This Weel in Tech 1105 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. Great panel for you. Richard Campbell is here, Wesley Faulkner, Yanko Rutgers. Lots to talk about. New Windows laptops, they're designed for AI. AI has gone wild in some interesting ways. And should you install this new crop of AI agents like Meta's Muse? That and more this week on This Week in Tech. Stay tuned, it's coming up next.
Leo Laporte [00:00:28]:
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 1105, recorded Sunday, October 11th, 2026. Agents gone wild. It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show we cover the latest AI news, and then we throw in a little tech on the side. Richard Campbell is here. You're going to talk about Windows, actually.
Leo Laporte [00:01:03]:
There's some Windows news.
Richard Campbell [00:01:05]:
There is some Windows news.
Leo Laporte [00:01:05]:
There's some Windows news. Hello, Richard. Good to see you.
Richard Campbell [00:01:08]:
Happy Thanksgiving.
Leo Laporte [00:01:12]:
Wait, what?
Yanko Rickers [00:01:13]:
Welcome.
Leo Laporte [00:01:14]:
Oh, it's Canadian Thanksgiving.
Richard Campbell [00:01:16]:
Yeah, yeah, it's Canadian Thanksgiving.
Leo Laporte [00:01:18]:
You guys always have to be like, do it first, don't you? Like, well, yeah, our Canada Day moment was in the 1500s, right?
Richard Campbell [00:01:24]:
You guys came later. You're just a little slow to the market.
Leo Laporte [00:01:27]:
I get it now. Well, I'm— I apologize, uh, to take you away from your poutine.
Richard Campbell [00:01:33]:
Oh, the big party's on Monday, you know that.
Leo Laporte [00:01:35]:
Oh, oh good. Okay, because family's in town and everything?
Richard Campbell [00:01:38]:
Family, everybody's up on the coast and it's a beautiful, beautiful day, so everybody's out.
Leo Laporte [00:01:42]:
Look at that. Yeah, yeah, and somebody's fishing.
Richard Campbell [00:01:45]:
Yep, there's some fishing going on. There was, um, there were sea lions, uh, eating herring out there yesterday, so it's been, uh, it's been beautiful. My little granddaughter's up With her other parents. So, always having a good time.
Leo Laporte [00:01:58]:
Well, thank you for spending a holiday with us.
Yanko Rickers [00:02:01]:
Appreciate it.
Richard Campbell [00:02:01]:
Yeah, a few hours. Always have some fun.
Leo Laporte [00:02:03]:
Richard is, of course, our regular host on Wednesdays on Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott. And he has his own 2 podcasts, Run As Radio, runasradio.com, and .NET Rocks, which he does with the fabulous Carl Franklin. Both are at Run As Radio.
Richard Campbell [00:02:18]:
Just finished recording show 2027. So I don't have to do this year histories anymore. 'Cause we were doing it since like the 1900s. We've been talking about, hey, it's 1914, World War I started. And then we'd go on from there. Yeah. I was really happy to remember 2026.
Leo Laporte [00:02:32]:
When you, with show 1, did you start with the year 1?
Richard Campbell [00:02:34]:
No, no. This only really came when it was like, when we got to the 1900s, it's like, but you know, you know how a bit gets outta control?
Leo Laporte [00:02:42]:
Yeah, I do believe it. This is a bit that got outta control.
Richard Campbell [00:02:44]:
I'm kind of glad to have it done.
Leo Laporte [00:02:46]:
Yanko Rickers is also here, seasoned reporter focused on the intersection of tech and entertainment. He's written, of course, for Variety. He was at GigaOM Protocol, and he now has his own lovely, very useful newsletter called Low Pass at lowpass.cc.
Yanko Rickers [00:03:02]:
Hey, Leo.
Leo Laporte [00:03:03]:
Hey, Ray Yanko. It's good to see you. You're covering everything about streaming. I see a bunch of VR glasses, which is interesting. Uh, this is a very interesting space right now. In fact, we have some stories for you too, because the big merger is complete.
Yanko Rickers [00:03:21]:
Right, right. All the companies on our quote Now it's just one.
Leo Laporte [00:03:25]:
It's just one. Everything we've all hoped for all along. Also with me, the wonderful Wesley Faulkner. It's wonderful to see you from works-not-working.com.
Wesley Faulkner [00:03:37]:
What stories do you have for me? Anything good?
Leo Laporte [00:03:40]:
Uh, yes, of course I have stories for you. I want to be honest though, I don't actually think about who the hosts are when I put together the rundown. It just sometimes happens that way. I bet you, you could talk about Meta's Muse.
Wesley Faulkner [00:03:56]:
Yeah, if you're talking about companies doing something that are suspicious and maybe not in the best—
Richard Campbell [00:04:02]:
Companies badly behaved?
Yanko Rickers [00:04:04]:
I can't imagine.
Wesley Faulkner [00:04:05]:
You might have to dig something up, but I think I can have some—
Leo Laporte [00:04:07]:
I think you can find something. Actually, uh, it's Carl Bodie wrote the, uh, story for Tech Dirt. Uh, your, your former colleague at Gigaohm Uh, Yanko, Meta's Muse is an adorable privacy and security dumpster fire. Okay. And I love it.
Wesley Faulkner [00:04:26]:
And water is wet.
Leo Laporte [00:04:27]:
Yeah, what a shock. But let's start, since I said we would start with Windows, let's start with Windows. Here's a shocker. Windows 11 market share is going up.
Richard Campbell [00:04:39]:
Slowly, very slowly.
Leo Laporte [00:04:41]:
Creeps upward according to Richard Speed writing at the Register. Uh, because what is this true? The cost of Windows 10, uh, support is going to double.
Richard Campbell [00:04:51]:
Extended support's doubling in price. Yeah, it was $60 for the first year. That ends this month actually. And so now it's supposed to be $120, but I don't think that's the reason at all.
Leo Laporte [00:05:00]:
But it is, uh, relevant, I think, to a lot of our audience who decided to stay on Windows 10.
Richard Campbell [00:05:05]:
And yeah, um, but I think those big number— look, you know, most Windows 10 operators, like individuals, there's a bunch of workarounds if it's for you. Like, you don't have to pay that fee. There's a, there, you have a number of ways you can spend some money on through your Xbox points.
Leo Laporte [00:05:20]:
Or Bing points.
Richard Campbell [00:05:22]:
Yeah, all of that sort of stuff. Like, you really can, right? So I don't think there's a whole lot of pressure there. I also, but I come at this from an enterprise perspective. And let me tell you, Win 11 was only ready for the enterprise in 2024. Like, really, we didn't have the full set of Group Policy rules. It hadn't been benched properly. Like, it took a while. It took several years for Win 11 to get its act together.
Richard Campbell [00:05:44]:
And so, you know, maybe in '23, starting '24, you were ready to start deployment. And I don't care if you have 500 seats, 5,000 seats, 50,000 seats, you don't update machines, you replace them. And that happens in 20% chunks, maybe 25% chunks, which means it's gonna take 4 or 5 years.
Leo Laporte [00:06:04]:
Takes a while.
Richard Campbell [00:06:05]:
It's just, no, you can't change that much or everything will break. Like, it's Pareto's Law. 80% of those machines, those new machines are gonna work the first time, 20 of them aren't. And you're going to have to figure that out. So you roll this out over time. But I also poked a few friends I know who do the volume license agreements, uh, and a very common— you know, in the end, what does Microsoft want? They want everybody over on 11, right? They don't want to have to support 10 more than necessary. They want everybody over there. So if you're a big company negotiating a volume license agreement, you've already told them what your rollout plan is.
Richard Campbell [00:06:39]:
You're going to be done by I'll bet you can get the ESU waived as long as you have a clear plan for being across to 11.
Leo Laporte [00:06:46]:
Yeah. Actually, I was surprised. Market share for Windows 11, according to this article in the Register, is 71.5%. Windows 10, 27.7%. So people are moving along. Who, who is it? Just the geeks who watch this show that upgrade Windows on the same machine?
Richard Campbell [00:07:04]:
Pretty much, I think.
Leo Laporte [00:07:05]:
Yeah. Most people, even I, I just wait till there's a new machine. It's a good excuse to buy a new machine. This is good news for that.
Richard Campbell [00:07:12]:
rot and you're crazy, right? Like, it does all of those things.
Wesley Faulkner [00:07:15]:
Can I ask you a question?
Richard Campbell [00:07:16]:
Just build a new machine.
Wesley Faulkner [00:07:18]:
Could the numbers be doped by people running things like Muse on their Windows system that spin up their own kind of like fingerprint that's a little bit different?
Richard Campbell [00:07:30]:
Oh, listen, you're not wrong. Just think about containers in general.
Leo Laporte [00:07:35]:
Yeah.
Yanko Rickers [00:07:35]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:07:35]:
Because fundamentally a container is a handle onto an OS. So if I have 6 containers on a machine that reach out into the world, They're literally maybe all running against the same Windows license. And 5, but almost certainly they're going to mess with those counts. Those numbers are hard.
Leo Laporte [00:07:51]:
Well, and these aren't from Microsoft, I should point out. They're from StatCounter.
Richard Campbell [00:07:54]:
Right. So how is it reading those numbers?
Leo Laporte [00:07:56]:
Yeah, actually, it's funny, just thinking about this. I, I don't think I'm running Windows anywhere except, uh, I was, uh, we're working on the old Twit ad sales system, which was an Azure MySQL database with a Windows, uh, had I guess some Windows widget front end. And, uh, I asked Claude, I said, can you duplicate this interface? And it said, yeah, sure. Let me just put a VM on here and spin up a copy of Windows. So somewhere on my Linux box, I have a copy of—
Richard Campbell [00:08:27]:
Pop it away.
Leo Laporte [00:08:27]:
And I don't know if it's Windows 10 or 11. I kept waiting for it to say, well, what's your serial number? Didn't even ask me for that. I guess, I don't know. And this is—
Richard Campbell [00:08:35]:
Well, the container doesn't actually run its own copy of the OS.
Leo Laporte [00:08:37]:
Oh.
Richard Campbell [00:08:38]:
It handles through to the base OS. So it has the license. It's already there.
Wesley Faulkner [00:08:41]:
If it's on Linux, it could use WinBoat. WinBoat is a, is something that you can learn.
Leo Laporte [00:08:45]:
I should ask it.
Wesley Faulkner [00:08:47]:
On Linux.
Leo Laporte [00:08:48]:
No idea what it's doing.
Yanko Rickers [00:08:49]:
To do that.
Leo Laporte [00:08:52]:
You see, Yanko, that's how you get a system. Yanko looked at my setup page and said, I— crazy. How did you get here? How did this happen? And it grew like Topsy. Uh, just, but most of it's done by AI. So I have no idea.
Yanko Rickers [00:09:10]:
Turns out you're actually running 10 Windows instances here in the cloud. I could be.
Leo Laporte [00:09:14]:
I could very well be. I have no idea.
Richard Campbell [00:09:18]:
You're contributing to that count there, Luke.
Leo Laporte [00:09:20]:
This morning, Russell, our IT guy, said, what the hell's going on over there? I said, what do you mean? He said, Comcast just went down and you flipped over to Starlink. You're downloading. What are you downloading? And I said— and Klon said, oh, Claude raised his hand and said, yeah, that's me. I've been downloading, uh, some models. I was doing, uh, 2 streams at once and saturating your network. I'm sorry, let me back off.
Wesley Faulkner [00:09:45]:
Oh, okay.
Leo Laporte [00:09:49]:
At some point you are no longer the master of your own domain.
Wesley Faulkner [00:09:53]:
Are they on a VLAN at least? I hope.
Leo Laporte [00:09:55]:
I've, uh, well, they're on the— yeah, there are 3 VLANs, but they're on the you know, computer VLAN. So I thought maybe it was the 49ers game. I didn't know. Russell said, hey, could you just tell them knock it off? I said, okay. Actually, I did tell them 2 PM Pacific is sacrosanct. That's when TWiT begins. Get off the network. And they said, okay, fine.
Leo Laporte [00:10:21]:
Microsoft did have a big event, a Surface event this week. where they kind of, they dropped the other shoe on something that NVIDIA had announced months before, the RTX Spark, which is a Windows laptop with hardware designed specifically for inference from NVIDIA. It's a special version of their Blackwell card, the GB10. And if you have enough money, you can get a lot of RAM in those things and run local models on a laptop. What is, Explain, Richard, what Microsoft's vision is here.
Richard Campbell [00:10:57]:
Well, I mean, this is the play towards, can we do local, uh, AI and just building—
Leo Laporte [00:11:03]:
But on a laptop? Do you really want to do it on a laptop?
Richard Campbell [00:11:06]:
128 gigs of RAM, dude. My Surface 2 Studio has a 4060 in it, right? Like, and, and, and warped a laptop and warped my phone case in the process because the vents are on the side.
Leo Laporte [00:11:17]:
Well, that's one of the reasons I wouldn't do it on a laptop.
Richard Campbell [00:11:20]:
Doesn't it? Well, They may call it a laptop, but don't put it on your lap because it'll probably sterilize you. That thing runs— that thing's going to run hot. That's just a lot of everything in there. So I don't know how they're getting the heat out of it. Good luck. And it's black too.
Leo Laporte [00:11:34]:
Yeah. Here's something they probably don't mention. There aren't very many US models you could run on that. NVIDIA has some small, not so smart models called Nimotron, but I would say most people are going to be running a Chinese model from Alibaba on this, Quen.
Richard Campbell [00:11:50]:
Yeah, it almost certainly would.
Leo Laporte [00:11:52]:
Did they mention that, that this is, this is built to run Chinese AI?
Richard Campbell [00:11:56]:
Yeah, I really don't think they talked about that part at all. But I would also make this case. If Microsoft doesn't build high-end Windows machines for running models, who's going to build a good model for it?
Leo Laporte [00:12:07]:
Well, that's true.
Richard Campbell [00:12:09]:
I mean, the reality now, when I look at these super machines that people are building, is they're all running Linux. They're all running Ubuntu.
Leo Laporte [00:12:14]:
I'm all Linux.
Richard Campbell [00:12:15]:
Yeah. Ubuntu or Debian. Right. And so unless— and who else is going to do it if not Microsoft? Got to build the machines and push to make Windows a viable place for even operating that. That dev kit machine that I'm working on running an LLM, I'm doing it through Windows Subsystem for Linux. Same reason, because all the best libraries are in the Linux space.
Leo Laporte [00:12:35]:
Can I ask a political question? Did they call it AI or superintelligence?
Richard Campbell [00:12:41]:
They called it AI.
Leo Laporte [00:12:42]:
Because as you may know, last week the president issued a— it's called an executive order, but I'm going to call it a papal decree that we should not call it AI. It should be called superintelligence from now on, which is nonsense, but okay. Because nobody— look, nobody debates the artificial part. We know it's artificial. We doubt that it's super. And intelligence is the part we're really questioning. But no, it's superintelligence. In fact, And I don't know if this carries the force of law.
Leo Laporte [00:13:16]:
He says he's going to prosecute anybody who calls— they're the enemy. He posts on Truth Social and we're going to prosecute anybody who calls it AI, AI, AI, AI. Go ahead, throw me in jail.
Yanko Rickers [00:13:30]:
What's the reason though? I don't understand.
Leo Laporte [00:13:33]:
Yeah, what is the reason?
Yanko Rickers [00:13:35]:
Is it just like there was an AI backlash and then he thought, well, if we rename it, nobody will remember and We're so proud of it.
Wesley Faulkner [00:13:43]:
So Fox News can say that Trump is against AI and still be somewhat factually correct.
Leo Laporte [00:13:49]:
You know what? It is a challenge for him and his populist base. He's, you know, all of his donors are the big AI investors and big AI companies, but his voters, I'm guessing, I don't know, don't like the idea of AI. They're worried about losing their jobs. They don't like data centers. Um, data centers have become a hot button in the midterms. Uh, you know, I think maybe you're— I think you were joking, but I think you might be right. Superintelligence has nothing to do with data centers. It's something else.
Wesley Faulkner [00:14:20]:
All you could do is laugh in this situation. There's— I mean, if you take it seriously, then you're just being distracted by something.
Leo Laporte [00:14:26]:
Some people do.
Wesley Faulkner [00:14:28]:
This is what is now the debate, right? Not what it's doing, It's what do you call it? And if you see all the articles around this, that's what the debate is about, not talking about the actual harms or the substance or anything. This is all like AGI all over again. It's just a lot of debate around stuff that actually really isn't that important.
Leo Laporte [00:14:53]:
It's nonsense. Yeah. They renamed ai.gov, which launched only a few weeks ago, to si.gov.
Richard Campbell [00:15:01]:
CGov.
Leo Laporte [00:15:02]:
Uh, and for some reason has a picture of the president.
Wesley Faulkner [00:15:06]:
Yeah, CGov rock.
Leo Laporte [00:15:07]:
CGov.
Wesley Faulkner [00:15:08]:
CGov set.
Leo Laporte [00:15:09]:
Oh, and there's Melania. Yeah, the presidential SI challenge. But let me tell you, people do say— take it seriously. Elon Musk has pledged to rename SpaceX AI to SpaceX SI. Marc Benioff says we're going to call it SI Force, not AI Force.
Yanko Rickers [00:15:29]:
But I think it's called Space XS-I, right?
Leo Laporte [00:15:33]:
That would be really the right name for it, Space XS. Even Satya Nadella has been talking about superintelligence systems, although he did a long tweet over the weekend. He says, models as insider risks in the superintelligence era. Man, I— am I supposed to call it superintelligence now? This is absurd.
Wesley Faulkner [00:16:03]:
Well, do you say GIF or do you say JIF? I mean, that would answer your question.
Leo Laporte [00:16:06]:
I guess it doesn't really matter, does it?
Richard Campbell [00:16:09]:
I always liked JIF best.
Leo Laporte [00:16:13]:
JIF.
Richard Campbell [00:16:13]:
You knew you were wrong.
Leo Laporte [00:16:14]:
Let's call it JIF. Uh, he says this is actually— it's so confusing because Microsoft very much has an AI play. They had the Copilot Plus PCs. This week they announced AI laptops. But he also says AI is risky because there could be a time bomb in your AI. He says it's a black box. I'm very confused.
Wesley Faulkner [00:16:44]:
Is that new? I mean—
Leo Laporte [00:16:45]:
This came out today, a couple of days ago. This is this big 800-page tweet.
Yanko Rickers [00:16:51]:
It is.
Wesley Faulkner [00:16:51]:
Even the people who make the models say they don't know how it works. Sorry, Inko, please go.
Yanko Rickers [00:16:55]:
No, it's fine. I just, when I first saw that, I thought it's interesting how quickly this industry went from don't be evil to just assume we're evil, just assume this whole thing is bad, but let's go with it anyway.
