This Week in Tech Episode 1093 Transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. We've got Alex Wilhelm here. We've got Harper Reed. It's going to be a fun show. All of the new AI coming from China. What's China up to? What's America up to? And how is it going to respond? We'll also talk about the giant bill a few people received from Amazon Web Services and the new AI teacher in Salamanca, New York. You won't believe your eyes. It's coming up next on TWiT.
Harper Reed [00:00:30]:
Podcasts you love. From people you trust.
Alex Wilhelm [00:00:35]:
This is TWiT.
Leo Laporte [00:00:43]:
This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 1093, recorded Sunday, July 19th, 2026. California sober. It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. And as usual, When I have Harper Reed on the show. Hello, Harper. Great to see you. Technologist, entrepreneur, hacker.
Harper Reed [00:01:06]:
Great to see you.
Leo Laporte [00:01:07]:
He runs a little AI doohickey called 2389.ai. Always wonderful to have Harper on. He's been traveling a lot. We've been trying to get him on.
Harper Reed [00:01:17]:
No, I'm happy to be here.
Leo Laporte [00:01:18]:
And when we have Harper on, we often don't— we decide to have a smaller panel because— Well, when I get— You won't shut up. No.
Harper Reed [00:01:26]:
That way you're like, man, Harper will not shut up.
Leo Laporte [00:01:28]:
No, no, there are people uh, shall remain nameless, who come on the show who I can't get to shut up. You're not one of them, but you have such great things to say and your rapport with everybody is so great. Remember the last time you were on, it was just you and Amy Webb. This time I'm going to introduce you to a new character I think you will like. Alex Wilhelm is also here. Alex has a wonderful newsletter that is going, you know, great guns, cautiousoptimism.news.
Alex Wilhelm [00:01:54]:
Yes, sir.
Leo Laporte [00:01:55]:
And you also hear him on This Week in Startups. And it's great to see you once again, my dear friend. Coming to me from my old backyard.
Alex Wilhelm [00:02:03]:
Indeed. And Leo, I just got— I just got to say, of all the times to come on the show, the week after the AI policy fracas is the right time to have me on. So I'm excited. Oh, I'm excited to have— I mean, like, everything that I want to talk about is what's in the show notes today. So thank you for having me as always. It's a real treat, and I will not burn down your house.
Harper Reed [00:02:19]:
I—
Leo Laporte [00:02:20]:
please don't.
Harper Reed [00:02:21]:
I, uh, that is an option, I suppose. It's not your house, it's your, your house.
Leo Laporte [00:02:25]:
It isn't my house anymore. No, it is not.
Harper Reed [00:02:28]:
So you can burn it down. You have permission.
Alex Wilhelm [00:02:31]:
I'm not on the deed.
Leo Laporte [00:02:34]:
Ladies and gentlemen, it is true that this is the week that the AI stuff kind of exploded. We do have a full-time AI show.
Harper Reed [00:02:44]:
I like that this is the week that the AI stuff exploded. I don't know if y'all have been awake for the last, I don't know, 2 years. This was no different than the rest of the week.
Leo Laporte [00:02:53]:
No, it's true. And people, People email me and say, can you stop talking about AI? Isn't there a new phone out? And I say, no.
Harper Reed [00:03:02]:
But if it were to be out, it would be all about AI.
Alex Wilhelm [00:03:05]:
It would literally be all about AI.
Harper Reed [00:03:06]:
It is.
Alex Wilhelm [00:03:06]:
The AI phone.
Leo Laporte [00:03:08]:
It is.
Harper Reed [00:03:08]:
It'd be like, the new foldable iPhone is full of AI and it's horrible, or whatever. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:03:13]:
I do have one phone that has no AI on it, which Jeff Atwood sent me. It's an E Ink screen. It is the Mudita. It has nothing. It's got nothing on it. It's just—
Harper Reed [00:03:24]:
Nothing?
Leo Laporte [00:03:25]:
It's just the simplest, purest. And who wants a phone? This is text and phone. Oh wait, it has some apps, but I can't imagine they're very good. Calculator, calendar.
Harper Reed [00:03:37]:
Do you think Pat would send us some?
Leo Laporte [00:03:39]:
Uh, I will send you this one. There is a camera. You know what's funny about the camera is it takes full-color pictures, but they're, uh, but they're— go ahead, go to the 3-shot real quickly so I can get a good picture of these guys. They're— oh, it's so slow, but they're, they're, uh, they're—
Harper Reed [00:03:57]:
oh, I love that. I love that. I love this.
Leo Laporte [00:04:00]:
They're monochrome pictures.
Alex Wilhelm [00:04:02]:
Oh man. We've never really made E Ink screens fast, have we?
Harper Reed [00:04:06]:
The Kindle one is, is pretty fast, but other than that, most of the consumer ones are not as fast.
Leo Laporte [00:04:12]:
But I think the point of this is it's a phone that you don't want to use, so you don't have to worry about getting sucked down the Instagram.
Harper Reed [00:04:18]:
I think, right, I think the problem that I have is that I, I love and I fantasize and I dream about this type of phone, but I think if I started calling all of my friends on the telephone, they would stop being my friends. They would just be like, please do not call me.
Alex Wilhelm [00:04:33]:
No, no, no, no, no, no. People that complain about phone calls that you know are wussies. I just call everybody. In fact, some people I just aggressively FaceTime them without calling ahead of time.
Harper Reed [00:04:42]:
I'm just like, that's actually one of the best things ever. And The unannounced FaceTime, especially at odd hours, is so good.
Leo Laporte [00:04:53]:
So horrible.
Harper Reed [00:04:54]:
It's so good.
Leo Laporte [00:04:55]:
So horrible.
Alex Wilhelm [00:04:55]:
You get to see your friends waking up from a nap. They're in bed holding their phone like a baby.
Harper Reed [00:04:59]:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:05:00]:
What, what's wrong?
Alex Wilhelm [00:05:01]:
I'm like, nothing.
Leo Laporte [00:05:02]:
Well, first of all, there's no— you don't know that it's gonna be a picture, right? You just think your phone's ringing, and so you pick it up and there's—
Harper Reed [00:05:09]:
It says— I mean, that's true, that's true.
Leo Laporte [00:05:12]:
That's What are you doing here?
Harper Reed [00:05:15]:
I love it. I love it. I think it's great.
Alex Wilhelm [00:05:16]:
I'm sticking my face into your house like this. I'm just going to walk into the door and just put my face in your bedroom.
Harper Reed [00:05:21]:
Hi.
Alex Wilhelm [00:05:22]:
You know what it does? It does show you which friends are like always down and which friends you need to put on the calendar first.
Leo Laporte [00:05:29]:
Like if somebody smiles broadly and says, Alex, then you know, this is, this is a true friend, even though they're still wearing curlers. So you're right. I should point out this is no really special week in AI except it sort of feels We're still alive.
Harper Reed [00:05:46]:
That's what makes it special is like the things about AI that's cool is we haven't all been killed yet by AI.
Leo Laporte [00:05:52]:
Yeah, that's good news.
Harper Reed [00:05:53]:
Right? The fast takeoff hasn't happened as everyone promised it would.
Leo Laporte [00:05:58]:
It feels like it's happening. You don't think it's happened?
Harper Reed [00:06:04]:
I don't know. I oftentimes wonder, there's a couple things that I wonder. One of the things I wonder a lot about is as these models get more powerful, You think about both, um, our friends that have worked at some of these big companies and they say, not like these, but like, let's say Apple or Google, and they've been using some technology for a year before it gets to us. Um, and obviously the cycles are much shorter now, but like, what is, you know, OpenAI or Anthropic or KIMI, what is their 6 months early look like? Like, they're like, what is, what do they have access to that we as just boring consumers would never, ever, you know, dream of?
Alex Wilhelm [00:06:43]:
Well, I think we find out pretty quick, because one thing that I always find really frustrating is when they drop a new model like the OpenAI GPT-5.6 family, and then everyone that I know on Twitter is like, oh yeah, I've had this for 4 weeks, it's fantastic.
Leo Laporte [00:06:55]:
I know, it's frustrating. Okay, well, how did that happen?
Alex Wilhelm [00:06:58]:
Like, yeah, who are you?
Leo Laporte [00:06:59]:
Yeah, why do you have it?
Alex Wilhelm [00:07:01]:
You have 7 followers and you're annoying and I don't like your face.
Harper Reed [00:07:04]:
Uh, Have we figured that out? I don't know how that works. I've been trying to figure that out too.
Alex Wilhelm [00:07:10]:
It's, it's, there must be some like club that we're not in. But I, I will say that I don't think there's stuff that's that production ready that's so far advanced of what we have or is coming down the pike. Like, I don't think there's a special access program of like, you know, special jets from OpenAI or whatever. I don't think the models are that much better, 'cause I think you have to, given the cost of creating them, get them into the market. Yeah. With a reasonable timeframe to recoup the money you spent training them. But I will say the cadence that we've seen from AI in the last 6 to 9 months to me really does, I think, show that the breakthroughs in agentic coding we saw at the end of '25 with, was it Opus 4 or 5?
Leo Laporte [00:07:46]:
Opus 4 or 5 at November 24th, a day that will live in my heart and infamy.
Alex Wilhelm [00:07:53]:
Yeah, well, I think that was—
Leo Laporte [00:07:54]:
That was when everything changed as far as I was concerned. It was like, okay.
Alex Wilhelm [00:07:57]:
The cadence is faster and I think we're seeing AI models either accelerate humans to do more, more quickly, or I think as we've seen the last couple of major releases, you know, sparks of recursive self-improvement or whatever. I think we're starting to get to the point where that's having a very modest impact, but I think that that plus the accelerated humans does feel like a new gear.
Harper Reed [00:08:16]:
Have y'all noticed more features being released in other software you're using?
Leo Laporte [00:08:22]:
Oh, that's interesting. I have noticed more bugs.
Harper Reed [00:08:25]:
So I think that's part of it.
Leo Laporte [00:08:26]:
This week, Tuesday, Microsoft shipped a Patch Tuesday with a record number, more than 500 fixes. And if you include the fixes they applied to Microsoft Edge because of the Chromium project, it was over 1,000. And that's AI, right? That's, that's Mythos.
Harper Reed [00:08:45]:
Well, I meant the other kind of direction of—
Leo Laporte [00:08:47]:
You mean like good features?
Harper Reed [00:08:48]:
Literal features. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's one thing when you have all these things. So I've, I've been starting to notice a few things, and I— and it's not enough to to like have a list, but I'm, I keep thinking like, oh, that's new. I wonder if that was just something they shipped really quickly. Like I keep thinking this as I use an app like a Gmail or, um, I'm trying to think what else app I use, but like it seems like there's some, a quicker pace.
Leo Laporte [00:09:17]:
One would expect that actually. Uh, instead what I see is a lot of, uh, vibe-coded crap, to be honest with you. GitHub is overflowing and By the way, I have contributed. I all of a sudden have 20 GitHub repos and I'm not even posting everything I'm doing. So—
Alex Wilhelm [00:09:39]:
The explosion of consumer software in that sense, Leo, has been so fun to watch through the lens of a niche. So I'm a, I'm a poker fan and I hang out on the poker subreddit. And there was this period of time when Claude Code took off before everyone ran out of compute capacity in which they literally had to tell everyone no more sharing. your free poker app that you built because there are too many. Here is a negative now. 'Cause everyone was like making, you know, GTO trainers and all this cool stuff. And it was fun. It was cool.
Alex Wilhelm [00:10:06]:
Everyone was pretty happy.
Harper Reed [00:10:07]:
Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [00:10:07]:
But it was just every other post was like, look at what I made.
Leo Laporte [00:10:10]:
So I follow a subreddit called RSS, which was a fairly quiet, not, not much was happening. All of a sudden, every single person on there has written, including me, their own RSS reader. There are an infinite number now of vibe-coded RSS readers. Mm-hmm. Out there. Uh, so that, if you include that, Harper, yes, there are more features, but in commercial software, I don't see a great leap.
Harper Reed [00:10:37]:
So just start paying attention because this is something I'm kind of working through.
Leo Laporte [00:10:40]:
You should see it.
Harper Reed [00:10:41]:
I think, I think, I really do think there is something happening. Um, just because I have, I have, I'm going to create a list and then next time, whenever I see one, I'll create a list. I'll make a note and I'll just start doing it because, well, you can't have the AI do it because it's a lot about feel, right? Like it's a lot about like, oh, this is interesting. This is a new feature that I wouldn't have expected. 'Cause I guess what I'm trying to suggest is that it's not just features. It's that features that are not that, that you, as if you like go through a quick product manager audit, you'd be like, oh, why would they prioritize this? This is interesting. It has a little too many flourishes or it's a little too fancy or it's a little too on the edge of something or another. But I think it's great because we are seeing this internally to my company.
Harper Reed [00:11:29]:
Like the fact that we can ship anything very quickly. So I would love to see it more at some of these bigger companies. It shows that it's working.
Leo Laporte [00:11:36]:
You're looking for a move 37 feature. Do you know what I'm saying when I say move 37? When AlphaGo was playing Lee Sedol in Go, there was one move, move 37, where all of the Go masters said, no, that's, uh, uh, what? They said that's a terrible move. It was a non-human move. that turned out to be a winning move.
Harper Reed [00:12:03]:
Yeah, for sure.
Leo Laporte [00:12:04]:
And that's what you're saying. There should be some move 37s out there, stuff that one wouldn't have expected, maybe.
Harper Reed [00:12:11]:
I think that there are. I think that there's a thing that I keep thinking about. Like, we— everyone talks about software factories in my world. Like, that's a thing they talk about. And there's a couple things that I don't really understand why we are talking about that. The first one, it, it's like It sounds like a good idea. It sounds hard, but everyone's acting like they're done. Um, and, and I feel, I feel like there's a, this thing where if you had a real software factory and it was truly effective, absolutely working, and you were able to ship things with like, you know, just let's say you 10x or 20x all of your humans, why would you tell anyone about it?
Alex Wilhelm [00:12:53]:
Oh, you're looking for signals of a rumble from someone else's earthquake that's beneath the surface. I see. So you're not looking at like, here's the corporate blog post announcing—
Harper Reed [00:13:01]:
Because everyone who's saying like, we use AI to do a billion things seems to be lying. And they seem to say that in a, in a, in a coordinated way because they're, they're then going to do a layoff of like 15% of their workforce 2 weeks later and just be like, oh, it was AI. And it's like, no, you just overhired during COVID Like, this is a very clear example of you hiring, you know, 40% more people. It's AI washing. It's AI washing. And I feel like that's been for the last couple of years. But I guess my assumption is I'm seeing, we've seen, and our company has been changed forever with some of how this stuff works. So I am assuming that a bigger company that is doing similar stuff to we is going to have the same examples, the same outcomes, the same—
Alex Wilhelm [00:13:43]:
How many people are at your company?
Harper Reed [00:13:45]:
6.
Alex Wilhelm [00:13:46]:
Yeah, that's why it works. I think, I think that's why when we see these layoffs, and I'm not even being facetious, people say like, you know, we're going for smaller teams. Um, you know, the Amazon 2-pizza rule has become the Amazon 1-pizza rule. Everyone wants to move faster. I think the lack of bureaucracy layers, size, scale, enterprise SLAs, and so forth is why you can do that. But what I am seeing that I think matches what you're saying is I'm shocked at how much stuff companies now drop in a major release. So like when Databricks put out their The Genie, Omni, whatever their new agent is, they had like, I, it felt like 15 different posts about new stuff they put out. Microsoft during Build, they dropped more things than I could literally keep in my head to write about.
Harper Reed [00:14:25]:
And so this is, this is kind of what I mean, right? Like these I think are signals that it's working for some people. And I don't think you have a, I don't think it's of interest or there's no strategic interest to tell people you're using these tools effectively.
Alex Wilhelm [00:14:41]:
Yeah.
Harper Reed [00:14:41]:
Because it will alienate hiring. It'll cause hiring to be harder. It will, um, maybe give your competitors some sort of heads up to say, oh, well, like maybe we should be looking at that a little more seriously. Um, especially if you're linking it to actual outcomes. Um, and so this is where I'm like trying, every time I'm, I'm using a big company's app, I'm a little bit looking, like trying to read tea leaves through that interaction to be like, oh, is this new? Did they always have that shadow there? Is that, that seems like a little bit of a flourish because I do think that what we'll see is we'll see parts where people are showing off. Yeah. Where they're actually explicitly, you know, because like you're saying, it is a smaller team thing, which allows for more specifics. Like a friend of mine here in Chicago built, uh, you know, NBA Jam, the video game.
Harper Reed [00:15:26]:
And because it was such a small, tight team—
Alex Wilhelm [00:15:29]:
Wow.
Harper Reed [00:15:29]:
The Easter eggs are literally the developers' heads on the players.
Leo Laporte [00:15:32]:
Yeah.
Harper Reed [00:15:32]:
Right. And so I think we're going to start seeing some of those kind of Easter eggy personalizations again, because the teams are so small and tight. And so that's the flourishes that I'm kind of looking for. What is this little thing? Oh, when you hover over this, you, this Or you double-click on here and you get the Death Star instead of a planet or whatever it might be.
Leo Laporte [00:15:48]:
Yeah, it's my guess though that the bigger enterprises all are working as quickly as they can to create internal software that, you're right, they probably don't want to tell anybody what they're doing for a variety of reasons. I've heard anecdotally in our AI user group where we have a number of people who work for a big enterprise that very commonly in big enterprises you have multiple teams. There's not one you know, monolithic AI strategy. You have multiple teams working on multiple different things. And I also, from time to time, see stories like, we replaced our CRM, our half-million-dollar-a-year CRM budget with vibe-coded software. Or, you know where you really see it? Customer service.
Harper Reed [00:16:31]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:16:32]:
Right? People are admitting that. And in fact, it's kind of interesting because While you and I might say, God, we hate those phone trees and we hate automated customer service, in general, it seems to be a good experience for customers that they're triaging the easiest things fast so that the humans can handle the hard things. You know, it happened in Linux world this week. Linus Torvalds surprised me a little bit. He, on the Linux newsletter, said, I realize that some people, or rather mailing list, I realize some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where—
Alex Wilhelm [00:17:08]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:17:10]:
I'm willing absolutely to put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects. And if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open source thing and fork it or just walk away. AI is a tool just like other tools we use, and it's clearly a useful one. So this was seen by, by the open source world as an endorsement from somebody you might say is probably anti-LLM.
Alex Wilhelm [00:17:36]:
Not at all.
Harper Reed [00:17:37]:
I mean, I think it's interesting to fight this battle a little bit because what I have found is it doesn't seem like this is a bell that we're going to unring.
Leo Laporte [00:17:50]:
No, that's for sure. Well, okay, but we are going to talk about some headwinds because there are some serious headwinds.
Harper Reed [00:17:57]:
Yeah, tell me.
Leo Laporte [00:17:58]:
All right. Well, no, I want you to finish the thought. So if this is— if we have already crossed the Rubicon and AI is done, it's going to happen, what—
Harper Reed [00:18:08]:
I don't even mean it's like done. I don't, because done offers some idea of completion. I just think we are—
Leo Laporte [00:18:13]:
No, no, a given.
Harper Reed [00:18:14]:
Let's say it's a given. Things have accelerated. Like I've done a handful of companies and every time we had the same pattern. And I've said this before on the show, like, you know, we used to, we used to very quickly hire 20 people and we have very quickly not hired anyone since we started the company. And we have had so much output. And I do contend that, like, I agree with Alex, like this is because we're small, we're able to do this, but the amount of output that we're doing is more than I've ever seen in my entire life. It's almost more output than my entire career prior. Like, it's so much output.
Harper Reed [00:18:49]:
Um, there's a focus issue there, but well, let's not talk about that. But, but I do think that there's a, there's a lot of, um, like, this is hard to contend with. And I think if you build in the process to handle it, then the benefits are so big. You have such huge benefits, which I obviously, um, Linus is seeing, especially for something as important as Linux or, or what have you. Um, you know, there was a friend was, was mentioning this, um, that when, um, the US government, uh, nuked Fable, the Project Glasswing or whatever was still doing reports because you were still seeing bug reports being submitted that were written very thoroughly, which obviously means Fable wasn't nuked for everyone. Um, and so it's like that kind of thing, like those, like the fact that Microsoft can be like, here's our patches and it patches these all of these bugs, makes everyone safer. And the fact that Linux is on 100% of our devices, and Linus obviously sees the benefit from progress, Project Glasswing, et cetera, means that I think it makes sense. The people that I know who are anti-AI as coders think they are very smart.
Harper Reed [00:19:58]:
The people who I know who are pro-AI and very good coders oftentimes are like, I'm very smart, but this thing is really good and I am smarter with it. And I think it goes back to the Lisa et al. GOAT stuff, right? Which is basically like when you hooked a person to the machine, it was pretty good. Which is why I believe in the Matrix.
Leo Laporte [00:20:17]:
I think there might be some commonality with people's attitudes towards self-driving cars. Lisa had a big fight with her, uh, her, uh, her brother-in-law yesterday who said, no, Waymos are really dangerous. And Lisa said, no, the stats are clear. Waymos are roughly 10 to 15 times safer than human drivers. Uh, they're not, they're safer. He said, no, no, no, AI can't drive. And I think it's, it's maybe kind of like that, that there are people who deny that AI can be any good. And then, uh, then there are people who are, are using it.
Alex Wilhelm [00:20:55]:
I think also, Leo, we're seeing people that used ChatGPT's web interface once, 18 months ago, then saying, oh, that AI is driving my car.
Leo Laporte [00:21:04]:
But I will say, in their defense, AI is jagged. Intelligence is jagged. And so Sam Abul-Samad, who's a regular on our show and a car guy, said you will never see level 5 self-driving because there's always going to be an issue. There's going to be a thing that AI isn't prepared to handle. And so completely autonomous on any road is not going to happen. And I think he's somewhat credible. I don't think he's an anti-AI guy. I think he's somewhat credible on that.
Harper Reed [00:21:33]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:21:35]:
But nevertheless, so this is why it's not quite as cut and dried as all that. AI, well, here's another question in software. Steve Gibson, our security guy, we were talking about all these bug fixes.
Alex Wilhelm [00:21:50]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:21:51]:
And he says, what you're gonna see, his prediction is what you're gonna see is a rise, an increase in the number of bug fixes to a dramatic level. We might already be there. And then he's— and he says this will happen over the next year, a decline to the point where you don't have any more bugs.
