Speaker 1: Zone Media.
Speaker 2: This is water extermination, fights cell by cell, through bodies
Speaker 2: and mindscreens of the earth. Soul's rotten from the orgasm,
Speaker 2: drug flesh shuddering from the ovens. Prisoners of the Earth,
Speaker 2: come out storm the studio. This is better offline and
Speaker 2: I'm at Zetron. We have an incredible studio guest assortment.
Speaker 2: Today we have the wonderful Victoria song from the Verge,
Speaker 2: hating Victoria. I'm good geez great, and we of course
Speaker 2: of Alison Morrow of CNN CNN Nightcap Newsletter as well. Yes, wonderful,
Speaker 2: and of course Gare Davis, the wonderful Gear Davis who
Speaker 2: didn't insult me on Bluesky for being late because I
Speaker 2: was on time. Of Cool Zone Media, Gear, thank you
Speaker 2: for joining us.
Speaker 1: Thank you for having me again, despite our despite our
Speaker 1: brief fight on Blue Sky tiff.
Speaker 2: It was not even a tiff. It was a friendly
Speaker 2: thing by some merchandise though, if you're listening to it.
Speaker 2: We have new hoodies, we have new t shirts, we
Speaker 2: have new hats. We have an upcoming challenge coin that
Speaker 2: you can spend your money on and it will flow
Speaker 2: somewhat to me. That's what's great. But today we're talking
Speaker 2: about artificial intelligence. There have been a few stories in
Speaker 2: the media. Allison is freshback from vacation, so she has
Speaker 2: to learn about all the good things that have been happening.
Speaker 2: Don't want to start with one of my favorite stories
Speaker 2: at the moment, and this is the negotiation between Microsoft
Speaker 2: and open Ai. Now, the negotiation is just to run
Speaker 2: this down because open ai, by the end of the
Speaker 2: year needs to become a for profit entity. It's a
Speaker 2: little more complex than that. It's the for profit part
Speaker 2: of a nonprofit needs to convert. That alone would be difficult,
Speaker 2: but Microsoft owns forty nine percent of this company's future
Speaker 2: profits and a bunch of other stuff. They get a
Speaker 2: revenue share, they get right store of their IP through
Speaker 2: twenty thirty and all these other things. And open ai
Speaker 2: has said, Okay, what if we give you thirty three
Speaker 2: percent equity less revenue share and you don't get access
Speaker 2: to ORIP And understandably Microsoft has said no. So we
Speaker 2: are in the funniest possible scenario here in the Microsoft
Speaker 2: could literally just fold their arms and let open ai die.
Speaker 2: And I feel like at the moment, this is an
Speaker 2: underdiscussed topic because this is a gun to Sam Worman's head,
Speaker 2: and everyone's just kind of acting like it's fine. I
Speaker 2: guess maybe it's just two complex and it's confusing to
Speaker 2: me why more people aren't a little bit worried. Anyone
Speaker 2: numbers hard numbers.
Speaker 3: That's scary, that's.
Speaker 4: Scary, that's yeah.
Speaker 2: But I think I think why I'm going so insane
Speaker 2: about it is this could kill open AI one hundred percent.
Speaker 2: Like this is they don't turn into a for profit,
Speaker 2: they're dead dead, And I'm just wondering why everyone's just
Speaker 2: kind of chilling walking around about it. I feel crazy.
Speaker 5: I think it's just the sense that like that seems
Speaker 5: implausible to most people, like if you look on it,
Speaker 5: like maybe, but you know, chat GBT is synonymous with
Speaker 5: AI in the sense that kleanex is synonymous with tissues
Speaker 5: right now, So you know, we're at a point in
Speaker 5: time where when you see the big one of of
Speaker 5: like a tech thing, you kind of feel that they're infallible.
Speaker 5: It's sort of like saying, well, if Apple doesn't get
Speaker 5: its ducks in a row with these tariffs, they're fucked,
Speaker 5: in which case you're like, are they are they? It's
Speaker 5: like a Marvel movie at the end, Are they dead.
Speaker 5: Are they are they really dead? Or will they come
Speaker 5: back in some mutated form in Avengers like Part seventy two,
Speaker 5: The avengein ing right.
Speaker 6: And I think everyone's still under the spell of Sam Altman, right,
Speaker 6: there's a sense that he's the visionary who's going to
Speaker 6: lead us into this AI utopia. And you know, I
Speaker 6: at others, you know, a bunch of us have reported
Speaker 6: that a lot of it is smoke and mirrors. But
Speaker 6: I think investors and shareholders and people who like frankly,
Speaker 6: the people who work for him, desperately want to see succeed.
Speaker 6: I think Silicon Valley wants him to succeed. So maybe
Speaker 6: it's just a willful blindness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the most strange time in history because in
Speaker 2: Victoria you've written quite a lot about this. When you
Speaker 2: look at the actual things that this shit does, it
Speaker 2: don't do that much. Right now, you've been on the
Speaker 2: lead a on the verge for a few months now,
Speaker 2: have you seen anything exciting at all?
Speaker 5: Define exciting, Anything.
Speaker 2: That you looked at and you felt delighted by in
Speaker 2: any way, Because I'm genuinely curious by delighted.
Speaker 3: I think delighted is a strong word.
Speaker 5: Have I seen things that have been surprising. Yeah, with
Speaker 5: some of the Like I wrote a story not that
Speaker 5: long ago about the what I call the hug and
Speaker 5: Kiss generators.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5: So there are these apps there are called Hugging and
Speaker 5: Kiss AI generators. So you take a picture and like
Speaker 5: they were advertised in a kind of skivy way where
Speaker 5: it's just like, oh, you take a picture of you
Speaker 5: and your crush and make them kiss, and like that's
Speaker 5: good that you can do. AI doesn't understand what to
Speaker 5: do with tongues yet, so you know, I was generating
Speaker 5: very cursed content for the Verge dot com.
Speaker 2: That was what those horrible things you're sending me?
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I sent you some horrible things.
Speaker 2: Really awful.
Speaker 6: It turns to the AI bots. A lot of humans
Speaker 6: don't know what to do with tongue.
Speaker 5: But no, they but they really don't know what to
Speaker 5: do with the songs, like you know, you're supposed to
Speaker 5: make people kissing, and so like, I generated a couple
Speaker 5: of videos of me and Edward Collin because not because
Speaker 5: I'm like a twyhard but because he was like a
Speaker 5: preset in the app, right, and you know, you just
Speaker 5: you just watch yourself kiss Edward Cullen with full on
Speaker 5: tongue and you're just.
Speaker 2: Like, but little wrong tongue.
Speaker 5: It's wrong tongue because honestly, it's it's like if you
Speaker 5: told a toddler what kissing looks like and they just
Speaker 5: you know, imagined two faces smooshing together and like things
Speaker 5: coming out of the mouths and odd rhythms. That's what
Speaker 5: it looked like.
Speaker 1: I mean, I could be wrong here, but I assume
Speaker 1: most of these products are made by straight man who
Speaker 1: do not know what to do with the tongue.
Speaker 5: These apps are just very like, yeah, weird, but you
Speaker 5: know so I tested them. I deep faked my parents
Speaker 5: parents at my wedding, and I was like, oh, this
Speaker 5: makes me feel weird. I have emotions that mom's teeth
Speaker 5: are not correct in this story. But you know so
Speaker 5: that was just like one of the I think one
Speaker 5: of the things that I've tested most recently and I went, oh, okay.
Speaker 4: This is something.
Speaker 1: I mean, the thing that I've seen this with is
Speaker 1: like this this woman who made like a video of
Speaker 1: like her mom hugging her as a kid, based on
Speaker 1: like an old picture, right, and it's like this is
Speaker 1: I've never seen a video of my mom before, and
Speaker 1: it's you start obsessing over this, this like artificially generated video.
Speaker 1: When you're ignoring you you actually have a picture of
Speaker 1: your mom hugging yeah, Like you can look at like
Speaker 1: that and that actually is her, that is like what
Speaker 1: she looks.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, versus watching something imagine, not imagine just generate.
Speaker 1: Put on like a skin suit of your mom hugging you,
Speaker 1: which it just isn't like it's weird. The video is
Speaker 1: not real, but the picture is.
Speaker 5: I just it's a bizarre I feel those I felt
Speaker 5: very judgmental of it before I tried it, and then
Speaker 5: I tried it and I sobbed.
Speaker 3: I like genuinely sobbed because that's interesting.
Speaker 1: That reminds me of like the the VR thing where
Speaker 1: you're like reconnecting with like dead family members only VR headsets,
Speaker 1: which which yeah, people were very skeptical of. And then
Speaker 1: I saw saw some people try it in Japan and
Speaker 1: they like like just totally broke down.
Speaker 5: It's just like when I like, I think the phrasing
Speaker 5: that I used was like, I know it's fake. It
Speaker 5: didn't look anything like my dad gave him hair. My
Speaker 5: dad had never had hair in his life, but like
Speaker 5: the shape of it was enough to like sketch this
Speaker 5: like part of me that was very much longing for
Speaker 5: my father to have been able to go to my wedding.
Speaker 5: So like doing it, I was like, this is weird.
Speaker 5: I don't feel this is not comforting. I mean it's
Speaker 5: not comforting, but it's.
Speaker 2: Makes you feel bad.
Speaker 1: That nausea is like like indicative of like the hyperreality problem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which which mean people like like Altman in the whole
Speaker 1: the whole industry or can you break them rapidly pushing
Speaker 1: us towards.
Speaker 2: On the hyperreality problem? Can you break that down?
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I guess if turn gets used in
Speaker 1: a few different ways, but it's like the more something
Speaker 1: is so fake that it's more real than real hmm.
Speaker 1: And we see this problem with a lot of like
Speaker 1: the VR stuff, But now now you see this a
Speaker 1: lot with with a AI generated images which are like
Speaker 1: quote unquote photorealistic, but they're like two photorealistic because they're
Speaker 1: being trained on on on a data set of like
Speaker 1: highly photoshoped images, So it looks like reality, but it
Speaker 1: looks more than reality. It's it's it's it's stronger than
Speaker 1: what reality actually is. Supposed to be and that's like
Speaker 1: completely poisoning the data set and like this can affect
Speaker 1: you like emotionally too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what But the thing is that gets me
Speaker 2: about this is you look at everything. You look at
Speaker 2: all the AI stuff and this is a fairly old
Speaker 2: example at this point. And I'm not I'm not insulting
Speaker 2: you would. This is nothing bad about your point. It's
Speaker 2: just they've not been able to find a dude at
Speaker 2: or a gizmo that at least brings you cheer.
Speaker 5: I mean you can if you are twisted, then my
Speaker 5: mind is twisted. And you'll like come up with some
Speaker 5: prompts that are truly cursed and no editor will let
Speaker 5: you publish in good faith, Like yeah, you could have
Speaker 5: a little fun with it.
Speaker 2: I'm talking about a thing that people used to do
Speaker 2: something normal.
