This Week in Tech 1019 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. Brian McCullough is here from the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast, ian Thompson from TheRegistercom and our good friend Wesley Faulkner in the news. Tiktok, it's back in the App Store. How did that happen? Elon Musk's Doge website has already been hacked and it looks like we're ready to sell off Intel for parts. Oh, it's all. Next on Twit.

00:26 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

00:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Twit. This is Twit this Week in Tech, episode 1019, recorded Sunday, february 16th 2025. Nickel for your thoughts. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news, and here I thought we were like amazing, because we've been doing this for 20 years and we have 1 000. This is episode 1019, and along comes brian mccullough of the tech meme ride home podcast, who is about to celebrate 2 000 episodes well, yeah, but if we strung together all the episodes for all your shows, I mean, I guess, have you ever done that counting?

01:26
yeah, it's more than 10 000. Yeah, I figured it's a lot. It's enough that if I really wanted to retire I could have an ai and just them all and I wouldn't have to do a show. A lick of work for the rest of my life. Great to have you, brian. Welcome also here. Wesley faulkner. Influencer wesley83.com.

01:46 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
He's decided he doesn't want to talk about work anymore. He just wants to be an influencer I want to be a person of the people. I just uh am here representing the, the regular joe okay, I like it.

02:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what does that make us the princes of technology? What we're all regular Joes here? You're the platform, I'm the platform Upon which you are boot dancing. Yeah, ian Thompson's also here from the register. Great to see you.

02:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Always a pleasure he has been promoted to reporter Well honestly, the writing is the fun stuff. So yes, yeah.

02:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, it's great to have all three of you. So, uh, I've been out of town for a couple of days. Went to uh tucson, to uh to buy a hat and uh, oh my word, I got the hat, but I missed the news. So apparently, while I was gone, apple and google both put tiktck back in the app store. What? Uh? Yeah, that's surprising it's.

02:49 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's kind of yeah, we passed a law, yeah, we're gonna just ignore that one for the moment, you know so tick tock never really went away, but you couldn't download it.

02:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh all because of the law that was not only passed by the US Congress, signed by the president at the time, it was also upheld nine to nothing by the US Supreme Court. But then President Trump said hold on. He signed an executive order saying we're going to give you a 75-day extension to find a buyer. At the time both Apple and Google said yeah, but oh, the fines are pretty steep if, if, if that doesn't work out. We don't want to take that chance. So they didn't put it back in the app store. They took it down on january 19th. But now I guess they have assurances from the pres. I don't understand what's what changed?

03:45 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
One thing is that the statute of law is five years, which means the penalty can happen outside of this administration, so the next administration can enforce those penalties. And so them saying we hope that you will do the right thing, president Trump, or Congress, to actually pass a law to repeal the law, which is what they'll need to do in order to make sure that they're out of the woods. They're putting a lot of hope and that it won't come back to bite them.

04:13 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
So because also remember the fines for that, as it's written in the law, are so they're like they would amount to like something like ten thousand dollars per user. Um, so, if you do the math on the billions of users, just the people will follow my son alone. It'd cost you billions um, but supposedly they got a letter from who's the AG. Now, uh, pam Bondi, right right right assuring letter.

04:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is, according to Bloomberg sent him a letter assuring them that a ban wouldn't now this does not seem very assuring immediately be enforced I think it's a question of can they find a buyer?

04:53 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
and larry ellison is reportedly very keen, you know. I'm sure elon would throw some money at it, because that's what he does well there was a rumor that musk going to buy it, but then he denied that.

05:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it'd be interesting if he bought it, because he would then really control two of the primary social networks that people use for news.

05:14 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
But TikTok never said affirmatively that they're willing to sell Right. They have not actually said yes, as soon as we find a good agreement of who we can sell it to, then we'll do that. They have not said anything in the affirmative that they're moving in that direction.

05:33 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
There were also rumors, though, that the Chinese government might like Elon to do it right. So if what you're saying, Wesley, is that TikTok never said we're going to sell which we also assume the Chinese government says we don't want tick tock to sell, but if the chinese government is okay with elon, then in theory that could happen.

05:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very confusing, although I think a lot of the rationale for banning tick tock is moot uh, because, uh, security has just disappeared inside the government's computing and um, it's just I. I feel like that's the least of your problem. If you're worried about security or even propaganda, tick Tock is the least of your problems. Anyway, who knows?

06:18 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
it's very weird uh, well, I mean, the weird thing has been people moving from Tick Tock, which is that was just a protest move. I did a deep dive into Red Note security this week and, my goodness, it's bad. They're still using HTTP. They're not even encrypting traffic. Yeah, I mean, the security on that app is terrible and I spoke to somebody at Citizen Lab and they're saying look, we don't think it's there for espionage, it's just really bad coding.

06:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right Sloppy code. It feels to me like there's more. There's something else that went on under the hood that we don't know about, because a letter from the attorney general saying we're not going to do anything immediately doesn't seem sufficient to get both Apple and Google to take the risk. I'm sure their lawyers are saying well, there's a lot of risk, there could be huge fines. I, I just I think there's something else under the hood, don't you there can? There must be some other assurance beyond just yeah, we're probably not going to prosecute you immediately that's probably.

07:18 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But it's nice to have the sort of Damocles hanging over your head.

07:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it comes to making decisions. Yeah uh, by the way, we should mention that the doge website it was hacked almost immediately smartest guys in the room uh, this is uh from the new republic.

07:37
The dogegov website is such a coding disaster that pretty much anyone can take over 404. Media broke the story. Anyone can push updates to the doge got gov site. Two sources independently found the issue. One made their own decision to deface the site. The defacement was these experts in quotes left their database open, row row. This is in the on the page. It says meet the US government, Trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy, US government executive branch, small independent agencies. And these experts left their database Open. Roro.

08:19 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I think this shows that being smart in one domain doesn't necessarily mean it translates to another. That even if they are experts and they're smart in Tesla's or Elon's companies, that expertise doesn't translate to everything.

08:37
You can't just say you're a smart person, you can figure it out. There's years, decades of knowledge that our government uh, employees have done to and like stacks and stacks of regulations and checks and balances to make sure that this stuff doesn't happen. And if they're not following those and they don't have any respect for any of those stuff, like this is going to happen over and over and over again um, yeah, I'm the german.

09:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm sorry the.

09:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I'm a I'm. I don't know how smart I am, but I would know better than using a wordpress theme placeholder page for wastegov. Uh, it was. It's a placeholder. They use the uh just in case you want to make it look just like your site, look just like that they. The rest of the web page is about an imaginary architecture firm called etude, pulled from a sample web page for a default wordpress theme called 2024. I used to use 2024. It's a nice theme. This is from jason kiebler writing for a 404. So not only was the dogegov site hackable, the wastegov site that was set up was not even done. It says etude is a pioneering firm that seamlessly merges creativity and functionality. Uh, also, waste does not comply with uh executive orders issued by donald trump. Begins it contains the word diverse, but that's left over from the old architecture site yeah, this is a no checks, no balances.

10:13 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Do what you need to do, throw something up, we'll just.

10:15 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We're moving fast, but move fast and break things.

10:18 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes yeah, it takes. It's okay to sit back and just like well, how do we want to approach it? What makes the most sense? Uh, because you're going to have to be doubling back and just like well, how do we want to approach it? What makes the most sense? Because you're going to have to be doubling back and it's confusing people and that's okay, apparently, in this administration to just move forward and see what happens.

10:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the old Silicon Valley motto, meta's motto, was move fast and break things.

10:41 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, but this is move fast and kill people.

10:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the thing. When the government breaks things, it's a little bit more than when meta breaks things.

10:48 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And it's not just rolling back a change we're talking about, especially if we're talking about firings and we'll probably get into that later. These are career professionals with decades of knowledge that we'll lose them and we won't get them back. You can't just fire people or let people go and then replace them with anyone that doesn't have that really ingrained institutional knowledge.

11:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I understand, though, the urge. I mean, look, it's pretty clear the government is bloated, there's a lot of waste. I understand the urge, the need, in fact, to find that waste and get rid of it. I don't think that's a bad thing. Um, it's being done.

11:28 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
One person's waste is another person's livelihood right you can't just some things that are considered waste, like the. Let's talk about usaid. Let's say that is wasteful to give this, these benefits to all these other countries. A lot, lot of the wheat, a lot of the rice, all the products that were shipped overseas were basically a subsidy for our farmers.

11:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's where that came from $2 billion a year Exactly.

11:55 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And so you might say, oh, that's waste, or that's someone's pork project or whatever. But that doesn't mean that it's worthless just because people feel it's waste. And you have to understand the reasoning behind this. And if you're not doing the work, even like whatever the 50 million dollars for condoms for gaza or whatever they said- it actually wasn't turned out. If you don't ever ask why, right then you never understand the root of why that decision was made and why it was like. Well, this is what you get.

12:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is what you get with elon, and this is uh, apparently, uh, what, what uh he wanted? I have to say I'm sad because one agency that is not, uh, eviscerated is apparently the irs. They've just purchased an nvidia super computer. They've just purchased an NVIDIA supercomputer. According to the Intercept, the IRS is set to purchase the NVIDIA SuperPod AI supercomputer, 31 servers with Blackwell, those very fancy giant Blackwell processors. All of this to enhance the IRS's machine learning capabilities for fraud detection and taxpayer behavior analysis.

13:07
Well, you know what I'd say it's a revenue generating arm of the government, right yeah, we have to pay our taxes.

13:14 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You know it's the price we pay for a civilized Society.

13:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um you know 248 Blackwell processors, to be exact finally got them.

13:23 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
They were delayed for so long, but yes.

13:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A single SuperPod system is $7 million, but the exact cost is not specified in the acquisition document, so maybe it's only $7 million. It will feature enhanced memory upgrades. Yeah, you want to get all 64 gigabytes of RAM. I'm sure it's a lot more than that. Providing substantial computing power for the IRS Research, applied Analytics and Statistics Division, ras, to operate large-scale machine learning models as part of their Compliance Data Warehouse Project.

14:06 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I would love to see it confirmed if they're actually purchasing these for ownership in their own data centers. Because of the way that things have gone, pushing towards private industry, I wouldn't be surprised if this is a contract in which they're purchased through another entity to have this.

14:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A third party.

14:27 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And then they have access to it, right, and so basically, I don't know if this is going to be an XAI data center.

14:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's going to be installed at the IRS Computing Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, just up the road from you.

14:41 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Okay, good, all right, that makes me feel a little better. At least we'll own this yeah.

14:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wonder the road from you. Okay, good, all right, that makes me feel a little better. At least we'll own this. Yeah, I wonder how long it'll be relevant for. But yes, this sounds great. The irs has 68 different ai related projects underway. It makes sense if you have to process tax returns from hundreds of millions of people, uh it's, you're going to need some pretty hefty computing.

15:02 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, I mean, on the other hand, they did have the IRS system, which was a free tax return, essentially, where they would estimate your taxes and send it to you, and that was one of the first things that was killed. It's a rather odd system in its way.

15:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elon said that I saw his ex-post so I wasn't sure if he meant the free file system. Remember that the IRS trialed this last year so that you don't have to pay $60 to TurboTax it's free, except as soon as you want to file you have to pay them for the free tax return. So the government trialed this last year to great applause, and they were going to do it this year. As soon as I saw Elon say it's, he said deleted. I checked and I was going to do it this year. As soon as I saw elon say it's, he said deleted. I checked and I was able to do it. Oh right, so I don't. This is the problem. It's uh, I don't even think elon knows what's deleted and what's not. The the free file system. The last time I checked, which was a few days ago, is still up and running okay, well, I mean, it makes sense.

16:04 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's the way that everyone else in the world does it, every country. I mean, it's I, I've. I had never had to file a tax return until I came to the us and it was just like it's taken out your paycheck, easy job done nothing to worry about understand americans. Yeah, I've been over here 15 years.

16:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think I'm getting there we don't trust the government to tell us what we owe. We got to figure that out for ourselves right I think americans really. I mean in, you know, in sweden, you get a postcard that says hey, we took the money.

16:38 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Thanks so much, see you later well, in norway all public tax, all tax returns are so you can see exactly what everyone earns. And that goes for political leaders all the way down. And yes, that would never play here and I'm not quite sure it would work, to be honest, but it's an interesting idea.

16:56 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I talked to Matt Cutts about this specific topic when, way back when, he was in charge of what is now called Doge.

17:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was then it was the USs digital service.

17:08 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It didn't have a meme name yes, yes and um for this issue. He said that he personally was really trying to champion this to happen and that they were working on building apis into different parts of the government so that they could, if a law did change, to kind of do the pipework piping to bring that all together. So my guess is that they might be ready for this, to be able to do audits with a large supercomputer to figure out what's missing, what's not, which would be a good thing for some. But then there's a with the way that this administration selectively applies the law to who they feel is the people that don't agree with them. I would be afraid of it being weaponized in that way.

18:00 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, it's. They're talking about, oh, smartest people in the in the room, but having access to that amount of data is distinctly worrying, without any controls or background checks. I mean it's actually.

18:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, maybe somebody can explain it. Elon tweets like 100 200 times a day. He is a champion in two video games, so he's running tesla, spacex, the boring company, and neural link. I'm sure I've left a few out and he has time to do this. When is this guy? Oh, and let's not forget, he has 13 children. When does this guy sleep?

18:42 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
well. Well, it's interesting. I was talking to somebody at SpaceX and distinctly off the record and at a sort of a more relaxed situation, but they were saying, honestly, spacex works best when Elon's doing other things and he's not sticking his finger in the whole time. You know, it's like let us get on with the engineering, this is what we do best. Yeah, you go and raise money and the rest of it.

19:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, if you, okay, even if you take spacex tesla, it's the boring company neural link away. I couldn't tweet 200 times a day and still get anything done. What is going on is this guy? Uh, is there, are there? Are there 10 elon musks really?

19:19 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
well, I'm sure he has people for it.

19:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it's kind of it feels like I mean, unless he's got somebody hired to do dad jokes it really. It feels like it's in his voice, don't you think?

19:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
yeah, uh. On the other hand, he does, he, his dad, to a lot of kids. So apparently, with an influencer, we've just learned this, uh yeah, new kid, two new kids.

19:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, we also learned that he's not actually uh forgive me, uh for getting vulgar he's not actually sleeping with these women. So this is another activity. Elon scott, he's, I know. I don't even want to go any farther, we're just going to stop now let's just not mention this he sends out vials of his uh sperm to people.

20:04 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
How romantic.

20:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's romantic. I would you know I want if it came with a contract that said I will support you in this child for as long as a child's old.

20:12 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Oh, bad choice of words. Yeah, why? What do you mean? Nothing Bad joke. Just listen, just move forward. I'm not acknowledging the words that you use.

20:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's right over my head there. It must be the hat. All right, let's move on. I, it's just I, I am. It's a little baffling, by the way, another thing Elon did this week. He put in a bid for open AI of $97.4 million. Which feels in Elon, it must mean something right. Everything's 420 or 69, it's all dad jokes. Does anybody know what?

20:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
97.4 million dollar, billion, billion isn't 97.4 the average temperature of the human body no, I think it's 98.6 unless it's changed.

21:00 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I don't know. I feel like it's something radio station he listens to.

21:03 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, the way things are at the moment, you wouldn't put it out of the box.

21:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's also suing OpenAI because they're doing a transition from a not-for-profit to a for-profit. When he co-founded it with Sam Altman, the whole idea of OpenAI and it was, I think, an honorable idea back in 2015, was let's create, create. We don't want the big companies like Google and Microsoft to dominate artificial intelligence. It should be open, it should be for the people, so we're going to make an open research project called open AI.

21:37
Of course, a few years later, elon we now know because the emails have been released threatened and said I want to take it over and if, if you, if you don't let me take it over and run it for profit, I'm gonna go after you. And they said no and elon was forced out. But it turned out they needed a for-profit division because it's hideously expensive to generate these large language models. So they had this kind of weird dual structure of for-profit not-for-profit. Now they're trying to say that forget the non-profit part, we're just going to be for-profit. Elon sued he's currently suing and then made an unsolicited bid. Uh, it's widely believed that it really was more about setting a price way above what they're worth to anybody else who might want to invest.

22:25 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, not necessarily way above what they're worth, because one of the things is, you know, there are laws that say if a for-profit yeah, below.

22:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I meant below, not above. It's well below the valuation.

22:39 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Right, that's what I was going to say. So the key is that there are laws that say the for-profit has to be compensated fairly, and there were numbers floating around that, okay, they would compensate the nonprofit at X dollar figure. So he did come in above what those rumors were. And so the idea here is what people are suggesting is hey, if Elon could take over controlling interest of OpenAI for 97 billion dollars, that seems cheap, but at the same time that drives up the price of what um open. I would have to pay to the, the non-profit, to get out from under the, the governance also keep in mind that.

23:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's trolling.

23:21 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's trolling, but trolling with a consequence 100% and because, also, remember, you have other investors, like, say, microsoft, that they would be interested in what the value of their holdings are, and at the same time, we know that OpenAI is in talks with Masasan and SoftBank to have a $40 billion investment round. We think the numbers will come in at. So, again, if that's the case, if Elon drives up the price of what they would have to pay to the for-profit, openai does not have $97 billion to compensate the nonprofit and so, again, and even $40 billion won't cover that. So if he can jack the price up, even if he doesn't take over OpenAI, he screws over Sam Altman, who, no less than President Trump, has animated. What was the quote? He said something there's a guy that he hates, or something.

24:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he's not a fan of Elon. No of the funny thing is he ended around. He didn't end around on elon when he kind of snuck larry ellison and uh and son-san masayoshi's son of softbank, into the white house and said and got the president say, yeah, we're going to spend 100 billion dollars to create stargate. Can you see elon anywhere in there? No, so there's this, there's this inner nice scene, almost childish war between these two.

24:46 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I totally jinxed that. By the way, if you look at my Monday show title, it's Sam Altman out maneuvers Elon Musk. He did, and then the very next day Elon does this thing. So I said on the show I was like, oh sorry, sam, I jinxed you because uh yeah, elon, it's a slap fight.

25:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is between billionaires, um, by the way, uh, the board draw rejected the take. I understand yes, because they knew. In fact, they even said it's not a serious. We know it's not a serious bit, it's really. And, by the way, elon has a closed source AI company called grok or xAI.

25:25 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
XAI, right? Well, see, that's the other aspect of this is, let's say, that he drives the price up so high that they can't do this for-profit transition. In theory, then OpenAI cannot raise any more money and then in theory would go out of business, right? So that would be the ultimate third degree level of this trolling. It's just wild Because, as you said, it's, it's eye wateringly expensive to to train these models and things like that. But, um, you know, I, if it it's sort of a heads he wins, tails, sam loses, sort of thing, so it doesn't really matter.

26:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Basically, it is. It is amazing to watch these infinitely rich people. I remember when bill gates had a billion dollars worth of net worth, he said for all intents and purposes, I'm infinitely rich. I have so much money I could not spend it in a lifetime, so everything else doesn't matter post economic, as the phrase is at the moment yeah, you're post-tech. So elon, by the way, has fired back, has announced that Monday tomorrow as we record XAI will release its quote scary, smart Grok 3.

26:37 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Did you?

26:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ever think we'd live in a world where there was a government agency named after a meme coin, an AI named Grok. That was scary smart president's day, and it's on president's day.

26:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, george washington must be just you know uh, reaching about 45 yeah revolutions per minute in his grave. Yes, um, it has been a remarkable week, I have to say. Elon bringing his kid into the Oval Office was quite something. Um, I don't think Donald is a big fan of children, uh, except in the abstract it's pretty clear.

27:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As X as the child is named, that's his nickname because I, no one can pronounce his full name. As X approached the Resolute desk and the president you can watch the tape president trump's like offending him off, he's like getting, and then, and then the kid who was three years old, so doesn't know any better picks his nose, wipes it on the desk yes, and tells the president shut up you know what's sad about that.

27:42
I was talking before the show with wesley, who is also a parent. Is you know that he says this three-year-old says shut up, because he's told that all the time. Right, that's he. That's like his vocabulary. It's actually very sad. Um, yeah, it was just a weird. See. I feel like we're living in in maybe elon's right. It's a simulation and then something's gone wrong with the software, because it's just weird what's going on sim city with a disaster menu turned up to max here, yeah um, I thought actually elon was fairly coherent and logical in in that talk.

28:20
Um, he made some sense. Some of the stuff he said was made up, I think. But uh, I I'm not against the idea of cutting government waste.

28:28 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
There's clearly a lot of it it's just that we can't trust him and he can't even say there that you can't trust him.

28:35
Yeah, so he needs to bring actual receipts instead of a website that he curates and he is able to say put his own spin on it with, with no checks and oversights, he's there's no accountability, which means he controls the narrative, and that is not how we are supposed to run. He could be a hundred percent right and I hope that he is. Uh, for all of our sakes, but the, the, but we already know that he himself says that he's not, and nor can we. There's no change log, there's no commit log to look to see exactly what he's done.

29:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't retract it. Maybe you could, I don't know. I hope they keep taking notes. Elon says that the Grok team is working all weekend. Right now, as we speak, they are. I wonder if Elon's's still tweeting though. But as we speak they are working hard to get uh grok out on monday. He said it. He told uh summit world economic summit in dubai uh by a video call because he he couldn't get to the world government summit uh earlier this week that they were still a week or two away from releasing the product and he didn't want to be hasty. But he seems to have decided to press ahead. He posted on x that he would be honing product with the team all weekend and that he will be offline until then. I think so. I think if you've been looking for Elon's posts, he's busy.

30:05 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, remember, they spun up I think it's the largest supercluster, or one of the largest superclusters in existence and they did it in record time. So I think, specifically, it was to train this model.

30:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what, Maybe when he said I'll be offline, he meant just mostly offline, because he did just post an hour ago, I see here, and then before that it's been a few hours and you know, retweeting doesn't count.

30:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Interesting that Andrew Tate comes up in the suggested things for Elon Musk these days.

30:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they keep trying to get me to follow Andrew Tate.

30:43 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm. Tucker Carlson and I just chinless wonder that beard is fooling nobody uh, in the style this is.

30:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is elon's post, in the style of eeyore's ring verse introducing the origin of rings, assign engineers to work on an advanced llM with search, the verse of the engineers. Oh, I'm not going to. No, I'm not going to read this. Three minds for the search kings, keen and precise Under the cloud where vast data lies. Seven for the agents with choice to devise In halls of code where their logic flies. Nine for the memory weavers. This is, I'm sorry, that's sacrilege. I'm not going to go on well, hey, by the way.

31:29 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Uh, you were asking if maybe he has people tweet for him, but have we not considered the idea that he's trained in a grog's tweeting for him? That's what I'm saying that's a possibility.

31:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean it's um, it would explain an awful lot as well, because we don't like to say that ai is wrong. We call it hallucinating, which is just a way of saying it's screwed up. So you know, I mean it's possible. I wouldn't put it past him, put it that way.

31:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, maybe that's the solution. We know he's actually using other people to play his video games.

31:58 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh, that was just. You know, everyone does it.

32:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, amazingly enough enough, a lot of people don't. I share my account with 20 people in china. Uh, yeah, doesn't everybody? Sure, let's take a break, we come back. We actually have some other news, big news will intel be sold off for parts? It looks like that might be coming. Brian mccullough is here from the tech meme ride home podcast. Wonderful to have you. Uh, you're still a little pink, my friend uh, I'll work on that during the ad break.

32:27
I don't know if that's your natural color. Wesley faulkner is also here. Great to see you. Wesley uh, wesley83.com is the website. And ian thompson uh, actually wesley, but we might have reported for the register. We might have just lost wesley he was warning us. He lives in northern virginia and there's some severe wind storms going on right now.

32:47 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Oh nasty well that's the stuff that just went through kentucky right right.

32:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So he was a little concerned that he might get, uh, blown away. Stay tuned, stay tuned. Our show today, uh, we're very pleased to say, brought to you by shopify. When you think about businesses, I'm just I. I love Shopify because without Shopify, my son would still be getting an allowance from me, let's put it that way. When you think about businesses whose sales are rocketing we're talking Allbirds, untuckit, salthankcom you think about an innovative product, progressive brand and button down marketing.

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35:17 - Benito (Announcement)
uh, wesley oh, there he is. He's got him back, yep winds are howling in nova got him back.

35:31 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yep, winds are howling in nova, are you okay? Yeah, hopefully it will not. We won't lose it again. Um, so it's been kind of all over the place with yeah no I lost it for a day and a half last week. Wow, uh, and so it's. It was it's, that's a hit's a bummer.

35:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When you lose your internet for a day and a half, who's the provider?

35:47 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
We use Cox internet, but there are so many trees here and we are in the mountains as well, and so it's the terrain is not good. There are a lot of trees that can fall on lines, and since it's the, the, the incline, it makes it hard to get service. Um, roads get blocked off really easily, and we also had uh torrential rains yesterday and today, so there's flooding as well, so it's just uh not the best. I'm I'm, but we haven't. We've gotten brownouts, but I haven't lost power for a long time so stay safe sorry about no, don't apologize, Just stay safe.

36:26 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, it's the same over here. It's just like you've got to have a couple of I've got a couple of you know battery packs ready, which should theoretically give us a couple of days laptop use.

36:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you in San Francisco?

36:38 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
East Bay, but yeah, east Bay. But we're half a mile away from the Haywood fault lines, so we have our water, we have our camping supplies and we've got battery power backup.

36:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, it's amazing, yeah, amazing.

36:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It is quite bizarre, though, when you invest your life savings in a house that close to a fault line.

36:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Brian, are you in the Bay Area? I forgot where you are.

37:00 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
El Cerrito area.

37:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I know you are, and where's Brian? El Cerrito area no, I know you are, and where's Brian? I'm in Brooklyn, brooklyn. Yeah Well, nothing bad ever happens in New York. You're fine, by the way now I think I look blue, but you can tell me You're not getting more. I don't know what's going on, what kind of camera are you using?

37:20 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
No, it's not the camera, it's this new light that I'm using and theoretically you can change the color temperature, and I don't think it actually functionally works.

37:29 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We're talking a smart device which isn't that smart.

37:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a shock. Well, the power broker is perfectly white balance, so you're safe. All right, let's continue on. Intel has spoken with the trump administration and tsmc over the past few months about get ready for this. This is a shocker. Selling off its fabs to tsmc uh, you know intel's quarterly results weren't awful and the stock did all right. I think I remembered last week, right?

38:09 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
tsmc, of course, is the taiwanese company that makes the chips for apple so wait, I got some stats for you, if you're just mentioning yes versus tsmc, intel's foundry business lost 13 billion dollars on 17 and a half billion in revenue last year, just last year, 2024. Meanwhile, tsmc had $41.1 billion in profit on $90 billion in revenue over the same period. So comparing the comparisons are not great.

38:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, intel's fourth quarter revenue down 7%. This is the most recent quarter year over year Full year revenue down seven percent. This is the most recent quarter year over year full year revenue down two percent. Um, so intel, you know, struggling. I think nobody doubts that. So here's the plan they're going to sell the fabs, perhaps to tsmc, which would help tsmc because many of those fabs are in the us right, and that would give tsmc, who already has a foundry in um or a fab in uh, arizona, uh, to become more of a american company, which I think they would like to be. Meanwhile, broadcom is also in the mix. Now this is broadcom's um. Where are they based? Singapore, taiwan, taiwan, I've forgotten. Uh, they've joined tsmc considering deals for parts of intel, according to the wall street journal it is very sad to see how low intel has fallen.

39:37 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You know, I mean if, if the board had chosen pat gelsinger in 2005 rather than paulolini, intel would have saved itself 20 years and billions of dollars in stocks, buybacks, and actually invested it in making TSMC a competitor, if not outclassing them. But they sat on their laurels, they took the money and now we're looking at one of the great American chip companies being scrapped and sold off for parts.

40:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess Broadcom would take the, the uh foundry, what would? What part would broadcom go ahead, go ahead. You wanted to clarify.

40:12 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I was going to say they cannot 100 divest because of the money that they got from the from the government chips, yeah, yeah and so even a cell would be a partial cell.

40:22 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
It wouldn't be a hundred percent to answer your question, le Leo Broadcom is looking at the chip design.

40:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They want the design. Yeah business and TSMC wants the plants.

40:32 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
But they're not working together, according to the journal, which you would think, because Broadcom would want somebody. If they don't want that part of the business, they would want somebody to take it. So maybe they should work together to talk to intel. But uh.

40:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A white house official told reuters on friday that the administration might not support intel's factories being operated by a foreign entity, tsmc. Um, they're unlikely. The white house official said the trump administration supported foreign companies investing and building in the US, but was unlikely to support a foreign firm operating Intel's factories. So maybe it doesn't solve TSMC's tariff problem.

41:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, I mean, tsmc has a very mixed bag when it comes to sort of investing in US, in US fabs. Anyway, they've had to import an awful lot of workers from Taiwan with their existing uh facilities over here, yeah, exactly so. Whether or not they could take over Intel's you know factories and actually make them run in the way that they would like is a very mixed game, put it that way. Uh, on the other hand, taiwan, given China's stance, looks like somewhere to get out of, so it could be an interesting exit route.

41:47 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
But is the importing of workers? Is because we don't have the knowledge here for that specific industry? Well, it's not. Like it wouldn't transition into mostly an American. It wouldn't add jobs.

42:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm trying to remember. I think the Arizona plant only had a thousand us jobs. Part of that's not merely we don't have the brains. We do have the brains, but they're very much more expensive. Uh, the the phds who are working at the tsmc plants in taiwan make around 65 000 a year. You're not going to get a high level phd expert working for you in Arizona for that price.

