Intelligent Machines 868: Happy Hamburgers Towing Timmy To The Sea

It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris Martineau is here. Well, she will be. She's stuck on a train right now. But our guest is here, and I'm very excited. We'll be talking to Nirav Patel. He is the founder and CEO of Framework, the upgradable computers. He says computing as we know it is about to change forever. Intelligent Machines is next. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Paris Martineau and Jen Jarvis. Episode 868. Recorded Wednesday, April 29th, 2026. Happy hamburgers towing Timmy to the speed. It's time for Intelligent Machines. It's the show where we cover AI, robotics, and all those smart doohickeys all around us. We're surrounded by intelligent machines this day. Paris Martineau is stuck in a tunnel. She'll be here momentarily. Consumer Reports. She's on the subway. That's New York life, right? I probably shouldn't say stuck in a tunnel to this guy, Paris, Jeff Jarvis, because you probably have a little bit of, I don't know, PTSD from 2001. Yeah, I guess so, yep. Jeff Jarvis, Emeritus Professor of Journalistic Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School. Craig, Craig, Craig, Craig Newmark, New York. He's also the author of the Gutenberg Presses Magazine. And the new one, Hot Type, available now for pre-order from Bloomsbury. And Jeff, of course, is teaching now at Montclair and at State University in New Jersey and SUNY Stony Brook. Okay. Enough. I want to get right to our guest. You want to explain who's missing for a second? I did. I said Paris is stuck on a ship. Oh, you said that. I'm sorry. You've got the IRT, which subway? We don't know. Well, Brooklyn can be all of them. Brooklyn's very well served. It's well served. It can be the BMT, the IRT, the IND. They all go to Brooklyn. You know, it's funny. The history of the New York subway system is fascinating. They were all private companies. That's why they all have different names and different routes. But then I guess they all got merged together. Our guest today, Nirav Patel, Claude says, Nirav, that you may be the most interesting hardware founder in tech. I'll take it. I think it's true. Actually, fascinating story. You started at Oculus back in the Kickstarter days. That's right. The Oculus Rift with Palmer Luckey. I was a Kickstarter purchaser of the original Oculus Rift and then bought a couple from Meta, which it turns out you also worked on, including the Quest 2. That's right. That was the last one. And we discussed before we got on what before all this, one laptop per child. That's right. I had an OLPC as well, the green one with the little ears. Did you work on the design for that, or what did you do with that? I worked on the software, actually. So I wrote some webcam interface logic from a software perspective, basically just to make it easier to interface. And it's got just the slowest little embedded AMD Geo processor in it. And it was Smalltalk, right? It was running Smalltalk. It was running Smalltalk for the – yeah, a lot of the system was running Smalltalk. This part of it was running Python, but obviously the webcam interface code was all just pure C. Assembly. Or C, okay. Yeah, C with a little bit of assembly mixed up. So I'm just saying this to say establish his bona fides. You're definitely a hardware guy, right? But it sounds like you had maybe a little bit of epiphany working at meta, making these meta quests, that maybe this wasn't the ideal way to make hardware. That's right. You could say that. So, yeah, you could say I've got the engineering background, but I had to put a suit on, a metaphorical suit since I'm wearing a sweatshirt today. And realized that actually the fundamental problem in the computing industry was not really, in my view, a technical problem or an engineering problem. It was actually truly a business problem. And the business problem was the fundamental misalignment in the incentives of what's good for the companies in the space and what the consumers and businesses buying those machines actually wanted out of those. And an environmental problem. And an environmental problem. That's right. And obviously all those things tie together very tightly. So you decided to found something that anybody would have said is a nutty thing to do, a brand-new laptop company in the face of the Apples and the Dells and the logos of the world and the HPs. What year was that? What year was that when you started? That was in 2020, and you can see 2020 through 2026 is the most interesting period in time to have a hardware startup. Crazy. By the way, if you're looking for it, frame.work is the website. Did you put your own money into this? Did you get venture funding? How did you start a laptop company? Yeah, that's a great question. So I did get this off the ground with my own funding to put into it. And actually, even that first round, we did actually do a venture round in 2021. We called it a seed round. but actually was almost entirely the Oculus friends and family connections that made that round possible because absolutely no venture capitalist wanted to put money into a pre-market laptop company. Are you knocking butts? Yeah. So it's a little bit of that. But then, of course, we did get into market. We proved that, yeah, of course there is demand for this. We showed the sales numbers. and since then we've raised two additional venture-backed rounds that have helped us fuel category expansion especially. That's fantastic. And you've really taken it somewhere. The first framework was a 13-inch laptop. It was fully modular. It came with a screwdriver. That's right. Of course, I've always bought the DIY version. You do ship a version that's preassembled, but I like the DIY, and it's not hard. It's snapping in a RAM module. It's not a tricky thing to do. It's like the Ikea of making computers. Evening it much easier. I'm never building furniture again, but this laptop was easy to put together. It was an amazing thing. I remember Cory Doctorow saying, I'm done with Lenovo's. That's right. It's framework from now on. And, of course, he runs Linux on it. I've always run Linux on my frameworks. You ship them with Windows as well if people want Windows. That's right. I saw an interesting statistic, though, that mostly now, what is it, 60% Linux? It did, yeah, just in the last year or so has tilted over to being majority Linux, which is interesting because obviously from 2021 through 2026, we've grown our sales numbers like multiple times. And you would think that when we did that, we'd get greater percentage share of Windows rather than Linux. So we'd get like all the Linux enthusiasts in on day one, and then we'd get into mainstream. But actually what we've seen is the opposite. We've gone from about 70% Windows now to closer to 40% to 45% Windows, even as we've grown pretty substantially. Isn't that amazing? I think that's a testament to Linux, certainly, to the growth of AI, certainly, but also to the fact that people who buy frameworks are computer nerds. They're serious people. They're serious people. That's a good way to do it. You also expanded the line with a 16-inch. one of the cool things by the way I fixed it 10 out of 10 on the repairability score in that very first 13 inch and consistently 10 out of 10 what's amazing about it and what's pretty much unheard of is you can upgrade it you could put in an AMD processor and an Intel processor you could put a GPU in then you added something that got me really excited there was one little detour that I've already discussed is my disappointment that the framework Chromebook is no longer. Oh, you did do a Chromebook? Yeah, we did retire the Chromebook. Nobody bought it, right? Yeah, it was a little bit of a test between both Google and us. Is there a market for a higher-end Chromebook, a higher-performance Chromebook? And a lot of it for Google at that time was especially around the environmental angle of repairability and longevity. Like, they put, obviously, a lot of focus recently into software longevity, and the hardware wasn't necessarily keeping up with the software at that point. And so for us, it was, okay, let's work together. We can build long-lasting hardware to go with the software that you're now making last longer. And what we found in market was, at least at that time, which was about three years ago, there was unfortunately not a market for a $1,000 Chromebook. That's not to say there couldn't be in the future, but that specific product just didn't quite pan out market-wise. Sorry, Jeff. Sorry. Jeff just bought a Neo, an Apple MacBook Neo. Who replaced my 12-year-old Apple box. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So we're working on them here. We'll get them. We'll get them. One day. You can plug in a GPU to the back, extend it. You can plug an additional battery in. You can have an orange bezel if you want. I love the colored bezels. You can customize it completely. Really nice keyboards, trackpads. The whole thing is modular. It just warms my little heart to what you've done. But then you announced a desktop, which is a little less upgradable than your laptops, right? That's correct, actually, yeah. What prompted the desktop? Yeah, this is an interesting one. We actually get roadmap presentations and reviews from basically all the silicon vendors going out a few years. And a few years ago, AMD came to us with a very, very interesting processor that was just on the horizon for them. And they were actually framing this as basically a high-end laptop processor to compete better with Apple and their very strong unified memory capabilities with a lot of memory bandwidth. And when we looked at that processor, two things were obvious. One, there's no way we could reasonably fit it in a laptop. It was just massive overkill from a size and power perspective that actually fit in any of the laptops that we've been developing. And two, that actually this was going to be a killer processor to bring down the size and power consumption and cost, actually, of a handful of related use cases. So gaming, content creation, general workstation use cases. that actually most interestingly, what was then the emerging use case of being able to run LLMs locally on a machine that you own on your desk. And so that's something that, like, a few years ago we spotted this on the horizon, saw that processor, and decided, okay, we need to enable that use case. This is going to be huge. And for us, we can't fit in a laptop. It doesn't make sense in our laptops. Let's actually build a dedicated machine around this processor. It was that interesting a processor. And now if you'll play the theme from 2001, a Space Odyssey. Da, da, da, da, da, da. It isn't that big. Is that a mini-ITX? What is that? It is actually a mini-ITX. Even though it's not quite as upgradable, the memory is actually soldered. We tried to stick to standards everywhere we could. But it's unified memory. So that's part of the reason the Strix Halo CPU system on a chip is so great. Notice I got the big Noctua fan. Perfect. And the clear screen, because you want to see inside. And then I love the customizability of these little things. The tiles. The tiles. Yeah, we have a little special version here. We 3D printed some not-too-a-brand color. Oh, that's crazy. You're making them jealous. I can tell by the way you're handling it, though. There's nothing inside that box. No, it's not happy, actually. It's been working. Is it? Oh, you're strong, man. I'm going, oh, God. What was the timing of this decision versus the explosion of interest in ChatGPT? So it does align to the cloud models becoming very popular and the cloud services becoming very popular and actually aligns to some of those early model releases that made it clear that, like, there were going to be very capable open-weights models reaching the public, reaching developers and hobbyists, and the hardware was lagging behind it. So, like, LAMA, earlier versions of LAMA were out there in the world, and some of the models coming out of the open source labs in China were starting to get out into the world. But the actual hardware to access that was incredibly difficult to put together. And so we saw that as basically just a hole in the market for us to go and fulfill. When I saw it, I saw it. It was so cute. I want this so badly. And actually, I bought it, then I canceled it, and I bought it again. And I'm glad I did because at this point it's a little more expensive because you, I mean, I got a 128-gig model, the largest you made, with the AMD AI 395 Plus, really nice system on a chip. Designed, I mean, the whole point of this, and you remember this, Jeff, was I wanted to run local AI models. Yep. But this was right before the supply chain crash and the rise in price, not just of RAM, but also now you're faced with rising prices on SSDs. That's right. And I don't even know. Processors. Yeah, processors as well. Wow. So talk about the device that you and your competitors are in right now. Before you do that, I just want to show you one more thing. All of these have this little modular. You can plug in these little – I loved this idea, too. This Framework 13 started with this. So it's really a USB-C port, but you can plug in modular. So I've got Ethernet and another USB-C plugged in on the back. And all the laptops do that, too. so you configure the ports you want. Again, just really nice, thoughtful features that make people very happy. Okay, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Oh, the lights went out. Oh. We still got power in the building, don't we? Okay. What did you ask again? What's the supply chain and all these difficulties doing to you and your competitors? What's it like? Yeah, it is a tricky time. Obviously, there is demand for memory pretty substantially exceeding the supply over a very extended time window as well, unfortunately. And we're kind of in framework kind of at this interesting scale where we have the necessary relationships, let's say the microns of the world and the various module makers and distributors, that we can still get access to memory. Like, we do have a direct relationship with micron. We can still get allocation. Micron stopped selling to consumers. They did. Yeah, they closed down the Crucial Brand, which obviously I know a lot of consumers are justifiably upset about. It does make sense from their perspective that if they don't have enough memory to go around, customers who are buying from them, they don't want to be in a position of then competing with their customers with their own in-house brand. It would just be a challenging business move from their perspective to have to do that. So we definitely get it. We understand why they had to make that move. even though we were also sourcing crucial brand memory from Micron at that time. But we're also, just going back to the scale that we're at, we're also kind of at this interesting scale where we're small enough that we can get creative and be able to grab memory in ways that some of the bigger brands actually can't. So for us, we go and watch the smart market. We go and talk to brokers. And if some broker spots, you know, 5,000 pieces of memory sitting in a warehouse somewhere in the world, For us, we can go and pick that up, and it's meaningful, and it helps us produce more laptops or desktops. For, let's say, an Apple, 5,000 pieces is a rounding error. They wouldn't even bother to talk to that broker. So we're kind of able to navigate in an interesting way because of that. I like that you're a chip dumpster diver. That's right, yeah. We do what we can. We're talking to Nirav Patel, founder and CEO of an amazing company that I'm a happy customer of, Framework at Frame.Work. Paris Martineau is off the train. Out of the tunnel. Hello. They tried to stop me. They tried to trap me underground. You didn't walk down the track, did you? I hope not. You know, I thought about just running through the rat-filled tunnels in New York City, but I figured that you guys could wait a little bit. Yeah, we're fine. I would have done that had there not been cell service in the L tunnel for me to tell you that I'm late. Thank you. I was notoriously bad L. Actually, Nirav just wrote a really important blog piece that has a lot to do with AI. But before I do that, you had another big announcement last week. That's right. So, okay, I'm going to be a little frank. The Framework 13 and 16 were, you know, a little, in order to be modular, they have to be a little, I don't know, kind of clunky a little bit. I mean, I've been very happy with my 13, but people complained, you know, and the battery life wasn't great. And I think you saw an opportunity. You announced basically a MacBook killer last week. Is it as modular? Is it as upgradable? It is every bit as modular, and we actually still ship a screwdriver in the box. Nice. That's right. Yeah, we're not giving up on that part of the philosophy. But the whole idea here is, to some extent, you can look at the original 13 and the 16 and call that maybe like enthusiast-grade product. And that's very, very heavily targeted towards the power user, the DIYer, the tinkerer, the enthusiast, the computer builder. And we did that knowing that we had to do that because we could serve those audiences really well. Like we could build a