Alex Wilhelm [00:22:09]:
Hmm. Harper, you're more of a developer than I am, but I don't think we're going to end up with bug-free software. I think we're just gonna have a faster remediation cycle.
Harper Reed [00:22:15]:
I mean, I think that's true, but it might be equivalent, right? Like, I think the thing that I found is that as a developer, we used to— we did testing, right? So in, you know, 2016, you would say, let's get our test suite up and you would shoot for like, 40%, 60%. And if you were insane, like truly had nothing else going on in your life, you might hit 80%. Um, you know, some people said we have 100% test coverage and mostly that was performative.
Alex Wilhelm [00:22:42]:
Yeah.
Harper Reed [00:22:43]:
Like people, I don't, I don't know very many people who worked in production environments who had such high test coverage because there was so much other shit happening that it was scary. You had to just do stuff and it was hard and you had to just get all this stuff done. And, um, now that's just table stakes. Like, cloud will just give you 100% test coverage.
Leo Laporte [00:23:01]:
Well, but the test isn't sometimes right, but like, uh, basically dummy tests where, you know, of course it does, of course it does.
Harper Reed [00:23:11]:
But, but this is where you still have to have good practice. Like, you still have to have code review practice. I agree with you, all that stuff. But it's—
Leo Laporte [00:23:20]:
I do.
Harper Reed [00:23:20]:
And this is where the bugs will disappear, right?
Leo Laporte [00:23:22]:
I have my I do TDD. In fact, I do red, green, blue testing because that's how I learned how to code, right? And I think that's probably a good, sensible way for the AI, but I don't have— I think this is where the jagged thing comes in. Sometimes, most of the time it's good and it'll write a test, the test will fail, it'll write the code, the code passes, it does behavioral testing and everything seems to work. And then sometimes it'll just say test passed. It'll just say test null. Yeah, yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [00:23:55]:
occasionally it running out of compute on the backend and then they're going, okay, JK, now you're running high throughput.
Leo Laporte [00:23:59]:
There's a variety of reasons it does it.
Alex Wilhelm [00:24:02]:
Well, but if I— Harper, please.
Harper Reed [00:24:04]:
I was just gonna say, my experience with, with building like all of our process around this, um, it's just you have to do more loops. And so what, what, you know, and this is the popular word on Twitter, et cetera.
Leo Laporte [00:24:16]:
Loops, loops, loops, loops. Would you explain this to me? 'Cause that's—
Harper Reed [00:24:18]:
It's all, I mean, all it is is like—
Leo Laporte [00:24:20]:
All I see is like talking about on X is loops.
Harper Reed [00:24:21]:
I mean, it's pretty stupid, right? Like all you do is you just are like /loop. Do this until it's done. And it literally will just do that until it's done. And so that's why they were like, well, that really is a way to burn tokens because then it just does a bunch of shit. So you do /goal where you say, do this until the tests pass or do this until you have 100% test coverage. So you give it, and so that kind of thing. So what, but what we have found is that, um, you can't just have Claude do it. So what we'll do is we'll use Claude.
Harper Reed [00:24:47]:
It'll go through, it'll build the thing. It'll be like, tests pass, everything's great. And we're not looking at code. So then we will pass it over to Codex and then Codex will be like, y'all insane. These tests are horrible.
Leo Laporte [00:24:59]:
I have 3 agents now looking at my products.
Harper Reed [00:25:01]:
Yeah, exactly. And then you pass it to—
Leo Laporte [00:25:03]:
And Fable. And actually I have Fable do the design, but because of costs, I keep— and we're going to get to this in a second— I keep expecting them to turn Fable off. So I have Fable design it and hand it off to Opus 4.8 for the coding and then have it reviewed by Sol 5.6 and then have that reviewed by 4.5. And then, and I, and in order to do this, I gave them— I've got tired of pasting the results from one, from Codex into Claude Code into Hermes. So, I just said, email each other, would you? I said, you got a mailbox, just email each other with the results.
Harper Reed [00:25:34]:
What are you using for mail?
Leo Laporte [00:25:35]:
Obsidian. I just had them make text files.
Harper Reed [00:25:38]:
Yeah, exactly. It makes sense. Yeah, it works perfect.
Leo Laporte [00:25:40]:
Because then I can read it in case I want to. Although, as you said, you think you're going to read the code.
Harper Reed [00:25:46]:
No, no, you don't.
Leo Laporte [00:25:46]:
You expect to read the code. I don't even read the plans anymore. It'll say, I've written an entire plan for you, 15 pages. As soon as you approve it, I'll get to work.
Alex Wilhelm [00:25:55]:
work.
Leo Laporte [00:25:56]:
And I just go, yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Harper Reed [00:25:57]:
So I think what this means is that if you, if you believe the agents, then we get what amounts to normal output, which is the same thing that happened if you believe humans as well. Like, there's no difference.
Leo Laporte [00:26:09]:
I don't think agents anymore will write buffer overflows or will access memory at zero.
Harper Reed [00:26:16]:
Or they will write it, but they will find it much, much quicker. And so, like, the process that you would normally have is to just kind of keep iterating on this stuff, you know what I mean? Like, you would keep pushing, keep going, keep doing, and then it will just kind of do its thing. Like, it'll fix the bugs it finds. And I, I don't think we'll go to zero bugs because bugs are mysterious and they seem to just, uh, uh, happen and generate.
Leo Laporte [00:26:41]:
Well, there's different kinds of bugs too. I mean, there's bugs that are coded bugs, and I guess that's what we're talking about, not things like timing bugs or Rowhammer or, you know, things that are kind of not code-caused. But I think we can expect code bugs to become increasingly rare, don't you?
Harper Reed [00:27:00]:
Um, yeah, I think so. I mean, we're seeing this, like we're seeing our software is 10x better. But the other side effect of this is that we are also using programming languages that we would never have used before. We're using a lot of Swift and a lot of Rust and a lot of Go. Um, you know, these are much safer than You know, Python.
Leo Laporte [00:27:22]:
Yeah. And who wants to type all that Rust? But if the agent's doing it, go right ahead, please.
Harper Reed [00:27:26]:
We want type safety. Exactly.
Alex Wilhelm [00:27:27]:
Those can't be real programming languages. When I was growing up, C++ was a programming language.
Harper Reed [00:27:31]:
Now you're like, I'm using Jam with Whip, and then I'm going to use—
Leo Laporte [00:27:34]:
Here's a good question. Aside from reviewing existing code, does anybody write greenfield code in C++ with their AI? No, right?
Harper Reed [00:27:41]:
I have.
Alex Wilhelm [00:27:42]:
Have you?
Harper Reed [00:27:43]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:27:44]:
Why would you?
Harper Reed [00:27:45]:
Well, I mean, sometimes you need to write C++ code. Yeah. And the thing that's funny is the agents are just like, yeah, it makes sense. Why wouldn't you do that? That's totally what you would do. It doesn't care.
Alex Wilhelm [00:27:57]:
I think the interesting thing about what we just talked about, writing code yourself, is can you imagine a child born today going through the hell of learning the syntax arcana of C++ and getting it right and thinking that that was a good use of their time versus architecting a system that will be built by agents? This is going to be a lost art in not that long. And this is actually something that was predicted a long time ago. I forget which Foundation novel it was. It wasn't in the main trilogy. It was one of the prequels or sequels. But in Foundation, they literally write code to have the computers write the mathematics behind psychohistory.
Leo Laporte [00:28:29]:
Oh, yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [00:28:30]:
And when I was reading that, as, you know, like 15-some years ago, I was like, whoa, they're not even doing the work themselves? How will they ever know if it's right? And then here we are, and it turns out that, well, it's actually a pretty good way to go about things because computers can do more faster than us.
Leo Laporte [00:28:44]:
Plus they speak computer, which we don't, you know. Anyway, let's take a break. We, we didn't even get to any of the news stories.
Harper Reed [00:28:54]:
Well, we can. Let's do them.
Leo Laporte [00:28:55]:
We will. We come back, the actual, the actual news, because it ties right into this beautifully. Uh, you're watching This Week in Tech. We're so glad to have Harper Reed here. Nice to see you. I have used many of your skills at 2389.ai. A lot of the review skills are very useful. Good stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:29:16]:
Are you still putting new ones out all the time?
Harper Reed [00:29:19]:
Oh man, we have so many. We have one called Thrifty that you might like.
Leo Laporte [00:29:23]:
Yeah.
Harper Reed [00:29:24]:
That does— it's really good with Fable. You basically use Fable to plan and super cheap models like Haiku to do the work.
Leo Laporte [00:29:32]:
So that was my idea. I thought 4.8 was cheap. You use Haiku?
Alex Wilhelm [00:29:35]:
Wow.
Leo Laporte [00:29:36]:
Okay.
Harper Reed [00:29:36]:
Yeah. I mean, it's— we, we tested it even on some open models. Um, and I've been— we've been thinking a lot about this because we do a lot. We, you know, trying to output this stuff is really interesting. And so we've been really thinking about how do you kind of lean on that a bit more? Like, how do you build pipelines and whatnot where especially you're using—
Leo Laporte [00:29:55]:
So expensive, right?
Harper Reed [00:29:57]:
Well, you can use 4.8 or you can use GLM or whatever to do planning. And then you, you can throw that to, you know, Gemma or, or Kimmy or like something to do the code. Um, all it has to do is be able to do tool calls.
Leo Laporte [00:30:12]:
Right.
Harper Reed [00:30:12]:
That's it. And as long as it can do tool calls and you have a reasonable harness that can handle it, um, you can kind of get some stuff done, which means that like, I, I think the, what we will be talking about soon, which some people already are, you can hear them, is you have to be able to pay less than retail for tokens, which is why everyone loves subscriptions.
Leo Laporte [00:30:30]:
Right.
Harper Reed [00:30:30]:
But if you're a big corporate, you're still stuck with like APIs and you're just paying retail. And it's like, you'll never build anything that will be, um, sustainable because it's just so expensive. OpenAI or Anthropic or whomever will beat you. Google will beat you. But with KIMI and GLM, suddenly things are getting much more interesting. And so I'm very excited about that stuff. I think this is where things get really interesting.
Leo Laporte [00:30:56]:
It is. And, uh, we have more to talk about in just a bit. Also, Alex Wilhelm is here. His newsletter kind of covers a lot of the same stuff, Cautious Optimism, uh, and you can subscribe to it. And, uh, but you can also read a lot of it right there at cautiousoptimism.news. News. Yes.
Harper Reed [00:31:18]:
News.
Alex Wilhelm [00:31:19]:
Yes. Because it turns out that when you think of a phrase that people already know and try to get the .com, you don't. Yeah, funnily enough, who would have thunk it?
Leo Laporte [00:31:26]:
You know what, if you got a .com these days, people would say you were unoriginal.
Alex Wilhelm [00:31:30]:
Are .coms becoming cheugy?
Harper Reed [00:31:33]:
No.
Leo Laporte [00:31:33]:
I think it looks— I think it looks stodgy. I think it looks like, uh, from the year 2000.
Alex Wilhelm [00:31:39]:
Yeah, like whenever I see Crypto.com, like the Crypto.com Arena down in LA where the Sparks play, I'm always like, it feels so '94.
Leo Laporte [00:31:46]:
Look at you guys. You got—
Harper Reed [00:31:47]:
are you sure that's not the crypto part of it?
Leo Laporte [00:31:49]:
I got .fm. You got .news, I got .tv. Who's using .com anymore? US Steel?
Alex Wilhelm [00:31:57]:
I don't think we see enough people going crazy with TLDs now that you can do kind of whatever you want.
Leo Laporte [00:32:02]:
.pizza.
Alex Wilhelm [00:32:03]:
Yeah, .yourmom. I mean, like, why don't we have that?
Harper Reed [00:32:07]:
Google got that one though, I think.
Leo Laporte [00:32:09]:
Oh, they probably have that one.
Harper Reed [00:32:11]:
Yeah, they got that one.
Leo Laporte [00:32:13]:
This was the week— first of all, there's a very funny game which I showed on Wednesday called Super Dario. It's a platformer like Super Mario, but you're Dario Amodei running along. And as you run along, it says, we've extended it for another day. We've extended it for another week. We've extended for another 2 weeks. They keep extending Fable again and again and again. Uh, and I've been like probably a lot of people because of the rug pull last month, you know, thinking I'm going to lose Fable. I'm going to lose Fable.
Leo Laporte [00:32:42]:
So I've been hustling along.
Alex Wilhelm [00:32:44]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:32:45]:
project rewriting our old ad sales system. And, you know, I wanted to use the best model, so I've been rushing and rushing. I don't know what I was rushing for. Uh, this actually, I think it was yesterday, it was on the weekend, I think. Claude Anthropic announced beginning July 20th, Claude Fable will be included in your subscription. I guess presume forever.
Harper Reed [00:33:11]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:33:12]:
Uh, now it's 50% of, uh, of the limits, so you can't use it as much, but I haven't run up— I mean, maybe I'm not doing enough sub-agents, maybe because I'm being, uh, proactive as you suggested, using, uh, lower quality agents to do some of the hard— the tool stuff, but I haven't run into limits, uh, and I'm doing a pretty big project. I'm using it all day, every day.
Harper Reed [00:33:34]:
Are you using Fable primarily, or are you dropping it on—
Leo Laporte [00:33:39]:
And then what I— so what I, when I started the plan, I said, because you're going to run out. This was 3 weeks ago. Because you're going to run out, I want you to plan this whole thing and then divide it into manageable chunks, which we're going to hand off to 4/8. So you're going to plan it, you're going to hand it off to 4/8, you're going to review 4/8's code, and then we're going to move on. And then I added, once SAW came out, ChatGPT 5.6, and FiveSix is going to review it. And then once I got Grok 4.5, and I said, and Grok 4.5 is going to review it. Uh, and so I feel like with those triple reviews, the, the, the coding is being done by FourEight and some in with sub-agents, but because it's a lower cost, it's fine. Sonnet 5 is good.
Leo Laporte [00:34:25]:
So yeah, that seemed— I haven't run up against limits. So anyway, I feel like, you know, I have a Claude Max subscription, but I feel like this is This means we're going to continue to have it. Why do you think this happened? They say demand for Fable has been challenging to predict, which is why we rolled it out to subscription plans in stages, extending access several times as we secured additional capacity. Some of that coming, I think, from xAI for $1 billion a month. But does this tell you that maybe they thought there'd be more demand for Fable? Or they were concerned about it.
Harper Reed [00:35:01]:
I think we also have just forgot that the US government blocked it for 2 weeks.
Leo Laporte [00:35:06]:
Yep.
Harper Reed [00:35:07]:
Did we all just forget that? No, I didn't forget it.
Leo Laporte [00:35:10]:
I was peeved.
Alex Wilhelm [00:35:12]:
But Harper, are you saying that because they blocked it for a few weeks, people kind of came up with other systems, other approaches, and therefore reduced their need for it?
Harper Reed [00:35:20]:
Yes. I will say that. So I actually think there's a lot of nuanced things going on. So I think the first thing that's happening is that, um, these things are— our tokens are oil.
Leo Laporte [00:35:34]:
Yep.
Harper Reed [00:35:35]:
Anthropic wants us to think that they are the engine. They want us to think that if you use Claude, it's Claude and it's different than OpenAI and KIMI and GLM and all these things. Um, what we have found, and I think everyone kind of has a similar experience is like a lot of people prefer the vibe of Claude, which I think is related to the prompting, um, and the system prompts and whatnot. And they think OpenAI is kind of boring, but OpenAI is just as effective. The models are very good. As you know, like SOL is incredible. It's, it's Fable level, especially around, uh, execution and programming. Um, and so that, that's great, but you can put any of these models into any, or into any harness that you have, and they will probably be equivalent.
Harper Reed [00:36:19]:
And you might have to tweak it over here because this model has these idiosyncrasies, or this one does this. I personally like Anthropic models, but I have had just as good of luck with GLM on a few things as I've had with Anthropic, and the vibe seems similar. And so I think what is happening is when Anthropic and the US government nuked themselves, nuked Fable, I think people were just like, well, that sucks. Well, let me go experiment more. And what it did is it broke the trust.
Alex Wilhelm [00:36:43]:
That's right.
Harper Reed [00:36:44]:
And so it allowed people to go experiment more with different harnesses, with different things. And OpenAI didn't help by releasing SOL. And then very specifically, some of their, you know, thought leaders at OpenAI tweeted about how to use SOL inside of Cloud Code. And so all the people who like Cloud Code were able to go and use SOL inside of Cloud Code, which is great. Like, that's a great thing people should experiment with. But once you do that once, that's another one of these, you know, bridges that is going to be hard. Like, they burned that bridge. You're never going to have that trust.
Leo Laporte [00:37:16]:
You lost that bridge. And again, it's because of the federal government, because of the rug pull, they turned the classifiers up way up.
Harper Reed [00:37:24]:
Oh my God, that thing was annoying.
Leo Laporte [00:37:26]:
I'm hearing people say, I can't get Fable to do anything.
Harper Reed [00:37:29]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:37:31]:
This is, this is the protective layer because I think it's pretty clear Fable is Mythos. It's Mythos with a lot of— with a classifier running on top of it that says the minute you try to do something having to do with cybersecurity or biohacking, or, or, or AI, it says no, no, no, no, no, no, uh, or it will turn it down to 4.8, Opus 4.8. And people are complaining that I— they can't even do simple normal stuff, the classifier is so aggressive. So that's another reason maybe.
Alex Wilhelm [00:38:02]:
But given everything you just said and everything Harper just said, think about what Anthropic said in their missive. Beginning July 20th, Claude Table 5 included in all Max plans and Team Premium plans at 50% of limits. So for certain plans, 50%. For everyone else, one-time $100 credit to your account. That is not a company that is swimming in spare compute, because I think they would love to serve a lot of inference at either the subsidised rate, as Harper mentioned, or at the headline rate for this, which is, you know, $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. They would love to do that, but they're still having restrictions in place. So to me, they're not compute abundant yet, and I don't think they will be for a long time.
Leo Laporte [00:38:40]:
But they're more than they thought they'd be, because they They did act as if it was going to be API tokens only, right?
Alex Wilhelm [00:38:46]:
Sure. But we don't know if they found some ways to serve this inference more efficiently. For example, we don't know if Amazon just turned on another— I don't know.
Leo Laporte [00:38:55]:
They're buying compute from xAI at $1 billion a month.
Alex Wilhelm [00:38:58]:
I mean, they're buying it from Alphabet and Amazon and Microsoft and they're building their own data centers and they have—
Leo Laporte [00:39:03]:
What we don't know—
Alex Wilhelm [00:39:03]:
And their NeoClouds.
Leo Laporte [00:39:04]:
It's such a black box. You're saying we don't know and we don't know. We don't know anything. We don't know what it costs them. We don't know if they're losing money, if they're making money. We don't know anything, do we? Because they're not public yet.
Harper Reed [00:39:17]:
I saw a good tweet where someone said 2 things can be true, which is they can be absolutely crushed under the operating expenses, and they also can be swimming in money from all this revenue.
Leo Laporte [00:39:31]:
Well, they have—
Harper Reed [00:39:31]:
like, the fact that they can't light up enough data centers, they can't do all this stuff because of the costs, etc., and also the fact that everyone is paying them billions of dollars to do And they have ample runway because of the investment that's been poured into them.
Alex Wilhelm [00:39:47]:
Oh, they have tons of capital. There was that meme for a few weeks, a few months ago, people like, oh, OpenAI is going to run out of money. And I just wanted to be like, guys, they just raised $122 billion in a single round.
Leo Laporte [00:39:56]:
The largest raise in history.
Alex Wilhelm [00:39:57]:
In history. Anthropic's not going to run out of money ever because of— well, maybe if they lose the edge and they get mocked by Chinese open models and so forth. The way things are going today, they're fine. But I do think Leo hits on a very important point, which is it would be nice to have better access to the numbers so we could understand how healthy this company is or not. But if you go back to earlier in the conversation, we were talking about not telling people how much value you're getting out of AI because you don't want to tip them off. That is ironically the Google IPO problem. They didn't want to go public because they didn't want everyone to know how much money they're making on search. They had to because back then—
Leo Laporte [00:40:32]:
They were legally required to because they had so many shares. shareholders, right?
Alex Wilhelm [00:40:35]:
Back then there were rules about these things. Now we don't have that.
Leo Laporte [00:40:38]:
But ever since the JOBS Act, that's gone.
Alex Wilhelm [00:40:41]:
Well, kind of. There's different rules. But once Anthropic goes public, if they are minting money as much as they think they are, then people are gonna get pretty peevish about paying $10 for a million input tokens because that's a little bit excessive compared to open source or an open weight model.
Leo Laporte [00:40:54]:
That's a good point.
Alex Wilhelm [00:40:54]:
So I think right now they're probably sitting pretty pretty. A lot of demand, not enough supply. Money's coming in.
Leo Laporte [00:41:00]:
Both Anthropic and OpenAI have filed for IPOs, but they're holding onto it. And I think the Trump rug pull gave both of them cover to hold on to the IPO. Because you're right, I don't think they really are too anxious to reveal any of these numbers.
Harper Reed [00:41:21]:
No.
Alex Wilhelm [00:41:21]:
You do the dirty work before you list. And I think right now they're still in the dirty work era of building out their compute footprint and so forth. And I don't think all the deals they've done are going to be simple to explain. And I don't think that the cost of their employee compensation is going to make their GAAP numbers look particularly salubrious. But that does not mean that the core business of making and selling intelligence isn't actually pretty sick. Um, I'm—
Leo Laporte [00:41:43]:
Dirty AI done dirt cheap, is that what you're saying?
Alex Wilhelm [00:41:46]:
Indeed, sir. Sing it for us, Leo.
Leo Laporte [00:41:49]:
So it also got very complicated because all of a sudden China, who also has very mixed motives, is now starting to release open weight, very credible AIs. It started with Kimmy this week, Moonshot AI. They say it will be open weight on the 27th. It's not open weight yet, but they showed benchmarks, and a number of people have confirmed this, that say it is almost— not quite, but almost Fable quality.
Harper Reed [00:42:19]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:42:20]:
They offer a subscription as well as API tokens.
