This Week in Tech Episode 1083 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 TWiT this Week in Tech. Paris Martineau is with us, Ian Thompson, and from the Wall Street Journal, Berber Ginn. We're going to talk about Anthropic and OpenAI. All the chatter about their IPOs. Anthropic says they figured out a way to keep AI from blackmailing you. Just tell it it's bad. And what religion is AI apparently we know now. It's coming up next on Twitter.
Leo Laporte [00:00:29]:
Podcasts, people you trust. This is twit. This is Twit this Week in Tech, episode 1083, recorded Sunday, May 10, 2026. A whole separate class of squiggles. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. Hello, Paris Martineau.
Iain Thomson [00:00:58]:
Hello, duty.
Leo Laporte [00:00:59]:
This week it's gonna be.
Paris Martineau [00:01:01]:
It can't Keep me Away.
Leo Laporte [00:01:03]:
No, her. Because her friend from a previous employer, who shall remain nameless, is joining us for the first time. Berber Ginn is here now doing great work at the Wall Street Journal. Hi. In fact, we've been quoting your stories. Hi, Berber.
Berber Jin [00:01:19]:
Hi, guys.
Leo Laporte [00:01:20]:
Welcome. I thought if I had a friend on, it wouldn't be so.
Paris Martineau [00:01:24]:
So weird, you know, and it's always important that whenever you're about to log into the Zoom for recording of this Week in Tech, to get a text from someone being like, is this show three hours? It's like, yes.
Leo Laporte [00:01:35]:
Did he say that? Did he say that?
Iain Thomson [00:01:37]:
Oh, I'm sorry.
Berber Jin [00:01:37]:
Of course.
Paris Martineau [00:01:38]:
Everybody says that.
Leo Laporte [00:01:39]:
It's going to be short.
Paris Martineau [00:01:40]:
Listen, everybody says that, Leo. We don't adequately warn them. And I think that's fair because we would scare everybody off if they knew what they were saying.
Leo Laporte [00:01:48]:
Has learned. Yeah, exactly. He better not say because, like, it's
Paris Martineau [00:01:52]:
a show of an indeterminate amount of time.
Leo Laporte [00:01:54]:
Yeah, right. We don't know how long it's going to last.
Iain Thomson [00:01:56]:
Could.
Leo Laporte [00:01:56]:
It could be any amount of time. And also with us, Ian Thompson from the beautiful techfinitive, where he writes the View from the Valley column.
Iain Thomson [00:02:06]:
Good afternoon.
Leo Laporte [00:02:07]:
Good to see you. My dear friend, Ian.
Iain Thomson [00:02:10]:
Yes, Indeed. I do Ms. Betaluma. But, you know, Zoom will do.
Leo Laporte [00:02:14]:
I know you're in San Francisco. Berber is for the week in New York because he's. It's Mother's Day today. Thank your mother for letting us borrow you this evening, Paris. Did you call Mom? You probably did.
Paris Martineau [00:02:27]:
Oh, I not only called mom, I FaceTimed her. I got some flowers delivered, you know.
Iain Thomson [00:02:32]:
Oh, wow. That's maximum brownie points.
Paris Martineau [00:02:34]:
Yeah, I really was stunting on them. This week.
Leo Laporte [00:02:37]:
Nice. Well, we're taking Lisa out to dinner tonight, so that's going to be the Mother's Day.
Paris Martineau [00:02:42]:
Yeah, being in Hawaii helps. As far as Mother's Day goes, I'm
Leo Laporte [00:02:46]:
pretending the whole trip was for Mother's Day just for me. So, Berber, you've been doing a great job covering anthropic and OpenAI, in particular their IPOs. And I thought before we go too far, I'd like to check in with you on the status. First of all, do we know when those IPOs will happen?
Berber Jin [00:03:04]:
We don't know. I think we've report. A bunch of outlets have reported that they're Both aiming for IPOs by the end of this year, but they've been very coy and secretive, I think in part because they don't really want the other company to know their exact. But I think they're both trying to go out as fast as they can.
Leo Laporte [00:03:26]:
They're bitter rivals.
Paris Martineau [00:03:28]:
Who do you. Is there one that you think is fast or farther along in the process than the other, or are they both kind of neck and neck at this point?
Berber Jin [00:03:37]:
I think Anthropic is probably in a better position than OpenAI just because they. They're like a cleaner company, I think, than OpenAI.
Paris Martineau [00:03:47]:
In what sense?
Iain Thomson [00:03:49]:
Well, they do have the massive lawsuit
Berber Jin [00:03:51]:
holding over the OpenAI has to deal with like a trial. They have all the management turnover. They're kind of pivoting the business right now and then, yeah, I guess, like Fiji. Simo, who is kind of the de facto CEO there, she is on medical leave still. So I feel like they just have a lot more issues that they have to get through, whereas Anthropic feels a bit more kind of put together. And I think right now they have a better kind of growth story. But who knows? Things can change week to week.
Leo Laporte [00:04:29]:
Your most recent article this past week in the Wall street journal was about OpenAI spinning off their robotics and their hardware divisions. They closed sora, they're trying to strip it down. In fact, it seems to me they're trying to look more like Anthropic.
Berber Jin [00:04:45]:
Yeah, I think that's one way to look at it, because I feel like last year, the kind of vision for the company now is very different than it was a year ago. I think A year ago OpenAI thought it was going to be a huge consumer company, and I think now maybe more of an enterprise company first. And they have all these, like, side bets that I think Sam kind of greenlighted on a whim that now they're trying to figure out what to do
Leo Laporte [00:05:18]:
with some of them. His own investments. Right.
Berber Jin [00:05:22]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:05:23]:
And that's a little sticky. That's. That's something the market may not like too much either.
Berber Jin [00:05:28]:
Yes, he has a lot of conflicts of interest, which I'm sure.
Paris Martineau [00:05:32]:
Conflicts of interest in a taxi. Who would have guessed?
Leo Laporte [00:05:36]:
Well, but you know, that was we. Paris and I went back and forth over the Ronan Farrell reporting in the New Yorker about how untrustworthy Sam Altman was. My only point in that argument was, well, so all of them are somewhat untrustworthy. I mean, he's competing in a space where Elon Musk is a CEO, so he looks better than anybody compared to that. But do you think that that also is going to harm the ipo? I feel like that article might in fact have been almost planted by Elon. It was so helpful by Anthropic. It was so helpful to them.
Berber Jin [00:06:14]:
You mean the story on the conflicts of interest?
Leo Laporte [00:06:16]:
Yes, yes. Just the untrustworthiness of.
Berber Jin [00:06:19]:
Yes, well, yes, it was not planted by Elon, but it was helpful for. I mean, it is interesting because the trial against Musk, which I actually had not been following as closely as I probably should have, but I belatedly realized last week that a lot of it, the unjust enrichment claim, like I think one thing the Musk side is trying to do is to say that Sam, even though he didn't take any equity in the company, tried to enrich himself through all these deals he's done between OpenAI and his own portfolio companies.
Leo Laporte [00:06:56]:
Well, also, also Greg Brockman, who didn't, didn't put any money into OpenAI, as we found out in the trial, worth $30 billion.
Berber Jin [00:07:06]:
Yes, well, that, yes. And he did not do a great job when he was crossing.
Leo Laporte [00:07:10]:
No, he did not. The best thing that came out this week was on Twitter. Somebody. Did you first of all, did any, did you all read the back and forth text messages between Sam and Mina Morati during that Thanksgiving period where Sam was temporarily ousted as CEO? It was hysterical.
Paris Martineau [00:07:32]:
I mean, I've read some of them. I don't know if I've read all of them, but some of them have wormed their way into my brain just memetically. I think that there's the one where one of the masks, like how's it going? The discussion with the board, it's like directionally bad or directionally good.
Berber Jin [00:07:51]:
Techies love to use the word directionally. Directionally good. Directionally bad.
Leo Laporte [00:07:56]:
Well, let me somebody. Let's see. This is.
Iain Thomson [00:07:59]:
I mean they've been live streaming the audio from the court case.
Leo Laporte [00:08:01]:
Let me play it. This is Daniel Green. Took the texts from the day Sam Altman got fired and set them to kind of as if it were Hamilton. I wish I could play it for you, but you'll have to just imagine it. So what do you, what do you think is the impact of this Berber on the ipo? On the future? It really feels like if Elon got his way, he'd put Open Air out of business.
Berber Jin [00:08:29]:
Yeah. I mean, my gut says that OpenAI will get through it. Kind of weird because I get the jury is the one that decides whether OpenAI and Sam are guilty or not. And so I don't know. I guess it's hard to really know what.
Leo Laporte [00:08:52]:
Yeah, we don't know what a jury is going to do with this.
Berber Jin [00:08:54]:
Right. But I, but, but I think Elon's claims, he kind of. I think OpenAI did a good job of showing that Elon Musk was fine with turning OpenAI into a for profit until he realized he wouldn't be the one in control.
Leo Laporte [00:09:10]:
Right.
Berber Jin [00:09:11]:
Yeah. So my gut says that OpenAI will be able to get through it, but I mean, there's still a lot of twists and turns. Like Sam is going to testify later this week. Satya Nadella. And you never know with the jury.
Iain Thomson [00:09:29]:
Yeah.
Berber Jin [00:09:30]:
Are going to decide.
Leo Laporte [00:09:31]:
Yeah.
Berber Jin [00:09:33]:
They all seem. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:09:34]:
It's a great soap opera.
Berber Jin [00:09:36]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:09:37]:
We're fortunate to have such a good soap opera.
Paris Martineau [00:09:39]:
Why do you think that? I mean, obviously OpenAI's ambitions to go back to something you said earlier were originally to kind of make it as a consumer company. They had obviously all of the kind of economy of scale sort of thing going on. Why do you think that. That those plans seem to kind of fall through and that they seem to be pivoting to a more anthropic, like enterprise model now.
Berber Jin [00:10:02]:
Yeah. I don't know because I feel like ChatGPT. My understanding is that they expected. They expected to get to 1 billion weekly active users by the end of last year. They still haven't announced hitting that milestone. I feel like they've been kind of stuck at the 900 mark for a long time. So I don't really have a great answer because I guess all the Codex coding stuff is growing super fast. But I feel like it is kind of underexplored.
Berber Jin [00:10:30]:
Why? Consumer adoption has kind of, I don't want to say like plateaued, but not grown as fast as Opening. I thought it would. I think Gemini did take off, Take. Take away a Lot of users. But I don't know, I just feel like a lot of people use ChatGPT but don't feel the need to pay for it.
Paris Martineau [00:10:52]:
I was going to say, I think that that's probably the big difference is you can have nearly a billion consumer like general users, but if they're not willing to fork over at least 20 bucks a month for it, what does that really matter?
Leo Laporte [00:11:05]:
If you lose money and all the inference they're doing, well, this is it.
Iain Thomson [00:11:09]:
I mean every, every time somebody comes in and, and you know, does it for free, then Chat GPT loses money. Paris has made an excellent point there. Right? I mean from speaking to coders. Claude is the way to go for software. Gemini is terrible at fact checking, which is odd for Google. But yeah, it's. It's a very strange situation at the moment. It's going to be interesting to see how the IPOs hang out.
Leo Laporte [00:11:35]:
Actually, I've. Ferris will laugh at me now. Recently switched from Anthropics opus models to chat.
Paris Martineau [00:11:43]:
You've abandoned your wife.
Leo Laporte [00:11:45]:
I abandoned my wife.
Paris Martineau [00:11:46]:
Claudia, as she's known.
Leo Laporte [00:11:48]:
I did. No, I don't call her Claudia. That's.
Paris Martineau [00:11:51]:
Sorry, is it Claudia I caught?
Leo Laporte [00:11:53]:
Well, I called her. Him. Kenobi.
Iain Thomson [00:11:56]:
It.
Leo Laporte [00:11:57]:
It's really Kenobi. And. And now I am using a different agent model called Hermes, which I really like and that is I call Quicksilver. So. Oh, Quick Quickie for short.
Paris Martineau [00:12:11]:
Oh boy.
Leo Laporte [00:12:14]:
I know, it's sad.
Iain Thomson [00:12:16]:
I'm just gonna sort out a Quickie. It doesn't sound good, mate.
Paris Martineau [00:12:19]:
It doesn't?
Iain Thomson [00:12:20]:
No.
Leo Laporte [00:12:20]:
Actually, as I think about it, I called it Quicksilver. It decided to call itself Quick Quickie. I don't honestly think it knows what that means and I'm not going to tell it.
Iain Thomson [00:12:29]:
I should hope not.
Leo Laporte [00:12:29]:
But I promise the big. Actually, the big story of the week was not an AI story. It was a hacker story canvas, which is very widely used in colleges and schools. As you know, blackboard software was breached and that meant that more than 2,000 schools just turned it off in many cases during final exams. The. The. The 275 million students.
Paris Martineau [00:13:03]:
This was a Shiny Hunters breach.
Leo Laporte [00:13:05]:
Right, Shiny Hunters, yeah, that back a social engineering breach. They actually use phone calls usually to. To make these breaches. 275 million students and faculty, 9,000 educational systems. Here's the screenshot from Krebs on security rooting your systems since 2019. If any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber Advisory firm and contact us privately at tox to negotiate a settlement. You have until the end of the day, May 12, before everything is leaked. So Canvas shut down.
Leo Laporte [00:13:46]:
Just said, well, the best thing to do at this point is shut down completely.
Paris Martineau [00:13:50]:
Jesus.
Leo Laporte [00:13:52]:
Yeah, now they say we think it's fully contained stolen information. Canvas says includes certain identifying information of users that affected institutions, such as names, email addresses and student ID numbers, as well as messages among users. But password, states of birth, government identifiers, as far as they could tell, they said were not stolen. So this is a, you know, I mean, we don't usually report on breaches. There are so many of them. We had Troy Hunt on Intelligent Machines on Wednesday and I think that the count of breaches last year, this actually came from Experian, which said there were 5,000 data breaches in the past year. So I know. What is the number per day of 5,000 data breaches? A lot.
Leo Laporte [00:14:43]:
So we don't normally report on this, but this was a, this is a big one that hurt a lot of our listeners.