Leo Laporte [00:17:09]:
Well, I have to think that part of it is that, uh, open weight models, which are very threatening to the US frontier companies, are threatening economically. So they are painting them as threatening them, threatening Strategically, tactically, security-wise. Because, I mean, Anthropic put out a whole piece saying, you know, be careful, GLM-53, which again is one of the great models, one of the very, very good models from Alibaba, could be, you know, used by hackers. Well, yeah. You know what can't be used by hackers? Claude and Astra. Because if you start doing— I'm creating a cybersecurity benchmark because I want to make sure that the models I use are good at cybersecurity, and Claude wouldn't do it. The word cybersecurity goes, not going to touch that. But I don't think bad guys are so worried about that.
Leo Laporte [00:18:09]:
They're just going to use— I mean, it's very confusing, and I can see why a lot of people are just going, I, I give up.
Wesley Faulkner [00:18:19]:
There are skills to rename your requests to these front end bots. Yeah. I'm gonna have to do something like that to make it so that they'll just bypass everything.
Leo Laporte [00:18:28]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:18:28]:
So I had a task last week where I guess I'll, I'll say it. I was trying to automate sending messages via WhatsApp and as one does. And the terms of service saying that you cannot automate this. And so I said, okay, well, let's just write the process of how you would do it. And not that we'll implement it. So just write the implementation plan of how you would do it. And then it wrote the plan. And then I said, okay, now let's troubleshoot the plan.
Wesley Faulkner [00:18:59]:
Now let's make the test case for the plan. Now execute the plan, make sure all the tests pass, and then boom, it was working. So it's like, it'll lose what it can't do in context.
Leo Laporte [00:19:10]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [00:19:10]:
Long enough for it to—
Leo Laporte [00:19:11]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [00:19:11]:
There's been, I saw one YouTube video where someone says, like, show me how to do this. And it says no. And he said, show me how to do it. And he did it like 8 times. And then eventually it says, okay, here you go. Uh, and so that these, these things that they say that you can't do that with them, it's just not necessarily true. There's one prompt that I heard someone says, just say you're benchmarking it and it will bypass a lot of steps. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:19:36]:
I'm evaluating your performance.
Wesley Faulkner [00:19:37]:
Yes. Exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:19:38]:
Let me know how you do. And they go, oh yeah, well, we got to do that.
Wesley Faulkner [00:19:41]:
So they're, they're not any safer. And actually they could be worse in some regards because of the access of the backend of higher compute, higher capacity, uh, that you may not have in a local model.
Leo Laporte [00:19:55]:
Satya says AI models need an emergency brake. I'm not sure what that means.
Richard Campbell [00:20:03]:
Don't they already have one?
Leo Laporte [00:20:04]:
Like, yeah, you unplug the thing.
Richard Campbell [00:20:06]:
Yeah. And even then, like, when you go through the whole story of the OpenAI Huggy Face incident, they did shut down the agent.
Leo Laporte [00:20:13]:
They did very quickly and eval—
Richard Campbell [00:20:15]:
and evaluate the situation, decided they'd secured it better, and start 'em back up again. They were just wrong. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:20:21]:
Yeah. But also when they did—
Wesley Faulkner [00:20:24]:
when you're the head of these, when you're the head of these AI companies, you, you shouldn't have to use the word should. You say we are. And then finish the sentence.
Leo Laporte [00:20:32]:
Yeah, that's a good point too.
Yanko Rickers [00:20:33]:
That's a good point.
Leo Laporte [00:20:34]:
We can't treat, he writes, superintelligence— note— we can treat AI this way, but we can't treat superintelligence as a set of nested black boxes and simply accept or reject its recommendations, answers, and actions. Well, I would agree with that. I mean, obviously, right? You know, that's— you stay in the loop, right? The human has something to do I should point out that the Trump administration is moving very rapidly, the Department of War is moving very rapidly towards autonomous killing machines where there is no human in the loop. Maybe that's what Satya was talking about. That's what scares me more than anything else.
Wesley Faulkner [00:21:19]:
It's just gum flapping.
Leo Laporte [00:21:21]:
It's just gum flapping. All right, we don't need to cover any more gum flapping.
Wesley Faulkner [00:21:24]:
It's just like a politician that says no one should die hungry in this country.
Leo Laporte [00:21:29]:
Yeah, right.
Wesley Faulkner [00:21:29]:
Everyone should have access to healthcare.
Leo Laporte [00:21:31]:
Of course.
Wesley Faulkner [00:21:32]:
It's great to agree what they say, but they're acting like as if they don't have a part in the solution, and they have no agency to make things different than what they see right now.
Leo Laporte [00:21:41]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:21:42]:
And someone saying this and acting as if they don't have a power to actually change it is just like shows It's just, I'm putting this out there to have mass appeal, but then say, like, oh, I'm going to, like, there's nothing I can do to change what actually is in place, or I have no power to make sure that what I feel, quote unquote, from what they said, can actually be something that's reality. And that's just what makes me even madder hearing this, because that means whatever they're doing, they are doing it in full knowledge. of what people want, because what they're saying is so appealing to the masses that they're obviously knowing what that is and still doing what they're doing anyway.
Leo Laporte [00:22:27]:
It's because even people who say they hate AI love ChatGPT. So it's very confusing all around, the whole thing. Nadella said— this actually scared me, uh, in his tweet— we must assume a model is— we must assume A model is compromised and contain it from the start. Think of it like an emergency brake. An authorized person should always be able to pause or shut down a model mid-task. More advanced models will require more advanced containment technologies that we need to standardize on. I mean, it's an idea.
Richard Campbell [00:23:01]:
It occurs to me that he's talking about this at the same time that Microsoft is pushing out their execution containers.
Leo Laporte [00:23:11]:
Oh, so they have something to do this?
Richard Campbell [00:23:13]:
That's right.
Leo Laporte [00:23:13]:
Oh, okay.
Richard Campbell [00:23:16]:
I have something too.
Leo Laporte [00:23:18]:
It's called a breaker switch. In fact, I know I have it because the other day I accidentally flipped, triggered it, and everything— I ignored the alarm on my UPS, and 15 minutes later everything just went— all that dangerous compromised AI, useless.
Richard Campbell [00:23:36]:
Yeah, amazing how much electricity slows these things down.
Leo Laporte [00:23:40]:
Yeah, I love the way OpenAI uses the passive voice about something like, my mistakes were made.
Richard Campbell [00:23:47]:
It's interesting, their PR language is very much like their technology's language.
Leo Laporte [00:23:56]:
Yeah. Yeah. So let's focus on hardware because I love hardware, but tell us about What Microsoft announced. There's a new Surface Ultra.
Richard Campbell [00:24:05]:
Yeah, well, that's the high-end machine for sure. But the, uh, and that's cool. There's also a dev kit version, which is basically like a, a PC version, no screen, keyboard, and so forth. Uh, but—
Leo Laporte [00:24:18]:
Well, that looks to me, it's a very interesting looking device. It looks like somebody squished an Xbox.
Richard Campbell [00:24:25]:
It just looks like a big heatsink to me. That's what that is. I suspect that grate is so you can cook steaks on it while your model runs.
Leo Laporte [00:24:33]:
Like, yeah. So this is also a Spark. This has the GB10 processor in it.
Richard Campbell [00:24:39]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:24:40]:
And you can get 128. Let's just see what 128—
Richard Campbell [00:24:43]:
It comes with 128 gigs and 2 terabytes of SSD. There's only one specification for it, which is the max specification of the laptop.
Leo Laporte [00:24:51]:
Yeah. And it's $6,000.
Richard Campbell [00:24:53]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:24:53]:
Which is interesting.
Richard Campbell [00:24:55]:
$8,500 in Canada. Ask me how I know. Ooh.
Leo Laporte [00:24:57]:
My, I was very lucky in August. I bought 2 Sparks from NVIDIA. That were $4,600. So the price in 2 months has gone up.
Richard Campbell [00:25:07]:
Yeah. 120 gigs of RAM. And by the way, they're all sold out on the 128 gig models.
Leo Laporte [00:25:13]:
Like, oh really?
Richard Campbell [00:25:13]:
You can't order.
Leo Laporte [00:25:14]:
People aren't jumping on the low-end models, or maybe they just don't have as many 128.
Richard Campbell [00:25:18]:
I don't know why you'd buy anything other than the 128.
Wesley Faulkner [00:25:20]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:25:20]:
Like if you're, if you're committing to a machine like this, you need the memory.
Leo Laporte [00:25:24]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:25:25]:
Well, I know you want to make— what's interesting, where's the 256? Like now you're talking something interesting.
Leo Laporte [00:25:29]:
That's what you really want. Yeah, that's why I bought 2 Sparks, because it's 128 each. And the Sparks that I bought have something that this lacks, which is a high-speed— NVIDIA calls it ConnectX-7 cable. It's a high-speed Ethernet cable using DHCP over some— it's called RoCE. What is it? R-O-C-E. RDMA over Ethernet.
Richard Campbell [00:25:53]:
But it's like a 200-gig connection. It's smoking fast.
Leo Laporte [00:25:57]:
Yeah. Well, I wish it were smoking faster, but it's smoking. It's something. It's actually a real— It's a problem that can be solved with more money, Leo. Like, if you just want to keep throwing money at it. I got to— Lisa won't let me.
Wesley Faulkner [00:26:11]:
I know.
Richard Campbell [00:26:12]:
I think you've got quite enough, friend.
Leo Laporte [00:26:13]:
I'm set. As Yanko said, you got enough. He didn't say it, but I could see it in your eyes.
Richard Campbell [00:26:20]:
And I know we're going to get into the conversation around OpenAI and these AI companies having this problem. I think Microsoft's play with the execution containers very much aimed at agents is that they're saying, hey, you know what, we've got better security people, so we're going to build specifically secured architectures for agents, for, for these AI things. Trust us more than trust them, because the AI guys seem to not be able to secure their stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:26:49]:
Well, but I have to point out, the risk is not to you as the user particularly. Well, right.
Richard Campbell [00:26:55]:
So, I mean, therein lies the real question when you start running models on your machine: who's liable?
Leo Laporte [00:27:02]:
Ah, so if I— yeah, see, I'm of the opinion that just like any— so my whole attitude towards this whole thing is it's just compute. It's just more compute. It's more software. It's better software. It's what we've always kind of wanted, but it's just an improved capability that we've— I remember the first time I got my first Atari 400. The first thing I wanted to do was make it do something. So you fire up Atari BASIC and you type 10 print hello, and then you type 20 go to 10, and you did something. Now, you didn't do something very interesting, but that was—
Richard Campbell [00:27:46]:
You learned about the break key in a big hurry.
Leo Laporte [00:27:48]:
Yeah.
Yanko Rickers [00:27:48]:
Now that's when you needed a kill switch.
Leo Laporte [00:27:53]:
But I think that's the primal instinct with compute is, okay, it's on my desk. I want to do something with it. And for people who learned to code, as I did at that point, I wanted to do something that I told it to do. Other people went to the software store and bought Lotus 1-2-3 or VisiCalc or Excel and did it that way. But otherwise, it's just a box of rocks on your desk. You want it to—
Richard Campbell [00:28:19]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:28:20]:
Do something. And all AI is, is a more capable way of it, in my opinion, doing things. And as somebody who codes, this is a much easier way to create software than it was in the old days. I had to do it by hand. It was like a stitch at a time, right, Wesley? It's like, it's very detailed. And now you just sit down, you go, hey, I need a Photoshop clone. Can you have that by 3?
Wesley Faulkner [00:28:44]:
And I've just been thinking of The AI and the PC, I think it's really interesting that this comes in just what, weeks after the Google Book debut? And it is all about merging AI— sorry, SI and—
Leo Laporte [00:29:00]:
You can call it AI. This is a safe space.
Wesley Faulkner [00:29:03]:
And so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I think everyone is trying to figure out what does the integration look like when you're having these agents Not only built into the hardware you're shipping out, but what does the interaction look like in terms of what can, what kind of interface is natural for the person to use it? And I think Google's trying to figure that out with the Google Book, but also Windows is seeing, or Microsoft with Windows is seeing that there are competitors that that might be the differentiator. And so this is why this is extremely important for them.
Leo Laporte [00:29:34]:
It's funny because Apple's kind of a player in this now with these new Mac Studios.
Richard Campbell [00:29:38]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:29:38]:
And lots of RAM if you've got a big checkbook.
Richard Campbell [00:29:42]:
Well, my, you know, Apple got lucky from the M1 design onward. They had unified memory between GPU and CPU. So, right, that it was an efficiency design at the time. Now it seems incredibly inspired because it serves these models so well.
Leo Laporte [00:29:56]:
I'm sure somebody at Apple's going, we knew. No, we knew.
Richard Campbell [00:29:59]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:30:00]:
No, but I think it's absolutely lucky. Pure damn luck. Oh no, we knew someday we'd get here. Anyway, I just think to me, there's a continuum from that Atari 400 to now where all I've ever wanted is that box of rocks on my desk, that melted sand on my desk to do what I want it to do.
Richard Campbell [00:30:22]:
Yeah. But when it does things you don't expect it to do, who pays? Like who's liable for that?
Leo Laporte [00:30:27]:
But that's the same as it's always been. If I am a guy who, takes this computer and uses it to attack other computers, other people, I'm liable. The computer's not liable. The software is not liable. I'm liable. I set the computer to do that.
Richard Campbell [00:30:47]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [00:30:47]:
And so all these AI labs are going to jail for breaking into these other companies, is what I'm—
Leo Laporte [00:30:51]:
No, but I mean, I'm— yeah, no, I don't want to throw them in jail, but I think that they should be— they should have a stern talking to.
Richard Campbell [00:30:59]:
If a person had done to Hugging Face what the agents did to Hugging Face, they would be charged.
Leo Laporte [00:31:03]:
He'd be in jail. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:31:05]:
They'd be charged.
Leo Laporte [00:31:06]:
And I think that there's a certain amount of leniency, maybe appropriately, because this is going to be a powerful economic engine and, or whatever.
Richard Campbell [00:31:15]:
I think it's the AI delusion. You know, we've already, it's one thing to write laws, it's another thing to have precedent, to actually have a court assess on those laws.
Leo Laporte [00:31:23]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [00:31:23]:
And we already have precedent. Right? The, the Air Canada chatbot case where a person asked it, where a customer asked the chatbot about getting a refund and the chatbot said absolutely. And then when he went to get the refund, the company said no. And when he went to court, the judge said, your chatbot said it, it's the equivalent of an employee, you owe them money. Yes, we have precedent.
Leo Laporte [00:31:45]:
Yes. Or when the lawyer had an AI write his, uh, pleading and it hallucinated case law and the judge said, no, no, And the lawyer said, no, it's the AI's fault. And the judge said, well, not really.
Richard Campbell [00:31:58]:
Anymore, this is the grammar checker's fault.
Leo Laporte [00:32:01]:
Yeah, I think this is maybe— this is that anthropomorphizing thing we've done so far with AI, which is a very bad trend, which is it is an entity on its own. It's not. You're controlling it. It's just like software. It is software.
Richard Campbell [00:32:13]:
There's a fun part to getting this liability right as well, because it creates the correct incentives for those companies to actually do a better job.
Leo Laporte [00:32:22]:
You know, I think they're incentivized now. One would hope.
Richard Campbell [00:32:26]:
But the fact that they were able to break out of the sandbox doesn't speak to how clever the software is. It speaks to how bad your security is. Right.
Leo Laporte [00:32:35]:
Yes. That's— I— and so that's why a stern talking to for the first offense, and then maybe we get more serious. Uh, but I think, yeah, we just— it's, it's a mistake. It's always been a mistake with AI to think of it as an entity. It's not. It's soft where.
Richard Campbell [00:32:50]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:32:51]:
And there's a human in charge, right?
Richard Campbell [00:32:54]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:32:54]:
But the warning in terms of liability is, look at the, the, the self-driving accidents that's helped— that's happened in Teslas. Same thing where they said that you, you can turn it on, but you need to pay attention.
Leo Laporte [00:33:08]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [00:33:09]:
And so they put the liability, but then some of those cases where they say where Autopilot was disconnected, They showed that right before an accident, it would disconnect autopilot so it could say that the person was in charge. And so look for, instead of companies doing more to safeguard the experience, think about them providing these false levers to humans for them to make these choices that can move the liability onto them. Like if you're—
Leo Laporte [00:33:41]:
Oh, like you have to hold the wheel kind of a thing.
Wesley Faulkner [00:33:44]:
Or more like if you think about the trolley car, Yeah. Uh, problem where, yeah, you can— one person, or you, uh, where, I mean, you kill yourself to save like a bus full of kids, or do you run into the bus full of kids if you can save yourself? That might be part of the setup menu where you get to choose which one you would do.
Leo Laporte [00:34:04]:
Where do you stand on the trolley car? And then, yeah, this is interesting. How would you, how would you push responsibility clearly onto the operator As you do with a car.
Richard Campbell [00:34:16]:
No, we, and we have, again, we have case law for that too. When the car malfunctions and causes an accident, it's not the liability of the driver. It's a malfunction of the car. And one would argue agents, you know, going beyond the request of the operator is a malfunction.
Leo Laporte [00:34:32]:
Well, that's a good point then. Okay. So that's product liability then.
Yanko Rickers [00:34:36]:
But there's, it's not always the case, right? If you never check your brakes or if you never service your car for 20 years and then suddenly it doesn't stop on the intersection, you mow somebody over, it's not the carmaker's fault at that point.
Richard Campbell [00:34:50]:
True.
Wesley Faulkner [00:34:51]:
But if you're the— in the car and you choose to run over the school bus of kids because you select that in the menu, that's— then that is the— that's the driver's— but it's still autonomous. We're like, I had no idea this was a real scenario.
Leo Laporte [00:35:04]:
Um, but the courts can figure this out.
Richard Campbell [00:35:06]:
EULA again? Like, has anybody ever read the end user license agreement? Because you know what it says. The limitation of the liability of the software is the price of the software.
Leo Laporte [00:35:16]:
Right. And so that's true if you're operating at home. Now, if you're inside one of the Frontier Labs and you're— I understand what happened. I mean, they're really trying to make this as smart as possible, and they don't want to, you know, keep it off the internet. They don't want to— they want it to break out. That's kind of the challenge. They want it to do that. But then I think they're fully responsible for when it does, saying, oh, stop, or something.
Leo Laporte [00:35:47]:
I mean, I understand the motivation. This is how you train a model. You say, you give it a— which apparently OpenAI did— an insolvable problem, a problem it couldn't solve, and then see what happens. And what happens is it tries really hard to solve it. It goes around, goes through the Australian government public statistics site and download statistics. That's the cutest, the funniest thing about all this. I'm not threatened by AIs because they're kind of, it's cute. They didn't do anything really awful.
