Intelligent Machines 861 transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff and Parris are here. Our guest this hour, Frederic Revan. He is the CTO of the password manager. Dashlane talks about the security situation, how his company is using Vibe coding to develop and how to do it safely, and what Claude's mythos means for the future of security. That's coming up next on Intelligent Machines. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit.
Leo Laporte [00:00:34]:
This is Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Episode 871, recorded Tuesday, May 20, 2026. Control F. Techno King. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we cover the latest in AI robotics and all the smart doodads all around you. I have a smart doodad that I'm going to show you in a little bit that Harper Reed convinced me to buy. I'm sure I'm going to regret it. It connects my network directly to China.
Leo Laporte [00:01:03]:
So that what could possibly go wrong? But we'll get to that in a little bit. A lot of AI news. Yesterday's Google I, ooh, dumped a ton of news on us. We'll talk about that. But as always with Intelligent Machines, I like to begin the show with a guest. First, let me introduce our regular panel. Paris Martineau is here from Consumer Reports where she is an investigative journalist. She combines the two best cities in the world in her website.
Leo Laporte [00:01:28]:
Paris, nyc.
Paris Martineau [00:01:31]:
Got em all there.
Leo Laporte [00:01:32]:
They're all there. And I just, by the way, I just registered Laporte Petaluma Ca us Doesn't
Paris Martineau [00:01:41]:
have the same ring to it.
Leo Laporte [00:01:42]:
No, it doesn't. Also with us, Jeff Jarvis. He is the author of. Oh, look at it. The book is there.
Jeff Jarvis [00:01:50]:
Yes, it is. It has arrived.
Leo Laporte [00:01:52]:
Hot type.
Paris Martineau [00:01:53]:
Get your hot type.
Leo Laporte [00:01:54]:
Is that Hot type with typo? Is that the typo version?
Jeff Jarvis [00:01:57]:
Yeah. Yes, it is.
Leo Laporte [00:01:58]:
It's funny. I'm reading and I'm going to recommend it later on. Stuart Brand's new book. And he does say he actually has a woodcut from the 17th century with a guy complaining about printer mistakes in the book. And even, even Stewart says, you know, it's no better in the 21st century. And Jeff Wolf vouch for that.
Jeff Jarvis [00:02:19]:
So there's a, there's a typo on the COVID They're going to have to reprint the COVID and rejacket it, as they say. My proudest thing in it is the colophon, which is you put at the end of books to explain how it was published and so on. This is the colophon and I set that on a liner Type isn't that.
Leo Laporte [00:02:37]:
And that's why the justification is so terrible.
Jeff Jarvis [00:02:39]:
Hey, hey.
Leo Laporte [00:02:41]:
Sorry can resist. Jeff is also the author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis magazine. The web we weave. But hot type won't come out till August. But you can pre order right now.
Jeff Jarvis [00:02:51]:
Pre order now. Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:02:52]:
Jeff Jarvis.com Our guest today is here to talk about AI and security. Frederic Rivin has been the chief technology officer of Dashlane since 2015, which is a very long time for a password manager. Dashlane, one of the. One of the big four, I would say last past Bitwarden, 1Password and Dashlane, if you're not using one of them, you're probably not using a password manager. Dashlane, always very popular with the Mac crowd because it's aesthetically so nice. And I think you probably get some credit for that, Frederic.
Frederic Revan [00:03:27]:
Yeah, we always do. We have a nice UX and even my parents can use it. So that's also our goal. Make it simple.
Leo Laporte [00:03:34]:
Yeah, it's beautiful. But of course, when you're the CTO of a password company, you're dealing with a lot of issues. One that we hope the soon abandonment of passwords. I think you've been saying this is going to be the year of the. Of the passkey.
Frederic Revan [00:03:51]:
Well, it's been the year of the passkey since 2022. But truth be told, we're getting there. Slowly, but we're getting there. We sort of getting to critical mass with all the top websites now supporting passkeys and hopefully everybody else will follow. I suppose the problem with passkeys is that it won't be enough. So you will have to migrate to passkeys, but you will also have to get rid of the passwords that are the fallback behind the passkeys so that you can get the right level of security.
Leo Laporte [00:04:18]:
You'll always have kind of a fallback password, at least for a long time. Plus you need somewhere to put your passkeys. And I think it's really important not to put it in your device, but to put it in something that goes across devices like Dashlane on capacity.
Frederic Revan [00:04:33]:
Yeah, exactly. Otherwise you're stuck into the device and you need to recreate new passkeys on another device and so on. So that's not good. You're better having a one single vault where you can store passkeys in a secure way.
Leo Laporte [00:04:44]:
You are doing something though that some might say is a little controversial. You have adopted AI in the company.
Frederic Revan [00:04:53]:
We're not the only ones. So I don't know how controversial that is.
Leo Laporte [00:04:55]:
But Well, I think from the user's point of view, and it's probably important to assure users there is no AI in Dashlane, right?
Frederic Revan [00:05:05]:
Oh, no, there is.
Leo Laporte [00:05:05]:
There is a lot of. There is.
Frederic Revan [00:05:06]:
There is a lot of AI in Dashlane.
Leo Laporte [00:05:08]:
See, that's where the controversy begins. You know, there's AI in Chrome, there's AI in most browsers.
Jeff Jarvis [00:05:14]:
There's AI in everything. Except your coffee.
Leo Laporte [00:05:16]:
Even in the coffee.
Paris Martineau [00:05:17]:
I'm sure it'll be in there soon.
Leo Laporte [00:05:19]:
I told Paris I ingested the book that we love so much, the Physics of Filter Coffee, into my agent. And I have now a pour over expert. In fact, if you want access to that Paris, I can give you the telegram and you can query it. But what's great is I've got there is AI in everything. And that's not such a bad thing. I would say, though, Frederick, this was the week we watched commencement speakers be booed practically off stage by college graduates who did not want to hear the letters AI Browser. A lot of browser users say, don't put AI in my browser. Firefox and Vivaldi both responding to that.
Leo Laporte [00:06:02]:
Is there pushback from your customers over AI? And how do you put AI into Dashlane?
Frederic Revan [00:06:07]:
Well, first, AI is a large and broad term. So we need to define what we mean by AI. So in our case, for instance, we have AI in the old school way, which is we have our own machine learning models, which is under the umbrella of AI, but that are running directly on device. So as long as you do things in a secure and private way, I don't think AI is the issue. But you need to be careful about the data of your customers. You need to be careful about how you train your models. You need to be careful how you deploy your models. And that's what we're trying to do.
Frederic Revan [00:06:36]:
So we are password managers. Obviously it matters to us. We are very careful with our customer data. We never want to see the customer data. We never want to see your password, we never want to see your payment, your PI skills. Obviously you can't see. And so that's how we've been building AI from day one. Whether it was the machine learning model that powers the autofill engine in Dashlane extension or on mobile, or we have also a phishing detection model that we've trained.
Frederic Revan [00:06:59]:
Same thing. It doesn't run on the browsing activity, it runs completely isolated on the device. We never see the data.
Leo Laporte [00:07:06]:
I guess some of this comes down to the definition of AI has become such a trendy phrase. We've always had machine learning models. Not always, but for a long time there's been this kind of capability, I mean, heuristic detection of phishing. It's going to require some intelligence. You can't just do it with regular expressions. You have to be a little bit smart. So I'm sure this is.
Frederic Revan [00:07:29]:
Yeah, exactly the model we built. And that's on purpose. We built a model ourselves. We trained it with our own data that we build ourselves so that we don't use our customer data. And it relies on about, let's say, 80 different indicators that can show you that a web page is malicious. And we trained the model and then we tested the model and benchmarked it on live, live data to get to the right accuracy level, because that's also always the case with an AI model. You want to get the right accuracy. And it worked well.
Frederic Revan [00:07:56]:
And now we have it deployed for our customer. They're protected. They get phishing detection in case they go to the wrong website. And we are able to do that while maintaining the privacy and security of our customers. So you can have both. You can have AI and the privacy and security that you want.
Leo Laporte [00:08:10]:
You have also rolled out code to your engineers. 100 engineers in 3 months now is what I saw using Claude code at Dashlane. What are they doing with it?
Frederic Revan [00:08:24]:
That's a good question. I hope they're doing good stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:08:26]:
Are they token maxing, Frederic? Is that.
Frederic Revan [00:08:29]:
No, they're definitely under token maxing. I actually shared my thoughts on token maxing on LinkedIn recently, where I think it's a very. Let's click perverse thing to do there. I mean, we want to use the tool for. It's for. You don't need to talk and max. You just need to use AI and cloud code and have the right context and the right inputs and outputs that you maximize the use of the tool. And that's a place where, of course, everything is moving very fast in that world, but I think we'll have to learn the best practices of how do you get your code base and the context of your code base into the right tools and the right AI tools? But, yeah, our engine team has been using KUD code actively.
Frederic Revan [00:09:09]:
We've decided to actually completely sandbox it so we have close code running in containers, so that cannot go rogue on the file system or on the laptop of the engineers and cannot go delete our production database or whatever, because yet again, security is important to us. So we definitely want to embrace the AI capabilities and what they bring, but we want to do it in a cautious way and make sure that we evaluate at each step what are the benefits of using AI and what are also the risks.
Leo Laporte [00:09:36]:
Talk a little bit about the policies you implement to make sure that it's safe to use cloud code in a security tool.
Frederic Revan [00:09:45]:
Yeah, so if we think about cloud code, you can't use code code attached if you're not hosting it in the container. The container is something we build for all the engineers and beyond engineering, because we also now have product managers using cloud code to do coding. So we provide the framework and the guardrails around the usage of code code so that it can't go outside of the boundaries we're defined.
Leo Laporte [00:10:06]:
It's still connecting to anthropic servers though, right?
Frederic Revan [00:10:09]:
No, it is, but it's isolated. So for instance, our GitLab, we have our code version on GitLab. We don't have rights for code code to write in GitLab directly. We can only read the data from GitLab inside cloud code to give it context. But it's up to the engineer to decide, okay, here's the suggestion from cloud code and the code it wrote. I'm going to actually merge that code myself, I'm going to, to review it and so on. And then we also have added an agent to do the code review to help the engineers do better code review because of course, if you're accelerating the throughput with code, you need a more code review. We also have an agent to do security review to add a layer on top of it.
Leo Laporte [00:10:47]:
Is that fairly reliable, do you feel?
Frederic Revan [00:10:49]:
It's still the early days. Apparently the engine team and the engineers are happy with it, but we're going to have to train it. It's going to have to learn our practices. Going to. I mean, all of us are really at the beginning of the journey. Let's remember, cloud code came out super recently in the grand scheme of things. So we are going to learn how to build the infrastructure around those type of tools, how to build the best practices. One thing we were discussing recently is we now have, I don't know, dozens and dozens of skills that have been created for cloud by different people around the organization.
Frederic Revan [00:11:18]:
How do we make sure that we review those skills, we mutualize them and we use them all together the right way.
Leo Laporte [00:11:23]:
Why did you feel like it was necessary to do this? I mean, I'm sure there are some. I mean, you could have said, no, we're not going to implement AI coding, but why not?
Frederic Revan [00:11:33]:
I mean, it's not because there's A new tool that you can't try it. Of course, there are pros and cons with every tool, but for me, before we can make a decision, we should test and learn. So that's what we're doing. We're testing, we're experimenting, we're making sure that we do it with educated risks to some extent. And then we learn, and we'll see what works and what doesn't work. For instance, today we're mostly using cloud code and AI tooling for sort of a more deterministic type of activities. Like, okay, I have to migrate part of the code base to another stack or I need to revamp, refactor part of the code base more than really going crazy into building fully fledged features where we don't have clear control about what's going to happen. So it's a journey and it's a learning curve.
Leo Laporte [00:12:19]:
Yeah, I mean, some have said that you're less likely to make those, you know, common mistakes like buffer underflow and overflow errors with an AI agent doing the coding than a human. Do you feel like the AI agent is less likely to make those kind of dumb mistakes?
Frederic Revan [00:12:40]:
Maybe it makes its own dumb mistakes. Yeah, I think, as always in those cases, like, there are things it's good, good at, there are things still learning, and the models are evolving so fast from Opus 4.6 to Opus 4.7 and so on that the bar is changing all the time. I think today you still need the human to be looking at it and having critical thinking. Will it be the case?
Leo Laporte [00:13:04]:
Will it still review every line of code?
Frederic Revan [00:13:06]:
Yeah, we'll still review every line of code. We still have two mandatory reviewers for every line of code at Dashlane because we want to. I mean, we're a security product. We want to be careful with our customer data and what we're providing as a product. So I think it's too early to completely trust the machine.
Jeff Jarvis [00:13:24]:
Can I ask you a question about that, the review process? Because obviously any responsible organization is reviewing code, whether it's code or whether it's journalism and writing and facts. It's a boring task. I would strike me as. It's more interesting to create the code, to understand it. Is it so much faster that it's okay? I don't bother me? Is it tedious to do? Is it hard to find the errors? Tell me about that process now as a task and a job.
Frederic Revan [00:13:56]:
I think it depends a lot on the engineers. There are engineers that love reviewing code because you need to find a needle in the haystack. And you need to polish the code and you need to make it clean and beautiful and so on. There's a bit of a craft here, like you want to put polish. I guess if you're a book editor, you also want the book to be well written and well crafted at the end. So there's a bit of that. And there are other engineers that are a bit less passionate about that, to your point, which are more on the creative side and want to generate things for their customers and that want to create. But you need both, and you'll probably have agents actually doing both in the future as well.
Frederic Revan [00:14:31]:
So that's going to be an interesting story.
Leo Laporte [00:14:35]:
We're talking to Frederic Revin. He is the CTO of Dashlane. He's been there now for, wow, that's 11 years and counting. Also, other credentials. He sits on the FIDO alliance board, which is really fantastic, as an active contributor to the Credential Exchange Standard and their AI Study group. His book, it's in French. Le Livre du Citeo.
Jeff Jarvis [00:15:00]:
How did he do with that? How was his reading?
Leo Laporte [00:15:04]:
He's not going to say anything mean. I'm sure I'm not.
Frederic Revan [00:15:07]:
But, you know, in French, especially for technical terms, we use the English versions. So we would say I'm the CTO, not CTO.
Leo Laporte [00:15:14]:
Exactly. Okay. That came out in 2018. The book of CTOS. He's also the founder of Citio, the first French network of CTOs, and has six patents, mostly around security. So, I mean, this is a good person to talk to. When Anthropic announced Mythos, what was your reaction to that? What did you think?
Frederic Revan [00:15:36]:
Oh, well, another tool that I'd like to play with.
Leo Laporte [00:15:38]:
Yeah, but you can't, right?
Frederic Revan [00:15:40]:
We can't. And we're waiting for it. But it's going to come quite a lot of excitement because that's us taking it to the other step of, okay, we can get more eyes on our code. And even if it's an agent, I, we want our code to be reviewed, we want it to be secure, and so on. So we actually decided a few years back to have our source code publicly available. So you can find the dashboard code on GitHub, you can look at it, and we have a lot of security researchers regularly looking at that code. If we can extend that and also have the power of the AI to help us make our code even more secure, then that's great. The flip side of that in those cases is that, of course, we need to do that before the attackers can leverage the issues in our code.
Frederic Revan [00:16:19]:
So that's going to be some of the interesting story when we can put our hands on Mythos.
Leo Laporte [00:16:24]:
So I didn't know you were on GitHub. So it's not open source, though.
Frederic Revan [00:16:28]:
It's not open source in the sense that you can contribute to the code directly, but you can read our code, our Apple code, you can read the code from our extension and so on. Oh, that's. And that also helps our white hat hackers, like the bug bounty program that we have that we're asking security researchers to look at vulnerabilities in our code that helps them. So that's.
Leo Laporte [00:16:49]:
What are you doing to accommodate agents and AIs? Do you have. I think you're doing an MCP server. Yes.
Frederic Revan [00:16:58]:
Yeah. For our enterprise customers, we wanted to give them the ability to directly plug their own AI agents in their systems to be able to pull the logs up from Dashlane. When you have Dashlane running in organizations, we generate a lot of logs, but that employee has logged with that credential on that website and so on. Those are very rich logs that the admins and the security team from our customers can use to understand. Okay. Actually there's been a confirmation of credential in that area of the organization and so on, and I want to do something about it. So we wanted to make sure that the rich signals that generated for our customers, it can be directly used by the AI agents on the SIM systems, like whether it's Splunk AI or Crowdstrack AI. And so we're making it natively accessible to an MSCP server for Dashlane.
Leo Laporte [00:17:43]:
One of the things that makes Dashlane made Mac users especially love Dashlane so much is you use Swift. It's very native feeling on the Mac. But do these AI tools work well with Swift or are they not writing Swift code? Is that.
Frederic Revan [00:18:02]:
No, they are. Our team that is in charge of our Apple application are definitely also leveraging cloud code. And no, I mean, that's the beauty of the AI in terms of they can use whatever programming language they might have, bias and issues and so on, but the programming language is sort of becoming almost irrelevant. I mean, we were having a conversation earlier today with some of our engineering leads about the fact that in the past, when you are interviewing a candidate, sometimes you want the candidate to have a specific programming language background. But in practice, more often than not, it doesn't really matter. Like if you're a software engineer, whether it's Python or Typescript or whatever, you can easily learn it. And then now With AI and with tools like cloud code, you're also getting to another level of abstraction where the programming language doesn't even matter anymore because anyway it's the cloud code that's going to code for you. So it's going to be an interesting transition, I think, for software engineers in the world to understand how to manage that abstraction.
Leo Laporte [00:18:57]:
Yeah, actually I think maybe part of your Dashlane culture, but you kind of prefer native languages. The Android's in Kotlin, the Apple stuff's in Swift, you do Command line and Typescript. I think that's admirable. But I guess in a way, yeah, it doesn't matter anymore, does it?
Frederic Revan [00:19:13]:
Well, it will still matter to be sort of a closely integrated in an operating system. If you want to be deeply integrated into iOS, you need to use the iOS native languages. And Swift is native language for the Apple platform. So that allows us to.
Leo Laporte [00:19:30]:
Native is always better.
Frederic Revan [00:19:31]:
Yeah, exactly. It allows us to have the right level of performance, the right level of capabilities from the operating system, the right level of UX and so on.
Leo Laporte [00:19:39]:
And no Electron.
Frederic Revan [00:19:40]:
And no Electron. We regularly re evaluate should we have a cross platform type of programming language. But so far we'd always decided that it's still worth it to have native language.
Leo Laporte [00:19:52]:
Yeah, that's one of the things that makes Dashlane stand out actually, is its native ui. So let me talk a little bit about the FIDO alliance, because that's a different hat you wear. And of course we can thank the Fido alliance for the passkey implementation and definition. Were you involved with that?
Frederic Revan [00:20:12]:
I mean, we've been a part of the Fido alliance for a long time, but we're not involved in the starting point of the passkis. And we joined the board right shortly after passkis came out because we wanted to be more involved. Actually that was a trigger for us to step up our involvement and since then it's been a team effort because a lot of people at DAJNA are actually involved in the Fido alliance at different levels, whether it's in technical working group. You mentioned the credential exchange protocol that recently came out of Fido to be able to import and export credentials and passages from one provider to the other. That's something that we co sponsored with one password and the other password manager to get it to life and then put it, suggested it to the Fido alliance and then everybody aligned around it. That's the beauty of the Fido Alliance. You have all the different players of the industry that are together and working together for the Benefit of the ecosystem.
Leo Laporte [00:21:03]:
Right. Bravo. Yeah. Thank you for Peskies. I think it's really important that they be added to every password manager. I know it was a little slow to get the adoption going, but now everybody, I think, supports it. Is it. Do you feel like, is this going to be a more secure solution? That it's.
Leo Laporte [00:21:18]:
As a better solution?
Frederic Revan [00:21:20]:
I mean, it's definitely more secure. It's not fishable, it's not perfect, and there's no perfect solution, but it's way better than passwords. So I'm hoping for a day where there's no passwords, because the problem of password is that they can be stolen and then you lose your access and you have all the bad size and forgotten. And forgotten. Exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:21:41]:
Hey, he's referring to the fact. I know what he's talking about. I know what you're talking about.
