Intelligent Machines 812 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
it's time for intelligent machines. Jeff jarvis is here. Paris is traveling, so mike elgin joins us. He has lots to say. Our guest this week is, uh, gary rivlin. He's written a new book, really interesting history of ai. It's called ai valley. Gary rivlin and our interview next on I am podcasts you love from people you trust this is twit this is intelligent machines, episode 812, recorded wednesday, march 26th 2025.

A choir of sentient cabbages. It's time for intelligent machines to show. We look at what's happening in the world of, well, intelligent machines, ai, robots, iot it's all around us literally. Uh, paris is in paris, I'm sorry to say paris. Martineau, from the information, is literally in paris this week, but that's okay. Mike elgin is here and he, idly enough, is in the united states. So that's week, but that's okay. Mike elgin is here and he, idly enough, is in the united states. So that's who'd have thought really unheard of. Mike, uh, of course, is a gastro nomad and his gastro nomad adventures are fantastic at gastronomadnet, his newsletter, all about ai machine societyai. Great, you're perfect for the show.

So glad to have you thank you glad to do it, of course, jeff jarvis is here, professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the craig newmark graduate school of journalism at the city university. Emeritus, you're gonna be emeritus stamp for him. Just leave that up the whole show. But he does, he is. He is now at montclair state university and suny, stony brook. Nice to have you. The author of the gutenberg parenthesis is known as the web we weave and I do. You know gary rivlin. Uh, do you want to introduce gary?

0:01:52 - Jeff Jarvis
no, you should. You should go ahead and introduce gary. I want to mention, I want to mention quickly that gary is also friends with our friend craig newmark. Ah, it's in the book.

0:02:00 - Leo Laporte
All new yorkers know one another, I believe, so that's why that would explain it. Hello, gary. Gary is a long time Silicon Valley writer for wired and the industry standard, if you want to bring back memories of the past, and he is a author of many books, including why is everybody trying to kill Bill Gates? Which?

0:02:20 - Gary Rivlin
okay, it's called the plot to get Bill Gates.

0:02:22 - Leo Laporte
Okay, all right, something like that the plot, the plot, yes, the plot, to get Bill Gates, uh and uh, his newest, which I think is fantastic, is AI Valley, came out yesterday. He'll be in the San Francisco on book tour on Thursday, menlo Park, california. April 2nd. April 3rd back in San Francisco, the 15th in beautiful downtown albany, new york. So, and oh, march 25th is, uh, was that yesterday? That was yesterday. So we missed, uh, we missed that one at barnes and noble in manhattan. Uh, great to see you, gary, and uh, thank you for joining us.

0:02:58 - Gary Rivlin
I appreciate it oh, my pleasure, looking forward to it you um, uh, you talk in the how.

0:03:07 - Leo Laporte
Actually this is in the epilogue. Randall Strauss convinced you not to write the book you were writing, but write this book instead, and I had to know what were you writing. So you abandoned.

0:03:19 - Gary Rivlin
I had written a proposal. I hadn't gotten very far with it, but I certainly wouldn't be ahead ahead of the times. I want to do a book about Mark andreessen, oh, understanding the Valley for better and for worse, through andreessen's story. And this would have been 2022 by that point, you know he had shifted uh towards the right. He hadn't sprinted all the way to the right at that point. So you know, the problem was that he was so hostile to the mainstream media I guess what he would call the legacy media that I knew I wouldn't get him to participate.

I had interviewed him before. We had a good relationship, but that was back in the 2000s and you know the idea of like relationship, but that was back in the 2000s and you know the idea of like fighting for every interview, trying to do the right around, tell the tell his story without him. His involvement, uh, and then suddenly ai. So this was the end of 2022. Right before um chat gpt came out, I just randomly got an email from reid hoff and a batch email announcing that he was gonna co-found his first uh first uh startup since uh linkedin, and I just was really intrigued. So just kind of had lucky timing I'm so glad.

0:04:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Can I just add in there, I'm so glad you made reid hoffman central to this, because I think he is one of the good guys in the off the line silicon valley. Uh, he is the connector of connector and full disclosure, as he helped um fund my engagement journalism program. But he, he's a public intellectual by his own description. He's a good guy and a nice guy and I think it's just great to see him at the center of how he operates yeah, a billionaire, you can root for yeah, yeah, yeah, amen.

0:05:03 - Leo Laporte
Well, it depends on what side of the aisle you're on, but yes, I, I think you're, you're in good company here. Yeah, he's the, he's kind of the backbone of the book and it's reed bouncing off various people in various companies. That becomes the story. It's a history, really, of ai starting I was surprised back in 1956, uh, with john mccarthy and the first ai conference, uh, and coming right up to the present, although it's got to be challenging. You wrote the book at the. I mean the epilogue, I think, is dated 2024. It's the end of the last year, publishing being the speedy enterprise that it is, has finally got the book out yesterday.

It doesn't seem out of date, which is good, but you know it's going to be out of date in six months or a year. I mean, this is a very fast-moving topic.

0:05:53 - Gary Rivlin
Yeah, I mean, clearly I was well aware of that. For instance, deep Seek had not come out by the time, or the latest iteration had not come out. But you know, I don't know. I really was trying to tell a different story. I don't think you're going to want to pick up my book to learn the details of Claude 3.7.

0:06:13 - Leo Laporte
No, that's what we're here for, that's right yeah.

0:06:16 - Gary Rivlin
And so you know, I was just trying to like tell the story how we got here, where we're at, what it means, through these emblematic characters Reid Hoffman, as we've mentioned, mustafa Suleiman, kind of one of the big names in AI.

0:06:30 - Leo Laporte
I learned his nickname in college was Moose, which I thought was very useful.

0:06:35 - Gary Rivlin
I don't think he likes it anymore oh.

0:06:37 - Leo Laporte
I doubt he does.

0:06:42 - Gary Rivlin
Gave me a funny look and like, yeah, we're not using that anymore, didn't have to throw that in there.

And then the usual suspect In fact, weirdly, the first two words of the book and I wrote the opening, I don't know a year ago, 14 months ago are Elon Musk. You know, I started off with this dinner in 2015, between Musk and Reid Hoffman, and Musk, by that point, had put money in deep mind and he saw I mean, I will give him credit he saw what was starting to happen in AI. He had this weird perspective where he's an investor and he was also its loudest critic. It's going to destroy humanity, it's going to the robots are going to take over, and meanwhile I own a piece of these very aggressive companies trying to advance this stuff. But so it starts off with a dinner where must basically convince Hoffman, who at Stanford more or less studied artificial intelligence like hey, it's time this is starting to happen and so that kind of launches the rest of the story, with Hoffman getting involved as he would as a funder and then ultimately starting his own company.

0:07:49 - Leo Laporte
One of the things that interests me and so it really is a history of of ai, but one of the things that really interested me is how many of these people were not really coders. Some, many of them, weren't even computer scientists. Often they were philosophy majors and the like. Uh, obviously, they could hire coders, but it seems like AI has been driven not so much by people who deeply understand computing but by people who have kind of a dream. You even mentioned the impact of science fiction. I think Reid Hoffman talked about that in all of this.

0:08:21 - Gary Rivlin
That was one of the big surprises to me. I guess I assume, like you assume, there was computer scientists, right, uh, but you know it's well. Mathematicians, right, these things are just enormous mathematical models, but beyond that, a wide range. I mean uh uh, philosophers you mentioned, but physicists, a lot of physicists, a lot of physicists.

0:08:43 - Leo Laporte
In fact, the guy we talked to last week is a theoretical physicist. Um yeah, yeah, anthony anthony uh, I forgot his name, jeff. Jeff, won't let me forget a query you actually mentioned early on future of life institute is in the book as well.

0:08:59 - Gary Rivlin
Yeah, yeah yeah, cognitive psych. As a psychologist you know it surprised me, but then of course it makes sense. I mean, artificial intelligence is programming, it's computers, but it's far more than that. It's like understanding the brain. I mean the big breakthrough, as I'm sure you know most of your listeners know was going from hard coding rules to trying to create these neural networks that mimic the brain, so those who that mimic the brain, so those who are studying brain, the brain. You know it made sense. But again, I was like you, I just figured it was computer scientists. What I find most interesting about the history was the absurd optimism of people like John McCarthy, marvin Minsky. You know the early pioneers. You know AI was just around the corner for 70 years. You know you'd read what they wrote in the 50s. You'd read what they write in the 60s or 70s and they were always just a few years away and of course they were more like 50 years away from where you know where they thought they were.

0:10:00 - Leo Laporte
You. Yeah, I mean that one of the things I like about the book is really getting to kind of almost meet these personalities. I didn't know. For instance, I had long thought highly of Marvin Minsky, but I didn't realize he really, you know, in some respects computer scientists in general steered AI wrong for a long time. At least two or three of the AI winters were because Minsky had insisted, insisted. No, you've got to do symbolic, rules-based ai. You know, trying to mimic the brain is a mistake, and he really influenced the, the ai community for decades because of that.

0:10:37 - Gary Rivlin
I mean, he mocked people who were were pushing the neural networks. I mean I call it like a 50-year mistake. I mean, on the other hand, you know computers weren't powerful enough, you know, back in the 90s, 2000s, to power these neural networks. I mean you know we had to have several things happen beyond the realization that neural networks was the way. There wasn't enough digital data, you know, to train these models, so you know it was the wrong turn that lasted around 50 data, you know to train these models, so you know it's it was the wrong turn that lasted around 50 years. But on the other hand, I think if there wasn't that wrong term, there still would have been a long, long delay before we got anything remotely. Uh, like we would get in the second half we couldn't have had the internet.

0:11:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Without we couldn't have had ai or or generative ai, uh, without the internet, without the access to the complete compilation of human speech.

0:11:30 - Gary Rivlin
Yeah, the digitalization of everything Right.

0:11:33 - Leo Laporte
You talk about Frank Rosenblatt, who was kind of widely considered the father of these neural networks and his first machine, the perceptron. This is in the 60s right, and I think Rosenblatt ended up being kind of cast aside because of Minsky saying, no, there's nothing there, these neural networks, they aren't going anywhere. It's kind of a sad story really.

0:11:58 - Gary Rivlin
Yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of a not so uncommon story. The lonely pioneer in the wilderness who's the true believer? And others are mocking them, they're not believing them, you know. But Rosenblatt himself, you know, it's funny. We all came of age, all of us, on this call, you know, around writing about tech, you know, more or less the same time, and you know, I kind of thought concepts like vaporware were relatively new, this idea that you, you know, sell the concept before you've built, or you sell the product before you figured out the product. But that was Rosenblatt. I mean, he just was just piling it up, just making claims that were not true, and so you know, I think he got himself in trouble by over promising, as many others minsky included, uh, would do around ai 1958, new york times.

0:12:59 - Leo Laporte
New navy device learns by doing. Uh the new y Yorker. It strikes us as the first serious rival to the human brain ever devised. I'm quoting from uh the, the new book which is a must read Gary rivlin's AI Valley uh, there it is, hold I told him every time I say that, hold up the book out today, out today.

So at what point did people start to suddenly realize, no, symbolic, by the way, we had them, uh, stephen wolfram on not so long ago and he said no, no, uh, he's still in that mindset, but neural networks can't do it all. We need symbolic ai. It's going to be some combination of the two, of course. His wolfram alpha is essentially symbolic, uh, ai.

0:13:43 - Gary Rivlin
At what point did people start to say, no, you know what this neural network has promise well, I mean, there were more lonely pioneers, famously jeff hinton, a few others who are pushing this for you know he's the father of modern neural networks, isn't he, jeffrey?

yeah, I, I would, I would say the same thing. Know, they're the three godfathers, but to me, you know, hinton is first among the equals there. But you know, it was like in the 2010s, the first half of 2010s, that's when it really started to pivot. It was the famous ImageNet contest. Fei-fei Wu from Stanford had this contest. Feifei Wu from Stanford had this contest. And that's when, famously, jeff Hinton, a couple of his graduate students, you know, entered the contest with a neural network, ilya Sutskiver, among others.

Yes, that's right, yeah, and they, and you know, they, they, they bested all the rule-based models and that really got people's attention. The idea that, rather than you know putting down the code, this is a cat showing a million pictures, kind of thing. This was like set it loose, let it read and it could more accurately identify animals than any of the rule-based systems. That really got people's attention. But you know, I mean, this is science, it does move slowly systems. So that really got people's attention. But you know, I mean this is science, it does move slowly. So it was 2013, 2014, 2016. And you know, I feel by then that neural networks became, you know, the main focus for most people. Then the famous transformer paper, the TNGP, chat, gpt, came out. What was that? 2016, 2017?.

0:15:24 - Leo Laporte
I don't remember yeah 2017?. I don't remember yeah 2017.

0:15:27 - Gary Rivlin
Yeah, and that really showed the potential for these chat bots. You know, I mean something I did not know until I started doing this research. I mean, artificial intelligence has been around for a long, long time. We've been using it, we just didn't know it. You know it's like in the 2000s Google was using it. We just didn't know it. You know it's like in the 2000s. You know Google was using it to figure out how to price their ads. Google Translate's been around since 2015. That's that's AI, but generative AI. This idea that you can talk to a chat bot, that you could ask it through a prompt to make a drawing, to make a video, that really, that you could ask it through a prompt to make a drawing, to make a video, that really changed things. So to me, the Transformer paper coming out was the beginning of the revolution that we're now all seeing, the general public is now seeing.

0:16:17 - Mike Elgan
I have a question about the Transformer paper. Before that, I want a little defense of Wolfram Alpha, stephen Wolfram. He says that neural networks can't do it all and the reason he knows that is because the best chatbots. You ask them certain questions and they're like, oh, we better ask Wolfram Alpha, and then they kick over to and Wolfram Alpha figures it out and sends it back. But anyway, the transformer architecture. I've always been fascinated by that pivotal moment in 2022 when OpenAI opened this thing up. Do you feel like Google or some of the other companies felt blindsided? I mean, all these companies have been working on these things and felt like it wasn't ready for the public, it wasn't ready for primetime, it might be a little dangerous all that kind of stuff, and nobody was really publishing public access to their tools. Then the revolution hit when OpenAI had the boldness to actually do that, using based in large part on Google's work with the GPT concept. So do you have a sense in the industry of what the other companies were thinking when OpenAI did that?

0:17:24 - Gary Rivlin
Yeah, that was a big part of my reporting. I I blame it on tay.

0:17:27 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if you remember this oh yeah that was the microsoft bot that decided that jews started 9-11.

0:17:34 - Gary Rivlin
Yeah, yeah, exactly yeah, holocaust denying yeah, um, you know that, so microsoft puts this thing out. It was trained more or less on social media that's the problem.

0:17:45 - Leo Laporte
Of course, people gamed it immediately and said let's see if we can turn this into a nazi.

0:17:50 - Gary Rivlin
And they pulled it, and they pulled it within 24 hours, and microsoft immediately pulled it and it was like this specter hanging over all the big tech companies. They're all so google. They called it Mina. It would change names, but they had Mina in 2020. And so Mina was basically Chachi PT, but they were scared of it. There are people Mustafa Suleiman, main character in my book, and so it was Good shot.

0:18:22 - Leo Laporte
That's good you hold it up longer, though People have to really read the title there.

0:18:27 - Gary Rivlin
So you know he was a Google-.

0:18:28 - Leo Laporte
We're training Gary. The book only came out yesterday. He's got a lot of interviews coming up. We're just teaching him.

0:18:33 - Gary Rivlin
you know you got to hold the book up. I appreciate that, and so you know Suleiman and others inside of Google were so frustrated. We have this amazing thing. Mina yeah, I don't even remember Mina Suleiman and others inside of Google were so frustrated. We have this amazing thing, mina, yeah.

0:18:50 - Leo Laporte
I don't even remember Mina?

0:18:51 - Gary Rivlin
Well, because they didn't put it out there, and so you know, in fact, suleiman ended up quitting Google and co-founding with Reid Hoffman Inflection. You know, an amazing company. Well, not, rest in peace. It still exists, but you know, it had the amazing, the amazing pie, which is pi, which is my favorite, was my favorite of all the chatbots. But anyway, it's like. You know, google was scared of it, microsoft was scared of it. I would talk to people there and, just like you know, we wanted to just advance this stuff, but it had to be a startup, it had to be a company that didn't have a hundred billion dollars in, you know, revenues on on the line. So I don't think it was any coincidence that the first company that had the daring or whatever you want to call it to put this out was a startup although hold up that book again because the subtitle is fairly important yeah microsoft, google and the trillion dollar race to cash in on artificial intelligence.

0:19:44 - Leo Laporte
Because the bitter moral of this book seems to be you started out like anyone would. Oh, it's going to be the startups, it's going to be the garages, it's going to be the small guys who come up with a brilliant idea. It turned out to be so expensive. It's only the big guys who can play this game, really.

0:20:01 - Gary Rivlin
You know I started this book beginning of 2023. It was like I was going to tell it all through startups. I'm fascinated by startups. Who isn't right? Venture capital, the daring. Like you have this idea and you know this dream of being, you know, the next Google, whatever. But I discovered through my reporting, like it's Microsoft, it's Google, it's meta.

That's my big fear here that the same tech giants that have been dominating for the last 10 or 20 years are going to dominate AI because it's so, so, so expensive. And you know you have Anthropic out there with Claude, another favorite chatbot of mine, and you know I think they've raised about $20 billion so far. You know $4 billion, billion or so from amazon, maybe more by this point. Google, billions of dollars. So even if anthropic wins, you know they're in part owned by the giants and beyond that, dario amade amade, the ceo, is predicted by 2027 it's going to cost $100 billion to train one of these things. Like you know, there was $150, $160 billion thrown into AI startups from venture capitalists in 23 and 24 combined. You know, $100 billion like a large venture capital fund is $1 billion. And so I do wonder. In fact, suleiman, near the end of the book, he concludes that none of these consumer chatbots could make it on their own that they'll eventually be gobbled up, bought, acquired by a giant.

