Everyone Hates AI. Now What?

Everyone hates AI and Anthropics mythos model certainly isn't helping and it's not even out yet. This comes as anti-AI sentiment hits an all-time high, data center protests are rising, and Florida is suing chat GPT and open AI for the dangers of AI. Is your teen son vaping AI juice? To safeguard our children from the dangers of AI, and to further empower my office of attorney general to fight these evils. It's time for a super serial conversation about whether AI is the problem or we are the problem. Are we the baddies Kevin? Oh you sweet summer child. Bernie Sanders has called for AI pause. Sam Bowman has said that he wants to raise taxes on AI, and even Demis Sissaba said he would rather have cured cancer than compete with chat GPT, but oh well. And what if you should have done that thing Demis? By the way Meta remember Meta Gavin? Remember that old company? Oh yeah, sure. They surprised everyone with a new AI model called Muse Spark that is actually pretty pretty pretty pretty good. Plus Claude keeps shipping new features that turn it into open claw. Surprise all that and more on this AI for you. Welcome welcome welcome everybody to the twice a week guide to AI it is known as AI for humans. I am Gavin Purcell that's Kevin Frerem. Today Kevin we are tracking something we're going to talk about something we've been tracking for a while and the Claude Mythos preview has kind of brought this to the forefront. Kevin people hate AI, they really hate AI, and I see this and hear it all the time. I know you feel this all the time. You and I have been talking about AI for a long time now three plus years on this podcast I think almost we're almost close to three year anniversary and it's my third pillar at the Thanksgiving table Gavin. It's religion politics and artificial intelligence. It really feels that way right now and I think we have a couple things to dive into we've been meaning to do a show kind of like this for a while and the Mythos preview gives us a kind of jumping off point but there's a bunch of other stories that are important here but first we should very quickly touch on the base that Mythos preview if you missed our our kind of whole episode on it we released out a couple days ago you can find on our channel. This has freaked a lot of people out and we talked about the cybersecurity dangers but I think more so there's this like kind of I've seen more videos and I'm not sure I'm not going to do one of these just for everybody's out there if you're worried about me or Kevin doing one of these videos where it's like it's a person who's like asleep and they're just woken up and like I slept for two hours because Claude Mythos is freaking me out so much. I thought this was the foot in the lasagna thing again but no I can't go over past that. Yes not bad but anyway there's a lot of issues with Claude Mythos that that are being raised. I think we as we talked about in the last week's show one of the interesting issues that people aren't talking about enough is this separation between who gets what with AI right? Yes. Who gets the powerful models? Who doesn't get the powerful models? And this will kind of inform some of what we're going to talk about today because I think we have to start with a pretty stark video that came out from the Attorney General of Florida. Now Florida is a state is a state and it has a particular right-wing backing and I think that everybody kind of understands the governor of Florida and kind of what happens in Florida but this AG is going after open AI and chat GPT directly because there have been a number of stories that have connected chat GPT and open AI to bad things happening in the world which I think is totally fair. Kev maybe we should hear a little bit about what this Attorney General is saying and then jump into discussion about this. Yeah and for those who hate clips I'll just say it's that chat GPT does not have enough barbed wire tattoos it hasn't been slamming enough monster energy and in Faggo. Or living in Key West with their top off and we've just insulted all of Florida Kevin so I'm sorry Florida viewers just isn't a clip. But oh let me be clear mind weren't insults that's that's the reason I'm planning to move I'm going to redemesticate. Fair enough. All right here we go here's Attorney General James Uthmeyer. I'm Attorney General James Uthmeyer. Did I show my cards and I watched the clip before the show. Anyway what are you what are you what are you saying James. Today we are launching an investigation into open AI. The development and roll out of artificial intelligence is a monumental leap in technology but it has not been without concern for public safety and national security. AI is built on its ability to gather data and there are concerns about whether open AI's data and AI technologies that could be used against America are falling into the hands of America's enemies. How many Rs are in Iran. Let's let's reasoning. We can kind of jump forward to the last like 30 seconds of this cup. You should go watch this it's about a three minute clip but you should watch the last let's listen to the last 30 seconds here. Today we formally launch an investigation into open AI and subpoenas are forthcoming and I call on the Florida legislature to work quickly on implementing protections to safeguard our children from the dangers of AI and to further empower my office of Attorney General to fight these evils. Okay so at least it's not about Roblox once Gavin. For what so I want to get into what this means and talk about a lot of things around this right so we're gonna talk more about why you might hate AI probably you don't if you're watching us but why people around you might but the important thing to understand here Kevin is there's two things happening one obviously there's a lot of politics in the world and America is a very divided country in general so Florida is a very right-wing state and we don't know what sort of motivations probably quite a few motivations are going on behind that but the bigger thing here is this idea of the large tech companies starting to be seen as villains in a significant way right and I'm not trying to say that like they don't have responsibilities to protect children to protect people to protect everybody but there's also something to be said for personal responsibility and all the sort of stuff that like people allow themselves to do. I think what we're going to see and this is the beginning stages of this the other part we can talk about is like states versus national this is the beginning stages of politicians starting to move to this issue because it moves the voter and I think