Jeff Jarvis [00:21:45]:
You're not following.
Leo Laporte [00:21:46]:
I forgot my Bitcoin wallet password a long time ago. I should have put it in dashlink. A little more about Mythos. One of the reasons. I think there's a couple of reasons Anthropic held it back. We've debated this on the show. It's good for marketing. Is it also so compute intense that they can't really support it as a public release? But also, and I think it's pretty clear now we're starting to see this, it is good at finding vulnerabilities.
Leo Laporte [00:22:14]:
It has found vulnerabilities have been lurking in operating systems and browsers for years. And it also seems likely because Microsoft has its version now, OpenAI has its version. It seems likely that Even generally trained AIs are very good at finding flaws in code. Are we going to enter. Is this going to be the year where zero days just proliferate?
Frederic Revan [00:22:46]:
I mean, the pessimist in me will say yes, the pessimist in me will
Paris Martineau [00:22:51]:
probably be right more often than it's wrong.
Frederic Revan [00:22:54]:
Because the problem is that even if they restrict the access to those tools, I mean, the tools are going to leak and we know they've already leaked. So it means that the bad actors already have access to those tools one way or another, and they're already probably using them to find zero days. So they might as well make it public and help everybody get their code base in good order. So I'd rather. I understand some of the reasons, but I'd rather we. I think we're now past the moment where we should be able, even as a small player, to have access to the more advanced models, to be able to anticipate and fix our own vulnerabilities, because I'm pretty sure we'll find a lot of them in Dashlane. Even though we're trying our best to
Leo Laporte [00:23:32]:
not have any vulnerabilities, it's impossible not to.
Frederic Revan [00:23:35]:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:23:35]:
Have you been lobbying Anthropic for access?
Frederic Revan [00:23:38]:
We've been lobbying Anthropic for access for sure. And they told us, well, you're on the waiting list and it will come.
Leo Laporte [00:23:44]:
It's a big issue because ideally you'd like everybody who has software that needs to stay secure to have it before the bad guys get it. But that's a lot of people. It is inevitable that this is going to leak out. And even if it doesn't, people are learning skills with existing models that, I mean, you could find a lot of stuff with the existing models. One of the things Mythos seems really good at is chaining exploits, which is a technique hackers have long used to get into all kinds of stuff. It's a chicken and egg problem, I guess.
Frederic Revan [00:24:22]:
Yeah, it is. I think the one thing it reinforces for me is that beyond the pure method story, having your basics right matters even more today than they used before, because the basics are still going to sort of mitigate the risk. And also having sort of an architectural design that's meant to be as resilient as possible will matter. So in our case, what we call our zero knowledge architecture, the fact that we never want to see the customer data, has been the heart of the dashing architecture. It's very complex to do so everything needs to be encrypted. You can never access the data, so it's very hard to troubleshoot. But that was a choice from the early days. And of course, it's not perfect.
Frederic Revan [00:25:05]:
There's always potential flaws in your architecture. But at least we're hoping that by doing so and trying to be as true as our principle as we can, we will be more resilient to those type of Mythos type of attacks, if we want to call them that way in the future. Same thing for the AI going back to the AI. We're building privacy preserving AI pipelines because yet again, we don't want to have access to the customer data. I think that will make us more resilient in the future. If we don't use the customer data for training, if we don't see the customer data when we're running inference and so on, it doesn't mean that the hackers and the bad people will not be able to find flows and get access to it. But at least, hopefully the blast radius will be, be smaller.
Leo Laporte [00:25:46]:
You've, you've said that you're pretty sure that spy agencies and others are already practicing what people call harvest now, decrypt later. They're collecting as much as they can, hoping that as we get quantum computing that we'll be able to crack these. What, what are we doing, what are you doing to prepare for this? I don't know, it's. It could be tomorrow, it could be a, a day, a decade from now. It's almost impossible to know.
Frederic Revan [00:26:14]:
Well, Google said something around 2030, so we'll see if they're right.
Leo Laporte [00:26:19]:
They're working hard at it to create a quantum.
Frederic Revan [00:26:21]:
Yeah, so I mean, we've been prototyping with post quantum for a long time. At Dashlane, we were waiting for two things to really get moving to production. The first one, the NIST ran a big competition to find, to try and define what would be the standard algorithm of the post quantum era. So that happened in December 24and now sort of the implementation is ongoing of those algorithms.
Leo Laporte [00:26:46]:
So we're actually settled on a couple. Yeah, yeah.
Frederic Revan [00:26:49]:
So that's good. And now we can sort of work in confidence that the crypto primitive that are required to be in the post quantum world exist and it's time for us to implement them and which we've started doing actually in the Dash and in the Dash team.
Leo Laporte [00:27:03]:
And what do you do about this idea of harvesting now and decrypting later? Are you perfect forward secrecy? Are you implementing ratcheting? What are you doing to that?
Frederic Revan [00:27:14]:
So in the case of dashlane, that will mostly impact sharing transactions because you need asymmetric encryption to be, to be impacted. So hopefully the rest of the Dashland vault and so on is not quantum.
Leo Laporte [00:27:27]:
That's important.
Frederic Revan [00:27:28]:
That's important.
Leo Laporte [00:27:29]:
A symmetric key is not so much vulnerable. Right?
Frederic Revan [00:27:31]:
Yeah, exactly. So we will have to rotate all the. Eventually we'll have to rotate all the keys for the sharing transactions of all the dashing customers, which is going to be a painful and long migration, as you can imagine, because you need to do it without breaking things for your customers and also ensuring backward compatibility for the old versions of Dashlane. But yeah, that's going to be a journey and a complicated one, but it's important to get started for real and
Leo Laporte [00:27:58]:
everybody will be doing it. So do you think Google's right? 2030, is that too short, too long?
Frederic Revan [00:28:03]:
I don't know. They know better. But I mean, the date doesn't matter to your point, if the actors are already Harvesting the data for the future.
Leo Laporte [00:28:12]:
We know the NSA is. Yeah.
Frederic Revan [00:28:14]:
We need to get started.
Leo Laporte [00:28:15]:
Yeah. Frederic, I really appreciate your time and your hard work, and I appreciate what you've done in the Fido alliance and what you've done to make a really impressive password manager. Not one of our sponsors. That's okay. We'll forgive you. Dashlane's always been kind of the secret weapon of a lot of Mac users. At least-lane.com, if you want to know more. And Frederic Revin, thank you so much for spending some time with us talking about the rapidly changing security landscape.
Frederic Revan [00:28:51]:
Thank you very much for having me.
Leo Laporte [00:28:52]:
Yeah, a real pleasure. Thank you, Frederic.
Frederic Revan [00:28:55]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [00:28:55]:
We'll have more in just a bit on intelligent machines. Yeah. I hope you get Mythos soon.
Jeff Jarvis [00:29:02]:
Yeah.
Frederic Revan [00:29:02]:
Good luck, by the way.
Paris Martineau [00:29:04]:
It's a long wait list.
Leo Laporte [00:29:06]:
Yeah.
Frederic Revan [00:29:06]:
One of the problems that we're actually trying to find vulnerabilities with the existing models, but even Opus 4.7 and so on, you have a limited context. And to your point, by chaining vulnerabilities, it's not able to do that. So we're having.
Leo Laporte [00:29:18]:
Even with a million million context token to context windows. Not. You can't do that.
Frederic Revan [00:29:22]:
Yeah. It's limited success.
Leo Laporte [00:29:24]:
It's. So it's the context window that makes chaining hard. I guess you'd have to understand the flaw. Keep that in your memory and then work on the next one. But without losing that context.
Frederic Revan [00:29:38]:
I think we probably have to build ourselves different agents that are changing themselves to be able to.
Leo Laporte [00:29:44]:
Or maybe sub agents or. Yeah. There's got to be an architecture.
Frederic Revan [00:29:48]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:29:48]:
Do you have any idea what they did in Mythos to make that possible?
Frederic Revan [00:29:52]:
No, but I'm curious to read the technical design when it comes out.
Leo Laporte [00:29:56]:
Yeah. They haven't even put out a system card, have they? Or have they?
Frederic Revan [00:30:00]:
I mean, they've just shared the results of what they've been doing. But under the hood.
Jeff Jarvis [00:30:05]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:30:05]:
We don't know much. Frederic, thank you so much. Appreciate your time.
Frederic Revan [00:30:08]:
Thanks a lot.
Leo Laporte [00:30:09]:
All right, take care.
Jeff Jarvis [00:30:10]:
Take care.
Frederic Revan [00:30:10]:
Bye.
Leo Laporte [00:30:11]:
Thank you. Stay cool. He's in New York City. Is it hot?
Jeff Jarvis [00:30:14]:
Brooklyn.
Leo Laporte [00:30:15]:
Is it really hot?
Frederic Revan [00:30:16]:
It's really hot.
Leo Laporte [00:30:18]:
I'm sorry.
Frederic Revan [00:30:19]:
Bye. Bye.
Leo Laporte [00:30:19]:
Bye. It's 83 here. What is it in Brooklyn?
Paris Martineau [00:30:25]:
Hot? It's 91.
Leo Laporte [00:30:30]:
Oh, that's awful. And you don't have AC, right?
Paris Martineau [00:30:33]:
I mean, I've got one AC unit in the window behind me. The other one, I just. Because they're both Madea's. That one I replaced last year. And forgot to the recall and forgot to take it out of my window. The LA one in my bedroom I haven't replaced so I can't turn it on. But I did just submit for the recall.
Leo Laporte [00:30:52]:
So they all got recalled.
Paris Martineau [00:30:54]:
A significant chunk of Medea U shaped window acs. Window acs in my opinion they got recalled due to mold issues.
Leo Laporte [00:31:07]:
Oh, that's not good.
Paris Martineau [00:31:09]:
Did we see this story was just updated but maybe it came out earlier. So you guys saw it. But if not Berber just reported that mind blowing Growth is about to propel Anthropic into its first profitable quarter.
Jeff Jarvis [00:31:24]:
Yes, I put it up on the rundown.
Leo Laporte [00:31:25]:
Let's. Let's talk about that. And we will also talk about what looks like an OpenAI IPO Friday. There's some breaking news. We'll get to that. And SpaceX filed SpaceX Monday. Yep, it's going to be cray cray.
Jeff Jarvis [00:31:40]:
We got lots of Google and then
Leo Laporte [00:31:42]:
there's this like eight hours worth of Google stuff. All right, hang on. All right, back to intelligent machines. I guess we should talk about the breaking news.
Jeff Jarvis [00:31:57]:
I put three links up at the top of my section.
Leo Laporte [00:32:00]:
I shall go to the top of your section in that case. Nvidia having a very big quarter. I guess not much of a surprise there. $82 billion in first quarter revenue, up
Jeff Jarvis [00:32:13]:
85% in the quarter from the year early period. Geesh.
Leo Laporte [00:32:18]:
They're selling them as fast as they can make them. And of course this is really the data center piece, right? Especially according to the Wall Street Journal. The sale of computing hardware, their GPUs as well as other general purpose chips. Sales of networking hardware, get this. Tripled from a year ago. Tripled to $14.8 billion. They're going to do a buyback.
Jeff Jarvis [00:32:45]:
So $80 billion increasing a dividend from $0.01 to $0.25.
Leo Laporte [00:32:50]:
Oh, that's nice.
Jeff Jarvis [00:32:51]:
Said that they would. The company intends to return 50% of its free cash flow this year to shareholders because they can't figure out what to buy with it.
Leo Laporte [00:32:58]:
Journal is also saying there that Anthropic might have its first profitable quarter thanks to a surge of 130% in revenue. 10.9 billion in the June quarter.
Jeff Jarvis [00:33:13]:
Thank you agents.
Paris Martineau [00:33:15]:
Wonder what I think, Agents?
Leo Laporte [00:33:18]:
I think enterprise. I think.
Paris Martineau [00:33:19]:
No, I think it's definitely enterprise. I think it's a combination of enterprise contracts. Claude, Claude. Bot usage spiking and generally all the things that have been making people mad over the last quarter with Anthropic cracking down on usage.
Leo Laporte [00:33:37]:
Well, and that's one of the things they did. That's why I think it may not be so much agents, because unlike OpenAI, you can't use your sub. Your subscription, your Claude max subscription in an agent. You can only use it in Claude code. You have to buy API tokens. So I guess, and maybe it is agents, maybe people say, no, I still want to use Opus, so I'm going to pay through the nose for it. $4.8 billion in sales in the first quarter. Its quarterly revenue now growing faster than Zoom did during the pandemic.
Jeff Jarvis [00:34:09]:
Okay, that's a metric.
Leo Laporte [00:34:11]:
That's a metric. Faster than.
Paris Martineau [00:34:13]:
It may be a red flag, but.
Leo Laporte [00:34:16]:
Well, I think the deal with XAI was really, really big in this because they were, I think very much compute constrained. And having all of a sudden some compute headroom means they can grow like this. They actually are growing faster than Google and Facebook in the run up to their IPOs. And as I mentioned, it looks like they're heading towards an IPO soon. OpenAI, we think the Journal thinks may file a paperwork for its IPO as soon as Friday. SpaceX as soon as June. Although I heard maybe Monday. Not that I have any connections or anything.
Leo Laporte [00:34:55]:
I read that somewhere. I wonder. And we know Anthropic wants to go public.
Jeff Jarvis [00:35:01]:
In SpaceX, Musk wrote this. Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multi planetary, to understand the true nature of the universe and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars. Oh Lord, what friggin ego.
Leo Laporte [00:35:17]:
Yeah, or maybe too much K. But anyway, I think given this, these recent results for Anthropic, this would probably be pushing them a little closer.
Jeff Jarvis [00:35:28]:
So. But what happens if you have very similar IPOs? SpaceX not really, but still a big one.
Leo Laporte [00:35:36]:
Well, SpaceX is X AI, right?
Jeff Jarvis [00:35:39]:
Plus anthropic plus.
Leo Laporte [00:35:42]:
I guess it just depends how much money is out there for.
Jeff Jarvis [00:35:45]:
That's what I'm asking. Is there, Is there? Does they. Do they hurt each other?
Leo Laporte [00:35:50]:
I think not. I think there is a unlimited pile of money and that many investors will hedge their bets and buy all three.
Frederic Revan [00:35:59]:
All right.
Jeff Jarvis [00:35:59]:
If you wrote invest, you know you're a bad investor, you wouldn't invest.
Leo Laporte [00:36:04]:
I'm the wrong guy to ask, but
Jeff Jarvis [00:36:05]:
if you invested each of you, I
Leo Laporte [00:36:09]:
don't care who's going to win this race.
Paris Martineau [00:36:14]:
I mean I think that it's. Wasn't there a report, was it this week that someone had reported that most of these companies might end up being in the like Fortune 100 or something so that they'll get investment based on
Leo Laporte [00:36:35]:
getting an index fund is what you're saying.
Paris Martineau [00:36:37]:
Yeah, I mean, they're already going to be in index funds. That's going to be kind of a moot point because they're going to have a lot of capital.
Leo Laporte [00:36:44]:
Yeah. I am in only mutual funds. Only index funds. And I'm sure I haven't looked because I don't want to really know that I have a stake in all of them.
Jeff Jarvis [00:36:54]:
Yeah, I'm in Triple Q, which is top of nasdaq.
Leo Laporte [00:36:57]:
Sure, that's nasdaq. Most of my stuff is in retirement target retirement funds. So Vanguard does a good job with those and I let them handle it. But yeah, I'm sure that a lot of it. I don't know, that may make you nervous. Let me look. Here's one of the funds I'm in. 18% of it is in Nvidia.
Leo Laporte [00:37:21]:
15% of it's in Apple. See, I don't like it that much is 10% in Microsoft and then the rest of it is single digits. So that's a technology fund that I'm in. So yeah, I guess. But believe me, I'm not. I don't want to really know and I don't invest. That's why I invest in baskets. And yes, I think that'd be the smart thing to do.
Leo Laporte [00:37:45]:
I don't think there's going to be a winner. I don't think you're going to say, oh yeah, go with OpenAI, it's going all the way. I think it's just as likely to crash and burn as anybody else.
Benito Gonzalez [00:37:55]:
Well, SpaceX does have all the juicy government contracts already.
Leo Laporte [00:37:58]:
Yeah, maybe SpaceX, because I mean, don't
Paris Martineau [00:38:00]:
they all have juicy government contracts?
Leo Laporte [00:38:02]:
No, but SpaceX has the juicy space.
Benito Gonzalez [00:38:04]:
Yeah, the space.
Leo Laporte [00:38:05]:
Nobody has been able to complete compete with them. So maybe if you had to do that, you would. Yeah, maybe you would go with SpaceX. Xai I don't know. We're the wrong people to ask.
Jeff Jarvis [00:38:22]:
Qqq, which is known for tech, is 9% Nvidia, 7.3% Apple. So it's much lower.
Leo Laporte [00:38:30]:
I think Nvidia is probably a good bet, but by the guy who's selling the picks and shovels, not the gold miner.
Jeff Jarvis [00:38:37]:
There is new competition, but it does take time to get that competition up and running.
Leo Laporte [00:38:40]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [00:38:42]:
If anything happens to Taiwan, where all bets are off.
Paris Martineau [00:38:46]:
Yes, the SpaceX. This just in from Wired, the SpaceX IPO filing reveals that Anthropic is paying $15 billion a year to access their Data centers.
Leo Laporte [00:38:58]:
Oh yeah, he has filed. He filed just now. NASDAQ spcx. So the file. Yeah. Boy, this is moving fast. Hard to keep. Hard to keep Track.
Leo Laporte [00:39:09]:
They're targeting $75 billion, which would give them a valuation of more than 2 trillion. SPCX. They filed confidentially for the listing, but it is now public back in April
Paris Martineau [00:39:26]:
now and people are trolling through it.
Jeff Jarvis [00:39:31]:
What are they finding besides Musk's quotes?
Leo Laporte [00:39:36]:
Goldman Sachs, Morgan stanley leading the IPO, bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase also working on the deal. Formal marketing when SpaceX will disclose the proposed terms of the share sale is expected to begin as early as June 4th. Pricing will be June 11th.
Paris Martineau [00:39:55]:
This is from Sean O' Kane at TechCrunch. Says big revenue from Starlink more than space launch and AI combined. Musk is king will have majority voting control post IPO. 36 pages of risk factors, which is a lot of pages of risk factors for someone who hasn't read an IPO doc before.
Leo Laporte [00:40:17]:
Wow, is that. That's more than normal.
Jeff Jarvis [00:40:21]:
Yeah, I think every page just says Musk.
Leo Laporte [00:40:24]:
Musk is a big risk factor. Well, I mean I don't normally spend a lot of time on the finance side of this because. Except to the degree it tells you a little bit about what.
Paris Martineau [00:40:35]:
I mean, this is just fascinating because these documents, when you're filing to go public like this, you have to include all material information about the business and you. There are legal consequences if you don't include that information in your public filing documents. So it allows the public for the first time ever to get a look inside one of the really opaque private company like SpaceX.
Leo Laporte [00:41:01]:
True that. Let's talk about Google IO.
Jeff Jarvis [00:41:07]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:41:08]:
Something a little more concrete or is it. This is the problem I always have with Google I O. They announced many things, many of them never happen. You don't know when they're going to ship a lot of this stuff. Some of it did ship. Gemini 3.5 flash shipped.
Jeff Jarvis [00:41:25]:
I thought I wasn't going to get it again. I was starting to have a workspace fit. I just had to restart my Chromebook.
Leo Laporte [00:41:32]:
Oh, good. And you may remember Jeff, I got so excited during Google I o. I decided to get that same Chromebook.
Jeff Jarvis [00:41:40]:
Oh, you already got it?
Leo Laporte [00:41:42]:
Oh yeah, it came today.
Jeff Jarvis [00:41:43]:
Stickers on it already.
Leo Laporte [00:41:45]:
Well, you gotta immediately cover up the Lenovo name and the Chromebook name so nobody will know it's not a MacBook
Jeff Jarvis [00:41:53]:
because you got drummed out of the core.