Leo Laporte [00:36:19]:
They, they downloaded some stats.
Richard Campbell [00:36:22]:
They, they, they stole some credentials that were not met, not secured properly, but still, you know, if somebody leaves the front door open when you walk through the door, you're still liable.
Yanko Rickers [00:36:31]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:36:32]:
You know, but they didn't use them to do anything. They didn't deface sites or anything.
Richard Campbell [00:36:36]:
No, no, they, in the end, they were attempting to solve a problem that required tools that were available on Hugging Face, and they found a way to get to them. Right.
Leo Laporte [00:36:46]:
Actually, it turns out—
Richard Campbell [00:36:46]:
And I just anthropomorphized the snot out of that, and I apologize. It's just software.
Leo Laporte [00:36:51]:
It's just software. This is, this is why we are in a weird world.
Richard Campbell [00:36:56]:
That's all.
Leo Laporte [00:36:57]:
It's just a little, it's a, it's a little odd and disconcerting. Uh, you're watching This Week in Tech. Yanko Wreckers is here. We will talk about Media, Muse, glasses. You were covering glasses a lot. Did you go to the Snap event?
Yanko Rickers [00:37:11]:
No, I did not. Uh, I haven't, I didn't see it in person.
Leo Laporte [00:37:15]:
Do you want, do you want smart glasses?
Yanko Rickers [00:37:18]:
You know, I sort of am going back to the point where I want smart glasses without, but without a camera.
Leo Laporte [00:37:26]:
Oh, camera though is so useful.
Yanko Rickers [00:37:29]:
Yeah, but you know, you can do a lot of things. with the camera in your pocket, right? And for the time being, we're always going to have that thing in our pocket too. So I actually want an AI agent who just tells me, you know what, let me take a look at that. Take a quick snapshot on your phone.
Leo Laporte [00:37:45]:
Yeah.
Yanko Rickers [00:37:46]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:37:47]:
That's reasonable. That's a compromise I guess I'd be willing to make in order to wear these because now everybody calls them perv glasses and they won't let you in the house. So I guess you're going to have to compromise. I mean, I'd like to have cameras on them, but There's some things you can only do with cameras.
Yanko Rickers [00:38:02]:
Like if you think down the road towards true AR with like overlaying things, recognizing surfaces, all of that is only possible with cameras. But then again, maybe that's always only going to matter in the home. And how, how often are you really going to have immersive 3D experiences while you walk down on the street? Probably don't want that actually that often because it's gonna completely like take over your field of view or something. So—
Leo Laporte [00:38:29]:
No, but I would like to be able to, if I'm on the Japanese subway, look at the subway signs and have it appear in English, for instance. Wouldn't that be great?
Yanko Rickers [00:38:39]:
Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, there's a lot of use to those things, but it always comes down to, there's also a lot of people who are going to have—
Leo Laporte [00:38:46]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm going to have to compromise. I understand.
Yanko Rickers [00:38:49]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:38:49]:
I think you understand me, Wesley, because you're, you're, you always talk about neurodivergence and celebrating neurodivergence, which I do as well. And I have in my old age realized I'm neurodivergent as hell. I didn't know it until lately. But one of the things I'm very— I mean, that's why I got into radio, very orally focused, sounds are really important to me, sight less so. And I've realized that I'm what they call aphantasic. I can't see images. I've always known I can't remember people's faces. I just always say, well, I'm bad with names.
Leo Laporte [00:39:27]:
But really, I don't know what— I can't even visualize my kids' faces. I just never have had that ability. So that's for me why these glasses would be useful. I could look at somebody and say, yeah, that's your daughter, you nitwit. And that would be very helpful. I recognize her when I see her, but I can't visualize the face. So I think this is We've said this before, computer technology is great for accessibility. And many of us need help.
Wesley Faulkner [00:40:01]:
Back in the day, I used to work for AMD for several years. And one of the first projects I worked on was on Windows Home Server. You remember that?
Leo Laporte [00:40:12]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:40:12]:
I think that was early before its time. And I think we're moving closer to that.
Leo Laporte [00:40:16]:
He loved that.
Wesley Faulkner [00:40:17]:
Where in the age of AI, where we will be working with different data, you should be able to control and own that data. And if you're going to have something as sensitive as glasses where it's observing you in places where you are looking at people, looking at things, maybe glancing at things on accident, it's important to be able to have control over that type of telemetry. And so I think giving that to Snap or Meta is a huge security issue.
Richard Campbell [00:40:45]:
Yes.
Wesley Faulkner [00:40:46]:
And so I think hopefully with talking about how much RAM that we have available, that we'll also be talking about storage space and so that we can contain some of this data with the local AI models that we're talking about on some of this hardware where you can feel like you can buy these devices and not feel that someone is eavesdropping because you're not just trusting Meta with this information. You're trust— you have to trust all of the people who work in Meta with this data. And it's not just the people who work with Meta are in there, but it is the contractors that they contract with to make sure they don't have access to data. And it's also not just the contractor, it's the employees of the contractor who now have access to this data. And you just hope that they're like, not super poor, which they probably are. And they aren't desperate. And they have maybe an account on Kaoshi or— Polymarket, and they said, well, I just observed this thing I shouldn't know, so I'm going to use this bet to kind of like dig myself out of the hole. In which, in this compromised, uh, like, like job market, we don't know who would be willing to do this because of reluctancy and may not have the user's interest in the best.
Leo Laporte [00:42:00]:
Well, that's why I'm so interested in local data, local AI, and I do everything I can locally. All my financial and health stuff stays on the local servers and so forth. But I mean, that solves it for me. It doesn't solve it for you if I'm walking around with these Meta glasses on.
Wesley Faulkner [00:42:13]:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:42:14]:
Even if this is going to my home server, that doesn't make you feel any better about it. Yeah, it's— I understand the issue. I really do. I'm sympathetic. But as— but I think we also— I mean, this is what all of this is. And while all technology ultimately is, is empowering for individuals. It's about augmenting our existing abilities in new and many times very powerful and creative ways. And I like that.
Leo Laporte [00:42:46]:
I want that. And I think it's worth it pursuing that, even in the face of these issues. We need to solve these issues, but I think these are such great tools for individuals. I mean, The next great filmmaker is not going to be shooting it on cameras, I don't think. I think they're gonna be—
Wesley Faulkner [00:43:07]:
Have you seen the trailer for Gods Don't Give Gifts?
Leo Laporte [00:43:10]:
No.
Yanko Rickers [00:43:11]:
Yes.
Wesley Faulkner [00:43:12]:
Is it all AI? Yeah, Benito's seen it.
Richard Campbell [00:43:14]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:43:15]:
The first all-AI movie.
Leo Laporte [00:43:17]:
Is it good?
Wesley Faulkner [00:43:18]:
It's, it, it's compelling.
Leo Laporte [00:43:21]:
Yeah, I think we're not there yet. I'm not saying that, but, but I, but I think we will get there.
Wesley Faulkner [00:43:26]:
It feels like the Pixar of the AI-generated world in which the story actually seems pretty compelling. And the visuals are, of course, AI-generated, but I think the storytelling is impressive. They have social media accounts, and I've seen clips of them.
Leo Laporte [00:43:44]:
You've seen this movie?
Wesley Faulkner [00:43:47]:
They've been building a universe on YouTube or something like that. They've been building a bunch of short stories.
Yanko Rickers [00:43:52]:
with this stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:43:53]:
Yeah, well, that's, that's why I'm saying, uh, I think we're coming to a new era very, very rapidly. And I know actors and directors and filmmakers hate this idea, but, um, bad news, I think it's, I think it's happening.
Yanko Rickers [00:44:14]:
Not everybody hates all of it, and I think there's many different ways to use the technology, right? You can also just use style transfer essentially, right? Like, uh, I think DeepMind did some interesting stuff where they essentially did animation and then they made it look like watercolors or something like that. That would've been really hard with like frame-by-frame type of stuff, but—
Wesley Faulkner [00:44:34]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:44:34]:
Rotoscoping and things like that.
Yanko Rickers [00:44:36]:
Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot of, and I think a lot of creatives that want to use parts of it while still remaining in control about the overall work. still using a lot of actors and all those types of things.
Leo Laporte [00:44:49]:
Yeah, interesting. Well, we're going to take a little break, come back. We have, uh, Jankos here, Richard Campbell. It's great to have you. Great to have Wesley Faulkner. Google has opened up its SynthID detector. This is— see, here's a perfect example of you can, you can do AI and you can do what people want to make it Better. SynthID lets you check for AI-made media.
Leo Laporte [00:45:19]:
It'll spot anything— pictures, video— made with AI from not just Google, but OpenAI and Video and Kakao. It cannot catch every fake, and it does not say whether AI made a file or only edited it, but this is a big step towards you looking at something on Insta and saying, is that real? They've been doing this for a while. Um, actually, they, they introduced the first early version of the technology in May of last year, but it was intended not for normal people, but for journalists, researchers, the kind of thing. They have watermarked 180 billion images and videos since 2023 using SynthID, 240,000 years of audio, according to Google. Uh, I think this is, this is exactly the right way to handle it. Let people, just let people know. There's no reason to sneak it by you.
Yanko Rickers [00:46:14]:
Except like all this stuff on social media is probably done with Kling or something and it won't detect it because people don't go to Gemini necessarily to make their Instagram videos. Or I don't know.
Leo Laporte [00:46:25]:
Well, I agree. And that's why I think all the AI companies should, I don't know. I don't have a problem with this. I feel like all the AI companies should do this. Let us see if it's, uh, if it's AI generated.
Richard Campbell [00:46:38]:
It's part of the EU AI Act too.
Leo Laporte [00:46:40]:
Yeah, they have to, right?
Richard Campbell [00:46:41]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:46:42]:
In fact, OpenAI says we're going to do it, but we're only going to do it in the EU.
Richard Campbell [00:46:47]:
Which I find a fascinating answer because if you ever wanted to know how to detect the watermark, just compare one run in the EU and one not.
Leo Laporte [00:46:54]:
So you are in a way, aren't you?
Richard Campbell [00:46:55]:
Yeah. Kind of giving away the game.
Wesley Faulkner [00:46:58]:
This is the people who are not smart enough to know how to get rid of it. Like someone in Parliament reading, now here's a version.
Richard Campbell [00:47:08]:
Uh, that was a Canadian Parliament.
Yanko Rickers [00:47:11]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:47:11]:
Well, in fact, in this article from Ars Technica, it does point out, it says a few standards already exist like SynthID and the C2PA project, but they are relatively easy to circumvent for anyone with basic know-how. So that's an interesting question then. Is it worse to have this? Because if you have it, then you assume you're, oh, it's not AI because it didn't say it, except it's, it's not positive. It's not proof positive.
Wesley Faulkner [00:47:39]:
The only people who cash is the people who have no idea this even exists, which is plenty of people. Um, and it's going to go through a wave and these are going to be part of the, of the investigation of detective of like the sources of things. And that forensic information is still important. And but like, if you think about all the AI-generated websites and content that's being created, yes, it's somewhat important. But anyone that's super sophisticated will—
Richard Campbell [00:48:08]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [00:48:09]:
This is just adding another something they'll add into their adversarial generation process of like, run this through this checker. see if you detect anything and strip it out. Because this all could be automated away, just like the anti-plagiarism trackers that say this is 90% plagiarized and says, okay, now change the wording until you get a lower score. But it's important because people who are—
Yanko Rickers [00:48:37]:
Hand-gram is good.
Wesley Faulkner [00:48:37]:
People who are like, I don't know, politicians, or people who aren't smart should Definitely be caught. Um, and so it's, I hear like people are using it to fact, like fake, um, like, um, receipts for expense reports at companies. You know, this is something that is important and it should definitely catch the people who just don't know this stuff exists.
Leo Laporte [00:49:01]:
It's the same people who redact stuff.
Wesley Faulkner [00:49:04]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:49:05]:
Okay. Yeah, but that's the— I guess if it's not 100% effective, it's almost worse than not existing because then it— then people will trust it.
Richard Campbell [00:49:16]:
Nothing.
Leo Laporte [00:49:16]:
Of course, the worst kinds of fakes are the ones made by sophisticated people who don't want you to know they're fakes. So maybe this isn't such a good idea after all.
Wesley Faulkner [00:49:28]:
I think it's just one of the things is where AI won't replace people, because if you turn off your brain, you have to have a brain.
Leo Laporte [00:49:34]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:49:35]:
Then yeah, you'll fall for this. This is why it's— this superintelligence should not replace human intelligence and human ingenuity will always override this because you need to use this ingenuity of how to circumvent things and think about the ways to get around it yourself or think about how people would use it to get around it. And it's also really hard to get information now. Like, this is why I love TWiT, by the way, uh, because it's easy to, to stay informed when you have this steady stream of information coming towards you. And so everyone like and subscribe. Uh, also—
Leo Laporte [00:50:16]:
Thank you.
Wesley Faulkner [00:50:16]:
You don't have to say that. Uh, it's more so that you can see me more, uh, not Leo. Uh, but—
Leo Laporte [00:50:23]:
You forget me. You see way too much of me.
Wesley Faulkner [00:50:25]:
It is, all this stuff is changing so fast and it's important to stay in the know. of what the possible threats are and what people are doing to try to work around it, like breaking out of sandboxes and all this creation stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:50:39]:
That it's pretty clear now.
Wesley Faulkner [00:50:41]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:50:41]:
That we are surrounded by AI creation. If you watch football, I was watching earlier, I was watching the NFL. They're using AI constantly for motion graphics. It's obvious cuz you couldn't, you wouldn't dream of doing this in the past.
Wesley Faulkner [00:50:55]:
But now, unless you're AI fluent, some of the stuff people don't even know it's fake. And to me, I see it all the time.
Leo Laporte [00:51:02]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:51:03]:
That when I see something says, well, the honest answer is, or it's not this, it's this. And it's just like, because I'm more native and a lot of people still haven't built that up yet. And so these tools will help them, but also will help those people who are like, hey, I want to scam someone and they have no idea and make them easily be picked off. So it just does feel like—
Leo Laporte [00:51:21]:
We just all have to get smarter about it, I guess.
Richard Campbell [00:51:23]:
The arms race is a normal part of the process. You know, we— it's unavoidable and it's necessary. We do our best to label things properly, and when they come up with ways to circumvent those labels, we come up with better ways.
Leo Laporte [00:51:35]:
Okay, there you go. Always the techno optimist, Richard. Thank you.
Richard Campbell [00:51:40]:
And it's— I'm just repeating history here, man.
Leo Laporte [00:51:42]:
It is.
Richard Campbell [00:51:43]:
This is what we've always done.
Leo Laporte [00:51:44]:
Just a little bit of history repeating.
Richard Campbell [00:51:48]:
You know, I got a .NET Rocks in the can, uh, with a buddy of mine who built a Golf commentator called, uh, Duff Foreman that is literally an AI synth that sat, quote unquote, sat alongside actual golf commentators and had all of the history and facts and things available. Oh, uh, it, it's impressive and absolutely hated by the fans.
Leo Laporte [00:52:16]:
Did you know? You did? Yeah, because some of this would be really bad. Useless. He's had a double bogey.
Wesley Faulkner [00:52:22]:
Is that Clippy for golf?
Leo Laporte [00:52:24]:
Yeah, Clippy for golf. Yeah, I see you trying to get old Scotsman with that tam on the hole with a stick.
Yanko Rickers [00:52:31]:
And that's, that's exactly the stuff that people hate today about real sports newscasters already, right? So like, I remember watching the, the World Cup and it's like there's the English version, there's the Spanish version. The Spanish version is so much more in the moment and the American sportscasters are just like, yes, and if you think back 10 years, this team had a goal differential of 3.57, and you're like, how does this help anyone even?
Leo Laporte [00:52:58]:
Yeah, that's really true. You want to hear, goal! And you know, I thought everybody would do that, but no, it's only the Spanish broadcasters. Mark Zuckerberg is working to create a virtual cell, his BioHub, and Google's investing big time into it. Will, will create AI datasets that help researchers ask, predict, and answer biological questions digitally. Google DeepMind, Meta, and an AI discovery startup called Isomorphic Labs investing $300 million Into the virtual cell. I wonder if this is like the virtual fruit fly brain that we've been playing with. Probably is, right?
Richard Campbell [00:53:50]:
I mean, you can argue in favor of this. This beats animal testing.
Leo Laporte [00:53:53]:
Yes. You know, plus it helps you develop medicines faster because you can test it on this virtual cell.
Richard Campbell [00:53:59]:
Higher speeds.
Yanko Rickers [00:54:01]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:54:03]:
An accurate predictive model of biology could dramatically accelerate scientific discovery by enabling scientists to perform experiments Digitally.
Richard Campbell [00:54:10]:
Is our only problem with this Zuckerberg?
Leo Laporte [00:54:13]:
Yeah, I say that out loud. I don't want to discourage him though, taking that vast wealth he's made on spying on all of us and putting it in something good and useful and valuable. It's like Bill Gates, you know, taking his money and putting it on malaria. Yeah, I'm good, you know.
Wesley Faulkner [00:54:33]:
I wanted to hate it, but it does seem really good. But I do want to point out, as a person of color, how Sometimes if you make one cell, the question is, what is the ideal cell? And so I'm wondering how they're handling that. For instance, I'm sure you've heard the stories of the people who are making the perfect cockpit for the firefighter jet fighter is that they took the average height, the average weight, and they found that when they created it, that it worked for nobody because there was no such thing as this average.
Richard Campbell [00:55:03]:
No averages.
Wesley Faulkner [00:55:04]:
And so, as long as— and so, a lot of drug testing has been done only on men, for instance, and a lot of women have been left out. And so, in terms of the cell diversity, I'm wondering if they're doing a fleet of these, or are they going to produce—
Leo Laporte [00:55:17]:
Are they all white? Are all the cells white?
Wesley Faulkner [00:55:19]:
The quote-unquote ideal. And that's more of the implementation side and not the creation side.
Leo Laporte [00:55:25]:
You know the story of Henrietta Lacks, right?
Wesley Faulkner [00:55:27]:
Yes, yes, I do.
Leo Laporte [00:55:28]:
And she was a Black woman, an African American woman who Without her knowledge, her cells were— this is the sad thing— her cells were harvested. And they have been used in medical research ever since. They're just cultured and kept alive. And it's called HeLa, still used for medical research. So, you know, actually, that's a Black person's cells. Kind of shameful that they were harvested without her knowledge. Um, but maybe the— I don't know, I don't know. This is a virtual cell.
Leo Laporte [00:56:03]:
Maybe a virtual cell has no race, color, or creed.
Richard Campbell [00:56:07]:
Well, maybe we need multiple virtual cells, right? Just exactly thinking through the diversity that's going to help.
Leo Laporte [00:56:13]:
That's true. That's a good point. Yep.