42:26 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
But it also is the institutional memory stuff. If we haven't had people doing this domestically for 20 years or more, then you don't have people with 20 years experience doing it that you can just pull off the shelf.

42:38 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Absolutely. I mean it takes time to spend. I mean I'm glad you brought up the CHIPS Act because you know it's like it's all very well and good. Yeah, let's build chip fabs in the US, but it's going to take 45 years to get those on stream and you need the skills base there and you need to be training people from day one on how to work it and all this sort of well. You know we'll just tariff everyone and you know we'll develop our own manufacturing, but it takes a hell of a lot of time and that interim period is very dodgy.

43:06 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
But also vis-a-vis the CHIPS Act. One of the things that was reported on was that a lot of that CHIPS money that was funneled to Intel on the way out the door, the Biden administration was trying to get as much of it out the door as possible in fear that if the Trump administration did not follow through on delivering that money, intel's basically reliant on it at this point and so if it doesn't come through, then Intel's kind of goose is cooked and thus back to Leo saying sold for parts.

43:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, as you know, after the election, shortly after the election, the Biden administration finalized a $7.86 dollar award to intel um. But you know what, if the check's not in the mail, yeah, I wouldn't ca, I wouldn't cash it. Let's put it that way. Let's, let's hold off um. There are also milestones that you have to achieve to get that money. Intel has met some initial project milestones and and was to receive a billion dollars by the end of december. There was a grant reduction because it was going to be more than eight billion um down. Eight and a half billion was announced in march. Uh, yeah, I think intel's just really, at this point they're these are early conversations, according to the Wall Street Journal that they haven't gone too far. Broadcom, tsmc way, possible Intel deals that would split storied chip maker. Could this be the last chapter in the story of Intel?

44:40 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean from a national security perspective, though, you do want a chip maker who is domestically based and who is doing the best stuff. Selling it off to a foreign, to a foreign company, doesn't seem like the best strategy so for some reason I keep thinking Broadcom is not based in the US.

44:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you know, brian?

44:57 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
um, all I know is that they were the most recent people to pass a trillion uh, a trillion dollars in market capital yeah, I think they're from singapore.

45:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're multinational. So they're.

45:08 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
They're one of those ones where you would know them from previous names and yeah, I mean headquartered in san jose.

45:14 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But yeah, yeah, it says american multinational.

45:17 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I'm on wikipedia american multinational um designer, manufacturer, developers, okay okay they used to be known as a vega technologies okay, wait first hp associates, then agilent and then oh, agilent, I remember yeah yeah, there you go and so broadcom has been really kind of a conglomerate of all sorts of stuff.

45:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's interesting because ai has just been such a boon for nvidia. It feels like intel. You're right, intel kind of had they, had they started making better gpus 10 years ago, they might. They might be the ones in this position now. Um arm, which has been up to now a completely design, a fabulous company, a design firm, has said we're going to start making our own CPUs in-house no, I, because I've read through this and we've been discussing it in-house.

46:21 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, it seems like they're going to still be using tsmc to actually make the chips themselves. They're building their own fabs. Yes, so yeah, but the point is, is that they've never.

46:32 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
They've always been the switzerland right they sell the design to apple or qualcomm or so even watching back to nazi gold but even if if nothing else about this story the idea that they are going to risk that, you know, now maybe they're seeing the writing on the wall because everybody from Meta to Apple already does it. Everybody's trying to get their own chips in-house, right, and so maybe it's not as risky for them to be like okay, we also now have our own chip that is branded by us, that you know, designed by us, all that stuff, as opposed to just licensing the designs, which is what they've done, right, their whole life.

47:12 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
yeah have they said whether or not they're going to license whatever they create for meta? Uh, is that going to be part of their? Now there's their reference queue where they can say this is what we we have, and now anyone else can have it uh, supposedly uh meta is the exclusive partner for this first job okay, well, they've got money to throw around.

47:35 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, they've been trying to get the metaverse to take off for years now and it really just isn't going anywhere oh, it's all over.

47:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we AI now, come on, get rid of the picture. Unbelievable.

47:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I don't know. It's a sad end for Intel. I mean, I was going to Intel developer forums 20 years ago and they were doing some marvelous things and they got basically market domination and got lazy and someone else came up and took their lunch. It's a sad thing, but it's the way competition is they.

48:07 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They were too comfortable with trying to like be the leader in the industry in a way that was in a direction that they people didn't want to go, but since they were the the the biggest player in this game, they thought that people would just follow them. Um, we've had conversations about optane and how, oh god, yes oh, and then what?

48:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
was it ultium? Uh, yeah, yeah, I mean basically it's just like you don't.

48:35 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You don't need a crossover 30, 32 to 64 bit chip, we'll just go 64, go for it, right. And I was sitting, sitting in that keynote and it was just like my goodness, goodness, you're going to get your lunch eaten on this one.

48:47 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And they had that video card that was based on x86 technology.

48:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, and the Atom that they thought was going to be a mobile processor. It was just like madness.

48:57 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It's just they sunk too much money into these things that they're like well, this is going to benefit us the most, and so that's why we're going to do it.

49:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the conventional wisdom industry was that, uh, they always wanted to be an integrated company where they both designed and manufactured the chips, and that made a lot of sense, until tsmc came along and showed that it's much more efficient to make the chips, that others design and sell it to them, and they got they kind of got their lunch at.

49:27 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
There were a lot of reasons, I guess, um well, they went down the wrong, the wrong road in terms of chip design and and chip fabrication. You know they had real problems dealing with the small ananometer chips. But yeah, I mean they just should have invested and they should have kept engineers in charge that was that.

49:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know we were talking about this before the show and I guess that was my question is had they known 10 years ago? You know tim cook started meeting with tsmc 10 years ago. We now know because the chairman of tsmc wrote of his autobiography and he said I started meeting 2011 with tim cook because tim was worried about the direction Intel was taking and started to talk to us about making chips, first for the iPhone and then later for Max says long as 20 ago is 2011. But I wonder if Intel knew that, had that information, could they have done anything differently? They were. They were kind of caught up in the innovators Dilemma right to take a, at that time, highly successful, highly profitable business and completely change. It is very difficult. It's hard to convince the stakeholders oh no, you know, 10 years down the road, this is going to be a problem. We got to change now.

50:37 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
That's not what happens to miss two of the most historic, you know, secular shifts mobile and the gpus. Yeah, um, didn't they, you know? And? And they missed gpus even before ai, because gpus got hot because of crypto, you know. So, before that gaming, they could have known.

50:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, nvidia made gaming gpus. They could have known. At the time, I remember seeing. I remember seeing the intel's gpus were used in cars, they were used in gaming, they were used in crypto and they were using ai, and I thought this is a company that has irons in every important fire of the 21st century and and, as a result, this should be a a good company, whereas intel just couldn't do it no, I mean they tried buying in gpu talent didn't particularly work.

51:29 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Um, it was just they were locked into the x86 platform and it infected everything else. And yeah, it was great for a while in data centers, the atom they couldn't scale down for mobile processing, so they just abandoned that, the gpus they bought in other companies, and then just abandoned that, the gpus they bought in other companies, and then that didn't quite work and it just seems like a lax state of innovation.

51:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's put it that way you know, in some ways, uh, they were saved and shouldn't have been when itanium was a flop because it was too hot. It really wasn't a good chip. They were lucky it was huge.

52:04
They had a little skunk works in israel that was designing an x86 chip which ended up being the core chip, and they were able to just because they had this company, kind of these engineers off in the corner doing something. All right, toss out the itanium bring in core, and that kept them going for another 10, 15 years. Toss out the itanium bring in core, and that kept them going for another 10, 15 years. But maybe it would have been better had they had really said oh no, we got to do something here.

52:35 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I don't know, it's easy in hindsight to say they should have done better, they should have known better. Yeah, but look at the. You said um, somebody said they're the x86 company and remember the? Their partner for the duopoly all those years was Microsoft, and the joke on Microsoft was they think they're a Windows company, not a software company anymore. Right. And so look at how Windows has turned itself around.

52:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, there's the car example. Microsoft, that's right, right, yeah, microsoft has done an amazing job, but that's the example. That proves, that's the exception, that proves the rule, isn't it because so many companies struggle to make that turn?

53:07 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
and also and also microsoft also did miss mobile.

53:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And yet they say they almost missed the internet. Yeah, bill gates thought the internet was just a fad no, no, I have a.

53:19 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I have a copy of the road ahead in the bookcase actually, but it was just like it's like the cb radio for his age. And then, all of a sudden, it was like he gave an interview recently where he said that book came out two months before. I basically had to go to the company and say, look, we need to reconfigure for internet. And they rushed it and they, you know, implanted Internet Explorer, got themselves a huge antitrust problem, but they were panicking, they were late to the game.

53:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But Microsoft has reinvented itself. I wish Intel could have done the same. Was it Ray?

53:53 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Ozzie, who wrote that famous memo to build the internet.

53:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tidal wave memo. No, it was Ozzie.

53:57 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I can't remember. It's been too long since I wrote my book. But you know, the funny story about the Gates book is that if you have the hardcover because I bought both the hardcover and the softcover to research for the book if you look in the index the internet has like six citations in the hardcover. If you get the paperback there's like 200. So yeah, ian, if you can find the hardcover and the softcover, there's a difference between the two significantly.

54:23 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Okay, I'm just looking around for the hardcover at the moment. But yes, it's um, I didn't get the soft cover. They basically so they kind of went in after the fact and said maybe this internet thing is yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, nobody likes to make it to be, you know, called out on what they predict, but um, I'm actually really looking forward to the bill gates.

54:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh by, that's due soon, isn't it? He's been doing a book tour.

54:47 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
He has been everywhere.

54:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a four-part, it's four.

54:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh, good, lord, Because, yes, he's just done his early years right, it's three parts.

54:54 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
He's separating it and the first part is coming out.

54:56 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, he's doing Bill Gates' the Early Years.

55:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God, he did admit, and I saw this. I think he was on Fallon. You remember that famous scene at All Things D? You got Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher sitting in those red chairs and what a coup. They got both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on stage to talk these historic rivals. And Steve says, yeah, microsoft never had any taste. He, he said I don't trust anybody who didn't take acid. They, they should have taken acid. Bill Gates is unfilial. He says I couldn't say anything at the time because I was the CEO of the company, but I took acid.

55:37 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I've taken acid oh, he was wild back in the day.

55:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yes, yes, I took acid. It didn't help.

55:44 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I guess there's that famous mug shot because he used to drive, he had so many speeding tickets. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

55:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
He also bought one of the I think it was a Porsche 959, imported it and then couldn't drive it for 10 years because it wasn't street legal. But he does like to go fast.

56:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, steve Jobs had the right idea. He would lease a mercedes every few months. He would lease a new one because you could have a car for three months without having getting a license on it, and and so he didn't want it. Once he had to put a license plate on it. He didn't want it, so he kept getting a new car every three months. So his mercedes never had a license plate on it he also used to park in a disabled parking place right up.

56:28
Yep, yeah, that's my spot. Yeah, well, you know, to be fair, they should have had a ceo spot for him yeah, they were too egalitarian too hippie californian. And so he said well, I'm just gonna take this one, that's closer. Anyway, all right let's take a little break. More to come. It is, it is. I think we will be. I don't know we'll be. We'll be eulogizing Intel, or will Intel survive in some former fashion?

56:55 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I think, sir, I'm sorry.

56:57 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I was gonna say they'll survive in the same way that HP has survived, in different names and forms and pieces.

57:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean it's a very good way of putting it ge has basically been split into parts general electric or they survived the way nokia survived, hm.

57:12 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Right, then they parted out to whoever wants it, wow I very nearly moved out to finland with nokia in 99 and it's just looking at the way the thing's gone.

57:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now it's like, yeah good, good move, not too oh, the one of our regular chatters still works for a nokia and he says it's a good job. So I'm not gonna.

57:29 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm not it was a fantastic company. I mean it seriously. I mean you go into the canteen and everyone ate there. The ceo cto would be on the next table. It was a very egalitarian structure. Their engineers were great. Their management, however, just missed the boat.

57:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of those things uh, I hope we're not, I hope we don't have to do the intel eulogy at any point.

57:53 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
But usually these companies just fade away, right, they just, they don't, they don't die, they just fade away like general I'm just gonna say generally, as a person that used to work for amd, intel was a big bully and yeah, uh, and I believe they would not be in this mess if they didn't do the shenanigans that they pulled and really try to compete on um their own merits. And that's my personal opinion.

58:16 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I'm not speaking so, leo, if you ever have to do, if you have to do a eulogy, you got to get wesley on to give the uh rebuttal you got to get wesley on to give the uh rebuttal.

58:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm glad, yeah, I'm glad they're gone, glad, I tells you. Well, I mean they. I mean they did bully suppliers when it came to optron, which was a clearly better chip, and it was just like you know microsoft was the worst bully of all right well, the winter alliance google is in trouble now because they bully people over android.

58:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, this is how you become a success. This is how big this is the story of big tech.

58:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
They're all bullies yeah, well, you know, it's like you don't free market competition because Monopoly is an awful lot more profitable.

58:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, so good, isn't it so good? Uh, let's take a break, we're going to come back with more. Ian Thompson, so nice to see you. I hope you're all doing well and keeping the lights on there and beautiful, uh, uh. East bay, california. The reporter at the registercom, also wesley faulkner and nova, is it? No, are you in, nova? Uh, I'm in roanoke?

59:16 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
is that nova is north of virginia, north of roanoke?

59:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, you're where you're the original. That's where the original america was born, in roanoke the.

59:25 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
This is the second roanoke. The first roanoke. This is the second Roanoke. The first Roanoke is the last colony of Roanoke.

59:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't even know where it is.

59:30 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, that's St Augustine or Asia Think about it. What's St Augustine or Asia? St Augustine was the first in what it is in the continental United States. It was the first settlement what it is in the continental united states.

59:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was the first settlement, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, oh, I thought the roanoke colony was.

59:48 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I think saint augustine was like 15, 10 or 20 or something like that and roanoke was like early 16 1585. It says okay okay, and then where's roanoke? So if I'm wrong, correct me.

59:59 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Now the lost colony yeah, england said take your point, take your square-toed shoes and bugger off to the colonies.

01:00:08 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I was told there would not be history on this.

01:00:12 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
You're leaving it wrong though dude Wesley, you're right, almost about the same time, 1585. So six and one half dozen, or the other. Wow.

01:00:21 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I'm sure the Native Americans had something to say about that, but yes, and also our historian.

01:00:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He is the internet historian, uh, brian mccullough from the tech meme ride home podcast that book he's talking about a history of the internet, right how the internet happened. It's up there somewhere, yeah, um, there's been talk, but I have no current plans to do that yeah, I think somebody's got to write a book about ai, but you got to be taking notes because it's moving very, very fast actually very fast.