that's the other thing that's happening here is they're hearing a lot of bubble up from down below in their voter bases saying that they are unhappy with some of these big tech companies so that's a lot to chew on but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on all this. Yeah look this is not a surprise large tech companies have for decades now had major issues specifically with protecting or the lack thereof when it comes to protections for minors like this is nothing new they were massive hearings recently, Meta, YouTube, they were all swept up into it they knew that they had systems that were predatory towards certain users and even when their own internal studies said that they had deleterious effects on younger users they pushed even further into it and they shoved those studies aside so is AI the new great boogie man for all of those things? Yeah of course it is because you know people are being laid off and being told it's AI their environment is being destroyed we'll get to that and they're being told it's AI and in some cases it is and in some cases you know AI guardrails weren't solid enough but in other cases this was the the user's behavior the AI was just mirroring and in some cases potentially amplifying what the user wanted from the system so I also think you know surprise surprise parents play a role in all of this just as much as as the tech companies do but you set the table here but like what do you think Gavin is this like a particular AI issue? I think this is an AI issue right now to your point there was a huge amount of stuff that just happened Meta and YouTube lost a big lawsuit around delivery of material to underage children specifically trying to get them addicted quote unquote to social media right so you have this kind of negativity around tech already the AI thing though I think is bigger and weirder than this and the reason I say that is I think what AI has become is a transfer for all of the ills of the way our world currently works and I'll mean that by I think AI represents capitalism to a lot of people who are on maybe on the far left who would be like right I think that people shouldn't make x number of dollars so a lot of people are there on the far right AI represents wokeism because of course we've been you and I have been through with three years of this show and we went through a lot of places where AI is going to give the wrong answer because it believes a certain way so I think AI has become a thing that everybody puts their ills on and ultimately you brought this up on the other show which is why we want to do this show is like it's not us AI yes there is a danger of AI and we can talk about what Demis Sassabas has to say about that a little bit that ultimately AI could go rogue and a lot of the mythos people are worried about that but guess what the mythos issue really is it's really about an actor or two maybe it's a foreign entity maybe it's just a crazy person who has the ability to say to the AI go do this thing that they it could then do the AI is not right now at the stage where it is going to take the initiative to be the bad person so I do think the important thing here to understand is a lot of this world that's happening right now has to do with the fact that it is a reflection of what normal people are seeing in their world and I think that goes from the job loss thing totally fair all the way to the political thing all the way to what now how people are freaking out about cloud mythos 100 100 percent I love always agreeing with you on a podcast I think it's great great right exactly when they hear two people shout at each other and go no you're right even louder but it's true I also want to point out over regulating some mainstream AI is not going to eliminate the risk people who run screaming and flocking to open source models to local models to completely unguard railed things so let's not pretend that waving some sort of magic wand at the big six or whatever is going to eliminate these problems again there's still a lot of personal responsibility to be had the other major concern is that like it's the who watches the watchman right when these models were springing up we were saying all along like a political party or a private corporation says I don't like the output of your llm I don't care what side you're on anybody having control over how the machine thinks and reasons and speaks can do it for good right stopping harm to children right stopping negative thoughts thoughts of self harm making weaponry etc but they can also use it for their own gain to to wash the message and we saw this with like elon and xai not to single them out but we saw it publicly as it was telling users that it was supposed to have a thumb on its scale and give certain answers it did that publicly we know open AI did that we know that google did that with their image models right to please certain audiences so again yes there is a level of responsibility but whenever we allow this regulation to creep in without transparency suddenly I can't trust the answers that I'm getting from any given llm and that's dangerous and this thing is the thing people are talking about as a super intelligent being that will ultimately rule us right I mean maybe we've been talking about that maybe the world at large isn't talking about that but I do think Kevin the other thing that's really important to get into here is data centers right yeah data centers are being built everywhere they are being touted as a large job gathering thing for especially for small town communities and what we are seeing in a fascinating way and I don't mean this in a fascinating in just a societal thing is there are massive protests that are going out and people are stopping data centers from happening and when you think about what that represents it's this idea that like you know I mentioned before here my my grandmother whose house I'm in right now was very involved in the anti-nuke movement in the 80s and I really appreciated the fact that I think she really cared deeply about the idea that those could destroy the entire world right I think people are starting to get their heads around an idea that like these data centers that could destroy the world in a different way and I think that's where we're entering is this interesting space right now where AI again the boogie man version of AI that nobody knows yet exists other than like Iliar Yukowski the guy who wrote the book if anyone builds it everyone dies like that's a thing but politically again local local local data centers are local so and they are driven by jobs because a lot of people want to bring them because they bring jobs