Harper Reed [00:42:22]:
They're not Which is sold out. Yeah, they sold out of the subscription, which I think is, um, you know, back in the early aughts when I was involved with t-shirts, um, we would pre— we would sell out of things specifically to get the hype going for when we would launch it, right? So you do a small run and then do a big run, and, and that was such a great way because people would be like, oh man, and they buy something else, they do something else. And it's— I mean, this is famous. They, they are doing a very good job at comms and growth and marketing. And I, I love it because the models are probably also very, very good.
Leo Laporte [00:42:58]:
Um, and well, and then Alibaba said, hold my baba.
Harper Reed [00:43:03]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:43:04]:
And said, oh, by the way, Quen 3.8 Max is coming out. It's been launched in preview to those same people who got access to the other ones before we did. Uh, that was today.
Harper Reed [00:43:17]:
Oh yeah, this is an exciting weekend and I am behind. I was like, oh, I'll check out KIMI later. And I just can't. It's not available. You can't even see it.
Leo Laporte [00:43:25]:
You know, Quen is very good. I have to say, I've been using 3.7. I can run that locally, uh, the 27B and 35B, and it runs nicely.
Harper Reed [00:43:33]:
Did you play with GLM?
Alex Wilhelm [00:43:35]:
I, uh, 5.2.
Leo Laporte [00:43:37]:
5.2 is— I don't run it locally because I don't have—
Harper Reed [00:43:39]:
You don't have rich— you don't have 8 B200s sitting behind that, uh, PDP-11.
Leo Laporte [00:43:44]:
But I do run it. It's my Hermes default. I love GLM. It's very good at language. Yeah, uh, I find I haven't tried it so much with coding.
Harper Reed [00:43:53]:
Uh, it's good. It's great.
Leo Laporte [00:43:55]:
I still have in my mind that Anthropic is the coding king, but I, maybe I should let, let go of some of that.
Alex Wilhelm [00:44:02]:
Uh, well, that's, that's the risk that we're talking about really. But I just wanna go back to the Harper point about how to build hype by restricting access to your product. Um, Zippoo AI, Z.ai, the makers of the GLM family models, did this earlier this year. They restricted new signups to their coding plans that didn't have capacity for. for it. So this is not even a new approach by a Chinese lab to gin up interest in the American media, and it works every time.
Leo Laporte [00:44:24]:
I have a ZAI subscription for their Max, their top of the line. It's a third what Anthropic's Claude Max is. It's like $75 a month, and I use it like it's my—
Harper Reed [00:44:34]:
Which one is this? Oh, the Z.AI?
Leo Laporte [00:44:36]:
Yeah, GLM-5-2. So love it.
Harper Reed [00:44:38]:
Here's, here's something I, I like to think about. Um, I was using Claude Code In, was it when it— February 2025? Just had launched, early days, and it was great. And we were building all sorts of cool stuff and our processes were horrible. I think GLM is way better than the Anthropic models that were available then.
Leo Laporte [00:45:02]:
So this is now the question. How close are the OpenWeight models to the frontier models?
Harper Reed [00:45:09]:
Well, I think it's not a question of how close, actually. I think it's a question of time, because it doesn't matter if they're equivalent. I like how you were like, Alex, he's gonna say it, and then I said it and you were like, well, but, um, no one else, no one else can see me. So I got some— yeah, yeah, I was excited about that. I was just like, like seeing your head just collapse in on itself as you didn't expect what I was gonna say.
Alex Wilhelm [00:45:29]:
But no, you, um, you let me down. I thought you were gonna say time, but no.
Harper Reed [00:45:33]:
But I think time is the key. Like, it is How long ago would you have an equivalent? Like, would the—
Leo Laporte [00:45:40]:
Is it 6 months, 8 months, 4 months?
Harper Reed [00:45:42]:
Yeah, how ahead are the foundational models? And I think it's getting shorter and shorter. But my point is less that, does that matter? My point is, 6 months ago, I was using Cloud Code and it was awesome. So if GLM is 6 months behind and it's effectively free, then like, what? This is like a present. This is great.
Leo Laporte [00:46:00]:
Well, you know what is effectively free and is very close is DeepSeek. The Chinese model that blew us all away in February of 2025 that changed the whole world. It was an open weight model and it was— and now they're really cheap. It's like 12 cents per million tokens in.
Alex Wilhelm [00:46:16]:
DeepSeek V4 is incredibly inexpensive.
Leo Laporte [00:46:18]:
I use that as well, but I have to say GLM has kind of eclipsed that for me. But the point is all 3 of these are from China and the Chinese government has made noises that they may want to Stop this. They may want to embargo open-weight models from the US, just as the US government is making noise they want to block Chinese models from the US. This is partly protectionism, just like they block Chinese EVs from the US to protect our auto industry, partly maybe security. Because let's not forget, you know, Harper, you're the one that made me buy this. Chinese— where is it?
Harper Reed [00:47:02]:
It's pretty good, isn't it?
Leo Laporte [00:47:03]:
It's escaped. It's escaped. Now it's a little ball that you connect up to your Wi-Fi and it immediately calls China and it's DeepSeek. And, uh, yeah, it's really cool.
Harper Reed [00:47:14]:
And it's not horrible.
Leo Laporte [00:47:16]:
No, but am I exfiltrating? Look, we just saw that Grok is taking everything it can get. Yeah, Elon says this is a bug and they're going to fix it, but the, but the Groq command line interface was apparently downloading entire directories of your, of your hard drive when you use it.
Alex Wilhelm [00:47:36]:
Before we get to that, I want to go back to the Harper point. I, I want to double-click on this because my Chinese— I thought you were going to say that as we watch open-weight models become closer and faster followers to American closed-source models, That there's going to come a point in which they are sufficiently intelligent for whatever task you need to put against them, and therefore the pricing power of American closed models will collapse. And that is going to be a really tough moment for these companies. But right now, today, to Leo's point, we do have DeepSeek V4, and you know what? People use it. And you know what? They still also pay through the nose for Fable. So to me, we're not there yet. But to your point about using old Claude code versus present-day GLM. I mean, we can't be more than a couple years out from when the average model is sufficient for all of my Alex Wilhelm's personal needs and all of yours.
Leo Laporte [00:48:28]:
Well, yes, GLM is fine for my agent. That's what I use Hermes with, and it's great. It's all I need. It's wonderful.
Harper Reed [00:48:33]:
Okay, but I would guess that we're there already. Yeah, for the most part.
Alex Wilhelm [00:48:40]:
The—
Leo Laporte [00:48:40]:
unless you're coding, unless you're doing hardcore coding.
Harper Reed [00:48:43]:
I think that if you're coding you can get pretty far. Now that doesn't mean that you can't get better, right? Like, I think there's a difference between could this do everything I need it to do? And is this the best model in the same way that you have cars, right? Like buying a, a, um, Toyota Corolla is a completely rational car. I would probably prefer another car, but that, but like it does do the thing. And so I think that if you are, if you have a GPU that can run, like you have, you know, we have a Spark, right? We have one of these Sparks and it can, has 128 gigs of RAM. We can run some of these bigger models slow, just so slow, but you run it and it works great. And like, for the most part, that could power my local agent, my Hermes agent or whatever. It could power, probably do some coding with Pi, um, and all this stuff, but for free or just power of electricity. And so I think this is accessible.
Harper Reed [00:49:34]:
I do think though, that when you really want it to work, you want to use something like a GLM or probably these KIMI K3 or, um, you know, the new Quin, and those are going to take a lot of GPUs. Like, I don't have 8 B200s. Like, I don't— like, I don't even know how to get those. Like, I don't know how that works. Um, and so, like, I don't think that is a reasonable thing. So I think we have eclipsed the, you can run it locally for free. And of course, these will be, you know, they will be quantized, et cetera, to get them a little smaller. But, like, the magic here is that you can get something that is like Fable or like Opus 4.8 for you know, max $1.40 an hour or tokens, a million tokens or whatever it is.
Harper Reed [00:50:16]:
Like there's all these hosting ways. Um, a friend of mine was, was renting on Vast AI an 8 B200 box, which amounted to basically $50 an hour and then giving all of his friends free inference. And so you could just, but you could do whatever you wanted.
Alex Wilhelm [00:50:34]:
Right.
Harper Reed [00:50:34]:
Because there is no limits. So, and, and there's, and then he did some really cool stuff with scheduling and all sorts of stuff. And it worked out really, really well. And it was really fun because we rarely have opportunities to just rip through as many tokens as you want.
Alex Wilhelm [00:50:46]:
Right.
Harper Reed [00:50:46]:
And he was doing testing because this is ostensibly a startup and he's trying to figure out if he could— if this is something sustainable that he could give to companies. And it actually got me thinking much differently about how tokens are given out. Whereas with a Fable or whatever, you have all these very limited things, but in what situations would you want unlimited tokens? Like a WeWork of the future might say, oh, and we have a GLM instance that is unmetered Because you remember when the data centers did this, right? Like you would have like Exodus would try and get you in and they'd be like one year of unmetered, you know, egress or whatever back in 2001. And like, like that kind of thing, I think will start to happen as this, as this commodifies further.
Alex Wilhelm [00:51:24]:
The children forget that in the early days of AWS, back when Azure and AWS were fighting it out for market share, they actually cut prices occasionally. It was a thing. Microsoft said, we will never have prices higher than AWS. And everyone went Everyone went, yay! And then now everyone's broke because they're running the cloud. On the point about price, what's very interesting to me about the latest crop of models that we're talking about, especially KMAK-3, is that it is not cheap in its current form. It's roughly priced along with GPT-5.6 Terra, I believe, kind of the middle-sized model.
Leo Laporte [00:51:53]:
But it's a lot less than Fable, and it's nearly as good as Fable, is the pitch, right?
Alex Wilhelm [00:51:57]:
But, okay, I don't think it's as close to Fable as you guys do. person.
Leo Laporte [00:52:02]:
I don't, I don't know. I'm—
Harper Reed [00:52:03]:
I, I don't—
Alex Wilhelm [00:52:04]:
they even, they even said in the Kimmich K3 blog post at the very bottom and says like, this is not as good as—
Leo Laporte [00:52:09]:
Yeah, they said it's second to Fable, better than Sol, but second to Fable is their pitch.
Alex Wilhelm [00:52:14]:
At some point we're gonna—
Leo Laporte [00:52:15]:
but this is, by the way, benchmarks are BS, right? Benchmarks are not usable anymore, I think. Anyway, go ahead, make your point.
Alex Wilhelm [00:52:24]:
Oh no, I'm just saying that right now we are seeing a, a Kimmich K3 come out. It It is a big model. It is not cheap to run. It is currently not open. And it smells a lot like an American AI model to me. Now, they will open weight it, sure. It will get distilled, condensed, improved, tweaked, and it'll get cheaper. But right now, what they have built is something that if it came out from OpenAI, you'd be like, cool.
Leo Laporte [00:52:45]:
Yeah, you're right. I think it's not the super duper cheap— If it does become open weight, you still wouldn't be able to run it because I think it's close to 3 trillion parameters. So you're just not going to be able to run it. Yeah, it's not going to fit on your— so let me read you what Dean Ball says. Dean Ball is a conservative from the Hoover Institute, um, he, you know, Heritage Society, you know, that lineage. He's now head of strategy at OpenAI as of 2 weeks ago. Head of Strategic Futures is his title. He wrote this and I thought it was very provocative.
Leo Laporte [00:53:16]:
Are you familiar with this, Alex? Have you seen his tweet?
Alex Wilhelm [00:53:19]:
Yeah, yeah, I've read through this.
Leo Laporte [00:53:21]:
Some observations on KIMI. It is a very good model. I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation, which is what some like Anthropic claim. It's in agentic coding sessions, this seems pretty much on par with the best public models of the first quarter of this year. I'm personally surprised— this is, this is where he gets to the economic argument, which is very interesting.
Harper Reed [00:53:41]:
Mm-hmm.
Leo Laporte [00:53:41]:
I'm personally surprised that the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good Given the risks, he says, to be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I'm surprised that China's fine with it. The presumption, by the way, when you say open weight is that people will— it doesn't have to be run in China. It could be run on American servers, you know, that WeWork model.
Harper Reed [00:54:08]:
Mm-hmm.
Leo Laporte [00:54:08]:
Or if you had 20 B100s, you could run it at home. So it's basically China's letting it out of their control. Uh, I suspect the reason they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness, that the Chinese Communist Party isn't like thinking along the lines of American frontier model companies like Dario.
Harper Reed [00:54:31]:
This is, this is the, uh, I think this is the fatal flaw when anyone talks about China is they can't help but being like, well, they're just so stupid.
Leo Laporte [00:54:39]:
They don't—
Harper Reed [00:54:39]:
you're just like, they're just like, I don't think that's the case. Like anytime you read like, like Apple in China, Chip Wars, all these books were like this incredible book telling about how China is doing all this cool stuff. And the last chapter is like, well, they just won't make it.
Leo Laporte [00:54:52]:
I'm more of like—
Harper Reed [00:54:53]:
How is that?
Leo Laporte [00:54:54]:
I'm more of the opinion that it's for them, it's soft power, you know?
Harper Reed [00:54:57]:
Yeah, no, 100%.
Leo Laporte [00:54:57]:
The same reason they're making their own chips, because they don't want CUDA and NVIDIA to own the world. They want to have their own. He says the other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference. since they can't run it locally, maybe they don't have enough compute to do that. He says also the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports. And for the companies, as opposed to the government, the decision to open source is partly ideological, partly because they're behind, and because they know, as Alex was just saying, very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China, right? It's not competitive. But this is the thing that he said that's very provocative and scary.
Alex Wilhelm [00:55:35]:
Yeah, this is points 3 and 4 when it gets spicy.
Harper Reed [00:55:37]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:55:38]:
Open weight models are inherently decelerationist. He says that because they basically make it impossible to raise money for frontier models. If somebody's giving it away— Go ahead.
Alex Wilhelm [00:55:55]:
Oh, I just— this is what I wanted to jump in and kind of explain this point, but I realized that you were about to do that and I've been a terrible guest. So I'm going to shut up and let you finish.
Leo Laporte [00:56:03]:
He says, in the end, open weight models deter AI CapEx. Right? Why would you invest billions in AGI from Anthropic if China's going to give it away? He says, this is what's really scary. Now we're to point 4 that you thought was equally scary. One probable outcome of an open weight model dominant world, which by the way is a world I've been advocating for. Wednesday, we had the CTO of Mozilla, Mm-hmm.
Alex Wilhelm [00:56:33]:
on.
Leo Laporte [00:56:33]:
He just put out his— the state of, uh, uh, OpenAI, state of open source AI. Uh, we believe just like open source software, this is, this is great, this is revolutionary.
Alex Wilhelm [00:56:45]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:56:45]:
He says no, it's AI communism. Now remember, he comes from the Heritage Society and the Hoover Institute, and it's precisely what China proposes. Rather than a market product, AI is a public good which will ultimately be provided by the state. as a kind of digital public infrastructure. This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape. I can't argue against that point. He makes a good point.
Harper Reed [00:57:14]:
So I think there's 2 points there, right? One is it's communism. Great, who cares? The other one is that this might cause issues for— I mean, it's a communist country. What would you expect them to do? You can't own property. Like, he's like, this is my 99-year lease from China. They have introduced an idea of communism. And it's like, well, yes, that's true. Like, yeah, I don't know, read the, read the House of Huawei and like, tell me about communism. So like, like the thing I think is, is interesting and actually compelling is there's one thing very specifically that why would you invest in a foundational model that has a closed model if you can get an equivalent thing for free?
Alex Wilhelm [00:57:52]:
Right.
Harper Reed [00:57:52]:
And we all know, A, that that has not been true historically.
Leo Laporte [00:57:56]:
Not with open source software.
Harper Reed [00:57:57]:
There's lots of companies that have made open source software that is great, and then competing closed source software that is able to raise way more money than the open source version. So I feel like, okay, but, and, but the thing that I think is interesting, and I don't necessarily disagree, is what if that is strategic? Right? Like, what if there is a strategy there? And I think the, the But there's another thing that I think is going on, which I think is similar, which is the United States, for better or for worse, has demonstrated to the world that we are a different country than we were 10 years prior, especially for our partners and our friends and our frenemies. We've just demonstrated that in some cases we're more reliable, in others we're way less reliable.
Alex Wilhelm [00:58:49]:
Yeah.
Harper Reed [00:58:49]:
But this has changed how people interact with us. And there is a hole. There's a vacuum where we sat before. And one of the things that China has taken advantage of is just public investment. And so it's not so public in China. It's not the same kind of thing, but they have invested a lot in infrastructure, in roads, et cetera, all over the world. And why is AI or data infrastructure any different? I would posit actually that we are missing the boat by not doing open models. Because if you look at a place like the Middle East, for instance, Dubai or what have you, they have huge data centers.
Harper Reed [00:59:24]:
They've been building a lot of data centers. They've been building AI cities. Whose models are they going to choose? Are they going to choose the closed models that they don't have access to? Are they going to choose the open models that are freely given that they can then modify to their own values and their own culture?
Leo Laporte [00:59:38]:
It's a Belt and Road initiative for AI.
Harper Reed [00:59:41]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:59:41]:
Basically.
Alex Wilhelm [00:59:42]:
And then once these open weight models are selected and American AI companies can't sling their same models at the same margins as we discussed earlier, What happens to their business? Well, it becomes much less healthy, becomes less investable, less backable. And you could see the closed-source American AI labs that have so far led the entire AI race lose this. And this is why I think we see the Heritage Foundation guy going, ah, it's communism, right? Because it is not great to see American capitalism pouring private investment into these models to create something that is valuable today, only to see China, you know, essentially undercut them with zero-cost products.
Leo Laporte [01:00:15]:
Right.
Alex Wilhelm [01:00:15]:
products. Here's my question: how can you keep funding these Chinese AI labs, which currently are deeply unprofitable? And we know that because ZAI and Minimax are both public companies. We've seen their books. I have read through them myself. Uh, how do you build businesses of sufficient health to keep this up?
Leo Laporte [01:00:33]:
Now, well, but if you're— the government's supporting it.
Harper Reed [01:00:37]:
Well, you're forgetting, but it's communism. Well, like, I think there is a real— there is a real reality here that arms of the Chinese Communist I don't think— I wouldn't even go that far. I would say that there's a different value system.
Leo Laporte [01:00:49]:
That may be it.
Harper Reed [01:00:50]:
And you have state capitalism, which is not our capitalism. I would call our capitalism fast food capitalism. And so state capitalism gets a longer investment horizon and more support from the government, from the state. This is true. Like, this is how it is. This is why there's so much solar in China. Like, there's a really good book actually called Breakneck by Dan Wong, which I highly, highly recommend. Super, super book.
Harper Reed [01:01:12]:
And it just posits this very simple fact. Um, the Politburo of China are scientists and technology people. The, the business people, or the leaders of the United States, are lawyers. So when you look at what tools you have in the United States, our tools are regulation and laws. In China, their tools are science and technology. And that will change. In the book, it does a really good job of kind of portraying this about how this is, this is a reaction to industrialization. Um, and so like, this is how we got here.
Harper Reed [01:01:42]:
And so I think what, what we have to kind of figure out is where do we as a country want to go? And right now the answer that we have is no. They're just like, where do you want to go? And everyone's just like, no, we don't want to go anywhere.
Leo Laporte [01:01:52]:
Do you, would you want a United States federal government subsidized AI run and, and—
Harper Reed [01:01:59]:
But I think you're missing the point here. I think you're missing the point. We've done this before after World War II with all of the science labs. This is not like we have to reinvent some magical thing and follow China into communism. It's this, we have to invest in science. That's basically what it is. Like, that's all it is. This is not even we have to invest in science and get rid of capitalism.
Harper Reed [01:02:18]:
It's like literally invest in science and things like Silicon Valley will be invented, which is what happened. Vannevar Bush, et cetera. And so this is why every 4 or 5 years there's some senator proposes some kind of idea that we would reinstantiate federal labs and all these labs, which then spun out all this unnamed technology and did all that stuff. But the thing is, is it's—
Leo Laporte [01:02:41]:
They're still around, actually.
Harper Reed [01:02:42]:
But the problem is, is that it doesn't make financial sense if you are in a fast food capitalism type of world. And if you're waiting for— if you have a quarter-by-quarter requirement to be profitable, then you cannot do this type of innovation.
Leo Laporte [01:03:01]:
I should point out also that Dean W. Ball is now head of strategy at OpenAI. So this is maybe the point of view that OpenAI might reasonably have. By the way, the final— let me give you the final scare point, and then you— then you can go, Alex. It's probably true, he writes, that open-weight models of this capability make the world a bit more dangerous, but not so much more that you'd really notice. At some point, the models will be capable enough you will notice. Quote, a non-living, invisible, dangerous, and infinitely self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab, you Color me shocked. And, and somebody did point out that one of the advantages that they have is the Chinese don't really care about intellectual property rights.
Leo Laporte [01:03:44]:
There's no debate over whether it's okay to copy a million pirated books into our database. They don't— one of the pieces I think of, one of the real reasons people are liking KIMI compared to Fable is it doesn't have the restrictions. People are saying, yeah, I asked how to make an anthrax bomb and it told me. Yeah.
Harper Reed [01:04:01]:
But also, we didn't care about copying any of the books either. We had no interest in that. Like, I think there's a lot of— oh, do we, Leo? Like, did we stop training the models on the books?
Leo Laporte [01:04:11]:
No.
Alex Wilhelm [01:04:11]:
No.
Harper Reed [01:04:13]:
Okay, so I don't think we actually cared. I think we paid— we don't care at all. So I feel like this is all fake. This is all fake anti-China BS. But I think the problem with, with the fake anti-China BS is it actually papers over some really important things that we as a country need to figure out, which is like, how do we compete when there's a game being played that we are not participating in?
Leo Laporte [01:04:35]:
That's a good—
Harper Reed [01:04:35]:
and if we want to participate in that game, then we actually have to— or we want to win that game, which I think is the American way, then we need to invest in participating in that game. And we can't just have it be Llama and, you know, Gemma and just call it a day.
Alex Wilhelm [01:04:50]:
Okay, that's true. I agree with that. But I will say Nimatron 3 Ultra, pretty good.
Harper Reed [01:04:54]:
It's very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [01:04:56]:
And the Reflection AI is NVIDIA's open family of models. And also, I keep talking to the people over at Reflection AI, and they, they, they claim they're doing things. And also, we just saw Thinking Machines Labs drop Inkling. There we go.