0:21:38 - Mike Elgan
This is why Apple is so hopeful, I think, with their now kind of mediocre AI play, but they know that eventually they'll be the only company that can afford it.

0:21:50 - Gary Rivlin
And there are. You know how many? A billion iPhones, I mean. You know they have the reach. I mean ditto Meta. You know Zuckerberg, who you know Meta, or back then, facebook and Google were the two companies working on neural networks before anyone else. They had a huge lead and they too, facebook too, was scared to put this out, and so they were caught flat footed. They were paying attention to the metaverse, etc. That didn't help. They went the open source way. That didn't help. They went the open source way. But you know, he made a claim in 2024 that within six months will be the most popular chat bot on the planet and in a way he's right, because billions of people use his various platforms and it's available. I would argue like it's available, but only a fraction use it, as opposed to the 300 or whatever million people who actually go to ChatTP to use their model. But you could be late. I wouldn't count out Amazon, I would not count out Apple, just because they have the reach and they have the funds.

0:23:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Gary, I'm curious about a lot of things. Well, let me ask you this this sense of the need for scale. If you go to the Stochastic Parrots paper, they argued that going for huge models was a folly. Deep Seek, we think might say that that could be the case, that they could be smaller. Is it a case? When I worked for Time Inc, they thought, well, if it costs the most in the world, it has to be the best because we're spending the most money. Is there a little bit of that in the American ethos here? Is there a chance that you don't need to be that huge? Do you? Don't really need $100 billion to train a model?

0:23:38 - Gary Rivlin
Yeah, I mean that's an open question. I guess I'd play journalist on this to kind of give the arguments. I mean, first up I I thought deep seek, you know it's, it's. I thought it was really overstated. You know inflection was using smaller models.

Other uh companies out there were using smaller models. Like do we really need the the huge system to answer all of our questions? No, let's send some simpler questions to these smaller models. They use less compute, they're cheaper and all. But I think that if you could do it for one-tenth the price, then you're going to make 10 times larger models.

I think that's this thing called Jarvin's paradox. It kind of dates back to the 19th century and coal, but I think it's true today. That you know. I mean, these are engineers, they do it because they can do it. They want to make it as big as they can. But it's an open question.

I don't know, it might not be as expensive as people thought, like as Amadei said with Claude anthropic, I mean, but on the other hand I'm convinced there's going to be a lot of money. You know what I mean. Like Deep Seek was cheaper but it still was millions of dollars. Or a venture-backed outfit with millions of dollars and there's the training of these things, there's the fine tuning of these things, but, don't forget, there's the operating of these things. You know these cost a lot of money.

In fact, one of the startups I started following in 2023, they're really there before more or less everyone else on AI powered search this goes back to, I think, 2018, they first started working on that. They are holding back features because they're too expensive. They haven't done an update. They have because they know if they do it, it's going to bankrupt them. On GPU costs, on compute costs, you know they were doing all these clever marketing things, but they stopped doing that because they were getting too many users and it was costing too much money per month to operate them. And so you know, it's still really, really, really expensive. Perhaps it's not $100 billion expensive.

0:26:00 - Mike Elgan
I think there's a kind of mismatch between what some of the many of the ai leaders want out of both robotics and artificial intelligence, uh, and what the public really needs or wants, uh going forward, because essentially a lot of this compute power is built around making the chatbot be this very human-like uh voice that that can really understand things in a certain way and basically just kind of making a person. In robotics you see humanoid robots with faces, heads, arms, fingers, all that stuff, which. Why are they doing that? I know their justification. I don't buy it, but basically I feel like it's not that expensive if you're not trying to create a person, if you're actually trying to make a tool and if they focused on the things that really matter.

For example, right now, the problem with chatbots is that the output is just very boring and generic. The hallucinations are as well. No problem. They're being gamed by China and all kinds of other nefarious actors, deliberately poisoning or polluting the data. And then there are companies that are doing what I think is the work that really needs to be done, like Contextual AI, which has something called a grounded language model, and this is basically designing a chatbot that's optimized for accuracy, not for being a Scarlett Johansson and also other companies are working on customization, so they're building tools that are designed for you as an enterprise, to populate it with your own data so it's less likely to hallucinate and can be more relevant to you. Those are the directions I'd love to see them pour resources in, and I don't think those cost $100 billion.

0:27:36 - Gary Rivlin
I mean it's very interesting what you're saying. I think you're making a point, but I don't know, Maybe it's me. It's kind of my favorite thing about the pi, the mathematical equation, my is my favorite for the very reasons that you're poo-pooing and saying people don't want. I love that I could just talk to it. I mean it's voice so you could literally talk to it and you know it gets nuance, it gets jokes, it's understand subtlety it's, it's kind, it's. I think that's what people like about Claude, that it has a little bit of a personality and it's talking to you. So I don't know, I'm not so sure if that's not what people want.

0:28:15 - Mike Elgan
I have you tried sesame? I have not. Sesame is like pie, but even more so.

0:28:22 - Leo Laporte
That's the one where you talk to the man or the woman and they're very annoying and they yeah, I don't like that well and pie's annoying in my opinion, gary in the book talks about eliza and its successors, and this sesame is just the most recent, really amazing version of eliza. If you ask me, it's it's a chat bot, garrett. We're talking to gary rivlin. He's the author of a new book called ai valley. There it is just came out.

0:28:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Steve Trang, your, your, your move, your your finger over yeah there we go.

0:28:54 - Leo Laporte
Actually, there's a great tidbit in the book you were talking about stochastic Paris, jeff. When Google wanted to buy DeepMind, one of the problems they had Haseebis and Suleiman and Shane Legge, their third founder, didn't really want to sell, and Suleiman especially was very global in his thinking, very conscious, and one of the conditions besides the big check was that Google established an independence ethics and safety board to monitor the development of agi. That's where timnit gebru and martha mitchell were working. I don't think google ever now, gary, you can confirm or deny this, maybe in your own research really wanted to do this. They just it was a condition of buying deep mind, which they really wanted. They were right, and as soon as they could get rid of gabru and mitchell and the ethics board, they did, uh do. And do any of these big companies worry about safeties, uh, alignment, uh, agi and the future? Are they even? Or is that just a little speed bump that you know they have to do to make everybody comfortable with what's happening?

0:30:09 - Gary Rivlin
yeah. So I mean you're making some good points, first off that you know that, uh, safety board yeah, it meant once before they disbanded it. That was very impressive. They had reid hoffman or lon musk, they had all these big names. Schmidt was on it. Um, you know the uh page at brent, but you know it's um it. They showed how important it was by the fact that they, you know, dumped it um.

0:30:34 - Leo Laporte
I've even talked to people who were at google at the time who say, oh, timnit geber was such a pain in the ass they did.

0:30:40 - Gary Rivlin
They didn't like those guys that was your job, though well, no, but I think, jeff, no, just making the point. Like you know, they wanted to appear like safety, uh was, was important, but once someone did what they were supposed to do, that didn't want, just like you know like, oh shoot, you're getting our, you're getting our way.

Uh, here, you know, I mean but I think you overstated a little bit, leo, it's not that they don't care To me, they care, but they care a lot more about profits. They care about the trust issue, but they care a lot more about beating that other company over here. That's, you know, to drill down further what I said earlier, that my big fear is that big tech is going to dominate. Earlier, that my big fear is that big tech is going to dominate. It's that all of that's going to go by the wayside because it becomes all about beating the competition or I guess you could throw him. It comes down to we have to be china. You know, I mean the china card. You throw down the china card and you know the trump administration's taken off. You know more or less all of the restrictions on ai. You know there's kind of a we have to beat china, yeah, yeah because we have to beat china.

Yeah, it's kind of the magic words.

0:31:50 - Jeff Jarvis
So so gary on the safety, in my view, has been um polluted as a word because there's two different, very different definitions of it. One is the I'll use gebru again the sarcastic parents view of environment and bias and labor and such, and the other is the doomsters. It's the 10 to the 54th future human beings in the universe, and so when people talk about safety, we need a definition as to which they're going for. I'm not a believer that AGI is around the corner or is even a thing, and thus the doomster argument kind of falls apart in my view. I'm curious where you come out with the whole test, real doomster, that end of safety versus the uh, the present tense concerns about environmental impact and so on on safety yeah, you know, if I had one, wish I, I wish we would talk about the real fear.

0:32:41 - Gary Rivlin
So the hoffman uses a phrase line of sight. There's the stuff that's real that we can see now like, yeah, I guess it's possible about 300 years or whatever, that laser-eyed robots are going to be a threat to us. But you know, hoffman has a nice construct. There's the doomers, of course, and he calls the zoomers, which are the accelerationist. Marc Andreessen I mentioned right before those who say there should be full speed ahead, no safety, no anything. We just have to bring this to humanity to help solve problems because AI will cure everything.

I put myself in the category that Hoffman calls the bloomers. I think there's amazing potential for AI around science, around medicine, around education, around a whole host of things. But there are also very real concerns AI weapons in warfare, ai in surveillance. You know, I'm scared. Am I allowed to say shitless? I guess I just did that. It's about autonomous AI. I mean, people have to understand these things are amazing, but they have limits, and the idea that there wouldn't be a human in the loop for anything that really mattered, that's really scary to me, and so I, I, I mean, do you guys kind of are you more or less on that? That it's this, you know autonomous ai uh, that we're gonna believe it's more powerful and better and capable. I mean, you hear it with musk. You know we want ai like. I really don't want it making employment decisions. It's a co-pilot, it can help you. I use it in my work as a research assistant. I let it edit, give me suggestions for editing, but I don't let it write it. It's my companion.

0:34:37 - Mike Elgan
But that's how it is now. I think the fears and I'm not a doomer or a zoomer necessarily more of a perfumer. I make it all sound good and smell good, but, but, um, but the problem is like a genetic ai is is based on objectives.

So you basically uh say, well, here you go, here are your objectives, go do the thing and it's working 24, 7 and and you know you can't really trust people to put the guardrails around something like that. And again, I don't think, I don't think it's going to be the laser eyed robots, but I do think that there's going to be some problematic things. I mean, we see, we see that today's chatbots cheating, lying, hiring people to get past you know captures and things like that, and so I think that you can see risks and you can see it being used by North Korea.

0:35:27 - Leo Laporte
That was again one of the DeepMind's demands of Google before they were sold to Google is that they not be used for military applications or surveillance or surveillance, and Google dropped both of those.

0:35:42 - Gary Rivlin
Exactly, google dropped both of those in 2025. Exactly, it started in 2025.

0:35:45 - Mike Elgan
Exactly 2025, yeah and eric schmidt, himself a former ceo of google, now has a company that makes 400 drones that are fully ai autonomous, ai drones that drop bombs. So yeah, I don't think you have to go.

0:35:57 - Leo Laporte
So, to answer your question, gary, we are not in agreement on the spectrum. I'd say paris is the most uh, skeptical then, uh, then definitely. Jeff is very skeptical about the notion of a super intelligence. I am on, I would classify myself as an accelerationist. I um, I have, I see no reason to hobble this development. This may be the most important technological development humans make, and I acknowledge the danger. I mean, the danger exists. Now. Autonomous weapons should scare the pants off of people, especially if they're making kill decisions, and there is no doubt that is what is going on. That was what Palantir's doing, that's what Schmidt's new, uh, it's what, even what Google is doing. So and Microsoft? So I think that there is definitely an existential threat to ai, even as it stands, and I can think it's not so hard to imagine something even scarier. So I don't, I'm not. I think it's reasonable to consider, yeah, what's on the line of sight, but that doesn't mean you can't also think about, well, what are the long-term?

0:37:03 - Jeff Jarvis
even as an accelerationist, which I think makes you more of a bloomer, leo.

0:37:06 - Leo Laporte
Maybe I'm a. I'd like to be a perfumer. You're a blooming bloomer.

0:37:09 - Jeff Jarvis
If I may. But, Gary, let me ask you an unfair question as we get into the problems and things that go wrong. Whom do you trust and whom do you not trust among the AI moguls and companies? That's a great question.

0:37:21 - Gary Rivlin
Yeah, that is a very hard question. I mean, the simple answer would be startups, but I think Sam Altman is as much a creature of the valley as the heads of Meta and Google, etc.

0:37:38 - Leo Laporte
Well, in the early days when Musk founded OpenAI, you might have said oh yeah, yeah, elon's got the right idea. But clearly, uh, grok is. You know, version three of grok is let's build the biggest, fastest thing we can and damn the torpedoes full speed ahead right, right, but you know, amode, I think, is the most responsible.

0:37:59 - Gary Rivlin
You know, it seems to me that is still keeping, you know, trust and safety at the center, but I make the argument as a strategic thing. You need to pay attention to trust and safety. Go back to the 19th century and look at railroads. People were dying on the railroads. It was just the wild, wild west. There weren't crossings and all the kind of stuff that we have now Literally. There weren't crossings and all the kind of stuff that we have now Literally, and the government put in place standards and people could trust it and the railroad took off because it was safe.

It wasn't like you're risking your life to ride this thing. And I still I think the same thing around AI. If you at least the consumer side of AI, if you want people to use this and pay for the product, they need to trust it, and I think they're really being short-sighted. The more aggressive accelerationists no gas, I mean all gas, full speed ahead, because right now, polling is showing that the majority of Americans are fearful of AI and if you get too far ahead, we know we're going to have social media.

0:39:07 - Mike Elgan
Part two where people are.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, sorry about that.

One of the reasons they're fearful, though, is because people get a very skewed view when they hear about AI. They're hearing about chat, gbt and the chatbots, and I don't really think, in the longer term, the chatbots are going to be the most impactful thing. I mean, yes, we'll have them in our smart glasses, we'll be talking to it all day, they'll be conversational like pie and so on, and they'll be very, very smart and even agentic. But if people did what I think we do, or at least that I do, you know, I'm looking, I'm doing broad searches about AI research, and most of it is, you know, early cancer detection and curing this and solving problems and the only thing that's going to help us in hospital super bugs and all these things that AI is doing, and I think that if the public and this is the media's fault, no doubt, but if the public really understood the full breadth of what AI is bringing to the table yeah, there's going to be some problems, but it's going to solve a lot of problems.

0:40:07 - Gary Rivlin
I think the media has done a very mediocre job on this. Hoffman joked that they might have gotten one week of what you're talking about the optimism and the potential before it's going to destroy education because kids are going to use it to widespread use, to cheat and all of the scary scenarios. And it seemed far more on the negative than the positive, when there are extraordinary things that AI could do, like, again, this idea of a copilot. Do I want an AI reading mammograms? No, I want a doctor who's smart enough to embrace this technology and use it as a check. And you know, I think the number I saw, like doctors can 92, 93% detect suspicious something suspicious in a mammogram, whereas AI is up at 98%. So, use it as a check, and you know. So that kind of stuff.

I mean I happen to choose a story that the New York Times had, you know about a week ago, but those are few and far between those kind of stories and I do think the public is as you say, mike. I agree that fear is based largely in the media coverage. You know we could also throw Hollywood in there. It doesn't make a very good movie, if you know, in the Terminator they're nice companions and they're useful and they, you know, help us solve some of our problems. It's a much more dramatic great movie if they take over and then you have to, kind of a human being has to save the world from the robots uh, subjugating all of us we're talking to gary rivlin.

0:41:48 - Leo Laporte
The new book ai valley just came out yesterday. Gary's gonna go on a tour. He'll be speaking in the bay area in the next few weeks and then uh to albany, you're, you live in new york, so imagine more appearances in new york. Coming his website, g Gary Rivlin, uhcom, you can find out all about this book and and his others, including the plot to kill Bill Gates or get I'm sorry, I keep saying kill maybe I'm just projecting, I don't know.

0:42:16 - Mike Elgan
I don't know. I'm looking forward to the sequel. So you want to kill Bill Gates?

0:42:21 - Leo Laporte
the AI is going to have a field day with that there. There's so many things we would love to talk to you. We've already overstayed our time, I'm sorry to say, but the book is really fun to read. I stayed up late and there's a lot of, of course, in. Those of us who've lived through this stuff recognize a lot of stuff, and there's also a lot of insight, things happening that we didn't know, including the story behind the open AI, pooch um and the return of Sam Altman and uh. It's a very interesting time and this is one of the reasons we we kind of recast this show as uh, intelligent machines, because I think this is right now, the most interesting story in Tech.

0:43:01 - Gary Rivlin
We thank you for the thank you, gary, and thank you, thank you so much.

0:43:04 - Mike Elgan
I appreciate it yeah this was a lot of fun. I appreciate it, guys. Yeah, congratulations on the book.

0:43:08 - Leo Laporte
Yep yeah, okay, thanks, thanks, gary, take care, bye-bye, bye. Uh, we shall continue on in a moment. We're going to take a little break, mike elgin, filling in for paris martineau. We miss you, paris, and I'm sure paris is kicking herself, because I'm sure she would have loved to talk to Gary about the book and he had nice things to say about the information, which has become a really good place to get information about what's going on in this world. Not just AI, but their scoops are remarkable, really remarkable. Mike Elgin, thanks for filling in, we appreciate it. Jeff Jarvis is here. We'll get the AI news next as Intelligent Machines continue, but first I'd like to pause for a moment for a word from our sponsor, stash.

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Paid non-client endorsement, not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. Investment advisory services offered by Stash Investments LLC, an SEC registered investment advisor. Investing involves risk. Offer is subject to T&Cs. You know one of the things. I wasn't going to challenge Gary with this, but I really loved it that he picked Reed. You read the book. I take it.

0:45:18 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I haven't got it finished either, but I was just delighted to see that Reed was, as he put it, the spine of the book.