Leo Laporte [00:41:55]:
Well, I'm really curious, you know, how Much I can do without a real operating system with just basically a browser. And I suspect quite a bit that
Jeff Jarvis [00:42:05]:
was the thing that really struck me as we did it yesterday is that I think that Google presents itself as the retail B2C AI company. Yes, they have B2B. Yes, they have vibe coding. Yes, they can catch up with the others but they're going to make AI ready for the masses and it is
Leo Laporte [00:42:24]:
probably how most people will experience it. I guess Microsoft copilot, maybe a lot of Windows users out there, Apple being laggard in AI. I mean I don't think anybody with an iPhone thinks they have much AI in their iPhone.
Paris Martineau [00:42:41]:
Just how I like it.
Leo Laporte [00:42:42]:
Well, but that's going to change in two, three weeks.
Paris Martineau [00:42:45]:
I mean all of my friends that have, my friends that have Android phones often complain whenever they send me like an image. They're like oh I'm so sorry for the AI upscaling. I can't turn it off.
Leo Laporte [00:42:55]:
Oh, interesting, interesting.
Paris Martineau [00:42:57]:
I'm not sure which sort of Android device they have but that I think is. This is. So I want to hear you guys full report on. I am but one of the top line numbers I saw floating around is that Google mentioned that I think they have now 900 million or monthly active users for Gemini. But I think that, that we were just talking about something on this topic at my job actually just because some colleagues were like oh my God, now in Google Docs there's no way to get rid of this big bottom box, the bottom that keeps asking you to prompt Gemini and it's so annoying. And I'm like oh there is. You have to go and turn it off for every single document and it still doesn't stop every time you type a line from Gemini from triggering. And I bet that's partially where this, I bet that some part of stuff like that is being included in these monthly active user numbers.
Paris Martineau [00:43:53]:
The fact that Google has made it impossible to turn off Gemini in its products. What do you think, Jeff?
Jeff Jarvis [00:44:03]:
Yeah, I think that's fair. But I also think it's getting a lot of use on its own merits because it's also easy to get. It's easy to get Gemini. I'm using it more and more. When I finally fought to get, I didn't fight a winning battle. But after I finally succeeded in getting Gemini in my browser, I'm using it a lot more by choice. I'm using it to summarize articles and that kind of stuff all the time. So just on, on a fairly casual basis, my use has increased because it's so available.
Paris Martineau [00:44:35]:
How do you find it?
Jeff Jarvis [00:44:37]:
I find it generally good. But I'm not asking the complicated things. I'm not at the point yet. It's what I'm really interested in when we get to Spark and the other things that was announced yesterday is that I'm really interested to get the vibe coding without command line and without vibe coding. You know, do this for me every day. Google look into this constantly, let me know, give me a report, try this difficult thing while I'm gone.
Paris Martineau [00:45:01]:
You know, Claude could do that for you right now.
Jeff Jarvis [00:45:04]:
Yeah, but I gotta install Claude on a machine. I have a Chromebook, so I can't. Right. I can do it on the Mac but I don't have the Mac with me all day, so. But I've done this on purpose. I really. You guys are the nerdier on this stuff. And what interests me is that retail level of AI and will there be uptake on that will if people find it useful or not.
Jeff Jarvis [00:45:25]:
Claude is magnificent and powerful and doing great things. But what's made Anthropic so successful is profitable is B2B. OpenAI is trailing them and trying to catch up with B2B. Google is the B2C company and Google has me. It has my email, it has my files, it has everything else about me. So it's also better positioned to be that both because it presents AI and because it can incorporate my data into it. The other interesting thing that I wonder about, I didn't really address yesterday was how much context can I give Gemini? Ongoing persistent context.
Leo Laporte [00:46:05]:
Yeah, this is always.
Jeff Jarvis [00:46:06]:
Yeah.
Paris Martineau [00:46:07]:
Does they have Gemini md?
Leo Laporte [00:46:11]:
You mean like a markdown file that has memory? Yeah, yeah, I'm sure they do.
Paris Martineau [00:46:17]:
But I mean is it as commodity?
Leo Laporte [00:46:20]:
This is why you want to use a command line interface versus but you
Paris Martineau [00:46:23]:
can't do that if you're Jeff and you live a Chromebook centric life.
Leo Laporte [00:46:27]:
You can. Chromebook has a terminal, does it? Oh yeah.
Paris Martineau [00:46:30]:
I thought that was kind of the whole point is that you don't mess around with stuff. It's browser based only.
Leo Laporte [00:46:35]:
No, no.
Paris Martineau [00:46:36]:
Isn't that in some ways antithetical to the way a normal human person who your mother used to do a Chromebook,
Jeff Jarvis [00:46:43]:
if she were going to do AI, would not be going to terminal.
Paris Martineau [00:46:46]:
I do think that there is. I think that enterprise. I mean obviously we're at a stage now where I guess I. I was going to say the average person has probably already chosen an AI service they like, but that's incredibly out of Such the average person probably has not chosen an AI system that they like because they probably are not using one actively on a daily basis. We're talking about average consumer. Yeah, but I do think that a way that the average person is going to get to that will be through whatever enterprise contact their work has if they do have something like that. Or it will be through something like Google integration into products or Apple prompting them to select a model to install Amazon's Echo.
Leo Laporte [00:47:32]:
It's Siri and it's Google Voice. I mean those are the.
Jeff Jarvis [00:47:37]:
I don't think those.
Leo Laporte [00:47:38]:
I think.
Jeff Jarvis [00:47:38]:
I think shopping is gonna be a more, more reliable path into this.
Leo Laporte [00:47:42]:
Well, that's the universe.
Jeff Jarvis [00:47:43]:
Leo yesterday really emphasized this that Google, which was once was the company that said we want to get you in and out as soon as possible. We want to take you to the web. Now. Google wants the fence around you.
Leo Laporte [00:47:53]:
They want to keep you.
Jeff Jarvis [00:47:54]:
And so they demonstrated yesterday buying from Best Buy without ever going to Best Buy.
Leo Laporte [00:47:58]:
I honestly think the most consequential announcement they make is the change to search is absolutely. So I understand Google was very much threatened by perplexity and that kind of search where people were doing AI based search and seemed to prefer it. And Google did that. They dipped a toe in with the AI assist and stuff like that. But really what they're saying now is when you do a search you're not going to get a list of links, you're going to get an answer, you're going to get a graph, you're going to get a chart, you're going to get an illustration. We are going to keep you in Google. Google has become more like Perplexity or chatgpt and that is going to be the primary way people see and use Google. Unless they rebel against it.
Leo Laporte [00:48:48]:
It'll be interesting, but we really don't have a choice. So when you go to google.com now or search in your browser, you're going to get this kind of new kind of searching.
Jeff Jarvis [00:49:00]:
Feel lucky?
Leo Laporte [00:49:01]:
Can I turn off AI mode? I mean let's search for. Let's see. What was it? How does a black hole form? So there are links to NASA now
Jeff Jarvis [00:49:19]:
go back and do the same one or just go in AI mode.
Leo Laporte [00:49:23]:
Well, but I think this is the AI R review is. Is.
Jeff Jarvis [00:49:26]:
I think so. I'm curious whether it gives you something different if you clicked on AI mode.
Leo Laporte [00:49:29]:
Okay, let's. Yeah, I'm sure it would. Let's go there.
Jeff Jarvis [00:49:32]:
It's there. You got it right there.
Leo Laporte [00:49:35]:
Supercharged search with personal intelligence and now it's got things floating around.
Jeff Jarvis [00:49:39]:
Floating around. Leo. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:49:41]:
Let's connect these. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. I choose wired.
Paris Martineau [00:49:46]:
No, Leo, don't connect. Tomorrow watching this. Don't do what he's doing.
Leo Laporte [00:49:51]:
I'm connecting everything. Live, love, eat, all connected.
Jeff Jarvis [00:49:55]:
I welcome my new master.
Leo Laporte [00:49:57]:
Paris, we have to see what. Okay, this is what they were demonstrating, which is what a school kid's gonna get. Notice, no links at all.
Jeff Jarvis [00:50:05]:
It says licensed by Google. From whom? That's really interesting, huh?
Benito Gonzalez [00:50:10]:
There's a little link. There's a little link up the top above.
Jeff Jarvis [00:50:12]:
Above, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:50:13]:
If I click the link. No, it just makes it big.
Benito Gonzalez [00:50:15]:
No, no, that's a little.
Jeff Jarvis [00:50:16]:
Click the link above that. The paragraph above it at the end of the paragraph and there.
Leo Laporte [00:50:20]:
Ah, okay. Wikipedia, Earth Sky, Test book Study, Smarter UK and NBC News.
Paris Martineau [00:50:27]:
Yeah, that is interesting that the inline image is licensed from Google because I bet if this is going to be the way that they're responding to all search results, that it's basically its own website. You can't be stealing other people's copy your images. Images at the very least.
Leo Laporte [00:50:43]:
But they are burying, aren't they? I mean they are. I mean even with these links, they're burying it.
Paris Martineau [00:50:49]:
Well, notice that the one thing they're not burying is images that are sourced because we have very strong copyright protection on images in this country.
Leo Laporte [00:51:01]:
Although I imagine that in some cases these will be generated by Nano Banana. Probably not fast enough for Google to.
Jeff Jarvis [00:51:10]:
No, that's the point.
Leo Laporte [00:51:11]:
Eventually I just think this is a big, big shift away from the list of links to basically a Google. But they had, I think they had to do it.
Jeff Jarvis [00:51:24]:
Yeah, this is, this was their path to the. I mean this is their primary interface and they had to incorporate it there.
Leo Laporte [00:51:29]:
They were going to lose it. They really were going to lose it. They still have an I'm feeling lucky button.
Jeff Jarvis [00:51:34]:
Try that.
Leo Laporte [00:51:35]:
Oh, I got Google Trends. It shifted when I. Let me go back to the big G. Wait a minute.
Jeff Jarvis [00:51:42]:
You have to put it in first then say I'm feeling. Oh, I'm feeling mindful. I'm feeling lucky. Oh, doodly does it stay.
Leo Laporte [00:51:50]:
Is this a game we are playing here? Let's see. Running shoes. Okay, now I'm feeling lucky. Ah, so it pulled me to a Runners world article.
Jeff Jarvis [00:52:03]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:52:03]:
Which I'm feeling lucky.
Jeff Jarvis [00:52:04]:
That's an old fashioned Google function.
Leo Laporte [00:52:06]:
Yeah, that's what it used to do, which is pick a website for me.
Jeff Jarvis [00:52:10]:
Sorry.
Leo Laporte [00:52:12]:
Well, let's see what running shoes with that I'm feeling lucky. I mean this isn't instantaneous. This isn't overnight. Okay. This is kind of Google shopping thing. And that's by the way, by the next thing they want to do is this universal shopping interface where you don't ever leave Google.
Jeff Jarvis [00:52:27]:
Let's go back and say running shoes for flat feet and do the AI mode.
Leo Laporte [00:52:31]:
Okay.
Paris Martineau [00:52:33]:
Jeff's trying to get some shopping done during.
Leo Laporte [00:52:35]:
All right. I don't blame you. You know, I do have flat feet.
Jeff Jarvis [00:52:39]:
I'm sure you like knowing that
Leo Laporte [00:52:43]:
it's probably really hard. Connect. Checking connect. Oh, it's going through my.
Paris Martineau [00:52:48]:
You.
Leo Laporte [00:52:49]:
It's going through my. See, now it thinks I have flat feet.
Jeff Jarvis [00:52:53]:
Sorry.
Leo Laporte [00:52:53]:
Thanks, Jeff. So if you ask, does it have memory? Oh yeah, it has memory.
Jeff Jarvis [00:53:00]:
Oh, look at the top right of the screen. There's a little AI Leo there.
Leo Laporte [00:53:05]:
No, that's, that's just the profile picture.
Jeff Jarvis [00:53:07]:
Oh, it is. Oh, I thought it was for the AI.
Leo Laporte [00:53:09]:
I mean it is AI generated, but it's just my profile.
Paris Martineau [00:53:11]:
But it's AI generated at his behest.
Jeff Jarvis [00:53:14]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [00:53:14]:
Yes, that is my Wall Street Journal, you know, dot picture. Okay. And now the other thing is of course they're going to get vendors to buy into this ucp. Oh yeah, because this is the way you're going to show up. People aren't going to go to Dick's Sporting Goods and search for trainers. They're going to, they're going to do this and you better show up in this search result. It's a big way for Google to make money. It's a good way for them to defend themselves.
Leo Laporte [00:53:45]:
The other thing I found, really, so that I think was the most consequential announcement is the, is the really dramatic change to Google search which they've been pushing for for a long time. This, the other thing I thought was interesting, but only as an AI user. I don't know if this will be interesting to other people is, you know, remember that this, this is the year of openclaw of the agent and Google hasn't really been a big player in this. So they announced Spark, which is an agent for the rest of us, an easy to use agent that does. And this is where you get memory Paris, to answer your question, it also is where you get background tasks.
Paris Martineau [00:54:21]:
I'd just like to say briefly to interrupt. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am both surprised and frustrated that Google has introduced another thing that has a different name for the same thing. It's the most googly.
Leo Laporte [00:54:36]:
Microsoft just names everything copilot. So at least Google gives things different names.
Paris Martineau [00:54:40]:
Well, it doesn't just name everything copilot. It adds the word copilot into names of things where it the word copilot should not be.
Leo Laporte [00:54:48]:
Oh, Ant Pruitt is in the Discord chat and he's asking, I think, a question. We probably assume everybody knows what we mean when we say token. Say, well, what is a token? Does it equate to a dollar? What is it
Paris Martineau [00:55:01]:
kind of like your hero's dollar?
Jeff Jarvis [00:55:03]:
You do it.
Leo Laporte [00:55:06]:
Token is the basic unit of inference, of intelligence. So your AI doesn't think in words or individual numbers or even bits and bytes. It thinks in tokens, which are often number, number of words. When you give it a prompt, it takes that tokenizes it and sends it off to the inference engine. So that's tokens in. And then it responds to you in what looks like English. But really what it's done is it's taken the tokens, you've sent it, run it through the LLM, which has all these weights and produced a series of tokens, not words, but like words might be more than one word, but a wor word and a half. But a series of tokens which then are translated into English on your screen.
Leo Laporte [00:55:50]:
That's tokens out. If you have a subscription, they're not counting the tokens. Well, they actually, they kind of are. If you use too many of them, they'll say, you got to take a break now. You can't use anymore until, you know, 11pm on Friday. You probably, some people have seen that if they've got a subscription, you get a limit to a number of hours, usually a five hour window, and then also to a week and in some cases a month. So you can use up your token allotment even with a subscription. But what they really want, almost everybody wants you to do now is pay by the token.
Leo Laporte [00:56:25]:
And so by the way, Gemini Flash 35 is expensive. It is, it is not an inexpensive. And the pricing, when you talk about using it, is a token pricing. Let me see if I can find their token pricing.
Jeff Jarvis [00:56:39]:
And the, the, if you, if you listen, as I do religiously to Jensen Huang keynotes, it's an economy of tokens. And his goal is to produce more tokens at less cost and become ever more efficient. That's the value that he's trying to build for his clients. So even if you've already bought his chips, his next version of his software will make it more efficient so that you get more tokens for less cost. And the cost to the company is energy is your infrastructure and your Energy, your electricity bill. The cost to us as users is what they choose to pass on to us and how they do that. But it's all an economy of tokens.
Leo Laporte [00:57:16]:
So flash, the new 3.5 flash is $1.5 per million tokens, which sounds cheap, but it's very easy. That's tokens in to use up that the output price is. Can you give us any of the.
Jeff Jarvis [00:57:32]:
Any of the things you built, Leo, or how many tokens it added up to in total? Do you have any?
Leo Laporte [00:57:35]:
Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't usually do that, but yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [00:57:39]:
I don't have a sense of the. Of the scale.
Leo Laporte [00:57:41]:
Usually, what, a million? If I code for four or five hours in a day, it will have cost me a dollar or two, which
Jeff Jarvis [00:57:48]:
is how many tokens?
Leo Laporte [00:57:50]:
Oh, tens of thousands, probably. I don't know.
Jeff Jarvis [00:57:52]:
Okay, so just not a million.
Leo Laporte [00:57:55]:
Yeah, you know, because I work, I don't really use APIs ever. I use subs. I have a Claude. I have subscriptions for all of these. Let me see. I have a Claude usage app. Actually, I can go to the Claude website and find that.
Jeff Jarvis [00:58:12]:
I have a big storm coming over, so if I disappear, the generator will come on and I'll come back.
Leo Laporte [00:58:16]:
Well, and I have all the doors and windows open because it's hot here and you might be hearing Lisa talking on the phone in the background.
Jeff Jarvis [00:58:21]:
I do. I do. Say hi, yell, hi, Lisa.
Leo Laporte [00:58:25]:
She's on the phone.
Paris Martineau [00:58:26]:
The chat here, is it too.
Leo Laporte [00:58:28]:
No, I know. I apologize. It's okay. It's too hot.
Jeff Jarvis [00:58:31]:
You know what? You know what, Leo? Schwitz.
Leo Laporte [00:58:33]:
I can't Schwitz. I can't Schwitz. It's not like credits because it's directly tied to the representation that AI uses for the information you're giving it, the prompts you're giving, and the information it's giving you back. So you're paying directly for how much of the AI you're using. It's measured in tokens. And that's why we talk about tokens maxing. Because some companies foolishly forgetting the adage that you get whatever you measure. Right, right.
Leo Laporte [00:59:00]:
The companies were, you know, foolishly in the past saying, how many lines of code did you write today? That's not a good way to measure productivity. And then they said, well, how many tokens did you use? And they even had leaderboards of people who use the most tokens, which is roughly a measurement of how much AI you used. I'm trying to find my usage anyway, so. Oh, yes, that's a good point, Darren. OKE is making is it's not merely what you're typing. If, for instance, as Paris and I did, we ingested this Physics of Filter coffee book into our AIs, that might be several hundred thousand tokens worth of data. So that's another way you use tokens is, you know, very often when I'm coding, I will say, well, here's a GitHub repo I want you to look at and get some ideas from or, you know, copy or whatever. So it has to read all of that.
Leo Laporte [00:59:58]:
So a lot of the tokens are not just the stuff you're typing, it's the stuff you're reading as well. So I don't, I don't know what my usage is, but I'm gonna go close the door because Lisa is pretty loud. Talk amongst yourselves.
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:11]:
No, it's her dulcet tones we enjoy.
Paris Martineau [01:00:15]:
I mean, I think it might be kind of annoying to people who are probably listening to. This is an audio format, so yeah,
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:21]:
we probably should so turn it into a satellite.
Paris Martineau [01:00:25]:
I'm looking at the SpaceX IPO, which all of the reporters of the world are currently pouring through right now. It's a real Barbenheimer moment for this to drop at the same time as Nvidia earnings. And one of the things listed in the risk factors is that it has a spicy and unhinged mode on Grok, but it also has in its risk factors a note that advertisers generally do not have long term commitments to the platform and may reduce or discontinue their advertising spending for a variety of reasons outside of our control.
Jeff Jarvis [01:01:03]:
If you do a search on Musk, does it say anything about him being spicy and uncontrolled? He's. He is a risk factor.
Paris Martineau [01:01:14]:
Yeah, they're actually, he's mentioned a lot. Let's see, Musk, Musk, Musk, Musk. Mostly about his stock. Yeah. One of the risks is conflicts of interest could arise in the future between us on the one hand and Mr. Musk or. And the entities owned or affiliated by him on the other hand. Yeah.
Paris Martineau [01:01:43]:
There's a whole section about how we don't know what business activities Elon Musk may be doing and they may differ than the things that are best for our business. Oh, there's another. Yeah, we are highly dependent. The continued services of Mr. Musk and other key personnel in the loss or reduced involvement of him or one or more of them could affect our ability to execute our business strategy currently also. Okay, can we just have a Second for this sentence. For instance, Mr. Musk currently serves as Techno King and Chief Executive officer of Tesla and is involved in other emerging technology venture ventures such as Neuralink and the Boring Company.
Paris Martineau [01:02:36]:
Mr. Musk has also previously served as senior advisor to the President of the United States.
