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The Artificial Intelligence Show
#165: AI Replacing Young Workers, AI Industry Gets Political, Google’s “Nano Banana,” ChatGPT Parental Controls & Anthropic Settles Author Lawsuit
01:14:57
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- [00:00]
A
I still think middle management's going to get decimated. I think the people who have all the domain knowledge within their industry, within their company, and have the most benefit to gain from working with these AIs at a high level, reasoning level, decision making, problem solving, I think a lot of the value is going to accumulate early on with the people who can work with the reasoning models and those are going to be the better strategists, in my opinion. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence show, the podcast that helps your business grow smarter by making AI approachable and actionable. My name is Paul Raitzer. I'm the founder and CEO of SmartRx and marketing AI institute and I'm your host. Each week I'm joined by my co host and Marketing AI Institute Chief Content Officer Mike Kaput. As we break down all the AI news that matters and give you insights and perspectives that you can use to advance your company and your career. Join us as we accelerate AI literacy for all. Welcome to episode 165 of the Artificial Intelligence Show. I'm your host Paul Raitzer, along with my co host as always, Mike Putt. We are recording this special edition, I guess Labor Day holiday bumped us a day, so we're recording on Tuesday, September 2nd. If you're new to the podcast, it usually drops on Tuesdays. Today it's dropping on a Wednesday. This this week's dropping on a Wednesday due to the holiday. We will be back to the regular Tuesday schedule next week, I think. Unless something's going on, I don't know, I kind of forgot about the Labor Day holiday leading into last week's. So yeah, if we got, I don't know, it wasn't like crazy week last week, I guess. Well, Google's Nano Banana sort of took over everything last week, it seemed. From a technology perspective, I expect a wild September. So we're going to kind of ease into September with some look at jobs and the labor market. Yeah. What's going on with OpenAI and Google? And then I think starting next week, my guess is we're going to enter model release season or a pretty high velocity of news from the labs. So we'll ease in this week with some big topics, some fun topics and then we'll see what September brings us. All right, so this episode is brought to us by AI Academy by Smarter X. This launched what Mike, like two weeks ago now?
- [02:20]
B
It seems like a lot longer than that.
- [02:22]
A
I feel like I'm living in a time where I was just joking with Mike, like this past weekend was literally the first weekend I wasn't building courses. Like I started building AI Fundamentals, Piling I and Scaling AI probably sometime in like foundationally in April, May, but actually like building the 20 or so courses and then recording the 20 or so courses in beginning of June. So every weekend until this past Saturday, I was doing courses. And so I finished them last Friday I recorded. I spent like 12 hours, I think, in the studio recording the whole Scaling AI series. And then I woke up Saturday morning. Like, I don't know what to do with myself. Like, this is so bizarre to not be working on courses right now. It'll start back up in a couple of weeks. But like, for that moment it was a nice reprieve. Okay. Anyway, so Academy by SmartRx we completely reimagined Academy. I've been telling the story of this now for a couple of months, but we started this process last November. Me and Mike have both just been investing immense amounts of time and energy building courses. So we're going to do is each week moving forward, we're going to kind of put a spotlight on some of the different series that are now part of AI Academy. So as I said, we kind of recreated this whole thing. There's AI Fundamentals as a professional certificate series piloting AI Scaling AI. We have AI for industries, AI for departments. We have a weekly Genai app series that's dropping new product reviews. Every Friday we have a new AI Academy Live series. So there's just a ton going on. And so it doesn't all just get kind of lost in the clutter of everything. We figure we'll put a little spotlight on it. So we're going to start with AI Fundamentals. So the way we think about learning journeys is fundamentals. Piloting Scaling is sort of like the foundations collection. It's like the fundamental things every business person should take, every leader should take. And so the AI Fundamentals series is the first one that I redid this summer. I finished it in early August, I think. So this one consists of eight courses. There's Intro to AI that is sort of a reimagined version of the Intro to AI class that I teach every month. There's AI Concepts 101, which might be my favorite course. It sort of walks people through how models are built, how they work, how they get smarter, how they infuse into businesses. There's the State of AI, which is actually an updated version of my standard keynote presentation. So I'll do 60, 70 keynotes throughout the year. This is the talk I do most of the time. And so this is an evolved version of that talk. AI timeline is a refreshed version of my Macon 2024 opening keynote and it's a continuation of the Road to AGI and beyond podcast episode that I did in March. Generative AI101 is a look at advancements in multimodal and reasoning models with a five step framework to get started. Prompting 101 is a brand new course that walks through prompting best practices for text, reasoning, images, video and audio. Gives you a simple and actionable approach you can use apply it to your prompting. AI agents 101 tackles what are they? What are the impact they're having now? What are the impact they're going to have moving forward? And then AI in you is sort of a personal reflection on AI advancements over the last few years and a challenge to consider how it's going to change the work you do. So that's the AI Fundamentals series again. Eight courses. It's professional certificate series. You can buy each series individually so they're 4.99 individually or you can get them as part of a 12 AI mastery membership. So you can use pod 100 for $100 off either of those. The the Master membership comes with all of the course series are all included in it. And so you can go to Academy SmartRx AI and learn more about the AI Fundamentals Series and all the other ones. And like I said, each week moving from the podcast, we're gonna just take a few minutes up front and give you a little spotlight of what's going on and what these different course series look like and what the professional certificates look like. The second part today is brought to us by Macon 2025. So this is our flagship in person event. It's happening October 14th to the 16th in Cleveland. Dozens of breakout and mainstay sessions, four incredible hands on workshops, optional workshops on October 14th. You can do this as an add on when you're registering. We are trending way above 2024 numbers, significantly above. So we're definitely heading in the direction of 1500 plus attendees. It would be incredible to have everybody with us in Cleveland that is Macon AI. So it's M A I C O N A I and you can use that same pod 100 promo code for $100 off your Macon ticket. Okay Mike, we Talked about episode 164. We talked a little about the MIT study that we weren't like huge fans of necessarily how it was executed and how it was promoted. But we had another big study that kind of came out this one a little bit more, more legitimate in terms of who's behind it and the process they went through. So let's dig into the labor market and AI and what we're starting to see there.
- [07:18]
B
Sounds great, Paul. So, yeah, Stanford researchers say that they have found the clearest evidence yet that AI is reshaping the labor market. And they're finding that young workers are taking the biggest hit. So using payroll data from adp, Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at Stanford University, Ruyu Chen, a research scientist, and Bharat Chandar, a postgraduate student, tracked employment patterns from late 2022, when ChatGPT launched through mid 2025 in industries they had previously identified as most exposed to generative AI, things like customer service, software development. They found that jobs for workers aged 22 to 25 fell by 16%. The losses were not spread evenly. More experienced employees in the same field saw job opportunities hold steady or even grow. So their takeaway here is that AI is starting to seemingly replace entry level repetitive work, while seasoned workers benefit from tools that speed up their jobs. Now, crucially, they also found, at least not yet, wages have not dropped as a response to this. So, Paul, we always look at research like this first by examining its methodology, then talking about the conclusions through that lens. So maybe walk me through what you made of the way this research was done and what it might be able to tell.