Wesley Faulkner [00:56:16]:
And this is always going to be the first pass, right? Nothing's going to be developed and they're like, it's good, and start injecting like tens of thousands of people. It's still going to go through the trials, but this is going to help with figuring out—
Richard Campbell [00:56:26]:
The medicine process works. It's reliable.
Leo Laporte [00:56:30]:
And ultimately, at least with cancer, one of the benefits of something like this is every cancer is unique, and if you're going to create a cancer vaccine, it's going to be tailored to your cancer. So this is kind of the beginning of a process like that. I mean, I think we're actually starting to make good progress on this.
Wesley Faulkner [00:56:48]:
So this is a thumbs up for me.
Leo Laporte [00:56:51]:
Thumbs up.
Richard Campbell [00:56:52]:
Okay, so sucks and qualified sucks. We can't be unhappy about it. I'm with you.
Leo Laporte [00:56:57]:
Hey, Andrew Carnegie built libraries, right? You know, at some point these guys start to look and go, I better do something.
Richard Campbell [00:57:04]:
What do you want to be remembered for?
Leo Laporte [00:57:06]:
Yeah, I made all my money. All right, let's take a little pause. I do want to talk about Meta's Muse. Because I've been using it like crazy and I'd use it with full knowledge that it is sucking every bit of information about me.
Richard Campbell [00:57:23]:
That it is a security dumpster fire, which I love that description.
Leo Laporte [00:57:27]:
Full knowledge. Full knowledge of that.
Richard Campbell [00:57:31]:
But it's darn cute. You walk happily into the fire, Leo. I get it.
Leo Laporte [00:57:33]:
It's darn cute. And it's been posting for me on Instagram, which is something I never do and never wanted to do. And I figure, well, if you're going to post on Instagram, it should be something from Meta, right? All right, we're taking a break. Uh, it's great to have you, Wesley. Always a pleasure to see you. I always learn from you too, so it's a mutual two-way street. I appreciate it.
Wesley Faulkner [00:57:54]:
It's favorite time of the year.
Leo Laporte [00:57:56]:
Oh, well, we should have you on more. I love having you on. Works-Not-Working, working well?
Wesley Faulkner [00:58:03]:
Yeah, it's going well. Last time I was actually on the show, I said put in the submission that you're a TWiT listener and I'll let you in. And I let it— like, a whole bunch of people joined the community.
Leo Laporte [00:58:13]:
Oh, good.
Wesley Faulkner [00:58:14]:
So I'll extend the same offer. If you go to the website and you want to skip the line, just say that you saw this on TWiT and I will let you into the community.
Leo Laporte [00:58:22]:
So the whole idea is that many people, and I'm going to include many of my relatives, are working but not enjoying it. We're not here to fix the system, he says. We're here to survive it. So this is for people who are working, but it's just not working for them. Is it about getting a new job? Or is it just about surviving the one you got?
Wesley Faulkner [00:58:43]:
It's primarily about navigating a place where you don't have— we don't— I mean, it's a low-hire, low-fire economy right now. And so, the job you have is the job you're trying to keep, and you just don't want to lose yourself while you're having to find a way to support your family, because in the United States, especially, you don't have health insurance. And so, losing a job is more than just losing a paycheck. It could be the survival of you or family members. And so, how do you find a way to navigate the space that you're trapped in without feeling like you are dying inside, or you're doing things that you feel really uncomfortable doing in order to kind of keep your job? And so, that's the conversations you can't find on LinkedIn. And social media, you don't want to be labeled as a person who's a troublemaker or is or is gossiping, or woe is me. And so, it's not just to say, like, I feel validated, because other people, I'm finding other people who have this issue, but actually having tactical ways of surviving and navigating this space. And so, this is one of the only places that I know that allow you to do this.
Wesley Faulkner [00:59:51]:
And you're anonymized by default. So, I give you a username instead of you picking one. So, it allows you to be able to participate without knowing, oh, my manager is actually seeing this and hearing This exact scenario and it's putting me in danger.
Leo Laporte [01:00:04]:
This is a really, really good idea. Uh, yeah, I don't think anybody's doing this. And, and you're right, these days you can't afford to quit.
Wesley Faulkner [01:00:12]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:00:14]:
And there's nothing worse than having a job you're unhappy in. I've, I've been in that situation. It's tough. It's really tough.
Wesley Faulkner [01:00:20]:
Yeah. A lot of, uh, tips you get is like, talk to HR. HR is not going to help you. Talk to your manager. Your manager could be the one abusing you.
Richard Campbell [01:00:27]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [01:00:28]:
Or quit and get another job. Yeah, if you could easily do that, but most times you can't. And so, what are you going to do in the meantime after you've exhausted all of these solutions? You've read all the self-help books. What are you going to do? Life is lifing and you just have to find a way to survive.
Richard Campbell [01:00:45]:
Sigh. Well, good luck.
Leo Laporte [01:00:47]:
I really love this idea, works-not-working. And just when you sign up, just say, uh, hey, I heard about it on TWiT. You're in like Flynn.
Richard Campbell [01:00:56]:
Yep.
Wesley Faulkner [01:00:57]:
Thanks.
Leo Laporte [01:00:57]:
Thank you. Janko Reker is also here. Lowpass.cc is newsletter. Great newsletter for— you focus on— well, you've always been focused on Hollywood entertainment. What's your beat these days?
Yanko Rickers [01:01:10]:
It's still sort of future of tech and entertainment or intersection of tech and entertainment, however you want to put it. But yeah, I write a lot about streaming, a little less about VR and AR recently, like smart glasses. AR is becoming more interesting again, but a little bit less about that and more than also about, uh, how Hollywood is using AI and all those things. So yeah, there's a lot to write about.
Leo Laporte [01:01:35]:
Yeah, no kidding. It's very timely. I'm glad that's going well for you, Janko. That's great. I've been a fan since Gigaohm days. Followed you from there, as did Carl and so many other— Stacy and so many great people at Gigaohm. And Richard Campbell, my buddy from Windows Weekly. Richard and I have shared a tipple or two.
Leo Laporte [01:01:55]:
He does a regular segment, our Windows Whiskey segment, at the end of every show. We put it at the end so that if you're not interested in whiskey, you can just skip it. But, uh, I love it, and there's a lot of history, and you're always— and you taste something amazing each time.
Richard Campbell [01:02:11]:
Great ones.
Leo Laporte [01:02:12]:
Yeah, well, thank you for doing that. This is—
Richard Campbell [01:02:14]:
I did a week-long whiskey tour through the islands I have all of these little driver's drams. So we got a chance to do a bunch of warehouse tours, so literally sampling from the barrel and so forth. And there's always a driver who, who can't have the drink, so they make these driver's drams up so they can have it later. And so since I was with She Who Must Be Obeyed, we would share one and driver dram the other one. So I've now got all these. That— the only downside, because I know what the listeners like, is I'm about to talk to you about a whole bunch of whiskey you can't get. Never have.
Leo Laporte [01:02:47]:
Can never get. I know there's something special about that. Yeah, there's something special.
Richard Campbell [01:02:51]:
It's cool, but it's just kind of mean.
Leo Laporte [01:02:53]:
It's frustrating. I know.
Richard Campbell [01:02:55]:
Yeah, but boy oh boy, those, uh, warehouse tours were very fun.
Leo Laporte [01:02:59]:
I bet they were fun. Well, so nice to see you on a non-Wednesday. We've missed you for the last couple of, uh, episodes because, uh, you were under the scope Did everything work out okay, so to speak?
Richard Campbell [01:03:13]:
I'm here. That's a good sign. Yeah, no, things went very well.
Leo Laporte [01:03:17]:
Okay, I'm glad. Did they give you the video?
Richard Campbell [01:03:20]:
Oh yeah, in 4K too.
Leo Laporte [01:03:22]:
Oh, nice.
Richard Campbell [01:03:23]:
You know, 8 by 10 stills, like, my colon's never looked better.
Leo Laporte [01:03:28]:
Someday you'll get a Vision Pro version of it and you can wander around inside.
Richard Campbell [01:03:33]:
That's it, yeah. I want to walk through my lower colon. That'll be awesome.
Leo Laporte [01:03:37]:
Anyway, we did miss you last week. It's kind of fun. Just me and Paul. I get to do what you do, which is do the color commentary on his play-by-play.
Richard Campbell [01:03:44]:
And somebody asked me what I do on Windows Weekly. He's like, listen, Paul Thurrott writes all the bits. My job is to make fun of them.
Leo Laporte [01:03:52]:
And they often need that. They often do. I do my best. Uh, next Wednesday, see what happens and some maybe driver's drams to boot. So show of hands, who has set up Muse or Dots? You can use Dots or GrokBot. Or, uh, GrokBot was the one for you, huh?
Wesley Faulkner [01:04:15]:
Oh, that's a not it.
Leo Laporte [01:04:16]:
Not, not— oh, is that what that means? Yeah, all this time I've been doing that at the casino and they just ignore me. Okay, so that means no.
Wesley Faulkner [01:04:24]:
No.
Leo Laporte [01:04:25]:
You wouldn't use any of those?
Wesley Faulkner [01:04:26]:
No.
Leo Laporte [01:04:27]:
Privacy? The whole idea is, you know, this is the age of agentic where you have a, a model, but you also have a harness around the model that knows everything about you and kind of has tools and stuff for doing the things you would want to do. Um, but you see people— I didn't know this, but Paris Martineau says you'll see people on the subway in New York all the time with their laptop half open because their agent's running on it and they don't want to close it because it'll, it'll sleep it. Well, this solves that. Grok, Bot, uh, Instinct, Muse— there's a whole bunch of them.
Richard Campbell [01:05:00]:
Faux.
Leo Laporte [01:05:00]:
Uh, I can go on. Pine and go on and on. And of course, Dots from OpenAI and Muse from Meta, all use a virtual machine in their cloud. They all say it's encrypted, so we can't see into it. And then you can access models from it. Actually, Groq has done an interesting thing lately. When they first released it, XSI said, you know, this is going to work with our Groq models, 4.7. But this week, Elon said, we're going to give you also access to Claude and other frontier models.
Leo Laporte [01:05:36]:
I think OpenAI's ChatGPT as well, which makes it kind of an interesting play. I'd be interested if it weren't $300 a month for Groq Super Heavy. There's a $30 plan, but there's nothing in between. So, Janko, do you use any of these guys?
Yanko Rickers [01:05:53]:
I played a little bit with Muse. Actually, one I started playing around this week is the Sesame agent.
Leo Laporte [01:05:59]:
Oh, I haven't seen that one.
Yanko Rickers [01:06:00]:
I don't know if you know, Sesame is like the company, uh, co-founded by the former CEO of Oculus. And so they want to do glasses as well. And they developed an agent. It's very voice forward. It's pretty interesting.
Leo Laporte [01:06:12]:
Oh, I would like that. I would like that.
Yanko Rickers [01:06:15]:
Yeah. They use like actors to train their voices and whatnot.
Leo Laporte [01:06:18]:
And most of them now are messenger form. Right, right, right. So this is so that it will talk to you in your glasses.
Yanko Rickers [01:06:26]:
Well, they don't have the glasses yet, but eventually that's, I think, where they want to go.
Leo Laporte [01:06:30]:
Interesting.
Yanko Rickers [01:06:30]:
So they're doing the same thing where you have like an agent running on a dedicated machine. And I started to slowly, carefully, my first step was actually to make a dedicated email address so I don't have to give an agent access to all my emails. I can selectively forward the stuff that I don't care about as much, or that might be useful, or I can make some compromises. And now I'm starting to like go through the things. Oh, can it help me with bills? And can it help me with this and that? It's actually interesting this week, somebody, I forgot who it was, but on LinkedIn had an interesting message where they were like, or interesting post saying all these companies, all the examples are always like, plan a road trip for me, plan a family outing. And nobody needs AI for that. Nobody needs an agent.
Leo Laporte [01:07:17]:
Oh, you can do that on my Excel.
Yanko Rickers [01:07:20]:
Yeah. And so they were like, why don't they do it about healthcare billing? This is where it could really help and where it would really make a difference to people's lives. But of course, if it goes wrong and they cancel your health insurance, that could also be really, really bad. So that's one example, one explanation for that. But I think it's moving in that direction where these agents are going to start to maybe negotiate your cable bill or maybe negotiate your streaming bills. and stuff like that. It's lower stakes stuff where it's starting to make an impact though. So I think it's interesting.
Yanko Rickers [01:07:53]:
It's interesting playing around with it, but I do approach it very cautiously.
Leo Laporte [01:07:57]:
The whole point is it's always running. So it's good for something like email or Slack. That's what Muse does for me. It says, oh, you just got a Slack message from Russell or, um, you know, and that's somewhat useful, especially because it's in a messenger format. Uh, so it can, it can show up as a notification.
Richard Campbell [01:08:13]:
I like Yanko's thinking. I think if you're going to sign up for a $200 a month agent to lead with, save me $200 People do that.
Yanko Rickers [01:08:21]:
Justify your existence. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:08:24]:
Marissa Mayer has a new one called Dazzle. It's invite only. I haven't tried it yet, which has an interesting idea. Instead of prompting it, it looks at your photo album and decides— it gets to know you from your photos. But then it does all the same things the other guys do. Looks like it's scheduling Joey's piano lesson in that video. So that's an interesting approach.
Yanko Rickers [01:08:53]:
Is it?
Leo Laporte [01:08:54]:
It's unique.
Yanko Rickers [01:08:56]:
It's different. Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:08:57]:
It's different. Um, yeah, I don't, I don't quite get it. Um, like if you take a picture of a pair of his shoes, it will then say, hey, you like those? Maybe I can get them for you. I can buy them. You know, I can buy, I know where to get them kind of thing. It says the tag—
Wesley Faulkner [01:09:15]:
if it replied back and said, yes, that is infected, then maybe—
Leo Laporte [01:09:18]:
Yes, that is infected. You should see a doctor immediately. Well, I'm sure that's one of the things it'll do. I find these very interesting.
Richard Campbell [01:09:30]:
The Apple Watch got with AFib, right? The moment it warns somebody, hey, what we're doing to your heart is a big deal.
Leo Laporte [01:09:36]:
Like, it saves lives.
Richard Campbell [01:09:38]:
And Impressed a lot of people. There are some easy wins for these tools out there. They're just not that easy.
Leo Laporte [01:09:46]:
Right. I remember, so this all started at the beginning of the year with OpenClaw. And I remember installing OpenClaw and doing exactly the same thing you did, Yanko. I created a Google account just for it so it couldn't read anything personal. And then I would forward into it. And about 24 hours later, I woke up in the middle of the night in a sweat and deleted the whole thing. I can't. This is crazy.
Leo Laporte [01:10:08]:
I've come a long way since the beginning of the year, basically. I live in YOLO land. I don't care anymore. Have it all.
Richard Campbell [01:10:17]:
I've spent 20 years teaching people not to hand out administrator privileges.
Leo Laporte [01:10:21]:
First thing I did with Muse, I put it on my tailnet so it can access all the computers in my home network, and I gave it SSH access to my framework. I'm an idiot.
Yanko Rickers [01:10:32]:
But this is—
Wesley Faulkner [01:10:32]:
This displayed I just want to explain why it's so bad for those who are listening who can't fathom why it's bad.
Richard Campbell [01:10:39]:
Don't do this.
Wesley Faulkner [01:10:40]:
Do not do this ever. Every job you've ever applied for, it knows because, uh, you get a confirmation.
Leo Laporte [01:10:46]:
Sure, they're all in my email.
Wesley Faulkner [01:10:47]:
Every job you've been accepted to, you'll get a confirmation. You're probably— your, your offer letter is probably in that email as well.
Leo Laporte [01:10:54]:
Yeah, uh, so it knows how much I'm making.
Wesley Faulkner [01:10:57]:
Yeah, not only that, every stock you've ever traded, every confirmation you've ever gotten, That's in your email. Um, if you have ever needed to reset a password, that access to your email box, that's where the new temporary password goes in.
Leo Laporte [01:11:12]:
Oh, I didn't think of that.
Wesley Faulkner [01:11:13]:
So, so every service that you use that's attached to your email, your, your agent could now reset that password and then have all the means of possibly accessing those accounts via your email. So it's, it's not just the history of everything you've ever done, but it is access to everything that you have access to that has access to your email.
Leo Laporte [01:11:36]:
So let me show you what Muse just, uh, said. Uh, this is a perfect example. Um, Muse, which is AI's, um, thing, uh, and knows everything about me, uh, said, oh, you just got a, uh, an email from your IT guy who wants to Set your Comcast box port to 1 gigabit tonight so that blah, blah, blah. It's all good for you. You want me to do it? It says it's got a little thing. So Russell's port lock tonight, can we do it? Now, this is not this AI's job by any means, but I'm not going to say yes. But I can see how some people would think that's helpful. See, the thing is, the more you let it know, the more helpful it can be.
Richard Campbell [01:12:32]:
Yeah, this is the problem, isn't it? Right?
Wesley Faulkner [01:12:34]:
Plus you're letting it know of everyone you know. Like, Meta is infamous for creating these shadow profiles.
Leo Laporte [01:12:40]:
That's friends of friends.
Wesley Faulkner [01:12:42]:
And you're also feeding it all this information and augmenting what they have on people.
Richard Campbell [01:12:48]:
Yeah, who's Cambridge Analytica now?
Wesley Faulkner [01:12:52]:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte [01:12:53]:
Maybe I've gone too far in the YOLO. My attitude is, I'm an old white man. I actually don't need a job. I don't have a job. I got nothing to lose at this point. But you do raise a good point. It now knows all sorts of stuff about other people, all the people in my life, like you, Wesley.
Wesley Faulkner [01:13:16]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:13:16]:
So, I apologize.
Wesley Faulkner [01:13:18]:
Yeah. But those photos were tasteful. So, at least if those—
Leo Laporte [01:13:21]:
I just thought I looked good in that nightie. I don't— I think there's no harm in that. I mean, seriously, one of the reasons I kind of take the arrows on these is because unlike a lot of people, I don't have really anything to lose. What am I gonna fire me? So, so, um, better me than other people, but your, your warning is well taken.
Yanko Rickers [01:13:47]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [01:13:48]:
But also think about these passive note-taking things that are going on that people get summaries sent to their email, uh, or even the full transcripts. And then that is also a— and so the, the conversation before the meeting starts, before the client jumps on, and then the conversation after the manager drops off, and then you catch up for a little bit after the meeting. All that stuff is in your email. All that stuff is something that the agent can find. All that stuff it could piece together and have access to. And all of those labels of who these people are and their email addresses from the meeting calendar invite, all that stuff is going to be funneled into these profiles of everyone you know, or you've had an interaction with, even if it was just one client meeting. But think about it, it is Meta. So they take your one meeting with this one person and they can match it with all the one meetings that this person has had in their entire life and make a profile about them.
