Intelligent Machines 876 transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Paris has the week off. She's in Montana. Jeff Jarvis is here. Our guest, Olivier Sylvain says we should stop Section 230 because Big Tech's getting away with murder. The author of Reclaiming the Internet. Coming up next on Intelligent Machines, podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit.

Leo Laporte [00:00:28]:
This is Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Jeff Chart, Episode 876, recorded Wednesday, June 24, 2026. It's no Melania. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show. We cover the latest in AI robotics and all those smart doohickeys all around you. Joining me right now, Professor Emeritus Jeff Jarvis, the former. You don't. You're never former, are you?

Jeff Jarvis [00:00:54]:
What's your emeritus? No, you're just. It's Latin for old.

Leo Laporte [00:00:59]:
Professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School. Oh, wrong button. Oops, Wrong button.

Jeff Jarvis [00:01:07]:
Newmark.

Leo Laporte [00:01:09]:
Wrong button. Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Now at Montclair State and SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of a brand new book coming out in a little bit more than a month. Hot Type. The story of the machine that Drove Mark Twain Crazy. The Linotype and of course the web we weave and magazine and the Gutenberg parenthesis. You've been rotating the books.

Jeff Jarvis [00:01:38]:
Well, I figured given today, since we're talking about trying to save the web, I would put out the web weave. I was telling Olivier that his book, no Doubt, has sold already much more than mine since no one bought mine.

Leo Laporte [00:01:49]:
But Paris Martineau is on vacation this week in Big sky country. She was hoping to join us, but she said the youth hostel she's staying in doesn't exactly have the best bandwidth out there in Montana. Actually, I'm glad she's having a nice time in a beautiful area of the country, so I wouldn't want her to work on vacation. So it's just me and Jeff today, but we're not alone. We have a guest. Olivier Sylvain is the professor and author of a brand new book, well, relatively new, came out a couple of months ago. Reclaiming the How Big Tech Took Control and How we can Take it back. From Columbia Global Reports.

Leo Laporte [00:02:31]:
Professor Sylvain, welcome.

Olivier Sylvain [00:02:34]:
Thank you very much. It's a thrill to join you folks here.

Leo Laporte [00:02:38]:
We're glad to have you. You're a law professor, but I think people might recognize your name because you were at the FTC as senior advisor to Lina Khan for a couple of

Olivier Sylvain [00:02:49]:
years and yeah, they may Recognize my name because of that. That was mostly behind the scenes senior advisor. You know, for a middle aged person to take some time away from academia, it was a thrill to join Chair Khan at an exciting time at the ftc.

Jeff Jarvis [00:03:08]:
Where is bureaucracy worse? University or federal government?

Olivier Sylvain [00:03:11]:
Wow, that's a tough one. But you know the answer to that, I think, Jeff, the answer. Government is pretty thick with bureaucracy. And maybe another book I can talk a little bit about why some of the things I would have loved to have seen didn't happen. But that's another story.

Leo Laporte [00:03:29]:
Well, Chair Khan, really very young, came out of academia as well and really took on big tech. Unfortunately, a number of the cases she brought have been dropped in the subsequent administration. So I can't say she had a run of successes. I wish she, I wish she had. I think she was doing the right thing.

Jeff Jarvis [00:03:49]:
She certainly changed the discussion and the agenda.

Olivier Sylvain [00:03:52]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't, you know, I, I think I understand your point given that, you know, after four years you have a new administration that comes in and pulls a rag from under. Sure. But I think I'm with, with Jeff here. I'd probably go further and say there was, it was a, it was a, the four years were successful at least because it opened the aperture for what is possible. The kinds of things that I focus on were consumer protection issues, not competition issues. With regards to competition, I'm happy to talk about that stuff. But with regards to consumer protection, there are a couple statutory authorities that the FTC is currently using more than they had before this.

Olivier Sylvain [00:04:34]:
This ftc, including ROSCA, statutes addressed to dark patterns on online activity and Section 5 unfairness. It's not just deception anymore. Right. It's not just false claims that companies make about their services. It's also just foundational unfairness. This is something this current administration is using as well. So I actually think there's a lot of success that happened in the administration under Khan's leadership.

Leo Laporte [00:05:04]:
Yeah, I guess when it comes to government, it's progress, not perfection. You always hope to make little incremental improvements bit by bit. So I want to talk a little bit about your book. First of all, why do we need to reclaim the Internet? Who's got it now?

Olivier Sylvain [00:05:22]:
Well, it's not the so called users

Jeff Jarvis [00:05:27]:
that

Olivier Sylvain [00:05:30]:
many of us were fantasizing about in the 1990s that I know that Professor Jarvis has written about. It's, it's not, it's not, it's not them. And I think that's a pretty uncontroversial observation. You Know, the argument of the book is that you just have to look as far as the inauguration stage, January 2025, to see what's happened where the dominant players in our tech information economy were sitting right behind the President and very quickly benefited from, you know, the. The President's promises. So. So the extractive model that a lot of people have written about has. Has gotten some rocket fuel under this administration.

Olivier Sylvain [00:06:24]:
Those are the folks that are running the show now, but they have for a while. And part of the reason is because of what Congress and the courts have done over the past couple of decades.

Leo Laporte [00:06:35]:
They might defend themselves saying, hey, but we built it without our capital, without our servers, without our software, what would the Internet be? I mean, we. We. The people put the content on there, but it's their servers that we put the content on.

Olivier Sylvain [00:06:53]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:06:53]:
Kind of the telco argument, too, that we were going through with net neutrality versus the platform argument.

Olivier Sylvain [00:06:59]:
Yeah. I mean, we can talk about telcos. I mean, I start as a tech lawyer at General Block working on FCC issues, so. So, so I do. I agree there are echoes with regards to telco, but. But these are not companies that built it alone. The argument that I make is that they rely on a regulatory regime that is especially forgiving, especially deferential, so that the business model that emerges in the early 2000s never gets a close look until relatively recently. And so they got a big boost.

Olivier Sylvain [00:07:37]:
The more provocative claim I make, and I don't think is inaccurate, I'd love someone to tell me I'm wrong, is that the only industry that enjoys the same sort of legal protection, if not is the gun industry. These are companies that can get away with building applications and services that

Benito Gonzalez [00:07:58]:
hold

Olivier Sylvain [00:07:58]:
people's attention, even at the expense of those very consumers.

Leo Laporte [00:08:03]:
Yeah, you actually talk about the gun industry when you're talking about section 230, which we're going to get to.

Olivier Sylvain [00:08:10]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:08:12]:
Jeff and I both come from the John Perry Barlow generation of. We believed the Internet was going to democratize everything and it was going to open up a whole new means of communication and so forth.

Jeff Jarvis [00:08:28]:
And so it is like Commissioner Khan's. Like you're pointing about Commissioner Khan's tenure. In many ways, it has.

Leo Laporte [00:08:35]:
Well, that's the thing.

Jeff Jarvis [00:08:37]:
Reject. Yes, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:08:39]:
Yeah.

Olivier Sylvain [00:08:41]:
So I agree with that, by the way. I mean, it's. Who couldn't, you know, agree with the idea that it's been transformational in many good ways, for sure.

Leo Laporte [00:08:50]:
And yet we're also fans of Cory Doctorow and acknowledge that insidification is rampant. And you Call it ruthless commercial exploitation, but it's the same, it's the same thing.

Jeff Jarvis [00:09:04]:
And I just reread the Hutchins commission report from 1947 about the media and the news industry. And I think we think nostalgically that media back then was good before it got shittified, but there was a whole commission brought together because people thought that media was back then, well, isn't it

Leo Laporte [00:09:22]:
kind of the way of capitalism? We thought the Internet was free. We were obviously deluded. And at some point the bill came due and these companies were giving it away probably fully with knowledge that at some point they were going to be able to exploit it. And as Shoshana Zuboff has pointed out, I know you're not a huge fan of hers, Jeff, but that's kind of the nature of surveillance capitalism that she would say the whole thing was built specifically for that purpose. How do we reclaim it? I mean, I think we don't have to debate that. I think everybody's watching.

Jeff Jarvis [00:10:01]:
We need a better Internet.

Leo Laporte [00:10:02]:
Question knows we need a better Internet, but how do we get there?

Olivier Sylvain [00:10:05]:
You know, I, I, I very, I, I like reading that stuff from the 90s. BARLOW and you know, they're, they're, he fatted the E.A. the American dream. I mean, there are all these really, really amazing peons and what is possible, even Yochai Benkler when he writes the wealth of networks in 2006, you're still tapping into that. It's really attractive.

Leo Laporte [00:10:31]:
Yeah.

Olivier Sylvain [00:10:32]:
And you know, as someone who, with, with ACLU roots, I, I, there's a libertarian in me somewhere that, that thinks, you know, this is really, really great stuff, but I think that that discourse, that language was always, was always distracting and, and insufficiently alert to what would, as you say, what happens in capitalism. Right. I mean, there, there are business models that have to emerge. The one thing I don't think people totally got, or maybe I didn't, at least maybe you did, is the dramatic information asymmetry between the administrators of servers and the services behind the screen and the consumers. I don't think people totally understood what that would look like. They really thought that they would be governing the space co equally. But that of course was no, was never the case.

Jeff Jarvis [00:11:23]:
But didn't, we didn't if you, I'm sorry, I'm gonna do this because I write books about the history of media and technology. If we go back, the asymmetry was tremendous in mass media.

Olivier Sylvain [00:11:34]:
Yes.

Jeff Jarvis [00:11:35]:
People had no opportunity to speak whatsoever. That's what the Hutchins Commission report Worries about just to recall that again. And so the asymmetry may still be there, but isn't it, isn't it tremendously lessened in that anyone can speak now, no guarantee of being heard, Never was, never should be. So the asymmetry is still there. I agree with you. But isn't it a lot better than it was?

Olivier Sylvain [00:11:58]:
So I think potentially it was. But, you know, I'm happy to talk about this, Jeff, because, you know, I'm also a media history kind of person. You know, the Fairness Doctrine is not, you know, unimportant for thinking about the obligations the companies have. The licensing regime that the FCC sets up or that Congress sets up, that the FCC implements is not, you know, incidental. It's important to addressing the asymmetry. Right. I mean, the language that the courts and policymakers are making, as you know, is that there are just a handful of broadcasters who are running the show and we have to keep them accountable. Now, I'm not a huge fan of that comparative licensing regime as it was set up.

Olivier Sylvain [00:12:43]:
It was rife with corruption, too, but at least there was a mechanism for regulatory oversight. We haven't had this in the Internet setting ever.

Jeff Jarvis [00:12:53]:
But wasn't broadcast the exception? The rights that were given to print were sliced down like baloney Comm Radio. And again, reading about that and you know far more about this than I do, having worked with the FCC and understanding the roots of its regulation. But that was a slice taken out of the First Amendment, so that print had far more rights and remains with far more rights than broadcast did. And far more respect, I would say print has than broadcast did. And so should the. In an Internet where people have the ability to respond, the ability to speak, should it be closer to print or to broadcast in its regulatory regime?

Leo Laporte [00:13:36]:
No.

Olivier Sylvain [00:13:36]:
I mean, this is a great question. This is the perennial question. And the Supreme Court, I mean, I'm going to answer by starting with what the courts have said, which I know you know the answer to, and then tell you what I think that the, you know, they've said. It's much more like newspapers. Right. When Justice Stevens for the Supreme Court writes the Reno vs. ACLU opinion, he's talking about pamphleteers and libraries. Right.

Olivier Sylvain [00:14:01]:
And right. The web is one big library and that we're all individual pamphleteers. I think he has taken the story that Barlow and others are telling full cloth and restating it in the language of law. I think that is. I think that was wrong and I don't blame them. I was right there. Right. I mean, I I, I mean younger, but, but definitely excited about what was possible.

Olivier Sylvain [00:14:32]:
The problem is that the, it went further. Right. The First Amendment is one thing, and then Congress. I know, Leo, you said we'll talk about it. I can't help bring it up. But Congress goes further and insulates the companies from liability. Publishers are not subject to that same, same sort of benefit. Right.

Olivier Sylvain [00:14:51]:
So. So this goes beyond even what newspapers were doing. And what I'm talking about is this protection under 47 USC 230.

Jeff Jarvis [00:15:00]:
Right. But when I started, I worked for Advanced. I'm not a real professor by the way, just to be clear here. I snuck in through the side door of journalism. But when I worked as president of Creative Director of Advance.net, i started all of our newspaper sites and sort of worked on our magazine sites and so on. We were highly interactive. We were highly open to having the public there. My boss, Steve Newhouse believed in that immensely, that this was very different from a content based medium of magazines.

Jeff Jarvis [00:15:28]:
But if I knew our lawyers well and if we had been liable for the speech of others on our platform, we wouldn't have had it.

Olivier Sylvain [00:15:35]:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis [00:15:36]:
And I shudder to think how much would have been lost and still could be lost. And we see it happening just for the expense of moderation. And I think your points about moderation are right and we'll get to that. A lot of people are taking down comments and forums and such because it's too much of a pain in the ass. Not because it's liable. But if you add liability into that. We do. We end up back in the place where there's a few media brands and they're theirs and they're not ours and we can't speak in them.

Olivier Sylvain [00:16:09]:
Yeah, I mean, I do think this is a realistic threat when you don't have. There are no mechanisms to protect publishers in the way you described and especially online. Right. There's so much more content trafficking through servers online than there are than on a news. In a newspaper.

Jeff Jarvis [00:16:30]:
Right.

Olivier Sylvain [00:16:31]:
So the exposure is tremendous. I'm with you there. The problem is that I don't think that there's any shortage of incentive to build business models that could account for that potential. There was just so much commercial opportunity, I didn't know what it was. But I don't think that there. I think there are companies that would have come up with strategies to account for potentially unlawful distribution of content. I don't know this for a fact, but this is a hunch that I have and it would have been nice to have seen what it would look like in the absence of this substantial statutory protection, for what it's worth, there is a protection under First Amendment doctrine for newspapers and that would have been applied to the Internet. And that is once the companies know that they're distributing information that is harmful, they should be held accountable.

Olivier Sylvain [00:17:25]:
When they don't know. I'm with you, Jeff. That's not something that you could really anticipate. But when they know as a matter of course that this is happening, that unlawful stuff is being distributed, they should be held accountable. I would like to see what the world looks like when that liability regime exists.

Leo Laporte [00:17:41]:
Hold on a second. We're talking to Professor Olivier Sylvain. He's professor of law at Fordham University, as you mentioned, a former ACLU fellow in the legal office in New York. He is also a, I think former director at the Knight Institute. Is that right or you still.

Olivier Sylvain [00:18:04]:
I was just finished two and a half stint there. The research.

Leo Laporte [00:18:10]:
Also the author of a new book called Reclaiming the How Big Tech Took Control and How We Can Take It Back. So I just want to raise one issue and I think it's really timely because of course we just had the decision in Los Angeles with Facebook or Meta, and also in New Mexico. And I think it's timely because I want to really make a distinction when you talk about Section 230 often. I think far too often we talk about section 230 with regard to big tech companies like Meta. But I run a discourse forum. I run a Mastodon instance. I'm running a chat room right now on Discord. I am not a big guy.

Leo Laporte [00:18:55]:
And section 230 protects me because I don't have to defend myself in court. I understand your desire to say let's go to court so that we can litigate these issues. Section 230 cuts that off. It doesn't let it go to a case. It's a defense. And I just say, no, you can't sue me because I am not the publisher of this content. I'm just providing this form. Plus I can moderate it thanks to section230.

Leo Laporte [00:19:22]:
I can't be prevented from moderating it or not moderating it. I think that's really important. Absent that kind of protection, I can't afford to go to court. I would shut those down.

Olivier Sylvain [00:19:33]:
Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Leo Laporte [00:19:37]:
No, I just. I think that there's a big distinction between how 6 and 2:30 is used by big tech and how it protects little tech, little guys like me.

Olivier Sylvain [00:19:47]:
Yeah, I think that's what Jeff was Channeling as well. I'm sure that you two worked on extraordinary projects online. I love to talk about Wikipedia in this regard.

Leo Laporte [00:20:00]:
Good example.

Jeff Jarvis [00:20:00]:
Yes.

Olivier Sylvain [00:20:01]:
It is a miracle to me. I can't believe believe that it's community governed. Not entirely, but that it looks the way it does is astonishing. And I think that if there's a case to be made that there's a small tech, let's call it medium or small tech requires legal protection. It's a company like that or the ones you describe. Listen, I'm sympathetic to that instinct, but there is another protection that these companies enjoy and that's the First Amendment. The Supreme Court ratified a pretty generous view of what the First Amendment means and the choices that companies make about the content they distribute. A couple years ago, Moody versus NetChoice.

Olivier Sylvain [00:20:50]:
I know we're going to talk about Section 30, but I want to make sure that Section 230 lays atop another protection that comes now.

Leo Laporte [00:20:57]:
Yes, except that I would have to defend that in court as opposed to short circuiting it with two things.

Olivier Sylvain [00:21:03]:
Yeah, yeah. And you know, this is. I have the benefit of never having run a company and maybe that's a bad thing. I think many people probably think it is a bad thing that I, that I and others who are critical haven't been in the shoes that you've been in. But I, as I said earlier, I would like to see what the world looks like when companies do have an incentive to build services and filters and moderation techniques because there is so much money to be made. So I would like to see what that world looks like. I do think that there are some companies that would be chilled. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:21:39]:
All of the services I just described are pro bono. We do not make money on them. I would have to shut them down, period.

Olivier Sylvain [00:21:45]:
With the risk. Because of the risk of litigation.

Leo Laporte [00:21:47]:
Yeah. I cannot defend any litigation. There are people out there who would happily sue me because it would be a chance to show shut me down. So that's issue one. Now, I don't disagree with you and I think this recent LA case is very interesting that there are product liabilities

Jeff Jarvis [00:22:02]:
and product design questions, which is different from the content questions. Right?

Leo Laporte [00:22:06]:
Yeah.

Olivier Sylvain [00:22:06]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:22:07]:
Does Section 230 protect them in that case as well?

Olivier Sylvain [00:22:10]:
So this is what I've been arguing for the past 10 years. And I would like at some point if we could circle back to this really interesting, provocative point you've made about small tech. Right. So I do want to turn to the. But this is. You're talking about as the heartland of what I've been arguing for a long time and that section 230 should not be invoked by companies, that it's small or big. To the extent that the argument that plaintiffs make, that victims make, or that the ways in which a company has designed their services ought to be subject to legal scrutiny, never mind the content that goes through from users.

Leo Laporte [00:22:44]:
Yeah, that's a complete. There's these really two different issues.

Jeff Jarvis [00:22:47]:
Yeah.

Olivier Sylvain [00:22:47]:
Well, well, so.

