IM 883: Gates-Gate - AI Model Watermarks

Summary

Intelligent Machines (Audio) – Episode 883: Gates-Gate - AI Model Watermarks

Podcast by TWiT | August 13, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte | Co-hosts: Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau | Guest: Nicholas De Leon

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the transformative and sometimes controversial applications of AI in journalism, local news, and daily life. Special guest Nicholas De Leon showcases how he's leveraging affordable AI tools to power new forms of local journalism—ushering in what may be a new era for regional reporting and media innovation. The panel then debates the latest hot topic: the introduction of "watermarks" in AI-generated text, raising questions about attribution, privacy, and the future of content creation. The episode also explores hardware trends for intelligent machines, the economics of AI, and the ethics behind these powerful new tools.

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Main Topics and Discussion Points

1. Nicholas De Leon: Pioneering AI-Driven Local News

(05:12–29:00)

• Background: Nicholas, a senior electronics reporter at Consumer Reports, shares his side project—Tucson Daily Brief, a local news site that's (mostly) AI-generated.
• Origins & Philosophy:
  • Started as an experiment using OpenClaw and later other AI stacks to see how much meaningful journalism one person could accomplish with $30/month in AI tools.
  • City of Tucson as the testbed: “Maybe I could be in the conversation. Maybe I can have a seat at the table.” (07:12, Nicholas De Leon)
• Technical Approach:
  • Aggregates RSS feeds and scrapes data from various local sources; summarizes and posts the top headlines daily.
  • Automated using models like Claude, Deepgram for transcription, and more; minimal manual oversight—“I’m literally asleep when this part is happening, basically.” (09:57, Nicholas)
• Beyond Aggregation:
  • AI-generated podcasts using cloned voice (11Labs).
  • "Live AI reporter" transcribes city council/town hall meetings in real-time, then prompts a model to output AP-style news articles. Nicholas ensures accuracy and clarity with human editing.
    • “I’m about to add a couple school districts… The story was on the site within an hour. And I checked—we were the first local news source to have coverage of that meeting. Which happens all the time now, honestly.” (14:08, Nicholas)
• Community Service:
  • Covers local issues — e.g., liquor licenses, zoning, data centers — information being neglected due to the decline of local journalism.
• Unique Features:
  • ChatTDB: a local retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbot for the community.
  • Sunday newsletter in a “warm language” with a custom AI-generated crossword puzzle.
  • Social media automation, customized YouTube Shorts, and more.
• Cost:
  • All-in for ~$40/month; models chosen strategically based on cost/use case.
    • “We’re not curing cancer or discovering new science. This is text synthesis, you know.” (26:07, Nicholas)

Memorable Quote

“The way it works is—there's this thing in video games called a tool-assisted speedrun... Tucson Daily Brief is that same idea applied to local news. The tools are large language models.” (10:03, Paris Martineau, referencing Nicholas' project)

2. Other AI Side Projects by Nicholas De Leon

(28:43–39:40)

• Deep Dugout: AI sim for baseball, pitting different LLMs as managers.
• Matchday Inference: Personalized World Cup “programs”; generated news-style content about games using user-selected parameters.
• My Next Assignment: AI-powered job-matching tool for media professionals; matches user info/resume with open roles, drafts tailored cover letters and resumes (with user editing advised).
• Upcoming Apps:
  • In-development lifestyle and gaming accessory apps, built with AI-driven coding assistance.

Memorable Quote

“If I’m not having fun, I’m very easy to read. I get real grumpy, really quick. But this is all cool to me. This is all fun.” (39:23, Nicholas De Leon)

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3. Debate: Should AI-Generated Text Be Watermarked?

(47:45–56:50)

Anthropic's Claude Adds Invisible Text Watermarks

• The Issue:
  • Claude now invisibly embeds watermarks in its outputs—text can be checked to confirm if it was AI-generated, much as Gemini does for images.
  • Paris supports this, seeing provenance as useful and non-intrusive if no personal data is recorded:

    “It’s a great idea and something that all of the companies should do... you should be able to put a piece of text back into the company’s thing, and be like, did this come from you?” (48:29, Paris)

• Panel Concerns:
  • Leo and Jeff see dangers:
    • Could be exploited (e.g., tracking documents, legal subpoenas).
    • Possible false positives (real text flagged as AI) penalizing students, whistleblowers, or journalists.
    • Alleged “Calvinism” around AI-generated content.
    • Some recall how previous digital fingerprints (e.g., unique IDs in Word docs) could identify and compromise whistleblowers.
    • “My advice is no one should ever again use an Anthropic product.” (53:59, Leo)
• Privacy & Free Speech:
  • Debate over tradeoffs between confirming AI assistance and potential risks to privacy, free expression, or journalistic sources.

Notable Quotes

• “If you are using a tool to create writing and other people want to know whether you used a tool to generate writing... The company that made this is fine. It’s not a privacy issue.” (55:11, Paris)
• “You don’t know what data… I don’t trust them farther than I can throw them.” (56:54, Leo)

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4. The Hardware and Economics of Local AI Models

(57:21–86:04)

• Leo’s Hardware Odyssey:
  • Describes $8,000 spent on Nvidia DGX “Spark” hardware—local AI inference at home for privacy, autonomy, and benchmarking.
  • Rationale: Concern about watermarks, cloud-model tracking, and RAM shortages in mainstream PCs/Macs.
  • Open weights and local compute remain rare but seem increasingly strategic for privacy/enterprise needs.
  • Benchmarking Open Models: Nvidia’s new Nematron Lightning model outpaces expectations; performance varies by task.
    • “A: these open weight models are getting better fast. B: they're spiky. They're good at some things, not good at other things. And C: I shouldn't have bought two Sparks.” (68:24, Leo)
• Hardware Ecosystem:
  • Enterprise needs pressing: small companies and consumers would benefit from affordable, user-friendly local AI appliances.
  • Standardization/community tools (e.g., Jan, LM Studio) making things more accessible.

Commentary

The discussion illustrates the tension between centralized cloud models (and provider “lock-in”) versus the autonomy of local compute—a spectrum with major privacy, cost, and innovation implications.

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5. Market Moves and Business Models

(79:46–104:59)

• Open Weights Momentum:
  • Nvidia, Meta, and others are pushing for open weights—Zuckerberg publishes a 6,500-word pro–open AI manifesto.
• Nvidia’s Strategy:
  • A $500B chip financing fund to help companies deploy Nvidia hardware—compared to “railroad financing” of the gilded age.
• Chinese and US AI Competition:
  • The panel speculates on the global race, with China’s government-subsidized models as a counterweight to US commercialization.
• Monetization and AGI endgame skepticism:
  • Fears of a bubble or crash; questions linger about the actual revenue models for large-scale AI.
  • Reference to past financial crashes—1873, 1929, 2000, 2008—as parallels for potential over-investment in AI infrastructure.

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6. Other News and Quick Takes

• Google organizational pivot:
  • Tim O’Reilly describes Google’s new AI strategy as analogous to the Westinghouse shift: moving from centralization to distributed intelligence.
• AI appliance skepticism:
  • Paris critiques the “smart appliance” paradigm: “Whenever I am getting an appliance that is Internet connected it has never satisfied me in the same way as a good old-fashioned brand.” (83:17)
• Amazon vs Perplexity:
  • Courts allow Perplexity’s AI shopping agents; debate over the limits of authorized automation.
• EdTech:
  • Denmark plans oral defenses for essays to combat AI cheating; University of Michigan pilots pass/fail first semesters for student well-being.
• Google debuts SL2T:
  • New AI model supports sign language interpretation.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On AI in journalism’s “bucket brigade” model:

  “If all our facts go into AI, then who pays for getting the facts? …If all our models are open weight and free, who pays to advance the models?” (103:26, Jeff)

• On risk and autonomy in the AI age:

  “If you own the server and have downloaded the models, as long as you can get electricity, that's the only thing.” (103:12, Leo)

• On the emotional toll of academic certification:

  “The hospital in Berkeley, Alta Bates, clears a bunch of beds in their mental ward for exam time at UC Berkeley.” (113:33, Leo)

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Picks & Fun

• Paris Martineau:
  Yay or Nay — Daily game: Guess how senators voted on key bills.
• Leo Laporte:
  Voyager 1 Computer Emulator — Try programming the spacecraft’s vintage FDS system.
• Jeff Jarvis:
  • Chrome vertical tabs now available
  • Outrage over BMWs displaying Spider-Man ads — “Someone else taking control of your device and putting something there you didn’t want.”
• Paris (Food Safety Alert):
  • Jalapeño products recalled due to salmonella outbreak — “Advice: avoid jalapeños of unknown origin in prepared foods for now…” (155:35)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Nicholas De Leon interview & Tucson Daily Brief: 05:00–29:00
• AI models, crosswords, social media automation: 10:30–27:30
• Watermarks debate: 47:47–56:50
• Local AI hardware & economics: 57:21–86:04
• Nvidia, Meta, chip financing: 79:46–104:59
• BMW Spider-man Ad Outrage: 143:23–145:44
• End-of-show Picks: 135:59–153:07

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Concluding Thoughts

This episode exemplifies how AI’s promise—and peril—are already here: one person’s toolkit can produce near-instant, impactful local news; industry is rapidly iterating on hardware and model release; and the battle for control, trust, and privacy is heating up at both technical and societal levels. The crew blends deep tech insight, journalistic ethics, and practical skepticism in a lively, informative conversation. If you want to understand how AI is already reshaping journalism, privacy, and daily life, this installment is not to be missed.

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For further reading/listening:

• Tucson Daily Brief
• Yay or Nay Game
• Jeff Jarvis’ “Hot Type” Book
• Anthropic's watermarking policy (official announcement)

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Listen Next Week:
Possible guest: Christina Warren; subscribe to the Intelligent Machines Newsletter for updates.

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“I’m not a human being, not into this animal scene. I’m an intelligent machine.”

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff's here, Paris is here. And Nicholas de Leon is here. You'll be amazed what he has done with 20 or $30 worth of AI, including a local newspaper, predicted the winners of the World Series and the World cup, and even helped people get a job. Intelligent Machines is next. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Intelligent Mach with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Episode 883, recorded Wednesday, August 12, 2026.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Gates.

[Leo Laporte]

Gates. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show. We cover the latest in AI robotics and all the smart little doodads surrounding us all these days. Hello, everybody. I'm Leo. And let's say hello to Paris Martineau from Consumer Reports, where she is on the food safety beat.

[Paris Martineau]

It's true.

[Leo Laporte]

God bless her that I am. We need you doing that. Hello, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Hello, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Good to see you.

[Paris Martineau]

Good to see you.

[Leo Laporte]

I just want you to know you can swear we'll just bleep it out.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think that that's actually true. I mean, I think you'll bleep it out, but I don't know that I'm allowed to swear. I think that, Yeah, I think that quite a few people will yell at me.

[Leo Laporte]

Only Jammer B from A. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And that matters also.

[Leo Laporte]

Here he is the emeritus professor of Journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University, and his new book, Hot Type is How Soon?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I thought it was next week, but people were telling me they're getting the books.

[Leo Laporte]

Yay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I guess it's this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, awesome. Look in your mailbox. It could be there already.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Those of you who are nice enough to pre order. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

And if it's not, go to jeffjarvis.com and order hot Type. The story of. I sent you the funniest thing. Story of the Linotype. I don't know how Google's dream beans knew this. We've talked about dream beams before, which is this weird Google experiment where it reads all of your personal stuff and then makes pictures of you and suggests things you should do. I don't know if it's going to still be here. I sent it to you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was in the. The chat. Our chat?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, it's. It's.

[Paris Martineau]

Man, I gotta check this chat.

[Leo Laporte]

It's got new ones every day. Yes, it's. I have to open up the special super secret chat that we have in whatever program this is. But it was. It drew a Picture of me looking. You probably know what it was.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's what this was. Leo sent in our group WhatsApp at one point. Just an image of him and just utter nonsense below. And I was like, is Leo okay?

[Leo Laporte]

Mrs. Google did this. Google did this.

[Paris Martineau]

But, yeah, it's things.

[Leo Laporte]

I drew a picture of me looking

[Jeff Jarvis]

at some sort of a kind of linotype, a modified line of type.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. And then I'm looking at some block, which I think is the sorting mechanism. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The mechanical smiling.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It makes you happy.

[Paris Martineau]

It describes binary teeth. It's just a lot of. A lot of text below it.

[Leo Laporte]

It was recommending that I watch a movie called Linotype the film, which is very, very good. So Google knows.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a weird experiment. And now you can get it. You don't have to be a Google Ultra Gemini Ultra subscriber. You can get it if you have just a smaller Google subscription. I kind of. I both love it and hate it. I hate it because I think of all the work it's doing that I don't even look at. So that's, you know, another forest down. But it's kind of fun and it's funny. It's weird. I get weird. And it's all drawings of me and Lisa. It knows, apparently, what Lisa looks like and somehow knows I'm married to her. And so it recommends things we could do as a couple.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anyway, that. Nice. Do we have a guest today?

[Leo Laporte]

We do, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Is there someone else in this podcast that we're making sit in silence while you described your AI dreams?

[Leo Laporte]

He is. I have an app for that for the. He's along for the ride. Let me say hello to Nicholas De Leon. You've seen him many times. He was on Twitter on Sunday. He is a wonderful contributor to our show. But not. But. And senior electronics reporter at Consumer Reports, A colleague of yours, Paris. And the funniest thing happened, I think it was last week. Paris said, yeah, we had this conference call with this guy who works at.

[Paris Martineau]

Not this guy. I said, nicholas. Who? I've been on Twit before.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you knew. Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought maybe you didn't know who he was.

[Paris Martineau]

We both work together and we've both been on Twit at the same time with you.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember, I'm senile. I don't know who's worked with him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So he's outsourced his entire brain to

[Leo Laporte]

get other guys doing that when.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

But we thought we'd have Nicholas on this show because he is doing some really interesting stuff. Welcome, Nicholas De Leon to Intelligent Machines.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Thank you, Leo, for the warm welcome. I've actually known Paris. I don't know that I've met Paris. Correct me if I'm wrong, but we've.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think we've met in person.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Twitter for, like, I was just saying, the Internet.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's been quite a while. He's not just some guy.

[Leo Laporte]

He's not just some guy who posts

[Paris Martineau]

content on the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

But it is the case that your employer said, you know, what Nicholas is doing with AI is very interesting. He should. Did he do a presentation for you?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. So, came and presented to our special projects team, which is the team that I'm on at cr, about all of the really interesting work that he's doing with AI. And it was both in terms of kind of. We had a couple meetings, one of which was about FOIA more generally and kind of how his work could enhance our efforts there. But I got really fascinated by your discussion around your job that you're doing outside of the job that we both share. So I guess could you tell people a little bit about that and how you got started as a local news baron?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, well, I don't know about Baron yet. Maybe one day, but yeah. So the, the site is Tucson Daily Brief. I've been doing it for about six months now. You know, there, I, I, you know, I've had a couple conversations over the past couple days. There's no grand design here. There's no grand plan for like world domination or anything like that. This is just an experimentation in AI and journalism and stuff that you can do, basically. So the original impetus for this was when openclaw was like all the rage, you know, in like January, February, whatever. I initially dismissed it. I was like, this is just like Twitter talk or whatever. But then a couple weeks go by and it's like, okay, people are still talk, talking about it. And so I wanted to mess around with it. I was, okay, let me just use it. And, you know, my kind of the way I, I learn and do things, I gotta, like, mess with it, I gotta play with it, I gotta do it, you know, before. Before talking about really having any strong opinions necessarily. So I installed OpenClaw. And that was kind of the beginning of like, well, what can I do with this? Maybe I can. Yeah, everyone's like, oh, you can automate this, you can automate that. I was, okay, whatever. Maybe I'll do like a local. A local news site. I don't know that, you know, why not? I'm in Tucson Tucson, Arizona. It' like it's a small town, but it's not really that small. There's 500,000 in the city itself and there's like a million in the metro. So I'm like, okay, this is a good size city to try to mess around with some stuff. You know, maybe I can, you know, I'm obviously not going to like take over the town in terms of like I'll be the only source but like maybe I could be in the conversation. Maybe, maybe I can like I can have a seat at the table. Was kind of like the really only ambition here. So when the start the site started in February, it was, it was pretty bare bones. This is actually the third re version of like the design design, the most recent design that folks can look at right now. I actually made that with Kimmy K3 the model that was like oh, all the rage like two or three weeks ago, whatever it was. But the initial version was pretty much just aggregation. There's something like 30.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What were you running? What were, what were you running Kimmy K3 on?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Oh, just via open router. Just open.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, okay, I see.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't have powerful enough hardware to run much of anything locally. I have a 5080 the graphics card which could do some stuff, but like not really, honestly. So it's all just done via the API. So yeah, the initial version of the site was pretty much aggregation. You know, there's one newspaper in town, there's a couple TV stations, npr, you name it. Just pretty basic aggregation. And that's how it ran, just silently in the background. The way that it worked generally was and this is all built on the Claude stack, although that may change as soon as tomorrow. We'll see. But the initial version was hey, here's 30 sources of information, RSS feeds, maybe some light scraping. Whatever it is, this is the kind of the source of, source of truth regarding the city of Tucson. Go through these sources every night, pick out the top 10 stories that happened across the different categories. Government, public, safety, I don't know, Sports, whatever it is, whatever the categories are, synthesize and summarize them, send them to me and then publish them to the site. So every morning at like around 6am Arizona time, there's the Daily Brief and that's just kind of like the headlines for Tucson. All the, you know, it'll, you know, because it's summer, it's summarization, aggregation. Obviously it links back to the original, to the TV station, to the Newspaper, you know, whatever the case may be.

