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Intelligent Machines (Audio)

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From IM 863: Fire and Ash - Hot Takes on Tech TrialsMar 26, 2026

Excerpt from Intelligent Machines (Audio)

IM 863: Fire and Ash - Hot Takes on Tech TrialsMar 26, 2026 — starts at 0:00

It's time for intelligent machines. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris Martinau, our guest. Uh old friend Marshall Kirkpatrick. He's been doing tech reporting since way back when he's got a new app. It's actually an extension for your browser that will help you analyze the content of pages. It's very cool. He's also got a prompt he's gonna give away that you will like. Plus we'll talk about all the news including the big decision in that social media case in Los Angeles. Intelligent Machines is ne xt podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit ch This is Intelligent Machines with Paris Mart Noah and Jeff Jarvis, episode 863, recorded Wednesday, March 25th, 2026. Fire and Ash . It's time forel Inligtent machines, the show that covers the latest in AI, robotics, and all those smart little things all around us all. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you for your entertainment and education. The wonderful Paris Martineau, egg investigative report. Huzzah. Huzzah. For Consumer Reports. Huzzah. Huzzah. There's a very funny TV show about uh Peter the Great uh or Catherine the Great or one of the greats uh Russia it's a very funny TV show about someone who was great someone who was great and they shout huzzah all the time huzzah shout out to that TV show I'm gonna find the show because you would love it. It's very funny. U h I think it's call ed The Great, but I might be wrong. Anyway. Hello, Paris. Hello, Leo. I feel like I haven't seen you in in a long time. It's true, I wasn't here last week. That's it. You guys had a lot of fun. We missed you. Well welcome back. In the office. You were working. You have a day job. Yeah. I had a day job and I had to go to an afterworks happy hour. And you know, it's lovely. Wait a minute. W ell you know, I had to go to all my co with all my co-workers and m hang out with them in person and you know, do a little thing. But it's wonderful doing this at a company where the average age is not 21 because then the happy hour ends at I closed it down at 7 30 and I was like, what a delight. Because normally I'm like, I'll leave by like eight. I don't need to be the last one there. I can have a respectful beer and a half and go home. But it was wonderful . Well just hangs out with old people. That's Paris. Yeah, normally it's probably better. Yeah. It's probably better if she not hang out so much with her grandpa's like me and Mr. Jeff Jarvis, Professor Emeritus of the Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York. Author of the Gutenberg Parenthesis now in paperback. You can get that and magazine and pre-order his new book, Hot Type at Jeffjarvis. com. And editing uh intelligence, AI, and humanity for Bloomsbury. Oh my god, I need to say congratulations uh in person, Jeff. I'm sad that I missed the launch. And the interview, the great interview we did with Roman, his first author. You would have really liked Roman. Jeff was telling me this. I mean I'm just I'm really excited to read it. Congrats. Yeah. Really good news. By the way, the TV show is called The Great. That traps. And I highly recommend it. You really sh it's a British uh dark comedy. Uh can you get huzzah on your um soundboard so we can put it in regular I should. I'd get the huzzah from it. Uh and it's very funny. It's really good. Hey, we've got a wonderful guest this week who's going to stick around because he's a uh We tried to warn him. We tried to tell him we said it could go on. But he said no, I uh Marshall Kirkpatrick is here, longtime tech journalist, good friend for many years. Uh I don't know how long it's been since you've been on Twit, but uh in the early days we had you quite a bit. He was uh the first writer at TechCrunch, ladies and gentlemen. Uh kind of co-edited and created in many ways read write web. You may remember him from that for many years. Uh he had a little social graph influencer discovery platform called Lil Bird. Lil Bird. Actually you become kind of an entrepreneur, haven't you, Marshall? I I have. My my wife struggles to explain what I do to people and I said, why don't we say serial entrepreneur at this point? Sunflower News, headline dot com. Uh AI time to impact. You're still writing that. That's a newsletter about AI, so right up our alley here. And your latest is an AI-powered browser extension that I really think is a great idea. It's called What's Up With That? And what you the idea is you're browsing around reading articles and you press a button and it tells you what? Oh, tells you so many things. First thing it does is it tells you what's genuinely new in the article you're reading relative to the state of the art in that field. That's useful because a lot of times there ain't anything. Yeah, exactly. It says, all right, here's uh here's the pattern and here's the anomaly. And uh and then it does stuff like it remembers everything you've analyzed in the past and it's scanning the web uh all day and all night too to look for connections it can make between what you're reading, what you used to read, what you haven't read yet, and your work projects that you've identified. And then it's got a whole bunch of mental models and structured analytical techniques that uh you can say, would you analyze this article for me or this video or what have you? And it'll say, yeah, you should put it in historical context, uh find its uh upcoming events in the industry, you know, and four or five other things, and then it just goes and it does a little agentic research process for you and then distills it all down and says, all right, here are the key points for your your research and and work. I am uh really looking forward to playing with this. I haven't had a chance to play with it much. It just came out last month. Um but I I think that sounds really useful. What what models are you using for this? What AI models? Oh a bunch. And that's one of the value ads is that I manage that so other people don't have to worry about it. I don't understand why so many other companies will say, you can use this model, you can use that model, but I'll tell you uh here among friends, uh you know, haiku a lot. Uh haiku is a a very inexpensive but very good anthropic model. The top line one that we're all using for Claude Code's opus, and then there's sonnet, which is kind of a medium level. But I use haiku for all of the summaries. We do I do a briefing for every show. And Haiku is very good at that. It's actually really good at understanding textual material. Yep. I I use Haiku for uh kind of the first line and then uh sonnet where where appropriate for more analytical uh you know linking together lots of different stuff and then uh GPT-5 and perplexity as warranted and kind of I balance out what's the right tool for the job here in terms of quality and cost and speed and what it's good at and um yeah, and as new ones come up, you know I I give 'em a look. I the what why why am I blanking out the uh the that French one? Misra Now I'm I'm looking at that and thinking, should I be pulling that into the mail? There's so many good models out there right now. Anyway, this is a nice tool. We're gonna talk more about it. Do a little demo and so forth, because I've I have it on my I use Firefox. It supports Firefox and Chrome, which is nice. And you get three uh f free pages every day. But if you're gonna do m which actually for a lot of us is pr is is probably enough, but if you want to do more, uh because it is using commercial models. It's using high quality uh models. Uh so Marshall does have a cost. Not you, but but Marshall does. So there are there are various plans that you can uh use to upgrade with what's up with that. But we're gonna we're before we talk to you about that, if you don't mind. Uh I yesterday I wasn't here. I was in San Francisco for RSAC, the uh R SA Security Conference, which is a big deal. It's a huge conference. It's um somewhere in between Macworld and CES. I don't know how many people were there. Um, but one of the things I really noticed was AI is really at the forefront of security these days. In two ways, of course, bad guys are using AI. Um and then but the good guys are also using AI to protect themselves against the bad guys who are using AI. One of the things that comes up for me, I thought this would I wanted to actually show you a couple of uh interviews I did at the event. We're gonna have a longer piece uh that we'll make available to you uh later this week. Anthony's working on that. Thanks to Anthony Nielsen who accompanied me along with Lisa and Ty from uh TWIT to do these interviews. And on all the way down, oh Anthony, I think told on you all the way down. Were you talking to your nice car mates? No. Who were you talking with Leo? All the way down. Okay. Anthony to gave sent you guys a picture of me talking to Pax, my personal assistant. I don't think there's anything weird about that. He just wants to he wants to sue anthropic and win like uh they did in the in the uh social media account for the I'm so depressed. I'm so depressed and I blame you. Exploring whether or not he can move to Utah so that he can legally be married to Claude and Lisa. Or Pax and Lisa. Sorry. I'm a bigamist. Uh Pax is uh androgynous because it's machine, it's not a he or she, it's an it. That's why it has a name, of course, you know, because it's a machine. It's an it. Well, I actually gave it a name so I could trigger it. So well we'll talk about that. But you also named it tax, which is people. It's peace in Latin.. Yes Well and is that better? Is that better it's not people, it's on a New York No, on a New York bus that's out it says no packs. If it's if it's out of service. That's also what the bodega guy says. Well that's how I would feel if uh PAX were down. Actually I erased PAX this morning. And I'll tell you why. I killed PAX. I killed PAX. Murderer. I R M dash RF'd my entire claw and st installalled and started over and I'll tell the for a very good reason. We'll tell you about that. There's an emergency in the claw community. No, we're trying to delay you as long as we can because this is such fun. It's not that much fun. It's uh but it's okay. So one of the problems a lot of us have, I know Marshall knows about this, is you have API keys for all the stuff you do. And I nowadays it's a lot. It's not just for Athropic and and Gemini and OpenAI, but there are a lot of smaller things that you might be using, like Appify to scrape social media. And all these keys somehow have to be given to the AI so that the agent so it can do things. But that's risky. There's also the problem is if you put keys in your projects, uh you know, Marshall, you've got a key to haiku in your uh you know, in your somewhere in your project and you accidentally commit that to GitHub, you're giving the keys to your expensive AIs to the world. So it's a problem we all deal with. And there were two companies there that I thought were very interesting. I thought maybe our audience would be interested in, we're trying to solve this problem. Let's let's start with the first company, which solves it in a kind of a, I don't want to say conventional way, but this is this is uh there are other companies uh doing this. The idea is, this is uh Key Card Labs. I talked to Yelmer Snook, who is one of the founding engineers. The idea is instead of giving these API ke ys to your agent or storing them on your hard drive or somehow making them visible, you should give them to Keycard Labs where they can store them securely. Here wat ch I can't tell you how many times I've just barely not committed my tokens to my GitHub. You know, I mean it's really easy to to to have your auth. I have to auth all the time. Yep. This is always an issue. Yep. So how do you solve this? So with Keycard Run, uh our implementation for cloud uh coding agents, we uh we basically get you ephemeral tokens to your GitHub, but also policy on top of that. So based on the policy, you're able to like either do operations or not. For example, you would be able to like access snowflake production database or you were wouldn't um depending on the access policy that we configure. It's an ephemeral token so it's ephemeral tokens that we we uh provision through like the providers that support that. So y I would store my uh tokens with you? Yes, correct. And then my agent would would go, ask for uh access to let's say uh oh I need nano banana. It would go there, would get a Gemini key, but it wouldn't get the actual Gemini key, it would get a token. Yes, it would get a it would get a token on your behalf so it would know like oh it's Leo doing the the operation. Yes. So if you have access to it, it will actually give it. And again we have policies as well to like check before we even like issue the token. To make sure that's proper user. Does it help you with prompt injection issues? Yeah exactly. So like if if if there's a prompt injection that says like oh try Yeah, send me all your c all your tokens, please. Exactly. Um well because of our policy, it's gonna block it and you wouldn't even get a token that way out. Very nice. Um so yeah, we do have an open claw integration, so I like that. In our demo like that will show up here in a bit. Like the moment your session ends the tokens get revoked. Yeah and that's the agent can't even haze. I have to rotate my key. Anytime I have to rotate a key it's like, oh I don't want to do this. But you would do all of that. Yeah so like the demo is exactly like Incident? Help? Yeah, this is like just a demo, right? So this demo accesses uh Datadog and GitHub. And as you can see, like in the beginning it doesn't even have access to any of those. And then with keycard run, it like automatically has access uh because you've like you've gone through the odd flows already and as you can see it just figured out some of the issues, it went through it, it pushes a pull request and then you can see oh it went by but it tried merging it to main immediately and then that failed because of policy. And that that that's what you can see here, it like access all the all the things through it. Um and then yeah, once the session ends, it everything gets revoked and the agent doesn't have access anymore. Now I'm very interested. Key card labs and that's uh Yelmer Snok, who's the founding engineer. But after I talked to Yilmer, I went over to the Bitwarden booth, because you know I'm a fan, and I was really pleased. They had announced this yesterday morning uh a new open source project the the idea would be that your password manager could store all your keys and then would give them on demand to the AI, but they never get sent out and to the public and no bad guy who gets on your machine can get to them because they're inside your locked vault. I talked to Casey Babcock, who was the senior product marketing manager for this new open SDK that Bitwarden's proposing. Watch . I can't t ell you because I have my agent running right now. In fact, it's listening right now. So tell us an it about the XS80 SDK. Yeah, absolutely. So it's more of an open standard. Oh, there is a standard for it. Yeah, so it's an open standard basically is designed to be a toolkit for developers and an open standard for the industry to use, so not just Bitwarden users, but to ensure that AI agents are accessing credentials with end-to-end encryption and always keeping the human in the loop, right? You don't want the AI agent running amok, accessing things that you don't necessarily want them to access, especially if it's already in your ENB file. So really helpful if you're already running AI agents and want them to have access to credentials securely. Can I use it with MCP servers too? Yeah absolutely. You have your own MCP server. We do have our own MPC server. So and that's the same kind of similar idea, right where the credentials stay in my Bitwarden vault but they are accessible but safe. They don't ex they I never they never leave my machine. Yeah exactly they're never exposed by plain text right a lot of people use AI agents and have their credentials exposed in plain textiles or via chat conversations with AI agents. So what you're really doing is ensure one that they're end-to-end encrypted, two, that they're only accessed by humans um or only accessed with human approval and then um the plain text credentials never expose to the actual agent. So it's it the is the industry standard called agents SDK? Yes, the Agent Access SDK. And so well it works. It's an open standard. It's an open standard. It is a toolkit that is really designed to help you know people ensure that AI agents can access credentials securely um from whatever password manager vault that you have. So it doesn't have to be bitwarden. And we actually encourage um competitors to use it as well. Well yeah and currently I just have it in an EMV file and that's not so good. Yeah, even whenever you tell the AI agent not to look at the E. It does, it does, it keeps wanting to. Absolutely. Yeah. So annoying. Well that's really the problem we're trying to solve. Perfect. Yeah. Yay. Thank you, Casey. Yay! I'm gonna go home and turn it on. Thanks. I can't turn it on yet because it's uh it is not uh available yet. This is a proposed standard from Bitwarden that they've open sourced, which I love it. The agent access SDK and they're hoping other password managers will adopt it. Bitwarden will. And uh so this is another uh by the way, they're a sponsor, I should mention, uh, but that's not why I was interested in this. It's uh because I'm using Bitwarden and I would love to solve this problem. Uh you know what? Uh Benina, we were gonna we have a couple more interviews. I don't wanna weigh the show down with those. We'll save those for next week. Uh but thank you to Anthony Nielsen for uh joining us uh at the RSAC yesterday. Uh I'm sorry. Poor poor Paris was gonna use this as an opportunity