Speaker 1: No, yeah, no one, it's I mean it helped that
Speaker 1: one kid graduate from UCLA.
Speaker 4: So there you go.
Speaker 2: Which one was that?
Speaker 7: Oh, this has just been.
Speaker 1: A viral video the past like two weeks of this
Speaker 1: guy like showing the prompts he used to graduate from college,
Speaker 1: like during his graduation ceremony.
Speaker 2: So cool.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's the thing I've pointed out a lot of that.
Speaker 6: AI has found a lot of use cases. They're just
Speaker 6: all kind of bad.
Speaker 2: But they don't generate money, right.
Speaker 6: They don't generate money, and they take away This will
Speaker 6: be a metaphor that you relate to. I can't remember
Speaker 6: who said it first.
Speaker 2: It was a tech.
Speaker 6: Columnist anyway, it was about letting kids use AI to
Speaker 6: do their homework is like going to the gym and
Speaker 6: having a machine lift the weights for you. Like, the
Speaker 6: point is the process and the learning, and AI just
Speaker 6: kind of subverts that, which can be useful if you're
Speaker 6: coding or doing some high level technical stuff. I suppose yeah,
Speaker 6: not my area.
Speaker 2: But but even then, it's like with the coding stuff,
Speaker 2: they massively overstate what coding like, coding is only one
Speaker 2: part of the software engineering stack. And even then you
Speaker 2: can't like help They're like, oh, I could build an
Speaker 2: entire application? Could it has anyone? Actually, And this is
Speaker 2: Matt Hughes Murtis that brought this up the other day.
Speaker 2: How did it all this bullshit Kevin Rucy and bullshit
Speaker 2: about oh, vibe coding is taking up. I've got seen
Speaker 2: one fucking vibe coded company.
Speaker 5: Man. The phrase vibe code, it's just I haven't heard
Speaker 5: this before.
Speaker 4: Vibe coding is it's horrible.
Speaker 5: It's it's it's it's horrible. Like at Google Io they're
Speaker 5: like vibe coating and I was like, please kill me,
Speaker 5: because what does it even mean.
Speaker 2: It's so, here's what it's meant to mean. It's meant
Speaker 2: to mean that you, as a person do not understand software.
Speaker 4: True.
Speaker 2: True, you are able to use the coding thing to
Speaker 2: build software. And the idea which the massive liberty they
Speaker 2: take from there is that because someone can do a
Speaker 2: thing like this, whether it works or not, whether it's
Speaker 2: secure or not, who cares, it means that someone who
Speaker 2: doesn't understand coding at all could build a huge company
Speaker 2: that does whatever. It's kind of like if you saw
Speaker 2: the watch The Simpsons anyone. Yeah, there's an episode of
Speaker 2: The Simpsons where they rebuild Ned Flanders his house and
Speaker 2: like the rooms get smaller and they're like, this room
Speaker 2: has no electricity, this room has too much electricity, and
Speaker 2: all the hair stands up. It's like seeing that and
Speaker 2: being like, holy shit, these people could build a city.
Speaker 2: It's fucking insane. And of course there is a Kevin
Speaker 2: Ruth's article in New York Times, so he's like, that's arm.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I made a recipe application. It's just
Speaker 2: real like peekaboo moments in AI. And I know I've
Speaker 2: been thinking about AI for what feels like seven years now,
Speaker 2: but it's only one. But it's just I don't know
Speaker 2: why more people again, I get the Microsoft Open Air,
Speaker 2: I think I do, but I don't get why more
Speaker 2: people aren't more alarm. There's nothing. There's not a thing.
Speaker 2: There's not a thing that you can point and be like, Wow,
Speaker 2: this is actually kind of fucking cool. That costs too
Speaker 2: much money, it requires stealing, it boils legs with all
Speaker 2: these things. But at least we have this. Not really,
Speaker 2: I genuinely, I'm not even asking the question sarcastically anymore.
Speaker 2: I'm just like anything, anything, anything, one thing that I
Speaker 2: don't mean kind of works. I mean, this is a
Speaker 2: tool that I use every day, like a drop box
Speaker 2: style thing. I don't even mean a filse. I just
Speaker 2: mean a useful piece of software you can point to
Speaker 2: and go, I use this, and it's good.
Speaker 6: I have I have one, but I don't know how
Speaker 6: much of it is LM based. Do you use otter
Speaker 6: in your way?
Speaker 5: I do?
Speaker 6: Yeah, Like Otter is a dictation service.
Speaker 2: Yea transcription.
Speaker 6: I was just gonna say transcription.
Speaker 7: I was just gonna say clips captioning.
Speaker 1: That's like the only thing like Dropbox has integrated like
Speaker 1: of auto transcriptions for almost all their uploads and then
Speaker 1: mix My job really easy because I have to do
Speaker 1: a lot of interviews and now I can just refer
Speaker 1: to that. If I need a more complex transcription, I
Speaker 1: could set it to one of our services. But but no,
Speaker 1: like that's that's it, But like that's LLL Hulm's have
Speaker 1: been doing that for a long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just transcription. I'm not even being a misanthrope.
Speaker 2: I'm just so much money is going into this, so
Speaker 2: much money is not going into other things. And the
Speaker 2: only thing we're having popped out is, hey, we've got
Speaker 2: a Google search that kind of works but doesn't and
Speaker 2: we can do transcriptions, which they did almost immediately. I
Speaker 2: feel I feel like that like rev had their AI
Speaker 2: transcriptions almost immediately. Yeah, they've been around for it at
Speaker 2: There were various companies I worked with an AI transcription
Speaker 2: coming dead now A couple of years back with the
Speaker 2: like twenty twenty three, I think it was. It was
Speaker 2: like meeting transcription zooms had it.
Speaker 1: I was I was using where I was AI transcriptions
Speaker 1: back in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just like it feels it feels like I'm
Speaker 2: going insane sometimes. It feels like when I read these
Speaker 2: stories and they're like in the revolutionary power of Ai,
Speaker 2: but you look at it, it's like you don't even
Speaker 2: have a funny You have a funny thing. I guess
Speaker 2: a joker level thing. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think the problem is is just like we are
Speaker 5: promised one thing. Yeah, you're promised this personalization, this automat,
Speaker 5: this automation that it's gonna know you. And like we've
Speaker 5: been fed through so many generations of like science fiction
Speaker 5: what we think uh ai is going to be. This
Speaker 5: is not that this requires so much work from you
Speaker 5: to train it. Like you have to understand the language
Speaker 5: which with to prompt, chat cept or any of these
Speaker 5: other ais in order to get something remotely useful. So
Speaker 5: you're actually having to learn a new language. And like
Speaker 5: if you look at the most successful chat ChiPT prompts,
Speaker 5: they're like four four paragraphs along, they're insane. You have
Speaker 5: to like you have to be preempting what like this
Speaker 5: thing could be like I had. I was just like,
Speaker 5: you know, to your point about vibe coding, I'm not
Speaker 5: a I'm like a spreadsheet girly, but I'm not like
Speaker 5: an advanced spreadsheet early and I was trying to pull
Speaker 5: some data insights from this set I was looking at,
Speaker 5: and I was like, Okay, I don't know fuck all
Speaker 5: about spreadsheet formulas. Besides like the really basic ones. How
Speaker 5: am I going to do this conditional logic program? Let
Speaker 5: me ask chat CHETPT And it took me so long
Speaker 5: just to figure out the stuff, and it was always wrong.
Speaker 5: And because I could, like, because I understand math, I
Speaker 5: could parse out how to fix the completely wrong formulas
Speaker 5: it was giving me.
Speaker 3: But that was such a painful process, and.
Speaker 2: So was the output even that good?
Speaker 5: Oh no, it was an excellent output. I got a
Speaker 5: beautiful spreadsheet.
Speaker 2: That's cool. I had much time. Would you say you
Speaker 2: invested two and a half hours? Nice?
Speaker 6: You're you're a journalist who understands math, like you're a
Speaker 6: rare and special Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 5: I was just basically like this, the fact that this
Speaker 5: conditional if and statement is not working, or it's working
Speaker 5: opposite to what I want for to find this one
Speaker 5: particular data set is driving me cuckoo for cocoa puffs.
Speaker 5: It's very simple. I know how to do the math manually.
Speaker 5: Why can't the computer tell me how to write it
Speaker 5: to the other fucking computers two and a half hours.
Speaker 2: I love innovation, and I think I think that that
Speaker 2: speaks to the larger problem, which is generative. AI isn't
Speaker 2: completely useless. If it had been sold as it is,
Speaker 2: which is kind of niche cloud software, like cloud compute stuff,
Speaker 2: they wouldn't have been able to fund any of the
Speaker 2: data centers. If they would have been like, all right,
Speaker 2: we're going to be able to in two and a
Speaker 2: half hours give you the world's best spreadsheet, they would
Speaker 2: it was.
Speaker 5: It was a good spread okay, lot the best, Okay,
Speaker 5: a decent spreadsheet.
Speaker 2: The thing even the asterisks have asterisks, and it's it's
Speaker 2: just I feel like in the feedback I get from
Speaker 2: listeners is very much that everyone is like a lot.
Speaker 2: I don't get any emails from people being like, hey,
Speaker 2: atu man, I have the most useful thing I get
Speaker 2: the occasional bright spark is like I have, over the
Speaker 2: course of hours, created a very useful thing that I
Speaker 2: use Sometimes it's like cool, Okay, it's fine. Bidet sounds
Speaker 2: more useful than that, Like I'm trying to think of
Speaker 2: like other innovations that exist that could be Yeah, everything
Speaker 2: is more useful, like Apple pay is more useful than
Speaker 2: any of the shit that they've built. But it's this
Speaker 2: thing where we are being told again and again and
Speaker 2: again that it's the future, and we're being told that
Speaker 2: it's this ultracomplex thing that will never understand, which leads
Speaker 2: really neatly into my favorite story of the week, which
Speaker 2: is all of you, I assume have heard about this
Speaker 2: Meta offering one hundred million dollars to Open AI staff
Speaker 2: and how there's this big talent more and four people
Speaker 2: just left Open AI to go to Meta. Alison, you're
Speaker 2: on vacation, so you missed some of this, which is
Speaker 2: probably best for your mental health.
Speaker 6: Oh I saw a bit. The seven figure bonus story
Speaker 6: came out right before I went on vacations, so I
Speaker 6: was getting that.
Speaker 5: I can't blame Oh no, get way to a four
Speaker 5: oh one k that's fat and sizable, Like yeah, no, no.