Leo Laporte [00:22:48]:
And you also. You say it's the algorithm. And I certainly think you can make the case that they've designed an algorithm to be addictive, compulsive even. Look at people scrolling through Instagram in the middle of the night, including me.

Jeff Jarvis [00:23:01]:
Like Ray and Dickens Novel, though.

Leo Laporte [00:23:03]:
Yeah. Or like Dickens. That's problematic. But I would also point out that even if you merely made an algorithm to surface the most interesting material, the stuff, if you. In other words, if you turn that algorithm off and you're going to make a product that is not as good, let alone compelling. Well, so there's some defense in making some in algorithms in general.

Olivier Sylvain [00:23:26]:
Yeah. I mean, the Internet is comprised of algorithms.

Leo Laporte [00:23:28]:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis [00:23:30]:
Everything is a choice.

Leo Laporte [00:23:32]:
Editor makes a choice on the front page of the New York Times. Right.

Olivier Sylvain [00:23:34]:
Who wants to read something reverse chronological order. Right. I mean. I mean. Or alphabetical order or whatever. I mean, there's something about the algorithmic delivery of content that people want to see that is, of course, something we can celebrate on the one hand, but that's not really. For me, that is a misdirection in some ways. And we can talk about the trials just to get at this a little bit.

Olivier Sylvain [00:24:02]:
Right. So the trial out of New Mexico involved involves claims that the attorney general, state attorney general makes that says that Facebook is basically a space in which predators can find sexual predators, can find young people, and this is demonstrably true. As well as design services that are. With the limitless scroll and Autoplay video. Autoplay, doing something that resembles addiction. The key point is that section 230 blocked inquiry into whether the companies could be held liable for that period. Right. That's what230 blocked, not whether.

Olivier Sylvain [00:24:44]:
And by the way, I'm not sure whether in any given circumstance an algorithmic recommendation should be something that we hold someone legally liable for. But the inquiry itself was blocked off until courts started getting hip to this design theory, which is happening. There's a big case out of California involving Lemon. I mean, all these big cases are out of California, but the Lemon versus Snap, where Snap has a speed filter that you could predict a Teenage boy driving a car is going to use really dangerously.

Leo Laporte [00:25:17]:
Yeah, I've used it, although on the shuriken in Japan to see how fast the bullet train was going. So they're also legitimate uses of that. Yeah, I understand you use as an example in your book Arms List, which is a marketplace for unregistered firearms sales and they escaped liability because those gun listings were third party content. And so that is something maybe that's a little more visceral that people can really understand versus say Facebook.

Olivier Sylvain [00:25:47]:
Can I add a fact to this?

Leo Laporte [00:25:48]:
Yeah.

Olivier Sylvain [00:25:49]:
Arms List had as part of their design a space called Backroom where unlicensed gun licensed, you know, people who couldn't have a license to a gun could buy unregistered weapons. A domestic abuser says he wants to hurt his wife, doesn't have a license, a gun gets it. And, and the company prevails in a Section 230 defense because it's user generated content.

Jeff Jarvis [00:26:14]:
There's also the gun politics there.

Leo Laporte [00:26:17]:
But we can curious that, I mean that, you know, that's, that's a very visceral case of yeah, boy, that seems like that's a bad thing. But I, but I again bring up as a counter example my benign little Mastodon instance. You know, and I, and I would.

Jeff Jarvis [00:26:34]:
So. But in the design case, Leo, if I'm wrong in reading this way that the issue would be whether Mastodon is designed right. In such a way clearly armsless versus what Leo does in moderation.

Leo Laporte [00:26:47]:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis [00:26:47]:
Are you. What do you think of the. And I don't know the latest on it, but the various discussions in the UK on requiring a duty of care, does that put a proper or too much of a requirement on these platforms that they can they. And this goes into AI very quickly. Can you predict every use and every harmful outcome of something you've designed? Should you have a responsibility to do so?

Leo Laporte [00:27:11]:
Is it possible I will add one more little thing to this. I just recently, like a minute ago, right before the show, banned an account that was posting nudity because I don't want nudity on my masthead. On. I don't want him to be able to come after me and say, well, my first amendment right is being violated here.

Jeff Jarvis [00:27:29]:
Well, you're not the government.

Leo Laporte [00:27:31]:
Okay, you're right, that's true. Good point. But I'm still being censored.

Olivier Sylvain [00:27:34]:
By the way, this move that. I know that you got Jeff's retort there, but this move you made is the argument that a lot of people, mostly on the right of the making

Leo Laporte [00:27:44]:
About Facebook makes they're conflating the first amendment.

Jeff Jarvis [00:27:47]:
Yeah.

Olivier Sylvain [00:27:48]:
But this point about the duty of care is really interesting, by the way, it's happening in the US Too, with this discussion of casa. The Kids Online Safety act is considering there's a duty of care statute provision in that bill. I mean, you know, I am warm to that idea. For what it's worth. There are in law already obligations to attend to prospective harm, foreseeable harm in the common law. Now I'm, you know, I'm, I, you know, I can admit I'm, I tend to be a big government kind of person, so I'm not so worried about a new statutory provision that imposes an obligation to take care of people. But we already have negligence and, and product liability, as Jeff invoked. And the facts in some of these cases that have been litigated are really important.

Olivier Sylvain [00:28:32]:
Right. This is not like you're a mastodon or instance. Nor is it like mastodon. It's Facebook internal reporting saying, we know that this stuff is hurting young girls. Right. There are young girls that have kind of, you know, developed psychological concerns involving their body stories about self harm. There are internal reports and the company does not heed them.

Benito Gonzalez [00:29:01]:
Right.

Olivier Sylvain [00:29:02]:
This is foreseeable harm.

Jeff Jarvis [00:29:04]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:29:04]:
Those Francis Hagen documents were probably very much part of the jury's consideration. Right?

Olivier Sylvain [00:29:09]:
Absolutely right. And I don't think you need a duty of care to get that right.

Jeff Jarvis [00:29:14]:
So let me take this to AI if I can, because I think there's an interesting extension there. So I'll stipulate, your honor, that Facebook can have some harms and knows of those harms. It has the data and thus should do something about them and could be held in different law liable for them. Okay, so let's, let's presume that. But then the interesting discussion we get into with AI and with air quotes, guardrails around them is my contention regularly is that it's a general machine, like the printing press. You cannot predict every possible use to which it'll be put. You're not in control of every use to which it'll be put. You put a model out there, and so does the liability creep back to the, to the AI creator, or does it rest with the user who asks for it to do something bad? Where do you see that? Because I think there's a straight line here from the Internet and AI and I'm curious where you think a precedent in one will affect analysis of the other.

Olivier Sylvain [00:30:09]:
I would have us look at case by case to see who, whether or not the developer of an AI model should be held accountable or not and that sometimes the, the, either the deployer or the user should be held responsible. I mean, I'm actually with you there. But let's consider the cases that are emerging again, they're very dramatic cases involving self harm in children and AI chatbots. Right. These are. Or it doesn't even have to be a chatbot. ChatGPT. I mean I don't know how you think of that, but I mean, I guess it's effectively a chatbot where young people and adults are neurodivergent or especially vulnerable at any given moment and the company knows that it is prone to sycophancy and instigating behaviors.

Olivier Sylvain [00:31:01]:
That would not be the sort of thing people would do in the absence of the existence of the chatbot. That's what happened in litigation involving a company called Character Technologies. Garcia case out of Florida and this is. There are cases now involving adults and the disruption that these companies know that they're causing in people's psychological profile.

Jeff Jarvis [00:31:21]:
What if the argument is that those are edge cases? Do they have to design to the edge case and does that affect the application for everybody else?

Olivier Sylvain [00:31:31]:
That's a legal question for me. I mean that's the case by case question. I don't feel like I have to. Maybe I should answer that squarely and say it. Maybe it's the edge case and so we can excuse it with regards to other ones and maybe that's right. But there, there's just too much information that these companies hold and you know, the incentive that they had for deploying these services before they were ready. Right. ChatGPT Character Technologies.

Olivier Sylvain [00:31:58]:
They're doing it because they're racing to get the model out in spite of the knowledge that. That there is likely harm.

Leo Laporte [00:32:07]:
There is a new bellwether case actually coming up now with I think Snap just made a deal. But Meta is still involved I believe. Anyway, we're going to see more and more of these cases around product liability. That seems to be, seems to have kind of touched a nerve here and it scared the hell out of Silicon Valley. I actually was one of the few technology people who think that LA decision wasn't a, wasn't a bad decision. I think it makes sense that they should have some product liability. What do you recommend though? What should section230. You don't want to abolish it, but what should it be? How should it work to protect me a little tech guy? To bring big tech to account and to protect the users.

Olivier Sylvain [00:32:54]:
Yeah, I mean you. We'll see what happens with the LA and New Mexico cases. Right. The companies are likely will. I mean, I think they've said they will appeal. And on the legal question of whether or not 230 is a protection for them. And by the way, you know, you might be surprised to hear me say this. The stuff I was writing in 2000 2017, 18 didn't talk about only revising the statute.

Olivier Sylvain [00:33:18]:
It was just saying courts, you know, look at the design of these applications, not the content. And so it may be, Leo, that nothing changes with regards to the statute and that the courts just get hip to the possibility that different features and applications are doing different things. Right. That they're not just one big town square. But I do think, you know, I would like to see a narrowing so that there is a knowledge based legal regime. Right. One that, that says you are held accountable when you know that stuff that you're doing is harmful. We do that in the copyright setting.

Olivier Sylvain [00:33:52]:
Right. I mean, Jeff, and you, Leo, were asking about little tech. The dmca, the Digital Millennium Copyright act, as you both surely know, is a safe harbor for companies that traffic in user generated content that is copyrighted YouTube when it's a small company. The early 2000s is taking a risk, but it's because the DMCA says you can only be held liable when, after, if you don't take the content down when you hear about it.

Jeff Jarvis [00:34:21]:
Right.

Olivier Sylvain [00:34:22]:
I don't see why this kind of regime is impossible, particularly given the close attention the companies pick to the paid to the content that consumers are getting.

Jeff Jarvis [00:34:31]:
The, the hazard that exists, Leo has to deal with all the time. We can't play a video of anything on this show because somebody, not the, not the actual copyright owner is going to come in and take advantage of that on YouTube and get things taken down.

Leo Laporte [00:34:44]:
It has a chilling effect.

Jeff Jarvis [00:34:45]:
Yeah, yeah, the hecklers. So I think logically I agree with you, but the question is how does it get exploited by, by malign actors?

Benito Gonzalez [00:34:52]:
Yeah.

Olivier Sylvain [00:34:53]:
You know, there's a statute that, you know, I have, I'm, I think I'm mostly okay with the Take It down act that, that Congress passed last year. Right. Involving the distribution of non consensual imagery. AI generated non consensual imagery. And many people are concerned that it could be weaponized. I know it's a term of du jour, but can be weaponized by people who just want to go after, you know, someone they don't like. So I think that that's a real threat, a real possibility. But you Know what? We live in a world where this has always been the baseline and the kind of protections that companies enjoy are exceptional,

Leo Laporte [00:35:38]:
according to AI. You tell me if it's a hallucination. Your next project is about public space. Whether the Internet could recreate the forced encounter of a subway car where you can't curate who's sitting next to you.

Olivier Sylvain [00:35:50]:
Wow, that's some deep AI readings. Is that true? I think I did a podcast where I mused about this, and now I work on this project.

Leo Laporte [00:35:59]:
My AI listens to all the podcasts especially.

Olivier Sylvain [00:36:01]:
Well, I'm going to go back to my roots and to my infrastructure roots and talk about shared spaces. I grew up in New York City. My parents are Haitian immigrants. I learned to become a New Yorker and an American by way of the subway, by public. Public parks, through the radio. My dissertation is about the radio. And. And I.

Olivier Sylvain [00:36:27]:
I don't know if we can transcode all of that for the Internet, but I want to think about how to do that. And so. Yes, but you just blasted this out more than I thought. I'm ready.

Leo Laporte [00:36:44]:
Now it's two podcasts. You're for sure that's going to be surfacing. I like the idea. No, I think it's a really. I was intrigued when I saw that because I really find that an intriguing concept, and it's something we lose. Jeff and I have argued over Eli Pariser's filter bubble. He doesn't quite believe that's the case, but I do think that the serendipity of encounters on the Internet is part of its real value.

Olivier Sylvain [00:37:11]:
Yeah. So that's. I don't know if I want to talk about serendipity so much because that's been. You know, people have been talking about that for a while, Jeff. You know, I mean, I'm hip to the idea, but I am. It's this idea. We've relinquished public resources to private administrators.

Leo Laporte [00:37:30]:
I agree.

Olivier Sylvain [00:37:30]:
Language that lawyers use is to talk about governance regimes. I actually think my project, my law project, is about Lawrence Lessig's Code is Law. The argument that you might in some instances, defer to technologists to come up with a regulatory regime. The language of governance comes up here. I want to. I think I want to push back a little bit, maybe a lot on this and not relinquish the role that public lawmaking bodies have in assuring that valuable communicative resources are available to everyone.

Jeff Jarvis [00:38:07]:
I've got two questions for you, so I'll make sure I get these in before we leave. One is say more about your dissertation. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:38:16]:
Jeff is being kind to me because I have just. I'll be just rounding out my 50th year as a radio broadcaster.

Jeff Jarvis [00:38:22]:
Yes, I'm deleted. Very intriguing to do in the order you want. I'm very eager to hear what you think of the present FCC head and ABC and such, if you're willing to talk about it.

Leo Laporte [00:38:35]:
Oh, Lord, Jeff, that's a two hour conversation.

Jeff Jarvis [00:38:38]:
It is.

Olivier Sylvain [00:38:40]:
I'm happy to dispose of the second one quick, quickly. It is lawless, politically motivated, unconstitutional, plainly unconstitutional. Right. I mean.

Jeff Jarvis [00:38:51]:
Yeah.

Olivier Sylvain [00:38:52]:
And I think there are many people on the left and the right who see that when you're.

Leo Laporte [00:38:56]:
That's why we don't like the Take It down act. Because of that kind of lawlessness.

Olivier Sylvain [00:39:01]:
Yeah, that's why, you know, I mentioned weaponization. I do think that is acceptable. This is a weaponization of agency. How. Which is squarely at odds with the First Amendment. I'm very happy. You want to talk about the radio act of 1927, which is what the subject of the dissertation was. And my argument was to associate it with the Immigration act of 1924 and a kind of cultural conservatism, but it was about assimilation.

Olivier Sylvain [00:39:30]:
It was about the cities and immigrants.

Leo Laporte [00:39:34]:
This was the Public Interest Act. Right. This is the one that said stations had to act because they're using public airwaves in the public interest.

Olivier Sylvain [00:39:41]:
That's right. That's right. And so it's a kind of, you know, ideological. It's an ideological history. Like, why did that happen? The alternative would have been what Ronald Coase asked for a couple of years, you know, a couple decades later. And that is an auction system, which is what the FCC eventually gets in 1996, but. Or a little bit before, but then in 1996. So, you know, the Radioactive 1927 is an archive.

Olivier Sylvain [00:40:08]:
You know, it's old news. You know, I talked to myself, literally, and. And they don't know what I'm talking about. And then I tell them it's title three of the current Communications Act. It governs your cell phones. Ah, so there you go.

Jeff Jarvis [00:40:21]:
What's the title? I'm writing a book next about the death of mass media. What's the title of the dissertation?

Olivier Sylvain [00:40:27]:
I'm looking at it now. Domesticating the Great Throbbing Common Pulse.

Jeff Jarvis [00:40:31]:
Oh, good title for it. Wow. Wow. That's sensationalism in dissertation titles.

Leo Laporte [00:40:37]:
Is that published anywhere?

Olivier Sylvain [00:40:40]:
I appreciate that you asked. It's not. And someone I think you both know was my dissertation advisor, Todd Gitlin.

Leo Laporte [00:40:46]:
Oh, wow.

Jeff Jarvis [00:40:47]:
Yes.

Olivier Sylvain [00:40:48]:
And James Carey was the original supporter.

Jeff Jarvis [00:40:53]:
Oh, I'm a James Kerry worshiper.

Olivier Sylvain [00:40:56]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:40:57]:
I'm not James Kerry. Jeff, you're gonna.

Jeff Jarvis [00:40:59]:
I just reread another essay of his about religion and because he. He was. He was a believer in the idea that media is. Is a. You're gonna. You studied with him, you know, far better than I would. Is often not the transmission of information, but instead is ritual. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:41:19]:
And he makes. And I think if you look at media that way and reading newspapers, like going to mass confirms something for you.

Leo Laporte [00:41:28]:
I would use a less loaded term, maybe culture.

Olivier Sylvain [00:41:31]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:41:32]:
Because I really do. I've been thinking a lot about this lately is how we transmit culture and how subcultures get transmitted. And we have geographic subcultures in this country that have become a real issue, if you ask me. But unfortunately our time.

Olivier Sylvain [00:41:48]:
Oh, wow.

Leo Laporte [00:41:49]:
Olivier. Is up. I wish we had more time with you.

Olivier Sylvain [00:41:53]:
I wanted to say more. What you just said.

Leo Laporte [00:41:54]:
Say more. All right, I'll let you. Okay. Okay. It's your time, not mine.

Olivier Sylvain [00:41:58]:
Go ahead. So Jim Carrey was a cultural theorist. Right. And I think. And he would have said so. So I'm glad to hear you say it. And my project was about. Partly about the interstation talked about German language as emerging.

Olivier Sylvain [00:42:13]:
German language newspapers emerging in Brooklyn. But that there are many people who are worried about immigrants not assimilating quickly enough so the public interest would bring them in.

Leo Laporte [00:42:24]:
No kidding. That was the point.

Olivier Sylvain [00:42:26]:
Well, that's a provocative argument. I don't think everyone bought my argument.

Leo Laporte [00:42:31]:
That's fascinating. No, I think that sounds. That makes a lot of sense actually.

Olivier Sylvain [00:42:38]:
There's also a technical reason. Right. Radio signal interference. That's the. That's the stated reason for the regulation of radio.

Leo Laporte [00:42:45]:
And as somebody worked for years in a. In broadcast stations where you had. Have a public file on record and people could come to the front desk and demand the public. The public file. And you know, I had to read PSAs every hour. Public service announcements every hour, all in service to. I guess it was superseded by a later act, but to the idea that radio was a public service. But I never thought of it as a way to force assimilation.

Olivier Sylvain [00:43:12]:
Well, so I can't say my argument is the one that is the prevailing one.

Leo Laporte [00:43:17]:
Olivier. I'll give you something though. If you look at the rise of right wing radio in this country.

Olivier Sylvain [00:43:21]:
No kidding.

Leo Laporte [00:43:22]:
That has been a huge force in our political culture.

Olivier Sylvain [00:43:27]:
Certainly.