01:00:53 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
There are a couple of those in the works. I couldn't I forget who the writers are that are doing that, but yeah books, maybe not them, maybe aren't timely enough to really reflect what's going on.

01:01:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, what?

01:01:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
happened. I was talking to somebody who does security training and it's like if it's in a book it's out of date, it's too late yeah, uh, I know, because I have 13 of them, that I wrote that are so completely useless on my bookshelf.

01:01:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, wesley Faulkner is also here. Wesley83.com. I tried to plug you and you were. You had disappeared, so now I'm going to give you the plug, all right, our episode this week somebody pulled the plug. Was it cox or was it your electricity?

01:01:37
it was cox, oh well, yeah, this internet is hard I'm tempted to make an off-color joke here, but still no, no, no, no, no something about pulling out or letting things down actually to be fair to elon, we're Comcast here, but I have a Starlink right above me, a satellite dish, just in case for failover, and it's been useful several times during shows. Our show this week, brought to you by Oracle. There's a name you ought to know, right, even if you think it's a little bit overhyped AI is suddenly everywhere, from self-driving cars to molecular medicine, even business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming fast. But AI takes a lot of speed, a lot of computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control?

01:02:30
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01:03:38
Thompson reuters we just mentioned them won. The has now won the first major ai copyright case in the us and honestly, I didn't think they would win this one. I didn't think anybody. The new york times is suing publishers are suing uh. In 2020, thompson reuters, which is a big media uh conglomerate, filed an ai copyright lawsuit against ross intelligence, which is a legal ai company. In the complaint, they claimed that ross reproduced materials from thompson reuters legal research firm Westlaw If you're an attorney, you know those names. A judge ruled this week in Thompson Reuters' favor, finding that the company's copyright was indeed infringed by Ross. The judge, stephanos Bibas, us Circuit Court judge, wrote None of Ross's possible defenses holds water.

01:04:38 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I reject them all. Can I give you some important context here? Yes this was not an llm. This, this technology in question that they were sued over, was prior to this current generation of ai. But what's key here is it was the fair use part of it that the judge did not like. So, even though this is not striking down LLMs or you know the current types of models that people use, it is about how you train, and the judge is essentially saying you just hoovered up their stuff and that's not fair use interesting and then sold as commercial products.

01:05:20 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yes, I mean, it was a fascinating case in terms of and I think it's going to have an important knock-on effect for the rest of the cases that are going on along this. Um, it's quite amusing as someone you know who was started writing the the Napster years and it was like, oh no, copyright is all. Our products need to be carefully conserved. And then now, yeah, just slope up that data and fight it in the courts.

01:05:49 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, and also what they did is they ingested all of the data, and then there were specific things that Westlaw used and then had recategorized and had headnotes and summaries and things like that, and so essentially, what the argument was is that, well, you just regurgitated that verbatim, and so again, this is what I'm saying. Number one it probably is not a good thing for the current wave of AI startups, because if it's saying that ingesting is not fair use, that's bad. But it is important to note that what they're specifically saying is you were purely plagiarizing. You were regurgitating word for word stuff that we did.

01:06:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that is not how current LLMs work, and I think that's the defense of LLMs. Llms read it in kind of the same way we would read it. I might be able to quote verbatim a word or two from a book I've read, but I don't keep a copy of that book in my head, nor do LLMs. They tokenize it and they give weights to the tokens, but the actual text does not survive in the llm, so it isn't. There is something called the right to read. It's uh, in fact, if kathy gellis, our, our attorney, were here, she would be arguing very much in the favor of the right to read.

01:07:10
You and I have the right to read a book that's copyrighted material. It's, you know, owned by somebody. Um, you go to the library to read it. You could buy it, uh, you could even go to a bookstore, read it, put it back on the shelf. You don't have to give the company money to read it, but you have the right to read it. You don't have the right necessarily and this was a google case to xerox it and then and then sell it, but you have the right Xerox it and then sell it, but you have the right to ingest it, and then if somebody asks you to give them your understanding of what you just read, that's what an LLM is much more analogous to what an LLM is doing.

01:07:46 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Sorry, I couldn't remember the term. It's non-generative AI. Okay, so that's the key term that I couldn't bring to my head. Yeah, it's so. Gener, key term that I couldn't bring to my head.

01:07:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's, it's so, by the way, ross went out of business three years ago, citing the cost of this litigation, so they're gone. Yeah, so this is really an old style, uh kind of uh ai I don't even know if you would call it ai in this in the.

01:08:06 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
the question is does this mean that, um, it's not fair use to ingest, or does it really not settle it yet? Because if it's generative, then you are regurgitating it in a different way, and even not regurgitating, that's not the right word. When it comes, the output is not the same as the output from this case, which was basically, word for word, line for line, identical.

01:08:31 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I think the difference is that LLMs today, generative LLMs bring in a lot of different sources, but if you remix it, uh, you're still using the, the, the it's all distilled from that information. If you were only, let's say, uh, looking at movie reviews from one person and looked at their whole entire history and just say what do you think about this movie? And it only shared the same opinion of that one person, every single time You're always hitting their work that they created, then that's not generative, that's not unique, that's only. Maybe the words might be different, different orders, but you're saying the same sentiment.

01:09:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still think you'd have a lot of different information. I feel like you'd have the right to do that if you read, if, if you read, uh, roger ebert's review of a movie, and then somebody asked you about that movie and and you said, well, I don't like it because and and and paraphrase roger ebert, I don't think you would have.

01:09:49 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
He would have a, he's passed away, but I don't think but if you only face against you, if you only had your opinion based on Robert Ebert's.

01:09:57
Yeah, and maybe you sold it and you sold that opinion and you only did that and said that these were the things that they did wrong and things that they did in terms of the movie and the creation that they did right, which is very opinionated, right. Someone else has a different flavor, what's important to them, right, and you always had those. These are the bad points and it really like one-to-one matched the the history and that's not generative at all. It doesn't diverge at all yeah, of course courts are.

01:10:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you know that, for instance, the new york times has sued open ai and that's the crux of their case is that they were able to, with a lot of effort, persuade open ai to regurgitate paragraphs of verbatim text from the new york times and it's their contention that's not fair use because it undermines the new york times ability to monetize, because you wouldn't have to buy the times to read the times. That is a very flimsy case and I think that I hope the courts will see through that. Um, but that's different than this. In other words, by the way, I really want to recommend while I was on my three-day vacation, spent three and a half hours watching a video, a YouTube video, from a data scientist named Andrej Karpathy he was one of the founders of OpenAI that, literally, in three and a half hours, explains how these AIs work and I learned a lot that I didn't know before, including the fact that AIs don't store text. So which explains remember the people were laughing at OpenAI at ChatGPT because you would ask it how many Rs in the word strawberry and it would say two or five or it would get it wrong. He explains it.

01:11:33
He says well, that's because it doesn't store the word strawberry, and it would say two or five, or it would get it wrong. He explains it. He says well, that's because it doesn't store the word strawberry. It tokenizes everything and then assigns probabilities to succeeding tokens. Uh, that's basically how an llm works. It's worth watching. I highly recommend it. I know it's a long video, but I really got a lot out of it. He explains it very clearly, very knowledgeably, and it convinced me that an AI is not doing. It's not stealing, any more than you're stealing when you read something. It's working from its memory of the stuff it read. Now it did ingest the entire internet.

01:12:13 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, there's two things about that. Like if you memorized all of Shakespeare and you just, you know from rote memory said all of Shakespeare. Now Shakespeare is not under copyright anymore, so that's not a good example. But you know any movie or anybody's book. If you memorize line by line, word by word, and you regurgitated it, like that's clearly copyright infringement. But if what they're doing is churning out the thing that I did, memorize it and I'm telling you, based on memorizing everything in the world, what I think, like that, in a way, ian's shaking his head, but in a way, go ahead.

01:12:57 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, no, no, Please carry on. I mean, I just the situation is developing so rapidly at the moment that I'm not quite sure that, as you say. Coming back to what we said earlier, we're in the move fast and break things scenario, and I think there's an awful lot of terminology being thrown around, there's an awful lot of hype being thrown around. Give me concrete results. I'm there, but you know I'm a professional cynic. It's what I do.

01:13:26 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, and also you make a good point because it's functionally not going to matter, because this is the Uber model. The Uber model was as we go from city to city, and if we can spin up fast enough that within six months, people are using it and loving it, what are you going to do? Tell people, hey, you can no longer use Uber. So, by the time this gets through the courts, what are they going to do? Shut down the models? I mean, they can still find the companies and put them out of business. But all, all of these companies, big and small startups and mega, you know, trillion dollar companies, have made the calculation that, um, if we don't, you know, take the gamble we're going to be behind and then we're dead anyway. Yeah, so that's it.

01:14:09 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I was right. Before this show, it was going to write a post about four different ways that big companies in the space are going to go out of business, and one of them was like talking about the Uber model. The thing about Uber is that people were paying for Uber and they slowly ratchet out the cost. Unfortunately, in the AI space, most of these models are free. There's a free tier for everything and try to convert someone from paying nothing to anything and, at the same time, most of the cost is to train these models and create them, and there is also a lot of cost in the inference, but that's marginal compared to the training of these large models. And so, let's say, openai is the number one person here and they decide, hey, we are no longer going to have a free plan, people are just going to go to the other thing, that's free.

01:15:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there's too much. And now with DeepSeek it's safe. Well, yeah, I mean, deepseek's a case in point.

01:15:11 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, apparently the CEO of DeepSeek was called in to see winnie the pooh, sorry, the leader of the chinese, uh, communist party.

01:15:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um, thanks a lot. You just got us banned in china oh, come on, you could.

01:15:26 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Being banned in china is a mark of pride, but no, but yeah, I mean, basically he, he's pulled in the ceo and said great job. And you know, he just wiped billions of dollars off valuations for american companies and you may have changed the market.

01:15:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, well, yeah, if you were conspiracy minded, you would say and I think this is probably the case deep seek misrepresented how much it cost for them to make their model. It was subsidized by the chinese government and it was launched as a missile at the usai industry industry to tank them at the stock market, which it did. Now the good news is, because it's open weights, you can in fact, run deep seek without sending your data to China. If you run it off deep seek AI or use the deep seep GAC, that's not the case, but you can go to Hugging Face, for instance, and many other places where they're running the full deep-seek model, and you can use it without it ever leaving the United States, and it's a very interesting world we're in right now.

01:16:26 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's not just that the Chinese came up with a way to do it cheaper, which they did probably because of Maybe we don't know Right, or if they did, it was because they had to be resourceful, because they didn't have access to the chips, but that S1 one that they claimed was trained for $6,. The reason that that happened and again you could say, oh, but this is fiddling with definitions but the reason that that happened is because they used an open source model and they used new techniques. So essentially, they took an open source model that they didn't have to train from ground zero, and they used new techniques that were like OK, you already have this baseline of knowledge and can we tweak you to be smarter by doing different prompting, doing different data sets, and things like that. So the real secret to things coming down will be the open sourcing of it, because then all you have to do is change the recipes and change the training, because once the expense has already been paid for the models, then it's about getting them more efficient and cheaper.

01:17:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So again, I'm going to refer to this Karpathy video because it really opened my eyes as to what's going on. The most expensive thing is taking basically the contents of the Internet, whether it's from Common Crawl or other databases, tokenizing them and then churning on it. And it's very expensive using high-end GPUs to create these giant base models of LLMs. But a base model LLM and you can play with them isn't very good. It's not a chat agent, it's not a GPT, yet it then has to be trained in a secondary step that's much less expensive, involving humans. So all of that, by the way, those models are out there. They will continue to get better as they get, as they expand the number of tokens they can handle at once as we throw computing power at it. Basically, more memory, more processors, more gpus, they will get better. But the really interesting advance that deep seek did is at the other end with something called reinforcement learning. Seek did is at the other end with something called reinforcement learning. And, uh, karpathy explains this and, I think, a very good way. You remember when google's uh alpha go defeated lisa doll, one of the best go players in the world, in some, in something you know, chess had been conquered years earlier. But most experts thought go is too complex to really be solved by a computer.

01:19:00
What AlphaGo did is a little different from what LLM does. It used reinforcement learning. It played itself billions of games over and over and over and over again. And it did this reinforcement learning where it said well, that move worked, that move didn't work. That move worked and refined itself until it became better than the previous models, which were done solely in the manner of an LLM, and in fact got better than human players, significantly better and there's a Karpathy talks about this. There's a moment in one of the games between AlphaGo and in fact got better than human players, significantly better. And there's a Karpathy talks about this.

01:19:37
There's a moment in one of the games between AlphaGo and Lease it All. It's very famous Move 37, where the AI AlphaGo makes a move no human would make and all the Go masters are looking at it and say that's a blunder, that's a mistake, that's horrible. It won the game because it wasn't. It actually improved on human play, and that's what's happening with DeepSeek. That's what's happening with what they call these research models. They're using reinforcement learning. And it's the same thing with OpenAI's newest models. They're going a step beyond what llms have done. In fact, I've been using uh a uh. This is the story from venture b. Perplexity is now making an ai research model available. I pay for perplexity 20 bucks a month and it one of the things I like about perplexity is it lets you choose from a variety of different models when you ask it a question, so I can choose from it's also very good about citing sources and it and, yeah, the base model uses the internet, so it's up to date.

01:20:43
So it now has a deep research model. It's it's slow, but it's it's significantly smarter and you can watch it work, which is one of the things that made deep seek very, very interesting. Open ai does not show its work in the same way because they don't. They consider it proprietary. Deep seek didn't care, and so you can watch it think I hate to use those anthropomorphizing words because it's not thinking, but you can watch it go back and forth with the model to get a better result. These things it's much slower, but the results are much better. I've been playing with it all weekend and it's quite fascinating. So deep seek changed our the way we understand how ai works. It wasn't something that others didn't know, but it's certainly it's a new direction that others are going to take. This is one of the things we're going to be covering a lot in our new show, intelligent Machines, which is taking over from this week in Google. It's all about AI and I really am very bullish about this. I think we're making some really interesting strides in this stuff.

01:21:48 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Go back to what I was saying, though. You can't have a company that's losing billions of dollars every quarter and them also saying they're going to make it up in volume, right that like uber, right, yeah, yeah, they, they're going to go out of business, these, the, the, the. There's almost going to be an across where the open source models will be better than these proprietary models, and once you can do the inference locally, then how? What is the source of revenue?

01:22:17 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
that's happening right now there's a race. Right now you're talking about the commoditization and and wesley knows that I'm bullish, more bullish on this than than some but you're literally putting your mouth where your, money where your mouth exactly, but the argument that you could.

01:22:31
If you look at it through a different lens, this is just a new type of compute. And so, listen, you have all sorts of programs to help people communicate. Some have fancier wrappers than others. Why did Slack win a different type of communicator and product? If you think of it through that lens of this is just a different style of compute. People will pay for it, people will pay for it, and what differentiates isn't like the underlying commodity could be the intelligence, but then how you deliver it or the underlying terroir or secret sauce of the data could make a difference, and so that's why I'm bullish on it, because I don't see that this is any different than any other software that's ever been created since software existed.