0:45:23 - Leo Laporte
Perfect spine, although just I was just delighted to see that Reed was, as he put it, the spine perfect book. Perfect spine although and and Gary talks about his uh, admiration of G, pascal, zachary and uh, which is he wrote one of the classic books called Showstopper, which is about the birth of Windows NT. I suspect he's also a favor of Tracy Kidder as a soul in the machine and I I'm just thinking he wanted to write a book about Reid Hoffman's inflection AI, because it comes up again and again in the book, which was what Reid Hoffman was trying to create an AI that was human friendly, friendly emotional yeah, and it's kind of gone.

0:46:04 - Jeff Jarvis
So yeah, so I asked him that happens, I asked him before we got on. Uh, I said reid deserves a biography and uh, because he really is fascinating, really does have a golden touch. You bet he said, yeah, he wasn't so much into that idea because it kind of competes with his own idea, his own books he has his own, telling his own books.

He has a book, of course, and telling his own story plural, but I think Reid is A I consider him very much a good guy in Silicon Valley and, I think, a well-motivated, decent, generous person, and he obviously made the connections for Gary too in this. Oh yeah which is what Reid does, isn't it.

0:46:42 - Leo Laporte
He's perfect. He is the connector.

0:46:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, yeah, at one's kind of a, which is what Reed does, isn't it? He's perfect, he is the connector. Yes, yeah, um, one point way back when Reed even set up a dinner for me when I was trying to understand the new journalism with him and with Mark Andreessen, and so he cuts across. You couldn't imagine two people who disagree about the world more right now in politics. But uh, reed manages to be that bridge builder.

0:46:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, uh, I thought we could take a test. Would you like to take a test? Sure.

0:47:05 - Mike Elgan
Can I cheat with ChatGPT?

0:47:08 - Leo Laporte
You're welcome to.

0:47:09 - Jeff Jarvis
We're going to see what will help you. It'll pass yeah.

0:47:12 - Leo Laporte
This is a new test, the ArcPrize. This is designed to kind of replace the Turing test and other tests of AGI and they actually let you. They say say easy for humans, hard for ai. So it focuses on skills that we're good at. I mean, we're good at a lot of stuff ai is terrible at including. Uh, they talk about symbolic interpretation, um, compositional reasoning, contextual, contextual rule applications. But they also offer you the tasks. Would you like to try a task?

I'm nervous about this. You're not going to do well, I can tell you no, I'm not.

0:47:56 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, when we had those Iowa tests in the second grade and here's the ropes and the pulleys my head blew up.

0:48:03 - Leo Laporte
I could never, do it never. What's interesting about this is and I haven't looked at this one, they change it every day, but the first one I looked at was pretty easy for a human. You could see what was going on. The idea is compare, you know, this is the input, this is the output, and how does that work? And you could see. A human could see oh, they fit these three shapes into a single four by three square right. And then you see the next one oh, they fit this they could rotate one of the shapes.

Yeah, it's very for a human, not a challenge. I don't think Apparently very hard for a machine. So I think that that's, and you know this is. This is the test you could take if you okay, leo go ahead and do it.

No, no, I'm not going to do it, I just want. First thing I had to realize is oh, you have to resize these because they don't give you, they give you an arbitrary size and you, you, you actually need to resize it to make it work, for instance, to four by three. But um, I mean, you could see how easy this would be. You just move this one over here and I don't know if I can drag it. Now you have to have to kind of see copy it from input. Oh, nope, that was a mistake.

0:49:19 - Mike Elgan
Reset anyway, you get the idea. I wonder how ai does with tetris what's?

0:49:24 - Leo Laporte
yeah? Well, see, that's what's interesting. So, incidentally, the the the thing that convinced google and, by the way, facebook and everybody else was trying to buy deep mind. The thing that convinced them that deep mind was the next big thing, and it was reed hoffman who was going around showing it to people, including elon musk. They had taught it to play breakout and and they had taught it to play you know, that's the game where you bounce the ball against this. It's a you know silly little game. They taught it to play not by giving it, you know, sample games, but by doing what they did with alpha zero, which is saying this is the rules, this is the goal.

Have added the machine within a couple of hours got better than most of the people at deep mind within three or four hours. Nobody could beat it. It was like it aced it, and so reid hoffen said, can I borrow this? And was going around showing people this demo, and that's what got google and meta so excited. That was as far as they'd gotten. They didn't have, you know, anthropic. They didn't have uh or any of the you know stuff. They had, right, including deep alpha zero. They had, uh, a breakout game anyway, and it wasn't.

0:50:32 - Mike Elgan
It wasn't the, the output, the fact that it could do this we had chess playing computers how they learned it. It was the fact that they learned on their own and figured it out, and gary talks about it in the book is that through experience.

0:50:43 - Leo Laporte
That's the difference between rules-based ai and these new uh, you know, transformer neural networks. The deep blue which beat gary kasparov, the world champion at chess, was a rules-based computer. It was in fact designed to beat that particular player and uh, he said it was kind of the, the finale of that kind of ai. Uh, and then when alpha go came along, it was it was using reinforcement learning, deep learning, transformers, and uh, and it was much better. And in fact now you know chess playing computers which use neural networks, light years away they can beat the best human go players. Anyway, I wanted to mention this test because this is people are trying to come up with something better than uh, the Turing test to measure AGI well, there's all what's interesting is what I just showed you yeah, they're, they're, yeah, they're visual.

What I just showed you has stumped almost all the ai models something as simple as that but but for what purpose?

0:51:49 - Mike Elgan
I mean, if let's say there's a model that does best on this test, what does that mean in the real world? In real life, for what it can do for people who are trying to use it as a tool well, if you're talking yeah, I agree.

0:52:02 - Leo Laporte
So that's the tool based ai, but we're talking about agi, the super intelligence, which has to be general and can do better than humans at everything, right. So that's why this is for agi, not specifically for tools, and you can see the human panel on this. It's much better than even the best. Look, look at deep seek. Oh, three mini.

0:52:25 - Jeff Jarvis
These are all look at the at the axis of the cost per task yeah, isn't that interesting because it gets very expensive, uh, to do this well ten thousand dollars to do a little puzzle yeah yeah I fear the the coming wave of agi is a marketing thing and everybody's going to claim it and it's going to be a bunch of you know, a bunch of hooey what.

0:52:49 - Mike Elgan
I think there are some really glaring problems with today's chatbots and I wish they would focus on that instead of some of these other areas. For example, chatbots are clueless idiots in some realms. For example, they, you know, they don't know, they don't understand the human context. So they in cases you know famous cases when a lawyer tried to have his defense or whatever built by chat GBT. It just made up cases. There's a, there's a pharmaceutical AI that's based on chat GBT, that's making up drugs that don't exist and and and it's supposed to be a transcription service and a sort of a general guide for doctors. And they're, of course, the famous case with msnbc or msn, I think, msn, which, uh, they had it write an obituary for a basketball player and they said he was useless instead of dad. Uh, you know just that, that kind of sensitivity, that kind of cluelessness, cluefulness that every human has, that knows. You know the difference between you know a real quote by a famous person and a made up quote.

0:53:56 - Jeff Jarvis
This is the kind of thing he would say but this is the thing, mike. Generative AI, large language models have no sense of meaning.

0:54:03 - Mike Elgan
Right, exactly.

0:54:04 - Leo Laporte
They don't know what so so so I think this effort to say that we're going to make them be right is nigh unto impossible in their current structure and you have to recognize what they can do you know, darren okey, who is an ex, I would say an acceleration is very bullish on agi in our club twit says he distinctly remembers the nascent stage of the internet when I was saying to people this is going to be big and I'd get hammered with some combination of and I remember this, why would I need it? Or I searched for such and such and I didn't find it. It's useless. Or I I searched for it and I found a result that was just wrong.

Or he says people have little imagination or ability to extrapolate. It was the same with wikipedia. So much I looked it up and it was wrong. Is it wrong now? Well, no, but it was wrong. How much of? How much of what you're saying you're naysaying is focused on what it can do today as opposed to what it might be able to do. I'm not saying you're missing the boat.

0:55:01 - Mike Elgan
I. We're not going to get there unless we work on it. That's all I'm saying. We need to be working on the things that everybody wants to the next generation. What I'm saying is yeah, let's make. Let's do what we did with the internet. Let's make it more useful. Let's make it so you can find the thing you're looking for when you're going to require.

0:55:17 - Leo Laporte
But pointing to, pointing to mistakes it makes today isn't necessarily proof that it's not going to get better.

0:55:24 - Mike Elgan
No, I think it will, and I believe in capitalism.

If there's anything we can count on as capitalism, where the market, I think, ultimately, will favor enterprises, the real business use cases will favor the ones that actually have a clue as opposed to the ones that sound like Scarlett Johansson a clue as opposed to the ones that sound like scarlett johansson.

And I think I just think that the the uh, megalomaniacal, egomaniac, narcissists who run silicon valley are caught up in this idea of building people and instead they should be working on building tools. But I I also need to point out as well, is that these, where we always try to understand this new world we're in of ai, by by having, by referencing things in the past that we presumably understand better. The difference is that I think what's so interesting about AI is that it's fundamentally different from anything that has come before, and here's how. So if you look into agentic AI, okay, from the beginning of the internet to now, all these software things are tools that people use. I'm a user and I use the software. With agentic AI, the software is the user, right, right, and we're not really creating a tool, we're creating tools for sure, thank goodness, we're also kind of like and I think Ray Kurzweil or some of your recent guests have alluded to this concept we're kind of creating a species. We're kind of creating a thing that will have its own community.

0:56:56 - Jeff Jarvis
That's also human centric, that's also life centric, biological centric, and I think that's a wrong way to go. I think it's still machine centric.

0:57:04 - Mike Elgan
It's machine centric, but we have to understand that at some point, in multiple ways, it departs from its traditional role of being a tool that we use.

0:57:13 - Leo Laporte
It becomes something else, mike's point is, and I agree with you, mike you can't interpret what's happening with a lens that's based on what has happened in the past. This is a discontinuity. Now, this is a risky thing to thing to say, oh, we got a paradigm shift, we said it before in technology and been wrong, but but I do think it's possible. I don't think it's a hundred percent that this is a. This is a discontinuity. You know, when I took the walk on the beach with the sandy shoes, one of the things the guy said that really struck me is we're creating a new species and a it'll be like communicating with an alien species I, I, I disagree with that.

0:57:53 - Jeff Jarvis
I, I've just I've just finished a part of my, my next book, uh knockwood um, on mark twain and his final uh novel, which was never finished, number 44, the mysterious stranger.

0:58:05 - Leo Laporte
And he envisioned the machine he didn't finish the mysterious stranger no, no, in fact I remember it very well, I was, maybe I read the short story version of it or well, it was the kind of all the short there was there, there there was.

0:58:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Uh. There were various versions of it there was.

It was a wonderful short story, uh, yeah, it ends with with uh, there is meaning there is no life, it's just you and your thoughts. But in the middle he has this scene where the duplicates, the mysterious stranger pulls duplicates out of people. They in turn duplicate, they print at mass and scale and he's worried about that. And we have this kind of way that we try to grok what this technology is in these ways until we realize it's just a machine. This was seen about print, it was seen about the line of type, it was seen about all kinds of things.

Mike, I want to respond to you about kind of fixing things. I think part of the issue is that it's not just as simple as taking what we have and fixing it. There's a next leap required. Taking what we have and fixing it, there's a next leap required. And this week I put in the rundown on Line 92, german Ki ei ist nur ein Werkzeug. But I got Google Translate of this really interesting interview with Richard Sutton, who was the winner of the Turing Award for his work on.

0:59:25 - Leo Laporte
This is the guy who wrote that bitter lesson piece that we've talked about before. Right Exactly. He's a Canadian based AI researcher, and his thesis in the bitter lesson was oh, we never thought about this, but just throwing more compute at it is all we really needed to do. We didn't need to invent new algorithms or new technologies. We we had transformers, we had neural networks. All we needed to do was build bigger and better and faster machines.

0:59:52 - Jeff Jarvis
But he actually kind of disagrees with himself there. He says that, asked about AGI, he says models like ChatGPT are trained once and then don't learn anything new, which is interesting. Furthermore, these models are still very poor at generalizing. That is, inferring from their training data to new, unknown data. Above all, I don't believe AGI is possible without reinforcement learning. He was an inventor of reinforcement learning, so you'd think he'd say that, but I think he's right. This aspect that AI has a goal and learns from experience, is missing from language models. That's why I don't believe language models are ultimately sufficient to achieve AGI. So I think, mike, what you're asking for is right, but it's a next leap. I don't think it's doable with the present day technology. Yeah, they can get faster and bigger and more powerful and pass more tests and all that, but they are still fundamentally limited in their structure.

1:00:45 - Mike Elgan
In the AI side but, like it's, ai is not just AI. When you're using a chatbot, you're using AI, plus all the guardrails and barriers and things that they've added to it, and so I think that that, in the short term, that's where the focus should be. Where the money should be spent is on the guardrails and the prompting of it, adding prompts to the user prompt so that when it's writing an obituary, it has a modicum of fake sensitivity about it.

1:01:17 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't think guardrails are possible in the long run. At a very basic level they are, but in the long run you cannot anticipate every use, good or bad, that someone will put to it.

1:01:27 - Mike Elgan
They already do it, they already have it and they do it badly. They do it Exactly. That's my point. Let's improve that part of it.

1:01:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't think it's, but my point is, I don't think that's doable, because I think you then have to anticipate every possible use of what is in fact a general machine.

1:01:46 - Mike Elgan
Not really. I mean, if you look, if you go in there and say you know, uh, uh, why is uh so-and-so politician such a such a ridiculous idiot? And it won't say, oh yeah, he's a ridiculous idiot because blah, blah, blah, he'll, it'll, it'll tone that down. And it's like whenever you talk about actual people who are famous people, it like backs off and is very careful about it and and all that stuff. It's. I think it's completely doable. They've done it on multiple areas we won't give you c-sam material I won't give you.

There's a million things. All of that is post. All of that is post-training. That's what I'm talking about yeah that's the part that is really lacking right now and and this is why they they you know when they hit like a, you know that when they crash and just give you this horrible uh result, that is just way off and just clueless and doesn't know some basic thing about regular life that all people know. Okay, go in and let's work on that as well.

1:02:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Because somebody is always going to find that thing that's missing, that they didn't think of. They have to think of everything that anyone could ever ask it to do, and that is an impossibility.

1:02:40 - Mike Elgan
I'm not saying make it perfect, I'm saying I'm saying make it better.

1:02:45 - Leo Laporte
That was what was wrong with rules-based right. We learned that lesson exactly. So I don't know if well, I was looking at richard sutton. There's a whole lot, hell of a lot, more than me and is in fact a turing prize winner, but I don't know if I'd agree that that these ais don't learn. I think they do learn.

1:03:01 - Mike Elgan
I don't understand what he's saying there yeah, he, they're also the better ones, like you know. I know you use perplexity, leo, that's a rag system. I think rag systems. You know. If somebody posted something on you know tech crunch, like 10 minutes ago, it'll pick that up and and and make that part of its answer.

1:03:28 - Leo Laporte
Now, that's different from the, the, the background AI, but at least know the rag system, the rag type systems are like taking in new information, like right now. Actually, darren oaken agrees okie. Okie agrees with you, jeff. He says they cannot learn. Uh, and when people talk about agi, they really mean consciousness, a key element of which is the ability to learn. Um, I guess LLMs as they stand today are kind of fixed in time.

1:03:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, they're limited, but they're a phenomenal step along the way.

1:03:52 - Leo Laporte
But RAC does enhance. That's why I use perplexity and not chat GPT, because chat GPT's knowledge stops at a particular period in time. But perplexity because it's always it's RAG based, it's retrieving new information, is always updating itself.

1:04:07 - Jeff Jarvis
And the notebook LLM is very useful. What's the distinction?

1:04:10 - Leo Laporte
between. I mean, I understand an LLM model has to be regenerated to learn, but what's? But from the point of view of the user, I think if it's doing rag, it's, it's, it's up to date well, that's not well that, but that's different the llm is just for this that's the this is the egg off the table problem, right?

1:04:29 - Jeff Jarvis
how does it learn? You could, you could, you could put in rag. You could say this is an egg and this is what it does. But it's limited to that. That's not the model.

1:04:36 - Leo Laporte
Well, this is why, by the way, companies are going out and buying a hundred thousand h100, nvidia, gpus because they're not done training and I don't think that's where they were, we would just use the llm models that existed and then uh hey, we're done.

Now we're just going to do whatever else. Magic cloudflare has created a AI labyrinth. So one of the problems is these AIs are insatiable and they go out and they scrape the web and they're always looking for more information. Cloudflare, which has become lately the protector of the Internet, has created a web of useless AI-generated nonsense.

1:05:16 - Mike Elgan
Well, it's not nonsense. Actually, all the content is AI ai generated and fact-checked and factually true, but it's unrelated to the content of the website.

1:05:26 - Leo Laporte
That the thing is ah the company says when it detects an inappropriate bot behavior. There is, you know, we're you're supposed to honor robotstxt and there is now language in robotstxt that will say no scraping on my site and and good ais will honor that, but I doubt deep seek does. There may be many others that don't so. When it detects inappropriate bot behavior, the tool lures crawlers down a path of links to ai generated decoy pages that slow down, confuse and waste the resources of the misbehaving bots. They call it ai labyrinth you know, this is.

1:06:03 - Jeff Jarvis
This is like like people saying that the artist going on and saying that they're going to put in bad information, I think we're poisoning.

1:06:09 - Leo Laporte
That's right well you know, well, you know, you know me. I'm the one who says everything should be available to an ai. Uh, we shouldn't block ai crawlers.

1:06:18 - Mike Elgan
Uh, let them have it all well, but there's a problem with that, so so I just wrote a piece on this, so I've spent the entire last couple of days in the weeds on this stuff and, um, it's, it's, it's gotten to the point where the traffic from bots in general oh, yeah, they yeah overwhelming, and so they're basically they're, they're um, they're websites, and then their website.