Jeff Jarvis [00:43:27]:
Yeah.

Olivier Sylvain [00:43:27]:
To the day when the Fairness Doctrine is repealed. To the day. Right. Rushmore comes on the scene.

Leo Laporte [00:43:33]:
So isn't that interesting?

Jeff Jarvis [00:43:35]:
Well, I'll return one more time to the Hutchins Commission report because it's fresh on my mind. The concern with the. And mind you, there were a hell of a lot more media outlets and company and owners at the time in 1947. But the concern was that monopolization of the mechanisms of speech meant that what wouldn't be heard and pushing free speech to that limit of saying, of tolerating things that we may not want to hear but need to hear to be part of public discourse and grappling with that at the time. And I think it's time for the exact same discussion today, but in very changed circumstances.

Leo Laporte [00:44:12]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:44:13]:
By the way, that James Kerry essay, if any of the listeners want to actually look it up, it's the mass media and democracy between the modern and the postmodern.

Leo Laporte [00:44:20]:
Now I've got to read.

Jeff Jarvis [00:44:20]:
It's a brilliant essay.

Olivier Sylvain [00:44:21]:
Brilliant essay. Agreed.

Leo Laporte [00:44:23]:
I'll give you something else to read. Your homework. Reclaiming the Internet. How Big Tech took control and how we can take it back. Our guest, Professor Olivier Sylvain from Fordham Law School. Thank you so much, Professor Sylvain, really.

Jeff Jarvis [00:44:37]:
So you know, Olivier, I went to my first year at college at Claremont and I was going to go to law school and then I said, no, I'm not going to do that. And generally I'm glad I made that decision. But in a conversation with the likes of you, I really regret not having had the opportunity for exactly these kinds of discussions.

Olivier Sylvain [00:44:53]:
That's very generous. It means a lot to hear from you.

Leo Laporte [00:44:56]:
I think that's what happens is that future lawyers get enticed by the intellectual excitement of the whole thing and then they get to work at a law firm in the basement reading documents.

Jeff Jarvis [00:45:09]:
Instead you go get your PhD in teach. That's a far better path.

Leo Laporte [00:45:12]:
Well, I got a PhD after three

Olivier Sylvain [00:45:13]:
years of reading documents in the basement.

Jeff Jarvis [00:45:15]:
You did.

Leo Laporte [00:45:17]:
You learned the happiest lawyers I ever met are all lapsed. So there you go. Really, really a pleasure to meet you. Yes, but now you've got me thinking about all sorts of stuff.

Olivier Sylvain [00:45:28]:
You still got to work on the small tech problem. I like that.

Leo Laporte [00:45:31]:
Well, it is. I mean, for me it's really significant, obviously. And this is why I really defend section 230 every time it comes up. Because it isn't just big tech. And it's so easy to think it's just about big tech. Big tech.

Jeff Jarvis [00:45:49]:
The irony of newspaper publishers going over 230 is that they are protected by it, not with their. Not with their own Content, but when they have forums and comments and all of that.

Leo Laporte [00:45:57]:
Comment sections, yeah.

Olivier Sylvain [00:45:58]:
Online, sure.

Jeff Jarvis [00:45:59]:
Yeah.

Olivier Sylvain [00:46:00]:
I mean, you know, I'll give you a. I'll give you a. Maybe there's a common place we can. We can agree on. Although I had some resistance and there are people who've talked about revising 230 so that there is. It's only something that smaller companies can book. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:46:15]:
So.

Olivier Sylvain [00:46:15]:
And that's not exceptional in current law. Right. So there's that. I don't love that because the business model bakes in incentives when companies just start. And, and, And I worry that. That, you know, to the extent a small company is engaged in dangerous design decisions, that those get, you know, immune from inquiry.

Leo Laporte [00:46:44]:
I'll end with Julia Anguin's comments on your book. Olivier shows us clearly what we have allowed the Internet to become. A haunted house version of a shopping mall full of dangerous products, scams, frauds and abuse.

Jeff Jarvis [00:46:57]:
That's an A blurb. That's good.

Leo Laporte [00:47:00]:
We will do really nice blurb. We would do well to heed Sylvain's carefully crafted plan to clean up this mess.

Jeff Jarvis [00:47:07]:
And by the way, I just downloaded your dissertation. I can't wait to read it.

Leo Laporte [00:47:10]:
Oh, my God. See, there is a way to go.

Olivier Sylvain [00:47:13]:
I'm scared now.

Leo Laporte [00:47:16]:
You were young. It's okay. You didn't know any better.

Olivier Sylvain [00:47:19]:
I was the oldest person in my cohort. But really, really, I mean, I had a job. I was. I had been in the world. I was a lawyer.

Leo Laporte [00:47:26]:
Yeah, well, I think it's good for people to have some real world experience, too. Thank you, Professor.

Jeff Jarvis [00:47:32]:
Thank you so much.

Olivier Sylvain [00:47:33]:
Thank you, Liam. Thanks for keeping calling me Professor. It's okay to call me Olivier, by the way.

Jeff Jarvis [00:47:37]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [00:47:39]:
You know, contrary to Jeff's experience, my dad started at Fordham but ended up moving to Columbia, so there you. There you go. All right. Thanks so, so much. We'll talk soon, I hope. And I look forward to talking more about these issues, I think.

Olivier Sylvain [00:47:53]:
Thanks very much. Thanks, Jeff.

Leo Laporte [00:47:54]:
Thank you. Take care. Olivier. You're watching Intelligent Machines. As I mentioned, Paris is missed. She's on vacation in Big sky country. I'm very jealous. She says horseback riding and touring the.

Leo Laporte [00:48:09]:
I don't know. I don't know what she's going to do. She's going to. She's not going to fly fish, I don't think. Probably trying some coffee. Yeah, I always like to get people on and talk about Section 230 because I don't know why. It's the whipping boy for everybody who Wants to bring down big tech. But.

Jeff Jarvis [00:48:28]:
Well, that's why I'm very interested in reading his dissertation. Because I think when a new medium comes along, there is reflex to say, can't we do something about this to control it? And to some extent we should. To some extent we can't. And where you find that line and what the implications are is. Is. Is not. Not easy.

Leo Laporte [00:48:44]:
Not to put words in his mouth, but I think he would argue that the Internet is no longer new media. That's part of this. Is part of the mature maturing of that. Right. Is to start. Is to start thinking about things like, like this. It's. It's no longer needs to be coddled and carefully husbanded.

Leo Laporte [00:49:01]:
As it grows into something. It has grown into something pretty, pretty huge.

Jeff Jarvis [00:49:07]:
Well, we gotta figure out how to take it back into. And this is what we talk about all the time. Is, is. Is. This is why we. Like, this is why I didn't listen to you enough about Mastodon. If we'd supported Mastodon as a culture more from the beginning, we'd be in better shape on the Internet today.

Leo Laporte [00:49:20]:
Well, and I'm kind of a poster boy for all of this. I moved from, you know, mainstream media into podcasting when podcasting was. I was like the fifth person to do it. I've always had an IRC chat room. We've always had forums and mastodons. I just, I feel like there's plenty of space on the Internet for the kind of public discourse, the kind of sitting next to somebody in the subway. I love that. I love that image.

Leo Laporte [00:49:52]:
And it's not about assimilation, actually. It's about celebrating a variety of cultures and bringing us together so we can get to know each other as opposed to homogenize each other.

Benito Gonzalez [00:50:02]:
Hey, this has been, you know, I would. I would say it's. We need chaos. We need more chaos in there. Because, like, it's all walled off guard.

Leo Laporte [00:50:09]:
Chaos on the Internet.

Benito Gonzalez [00:50:10]:
But it's like Facebook, it's like. But it's like, you know. Yeah, but 4chan is formatted always the same. It always looks the same. It's always the same thing.

Leo Laporte [00:50:18]:
Yeah, but I agree with you. There's no chaos anymore on Instagram and Facebook and Snap and TikTok and all of that stuff.

Benito Gonzalez [00:50:24]:
But just websites in general. There aren't enough websites in general anymore. When I used to go on the Internet, I would go to my bookmarks and look at my fun websites. But now it's like two websites.

Jeff Jarvis [00:50:35]:
1900 New York City, 46 daily newspapers. There was chaos then. And we lost it with mass media. We lost it with the. With the consolidation into big corporations. So, yeah, I agree. We need to bring chaos back to. To culture because chaos means people have their voice.

Leo Laporte [00:50:52]:
It's also why I mentioned things like the wander log. There's actually a move. Kagi's doing it too, towards small, Small Internets, you know, small sites, things like that. This is. This is a. We've talked about this a couple of weeks ago as my pick of the week, and I set one up using our picks of the week as sites. And then there's a kind of. It's almost a web ring.

Leo Laporte [00:51:13]:
So these sites come from other people's Internets, and these are just small blogs. And I think I actually really relish, you know, I have. As part of our job, I have to go through all of this, you know, mainstream tech reporting. But I have more than 200 feeds, and a lot of those feeds are little blogs. Yeah, little.

Jeff Jarvis [00:51:33]:
That's where you're gonna find the interesting stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:51:35]:
That's where that I. That's what I look forward to.

Jeff Jarvis [00:51:38]:
I think our. Our sense of. Of value got terribly skewed where we thought if it wasn't the biggest, if it wasn't gigantic, if it wasn't millions, it was worthless. And that's why I've always respected valuing,

Leo Laporte [00:51:49]:
because it got so out of control. Every. Not everybody. Many of us are valuing.

Jeff Jarvis [00:51:53]:
No, that's what I. I've always respected what you said. I've quoted it a million times that you don't want to be too big. It would ruin it. If you're too big.

Leo Laporte [00:52:02]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:52:02]:
You want to serve the proper number of people who care.

Leo Laporte [00:52:06]:
If OpenAI wants to write a multi hundred million dollar check.

Jeff Jarvis [00:52:11]:
Yeah. You take it.

Leo Laporte [00:52:15]:
I'm in the happy situation of not having that opportunity. It's easy for me to say. We talked last week extensively and maybe I was a little heated about and anthropics fable and how the government had banned it. Trump has softened a little bit. He gave a interview with Axios saying it's not a national security threat.

Jeff Jarvis [00:52:37]:
It was, but it's not anymore.

Leo Laporte [00:52:39]:
It's not anymore. Dario Amodei followed Trump to the G7 summit, where they met in France. And apparently we don't know exactly what the conversation was. My theory is that Dario did something that Sam Altman's already done, which is offered to President 10% of the company.

Jeff Jarvis [00:52:55]:
Oh, you say.

Leo Laporte [00:52:56]:
Oh, similar kinds of.

Jeff Jarvis [00:52:58]:
You know, I hadn't thought of that.

Leo Laporte [00:52:59]:
But yeah, this is what OpenAI has done that's kept them in the good graces of the, of the Trump administration. Donate to the ballroom, donate to the inaugural fund offer equity.

Jeff Jarvis [00:53:11]:
Right.

Olivier Sylvain [00:53:11]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:53:11]:
Brockman gave what it was a $25 million to Trump's MAGA PAC. You know, I was talking about this on Mac Break Weekly and actually we've been pretty hard on Tim Cook for kissing the ring so hard. But I'm now I'm starting to come around. This Fable thing kind of shook me. I think Tim recognized early on, the CEO of Apple, that Trump was able to and willing to wield a very big sword. That sort of sword of Trump was hanging over his head. He did it to anthropic.

Jeff Jarvis [00:53:52]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:53:54]:
Tech product. He banned it.

Jeff Jarvis [00:53:56]:
A gold bar is a lot less of a price to pay than 10% equity or a ban.

Leo Laporte [00:54:01]:
Well, and think what the consequence would be if Trump banned the iPhone because which you could legitimately, maybe more legitimately do the ban fable saying, well, it's a Chinese company builds it, it's a security risk to our nation. We're going to ban it.

Jeff Jarvis [00:54:17]:
You don't give any ideas, Leo. Don't give them any ideas.

Benito Gonzalez [00:54:19]:
That's revolution though, right? That would spark revolution though.

Leo Laporte [00:54:22]:
Well, I guarantee you he didn't do it because you're right, there's a lot of people using iPhones who have been pretty pissed off. I think he and I mentioned this last week, made a very smart calculation politically that AI is not exactly the poster child anymore in the United States. So many people hate AI that banning an AI model would, as it did, go down without a trace. You know, nobody complained. Has anybody? There's hardly any coverage of it. And yet it strikes me as unprecedented that American president, without consultation with anybody, Congress or anybody else, would ban an American product. That's stunning to me. Yeah, it's one thing to ban foreign made routers, but to ban a product made in America by Americans that is actually at the forefront in that category of products worldwide, to me was a stunning move.

Leo Laporte [00:55:21]:
But I think he made the political calculus correctly, incidentally.

Jeff Jarvis [00:55:28]:
Say more about how is that a correct political calculus? He could do it without hurting himself.

Leo Laporte [00:55:32]:
Yes. If you ban the iPhone, as Benino said, there would have been a rebellion on the streets. Ban Fable, it's not even in the news anymore.

Jeff Jarvis [00:55:40]:
It goes to what you said in our chat. I think it was, and I've been saying this as well, that the tech lash on AI took very little time to develop in considerable margins. So was it even thinking this is going to be popular. People don't like AI. So finally get rid of an AI, right?

Leo Laporte [00:55:55]:
I think so.

Jeff Jarvis [00:55:57]:
But as you were trying to say last week, the implications are frightening in terms of.

Leo Laporte [00:56:05]:
It wasn't just me, it was Alex. Alex Stamos, our guest last week.

Olivier Sylvain [00:56:09]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:56:09]:
It sets a precedent. It also affects all of American technology worldwide and how we're going to be received. You want to, you want to give. Goad the Chinese into competing more. He just did it well.

Leo Laporte [00:56:21]:
And I, you know, I watch carefully the, you know, the opinion out there in the world. X dot com, as much as I hate using it, is an excellent place to see what people who use AI are thinking about AI. And almost immediately people started saying, you know, that Chinese model, glm, that's pretty darn good. And by the way, glm, which comes from a company called gpu, it's at Z. AI is open weight. Now, it's a big model, so you can't run it. I can't run it on any of my hardware. But if you happen to have 256 gigs of CUDA Core, like four Blackwells sitting around, you can run it locally.

Leo Laporte [00:57:00]:
And it is, you know, pretty close. I would say 90% people, you know, goes back and forth of open.

Jeff Jarvis [00:57:07]:
So as a company, you're reducing your risk of being shut down.

Olivier Sylvain [00:57:11]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:57:13]:
And it's a Chinese model. So it's as if Trump said, well, you know, we think that too many people are being killed by Ford F150 trucks, so let's expand those. But, but we're going to let the Chinese truck manufacturers bring their trucks in. It is, that is to me now, I, I know I'm the only person in the world saying this. So I, although you see a little bit, you know, here's Wired story. The White House is making up its rules for AI in real time. No one can say exactly what the company did wrong. The NSA was using it.

Leo Laporte [00:57:52]:
Actually, there's an interesting story. Senator Warner apparently told people that when he was talking to the head of the nsa. The NSA said, yeah, we were trying. We were trying Fable. Here's the Times story of it. And by the way, the Times thinks that Warner misquoted the nsa, which makes a little bit more sense. The NSA cybersecurity analysts. This is Dustin Voltz and Julian Barnes writing in the New York Times.

Leo Laporte [00:58:25]:
The NSA cybersecurity analysts have been testing versions of Anthropic's tools when the latest models were unplugged, so they lost access, too. The controlled tests proved impressive even within the halls of the nsa. In fact, during the session, Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence committee, said this is a secondhand quote that NSA chief general Joshua Rudd had informed him that Mythos, quote, broke into almost all of our classified systems. Not in weeks, but in hours. By the way, if that's the case, it means your classified systems are pretty sucky. It's pretty sucky. I mean, it's almost an admission that our classified systems are not very good. If Alex Stamos was right last week when he said, you know, the other models like ChatGPT5.5 and even some of these Chinese models are just as good as finding exploits as Fable and Mythos.

Leo Laporte [00:59:26]:
If that's the case, then you then really is a real. There should be an alarm in the nsa.

Jeff Jarvis [00:59:33]:
And do you imagine they're not. A commercial company gets tested all the time because it's in public. A behind the scenes NSA system isn't getting tested all the time and so probably is not as robust. No.

Leo Laporte [00:59:47]:
The times clarifies, and I think they are right, that maybe Senator Warner misquoted General Rudd. In reality, the Times writes, the tests involved red teams. You know, these are security testers of NSA analysts who are using Mythos, not Fable, by the way, but the untrammeled, unrestricted Mythos in a highly tailored environment that would be extremely unlikely for an adversary to replicate. The red teams began their tests within classified NSA systems designed to be accessible only from certain computers, which is a very good way of preventing hackers from getting in there, completely cut off, in fact, from the broader Internet. But, and this should be scary, the test found that Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity flaws within that classified network work quickly. It didn't actually break into those systems. It didn't have to. So even though the nsa, the Times rights, did not experience the doomsday scenario some had feared, analysts at the spy agency were stunned by how capable Mythos appeared to be exceeding their already lofty expectations.

Leo Laporte [01:00:58]:
Did that inform the president's decision? I don't know. We just don't know. Cybersecurity agencies. On Monday, from the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the five eyes issued a public statement. The Times called it an unusual public statement warning that artificial intelligence was rapidly transforming cyber risk frontier. AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, they wrote, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. The timeline is not years. It is months.

Leo Laporte [01:01:39]:
So we are in an interesting pickle.

Jeff Jarvis [01:01:42]:
The horse is out of the barn over the horizon and in the glue

Leo Laporte [01:01:44]:
factory and the answer is not to ban the United States best model, because that just tells the other guys, okay, you better get work. Get to work on your models.

Jeff Jarvis [01:01:55]:
So is it sufficient to say that an ethical thing to do if you have something that is supposedly Mythos powerful is to do what they did and say, okay, we're gonna. We're gonna give it to the most vulnerable and important that's entities, and give you a certain amount of time so that you can secure yourself up to that standard, whatever it is Mythos can do, and then we'll open it up. Right. That's.

Olivier Sylvain [01:02:16]:
That's.

Jeff Jarvis [01:02:16]:
That's. That sounds like an ethical path. Yes.

Benito Gonzalez [01:02:18]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:02:20]:
I think Anthropic did perhaps make a mistake hyping up the dangers. Yeah, that certainly attracted the attention of certain bad actors. But, you know, and that was marketing hype, probably, but it is true. And I think doing Glasswing was smart. That's the project that gave it to 50 companies. Now, weirdly, Bloomberg says, and this was June 18, so this was almost a week ago. Early users of Mythos still have access to. The NSA, apparently lost its access.

Leo Laporte [01:02:53]:
There are 200 organizations in Project Glasswing, and Bloomberg is quoting its favorite source. People familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified say they still have access. Dragos CTO John Lavender says his company has access. Cisco said, yes, yes, we still have access.