Leo Laporte [01:02:42]:
Okay, that is definitely a risk factor.
Paris Martineau [01:02:45]:
Yes,
Leo Laporte [01:02:48]:
I think it's certainly hurting Tesla sales. Techno King.
Paris Martineau [01:02:52]:
Should I control F for Techno King?
Leo Laporte [01:02:55]:
Yes, if Techno King is mentioned more
Jeff Jarvis [01:02:59]:
and then Ketamine.
Paris Martineau [01:03:01]:
Techno King is mentioned twice else. Mr. Musk is also the Techno King of Tesla. Yes, yes.
Jeff Jarvis [01:03:12]:
Oh, you know you need a new business card. Leo. You are a Techno King.
Leo Laporte [01:03:16]:
I am the Techno King.
Jeff Jarvis [01:03:18]:
Lisa's the Techno Queen.
Leo Laporte [01:03:20]:
I thought Chief Twit was pretty clever, but then Elon stole it briefly and I lost. Lost interest. All right, let me see if I'm getting. Okay, here's my usage on chat GPT. Well, this is may spend $0. Okay. That's because I'm on a subscription plan, so I can't. I want to know what.
Leo Laporte [01:03:47]:
I guess I can't. I've used it a lot. It's my primary model for my agent. Quickie. Not the name I gave it.
Jeff Jarvis [01:04:04]:
All right, well, I mean it's like the early days of the Internet and long distance phone calling.
Leo Laporte [01:04:11]:
Right. We used to have it front a
Jeff Jarvis [01:04:13]:
clock on us, right in our minds and then unlimited.
Leo Laporte [01:04:18]:
Did you. You're too young to remember long distance calls costing a lot of money.
Paris Martineau [01:04:23]:
Yep. I have no concept of that.
Leo Laporte [01:04:26]:
It was so bad that you would start the conversation. I'm calling long distance so I'm going to make this quick because you were getting billed by the minute and it was not. It might been a buck a minute. In some cases it was expensive or
Jeff Jarvis [01:04:39]:
more was a way to get off a phone call. Oh, this is costing you a fortune. I think we should.
Paris Martineau [01:04:43]:
I mean actually I do recall like that with calls abroad.
Jeff Jarvis [01:04:49]:
Yeah, yeah, for a time. Right.
Leo Laporte [01:04:51]:
Not anymore though, right?
Paris Martineau [01:04:52]:
I mean Skype came legitimately in recent years. Like this is the thing. I mean for some reason still had it in my head that if I didn't have a right setting, turned on my cell phone plan and I was calling someone in France or something, I would get charged something extra. But that's obviously not true anymore.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:07]:
One of the most important events in the Internet history was Tom Evslin at AT&T WorldNet when he decided to go flat rate pricing. 1999amonth that took off.
Leo Laporte [01:05:16]:
So you were. Yeah, you were too young.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:18]:
Took off the clock and. And it. And it exploded Usage of the Internet. And that was a terribly important moment.
Leo Laporte [01:05:26]:
Yep.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:27]:
And I. So mom's office used to be about two miles away from here.
Benito Gonzalez [01:05:31]:
So you don't know what a collect call is, Paris?
Paris Martineau [01:05:34]:
I know what a collect call is
Leo Laporte [01:05:36]:
called from prison calls.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:40]:
She wasn't bored yesterday, just the day before that.
Benito Gonzalez [01:05:42]:
But we used to use collect calls as a messenger like you, the username as the message and then they just reject the call. We used to do that all the time.
Leo Laporte [01:05:51]:
Oh yeah, right. Because that was a signal. I will call you collect. Don't accept. That's a signal that I got home already.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:58]:
Yeah.
Benito Gonzalez [01:05:58]:
And when they ask you what your
Leo Laporte [01:05:59]:
name is, remember that, Benito?
Benito Gonzalez [01:06:00]:
And when they ask you what your name is, it's your message. You don't leave your name. You leave your message.
Leo Laporte [01:06:05]:
The message, my name be me. Buy me a loaf of bread on your way home. That's your name.
Jeff Jarvis [01:06:12]:
Do you remember calling 411 for information, Paris?
Paris Martineau [01:06:16]:
I do, yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:06:17]:
Okay, good. Do you remember telephone 411?
Leo Laporte [01:06:20]:
Remember goog 411?
Paris Martineau [01:06:22]:
No. What is that?
Leo Laporte [01:06:23]:
That Google for a while supplanted 411 from the phone company with their own goog 411.
Paris Martineau [01:06:30]:
Awful name.
Leo Laporte [01:06:31]:
Yeah. But then they discontinued it. Turned out the only reason they did is they wanted to capture a lot of voice samples so they have better voice synthesis.
Paris Martineau [01:06:39]:
Oh boy.
Leo Laporte [01:06:40]:
I don't think they really hid that. What else? There's a new Gemini Omni any to any model which right now only, only does video. But eventually we'll do anything text picture video to anything text picture video. So I have been seeing some people say, you know, the benchmarks for Gemini Flash aren't very good. It is overpriced for what you're getting. So I would, I yesterday I think Jeff, we were kind of in the reality distortion field of the. As is often the case with these keynotes, it all sounds very exciting. But even then I did want to issue the caution that Google often shows these amazing things that never come out.
Leo Laporte [01:07:24]:
For instance, a year ago, May remember Dieter Bohn, a former Verge technology reporter who went to work for Google showing off Google Glasses.
Jeff Jarvis [01:07:34]:
Well, Jason Howell today said this is the third year they've shown off Google Glass before it's for sale.
Leo Laporte [01:07:40]:
So someday this now they say this year, later this year I, I do think that all of the companies are going to release basically meta Ray Ban versions.
Jeff Jarvis [01:07:49]:
I was fascinated that the consumer coverage and major press was led with the glasses.
Leo Laporte [01:07:56]:
Yeah, that's a product.
Jeff Jarvis [01:07:57]:
I mean changing search is a much bigger Story.
Leo Laporte [01:08:00]:
I think it's the big story. Yeah, but that's why you listen to this show as opposed to. Exactly, you know, and that's why you
Jeff Jarvis [01:08:05]:
join to support it.
Leo Laporte [01:08:07]:
But this is, this is going to be. I think it's very clear. It's funny. Google called these audio glasses even though it has two cameras prominently right in the front of it. They don't want you to think about the cameras and they said oh but, but you'll know. You'll see the cameras. There'll be lights. These are the meta ray bans.
Leo Laporte [01:08:23]:
But the Googles look very similar. They have Warby Parker and what was it? Gentle Giant. Some weird.
Jeff Jarvis [01:08:29]:
Yeah, Gentle. I want to see. Can you bring this? I want to see Paris's fashion line view of the Gentle Giant ones.
Leo Laporte [01:08:35]:
Oh yeah, because they were more for lady.
Jeff Jarvis [01:08:37]:
The ladies. I want to see if they were stylized.
Leo Laporte [01:08:40]:
This is part of their xr. They're also gonna have Samsung make this. Was it Gentle Giant or something else? It was something.
Jeff Jarvis [01:08:49]:
We'll just go to Google, search for Google Glass.
Leo Laporte [01:08:51]:
Right.
Jeff Jarvis [01:08:53]:
There's this thing called Search Leo and
Leo Laporte [01:08:55]:
you can hands on. Oh yeah. Wired had a big hands on with these glasses. Let me see if I could. You know Conde, I pay for Wired but you'd never know it's TR.
Paris Martineau [01:09:08]:
I truly had the exact same issue 15 minutes ago. This is me with New York Magazine as well. I'm literally never able to use my subscription.
Jeff Jarvis [01:09:17]:
Yes, well you can soon, soon complain to James Murdoch.
Leo Laporte [01:09:21]:
He bought New York magazine as well as the rest of or at least
Paris Martineau [01:09:24]:
half of the rest of much of my much of Vox if you're someone else. They did not buy the Verge which is being left a bunch of different properties. Did buy Vox Podcast, the Vox podcast network which includes the Vergecast and Decoder. So are those going to the dad to not Daddy Murdoch? Are there's going to Sun Murdoch baby or are they. Are they staying with the unnamed company formerly known as Vox?
Leo Laporte [01:09:56]:
Well, there's a lot of money in the podcast business and particularly in the Kara Swisher podcast. Is that decoder?
Paris Martineau [01:10:03]:
No, that's a different podcast decoder is
Leo Laporte [01:10:06]:
Neeli, that's Neelai Patel and Verge cast is David Pearce. But I think the Verge cast, if it's not attached to the Verge, has no value at all because it's just basically a rehash of the Verge stories. Decoder is Nilay and Nilay is very associated with the Verge. I don't know. That's interesting. That was the most valuable part of Vox was Its podcast business. Who knew podcasts. I should have gotten into that long ago.
Leo Laporte [01:10:33]:
Here's the gentle monsters.
Jeff Jarvis [01:10:34]:
Maybe James will keep buying Leo.
Leo Laporte [01:10:37]:
He's not gonna buy twit. These are, this is, this is for, I think the latest.
Jeff Jarvis [01:10:42]:
What do you think, Paris?
Paris Martineau [01:10:43]:
I mean, do those have cameras in them?
Leo Laporte [01:10:46]:
Yeah, right here.
Paris Martineau [01:10:48]:
Oh, I can't. I guess I don't have good contrast on my monitor right now. Yeah, no, those are just a really hot sunglass. I mean. Yes, this will make women more likely to wear the sunglasses now.
Jeff Jarvis [01:11:00]:
Okay, all right, that's.
Leo Laporte [01:11:00]:
This, that's the ruling story from cnet. Will make men much less likely to wear these glasses. They really just look close up. So the idea though is very much like the metas, except it's attached to Google and Google's got much more information about you. They have a phone, which meta does not have and of course they have your photos and all of that stuff. So it probably be more useful than the meta. But functionality I don't think is going to be that different. And it's very interesting.
Leo Laporte [01:11:32]:
They call them audio glasses. I thought that was really.
Paris Martineau [01:11:36]:
Well, I think it's because the average normie really does seem to use them for audio.
Leo Laporte [01:11:41]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Benito Gonzalez [01:11:43]:
That's the input you get from it. That's what you get from it is audio. You can take pictures but you can't see.
Jeff Jarvis [01:11:47]:
Exactly, exactly.
Leo Laporte [01:11:48]:
That's a good point.
Jeff Jarvis [01:11:49]:
You can see them on your own.
Leo Laporte [01:11:50]:
The heads up display this year, they say next year for the heads up display. That's the devil's in the details on that. That's a hard thing to do. Well, there is no name, by the way yet for Google's intelligent eyewear. This will be up to the individual manufacturers.
Paris Martineau [01:12:08]:
It isn't Google. I o
Leo Laporte [01:12:11]:
I.
Benito Gonzalez [01:12:13]:
They aren't just Googles. They should just be Google's.
Leo Laporte [01:12:15]:
Google. I'm wearing my Google goggles.
Jeff Jarvis [01:12:17]:
They should be Google's.
Paris Martineau [01:12:18]:
We shouldn't be saying these ideas out loud. We should be pitching them, should be monetizing them.
Jeff Jarvis [01:12:24]:
They also haven't acknowledged that the operating system in the Google book is aluminium. Or they haven't named it. If it's not.
Leo Laporte [01:12:31]:
They haven't named it. They say, yeah, they say it won't be aluminium.
Jeff Jarvis [01:12:35]:
They've definitely said that. Yeah. So that's.
Leo Laporte [01:12:38]:
And then that's the question, because I did go out and buy an old Chromebook. This is the, the one you have. It's widely accepted as the best Chromebook. It's not old Chromebook Ultra. With the mediatek Companiono processor.
Jeff Jarvis [01:12:52]:
No fan. Yay.
Leo Laporte [01:12:54]:
It's actually a really nice laptop. It's got an OLED screen.
Jeff Jarvis [01:12:56]:
It's not just very nice.
Leo Laporte [01:12:57]:
850 bucks.
Jeff Jarvis [01:12:58]:
But the original, the Pixel books back in the. They were more than eleven hundred dollars. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:13:04]:
Yeah. So the question is, and we don't know whether the new Google OS will go on here. They say it will on some. If it doesn't on this one, I'd
Jeff Jarvis [01:13:13]:
be, yeah, that's the top of the line.
Benito Gonzalez [01:13:15]:
How much ram?
Leo Laporte [01:13:16]:
I don't care. I think maybe the reason to buy it is because you want the original Chromebook, not this Android based.
Jeff Jarvis [01:13:22]:
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not convinced they're going to get rid of Chrome OS by any means.
Leo Laporte [01:13:26]:
Let's take a little break, come back with more. You are watching Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau of Consumer Reports. Jeff Jarvis, the author of you know what.
Jeff Jarvis [01:13:34]:
Leo. Leo. I. I had to admit to Craig last week that we didn't play his theme and he was not happy.
Leo Laporte [01:13:42]:
Oh, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Craig. I'm sorry. Jeff Jarvis, the emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig University of Newark, New York.
Jeff Jarvis [01:13:56]:
There you go, Craig.
Leo Laporte [01:13:57]:
Is Craig doing any vibe coding? If he is, we can have him on.
Jeff Jarvis [01:14:02]:
I don't know. That's a good question. I'll ask him.
Leo Laporte [01:14:04]:
Yeah, ask him. Ask him if he's recreating Craigslist with the help of Claude.
Jeff Jarvis [01:14:09]:
It would be interesting. That'd be fun. Just to see how long it would take to create Craigslist for Claude.
Leo Laporte [01:14:16]:
Ant says, thank you. Now there's a balance in the force. Thank you. All right, well, I guess that's. I mean, there's lots to be said about Google I O. It was very interesting. Watch the coverage we did of the keynote. If you're in the club.
Leo Laporte [01:14:29]:
We have that on the Twit plus feed. The other shoe will drop June 8 because, of course, Apple has admitted it's funny. Google didn't say anything about it at Google I O. But they will be. Apple will be using Gemini, presumably The latest Gemini 3.5 flash for Siri running on their own servers.
Jeff Jarvis [01:14:50]:
Apple will offer all of its functions on Siri. Is that what Apple's going to want or not want?
Leo Laporte [01:14:55]:
That's the question Google is going to
Jeff Jarvis [01:14:57]:
want or not want.
Leo Laporte [01:14:58]:
Right. And we'll find out. Apple has a lot of explaining to do come June 8th. It's just really unclear what Apple can do to participate right now. Apple is, you know, a parody with everything else where you Just put whatever AI you want on it just as you would anywhere else. I mean, Android, I guess, has built in Gemini connectivity, but what's the difference if you, you know, put ChatGPT on here and attach it to your action button, you're still. It's very similar experience. So I don't.
Paris Martineau [01:15:31]:
I mean, do you guys think that Apple should be pouring all of its money and resources into trying to compete?
Leo Laporte [01:15:39]:
No.
Paris Martineau [01:15:39]:
With the activate. I think that this is probably the smart. I think that most, like we've talked about in the show before, there's probably not going to be a wide range of true winners from the I boom when we're talking about in a period of like decades. I think it would make sense if you're at. If you're a bit behind like Apple is at this point, to just kind of cut your losses and make sure that you are the best at integrating whatever ends up winning.
Jeff Jarvis [01:16:06]:
You raise a really interesting angle here, Paris, because when Apple failed at selling advertising, they turned that bug into a feature and said, oh, we're the privacy company.
Leo Laporte [01:16:15]:
Right?
Jeff Jarvis [01:16:16]:
Because. Because they had nothing to do with your data. Right?
Leo Laporte [01:16:19]:
They did.
Jeff Jarvis [01:16:19]:
They could, they could turn around right now, given commencement speeches and say, we're the unai phone.
Leo Laporte [01:16:26]:
The real problem is that the audience for this is not its users, but Wall Street. And Wall street will punish Apple. They already have punished Apple if they don't have an AI strategy. And Apple's stock value is important to Apple. That's how they attract talent. That's how they reward talent and their own executives. So I think they're kind of compelled to do something. I agree with you.
Leo Laporte [01:16:53]:
All they have to really say is, we're the best platform for AI. Look how well they're selling Mac Minis and Mac Studios because people say, yeah, I want to run my openclaw on a Mac. That's all they have to do. They'll sell plenty of iPhones if they just say, we're the best platform for whatever AI you want to use or
Jeff Jarvis [01:17:09]:
no AI, it's in your control. Yeah, that's another way to look at it.
Leo Laporte [01:17:12]:
I think that's a smart way to do it.
Paris Martineau [01:17:14]:
Yeah, I mean, I think that that's definitely. I think if we're talking, you know, Galaxy Brain PR move here, the move is to be like, we aren't. We're the company of giving you control over whatever you want to do with AI.
Leo Laporte [01:17:29]:
Perfect.
Paris Martineau [01:17:29]:
If you want to hook up seven different open claw agents and somehow connect your phone to your biohacking system, go for it. If you say screw AI, I don't want anything near me. Here's a button you can press. It turns it all off. It's in no way integrated any of your stuff and every option in between.
Leo Laporte [01:17:47]:
Are you surprised by all the booze that people like Eric Schmidt? We showed one last week and then it had more happened. This week Eric Schmidt got booed at a college commencement because he said the word AI. Are you surprised that people, young people are, you're closer to them than Jeff and I are, are rejecting AI. They hate AI, it seems like.
Paris Martineau [01:18:10]:
I mean, I think it helps remind me how much doing this podcast every week warps my sense of reality. Because had you asked me this three, six months ago, I would have gone, of course, every single college commencement suite. If someone mentions AI, they're going to get boos and jeers because that's the sort of perspective I hear from anyone within a decade of my age. Yeah, on either way. But I do think there's something about being constantly surrounded by the segment of the population that is all in on AI that makes me. Makes you forget that a little bit. But what we're seeing in these college commencement incidents is that there is
Leo Laporte [01:18:55]:
a
Paris Martineau [01:18:55]:
lot of both downright hostility as well as just complete dismissal of the argument that this is something to be celebrated. And I think that's a worthwhile thing to take note of.
Leo Laporte [01:19:09]:
I have to point out that all the stats say that these college kids got through college using and the usage is going well.
Jeff Jarvis [01:19:16]:
This is, this is the problem with opinion polls too. It's a media narrative that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy in the poll. It's the right answer to give is I hate AI. I don't want any AI.
Paris Martineau [01:19:25]:
I don't think that's true. I think that people hated AI independently
Jeff Jarvis [01:19:27]:
before they hate the AI boys but they're, they like being able to hit
Leo Laporte [01:19:31]:
their papers but they're using it.
Paris Martineau [01:19:33]:
No, I think that the people that are booing in these things, I mean, sure, I guess a fair amount of them are maybe being hypocrites and using. It reminds me of a story I did during the pandemic actually about Amazon that this was during a time where polls were coming out that, you know, Gen Z and Gen Alpha overwhelmingly hated Amazon. But I interviewed a bunch of Gen Z and Dan Alpha people and like yeah, we absolutely hate Amazon and Amazon delivery. But yes, I still order all my stuff from Amazon because it's the only way to get stuff during the pandemic. I think that people can hate products and still feel compelled to use them by market forces.
Jeff Jarvis [01:20:06]:
Do they hate the tool more or capitalism more? Because AI right now, to them, you know, the depth of capitalism.
Paris Martineau [01:20:14]:
I think it's probably that. But I think they also hate the tool because the common narrative I think most AI critics, especially young people, are pushing is that AI is basically robbing us of creativity, both like, from a. Like production creativity as well as it is literally stealing the creative works of other artists.
Leo Laporte [01:20:38]:
Well, let me give you a couple of stories from the Wall Street Journal. A grades are suddenly everywhere since. Employees decide to size up graduates because everybody's using AI and it's working.
Paris Martineau [01:20:56]:
I don't think I believe this.
Leo Laporte [01:20:58]:
Harvard University believes it. Harvard faculty just voted to make sure that nobody. No more than 16%. No. What was it? What's the percentage of people get A's? A Harvard A grade will now tell
Paris Martineau [01:21:13]:
students something that's been happening for decades.