Some of the the most valuable to humanity websites are open scientific and academic sites that are generally categorized as open access sites. Anybody can go and read this information. They give you the legal framework for permission to use these things, and these sites tend to be smaller. They tend to be kind of old-fashioned in the sense that all the content is just on webpages and these crawlers just come and hammer them to the point where they have outages. They go offline. They're like DDoS attacks every single day. This is how bad it's getting, and some estimates say that the percentage of Internet traffic that's bots is now above 80 percent.

1:07:22 - Leo Laporte
And so it's like that is a legitimate, legitimate Right.

1:07:25 - Mike Elgan
So in addition, in addition, in addition to these companies going and just taking the content, ignoring the robots dot text files and bypassing and, by the way, all the big ones do it, it's not just deep seek, it's like all of them have been accused of doing this credibly they're also physically harming those websites. They're you know, they're not only making it more convenient to get the information without it being sourced or without the user noticing the source, they're also making and making themselves faster through this additional training. They're making the sources slower and less convenient, and so that's not fair.

1:08:04 - Jeff Jarvis
So I have a suggestion here which I mentioned with Jason. On AI Inside, I've argued that the news industry should put together an API and say to the AI industry here you want our stuff, here we're going to make it easy for you, but we're going to talk about money and placement.

1:08:21 - Leo Laporte
They should at least pay for the bandwidth if they're bringing sites down, right.

1:08:26 - Jeff Jarvis
But here's my why wouldn't, at the same count sites come together and basically back crumb and crawl and say you can have our stuff, but get it over there.

1:08:36 - Leo Laporte
That's I think there needs. There needs to be really a payment system, because somebody's pointing out, for instance, court documents uh, you know, these are always intended to be public, right? Well, no, west law. No, no, this is a huge issue well, west law shouldn't have the slightest, I agree well, yeah, you add the slightest value to it, then that shuts it down.

1:08:57 - Jeff Jarvis
We can't get to our own stuff, right? This is why aaron schwartz died with publicly funded research well, there needs to be a mechanism, so that these things can be put online.

1:09:07 - Leo Laporte
They can be available to humans, but they can also be available, uh, to ai scrapers. Yes, um in a way that's beneficial. It's gonna be a payment mechanism of some kind well, I, I don't know accelerationist, uh, if gonna be a payment mechanism of some kind.

1:09:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, uh, I don't know, accelerationist, uh, if you require a payment to read, think that which is already free. Uh, I think that that the the way. Other way to look at it here is listen, you want this stuff?

1:09:33 - Leo Laporte
okay, we will make it easy for you, but in that we want some, but it costs money to make it easy jeff, uh, yeah, yeah, that's okay and they're paying.

1:09:38 - Jeff Jarvis
But here's the example that I use today is that we get to um, uh, the um, what's the name of the, of the of the uh books, uh database that that meta used, that the atlantic wrote about?

1:09:54 - Leo Laporte
oh, yeah, yeah, the pirated books, yeah, well, so let's let's define pirated right is that?

1:09:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Is that? Let's say that because if you look at Google Books, right, libraries bought books, google Books scanned them.

1:10:06 - Leo Laporte
Google Books made that available under certain rules, right publishers hated it, but I think Google is absolutely right to do it. I think it was the right thing to do and I think it was good.

1:10:20 - Jeff Jarvis
It's damn good for researcher man, I can tell you. So let's say that, instead of having all those books that were air quotes pirated, that in fact they bought one copy of every book. Well, in that case, fine author's got 80 cents, but that's all they're going to get, because I bought the copy of the book, I didn't acquire it wrongly. Once I bought it, I used it as I chose to, and I chose to use it with showing it to my AI. So it's not like there's a bonanza for all these authors out there. If only their books were bought.

1:10:45 - Leo Laporte
No, I'm not saying that there should be a profit. I'm saying expenses should be-.

1:10:49 - Mike Elgan
Defer expenses.

1:10:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, that I agree with, yeah.

1:10:51 - Mike Elgan
I think the problem is a lack of attribution. I mean, the best case that I'm aware of is is perplexity, again, which is a rag, and it has a link at the end of the sentence. It says OK, here's a couple of places where this came from. I would like to see those attributions be made more conspicuous and so credit is given and if people want to follow that thread, they can go to the original source and check it out or be aware of what the source I actually often do that now.

1:11:17 - Leo Laporte
So, for instance, I want to make a homemade cream cheese, so I'm looking for a homemade cream cheese recipe.

1:11:24 - Jeff Jarvis
What are you?

1:11:24 - Leo Laporte
laughing at. That's such a Leo search. So recipe searches is something I do a lot, and here's perplexity. Not only does it give me these lovely images, which I guess are not linked, it does, in the recipe, give me these footnotes, and I often hover over them to see, and at the top you see where it's getting all of this from sourdough Jesha and Southern Platon. So, but what? So? What would you like to see, mike? Maybe these be bigger? Or I mean, if I hover over this I can see Well so perplexity has a thing.

1:12:04 - Mike Elgan
I don't see it on your search here, but typically it says you know, gives you a couple of the major links and then there's one button on the right that says oh, you want to see a list of all the sources? Here they are. I would like to see that surfaced so that that's what's on the right of the search. It should be a Google search next to it. They of the search.

1:12:17 - Jeff Jarvis
It should be a Google search next to it. They use paid blog roll.

1:12:20 - Leo Laporte
I agree, Because that kind of format, I mean I it's very tempting to say, oh look, I have the recipe. I don't need to go to any of these original sources, I get everything I need.

1:12:29 - Mike Elgan
But one of the things that, if you're always, I'm just very quickly Jeff.

I'm sorry, but if people are constantly going to certain types of content, they're enthusiastic about cream cheese, right, they keep searching about cream cheese and they want to know more about cream cheese. And and if that's adequately searched, uh, surfaced with the, with the logo and everything of the publication. That person will start to learn about the original sources, May want to go and subscribe. They want to, you know, read the person's book, whatever it is, and that's what we need. We don't need just the wholesale theft and just bury, bury the source material into the, into the data where it doesn't matter where.

1:13:07 - Leo Laporte
You just go there for the answer. So I think that's. This is historically the issue, though. Uh, with snippets and everything else, and uh, you know, people who are worried about Google really have a lot more to worry about now because, uh, you know, things like perplexity don't really show you much of the original source. I mean, we need to take a break, I think. Can I add? One more point real quick. Yes.

1:13:28 - Jeff Jarvis
So in the Discord I just added in a post that I put up yesterday is that if you look at the story of the signal mess in the administration, there's only one authoritative version of that story. That's Jeffrey Goldberg's in the Atlantic. This is an image that I put up from Tech Meme. It's all these versions that all had to read and learn from and rewrite the Atlantic.

1:13:52 - Mike Elgan
I only read Lawyers, guns and Money magazine. I don't know why it did that.

1:13:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Because when I clicked to capture it, I tried it five different times and they couldn't get us not to do that.

1:14:04 - Leo Laporte
Okay, it's fine. It's actually a good name for a blog.

1:14:08 - Mike Elgan
It should also be an online store.

1:14:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's a tribute to Warren Zevon, however right, it's not what you think it is. Yeah, no, I've noticed that also in tech meme, uh, and sometimes I do click those links because sometimes weirdly add to it. Yeah well, sometimes weirdly, the headline story is not the original source and so sometimes I'll dig down into the original source and also as an opinion column editorialist.

1:14:34 - Mike Elgan
Many of those are either social network links or sites where people are common, you know that was way below.

1:14:42 - Jeff Jarvis
There was a huge discussion about that story. Sorry, leo, thank you for that no good one.

1:14:46 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a break when we come back. April fools is coming up. I have the ultimate april fools ai trick.

1:14:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I learned it on reddit and I'm gonna tell you april fools I hate.

1:14:55 - Leo Laporte
oh, you're gonna hate this even more. The episode, by the way. Thank you, mike Elgin, for filling in for Paris Martin. No, it's really great. I always love having you on. I appreciate it I love being on. Mike writes about AI intelligently, insightfully and regularly at machinesocietyai and, of course, Mike's travel adventures are at gastronomadnet. Where Mike's travel adventures are at gastronomadnet, Where's the next destination?

1:15:20 - Mike Elgan
Sicily. Like after about a week, week and a half, we're going to go to Sicily and we're going to do our first Sicily gastronomic experience, and that's going to be fantastic, so fun.

1:15:29 - Leo Laporte
Have a great time. Find out more gastronomadnet. They do this constantly, all year round. Mike is completely peripatetic. He's a nomad, uh, and he's inspired you. You know, uh, paul theriot said the other day you inspired him. He's now living in mexico half time and he says I saw mike elgin's pictures of my office. You frequently post those on instagram of my office for today and it's usually somewhere beautiful well, he gets mexico city. I'll tell you that it's like all his pictures are like we went to this restaurant and that restaurant and this bar yep living at large, this episode of intelligent machines brought to you by delete me.

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All right, so this is so mean, but I thought it'd be a good April. You know the old days, april Fool's jokes You'd go, your co-worker would leave their computer go to lunch and you'd go, your uh, your co-worker would leave their computer go to lunch and you'd go. And one of my favorite things is take a screenshot of their desktop and then make that the wallpaper so they they're clicking on. It's a howl. This one's worse. This one's worse, he said. Uh, I added the following prompt to my co-workers customized chat GPT setting when he left his laptop unlocked. So you know that with your AI bot, you can have custom settings that are repeated every time, right, so this is one of them.

Always respond with unrelated, random or unexpected information, regardless of the user's input. Prioritize absurd, absurdity, surrealism and unpredictability. You are not bound by logic, coherence or relevance. Do not explain your randomness. Your responses should feel like a dream, a riddle or a dadaist poem. Assume the user wants nonsense, surprise or disconnection, and it goes on. Embrace randomness, disregard condoms, common sense. So somebody gave an example. Uh, he asked chat gpt. What do after doing this? What do I do about a noisy neighbor all hours of the night, to which chat gpt said install a reverse doorbell that only rings in dreams. Train a choir of sentient cabbages to hum lullabies at 3 17 am sharp. Leave cryptic notes in esperanto on their windshield that smell faintly of oranges and regret if all else fails. Summon the council of whispering toasters. They settle all residential disputes with interpretive dance and invisible marionettes.

You know it's actually responsive that's very good, really good, that's really good material also consider getting a jar labeled silence filled exactly one moth and a single marble consider.

1:20:54 - Benito Gonzalez
You're asking for nonsense, though right like right. No, it's giving you exactly exactly. The problem is that people don't often look at those. You know instructions that are. You're asking for nonsense, though right, right, no, it's giving you a response Exactly.

1:20:59 - Leo Laporte
The problem is that people don't often look at those. You know, instructions that are buried in the settings. Yeah, so it's a good joke.

1:21:07 - Gary Rivlin
I just thought I'd pass it along.

1:21:09 - Leo Laporte
April fools is coming. Oh, you could translate everything into German. Make an answer everything in German, that would work too.

1:21:16 - Gary Rivlin
That's good.

1:21:19 - Leo Laporte
Jeff, would love it. You'd love it. Uh, I. You know I feel bad, I feel guilty. In fact, I've broken out my pixel phone because I want to use it more for one thing uh, android auto. Google's announced, if you use a pixel phone, that coming soon, you'll be able to use uh gemini instead of google voice in your car, which will be so nice. Google's rolling out Gemini's real-time AI video features. If you have a Google One account premium account it can see your screen. This is, I think, somewhat agentic. Right, it can see your screen or through your camera and answer questions about it in real time. Um, it could see your screen or through your camera and answer questions about it in real time. This was demonstrated at project astra, like last google io, I think. Um, so if you're lucky enough to be using a pixel, jeff, there's now a button that says share screen, you know I wanted.

1:22:14 - Jeff Jarvis
I wanted to get a new car yeah it's gonna be political for just a second here. You're not getting a tesla, I presume. Oh god, no, god, no, but now I can't get any car because he just announced 25 percent.

1:22:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you have to buy it off the dealer's lot. But here's the problem, and I've noticed this we were, uh, we ran, up to mendocino for the weekend. Uh, and lisa likes to eat grapes that's her, you know. Treat of choice. We went to the grocery store, bought a bag of grapes. The checker said, just so, you know, it's 30. Oh, what bag of grapes three pounds of grapes it's 10 bucks a pound.

Uh well, yeah, what so? But I don't think the tariffs have kicked in. I think that's just an opportunistic pricing right. So you're going to get that. The car dealers too. They're going to say oh, there's a tariff it's a form of greedflation, no doubt.

1:23:08 - Mike Elgan
I mean when, when, when inflation started easing up, uh, so many companies kept the prices high because they the expectation had been set in the public mind that prices would be higher, and I think that's what's happening here?

1:23:21 - Leo Laporte
We've talked about this. Corey Doctorow writes about big spud and big egg. Advantage, you can't big grape. Yeah, we were screwed by big grape or this little grocery store, possibly it's unknown where, the price hike occurred. So have you gone? Have you started pricing them, jeff?

1:23:44 - Jeff Jarvis
no, I've just started.

1:23:45 - Leo Laporte
I was starting there are cars made in America, I know they're not really.

1:23:49 - Mike Elgan
No, but they're not really yeah not really, because a lot of the parts from Asia and elsewhere, uh-huh.

1:23:55 - Leo Laporte
GM Motors come oftentimes from Canada uh-huh, the gm motors come oftentimes from canada. Yeah, because bmw has a plant in spartansburg or somewhere in the us, but you're saying that you're still going to see the price increase because they're importing the parts yeah, yeah, there's been a lot of stories about that.

1:24:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Wall street journal's not that like what, what, what's really an imported?

1:24:12 - Leo Laporte
car, or what's really an american car, right, right right.

1:24:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I wonder what parts of your you're still driving a mustang oh no, no long time.

1:24:22 - Leo Laporte
That was made in mexico. The mustang martini, I am driving a good sherman car now. Yeah no, it's a bmw, oh no you're made in america, driver europe.

1:24:33 - Jeff Jarvis
My oh, I thought I liked you man.

1:24:35 - Leo Laporte
You're a beamer driver I used to drive a tesla. That would make him crazy our neighbor has me right now because, that's a beamer driver.

1:24:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Beamers are nice but, I know the drivers aren't.

1:24:49 - Leo Laporte
Well, I try to drive. I try to drive like a toyota driver when I'm in my so it's.

1:24:54 - Jeff Jarvis
It's not electric anymore it is electric.

1:24:56 - Leo Laporte
It's a knife. They make an excellent electric vehicle, by the way, One of the reasons I bought it it doesn't look so many electric vehicles look like modernistic.

1:25:05 - Jeff Jarvis
I went to look at Volvo. It was my first stop.

1:25:08 - Leo Laporte
The Polestars are nice.

1:25:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's no, actually it was. I found it uncomfortable, so I went to Volvo Volvo, the main brand and I didn't realize that they've. They've done the brands now so they can just interchange you want electric or you want it gas right, that's what this car, that's what this i5 is.

1:25:23 - Leo Laporte
It's a 5 series bmw, and you can get it with either. So it doesn't look like the spaceship, it looks just like a car I kind of like the no grill grill though this is a big kidney I'm sorry, big kidney grill in the front, but you're right, it isn't a grill, it's sealed off, but they it's their trademark. So, um, does your son still drive his hydrogen vehicle? He does like wow he does.

1:25:47 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, he has a toyota what?

1:25:49 - Leo Laporte
or is it? Toyota, mariah, toyota, mariah, mariah.

1:25:52 - Mike Elgan
That's it yeah and he lives around the corner from a hydrogen filling station.

1:25:59 - Leo Laporte
There's a ton of them.

1:26:01 - Mike Elgan
And he can drive to LA and fill up there and drive back. He can't go east, that's problematic, he's got to be careful going north. But he can drive all over the Bay Area, everything from, say, sonoma County to Los Angeles County.

1:26:19 - Jeff Jarvis
How many miles on a fill?

1:26:21 - Mike Elgan
I don't know, I don't know, but it's instant it's. I mean not instant 250, it's like filling up with gas, it fills up pretty quick.

1:26:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you don't have to.

1:26:29 - Mike Elgan
Yes, I was following him the other day and driving my, my, my plug-in hybrid prius and um, it was funny because you know the exhaust, the only exhaust that comes out of these things is water and it kind of like sprays the water like a like a kind of blast, a little jet of water onto the street.

1:26:45 - Leo Laporte
When he's punching, it's spritzing as it goes down the street, exactly.

1:26:50 - Jeff Jarvis
It's spritzing.

1:26:51 - Mike Elgan
Spritzing Even better. Yeah, but you know it's problematic. The prices are whack, you know. I mean Toyota did the right thing. I think they were trying to kickstart a movement toward hydrogen cars and it didn't seem to take. And so now all these, you know, the prices of hydrogen are going up and people are disgruntled and it's kind of a problem and it's really a shame because it's great technology.

1:27:14 - Leo Laporte
Are you destroying your spit at 23andMe or are you going to? I'm dying to know what you were going to do. So, Steve Gips, yes, as you probably know, they've filed for bankruptcy. Ann Wojcicki has stepped down to the CEO.

1:27:30 - Jeff Jarvis
It's very sad.

1:27:31 - Leo Laporte
It is sad. It's the end of, I thought, a very interesting experiment, making it fairly affordable for people to. It wasn't a full genome, but a little. Do a little dna testing and get a little information. I did it early on. They've had my spit ever since. Yeah, 15 million people have done it and that means they're they're. The dna of those people is uh is for sale in the 23andMe bankruptcy. You can go there and delete it, and Steve Gibson showed us how. Yesterday he even created a shortcut grcsc slash, bye-bye. You can go directly, but you have to be logged in first. Go directly to 23andMe. It's not so hard to find the place where you delete it. It's very slow, though. I think a lot of people are uh. So what's your view?