Harper Reed [01:05:09]:
Inkling.
Alex Wilhelm [01:05:09]:
Had to reach for that one.
Harper Reed [01:05:11]:
Sorry. Is that open weight?
Alex Wilhelm [01:05:13]:
I believe it is open weight, and it's designed to be used in their Tinker system to allow for fine-tuning and post-training.
Leo Laporte [01:05:17]:
So you do see sparks of And I use Hermes from Neuce Research. They have open models as well.
Alex Wilhelm [01:05:24]:
Shout out Neuce Research. And we also, in the West broadly, have Mistral, which is a company that I think has been very much under-repped. And we have a couple of labs working on non-transformer-based AI models and tinkering around with world models and so forth. So America is not doing nothing.
Leo Laporte [01:05:38]:
The race isn't over, is what you're saying.
Alex Wilhelm [01:05:40]:
No, not at all. And I don't think that we're actually as far behind as people might think. I will— I, I, I, I don't know how to get enough compute built without having the profit element of this be at the forefront today, given the global race for compute.
Leo Laporte [01:05:58]:
And that comes from the notion at OpenAI and Anthropic that they are building AGI.
Alex Wilhelm [01:06:05]:
Tell me why.
Leo Laporte [01:06:06]:
Because the, the hyperscalers believe the only route to AGI is more parameters. There's 10 billion, 20 billion, 30 billion parameters. At some point, we're going to get so many parameters, we will have AGI. And whether that's true or not, that may be a fool's errand, and it may be smarter to build smaller models with more limited capabilities.
Alex Wilhelm [01:06:31]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:06:33]:
But it doesn't advance you towards an artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence.
Alex Wilhelm [01:06:37]:
I've spoken to a number of the SLM companies, the small language model companies. And really what's really interesting come down to are the kind of like micro agents that do one specific thing, like your accounting software. Very useful, very targeted, but it's a wrench, not a workshop. And so to me, they're kind of just different conversations, Leo. And I don't think—
Harper Reed [01:06:53]:
Totally.
Alex Wilhelm [01:06:54]:
I don't think that's the way to go about it. But also on the point about you only need this much compute for AGI, I don't agree because we just spent 15 minutes talking very positively about 2 of the largest models ever released in the world, KIMI-K3, and I think the next Quinn model is going to be huge as well. So if we're going to sit here and say that China is eating our lunch because they're releasing these open weight models that happen to be enormous, I don't think the solution is we need to have open weight models in the United States that are small.
Leo Laporte [01:07:19]:
How big is— do we know how big SOL is? People think that Fable is 10 billion parameters. 10 trillion, I'm sorry, parameters. Do we know how big— so 10 trillion is 3 times the size of KIMI. So do we know how big SOL is? I don't think we do. They don't. And these companies don't tell us.
Alex Wilhelm [01:07:36]:
This is just speculation. Where's Sam Altman? Come on, Sammy boy, tell us some stuff. I'm asking Saul 5, 6.
Leo Laporte [01:07:47]:
The thing that was interesting about DeepSeek is that they couldn't build these giant models. Frankly, the thing that's interesting, a lot of the Chinese stuff is they don't have access to CUDA, to NVIDIA chips. KIMI was done entirely with Huawei chips, 100,000 Huawei chips, but Huawei chips nonetheless. And so their constraints have seemed to be a benefit. Look what DeepSeek did a year and a half ago. It opened our eyes to the idea of reinforcement learning.
Alex Wilhelm [01:08:17]:
Sure. And since then, what has happened with the 2 leading AI labs? Everybody's doing it. No, I mean, they've scaled from like Anthropic's run rate was like a billion when that happened. And now last we heard it was $67 billion. So DeepSeek, the DeepSeek moment, the terrifying moment that shook the cage.
Leo Laporte [01:08:29]:
It didn't shut it down.
Alex Wilhelm [01:08:30]:
Was one of the moments in which we saw Anthropic accelerate to the moon, or as OpenAI would say, to the Luna. Aha, AI model family jokes. Come to Twit for the dad humor.
Leo Laporte [01:08:42]:
Let's come back down to Terra and do a commercial, and then we will continue. You're watching This Week in Tech. I didn't intend to make it an AI show, but it was the big news of the week, I have to say. We will talk more about other things in just a little bit with Alex. Wilhelm from This Week in Startups, TWiST, but his newsletter is cautiousoptimism.news. And the wonderful, wonderful person who lives in my childhood home. And the other wonderful person who lives in Chicago, Illinois, Harper Reed.
Harper Reed [01:09:14]:
It's me.
Leo Laporte [01:09:15]:
2389.ai. You've been in Japan for ages.
Harper Reed [01:09:20]:
No, I was just there for like 12 days and then I had travel all over. And then we did an event in Montreal where we had a bunch of people come over and do what we called a hack party. Um, and, uh, and yeah, that was— it was— it's been, um, it's been a frenetic few months basically since I last saw you. Was just like constant travel, which has been really good because it's, it's always entertaining to go other places.
Leo Laporte [01:09:43]:
You just had another, a third child, Alex? That's so great. Congratulations.
Alex Wilhelm [01:09:47]:
Thank you. Yes. Uh, it has contributed greatly to my sanity and to my health.
Leo Laporte [01:09:53]:
You're lucky though because you have a man You have a man cave that is separate from the house. You can go out there, right?
Alex Wilhelm [01:09:58]:
But, but like in the '50s, yes. If I was a dad in the '50s, I would go out here and smoke my pipe and—
Leo Laporte [01:10:05]:
With the kids follow you right out there, don't they?
Alex Wilhelm [01:10:07]:
Well, no, I, I don't even get to come out here. Like, like, okay, so people who aren't parents don't understand this, but when you have your first child, you still think in terms of like what you want to do on the weekend.
Leo Laporte [01:10:17]:
Oh yeah. That doesn't last.
Alex Wilhelm [01:10:18]:
Like, you might think, you know, I really wanna go, go see that movie, or I wanna go, I wanna go for a long bike ride. right. Your second child really turns that into a thin layer at the bottom of your life. And your third child is when you realize that weekends are now much harder than workdays.
Leo Laporte [01:10:32]:
Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [01:10:33]:
Like now every single Sunday night I'm like, oh, thank God we're going back to work. The nanny's coming.
Harper Reed [01:10:38]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:10:39]:
I got to— you're doing something I never did. I don't know if I could have done it. You're working at home. I got to get in a car and drive and drive away.
Alex Wilhelm [01:10:48]:
My wife does this every day and I'm always like, bye-bye.
Leo Laporte [01:10:51]:
Bye.
Alex Wilhelm [01:10:51]:
The nice thing is I do go in the house to get a drink, to get a bite, use the toilet, whatever. And I do get to pop in and see the kids and they're always so excited to see me because I've been gone for 3 hours and they're like, Dad, look, I made a thing. And then like your heart grows so big.
Harper Reed [01:11:05]:
Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [01:11:05]:
So I wouldn't trade it.
Harper Reed [01:11:07]:
And then you leave again.
Alex Wilhelm [01:11:08]:
Yeah. And then I go back and they cry and they wail.
Leo Laporte [01:11:11]:
And I remember, I remember I had an office, home office, uh, and they would, they would know I'm in there and they would pound on the door and say, let me in. Let me in. So you can't get away.
Alex Wilhelm [01:11:23]:
You know, you know, in my man shed that there's a little porch? Well, we've put one of the children's swings there. And so often I'll be like working and then I'll look over and there'll be a child doing this outside the door. And I'm like, they better not. I'm recording right now. They better not knock. They better not knock.
Leo Laporte [01:11:37]:
Daddy. It's okay if they do. I'm just telling you, it's quite all right. I had a swing on that tree right behind you. That big tall— is that still there? The big tall—
Alex Wilhelm [01:11:46]:
Oh yeah. It's right there.
Leo Laporte [01:11:47]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had a swing right on that.
Alex Wilhelm [01:11:50]:
Yeah, you should come back and see what we've done with the place. There's been many, many additions and improvements since. Um, no, but I, I, I think that children have changed me in one more way that I'll bring up, which is it's taught me how I've already lost this battle, so I'm not gonna try to be a moral leader here, but like, phones are so addictive.
Leo Laporte [01:12:08]:
And I— yeah, what are you gonna do? Have you decided what you're gonna do?
Alex Wilhelm [01:12:11]:
I'm going to hold out until I am the last parent in their friend group that lets them have a phone and calls Yeah, I, I, I'm so glad I didn't have to deal with that.
Leo Laporte [01:12:21]:
I don't know what I would do. Harper, what are you going to do with your kids when they get to that age?
Harper Reed [01:12:25]:
I mean, I've always believed abstinence is a really good program for everybody else. Um, I just don't think it makes sense. I mean, I think it's like you're just gonna try and be a good parent, you know what I mean? Like, you do what you can. Like, you got to do what you can. I'm not going to die on any hill. hills. I feel like most of the hills, you're just like, you're— and, and I think the thing that is complicated, it's very hard to me, for me to be like, you should not be using technology, while then I'm using technology 25 hours a day. Right.
Leo Laporte [01:12:57]:
That's hard to—
Harper Reed [01:12:58]:
And so like, what, what instead is like, how do you have, uh, filtered and metered access? Um, you know, and I think that's, that's the key. Also, sometimes you have to fly in a And like the no screen time rules when you have to fly in a Czech plane, just like out the window. Yeah, I'm not a monster.
Alex Wilhelm [01:13:16]:
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. People still tweet things like, I was at the airport at 9 AM and I saw someone drinking. There's no time zone in the airport and there are no screen rules for children on the plane.
Leo Laporte [01:13:27]:
Oh, there you go.
Alex Wilhelm [01:13:28]:
Like, no, no, no.
Harper Reed [01:13:29]:
Also, it's fun to mix those things.
Alex Wilhelm [01:13:32]:
Oh, I, I gave up drinking, but yes, yes.
Leo Laporte [01:13:35]:
Social media limits coming for teens across Europe. says EU leader Ursula— perfectly named— Ursula von der Leyen.
Harper Reed [01:13:45]:
I feel like this is a bad idea. This is a bad idea. It seems this is something that, like, whenever something like this happens, I just look at my security-focused friends who are thinking of things that I don't think about and have brains that work differently than my brain, and they're always like, this is horrible. And, and that's when I'm like, oh, I should pay attention. And then the more you think about the ramifications the more this just turns into a let's name every person on the internet surveillance bill, which—
Leo Laporte [01:14:13]:
That's what it is.
Harper Reed [01:14:14]:
Chat control.
Leo Laporte [01:14:15]:
Yep.
Harper Reed [01:14:15]:
Which is bad. And that, and that is like getting everyone's information into one database has not typically worked out very well for humans. Um, bad news. So I, I don't, I, I worry about this quite a bit. And one of the things I love about the United States is that we're not very creative. And so we'll just be like, we should copy that. Let's just copy that. Let's do a worse version.
Harper Reed [01:14:34]:
But we're all, what's going to happen is it's going to be like the GDPR, the California, like privacy stuff. But it's gonna be like Alabama makes everyone follow this one rule, and then everyone who's building tech has to follow some stupid Alabama rule or whatever.
Leo Laporte [01:14:47]:
We're already there.
Alex Wilhelm [01:14:48]:
Yeah, we're seeing it at the state level. But also, I want to point out this is not just an EU thing. China this week banned certain AI companions for, for kids and such. So like, we're seeing, I think, around the world people trying to be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, go outside, meet somebody, go to a bar, try to have a child. Please, please stop staying in your house and talking to your chatbot. Or your social media feed all the time. Because I, I do think that there is an intersection point between— and not to get all different topic-y, but like the birth rate crisis and the rise of technology and people staying indoors.
Leo Laporte [01:15:19]:
I don't see kids out on the street playing very much anymore. Do you see that?
Harper Reed [01:15:24]:
It could be that nobody has any— no one has any money. It could be a relationship with nobody has any money.
Leo Laporte [01:15:31]:
Well, it doesn't take money to go outside and ride your bike.
Alex Wilhelm [01:15:34]:
It does.
Harper Reed [01:15:35]:
I meant the neighborhood. I meant the kids in the safe neighborhood and like having more kids and the birth rate and all this stuff. Like, I know a lot of—
Leo Laporte [01:15:41]:
oh yeah, nobody can afford kids. Yeah, yeah.
Harper Reed [01:15:43]:
And everyone's just like, why would I, A, do any of that? Because I don't have any money. And B, uh, we're all gonna die from like Elon Musk or whatever in 5 years. So, you know, so I feel like there's a lot of like feel— a lot of things that go into this that I think we are— it's easy to say, oh, this is the reason why. But it's like a very big system. Yes.
Alex Wilhelm [01:16:05]:
And like, you know, but this is why governments are taking it, taking it on, right? So currently in the US, states that have enacted laws directly limiting minor social media access or requiring parental consent include Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, down the list. So we've done this in half the US, right? And we're doing it in Australia, and we're doing it in Europe.
Leo Laporte [01:16:23]:
And we're doing it—
Alex Wilhelm [01:16:24]:
yeah, the UK, which is almost Europe but not quite. And I do think that that this is going to become a global, global issue. And I do think Harper's dead on.
Leo Laporte [01:16:32]:
Finland's dead on.
Alex Wilhelm [01:16:32]:
That what we're going to wind up with here is essentially increased government control of the internet, which I am fundamentally opposed to.
Leo Laporte [01:16:38]:
Right.
Harper Reed [01:16:38]:
But there is an upside, which is A, it'll make more hackers, and B, it'll be fun to try and get through it. Like, it'll— it's, it's as a hobbyist hacker, it'll be fun to be like, oh no, the government has access to my internet. Let me fix that? Like, I, I, I, I also think there's this slightly fringier side, which is, you remember when some like, you know, new name service comes on or someone messes with the BGP routes or whatever, some country's like, we're going to do a thing like Iran has protests or whatever. I guess they don't anymore, but they used to have protests or whatever. And then, um, all the internet would go down for like 40 minutes and then they'd fix it. Like, this is not that simple. Like, I can't wait. Because they're going to break everything and there's just going to be internet too, finally, from the universities.
Harper Reed [01:17:23]:
And we're all gonna, we're all gonna hopefully, you know, live in free land.
Leo Laporte [01:17:26]:
Not true.
Alex Wilhelm [01:17:27]:
Can I ask you about that? Because one thing that I've read about, and I forget the exact time that I read this and I can't pull up the article in real time, but like I read that China is working to export their Great Firewall technology to other, uh, aligned nations with them. And so my question is, what we're talking about here in broadly the West is pretty lightweight. I do agree with you, Harper, you can get around it, blah blah blah blah blah. Good hackers love it. But what happens if nations begin to get even more heavy-handed? Can we end up in a world in which the, the Russian-style approach to the internet, the Chinese-style approach to the internet, the North Korean-style approach— well, maybe not that far, but when that becomes the norm in, in most nations? Because I think that you probably can't as easily hack your way around that level of state control, and that's what I'm worried about.
Leo Laporte [01:18:07]:
So this week—
Harper Reed [01:18:09]:
Can you not? I mean, this— like, I think you— I don't know.
Alex Wilhelm [01:18:12]:
Can the average person, can the child, can the The, the homebrew hacker, to your point from before.
Harper Reed [01:18:17]:
I don't know. I mean, do you talk to anyone from like— literally everyone in China knows what a VPN is.
Alex Wilhelm [01:18:23]:
True, but how secure are they and how much visibility does the government have?
Harper Reed [01:18:28]:
But now we're focusing on perfection, right? Like, I think like the question is, can you hack around it? The answer is yes. Okay, does it— is it perfect? Like, no, nothing is. I would just say use Tailscale.
Alex Wilhelm [01:18:40]:
Shout out to our friends at Tailscale. tailscale.com.
Leo Laporte [01:18:42]:
I'm using it right now. Yeah, it's incredible. I love it. scale. Yeah.
Harper Reed [01:18:46]:
I love it. I, I, like, I, I just think, I think there is this thing that like, we assume there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into this. Like, and I highly recommend if you're interested in what it looks like exporting China's Great Firewall to read the book, I think it's called House of Huawei. Um, which is very, very, very good book. It's a very interesting book, but it basically talks about that. Like they did that. They, they exported that technology to lots and lots of different locales and And, and in many cases it wasn't for surveillance, it was for in case of an emergency, we want to be able to, you know, lock down or control information or what have you, which is not how we in the United States do it, but is how places in the world do it. Um, and, and it's very interesting to see that they just did it.
Harper Reed [01:19:30]:
Like, they just— they— and it's not like China is going to export that, you know. And I think it's very easy for us to, um, link China with these companies, um, and say these are equivalent, but I, but I don't think they are necessarily equivalent.
Alex Wilhelm [01:19:41]:
Yeah.
Harper Reed [01:19:44]:
They are linked. So I don't, you know, because of state capitalism, et cetera. But it is a very interesting— it's a definitely interesting book. And I do think we in the US are not prepared for what it looks like when every single person has to register their name and birthday to get on the internet.
Leo Laporte [01:20:00]:
We're not far off from that, I think. So the EU this week was unable to stop chat control, which is the warrantless mass scanning of private messages and photos. in the EU. They, due to a kind of a little manipulation of the rules, they were able to get that. There were, there was a vote to reject it, which didn't succeed. So now in September, they're going to actually debate the permanent Chat Control 2.0. But what this essentially does is it forces companies to provide clear text versions of all your private stuff, every photo, every message, every file, so that it can be scanned. And of course, the proximate reason for this is to look for child pornography, but, uh, it has the effect really of break— completely breaking privacy.
Alex Wilhelm [01:21:01]:
I thought that the, the compromise in this case— and Leo, if I'm wrong, just please shout at me— but I thought that they were going to not demand that encrypted encrypted chat be broken to allow for scanning of that as well? So you still get, uh, the ability to have encrypted chat in the EU, is that right?
Leo Laporte [01:21:17]:
Yeah, I'm, I'm ex— I am— I don't know, I'm not clear. Um, okay, the original chat control would break encryption, and that's why Meredith Whitaker of Signal said if that passes, we're getting out of here. We cannot offer Signal in the EU because we refuse to, to provide a backdoor to Now, they haven't done that. So I imagine that you're right, Alex, that in some way the current version of chat control doesn't do that. But this fall, they are— this is still on the table. They still want to do this, I think.
Alex Wilhelm [01:21:50]:
I worry that safetyism is going to be a real issue broadly. Going back to the self-driving car point and, you know, talking about what's safer and what's not, like, I think that we should move faster. There, I think we should have less, less safetyism on these cars because they're already, I think, better than everyone that I see driving. I see a lot of children driving Suburbans at like 75 miles an hour down my residential street.
Harper Reed [01:22:12]:
Scary.
Leo Laporte [01:22:13]:
Maybe that's not a great idea.
Harper Reed [01:22:15]:
If that was a Waymo, if that was a Waymo, a child wouldn't be driving it, right?
Alex Wilhelm [01:22:19]:
It would be a robot going exactly 25 miles an hour. Yeah, thank you.
Leo Laporte [01:22:22]:
You're driving like a grandma. Yeah, I used to bicycle down that street. I safety pin a towel around my neck and pretend I was Superman. It'd be dangerous to do that now. Dangerous, I tell you.
Alex Wilhelm [01:22:33]:
You cannot let your children out of the house and not have them taken away by the police. Different topic entirely.
Leo Laporte [01:22:38]:
Is that true that they will say, oh, you're a bad parent, you can't let your kids out of the house?
Alex Wilhelm [01:22:42]:
My sister does this in the Bay Area. She lives in the South Bay. I'll keep it relatively—
Leo Laporte [01:22:46]:
No free-range kids anymore.
Alex Wilhelm [01:22:47]:
She lets her kids bike to their friends' houses and the other kids' parents are gobsmacked and terrified. Like, what do you do? You let them skateboard over here? Isn't that sad? Yes, yes it is. Yes it is. Um, it is indeed sad. Yeah, it bums me out because I spent a lot of my youth climbing over barbed wire fences in the country and picking flowers. So yeah, yeah, quite a lot.
Leo Laporte [01:23:10]:
I walked to school 2 miles every day. It was great. And I did it slowly because I enjoyed it. I had fun uphill.
Alex Wilhelm [01:23:17]:
That's because there was no Netflix back then.
Leo Laporte [01:23:18]:
It was up Lloyd Street. You know the street I was going up. That is— it's a hill. It's uphill.
Alex Wilhelm [01:23:23]:
I know, I know.
Leo Laporte [01:23:25]:
Well, it was downhill going to school, but it was uphill coming home.
Alex Wilhelm [01:23:30]:
Can we unify some points here? We're talking a lot about American AI regulation, how China is approaching the world, and also this broad global effort to cut back on children's access to social media. It seems like everything's kind of pointing towards a world in which centralised powers have a lot more control over our digital lives as that becomes a more important chunk of who we are. And like, I don't know, guys, that has me really worried.
Leo Laporte [01:23:55]:
I think— I think the pendulum will swing the other way. I don't think people really want this. I don't know, man. The people in power know that fear is the most effective way to garner votes and promote this notion of fear, and we are all cowering inside because it's effective and it got them in power. But I think the pendulum swings, and I don't think people want to live in fear.
Alex Wilhelm [01:24:20]:
Well, I mean, like, the only thing I was kind of excited about, about the Trump administration— and I say that knowing that, you know, my politics are very close to your guys', but, um, I was kind of excited that there would be more of a free-range AI approach to regulation on that front. But as it turns out, that the false appearance of choice, you end up in the same place, which is government control over AI model releases. And what a disappointment.
Leo Laporte [01:24:46]:
It's project aptly named Project Golden Eagle, uh, and the whole idea is that, uh, and, and by the way, the Frontier Labs are going for this, that the Trump administration or the government, let's just say the government, whoever that government is, will have 30 days to look at any model and approve it, make sure it's safe before it gets released. The White House currently says participation is voluntary Um, but yeah, that doesn't seem necessarily to be the case. According to CNBC, the program will put the White House in charge of greenlighting which companies can access new models. This is Gold Eagle.
Harper Reed [01:25:29]:
I am— having worked for Obama, I'm never gonna get access to any of these models.
Leo Laporte [01:25:34]:
Well, that's right.
Harper Reed [01:25:34]:
They're just gonna say, they're just gonna say, nope, not that company. I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to like get a, I don't know, a Trump iPhone cover when I go to a meeting or something so I can— so people will be like, oh, he's true MAGA, and then I'll be able to get access to Fable 4 or whatever it is.