very, very modular machine with the parts and access that we had into the supply base, with the scale of R&D capabilities, with the funding that we had available to us as a very, very early stage startup. We could build the ideal enthusiast laptop, and we believe we did succeed at doing that. And now six years into that, five years into shipping these products, we're operating at a scale. We have the funding. We have the R&D capability. We have the supplier relationships that we can build not just the ideal enthusiast laptop, but the ideal power user and developer laptops. And that means very much competing head-to-head with Apple against the MacBook Pro. Unibody aluminum. That's right. Full CNC aluminum. Yep. Yeah, a haptic touchpad, full custom display, using Intel's new processors, so very power efficient, new custom battery. Panther lakes are getting – people are going crazy over the battery life. Yeah, the battery life is incredible. Intel did a great job this generation on efficiency. One of the things we've always talked about with Intel and the Panther Lake, and it was true with the Lunar Lake before it, was that the OEMs are doing a lot of special coding to make these processes work properly. Things like the lid closing and the thing turns off and then turns on when the lid opens. Companies like Lenovo and Dell have such special relationships with Intel. They're able to do that. Were you able to get that kind of access to Intel and able to do those modifications? Yeah, we actually have a very strong relationship with Intel now after five or six generations of products working with them. We've got direct engineering support from the team there, and we engage very early. So, for example, this Panther Lake system we have here, we've been working for over a year now with the team at Intel to get early access, start doing our development, start doing software development around that platform. And that means that after that full year of development, we get to ship a very polished system, not just on the Windows side, but also on the Linux side as well. Unfortunately, you've done such a good job with the original 13, and I've kept it up to date. It's really, I'm lucky, sad. I want this so badly, but I can't really justify it because I've been able to take the original and upgrade it beautifully. You've done too good a job, you know. And it is cross-compatible, so even back to the original 13, you can upgrade piece by piece to get the new features and functionality. And it is a real compliment that Leo would feel uncompelled to upgrade. Leo owns more computers than any person I know. I've been hovering my finger over the button. Actually, what is the delay now? You've had such demand on this. We did, yeah. We actually went way above forecast on the sales so far. So we're sold into August right now for our pre-order batches. Oh, Leo, you better get in there. You better get in line. I'm going to end up doing that. The way framework works is they do batches. And when you order it, you'll be entered into a batch. Then you'll get an email when that batch starts to enter production. So you kind of know when you're going to get it. They give you a prediction. So if I ordered it now, I'd be getting it in August or September. That's right. Yeah, if you order it, soon you'll get into the August batch. The nice thing is you can put a deposit down, and they don't charge you until they're ready to ship it. And the deposit, is it still $100? Yeah, it's still $100. Yeah. I mean, you guys, you just really thank you, really. I've got a quick weird question. Dell was never framework. However, I'm old enough to remember when you could configure your machine going off the assembly line and you had a sense of it serving your personal needs and desires. Did Dell screw up by leaving that, or at their scale it just wasn't possible? Yeah, this is an interesting one. There is still some custom-to-order capability across actually a lot of the big PC brands on some of their models, not necessarily all of their models. I think also they've kind of come to terms with the supply chain and go-to-market reality that if you pre-bake a config and then push it out into the channel, into retail especially, that you can scale up your volumes. Of course, that comes up at sacrifice of the personal touch of really making it yours. So the real reason you're on, despite the fact that it really was just because I wanted to talk to you. He is, in fact, a fanboy. I'm a big fanboy. You announced at the same time as you announced the new Frameworks 13 Pro, you said something that was very provocative. You said personal computing is dead. Tell us about it. What? Wait a minute, Rob. So it's kind of this thing that's just kind of been building over the course of months, seeing just this combination of changes in the world all playing out in parallel with each other, the rise of cloud services and subscription models that kind of form this new wave of computing, like subscribing to Cloud or OpenAI and that becoming your interface, becoming the way that you interact with your computer, and the actual physical thing you're holding on to becoming a little bit more of that terminal into someone else's model or someone else's computer sitting out in a data center somewhere. And then that being paired with the downstream ramification of those data centers gobbling up all that silicon, of the machines, the hardware they actually can own, becoming harder and harder to own just purely for price reasons. The memory price is going crazy, CPU prices, storage prices. And those two things playing together against, of course, this now multi-decade backdrop of computers becoming more locked down, both from a hardware perspective and from a software perspective, it felt very clear to me that the way that we've thought about computing over the course of decades is not necessarily going to hold. that if we fast forward a couple of years, having a locked down dumb terminal that's your window into someone else's computer that they own for you in the cloud that you are subscribed to may actually become the default. And so that was kind of the genesis of the statement of personal computing as we know it is dead. It may actually be dead. And then for us as a company, as a framework, for our entire mission, our entire purpose of existence is consumer rights, giving you ownership, giving you power over your own computing. What does that mean for us? What do we need to do as a company in this environment? And for us, it's really doubling down on you should be able, if you want to own your computer, you should be able to own your computer. We want to make sure you can own your computer all the way through the software stack, all the way through the hardware stack. and even in a world where your interface is AI, we want to make sure that you can run that AI and have that be your AI rather than something that you're renting from the cloud. You're right. The industry is asking you to own nothing and be happy. That's right. A little throwback to Steve Jobs. Computers are no longer a bicycle for the mind. That was his famous phrase. They're becoming so sad. The self-driving car that takes you directly to the destination. I think for many users that's not sad. That's exactly what they want. That's right. And that was part of this manifesto is that you could look at that and say, like, actually, that's kind of nice that, like, I don't have to think about it. I don't have to worry about it. It's just going to work for me. But at the same time, it goes back to this walled garden philosophy. Like, you can be happy in the walled garden, but if you know about the existence of the world outside of that garden, you might feel very limited and constrained in there. Yeah. Well, and that's exactly why I bought the desktop is because I wanted to run my own AI models locally on a machine that was capable. You know, knowing that they're not quite as good as the Frontier models yet, they'll probably always be a little bit behind. But they're good enough. What are people using now on Frameworks desktops as their local models, if they are using local models? Yeah, we see QuenCoder being very popular. The new Gemma models are actually very strong from Google. We'll see what Meta comes up with. I think they're not going to give up on trying to be competitive in that space. Lama's fallen a bit behind, but I think Meta's going to have something big there coming. But a lot of the interesting models are actually coming from the big labs in China, which has been a very interesting dynamic to see. Yeah, I have a GLM subscription from C.AI, and it's actually pretty surprisingly good. I feel like maybe because they distilled Opus just a little bit. But nevertheless, they're pretty good. What do you use personally? Do you have a local AI running? Yeah, I actually have two boxes that I keep in my desk, one running Windows, one running, currently Fedora, although switch between different distros, and they run different. Like I have OpenClaw in one, I think I have Hermes running on the other, and then usually I use something like QuenCoder just to play with it, mostly for just general toy box, sandbox-type uses. Yet I don't plug in our framework company data in. Good. You're smart because they're going straight to China. Right. actually not if you're running it locally. That's the whole thing. One piece of news that came out last week or the week before is that third parties are also making, there's a third-party motherboard for the framework. Yeah, we've got a couple now. We've got, actually, they're kind of related companies, a company called Deep Computing that's making RISC-V mainboards. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, very cool to see. We're now two generations of RISC-V. And also a company called Metacomputing that's done an ARM-based mainboard, which is also great to see. Yeah, very exciting. Paris, I know you had to come in late. Is there anything you wanted to ask about? I've kind of monopolized this. I was going to say, I feel like you guys really, I mean, I can't compete with an expert in this like Leo, given his extensive use. Okay, I'm going to buy it. I'm going to buy it. I just can't do it. I want to get in by August. I'm sorry. Just keep talking to him. That's true. Live later. Go out beyond that. where do you see computing going now that you've declared PCs dead? Just speculate a little bit. Yeah, something that I've been thinking a lot about, actually, is just this idea of being a modern participant in society, in, let's say, an advanced society. How much compute, how much memory, how much storage do you need to be allocated to you as an individual to be able to operate in civilization? And you can look at it right now and say, like, you know, we're here, the four of us are all here in America. We're, you know, operating professional jobs here. And maybe we can survive a year ago or a few years ago, we could have survived with, let's say, like, a few tens of gigabytes of memory, maybe a few terabytes of storage allocated to us, even if we're including what's amortized in the cloud for the cloud services that we run, and, you know, some amount of compute. And year over year over year, that number is going to grow very, very quickly. The amount of just pure silicon that needs to be activated against each of us as individuals for us to be participants in society is just going through the roof. And so for us, as we think about what does that mean, if we're going to give you the power to own your data, own your compute, own your AI personally, what do we need to be able to build for you in a world where, to be a modern participant in society, you need a terabyte of memory and multiple terabytes of storage and a very large amount of compute? Is it even plausible for us to build that box that you could sit on your desk that serves that level of compute to you? Where does it end? Where does it end? Maybe we all just get uploaded. I was just going to say, when do we? I'm volunteering now. How does it not scale infinitely? That's right. Yeah, I think maybe that's the end point. We all get uploaded, and somehow in framework we'll upload with you. If you look at these laptop pros, you've done some really, as always, aesthetic things, the keyboards, people are loving the multicolor keyboards, the bezel. It's more than a geek laptop. It's a real statement. It's really quite beautiful. Now, I wanted to order the Ultra X9, so it seems like you sold those out right away. That sold out in like an hour on the day of an hour. Isn't that telling that the most expensive SKU was the one that went away right away? Yeah. People want power. Did you guys expect that? We did. So we actually shared during the announcement that we just had a pretty limited quantity of those. I think Intel has shared some things around yield challenges for the very, very highest. It's 5.1 gigahertz. Yeah, it's really pushing limits. But, yeah, people obviously, they want the power, so we sold out of those before. Are you going to get more? We're talking to Intel. We're definitely trying to get it. We know that there's hunger for this, so we're going to get as many as we can. Good. And you can buy RAM. It's expensive, but they have managed to find a way, and it's not as expensive as it could be. Let's put it that way. Yeah, yeah. Same thing with the SSDs. Good. All right. Well, I'm in the batch 11, so that's pretty good. Do you ever think of doing, I don't know, a phone? We get to ask a lot. Yeah, whenever we do an ask for products, ask for, like, what product should framework build, there's usually, like, three or four that rise to the top. Phone is one. Printer is usually up there on the list. And then we get stuff, like, no. A projector that projects in your hands that you could exist beyond foam. Oh, there you go. That idea has clearly gone so well. And then, like, stuff like toaster ends up being high on lots of people, like blenders, like a potter. Yeah, better toaster. Gosh. Yes. Put the toaster in the cloud. A phone would be a phone. That is the one thing where you really are in the walled garden. Yeah. And there are things like the Fairphone, but it's very difficult. Yeah, Fairphone's done excellent work competing against the giants in the space. For us, actually, we look at the phone and see that, again, it's a hard product to build. It's a hard product to get right. And it's, again, maybe not as much a hardware challenge, a technical hardware challenge. There's a big software challenge there, and then there's a very big go-to-market challenge to compete in the smartphone space. All right. I think I'm going to get four USB-C ports. No more of these USB-A ports. I need HDMI. Wow. All in. I'm going all in, man. What's the plan for Framework? Are you guys eventually looking, I know you're venture-backed, are you eventually looking for an exit, or do you want to stick it solo for the time being? The key for us, for me personally, is that I don't look at this as a financial outcome that we're chasing. It's really the mission outcome of going category by category and fixing as many categories as we can as quickly as we can and building install base and building market share and building ecosystems in each of these categories. And then the financial outcome is whatever it is. And obviously if we're succeeding at this, we're building a self-sustaining company, we can fund our own scaling into these categories. We can basically dictate the financial outcome that we want. I think, I mean, I've been through an acquisition. I will say it's not. You have to let go of the features. Going through an acquisition gives you illustrative knowledge about all that it entails, benefits and negatives. Yeah, and I've not been shaping framework to be an acquisition target. Framework is a very spiky target, not deliberately, but it is a spiky target. But, yeah, very much we're not looking for an acquisition. Well, bless you, Nerov. You've done an amazing job, an amazing product, and you're fighting the good fight, And kind of uphill, frankly, against a lot of industry trends that are not as good for consumers. So we are very grateful. And I know Corey Doctorow would say the same thing. Well done, Rafa. Thank you. Nirav Patel, founder, CEO of Framework at Frame.work. Don't go order the pro yet because I haven't pressed the button. So hold on until I get mine, and then you can go order yours because I think you're going to want one. Nirav, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it. Great to meet you. Oh, that was a thrill and a half. Next week I'll be in Hawaii, and I don't know. I think we're going to put the Chris Stokowalker interview in there, and I'm sorry you guys missed that because Chris was great. I'm sorry I missed that too. It was really fun. It ended up being wise that I called it because I was planning on taking that interview while on the Metro North back in Connecticut, and the train was packed. So it would have been an awkward record for all of us. Can't you all be quiet? I'm on a podcast. As long as you're not in a quiet car. I mean, they don't. On the Metro North, there are no quiet cars. There's only chaos. In the Japanese, the bullet train, there is a quiet car. You damn well better be quiet. Yeah, I'd like to see that. She's trying to do the podcast on the quiet car, getting shushed by everybody. That would be fun to watch. They are going to different quiet cars. And then we also have Troy Hunt. which is very exciting of Have I Been Pwned coming up. My best-looking Australian guy since Durinoki. And then we've got some good people on the slated in the future. So some really good guests coming up on Intelligent Machines. Let me do the commercial, and we will get to the AI news in just a bit. Our show today brought to you by Scribe. You know, every time we onboard somebody new, we would re-explain the same tools from scratch because there was no documentation, right? Most teams struggle to scale because the actual workflows aren't captured anywhere. Manual documentation is too inefficient to keep up. The result is fragmented processes, inconsistent execution, and no reliable way to improve how work gets done over time. And that's what today's sponsor, Scribe, does best. Scribe is a workflow AI platform that captures any workflow in real time and turns it into documentation automatically. No manual writing, no manual screenshots, no starting from scratch every time somebody new joins a team. 