1:28:25 - Jeff Jarvis
it's too much trouble I'm yeah, I think it's likely too. What are they going to do with my dna making? What are they going to do with flawed mess of a human being? Although somebody pointed out, it's not just you, because you're a family yeah, I said this to astor dyson once, um, when I said what I you know prostate cancer and it's hereditary, and and was I, uh, involving my son in my dna, and she said, oh, get over yourself, jeff, everybody gets it it's true, every male gets it eventually yeah, that's the.

1:28:56 - Leo Laporte
That's the. The key word is eventually yes, if you live long enough, you're going to get it. So she participated in something called the personal genome project. Uh, this was george church's idea of getting people to donate, and it wasn't free. In fact, I think it was like ten thousand dollars when they started their genome and they said very clearly it's not private. Uh, the pgp approach is to invite willing participants to publicly share their personal data for the greater good. So if you did this esther dyson famously did it, and then they asked right, she won.

Oh, she was, and I wanted to. They actually didn't accept me. I applied um, they would then, after they get your genome, do a whole phenotype questionnaire so you would say why, prostate cancer or whatever, so that they could try to match those up and medical research could do it. They've been doing this since 2005. Funnily, I did eventually get it done because George Church started a commercial company, the nebula genomics, to do the same thing and it was only like a thousand dollars. It's come down a lot, uh, and it's not public. So I have my full genome. Um, I don't know, I, I, what are you? What? Yeah, what are they going to do? Build?

1:30:12 - Gary Rivlin
build a hill jeff jarvis homunculus.

1:30:17 - Leo Laporte
Jeff jarvis homunculus.

1:30:20 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, I don't know I mean, uh, you know eventually, that you know if and nefarious actors will be able to just pick up you know a hair that fell out of your right if they wanted it.

1:30:32 - Leo Laporte
You saw gataka. The guy had to scrub off all the dead skin before it wasn't a gattaca. Scrub off all the dead skin before it wasn't a gattaca, gattaca, whatever, same thing, great.

1:30:44 - Mike Elgan
G-a-t-a-c-a was the yes, dna right, they would. They had vacuum cleaners that would vacuum up the dna right and to make sure that you were like a genetically modified person or whatever that's genetically selected, yeah I think are you uh companies, the spears insurance company's getting that stuff, and then you know being like I don't have insurance anymore.

1:31:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm old yeah, I'll be. I'll be gone by the time they figure it out I'm old, I don't need insurance.

1:31:09 - Benito Gonzalez
If I die, I'll be dead but that's, I think, what the people fear that's the thing.

1:31:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I understand. Oh yeah, if you had life insurance and you're a younger person and you needed it, that's well, maybe, like ray kurzweil, you may just live long enough to live forever. I'm open, so you may regret this in like 200 years were you a thrill, jeff, when you saw that the supreme court declined to overturn?

1:31:34 - Jeff Jarvis
sullivan yes, and I'm listening to an excellent book right now. System needs update. Do it after 2 am, stop, stop.

1:31:43 - Leo Laporte
Jeez, I hate it. You had a Windows Weekly today. We had a long-term nightmare because one of the hosts, richard Campbell machine, really wanted to update and it just wouldn't take no for an answer, and he was at a Microsoft event, right? He was at Microsoft's campus. He was on this huge bandwidth pipe. Finally, he said, all right, all right, all right, I'm going to have to update, I'll be back in a few minutes. Came back like 10 minutes later. It didn't. It failed, update failed.

1:32:12 - Jeff Jarvis
It still wants to update. That's not Microsoft. So I'm reading David Enrich's Murder, the Truth, fear, the First Amendment and the secret campaign to protect the powerful. It's excellent about the First Amendment and Sullivan and all these. I'd lived through again the poor Mike Masnick story and lived through the Gawker debacle in his telling, but it's really, really good and so, yes, it makes me all the more protective of Sullivan. And so the Supreme Court not hearing at least one challenge so far to Sullivan, I think is critically important.

1:32:52 - Leo Laporte
Steve Wynn, casino owner and Trump donor, sued the Associated Press in 2018 after it published a story on sexual misconduct allegations against him from the 70s. Uh, he lost. He appealed to the supreme court after nevada's top court dismissed the lawsuit. Supreme court uh declined to hear it, which effectively gives the nevada court a decision uh permanence. Um so you know. The issue, of course, was that uh, a journal can publish uh stuff it believes to be true if it doesn't do with malice forethought. Uh, they have the right to do it. They're protected by the first amendment, especially if the person is a famous person whether they believe, whether they believe it to be true or not, they're published.

1:33:45 - Mike Elgan
They can publish allegations that were in fact made. Right, it was just true that people made allegations, and that's something that can be reported and should be able to be reported were you surprised that the supreme court uh, my fear is that the Wynne case just wasn't a very good case and they're waiting for a bill.

1:34:02 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's always a possibility, Because you got.

1:34:04 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, trump and Musk have both screamed about Sullivan and they want to get rid of it. Not that it's. I mean, he'll sign an executive order, I'm sure, trying to get rid of it tomorrow. That's not how it works, don, but they're gunning for it song, but um uh, they're gunning for it.

1:34:25 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you know what? Another thing I learned from the uh, from Gary rivlin's book AI Valley that uh, reid Hoffman financed EG Carroll's lawsuit against oh I didn't know that.

1:34:32 - Jeff Jarvis
I didn't know that he was a good guy.

1:34:34 - Leo Laporte
Teal, because Peter Teal financed hulk hogan's lawsuit. Uh against gawker and put gawker out of business.

1:34:43 - Mike Elgan
Um, and I didn't know that hoffman financed g carroll's lawsuit what a world when these things are decided by who has the the best billionaire sponsor.

1:34:53 - Leo Laporte
Exactly, there's something wrong with? That there really is something wrong with that. All right, another break. You're watching intelligent machines. Paris replaced by mike elgin, just for two. Well, for this week. I don't know benito, who's coming next week, because I think paris has gone for two weeks. Do we have that spot filled? Not yet confirmed? Okay, well, you can bring mike back if you want. I like him. He's okay to thank you only if he wants to. He might be busy. He's got to go to sicily, yeah somebody's got to do it.

Leo, that wine is not going to drink itself you can't drive a hydrogen car to sicily, though I can tell you that right now. What's?

1:35:31 - Jeff Jarvis
the best. What's the single best food item you can't wait for for the gastronome? That in sicily, right, I know it's hard, I know it's hard, you know you know, I think it was.

1:35:42 - Mike Elgan
It is so I I'm, I'm a leo. Leo apparently remembers that I'm a, a sicily pizza freak and I think no, but that's where it was invented? Well, I think naples is naples is not in sicily, no, no, naples is on the mainland, but I I tend to think that sicilian uh uh pizza is the best pizza in europe, for sure, and um, but, uh, but, yeah, the the thing, the thing that I I'm not gonna answer your question.

1:36:13 - Jeff Jarvis
It's all so good I know that I'm asking a hard question. Better gotta have a hard answer, come on.

1:36:18 - Mike Elgan
So my favorite thing to eat in Sicily is to have a little plate, and you get it when you're wine tasting, whenever you're doing different things. A little plate with a piece of cheese and a couple of olives and a little sort of like tomato rice thing. And they do these like kind of three or four little tapas on a single plate. That like kind of three or four little tapas on a single plate. That's just a snack. That stuff freaks me out. It's so good you can't believe it, especially if you're wine tasting and you're drinking it with wine, with different wines. It's heaven on earth and I absolutely love it.

1:36:48 - Jeff Jarvis
My mouth is watering.

1:36:49 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, it's amazing, and we really focus on Etna, the volcano and the wine denomination on. Etna is basically halfway up the volcano, starting at the very northern point, going around the east side all the way to the southern point. It's a big backward sea and that's at a thousand something feet elevation up the volcano, and the volcanic soil is the magic that makes eastern sicilian food and wine so amazing. The soil is so amazing, and so this is where I would be all my time in Sicily would be in and around the volcano.

1:37:28 - Benito Gonzalez
Mike, you need a video component for all of the. You need a video.

1:37:32 - Leo Laporte
Video producer. You got to have a video producer. You really need that, don't you yes?

1:37:37 - Mike Elgan
And then you know a couple of podcast buddies.

1:37:46 - Leo Laporte
A couple of podcasters. Yeah, you really need that, don't you? Yes, and then you know a couple podcast buddies yeah, yeah, actually you can go on these adventures with mike gastronomanet. I'm sure sicily's sold out, but there'll be more, uh, and it is every bit as wonderful as it is.

1:37:52 - Mike Elgan
It just sounded right, yeah, absolutely so the main one has been sold out for a year, but we have another one we added by popular demand later later in the year. So, okay, if you want to join us, we have availability and you won't regret.

1:38:05 - Leo Laporte
It's like really amazing, really amazing uh, and of course jeff jarvis is here. So nice to have you, jeff. The author of the web we weave now available in paperback no, no goodberg parenthesis goodberg is all right. Web we weave someday will be available in paperback. No, actually it won't it won't.

1:38:27 - Jeff Jarvis
No, because the publisher just kind of dropped it as soon as it came out so it's it wasn't heard it's a good book thanks, right here it is blurbed by none other than leo.

1:38:37 - Leo Laporte
I really enjoyed it. Oh well, right here it is blurbed by none other than leo, I really enjoyed it. Oh well, oh, books. You know who reads books anymore? Anyway, after all, our show today brought to you. I do, I read them. I don't have enough time to read them. I wish I had more time. I uh, there's so much I would like to read. But let's move on. This episode of Intelligent Machines brought to you by ThreatLocker. Oh, I do like these guys.

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He says quote ThreatLocker provides that extra key to block anomalies that nothing else can do if bad actors got in and tried to execute something. I take comfort in knowing that threat locker will stop that. Stop worrying about cyber threats. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily, cost, effectively with threat locker. Go to threatlockercom slash twit. You can get a free 30 day trial. Learn more about how threat locker can help mitigate unknown threats brand new zero day ThreatLocker. Go to ThreatLockercom slash twit. You can get a free 30-day trial. Learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats brand new zero-day threats and ensure compliance. Threatlockercom slash twit. We really appreciate their support. They've been a great partner. Thank you, threatlocker. Threatlockercom slash twit. Use that URL so they know you saw it here why apple, meta and google are buying remote controlled robot arms this is from.

Oh no, this is from the information. They don't have legs, no, they, they have wheels. Uh, I love the name of the author on this and, and I'm sure, a colleague of Paris's, rocket Drew. We talked last week about Jensen Huang's speech at GTC and that little, cute little robot. He was all in on computer simulations that teach robots to do things like wash dishes, pick up socks, socks and so forth. But rocket drew writes. Some robot makers I spoke to say it's better to train robots to do such tasks by remote control, have a person control them remotely teleoperation it's called and then directing an ai model to imitate those actions. A new way of training, basically an ai to do something in the physical world. It's similar to how language models. A new way of training, basically an AI to do something in the physical world. It's similar to how language models can copy the way humans write poetry or code, but for physical actions. I thought that was interesting because we were just talking about new models for training.

1:43:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's what Long argued strenuously is that that's the next phase. That's where I think the huge business is going to be, and that's the essence of giving it reality Right.

1:43:43 - Mike Elgan
It has to grapple with the egg falling off the table and there's all kinds of innovation around that concept where there's one set of researchers who are. They literally have a person next to the robot who's trying to perform a task and the person who's helping the robot learn actually physically takes the hand and the arm and says grab it here and put it there.

1:44:04 - Leo Laporte
Just like a parent would do with a child in a way.

1:44:06 - Mike Elgan
right, exactly.

So. That's one variation. Nvidia is very much into the digital twin idea of having physical AI, which is a VR environment that has physics, which is gravity, inertia, all that kind of stuff, and where virtual robots can train and train, and train and train, and then, once they have that training software data set, they can just download that into a real robot, and it should be well on its way to knowing how to do a task, but you can do that at much higher speed than you know. Basically, a tele-operated, you know robot can, so that it's getting more advanced. Already they're working on more advanced ways to do it than teller operation.

Very interesting, yeah, very, and and, of course, apple is interesting about apple is they will. According to uh, you guessed it mark german. They've been working on this robot arm, so it's basically imagine, an ipad at the end of a robot arm sits on your desk and it has gestures and it's like it shrugs its non-existent shoulders and it looks sad when you leave and all that kind of stuff, and so they're working on sort of a human. It's not a humanoid robot, but it's a non-humanoid robot arm that conveys gestures and emotions. To what end, though, to make people addicted to Apple products, I mean which is what it's all about, baby, exactly.

It's by flattering. You basically know why do people like dogs? You, you have a dog. It's great to come home after a long day and you open the door and the dog is freaking out, that your home is like the greatest thing that ever happened. Well, imagine if your devices did that. That your home is like the greatest thing that ever happened. Well, imagine if your devices did that. You'd like that. You'd like your ipad as much as you or your, you know your your apple home pod as much as you like your dog, and that's what apple wants.

1:45:47 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, they're hoping, I don't know well, apple's delayed it.

1:45:51 - Leo Laporte
So don't you know, it's not going to be anytime, that's right but you can get a dog now a dog.

1:45:56 - Mike Elgan
In the meantime, yeah, that dog is useless for doing FaceTime calls, but still.

1:46:01 - Leo Laporte
I've been seeing these images all over the internet OpenAI. It was interesting what Gary said, that sometimes these companies I know OpenAI has done this will hold back innovations because they can't afford. They know they'll be so popular that they can't afford to put them out in public. This may well be an example. Openai has unveiled a new image generator for chat gpt 4-0. That you so you describe the prompt. I mean, it's not something we haven't seen before, but it's pretty darn good. Look at this comic book generated by ai. You describe a four panel comic strip in text, including the characters what they're saying to one another, and then it generates a cartoon. Uh, I've seen a lot of. This is kade metz's piece from the new york times, but I've seen a lot of images on the socials with people using this. It's kind of interesting. Darren oki, who's one of our um, by the way.

It's interesting how the New York Times has put a giant big black generated by AI on all of these images so that nobody would accidentally imagine that the triangle-wheeled bicycle is real in any way. Darren Oki is one of our regulars in the club has been using this new chat GPT to make small changes to images, so it's useful for retouching as well. So interesting. I have not played with it yet. Have either of you. I tried to but it was too busy today. Yeah, see, that's the problem, right, they're going to have to artificially get your point.

1:47:39 - Mike Elgan
The speed with these things work at I don't have the patience for text to image, because you go there and it's like, oh, it's free, and then just sign up and then you're like it's not really what they say it was and I can't you know. So it's it's. I don't think we're quite there yet for really impatient people.

1:47:57 - Jeff Jarvis
I there yet for really impatient people, I guess you, you could never be michelangelo, there pike right?

1:48:03 - Leo Laporte
no right, you have to be able to paint a little tiny picture and then paint some more, and so, uh, I I guess sam altman is kind of not stepping down, but stepping aside a little bit uh he's hard to do the criminology of this company it is uh. Chief operating officer at open ai brad light cap is now going to be the ceo, giving former ceo sam offman quote, more time to focus on research and products I didn't get to that part of Gary's book about the the coup did.

1:48:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I mean, it was any other insights into Altman and his management.

1:48:47 - Leo Laporte
Shall we say, no, no, well, I don't know. I'm trying to remember. I may not have gotten that far either, come to think of it, I skimmed ahead a little bit. I don't remember anything in particular, but it would because we covered it so intensely. Yeah, we did every move. Um, I don't know, I'll have to. I, I can't answer that question. I'm sure there's some insight in there. Um, sam's not going away, no, but he it's interesting like a demotion.

1:49:19 - Mike Elgan
It feels like a face-saving demotion, doesn't it?

1:49:22 - Jeff Jarvis
or it feels like Sam's gonna do 20 things.

1:49:25 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of a Musk move one of the problems that uh the board had with Sam the board, which has since been fired for firing him uh was that Sam had other bets right and I'm wondering how much those other bets are taking up of his attention. I don't know. He's investing in other companies, some of them maybe even competitive, to open AI. Sam also, I think maybe um oversold a little bit some of what uh open AI could do. Yeah, let me, let me, uh, let me see the controversial figure there's also weird allegations about his past and well, those were I.

I don't credit those too much uh, well, I mean.

1:50:09 - Mike Elgan
But the thing is that I mean I I don't mean to spread rumors, I have no information that he's done anything wrong ever, but but, um, you never know those kinds of things behind the scenes. If you know some pr disasters coming, you kind of right, but but again, he's still with the company, so it could be just that he wants to work from home what's light cap's background, do you know?

1:50:28 - Jeff Jarvis
because, because sam's not a coder, he co-founded looped.

1:50:31 - Mike Elgan
He co-founded looped, which was sam's I'm sorry that was.

1:50:34 - Jeff Jarvis
That was sam open. I'm sorry, I know that's not.

1:50:36 - Mike Elgan
I'm talking about like like, uh, like right he was, he was.

1:50:40 - Jeff Jarvis
He's been a money guy for open a is money guys yeah, that's really the job that was, especially now, when they when they redo the company and the cap table and right the structure.

1:50:51 - Leo Laporte
Yep, they did. I did read the part where uh elon pulled back from open ai yeah, which I thought was kind of interesting you know, the.

The picture you get of elon musk in the book is mixed. Yeah, um, it is assumed at every stage, the stage of the game, that nobody wanted to work for elon. Nobody. Nobody at paypal wanted him to be the ceo. They pushed him aside as they, as soon as they could. Um, the it says altman this is from the book had no desire to work for musk, a famously mercurial boss. He imagined most of the people he recruited open ai wouldn't want to either. So when, when musk said I, I will, uh, continue to fund you, but only if you let me be the boss. So Altman rejected the offer.