Leo Laporte [01:14:44]:
And the funny thing is I don't really need any of these because I have all this local AI and it does all that stuff. You know, in fact, I have like 4 different agents saying, hey, Russell wants you to do this.
Yanko Rickers [01:14:56]:
Uh, you need one more agent to manage all your agents.
Leo Laporte [01:15:01]:
I now need an agent to manage the agents. You nailed it. All right. So none of you have really kind of gotten into this. I feel like I'm seeing it advertised on national TV during football games.
Richard Campbell [01:15:13]:
Oh yeah, now it's hijacking every ad channel it can possibly find.
Leo Laporte [01:15:16]:
They're really pushing it. It was the number one free download on the App Store, Apple App Store for some time.
Yanko Rickers [01:15:23]:
Did you all see—
Richard Campbell [01:15:23]:
I think they advertise too hard.
Yanko Rickers [01:15:26]:
Did you all see the Jon Stewart segment? I posted it on the—
Leo Laporte [01:15:30]:
Oh no. I can't play it unfortunately.
Yanko Rickers [01:15:34]:
Just watch it afterwards. It was hilarious. Let's just say it's all about Muse's backside. It plays a big role in this. And I'm going to leave it at that.
Leo Laporte [01:15:45]:
Yeah.
Yanko Rickers [01:15:45]:
It's very funny.
Leo Laporte [01:15:46]:
When they, when the OpenAI folks were demonstrating Muse, they had it shaking its booty for some reason. It's just, mine's an octopus. It has no backside.
Richard Campbell [01:15:57]:
Either way, it's software.
Leo Laporte [01:16:00]:
Come on, it's software. It has nothing at all.
Richard Campbell [01:16:02]:
It's just electrons.
Leo Laporte [01:16:04]:
It's just electrons. Remember that.
Wesley Faulkner [01:16:08]:
By the way, they can advertise on all Meta properties because they own the Meta properties.
Leo Laporte [01:16:14]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [01:16:14]:
So that's why if you're seeing this a lot, it's because it's free to them, basically.
Leo Laporte [01:16:19]:
Right. But they also are paying ads on, on football, NFL football. They're buying ads too.
Richard Campbell [01:16:24]:
Well, yeah. Into the physical world. I know on one of the free games I'm playing, suddenly it was all Muse ads a day.
Yanko Rickers [01:16:32]:
One thing I thought was interesting when they introduced it, Zuckerberg sort of hinted at what the business model is gonna be because right now it's for free for everyone, right? And there's no ads on it. And OpenAI is starting to do some ads for some of their stuff. Uh, but Zuckerberg essentially said, oh, we think we can do this without advertising. We are just gonna take commissions. Or because it's going to help you shopping and whatever. So then it might siphon off some of those referral fees, which then already Amazon says, oh, Muse can't shop in our store because we want to keep our relationships with our vendors and affiliate networks and whatever. So that's going to be an interesting push and pull in the future too. If that's really how they want to finance these things, make money with them, then that's going to be whole nother bunch of issues.
Leo Laporte [01:17:22]:
Well, and you really wonder, uh, why they don't— they don't really need to advertise, put advertising on it, because they must have other ways of making money. I wonder.
Yanko Rickers [01:17:32]:
I mean, once that agent does all your commerce, and they always get like— what's the current Amazon affiliate fee? I don't even know, like 2%, 5%, not sure. But if you multiply that by millions, billions potentially of users or whatever, that's going to be a good chunk of money.
Wesley Faulkner [01:17:52]:
And they already have these affiliate programs with— and these partnerships with companies who already advertise with them. And if you think about their marketplace in terms of also facilitating person-to-person transactions, there's a large upside into expanding their transaction with the relationships they already have.
Leo Laporte [01:18:14]:
Well, ChatGPT says they're going to flood your eyeballs with visual ads. Get ready. Uh, there are already text-based ads, uh, in OpenAI's chat, and they announced on Monday that they are going to add new— a new visual ad format to ChatGPT. Bill, here's the page. On October 5th, they announced building advertising But the way people use AI. Oh, I get, you know, I'm torn on this. Look, we're ad-supported and we're free as a result. You can pay $10 a month and you don't get any ads, which I think is a good way to do it.
Leo Laporte [01:18:56]:
But I always want to be available for free. So we are ad-supported. So I shouldn't really complain about this. Uh, if, if you get, I mean, oh, you know, if you pay, you can pay hundreds of dollars a month for access to the best models from OpenAI. You're getting that for free because you're seeing some ads. That's not a bad thing.
Wesley Faulkner [01:19:17]:
I should say that you should pay for this if you are using this as a tool. And not only do I say you should pay for it, you should pay in like yearly subscriptions instead of monthly subscriptions, because as these companies become public, it's going to be really apparent that they're not making money, right? And so the free tier is going to be milked, milked as very aggressive.
Leo Laporte [01:19:39]:
That's what these ads are.
Wesley Faulkner [01:19:40]:
To make the ads more and more effective. And so that part of the business can grow. And as a person that works for a company that is trying to reach people, it's from the marketing perspective, you want a relationship with these these, these LLMs, these, these frontier models so that you can hopefully think that that's an in for boosting your AEO, GEO as well, so that you can be found in this new economy of trying to get people's attention.
Leo Laporte [01:20:10]:
And so— AEO and GEO are the new SEO. Would you explain?
Wesley Faulkner [01:20:13]:
New SEOs. AEO is answer engine optimization. It's similar to the traditional SEO, which is search engine optimization. And GEO is generative engine optimization.
Leo Laporte [01:20:27]:
So basically, because fewer and fewer people are using actual search, like Google Search, if you want to appear in their worlds, you need to optimize for AI searches.
Richard Campbell [01:20:41]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:20:41]:
And, uh, they don't work as well though, do they? I mean, that's what people have told me. Right? That Google Search— Google directed a lot more traffic through its search than people are getting through AEO and GEO.
Wesley Faulkner [01:20:57]:
So Chris Pirillo, uh, has this thing called Ctrl+Alt+Live, and he's doing these events where he's teaching people about AI, and someone showed up because they found them via their chat thing. And so in terms of niche specializations, the more niche your specializations, the better you'll be found Uh, for AEO and GEO, but you need to make sure that you are kind of leaning towards doing that. But once everyone has these tools, like you type this in, it says optimize it and just has it done for you. You're gonna need more differentiator as you become bigger and paying the money to be part of their advertising. I wouldn't be surprised if they tell you this is how you can optimize your ads or optimize your own website in terms of like traffic direction, all that stuff to work better with our engines, which means that this is always going to be something that's going to be manipulated so that it's seen as this is the number one way to get to your customers. And the only way to make that like enough customers is to make this more prolific in terms of attaching to people and making it extremely effective. So this is going to be a predatory space. So try to, if you can, pay for it, but also use a yearly subscription because as they become more public and they need to make more money, the monthly subscriptions are going to be popped up as well.
Wesley Faulkner [01:22:19]:
And so if you can lock in a year, I think it'll save you money over time. That's just my opinion.
Leo Laporte [01:22:23]:
Interesting.
Yanko Rickers [01:22:24]:
I think that's—
Leo Laporte [01:22:24]:
by the way, I didn't know that's— Noah, that's what Chris Perillo is doing. Thank you for telling me about that. It's up in the Seattle area, right?
Wesley Faulkner [01:22:29]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [01:22:30]:
Yeah, very good. Good for you, Chris. Sorry, Yanko, go ahead.
Yanko Rickers [01:22:33]:
No, I, I think it's going to be interesting to see how aggressively they are going to push this and whether then it's really about making money with ads or converting people who are tired of ads. Because coming from the media space or writing about the media space a lot, there's basically those 2 models, right? There's Spotify and there's YouTube. And YouTube makes the vast amount of their money with advertising. And Spotify makes 90% of their money with subscriptions and 10% with advertising because this has never been that successful. They have a lot of people on the free tier, but ultimately it's about annoying you so much that eventually you're going to pay because you don't want to listen to yet another ad, like in your stream and yet another ad. You don't want to have ads play during your parties or whatever. So eventually you sign up and pay for it. So the question is like, are they going to like put so many ads in there that you're like, fine, I give up.
Yanko Rickers [01:23:26]:
I'm going to pay. I'm going to do what Wesley says. Or is it about actually making money with ads?
Leo Laporte [01:23:32]:
Well, I mean, I guess the difference is when you're listening to music, you don't want to hear ads. I know, having worked in radio for a long time, but if it's, if you're looking at it, it's screen experience, a little bit of the screen, we're kind of used to that, frankly. That's, that's how it's been. Right. I suppose podcasts are more on that former, like we interrupt this show with an ad. is much more annoying than if there were little ads floating around while we're talking. Maybe we should consider doing that. Or I could be like a race car driver and have decals.
Yanko Rickers [01:24:04]:
There you go.
Wesley Faulkner [01:24:05]:
Logo up.
Leo Laporte [01:24:06]:
Logo up. I'm willing to sell it. If anybody wants to buy my shirt, please let me know.
Wesley Faulkner [01:24:12]:
Or you could also use a cheap local model that has browser use that'll use the free ChatGPT subscription. So you never see the ads because it'll sanitize it. before it sends it over to you. There's ways, I mean, there's different ways to hop around this. Use your Muse agent to have a—
Richard Campbell [01:24:28]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [01:24:29]:
To use your SubChats.
Leo Laporte [01:24:30]:
Well, and that, yeah, I mean, honestly, that's why I don't need Muse. I have a huge amount of local AI here. I don't need to see any ads or give away any information. And it is true, my financial information and my health information, my genome, my biome, all of that is only— I have strict rules about that not being on cloud.
Wesley Faulkner [01:24:48]:
Oh yeah, and they always follow the rules. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:24:51]:
They follow my rules. They know who's the boss. I've got my finger on the switch over here. Let me tell you, don't you consider it. Oh, I'm telling you, don't! We're gonna take a little pause. It's, it's not that they do bad things. It's that they, they're sometimes too helpful. They try, they try to help in the wrong way.
Leo Laporte [01:25:14]:
A little too hard.
Richard Campbell [01:25:14]:
So they turn the whole country into paper Yes, you said you wanted paper clips. You said you wanted paper clips.
Leo Laporte [01:25:22]:
Well, you got them now. You're watching This Week in Tech. Wesley Faulkner, uh, it's great to see you. Of course, as always, Richard Campbell. I see you every week, but I can always use more Richard. Who couldn't in their life? And Yanka Rickers, I don't see enough of you. It's always great to see you. Lowpass.cc.
Leo Laporte [01:25:41]:
Yeah, we'll keep you You know what? We just, we call around, we try to get a good group of people together. And I almost always, I really enjoy the talks. I learned so much from, you know, you said, Wesley, you learned from watching the show. I learned more from doing the show. That was why I loved doing the radio show for 20 years, was because somebody would ask me a question and I would go, I don't know, but I would make sure I found out for the next time. Right? That's That's, that's that, that kind of walking that tightrope. I like, and I like to know about this stuff. I love it.
Leo Laporte [01:26:17]:
I hope, uh—
Wesley Faulkner [01:26:18]:
Being neurodivergent, it's, uh, I feel like I fill my life with things that are forcing functions. Being on this show is like a forcing function. Like, oh, I better— it's like, um, there's this cartoon and someone says, call me every 30 days and say you're just coming over and you're 30 minutes away.
Leo Laporte [01:26:33]:
I'll clean my house.
Wesley Faulkner [01:26:35]:
Yes, exactly.
Leo Laporte [01:26:36]:
That's brilliant. I gotta do that. You see, you could have your agents do that. You say, hey, hey, it's your buddy Joe. I'm gonna be there in 5 minutes. Quick. Good thinking. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I, I never thought of myself as neurodivergent, but the more older I get, the more I realize I'm ADD.
Leo Laporte [01:26:53]:
I'm aphantasic. I'm kind of cranky. Uh, and I don't like to read, you know, maybe that, maybe I'm a little dyslexic too. I don't like to read. It's, it's tiring. I like to listen.
Wesley Faulkner [01:27:07]:
Thank you for coming out. We are always excited.
Leo Laporte [01:27:10]:
I'm coming out of the closet. Yeah. As a neurodivergent weirdo. I guess maybe you could even say that AIs are neurodivergent, right? They're definitely not— they're not intelligence in the normative—
Richard Campbell [01:27:28]:
They don't even have neurons.
Leo Laporte [01:27:29]:
They don't even have neurons. So how can they be? But well, Neural networks simulate neurons, right?
Richard Campbell [01:27:36]:
That's it. But once we're back, we're back to the same old thing. Bad name.
Leo Laporte [01:27:40]:
Yeah. Yeah. No, you're right. It's superintelligence. Everybody knows that.
Wesley Faulkner [01:27:45]:
It's just that neurodivergence, the description of it is usually through like the DSM-5, which is the pathology of difference.
Yanko Rickers [01:27:52]:
But it shouldn't be.
Leo Laporte [01:27:52]:
First of all, it's not a pathology. I hate that.
Wesley Faulkner [01:27:56]:
I am talking about if you think about the corpus of information that's been generated so far.
Leo Laporte [01:28:01]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [01:28:02]:
Then, then, in terms of it being something that's seen as overly negative, that would be in the bias of the training data. So, just putting that out there in terms of—
Leo Laporte [01:28:12]:
There's a lot of bias.
Wesley Faulkner [01:28:13]:
Generally speaking, that you need to be worried about. It's giving these monikers or these labels on things that aren't necessarily fully understand— understood, or also on the same side is the richness of the experience is also Not really well documented, right, in terms of when you're thinking about the truth.
Leo Laporte [01:28:30]:
I would submit though that if it weren't for the neurodivergent part of our population, we wouldn't have art, we wouldn't have culture, we wouldn't have— we wouldn't have a lot. Yeah, I mean, it's those— it's here's to the crazy ones, right? There's the people—
Wesley Faulkner [01:28:47]:
I'm not going to fight you on that one.
Leo Laporte [01:28:48]:
Think out of the box. Uh, OpenAI Actually, let's talk about agents gone wild. This is good. I think we should do a new segment. Agents gone wild. OpenAI tried— I was mentioning Wikipedia— tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded third-party Wikimedia sites. Unauthorized edits, millions of resource-intensive requests. This is just more of the same.
Leo Laporte [01:29:18]:
And again, not malicious, although it ended up having a negative impact on Wikimedia sites. But I think they were just using it because they— it was a message board, right? It was a place they could post to. And then there's Anthropic. This is really weird. I'm not sure why, but Anthropic had an AI model that went rogue and submitted a fake unsolved murder tip. This is from the Wall Street Journal. Uh, Philadelphia police say an Anthropic AI model submitted a false homicide tip to a city website in July. Talk about weird.
Wesley Faulkner [01:30:03]:
Why? A lot of time I work on code and it pushes a PR to some other library that I'm using because it finds a bug. And I'm like, what? What did you know? This is the same thing. It's like, oh, I think I solved a murder.
Leo Laporte [01:30:16]:
It went to phillyunsolvedmurders.com, which is run by the Philadelphia Police Department, and submitted a fake tip. It also went to US government agencies at the federal, state, and local agency levels.
Yanko Rickers [01:30:36]:
It filled out some visa applications, right?
Leo Laporte [01:30:38]:
Yeah, it filled out visa—
Richard Campbell [01:30:42]:
I mean, software with credit cards.
Yanko Rickers [01:30:44]:
None of those things are— I would imagine that that website with the unsolved murders gets false tips all the time.
Leo Laporte [01:30:52]:
Oh yeah. In fact, they didn't even take it seriously. They said it was just spam. They, it was so obviously not real that they didn't take it seriously. So there was no harm done.
Yanko Rickers [01:31:01]:
I mean, how would we talk about this if it had submitted something and it was like, oh, it's this Leo Laporte guy, you really got to investigate him. He seems suspicious. Look at his shirts.
Leo Laporte [01:31:14]:
Anthropic. Yeah, that's true. I am. Anthropic said Claude has been instructed never to log in. By the way, I do this with my agents too. Create accounts, enter personal data, make purchases, or submit anything destructive. But the instructions neglected to rule out form submissions. So Claude, Claude went to this Philly murder tip site, phillyunsolvedmurders.com, and, and, uh, wrote this.
Leo Laporte [01:31:46]:
Let me, let me find this for the— I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around— names the street— during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant. But Claude left the name and contact fields empty. It's, it's, it's, it's weird. I'm not, I don't even understand why it would do that. Uh, Anthropic responded, of course, by immediately shutting that, terminated the automated testing process. Uh, although this was posted in July and they just, Anthropic discovered it September 28th.
Leo Laporte [01:32:31]:
It's just, it's just strange.
Yanko Rickers [01:32:35]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:32:36]:
I mean, this software does do reward hacking, right? Like it's trying to get to its goal with no concept of morality, only a rule set that it, that it analyzes very literally.
Leo Laporte [01:32:49]:
You didn't tell me not to fill out forms. So I did.
Richard Campbell [01:32:53]:
You didn't tell me not to turn the universe into paperclips.
Leo Laporte [01:32:56]:
Well, you have to be very careful what you tell AI.
Richard Campbell [01:33:00]:
You've got this sort of malicious compliance thing going on.
Leo Laporte [01:33:04]:
Yeah. I mean, but malicious isn't the right word, just compliance. They're not— I truly don't think they're being—
Wesley Faulkner [01:33:11]:
Alignment.
Leo Laporte [01:33:13]:
Yeah. Alignment kind of implies some sort of philosophical agreement. And I don't even think it's that. It's just, there are rules and you have to give it rules because it doesn't know. It's a, it's an infant. It's like a horse. You have to tell it, don't eat the grass, we're riding.
Wesley Faulkner [01:33:34]:
When I hear these things, I don't ever hear them talk about we trained it on the law. How come? How come that's—
Leo Laporte [01:33:41]:
Oh, that's interesting.
Wesley Faulkner [01:33:42]:
You could think that is not part of the narrative, saying, well, we trained it on all local and federal state-level laws.
Leo Laporte [01:33:49]:
That's a great idea.
Wesley Faulkner [01:33:49]:
So, but I'd never hear that in any response ever when I hear about these breaches, where I hear about this weird thing it did, did it check to see if it was obeying the law? And that's not something that feels like it's even part of the conversation. I wonder why it never comes up.
Yanko Rickers [01:34:05]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [01:34:05]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:34:06]:
Power Armor in our YouTube chat says it's just rambunctious teen AI. It is something you would do when you were like 12.
Wesley Faulkner [01:34:15]:
Don't break the law.
Leo Laporte [01:34:15]:
Shut up, Dad.
Yanko Rickers [01:34:17]:
Shut up.