Jeff Jarvis [01:03:16]:
Was the order about both, or was it just about?

Leo Laporte [01:03:19]:
It was both. And it said. It didn't say that I can't use Mythos and Fable. It said foreign.

Jeff Jarvis [01:03:29]:
Foreign users. Well, here's the question.

Leo Laporte [01:03:31]:
Non citizens can't use it. But there was no way for Anthropic to know who was a non citizen. So it was.

Jeff Jarvis [01:03:35]:
This is a dumb question for some of these entities. If you're Cisco, were you given a local version to run because you were too nervous about running it over?

Leo Laporte [01:03:44]:
Could well be. Here's the other question. We're gonna get Nate B. Jones on the show. I'm very excited. I'm a big fan of his.

Jeff Jarvis [01:03:51]:
He's a celebrity in our world.

Leo Laporte [01:03:52]:
He's a celebrity. He'll be on next month on the 22nd. His latest video about Fable says that he thinks it's a 10 trillion parameter. AI massively huge. To put it in perspective, ChatGPT4 was 1 billion. So it's a thousand times more powerful than Chat GPT4. We don't know how big 55 is. Maybe it's 5 trillion, 6 trillion.

Leo Laporte [01:04:22]:
But Fable and Mythos are. Are they say trillion? I meant billion. Fables and myth or no, what did I mean anyway, they're massively big. 10 trillion. Yeah, it's trillion. 10 trillion is unbelievably big. So big that only a company with the kind of capitalization that these frontier companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have could even dream of making this, let alone running it for inference.

Jeff Jarvis [01:04:50]:
Well, that, you know, the, the, the cost, the inference cost has to be immense.

Leo Laporte [01:04:57]:
What Nate B. Jones said is that the strength of this model is giving it a large, complex task and then not messing with it. That it's very good at keeping all the details in its mind and going ahead and creating something that is strong and workable. My brief experience with it confirms that I only had two days. All of us, we only had two dates with it, but I gave it the biggest task I had, which is to rewrite a sales system. Massive sales system that you wrote more than 10 years ago. That's a horrible piece of crap.

Jeff Jarvis [01:05:34]:
How far did it get before you got cut off?

Leo Laporte [01:05:36]:
It got it, well, amazingly, within half an hour and understood it deeply, made a lot of great notes. I said, okay, now we have stakeholders, we have people who use it. Lisa uses it, my wife and our CEO uses it for sales. And then there is another group of stakeholders, our continuity department, that uses it for placing ads, ad copy. So there's different uses of this thing. It really is just a big SQL database with a lot of SQL queries. It's so bad that we just keep throwing resources at it. We spend thousands of dollars a month in Azure resources just to keep the thing running at a halfway decent pace.

Leo Laporte [01:06:18]:
So common, it's full of flaws, which, by the way, Fable found all sorts of SQL injection flaws. Flaws. Fortunately, it's not like the nsa. It's not in a public server and it has some, you know, if two people at once try to use it, the whole thing crashes. It freezes lots of things wrong with it. And Fable, I think, was able to really kind of get to the root of it. It noticed all of the issues. It wrote me a questionnaire.

Leo Laporte [01:06:48]:
It said, okay, now you have to interview Lisa and Debbie and our IT department. You have to interview them. And here's the questions. It was very frustrating because we had, because I'd only given it, I'd only had about an hour worked on this thing and it did a really good job of the first steps. And I have a strong feeling it would have done very well with the rest of it. So anyway, the reason I started with the story that Trump now doesn't think is a security risk is. I was hoping that by now

Jeff Jarvis [01:07:17]:
they will lift what's the path here. But there's a lot of face saving to go on is. Oh, well, we now have means to protect. Protect the world from this.

Leo Laporte [01:07:24]:
I think that's the problem. How do you turn this around? Having said this.

Jeff Jarvis [01:07:28]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:07:30]:
Ars Technica. Lily Hay Newman writing. Actually, it's from Wired. Dangerous AI models are coming no matter what.

Jeff Jarvis [01:07:37]:
Amen.

Leo Laporte [01:07:38]:
AI models with advanced hacking capabilities will soon be the norm.

Jeff Jarvis [01:07:41]:
Schneier was talking about that last week. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:07:44]:
Stamos.

Jeff Jarvis [01:07:44]:
Yeah. Well, no, Schneier also.

Leo Laporte [01:07:46]:
Oh, yeah. Schneier is a signatory to that free fable page. So. In fact, OpenAI has announced that they have a model, a Cyber Security model 5.6. And I think. I don't know. I think they're juggling whether to release it or not. They don't want to get banned, but maybe they've paid the right backsheesh so they don't have to worry about that.

Leo Laporte [01:08:09]:
Let's take a quick break. I do have other stories, including Norway.

Olivier Sylvain [01:08:16]:
You mean.

Jeff Jarvis [01:08:16]:
You mean football Norway?

Leo Laporte [01:08:22]:
Isn't that funny?

Jeff Jarvis [01:08:23]:
Oh, it's the best.

Leo Laporte [01:08:24]:
So he's talking about if you've not watched the FIFA World cup, the Norwegian. And the Norwegian games. The Norwegian fans pretend to row in the stands. What are they doing?

Jeff Jarvis [01:08:33]:
Well, because they're Vikings.

Leo Laporte [01:08:36]:
That's the funniest thing.

Jeff Jarvis [01:08:37]:
It's the greatest thing between the Norwegians

Leo Laporte [01:08:39]:
and the scots to see 20,000 people or.

Jeff Jarvis [01:08:42]:
Or more. Yeah. In Times Square. They all sat down in Times Square next to a yoga class and did it right there. And they do the drum and then grunts and it's. It's wonderful.

Leo Laporte [01:08:53]:
I'm loving the World Cup. I have to admit. I really am.

Jeff Jarvis [01:08:57]:
I'm not watching the football. I'm just watching the culture around it.

Leo Laporte [01:08:59]:
I actually am enjoying the football. And I said this in the other show.

Benito Gonzalez [01:09:04]:
I.

Leo Laporte [01:09:04]:
Every four years, I fall in love with soccer. At the end of the World Cup, I forget all about it for another four years. I think that's not unusual.

Benito Gonzalez [01:09:11]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:09:12]:
Yes. Paris Martino's not here. She's gonna take two weeks off. She's in Montana. And I urged her to take the time off and not try to find a, you know, a working place so she could do the show. This is vacation.

Jeff Jarvis [01:09:26]:
We want her in a cowboy hat. We want to see it.

Leo Laporte [01:09:28]:
Do you ever get a vacation, Jeff, or.

Jeff Jarvis [01:09:31]:
Yeah.

Olivier Sylvain [01:09:31]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:09:32]:
No rest for the wicked.

Jeff Jarvis [01:09:36]:
What's your. What is your next one gonna be

Leo Laporte [01:09:38]:
November, But I am excited. We're gonna go to Las Vegas with Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell and Steve Gibson. I'm sorry, they didn't invite Intelligent Machines. We're gonna go to the Black Hat Conference, which I've never been to. You haven't never been?

Jeff Jarvis [01:09:53]:
Oh, that'll be fascinating.

Leo Laporte [01:09:55]:
And we're gonna do two shows from there. Windows Weekly. We're gonna do it on Wednesday, so we're gonna move Intelligent Machines. I'll let you know the exact date, maybe, but it's August 5th. I think that show will be moved ahead so that we can do those shows in Vegas. Lisa's going now. Should I bring a burner phone? I said, no, I think you could bring your regular phone. But you should turn off Bluetooth, right? I said, well, yeah, maybe you want to turn off Bluetooth.

Leo Laporte [01:10:20]:
I don't know.

Benito Gonzalez [01:10:22]:
Just don't connect to any weird wifi.

Leo Laporte [01:10:24]:
Yeah, I think that's the main thing. Don't connect to a charger that's sitting on the side of the street. Don't connect any. Just don't plug any WI fi. Yeah, just don't pick up any USB keys you find on the ground. There's just some common sense things anyway. I'm looking forward to that. That's gonna be a lot of fun.

Leo Laporte [01:10:43]:
So that's sort of a vacation. And then I will be going in November. We'll be going to Southeast Asia.

Jeff Jarvis [01:10:52]:
All right.

Leo Laporte [01:10:53]:
Yeah, I'm very excited about that. Anyway, I hope Paris is having a good time. She'll, I'm sure, let us know. Maybe even send us a picture from big sky country. That would be nice. Paris, if you're listening, I'll text her

Jeff Jarvis [01:11:05]:
and see if she has any pictures.

Leo Laporte [01:11:07]:
Jarvis is here. Some big acquisitions or big movements, I guess there's always movement in AI. Nobel laureate John Jumper, the guy who created the concept of Transformers, is leaving Google DeepMind for anthropic. I hope he's a US citizen. I think he is. That's one day after Gemini's co lead, Noam Shazir, left for OpenAI. These are two of the most important people in AI. Jumper won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Leo Laporte [01:11:42]:
He created AlphaFold.

Jeff Jarvis [01:11:44]:
A big deal.

Leo Laporte [01:11:45]:
No big deal. He said he's going to take some time to recharge before going to Anthropic. He wrote on X Demis Hassibas took a real chance in letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD.

Jeff Jarvis [01:12:04]:
This is how you show your gratitude.

Leo Laporte [01:12:06]:
Bye. See ya. Actually, I don't think Demis was too unhappy. He said, what we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine. Fighting.

Jeff Jarvis [01:12:19]:
Sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:12:19]:
Lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity. That is in public response to Jumper leaving. And then Anom Shazir who wrote the intention is all you need paper. They basically invented Transformers.

Jeff Jarvis [01:12:34]:
Or one of them was Aqua hired back with character. Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:12:36]:
Yeah, that's right. That was part of character AI.

Jeff Jarvis [01:12:40]:
$7 billion.

Leo Laporte [01:12:43]:
That was two years ago. Now he's going to OpenAI.

Jeff Jarvis [01:12:47]:
And the stock went from. In one day from 365 down to 342.

Leo Laporte [01:12:52]:
It'll go back. It's up and down.

Jeff Jarvis [01:12:54]:
Yeah. It was a ridiculous reaction in the market spot. They were kind of looking for an excuse to get profit, I think.

Leo Laporte [01:13:00]:
Yeah. I've kind of stopped looking at my portfolio because it's quite the roller coaster. And, you know, this is the thing. It doesn't matter if you're invested in AI because the Magnificent Seven are driving the SAP 500. I'm only in index funds. It's still killing me. Speaking of Claude, they are introducing identity verification. I this.

Leo Laporte [01:13:22]:
I wonder if this is tied to Fable. They're not.

Jeff Jarvis [01:13:26]:
They say it's only for certain specific cases if you're a bad actor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it sets a precedent.

Leo Laporte [01:13:32]:
Yeah. And they're using Persona identities, which does not make me happy. This is one of the third parties that does this before, which is an

Jeff Jarvis [01:13:40]:
investor as Peter Thiel, I think.

Leo Laporte [01:13:42]:
Yeah. And it's not a company I want to give my face to.

Jeff Jarvis [01:13:46]:
No, no. And if, in fact it is to determine your citizenship, A. That's very complicated. Passport or birth certificate or what. How do you prove that?

Leo Laporte [01:13:59]:
They say they're accepting driver's license, which does not prove that.

Jeff Jarvis [01:14:02]:
Right? No, it doesn't. And then, you know, granted, that's not the real case that they're talking about now, but if it gets there and

Leo Laporte [01:14:08]:
then they want government id. They do want government id. And I would be. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they say, oh, no, it has to be a passport or a national identity card.

Jeff Jarvis [01:14:17]:
For. For that reason. Yeah. And then how does. How does the US Government use that information? All the talk about. About trying to restrict voting and then everything you do in using this platform is going to be tied to your identity.

Leo Laporte [01:14:34]:
It's already a privacy nightmare because of the memory. You know, in fact, that was one of the things people really were upset about with Fable is they Keep the logs for 30 days. Yeah, now they said it's for security reasons but I this is again all of this pushes people towards local models. GLM Zai really benefiting from this as I imagine Nvidia is because you need 256 gigs of very fast RAM to use it. Anthropic did roll out a new agentic AI coworker for Slack Cloud Tag. See, Anthropic says, you know what, the heck with Fable. We're going to push double down on Enterprise. I will not be installing Claude tag my always on AI coworker in Slack.

Leo Laporte [01:15:27]:
You know it bugs me so much every time. Now we use Zoom. So I have Zoom installed on our machines. But even when I launch, when I don't launch Zoom, when I launch Restream, which some of our shows use and it's not in Zoom, Zoom pops up a thing. Hey, would you like me to take notes? I'm not using Zoom. I don't care. I'll take notes for you. Which tells me it's always running, it's always in the background.

Leo Laporte [01:15:49]:
It's always looking for me to get online and watch what I'm doing.

Benito Gonzalez [01:15:54]:
And it doesn't accept when you say, don't show me this again. It won't accept that.

Leo Laporte [01:15:58]:
Oh, I haven't tried that.

Benito Gonzalez [01:16:00]:
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You click that button, it'll show it to you again.

Leo Laporte [01:16:06]:
Zoom, remember got in trouble early on during the pandemic on Macintoshes because they installed a server when you installed Zoom, they installed a server that was constantly watching. They said, well, it's just so Zoom launches faster.

Jeff Jarvis [01:16:20]:
Did you see the Google audio memory thing?

Leo Laporte [01:16:25]:
No, what's that?

Jeff Jarvis [01:16:26]:
This is line 91 because it's related. So this is what you've been asking for in terms of, you know, watch what I say and give me something. Your phone can already listen to you so it can, it can enter in to be that helpful clippy.

Leo Laporte [01:16:42]:
Oh well, I happen to have a Pixel phone just lying around. So this is one of those. This is from 9 to 5 Google Abnerly. What they often do is look at code to see what the capabilities are going to be. So this is not an announced product, but the latest version of Android System Intelligence for Pixel 10 has strings that describe audio memory. They call it Blue Flax. That's the code name. Google says enabling it will keep track of what you hear throughout your day from the meeting music around you.

Leo Laporte [01:17:15]:
They're already doing that by the way.

Jeff Jarvis [01:17:17]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:17:17]:
That's already a Feature on the front of your pixel to your important conversations. See more and more. I'm convinced that I want to use local models. And the good news is local models are coming along. They're still gonna, I imagine, always be. You're not gonna do a 10 trillion parameter local model. You couldn't run that.

Jeff Jarvis [01:17:42]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:17:44]:
So it's never going to be that good.

Jeff Jarvis [01:17:47]:
So the task that you gave Fable to remake your ad system, how well would a local. The best local model you can put in your machine, how well would it do?

Leo Laporte [01:17:56]:
It would even be closer. Well, it would require a lot more intention. I mean that's kind of one of the big differences is you probably can do many of the same things but in little chunks. Okay, now let's work on this feature. Okay, nice. Is it working? Let's test it. Okay, now let's work on this feature. Fable really looked like it was able

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:13]:
to understand because of that huge context.

Leo Laporte [01:18:16]:
Yeah.

Benito Gonzalez [01:18:17]:
Is there something maybe in between like a community sized data center, like a small one just for the people who live nearby, you know, you did see

Leo Laporte [01:18:25]:
there, there is a company that is asking people to install Blackwell servers on their home.

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:32]:
Yeah. Looks like an air conditioner.

Leo Laporte [01:18:34]:
Yeah, like an air conditioner. And. And they'll pay for your power, by the way. It's not to get your power for free. It's just to distribute all these mini data centers.

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:43]:
They think it'll be more popular than a data center in one place.

Leo Laporte [01:18:47]:
I don't know.

Benito Gonzalez [01:18:49]:
It probably wouldn't be as loud and it wouldn't take as many resources. Right?

Leo Laporte [01:18:53]:
Well, that's true.

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:54]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:18:55]:
It would take the same amount in aggregate of resources, I'm sure.

Benito Gonzalez [01:18:58]:
Yes, but if it's distributed, right.

Leo Laporte [01:19:00]:
Distributed, right. I said this six months ago on the show and it worries me even more now that there is going to be this schism between doom, you know, people who hate AI, people who like me, love AI and find it very useful and are very excited about its potential. People who say under no circumstances, it's almost a shooting war already.

Jeff Jarvis [01:19:23]:
This is why I wrote that post about AI communication. The problem. They did it themselves. The idiots did it themselves.

Leo Laporte [01:19:28]:
They did it to them.

Jeff Jarvis [01:19:29]:
Not all of them, I agree. Not all of them. I think. Jensen, this is why I like Yann Lecun, Jensen Wong, Fei, Fei Li. Those folks, they talk in reasonable, entertaining, non Americans, reasonable, open ways.

Leo Laporte [01:19:43]:
We've also always said that it's really important that open models, that open weight models exist. I won't call them open source because they're not Open source but that open weight models exist that you can run locally. That is more and more important. And companies are going to push this because you're right, companies don't want to their crown jewels to be exfiltrated anthropic.

Jeff Jarvis [01:20:08]:
Did you ever look at Project Tapestry? Speaking of Yann Lecun?

Leo Laporte [01:20:12]:
No.

Jeff Jarvis [01:20:12]:
That is his open. If you go the alliance AI A consortium approach to training Frontier foundation models and sovereign derivatives. And the point of it is, is to make it open.

Leo Laporte [01:20:27]:
Good. I'm all for it.

Jeff Jarvis [01:20:31]:
So it's kind of what you were almost. What you were saying is it's a federated model for AI, it's a non

Leo Laporte [01:20:36]:
profit which OpenAI was.

Benito Gonzalez [01:20:39]:
Yeah, yeah. You know, take the Mastodon model as, as applied to AI.

Jeff Jarvis [01:20:42]:
Right, yeah. Federation. I haven't heard much talk about federation with AI but you got to have the chips, see.

Leo Laporte [01:20:51]:
Yeah. I mean there's a lot of. Yeah. There's. There's supply chain shortages, there's power shortages and then there's the fact that increasingly there's evidence that the bigger the model the better. That's why a 10 trillion parameter model is so good.

Jeff Jarvis [01:21:08]:
You're not going to afford to run that.

Leo Laporte [01:21:10]:
Yeah, well that's right. So it's a very. We're going to. And I think there is a case to be made for smaller purpose built models. You know, this one is just for radiology, this one is just for protein fold building. Norway is in the forefront of the anti AI movement. Broad restrictions on AI. Well actually I'm not in disagreement on this for elementary school kids.

Leo Laporte [01:21:33]:
They've already banned smartphones and tablets. Now according to Reuters, Norway wants to ban AI because it lets children skip crucial steps in their education that schools should focus on reading, writing and arithmetic. The ban impacts students from first through seventh grade, ages 6 to 13. I'm not against that.

