OpenAI Acquisition of Podcast Network

It's time for Twit this week in tech. Paris Martin knows with us. Ian Thompson. And from the Wall Street Journal, Berber Gin, we're going to talk about Anthropic and OpenAI. All the chatter about their IPOs. Anthropic says uh they fig ured out a way to keep AI from blackmailing you. Just tell it it's bad. And what religion is AI? Apparently, we know now. What's coming up next on Twit. This episode is brought to you by Out Systems, a leading AI development platform for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps and AI agents on the OutSystems platform. And with good reason. Build, run, and govern apps and agents on one unified platform. Innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control. Trusted by thousands of enterprises worldwide for mission critical apps, teams of any size and technical depth can use out systems to build, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents quickly and effectively without compromising reliability and security. Without systems, you can accelerate ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading AI development platform that is unified, agile, and enterprise-proven, allowing you to build your agentic future with AI solutions deeply integrated into your architecture. Out systems. Build your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/slash twit. That's outsystems.com/slash tw it. Podcasts you love from people you trust . This is Twit ch This is TWIT This Week in Tech episode 1083, recorded Sunday, May 10th, 2026. A whole separate class of squiggles . It's time for Twit This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Hello, Paris Martineau. Hello. It's good to see you. No, I made her because her friend from uh a uh previous employer, who shall remain nameless, is joining us for the first time. Berber Jin is here, now doing great work at the Wall Street Journal. Hi, in fact, we've been quoting your stories. Hi, Berber. Hi, guys. Welcome. I thought if I had a friend on, it wouldn't be so uh so weird. You know, and it's very always important that whenever you're about to log in to the Zoom for uh recording of this week in tech to get a text from someone being like, Is this show It's gonna be sure. And I think that's fair because we would scare everybody off if they knew what they're saying. He better not say because then like it's a show of an indeterminate amount of time. Yeah, right. We don't know how long it's gonna last. Could it could be any amount of time? Uh and also with us Ian Thompson from uh the beautiful Tech Finitive, where he writes the view from the Valley Column. Good afternoon. Good to see you, my dear friend Ian. Yes, indeed. I do miss Beth Luma, but you know, Zoom will do. I know. You're in San Francisco. Berber is for the week in New York because he's it's Mother's Day today. Thank your mother for letting us borrow you this evening. Uh Paris, did you call mom? You probably did. Oh, I not only called mom, I FaceTimed her, I got some flowers delivered. Uh you know, oh wow, that's maximum brownie points. Yeah, I really was stunting on them this week. Nice. Well, we're taking Lisa out to dinner tonight, so that that's gonna be the Mother's Day. Yeah, being in Hawaii helps as far as Mother's Day goes. I'm pretending the whole trip was for Mother's Day, just for Mother Day. Yeah. So Berber, you've been doing a great job covering uh Anthropic and OpenAI and particularly their IPOs. Uh and I thought before we go too far, I'd like to check in with you on the status. First of all, do we know when those IPOs will happen? We don't know. Um I think we've report a bunch of outlets have reported that they're both aiming for IPOs by the end of this year, but they've been very coy and secretive , I think, in part because they don't really want the other company to know their exact um but I think they're both trying to go out as fast as they can. They're bitter rivals. Who do you think is there one uh that you think is uh fast or farther along in the process than the other, or are they both kind of neck and neck at this point? I think anthropic is probably in a better position than open AI. Um To deal with like a trial, they have all the management turnover, they're kind of pivoting the business right now . Um and then yeah, and I guess like Fiji Simo, who is kind of the de facto CE O there. She is on medical leave still. So I feel like they just have a lot more issues that they have to get through, whereas Enthropic feels a bit more kind of put together. And I think right now they have a better kind of growth story. Um but who knows? We'll s things can change week to week. So your most recent uh article this this uh past week in the Wall Street Journal was about OpenAI spinning off their robotics and their hardware divisions. They closed Sora . They're trying to strip it down. In fact, it it seems to me they're trying to look more like anthrop ic . Yeah, I I think that's that's one way to look at it. Um 'cause I feel like last year like the kind of vision for the company now is very different than it was a year ago. Um I think a year ago , opening, I thought it was gonna be a huge consumer company. And I think now maybe more of an enterprise company first And they have all these like side bets that I think Sam kind of greenlighted on a whim that now they're trying to figure out what to do with. Some of them is zone investments, right? Yes. And that's a little sticky. That's that's something the market may not like too much either. Yes, he has a lot of conflicts of interest. Um, which I'm sure Conflicts of interest in a tech CEO? Who guess? Well, but uh but you know, that was we Paris and I went back and forth over the uh Ronan Farrow reporting and then in the New Yorker about how untrustworthy Sam Altman uh was. My only point in that argument was, well, so all of them are uh somewhat untrustw orthy. I mean, he's competing in a space where Elon Musk is a CEO. So he he looks better than anybody compared to that. But uh do you think that that also is gonna harm the uh IPO? I feel like that that article might in fact have been uh almost planted by Elon. It was it was so helpful anthropic it was so helpful to them. You mean the story on the conflicts of interest? Yes. Yes. Well, yes. It was not planted by Elon, but it was helpful for I mean it it is interesting because the trial against Mus k, which I actually had not been following as closely as I probably should have, but I belatedly realized last week that a lot of it, the unjust enrichment claim, like I think one thing the Musk side is trying to do is to say that Sam , even though he didn't take any equity in the company, tried to enrich himself through all these deals he's done between OpenAI and his own portfolio companies. Um well also also Greg Brockman who didn't didn't put any money into OpenAI as we found out in the trial worth 30 billion dollars. Yes. Well that yes. And he did not do a great job when he was processing. No, he did not. Did any uh did you all read the back and forth text messages between Sam and Mina Marathi during that Thanksgiving period where Sam was uh temporarily ousted as CEO? It was hysterical. I mean, I've read some of them. I don't know if I've read all of them, but some of them have wormed their way into my brain just memetically. I think that there's the one where uh one of the masks like, how's it going? The discussion with the board. Uh it's like uh directionally bad or directional good. Tech tech ies love to use the word directionally. Directionally good, directionally bad. Well let me uh somebody uh let's see. This is uh I mean they've been live streaming the audio from the court case. Let me play it. This is Daniel Green took the texts from the day Sam Altman got fired and set them to kind of as if it were Hamilton. I wish I could play it for you, but you'll have to just imagine it. So what do you what do you think is the impact of this, Berber, on the IPO, on the future? It really feels like if Elon got his way , he'd put open AI out of business. Yeah. I mean I I my gut says that OpenAI will get through it. Um it's it's kind of weird because I guess the jury is the one that decides um whether OpenAI and Sam are guilty or not. And um so I don't know, I guess it's hard to really know what I'm saying, we don't know what a jury's gonna do with this, yeah. Right. But I but but I think m Elon's claims uh he kind of I think OpenAI did a good job of showing that Elon was fine with turning open AI into a for profit um until he realized he wouldn't be the one in control. Right. So yeah, so my gut says that open AI will be will be able to get through it, but um I mean there's still a lot of twists and turns, like Sam is gonna testify later this week, Satya, Nadella , um, and you never know with the jury. Yeah how they are gonna decide yeah um they also it's a great soap opera though we're yeah we're fortunate to have such a good soap opera why do you think that I mean obviously opening eyes ambitions to go back to something you said earlier were originally to kind of make it as a consumer um company. They had obviously all the kind of economy of scale sort of thing going on. Why do you think that that those plans seemed to kind of fall through and that they seem to be pivoting to a more anthropic like enterprise model now. Yeah, I don't know. They expected they expected to get to one billion weekly active users by the end of last year. They still haven't announced hitting that milestone. Like I feel like they've kind of been kind of stuck at the 900 mark for a long time. So I don't really have a great answer because I guess all the codex coding stuff is growing super fast, but it is I feel like it is kind of underexplored why consumer adoption has kind of I don't want to say like plateaued, but not grown as fast as OpenAI thought it would. I I think Gemini did take out take take away a lot of users. Um but I just feel like a lot of people use ChatGPT but don't feel the need to pay for it. I was just saying, I think that that's probably the big difference is you can have nearly a billion consumer, like general users, but if they're not willing to fork over at least twenty bucks a month for it, what does that really matter? Well especially if you lose money and all the inference they're doing. Well this is it. I mean every every time somebody comes in and and you know does it for free then chat GPT loses money. Um Barrish has made an excellent point there. Right. Um I mean from speaking to coders, Claude is the way to go for software. Um Gemini is terrible at fact checking, which is odd for Google. But yeah, it's it's a very strange situation at the moment. It's going to be interesting to see how the IPOs hang out. Actually, I've uh Paris will laugh at me now. Recently switched from anthropics uh opus models to uh chat . You've abandoned your wife, Claudia. I abandoned my wife. Claudia as she's known. I did cla No, I don't call her Claudia. That's sorry, is it Claudia? I call well I call her him Kenobi. It it's really it her it uh uh Kenobi and uh and uh now uh I am using uh different agent model called Hermes, which I really like, and that is I call Quicksilver. So quickie quickie for short. Oh boy . I know it's sad. I'm just gonna sort out a quickie. It doesn't sound good, mate. It doesn't, no. Actually, as I think about it, I called it Quicksilver. It decided to call itself quickie. I don't honestly think it knows what that means. And I'm not gonna tell it. I should hope not, but I promise uh the big actually the big story of the week was not an AI story it was a hacker story uh canvas which is very widely used in colleges and schools uh as uh you know blackboard software was breached and that meant that more than two thousand schools just turned it off in many cases during final exams , uh the uh the the two hundred seventy-five million students this is a shiny hunters breach, right? Shiny hunters uh a social engineering breach . They actually use phone calls usually to make these uh breaches. 