Speaker 2: I think it rocks. I think it's great. I think
Speaker 2: they should demand There was a part of the erin
Speaker 2: Woo from the information of a great story about this,
Speaker 2: where she she was talking about how some people are like,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, I just threatened to quit and they gave
Speaker 2: me more money. I would join one of these companies
Speaker 2: and day two slug fucking quit. Mark, What are you
Speaker 2: gonna do about it? Mark, I'm gonna go right back
Speaker 2: to Open Ai. They're gonna give me this money and
Speaker 2: then Mark Zuckerbo will give you whatever you He's been
Speaker 2: flying them to his house in Tahoe and they're still
Speaker 2: saying no. That's the best part that people just like, nah,
Speaker 2: I don't want to, don't want to mate, But it
Speaker 2: might be because they're all in a weird I'm gonna
Speaker 2: say click, but I want to I want to believe
Speaker 2: Polly situation. So all okay, I have no no knowledge
Speaker 2: that they're fucking. But the recruits on the list, which
Speaker 2: refers to the meta list for potential people that they
Speaker 2: could hire, typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley
Speaker 2: and Carnegie. Melon They have experienced places like open Ai
Speaker 2: in San Francisco and Google Deep Mind in London. They
Speaker 2: are usually in their twenties and thirties, and they all
Speaker 2: know each other. They spend their days staring at screens
Speaker 2: to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems that require spectacular
Speaker 2: amounts of computing power, and their previously obscure talents have
Speaker 2: never been so highly valued. So these stories have a
Speaker 2: thread through them I'm really enjoying, which is that the
Speaker 2: writer and the companies don't know what these people are doing,
Speaker 2: and I just feel like they are scamming I think
Speaker 2: they're scamming them. Another quote from The Wall Street Journal,
Speaker 2: Megan Borodowski, I believe it, wrote this. The handful of
Speaker 2: researchers who are smartest about AI have built up what
Speaker 2: one described as tribal knowledge that is almost impossible to replicate.
Speaker 2: Rival researchers have lived in the same group houses in
Speaker 2: San Francisco, where they discuss papers that might provide clues
Speaker 2: for achieving the next great breakthrough. We are very aligned
Speaker 2: on research directions and interests. One of them wrote, I
Speaker 2: hope we get to work on more stuff together in
Speaker 2: the future. They are fucking lying to them. I'm sorry, sorry,
Speaker 2: they are just making shit up. This has to be
Speaker 2: I think that this is the funniest thing ever. I
Speaker 2: think that this is a true revenge of the nerds situation.
Speaker 1: Have they reinvented collective bargaining?
Speaker 2: They have, They've basically done unionization. It's amazing. It's good
Speaker 2: for them.
Speaker 6: Higher education is really expensive. They have a lot of debt.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love this. I think that they should ask
Speaker 2: for more money. I think they should all get together
Speaker 2: and just refuse to take less than fifty million a day,
Speaker 2: eight figure, site, nine figure, like Sky is the limit?
Speaker 2: Sam Samon want to burn anything. But back to erin Wouhi.
Speaker 2: This is another quote about this which this is from
Speaker 2: inside the Great AI Talent auction that deals with the
Speaker 2: free agents and the egosham But a senior leader another
Speaker 2: of the major AI labs said it was hard to
Speaker 2: know what research specialties actually mattered for improving AI models.
Speaker 2: AI is field where researchers are designing such complicated systems
Speaker 2: that is difficult to break up one aspect of the
Speaker 2: work from another, the leader said. Ultimately, they said recruiting
Speaker 2: often comes down to word of mouth, the game knowing
Speaker 2: a person or having worked with them before. It's a scam.
Speaker 5: Isn't that just like normal job stuff like word of mouth,
Speaker 5: knowing having worked with someone before?
Speaker 6: And yeah, yeah, it feels like hyper focused Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2: But stuff generally you know what they did at the job.
Speaker 2: Generally you do. And Mark Zuckerberger, guy, we did AI.
Speaker 2: There is a WhatsApp group I think it's called recruitment
Speaker 2: and it's the party Emoji. And that's where Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 2: invites people. He like has this little weird little WhatsApp
Speaker 2: hot like whole he invites people. He's like, hey, I'm
Speaker 2: Mark Zuckerberg. Do you want all the money in the world?
Speaker 2: What do you do? I don't care how many? And
Speaker 2: apparently one of the metrics they measure them on is
Speaker 2: like citations in papers. I genuinely think this is a scam.
Speaker 2: It's genuinely a scam. I think it's the coolest scam
Speaker 2: of all time. We find it's nerds versus management consultants.
Speaker 7: So nerds versus different types of nerds.
Speaker 2: Management consultants are not nerds. Actually, I want to say
Speaker 2: management consultants are not nerds. They're jocks.
Speaker 5: I would agree with that. I would agree with that.
Speaker 4: They see it.
Speaker 5: They are professional deckmakers about and they go in slide one,
Speaker 5: we can see that number go up. Yeah, and slide too,
Speaker 5: we can see number flat. Here's a pie chart.
Speaker 2: Someone else made. Yes, that's it.
Speaker 7: I can see it.
Speaker 2: It's jock shit.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I went to a drama private school. I know everyone,
Speaker 2: this is not shocking. Yeah, I thank you all boys
Speaker 2: as well. It's yeah yeah, but I was like the
Speaker 2: dumbest kid in that school, which is really and I
Speaker 2: was the fastest as well. So school was great for me.
Speaker 2: But you run into a lot of people who can
Speaker 2: memorize a lot of things but don't know how to
Speaker 2: put them together. There's no real like synthetic thought. It's
Speaker 2: all just like, I don't know, like having a big
Speaker 2: isle of information that they portunly draw from and that
Speaker 2: they don't really know what any of it means.
Speaker 5: Sounds familiar to all the AI fitness summaries that I've
Speaker 5: been suffering through. I just wrote a thing about.
Speaker 2: It that's tell us about that. What's what's the AI
Speaker 2: fitness ship been doing? This is?
Speaker 1: Ah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I ate it during a run last week.
Speaker 5: Yeah no, it was too hot outside. Uh and I
Speaker 5: was you know, I was on the Box union bargaining committee.
Speaker 5: So I've been like sleep deprived for two months.
Speaker 2: Well, so congratulations, yeah, congratulations.
Speaker 5: It was it was. It came down to the wire,
Speaker 5: but we averted a strike. It was real great stuff, uh,
Speaker 5: and I was I basically was like, oh now time
Speaker 5: to look into my fitness and wear a wile data
Speaker 5: from this time period and and kind of gain insights.
Speaker 5: And it was just like not that it was beyond
Speaker 5: I called my article the Unbearable Obviousness of AI Fitness
Speaker 5: nice Summaries because it was just not great. But to
Speaker 5: my point, I ate it on on this run, like
Speaker 5: you can kind of see my hands fuck up playing bust,
Speaker 5: my knees are fucked up. So like I was basically like,
Speaker 5: all right, let me see what all of these things
Speaker 5: said about my data and could I find Could I
Speaker 5: get these ais to say like, hey, you've been like
Speaker 5: really strung out over the last two months, your sleep
Speaker 5: schedule has been supremely disrupted, your metrics are completely off.
Speaker 5: These are all things I know from looking at my
Speaker 5: baselines and knowing what they are. But could I get
Speaker 5: it to say you showed haw like you've shown signs
Speaker 5: of elevated risk of injury.
Speaker 3: Not a single one of them could do it.
Speaker 5: And Strava's was like the most egregious because it's like
Speaker 5: you had an intense run and I had uploaded pictures
Speaker 5: of my injury. I had like uploaded a note saying
Speaker 5: that I had like injured myself pretty badly. There was
Speaker 5: no context of like what I should do with that.
Speaker 5: It was just it's literally stuff like you ran three
Speaker 5: point one miles, it was eighty eight degrees fahrenheit. This
Speaker 5: was slightly higher effort than other efforts that you've made
Speaker 5: the last thirty days.
Speaker 3: Have a nice day.
Speaker 5: And I was like, that's not useful when you put
Speaker 5: it right next to a chart that says the same thing.
Speaker 5: Your elevation was eighty eight You had an eighty eight
Speaker 5: feet of elevation gain and it was.
Speaker 3: Up and down during your run.
Speaker 5: And literally it's next to a thing that says elevation
Speaker 5: gain eighty eight feet and a graph that shows up
Speaker 5: and down.
Speaker 3: Like it's that there's no intelligence.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there is intelligence.
Speaker 7: AI, there's no intelligence.
Speaker 2: It feels like the thing it should be able to
Speaker 2: do already.
Speaker 5: This is what people wanted to do because at least
Speaker 5: in my field, where you generate a massive mountain of
Speaker 5: like quantified self data that you're looking at and you
Speaker 5: want insights from. I wanted Aura to tell me, like
Speaker 5: what my average weekly number, like how many hours per
Speaker 5: week do I sleep on average on a twelve month basis,
Speaker 5: and then how much of a sleep debt did I
Speaker 5: incur in this specific week?
Speaker 3: And it's like, ooh, we can't do that.
Speaker 5: We can only do it the most recent week in
Speaker 5: the most recent month for Trent, and I was like,
Speaker 5: that's fucking useless. I have six years worth of AURA
Speaker 5: data that I should be able to mine for that
Speaker 5: kind of insight, and I can't do that. So that's
Speaker 5: not at all useful for what I for like the
Speaker 5: purposes of what I was trying to prove.
Speaker 3: And so I ended up arguing with this thing for
Speaker 3: like an hour.
Speaker 2: But I feel like you did prove something though, yeah
Speaker 2: I did.
Speaker 5: I did, but it was at the same time, just
Speaker 5: like it's sort of like a wikiped It's like a
Speaker 5: book report written by a fourth grader who decided to
Speaker 5: read the entry of the book on Wikipedia instead of
Speaker 5: actually reading the book for insights.
Speaker 3: So it's like a here you go, here you go.
Speaker 2: It feels like the most elementary thing it should be
Speaker 2: able to do. I have over a decade of fitness
Speaker 2: day up. Yeah, and I still don't have shit. I
Speaker 2: don't it told my Aura ring the other day, I
Speaker 2: got Aura, I got somny, I got the thing that
Speaker 2: electrocutes your head. Yes, why I'm so smart. It's like
Speaker 2: I just watched the X Files episode with the computer
Speaker 2: bit and that's what's happening to me. I'm getting electrocuted
Speaker 2: every day. I got Aura, I got the eight sleep
Speaker 2: in Vegas. I got also some gumph and I don't
Speaker 2: know a single goddamn thing. It told me two days ago.
Speaker 2: I am like something is wrong. Yeah, I'd slept three
Speaker 2: hours two days straight. It was just a bad combination
Speaker 2: of red ice. And it's like, yeah, you should do
Speaker 2: something about that. Thanks, I'm glad I pay you ten
Speaker 2: dollars a month for But this just feels like the
Speaker 2: obvious and how does it not know? How? And maybe
Speaker 2: it is just the ultimate limitation that we've been complaining about.
