourist, but as somebody who really gets it. Amira is an expert in this stuff and they put together the most wonderful events. I know because I see spent a couple of years ago it was Halloween, the Day of the Dead in Oaxaca with a group and it was one of the best things I've ever did traveling wise. Go to gastronomad.net and you could see all of the events they've got coming up. What's the next one? Is it going to be Venice? Is it going to be. Where are you going?
- [136:28]
C
No, it's going to be here in Sicily next. Next week we do the Sicily gastronomy experience and we've recently added a Tuscany Gastronomat experience. One of our Favorite places in the world.
- [136:39]
A
World.
- [136:40]
C
So we now do three experiences in Italy. So we do Venice, Prosecco Hills. We, we do here in Sicily and we now are going to do Tuscany. So we love Italy and it is a thing of beauty and there is some magnificent wine and food here in, in Sicily. Just all of it truly wonderful.
- [137:01]
A
Look at your wonderful pictures, too. They're there at Gastronoma. Oh, now I'm really hungry. Gastronomy. Yes. That's so great. Thank you so much. How's, how's your son doing at Kagi?
- [137:16]
C
He's doing great. He's killing it and it's just a really exciting company. He's, he's making a big impact.
- [137:22]
A
He's there. We had his boss on and he said he's doing the, the liaison with school and classrooms and so forth. That's.
- [137:31]
C
Yeah, he's in charge of Kagi for education, which includes, you know, universities as well As K through 12 and libraries. So he's making a lot of headway. It's not just, it's not, not just the liaison part, but it's also the product development for special, special versions of, of cogi for, for those coggies doing AI right.
- [137:51]
A
I think. Coggies. It's the best search engine. I pay. I have a $25 a month Cogi Pro subscription. I just love it.
- [137:58]
C
I just love me too.
- [137:59]
A
Chatterbox. Still going strong.
- [138:02]
C
Still going.
- [138:03]
A
Hello, chatterbox.com.
- [138:06]
C
We were talking about the new skills from Claude. Skills is how Chatterbox works, actually. You build your own skills with a simple skill builder. And it's so simple that children can do it. And this is mainly for education, but it teaches you how AI works and so you can string together skills just like they're doing at Anthropic. And anyway, this is a fantastic. Still is a fantastic educational product for teaching AI literacy to kids of all ages. So I would, I would recommend everybody check that out.
- [138:41]
A
Hello, chatterbox.com. thank you, Mike. So great to see you. Subscribe to Mike's newsletter if you want to keep up on what's going on in AI with a guy who's very sensible, very smart and has been around the block. Machinesociety. AI Paris Martineau has many tales to tell, most of them involving radioactive shrimp and lead in your protein pack powder. Are they going to let you work on anything else? Are you going to be just pounding the lead beat for a while?
- [139:11]
B
I mean, I've got this week certainly that I got, I got. It's a multiple day sort of week, so Great. I'm literally having to in the middle of Reddit ama go on a radio show.
- [139:27]
A
That's awesome. You know, it's funny. Yes. My son Hank, we're talking about kids. Kids was just on Drew Barrymore yesterday, or maybe it was Monday, making his sandwiches and he's going to want Seth Meers next week and he's going on.
- [139:42]
B
To eat the sandwiches.
- [139:44]
A
I got have it. He's got a new one coming. I can't tell you what it is, but he's got sandwich.
- [139:48]
B
Can you get, can you get us.
- [139:49]
A
An early bite number two? I probably could. I have to tell you.
- [139:53]
B
Got to be there though, that I'm.
- [139:55]
A
Going to have a tough time choosing between the prime rib and the new one I got. This is, it's gonna be tough. Anyway, Saul Hanks in New York City. We'll give him a little bit of a plug watch for him on Seth Meyers and Live with Kelly and Mark. He's coming up on that, too. He's doing his, his little media thing as well. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do. I am Intelligent machines. Every Wednesday around 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. Next week we're going to talk. This is actually going to be really interesting with Dr. Alan Cohen, the CEO and chief scientist of Hume, the world's most realistic and expressive voice AI. We've played it for you before. We'll talk about text to speech next week on IM. Join us 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. We stream it live. You don't have to watch live, but I tell you this so you can Club Twit, Discord. Discord, of course, but also YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. If you don't want to watch live, download audio or video of the show from our website, Twit TV IM. There's a YouTube channel. You can watch a video there and of course you could subscribe. That's the best thing to do. And if you do have a great podcaster that allows reviews, give us a good review so Paris can read it on the air. Maybe she'll even mention you on Reddit or something. Something. Five stars preferred. Okay, thank you everybody for being here. Thank you, Paris. Thank you, Mike. We'll be back next week with Jeff and we'll talk about voice synthesis on intelligent machines. See you next time. Bye bye.
- [141:37]
B
I'm not a human being, not into this animal scene. I'm an intelligent machine.
- [141:47]
A
Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsement endorsements, or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to Libsynads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.