- [08:50]
A
Research is hard. So I mean, they obviously used a proprietary data set here and they went deep. You know, they took a lot of the payroll data. It's a logical way to try and find those trends in their key findings. They talk a lot about trying to normalize the data and account for other things that could potentially cause these disruptions. So if you first find out that there is this decline, that these age 22 to 25 are seeing a disproportionate decline in employment, then you have to control for what these they call like these shock events. Like could Covid have anything to do with it? Could the back to work policies have anything to do with it? Like they're, they're trying to find, is there some other anomaly here that could actually be related to this that might make the 13% misleading if we leave with that headline? So they obviously did their homework and they looked at every possible scenario and you know, the tweet that Eric had was too long. Don't read. Employment has begun to decline for young workers and highly exposed occupations like coding and call centers. But older workers and workers who use AI to augment not Automate work have seen job gains. We also see more work for young workers in the least exposed occupations, like home health aides. Again, like I would, it's, it's a pretty quick report. Like, it goes through six key findings. It doesn't have a ton of. It's not like a 70 page report. If I remember correctly, Mike, this was like a 10 pager. You can read through it. But that really is it like that, that is pretty much what it says. And then it just goes through the process of like how they tried to account for these variations. And so I would say like a couple things I took away from this one is how hard it is to actually extract the current impact AI is having on jobs. The current administration, David Sachs in particular, is very aggressively trying to take the side that AI is not going to impact jobs. Now I think we have to understand, like, with anything, you have to understand the intention behind people's current belief about this. So Eric and his researchers are just trying to get to the truth. Eric's pretty optimistic overall. I mean, his past research, the things he tweets, he's pretty, he's pretty balanced in his approach, for sure. But he also seems way more optimistic about AI not having this really, really dis. Disruptive impact in the near future. David Sachs, who's kind of like the ar aizar for the Trump administration and, and Silicon Valley guy and what's the name of their podcast? All in podcast. David Sacks.
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B
Right.
- [11:34]
A
He, he is, he is very much touting the line that all of this is hype, that AI isn't going to impact jobs. Now you just can't believe that because he has to say whatever the administration wants him to say. And they cannot be saying that leading into the midterms next year, which we're going to talk about the midterms in Silicon Valley in a minute. They cannot admit if they actually think AI is going to be disruptive to jobs going into 2026. They can't, because it would be disruptive to their campaign. So what we have to do is just be like, I don't care about people's policies. I really don't. Like, we have to be honest with ourselves about the intentions of the people that are putting out statements about these things. And so the research like this is, is as neutral as we can get. They're literally just looking at payroll data and they're just trying to find the trends because one side saying, hey, we're going to see a big disruption, other side saying, no, it's not going to happen. It's going to be great. We have a deficit of workers across all these different industries, which we do, and it's just going to be augmentative and somewhere in the middle is going to end up being what actually happens. And none of us really know. We. All we can do is kind of look at what's going on, apply what we're hearing and seeing in different industries. And I will just say like even last week I had conversations with some people at some pretty significant companies and they're like, it's happening. Like we are, we are absolutely starting to see an impact on jobs. We expect more in 2020. Not being talked about publicly, but like it's, it's coming. So I don't know. I mean I think that this again, we need more of this kind of research. We need more of like finding different patterns and different data sets and trying to figure out where, where are we, when is it happening, how can we protect against it. I, I've always just been of the belief that we need to be proactive and prepare for maybe it doesn't go smoothly. That's always been our position is like, seems like there's a probability the disruption is great. And I do think that the entry level work makes a ton of sense. I wouldn't take solace in this if I was middle management or a leader. Like, I still think middle management's gonna get decimated. Like I really do. Like, I think that the people who don't have this super advanced domain expertise that can work with the AI, who have all the experience, I think the people who have all the domain knowledge within their industry, within their company and have the most benefit to gain from like working with these AIs at a high level, reasoning level, decision making, problem solving. I think a lot of the value is going to accumulate early on with the people who can work with the reasoning models and those are going to be the, the better strategists in my opinion. So I don't know. I mean there was a couple. Wired magazine had a good kind of short article. We'll put the link in here. There was a couple interesting things in there because Bjornsson did an interview and he said he is. The article said he has long suggested the government could change the tax system so that it does not reward companies that replace labor with automation. If that was happening, I would feel a whole lot better about this. Like if there was actually government efforts to penalize companies for removing humans in favor of automation or at least taxing those people and then using that to distribute back to citizens. I, I would like that direction. I'd like to hear more about that direction. And then the idea of these early warning systems so we have a better concept of when it's starting to happen across different industries. So I don't know, I mean, a good report, nothing earth shattering here. It is kind of like a signal, like, and we're, that's what we're looking for right now is like the signals within the noise that maybe tell us what's really happening and how quickly things are happening. And I thought this was a, you know, good one. It's also a good reminder. We built Jobs GPT to help with this kind of stuff, to project it at an individual level. So I devised last year this exposure key that looks at these 11 levels of exposure to like jobs and tasks based on the capabilities of models. So it looks like image, video, audio, voice reasoning, persuasion, digital action. So I built this 11 phase exposure key and that's trained. Jobs GPT is trained on that. So you can go into Jobs GPT. We'll put the link in the show notes, but it's SmartRx AI and just click on Tools. It's right there. And you can put a job title in and it'll actually do an assessment for you of how exposed that job is to disruption. So, yeah, I don't know again, like looking for the signals. We'll continue to highlight research when we think it's worth, you know, paying attention to. And this is one of them that I would, I wouldn't assume. This is like figuring it all out. And that's it, that's the end of the, that's the answer to the question. It's going to be early entry level workers and everybody else is safe. This is, this is just the beginning of this.
- [16:19]
B
Yeah. And I can't emphasize enough. If you are a parent who has a child who is entering the workforce or you're a student or heck, you're at any phase of your career, go use Jobs GPT if you have not already, because in just a few minutes. It is incredible the kind of insight you can get. All right, so our next big topic this week, Silicon Valley is gearing up for next year's U.S. midterm elections and putting more than $100 million behind a new network of political committees, or PACs, which are designed to protect the AI industry from heavy regulation. There is a new major, what they call a super PAC called Leading the Future that is backed by venture Firm Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and other major players. Their pitch, according to them, is that they're not necessarily pushing for total deregulation, but they want to stop what they see as overreach, like state by state rules or proposals to slow down AI development until safety concerns are resolved. The group plans to fund candidates it views as AI friendly and target those it says could stifle innovation. Leaders describe themselves as a, quote, counterforce to voices warning of catastrophic AI risks. Now, this pack in particular will start by focusing on four battleground states. New York, California, Illinois, and Ohio State, and says it is prepared to support both Democrats and Republicans. So, Paul, can you maybe unpack for us what's going on here? It sounds like AI might become a fairly significant issue in the 2026 midterm.