Speaker 2: It's just it's kind of insulting. I don't know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, not to feel like I don't want to be
Speaker 6: the hippie here, because I use Strava and I like
Speaker 6: track my workouts and things. But it's like I know
Speaker 6: when I'm tired, yeah, and I know when I'm hungry
Speaker 6: and when I've eaten too much or eaten too little,
Speaker 6: Like you know, why do we need the computer to
Speaker 6: do that for us? Is a real question, and it's
Speaker 6: part of this like consumer trend of just trying to
Speaker 6: get AI into every single app on my phone. And
Speaker 6: it's like, I don't need Strava, Like Strava's doing great
Speaker 6: for me for what I need it for. I like
Speaker 6: it to show me how many miles I ran that week,
Speaker 6: and like my bike ride to work.
Speaker 2: Look, but I.
Speaker 5: Wanted it, I like, I would have loved it to
Speaker 5: be like, Okay, so when you go run after a
Speaker 5: prolonged break, particularly in hot weather, you have self reported
Speaker 5: and increased number of injuries.
Speaker 3: That's the type of shit that I want.
Speaker 5: And so it's like, so seeing that it was really
Speaker 5: hot after a prolonged injury, you have a real bad
Speaker 5: habit of getting injured after that. So like you dumb, dumb.
Speaker 6: Yeah, maybe the pack.
Speaker 5: Do the thing.
Speaker 3: So like that is the.
Speaker 5: Type of insight I would have liked after this most
Speaker 5: recent run where I ate it.
Speaker 2: Well, the last three months, I've increased my cardio. Shit,
Speaker 2: I'm playing basketball. I would love to see and it
Speaker 2: has all the stuff And this doesn't feel that difficult
Speaker 2: if it could say yeah, your cardio vascula has improved
Speaker 2: or likes the occasionally be like yeah, you're four years
Speaker 2: or two years younger than your age cardio. Why isn't
Speaker 2: this like, oh, don't get started.
Speaker 5: That mean, don't get me started on those like longevity metrics.
Speaker 2: I but just there's nothing useful to it other than
Speaker 2: I'm a data perva and like looking at the numbers,
Speaker 2: going hmmm, number up, number down? Why? And but even
Speaker 2: then the simplest things are kind of hard to get.
Speaker 2: With Strava. You have to go through like three menus
Speaker 2: to just see how much you've worked out. There's like
Speaker 2: eight different options. None of them you can't turn any
Speaker 2: of them off. There's one about biking because I used
Speaker 2: to bike. I don't bike anymore. I don't need that
Speaker 2: now you need to share the biking, mate, gotta make
Speaker 2: sure zero miles, you fucking idiot loser. It's just it.
Speaker 2: It is the wider thing of tech just not being
Speaker 2: for us anymore. Almost, it's like, hey, got some data,
Speaker 2: I guess pay me, now, pay me. And even then
Speaker 2: with Aura and A, I've been using them for five years,
Speaker 2: six years. No, I've never got a single bit of
Speaker 2: advice about my sleep. I've never had it. Say hey,
Speaker 2: what if you did this? Nope, it'll be.
Speaker 5: You tried using the chat pot. That's an aura.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 2: I thought about it yesterday and I was like, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna get angry at this.
Speaker 5: It's actually one of the better implements.
Speaker 2: Does it work?
Speaker 5: It's one of the better implementation If you like, I
Speaker 5: know how to.
Speaker 2: Talk to it, Okay, how do I talk to it?
Speaker 5: Well, you have to be very specific about the information
Speaker 5: that you're wanting. So you're like, tell me about my
Speaker 5: sleep trend and I've noticed that I have this problem.
Speaker 3: What are some ways that I could uh get around that?
Speaker 5: Or just like, do I show signs in the past
Speaker 5: month of sleep irregularities?
Speaker 3: If so, like, what are some the.
Speaker 5: Thing is like, the things that's going to tell you
Speaker 5: to do that are actionable are going to be.
Speaker 2: Like, well duh right?
Speaker 5: Really only helpful if this is your first foray into
Speaker 5: fixing your health, into fixing your health, if you've literally
Speaker 5: googled anything before, have any base knowledge of like you
Speaker 5: should have consistent sleep schedules. You maybe just don't eat
Speaker 5: ice cream before bed, like common sense things like that.
Speaker 5: It's just not gonna necessarily help you, but you know
Speaker 5: other things. I were because I'm also I've got a
Speaker 5: CGM at the moment, and so it's.
Speaker 2: Just like, does that constant glucose Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, continuous glucose monitor. And I was like, I've had.
Speaker 3: A lot of stress.
Speaker 5: Does stress impact glucose levels? And I was like, yes,
Speaker 5: it does. And I was like, okay, cool, that's nice.
Speaker 5: Nice to know that it's high because of that, and
Speaker 5: then it'll remember that when you ask it questions in
Speaker 5: the future.
Speaker 3: So you just have to like you just have.
Speaker 5: To talk to it so much and like kind of
Speaker 5: train it. It's like literally like training a toddler. So
Speaker 5: the amount of effort that you're putting in versus what
Speaker 5: they're telling you, like all the insights they'll be so personal,
Speaker 5: personalized and so automated.
Speaker 2: It's like, just have to do all the work to
Speaker 2: make it useful, which it appears to be the AI theme.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 5: Do an immense amount of legwork and like training and
Speaker 5: thinking like an AI in order for it to spit
Speaker 5: out something that might make you go huh.
Speaker 2: Wow, yeah cool. I love living in this wonderful period.
Speaker 2: I saw Wired mentioned this thing called limitless earlier if you.
Speaker 3: Have yes, yes, it's the it's the class. It's like
Speaker 3: b the thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I say time, the AI device that constantly listens
Speaker 2: to you. What is limitless?
Speaker 5: Though similar? It constantly listens to you and generates insights
Speaker 5: based not listening to you constantly.
Speaker 2: Stephen Stephen Levy, the Larry Bird of Big Wet Kisses
Speaker 2: in Tech Journalism wrote about it like it is the future,
Speaker 2: and it's just like, I just wish some writers would
Speaker 2: experience humanity just once, because the idea of someone constantly
Speaker 2: listening is not fun good, nor has it ever really worked.
Speaker 6: I don't want to age anyone here, but I feel
Speaker 6: like we're roughly the same age. And we experienced kind
Speaker 6: of the revolution of social media as this kind of like, oh,
Speaker 6: look look at how cool it can be if we're
Speaker 6: able to connect right in mass, all the time anywhere,
Speaker 6: And that was cool, that was revolutionary in its time,
Speaker 6: and now we're at kind of like the denoma of that,
Speaker 6: and it's turned us all inward. We're all like tracking
Speaker 6: our personal data and like, you know, we're more isolated
Speaker 6: than we've ever been. Not entirely social media's fault, but
Speaker 6: doesn't help. We're like talking to our AI therapists and
Speaker 6: our AI boyfriends and girlfriends.
Speaker 2: I don't know how many people are actually doing that,
Speaker 2: though I know a lot of them are.
Speaker 6: But I think that like the narrative, like the step
Speaker 6: back narrative right now, is just like, well, there should
Speaker 6: be a next thing. It shouldn't just be social media
Speaker 6: was cool and the Internet was cool for a while,
Speaker 6: and things are getting kind of stale, and it's like, well,
Speaker 6: what's the next thing. And I think I think tech
Speaker 6: journalists can be guilty of this sometimes, of feeling like, well,
Speaker 6: twenty twelve was really exciting, so twenty twenty two has
Speaker 6: got to be just as exciting, and twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: Five, boy can't wait.
Speaker 6: Maybe the technology is just not there yet and it's
Speaker 6: going to take a lot longer than anyone expects.
Speaker 5: Or maybe this is just not the right approach, because
Speaker 5: the way to lllm's work is that it's a and
Speaker 5: like we have tech journalists left and right failing the
Speaker 5: mirror test and like not understanding that when you talk
Speaker 5: to chat GPT, or you talk to these AI girlfriends
Speaker 5: and boyfriends and a different avatar, you are.
Speaker 3: Just talking to yourself in the mirror.
Speaker 5: It is the digital version of talking to yourself in
Speaker 5: the mirror, which can be useful. It can be useful
Speaker 5: to talk to yourself in the mirror. There's a reason
Speaker 5: why people go like you're great, yes, awesome. Sometimes you
Speaker 5: need to like hear yourself think out loud, and that
Speaker 5: can be useful and helpful. But that's what you're doing. Like,
Speaker 5: you have to understand that you are talking to yourself.
Speaker 5: You are just having a conversation with yourself. And I
Speaker 5: think a lot of people don't get that. They don't
Speaker 5: they think they're talking to a higher intelligence. Literally, know,
Speaker 5: you were just talking to yourself. If yourself could Google
Speaker 5: a little faster than you currently.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that was That was the gist of Kashmir Hill's
Speaker 6: amazing New York Times piece about the people who really
Speaker 6: fell into a rabbit hole around these chat bots like
Speaker 6: chat GPT convinced them that they were in a matrix,
Speaker 6: like you know, alternate universe. And like one guy committed suicide.
Speaker 2: Didn't he pull a knife on a cop or something?
Speaker 6: Yeah, he like told the bot that he was going
Speaker 6: to kill himself to suicide by cop. And then his
Speaker 6: dad was like worried about his mental health, did call
Speaker 6: the cops and he was like, listen, I think my
Speaker 6: son's going to try to kill himself by attacking you.
Speaker 6: And guess what he did, because the chatbot was like.
Speaker 2: And guess what. The cop just came right over with.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, you know, someone mental health, what do
Speaker 2: they need? Oh, they definitely want to die by a cop.
Speaker 2: Let's pull our guns.
Speaker 6: I'm saying it's our society is not in a good
Speaker 6: spot right.
Speaker 2: Our society is not prepared policing is prepared to arrest
Speaker 2: rather than help or service. So yeah, it's the natural.
Speaker 2: I think it's all of this is the natural comeopance
Speaker 2: of a society built with very little intention and suck
Speaker 2: because yes, because that's the thing is vibes and large
Speaker 2: language models are the ultimate like vibe slop. It's something
Speaker 2: built with no real and people love to say, well,
Speaker 2: Samulton's plan. No one has a single goddamn plan at all.
Speaker 2: That's why there are no use cases because if anyone
Speaker 2: sat there and went what can we do with this?
Speaker 2: They go, fuck, I don't, I don't know, I don't.
Speaker 2: Is there anyone that we can pay one hundred million
Speaker 2: dollars too.
Speaker 5: Well, you can do anything that you can imagine. That's
Speaker 5: why Auntie Jesse is saying the future is up to you.
Speaker 3: Guys imagine solo.
Speaker 2: I can imagine a lot. And it's but that's the thing,
Speaker 2: Like Alison, you had an excellent piece on this. It's
Speaker 2: like the whole job loss story is just them being like,
Speaker 2: please please up the shares up, shares, gun number go up. Please.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: It's like I have to say this because everyone's paying
Speaker 6: attention to me. And it's like, I'm sure shareholders and
Speaker 6: vesters on Wall Street are saying, what is your AI
Speaker 6: strategy and how are you planning to mass lay off
Speaker 6: your staff so that you can cut corners and replace
Speaker 6: people with AI? And so you have someone like Andy
Speaker 6: Jazzy come out and say, you guys are all doing
Speaker 6: great work. We've built incredible products. Alexa everyone loves it. Spoilerler,
Speaker 6: No one loves Alexa. That's stupid.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And as a result of that, sometime in the near future,
Speaker 6: I won't say when, but sometime soon, a lot of
Speaker 6: you are going to be laid off or have your
Speaker 6: jobs changed by AI. And I'm shocked every time one
Speaker 6: of these CEOs does this, we report it out as
Speaker 6: if it's like, oh.