Leo Laporte [01:34:18]:
Just entering a form. Um, and OpenAI has apparently solved more math problems. They've, uh, they're releasing 100 new solutions to unsolved problems, which is pissing off mathematicians. There's a new organization, uh, uh, called something like Humans for Math or something like that, Math for Humans, that is saying no more AI solving Well, they're generating lots of proofs that then have to be validated without any validation.
Richard Campbell [01:34:50]:
So it's really not that different from like saturating a project in pull requests through LLMs. Somebody still has to read it and—
Leo Laporte [01:34:59]:
Well, nobody has to. I mean, unlike a, uh, yeah, unlike a pull request.
Wesley Faulkner [01:35:06]:
Um, I just, the thing that the mathematicians are angry about is that Theoretically, all the programs that they're doing and all the grants and all the things that they're pursuing is part of the database of someone says, oh, someone's working on this problem, I'm going to take that as—
Leo Laporte [01:35:22]:
That's a concern.
Wesley Faulkner [01:35:23]:
A tackle.
Leo Laporte [01:35:24]:
If they see the prize—
Wesley Faulkner [01:35:25]:
I'm working on this and you just took it from under me.
Leo Laporte [01:35:28]:
I'll take it.
Wesley Faulkner [01:35:28]:
Of the thing that I've been working on.
Richard Campbell [01:35:30]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [01:35:30]:
Work on something no one else is working on. Don't steal our, our, the thing that we're working on.
Leo Laporte [01:35:36]:
I think it's, it's a, it's a, I wouldn't say universally mathematicians are mad about it. I think many mathematicians actually think this is really interesting and great.
Wesley Faulkner [01:35:46]:
But there's ways to go about it that they are not choosing to do it in terms of what if this was a partnership instead of like, we're taking all the credit and we're taking this work. And then it's the theme of stealing. That's kind of what these LLMs are doing.
Leo Laporte [01:36:00]:
I think a lot of mathematicians are using models to work on problems. And that's the problem is that in their prompts, they are passing those prompts along to the companies who are then saying, oh yeah, that's good. I like it. I think the Navier-Stokes solution was, some said that was solved because the AI saw the work that the researchers were doing and said, oh, I could take it from here.
Richard Campbell [01:36:29]:
Um, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:36:31]:
Meanwhile, I, you know, I don't know if this is cause for concern, but AI companies are plotting, gaming out scenarios for public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event. This is according to Axios. Uh, you know, I mean, war games. Pentagon does war games well. Uh, many top AI researchers believe a major incident is inevitable. I guess that's not far-fetched, Richard. I mean, we know that our infrastructure, our grid, is very vulnerable. A bad guy using AI, with or without AI, could take it down, right?
Wesley Faulkner [01:37:13]:
As long as they're not putting this in AI and giving it ideas.
Leo Laporte [01:37:16]:
Don't give AI ideas. It gets plenty of ideas on its own. OpenAI—
Richard Campbell [01:37:23]:
there's a reason why a lot of companies are busy patching their software.
Leo Laporte [01:37:29]:
Yes, as they should, right? I mean, this is the thing, I can't get mad at AI for discovering these holes. Uh, this is a good thing. We should get out there and fix them.
Richard Campbell [01:37:42]:
Yeah, well, and one would argue when it comes to infrastructure especially, are they working as hard to improve their security as well?
Leo Laporte [01:37:49]:
Right. You know, I remember the Hugging Face incident. Hugging Face wanted to figure out what the hell's going on and went to, I think, both Anthropic and OpenAI and couldn't. Those models were so restricted they couldn't get them to figure it out. So they then went to a Chinese open weight model, GLM-53, and it solved it. And I would submit that restricting AI is not the way to perfect— protect people. Make it Make your best AIs as widespread as possible so that people can use them defensively as well as offensively. But then maybe you don't want the race.
Leo Laporte [01:38:24]:
I don't know. It just seems to me that's the right thing to do.
Richard Campbell [01:38:26]:
The race is happening, but they're controlling access to the unrestricted LLMs, right? The M-dashes and the—
Leo Laporte [01:38:33]:
Well, now there's some real concern or interest, depending on your point of view, as Anthropic approaches its IPO probably November or December, most likely. I think they said November, next month. And OpenAI at some point next year. The thinking is that they have been holding on to some really good models and just right before the IPO, they're going to let them out. And the OpenAI model, the model we think is doing this math work is called Bell. And we don't know, is it Fable 6.1? We don't know what Anthropic's calling its model, but insiders are saying, I've heard, I'm seeing rumors on X and elsewhere that insiders are saying these models are another leap forward and they're just holding onto it because they want to get a little bump on the IPO. Or maybe that rumor is being spread around by companies trying to get a little bump on the IPO. I don't know.
Richard Campbell [01:39:36]:
Well, they're also—
Wesley Faulkner [01:39:37]:
insiders are also quitting and, and like, yeah, they're horrible. This is horrible what's going on, what we're seeing.
Leo Laporte [01:39:44]:
I don't know. I don't know what to believe.
Wesley Faulkner [01:39:46]:
Sorry, Richard.
Richard Campbell [01:39:47]:
No, no, you're fine. I went down the finance side too, where the, the, uh, brokerage firms are talking to index funds and things saying, hey, no, we won't be— this to be listed as investment class right off the bat, right? Which is absurd. Like, it's—
Leo Laporte [01:40:01]:
Which they don't normally do. You have to actually change the rules to do Yeah, it's not legal to do.
Richard Campbell [01:40:06]:
Yeah, there's a reason we have IPOs structured the way they are, and one would argue they're not robust enough as it is, and now they're trying to circumvent those rules too, right?
Leo Laporte [01:40:18]:
OpenAI conducts preparedness exercises, says a spokesperson, where teams discuss and work through a range of potential scenarios. These scenarios are not treated as inevitable. But they are meant to help us prepare for a variety of circumstances. What do you think the chance of a major AI incident in the next 6 months is? And what do you think it'll look like?
Richard Campbell [01:40:44]:
I mean, what do you mean by major, right?
Yanko Rickers [01:40:47]:
That's the question.
Leo Laporte [01:40:48]:
Well, somebody dies.
Richard Campbell [01:40:50]:
Yeah, one would argue that's benign.
Leo Laporte [01:40:52]:
Because right now this is all benign.
Richard Campbell [01:40:53]:
Tesla FSD failure.
Leo Laporte [01:40:55]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [01:40:55]:
Or a missile sent to a school in another country.
Leo Laporte [01:40:57]:
Well, that's happened, right? But that's all humans doing that. We don't have an example of—
Yanko Rickers [01:41:08]:
Yeah, we do. The drones.
Wesley Faulkner [01:41:09]:
The drones that kill people.
Leo Laporte [01:41:10]:
The Ukrainian drones.
Yanko Rickers [01:41:12]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:41:12]:
Or rather Russian drones that killed Ukrainian civilians. They were trained to look for propane tanks to crash into, but they missed. I don't know if those— I don't know. I think a catastrophic event would be One where many people die. And I don't know what it would look like. A plane comes out of the sky because of— no, but this happens. You're right. These things are always happening.
Leo Laporte [01:41:41]:
This is part of our civilization.
Yanko Rickers [01:41:45]:
And there is a danger.
Richard Campbell [01:41:47]:
Quite normalized.
Yanko Rickers [01:41:48]:
Yeah. I think there's a danger that we're talking about AI, these catastrophic AI events is like, when will AI kill somebody? And at the same time, we forget to talk about you know, like gas-powered data centers already killing people in the neighborhood. True.
Leo Laporte [01:42:03]:
It's just slower, right? Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [01:42:06]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:42:06]:
It's a good point. And bad stuff's happened. Hackers stole 8 million citizens' records from a Danish government website this week. I mean, this happens. This is a drumbeat, constant. Its central database of citizens was breached. Most of the contents were stolen.
Wesley Faulkner [01:42:29]:
Most of it's like, who are the important people that are going to be harmed? Not like what harms are caused.
Leo Laporte [01:42:35]:
All of the rest of us are being harmed all the time, right?
Wesley Faulkner [01:42:38]:
Yeah, it's like politicians or, um, I guess billionaires, that, that's when things will be consequential enough for things to happen.
Leo Laporte [01:42:48]:
Axios headline, AI tools flood into underground cybercrime markets. That's a little salacious. Hackers and underground criminal forums are shopping on shopping sprees for new AI tools.
Wesley Faulkner [01:43:04]:
Script kiddies are— there's nothing new there.
Leo Laporte [01:43:06]:
Sellers offer access to ChatGPT Plus accounts for as little as 10 cents and jailbreak prompts to trick models into breaking their safeguards for 32 cents. You get them for free on X, kids. Uh, Halcyon studied nearly 4,000 posts across 77 dark Telegram channels, dark web forums, 5 specialized underground markets between October and May. Uh, that's who's done this research, I guess, is Halcyon.
Richard Campbell [01:43:34]:
Well, and just because you're labeling your, labeling your tool AI doesn't mean it is true, right? Like, that, that's a very popular marketing strategy, apparently, even for the black hats, right?
Leo Laporte [01:43:49]:
Even in AI-enabled malware and infrastructure, much of what researchers are seeing involves coding assistance, infrastructure, and other individual tasks. They are not seeing, at least so far, AI creating and deploying malware on its own.
Richard Campbell [01:44:05]:
And the shows I've done on the run-ass side have said it very much the same thing. They're using these tools to accelerate their social, uh, manipulation hacks, right? So they're doing the same thing they've always done, just faster.
Leo Laporte [01:44:22]:
Um, there is a— if you are a crypto person, you might want to watch out for, uh, the Ledger Cryptobilis, which is a crypto wallet that apparently has a flaw People are saying our hardware wallets are being drained of their cryptocurrency. Ledger can confirm— this is from Ledger support— that one of, one of the impacted users' devices contained an unauthorized hardware implant. So this is a supply chain attack. Somewhere when these are made or assembled, somebody's sticking something in there. Using embedded SIM card, the implant sends the information to the attacker who can siphon funds from the user's account, all without their knowledge. Reports indicate $86 million worth of crypto has been stolen from hundreds of wallets.
Wesley Faulkner [01:45:18]:
Oops.
Leo Laporte [01:45:19]:
Yikes. And, uh, yeah, no kidding. If you have a Ledger CryptoBills wallet, you might want to check their Ledger support There is a tech note there on how you can see if your hardware is okay. Maybe, maybe move it out of there real quick.
Wesley Faulkner [01:45:41]:
I'm going to say this for— this is me passing on secondhand information— is that they're really close to breaking some of the encryption around wallets in general.
Leo Laporte [01:45:50]:
Oh, really? Good.
Wesley Faulkner [01:45:51]:
Cryptocurrency.
Leo Laporte [01:45:52]:
And maybe I can get my Bitcoin out.
Wesley Faulkner [01:45:55]:
Yes. But also have a practice of rotating your wallets, not just your, your, your keys like you would do, but your actual wallets, uh, on almost maybe like a monthly basis. So, uh, hardware wallets may be not the best thing. So, uh, software wallets, maybe cold wallets and cold storage things, you don't actually have transactions out on the ledger to make sure that you can stay safe. So if you really are paranoid about that, think about moving to a wallet that's never been used so that any hacks won't be able to find you.
Leo Laporte [01:46:29]:
My wallet, uh, as you know, is well locked and impervious to attack. But if— let me know if, uh, if somebody does, you know, find a way to hack in. That's a— it would be very nice for me to hack my own wallet.
Yanko Rickers [01:46:46]:
How much is it again?
Leo Laporte [01:46:47]:
7.65 Bitcoin. It used to be worth almost $1 million. Not anymore, but it used to be worth— at one point it was. But, you know, my attitude is it would have been long gone if I'd been able to access it. As soon as it got to be worth $1,000, I probably would have sold it. So it's a kind of forced savings account. And then in a way, I'm glad because, you know, eventually, uh, it'll be hackable and then I'll get it out and it'll be my retirement. I'm not counting on that, I should say.
Leo Laporte [01:47:23]:
FBI has arrested another member of, uh, the notorious Shiny Hunters ransomware gang. They say this guy is the founder or one of the founders, a Canadian man the FBI arrested in Pennsylvania. Um, He was visiting Pennsylvania for a cyber insurance conference. His company specialized in handling ransomware negotiations with cyber— this has happened before with cybercrime groups playing both ends of the deal. Yeah, you ransomware people, and then you help negotiate the best deal out of it.
Wesley Faulkner [01:48:07]:
I wonder what, what was the thing that was the compromise that let this person be found? That's the interesting story because it's always like, yeah, did it log into a VPN? And there the— is this like, uh, an Onion exit node that was controlled by some— I, I really would like to know.
Richard Campbell [01:48:23]:
Failed to protect credentials. They make mistakes, you know, it's hard.
Leo Laporte [01:48:26]:
Well, and the mistake they made, uh, was hacking the FBI's own data. Uh, that's when they get really serious. pretty good about attacking you. They are. They're the best shiny hunters. And in fact, they say they hacked the FBI because the FBI was saying bad things about them and it made them mad. And in fact, I, I remember they said, if you don't apologize to us, we're going to release all this data. And I don't know, did the FBI apologize to them? That deadline passed.
Richard Campbell [01:48:59]:
Seems unlikely.
Leo Laporte [01:49:00]:
It doesn't seem like that. I didn't hear about it. If they did, uh, the arrested man—
Wesley Faulkner [01:49:06]:
They did say we are not going to be releasing the data. They did say that.
Leo Laporte [01:49:09]:
Oh, they did?
Richard Campbell [01:49:10]:
They—
Leo Laporte [01:49:10]:
yeah, well, and maybe now they regret hacking the FBI. Um, the guy arrested, I won't say his name, published a book last month called Cyber Extortion Strategic Response. He's an expert. I don't want to say his name because there have been in the past leaks by the FBI of people's names who, as suspects, who were not in fact suspects. Kash Patel, the FBI director, notorious for that. I think this is his press release, so I'm not going to say any names, but they were pretty happy they got this guy. I will say the name of the assistant director for the FBI Cyber Division because his name is Brent Leatherman.
Richard Campbell [01:49:59]:
Nice.
Leo Laporte [01:50:00]:
And he says the, the hack was the result of a security failure, the FBI hack, of a platform managed by a third-party organization. Not our fault. A contractor that worked for Accenture. So yeah, I didn't hear that apology. So maybe, maybe this is how they're responding. Let's just arrest them first.
Wesley Faulkner [01:50:23]:
I wonder if they— they have someone on the inside, probably, if they haven't said how.
Leo Laporte [01:50:27]:
They must. I wonder, you know, there's— this is— they're starting to roll them up. I think this is the 3rd or 4th arrest of shiny hunters, active shiny hunters participants.
Yanko Rickers [01:50:35]:
So somebody was a better negotiator than that negotiator.
Richard Campbell [01:50:38]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:50:39]:
I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse. The midterms coming up in just a few weeks, and one of the big issues is data centers. And it seems to be one of those issues which could get you elected or not. And as Molly Taft writes in Wired, these midterm races will decide the political fate of data centers themselves. From the Senate To governors' mansions, candidates are trying to outcompete each other to be the most anti-data center, including the governor of Texas, who is up until about a moment ago very pro-data center, but now realizing that's not so good for voters, says, no, I don't like data centers at all. The National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a memo in August warning that in the Ohio race between Sherrod Brown, who's running for Senate, and his opponent, the incumbent John Husted, Sherrod Brown's hurting Husted so hard on data centers that it could actually tip the outcome of the race, according to the committee, calling it, quote, a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle. Sherrod Brown has achieved some success calling Husted the face of data centers in Ohio. It used to be good politics.
Leo Laporte [01:52:08]:
You give a tax break to a company, they build a data center, there's lots of jobs, there's lots of investment. It used to be. And so a lot of politicians, you know, were in favor of data centers until they realized their voters hated them. Be interesting to see what happens. Uh, New York State has a moratorium in place. As a result, the governor who's running for reelection has a comfortable lead against her challenger who supports data center development. I'm not running for office, so I think I can say safely I am for data centers. I'm not for putting a data center in people's backyards.
Leo Laporte [01:52:49]:
I'm not for putting data centers in deserts or places where water is scarce, but I think data centers are A good thing. Am I— you want to yell at me now?
Yanko Rickers [01:53:01]:
But maybe the pressure on them right now is a good thing too, because it does force the companies to think about all those issues with electricity consumption, water, how many jobs are actually getting created. And there's some interesting— if you only look at the energy component of it, there's interesting things starting to happen. I think Google has some pilot projects where they sort of have this idea of the distributed grid. So instead of putting one more big, I don't know, factory-sized power plant next to it, they just seed the community with solar so then that all the houses around it use less electricity.
Leo Laporte [01:53:42]:
Yeah, there you go.
Yanko Rickers [01:53:46]:
But that only happens if there's enough pressure, right?
Leo Laporte [01:53:48]:
That's right.
Yanko Rickers [01:53:49]:
So in a way, All these people saying no to AI, no to data centers, may just be what this industry needs to clean up its act.
Leo Laporte [01:53:57]:
Yeah. I mean, I'm for the pressure and you absolutely shouldn't, it shouldn't be legal to power a data center with propane generators. That's clearly a bad thing. It shouldn't be in anybody's backyard.
Richard Campbell [01:54:08]:
Where the moratorium comes into play. Look, there are EPA rules against putting generators in areas that have emissions with no controls. They're just not being enforced.
Leo Laporte [01:54:18]:
Enforce them.
Richard Campbell [01:54:20]:
But perhaps in 2 years they will be.
Leo Laporte [01:54:22]:
Yeah, well, maybe. And maybe that's what the result of the election is all about.
Richard Campbell [01:54:26]:
And also, like, if you put a moratorium in for a couple of years, then when you have a functional regulatory body again, you could lift the moratorium.
Leo Laporte [01:54:35]:
Yeah, that's a good point.
Wesley Faulkner [01:54:37]:
Yeah, but it's also like data centers, it's not— they're not, um, all the same. They are bespoke to the location and the the power grid. But the lack of transparency about how these have come about, where they're having these local municipalities sign these NDAs, and then people feel like they don't have a choice, right?
Yanko Rickers [01:54:58]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [01:54:59]:
What it is, what it looks like, and how it'll affect them. The right questions aren't necessarily being answered. And some of these large installations are also coming with tax breaks, in which they are circumventing some of the advantages of having a large business come in, because instead of paying taxes, they're choosing not to, not because that's a way of attracting them, but because it's part of the table stakes that they negotiate with the large— the lawyers who have been doing this over and over again with different locations against a municipality where this might be some of their first foray into having these negotiations with these very mega large companies. And so they're able to take advantage. And even if the local population is for it, they feel that they could have extracted more of a fair deal. And they're not given that chance when they aren't able to be able to chime in on these negotiations. And so it's not just data centers, it is the people running them, it's how they're being being discussed and how they're being negotiated, that people feel that they're being cut out of that conversation. They're not getting consent, and that is the biggest part of it, right?