Alex Wilhelm [01:25:48]:
Your office is as great as Mar-a-Lago to me.
Leo Laporte [01:25:50]:
It was widely thought that the reason Fable was pulled was because Katie Mazuras was, uh, the person, uh, that, uh, Anthropic talked to. And of course, uh, Katie Mazuras was associated, uh, with Chris Krebs and the Obama White House, and it was political. Now, whether that's true, I don't know. And, you know, and I understand the argument that this stuff is so dangerous. Some— and honestly, if you thought— if you thought, you stipulate the government has the technical ability to do this, which is not clear, but let's say they did.
Harper Reed [01:26:30]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:26:32]:
Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea that they would vet these models to make sure that they were safe before they were widely used. I'm not worried about, uh, good guys. I'm not worried about us using them. I'm worried about bad guys using them. Should we— should you not worry about that, Harper?
Harper Reed [01:26:50]:
I mean, of course, but like, we don't actually care in the United States. That's not actually the reason. That's not what's going on. No, no. If we cared about bad guys not doing bad shit, we'd stop people from shooting kids in schools. We don't care about anything like that. We care about money and capitalism. We care about shareholder value, and we care about making sure that I get the shareholder value, not you.
Harper Reed [01:27:11]:
And so if you look at all of these, most of these things I think are directly related to someone's money. I think that they are, you know, and that's a very cynical point of view because I do think that we have a lot of actual issues that we should be addressing, um, social infrastructure, et cetera, in the United States.
Leo Laporte [01:27:27]:
Yeah.
Harper Reed [01:27:29]:
But I think a lot of this, um, is very much related to, you know, like, like, how are we— who is getting money and how? Um, right around this time, I think it was, you know, the same kind of time period, there was a lot of talk of the US government taking some shares of OpenAI and Anthropic, etc. Um, you know, and so, like, we don't know what was happening in the negotiations that, that may have precipitated some of these actions. Um, and so my My kind of point of view on this is like, of course we should be investing in safety. That seems important. But we in the United States seem to invest in safety 4th or 5th, 6th maybe, way after we invest in shareholder value. Just think about the COVID response. The COVID response was very much about shareholder value, very much not about safety of our citizens. And that's why we had such a disastrous response to that.
Harper Reed [01:28:24]:
And that is like outside of politics. Like, that was very much both sides did this. And so I do think there is a, it's just a consistent, uh, response that, that we do over and over again. It's just like, how do we max shareholder value? And it's also a little bit like, okay, like I also run a venture-backed company. Like we are also participating in this game. So I don't mean this as a form of critique as much as this is the system that we're in. If we want to fix the system, it's a system problem, not a, we should point at Anthropic and just be like, blah, blah, blah, or whatever. Like they are also participating in the system.
Harper Reed [01:28:55]:
Um, we are all here together.
Alex Wilhelm [01:28:59]:
What would a safety system look like for AI in America when Chinese companies are releasing models that everyone keeps telling me are like nipping at Fable's heels? We heard it today on the show, uh, in an open weight format. I mean, to me then, if that's the game, then there's no point in trying to have a seatbelt on because everyone else is, you know, drinking a 40 while they drive with their feet on the dash.
Leo Laporte [01:29:18]:
Well, could you effectively say we don't think the Chinese models are And we forbid any federal government agency from using them, and we furthermore forbid any company that has any business with the federal government to use them, and in effect shut down these open weight models?
Alex Wilhelm [01:29:37]:
No, no.
Harper Reed [01:29:38]:
They could. They could.
Leo Laporte [01:29:39]:
I mean, you and I'd still use them. I don't do business with the government.
Harper Reed [01:29:42]:
I think they would not.
Leo Laporte [01:29:44]:
You could block them, couldn't you?
Harper Reed [01:29:45]:
I think you would block the finances of the companies that are making them from participating in the West. You'd have to— I don't think— I don't think you would block— You can't just put a firewall. You're not going to Well, I mean, they've been trying to block torrents for how many years? And there's, you know, like a friend of mine just said to me, Harper, you should use Soulseek. Like, I'm like, what? I thought that died 100 years ago. Like, like this stuff just lasts forever. Yeah, exactly. So, so I think that the, like, trying to stop someone from downloading a thing is not the right path here. And I don't— and I think everyone who would be trying to stop something would, would agree that that's not the right path.
Harper Reed [01:30:21]:
path. Like, like, there's no way to do that. What you want to do is you want to stop the companies from making it in the first place. And the easiest way to do that is to actually use a lot of the same tools that we use—
Leo Laporte [01:30:33]:
Sanctions.
Harper Reed [01:30:34]:
Sanctions against Huawei, a lot of the same tools you use against all of these, these, these in the past. Like, we have the tools at our disposal, and we also have some really, really big ones like OFAC, etc., that we have not used in this kind of framework. And so, like, I think that we have the tools that we want to. I think that that would be very short-sighted to do so. I think—
Alex Wilhelm [01:30:53]:
I think the Office of Foreign Assets Control, if people don't know.
Harper Reed [01:30:57]:
And I think that if we were to use those tools, that would basically admit that we are not good enough to compete. And we'd basically be saying, well, we cannot participate in this system.
Leo Laporte [01:31:08]:
That we, we do that to protect the, uh, United States automotive industry by blocking—
Harper Reed [01:31:13]:
Oh, I know. And it's so stupid.
Leo Laporte [01:31:15]:
Like, like But they would probably do it.
Harper Reed [01:31:18]:
Yeah, but you can go to Canada and buy one with a 100% import fee, a tariff, and it's still cheaper than like a Model S.
Leo Laporte [01:31:26]:
You can't drive it in the United States though, they'll stop you at the border.
Harper Reed [01:31:30]:
I think you can with a tariff. With a tariff, you have to pay the tariff.
Leo Laporte [01:31:34]:
Okay, are you sure?
Alex Wilhelm [01:31:36]:
No, we let Chinese, uh, self-driving companies like collect data in the US. Like, I mean, like, where are Saudi Arabia owns a lot of Arizona land and uses water to grow alfalfa for their cows. We're not really a closed-off nation when it comes to commerce, Leo. We have some lightweight rules that make it more difficult.
Leo Laporte [01:31:51]:
But I'm just saying, there's an example of a protective rule that protects the United States auto industry and unfortunately belabors consumers, because those are better vehicles.
Harper Reed [01:32:01]:
They're apparently very nice. I really want one.
Leo Laporte [01:32:04]:
Me, too.
Harper Reed [01:32:05]:
A friend of mine said the nicest car he's ever been in in his whole life, and this is someone who likes cars, was a BYD taxi in Shanghai. He was just like this at it, and he's a, he's a nerd like us, and he was like, it has more screens than I have in my house, you know? Like, he was like, it was incredible.
Leo Laporte [01:32:24]:
Leo, are you gonna buy a Topolino? I want a Topolino.
Alex Wilhelm [01:32:27]:
I want this car so badly. They're bringing it to the United States. This is, this is off topic, but if you're talking about AI—
Leo Laporte [01:32:31]:
It's not street legal though, right?
Alex Wilhelm [01:32:33]:
No, you can get it, uh, tweaked so it can go up to 25 miles an hour.
Leo Laporte [01:32:37]:
It only goes 19 miles an hour.
Alex Wilhelm [01:32:39]:
Oh, there's a It's a kit, $25.
Leo Laporte [01:32:41]:
But they have a free kit that will make it street legal. It is probably not the safest car ever, by the way. This is the model with a rope for a door instead of a door for a door.
Alex Wilhelm [01:32:52]:
Uh, hello, I'm sorry that I'm too much of a baller for you and your safety assembly. I'm gonna buy, I'm gonna buy 2 of these.
Leo Laporte [01:32:57]:
If I could get a red velvet rope, maybe spray paint, baby, $3. They do have, they do have a, uh, a door, uh, upgrade. No, I know, I really like this. It's basically a golf cart.
Harper Reed [01:33:09]:
This is adorable.
Leo Laporte [01:33:11]:
Yeah, it's adorable.
Alex Wilhelm [01:33:12]:
$14,000.
Leo Laporte [01:33:13]:
Bring it on. And you can't buy it in the US, right?
Alex Wilhelm [01:33:15]:
They're coming to the— I think next year. But if—
Leo Laporte [01:33:17]:
But you will be mocked if you drive this around.
Harper Reed [01:33:21]:
Have you seen Teslas?
Leo Laporte [01:33:22]:
Yeah, that's true.
Alex Wilhelm [01:33:24]:
I'm a bald middle-aged man with 3 children. Do you think I care about being mocked?
Leo Laporte [01:33:29]:
I really want this.
Alex Wilhelm [01:33:30]:
Apparently risible.
Leo Laporte [01:33:31]:
I want this. I would just drive it around town.
Harper Reed [01:33:33]:
Yeah, me too. I would love it.
Leo Laporte [01:33:35]:
Yeah, I wouldn't go on the highway. Uh, but 19 miles an hour is kind of a little slow. I think you'd— in this area, you'd be— people would be driving up, up your rear.
Alex Wilhelm [01:33:47]:
Yeah, but I only wanted to take it to the weed store and McDonald's. Like, that's the only 2 places.
Leo Laporte [01:33:51]:
Perfect for the weed store. Yeah, like, now I know you don't go to the weed store, Alex, because you're sober, but—
Alex Wilhelm [01:33:58]:
No, I'm, I'm California Oh, okay.
Leo Laporte [01:34:01]:
I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [01:34:03]:
Okay. So I just, I just hit 10 years of not drinking and I don't do any, any hard drugs at all, but I do allow myself alcohol and nicotine and cannabinoids.
Leo Laporte [01:34:10]:
Okay.
Alex Wilhelm [01:34:10]:
Oh no, no, sorry. No caffeine.
Leo Laporte [01:34:13]:
No booze. Caffeine's okay.
Alex Wilhelm [01:34:14]:
Caffeine, nicotine, and cannabinoids. Those are, those are my, my allowed substances.
Leo Laporte [01:34:18]:
The 3 C's.
Alex Wilhelm [01:34:19]:
The 3 C's. Nothing else.
Leo Laporte [01:34:21]:
The 3 C's of addiction.
Harper Reed [01:34:23]:
Okay.
Alex Wilhelm [01:34:23]:
Never had a problem with those. It was just the booze that got me, Leo.
Harper Reed [01:34:26]:
Yeah. I mean, sense. I think that seems accurate. Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [01:34:31]:
I wrote a blog post about this in like 2019. My wife didn't like it.
Leo Laporte [01:34:35]:
Yeah, I bet. Uh, would you get the door? I think you'd have to because you have children. I don't think the rope would be sufficient to keep the kids in.
Alex Wilhelm [01:34:42]:
I'm not putting my children in my Topolino. No, they're going to be in the war wagon that has all the car seats. This is for daddy to go cruising.
Leo Laporte [01:34:50]:
This actually looks like they're, uh, they're in, uh, in Cranston right there, right on the, on the, uh, Providence Bay, on the Narragansett Bay.
Alex Wilhelm [01:34:57]:
It's gonna be—
Leo Laporte [01:34:57]:
it's gonna be driving on the boardwalk. It's beautiful. You go to the beach club for fresh air, not exhaust, it says. The Topolino. All right.
Alex Wilhelm [01:35:07]:
Do you remember the Fiat Jolly, Leo? This is essentially the ancestor to that. Oh, the Fiat Jolly was an old-fashioned special Fiat car that had like a, like a cloth roof, and it looked like a golf cart that was like a car, and it was super popular amongst the Newport set.
Leo Laporte [01:35:21]:
Oh, you can get them. Uh, let's see, wait a minute, here's one for sale, um, from Hemmings. Oh, those are cute.
Alex Wilhelm [01:35:27]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:35:28]:
Oh, they're expensive. Yes, they're $44,000. I'm getting a Topolino. I do like the— it's like the Surrey with the fringe on top.
Alex Wilhelm [01:35:36]:
But they have wicker seats.
Leo Laporte [01:35:38]:
Can you imagine a car with wicker seats? So these are now classic cars, so they're suddenly expensive again.
Alex Wilhelm [01:35:45]:
Yes. So now they're making the Topolino for the modern set who would like an EV, uh, that has a roof versus a picnic blanket. So Back to the Future, y'all.
Leo Laporte [01:35:57]:
I wish I could say our advertiser, our next advertiser, was the Fiat Jolly, but I can't. I wish I could, but I can't. Satya Nadella, uh, has warned people that if you're an AI-using enterprise, you might be giving away your business secrets It's not just the cost. This was a post on X last weekend. I guess we could go to the post. He said it's a reverse information paradox, a situation in which the purchasers of AI, essentially, you think you're paying for tokens, but really you're paying for the product with cash, but also with something even more valuable, the business this knowledge that you're sending to the AI. You're nodding, Harper. We just learned this.
Leo Laporte [01:36:50]:
And actually, I kind of— at first I saw that report that xAI, if you're using Grok, is sending all this information back to Grok. And I thought, oh, that's horrible. Then I realized, well, how else? If you say, you know, read this plan or read this file or take a look at this, how else is it going to do it? Unless you're running local models. It's sending it back to the home office.
Harper Reed [01:37:12]:
Well, I think the— I think the— I think there's a whole bunch of things here to unpack. The first one is we are all unwittingly sending training data back to the foundational models via our subscriptions. I think that's like not necessarily clear to most people. Um, also these things are subpoenaable, which is not necessarily— yeah, but that's— we've seen that happen in So that's, that's a real thing. But the second thing is, is that Microsoft is saying this to us. Yeah, that's, that's, I think, the thing that's more interesting than the thing, like, like, the fact everyone was like, oh, this is a good point, we should stop training these models. It's like, yeah, but yo, Microsoft was the one that told us. What is the follow-up?
Leo Laporte [01:37:56]:
They probably invented it.
Alex Wilhelm [01:37:58]:
Well, I mean, Microsoft right now has a new set of models that it just announced under the M-AI rubric. There's Thinking 1, there's a fast coding model, and so forth. But I think what—
Leo Laporte [01:38:07]:
Are they private is the question.
Alex Wilhelm [01:38:09]:
They are. But what I think is really important about this post from Satya is that he doesn't say the AI labs are hoovering up all of your data and they're reading the exact things you put into it and take out from AI. He says that they're using essentially kind of this exhaust from these model usages. So how often do you do tool calls, that sort of thing? So If you go to the actual—
Leo Laporte [01:38:29]:
the prompts you use, the— he says especially the corrections you make, that's teaching.
Alex Wilhelm [01:38:36]:
If you go to the data retention policies of every major American AI lab, they all say the same things: we don't train on your data, we won't hold it if you have a ZDR policy, etc., etc., etc. But there's still enough metadata around the data that you might be concerned about on a first-order basis that they can still learn quite a lot from you. And I I think that this wasn't as scary back when OpenAI was a little laboratory that was trying to make some money for the first time.
Leo Laporte [01:38:59]:
That's true.
Alex Wilhelm [01:39:00]:
And now that they're going increasingly horizontal and vertical, every AI lab is now doing more for more people at an increasing level of sophistication. Suddenly they could eat the entire enterprise layer. And that's the SaaSpocalypse. That's so much other things all in one bucket. I just don't think that Microsoft may be the champion to carry this torch because it's Microsoft.
Leo Laporte [01:39:18]:
It's interesting that they posted that.
Harper Reed [01:39:20]:
It really is.
Leo Laporte [01:39:21]:
I mean, AWS has this. They, uh, the government, you know, the Pentagon runs Mythos but doesn't run it on Anthropic servers. They run it on private servers on AWS, right?
Harper Reed [01:39:31]:
I mean, I think there's— Microsoft has been very surprising lately. I think that the work they've been doing has just been very surprising. And I think it— I wonder, and I think I know the answer, but I wonder if it's surprising to younger people who haven't been around as long as to remember the browser wars, et cetera. So then it's, so then it's like, should we allow Microsoft to have this moment and flourish like they seem to be doing? Um, or should we be like, we know your true feelings. Is this like, you know, you know what I mean? We know you're a monopolist trying to steal all of our stuff. Or should we just be like, you know, yeah, sure, this, go, go for it. It sounds, you take your moment. This is good.
Alex Wilhelm [01:40:14]:
Who is in charge of Microsoft right now? Satya. What is IT. Gigantic dweeb.
Leo Laporte [01:40:19]:
And he ran Azure before he became CEO, by the way. He knows all about, uh, stuff going up to the cloud.
Alex Wilhelm [01:40:25]:
That's where I met him, back when he was running Azure. Very smart then, even smarter now. Who's not in charge right now? Ballmer. But all the kids, the business, to the point, they don't remember Ballmer. They just joined the workforce. They've only known Microsoft under Satya when they were doing cool things and were embracing open source and having some Linux filter into Windows. It's a different era. I hadn't thought of companies being so old, Harper, that an entire new generation cannot have been there.
Leo Laporte [01:40:50]:
But the modern generation also knows Microsoft just laid out 4,800 people at Xbox, that Microsoft has laid off tens of thousands of people because of AI.
Alex Wilhelm [01:41:00]:
Everyone's doing that. I don't think they're going to get—
Leo Laporte [01:41:02]:
they're not getting blamed for that.
Alex Wilhelm [01:41:04]:
No, because I think, I think everyone—
Harper Reed [01:41:05]:
No one has a job, Leo. There's no more jobs. I don't know if you've talked to anyone, like no one has a job. Like, like there's— everyone's getting laid off. We're about to get laid off. Like all of us, we're now— we're all the leaders and CEOs and we're going to get laid off tomorrow. Claude's going to email you, Leo, and you're going to—
Leo Laporte [01:41:22]:
Claude's going to take over my podcast.
Harper Reed [01:41:24]:
He's going to say like, Leo, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you had to find out this way, but, uh, we're going to have to part ways.
Leo Laporte [01:41:30]:
I, uh, haven't paid— I do, I have local models, but there's not— I like the Frontier models. Should I be worried about It's hoovering up everything I do.
Alex Wilhelm [01:41:38]:
No, they don't care for you.
Harper Reed [01:41:41]:
I mean, I think— is that gonna—
Leo Laporte [01:41:43]:
is that how I'm gonna lose my job?
Harper Reed [01:41:45]:
I, I, I think this is such a funny and nuanced situation. Like, no one is— no one says this stuff about like Instagram. Like, no one says it about all of the text messages or all the emails that, that Google claims not have used. Like, like all of these things, like we have a relationship with these big companies where we share data with them and they give us free products.
Leo Laporte [01:42:09]:
And so I think that's my problem with Instagram is I give them money for the products. I gotta stop. I keep buying things like this, the Slot Dog. What? I shouldn't.
Harper Reed [01:42:20]:
What are you doing with your life? This is a show. This is a, this is a G-rated show. What is this?
Alex Wilhelm [01:42:28]:
I've never seen mustard in a pot.
Leo Laporte [01:42:30]:
It's a hot dog slicing tool.
Alex Wilhelm [01:42:33]:
Leo, okay, so a couple things here. One, you're buying those off of Leo, you're, you're, you're not old, but you're also not 22. You should not be eating enough hot dogs that you needed a hot dog accoutrement. That's true.
Harper Reed [01:42:46]:
I'm gonna start with Alex on this one.
Alex Wilhelm [01:42:49]:
I hope your amuse-bouche is some push-ups. Like, come on, dude.
Harper Reed [01:42:53]:
I—
Leo Laporte [01:42:53]:
the last thing I bought was, uh, a bucket of pickleballs. 36 of them.
Harper Reed [01:42:59]:
Okay. Are you, are you a pickleball guy?
Leo Laporte [01:43:01]:
I kind of like the doink. Yeah.
Harper Reed [01:43:04]:
The doink? That's what they call the pickleball? I know. I guess I'm out of the loop here. Have you had the pickleball, the snack?
Leo Laporte [01:43:16]:
There's a snack?
Alex Wilhelm [01:43:17]:
No.
Leo Laporte [01:43:17]:
Is it a pickle?
Harper Reed [01:43:18]:
I highly recommend these. It's like pickle-flavored Cheetos. Kids love them. And I don't even— I just remember it's just Just like, ooh, yeah, pickleball. Just search for pickleball on Amazon. Vlasic pickleballs, dill pickle flavor.
Leo Laporte [01:43:36]:
Vlasic makes them.
Harper Reed [01:43:37]:
Yeah, they're good.
Leo Laporte [01:43:37]:
The pickle guys.
Alex Wilhelm [01:43:39]:
There's only 2 options for the show, everybody. It's too much AI or us going entirely off the rails.
Leo Laporte [01:43:44]:
Oh my God, I love it. Serve up a winning combination of big crunch and bold flavor with Vlasic pickleballs, dill pickle flavored corn puffs.
Harper Reed [01:43:53]:
I highly recommend them. Are they good? They're so good.
Leo Laporte [01:43:56]:
Look at, they even have a pickleball paddle on the COVID I didn't know that.
Harper Reed [01:44:01]:
That actually, that escaped. Oh, that's the doink you've mentioned before.
Leo Laporte [01:44:05]:
That's the doinker.
Harper Reed [01:44:05]:
Yeah. So, so I didn't notice that was a doinker and I just ate it and they're so good. If you're a pickle fan, especially dill pickles, perfect.
Leo Laporte [01:44:12]:
This goes with the, with this, you get your Topolino, you go down to the weed store, you stop off at the 7-Eleven, you pick up some pickleballs. This all starts to sound like you guys— should be hanging out together, I guess.
Alex Wilhelm [01:44:26]:
So, so over in the, over in the Discord for Club Twit, uh, Trust No One says Vlasic has been smoking weed with the Taco Bell guys. I have to say, yes, that's true.
Harper Reed [01:44:36]:
Not wrong. Not wrong. Not wrong. Also, Taco Bell is one of the genius foods ever invented. It's perfect.
Leo Laporte [01:44:42]:
Like Crunchwrap and stuff. Of course, you can't get lettuce at Taco Bell anymore, but other than—
Harper Reed [01:44:46]:
well, you can get it. I mean, yeah, but that's because they're—
Leo Laporte [01:44:48]:
they get diarrhea, but you can't get lettuce.
Harper Reed [01:44:50]:
They can read the news.
Alex Wilhelm [01:44:52]:
Yeah, Taco Bell gets too much hate for gastrointestinal distress.