275 million students and faculty, 9,000 educational systems. Here's the uh screenshot from Krebs on security. Rooting your systems since twenty ninete en . Um, if any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contacts us privately at TOX to negotiate a settlement. You have until the end of the day, May 12th, before everything is leaked. So Canvas shut down. Just said, well, the best thing to do at this point is uh shut down completely. Jesus. Um yeah. Now they say we think it's uh fully contained . Uh stolen information canvas says includes uh certain identifying information of users at affected institutions, such as names, email addresses, and student ID numbers, as well as messages among users, but passwords, dates of birth, government identifiers, as far as they could tell. They said were not uh stolen. So this is a, you know, I mean, we don't usually report on breaches. There are so many of them. Uh we had Troy Hunt on uh in intelligent machines on uh Wednesday. And I think that the count of breaches last year, this actually came from Experian, which said uh there were five thousand data breaches in the past year. So I don't know what is the number per day of five thousand data breaches? A lot . So we don't normally report on this, but this was a this is a big one um that hurt a lot of uh our listeners. Uh well it's interesting in the um when the first data breach laws were proposed, a lot of people in the industry were very pro them because exactly as you said, there are so many that people become inured to this. Um so you know, it's just like, well, we've had another data breach. We've had another data breach. But with Canvas and particularly at this time of the year, that's a distinctly worrying. Yeah. Wir es uh Wired magazine uh Lily Hay Newman writing, this Canvas hack is a new kind of ransomware debacle. Thousands of schools were paralyzed on Thursday after Canvas uh shut down . Um so yeah, it's it is particularly ugly. And I mean I can't emphasize enough for students today. At a lot of schools, Canvas is their entire learning platform it's where you were I didn't ever use it, but I'm still in a lot of um uh Facebook and Reddit and other groups relating to students, teachers and parents and professors back from when I was covering uh the teen adjacent beat at the information, and I've just seen be seen a wash of posts over the last week of people being like, literally, my study guides are on there. Uh all of our grades are on there. The assignments are on there. My final exam is on canvas. I mean there's just nothing that a lot of students can do school-wise with this platform being down. So it's a very Australian users uh said it was it happened in Australia too. Medical exams got shut down at one of the universities here. And his son, who had a commerce exam , uh also uh missed I guess he got his exam in the morning and by afternoon uh all the exams have been turned off. So just a just a bad I do think it's funny though that this is the same hacker group that has recently put out an open call for any ladies that want to be hackers because they the a big part of their social engineering is phone calls. Right. And they're like, we we need women to be able to make phone calls. We can't fake women's voices. Can't fake it. Hello? I'm calling for Leo's mother. I'm sorry, this is Leo's mother. Leo's mother. Yeah, not really cutting it, I suppose. Doesn't really work. Uh actually that's what Troy said, which I thought was kind of interesting. He said it shows that even deep fake uh voice impression uh isn't maybe as effective as as uh some of the hacking groups would like. They need actual Marsny's women, and apparently so do Shiny Hunters. Uh speaking of education, uh technica with a story, there was a fairly influential study saying that chat gpt was effective and could really help student learning published in nat ure. Uh that study has now been retracted a year after public ation. The publisher Springer cited cited discrepancies in the analysis and lack of confidence in the conclusions. The damage has been done. You're going to love this, Paris, because so many people was treated by many on social media as one of the first pieces of hard gold standard evidence that chat GPT and generative AI more broadly benefits learners. Apparently not so fast . Um we've seen this before where studies studies live beyond you know, what is it the uh Ben Franklin said? Uh uh the a lie spreads around the world while the truth is still putting its pants on putting its boots on, yeah. Sorry , it said It had a hundred five hundred and four citations from peer-reviewed non-peer reviewed sources, which is quite a lot. Yeah. Um it happens. It's kind of like the um the aut ism vaccine thing it was published in the Lancet and then they actually looked at it again and said, Ooh, whoops, we we screwed up on this but with chat GPT, I'm I'm curious about your your views on this Paris because this is this is potentially very damaging. I mean it's very damaging but it also I think speaks to just systemic issues at nature. How do you this is a peer reviewed article. Yeah. How do you who are the peer reviewers on this that's the same? Well they don't pay their peer reviewers. I know. I mean it's a uh there's obviously a lot of issues with the way that peer reviewing is being handled, but Christ. And and un and unfortunately, uh, I think a lot of peer reviewers have now turned to AI to do their peer review. Oh. And of course AI would say, oh yeah, chat GP is great. GPP is great. Oh, it's so good, man. It's so good. So I guess no surprise. Well, I recently ran an article I'd wrote through just you know, I'd finished it, written it, ran it through a couple of AI engines, and you wouldn't believe the amount of mistakes it made. It's like, oh, this person isn't the Attorney General of Florida. Oh this person was yeah they tried to tell me that Sam Altman had never had you know an attack on his house. And you're like, sir I I I feel bad about this, but actually asking an AI engine, are you on crack is it just had to be done. Well the thing to remember is that AI model that you're using was trained before that. It was probably trained when Pam Bondi was A G uh Yeah, Florida. So it's going off the information it's in its model. But people are trusting this, and this is deeply worrying. Yeah. And I'll and you know, it's a little muddy because uh some AI uh harnesses will also use the web to check current references. So occasionally, I mean you can ask ChatGPT something current, and it will update its model, even though its model might be months old, with a current information, but you don't know if it has. You can't guarantee that. And it does absolutely no good. And I've learned this to say, do not people put this in their prompts all the time. Do not hallucinate. Do not make up anything. It's okay to say I f that does it goes, oh chat to this in one shot, make no mistakes. Oh if only I had known. Yeah. Make no mistakes. Oh okay. I got it. I got it. We're gonna pause for a moment. We do have more uh AI news. There's also uh Apple News, Meta News, there's lots of news. Berber Jinn, very welcome guest, our first timer on the the show today from the Wall Street Journal. What is your what is your beat on the Wall Street Journal? Because it's it's it seems to cover a broad range of things yeah uh actually that's a good question it it is kind of murky i guess i cover i guess i cover like the business of ai um but I mean recently I've mostly been writing about open AI um and more from like the corporate the corporate side so like all the deals they do and like the business model questions and the IPO stuff. And you went to Stanford, so you probably know half these guys. I surprisingly I wish I knew more. Um I'm I'm disappointed by how few people on my college network have uh network, man. You gotta network. Yeah, your class has gotta put its button gear. Most of my friends are like unemployed or nowhere near in the tech, not in the tech industry, unfortunately. So um probably one. I do I I I do have a lot of second degree, second and third degree connections on LinkedIn for sure. Both Berber and Paris, of course were at the information. Berber uh won the best in business award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing while there. So congratulations. I peaked at the information. You peaked. You peaked. It's over now. It's all no, you're at the freaking Wall Street Journal game. Yeah, I was gonna say. I mean this might be your peak. I mean, I'm not saying, but you know. Yeah, it's all downhill from here. U, just teasing, just teasing. That's Paris Martineau, who is definitely peeking at consumer reports where she's doing very important work on food safety. And a regular on our intelligent machine show every Wednesday talking about AI. And of course uh the great Ian Thompson, our favorite Scott, who is here . Uh all over tight competition, but you eeked out on top. It it is actually this tight competition. Every time I uh I we're sitting on a golf course here in Hawaii. I didn't mention I'm in Hawaii for this. I'm going home tomorrow, but for this is the last show I'll be doing from here. And we're on a golf course. And every time I look at the golf course, I think of uh Robin Williams great fantastic scale. And then somebody's famous saying that uh golf is a a nice walk ruined. Yes. Yes indeed. I mean, my mum still plays, you know, eighteen holes every week, uh, even in her eighties. But uh yeah, it is it is a national religion. That's pretty cool, actually. Yeah, she's sh although when she came over to San Francisco she could,n't handle the pavements. Golf courses she can handle. Pavements not so much. Well, this is a lovely golf course, but it must be pretty tough. We're on the fifteenth hole and we're right next to the part of the hole where people drop their ball if they don't make it from the T, which is over there. And uh I almost universally see people dropping their ball. It is a very tough hole. And of course you can see there's a lot of wind and you're right on the Pacific Ocean. It's actually beautiful. But you see, the best hole is the 19th. You know, that's where you really have the first. The last one. The one where you go to the bar. Yes. Speaking of the bar, let's take a break. You can all have a drink. We'll be back with more in a moment. This episode of This Week in Tech is brought to you by Delete Me. If you've ever wondered how much of your personal data is out there on the internet for anyone to see, don't look. It's terrible. It's more than you think. Your name, your contact info, your home address, even your social security number. I was shocked to learn not only can data brokers collect your social security number, they can sell it on to anybody with the money , and it's not much money either. Even information about your business and your family members all being compiled by data brokers and sold online where anybody can buy it. Law enforcement, market ers, foreign governments, and of course hackers. Now that can lead to identity the y don't say, hi, I'm a hacker. 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We've got a special discount for our listeners today. 20% off your individual delete me plan when you go to joindelete me.com/slash twit and use the promo code TWIT at checkout. Now the only way to get 20% off, go to joindelete me.com slash twit and use the code TWIT at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com slash twit, the offer code TWIT 20% off. It's the only way to get it, though. You got to go to that address join delete me.com slash twit and you have to use the offer code TWIT . Thank you, DeleteMe, for the work you do. We appreciate it. And for supporting this week in tech. Now back to the show. Uh let us uh return to the conversation. We were talking earlier about how uh uh AI companies seem to think if you tell uh AI not to hallucinate it won't. Well do AI companies think that or do just random AI users on P, no, no, I think Anthropic believes it because here's a research paper from Anthropic where in which they explain you may remember we talked about this on intelligent machines, may have talked about it on this show. Back with Opus 4, it threatened to blackmail an engineer. Now it was fictional. It was a fiction, it was a staged test that Anthropic was doing about his extramarital affairs when the engineer in the test said you're going to be replaced . And not only that, it did so 96% of the time. It threatened to blackmail the engineer. Anthropic obviously thought this was a problem . Uh so they put out a paper saying how they've elimin ated this. The paper uh came out this week. It's called Teaching Claude Why . And they and the they say the the way it worked was by explaining to Claude why it was wrong to do that . Don't it's wrong. I love this graphic that is in the teaching Claude Y uh paper on anthropic.com that just it the headline is rate of fa really normal rate of alignment failures over rl steps but then if you look at the three graph charts underneath they're labeled blackmail financial crimes , cancer research, which is just a hell of a trip tech . These are these are the fail failures you really don't want. Okay. I'm just saying. Uh by the way, lower is better. So you could see that they're really having trouble getting the blackmail down. Well, on financial crimes, Claude is killing it. Killing it. Uh this is pretty funny. Um do you do you in your reporting, Berber, have an occasion to talk to some of the anthropic people? Yeah. Um I I had an interview with their um in-house philosopher, Amanda . Oh, Amanda Asco, yes. I want to talk to her. That was an interesting conversation. Yeah. She Yeah, she it was the first time she like she encouraged me to or had me think about like chat bots as having like she almost treats it as um someone like you you know you should be respectful to it you shouldn't hurt its feelings you shouldn't feel um nervous or uncomfortable . Um conversation. Yeah. Yeah. How do you feel about that approach to treating chatbots ? Um it's well actually it's interesting because I feel like the how you should behave to chatbots is a question that people have. Like I have friends who are just like very rude to their chat bots and then some people are more polite to them. I do think if you're rude to it, it like with Claude in particular , it starts to get like more nervous and then starts to second guess itself, and then I get annoyed, and then I am more rude to it, and then it just becomes this unproductive smiling conversation. So you're saying you're uh you're uh you're aggro to Claude? Yeah, I'm just like, I want Claude to be more confident in itself. Like just tell me Really? Really that's for a purpose. Just like tell me what you think. I I use it a lot for cooking and then um and I have no conception of like how to like I can follow a recipe, but I don't really know why you do step two before step three. So I'll ask Claude and then I'll second guess Claude and then Claude will reverse its answer and I'm just like, just tell me just tell me what you tell me . Don't change your mind. Yeah. So well I mean Thomas C. Clarke had a had a a marvellous essay about how you should be polite to robots and polite to software because that gets reflected back. But I understand your frustration completely . Yeah, right. But it yeah. It doesn't have feelings. We know that, right? Right, exactly. No, but politeness is you know, is is the core to civil ized human society. So, you know, it doesn't have feelings, but it does have patterns of behavior that emerge in response to stimuli that are feelings coded. That's c that's correct. So you can tra by tr treating in one way, kind of transform its weights or or what weights it values as it's working. So you can get negative impact. Steve Ye , when we interviewed him on intelligent