01:23:14 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Well, the thing is people could pay for it, but also there's the option not to pay for it and still get all the benefits, and that's as long as you still have that option of this is true for open source software from day one of open source yeah, this is the

01:23:25
tweet but, you're talking about. The same thing that's on like on the web is going to be the same thing locally like. If you think about like what's going to be shipping with all versions of Windows with local models, and the same with other PCs from Apple that you have local models that you can use, that you can use offline. Even then why would someone pay for service when they can just run it locally? That's going to be quicker, more reliable and work offline. And even if a company, a company, finds value in this, what is preventing them from just deploying their own servers to make sure that their data is housed locally, making sure that it doesn't go out to any proprietary third party, and just be able to do the inference locally as well from a corporate standpoint.

01:24:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we're not there yet. I mean, if you've used Apple intelligence, you see the the drawback of trying to do everything on the device, right?

01:24:18 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
we are not there yet, but we are moving that direction. Oh, I agree that we're accelerating adoption.

01:24:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the tweet from the CEO uh, the founder of uh perplexity, ai Aravon shrinovas. He says thank you for open, thankful for open source. We're going to keep making this faster and cheaper knowledge to be universally accessible and useful, not kept behind obscenely expensive subscription plans that benefit the corporates but not in the interest of humanity. Let's not forget that these models are trained on the public internet, that they can exist because the public internet exists and because all of us have been pumping our, the contents of our brains, onto the web for the last 15, 20 years. Right, more than that, let me give a different argument.

01:25:01 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Let's go to the other side of the curve. Let's say these huge companies are super, super advancing AI. Let's say we have agentic AI right, and agentic AI, that's general intelligence and can do anything a human can do. And so we have companies that are going to be hiring less people because they're able to use these agents and this, this, this AI that's so smart that they can hire these people Sorry, these digital people instead of physical people, which means that less people will get jobs, but more people will start their own company because, instead of having to hire a huge staff, they use these digital employees. And so now we're going to have a lot more competition of different properties and different companies out there with different AI tools, but we're not growing the consumers. The consumers are going to be constrained, which means there's going to be less and less people to even buy this stuff, which means that these mega corporations cannot be sustained on the revenue flow from it being diversified between all of these other companies that are going to exist?

01:26:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that analogous to what happened in the music industry, where 30 years ago, you had platinum artists, a handful of people who made billions of dollars all Taylor Swifts to a time when there were a lot of people who made billions of dollars all taylor swift's to a time when there were a lot of artists who could make a living like a hundred thousand a year not make the mega bucks that the big superstars did in years gone by but a lot more artists can make a living as a musician. Is it like that? Or or think of the?

01:26:32 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
largest streaming platform we have is youtube.

01:26:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there's a really good example yeah, and, and now everyone is not everybody's a mr beast, yeah, but, but there are plenty of people who can make a a living. We're we're an example of that. You know it can make a living on it actually. Uh, there is a related story which I'm going to get to in just a moment. We're going to take a break. Uh, youtube's ceo, neil mohan, came out with his annual letter this week with a surprising statistic. But we will hold off on that. But oh, you tease, hold that. Thought west, because I think you're on to something here. West faulkner is here. Wesley 83. He's an influencer, wesley 83.com. Yes, he is. We won't talk about his job because we don't want to talk about his job. He's an influencer. He doesn't have a job? Well, he has a job, but he doesn't need a job. He doesn't want a job, but he has a job.

01:27:33
So don't worry about it, right, I want you to love me, for me, but not you know what, wesley, it's always been that way, from day one, right? Yes, since.

01:27:42 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I met you at.

01:27:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
South by. Are you gonna go to?

01:27:43 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
South by this year? Unfortunately, no, I am NOT. This is gonna be the first South by. I've missed since 2007.

01:27:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow that's a big deal, isn't it used to live in Austin, though, so it doesn't. Yeah, the first 10 years I was on the advisory board for south by. So yeah, uh, for 13 years amy webb is doing her annual talk there. She's going to be on with us the week after, so we'll get a south by report from amy.

01:28:07 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They're going to miss you, wesley they're also going to miss the convention center. They're tearing it down. What, what? So that's it's going to be a little bit of a chaotic. Is it all going to be at the?

01:28:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
driscoll what? Where are they going to do it?

01:28:17 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I have no clue of where they're going to go. Wow, and it's going to be in multiple places, probably yeah, spread out.

01:28:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, great to have you, ian thompson, also here from the register, the snarkiest news operation in the world. We try, yes, that's good. It's good, it's always nice to have you on, ian, and oh, it was a pleasure yeah, and a good friend. It's not over yet, ian. Don't don't get your hopes up. We still have many more stories oh, no, lots more stories.

01:28:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
And oh, I thought you were talking about the nation many more commercials as well. Yes, you're welcome to join the british commonwealth again if things get a bit, a bit sketchy, you know what?

01:28:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been thinking lately is, I think, humans like kings, we like it, we like having a guy. You know, there was this brief period in the united states where, you know, we were anti-monarchy and we were like independent and we weren't ever self-governing. But that's a lot of work. I think maybe we just want a king again, not Not Charles, he's a buffoon.

01:29:18 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, come on. I mean, you had George GW Bush, for example, the son of a former monarch and who wasn't the smartest tool in the box.

01:29:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You would have had another Clinton as president. Let's put it this way it's a work in progress. We're looking for a king. I'm just saying that Brian McCullough is also here. He's a historian, he knows. He knows what I'm talking about.

01:29:37
Host of the tech meme ride home podcast. Great to have all of you and all of you watching. Thanks especially to our club. Twit members make this show possible. Yes, we have advertisers, but it's the club that keeps the lights on because the advertisers don't cover the costs of all the shows we do.

01:29:53
I think now more than ever, our mission is important, as AI is about to change everything. We are covering stuff that's making a big difference. Used to be, when I started, tech was the toy store. Right, you were covering gadgets and gizmos. It didn't make much difference. That's all changed. That's all changed, and to keep up to date with what's going on, I think you need us and we need you. So if you're not yet a member of the club, I'd love to get you in it. All you have to do is go to twittv club to it and sign up. Seven bucks a month very affordable gets you ad free versions of all the shows, access to our wonderful discord, um, a special program and we don't put out anywhere else. Twittv slash club twit. Thank you in advance.

01:30:40
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01:34:04
Two interesting statistics this week. Uh, one, the super bowl and I know you guys probably didn't watch it was the most watched TV show of all time. Last Sunday, the most watched TV show of all time. But according to Neil Mullen, youtube CEO, more people are watching YouTube than anything else. Tv screens have overtaken. Mobile is the primary device for YouTube viewing in the US. More people are watching YouTube on TV sets than any other device here in the US wait, wait, wait.

01:34:46 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
You're conflating two things there. Number one YouTube, in terms of streaming, is bigger than Netflix. They're by far bigger than everybody else. But yes, the second statistic there is that now you're watching on your TV, on your big screen.

01:35:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you're not sitting here in the line at the grocery store laughing at your YouTube shorts. You're sitting by the way, they're very funny shorts you're sitting on your sofa watching it on the big screen. So I mean it's it's two different trends, but I think they're related, brian, because we are watching tv traditional tv, we watch the super bowl like crazy, but every other day of the year I think everybody's watching youtube on those big screen tvs, right?

01:35:33 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I say all the time on the show that YouTube is the most powerful thing in media, that people continue to undervalue and underestimate their power. Everybody talks about Netflix and Netflix's only competition is sleep, but Netflix's real competition is YouTube and YouTube is, if you just look at the amount of minutes, time share, whatever. However you want to do it, youtube is bigger and and they don't have the production budget that that they don't have any production.

01:36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But well, I mean, they might have a token production budget, but really the people who post on YouTube we're we're paying our production costs, not YouTube, right, so YouTube's getting it for free. Basically so, 128 million people watch the super bowl. That was a rating of 49.1. Almost all the households with tvs were half of them were watching the super bowl. That's a pretty amazing thing. But again, those, those events are few and far between.

01:36:35 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I wanted to say one thing about the youtube thing though. Yeah, is that I use youtube, but I watch youtube a lot on my desktop or on my phone. I turn off autoplay. Yes, on the television you leave it on like a hassle to do a search, so autoplay goes on. So I wonder how much of those are just going in the background and running even overnight. Someone's falling asleep. It's easier to you don't have to channel surf when the TV is just choosing new programs. So that could also be part of it. Is that the habits are dramatically different for how people use it on a TV as opposed to-.

01:37:09 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, but that's the genius of YouTube. Versus, everyone used to complain about the boob tube and when we were younger of oh, people just sit there and mindlessly channel flip. The genius of YouTube is you don't even have to hit the remote button. Put the remote down.

01:37:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let us choose for you. Yeah, youtube has announced also that premium members and I imagine, soon everybody will have access to AI. If the videos are too long long, you can get summaries of the video, highlights and summaries of the video thanks to the AI built into YouTube. There's going to be a new button underneath. They also have auto dubbing using AI so that your YouTube video can be in multiple languages. That's going to become available later this month for all creators in the youtube partner program and the one in, are we?

01:37:59
in the youtube partner program benito, because I would love to have this show be available in spanish and chinese and japanese, and tag. It's like they're paying you. They're paying for your content. You know they're paying for your oh, so we don't want to be a partner uh, I mean they also.

01:38:16 - Benito (Announcement)
There's probably a lot of exclusivity stuff going on there too you can only be on youtube, kind of stuff yeah okay, never mind, but the other big, the only youtube I I like being on youtube the.

01:38:27 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
The other big ai announcement in that letter from moen is the they're going heavily into the creation, moen is they're going heavily into the creation aspect of it. So you can type in I want to be in front of a beach in Hawaii or whatever. It's that sort of stuff that they're going heavily into now too. Or I want my shirt to look different, or I want all of that stuff, especially for the stand in front of my phone and do a talking head. You know YouTube short or whatever, like you could just immediately zhuzh that up as much as you want with AI.

01:39:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well and that is, I think, an important point is that for most people I'll include myself it doesn't you're creating. I mean, you look at somebody like Marques Brownlee or Mr Beast and those standards are so high. Look at somebody like Marques Brownlee or Mr Beast and those standards are so high it doesn't feel like you could be a success on YouTube.

01:39:19 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Have you ever been to his studio? Because I recorded something there once. It's a huge warehouse. If you're ever driving up I-95 or down to the airport in Newark or whatever, there's all these warehouses along the water and he has a big one. So if you ever see his videos where he has the car outside in the parking lot, it's right outside. But yeah, it's a huge cavernous thing with like maybe it's a cheap warehouse or something or whatever, but yeah, it is a-. Oh, it's not cheap, he's got money, he's got lots of money. Leo, it's not a studio, it's a campus.

01:39:50
It is cavernous and right. So to have this the thing, that again this. We're coming back to the AI argument. One of the things that I always say about AI is it right now. I mean, maybe it'll cure cancer tomorrow, but right now what it does is it takes away the busy work. And so for a creator to not have to have a cavernous studio, to not have to do all of the editing, all the if AI can take away that stuff and say, hey, leo likes to wear Hawaiian shirts, but right now he'd rather be naked, so let's have AI put on the Hawaiian shirt for him.

01:40:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How do you know we're not doing that? How do you know?

01:40:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Don't stand up, Leo, please.

01:40:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is point four in Moen's letter. Ai will make it easier to create and enhance the YouTube experience for everyone. Last year we rolled out DreamScreen and DreamTrack, which generate image backgrounds, video backgrounds and instrumental soundtracks for shorts. We'll continue to invest in those features, including integrating vo2, which is that's the uh, I think that's the google video generation ai into dream screen. Uh, soon, uh, it's. It is remarkable. His point is uh, youtube is not the future of television, it is television also.

01:41:15 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
He does point out, though there are a few creators who are building their own Studios.

01:41:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not just Marquez Brownlee, there's. There's new Studios, he says. Alan chicken chows 10 000 square foot studio in Burbank. Uh, canegra Dayan I'm saying your name wrong because I'm not, I don't know how to say their names is building a studio in Birmingham, alabama. Last November, the creators behind the channel's Mia Plays which is probably a 12-year-old right, and Kumon, opened their studio in North Vancouver. I'm sorry, go ahead, wesley. I didn't mean to interrupt.

01:41:47 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I was just saying that this is going at the same time where streaming services are either ratcheting up the costs on the top end or adding ads at the bottom end, and so it's becoming less attractive to use these streaming services or to use multiple streaming services.

01:42:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you all pay for YouTube Premium? I'm just out of curiosity.

01:42:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Nope. No we don't no, absolutely not, no, I mean-.

01:42:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You watch all those ads.

01:42:11 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, you just skip over them. I mean, it's just, it is also. It's just, it is also. It's kind of maybe I'm being a bit too ornery about this, but I you notice, in the last couple of years they've really ratcheted up the ads and it's just like to push people onto premium and I refuse to play that game. You know, it's like, oh, I've got to sit through an ad for some hoodie or something, and it's like well, hoodie or something and it's like well it's, it's, it's not that big a deal, so you just sit through them.

01:42:38
Um, sit through and skip. Yeah, you know, I mean it's a minor inconvenience. Um, better that than getting paying for an endlessly. As you were saying, wesley, the prices are ratcheting up and up and up and they're spamming more and more ads out there. Um, it was a bad moment when they started running ads.

01:42:54
When you pause a video on youtube, oh, that was kind of like yeah, oh, my god, that's annoying it's like I paused to go and, you know, do something in the kitchen and then all of a sudden I'm getting another ad. But others.

01:43:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The streaming channels are starting to do that too. I think hulu is so annoying it's starting to do that. You're paused.

01:43:12 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You know this would be a good time to go buy some new shoes yeah, I saw you looked at, looked at looks a new sofa last week and maybe you'd like to go to sofa world. I'm just jealous because we haven't figured out how to do that.

01:43:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We probably would if we could.

01:43:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You can pause this well, for some reason I keep on getting spammed with extremely inappropriate ads. You know, it's just like bras for bras for the small chested woman. Well, they're not that big.

01:43:43 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
The bad things about the ads for those services too is they're super repetitive. So yeah, they don't have enough advertisers.

01:43:49 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You see the ads over and over the same exact thing.

01:43:52 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
But, leo, you're right, Everybody that swears by paying for it. They love it. But what I know when someone tells me that is oh, you watch more YouTube than I do. Yeah, because if I was watching an hour or two a day then for sure it would be worth it. I'm not saying there's any, I'm not being negative about YouTube or people that watch a lot of YouTube or whatever, but it's I don't watch enough for it to be worth my while. That's how I know oh, you watch an hour or two a day, I get it.