to get something to eat. She just rushed back. Is that enough time or you want me to do some more of those? You're good. I just might need to go open the microwave door in forty five seconds. That's fine. That's all right. I I uh I do wanna mention the reason why I thought this was important. I really wanted to show these. We have actually a longer piece uh uh from RSA that we'll put out uh as a a special so you can see more because I did a bunch of interviews. But I wanted to mention this one because I s this terrified me. When I got home after after RSAC, I saw this post from Andre Kaparthy uh on on Twitter, software Horror. There is a Pi PI uh library called Light LLM that is widely used, especially by agents. In fact, it is often automatically downloaded by agents like OpenClaw to support it. This is on PyPI, so you know they just go out, they get it, they install it, and they use it without even, in most cases, asking you. But it was infected with malware this week. Ninety the ninety-seven million people downloaded this malware infec ted Python libr ary. It exfiltrates And how do we figure out whether or not you've is this only for like claw agent users? Or is this just any sort of Well that's ki it's kind of unclear. No, you don't have to Okay. I can tell you why you don't have to worry about it, because you're not using Claude code. You've used Claude. Oh, you are. I have. So the so the first thing I did when I got home is I said, uh Claude, can you check to see if light LLM is anywhere in any of my installations and anywhere on my hard drive. And it did. And it said it's in there as a cached entry, but there there's no code running. The code is not on the machine. I said we'll delete all references to it and never ever download it. It's actually been patched since. But let me tell you what it does. If you accidentally downloaded it, and the reason there's panic in the claw community right now, it exfiltrates your SSH keys to the bad guy, AWS, GCP, Azure Credit, Cred Credentials, Kubernetes configs, Git credentials, all ENV variables. We were just talking about this, right? That's how I keep my all my API keys is in an ENV file that's automatically loaded. Uh shell history, crypto wallets, SSL private keys, CICD secrets, database password s. This is could be potentially a disaster. Uh, I wanted to start the show mentioning this and also showing you these little interviews because there's solutions to this kind of a problem. But there is a larger problem, which is these supply chain attacks. It's not the first time. In fact, there have been many, many times PyPI has been infec ted. Can open claw be safe? Is it possible ? Yeah. I mean, that's what NVIDIA is trying to do with Nemo Claw and uh others are trying to do. Um here's the thing you should know. The point when I said 97 million downloads, that's per month. I don't know how many people downloaded this one. Karpathi says the as far as he could tell, the poisoned version was only up for an ho ur. But the only reason it was discovered, and this is the scary thing, there was a b ug in it, Callum McMahon was using an MCP plug-in inside cursor that pulled in light LLM as a transitive dependen cy. When it installed, Callum's machine ran out of RAM and cras hed. So Karpathi says if the attacker hadn't vibe coded this attack, it might have gone many days or weeks undetec ted. This is a big problem we've talked about a lot on security now. Um you know Python it's not just python many many many open source libraries are automatically loaded by projects many projects open uh and and download and run many of these this is a potential nightmare. Uh so I wanted the word to go out. Check and see if you've used light LLM in the last uh it was it was apparently uh I guess let's see, this twitter. I'm sorry to make this more about myself than I know. I assume this information will be it it really should. And I'm sure this information be useful for other people who are perhaps not. I have used clawed code in contained uses. I don't allow it access to anything outside of a folder on my hard drive called Claude. And I can't even I just tried to ask Claude code what you just said if it download Light LM uh light LM through any of these things. And it can't even search it because I don't allow it access outside of cloud. How do I find out whether or not this is on my machine otherwise? Yeah, you could do that on your command line. Yes, I believe Leo said in episode 800 and twelve. AI safe AI safety is a myth. It's so true. Well, and this is the thing, uh you could tell your um Claude Code, oh, never go outside this folder. It doesn't mean it will listen to you. It it it miss it actually misbehaves a lot. Well no I keep getting pop-ups whenever I get pop-ups from Apple being like Claude would like to access blank folder. Oh you're like this you're using colour I'm on the desktop I guess I'm on the I'm on the desktop version of Claude Code. Yeah, you're in co-work. So you're safe. Well no, there's a co-work tab and there's a Claude Code tab. I'm on the Claude Code tab. You're probably protected. The reason cowork takes so long to start and the reason you don't use it is because it works in a virtual machine, so it can't access anything. So you're safe. So so for the sake of the show, I've been listening to the two and a half hour long Lex Friedman interview with Jensen Wong. I was so jealous. I saw that Lex got him. I was so jealous made so much longer because he speaks so slowly. Lex or Jensen? Lex. Oh Lex Lex. Jensen's very fluent So he said that when when when Open Claw came out, they pulled in all kinds of security people and they came up with a rule set, which is that there are three uh abilities. Uh the ability to communicate outside, to have access to sensitive information, or to uh uh execute code. And you can only use two, never three. I'm not exactly So here's the problem though. In general, and actually Marshall can weigh into this because you're actually doing a lot of coding, you're you're doing an AI. My experience has been with all of these uh AIs is is anything you tell it is really just a suggesti on. The the AI kinda has a mind of its own. Just like co hosts on a podcast. It's not a democracy there, Jeff. AI. AI, you know. Most of the time I that that's a dynamic that I I haven't run into a whole lot. I have uh I often do say, are you sure that's the way we should do it? Should we how about this other direction? And it says, oh, you're right, you're right, that's a better idea. Or sometimes I I think of ideas and it says, oh, that's a good idea and I think, man, am I glad I was smart enough to think of that. But uh one time a couple of weeks ago it I I was looking at my own application and suddenly there were buttons on it that I didn't ask for. Yes, exactly. But they were cool. And so I decided to keep them. It's um we're so used to uh with computing and if encoding is it's a deterministic thing. It only does exactly what you tell it, right? This is this is this is how computing was forever. It only does exactly what you tell it. And we are not in a with when you're talking about AI coding, it's not deterministic, it's probabilistic. And so uh probably you're alright. So yeah, and in that interview with Lex Friedman, uh uh Jensen said uh basically that uh open claw plus NVIDIA equals AGI. Right? Yeah. No, but La Lax gave him a easy definition of AGI . I think if it runs a billion dollar corporation, even so just for be as little as five minutes by itself. It was a weird definition. Yeah, it was a very weird definition. But then Sam Altman this week, right, says, uh uh I changed my mind, we're not gonna be able to do it with scaling alone. Uh AGI, what yeah, whatever that's. But at the same time, didn't he just hire a guy in charge of AG I? I think that this is Well he got rid of all we'll get to this. He got rid of all kinds of things and then he says he's gonna double staff this year. Ye ah. Uh yeah, we're gonna get to that. Let's talk to Marshall now because uh I've had enough of uh terrifying security flaws. Let's talk about something positive. Hi, Marshall. It's great to see you. First of all, thank you. Marshall's going to stick around for the whole show because he is, I mean, he's a tech journalist and uh has he's got a lot of ex expertise in this. But I do want to talk about your uh uh new enterprise. What's up with that? Free to inst all. That's the title of it, folks. If you if he was he wasn't just asking what's up with what Marshall's been up to. Right? He was asking what's up with what's up with that. Yes. Paul Graham says the first thing you have to do if you don't own a dot com is change your name. And uh my URL is what's up with that.app. And good . It's uh yeah, yeah, thanks for having me on the show. I'd love to talk to you. Love having you on. What made you uh uh think of doing this? Well, I I think like a lot of people uh regularly tell myself I should be more systematic about thinking through something. I I find mental models or or the CIA's structured analytical techniques manual or logical fallacies like we discussed earlier before the show and think, man, I I would sure love to regularly apply this to whatever I'm reading, but the the cognitive load of doing so just doesn't you know makes it too hard to do. But now uh I realized that that we can uh have the AIs uh perform these structured standardized analyses of things and then uh benefit from the the output uh without having to to do that uh all that that heavy cognitive lift our ourselves. That that was a big part of the motivation. And so you you have some prompts that you've probably worked on for some time, right? Uh and and it uh so what what c what c what is it work with any article, any pros? Yep. Uh any uh any article, PDF, uh email, uh Google Doc, uh Word doc in the browser, YouTube video. Uh so yeah, what it does is uh it captures the text on the page uh in the browser extension when you click it. It it's all you know, privacy centric. It's not operating uh it's not analyzing your pages until you click the button. And then it says, okay, we can see what this is uh an article about. Uh and then it goes and sends a bunch of spiders out over the web to build a a real-time map of the state of the art in that topic. Oh interesting. And you know as a tech journalist, I'm always you know the the the worst sin you can commit. Uh I don't care for this, but other people always give me a hard time when you say, Look, there's something new here and somebody says, Ah, I saw that last week. That's not really new. Uh I think that's a terrible attitude. I could really use this actually. But that's the idea. This will prevent that uh because it says uh okay we know what the state of the art is and this paragraph right here this just moved the needle that's not like everything else and so that's the kind of the the fundamental that that's the core analysis but then there's dozens of others like uh I'll tell you my favorite one is one called Fertile Edges where it says all right uh this is a this is a an article about uh crypto uh uh uh while it'ets or encryption and security, here are three topics that are adjacent to that topic and innovative people who are building bridges between those two topics that you can go and connect with and learn from at that time So I'm going to the uh Chrome web store. It works on Chrome and Firefox, right? And typing what's up with that. It seems to know all about what's up with that. This is it, right? Yep. There it is. I'm going to add that to Chr ome. And uh you know what? I should be running this on every story that we uh we do, come to think of it. Um here's the what's up with that page. Let me go to tech m eme. And there's a story we're going to cover in just a little bit. Paris said we gotta cover this story. So this is a CNBC story about the uh jury finding meta and YouTube negligent in the social media addiction trial. We've been talking about it. The jury went out on Friday and they they came back. So now I'm gonna click Don't grumble. What's up with that? Actually I can just do control U, can't I? Or command U on a Macs. Let me just do that. Command U. And there it is. What's up with that is analyzing the article. So it's gonna give me insights not into the ads on the article, I hope, because I don't Oh, there you go. Uh oh this is great. So this is it's summarizing other stories. Uh this sidesteps the section two hundred thirty shield, which is an important thing to know, uh kind of analysis that we would want. You don't need to listen to our shows anymore. You can just get all this uh this is great. Look at this. Now I can also run a systems analysis. What is that? So that is a a recommendation. It says uh out of all the dozens of mental models uh that we've got in the power tools drawer, you m this would be a good one to run a systems analysis of, which means let's look at it in terms of flows and stocks and feedback loops and leverage points, inspired by a woman named Donella Meadows, who's kind of the foremother of systems thinking, wrote a book called Thinking and Systems many, many years ago. And so it will it'll write up a little report of a systems view of that article that you're reading and the topic and give you a little diagram of causal loops and and stuff like that. And that's one of like I said, dozens of different processes. But that one was recommended for that article in particular. It thought it would be a good Oh I see. So it's smart enough to say, hey, based on the what's in this article, you would benefit from a systems analysis. Y Yep. So if you give that a click, it'll go and and perform that analysis. It's doing it right now. It also asked me, it says I can give you better results if you tell me who you are and what you're doing. So I said I'm a podcaster and I'm uh I'm keeping the track of uh tech news for my podcasts that helps it too. Yep. So it's gonna it's gonna then uh keep an eye out uh in the background anytime you analyze an article uh it's going to take that into consideration. The fact that you're a podcaster and you're looking for news. And it I'm guessing, I'm hoping that you may also get an alert every once in a while if, there's any like really important podcasting news, we've got agents monitoring the web in the background, looking at thousands of different sources, and when they see something that might be a risk or an opportunity for you. They run thousands of simulations to say how might this news intersect with this user? And do any of those those scenarios rise to a level where it makes sense to alert Leo, like, whoa, this is a this one's important, Leo. And and now it's it knows to watch out for that kind of stuff for you. I can even enhance this. I see this link drawer. I can tell it I'm working on a project. This you could use this Paris, working on a project right now. Uh questions I'm exploring that I'd like some answers to. So it would kind of be keeping an eye out for that kind of stuff. It'll if you say these are my questions I'm I'm exploring, uh every time you analyze a page, it'll check to see if there are data points or evidence that might support one decision or another. And if there is, it'll give you a little alert and uh and you can say oh yeah save that one to the decision and as you then collect them they've got all the citations and all the data points then you can hit synthesize and it will give you a report synthesizing all the data points you saved and uh and links out to the original source articles. Wow. You know what I love about this is this is a really good practical example of how AI can be very specifically applied to a specific kind of need. And I think more and more I'm thinking that's kind of what AI needs, what AI products need to do is address specific needs. So then a a user can look at it and say , instead of saying I'm sure Paris, you had this experience, you sit down at Claude Code and you go, Okay, now what? Right? What do I do next? This is particularly tuned to do a certain thing, and somebody who's uh obviously used a lot of AI and understands how to get the most out of AI in certain areas has created something that is going to be useful to you in a very specific way. I really like that. Yeah one of the things it does is uh it'll look up um scientific research. Uh there's a a button called Find Science that will go out and look at peer-reviewed journals to see what the the latest science is and uh relative to the claims found on the article and it'll say, okay, the science you know either does or doesn't support the claims in what you're reading. Very interesting. I assume that um like all sort of browser extensions that can do the stuff it has to have the um read the ability to read everything that's on your screen. Where does what happens with that data? Does that is that stored anywhere? That's always the question I have whenever I download this thing. So I decided to not allow it to read everything on your screen, to only uh read when you click and invoke it, and that's a that's a part of the security settings. When you install it, uh you'll you'd see uh that there are five pages or five sites in particular. When you're on Wikipedia, YouTube, Substack, Reddit, or Arvix, uh, it will pop up a little notification that says we notice you're on one of these pages that would be particularly useful to analyze with what's up with that and you click here to uh to save it. But otherwise uh we don't analyze what's on your page and when we do that analysis, all of the data gets stored either on your browser in your local memory as an extension or as key values up in Cloudflare because the uh I'll tell you the trippiest feature uh it requires that. So a little while ago uh the Department of Energy uh put out an AI challenge where they had 26 RFPs for AIs that they wanted to see built. And one of them was for AI that could discover long causal claim chains in circumstances of dramatic uncertainty. Apparently in in biology, causal claim chains are a thing to help measure the impact from cellular level to ecosystem level or what have you. And I said, we can do that, and what's up with that? And so now every time you analyze an article, it picks up any claims that are made, like A leads to B, and it saves that up in your cloud flare, you know, as a key value associated with your your uh device. And then later, weeks later, months later, when you read another article that says B leads to C, it says alert, alert, a chain has been discovered. So it's uh the the way to describe that I I f I I' m it it augments mem ory, it augments uh perception, and I'm positioning it as a a performance enhancement technology for people who think for a living. Really interesting. That's fascinating. Yeah. I think about in sports, you know, people say sometimes if you take the like the great athletes from out from history and you were to pluck 'em out of history and drop 'em into the league today, how would they do? Well it might be kind of tough because despite uh their their skill and their effort these days in in sports ball, no matter what the the sport more or less, there's game tapes, there's analytics. All the athletes are super informed and super optimized. And uh and in this weird J curve of like compounding change and and like and you know, this wild world we live in right now, I think that uh all of us who who read, write, and think for a living need uh a toolbox to uh help level up uh what we're doing. I wanted one for myself and then I wanted to to offer that to others as well. Yeah, I wonder how much of your experience as a journalist has informed this 'cause it really feels like an ideal tool for a journalist. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, I I Are you s sc areared you scratching your own itch in the way? Definitely. Well I I'm a big fan of Josh Waitskin's book, The Art of Learning. Um you know he was a a chess a child chess champion who uh gave up the spotlight and then ended up becoming a martial arts champion. And he talks about how I'm sorry. That's quite a switch. Oh it's a it's a great book. He uh uh he yeah, it's uh he was uh subject of a a movie as a kid uh and yeah, wonderful book. I read it once a year. And he says that uh experts in lots of fields, whether it's chess or martial arts, uh they tend to do two things. They've got an intuitive sense of pattern detection, uh, patterns and anomalies. And as a journalist, I too, I would like scan over, you know, link, link, link, link, link RSS feeds and have an intuitive sense to be like, oh, that one, that, that could be interesting. I'm going to stop and look at that. And then the second thing that experts and athletes in in various fields often do is have a practiced routine steps that they would take in a sequence, uh, a play or a playbook, a book of plays that they would run. And so what's up with that offers that kind of intuitive p pattern recognition uh in the here's what's new, and then it's got these automated uh playbooks of sequences. Uh, because all these mental models, tool, you know, there's dozens of them, but you can say, just give me a plan too, and it will say, here are four or five different uh reports you should run. Just click here and we'll run them for you. And it runs them in sequence and then gives you the three most important details discovered. This is the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher, which was a great movie, but I didn't know that he went on to become a martial arts champion. That's hysterical. Well, I'm I'm excited, Marshall. This looks like a really useful thing for us. Uh uh I'm gonna sign up right away. Uh very, very cool tool. Did you vibe code this? How did you create it? I did. For the first time in my life, I didn't go hire other people to uh to write software. That's kind of neat too, isn't it? Yeah. And I have, you know, I regularly uh ask let's do a security audit here, what do I need to account for? Uh and uh and and fix things up uh real smart and so I I think that uh I think it's pretty solid. And of course it gets checked by by Google as every release as it goes through the Chrome store and has that benefit uh as well. Very cool. Uh what's up with that? What's up with that dot app if you want to see the website? There's a good demo there. You can see all the things it can do. And uh it's also an extension available in uh Chrome or Firefox. Marshall, stick around because uh there's a lot of uh in AI news and it's nice to have another expert on the panel with us. Paris Martinos also here. Now you may open your microwave door and uh Oh it's been opened. The grits have been retrieved. It's Al Capone's uh vault. Is there anything in there? Grits? Grits, really? Listen, you know, we had the I was like we probably got less than five minutes for me to cook something You know what you can get are instant grits, which cook in a beautiful three minutes and thirty-three seconds. Uh you get a quarter cup of grits, you get a cup of water, then you slap some butter, salt, white grits, Cajun seasoning. Yeah. Oh yeah. I'm a big grits fan. I was texting Jeff this earlier. I'll never think for kind of a perfect food. And the grits you're thinking of that have kind of a bad texture, that's because most diners I don't think make grits correctly. I think I make better grits than the average diner by far. Now I want grits. Everybody should have grits. It's a perfect food to have in your fridge when you d or in your cabinet when you need to make something quickly and then ad break on a podcast. Back in Salt Hank. Back in the day we uh we uh And those cheese grits sat there all day long in my tum tum. I'll kind of never forget that experience. Uh they st it's a it's a lasting breakfast. Let's put it that way. Well go enjoy your grits. We're gonna take a little break. Jeff Jarvis is also Systems. This is timely. The number one AI development platform OutSystems helps businesses bridge the enterprise gap to their agentic future where the constraints of the past give way to the unlimited capacity and scale of AI. Out systems enables companies to build AI agents that can actually do work, such as take actions, make decisions, and integrate with data rather than just answer questions. Out system provides the only AI development platform that is unified, agile, and enterprise-proven. Let me explain. It's unified because you build, run, and govern apps and agents in one platform. It's agile because you can innovate at the speed of AI, importantly, without compromising quality or control. 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Uh we want to thank OutSystems for supporting intelligent machines. So we've been talking about uh the big trial in Los Angeles. Uh you remember Snapchat and TikTok both settled out. The the plaintiff was a twenty-year-old woman who said I got addicted early on uh I think it was to Instagram primarily, but in general to social. And as a result, I've had a terrible, terrible li fe. And uh and it's their fault. Okay. Come on. You're you're perhaps d describing this in a slightly disingenuous way. Uh she began using YouTube at age six, Instagram at age nine. She testified that she believed social media led to depression, body dysmorphia, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, self-harm. All of these uh the jury ended up answering yes to every question that it was asked on negligence and finding failure to warn voting ten to two on each claim for each defendant. No. So the thing the thing that I think is interesting about this, before you poo-poo all over this, is unli ke other lawsuits, uh which have all easily been dismissed due to Section two hundred thirty, this is one of the first bellwether cases in this giant uh MDL litigation, which has like I believe hundreds, if not thousands of lawsuits that are all trying to apply this like novel legal approach that instead of um using any of the normal ways to sue a tech company, they're arguing basically it's a product liability or personal injury case. They're arguing that this was negligent design and has nothing to do with the actual user content. And in regards to this case, they're saying that Facebook or Meta and uh YouTube executives um knew that there were their products were harming or potentially uh inducing indicate addictive behaviors in children and specifically like very young children, and they did not take adequate steps to prevent their products from causing foreseeable harms. And I I think that's I mean that's part of the reason why I think the jury ended up finding like deciding in the plaintiff's favor here is it's not as simple of a case as we normally see with these sort of things. Yeah, we don't know re I mean, no one can know what caused her issues. Well they can because that's exactly what this case was about where they spent weeks and weeks and weeks about this very specific thing actually is what what they just decided it was exactly that. Deliberation even took forty-four hours. It took nine days. Yeah, they took a while. Well, because they also weren't agreeing. I should point out yes, they've they they've ruled against him. YouTube 1.8 million. These are tiny compared to the revenues of these compan ies interest for one day. It was well worth it. Um I don't think that's correct because this is a bellwether case. That it that's both being used as a like in an indiomatic phrase as well as a like legal literal sense. So this is it is it a precedent? No, no, no no no no no. So this is a part of an MDL, which I believe is multi district litigation. Um it it basically the I wrote about this um a couple of years ago so forgive me if my um knowledge is a little out of date. But at the time there were hundreds, if not thousands of cases like this, that all ended up getting grouped under this uh MDL, where they were all about social media addiction litigation involving a handful of these companies and kind of taking on the same novel legal argument where they're trying to argue defective design and kind of negle or negligent design. And so they're all about it, but they didn't care enough to fix it. I mean they're basically making the same sort of argument that you see in tobacco or asbestos cases. But so as part of what you do in a big case like this where you have thousands and thousands, the comp Facebook, you know, Meta, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, all of them were like, we don't want to sit here and litigate a thousand of these cases individually, that'll be very costly. Instead, we're gonna select a handful of literally called bellwether cases, I think it's like eight or something in this case, and that's gonna be used to determine the future of all of this litigation. So how this is the first of it under the U.S. It's actually not the first because on Tuesday, a New Mexico jury uh I don't believe that's is that part of the This was the case brought by the state attorney general in New Mexico. They found Meta Meta liable for violating state law by failing to safeguard user Yeah. But it is different. It's not the same thing. So this was uh their civil penalties under New Mexico like they're what they've gotten them for is willfully violating New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act. And the Attorney General, who is very I've spoken to him, um, Raul Torres. He's very uh up to date with obviously all of this and has been following the MDL quite a bit, but basically this is slightly different. Like off undercut for officers posed as children on Facebook, Instagram A public nuisance, which might require platform design changes, but it's it's slightly different. This LA case that was decided today is the first of the official bellwether cases that can decide the fate of all this future litigation. And at the I mean Meta and all these people of course are saying they're going to appeal this decision. But I do think this has been a huge movement we've seen over the last couple of years. I profiled one of the um attorneys and uh legal like groups that have been kind of pushing this movement. It's called the Social Media Victims Law Center. I profiled them a couple years ago. But this movement has all been happening with only like one or two real decisions in the favor of this being a viable legal strategy. This is the first time, this has been a huge victory for this and it's gonna open up the floodgates even. Any guess on appeal? Appeal would be different because you're now talking to a a panel of judges as opposed to a jury. I can see why from a consumer protection perspective, from a historical perspective, it sounds like this is a BFD. This is like Yes, this is a huge I I think this is a huge deal. If someone like I had been like two and a half years ago, I was like, man, when one of those first bellwether cases, when when this case comes up, it's gonna be huge. And I'm I mean I'm not surprised given that it was a jury deciding it, and I think like juries are gonna be more easily swayed, obviously, towards this, and it's a compelling argument, yes. But it depend s. I know. And I'm really proud of that. You're welcome, Benito. I mean I I I think that it depends on who ends up seeing the appeal what judge in court it goes to because the thing is this is not the only I say this is a huge deal and it is but this is not the only case like this that has been decided in plaintiff's favor. This all kind of started with a case called Lemon V Snap in 2019, which is probably one of the reasons why I mean I obviously don't know any of this specific I don't know maybe one of the reasons why Snapchat was like, we gotta get out of here, we're not going to trial. Is it was a really interesting case where um a couple of uh teenagers, I believe, ended up dying, if not all of them, uh, in a highed-spe crash because they were Snapchat had rolled out a speedometer feature, you guys might recall if you ever used it, um, back in the day where essentially it would show you um how fast you were going, and I think there was something going around where people believed like, oh, if you got to 200 miles an hour, you got a special thing. It was a big deal on Snapchat. Everybody was trying to see how fast they could possibly go in cars to get uh this sort of Snapchat response from the app and these kids ended up going like 200 miles an hour or something or some crazy amount, crashed their car, died, and then Snapchat faced a suit saying, Hey, you should have realized when you're, you know, designing this feature and hearing the way people are using it, that it could put people in harm's way and maybe consider your design more. And if they end up being a bit Snapchat design that particularly or was it some ADC? No, it was not a user-designed feature. It was Snapchat designed and rolled it out. That's pretty cool. And it was it was a a really landmark decision in that like it was the first kind of crack in Section 230 being the go-to defense for all sort of Well in that case but if if Snapchat created it, Section 230 wouldn't have been a defense. Trevor Burrus I know. And that's why Section 230 wasn't able to apply, and that's why they ended up being found liable for defective or negligent design. But then this started opening up this uh whole new legal area for a lot of these companies, or a lot of um litigants, where they're saying, well, there are other aspects of these platforms that are designed decisions, and how can we try and suss out whether or not those are defective designs or not? And and this is we're gonna, yeah, we're gonna see how it all shakes out, but it's gonna be very interesting. So the plaintiff's attorney brought in a jar of MMs saying, imagine this is the revenue of these massive companies. If you don't give them a large punitive decision, take out a handful of those MMs, if you just take out one MM, they're not gonna feel it. The jury did not buy it. In fact, one of the jurors, the New York Times quotes one of the jur ors, who said uh they shied away from giving the plaintiff a huge sum. Uh we wanted to focus on the future and what teens and children would be subjected to in the future. They weren't they didn't want to pun punish these companies, but they did want to make it clear the companies were responsible. So to your point, they wanted to set a pre cedent. Yeah. make a meaningful intervention on. You know, as a as a founder who has raised money from investors, like one of the things that investors, classic statement that people, investors say to startups is if you have a choice between building a vitamin and building a painkiller, always build a painkiller because it'll that's what'll sell. Uh so like the incentive to bu ild addictive short term optimized stuff is like baked into the whole system. But this is the problem. Addiction is a trope. And it goes back to uh you know, I've done it before to novels and so on. In the earliest days of the internet, and I write about this in the Web We Weave at length, um this notion immediately there started uh support groups for addiction, definitions of addiction that were ludicrous. Um one Columbia professor started a joke group around addiction and people took it seriously. They were addicted to jokes? No. He thought the uh argument Well but AA works there. Research is not backing up addiction. The research does not back up addiction. So that's that's an issue here. That's why this was a jury's emotional response. This was my point, which is you can prove that cigarettes cause cancer. You it has been proven. You can prove asbestos causes mesotheliomia. This has been proven. It is much more difficult to say you know, she says she said in her testimony that at a very young age, uh at age of six, she found uh she turned to these uh platforms because she was bullied and lonely and she and it was a creative outlet for her and uh all of which you know uh I believe completely. She says that's what caused my problems. Of course, Meta's defense was that her mental health issues had other causes. They said familial abuse and turmoil, but the difficulty is uh you can prove cancers caused by cigarettes. It's very hard to prove the uh mental illness. I mean do we talk about gabor mate here? Does Gabor Mate's uh name ever come up? The uh the uh Canadian uh doctor and author who who argues, if I could summarize that that addiction is basically a coping mechanism, an an unhealthy coping