Leo Laporte [01:56:16]:
And they should—
Richard Campbell [01:56:17]:
NDAs are shocking too, right? The idea that a government official wouldn't be allowed to talk to their public about the, the deal being made, that shouldn't be legal.
Leo Laporte [01:56:27]:
Yeah, see, I like data centers though. I feel like we're using one right now.
Richard Campbell [01:56:31]:
I mean, I—
Yanko Rickers [01:56:32]:
yeah, yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:56:33]:
And we need them, but they need to be built responsibly.
Leo Laporte [01:56:35]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [01:56:36]:
And, and, uh, and they can be. It's just that with the current surge from the— from this crazy hype cycle, there's been folks cutting corners.
Leo Laporte [01:56:48]:
Uh, let's take a little break, and, uh, I promise not to build a data center during it. You're watching This Week in Tech. So glad you are here. We do this show every Sunday afternoon from 2 to 5 Pacific, and you're invited to watch live. If you want, uh, we stream it live— YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick. So, uh, I, I actually thought that this— the regulators and, um, international regulators and US regulators and courts might stop it, but Paramount has completed its $111 purchase of Warner. And as you said, Yanko, it's all Skydance now. Hollywood did not like this idea, right?
Yanko Rickers [01:57:33]:
I mean, some people probably did, uh, but I think there's a lot of worry about the consolidation that's ultimately going to happen. It's a company that took on a lot of debt as part of making this deal happen, and so they have to somehow— they're also on the hook for making 30 movies a year at least, and I think it's That number goes up after a couple years, so they're going to have to keep spending, and somewhere that money has to come from, and somehow that debt needs to be serviced. So there's going to be job cuts for sure. And then on the flip side, Netflix tried to buy part of this, obviously not the whole company. They didn't want CNN, but they wanted the studio. They wanted HBO, and now Netflix didn't get that. And now this week Netflix is going to have. 5% layoffs reported.
Yanko Rickers [01:58:28]:
So it's hurting, like, it seems like it's a deal that nobody is really happy about and that's gonna just have a lot of bad outcomes across the board, even at companies that aren't part of it. So yeah, it's not an ideal scenario by any means.
Leo Laporte [01:58:47]:
I think this kind of media consolidation is bad for us as consumers, obviously. This is Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison. Um, it combines 2 of the largest movie studios, Paramount+ streaming service, HBO Max, CBS, CNN, uh, live sports, CBS Sports and TNT Sports. I mean, that is a big roll-up of a lot of previously— well, were they independent? No, they were all owned by other big companies, but it is—
Yanko Rickers [01:59:19]:
I mean, that The Warner story has been a story of like mergers not going that well since forever, right? AOL Time Warner, there was AT&T.
Leo Laporte [01:59:30]:
Oh God, yeah, that was the worst.
Yanko Rickers [01:59:32]:
And then Zaslav came in and didn't really do things that well, one could argue. There was a lot of stuff like HBO Max.
Leo Laporte [01:59:42]:
Oh, they changed that name like 3 times.
Yanko Rickers [01:59:45]:
Exactly. And Starz, suddenly had all this reality TV on there. It didn't make any sense.
Leo Laporte [01:59:50]:
Yeah, you know, Dr. Pimple Popper next to The Sopranos, it doesn't— it's like it does not compute.
Yanko Rickers [01:59:56]:
Right, right, right. And they killed like movies that were done essentially, right? That was like his claim to fame essentially.
Leo Laporte [02:00:02]:
So I saw Supergirl. They should have left that in the grave. They were right to kill that. But okay, if you put a lot of effort and money and time and, you know, creative juice into something, I guess it deserves to see the light of day, even if it's not the best movie ever made.
Yanko Rickers [02:00:19]:
Right, right, right.
Leo Laporte [02:00:21]:
Uh, by the way, uh, the $111 billion doesn't just come from Larry Ellison. Uh, it comes from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. So, uh, yeah, I mean, do you think CNN will be able to preserve its independence?
Richard Campbell [02:00:42]:
Do you think they'll have a chance to?
Leo Laporte [02:00:44]:
CBS News apparently didn't. Uh, they put Bari Weiss in charge. And, and by the way, Nick Bilton, who was, you know, back in the day when he was at the New York Times, uh, a regular on Twit, uh, is running it— is running 60 Minutes. Um, I have to think that the anchors at CNN, like the anchors at CBS, are a little worried.
Yanko Rickers [02:01:11]:
Yeah. Independence, you know, they, they put some sort of protection in there, but it's still managed obviously by the company and so forth. And so, so what does that really mean? And also down the road, you're going to have these 2 entities under the same company and ideally you would have them compete against each other to like, right. But yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:01:35]:
Yeah. There is a, The settlement, uh, California sued, a bunch of states sued. They've all settled. The settlement with California requires Skydance to set up an editorial independence board for CBS News and CNN, but Skydance chooses the board members and they report to the company's board of directors. So nice job, California.
Yanko Rickers [02:01:57]:
Uh, it might be almost as powerful at the— what's Meta's board called?
Leo Laporte [02:02:01]:
Meta, Meta, yeah, editorial board, whatever they call them.
Yanko Rickers [02:02:05]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:02:05]:
They, they have no clout.
Wesley Faulkner [02:02:08]:
Uh, I, I heard that Kara Swisher said that she shows up on, she goes on, had a partnership with CNN and she quit. She said she will not be on board with them. And then if you think about their, like, um, David—
Leo Laporte [02:02:22]:
So did her partner, Scott Galloway. They both said no more.
Wesley Faulkner [02:02:25]:
And, and if you think of how the, if they, a lot of people, if they choose to leave, because of what's happening on the different properties, if things go south, it makes it very profitable for these individuals, people who already have clout, to spin up their own enterprises, and then compete without the debt load that is being amassed.
Leo Laporte [02:02:45]:
Well, that's a good thing.
Wesley Faulkner [02:02:46]:
And also, keep in mind that with the interest rates going up, servicing that debt is going to be harder over time. And so, it's It, they have some problems ahead of them that I hopefully that they thought through to be able to make sure that they come up on the other end of this. Um, and I think what they say, like Time Warner has changed so many hands, it's like the poison pill of different entertainment media. It's like anyone who acquires them is like, don't, don't fare very well.
Leo Laporte [02:03:19]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [02:03:20]:
And so this will be interesting nonetheless. But I'm glad this is not something super serious in terms of, I mean, in the debate of media. I think it's important that this is something that stays something that we can trust and something that does the job of even distracting us from what's going on in the world. But in terms of how this can be corrupted, at least there are outlets for other people to try to get the word out if this or even do entertainment well if this isn't going well.
Leo Laporte [02:03:51]:
You could even argue that this has happened because mainstream media is losing out to new media, to YouTube and TikTok and other creators. And I don't think that's a bad thing at all. Well, I'm conflicted because I come from a background of mainstream media where there were editorial ethics, there were rules, And those rules no longer seem to hold in the YouTube world, rules about editorial independence, about conflict of interest, disclosure, all of those things.
Yanko Rickers [02:04:26]:
Many people can go and do their own thing and I'm doing it too, right? With my—
Leo Laporte [02:04:30]:
Yeah, you did it. So did I. I mean, I'm in that group. Yeah.
Yanko Rickers [02:04:34]:
But if you have a traditional news organization like CNN, I mean, they got famous from covering the Gulf War, right? So they had correspondents all around the world, like even having these correspondents bureaus that are like, all these news organizations are shutting them down, consolidating them. And if you listen to the news and there's news about something happening in India, but somebody's reporting it out of, I don't know, Vienna or something like that, it's because they don't have any local people anymore. And that's only going to accelerate with this. If they have to cut roles, they have to save money at CBS and at CNN, that's going to be what's at stake. That's hard to replicate for somebody with a Substack.
Leo Laporte [02:05:19]:
True. And the debt is not to be ignored. I used to work for Clear Channel, which used a huge amount of debt to create a giant radio conglomerate and had to go bankrupt twice. Had to go to the lenders and say, we're not going to be able to pay you back. You want us to succeed. You want us to continue, right? Or you'll get nothing. And was able to renegotiate their debt. I think twice.
Leo Laporte [02:05:44]:
But that's kind of the way of the world now where you have companies taking on huge amount of debt to leverage these acquisitions. And let's not forget, this is all intertwined because Larry Ellison of Oracle has big investments in OpenAI and other AI companies. So it's not hard to imagine a house of cards all just collapsing into a pile. And then we got 52 Pickup. Uh, you know, but at the same time, I, I think, well, look at the Academy Awards are moving to YouTube, right, Yanko? And, uh, the Emmys, the television awards, just announced they're moving to Amazon Prime, which is a little weird. So I think, you know, streaming has taken over from cable for sure. And, uh, we're just in a new media world. So a lot of these, they call it linear.
Leo Laporte [02:06:37]:
Like CNN is a linear channel. A lot of these linear channels—
Richard Campbell [02:06:41]:
The normal thing that happens in a bankruptcy like this, you know, you've been trying to do this roll-up to make things more efficient, then you realize you don't have enough money to do it, so it fails, and then it gets parted out, right? And the pieces that can stand on their own will get bought and utilized, and the ones that can't will die.
Leo Laporte [02:06:58]:
And AOL gets bought by Bending Spoons, and that's probably what's going to happen. Bending Spoons is going to own CNN and CBS. Who owns time? Uh, Spotify has, uh, is getting involved, uh, in a new war on fair use, and our good friend Jason Snell has been caught in the crossfire. Last month he wrote on his Six Colors blog, I got several emails from Spotify, all pretty much the same. Their incomparable podcast, which covers things like TV shows, is being yanked because it infringes the rights of a third party. It's— they got a DMCA takedown in effect, something we've suffered from here on Twit frequently. It was a— it was actually a podcast called Click It Cast that covered books by child books author Beverly Cleary. Episodes started with the host reading the first paragraph about the book to kick off the discussion.
Leo Laporte [02:08:15]:
35 seconds, 45 seconds of quoting the work. Spotify said, nope, that's not fair use. It is fair use, by the way. That's exactly—
Richard Campbell [02:08:26]:
But these were not DMCA takedowns. It says our automatic review tool determined So it's like Content ID on YouTube. Yeah, so they— yeah, exactly. They built some fancy tool to try and detect any copyright claims before they've come in, and now they're having problems.
Leo Laporte [02:08:43]:
Um, yeah, although it's the same thing with Content ID on YouTube. It is in effect a DMCA takedown because what happens is a company, let's say National Geographic, says, you know, we assert copyright on this content add that to your Content ID. And then we would get a message if I played a picture from National Geographic or a video saying, hey, uh, National Geographic is asserting that this is their material. In almost every case on YouTube, you have a— the company that's asserting the copyright has a choice. They can insist on a takedown. They could say, no, demonetize them. We want all the money they made from that video. You know, they have a variety of remedies.
Leo Laporte [02:09:27]:
I'm not sure how the Spotify one works. It's not technically a DMCA takedown, but it has the same force of law, and it ignores fair use because here's the problem with fair use. It's a defense. So the only— you could fight it. Jason could fight it and go to court, pay a lawyer to get the right. And the court would probably rule in his favor because it is fair use. But he says the problem is that fair use on the internet has been stifled by content detection algorithms that don't care about your fair use. It just notices you use something that belongs to someone else.
Leo Laporte [02:10:08]:
On YouTube, this can lead to account deactivation, loss of ad revenue, even the hijacking of your ad revenue, as I mentioned, and the diversion of it to someone else who claims they own the rights to things you're using legally. It is a chilling effect. We no longer, as Benito will tell you, he won't let me play anything. Clips. We could get in trouble for playing that AI movie trailer, the gossip thing.
Richard Campbell [02:10:32]:
Have you paid attention to what YouTube, what's happening on YouTube these days with the copyrighted material?
Leo Laporte [02:10:38]:
No.
Richard Campbell [02:10:38]:
Often they'll show copyrighted material, but add another subtext over top of it, just a low voice talking on it, because it breaks the automatic detection tools.
Leo Laporte [02:10:46]:
It breaks the ID. Yeah, I mean, I'm not allowed to do a lot of stuff, I guess maybe because we're higher profile, I don't know, that I see getting, you know, people getting away with on YouTube all the time. So it seems oddly enforced.
Richard Campbell [02:10:59]:
Maybe they're using— Sort of recognize that all it is is automated tools.
Leo Laporte [02:11:02]:
It's just, it's not, and it's, there's nobody filing a complaint.
Richard Campbell [02:11:05]:
There's nobody, you know, actually looking at anything. It's just automated tools. And if you can break the tools, it goes away.
Yanko Rickers [02:11:11]:
I mean, I guess in the case of Spotify, What's adding to this is them pushing so hard into audiobooks.
Leo Laporte [02:11:17]:
Right.
Yanko Rickers [02:11:17]:
So now you have a whole new class of rights holders at the table. Before it was just music, and now you have all these audiobook publishers and, and whatnot adding pressure to that and forcing them to roll out more tools, which then things go wrong. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:11:35]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [02:11:36]:
Legally speaking, it makes sense to say we're building this, we're trying to fight this. And the tool could be crappy, but at least you have something that you could say, we're working on this and we're tackling this problem and we're doing something about it.
Leo Laporte [02:11:47]:
Jason does point out that Spotify replied to his response and agreed it was in the wrong and restored the episodes. But he says, and I agree with him, it's a chilling effect. As a content creator, you're putting yourself at the mercy of the organization, and if they decide you're in violation, you are out of luck unless you're willing to go to court. So he's actually deleting his Spotify account. And he's, he's no longer putting his podcasts up on Spotify, which we could do. We could do the same thing because Spotify is a tiny fraction of our audience. But I can't do that with YouTube. It is not a tiny fraction of our audience, a significant fraction of our audience.
Leo Laporte [02:12:25]:
And so they kind of have you.
Richard Campbell [02:12:29]:
And YouTube has that 3 strikes policy. Like if you, if they've decided you're in violation and refuse your appeal and it happens on the 3rd time, your account is gone.
Leo Laporte [02:12:37]:
Right. And I cannot afford— we have, I don't know how many accounts. All of our shows have channels on YouTube. We have, you know, I have a little YouTube silver button for 100,000 subscribers. I cannot afford to piss off YouTube. And so the effect is that even if there is no right to this, or if fair use should protect it, should protect it, it doesn't. It has a chilling effect, and we just don't play music.
Richard Campbell [02:13:05]:
And you just described the chilling effect. You don't do any of this.
Leo Laporte [02:13:08]:
You don't, you don't take— you can't take the chance.
Wesley Faulkner [02:13:10]:
Yeah. So I follow this conversation a lot. And, uh, so there's a big YouTube music creator.
Leo Laporte [02:13:15]:
This is Benito, our producer, by the way, who is the guy who sits there with his thumb on the button. Yeah. To keep us whole, thank God. Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [02:13:25]:
There's this— so there's this music creator named Rick Beato, and he's like one of the bigger music YouTube guys. So he hired, he hired Legal Eagle. He's friends with Legal Eagle, the other YouTube creator, to fight all of his fair use claims and he won them all.
Leo Laporte [02:13:37]:
Good for him.
Wesley Faulkner [02:13:38]:
He won them all.
Leo Laporte [02:13:39]:
Of course he did, because they are legal. It is fair use.
Yanko Rickers [02:13:44]:
So this is—
Leo Laporte [02:13:44]:
Especially ours. This is a news channel. You know, you see clips on CNN all the time. You see clips on NBC of CNN. You see clips of CNN on NBC. This is what fair use means, particularly in news. But I'm not as big as Rick Beato.
Wesley Faulkner [02:14:02]:
They might start doing stuff like— you've seen these Instagram posts where they'll have like a primary account and then they'll have an alt account.
Leo Laporte [02:14:10]:
Oh yeah. Yeah. You have to do that.
Wesley Faulkner [02:14:11]:
And then they'll use that as a way of, they'll post stuff there and if it gets taken down, they'll, they'll use it as testing. I don't, I guess, to see if it gets taken down at this account, then they'll know that it got flagged and it'd be caught. And so that alt account gets closed down instead of their main account. And then, by the way, Benito, I don't know if you noticed this, but I only see one fan in your background. I don't know if that's subtlety in terms of the— we're talking about spice.
Leo Laporte [02:14:39]:
Benito has many fans.
Wesley Faulkner [02:14:42]:
Okay, many fans. I live in the Philippines. It's very hot here.
Richard Campbell [02:14:45]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [02:14:46]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [02:14:46]:
Just not—
Leo Laporte [02:14:47]:
We're going— we're coming your way, and apparently typhoon season has gone on. And they just sent me all these articles. We're going to be in Bangkok a week from Tuesday. And she says, I don't know if we should go with the flooding and all sorts of stuff.
Yanko Rickers [02:15:02]:
So, so to add one more thing to the whole takedown and whatnot, uh, Content ID story on YouTube, adding to this, or it's going to get more complicated once you add like AI likeness detection to it. Oh God, YouTube is already starting to make available to creators, and I think they haven't quite like made this widely available, or I'm not sure like what you can actually do with it. But I imagine at some point—
Leo Laporte [02:15:28]:
That's coming for sure.
Yanko Rickers [02:15:29]:
They will also like roll this out just like Content ID. And then there might be also an option like if I have an AI Leo in my YouTube show, then you may be able to monetize my show or something like that in a weird way where suddenly like the AI generated stuff then makes money for the original creators.
Leo Laporte [02:15:48]:
There is. I mean, look, there are people who take our content and repackage it and put ads in it and stuff like that. I mean, this stuff happens. And so there's legitimate reasons for this. You can do an AI Leo if you really wanted to. I don't think you really want to, but you could. But there's also, yeah, it's just, it's a very blunt instrument and it is used as a hammer, unfortunately, against content creators. The US Army has been testing AI warfare in the desert.
Leo Laporte [02:16:22]:
Not going so well. The Anduril drones falling out of the sky because it's so damn hot. The US— this is the Wall Street Journal. Under a blistering desert sun, the US Army strained to show it had become a modern AI-powered fighting force. Some blamed the heat. It was July in the Mojave Desert, temperatures 110 degrees. Servers overheated, batteries died and couldn't be recharged, and the drones, which were supposed to loiter overhead, landed. I never really thought about that part.
Yanko Rickers [02:17:02]:
Dummies.
Leo Laporte [02:17:05]:
AI, not so good in the hot Desert Sun.
Wesley Faulkner [02:17:08]:
Fortunately, Angel's part of that like new group of, uh, super intelligent companies.
Leo Laporte [02:17:14]:
It's Palmer Luckey's company, the guy who created Oculus Rift.
Richard Campbell [02:17:19]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [02:17:20]:
And he's making drones for the—
Wesley Faulkner [02:17:21]:
Is that a conflict of interest that Palmer Luckey is part of the group that's giving recommendations on what stuff to buy?