Speaker 2: It's true.
Speaker 6: God in Heaven just just said like this is what's
Speaker 6: going to happen, and that is what's going to happen.
Speaker 6: Like we had, you know, banner headlines saying like Amazon
Speaker 6: CEO says Ai is going to take your jobs, and
Speaker 6: it's like, well, he didn't really say how or when
Speaker 6: or by what mechanism, and there's no evidence of it
Speaker 6: happening yet, so what are we talking about.
Speaker 2: It's I think that there is an alarming amount of
Speaker 2: journalism that's excited for it, or there's just a doomerism
Speaker 2: behind it.
Speaker 1: I think you can replace the word Ai in a
Speaker 1: lot of these articles was just God and like this
Speaker 1: is something that like we talked about the first time
Speaker 1: we met in Vegas, right, is how all of these
Speaker 1: like the people who are int Ai talk about it
Speaker 1: as if it's just a cult, and we could like
Speaker 1: like like there's this divine aspect that has like ordain,
Speaker 1: like you have to lose your job because Ai is
Speaker 1: taking God. God has mandated this. And like even even
Speaker 1: like with the you know, talking to an Ai like
Speaker 1: it's a person, they often gain this like divine aspect
Speaker 1: when when people are treating these chatbots like they are
Speaker 1: like scenting in beings, it's like the same way we
Speaker 1: like project divinity onto aspects of nature. And I think
Speaker 1: that is like a big, a big part of it,
Speaker 1: because now you have God telling you that you're actually
Speaker 1: in the matrix and you and you need to do
Speaker 1: this thing, and for some reason, there's not safeguards put
Speaker 1: on this God program to protect you God's creation.
Speaker 5: They're all programmed to be super friendly and to tell
Speaker 5: you that you're great. And it's like if you if
Speaker 5: you're actually like trying to use this thing and you're
Speaker 5: viewing it as you talking to you, like I have
Speaker 5: to tell chat JPT all the time you're putting too
Speaker 5: much flattery in. You have to cap all of your
Speaker 5: flattery at one percent because I can't, I can't handle you,
Speaker 5: and I need you to like explain why everything you
Speaker 5: said has no bias or as little bias as possible,
Speaker 5: or to explain all of your bias in it so
Speaker 5: that I can read and evaluate and just go like, no,
Speaker 5: that's not it. And I've been told I'm insane for
Speaker 5: like programming all the AI I talk to you that way.
Speaker 2: Sample output shit, it's making it's adjusting a program to
Speaker 2: do a thing for you.
Speaker 3: It is because like if you just leave it at
Speaker 3: the default.
Speaker 7: It's trying to whop your brain.
Speaker 3: Like if you leave it at the.
Speaker 5: Default, it's just like you've done nothing wrong, you are
Speaker 5: absolutely correct and everything you said, what a brilliant thing
Speaker 5: that you said.
Speaker 3: And if you like listen to that enough times, it
Speaker 3: did well.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think it's whooping your brain because there
Speaker 2: is no intention behind this. They train it whatever, but
Speaker 2: they could relatively ease put a thing saying just to
Speaker 2: be clear you are talking to you. This is They
Speaker 2: don't want to do that, and I think it might
Speaker 2: be want to be another of the goombas from open AI.
Speaker 1: It breaks the illusion, right, like it's they need to.
Speaker 1: It's like the Wizard of Oz thing. Yes, but they
Speaker 1: should break the illusions. They have to, but they don't want.
Speaker 7: They don't want to because it means they will get.
Speaker 5: Less tension, economy the less. But it breaks the engagement.
Speaker 5: You're not going to engage with it if you're like,
Speaker 5: this is obviously a robot.
Speaker 6: That's that's the part where I get actually emotional and
Speaker 6: angry about AI is when the CEOs of these companies
Speaker 6: talk about it. They talk about it as if it's
Speaker 6: inevitable and we have no agency. That's where the god
Speaker 6: thing comes in, where it's like, yes, this is happening,
Speaker 6: whether we keep doing it or not, and.
Speaker 2: We are the ones who will fix it of course.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's like, oh yeah, I mean Sam Altman, I
Speaker 6: was just rereading, like.
Speaker 2: Uh the Gentle Singularity that fucking blog.
Speaker 6: Oh I hadn't read that one. No, I was talking
Speaker 6: about he created world coin. Oh God, because he's so
Speaker 6: convinced that.
Speaker 2: Let me stop you there. Okay, No, I just want
Speaker 2: to stop you because you said he's so convinced. Your
Speaker 2: only source of information for that claim is Sam Wiltman.
Speaker 2: Sam Oltman did world coin so we could sell a cryptocurrency.
Speaker 2: That's the only reason. Yes, so we could collect a
Speaker 2: bunch of No, he's so convinced. He's convinced of nothing,
Speaker 2: I believe. Okay, this is literally and the pitch, the.
Speaker 6: Pitch of world Coin, I like, I interviewed their ceo.
Speaker 6: I had a lovely conversation with him. Sorry, but you
Speaker 6: know the pitch is AI is going to become so
Speaker 6: ubiquitous and it's going to destroy all the jobs and
Speaker 6: flatten the economy, and we're going to have to have
Speaker 6: this ubi that's distributed by by this blockchain mechanism. And
Speaker 6: I'm sitting here and I'm going, yes, but we don't
Speaker 6: have we are actually full agents in this world. Like
Speaker 6: we all need to step back and realize that we
Speaker 6: have of sovereignty over what we do in the technology
Speaker 6: we make and how we regulate it. And it's a
Speaker 6: real just like kind of uh abdication of responsibility for
Speaker 6: society where I'm just like, what what do we want
Speaker 6: to make for future generations? And that's all the like
Speaker 6: problem that comes out of Silicon Valley is like building
Speaker 6: a better future, and it's like you can't have both things.
Speaker 2: Where are you building?
Speaker 5: It's because like what they really are building is money
Speaker 5: machine go up, and like that's the main thing. It's
Speaker 5: like they say all this lip service about making everything better,
Speaker 5: Well you could gear cancer.
Speaker 3: That would like legitimately make everything.
Speaker 5: They will, Sure, so you could do that, but it's
Speaker 5: like their first and foremost.
Speaker 2: I believe Joe Biden will cure cancer before Samulman. Both
Speaker 2: have claimed they will. I believe Joe Biden would. No,
Speaker 2: I mean neither of them will do it, which is
Speaker 2: my larger point. But I mean, you're both wrong because
Speaker 2: it's a click to quote Sam Altman. As data center
Speaker 2: production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge
Speaker 2: to near the cost of electricity. People are often curious
Speaker 2: about how much energy chat GPT queries use. The average
Speaker 2: query is zero point three four what hours? About what
Speaker 2: an oven would use a little over a second. Now,
Speaker 2: someone who's almost immediately thrown water on this entire thing.
Speaker 2: But this blog A Gentle Singularity by Sam Mortman was
Speaker 2: quoted like scripture by everyone, and that I think it.
Speaker 2: I'd love that you brought up divinity GEG, because it
Speaker 2: really is just like this pseudo religious it's religion, capitalism,
Speaker 2: it's all. It's just we found a way to love
Speaker 2: a company like a god and also kind of abdicate
Speaker 2: any responsibility or thinking about it, because when you look
Speaker 2: at the people who love AI and the way they
Speaker 2: talk about it, it's not about what's happening today. It's
Speaker 2: no in it. They're like in the future when this happens.
Speaker 1: No, it's always it's always this future privacy. And if
Speaker 1: if we believe in this god enough and if we
Speaker 1: build up this religion enough it can deliver us a
Speaker 1: infinite automated money machine.
Speaker 2: But what's crazy is the money machine is bad. It
Speaker 2: doesn't make any money. It loses some. They spent three
Speaker 2: hundred and seventy twenty seven billion dollars in cattle expenditures
Speaker 2: this year are projected to and the revenue of this
Speaker 2: industry is like forty billion dollars.
Speaker 5: That's because money is fake until you have none.
Speaker 3: That's the only time real the thing.
Speaker 2: Money will run out. Money go down, money go down.
Speaker 2: That work good. And the story that's really been twisting
Speaker 2: me up this week was telling you about Early and
Speaker 2: I swear it won't be this boring is open Ai
Speaker 2: is Microsoft's biggest customer ten billion dollars in projected revenue
Speaker 2: this year for Azure, and a zero revenue has been
Speaker 2: kind of like not growing so good. So we just
Speaker 2: have one of the largest tech companies in the world
Speaker 2: that is just handing itself cash. And as part of
Speaker 2: the deal when they funded them in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: they funded them principally in cloud compute credits. So ten
Speaker 2: billion dollars of microsoft reddit of revenue is going to
Speaker 2: be partially in air miles and everyone just sitting around
Speaker 2: being like this is great. On top of that, ten
Speaker 2: billion dollars a revenue from open ai, so thirteen billion
Speaker 2: total from Microsoft. Then open ai projected to make twelve
Speaker 2: point seven billion dollars. Half of the revenue in this
Speaker 2: fucking industry is open ai or the slop, the cost
Speaker 2: slop of open Ai.
Speaker 1: It's okay, yed, we can we can just keep blowing
Speaker 1: up the balloon. It's never gonna pop. You can keep
Speaker 1: blowing it up.
Speaker 2: It's just crazy.
Speaker 1: We found the infinite balloon. It's this crazy material that's indestructible.
Speaker 1: You can keep blowing more in and it's gonna be fine.
Speaker 2: It's just it's so funny as it kind of is
Speaker 2: gonna be fine.
Speaker 4: It's so good.
Speaker 2: I just feel like AI is just like the imbecile magnet.
Speaker 2: It's just this idea that people who don't really know
Speaker 2: stuff but have got to positions of power can go Yes,
Speaker 2: finally a thing that will make up the reason I
Speaker 2: have to buy it for me.
Speaker 6: I see this in journalism all the time. I'm getting
Speaker 6: like conversations about well AI could replace entry level journalism jobs.
Speaker 6: I think that's like a real concern if you're like
Speaker 6: just a I started as a copy editor with zero responsibilities,
Speaker 6: is other than like finding typos and misspellings and occasionally
Speaker 6: getting to write a headline and being like, oh, thank
Speaker 6: you for letting me write a headline. And I could
Speaker 6: see a large language model filling that in, in which
Speaker 6: case I don't get a jumping off point to do
Speaker 6: what I want to do.
Speaker 2: I mean, they've been off showing those jobs as well.