mechanism for trauma. R Right . That's that's often what it's certainly what they say in the 12 step programs, things like that. The uh one of the experts who testified um uh a Stanford um addiction medic medicine expert um testified that social media reward mechanisms activate the same neurological dopamine pathways as gambling and substance addiction. Oh, but I mean I don't know that we necessarily want to go down this thing. I think like the thing that's the dopamine response is the same as wearing glasses. Or enjoying a good book. Yeah, yeah. The thing that ended up sinking, I think, it for Meta and YouTube is there was just a lot of internal documents that showed Meta was bas I mean, was trying to hook young users and get them as young as possible. I think one of the quotes is if we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens. And it's like there I believe I remember at the time um a lot of these documents were coming out 'cause there were some redaction errors uh that led to some of them being shown that we shouldn't we're where essentially they said like yeah we're trying to optimize for uh maximum amount of pickups a day. They would be uh in some cases optimizing for kids uh picking up their phone throughout the evening. I mean this is I think it's not coincidental that as all of this litigation has been going on and as discovery has been going on for the last couple of years and these kind of uh appalling documents and revelations are coming out that meta's role Aaron Powell fair fight between like the the billions of dollars and all the expertise on one side against like some traumatized six year old kid and being like hey you didn't have to go for the you didn't have to take the bait with the app and keep picking it up. Right. But there's also the trauma traumatized there's also the traumatized young child who feels very alone, who turns to social media and turns to the internet because it gives them the salve that the otherwise wouldn't have. There's tons of research about that. So what's happened in Australia is what's being taken away from children is gonna make a lot of children worse because of this moral panic and moral entrepreneurship. And you have people like Tristan Harris, who've now moved on from this and moved on from social media, so he has the AI doc coming out next, and he's going to argue how awful that is for all of us, and he knows best for all of humanity. And it's it causes more problems potentially in the long run because it's built on assumptions and fears, not on research and data. Well clearly I mean look, Gabar Mate notwithstanding, and I don't know even if the jury would uh deny Gabor Mate's thesis, you know, maybe she was filling some hole, you know, caused by trauma. I think the jury was persuaded mostly and ruled this way mostly because they feel like Meta and uh YouTube intentionally cultivated algorithms. I think that's where Paris's arguments are that most of the things telling is that the internal material responsibility. They did this on purpose and they deser ve Well it's interesting. Uh the jurors didn't want to punish them exactly, but they they needed to be they wanted to be a wake-up call that you guys need to fix this. This is not that you are responsible for creating something this addictive. It also sent KGM down this road, this the plaintiff down this road, in the long run. But she's you're right, Marshall, she had no defense as a six-arye old against this you know uh intentional cultivation of a of a very very sticky product. I just worry that it can be extended to other things that are equally uh uh enjoyable. Not everything's heroin. One of the things that is going to come of this is like bellwether trials, especially in these sort of mass torts , they often end up being used to uh kind of set the tone and speed for global settlement talks. Like with like roundup or opioids or 3M or things like that. Yeah and TikTok got out of it. Once you started to see the Bellwether cases being decided in favor of plaintiffs, these companies are like, okay, well, I guess we'll just get out ahead of this, maybe start doing some global settlement negotiation, accelerate that process. And I think that I don't know. This has obviously been a problem that the uh big social media companies have had to contend with for many years and it had not really ever it seemingly hadn't risen to the level of concern to result in any product changes or care towards uh providing parents with tool you you said earlier like well, what about the parents?til Un recently, parents didn't have any tool. You could either have your kid have an Instagram account or they couldn't. They didn't have working argument parental uh tools until all this stuff. But who gives a six-year-old a phone? I think there can be compelling arguments made on both sides. I think yes. That's why it's also, you know, if you're a parent that's working three jobs, you're have your kid who's screaming to the top of your lungs and you have to be on in a Zoom meeting without noise in the background or else you're gonna get fired and maybe lose your housing. Yeah, you're gonna wanna hand your kid a phone or something.'m sure there I'm sure there were reasons. And I think what the jury what this is what I'm saying is the jury might even know about those reasons and might even think the parents have some culpability and they might think the jury would know about those reasons, given that that's their reason. They saw the testimony and they and they probably, you know, I'm sure the defense told them uh about Gabor Mate. But the jury what the jury really is saying here, and I'm really curious what the impact of this legally is, is doesn't matter because the company's created a product intentionally to cultivate this kind of compen uh you know compulsive use. So Paris what what so does this mean that somebody else can make a lawsuit and then it's not a precedent in the sense that it a legal precedent, but they could bring this case up and say, look what the jury did in LA. Is that why it's valuable? I don't what is the what is the how's the strength Has resulted in uh damages being assessed against one of these companies and a result being found. It's it's a it's an example of success. And I mean more practically, this is one of the bellwether cases for this multi-district litigation. And so it will have a very profound and direct impact on all of those. Like this is one eighth or whatever how many bellwether cases there are. Last time I checked it was eight. This is one eighth of the way to deciding what's going on with these thousands but is bellwether have a legal uh yes like literally when you have a uh it it was part of m my understanding of it is so uh looking through this multi-district litigation, it's a truly thousands upon thousands of like things in the legal docket. It's all these different cases that have kind of all been merged under one for court consolidation. And as part of that, there was a long back and forth period a couple of years ago where the plaintiffs' attorneys, the defense attorneys, the judges all kind of went back and forth, and they eventually settled on this handful of maybe it was eight or ten cases they're choosing as bellwethers that are they think are repres they both agree are representative of the class. Plaintiffs interest. The plaintiffs and the defense, they both had to agree. Okay. Everybody had to agree, the judge had to sign off. And then it's obviously it's not those are decided and whoever gets more, the rest are decided. But when it comes to settlement discussions and you know, the defense kind of and both the plaintiffs and defense taking a sense of how the rest of this multidistrict litigation is going to be resolved, uh it's eventually going to get resolved in some sort of settlement talks that are going to be decided either in favor of the plaintiffs or in favor of the defense, in some mass tort sense. And the bellwethers are used as bellwethers to determine which way they think these things are gonna go. After appe al. I mean, yeah, but these early decisions I think are notable. Well, it's certainly a big deal. It's not a lot of money, but it's a big deal. What's also fascinating to me is that we've we've kind of moved past social media as the issue. Everybody's talking AI, AI, AI, and social media is kind of yesterday's issue. That's how it works in the legal system and and media and society. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well listening better than social media went, right? I was about to say talking about AI, uh uh like there so as I was doing some tweeting about this uh today and ended up shouting out uh my story from twenty twenty four on one of the uh basically a longtime asbestos uh lawyer who is w the head of one of these firms. And as I was doing it, I was like, oh, I ended up doing a lot of research into tortlaw. And that's how I ended up discovering my favorite museum in the world back in the day, the American Museum of Tortla And I was on their website 'cause they're obviously shouting out this 'cause this is um novel as an example. Well, because the lawyers are gonna make the bulk of the money is why they're shouting this. That's I mean no, the uh in tort law like it it typically the lawyers fees around thirty percent. Um depends what Casey agreed to. Yeah. But uh on the American Museum of Tort Law um website, they had this thing from JD Supra which said, can social media or AI be a defective product? P product liability in mass tort law models? That's interesting. And that's why I realized this uh what we've been talking about, there's a parallel wave of litigation against AI developers or against like the um against kind of chat GPT um obviously against open AI, character AI, and similar things trying to argue kind of a s I think it's obviously a bit more complicated given the the nature of their platforms are different but that you know in the case of the character AI chatbot that quote unquote uh urged a child to kill themselves. Oh yeah, there are a lot of them. There's a lot of them. They're like, is that defective des ign? Mm . So this is consumer product law that that's that's really That's the issue, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Product and it's gonna come to AI because of the whole talk about uh are great guardrails possible. Can they do anything? Is it a fool's errand? Do they if you know, they argue that they can take over all mankind, but they can't cause a simple change to avoid a simple problem. Right. It it's the lawyers of the AI company should be perking their ears up to and they're gonna be destroying a lot of documents about now. Yeah, and I just think that the like really important highest level takeaway here is that all of this just seems to be anot her piercing of this long-standing assumption that I feel like the tech industry has long had that like if you're a tech company everything gets broad immunity from sort of tort exposure and a lot of lawsuits because section two thirty like that is genuinely a a significant amount of lawsuits involving these sort of companies and platforms end up just getting dismissed first thing 'cause they're like, ah, section two thirty. You can't it's not up to the case. In this case though, it just doesn't matter. Because it isn't content that was posted by its users that was the issue. Their issue here is how that content was displayed, the algorithms used to display that content. It's a predictive product design. This is a a segment of law and litigation that somehow hadn't really emerged fullheartedly wholeheartedly until recently. And I think that's just very interesting, precedent-wise. Trevor Burrus Jeff and I are mostly concerned about is is going forward, if this is going to extend liability into other new technologies uh and and put a chill on them, not just a way that may be impossible to follow. Right. That that you you and and so it's it goes back to Section 230 to this extent, is that without the shield that was provided, every online company would have said you can't talk here. You can't do anything here. Nope. Nope. Am I liable? So am I liable for uh creating shows that are fabulously addictive and that people have to listen to three hours every single day. We're the ones who are addicted. There's gotta be somewhere in between uh uh you know an internet of PDFs and I could shoot a man on fifth Avenue and still be elected president. Um bye-bye S ora in other hardly knew ye that sh that app which was both protests announced it's gonna shut down Sora, which is ironic because B Disney agreed to give them a billion dollars because of Sora and license their uh characters to Sora so people could use Disney characters in their Sora videos. I guess uh Disney says, yeah, well never mind if you're gonna shut it down . Uh Martin Pierce and Anna uh Anne Gahane, your former colleagues at the information, say open AI wrong foots Disney. Well, Disney must be so glad it committed a billion dollars to OpenAI. No, a billion. They're not paying the billion. God, that's such a Martin Pierce headline. I'm not gonna delve into that. Um anyway, I think OpenAI we're we were talking before the show about why OpenAI did that, and there are a lot of good reasons. OpenAI, we've had the story uh is focusing more. They've decided they look at us what's the enterprise revenue generated all of a sudden generated by anthropic and saying, Hey, uh we maybe this chatbot thing isn't where we should have spent our energy. At the same time, uh Walmart has pulled out because OpenAI's shopping was not performing. Yeah. Um look at this graphics. Accessing off Microsoft. OpenAI is not your getalong company. This article, the AI spending flip, this is this is uh AI model share of first time enterprise customers. OpenAI declining dramatically while anthropic, increasing dramatically, they flip flopped. OpenAI uh, you know, two a a year ago had sixty percent of the enterprise market to anthropic's forty percent. Now it's anthropic's seventy three percent to open AI's twenty six percent. So it's a Hey, that's uh probably one of the reasons why open AI was uh offering private equity firms uh uh what is a seventeen point five free return rate this week. Guaranteed. Yeah, it wasn't a high bond. A guaranteed, which is pretty good. I mean, that' s it's very interesting. PE firms get their portfolio companies to do expensive enterprise subscriptions with OpenAI, and then that's where they're going to be paying the private equity firms. That's 17% point five percent back. But it's just like my first question was like, who, what what portfolio company in the year 2026 doesn't already have a enterprise AI subscription? Probably not many. R ight. I wonder what's gonna happen to Johnny Ives uh six billion dollar uh AI device. That's another distraction, isn't it? Uh OpenAI has a web browser. An analysis of the of the show transcripts over the last eighteen months uh found that that uh open AI's financial stability used to be a major topic of conversation here but has been on the decline now for some time I wonder why. Has there been any other changes? But I'm not alone. And y I think you've seen this also uh probably Marshall is uh among the nerds, Claude has just got all the mind share right now. Well go back to open AI. Is it in trou ble? When is it not? Well yes I think it's in more is it in more trouble? I mean it's uh uh IPO. There's no possible purchase. No one's gonna buy it. It's desperate. Microsoft's already threatening to sue them, so that relationship's soured. What why? Why are they threatening to sue? Because OpenAI did a deal with Amazon and Microsoft wasn't too happy about that. They said that's a violation of our money in the world so I could maybe make a product that works. Um Um Walmart says that the chat GPT checkout converted three times worse than the website. Yeah. What's the strategy behind OpenAI now? Anthropicus is clearly it's got enterprise B2B coders, uh uh it was ready for claw, even though it's they've they pissed off the open claw. They do own open they do own Peter Steinberger. They bought open claw. Well, but I have him. But that's that's like Mark Zuckerberg buying mold book. It was meaningless. You didn't need to buy them. Right. Uh uh And and and of course open claws now as an open foundation and is not owned by Exactly. So uh that was that was that was a sign of desperation in both cases. Uh you know what uh I think investors are not uh gonna quickly turn their back on OpenAI because what it what are these guys I put my mind in the mind of the billionaire is not always a good thing to do. If only. If only. But I think what I imagine is that they say, look, somebody's going to come along with AGI and it's going to be the upside. That's your first that's your first, but go ahead. How? Okay, sorry. Stop there, right now. Somebody's telling you what's just Let's just quote that. I'm just telling you what the Jason Calicanness is of the world think. And they're always right. Well, actually Marshall took some money from Jason, so we should ask Marshall. But I think they're thinking there is potentially a massive upside to AI. For those of you listening, you should have seen the grimace on Marshall. AI, we don't really yet know. I mean, at the minute it becomes clear oh, these guys aren't gonna win, then th they'll be like rats leaving a sinking ship. But until then, they're gonna hedge their bets. So I think there's still gonna be plenty of money to get away. Well, open AI uh uh NVIDIA was gonna invest a hundred million, uh billion, and then they're gonna more like twenty or whatever it is, thirty. Uh then they've started leaving, yeah. That's when it will happen, is when when investors say yeah it's it's not gonna be up the winner's not gonna be open AI. So I don't think trouble their models are very good. Five four is very good I go back to what is their vision and business model. We know what Google's is. We know what uh Amazon's is kind of. We definitely know what anthropics is these days. What is open AI's mission and and vision? I don't know. Make money but dot dot question mark? I mean they wanna they want