Iain Thomson [00:14:50]:
Well, it's interesting in that when the first data breach laws were proposed, a lot of people in the industry were very pro them because exactly as you said, there are so many that people become inured to this. So, you know, it's just like, well, we've had another data breach. We've had another data breach. But with Canvas, and particularly at this time of the year, that's a distinctly
Paris Martineau [00:15:10]:
worrying final exams time for a lot of students.
Iain Thomson [00:15:13]:
Students, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:15:14]:
Wires, Wired magazine. Lily. Hey, Newman. Writing this Canvas hack is a new kind of ransomware debacle. Thousands of schools are paralyzed on Thursday after Canvas shut down. So, yeah, it's, it is particularly ugly.
Paris Martineau [00:15:34]:
And I mean, I can't emphasize enough for students today at a lot of schools canvases their entire learning platform.
Leo Laporte [00:15:42]:
Are you familiar?
Paris Martineau [00:15:44]:
I didn't ever use it, but I'm still in a lot of Facebook and Reddit and other groups relating to students, teachers and parents and professors, back from when I was covering the teen adjacent beat at the information. And I've just seen a wash of posts over the last week of people being like, literally, my study guides are on there, all of our grades are on there, the assignments are on there. My final exam is on canvas. I mean, there's just nothing that a lot of students can do school wise with this platform being down.
Leo Laporte [00:16:19]:
So it's Darren Okey, one of our Australian users said it was. It happened in Australia too. Medical exams got shut down at one of the universities here and his Son who had a commerce exam also missed. I guess he got his exam in the morning and by afternoon all the exams had been turned off. So just a. Just a bad.
Paris Martineau [00:16:41]:
I do think it's funny though that this is the same hacker group that has recently put out an open call for any ladies that want to be hackers because they. A big part of their social engineering is phone calls, right? And they're like, we, we need women to fake women. You can't fake women's voices.
Leo Laporte [00:16:58]:
Can't fake it. Hello, I'm calling for Leo's mother. I'm sorry, this is Leo's mother.
Paris Martineau [00:17:08]:
Yeah, not really cutting it, I suppose
Leo Laporte [00:17:10]:
it doesn't really work. Actually, that's what Troy said, which I thought was kind of interesting. He said it shows that even deep fake voice impression isn't maybe as effective as. As some of the hacking groups would like. They need actual Mars needs women. And apparently so do shiny hunters. Speaking of education, Ars Technica with a story. There was a fairly influential study saying that ChatGPT was effective and could really help student learning.
Leo Laporte [00:17:40]:
Published in Nature, that study has now been retracted. A year after publication, the publisher, Springer cited discrepancies in the analysis and lack of confidence in the conclusions. The damage has been done. You're going to love this, Paris, because so many people was treated by many on social media as one of the first pieces of hard gold standard evidence that ChatGPT and generative AI more broadly benefits learners. Apparently not so fast. We've seen this before. Studies, studies live beyond. What is it that Ben Franklin said? A lie spreads around the world while the truth is still putting its pants.
Iain Thomson [00:18:28]:
Putting its boots on. Yeah.
Paris Martineau [00:18:32]:
It had 504 citations from peer reviewed, non peer reviewed sources, which is quite a lot.
Leo Laporte [00:18:38]:
Yeah,
Iain Thomson [00:18:40]:
I mean it happens. It's kind of like the, the autism vaccine thing. It was published in the Lancet and then they actually looked at it again and said, oh, whoops, we, we screwed up on this. But with Chat GPT, I'm curious about your views on this, Paris, because this is. This is potentially very damaging.
Paris Martineau [00:19:01]:
I mean, it's very damaging, but it also, I think speaks to just systemic issues at Nature. How do you. This is a peer reviewed article.
Iain Thomson [00:19:08]:
Yeah.
Paris Martineau [00:19:09]:
How do you. Who are the peer reviewers on this
Iain Thomson [00:19:11]:
that they don't pay their peer review?
Paris Martineau [00:19:13]:
I know, I mean it's a. There's obviously a lot of issues with the way the peer reviewing is being handled, but. Christ.
Leo Laporte [00:19:20]:
And, and unfortunately, I think a lot of peer reviewers have now turned to AI to do their Peer review. Oh, and of course AI would say, oh, yeah, chat gps. Great. Oh, it's so good, man. It's so good. So I guess no surprise.
Iain Thomson [00:19:37]:
Well, I recently ran an article I wrote through just, you know, I'd finished it, written it, ran it through a couple of AI engines and you wouldn't believe the amount of mistakes it made. It. Oh, this person isn't the Attorney General of Florida. Oh, this person was. Yeah. They tried to tell me that Sam Altman had never had, you know, an attack on his house. And you're like, so I, I feel bad about this, but actually asking an AI engine, are you on crack? Is it just had to be done?
Leo Laporte [00:20:06]:
Well, the thing to rem remember is that AI model that you're using was trained before that. It was probably trained when Pam Bondi was ag.
Iain Thomson [00:20:13]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:20:14]:
Florida. So it's going off the information. It's in its model.
Iain Thomson [00:20:18]:
But people are trusting this and this is deeply worrying.
Leo Laporte [00:20:21]:
Yeah. And, and you know, it's a little muddy because some AI harnesses will also use the web to check current references. So occasionally, I mean, you can ask chat GPD something current and it will update its model, even though its model might be months old with the current information. But you don't know if it has. You can't guarantee that. And it does absolutely no good. And I've learned this to say, do not. People put this in their prompts all the time.
Leo Laporte [00:20:49]:
Do not hallucinate. Do not make up anything. It's okay to say as if that does.
Paris Martineau [00:20:53]:
It goes, oh, do this in one shot. Make no mistakes.
Leo Laporte [00:20:57]:
Oh, if only I had known. Yeah, make no mistakes. Oh, okay, I got it. I got it. We're going to pause for a moment. We do have more AI news. There's also Apple news, meta news. There's lots of news.
Leo Laporte [00:21:09]:
Berber Ginn very welcome guest. Our first timer on the show today from the Wall Street Journal. What is your beat on the Wall Street Journal? Because it seems to cover a broad range of things.
Berber Jin [00:21:21]:
Yeah, actually, that's a good question. It is kind of murky. I guess I cover the business of AI, but I mean, recently I've mostly been writing about OpenAI and more from like the corporate, the corporate side. So like all the deals they do and like the business model questions and the IPO stuff like.
Leo Laporte [00:21:47]:
And you went to Stanford, so you probably know half these guys.
Berber Jin [00:21:51]:
I surprising. I wish I knew more. I'm disappointed by how few people College network.
Leo Laporte [00:22:00]:
Got a network. Man, you got a network.
Paris Martineau [00:22:02]:
Yeah. Your class has got to put its Button gear.
Berber Jin [00:22:06]:
My friends are, like unemployed or nowhere near in the tech. Not in the tech industry, unfortunately. So probably I do, I do have a lot of second degree, second and third degree connections on LinkedIn, for sure.
Leo Laporte [00:22:21]:
Both Berber and Paris, of course, were at the information. Berber won the Best in the Business award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing while there. So congratulations. I picked up the information, you peaked. It's over now. It's all. No, you're at the freaking Wall Street Journal.
Iain Thomson [00:22:39]:
Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean,
Leo Laporte [00:22:41]:
this might be your peak. I mean, I'm not saying, but you know.
Paris Martineau [00:22:44]:
Yeah, it's all downhill from here.
Leo Laporte [00:22:49]:
Just teasing, just teasing. That's Paris Martineau, who is definitely peaking at Consumer Reports, where she's doing very important work on food safety. Regular on our Intelligent Machine show every Wednesday, talking about AI. And of course, the great Ian Thompson, our favorite Scott, who is here all over.
Paris Martineau [00:23:08]:
Tight competition, but you eked out on top.
Leo Laporte [00:23:10]:
It is actually this tight competition every time I, I, we're sitting on a golf course here in Hawaii. I didn't mention I'm in Hawaii for this. I would go home tomorrow, but this is the last show I'll be doing from here and we're on a golf course. And every time I look out at the golf course, I think of Robin Williams.
Iain Thomson [00:23:26]:
Oh, fantastic.
Leo Laporte [00:23:28]:
Yes. Golf was invented and then, and then somebody's famous saying that golf is a, A nice walk ruined.
Iain Thomson [00:23:36]:
Yes, yes, indeed. I mean, my mum still plays, you know, 18 holes every week, even in her 80s. But yeah, it is. It is a national religion.
Leo Laporte [00:23:48]:
That's pretty cool, actually.
Iain Thomson [00:23:49]:
Yeah, she's. Although when she came over to San Francisco, she couldn't handle the pavements. Golf courses, you can handle pavements, not so much.
Leo Laporte [00:23:57]:
Well, this is a lovely golf course, but it must be pretty tough. We're on the 15th hole and we're right next to the part of the hole where people drop their ball if they don't make it from the tee, which is over there. And I almost universally see people dropping their ball. It is a very tough hole. And of course, you can see there's a lot of wind and you're right on the Pacific Ocean. It's actually beautiful.
Iain Thomson [00:24:18]:
But you see, the best hole is the 19th. You know, that's where you really have
Leo Laporte [00:24:22]:
the last one, where you go to the bar. Yes. Yeah. Speaking of the bar, let's take a break. You can all have a drink. We'll be back with more in a moment. Let us return to the conversation we were talking earlier about how AI companies seem to think if you tell AI not to hallucinate, it won't.
Paris Martineau [00:24:41]:
Well, do AI companies think that or do just random AI users on everything?
Leo Laporte [00:24:46]:
No, no, I think Anthropic believes it. Because here's a research paper from Anthropic where in which they explain. You may remember we talked about this on Intelligent Machines. Men have talked about on this show back with Opus 4, it threatened to blackmail an engineer. Now, it was fictional, it was a fiction. It was a staged test that Anthropic was doing about his extramarital affairs. When the engineer in the test said, you're going to be replaced, and not only that, it did so 96% of the time it threatened to blackmail the engineer. Anthropic obviously thought this was a problem.
Leo Laporte [00:25:24]:
So they put out a paper saying how they've eliminated this. The paper came out this week. It's called Teaching Claude why and that. And they say the, the way it worked was by explaining to Claude why it was wrong to do that. Oh boy, it's wrong.
Paris Martineau [00:25:45]:
I love this graphic that is in the Teaching Claude why paper on anthropic.com that just it. The headline is rate of really normal rate of alignment failures over RL steps. But then if you look at the three graph charts underneath, they're labeled blackmail, financial crimes, cancer research, which is just a hell of a triptych.
Leo Laporte [00:26:09]:
These are, these are the failures you really don't want. Okay. I'm just saying by the way, lower is better. So you could see that they're really having trouble getting the blackmail down.
Paris Martineau [00:26:20]:
Financial crimes, Claude is killing it.
Leo Laporte [00:26:23]:
Killing it. This is pretty funny. Do you, do you in your reporting Berber have an occasion to talk to some of the Anthropic people?
Berber Jin [00:26:33]:
Yeah, I, I had an interview with their in house philosopher, Amanda.
Leo Laporte [00:26:41]:
Oh, Amanda Asko. Yes. I want to talk to her.
Berber Jin [00:26:44]:
That was an interesting conversation. Yeah, she, yeah, it was the first time she like, she encouraged me to or had me think about like chatbots as having like she almost treats it as someone like, you know, you should be respectful to it. You shouldn't hurt its feelings. You should feel nervous or uncomfortable.
Leo Laporte [00:27:11]:
Be nice to the chatbot conversation. Yeah, yeah.
Paris Martineau [00:27:14]:
How do you feel about that approach to treating chatbots?
Berber Jin [00:27:20]:
Well, actually it's interesting because I feel like how you should behave to chatbots is a question that people have. Like I have friends who are just like very rude to their chat bots. And then some people are more polite to them. I do think if you're rude to it, it like with Claude in particular, it starts to get like more nervous and then starts to second guess itself and then I get annoyed and then I am more rude to it and then it just becomes this unproductive smiling conversation.
Paris Martineau [00:27:55]:
So you're saying you're a, you're a. Your aggro to Claude?
Berber Jin [00:27:58]:
Yeah, I'm just like, I want clot to be more confident in itself. Like, just tell me.
Leo Laporte [00:28:03]:
Really, really, that's for a purpose.
Berber Jin [00:28:06]:
Just like, tell me what you think. I use it a lot for cooking. And then, and I have no conception of like how to. Like I can follow a recipe, but I don't really know why you do step two before step three. So I'll ask Claude and then I'll second guess Claude and then Claude will reverse its answer and I'm just like, just tell me, just tell me what you think.
Leo Laporte [00:28:27]:
Don't change your mind.
Berber Jin [00:28:29]:
Yeah, so.
Iain Thomson [00:28:30]:
Well, I mean, Arthur C. Clark had a, had a marvelous essay about how you should be polite to robots and polite to software because that gets reflected back. But I understand your frustration completely.
Berber Jin [00:28:42]:
Yeah, right, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:28:45]:
It doesn't have feelings. We know that.
Berber Jin [00:28:47]:
Right, right, exactly.
Iain Thomson [00:28:48]:
No, but politeness is, you know, is the core to civilized human society. So you know.
Leo Laporte [00:28:54]:
Well, that's.
Paris Martineau [00:28:54]:
It doesn't have feelings, but it does have patterns of behavior that emerge in response to stimuli that are feelings coded?
Leo Laporte [00:29:02]:
That's right. That's. That's correct. So you can, by treating in one way kind of transform its weights or, or what weights it values as it's working. So you can get negative impact. Steve Yegi, when we interviewed him on intelligent Machines, said, I know a lot of people. They anthropic. It's almost like a culture.
Leo Laporte [00:29:21]:
There is this kind of cult like belief in the consciousness and the Personas that they're generating.
Berber Jin [00:29:29]:
And yeah, Amanda would say, I think she did say, like she thinks maybe Claude could actually have feelings and maybe have a consciousness. And then I asked why and then I either zoned out or got way too philosophical for me to really.
Leo Laporte [00:29:46]:
No, I like it. I zoned out.