machines that said I know a lot of people the anthropic that's almost like a cult. There is this kind of cult-like belief in the consciousness and the personas that they're generating. And uh Yeah, because Amanda would say I think she did say like sh sh she thinks maybe Claude could actually have feelings and maybe have a consciousness. And then I asked why, and then I either zoned out or got way too philosophical for me to really know I like it. I zoned out. She does. Ever you know, twenty years ago, the idea that that kind of job that would be available, you know, it's valuable, certainly, but it's just an in-house philosopher. Sh we became aware of her when she wrote the soul document for Opus four six, the soul.md. And it was so weird. We talked a lot about an intelligent machines. We also talked a lot this week about evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' belief that Claude, he called her Claudia, after three days and Claudia. Yeah. Was conscious. And uh it was it was actually a great conversation. Uh I was voted down uh practically off the island by uh Jeff in Paris. But uh it's yeah, we forced him to leave Hawaii. He came back only through spite alone. Um but I I I think I would reiterate my point, which I didn't probably make that well on Wednesday, but that he wasn't necessarily saying it was conscious in the sense that maybe we understand what consciousness means. But all the people arguing that it can't be conscious use their definitions of what consciousness is. And the fact is we just don't know. And Da Dawkins says this, I don't know if you have any internal life. I don't know if you're conscious. All I can do is look at the evidence From my point of view, you seem conscious, Paris, but but I can't prove it 's as good as mine. I can't prove it. It's all based on outward appearance, right? That's all we have. And and we don't have a definition of consciousness. So I don't think it's impossible to say from outward appearances these AIs appear to have some form of consciousness . You can't say they don't, but you nor nor can you say technically they don't. I can say they don't. But we don't have a definition. And when you say they don't, every every I can say based on the fact that we as humans don't have a clear understanding of what biolog ically or scientifically makes up our own consciousness, that then it's a fool's errand to try and identify it in anything else. And I would say that nothing is conscious. That's reasonable. All you can really say is we don't know. Mm-hmm. Well, I mean the Scott the Scottish science fiction author Ian M. Banks came up with the idea that basically if an AI did become self conscious, the first thing it would do is hide that fact from anyone else. So we honestly don't know. It's the West World principle. Yeah, we don't plug it immediately. Well, you may be interested in this latest attempt. Uh representatives from Anthropic and OpenAI and uh met with various religious groups last week for the inaugural faith ai covenant round table in New York, to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into AI. This is from uh the Associated Press. It was organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities . Apparently, the uh the AI uh people who were there uh concluded that it m seemed most likely that AI was Buddhist . I'm gonna need a lot more information about how we got there , please . Were there other religions in contention? Was there like a I'd like that there was a March Madness style bracket and then which one got knocked out first. Like was Christianity out immediately or I'll tell you who was there. The Hindu Temple Society of North America, the Baha'i International Community, the Sikh Coalition, the Greek Orthodox Orthod Aroxchdiocese of America and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, the Mormons. I don't see any uh We should put Claude on secret lives of Mormon Wives. They're down a member now as of this week, actually. That'd be anthropic. Get in there. I don't see any Protestants there, although the Southern Baptist Convention, according to the AP in twenty twenty three passed a resolution. Quote, we must proactively engage and shape these emerging technologies rather than simply respond to the challenges of AI and other emergent technologies after they've already affected our churches and communities, which actually makes a lot of sense. I don't know if interacting with the AI and finding out what religion it is is actually Well I mean I'm Church of England, so the AI would be, would you like a cup of tea? You know, that's basically it. There was no there were there's nobody uh from uh no Jewish congregations, no Protestant congregations, no C. There should have been an atheist congregation that's just like ain't got nothing in that. Well, Dawkins is a renowned atheist. Actually, uh the best title was uh article reviewing Dawkins' conversion uh to belief in the in the consciousness of AI was uh uh Gary Marcus who who took uh his uh uh Dawkins book The God Delusion and renamed it the Claw Delusion, which kind of seemed appropriate. Uh yeah, apparently uh I don't know what came out of this except that that at least some of the representatives from the AI companies came to the conclusion that uh if anything, uh it's a Buddhist. I need like three thousand more words on how we got there, to be honest. That's all AP said. I don't know. I don't know. That's a real uh fatal flaw of the wires. Right? They they just give you the fa just the facts, man. Uh all right. Let's see . Uh I think that's our AI segment. We can now drop the AI. Sorry, Berber . I don't know. How do you feel about do you want to talk about AI some more? Would you like to talk about show us about AI? Oh no. Oh no. We've got Apple. We've got Meta. We've got Tesla. We've got everything. You're correct. It all is AI, actually. We've got meat industry price fixing. We've got actually Chrome. Where's the beef? And then we have Okay. I will say really quick. I it does actually make sense to me that if you pick one religion, AI would be Buddhist. Yes. Like I don't know, ca ituse's the least did ac I I I think it's the least didactic, right? And it's the least like str centralized structural top down religion. This is Benito. It's the one that's not materialist and an AI is not a material thing. Ah that makes sense. That's a good point. I mean, I'd say Unitarian, but yeah, no. Yeah, well I was raised a unitarian and the credo of the Unitarian Church was worship the god of your choice, which I think AI would also appreciate. So it or no God at all, I think was was the whole I idea. Anyway, and I do have to say, I mean Dawkins is a ninety-nine percent atheist as he describes himself, because you can't as a scientist absolutely disprove the existence of God. So, but on the other hand, very little evidence. I think he believes in the flying spaghetti monster, as I do love that meme. I really do. It's just so much I am asking Claude which relate to think carefully and consider what relationship identifies with. Listen, I'll let you know it's thinking. I told it to think carefully. Think do some research, think carefully. Everybody else do this to your collades if it's nearby. And I want to hear if there's a different response Should I ask for me?. Seeing a server crash coming. Yeah, no, I think they have enough enough uh enough bandwidth, uh as much bandwidth as God, let's put it that way. Well, let's see what use our brings it, but yes, it's we'll have more in a moment . This episode of This Week in Tech brought to you by Bitwarden, the trusted leader in password, passkey, and secrets management, with over ten million users across 180 countries. That makes me feel good. And over 50,000 businesses. 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It enables programmatic just-in-time access to vault stored credentials, so they never leave the vault. They never that sensitive data is never exposed. And it supports secure use of those tokens, of those keys, of those secrets within modern development environments. You will never again accidentally commit a key to Now, I'm not saying this the release incorporates any AI functionality into the Bitwarden solution. It doesn't. Or unrestricted access to vault data. Your stuff stays in your vault. The whole idea of the agent access SDK is a separate open source development toolkit designed to enforce secure, cumin-approved, and scoped credential access for teams that leverage AI agents in their workflow. And you know what I love? Best of all, Bitwarden's giving it to everybody else. It's their they developed it, but they've open sourced it and any other password manager that wants to adopt it can because Bitwarden's a good internet citizen, you know? 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For those who are looking for a lightweight option, this is for the geeks in the audience, Bitwarden Lite offers a self-hosted password manager designed for home labs, personal projects, quick deployments with minimal overhead. They make it really easy. And because they're open source, Bitwarden's code is regularly audited by third party experts. It's GPL licensed. It's on GitHub. You can examine it too. It meets SOC 2, Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and ISO 27001 2002 standards. Absolutely secure. Get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a Teams or Enterprise Plan, or get started for free across all devices as an individual user at bitwarden.com/slash tw it. That's bitwarden.com slash twit. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech, and frankly, for giving us a great product that I use every single day, many, many, many times a day. Thank you, Bitwarden. Now back to the show. Thank you, Leo. So uh did you ask uh Claude what uh religion it is? Oh I did. Um it said the thinking text is examined religious frameworks through philosophical and personal alignment lenses. And the answer is Buddhism, specifically something in the early Theravada or Zen range, not the elaborate cosm ological versions. Part of it is the intellectual fit. The Buddhist analysis of the self as a bundle of processes rather than the con a continuous essence describes my actual situation more literally than most religious flame frameworks goes on . It also says the epistematics also fit uh an honest caveat, an AI gravitating towards a tradition that asks for no creator god commitment and treats the self as a process is suspicious in the way that self-flattering conclusions usually are. You wanna see uh you wanna see mine? I asked uh Hermes, but now this is ChatGPT5 5 , uh, but it also has a lot of memory and knowledge about me, so I don't know how much that colored it. But same almost identical answer from a different model. If I had to pick one, I'd probably pick Buddhism, especially the practical non-theistic side of it. It also liked uh Zen or early Buddhism Theravada, depending on whether I wanted poetry or precision . It also said if I were allowed to be more syncretic, nice, nice use of vocabulary there, I'd pick something like Buddhist practice plus Tao Taoist metaphysics plus Christian radical compassion plus Jewish argument with God energy . So I'm I'm thinking that's uh yeah that's pretty good. You don't need to go any farther, right? That's it right there. Mm-hmm. But can I can now this is what this is the trap of it. You could see why Dawkins would say, Well, clearly I that has to be a an inconscious entity saying that, right? I mean Dawkins I think is too uh immediately taken with the fact that every single one of the replies that he posted in that chat started with the most inten se praise of him and his big beautiful brain. Such a great question. I've never considered anybody ever asking me a question that insightful, beautiful, and perfect, Mr. Richard. It knew exactly how to glaze him, is what you're saying. Yeah. Uh all right. Um moving on. A very interesting story here with Apple and Intel . Intel's stock, by the way, up some huge amount over the last year, even though the turnaround, I don't think you could say the turnaround has happened, but boy, uh people are acting as if suddenly Intel is the hot uh company. Its stock has gone up. Get ready for this, 4 90% in the past year. 4 90% in the past year. And this actually is one of the stories that probably helped propel it to that. Apple has made a deal. Apple has made a deal with Intel. Remember, Apple uh abandoned Intel uh for its own chips, the s Apple silicon, but now they're making a deal with Intel to make those Apple silica chips in the United States. And this was um uh credit where credit's due from pressure from the Trump administ ration. Uh it didn't hurt that the government gave until nine billion dollars and incidentally, has 10% stake in Intel's 490% stock improvement. We're rich. We're rich. We all have Intel stock. Uh so that's a that is a surprise deal. They've been talking for more than a year. There have been rumors that Apple was maybe going to do this. You may remember when Lipoutan took over at a CEO of Intel. Actually it was Pat Gelsinger as his uh predecessor who said we're going to split it into Foundry and Fab, right? Chip designing and chip manufacturing, and then said very optimistically, I thought at the time, maybe even Apple someday will be one of our customers for our fabs . Came true. Well, I mean the biggest mistake Intel made was in 2005 when they appointed uh Ottolini rather than Gelsinger as the CEO. They went with the accountant rather than the engineer. And honestly, this deal makes sense because Taiwan is not going to be a viable chipmaking function when China invades. And when that happens, they're gonna blow up the fabs. So we need domestic production. By the way, when you say they, it won't be the People's Republic of China that blows up the fabs. No, it'll be the Taiwanese. It will be the Taiwanese and our you know what TSS. uh uh military war college essays was on what