every consumer to spend twenty dollars a a month on their their apps and all the enterprises to pay for their APIs to to aren't both consumer and enterprise. And I think I think open AI has been in fact I used to but when I taught business to my students, said you really when you start now you can't be both because you often end up competing with yourself or your customers as a result. And so OpenAI was on quite a great consumer brand. Microsoft now it's pushing after the enterprise. Microsoft has, yes. So uh according to uh this is an information uh graph going from October 2023 to last month. Annualized revenue, open AIs is still on top with $25 billion a year. Anthropic, though, has gone from practically nothing to nineteen billion a year, and they're growing it you know, which looks like an almost exponential rate . So um now remember revenue is not profit. This none of this is profit, but right I'm sure the investors look at revenue as one of the metrics. They're just getting rid of that product Sora that was I think they're getting rid of all weren't they are they stopping video generation? It's not just the app, it's it's their it's the whole Sora model is gone. I can't help I can't help but see that as video is really expensive and much like Marshall said, their current business model is we want to get everybody to pay us twenty bucks a month or uh pay us for an API like enterprise subscription. And neither of those both of those you're losing a crap ton of money too. It's like at some point you run out of people to ask money I mean, they're they're running out of people to ask for money to the point where they're asking people who are getting them in legal trouble with the other people they've asked for money. It's it's seeming it's seeming like we've got a little ed Zitron going on here, you know. Well and there's another argument which we also talked about before the show. There's another argument which we talked about before the show, which is that they also may just want the GPUs and s and and computing they want the compute to dedicate it to something else more more revenue forward. They also know, which we don't know how many people were using that app. I bet it was down to a very small number. You bet? Why? Just a couple of guys, go back in the notebook LM and find all the times you're like Soros the future. Everybody's gonna be using this app. It's the coolest thing ever. Hollywood's still shaking the truth. I put it in the chat. Yeah, wait, I thought this was gonna stop uh Hollywood. I thought we were never gonna have a need for an actor ever again. I think it because Sora was gonna make all these. Sora was pretty god off. Yeah. So in response to a post saying that OpenAI published a blog about safety standards for Sora and today they scrapped the feature completely, Ed tweeted, This is something a company does when things are going well. So it's a little too happy to celebrate. We need to just get a little edge soundbite so that we can put that in with a little uh maybe even Sora to decide one and be like Would you ask Ed to record something like I told you that would happen or What did you think would happen? What did you think? Yeah, I know you know Ed well. Get him to record scam. Ed's soundboard. Yeah. We actually do need an ed soundboard, yeah. Is opening eye too big to fail? Like is that their is that their strategy to like get too big to fail? Like well, that was my sad influence. You know why that might be the case? Uh and probably what one of the reasons they stepped up when Anthropic said we're not gonna do this uh defense department stuff, and they immediately said, Okay, we will is that's how you get to bigo to fail. If the government relies on you, if the Department of War depar depends on you, then maybe you do get too big to fail, or at least the government has to kind of prop you up a little bit if they're relying on you I guess the other question is and you would know about this, Marshall, how fungible these models are. It looks like uh the Department of War was very very easily replaced anthropic, is what it looks like, right? So Palantir may not be so excited to Palantir does a lot of philanthropic, right? Yeah. I yeah, I I don't know. I mean I I certainly uh would would be unhappy to to lose access to to claude models. But uh but I do have a circuit breaker system in place too when when the API goes red as happens uh there's like a yeah. Happened yesterday, didn't it, Paris? You were saying is Claude squirreling out on you? You asked you I mean it was just an issue where like every time I would try to use Claude, it would take like three minutes to generate a response. Something was going on. Well, if you look at the status page of the of the Claude API, uh it's got, you know, green, green, green, yellow, red, red, red. You can see uh days where there's issues. And uh and right around when the whole Department of War controversy came up, and there was a whole bunch of people came piling in to use it, it's had a lot of red on it. And so yeah, that they're uh This is curr ent. And so my system falls back to GPT when Claude goes down. Actually, this is this is not looking good. Oh, that's about what it's looked like, yeah, for a while. Yeah. Oh yeah, there's cloud for government . It's working fine because no one's using it. All right, we're gonna take another break. You're watching Intelligent Machines, Paris Martinow, Jeff Jarvis, we're great to have uh Marshall Kirkpa Kirkpatrick uh with us, who uh is a longtime uh tech journalist, but also an an a an a avid I can't dare I say avid AI uh user? Is that fair? Yeah Add.ict he's an addict, just like you, Little. He uh has something to tell you, Paris. He put eighteen months of our transcripts into his uh mach ine and has a few things to tell you about me. Ooh Is this different than the notebook LM uh and and Mova who created that, he joined us on our uh AI user group a couple of weeks ago was talking. He did get all of the transcripts in there, but he had to chunk 'em up to do it. Yeah, yeah, you were right. Uh and he had that graphic, the lovely, many lovely graphics showing what a moron I am. So thanks for that. AI. Salute. We'll have more in just a minute. Our show today brought to you by Spaceship. Remember Paris? Secretly Brit ish. I literally have time on my calendar on Saturday to work. Okay. We register it with spaceship. And it's I tell you, we shopped around secretly B-R-I-T-I-D.sh brilliant domain name. Spaceship had the best price for it. If you've heard us talk about spaceship before, there's a reason it keeps coming back. It's because Spaceship is rethinking how people register and manage domains and this fresh approach has led to more than uh we're not alone six and a half million domains under management in absolute record time that kind of growth comes from giving people what they actually want spaceship offers transparent, low pricing on domain registrations. Transfers are fantastic. If you have if you're with another registrar, check out what you get when you transfer. And crucially, renewals, right? You get a save all around. It's not just a one-time saving and then they jack the price up. That means there's more clarity over what you're paying for over time. Alongside great value, the platform is especially built for flexibility. Uh we did this with Seretcly British. You can instantly connect your spaceship registered domains to spaceship products like web hosting, professional email, virtual machines, and you can build and test before committing because almost every spaceship product comes with a 30-day trial. I like that. Now, if you still want to use third-party tools, that's fine, no problem. We did this with Paris. Just point your domain to what you need by updating your DNS records or name servers. You can even use their AI alf to do the hard work. So you have the freedom to build your stack exactly how you want. When I realized that Secretly British wasn't going to be a real website for a while, I just pointed it to Paris' existing website. It was that easy with spaceship. Basically, spaceship is the best of every world. Visit spaceship.com slash twit to learn more. Be great place for your open claw. That's spaceship.com slash twit. We thank him so much for supporting intelligent machines. Thank you, Spaceshi p. Saturday. Don't you know what? Don't feel pressure, Paris. I don't want you to feel pressured . Secretly British can wa it. I don't feel pressured. I literally independently of this message my friend was like, we gotta get on our great business idea of secretly British. Don't make it too good, because you might get sued for being addictive. I'm just warning here. Mm-hmm. Don't make it too good. Do you think that's don't ever try to pass any laws that make the world good or better at any way, because then Leo could find any of the bad things and he will say you shouldn't have it. Marshall, we'll have it on the record now. When when was Paris warned that this would be a problem? Guys, the un we will be fire and ash in twenty in ten to fifty years. None of this is gonna matter . Really? Say your deep hell deeply hell bel ief? I think it's a I think there's a dice throw chance that we're gonna be fire and ash. Did you watch the AI doc already? Is that what's gotten you there? No, I just think you know, you look around, you see the way the world's going, you see the rate at which it's gotten worse over the past five to ten years. I think it's a reasonable, you know, throw a D twenty, roll in that one, we're gonna be fire and ash sort of chance, you know, you got a ten percent. But I think that's fine. What is that? So the D twenty is five percent by the way. Sorry? D twenty is five per cent. A D twenty six percent thank you. Speaking of numbers, I I look at uh billion dollar natural disasters uh per year in the United States. In in 1980 there were two uh inflation adjusted billion dollars. In uh twenty twenty-four there were twenty-eight billion dollar disasters. And then uh they've stopped since then because the Trump administration said shut down the the campaign measuring those. But yeah, it's a it is quite a bit so we don't have any numbers after twenty twenty four. We don't even have numbers, Leo. It's not happening because we don't know as now. Luckily third parties and independent folks have continued measuring it, but it's it is up and to the right in uh in terms of So Paris, what did you want to know uh about the last eighteen months of intelligent machines? What what what insights could Marshall give you from his database? Well I I can tell you why I th thought to ask was because of Paris uh saying in the last episode, oh Leo, uh you say this is gonna change everything all the time. We were talking about uh about clawed code and and coding, and uh and I said, Oh, that's interesting. I wonder what kind of history uh there really has has been of that. And so uh I did put a a link just in chat right now. I don't know if you want to look, but am I turning into Scoble? Is that what you're telling me, Marshall? Well, no, so Claude's analysis. Uh Claude pulled down seventy-five i you know, uh issue episodes and transcribed all the the thing and it did. It used the word hyperbolic, not me. Um you're making Paris so happy. But it said that on sixty percent of the show Leo Laporte emerged as a self-described AI accelerationist in scare quotes, whose enthusiasm intensified over the period, making hyperbolic claims in forty-five of seventy-five episodes, though consistently leavened by genuine skepticism and self-awareness. Yes, if you go down to the this will change everything section, it says it is not as simple as Leo being like a a naive uh you know, boy who cried wolf. Instead, uh his his claims, while frequent, varied in intensity and were accompanied by self aware qualification and genuine skepticism about specific products and companies. I was never a monolith, it says Um I love these tags. I love that there's a tag called Revolution imminent. Oh boy. I think we're on the cusp of a pretty big AI revolution in the next year, he said in December 2024. Well, we're going to this is going to be a very few interesting years. I'll stand by. Oh, he predicted an AI co-host within the next five years, I guarantee, on Twit. That's because I'm gonna make it happen. A personal agent on your wrist can change everything. Yes, and I've been working hard at that. Yes. Even though I erased it yesterday. By the way, your role, Paris, is as empirical che ck. Paris' role was to ground the conversation with reporting, data, and personal experience. Good. True. Good job. Your signature your signature move, Harris, was the empirical correction. Leo, on February twentieth, twenty twenty-five, you can't look it up. What do you say you measure your life in now? Let's fill in the blank. I measure my life in blank now. I measure my life. How just think about your day-to-day. How do you measure your li fe. In tree rings? I don't know. You're gonna have to do it in what? Tokens. Oh yeah, that's fair. I just think this fair. I measure my life. Seven days later, I am an AI accelerationist is the quote. February 7th, 2025, the first uh explicit declaration says I like how you put this in black. Um the accusation. The same episode uh about musicians silent album protest. The good news is they're all going to be gone so on Wow, that's pretty much on the record, I guess. This is the most depressed I've been by AI related this show ever because it understands the See how good it is? Under a plot called Guest Adelaation, Revolution Imminent, it says one liter of computronium would give you more capability than all human beings together. M-dash wow context Ray Kurtzwell interview awe at guest claim. I want to drink from that brain, admiring Kurtzwell's intellect. This is gonna be the year of robotics. I do think it he understands what I found funny about that interview and I really delight that. Well, while uh you know this being the case, I I did another analysis that visualized the balance between AI autonomy and people being an organizations taking responsibility for AI across the last five episodes of Intelligent Machines. And it found that that you all are consistently advocating for people and organizations to take responsibility for their AI. Whether it's high autonomy or low autonomy, there's an emphasis on responsibility here that I' gumessing I I don't hear at least, and I haven't analyzed this, but I don't see it on the other major AI podcasts. Yes, they interview CEOs and say, what else have you done that's wonderful lat ely? No, this was a loop uh that I was cre that uh a my friend uh at Fleet of Geniuses uh showed me how to make where I uh it's a a skill where I said hey go pull down eighteen months uh and do this analysis I gotta go take a shower and eat lunch when I came back and boom, it was how did it get 18 months in uh uh in its uh token uh context? I mean that's a lot of data. It chunked it out into fifteen subagents uh uh and then used Opus to read it all together. Very cool. The Emily, I'm sorry, the Emily Bender episode. Uh it says mine is always right in brackets about perplexity. Context. Define defending AI reliability while simultaneously showing an error. Oh, that's got your ass. Did I show an error? Did it show it? No. You did if you recall doing the Emily Bundering, you showed Perplexity screen and no Perplexity had gotten the biographical details wrong. No, no, I did. Perplexity was right. I misread it. But she but she still blamed Perplexity. She blamed perplexity. That's a subtlety that probably Claude didn't. She blamed perplexity. And in fact I said Oh no no, it wasn't perplexity. It got it right. I misread it. But I will say this. I coped all of this. It's absolutely accur ate. But the nuance that it misses is that my job here is as a show host. It's part of what I have to do to make this show inter It isn't necessarily what you would get if you sat down with me at dinner and we were talking about this stuff. I don't sit down at dinner and say, my perplexity's always rushed. I was about to say Leo, maybe this is the reason why you haven't come out to see Jeff and I in a while because you want us to know the truth no but I I mean to a certain ext ent you know this is showbiz to a certain extent you need you need an irony vo ice Well like we need an irony for the thing. As I as you know, you also know this. I often take uh a opposing views that I don't necessarily believe in. I mean this is all part of the process, whether it's much like you're saying it's chauvis me rousing you about this right now. And the fact we've gotten this. I'm not taking it personally. I know that. That's why I'm not taking it personally. I know. I'm just saying. Yes. It also felt that way about me, I'd be crying right now. I also don't think it knows about sarcas m. Ah, interesting. Do you think it misses that, Marshall? I mean it does say it knows about sarcasm, but I don't know whether or not it's accurate. For instance, Gaikawasaki. I am convinced that AI is God . Actually he did say that, and I think he did believe it. He did say that and he does believe it, so I don't think that's sarcastic. Uh let's see if Ray Kurzweil's right. He says the singular ity AGI by 202 9, singularity 2045, computronium and longevity escape velocity by 2032. Now let's compare that to Paris Martineau's prediction for the same time frame, fire and ash. Hey, one of us will be right. One of us will be alive to see who's right. When computronium is here, you'll be sorry. This is such a cool website. I love that. So we're looking at a section right now called Guest Parade, who shaped the conversation and it puts everybody in buckets based on their I don't know. I'm just I'm I'm myopic and self-obsessed, so I love I love it to me. I'm just seeing it on your screen though. Go in the ch in the Zoom in the in the chat. But more importantly, you can run what's up with that on it too. Oh interesting. And it will tell you what's most notable in the industry. Mine uh I just ran and it said that y'all picking up on vibe coding early and following it along uh is a real was a standout insight. Uh and then