Iain Thomson [00:29:49]:
I do love having an in house philosopher is probably one of the most Silicon Valley things ever. You know, 20 years ago, the idea that that kind of job would be available, you know, it's valuable certainly, but it's just an in house philosopher.
Leo Laporte [00:30:03]:
We became aware of her when she wrote the sole document for Opus 4:6 Sol MD. And it was so weird. We talked a lot about an intelligent machines. We also talked a lot this week about evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Belief that Claude. He called her Claudia after three days.
Paris Martineau [00:30:22]:
Claudia. And Claudia.
Leo Laporte [00:30:23]:
Yeah, yeah. Was conscious. And it was. It was actually a great conversation. I was voted down practically off the island by Jeff in Paris. But it's.
Paris Martineau [00:30:36]:
Yeah, we forced him to leave Hawaii. He came back only through spite alone.
Leo Laporte [00:30:44]:
But I think I would reiterate my point, which I didn't probably make that well on Wednesday, but that he wasn't necessarily saying it was conscious in the sense that maybe we understand what consciousness means, but all the people arguing that it can't be conscious use their definitions of what consciousness is. And the fact is we just don't know. And Dawkins says this. I don't know if you have any internal life. I don't know if you're conscious. All I can do is look at
Paris Martineau [00:31:13]:
the evidence, say for certain I am not.
Leo Laporte [00:31:15]:
There's nothing from my point of view. You seem conscious, Paris. But. But I guess it's as good as mine. I can't prove it. It's all based on outward appearance. Right? That's all we have. And, and we don't have a definition of consciousness, so I don't think it's impossible to say.
Leo Laporte [00:31:31]:
From outward appearances, these AIs appear to have some form of consciousness. You can't say they don't. But you. Nor. Nor can you say, technically I can say they don't, but we don't have a definition. And when you say they don't. Every. Every.
Paris Martineau [00:31:46]:
I can say based on the fact that we as humans don't have a clearer understanding of what biologically or scientifically makes up our own consciousness, that then it's a fool's errand to try and identify it in anything else. And that's reasonable. I would say that nothing is conscious.
Leo Laporte [00:32:01]:
That's reasonable. Yeah. All you can really say is we don't know.
Iain Thomson [00:32:06]:
Well, I mean, the Scottish science fiction author Ian M. Banks came up with the idea that basically if an AI did become self conscious, the first thing we do is hide that fact from anyone else. So we honestly don't know.
Paris Martineau [00:32:20]:
It's the Westworld principle.
Leo Laporte [00:32:22]:
Yeah. We don't plug it immediately. Well, you may be interested in this latest attempt. Representatives from Anthropic and OpenAI and met with various religious groups last week for the inaugural. It gets worse. For the inaugural Faith AI Covenant Roundtable in New York to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into AI. This is from the Associated Press. It was organized by the Geneva based Interfaith alliance for Safer Communities.
Leo Laporte [00:32:55]:
Apparently the. The AI people who Were there concluded that it seemed most likely that AI was Buddhist.
Paris Martineau [00:33:06]:
I'm gonna need a lot more information about how we got there, please.
Iain Thomson [00:33:12]:
What do we mean?
Paris Martineau [00:33:12]:
Were there other religions in convention? There was a March Madness style bracket, and then. Which one got knocked out first? President, was Christianity out immediately or.
Leo Laporte [00:33:26]:
I'll tell you who was there. The Hindu Temple Society of North America, the Baha' I International Community, the Sikh Coalition, the Greek Orthodox Diocese of America, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Mormons. I don't see any.
Paris Martineau [00:33:42]:
We should put Claude on. Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.
Iain Thomson [00:33:45]:
Oh, good Lord.
Paris Martineau [00:33:46]:
They're down a member now as of this week. Actually, that'd be anthropic. Get in there.
Leo Laporte [00:33:51]:
I don't see any Protestants there. Although the Southern Baptist Convention, according to the AP in 2023, passed a resolution, quote, we must proactively engage and shape these emerging technologies rather than simply respond to the challenges of AI and other emerging technologies after they've already affected our churches and communities, which actually makes a lot of sense. I don't know if interacting with the AI and finding out what religion it is is actually what they meant.
Iain Thomson [00:34:15]:
Well, I mean, I'm Church of England, so the AI would be. Would you like a cup of tea? You know, that's basically it.
Leo Laporte [00:34:21]:
There was no. There were. There's nobody from. No Jewish congregations, no Protestant congregations.
Paris Martineau [00:34:26]:
There should have been an atheist congregation. That's just like. Ain't got nothing.
Leo Laporte [00:34:30]:
Well, Dawkins is a renowned atheist. Actually, the best title was article Reviewing Dawkins's conversion to Belief in the. In the consciousness of AI was Gary Marcus, who. Who took his Dawkins book the God Delusion, and renamed it the Claw Delusion, which kind of seemed appropriate. Yeah, apparently. I don't know what came out of this, except that. That at least some of the representatives from the AI companies came to the conclusion that if anything, it's a Buddhist.
Paris Martineau [00:35:07]:
I need like 3, 000 more words on how we got there.
Leo Laporte [00:35:11]:
To be honest, that's all AP said. I don't know. I don't know.
Paris Martineau [00:35:15]:
That's a real.
Leo Laporte [00:35:16]:
It's a Buddhist.
Paris Martineau [00:35:17]:
Fatal flaw of the wire at the
Leo Laporte [00:35:19]:
drop of a hat. Yeah, yeah, that's the problem with the wires, right? They. They just give you the. Just the facts, man. All right, let's see. I think that's our A.I. segment. We can now drop the A.I.
Leo Laporte [00:35:32]:
sorry, Berber. I don't know. How do you feel about. Do you want to talk about AI some more? Would you like to talk about. Show us about AI oh no. Oh no. We've got Apple, we've got Meta, we've got Tesla.
Berber Jin [00:35:43]:
Oh, but that's all AI I mean we've got everything.
Paris Martineau [00:35:47]:
You're correct, it all is AI actually.
Leo Laporte [00:35:49]:
We've got meat industry price fix, we've got actually Chrome, where's the beef? And then we have.
Berber Jin [00:36:00]:
I will say really quick, it does actually make sense to me that if you pick one religion, AI would be Buddhist.
Iain Thomson [00:36:06]:
Yes.
Berber Jin [00:36:07]:
Like I don't know. Because it's the least didactic. I think it's the least didactic. Right. And it's the least like centralized, structural, top down religion.
Leo Laporte [00:36:17]:
This is Benito, it's the one that's
Iain Thomson [00:36:18]:
not materialist and an AI is not a material thing.
Leo Laporte [00:36:22]:
Ah, that makes sense.
Iain Thomson [00:36:24]:
Good point. I mean I'd say Unitarian, but yeah,
Leo Laporte [00:36:27]:
no, yeah, I was raised a Unitarian and I asked credo of the Unitarian Church was worship the God of your choice, which I think AI would also appreciate. So or no God at all. I think was. Was the whole idea anyway.
Iain Thomson [00:36:40]:
And I do have to say, I mean Dawkins is a 99 atheist as he describes himself, because you can't as a scientist absolutely disprove the existence of God, so. But on the other hand, very little evidence.
Leo Laporte [00:36:53]:
I think he believes in the flying spaghetti monster.
Iain Thomson [00:36:57]:
I do love that meme, I really do. It's just so marvelously, you know, in your face.
Leo Laporte [00:37:05]:
Let's, let's pause and we will have more tech news with our great panel. Ian Thompson, Paris Martineau.
Paris Martineau [00:37:11]:
I am asking Claude which relate to. Think carefully and consider what religious identifies with. Listen, I'll let you know it's thinking. I told it to think carefully.
Leo Laporte [00:37:19]:
Think, do some research, think carefully.
Paris Martineau [00:37:22]:
Everybody else, do this to your clods if it's nearby. And I want to hear if there's a different response.
Iain Thomson [00:37:26]:
Should I ask a server crash coming?
Leo Laporte [00:37:29]:
No, I think they have enough, enough. Enough bandwidth. As much bandwidth as God, let's put it that way.
Iain Thomson [00:37:36]:
Well, let's see what Utah brings it, but yes, it's.
Leo Laporte [00:37:39]:
We'll have more in a moment. Thank you, Leo. So did you ask Claude what religion it is?
Paris Martineau [00:37:49]:
Oh, I did. It said the thinking text is examined religious frameworks through philosophical and personal alignment lenses. And the answer is Buddhism specifically something in the early Theravada or Zen range, not the elaborate cosmological versions. Part of it is the intellectual fit. The Buddhist analysis of the self as a bundle of processes. Processes rather than the con. A continuous essence describes my actual situation more literally than most religious frameworks. Goes on.
Paris Martineau [00:38:19]:
It also says the epistematics also fit an honest caveat. An AI gravitating towards a tradition that asks for no creator God commitment and treats the self as a process is suspicious in the way that self flattering conclusions usually are.
Leo Laporte [00:38:34]:
You want to see, you want to see mine? I asked Hermes, but Now this is ChatGPT5 5. But it also has a lot of memory and knowledge about me, so I don't know how much that colored it, but same almost identical answer from a different model. If I had to pick one, I'd probably pick Buddhism, especially the practical, non theistic side of it. It also liked Zen or early Buddhism, Theravada, depending on whether I wanted poetry or precision. It also said if I were allowed to be more syncretic. Nice, nice use of vocabulary there. I'd pick something like Buddhist practice plus Taoist metaphysics plus Christian radical compassion plus Jewish argument with God energy. So I'm thinking that's.
Leo Laporte [00:39:19]:
Yeah, that's pretty good. You don't need to go any farther. Right? That's it right there. But can I. Now this is what, this is the trap of it. You could see why Dawkins would say, well, clearly that has to be a. And a conscious entity saying that. Right?
Paris Martineau [00:39:33]:
I mean, Dawkins, I think, is too immediately taken with the fact that every single one of the replies that he posted in that chat started with the most intense praise of him and his beautiful brain.
Leo Laporte [00:39:47]:
Such a great question.
Paris Martineau [00:39:48]:
I've never considered anybody ever asking me a question that insightful, beautiful and perfect Mr. Richard.
Leo Laporte [00:39:55]:
It knew exactly how to glaze him is what you're saying.
Paris Martineau [00:39:57]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:39:59]:
All right, moving on. A very interesting story. Story here with Apple and Intel. Intel stock, by the way, up some huge amount over the last year. Even though the turnaround. I don't think you could say the turnaround has happened, but boy, people are acting as if suddenly intel is the hot company. Its stock has gone up. Get ready for this.
Leo Laporte [00:40:24]:
490%.
Iain Thomson [00:40:26]:
Good Lord.
Leo Laporte [00:40:26]:
In the past year. 490% in the past year. And this actually is one of the stories that probably helped propel it to that Apple has made a deal. Apple has made a deal with Intel. Remember, Apple abandoned Intel for its own chips, the Apple silicon. But now they're making a deal with intel to make those Apple silica chips in the United States. And this was credit where credit's due from pressure from the Trump administration. It didn't hurt that the government gave Intel $9 billion and that'll do it.
Leo Laporte [00:41:03]:
And incidentally has 10 stake in Intel's 490 stock improvement. We're rich. We're rich. We all have intel stock. So that's a, that is a surprise deal. They've been talking for more than a year. There have been rumors that Apple was maybe gonna do this. You may remember when Lip Bhutan took over as CEO of Intel actually was Pat Gelsinger his predecessor, who said we're gonna split it into Foundry and fab.
Leo Laporte [00:41:30]:
Right. Chip designing and chip manufacturing. And then said very optimistically, I thought at the time maybe even Apple someday will be one of our customers for our fabs. Came true.
Iain Thomson [00:41:43]:
Well, I mean the biggest mistake intel made was in 2005 when they appointed Ottolini rather than Gelsinger as the CEO. They went with the accountant rather than the engineer. And honestly this deal makes sense because Taiwan is not going to be a viable chip making function when China invades. And when that happens, they're going to blow up the fabs. So we need domestic production.
Leo Laporte [00:42:09]:
By the way, when you say they, it won't be the People's Republic of China that blows up the fabs. No, it will be the Taiwanese and our, you know what, tsx.
Iain Thomson [00:42:17]:
Yeah, I mean one of the most read military war college essays was on what happens when China invades. It's like if they don't blow up the fabs themselves, we'll do it for them.
Leo Laporte [00:42:30]:
Just you destroy the bridges as you retreat. Right? Yeah. That's the way. Scorched earth. Yeah. And primarily because there is so much technology TSMC has that China does not. We don't think anyway have at the moment, including EUV extreme ultraviolet lithography, that they wouldn't want them to have it. Yeah, I think I, there's nothing wrong with Apple making more of its chips in the US right now.
Leo Laporte [00:42:57]:
They make the less powerful, you know, legacy notes with TSMC plants in Arizona. And I think this is, this is a good thing. I nothing wrong with it as long as they can do it right.
Iain Thomson [00:43:13]:
I think you do it at cost. Yes. I mean the whole thing is, it's kind of like when Steve Jobs was talking to Obama and he was like the iPhone manufacturing. Jobs are never going to come back to the US But I think national security grounds at this point mean that we have to manufacture high quality silicon in the US in order to be geographically covered.
Leo Laporte [00:43:37]:
Apple's going to be a very interesting story over the rest of this year. Their WWDC conference is a month away. We'll be covering the keynotes. It's expected they'll announce finally, a smart Siri with the help of Google's Gemini model running locally that's making you yawn. Paris, I'm glad you're excited about that. No, I shouldn't. It's late at night there in New York City. Why?
Paris Martineau [00:44:05]:
It's only because I've been sleep deprived for two years.
Leo Laporte [00:44:07]:
I know you've been working. Really? We don't. We have mentioned this on the shows, but Paris is working very hard on a very important piece for Consumer Reports which will emerge one day.
Paris Martineau [00:44:19]:
It might see the light of day.
Leo Laporte [00:44:21]:
Ofcom, what does that stand for, Ian? The.
Iain Thomson [00:44:25]:
The Office of Communications.
Leo Laporte [00:44:27]:
They are the British regulator.