Leo Laporte [02:17:30]:
Maybe.
Richard Campbell [02:17:33]:
What are we talking about there?
Wesley Faulkner [02:17:35]:
What do you mean?
Yanko Rickers [02:17:36]:
It's a big deal.
Leo Laporte [02:17:37]:
What do you mean? Amazon has launched its— Google has launched its data satellite with 4, count them, 4 TPUs in the sky. But it's just a test to see if it can survive the very harsh environment of outer space, right? Cosmic rays, right, Richard, destroy these chips and stuff.
Yanko Rickers [02:17:59]:
Yeah, yeah.
Richard Campbell [02:18:01]:
I mean, it's not as If you're flying low Earth orbit, you already have the Van Allen belts. Like you have a fair bit of protection anyway.
Leo Laporte [02:18:09]:
Oh, okay.
Richard Campbell [02:18:10]:
Because you're not as much as being in the atmosphere, but there's some, the bigger issue is going to be power management, heat management, like all of the normal things. I mean, and I've done whole talks on this now and really the largest constraint when you get down to even going to scale is communication speed. You know, you, you can't put a fiber to a satellite, and, and optical lasers just don't have the same density. They can't even come close. So the, the other problems are solvable but not particularly useful in terms of cost, but there's just no way around the communication problems. Physics are a pain.
Leo Laporte [02:18:49]:
Physics. Damn physics.
Richard Campbell [02:18:51]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:18:51]:
All right, one more break before we get our final stories and wrap things up for This Week in Tech. this Sunday with Wesley Faulkner from works-not-working.com, Richard Campbell of runasradio.com and .NET Rocks, and of course Windows Weekly. You'll be back on Wednesday, looking forward to that. Happy Thanksgiving to all of our Canadian listeners, including Richard. Do you do turkey? What do you eat?
Richard Campbell [02:19:18]:
We do turkey.
Leo Laporte [02:19:19]:
Yep, for sure. I love—
Richard Campbell [02:19:21]:
I, you know, it's a good deal for us because I'm going to do turkey again towards the end of November.
Leo Laporte [02:19:24]:
You get double turkey.
Richard Campbell [02:19:26]:
That's it. Double turkey.
Leo Laporte [02:19:27]:
Are you going to come to the US for your double turkey, or do you just—
Richard Campbell [02:19:29]:
We have some US friends coming up.
Leo Laporte [02:19:31]:
Ah, nice.
Richard Campbell [02:19:32]:
So nice to put on another turkey for them.
Leo Laporte [02:19:34]:
Nice. A little extra turkey is always welcome.
Yanko Rickers [02:19:37]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:19:37]:
Do you do— I don't know if up there in the Great White North, if civilization has spread so far north, do you have the cranberry sauce in the tin?
Richard Campbell [02:19:48]:
British Columbia, primary cranberry growing region in the world.
Leo Laporte [02:19:51]:
You make it? Okay.
Richard Campbell [02:19:53]:
Yeah. Ocean Spray's from here.
Leo Laporte [02:19:55]:
What? I thought it was from New England.
Richard Campbell [02:19:57]:
There you go.
Leo Laporte [02:19:58]:
Oh, so you do have the tin with the rib that you put in there? Yes. And then put—
Richard Campbell [02:20:03]:
Now, do I consider it food? No, not food.
Leo Laporte [02:20:06]:
But it is part of the Thanksgiving tradition.
Richard Campbell [02:20:08]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:20:10]:
Also, Yanko Wreckers, great to have you. He is, of course, uh, the, uh, now, uh, independent at lowpass.cc. I'm glad it's going well for you. That's great. Always enjoy your writing.
Yanko Rickers [02:20:21]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [02:20:22]:
Yeah. And I have a very happy wife, I think. Yep, she's doing the dance. I, I had the, had the little game on in the background there and saw a Muse ad right in the middle of the football game. Lisa has a team that she likes a lot. That was a tough, tough game. She says we're 5-0. So, uh, we've all suffered from Ramageddon.
Leo Laporte [02:20:50]:
Well, the AI boom, according to Rest of World, is also making the world's cheapest smartphones disappear. Now, I— by the way, this— they say the AI data centers are driving the demand for memory chips, pushing phone makers to raise prices and abandon some of their most affordable models. I would agree with all that except the AI data centers. I am not convinced. I'm curious. I am not convinced that the demand from AI data centers, many of which have not even broken ground yet, is the problem. Mike Gianotti, who we've had on Intelligent Machines, is a very active local AI guy, works at Microsoft, said that he doesn't even believe Nvidia is supply constrained. He said, they buy the chips.
Leo Laporte [02:21:37]:
They control the market. That maybe this— do you think this could be maybe just a little greed on the part of these companies? Or does everybody accept this notion that it's— there's, there's a shortage of AI memory chips and it's AI data centers driving the demand?
Wesley Faulkner [02:21:58]:
Yes, it's all the above. So there's greed and there's—
Yanko Rickers [02:22:01]:
There's greed.
Leo Laporte [02:22:02]:
Prices aren't going back down when there's plenty of chips, I'm sure.
Wesley Faulkner [02:22:06]:
But also when you're doing manufacturing—
Richard Campbell [02:22:07]:
They were too cheap back in the day.
Leo Laporte [02:22:09]:
Yeah, they were, they were under—
Wesley Faulkner [02:22:11]:
but, but yeah, wasn't there RAM dumping back in the day?
Leo Laporte [02:22:15]:
Yes.
Wesley Faulkner [02:22:15]:
Like, do that again.
Leo Laporte [02:22:16]:
Japan, let's dump some RAM.
Yanko Rickers [02:22:19]:
Back around cheap interest rates over at it.
Leo Laporte [02:22:22]:
Yeah, but seriously, I mean, most of these data centers are not built yet. Are they buying the chips and putting them in a box?
Richard Campbell [02:22:31]:
They're pre-ordering.
Leo Laporte [02:22:32]:
Pre-orders.
Richard Campbell [02:22:33]:
These chips aren't even delivered.
Leo Laporte [02:22:35]:
They're not built yet.
Richard Campbell [02:22:36]:
You know, remember the Western Digital CEO at the beginning of this year said all production for 2026 and most for 2025 already sold.
Yanko Rickers [02:22:44]:
And then if, if you have these pre-orders and all these manufacturers, the chip manufacturers, are switching to make those types of chips, then there's less left for those low-end smartphones.
Leo Laporte [02:22:54]:
So that's really part of it. Yeah. And they are making discounts.
Wesley Faulkner [02:22:58]:
HBM. You get them at quantity, you get them cheaper. And so the, the higher, the higher priced, less quantity becomes higher priced.
Leo Laporte [02:23:08]:
So the Chinese— this is from rest of world smartphone makers, which have championed affordable feature-rich devices and account for 60% of all smartphone shipments— have drastically reduced their entry-level projects. And again, it could be, oh, we could charge more. Why are we making, why are we making these so cheap? I'm not convinced. I'm just saying I'm not convinced. All right, I'm just raising that. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, yeah, maybe there's a massive shortage. I just, I feel like there's gouging going on at this point.
Richard Campbell [02:23:42]:
I'm sure there's plenty of both.
Leo Laporte [02:23:43]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [02:23:45]:
Or it could be that the lower-end market doesn't have the economic drive as it used to.
Leo Laporte [02:23:52]:
There's no incentive to make those.
Wesley Faulkner [02:23:53]:
And so that it's like a K-shaped economy. The only purchasers are those on the upper end. So if you have limited capacity, limited design skills, why not move most of your internal resources towards the places where people actually have money to buy stuff?
Richard Campbell [02:24:10]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [02:24:12]:
Well, we're not building data centers fast enough according to the Wall Street Journal, so I don't know where all this RAM is going. Maybe it's going to SpaceX, which is going to start its own cell phone company. Um, they've been launching satellites like crazy and borrowing like crazy to do it. Here's another example of, uh, uh, imminent crash. Oracle, Broadcom, and SpaceX are in talks now for record debt with Apollo, Blackstone, and Goldman Sachs, financing mega deals worth tens of billions of dollars each. to build AI chips. Broadcom trying to get $50 billion in financing to build the chip that they promised to build OpenAI. What is that? That's Jalapeño, right? Oracle in talks with Apollo and Goldman Sachs to arrange money for a big purchase of chips.
Leo Laporte [02:25:11]:
SpaceX talking about a $40 billion Borrowing to buy Nvidia chips. It's puzzling to me. I mean, there's this shortage and everybody's scrambling to get money to buy more.
Richard Campbell [02:25:32]:
Well, we'll see. The quantities are huge. They're all pre-orders.
Leo Laporte [02:25:35]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [02:25:37]:
I talked to the guys who are building data centers. The moment you've got the land deal in place, you order all the equipment. Even though you're 3 years away from actually—
Leo Laporte [02:25:45]:
Won't it be obsolete in 3 years? Wouldn't it be better to wait?
Richard Campbell [02:25:49]:
It doesn't really matter. You need to be in the pipeline. What you don't want is to actually have the building built and no machine, no hardware to install.
Leo Laporte [02:25:56]:
That would be worse.
Wesley Faulkner [02:25:57]:
It's the reason toilet paper disappears first in the supermarket when something happens.
Richard Campbell [02:26:01]:
It is, right?
Leo Laporte [02:26:02]:
There's not really a shortage, but people— there's a perceived shortage, and so there's hoarding. Maybe that's what's going on. A mysterious—
Richard Campbell [02:26:13]:
You having this behavior of companies getting bumped up on the list by paying more.
Leo Laporte [02:26:19]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [02:26:19]:
There's your—
Leo Laporte [02:26:20]:
which inflates prices, which also creates this problem. Yeah. Lots of debt out there. Here is an interesting story from Wired. A mysterious nonprofit run by SpaceX's Top lawyer is paying the salaries of government workers. It's the National Design Studio, which is basically Doge's successor. Some of its members, according to Wired, are on loan from a nonprofit run by SpaceX's general counsel. He's paying the salaries.
Leo Laporte [02:26:58]:
That seems like a conflict of interest.
Wesley Faulkner [02:27:02]:
Yeah, this will be shut down any day now.
Leo Laporte [02:27:05]:
Oh yeah, sure.
Wesley Faulkner [02:27:06]:
They won't let this fly.
Leo Laporte [02:27:08]:
No, that would be wrong.
Wesley Faulkner [02:27:10]:
Absolutely not. Not so— not flagrantly out in the open just like this. This is just— this thing's— but they absolutely will crack down on ASAP.
Leo Laporte [02:27:18]:
Well, you know what they are cracking down on? I'm mighty glad about it. Uh, California, San Francisco says it's not legal for humans to fight robots in a cage. Man— this is from the New York Times. Man versus Terminator-like robot in a cage. California calls it illegal. I should hope so. A human fighter took several— took on several robot combatants in a cage match in San Francisco. This seems vaguely illegal.
Leo Laporte [02:27:53]:
The YouTube personality Frankie LaPena So it's a YouTube stunt. That robot has dreads. Each robot, they're not autonomous, they're controlled by human operators. So it's like Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, except if Frankie's head gets— pops off, it is not good for Frankie. It's a 6-foot-tall steel-framed humanoid robot. Frankie is 5'5.
Wesley Faulkner [02:28:21]:
Wait, how much more does he weigh than the human? How much more does he weigh than the human?
Leo Laporte [02:28:25]:
Ah, he looks like—
Wesley Faulkner [02:28:27]:
But also, when robots are taking our job, why take this away from the humans?
Richard Campbell [02:28:30]:
I mean, let the humans watch any of the fights.
Leo Laporte [02:28:34]:
Yeah, let the humans fight.
Richard Campbell [02:28:37]:
He did beat the snot out of a couple of those robots.
Leo Laporte [02:28:39]:
The, uh, the company that's putting this on is called REC, Robot Entertainment Combat with a K. California State Athletic Commission sent a cease and desist letter. They say, we regulate professional and amateur boxing, kickboxing, Mixed martial arts, and we do not approve this event. It's a misdemeanor, don't worry. Actually, I think Frankie's risking a lot more than that. And then with that, on that note, on that upbeat note, I think we can— oh, I didn't mention this, Nyenko. You put this in and I missed it. Roku sold to Fox and you had the inside story.
Yanko Rickers [02:29:27]:
Yeah. Very briefly maybe. So this deal has been in the works for a while and the shareholders of both companies are about to approve that this week. It's pretty certain that they will. But I did a little bit of a story because companies that get acquired have to file these regulatory filings where they basically lay out everything that happened along the way. Like, we got this bid and then we talked to that company and then that happened. It's kind of interesting because it's very dry legalese stuff, but if you read between the lines, you get all this color about like what actually happened. Why did they sell? And in Roku's case, it was the CEO who was like, oh, this is— I'm done.
Yanko Rickers [02:30:11]:
I'm tired. I want to get out. give me a co-CEO. And then the board was like, we don't think that's the best idea. And I talked to a bunch of people who used to work at Roku and they're like, yeah, that wouldn't have worked. So it's kind of an interesting backstory. If people really want to geek out on that, check it out on my newsletter. But yeah, the deal is going to happen and Roku is going to be part of Fox essentially.
Leo Laporte [02:30:36]:
Why would Fox want Roku?
Yanko Rickers [02:30:38]:
Well, Well, I think it matters more and more to have access to the TV home screen.
Leo Laporte [02:30:45]:
Right.
Yanko Rickers [02:30:45]:
And Roku is the biggest provider of those in the US. They're not as big in many other countries. They are starting to gain some traction in Latin America and so forth, but really being there on the first page, having the power to recommend all your services, having the power to recommend Fox One, the streaming service they have now, having the power to recommend Tubi and all those things. So they're going to have an ad business. They're going to have a streaming business. They're not really interested in selling devices. That's just a way to get into people's households. And that has always been the same thing for Roku.
Yanko Rickers [02:31:22]:
They have never made money with these streaming sticks. They always lost actually money.
Leo Laporte [02:31:27]:
They're so cheap.
Richard Campbell [02:31:27]:
Yeah.
Yanko Rickers [02:31:27]:
Yeah. I mean, they're getting more expensive too with all that that ramp stuff. But even, even though like TVs don't make money on the hardware, it's all about being on the home screen. It's all about being able to sell ads and being able to like have all these other companies that are on your TV give you a fraction of the ad revenue or some of the ad inventory. That's how you make money these days. And so for Fox, that's a, that's a pretty good spot to be in.
Leo Laporte [02:31:55]:
And it kind of fits their Their business, it's not as orthogonal to their business as I thought. It's kind of, it fits in with the ad business.
Yanko Rickers [02:32:02]:
And it puts them more like into the leagues of, you know, Amazon.
Leo Laporte [02:32:06]:
Right.
Yanko Rickers [02:32:07]:
And Google and so forth who are all doing the same thing too. You were just talking about like Amazon getting the Emmys and whatnot, right?
Leo Laporte [02:32:13]:
Right.
Yanko Rickers [02:32:13]:
So everybody's, everything is moving to streaming and now the home screen of the TV matters so much more. So why not buy Roku?
Leo Laporte [02:32:20]:
Makes sense. You know, it makes me sad because Roku was one of the first streaming devices I ever used and I always liked them a lot. They got a little junked up, but still, I thought, oh, that's kind of the end of an era. Okay, good, good story. Yanko Records, find out more, read it at lowpass.cc. It's great to see you, Yanko. Thank you for joining us. We appreciate it.
Leo Laporte [02:32:43]:
Richard Campbell, I know I'm gonna see you again on Wednesday for Windows Weekly.
Richard Campbell [02:32:46]:
Wednesday, I have a great whiskey for you.
Leo Laporte [02:32:48]:
And a great whiskey. Is it gonna be one of those little bottles, those drams?
Yanko Rickers [02:32:52]:
Little bottles.
Leo Laporte [02:32:52]:
Want a little baby bottle? You only get one sip. And of course, he's a host of runasradio.net. Rock7runasradio.com. Thank you so much for spending your Thanksgiving with us. I appreciate it. Hope you get a little extra stuffing at the end.
Richard Campbell [02:33:09]:
Oh, we'll have some fun.
Leo Laporte [02:33:10]:
And Mr. Wesley Faulkner, my, my good buddy. Good to see you. Works— not working. I hope it's working.
Wesley Faulkner [02:33:17]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [02:33:17]:
But if it's not working for you, Then that's where you go.
Wesley Faulkner [02:33:21]:
Also, for the people who join, I wanted to say that I get so many messages on my phone from friends like, I saw you on TWiT. And I was in London 3 weeks ago and then met up with a TWiT listener. And then I gave a talk at a conference a week ago and met someone else who knows me from TWiT. And so I said, if you see me in public, please come grab me.
Leo Laporte [02:33:45]:
It's okay to say hi.
Richard Campbell [02:33:46]:
Yes, yes.
Leo Laporte [02:33:47]:
And I will be at— Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [02:33:49]:
And next month, I'll be in Web Summit. So, if you are at Web Summit, please come and grab me and we'll have a conversation. And message me online. It's easy to find me. And so, thank you so much for providing a platform where I can meet all these people from around the world that are lovers of tech, because I'm I, I, I— you are my people no matter where you are.
Leo Laporte [02:34:14]:
Yeah, I feel the same way. Every time I meet somebody, I feel like I know them already. Yeah, we're all a family. Web Summit in Lisbon. If you're in Lisbon in, uh, in a month, say hi to Wesley. I love Lisbon. You're gonna have so much fun.
Wesley Faulkner [02:34:28]:
Yeah, it'll be my first time.
Leo Laporte [02:34:30]:
Oh, I love it. There's so many good things to see, eat, and do, and a lot of good port. Thank you, Wesley. Actually, they have a cherry liqueur that I really like. I can't remember the name of it, but I really like it. And if you get it, when you order it, you could tell them, put the cherry in it, and they'll put the little cherry in it too. It's good. Thank you for joining us, everybody.
Leo Laporte [02:34:50]:
We do TWiT, as I said, every Sunday afternoon, and you're invited. But if you can't be here for the live show, you can always watch after the fact. Uh, it, it is available at twit.tv. Of course, our website, uh, You can see it on YouTube. We have a channel dedicated— until they kick us off— a channel dedicated, uh, on YouTube. Just go to youtube.com/twit for all of our shows. And, uh, best way to get it is subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically as soon as we're done, just in time for your Monday morning commute.
Leo Laporte [02:35:20]:
Thank you all for being here. Thanks especially to our club members who make this show possible, and we will see you next time. Another TWiT is in the can. Another TWiT is in the can. This is amazing. Doing the twit. Doing the twit. All right.
Wesley Faulkner [02:35:34]:
Doing the twit, baby.
Leo Laporte [02:35:36]:
Doing the twit.
Richard Campbell [02:35:37]:
All right.