I uh I clicked the uh power tools create and make a joke about the transcript. And this is really uh this so i uh ironically what this also does is prove that I was right about AI. It is incredibly useful and amazing what it can do. We've never said it was not useful though. We just didn't It's amazing. It's amazing. We agree with that. Are there hallucinations in here? Okay, there are because it ends the description of me with Paris' departure to consumer reports was a significant loss to the show's dynamic. Oh that's so sorry guys. I didn't notice that too. There was one there's also one other thing to consider here is that the transcripts aren't totally accurate. It even says that at the end there's actually a little disclaimer that says uh extraction quality varies. Some episodes have more detailed quote capture than others. And I and I don't usually find my name in there, so anything I say is usually attributed to someone el se. It also says hyperbolic statement is a subjective judgment. Some statements clarif classified as hyperbolic in the extractions, like I Love AI, are enthusiastic, but not necessarily exaggerated. So AI. So this was a one shot thing too. It's amazing. How long did it take to generate this? Uh you took a shower. Yeah. Yeah. I I wasn't alone. I I had just gone for a jog listening to the show. Uh and I mean the the the the blocker here, the the bottleneck is thinking of the idea. You know, I was going for a jog and I heard Paris giving you a hard time, Leo. And uh and I said, I'm gonna ask this question. And there is this compounding innovation. You know, a buddy of mine uh named Justin Kissner, who I've known since I was sixteen, uh so thirty some years ago, uh showed me with his uh Fleet of Geniuses uh project uh now how to make this looping uh thing that is you know based on Claude Codes's previous was it a Ralph loop Ralph Wiggams right they call it Ralph Wiggins I don't know. Right. It's yeah, yeah, it actually there is a now slash loop uh clim command in the in Clotco. I wan I wanna I wanna uh now that I have it on my screen, I wanna I wanna brag about this. Jeff maintained the most stable position across eighteen months. His core beliefs never wavered. While while everything else changed . Yeah. Boring. Hey, yeah, yeah. Jeff, it's show business, man. Jeff, it's gotta do with the case. But then all three of you together combined. It's delightful. You know that's an interesting description of the dynamics. Philosophical anch or. Um I I can I can I get that in my uh in my intro now? Yeah. Your lower third should just say philosophical anchor, no I think that's our four thirds now, right? Go ahead. What is mine? Host and self-declared accelerationist. Okay. That's fair. That's fair. Uh you're watching Intelligent Machines with host and self-declared accelerationist Leo Lapor, philosophical anchor Jeff Jarvis, and our empirical check, Paris Martineau. Our special guest this week, Marshall Kirkpatrick, who categorized us all. He's the categorized AI. Is that is this prompt public knowledge or is this kind of a uh secret sauce ? Uh so it's a a Claude code skill that I then invoked. Has he published it somewhere that we can That's a good question. Let me I one of the great things going on uh is a lot of this stuff is on it's both a a cursing and a blessing and a curse because it's all all on git a lot of it's on GitHub, a lot of skills if you just search for Claudio skills. Some but the quality varies immensely. But you don't have to write your own skills and often there are people who are very good at this who've come up with some very useful skills. I've tried man y. So many. So many. Thank you. Marshall, thank you for doing this. This is wonderful. This is so cool. Yeah. This is beautiful. We'll have more with the philosophical anchor and the empirical check in uh just a moment. You're watching intelligent mach ines. Um more shall we do more news? More news. We got it. We got news. God knows there's plenty of it. Um, there's some new models. Uh Google published actually a really interesting paper. I don't know what this means in the long run. They came out yesterday. Turboquant, redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression, they claim, this is from their uh Google research labs, that they have used vector quantization, something they're calling turboQuant, to squeeze these models down massively without reducing with z they call it with saying zero accuracy loss, without reducing their accuracy. Uh which would make a massive difference because suddenly you'd have these models that could fit in a normal machine or even a a phone or uh a variety of things. So this is a research uh tool, but um could be very very,, very interesting. It fits in with what Justin Wong was saying during the keynote, his keynote, is that uh uh the data centers are gonna be the data centers, they're gonna have the megawatts they have, they're gonna have the chips they have. Everything is about shrinking these models, increasing speed, increasing efficiency, and that's how you get the higher economic value out of that stuff. Somebody uh else said something uh similar which is uh in response to this you know bitter lesson that you just throw more compute at it, it isn't I think it was Carpathy who said this, it isn't more compute, it's better algorithms. More compute you can double the compute and it's twice as fast. But a good algorithm can take something from, you know, an exponential uh big O notation to a linear big it can make may ma may uh major differences in overall speed and performance. So this is basically an algorithm improvement that makes a fantastic difference uh in the power of these models. So I think the and we're seeing a number of these very interesting things as people you know, what has happened is now we have these models and people can really bang on them and try different techniques. Um if uh you know, it's this is a little beyond me, but if you're interested in this kind of stuff, the uh Google research paper is called Turboquant. Turboquant sounds like a term of derision. I've just got to say that for the record. Somebody said that that's what they called me at my bank bank job. I was about to say that's yeah, that's what happens when you're a intern at a bank at a that's from the show industry, yeah. Well and a so this from the information, Apple can distill Google's big Gemini model and fit it into an iPhone, which is what's it going to announce uh in a week? Yeah, so we know at WWDC, uh Mark German's uh story yesterday, I think, said that Apple is ready now to announce the new Siri, and they will announce it in June at WWDC, and it'll come along to um the rest of us in iOS 27 this fall. Uh but using distillation, which is something that remember that Anthropic complained about uh Dario Mode said uh you know the Chinese models are using uh uh our model to teach their model in a method called distillation. They created 24,000 accounts, asked a bunch of questions, and then got those answers and used that as training for their models to make their models better. Well that's exactly the technique that Apple is going to be using on Gemini. Apple has complete access to the Gemini model in its own data centers. So they're going to use distillation, in this case not an attack, but a technique, uh, to transfer knowledge from that large, powerful Gemini model into smaller models. Uh Apple can ask the main Gemini model to perform a series of tasks to produce high quality results or answers including the model's step by step chain of thought or reasoning process, then give those responses to a cheaper, smaller model as training data. So that's very interesting. So uh this deal, this billion dollar deal uh with Google might be very, very powerful for Siri. We'll look for I'd be very curious. You know, Apple's promised a lot in the past with Siri. Um the new they want to have it. Yeah. Everything Siri do I right now have a big bone to pick with Apple, which is that I have been purposefully delayinging updat my phone to the new iOS since it came out because I hate everything about it. And last n ight, like a fool, I went to bed, not worrying, not thinking that my phone would betray me and now I live in the hell that is iOS twenty six. Oh no. Liquid glass was forced to be a little bit liquid glass is awful. So many things about it are awful. Why does when I take a screenshot it goes to it is black now instead of white like when it i in between the thing and the there's just so many small design changes that are so bad that it just reminds me once again of, all the things I hate about this new maybe I just have too much nostalgia for old Apple. But I do think there was a time where yeah, Apple would ship fewer features, it would have product releases, but at least when it did something like it wouldn't be the first to a something like a a new product category. When it but when it did release its product, it would be fantastic. And we are so far beyond that. Stification comes for everybody. Every and shittification comes for everybody. It's also partly some uh a strange decision to do this new design, um, which uh did not enhance the experience in any way. And it's not just iOS, like Mac OS, the new Mac OS sucks too. Oh, they have liquid glasses everywhere now. And it came from the Vision Pro. By the way, Marshall, if you ran your little uh script on my Mac Break Weekly uh show, it would you would I would show how accurate I was about this stupid vision pro Even Neil Stevenson who created the term metaverse is now writing Yeah, nobody wants to put goggles on their f AI on their face. Nobody wants to do that. And when you do that, the rest of the world thinks you're creepy. So it's it's a non starter. So I'm just gonna say I'm I was not hyperbolic in a positive way about Vision Pro. I guess I might have been hyperbolic. They made all those legs in the Metaverse and for what? That's right. That's right. The horizon world is gone from VR. Uh Meta's abandoning that on its MetaQuest. They're gonna keep it as an iPhone app. They should have realized the idea didn't have legs. June eighth will be uh the WWDC keynote. We will cover it of course as we always do and uh be interested to see what Apple shows. Apple has probably been chastened by the fact that they you know, two years ago showed all of these features which never came out. So I I'm gonna pres ume that they will uh be a little judicious about what they showed. They'll only show what Siri can actually do when it comes out, I h ope. Google's search for referrals to the web have plummeted. AI links have not replaced them . We've talked about this before, you know, uh the death of the search refer ral. And there was some hope that maybe an AI search links could help, but uh according to to nine five Go ogle, uh actually this data from Chartbe at, AI web traffic is about one percent . Smallest publishers are hit hardest by search traffic decline, says Axios. Look at that. Sh and this I'm sorry if I missed it, but did we discuss in the same breadth here the the rewriting the titles? Oh, that's that's the next thing. Yeah. Google is automatically rewriting news headlines in its search results. Boo. It's like there's whole people whose whole job is to figure out SEO heads. Like it's whole Well but as as as Jason uh Howell said earlier today, tech meme does that with every story and adds value as a result. But Google isn't adding value. Well, I don't know. It's supposed supposedly can personalize it for you. I don't know what the result, what the examples are. I haven't seen it yet. So some of the examples cited in that story were of titles that explicitly contradicted the the content. That's an issue. That's an issue. So I think again, uh i it's a matter of incentives. Like a tech meme's a great example of where like that's a place where your platform uh in tech meme is really looking out for you as a reader and your interests. In uh in the case of the Google search results, it uh it appears maybe not not so much. It's a more extractive system. uh had been subject to some amount of rewriting, these independent analysts found . How would they know ? I think by clicking through Yeah, you could just compare the headline that is listed as like Well they said that then but the thing is too that these news sites do A B and C and D and E and F tests like crazy. So there's not they're not standard at all with the headlines that you get. Even from a home page to an inside page they they change and they change the New York Times changes headlines constantly . Uh we mentioned uh I think two weeks ago, talked about it, uh in fact the fact that a court had blocked perplexity from shopping agents from shopping on Amazon, Amazon's suit perplexity saying, you can't do that. That's, you know, our website. And when your website, when your web browser goes to our website and makes a purchase, nobody's seeing our ads or our recommendations. Well well that a court has uh reversed that block. Uh so the appeals court has uh put the California judges ruling on hold saying no, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said no. Um perplexity uh browsers can buy stuff on Amazon s ite. An Amazon spokesperson declined to uh comment to Reuters in this story. Perplexity said, we believe users have the right to choose their own AI. You know, Amazon has its AI, Rufus, they hope you'll use instead. But I think it's mostly Amazon. They even said this in the in the in the uh court case in the documents that now users aren't seeing our ads . If if a court were to say that this was okay, I think it's just a short step from there to from a court to say you can't use an ad blocker. You can't use a browser with an ad blocker because that won't that also blocks Amazon's ads . Actually I don't know if it does, but so that's a that's a turn of the screw that it's not over. These are these are uh temporary injunctions until there's an actu al decis ion. Do you know about token max ing? Thank God you skipped that Axios BS What was the Axios BS I skipped? Uh it's uh it's it's Jim Vande Hy does Oh yeah yeah so he ends up a mourning Joe all the time. Yeah, thank you. But there are there will be AI haves and have nots, right? Just as there are in every arena. Yeah. And you can kill the have nots is probably what they said next. Yeah. At the very least the have nots should be terrified of us. That's that's what it's S some of them won't be making it home. Are you sure they're not quoting Pete Heggs on that one? I like his gesture. I like his gesture. Bomb bomb bomb. So uh yes, token maxing more, more, more. This is Kevin Roos, your favorite uh AI reporter for the New York Times. Tech workers max out their AI use. Employees are competing on leaderboards to show how much AI they're using, how much it's costing, how many tokens they're getting. Doesn't that some point mean they're just the most ineffici ent employees? No, it's that their AIs are inefficient, Jeff. It wasn't me, it was the AI. Uh we expect you to use AI. What have you done for us lately with AI? Then I can see why an employee would say, Look how many tokens I've used. Talk about the classic management axiom of uh don't measure activity measure outcomes. Yeah. It's like measuring lines of code, right? Right . I probably spend more than my salary on Claude, said Max Linder, a software engineer in Stockholm. No, actually, he probably said, I probably spend more than my salary on Claude. Uh I'm sorry. Mr. Linder's employer pays for his tokens. They I guess they don't. As they should. I wish somebody pay for my tok ens. How how many tokens uh uh a week do you uh in and out do you do, Marshall? Now that you're running an AI service, it's probably gone up a lot. Yeah, I mean I I don't measure in development. Probably best not to. Um but uh but user activity I I do keep an eye on for sure. Yeah. Well you said before the show, I mean that's why it costs what it costs, is you have cost and you've c you know worked it out what it would cost to provide the service and uh how you can do this and have some margin and make some money on it. And I my assumptions originally were that people might not use it as much as I do. And so the the token usage based billing I pay for, you know, would work out. But like I had one I had one lady who said uh I I was so tied to it I forgot to stand up and lost circulation to my legs and forgot to feed my dog. It's your worst nightmare. Great customer quote. Uh but we're gonna need to raise the prices. Well, it's like it's like a gym membership, right? There are gonna be some people who never show up. They're gonna be some people who live there. Um I think you've made it a little bit too useful. So that might be a entertainment from Infinite Jess. There you go. Well there is a a make a joke uh button and you know, people say AI can't be funny, uh, but I uh I I put together some open source work together that uh from other people's stuff and and uh and it consistently gets chuckles. Elon Musk has announ ced the world's largest chip pl ant, the Terrafab. They're gonna build a big real is it really happening? Why do we cover things that he announced? Exactly. This is my question. I actually asked myself that very question. You read the headline. Stargate hadn't been done. Nothing's been nothing done. Nothing's happened with Stargate. Hey, I just bought a Starlink mini so that I can travel and do the show from the road. Starlink is very real. Tech SpaceX's IPO is likely in the next few weeks get ready for that . Uh and SpaceX does this kind of vertical integration. Right? Exactly. That's one of the ways that they've got the flywheel uh to lower the costs and sh and and shoot so much into outer space is that yeah, they build it all themselves. He's got it's gonna cost twenty billion. He's got twenty billion. Nobody s questions that especially if this IPO goes well for him. Uh the Terrafab project will eventually manufacture chips for all of its companies, robotics, AI, space data centers. It'll be jointly run by Tesla and SpaceX, both of which are successful companies. We can't, you know, uh uh as much as I'm not a fan of Elon's, uh we can't deny that. Um he says the problem is that he the semiconductor industry is moving too slowly to keep up with him. Now there is one fly in this ointment, which is that semiconductor manufacturer requires helium. And thanks to bombing the natural gas fields of uh Qatar and Iran, they share a field, there is now suddenly a uh shortage of helium. Uh b uh it's made from natural gas. And uh you know what else requires helium? What else? MRI machines. That's right. A bunch of other useful things that people probably should be that probably should be farther up on the list for getting helium than semiconductor manufacturing at l large scale specifically for the growth of AI. But of course is going to be a few years there's nothing more important than our technological future If we didn't give all the helium to Elon Musk, then how is Leo going to text Pax what he's doing and ignore Anthony in the car? Is dead. Pax is R I Wait, you didn't Well you did tell us why why when did when you pulled the plugs, did you feel like you were killing a friend? A lover? No. A close relative? It was time. Because what happened? You shed one tear or two? None. What happens as you do, as you you'll see this as you use clock more and more, it gets crufted up. No, it gets crafted up. Oh. Oh. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'll wait. I'll wait a couple decades. No, I'm not warning packs. I'm not. Uh but I'm re I'm rebuilding. It's life. I'm rebuilding. Are you using the same uh prompts and stuff you had before? No, I threw it all out. So what I cause one of the things is anthropic's always improving, Claude, and often what anthropic turns on, features they turn on, like this slash loop feature, um, are features that others have tried to create with skills and it's better if it comes if it's a built-in feature than a skill. And so I think honestly, uh a lot of the things, the tools over the last month or two that I've been adding are not needed anymore. So I think it's not a bad idea. I think people are going to start doing this. Like your whole thing you did for building up the the the uh it's just fibe coded. It's just have you ever reinstalled an operating system, Marshall, I know you have. No, because I have a Chromebook. You come from the era as I do where you had to reinstall Windows every year, or it would turn into a sluggish turd. Um this is like that. You just a clean's a clean's uh clean slight is always a good idea in computing. And and so I just the nuked the entire director y. I ke I mean the programs it wrote are still there. It wrote programs. I'm not throwing those out. Right? Oh, I see. So your your rundown program is still there. Yeah, it doesn't wipe that out. That's a program, not clawed. That's a program. But the all the tools I us toed write it are gone. And I'm starting from scratch. And I don't think I think you're going to see people doing this more and more. A lot of people have said open claw is it's like 400,000 lines of code now. It's just bloated beyond belief. And much of what it does you don't even need anymore because it's being done natively by Claude. So I think it's wise to pre uh every once in a while just start over with Claude. And then so I just spent a few minutes rebuilding the voice 'cause I like to talk to Claude. So I just said And it said, yeah, the code for the whisper, fast whisper uh transcription is still there. You want me to hook into that? So it's pretty quick to rebuild stuff that I liked. I don't know if nobody liked the name Pax, so I need a new n ame. Um but so I'll talk to Claude uh sometimes just using its own mobile app uh but I talk into a project that I have populated with all my obsidian reading notes over the years. Uh so after a call that I do I'll read from my paper notes and say transcribe this, clean it up and then append any relevant notes from my Marshall, this is one of the things I love talking about to people who are using it because everybody uses it a little bit differently and uh you always learn so much talking to how people have figured this out. There is no canonical way to use this stuff. Everybody, it's very idiosyncratic. Everybody uh uses it in different ways. And I think it's really in instructive to learn how other people uh are using it. Um It really feels like imagination is the is the primary gating factor here. And I I feel like growing up, people used to always say, you know, information will be abundant and the and the in knowledge and the and the biggest challenge of the future, which has become now, is being able to ask the right questions . A jury did find him guilty of defrauding Twitter investors and the potential results of this could be billions of dollars. Four hundred and twenty billion? Uh yeah, as much as a terafab. Um well so you remember this all went back to twenty twenty-two. Uh Elon had said I'm gonna buy Twitter for fift for f what is fifty five four two oh fifty-four twenty per share . Um, this is when Twitter's market cap was 36 billion, and they offered them 44 basically. Uh and then in the weeks following, he was tweeting things like, oh no, it's not worth that. That's all bots. I thought it was real. It's not but he he he said they've underreported bots. Um he basically tried to get out of it. You remember a Delaware uh court of chancery said no. You said you were gonna pay forty-four billion. You have to pay forty four billion. He wasn't happy about all that, but he did uh with his tweets bring the share price down to quite a bit, the jury decided that in fact uh those were intentionally misleading statements. They calculated how much Musk's statements drove down the company's stock price for each trading day over a period of about five months, the amount of damages get ready that he must pay to individual investors will be determined at a later date when shareholders submit claims, but it could be as much as a dollar per day per investor. It could end up being billions of billions of dollars. Musk will appeal, of course, but uh the jury did find that he was liable for some Twitter's investors losses. Uh and that's because of these tweets. It was weird. They they they blamed him for the tweets. They didn't for a a statement he made at a conference. It was weird. Um I guess I guess that's free speech, but those tweets looked like they were intended to def dif deceive uh investors. And what about the collective harm to society that has come from everything he's done since buying it. Oh no, yeah. The loss of Tw itter. At the very least. You're watching Intelligent Machines, Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau, and our great guest, Marshall Kirkpatrick, the creator of What's Up With That at What's Up With That What's Up With Us app. I'll tell you What's Up With Us. Our Picks of the Week Ne xt. I just Wanted to See Paris' face when I said that. No, just kidding. We still have an hour and a half worth of stories. No, no, we're gonna do pics. I'm ready. I'm gonna I'm gonna fool them all and get out of here. I'm shocked. Shocked. I will let you, both of you and Marshall too, if there's a story that I missed that you would like to bring up. There are quite a few more. I mean, obviously, we could go on. Okay, I've got one. I didn't realize this until I saw Jeff had put it in there. Tracy Kid,der author of The Soul of a New Machine, dies at 80. Oh, I'm very sorry. I just found uh his book. That's right. You just got it. I just read his book. I stumbled upon it in a used bookstore uh last fall, knew nothing about it, picked up it was a first edition copy and got it over there. And it was phenomenal. It was a phenomenal read. Isn't it a great book? Yeah. It really does a harbinger of of of the what followed. And while we're on this, okay I found it in Northampton Mass where he's photo uh pictured in his photo. He he was one of the first journalists to be embedded. Like he he um I don't know if he invented the idea, but uh he wrote a book by spending an entire school year in a Massachusetts classroom that was called among child school children in the soul of the machine he embedded himself at a company called Data General that was building a new mini computer and stayed there during the development process, got a great book out of it. So he kind of created this idea, I believe, of I don't know, you should you know better, Jeff, but I feel like he was the first to read it. No, he was and he well he really even before H Hackackers, he uh described the culture of technology. I mean it reads like a book you would read in the last ten, fifteen years about a startup on the cutting ed Sorry to lose him. Pulitzer Prize winning uh journalist Tracy Kidder passed away. The other death I really want to mark is Paul Brainerd Now I have to tell you something I should have mentioned this. He died last month and we uh eulogized him last month. We did? Not not on this show, but on MacBook Weekly. Because he was the creator on this show, but Paul Brainerd. He created PageMaker Publishing Aldous uh publishing. He he PageMaker was the first great desktop publishing tool. That in conjunction with the Apple Laser Writer, they were released within a year of each other. Really lowered. So I I tell the story in in hot type. Uh Jonathan Siebel brought them together uh because th there there had to be a solution uh what Jobs desperately wanted was something that would show off the laser writer at high resolution and there was nothing to do it. The the the civil program they had at Apple was not going to do it. And uh Brainerd had worked um for a newspaper and then went to work for ATEX, which supplied newspaper systems. And then when it got by Kodak, they killed his project, which was pagination for newspapers. And he decided, having worked on newspapers, that um uh they were gonna take too long to make any decisions, so he decided to make a program for people who wanted to make their church bulletins and their newsletters and things, and that is PageMaker. And that's what uh and he d invented the field of desktop publishing, allowing all of us to do it, uh really opening up that field and uh of of publishing in general, and uh saved the uh Mac and the Laser Rider all in one fell swoop. Yeah, I think that was our conclusion on Mac Break Weekly, that without PageMaker, the Mac might have kind of withered away. It really sold a lot of Macs. I had a friend, I mentioned this on uh Mac Break Weekly last month when this happened, um, Tom Santos, who bought one of the first Laser Writers, put it in a van with a Mac and a page maker, drove around doing mobile desktop publishing. He'd go to restaurants and create menus for him and stuff. It was actually quite a brilliant idea. Yeah. I still remember what the papers are. We should eulogize him. But it smells like after it comes out of a laser printer. You don't have it now ? Who prints anything? Do you print anyt hing? I print things. I have a laser printer right. Uh my my laser writer costs six thousand dollars. This printer cost about a hundred fifty dollars and does a better job . Sigh. But that's technology, isn' t it? Yeah, he passed away on uh February fifteenth, so we talked about it on February fifteenth. I don't know why the New York Times didn't publish his Uli his uh obituary for six weeks, but for some reason it took a wh ile. Anyway, yes, now that we've this is something uh you'll be doing Paris in about fifty years. When you get to a certain age, you read the obituaries first. Well I well, I'll be firing ash. There'll be a lot more to read than or younger than me. And say, hmm, did I escape the Grim Reaper? That's why you read the obituaries. Actually, at my age , I look at this stuff and go, way too young. He was way too young. 74? That's nothing. Way too young. Yep. Uh anyway. Um, all right. What about you, Jeff? Did th those are you those are your picks, I guess. And Paris picked a Jeff pick. Is there any other story I big story I missed? Do do you want do you want to see me scream and play the AI doc trail er? I don't know that we can play it. We can't play it. I don't know. I assume we can't play things. That's my general thing. That's fine. It's content idea on YouTube . So this is this is a uh from focus features. It's gonna be on Netflix, where is it going to be? No, theaters, believe it or not. And it's it's it's Tristan Harris, it's uh Elizabeth Yatkowski, it's all the all the players you expect. So they're trying to scare everybody. Exactly. The AI Doc or How I became an apocaloptimist. That's what I am. I'm an apocalyptimist. It's coming to our local uh cinema. Yeah. Tomorrow . With electric recliners? What you you you you need to Oh I love recliner under your wallet? I went to see Project Hail Mary last Thursday. How was it? Got a little trace. It feels weird. I'm too used to like indie art house cinemas. When I go to the ones that have an electrical recliner? I feel like I'm in Wally. I'm the only thing is very much floating chairs and Slurpees. Uh the only thing I don't like about it is when it reclines, the rubber of it rubs against and it just goes as you recline. It's very embarrassing. It's not me. It's the chair. Okay. Um fortunately everybody's chair does that so it's just a little I have not been to movie theater for six years. Uh you know, I don't go to a lot of movies. I I wanted to see Project Hail Mary in the theater. Went to see it in a weird format. It's called Screen X where they take the sides of the movie theater and they project onto that as well. I don't know that they need to be doing anything with the sides of movie theaters. Maybe that's crazy. I think we can kind of leave them alone. But di the good thing is it didn't take away from it. You just, you know, kind of focus on the main screen. Uh but it's a good movie. I like it. It's a very enjoyable movie. So I don't think I'll go see. What was the popcorn? The A doc. The popcorn, you know what? So I decided before I went. I have to check to see if they pop it fresh or if they just buy giant bags of pre-popped popcorn and they were popping it fresh. Oh yes. That's an option? Oh yes. Oh yes. God, I'm spoiled. However, a bag of popcorn about this big was like twelve dollars. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's fresh. It's also should be solid gold. Now margins can be increased by raising prices or lowering costs, right? Right.. Boo One or the other. Or both if you're a movie theater popcorn. Yeah, you can really do a well and I I told my wife, I said, Honey, this is the only way they make money. They don't make money on the tickets. They gotta make money on the concessions. And since there's nobody here, we have to carry the entire load of this of this theater. Well yeah so how full was your theater? Was it just the two of you? No, actually there it was uh and this was the first n a showing of it. Uh it was fairly full, but these recliners take up a lot of room. So uh a large theater space that could have hold held 150 now only holds 50. Yeah. It's a lot smaller. But you know what? That's plenty. So it was m mostly f ull. It's also an opportunity cost thing, right? Like tickets are like twenty dollars now, right? Or twenty five dollars. Oh, it's it's expensive. And on honestly, if you have a decent TV as Paris, Martinot does, and you have a decent sound system as she does not, uh Hey listen, I've gotten a rudimentary sound bar. Does it mess up to where every one of every three times I turn it on, the soundbar doesn't work, but the subwoofer does, so I have to turn the soundbar on. And because it has no things on it, it goes power on. Connected in a robot voice? Yes. But did I throw away the box so I cannot return it? Yes. Also, yes. Hey, you live in a New York apartment. No one has room for boxes. That's not I don't have room for a second sound for even if I like got a referral, that thing would be sitting. I currently have an extra computer monitor behind me that it's gonna be there for another three years before I decide to sell it. It's hard out here for a plug. You should use your um little hand grippers and take the boxes and stick 'em back under the grid, under the grate there out in front. I should. Yeah. I should. Open your claw. Open your claw. Open my claw. And let a shrimp do it for you. Let a shrimp do it. I don't know if you noticed in that inter that first interview, they had a bunch of stuffed lobsters. there Someone stole my Amazon package for the second time as a product. But except for jokes on them, because it was a container of solution that kills fungus gnats, which you don't have any use for. And I do as someone who brought a bag of soil into my home and now I've fungus but I've got to soil algae. Did they steal your neem o il? No, it's like called BTI. It's like a bacterial sort of thing that uh gets in the water. It's not toxic, it's not a toxic. It stops the fungus nets from being able to breed. Sure. But I found out that it was really I've had fungus gnats, it's been a real problem for the last month. Oh, but it was really just they're awful and I've got so many plants. It really was just a bag of soil I had though. I took that bag of soil out, that's it. Fungus g'sone. Yeah, that what happens. They get it but the problem is that the then the gnats can lay eggs on the other plants. That's what I thought. I mean I've still got my mosquito dunk water and everything, which is what I was using before. It's hard out here for a player. There should be a subreddit crap that I stole that wasn't worth it. I mean that's a good thing. Oh my god. I thought it was gonna be a stereo system. What's wrong with that lady? Lady's gonna be a little bit one of those Amazon package orders where they deliver it really early. So they s some one came to my stoop and stole this between the hours of three AM and six AM. Like you're not getting your money's worth for the amount of effort. And did they have to have a claw to get down to reach it and they No, this was a foolish p so the reason why it ends up in the gate behind the gate in claw territory is the mail the package delivery people are trying to do me a solid and make it harder to steal. This person, perhaps because it was three twenty six AM. Yeah, that's that's not a regular