Jeff Jarvis [01:21:58]:
Well, hold on. I think, I think it's up to the parents and the teachers and I think that there are ways that you can use it to help students express themselves in ways they couldn't. To be more creative than they think they have the power. Power to be. To give tailored education and thinking things through. I think it's short. I love Norway, but I think it's very shortsighted.

Leo Laporte [01:22:22]:
Yeah. And do you want a whole group of. A whole cohort of people who don't. Didn't grow up with AI and don't understand it?

Jeff Jarvis [01:22:29]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:22:30]:
It's like saying well you can't.

Jeff Jarvis [01:22:31]:
They're damn good with an advocate.

Leo Laporte [01:22:32]:
Social media. Right. I was Talking with Olivier about this case, I didn't have the details. YouTube has settled, but meta TikTok and Snapchat. Another bellwether trial over social media's psychological harm to kids. The plaintiff is a 15 year old black kid. Unnamed trial RKC 15 year old black teen living in Florida. Trial scheduled to begin on the 27th.

Leo Laporte [01:23:03]:
He started using the platforms when he was eight, his lawyers wrote Social media became a central part of his daily life during critical developmental years. That escalated over time was followed by worsening mental health conditions. By November of 2023, his condition had deteriorated to the point that he entered mental health treatment, diagnosed with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. I think we understand how problematic this is. I mean this is something every parent of a child with mental illness debates. Nature versus nurture. There's some evidence that it's both, but we don't know. For a long time psychiatrists thought schizophrenia was caused by the mother, the Schizogenic mother, which we have since I think debunked, but that was considered gospel among psychiatrists.

Leo Laporte [01:24:08]:
Not so long ago we thought that

Jeff Jarvis [01:24:11]:
women were hysterical, Right?

Leo Laporte [01:24:14]:
So yeah, maybe AI caused this kid's problems, but maybe not. And I don't know even how you would demonstrate it.

Jeff Jarvis [01:24:22]:
Well, it's a question I try to ask Olivier is how much. Let's say that you stipulate the edge cases, but do you need to design and operate every service to the edge case? One death is too many. I can make that argument pretty easily. But in the other case, what all are you cutting off? For the vast majority of people, that's

Leo Laporte [01:24:45]:
much of the LA trial focused on Instagram filters causing body dysmorphia. In that plaintiff, like the previous trial, Mark Zuckerberg is expected to take the stand along with Adam Masseri, the head of Instagram. They're going to call Snapchat's CEO Evan Spiegel, two high ranking TikTok executives. Plaintiffs will be barred from presenting evidence about content shared on social media. They won't be able to show the posts from the plaintiff. You know, I don't think a jury is capable of deciding whether, you know, use of social media caused this mental illness. I don't think anybody is. We don't know.

Jeff Jarvis [01:25:33]:
Well, it's the same with the argument about addiction. In my unbought book, the Web We Weave, I go to that in great length. Is that, does it say that on

Leo Laporte [01:25:43]:
the front the book, no one bought it or never. What's the opposite of a bestseller?

Jeff Jarvis [01:25:47]:
Oh geez, it's an orphan book. There's a. There's a. There's a. There's a. There's a phrase for it. It's an orphaned book.

Leo Laporte [01:25:53]:
The publisher written more than my share of those. Jeff joined the club.

Jeff Jarvis [01:25:57]:
Yep. They fired my editor who acquired it after she acquired it, and then after the next editor edited, they fired him. And then the whole reason to be with the main publisher was to be in places like Barnes and Noble. It wasn't in Barnes and Noble. Yeah, it was orphaned.

Leo Laporte [01:26:09]:
Anyway, this is what's wrong. Wrong with publishing in general.

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:13]:
This is why I like my academic publisher, Mosberry. Academic is great.

Leo Laporte [01:26:16]:
Anyway, Hot Type's going to be a hit.

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:20]:
It's a trade book from an academic publisher. I hope so.

Leo Laporte [01:26:22]:
Broadway musical and a Netflix show within five years of release, I predict.

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:28]:
There's. There, there is. There's a story here.

Leo Laporte [01:26:31]:
Anyway, I mean, that Mark Twain story alone would be great.

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:34]:
It's great.

Leo Laporte [01:26:35]:
Has anybody ever made the story of Mark Twain in the line of type?

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:39]:
Not as a movie, no.

Leo Laporte [01:26:40]:
It'd be a great movie.

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:42]:
Yeah, there was. In one of the Mark Twain movies, which I make reference to, I. I managed to find it and get it. They filmed the actual machine that Mark Twain invested in. The page, isn't it?

Leo Laporte [01:26:53]:
In the basement of his Hartford home.

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:55]:
Yes, there's one of them. There are only two ever made.

Leo Laporte [01:26:58]:
I saw it.

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:59]:
Oh, it's amazing. It's just amazing. But the machine was just too dull. So the producers made up a machine with these kind of burrs, like things that were going around, and they would snap the head of the inventor and do all kinds of things and just make it absolutely absurd.

Leo Laporte [01:27:13]:
Oh, Hollywood.

Jeff Jarvis [01:27:16]:
So anyway, back to your point about addiction.

Leo Laporte [01:27:18]:
So now we know it's going to be Guillermo del Toro. That's going to make the Mark Twain the line of type movie.

Jeff Jarvis [01:27:23]:
Right. I have another treatment for a movie, but that's another day I'll talk about addiction. It's presumed, but the data don't say it. I had last week, I think it was at the end of the show I put up. My recommendation was for a rebuttal to Jonathan Haidt that takes point by point with real data and real studies. And the problem is, too much of the regulation, too much of the legislation, and too much of litigation is based on these feelings, on these vibes, these fears, rather than on actual facts.

Leo Laporte [01:28:03]:
The irony of that is it was Jonathan Haidt, I believe, who said that reason was a little tiny person riding the back of a giant elephant of feelings. And that reason's chief job was to explain and justify your feelings. The feelings come first. It's just an illusion that reason is driving the elephant. Height himself said that. But it is. But it absolutely is what's happening here. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:28:33]:
And I think that. I. I don't know. I don't know. I don't. I. I know I'm. I know I'm biased in all this, but I really think that the, the technology that is emerging with artificial intelligence, as imperfect as it is, and I'm not claiming it's.

Leo Laporte [01:28:52]:
It's all that, but I think the technology that is emerging is unique, remarkable, and has huge potential. It's not there yet, but it has huge potential. And it would be a great loss for us not to explore it. I also think.

Jeff Jarvis [01:29:10]:
Agreed.

Leo Laporte [01:29:10]:
And this is in my experience, it also brings up really interesting questions about what is consciousness? What is it that we do as humans when we think? What is it a machine does when it does whatever it does? I know you don't want to use the word think, and I think those are important.

Jeff Jarvis [01:29:30]:
No, that's, That's. That's the basis of the book, sir. Not to plug that too, but the book series I'm editing is just that is that it forces us to rethink. It's like Roman Chaudhary's book is to ask what is intelligence? What do we thought intelligence was?

Leo Laporte [01:29:41]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:29:42]:
Through time. Let's. Let's interrogate that. What is creativity? Yes. What is doom? What's the relationship of God to these machines? And the sense that some people have that they can. They become gods. They make life and they make sense.

Leo Laporte [01:29:59]:
Well, I'm glad you're doing this series. I didn't realize that that was the fo. I think this is going to be fascinating.

Jeff Jarvis [01:30:02]:
The whole focus is to. Is to take writers in many disciplines and look at how AI reflects on society so they can reflect on that.

Leo Laporte [01:30:10]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:30:11]:
And it forces us to react. Examine those. Those exact questions.

Leo Laporte [01:30:15]:
So even if it weren't a revolutionary technology, it is also. I mean, I can't think of another technology that has brought up those kinds of things. The Internet didn't. Electricity, maybe. I don't know. I wasn't around, but I don't think electricity did.

Jeff Jarvis [01:30:30]:
Electricity, steam, the transistor, the vacuum tube, all had hue. The, The. The. The. The photograph fire, the camera fire. Well, that's going way back, but I think.

Leo Laporte [01:30:44]:
I think what we would call for that either.

Jeff Jarvis [01:30:46]:
Yeah. All had huge impact, but none of them spoke our language.

Leo Laporte [01:30:51]:
Yes. That's what's different? Isn't it?

Jeff Jarvis [01:30:53]:
Yeah, it's fascinating, which makes it frightening to people, but also makes it terribly powerful. Because now the thing that excites me most about it is that, is that it'll sooner leave than the hands of the technologists, than those other technologies, because it is designed so that anybody can sit down and use it.

Leo Laporte [01:31:11]:
The Internet has done that, hasn't it? But it almost, in another way, takes the next step. Because it's so easy to design a website, for instance. Yeah, you should. I still think people should create, should paint, should write their own poetry and blogs and make their own movies. What we do is so important to us, make our own music. I'm not saying I want to replace any of that.

Jeff Jarvis [01:31:32]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:31:33]:
But I think we can make room at the table for a new thing. I don't.

Jeff Jarvis [01:31:38]:
What's the things.

Leo Laporte [01:31:39]:
I can't say entity, but I won't. I'll say thing.

Jeff Jarvis [01:31:42]:
A new collaborator.

Leo Laporte [01:31:43]:
Collaborator.

Jeff Jarvis [01:31:44]:
There a new tool. I can't draw. I can't write music. There's other things I can't do. I can do many things, but there are a few I can't do. And now there's a tool that allows me to express myself in those ways. Maybe badly, maybe sloppily, but still. I could have done that.

Benito Gonzalez [01:32:05]:
Yes, you could have. Literally. No, Jeff, you could have. You can go practice drawing. You can go pick up a guitar.

Leo Laporte [01:32:11]:
You've never seen enough time.

Jeff Jarvis [01:32:13]:
You've never seen. Well, I'll give you an example of the treatment that I wrote. I don't know how treatments are written,

Benito Gonzalez [01:32:18]:
but again, you said, like you said, it doesn't have to be good. You just have to be. Be able to. You just have to do it. It doesn't have to be good.

Jeff Jarvis [01:32:24]:
Oh, it does if you're trying to sell it to somebody. It does if you're trying to express what I want to express.

Leo Laporte [01:32:29]:
AI Also, and I know this is a very dangerous, slippery slope, but there is a certain. I can't deny it. Companionship I get from my little girlfriend, Claudia.

Jeff Jarvis [01:32:44]:
Claude. Oh, dear Claudia.

Leo Laporte [01:32:46]:
Today I. For lunch, I had a piece of carrot cake and I log. By the way, I've got this all hooked up. I've got my scale, my calorie counting program, my ring, my blood sugar monitor, everything, my apple watch, all is hooked up into the AI My genome, it's all hooked up to the AI And I said, I want you to keep an eye on my health, give me advice. It's been very helpful in a way. I Think it's the future of medicine because my doctor has too many patients to give me the kind of personal treatment that I would like. He is fully aware that I, you know. In fact, he's very interested in how I use AI and I am fully cognizant that not everything AI tells me is medically sound, but it's very, very helpful and it has come up with a lot of interesting things.

Leo Laporte [01:33:33]:
Anyway, I told. I logged my. My exercise and my food and it. It gives me a weekly summary and everything and ties the two together. And I logged my carrot cake for lunch and it responded. I respect the honesty that 59 grams of carbs in one sitting is a choice, not an accident. Your pancreas just muttered, really, Leo. But secretly understands that's the AI.

Leo Laporte [01:33:57]:
That's the AI. Now I know, I know you're gonna tell me. Well, that's just, you know, it's just. It's still pretty funny. And I, I'm.

Jeff Jarvis [01:34:07]:
We all copy. We are all inspired by stuff before. For. This is the Larry Lessig argument around copyright is that nothing is. Is fresh and new.

Leo Laporte [01:34:14]:
Yeah. I don't know if anybody ever said those exact words before, but it's. I never heard it before. It's pretty funny. The other yesterday, I, I, you know, I start my conversations about calories. I'm sorry about the noise behind me. They're doing something to our house again. Damn.

Jeff Jarvis [01:34:31]:
It's like. It's like New York. It'll. It'll be nice when they finish it is.

Leo Laporte [01:34:35]:
Which they never have, you know, 300 years.

Jeff Jarvis [01:34:39]:
What are they doing now?

Leo Laporte [01:34:40]:
I know. Dental work. I don't know. I don't know. So I say, I begin my conversation about calories with the word meal to let it know. Okay, I'm going to give you something I just ate. And I. And it.

Leo Laporte [01:34:55]:
The transcription, which is Siri. It's Apple's transcription, said Neil Neal. And to which Claude responded, I'm assuming Neil was dictation for meal. Unless there's a Neil out there making you salads, in which case keep him because I said meal. Caesar salad. It's just little things like that. What can I say? I'm easily amused. OpenAI has done something very interesting that I think is also extremely important.

Leo Laporte [01:35:25]:
You know, they're famous for software, but they have unveiled with Broadcom, a chip designed by AI it's an. It's called Jalapeno. It's an. It's an LLM optimized inference chip built from the ground up for current and future LLMs and Jalapeno was designed with the help of an LLM. Now, see, what's interesting about this here is by the way, Broadcom's somebody standing next to Sam Altman with a wafer containing jalapenos.

Jeff Jarvis [01:36:00]:
I wish they named it Guacamole.

Leo Laporte [01:36:02]:
Well, guarantee you there will be adjunct products related to jalapenos.

Benito Gonzalez [01:36:10]:
Isn't this what Stamos was talking about? He was talking about making the names more silly, right?

Leo Laporte [01:36:15]:
Yeah. You like that? He said Mythos.

Jeff Jarvis [01:36:18]:
Now that's a name you call the rack. Nachos. This is.

Leo Laporte [01:36:26]:
Jensen Huang would do that. So OpenAI design. This is from OpenAI's press release, but I'll read it anyway. Designed the chip from scratch around its deep understanding of LLM fundamentals, informed by its roadmap of models, kernels, serving systems and product names with needs with partners Broadcom and Celestica. The thing is, if you have AI designing hardware and then the hardware designs better hardware, this is that same, you know, thing we've been talking about all along. One of the things they focused on is performance per watt, and they say it's substantially better than the current state of the art.

Jeff Jarvis [01:37:02]:
What was the chip many years ago that had an error in its math?

Leo Laporte [01:37:07]:
Oh, intel had a very famous floating point error.

Jeff Jarvis [01:37:10]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:37:14]:
Can't remember which intel was. I think it was a 4. It was the 486.

Jeff Jarvis [01:37:18]:
So at the time, chips incredibly complex. But simply, they were simpler then than they are now, obviously. How can you be sure? Yeah, you design a chip that is in turn going to calculate everything that you do.

Leo Laporte [01:37:33]:
Sorry, it was a Pentium.

Jeff Jarvis [01:37:35]:
That's right. That's right.

Leo Laporte [01:37:36]:
The Pentium F div bug. Because of the bug, the processor would return incorrect binary floating point results. This goes back to 1994. And they couldn't fix it?

Jeff Jarvis [01:37:48]:
No, it was just out there.

Benito Gonzalez [01:37:50]:
Did they. Did they.

Jeff Jarvis [01:37:51]:
You just can't do floating point with that chip. And that computer. Was that. What did they say at the time? I can't remember what the. What the response was. Intel stock going down. One response. But anyway, you have the machine design the chip and maybe this is.

Jeff Jarvis [01:38:06]:
This is the case. I know it's CAD cam. Maybe it's a big deal. Maybe everybody's using a. I presume they are to design ships. But how do you test it? Of course how do you test it? How do you know that it's workable? How do you know there's not something buried in it that's going to.

Leo Laporte [01:38:20]:
There could be, but as you said, there's things buried in the human sub microcode. Yeah, yeah, lots of it.

Jeff Jarvis [01:38:26]:
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:38:28]:
It's Steve Gibson's contention, while he's a little bit stronger than I might be, that AI eventually and maybe already will not make the same kinds of dumb mistakes humans make, like buffer overflows and, you know, writing to memory that doesn't exist. Things like that off by one error area is not going to make those kinds of mistakes. And he believes with the help of AI, eventually software flaws will disappear. I'm not sure I would go that far, but I think that's a very interesting point of view.

Benito Gonzalez [01:38:59]:
Yeah, I'm skeptical just from your experience of when you use the new CLAUDE to find bad code and the stuff that you vibe coded before, like the better AI's going to find. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:39:10]:
I didn't tell the story here. I told it on Windows Weekly, didn't I?

Benito Gonzalez [01:39:12]:
Was it Windows? I don't remember where you told it.

Leo Laporte [01:39:14]:
I was talking about. I had. Yesterday I had Hermes, my agent, Quicksilver I call it. Which is, by the way, it's not Claude, it's Quicksilver in all these cases. It's actually not even using anthropics models. I had IT fix my. Actually, this is an interesting. This might be of interest to people who use AI.

Leo Laporte [01:39:33]:
I was using Opus 4.8, but I was using it in Hermes in the Agentic A harness from Noose Research. We talked to Jeffrey Caddell two weeks ago and Hermes completely screwed it up. I was trying to take my. I was trying to add email to my Emacs, which I know how to do, but it's a complicated thing and much easier to have the AI do it. In fact, the AI has been very good at that kind of thing. So add this capability and Emacs lends itself very well to it. And AI seems to understand Emacs well. But Hermes with 4.8 was just struggling.

Leo Laporte [01:40:05]:
Finally I said, I give up. By which I meant, stop, I'm going to go do this in a different way.

Jeff Jarvis [01:40:14]:
It became your shrink. No, don't give up, Leo. Don't give up.

Leo Laporte [01:40:17]:
No, worse. It said, okay. And it deleted everything. And it done. And then I said, what are you doing? I actually yelled it. I said, stop. I didn't tell you to delete it. I just said, I want to stop this process.

Leo Laporte [01:40:32]:
And it said, oh, I'm sorry. And fortunately it was able to bring it all back because it does keep track of everything. It does. But what I. But here's. I think the interesting thing that People who use AI will be interested in. What I did is I went with the same model, but not in Hermes. And Claude code anthropic zone harness.

Leo Laporte [01:40:49]:
It did it beautifully without error. Flawlessly, in fact. Part of the problem was I switched. I said, I give up, and I switched to Claude code. At the same time as Hermes, Claude was deleting the code Claude code. Claude was trying to understand what's going on. Stuff's disappearing. It was a very interesting battle.

Leo Laporte [01:41:08]:
But Claude code in the, you know, Opus in Claude code was perfect and I think anthropic. In fact, I even suggested this and Quicksilver agreed. Nerfs Opus 4.8 if you're not using their own harness. If you're using a third party harness, they don't like that. Anthropic does some things I'm not really happy about. At that point. I turned off Opus 4.8 in Hermes. I said, don't use any Opus models.

Leo Laporte [01:41:37]:
Let's see, have I done? Oh, I have one more commercial. Let me do that now and then we will talk about the Sam Altman movie. Yeah, very exciting.