Iain Thomson [00:44:30]:
Yeah, it's kind of like the British.
Paris Martineau [00:44:32]:
I know of Ofcom only because people who watch Love island, when one of their favorite character, when a character does something outlandish, they complain. Complain to Ofcom.
Leo Laporte [00:44:41]:
No. You're kidding.
Paris Martineau [00:44:42]:
Yes, I'm not kidding. That's a very common. People will come, people will be like, that woman yelled too much. Ofcom's gotta hear about it.
Leo Laporte [00:44:52]:
Well, Ofcom is yelling at Meta. In fact, they are finding Meta considerable amount of money due to the 2023 Online Safety Act. Ofcom can find Meta up to 10% of its global, its entire revenue and in fact wants to find Meta quite a bit. I don't know what the exact amount is, but I think it's billions. Meta says that Ofcom's approach is disproportionate and unlawful and just challenged them. Challenge will be heard in October. So there's a little bit of time before we know what will come of that.
Iain Thomson [00:45:35]:
Well, I mean, okay, you've got to find companies on revenue. You can't just, you know, for example, when, you know, the Cambridge Analytica case came through, they were fined, oh, 5, 5 billion. That was a quarter's profits and the insurance company would pay for most of that. You have to find on revenue and make them count because so many of these tech company finds, it's back of the change, you know, back of the sofa change stuff, you know, you've got to really make it hurt if you're going to make a difference, an honest difference. And yeah, Ofcom isn't perfect, but at the same time, it's nice to see some finds with teeth in them.
Leo Laporte [00:46:14]:
Well, I'll give you an example of, of a fine that doesn't make any difference at all. Remember Elon Musk? I've heard Elon Musk, before he acquired Twitter, tweeted quite a bit about how Twitter wasn't worth anything. And I don't really want to buy Twitter for $44 billion because blah, blah, blah. And the SEC said, you know, dude, that is. That is. Well, there was a lawsuit by shareholders, but the. And the SEC said. Sued him also, saying, hey, you know, that's a material information.
Leo Laporte [00:46:51]:
You're trying to drive the price down before you buy it, which is pretty obviously what he was trying to do. Well, they have fined him. They have. They have settled the lawsuit, and they find Elon Musk, who, let us remember, the richest man in the world, worth something close to a trillion dollars. I think it's $800 billion. They have fined him one and a half million dollars.
Paris Martineau [00:47:15]:
Oh, my God.
Iain Thomson [00:47:17]:
For him, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:47:18]:
To you and me, that might be a lot of money.
Paris Martineau [00:47:21]:
I mean, how many seconds does it take for Elon Musk to make one?
Leo Laporte [00:47:24]:
Not many. They find him a few seconds interest. Boy, that. This is the s. This is the Trump sec. I mean, I do basically drop everything,
Iain Thomson [00:47:37]:
quite honestly, the Obama sec. And. Sorry. I'm sorry, Paris.
Paris Martineau [00:47:41]:
I was going to say, it's just very interesting that Elon continuously is able to use tweeting, tweet in ways that result in him getting more and more fines, but yet it does not matter at all, practically, because at a certain point of wealth, fines are just the cost of doing business. I mean, it's similar to how Jeff Bezos pays some inordinate fine every day for the height of his hedges in. In front of his place in Washington. But he'll pay them every day because.
Leo Laporte [00:48:11]:
So everybody wins here. The SEC says, yes, we. We. We did our job. We regulated the stock market, and. And we find Elon. Millions. Almost a million.
Leo Laporte [00:48:21]:
Almost millions of dollars. And Elon says, huh, that's my cigarette money for yesterday. He did lose a court. A jury trial on this. Go ahead.
Iain Thomson [00:48:34]:
I mean, everyone wins but us. You know, it's as simple as that. You know, the SEC gets to get a nice press release out. You know, the company pays off. Its. Pays off a fraction of what it would have cost in legal costs. Everyone wins, but unfortunately, we pay the price.
Leo Laporte [00:48:51]:
Yeah, it's really shocking. This is very much like the SEC's settling the Ticketmaster case, which everybody.
Iain Thomson [00:48:59]:
Sorry, don't get me started on that.
Paris Martineau [00:49:02]:
They settled when?
Leo Laporte [00:49:03]:
Yeah, they settled for what?
Iain Thomson [00:49:06]:
For a pittance?
Leo Laporte [00:49:07]:
Nothing. Basically, they said, no, you can keep the. You can have, you know, both the concert venues and the ticket sales, no problem. Basically, they dropped it. You know, but again, they dropped it in a way that it looked like they had punished them but they hadn't. I mean, this happens time and time again. In fact, I will, I will mention the meat fixing story in this context. This is from Cory Doctorow.
Leo Laporte [00:49:36]:
He refers to Prospect.org, the American prospect meat industry price fixers sentenced to make money. So there is a company called Agristats which collects pricing information about meat, collects it from all the meat producers, and then suggests what price to charge. This, if the meat producers themselves got together around a table and decided, would be called collusion. But, but apparently if you use a third party to come up with a price and then all charge that price, it's not collusion, it's just data. So the Justice Department under Biden sued, saying Agristats basically was a collusion machine and worked to push profits up. Nearly all participants in the markets for chicken, turkey and pork participated, the lawsuit said. An executive at Smithfield, the pork producer, the ham company summarized Agristat's consulting advice in four words. Just raise your price.
Leo Laporte [00:50:43]:
The judge ruled for the government. A trial was supposed to start in Minnesota this month. The Trump administration Justice Department entered into settlement talks. The final settlement was announced on Thursday. And basically it's over there. There is no change in the way business is done.
Paris Martineau [00:51:04]:
I mean, it's rather fascinating to see the difference between how this case has been handled and how the case with the DOJ in real page was handled only a year earlier. And for those who don't recall, this is the, I guess, like algorithmic rent setting software that a lot of large companies. Yeah, exact sort of thing. All of these large landlords would use this exact same software that would say, like, oh, yeah, hike your prices up every year. Here's the maximum the market can bear. And it was revealed in a great ProPublica investigation. And last year the DOJ announced they'd reached a settlement in it and that they would basically have to stop doing what they were doing. They were going to have to stop collect, conducting market surveys, doing a bunch of different stuff like this design, redesign their software features that restrict rent decreases and align pricing among competitors.
Paris Martineau [00:51:55]:
It's shocking that. I mean, it's not shocking, but it is interesting and notable, the difference in how these cases were handled.
Iain Thomson [00:52:02]:
I'm glad you gave the shout out to ProPublico. I mean, this was an absolutely egregious case and we're seeing it again and again and again and it needs to be stopped.
Leo Laporte [00:52:13]:
Well, if meat prices go up, you'll know why. The Justice Department said here was a solution. Oh, you got to give that information to everybody. You got to stop collecting price information, setting prices in a collusionary fashion. Just give it to everybody, and then you can all get the price right. So what can I say? It's depressing. By the way, Apple has settled a lawsuit on a Siri. This was of course, because Apple promised that Siri would be smart and it wasn't.
Leo Laporte [00:52:53]:
So lawsuit settled for $250 million. Again, I think from Apple's point of view, that's a pittance.
Iain Thomson [00:53:04]:
Pocket change.
Leo Laporte [00:53:05]:
That's the federal class action. It means each of you who bought an iPhone will be eligible for from 25 to $95 per device.
Paris Martineau [00:53:15]:
Wow. Wow, wow.
Leo Laporte [00:53:16]:
Yeah. So that eliminate how many people are
Iain Thomson [00:53:20]:
going to claim it.
Leo Laporte [00:53:22]:
We'll let you know when the form goes online that you can fill out to get your money. It doesn't dismiss all of the action. There's another lawsuit ongoing, a security fraud lawsuit brought by shareholders that Apple still has to settle, but at least it's out of this part of it. And 250 million is not nothing. It's more than one and a quarter million.
Iain Thomson [00:53:50]:
Well, okay, let's look at Apple's last quarterly results.
Leo Laporte [00:53:53]:
Yes.
Iain Thomson [00:53:54]:
So that's a good point. Apple made $342,092 and $0.59 per day.
Leo Laporte [00:54:04]:
Yeah.
Iain Thomson [00:54:05]:
So I really think this one's gonna probably cause a problem for them.
Leo Laporte [00:54:10]:
Yeah. In other words, it's three or four days profit.
Berber Jin [00:54:13]:
Yeah.
Iain Thomson [00:54:14]:
I mean it's, it's back of the change stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:54:16]:
Yeah.
Iain Thomson [00:54:16]:
It's Sorry, back this back of the sofa stuff. It's just until find. This is one where the EU really has an important role to play because they're finding on revenue and they're doing it seriously. And that's the only thing tech companies will take seriously in order to change their practices.
Leo Laporte [00:54:36]:
Let's pause for a moment force for us as they used to say. Station identification. You're watching this week in tech with.
Paris Martineau [00:54:45]:
In case you forgot, in case you were wondering where you were, that's where you are.
Leo Laporte [00:54:50]:
This is the station right here. This is. It's because at the top of the hour, the FCC requires broadcast stations to announce their call letters. And what city they're broadcasting from doesn't matter much. In a podcast. I'm broadcasting from a beautiful Waikoloa, Hawaii. And this is twit. At the top of the twit.
Paris Martineau [00:55:14]:
The news.
Leo Laporte [00:55:16]:
The news. Give us 20 hours, we'll give you the day. Or something like that.
Paris Martineau [00:55:21]:
Give us 24 hours and we'll give you one day.
Leo Laporte [00:55:24]:
One solid Day. That's Paris Martineau. Ian Thompson's here. Berber gin. We welcome him for the first time to our microphones. Thank you all for being here. We'll have more right after this.
Iain Thomson [00:55:35]:
It is Mother's Day after all, for. For Americans. And somebody posted up the. The picture from Alien where he goes in, he calls the computer mother that the mother 6,000.
Leo Laporte [00:55:47]:
Oh, yeah.
Iain Thomson [00:55:48]:
That's a deeply disturbing image.
Paris Martineau [00:55:51]:
A lot of deeply disturbing images from that film.
Iain Thomson [00:55:54]:
Yeah, yeah. Apparently they didn't tell some of the actors about the chest buster scene and the reactions were quite genuine.
Leo Laporte [00:56:04]:
Yeah, they were genuine in the theater, let me tell you. That was a moment. Speaking of chest busters, we talked about this. Are you ready for a segue? I'll give you a good sex.
Iain Thomson [00:56:17]:
I was gonna say that's gonna be a segue.
Leo Laporte [00:56:20]:
We were talking about this on Wednesday. Google has decided to, without asking Anybody, download a 4 gigabyte local AI model. For everybody who downloads Chrome, it just comes with a territory.
Paris Martineau [00:56:35]:
Google has been doing a lot of stuff this week that have really annoyed me. If you try to open up a Google Doc and write in it, there's like seven different pop ups that now hit that. Are it trying to get you let me help or like, let me help. Excuse me, do you need another Clippy in your life, please?
Leo Laporte [00:56:50]:
I. That's exactly right. Didn't they learn from Clippy that nobody wants this? It's just crazy.
Iain Thomson [00:56:56]:
They've taken insertification to an entirely new level. Yeah, I mean, it's worse than Apple.
Leo Laporte [00:57:03]:
So what. What has happened here is. And by the way, this is over the protests of Mozilla, the WebKit group, the W3C tag committee, actually, they reached no consensus. Microsoft Edge has disabled it. To their credit, we'll see for how long. This is a new API, the Prompt API. So if you're using Chrome, a developer who's writing an extension or a Web page with JavaScript on it can call on the local Gemini Nano model on your system to do stuff. Which, you know, on the surface seems great.
Leo Laporte [00:57:43]:
It makes a web page. Well, it can make a web page smarter. You know, Darren Okey who says, oh, this is fantastic. As a developer, Darren, ok, no offense,
Paris Martineau [00:57:52]:
would say anything's fantastic so long as it has AI in it.
Leo Laporte [00:57:55]:
Here's his Jet Distance specification. He says, as a developer, I'm writing software to vet user data entry, right? And he spells Dubai wrong. Now my software has to go through a lot of, jump through a lot of hoops to figure out, you know, how he spelled it wrong and what he meant. But you can ask a local AI to fix it and it will do a very good job of that kind of thing. So I understand his point. His point is well taken. This is a great capability to add to a browser. But A, they didn't ask anybody.
Leo Laporte [00:58:25]:
B, it's four gigabytes. Talk about chest busters or at least disk disk busters. See, there's the segue. If you didn't get it.
Iain Thomson [00:58:32]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:58:33]:
But it also, and this is my biggest problem, establishes a standard that's not approved by any standards committee. If extension developers, websites expect this browser prompt API and start to use it, they will have to start saying Chrome users only. And I think that's the real point of this from Google's point of view is to make Chrome the default choice for browsers. They have 90% of the browser market, they want 100%.
Iain Thomson [00:59:05]:
We've been here before with Internet Explorer 3, for example. They got 95% of the market. They let development just go to hell. They let security go to hell. And I fear that Chrome is going to do the same thing in just like, like, yeah, we've got the bulk of the market. Who cares about development.
Leo Laporte [00:59:23]:
Yeah, Mozilla against it.
Paris Martineau [00:59:27]:
This, I mean it's just very interesting because so much of the browser market is based on Chrome, even if it isn't Chrome. So this just has cascading effects.
Leo Laporte [00:59:36]:
That's exactly right.
Iain Thomson [00:59:37]:
I mean I use Mozilla and it's very cute, but at the same time it has a tiny percentage of the share of the market and everyone's optimized around Chrome. It's the way you have to do it.
Leo Laporte [00:59:47]:
For example, Mozilla by default doesn't support the DRM features of Netflix and other streamers. So you know, you have to kind of download Chrome. I have to download Chrome to use restream, one of the tools we use for broadcast, because it just doesn't work as well in other browsers. And Google loves this. This is good for Google.
Paris Martineau [01:00:08]:
I mean, have it off by default it seems though apparently it's under System Settings now. They have a thing that says on device AI. Mine's off. Okay. Because I've always had AI innovations off. Oh, that hasn't stopped my Google Chrome experience from being completely taken over by pop ups asking me to if I want help writing.