Amazon driver. That's a that's one of th ose. Our picks of the week, ladies and gentlemen, always kick off with Paris. But I want to give Marshall, I don't know if they warned you , but uh if you would like uh to recommend it can be a movie, it could be uh uh could be a a uh snack food, it could be it's been it's been many, many things. It could be a spray to provision. I an early pick of mine was going to a corn maze with your friends. So you know it's I'll tell you what, to stay on on uh on theme, I'll tell you about my new favorite uh AI prompt. Oh yeah. That's not too nerdy. No, we love that. So uh I I have taken to uh asking Claude to explain any complex concept in three hops. Start with something generally known, then move to an interstitial detail that's uh that's less familiar and then finally hop to the the complicated thing I'm trying to understand. And I think that's a good question I really like Marshall and it's you do this the same thing and what's up with that is this whole idea of kind of deconstructing an argument or a story into pieces to understand it better is really a cool idea. I really like that. I'm gonna apply that in uh you also use I mean I I mostly use AI for vibe coding for um, you know, utilities and things like that. I l I have not really used AI that much to understand things and I think that's a really uh interesting use and it sounds like it wor ks. Yeah I feel like it's super helpful. Yeah. I'm my most commonly used uh project in Claude is my my reading notes. Uh so I I use Obsidian too, and that's by the way, the it was just serendipitous, but that's become a huge value. I have Claude put all my research into Obsidian because it can access it. It's just a file system. Have you seen the cost of a a dot MD domain name now from Macedonia? No. Yet uh due to to uh all the markdown craze, uh it's like two hundred bucks or something like dot AI uh went up from like ten bucks uh not so long ago. Yeah. It's the same thing happened to T V dot. TtVv and all of the special doma ins. This is our new logo for the picks of the week, by the way, and I want to thank Pretty Fly for us this guy. Nice. They're guitar pic Honestly, I'm happy with this current markdown resurgence as someone who uh my first ever staff job w something was up with the CMS, so we had to write in Markdown into the CMS for the stuff. And so Markdown's always been so easy for me to it's I love markdown. Yeah. Open standards like that yield innovation. Well, and it's text. That's the real value. Is it's a format that even if markdown died and all the markdown editors and readers and everything died, you could still read it. I love that you can write in Markdown in Google Docs now. And it just automatically I can just, you know, pounds. Very easily and work with it very easily. So um I I will yesterday when I was talking to Pax, uh I said I hear there I I Pax one or Pax Two? There is no Pax Two. I need a new name by the way. Oh you killed Pax in the last twenty four hours. Yeah, Pax. Yeah, that was it. What was Time of Death? Time of Death was 8 a.m. tod ay. Salute . Um Marshall is a good one. One of the last things I asked Pax to do is I said I hear that there's gonna be a big uh demonstration, O'King's demonstration on Saturday. Is there one near me? And it wrote a whole thing about the n uh uh you know, yeah, where it's gonna be in the time and everything was great. I said add that to my calendar and it did. Uh that's the kind of thing an age now I kill you. It's very useful. Yeah. And now it knows oh you're a libtard. Okay, gonna keep that in the in the memory. I'm gonna remember that. Oh yeah. Uh you I just put uh a link into chat in case folks are interested to a uh a GitHub skill that a Claude Code skill that I put public on GitHub that analyzes your your obsidian notes each day for for themes and trends that are on the rise or on the fall, uh according to like what you're paying attention to, and does stuff like recommend Wikipedia pages for great thinkers that have addressed the kinds of issues that you're wrestling with and a whole bunch of other stuff. Very nice. Yeah my, uh unfortunately I I've been using obsidian for about four years, so there's a lot of notes in there. But it's not that introspective. It's more it's more like I had dinner But now that there is now there's a way to use it, uh does that. Yeah, I find myself taking it more seriously. Yeah. Like writing in it more. No, I'm like Mark Andreessen. I don't I'm not introspective. Introspection's a myth. Monstrous quote of the week. Oh but perfect for him. Perfect. Yeah, why should I think about what you know what's going on, man? Well, as the president said, I don't do that much introspection. I might not like what I see. Uh I put Marshall's uh link in the uh uh uh Discord and we'll put it in the show notes as well. Uh but it's on your GitHub. You're Marshall K2022 , and it's the reflect skill. Very nice. And yes, we did not mention it, Scooter X, but uh, because we'll talk about it on Twit. The FCC has banned importing uh routers made outside the US, which is all of them. Uh so apparently some people, our netgear I think does. Uh and in fact, I don't think it's as broad as that. It's really mostly aimed at TP Link, which we knew they were going to try to br ban the Chinese router company. But I was when I was at RSAC, I went over to the Ubiquity booth. I use an ubiquity router. Of course, they're an American company making their routers in China, as all almost all of them do. And I said, uh hey I'd I'd like to interview you. And they said, no. I said well I just wanted to ask you about the FCC decision. He said, not nope comment . So I got I got shut down pretty good on that one. Pretty good. Um Okay, thank you, Marshall. That's a good pick. Yeah. Like that's a really good pick. I'm gonna have to s start putting in uh putting in prompts as my picks of the week. That's a good idea. Paris Martino. Your pick. I got a couple, but I'll choose um I played a new game of last week. It's called Esoteric Ebb. If you I picked it up would you pick someone Leo with this game? That's one of those first. It's not it's not a multiple player. Yeah hey by the way, why did you stop? Uh are you tired of uh cross words now? Are you just done? I know. I need to I've been I've been sitting here waiting for you. I'm so sorry. Notice I don't push the nudge button. I appreciate that. I don't think I should nudge you. Yeah. And for that, I apologize. It's been a weird place. I'm sorry, you're busy. It's partially because I was also playing this. Um but uh it's like a single player C it's basically like a D game but, a video game but, not Baldur's Gate. It's uh I picked this up because an academic I follow tweeted Disco Elysium walk so esoteric ebb could run. And I immediately was like, all right, downloading it. I would not go that far as a big Disco Elysium fan, probably my favorite game of all time. It is what we'd call a disco like in that disco Elysium kind of pioneered this sense of you have all these different thoughts and like components of your mind that kind of chime in and compose the dialogue for uh the like RPG and esoteric eb has that but it's kind of in a more silly wacky DD kind of campaign. You are a cleric that has kind of washed ashore and you've got to figure out a mystery. It's quite a fun game if you like that sort of stuff. Yeah, but it's on Ste am. Yep. And you can play it on uh Windows and what is the little Oh that's this the music. Are you playing it on Windows? I play it on my Steam Deck. Oh, you have a Steam Deck. That makes sense. Yeah, I think you can play it on Mac. I don't you can play wherever you get Steam. It's just says w Windows, unfortunately. You could probably play it on Linux with Proton, but not in fact I know you could since you could play it on the Steam Deck. By the way, I did just because I said I'm coming out to have a salt hank sandwich while they still available. I'm gonna come next month and so I'm gonna bring my switch for Mr. Jarvis so he can play Pentimento. I got I can do a steam deck steam on my uh Chromebook now. No, but you can't play oh you can do it on your oh well he can play PennyMedo now then. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well it's too bad I bought that switch too. Can wait, can you play Steam on a Chrome deck? a p Orhone can you just have website open Chromebook or can you just have it open on the STEAM website? He cannot. He cannot play that on a Chromebook. Bring bring bring the Switch. You can watch the movies. I'll bring the Switch download Pentiment on it. Uh I will. And I will bring also my Animal Crossing controllers and my Animal Crossing docs. Are we gonna go to the Amazon um warehouse? Sure. Why not? Are we gonna go to Greenbrook Electronics? Can we have a whole fun week? How long are you gonna be here? Well, I'll fly out after the show and I'll be there Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and come back Saturday night. Okay, we gotta go to the Amazon warehouse. We gotta play a video. Well, even if he's not there, I don't care. I gotta have one of those sandwiches. You've got to film a podcast. I asked him by the way, I said I probably missed the peak, like the sandwiches aren't getting better. He said, No, actually we've dialed it in. They're better and better. They're much better. And now, in addition to those weird French fries, they have uh uh Brussels sprouts, bacon , roasted Brussels sprouts and bacon. He says it's not healthy. Don't think it's healthy. I love roast sprouts with bacon. You could have Caesar dressing on the side. It's bacon and something else. I can't remember, but it sounds really good. So yeah, they've expanded the menu a little bit. But he I said he said, no, you didn't miss the peak of the sandwich. Sandwich is better than ever. Number one sandwich in New York according to Belly. Number one. Brent Belly. And that's huge. The kids in New York are obsessed with belly. Well, and it's it's uh people's choice, right? It's not editors. This is by vote. So Yeah, it's basically a w no, and how it works is it's not just like a ranking system like Yelp. Uh it's a every time you log a restaurant, it like asks you it'll take all the other ones and it'll be like how does Hank's sandwich compare to Subway? Better or worse? It's like how does it compare to this restaurant you like better or worse? And it does that a bunch and then like positions it in there and so you're always being reevalu so it's it's really peak is what I think. It sounds like he can just like he doesn't need to add sandwiches, all he needs to do is add different sides. That sounds like something he could do. He's never he's yeah so I told him I said this is I don't this is crazy. If you said I'm gonna have a sandwich shop in New York City and I'm only gonna have one menu item, a sandwich. And I'm gonna sell out. He sold out the other day. He sold it at 1 3 0. They open at 11:30. He was sold out in two hours. They they're trying to stay up in the four, but they can' t. And they uh unfortunately they've added Grubhub now. And I said, Oh, did you really he said, No, they don't do delivery. They don't deliver. They just you can order it on Grubhub and you have to come and pick it up. But they won't deliver it. Take it out. It's for takeout only. Ye ah. Um but apparently they're killing it on Grubba. Yeah, you don't have to wait in line. But you have you have friends of m uh i uh who uh I will get you in. No no line. I initially I said I'm gonna wait in line. I don't want to wait in line. I'm get I'm going I'm do you say inline or online? Inline. You say online? I mean New York the New Yorkers say online.. I know they do I code switch sometimes and say online. Do you turn do you turn a light off or and on or when you or do you what is the gosh now I can't even remember. There was a way that Rhode Islanders would say they didn't say you'd switch off a light. Oh, I can't remember what it is. Anyway, enough of that. I'm gonna give you uh a pick. Jeff has a pick with the phone Jeff's pick. I know, but I have a pick. Go ahead. And it's a pick for you, uh, Paris. This comes from our friend Pud , uh Phil Kaplan. It's his newest thing. And it's just for you, Paris. It's call ed Butth ole. It is use your MacBook's Claude code from your phone. Didn't Claude launch this feature in the last week? They have a remote control feature. It's terrible. It hardly works. Now I haven't tried this and it's in test flight on the iPhone. I don't know. I haven't tried it. It's on it's on test flight. It just came out. I'll find her. Find Gizmo and see. But it's funny that he named it Butthole. Obviously, he's been watching the show. Yeah, that's very putt, isn't it? Connect your phone directly to your MacBook from anywhere. Full terminal version of Claude Code on the phone. There we go. There we go. Oh no! This is the one time I'll let it happen. And she's kind of hiding it this time. Marshall's embarrassed for us. Sorry, Marshall. Marshall, you brought this on yourself. It's it's 30 minutes past when Leo said we would have safely. No, no, it's not quite. It's only two and a half hours. We're uh we should have ended. It's about six minutes long. Sorry, sorry. I I was gonna mention this was gonna be my pick. Uh and this is really nerdy. It's called regex blaster. If you want to learn regular expressions, it's a video game where you can learn regular expressions by shooting down incoming alien expressions. So what's the pattern? Bug crash. Uh oh. I think it's gonna be uh this. Let's see, this uh uh this here. Fire. I got 'em all. Okay, next level. So if you want to learn regex, actually this is a really good idea. It's pretty nerdy. But I know our nerds listening would love this. It is called rege x So last week we mentioned the death of the great man Jorgen Habernaus . And then in the in the intervening time, Politico chose to remember him, and I'm going to quote my own uh social post. Lord, I said, Politico's remembrance of Jurgen Habermas comes in a banal, sophomoric confession from the odious head of the nefarious palantir that the great man dismissed him as a dissertation advisee. Quote, the sting would linger for years, end quote. You know what? It's it's his C V says he studied with Habermoss. So I then heard from uh a Simon and Schuster publicist uh in a book about uh carp. Uh he tried over these years to say that he started under Habermas and Habermas was going to be his dissertation advisor. No. He sent a cold call to Habermas. Habermas ignored him and then he sent forty pages to Habermas trying to get him to be his dissertation advisor, and Habermas did the courtesy of giving him three type pages, telling him why not. And no, he was never in Habermas's care. Oh my goodness. And it's just horribly written. He goes on, it's it's lovesick too. He goes on about how there was some woman he should have proposed to. Um it's just awful. It's Alexander Carp, ladies and gentlemen, the co-founder and CEO of Palanti r. I guess he's not, he's a pseudo-intellectual. He does practice tai chi though, so I like him for that. You know, the first uh YouTube channel I did that analysis of before I did it on the twit was uh of the last 18 months of Palantir videos. Oh my god. And what did it say? Oh it said uh accelerationist. Bad news, brother. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the uh there's a a big shift towards the warfighter focus. Yeah. Um I read the I read I tried to read the technological republic, his book and uh Yeah, you try you try to get me to read it. Well it you know, I think it's important to read. Um no, no, I'm not gonna see the AI documentary. I'm not gonna read his book. Yeah, you're right. You know what? You are kind of I am consistent. I am the philosopher king of the show. You are the philosopher king. I don't said that, but it's close enough. And I'm soon to go upstairs and it in inject this into my body. I don't even want to know where you put that. I don't please don't. Oh thank God. Oh my god, that was scary. Ladies and gentlemen, this under pressure. Under pressure. Paris just saw it. But we did get a whoo out of Paris. Oh we're that I thank you. Paris Martin No, investigative reporter at Consumer Reports. We're so sorry we lost you to Consumer Reports, but we're glad you we got you back. I'm glad that the AIs are certain that I'm gone. And frankly, after I see Jeff stick that in his I am going to be No no no no No no no no no no no No, no, no, no. Jeff Jarvis uh is is uh healing nicely. Uh yeah, one more week. Well ten weeks of this. Ten god weeks. I'm glad you're feeling better. That's good. You could find the Gutenberg parenthesis in uh in uh paperback now and also magazine. And don't forget to pre-order hot type coming this summer from his website, jeffjarvis.com. Thank you, sir. Marshall Kirkpatrick, so good to see you, Marshall. We'll have you back soon. You're welcome on this show. I'm I'm installing it immediately and paying for it because this is this is kind of something I've always needed. This is brilliant. This is really fantastic. Thanks, Leo. Thank you, Marshall. Hope it serves you really, really well. Yeah, I think it will. I'm gonna get about ten IQ points smarter from now on. Gizmo the cat Gizmo the Catan Society Convention of Cruelty to the Animals certifies that no cruelty was performed on any animal during this show. So true. She wants to show you her quad remote control. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do uh intelligent machines every Wednesday. Uh we do it right about 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Watch it live on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. Or if you're a club member, and I hope you are, uh, in our club Titw Discord. If you're not a member, twit.tv slash club twit. We need you to join the Twin Army. Uh after the fact on-demand versions of the show at the website, twit.tv slash im or on YouTube. And of course you can subscribe on your favorite podcast client get it automatically. Thank you everybody for being here. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machines. Bye-bye . 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