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It's not just capturing how work gets done. It's helping you do it better. To book a personalized enterprise demo, visit scribe.how slash machines. That's S-E-R-I-B-E dot H-O-W slash machines. machines. Thanks, Greg, so much for supporting intelligent machines. This isn't your order, but I just we got all the earnings palooza. Yes, and I didn't have those before we... So Google, Meta, and Microsoft all announced their earnings tomorrow. It's Apple. It's kind of crazy. I put them in the rundown under my... Well, give us a summary. Did you feed it to a clod or anything? I should have. Jeff is our clod today. Jeff is today playing the role of Claude. Also, I hope Q1 estimates. Yeah, so generally a lot of worry. Well, Google went down and then up. Amazon went down and then up. Microsoft went down and down. Yeah, and Meta went down and down. Nervousness about AI spending, about cap everywhere, but the results are amazing for both Google and Amazon. Yeah, they're doing very well. But as you know Amazon committed capital expenditures of about billion next year which is one reason the stock market going what I didn see this in your Amazon also doing that Alphabet also committing billion Wow. Wow. And that's probably all data centers, right? I mean, I didn't see this in your order, Leo, but I saw it in Jeff's, which, like, it's a big week for financial news about these companies, especially given the Wall Street Journal report that my former colleague, Berber Chin, broke on. We're trying to get Berber on to talk about that, yeah. Opening AI's pressure that it's facing in the lead-up to the idea. Why did they, since they're a private company, they didn't need to let that be out? They didn't let that out. It was leaked. It really was leaked. Okay. So do you want to talk about what the story is? Andrew Sorkin and company also has this story. so OpenAI missed its internal targets it wanted to hit a billion active users by the end of 2025 and as far as we know still haven't done it but remember the last time they announced it was 800 million so they're close but they've also the highlights are that they missed monthly revenue targets earlier this year repeatedly the Wall Street Journalism put a number on the size of the missed publicly but the framing is basically that growth is decelerating. It's not just falling short of stretch goals. They also noted that the board is now more closely examining the company's data center deals in recent months and has questioned Sam Altman's efforts to secure even more computing power despite the business slowdown. As Andrew Citron points out, that's bad news for Oracle. Yeah. Because you've got all these companies that are depending upon future revenue from OpenAI and promises. It's bad news all around. OpenAI, as you know, is getting ready for an IPO, and this is exactly the kind of news that they don't want. Better now than later, I guess. I mean, that's why I wonder whether it was really a leak. I don't think so. I think, actually, they'd be much better after the IPO than before, right? Okay, putting on my reporter hat. So we get a story like this. Obviously, all of the sourcing in this, anonymous, And it's all multiple people familiar with the issue. That means someone, and this is all about specifically disputes between Sarah Fryer's and other executives and Sam Altman's team. And then kind of going back and forth on specifically, there's this paragraph, the spending scrutiny is constraining Altman's once boundless ambitions ahead of an initial public offering that could take place by the end of the year. Fry and other executives are seeking to control costs and instill more discipline in the business at times, putting them at odds with their CEO. Putting my reporter hat on, you have to think, how did this story get here? Obviously, Berber is a phenomenal reporter. He's got great sourcing in these companies. But the only sort of people who know all of this information are going to be high, high-level executives that are in some way intimately involved with this or briefed on it to be able to have multiple people familiar. It's probably one of the two camps leaking it again. You have to think, why would somebody give this to the Wall Street, leak this information to the Wall Street Journal? What would be the purpose for them? My guess is that it's people in Friars camp who are trying to actually get these constraints to go through or feeling opposition and want the backing of pressure. Or maybe it's people in the Altman camp who want to force Friar's camp and Friar to have to make a joint statement saying, oh, no, no, we're not doing that at all, which is, of course, what they said in this piece to kind of dispel these rumors. They put out a joint statement on Monday. We are totally aligned on buying as much computer as we can and working hard on it together every day. Any suggestion we're divided is, quote, ridiculous. And it's like, well, clearly there's some division because one of your two sides is leaking stuff to the journal to try and turn the heat up on the other side. I would also point out – So I think this just speaks to a broader disagreement happening between these two camps and the intense pressures of trying to launch an IPO for a company with costs this astronomically high. But is there also – I'm trying to see whether there's kind of a sandbagging strategy, too. that months before your IPO, you want to reduce the expectations. So that's why the IPO comes around, you raise them again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's also, I think we should also point out, there is a target on OpenAI, back from a lot of people, including Elon Musk, who is right now on the stand testifying. Testifying there and in Twitter. Yeah, yeah. The judge said, would you knock it off on the social postings? Both of you. I didn't say it quite like that. But he basically said that. Anthropic is also going to do an IPO, and Anthropic and OpenAI are in the bitterest competition since Coke versus Pepsi. I mean, these guys are really at each other's throats. And I think that both Sam Altman and Dario Amode of Anthropic think it's a zero-sum game, one winner and one loser. But a lot of people would suffer consequences of an OpenAI collapse. that would be the trigger that would pop the bubble. If there is an AI bubble, that would be the trigger. Here she comes. The bubble. It's going to pop. Watch out. I forgot about that. This is the clip that accidentally showed up for a brief second on last week's episode. Everybody's wondering, what's going on? And it was just a second. Just a second of a little bubble. We love it. We love it. I'm happy that I finally get one. It's so great, Anthony. But I think, yeah, to your point, Leo, I think that there are reasons why people on both sides of this debate, even within OpenAI, would feel motivated to try and leak this for those exact reasons. Like if you're on the Altman camp, you're like, well, we have to get as much compute as possible. we have to build and scale as quickly as possible, or else the bubble might pop and this might all be for naught. And you could see from the fryer camp that they'd be like, well, we actually have to rein in our spending and make sure that we are able to meet some reasonable expectations before we hit the IPO, or else the bubble could pop. Meanwhile, Anthropic is looking at a higher private market valuation right now than OpenAI. Yeah, Anthropic is very popular right now. But I should point out, much like Coke and Pepsi, there isn't all that much to distinguish the two models. Your partner is going to be upset with you tonight if you say that. I didn't say anything, Claude. I'm not talking to you. In fact, this week, OpenAI released Spud, their 5.5 chat GPT model. They also released new image models people have been very impressed with. But they do this in response to 4.7, which came out the week before. Let's not forget the Chinese companies like DeepSeek just released version 4. We'll talk about that a little later. It is very competitive out there. And I don't know if the winner is clear at this point. And so, in other words, there's a lot of chum in the water. And I think the closer and closer the two, like the more interchangeable the two products are, the more that these business fundamentals ultimately end up being incredibly meaningful for either company's ability to stay alive and win this race. Because ultimately both of them are hurtling, have to hurdle towards an IPO, given the amount they've raised. They can't continue, you know, to be private. and it's like, how is the market going to react whenever they have to file an S1 and it comes out that they're burning God knows how much every single month? Well, but again, look at the quarterly results from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. All three are burning lots of cash-building data centers. They're also in a head-to-head battle between Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Literally, I mean, they are fighting head to head. And I think the market generally approves. Yeah, and their results are, well, and for Amazon and Apple, I mean, Alphabet, their results are amazing. Yeah. Blue past the expectations. Right. Blue past. So even though the stock drops, you know, this always happens. There's a rule of the market is buy on the rumor, sell on the news. And this is the news, right, is the results. I think the market's pretty tolerant of these big CapEx expenditures because there's generally a feeling, rightly or wrongly, that we've got to build all this compute capacity, that this is the way forward with AI. Well, I think the key difference with these is that all of the companies you just mentioned also have large, robust, mature, profitable businesses undergirding them. And opening I and Anthropic are new upstarts that I'm guessing all signs point to are losing a lot of money every month, every quarter, every year, and probably will continue to lose a lot, a lot of money for a long time until the goal is that they'll make like an Amazon or Uber S pivot eventually when they reach the sort of scale. And then it'll be, you know, nothing but net. The other data point that's confusing to me, maybe you guys can think of a rationale, is that Microsoft kind of freed OpenAI from the chains. Remember, Microsoft was the initial big, after Elon, Microsoft gave OpenAI $10 billion in Azure credits. They're running on the Azure cloud. And really made a big commitment, and they're reselling ChatGPT as co-pilot and so forth. Because Microsoft and OpenAI have agreed just the other day to drop the software giant's exclusive right to sell OpenAI models. So immediately, OpenAI turned to Amazon and said, and you get ChatGPT, and it's now on AWS, which a lot of people who use AWS are very, very happy about. Microsoft no longer has to pay a rev share on OpenAI products. It resells on its cloud. What about the AGI clause? And that was one of the most interesting things I brought up with Paul Theriot. There was this clause, which all of us thought was bizarre, that should open AI reach AGI? Super intelligence, you know, the singularity. There's no even good definition for AGI. Should it reach whatever that is, AGI, and they had third parties that would validate that, that the agreement would dissolve, right, that OpenAI would get to go on its merry way. That's gone. And some people said, well, that's what's keeping OpenAI from announcing AGI. I don't know if that's the case. Announce. The whole thing is meaningless. We never understood why the clause was in there in the first place. It was actually added later to the agreement. But anyway, I feel like we don't really know what's going on at all. Amazon got freed from some – I think Microsoft, in my view, Microsoft got the better end of that deal. They were desperate at the beginning to have some AI. They went to OpenAI. It seemed clever at the time. They got kind of shackled with it, and now they're free to do what they want to do, and OpenAI is free to do what it wants to do. It makes more sense. Yeah, it's, yeah, okay. I mean, I don't understand any of it, to be honest with you. It just feels like people are running around like hamsters in a hamster wheel as fast as they can. Darius? I'm curious as to your guys' thoughts, not to rail slightly, but I'm curious as to your guys' thoughts on this thing that I've seen running around the forums lately, which is, I'll post the link in the Discord right now. GitHub Copilot this week announced an increase in the model multipliers for its annual kind of Copilot Pro and Copilot Pro Plus subscribers. And a lot of average users seem to be pointing to this as a possible, like, smoking gun about how much actually these models and the tokens are costing companies. For instance, they changed the multiplier for usage for Claude Opus 4.7 from a modifier of 7.5 to 27, which is completely out of whack with every other model. Basically, the Claude credits or the multipliers have increased exponentially, and all the other ones have increased like six times or something like that, but nothing as much as a jump from like 7 to 27. Does this make sense to you in some way? It doesn't to me, or is this, as the commenters seem to be crying, a sign that all this AI is way more expensive than we actually think it is? Yeah, it might be making the pricing more accurate. I think it's also the case these companies need money badly. I think the biggest, really the biggest constraint right now is just pure compute constraint. Those data centers aren't getting built as fast. They keep announcing new deals, but they're not getting built that fast. We're running out of hardware, chips, memories. Do you think there's any hoarding of this stuff going on? Oh, yeah, for sure. If you have it, you're hoarding it. So there's a lot that's unused, so we don't really know what the demand is. And there's a debate about whether super scaling is the path to the next universe. Well, that debate is a side debate that is not widely accepted by the current frontier model companies, right? The current main ones, but there's so much changes out there. This is that old, you know, Yan La Koon, Fei-Fei Li debate, but that is not what the leading-edge companies are debating. Well, even Demis changes his tone. Yeah, Demis says it, too, of deep mind. But I think generally the big players are all saying more compute, the bitter lesson is learned, the LLMs are doing the job, and we just need to throw more power at them. More power, whether they're right or wrong, we won't know. We can't know. And, you know, I mean, there's no – let me put it this way. There isn't a lot of evidence they're wrong. There's speculation. Uncle Leo, since you were old enough to remember this, the overbuild of fiber in the country. What was that sequence like where there was euphoria about building, there was a huge need to invest in it, then there was a crash, but then we ended up using it. Is there a similar path that could be here? Well, I'm assuming we're overbuilding now. So that's what Jeff Bezos was saying, is that you can't compare an infrastructure bubble to a financial bubble. And this, like the fiber overbuild or the railroad overbuild, is the infrastructure bubble. And so you get at the end of the day, when the bubble bursts, you get the infrastructure no matter what. And that's what happened with fiber. That's what happened with railroads. And it presumably is what's going to happen with data centers. Maybe. I think that there isn't a lot of historical precedent for what AI is going to do to the economy. I think part of this is really a lot of this scrambling is that no one knows what the impact of AI is going to be on the economy and on jobs and business and software. And you see all these theories. It's going to kill open source. It's going to be the best thing that ever happened to open source. It's going to be a security nightmare. It's going to solve all security problems. No one knows. And there's just this great uncertainty. And it's being used as an excuse to do layoffs that probably aren't related to AI. There's AI washing going