Speaker 2: It's just another off showing.
Speaker 6: My point is I've been in this for like twenty
Speaker 6: years and it was happening. Then it might happen at
Speaker 6: a more accelerated timeframe with AI. But I'm skeptical you're
Speaker 6: still going to need as we saw with that Chicago
Speaker 6: Uhhago summer book list, you know, like in case anyone
Speaker 6: missed it, you know, you got the authors right and
Speaker 6: then just made up complete horseshit for the books that
Speaker 6: they didn't write and were about whatever AI made hallucinated
Speaker 6: they were about. You know, an entry level copy editor
Speaker 6: would have caught that. But we've all already fired those people.
Speaker 6: We've already laid off the entry copy editors. So you know,
Speaker 6: all of these things, these ways that like technology is
Speaker 6: going to create job losses. That's that's standard in our age.
Speaker 6: AI is going to create some job losses. Yes, is
Speaker 6: it going to be the what was it white color
Speaker 6: blood bath? I don't think so.
Speaker 2: On to twenty percent unemployment according to Warrio Ami Day
Speaker 2: and it's that's a CEO of Anthropic and his name
Speaker 2: is Wario. Everyone makes the type on type Staria. I'm
Speaker 2: not sure why it's in books and literature, so let's
Speaker 2: start correcting the record. It fucking pisses me off as well,
Speaker 2: because there I mentioned it earlier. There's almost like a
Speaker 2: excitement in journalism for job loss in AI. Maybe it's
Speaker 2: due rism, maybe they're just like, oh, I'll get ahead
Speaker 2: of this, but it feels almost like they want it
Speaker 2: to happen and they want it so that it proves
Speaker 2: AI is the big point is religious to get fucking Chrystal.
Speaker 7: It always it always comes back to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is that we've been talking about this for two
Speaker 1: years like like this this like cultish nexus around around AI.
Speaker 1: I mean this is this goes like the like the
Speaker 1: early super intelligence hype of like the twenty teens.
Speaker 7: Right, It's it's it's all God of this idea.
Speaker 2: Wait, there was a hype cycle on that. How'd I
Speaker 2: fucking forget that one?
Speaker 1: There was well, like like the rockospasiless thing, right, Oh god,
Speaker 1: it's it's the very like the earliestages of this.
Speaker 7: Yeah, like viewing AI like this inevitable God.
Speaker 2: I have you heard of Eliza Yudowski? Sounds familiar, but
Speaker 2: is the I keep having this person brought up to
Speaker 2: me by serious people. He is a person that writes
Speaker 2: about a g I and writes scary. He wrote like
Speaker 2: a fan fic, Harry Potter fan fiction, with ag yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I just want to be clear. If anyone else brings
Speaker 2: him up to me, I'm gonna email back just some
Speaker 2: sort of obscenity, because you should not take this man seriously,
Speaker 2: he writes Harry Potter fan fiction. He has just ingratiated
Speaker 2: himself with other cultists from Less Wrong, and I see
Speaker 2: real journalists mentioning them, and it's almost like people just
Speaker 2: want to find any possible proof they're right so that
Speaker 2: they can ignore the signs that everyone's wrong. And I
Speaker 2: also think that regular people see the problems of AI
Speaker 2: way more than the journalists though, And it's strange, it's bizarre.
Speaker 2: It's like another thing I forget who said this. If
Speaker 2: you're the person that said this to me, I'm very
Speaker 2: sorry for forgetting. But it's like everyone feels bad that
Speaker 2: they missed out on social media and calling social media
Speaker 2: is the best biggest movement, or they feel bad on
Speaker 2: missing out in GPUs and not saying GPUs have pushed
Speaker 2: the next thing. And by the way, there are people
Speaker 2: who tried in like twenty seventeen to say GPUs would
Speaker 2: be the next computing thing. They were ignored. It was
Speaker 2: crazy how early they were.
Speaker 6: But it's and journalists in particular were late to the Internet. Yes,
Speaker 6: so we're there's probably an institutional bias toward taking tech
Speaker 6: seriously because we are paying for brushing off the Internet
Speaker 6: in two thousand.
Speaker 2: I think I'm going to start in a war show
Speaker 2: called the fel for It Awards. That's a good idea,
Speaker 2: and I'm gonna when because it's like you say that
Speaker 2: and they were late. They weren't late to the metaverse.
Speaker 2: How'd that go? They were late to crypto but NFTs, that's.
Speaker 6: Says crypto sucks And it's hard to talk, like it's
Speaker 6: hard to explain.
Speaker 3: Yeah, having to explain the blockchain.
Speaker 2: No, it's it's the problem with crypto is it's complex.
Speaker 2: But you can explain it quite simply as a decentralized database.
Speaker 2: But when you explain it like that, it sounds fucking
Speaker 2: boring because it is. Yes, it's connected to money. Sometimes.
Speaker 2: I wrote about crypto for years, and every time I
Speaker 2: think about writing it again, I feel sad. But it
Speaker 2: come do my job, sure, sure, absolutely, give me a
Speaker 2: CNN column. Michael Balabano kicked my ass up, but it's there.
Speaker 2: He's a wonderful merite. It's just so frustrating as well,
Speaker 2: because as ever, and I'm kind of paraphrasing The Big Show,
Speaker 2: it's like the people who get fucked here are regular
Speaker 2: people AI bubble bursts. It's not like Sa sam Oltman
Speaker 2: will be humiliated. I will make sure of it. But
Speaker 2: it's not like Warrio or Sammy Clammy. Sammy Clammy. Sammy
Speaker 2: is going to get done in. At the end of this,
Speaker 2: it's gonna be the stocks are going to crash to fuck.
Speaker 2: People's pensions will be fucked. I mean, thirty five percent
Speaker 2: of the American stock market is magnificent seven nineteen percent
Speaker 2: of that it's in video. I think forty two percent
Speaker 2: of Nvidia's revenue is magnificent seven stocks. I will have
Speaker 2: a citation in this, notes Laura Bratton at Yahoo Finance
Speaker 2: the goat. But it's going to hit everyone, but it's
Speaker 2: not going to I don't think it'd be great financial
Speaker 2: crisis level, but it's going to be really bad. And
Speaker 2: I don't think these AI companies are going to be
Speaker 2: offering the free spigot anymore. It costs them so much money.
Speaker 2: So we're going to see all of this get like
Speaker 2: it will still be there, but like this festering hole
Speaker 2: the side of in the side of the tech industry
Speaker 2: as everyone goes, what the fuck's next?
Speaker 1: Do you have such a beautiful way with where it's in?
Speaker 2: Yes, kind of the way.
Speaker 6: The metaverse still exists within ye book, but like it's
Speaker 6: not the star Child okay anymore.
Speaker 2: I was talking talking to me lad later last night
Speaker 2: about this, and it was driving me insane. Isn't it
Speaker 2: fucking insane? Meta A multi trillion market cap company just went,
Speaker 2: don't worry, legs are coming in the metaverse and then
Speaker 2: just went, actually they're not.
Speaker 5: Actually we're pitty.
Speaker 2: A huge company just lied. They lied constantly for like
Speaker 2: over a year you had people being like, absolutely believe
Speaker 2: you one hundred percent, and then everyone just went, Oh,
Speaker 2: isn't that fucking straight? What the fuck is going It's
Speaker 2: it's weirder than the AI thing, though the AI thing
Speaker 2: is pretty weird. It's like we live tech journalism sometimes
Speaker 2: lives in an alternate reality. Oh yeah, it's so. I
Speaker 2: don't know. I don't know what's going on with a
Speaker 2: lot of things, but in particular, it just feels like
Speaker 2: it would be more fun if we were honest. It
Speaker 2: would be so much more fun. I wrote a thing
Speaker 2: today since coming out in a few days. So the
Speaker 2: thing they'reright on Monday is just make fun of them
Speaker 2: because they're not charming. They're not interesting, they're not hot,
Speaker 2: none of them are tasty looking.
Speaker 1: I think sen Altman has had some work done recently.
Speaker 1: Do you think he as his lips are looking a
Speaker 1: little fuller.
Speaker 2: Than Juicy Sam? Juicy Samultman. All right, that's a new
Speaker 2: that's a new phrase to me to text eight people.
Speaker 2: But it's it's like, they're not charming, they're not interesting.
Speaker 2: Seve Job's complete monster, but at least interesting to listen to.
Speaker 2: They're boring, they're all management consultants. They don't. I went
Speaker 2: and reread the iPhone announcement today, and the beginning is
Speaker 2: him just being like, yeah, we did this, we did this,
Speaker 2: and then we came up with the thing that did
Speaker 2: all of this, and I'm about to show you. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I get why people cheered that. But now it's like.
Speaker 1: I tried watching the Liquid Glas presentation. I fell asleep
Speaker 1: in like five to seven minutes there, damn. And like,
Speaker 1: I think there's parts of liquid Glass that seemed compelling.
Speaker 1: I hopefully it'll get worked out before it has the
Speaker 1: full launch, but like it's presented in the most non
Speaker 1: compelling way possible.
Speaker 5: It's glass based on vision os from the most successful
Speaker 5: the most.
Speaker 4: Successful Apple product.
Speaker 2: You remember the vision pro No, me neither. But that's
Speaker 2: the thing as well. I'm trying to get us excited
Speaker 2: for liquid ass. And it's very confusing as well, because
Speaker 2: you could just describe it in a boring mind said, yeah,
Speaker 2: just be very matter of fact about it. But I
Speaker 2: guess it's for shareholders, but is it even No, even
Speaker 2: the most slimy Apple people were kind.
Speaker 6: Of like they needed a literal shiny thing to distract
Speaker 6: from the how.
Speaker 2: About they fixed tapping in screenshots. My screenshots do not
Speaker 2: crop properly. You work for Apple and you know why,
Speaker 2: email me, but it's oh, I don't know. Make up
Speaker 2: devices work good. They're all a mess everything.
Speaker 5: Like if you think about the iPhone, it's seventeen years old.
Speaker 5: It's ready to go to college. Carry people who are
Speaker 5: twenty one, who can vote and go to war and
Speaker 5: do all those things, most likely have no memory of
Speaker 5: a life before the smartphone. Right, Like, we're at a
Speaker 5: point where people want what's next, and so I think
Speaker 5: you just have like tech journalism, we have to chase
Speaker 5: clicks and seo farm bait, we have to chase all
Speaker 5: of the to stay alive. And so it's very much like.
Speaker 3: This is the next thing.
Speaker 5: Get height because if you all care, it's like we're
Speaker 5: looking for the next Game of Thrones, but for tech.
Speaker 5: Because Game of Thrones was such a huge traffic magnet
Speaker 5: that literally anything that happened like wrah, we're all drinking
Speaker 5: at the tit of like seo traffic and ad moneys
Speaker 5: are coming in. So I just think there is like
Speaker 5: an incentive and like you know, journalists always get pushed
Speaker 5: in any doesn't matter who you write for, you always
Speaker 5: get pushed to like do the next big thing, find
Speaker 5: the next big trend, and.