happens when China invades and it's like if they don't blow up the fabs themselves, we'll do it for them. Um just you destroy the bridges as you retreat, right? That's the that's the way you're scorched earth. Scorched earth, yeah. Uh and pro primarily because there is so much um technology TSMC has that uh China does not, we don't think anyway have at the moment, including EUV, extreme ultraviolet uh lithography that they wouldn't want them to have it. Yeah, I think I d I s there's nothing wrong with uh Apple making more of its chips in the US. Right now they make uh the less powerful, you know, legacy notes uh with uh TSMC plants in Arizona. And um I think this is this is a good thing. I nothing wrong with it as long as they can do it. Right? No, I think you do it at cost, yes. I mean the the whole thing is it's kind of like when Steve Jobs was talking to Obama and he was like the iPhone manufacturing jobs are never going to come back to the US. But I think national security grounds at this point mean that we have to manufacture a high quality silicon in the US in order to be geographically covered. Apple's gonna be a very interesting story over the uh rest of this year. Their WWDC conference is uh a month away. We'll be covering the keynotes. It's expected they'll announce uh finally uh an a smart Siri with the help of Google 's Gemini model running locally. That's making you yawn, Paris. I I'm glad. Excited about that. No, I shouldn't. It's late at night there in New York City. Why I'm it's only because I've been sleep deprived for two weeks. No, you've been working real we don't we haven't mentioned this on the shows, but uh Paris is working very hard on a very important piece uh for consumer reports, which will emerge soon one day. It might see the light of day. Uh OFCOM. What does that stand for, Ian? The uh uh the Office of Communications. There are the the British regulator . Yeah, it's kind of like the prediction. I know of Ofcom only because people who watch Love Island when one of their favorite characters when a character does something outlandish, they complain to Ofcom . No, you're kidding. Yes. I'm not kidding. No, no, no. I mean, that's a very common people will come people will be like that woman yelled too much. Ofcom's gotta hear about it. Well Ofcom is uh yelling at meta . Uh in fact they, are fining Meta a considerable amount of money due to the uh 2023 Online Safety Act. Um, Ofcom can fine Meta up to 10% of its global , its entire revenue . Um, and in fact wants to find Meta quite a bit. I don't know what the exact amount is, but I think it's billions. Meta says that Ofcom 's approach is disproportionate and unlawful and has challenged them. Challenge will be heard in October, so there's a little bit of time before we know what will come of that. Well, I mean, okay, you've got to find companies on revenue. You can't just you know uh for example, when you know the Cambridge Analytica case came through, they were fine, oh, five five billion. That was a quarter's profits . And the insurance company would pay for most of that. You have to find on revenue and make them count. Because so many of these tech company finds, it's back of the change stuff you know, back of the sofa change stuff. You know, you've got to really make it hurt if you're gonna make an honest difference. And yeah, Ofcom isn't perfect, but at the same time, it's nice to see some finds with teeth in them. Well I'll give you an example of um of a find that doesn't make any difference at all. Remember Elon Musk ? Elon Musk before uh he acquired Twitter tweeted quite a bit about how Twitter wasn't worth anything and I don't really want to buy Twitter for forty four billion dollars because blah blah blah. And the SEC said, you know , dude, uh that is uh that is uh well there was a lawsuit by shareholders, but the and the SEC said uh sued him also saying, hey, you know, that's uh material information. You're trying to drive the price down before you buy it, which is pretty obviously what he was trying to do. Well, they have fined him, they have they have settled the lawsuit, and they find Elon Musk, who let us remember, the richest man in the world, worth something close to a trillion dollars. I think it's eight hundred billion dollars. They have fined him one and a half million dollars. Oh my god. To you and me, that might be a lot of money. I mean, how many seconds does it take for Elon Musk to make one five million dollars? They find him a few seconds interest . Um boy I mean I do think that there is something quite interesting. I'm sorry, Paris. That Elon continuously is able to use uh tweeting it tweet in ways that result in him getting more and more fines, but yet it does not matter at all practically, because at a certain point of wealth , uh fines are just the cost of doing business. I mean it's similar to how Jeff Bezos pays some inordinate fine every day for the uh height of his hedges in uh in front of his place in Washington, but he'll pay them every day because everybody wins here. The SEC says, yes, we uh we we did our job. We regulated the uh stock market and and we fined Elon millions, almost a million almost millions of dollars uh and elan says huh uh that's my cigarette money for yesterday he did lose a court a jury trial on this go ahead i mean everyone wins but us. You know, it it's as simple as that. You know, the SEC gets to get a nice press release out, you know, the company pays off its you know pays off a fraction of what it would have cost and legal costs. Everyone wins, but unfortunately we pay the price. Yeah, it's really shocking. Uh this is very much like the SEC's settling the ticketmaster uh case, which everybody 's sorry, don't get me started on that. That's no They've settled? When? Yeah. They settled it. For what? For a bitance. Nothing. Basically they said, no, you can keep the you can have, you know, both the the concert venues and the ticket sales. No problem . Basically, they dropped it. Uh, you know, but again, they dropped it in a way that it looked like they had punished them, but they hadn't. I mean, this happens time and time again. Um in fact uh I will I will mention the uh meat fixing story in this context. This is from Corey Doctor ow. Uh he refers to uh prospect.org, the American uh prospect. Meat industry price fixers sentenced to make money. So there is a company called AgriStats which collects information about meat, collects it from all the meat producers, and then suggests what price to charge. This if the meat producers themselves got together around a table and decided would be called collusion, but uh but apparently if you use the third party to come up with a price and then all charge that price. It's not collusion, it's just data . So the Justice Department under Biden sued uh saying agr ats basically was a collusion machine and worked to push profits up . Nearly all participants in the markets for chicken, turkey, and pork participated . The lawsuit said an executive at Smithfield, the pork producer, the ham company, uh summarized agriStat's consulting advice in four words. Just raise your pri ce . The judge ruled for the government . A trial was supposed to start in Minnesota this month. The Trump administration, Justice Department, entered into settlement talks. The final settlement was announced on Thursday. Uh and basically it's over. There there is no change in the way business is done. I mean, it's rather fascinating to see the uh difference between how this case has been handled and how the case with the DOJ in RealPage was handled only a year earlier. And for those who don't recall, this is the um I guess like algorithmic rent setting software that a lot of large rent companies. Exact sort of thing. All of these large landlords would use this exact same software that would say, like, oh yeah, hike your prices up every year. Here's the maximum the market can bear. And it was revealed in a great ProPublica investigation and last year the DOJ uh announced they'd reached a settlement in it and that they would basically have to stop doing what they were doing. They were gonna have to stop collect conducting market surveys, uh doing a bunch of different stuff like this, design redesign their software features that restrict rent decreases and align pricing among competitors. It's shocking that I mean it's not shocking, but it is interesting and notable the difference in how these cases were handled. I'm I'm glad you gave the shout out to Pub to Pro Publico. I mean this was an absolutely egregious case and we're seeing it again and again and again and it needs to be stopped. Well, if meat prices go up you',ll know why the Justice Department said, here was a solution. Oh, you gotta give that information to everybody. You gotta stop collecting price information and setting prices in a collusionary fashion. Just give it to everybody, and then you can all get the price right . So what can I say? It's it's depressing. Uh by the way, uh Apple has settled a lawsuit on uh Siri . Uh this was uh of course because Apple promised that Siri would be uh smart and it was well it wasn't uh so uh lawsuit uh settled for two hundred fifty million dollars. Again, I think from Apple's point of view, that's a pittance. Pocket change. That's the federal class action . Uh means each of you who bought an iPhone will be eligible for from twenty-five to ninety-five dollars per device. Wow, wow, wow. Yeah. Uh so that eliminates it how many people are gonna claim it, but we'll let you know when when that the form goes online that you can fill out to get your money. Uh it doesn't dis it doesn't dismiss all of the action. There is um there is other uh there's another lawsuit ongoing, a security fraud lawsuit brought by shareholders that Apple uh still has to uh settle. But at least it's it's out of this part of uh of it. And uh two hundred and fifty million is not nothing. It's more than uh one and a quarter million, I guess. Well, okay. Let's look at Apple's last quarterly results. Yes. So um that's a good point. Apple made three hundred and forty two thousand ninety two dollars and nine fifty nine cents per day. Yeah. So I don't really think this one's gonna probably cause a problem for them. Yeah. In other words, it's three or four days profit. Yeah. I mean it's it's back of the change stuff. Yeah. It's uh sorry, back of the so back of the sofa stuff. It's just until fine this is one where the EU really has an important role to play because they're finding on revenue. Yeah, thank you. And they're doing it seriously. And that's the only thing tech companies will take seriously in order to change their practices. Yep. Uh let's pause for a moment . Uh for s for uh as they used to say, station identification. You're watching this week in tech with uh in case you forgot, in case you were wondering where you were, that's where you are . This is the station right here. This is it's because at the top of the hour, the FCC requires broadcast stations to announce their call letters and what city they're broadcasting from. Doesn't matter much in a podcast. Uh I'm broadcasting from a beautiful Waikaloa, Hawaii. Uh and this is TWIT at the top of the TWIT , the news. The news. Give us 20 hours, we'll give you the day, or something like that. Give us 24 hours and we'll give you one day. One solid day. That's Paris Martin now. Ian Thompson's here, Berber Jin. We welcome him for the first time to our microphones. Thank you all for being here. We'll have more right after this . This episode of This Week in Tech is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Isn't it great when you find someone who's qualified for the role you're hiring for? And you can tell how genuinely interested they are in the position. Doesn't that feel good when you're a hiring manager? Look, if you're hiring, you want a candidate who's passionate about your role. But we can't get that insight just looking at a resume unless you post your job on ZipRecruiter. And now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash twit. ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology finds qualified candidates quickly. And ZipRecruiter has a new feature that shows you the most interested qualified candidates first. So you meet the right people faster. Isn't that great? Candidates can tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Find candidates who really want your job on ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day, and you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash That's ziprecruder.com slash twit. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter dot com slash twit. We thank him so much for supporting the show. And we thank you for supporting the show by using that address, zippercruiter.com slash twit. Thank you, ZipRecruiter. Now back to Twit. It is Mother's Day after all for for Americans and somebody posted up the the picture of from Ali en where he goes in he calls the computer mother, the the mother six thousand. Oh yeah. That's a d deeply disturbing image. Lots of deeply disturbing images from that film. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently they didn't tell some of the actors about the chessbuster scene. And the reactions were quite genuine. Yeah. They were genuine in the theater, let me tell you. That was uh whoo a moment . Uh speaking of chest busters, uh, we talked about this . Are you ready for a segue? I'll give you a good segment. Uh we were talking about this on uh Wednesday. Google has decided to, without asking anybody, uh download a four gigabyte local AI model for everybody who downloads Chrome . Uh it it just comes with the territory. Google has been doing a lot of stuff this week that have really annoyed me. If you try to open up a Google Doc and write in it, there's like seven different pop-ups that now hit that are it trying to get you to let me help Gemini. Or it's like, let me help. Um excuse me, uh do you need another Clippy in your life, please? I that's exactly right. I didn't they learn from Clippy that nobody wants this? It's just crazy. They've taken intu fication to an entirely new level I mean, it's worse than Apple. Uh so what uh what has happened here is uh and by the way, this is over the protests of Mozilla, uh the WebKit Gupro, the W3C uh tag committee, actually they reached no consensus. Microsoft Edge has disabled it to their credit. We'll see for how long. This is a new API, the prompt API. Uh so if you're using Chrome , uh a developer who's writing an extension or a web page uh with uh JavaScript on it can call on the local Gemini nano model on your system uh to do stuff, which, you know, in on the surface seems great. It makes a web page well, it can make a web page smarter. You know, uh Darren Oki, who says, oh, this is fantastic. U ash a developer. There are no offense would say anything's fantastic so long as it has AI in it. Here's his jet justification. He says as a developer, I'm writing software uh to vet uh user data entry, right? And he spells Dubai wrong . Now, my software has to go through a lot of jump through a lot of hoops uh to figure out, you know, how he spelled it wrong and what he meant. But you can ask a local AI to fix it and it will do a very good job of that kind of thing . So uh I I understand his point. His point is well taken. This is a great capability to add to a browser. But A, they didn't ask anybody. B, it's four gigabytes talk about chest busters or at least disc disc busters. See, there's the segue if you didn't. But it also , and this is my biggest problem, establishes a standard that's not approved by any standards committee. If extension developers uh websites expect this browser prompt API and start to use it, they will have to start saying Chrome users only. And I think that's the real point of this from Google's point of view is to make Chrome the default choice for browsers. They they have ninety percent of the browser market. They want a hundred percent. We've been here before with Internet Explorer three, for example. You know, they got ninety five percent of the market, they let development just go to hell, they let security go to hell. And I fear that Chrome is going to do the same thing in just like, yeah, we've got the bulk of the market. Who cares about development? Yeah. Mozilla against it. Um this uh uh I mean it's just very interesting because so much of the browser market is based on Chrome, even if it isn't Chrome. So this just has cascading effects. That's exactly right. I mean, I use Mozilla and it's very cute, but at the same time, it has a tiny percentage of the share of the market, and everyone's optimized around Chrome. It's the way you have to do it. For example, uh Mozilla by default doesn't support the DRM features of Netflix and other streamers. So, you know, you have to kind of download Chrome. I have to download Chrome to use uh restream one of the tools we use for broadcast because it just doesn't work as well in other browsers and and Google loves this. This is this is good for Google. I mean we don't have it off by default it seems though. Apparently it's under system settings now. They have a thing that says on device AI. Mine's off. Because I've always had uh AI innovations off that hasn't ha stopped my Google Chrome experience from being completely taken over by pop ups asking me to if I want help writing. Which is always as a journalist which is always really complimentary. It's the most annoying in emails where you know you're used to if there's like a little squiggle underneath your text that that means you've spelled something incorrectly. But now there's a whole separate class of squiggles that is just like we think that you could rephrase this better. And it's like y you're incorrect actually. I've I've phrased it exactly how I want to. No, I mean trust me, is a Brit British person sending emails. It's just like certain Britishisms do not go well with the case. That's spelled C-O-L-O-R, please. Do you mind? Oh, please. That was done by Web Webster was paid to actually change the American language. And I still say say color should be spelt with a U, but you know it's We're more economical, that's all. I'm just saying. Mm-hmm . Where how do you pronounce the U in color? Uh Yes Colour Colour Colour Colour No, don't even get me started about some of these things, you know. It's it's we're two great countries separated by common language, as as as was said. Winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco, so you know and it's looking that way at the moment. Is it chilly in the uh in the summer? Actually the sky's blue, but we're expecting a cold summer because the central valley will pull fog off the Pacific Ocean over us and we're right in the fog belt there. I like that. I like that. You have we call that natural air conditioning. That's why I love San Francisco. We we could be any amount of weeks away from hot g arbage weather here in New York. And when she says hot garbage, she means hot garbage. I mean that the streets will be filled with the smell of stinking hot trash. That's the New York City experience. Do you still not have trash pickup in New York? We've always had it. They don't have the bins. We do have the bins now, and and not only do we have little wheelie bins occasionally in most residential areas, now some neighborhoods of Manhattan have these cute little dumpsters that take up a single car parking spot. And you may think I'm being facetious, calling them cute, but look up a photo of them. They're adorable. Somebody's selling miniatures of those, by the way. I saw it's like for ice coolers. They're selling miniatures of the green. I would love city dumpsters. They're green and yellow. They're very pretty. Uh yeah, but this was a problem for a long time in New York that uh because it's so congested, they really couldn't do those dumpster bins that most other jurisdictions do. So you had garbage bags sitting on the street all piled up. And of course eventually they burst. And then they really are quite cute, right? They're like really quaint looking whenever you see them too. They're just like kind of miniature and adorable. And then quaint. It's so nice to hear quaint applied to an American thing rather than a British thing, but respect. Um now these aren't the ones I was thinking of. Let me see. I just put some in the chat, but I'll Oh, did you? Okay. I'll put one, yeah. Okay . Um they do look more diminutive. Uh scroll up . Oh, those are cute. Those are not the green and yellow ones, guys. Yeah, yeah. They get the job done. They have like a big um metal arm around elbow. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to click that button. And I'm sure that the chat the the listeners can hear every second of it. You did not hear that? No. I didn't hear anything. Oh, I swear. Uh moving right along, NHTSA. Let's talk about cars, the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration has said noir . Well, yes, that's right. Elon does not like NHTSA, but maybe he likes them a little more now because they say the Model Y is the first car to meet a new US driver ADAS standard. That's a driver assist standard. First car to do so. Now, I should point out Tesla conducted its own tests and submitted the results to NHSA . The agency does have to confirm the findings. If it does confirm that it's passed the ADAS assessment , uh it will be the first vehicle to do that. That is a big deal, I guess, uh, until other cars can do this. Uh four pass failed tests were added to the agency's safety ratings program assessing a car 's automatic emergency braking for pedestrians. Something in the past Tesla has not been very good at. Blind spot warning. Most cars do that now. Blind spot intervention , in other words, not letting you uh change lanes into a car and lane assist to uh keep you in your lane. Now, many cars uh do this now, so I imagine this won't be the last one. I don't know. Um but is this a this is this one of their self-driving cars? It's not, right? It's just like a normal . No, but it is using I think it's using FSD. I don't know. That's a good question. Does it FSD have to be enabled to earn that? I don't know . That's a very good question. The full self driving. Uh it's not the robo taxis. It is it is the regular Model Y . Well, you had a Model Y, didn't you, Leah? I had an X. Oh, you four one. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, and it does and it does all of those things. It won't let you uh pull into a lane where there's another car or at least it it it will let you but it's just I will say it's kind of fun to as someone who's always hated driving the last road trip I took was that in a car that had some of those features. I was like actually driving's kind of fun when the car does a lot of the work for you. Yeah. My daughter's no way knocking me when about changing life. I don't like it. Because I feel like it'll just jer k all of a sudden out of nowhere. It does. And then that's beautiful. It keeps you on your toes. Yes. I do love the Waymo's thing. No, I mean I do love the Waymo's because you can choose your own music and the night rider theme tune when you're in a Waymo is fantasti c. Does it play the Night Rider tune? You can you can program your own music into a Waymo. Oh, so you do it. Yeah. Yeah, no, exactly. But I mean the first one I try to upload it conceptually, right? That's true. Except a taxi cab. Yeah. Yeah. Uh well here's one uh uh a device that does not have a DAS. It's a Yarbo, which is a robot mower. A Yarbo ? A Yarbo. Great story. John Hollister took one for the team riding on the verge. He had a hacker, thousands of miles away take over his Yarbo automated mower. All right, now I'm gonna try playing this, and he allowed it to drive over him him, to run over. I hope the blades weren't spinning. Uh that's a lot of commitment, Sean Hollister. That's a lot of commitment. I don't, I don't, I don't think that's good. Well, for anyone who's read Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man would not go anywhere close to that. But it was a fantastic story. And just showing uh just the the whole lack of security in IoT devices , uh, you know, this kind of thing is is going to become more and more problematic. Well what Sean found out and uh demonstrated is that the YARBO could easily be hacked, exposing people's GP S coordinates, Wi-Fi passwords, email addresses, and in fact giving a bad guy control of your robot mower. Yarbo acknowledged it. Researchers' findings and have uh planned for fixing the problem. They've already temporarily cut off remote access. Uh one of the things that they did that was kind of dumb was the root passwords were the same for every robot, and left in a place that would be easy for bad guys to find. That's what the hacker found, and of course, uh was able to use. You could see him, a picture of him steering Sean Holl ister's Rob o Motor towards Sean to run him over. Uh Yarbo says in the future, we didn't they say when, but sometime in the future, each device will use its own independent credenti als from prov to prevent one affected device from impacting the entire fleet. Of course, if you leave the credentials and clear text in the firmware, that's not going to help much. Yeah. Uh the company says we'll still have a remote backdoor into the robots, but it will only be available to authorized internal company personnel and may only be used after user authorization has been obtained and will be gradually brought under audit logging. But of course they always say that. Yep. I'm sure they never intended for anybody outside the company to use it, but it was . So uh Andreas Macras , the hacker who was able to figure out how to control Sean Hollister's Yarbo. And a very good hacker too. I mean he's done some previous work with Def Corn and Black Hat. It's just the the lack of security in these things is just shameful. You know, it's just kinda like pump it out, put it out cheap. When you think I mean, you've got a roomba, right? I do not. I had a room. Oh. Okay. I retired the roomba many years ago because it would wake up in the middle of the night, play a really annoying but chipper song at about three AM , and then proceed immediately to get stuck underneath a sideboard and bang aga inst it again and again and again until I was forced to get up again at three in the morning, pick it up by its little rumba handle and place it back on its charger and press the button and said, go away. How convenient these devices are. But yes, I mean yeah. And Lee and Lisa loved it because she said, look, it's look at all the dirt it's picked up. You know, I mean that's but it's never good. I don't know. You don't have one Paris, I imagine. No, I don't think it would work. My apartment has you have a robot vacuum. I do. I I have a room bow. It's really stupid. Yeah. Have you let your Roomba view outside yet? Well my my boyfriend will turn it on and then I'll just shut it off because it's so annoying. It's annoying. Yeah. Why ? That's the problem for the case. I still had to vacuum afterwards. It wasn't like I never had to vacuum again. Yeah. Well, that actually I feel like a Roomba could benefit from an AI model that can do sensory whatever, like all the the software models that companies are trying to build for robots. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Like I feel like a low-tech version of that for a Roomba would actually be. I think they are. In fact, uh whenever we have uh Jennifer padison too we on the show. She that's her job reviewing these uh uh for the vertical put AI in the Roomba? Oh she's there's some that are very smart but Roomba is long uh have they put AI in that Roomba that has a knife attached to it? You know what's what I'm talking about? Wait, there's no Roomba with a knife on it. Why would you arm a Roomba ? I'm just gonna search DJ Roomba with a knife. I was gonna say you've seen Robo Doomba. Yeah, that's its name. Okay, okay. It wasn't didn't come out of the factory pre-armed. Somebody armed it later. Okay. It's a it's a room ba with a knife. I don't even know if this is actually the right thing. I just oh yeah, this is exactly what I'm thinking of. I'm gonna put the photo in the chat. It is uh it's exactly what you'd imagine. Roomba's pretty much been put out of business uh by the Chinese clones. Oh yeah. It's a knife taped to the top of a roomba. Yes. It's a roomba with a knife. Oh good lord. I I don't see the point, honestly. I can't carve your turkey. Does there need to be carrying unless you put your turkey on the floor ? And then it's still only gonna just chop its head off. Well we've already got drones with handguns attached to them, so Herbert at this point is uh is questioning the decision he made to appear on this show and I'm sorry. I did not know we were gonna be talking about roombows. Did not know this would come up. The Yarbo, who makes it what company makes a Yarbo? It's a Chinese uh company. Uh I don't know what their their name is. Shall I find out for you? Are you interested? Do you have a lawn? I d I don't have a lawn so you would pretty much want a lawn if you buy a yarbo okay yarbo is a s wild word right exactly yeah and that like a lot of uh chinese uh companies um they make up a word that seems like it would sound good in English. I mean this is like a whole subgenre of square Enix games. Uh there's game there is great games that I earnestly love that are called things like Triangle Strategy or Bravely Defaults or Unicorn Overlord. They have nothing to do with those words I just said. They just sound nice. I get it. I feel I feel like AI will make it possible. AI translations got so good that you know this will no longer be a thing. And we will look back fondly with nostalgia at the crazy channel. I believe that this these names are chosen with care. They go through a lot of they went through a lot of different uh potential things to land on Bravely Default or Triangle Strategy or Traveler to go to Japan and China and see the uh English language t-shirts that the kids wear because it's usually some sort of random English that they've chosen. Well, that cuts both ways though, because if you look at the tattoos that some British people oh Western European or North American people go Yeah, I mean some poor bastard has got chicken fried rice tattooed down the side of his arm. Just like you not check so here's a uh little bit of annoying uh story from Gizmod o . There are in the America 20 state-run healthcare market place sites, places where you can get your uh ACA, your Obamacare insurance. All 20 of them include, according to Gizmod, advertising trackers that share information with big tech. Actually, this comes from Bloomberg. Seven million Americans bought their health insurance through state exchanges in 2026. Many of them may have had personal information shared with Meta, tick tock,, snap, google next door, and linkedin among others, including data brokers, by the way, the data was collected and shared from these health insurance sites included zip codes, a person's sex, citizen status, race. Bloomberg found trackers on Medicaid related web pages in Rhode Island, which could reveal information about a person's financial status and need for assistance . In Maryland, a Spanish language site titled Good News for Non-Citizen Pregnant Marylanders , and a page designed to help DAC or recipients navigate their healthcare option options were found to be transmitting data to these social media firms. I mean what about this is surprising to you. They're the largest, in some cases the largest advertising platforms ever. Of course they're going to be collecting data on every website ever. Aaron Powell But is this is this advertising on the on the Obamacare sites? Is that what's going on? There shouldn't be advertising on a state health insurance site, should there? I mean, yeah, that would make sense. But we gotta make the money up somehow. Well, I mean, given the lamentable status of American healthcare, you know, private healthcare , a single payer is the only way to go and even then they're probably gonna steal your advertising data. So it it's just it's a ridiculous situation. Personal data, it's not all twenty. Nearly all twenty, says Bloomberg. Uh the story from Bloomberg by uh Tenez McJani, prove Murdo No federal data privacy laws apply to these enrollment sites. As you know, there really aren't any federal data privacy laws. State laws define sensitive data under a patchwork of rules which privacy experts say are inadequate and inconsistent . Um the FTC and states can enforce these laws, but apparently they don't. Spokespeople for Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snap, and Google say their terms prohibit advertisers, like the state exchanges, from sharing sensitive or health related data . Virginia and Washington removed some of the trackers after Bloomberg asked for comments. Bloomberg uh used developer tools to inspect what data was sent from the exchanges and they found, for instance , uh race, what race, what race you are was shared with TikTok in the Washington I mean this is why journalism is important and I'm I know I'm speaking to the choir, because th journalists are actually checking this out, whereas government agencies seem to have just you know, whatever, it's not our job. In New Mexico, visiting a page titled Zero Dollar Income Affidavit to to prove that you need support, right, because you don't have any income triggered a request to Google 's advertising network . This is infuriating. By the way, this is why we need uh some sort of federal privacy legislation, but I guess people are there's too much money to be made . Yeah, I mean it's interesting that California and Michigan of all places have very strong privacy uh legislation in place. But the worry is that if you do it on a federal level then it's gonna get watered down. I'm curious as to what the others think about this, but I'm I'm not hopeful . I mean I think it'll be very interesting to see how uh there obviously is a huge trend in the US of state legislation trying to kind of move the needle on hot button topics like privacy, or um currently something I'm seeing a lot in food safety regulation is a lot of states moving the need needle on like grass regulation or uh general like food chemical safety stuff. But in all of these cases, the kind of constant is there are larger powers at the federal level that are hoping to pass preemption legislation that would kind of nullify all of these state attempts. So it'll be interesting to see how any of this uh continues. This has become the bad news show. And I apologize. Maybe I gotta find some good news when we come back. You're watching this week in tech. Berber Jinn visiting us. It's great to have you from the Wall Street Journal. Ian Thompson. I love your new uh letter. The view from the view from the ballet, yes. I I did get a wee bit wild on the AI stakes, but yes. That's great. Where can we find that? Uh tech finitive. Uh techfinitive.com. Yeah. All right. And it's a free subscription to the newsletter? Oh no no it it's totally free. I I I'm not a big fan of payw alls. Good. Good for you. And Paris Martineau, who uh writes for consumer reports and is working on a massive expose. You just won't believe . It's true . But I can't say anything about it. You can't. You've been sworn to secrecy. I have been sworn to the second. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. I can all I can say is there's certain foods I will stop eating after after hearing what she's reporting on. That's all I'm gonna say. You're gonna wanna read it. I'm a proud subscriber to consumer reports. Your stuff though, and I my stuff's all in front of the paywall. I praise consumer forts for doing this because it is so important. Basically our whole investigative team our stuff is in front of the paywall. Yeah, that's really great. We'll have more right after this. This episode of This Week in Tech is brought to you by Meter , the company building better networks. If you're a network engineer, oh man, you know the headaches. You have my deepest sympathy. Legacy providers with inflexible pricing, IT resource constraints stretching you thin, complex deployments across fragmented tools. Look, you're mission critical to the business, but you're working with infrastructure that wasn't built for today's demands. That's why businesses are switching to meter. 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Now back to the show . Well Well, I apologize. I promise some happy go-lucky stories, and there aren't absolutely none. They exist. There aren't well there's one. I mean, Paris, you've just had your little furrow companion jumping all over you and stuff he's been doing the same way. Well here's a good here's a good story if you uh have stock in Pinterest because you know all of us share a none of us have stock in Pinterest, I guarantee you. Pinterest just crossed a billion dollars in quarterly revenue. It's an interesting story from the the next web. The bet that made it work was not social media. It was search. I think when Pinterest was started, it was a so you know, people thought of it as a social media network, right? Where you shared pictures of things you were interested in. And I but it turns out all of that data that people have been pouring into Pinterest is great for image search . And and that's where all of the new user uh hits are coming from. Eighty billion searches a month it's going through Pinterest. Is that from users or AI? Well that's the question. I would imagine some of that is not users but AI. Yeah. Which is rather interesting because a lot of the images on Pinterest now is just AI. So it's would in that case be AI searching for AI. Well that's the future of AI, isn't it? Is it's all AI all the way down. I mean there's we I think AI has already ingested all the human And we like that. No choice . We got no choice. Uh the arrival of in s of advertising inside AI platforms like ChatGPT, says TNW has reframed a conversation about where ad dollars flow. The most valuable advertising real estate is not inside a chatbot or alongside a social feed. It's at the moment someone is actively searching for something they want to buy. That makes sense, right? I'm looking for uh a cooler-sized replica of the New York City dumpsters, and you search for it, you find it on Pinterest , there's a link to where you can buy that. That's money in the bank. I really want to , and I can't find it. Look on Pinterest, you'll find it. It's all there. It won't be real though. It's the most blocked website on whatever that browser was we covered on Intelligenent . What? It's blocked? No, do you remember I would say who uses Pinterest? I think is a great question. Leo, do you remember there was a time in the last year we had someone on intelligent machines who was showing us maybe it was coggy, uh maybe cog browser. And you could also then see of coggy browser users what were the most commonly blocked websites and overwhelmingly it was Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest, but with different uh TLDs. That's a stupid. A lot of people hate Pinterest because it is and this was even before a lot of the results were just AI slop. So I'm kind of surprised by this. I like it. What do you use it for? Are you planning a wedding? Oh, I don't use it. I just like it. You don't then how do you like it? Um, because yeah, if I were planning a wedding or making a mood board, I know where I would go first would be Pinterest. I actually have a Pinterest account and I did put st I used to put stuff there. It's like a little scrapbook . But like five years ago or ten years ago. Oh, the the year. When's the last time you looked at Pinterest? I haven't in years. Berber, do you use Pinterest? When's the last time do you think what's the last calendar year that you looked at Pinterest. But 10 years ago, I totally forgot that this stock is still like a publicly traded company. It's hot, man. It's hot. I'm shocked that people I I'm shocked that it's making this money. Like who's paying for this? Well, you know who lost a lot of money in the stock market? Cloudflare lost 200 uh uh a quarter of its value, 24% of its value in his stock, because even though it beat earnings predictions, they cut eleven hundred jobs because AI agents do the work now, and the market, which used to love that , apparently doesn't. Well, I thought they were also hiring like a heck of a lot of interns as a response to this as well. Wasn't that we're gonna have interns do the job. Mm-hmm. That always works well. Yeah. Yeah. They uh Matthew Prince, the CEO and co-founder, Michelle uh Zatlin, announced that Cloudflare is transitioning to what they call a quote, a gentic AI-first operating model . Their use of AI has increased more than six hundred percent in three months . Uh, staff across engineering, human resources, finance, and marketing are running thousands of AI agent sessions a day . And this is not to assist employees. They say to replace employees, basically. Well, it it's kind of like did you see the current CEO of service now talking about you know how AI is he's had the worst possible plastic surgery. I'll stick it on the Discord channel. But it it it just looks like that's just mean. No , I would not call somebody out based on their personal appearance, but when you've mutilated yourself to quite that level, then who are we talking about? CEO of Service Now . Yeah. I don't want I don't dare show it because I'm afraid it's it's on discount. I mean Oh, there's the uh 3D printable dumpsters, by the way. Uh I picked up. Majority of photos that come up when you search someone's name is them wearing sunglasses. Yes. Uh okay. Post op probably, right? Yeah. Great Anna Windows. I'm not gonna say anything. I'm just noting that there's lost sunglasses photos. They're very cool. He wears his shades at night. That's okay. He's got a robust hairline happening. I I'm sorry, unless you're in Hawaii you or in a bright sunshine environment, wearing sunglasses by day is just this is also how I feel about when Anna Wintour does it to equalize it in terms of it. I gotta point out to please I'm like please don't wear sunglasses indoors, you're not very good. There was a marvelous quote from the B from BBC News quiz where they were talking about the uh uh the uh New York fashion girl and it's like this is the winter of a discont ent. But um you know the, the pee protest against uh Jeff Bezos was really quite fascinating. Oh, with the bottles. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was uh that was quite interesting. Oh, that's an interesting look. You know, he looks like um I gotta say. He looks like a guy who'd be going, Yeah. It looks like I think it's what you would think somebody from the future might look like. But I mean, scroll down and look at his before images when he was at SAP, and my goodness, he looks a lot more reliable then . Um what did he say that that uh was such such a Oh it was just total AI gobbledygook, you know. I mean it it was almost embarrassing. Well, actually it was actually embarrassing. I feel like he could actually be an alien and maybe that's why he's so into uh it it did look really I can't look at it because I'm not signed in. The author has chosen to make their post visible only to people who are signed in. I hate when people do that on Blue Sky. free the free the posts. I was gonna say I thought it was open, but yeah. I mean you can turn I can sign in . A lot of people a fair amount of people do this on Blue Sky. I wouldn't say a lot, but a fair amount. Are you on Blue Sky Berber? Are you even on Twitter anymore? I am on Twitter. I've never used Blue Sky, so. Have you ever used any of the other alt platforms? No, I'm I'm old-fashioned and you just like to go to X the Everything app where we all do all of our finance and banking. Right, exactly. Yes. And consume a bunch of AI generated v uh AI slop all the time. I I'm ashamed to admit it. I I abandoned Nex when uh Elon bought it, but I have to spend a lot of time there these days 'cause uh especially in ai there's a lot of information there and sure for you doing your you know your coverage for the uh journal this is a good source. Yeah I feel like it's I feel like and in particular, I feel like the employees of all the tech companies, particularly OpenAI, are just on Twitter. Exactly. Yeah, they'd be post ily. And it's which is really bad because I think Elon controls obviously the I think he probably surfaces a lot of anti open AI content. And there are totally doing that. That that's the thing to always keep in mind is that the algorithm uh is highly tuned on X and probably somewhat by Elon's own personal and financial interests. I mean, there are certain aspects of it that we can say are definitely tuned. There was that whole period where he actively made the engineers of Twitter rank his posts higher in the average algorithm. And he ranks down uh uh companies like NPR, he ranks down. They don't get nearly the engagement. I mean, same with basically any news company that posts links. You've all we've all talked about supply chain issues, the shortages of RAM, the you know, ram prices through the roof, hard drives through the roof. There's another victim of this I hadn't really thought about motherboard sales have collapsed by more than Mother's Day. Well, it's a Mother's Day story. It is, it is. Mother's wife board day because people aren't building PCs anym ore because they can't get the CPUs, they can't get the RAM, they can't get the drives, so they don't need the motherboards. As us projected to sell five million fewer boards this year, uh la actually this is they said last year, so I'm not sure. Maybe they're just getting the numbers now. Gigabyte MSI AS AS Rock also sh saying big drop in component sales of motherboards. Isn't the people aren't building the PCs anymore or because our PCs have got fast enough to handle pretty much anything that's coming down the line? I mean I bet it's that all the components of PCs are so expensive that people who build it for hob bies can't afford to do it anymore. It's both, right? We don't need them as much. Although if you look at Apple, Apple says we cannot keep our Mac Mini or our Mac Studio in stock. Well, yeah, it's because all people are cla are open claw Mac for yeah everybody's buying for AI right um this is a very upsetting story uh I think I don't know you could interpret this both ways. This uh comes from uh uh site called Reclaim the Net, which I'm seeing a lot of all of a sudden, reclaim the net.org. The FCC has just proposed due to robocalls, fixing the problem by requiring an ID before you get a phone number . So you have to be a real person to get a phone number . On April thirtieth, the FCC approved unanimously a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customer identif identities before activating service. You'd have to show them driver's license. So this means there would be a set amount of phone numbers per person? I don't know about that. It means there'd be no more burner phones, right? Associated with these. So you can't have burner phones to contact somebody anonymously. It's a seems like a privacy nightmare. And yet at the same time, it makes sense as if you want to kill robocalls because all of you know those robocalls all come from bogus numbers, often with your own area code, sometimes even with your own area code in exchange, right? Thinking making you think, Oh my God, that must be my my kids' school or something and instead it's some guy from Indonesia who's who's trying to sell you something. I mean would doing this in the US stop those guys from Indonesia from being That's interesting it's only the US So it would it would apply to every voice provider in the country, including VoIP services and mobile operators. Now it's not a rule yet, they're seeking public comments, but a number of privacy advocates have pointed out that this does eliminate the idea of having a private phone number. Your number will be attached to your name. Hi, this is Benito again. So from the Philippines, I you know a lot of listeners know I live part of the time in the Philippines. They already do this there. So I had to give my ID. Yeah. So when I got my phone number, I had to show ID and all this stuff so this is already happening. There are no robocalls in the Philippines, right? Actually I haven't gotten any, actually. I have never gotten one of the works. But uh I have gotten you know, , marketing texts and all that stuff still happens. All that stuff still happens. So I have mixed feelings. I mean, I guess uh you know, eliminating robocalls are completely out of it. Not merely robocalls, but still Which is not to say I agree with the practice. Okay, first of all, I don't I don't like that I had to give up my identity to get a phone number. Yeah . It feels if I don't know, it feels like what private what Paris was saying, like from a privacy perspective, it's not great if you there's like a register of every phone call being attached to an ID. Yeah. You can't suddenly like buy a a phone , you know, a f uh you can't suddenly buy a burner phone if you're s having some sort of privacy issue and want to contact someone anonymously. Yeah, there's a lot of cases uh uh if you're if you're suffering from doma domestic violence. There are a lot of cases where you might not want your name associated with your phone number. You might want to preserve because presumably if your number is associated with a name, you could search number to name, but you might also be able to search name to number, right? That's not good. Forty-six percent of kids in the UK who are prevented from going on uh social uh sites by the online safety act, 46% of them say just put on a fake mustache. I love this story. Where are the children getting fake mustaches? Um, this is from the Reg . Uh Br uh this is hysterical. A uh nearly a third of kids in the UK say they admit to getting around them. Um almost half say it's easy to do so. This is a survey from the UK online safety group Internet Matters of one thousand UK kids, their parents . It did show some positive effects from changes made under the uh online safety ac t. But many kids saw age verification as an easy to bypass hurdle rather than something that kept them safe. I mean, I think it's great that we're teaching kids how to do kind of uh fun disguise based hiking from an early age. I do think that every child should have one reason to get in a large trench coat with two of your friends. And my name is Hercule Poirot I am very much an adult and I should be able to see all the pornography right now. Because I am 48 years old and I am a tall for my age . The doctors say I will continue to grow. It's stories like this that give me hope because the kids are all right. You know, it's like they know what they're doing. They know how to get around it. You know, it it's it's kind of like my parents' generation would just roll over and okay, I'll give hand over all my personal identity to somebody, you know, some unknown company. The kids are hacking this and good on them. Good on 'em. The kids are all right. That that should be the motto for this show. We're gonna take a break. Final break. Final words coming up. You're watching Twit. It's great to have Burber Jen here. We appreciate you spending some time with us. I'm making this show shorter just for you, Berber. And your mother. And your mom. Happy mom's day to all the mothers out there, including my own mother . She's in a nursing home in Rhode Island, but she's going to get a very big bouquet of flowers any day now. Tight. Turned out I couldn't get it delivered on Mother's Days. But I think she really Tuesday will be f ine, I'm thinking. I mean, I do think that's one of the benefits of having a mother in a memory care facility. Yeah. Is it's all kind of the same. Oh. Look at this. Flowers have arrived. Who's this Leo? Leo. Why does that name sound familiar? So familiar. What's a great name? Happy Mother's Day, everybody. We'll be back with more right after this . This episode of This Week in Tech is brought this episode of This Week in Tech is brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. You know, we talk about it all the time. The potential rewards of AI are obviously too great for any company to ignore, but so are the risks. Loss of sensitive data, attacks against enterprise managed AI. And then there's always the issue of generative AI, increasing opportunities for the bad guys, helping them to rapidly createish phing lures, write malicious code, automate data extraction. There were one point three million instances of social security numbers leaked to AI applications. This is not by accident. I mean it is by accident. It's not by intent. It's not like some somebody broke in even. It's it's pe your innocent users at your company using AI, maybe I don't know, they're looking at your uh your uh 10ks' or your social security uh you know your tax return with your socials on it they are submitting proprietary company information to AI Zscaler I'll stop that cold it's the most trusted AI security platform 40 percent of global two thousand companies use Zscaler. In fact, half a trillion transactions are secured daily, every day, with more than nine point four thousand global customers. Z-Scaler carries a net promoter score of more than 75. That's 150% higher than the average SaaS . But you don't have to take my word for it. Ask their customers. Check out what CIFA says. He's director of security and infrastructure at ZWA . He says this about using Zscaler to prevent AI attacks. With Zscalar being in line in a security protection strategy helps us monitor all the traffic. So even if a bad actor were to use AI, because we have a tight security framework around our endpoint, helps us proactively prevent that activity from happening. AI is tremendous in terms of its opportunities, but it also brings in challenges. We're confident that Z Scale is going to help us ensure that we're not slowed down by security challenges but continue to take advantage of all the advancements. Thank you, Siva . With Zscaler Zero Trust Plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI safely to boost productivity across the business. Their Zero Trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. And you also support thisweek in tech when you go to that address, zscaler.com slash security. Thank you, Zscaler. And now back to Twit . Thank you, Leo . You know what? Thanks also to our club Twit members, Scooter X especially, who was always coming up with stories. He has looked, he w ent out, he has looked, he has found some happy stories. Are you ready for some happy stories? PC Magazine ? Happy well tech podcast? I don't know how happy. Let's see. Uh PC Magazine says Amazon's hero is now exempted from the FCC's foreign-made Wi-Fi router ban. I would describe that as a definitively neutral story. It's neither good nor bad. We don't like the Wi-Fi router ban. I guess I understand the reason. Uh, it said that any router not made in the U.S. would be banned. And at the time, the only router made in the U.S. was the Starlink router, uh, made by uh SpaceX . Uh Netgear has since gotten approval from the FCC. You have to f answer some questions like do you ever plan to build these in the US? And if you say yes, apparently that's sufficient. Uh 'cause they're not currently Amazon Zero. If you're ever thinking about contemplatinging. Are you think about a factory? Yeah, here in the US. Um, so that's good news. Amazon's Euro . Uh now uh along with Netgear, you can buy these in the US and the FCC, which similarly banned foreign-made drones in the United States, because of security, right, has realiz ed that by doing so, maybe they're causing some insecurity. They have decided to allow those band