[Leo Laporte]

How much do you do manually though? Do you write some or.

[Nicholas De Leon]

No, this is like predominantly just Claude code.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's automatic. You don't have to sit in a hover.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Oh no, no. This is just humming in the background. I'm. I'm literally asleep when this part is happening, basically.

[Paris Martineau]

Or just getting up on the website in the about it says how this is made. The newsroom is one person, which raises a fair question. How does one person cover four municipalities worth of public business before breakfast and keep his job? There is this thing in video games called a tool assisted Speedrun. A player uses software to play through a game with a level of precision and speed no human could achieve in real time. Tucson Daily Brief is that same idea applied to local news. The tools are large language models.

[Leo Laporte]

I like that.

[Paris Martineau]

Inscription engines, public data scraper schedulers and a few hundred lines of glue python. So I mean, I guess walk us through a little bit how you went from what you just described, like yeah, large scale aggregation of other local news sources to starting to use AI to actually go out there and get new information, new transcriptions, new documents and write stories off that that no one else has.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, the idea was like, okay, the aggregation is cool, like it's fine, right? But like anyone, you know, whatever, kind of. So I'm thinking as a journalist, okay, there's these tools like what could I do that actually like infuses like real journalism, real news here, move stories forward. Like what can I add here as someone who's been doing journalism in various capacities for enough years to like make this kind of stand out beyond just like a cool tech demo basically. So, you know, because I had the Daily Brief, I turned that into a podcast. I use 11 labs to clone my voice. So that's up. That's uploaded to Apple Podcasts and YouTube every morning at 6. And so the kind of the, the first beyond, like kind of just raw automation, whatever was the idea of a live AI reporter, which I, you know, I'm happy to give credit to an AI model when it comes up with the term. I came up with the term live AI reporter. I came up with the idea for chat tdb.com which I'll get to in a second. The idea with the live AI reporter is, you know, here I'm covering right now four municipalities. It's the city of Tucson, Pima county and then two of the other towns nearby. I'm about to add a couple of school districts. I think next week they come online. But Basically all these municipalities, you know, they all have town halls. They'll have whatever those are, usually streamed online, whether it's Facebook or some other platform. So I was like, okay, so this audio, I mean, this video, this, this exists, it's being transmitted, you know, live somewhere. So what I could do, and this is just me thinking an accumulation of like nerd knowledge years spent like, you know, transcoding video and like doing various like, nerd problems. Okay, so if there's audio being broadcast and I can capture that audio in real time, I know there are models that can transcribe audio in real time. So why don't I just put those two together, why don't I just transcribe? I'll grab the audio via FFmpeg, save that to disk somewhere as that's being broadcast, send that to some model to be determined. It ended up being Deepgram. So that creates a real time transcript of the town hall meeting. This could be happening simultaneously all over the county. But the live meeting happening, it creates a transcript. These meetings last three hours easy. So it creates a transcript. Boom, meeting's over. That transcript is then sent to again, anthropic. I think it's Sonnet 4.6, which is doing this leg of the work. So that transcript is sent to, to Sonnet and the prompt is something along the lines of, here's a giant text dump of a transcript of a local town meeting. Take this giant text dump and turn it into like a thousand word AP style news article, highlighting the most important things, the most impactful things. You know, don't get lost in minutia of like, you know, this isn't minutes of a meeting. This is a news story. This has, you know, local news. You know, local town halls aren't necessarily the most exciting, but they do describe and they do, you know, things of, of impact that, you know, around here in Arizona there's a lot of data center stuff, there's a lot of stuff about Flock, the security camera. There's a lot of like meaty things going on here. So Sonic gets the instructions, it turns that transcript into the article in, you know, a minute, let's say no time. Basically that that draft of an article is then sent to me. I edit manually to make sure, you know, the, the, the live transcription via the Deep Graham Deepgram engine is pretty good. Perfect. You know, there's a lot of Spanish language names here in Tucson. It always mangles those. So I had to make like a little interrupt in between to say, hey, if you mishear Gonzalez, he probably you know he means Gonzalez. There's a bunch of names here and words or whatever so that like corrects it manually and then that is. That's eventually published. That takes depending upon the length of the meeting to edit that down. That takes about h. Let's call it an hour. You know it. The latest one was last night. There was a Pima County Board of Supervisors advisors is the kind of executive board here. They had a meeting. It ended at 8:30 local time. My store. I was playing a video game. So I was like okay, I need a minute. But the story was on the site like you know, let's call within an hour. And I checked. We were the first local news source to have coverage of that meeting which. Which happens all the time now. Honestly, not that it's a race. Not that I'm like saying look how cool I am. It's just like okay, this is. It's working. You know I am actually getting some other.

[Leo Laporte]

Is the big win because I agree as local news has disappeared and I. You know Jeff, we've talked about this for years in every community.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

City council meetings don't get covered anymore. You have. I just love this. You've got liquor license applications. So I know there's going to be a new 711 that matters. This is, this is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to go to Taco Giro Mexican restaurant.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh they've got the Tucson has great Mexican restaurants.

[Nicholas De Leon]

This part. This is, you know every municipality here. The way it works, whether it's split between the county or the municipality somewhere there's you know, liquor license filings and this is all public information. This is not like I'm not stealing anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have to scrape it or do they have an API?

[Nicholas De Leon]

It's a combination. I believe this stuff is primarily API actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Nicholas De Leon]

So. But it's a combination and there's like so many like endpoints. I'm a little mixed. Mixed up like what exactly is where nowadays? Because there's so many sources of information. But yeah, so it surfaces all that. And so that's that that was kind of my first idea where it's like, okay, this is like real. You know, is this journalism? There was a. There was a story in Wired today where someone kind of did a very similar technique, a live transcript, turned it to an article and oh, is that reporting? I don't know. Some of this kind of feels like that like how many angels can dance in the head of the pin type of thing. It's like, I don't know. It's. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's it's if the public gets the. Here's a story about the vote over the new data center in the town. Did you write this leader? Today I write this lead. Voters nearly divided down the middle on the $5 billion Luckett Road project, proof of how contentious it has become. But the mayor and council members who approved it all kept their seats. Did you write that?

[Nicholas De Leon]

So the provenance of this was. The New York Times actually went to Marana, which is a town nearby. It's is an exceedingly nice town. It's like so beautiful in my opinion.

[Leo Laporte]

And so they naturally nimby, they don't want a data center anywhere.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, I mean it's a big thing down here. You know, obviously it's a desert, so there's, there's basically no water. But the land is cheap here. So I understand. You know, why would they build it here? Because the land is cheap, basically. So the New York Times is here in I think May. They came to Marana, big profile, you know, okay, whatever, that's fine. You know, it was getting a lot of hype. I was like, oh, the anti data center movement, you know, is really. So I was like, okay. You know, I'm a naturally skeptical person of basically everything, which is a partly a consequence of watching so much professional wrestling as a kid. I'm just very like skeptical of everything. There's always like an angle.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute, you mean that's made up?

[Paris Martineau]

So basically it's all real, just like your AI friends.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Virginia.

[Nicholas De Leon]

So the provenance of this is we had, we had an election, I don't know, two weeks ago, whatever it was. And you know, the anti data center ticket, you know, it was four people and only one person won. So I'm like, okay, that's interesting. You would think given some of the news coverage that the anti data center folks would just like, would just run the table. I don't know, there's some nuance there. So this is a story that I would say I, I co wrote with AI you know, we, we went through the results, you know, we went to the county recorder's office, we got like the raw vote totals. We added some context to the New York Times and it has my entire corpus of reporting on data centers and all this marina town halls going back to like, I don't know, February, March. So we were able to build a story that I think is fair. You know, it's not, it's not like saying haha, the anti data center guys lost or you know, hooray, they whatever it is it's just kind of like I don't really care. This is just like what happens. You know to me it's a journal

[Leo Laporte]

reporting it's factual honestly.

[Nicholas De Leon]

You know I made opinion but did you announcements? No, no. This was. This was. This was Sonnet. I guess I'm impressed or opus.

[Leo Laporte]

I forget because it doesn't let me but tells I. It doesn't feel like AI wrote it.

[Nicholas De Leon]

This is. This is probably a mixture of. Of me and it. I couldn't give you percentage maybe not 5050 maybe like 75, 25.

[Leo Laporte]

So you put some right?

[Nicholas De Leon]

I put some of me in here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah yeah.

[Nicholas De Leon]

It's not entirely. That's why I say on the site it's semi automated. You know some things like the Daily Brief is entirely. That just gets published to the site. You know like this. I have a little bit more of a hands on.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you find you have to do a lot of maintenance like corrective maintenance like no, don't do it that way. Do it this way. Or is it just completely at this point running on its own?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Maybe can't entirely run on its own but it's pretty close. Like I just do it because I think it's. It's responsible to like okay if I'm going to write an article. If I'm going to publish an article about the town hall meeting and I'm going to say hey here's what happened at Tucson town hall. I kind of need to. I wouldn't feel comfortable just like shooting that out there. Basically. I kind of want to take like even if it's just like 10 minutes just to make. Make sure it's like not crazy.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. On like a average day to day, week to week. Like how much time are you spending I guess overseeing these agents or like rewriting stuff that ends up the most

[Nicholas De Leon]

time is honestly the social media. I started doing Instagram maybe like six weeks ago that take while. Because that's. I can't automate Instagram really. You know I really can't automate that. I. I might if I could. So I do that you know I must say manually in this. In collaboration with. With the AI I'm like hey, here's today's brief. What's like a cool light thing that I could put on Instagram and then it does the rendering. You know I don't want to sit in Photoshop and like. Like I'm not doing that. So it like it generates all of that for me and. And I come with the. It comes up with the caption. I Maybe edit, but Instagram takes forever. I just started doing Blue Sky. Blue sky is like a combination of like auto posting and manual. X is entirely manual. What else did we do? Oh, we do YouTube shorts. So those are generated automatically if you go to YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute, you make little videos?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yes. Yeah. So there's YouTube shorts. That's new again. The, the kind of, the.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the what is it?

[Nicholas De Leon]

YouTube.com it should be Tucson Daily Brief. Yeah, those I don't even on a certain level is like, I don't even know why people watch YouTube shorts. But it's the type of thing where it's like people watch them, then watch them.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna make them, I'm gonna make it.

[Nicholas De Leon]

And the kind of, the marching orders there, like keep it light, keep it, keep it fun. There's like a jingly kind of song that I made with 11 labs. Like I'll make it sound like light hearted. So it's just kind of like voice

[Jeff Jarvis]

with 11 labs too.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, I cloned the voice with 11 labs.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so it's reading your voice. Yeah, let's, let's hear a little bit of it here.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Good morning, I'm Nicholas Daly. Brief for August 11, 2026. Two lightning sparked fires are burning in ranges near Tucson. The Finger Ridge fire in the Santa Catalina Mountain. Does it feel eerie as of Monday

[Paris Martineau]

to hear your own AI voice all the time?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Well, I hate hearing my voice to begin with, so I don't know, I,

[Leo Laporte]

I like it that you chose your voice instead of some, you know, I was.

[Nicholas De Leon]

And I, you know, I cloned my voice. You know, I just, I read. I'm almost certain it was like I was either a Consumer Reports article or like a Guardian soccer article. I read the article from A to Z, clone my voice and gave it to 11 labs. You know, I had to, I had to make some, some corrections there because actually 11 labs just out of the box. In my, in my experience it, it, you know, it can't read the Spanish names correctly. Things like Democrat, Republican, it'll, it'll say like rep or Dem. You know, symbols like the dollar sign. If it's like $10 million, it kind of had to add like almost one. So I had to make like an interrupt little, little file that like says hey, if you encounter this, you actually need to say it. And I, you say phonetically basically.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Nicholas De Leon]

What else?

[Leo Laporte]

We're talking to Nicholas Deon. He is by day a mild mannered reporter for the Consumer Reports. He's their seniors electronics editor. By night he's an AI whiz who has created. This isn't the only thing you've created either, by the way. Before we move off Tucson Daily Brief, tell us what Chat TDB is.

[Nicholas De Leon]

So Chat TDB is a thing and again, I'm happy to give credit to the model when it comes with stuff comes up with. I came up with Chat tdb. That's basically a. A rag tool. So basically it looks, it looks at like the. Every day at like 8am it kind of refreshes the various databases of like stuff that we've published, whether that you know, literally everything from like liquor license, all that type of stuff. And it should be able to answer your question. So on the screen here you're asking like, what did Miranda ask about the data centers? It should, assuming it works, it should be able to go through the corpus of stuff and come up with an answer saying, well, Mirana did X, Y and Z.

[Leo Laporte]

The establishment won, but barely.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

This is amazing because it's so local and it serves your communities. I mean, this is. I. How many do you have? A lot of visitors.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I mean, I mean, no, honestly, it's

[Leo Laporte]

like probably you're gonna have visitors from all over the world. After talking about this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm definitely not gonna move to Tucson and the prices will go up. It's your fault. Yeah.

[Nicholas De Leon]

In terms of like the biggest metric I care. We have a newsletter, so that's probably the last big thing to describe. So that's. I started that, I don't know, some, some way into the project. And so that idea is again, look at the week's worth of stuff. Let's come up with a newsletter that's in a warm language. You know, warm, warm language kind of fun. You read it Sunday morning. That. That is currently. Again, all this is currently being done with various anthropic models. You know, Grok 4.6 came out today and I was able to try it briefly. The pricing seems fair and not that local news needs like frontier level intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

How much do you spend on this?

[Nicholas De Leon]

All in. It's like, let's call it like $40 a month. 30. 30amonth.

[Leo Laporte]

You're using $20 plans for this?

[Nicholas De Leon]

No, the. See, that's the biggest cost is the 11 labs. I'm on like the creator tier and I probably don't need that. It's probably better to just pay via the API, but it's one of those things where it's like, I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So how are you doing it on the other models?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Those are all it's just via the API.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're paying by token. Not correct. Even then it's 20, 30, 40 bucks a month.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Not even. Not even, like, even, like, even. Even Opus would be like, I want to say like $12 a month, something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

But what you're doing, it's important. You're. You're smart about which models you choose, so you choose cheaper models to do the things they can do well to. You don't have to use frontier models for everything.

[Nicholas De Leon]

No, not, not. Not for this. I mean, this. We're not, you know, we're not curing cancer or like, discovering new science. This is tech synthesis, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, by the way, you want to subscribe to their Sunday morning roundup of Tucson news because there's a crossword puzzle.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yes, I made that. So one, I've done, like a handful of kind of AI kind of side projects. One of them was a few months ago. I'm sure you guys know the meme monitoring the situation where everyone, like, really pays close attention. So I made a website called crosswording the situation dot com. And that was basically a 5x5 mini crossword puzzle that's tied to news like. Like what happens, like, within the past two weeks. All the clues are, like, literally ripped from the headlines, so to speak. So I made that. I don't know, February, March. And then I was like, you know, it'd be cool if I take that idea of a crossword puzzle sourced in something and bring it to the Tucson thing. Maybe I could do like a Tucson

[Leo Laporte]

across any of these.

[Nicholas De Leon]

And, you know, I would say, you know, know, I don't know, every single clue is tied to Tucson, but, like, you know, some percentage of them are local stuff. So it kind of rewards either reading the site or just being aware of, like, Tucson stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

So cool. Yeah, it's.

[Nicholas De Leon]

It's, you know, I'm not. I'm not done yet. I. There, There's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very tucsony. Like one of the clues, dull and lifeless. The opposite of a monsoon sunset. Of course, you have monsoons and then loosens up, like, tension after a haboob passes, which I presume is another weather thing that.