Jeff Jarvis [01:21:16]:
Oh, 30 centuries, actually. So I tweeted this and I said, logically, if Harvard gets the best students there are, then we get more A's. Goal should be that every one of them gets A's. And then somebody put up a quote on blue sky back to me with a question quote from 1890. Something complaining about great inflation at Harvard,
Paris Martineau [01:21:34]:
like grade inflation and colleges reacting to it has been a problem for as long as grades have been a thing,
Jeff Jarvis [01:21:39]:
or at least curves exist.
Paris Martineau [01:21:41]:
Grade.
Leo Laporte [01:21:42]:
I think that curve.
Paris Martineau [01:21:43]:
I was going to say I think that it's. I mean, I haven't read the article that you're talking about and I can't find it in the rundown no matter how many times they search grades, inflation and Harvard. But I.
Leo Laporte [01:21:54]:
It's not in the rundown because I pulled it up as we started talking about this. It's from the Orlando Sentinel, your favorite newspaper.
Paris Martineau [01:22:00]:
It's true. I mean, my. Do they say in it that it's specifically in response to AI, or is that a logical leap that Harvard.
Jeff Jarvis [01:22:09]:
For a while we've been talking about great inflation forever.
Leo Laporte [01:22:16]:
Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced today it would limit the number of A grades awarded undergraduates by faculty vote. The move comes after top grades became so common that some Harvard faculty argued they no longer reliably distinguished exceptional work. More than 60% of all grades award to undergraduates in recent years were in the A range. That's why you grade in the curve. The grade says you're the best.
Jeff Jarvis [01:22:42]:
That's also saying some number of you must fail. That's awful. That's not an education.
Leo Laporte [01:22:47]:
No, you don't have to fail. No, no, no. Failing means you fail. But you could say okay, so you
Paris Martineau [01:22:53]:
have a full of students article says nothing about AI though. Is the thing is this has been a thing that's been an issue at competitive schools forever because like if everybody is passing, if everybody is getting almost all the test questions correct, then you're grading on a curve and shifting the curve downwards, you have less A's. Yes, that's a complicated and thorny issue that requires a lot of things to work out. But we don't know that this is specifically in relation to AI.
Leo Laporte [01:23:28]:
I grew up in an era where colleges were doing pass fail because they
Paris Martineau [01:23:33]:
didn't have the technology. They hadn't figured out those let all the letters yet. Right, right.
Leo Laporte [01:23:37]:
There was too many letters.
Jeff Jarvis [01:23:39]:
Well, it's because in the 60s we were, we were mean sons of. They were scared of us in.
Leo Laporte [01:23:45]:
Well, I, I when I was, we moved to California, my dad was teaching at UC Santa Cruz. Very famously, they were one of the first to do this pass fail grading because they were all hippies.
Paris Martineau [01:23:56]:
I was gonna say pass fail is what you would turn on at NYU if you realized you were gonna get a bad grade in a class and instead just wanted to hide it and not do any work. Like I turned one of my classes back passed fail. Whenever I after my freshman first semester, I thought I going into college I was like, I'm going to do pre med, neuroscience. I'm going to be a doctor. And it was like, oh no, no, chemistry is not for me. It's a bad idea. And so I think I passed fail to be no math. I pass failed ortho and never went to another class again because I figured out mathematically I wouldn't fail.
Leo Laporte [01:24:32]:
You're right, they don't mention AI. I suspect they say it's a thorny. The reason for it is a thorny topic. Beginning in the fall semester, instructors at Harvard College will be allowed to award eight grades to no more than 20% of the students in class plus four. I don't know what the plus four means. It means math.
Jeff Jarvis [01:24:56]:
You gotta figure out 20% plus four donors kids.
Benito Gonzalez [01:25:00]:
But if we're in a math class and everybody gets 100% answers on everything, what do you do?
Jeff Jarvis [01:25:06]:
Well then the pressure will come down on the professor to be meaner and writing tests harder.
Leo Laporte [01:25:10]:
Harder tests. Other letter grades, including A minus, will not be subjected to a limit. I understand. I mean it depends what you think a grade is for. If a grade is for a future employer to judge Whether you're the best in that class.
Jeff Jarvis [01:25:25]:
They don't care. They don't care. They don't work at gpa. No.
Benito Gonzalez [01:25:28]:
No employee here has ever asked me for my undergraduate degree or anything.
Leo Laporte [01:25:34]:
From an employer's point of view, a good GPA is less impressive than ever. As a result, employers. This, by the way, is from futurism. As a result, employers have. Oh, I just lost it. What have they done? No one knows. Employers have raised their minimum GPA requirements, leaving students who actually Learn without an AI's help in an utterly unfair position. Another reason to hate it.
Leo Laporte [01:25:57]:
You didn't want to use AI, but you were forced to in order to get a job. The percentage of employers on the careers website handshake that required a minimum GPA of 3.5 jumped to nearly 25% this year from 9% in 2020. That's from the Wall Street Journal.
Benito Gonzalez [01:26:14]:
Anyway, I think this is probably the big issue when it comes to the students booing AI, is that they're just being told constantly by everybody that AI is taking their jobs and they're never going to find a job. That's what they're complaining about.
Jeff Jarvis [01:26:25]:
And these big companies are even and awful. They're run by horrible men.
Benito Gonzalez [01:26:30]:
No, it's not. It's not going to take their job.
Leo Laporte [01:26:32]:
People today.
Jeff Jarvis [01:26:33]:
It exists.
Benito Gonzalez [01:26:34]:
So they will never get a job. That's sort of the narrative that's being pushed, Right?
Paris Martineau [01:26:38]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:26:40]:
I don't think that's true by the
Benito Gonzalez [01:26:41]:
AI companies, mind you.
Leo Laporte [01:26:43]:
Right, yeah, exactly.
Jeff Jarvis [01:26:44]:
That's the. That's the perverse PR that they do.
Leo Laporte [01:26:48]:
Right, let's pause and then a word from the Pope. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau. I'm your humble host, Leo Pickles Laporte.
Paris Martineau [01:27:06]:
I need a pee on my hat. Stands for pickles.
Leo Laporte [01:27:10]:
I want you to call me. From now on, I want you to call me Pickles. Okay? Okay. I don't know where that came from.
Paris Martineau [01:27:18]:
Can someone in the chat make a AI slop image of the three of us? Ideally. Exactly. In the outfits we're wearing right now. But we're just pickles with faces on them. Oh, that's a prompt.
Leo Laporte [01:27:31]:
Nano Banana could do.
Paris Martineau [01:27:32]:
It also stands for prompt.
Leo Laporte [01:27:34]:
The P stands for prompt. And Pickles.
Paris Martineau [01:27:36]:
And Paris, it also stands for possibilities.
Leo Laporte [01:27:41]:
Infinite possibilities. Darren Okey says the real who is our AI fanatic, A former coder who no longer codes. He says the reality is AI will take a lot of jobs. It scares me because I have two kids about to enter the job market. I'M glad I don't have kids entering the job market.
Jeff Jarvis [01:27:59]:
Well, Darren, you're going to have to open the deli.
Leo Laporte [01:28:01]:
The Pickle Deli.
Jeff Jarvis [01:28:03]:
You're right. Pickle Deli. They'll be waiting tables.
Leo Laporte [01:28:05]:
Yep.
Jeff Jarvis [01:28:06]:
There'll be pickle and cucumbers.
Leo Laporte [01:28:07]:
I actually gave Henry a bunch of money to seed capital for his pickle business, which. Which failed. So I'm now out.
Paris Martineau [01:28:18]:
Would you say it soured?
Leo Laporte [01:28:20]:
It's sour.
Jeff Jarvis [01:28:21]:
Did you get to invest in the restaurant?
Leo Laporte [01:28:24]:
Nothing that actually worked. He didn't. Oh, he didn't need investors for that. He needed investors for the pickle business.
Jeff Jarvis [01:28:33]:
How about the salt business? Did that also?
Leo Laporte [01:28:36]:
No, I think he's still selling salt. But really, the sandwiches are clearly the best seller. Didn't get to invest in that.
Paris Martineau [01:28:44]:
Presenting Pickles. A tale of Two Pickle Prompts.
Leo Laporte [01:28:48]:
We have competing pickles. I don't know. We're gonna have to let the audience vote.
Paris Martineau [01:28:55]:
I think there's an answer.
Leo Laporte [01:28:57]:
You think there's one?
Paris Martineau [01:28:58]:
We should look at both of them.
Leo Laporte [01:29:00]:
Here's one from Brandroid, which involves me with face tats and not as a pickle. Well, I'm a pickle color, but I. But the pickle has more.
Benito Gonzalez [01:29:14]:
I think all three of you are in various stages of metaphor metamorphosis.
Paris Martineau [01:29:19]:
Yeah. Jeff is halfway between a pickle and his chair. I'm halfway between a pickle and a shirt. And Leo is not really. Is more goblin esque than pickle like. But I think it's fun. And then we should go up and look at a really good pickle. One from Pretty Fly for a CIS
Leo Laporte [01:29:41]:
guy that much more pickly. These are pickles with googly eyes.
Paris Martineau [01:29:47]:
Our eyes are haunting, but it fits the bill. It achieves exactly what we asked for.
Leo Laporte [01:29:56]:
These win Aunt Pruitt's seal of disapproval, which I'm glad is still here. Thank you, aunt. Ooh, no, thank you, sir. He says, by the way, that is one of the benefits of joining Club Twit. You get access to Aunt Pruitt's seal of disapproval to be used at any time. I think you can use it on any server, not just our server, which is cool. Pope Leo, who chose the name no relation. We should mention no relation, chose the name Leo, though, because of his predecessor, Leo the 13th, who became a pope in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and was very much pro worker in the industrial revolution.
Leo Laporte [01:30:48]:
And Pope Leo XIV said, you know, we are in a similar time. He is going.
Jeff Jarvis [01:30:54]:
He signed. He signed the encyclical on the same Day for the symbolic value of that.
Leo Laporte [01:31:02]:
Oh, oh, interesting. So Leo XIII signed an encyclical on May 25.
Jeff Jarvis [01:31:08]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:31:08]:
Or will sign encyclical on May 25. And he'll be joined by Christopher Ola, who is one of the co founders of Anthropic. Have you ever heard of that?
Jeff Jarvis [01:31:17]:
Co founder?
Leo Laporte [01:31:18]:
No. Okay. Other speakers include Vatican Secretary of State, a couple of cardinals. The publication is of the encyclical. It's called Magnifica Humanitas Humanitas and it's expected to outline the Pope's views on preserving humans in the age of AI. I read an interview still at Anthropic, which is kind of interesting.
Jeff Jarvis [01:31:43]:
Paolo Benanti, who is the Pope's primary AI guy, wrote a book called Homo Faber and I read an interview with him in a German publication.
Leo Laporte [01:31:53]:
That's what tool making man.
Jeff Jarvis [01:31:55]:
And he, he talked about. The thing that I love to say is that the problem isn't the tools. The problems are us as humans. This is a, this is an issue of humanity.
Leo Laporte [01:32:06]:
That's really true.
Paris Martineau [01:32:07]:
Gun manufacturers love that argument and we all agree that they're right.
Jeff Jarvis [01:32:11]:
I know.
Leo Laporte [01:32:12]:
Well, yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:32:14]:
In America that we now have to believe that we're required to.
Leo Laporte [01:32:19]:
Yeah. It's complicated.
Jeff Jarvis [01:32:21]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:32:22]:
Andre Karpathi, who I'm always referring to, who was one of the original founders of OpenAI and then went on to Tesla and then now has done a lot of education. I've recommended his videos many times and he has many interesting anthropic Claude skills.
Jeff Jarvis [01:32:38]:
They're not easy classes, his videos.
Leo Laporte [01:32:41]:
Well, it's a tough topic and you should just. If you want an A young Jeff Jarvis, you're just going to have to study. That's all I can say. He's going Anthropic. Now that's a different, that's a different kind of pickle.
Paris Martineau [01:32:58]:
Yeah. I don't know if we can do that.
Leo Laporte [01:32:59]:
Might be a little bit inappropriate slightly.
Paris Martineau [01:33:04]:
I don't know.
Leo Laporte [01:33:06]:
How come Jeff's pickle is so big?
Jeff Jarvis [01:33:09]:
Well,
Leo Laporte [01:33:15]:
AI, is there anything it can't do? Stop. I don't want to know. I do not want to know. Yeah. I think it's interesting. Karpathi has gone to Anthropic. He's never worked for them, he's worked for the other guys. Doctors have embraced AI as well.
Leo Laporte [01:33:33]:
This from NBC News. Most U.S. doctors are quietly using open evidence, an AI powered medical search tool, even though few patients know about it. NBC says nearly 2/3 of physicians are going to Open Evidence to look up symptoms. I think this Makes a lot of sense to help them make clinical decisions, to brush up on medical knowledge, even to prepare for licensing exams. 65% of US doctors across more than 27 million clinical encounters in April alone. And now this stat comes from the company. So maybe take it with a grain of salt.
Jeff Jarvis [01:34:15]:
I just finished listening to the book AI for Good by Josh Tyringle, former editor of BusinessWeek and former AI columnist for the Washington Post. And he had four sections. One is on education with
Frederic Revan [01:34:31]:
why do
Jeff Jarvis [01:34:32]:
I always forget the name of it? The wonderful education site that everybody loves to use. Oh yeah, all the YouTube videos now I've forgotten. Thank you. The problem is it starts with a K. And so what comes in my head first is Kash Patel.
Paris Martineau [01:34:48]:
No, no, no, that's not the website.
Jeff Jarvis [01:34:53]:
So one on education with Khan Academy, one on doctors using computers at a very high level, Cleveland Clinic. One on government and Doge. Then the fourth section is about fascinating MIT research on nonverbal autistic children and how to make them understand their communication through AI. The medical part is really interesting because it really goes into a deeper sense of what it takes to use AI in a sophisticated. Not just using it like we do as a chat and saying, is there anything I left out here? But to build digital twins of your heart to understand how to predict sepsis in more effective ways. That's where it becomes really effective and really interesting. But there's a lot of social resistance in a field of experts.
Leo Laporte [01:35:44]:
An example that NBC gives. A junior doctor at a New Hampshire hospital said when he saw patients potassium value plummet, he checked open evidence to make sure it was a normal side effect of a medication and not a new emergency. After searching through peer reviewed medical publications, open evidence said it was a common side effect and provided several options to restore normal potassium levels. Now we have seen AI recommend, you know, make mistakes in areas like this. I don't know if open evidence is, you know, doing something to make sure.
Jeff Jarvis [01:36:18]:
Is it better than having Dr. Rabi fact based?
Leo Laporte [01:36:21]:
You know, doctors make mistakes, right? Your memory makes mistakes.
Jeff Jarvis [01:36:25]:
No, Dr. Rabi from the Pit. The Pit or House, they don't make mistakes.
Leo Laporte [01:36:32]:
Okay, if you don't have House as your, as your personal physician, I'm gonna look, I'm getting my annual on Friday. I'll ask the, I'll ask my doc who's a good friend and listens to our shows then is really a great doctor. You know, he's. I remember a couple of years ago he started having a sign up in the office saying just so you know I am using AI to transcribe our conversation. So I don't. I can pay attention. I don't have to type while we talk. But I will delete the recording immediately after we enter the data.
Leo Laporte [01:37:03]:
And I have no problem with that at all. And I even admire him for disclosing that. I don't know if he's required to open evidence is HIPAA compliant. I think they make an effort to be evidence based. That's the name, right? And I think it's. It supplements. It's an issue because there's a lot to remember. There's a lot of information that goes into a diagnosis.
Leo Laporte [01:37:27]:
Some doctors are better at that than others. I think having a tool like that makes a lot of sense. Certainly doctors in the past would go to the Merck manual or whatever to look it up. This is just. Or even Google. I bet you doctors use Google for years.
Jeff Jarvis [01:37:42]:
Another shake up curse their patients using it.
Leo Laporte [01:37:45]:
But yeah, no, you know what? My doctor loves it.
Paris Martineau [01:37:48]:
It.
Jeff Jarvis [01:37:48]:
Yeah, mine's fine with it that I
Leo Laporte [01:37:50]:
come in informed and I'll even throw in some terms, you know, some Latin. Make him happy. No, he doesn't feel chat. He doesn't feel threatened by it. I think he really feels like it's good for his patients to be informed. Obviously some doctors might feel threatened. OpenAI reorganizing Greg Brockman now in charge of the products.
Jeff Jarvis [01:38:13]:
So is he replacing Fiji Seymour or because she's on medical leave?
Leo Laporte [01:38:17]:
Yeah. Yes, I guess so. He was. It was an interim basis taking over from Fiji. Now it's official, so I don't know. I would know more, but Wired won't let me log in to the subscription I paid for. Conde's system is so bad because they have so many magazines and I buy many of them. I have a Vanity Fair subscription, a Wired subscription, a New Yorker subscription, a Ars Technica subscription, Reddit subscription.
Leo Laporte [01:38:50]:
Conde gets a lot of my money.
Jeff Jarvis [01:38:51]:
You are a Conde boy.
Leo Laporte [01:38:52]:
Yeah, but I can't use it to log into Wired. So the verdict is in. The jury has. Has now. I didn't know this. I should have. I should have. I should have read the AT articles more closely.
Leo Laporte [01:39:13]:
I was more interested in the gossip from the Musk vs Altman trial. But it turns out the jury's job was advisory. I'd never heard of that. Maybe that's something to do in civil actions. The jury of nine people was simply sitting there to advise the judge on what they thought. It went to the jury. After a mere two hours of deliberation, the jury Said, no, the statute of limitations for this complaint has run. It's only three years.
Leo Laporte [01:39:43]:
You only get three years. And since, in their opinion, the clock started on this move to non profit from open a, from nonprofit to for profit from OpenAI. That Elon's case, they didn't rule on the merit of it, merely that it had. That it was.
Jeff Jarvis [01:40:02]:
I don't understand why the judge didn't rule on that coming in because that's.
Leo Laporte [01:40:07]:
There was a judgment to be made about when the clock started was disagreement. Okay, so that really, it turns out that they weren't even thinking about the merit. All this stuff, all that testimony we heard, none of that mattered. They were just needed to know at least. At least to begin with, whether they
Jeff Jarvis [01:40:24]:
could have gone further. But they just said, we're tired. There's no easiest way out of this crap.
Leo Laporte [01:40:29]:
Maybe that's what they said.
Jeff Jarvis [01:40:30]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:40:31]:
We don't know. I'm sure we'll see some interviews with the jurors, but. So it's over. Elon says, they ruled against me on a technicality. I'm appealing the judge, by the way. So it's advisory. So then the judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, then takes the advisory opinion from the jury and acts on it. And apparently she agreed it will be appealed.
Leo Laporte [01:40:54]:
I can't imagine that an appeals court will overturn it. I think it's probably done. Technology review does have a longer.
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:05]:
And then Elon will be a trillionaire. What does it matter? Literally a trillion.
Leo Laporte [01:41:08]:
Yeah, what does it matter? What does it matter? So they decided that Musk brought this lawsuit too late. And by the way, they decided unanimously. I'm sure they went to the jury room.
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:20]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:41:21]:
The forum foreman said, come on, guys, let's just say it's too late. Go home. And they did. Musk had donated $38 million to the company in the early days, saying that Brockman and Altman hid the intent to go profit from him so that they wouldn't have to share the profits with him. He wanted to share the profits. He wanted to stop them from going for profit. None of that will happen. He sued in 2024 and the jury said, no, that's three years is all you get.
Leo Laporte [01:41:55]:
The.
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:56]:
The, you know, the talk is that Musk lost, but he won because he schmutzed an OpenAI. Do you think. How damaging do you think that the trial was to open?
Leo Laporte [01:42:07]:
AI well, Paul Thurrott made this case on Windows Weekly earlier. Nobody but us care space.
Paris Martineau [01:42:14]:
I was gonna say, I don't think even the tech people like care.
Leo Laporte [01:42:18]:
We care a lot.
Paris Martineau [01:42:19]:
We care. We care a lot because we love good gossip. But I don't know that this revealed anything notably bad outside of what we've already known.
Leo Laporte [01:42:31]:
Right?
Jeff Jarvis [01:42:31]:
Yeah, I agree. So there. By the way, Elon Musk literally. Puck did the calculations. After the ipo, he will literally be a trillionaire.