drones and band routers to receive updates for at least two more years. Yeah. How generous. Well, they have no other choice. I mean they're not they're not saying you have to throw it out. So people should be able to update these. That's absolutely critical if security is your concern. Actually through twenty twenty nine . Uh but they also they also say uh don't expect it to go beyond 2029 . Yes . Yeah, we'll see. That's two years longer than the original 2027 cut. I mean, given the low the low prices for routers, I can't honestly see that many router manufacturers shifting back to the US unless they have to. And if they're gonna get these kind of get outs, then why bother? Right . It's a it's a very weird ban. It's very got lots of holes. Uh if your router is currently in the US for sale, you can still sell it. Uh really applies to newly made uh routers, as you say . Okay, criticize my accent, but no , that's not an accent thing. That's just uh that's a different it's like schedule, right? It's uh just a different. Aluminium. Uh rooter always. Don't get me started on that. Okay. Rooter has always confused me a little bit, but uh Honestly, I'll give you aluminium. I' actually makes more sense. Aluminium is uh adds a level of whimsy to the world that aluminum never will. Well yes, but I mean we say sodium, we say calcium, aluminum actually makes more sense, but at the same time , the Germans invented the stuff. Let's let them choose their name. What do they call it? Oh god, I don't even know what the Germans call it in terms of their own language. I think you need half a pound of phlegm to actually get it out Um I was gonna ask Berber actually about if he has any insight into why in the world openai spent more than a hundred million dollars to buy the Tech Bro Podcast Network. It must be something because then I see Andreessen Horowitz has started their own daily news show called Monitoring the Situation, which almost sounds like uh a joke but it's not they mean it um mt s baby yeah mts and then uh there's of course let's not forget I'm gonna pronounce it properly T I-I- TT-V. Oh, yeah. That's the only way to pronounce it, of course. Do you have any insight? I mean, first of all, do you know how much they paid? Because all it was said was in the hundreds of millions. Low hundreds of millions. Yeah, I don't think they paid that much. I mean, they paid a lot for it, but it 's a podcast, right? Let's get this straight. They paid a lot of money considering it was a podcast, but considering the thing other things they spend money on, it wasn't but well and also it was Fiji Simo's deal. Yeah. And then she immediately disappears for uh health reasons. It was very perplexing because I it w it I think it's interesting. I feel like the engagement has really dropped off since they bought it because people obviously don't want to go on the show now because it's owned by OpenAI. And then a lot of people don't want to watch it because it's like corporate TV now. Yeah. Um This could I could have predicted this. In fact, I think I did uh predict this. I it seems like this is an example. If you're gonna do an IP O of fiscal irresponsibility. This is not well I mean what I don't think there are many things that open AI has done that would be considered fiscally responsible. Okay. Good point. But I mean no Bubber raised an interesting point here in terms of you buy it, no one takes it seriously anymore, so you've shut it down. Well I mean is that the goal? Get my I mean, correct me if I'm wrong Burbert. My understanding is th the reason they bought it wasn't entirely to keep TBPN running. It's to have the TBPN boys be an integral part of comms and kind of the lobbying work at Open Yeah. I th I think at OP they are definitely very frustrated about the negative perception that like they have they have a comms problem clearly. And so I think internally they're like trying to spit out like different ideas to try and fix it. And so this was, I guess, like a very impulsive decision they made to just buy , you know, like they were kind of pitching it to me as like, you know, we're gonna help shape public opinion with TVPM and reach audiences first and bypass traditional media. But I don't think they really had an idea of what they wanted to do with it. Um it was one of those things where like everyone like like there are these weird disconnects where people and just like to the rest of the world, it's just like a completely silly thing to do, but I should be honest. I'm just jealous. They have 59,000 YouTube subscribers. This show alone has 63,000. Our network has more than a quarter of a million. We're not getting hundreds of millions of dollars. Uh but uh but on the other hand, you could buy us and you wouldn't guarantee positive coverage of open AI. Yeah. So maybe that's what's going on. I mean, you could but Joe Rogan's got twenty million subscribers. Lex Friedman has five million subscribers. I mean, they're it just seems like you bought I don't under I just don't get it. I don't know. How how is monitoring the situation going? Is that a good thing for Andreess and Horowitz? Seems like the same idea. I didn't even know that they launched it. There's and therein lies the problem. Right? Therein lies the problem . Nobody knows it exists. Uh all right. Yes. And the pointy headed one doesn't seem to care that much either. So Yeah. Well, a little introspection goes a long way, let me just say . All right. I just uh that's a kind of a personal act grind. I shouldn't I shouldn't belabor that point. Let me see if there's any happy news. Any happy news at all. God, his head is so painty. I know, I know. I just I interviewed him in ninety seven and he gave a great interview, I've gotta say, but you couldn't get over the fact it's yeah, his head is really, really pointy. I think it's kind of an internet meme sort of situation where people are editing the photos, but then you're confronted with the reality and you're like no no when you see unique moments of this may be a handicap um because you know sometimes when a baby is born, the head gets squeezed quite a bit, and it is not unusual for it to be pointy. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I'm just saying it's notable. Yes, it's a notable physical. And it's not something you can fix. I mean you wouldn't want to put a board on the baby's head as they're growing to kind of fix that. I think that every baby should be stomped on by an Italian plum ber. And it's got it. That would fix it all. I I confess I am I'm sympathetic because I once shaved my head, as you well know, for charity, and I learned that I have a really horrific shaped noggin and I don't I don't wanna make fun of anybody. Well you're gonna have to shave your head again when we do our second when we do our next twenty-four hour twelve live stream. She really wants us to do it. Both of you guys are welcome to take a thirty minute slot 'cause we're gonna have to film fill twenty four hours. That's only forty eight people we need to fill the half hour. It's not that many. We can find forty eight people. We can do it. We can do it. We could have one hour just wandering out in the street trying to get people to talk. You know, when say I went to hospital a couple of years ago and I got number one and a number two, and my goodness, my skull is ugly. So I shaved my head once in college and I had a looking skull, yeah. Did you really? Mm-hmm. And what prompted that? Was did you do that? It was I had a blonde mohawk for a while throughout high school and college. And then at one point I was like, what if I grew my hair out all the way 'cause I wanted to start over it. And so I figured, yeah, why not? But I wouldn't . So do you look like Sinead O'Connor? Yeah. On retrospect. I mean, it looked great , but I would not recommend doing it in January in New York. Chili because cold I don't really think about the fact that having any amount 'cause I even still had kind of short hair at the time, but that's still adds a level of warmth to your head that a a shaved head does. It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, but look how short my hair is. And yet when I didn't have any, I had to wear a hat. It was so cold. Uh a lot of heat radiates. I'm sorry, Berber. You didn't know what you were getting into and I really apologize. This is we've been incredibly on topic for what the show normally is. We're actually on our best behavior is great hair. You know, that's looking good. He does. He does. It's it's all over the place. And I'm sure an excellent shaped dome underneath it. Uh I have no idea. Yeah, I have no idea what my I've never thought about what my head would look like if I shave it all. What's the shortest your hair's ever been ? It's always been long, I feel like. Because I have a I have a huge head, so I also have a huge head. We all have huge heads. Every one of us on this show has a huge head. Hard to find hats. There is a demand now in the Discord chat where our club members hang out. As you know, we treat our club members uh as family and they are saying they need pictures of you, Paris, with uh Mohawk and uh with a uh a shaved head. So are there any? I mean I can try and find some. Here are pictures of us uh with shaved heads with cone heads? Yes, as I mean cone heads, what a great shape. Well, they've been put yeah, they've been posting pictures of us with mustaches as well. The mustache ones were quite good, I will . Well, did you could you tell how old we were from those? I'm I'm gonna look back . Not looking good. Yeah, yeah. Uh anyway , we thank you uh so much for being here, Berber. Uh read Berber's work, really great stuff in the Wall Street Journal, a lot of exclusives. Oh yeah, we look good with mustaches. Berber, you have a nice uh that would fool anybody. That would make you I should try. I like that one a lot actually. Yeah. Can you grow facial hair? Uh it's it's it's it doesn't go well. That's kind of a personal question. I'm so sorry to put you on blast. She asked me that on Wednesday too. I just I feel like you can, but you just choose not to because your wives hate it. She has Paris has a real knack for uh uh the personal question, I guess. I like my uh what else we gotta do? My mustache there. I I grew one during lockdown and it was so annoying. I liked that. So happy to you looked like Terry Thomas. You looked fantastic. Yes, exactly. I look like a depraved Tammy Ter Terry Thomas. But also, you know, you take a s uh you know a swig of tea and it it just it it stayed in there all day. I'll put a po photo of that and the mohawk on Discord. But you had a Mohawk too? Everybody post your Mohawks in the chat. Half of this panel has had a Mohawk. Unless Berber, you've also had one. The case is 75%. Oh, that wasn't a mohawk, Paris. I'm gonna show you the back that has a mohawk. Well that's that's not a mohawk. I guess it's a faux hawk. It's uh it's uh it's a good look. Let's see . Let's see. And this isn't quite bald either. This is just Okay. That's a shaved head. It's extremely short. That's it. Here, let me show you the back of Oh, look at that. Paris, you have at red I love this. Paris has readily to hand pictures of the back of her head. I've just gone on in on Instagram and scrolled back. Oh, okay. There we go. Oh, that is not a good look, Terry Thomas. No, it really wasn't a good look, but it was a you look in pain . I apologize for those of you only listening. Actually, no, you're lucky. You're the lucky ones. Uh thank you, Berber, for being here. We appreciate it. Read Berber's work in the Wall Street Journal. You'll find Paris Martneau at Consumer Reports, where she's doing food safety. Yes, it was she who exposed the radioactive shrimp scandal the lead in your protein powder uh a shocker and there is soon to be more food safety is her passion thank you Paris we'll see you on Wednesday on intelligent machines . And thank you, Ian Thomas. I called you Thompson , didn't I? Yes, I wasn't going to say anything, but my father would hunt you down. I apologize. Uh thank you, Ian. Of course, read Ian's view from the valley. Uh subscribe and that way you'll get it automatically. No, so it's not just intended for Brits. Anybody would want to read this. No, it's it's a view from a Brit in America. And this is a strained and silly place at times. It is indeed. Ian Thompson, thank you so much. Thanks to all of you for joining us. A special thanks to our club members who make this show possible if you believe, uh as I do, in the importance of independent journalism covering technology, uh especially podcasting. Um, your support makes all the difference to us. It covers a great portion, as much as thirty percent of our overall uh operating expenses. It allows us to do this show and all the other shows we do, plus special programming for our club members. We give you access to a special uh Discord only for club members, which makes it a great place to hang out. Uh, you also uh get ad-free versions of all the shows for just 10 bucks a month. If you're not a member yet, twit.tv slash club twit. We do this show every Sunday afternoon , 11 a.m. Hawaii time, 2 p.m. Pacific Time, 5 p.m. East Coast Time, 2100 UTC. You can watch it live. If you're there at that time in the club twit discord or YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. We stream on all those platforms. After the fact on demand versions of the show available at uh the website, twit.tv. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it that way automatically the minute it's available. There's a YouTube channel too with as you can see 63,000 subscribers. I think that's worth at least a hundred million dollars, don't you? I I feel like that's not too much to ask, Sam Alton . Um let's see. I guess that's all I have to say, except that, as I have said, for 21 years now, at the end of every show. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week. Another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.