Speaker 6: If you're a bit way journalist, you have to think
Speaker 6: about what's the next election, Who's going to be the
Speaker 6: next thing?
Speaker 3: You know, It's like what's the what's the take?
Speaker 2: And I think that the reason no one wants to
Speaker 2: write that is the there's nothing left.
Speaker 1: I don't mean that's a scary thought, right, It's like
Speaker 1: what if this is?
Speaker 5: It?
Speaker 1: Like like we're trying to come up with what's the
Speaker 1: thing that will be the new thing after the smartphone?
Speaker 1: And like it's like a like ar contacts, like come
Speaker 1: on every red in a minute, Like it's it's until
Speaker 1: we start getting the chips implanted, Like and I.
Speaker 6: Thought Joni I was hired to fix this, to figure
Speaker 6: out what the what that's the phone?
Speaker 2: That's not a phone. We've come up with a new
Speaker 2: kind of phone.
Speaker 5: It's I mean, I just think we're at a point
Speaker 5: where like the tech is stalled out, right, because if
Speaker 5: you have like the law of diminishing returns and just.
Speaker 2: Wrote com bubble our episode lost you is though it's
Speaker 2: we're at the are we at the I'm not gonna
Speaker 2: say end of history because people misquote for Kuyama. But
Speaker 2: it's we're at the end actually, anyway, I'll get back
Speaker 2: to Laa. It's we're at the end of innovation for
Speaker 2: a minute, because if you look at how they're trying
Speaker 2: to innovate right now. First of all, I know I've
Speaker 2: been making fun of the overpaying people, but the overpaying
Speaker 2: thing they're doing is only something you do if you
Speaker 2: have no fucking clues.
Speaker 7: They don't know what to do.
Speaker 2: Yea. Yeah, they're just throwing around money. They're investing three
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty seven billion dollars this year into something
Speaker 2: they don't They built massive data centers. I don't think
Speaker 2: that any of I think they all kind of have
Speaker 2: realized there might not be you next thing, and I
Speaker 2: think that their obsession has become something different, which is
Speaker 2: line go up, money, go up. But how can I
Speaker 2: charge you ten dollars a month? How can I charge
Speaker 2: you and a thousand people at your organization thirty dollars
Speaker 2: a month? To the point that they don't know how
Speaker 2: to do math anymore, And they're like, well, I got
Speaker 2: you to pay thirty dollars. It cost me seventy five
Speaker 2: to get that money from you. But I don't know
Speaker 2: how to fix that, But what if I spent more
Speaker 2: money to find out? Maybe I don't know and they
Speaker 2: don't know how. And they will say this if you
Speaker 2: ask questions, which people tend not to with these people.
Speaker 2: And it's just even you've got analysts doing And so
Speaker 2: there was an analyst earlier who's like, oh, yeah, Google's
Speaker 2: are they're making three point one billion dollars in Google
Speaker 2: one subscriptions because of AI and it's not they just
Speaker 2: like Google one subscriptions have gone up, and they're like, fuck,
Speaker 2: I think it's AI.
Speaker 1: I mean this is this is why everyone's focused on
Speaker 1: it on AIS because it's like it's like the final
Speaker 1: boss of our like collective tech like unconsciousness. Right, It's
Speaker 1: the thing Victoria you were talking about earlier. It's like
Speaker 1: like in like you know, like eighties sci fi. This
Speaker 1: is always like the final thing. Yeah, after we've gotten
Speaker 1: like you know, augmented reality, you got the contacts, got
Speaker 1: the glasses, like AIS, that's like the last thing that's
Speaker 1: the last like ghost of our of our past that
Speaker 1: we're still trying to chase. That's this thing that's still
Speaker 1: trying to like control us, like time traveling, like backwards
Speaker 1: in time, this idea that eventually we will we will
Speaker 1: have this AI thing and like it is, Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It is like the final boss and we're always trying
Speaker 1: to chase it and we're coming up with like the
Speaker 1: barrier of like maybe this thing isn't actually ever gonna
Speaker 1: be real.
Speaker 2: And I think they think it's the magical thing because
Speaker 2: it will tell them how to run their business.
Speaker 1: Because it'll it'll tell them what's actually the only this
Speaker 1: is as far as we can get, and then we
Speaker 1: have to create something smarter than us so it can
Speaker 1: tell us what the next thing will be, because this
Speaker 1: is the final thing we can imagine and it's like
Speaker 1: this is like it.
Speaker 2: But even when you listen to Clammy Sammy talking about it,
Speaker 2: and he'll say he will be like you see Sami,
Speaker 2: you Sie sam Oldman. Clammy Sammy's thing he always says
Speaker 2: is I can't wait to see what you'll build with this,
Speaker 2: and it's like, motherfucker, that is your job. And that's
Speaker 2: actually the thing with AI as well. I'm always being
Speaker 2: to But the few haters who dare ender my dojo
Speaker 2: is they say, oh, well you don't know how to
Speaker 2: use it, right, You're not doing it correctly. I think
Speaker 2: even Alison you might have mentioned this like holding it
Speaker 2: wrong thing. But it's like, no, I am the customer.
Speaker 2: I am I am paying you for work. I shouldn't
Speaker 2: have to write a nine hundred and fifty word prompt
Speaker 2: that tells you to imagine you're a spaceman or whatever,
Speaker 2: like whatever makes it work. Fuck you, fuck you man,
Speaker 2: I'm me pay you money.
Speaker 1: You give me thing, nine hundred word prompt to generate
Speaker 1: a nine hundred word story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that sucks.
Speaker 2: They're like straight upset. There's just like bereft of. And
Speaker 2: it's also we've handed over society to people that don't
Speaker 2: create things. We've had people who are just like showing
Speaker 2: different faces to enough people that they get where they
Speaker 2: need to go. The business idiot writ large and it's
Speaker 2: just it's so funny as well because it's going to
Speaker 2: fall apart, and when it does, everyone I genuinely, I
Speaker 2: mean I look forward to it because of the obvious
Speaker 2: yucks and chuckles. I will get out of it, but
Speaker 2: there's going to be a really interesting period of journalism
Speaker 2: having to see it and go why did we fall
Speaker 2: for this? And if there isn't, I will make this
Speaker 2: happen with all of my energy. I will hold everyone
Speaker 2: because it's I think, and I'm not insulting. You're out there. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: this is not an insult. I promise. Read the comments
Speaker 2: on AI stories on the Verge.
Speaker 3: I do read that.
Speaker 2: I love reading because you see, regular people are so
Speaker 2: skeptical of this shit.
Speaker 5: Oh no, I read. I read love the comments on
Speaker 5: all the stories that I write, which are just like,
Speaker 5: thank you for calling out how stupid it is.
Speaker 2: Well, that's the thing, though the regular people seem to
Speaker 2: get it.
Speaker 1: There's gonna be well, it depends. Like there's I think
Speaker 1: there's a sector of counter culture that's developing like a
Speaker 1: neo Loodite perspective like beyond just like like you know,
Speaker 1: like like anti tech, like Green anarchists, which have carried
Speaker 1: the bloodite torch for the past like thirty years. We're
Speaker 1: starting to see like like the quote unquote the cool
Speaker 1: kids adopting this like neo Loodite tendency mostly in response
Speaker 1: to like you know, like like alienation and like automation. Right,
Speaker 1: And I think that's trend is going to like continue,
Speaker 1: Like that's gonna it's gonna be like almost like a
Speaker 1: social status, like status like a signifier, is the fact
Speaker 1: that you're not reliant on on these things, because there
Speaker 1: will be a version of the I that does keep
Speaker 1: getting like Normy Afied, I think it's gonna it's there's
Speaker 1: gonna be very like even if you look at the
Speaker 1: way higher education is working right now, like the level
Speaker 1: of people who are graduating just on the basis of
Speaker 1: like AI helping them with large parts of their assignments,
Speaker 1: like I have, I have a few friends who are professors,
Speaker 1: and the majority of assignments that are turned in are
Speaker 1: majority written by AI. And we get to this point,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have like a we're gonna have a new
Speaker 1: generation of the workforce that doesn't really know how to
Speaker 1: do anything because AI has been doing everything for them.
Speaker 1: But they got their degree, you know, like I am
Speaker 1: employable certificate, but now that now they don't really know
Speaker 1: what to do.
Speaker 2: So'sification.
Speaker 1: There's gonna be but there's gonna be a counterculture that
Speaker 1: is like that like refuses to use that. Right, that's
Speaker 1: like I will not be using AI. That's gonna be
Speaker 1: a thing you have to you have to like prove
Speaker 1: and like talk about and it's it's it's gonna be
Speaker 1: a version of a social like.
Speaker 7: Wild like status card.
Speaker 3: Have you heard of clearly?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's the cheat on everything app. And so it
Speaker 5: was invented by this uh Columbia kid drop It, who
Speaker 5: I interviewed him for.
Speaker 3: Oh I heard about this guy.
Speaker 5: Okay, so it's the cheat on everything app. I tested it.
Speaker 5: It helped me cheat on nothing.
Speaker 3: It was terrible.
Speaker 1: I cannot wait all dates go flawless. Now that I
Speaker 1: read from a teleprompter.
Speaker 5: I can't even do that. Like in its current state,
Speaker 5: it's like you use it, it's like a prompt machine
Speaker 5: for when you are on a video call, and it
Speaker 5: very slowly can answer prompts based on a transcript of
Speaker 5: your video. It's it's not that usable. It messed up
Speaker 5: the mics on my computer from testing it to this
Speaker 5: point where like I deleted it from my computer and
Speaker 5: video uh software programs like Google Meet and Zoom will
Speaker 5: pick a non existent cluly mic And I'm just like,
Speaker 5: I don't love.
Speaker 7: That's concerning it.
Speaker 5: But you know, cool, yeah, but you know, like as
Speaker 5: soon as I wrote that story up, someone another company
Speaker 5: messaged me is like, we're using AI to catch the
Speaker 5: AI cheaters, and I was.
Speaker 2: Like, Okay, finally we have bare Force from the Simpsons
Speaker 2: solving this problem we created.
Speaker 4: That's the perfect use case for AI.
Speaker 1: Though, using AI to fix all the problems cast by AI,
Speaker 1: that's the real.
Speaker 2: I think it's beautiful.
Speaker 4: I think that's the actual singularity.
Speaker 2: We've created problems to create solutions for neither of them work.
Speaker 2: But clearly the one of the people from Andresen went
Speaker 2: on a podcast is like, yeah, you know, it's when
Speaker 2: marketing and virality overtake making a perfect Artesian product. It's like,
Speaker 2: what you mean is when something goes viral for fucking
Speaker 2: lying lying, like it was a lie. Like when you
Speaker 2: say something that is not true intentionally, that's called lying.
Speaker 1: It's called an i RL hallution.