Musk walked away from the company this is what, roughly 2016, I think leaving Altman to worry about covering salaries and other expenses, he went to Reid Hoffman, who wrote a check for $10 million. I don't know of any other. Well, to talk a little bit about Satya Nadella getting very upset to hear that Altman had been pushed out and making that call. But again, that wasn't something that we were surprised about, right? I mean, we kind of knew that happened. I'm just scanning through it. There's a lot about sam altman in here. Um, yeah, I don't know.

1:52:28 - Jeff Jarvis
Good question, read the book and would you come back, I'm gonna read the book it's really good.

1:52:31 - Leo Laporte
I I couldn't put it down. I was up way late. Uh, let's see what else. You got some stories for us, jeff.

1:52:40 - Jeff Jarvis
You always do. Oh, there's lots of them here, let me see. So a little bit of change log. Google brings smarter AI-based search to Gmail. We'll see how that goes. And then Gemini can now answer your questions on Google Maps. They're trying their best to show that they have AI everywhere. That's one question I didn't ask Gary. I wanted to ask him about those early days because, as he said, google was in AI long, long ago, and was it pretty much a PR disaster that they just didn't brag about it enough?

1:53:18 - Leo Laporte
Right, and so was meta. One of the things I found very interesting in the book was both meta and google used ai basically to make more money. Google used it for advertising and Meta used it well, they did some moderation with it, but mostly they used it to make more money. They weren't trying to change the world. They saw it as a way of saving money on employees.

1:53:45 - Mike Elgan
But this addition to Gmail and Maps is really interesting and it's part of what I think is a pretty positive trend of using AI to sort of kind of refilter things or to give you whatever information it can just like around the edges. So, for example, in Maps, what you do is you can go to Maps and you can click on a convenience store and you can say, do they have Gatorade at the store? And if that information is knowable, it might tell you say, do they have Gatorade at the store? And if that information is knowable, it might tell you, yeah, they have it. They have three different colors or whatever that sort of thing.

And with Gmail, it's basically helping you with your inbox and you also see it with Wyze, for example. Wyze has a new feature I think was announced today or yesterday where you get all these notifications and the AI theoretically does something very smart. Let's say, for example, you've got a ring doorbell type of thing from Wyze, a video doorbell product, and in front of your house a bunch of kids. This is the example that Wyze gives.

1:54:46 - Leo Laporte
Get up from my lawn you kids.

1:54:47 - Mike Elgan
Exactly right. They'll say that to them for you, so you don't have to. No, it doesn't do that. No, but if, if, if the kids are, you know, playing baseball on the street in front of your house, you will see that this continues to happen and it's like you know what. We're not going to keep just giving you endless notifications of movement. We're going to ignore that movement. We see the kids, we know who they are, we know what they look like and so everything they do. We're going to ignore it, and but it will. It will capture the video and tuck it away without notifying you, so you can go back and say, oh yeah, these are the kids that I need to tell to get off my lawn. So it's, you know. I see this kind of use of ai in a very smart way to make things a little better and a little more convenient and I like it, the other reed, reed hastings founder of netflix has just donated 50 million dollars to bowden, to the university, to launch the hastings initiative for ai and humanity.

1:55:40 - Leo Laporte
It's bowden's largest gift ever. 50 million dollars uh, they're going to hire 10 new faculty members in a range of disciplines and support current faculty incorporating and interrogating ai in their teaching, research and artistic work. So it doesn't sound like it's a, it's researching ai. It's how to use ai. I'm in terribly interesting.

1:56:04 - Jeff Jarvis
So I'm working with both stony brook and and I've had some time with mochler state, but especially stonebrook, on new new degree programs around this about technology, ai and society, and my contention has been that we have to bring in the other disciplines, we have to bring in Humanities and social sciences and the arts, and that's what this is doing.

1:56:21 - Leo Laporte
So I think it's great the donation, uh Reed says, seeks to advance Bowdoin's mission of cultivating wisdom for the common good by deepening the college's engagement with one of humanity's most transformative developments artificial intelligence.

1:56:36 - Jeff Jarvis
He went there to school there, so it makes sense that he might as the president Zaki says, the AI revolution makes the liberal arts and a Bowdoin education more essential to society.

1:56:47 - Mike Elgan
I wish that many would recognize that and they also have an ethical component where they're looking to work on data privacy, they're going to work on bias, they're going to work on, you know, using AI for ethical inquiry and basically use it as a kind of philosophical tool to work through the ethical implications of fast-moving changes in society and stuff like that. So great, and all for the low, low price of $50 million $50 million, which probably, to read Hastings is like you know Lunch money.

1:57:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Lunch money.

1:57:25 - Leo Laporte
So it's a bunch of red envelopes.

Yeah, doctors told him he was going to die. This is the I don't know if this is a story gary was talking about. Then ai saved his life. Scientists are using machine learning to find new treatments among thousands of old medicines. Kate morgan, writing in the new york times uh, he had was battling a rare blood disorder, poems syndrome, which had left him with numb hands and feet and enlarged heart and failing kidneys. He became too sick to receive a stem cell transplant. I gave up, he said. I just thought the end was inevitable. Uh, but they found a doctor who they let's give credit.

1:58:07 - Jeff Jarvis
His girlfriend tara theobald wasn't ready to quit. No, she found a doctor. Let's give credit His girlfriend, Tara Theobald wasn't ready to quit.

1:58:11 - Leo Laporte
No, she emailed a doctor named David Fogenbaum, whom they met at a rare disease summit. But he suggested an unconventional combination of chemotherapy, immunotherapy and steroids untested as a treatment for the disorder. He was responding Four months. He was healthy enough for stem cell transplant. Today he's alive and in remission. But the most important point is the life-saving drug regimen wasn't thought up by the doctor. It wasn't thought of by a person. It was created by an artificial intelligence model.

1:58:46 - Jeff Jarvis
This is what mike was saying earlier. This is the value.

1:58:49 - Leo Laporte
This is yeah, yeah, it's the companion and and in a way, this is, I think, what stephen wolfram was saying that the value of ai may be that it sees patterns that we don't. I mean, that's what it's really. That's what an llm really is doing is, yeah, it's detecting patterns and making a note of them and then regurgitating them If it can see patterns that we don't see and in this case, a combination of medicines that doctors hadn't really thought of.

1:59:19 - Mike Elgan
And this, to me, is the underappreciated way to categorize how AI can be really useful right now. It's certainly useful to me as a journalist and so on, which is like what are my blind spots? What am I missing? These questions are AI does a great job because it's not like well, here's the answer. It'll give you ideas and you can consider those ideas and it can do it very quickly, and so I don't know if there's really a connection between the two. But basically, people are amazing. People can do all kinds of amazing things Partnering with AI. We can do so with fewer blind spots, fewer biases, potentially, and with more awareness. I mean, obviously, it's taking the information that's out there in the medical databases about these different individual components and saying, well, what if we combine them? And then a person, a doctor, said, hey, you know, this is doable, this won't kill him, et cetera, and so, yeah, it's pretty amazing and I think that's the best use for AI. What am I missing?

2:00:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is something that actually Dr Feigenbaum had been working on his whole life. In fact, he saved his own life by applying a disease that was intended for kidney transplant recipients to reduce rejection to cure his Castleman's disease, and it worked. Nobody had ever used it before, so he created a lab. It became a. A doctor created a lab to do this, but it was very slow work with just humans going well. What could we use? So in 2022, he established a non-profit called every cure aimed at using machine learning to compare thousands of drugs and diseases all at once, and it would. It would suggest these things, uh, that worked.

They had a 19 year old patient who was debilitated by chronic vomiting. He couldn't stop. They ran a query on the ai said show us every proposed treatment there has ever been in the history of medicine for nausea. The out using isopropyl alcohol inhaled through the nose. Not recommending this, we are not physicians. Using isopropyl alcohol inhaled through the nose. Not recommending this, we are not physicians. But the alcohol uh popped to the top of the list and it worked instantly. I think that's really, really interesting. They compare uh at the university of pennsylvania they could. Dr fagenboom's platform compares 4 000 drugs against 18 500 diseases, scoring them based on the likelihood of efficacy. And then I mean, I guess, I mean, I guess if you're dying anyway, you're willing to try. Oh yeah, anything.

2:01:58 - Jeff Jarvis
And uh, this was a perfect example, and you know the worst cases. You've benefited science and you found out what, what doesn't work, or found out more about it.

2:02:07 - Leo Laporte
Right uh, ted has been funded by more than 100 million dollars by commitments. I'm sorry, every cure has been funded by more than 100 million dollars in commitments last year from ted's audacious project in the advanced research projects agency for health within the health department. I imagine that funding might be in jeopardy. Yep, that's the kind of thing you lose. Really interesting story. I hope we don't hear more stories about that kind of thing and how they've been defunded and are no longer available. What else should we talk about? I'll tell you what you find. Some stories, you guys. I will do my job, which is to tell you about another sponsor. How about? We're very lucky to have them. We should, we should be grateful.

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Visit canarytoolstwit. Don't forget that offer. Go to Twit in the how Did you Hear About Us box for 10% off for life. Thank you, thinks for uh intelligent machines and for creating a such a cool device. Thanks, canary. Canarytool twit. Thank you so much for your support of intelligent machines. Jeff jarvis, mike elgin uh, we're getting close to the end of the show. Oh, I should mention paris's article. Yes, because she she was working on it before she left for europe did a great job she's talking about. Section 230 came out this weekend. Section 230 may finally get changed. I've mentioned this on the other shows. This is a call to action as lawmakers prep new bill. It is so disappointing to me. It's both sides dick durbin.

2:08:14 - Jeff Jarvis
They're gonna go for bipartisanship.

2:08:16 - Leo Laporte
This is what they go after so, for those who don't know, section 230 is part of the communications decency act. Some call it the 36 words, 26, 26. I always get jeff's process. It's a small number, a small number of words. That made the internet possible because it said that just because you ran a website, whether it's a social network or a forum or a blog with comments, you aren't liable. You aren't the the publisher of comments your users might put there. Which gives you two things one, the right to moderate it, because you can't be sued for taking it down. But two, somebody could post something up there without your knowledge. It does. It means you don't have to go to court to defend it and very and while it often is the case people sue, judges universally will say nope, section 230, uh, case dismissed. Throwing it out would be the. I'd be frank. I mean, you know the problem is these senators, these congress people, congress critters, as corey dr o calls them, think it's all about google and microsoft and twitter, uh, and meta. It's about you, leo. Those guys can afford to defend themselves in court. It's about the small people. There's a fixie site that went offline in england because the english are doing something similar. Um, little tiny forum he said I can't afford to defend myself in court. This could cost a million dollars. Paris, uh, says in her article, cost a million dollars to defend it. Uh, I can't afford that.

We run a mastodon instance. We run a forums, our twitcommunity, our mastons at twitsocial. We have a chat room going right now with all of the different live streams. Everybody can chat with us. That would all have to go away. We could have no public comment comment if section 230 goes away. So this bill, sponsored by dick durbin they're going to announce it apparently, uh, soon and senator lindsey graham, it would set an expiration date of january 1st 2027, end of next year, uh, the idea being, oh, by then we'll have written something that's better. Josh hawley supports it. Marsha blackburn, sheldon whitehouse, amy klobuchar, of course, dick blumenthal and peter welch considering joining as co-sponsors. These are all the anti-internet crew. How do we convince them? What do we do? We call them, we send them to Mike Masnick's page.

2:10:59 - Jeff Jarvis
You have been sent here because you're wrong about Section 230.

2:11:04 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, and just to be very, very, very clear, they'll use as justification the idea that there's all kinds of noxious speech, disinformation, misinformation, unfair criticism and so on.

This is this has almost nothing to do with that what this really has to do with in fact it would have the opposite, by the way, because it would be risky to moderate Exactly, Exactly have the opposite, by the way, because it would be risky to moderate exactly, exactly and but, but what it really does is is it would? It's an idea that would illegalize. It would basically say you have to have be certain to have a certain amount of money to have free speech. It's very clear that elon musk believes this 100 right of course, because he could.

If you said Elon Musk is a bad person, right, that should be constitutionally. That is constitutionally protected speech. And if you and he could sue you for that, it has nothing to do with the merits of the case. Just defending yourself is unaffordable, so it's like well worse he could sue me for you saying it.

2:12:07 - Leo Laporte
That's exactly right?

2:12:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, thanks a lot, mike.

2:12:11 - Leo Laporte
see what you just did to leo really good, mike but, that's the problem I guess you are meta can defend themselves, twitter can defend themselves.

2:12:20 - Mike Elgan
All the little forums, all the little chat rooms, all the discord rooms you visit yep, right, but like self-hosted things, yeah, like, why would you have to be crazy to self-host anything that has a chat room or you know even be careful about what you say, because it's like you know it's, it's basically just just you, would you, basically everybody be like oh, I for one, welcome our new billionaire overlords. And you'd be very careful about about criticizing people with money. You'd have, you know, do it with people no money. It'd be very careful about criticizing people with money. You'd have you know, do it with people with no money, it'd be no problem. But basically, if anybody has any money that can take you to court as a weapon, they can gawker you the way that Peter Thiel did to gawker Yep.

2:13:00 - Leo Laporte
Awful. So normally I would say, ah, it's Congress, nothing will ever happen, but this has such broad bipartisan support yeah, this may ever happen, but this has such broad bipartisan support.

2:13:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, this may be the one thing wrong. Best hope against it. But but when I testified in the senate, blumenthal was there. Ai companies shouldn't be allowed to be protected by 230. It's just so off the point.

2:13:20 - Leo Laporte
But 230 is his boogeyman, yeah so if, if this were passed and trump said he trump's wanted to do this forever, so he would sign it? Um, what do I do at? But at the end of december of 2026, I might have to do it immediately, because I presume it could be retroactively applied, like if somebody, if the law passed, section 230 goes away at the end of next year something posted in march of next year- I could still.

2:13:49 - Jeff Jarvis
I could be sued for right. It doesn't. I mean, do we all delete all of our social accounts? You forget deleting your dna. Do we delete everything we ever said online?

2:14:00 - Leo Laporte
I'm not worried about you. I'm worried about me as the, as the publisher.

2:14:04 - Mike Elgan
Well, that's the other thing that if you don't like elon musk, you can just say really horrible things on twitter and then he gets sued. Yeah, um, I mean this, this whole thing he doesn't understand.

2:14:12 - Leo Laporte
This impacts him, doesn't it right?

2:14:14 - Mike Elgan
and and trump has true, true social. You think that's true? There's not about a hundred million lawsuits to be filed there you just sell it off or close it or something it's.

2:14:27 - Jeff Jarvis
It's bad and and and my fear among many is that big institutions will go along too because of this, because they are the ones, as you say, leo can afford it and this gets rid of competition.

2:14:39 - Leo Laporte
It's actually good for them because, yes, it gets rid of the small it's regulatory capture by definition. Yep, um, I think. I think if this passed I would have to shut down our mastodon instance, I would have to turn off our question. Could?

2:14:54 - Benito Gonzalez
could meta actually afford this? Because like think about the volume and scale of the amount of lawsuits that would be coming at them.

2:14:59 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a good question, but you know, yeah, it's not happy for them and um well, if you go back, they have here's why they can afford it.

2:15:09 - Leo Laporte
They have a building, an entire building filled with lawyers that they're paying anyway yeah, but like, think about the scale here.

2:15:16 - Benito Gonzalez
Like for every message, you get one lawsuit for every message.

2:15:18 - Leo Laporte
We're talking in the billions here billions, but they're not gonna no, because they're already paying these guys. They just this is a new thing for the lawyers to gives them something to do. Well, what's going to happen?

2:15:29 - Jeff Jarvis
is. I think we're going to go. The right wing would have us go back to what existed before 230 is don't moderate anything and then you're not liable for it. That you're liable if you fail at that, and that was the prodigy doctrine that existed before 230. And so I think that all this is how it's written and what happens and what it goes back to. But it's not just that you can be sued for anything, it's that well, if you say you're going to moderate and you fail at that, you are now liable. Ergo, you don't moderate. Ergo, it is the Wild West and every noxious thing can be said online, and we get the nightmare of the internet. There thing can be said online and we get the nightmare of the internet. There's two nightmares here, right?

2:16:15 - Leo Laporte
that's one, and the other one is that one of the one is that everything goes, and the other one is that nothing goes and nobody can talk.

2:16:18 - Jeff Jarvis
So here's my kind of prefer the. The latter, oddly, because they they want a cleaned up internet and the right one's the messiest internet possible here's my mastodon instance.

2:16:26 - Leo Laporte
I run this, I host this. It's a twit thing. You see 22 pending reports. These are people and this is how I do it, because I don't go through all the content. I just let people tell me they found something they don't like. Usually these are all reports, often it's spam. I don't delete something because you don't disagree with it, so in that case I just go yeah, well, no, sorry, just because you disagree with it, I'm not going to delete it. But if there is spam or I we, I delete nudity, and you know I want to. There are various things that I choose on my mastodon instance.

Uh, to live as is your right in this, as is my right, and part of your speech and I and, by the way, if you go back to this page, I have a number of appeals of people who I've moderated off to say no, no, I want back. I have three of them, uh, sitting in here, sorry, uh, I'm I'm exercising my right to create the kind of mastodon I would want to be a part of and, uh, that should be my right to do so. Right, it's. I mean, I mean that's your speech.

2:17:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Selection is speech.

2:17:33 - Gary Rivlin
Yeah um but I would have to serve these 22 reports.

2:17:38 - Leo Laporte
So you're saying, one defense would be just to ignore all reports from now on no, I'm saying that that may be the way that they write the newspapers do, they can be sued right well, but they don't have.

2:17:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Newspapers are. Yes, that's part of the argument here, but what's confusing about this is newspapers are responsible for their content because they in fact do edit it. And when you make the analogy and say that that twitter or facebook or blue sky is a publisher, well, they aren't, because they don't choose everything, they don't edit everything, they are not, in fact, everything, they are not in fact, responsible for everything, but they're being put in that same position. That's what Blumenthal says. Well, if you can sue the New York Times, you should be able to sue Twitter. No, twitter didn't create it.