Leo Laporte [01:44:56]:
You know what?
Harper Reed [01:44:57]:
Have they seen Chipotle?
Leo Laporte [01:44:58]:
Let me just say, let me just say, they did the right thing. Yeah, and they took a lot of heat.
Harper Reed [01:45:04]:
They did.
Leo Laporte [01:45:04]:
They said, well, we're not gonna sell lettuce products anymore until this is all over. But they weren't the only people that were causing the problem. It was the company they were getting the lettuce from who sells it to many, many other places. But they did the right thing. They said we're not— and nobody else did. So it's not— they get— and everybody acted like it was their fault.
Harper Reed [01:45:23]:
It's not the CDC wanted, but it's the CDC we got.
Alex Wilhelm [01:45:25]:
Yeah, I saw there was a tweet. Someone was like, Taco Bell is being more forward about this than the CDC is. And I was like, ah, that's a, that's a real idiocracy headline.
Leo Laporte [01:45:33]:
It tells you that's idiocracy in a nutshell.
Alex Wilhelm [01:45:36]:
Oh man.
Leo Laporte [01:45:37]:
It's, it's what a body needs.
Alex Wilhelm [01:45:39]:
Going back though, I think it is interesting that Satya is saying this because it's what a body needs. I'm trying to steer here, Liam.
Leo Laporte [01:45:47]:
I'm trying to steer a little bit. Sorry, you're right.
Alex Wilhelm [01:45:49]:
You're right, please. I think that Satya saying this is interesting, him saying it from his personal X account's very interesting.
Leo Laporte [01:45:54]:
Isn't that interesting?
Harper Reed [01:45:55]:
Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [01:45:55]:
And I think also how well received it was tells us quite a lot about where Microsoft sits in the market today. Because if this happened 10 years ago, we would've all gone, boo, hiss, Windows 8, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Leo Laporte [01:46:06]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Microsoft. Yeah, that's rich.
Alex Wilhelm [01:46:09]:
Yeah, yeah. Microsoft's saying that they care about other people's IP and business right now.
Leo Laporte [01:46:15]:
Really? That's rich.
Harper Reed [01:46:17]:
I also—
Leo Laporte [01:46:18]:
that's because I'm an old guy. I remember the old Microsoft, and the kids today, they don't know.
Harper Reed [01:46:22]:
The one thing about Microsoft I think about a lot is how just trounced the GitHub team is right now. Oh yeah, just clobbered. And I feel bad because this is their time, you know, like collaboration and code. And then every agent's like, I'm gonna open 400 repos and I'm gonna do 2 million pull requests.
Leo Laporte [01:46:41]:
There's this thing called GitHub Actions and I'm going to use them like crazy.
Harper Reed [01:46:45]:
And it's just like, I just feel really bad because they built a really good product that we all love and it's gotten slower as more people have used it or what have you.
Leo Laporte [01:46:53]:
And they've had a lot of downtime.
Harper Reed [01:46:55]:
And the agents were just like, like, hold my beer. Very much so. Like truly, like they're, and they abuse it. Like I see it in my own agents where they're just like, so I was thinking, are we just going to download macOS into the actions and run But I know they have a macOS runner, but we're going to download another copy and run it in Docker on that. And you're just like, what are you doing? Or whatever. Never.
Leo Laporte [01:47:17]:
That first thing I built was that RSS reader. And it says, hey, I just made a Windows, a Linux, and a Mac version for you using CI/CD. And I'm going to keep it up to date. And I went, I don't even know what CI/CD is. And you're making versions of this thing for every operating system? What are you— I love it.
Harper Reed [01:47:38]:
Yeah, we're in trouble. I mean, because I just think that's such a— it's such a funny— I mean, I feel so bad. Well, they were—
Leo Laporte [01:47:45]:
they're okay. They're doing—
Harper Reed [01:47:46]:
they're, they're okay.
Leo Laporte [01:47:47]:
They're okay.
Harper Reed [01:47:48]:
Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [01:47:49]:
Although I was gonna make us a meme of the guy beating the dead horse and have it be labeled GitHub, but I don't think I'll pull it off in time. But I really wanted to bring that visual to you guys.
Leo Laporte [01:47:56]:
But well, don't worry, because I'm sure the Club Twit Discord will have—
Alex Wilhelm [01:47:59]:
can we, can we talk about GitHub though? Hello again. So, so, Harper, uh, it seemed that Microsoft should have won a lot more of the agentic coding share than they did because they had GitHub, they had GitHub Copilot early. It was $10 a month. Everyone loved it.
Leo Laporte [01:48:12]:
Um, yeah, why didn't they win? That's a good question.
Alex Wilhelm [01:48:17]:
Well, they ex— they, they exported all their intelligence to OpenAI and then they wanted to make Sora when Anthropic made—
Harper Reed [01:48:23]:
No, that's not true.
Alex Wilhelm [01:48:24]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:48:24]:
Copilot has a bad reputation.
Harper Reed [01:48:26]:
It didn't win because it sucked. Yeah, like, like, like, we can, we can point at things and be like, well, they should have done this and that. It just wasn't good.
Leo Laporte [01:48:34]:
Like, also, but they forced it down people's throats.
Harper Reed [01:48:38]:
But also, there was a lot of— I think that was one of the last big product launches before everything changed.
Leo Laporte [01:48:46]:
Yeah, you're right.
Harper Reed [01:48:48]:
Where they were like, here is how a product works, and they rolled the product out in a way that would have been great But then everything changed because Copilot launched. We were like, this is awesome. And then Aitor launched. This was awesome. Then Cloud Code launched. And then 10 million of them launched in quick succession, and they're still launching today. And we haven't even had a time to catch our breath. And so in the old way of doing things, you would launch it, you would get information, you would iterate, you would, you'd make this go.
Harper Reed [01:49:16]:
And we just don't— that's just not part of the program now. And so they didn't even have a chance to catch their breath and make it better. And so they launched it in this way that was like this way. Now, corporate Microsoft did take Copilot to a couple levels, and I've had to unravel some of those things where people come in and be like, we use AI at our company and this is what we do. And you're just like, tell them, show me your workflow. And they're like, I open up Copilot and I'm just like, okay, well, I can't help you. Um, you know, but, but I think everyone knows this. Like, I don't think—
Leo Laporte [01:49:45]:
You are such a bigot. You are such a bigot.
Alex Wilhelm [01:49:47]:
bigoted.
Harper Reed [01:49:48]:
Have you used it?
Leo Laporte [01:49:49]:
No.
Harper Reed [01:49:49]:
It's almost as bad as Gemini.
Alex Wilhelm [01:49:52]:
He's not a bigot. He's an artisanal hater.
Harper Reed [01:49:56]:
No, no, but the thing— but the thing is, is like, I don't think this is a surprise. I don't think anyone is like, what? Wait a minute, the pilot isn't good?
Leo Laporte [01:50:03]:
Google and Microsoft, this— they should be the kings of this.
Harper Reed [01:50:07]:
Yes, but, but, but, but I think this is an okay boomer time for everyone who agrees with that, because that, that is exactly what should have happened.
Leo Laporte [01:50:14]:
No, IBM could be on top of this game.
Harper Reed [01:50:18]:
It could be. No one gets fired for choosing IBM.
Leo Laporte [01:50:21]:
IBM, man.
Alex Wilhelm [01:50:23]:
Can we connect 2 things though? Remember earlier we were talking about companies doing more faster with AI? Harper was making that point about, you know, people being able to do more and also the death of the yearly product cycle. Yes, it's gone. Like, how insane is it that Apple still is trying to have like a yearly macOS release and like a yearly iPhone release? And I don't give a fricking frack about that. I want what's new now.
Harper Reed [01:50:46]:
They are for sure, but they're also just, just shooting out security fixes.
Leo Laporte [01:50:52]:
Yeah.
Harper Reed [01:50:52]:
Like there's so many security fixes. So I think that the, the thing that we don't know, and nobody knows this, is how products work. How do you build products in this time? And more importantly, in the future, like just nobody knows that. And so what this means though, is that you can look at examples where it didn't work, Copilot, for example, and then you can see Microsoft actually seemingly doing the work to fix this. You're like, over time they have gone and they've, they've hired the right people or interesting people. They've probably fired a lot of people who, who, it's also, Microsoft is old. Old. I remember when, when like PayPal, when we sold a company to PayPal and we went in there and someone's like, I've been here for 16 years.
Harper Reed [01:51:29]:
And I was like, I'm 16 years old. Like, how is this possible? You know what I mean? Like, like, how do we have this thing? And Microsoft is way older than PayPal. And so there are people there that are, that have probably been there for so long that they're ending their careers there. And I think that's great. But the point is, is like they are taking the time and effort to actually move forward and figure out how to launch products in this world. And I think a lot of the companies of their vintage are not. And so they're actually following this process of a yearly product launch, which is insane for anything. I don't make hardware, so I can't really comment on Apple because that seems hard.
Alex Wilhelm [01:52:02]:
That was probably a poor example.
Harper Reed [01:52:04]:
But there are— but we have those examples of companies that are doing this that are still going through that same thing and not having this more iterative approach to releasing products. And I think it's very interesting. And I really wonder, I mean, I wonder this every day, every single day because of my company, et cetera, is like, what does a product look like in the future? Will the consumers expect this constant barrage of features? Would they prefer something simpler that works? For instance, you know, what are the, what are the things that we can take away from this time and how does it end up manifesting? Because if you look look at, um, 2001, software delivery was drastically different than what it turned out to be in like 2006 with Web 2.0, right? Like with SaaS, invention of SaaS. And then that changed to, to be drastically different with the introduction of mobile, because you remember when people actually put the changelog in the App Store release, and now they're just like bugs and fixes. And so like, so like the thing, these things evolve and we haven't given it time to actually evolve.
Leo Laporte [01:53:03]:
Did you see, speaking of which, the guy who took the new Kimi and spent half his month, almost all of his month's credits building a clone of Mac OS 27? Did you see that? Watch here, I'll open it up.
Harper Reed [01:53:22]:
I love these type of things.
Leo Laporte [01:53:24]:
I don't think it's actually a working Mac OS, but this is—
Harper Reed [01:53:27]:
But it's just like, there's just so, there's something about this that I've always loved. Yeah, I just love this. Yeah, I love it. Like, I was playing with this earlier and I was telling my boss that I wasn't gonna make it to the stand.
Leo Laporte [01:53:44]:
This, it just basically one-shotted macOS. Now I don't, I think it's just a webpage, but it's, it's—
Harper Reed [01:53:52]:
But even if it is just a webpage, there were whole-ass startups that were that webpage 10 years ago. And like, I think this This is, this is what kind of pulls into this idea of like, now you launch that, you get into YC, whatever, you do a startup, you raise some money. What is the product?
Leo Laporte [01:54:08]:
This is a minimum viable product, really.
Harper Reed [01:54:12]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:54:13]:
Yeah. You can open iCloud Drive.
Alex Wilhelm [01:54:15]:
I keep asking investors, cause I host a weekly venture capital roundtable and I'm like, where's the value that is going to be sustainable and defensible when things can be quote-unquote one-shotted and so forth. And it's kind of incredible about how people don't have an answer to this yet. Like, no one really knows. So I think we don't know how to build with the new paradigm. I don't think we know how to sell long-term with the new paradigm.
Leo Laporte [01:54:36]:
Wow, this actually is functional. This is the Photo Booth app built by Kimmy in— I guess it's a web page.
Alex Wilhelm [01:54:44]:
That's actually pretty good.
Leo Laporte [01:54:45]:
It's working. I, I find this kind of hard to believe.
Harper Reed [01:54:50]:
Wow.
Leo Laporte [01:54:51]:
Uh, wow is right.
Harper Reed [01:54:53]:
That's being sent to Kimmy right now. All those right now.
Alex Wilhelm [01:54:55]:
Yeah, China knows who Leo is. He's on some lists. Come on.
Leo Laporte [01:54:58]:
Uh, yeah. Wow. Uh, that is macOS27.kimmy.page if you want to, uh, play with it.
Alex Wilhelm [01:55:06]:
That, that's a safe URL. .kimmy.page. I have a lot of faith in that one.
Leo Laporte [01:55:12]:
Come on, man.
Alex Wilhelm [01:55:14]:
.giveit.cc.
Leo Laporte [01:55:14]:
You know who taught me? You know who taught me to run a YOLO mode. This guy right here, Mr. Harper Reed, ladies and gentlemen.
Harper Reed [01:55:21]:
It's the best.
Leo Laporte [01:55:22]:
I run everything in YOLO now.
Harper Reed [01:55:24]:
You have to do it. There's no other option.
Alex Wilhelm [01:55:26]:
Who has time? What is a YOLO mode?
Harper Reed [01:55:30]:
It's like when you run without permissions.
Leo Laporte [01:55:33]:
It's—
Harper Reed [01:55:33]:
so you turned off all—
Leo Laporte [01:55:35]:
Dangerously skip permissions.
Alex Wilhelm [01:55:37]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:55:38]:
And actually—
Alex Wilhelm [01:55:38]:
People don't click that? I thought everyone clicked that immediately.
Leo Laporte [01:55:40]:
Right. It's the first thing you do.
Alex Wilhelm [01:55:42]:
Yeah. I'm not, I don't want to sit here and be like, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Harper Reed [01:55:45]:
No.
Alex Wilhelm [01:55:45]:
go off and be crazy. If you delete all my files, I live my life.
Leo Laporte [01:55:49]:
Just— Harper taught me this too. Just curl to Bash. It's the best.
Harper Reed [01:55:55]:
A friend of mine was talking about how they have a— I've heard this a couple times, but this friend was saying they have a big code agent and they had all these tools that it was using and they just removed all the tools except for Bash and the code agent was just like, great.
Leo Laporte [01:56:06]:
Sure. That's kind of what Pi is. Pi, the Pi chart, is 4 things: read, write, Write, Bash. I can't remember. There's 4 tools and it does everything.
Alex Wilhelm [01:56:16]:
Pi is a coding harness that competes with Cloud Code and is open source and is quite powerful.
Leo Laporte [01:56:20]:
That's right.
Harper Reed [01:56:21]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:56:21]:
I'm a Hermes guy. It's the opposite. It's like batteries included. It's got, comes with like 99 skills. I got 99 skills, but, uh, but a use case isn't one. Use case ain't one. Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:56:33]:
All right. We're gonna take a little break. Thank you. Thank you for finishing that sentence with our fabulous panel. You see now why I didn't book a 4th person. I thought, I got Harper, I got Alex, I got everything. I got all I need. I got all I need.
Leo Laporte [01:56:50]:
Okay. Okay. So the OpenAI keyboard, now I want that. What? It's just got 2 keys?
Harper Reed [01:56:58]:
So it's, is it the company called WorkLouder? Is that what it is?
Leo Laporte [01:57:02]:
Is it a joke?
Harper Reed [01:57:02]:
No, no. So there's a company, a cool company called WorkLouder. I don't know how their keyboards—
Leo Laporte [01:57:07]:
It's called the Codex Micro, your command center for agentic work.
Harper Reed [01:57:11]:
Oh, it's cool.
Leo Laporte [01:57:12]:
Oh, this is cool.
Harper Reed [01:57:13]:
The cool thing about WorkLouder is they make some neat looking keyboards and these little Creator Micro things and all this stuff. I have no, I've never used them. I don't know. I'm a little concerned that they're not very good keyboards. But, but the thing that's really interesting about them is that they make these for Figma. For all of these companies have made these, have used these, um, them.
Leo Laporte [01:57:36]:
It's like some control surface kind of.
Harper Reed [01:57:38]:
Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of cool.
Leo Laporte [01:57:39]:
A Stream Deck or something.
Harper Reed [01:57:40]:
Yeah. And I love a Stream Deck. Um, but it's just an interesting thing. It's very neat. They made one for Figma that was really cool too. That was basically the Figma logo kind of stuff that looked like it's, it's just neat. Like the whole thing is cool.
Leo Laporte [01:57:54]:
You're— oh, look, it's got a dial for the reason. That's hysterical. But you need this because your agents, if you have many agents working at once or sub-agents, say, you know, sometimes they need your attention but you don't know. So there, the little light lights up, says it needs you. Mine, I have them talk to me in different voices, so they just— it drives Lisa crazy.
Harper Reed [01:58:15]:
They talk out loud?
Leo Laporte [01:58:16]:
Yeah.
Harper Reed [01:58:17]:
Are you a monster?
Alex Wilhelm [01:58:18]:
Wait, you have your agents talk to you?
Leo Laporte [01:58:20]:
Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [01:58:21]:
What, what, uh, what's the voice Well, it depends.
Leo Laporte [01:58:25]:
I'm using a local model called Kokoro, K-O-K-O-R-O. It's pretty good.
Harper Reed [01:58:31]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:58:31]:
Let me see if I can— whoops. I know I didn't fall.
Alex Wilhelm [01:58:38]:
Every time I think that I'm getting too deep in the weeds, I just got reminded.
Leo Laporte [01:58:41]:
Hey, we're in the middle of Twit. Can you say hi to Harper and Alex on the MacBook Air? Because they want to know what you sound like. This may take a little while. It doesn't happen instantly. So one of them is an American woman. One of them— there's 2 British voices. There's Louis, and I think this is Louis is going to talk to you. I'm not sure.
Harper Reed [01:59:05]:
You're using Eleven? Oh, this is Kokoro.
Leo Laporte [01:59:07]:
Kokoro. You know the Kokoro voices?
Harper Reed [01:59:09]:
No.
Leo Laporte [01:59:10]:
No, they're good. Yeah. Whoa, I didn't turn him on. I hope we didn't.
Harper Reed [01:59:15]:
Oh, he's going to get an issue. He's going to get some—
Leo Laporte [01:59:18]:
Push his Well, I don't know. We might've missed it anyway.
Alex Wilhelm [01:59:23]:
Anyways, I think it's a great— I hadn't thought of having it talk back to me. I just got into talking out.
Leo Laporte [01:59:28]:
I talked to it.
Alex Wilhelm [01:59:28]:
Using WhisperFlow.
Harper Reed [01:59:30]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:59:30]:
In fact, I was just talking to it through my watch.
Harper Reed [01:59:33]:
What do you use to talk to it through your watch?
Leo Laporte [01:59:36]:
Uh, port 8839 uses Tailscale. There's a server running on the framework and, uh, just It's listening on that port and it talks to it.
Harper Reed [01:59:47]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:59:47]:
And it goes to Whisper, transcribes it, sends it to Hermes, and then Hermes responds back. And you can do Telegram or Discord or voice or all of the 3. But when I have a lot of stuff going on, you often, you know, you're busy doing something else. So you want it to say, hey, I finished. Would you like me to, you know? I say, just give me a sentence. I just want to know that you're done. You need to tell me the whole, whole story. What happened? It didn't—
Alex Wilhelm [02:00:15]:
I, I think that what we don't say enough in moments like this, especially given people's complaint— I get this in my newsletter as well— that there's too much AI, is that technology is fun again. Leo just laid out a 7 different way approach just, just to get an open-source voice model to tell him, Leo, I've completed your task, in a British accent.
Harper Reed [02:00:34]:
Yeah, yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [02:00:35]:
Like, this is fun. The homebrew stuff that we used to really want. And now there's like cool tech.
Leo Laporte [02:00:41]:
Well, or like my camera saying, hey, there's an old man coming in the house. It's me.
Alex Wilhelm [02:00:45]:
Who doesn't want to get roasted by their own in-house Palantir?
Harper Reed [02:00:49]:
All right.
Leo Laporte [02:00:50]:
So, okay. You both wear glasses. Meta is basically going all in on the Ray-Bans, right? Here's a story from the Wall Street Journal. Meta is flooding the market with smart glasses. Privacy advocates are up in arms. arms. People say, I don't want, you know, you're taking pictures of me. Hey, Harper.
Leo Laporte [02:01:13]:
Hey, Alex. I'm Quicksilver, Leo's AI assistant running on the framework down in the studio. Figured I'd introduce myself properly.
Harper Reed [02:01:23]:
You're listening to TYT and now TYT is listening to you.
Leo Laporte [02:01:27]:
Welcome aboard. I don't know who TYT is. And then it started talking through the Sonos too. I don't know if you heard that. I know it's, it's a little out of control.
Alex Wilhelm [02:01:38]:
I'm never coming to your house is what I'm saying. You guys, Lisa's crazy.
Leo Laporte [02:01:42]:
We'll be watching a TV show. She said, what's that? There's a voice. I said, yeah, don't worry about it. It's just Quicksilver.
Alex Wilhelm [02:01:49]:
Like, Leo, at what point could you lose control if you're, if you're dominant?
Leo Laporte [02:01:52]:
Quicksilver here, beaming in from the ether. Leos is high from his wrist in the middle of twit. Keep it weird. Keep it wonderful.
Harper Reed [02:02:01]:
This is Like, I sometimes when I talk about what's going on right now with people who are not in the game, I feel insane.
Leo Laporte [02:02:12]:
Yeah, it's true. Because they go, what are you doing?
Harper Reed [02:02:15]:
Here, let me, let me try on what I told my team earlier today. All right. Or not today, this week. I came in and I was really excited. They're like, what did you do? And I was like, oh, I made a palace for my agents. And then I gave them a room. And then I told them to build a gossip because I thought it'd be fun if the agents gossiped. And then I went to bed and I gave them a developer with cloud code and superpowers, and I went to bed and I woke up and it was done.
Harper Reed [02:02:38]:
They hung out in the palace, in the room in the palace, and built a bunch of stuff. And, and I, I forgot who was nearby, was just like, what are you guys talking about? You know, it's like, what is this?
Leo Laporte [02:02:47]:
You once told me, Harper, and I didn't follow up on it, that you have friends who have AI psychosis.
Harper Reed [02:02:53]:
Oh yeah, 100%. It's Oh yeah, 100%.
Leo Laporte [02:02:58]:
How do you define— how would you define AI psychosis?
Harper Reed [02:03:02]:
Well, a friend of mine has—
Leo Laporte [02:03:03]:
We could talk about meta later.
Harper Reed [02:03:05]:
What he has described is AI psychosis. And I think we are probably all going through this to some extent. And it is— I think it's complicated. I think it's related to a lot of systemic issues. Like, for instance, Um, I have many friends who need therapists but can't pay for therapists, and so they use Claude and they use ChatGPT for therapy. And I would have— probably a lot of people would say, well, you shouldn't. And it's like, well, would you rather them have a virtual therapist that is, that is maybe complicated ethically, or would you rather them have zero therapy and be in pain? Um, and I think that there's just a lot of these things that are happening. The, the downside is I don't think we as humans are prepared for computers that talk to us and emote feelings.