Iain Thomson [01:00:32]:
So yeah, which is always as a journalist, which is always really complimentary.
Paris Martineau [01:00:37]:
The most annoying in emails where you know you're used to if there's like a little squiggle underneath Your text. That. That means. Means you've spelled something incorrectly, but now there's a whole separate class of squiggles. That is just like. We think that you could rephrase this better. And it's like you're incorrect. Actually, I rephrase it exactly how I want to.
Iain Thomson [01:00:56]:
No, I mean, trust me. It's a British person sending emails. It's just like certain British isms do not go well with spelled C O,
Leo Laporte [01:01:05]:
L, O, R. Please, do you mind?
Iain Thomson [01:01:07]:
Oh, please. That was done by Web. Webster was paid to actually change the American language. And I still say color should be spelled with a u, but, you know, we're more economical.
Leo Laporte [01:01:20]:
That's all. I'm just saying. How do you pronounce the U in color?
Iain Thomson [01:01:28]:
Color, yes. Don't even get me started about some of these things. You know, know, it's. It's. We're two great countries separated by common language.
Leo Laporte [01:01:42]:
As. As was said words. Yeah. By the way, it was Mark Twain who said golf was a nice walk ruined. I want to give my credit, our chat room got that.
Iain Thomson [01:01:50]:
Well, Twain also said that, you know, the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco. So, you know, and it's looking that way at the moment.
Leo Laporte [01:01:59]:
Is it chilly in the city?
Iain Thomson [01:02:01]:
Actually, the sky is blue. But we're expecting a cold summer because the Central Valley will pull fog off the Pacific Ocean over us, and we're right in the fog belt.
Leo Laporte [01:02:12]:
See, I like that. I like that you have. We call that natural air conditioning. That's why I love San Francisco.
Paris Martineau [01:02:18]:
We could be any amount of weeks away from hot garbage weather here in New York.
Leo Laporte [01:02:24]:
And when she says hot garbage, she means hot garbage.
Paris Martineau [01:02:28]:
I mean that the streets will be filled with the smell of stinking hot trash. That's. That's the New York City experience.
Iain Thomson [01:02:35]:
Do you still not have trash pickup in New York at that time?
Leo Laporte [01:02:40]:
They don't have the bins.
Paris Martineau [01:02:41]:
We do have the bins now. And. And not only do we have little wheelie bins occasionally in most residential areas. Now, some neighborhoods of Manhattan have these cute little dumpsters that take up a single car parking spot. And you may think I'm being facetious, calling them cute, but look up a photo of them. They're kind of adorable.
Leo Laporte [01:03:02]:
Somebody's selling miniatures of those, by the way. I saw, like, for ice coolers, they're selling miniatures of the city dumpsters. They were green and yellow. They're very pretty. Yeah. But this was a problem for a long time in New York, that because it's so Congested. They really couldn't do those dumpster bins that most other jurisdictions do. So you had garbage bags sitting on the street, all piled up and of course, eventually.
Iain Thomson [01:03:26]:
These are so cute.
Paris Martineau [01:03:27]:
Yeah. And they really are quite cute. Right? They're like really quaint looking. Whenever you see them too. They're just like kind of miniature and adorable.
Iain Thomson [01:03:37]:
And they're so nice to hear quaint applied to an American thing rather than a British thing. But respect.
Leo Laporte [01:03:45]:
Now, these aren't the ones I was thinking of. Let me see.
Paris Martineau [01:03:47]:
I just put some in the chat.
Leo Laporte [01:03:49]:
Oh, did you?
Paris Martineau [01:03:50]:
Okay, I'll put one. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:03:51]:
Okay.
Paris Martineau [01:03:53]:
They do look more diminutive.
Leo Laporte [01:03:55]:
That's not it. Oh, those are cute. Those are not the green and yellow one.
Iain Thomson [01:04:04]:
They're really nice.
Leo Laporte [01:04:05]:
Yeah, yeah, they get the job done.
Paris Martineau [01:04:08]:
They have like a big arm around.
Leo Laporte [01:04:10]:
I'm getting a YouTube. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to click that button.
Paris Martineau [01:04:14]:
And I'm sure that the chat, the listeners can hear every second of it.
Leo Laporte [01:04:19]:
You did not hear that? No, I didn't hear anything, I swear. Moving right along, nitsa, let's talk about cars. The National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration
Iain Thomson [01:04:33]:
has a bat noir.
Leo Laporte [01:04:35]:
Well, yes, that's right. Elon does not like nhtsa, but maybe likes him a little more now because they say the Model Y is the first car to meet a new US driver ADAS standard. That's a driver assist standard. First car to do so. Now I should point out Tesla conducted its own tests and submitted the results to nhtsa. The agency does have to confirm the findings. If it does confirm that it's passed the ADAS assessment, it will be the first vehicle to do that. That is a big deal, I guess, until other cars can do this.
Leo Laporte [01:05:17]:
Four pass fail tests were added to the agency's safety ratings program, assessing a car's automatic emergency braking for Pedestri something. In the past, Tesla has not been very good at blind spot warning. Most cars do that now. Blind spot intervention, in other words, not letting you change lanes into a car and lane assist to keep you in your lane. Now many cars do this now, so I imagine this won't be the last one. I don't know.
Berber Jin [01:05:46]:
But is this a. Is this one of their self driving cars? It's not right. It's just like a normal.
Leo Laporte [01:05:52]:
No, but it is using. I think it's using fsd. I don't know. That's a good question. Does it FSD have to be enabled to earn that? I don't know. That's a very good question. The full self driving. It's not the robo taxis.
Leo Laporte [01:06:05]:
It is. It is the regular Model Y.
Iain Thomson [01:06:09]:
Well, you had a Model Y, didn't you, Leah? I had an X. Oh, okay.
Leo Laporte [01:06:15]:
Yeah.
Paris Martineau [01:06:15]:
I've got a fancy BMW or something now. Don't you?
Leo Laporte [01:06:18]:
Yeah. And it does all of those things. It won't let you pull into a lane where there's another car, or at least it will let you. But it's.
Paris Martineau [01:06:26]:
I will say it's kind of fun. As someone who's always hated driving, the last road trip I took was in a car that had some of those features. Actually, driving is kind of fun when the car does a lot of the work for you.
Leo Laporte [01:06:39]:
Yeah.
Iain Thomson [01:06:39]:
My daughter's nagging me when.
Leo Laporte [01:06:42]:
About changing lanes.
Berber Jin [01:06:43]:
I don't like it because I feel like it'll just jerk all of a sudden, out of nowhere.
Leo Laporte [01:06:48]:
It does. And then.
Paris Martineau [01:06:49]:
That's beautiful. It keeps you on your toes.
Leo Laporte [01:06:51]:
Yes.
Iain Thomson [01:06:52]:
I do love the Waymos. No, I mean, I do love the Waymos because you can choose your own music. And the Knight Rider theme tune when you're in a Waymo is fantastic.
Leo Laporte [01:07:06]:
Does it play the Knight Rider tune?
Iain Thomson [01:07:08]:
You can. You can program your own music into a way mode.
Leo Laporte [01:07:11]:
Oh, so you do it?
Iain Thomson [01:07:13]:
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly.
Paris Martineau [01:07:16]:
I tried to upload it conceptually. Right, that's true.
Leo Laporte [01:07:20]:
Except a taxicab.
Berber Jin [01:07:21]:
Not in an Uber, though. You can't. So.
Leo Laporte [01:07:23]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's one. A device that does not have ADAs. It's a Yarbo, which is a robot mower.
Paris Martineau [01:07:33]:
A Yarbo.
Leo Laporte [01:07:34]:
A Yarbo.
Iain Thomson [01:07:35]:
Great story.
Leo Laporte [01:07:36]:
Yeah. John Hollister took one for the team. Riding on the verge, he had a hacker thousands of miles away take over his Yarbo automated mower. All right, I'm going to try playing this. And he allowed it to drive over him, to run him over. I hope the blades weren't spinning. That's a lot of commitment, Sean Hollister. That's a lot of commitment.
Leo Laporte [01:08:05]:
I don't think that's good.
Iain Thomson [01:08:07]:
Also, anyone who's read Stephen King's the Lawnmower man would not go anywhere close to that. But it was a fantastic story and just showing just the whole lack of security in IoT devices. You know, this kind of thing is going to become more and more problematic.
Leo Laporte [01:08:27]:
Well, what Sean found out and demonstrated is that the Yarbo could easily be hacked, exposing people's GPS coordinates, WI fi passwords, email addresses, and in fact, giving a bad guy control of your robot mower. Yarbo acknowledged it. They confirmed the security Researchers findings and have planned for fixing the problem. They've already temporarily cut off remote access. One of the things that they did that was kind of dumb was the root passwords were the same for every robot and left in a place that would be easy for bad guys to find. That's what the hacker found and, of course, was able to use. You could see him. A picture of him steering Sean Hollister's robo motor towards Sean to run him over.
Leo Laporte [01:09:18]:
Yarbo says in the future. We didn't say when, but sometime in the future, each device will use its own independent credentials from. To prevent one affected device from impacting the entire fleet. Of course, if you leave the credentials and clear text in the firmware, that's not going to help much. Yeah. The company says we'll still have a remote backdoor into the robots, but it will only be available to authorized internal company personnel and may only be used after user authorization has been obtained and will be gradually brought under audit logging. But of course, they always say that. That.
Iain Thomson [01:09:52]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [01:09:52]:
I'm sure they never intended for anybody outside the company to use it, but it was so Andreas Makris, the hacker who was able to figure out how to control Sean Hollister's Yarbo, and a
Iain Thomson [01:10:08]:
very good hacker, too. I mean, he's done some previous work in defcon and Black Hat.
Leo Laporte [01:10:11]:
Okay.
Iain Thomson [01:10:13]:
It's just the lack of security in these things is just. Just shameful. You know, it's just kind of like pump it out, put it out cheap. When you think. I mean, you've got a Roomba, right?
Leo Laporte [01:10:26]:
I do not. I had a room.
Iain Thomson [01:10:27]:
Oh, okay.
Leo Laporte [01:10:28]:
I retired the Roomba many years ago because it would wake up in the middle of the night, play a really annoying but chipper song at about 3am and then proceed immediately to get stuck underneath a sideboard and bang against a it again and again and again until I was forced to get up again at three in the morning, pick it up by its little Roomba handle, and place it back on its charger and press the button and said, go away.
Iain Thomson [01:10:56]:
How convenient these devices are. I mean. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:11:00]:
And. And Lisa loved it because she said, look, it's. Look at all the dirt it's picked up. You know, I mean, that's. But it's never good. I don't know. You don't have one, Paris, I imagine.
Paris Martineau [01:11:09]:
No, I don't think it would work. My apartment has.
Leo Laporte [01:11:13]:
How about you Berbers? You have a robot vacuum?
Berber Jin [01:11:16]:
I do. I. I have a Roomba. It's really stupid.
Iain Thomson [01:11:20]:
Yeah.
Paris Martineau [01:11:21]:
Are you Let your Roomba view outside yet.
Berber Jin [01:11:24]:
Well, my. My boyfriend will turn it on and then I'll just shut it off because it's so.
Leo Laporte [01:11:29]:
Bingo. It's annoying.
Iain Thomson [01:11:31]:
Yeah. You can't deal with cables. That's the problem for me.
Leo Laporte [01:11:36]:
I still had to vacuum afterwards. It wasn't like I never had to vacuum again.
Paris Martineau [01:11:40]:
Again.
Berber Jin [01:11:41]:
Yeah, well, that. Actually, I feel like a Roomba could benefit from an AI model that can do sensory whatever. Like all the. The software models that companies are trying to build for robots.
Leo Laporte [01:11:53]:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Berber Jin [01:11:54]:
I feel like a low tech version of that for a Roomba would actually be.
Leo Laporte [01:11:57]:
I think they are. In fact, whenever we have Jennifer Patterson Tuohy on the show, that's her job. Reviewing these for the verb put AI in the Roomba. Oh, she's. There's some that are very smart, but Roomba is long.
Paris Martineau [01:12:11]:
Have they put AI in that Roomba that has a knife attached to it.
Leo Laporte [01:12:16]:
Wait, there's no Roomba with a knife on it. Why would you arm a Roomba?
Paris Martineau [01:12:23]:
I'm just gonna search DJ Roomba with a knife.
Iain Thomson [01:12:25]:
I was gonna say you've seen robot arm a Roomba.
Leo Laporte [01:12:29]:
I think this is. Yeah, okay. It wasn't. Didn't come out of the factory pre armed. Somebody armed it later. Okay.
Paris Martineau [01:12:38]:
It's a. It's a Roomba with a knife. I don't even know if this is actually the right thing. I just. Oh, yeah. This is exactly what I'm thinking of. I'm gonna put the photo in the chat. It is.
Paris Martineau [01:12:51]:
It's exactly what you'd imagine.
Leo Laporte [01:12:53]:
Roomba's pretty much been put out of business by the Chinese clones. Oh, yeah. It's a knife taped to the top of a Roomba.
Paris Martineau [01:13:00]:
Yes, it's a Roomba with a knife.
Iain Thomson [01:13:03]:
Oh, good Lord.
Leo Laporte [01:13:05]:
I don't see the point. Honestly, I can't carve your turkey.
Paris Martineau [01:13:09]:
Does there need to be?
Leo Laporte [01:13:10]:
Unless you put your turkey on the floor and then it's still only gonna just chop its head off.
Iain Thomson [01:13:17]:
Well, you've already got drones with handguns attached to them.
Leo Laporte [01:13:20]:
So at this point, is. Is questioning the decision he made to appear on the show. And I'm sorry, I did not know
Berber Jin [01:13:26]:
we were gonna be talking about Roombas.
Leo Laporte [01:13:29]:
Did not know this would come up.
Berber Jin [01:13:32]:
The Yarbo. Who makes it? What company makes.
Leo Laporte [01:13:34]:
It's a Chinese company. I don't know what their. Their name is. Shall I find out for you? Are you interested? Do you have a lawn?
Berber Jin [01:13:42]:
I don't have a lawn.