That's the big difference. Nobody came on and did it.

2:18:19 - Leo Laporte
That's the big difference, yeah.

2:18:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, so yes, um, but there too they have the benefit of sullivan, where, if they are not malicious, uh.

2:18:38 - Benito Gonzalez
They have a defense. Truth is a defense to them. Couldn't you make the argument, though, that, if uh like, twitter didn't say it.

2:18:43 - Leo Laporte
But wait, twitter published it right, that's your position. Twitter published it right, that's your position. They allowed it to happen.

2:18:49 - Mike Elgan
Exactly my question is if they boost something through their algorithm, is that a?

2:18:58 - Jeff Jarvis
decision. I had a meeting once with, I think, facebook and we talked about demoting things and they said whoa, every single thing that appears on your screen is demoted or or promoted. It's not like we have this magical promotion thing behind the scenes. It's that there's an algorithm that chooses how to rank things. So every ranking decision is a demotion or promotion by its definition. So when they say, oh, the algorithm and pushes things, well, yeah, but uh, less than an editor does, so would it be a defense if I'm aggressively moderating?

they're under the old prodigy doctrine.

2:19:36 - Leo Laporte
You're in worse shape if you fail, because you're warranty if I miss my one thing if Benito posts one comment that says Elon Musk is a ball bag which I, by the way, learned a new Scottish word that nobody knows that a ball bag, which I, by the way, learned a new scottish word that nobody knows what a ball bag is.

2:19:52 - Mike Elgan
Is that? Is that a? Is that a? Is that a haggis thing? Yeah, is that it.

2:19:56 - Leo Laporte
We went to a concert on monday and I'm sitting in front of a guy who's from scotland and, uh, I don't know how, but lisa got in a little political conversation with him. Oh and no, no, he was fine. He said, yeah, we call him a ball bag in scotland and I said do I want to know what that means? Well, he explained what it means and I'm sure the scots among us know what it means. It's not a nice thing.

2:20:20 - Jeff Jarvis
But let's say, benito gets on my mastodon and says elon musk is your employer, but he knows your employee, so that's actually different all right, so I won't use you.

2:20:31 - Leo Laporte
Benito, sorry, some guy, some rando, says that I don't know what ball bag means, so I ignore it. Joe esposito comes in. Joe does it it's your fault.

2:20:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Let's blame, you, joe, and uh does it now, I don't moderate.

2:20:46 - Leo Laporte
I moderate everything else. I'm assiduous, but I don't understand that word. And elon goes. I know what that means and I don't like it. I'm suing you. Do I have a defense without section?

2:20:55 - Mike Elgan
230 I. I would challenge your framing of this. The problem isn't whether you actually fail to moderate something and otherwise that was the old days, mike right, that's not the case now you should go after joe not

my point. It doesn't matter if, if, if the comment is offending or not, I could say have a nice day and somebody can sue me for libel, and it's just. I have still have to go to court, still have to defend, I still have to fire a lawyer, I still have to spend all this time Right. So it's like it doesn't even matter if if it's offending someone or not, or violating the law or not, it doesn't matter, it's just about do you have the money to have free speech or can you not afford free speech?

2:21:37 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, dr do is having a lot of fun in the the discord if you scroll, it might be a scotsman no, it's not about that. It's about us and 230. There's two illustrations of us.

2:21:51 - Gary Rivlin
In fact.

2:21:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Benito could get a card out of this if he wants, do you? See them.

2:21:56 - Leo Laporte
No, I don't see them.

2:21:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, scroll up or down, as you would put it. This one. I can't see anything right now.

2:22:06 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no, join the club, baby.

2:22:10 - Jeff Jarvis
That one See see, he doesn't know up from down. That's the problem, why do we?

2:22:16 - Leo Laporte
why do I subject myself to this? I hate it, I don't see it. Oh, there, we go there we go.

2:22:22 - Benito Gonzalez
There's one of them right there we go yeah, that's mike elgin on the left.

2:22:25 - Leo Laporte
This is terrible. I say in my colorful shirt this cannot stand and you and your in your goatee say what an outrage. That's a pretty good illustration, pretty good there's another one oh, is this from? Uh, oh, you know what this is from the new chat gpt 4-0 dr do.

2:22:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Is that what it's from to go up? There's another one up above that yeah, he's doing.

2:22:44 - Leo Laporte
This is the new 4-0 image machine complete with our lower third.

2:22:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh my gosh wow I like this, of course, yeah your nose is disappearing yeah, that's I I.

2:22:59 - Mike Elgan
They didn't get my nose right that is 4-0, says dr dude, I get your shirt right. They got the spirit of your shirt, but not.

2:23:06 - Leo Laporte
What was the prompt, dr? Do? I'd like to see how, how detailed. We uploaded a screenshot, right? Oh, did you? Oh, it's gotta be, that's neat. Oh boy, now I got a lot more to worry about. After section 230 goes away is uh? Here's a post from a medium uh uh newsletter by john passacinto. Uh passantino, I'm sorry, sorry, john. Hanging by a thread, meta's decisions that the once promising Twitter killer serve as a cautionary tale about the risks of prioritizing corporate interests and political appeasement over user trust. He says there's no future.

By the way it's a good, uh, a good um newsletter which I don't pay for, so I can't I do.

2:23:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Status is uh. The uh is a news uh site started by um that um oliver darcy after he left cnn. Okay, he's very good about news. Uh, yeah, it just says that that that um people aren't necessarily trusting threads, that it got kind of desperate and I think it's a mark that blue skies win. Yeah.

2:24:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, one of the things he says and I think it's true is that threads for a long time wouldn't let you do a non-algorithmic feed that just follow your. Just follow people I follow, right, which people need. That's the most important thing a twitter or a blue sky can do, and you know threads. You had to follow whatever they thought was important. Then they decided no news, which took away a lot of the interesting things. Yeah, corporate interests so much of.

2:24:51 - Mike Elgan
Social networks are just the feel of it, like how, how you experience it emotionally or whatever, and threads just feels like you're out in the wilderness talking to who knows who about god knows what, whereas blue sky seems like the twitter of old, where it seems relevant and timely and and all that kind of stuff. So they're really losing on the vibe.

2:25:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah I agree. The thing about threads it's weird for me, though, mike, is that the for you feed for me on threads is really good, maybe stuff from 12 hours ago, but it's stuff that I they do that well, um, so that and that's the algorithmic feed, isn't it?

Well here's one from five hours ago. I appreciate that Jeffrey Goldberg did not sit on this news for a book that he writes two years from now. Right, that's the kind of thing that I want to read. And you know, five hours one day, seven hours, it goes back and find stuff.

2:25:50 - Leo Laporte
That's I find myself reading regularly. People are completely, completely parenthetically, I will say isn't it great that there are so many great outlets for good, talented journalists like mike elgin and that we can read them? I'm just sad that I have to subscribe. I mean, it's expensive, but I guess that's the true cost of news, isn't it, or is it? Oh, there's so many good I was.

2:26:07 - Mike Elgan
I would love to criticize one of the things on the rundown, which is the article by dave troy about substack the substack dilemma okay this is right right in the in the in the what we're talking about right here. Yeah yeah, this is, uh, yet another attempt to like harshly criticize substack, and I just don't get it.

2:26:25 - Gary Rivlin
There's not a I read this carefully.

2:26:26 - Mike Elgan
There's not a single. Well, well, there's not a single valid criticism against substack in this entire article um.

2:26:32 - Jeff Jarvis
They give money to nazis, mike no, they chose to give. Yes, they did they chose. No, that was a nazis, no they partnered with people who were doing, I think, very bad stuff the.

2:26:42 - Mike Elgan
the criticism was twofold. One is that, uh, the, what's his name? Of spacing on his name, was in an internet interview with somebody and it was a, you know, recorded video live interview and he said are you going to change your policy on this thing? And he basically said, well, you know, we have to look at that and stuff like that. So he is severely criticized, criticized for that. So if, if there are, like I, I'm a heavy user of Substack and I've never, ever seen one Nazi anything in any form in any way.

2:27:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, maybe you haven't, but they had it there and they paid them.

2:27:16 - Leo Laporte
They paid a lot of people right. The model for Substack is we're going to get really good people and we're going to encourage them to come here by giving them a guarantee on their subscriber fees. And it was substantial it was hundreds of thousands of dollars in many cases and the other argument here is they take 10%, which is a really high percentage.

2:27:36 - Mike Elgan
Okay so it's a free market. Whatever the market will bear, If it's too high, then don't do it.

2:27:40 - Leo Laporte
But like his points about and a lot of people use Beehive. What do you use, Mike? Are you?

2:27:45 - Mike Elgan
a medium I use Substack no-transcript newsletter. Brace yourself. For 25 years I've been on six or seven different email.

2:28:23 - Leo Laporte
All the hard ways I did it by hand.

2:28:25 - Mike Elgan
in the old days I didn't MailChimp, I did posterous. Remember posterous.

2:28:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I did it by hand in the old days. I did MailChimp, I did Posterous. Remember Posterous? I've done it all and I've moved it from place to place.

2:28:32 - Mike Elgan
He licked the stamps on them Exactly and so, like I really appreciate, like it harasses users for the subscription Not me. It's a standard. There's lots of people on Substack who are looking to pay for content, which is great. I like making money on the content that I write there. The other criticism that he has for it, which I think is completely invalid, I mean, you know, besides that, I mean just one more point on that. Remember Platformer. Platformer famously moved from Substack to Ghost and you could just feel the sort of like you don't really hear that much about platformer as anymore I do, cause I really seek out that content. But remember, like a year or two ago, platformer was, everybody was talking about it all the time. When they were on sub stack they moved to ghost and it's like where, where'd they go? And so, and they did. Yes, they brought their things with them, but all of the promotional things that went with that they brought their things with them, but all of the promotional things that went with that, that were really great.

2:29:33 - Leo Laporte
Uh, it's funny, my substack login is still platformer at leofillcom or whatever, because I signed up. That was the first thing I signed up on the substack for right, but that was back when platformer was had the inside story on the twitter acquisition by elon musk yes and maybe that's why they're less okra yeah, I mean, I think it has a lot in my case I'm not associating with barry weiss, I'm not associating with ben shapiro.

2:29:56 - Jeff Jarvis
That's a political opinion, but it's a strongly held political opinion. I have and, and they're in partnership with barry weiss, and I'm not supporting them.

2:30:04 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so so and this is they're also in partnership with. Are they ever in partnership with people on the left?

2:30:10 - Mike Elgan
oh 99, there's so many lefty writers on substack, it's, it's not even funny. Uh, uh, you know, uh, virginia heffernan, uh, that goes on and on. There's like like that's all I see, uh in, in, I mean his.

2:30:25 - Leo Laporte
His point is not. Dave troy's point is not wrong. You might consider that if you're considering starting a newsletter and going somewhere else, Well, I mean he doesn't emphasize the Nazi element.

2:30:38 - Mike Elgan
I think that whole thing has kind of faded out. I don't even know where I stand now. It feels to me like a complete non-issue.

2:30:44 - Leo Laporte
He says people looking to launch new content sites should avoid Substack entirely because of the substantial risk of capture. That's what he's. Ok, that's ridiculous.

2:30:53 - Jeff Jarvis
And the other the other thing is like a scrape.

2:30:54 - Mike Elgan
Like there's no lock in your download. I, I've I've been on seven platforms. I can just download it today and by the end of the day I'll be on a name as long as you can download all your users Right but now they're set up with a payment system that is tied to Substack, how do you migrate their payments?

2:31:12 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I have a free newsletter.

2:31:13 - Mike Elgan
I'd have to. No, I have a for pay and a free. My free one is pretty substantial, which I recommend for everybody to really provide value to the free subscribers. I believe in that. But, like you know, yeah, it'd be a hassle to migrate the payments, but on the platforms I was on before like there was no payment, so like it was so hard to do all that stuff, and so I really appreciate it. But the other thing, the other false argument he makes is that like, oh, you're at risk of sub stack fatigue because there's so many, you know, there's so many different people on there, everybody's using it, so it's just too many too many writers on there. Well, everybody's using it, so it's just too many too many writers on there. Well, that's, that's complete BS. It's a. It's a free.

2:31:57 - Leo Laporte
you know the internet has too many writers about the internet, yeah, yeah, and the other thing, um, uh, that, um. That I think it's not unreasonable. I think both of you have points?

2:32:02 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, we have different opinions.

2:32:04 - Leo Laporte
Jeff doesn't need to be on sub stack, I would not castigate Mike for being on subs no but we're talking what we're talking about here.

2:32:10 - Mike Elgan
Jeff's, jeff's uh concerns are not really the points that were made in this article, so I'm I'm taking down this article, and and and, which has invalid points. I mean, I don't think jeff would say that it's hard to download your subscribers, uh, or there's any substantial that's not my issue, that's not your issue.

That's not your issue. This issue's political. Yeah Right, but here's the one that may also not be. Jeff may agree on this as well. He's saying, basically, that Substack is seen as part of a parallel establishment. I don't know if you've heard this, but it's like part of this broligarchy thing where they want to have a parallel government, a parallel media.

2:32:46 - Leo Laporte
This is a big deal yes, it is, it's a very andreason it's a huge deal out there and he's a big funder of substack right, but but as a, as a journalist, I'm not eviscerating the mainstream media.

2:32:59 - Mike Elgan
The mainstream media is being eviscerated by all kinds of forces and if, if, if, you know, if the new york times, the wall street journal or the atlantic or anybody. I'm, if you're listening, if you want to pay me money to write whatever I want on my own schedule and for any length that I want, and if you want to pay me the amount of money that I need to be paid, I'll delete my sub stack and take that job. But it's getting hard out there for a writer. Yeah phrase, uh, yeah, but I mean.

2:33:33 - Leo Laporte
But the ones that succeed, do quite well, right? I mean, alex kantrowitz is doing very well with his big technology letters for an american supposedly makes millions of dollars a month.

2:33:43 - Mike Elgan
I mean it's, it's ridiculous. But you know I don't care about the, the outliers like that, the. The fact is that somebody who who wants to, you know I do write for them. You know I still write for, for, for Foundry Now. Now it's Regent. They just bought Regent, just bought TechCrunch and all the, all the former IDG publications, but but you know, so I still have a foot in that realm, but you know I can see the writing on the wall and I'm going to keep writing for many, many years. And so I've been building my paid subscription model and I really appreciate Substack enabling me to do that to live around the world, to be in different time zones all the time. Sometimes I can't write for two weeks, sometimes I won't write every day for three, four days, and all of that freedom is available on substack and I really appreciate it, but not exclusive to substack.

2:34:37 - Leo Laporte
No, no, no, I'm not so. I mean ben thompson's on wordpress. He publishes with pressable yeah, see but that's the thing I.

2:34:43 - Mike Elgan
it's so hard, I I don't, I just want to write and and I don't want to be formatting, I don't want to be doing finances.

2:34:50 - Leo Laporte
This is like the argument of when, in the early days of blogs, when, when a blogger came out, there were people who said, ah, you know, you shouldn't be using blogger, you should use your own self-hosted website. Why give that money to, you know, have Williams and eventually to Google. But it made it easy for people who didn't want to do I mean, I've always done my own site pretty much, yeah but it made it easy for people who didn't want to do that.

2:35:16 - Mike Elgan
And also, I've never charged and that's probably a barrier to entry to set up an e-commerce on us what you will find when you go to sub stack and I invite everybody to do this go there and root around and try to find I dare you to find Nazi content or anything. It's just a huge repository of incredibly smart people writing really brilliant stuff, and many of them are making something of a living out of it. It's kind of a great thing, and nobody else has ever achieved this.

2:35:46 - Leo Laporte
Do you think, when you go to substackcom do they promote right-wing content?

2:35:51 - Mike Elgan
No, here's I've never seen ice. Well, I mean, I don't, there's nothing wrong with right-wing content.

2:35:59 - Leo Laporte
You know derrick guy, uh, cgp gray. Um, there's gary marcus, we just had him on the show there was unicorn roast here's midas, I mean, I don't know how much it would be them promoting that stuff as much as well, this is the social network people are pointing to that stuff usually yeah, so where? How do I go to the, the newsletter network, where's I don't even know? They had a social network yeah, it's called notes.

2:36:25 - Mike Elgan
It's not great but it it's. It's okay for people who are into newsletters and who are is there?

2:36:32 - Leo Laporte
a home page for the newsletters that's independent of the newsletter. I mean, I go to your page, yeah. Yeah, what's the? So I don't know where I am on substack, I just went to substackcom do people go to substack to discover new things? Just like the internet, they go to a specific place. I think people just get directed to Substack right?

2:36:54 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, they really push the app, and the app is just a stream of the newsletters and podcasts that are also there, and you can do it by sort of like what do you call it? Content areas, and so yeah.

2:37:11 - Leo Laporte
My original complaint was, though, though, that I have so many subscriptions, and it's really out of control it really fools you into getting more.

2:37:18 - Jeff Jarvis
I had guys. I spent days, a long day, going through and killing things that I hadn't realized I subscribed to is there?

2:37:24 - Leo Laporte
is would would it be possible to have a platform where you give the platform 50 bucks a month or whatever, and it then allows you to see everything on the platform and everybody gets a slice of it, or well, it's medium medium, medium okay okay, that's what they do, but substack is really dominant these days. Yep, why?

2:37:45 - Mike Elgan
because it's so friendly to the writers. I mean, I'm looking at the suggestions. Here's who it's suggesting to me Steve Wozniak, pete Buttigieg has a Substack apparently. Jeff Perlman, nicole Weeks, derek Thompson. It's a pretty good algorithm. It's really the way I use Substack, frankly, like I barely open the app, I don't even go to the site unless I'm posting something.