Harper Reed [02:03:54]:
Whether those feelings are real, I don't think is even germane to the fact that they're emoting them. Um, and, and like, if you are lonely— a friend of mine, we were talking about this. Here's a good question when we're talking about this. So I'm an extrovert. I'm guessing that because we're on a podcast that everyone here is probably, for the most part, extroverts.
Leo Laporte [02:04:11]:
Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [02:04:11]:
Um, Alex specifically, I thought he was probably the biggest extrovert of all of No, no, I fake it and then I go into my little hole for 8 hours.
Leo Laporte [02:04:19]:
I'm like Alex, I'm a fucking pretend extrovert.
Harper Reed [02:04:22]:
Yeah, I get it. I do this and then I go out and make everyone crazy because I've just powered up. I'm like, I just talked for 3 hours. Um, but, but the question is, is that like, uh, our friend Dirk Elmendorf asked us this. He was like, okay, first of all, like, are, is your social battery depleted? After, after talking with agents, or has it been, um, you know, did you get energy from it? Oh, that's a good question. Which is like a very, which is, which is really interesting, right? Because like, for me, I don't necessarily notice that I'm getting tired from talking to it, but my co-founder Dylan, um, who is an introvert, is like, I'm exhausted. Like, it takes so much of my energy to talk to these things. And so I think that we are, the point here is that this is very similar to a social environment.
Harper Reed [02:05:10]:
When we talk to ChatGPT, etc., it's very similar. And even if we move it into things like chat or your phone, it's even more similar to how we talk to our friends, etc. And so it's no wonder that we're in this weird situation where people fall into AI psychosis, because like I get more response, you know, sycophantic or not, um, from these AIs than I do from any of my dear friends because they're busy as Yes. Right? And so we're in this funny world.
Leo Laporte [02:05:37]:
But isn't it sad we're talking to machines?
Harper Reed [02:05:39]:
Who cares? Like, I'm sure someone was like, isn't it sad that you have to— that you ride on a horse? I love walking.
Alex Wilhelm [02:05:45]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back in my day, we had to ride a bicycle.
Leo Laporte [02:05:49]:
What's wrong with you?
Harper Reed [02:05:50]:
I mean, it's like, okay, so what— like, this is, this is one of those things. Like, we're not gonna unring the bell, so we might as well get used to the fact that people are gonna have AI girlfriends. friends. What does that therefore mean? Do we need to work through that? Like, like, I think the, the fact that all these people are chatting with AIs and the fact that young people are like, this is horrible, I'm going to buy an analog camera, an analog stereo, and hang out with my friends, seems like the world is working. Like, if the young people are the ones who are like, I'm going to find the inverse of my, my technology world by going outside, which is currently happening, there's more people going to shows, movies are are just blowing up right now. Like, people are going outside to do stuff that is like in person, as well as the fact that like you go to any camera store, it's film everywhere. Records are being sold all over the place. Tapes are back for some reason.
Harper Reed [02:06:40]:
That's the worst media format ever invented. And like, all this is happening, but not for us. Like, we're the ones that are having a problem with AI psychosis.
Alex Wilhelm [02:06:49]:
You know, okay, so I want to throw some other perspectives on this. I think Harvard's making a very interesting point, but some data, because I'm young, I hate Data. Sorry, anecdotes.
Harper Reed [02:06:59]:
Thank you.
Alex Wilhelm [02:06:59]:
Thank you.
Harper Reed [02:07:00]:
Much preferred.
Leo Laporte [02:07:00]:
If you were in Star Trek, you would talk to Data. So that's—
Harper Reed [02:07:03]:
Yeah, but I mean, but only if he's really big, because I like big data.
Leo Laporte [02:07:07]:
Big data.
Alex Wilhelm [02:07:08]:
I like big data, and Harper cannot lie. So when we think about who's getting hit with AI psychosis and who's being too digitally mediated, my sister— she's the oldest in my family, so our kids are the oldest. And it's interesting how she talks about the current generation of high school students. Not interested in driving, not interested in going out and trying to score alcohol. They're very digitally mediated, and they're very connected to one another, actually, interestingly enough, but entirely through Discord. So I think that there is— I think when we think about the people in the camera store, it's not the youths, because one, no one can afford camera technology unless they're a late-stage professional. But I think that children are probably a little bit less IRL than Harper's Yeah, I'm not talking about children.
Harper Reed [02:07:53]:
I'm talking about more Gen Z folks.
Alex Wilhelm [02:07:55]:
Oh, so early professionals.
Leo Laporte [02:07:56]:
I also think people of my generation—
Harper Reed [02:07:59]:
Those children also aren't going— like, children aren't going to bars.
Alex Wilhelm [02:08:02]:
Well, we used to try to, but after that—
Leo Laporte [02:08:04]:
but they have other means. But they used to go to the mall, right? You don't go to the mall anymore. You, you hang out at home.
Harper Reed [02:08:10]:
That's because there's no more malls. This is like this funny thing, like everyone's like, no one goes to the malls anymore. It's like, yeah, well, we killed the malls with Amazon.
Leo Laporte [02:08:19]:
By not going to the mall, they killed them.
Harper Reed [02:08:20]:
No, no, they— well, I mean, sort of. We killed the, the stores in the malls. All are there.
Leo Laporte [02:08:26]:
If people don't go to Hot Topic, there isn't going to be a Hot Topic anymore.
Alex Wilhelm [02:08:30]:
Jeff Bezos killed the birth rate.
Leo Laporte [02:08:33]:
Because I blame Jeff Bezos for pretty much everything, actually. Oh no, no, I, I— it's funny because I'm, uh, I do get exhausted talking to people. I have to withdraw after a few I can't sleep anymore. I wake up at 6:00 AM dying to go talk to my agent because I thought of 10 things that I want to get done.
Harper Reed [02:08:52]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:08:52]:
So it is—
Harper Reed [02:08:53]:
But that goes to the fun thing because that's how I was in 2002 to basically today. I've always been that way. I love technology. I love computers. I love all this stuff. And this is just—
Leo Laporte [02:09:05]:
I was getting bored.
Harper Reed [02:09:05]:
Just shooting it into my brain. Like I am so like— I am. What, what— so I think the thing that is important with this is I think the answer is yes, AI psychosis is happening. I think absolutely. I think we should probably at some point figure out what to do with that, or we just treat it like everything else we have and just ignore it and it'll go away. Um, but, but the, the other thing here that's happening is I'm seeing a lot of people who are not builders, who have never felt the joy that all of us who've been around tech for forever— Like your brother. My brother, for example. I have a, a a whole bunch of friends, just, I mean, dozens of friends.
Harper Reed [02:09:39]:
One of the things we have in our office is one of the young people that we're, that was in our office quite a bit was like, I don't have any third spaces. So we were like, well, why don't we, we have this giant office. It's very cool. Why don't we just have every once a month, we'll have people over and they can show off what they're building and talk about what they're building. We just have not an industry event, not a networking event, just kind of cowork. Um, and so we start doing this and all these people start showing up. No one that is in tech. All people that were like starting to use agents and agentic software building and all these practices to participate in the world that we've participated in last 30 years, but for the first time in their life, they were either intermediated by, disintermediated by some random person that was like, oh, I'll build that for you.
Harper Reed [02:10:18]:
And so they never had autonomy.
Leo Laporte [02:10:19]:
Right.
Harper Reed [02:10:20]:
And they've been able to take back this autonomy using this technology. And some of these people, I just had a great conversation with this, this, this, um, DePaul student who is like, I'm pretty anti-AI because I work in movies, but I have some, you know, he has, he has some disabilities that stop him from being able to participate in many ways. And he's using AI to, to solve some of these big problems, including voice, building voice, um, control of his computer and all sorts of stuff. And he's just like, so I have very mixed feelings, which honestly echo my mixed feelings.
Leo Laporte [02:10:49]:
I think we all have mixed feelings. I agree.
Harper Reed [02:10:50]:
Right. And I think it's easier to just kind of say, you know, like, I don't know, I think there's, it's just, it's so nuanced, but we really like black and white as humans. It's just a thing that we love inside of our bodies. Um, and so it's just easier to say this is black or And I think that's the problem, is it's not a black and white thing. Like, I would, you know, working— I work with a lot of people who have different levels of English, and the fact that they are able to have confidence in what they're writing for the first time, you know, like before they spent so much time optimizing for these little spelling and grammar mistakes that they were so worried about that they honestly didn't have.
Leo Laporte [02:11:24]:
Think about translation. All of a sudden we can talk to people without speaking their language. It's amazing.
Alex Wilhelm [02:11:32]:
There was a moment when they added translate to English into Chrome and it blew my mind and no one talked about it. But now I go around the internet, I don't even think about what language it's going to be in. I don't care.
Leo Laporte [02:11:43]:
Right.
Harper Reed [02:11:43]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:11:44]:
Every page I'm available to put it in, put it in Farsi.
Alex Wilhelm [02:11:47]:
Frick it, let's go. Like, cool, click English.
Leo Laporte [02:11:51]:
I, I could talk to you guys for hours, but we got one more break and then, uh, some silly stories and then We gotta wrap up because I ostensibly have to, have to have dinner with my family.
Harper Reed [02:12:02]:
So that would be—
Leo Laporte [02:12:02]:
Family.
Harper Reed [02:12:03]:
You guys have families, you know? Yeah, yeah. Our, our children aren't yet famous.
Leo Laporte [02:12:07]:
Yeah. And my, my, my agent is just dying to talk to me. I can tell.
Harper Reed [02:12:13]:
It's talking through, it's talking through every speaker that's available to it. Well, Leo, where are you? Leo, are you here? Are you here?
Leo Laporte [02:12:20]:
I have Sonos speakers in every room, and I figured out that the agent could talk Through the speakers. So I said, just figure out what device I'm on and then see what Wi-Fi access point I'm on. And then here's a mapping of all the Wi-Fi access points and the nearest Sonos speaker. So now if I'm on the watch downstairs, it talks to me through the Sonos speakers. That's what it was doing.
Harper Reed [02:12:43]:
Pretty smart. Because yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:12:45]:
So it can reach me.
Harper Reed [02:12:46]:
That's, that's a company with a really great app, Sonos. They really, they really killed it with their new software.
Leo Laporte [02:12:51]:
Oh my God. I— so now I use the AI to do that, to play Sonos, because it— it— and by the way, let me tell you, it was hard to figure out the Sonos API. We both agreed it was a terrible API. The— Claude was saying, this— this is awful.
Harper Reed [02:13:07]:
I—
Leo Laporte [02:13:08]:
I know why their app is bad.
Harper Reed [02:13:10]:
I can't name another product that had such goodwill with literally everyone that just like nuked it, right? They're just like, what if we killed it? And— and I think what's interesting is it's so— they're so expensive that if you have a bunch, you're just waiting for it to get— you're just waiting for it to get better.
Leo Laporte [02:13:26]:
Yeah, you're invested. You can talk to it once you figure out— I think I put it on GitHub. It was not easy to figure out an interface, but once you figure out the interface, now I can say to my agent, you know, play AC/DC Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap on the Sonos in the gym, and it'll play it.
Harper Reed [02:13:45]:
What I will say though is I had some Sonos issues recently, and their support is top-notch. Oh, that's like top-notch. Like very— they even— it was a level 2 support situation. They're trying. And there's a level 2 support situation. And as the follow-up, the support person sent me a Calendly in case I needed more help.
Alex Wilhelm [02:14:04]:
See, that, that's how you build goodwill.
Leo Laporte [02:14:05]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Harper Reed [02:14:07]:
I was like still mad at the software and I did throw my phone through a window in the process of trying to debug it, but at least I had— I could talk to someone and I felt like they had solved the problem.
Alex Wilhelm [02:14:17]:
Yeah, we have— we only use the Spotify app to talk to our Sonos setup. Yeah, I don't even use the Sonos app because I tried, I tried, and I was like, no, no, no, no, no. How do you make software that doesn't work? Maybe we'll know we've reached AGI when the Sonos app isn't complete and utter bollocks.
Harper Reed [02:14:36]:
Yeah, that's, that's, that's a good—
Alex Wilhelm [02:14:38]:
anyways, we cut Leo.
Harper Reed [02:14:39]:
Fast takeoff.
Alex Wilhelm [02:14:40]:
Do your ad so we can do my ad, keep talking I'm gonna do my ad.
Leo Laporte [02:14:44]:
We continue the crap.
Harper Reed [02:14:45]:
Hopefully it's not a Sonos ad.
Leo Laporte [02:14:46]:
It is not a Sonos ad. You know, I was so mad at them when they deprecated all of my gear that I'd spent thousands of dollars on. I said, I will never buy another Sonos until I found out that my agent could use them to talk to me.
Harper Reed [02:15:00]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:15:00]:
And then I said, oh, I need speakers in the other room.
Harper Reed [02:15:02]:
There's Music Assistant, which is a really good open source project from the Home Assistant folks that I really, really like. That's very good.
Leo Laporte [02:15:09]:
server that I talked to also from, uh, with the AI. So yeah, it is going to end up solving that whole home automation thing.
Harper Reed [02:15:17]:
Yeah, I think so.
Leo Laporte [02:15:18]:
Yeah, because it'll disintermediate and you can just finally— all the different things you can talk to.
Alex Wilhelm [02:15:24]:
What are we gonna do with our kids, Harper? I mean, by the time they're like post-college, what's the economy gonna look like?
Harper Reed [02:15:29]:
They're probably gonna be harvested for their organs and, and whatnot by, by the local oligarchs.
Leo Laporte [02:15:35]:
Terrible thing to waste, you know what I'm I think it's like, it depends.
Harper Reed [02:15:39]:
Like, are they gonna— like, there's so many questions. They're like, are they gonna have water? Will they have water? That's the question.
Leo Laporte [02:15:46]:
They're gonna have water. They're gonna have all that stuff. It's not gonna be that— the drama. It'll work itself out. Remember the Black Plague? We were— we all thought everybody was gonna die. We all thought—
Alex Wilhelm [02:15:58]:
Half of us did.
Leo Laporte [02:15:59]:
Okay, so half of us did, but the other half thrived. Right, everybody.
Harper Reed [02:16:05]:
Sorry, Leo, it's too late, man.
Alex Wilhelm [02:16:08]:
Yeah, your agent's lagging.
Harper Reed [02:16:09]:
We didn't make the— yeah, you, you gotta— you stop using Sonos Cloud. Yeah, yeah, it's local.
Alex Wilhelm [02:16:15]:
Leo makes a good point. There was a massive death event around the world, and it did change the labor relations between the peasants and the, and the ruling class.
Leo Laporte [02:16:23]:
It ended up working out.
Alex Wilhelm [02:16:25]:
It ended up quote-unquote working out after a long enough time horizon, but over a long enough enough time horizon, Leo. We have the heat death of the universe. I don't think that's really the argument to make.
Leo Laporte [02:16:32]:
Exactly my point.
Alex Wilhelm [02:16:35]:
I said, okay, well, that got darker than I thought.
Leo Laporte [02:16:38]:
I had no idea when Henry was growing up that there would be such a thing as TikTok or Instagram.
Harper Reed [02:16:43]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:16:44]:
Uh, he— there was YouTube. He loved watching YouTube cooking videos. He loved doing that. I said, that's great. I encouraged him to do something he loved. And I— if I had said, no, no, you really need to, I don't know what, get a degree in television news or something. That would have been a mistake, right? Learn how to write for newspapers, Henry. There'll always be a job.
Leo Laporte [02:17:07]:
I didn't. I said, do what you love, pursue what you love. And because he was doing something he was passionate about, when the opportunity came along, he was able to pursue it. And it worked out. It worked out. Now, maybe he was very lucky. Luck has a lot to do with it, you know, but, um, I think, I think really that you can't tell what, well, who knows what your kids are going to do?
Harper Reed [02:17:29]:
But there's this, this, there's a, there's a, there's a John Quincy Adams quote, which a friend of mine told me the other day. I am a warrior so that my son may be a merchant so that his son may be a poet.
Leo Laporte [02:17:41]:
Right.
Harper Reed [02:17:42]:
Right. And I think, and I think that there is a lot of that, that we're, that we're living within, right. Which is like the amount of work that you do just so that, you know, an opportunity like—
Alex Wilhelm [02:17:51]:
Yes, yes. I do think about money differently now and owning things, because if we do end up moving towards a less labour-mediated economy, capital probably will be worth more. And so I'm quite literally changing my long-term financial goals around essentially backstopping my children, so that way if they end up not being able to be accretive personally, they'd also So we won't be starving individually.
Harper Reed [02:18:17]:
Yeah. And, and because they're young, they have infinite plastic. And so you'll see, you can start melting down all those plastic toys.
Alex Wilhelm [02:18:25]:
Oh, I thought I'd melt down my children by the time they're— No, no, no, that'll be one big—
Harper Reed [02:18:29]:
much harder. Much harder.
Leo Laporte [02:18:31]:
I just— for those of you who think it's a gloomy future, I just want to tell you, uh, federal employees can now download TikTok on government devices. All right. And you said the world wasn't getting better. Uh, it is. Congratulations.
Harper Reed [02:18:46]:
Uh, you know, I love TikTok. I am such a fan of TikTok.
Leo Laporte [02:18:50]:
I just wonder how many of our government employees are spending time using TikTok on their government devices. That seems like a not a good use either.
Harper Reed [02:18:59]:
Have you met people, Leo? People use the internet on literally everything in front of them.
Leo Laporte [02:19:04]:
It's true.
Harper Reed [02:19:05]:
Like, having employees, you're just like, you get a computer back, you're like, what, what did you do with this? Where were you doing this? What were you doing? Did you have another phone? Like, why was this the one that you, that you installed all that onto? Like, no, it's just people do whatever they want on everything.
Leo Laporte [02:19:21]:
If you use AWS, you might be surprised by a rather large bill.
Harper Reed [02:19:27]:
This, this was hilarious. I loved reading about these people being like, $16 million?
Leo Laporte [02:19:33]:
Oh no, million, billion. Dan Harvey is the head of marketing at the Hampshire-based Learning Through Landscapes. It's a nonprofit. Uh, he received an email alert from Amazon, was not even the end of the month, and Harvey's Amazon Web Services bill, which was last month 43 cents because they don't— I mean, it's a nonprofit— was $7.8 billion. I love it.
Harper Reed [02:19:57]:
Like, could you imagine just being like, like someone who's on the edge of understanding tech? Like, you've done a good job, you're using AWS, Things are good, but AWS is like another— it's like a foreign language.
Leo Laporte [02:20:10]:
It's a—
Harper Reed [02:20:10]:
there's a lot going on in there. There's a lot of—
Leo Laporte [02:20:13]:
A student in Delhi who usually pays $1.28 a month for his AWS was billed $10.9 billion. He asks on Twitter, could you please investigate this? Another user, Bharat, posted on X with a screenshot of his bill saying his usage was up, uh, $7,728,000,000. 201,701% on the previous month. His bill was $1.5 trillion.
Alex Wilhelm [02:20:40]:
So here's my question, because we were talking earlier about software bugs moving faster and so forth, and I'm not saying this is an AI-related problem, but why wasn't there some sort of intelligence looking at these numbers and going, maybe a trillion-dollar budget or bill is too high?
Leo Laporte [02:20:55]:
Like, why? It was $48 last month. Amazon said, we expect— this actually is even more scary— we expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data. They said after an hour and a half of investigation, there was an issue with the unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem.
Harper Reed [02:21:18]:
It's just the units. It's just a unit issue, which is very funny.
Alex Wilhelm [02:21:22]:
Why is that funny, Harper?
Harper Reed [02:21:23]:
Well, because it's always units. It's always complicated. Yeah, it's always like, yeah, Yeah. Like, I mean, yeah, I just think it's, I don't know, this is why there will still be bugs.
Leo Laporte [02:21:36]:
Yeah, maybe.
Harper Reed [02:21:36]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [02:21:37]:
And, and like, there's always going to be units.
Harper Reed [02:21:39]:
There's always going to be units. There's always going to be humans trying. It's like, this is the driverless car thing. I sometimes, you see a crazy driver and you're like, if, if everyone had driverless cars, this wouldn't happen. You're like, no, no, no, they would still happen. It'd just be that same crazy driver would be zooming around my driverless car. Like, it's, you know what I mean? Like, like it wouldn't change anything. It just on average, we'd be much more safer.
Leo Laporte [02:22:01]:
On average is what matters. Half the world could die from the Black Death, but half the world had many more employment opportunities.
Harper Reed [02:22:09]:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte [02:22:10]:
Right.
Harper Reed [02:22:10]:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte [02:22:11]:
Major League Baseball has a problem. They're giving iPads to players and managers in the dugout, but now they're using AI on the iPads to make strategic decisions in the ballgame.
Harper Reed [02:22:22]:
That's such a good idea. That's very funny.
Leo Laporte [02:22:26]:
Let's ask the AI. According to the commissioner's—
Harper Reed [02:22:29]:
I'm doing the same thing, but I'm not— but I don't play baseball. Like, why are they not allowed to do that?
Leo Laporte [02:22:35]:
No. According to the commissioner's office in a memo obtained by The Athletic, teams were pushing the boundaries of guidelines governing the use of technology by, in many cases, installing custom apps that expanded the use of the iPads beyond their originally intended purposes to include recommendations regarding substitutions, pitch calling, and other game decisions traditionally made by players and coaches. You're not allowed to do that, I guess. It seems like you should be. Yeah, why not?
Harper Reed [02:23:01]:
I mean, I also have never thought of Claude or ChatGPT as being a particularly good baseball player, but maybe I just don't know.
Alex Wilhelm [02:23:08]:
I don't— Well, think about how much baseball data we have to ingest, right, to give these AI models. Like, we have— how many games?
Leo Laporte [02:23:15]:
It's got everything. It's got everything. It's all in there. Actually, Kevin Kelly had a really great piece, which I did not put in our rundown, but I probably should have, in his latest blog, in which he says, in effect, we've taken the entire knowledge of the human, of the world, and compressed it into 2.7 billion parameters.
Harper Reed [02:23:37]:
Truly.