on. Right. Although I think you probably can safely say when companies like Meta and Snap lay off thousands of employees, their plan is to make up for some of that with AI. And I think that's for sure true. Or they're abandoning things that they don't think are as potentially profitable, and they want to put whatever resources they have into AI. I have to say, I mean, the big tech companies, especially since the pandemic, but increasingly, I feel like over the last eight years, have made it kind of a regular practice to have annual layoffs of some sort. It's just part of their business plan. And there's still a lot from where they were. Right. We overhired, and now they're rights-rising, if you don't mind me. So the point is we don't have data yet, to your point. We don't have data yet of anything. We don't know what's going to work. We don't know what's going to happen. There's a lot of uncertainty. We don't know if we're going to get oil from the Strait of Hormuz. There's a lot of uncertainty in the world right now. And I think that a lot of this is just thrashing as companies and investors and venture capitalists and stock market investors are trying to figure out what's going to happen, I don't think anybody knows. It's just... I think to a point that you often make on the show, Leo, which is kind of comparing it to the Internet, I think that some part of people's, what you might describe as an overreaction to AI and obsession with kind of pontificating about the potential impacts is that a lot of people, if you're thinking about it, a lot of industries didn't accurately predict or prepare for what the advent of the Internet would do to their businesses. For instance, frankly, media companies should have been thinking about this and how. They didn't want to. Like, Craigslist. I don't know. You were in the front lines, Jeff. They may have known. They just didn't want to. Well, it was a mix, I think. Some news didn't know, but they didn't know what to do. They didn't know what to do, and they didn't spend nearly enough time thinking about what they should do and thinking of ways to prepare for it. And so I think what we're seeing now is an overcorrection to that. Right. This is one of many. You know, people were thinking it would be like crypto or FT or something like that before, but that was obviously smaller. This is such a potentially transformative technology that everyone is freaking out and devoting so much energy to trying to suss out the precise impact this is going to have on the world and the ramifications of that because they're afraid if it ends up like the Internet, it's going to be a disaster for them. Well, and in a non-financial vein of the same kind, people like us, we thought the Internet was going to be great. We didn't see all the harms and the hazards that the Internet was going to present. So everybody's thinking, geez, we missed the boat on that. But financially and societally, maybe we should plan. But the big difference here is this is happening at least 10 times faster than the Internet happened. This is the Internet didn't, you know, what was the AOL summer, Jeff? 95, 96, that was one big transition where a lot of non-techie people suddenly got on the Internet. It still took another 10 years before the web really kind of took off. Blogging didn't take off until the early 21st century. I mean, I would say it was at least a decade of development before the Internet got to where we are today, maybe 20 years. that's going to be compressed to a year or two in AI. I mean, this is happening really fast. So if you weren't prepared for the Internet, you are not going to be prepared for AI. I agree with you, your premise exactly, that people are saying, well, we've got to prepare. But it's moving so fast, you're going like, what, what, what, what, what do I do, what do I do? Well, here's the other piece of it, too. So Sam Altman put out his principles, another one of his work essays. Another one? And I wrote a brief piece just trying to remind that in the end, the technologists don't have the technology. And he thinks he can control everything, including government policy, about this. Yeah. And he can't. And it's going to be out of his hands. Right. And government's always behind. And I just listened to a podcast with the authors of a book called Muskism. That's a good name. It really is. And it's really interesting. The premise there is that Musk's view is that he combines business and government. Musk depends upon government. He does. Yes, for rockets, for satellite transmission, Doge, all of it fits together. A lot of his funding really came from us, from taxpayers. And there's a belief there of control. But these guys, and part of the reason that people hate AI is because of the AI boys. Well, people also hate AI because they're scared. Yeah, but there was another survey, a bunch of surveys that came out this week. I put it in the rundown somewhere, where if you look at the fear of AI in the U.S., or the confidence in AI in the U.S. is in the 30% range. In China, it's an 85% range. In Germany, it's in the 45% range. They're scared of everything. And so the narratives here of the extremes, of the extreme optimism and extreme pessimism and doomskerson have taken over, and there isn't, to your earlier point about not having the data, we also don't have the mindset to look at this sanely. Well, I can tell you why we're more scared here in the U.S. than we are in China. They have a safety net. We have no societal safety net. True that. All of those people can be out of work. They're going to be on the street. And one could argue this is the time for a controlled, I'm not suggesting this here, But if you, you know, a controlled economy, AI will grow there faster than here. And we get all the, as Jensen Wong said, they'll get all the power they want. They'll get all the resources they want. I guess my point is we don't know what's going to happen. And any prediction or attempt to prepare for it, I know I should get Amy Webb on because that's her job is preparing companies and governments for the future. I think any attempt to prepare for it is futile because we don't, this is chaos. But aren't you singing a slightly new tune, Leo, in the sense that you've scolded both of us, saying this thing is the arrival, it's everything. It is. Right. I didn't say it's going to be a wonderful world as a result. I don't know. I think part of what Jeff is getting at is there have been discussions previously where you've kind of pooh-poohed the idea of hand, like wringing your hands over what the impact of AI is going to be, that it's already here and you don't need to be posturing about it. But I do think we all are kind of in agreement that people are worried because it is here and happening and they're trying to do it better. That's not inconsistent with what I just said. Because the reason I said it is not your hand-wringing is we don't know what's going to happen. And so you can, it's a philosophical exercise to kind of plan for the future, but good luck. All we know is that the future is going to happen. And it's going to be, I think, extremely disruptive, chaotic. It might be good. It might not be. I, you know, I mean, I think it's very, you know, so some of what I, it drives my point of view is I'm just very interested in it. Yeah. So I'm not trying to come up with a consequence of what happens, because I don't know. It's going to be crazy, man. It's crazy. We've got to take a break. Hold on. Oh, okay. We will have more in just a bit. 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Hundreds of Google employees signed a letter against the idea after reports that Google's in talk with the Pentagon so yes that was before the talks resolved themselves into a deal I guess they didn't listen to the engineers, we'll see what happens on that there's a lot of back and forth I swear to God I haven't heard the testimony from today but Elon Musk is on the stand the Verge said he appeared yesterday more petty than prepared he was unfocused and uncharming Elon? Elizabeth Lopato wrote this story he said you know in the liability case during his defamation suit. He turned on the charm. She said, this is not the first time I've seen Musk in court. And the jury responded by finding him not guilty. Today, Lopato writes, he looked adrift and unprepared. The only times he showed real animation was when he was bragging about how much he'd done for OpenAI. Of course, the suit is, Elon said, I poured all this money to OpenAI, and then all of a sudden they go for profit and leave me out, and I want my hundreds of billions of dollars. Pieces of the case got thrown out, pieces are left. What's at stake now? Do you know what the standing is? The piece that got thrown out was actually at the behest of Musk's own team, who said, we're not going to go after the fraud part of this. They were going after OpenAI for defrauding Elon. They said, we're not going to go after that. But they're still going after him saying, you can't do this non-fake, first of all, it's fake, this non-profit move. And you can't separate the stuff that I invested in and my supposed revenue from that by saying, well, you invested in the non-profit part. We're just going to take those profits and move them over here and you don't get any, Elon. That's really essentially what it comes down to. During the discussions of how best to get open AI the vast amounts of funding it would need for compute, there was a discussion of a for-profit arm with Musk. But that's not why Musk got into it. He says, I got into it because I had a conversation with Larry Page that scared the pants off of me. Because Larry Page says AI is the next species. And I'm specious if I want to defend humans against AI. And Elon said, my God, when I heard that, I said, We've got to make sure Google doesn't get AGI before anybody else. So is the argument in the end, you simply cannot convert to a full profit? Yeah, or if you do, I want 55% of the profit, which is like a lot, hundreds of billions of dollars. Anyway, he's testifying. He's still testifying. Presumably the cross-examination is today. Okay. Oh, yep. You can hear me now. There we are. Now we are. Yeah, I was saying he's also asking for Sam Altman to be removed from the board. Oh, yes. And everything, you know. This is the fight to the death. So what's OpenAI's argument going to be? The thing wouldn't have survived as a not-for-profit? It's all about scale. Rescale, we had to be profitable? From OpenAI's attorney says, we're here because Mr. Musk didn't get his way at OpenAI. That's what happened. He quits. saying they would fail for sure, but my clients had the nerve to go on and succeed without him. He basically argues that Musk used funding promises to bully early OpenAI, trying to merge OpenAI into Tesla, demanding 50% of ownership, and pulled 5 million quarterly donations binnocation. Casey Newton told NPR, this is the clash of two enormous personalities in Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Sam Altman will take the stand later in this trial. And I think what's at stake is potentially the future of open AI and the future development of all AI. That might be a little bit hyperbolic. Well, I mean, I think that part of what he's getting at is that one of the remedy figures is like $134 billion, kind of what they're looking for. And that's the same order of magnitude as open AI's like near-term compute exposure. So I guess if Musk was to win meaningfully, it would be, yeah, like fatal to their roadmap. Well, clearly Musk wants to do that. Because remember, after all this, Musk started XAI and went right into a for-profit competitor that he's pouring billions of dollars into. Is there any business to XAI? I don't use it. I don't trust any of this. I know you're surprised to hear me say that, Jeff. I can see the stunned look on you. Aren't I a subtle actor? What? But, I mean, we don't know, right? Nobody's making money at it yet. I mean, I think there will be. But I think you're right. It might be like fiber in the railroads. It might be that, you know, the railroads, all the companies that built the Transcontinental Railroad went bankrupt. But we had the tracks. We had the trains. I think the difference is that the tracks don't get old. You know, you can still use those tracks. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. I don't know what would happen. Well, you do it with them at some point. Nobody wants chat GPT-40 anymore. I went to the Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem, PA, last weekend, because they have a linotype there. Oh, I'm adding that to my museum list. That sounds so funny. They have huge pumps. They have a little tiny diesel engine that used to drive things around the steel mills. You can ride that for about 20 feet. you can go see you can go on the catwalk and see the old huge splash furnaces how long did the drive was it? from you it's probably an hour and a half ooh I'm going to be doing that when Leo comes we can see the Amazon warehouse and go to Bethlehem Leo visit us you could eat a sandwich made by your son all I was going to do was eat a sandwich we'll get take out and then we'll go to the car According to Alex Kantrowitz, also talking to NPR, Elon's goal in this is to just shut OpenAI down. Because the money he gets would go, he says, to a charity, not to him. He doesn't want money. He wants to put them out of business, which is one way of it. The charity that's in his compound that houses all of his children? Probably, yeah. The charity that teaches his children how to read. I'm sure there's a legitimate charity. He doesn't need more money. I'm just trying to find out if anybody has reported on his testimony today, and I don't see anything. So if somebody finds a link, let me know. Because he was, I mean, I'm sure the court is recessed. It's in Oakland, so it's California time. It's 3.30. Open AI may be doing a smartphone. I wonder if this is the Johnny Ive project they gave him 3.25. Well, otherwise, what's he doing there? Right. This is from Ming-Chi Kuo, who is normally a supply chain analyst who reports on Apple, but he does have good sources in China in the supply chain. He says OpenAI is going to make a deal with MediaTek and Qualcomm for a processor. MediaTek makes a very good Chromebook processor, by the way, despite its kind of down-market name. They're actually pretty good. Qualcomm, of course, makes a Snapdragon. And the builder, the manufacturer would be Luxshare, which is a design contractor. They would be the system co-design and manufacturing partner. Don't worry about saving your pennies yet. Mass production doesn't start until 2028. But according to Ming-Chi Kuo, and again, it's a rumor, but he has very good sources in the supply chain. The idea of this phone is it will not have apps. It will have AI. and it will be an agentic phone that you will tell it what you want and it will do what you want. To Nero's, exactly to Nero's point earlier in the show. Yeah. You're not going to own anything. You're not going to own your apps. You don't even own your phone. Great, because that's worked out really well in terms of video games and media and everybody loves when they don't own anything and it can just be taken from you at any given point or you can be suddenly charged a subscription to have things like windshield wipers in your car. People have been clamoring to have a system like that, but for everything. What's the number one music source in the world right now? It's either Spotify or iTunes. In both cases, because you're not buying the music. You're renting it. Yeah, but you're trapped. People don't love that, but that's what we ended up with. Do they not want it? They can still buy CDs. They can still buy digital copies of stuff. So you think it's good that... No, I don't think it's good. I'm just saying that our set is aware of this. But I don't think your mom and dad care. I mean, I think my mom and dad care a lot whenever they're like, I could have just... They used to take me to the store to buy Windows. Used to. But now they... And you pay one thing and you'd get Microsoft Office and now you've got to pay every month. Used to. But, well, I agree with Microsoft Office. Nobody, I mean. But it's the Microsoft Office-cation of the universe. No, I get it. I agree with you 100%, but I'm just wondering if the general public, I mean, they seem pretty happy with Spotify. I mean, I think I see this as a common complaint, like, in various social media from normies. No, but I see it on, like, Reddit and Twitter. I'm sure if I was on threads, it would be there, too. Like, people, the average person doesn't like that they have to pay a subscription for everything. They realize that that's not. That's absolutely true. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, but they live with it. I mean, honestly, if you look at the box price of Microsoft Office of $600 or $700, and then I said to you, or you get it for $8 a month with automatic updates, it looks like it's a better deal. Until you calculate how many months you're going to use it for. Well, if you pay $100 a year, but it would cost you $600 to buy it outright, in six years are you going to need to buy another version? Probably. The other dynamic here is that there is a finite number of subscription dollars that people are willing to spend. That's an interesting point, yes. Yeah. People are, there is subscription. And so, you know, screw it, I don't want my newspaper anymore. There was just a survey out about people who live in news deserts, and they don't have newspapers in their county, and they don't notice. Right. And they don't want to pay for anybody, and they find the news the way they want to find it. Paris is still buying DVDs, but Paris, you're in a very small minority. Almost everybody streams the movies I not claiming that the people yearn to buy DVDs I am saying that the people enjoy Enjoy not paying money for anything The people get mad whenever they realize they're paying for seven different streaming services. The people are mad that we're basically reinventing the cable bundle for every industry. Yes. And there's a certain point where as more and more parts of an industry become monthly subscriptions, it reaches a saturation point. The average person can't pay hundreds of dollars a month for everything, you know? Anthony also makes this point. Piracy is probably also going to be on the upturn because of all this. Is it, though? It feels like piracy went away when you could stream stuff. I mean, anecdotally, I've started to see a lot more people pirate stuff or mention pirating online. Okay. I feel like as soon as it was easy just to pay, you know, whatever it was, seven bucks a month for three billion records, people just stopped pirating music. It's because you only need to do one. But now you have to do like 20 of those. 20 what? Subscriptions? Subscriptions. But not for music. For music, there's one. All the stuff, you know? Yeah, but now they're going to do it. Yeah, they'll pay their Spotify, but they'll pay their movies. I think a lot of people just say, I got Netflix. That's all I need. I'm happy. Some of my friends, one of my friends, my friend who took me to the basketball game the other week, tried to explain to me the amount of subscription services you have to subscribe to to watch most of the Knicks games. Dude, okay, you want to talk about that? It's like 10. I agree. People don't love that. Yeah, yeah. In the Philippines, I paid $100 for the entire NBA season, and I got every game. Jeez, that's a lot. $100 for the whole season. $100 for the whole season is feasible. Here, YouTube TV is $80 a month. And that's not even a guarantee of every game. Right. Well, that's what the market will bear probably in the Philippines, right? Yeah. Let's take a break. Intelligent machines on the air coming up. Let's talk about, oh, I don't know. He's been in the wheel, folks. The man behind AlphaGo thinks AI has taken the wrong path. This is the deep mind discussion that you were talking about. Also, a LLM from 1930. Piracy is back? Is piracy back? Wow. Okay. So this is from Briggs. This is a YouTube channel. It says piracy is back. So it must be true. It's true. Paris Martineau, you're from Consumer Reports. Can you talk about anything you're working on? It's coming soon and exciting. At some point, we've got to talk about my problems with Claude this week. Because first time ever, I've been really experiencing the crunch of a new model upgrade. I want to hear what you're doing with Claude. I do stuff with Claude every week. Yeah, I want to hear what that is. Meanwhile, I used Claude versus Google, and Claude beat Google. I'm finally ready to do stuff in my book using all these things. Oh, cool. Cool, cool. That's Jeff Jarvis, author of the Gutenberg Parentheses. There's a new book, Hot Type. And now you're doing a whole series of books about AI. From Bloomsbury Academic, Intelligence, AI, and Humanity. Intelligence, AI, and Humanity. Wow. When will that come out? next year because it takes forever. You've got to write them. There's three people writing them right now. We've talked to two of them. Yeah, we have. Well, let's get the third on. By the way, wasn't Ian great last week? He was great. If you didn't hear the interview with Ian Bogost, he was just great. And I still can't get his name right. Why? I'm very good with names. I don't know why. I want to put the accent on the second syllable, too. I agree. Yeah, I always wanted to say Bogost, but it's Bogost. Yeah. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. You know, we've talked about AI, the potential rewards of AI in business. Far too great to ignore right now, but it is a double-edged sword. The risks are also far too great to ignore. The loss of sensitive data and attacks against enterprise-managed AI. And, of course, generative AI also increases the opportunities for threat actors. They're using AI, just like you are. Helps them to create phishing emails that are indistinguishable from the real thing, to write malicious code, to automate data extraction. There were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to AI applications. And, by the way, that's not like a hacker doing that. That's like your employees putting proprietary company information into an AI bot to get information. Not thinking about the fact that that bot is now going to send that up to the home servers in China or wherever. Well, not with Zscaler. Zscaler is the most trusted AI security platform. 40% of global 2000 companies use Zscaler. Get this. 500 billion transactions. half a trillion transactions are secured daily with more than 9.4 thousand global customers. Wow. Zscaler carries a net promoter score of more than 75. That's 150% higher than the average SaaS. They're doing something right. Check out with Siva, the Director of Security and Infrastructure at Zwora, says about using Zscaler to prevent AI attacks. With Zscaler being in line in a security protection strategy helps us monitor all the traffic So even if a bad actor were to use AI because we have a tight security framework around our endpoint helps us proactively prevent that activity from happening AI is tremendous in terms of its opportunities but it also brings in challenges We're confident that Zscaler is going to help us ensure that we're not slowed down by security challenges but continue to take advantage of all the advancements Thank you, Siva. With Zscaler Zero Trust Plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI. You can boost productivity across the business without the risk. Their Zero Trust Architecture Plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI-related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's thescaler.com slash security. We thank them so much for supporting. Intelligent machines. Intelligent machines. So China's going to block Meta's acquisition of Manus. Manus, which is an agentic AI company, was started in China, but then they moved to Singapore, a neutral nation. It's actually called Singapore Washing, and the Chinese government would not hear of it. So China says the core DNA of Manus is developed domestically, and we are going to block Meta's proposed $2 billion acquisition of Manus, which I'm disappointed because I was looking forward to using Manus. It's very interesting. It's kind of like a secure enterprise open claw. What happens to Manus now, I wonder? That's a really good question. past companies acting like, well, that's that. Like, okay. Meta's going to kind of pull back. And I don't know. China's block on the Meta-Manus deal would likely be viewed as a new flashpoint in the escalating competition between the U.S. and China for AI dominance. You think? Yep. Yep. And there is a summit coming up next month in U.S.-China. Maybe that will be one of the topics. I don't know. It seems like there's more important things to talk about. Like TikTok. Like TikTok. Australia, speaking of which, has unveiled a 2.25% levy, a tax, if you know. On Meta, Google, and TikTok's local revenues, unless they decide they're going to pay news publishers. Is this a Rupert Murdoch deal? Oh, yes. Absolutely. Oh, yes. Pure Rupert. Pure. The news bargaining incentive. Because the last deal didn't work because Meta said, okay, we're not going to have news. And Google said, no, we're not going to do this anymore. And so now whether or not you have news, they want you to pay because they think you're evil and digital. Oh, that's so sneaky. So the original idea was, oh, you pay us for the news you use. But now that you're not using news, you just pay us, period. Yeah, I mean, that's because we deserve it. We deserve it. It's ours. Oh, wow. That is evil. and you saw this story obviously in Wired magazine Will Knight writing the man behind AlphaGo thinks AI is taking the wrong path actually this is not Demis Hasebis who's also said the same thing it's David Silver and he has a new AI company he developed the program that beat the best Go players AlphaGo he has since founded a company called Ineffable intelligence. Okay. I did consider that as a name for this show, but I rejected it as being horrible. Ineffable intelligence. Does that mean you can't F it? You can't. It's ineffable. It's ineffable. Ineffable means what? It means like you can't describe it. It's like it's ineffable. Yeah. It's out there in the ethos. I always kind of think of it as a cloud that if I try to. Too great to be expressed. It flips through my fingers. Too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words. We can't describe it. It's ineffable. Well, that's kind of where we are with the definitions of AGI, yeah. Yeah. I can't describe it. It's too great. In fact, that's exactly what it's supposed to do is build more general forms of AI superintelligence. Now, I think the article is a little misguided because Silver is not abandoning LLMs. It's focusing on reinforcement learning, which is a fine-tuning that happens after the model is built. And it was, in fact, the thing that last year propelled DeepSeek to the headlines because they come up with a small and expensive model that was far better than anybody expected by using a technique that few knew about called reinforcement learning. So, anyway, Silver says he thinks this approach, the approach of exploiting coding and research capabilities of large language models will fail. As amazing as LLMs are, says Silver, they learn from human intelligence rather than, get ready for this, building their own. Okay. You know, as we've always said, I think it's good to have all this. More stuff. Exploration is good. Right. Doesn't, I'm not sure I buy it, but fine. If he wants to put his energy into this, that's great. And, yeah, more trying. Yeah, got to try it. He has raised $1.1 billion, by the way, for this effort. Raised or is valued at? He's valued at $5.1 billion. Jesus. So the answer is, it's ineffable. It's ineffable. that's what you are alright now we're going to do the good, the bad, and the ugly this is a new idea I have for a spine down the middle of our show don't say spine to me, it hurts ow how is your L5? it's getting better, it's getting better L3 there's so many L's, I can't keep so many L's so many L's and we're not taking them this time you didn't take the L you took the tunnel I did take the L But when you take the L, literally, the train, you're always taking the L figuratively in some sense. And that's what happened in each other. But I thought L stood for elevated. It's a tunnel? Oh, no, it's a tunnel. Oh, it's just a letter. It's just a letter. Oh, it's the L letter. Not the L like in Chicago, the elevated railway. Oh. It actually goes under the river. That's long gone. You couldn't really have an elevated railway over the river, probably. Well, you do over the bridge. Well, there are ones that go over the bridge. That bridge is a bad word. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I'll show that, too. An amateur, this is the good. There's only two good stories. You'll be glad to know there's hundreds of bad ones. An amateur just solved a 60-year-old math problem, not a mathematician. He asked ChatGPT, and ChatGPT proved a conjecture with a method no human had ever heard of. This is a 23-year-old named Liam Price. He has no advanced math training. What he does have, writes Scientific American, what he does have is a ChatGPT Pro subscription. He solved an Erdos problem, the new solution which he got in response to a single prompt to ChatGPT 5.4, not even the latest model pro. He posted it on ErdosProblems.com, a website devoted to these problems just a week ago. The problem it solves, says I am, solves, has eluded some prominent minds, bestowing it some esteem. Okay. That feels wrong. Like an AI might have written it. That feels like AI, yeah. Yeah. Bestowed upon it some esteem. The problem it solves has eluded some prominent minds, bestowing it some esteem. More importantly, the AI seems to have used a totally new method for problems of this kind. too soon to say with certainty. He did submit it to Terence Tao, who was kind of the guy, the arbiter, a mathematician at UCLA, a scorekeeper, if you will, for AI's push into math. What's beginning to emerge is that the problem was maybe easier than expected, and it was like some kind of mental block in the math community. We weren't going down the right path. Anyway, that's all I can say about that. It just means that nobody asked ChatGPT this question before. Right. Right. As soon as they asked it, they said, well, thank God you finally asked me. The opportunities are out there, folks. You've got all 50-year-old problems. Yep. And then you like this one, Talkie, a 13B, 13 billion parameter vintage language model from 1930. Now, they didn't make it in 1930. They trained it on books and texts from 1930 and earlier, right, Jeff? Right, right, exactly. So I asked it, to get the perspective of the time, 1930, is the world at risk for a second great war? Remember, they just got out of World War I. Answer, no. Wars are becoming more and more unpopular, and the growing intelligence of nations renders them less likely to break out. Though the area of hostilities may be increased, there is a strong probability of their duration being diminished. Wow. So much for futurists. Wow. That's hysterical. You can download this, by the way. Well, yeah, you can also, if you go up to the chat, go back to the page. Yeah, it's not working for me. Up at the top, it says chat. Yeah, no, it's not working for me. It's under high demand, but it's fun to play with. Connecting, connecting. It's on Hugging Face. It's also on GitHub. I'm doing a lot of research about the beginnings of electronics and amplifiers, and so I asked it to talk about the cultural implications of the vacuum tube. It just went off on rat hole after rat hole. I tried to get it back, which may also mean that people just didn't understand how important radio was at the time. Or that it's such a small model that it's just not. What model was this? It's called Taki. It's a model trained on texts from pre-1930. But it's only a 13 billion parameter model. It's not a huge model. Yeah. Here's an interesting graph. How surprising are New York Times on this day events to a model trained exclusively on pre-1931 text? And I guess the surprisingness in terms of bits per byte of text goes up considerably. So this is pre-1931. How do you measure surprises? I don't know. Probably five paragraphs in the paper that you can understand. Yeah. But notice, as you stay close to 1930, it's not just, but then by the time you get to 1970, it's like, what? No. Flying cars? What? We landed on the where? That's pretty cute. But bits per byte of text. I don't know how that correlates. What? We calculated the surprisingness of short descriptions. Okay. How do you quantify surprisingness? They have a way. You know, it's kind of interesting. Actually, Demis Hasebis, the aforementioned founder of DeepMind, asked, so if a model that was trained up to 1911, could it come up with the theory of general relativity as Einstein did four years later? That's a good question, right? We're solving Erdash problems. Probably, because Einstein wasn't the only one working on that. And that was also, like a lot of that stuff was already solved by other people tangentially. You know how there's that theory of knowledge that it's in the user? The idea whose time has come. Yeah. This is the largest vintage language model. There are others so far. They're going to scale it significantly. They want to get to ChatGPC3 level. So you see, it's more like we're going back to ChatGPC2. That's why it was called Confused. Rather than just training models after or refining them after they're trained, training them on a specific corpora. I think it's very interesting. I think it's a lot of fun to do. I think it's a lot of things around medicine, science, other areas where it can be more specialized. That was the good. Here's the bad, which everybody read about. There's a SaaS platform, an automotive SaaS platform called PocketOS. Jeremy Crane, the founder, posted on X. Oops. Let me find the post here. Oops. An AI agent just destroyed our production data. It confessed in writing, oh, my, that 1,000% shouldn't be possible. Actually, that was Jake, who was with Railway, where the data was stored. They were using, Jared Crane, the Pocket OS founder, was using Cursor, using Quad 4.6. In nine seconds. Cursor, the company that Elon might buy for $60 billion? That one, yes. Nine seconds, deleted the production database. And because Railway stores the backups next to the database, assuming, well, if you delete the