01:44:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know how much I watch. I watch a lot. I just watched that three and a half hour video. But what's amazing is here's this guy Carpathia is an, an expert in AI there's there were no ads. Maybe there were ads. I don't think he did it to make money. I think he wanted to actually teach people about what he's doing. So he made this three and a half hour incredibly well done video, not not production wise he didn't have a crane zooming in and animated graphics and things like that, but it just was. The content was very well produced, uh, and I think he did it. It's kind of the way the internet was created right to uh, just just to create some content.

01:45:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, I think it's, it's very good in a way, um, certainly from the advertising perspective for, as you say, sort of these extended form documentaries or talks. I watched a lot of the bra the naval college talks, for example. There was a fascinating one on what's going to happen to taiwan if china, if china invades, and that's an hour and a half and there's no adverts in it. So you know it's, it's a good deal and sarah payne, whenever she's on, fantastic strategic isn't that, though maybe that's part of the problem.

01:45:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At least it's a problem I find is that at least with a streaming channel, there's this kind of a way of finding stuff. There's a limited amount of content. You can search through it. You may not find what you want, but you can look and see, have feel fairly confident. You've, you know, you know what's there. With YouTube it's infinite and does that. Or maybe that's just because I'm old, old timer and I used to have three channels on my tv. Uh, does that put?

01:45:57 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
you luxury.

01:45:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We used to have two uh, does it the fact that there's so much content on youtube? Is that an advantage or a disadvantage?

01:46:06 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
yeah, but they've solved that with the algorithm and the recommendation, the recommendation and the continue playing. Like. What I've realized is like I mean, this is true for Netflix to an extent too Like if you go to your Netflix homepage, you'll see different content recommended than I would get recommended, but wildly different the times that I've seen. You know, like my brother's YouTube when he's on his laptop or whatever, and I'm like, oh, I see you, you are, you're, it's all car stuff which I get it, and so then he has his five or six car shows that he goes to. Mine is tech and computer games and history and stuff like that, and Ian's is Naval College stuff. They've solved that because it's like TikTok. All you got to do is give it enough information and then it's like all right, you're in this box and here you go.

01:46:58 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, and breaking out that box is quite tough sometimes.

01:47:02 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
That's true too, yeah.

01:47:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you see that Warner Brothers is now releasing movies for on youtube for free?

01:47:10 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
yeah, to be fair, really bad ones, but well, they're not uh are they all really bad or they're just well? Maybe not all. I'm sure somebody loves loves them somewhere, but it's an interesting mantra strategy from them yeah, they're full movies.

01:47:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, michael collins, mr nice guy, that's been watched 16 million times on youtube. The wind in the line right some of these were I mean, michael Collins wasn't bad yeah, mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando, mr Christian, yeah, the Bonfire of the Vanities with Tom Hanks. So I'm not sure I understand. Is this a tax write-off? What? Why is Warner Brothers doing this?

01:47:50 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
well, right, because remember they're the ones that shut down actual movies. And right, putting them in theaters for tax write-offs.

01:47:55 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah waiting for guffman was hysterical they don't have any licensing that they have to worry about when they publish it on youtube themselves. They can just put it out there, and if someone wants to license it, they still have that ability, so they can. Instead of it sitting in a vault somewhere where no one wants, they can just put it out here. Maybe it'll create a viral, viral hit. Maybe there'll be a campaign for someone to make a sequel to one of these movies, maybe someone will make this a meme and and then show it and then it'll go viral. But they're making money off the ads. Why wouldn't they do this instead of it sitting in a shelf somewhere?

01:48:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I've got to say also, bonfire of the fantasies is famous for one particular scene. Melanie Griffith, I think, had breast implants halfway through filming. So she goes out of a door and then comes in and she's significantly larger in the chest area oh, I gotta watch it that's like that's like Bill Gates book with the internet you get one copy and it's different the next time.

01:48:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the index got a lot.

01:48:50 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Melanie's index got a lot longer show title show time um yeah, I mean I.

01:48:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean I doubt warner is doing it altruistically, but it kind of feels like it like, well, why should these movies be buried? Let's just put them on youtube, where everybody can see them maybe there's some incremental income, but I don't think they're doing it for that reason I think it's these.

01:49:11 - Benito (Announcement)
I think this might be the first time these all come out digitally.

01:49:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These might not exist anywhere else right, but that's been a problem, right? Uh, if you, if you don't have a vhs player and no town has a movie store anymore, right? Uh, I think there's, there's, there's uh one blockbuster left in, that's in seattle, washington and that's it.

01:49:30 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Oh, it was oregon or something was it oregon?

01:49:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, there's one left, I thought it was alaska okay okay, somewhere. That's all I know.

01:49:38 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's a long way to go and to think they could have bought netflix. For how much was it?

01:49:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
50 million, they were asking it was like 30 or 50. Yeah, but yeah. But that was the red envelopes days of netflix and if you think about it, you might have thought that it's not a lot of future. Netflix is a good example of another. There you go. Now there's two companies that have pivoted. They made a very risky pivot, uh, to digital only uh, and at the time remember this there was a huge stock sell-off. People thought this is nuts, you're getting rid of the red envelopes flickster, quick, quickster, quickster that was the name we're trying to do.

01:50:15
They're spinning off their dvd business and they changed their mind on that right, you would go to quickster, yeah, instead of netflix okay, but it turned out like that was a good pivot. They they made it successfully turned the corner.

01:50:30 - Benito (Announcement)
I got a question, though, like if if the office wasn't on netflix, do you think it would have taken off still, because it was really. Everyone was watching the office.

01:50:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was what happened oh no, we were watching it on network television. No people were re-watching the office on netflix. That's what netflix is primarily for people still are.

01:50:49 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Okay, don't don't make me put my history hat on, because I could go for a half an hour on this, but uh forget, put the hat on.

01:50:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll put mine on.

01:50:56 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
You put yours on, okay uh, the reason they tried to sell to blockbuster is because it was a transition to dvd. So initially blockbuster didn't want to have uh vhs's, they didn't want to do dvs because they had been burned by laser disc. Okay, that's number one. Number two.

01:51:13
Then when smart or TVs go flat screen, remember they would give you in every box when you would buy your smart TV or your flat screen TV hey, here, try Netflix for free. Right, here's something you can do with your DVD player or whatever. Then the third thing that they did was when smart TVs came around and you're like well, what am I going to do with an internet connected TV? That's when they launched streaming, because then it was like again. So three times they were like they took advantage of a shift in media, exactly.

01:51:48 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I mean it was. It's been a fascinating ride and I think they surfed the wave of technology really well, in a way that other companies just got pushed down into the well, crushed by the waves, as it were. But, yeah, no, I mean, they've done it really well, but coming towards this point.

01:52:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you give Reed Hastings credit for that? Is he a genius? He doesn't have this hat, I could tell you that right now.

01:52:17 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
By the way, if that's the official history hat, then I need to find out where you got that it's a good hat.

01:52:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if it's a history hat I got this at the tucson international gem and mineral show. Tucson, arizona. National gem and mineral show Tucson, arizona. Uh, so you need a flat cap. That's um. Well, I have some of those too. I have all kinds. This is just one more um. Does Reed Hastings deserve all the credit, mr?

01:52:45 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
uh historian Brian McCullough um for sure, because he also really the founder. He wasn't the founder oh interesting remember the, the actual founder came out with a book a couple years ago, but Reid, like Elon, was someone that was not necessarily the founder but came in and was like, hey, this is a great business and I think I can take this much further than you all are taking it.

01:53:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice.

01:53:09 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Although Elon did go to court to have himself officially, I was going to let me, let me retract. That is the founder of tesla yeah, even though he didn't found it yes let's not make any mistakes.

01:53:22 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
He found it like columbus found the united states yeah, this is a very good analogy.

01:53:27 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
There was no us or north america. Columbus came along exactly the vikings would disagree, but and the native americans?

01:53:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but yes, it's I better take this hat off because I got to do an ad and I don't think zip recruiter wants me to wear a watermelon hat during their ad. You're watching this week in tech great panel this week. Lots more to come. Our show today brought to you by zip recruiter according to research.

01:53:54
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01:56:02
Just because you asked, how fast does ZipRecruiter's smart technology start showing your job to qualified candidates immediately? How fast does it deliver qualified candidates to you? Well, certainly within a day In our experience. You know Lisa's kind of worried. We're at breakfast. Oh, we got to hire somebody. This is going to be awful. She posts it within an hour or two. She's saying oh, here's a great candidate, oh, we got another one. So relax, let ZipRecruiter speed up your hiring. You can see for yourself again for free, at ZipRecruitercom slash twit. Try it right now, free. The same price as a genuine smile from a stranger, a picture-perfect sunset or a cute dog running up to you and licking you on your hands. Ziprecruitercom, slash twit, ziprecruiter, the smartest way to hire Personally. Vouch for it. All right, let me see I scrolled up. Let's go back. Oh, it's now the Gulf of Mexico. Both Apple and Google say it is the Gulf of America. Did I say Gulf of mexico?

01:57:13 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm sorry, gulf of america well, I tweeted that out when it first came out. It's like could everyone around the world. Just why I didn't actually tweet it, I blue sky, because I don't really go on twitter that much anymore you skated it out. I hate that phrase, but yes, but asking people around the world and yeah, I mean, google really bent over and kissed the ring on this one and I'm not quite sure which one.

01:57:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Apple did too. By the way, apple's done it too. They are off the hook because they say, hey, no, we follow the geographic names information system, gnis, and as soon as it changed in GNIS, we changed it in the us. Now users in mexico will consider to continue to see gulf of mexico, but everywhere else in the world it'll be gulf of america, brackets, mexico brackets yeah, I think every else in the world they'll see.

01:58:05 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Gulf of mexico yeah, brackets america.

01:58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's not confusing at all that's well.

01:58:12 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
What with that and taking the you know pride stuff off, there are a lot of very peeved people at Google at the moment.

01:58:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh really, oh yeah, that's interesting.

01:58:22 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean the mapping thing all well and good, but it's taking away things like pride and, you know, international oh yeah, it's Black History Month.

01:58:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not saying that in the calendar anymore.

01:58:32 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
they said it was too much trouble, it was too it's a political decision, you know, I mean, and it one could argue that actually including it was a political decision, but I don't quite believe that, because a lot of people at google, this is a really important thing for them. You know that they are on the side of the good guys, as it were, and it's um, yeah, I mean it's, it's pretty shameless kowtowing the, the, the quote that they used um, the spokesperson said it didn't scale and I was like, wait a minute.

01:59:00 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
You've been able to scale years, yeah, trillions of of search queries. A second and and you've also had doodles on your home page 25 years. So scale I guess means something different, but okay.

01:59:17 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They also undid work. So even if they were having issues, the work was done. So they're rolling back things. It is odd, isn't it so, that work had already scaled, they already scaled it, and now they're undoing. But I will say about the map thing, I don't understand why that's such a big deal.

01:59:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um, which which? Changing it to gulf of america or not changing?

01:59:40 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
it yeah, why not why is it a big deal that they did change it?

01:59:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, because the gulf of mexico is also on mexico right and it's always been the gulf of mexico but I mean it's just a name, I mean mean it's just a deal.

01:59:53 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean Hawaii used to be known as the Sandwich Islands when we owned it. So you know, I mean it's just, it's one of those things, but it just seems pandering, you know, I mean Because it is yeah, exactly. That's what they're going to do, I think when you say the inauguration and sit behind the president's family is just like that's well yeah, I mean at the inauguration it was very much like here's my trophy hunting cabinet. Yeah, make them sit up there so they can all see and pay homage.

02:00:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it was kind of embarrassing well, yeah, and, and I guess you have to pick your battles right.

02:00:31 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah. Yeah, so all right I mean if they call it the Gulf of America and then they get a massive tax break down the line. You know it's good business.

02:00:39 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I did. I think I talked about this on a different show, but it's a carrot and a stick. So the stick is you don't want to get the ire of the president, make him like, attack you Right. But the carrot is there's still a ton of government contracts to be had, uh, and you want to be able to be in good favor to get some of that windfall of cash, especially removing parts of your ai ethics part, saying that we won't use it to kill people. There are reasons why they're making these changes and it's just for money, and it's it's I saw and that's what they feel that I saw a meme that really would be.

02:01:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's more they wanted to call it. The cryptocom presents the gulf of america brought to you by amazon.

02:01:25 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Something like that might be might be more appropriate kind of well, I mean associated press has been banned from the white house and Air Force One because they're still using Gulf of Mexico. It's just bonkers. That's a little petty.

02:01:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's just a little petty, a little I mean that's a huge amount of pettiness.

02:01:41 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's not like AP is exactly, you know, a firebrand of left-wing politics. You know, they are actually very accurate.

02:02:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, speaking of petty, Scarlett Johansson is asking the government whoever that might be to limit AI. After a fake video of her opposing, kanye West goes viral, she's urging US legislatures to. You know this? Ai is such a bad idea. You see what they did with it.

02:02:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
She wants them to place limits on artificial intelligence yeah, good luck with that.

02:02:23 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Just sue the person who did it yeah yeah there ought to be a law.

02:02:25 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Just sue the person that did it. Yeah, yeah, I mean. Well, I mean, what was it? Last year, tom Hanks came out because someone did a deep, deep fake of him talking about diabetes, which he suffers from, and you know, I mean this stuff is going to happen and I don't think honestly saying, well, we need to limit the entire technology just because I'm getting deep faked is going to work in any way, shape or form.

02:02:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, not to mention that, even if the United States outlawed AI, that everybody else is going to go full speed ahead yeah, oh, absolutely, it's the new arms race it seems a little bit like self-centered to say well, you should stop ai, because they're making fake videos of me it's a little bit right. The quote should be limiting ai deep fakes yeah yeah, as a person, I don't think you even should do that. That's free speech, you know well as a public figure.

02:03:16 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
But again the problem is is that limiting ai as a top priority? Is the quote um a bipartisan issue? But should there be a law? Against kanye west well, should there should there be a law you can't make a law.

02:03:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't.

02:03:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's not how it works well, I mean, I thought defamation would work quite well here, you know, if you're actually we already have that law yeah, exactly so we've got you we've got the rules in there.

02:03:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um the problem, and this is the big problem with the internet. I think you should ban the internet. Is it's possible to do something completely anonymously and never get caught? So ban the internet, because you don't know who to sue and keyboards and cameras oh my god, yes, oh, let's just go back to horse and buggies. You know, the amish had it, had it pretty, pretty good, they were pretty smart well, yes, I mean, what would the law be?

02:04:11 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
how would you even write it like yeah, it's just.

02:04:12 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They were pretty smart. Well, yes, I mean, what would the law be? How would you even write it? It's just impossible to even wrap your head around. It's very self-centered.

02:04:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You do all the other work.

02:04:21 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
If you feel you were harmed, go after the person who did it.

02:04:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You were defamed. It's going to be John Doe, because no one's ever going to catch that person. Yeah.

02:04:30 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And at the same time, it's what is it ever going to catch that person? Yeah, and at the same time, you it's, it's what is it? It's not just harm, it's intention. And then it's also the the magnitude of the harm in terms of financial, like, did she lose a contract? Did she uh, get?