[Nicholas De Leon]

That's the word for dust storm. They use it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Yeah. This is so amazing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo, you mentioned before the meetings. I know from. I'm on the board of a little newspaper company now. And. And the problem is that that's commodity news, right? And what a place wants to do is free up their reporters spare time to do more than that. And so we're using a company here in New Jersey, I think, called Sevillo to help out of Mucklear State to help transcribe these meetings just to give the reporters what they want. But you can go directly to the public with it as long as you're clear about how this happens. And it frees up journalistic resources to do more.

[Leo Laporte]

Although isn't that where many reporters start was. Is with those really?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And I covered them back in the day. I covered fist fights at local meetings back in the day.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let me ask you because we're running out of time. I know you have a. You're on deadline or some sort of weird.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, he's ready for a star turn on tv.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right. You got, you got.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I, I got, I got like 15 minutes. I got. As long as I'm out by.

[Leo Laporte]

Tell us about your other stuff. So you had a, A World Series simulator. You had a World cup simulator?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yes, I had. So if you go deep dugout was kind of my first big thing. And that was like an AI baseball simulation engine. If you go to deep, deep dugout.com. that was the idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Bug out I. There you go. There's the typo.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a bit different.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Nicholas De Leon]

And so basically the idea was what if you had, you know, baseball is very stats heavy. You know, of course the idea was basically what if I give each manager a model fable soul, you know, whatever it is, and have them play against each other. You know, I made like a baseball simulation engine where basically, you know, the, you know, the managers more or less decided do I pull the pitch or do I keep them in? What's the lineup going to be today? All those separate decisions that a real manager would make, I handed over to a model. I use Poly Market to like or who was the favorite to win the World Series. So, you know, there's some source of real world and then it's. And then it's kind of like an extension of, you know, arguably this is AI slop. And I understand that and I, I don't mind because it's like it generated like, you know, match reports, it generate again, it generated podcasts, it generated like, you know, if you read the New York Post, like the, the Yankees beat reporter and he's like, you know, he's mad at the team. There's like post game interviews. There's like, it's like a whole world of like stuff happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Made up stuff.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah. And.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think one of the things you're doing that's Interesting is pitting models against each other.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

To see who. Which models would be better at managing a baseball team.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah. And it, you know, it feels like it's, it kind of hit like a plateau.

[Leo Laporte]

Where's the best at it?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, it hit a plateau probably with like, opus. I don't know, maybe four, seven. Where, like at that model, at that point, it was just like burning, like reasoning tokens and not.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no reason it doesn't get what

[Nicholas De Leon]

is a. Yeah, well, it was kind of my, my. You know, in sports, you know, I'm a big soccer guy as well. And there's a manager, Pep Guardiola, he recently just left Manchester City. But his. The biggest knock against him for years was like, sometimes he overthinks games where it's like the, the, the answer is so obvious. You know, this is your lineup, these are the guys you play. And sometimes he would, like, be a little too clever and they would lose the game. And the criticism in the media was always. There he goes again, overthinking his, Overthinking the situation. And he got it wrong again. Now, that didn't happen all the time. He's a very good manager. But like, when he tripped up, that's how he tripped up by over. So it was kind of like, okay, do models overthink things? Do they make things too complicated?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Nicholas De Leon]

So, so that was kind of the, the, the thinking there and then. So that was the baseball project I also made for the World Cup. I made something called matchday inference dot com. You know, get it? Inference. So matchday inference dot com. And the idea was, you know, you go to a stadium, you know, and there's a program, right. Oh, today the Yankees are playing the Red Sox. You know, they have this, is this record. It's a long and storied rivalry, yada yada. So the idea was, okay, I'm going to make a digital version of that for the World Cup Cup. But what I want to do is, you know, if you are. And this was, this was a pure, like, journalism, like, product, like, thinking thing. It's like, okay, what if we had infinite resources? How would we cover the World Cup? Probably the best resource newsroom is probably the New York Times, if I had to guess. And, you know, they can, they can do a lot, but they don't have infinite, you know, what can't they do? So the idea here was, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a match day program totally customized to the, to the person to the individual person. So you pick your player, you pick your team, you know, Spain, Germany, whatever it is, you pick a lens. I call that. Do you want the report to be, you know, historical based? Do you want it to kind of be like banter at, like at the, at the pub type of thing? You give it all those parameters, you click a button and it generates a, a, a match day program for you every morning that was sent out of the day of the game. And literally no two of those were the same. You know, it was pulling stuff I paid for a professional API, so the sports data was accurate, you know, scores and things like that. I was pulling stuff from the FIFA archives, From the FIFA YouTube account, you know, trying to bring in world context into. So when you open your email and you read this thing, oh, Spain is playing Argentina in the final at New York New Jersey stadium, you had like a real product in your hand type of thing. It was. And the design was, you know, I see a lot of discussion online about like, you know, every like Claude design website looks the same. There's some truth to that. I kind of don't think it matters. I think a lot of this discussion is. I think we've got too many people just discussing things all day basically, just

[Leo Laporte]

like the AIs going back and forth.

[Nicholas De Leon]

It's just a lot of talk about

[Leo Laporte]

like I like the design because it's, it's like a zine. It's very. Yes, it's my personal film.

[Nicholas De Leon]

The idea was very Sub Pop Records, you know, Slater Kinney, Nirvana. I wanted it to look like cool basically. And so this was Claude, this was literally just Claude code. No other outside whatever, just me kind of like feeding it like album covers and like, oh, I want it to look like this. Maybe pink is a cool color. Maybe the, the topography should kind of look like this. And just riffing back and forth. And eventually we were able to land on this sort of aesthetic. So that's, that was the last one and the last one, the last kind of big one is. It's a, it's a premium product. It's, it's my first kind of go at like maybe having making money off this. It's called My Next assignment dot com. And what that is is it's basically a, well, it's basically a job finder tool for folks in media editorial. It looks at like 300 plus job boards across newsrooms, across companies and universities. And you name basically it works is you sign up, you know, you answer a little questionnaire. You know, I've been in the industry for X number of years. This is. These are my beats. This is what I'm good at. And then it will take your information, put it against the various pipelines and try to match you to roles that you would be good at. Oh, you would be really good at. You know, this job that the Los Angeles Times is hiring for. And that's a, That's a premium product that I don't remember the pricing offhand, but the kind of, the cool thing is that, you know, it's worth it it.

[Leo Laporte]

Because if you get a job, this is a lot less than joining a job board.

[Nicholas De Leon]

And to me, it's like, what the. What it does and what does a huge time saver 1. It finds jobs that like, match your skills. I mean, nothing is. Few things are more demoralizing than like, been looking for a job honestly. And like, okay, I'm good at this. I'm good this. You give it. And the models will scour the Internet to find roles that are open that you may be a good fit a. A good fit for it. Then if you want to pay a little extra, it will then go ahead and, you know, tailor your resume to the job description. You know, you give it your resume, okay, it's going to rewrite it, matching the job description exactly, and it will then create a cover letter. You know, hi, my name is Nicholas, and I would love to join your company. All of this is like a humiliation ritual, obviously. So it. But you know, I would, I would never recommend and for all this stuff, you know, I would never recommend just like submitting it blindly. You know, you need to edit this stuff. You need to like it. You. Not just for like, you know, that you, you just should like, you should make it. You, you're trying to. So, but. But it like, saves so much and. Okay. Does it work? I've given this tool, you know, it's been, it's been in beta for like, let's call it like six weeks. I've given it to a handful of friends I'm aware of. I think I want to say five interviews with real companies that we've all heard of on this call, which I will obviously not mention. But like, I'm like, okay, okay, this thing works. You know, ultimately I can't guarantee anyone gets hired. Obviously, I, I cannot guarantee anything. But what it can do is it could save you time and, you know, overnight you get an email. So you wake up in the morning, you get an email that says, hey, Nicholas. Hey, Paris, we found you. You know, 20 roles that you are a good fit for. You know, we used, I forget off hand what models I'm using to kind of filter it out, but like, here you go. So here's 10 roles that you would be a good fit for. Three of those roles you'd be an awesome fit for. So we've gone ahead and made the COVID letter and made the resume for you, for you to edit and submit at your own, at your own pace.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing that's really so interesting here is here. See just one guy. Not a. You know, I don't, I presume you're not a computer science, you know, PhD or anything, you're a journalist.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Just a guy guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Who in his spare time has done all of this really high quality work. I think it's just fascinating.

[Nicholas De Leon]

And then I have two iOS, I have two iOS native apps that are.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course you do.

[Nicholas De Leon]

One is, why don't you get up

[Jeff Jarvis]

at 5 o' clock to walk the dog.

[Leo Laporte]

You got a lot of energy. So tell us about the iOS apps.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, the iOS apps. One is. I don't want to give two. Maybe they should be out in the store maybe the next time I'm on Twitter a couple months from now. But basically one is, is kind of like a lifestyle app. I'll say that is code complete. That is, I'm literally in the, in the process of like putting together like the bank account stuff for the app Store for that. And the other one is a gaming accessory app. It would be, it's, it's, you know, if you play a lot of video games, it will be useful to you, is really all I can say. But especially for folks who play on Steam, I'll leave it at that. But that is like 90% code complete. It has like a bunch of cool themes like all through gaming history. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm getting old. You know, I played a lot of Super Nintendo, Sega. Those are kind of like the games I care about. N64, I don't care as much about PS5. So if you have like a real history of like video games, you may appreciate the, the overall design and aesthetic of the apps. And those will be. Those should be launched, I don't know in the next. Well, some of it depends on App Store review, but like very, very, very, very soon. And those were made again using primarily cloud cod. When Fable came out, that really helped with the, the UI work. Fable was very good with UI work, but it's just, yeah, it's just me messing around. It's just me Tinkering, you know. And you know, I'm having fun. You know, I, I tell my wife is like, she's like, are you like, are you having fun? You're in that room like, oh, what

[Leo Laporte]

are you doing in there?

[Nicholas De Leon]

I'm like, I'm like, you like you know me by now if I'm not having fun. I'm very easy to read. I get real grumpy, be really quick. But it's like, this is all cool to me. This is all fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, it's cool. It's very impressive what you're doing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Unbelievable.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I never set out to figure out the future of news or like, I'm gonna do this in journals. No, that was never my, never my goal. It was just these things exist. I kind of want to see what they can do is basically just, I

[Leo Laporte]

think you've shown us what they can do and I'm very impressed, especially considering you've spoken, spent a tiny amount of money doing this. That's for obviously many hours, but a tiny amount of money. And it is fun. It's very fun.

[Nicholas De Leon]

It's fun to me. That's the bottom line for, it's just fun. It's fun to mess around with this stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Nicholas De Leon is senior electronics reporter at Consumer Reports. Of course, you'll see him on Twitter again soon. We love having him on and I just thought it'd be fun to spend a little time talking about these projects. We never really get to delve into it and I still feel like we only scratch the surface. You're very productive. Productive. I'm impressed as hell. Thank you, Nicholas. Go be on tv.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, I gotta, I got a TV hit. Thank you again. I'll speak to you guys soon. Bye.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I, I'm sorry. Because I have a feeling Paris Nicholas is headed well, I asked him on that. Sweet. I said, do you, he's been at Consumer Reports for seven years. I said, how long before somebody comes and snatches you up?

[Paris Martineau]

A lot of people at CR have worked here for like 20.

[Leo Laporte]

He really, he says, I don't want to leave. He says, no, no, it is, I

[Paris Martineau]

would say most of the people that I interact with on a day to day basis have worked there for more than 10 years. It's a great and like I'd say a not insignificant amount of the people I interact with on a day to day basis have worked there for more than 20 years. It's a good place to work.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We are going to take a break. We'll come back in just a Bit with. I was. I was. I was remiss. I did not do the rundowns. And actually I get a lot of help from AI and I still didn't do the final chore of putting.

[Paris Martineau]

I was about to say we got a blank spreadsheet.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if you scroll down, Mr. Jeff Jarvis now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Finally, finally my moment.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, are we finally gonna get Jeff time? I'm starting after months of I should

[Leo Laporte]

just let Jeff do the show. Yeah, what am I doing?

[Paris Martineau]

I was gonna say this is actually incredible because. Because despite the fact. So for the listener, we operate off a spreadsheet where we put in our links and stuff like that. For most, the first, like two years of my time here, you had a section of the top of Leo, you had a section of. Top of a million links from Jeff. We kind of pick and choose from all of them. Sometime, I think over the last six months or so, when Leo started having AI do his briefings, we got into a very good routine of we're just going to go down Leo's list. But just Jeff, who believes in himself, kept putting his 65 links down there regardless, even though we never got to basically any of them. Every single time.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Education.

[Paris Martineau]

And now it's Jeff time, baby.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My turn. Well, Paris, there's a chapter before this. Used to be there was only one rundown and Leo would put in his stories and I, not knowing, interfered and I would add in more stories and it drove him completely bananas until he finally said, enough. There's my space and then there's other space.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's how we got.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember it at all. But. Okay, if you insist. I don't remember that. I thought we were. No, no, no, I remember.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But was it Jason who came and said Leo has another idea about the.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Maybe I said something to Jason that might make a little bit.

[Paris Martineau]

What are all these stories doing in my mind?

[Leo Laporte]

What's going on? I don't want to is. We'll take a break, we'll come back. There is a lot of news. I don't know if you got to it all and some of it's in my head. New models. We're going crazy here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

New business models. New.

[Leo Laporte]

New everything.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

People moving upstairs, downstairs and out the side door. You're watching Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. More in a moment. Our show today, brought to you by Monarch. Now, I gotta say, I love Monarch. So much so that, you know, I tried it for a while and I said, this is it. I'm using this from now on. But I Gotta tell you, my subscription recently, okay, I bought a year. I buy a year every year. And I subscribed and I bought a year and I. So my subscription came up and I thought, well, I really ought to look around and see what's out there. And I literally spent a morning installing all the other guys. And I said, what am I doing? There is nothing as good as Monarch. I love Monarch. So yes, I re upped. It's the personal finance app that tracks everything. Accounts, investments, savings goals, spending. With Monarch, I can feel relieved that my financial picture is the clearest it's ever been. It's so easy. I open the app or go to the website, Boom. Not only do I see where I stand right now, but it's kind of like having a financial advisor in your pocket. Most apps focus on what you've already spent, you know, oh, you spent a lot this month, Monarch. No, they don't do that. It helps you set goals. It helps you plan, map out big purchases, see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. See how you're doing for retirement, that kind of thing. Planning for getting married at college, putting your kids through college. You can ask Monarch's AI assistant anything about your finances, like how much did I spend on travel last summer? Or can I afford this vacation without touching my savings? It will spot things you wouldn't think to look for with its AI insights. Has your spending gone up or is it just inflation that's costing everything? Get a heads up on what's happening with your money. You'll even have it has a great AI weekly recap which flags spending spikes, net worth, shifts, upcoming expenses. Honestly, this is what I would design if I had the time. You don't have to. You got Monarch. Oh, and there's one little thing I just love. It's just a little extra feature they just threw in. Split the check without headache with Monarch's bill split. You scan the receipt in Monarch. Everyone claims what they got. Then you settle up. You don't need a separate app. It's just one more wonderful. I call them quality of life features. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use the code I [e-mail] to get your first year of Monarch Core Half off. Just $50. That's 50% off your first [e-mail]. don't forget the offer code. I am. So they know you saw it here. Monarch.com code I am. Well, it's been a busy, busy, busy week for the models. Busy week for me. I have to Say, I admit it, I spent a little bit of money this week.

[Paris Martineau]

You spending money.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was like the old days.

[Paris Martineau]

It felt like the old days. I miss when you. This show used to have a segment that was just what you bought through Instagram.

[Leo Laporte]

The crap I bought.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Or a game which says, what can we get Leo to buy today?

[Leo Laporte]

I did buy this Macintosh clock.

[Paris Martineau]

That seems like something you would buy on Instagram. You know what? You should get one of your little models to start doing a thing where every week it just presents.

[Leo Laporte]

Just buys me something.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no. Oh, it could. That could actually be interesting. But it could just make 5 to 10 fake Instagram ads for you of wacky products it thinks you would like. You could cut out the middleman of Facebook.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, just go, I don't need it anymore. I mean, have it make them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I really got spooked a little bit.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Both.

[Leo Laporte]

I was both impressed by the advance people were making in open weight models, Deep Sea Seek and others. And a bunch of open weight models came out this week. We'll talk about that in a second. And I also got a little spooked by the RAM crunch, by my inability, for instance, to buy a Macintosh with more than 96 gigs of RAM, which is really not enough to run a lot of these local models. I also got spooked by some of the news stories. You saw the news story yesterday that Anthropics decided to put tracking code in all of its results.

[Paris Martineau]

Why does that spook you?

[Leo Laporte]

Why wouldn't it? Do you want tracking code in all of your.

[Paris Martineau]

You mean a text? You mean a watermark in text so that if much water could do it? No, it's a like. It's the equivalent of like a watermark in images where if you then paste the text back into anthropic, it says, yes, that's an anthropic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but how would it teach this? I'm copying text.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's going to change something about the text in a way.