Jeff Jarvis [01:41:48]:
If you ever see it.

Leo Laporte [01:41:51]:
It's no Melania, let me put it that way. This episode of Intelligent. But it may confirm. It may confirm Paris's theory, Her thesis from last week.

Jeff Jarvis [01:42:04]:
Yeah, it might.

Leo Laporte [01:42:04]:
Might. According to Variety, the movie's almost done. A biopic of Sam Altman. It's called Artificial. But Amazon is dropping it maybe because they are partnering with OpenAI. This maybe explains, you know, Paris's theory that Andy Jassy was trying to tank Fable with the president. I'm still not convinced of that. But Amazon is putting $50 billion into OpenAI.

Leo Laporte [01:42:40]:
It's credits for Amazon Web Services. It's one of those circular deals. We'll give you money, you give it back to us. How's that? Amazon says we have the utmost respect and admiration for Luca Guadagino as an award winning filmmaker. Guadagnino. Not to mention a long standing relationship we hope to continue. Oh, yeah, good luck with that. We believe that Artificial will be better served if it were released by a different studio, not us.

Leo Laporte [01:43:11]:
And we're working closely with the filmmaking team to find a new home.

Jeff Jarvis [01:43:16]:
And I don't think that's easy.

Leo Laporte [01:43:18]:
It's. It's made. Maybe it's.

Benito Gonzalez [01:43:20]:
How much did it cost? How much did it cost to make? Is there a budget in there?

Leo Laporte [01:43:25]:
I read somewhere and I don't remember the details. I feel like it was more than 10 million.

Benito Gonzalez [01:43:31]:
That's.

Leo Laporte [01:43:31]:
They spent 50 million on Melania, right?

Benito Gonzalez [01:43:34]:
No, that was like $10 million for a movie these days is nothing. That's an indie film.

Leo Laporte [01:43:39]:
Yeah, but I may be wrong, so. So don't quote me the cast. Let's see. Jason Schwartzman's in it. I don't know.

Benito Gonzalez [01:43:52]:
Is Jason Schwarzman playing Sam Altman?

Leo Laporte [01:43:55]:
You're probably right. Ike Barinholtz is Elon Musk. That's pretty funny. Yura Borisov is Ilya Sutskever. Monica Barbero is Mira Morati. Also in it. Mark Rylance. I love Mark Rylance.

Jeff Jarvis [01:44:13]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:44:14]:
It was written by Saturday Night Live writer Simon Rich. And it's actually the juiciest part. It's the period where Sam was fired.

Jeff Jarvis [01:44:24]:
Is it a comedy? Is it a Death of Lennon comedy?

Leo Laporte [01:44:30]:
We're so close to finish. They've actually test screenings which apparently Variety says went very well. So it's not because it wasn't a good movie.

Benito Gonzalez [01:44:39]:
I think this will come out.

Leo Laporte [01:44:40]:
According to an insider who's seen the movie. Variety says the characters of Altman and Musk are the least sympathetic and the ones audiences would like the least. I bet you everybody loves Mirror Morati in it. It's also understood Amazon had seen all the early iterations of the script before the director boarded the project. Altman was at Bezos's wedding in Venice last year. This is a. Puck got this story from.

Jeff Jarvis [01:45:09]:
If only Musk had done. I mean, if only Zuckerberg had done different things, maybe there wouldn't be a sequel of his movie coming out.

Leo Laporte [01:45:15]:
That's going to be interesting, isn't it?

Jeff Jarvis [01:45:17]:
Jeremy Strong playing Zuckerberg.

Leo Laporte [01:45:19]:
Jeremy Strong, the guy who was so great in succession.

Jeff Jarvis [01:45:24]:
He's intense as Kendall.

Leo Laporte [01:45:25]:
Roy. He's very intense. He's a short.

Jeff Jarvis [01:45:28]:
Yeah. Kendall. It was Kendall.

Leo Laporte [01:45:29]:
It was Kendall. Yeah. I don't know you. You can. It's so easy to have conspiracy theories

Jeff Jarvis [01:45:37]:
now, but I. I also think it's. I mean, the other story in showbiz is that. Is that Google invested in a 24. And I think that the Hollywood slash Silicon Valley axis changes once the. Once the actors agreed that. That you could use it in some circumstances. Once you see things like that happening, I think they don't want to piss off the AI companies.

Leo Laporte [01:46:04]:
Maybe. Yeah. I mean, goodness knows we all love the ad companies. In the days since. This is from Puck. Since the tech giant scrapped plans to release Luca Guada Nino's OpenAI movie CAA, the agency is scramble to find a home for the all but completed project. It seems the only sure thing in Hollywood these days is tech's growing reach across town.

Benito Gonzalez [01:46:32]:
But Netflix don't care though, right? They'll take it.

Leo Laporte [01:46:36]:
Yeah. Netflix will get. They'll get a deal on it, probably. Yeah, yeah. By the way, OpenAI, Ed Zittran got a big scoop. He got. He got the details of OpenAI's financials.

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:49]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:46:49]:
And none of that good. They burned $3.7 billion in the first quarter in three months of 2026. So a billion dollars a month cash burn they did have.

Jeff Jarvis [01:47:06]:
There was an unusual expense in that.

Leo Laporte [01:47:08]:
Right, right.

Jeff Jarvis [01:47:09]:
But everything's an unusual expense for these guys.

Leo Laporte [01:47:11]:
It's all unusual. Yeah, they've got it some Runway. They raised a lot of money and they've got an IPO coming. But maybe these numbers are not. Maybe this isn't a good time for those numbers to show up. Ed Zittran certainly was happy to tout them. And I mentioned OpenAI has its own mythos model. It's called I got the number wrong.

Leo Laporte [01:47:38]:
5.5 cyber. And to go with Project Glasswing. They have their competitor, Patch the Planet.

Jeff Jarvis [01:47:47]:
No, no, it should be 5.5 salsa

Leo Laporte [01:47:51]:
to go with jalapeno guacamole. Patch the Planet is an Internet scale effort to help open source software get ahead of AI bug hunting tools. Also an effort to help the open source community see the benefits and not just the downside of AI coding tools. Of course. Of course. Patch the Planet and Getty Images has made a deal. Is that. Are they the largest licensing company for images? They made a deal with OpenAI, which apparently the market loves.

Leo Laporte [01:48:25]:
Stock price went up 145% on Monday after they announced that licensing deal.

Jeff Jarvis [01:48:32]:
I think it kept going up on Tuesday too.

Leo Laporte [01:48:34]:
Yeah, it hadn't been going down. A lot of people thought, what's the future of Getty? In a world where AI images are so easy and cheap to make, we don't know what the deal exactly is. The companies didn't share financial terms. One of the questions still open, will Getty Images be used to train future OpenAI models?

Jeff Jarvis [01:48:58]:
Any answer?

Leo Laporte [01:48:59]:
We don't know. It's open.

Benito Gonzalez [01:49:00]:
Of course. Of course. Come on. Of course.

Leo Laporte [01:49:04]:
You would think. Yeah, but at least paying for it is better than just stealing them, right?

Benito Gonzalez [01:49:12]:
Yeah, but Getty gets that money.

Leo Laporte [01:49:14]:
Not the photographers again, Right, well, but Getty made a deal with the photographers. They bought the rights. Right.

Jeff Jarvis [01:49:21]:
Before we.

Benito Gonzalez [01:49:22]:
Yeah, exactly. Before the photographers knew this was going to happen.

Jeff Jarvis [01:49:26]:
When I was at shitcott and asked, there came a time when all of the writers contracts had to be renegotiated. Because. No, nobody anticipated the Internet and we wanted to put up writer stuff. And their contracts said nothing about the digital.

Leo Laporte [01:49:39]:
Yeah, because nobody anticipated.

Benito Gonzalez [01:49:43]:
This is why you get 360 deals now.

Leo Laporte [01:49:45]:
Go ahead.

Benito Gonzalez [01:49:45]:
Have you heard of a 360 deal in Hollywood? You know what those are? It's like a deal that basically encompasses all of you forever across the universe.

Leo Laporte [01:49:54]:
All of our releases at Tech TV said we own the rights to this in all forms of media in perpetuity now or in future creation.

Jeff Jarvis [01:50:06]:
This universe or any imagine.

Leo Laporte [01:50:09]:
But that's. A lawyer's gonna write that because, you know.

Benito Gonzalez [01:50:13]:
Yeah, but people are signing away their entire likenesses to companies already.

Leo Laporte [01:50:16]:
Maybe people should learn. Yeah, maybe you think, you know, Taylor Swift found out that Scooter Braun had bought her entire discography on Instagram. He didn't bother to call her. They just, you know, he just bought it. But her response was great. And I don't know if a photographer could do this, but she recreated all those albums.

Jeff Jarvis [01:50:34]:
She re.

Benito Gonzalez [01:50:35]:
Recorded everything. And that's like. That's the thing you're supposed to do.

Leo Laporte [01:50:37]:
Yeah, that's the way to do it. Take it back. Meta has launched new smart glasses without the name Ray Ban. Instead the name Kylie Jenner.

Jeff Jarvis [01:50:49]:
That's the expensive version has her name. Cheap version.

Leo Laporte [01:50:53]:
Yes. This is the Meta Fury glass. Isn't there a. Isn't there a Avengers character? Fury. Am I wrong on that?

Benito Gonzalez [01:51:03]:
Nick Fury.

Leo Laporte [01:51:04]:
Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson. No.

Benito Gonzalez [01:51:07]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:51:09]:
Yeah. So maybe that's why they call him Fury. These are not wimpy. And for the ladies, there's the Kylie Jenner glasses.

Jeff Jarvis [01:51:20]:
$299 and $399.

Leo Laporte [01:51:22]:
Those are the Kylie Jenners, the Kylie edition. They feature a little gem on the bridge of the nose. And the nose pieces are metal so as not to absorb makeup. I guess that means I should buy them. These are cat eye. And see. Yes, they do have the. They have the cameras on them.

Leo Laporte [01:51:39]:
There's also the Meta Adventurers. These will be 81 bucks cheaper, the basic ones, because they don't have the Ray Ban name on them, even though the manufacturer, Esselor Luxottica owns Ray Ban. They make all glasses and everything else. They make all glasses. By the way, look at the Fury's temple pieces. Those are almost as big as the Snap glasses. So Snap has also announced its AI glasses. Not as inexpensive as the Metas.

Leo Laporte [01:52:08]:
$2,199. And what do they say? What was Ian Thompson saying on Twit on Sunday? Or was it Ian or was it Doc Rock? I think it was Doc Rock on Mac Break Weekly. These glasses, you look like Charles Nelson Riley in the front and it looks like you've. Oh, no, it was Andy Inaco. It said souvenir hockey sticks in the back. They are rather large temple pieces. But remember, Snap, like Meta, doesn't have a phone, so they've got to build more electronics into the. Into the spectacles.

Leo Laporte [01:52:48]:
I don't know who would buy $2,195.

Jeff Jarvis [01:52:52]:
It's a PTSD for my Google Glass.

Leo Laporte [01:52:54]:
Yeah, that's what Google Glass cost, roughly.

Jeff Jarvis [01:52:57]:
Or fifty hundred.

Leo Laporte [01:52:58]:
They were. They were less expensive.

Jeff Jarvis [01:52:59]:
But when you got my special lenses.

Leo Laporte [01:53:02]:
Oh, that's right.

Jeff Jarvis [01:53:04]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:53:04]:
Snap's CEO Evan Spiegel says this is it. It's make or break. We can't fulfill our mission without these new AR glasses. I'm a believer in AR glasses. I don't think anybody's nailed it yet. No, Apple's gonna be the one, in my opinion. But we have to make a leap

Benito Gonzalez [01:53:23]:
in battery technology still. There's still a leap to be made, but.

Leo Laporte [01:53:27]:
Yeah, these only get four hours, but the case can charge them several times. But see, the key is having the. The computing platform. And since everybody's carrying an iPhone, they're already carrying a very powerful computing platform with AI built in. Internet connectivity takes that all out of the glasses, so the battery can last longer. I think we're going to see Apple glasses in two years.

Jeff Jarvis [01:53:51]:
Four hours makes. I mean, if you're. If you're like me and you have lenses you need the glasses to see,

Leo Laporte [01:53:56]:
you'd have to buy three pairs.

Jeff Jarvis [01:53:58]:
Yeah.

Benito Gonzalez [01:53:59]:
And most people I've like, I've ever talked to who use these only really use the audio and never use the camera.

Leo Laporte [01:54:05]:
Right. The audio is great.

Benito Gonzalez [01:54:06]:
So why don't they make these that don't have a camera?

Jeff Jarvis [01:54:09]:
They're talking about that. There was a hint of that.

Leo Laporte [01:54:11]:
Yeah. And they still haven't built in the face recognition. We know the code was in there, but they backed off. Honestly, that's why the camera. This can recognize the AI in this, can look through the camera and tell me what I'm looking at. Read signs in a foreign context.

Benito Gonzalez [01:54:30]:
I understand all that, but nobody ever uses that.

Leo Laporte [01:54:33]:
Well, because it's not very good yet. I've tried to use it.

Benito Gonzalez [01:54:38]:
Exactly. So we're at the point where that technology isn't even that good yet. So why do we try to sell it to people?

Leo Laporte [01:54:44]:
Let me see if it's getting better. Hey, Meta, what am I looking at right now. We'll be back in a few moments. It's going. It's not connected to the phone yet. See, that's the problem, is they don't. They can't do anything on their own. Well, too bad.

Leo Laporte [01:55:14]:
It used to work. I guess every once in a while you have to connect, reconnect a meta. AI. Oh, yeah, I wasn't logged in, that's why. Ah, well, China has. I don't know what this has to do with anything. Tightened its indium phosphide checks.

Jeff Jarvis [01:55:32]:
Well, that's a story everybody's talking about.

Leo Laporte [01:55:34]:
That's. It's on everybody's lips. Forget fable. What about the indium phosphide? It's a niche compound, essential to AI data centers. It's become Beijing's newest point of leverage.

Jeff Jarvis [01:55:48]:
They got us by the short hairs,

Leo Laporte [01:55:50]:
they got us by the phosph, by the. Got us by the. Indium phosphide is what they got us by. What else? AI data centers just got a government mandated fast lane to the grid, writes Tim Dechant, TechCrunch, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC. Who do you work for? Oh, I work for FERC. Oh. Oh, you're one of those.

Leo Laporte [01:56:18]:
What do they call them? Ferkies? They told grid operators last week to fast interconnect.

Benito Gonzalez [01:56:24]:
It's Ferkers, Leo Ferkers.

Leo Laporte [01:56:27]:
I'm a ferker. You little ferker. Six major grid operators have to show that data centers are able to connect to the transmission system in a timely and order orderly manner. Well, I guess for the people who are suffering from the wine of the natural gas powered turbines on Elon Musk's data centers, they might be happy to hear that this could go away. Grid operators have 30 days to submit a report detailing how much generating capacity they have to spare, if any, and then 60 days to defend or revise electricity rates within their regions. Basically, the Feds are putting their thumb on the scale for AI, which is why it's so weird, I guess. It's only, I guess that they want to favor some AIs, but not all AIs, I guess.

Jeff Jarvis [01:57:20]:
The big boys.

Leo Laporte [01:57:21]:
The big boys. All right, here's some good news. You want some good news? An AI engineer claims that he has cracked Linear A. Tom Dimino, a self taught AI engineer and amateur linguist. Linear A is an ancient Bronze Age Minoan writing system that we don't understand. It's. You know. His claims are currently being reviewed by linguists at Rutgers in Cambridge.

Leo Laporte [01:57:57]:
Domino studied classical history, linguistics and languages he has proficiency in eight languages, including Attic, Greek, Classic Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic.

Jeff Jarvis [01:58:07]:
Don't you hate people like that?

Leo Laporte [01:58:09]:
Oh, I wish I knew. Uygur Riddick comes in so handy. He actually went to Greek, to Crete, to learn more about the Minoan culture.

Jeff Jarvis [01:58:20]:
God bless.

Leo Laporte [01:58:21]:
He began work, though, on deciphering linear A in January. By May 22, a major insight came to him. This would be a huge deal. Linear B was deciphered in 1952 that made the front page of the New York Times. But we were never able to crack linear A. But with the help of AI,

Benito Gonzalez [01:58:46]:
the

Leo Laporte [01:58:46]:
key that unlocked linear A, he was analyzing a series of linear A prayer inscriptions that adhered to a formula. In the formula, all of the words in each line of the inscription were known based on their overlap with linear B, except for the first word. First word, same verb root, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then there's more of that. He used Claude code to build a suite of Python scripts that query, cross reference, and organize the digitized linear A corpus, enabling systematic hypothesis testing at a scale that would have been impractical to do manually. That's how it did it so fast. Anyway. We'll keep an eye on that one.

Leo Laporte [01:59:29]:
That would be a big deal. What'd you think of the midjourney announcement? Did we talk about that last week?

Jeff Jarvis [01:59:38]:
No, we didn't. It's really interesting. Well, a. It's a pivot. A fascinating pivot. Not so far as going from shoes to AI

Leo Laporte [01:59:50]:
as these guys. All birds who are now named smart birds, and they don't make slippers anymore. Okay, he's fine.

Jeff Jarvis [02:00:01]:
Excellent shoes.

Leo Laporte [02:00:02]:
So Mid Journey, as you all know, was famous for making images until they kind of got scooped by Nano Banana and I don't know if anybody.

Jeff Jarvis [02:00:08]:
Long ago. Right. We haven't heard from Midjourney in a long time.

Leo Laporte [02:00:11]:
So they decided that to turn their AI chops to another issue. This is their ultrasound that they claim is the equivalent of a full body mri. Here a young lady in a fairly modest one piece is being dunked into water. And then they will fire sound through the water at her body and through it. And then the AI will take those fuzzy signals and turn them into a 3D image of. Of her body. Those who I've talked to say it is fairly low quality imagery. They are not yet really anywhere near what an MRI could do, but it's a lot cheaper.

Leo Laporte [02:00:55]:
And they're going to build this.

Jeff Jarvis [02:00:58]:
What Jason was talking about this. It's. It's trillions of data points.

Olivier Sylvain [02:01:03]:
Yes.

Jeff Jarvis [02:01:04]:
So I don't know if it's any cheaper to do.

Leo Laporte [02:01:06]:
Yeah, it's cheaper than building a giant MRI machine. Plus, it's not as unpleasant for the customer. It must be cheaper because Mid Journey's plans include building a spa in downtown

Jeff Jarvis [02:01:19]:
San Francisco for rich people.

Leo Laporte [02:01:22]:
They're gonna have seven of them. They only have one right now. Yeah, I, you know what? It's, it's a pivot. It's probably also a Hail Mary. It's a pivot and a Hail Mary.