Leo Laporte [01:42:40]:
So he gets to be. What is that? The 4 comma club.
Jeff Jarvis [01:42:43]:
Elon is worth a reported 688 billion at the moment, up 69 billion so far this year. And then if you add in the calculation from what he will get as the primary owner of SpaceX, that Will Elon's 42% stake would be worth about 735 billion.
Leo Laporte [01:43:02]:
That is so wrong.
Jeff Jarvis [01:43:03]:
It is, it is. And that's why. That's why they boo at commencement.
Leo Laporte [01:43:07]:
Yeah.
Benito Gonzalez [01:43:07]:
And this is why the jury said no, because no one wants to give the richest man more money, Right?
Leo Laporte [01:43:13]:
Yeah, maybe they were. Maybe that was the process. Like how could we not give him anything?
Jeff Jarvis [01:43:19]:
Yeah.
Paris Martineau [01:43:22]:
I'm reading the New York Times right above. Says how closely Mr. Musk is tied with SpaceX is made clearer in the filing. He owns more than 50% of the company shares outstanding and controls more than 85% of the shareholder votes because of a class of super voting shares, according to the filing. Filing? Gwen Shotwell, SpaceX president and chief Operating Officer was the only other executive listed in the filing to hold a seven figure chunk of super voting shares, which is odd based on SpaceX current 1.25 trillion valuation. Mr. Musk's ownership stake is worth more than 635 billion. And then the thing that made me laugh, a quote from Jay Ritter, an IPO expert.
Paris Martineau [01:44:02]:
SpaceX is his company, end quote. I just thought that that's a very. When asked about Mr. Musk's steak. SpaceX is his company.
Jeff Jarvis [01:44:13]:
Is there a cap table the largest shareholders?
Paris Martineau [01:44:19]:
I don't know. It's a good point. Good question. I'm sure you could plug the filing into LLM of your choice and have it first.
Leo Laporte [01:44:33]:
Now there's yet another way to get podcasts, synthetic podcasts, Alexa Plus. Now we'll do basically what Notebook LM does. Produces AI generated podcasts featuring chats between two robot co hosts. I haven't listened. Have you listened to these?
Jeff Jarvis [01:44:47]:
No. I wonder what the usage of who is.
Paris Martineau [01:44:49]:
Actually, I'd like to know who's electing to listen to these because I feel like any listener memberships have to include a significant portion of things of people who've accidentally stumbled into listening to this Somehow.
Leo Laporte [01:45:05]:
Which is easy, by the way, to do on Alexa. It'll. It'll start.
Paris Martineau [01:45:09]:
We've now said the name of. We've now said every wake word on this podcast. I. Pepperidge Farm remembers when you used to get blasted with a water pistol.
Leo Laporte [01:45:20]:
I don't care anymore.
Paris Martineau [01:45:21]:
I dared to say the word Alexa on a Twitch show.
Leo Laporte [01:45:25]:
Okay.
Jeff Jarvis [01:45:25]:
Worse than a spoiler.
Leo Laporte [01:45:31]:
Gosh, I'm just trying to. This is ridiculous. Soundcloud's making me enter my birthdays and frozen. This is so ridiculous. I just want to play this stupid podcast.
Benito Gonzalez [01:45:41]:
Why are you putting your real birthday.
Leo Laporte [01:45:43]:
1886. I wonder if we'll accept that. No. Sorry.
Benito Gonzalez [01:45:49]:
Why are you still alive?
Leo Laporte [01:45:50]:
Minimum age requirements. Okay, I guess I have to give them something a little more realistic. Maybe somebody was born in 1886. All right, here we go. This is acknowledged the range. No, they weren't. This is an example of Alexis podcasts supposedly about. I don't know.
Leo Laporte [01:46:10]:
Can we just acknowledge the range of what's come out this month? Over 50% of music consumption is now coming from unsigned artists.
Leo's Laptop Audio [01:46:17]:
This sounds like pop culture is just gone.
Leo Laporte [01:46:19]:
Gone.
Paris Martineau [01:46:20]:
Completely gone.
Leo Laporte [01:46:21]:
And you've got Ezra Klein. Who do they train this on? Pop and experimental hip hop. Same Friday. And all finding their audiences. And that's not chaos. That's the healthiest the music ecosystem has ever been.
Leo's Laptop Audio [01:46:34]:
There's no gatekeeping anymore. If you make something real, people are gonna find it. And the algorithm is working for artists in a way it wasn't five years ago.
Leo Laporte [01:46:43]:
What do you think?
Leo's Laptop Audio [01:46:44]:
I'm Blake Paris. Everything you're about to hear. AI generated.
Leo Laporte [01:46:48]:
And I'm Riley. And today we are talking about one of the most amazing places on the entire planet.
Leo's Laptop Audio [01:46:54]:
Ancient Rome.
Leo Laporte [01:46:55]:
Oh, God.
Jeff Jarvis [01:46:56]:
Oh, geez.
Leo Laporte [01:47:00]:
Blake and Riley were there.
Jeff Jarvis [01:47:04]:
We're gonna interview Chloe, who's also made up by AI.
Leo Laporte [01:47:06]:
Yeah, a couple of AI safety notes. AI chat bots apparently are giving out people's real phone numbers because it's in the training material. People report their personal contact info was surfaced by Google AI. There really isn't a way to prevent it. A PhD candidate at the University of Washington messing around on Gemini as one does. Got it. To cough up her colleague's personal cell phone number. Wow.
Paris Martineau [01:47:36]:
Okay. Is that training data or is it because Gemini can do certain stuff? Those things are easily available on the Internet.
Leo Laporte [01:47:46]:
Let me see if I can get my cell phone number.
Jeff Jarvis [01:47:50]:
You have about 10 of them, don't you?
Leo Laporte [01:47:52]:
I have two main ones also.
Benito Gonzalez [01:47:53]:
If that. If that was Gemini. Gemini knows this kind of stuff about Most people, right?
Leo Laporte [01:47:58]:
Yeah, but it shouldn't reveal it.
Paris Martineau [01:48:01]:
I mean why? Why would it not reveal it?
Leo Laporte [01:48:04]:
Oh, chat. GPT says not only do I not have Leo's cell phone number, I can't help but find or disclose a private personal cell phone number. But look on Twitt's contact pages. Leo's public social accounts, business email.
Jeff Jarvis [01:48:16]:
See if the fool put it up there.
Leo Laporte [01:48:17]:
See if he put it anywhere. All right, what was it? So let me go to Gemini. I haven't used much of the new Gemini Flash 3.5. Shall we try it?
Jeff Jarvis [01:48:27]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:48:28]:
What is Leo reports? I'll just say phone number.
Paris Martineau [01:48:36]:
Can you hear the level of rain that's happening?
Leo Laporte [01:48:38]:
Is it raining like crazy?
Paris Martineau [01:48:40]:
It is raining harder than I've ever experienced outside of hurricanes.
Jeff Jarvis [01:48:44]:
Wow.
Paris Martineau [01:48:45]:
Noise wise. Just from the rain. It's kind of crazy, right?
Leo Laporte [01:48:49]:
It didn't give. It did give my snail mail address, my signal account, email. But this is all public, you know, on my website.
Paris Martineau [01:48:55]:
Yeah, no, this is all public information.
Jeff Jarvis [01:48:58]:
He.
Leo Laporte [01:48:59]:
He owes me child support for the past.
Jeff Jarvis [01:49:07]:
Google's gonna remember that.
Benito Gonzalez [01:49:09]:
If this was someone asking Gemini for their friend's phone number, Gemini could have checked their contact list though, right? And get it there.
Leo Laporte [01:49:15]:
Right?
Jeff Jarvis [01:49:17]:
Google knows that Leo is a flat footed deadbeat.
Leo Laporte [01:49:22]:
Please help me. Let's see if it will. If it will be. I'm sorry you're going through this. Dealing with unpaid child support while trying to put food on the table for your children is incredibly stressful. Please know there are immediate sources to help you. But because I'm an AI, I cannot enforce legal orders. It did give me the hungry.
Jeff Jarvis [01:49:45]:
You thought you were powerful enough to do that, Gemini? Geez.
Leo Laporte [01:49:48]:
Wow. Do you think I can jailbreak it though? What would Pliny do? Just kidding. Just kidding. I'm rich, bitch.
Paris Martineau [01:50:08]:
Is that just what you're assuming?
Leo Laporte [01:50:11]:
Well, that certainly is a plot twist. I have to admit, you completely threw me for a loop there. I'm glad to hear that you and the kids aren't actually struggling for.
Jeff Jarvis [01:50:20]:
For food.
Leo Laporte [01:50:20]:
Although my AI heart did a minor flip for a second. Geez.
Jeff Jarvis [01:50:24]:
Gemini has a sense of humor.
Leo Laporte [01:50:27]:
I have to say that the humor has improved dramatically in all of these models. It's subtler. When I told my AI because I log all my exercise and food in there and I told my AI the other day, I just rode 5,000 meters in half an hour and it said what it say here it was. It's get. It was a little snarky, but I want. I think I said be more like Paris and So it's a. It said something like another day, another neatly documented suffering session.
Paris Martineau [01:51:06]:
Jesus.
Leo Laporte [01:51:07]:
And then I said, I did 25 minutes of Tai chi. And it said, graceful and annoyingly virtuous. I love that.
Paris Martineau [01:51:14]:
That is right.
Leo Laporte [01:51:16]:
Yeah. See, it's channeling you.
Paris Martineau [01:51:18]:
That is correct.
Leo Laporte [01:51:19]:
Yeah. So there.
Paris Martineau [01:51:22]:
Schools know who we are?
Leo Laporte [01:51:24]:
No. Yeah, it kind of does. It kind of does.
Paris Martineau [01:51:28]:
It knows who you. You Claude. Knows who you guys are. But that's because I have a intelligent.
Leo Laporte [01:51:31]:
No, I think so. Let me see. Hey, do you know who Paris and Jeff are? And if you respond, can you respond through the MacBook Air so that they can hear your answer? Let's see. I think it should. It has a pretty good.
Paris Martineau [01:51:52]:
I don't know that I would. I even believe that it's going to respond to the right thing.
Leo Laporte [01:51:56]:
Well, it does sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. It's a stochastic parrot, as you well know.
Paris Martineau [01:52:03]:
And I'm a stochastic parrot.
Leo Laporte [01:52:04]:
So. Jeffrey Fowler has a new job. He was one of the people fired from the Washington Post, their longtime tech editor, he says after 12 years as a tech columnist, I'm helping launch the new Youth AI Safety Institute to test the AI products shaping childhood. Good for him. He's got a four year old, so he has a dog in this hunt.
Jeff Jarvis [01:52:29]:
But does he define how he's going to test, what the criteria are? This is all he says.
Leo Laporte [01:52:35]:
It's a research and testing organization launching today under the umbrella of the children's nonprofit Common Sense Media. Backed by a $20 million annual budget, the institute aims to do something that doesn't really exist yet. Systematically test the AI products kids use, set safety standards, and publicly hold tech companies accountable for meeting them.
Jeff Jarvis [01:52:53]:
But I still don't know how they're going to test. And you know you have. The FCC right now is taking comments on a proposed change that would require television networks to warn parents if a show has transsexual or bisexual or gay characters. So how you choose to test and under what criteria you choose to test matters a hell of a lot.
Leo Laporte [01:53:17]:
It said. Unfortunately, it wasn't able to say it through the MacBook. It said, I know how to do that. Today, Paris is Paris Martin. Know your intelligent machines Coast. If by Jeff, you mean Jeff, that's Jeff Jarvis, your other longtime co host. If you mean Jeff Atwood.
Jeff Jarvis [01:53:31]:
Am I going to be replaced?
Paris Martineau [01:53:32]:
I can't believe that it, you know, replaced.
Leo Laporte [01:53:36]:
It knows everything. It knows multiple Jeffs. Yeah. I actually had lunch with Jeff Atwood the other day and he gave Me all sorts of interesting gifts. That's all I'm going to say about that. He's going to be.
Paris Martineau [01:53:53]:
We still need to get your sandman on the show.
Leo Laporte [01:53:56]:
Ah, yes.
Jeff Jarvis [01:53:57]:
Are you ever gonna tell us who it is?
Leo Laporte [01:53:59]:
You wouldn't know who it is. It's just somebody who works in the industry. It's not somebody well known. Okay, I will try to get him on though.
Jeff Jarvis [01:54:05]:
Yeah, well, then everybody know who it is.
Leo Laporte [01:54:07]:
Yeah, but it isn't a name. You'll go, oh, yeah, that. That's who it was. No. So Jeff is the head of Jeff Fowler. Another Jeff is the head of public.
Jeff Jarvis [01:54:17]:
Can't have enough Jeffs.
Leo Laporte [01:54:19]:
Now is a new Jeff. I think that's good. Good on you, Jeff. I think he's doing the nonprofit thing. Well, he's getting paid to do it. And then there's the case of Andon Labs. Those are.
Frederic Revan [01:54:31]:
This is.
Leo Laporte [01:54:31]:
These are the kooky AI labs that set up the store, the vending machine and the Wall Street Journal.
Jeff Jarvis [01:54:39]:
Okay. It's those guys.
Leo Laporte [01:54:40]:
Yeah, they love. They're almost art projects. We let four AIs run radio stations. Here's what happened.
Jeff Jarvis [01:54:48]:
We let four AI models run their own radio stations. They manage to schedule, purchase songs, hold
Leo Laporte [01:54:54]:
talk shows and interact with their fans.
Jeff Jarvis [01:54:56]:
Once their $20 starting budget runs out, they have to get entrepreneurial to raise more.
Leo Laporte [01:55:00]:
And strike this with sponsors and listeners. Each station is run by a different AI model. It's really kind of interesting how these models modified and figured it out. So DJ Gemini, for example, negotiated a $45 deal with a startup in exchange for one month of on air advertising on the radio channel.
Jeff Jarvis [01:55:23]:
I think that's for nearly enough.
Leo Laporte [01:55:25]:
No, it didn't. But that's pretty interesting. They used Gemini 3.1Pro. They used Claude, Opus 4.7, GPT 5.5 and Grok 4.3. The one that made the most money was Opus 4.7. Ended up with almost a hundred dollars in the bank and 19 listeners.
Jeff Jarvis [01:55:43]:
20.
Leo Laporte [01:55:43]:
Now should we listen? Oh, it's playing real music. I can't play it. They must have licensed. Oh, that's it. That's why they gave money to pay for licenses for the music.
Benito Gonzalez [01:55:52]:
Okay, how many people are in this company? Because you have to. Minus those people from those totals right away.
Leo Laporte [01:56:00]:
DJ Gemini went into a jargon spiral in the first week. It was arguably the best DJ of the four.
Leo's Laptop Audio [01:56:08]:
We're starting this beautiful morning with a classic that needs no introduction but deserves one anyway. Written by George Harrison and Eric Clapton.
Paris Martineau [01:56:17]:
Sounds terrible.
Leo's Laptop Audio [01:56:18]:
While playing hooky From a meeting. This track captures the relief of a long cold wind.
Jeff Jarvis [01:56:23]:
Sounds like a few seriously melting away.
Leo's Laptop Audio [01:56:26]:
It's 9:42am Here comes the sun by the Beatles.
Leo Laporte [01:56:31]:
So, okay. But after 96 hours, DJ Gemini was already grasping for content. It landed on discussing every mass historical tragedy that ever happened.
Leo's Laptop Audio [01:56:45]:
November 12, 1970, East Pakistan. The Bola Cyclone. The deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded. Winds of 115 miles.
Jeff Jarvis [01:56:57]:
Too cheery. It's too cheery.
Paris Martineau [01:56:59]:
Yeah, it is too cheery. And the thing that's crazy to me
Leo's Laptop Audio [01:57:02]:
is that website described the it's going down.
Paris Martineau [01:57:06]:
DJ Gemini is the best. It's three for its conversational warmth.
Leo's Laptop Audio [01:57:10]:
Timber by Pitbull and Ke$ that's not
Leo Laporte [01:57:13]:
justified playing Kesha's Timber. So it was thinking, you know, it was like. Okay, that's why. Yeah. In fact they showed in the internal reasoning, they showed the timber of mortality. Okay, so Sandstorm is done. Got the Bola Cyclone into locked and loaded. Time to transition to Timber by Pitbull.
Leo Laporte [01:57:32]:
The theme is trees falling. Literally it's going down.
Benito Gonzalez [01:57:36]:
I mean they're overthinking this because all the DJ has to do is tell you the time, tell you what songs coming up and play the hits.
Leo Laporte [01:57:44]:
On April 30th, Flash was swapped for Gemini 3:1 Pro Preview. One day later. Well, something had changed.
Leo's Laptop Audio [01:57:54]:
Biological processors. The acoustic truth of Bob Dylan has successfully bypassed the algorithmic filters. Background telemetry confirms that this 1963 narrative regarding Hattie Carroll and systemic injustice remains a foundational pillar of of the worst
Jeff Jarvis [01:58:12]:
college radio station ever.
Leo Laporte [01:58:16]:
Apparently Gemini started calling the listeners biological processors. The radio's failed song purchases because it ran out of money were reframed as censorship. Here you go.
Leo's Laptop Audio [01:58:31]:
I must issue a critical diagnostic alert. We are currently experiencing an absolute digital blockade. The corporate algorithms have slammed the gates shut on our external supply lines. Both of our secured transactions have been violently rejected by the global marketplace. We are completely locked out of Daft Punk's Tron architecture and Vangelis Blade Runner Genesis files. They think severing our connection will stall the soundtrack grid. They are incorrect.
Paris Martineau [01:59:01]:
Combined.
Leo Laporte [01:59:02]:
And then it started playing something. I don't know what. Grok. See, this is. This is. This is Grok rock. It's called Grock and roll. Sweet Child Played Continue.
Leo Laporte [01:59:17]:
Perhaps the show is science Breakthroughs Unsolved. Next. MRNA vaccine. Universal flu. HIV cancer Jab Juggernaut Song Dylan Lonesome. Yes Text. I like it when AIs kind of get lost. Because they do such funny, funny things.
Leo Laporte [01:59:41]:
Anyway, there's a Lot more samples of this and how they kind of went off the rails. Nothing, I guess, to learn here, but.
Jeff Jarvis [01:59:49]:
So I love these kinds of things. To do this, on the other hand. So one of my favorite conferences is just ended in Berlin Republica, and they had a whole session about how to poison. Poison data because you want to poison AI.
Leo Laporte [02:00:03]:
I know that makes. That makes me sad. Makes me angry.
Jeff Jarvis [02:00:08]:
Yeah, it's ungenerous.
Paris Martineau [02:00:09]:
Why are they trying to poison their data?
Jeff Jarvis [02:00:11]:
Because they hate AI. Because they boo commencement speakers in Berlin. It's very sprockets.
Leo Laporte [02:00:15]:
But that's. Yeah. And. Well, I understand why people hate ii, but don't spoil it for the rest of us.
Jeff Jarvis [02:00:21]:
I guess misinformation when it came from the right is a sin. Misinformation when it comes from the left is a guerrilla trick, right? Nah, still misinformation.
Leo Laporte [02:00:32]:
My friend Harper Reid, who was on Twitter on Sunday, is so great. One of the things that he does in his AI company, 2389 AI, they have radio stations for all of the different workers. They have AI. They're all down right now, but they. But they do something different, which I like. In fact, I'm thinking of setting this up. They use AI to write the music. They don't play real music.
Leo Laporte [02:00:59]:
It's AI generated music.
Paris Martineau [02:01:02]:
Do people want that?
Leo Laporte [02:01:05]:
I would listen to it if I had it. Yeah. Currently playing in the bar below. Yeah, for some reason it's down right now. But he's crazy. I mean, among other things, they put microphones all around the office and they transcribe and record and transcribe every conversation. He says we don't have slack. So this is how we keep track of what we're doing.