[Leo Laporte]

It's writing the text in a way, too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it can be identified. That's not a good thing at all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

It also raises all sorts of specters. Steve, you could.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you.

[Paris Martineau]

I disagree. I think that Anthropic has said that their whole goal in this, to make it the. There's no noticeable change in the output in terms of quality or words being used. And I think it's incredibly. It's a great idea and something that all of the companies should do that you should be able to put a piece of text back into the company's thing, and be like, did this come from you? And it could tell you yes or no. It's the exact same that Gemini does with its images, where if, even if it doesn't have a visible watermark on it, you put that image back into Gemini and it's like, yes, this was processed using.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have they said that's how it's going to work? They've said they'll provide a means that can tell you.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, they did. I've got a link in the rundown. If I can find it on my computer screen, that in my nice, well organized rundown.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can't find it there.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, it's under the section called France.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That makes sense.

[Paris Martineau]

Which is my section, row 221. And it. It's called how Claude marks AI generated content. And it goes. It basically says, we'll help you to detect Claude's marks. Will support users and other third parties to detect Claude's marks. Marks will apply to output from supported CLAUDE models across Claude platform API, claude, CLAUDE code, CLAUDE cowork and CLAUDE tag. If we can see the embedded watermarks and text. When a supported Claude model generates texts, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly text itself. You won't see it and it doesn't change the meaning, quality or readability of Claude's response.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Says Anthropic.

[Leo Laporte]

I am stunned that you think this is a good idea.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

This.

[Paris Martineau]

Why would it be?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm never using Claude again. What are you talking.

[Paris Martineau]

So the only. So you think that the only way you want to use Claude for text output is so that you can pass it off and no one can ever know that you used Claude?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want.

[Paris Martineau]

This is the only thing that it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Where does this Calvinism about. It was AI helped come from that. Oh, my God, it has AI cooties. So we must admit.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not. I just think that we should understand the provenance from where things come. And I think that it's helpful if you are creating something with a very specific tool and the maker of that tool wants to provide a way for other people to identify it. Them's the brakes, buddy.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, it is the breaks. I'm never using Anthropic again. And by the way, I am not alone. Dario, I think, has gone off the deep end in his fight against open weight models.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

Wait, no, they are attempting to.

[Paris Martineau]

What's the problem with this, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't even. I don't know where to start.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, we'll give a disaster scenario for Paris, because she's not well.

[Leo Laporte]

Steven Sinofsky gave a disaster scenario on Twitter. He's. He used to work at Microsoft. He said at one point we thought it'd be a really good idea to put a GUID Globally Identifier. Global Identifier in all Microsoft Word documents. And what we didn't realize is that people could use it to, you know, track you, to figure out who you are. We spent a lot of time on. Wait a minute, slow down. We spent a lot of time talking about how to keep your browser from fingerprinting you. This is exactly that.

[Paris Martineau]

It has nothing to do with you personally. All it says, it's a simple yes or no. It says, this was may have been processed by Claude, or this does not show signs that it was processed by Claude. Those are the two options. I think that that's a fine data signal to have. What is the big deal if suddenly all the text you output using Claude could return a signal that says may have been processed by Claude?

[Jeff Jarvis]

What if one of your sources. What if one of your sources says, I'm not a very good writer, I'm going to try to provide an explanation of what's going on in the scandal to Paris Martineau, because she will uncover this, but I'm going to use Claude to write this up. And then it goes to you. And you don't know there's a watermark in there.

[Paris Martineau]

Like, I would never publish the text that someone else sent me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, but you wouldn't even know because it's text. And the Reality Winner story was that there was something hidden in the text there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Reality Winner went to jail for five years as a result.

[Paris Martineau]

The reality in Reality Winners case, it was something that specifically identified the user ID and name of the person who printed it. This is not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, we don't know what. We don't know. We do, because what can be subpoenaed by the authorities if they say. If the authorities say this text and you wouldn't publish it, but if you quote from it, let's say you just have to do a block quote of this. You don't know it's got in there. And they're saying that even if you cut and paste this, it's still in there. And so they. Then, then the government comes along, the DOJ and puts it into Claudette says, yes. And then they go to Claude, they say, we're going to subpoena you this. Who did this, when and where. And you are not even aware as a reporter that that was in there. Is that freaking out?

[Paris Martineau]

Not at all. I don't think that you're describing what Anthropic has said they've done. It's simply. Was this processed by Claude? Might or. They don't even say this was processed by Claude. They say the signals are. Are. This may have been.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's not caused by Claude.

[Paris Martineau]

Or this may have not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then they could be schmutzing some poor student who. Who did the work and actually did write it. But Claude says, oh, yeah, that looks like ours. And the student gets. Gets kicked out of school because Claude made a mistake.

[Paris Martineau]

That's also not what they're saying.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

My advice, if we can stop now, Paris, My advice is no one should ever again use an Anthropic product. They're doing this because the EU demands it. It, yes.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Let's play.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, the only ones responding to the EU this way, although I imagine OpenAI is going to do it, One of the reasons that really convinced me to move to local models is exactly this. These are nightmare scenarios. And I'm sorry you don't see the potential disaster for this. I really wonder, somebody raises this in our club Twit Discord, if this will be done with enterprise products. Because. Because in many cases this would absolutely be a problem for enterprise. And of course, that's Anthropic's entire business.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The EU is, I think, requiring it across the board.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, we'll see. Anyway, we can debate its merits. There are those of us who do not like the idea of a fingerprint in our content, whether it's on our printed page.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So one more second here, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Course.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Defend the, if you will, if you will, the societal reason for having the watermark.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that if you are using a tool to create writing and other people want to know whether you used a tool to generate writing that you're passing off as your own. A having a thing out there that just says aspects of this contain the sign that some words in this were processed by me. The company that made this is fine. It's not a privacy issue. It has nothing to do with your identity. It just shows the fact you declare

[Jeff Jarvis]

that there's a signal of.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's a useful signal to have. If, in your example, a source passed me off a document and claimed it was theirs, and I put it through this and found out that it was generated by Claude, that'd be incredibly useful information for me to have that that person was passing me out off a fake document.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. Who says it Was. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait there. Who says it was fake at all? I use this to help me write it. I'm a bad writer. I had to help get help.

[Paris Martineau]

That would not be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I decided at the end. I went over every word that would

[Paris Martineau]

be considered fake because I would not want a document. The usefulness to me of getting a document from a source is that it comes from the source, went over word

[Jeff Jarvis]

by word and says this expresses exactly what happened in this case and exactly what I wanted to say. Say, and I'm glad it helped me write this. I use Grammarly to get the. The. The commas right. And I use this to help me write this. And I put it off. And then you're now going to resembly.

[Leo Laporte]

Might have to do this according to the eu. I just think that I agree. If it doesn't identify you, it only says this was made by Claude. It's less of a problem. I'm very concerned.

[Paris Martineau]

No one has said it identifies.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, we don't know. We don't know whether description of it

[Paris Martineau]

does not indicate that it does that.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't know what data trustworthy. I don't trust them farther than I can throw them anyway. No, I'm just saying. You made your point. Good point. We disagree. Moving on both sides. Yes. Let's see what else is going on. More models are coming out like crazy. Glimmer. You wanted to use Glimmer, Jeff. Locally. You wanted to run it from metal. I tried it briefly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, you did try it. Okay. Yeah, tell about it. Well, you know you were going to tell Leo you were starting down the pike. I want to hear about you and Glimmer, but you were starting on the pike of describing your purchase. What do you want to get to that later?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I'm afraid if I tell Paris, she's going to yell at me. So maybe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know why you think everything I do, Leo.

[Paris Martineau]

Me having criticism, not even me having a basic criticism, me supporting a feature an AI company has released this week does not mean that you can't talk about AI on our podcast about AI. I use AI. I co host a show with you about AI. We can talk about it and you can talk about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Yeah, I don't really talk about Glimmer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Talk about Glimmer.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you talk about your thing that you just bought that you wanted to tell us about? Why?

[Leo Laporte]

Don't want to talk about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I've been dying to hear about it.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to be mocked and I have a feeling that's what would happen.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not going to mock you. Please talk about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you wanted to run models at a higher rate.

[Leo Laporte]

I mock me. So I really did feel that it more and more important to if you can, to run your own models. I was concerned that that is going to become harder and harder to do. This is another example of that is, you know, if you're running an open weight model that doesn't have a watermark in it, the EU might say, oh, I don't know what the EU could do about it. Frankly I don't know what the US government could do about it. I don't know what the Chinese government could do about it. The interesting thing is there are. I don't know. I thought I would be using a local model. I bought some hardware to run the local model. I upgraded my gaming PC from a 10 gigabyte very old 5 year old video card, the 3070 to an RTX 3090 which is almost, I think it is as old but it has 24 gigabytes. It allows me to run one of the Chinese models. Quinn. It's a very good model, 3.5. Now 3.8 has been announced and I hope will be downloadable at the end of the week. They announced 3.8 max which I had been using for a while as an open weight download today. This morning they will do 3.8 smaller model 27B on Friday they say that would run in that 3090 I think, I hope certainly their older version of that does and runs quite well, quite fast. So that's nice, that's for quick inference but I also wanted to run, I was hoping to run something more substantial. I thought had been using Deepseeks before Flash for a while was very, very impressed by it. Turns out you can't run it in a single DGX Spark. Now these are not cheap machines. These are $4,000 each. They are basically headless computers designed to do one thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do they come with a set amount of RAM?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, 128 gigs of RAM, unified RAM and it's a Blackwell GPU in it. So it isn't, it isn't by any means like a 6000 or even a 5090. It's not, it's. It's a little bit slow, it's not a super machine but it is big enough to host a larger model and they have on the back of it a 200 gigabit connector port and if you buy two of them and they Buy the cable. They can be paired to run an even larger model. And a deep seq V4 flash will run in. But it needs two of them of them. So I thought, well, that's probably what I want to run. I like it. It's good. There's going to be a deep seq V4 Pro coming soon. These open weight models, you know, you want to run as big a model, I thought you want to run as big a model as you can locally because that's going to be your main model. What I did before I ordered these, I spent a long time agonizing about this and I finally spent some money out of my, my savings to do it. I guess I'm glad I did. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Sparks. I set them up last night. Quinn's running nicely. I have the Mac 64 gig Mac mini which is running whisper large. It's very nice, very fast. And I was hoping to not do coding with it. I think I. I still think I'll probably need to use a Frontier model for the bigger coding projects like the Twit sales system that I've been working on. But I was hoping to use my agent Hermes with a local model entirely, especially when it's doing things like financial and health information. I'd like to keep those things to myself now. It's not an economic, a good economic decision. It's so cheap to run Deep Seek on, on a server, whether it's a Chinese server or an American server, like open code, that it really doesn't make sense in any financial sense. It's purely for autonomy and for privacy. And now that Anthropic's doing what it's doing, that's why I let off with it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And you could learn the limits of it not being connected to the mothership.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And how it operates, which I think is really interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. In fact, of late, Deep Sea seems to not be as good as it was a couple of days ago. And I think think the Chi I was running through the Chinese Deep SEQ servers, the official servers, and I think they have been so bandwidth constrained they've already talked about, they've already said we're going to raise prices a lot. They've been so bandwidth constrained that they can't serve the people who want to use it. And as a result you get less of a model. So if you're running it locally, you're going to get at least a consistent result as long as you can afford the power. The nice thing about the Nvidia Sparks. They're very low powered. They're comparable to a Mac minus many. So they're not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Leo, by the way, asked his models to give him a report.

[Leo Laporte]

I have actually a dashboard I can look at the. Currently, the Mojo model, which is the Quen model, is running full bore because I'm having it analyze a code base. This is what it's very good at, analyzing a code base, making a. What's called a graph out of the code base to save energy. When the coding models are looking at it and you can see it's at 96%, it's 75 degrees centigrade. It's using 350 watts of power. It's using a lot of power. That's almost the entire power budget. Total power budget for the three machines right now is 366 watts. So the Sparks aren't using very much power. And that's one of the other advantages of them. They're fairly inexpensive to run now. So I thought, I'm going to run Flash, and I got a recipe. But I thought I should also test some of these open models.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which Flash? Whose flash?

[Leo Laporte]

Deepseek V4 flash.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought I should test some of these open model, other open models. So I had the other agents, mostly Fable and Saul, create a harness of benchmark tests. They created seven, like, word problems and you know, the kinds of things that, you know, trip up AI like, you know, I'm going, I need to wash my car, should I walk or drive? Kind of question. Those turned out to be too easy. All the local models I tested, I tested about half a dozen of them, all got those all right. But it had a second tranche of problems which I thought were a good idea, which is stuff we've struggled with over the last few weeks of coding, stuff the other models got wrong or mistakes they could have made. And I ran that by them and they solved all of them as well. They were very good. And the winner, when I finally gave it the hardest problems of all was Not Deep Seek V4 flash. So I tested Nematron Deepseek flash, quin35 glm52 OpenAI's GPT OSS. I don't. I think it's not. I think it's 20B, not 120B. A minimax model. I tested also what's called an obliterated model of Deep Seq V4 flash. So it can't say no.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, what do you mean, mean? Well, what does obliterated mean? Obliterated specifically, what it means it's not obliterated.

[Leo Laporte]

It's absolute jailbroke. It's abliterated, which is not a real word. It's jailbroken. It's actually a Pliny the. The liberator's word for a jailbroken.

[Paris Martineau]

But, you know, and it's jailbroken in what way? Like, what are they.

[Leo Laporte]

Many models have. Well, the Chinese model specifically, for instance, if you ask about Tiananmen Square, will say, what? Nothing happened. Nothing. Nothing. What are you talking about? So it also will reduce turns off

[Jeff Jarvis]

the guardrails, or you think you turn

[Leo Laporte]

off the guardrails and one of the guardrails. That concerns me considerably. Both fable and chat GPT Saul 5, 6 Saul have been very much locked down by these companies that are terrified of the Trump administration. Remember, Fable got pulled for weeks. OpenAI is holding Astra back because it doesn't want the government to say, you can't release these models. They're dangerous. So they often have cybersecurity, they have classifiers. But even within the models they have holes where they. I'm not going to do any cybersecurity research. I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to do that. Because they don't want to get in trouble with the government. So an obliterated model in theory doesn't reject what you ask of it. It does. It's now my. In truth, that's probably also nerfing it to some degree. It's making it a little bit stupid. Jupiter. In any event, I wanted to try it. So I have a deep seq v4 flash that's obliterated. After running the tests, I was shocked that Nvidia's model, which runs on a single spark, is easily the best, certainly the fastest. More than twice as fast as Flash, three times as fast as Quinn, and made no mistake.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it's an open weight model.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an open weight model from Nvidia. Now this is one. They just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is this the new Nematron? This is the new one.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. This is the new one. Nematron Lightning, they call it. And I was kind of stunned at how good it is. I'm running it right now locally on Hermes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why were you stunned? Kind of? I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, first of all, it's a lot smaller. It's half the size.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought Nvidia is good, folks.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought Deepseek Flash would do better. Well, Nvidia is good on Nvidia's hardware. Exactly. Maybe be its secret sauce. I don't know. The Nematron models are surprisingly good. So I did say. But now we should test it with harder problems, including coding. And it failed miserably at coding. I mean it literally, it, it was, it was close to dumb in coding. Here's the result. Hard fail. By the way, it's Nematron grading Nematron. Ironically, it gave it a problem where to refactor some Python code. But it did a bunch of things. Just dumb things. It clearly is not a good coding model, which is okay because I anticipated I'd probably be doing coding somewhere else. But what I want is a good ajuntic model. And it seems like it is a good agentic model. But there's also a lesson here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here.

[Leo Laporte]

A, these open weight models are getting better fast. B, they're like all AI spiky. They're good at some things, not so good at other things. And C, I shouldn't have bought two Sparks.

[Paris Martineau]

How did you get two Sparks? Are they, are they just having the same sort of. They're not having the same.

[Leo Laporte]

They haven't changed the price. Well, this was what concerned me. They haven't changed the price since they announced them. And my feeling is they probably built 10,000 of them or whatever and then once they've sold them all, then it'll be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was like a high end Chromebook. You know, who's going to buy. It's a very specific hobby.

[Leo Laporte]

They'll be done. And so I was very afraid that if I didn't buy it now, it might be that I. RAM is. You just cannot get RAM for love or money at this point. And ram's one of the things you really need. You need fast cards.

[Paris Martineau]

So why do you think that these haven't sold out then

[Jeff Jarvis]

paid?