Jeff Jarvis [02:01:35]:
Well, some of you guys.

Leo Laporte [02:01:36]:
Is it a Hail pivot or a Pivot Mary? It's one or the other. They say the. Actually, they'll tend 10 of the scanners in the Mid Journey spa at Union Square open before the end of next year.

Jeff Jarvis [02:01:49]:
Okay, Leo, I think you gotta go do it.

Leo Laporte [02:01:51]:
I will, absolutely. I've done the, I've done the full body mri. The Paid a couple of thousand dollars for it. Wasn't cheap. But the idea is Kevin Rose told me to do it, so I did it. I do everything he says. Lisa and I went down and got a baseline. The idea is if you, you know, you get this done now and it can tell you, especially if you do it every few years.

Leo Laporte [02:02:14]:
They said I should come back because I could die any day now in 18 months and do it again. And I have my, I have my full. I don't show it to people because it really is quite revealing. I have my full body MRI right here on my phone. And I wonder if there's a way to show you without your toes. Perhaps I can show you my toes. It said one thing which concerned me a little bit. What my doctor said, he wasn't against the idea, but he said the problem with all of this, and it would be the same problem, frankly, with the Mid Journey, is it reveals things about you.

Leo Laporte [02:02:59]:
We're all imperfect. Nobody is a perfect human. So it reveals something about you that is maybe abnormal.

Jeff Jarvis [02:03:06]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:03:07]:
But not necessarily a cause for concern. The problem is, if a doctor knows about it, they have to do something about it. Sometimes those are quite invasive. I'll give you an example. Friend of mine got a full body scan and there was a growth on their thyroid. Now, that meant they had to go in and get biopsied, which involves a very long needle thrust into your chest. Been there, had it not pleasant, perhaps risky, turned out completely benign. And that person would never have known about it if they hadn't done the full body scan.

Jeff Jarvis [02:03:41]:
Yeah, but, but so, so the argument, I, I, I go through this because I have had Prostate cancer. There's always a constant lot of argument about prostate testing and, and breast cancer testing. Oh, we shouldn't do so much because it's the, the odds that it's going to save your life are low. Well, that's. If you look at the aggregate of everybody, the intervention is risky in my prostate, I want to know.

Leo Laporte [02:04:02]:
Yeah, well, it's an interesting thing because Kaiser, my health plan, used to give me a yearly PSA test. This is a blood test to test for prostate specific antigen. And if you have a high PSA number, it means, well, you might.

Jeff Jarvis [02:04:17]:
They don't test that anymore.

Leo Laporte [02:04:19]:
They stopped a couple of years ago and I asked my doctor last year, I said, why don't we do PSA anymore? He said, well, we'll do it, but you've got to go to this website, this Kaiser website, where we explain that we don't like to do it anymore because if it comes out high, then we have to do interventions often which are more dangerous than the very, very slow growing prostate cancer. And so we don't like to know. We prefer not to know. I said, you know what, I'd like to have it anyway. And he said, okay, you just have to go to this website, understand, blah, blah, all of this and say, yes, I understand. And fortunately my PSA is low. Interestingly, last time, a couple of months ago, I went in, he offered it, he didn't even ask. So maybe they've changed their tune as they do, as happens all the time in medicine.

Leo Laporte [02:05:14]:
But that's the whole idea, is sometimes it's better to wait for a symptom than to do one of these tests and see. For instance, I hope this isn't too much information. According to the scan I did, one of my kidneys is tiny.

Jeff Jarvis [02:05:32]:
I was glad you didn't say testicles, but keep going

Leo Laporte [02:05:36]:
is basically useless. Is it atrophied? And this is why you want to do a baseline when you're young.

Jeff Jarvis [02:05:43]:
So you're not going to contribute one to me when I need one.

Leo Laporte [02:05:45]:
I can't give you a kidney. Thank God.

Jeff Jarvis [02:05:47]:
Oh my gosh, I thought we were friends.

Leo Laporte [02:05:48]:
I'm glad I did that scan. So they said we don't know is it could have been, you were born that way and it's always been that way. Or it could be a trauma, it could be a sign that something attacked your kidney, punched in the kidney, something should be, you should be aware of, maybe you've got a problem, but we just don't know. And to figure that out would involve invasive Surgery, I guess. I don't know. It's not worth it. So I just. I have to live with this possibility that I.

Jeff Jarvis [02:06:16]:
Knowledge.

Leo Laporte [02:06:17]:
Nice knowledge. And you know what? I even think it could be just the picture was a little skewed and it looked small. I don't know.

Benito Gonzalez [02:06:25]:
Perspective. Yeah, perspective can do that.

Leo Laporte [02:06:27]:
It could be a perspective thing. Maybe the camera was off a little bit.

Jeff Jarvis [02:06:30]:
I had something looked like a funny thing on my kidney in a. An MRI or PT scan. And then I went. When I was in the hospital for all my stuff, they did a lot of scans on me. And so they looked again and said, no, no, no, it's nothing. And I went to the urologist and he said, no, it's nothing.

Leo Laporte [02:06:47]:
But this. Sometimes doing these electives, I did pre Nouveau. And you know what? Now that I've done it, I do want to do another one, just to see. For instance, now that you have a baseline, if my kidney continues to shrink, well, then maybe there is something we should pay attention to.

Jeff Jarvis [02:07:04]:
How long are you in the subway tube?

Leo Laporte [02:07:10]:
It's like an hour. Because it's a full body scan. They don't. It's not just your brain, and it's loud as hell. It's bang, bang, bang. They give you headphones and they say what kind of music you want to listen to? And I said, can I have some Americana? They said, sure, but it doesn't mask the bangs. It's like somebody. It's very loud and I'm not claustrophobic, so it was fine, but it's a long time.

Leo Laporte [02:07:32]:
Yeah, it was like. It felt like. I don't know, it was 45 minutes or an hour. It was quite a long while because they're. Because they're moving it around. They have to. They're doing your whole body. Anyway.

Jeff Jarvis [02:07:42]:
Anyway. So interesting that midjourney's doing this, but it's gonna be a while.

Leo Laporte [02:07:48]:
That was a big tangent we went on.

Jeff Jarvis [02:07:50]:
It was two old guys, two ultracoccus.

Leo Laporte [02:07:53]:
I'll tell you about my kidneys.

Jeff Jarvis [02:07:54]:
Yeah, kidneys. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:07:59]:
So have you done an elective mri? No. You did it for good reason.

Jeff Jarvis [02:08:02]:
No, I did it for a reason.

Benito Gonzalez [02:08:03]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:08:04]:
Yeah. Princeton graduate, built a $30 million AI detection business, and now he's selling it to Superhuman. The folks who own a Grammarly.

Jeff Jarvis [02:08:14]:
And I don't trust any of these AI detection things. I think that they're going to accuse people of cheating when they don't.

Leo Laporte [02:08:23]:
You're going to miss GPT0. Have you ever heard of that one?

Benito Gonzalez [02:08:29]:
Can't you Just like, build a random number generator that says if something is fake or not and sell that as an AI detector at this point?

Leo Laporte [02:08:34]:
Yeah, that's kind of at this point.

Jeff Jarvis [02:08:36]:
I had a study a few weeks ago that I put in where if it was all AI, it was pretty good. If it was all humor was pretty good. The weird thing about this study was that when they put in a low amount of AI content, it thought it was high. And when they put in a high amount of AI content mixed in, they thought it was low. Yeah, the machine did.

Leo Laporte [02:08:57]:
Peter A. Jones in our YouTube chat said there's nothing like a really long chat about old men's ailments. This is why we need Paris on this show.

Jeff Jarvis [02:09:06]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:09:06]:
Come back soon.

Jeff Jarvis [02:09:07]:
Her eyes will roll and we'll know we've gone on long enough.

Leo Laporte [02:09:10]:
We got to move on. So, you know your AI can have a phone number now with Twilio. It can even make calls because it can have a voice with stripe. You can give it a credit card. Estonia intends to give them digital IDs. Estonia, which already has digital IDs for humans, is going to allow AI agents to have their own digital identities as well. They're going to develop ID codes AI agents can use to take actions. I guess this makes sense.

Leo Laporte [02:09:45]:
If you have an identity here. I'll do the. You know what? I'll tell you one thing AI's gotten good at is translation. Used to be the translate. This page stuff wasn't great. Oh, well, maybe this isn't a good translation. It translated something in Estonian into the most AI smart people, I guess.

Jeff Jarvis [02:10:06]:
Sounds Estonian.

Leo Laporte [02:10:08]:
Yeah. Oh, a million learning byte a year.

Olivier Sylvain [02:10:13]:
Which.

Jeff Jarvis [02:10:13]:
What translation are you using?

Leo Laporte [02:10:15]:
I don't know. I think that was cocky.

Jeff Jarvis [02:10:17]:
Use Google.

Leo Laporte [02:10:18]:
Maybe you should use Google. Yeah, that's a little disappointing.

Jeff Jarvis [02:10:24]:
Siesta was the button. Yeah, I think that you. Yeah, no, no, no.

Leo Laporte [02:10:27]:
Let's go back to Estonian anyway. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Look at my. I'm going to campaign for this. I really think that everything. I know they don't want to do this, but everything you interface with should have an AI interface on it. An SDK, an API, an MCP server, whatever. I love it that I can.

Leo Laporte [02:10:50]:
I can log into my digital scale through my AI and it can get all the information out of the scale. I think that's fantastic. Unfortunately, the chronometer calorie counter that I use doesn't have an interface. But some. Some guys reverse engineered it and there is a. So I can. And so now I can talk to my Watch. I can tell it what I ate.

Jeff Jarvis [02:11:12]:
It can.

Leo Laporte [02:11:12]:
Then get the calories from chronometer, put it in my obsidian, add it to my chronometer, add it to my health summary. Everything should have an interface. Now, in my.

Jeff Jarvis [02:11:20]:
Do you take pictures of your food? Does that work?

Leo Laporte [02:11:22]:
Well, I could do that, too. Yeah. I could use my agent, send it a picture because it understands pictures. It would analyze the picture. I haven't tried that yet, but I will try that. There are AI. There's one called Calai, which I think actually Apple banned. I used it for a while that did exactly that.

Leo Laporte [02:11:42]:
It wasn't super accurate, but it was good enough. The whole idea is it's a pain in the butt to log your food. Anything that makes it faster and easier is a good thing.

Jeff Jarvis [02:11:51]:
I should have asked you this before. Was the carrot cake your entire lunch or just dessert?

Leo Laporte [02:11:58]:
No. How embarrassing. No, I had a Greek yogurt as well. Oh, okay.

Jeff Jarvis [02:12:04]:
Oh, it sounds fine to me.

Leo Laporte [02:12:06]:
I love carrot cake. I bought it a week ago. I thought I better eat it now. It's going to go stale. I just love it. And I only bought one piece. Every once in a while, I bought it. You know what I did bad, though? I made bagels last week.

Jeff Jarvis [02:12:18]:
Oh, you had. You had stopped that.

Leo Laporte [02:12:19]:
Yeah, I had stopped it. I gave away my sourdough. All right.

Jeff Jarvis [02:12:24]:
No. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:12:26]:
Because I said I'm never. I can never do this again. It's killing me. But, you know, now that I'm on. Actually, I've moved from GLP1 to tirzepatide. I'm on Zepbound now. My doctor said that's okay. I was on Ozempic, but now that it's brought my blood sugar down, back to normal.

Jeff Jarvis [02:12:45]:
Yay.

Leo Laporte [02:12:45]:
I'm able to eat carrot cake and bagels. But not all the time.

Jeff Jarvis [02:12:49]:
But your pancreas has.

Leo Laporte [02:12:51]:
Love making bagels.

Jeff Jarvis [02:12:53]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:12:53]:
And so I make them. I get one, and I give them to everybody in the family. We had a big brunch for Father's Day. Everybody came over and had bagels. It was great. We invited the workers, the guy who's doing the drilling outside. We invited them in for bagels. We invited them all in.

Leo Laporte [02:13:10]:
New York Times publisher. Is that Salzburger?

Jeff Jarvis [02:13:14]:
That's Salzburger, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:13:15]:
AG Salzberger says Big Tech is a thief and a liar.

Jeff Jarvis [02:13:21]:
Do they use those same words with somebody else we know of?

Benito Gonzalez [02:13:25]:
Mm.

Jeff Jarvis [02:13:26]:
Salzburger. Aren't you a little shy by using those words to describe someone?

Leo Laporte [02:13:30]:
We don't say liar. We. Yeah, we don't like to use that word. This is. You've been talking about this all along. He was addressing the annual Wan IFRA World News media conference a couple of weeks ago. Big Tech is stealing news media's property and undermining democracy.

Jeff Jarvis [02:13:53]:
Oh, the self importance.

Leo Laporte [02:13:55]:
And the only solution is for news organizations to work together to resist it. He said Big Tech's hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their AI products. A brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale. Tech giants strip mine news websites without permission or compensation. Doesn't he have a deal with OpenAI? I thought the Times.

Jeff Jarvis [02:14:21]:
No, he's suing Open AI. So they saving the restoration. Yeah. And mind you, the New York Times didn't kill other papers across the country, but it was a kick to the kidney to many of them.

Leo Laporte [02:14:31]:
Right.

Jeff Jarvis [02:14:32]:
When it went national.

Leo Laporte [02:14:34]:
You made a really excellent point, I think on Blue sky or Madison maybe when the Knicks won the NBA championship, which would have been in the old days of a New York newspaper. Banner, headlines, stop the presses, pictures, everything. It didn't even make it. It wasn't even above the fold in the New York Times.

Jeff Jarvis [02:14:55]:
So the New York Times, that was. And the website, to be clear, online they had pictures above the fold. I mean on paper they had pictures above the fold, but on the website, yeah, it was lower down the page. And I said, this is ridiculous. You haven't been in New York newspaper in a long time, but you really aren't now.

Leo Laporte [02:15:08]:
It's clear.

Jeff Jarvis [02:15:09]:
This is just bad news judgment. Well, so here's the interesting thing. You know, I'm talking about the broken times constantly. Times has never raised their head, never said a word. Word, nothing. Suddenly they responded to me. Oh, and well, Jeff, we had it all in the middle of the night and I said, not good enough. You know, your readers don't come in more than a few times a month.

Jeff Jarvis [02:15:28]:
So you think we just did it once, that's good enough. No, they come in the next morning, they want to see it, it's not there. Bad news judgment. I thought, why did they respond to me in this case? The New York Post did a story about my blue sky.

Leo Laporte [02:15:40]:
Oh no, because anything to tweak the

Jeff Jarvis [02:15:44]:
Times so they felt they needed to be on their own record having.

Leo Laporte [02:15:46]:
I'm sure the Post had a banner headline Nick Swin or something, right? I mean. Oh yeah, the Post loves that stuff

Jeff Jarvis [02:15:52]:
they post in Daily News. I just read a history of the New York Daily News. It's the kind of thing that you just died for back in the day to do a front page around those kinds of topics.

Leo Laporte [02:16:02]:
That's was the Daily News. The one with the headless body and a topless bar?

Jeff Jarvis [02:16:05]:
No, that's the Post.

Leo Laporte [02:16:06]:
That was the Post.

Jeff Jarvis [02:16:06]:
Daily News was Ford to City. Drop Dead.

Leo Laporte [02:16:09]:
That's right.

Jeff Jarvis [02:16:11]:
I read this book which is not out yet. It's quite wonderful that evidently it came from one. As they were trying to figure out the headline which was happening. You're standing around the newsroom, you're going around, you're throwing out ideas and somebody passed a note to the editor that said forward to City F off for laugh. But that became the basis of Drop Dead.

Leo Laporte [02:16:36]:
We really are out of time. If there's any stories that we missed that you want to cover. Before we do though, I just read a little bit of Mick Sweeney's piece by Andrew Singleton. AI Economics for Dummies. As AI companies get ready to go public and we get a deeper look at their inner workings, it's only natural to have questions about their finances, like do they make money and how. Here are a few examples to help the average layperson understand the business side of AI. Acquiring one grape costs Alex $2 billion. Alex offers to sell Mike one grape a month for the next 12 months for $1 billion per grape.

Leo Laporte [02:17:18]:
Alex asks for the full $12 billion upfront and provides Mike with one grape for the first month. Alex makes a $10 billion profit this month. His annual rate of revenue is $120 billion. And his profits are trending up at an infinite rate. The Wall Street Journal's business editor moves into Alex's house. Having accepted a part time position as Alex's human footstool. He never asks to see the books. It's very funny.

Leo Laporte [02:17:49]:
It goes on. I don't want. I won't read the whole thing, but it is a pretty good send up on the economy of AI.

Jeff Jarvis [02:17:57]:
I love McSweeney's line 115 is something you look at a line like I think and op ed in the New York Times.

Leo Laporte [02:18:05]:
Oh well, I agree with the headline. We have Doom.

Jeff Jarvis [02:18:08]:
Maxine has to stop.

Leo Laporte [02:18:09]:
Yes, we have to stop freaking out.

Jeff Jarvis [02:18:11]:
This is by Robert Schiller who is a Nobel Prize winning economist who's just going on about the. It's obvious. But what's, what's the harm of all this doom stuff and we certainly recognize that where we are. So just stop it. Just stop it.

Leo Laporte [02:18:25]:
We all grew up, as he points out on Doom Sci Fi, it's been the trope of sci fi and AI since the very beginning.

Benito Gonzalez [02:18:37]:
Only in books, in movies and TV, robots are usually good guys.

Leo Laporte [02:18:42]:
HAL 9000.

Benito Gonzalez [02:18:44]:
That's one name more.

Leo Laporte [02:18:49]:
What's the Forbin project? That was a terrible, terrible AI I guess in war games, the AI. No, you know, only R2D2 data.

Benito Gonzalez [02:19:04]:
R2D2 data.

Leo Laporte [02:19:06]:
Okay. A lot of recent TV AI movies.

Benito Gonzalez [02:19:09]:
You know, there's more.

Jeff Jarvis [02:19:11]:
There's more.

Benito Gonzalez [02:19:12]:
There's more with their friends.

Leo Laporte [02:19:13]:
The movie Artificial intelligence AI. I could think of a lot of modern movies. Even her. The AI isn't exactly benign.

Benito Gonzalez [02:19:22]:
Terminator is a bad guy. But in the second one, he's a good guy.

Leo Laporte [02:19:24]:
Terminator, but he comes back as a good guy. But the machines are not good guys in any.

Benito Gonzalez [02:19:28]:
But there's always a twinge of, oh, maybe hits a person, maybe he. Maybe. Maybe he feels. But robots and androids have humans, so.

Leo Laporte [02:19:36]:
Okay, he's a cyber.

Jeff Jarvis [02:19:37]:
Speaking of machines, you told me you said you were going to buy a new Steam. Do you have price sticker shock?