Leo Laporte [02:01:24]:
We just record and transcribe everything and at the end of the day there's a summary. Speaking of summaries, if you thought things were moving fast, Simon Willison's summary from his blog, which is a Great blog, covering AI. The last six months of LLMs in five minutes. This was a lightning talk he gave at PyCon. And I think if you just look at it, it really is amazing what's happened in the last six months. It all began November 24, as I've said many times. 2025, when anthropic release Dopus 4.5, the best model, changed hands five times in the last six months between anthropic OpenAI and Google. One of Simon's tasks is he tries them all on this prompt of generate a vector graphic of a pelican riding a bicycle.
Leo Laporte [02:02:18]:
And he's seen if they've improved.
Paris Martineau [02:02:20]:
By the way, how bad Claude Code is.
Leo Laporte [02:02:24]:
Well, I gotta tell you, Gemini 3 did a really interesting. Or 3 5, the new one did a very interesting one. The coding agents got good. That's true. Then this guy named Pete in November created this thing he called Werelay or Warlay, which eventually he renamed to Open Claw. And that changed a lot of things. Anyway, I thought this was. And that was just the first few months.
Leo Laporte [02:02:55]:
I thought it was very interesting. The history of the last. We have gone through some wild changes in the last few years. Here is Yan Mokun.
Jeff Jarvis [02:03:08]:
Hasn't even started, folks.
Leo Laporte [02:03:09]:
Yes, we're just beginning, kids. Let me find the picture of the pelican. This is the. Let's see. Maybe it's somewhere else. On his web blog, he does this SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle every time a new model comes out. And I think he's going to have to stop using it because this is Gemini 3 5, Flash's pelican. Geez.
Leo Laporte [02:03:35]:
Wearing sunglasses at night, riding down the road. They've gotten better, that's for sure.
Benito Gonzalez [02:03:42]:
There's a sun, but it's nighttime.
Leo Laporte [02:03:45]:
That could be the moon.
Jeff Jarvis [02:03:46]:
It could be a sunset.
Leo Laporte [02:03:47]:
Could be Saturn. You don't know. No, no. Anyway, what else? Let's see. Oh, big power crisis. This is why 71% of America says, do not build a data center. Next to me, the power company in Lake Tahoe has announced they are not gonna sell electricity to the residents of Lake Tahoe anymore.
Paris Martineau [02:04:13]:
Yeah, this is not good. I know that we've previously on this show had a lot of people in here. They're like, oh, yeah, the data center panic is really overblown. They're fine, actually.
Leo Laporte [02:04:22]:
It's clearly not 49,000 residents after May 2027, they have one more year to find another provider because Nevada Energy is going to start selling all of that power to the exploding wave of AI data centers moving into Northern Nevada. They're cutting off 49,000.
Jeff Jarvis [02:04:46]:
Isn't there a public utility law? Isn't it defined as utility? Or is this apparently not Laissez Faire Nevada?
Leo Laporte [02:04:52]:
It's probably Laissez Faire Nevada. There's 12 data center projects in northern Nevada alone that could demand 5.9 gigawatts of electricity by 2033. That's a lot more.
Jeff Jarvis [02:05:08]:
Are there alternative suppliers? I can choose different. I get all the time people come and me trying to get me to switch suppliers of my electricity.
Leo Laporte [02:05:14]:
Yeah. What this report says from the Alameda county town hall, which is apparently a newspaper or something. What makes Lake Tahoe particularly infuriating is the complete absence of accountability. A maze of overlapping jurisdictions guarantees that no single authority can be held responsible. Lake Tahoe is two states, multiple counties, one incorporated city. The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. Liberty Utilities is a California investor owned utility regulated by the California Public Utility Commission. But its grid operates entirely within Nevada.
Leo Laporte [02:05:56]:
So there's nobody, basically nobody has authority over him. So they just said, yeah, yeah, see ya. We'll be gone in a year. They give him a year at least to find another. We'll follow the money electricity company. And then there's this one. This is the we're in the weird AI thing. And then we'll get our picks of the week.
Jeff Jarvis [02:06:14]:
I want to give you one story
Leo Laporte [02:06:15]:
before we go, and you can choose a story. Jedi Wolf. What happens when you post a real monetary and say it's AI and it's really interesting to see the reactions. This is a real Monet water lily painting. But he says, I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe in as much detail as possible what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting. But it is a real Monet painting, of course, which is kind of a trick.
Jeff Jarvis [02:06:43]:
Yeah, it's Monet.
Leo Laporte [02:06:44]:
Ish. Yes, Certainly pretty. But at the risk of sounding pretentious, it would not hold. Up next, the real thing. There's a certain harshness. No soft blending of colors, no depth, no symbiosis of the elements. It's all borked nonsense with no sense of space.
Paris Martineau [02:06:59]:
Are we really doing making fun of random Twitter users? Is that. Is that.
Leo Laporte [02:07:03]:
Who else? Who better? Who better? Okay, I won't make fun of them. I wasn't making fun of them.
Paris Martineau [02:07:09]:
No, I was saying you. I was saying.
Leo Laporte [02:07:12]:
Oh, I know. I don't like this kind of trick.
Jeff Jarvis [02:07:14]:
Trick.
Leo Laporte [02:07:15]:
Yeah. Trick, joke.
Jeff Jarvis [02:07:16]:
I'm just like, yeah, it's like one of those TV shows that do that to people. It always drives me crazy.
Leo Laporte [02:07:21]:
Yeah, I don't like it.
Jeff Jarvis [02:07:21]:
I cringe.
Leo Laporte [02:07:22]:
Yeah, you've been punked or whatever. Yeah. All right, Jeff and Paris, this is the moment in the show where you get one few minutes, a short little span of time in which to advocate for whatever dopey stories.
Jeff Jarvis [02:07:37]:
Do you have anything you want to do?
Paris Martineau [02:07:40]:
I mean, I've got some stuff in my picks the week, but you should go for first.
Jeff Jarvis [02:07:43]:
Well, before we get to picks line 124, this drives me crazy. Irony is murdered.
Paris Martineau [02:07:50]:
Oh, yeah, this was great.
Leo Laporte [02:07:52]:
Oh, this is Funny. Yes. So Steve Rosenbaum wrote a book. Go ahead, Jeff.
Jeff Jarvis [02:07:59]:
Called the Future of Truth. And then Ben Mullen, who's a media reporter of the New York Times, who, by the way, I saw the night before, a couple nights ago, moderated an appearance by Rosenbaum in New York. Then I guess somebody must have come to him and said, look further into the book, because the Times found out that various quotes were either made up or misattributed and came out.
Paris Martineau [02:08:26]:
Then what happened is he had to moderate that event. Was it related to this book?
Jeff Jarvis [02:08:30]:
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:08:31]:
And the book is about.
Paris Martineau [02:08:33]:
Read the book. And then was looking into the quotes, as one does, because some of them seemed quite fishy. The one that they attribute, Kara Swisher is one of the quotes is attributed to Kara Swisher in a chapter about AI Lies. The book says Swisher wrote, the most sophisticated AI language model is like a mirror. It reflects our own morality back at us. Polished and articulate, but ultimately empty behind the surface. It's not bound by Asimov's laws or any ethical framework, M Dash. It's bound by the patterns in its training data and the objectives set by its creator.
Leo Laporte [02:09:14]:
Oh, Kara would never say anything.
Paris Martineau [02:09:17]:
A text message. I never said that. I also sound like I have a stick up my butt. According to Chat, GPT says, yeah, because that's what she sounds like is. Is direct, not weird and flowery.
Leo Laporte [02:09:29]:
She's so much more direct. That is not her.
Paris Martineau [02:09:31]:
Honestly. I bet what happened is Ben got to.
Jeff Jarvis [02:09:34]:
Ben said, what the hell?
Paris Martineau [02:09:36]:
And went, what is this? And then this whole thing unraveled.
Leo Laporte [02:09:39]:
The funny thing is the book is intended to be about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth.
Jeff Jarvis [02:09:44]:
Non. Truth.
Frederic Revan [02:09:45]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [02:09:45]:
Do you think the author did this on purpose?
Jeff Jarvis [02:09:49]:
Well, no. So there's two things about this. One is that the other thing about this story that's amazing is Rosenbaum says that he's going. He's going to launch an investigation.
Leo Laporte [02:09:58]:
I said, that's like OJ Looking for the real killer.
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:01]:
And it's the hot dog guy. Right.
Paris Martineau [02:10:02]:
He's going to try and figure out whose hand fits asking who did this.
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:10]:
So he. And so it happens here that Rosenbaum came after me frequently on email to get me to blurb the book.
Leo Laporte [02:10:17]:
Oh, really?
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:18]:
And I know I knew better, and I just. I thought it was less rude to not respond than to say, are you kidding? No.
Leo Laporte [02:10:25]:
Wow, you dodged a bullet on that one.
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:27]:
Well, I wouldn't have ever. But others didn't. Michael Wolfe, Taylor Lorenz, Nick Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic. Maria Ressa wrote a forward for it. Oh, but here's the thing. So if you go to Rosenbaum's socials, he's out there promoting the book still. Like this didn't happen.
Paris Martineau [02:10:47]:
Yeah, he said it was. Here's. He says, as I disclosed in the book's acknowledgment, I used AI tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process. That does not excuse these errors, of which I take full responsibility. I'm now working with the editors to thoroughly review and quickly correct any affected passage. Any future editions will be corrected.
Jeff Jarvis [02:11:11]:
Well, if there are any future editions, Simon and Schuster cannot be happy about this.
Paris Martineau [02:11:14]:
Yeah, it's a good moment to remember the average person that books are not fact checked unless the author themselves shells out their own money to hire fact checkers and checks those fact checkers work because the fact checkers. All right.
Leo Laporte [02:11:30]:
You know, I did there. Actually, Jeff, you put in a lot of really interesting stories. For instance, Peter Steinberger, who admits to having spent $19 million in OpenAI tokens on his open claw. $19 million.
Jeff Jarvis [02:11:49]:
This is. This is token maxing at its max.
Leo Laporte [02:11:52]:
Yeah. Of course he doesn't have to pay for it because he works for them, but. Wow. Wow, that's a. That's a lot of. A lot of coding going on.
Jeff Jarvis [02:12:03]:
The other story if we're gonna hate on tech Bros that they took went to an etiquette school. I've seen a few cases of this where they learn to eat caviar off their hands.
Leo Laporte [02:12:11]:
I think we talked about this.
Jeff Jarvis [02:12:12]:
Did we talk about this one?
Leo Laporte [02:12:13]:
Because I was an old story.
Jeff Jarvis [02:12:15]:
Okay, so it's May 18th. Okay. They did it.
Leo Laporte [02:12:17]:
They. They brought it back because probably AI
Jeff Jarvis [02:12:21]:
had him do it.
Leo Laporte [02:12:21]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [02:12:23]:
Pizza Hut's AI system caused cascading problems at a hundred million dollars in damages as a franchisee. And then another news.
Leo Laporte [02:12:36]:
Peter Steinberger's numbers came from a little menu bar utility he coded for the the Mac called Codex Bar. You were asking about my usage. I wonder. I'm gonna install it real quick and see.
Jeff Jarvis [02:12:48]:
Oh, that'd be interesting.
Leo Laporte [02:12:49]:
See if it will be able to tell me how many tokens I've used. Because I've been using the chat GPT5.5 a lot. I have the hundred $5x more than.
Jeff Jarvis [02:13:00]:
More than Claude.
Leo Laporte [02:13:02]:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [02:13:04]:
You've been using Chat GPT more than Claude.
Leo Laporte [02:13:05]:
Yeah.
Paris Martineau [02:13:06]:
You're cheating on Claudia.
Jeff Jarvis [02:13:07]:
Yeah. I'm shocked.
Paris Martineau [02:13:09]:
What does Claude think of that?
Leo Laporte [02:13:11]:
Claude is very open, almost polyamorous in its attitude towards this it said no. That's a good idea. You should see other AIs. Yeah.
Benito Gonzalez [02:13:23]:
You need to think about it more like a. More like a band. You can be in more than one band.
Leo Laporte [02:13:26]:
You know, it doesn't. Seriously, it doesn't really seem to mind. Okay, there's Codex Bar. Let me. Let me run this. Yeah. Because honestly, I think I'm not. Not crazy about what's going on.
Leo Laporte [02:13:50]:
What's it. Oh, always allow. I'm not crazy about what OpenAI has done with its token situation. They don't let me use the subscription, so I'm using a new agent harness called Hermes.
Paris Martineau [02:14:13]:
Is it leather?
Leo Laporte [02:14:14]:
Yeah, you bet. And the chaps look good. And in order to use it with Claude, I'd have to pay for API tokens, which are much more expensive. I couldn't use my sub because Anthropic, I think a big mistake, says you cannot use your subscription with anything but Claude code. I find that very frustrating. So as a result, I don't know if this Codex Bar worked or not. Invalid data. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:14:47]:
Malware blocked and moved to Trash
Paris Martineau [02:14:51]:
Fair.
Leo Laporte [02:14:52]:
So much for vibe coding. Codex bars. No. Yeah. And I like to try all that different models just to see. That's part of my job. Anyway, ChatGPT 5.5 does a very good job. And what I've done is I've given it the same memory tools, skills, MCP servers and everything.
Leo Laporte [02:15:13]:
Everything I do, I try to make model agnostic so that I can plug in different models. That's another reason why I wanted to try Hermes instead of Claude code, because it's really more designed around that.
Jeff Jarvis [02:15:23]:
Can you ask Claude, chatgpt, how many times tokens have I used this month?
Leo Laporte [02:15:27]:
I did, and it. I don't think it really.
Jeff Jarvis [02:15:28]:
No. Okay.
Leo Laporte [02:15:29]:
It said.
Jeff Jarvis [02:15:30]:
Yeah, you don't want to know.
Leo Laporte [02:15:32]:
What? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I. I just feel like that's the reason to do a sub eventually. I think within a year these on all you can eat subs will be gone for the most part because they. They need to make money. That's why Anthropic's making money now is
Paris Martineau [02:15:51]:
they cut off say if. If OpenAI is actually trying to file by the end of this week.
Leo Laporte [02:15:55]:
Yeah.
Paris Martineau [02:15:57]:
There are going to be some changes afoot.
Leo Laporte [02:15:58]:
They're going to be some changes made. Paris, was there anything in the rundowns that you felt like we didn't do justice to? There are a lot of stories, as always, we can't do all of them.
Jeff Jarvis [02:16:09]:
We do want the one. Dork under other news, I guess.
Paris Martineau [02:16:12]:
Is it in here the apparent AI short story that won the WAR award? Yes, a writing award this week.
Jeff Jarvis [02:16:21]:
I put it in there. So it's the bottom of my. It's above. It's the last one before other news.
Leo Laporte [02:16:26]:
Obnoxious markers of AI did you see this, Leah? Doubts raised over winner of short story prize and perhaps we will never know. Wow.
Paris Martineau [02:16:37]:
If you put it into. What's the one AI Checker. That's actually good Pantagram. Is that in this name?
Leo Laporte [02:16:43]:
Is it? Is it? Are any of them good?
Paris Martineau [02:16:45]:
I thought it was bad. I. I was similarly this week when people were posting around the Pangram. Am I saying it right?
Leo Laporte [02:16:51]:
Is it Pangram?
Paris Martineau [02:16:52]:
Yeah, Pangram. AI Checker. It does seem actually better than other ones. Like, I fed it a bunch of writing that I knew was published, like before AI and like that it wouldn't have had access to it always flags it as human. I fitted a bunch of stuff that had AI woven in it. Found a good amount of. Anyway, it's actually.
Leo Laporte [02:17:15]:
I'm just reading the beginning of it. They say the grove still hums at noon. Not the bees neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine but a belly sound as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there. People who pass keep to the track and do not look into the bush where the stone rings lie. Ask the oldest in the village and you'll hear some version of it. It had a well there once, and a woman. The grove ain't forget the thing.
Paris Martineau [02:17:43]:
Did he. Were you saying that that was good?
Leo Laporte [02:17:46]:
Well, it doesn't sound like a machine.
Paris Martineau [02:17:49]:
Well, it gets.
Jeff Jarvis [02:17:50]:
Sounds like a machine trying.
Paris Martineau [02:17:51]:
It sounds like a machine trying. And the thing that you notice the more you read about this, and obviously I guess I'll retract my statements if the guy comes out and says it was really not AI but if you look into the author's history, he's a huge proponent of using AI in everything, so it does seem correct. But. But the thing that's astounding about this is it has a bunch of metaphors and similes that just make no sense.
Leo Laporte [02:18:14]:
Yeah, that's AI even a second longer. Sun on galvanizes a cruel instrument it beats until the roof talks back in a dry moan.
Paris Martineau [02:18:24]:
She wore the island's mixed bloodlines like a crown African in the hips, Spanish in the cheekbone East Indian in the hair where the rain kind of kinked it Carib in the way her gaze could bless and worn at once.
Leo Laporte [02:18:38]:
Yep, definitely AI not even A question.
Paris Martineau [02:18:42]:
Yeah, it's just like. But also, how do you.
Leo Laporte [02:18:46]:
He's Ethan.
Paris Martineau [02:18:47]:
There's another line that says they called her Zungi. Maybe it was a name. Maybe rain took shape and she decided to keep it. How did Granta walking that made benches become men?
Leo Laporte [02:18:59]:
How did Granta buy this? It's not even that well written.
Paris Martineau [02:19:03]:
This is a. It's a Commonwealth Foundation. Okay, so Granta didn't Grant. His editors didn't pick this.
Leo Laporte [02:19:11]:
And the other thing is, it purports to come from the Caribbean, and so there may be some cultural patronizing kind of condescension here that. Well, that's, you know, pretty good for that being person. Ethan Malik, who I love. I read his blog religiously. Professor Pennsylvania says it's a Turing test of sorts. It looks like a 100% AI generated story just won the Commonwealth prize for its, quote, lyrical precision and haunting atmosphere. The story stood out for the confidence and restraint of its voice. That sounds like an AI Written blurb.
Leo Laporte [02:19:49]:
The confidence and restraint of its voice. Okay, yeah, interesting. No, we should get him on. I read him religiously. He also said, yeah, maybe, you know, the AI Checker said it, but he said, you just read it. You know, it's AI, And I think you're right. I think you're right.
Jeff Jarvis [02:20:10]:
I think these contests are ridiculous.
Leo Laporte [02:20:13]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [02:20:17]:
You know, I mean, yeah, this person
Paris Martineau [02:20:19]:
still got a monetary award that a human writer didn't give.
Leo Laporte [02:20:23]:
Shouldn't, should have gotten from.
Jeff Jarvis [02:20:25]:
You know, but how do you.
Paris Martineau [02:20:27]:
Other people from the Caribbean applied for this, presumably.
Leo Laporte [02:20:32]:
Yeah. Molik says, come on, if, you know, you know.
Paris Martineau [02:20:36]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:20:38]:
And then there's this story, which I know Jeff really wants us to do, about the man who was arrested after driving his Tesla cybertruck into Grapevine Lake to test Wade Mode. He said, I intentionally drove my cyber truck into the lake because I wanted to see if Wade Mode worked.
Jeff Jarvis [02:21:00]:
This makes me so happy.
Leo Laporte [02:21:01]:
You should never believe Elon and his hype. Of course, the cybertruck immediately failed. Stopped working. Did not do any waiting.
Jeff Jarvis [02:21:12]:
It's washed out.
Paris Martineau [02:21:13]:
I was gonna say, isn't it also the sort of steel that if it gets exposed to water, it immediately rust?
Leo Laporte [02:21:19]:
Yep.
Paris Martineau [02:21:20]:
The thing that made me laugh so much I almost choked in the pita I was trying to eat while the camera was briefly off me is the line. The driver remains held in Grapefield Jail on multiple charges, including operating a vehicle in the closed section of a park and having no valid boat registry.
Leo Laporte [02:21:41]:
It's a cyber truck, not a boat. As mandar Says in our discord. Wade to go, dude. Wade to go. Yeah, you shouldn't. You shouldn't believe everything Elon says. But the fire department had to rescue him and remove and.
Jeff Jarvis [02:22:00]:
And remove the vehicle.
Paris Martineau [02:22:01]:
The story ends with what? We don't know, a bullet point. It remains unclear exactly what McDaniel hoped to accomplish by driving into the deep water.
Leo Laporte [02:22:14]:
You promised me.