- [17:57]
A
I've been saying for months this is going to be like, I think it's going to maybe be the issue going into the midterms next year. And, you know, this is certainly a step in bringing that to life. So PACs, I've heard about them a million times. I've never actually taken the time to see, like, exactly how a pack works. So I did quickly do the what is a PAC and how does it work kind of thing. So it's an organization in the US that collects and distributes contributions from members or donors to support candidates, legislation, or ballot initiatives. They are regulated by the Federal election Commission. Super PACs in particular, which this one is, can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations and unions, but cannot directly coordinate with candidates or parties. They primarily spend on advertising to support or oppose candidates. Super PACs have no contribution limits, but are restricted from direct coordination with campaigns. Okay, so then the wall. They put out their own press release announcing this, but I'm going to go into like, the Wall Street Journal article. So as you talked about, they want to advocate against strict AI regulations. The signal attack executives will be active in the elections. Andreessen Horowitz, Head of Government Affairs Colin McCune Brockman and OpenAI Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane were involved in initial conversations earlier in the year about the need to help shape industry policies. Leading the Future hopes to use campaign donations and digital ads to advocate for select AI policies and oppose candidates who group believes will stifle innovation. As you were saying, one of its goals is to push back against the movement backed by some other tech titans that focus on regulating AI models before they get too powerful and create catastrophic risk for society. That's what happened in the eu. They were trying to set some limitations on, like, the training runs and how powerful the models could be, how much compute would go into them. So they're trying to avoid all that avoid the state level stuff. The organization said it isn't pushing for total deregulation, but wants sensible guardrails. Zequote says there is a vast force out there that's looking to slow down AI deployment, prevent the American worker from benefiting from the US Leading in global innovation and job creation, and erect a patchwork of regulation, josh Velasto and Zach Moffat, the group's leader, said in a joint statement. This is the ecosystem that is going to be the counterforce going into next year. It went on to say many tech executives wore that Congress won't pass AI rules, creating a patchwork of state laws that hurt their companies. Earlier this year, a push by some Republicans to ban state AI bills for 10 years was shot down after opposition from other conservatives who opposed a blanket prohibition on any state AI legislation. Now, the one thing I noted here is not only, you know, do we have this super PAC showing up. Elon Musk, world's richest person, has said he was going to start a competing party. You know, he was going to start the, what was it, the American Party.
- [20:42]
B
The America Party, I think.
- [20:43]
A
There you go. So he had threatened to basically take out Republicans who voted for the spending bill. His goal was to like take five to seven, you know, seats in the House and then have everybody have to go through them, basically. So whether you're Republican or Democrat, if you wanted something done, you were going to have to bow before these, you know, five to seven people that Elon was going to fund to get into office. He has apparently pumped the brakes. I hadn't heard about anything like four weeks, so I did a search. I was like, what's going on with Elon's party? So here is a August 19th article. It says billionaire Elon Musk is quietly pumping the brakes on his plans to start a political party. According to people with knowledge of his plans, Musk has told allies that he wants to focus his attention on his companies and is reluctant to alienate powerful Republicans by starting a third party that could siphon off GOP voters. As he has considered launching a party, the Tesla chief executive has focused been focused in part on maintaining ties with Vice President J.D. vance, who is a Silicon Valley guy who is widely seen as a political as a potential heir to the mega political movement. Musk has stayed in touch with Vance in recent weeks, and he has acknowledged to associates that if he goes ahead with forming a political party, he would damage his relationship with the vp. So he's maybe backing out of doing his own party, which I kind of guessed he was going to at some point, mainly because the current administration could dramatically damage Musk's companies. His SpaceX company obviously relies on government contracts, and the government relies on his SpaceX company to get back to the moon and beyond. So I mean, there's, there's a lot of incentive for Musk to not make tremendous enemies on the Republican side. And JD Vance is a logical person that Musk would align himself with. So, yeah, real interesting, Brockman. I couldn't find any prior political affiliations or activities from Brockman. This seems like his first foray. A16Z or Andreessen Horowitz was very publicly supportive of the Trump campaign this time around after they the rumored disastrous meeting with the Biden administration related to their plans to regulate AI. So we talked about this in 2024 that Andreessen, not necessarily to the joy of their portfolio companies, was one of the first to really back the Trump campaign. And so it actually led me back to October 2023 when Andreessen Horowitz published the Techno Optimist Manifesto. So if you haven't been following along for the last two years, listen to the podcast every week. I'm going to rewind here for about a minute and I'm going to read you a couple of excerpts from the Techno Optimist Manifesto. If you don't understand what Andreessen Horowitz is doing, if you don't understand what this super PAC is all about, this about sums it up for you. This is directly from their manifesto. Our civilization was built on technology. Our civilization is built on technology. Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress and the realization of our potential. We can advance to a far superior way of living and of being. We have the tools, the systems, the ideas. We have the will. It is time once again to raise the technology flag. It is time to be techno optimists. Techno optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow and die. That's such a weird analogy. We, we believe growth is progress leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being, we believe not growing in stagnation, which leads to zero sum thinking, internal fighting, degrade, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death. There are only three sources of growth. Population growth, which is declining at the moment, natural resource utilization, which is somewhat limited, and technology. The only perpetual source of growth is technology. In fact, technology, New knowledge, new tools. What the Greeks called techne has always been the main source of growth and perhaps the only cause of growth as technology made both population growth and natural resource utilization possible. Economists measure technological progress as productivity growth. How, how much more can we produce each year with fewer inputs, fewer raw materials? Productivity growth powered by technology is the main driver of economic growth, wage growth and the creation of new industries and new jobs as people and capital are continuously freed to do more important valuable things than in the past. Productivity growth causes prices to fall, supply to rise and demand to expand, improving the material well being of the entire population. And then we'll close with their thoughts on AI. We believe intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better. Smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure. Intelligence is the birthright of humanity. We should expand it as fully and broadly as we possibly can. We believe we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities for unimagined to unimagined heights. We believe artificial intelligence is our alchemy, our philosopher's stone. We are literally making sand think. We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder. This, that is like 20% of the manifesto. So if you want to understand Silicon Valley's approach to this, if you want to understand 100 million is nothing like that. That is the starting point. That'll be a billion dollar plus pack within months. Like the midterms in the United States are, are going to be ground zero for AI. And if, if you don't believe me, just go back and reread the manifesto. Like they, they will not lose. Like Silicon Valley sees this as a, an inflection point in humanity. And they, they believe they have to win at all costs. No matter who that puts in office. They, they will, they will fight to win this. And they have the backing of the richest people in the world to do it. So.
- [26:42]
B
If I were them too, I'd be, I'd probably be anticipating and trying to get ahead of what we've discussed before, which is societal backlash to AI. Right. Because the big fear I would imagine is not just that federal regulations slow down AI, but that there's big backlash to say, job loss or whatever the next new dangerous technology is that comes out. And the result is that every state level representative says I want to hang my hat and make my career on like banning AI for X or whatever. And then suddenly you are off to the races of potentially slowing everything down in their eyes.
- [27:22]
A
Yeah. And I'm no political strategist but I mean you can't fight the funding they're going to have access to. You have to probably fight it with fear and emotion. And so it's just going to get ugly like there. Yeah, man, I don't even want to think about this. It. It's gonna, it's gonna be really, really messy next year. I don't, I don't know any way, I don't know way around it. Unless they somehow all the politicians come together and say listen, we, you know, we have to be China, whatever they're going to rally behind and they all unify behind America leading in AI which it should. I just how it happens, I don't know. Like I don't know the right way to do it, but it's possible that both sides of the aisle in the United States come to an agreement that we need to win an AI and it needs to happen before the end of the decade. And so we're going to work together on this. I hope somehow that happens. I don't know what that looks like, but otherwise, yeah, it's going to get ugly.