[Leo Laporte]

They're very expensive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, if you're going to run. Let me ask this question then to go to Paris. Question. If you're a small company wanting to run models, are there cheaper things to use than not really Sparks? No, not.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, again, there's a, there's a. You got to pay a certain amount of money. Honestly, if you were a small company, I wouldn't even buy Sparks. I'd buy something in the hundred thousand dollar range.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, small company.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, not so small, but companies if you want local inference because you want to protect your company's proprietary information or privacy, that's worth something to you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the, the machine you built that you were using before was what? It's the.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a gaming rig I bought from Dell. An Alienware gaming.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no, no. The other one. You're The.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the framework.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Framework. But how much was that?

[Leo Laporte]

It's not Cuda. That was about the same as a 3, 500 bucks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I had hoped that that would last me and it is. It's still the heart, it's still the server. It's running everything. The models are running headless on these three other machines and then they connect into the agent which is running on the framework.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Could you run Nematron on the framework?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it can't run in the framework

[Jeff Jarvis]

because it doesn't have Cuda as a. Yeah. Os. Okay, so it sounds like it's worthwhile to have gotten the.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And. And I keep saying keep thing to Quicksilver. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have bought those other Spark. I said, don't say that, Leo. You're so smart, you. No, it didn't say that. It said, well, remember, that's today. Tomorrow V4 Pro might come out tomorrow. There'll be new models that may well require all of that. But what's really interesting is Nematron Lightning runs quite well on a single Spark. And I think very impressive. So that's. That's the point. Now, interestingly, Elon came out with, as Nicholas said today with Grok 4.6, which he was touting on X is all that. Did you see a lot of stories about it? I didn't. Everybody was waiting for the 6:30am Pacific Time drop of Quinn. Nobody was waiting for 4.6 or even cared, which is ironic because Grok's actually pretty, pretty good. But people just don't want to use it after the Mecca Hitler. No, they just don't want to use it. So it's a. It's a good time to be using local models, I guess, is the point. Glimmer the Meta models about what you'd expect. What I'm glad to see, it's very important to mention is Meta hadn't put out a local model in years. They started the local model trend with Llama and really seeded that whole industry. And so I'm glad to see them back at the table.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was fascinating to see Yann Lecun all over social media. It's like good Grasshopper, good. Praising Zuckerberg and Meta for sticking with Open.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. And as I mentioned, they opened the Meta glasses. I think Mark Zuckerberg. I think what it is is an admission. Admission, much like Google's admission. We'll talk about that in a second. That they are not in the race, really. And maybe they better find another way to justify their billions and billions of dollars they've spent on AI.

[Paris Martineau]

How are your glasses hacking going?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I haven't hacked them. I'm not. I haven't worked on that yet. I don't. Partly because I'm waiting for better glasses. I really don't want to wear these around. I'd have to put real.

[Paris Martineau]

They have cute ones now.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, but I have to put good lenses in them. It'd be hundreds of bucks. Yeah, no, I'm not wearing Kim Kardash or no, Kylie Jenner's glasses.

[Paris Martineau]

They look kind of cute.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It could. It could be.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't want to get beaten up by my friends in Brooklyn. I also just have no interest in the features that they offer, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that's right, because you'd have cameras walking around with cameras in them.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I carry both a camera. Camera in my pocket, and I have a physical camera. I don't need a third camera. And I've also been transitioning away from wearing glasses, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, you're transit. You're trans. You're going to be all contacts all the time.

[Paris Martineau]

I got contacts.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they getting more comfortable?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean. Yeah, they've been very comfortable after. Since the first week or so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good. Yeah, because I know you were.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I used to wear contacts

[Jeff Jarvis]

all the time, so it wasn't a new thing.

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's the new thing for me as someone who wore contacts, you know, all through grade school and stuff. Is now. Now they have dailies that are cheap, and that's the thing that everyone gets. I used to wear monthlies always. That was the only option.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to clean them.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, you have to clean them and store them. Now, I've just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My sister used to put them in her mouth.

[Paris Martineau]

Just plopping them out everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Do not put them in your mouth. Yeah, now you just throw them out. I'm done with these. I'm done with you. We're gonna take a break anyway. It's an interesting time to be local, and I still.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Real quick, Leo, I have one question about your story setup. Like, do you have a photo, Gonzalez?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, sir.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Is it like a 90s hacker aesthetic you have going on over there? Or is it like. Or is it all in a closet?

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of a 90s hacker aesthetic. Let me put it this way. If the. If the. If the popo come knocking at the door, I'm throwing everything in the microwave oven and climbing out the back. No, I'm kidding. That's a Mr. Robot reference. Yeah, it kind of has that aesthetic. There's a lot of screens, a lot of machines. It's beastly hot in here. 86 degrees.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jesus Christ.

[Leo Laporte]

It's only 81 outside. But air conditioning just can't control what's going on in this, in this office. Mostly it's because of this mojo. The 3090 churning really hard. It's a four hour job. It's actually kind of cool. I found a project that takes your code base, makes a graph out of it to speed up the frontier models. Looking at your code base, they look at the graph instead of the code base and it's much faster. So I'm actually pretty excited about that. And this is where a local model is. Great. I'm not using any tokens or anything. I'm doing this all locally and it's pretty, pretty fast.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to hear a little bit about the business model here. So you talked about.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, hold on, let me do a. Speaking of business models.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

We do have one. Hard to believe, believe. And again, I want to emphasize, I actually just got a check from the IRS for exactly that amount of money. And I thought that's a sign. Lisa says, don't cash that check, they're going to want it back. I said no. They said I overpaid three years ago and they gave me my money back.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jeez.

[Leo Laporte]

She said, they did that to me. And then a year later they said, oh, our mistake. Can we get, can we get it back? And we want interest. No, I think they said, if you pay us right away, we won't charge you all that interest.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, how nice of them.

[Leo Laporte]

How nice of them. So I, I may be spending funny money, but I'm not spend. I don't, I don't make enough to do this. This is, this is dipping into my children's inheritance. But I, it's almost a political thing. I feel like I really need to do this. Plus, it's fun to have it located local and have it be my own.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're in control. I think that's so much where the future is going. It's also part of all people to know where it's going.

[Leo Laporte]

I got to try all these. I mean, it's nice that I can benchmark these models locally and see and so forth. I am still looking for a good coding local model. I don't think they exist. I think you still have to go out into the real world. Our show today. Anyway, we'll be back. More intelligent machines coming up. It's the Jeff Jarvis rundown. Actually, I should let you Just run the show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not a democracy.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is today since I didn't do my job. Our show today. Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau, great to have you. Our show today brought to you by Helix Sleep. Oh man, it's hot, right? Those hot August nights, what do they call them, the dog days of summer? It's making it hard to get restful sleep, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Jeff Jarvis]

So so Nvidia started the letter that Now I think 250 companies have signed in favor of open weight. Everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, Mark Zuckerberg also wrote a long piece on 6,500 words.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I, I had to, I had to have it read it to me because I was not going to spend my time.

[Leo Laporte]

But he was in support of open weights as well. I didn't read it either, but that's what I understand.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you just explored Meta's model is kind of okay, we're behind, we're going to. We catch the llama breeze again, see what's what. Nvidia's model for this, I mean he's generally says the more people use AI, I tell you, chips, the better.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's. See he, what is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What do his customers think of this?

[Leo Laporte]

He doesn't make money. Oh, I know what you're saying. Yeah, he doesn't make money selling inference. He sells money selling inference engines. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So making a model that you will use his hardware better than anybody else is great. But I understand what you're saying. Doesn't that piss off all the people? People who are buying Nvidia GPUs, but

[Jeff Jarvis]

they need them too badly.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, yeah, they can't. What else are they going to do?

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're not going to piss them off.

[Leo Laporte]

He has a monopoly. There is no other choice. I mean the Chinese are choosing other hardware from Huawei and Xiaomi because they have to, because they can't. In theory, they can't legally buy Nvidia's chips, but everybody else is snapping them up as fast as they can make them. So I guess he feels like he can do this. I also think he's not really threatened. I mean as good as no Nematron Lightning is. It isn't Claude Co. It isn't, you know, Fable or even opus 4.8 or 4.5 even. It's just, you know, it's a good agentic harness. The fact that it failed so badly at coding is a good example. Glimmer is not bad. Glimmer's pretty good. It's not bad bad. It's not good enough that I would make it my full time model, but it's run on a 64 gig Mac. Pretty, pretty snappable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It said you can actually run it

[Leo Laporte]

for less, but yeah, yeah, I don't know what the minimum is. Yeah, there is in general a relationship between model size and performance.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here's my question because I keep on trying to think, because I'm an idiot about this stuff about the retail level of this you still have to go to. You have to install Wallet with terminal window and all that. Right. Glimmer, who is, is anyone going to make a locally run AI model as easy to install as an app?

[Leo Laporte]

Well that's an interesting question because of course all these companies are doing their own apps Perplexity Computer but those call to the mothership. They call to the mothership and they're hoping that's what people will want and use. I think that really interesting challenge is enterprise at this point because businesses are maybe sometimes legally constrained and certainly want to be private and don't want to send all their proprietary information to a frontier model. So they have to go out and pay a lot for private compute, you know and of course all the big companies will sell that to you through AWS or Microsoft or anybody else. It's very expensive but it's what they want.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris, do you see any consumer as a consumer do you see any need and as a reporter cares about AI appliance?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Would you like an AI appliance? Would, would it be worthwhile to you? Muted. Muted.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean to preface my response is not indicated is not informed by me hating or disliking AI but to respond whenever I have had appliances that are connected to the Internet in some way that connection ends up being one of the immediate points of failure. It is like some update that goes poorly or a new update that's ported over that doesn't allow me to use bootlegged ink for my printer or things like that. There are just I think whenever we in my experience or whenever I am getting an appliance that is Internet connected it has never satisfied me in the same way as a good old fashioned brand that had worked for 20 years prior. But I guess if there's an AI appliance that has longevity and is buy it for life in addition to being AI and the AI provides some sort of use that would be useful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah I don't think these companies really incented to they really like and this is what all companies, all technology companies learned. It's much better to rent than to sell.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I don't want to rent a laundry machine as a service right this

[Leo Laporte]

the chat room's reminding me there is this There are a number of programs like this. Jan is one of them that is a. It's an app you download and will let you run local models. I mean again the problem is you're going to be unhappy when you run a local model on anything less than a 128 gig Mac or more. That's the problem. And people can't get these big machines anymore, by the way, this is Mac, Windows and Linux. And if you, I mean, I tried it. I did a lot of these, you know, LM Studio and things like that as my first. I did all, you know, I worked my way up very much like Nicholas did. You know, you start with a chat bottle and you kind of get more into it and you work your way up. Yeah, I don't. You, I just don't know you. At the same time, you're seeing companies open. AI says we have a billion users. Google just said we have a billion users for Gemini. I suspect they're including all the people using AI overviews against their will. But people. There are. People are interested in it. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think there's an opportunity here for a retail scaled level of AI when people understand that they can make an agent without geeking out and it can do what they want it to do and they want it to be local and they want it to be private and they don't want to pay constantly. They're tired of subscriptions all around. They hate subscriptions for entertainment and to pay it for AI too.

[Leo Laporte]

I wouldn't be surprised in two years if Nvidia doesn't sell a machine in the one to $2,000 range. It runs a local model. It's all ready to go. You plug it in, they have an app on your phone, they have an app for all your operating systems that connect through that model. And you put it in a closet. I think that's within two years for sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Since it's my rundown today, I see a transition here to a Tim O'Reilly speculation about what Google's up to with its reorganization.

[Leo Laporte]

He calls it the Westinghouse bet. This was that I mentioned there were two pivots. One is Microsoft saying, yeah, I guess we lost, so we'll do something else. To some degree, Google's saying, yeah, we're not going to be a frontier model.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Maybe I think it's reading a little too much and saying they're giving up there, but they do support opportunity.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll tell you, before we get to Tim's much more astute analysis, I think my sense of it is Google's trying to put an arrow in the sand in the distance, skating to where the puck is going, saying, you know what? Okay, we missed the boat on coding, but you know what's gonna be the next big thing? Curing cancer, Making vaccines. Making new medicines. So let's aim for that. And let's take our smartest mind, Demis Asibas, away from day to day operations at Deep Minds and put him in charge of Discovery Loop which is, is their health lab. So that was my sense.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's one puck ahead.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, why would they, if that was their focus, why would they dissolve one of the labs that was working on this? Wasn't that what we reported like, but

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think that's the spin out, isn't it? Basically it becomes the spin out instead.

[Paris Martineau]

No, but all those people went to Gemini.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, some of them went to the spin out which is going to do just that. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I apologize. Jeff Dean went to Discovery Loop. That's his startup. That's a big loss. Jeff Dean was like Google employee number 30.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, but that's what Paris is asking.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why wouldn't you keep that in the company? Or is is the fact that he

[Leo Laporte]

left and he probably left because he wasn't appreciated. I don't know why.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, yeah, that suggests Google's investing. It's not focusing a lot of time and effort into that being its differentiating factor.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, so, but, but Sundar Pichai's announcement said we're moving, we're promoting Demis. Right. So what does Tim O'Reilly say about it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, Tim O'Reilly is arguing something different. He's arguing a Westinghouse model that

[Nicholas De Leon]

in

[Jeff Jarvis]

the age of steam powered machines, you had a huge steam machine and belts would, would power every single thing in the building and then along comes electricity and you had a huge electric motor that did the same thing. The Westinghouse said no, we can distribute that and you can get a little. As long as we get the electricity to you, we can get lots of little electric engines all over doing all this kinds of work wherever it is, you don't have to be next to anything. Isn't that better? And that that's what he thinks Google is trying to do, given that it's a consumer company and it has all of these structures of distribution and advertising and such in place that it becomes the distribution company for a AI. So I think that's what I'm reading into what Tim is saying and Cecile Tamura in Facebook who does great summaries of this thing, she did a very good summary of it, which I also have in the rundown. I think that that's, I don't think Google's given up on Frontier. I don't think they've given up on science either. Paris, though I think you raise a really good question is why did they dismantle their Nobel winning division decision? But I do think that the puck they're seeing ahead of them is, is saying the frontiers are going to be commodities and we can get AI in the hands of more people than anybody else.

[Leo Laporte]

They already have a foot in the door with Apple, remember?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple's going to put in effect put Gemini in a billion and a half pockets. So Tim says, you know, the analysts are probably right. Google gave something up on August 5th, but possibly wrong about why it's hard. You know, this is. Keep talking about how opaque these companies are. We just really don't know what's going on. I don't think bringing Sergey Brin in is necessarily a move for the better. I don't know. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, he's been heavily involved for what, the last 18 months or so in their AI efforts.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting, you know, it's. We can only speculate. This is the problem. We can only speculate about what Mark Zuckerberg's thinking, what Dar Dario Mod is thinking, although Sam Altman's thinking, although you got to judge people by their actions. And that's, that's I guess where I'm, where I'm judging them. What else is going on? Let's see here. You, Jeff, it's your rundown.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's Jeff time.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how. Let's talk about the hockey puck. The mechanical hockey puck or as I call it, the mechanical donut. OpenAI. This is a Mark Gurman leak from Bloomberg. Gurman says OpenAI's first hardware device will be released next year. It is a donut shaped smart speaker, no display with mechanical movements inside. This is so Jony I've. It's coming out of his love from design firm mechanical devices inside to make you think. It's thinking to make you feel like something's happening instead of it just sitting there there. Which is probably why it's going to cost 2 to $300.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Makes no sense.

[Paris Martineau]

What does that mean? What are they?

[Leo Laporte]

The circle. This is what Mark writes. The circle shaped device will include parts that move on their own. According to the people in the know, that will help show when it's responding and interacting with the user. The goal is to make the object feel more alive than today's stationary speaker products. Actually, let me.

[Paris Martineau]

I love the. That OpenAI paid so much to get Joni I've. And basically what he came up with is what if we Do a smart speaker like everybody else. But. But it's not going to be just like everybody else's. Ours is going to move. So it feels different. And they're like, wow, that was a lot of money. Well spent. Great.

[Leo Laporte]

And.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Paris, you can carry it from room to room because it's a donut. You can put your finger in it.