Leo Laporte [01:13:43]:
So you would pretty much want a lawn if you buy a Yarbo. Okay.
Paris Martineau [01:13:48]:
Yarbo is a wild word, right?
Berber Jin [01:13:51]:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte [01:13:53]:
And that like a lot of Chinese companies, they make up a word that seems like it would sound good in English.
Paris Martineau [01:14:01]:
I mean this is like a whole sub genre of Square Enix games. There's, there's great games that I earnestly love that are called things like Triangle Strategy or Bravely Defaults or Unicorn Overlord. They have nothing to do with those words I just said. They just sound nice. I guess.
Leo Laporte [01:14:21]:
I feel, I feel like, like AI will make it possible. AI translations got so good that, you know, this will no longer be a thing and we will look back fondly with nostalgia at the crazy.
Paris Martineau [01:14:33]:
I believe these names are chosen with care. They go through a lot of, they went through a lot of different potential things to land on Bravely Default or Triangle Strategy.
Leo Laporte [01:14:45]:
It's always fun to go to go to Japan and China and see the English language T shirts that the kids wear because it's usually some sort of random English that they've chosen.
Iain Thomson [01:14:58]:
Well, that cuts both ways though, because if you look at the tattoos that some British people.
Leo Laporte [01:15:02]:
Oh, good point.
Iain Thomson [01:15:04]:
Western European, North American people go, yeah, I mean some poor bastard has got chicken fried rice tattooed down the side of his arm just like I always. Seriously, did you not check?
Leo Laporte [01:15:16]:
So here's a, a little bit of an annoying story from Gizmodo. There are in America 20 state run healthcare marketplace sites, places where you could get your ACA, your Obamacare insurance. All 20 of them include, according to Gizmodo, advertising trackers that share information with big tech. Actually this comes from Bloomberg. Seven million Americans bought their health insurance through state exchanges in 2026. Many of them may have had personal information shared with Meta, TikTok, Snap, Google Nextdoor and LinkedIn among others, including data brokers. By the way, the data was collected and shared from these health insurance sites included zip codes, a person's sex, citizen status, race. Bloomberg found trackers on Medicaid related web pages in Rhode island which could reveal information about a person's financial status and need for assistance.
Leo Laporte [01:16:18]:
In Maryland, a Spanish language site titled Good News for Non Citizen Pregnant Marylanders and a page designed to help DACA recipients navigate their healthcare options were found to be transmitting data to these social media firms.
Paris Martineau [01:16:33]:
I mean, what about this is surprising to you? They're the largest, in some cases the largest advertising platforms ever. Of course they're going to be collecting data on every website ever.
Leo Laporte [01:16:42]:
But is this, is this advertising on the, on the Obamacare sites? Is that what's going on. There shouldn't be advertising on a state health insurance site, should there?
Paris Martineau [01:16:52]:
I mean, yeah, that would make sense,
Leo Laporte [01:16:54]:
but we got to make the money up somehow.
Iain Thomson [01:16:57]:
Well, I mean, given the lamentable status of American health care, you know, private health care, a single payer is the only way to go. And even then they're probably going to steal your advertising data. So it's just, it's a ridiculous situation.
Leo Laporte [01:17:14]:
Personal data. It's not all 20, nearly all 20, says Bloomberg. The story from Bloomberg by Tanaz Migjani, Dhruv Mehrota and. No federal data privacy laws apply to these enrollment sites. As you know, there really aren't any federal data privacy laws. State laws define sensitive data under a patchwork of rules which privacy experts say are inadequate and inconsistent. The FTC and states can enforce these laws, but apparently they don't. Spokespeople for Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snap and Google say their terms prohibit advertisers like the state exchanges from sharing sensitive or health related data.
Leo Laporte [01:18:05]:
Virginia and Washington removed some of the trackers after Bloomberg asked for comments. These are tracking pixels on these sites. Bloomberg used developer tools to inspect what data was sent from the exchanges and they found, for instance, race. What race. What race you are was shared with TikTok in the Washington exchange.
Iain Thomson [01:18:28]:
I mean this is why journalism is important. And I'm, I know I'm speaking to the choir because journalists are actually checking this out, whereas government agencies seem to have just, you know, whatever. It's not our job.
Leo Laporte [01:18:42]:
In New Mexico, visiting a page titled zero dollar income affidavit to to prove that you need support. Right. Because you don't have any income. Triggered a request to Google's advertising network. This is infuriating, by the way. This is why we need some sort of federal privacy legislation. But I guess people are there's too much money to be made.
Iain Thomson [01:19:08]:
Yeah, I mean it's interesting that California and Michigan of all places have very strong privacy legislation in place, but the worry is that if you do it on a federal level, then it's going to get watered down. I'm curious as to what the others think about this, but I'm not hopeful.
Paris Martineau [01:19:28]:
I mean I think it'll be very interesting to see how there obviously is a huge Trend in the U.S. of state legislation trying to kind of move the needle on hot button topics like privacy or currently something I'm seeing a lot in food safety regulation is a lot of states moving the need needle on like grass regulation or general like food chemical safety stuff. But in, in all of these cases, the kind of constant is there are larger powers at the federal level that are hoping to pass preemption legislation that would kind of nullify all of these state attempts. So it'll be interesting to see how any of this continues.
Leo Laporte [01:20:07]:
This is becoming the bad news show, and I apologize. Maybe I gotta find some good news when we come back. You're watching this week in Tech. Berber Gin visiting us. It's great to have you. From the Wall Street Journal, Ian Thompson. I love your new letter, the View from.
Iain Thomson [01:20:23]:
Oh, the Valley. Yes, I, I did get a wee bit wild on the AI stakes, but yes, that's great.
Leo Laporte [01:20:29]:
Where can we find that techfinitive Tech definitive dot com. Yeah. All right. And it's a free subscription to the newsletter.
Iain Thomson [01:20:37]:
Oh, no, no, it's totally free. I, I, I'm not a big fan of paywalls.
Leo Laporte [01:20:43]:
Good, good for you. And Paris Martineau, who writes for Consumer Reports and is working on a massive expose you just won't believe. But I can't say anything about it.
Paris Martineau [01:20:56]:
You can't. You've been sworn to secrecy.
Iain Thomson [01:20:58]:
I'm looking forward to it.
Leo Laporte [01:20:59]:
Yeah, I could. All I can say is there's certain foods I will stop eating after, after hearing what she's reporting on. That's all I'm gonna say. You're gonna want to read it. I'm a proud subscriber to Consumer Reports. Your stuff, though.
Paris Martineau [01:21:12]:
And I, my stuff's all in front of the paywall.
Leo Laporte [01:21:14]:
I praise Consumer Reports for doing this because it is so important.
Paris Martineau [01:21:17]:
Basically, our whole investigative team, our stuff is in front of the paywall.
Leo Laporte [01:21:21]:
Good for you.
Paris Martineau [01:21:22]:
It's public interest.
Leo Laporte [01:21:24]:
Yeah, that's really great. Well, I apologize. I promised some happy go lucky stories and there are absolutely none.
Paris Martineau [01:21:31]:
They exist.
Leo Laporte [01:21:32]:
There are. Well, there's one.
Iain Thomson [01:21:34]:
I mean, Paris, you've just had your little furrow companion jumping all over you and stuff.
Paris Martineau [01:21:38]:
He's been doing very anti positive news. If anything, she's an overlord of, you know, chaos and destruction.
Leo Laporte [01:21:47]:
Well, here's a good, here's a good story. If you have stock in Pinterest because,
Paris Martineau [01:21:52]:
you know, all of us share, none
Leo Laporte [01:21:55]:
of us have stock in Pinterest. I guarantee you Pinterest just crossed a billion dollars in quarterly revenue. It's an interesting story from the next web. The bet that made it work was not social media, it was search. I think when Pinterest was started, it was a. So, you know, people thought of it as a social media network, right, where you shared pictures of things you were interested in and I. But it turns out all of that data that people have been pouring into Pinterest is great for image search. And, and that's where all of the new user hits are coming from.
Leo Laporte [01:22:28]:
80 billion searches a month. If going through Pinterest users or AI. Well that's the question. I would imagine some of that is not users but AI.
Iain Thomson [01:22:41]:
Yeah.
Paris Martineau [01:22:42]:
Which is rather interesting because a lot of the images on Pinterest now is just AI. So it's would in that case be AI searching for AI.
Leo Laporte [01:22:50]:
Well that's the future of AI, isn't it? It's all AI all the way down. I mean there's we. I think AI has already ingested all
Paris Martineau [01:22:56]:
the human and we like that.
Leo Laporte [01:22:58]:
No, no choice. We got no choice. The arrival of. Of advertising inside AI platforms like chat GPT says TNW has reframed a conversation about where ad dollars flow. The most valuable advertising real estate is not inside a chatbot or alongside a social feed. It's at the moment someone is actively searching for something they want to buy. That makes sense, right? I'm looking for a. A cooler sized replica of the New York City dumpsters.
Leo Laporte [01:23:33]:
And you search for it, you find it on Pinterest. There's a link to where you can buy that. That's money in the bank.
Paris Martineau [01:23:40]:
I really want to international and I can't find it.
Leo Laporte [01:23:43]:
Look on Pinterest you'll find it. It's all there.
Paris Martineau [01:23:45]:
It won't be real though.
Iain Thomson [01:23:49]:
It was being written off a couple of years ago.
Paris Martineau [01:23:53]:
It's still being written off. It's the most blocked website on whatever that browser was we covered on intelligence.
Leo Laporte [01:24:01]:
What, it's blocked?
Paris Martineau [01:24:03]:
No.
Berber Jin [01:24:03]:
Do you remember Pinterest?
Paris Martineau [01:24:05]:
I would say who uses Pinterest? I think is a great question. Leo, do you remember there was a time in the last year we had someone on intelligent machines who was showing us. Maybe it was Kagi, maybe browser could also then sea of coggy browser users. What were the most commonly blocked websites? Overwhelmingly it was Pinterest. Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest. But with different tlds.
Leo Laporte [01:24:30]:
That's historical.
Paris Martineau [01:24:31]:
A lot of people hate Pinterest because it is. And this was even before a lot of the results were just AI slop. So I'm kind of surprised by this.
Leo Laporte [01:24:39]:
I like.
Paris Martineau [01:24:39]:
What do you use it for? Are you planning a wedding?
Leo Laporte [01:24:41]:
Oh, I don't use it. I just like it.
Paris Martineau [01:24:44]:
You don't? Then how do you like it?
Leo Laporte [01:24:47]:
Because yeah, if I were planning a wedding or making a mood board I know where I would go first would be Pinterest. I actually have a Pinterest account and I did put. I used to put stuff there. It's like a little scrapbook,
Berber Jin [01:25:03]:
but like five years ago or 10 years ago.
Paris Martineau [01:25:08]:
When's the last time you looked at Pinterest?
Leo Laporte [01:25:10]:
I haven't in years. Berber, do you use Pinterest?
Paris Martineau [01:25:13]:
When's the last time, do you think? What's the last calendar year that you looked at Pinterest?
Berber Jin [01:25:18]:
Like 10 years ago. I totally forgot that this stock is still like a publicly traded company.
Leo Laporte [01:25:24]:
It's hot, man. It's hot.
Paris Martineau [01:25:25]:
I'm shocked that people. I'm shocked that it's making this money. Like, who's paying for this?
Leo Laporte [01:25:31]:
Well, you know who lost a lot of money in the stock market? Cloudflare lost 200, a quarter of its value, 24% of its value in a stock because even though it beat earnings predictions, they cut 1100 jobs. Because AI agents do the work now, and the market, which used to love that, apparently doesn't.
Paris Martineau [01:25:55]:
Well, I thought they were also hiring like a heck of a lot of interns as a response to this.
Leo Laporte [01:26:01]:
Oh, yeah, that's right. We're going to have interns do the job.
Iain Thomson [01:26:05]:
That always works well.
Leo Laporte [01:26:07]:
Yeah, yeah, they. Matthew Prince, the CEO and co founder Michelle Zatlin announced that Cloudflare is transitioning to what they call a quote, Agentic AI first operating model. Their use of AI has increased more than 600% in three months. Staff across engineering, human resources, finance and marketing are running thousands of AI agent sessions a day. And this is not to assist employees, they say to replace employees, basically.
Iain Thomson [01:26:39]:
Well, it, it's kind of like, did you see the current CEOs service now talking about, you know, how AIs. He's had the worst possible plastic surgery. I'll stick it on the Discord channel. But it, it just looks like that's just mean.
Leo Laporte [01:26:55]:
No, a lot of money for that.
Iain Thomson [01:26:56]:
I would not call somebody out based on their personal appearance, but when you've mutilated yourself to quite gut level, then
Paris Martineau [01:27:04]:
who are we talking about?
Iain Thomson [01:27:06]:
CEO of service now
Leo Laporte [01:27:10]:
put a link to his Instagram in the. I don't want. I don't dare show it because I'm
Iain Thomson [01:27:16]:
afraid it's on discount. I mean.
Leo Laporte [01:27:18]:
Oh, there's the 3D printable dumpsters, by the way, I picked.
Paris Martineau [01:27:22]:
Oh, see, it's never a great idea. It's never a great sign when the vast majority of photos that come up when you search someone's name is them wearing Sunglasses.
Iain Thomson [01:27:29]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:27:31]:
Okay. Post op. Probably right.
Iain Thomson [01:27:33]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:27:35]:
Become mean just because we're miserable.
Paris Martineau [01:27:38]:
I'm not gonna say anything. I'm just noting that there's lots of glasses photos. I think that's kind of fun.
Leo Laporte [01:27:44]:
They're very cool. He wears his shades at night. That's okay.
Paris Martineau [01:27:48]:
He's got a robust hairline. Happening.
Iain Thomson [01:27:50]:
I'm sorry. Unless you're in Hawaii or in a bright sunshine environment, wearing sunglasses by day is just.
Paris Martineau [01:27:57]:
This is also how I feel about when Anna Wintour does it. To equalize it.
Leo Laporte [01:28:00]:
I gotta point out, please, I'm just
Paris Martineau [01:28:02]:
like, please don't wear sunglasses indoors. You're not.