Speaker 5: Yes, it's weird because the way that app was born,
Speaker 5: and initially it was like some other app that was
Speaker 5: used to kind of make a point about how stupid
Speaker 5: technical interviews are for devs, right, and I was like,
Speaker 5: that's actually kind of radical, and like it is proving
Speaker 5: a point and you have lost the point and now
Speaker 5: you have five million dollars in some somebody is going
Speaker 5: into one hundred thousand dollars commercials and nice apartment.
Speaker 2: Did you hear about Mira Marathi though, the former CTO
Speaker 2: of Open Ai and her new startup, Intelligent Machines. No
Speaker 2: one is so they raised I think like a billion dollars,
Speaker 2: I want to say, and they did not share anything
Speaker 2: about the financials. They also did not share anything about
Speaker 2: the product, so anyone investing just went into room mirror.
Speaker 2: Maarati went yes, so I need money, mean money now,
Speaker 2: and they went fuck yeah. Absolutely. There were reports where
Speaker 2: people would do the vcs were just like, can you
Speaker 2: share anything? You said no. On top of this, and
Speaker 2: by the way, I admire the scam at this point,
Speaker 2: I just get it. She has her voting rights supersede everyone.
Speaker 2: Get it now. I fuck these pigs who cannot even
Speaker 2: bother to even think about what they're building or what
Speaker 2: it is they do. They just like, I will take
Speaker 2: an I will give you an unlimited amount of money
Speaker 2: because of the vibes I have, because of the I
Speaker 2: would love to know. I definitely had a moment where
Speaker 2: I'm like.
Speaker 5: Could I vibes give me money, give me one hundred
Speaker 5: million money, and I will vague vaguely promise to mark
Speaker 5: something in the future at a time I will.
Speaker 2: I will never do anything, I will guarantee you that.
Speaker 2: I mean, Ilia Suits gave it the other open aye
Speaker 2: guy misreported by Pivot to AI that generally does good
Speaker 2: work but needs to work on their fucking headlines, suggesting
Speaker 2: that they guaranteed they would not do anything into a superintelligence,
Speaker 2: when the actual headline was that they said they have
Speaker 2: nothing and they want to build superintelligence, which is way funnier.
Speaker 2: I honestly at this point like it's evil to lie
Speaker 2: and extract capital, but the people you're extracting it from
Speaker 2: your wallet inspecting them. But also you could fix almost
Speaker 2: you could fix like world hunger, I think for six
Speaker 2: billion dollars. They worked at it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, you could and challenge Gilan Musk and he said,
Speaker 6: if you figure out the number, I'll give it to you.
Speaker 6: And then they figured out the number.
Speaker 2: The numbers not based. It's very upsetting. I saw an
Speaker 2: out there as well say today that Grock only makes
Speaker 2: a hundred million dollars in revenue. It's so fucking cool
Speaker 2: as well, they'll burn money.
Speaker 5: I I mean, just give it to me, give it
Speaker 5: to me, or so to me. Give sponsor a journalist.
Speaker 5: We too can sponsor a journalist to live a life.
Speaker 2: And the funny thing is is, like, I actually think
Speaker 2: you could make a shit ton of profitable journalism just
Speaker 2: by like talking about this bluntly. I'm doing it all
Speaker 2: the time. But it's it's weird, and I actually it's
Speaker 2: kind of wrap us up as well. I have to
Speaker 2: wonder if at the end of this farce whether there
Speaker 2: will be a rise of critical tech journalists. I'm not
Speaker 2: holding my hopes out, but I think that there is
Speaker 2: a slog Like you two, actually, Victoria Allison, You've both
Speaker 2: inspired me a bit that it's possible.
Speaker 4: It's just right, that's true.
Speaker 3: I try it, and I tell you what happened.
Speaker 4: When I tried it.
Speaker 5: That's it.
Speaker 3: Imagine my job.
Speaker 2: Imagine that. Imagine if that happened on Hardfalk. Sorry but
Speaker 2: I'm saying nothing. No, I know, I know, I know.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to let these are my opinions just mine.
Speaker 2: I think about them all the time. It's I'm hoping
Speaker 2: this happens because I think you've got Brian Merchant, You've
Speaker 2: got Edwinald grayce So Junior, and Molly White, of course,
Speaker 2: one of the fucking best in the business. Molly's great
Speaker 2: Molly is You've got really good criticism, and I think
Speaker 2: people are hungry for it. The reason I brought up
Speaker 2: the Virgin's comments is this isn't like any kind of
Speaker 2: fun making. It's you see people saying it now, just
Speaker 2: being like, hey, why the fuck am I having to
Speaker 2: pretend here? And I just I think it's the business
Speaker 2: idiot idea I had a few months ago where it's like, hey,
Speaker 2: maybe we've handed over our eccon and me are finances,
Speaker 2: the editorial structure of some publications and the people with
Speaker 2: the biggest microphones to people that don't understand a single
Speaker 2: goddamn thing. And it's kind of that scares me more
Speaker 2: than anything, because we talk about the harms of generative
Speaker 2: AI and it's yeah, there is no intention. No intention
Speaker 2: is far scarier than people being like they want all
Speaker 2: of your data and all this when they have no idea.
Speaker 2: I was actually kind of disappointed. Meredith's Meredith Wird toa
Speaker 2: care of signal. She's really good Admira her daily. She
Speaker 2: said a thing on stage about how like, yeah, AI agents,
Speaker 2: which is the marketing term, but they're going to do this,
Speaker 2: and they're going to do this. Whenever anyone speaks about
Speaker 2: AI agents just imagine like clown noises, circus music if
Speaker 2: it helps. Because AI agents do not exist, they do
Speaker 2: not work. There are people who are getting close to
Speaker 2: a thing that might work. One time, they had a
Speaker 2: big study out of salesforce. So like after with multi
Speaker 2: step processes, you know, things that require you to do
Speaker 2: more than one thing. Yeah, it failed like less more
Speaker 2: than I think it's like more than thirty two percent
Speaker 2: of the time. It's like, sorry, I only succeeded thirty
Speaker 2: two percent of the time, which is very bad and
Speaker 2: not getting better. And it's like, this is what everyone's
Speaker 2: talking about AI agents despite they're not working. I realized
Speaker 2: the sentence started at one point and it's going to
Speaker 2: end it that I feel like I'm going fucking insane
Speaker 2: every time I read the news and they see a
Speaker 2: new thing that does not exist and everyone says it exists.
Speaker 2: Am I crazy? Am I having a problem? Like it's
Speaker 2: I mean, yes, but is that why I'm reading the
Speaker 2: stuff that doesn't exist? It's just driving me insane. But
Speaker 2: now you've said the divinity thing, I'm just like, this
Speaker 2: isn't actually about building stuff. This is a belief system
Speaker 2: and plate spinning. This is just an intention to build
Speaker 2: a vibeespased economy, except it can't last long term, oh God.
Speaker 6: Or until the next the next revolution that replaces the
Speaker 6: AI god. You know, if like industrial revolution and modernity
Speaker 6: killed God, quak God, then maybe AI is the is
Speaker 6: the demigod that we that we replace God with, and
Speaker 6: then something else will happen.
Speaker 2: Sam Altman is the Antichrist.
Speaker 4: Many many people are saying that.
Speaker 2: Many people, many.
Speaker 6: People in a New York City podcasting studio are saying, did.
Speaker 4: I do that?
Speaker 2: It's sorry, it's but even then, the reason I say
Speaker 2: is the Antichrist is not any recent interviews on the
Speaker 2: New York Times podcast. It's specifically about the fact that
Speaker 2: he is able to charm every business idiot. He's so
Speaker 2: good at it. He's good at saying nothing in a
Speaker 2: way that makes people give him a billion dollars. And
Speaker 2: he is wrapped. I think he's wrapped everyone up in
Speaker 2: this insanity, and no one really knows why they're doing it.
Speaker 2: You've got journalists, you've got investors, you've got consumers even
Speaker 2: who are like chasing this dream. And I genuinely think
Speaker 2: he may lead the tech industry to a kind of ruin.
Speaker 2: I don't think all the companies are going to shut down.
Speaker 2: But this is the ultimate hubris of basing everything in
Speaker 2: tech on venture capital invested by people don't really understand,
Speaker 2: and public companies run by people with nbas. Every single
Speaker 2: Mark Zuckerberg's rarity. He doesn't have an MBA, but all
Speaker 2: the rest of them do. Even the guy who replaced
Speaker 2: Andy Jesse Aws the cloud part of Amazon has an NBA.
Speaker 2: Nbas are everywhere. I think we should bar them from
Speaker 2: running companies and also being allowed to just don't give
Speaker 2: houses or healthcare. No, sorry, I'll stop that one there,
Speaker 2: But it's just I don't know. We're all going to
Speaker 2: suffer for this. I will I'll blog about it, I guess,
Speaker 2: and we'll all blog, we'll do podcasts, gere, but you
Speaker 2: know what, I'm gonna wrap it on that happy note there,
Speaker 2: get Where can people find you?
Speaker 1: Well? I help run a daily Yike's news show, four calls,
Speaker 1: and media called it could happen here. That's who you
Speaker 1: can find most of my work. Right now, I'm finishing
Speaker 1: my final piece on the stop cup City movement in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: as well as an upcoming piece on liberal accelerationism.
Speaker 2: So what is that?
Speaker 7: You know?
Speaker 4: That's the pieces about.
Speaker 2: Well, we'll have to find out and listen to it. Alison,
Speaker 2: Where can people find you?
Speaker 6: I read a business newsletter for CNN called Nightcap. You
Speaker 6: can just google CNN Business Nightcap and I'm on Blue
Speaker 6: Sky and Victoria.
Speaker 5: You can find me at the Verge and all my
Speaker 5: handles on everything Blue Sky, Twitter, Instagram, all the things
Speaker 5: is at vicmsong.
Speaker 2: You can find me inside your computer. That's where I live.
Speaker 2: I'm d Zetron. You've been listening to Better Offline. Thank you,
Speaker 2: of course to our wonderful producer Daniel Goodman. You've been
Speaker 2: hearing us recorded out of the beautiful New York City, Nevada.
Speaker 2: And yeah, you keep listening to my goddamn show. We'll
Speaker 2: have a monologue this week as well. Be sou thank
Speaker 2: you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer
Speaker 2: of the Better Offline theme song is Metasowski. You can
Speaker 2: check out more of his music and audio projects at
Speaker 2: Matasowski dot com.
Speaker 4: M A. T.
Speaker 2: T OsO w Ski. You can email me at easy
Speaker 2: at Better Offline dot com or visit Better Offline dot
Speaker 2: com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter.
Speaker 2: I also really recommend you go to chat dot Where's
Speaker 2: youread dot at to visit the discord, and go to
Speaker 2: our slash Better Offline to check out I'll Reddit. Thank
Speaker 2: you so much for listening.
Speaker 4: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 2: Zonemedia dot com, or check us
Speaker 6: Out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 6: get your podcasts.