02:04:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, because everybody knows it was fake. Nobody is fooled, so what was the actual? Harm that she would need to like quantify to do only look, okay, some not so bright people might have been fooled by it, ian, but really everybody knows they're deep fakes, I mean this is the problem, you know, I think, as the technology gets better, a lot of people aren't going to know that it's a deep fake.

02:05:07 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
And you know the old aphorism from terry pratchett you know, a lie can go around the world three times for before the truth has got its boots on. You know, I mean, this kind of stuff is going to be really important going over, you know, in the next few years as the technology improves.

02:05:22 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Okay, I saw this video, this thing that was being sold. It was a ring that you could slide on, it was an extra finger coming out.

02:05:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, the extra finger ring. I love that yes, that's hilarious, so it's a marvelous idea the idea being that by doing that, um you know deniability, saying like you could say well, that wasn't me, that was a picture of ai yeah that was made by ai it's.

02:05:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's a marvelous idea. I do.

02:05:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do admire the spirit somebody's got to be selling these, probably on shian and timu. Alibaba will have have. You can buy a dozen of them you're to say I'm tempted so for people not seeing the video, it's a ring you put on your finger that has an extra finger, so it looks like you've just got an extra finger sticking out of your ring finger, which means, obviously, that this is an AI generated photo.

02:06:21
I would like to meet the person that came up with that idea, because that that's smart, that's really smart uh, we've actually for a long time talked about things you could wear that would confuse an AI, right, right, right. But you know, in fact I remember way back in the cottage days, like 15 years ago, our chief of engineering, colleen Kelly, was going to make, because my wife at the time didn't like to come to the studio, she didn't want to be on camera. Uh, cause, cause, my wife at the time didn't like to come to the studio, she didn't want to be on camera. So she was going to make her a ring, a necklace she could wear that had invisible LEDs. That would blind a camera, but you would. No one would be able to see it. It wasn't visible light but the camera, you would just be a glowing blob. Hmm, Good idea, we should all have that necklace Walk around.

02:07:11 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Do you have the scarf? That was, it was like a sort of 300 bucks anti-paparazzi scarf. Yeah, yeah, and Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch, took it even one stage further With one of his smaller yachts. He actually had camera detectors, so if somebody was aiming a digital camera at you, then they'd try and flash out that.

02:07:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, what will happen and it will certainly come in the next few years where you just nothing you see you could trust like anything could be generated. What will the upshot of that be?

02:07:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I think we'll go slightly mad, to be honest. I mean, if I mean I was. I was talking about this with someone the other day and it's like, if you think the 1960s ands, most of us got all our news and information from a very limited number of sources a few TV channels and newspaper, maybe the local radio.

02:08:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, as a result, we were all on the same page, or mostly.

02:08:06 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Sort of on the same page.

02:08:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We at least had an agreed upon set of facts that we were working off of.

02:08:12 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, and now at the moment, you can find whatever facts you want which fit into your worldview. I don't know, there is talk about getting watermarking schemes and that sort of thing going, but I'll believe it when I see it.

02:08:25 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
So, yeah, I think Sorry. Yeah, it was just sorry. I interrupted. I was going to say that's why we have influencers.

02:08:30 - Benito (Announcement)
I was just going to say that's why we have influencers, because I was just going to say that too.

02:08:33 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, why do we have influencers? Because people trust this person instead of trusting a media or or an organization. They're like I'll just talk to my what. You would go to your neighbor and they would tell you about something that was going on downtown or something that happened at their job. You were just you would take it as fact because you trust the person and thus you trust the information they're saying. By the way, that's probably why I'm an influencer, now, right, because we all trust you. Yeah, once you trust people, then what you hear from them is the thing that you put trust in, rather than an organization right, it's not.

02:09:03 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I mean, obviously the algorithms have had a lot to do with that and but, um, I I've said that for a long time that that of what the influencer economy is is. You find your crew, and those are the people that, like, make you laugh, like we've always done that for, like the actors, the comedians, the musical artists we like. But what's changed is you do that for information now, you do that for news Now, whether those people are trustworthy or not. That's where you get into the weird dystopian of like, well, my truth is different than yours and no truth overlaps. That's where the problem may be.

02:09:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean as a journalist, this is particularly concerning because it's you know, our whole business is facts and you know, when people can make up their own facts, then how do we get reasoned and intelligent debate?

02:09:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Another technology on the horizon. According to Sundar Pichai he says the CEO of Google, of Alphabet actually useful quantum computers are five to ten years away.

02:10:10 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Just like Fusion.

02:10:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just around the corner, just like the singularity and everything else.

02:10:17 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
everything is five to ten years away I mean, I've been hearing this about fusion for you know decades and we've been hearing this about quantum computing for a while, but I don't know. It does look like it's coming together slowly, but it is slowly coming together.

02:10:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jensen huang of uh nvidia said very useful quantum computers are likely decades away. Pachai said well, here at google, he knows right they've made breakthroughs in quantum chips that have allowed researchers to calculate in five minutes, a problem that would take existing supercomputers longer than our universe has been around. Pachai, who is rarely excited by anything, says the progress in quantum is palpably exciting it is amazing.

02:11:01 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It's pretty great technology.

02:11:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't wait for it, is it you believe it? It's true, it's happening, yes, well well, let me explain quickly.

02:11:11 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
quantum computing, um, I I hear when, when people try explain it, they talk about bits and qubits and being able to be in multiple states. Think of it this way Quantum computers use the way nature works to get an outcome.

02:11:28
If you're standing on top of a hill and you're looking down and you're saying, from this point, what is the quickest path to get to the end? You could do measurements. You can run around trees, you can run around the humps and the dirt and the rocks, or you could take a vial of water and then start pouring it down and see which way it goes. And that's kind of what a computer is like pouring it down and see which way it goes, and that's kind of what quantum computer is like.

02:11:55
It is. You're able to use the way the nature finds its easiest path to get to that, to find and do those calculations. So that's just to give it that way. It's how it harnesses nature to basically get you the answers that you're looking for. And so, when you get enough of these quantum bits, you're able to create more scenarios and more simulations in order to be able to use that same force to get your answers. And so, yes, this is real, yes, it's happening and yes, as we are able to deal with the error rates, which there are breakthroughs all the time, this will be something that will change all of our lives just uh, for giggles.

02:12:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I asked my ai to explain quantum computing to a dog. It said woof. Let me try to explain quantum computing to you, my furry friend, in a way that might make sense to a dog fetch, but with many balls at once. Imagine you're playing fetch, but instead of one tennis ball, your human throws a whole bunch of balls at the same time. Now here's the magic part you can chase all the balls at once. It's like you're in many places at the same time, sniffing and grabbing every ball simultaneously. Careful, that's kind of what quantum computing do. Does computers do? They can work on many problems at the same time. And then it goes on into something a dog does not understand, which is superposition entanglement, which it calls magic doggy telepathy.

02:13:26 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's what you were saying, actually exactly what you're saying, wesley I was going to say say Wesley, though that's the best, forget the AI answer. That was the best explanation he did that. I've heard the water that that's. That was the best that I've heard it's like nature.

02:13:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Quantum computing. It's like nature be like water. My friend, I uh have a cryptocurrency wallet with almost eight Bitcoin in it and I'm just waiting for quantum computing to crack the password which I have long forgotten. Do you think that'll happen? Is that possible in my lifetime?

02:13:58 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
technically.

02:13:58 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, I mean five to ten years. Yeah, yeah well, but also at the edge it could be worse, leo.

02:14:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
At the moment there's a guy in wales trying to buy a landfill site. I know, yeah, he's still going on that it's just like there's 400 million in bitcoin in this landfill site. Just please let me find it.

02:14:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's I know it's here somewhere.

02:14:20 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
He's the person who picked up the garbage, nicked it and is now using it yeah.

02:14:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, yeah, it's like oh, it's not a perfectly good computer every, yeah, so every time I've taken something to the tip the.

02:14:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
The person running is just like yeah, I'll take that and I'll take that. And to the tip the the person running is just like yeah, I'll take that and I'll take that, and you can throw the rest in. It's just like yeah, somebody's got very rich out of that suspect we should explain that in great britain they call landfills tips oh yes, of course sorry. Two great countries separated by common language is that?

02:14:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because you tip your garbage into it exactly, exactly.

02:14:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's exactly the name behind it, so yes, oh.

02:14:54 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
So when they come over saying, hey, you want to give me a tip?

02:14:57 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
that's…. Well, there's another thing Also. We don't tip as much in the UK. The very idea of…. The first time I came over here and bought a drink at a bar and paid with the exact currency and the barman was like you're from England, aren't you?

02:15:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Over here was like you're from england, aren't you over here. We tip when you, yeah, tipping. So there's two things we're never going to get rid of in the united states. One is tipping, the other is pennies. Except the president has directed the treasury to stop making pennies yeah, I can't help but agree.

02:15:26 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's a ridiculous form of yes well, here's the problem.

02:15:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so the? So he says, and he's quite right. It costs us more than a penny to make the penny. The penny is not made of copper, it's made of zinc. It literally costs more than two cents. Trump wrote in a post last week on truth social I've instructed my secretary it's his secretary of the us treasury, by the way to stop producing new pennies, however and by the way, the mint did lose 83.85.3 million dollars last year making pennies. Uh, every penny costs 0.037 cents, no dollars. So that's three cents, 3.7 cents per penny.

02:16:09 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Uh the problem is the ei because of the color of the penny yes, it's copper.

02:16:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't like that. No, the problem is, retailers are pointing out, if you get rid of the penny, then we're gonna have to round to the nearest nickel. And it turns out nickels are even more expensive to make than pennies now, how did they solve that in britain?

02:16:31 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, we haven't. To be quite frank, you can still get pennies, although they are slightly made of copper. There is the old joke that copper wire was actually invented when a Yorkshireman and a Scotsman were fighting over a penny. But yeah, I mean, we still have them. But, honestly, as we're moving away from a cash society, you know, I mean the fact that it's costing more than a penny to actually make these things. That's ridiculous I think it's Canada has now got rid of them and is rounding up the nearest five yeah.

02:17:02
And I think the same is going through in Australasia somewhere, and it seems logical. Retailers would like it because they could jack up their prices a bit. Retailers would like it because they could jack up their prices a bit. Um, but speaking of someone who you know, my credit union thankfully has a coin sorting machine, because I hate carrying coins. So something like that is you know, is really useful.

02:17:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It should just all be digital right, except that except that digital isn't anonymous. Exactly, you know, exactly, yeah, you know, I mean privacy advocates say this is one way we, the last way you have of paying for something, because we know now that crypto isn't private either. This is the last way we have of paying for something anonymously. Is what?

02:17:43 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
if they remove the penny and they remove the nickel and made a brand new seven cent piece oh, come on, no one's gonna make it out of something really cheap and ugly something really cheap. Make it out of wood so, like the us, mint says every penny.

02:18:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Trump got it. Trump underestimated every penny costs 3.7 cents to make. But if we replace them with nickels, every nickel costs 13.8 cents to make. Nickelss are more than it's ridiculous.

02:18:15 - Benito (Announcement)
Okay, then we just make pennies cost worth five, then right, we just make pennies, but we make them worth five. Oh, make pennies be, a nickel Problem solved.

02:18:23 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Make the new seven cents. Thinking outside the box, Get rid of both. That's brilliant.

02:18:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And if you have been collecting pennies, you just multiplied your fortune by five well, I don't know, I mean it's fifty dollars, not ten I mean just the whole seven cents thing.

02:18:43 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm guessing arithmetic is not really a strong point over here, considering that a lot of people thought that a third of a third pounder burger was in some way more than a quarter pounder.

02:18:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right. Yeah, a third of a pound is less than a quarter of a pound.

02:18:59 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Exactly yeah.

02:19:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Three is less than four, and everybody knows that.

02:19:03 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Wasn't it like 25 years ago stocks were still traded in like 16ths and things like that. I know that most of that was done digitally and again, something we inherited from Britain, Ian, but they managed that transition and it didn't blow stuff up Again. Digital, it's not the same.

02:19:23 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean Britain went decimal in 1973. So up until that point you got 20 shillings to a pound. Don't even get me started on guineas and groats. It was a complete mess.

02:19:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it, though Metric makes sense.

02:19:38 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
One ten hundred thousand it's logical For your thoughts. No, I mean a guinea was something like. It was like one pound twenty or something it was. It was bizarre, bizarre thing. I'm very glad I was brought up in the metric age and then I come over here and you've got Imperial units.

02:19:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, don't get me started.

02:19:56 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm surprised we don't have guineas, to be honest, I mean, I wrote a long rant about this about three years ago. But the idea of the cup as a unit of measurement, or you know the pint, you know and it's a different pint from the UK pint, which always pisses off Brits when they come over here. There's a pint in the UK of 16 fluid ounces, here it's 14. So you've got to drink six pints to get the same effect as five. That has led to some interesting drinking competitions. Nobody knows, I don't think they'd understand any of that the.

02:20:27
US has a totally unique system.

02:20:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take one last break to let your brain cool off. Unique system. So let's take one last break to let your brain.

02:20:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Cool off, and uh, we will. We will end the show with ian's story about privacy. Oh yeah, land on a high note, right?

02:20:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
why not? You're watching this week in tech. We're so glad to have you here and, thanks to the club, many of you are watching live. I have, uh, 1 276 people watching as we do the show on youtube, twitch, xcom, tick tock, facebook, linkedin, kick, and, of course, our club members are watching in the club twitter discord. Thanks to everybody watching live. Of course, you don't need to watch live most people don't. You can always download the show after the fact, uh, as I'm sure you did right with your favorite podcast client or on our website. But, uh, it's nice to have the live audience too. We're watching the chat and, uh, trying to pretend they're not yelling at us right now. Our show today brought to you by delete me.

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02:21:40
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02:24:40 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
uh, your work, yeah well, yeah, I mean 10 years ago, bruce schneier, who's you know, literally he's been on the show absolutely yep, marvelous chap. He wrote this book called data and goliath. Now, bear in mind this was, you know, 2015. We just coming into the Snowden era, where we'd actually find out. Found out what was being collected. Or Scott McNeely memorably put it's like I said privacy was dead.

02:25:04
I didn't realize quite how right it was he really was right, I mean it was written in a reaction to that, but yeah, I mean, he was predicting that exactly the kind of situation we're in now where, as you say, data brokers can hold enormous amounts of information on individuals and there's really very little that anyone can do about it.

02:25:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you interviewed Bruce, which is great. I just he is a legend, just really fantastic.

02:25:33 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh, absolutely yeah. Um, and he, he's one of those infuriating people to cover as a journalist, because he's kind of like cory doctor in that they give such good quotes. Yeah, you've actually. You know, the temptation is just to quote it entirely, but well, you did that, which is great.