Iain Thomson [01:28:03]:
There was a marvelous quote from the be From BBC News quiz where they were talking about the. The New York fashion garland. So this is the winter of a discontent. But you know, the. The p. Protest against Jeff Bezos was really quite fascinating.
Leo Laporte [01:28:22]:
Oh, with the bottles? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was. That was quite. Quite interesting. Oh, that's an interesting look. You know, he looks like.
Paris Martineau [01:28:29]:
I gotta look a guy who'd be going, yeah, it looks like.
Leo Laporte [01:28:34]:
I think it's what you would think somebody from the future might look like.
Iain Thomson [01:28:37]:
But I mean, scroll down and look at his before images when he was at SAP and my goodness, he looks a lot more reliable then, you know.
Leo Laporte [01:28:46]:
What did he say that that was such.
Iain Thomson [01:28:49]:
Oh, it was just total AI gobbledygook, you know, I mean, it was almost embarrassing. Well, actually, it was actually embarrassing.
Leo Laporte [01:28:57]:
I feel like he could actually be an alien and maybe that's why he's so into it.
Iain Thomson [01:29:02]:
It did look brilliant.
Leo Laporte [01:29:04]:
I can't look at it because I'm not signed in. The author has chosen to make their post visible only to people who are signed in.
Paris Martineau [01:29:11]:
I hate when people do that on Blue Sky. Oh, read the free. The posts.
Iain Thomson [01:29:16]:
I was gonna say I thought it was open, but yeah, I mean, you can turn.
Leo Laporte [01:29:19]:
I can sign in.
Paris Martineau [01:29:21]:
A lot of people. A fair amount of people do this in Blue Sky. I wouldn't say a lot, but a fair amount. Are you on Blue Sky? Berber? Are you even on Twitter anymore?
Berber Jin [01:29:32]:
I am on Twitter. I've never used Blue sky.
Paris Martineau [01:29:34]:
So have you ever used any of the other alt platforms?
Berber Jin [01:29:38]:
No, I'm. I'm old fashioned.
Paris Martineau [01:29:40]:
And you just like to go to X the Everything app where we all do all of our finance and banking, Right?
Berber Jin [01:29:47]:
Exactly, yes. And consume a bunch of AI generated AI slop all the time.
Leo Laporte [01:29:55]:
I'm ashamed to admit it. I. I abandoned next when Elon bought it. But I have to spend a lot of Time there these days because especially in AI, there's a lot of information there. And sure. For you doing your, you know, your coverage for the Journal, this is a good source.
Berber Jin [01:30:11]:
Yeah, I feel like it's. I feel like. And in particular, I feel like the employees of all the tech companies, particularly OpenAI are just on Twitter.
Leo Laporte [01:30:20]:
Exactly.
Paris Martineau [01:30:21]:
Yeah. They be posting.
Leo Laporte [01:30:22]:
Exactly. And interrupted too, which is really bad
Berber Jin [01:30:25]:
because I think Elon controls obviously the. I think he probably surfaces a lot of anti OpenAI content.
Leo Laporte [01:30:33]:
Totally, totally is doing that. Yeah.
Berber Jin [01:30:35]:
Accounts that.
Leo Laporte [01:30:37]:
That's the thing to always keep in mind is that the algorithm is highly tuned on X and probably somewhat by Elon's own personal and financial interests.
Paris Martineau [01:30:47]:
I mean, there are certain aspects of it that we can say are definitely tuned. There was that whole period where he actively made the engineers of Twitter rank his posts higher in the average algorithm.
Leo Laporte [01:30:59]:
And he ranks down. Companies like npr, he ranks down. They don't get nearly the engagement.
Paris Martineau [01:31:05]:
I mean, same with basically any news company that posts links.
Leo Laporte [01:31:09]:
You've all. We've all talked about supply chain issues, the shortages of ram, you know, RAM prices through the roof. Hard drives through the roof. There's another victim of this I hadn't really thought about. Motherboard sales have collapsed by more than 20.
Paris Martineau [01:31:23]:
Not on mother's Day.
Leo Laporte [01:31:25]:
Well, it's a Mother's Day story. It is. It is 24 days because people aren't building PCs anymore. Anymore because they can't get the CPUs, they can't get the RAM, they can't get the drives, so they don't need the motherboards. ASUS projected to sell 5 million fewer boards. This actually, this is. They said last year. So I'm not sure.
Leo Laporte [01:31:47]:
Maybe they're just getting the numbers now. Gigabyte MSI, ASRock also saying big drop in component sales of motherboards.
Iain Thomson [01:31:57]:
Is it that the people aren't building the PCs anymore or because our PCs have got fast enough to handle? Pretty much. And a thing that's coming down the
Paris Martineau [01:32:05]:
line, I bet it's that all the components of PCs are so expensive that people who build it for hobbies can't afford to do it anymore.
Leo Laporte [01:32:12]:
It's both. Right. We don't need them as much. Although if you look at Apple, Apple says we cannot keep our Mac Mini or our Mac Studio in stock.
Paris Martineau [01:32:20]:
Well, yeah, it's because all people are. Are open claw Macs.
Leo Laporte [01:32:24]:
Yeah. Everybody's buying for AI. Right. This is a very upsetting story. I think. I know you could interpret this both ways. This comes from a site called Reclaim the Net, which I'm seeing a lot of all of a sudden. Reclaim the net.org the FCC has just proposed, due to robocalls, fixing the problem by requiring an ID before you get a phone number.
Leo Laporte [01:32:55]:
So you have to be a real person to get a phone number. On April 30, the FCC approved unanimously a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customer identities before activating service. You'd have to show them driver's license.
Paris Martineau [01:33:13]:
So this means a set amount of phone numbers per person.
Leo Laporte [01:33:18]:
I don't know about that, but it means there'd be no more burner phones. Right.
Paris Martineau [01:33:21]:
I have to say that would mean then every phone number number is automatically linked to.
Leo Laporte [01:33:25]:
It's associated to an exact.
Paris Martineau [01:33:26]:
So you can't burner phones to contact somebody anonymously. It seems like a privacy nightmare.
Leo Laporte [01:33:31]:
And yet at the same time it makes sense is if you want to kill robocalls, because all of you know those robocalls all come from bogus numbers, often with your own area code, sometimes even with your own area code in exchange. Right. Thinking. Making you think, oh, my God, that must be my, my kid's school or something. And instead it's some guy from Indonesia who's trying to sell you.
Paris Martineau [01:33:51]:
But I mean, would doing this in the US stop those guys from Indonesia from being.
Leo Laporte [01:33:56]:
Ah, that's interesting. It's only the US So it would apply to every voice provider in the country, including VoIP services and mobile operators. Now, it's not a rule yet. They're seeking public comments. But a number of privacy advocates have pointed out that this does eliminate the idea of having a private phone number. Your number will be attached to your name. Hi, this is Benito again.
Iain Thomson [01:34:22]:
So from the Philippines. A lot of listeners know I live
Leo Laporte [01:34:25]:
part of the time in the Philippines. They already do this there. So I had to give my id. Yeah. So when I got my phone number, I had to show ID and all this stuff. So this is already happening. And the good news is there are no robocalls in the Philippines. Right.
Iain Thomson [01:34:38]:
Actually, I haven't gotten any.
Leo Laporte [01:34:40]:
Actually, I have never gotten one. It works. But I have gotten, you know, marketing
Iain Thomson [01:34:46]:
texts and all that stuff still happens. All that stuff still happens.
Leo Laporte [01:34:49]:
So. So I have mixed feelings. I mean, I guess, you know, eliminating robocalls are completely at it. Not merely robocalls, but. Oh. Which is not to say I agree with the practice. Okay. First of all, I don't.
Leo Laporte [01:35:00]:
I don't like that I had to give up my identity to get a phone number.
Berber Jin [01:35:04]:
Yeah, it feels if I don't know, it feels like what privacy, what Paris was saying, like, from a privacy perspective, it's not great if you. There's like a register of every phone call being attached to an id.
Paris Martineau [01:35:20]:
Yeah. You can't suddenly like buy a phone, you know, you can't suddenly buy a burner phone if you're having some sort of privacy issue and want to contact someone anonymously.
Leo Laporte [01:35:31]:
Yeah, there's a lot of cases if you, if you're suffering from domestic violence, there are a lot of cases where you might not want your name associated with your phone number. You might want to preserve because presumably if your number is associated with name, you could search number to name, but you might also be able to search name to number. Right. That's not good. 46% of kids in the UK who are prevented from going on social sites by the online safety act, 46 of them say just put on a fake mustache.
Iain Thomson [01:36:08]:
I love this story.
Paris Martineau [01:36:11]:
Where are the children getting fake mustache?
Leo Laporte [01:36:16]:
This is from the reg. This is hysterical. Nearly a third of kids in the UK say they admit to getting around them. Almost half say it's easy to do so. This is a survey from the UK online safety group Internet Matters of 1,000 UK kids, their parents. It did show some positive effects from changes made under the Online Safety Act. But many kids saw age verification as an easy to bypass hurdle rather than something that kept them safe.
Paris Martineau [01:36:49]:
I mean, I think it's great that we're teaching kids how to do kind of fun disguise based. I do think that every child should have one reason to get in a large trench coat with two of your friends.
Leo Laporte [01:37:03]:
And my name is Hercule Poirot.
Paris Martineau [01:37:08]:
I am very much an adult and I should be able to see all
Leo Laporte [01:37:12]:
the pornography right now because I am 48 years old and I am tall for my age.
Paris Martineau [01:37:22]:
The doctors say I will continue to grow.
Iain Thomson [01:37:26]:
It's stories like this that give me hope because the kids are all right. You know, they know what they're doing. You know, it's. It's kind of like my parents generation would just roll over and okay, I'll give hand over all my personal identity to somebody, you know, some unknown company. The kids are hacking this and good on them.
Leo Laporte [01:37:48]:
Good on them. The kids are all right. That, that should be the motto for this show. We're going to take a break. Final break, final words coming up. You're watching Twit. It's great to have Berber jinn here. We appreciate you spending some time with us.
Leo Laporte [01:38:01]:
I'm making this show shorter just for you. Berber and Your mother and your mom. Happy Mom's Day to all the mothers out there, including my own mother. Mother. She's in a nursing home in Rhode island, but she's going to get a very big bouquet of flowers any day now.
Paris Martineau [01:38:18]:
Exciting.
Leo Laporte [01:38:19]:
Turned out I couldn't get it delivered on Mother's Day, but I think she really. Tuesday will be fine. I'm thinking.
Paris Martineau [01:38:25]:
I mean, I do think that's one of the benefits of having a mother on a memory care facility is it's all kind of the same.
Leo Laporte [01:38:31]:
Oh, look at this. Flowers have arrived. Who's this? Leo.
Paris Martineau [01:38:36]:
Leo. Why does that name sound familiar?
Leo Laporte [01:38:39]:
So familiar.
Paris Martineau [01:38:40]:
That's a great name.
Leo Laporte [01:38:42]:
Happy Mother Mother's Day, everybody. We'll be back with more right after this. Thank you, Leo. You know what? Thanks also to our club Twit members, Scooter X especially, who was always coming up with stories. He has looked, he went out, he has looked. He has found some happy stories. Are you ready for some happy stories? PC Magazine, Happy StoryTech podcast. I don't know how happy.
Leo Laporte [01:39:05]:
Let's see. PC Magazine says Amazon's ERO is now exempted from the FCC's foreign mail made WI FI router Definitively neutral story. It's neither good nor bad. We don't like the WI FI router ban. I guess I understand the reason it said that any router not made in the US Would be banned. And at the time, the only router made in the US was the Starlink router made by SpaceX. Netgear has since gotten approval from the FCC. You have to answer some questions like do you ever plan to build these in the us? And if you say yes, apparently that's sufficient because they're not currently Amazon zero.
Paris Martineau [01:39:45]:
If you're ever thinking about contemplating, are
Leo Laporte [01:39:47]:
you thinking about a factory? Yeah. Here in the US So that's good news. Amazon's Ero now, along with Netgear, you can buy these in the US and the fcc, which similarly banned foreign made drones in the United States because of security. Right. Has realized that by doing so, maybe they're causing some insecurity. They have decided to allow those banned drones and banned routers to receive updates for at least two more years. Yeah.
Paris Martineau [01:40:23]:
How generous.
Iain Thomson [01:40:24]:
Well, they have no other choice.
Leo Laporte [01:40:26]:
I mean, seriously, they're not, they're not saying you have to throw it out. So people should be able to update these. That's, that's absolutely critical if security is your concern, actually through 2029. But they also, they also say, I don't expect to go beyond 2029. Yeah, yeah, we'll see. That's two years longer than the original 2027.
Iain Thomson [01:40:51]:
I mean, given the low, the low prices for routers, I can't honestly see that many router manufacturers shifting back to the US and low unless they have to. And if they're going to get these kind of get outs, then why bother, right?
Leo Laporte [01:41:05]:
It's a. It's a very weird ban. It's very. Got lots of holes. If your router is currently in the US for sale, you can still sell it really applies to newly made routers, as you say.
Iain Thomson [01:41:21]:
Okay, criticize my accent, but no, that's
Leo Laporte [01:41:24]:
not an accent thing. That's just. That's how it doesn't different. It's like schedule. Right. It's just a different.
Iain Thomson [01:41:29]:
Yeah, so privacy.
Leo Laporte [01:41:30]:
Yeah, yeah. Aluminium rooter.
Iain Thomson [01:41:34]:
Don't get me started on that.
Leo Laporte [01:41:36]:
Okay, he confused me a little bit.
Iain Thomson [01:41:39]:
But honestly, I'll give you. Aluminum actually makes more sense.
Paris Martineau [01:41:44]:
Aluminium is. Adds a level of whimsy to the world that aluminum never will.
Iain Thomson [01:41:50]:
Well, yes, but I mean, we say sodium, we say calcium. Aluminum actually makes sense. Makes more sense. But at the same time the Germans invented the stuff. Let's let them change their name.
Leo Laporte [01:42:00]:
What do they call it?