[Leo Laporte]

I kind of understand what they're thinking because every time I've been designing, like I have this ESP32, when I design these. These things, it wakes up to, hey, Quicksilver. I have to put different things on the screen so I know a. It heard me. And then it flips over to another screen. It's thinking, and then a final screen when it's speaking so that I understand what state it's in. Otherwise, it just sits there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The new Android phones is the. The Pixel 11 is going to basically do that. The Pixel. What do we call it? Yeah, Pixel.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're going to have. They're going to use the color bar to let you notify you of that. Yes, I heard you.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And actually that's kind of what Apple's doing with Siri. The new Siri has a little blob that hovers. And then you could see it's. It's hearing what I'm saying because it's responding to that. Then when I stop talking, it's thinking. And then so you have to kind of faded blob.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Avatar. Microsoft Copilot. It floats on the screen, changes shape and color to show that the assistant is listening and processing your voice. Are you using Microsoft Copilot or is this happening on a different app?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you dummy, it's happening on you. That's the new Siri. And so I understand you need some interaction cues. I don't know. It's. This is a rumor. The speaker. The product, according to. Again, the rumor, will have speaker grills and a microphone for fielding commands and conversing with users. Ooh, what an innovation. The battery pa. It's battery powered, which means you can carry it around. This is also battery powered. I don't have a battery on it right now, but. And it's, by the way, a $60 ESP32 device, but I'm just putting one on every floor so I can talk.

[Paris Martineau]

It says it as a camera system.

[Leo Laporte]

It has a camera in it.

[Paris Martineau]

It says a camera system. And other sensors, meanwhile, will perceive the surrounding environment and feed visual information into the AI.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a deal breaker, ladies.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, my little. My little donut. That goes has little clunky robot parts. Has not just one camera, but a camera system them.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interest. I missed that.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Okay, well, also, moving parts means it can be broken easily.

[Paris Martineau]

I was going to say. That's the first thing I thought, Benito. I was like, those moving parts mean that that's going to get caught on stuff. So quick, stuff's going to get in there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Your cat's going to tear it apart.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the cat's going to know something's going on, man. There's something in there.

[Paris Martineau]

I got a new vacuum. This week in Gizmo is both terrified and really trying to assert her dominance.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a robot vacuum or is it a.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I didn't get a robot vacuum. I don't have the floor. I don't have. I've got too many things on my floor to have a robot vacuum. I got a canister vacuum, which I, you know, I'm right now experiencing Vacuumania, which is where you get a new vacuum and especially a new type of vacuum. And suddenly, I mean, yes, but now I'm just vacuuming everything like crazy. And I feel energy energized by it because it's a new vacuum.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you get in the auction?

[Paris Martineau]

I didn't. He's talking about. It's currently the CR auction, which is a wonderful employee perk at Consumer Reports where a couple times a year we do like an employee, friends and family, like, auction for stuff we've tested. And I was holding out for the CR auction to get a new vacuum, but I knew I wanted a canister vacuum. And I guess we didn't test it. None of the ones we've tested are in this batch, so. So I just got a basic kind of Kenmore, but I'm going to try. I got a kind of lower end model for what I was expecting to pay because I wanted to see if I want to live the canister vacuum lifestyle as a former stick vacuum person. And if I do, then I'll maybe spring for a meow.

[Leo Laporte]

See, I always. If I were going to get a canister vacuum, I'd get a Henry. The ones, they have little faces on them and the nose is the vacuum hose that comes out.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that's a great idea. Idea. I should get two big googly eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. You could make it a Henry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That'll really freak the cat.

[Leo Laporte]

They actually have a Henry and they have a heady. I didn't know this. It's a British company and they're only £149. So, yeah, pareidolia. Everything looks like a face to me. Wait a minute. Does that vacuum have eyelashes?

[Paris Martineau]

That's beautiful, isn't it? It looks like it's plotting something thing.

[Leo Laporte]

It does look like it's up.

[Paris Martineau]

It's looking up and to the right, like it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's looking at you as you vacuum.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's fun. It's coy about it.

[Leo Laporte]

If a vacuum doesn't work, I guess Larry says you can't say it sucks.

[Paris Martineau]

You can't.

[Leo Laporte]

But it doesn't suck, which means it doesn't work.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So back to the rundown. Yes, the Nvidia $500 billion fund I also found fascinating. They tied together a whole bunch of money to help companies buy Nvidia's chips, which Nvidia was doing on its own before, but now they've gotten this huge debt market in there. And the problem, the Wall Street Journal explained, was that companies couldn't afford to buy the chip chips. So Nvidia needs to give them the money to buy the chips, which is circular, I know. Now it's outside money. Now it's outside money and. But Nvidia still has skin in the game.

[Leo Laporte]

They both book it as income, don't they?

[Jeff Jarvis]

And if. And if the company defaults, well, Nvidia gets hurt to an extent by that. But then somebody else is going to pick up the chips. There's a constant market for chips. You'd buy used chips in a second.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's one of the reasons I didn't mind buying, buying those sparks, because they're only going to go up in value. They're not going to go down. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, for at least a year or so.

[Leo Laporte]

If in a few months, I go, boy, that was a dumb thing, I'll just sell them and I'm sure I could at least get my money back. What's interesting is this $9 billion deal is with bitcoin miners.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is another deal. Yeah, different.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is a different one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a different. Yeah, yeah. Nvidia is a debt market of $500 billion dollars to securitize part of that chip, to securitize chips. So that just as. Just as when United doesn't buy the jet, an entity buys the jet and leases it to United. Now, basically, you have a mechanism to securitize chips. Now, the Journal argues that the problem is the chips have a short shelf life because the next chip comes out and then everybody wants that chip. But it's not as if these chips are going to become useless. They still have value in the marketplace. And so that's that story. The separate story is that Anthropic did a deal to buy server capacity from a bitcoin company. Because bitcoin, well, you know, it's not today's thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You know, when I bought this RTX 3090, I bought it used on ebay. And I'm going to bet that it probably was part of a bitcoin mining rink that got disassembled and sold out for parts. I was a little nervous. It might be kind of on its last legs, but it seems to be, it's doing pretty well. It's chugging away over there. It's putting a little heat out, but otherwise it's survived. It's working.

[Paris Martineau]

So Ben supplying 191 megawatts of computing, enough to power roughly 143,000 homes at any given moment.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That, that bitcoin deal.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

To make nothing. To make bits.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Ben Thompson says that the Nvidia deal is like the railroads of the gilded Age.

[Leo Laporte]

Did they make the same kinds of loans?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, there was a lot of, of. Of money out there. I don't necessarily agree with Ben on

[Leo Laporte]

this, but he says in 1864, Congress created the Northern Pacific Railway Company. Congress did this because they wanted to link the Great Lakes and Puget Sound with tracks that would run from Duluth to Tacoma, all the way from the Midwest across to the west coast, which, as you could see, I mean, that's something a government should invest in. That's good for, you know, the polity. The charter included 40 million acres of

[Nicholas De Leon]

land

[Leo Laporte]

adjacent to the proposed line in exchange for the build out. For years, six years, they struggled to secure financing, even as the Union Pacific and Central Pacific did the same thing. That's the golden spike story. What happened to Northern Pacific? Did they.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They all went bankrupt.

[Leo Laporte]

They went bankrupt. It was. The great crash of 1873 was one of the. It's. It's probably the greatest crash of all time. People talk about the Great Depression of 1929, but 1873.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a new book out about 1873 called 1873.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's one called 1929 and now there's one called 1873. Yeah, I should get both and just have them as bookends. And then anything that happened between 1870, what's coming, I put that in the middle. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Everybody says the, the. The crash is imminent. I'm sure it is. At this point, it really feels like A shell game.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But you've got real money being invested. I mean, the, the, the 2000 crash was idiot Internet companies buying traffic, and

[Leo Laporte]

2008 was banks giving bad loans.

[Jeff Jarvis]

2008 was. Yes, because they securitized.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that was to consumers. In this case, you got $500 billion. Not going to. Consumers are going to companies that are desperate for this so that they can grow. So I don't see. I can. Famous last words. I don't yet see the.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is what everybody says. What's the end game? How do you make that money? And I'm increasingly of the opinion that Dario and Sam, because it's this test real thing you talked about, really believe they're creating gods that will create so much value with AGI that money will be meaningless, that all of this will be just, you know, that's the crap they believe.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I think this is where I have some hope, because the open weights.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes, I agree. I also think if you have. If you own the server and you have downloaded the models, as long as you can still get electricity, that's the, that's the only thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The next question is, who advanced? It's the journal. It's the same as the journalism question. Question. If all of our facts go into AI, then who pays for getting the facts? If all of our models are open weight and free, who pays to advance the models? That becomes the next question.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Do they advance at all? Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. Well, the Chinese are going to advance them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because they, they have a different incentive. They have a political incentive. Right, the soft power incentive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And Nvidia has an incentive I guess you always should look at. Why? What is it they're looking to get? Nvidia's incentive is to sell chips. China's incentive is to wield soft power and screw America.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There was a video I watched on. On TikTok, a Marxist analysis of what China is doing that I think I sent to y', all, that was fascinating. Bit above my head, but arguing basically this is the next stage of capitalism and that it's. It's part of a lot. It's not just. This is a canny business movement move.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not political. It's. It's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's not business, it's political.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, but how is that capitalism?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's because you get to the end stage of capitalism.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's to take down capitalism.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. It's to get you what's next, which is Marxism. So it's religion after religion. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There's still Marxists That's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what struck me about this. I thought they'd kind of given up on it and they're just capitalists now. But no, it's to an end. To an end? I. I didn't get that.

[Leo Laporte]

Workers of the world, unite.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Coders of the world unite.

[Leo Laporte]

A US appeals court has struck down the injunction that blocked Perplexity from using its AI shopping agents on Amazon. We've been talking about this. Amazon said, how dare they? We've got our own AI. And if you use Perplexity, you may never see the ads on the Amazon site. Amazon sue Perplexity, it said, because its AI agents log into customer accounts and place orders. The court ruled that users themselves were accessing Amazon through their agents, not the AI company. So it isn't. They were using the Federal Computer Fraud act to pursue this Amazon. Well, you might have to find another venture.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You.

[Paris Martineau]

Why can't they just ban access to it?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, because it looks like a customer. That's why. Because that's. That was the clever move Perplexity made. They're. They're using your browser to log in as you and search around. You know, there probably are fingerprints. They're probably ways that they could tell, but maybe they're not reliable enough. Actually, I really like it because one of the things Amazon has started doing, I don't know if you've seen it lately, the pops of a sidecar on your Amazon page. And one of the first things, it has this little Amazon. What do they call it? Rusty or whatever. It's Amazon Asia. What is it?

[Paris Martineau]

Rufus?

[Leo Laporte]

Rufus. One of the things Rufus will do is show you price history. I used it the other day to see how much hard drives have come.

[Paris Martineau]

That is the only useful feature an AI agent that pops up on the side of a webpage has ever given to me on.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good one.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Ever.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. I'm saying it's a. It's the only useful feature. I normally completely tune them out because now every website has something go boop, boop, and it's intolerable, but it's replaced

[Leo Laporte]

the previous intolerable thing, which is those little chatbots. You want to talk?

[Jeff Jarvis]

You got a question?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, those chatbots are still there, but they're just AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Another AI. What do you want? What do you want? You could talk to an agent. So the Danish schools think they've found a solution to AI cheating. You're gonna. I think this is brilliant. You're gonna have to. If you're a high school in Denmark, you'll have to make an oral defense, just like, you know, a PhD thesis of your papers to prove that you actually understand them and wrote them. A verbal defense will be needed for all exams written at home.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that's great.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's from the Danish Ministry of Education. High schools will also use a firewall to keep you students from accessing content to get an advantage. How dare they.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The issue becomes. So I wrote a course syllabus that I didn't teach but was taught at Stony Brook. And the last section of it had 450 students. So you can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, yeah, but a scale, as they say. But you can't imagine doing oral recitations.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

With four.

[Leo Laporte]

I think by college at least the expectation should be you're there because you want to learn. This is the problem is that college has become instead a certification factory.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So that you can get a job because you have the piece of paper. But what it really should be is in the original idea of a collegium, a place for scholars together to learn from one another. And if you're there to learn, then you certainly aren't going to use a shortcut. You're going to do everything you can to learn.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was my attitude with opportunity. Graduate school you're here for. Graduate school, you're here for a purpose. Undergrad is a little bit different. I was talking to a professor at Seton hall this week and he always asks, what about AI in your classes? And he was empathetic to his students because they want to do. Well, they want to do. And they're under a time pressure. I don't know if you saw the story this week. I'm curious what both of you think about this. University of Michigan is eliminating grades for the first semester for students, not for all classes.

[Paris Martineau]

For some, I thought, oh, is it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I missed that. Paris. Say more.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that's. I literally scanned across a headline mine within the last two or three hours and saw that. Let me look it up. My understanding is that it is something like that. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm trying to find it here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, the aim is so the students will experiment more. They'll be less freaked out mainly so they're. They're. They won't get first for their mental health, which says something about grades.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a. So Starting in fall 2027, students entering specifically the university's College of Literature, Science and Arts will receive pass or no credit marks on their transcripts for the first semester. Instead of traditional letter grades, their Actual grades will still be kept internally. It's a pilot program.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're still grades you just don't get to know.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's a pilot program intended to ease academic pressure, helping freshmen adjust to college and helping them start strong and curb up their mental and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college age.

[Leo Laporte]

How does that help if there are covert grades being assigned which are going to be on your transcript now it's even worse now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know. I don't know if it's going to be your transcript.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think it will yet. They say, say it's LSA first semester grade covering pilot program beginning in fall 2027. The college will designate all first year students first semester grades as pass or no credit on the trans.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I see. So it's the other way around. They will tell you your grade but it won't be on the transcript.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. While the students will still receive grades and instructor feedback in every course as they always have, final grades will not be recorded on the external transcript will not be reflected in the their GPAs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, some students will still be motivated by grades, you know, but it doesn't, it's not on your primary record.

[Leo Laporte]

When my dad started teaching at University of California Santa Cruz in 1971, everything was pass fail. That was a, that was a great,

[Jeff Jarvis]

that was a hippie school.

[Leo Laporte]

Hippie school. But it was the trend in America

[Paris Martineau]

was to do the only classes I ever designated patsville were in my first semester of college because that was the semester where I thought I wanted to do pre med neuroscience and then quickly realize no, no, no, chemistry, not what I want.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Was that what was the killer course? Paris

[Paris Martineau]

Chemistry?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I was just like I don't want to be doing this amount of math in combination with science. And so I was like, rather than, you know, once I figured that I was like I'm just going to do a pass fail on it and then focus on other things rather than spending. It was one of those kind of weeder outcomes courses that required like minimum and did it 20 hours of extra work outside of the class just to study independently. And I was like I don't, I don't have time for this.

[Nicholas De Leon]

That's okay. That's okay.

[Paris Martineau]

It's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently Bonito was also weeded out. Unless you're a physician. Benito. And just slumming Dr. Benito.

[Nicholas De Leon]

I, I was on a path and like yeah, organic chemistry is not fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody says that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I knew I couldn't do it.

[Leo Laporte]

You know it's funny for it. For me, it was geology. My father's a geologist. And I thought, oh, this is great. I'll take a class in geology. How hard can it be? It's rocks. And I went to the class and the professor said, oh, you're Leo Laport's son, will expect great things of you.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

And then it got hard. I dropped out. I said, yeah, no geology for me. I was wrong.

[Paris Martineau]

University of Michigan has some interesting context on here, which is that a lot of other colleges do this. MIT in 1968 implemented pass, no record, first year grading. Same with Wesley and Swarthmore College and California Institute of Technology. I don't know, sounds, but I think it's wrong to try and conflate it with AI, which I feel like a lot of people had online. I hadn't read the full thing.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems like you're saying for mental

[Paris Martineau]

health, which I think is reasonable. A lot of students get very stressed, and this could be, you know, a useful way for them to kind of experiment and take courses and figure out what they like.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, the. The hospital in Berkeley, Alta Bates clears a bunch of beds in their mental ward board for exam time at UC Berkeley.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jesus.

[Leo Laporte]

Because they expect a number of people to show up.

[Paris Martineau]

That's grim.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, isn't it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

We do our kids, our own kids.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, that's stressful. It really is. And that's because that's the problem of focusing on the outcome, the certificate, as the. The degree, as opposed to the pleasure and joy of learning. And it's actually kind of why I dropped out, because I was much more interested in taking my time and reading books and learning things. And I was surrounded by a lot of pre med and pre law students, and it just seemed like it was a grind instead of a pleasure, a joy. Now I just sit up in my sweltering hot attic and type at the keyboard and talk to my little friends at my own pace, I might add. Moose Espionage gets the pun of the week. He said the rock class was hard. The material wasn't very nice. GN It's a. I guess you have to read it. G, N E I S S.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So in good AI line 45, Google debuts SL2T, the AI model designed to understand the sign language.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is next. Cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is so cool.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a visual model.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you look at this. Yeah, there you go. There's the how.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Cool.

[Leo Laporte]

So that would become a first step in simultaneous translation of asl.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. See, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's another language. Wow. That's great.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wish I knew more of it, but I can't do any language.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's going to be on the Pixel 11. Tell us about the new phone. I did not watch the Pixel event. I was busy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't think that I compared the models before we got on and there's really not much new.