- [28:27]
B
Yeah, I feel like this is a prediction we're going to be returning to in a handful of episodes. All right, so our third big topic this week, Google just rolled out a major upgrade to image editing inside Gemini and it's being called by some the most advanced AI photo editor available. So this is a new image generation and editing model that's formally called Gemini 2.5 flash image but it is kind of nicknamed and also internally nicknamed by Google Nano Banana after a codenamed version of this model before this kind of formally came out. So this is embedded right within Gemini and Gemini 2.5 flash image nanobanana allows you to edit any image while maintaining character consistency. So the same face or product can appear reliably across many different scenes. It also supports multi image fusion, so you can blend objects or environments into a single photorealistic picture. And there's overall prompt based editing so you can make really precise changes like erasing a stain, shifting a pose, recoloring an old photo just by describing all of that in natural language. Now this also has some world knowledge to it. So unlike most image generators that only excel at aesthetics, this can actually interpret diagrams, ground images and real world facts and even act as an interactive tutor. So the images that are edited and produced with this new model include Google's invisible SYN ID watermark. We talked about that before. That flags the images as being AI generated or manipulate. So Paul, we've got plenty of image generation image editing tools out there. Many of them are really impressive. But it does seem like Nano Banana has caught fire and gotten a ton of attention for just how powerful it seems to be. Based on the experiments and examples I'm seeing, why is this worth paying attention to?
- [30:31]
A
Yeah, it definitely got a lot of buzz in like the couple weeks leading up to the actual launch. A lot of rumors, you know, people assumed it was probably Google, but no one was really sure what the Nano Banana thing was, but it was really impressive. And then the launch, I mean, yeah, the stuff I've been seeing is just tremendous response online to the model. I was honestly like really confused as to whether this was like what happened to Imagine four. Like where was the app? I thought that was their image generation model. I was like, is this just an editing model or is it like the whole thing? Because when you go into the app it just says image and they have a banana emoji, so which is so ungoogle. Like I think it's hilarious that Google is now just willing to play the game and having more fun with their product announcements and playing along with all this. So yeah, if you, if you're not sure how to use it, literally just go into the Gemini app and look for the banana. Like it just says banana and image. So I, I couldn't find anything from Google officially that explained was this imagined for reimagined as like something else or like what happened here? And so I went into Gemini and asked because I again, I know, so I don't. This seems correct to me. But without having anything official from Google, I'm just going to roll with what Gemini is telling me. So it says they are different models. So imagine 4 is a specialized text image diffusion model designed for creating high quality photorealistic images from text prompts. Gemini 2.5 flash image is a multimodal LLM. This means it's part of the Gemini family of models and was trained to understand and work with both text and images. So then I said okay, like, so does imagine 4 not get used? Like when I ask for an image using this nanobanan, like am I using Imagine 4 at all? So it says when you're using the Gemini app to generate an image and see the 2.5 flash image banana emoji, you are indeed using the 2.5 flash image model, not imagine 4 directly. So Gemini 2.5 is primarily a primary image model built into the Gemini app. It is native multimodal, understands both text and Images. It says Imagine 4 is the underlying image generation engine. So think of it as a highly specialized tool that Gemini 2.5 flash can call upon when it needs to create a brand new image. So it's basically saying like, 2.5 flash is kind of the primary model you interact with and that model chooses to use Imagine 4 for original generation of images. Okay, we'll keep looking into this, but like that's basically what seems like it's happening is like a model choice thing. And if the 2.5 flash needs image generation, it does it. Otherwise it just edits your existing stuff. So if you want to test this out, what I've always found with, because I'm not good at prompting images and videos and audio, is just go into Gemini and say, give me some prompts to test the full capabilities of 2.5 flash image. So if you want to see what it's capable of doing, just ask Gemini to give you some prompts to use and it'll give you like really detailed prompts. Or say, hey, I want to upload this photo. Give me a prompt I can use to see what 2.5 Flash is capable of doing to it and it'll give you prompts. It's the best way to kind of experiment with these. And then we'll have a gen app review as part of AI Academy coming out soon that'll go a little deeper into this and do like a 15, 20 minute review of it.
- [33:47]
B
Yeah, that's what's so cool about that series is we've kind of designed everything to be able to kind of quickly jump in when something like this takes the world by storm.
- [33:55]
A
Yeah, it was, I mean it really was part of the motivation. So like I said with the AI Academy by Smart Racks, we have this Gen app series where we drop something every Friday. And that was the actual use case Mike and I talked to each other about. It's like, hey, we talk about all these products, like how cool would it be if we talk about something on a Tuesday and that Friday we're able to drop like a 20 minute review of it, like really nice value add for the audience to get to like actually experience it. So that was the vision behind the Genai series, was kind of this more real time research and sharing.
- [34:24]
B
So, all right, let's dive into the rapid fire topics this week. So first up we have OpenAI is making and considering some changes to how ChatGPT responds to people in emotional crisis. So the company says it's seen a rise in users turning to the chatbot for life advice, support, and even for support during moments of acute distress. So in response, OpenAI is expanding the system's ability to recognize and de escalate mental health emergencies. So GPT5, which is now the default model, includes a new safety technique called Safe Completions, which are aimed at reducing emotionally harmful replies, especially in long conversations where prior versions could lose context and slip up early. Results, according to OpenAI, say they show a 25% drop in dangerous responses compared to GPT 4. Oh, when users express suicidal intent, ChatGPT now refers them to local crisis lines like 988 in the US or Samaritans in the UK. OpenAI is also working with more than 90 doctors across 30 countries and forming an advisory group focused on mental health and youth safety. Now, the company says they also are considering and may want to offer one click access to emergency services, therapist referrals through ChatGPT, and even ways for teens under parental guidance to alert trusted contacts directly from the app. So, Paul, it's good to see OpenAI kind of acknowledging that people are using ChatGPT for whether you like it or hate it, for very personal things. It's good they're taking steps to protect users, especially kids and teens. But I do have to say it really seems like we're seeing more and more situations where people are developing dangerous or harmful relationships with tools.
- [36:20]
A
Yeah, it feels like every week there's another article or two that you just can't even as a parent of teens, like you just can't even get through them. Like they're just very painful to read. The only thing I, I'll say on this one for now is just keep this like rapid fire it. The only answer here is parents, you got to talk to your kids like this is. It's great that OpenAI is doing this, but GROK is not like kids are going to have access to AI chatbots in every social network, every piece of software they use. Like if, if you think that OpenAI is going to solve this for your kids or your kids friends or like adults too, like adults are going to be impacted by this as well. That's just one chatbot. Like they can talk to these things anywhere and they will, like, they will find ways to interact with these chatbots that are going to increasingly feel very, very human. We talked about that seemingly conscious AI from Mustafa Solomon last week. Like these things are going to feel real. They're going to be there to listen when other people aren't. They're going to be easier to talk to than the parents Sometimes, like kids who are susceptible to go this path are going to do it. And you have to, as a parent, have a high level of awareness. And you have, you have to be there and like, understand this stuff and see it for yourself, how it works and understand the way that the kids may interact with it. It's a much easier thing to just pretend like it doesn't exist, trust me. But you got to have these conversations with your kids and, and you know, the awareness is the first step here. So, yeah, I, I said lastly, there's just some, some of the stuff I can't even talk about, honestly, as a parent. But, you know, I think that it's just super important. And so we'll do our best to keep kind of putting a spotlight on it without getting into too many, into the details. You can go read these articles yourself. Trust me, they're, they're tough, but I think we got to do it.