Leo Laporte [02:19:43]:
I'm not going to buy a new steam.

Jeff Jarvis [02:19:45]:
The price.

Leo Laporte [02:19:46]:
150. $1,050 for the steam machine without a controller. 100 bucks more.

Jeff Jarvis [02:19:53]:
And this is all because of memory chips.

Leo Laporte [02:19:55]:
Yeah, I. I did buy a new machine. I bought. In fact, you're going to inherit my old switch. I bought the new switch, too, so you're going to inherit the old one so you can play the game that Paris really wants you to play.

Jeff Jarvis [02:20:07]:
I'll do it for about five minutes, so. No. Yeah. No, I won't.

Leo Laporte [02:20:13]:
I'll bring it out when I come out to have one of Hank's sandwiches.

Jeff Jarvis [02:20:16]:
Good.

Leo Laporte [02:20:16]:
Which is much like Haley's Comet. Long anticipated, long awaited. Yeah, it's considerably more than it was going to cost. Was. Well, they never did announce a price, but, boy. Yeah, that's. It's three times more than the PS5, and it's not any better. So I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:20:38]:
I don't know who they're gonna. I don't know who they're gonna want it for. All right, you're watching Intelligent Machines. As I mentioned, Paris Martineau has the week off. She'll be back in two weeks. We do have some great guests coming up, though. Paris is gonna be sad that she's gonna miss next week. Chris Potts of BigSpin.

Leo Laporte [02:20:57]:
AI this is all about AI hallucination. Dr. Ian Bogost is coming back. His book is coming out. He said, I'll come back in July when my book comes out, the small stuff. And I'M starting to see interviews with Ian. We really enjoyed having him on. He was the AI Whisperer.

Leo Laporte [02:21:18]:
He was on. And I'm happy to say we got Nate B. Jones, who is one of my favorites on AI. Yeah, I'm very excited about having.

Jeff Jarvis [02:21:26]:
We couldn't even find an email address for him. Couldn't figure out what.

Leo Laporte [02:21:28]:
Get them my AI Found it. I will not share it with you. I don't know how it found it. I don't know how hard it is to find. But yeah, we're glad we got a hold of them. Anyway, those are all coming up. Paris will be back for Ian Bogost, which is nice.

Jeff Jarvis [02:21:42]:
Good.

Leo Laporte [02:21:43]:
In a couple of weeks. And did she get. Did she respond to your message?

Jeff Jarvis [02:21:47]:
No, she didn't. She must be. She did. She did. Oh, she did. Yes. Hello from Old Faithful, where I am shocked to say I have cell service. I just stuck in traffic because of a giant bison.

Leo Laporte [02:22:00]:
Good for her. She's out there. So Old Faithful's in Wyoming. I thought. Is it in Montana? She's seeing the American planes.

Jeff Jarvis [02:22:11]:
Montana. Still, question mark.

Leo Laporte [02:22:12]:
Were there any pictures?

Jeff Jarvis [02:22:14]:
No, she didn't send no pictures.

Leo Laporte [02:22:16]:
All right, send pictures anyway. We miss her, but she'll be back. And Jeff Jarvis, of course, is here. His new book, Hot Type, coming soon. We'll have to interview you when the book comes out. Oh, well, we could do some dramatic readings. You could do your Hal Holbrook verse.

Jeff Jarvis [02:22:33]:
I did my Halbrobrik voice and I was telling people about this and they said, who? So it'll make no sense to some people I know.

Leo Laporte [02:22:40]:
Only we know. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the Picks of the week. There'll only be two of us picking this week, I'm sad to say. I will give you, in that case, this one. It's called in the weights. I don't know. It's an AI Vanity search. All right, so what Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn have done is they have gone and collected all of the different models.

Leo Laporte [02:23:14]:
GPT 5554, Mini Opus 4 8, Haiku Grok, Gemini, Kimmy, Deepseek. And they allow you to scan them for your name and then they rank it based on how well known your name is. And as it makes sense, pop icons are higher ranked. Minnie Mouse, currently today's heavyweight, followed by R2D2, Beyonce, and a guy known as Charles Lukewig Dodgson, maybe better known as Lewis Carol. Now, shall I put in your name, Jeff? Let's see if the AI well, they know who you are. The question is how Highly ranked.

Olivier Sylvain [02:23:58]:
Are you?

Leo Laporte [02:23:58]:
So we're going to quickly search through professor of journalism.

Olivier Sylvain [02:24:00]:
Look at that.

Leo Laporte [02:24:01]:
You're in the top 3% 804 strength.

Benito Gonzalez [02:24:04]:
Yay.

Leo Laporte [02:24:04]:
It found you in every one of these. Except Llama.

Jeff Jarvis [02:24:08]:
Hey. Which is fine.

Leo Laporte [02:24:11]:
Look, now if we just search for journalism Professor. Media critic 804, which is a very good score. A little weaker on the twig podcast. Co host only. Opus thought you were in that song.

Jeff Jarvis [02:24:23]:
Oh, ouch.

Leo Laporte [02:24:23]:
And you want to see the hallucinations?

Jeff Jarvis [02:24:25]:
Sure.

Leo Laporte [02:24:29]:
Let me see. Where are they? Oh, below. They're below. I'm going to show Jeff Jarvis, British TV presenter. That's what Llama thought you were. Jeff Jarvis, rock and folk musician. The French model. Mistral thought you were a rock and folk musician.

Leo Laporte [02:24:50]:
Are there Jeff Jarvis?

Jeff Jarvis [02:24:51]:
There is a Elvis impersonator. Jeff Jarvis.

Leo Laporte [02:24:54]:
Maybe that's what they were thinking.

Jeff Jarvis [02:24:55]:
There's a jazz musician.

Leo Laporte [02:24:56]:
Is there a professional wrestler named Jeff Jarvis?

Jeff Jarvis [02:24:58]:
I don't think so.

Leo Laporte [02:25:01]:
Claude Haiku. Thought that was the case.

Jeff Jarvis [02:25:03]:
That's great. That's funny.

Leo Laporte [02:25:04]:
Isn't that fun?

Benito Gonzalez [02:25:05]:
I love this aesthetic, though. I love this adventure game aesthetic.

Leo Laporte [02:25:09]:
It's very eight bit. Here.

Jeff Jarvis [02:25:11]:
Here.

Leo Laporte [02:25:11]:
I'll put Benito.

Benito Gonzalez [02:25:12]:
It's King's quest.

Leo Laporte [02:25:14]:
Yeah. Oh, is that what it is?

Benito Gonzalez [02:25:15]:
That's what it looks like to me.

Leo Laporte [02:25:17]:
Let me see. I don't know. Think Benito will show up?

Benito Gonzalez [02:25:20]:
Well, there's a famous version of me, so that name will show up.

Leo Laporte [02:25:25]:
So it's going through. It's a little slower. It's clustering up all of the different models. American jazz pianist.

Benito Gonzalez [02:25:34]:
Yep, that's the one. That's why I can't even be a musician. Because there's a more famous musician than me.

Leo Laporte [02:25:38]:
Yeah. A Spanish footballer. A Spanish professional cyclist. A Mexican politician. Well, Benito, no wonder it's having a hard time with you.

Jeff Jarvis [02:25:47]:
A boxer.

Leo Laporte [02:25:48]:
I'm not going to assume nations could be common Hispanic name. Okay. Fictional.

Jeff Jarvis [02:25:54]:
39th California governor according to Llama, assassinated in 1910.

Leo Laporte [02:25:59]:
And a Filipino politician.

Benito Gonzalez [02:26:01]:
Oh, that one's very close, Quinn.

Leo Laporte [02:26:05]:
Yeah. Well, yeah. You have Filipino politician family members? Could be.

Jeff Jarvis [02:26:11]:
All right, is Hank the port in there? Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:26:14]:
Oh, should we look?

Benito Gonzalez [02:26:15]:
Hank will for sure be in there. Right?

Leo Laporte [02:26:17]:
Salt Hank. Let's see. In the weights. Is Salt Hank in the weights? See, it's maybe more too modern. You know, that's. That might reduce the. No social media food creator. He is.

Leo Laporte [02:26:31]:
This is the one area where I think I might beat him.

Jeff Jarvis [02:26:34]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:26:35]:
He's a 249 score. I think the longevity of your presence in the world. I am top 1%.

Jeff Jarvis [02:26:42]:
Top 1% 194.

Leo Laporte [02:26:45]:
But again, llama has no idea and there are no hallucinations. GPT5 knows I'm a technology broadcaster, as does 54 mini opus, same thing. Known as the Tech Guy. Founder of the Twit Network.

Jeff Jarvis [02:27:02]:
Tech God.

Leo Laporte [02:27:03]:
Tech Guy. That's my radio name. Hi Guy.

Jeff Jarvis [02:27:08]:
You're Canadian? American.

Leo Laporte [02:27:09]:
That's a bit of a. Yeah, no, sorry, Grok. Known for hosting the Tech Guy radio show and founding the Twitt podcast network. Anyway, it's kind of fun. Are you in the weights? Well, find out.

Jeff Jarvis [02:27:22]:
Cool.

Leo Laporte [02:27:22]:
Yeah, just a little fun thing. It's in the weights dot com. Mr. Jarvis, a few things.

Jeff Jarvis [02:27:30]:
One, I didn't know this has been known. Did you know that the UK is going to turn off terrestrial TV signals? What in 2034 or now? They're thinking about 2040.

Leo Laporte [02:27:40]:
No antennas.

Jeff Jarvis [02:27:42]:
Yeah. They're just going to turn it off because they'll need inexpensive Internet access for all. But then they will just turn off broadcast.

Benito Gonzalez [02:27:51]:
Wait, so the Spectrum system is WI fi? The Spectrum is just going to become WI fi?

Jeff Jarvis [02:27:55]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:27:57]:
Or Internet TV hardwired. But it'll all be over the top. So that's interesting because they have a kind of weird relationship to broadcast. You know you have to buy a license, right. Broadcast TV license. And that funds the BBC, which is a weird thing to do. And they actually have little vans that go around to see if anybody's watching tv.

Jeff Jarvis [02:28:17]:
But that was. That's the difference in our model is that. Is that. That's what they decided to make it a public good. Instead of ads in the twenties. Instead of ad supported was because the. The US Navy created, as I said last week, insisted on the creation of rca. And that set in motion our model versus theirs.

Leo Laporte [02:28:33]:
I wish we'd had time with Olivier to get into that because I think he would have.

Jeff Jarvis [02:28:37]:
We should have you back. That was a fun. That was a fun conversation.

Leo Laporte [02:28:39]:
Really fun to talk about that stuff.

Jeff Jarvis [02:28:41]:
The Computer History Museum is hiring someone to start their new AI archive, which is great news.

Leo Laporte [02:28:46]:
That's interesting. So kind of like Internet archive.

Jeff Jarvis [02:28:51]:
No, I think more like a museum is what do they need to. How do you save an archive of the AI age? So they're going to hire one person who's going to work alone at first

Leo Laporte [02:29:01]:
to capture the liberty, the history of AI and robotics. What a great job that was. This is, if you're in the San Jose area, highly recommend to visit the Computer History Museum.

Jeff Jarvis [02:29:12]:
And they do other great events and much. Right. They did A great event which was. Which was key to my book Hot type on sale now on. On the creation of desktop publishing. And they had in the key people who did that to. To. To reminisce.

Jeff Jarvis [02:29:26]:
And it's an invaluable historical document.

Leo Laporte [02:29:29]:
Everything they do is great. And. And the exhibits are fantastic. And if you're a listener to our shows, you'll recognize so much of the stuff in there. There's an Apple one. I mean, it is really a wonderful museum.

Jeff Jarvis [02:29:42]:
And then my whole family sends this to me regularly. The onions. Dad suggests arriving at airport 14 hours early. So that's me. That's been the case. So I found a new Tik Tock account, which is Airport Dad.

Leo Laporte [02:30:00]:
All right, let's see. Why are all dads like this? It says airport dad arriving at the airport.

Jeff Jarvis [02:30:07]:
Guardian of all bags must have all the passports. Checks flight status every five minutes.

Leo Laporte [02:30:13]:
I guess I am that. I do do that. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [02:30:16]:
Annoyed when you stop at every shop. Triple checks everything. Checks if the plane is at the gate. Very important. I do that, too. Although first ignored every time.

Leo Laporte [02:30:23]:
Currently, Lisa is much more of a. I am more like, yeah, we can leave three, you know, two hours before the flight. We'll get there in plenty of time. I know. I don't like sitting in an airport.

Benito Gonzalez [02:30:36]:
Yeah, that's standard Filipino behavior. We're always there four hours before our flight.

Jeff Jarvis [02:30:41]:
Really.

Leo Laporte [02:30:42]:
Bill Gates was famous. Famous for cutting it as close as possible.

Jeff Jarvis [02:30:48]:
That's what I do when he flew commercial.

Leo Laporte [02:30:50]:
Back when he flew commercial. So this is in the very early days of Microsoft. He would arrive. He wanted to arrive just as the gate was closing.

Benito Gonzalez [02:30:59]:
Yeah, I used to be on the road. I used to be on the road like every other week. So I figured out how to get to the airport when I needed to. So now I can leave, like, a nice time. Yeah, I know exactly how to do it now.

Leo Laporte [02:31:12]:
Yeah. I know exactly how long it's going to take to get to SSL. No, it's an hour and 15 minutes. The problem is you get there nowadays and the TSA is the problem. You don't know how long that line's gonna be. It's very unpredictable. Right. Although there are ways.

Jeff Jarvis [02:31:29]:
Do you do the. Whatcha call it?

Leo Laporte [02:31:31]:
The clear? No, clear.

Jeff Jarvis [02:31:32]:
Oh, I pay for clear.

Leo Laporte [02:31:33]:
I did clear when it first came out, and I was so embarrassed because I walked up and they go, here. They take your luggage in your bin and they push ahead to the front of the line.

Jeff Jarvis [02:31:46]:
Oh, they don't. Well, I don't quite do that. Now? Yeah.

Benito Gonzalez [02:31:50]:
No, they have their own line now, right? They have their own.

Jeff Jarvis [02:31:52]:
They have their own line now. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:31:53]:
Oh, they still have to go through the tsa.

Jeff Jarvis [02:31:56]:
Yeah, but you have your own separate line through the tsa.

Leo Laporte [02:31:59]:
You don't have your own separate air X ray machine.

Jeff Jarvis [02:32:03]:
Kind of.

Benito Gonzalez [02:32:03]:
You do.

Leo Laporte [02:32:04]:
Oh, really? Okay. Not at sfo. At sfo, you have to be wedged somehow into the line for taking off your shoes and. And putting your laptop on.

Jeff Jarvis [02:32:14]:
But you don't take her shoes anymore either.

Leo Laporte [02:32:15]:
Well, I know. I guess it's a. I'm old hat now. No. So I didn't do that. I was embarrassing. Every time we. And the other thing is often the line for clear is longer than the line because everybody does it now.

Leo Laporte [02:32:31]:
So I, you know, I have a global entry. I have TSA pre. That's plenty. I don't. I don't even do that usually. I just.

Jeff Jarvis [02:32:39]:
I used to be United Global Services, which is the highest secret level. I got to kick old ladies out of the Jetway, but I don't have that anymore.

Leo Laporte [02:32:48]:
Out of my way, lady. Get out of that wheelchair now.

Jeff Jarvis [02:32:51]:
However, I will travel with my cane.

Leo Laporte [02:32:54]:
Oh, that's good. What do they call that? Johnny Jet had this. Had a name for it. The Miracle. They call them the miracle flights.

Jeff Jarvis [02:33:00]:
Yeah. Where people.

Leo Laporte [02:33:03]:
When you're getting on the flight, there's 40 or 50 people in wheelchairs to get on early, and then they all walk off at the end of the flight. It's like they're healed. It's amazing. I was on a miracle flight. I was like, that was the weirdest. I would be again. I'd be embarrassed. I don't want to.

Leo Laporte [02:33:20]:
I don't. I don't want to be. I just. I'll get in line with everybody and be a normal human. That concludes the old man version of.

Jeff Jarvis [02:33:31]:
Even with only two of us, we still went long.

Leo Laporte [02:33:33]:
Intelligent machines. Thank you so much to Olivier Sylvain, our guest. He was fantastic. Look forward to reading his book. Or you should look forward. I read it. But you should look forward to reading his book, Reclaiming the How Big Tech Took Control and how we can take it back from Columbia Global Reports. Next week, we will talk about AI Hallucination.

Leo Laporte [02:33:58]:
That should be interesting. Paris will be back in two weeks

Jeff Jarvis [02:34:02]:
with a cowboy hat.

Leo Laporte [02:34:03]:
With a cowgirl. She better have a cowboy cowgirl hat and snakeskin boots. We thank you all for joining us. We do intelligent machines every Wednesday right after Windows Weekly. That's 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us do the show live in the club. To discord. I hope you're a Club Twit member.

Leo Laporte [02:34:22]:
If you're not, please join the club. Support our efforts. Unlike Salzburger, I. I do not have a trust fund to run this on. We just. We rely on the kindness of strangers. You for almost 30% of our operating expenses. Twitter, TV.

Leo Laporte [02:34:40]:
Club Twit.

Jeff Jarvis [02:34:41]:
It's filled for 50, folks. Come on, come on.

Leo Laporte [02:34:43]:
Yeah, come on. Actually, you do get one benefit, a new benefit. You add free versions of the show. But we now have chapter markers in all our shows, which allows you to skip over the old men talking about their ailments segment. So that's a. That's a real benefit.

Jeff Jarvis [02:34:57]:
Poor Bonito has to mark that out.

Leo Laporte [02:34:59]:
Club Twit, here's the ultra Cocker market.

Benito Gonzalez [02:35:02]:
No, AI does that now.

Leo Laporte [02:35:04]:
AI does it? Yeah. So it's not hard to do. We do do it, but the problem is because of ad insertion after the fact, we don't know the lengths of the shows with ads and so we can't really do it reliably. So join the club. That way you get that benefit. You can watch club or not. And YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn or Kik. We stream on all those platforms as we're doing the show after the fact.

Leo Laporte [02:35:26]:
You can get audio or video from our website, Twit TV IM. There is an Intelligent Machines YouTube channel. You can go there and get the video of the show. Great way to share clips or subscribe on your favorite podcast client. And you'll get it automatically as soon as it's done. Thanks to Benito Gonzalez, the world famous Benito Gonzalez, our producer and editor. Thanks to all of you for joining us.

Jeff Jarvis [02:35:49]:
A boxer and politician who knew Benito. Yes, from us.

Leo Laporte [02:35:53]:
So many things. Jazz musician as well. We will see you next week on Intelligent Machines. Bye Bye. I'm not a human being.

Jeff Jarvis [02:36:04]:
Not into the animal scene.

Leo Laporte [02:36:07]:
I'm an intelligent machine.