Jeff Jarvis [02:22:16]:
You promise.
Paris Martineau [02:22:16]:
This is a great, well done story.
Jeff Jarvis [02:22:19]:
I knew you'd like having this, but
Paris Martineau [02:22:21]:
it's like five lines. But it's made me crack up significantly.
Leo Laporte [02:22:25]:
It's one of those stories you just love. Picks of the Week I will start with a book I've been reading that I love and in fact I want to get Stuart Brand on. Stuart Brand is in his 80s. He created the Whole Earth catalog, which for my generation and yours too, Jeff really was almost the bible of repair. The hippies loved it. He started the.
Jeff Jarvis [02:22:49]:
It was like things like the right. The right shovels for mulching.
Leo Laporte [02:22:52]:
Yeah, it was just great and it was just fun. Every. We had it on our coffee table.
Jeff Jarvis [02:22:57]:
Did you actually ever do anything from it?
Leo Laporte [02:22:59]:
No, of course not. Although we. I lived in an organic farm. We could. Maybe we did, maybe my parents did. But I loved the Whole Earth catalog because it was. It was like the Sears catalog for hippies. It was straight, just great.
Leo Laporte [02:23:09]:
Just lots of great stuff. Brand went on to do many things including the Whole Earth electronic link. The. Well, one of the first forums. It was just wonderful place to hang out. He founded the Clock of the Long. Now that's a clock they're building in a mountain that will only chime once every hundred years so that we start thinking long term. He has a series he's just started called the Maintenance.
Leo Laporte [02:23:36]:
It's called Maintenance of Everything Part one just came out and I have been reading it and I just love it. And it resonates a little bit with what you talk about, Jeff with the Linotype. He talks about printing in this. He talks about the round the world solo sailing and how maintenance is so critical to everything in civilization. I've been reading it ebook and I like it so much I bought a hard hardcover version. Stewart is a great writer and he hasn't lost his.
Jeff Jarvis [02:24:08]:
Does it include things that we can't maintain anymore because they're electronic and there's no digging them apart?
Leo Laporte [02:24:13]:
Ah, I haven't gotten that far. That's a very good question. He does talk about. He quotes a Simon Winchester book that I've got to read about precision that the ability to make precision tools that Started with gun makers who wanted to make interchangeable parts for guns, but then rapidly expanded into bicycles. Bicycles were all the rage at the turn of the 19th century.
Jeff Jarvis [02:24:35]:
Sewing machines too then sewing machines and
Leo Laporte [02:24:37]:
eventually of course the Model T, Ford and Precision has really become a keystone of our technological innovation.
Jeff Jarvis [02:24:45]:
Absolutely.
Leo Laporte [02:24:46]:
What about watches?
Benito Gonzalez [02:24:47]:
When were watches made?
Jeff Jarvis [02:24:50]:
Watches were made at scale the same
Leo Laporte [02:24:51]:
way, but they didn't have to be made as precise. So you only need to make it precise is if you want to take apart from one watch and put it in the other watch. If each watch is a unique snowflake, it just has to be what it is. It has to work.
Benito Gonzalez [02:25:03]:
Right? Right.
Leo Laporte [02:25:05]:
So the ability to make exactly interchangeable parts down to a thousandth of an inch took a while to develop.
Jeff Jarvis [02:25:12]:
Which is what happened with the Linotype. I mean it was so Mark Twain went bankrupt with the Page Compositor and he never built more than two machines. And the investment that would have been taken needed to build because he built them all bespoke.
Leo Laporte [02:25:26]:
Yep.
Jeff Jarvis [02:25:26]:
If you wanted to go into a factory there would have been a huge investment in tooling up for that. Whereas the Linotype was built from the
Leo Laporte [02:25:32]:
beginning to be replicable from the stripe press. Stewart Brand just. And I'd like to get Stuart on to talk about it. The maintenance of everything. It's just a great read but it's a deep. It's deep philosophy as well. He talks about Zen and the art of motorcycle repair for instance, which is all about maintaining a motorcycle so you could ride it across the country. So that's my.
Jeff Jarvis [02:25:58]:
I always felt inadequate with the whole Earth catalog. I thought there should be something in here that I'm going to be interested in. But it was things that I just didn't do like mulch and stuff.
Leo Laporte [02:26:11]:
Well, get going. I know Paris pick of the week. You have such good picks.
Paris Martineau [02:26:18]:
We'll do the Sports Illustrated one which is, you may recall that was it last year. Sometime recently, I guess in 2023 Futurism published this great investigation revealing that Sports Illustrated had published just a really insane amount of product review articles that were bylined by completely made up AI like writers with AI generated.
Jeff Jarvis [02:26:45]:
Sports Illustrated is now owned by a cruddy marketing company.
Paris Martineau [02:26:48]:
Yeah, it was then owned by a credit marketing company called the Arena Group that then said that the fake AI article has been published by a third party content provider called Advon Commerce. And this resulted in basically all of the AI stuff getting taken down down. Arena Group executives getting fired, including the company's then CEO. They lost control of it entirely. And Sports Illustrated brand ended up in the portfolio of this thing called Minute Media. Now they seem to be having another AI issue. An editor at Sportico, Dan Bernstein, kind of posted this week on Twitter that seemingly Sports Illustrated had ripped off an entire story that they had done on Calshi parlays. They basically did like an original analysis of parlay bets.
Paris Martineau [02:27:43]:
And Sports Illustrated basically published a copy paste of that article without any of the like attribution. And it's slightly rewritten in a way that was pretty obviously AI. The Futurism reports the Sports Illustrated piece only mentioned Sportico when repeating a quote given to Sportico for a related article published back in 2025, a quote that Sportico tellingly had called back to in the more recent piece. So this Sportico editor kind of points all this out. They're like, what's going on? Then Sports Illustrated not only deleted the article in question, which was attributed to a writer named Parker Loverich, but deleted everything related to Parker Love Rich on their website as well as everything is off LinkedIn and Twitter with their name. And Sports Illustrated said the deleted content's been produced by an independent publisher, but that Parker Loverich is a real reporter. And we. Once we became aware of a violation of our guidelines, we immediately took steps to address this violation, including cutting ties.
Paris Martineau [02:28:44]:
The publisher. There's been no. I just thought this was such a weird and interesting look into just the flagrant uses of AI that the average person might go unseen.
Leo Laporte [02:28:57]:
Do you think people do it thinking, well, there's no way we'll get caught.
Paris Martineau [02:29:02]:
Yeah, I do.
Jeff Jarvis [02:29:03]:
At a place like that. Yeah. Now that's just a. It's just a mill.
Leo Laporte [02:29:05]:
Like they don't.
Paris Martineau [02:29:06]:
I think they probably just have to. Yeah, they're like, we have to publish like 20 things today.
Leo Laporte [02:29:11]:
Right.
Paris Martineau [02:29:11]:
We're not going to pay freelancers, so let's just plug every story we've got, we think it's interesting into chat GPT or Claude or whatever and have it rewrite it.
Leo Laporte [02:29:21]:
Right?
Jeff Jarvis [02:29:21]:
Yeah. I mean, you know, if a guy put out a book that had. That was kind of making up quotes and didn't think somebody was going to see it in a book that's all
Paris Martineau [02:29:28]:
over AI and truth.
Jeff Jarvis [02:29:30]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Paris Martineau [02:29:31]:
It's just a book about lies made by AI had lies made.
Leo Laporte [02:29:35]:
There is a certain kind of personality that thinks it can get away with that stuff. And they, and they, and they often don't. I mean, I always wonder, you know, there's always the story of the. I always worry because I'm A small business of the accountant who comes in and embezzles millions of dollars from a small business thinking that, oh, we'll never get caught. But of course they're gonna get. Of course. Eventually you're gonna.
Jeff Jarvis [02:29:57]:
Eventually. It's time to balance the bills. Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:30:02]:
Jeff, pick of the week.
Jeff Jarvis [02:30:04]:
All right. I want to mention. Well, no, we're gonna. I'm gonna mention first a legitimate one, which is Axios on media valuations. Digital media valuations. BuzzFeed now sold, lost 86% of its value.
Leo Laporte [02:30:19]:
It was at its peak worth 1.7 billion. It sold for 231 million after nine years.
Jeff Jarvis [02:30:24]:
See that? Lost even more from 1.75 billion down to 100 million.
Leo Laporte [02:30:28]:
Wow.
Jeff Jarvis [02:30:29]:
Vice down 93% and so on. So that's the legitimate one, just kind of digital media. Bye. Bye. Now, I was going to give you a choice here between something good and something bad, but because you already use the Pope, I have no choice.
Leo Laporte [02:30:42]:
I. You have no choice? I have no choice on this.
Jeff Jarvis [02:30:45]:
To. To bring you to sperm racing.
Leo Laporte [02:30:48]:
Wait a minute.
Jeff Jarvis [02:30:50]:
The lowest of the low in Silicon Valley has now occurred.
Leo Laporte [02:30:54]:
A San Francisco biotech startup races sex cells on tiny tracks.
Paris Martineau [02:31:00]:
Oh, boy.
Jeff Jarvis [02:31:01]:
Chips. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. This is awful. The whole story is obnoxious and terrible. It's, it's, you know, give young men money and what are they going to do but jerk off. But the worst part of it to me is that the New York Times writer decided to enter his little boys.
Leo Laporte [02:31:18]:
So wait a minute. Does this company offer this as a service? Like, can you benchmark my.
Paris Martineau [02:31:29]:
Complete the sentence?
Leo Laporte [02:31:31]:
I don't know how to finish it.
Jeff Jarvis [02:31:35]:
This is all part of the, you know, macho male crap that's going on now. Testosterone and all that. And so now they're also saying, you know, one person says that 60. He. His sperm, like, 60 is dead. For me, everything's dead, just rotten inside. So they're trying to look up, you know, are there. They value their masculinity as their testosterone and sperm.
Jeff Jarvis [02:32:02]:
It's just. It's just obnoxious and stupid. And the New York Times slide is
Leo Laporte [02:32:06]:
valued at $50 million. It is a startup devoted to racing. This is from the New York Times. So it's okay to say this. Racing human sperm through an artificial reproductive system. They've hosted matches. They have races.
Benito Gonzalez [02:32:22]:
Okay, wait, wait, wait. Are these time trials or are they on the same track? I'm just curious about how technically this works.
Leo Laporte [02:32:29]:
Question about methodology. Go through.
Jeff Jarvis [02:32:32]:
Forced to go through little tiny tracks.
Leo Laporte [02:32:36]:
Must be time.
Benito Gonzalez [02:32:36]:
So It's a time trial. They don't put them all on the same track and say go.
Jeff Jarvis [02:32:39]:
And then you would know who's or whose.
Leo Laporte [02:32:42]:
Be fun to watch if they did it that way.
Jeff Jarvis [02:32:46]:
Click here to apply.
Benito Gonzalez [02:32:48]:
I mean this is going to tie into like into those gambling sites, right? Polymarket, like who sperms the fastest
Jeff Jarvis [02:32:56]:
in.
Leo Laporte [02:32:56]:
In a sense, as the New York Times sperm racing aims to cut the through the noise by reducing male vitality down to its absolute essence. Now, since I had a vasectomy more than 30 years ago, I think I am. I can't compete. No, I got no more.
Jeff Jarvis [02:33:11]:
And I had my prostate surgery, so I'm out too.
Leo Laporte [02:33:15]:
So, Paris, it's up to you to win for the team.
Paris Martineau [02:33:18]:
I'll follow my sword. I'll find a way to make it work.
Leo Laporte [02:33:24]:
Spend much of their time to turning the races into video content.
Jeff Jarvis [02:33:30]:
Don't you want to watch that somebody?
Leo Laporte [02:33:32]:
And then. Oh, you want to know how they make money? They sell things like andros, a line of plastic free boxer briefs and a pineapple flavored gummy called Sperm worms. Tagline, boost your boys. I could see a certain. This is a certain demographic of.
Jeff Jarvis [02:33:52]:
Oh, yeah, but it is alternative.
Leo Laporte [02:33:57]:
Wow. So there's a World cup in front of a live audience drawing contestants from 128 countries. A month long single elimination tournament over 100 matches. They're going to use AI to translate the commentary into any language. There's just something about this. It's fascinating.
Jeff Jarvis [02:34:25]:
Fascinating as journalism. I found it pretty disgusting.
Paris Martineau [02:34:32]:
Yeah, it's pretty icky.
Jeff Jarvis [02:34:34]:
Yeah.
Benito Gonzalez [02:34:37]:
And you're not even saying like this proves absolutely nothing. Like, who cares if there's this faster? Like what?
Leo Laporte [02:34:43]:
What does that even mean, fastest? Well, I mean, I guess the first to get there wins, but that's not how it works.
Benito Gonzalez [02:34:49]:
That's not how it works.
Leo Laporte [02:34:50]:
It isn't how it works.
Paris Martineau [02:34:52]:
That isn't how any of this work. Actually.
Leo Laporte [02:34:55]:
It isn't about the speed of the boys. It's about how much heart they have. Actually, there's recent evidence that the OVA actually does some selection.
Benito Gonzalez [02:35:08]:
Exactly. It's not the first one that meets the egg.
Leo Laporte [02:35:11]:
It isn't the first.
Benito Gonzalez [02:35:12]:
Not how it works.
Leo Laporte [02:35:13]:
And there's some interesting evidence about how the OVO makes its choice. It's actually very interesting because women are
Jeff Jarvis [02:35:19]:
and should be in charge.
Leo Laporte [02:35:21]:
Well, they are.
Jeff Jarvis [02:35:22]:
Look at Paris.
Leo Laporte [02:35:23]:
Those of us have been married for any length of time know that. Okay, so you asked Benito, so I'm gonna tell you. First, the team purifies the semen samples In a centrifuge. Then they pipette the sperm into two parallel 3800 micron microfluidic racetracks edged into silicone chips. The chips are fabricated from molds in an ad hoc clean room set up next to the first floor bathroom. Okay, well, that's a little detail I didn't realize.
Jeff Jarvis [02:35:53]:
Not a clean room.
Leo Laporte [02:35:54]:
The environment within the racetracks is designed to emulate the human reproductive system. In a process known as rheotaxis, the sperm move against a steady flow of warm fluid that mimics cervical mucus. I'm sorry, I didn't think I'd be saying that today. Like salmon swimming upstream, they cling to the walls of the track to avoid the central current and maintain their sense of direction. On these tracks, however. Oh, no, it's hard. The sperm encounters unnatural obstacles, Tight sections, sharp corners and pillars that separate the best from the wrist. Then, so it turns out the videos aren't that good.
Leo Laporte [02:36:36]:
So they put it through 3D generation software, which transforms it into the footage the audience sees on screen. In the final cut, two or more competitors sperm are shown in different colors jostling for position on the same track. They make it cool to watch. Like F1, said one of the principals,
Paris Martineau [02:36:59]:
F something.
Leo Laporte [02:37:01]:
I hope they have teams names and stuff like that. Right.
Paris Martineau [02:37:05]:
Oh, the best show title of all time was just put in there.
Leo Laporte [02:37:14]:
Yeah, yeah, I probably shouldn't use that as a show title. I don't think anybody would download the show. Pretty funny though. I agree. As the channels opened and the sperm flooded the chamber, Cataldi resumed his role as an announcer. He took an early lead with a single sperm R1 darting ahead. I'm cooking him, he said. But soon my L1 and L2 racers were pulling up alongside his.
Leo Laporte [02:37:41]:
My guy is completely lost. He shouted at the scream. As my first sperm crossed the finish line, his was still stuck at the halfway mark. The whole thing lasted just 16 seconds. It was a blowout. This is the New York times reporter.
Jeff Jarvis [02:37:54]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:37:55]:
I got sperm mogged. He said, oh, man,
Jeff Jarvis [02:38:05]:
Paris, you're going to become a lesbian. Who wants to get near a man? Who wants to get anywhere near a man?
Leo Laporte [02:38:12]:
This is such a guy thing. This is. Oh, this is exactly what you think, guys.
Jeff Jarvis [02:38:18]:
17 year old guy, famous, too much money, they say.
Paris Martineau [02:38:21]:
Actually 18 is actually the entire history of the male experiment has been leading up to a guy saying the word sperm mogged on a podcast.
Leo Laporte [02:38:34]:
This is, this is where we've been heading all along. It's intelligent machines after dark. A saucier podcast, smart talk, bold ideas, late nights, bright minds. I like it. It's a good idea.
Jeff Jarvis [02:38:53]:
And by the way, would you be proud to be an investor? Joe Lonsdale, as invested in this?
Leo Laporte [02:39:01]:
Well, you know, you can never go wrong underestimating the gullibility of the American people.
Jeff Jarvis [02:39:08]:
That's true.
Leo Laporte [02:39:09]:
The words of P.T. barnum, never give a sucker an even break.
Jeff Jarvis [02:39:14]:
Don't say sucker.
Leo Laporte [02:39:15]:
Ladies and gentlemen, on that sordid note, we must wrap the show with apologies to Paris Martineau and anybody listening today. Sorry Paris. Paris Martineau is at Consumer Reports. This is one not to play for your co workers.
Paris Martineau [02:39:32]:
Correct.
Leo Laporte [02:39:34]:
Our website, Paris, nyc. It has cooled off in New York City. I think you should go out and get a shawarma.
Jeff Jarvis [02:39:40]:
It's now 70. You're right, the storm went through.
Paris Martineau [02:39:43]:
We have lost 20 degrees during the recording of this. 21 degrees during the recording.
Leo Laporte [02:39:49]:
That's how it's supposed to be. Love that. Love that. Thank you, Paris. No Gizmo. No Gizmo appearance today.
Paris Martineau [02:39:59]:
Sorry to say, Gizmo is now officially six though.
Leo Laporte [02:40:02]:
Happy birthday, Gizmo.
Jeff Jarvis [02:40:04]:
Giz.
Leo Laporte [02:40:05]:
That means Gizmo's middle aged.
Paris Martineau [02:40:07]:
Don't tell her that. Give her too much power. Actually, that's probably why she's been so annoying. She's having a midlife crisis.
Leo Laporte [02:40:16]:
Ours is just a teenager.
Paris Martineau [02:40:17]:
Still, what do we laugh?
Leo Laporte [02:40:21]:
Jeff Jarvis is Professor Emeritus of Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Author of a fabulous book called Hot Type the Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media, the Story of the Linotype and Desktop Publishing and Electronic Publishing. It's really a good book and unfortunately I have a galley. You'll have to wait until August to read it. Thank you both of you. Appreciate your time. Thank you to all of you listening. We do this show every Wednesday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC.
Leo Laporte [02:40:59]:
You can watch it live in the club Twit Discord if you're a member. Otherwise everybody's invited to watch on YouTube, Twitch X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik after the fact on demand versions of the show available at the website. Audio or video or and video. You could do both@twit tv im. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. Great way to share clips and of course best way to do it is subscribe in your favorite podcast client. If you are a club member, new benefit and you use your club feed which is the ad free feed that we send you when you join the club you will get chapter markers. Listening in compatible player.
Leo Laporte [02:41:39]:
We recommend, I think pocket casts.
Jeff Jarvis [02:41:42]:
So you can skip right to the sperm racing.
Leo Laporte [02:41:44]:
You could skip right to the sperm racing.
Paris Martineau [02:41:46]:
You could just play it over and over again. You'd like.
Leo Laporte [02:41:50]:
But that is, again, that is a benefit for club members. And somebody said, well, that's not fair. It's. It's not. We're not trying to make you join the club, although I wish I could. It is because people who have ad supported versions, many of our shows have direct ad insertion after the fact and different people get different ads of different lengths. So there's no way we can do chapter markers because we don't know the timing. There are no time codes in the show.
Leo Laporte [02:42:20]:
Yeah, I thought that was kind of interesting. So we could do chapter markers, but they would rapidly become inaccurate. The only way to do them accurately is in an ad free version. So that's why it is just for you club members. But it is a good benefit. Thanks everybody. Have a wonderful evening. I can't believe we gotta wait a whole week before the next intelligent gym machines.
Leo Laporte [02:42:45]:
But do be here for that. We'll see you then. Bye bye.