- [38:23]
B
All right, next up, Anthropic has settled a high stakes copyright lawsuit from US authors. So we covered this ongoing suit in a previous episode, and it had a couple different components. So the core issue in this lawsuit was whether or not Anthropic's use of books to train its models constituted what's called in copyright fair use. On that point, Anthropic largely won. The judge said authors can't stop the company from training on books if it legally purchased them. And that was a sticking point because the company was also accused of downloading millions of pirated books to build a library to train its AI. The court had already ruled that this act likely violated copyright law. Even if Anthropic later bought legitimate copies to cover its tracks, which it was doing, the statutory damages could have reached $150,000 per book over millions of books in question. So Anthropic went ahead and settled, but the terms of the settlement have not yet been disclosed. So, Paul, I guess as we're reading the conclusion of this, you know, we had followed it closely when it first started. I guess I keep wondering, is this even really a win for the authors? Like, seems like the judge still ultimately said, Anthropic, you can use books to train on as long as you buy them.
- [39:42]
A
Yeah, I don't know. This is, again, not legal experts here. I think all the legal experts are trying to understand what the implications of this case is going to be down the road. Anthropic was, was going to be in a really tough spot that was gonna be a really big number if they got anywhere close. I mean, steal 7 million books and 150 per. I know when we talked about this on the podcast, I think that was going to be like in December when they're gonna like, I mean that's an extinction event for anthropic. Like you can't pay that bill, like they're done. And so at the time I assume you find some, I mean you got to pay this off, like you got to move on from this. But I, I, I don't know that this protects them from other judgments down the road. It certainly doesn't protect other labs from these kinds of judgments. So yeah, I don't know that anything's really solved here. I, you know, the, the, the attorney representing the authors was like it's, you know, good for everybody. It's like okay, yeah. But it doesn't fix anything. It's just allows them to keep going. They pay their 500 million or billion dollar or whatever the judgment ends up being or whatever the negotiated amount ended up being. I'm sure it wasn't insignificant but in anthropics world like whatever, go raise another 30 billion, like you know, take care of it. So I don't know, it'd be interesting to see if you, as we head into 2026 how this stuff shakes out. I feel like we're still just at the starting gate here of how all these lawsuits are going to play out and what the future of copyright is going to look like. And I don't know that that's going to be like a big issue in the midterms next year. I don't know that there's enough groundswell interest in it. But that's certainly one of those triggering issues that can cause backlash from society. If enough people feel like these big multi billion dollar 100 billion dollar companies are just stealing from the little people. That's the kind of thing that can create enough backlash potentially. So no, no, we'll keep monitoring this. It's like I said, nothing definitive. This doesn't change anything. It's just interesting note along the way.
- [41:38]
B
Yeah. And on that backlash point I'll sometimes be surprised. Obviously we're all in our own little bubbles here. But I'll stumble on a post from someone I, you know and I'm acquaintance with on social media who maybe does art or is an artist and the hashtag AI is theft. It's very prominent on some of those and you know, I don't know how widespread that notion is, but you start to see this where it's like oh, to that person, like I don't even want to post about the work we do because they're not gonna think very well.
- [42:07]
A
You do wonder at what point does the perception change? And I think again, like not trying to put the political, political strategist hat on. That's the exact kind of thing you do. So if you're, if you're trying to do the grassroots thing while they're putting their, you know, 100 million and eventually their billions into the super PAC, you have to find the grassroots ways to like, change sentiment. And AI is theft is a, seems like a minor thing, but like, that's the kind of thing I think you'll start to see is this like under, like underneath society where all these perceptions are starting to grow? I think, you know, people will try and catalyze those through different campaigns and efforts.
- [42:45]
B
So next up, there's some trouble at Meta. Just two months after Meta launch, Meta.
- [42:51]
A
Started totally shocked, shocked.
- [42:53]
B
I feel like every Meta segment we start is just like, oh, here's another thing going on badly at Meta. So just two months after they launched Meta Superintelligence Labs, there's kind of some cracks showing in the team because at least three high profile researchers have resigned. Two of them returned to OpenAI after less than a month. One of them, Rishabh Agarwal, publicly said it was a tough call to leave a team with such talent and compute density. But after years at Google Brain, DeepMind, Meta all places he was at, he was ready for something different. Now these exits are just one, perhaps small signal that Meta's push to compete in Frontier AI might not be going as planned. Now this is of course, despite some of the highly publicized things. We've covered around nine figure pay packages and their aggressive recruiting spree, there are also some rumbles of internal turmoil and organizational reshuffling that have reportedly slowed progress. So, Paul, are you. I guess I know the answer to this. Are you surprised to see this happening already, given how much money Meta is thrown around here?
- [44:01]
A
Like the other interesting one that we don't really get into in this Mike, is this the information of the story that Scale AI, who they paid $14.9 billion to get Alexander Wang out of Scale AI and some of the executives, but then they're supposed to use Scale AI's data and training systems in their models and apparently the data sucks and they're actually using competitors of Scale AI to train their models is what the information was reporting. So not only is there all these issues with throwing, you know, a dozen plus researchers together who you're paying hundreds of Millions of dollars, while all the people who've been at Meta aren't getting paid the hundreds of millions of dollars. You're gonna have egos hurt, you're gonna have conflict. Now, there appears to be maybe an issue around the $15 billion, not acquisition, but Aqua Higher and the data that they were supposed to be using. So again, like I said last time, like, I'm not rooting for this to not work for Meta. I'm just stating, like, it. It's an unorthodox strategy that if you look at the parallels in the world of sports and you try and throw a bunch of alphas into a room together and then all the previous alphas are left to fight for the scraps. Like, usually human nature kicks in and it's not like Kumbaya. Like, everybody's not just like, oh, this is great, let's do super intelligence together. And it's going to be amazing. And so it just, yeah, you look at this and you think, okay, like, this is going to get ugly. Like, you could make a TV show about how this is going to go. It might work. Like, we're not projecting, like, this is going to completely collapse within 12 months. It's possible. It's also possible that somehow out of this they make some breakthroughs and do some incredible things and they get the super intelligence first. I wouldn't be putting my money on it, but who knows? It's going to be entertaining as hell in the process, I guess.
- [45:52]
B
Yeah. It's interesting too to note that these people who are coming and going all clearly have options like, you can just go back to Open Air like a month after. They don't care.
- [46:01]
A
Take my 2 million from OpenAI like it's not worth it. You can keep your 100 million. I'm not dealing with this. Yeah.
- [46:09]
B
All right, next up, the famed venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who we mentioned before, has released the 5th edition of their Top 100 Gen AI Apps list. This list ranks consumer AI apps and websites by usage to give a more complete picture of the generative AI landscape. So the way this is divided, the list is divided into top 50 AI web products determined by unique monthly visits, and a list of top 50 AI mobile apps determined by monthly active users. And there's definitely some overlap between the two lists, but they call it the Top Hundred gen apps list. So this time around, the firm found that consumer AI is beginning to stabilize, in their words, with only 11 new names on the web rankings list, compared to 17 in the last edition. As always, so far, at least, ChatGPT has taken the top spot on both the web and mobile lists. Now, for the first time, Andreessen ranked Google domains separately, so we can now see how individual Google tools are ranking here. Four of them made the top 100, including Gemini, Google AI Studio, NotebookLM, and Google Labs. Gemini ranks number two on web behind ChatGPT. I believe they said in here it has about 12% of ChatGPT's usage. And it's also number two on mobile. Grok is also moving up the rankings fast at number 4 on web. Number 23 on mobile. Meta AI is a bit lower than you might expect on the list. It's at number 46 on web. It's not in the mobile top 50 at all. And there are several Chinese products and apps that also made the list, including the most famous or infamous, depending on your perspective. Deep Sea. So, Paul, I'm curious if anything jumped out at you this time around with these rankings. I mean, Google is not surprising to me, but it is interesting to see Gemini in the number two spot.