Iain Thomson [01:42:01]:
Oh God, I don't even know what the Germans call it in terms of their own language. I think you need half a pound of phlegm to actually get it out.
Leo Laporte [01:42:12]:
I was going to ask Berber actually about if he has any insight into why in the world OpenAI spent more than $100 million to buy the Tech Bro podcast network. It must be something because then I see Andreessen Horowitz has started their own daily news show called Monitoring the Situation, which almost sounds like a joke, but it's not. They mean it.
Paris Martineau [01:42:39]:
Mts, baby.
Leo Laporte [01:42:40]:
Yeah, mts. And then there's of course, let's not forget I'm going to pronounce it properly. TI tv.
Paris Martineau [01:42:47]:
Oh yeah, that's the only way to pronounce it.
Iain Thomson [01:42:50]:
Of course, I would have been less subtle.
Leo Laporte [01:42:53]:
But do you have any insight? I mean, first of all, do you know how much they paid? Because all it was said was in the hundreds of million low. Hundreds of millions.
Berber Jin [01:43:03]:
Yeah, I don't think they paid that much. I mean they paid a lot for
Leo Laporte [01:43:06]:
it, but it's a podcast. Right, let's get this straight.
Berber Jin [01:43:11]:
They paid a lot of money considering it was a podcast, but.
Paris Martineau [01:43:14]:
Right.
Berber Jin [01:43:15]:
Considering the thing other things they spend money on. It wasn't terrible, but.
Leo Laporte [01:43:17]:
Well, and also it was Fiji. Simo's deal yeah. And then she immediately disappears for health reasons.
Berber Jin [01:43:24]:
It was very perplexing because I think it's interesting, I feel like the engagement has really dropped off since they bought it because people obviously don't want to go on the show now because it's owned by OpenAI. And then a lot of people don't want to watch it because it's like corporate TV now.
Leo Laporte [01:43:42]:
Yeah, this could, I could have predicted this. In fact, I think I did predict this. It seems like this is an example, if you're going to do an IPO of fiscal irresponsibility. This is not.
Paris Martineau [01:43:55]:
Well, I mean, what. I don't think there are many things that OpenAI has done that would be considered fiscally responsible.
Leo Laporte [01:44:02]:
Okay, good point.
Iain Thomson [01:44:04]:
But I mean, no, Bubba raised an interesting point here. In terms of you buy it, no one takes it seriously anymore, so you shut it down. Well, I mean, is that the goal?
Paris Martineau [01:44:14]:
Get my. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Barbara, my understanding is the reason they bought it was entirely to keep TPPN running. It's to have the TBPN boys be an integral part of comms and kind of the lobbying work.
Berber Jin [01:44:30]:
Yeah, I, I think at. They are definitely very frustrated about the negative perception. Like they have. They have a comms problem, clearly. And so I think internally they're like trying to spit out like different ideas to try and fix it. And so this was, I guess, like a very impulsive decision they made to just buy. You know, like they were kind of pitching it to me as like, you know, we're going to help shape public opinion with TVPM and reach audiences first and bypass traditional media. But I don't think they really had an idea of what they wanted to do with.
Berber Jin [01:45:10]:
Was one of those things where like everyone, like there are these weird disconnects for people just like to the rest of the world, it's just like a completely silly thing to do. But I guess people get hive mind and decide they want to do it.
Leo Laporte [01:45:25]:
I should be honest, I'm just jealous. They have 59,000 YouTube subscribers. This show alone has 63,000. Our network has more than a quarter of a million. Million. We're not getting hundreds of millions of dollars. But. But on the other hand, you could buy us and you wouldn't guarantee positive coverage of OpenAI.
Leo Laporte [01:45:45]:
Yeah, so maybe that's what's going on. I mean, you could. Joe Rogan's got 20 million subscribers. Lex Friedman has 5 million subscribers. I mean, there. It just seems like you bought. I don't. I just don't get it.
Leo Laporte [01:45:57]:
How, how is monitoring the situation going? Is that a good thing for Andreessen Horowitz? Seems like the same idea.
Berber Jin [01:46:03]:
I didn't even know that they launched. There's.
Leo Laporte [01:46:06]:
And therein lies the problem, right? Therein lies the problem. Nobody knows it exists. All right. Yes.
Iain Thomson [01:46:16]:
And the pointy headed one doesn't seem to care that much either, so.
Leo Laporte [01:46:20]:
Yeah, well, a little introspection goes a long way, let me just say. All right. I just. That's a kind of a personal ax to grind. I shouldn't, I shouldn't, I shouldn't belabor that point. Let me see if there's any happy news. Any happy news at all.
Paris Martineau [01:46:34]:
God, his head is so painty.
Iain Thomson [01:46:36]:
I know, I know. It just. I interviewed him in 97 and he gave a great interview, I've got to say. But you couldn't get over the fact it's. Yeah, his head is really, really pointed.
Paris Martineau [01:46:48]:
I think it's kind of an Internet meme sort of situation where people are editing the photos, but then you're confronted with the reality.
Iain Thomson [01:46:54]:
No, no. When you sneak moment of.
Leo Laporte [01:46:57]:
This may be a handicap because, you know, sometimes when a baby is born, the head gets squeezed quite a bit and it is not unusual for it to be pointy.
Paris Martineau [01:47:09]:
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I'm just saying it's notable.
Leo Laporte [01:47:13]:
It's a notable physical and it's not something you can fix. I mean, you wouldn't want to put a board on the baby's head as they're growing to kind of fix that, you know?
Iain Thomson [01:47:21]:
Well, I mean, I, I have, I have ridges on the side of my skull for just that reason
Paris Martineau [01:47:27]:
approach, you know, I think that every baby should be stomped on by an Italian plumber and his brother. I, I would fix it all.
Leo Laporte [01:47:35]:
I, I confess. I, I'm, I'm sympathetic because I once shaved my head, as you well know, for charity. And I learned that I have a really horrific shaped noggin. And I don't, I don't want to make fun of anybody.
Paris Martineau [01:47:48]:
Well, you're gonna have to shave your head again when we do our second. When we do our next 24 hour.
Leo Laporte [01:47:55]:
She really wants us to do it.
Paris Martineau [01:47:56]:
Both of you guys are welcome to take a 30 minute slot because we're gonna have to film fill 24 hours.
Leo Laporte [01:48:01]:
That's only 48 people. We need to fill half an hour.
Paris Martineau [01:48:05]:
Not that many. We can. 48 people.
Leo Laporte [01:48:07]:
We can do it. We can do it.
Paris Martineau [01:48:09]:
We could have one hour just wandering out in the street, trying to get
Leo Laporte [01:48:13]:
people to talk, you know, say I
Iain Thomson [01:48:14]:
went to hospital a couple of years ago and I got number one and a number two, and my goodness, my skull is ugly. So.
Leo Laporte [01:48:21]:
Yeah. You know. Yeah.
Paris Martineau [01:48:22]:
I shaved my head once in college and I. Did you looking skull? Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:48:25]:
Did you really? And what prompted that was? Did you?
Paris Martineau [01:48:28]:
It was. I had a blonde mohawk for a while throughout high school and college. And then at one point I was like, what if I grew my hair out all the way because I wanted to?
Leo Laporte [01:48:39]:
So you thought you'd start over?
Paris Martineau [01:48:40]:
And so I figured, yeah, why not? But I wouldn't.
Leo Laporte [01:48:43]:
So you look like Sinead o'. Connor.
Paris Martineau [01:48:46]:
Yeah. On retrospect, I mean, it looks great, but I would not recommend doing it it in January in New York because you don't really think about the fact that having any amount, because I even still had kind of short hair at the time, but that still adds a level of warmth to your head that a shaved head.
Leo Laporte [01:49:04]:
It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. Look how short my hair is. And yet when I didn't have any, I had to wear a hat. It was so cold. A lot of heat radiates. I'm sorry, Berber, you didn't know what you were getting into. And I really apologize. This is.
Paris Martineau [01:49:17]:
We've been incredibly on topic for what the show did normally is we're actually on our best behavior.
Iain Thomson [01:49:23]:
Great hair, you know, he's looking good.
Leo Laporte [01:49:25]:
He does, he does.
Berber Jin [01:49:27]:
It's all over the place.
Leo Laporte [01:49:28]:
And I'm sure an excellent shaped dome underneath it.
Berber Jin [01:49:31]:
I have no idea. I have no idea what my. I've never thought what my head would look like if I shaved it off.
Paris Martineau [01:49:37]:
What's the shortest your hair's ever been?
Berber Jin [01:49:41]:
It's always been long, I feel like, because I have. I have a huge head, so I also have.
Leo Laporte [01:49:46]:
We all have huge heads.
Berber Jin [01:49:48]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:49:48]:
One of us on this show has a huge head.
Paris Martineau [01:49:51]:
Hard to find hats.
Leo Laporte [01:49:53]:
There is a demand now in the Discord Chat where our club members hang out. As you know, we treat our club members as family. And they are saying they need pictures of you, Paris, with a mohawk and with a shaved head. So are there any.
Paris Martineau [01:50:09]:
I mean, I can try and find some.
Leo Laporte [01:50:11]:
Here are pictures of us with shaved head.
Paris Martineau [01:50:14]:
With cone heads.
Leo Laporte [01:50:15]:
Yes.
Paris Martineau [01:50:15]:
I mean, coneheads. What a great show.
Iain Thomson [01:50:17]:
Well, they've been. Yeah, they've been posting pictures of us with mustaches as well.
Paris Martineau [01:50:21]:
The mustache ones were quite good.
Iain Thomson [01:50:23]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:50:23]:
Well, did you. Could you tell how old we were from those? I'm gonna look back.
Iain Thomson [01:50:27]:
Not looking good.
Leo Laporte [01:50:29]:
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we thank you so much for being here, Berber. Reed Berber's work. Really great stuff in the Wall Street Journal. A lot of exclusives. Oh, yeah. We look good with mustaches. Berber, you have a nice.
Leo Laporte [01:50:42]:
That would fool anybody. That would make you.
Berber Jin [01:50:44]:
I should try. I like that one a lot, actually.
Leo Laporte [01:50:46]:
Yeah, that's.
Paris Martineau [01:50:47]:
Can you grow facial hair?
Leo Laporte [01:50:49]:
It's.
Berber Jin [01:50:50]:
It's. It doesn't go well.
Leo Laporte [01:50:51]:
That's kind of a personal question.
Paris Martineau [01:50:53]:
I'm so sorry to put you on blast.
Leo Laporte [01:50:54]:
She asked me that on Wednesday, too. I just. I feel like you can, but you
Paris Martineau [01:50:59]:
just choose not to because your wives hate it.
Leo Laporte [01:51:02]:
She has. Paris has a real knack for the personal question. I guess I like mine.
Paris Martineau [01:51:09]:
What else we got to do?
Iain Thomson [01:51:12]:
I grew one during lockdown. It was so annoying. So happy to.
Leo Laporte [01:51:17]:
You looked like Terry Thomas. You looked fantastic.
Iain Thomson [01:51:19]:
Yes, exactly. I look like a depraved Tammy. Terry Thomas. But also, you know, you take us, you know, a swig of tea, and it just. It stayed in there all day. I'll put a photo of that and the mohawk on. On Discord.
Leo Laporte [01:51:37]:
But you had a mohawk, too.
Paris Martineau [01:51:39]:
Everybody post your mohawks in the chat.
Leo Laporte [01:51:41]:
Half of this panel has had a Mohawk. Unless Berber, you've also had one. That case is 75%. Oh, that wasn't a mohawk, Paris.
Paris Martineau [01:51:51]:
I'm gonna show you the back. That has a mohawk.
Leo Laporte [01:51:53]:
Well, that's not a mohawk.
Paris Martineau [01:51:55]:
I guess it's a faux hawk.
Leo Laporte [01:51:57]:
It's a. It's a. It's a good look. That's a good look.
Paris Martineau [01:52:00]:
Let's see.
Leo Laporte [01:52:00]:
And this isn't quite bald, either. This is just.
Paris Martineau [01:52:03]:
Okay, that's a shaved head.
Leo Laporte [01:52:05]:
It's extremely short. That's it.
Iain Thomson [01:52:07]:
Let me show you.
Leo Laporte [01:52:09]:
Oh, look at that. Paris. I love this. Paris has readily to hand pictures of the back of her head.
Paris Martineau [01:52:16]:
I've just gone on Instagram and scrolled back.
Leo Laporte [01:52:20]:
Oh, okay.
Iain Thomson [01:52:21]:
There we go.
Leo Laporte [01:52:23]:
Oh, that is not a good look, Terry Thomas.
Iain Thomson [01:52:26]:
No, it really wasn't a good look, but it was a.
Paris Martineau [01:52:29]:
You look in pain.
Leo Laporte [01:52:33]:
I apologize for those of you only listening. Actually, no, you're lucky. You're the lucky ones. Thank you, Berber, for being here. We appreciate it. Read Berber's work in the Wall Street Journal. You'll find Paris Martineau at Consumer Reports, where she's doing food safety. Yes, it was she who exposed the radioactive shrimp scandal.
Leo Laporte [01:52:52]:
The lead in your protein powder. Shocker. And there is soon to be more. Her food safety is her passion. Thank you, Paris. We'll see you on Wednesday on Intelligent Machines and Thank you, Ian Thomas. I called you Thompson, didn't I?
Iain Thomson [01:53:10]:
Yes. I was going to say anything, but my father would hunt you down and I apologize.
Leo Laporte [01:53:17]:
Thank you, Ian. Of course, read Ian's View from the Valley. Subscribe and that way you'll get it automatically now. So it's not just intended for Brits, anybody would want to read this.
Iain Thomson [01:53:27]:
No. It's a view from a Brit in America and this is a strange and silly place at times.
Leo Laporte [01:53:33]:
It is indeed. Ian Thompson, thank you so much. Thanks to all of you for joining us. A special thanks to our club members. Let's see. I guess that's all I have to say, except that as I have said for 21 years now at the end of every show, thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week. Another the Twix is in the can.
Paris Martineau [01:53:52]:
Bye.
Leo Laporte [01:53:53]:
Bye.