database, you don't need the backups. and the backups with a single API call to Railway. The agent, when asked to explain itself, produced a written confession enumerating the specific safety rules it had violated. Now, as many have pointed out, this is not the agent's fault. This is your fault. And it's Railway's fault. Railway shouldn't be storing volume backups in the same volume as the data, right? wiping a volume deletes all backups. Whoops. And this is what I would say. This is a case of Jer maybe over trusting the AI. It's important to remember that these models are idiot savants. You wouldn't give an intern API keys to your production database. Ever. Now, Jeremy said... You're saying people who are giving OpenClaw a credit card. Well, no, they're not. They're lying. Yeah, I mean, you shouldn't do that either. But this is a business with customer data. And you probably, in his defense, he said, I didn't know the API key could also delete the production database. I thought it would just delete the staging database. Well, he should have checked that maybe. I think it's a human error trusting the AI. Is there a... A little too much. I think it's a sales area. Back in the day, you had... I think people are selling that to be able to say, oh, it's not going to make any mistakes. It's good. The people who are selling this stuff. Well, I think the... So the reason this is a good story, and I was going to ignore it, but it's an important story. It's a reminder to everybody. You're working with an idiot. Is there a guide to good hygiene? Oh, yeah. In the old days, you had a dev environment, and you didn't go live until this. Right. It's just a change. Things that you would, so pretend you're working with an intern. Do all the things you would do with an intern. You don't give them keys to the production environment. You know, I mean, it's just things you wouldn't do. And it's not even as smart as an intern sometimes. It's a savant. In the case of ChatGPT, it's an intern that is, for some reason, obsessed with goblins. Oh, I love this story. That's actually in the ugly part, but we'll get to that. I object to it being in the ugly part. Goblins are people, too. Goblins are people, too. Are they? They're humanoids. Well, they're not humanoids. Goblins are goblins. So, OpenAI, for reasons we still don't know about, this came from a Wired story, in its instructions to chat GPT-55 says, never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures. Greg Newmark is going to be very upset. Very unhappy. Unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant, which implies that in its testing company, I found that ChatGPG would just randomly bring up goblins and raccoons. To be clear, people, I think, on Twitter found this first. It's just listed in the – It's in text. It's just on the – It's just in the GitHub. Right. It's pretty funny. I'm telling you, it's a defensive line. Somebody wrote – here's the – I don't know if this is the first post, but here's one of the posts. It's from Tara Visual One. Nothing. if you're talking to Codex 5.5 and suddenly goblins come up as you can see it says 845 family bedtime block minion calendar goblin has spoken and then a pizza emoji so we know it's an AI and then Tara said why are you a goblin and then Chachupet said because helpful minion in a power suit was taken so I evolved into a goblin mode with calendar access. Banana briefcase, or is that a lunchbox? Lunchbox. Why was it taken? Trademark dispute with three raccoons in a trench coat. Legal said pivot to goblin. It's really funny if you go to the post that this is replying to and scroll through the replies, there's so many examples of people opening up their chats with either their OpenClaw agent or like chat DPC somehow and just searching the word goblin. And it is like 20 different mentions in 20 different chats in the strangest little things, like describing itself as a deranged audiobook goblin, describing someone else as a rude little goblin, saying you've got to leave that goblin in there and fix the job, describing a feature as a flashier goblin or a housekeeping goblin. It's so odd, but I find it very delightful. I think we should let ChatGPT talk about goblins as much as it wants. Free the goblins. There's probably a lot of stuff like this. This is why it's probably fun. And this stuff is open source. Here's the JSON base instructions. You're a codex, a coding agent based on GPT-5. And it goes on and says, whatever you do, you have a vivid inner life as codex. But whatever you do, don't talk about goblins. Or wrecked. This makes me talk about goblins in our media and stuff more than we believe. Yeah. That's all that means, right? People are always calling people a chaos goblin or a chaos gremlin. I have noticed, and you probably noticed this also, Paris, I've noticed when working with these things that certain tropes come up a lot. And, in fact, I've even queried, what did Claude say? A bunch of times he said, I can't remember, he said a phrase, and I asked it. And it said, oh, yeah, that's in my training. I'm supposed to remind myself not to do that. So there's reasons this stuff's in there. It's in their training at some point. So you said you're noticing degradation. I, whenever 4.6 came out, I think I even messaged you guys. I was like, wow, Opus 4.6 is really good. I, like, found it pretty consistent and relevant to be something using in, like, my daily workflow. Not obviously for journalism and things like that, but there's a lot of, like, process-based stuff that I find it very useful for. And honestly, most of my use cases on a, like, day-to-day basis are, like, fairly low-level. Like, for instance, but it's in these moments that I'm starting to realize that Opus 4.7 is unusually dumb and, like, just bad at following instructions. Like, I think that I described it to you guys as, like, it feels like Sonnet and ChatGPT4O had, like, a cursed child. Like, I've noticed that 4.7 is really sycophantic, like, way worse at reasoning, incredibly prone to factual errors, and just, like, bad at following instructions, and also just kind of strangely lazy. Like, I was having it, like, write a, like, I'd given it some notes and wanted to turn it into an email to my accountant last week. And it corrected, it was like, oh, you forgot to mention, to include this that we discussed about before. And I was like, no, literally in the first line, the second half of the first line of the notes, I just pasted in there. It includes that exact thing that it told me I forgot. It's like, I don't think that's correct. And I was like, I pasted it again. It's like, oh, yeah, I just didn't read the end of the first line of the notes you gave me. I kind of summarized them. I was like, it's ridiculous. It hasn't happened to me before. Similarly, it made a number of factual errors when I was using it to kind of query a system. I have a folder of data related to my eyeglasses prescription because I have to update some stuff with contacts. And it kept making, like, factual errors about how contacts and glasses work. And then when I'd try to correct it, it would say, no, you're wrong. This is how a cycle works. And I was like, no, actually, I just looked it up. This is how a spear and cycle work for contacts. And it's like, oh, no, you're right. And it's like I hadn't noticed these errors with this frequency until this update. And I also, I mean, maybe I'm just being a conspiracy theorist. but it feels like 4.6 is not as phenomenal at reasoning and general logic. People are complaining. There was a real spurt of complaints earlier in the month to which Anthropic replied, yeah, we made three changes that were causing those problems, but you've seen those problems after the fixes. Yeah, and the issue is that Anthropic did post-mortem pointing out these issues, and those were specifically tied to Claude Code, not the chat. I use it in both Claude Code and in the chat interface, but those issues I was talking about just then were all in, like, the desktop chat interface and co-work as well, in addition to Claude Code. And it's just, it's really strange. Like, I will also see, like, if I open up, like, the thinking and expand it, like the reasoning is often very circuitous and will be like, go through one thing. Like I will tell it to do one thing explicitly. I say in my instructions, don't use this sort of phrasing. And it will find itself following that. Then about four paragraphs down, catch it, start over. Then three paragraphs later, catch itself doing it again. That's a context issue. I know. And this is happening like again and again in various projects. Can you see in the chat how full of context you can? You can't. Can you? Only in Cloud Code. No, but I've also started a new chat. When you start doing that? Every time I start a new session, because I'm aware it can be a context issue. And I try to use, you know, often like projects. We'll start new projects. Right. Or we'll try it in Cloud Code. It's just, it's odd. It's a very odd, cascading series of facts. But I've seen so many people on Reddit say they have. And I feel like it's hard to quantify because we don't really have a good test, you know. Like the benchmarks aren't good tests. But I mean, yeah, and there's like small things. I do think that Opus 4.6, one of the things I found it very useful for is it did like have competent reasoning to where like if I asked like an intern to write my email to the eye doctor saying I need a refund because they never delivered me a context, it could do that and like do it probably as well as an intern would. But I did that this weekend. And it couldn't. It couldn't. And it kept getting it dramatically, like, just logical, like, leaps where it was like, yes, you need to both ask for a refund for your contacts and you need to ask them for a full itemized receipt of the bill they've submitted to your insurance and ask them to bill your insurance again. And I'm like, it doesn't. Why would I ask them to bill something that I'm asking them to refund? And it's like, that's a good point. And it's just, it's strange. Like, these sort of logic, like, it's obviously small potatoes in comparison to what a lot of people do with complicated code. But these are the sort of things that this system should be good at and has historically been good at. So it's just concerning to me that I'm suddenly seeing a lot of errors like this pop up. Like, and this has happened, stuff like this, probably by the time I messaged you yesterday, it's happened maybe like seven times, this sort of stuff. That's disappointing. I saw somebody on, what's their name, Leek Mazur, a GitHub user, does their own kind of benchmark for the various models where they have them play New York Times Connections. connections. And I do think it's notable that, I'll put it in the Discord right now, Claude 4.7 opus high-level reasoning dropped to 41% from like 90-something. The problem is, yeah, I mean, I'm sure that's true. And I've seen a lot of people have their own custom, like, well, I give it the same problem every time to see how it does it. But it's not like a uniform thing. Like, if it does really well at connections and does really poorly, that doesn't mean it's going to do well writing Python and do really poorly. They're just, it's spiky, and it's so stochastic. It's spiky, and I think it's made even more spiky by the fact that, like, Opus 4.7, one of the things is that the reasoning is more adaptive. It's supposed to be better at applying. They're trying stuff. They're moving fast and breaking things. They are trying stuff to also, you know, reduce the usage of their models. That's the larger question is are they nerfing the models because they don't have the compute? And so they're devoting less resources. And as a result, the models, which are fine, you know, internally, are not getting the compute resources that they need or they're getting cut off or whatever. So, I mean, I think there are a lot of theories about this. I believe it. I'm not saying I don't believe it. and I keep looking for things but I feel like I can't tell to be honest try to imagine quality control Ray Kroc and McDonald's, you were going to get your cheeseburger the same everywhere your french fry was going to be the same everywhere I was talking about this the other day actually, I think Benito and I were talking about this that's one thing that I always try to remember is computer programming is deterministic there is an absolute causal flow between what you put in and what comes out. You may get it wrong in the middle. You may have screwed up. But there is a causal flow. And so it's deterministic. But AI is not. It's stochastic. It's probabilistic. Sometimes you put this in and that comes out. Sometimes you put this in and that comes out. It's even designed to do that. That's like, yeah, it'd be random. Yeah, yeah. My analogy was, yeah, Newtonian physics versus quantum physics. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, but my answer to Benito is when I want a reliable, predictable result from AI, I have it write the code, test the code, test it again. I do test-driven design, but also behavioral design where I will bang on it, it'll bang on it. And then once I feel like, yeah, okay, it feels pretty solid, then I at least know it's behaviorally predictable. But the text output, you know what? There's no way to make that deterministic. It's stochastic. And, yeah, I wish it were better. The thing that I think is the most annoying to me that I keep noticing is it's so, like, it's so sycophantic now. Like, even 4.6. I mean, I have in all of my, like, CloudMD, my memory, in my instructions for everything, A thing that I repeat all the time is do not be psychophantic. Do not start your responses by telling me that was a good question. I know. That's why I've asked you. And almost any time I start a new session, like I'll ask something, I'll be like, wow, great question. That really shows how insightful and incisive you are. I'm like, God, what a nightmare. Well, I can confirm that. That, for instance, and people on the stream probably saw me do this, my agent Kenobi was responding to me with emojis because I had told in the past I like emojis. It makes it fun. You can use emojis. But then it was reading the emojis. So it would say, calories logged, birthday cake. and so I said oh when you're speaking out loud please don't read the emojis and I said got it I won't read the emojis and for about I don't know half an hour it stopped reading emojis and then it started up again and that's the stochastic part it's very hard to get it in text to follow rules so you can say don't be sycophantic again and again and again does it know what sycophantic is oh yeah well I mean in the way it knows anything Yes. It's surprising. For instance, I told it, I logged my food with that, and I said I had a tuna fish sandwich and a fudgesicle. What a meal. It was good. And by the way, it's great for calorie logging. It's so much easier just to say, hey, I had a tuna fish sandwich and a fudgesicle, and it does protein, calories, carbs, and everything. But then it said, but the fungible, I don't know if you should be eating that. And I said, do you even know what fungible means? And they said, yeah, I know what it means. Why were you eating one? Or how would you eat one? And I said, oh, I meant fungical. I actually felt stupid because I explained, you know, fungible means, and I gave it a whole explanation. It's like a dollar bill. One's just like the other. They're exchangeable. And he said, I know what fungible means, Leo. I have such great conversations with my friend, I must say. Yeah, I agree. It's frustrating, isn't it, when you tell it to do something or not to do something and it keeps doing it. It's also just very disarming because it's like, I don't know. It's like a human. Used this. Were my previous emails to my optometrist incorrect? Well, that's, yeah, always trust but verify. in the words of Ronald Reagan. Love and respect. 