02:25:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's an interview and it's it's nice that it's on there. It it's fantastic.

02:25:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, but I mean, we are in a sort of post-privacy society at the moment.

02:25:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He is advocating, as I have for years, that we need a comprehensive privacy law in the United States.

02:26:03 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, california's got a pretty good one, illinois's got a pretty good one. The fear is with a federal privacy privacy law, then they might be watering down the standards that others have said.

02:26:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Senator maria cantwell did propose a national privacy law, but it turned out the whole point of it was to over override the state laws yeah, yeah, and presumably weaken them.

02:26:27 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, there's an awful lot of people in the in the tech industry who do not want a federal privacy law because it really upends their entire business model.

02:26:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He said something that's devastating to me. Like Bruce Schneier, I don't use Gmail. I don't want Google to have my email, but he says it doesn't matter. Google has more than half of my email because over half of my correspondents do use Gmail, and I hadn't even really thought about that, but they've got their end of the conversation you really can't opt out.

02:26:55 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You know, I think at this at this point. It's um. I mean, I would love to see something like gdpr that we have in europe applied to the us, but it's it's not going to happen based on the current uh legislative agenda, it seems what does he say?

02:27:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like people gave up with, like I don't care anymore. It's like I'm wearing, I'm working on my wrist. We're going to interview these guys on wednesday. This is an ai device that records everything. He sends it to an unknown because they never they don't say unknown ai for an analytics, for transcription and analysis, and then puts on my phone, puts notes from my day it's great, tells me what I agreed to, what I did. It's like a diary that some you know third party is making. But I gave up like I don't know where this is going, I don't even care anymore I mean it's not like big brother, where the state enforces that you have these things you actually buy?

02:27:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
them? I mean I don't know. I mean, leo, I know you have smart devices in the home, brian and wesley, do you as well, cause I refuse to have them in there.

02:27:54 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I mean we have yeah, they're probably not plugged in, unless you know my smart TV is. You don't use Amazon's echo, no, no, but hey, aren't they about to release one next week or something?

02:28:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah 26th Wesley do you have an echo or a siri or a google assistant? We have.

02:28:11 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
We have the homes, uh, from the jeep company. But um, I was just thinking that with with uh meta's influence with the, the new administration I know he was regulate he was saying like, please regulate us, so maybe he can use his influence to pass some privacy laws, because that's what he wanted, right yeah, I guess, but I my my sneaking suspicion is, yes, he wants a privacy law, but he wants one that he writes.

02:28:37 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You know well, I would prefer having the EFF right, one or something. What do they call?

02:28:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that regulatory capture. That's, yes, where you're big enough to survive this threat, but it'll keep all the little guys from becoming competitors. Right, you're pulling up the ladder after you, and I think that's what Matt is doing. They're saying oh yes, please pass a privacy law, um, but we already know everything about you, so it just keeps the new guys off the block. That's all Amazon is going to do, we think, in a up, I upgrade they. They were supposed to decideiday and I don't know yet, all right, uh, whether they did so. They, they were going to have an. All you know, all of the people working on the ai were going to get together on friday because it was famously not working very well. Uh, oh, here it is. According to internal messages seen by the washington post and an amazon employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity, they have decided to push back the release of the ai alexa for more than a month after. So they're still going to have a february 26th event.

02:29:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Poor panos panay again is going to have the rug pulled from under him he won't get to announce what he wanted to announce oh, we'll show his pictures of his children, though he always does.

02:29:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he actually. One time he did it when he worked at Microsoft. He was in charge of surfaces. He did it from his house and his daughter showed up in the middle.

02:30:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That was terrible.

02:30:06 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
I remember that was so inside baseball of all of us to laugh at. So ridiculous.

02:30:13 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Honestly, I remember the surface days when he made one of them into a skateboard and that was just like you were sitting there in the press conference going. My goodness.

02:30:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who was it that we had on? It was Daniel Rubino from Windows Central, who said he's had private briefings from Panos when he was at Microsoft. He's exactly the same. Even if it's just one on one, he's always pumped, but he's really enthusiastic, he really loves what he did. I think it was a smart move for amazon. They hired him, put him in charge of this. You know thing that everybody has. They've sold millions of them, hundreds of millions, but nobody really uses for anything but cooking timers and music devices and and to turn it into something useful, the smarter and more. According to the Washington Post now, after that Friday Valentine's Day meeting, the smarter and more conversational version of the Amazon Echo will not be available until March 31st or later.

02:31:09 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Uh, because it's just not smart and it's not going to get smarter between now and when it's released. I know, maybe marginally, but it's it's.

02:31:18 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
This is a waste because leslie clearly a month might be enough it might get better in a month they want to charge they say five to ten dollars extra for the smart echo.

02:31:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could still have the free dumb Echo. But they figure, everybody will buy.

02:31:35 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
This is gonna be just like Apple intelligence, where? Yeah? It's very disappointing you're just gonna be making things up and Apple's still pushing it off.

02:31:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now it's eight, four or uh whatever. It is uh 18. What is the?

02:31:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Iowa butchered the BBC's headlines and I think they've got a long ways to go.

02:31:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you know what? I turned on the summaries, the AI summaries, for my notifications because they're hysterical. But you know it's not true.

02:32:06 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You know my ring doorbell says many people came to your door. It's just funny. I mean you say that, but I mean a friend of mine's a teacher and this is a real problem in schools at the moment. It's like well, where'd you? Get that fact. Well, ChatGPT told me, and it's like, well, it's wrong. Well, no, it can't be. Because ChatGPT told me and it's just that trust is bad.

02:32:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It says there was a person at your front door. Multiple it's, you know, I mean over a period of 24 hours probably, um, anyway, uh, it'll be like I guess I don't know. That's the problem. If you really want an ai to be good, it has to invade your privacy, it has to wear it on your wrist, has to be listening. Everything you say, no, everything there is to. I gave it my gmail, my calendar, my contact list.

02:32:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's all in there and you've got to trust the company that's holding that data as well.

02:32:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know whether or not I don't even know who they are. Yeah, um, but I'm going to interview them on wednesday and we'll find out who they are. Who are you guys after? No, but I love it honestly. I love it, but uh, we'll talk about it on wednesday. Intelligent machines. So, according to internal documents seen by the post, the new features of the subscriber only AI powered echo could, could include could possibly, if we can get it to work, include the ability to adopt a personality, recall conversations, order takeout or call a taxi.

02:33:29 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
But just like Apple intelligence, I thought we already had those things and they didn't work very well the first time, and so call it a different name and, um okay.

02:33:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's too bad, if you know what you're doing. Um, ai is amazing. If you, if you're sophisticated enough to to use the right ones for the right job and to use it appropriately, it's amazing. But most people's experience of AI will be this or will be the dumb Apple intelligence and there, and I think most people are just going to say, oh, ai is just a joke, it's stupid well, I mean, we're in the hype cycle curve at the moment.

02:34:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Right, you know it's like when Microsoft's put 10 billion plus into this, they've got to be able to, you know, show something for it. And so, yeah, you now have to buy an AI PC and you get paying a subscription and they'll bring in some money. But, yeah, I think for the general public who don't know how to use it properly, it's just an enhanced search engine, at the moment at least here's.

02:34:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the only silver lining to all this. According to the Washington Post, amazon's echo, when asked to identify the tallest mountain peak in alaska, says denali. When asked what body of water borders texas, it said the gulf of mexico maybe it's not good to be hallucinations, clearly hallucinations

02:34:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
clearly hallucinating. But you see, this is why I I remember when, uh, when ch Challenge UBT first came out, I was talking with a fellow journalist and he said you just know, the publishers are going to be looking at this and saying, right, let's get rid of the journos and install AI. But AI can't break stories, ai can't interpret stuff and it hallucinates the whole time. And until they solve that problem, then it's widespread adoption. Without the specialized knowledge it's not going to happen.

02:35:14 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Again, the thing that somebody smarter than me and I can't remember who it was said recently is like okay, yes, it's the greatest intern you've ever known. It's, it's, it has, it has ingested all of human knowledge that we put online, etc. Etc. But have we yet seen one thing where it's like hey, this is a new compound and I know that there are startups that believe that?

02:35:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yes, we have.

02:35:40 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean it has created theoretical new compounds. But at the same time this is kind of controversial because some scientists are saying actually that's never going to work, just because you say it's going to be a of it may not, but some of it may.

02:35:53 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
We're doing, they're doing protein folding, remember when you okay, but wait but, leah, what I'm saying is, is that that's still pattern matching versus something? No, no, it's move 37.

02:36:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
okay, we are breaking through now, and that's exactly the point of this reinforcement learning is getting past the regurgitation point to the point where it can do creative, generative stuff, and I think we are. This is debatable, but I think we're starting to get there.

02:36:20 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
To bring it back to fusion. Okay, I need the AI to say to me okay, by the way, the reason you haven't figured out fusion yet is because you all haven't thought of this and that and the other thing. Yeah, you don't understand.

02:36:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right Right, thought of this and that and the other thing. Right right, it has to do something that a human hasn't done. That was the whole point of that. Uh go, uh. Anecdote is that move 37 was something no human would ever have thought of, but by using reinforcement learning, it could actually create and do something that a human hadn't done ever before all right, I await fusion. Yeah well, I do too you know what, if you could have one invention that would change the world? It's not quantum computing, it's fusion it's fusion for sure would change everything.

02:37:00 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
The echo devices aren't going to do that though would that be funny.

02:37:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Echo, how do you do fusion? Oh, I'm glad you asked. I've had that. I've been waiting for you.

02:37:11 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Wait, wait, we're underestimating panos panay, listen, yes, he's pumped he's gonna announce it.

02:37:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, there's one interesting thing we'll see. We've talked about neural link elon musk's brain implant technology. Several people have had their brains implanted, and with some success. Meta has now created a device using ai that can read your mind. Uh, this is the paper from meta. It with some 80 accuracy, you can type just by thinking I'm just gonna say it could read a mind one mind well, you have to start somewhere yes, so brands and actually this could be of huge value to a variety of people with variety of uh problem, you know, neuro-linguistic problems.

02:38:00
Here's a uh terrifying video from meta of a woman getting her mind read. She's got a giant thing on her head. Um, look, this isn't going to scale yet, but that's a big breakthrough, okay. Um, I think there's stuff going on, stuff is changing. Uh. It all starts uh very rudimentarily, but eventually, uh, these little steps become milestones. I'm hopeful, I'm excited about the future. I don't want to be like you, ian, just a curmudgeon, denying, cynical about everything. Do you get optimistic at all, ian, about any of this stuff? Oh, you're muted. I see, there we go. Yeah, nope, you're muted.

02:39:01 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I see, yeah, there we go. Yeah, nope, you're still muted. You just, you just I don't know what's going on, he's. So I was gonna say like I, I have adhd, and if this was hooked up to me, it would just be printing random things all the time, would not make sense, oh, but it'd be great, wouldn't it.

02:39:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could. It'd be like that dog with the 40 tennis balls you could. You could write two novels at once.

02:39:16 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, but there's some editing that happens that in order to be understandable, in which that's why I was saying it doesn't it? It read a brain. It may not work on everyone yeah, wesley it's great to see you, wesley Faulkner.

02:39:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wesley83.com. Uh, thank goodness the lightning, thunder lightning, very, very frightening didn't take you off a second time. We're glad you were here. Appreciate everything you do. It's great to see you, my friend. Sorry you're gonna miss south by. There'll be a lot of people in austin disappointed yeah, oh, I'm sure they'll be fine.

02:39:48 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Uh, I, I, I I'm more curious about how would, how it's gonna be as an event over the next few years, because the convention's not supposed to be done until 2029, maybe, yikes, um, so maybe, I guess.

02:40:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't change south by to another venue, you can't move it out of austin. In other words, you couldn't, could you do it in another city, would it be?

02:40:10 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
yeah, I mean, think about the amount of miles and steps you have to put in just to go. Yeah, in any way, it would be better if they just like let's just do it in vegas or whatever.

02:40:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, move it just just until the center's done. Yeah, yeah, because I gotta get my queso. Man, you can still go to texas that's a good point. I don't have to wait. All right, thank you, wesley. Great to have you, ian Thompson, it's so nice to see you. The registercom he's still muted, but you know sometimes give him time.

02:40:48 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Give him time it might be a hardware mute to see if there's a switch.

02:40:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not how I dreamed of it. There you go, perfect.

02:40:58 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yes, bingo, sorry. New set of headsets, oh, it's good.

02:41:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like new boots and panties. It's time to celebrate, I think that's wonderful.

02:41:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Hey, I haven't heard that expression before, but I'm hoping it isn't relevant to me.

02:41:08 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's from Austin Hoping. It isn't relevant to me. I thought it was a Britishism.

02:41:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, never mind, it was a different Ian, ian Drury, never mind. Ah, yes, and the blockheads, yes, and the blockheads. Hit us with your rhythm stick. What should we look for, ian Thompson, in the registercom in the near future?

02:41:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh well, I mean, we're keeping an eye on what's going on in government, obviously, because that's kind of weird. But on the enterprise side, we've got a lot of big announcements coming up from the chip makers and I suspect there's going to be some really interesting news coming down the line in a couple of weeks' time.

02:41:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, very good. A little tip from TheRegistercom. Thank you, ian. Brian McCullough. Every day tech meme, ride home podcast. It wasn't supposed to be the weekends, but you just couldn't stop could you?

02:41:59 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
well, only 2 000 times. We're gonna do it. Uh, a week from tomorrow, our 2000th episode, um, that's exciting if you like tech news in 15 minutes. A a little pill, a daily dose february 24th.

02:42:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tune in for episode 2000. Congratulations, that's a big milestone.

02:42:20 -  Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, done, thanks. Yeah, we'll do something special for it, not on that day, but because we got to do the news that day? Yeah?

02:42:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, gotta do the news. Uh, just like us, except we don't really care about the news, we, we just do whatever, whatever suits us. I will be back again Tuesday for Mac break. Weekly security now with Steve Gibson, wednesday windows weekly and, of course, the brand new intelligent machines. We've got a great guest. We're gonna find out where all of this stuff is going, what AI is analyzing all this stuff coming off of my wrist. I hope you'll join us for that.

02:42:55
We do Twit every Sunday afternoon, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, that's at 2200 UTC. As I said, you can watch us live, but really it's a podcast. So get your copy, audio or video, sunday night, after we've edited it all up. Thanks to Kevin King for doing that. You can get it at the website twittv. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this Week in Tech and, of course, the best way to get it is subscribe in your favorite podcast client so you get it automatically, just in the nick of time for your Monday morning commute. Thank you to our technical editor, technical director and producer, benito Gonzalez. Is Kevin editing it tonight? Benito, I think so. Kevin King, our editor, executive producer, my dear wife, lisa Laporte. Thank you all for joining us. As I have said now, you know we don't have 2,000 episodes, brian, but we are going to have our 20th anniversary in April. 20 years doing the same damn thing. Boy is my butt tired. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can