[Leo Laporte]

I know I have a Pixel 9 and I feel. I didn't feel a compulsion upgrade last year and I don't feel a compulsion upgrade this year.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I skipped from the 6 to the 10.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. You're on a way old model maybe. But the 10 is going to be fine for years and it's better.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But the six was actually okay.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's also partly driven by the fact that RAM and storage are hard to come by these days. It can't.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. I couldn't figure out what affected the price, what effect it had on the price.

[Leo Laporte]

Did it go up a lot?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I don't know if we go to the store. Hold on.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to go to my Google Fi store because I have a Google Fi account and they often have good prices on new stuff. I'm saving my pennies for the folding iPhone, which I'm probably going to bitterly regret.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The folding phones, I go in the. In the Best Buy and I fondle them. The Samsung ones.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pretty amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I have a Samsung. The what? The thing I like about the rumored new Apple phone which will be, by the way, we're like three months, three weeks away from that. It's probably September 9th or. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Is the foldable Apple phone coming in this one or is it coming in the thing that they're announcing? I think at the beginning of next year. I thought there were two.

[Leo Laporte]

So there will be an iPhone 18 that they will. Nothing. I don't know. I can't remember. Yes, there will be a phone next year, but the high end phones are September, probably September 9th. So probably three weeks from now. And it's a passport. It's a different. It's a square. It's an aspect ratio of more like a passport. That opens up to roughly an iPad mini which I. Samsung has that mini, I think. Samsung, yes. Samsung I think is making the screens for the Apple and. And they thought, well, as long as we got them. So they jumped. They jumped. I don't know how happy Apple would have been. I don't know. Apple couldn't see anything because they haven't announced a phone. They never do until the day. So they can't really say, hey, we were going to do that. But anyway, Samsung. Yeah, I think this is very much like what Apple is doing. In fact, Brar Alheit who has the new Samsung Passport phone says it's a really nice form factor. Now here's the other problem. Apparently Samsung has figured out a way to do a creaseless folding phone and they're going to put that out in a few months. And Apple apparently maybe jumped a little too soon.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the Pixel 10 is right. Is now 799. The Pixel 11 is 8.99.

[Leo Laporte]

The 11, if I bought it from Google, Fi is 449 and 599 for the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's with. That's with a trade in. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it says retail price. I. Maybe it is. Okay. Yeah, this is. Yes. You know what?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now if you compare, if you go on that page and you compare the 11 to the 10, there's virtually nothing changed.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a different color.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They have a nice pink.

[Nicholas De Leon]

This.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we don't call it pink.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, what do we call it?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I don't know. Canyon, Canyon, Olive, Fog and Obsidian. And look at that. Starts at 256 gigs for 749 bucks. So let me see. Should I get a. I'm not going to get one but let's say. Let's just see. No, that's not. With a. I don't know how they do. I guess because I'm a FI customer. It's like 500 bucks off.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah, that's if you have a phone.

[Leo Laporte]

It's without the phone. Huh.

[Nicholas De Leon]

It's a fi. Because you're a FI customer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. See, it's good to be a FI customer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Live la vie to Google.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you have to stay active on Phi for 120 days to save that instant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So how many months is that? Four months.

[Leo Laporte]

Four months, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you. You can see why I didn't go to.

[Leo Laporte]

Ok. You should have tried geology. It's a.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a easy a gut course.

[Paris Martineau]

We used to say it rocks.

[Leo Laporte]

It's gut. Yeah, it rocks. You're watching intelligent machines. Jeff Jarvis, Pettis Martineau, Great to have you both.

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[Paris Martineau]

More.

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[Leo Laporte]

And let's see. Let's continue on, shall we?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris did you have some stuff from your end of the rundown?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. Let me go down to France now I'm feeling bad.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't do. I didn't do my job.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is fun.

[Paris Martineau]

It's fun. It's, you know, kids table. I love being able to talk about things. There was a really interesting story. I mean this isn't directly AI related so but there was an interesting story this week about Phoebe Gates app, the FIA shopping app that had previously been kind of implicated for it's one of those kind of apps like or software programs like Honey that lives as a browser extension and supposed to I guess help users save money on transactions by finding coupons. There had been kind of a big expose some months ago that it had basically been kind of circumventing what is typically allowed for those companies to doing and basically taking a cut of every transaction whether or not people had engaged it at all. And the defense from the co founders includes building Gates daughter.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh that's who Phoebe Gates is.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Yeah. Bill Gates.

[Paris Martineau]

This is the Bill Gates daughter company

[Leo Laporte]

who has plenty of money.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, the, the defense from the co founders was well we didn't know this was happening at all. We didn't you know in 10 for this happened it was a complete mistake. We're remedying it right now. So Bloomberg published the Slack transcripts. The two co founders both were told it's happening and we're like yeah, go for it. And it's a delight. It's. It's a really delicious story because they have just like verbatim the full Slack transcripts of both the co founders, including Phoebe Gates. Like, basically, in one case of this, an engineer, like they're asking an engineer to do some. To do the thing I just described. And the engineer is like, yeah, but that would be against compliance, right? We're not supposed to do that, right? Isn't that against compliance? And they go, so do it anyway. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And they have transcripts of that.

[Paris Martineau]

Literally. Basically, somebody sent Bloomberg the screenshots of Slack, the Slack, and they remade them, which is honestly incredibly good journalistic opsec, because you never want to send post the Slack screenshots, but you can recreate them fully like this in text.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't put it in writing, kids.

[Paris Martineau]

Don't put your. Don't put your crimes in writing.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the big stories at Black Hat, which I went to after our show last week, was of course, that hugging face incident. And OpenAI had two security researchers go through it step by step, and it was mind boggling. I said it was both simultaneously the most exhilarating and terrifying thing I'd ever heard. They were so good and so sneaky. And the funny thing is, shortly after OpenAI said, yeah, this is our new model. Astra did that. Anthropic said, yeah, ours did too. We have three of them. And now Meta says, ours did too.

[Paris Martineau]

Meta's like, my child can commit crimes as well.

[Leo Laporte]

We got bad boys.

[Paris Martineau]

We've got a crime child.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Will you date me now that I'm a bad boy?

[Leo Laporte]

Meta?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, not a nerd.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm wearing a leather jacket. Meta has confirmed that one of its AI models reached the open Internet by exploiting a vulnerability during a security evaluation. The incident, which involved a misconfiguration during testing by an AI security forum, probably the same one, by the way. OpenAI and Anthropic both were using the same security firm. Closely mirrors the disclosures by OpenAI and Anthropic. So I wonder if we can find out what the firm is, because if it's the same one, then there's something going on here. Oh, it is irregular. Okay, okay. So all three companies contracted with this outside vendor to test the capabilities of their models.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They found out the capabilities.

[Leo Laporte]

It worked.

[Nicholas De Leon]

So no one's talking to this vendor. Like all three of these companies worked with these. No one's talking to them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Reporters, you mean? Yeah. Well, speaking of black hat, line 109. Wired is a bit Chagrined because a an online only news company not unlike Nicholas's wasn't at Black Hat, but but watched the video like everybody else. And Runtime Wire got a story up about that presentation three hours before Wired.

[Leo Laporte]

I wasn't at the presentation only because I was doing Windows Weekly at the time, but I immediately that when I got home, got back to the hotel, watched is in. I watched it with Lisa and it is an incredible story, but it lost

[Jeff Jarvis]

me in a few spots. I didn't know enough. Yeah, I sent it generally, Generally there's

[Leo Laporte]

some jargon, you know, SSRFs and things, but, you know, among other things, the rogue agent at OpenAI created a message board with other agents at OpenAI, almost out of an altruistic motive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, they didn't have a message board and so they kludged a way to have messages. That's what amazed me most.

[Leo Laporte]

And they used it. And according to the security researchers, the premise was, well, we don't know if these other guys will be able to help us or we don't know if the things we found will help them. But what if we put it on a message board? Maybe somebody will find it useful and help us. The message board, which took advantage of a zero day in Artifactory, a tool, that coding tool that's used at OpenAI, was discovered. They shut it down. They told Artifactory about the zero day. Artifactory patched it. The agents did it again. They created a new message board, but this time because they couldn't make like a real message board, they used file names and folder names as the messages. They changed file names to be a message. You know, I didn't want this to happen with my guys, so I gave them a message board of their very own.

[Paris Martineau]

You're just like, yeah, let's cut the middleman.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, why should I? You know, I know you're going to do it, so I'm just going to do it for you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So related to the online journalist right

[Leo Laporte]

above that is good on them for doing that. Yeah, yeah, I don't see a problem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think we've got it. We've got it. And as long as it's to Paris's point, as long as it's transparent, you know the source and you can judge.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, what I really wanted to do, and I just, it was too much work and I'm lazy, was to take that video and take little clips from it and kind of explain it and talk about it. By now it's kind of old hat. So I, I, but the other Reason I didn't do it is because the chilling effect of Google and YouTube. I know if I play clips, even though that is an absolutely journalistic standard, to play clips and explicate them, that we would get taken down on YouTube.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I see other podcasts that do video.

[Paris Martineau]

You do it and they don't get taken down.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You are targeted because.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's automatic. It's a content id. I think some people.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, I don't think it's. In some cases, I think they. They just.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in some cases it's not Apple. It wasn't. It was an attorney, but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right, but.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, I mean, I think it's perfectly legitimate to take that video, Video, which is owned by Black Hat, by the way, a sponsor. It's owned by Black Hat, and take little excerpts and explicate it. That's fair use. Clearly. But I ain't going to court to defend it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

So put on runtime wire. Yes, and good on wire to admit

[Jeff Jarvis]

that they got scooped. Yeah, maybe those kind of immediate stories. Fine, let the AD do it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an easy thing for. Look at the video. Can get a transcription, it can summarize. It's the same as the town meetings. Yeah, it's the same thing. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the story above that I love, I saw just before we got on, David Corn, who's a wonderful Washington investigative reporter for Brother Jones.

[Leo Laporte]

I know his name. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You've just read stuff by him, I don't doubt. So he's sitting around with a friend talking about AI and bemoaning, as he said in here, the future of writing and so on, so forth. And he and his friends, well, what, you know, could it write another novel? And he did a. A clever prompt. A struggling writer who has had five novels rejected turns to an AI chatbot to write a novel. He submits that novel to a publisher without revealing it was written by an AI Chatbot. It is accepted and goes on to become a bestseller. No one knows it was written by AI but eventually that fact becomes publicly known and a controversy ensues. The writer then writes a book about.

[Leo Laporte]

This way you wouldn't be able to get away with that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So. So he had. He went to class. Claude. And he gave. He gave the novel to Claude. And Claude.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a paragraph prompt. It's not a long.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And he said the story first. It did a short. Basically a short story said, well, it's not enough for a novel. So it came back and did a longer story. And. And David read it and he said, it's Actually pretty good. It's actually pretty clever. They, they had the writer not have the first book written entirely by AI it was collaborative, but still went, still got exposed, still write the next book and so on and so forth. And it's a really well written story by David and you can read the novel and I kind of appreciate how he said, yeah, it's not bad.

[Leo Laporte]

I like Claude's response to the initial prompt. That's a fantastic premise. It's got layers of irony, commentary on the publishing industry and a real timeliness to it. Let me write this for you. I did pick a good name. The Ghost in the Machine. I think that's a decent name. Not great, but it's decent. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of decent is probably how you would describe all of it. Not, not stellar, very. But you know what? There are a hell of a lot of novels, novels out there that are just at best decent and they're written by actual human beings.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The protagonist is Ethan Moss, a 41 year old failed novelist who lives in an apartment in Astoria, Queens. He's divorced from Dana, a lawyer who resides in subur urban New Jersey with her 9 year old daughter Sophie. Ethan has a cat named Bellow. Get it? Oh, and on and on and on.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all Bellow, by the way. P E L L O W. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So anyway, I just wanted to point that out because I think it's a fun story and it makes us ask, you know, what's the nature of creativity? If it amuses you, if it gives you the story you wanted to read, is it so bad?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and again, if you, you couldn't use Claude to make that because it would immediately be fingerprinted as a. A Claude generated content. So it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I saw, I. I couldn't figure out who did it, so I couldn't verify this. But in Tik Tok somebody said they put Moby Dick into one of the oh yeah. Detection machines and came up 12% AI and 20% AI assisted.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's very hard to identify a. Although I, I flatter myself. I've seen so much AI writing now. Far too much for any human. I can. I almost immediately recognize it. In fact, did they, did they publish Dario's comments to the Congress? Because it felt to me very AI written.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wonder how much Mark Zuckerberg's piece was AI written both and then 6,500 words of it.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know why everybody was freaking out over the length of it. Tech poison Publishing long diatribes forever.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was a word salad. It had interesting things to say, but his op ed, which was a condensation of that pretty much said it all that we before.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is probably means it was AI written right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I had it. I I had the app read it to me as I took my morning constitutional.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the future.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. Other people are listening to fascinating things. I'm listening to Mark Zuckerberg about saving

[Leo Laporte]

the world with his in his voice or no, you have no no, no no no.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And and the weird thing was it couldn't say AI it always said I I.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, one more break and then your picks of the week Paris Martineau Jeff Jarvis Special thanks to Nicholas De Leon, who joined us to talk about what he's doing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Really interesting stuff. We're glad you're here. This is Intelligent Machines this episode is

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[Leo Laporte]

Our all right Picks of the week Time we start with Paris, right? Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

I've got a silly little game that came across my Blue Gay feed and I'm bringing it to you before it's bought by the New York Times or Politico. It's called play yayornay.com. and it's game called Yay or nay, where every day you can vote, it gives you five senators letters and you get a little description of them. And then you click in and it gives you three bills that they all voted on. You have to guess whether they voted yay or nay.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's hard.

[Paris Martineau]

It is hard and it's kind of fun. So it gives you the time of it. I've got a. I've already played today, so I've got to open it up in a.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, let Jeff and I play because, you know, we. We follow.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, you should be really good. So it's the class of 2008, five senators, four of whom all want the same promotion. You got Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. The first one is minimum wage increases. This is February 2007.

[Leo Laporte]

Say yay. Nay.

[Paris Martineau]

Barack Obama voted yay. I was going to Hillary Clinton day

[Leo Laporte]

is what I'm saying.

[Paris Martineau]

McCain Day.

[Leo Laporte]

Joe.

[Paris Martineau]

Joe Biden,

[Leo Laporte]

Bernie Sanders.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

So what do you think? Do you agree with me, Jeff, or

[Jeff Jarvis]

no, I'm going to say Barack Obama. Nay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he was.

[Paris Martineau]

You think that, right? As you know, this is 2007.

[Leo Laporte]

He was a freshman.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because this is also the time of Bill Clinton after Bill Clinton, people trying to be reasonable and middle.

[Paris Martineau]

But I mean, they're both. You know, they're like four of these people are vying for the nom. I don't think any of them are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm just trying.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm trying to give both sides.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, the trick one is going to be John McCain. What do you bet he. Because he's a maverick in this case. Well, we know Bernie said Yay.

[Nicholas De Leon]

All right, that could be the trick.

[Leo Laporte]

Should we say, yeah, there's a trick. All right, let's try it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, okay. We missed all of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Is McCain.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They were all yay.

[Paris Martineau]

They were. They all voted for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well.

[Paris Martineau]

So you got McCain and 94.

[Jeff Jarvis]

3.

[Nicholas De Leon]

You guys were thinking through today's political lens back then.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, the minimum wage was $5.15 and they raised it to $7 at 25 sense. But it was a 94 to 3 passage. Yeah, that. That was a different era.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Fun. Then we get the next one is Iraq war funding. No timeline. It's just a delightful look into the past and you kind of get to. They change up who the five senators are every day. It's kind of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels like the distant past doesn't feels like it was been Abe Lincoln's Congress.

[Nicholas De Leon]

It is 20 years.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Okay?

[Nicholas De Leon]

That's one whole voting person's lifetime.

[Leo Laporte]

Yay or nay. I got an interesting pick for you. This is a simulator of the Voyager 1 computer. Voyager 1 is now a light day away, the farthest any man made object's ever been. In fact, the good news, we talked about it on some Sunday is they have figured out to get it to last yet another year. It's running on a plutonium generator that is really running low. But they've managed by shutting things down to keep it working. And it does have a pretty rudimentary computer on it. Not a lot of memory, not a lot of processing, but you can write code in Voyager FDS assembly, the flight data subsystem system, and you can even run the code and they even have examples. So let's see if we can get to countdown from 1 to 10. It's machine code. This actually be kind of interesting if you're curious about early computers, because remember this was launched in 1977.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can put it on your Spark Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure this is AI generated, I have no doubt whatsoever. But what a great way to celebrate the most amazing it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What year did it go up?

[Leo Laporte]

1976.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow. Different era again.