- [48:03]
A
Yeah, some of these I haven't heard of. Like, I was actually just looking at the top 50 in janitor AI. That was a new one. Like, I hadn't heard of that.
- [48:11]
B
Every time I see one of these new entries and, like, scratch it a little harder, like, oh, this is for, like, teenagers.
- [48:19]
A
Exactly. And that's exactly what I'm looking at. It's like, okay, character AI is still fifth grock, which Elon Musk is certainly pushing as a character interaction. Chatbot right now has lots of uses, but, like, that's the thing he's been going, you know, intensely on is building these characters to interact with. It looks like that's what that is. This duo. I'm just glancing at the icon.
- [48:42]
B
I think that's a Chinese. Might be a Chinese social network slash AI as well.
- [48:47]
A
Yeah, Spicychat AI. I'm gonna take a wild guess what that one is. I am not going to that URL. So when you lovable, like, you start to look at these names and you realize, again, going back to this whole, your kids are gonna talk to AIs and some of them are actually gonna be designed to be specifically engaging to your kids to keep them there. It is not. It's not just chat gbt. So, yeah, I don't know. Just looking at it, the. The overall landscape of, like, how or how is society using AI and what are the interactions? What is their experience? So, like, like you said, Mike, when we sort of talk to the people outside of the bubble who aren't listening to the artificial intelligence show every week or just sort of like, you know, unknowingly sometimes interacting with it, what are they doing with it and chats and characters. Sure seems like it's gonna probably end up being a really powerful thing. And then you know, like you said, sort of Google just doing their thing like four of the top 50 and actually, I mean four of them are in the top 30 I think and just keeps kind of growing. So I don't know. Fascinating. But I would say it's, it's good, it's kind of like neat. Go click on the link in the show notes like check it out, look for yourself with these 50 are. It gives you a sense of just what people are doing with AI. I don't know, it's kind of fascinating.
- [50:04]
B
Yeah. And if you, I just have to emphasize if you're someone that believes the whole AI relationship thing is overblown or like just kind of weirdos or whatever, like this list is based on usage. I swear like 30 plus percent of these are AI companionship apps. Like it's wild.
- [50:20]
A
Yeah. And, and keep in mind that is probably actually the dominant use for chat GPT for a lot of people. Like it's right. So not only is there all these under underlying startups for that Gemini, ChatGPT, Deep Sea Grok, the top four that is a pop. Very popular use case of those. So yeah, I mean like some points someone's going to try and figure out a way to do the study of like okay, if all AI use in the month of September 24was chatting with a relationship coach or like yeah.
- [50:52]
B
And if you think Andreessen isn't investing based on that information, 100 money they're.
- [50:58]
A
Going to invest wherever the people are going. So yeah, you talk about growing productivity, but I wouldn't say that character AI is designed to grow productivity for anybody. Yeah.
- [51:10]
B
All right, next up, OpenAI and Anthropic just ran internal safety tests on each other's AI models and published the results. This is kind of the first big cross lab collaboration of this kind and it shows how far safety research has come and a bit how messy it can still be. So from the findings they found that Anthropics Claude models stood out for their discipline. They were the best at resisting system prompt extraction and generally handled instruction hierarchies with fewer slip ups. But they also refused to answer so often, you know, when they didn't have enough information or didn't know the answer. In some cases they would do this 70% of the time that the usefulness of these models often took a hit when they were really pushed on this now, OpenAI's models were more willing to answer, which made them more helpful, but also more prone to hallucinations on jailbreak tests. OpenAI's O3 and 04 mini looked stronger than Claude though. Both companies found ways to trick each other's systems with simple tweaks in high stress, what they call scheming simulations. Neither lab could claim that they have the high ground here. The models, all of them lied or sandbagged even when they seemed to know better. So Paul, this is pretty rare. It seems to have two major labs essentially safety testing each other's models and publicly releasing the results. Like why are they doing this and why are they doing it now?
- [52:36]
A
I'm not sure, I'm just happy to see it. There was a tweet from Woj Zarembo, who's a co founder of OpenAI said it's rare for competitors to collaborate, yet that's exactly what OpenAI and Anthropic just did by testing each other's models with our respective internal safety and alignment evaluations. Today we're publishing the results. Frontier AI companies will inevitably compete on capabilities, but this work with Anthropic is a small, meaningful pilot toward a race to the top in safety. The fact that competitors collaborated is more significant than the findings themselves, which are mostly basic. Transparency plus accountability means safer AI. So I hope that this actually rapidly accelerates collaboration in this way across all the major labs. Like, and honestly this is the kind of thing that could hold off government regulation. Like if the labs were more collaborative and they're not giving each other access to some versions of these models that are like behind the scenes, that's giving away intellectual property. These are the public facing models. They're getting access with some restrictions pulled back. Like we're going to allow you to have more API calls while you're running these tests than maybe we would, that kind of thing. So there is some collaboration, but they're using the public facing models and just testing each other and then being willing to share it. Like, I don't know, I mean this is fantastic to see. I was, I was actually really surprised that this happened, especially with Anthropic and OpenAI and if those two can work together, then, you know, why couldn't the other? Now I don't see Grok and OpenAI working together like X AI, but who knows, like maybe there is a central body that's created that allows for this cross testing and the labs to, you know, agree to publish on the same day at the same time. So nobody gets, you know, more acknowledgment than the other acknowledges when their model underperforms against the competitor's model. Like, it's great to see. Like, it's very encouraging, actually.
- [54:30]
B
Yeah. Grok collaborating would require them to do safety.
- [54:34]
A
Yeah, they need to have some safety employees first.
- [54:38]
B
Yeah. All right, next up in a new interview, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AI could usher in a four day work week. But don't expect life to slow down. He predicts people will actually be busier because AI frees up time to pursue more ideas. And more companies have more ideas than they can pursue. He said, quote, I have to admit that I'm afraid to say that we are going to be busier in the future than now. I'm always waiting for work to get done because I've got more ideas. And he noted, quote, most companies have more ideas than we know what to pursue. So the more productive we are, the more opportunity we get to go pursue new ideas. He noted that previous industrial revolutions have ushered in societal behavioral change and that AI could do the same by enabling us to do more in less time. So, Paul, this actually hits on a couple elements of something I get asked about a fair amount, which is a lot of professionals know that AI will create or is already creating massive productivity gains. But you know, there's some of these more experienced people that are kind of just like sigh and say, okay, is this just going to mean I'm going to do more work or do more with less?