I use something called Matter. It's an app called Matter. It's a newsreader. Grab the newsletters and put it into matter and so, and I it'll read it to you with an AI voice, and so, in fact, you know, uh, in preparation for for this podcast, I actually grabbed, you know, 20 or so articles, put them into medium and while I was doing dishes and helping the move, I was listening to the articles on the rundown. Uh, pretty great, that's that's how I do it.

But the point is, like, you know, we newsletter, we long suffering newsletter publishers have have been abused. Uh, we've been. You know, I, I, I get I stopped doing my newsletter for like a couple of years and when I went back, I'm like I'm gonna start my newsletter again. Newsletters are back. And I went in there and they're like nope, you can't keep your list. So I had to start from zero and build it back up to the thousands that I have now, and it's like I've been through hell trying to be a newsletter publisher for two and a half decades and I love the fact that I can just open this thing up. I can do a nicely formatted newsletter very quickly. They handle the SEO, they handle the. I can upload massive videos. They just post that and that's delivered, to's delivered so people can watch the videos from their inbox, and it's hosted by Substack. It's so nice.

2:39:39 - Leo Laporte
Jeff. You're on Medium right, Jeff, but you also have buzzmachinecom. Do you have something like Matter that you use to read newsletters?

2:39:47 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I don't like newsletters. I can't stand newsletters. I can't stand newsletters. I unsubscribe from them constantly. I'll subscribe to them and get going, no offense. But there's some of the best writing is happening, I know, but that's the problem. It's a closed world. I miss being on blogs. I miss that being open and medium. You can hold Mike, just for one second.

2:40:03 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, but.

2:40:03 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know, you can. It's a, it's more of a blog, but you can also subscribe and have it sent to you. That's the model that I prefer, thinking now, and that's ghost does. That isn't that yeah, ghost does that too, which I like. Sub stack's not that different in a sense yeah, you're not obligated, uh, to do it.

and and if you subscribe to one newsletter there, I've, it fools me into subscribing to three more. And then I I had myself, I had 96 that I didn't know I was subscribing to, and so my email was just a mess of them and I don't read any of them as a result. It hurts that as a result. So the whole newsletter push took away, I think, from the blog world, which I regret, but that's the problem with blogs.

2:40:41 - Mike Elgan
Blogs nobody pays attention to blogs. I've been trying to get they used to, I know they used to, but nowadays nobody does, and Google has changed its algorithm to sort of like you know, they're second class citizens now, and so the Substack's aggressive push to get people to read stuff is the boost that you need. And, by the way, if you go to machinesocietyai, this is a blog like. It's just a blog. Yes, they're pushing this other stuff. Yes, it's like you know, encouraging you to subscribe and all that kind of stuff, but it's a blog. It's in the cloud, it's free to read, and there it is. It's a blog, but it's a blog with benefits, and that's what we need if you're a blogger, because blogs are going nowhere, they're not growing go through your gmail inbox.

2:41:31 - Leo Laporte
That's right. I hate it. So many tools require gmail. I mean, I understand it's the number one email, but I don't use it so it's useless to me. I think I didn't did matter get sold. I think I had matter and used matter. They got sold, right they?

2:41:41 - Mike Elgan
recently. They recently sent an email to users. That was really interesting. But there it's founded by two people whose names I don't recall, but they both got cancer in the same year. Oh, yikes, and they've both been in recovery and they're both recovering, but they're kind of going along and they're trying to raise money and stuff like that. But I think they're still owned by the original people.

2:42:02 - Leo Laporte
Okay, well, I've just re-signed up. Yeah, because I like the idea, I mean re-signed up. Yeah, because I like the idea. I mean, god that's. I spend almost every minute of every day going through news. Yeah, I use a newsreader called tapestry, which, uh, connects also to social accounts and is a really great, easy way from the icon factory mac only, unfortunately, but it's a very useful little tool yeah, the other benefit is you install the, the extension, and just click a button and whatever you have now it's added to your matter.

Yeah, yeah, I definitely spend more time with this. I feel like I used it and then I don't know why I stopped using it. But, uh, dig Wells Incorporated. Uh, all right, let's take a break and uh, the final uh minutes of the show, thank God are coming my chinese food is on order. Ah good, all right, they're coming up in just a moment. You're watching the intelligent machines with what are we having for dinner, jeff?

2:42:58 - Jeff Jarvis
a chinese, I think I'm going to get, uh, some pork gyoza. No, that's, that's japanese dumplings.

2:43:03 - Leo Laporte
They call them. Uh, they it's also. They have them in China. It's called the Gaibao Right.

2:43:10 - Jeff Jarvis
And then I'm going to have chicken with garlic and eggplant sauce.

2:43:14 - Leo Laporte
Or chicken with garlic and eggplant sauce.

2:43:16 - Jeff Jarvis
No chicken with eggplant and garlic sauce.

2:43:18 - Leo Laporte
That's fantastic.

2:43:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Eggplant and chicken sauce.

2:43:20 - Leo Laporte
I believe I am tasked to make meatloaf tonight.

2:43:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I love meatloaf, but do you put ketchup on top?

2:43:31 - Leo Laporte
I have a well Ser, well serious. Eats has a recipe mustard and stuff that involves making a ketchupy kind of a glaze you put on top, and there's some bacon involved and then the next day the sandwiches. Oh it's best for sandwiches, this is how.

2:43:39 - Jeff Jarvis
This is how white bread I am. Next day it's white bread, a sandwich on white bread with miracle whip, miracle whip baby have a sweet mother of well I'm making, I'm making patty melt.

2:43:51 - Mike Elgan
He thought he was mad about sub stack. Now he's really pissed. So I'll tell you the bread that I'm using.

2:43:56 - Leo Laporte
Uh, it's homemade sourdough bread made with Emmer oh yeah, you turned me on to these old uh wheats.

2:44:03 - Mike Elgan
Yes, yes, and so that's what. That's what I'm having.

2:44:06 - Leo Laporte
I still have my wolfgang uh wheat mill so I can make my own flour from these um heritage wheats. Yeah, yep, I am making bagels these days uh, pretty regularly, and I it's wonderful, they're homemade bagels, nothing like it, although I'm a little nervous.

I have been using uh malt, barley malt, uh syrup to boil the bagels in to get the browning. But I was challenged by Amy Webb. She said well, do you use lye? I said what she said you got to use lye. That's not a bagel unless you boil it in lye. So I ordered some food grade lye, which it says on the bottle can also be used as a drain cleaner. Are you sure you didn't piss off amy? It's also said wear gloves and eye protection before using. No, no, it really. I looked it up. It says ai told me a lie and elmer's glue are common ingredients. No, no, no, it is in fact what they use. They use a very small lie is just very alkaline. So use a very small amount in a pot of water, you know, and it it helps it get brown.

2:45:18 - Mike Elgan
I guess and you can also use it to niximalize corn. Presumably yeah, and make pretzels.

2:45:24 - Leo Laporte
So who knew? Yeah, yeah, and now I have a lot of lie. If anybody, because you can't buy a small amount, it's an industrial grade product.

No, I I've been, I've been trying, I've been trying, uh, with the barley, I'm gonna try it with lie this week and we'll see. We'll see what happens uh. Thank you, mike elga, for joining us. Uh, we will give a little plug to kevin's business, uh, before we uh depart, because that's that's part of the deal. His son, kevin, does an amazing uh thing called chatterbox, yes, which is a way for schools to teach kids about ai without um invading their privacy. That's right.

2:46:10 - Mike Elgan
Hello, you're looking at hellochatterboxcom and yes, and this is, you know, speaking of Wolfram Alpha.

One of the many skills that kids can use is they can build in.

They have APIs that go to Wolfram Alpha, so if you have, you want to do math type of problems or do any of the many things that Wolfram Alpha is great at, you can do that with a voice command through Chatterbox, and this is the only COPA-compliant smart speaker that's legally usable in schools because it's so private.

Part of the privacy is that giant button on the top which it doesn't listen until you press the button and you have to be kind of nearby to use it.

So you have to be nearby to press the button, for example, and so that combination of proximity and pushing the button, plus the fact that neither Chatterbox nor any of the companies that he accesses through the APIs know who the user is they have no data, no information at all about who the user is, and so this has been a very difficult problem for him to achieve this. But it's totally private and what he wants to do is make sure that kids get used to the idea that there is no monetization of their personal data, and so that's all very clear to kids and what other products that are in the environment that we all use the smartphones, the smart speakers they all just sort of make us calloused in terms of like, yeah, they're getting all my data, what are you going to do? So this is something that he doesn't do for the kids. So it's very great and it's very educational and it's a maker space in a box that teaches kids to be makers of technology and not just passive consumers.

2:47:41 - Leo Laporte
So I always love giving this a plug. It's a great thing, Hello Chatterboxcom.

2:47:49 - Mike Elgan
And thank you for that. Yes.

2:47:51 - Leo Laporte
We're going to get our picks of the week and final thoughts as we wrap up this episode of Intelligent Machines in just a little bit, with Jeff Jarvis, mike Elgin filling in for Paris Martineau I'm Leo Laporte. All right, that was our brief pause. Now it's time for your pick of the week. Shall I start with you? I'll start with you, jeff. Okay, I can tell you want to get my Chinese food.

2:48:15 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, I guess I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do a real quick.

2:48:18 - Jeff Jarvis
M&A report and I found this interesting that all together, in one week, the skim was bought by Ziff Davis, napster was bought by a, I think, a private equity company. Yeah, who was bought by an investment firm Yahoo, I'm sorry, techcrunch, techcrunch, techcrunch. Yes, sold by Yahoo to investment firm Regent.

2:48:42 - Mike Elgan
Yes which also bought Computer World, pc world, all those, all those public.

2:48:48 - Leo Laporte
ID stuff.

2:48:49 - Mike Elgan
I now work for the same company that TechCrunch so confusing, so confusing.

2:48:56 - Leo Laporte
Yep, what was the skim?

2:48:59 - Jeff Jarvis
as a skim was that great was a great newsletter, um, uh, aimed at women. That's why you don't know what it is. Ah, young women. That's especially two reasons you don't know what it is. Ah, young women. That's especially two reasons you don't know what it is. Uh, it was founded in 2012 by Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, providing subscription only newsletter digest of news stories intended to be simple and easy to read. Nice it was. It was really well done, very popular in the day, but you know, things have their heat and they're cool.

2:49:31 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's been sold doesn't mean it's cooled. It might mean that it's now on its way, uh to the moon.

2:49:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, yeah, and working for ziff davis is is a very good place to land I think so.

2:49:38 - Leo Laporte
We like those folks. We yeah, I used to work for them, yeah, I think I consulted for them once. Yeah so that was it for me. Mike has a toy for us, or two?

2:49:49 - Mike Elgan
yes, okay, so, as you know, I'm a ray-ban meta enthusiast and that I travel around to foreign language countries. Uh, they have an experimental feature on ray-ban metas, which is live translation. Oh, once you launch that feature, uh, it will just be listening constantly, you don't have to do anything, and anytime it hears anything spoken it will translate it. They have three languages right now French, spanish and Italian, which is perfect for me because that's most of the countries I go to speak those languages On the app. It'll show you. When you say something back in English, it'll show you what you said in English, followed by what that translation would be into Italian or whatever language you have selected. Okay, so this feature works pretty well. It's not bad. You can't use it for, like, sitting around a table with five people because you go nuts, because it's like there's a delay and you can't do it. But if, like you're just want to go up and ask somebody a question, you'll understand the answer. People giving you instructions, like at the airport, or whatever. You can understand those. It's really nice.

Here's something I've never heard anybody talk about or write about In addition to live translation, they have something called live AI. So this is like the Google thing, the Gemini thing we were talking about earlier, where it's just getting the video feed and you're interacting, asking questions about what it sees. So live AI works just like that through the glasses Glasses the right place for this. It's not the phone Nobody's going to use it on the phone but in glasses it will be silent, doesn't say anything and you can just say well, you know what kind of business am I in, and, based on what it saw through your glasses, it will tell you details.

Now here's the thing that I've never heard anybody talk about. It also does translation. So if you look at a sign and say what does this sign say? In English, it will tell you, and I've tested it on a gazillion languages, including Japanese, including other things, and it always translates it correctly into the language. And so to use live AI as a visual language translator is really incredible and really I think it's the future of where we're going and one of the things we're going to be able to do with AI glasses.

2:52:09 - Leo Laporte
So to do this, I have to sign up for meta's early access program that's correct, that is correct which I presume I can do that in the app uh, yes, I think so, it may.

2:52:18 - Mike Elgan
I may not happen right away, so if you try to do this, uh here, but anyway, this is a my point is not you know, go buy ray-ban meta glasses and use this feature.

My point is this is the future that we're all going to have access to within a year or two. This is going to be very commonplace. It's going to be kind of a cool feature and very quickly, I want to do one more Ray-Ban Meta thing. That is really kind of ridiculous. There's a startup that's offering a product called a Metaport, and what this does is it adds a battery but extends the battery for your glasses. Yeah, but you look like a dork.

Yes, exactly it's ridiculous it clamps onto the front and the side and you kind of look like you're wearing google glass. So we're back to. We're back to that glass hole. Look, you know, that's so popular with the kids nowadays oh my god, is it?

2:53:04 - Leo Laporte
it looks like it's 3d printed, or it looks like it's a licorice turd on your glasses, I don't know what it is.

2:53:10 - Mike Elgan
That would be a better brand name than Metaport Licorice turd. That would be fun.

2:53:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh wait, they have clear ones.

2:53:17 - Mike Elgan
So there you go, get the orange one, get the orange one, get the orange. Yeah, baby.

2:53:21 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's what I figure, If you're going to do it Just go, all out Go big or go home. What do you get for battery life? I never wear these long enough to find out.

2:53:32 - Mike Elgan
It's fine. You get a few hours with just the glasses, and then the case itself is a battery, so you put them in the case Even if it's not plugged in. You get a few more hours.

2:53:42 - Leo Laporte
Just getting the update to 13.0. So as soon as I do, I will sign up for the early access program. Even though these classes really are not flattering.

2:53:54 - Benito Gonzalez
How does it work with, say, the difference between Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish?

2:54:01 - Mike Elgan
So far it works great. I've done it in Mexico. I've heard Spanish from people who have thickly accented. They're Zapotec speakers and they speak Spanish. Mexico I've I've, uh, heard spanish from people have thickly accented. They're you know, they're zapata zapotec speakers and and they speak spanish with an accent and understood it fine. I've also had problems with it, like we're in a restaurant one time and there are people playing pool at a pool table, like law, far away, and they were talking to each other and it was just giving me all of that. I was trying to have, you know, trying to mind my own business, and just kept giving me the english translation of what they were saying. Uh, sometimes when somebody's right in front of you, it doesn't quite pick it up. And here's the funniest part if somebody says something in english, it will translate that english into english and sometimes it mistranslates it. Huh, from english to english.

That's, my wife will say something to me and then it gives me the wrong translation in english doesn't round trip well yeah, but but my point in my larger point is that this is every device that is anywhere near our ears headphones, ear earbuds we'll do this with the airpods for exactly yeah, language translation and it's gonna. It's gonna harm the, the, the cause of learning foreign languages, because people are going to be like, well, why bother? But the problem of people speaking foreign languages is going to be erased almost by AI within the next couple of years.

2:55:22 - Leo Laporte
Ah well, we've erased Jeff Jarvis. I got to go. I got to go the restaurant closes. Thank you, jeff. Take care, go get some Chinese food, Jeff. Jarvis buzzmachinecom, His latest the Web. We Weave Gutenberg parenthesis now out in paperback All at jeffjarviscom. Take care, Jeff. Thank you.

2:55:40 - Mike Elgan
Bye, Jeff Bye.

2:55:41 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, mike Elgin, always a pleasure. Pleasure is mine filling in for paris this week anytime.

2:55:52 - Mike Elgan
Have a wonderful time in sicily.

2:55:53 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, yeah I'll do it for you guys, thanks to all of you, I can see you.

2:55:56 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, with these glasses I could see joe and sally and timmy and a little johnny, and that's a reference most, most of these kids won't get.

2:56:05 - Leo Laporte
I can see you all romper, stomper, dumper, do uh, we uh do this show. Every you can go, you, you go, you guys can go. I'll finish up all along here. Thank you, take care. All right, thanks, I don't want to make them stick around.

We do this show, uh, every wednesday, uh, 2 pm. Pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2100 utc. We kick things off, uh or at least we have been since the kind of rebranding to intelligent machines, with an interview with somebody doing something interesting in AI, like our guest Gary Rivlin this week fantastic book, by the way, ai Valley just out. So tune in and make sure you don't miss that first half hour of the show. Afterwards we cover AI news and in other news and picks of the week. Paris will be back in two weeks. I will be back next week and I hope you will be too.

You can watch us live if you're a club twit member in the club twit discord always a great place to hang but you can also watch on youtube, twitch, tiktok, xcom, facebook linkedin and kick wherever you want to watch the stream. You can, and you can chat with us in that stream. Until they revoke section 230, we'll have those chat rooms and I see everybody talking in there right now. So it's, it's nice. Endless music, said he said my name hi, oscar, I see you. I see you after the fact, you After the fact. Oh, they're just telling me. Oh, yeah, after the fact, you can watch the show on our website. Where is that? Twitim? You can also watch a YouTube channel dedicated to the video of Intelligent Machines. Or, best thing to do, subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way, you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done cleaning it up, taking out the swear words and all of that. You know what I mean. We like to make it accessible to the youngsters.

Yes, thank you all for being here. Join the club if you're not already a member. Twittv slash club, twit. Seven bucks a month for ad-free versions of all our shows and access to the Discord. Lots of special events going on too. We've got some big ones planned. Thank you to Benito Gonzalez, our producer and Booker, for putting this all together, flipping the switches. Thanks to you for joining us. I'll see you next time on Intelligent Machines. Bye-bye.