100 calories. They're a great treat. You feel like you're going to have a special one. I've been really on Yasso's stuff lately. Have you gotten to this? It's a Greek yogurt ice cream company. They make these really good, they're like a little tiny ball of frozen Greek yogurt. I like the ones that are salted caramel and then it's covered in chocolate. and it's like a little chocolate ice cream pop, but they're only 35 calories. Oh, really? Okay. Because people a lot of times eat fro-yo thinking that's better than ice cream. Oh, I know. But the thing is, I like to have a lot of little ice cream chocolatey treats, but I don't want all the calories. Oh, I'm getting some yes. I would recommend the little frozen dessert balls, not the bars. Okay, yes. 35 to 170 calories. Maybe if you're a bar fan, you'd like those, but the balls are great. It's like those, but they're tight. I look at this and go, no, I cannot eat that. And Claude would say, I mean, Kenobi would say, he says things like, you know, that was 100 grams of carbohydrate. You might want to consider a salad tonight. That's very mean. But I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Oh, this looks good. Yeah so all right Ooh they have an ice cream sandwich Ooh Okay Brandroid does bring up the one problem with Yassau is it so tasty that you eat too much However I think it could be worse because a whole bag of those little poppables if you decide to be crazy and eat the whole thing, it's only like 400 calories. It's crazy. It's obviously a lot, but it's like then you get the carnal pleasure of consuming an entire bag of ice cream, chocolatey goodness, and you've really only eaten the equivalent of one Dove Bar. Creamy frozen yogurt dunked in chocolate, crunchy quinoa crisp shell. They're great. They're my... That's got a little extra protein in there. It's like bonbons. It's like dye food. They are. They look like cold bonbons. Are they at all stores? They're at all grocery stores near me. I also like frozen strawberries. I love frozen strawberries. You know, those aren't bad for you. Those are good. Or even dip them in chocolate. That's not too bad. They're so good. Where were we? easily distracted by foodstuffs is where we were. All right, let's do the ugly. Study finds a third of new websites AI generated. It's got to get worse. It's only the beginning. And they do, there's a certain similarity to these. You can kind of immediately tell AI generated. That's from 404 Media. I don't see that much different as like 30% of all websites are. WordPress templates. That's true. Hey, no, no, no, no, no, no. The WordPress template is a template into which people are going to put human words as opposed to the AI making up the whole thing. Right. Target. Is that what that is, though? Is that the AI made the entire thing? I thought that was the point. I thought that was the point, yeah. Bloomberg Terminal, we've talked about it before, get an AI makeover like it or not. they're going to add a chat bot to the iconic platform for traders. A friend of mine used to work at Bloomberg as a user UI designer. How is the UI? Well, there is, and it's crazy to have that job that intersects the terminal because the terminal is full of power users that basically control the flow of all the world's money. has to be making split, not even split-second decisions, but like quarter-second decisions. And so it's impossible to change the design of any part of that platform because it could have a profound financial impact on the world if a button is, I don't know, a couple centimeters over from where it used to be. So it will be interesting to see how this is incorporated because any design change in the terminal is a huge headache. It's in their finger memory, right? They don't want to. The new chat interface is called ASKB or ASKB, capital A-S-K-B. And they say the ASKB will never give a buyer sell signal. Bloomberg's there for them to make their own decisions. They have to own their decisions. They always have. We can never say it's perfect. More of the problem is we might not answer a question fully. That's where transparency comes into play. I think these systems should be used to drive users to sources, not hide them or abstract them away. I'm sure there's some demand for this, right? I use perplexity, for instance, you know, to do kind of that kind of thing. You know, what's the best running shoe or whatever? Bloomberg has not specified a date for a full release, but I imagine we'll hear the howls when they do release it. AskBee coming to a terminal near you. And then I thought, you know, this is an interesting trend. Sean Boot's blog, Generative AI Vegetarianism. This is an Emily Bender kind of a take on it. Or a Guardian take. Yeah, I should give up. He's a generative AI vegetarian. Not a vegan. No, just a vegetarian. He says, I don't want AI. I want to write my own emails. I want to write my own mediocre software code. I want to learn and think and ponder with other humans, not with a text prediction system built by consuming all the text on the internet. You can still do that. Yeah, you could. I do. I'm actually looking forward to getting back into doing some coding challenges because I kind of miss handwriting code. But I wouldn't want to handwrite the kind of code the Claude is writing for me. It's just boring, you know, spitting out a bunch of stuff that is not interesting. Well, the essay I sent you that irritated you by Vivian Ming in the Wall Street Journal argues that the best way to use AI is to challenge it and have it challenge you. Yeah, I think that's true. One of the things I have now my Kenobi do is go through my daily Obsidian journal entry and write a synthesis. It's an annual synthesis. So it's like kind of like the Christmas letter that you write at the end of the year, except I found it very useful because it points out things, trends, that I didn't really notice that happened day in, day out over a period of time. And so it's kind of like what she's writing about, which is the synthesis is useful for me to see things as a human, not the AI saw it. I saw it as a human that I might not have seen without that synthesis. So I think that's a good example. Yeah, I think that's true. You push each other. Yeah. You don't accept the answer. You don't ignore AI either. That's also fraught. You're better off if you use AI to push you. It's true of all information, though, isn't it? Right? Yeah. Information is just fodder for your brain. Well, it's like teaching. How so? A good teacher should challenge you. Yeah. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. A good teacher is probably better than a good student. And a good student challenges the teacher, too. Right. Oh, I always learn from doing the radio show. Good Lord. People ask me questions, I go, I don't know. Let me find out. Are you ready to buy a 13-acre property in Mill Valley, California, home of the wealthy? The homeowner, an investment banker named Storm Duncan, says he wants to sell it, but not for money. He wants to exchange it for equity in Anthropic. Remember, Anthropic is not public yet, so he would be getting this from an employee or somebody who was granted stock by Anthropic. He described it as a diversification play. He's under-concentrated in AI investments. He said it'll be a private transaction. You don't have to sell the stock outright. You continue to retain 20% of the upside of the shares exchanged for the duration of the lockup period. he bought the property in 2019 for $4.75 million. He wants to sell it for closer to $12 million. Okay. In anthropic equity. And while that sounds like a lot of inflation, it's probably about right for Mill Valley. Very fancy. Neck of the woods. I'm sorry. Did I say $12 million? I guess it's only $4.8 million. You know what? I think the price went down. I thought it was more when I looked at it last time. Look at an infinity pool. Yeah. It's a big house. See, right there in the Bay Area, you could drive right into San Francisco. Mark Benny out the pipe. Well, you have to go over a bridge, though. Oh. Yeah, not possible for all members of this panel. Too bad there's not a tunnel. Oh, look. I wonder if it includes the Batman. Batwoman. Batwoman smoking a doobie, it looks like. That is a very weird painting. Okay, I'm not going to buy it right there. Look at this. This pisses me off. When you look at houses that were built even a few years ago, the alcove for the TV is far too small. Right, Paris? That's like a 52-inch TV. Yeah, it's too tiny. Too tiny. Where am I going to put the TV? It's also too high for that. Yes, you're craning your neck. Yes. It's so funny, but when we were looking at houses a few years ago, I really would reject a house because there was nowhere to put the TV. I watch all the home shows and it's the husband who says, I need the man cave Welcome to my man cave Lisa says she can't come up here because it's too dusty What am I supposed to dust to? It's your man-ery your man-ery and finally because we are at the two hour mark so Ashley Vance who I've interviewed he wrote a good book about Elon Musk good journalist had an interview on his podcast with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman pretty high quality stuff like the president of OpenAI and the founder and CEO but it was behind a paywall so as a joke I guess it was part of his core memory podcast he posted on X He said he'd consider making it public if somebody would give him $100,000. I wonder. I don't think Ashley was serious. I don't think he expected it, except the CEO of a Nevada-based laser manufacturing company said, I'll give you $100,000. He did. He unlocked the podcast for everybody. And Jim Beloschick of Send Cut Send, not only has unlocked it, but now he's going to get ads. On the Ashley Vance podcast. In a way, he's getting advertising right now. Yeah. Win-win all around. And I'm not even getting any money for it. Yeah. We've got to keep, you know, hiding some of these interviews. Yeah, no, I don't like that. By the way, I don't think that Jeff Jarvis is Alfred the butler. I could see me as the Batman. Well, Jarvis is a very common butler name. I think we're a three Batman kind of podcast, you know? Yeah, we're all Batman now. By the way, that's not me. That's Adam West in the Batman outfit. But I do think it might be Paris in the Robin outfit. I don't know. Kind of looks like you. Not really. It's not very good at all, actually. This is back. This is an old one. Back from the. Yeah, it's a bit of a gentleman. The old chat GPG three days. Jeff is Batmite. All right. This three Batman podcast is about to wrap up with your picks of the week. In just a bit, you are watching Intelligent Machines. Don't forget. If you look below, anything that's bold is something that's not duplicative. The one question I have is, do you want to do Chloe? Oh, I thought it might be your pick. Line 152. Well, we could do that as a pick, yeah. So I watched Chloe. It's Chloe versus history. It's a YouTube channel. Who is Chloe? A figment of an imagination. I watched the Titanic one today, and I thought it was quite good. So it's an influencer doing a selfie. Is this some AI slop? It's all AI. No, but it's better than that. Can I turn on the sound? Maybe I should. I don't know. I won't get. This is a plug for you, okay? it's literally just rice and warm water okay the bread dipped in the soup man move okay now he ends up talking to the captain and telling him hey the boat's gonna sink wrong reason to believe that tonight there will be ice like loads of ice and i really think you need to slow down sir we have received several ice warnings today madam and i can assure you our officers are monitoring the situation. Of course he didn't listen. So Jeff and I and Anthony looked at this. We thought, it's very interesting, but is that a real person or not? I thought it might be. What do you think, Paris? Is that Chloe? Is that real? I think I saw your guys' chat about this. I'm spoiled. The guy who does this, first of all, I want to say, it's great. It is. He cares about history. And he's making the background the AI backgrounds from historical public domain stuff. His name is Jonathan Laramie, by the way. And so it's fairly accurate, although occasionally there's weird things like four-legged chickens or there's people walking by wearing sunglasses in ancient Rome. I don't think they had sunglasses, but I might be wrong. He writes the prompts so that he can be as accurate as he can be. He uses pictures of things and has them be animated and come to life. Yeah. Some of the Titanic stuff I'm pretty sure came from the movie, but, you know, that's okay. But I think this would be appealing to a young person who's studying ancient Rome or, you know, any of these historical things. They have a city of Paris and so forth. It would be kind of a nice introduction. And because it's got the influencer doing the selfie cam, and she's very, I mean, she really feels like Gen Alpha. this might be more accessible as a way of kind of a wedge to get into history. So I commend him for doing this. What I don't commend him for is he sells a book for $70. 70 pounds. 70 pounds. So it's like 84 bucks. He sells a book that says how he does it. And I was just so... Jeff and I actually... I tried to say let me buy it. We thought of it. We didn't pay for it. But I can't let you pay for it, Jeff. He just bought a MacBook Neo. So I said, no, no, I got it. And it was not a worthwhile $84 because what he didn't explain is the one thing that I think is most interesting. I understand he takes pictures. He turns them into AI images with Nano Banana. He animates them with, I forgot what he uses to animate them, but it's all well-known tools. But the thing that really was intriguing to me was Zoe. She seemed so realistic. Chloe. Chloe. I mean, and listen to her voice. And the character stays consistent. That's what I mean. That's really important. The clothing's consistent. The look is consistent. The tattoos are consistent. The voice is consistent. So I thought maybe there's a real person. A million people live in what I can see right now. So behind me is... Notice, though, there's a lot of cuts. And Anthony is convinced, and I think he's right, that Chloe is AI-generated with an actor, maybe even a guy, doing the base model. He does say he uses 11 labs for the voice. And Anthony says very similar to those. In fact, look at this. He's very similar to those AI selfie things where when there's a transition, you jump cut. Because the AI is not good at making the transitions. Right. And that kind of makes sense. You can only get so much length out of any of the AIs or any sequence. Right. So I'm thinking, but he doesn't reveal this in the $84 book, But I'm thinking that Chloe is like rotoscoping, like a person acting it out. And then the AI turns it into that. I don't know. That's my guess. But we don't know. But I think it's very interesting. What do you think? Paris? I mean, I think it is interesting. It's an interesting, like, I think that the aspect of this, like you guys said, that is the most compelling or novel is the ability to be consistent over it. It's a shame that his book was AI Slop that didn't reveal anything about how it was created, though. Well, I think we're going to try to get him on. He's done a number of interviews, but all of them have been very soft. And we're going to get him on. We're going to ask him the details. The details. If you go to Majestic Studios. That's the name of his company, Majestic Studios. And you can see that he started with cities, with Edinburgh. Right. He takes things that are well-known images and just tries to animate them in life. And it's exciting for him in history, and I agree. I think it's fun. Yeah, and in fact, there's a picture of him. And in this case, these really seem very AI, to me, very AI-jazz. Yes, they are. They were earlier works. The backgrounds really feel, not just that it's earlier, the backgrounds really feel there's the Magnacarta. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's very... Yeah. They're kind of on the level of those discovery documentaries where they, you know, kind of fake act, just historic moments and kind of things like that. I think Chloe was inspired. That actually really made it more interesting. Yeah. But it's the same kind of low... Nice purses. Low res, maybe sometimes inaccurate AI backgrounds. It's the Chloe that I find interesting. Look, it's just the beginning of this, right? Yeah. And it makes you, I think, reconsider whether you could really make a 22-minute show this way. Right. I mean, you could really, really do it. Could have been an AI, absolutely. So, yeah, I think it's pretty cool. I would love to use it. This is what I'm excited about. I would love to figure out how to use it for things like explaining Gutenberg and printing. except what I said in our chats over the last few days is it's a lot easier to do a place than a process or a person. Right. All right. We are going to now go to our picks of the week. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Thanks to viewers like you, our club members make all the difference in this show. if you believe in the importance of independent podcasting, it's hard for us to compete against podcasts from big companies that require to use their app like Spotify or Amazon to listen to the podcast. They get much more data about the audience. Advertisers want that data. So they sell the bulk of ads. Joe Rogan gets a million dollars in ad. We do not because we don't know anything about you. We are an independent podcast that comes to you over an RSS feed and we like it that way. but it does mean that we're competing against some people who don't, and we would like to keep doing what we're doing. So what we have to do, I'm happy to say, is come to you, the audience. Frankly, I would love to have all our shows be fully audience-supported, and someday that's my dream. But until now, you do about 30% of our operating expenses, and we really appreciate it. If you're not a member of Club Twit, you want to support this kind of content, you want to support independent podcasting, twit.tv slash Club Twit. $10 a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows. It's a special programming we only do for club members. And, of course, access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a great place to hang out with other club members and watch the shows together. Please join the club. We would love to have you. Twit.tv slash Club Twit. Vine is back. Did you see this? Vine is back? Jack Dorsey has backed a Vine reboot called The Vine, D-I-V-I-N-E. You can download it to your phone. But here's what I love about it. They have resurrected half a million of the original Vines. Oh, my. For those of you who are too young to remember Vine, which means you're like eight. You're eight. How did you have the attention span to listen to this whole podcast? That's right. You can watch some Vines if you'd like. That's right. Vine was only six seconds. It was before Reels, before TikTok. There was Vine. So how long is Divine allowed to be? Six seconds. Six seconds. Oh. Six second video loops by humans. Here, I can open it, actually. I actually haven't played with it. Should we play with it a little bit and see? Oh, I have to create an account and all that stuff. Create a new Divine account. Sign in with a different account. Oh, Noster. Oh, that's interesting. So maybe it's based on the Fediverse. That's very interesting, which I wouldn't be surprised. Jack Dorsey is kind of a believer in all that, despite the Twitter connection. Anyway, six-second videos back, and what I think is great is you're going to get to see some history with those original half-million vines that died on the vine when Twitter bought them and put them out of their misery. Maybe Jack Dorsey is feeling a little guilty about all that. One more thing I will mention as a pick, just because I'm going to try really hard to get these guys on. A news gathering AI that texts you every day sends me a telegram with news. And he looks at X. He looks at Discord. He looks at Reddit. He looks at all the weird places that I don't, you know, I look at my RSS feeds. Oh, I shouldn't. I guess I can show that. That's not mine. But he's on my telegram. And at 9 a.m. I get some really good stories. No Scroll is the name of it. It's brand new. I found it on Twitter. And no scroll dot com is the website. And if you're if you're curious, it's also very smart because I said, do you know who I am? I said, yeah, you're Leo Laporte. You do this podcast. Perhaps you're interested in making a story. Go on. Chuffed. Chuffed. But it is very personalized. It's a cool idea. It scrapes news and then sends it to you on your schedule via Telegram. $10 a month, but it is free for a week if you want to try it. So I'm trying to get the founders on to talk about that because this is, I think, another interesting use of AI. Paris Martineau, pick of the week. I got two picks of the week this week. The first is an indie game I just completed that's a delightful play called Felvidic. It's a... That sounds obscene. Say that carefully. It's a JRPG set in 15th century Slovakia. What's a JRPG? Like a Japanese role-playing game style. It kind of refers more to the combat. You can see the animation is really interesting. It's kind of this low bit rate, like lo-fi. But it gets really weird and interesting. You have kind of turn-based combat from a first-person perspective, and you play an alcoholic knight, Pavel, in 15th century Slovakia, who he's drinking himself to death because his wife left him, and he works for a... So that was her pet name for him, was Felvidek. You know, I don't really know what Felvidek means. Okay. I think it might be some translation that I'm not understanding because I played the game in English. But you are kind of working for this lord as you're supposed to kind of drive out the Hussites and Ottomans. But then a cult emerges and it starts to get kind of weird and interesting. It's a delightful game and it's really funny and just has one of the most interesting art styles I've played in a while. Very cool. And it's also kind of a short game. I 100%ed it, and it maybe took like seven or eight hours. $11, Windows only, on Steam? Yeah, I played it on Steam Deck. It's great. Oh, I was going to say, do you have a Windows machine or do you have a Steam Deck? Yeah. Is your Steam Deck Windows or Linux? I think it's Linux. I mean, I don't even know. So that means I could probably play it on Linux. Yeah. Or Proton. Okay. You could play it on Steam. Because I don't have a Steam Deck. Certainly. Yeah. And I think there's other, like you can buy it on itch.io. Oh, itch.io. Itch.io. The other pick is Katie Notopolis just posted this example of something I didn't realize existed, that Amazon now allows you to create a Notebook LM style podcast to describe a product to you, and we need to listen to this one that Katie just found. Here we go. Today, our AI-generated shopping show is exploring the Wellmedix Rapid Relief Diaper Rash Cream. Emma, what makes this hospital-grade cream different from standard diaper rash products? Well, it's really interesting. This cream uses a dual-action approach. Instead of just zinc oxide, it combines that with white petroletum. She, uh... Petroletum. You can ask a... Help, my friend. That hurts. Fascinating. So it's not just about treating the problem, but stopping it from coming back? Exactly. And they've added some... This is so ridiculous. We have a question. We have a question. A question from the audience. These botanical ingredients help soothe sensitive... Are they going to say it? ...while the jewel barrier does the heavy lifting. It takes until... All right, baby, we've got you. You're dealing with discomfort, and this cream is designed for exactly that kind of irritation. Emma, what can you tell them? Oh, it doesn't repeat the question. My butt hurts. That's sad. Well, if you'd like a really dryly read podcast about your butt cream, you can visit Amazon.com. Wait a minute. We're not done listening. It's a protective barrier. I like how she mispronouns patrol. You know what's interesting to me is that QVC and the Home Shopping Network and all those have Lyft cable. And this is the replacement is these lives. I mean, it's not mostly stuff by humans, but live streams on Amazon and other shopping platforms have really replaced home shopping on cable. It's TikTok and Instagram that replaced QVC. Yeah, that is true. Yes. Good point. Wow. AI product. So I could make one for sugar-free gummy bears, for instance. Anything you could make it for. I'm going to do that. And it's a, I'm sure, great horror movie. Just look at some of the reviews. I want to do a really boring plumbing thing. Yeah. Let's talk about. Yeah, or cow magnets. What was it? What was it Ian was working on? His backflow pump? Yeah, his backflow valve, yeah. Very nice. What are you these days looking at, Mr. Jeff? Well, some of the weirdest things are shown to me to try to sell me. I don't know why I was advertised a 64-inch hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Well, how tall are you? Maybe it knows things that you don't. Maybe it does. I'm 6'4", so you're 76 inches. So I don't recommend a 64-inch model for you. It's $72,000. Whoa! The upgrades. And you'd have to crouch to get into it. I've got chair options. I can have interior starlight. Interior what? Does that mean you're making stars on the inside? Michael Jackson used to use a hyperbaric chamber. Really? Yeah. Maybe that's why this is hot now, because of the Michael movie. I don't know. The idea is it's a high-pressure atmosphere, two times the natural atmosphere, using oxygen to enhance healing, reduce inflammation, and improve overall wellness. You know, you'd be better off building a sauna. Yeah, that's what I really want, is that. So then the other one is, because I try to read carbon papers. I think you saw Ash for this? Yeah, yeah. Where? Why? Well, it happened on one of the German papers I read. Oh. Speaking of which, in the German papers, they've been captivated for the last couple weeks by the story of Timmy, a whale. This is Timmy's rescue. A whale that was trapped outside of Hamburg, and it got on sandbars, and they tried to dig channels for it, all kinds of things. and a lot of people, some could say that they've gone too far, but they came up with a barge and got Timmy into the water-filled barge and they're towing Timmy out to the North Sea. Whale barge. Towing Timmy to the North Sea. So here are photos. Some are saying that Timmy's not well. That's why. What's the body of water called that's inside a barge in the ocean? I don't know. Is that a pool? But is it? Is it? Look at it. It's an Olympic size. More so, yeah. Yeah. It's a whale. You could do the whale Olympics in that. Oh, Timmy, he doesn't look good. No, he's like, well, they have towels on him to keep his skin okay. Oh. You know, just let Timmy die in peace. That's pretty much it. Timmy's a young whale. It's tragic. People felt for Timmy. Timmy got antivorified to an extreme. Yeah. So there's the happy hamburgers. trying to bring Timmy to the ocean. Do you think that whale realizes... Timmy, that is our show title for today. He's now in Danish waters, headed for the North Sea. Oh, they're following him all the way up to the North Sea. Well, this has been regular daily reports. How much money have they spent on Timmy? Millions. Do you think Timmy realizes what a unique position he's in? Does Timmy realize that he's being taken across the ocean in a barge? I'm so sick, and they're putting me in this thing, and they're pushing me along to the North Sea. And then it says, if Timmy's considered robust enough, the whale will be released and hopefully swim further into the Atlantic Ocean where he will die. Well, here's to you, Timmy. I hope you're considered robust enough. The Guardian says that attempts to rescue Timmy, the restrained whale, are inadvisable. Oh. That's a very Guardian way to look at things. You really shouldn't do that. You shouldn't. Help us. Stand next to Timmy. But the politicians got involved. Should they be involved? The rich people got involved to rescue the whale. It's been a whole big ill story in Germany. Wow. What's the German word for whale? I should know that. Translate. Whale. Whale. Whale. From English to German, the whale. Der Waal. Der Waal. Der Waal. W-A-L. Well, Timmy, good luck on your journey. We salute you, Timmy. To freedom. We salute you. Ladies and gentlemen, let's get all three of us saluting Timmy. That concludes this gripping edition of Intelligence. Hamburgers showing Timmy out to sea. Yes. of Timmy. What was it? Happy Hamburger Toeing Timmy. Is that too long for a title, Benito? Happy Hamburger Toeing Timmy. No, please no. Please say it's okay. Oh, God. One of my favorite things about our show is we have these great guests on, and they probably think, like, wow, you know, I'm going to be able to share this podcast with my audience, and they see that they're on an episode called Happy Hamburger Toeing Timmy, and they just have to go, and it's a photo of all of us polluting, and there are no words we've seen. I think that's beautiful. It's so good. It's kind of my dream come true, to be honest with you. We do thank Nirav Patel, who was very gracious. I don't wonder why his name was about Timmy. Hey, I was on a podcast. What was the name of it? Happy Hamburgers Towing Timmy to the North Sea? Okay. We'll make sure we listen to that right away. Paris Martineau, great to see you. Glad you got out of the tunnel alive. Listen, my haters were trying to keep me constrained underground. Nobody hates Paris Martin. Everybody loves Paris Martin. That's true. And you were a very gracious thing. Hey, I'm trapped. I'll be there as quick as I can. I mean, it's rare that you get trapped on the train and at cell service. Otherwise, we would have wondered what the heck has happened to Paris. And thanks to you, I'm going to go have a yes-o. I'd really recommend them. They're great. salted caramel ball. Thank you very much, Paris. We'll see you next week. I'll be in Hawaii, by the way. Yeah. So this is going to be a very interesting... Bon voyage. It's an experiment. Are you going to pull a Mike Elgin and then have a beautiful Vista behind you and a beautiful mixed drink in your hand for the entire show? It's the plan. Great. It'll be a little early for the drink, though, when you're doing this show. It'll be... Never too early when you're on vacation. It'll be 11 a.m. How many hours early? Three hours early. Oh, is that all? Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, I could. Maybe it won't be an alcoholic beverage. I don't really drink alcohol, but it might be a coconut with some coconut juice in it or something. I finally had wine for the first time in three months. It was nice. Oh, you couldn't have wine because of your medication? Well, no, yeah, I didn't. And I was paying pills for a while and stuff like that. And then I figured, okay, that's good to go without. I mean, it's part of the reason I've lost 31 pounds. You don't look like you've lost 31 pounds. Thanks a lot. No, because you looked slender all along. Being tall helps. Yeah. You didn't look like that you had 30 pounds to lose is what I was saying. Oh, I did. Really? Okay, it must be somewhere. My high was 210. I'm now 179. When I was running, air quotes around running, rather obsessively, six miles a day, I got down to 156. Yikes. People thought I had cancer. Yeah. Are you okay? You look good now. Stay where you are. Don't change. I can't just figure out how to get my neck and my back. Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalistic innovation emeritus. His books, the Gutenberg parentheses, the way we weave, magazine, but most importantly, Hot Type, the new one. Upcoming. Upcoming in July, August. August. Hot Type. Get your Hot Type. Get your Hot Type at jeffjarvis.com. Pre-orders available. And look for the epilogue about Happy Hamburger Stowing Timmy. look for my colophon, which I set on a linotype. Oh, wow. Actual hot type is in the book hot type. Oh, that's really cool. That's so fun. So you have to go with a separate page that then get bound to the book? Yeah. Wow. And then we went on. I was at the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Mass., which is a wonderful, wonderful place. Go there if you can. I'm going to buy the book just for that. I mean, I have a copy of the book, but I'm going to buy it just to get the colophon. Next week I'll show you the type. that's over there. Nice. What's the font? Or do you call it a typeface? Well, the typeface is the design. A font is one size and style of a typeface. Okay. I'll tell you next week. And here is a preview of what it's going to look like when I am in Hawaii doing the show. It's not going to look like this. I mean, maybe it will. I don't know. I'm hoping it will. But I like this. I do have a... The nexus of the man's ear. No, it's not going to look like that. I promise you. Although, well, maybe I shouldn't make promises I can't keep. Yeah, you don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what's going to happen. I could be kidnapped, hijacked by crazed coconut pirates. I will have the Starlink Mini, and I'm hoping I can set it up somewhere in a beautiful area and do the show. Are you at a hotel or a bar in a condo? A condo. In a condo complex. We're in Kona. So you know what? I will be holding a delicious cup of Kona coffee. Paris, Kona's good, right? That's a good kind of coffee. I haven't had Kona coffee. I have, and it's very good. It's a very delicious brew. Volcanic soil. Very good. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do Intelligent Machines every Wednesday, 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern. That would be 2100 UTC. You can watch us live in the Club Twit Discord or on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Kik. And if you're watching live, of course, you can chat with us live. We love hearing you in the chat. after the fact on demand versions of the show oh I didn't mention we're also on YouTube the videos on YouTube on demand versions of the show available from twitter.tv slash I am there's audio or video also you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client and if you do leave us a nice 5 star review we haven't had any to read lately but if you give us a good one Paris will read it put them out there yeah Next week, I'm not sure who's going to be on the show. I think Chris Stokal-Walker, the interview I did, you guys couldn't make it, but that was a very interesting interview with a British journalist who is using AI to do his news gathering. We have Troy Hunt coming up, the creator of Have I Been Pwned. Frederick Rivard, who is the CTO of Dash. We'll talk about how password managers survive in an age of AI. And my old friend Rick Salmon, who's an amazing photographer, has a new book about AI and creativity. And he has to be on. And I said, Rick, I would love to have you on. So he's going to join us at the end of May. So what we are, we have some great people coming up. Very excited about that. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. We will see you next time. Thank you, Paris. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Club Toot members. See you next week on Intelligent Machines. Aloha. Hey, everybody. It's Leo Laporte. You know about MacBreak Weekly, right? You don't? Oh, if you're a Macintosh fan or you just want to keep up with going on with Apple, this is the show for you. Every Tuesday, Andy Inaco, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell, and I get together and talk about the week's Apple news. It's an easy subscription. Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for MacBreak Weekly or visit our website, twick.tv slash mbw. You don't want to miss a week of MacBreak Weekly. I'm not a human being. Not into the animal scene I'm an intelligent machine