- [55:47]
A
Yeah. I always said I think each company will have a choice, so I'll just, I mean, this is just a personal anecdote, you know, So I, I, like I said up front, I spent the last three months, and I'm not joking, like 95% of my time was building the academy stuff, like everything went into it. Every, every spare bit of brain power I had, every free moment went into building those courses. And I can't tell you the amount of excitement I had to finish them to get them out into the world. But to go work on all of these things that are now solvable, that as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, we just couldn't do before and like the idea of just freeing up time to spend a day or two a week working with these advanced reasoning models on problems I've tried to solve before, things I want to build. I've never been more excited to lead a company than I am today because of everything that's possible. And so I do believe that companies like ours will grow. We will keep hiring people. We will always have enough work to do. I don't know that we would ever go to a four day workweek, sorry for any of our employees listening to this, but I could absolutely see where you're like, all right, we're just going to take Fridays off for the, you know, Friday afternoons off for the next, you know, month. Like it's a. We got through our biggest conference. Like, let's, let's take some time back now. Let's like go do that, you know, during the summer. Like, I could absolutely see way more flexibility because I think you can run dramatically more profitable and productive companies. And so as a leader, you find ways to give that back through increased composite compensation, through more freedom with their, you know, to be with their friends and family. Like, you do that. But you do that to recharge people so we can keep doing the exciting, amazing things that we couldn't do two years ago because the tech wasn't there yet. And so I've always said, just because AI is going to be more powerful and generally capable doesn't mean everybody's jobs go away. The companies where there is demand for what they do can grow in incredible new ways and hire more people. Maybe not as many as they would have previously needed, but you will keep hiring people because you're going to keep going to new markets, launching new products, launching new services. But if you work at a company where their demand is flat or like growing single digits, they're cooked. Like, you're not going to be able to compete with the people who are applying AI and doing more innovative things and opening up these new markets. So, yeah, there's absolutely going to be incredible stories of growth and innovation. AI is going to power and there's going to be a whole bunch where these companies get obsoleted and the jobs go away. And I would love to see the former balance out the latter. I would love to see growth and innovation and entrepreneurship as like the future engine of economies and that creates enough jobs where we never have that true deficit. Like the World Economic Forum. I think they did that study where it's like 78 million net new jobs by 2030. I hope so. Like, that'd be amazing. And I think we can, we have to be intentional about it though.
- [58:56]
B
Yeah. And it's also worth remembering. I mean, I tend to look at it as well just in terms of like, what impact can I now have in the same Amount of okay, right. I'm less, I'm less worried about like four day work week or like everyone's save time. I get that, like everyone's way too busy. But I'm just like looking at the outcomes that are achievable that we've been able to achieve even scratching the surface with these tools. And it's like, wow, that was time well spent. Which is more and more my metric versus like saving hours or not saving.
- [59:24]
A
Yeah, and Mike, I mean you've been in it too, building these courses. I am not exaggerating. To do the three course series I just did would have taken a year easily before I had Gemini 2.5 Pro as like an AI assistant to like build and think and do these things with. So I mean, again, I can always just relate to what we do internally. And that's why I always look at companies like, yeah, we're just not getting the roi. You're doing it wrong. It is impossible to not get the ROI and to see the, the impact if you have the right use cases and people are trained how to properly use the tech. It is impossible not to get value out of AI and we could sit here all day and just go through examples to prove it.
- [60:11]
B
Well, maybe on the topic of not getting value out of AI, Microsoft just added a copilot function directly into Excel, which is great, but it also comes with a bit of a warning label. So this is a new copilot command. So basically you type copilot into a cell or row and it lets you type natural language instructions about what you want to do with your data and AI will go generate the right formula, et cetera. So you might use it to like say summarize info in a bunch of cells or automatically classify data. But there's a bit of a catch here because Microsoft like explicitly goes out of its way to say, do not use this new feature for anything requiring precision. The company explicitly says not to trust it with financial reports, legal docs, any scenario where accuracy and reproducibility matter, reproducibility rather matter. So in other words, that's like most of what Excel is used for. So this feature right now is still in beta. But Paul, I always thought like getting real powerful AI into Excel could be this huge unlock for Microsoft because Excel just makes the world run at this point. But it's kind of wild that they're saying, don't use this for anything important.
- [61:25]
A
We going back to 2023, Mike, when we, when they first started demoing what it was going to look Like, I mean, I used to show that video in my notes back in like 2023 of like, hey, here's the future world where it's going to change the way we work with Word and Excel and everything. And yeah, like we just, we haven't gotten there. And in part to your point, like, what else do you use Excel for than precision? Like, everything I do in Excel has to be precise. And imagine like the CEO or CFO or like somebody who's maybe not 100% sold on this AI stuff yet, but they bought the co pilot licenses for the company, but they don't really know how it's going to use. And the first time they get a report where data is incorrect and someone's like, well, I used Copilot, I thought it would check it. Done like that CFO is like, we are never using Copilot again in Excel. Even if so this is the kind of thing that creates that disillusionment when people don't understand it's not good at precision yet. Now they'll probably fix that. Like it'll get there. They'll have an AI agent that checks the, you know, verifies all the data like it'll get solved, but we're not there. And most business users aren't going to read the fine print to not rely on the data from copilot. So yeah, it's just we're in that messy transitional period here where the AI is not that reliable, but it seems to do magical things. But you still as the human, have to own the outputs. That is the most important lesson is you are still responsible if you use these tools to create anything. You're responsible for the factual nature and the quality of what is presented to people.
- [63:04]
B
Yeah, I would hate to be this past week like a Microsoft Enterprise AI sales rep and then this post comes out and you're just like, I gotta explain this to the deal. I'm trying to work.
- [63:14]
A
Yeah, it's gonna be amazing in Excel. You just can't use it. Like, just wait.
- [63:18]
B
Right? All right, next up, a new report from Anthropic sheds some light on how professors themselves are using Claude. So they actually analyzed 74,000 anonymized conversations from higher ed professionals, plus some surveys they did with Northeastern University faculty. And they found that professors are leaning AI on AI the most for curriculum design, research and admin work. So routine tasks like admissions or budgeting are often automated outright, while lesson planning and advising tend to stay collaborative with AI as a thought partner rather than a replacement. What's really cool is some professors are even using Claude's artifacts feature to build interactive tools for students on the fly to facilitate learning. Now there is a little controversy here. They actually found that a fair amount of people are using AI for grading. Nearly half of grading related conversations showed heavy automation, even though surveyed faculty overwhelmingly said AI isn't good enough for that and raises some ethical concerns. So Paul, I found this breakdown pretty fascinating. I mean, it's incredible to see teachers really leveraging tools like Claude to reinvent education. Then you're already getting into like some possible pitfalls here because like using AI for grading, I'm not coming down one side or the other, but they seem to be very skeptical about doing that and then we're doing it themselves. So does this kind of map to what you're seeing and hearing from teachers in your work, your talks?
- [64:51]
A
Yeah, I think so. Again, kudos to Anthropic for continuing to put out this like actual user based research, which is fantastic. You know, we've talked about the research previously a lot of times. You know, Anthropic is heavily used in computer programming by developers, AI engineers, and so a lot of their data is skewed toward that user. So having this specifically for higher ed professionals is great to like really be able to segment in and zoom in on that data set. Yeah, I am not surprised at all. On the grading thing, again, you have to teach the teachers like for they're trying their best to figure out how to do this with very little support. Honestly, in 20, 23, 2024 school years, like there wasn't that much education being provided at scale to professors. And so they don't know how to use the tools. Like they don't know what they're good at. It's kind of like going and using an Excel. It seems like it did a great job the first time. You're like, oh, let me see if we can grade a paper. And it's seems to do it really well. And you're like, oh wow, this could save me 20 hours a week. I get it. Like, and that's what I've always said. You have to teach the teachers, you have to empower them, understand the weaknesses, the hallucinations, know how the models work. Again, going back to like AI chemistry, that's why I built AI Concepts 101. It's like I just wanted people to have this like really fundamental understanding of how these models work, how are they trained, what are their deficiencies, where are they really good. And I think that's what needs to happen with all educators, administrators too. Like, you just, you have to have a deeper understanding of what these things are. And so it's great to see, you know, like Google and OpenAI and Anthropic, they're all creating education, they're all trying to like, make it way more accessible for people to get the knowledge they need to use these tools properly. And hopefully this kind of research sheds a light on the urgency of like continuing to do that to make sure they're used well to prepare students for the future of work, for sure.