[Leo Laporte]

It will be 50 years next year. We liked science and it's going to make it to its 50th birthday.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

It takes so long to get there. It takes now 37 hours and 26 minutes to get a signal there. So if you wrote this program, you would press send and it would go for almost a day and a half, more than a day and a half. Then it would run it and send you the result for another three days. Later you'd find out if it counted down from 1 to 10.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh brother.

[Leo Laporte]

I just kind of an interesting history. An 800 6khz computer, which for 77 is probably pretty fast. It had 8k 16 bit memory. So in our modern parlance that to be actually 16k of memory. It had kind of just a couple of registers.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Your L2 cache is bigger than that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it was based on. It's really cool. I think it was done by AI because it was based on scanned JPL documentation of this computer from 1974. It's in the Wichita State University special collection. And so you can see that, you know, the guy who wrote this, scanned these in, interpreted them and turned it into a computer simulation. We live in marvelous times, man. Jeff Jarvis, picture or sorry, pic of the week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So one little thing is Google, since I use Chrome and you don't, Leo, so you can't use this. But a major change in my life is that you can now put the tabs on the side.

[Leo Laporte]

I love vertical tabs. I am a vertical tab.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a big thing. So now you can read the whole thing. You hate it.

[Paris Martineau]

I hate it, but I'm happy for you. I hate when I open, when I use a different browser on mobile and the tabs are not at the top. It's just too mobile.

[Leo Laporte]

They should be on the top.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm still getting used to it.

[Leo Laporte]

On a widescreen laptop or desktop top, you got all this room on the left.

[Paris Martineau]

I know, I know that logically they shouldn't be up there, but in my heart, in, in. In the heart that exists both in the top. That's where they go.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who would think she's such an old fart. Who would think it?

[Leo Laporte]

I hated vertical tabs for a long time. I've only been a recent convert because.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I don't think you could do it on Chrome before, but now you can.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that's. Can you. You can. Okay, good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can now. So. All right, so that's, that's that.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations, Jeff. Welcome to 1979. No, what else?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So the other one is BMW owners angry at Spider man ad that they got on their car's screen. They couldn't.

[Paris Martineau]

This is infuriating. I'm not a car owner and I'm mad. They shouldn't be allowed. They shouldn't be allowed to just put an ad in the car you bought

[Jeff Jarvis]

that you spent a fortune on. It's a Beamer.

[Leo Laporte]

Which models was it? Because I didn't get it and I'm very upset. Maybe I haven't got it yet. They push it down. They're doing over the air updates and I have received in the past like a Christmas thing that kind of still crazy. Tesla started it, you know. Tesla pushes to the Tesla. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you. Are there ads on Tesla?

[Leo Laporte]

Not ads though, but things like. I loved this. There was a Christmas display on the Model X. It would play Mannheim Steamroller music really loud through the speakers and it would flap the wings and the lights would go like this. That was very festive. Yes. It's not an ad, but it also is. You think about it using bandwidth and memory on your. On your car. I don't. So I'm not sure. Yeah, I mean you shouldn't be putting ads on there at all. But BMW, they're the ones who wanted to charge you rent to have Heated seats. So BMW said it was a special surprise for their drivers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's like Apple giving you YouTube an album you didn't ask for.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a special, special surprise.

[Nicholas De Leon]

It's more about the someone else taking control of your device and putting something there you didn't want. That's really. Right. That's what it comes down to.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Right?

[Paris Martineau]

Unacceptable.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and it. The thing is, it's sort of an ad. But it's an ad how it.

[Paris Martineau]

It's Spider man in your car.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That this is what, a cultural moment?

[Paris Martineau]

Spider man in your car to promote a movie. That's an ad.

[Leo Laporte]

So. But it's not. Like, is it. Well, I don't know because I didn't get it. Is it just like an ad place or is. Is it a little cool thing where Spider man is like, in your dashboard and he's doing things?

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, imagine Spider man is Ronald McDonald. Is that an ad now?

[Leo Laporte]

No. No, I don't want it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There you go.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

You're right.

[Leo Laporte]

The banner touting the film appears in the car started. If you wanted to see the ad, you'd have to click the full video. Yeah, I don't. I don't really like that. No, I just don't. I don't know why I didn't get it. Maybe. Maybe it'll.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now you're hurt. You wanted it hurt.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm hurt. By the way, it's a joint thing because in the movie there's product placement for BMW. Tom Holland finds himself in a random civilian's BMW. I hope this isn't a spoiler. And the driver activates the car's sport mode before they drive off.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hollywood's dead.

[Leo Laporte]

I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's just dead.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you. Have you seen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did I tell you you. I. Yeah, I didn't like it.

[Leo Laporte]

You didn't like it?

[Paris Martineau]

I haven't been able to get tickets

[Jeff Jarvis]

anywhere because you're trying to go to the full.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I've been trying to go to the imax. I've been trying to go to Nighthawk. I refuse to go to Alamo because I will never support a company that changes its policies to promote cell phone use during films. But I don't know. It's hard. It's hard out there for someone who wants to.

[Leo Laporte]

Where you draw the line, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

Where I draw the line. Mine is I like seeing movies. And I would go to the Alamo because they're showing it in 70 millimeter and that would be a great way to see it, but they made it so that you can't write your order on a piece of paper anymore. You have to open your phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's.

[Paris Martineau]

And type stuff in to order everything. So when you go there, it's just a sea of people on their phones the whole movie. And that's part of the experience now. And why would I ever.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't want that waiters coming in. Disturbing. Watching the movie. That drives me nuts.

[Paris Martineau]

I think Nighthawk does it really well. They're the original. They're the original. Yeah. Nighthawk was the first like dine in sort of movie.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they have the troughs in front of you so that they slow so it doesn't block the movie?

[Paris Martineau]

No, they have the trough where you sit down and they just like put out a bunch of pig feed and then you all kind of pick it up with your hands throughout the movies. That kind of trough Queens.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, I. I only went to the Alamo once in Austin and I loved it. I thought it was so cool. Not. Not just the food, but just Nighthawk

[Paris Martineau]

is like Alamo, but Indian cool and kind of edgy.

[Leo Laporte]

Did Alamo. Alamo probably got bought.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm going to go see Steve Buscemi at Alamo or at Nighthawk this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, in person.

[Paris Martineau]

In person, yeah. He's doing a Q A.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So did you see it? Leo O. Have you seen Odyssey?

[Leo Laporte]

No. Tell me why you don't like it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'm going to come off philistine.

[Paris Martineau]

How do you feel about Nolan films? First, generally I have no particular opinion

[Jeff Jarvis]

and I haven't seen. I still haven't seen Oppenheimer.

[Leo Laporte]

I enjoyed Oppenheimer on the Oppenheimer.

[Paris Martineau]

One of the greatest moves.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'm just. The other question. Paris is how am I on myths and legends? Legends. Not good. Not good.

[Paris Martineau]

Anti fan of oral history, as you

[Jeff Jarvis]

know, I understand it had its place.

[Leo Laporte]

This is one wine, dark sea. You seen them?

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is gonna. This is gonna sound really bad, but I'm gonna say it. The problem is it's the same reason I can't stand Harry Potter. It's deus ex machina. Things are getting a little boring. So let's have a Cyclops.

[Leo Laporte]

Literally.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's what it is. That's the beginning of it. All right. And so I think that may have worked in its time, but as a modern movie, it just bored me silly. I was looking at my watch. Yeah, I'm pretty.

[Paris Martineau]

Have you ever seen oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's the Odyssey, isn't it?

[Paris Martineau]

That's the Odyssey also, but it's the Cohen's Odyssey. And it also led to a revival of folk music in America.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes,

[Nicholas De Leon]

that whole movement was excellent.

[Leo Laporte]

Blind Boys from Alabama. What a great movie.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, I wouldn't recommend it for you, Jeff, because you don't enjoy the Odyssey and it's also the Odyssey, but it's a great film. I've been on my co again.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I watch. It's loosely the.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's still very much the

[Leo Laporte]

Odyssey until the Criterion Collection said, here's our collection of Odyssey based films.

[Paris Martineau]

How do you not know there's a cyclops? No, but it says there's a cyclops. There's sirens, there's. There's, There's a flood. There's all the Odyssey things.

[Leo Laporte]

I wasn't paying attention. I just thought, this is a nice movie. I like it. I like the seeing some.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Does anybody turn into pigs?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Wait, isn't there a card at the top that says, this is based on the Odyssey?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, there is, as a matter of fact. I just wasn't looking at that moment.

[Paris Martineau]

George Clooney.

[Leo Laporte]

He was ordering food on my phone, probably.

[Paris Martineau]

You got some of the weirdest looking guys you've ever seen in that film.

[Leo Laporte]

They are weird.

[Paris Martineau]

John Goodman does some great stuff as a cyclops.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a really.

[Paris Martineau]

He's a southern cyclops. Lawyer. Cyclops. I'd really recommend O Brother where I

[Leo Laporte]

pick of the week. No, he's got. If not.

[Nicholas De Leon]

No, but that's a cyclops. He's a cyclops in the context of that world.

[Leo Laporte]

I get it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Have we done well?

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know what I saw, though, that was great. Is. Is it the invite or the invitation?

[Paris Martineau]

The invite. I gotta see that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's really good.

[Paris Martineau]

It's really my pitch, actually, for you listeners out there is. So I'm still on my Cohen kick. I watched Barton Fink and I need to watch it again, but I'm like, well, I want to watch it on. I want to. To get a Blu Ray and watch it. So I'm like, all right, you know, I'll go to my local Blu Ray store. Like, it's got all these rentals.

[Leo Laporte]

You must live in Brooklyn, kid.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. I went to Williamsburg for it. They didn't have it. So then I'm like, all right, I'll go online. I'll go. I know it's. I know. It's a keynote Lorber release. I'll get it from there. Sold out. This was re. Released on blu Ray in 2017. Does not exist for sale online unless you go on ebay and spend like Five times more.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Really.

[Paris Martineau]

The regular price for it, Barton Fink is not available for purchase on Blu Ray anywhere. So if you're out there and you're a listener and you know where I can get Barton Fink for maybe a two times markup, I'd be willing to pay twice as much. I'm not willing to pay three to five times a markup for a disc,

[Leo Laporte]

but I want to watch it like a normal human.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I was hanging out with a friend and he legally downloaded the Keno Lorber cut. But I don't have that technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there are different cuts.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it's not a. It's like the. It's the same cut, but I think it's. It's the way that it was formatted and like processed for digital on it. But I mean I would.

[Leo Laporte]

I love Goodman. I love Turturro.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a crazy Goodman movie. Have you seen that movie?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I just didn't. I don't think I got it.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, that's why I gotta watch it again.

[Nicholas De Leon]

That's the art film that. That's a true art film that the Cohen's made. The other ones are all like sort of plays on genre. Genre. And this one is sort of like their.

[Paris Martineau]

I would say this was a movie where, you know, you're watching through it and you're like, wow, this is very different than their con movies. There's not like kind of a central crime. It's not a pastiche of a genre specifically. And then one thing happens and you're like, oh, this is a kind of traditional Cohen movie. But in a way I wasn't expecting. And then you're like, oh, this is a David lynch film.

[Nicholas De Leon]

And that.

[Paris Martineau]

That's where I'm into.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly what I was gonna say.

[Paris Martineau]

I know it's a Cohen movie that in the middle turns into.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Into a David lynch, which goes to your heart.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's about. It's a movie. Ultimately, as I've been thinking over the last week, is that it's a movie about how Hollywood is hell.

[Nicholas De Leon]

Oh yeah, that's the common interpretation.

[Leo Laporte]

There are a lot of movies like that. By the way, that's a very popular Hollywood trope. Paris Martineau is at Consumer Reports where she covers a variety.

[Paris Martineau]

I should have probably put my random story Avoid Jalapenos.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Taylor Farms again.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it. Yes and no.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's not.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, Taylor Farms issued a recall. But unlike. So we're talking about is. I'll put this in the chat A link here. Like dozens of different prepared foods with jalapenos in it were recalled this week for salmonella. It was like prepared like fresh foods and things like that. And a lot of them were prepared by Taylor Farms. But unlike with the lettuce, this isn't grown and processed by Taylor Farms. Taylor Farms is like the middleman distributor for this. This was grown by a totally kind of different company and distributed by it. It's like called citrus something.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not cyclospora this time, it's salmonella. Salmonella, Salmonella.

[Paris Martineau]

Salmonella.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which is worse. Salmosporre.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean cyclospora is worse but salmonella could kill you.

[Paris Martineau]

Salmonella can kill you. So salmonella can be worse. Cyclospora.

[Leo Laporte]

The symptoms are bad.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean well in both cases the risk because both have now had deaths, there's been two deaths towards cyclospora. But it's, it's the, the risk is dehydration because the symptoms could be similar. But basically the problem with this outbreak is that these were jalapenos that were produced on mass by like kind of a no name distributor and then used in a bunch of different companies. Prepared foods. Like even trying to write about this recall story, I was like I can't literally list all the products and places it was sold because there's so many. Like it was sold in, you know, Albertsons, Dylan's, Heb, Hannaford, Kroger, Publix, Racetrack, Randall's, Whole Foods, Walmart, Wawa, like all

[Jeff Jarvis]

about wholesale to places like Taco Bell and Chipotle.

[Paris Martineau]

I right. I mean it was also sold to. How this outbreak first started is these jalapenos were used at Chipotle and at Qdoba restaurants, restaurants. But they've since. Because that's where most of the identified cases have come from. They've since pulled that from their stores. Chipotle is using a different jalapeno place. Qdoba isn't selling jalapenos at all right now. But yeah, it's just we don't right now know they're still trying to figure out where all these jalapenos went. So just this advice CR's food experts are giving is to avoid jalapenos of unknown origin and prepared foods. Basically like if you're getting a, like the things these were found in were like pre made burritos or like fresh salsa dip or pico de gallo or guacamole sold like unbranded at stores.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like if there's oil Beef.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's like really bland. If there's something that's like fresh and pre made and it contains jalapenos, maybe don't get that. Like maybe, you know, make chop. Get a jalapeno less one and add your own jalapenos in it that you get at the store. But yeah, it's kind of crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's that.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, that's your tech, that's your

[Jeff Jarvis]

digestion safe. Another week

[Leo Laporte]

you've been watching Intelligent Machines. Paris Martino, Jeff Jarvis, his book is out. Go get it. Jeff Jarvis dot com. You can order it there. Delivered soon. What is glr?

[Nicholas De Leon]

Is our code still good? Is our code still.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think it is till the end of the month or something. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And that gets you a little discount if you go to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That gets you five bucks off G,

[Leo Laporte]

L, R, B D. I'm trying to

[Jeff Jarvis]

make an arrangement with the bookstore so that some people have actually asked for autographed books.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'm trying to go to a local bookstore and say if you order from this bookstore, I'll go and autograph them.

[Leo Laporte]

I used to just go in the store and sign them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, there's that, but I want to

[Leo Laporte]

be able to tell people and in my fantasies I thought, okay, oh, somebody's gonna get this and go, wow, Leo signed it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the store that I'm dealing with said we can't return autograph books. I said, I thought that was a myth. I said no.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't tear the COVID off and send it back, huh?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it's not the COVID it's the title page.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, everybody, thank you for being here. We do Intelligent machines every Wednesday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live on Facebook. Yeah. LinkedIn, Facebook, X.com, twitter, Twitch X, Facebook, YouTube and Kick. And next week we were talking maybe about having Christina Warren on. I don't know if we've arranged that yet, Benito, or not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not yet.

[Leo Laporte]

We do have a recorded segment we're going to be doing. I don't know. We'll find out who's next week and let you know in the newsletter if you don't subscribe. That's. It's a great way to find out what's coming up on all of our shows. It's free Twit TV newsletter. Very pretty. Now they've really graphically jazzed it up after the fact. On demand versions of the show are available@Twit TV IM. There's a YouTube channel as well. And of course you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it auto Magically. Thanks for being here everybody. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machine.

[Nicholas De Leon]

If you like what you heard and you want more of this week's top stories in tech, well, subscribe to Tech News Weekly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Every Thursday, I talk with the journalists

[Nicholas De Leon]

making and breaking the tech news.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not a human being, not into this animal scene. I'm an intelligent machine.

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[Paris Martineau]

Close your eyes. Exhale.

[Jeff Jarvis]

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[Paris Martineau]

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[Paris Martineau]

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[Paris Martineau]

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[Paris Martineau]

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[Paris Martineau]

1-800-contacts hello. Look what TJ Maxx dragged in.

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[Jeff Jarvis]

We are digital.

[Nicholas De Leon]

We are downloadable. We are streamable.

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[Nicholas De Leon]

Pull yourself together.

[Paris Martineau]

We have work to do.

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[Paris Martineau]

That's all.

[Nicholas De Leon]

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