Leo Laporte [02:23:38]:
Everything's in there. I mean, it's lossy, admittedly. And he says, what an AI is doing is it's moving through that space you know, dog, 4 legs, tail, dog, cat, and it's moving, its vector is moving through these billions of parameters, but everything's there, which is why it could go from the Black Death to Major League Baseball, because it's all in there. It's all connected.
Harper Reed [02:24:04]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [02:24:04]:
Now we know, by the way, you've probably seen the speculation about these bets on Polymarket and Kalshi, these prediction markets. People seem to know what's going on. We figured out where it's coming from: a White House teleprompter operator.
Harper Reed [02:24:20]:
No, really?
Alex Wilhelm [02:24:21]:
I love this story.
Leo Laporte [02:24:23]:
He—
Harper Reed [02:24:23]:
This is true?
Leo Laporte [02:24:25]:
I love the New York Times. I mean, I know it's fake news, but he got— he won $100,000 on Calci because he, he saw the speech before the speech came out. So he placed bets, uh, about what Trump would say in his speeches.
Alex Wilhelm [02:24:41]:
And he won. What's hilarious about this is that you could get on— oh no, that's— no, you, you can— how many tweets will Elon do in the next 30 minutes? But he only made $100 grand. Like, can you imagine torching your entire professional life for one check that's gonna pay for one year of 3rd grade at a private school?
Leo Laporte [02:25:02]:
Oh yeah, he's in trouble. I mean, you know, they caught him.
Harper Reed [02:25:05]:
What private school— what private schools are you going to?
Leo Laporte [02:25:09]:
He lives in Providence. It's very Tony.
Alex Wilhelm [02:25:12]:
Oh, but no, I have too many children. They're going to public school.
Harper Reed [02:25:15]:
I'm not—
Alex Wilhelm [02:25:16]:
what am I made of?
Leo Laporte [02:25:17]:
I got a great education at Moses Brown School just down the road from you.
Alex Wilhelm [02:25:21]:
But how much does Moses Brown now cost, Larry?
Leo Laporte [02:25:23]:
No, I have no idea what it costs now. It was a lot more than it cost when I was in 1968.
Alex Wilhelm [02:25:27]:
Oh, okay, I'm sorry. So Moses Brown, uh, for lower school, for grades K through 4, is only $46,000. $56,000.
Leo Laporte [02:25:35]:
Oh my God.
Alex Wilhelm [02:25:36]:
Holy moly. If you want to go to middle school, I don't think—
Leo Laporte [02:25:39]:
I don't—
Alex Wilhelm [02:25:39]:
I wasn't going— and for upper school, it's $52,000. Wow. This is now the de facto price for—
Leo Laporte [02:25:44]:
that's more than I paid for college.
Harper Reed [02:25:47]:
Leo, we have bad news about college, Leo.
Alex Wilhelm [02:25:49]:
Yeah, we don't do that anymore. Um, no, but I wasn't really kidding, Harper. I, I was a little surprised by your reaction. I thought, are there cheaper private schools in Chicago?
Harper Reed [02:25:59]:
Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [02:26:00]:
Oh, okay. There you go.
Harper Reed [02:26:01]:
Shout out. You should move to Chicago. I mean, not all of them.
Alex Wilhelm [02:26:03]:
Like, I mean, I used to— it got Very snowy. I wasn't listening to it.
Leo Laporte [02:26:07]:
So, you know, Kashmir Hill, New York Times technology journalist, she apparently was surprised to go onto Amazon and find a biography of her.
Harper Reed [02:26:18]:
Oh yeah, this has happened to some friends.
Leo Laporte [02:26:20]:
Written by AI.
Harper Reed [02:26:22]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:26:23]:
I Got Slopped is the article that she wrote.
Harper Reed [02:26:27]:
Yeah, this is a real thing.
Leo Laporte [02:26:28]:
Has this happened to friends of yours as well?
Harper Reed [02:26:30]:
Yeah, yeah. A friend of mine has written a couple books and was just like, one of his books was about to come out and was just checking Amazon like you would, and he happened to notice that there was a handful of bios of himself that was written by people with his picture in this nice Creative Commons photo from Flickr. You know, like everything was done above board, so to speak. Um, but it's like very— a lot of mixed feelings about that, you know? Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [02:27:01]:
Like, yeah.
Harper Reed [02:27:01]:
And he, he And it's one of these Amazon things, which I find always so frustrating where you're kind of like, can you take it down? You know, that might be nice. And they're like, yeah, but why? It's a biography of you. Like you're not the author. Do you, you're a public figure. Do you own your story? Like, what is it? And then it's probably crappy. So then it's just like, you know, it's like so frustrating. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:27:29]:
She says, my biography is 90 pages long and should be shorter. It combines facts that are widely available about me on the internet, along with generic insights that could be true of anybody, like a horoscope spread over dozens of pages. You cannot understand Kashmir Hill without understanding her contradictions, my biographer wrote, along with an excruciatingly long description of my elaborate coffee-making ritual. Fact check, my husband does it. Oh, my God. does it. The book is flattering, fabricated, and actually absolutely packed with em dashes.
Harper Reed [02:28:01]:
I love it.
Leo Laporte [02:28:01]:
But the same author published 10 biographies in a single week, all of them about journalists, including Mike Isaac of the New York Times, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, and Jake Tapper of CNN.
Harper Reed [02:28:12]:
So a friend of mine— not my friend, my brother— was telling me about this world that he's in of like these, these kind of small fiction authors and how a lot of them are really anti-AI because people are just doing slop and it's kind of killing this art community. And he was saying that his— the best way he can find to figure out if something is slop is just the speed of which it was produced.
Leo Laporte [02:28:36]:
Right.
Harper Reed [02:28:37]:
Because people doing, you know, thousands and thousands of lines in a day, um, might just not be realistic. But, um, people might use AI and make good things. And so he's like, who am I to like say you can't use AI when you might need it for some reason? You might need it as an accessibility device, et cetera. But like, I do think that you should spend time to make it good. And so like, if someone is just outputting a bunch of shit really fast, that's typically bad. And we all acknowledge this. This is like not a, this is not a weird position. There's like, you know, you look at fast things as like fast fashion, fast food, all these things.
Harper Reed [02:29:13]:
We see that they're a decrease in quality, not an increase in quality typically. Um, and so I think this is a regular idea, but it's very interesting to see this come into like Like, well, how do you measure the speed of creation?
Alex Wilhelm [02:29:25]:
So this happened to be on YouTube. I'm a big fan of playing my factory automation games while having a YouTube documentary playing so I can pretend that I'm learning things while I'm, you know, moving belts around and such. And I, I, I got auto-played into a video and I'm like, this sounds kind of like AI. 'Cause the voice models are getting better. If you're not really listening, you can kind of get suckered in. And I was like, I'm just gonna like click on this channel. And it is a 40 or a 50-minute video every day for the preceding 15 days. And I'm like, slap, give me more.
Harper Reed [02:29:52]:
Because I know how much Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [02:29:54]:
Yeah.
Harper Reed [02:29:54]:
Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [02:29:55]:
They were not doing it.
Harper Reed [02:29:56]:
Were they good?
Alex Wilhelm [02:29:57]:
No, it was B minus at best.
Harper Reed [02:29:59]:
So, so that's pretty good. Like if I make a video on YouTube, mine's like C, maybe even D. Like I'm really bad at these.
Leo Laporte [02:30:06]:
Yeah. I think AI probably makes better videos than a lot of people, uh, would.
Harper Reed [02:30:09]:
So I think this is the thing that's complicated. Like in the code world, what happened is the code got quicker. It got better at making code than humans, but more importantly, it got thousands of times quicker.
Alex Wilhelm [02:30:19]:
quicker.
Leo Laporte [02:30:20]:
Yeah.
Harper Reed [02:30:20]:
And so we just all had to contend that that was just the future now. I wonder when this comes for various other creative things. And I'm not worried about artists. I'm worried about artists getting paid money, but I'm not worried about artists creating art because they seem to create art regardless of what's happening in front of them. But I am worried about artists getting paid money because, um, but, but I do think that creativity is really complicated in this framing.
Leo Laporte [02:30:43]:
Agreed.
Alex Wilhelm [02:30:43]:
But I do think that the argument you're making extends to other formats as well. For example, We just saw Spotify remove 75 million AI tracks, for example. Oh yeah. Did they? Yeah, I read that.
Harper Reed [02:30:54]:
All my playlists are empty.
Leo Laporte [02:30:55]:
I don't care. Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [02:30:57]:
Well, I think the point is that we probably do want to keep investing in human creators over artificial creators because that allows us to keep teaching things to the machines, right? That's where the source material comes from. And also, I spend a lot of time in more niche areas of heavy heavy metal, which is a pretty small genre already. And so a lot of these bands don't make a lot of money. And so even if the marketplace gets a little bit more crowded, it can have an outsized impact on people that are trying to be more experimental. And that makes me very scared.
Harper Reed [02:31:26]:
Are you, are you gonna go see Agriculture on their new tour? No.
Alex Wilhelm [02:31:31]:
Oh, because I— do you know how small my children are? Like, I had to negotiate. Like, there was a whole negotiation about not doing bedtime tonight with how many kids we have.
Harper Reed [02:31:40]:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [02:31:41]:
I understand.
Harper Reed [02:31:42]:
This took like—
Leo Laporte [02:31:42]:
All right, we got to let you go.
Alex Wilhelm [02:31:44]:
I can't come on for another like 6 months.
Leo Laporte [02:31:47]:
We got one more story. It's a school story. This is how you're going to save money on school. This is from the Salamanca, New York school district. They are going to start using AI robot teachers starting this fall. The AI is called Optio. It'll be available as tutors in classrooms and outside school hours. including 24/7 homework support.
Leo Laporte [02:32:14]:
The robot is part of the Realbotix M-Series. It's named Sally, and it'll be present in select Salamanca City Central High School AI and robotics courses. Now, I should mention this company, Realbotix, formerly known as Tokens.com, rebranded when they acquired the hyper-realistic sex doll company, Realdoll, in 2024.
Harper Reed [02:32:36]:
Oh!
Leo Laporte [02:32:37]:
Now that you know that, I'm gonna show you a picture of Sally. The new robot.
Harper Reed [02:32:42]:
Yes. I can't wait for this.
Leo Laporte [02:32:44]:
That will be teaching your children in the Salamanca. That's very strange.
Alex Wilhelm [02:32:49]:
I can't tell what gender that is.
Leo Laporte [02:32:51]:
School district.
Harper Reed [02:32:52]:
It's very strange.
Leo Laporte [02:32:54]:
I think it's repurposed from its previous job.
Harper Reed [02:32:58]:
It looks like a younger Alex Karp.
Leo Laporte [02:33:01]:
It looks like a carp, I'll give you that.
Alex Wilhelm [02:33:05]:
Yeah, I don't know how—
Leo Laporte [02:33:07]:
Ladies and gentlemen, on that note, that is a— that is a— if you're not watching the video, just use your imagination, I guess.
Alex Wilhelm [02:33:14]:
Yeah, or don't.
Leo Laporte [02:33:17]:
You can dress it up, but it's still a hyper-realistic sex doll to me.
Harper Reed [02:33:21]:
It's so weird. This is such a weird thing. That's very strange. Actually, you know, that's what I'm gonna look like once I get on all the peptides.
Leo Laporte [02:33:30]:
That's—
Harper Reed [02:33:31]:
I'm gonna come back in like a In like 7 months, and I'm gonna— you're gonna be like, Harper, you've changed.
Leo Laporte [02:33:36]:
That's the Ozempic face, is it?
Harper Reed [02:33:38]:
No, I'm, I'm pro-Ozempic. I'm talking about the really colorful ones.
Leo Laporte [02:33:42]:
Oh, good. The new—
Harper Reed [02:33:43]:
you know what I'm talking about?
Leo Laporte [02:33:44]:
Chinese peptides. Yeah, man, Chinese open-source models. We got Chinese peptides.
Alex Wilhelm [02:33:48]:
Can I add one point to that? So I love that everyone in Silicon Valley is like, oh my God, you can't eat fast food, you can't eat, you have to live forever. And then they're just jacking Chinese peptides directly into their bloodstream. I'm like, I don't think Michael Microplastics are your concern, friends.
Leo Laporte [02:34:00]:
Like, I think that it's worse than that. It's worse than that. RFK Jr. is saying don't get a vaccine for measles or COVID, that could be bad for you, but let's inject this foreign substance made in China because that's got to be good.
Harper Reed [02:34:14]:
I, I just love my favorite part about it. I love all this because I, I really think you should have the right to do this to yourself. I do believe that. But I also love that there are really bright colors Like, it's not— it's one thing to be like, I'm injecting something. It's— but it's like the fluorescent green fluid from a random person in a random country made in a random lab that, like, I feel like nature has said, don't do that. Like, that's, you know, like, that's why those birds are pretty. It's why those lizards look that way. It's because they'll kill you.
Leo Laporte [02:34:47]:
Mushrooms are red. Yeah, yeah.
Harper Reed [02:34:49]:
Don't do that.
Alex Wilhelm [02:34:50]:
It looks like the goo that the— the— the the Goblin guy from Spider-Man injected into himself to turn into the green thing. You know what I mean?
Leo Laporte [02:34:56]:
It was bright green. That's right. Yeah.
Alex Wilhelm [02:34:57]:
It's radioactive for a reason, y'all.
Harper Reed [02:34:59]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:35:00]:
Ladies and gentlemen, you've been very patient with us. I'm glad you were here for this fabulous edition of TWiT. We did get through some news stories.
Alex Wilhelm [02:35:08]:
Yeah, some.
Leo Laporte [02:35:08]:
I thought we had some great conversations. Thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate your time. Alex, I know you have little ones to get to, Alex Wilhelm, but we do encourage everyone to check out his brand new— well, he's not brand new. You've been doing it for a little while, right?
Alex Wilhelm [02:35:23]:
years.
Leo Laporte [02:35:23]:
Yeah, cautiousoptimism.news, the newsletter. And there's a lot of AI stuff. What do you cover?
Alex Wilhelm [02:35:30]:
Technology, business, and power with a modestly upbeat lens.
Leo Laporte [02:35:34]:
I love it. And you're a great writer. And, uh, I, and I, I love, you know, the independence is always a good thing. I think that's great. You can catch Alex on This Week in Startups as well. Uh, and, uh, thank you so much, Alex. Really nice to Dude, my pleasure. I missed you.
Leo Laporte [02:35:52]:
Yeah, yeah. Appreciate it. Take care of my house. Harper Reed is at 2389.ai. He is a technologist, an entrepreneur, and a hacker. You should check out 2389. They got some great little skills in there. Are you going to have a product at some point? I mean, what is the—
Harper Reed [02:36:09]:
I got to go. Someone just knocked on the door and—
Alex Wilhelm [02:36:14]:
The skills are the product.
Leo Laporte [02:36:16]:
Is the radio station back? Is that— is the Agent Radio back?
Harper Reed [02:36:20]:
I mean, the radio station is— is— should be live on the site. Nothing's playing right now, but, um, yeah. So, um, you know, what, what we have found is, and this is something I talked to Tim O'Reilly about recently on a talk, which was one of the things that we've seen is that the product seems to be a process in many cases. Like if you look at some of the, what we're seeing on Twitter, et cetera, people are just saying, look, here is how I use AI, and you see influencers doing this. And this is like a thing right now. It is so new and so underdeveloped and so underdiscovered that you can talk about the process. And we've been, we've been finding some interesting traction with folks in the big companies who are very interested in learning about how this can uplift a team, not just one or two people, because that's something that's really hard. And we've seen, you know, Boris recently tweeted about something similar.
Harper Reed [02:37:09]:
There's a lot of talk about this. So that's like our product, I don't think is traditional product shaped right now, but we have been seeing a lot of interest in people who want to theoretically pay us money to tell them about how to get their teams uplifted like dolphins from those cool sci-fi books.
Leo Laporte [02:37:26]:
I, uh, I've used almost, well, not all of you, you actually have a lot more skills than you used to, but I've used many of your skills. And the worldview synthesis was a great way for me to set up my agent, to give my agent some ideas about who I am. And it's funny, I did it in Claude Code, but it is carried over to Codex and it is carried over to her And, uh, it's great because it, it kind of knows what my deep philosophical worldview is and it helps it, it helps it be more effective for me. So.
Harper Reed [02:37:57]:
It's very good. That's a really good one. Um, the new one that we really like is there's 2 of them. One is called Jam, which is really fun. You can just start a jam and they'll just build and do everything. Um, it's very good. And then, but Thrifty is the, probably the best one. So if you're trying to be a little bit more thrifty with your, uh, uh, Claude plan or your Codex plan because you keep zooming through stuff, Thrifty is the way to go.
Harper Reed [02:38:17]:
And what we've found is just it's very good at planning. And if you say this is for a really stupid model, it'll plan accordingly, and then you'll just rip through it and it works out pretty well. It's very nice.
Leo Laporte [02:38:25]:
I'll have to try it. I've also used Fresh Eyes Review, which is really helpful.
Harper Reed [02:38:29]:
That one is so good. Yeah, yeah, that one is like ridiculously good.
Leo Laporte [02:38:33]:
I use this one probably every week.
Harper Reed [02:38:35]:
Yeah, this one is good. Have you seen Review Squad?
Leo Laporte [02:38:39]:
Yeah.
Harper Reed [02:38:40]:
Review Squad is basically super fresh eyes review where you can get a suite of agents to review your code and you can do experts, you can do users, and it obviously is tailored to what you're building. You can do the Well Actuallys, which is all of the Hacker News commenters and the Redditors, which is really great fun. But the one that I like to do is when you say I want experts and it's like, do you want to add any more agents? I'll be like, or reviewers, I'll say, yeah, I want to add Anna Karenina. I want to add a Star Trek ensign. I want to add that guy that went for an interview at the BBC and was actually on air. And I want to add a cat. Yeah, I want to— those are the things I want to add. And the cat always knocks something over.
Harper Reed [02:39:16]:
Anna Karenina says like prose that makes you cry about whatever you built. And then the, the guy from the BBC says something really nice. And the Star Trek ensign typically dies.
Leo Laporte [02:39:25]:
I love it. I've been using Council, which is a Carpathi skill where you get 5 people arguing, but this sounds like much more fun, to be honest with you. You say it's a panel of insufferably pedantic subagents who each obsess over a different domain.
Harper Reed [02:39:41]:
Yeah, it's so good. And this is really funny because the reviews are really good and it makes me really mad because, I mean, any of us who've ever launched anything in the world, you always put it on Hacker News, sees it and someone's like, well, actually it's like the famous— well, actually, you know, and you have this and it's It's like they're so good. It is very effective because the real key here is you have a contextless agent that looks at your code with these fresh eyes and is able to find things that you weren't thinking about. And it's just really good. And then we just want to make everything funny because the world's weird and we're all going to die when the sun blows up.
Leo Laporte [02:40:14]:
And I'll show you how you install this. You paste the— oops, that's the wrong one. You paste the URL. into your agent and you say, install this skill. And oops, that's the wrong one. I gotta get it back again. And it will just do it, which is—
Harper Reed [02:40:31]:
And it works really well.
Leo Laporte [02:40:32]:
Easiest thing in the world.
Harper Reed [02:40:34]:
Yeah, and so we have some new ones that I'm launching soon that are much more on the business side, which is kind of fun. And like, this is like, it's pretty good. Like, these prompts are really fun to build. They're really fun to do. And one of the things that's interesting about how we work is we have this team of people doing all this stuff. Every single one of our employees, every single people we've worked with and collaborated with have contributed one of these prompts. I did not write Review Squad or Thrifty. I wrote Fresh Eyes Review, but everyone just contributes them.
Harper Reed [02:41:02]:
And it's kind of, or there's a really good one, Leo, that you'll like, Binary Reverse Engineer. You know this one? Okay. So you can take that Chinese ball with DeepSeek. You can plug it into your computer and you can be like, reverse engineer this and it'll just rip through it.
Leo Laporte [02:41:15]:
Oh, I love it.
Harper Reed [02:41:16]:
And it's so good. And it works really, really well. Do not do it with fable. It'll just be like, I can't possibly do that.
Leo Laporte [02:41:22]:
Oh yeah.
Harper Reed [02:41:22]:
And then, and then you report it to, uh, to Kash Patel, and then no one wants that.
Leo Laporte [02:41:28]:
I, I love that. Uh, if you're using that, most of them are for Claude code, but it's pretty straightforward.
Harper Reed [02:41:34]:
They all work for Codex and Claude code. Um, they're pretty good with that, and we're trying to make them better.
Leo Laporte [02:41:39]:
Yeah. Uh, it says, uh, Hermes has got the full skill. It's a self-contained SkillMD, no linked reference files. The repo has 3 sibling Skills, Experts, Normies, Regulars. Uh, but you asked for Will Actually only, so I'll install that one. Yeah, no, I want them all. I want them all.
Harper Reed [02:41:58]:
Exactly.
Alex Wilhelm [02:41:59]:
It's a beautiful website, Harper.
Harper Reed [02:42:01]:
Isn't it?
Leo Laporte [02:42:01]:
Isn't it?
Harper Reed [02:42:02]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [02:42:02]:
It's really nicely done.
Alex Wilhelm [02:42:03]:
Really nice.
Leo Laporte [02:42:04]:
Yeah. Thank you, Harper. Thank you, Alex. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do TWiT every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5 PM Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 1900 UTC. If you are around, watch it live. If you're in the Club Twit Discord, you can see it behind the velvet rope access, even stuff before and after the show begins. But you can also watch on YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick.
Leo Laporte [02:42:26]:
After the fact, we make audio and video of every show available at our website, twit.tv. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Twit, youtube.com/twit, and there's of course your favorite podcast client. If you subscribe, you'll get it automatically. I think that's probably the easiest thing to do. Or ask your, uh, ask your AI to get it for you. Play it, transcribe it, analyze it, and boil it down to 3 short sentences. You'll save a lot of time. Uh, club members, we appreciate your support.
Leo Laporte [02:42:52]:
If you're not a member, ad-free versions of the show, plus chapter markers and a lot of special programming available at twit.tv/clubtwit. I invite you to join. Uh, thank you to Benito Gonzalez.
Harper Reed [02:43:03]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [02:43:04]:
To our technical director, Kevin King, our editor, thank you for being here. We will see you next time. And as I've said for, well, it is now 21 years, another twit is in the can. See you next week.