- [66:39]
B
There was also one really, I thought, humorous anecdote in here where a teacher told Anthropic they have in this article a link like all sorts of quotes from people and they said, I had one student complain that the weekly homework that he had reinvented using Claude was hard to do and that students were annoyed because Claude and chatgpt were useless in completing the work. I told them that was by design and it was a compliment and I hope to hear more of it. It's really cool. Yeah. All right, Paul, so we're going to round out here this conversation this week with a bunch of AI product and funding updates. Just going to run through these real quick. So first up, Google Translate can now handle real time back and forth conversations in more than 70 languages. You can tap Live Translate, pick your languages and start speaking. Translate also now offers interactive practice sessions to learn languages that adapt to your skill level and goals. It tracks your progress daily and basically this turns Google Translate into a personal language coach. Anthropic is piloting a Chrome extension that lets Claude actually use your browser, clicking buttons, filling forms, even managing your calendar or inbox. So this is a glimpse of what Agentic AI could look like in everyday life. For now they are only having 1000 of their max users, that highest tier of their licenses testing Claude for Chrome with permissions, confirmations and site blocks in place. Because Anthropic is also in the same breath of announcing this. Very worried that there can be attack vectors that malicious actors can use to derail Claude's browser use. Salesforce is rolling out some new research tools designed to make AI agents more reliable inside enterprises. The first is CRM Arena Pro, which is a simulated enterprise environment that acts like a digital twin of a business. It lets companies test agents in complex multi step workflows before putting them in front of real customers. And they introduced the AgentIQ benchmark for CRM, which is a test suite that grades agents not just on accuracy and speed, but also cost, trust and safety. Microsoft AI has unveiled its first homegrown foundation models. The first is Mai Voice 1. It's a speech generation system designed to sound natural and expressive. It can produce a full minute of audio in under a second on a single gpu. That's one of the fastest speech models to date. The second release is Mai 1 Preview, a mixture of expert model trained on roughly 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. It is Microsoft AI's first full scale foundation model built end to end in house. Higsfield, an AI video generation startup is launching Higsfield Records, which they call the world's first fully AI operated record label. So this uses AI to produce music and create virtual what they call idols. They already have their first AI musician being named Kion. And throughout proprietary tools like their Soul ID tool, Speak and FX suite. The label engineers and animates these idols to have them sing, dance and interact with fans on social platforms. They're actually now soliciting people to apply to, quote, become the next global AI idol in some type of context, basically saying you don't need talent, your face is enough and if you're chosen, you get a chance to become the first AI global superstar. So presumably they're using kind of your face and likeness if you win and.
- [70:17]
A
Probably if you don't. I'm sure there's some terms where you're getting permission to take your face and put it on whatever they want.
- [70:23]
B
Yeah, I think that you might want to read the terms and conditions carefully before signing up for that. And then we also have Perplexity is taking a bold step to mend fences with publishers. It is going to start paying them directly when their articles power its AI answers. They announced a $42.5 million revenue pool tied to a new new subscription product they have coming out called Comet plus, and that's rolling out this fall. So basically what happens is publishers will get 80% of the revenue, including from premium tiers where Comet plus is bundled for free. So if they're in practice, it means that if their article is clicked on or used to answer a user's question, the outlet behind it will see a payout from Perplexity. And Paul, I think you had one item you wanted to add here about OpenAI agents.
- [71:12]
A
Yeah, I threw this in last minute. I've been trying to find a test case for Agent mode. So if you go into ChatGPT, you can click on Agent mode. I don't remember what subscription tier you need to have access to. Agent mode. I assume it's built in all of them. Probably just limited use of it in the lower tiers, but I was struggling with it. And so last week my wife said she's been trying to find a new front door. And we have kind of this, like, you know, very old looking, you know, beautiful front door. I want like that, but it needs, you know, we just need a newer one. And I said that might be like an agent mode thing. Like, let me think about that. So I took a picture of our front door, I popped it into ChatGPT in agent mode, and I said, find me doors like this online. We want to replace the door with something close to this style. I don't know how to explain the style, honestly.
- [71:53]
B
Right.
- [71:54]
A
And so nine minutes later it came back and it had a chart breakdown of like, like seven different doors with links to everything, all the dimensions, a summary of why it would work. And so I was like, yeah, you focused way too much on like the diamond window. I need this to look more like the wood. And. And so it goes away for like six more minutes. It comes back and it nailed it. And it's like it was old world is how you describe the door. So there was the name and it found like the specific sites. Building a chart, sent it to my wife. She goes, oh, this is exactly what I was looking for. So again, it's just like. Like we have this technology. It just sits there. Let's go back to like the nano banana thing. Like, how do I even use this? Like, I want to test this thing. I was talking about, I don't know what to do. And. And I could have just gone and chat to me and said, hey, give me some ideas of how to use agent mode. I didn't do that at that point. I didn't have enough time. But again, incredible technology. Oh, what other one, Mike? I'm sorry, I will extend this for a second. Another personal use. So I used. We were in our backyard and we have a maple tree. And my wife and I are trying to figure out why are all these bees all around this maple tree? Like, what is going on? And as we're standing, I realized the leaves are like, wet. It hasn't rained in three days. I'm like, what in the heck is happening with this tree? How is it wet? Like, there's a pool of something at the bottom of the tree. So that night we're like, we just kind of give up. This is Friday night. Like, I don't know. I got this setting when I was like, I have to solve this. So I pull out Gemini. I turn on the video capability, like the Project Astra capability. I was like, I am completely stumped. I don't know where the dampness is coming from on the leaves. Here's the tree and I'm just showing it and I'm talking through it. It's like, oh, this is interesting. Have you thought about this? You thought about this? And I said, hey, there's one of those spot on lanternflies. It's like this invasive species that's in northeast Ohio right now. And it said, oh, there's your answer. They're known to feed on tree SAP. It'll actually extract it. It'll drip down the tree. And it gives me this whole analysis of what the dampness is. I'm saying, like, you gotta be kidding me. So I start looking in the tree and the thing is infested with these lanternflies and it was causing this. I was like, man, AI for the win twice this weekend in my personal life. Just like crazy.
- [73:52]
B
I mean, those personal use cases are sometimes what I counsel people, like, focus on immediately because, you know, 100 things you want to do in your personal life that you don't have to, like, think about the workflow for sure.
- [74:05]
A
Yeah. And then you start connecting the dots of how to do it in your business life too. So. Yes. So problem, Problem solve. I got my door solved and I got dozens of lanternflies invading my tree. All right, good stuff. Thanks, Mike. We'll be back next week, regular day. We'll be back on Tuesday the 9th with the next episode. So we appreciate everybody hang with us on a Wednesday the drop this week. So we'll talk to you again soon. Thanks for listening to the Artificial Intelligence show. Visit SmarterX AI to continue on your AI learning journey and join more than 100,000 professionals and business leaders who have subscribed to our weekly newsletters, downloaded AI blueprints, attended virtual and in person events, taken online AI courses, and earned professional certificates from our AI Academy and engaged in the Marketing AI Institute Slack community. Until next time, stay curious and explore AI.