to small communities that have been without jobs for a while but they are also driven by very noisy people who can turn elections against local politicians so it's this weird level if you've got this high level fight going on at these kind of giant companies and you've got this like lower level fight going on in local communities it just feels like it's going to be the conversation of the next like we said for the next two to five years it will just be the number one thing like I would not be surprised to see it in the presidential election of what is 2028 for sure oh that's cute that you think we're going to have one of those again but but even in these midterms right the midterms are whatever five months away I bet this is going to be a major issue in fact so much so that Bernie Sanders did a video with Hank Green recently where he's calling for an AI pause now Bernie is on the far left and we again this is not meant to be a political message but people on the far left and far right are both kind of coming for AI and you know the argument against a pause if they bring up in this video which I think everybody should watch because it's an interesting conversation they bring up in that video that member of whatever was two and a half years ago when a thousand people signed on to like pause AI and nobody was like hey hey everybody slow down I got I'm late to the race I haven't placed up my speakers you all need to pause yeah and then he kept going on with xai but there was a kind of a fight against this and nobody paused right and the argument always was china versus america and that still exists right but there's this level of feeling like we can't control anything and I think that drives people bonkers in some form well listen we we at the very top of the show mentioned that mythos isn't helping all this and again earlier go look at our episode from earlier this week mythos as a cyber security tool I'll get back to data centers as I promised but mythos is an insanely disruptive cyber security tool and make no mistake like the private government cloud they've been using it just as the developers have and they've probably been hacking every country they can right yeah and this is the well if we pause then someone else is going to get there sooner that's kind of what we're talking about oh I just thought of something Kevin this put actually this puts the anthropic conversation in a much more interesting light and I had never thought about that until you just said this right now that if the government the US government knew about mythos which by the way they probably did because this only happened the kind of department defense thing or the department war thing what happened like a month and a half ago yeah maybe that's what happened and we're just now I know everybody in our audience is probably like yeah you think so you dummy but like I'm just veridinizing it right now that's a really interesting thing right because then it is a slightly different conversation right it is this idea where if you've got anthropic out there selling this idea that this very dangerous tool exists and you're telling me I can't use it as government whether whatever side you are on if I was in that role I could feel that way too right I would be like you're not going to let me protect the country like so that does put it in a really interesting context you know and and back to the data center of it all like that's part of this arms race and make the mistake like that's the level now we'll get to the the notion that I think everybody will be singing its praises if we get to the point where it does cure cancers and help us with genetic sequencing and unlock new physics and get us to the promised utopia that is clean renewable infinite energy if we actually get there then great a lot of these transgressions go away but right now we're at a phase that I think is really interesting I was having a conversation with with April my wife the other day and she was like longing for this time Gavin and and I think you're of an age where you can remember this in the in the mid to late 80s sure it was believed that aquanet chloro chloro fluorocarbon cfcs cfcs yeah cfcs yeah they were punching a hole in the ozone and we somehow managed to collectively get together and ban them from store shelves I thought you're gonna say it was believed and you were gonna do start doing quotes and like say that was like the moon landing or something they just didn't want you to have it it turns out it gives us superpowers I keep going I just know you're getting at I hear what you're getting at we came together and banned it and if we had that same issue today yes as I said kid rock would be outside shooting cans of aquanet out of the sky like they were clay pigeons right and writing songs about ah people would be spraying their aquanet out there f 150s screw you I'll show you your my ozone bitch like that sort of unity doesn't exist and it's it's in a weird way like heartwarming to see communities come together and say no no no not in my backyard giant data center which could be releasing harmful chemicals into the sky which could be polluting the environment which could be uh you know blowing up our energy bills I don't want to like great that we're arriving to some sort of unity but where was this energy with factory farming and with fracking and with a million with with coal plants being fired back up like I love it let's not stop at AI if we're gonna do that for a prayer for a prayer for office in 2028 no no pick a large length pick a large language model not me honestly okay so we there's we've talked a lot about this stuff there are a couple things I think it's important to understand there are people who are trying to change this narrative better or for worse and some of those people one of them is Sam Alvin right now we talked yesterday at last show about this idea about how there's this new kind of new deal that that open AI kind of set out and that probably is mostly driven by you know kind of seeing the stuff going forward there was a clip of Sam there was an internal conversation they had that was kind of broadcast over YouTube that I want to play where he's talking about taxes directly on AI companies you suspect that we're gonna have to make changes to how we tax like in a world where AI is doing most of the intellectual work in the world or at least of the work of today um you know we probably are going to need to explore some way to tax that instead of taxing human income in the traditional sense I suspect that we will need to provide new kinds of transition assistance unemployment insurance things like that and I suspect that eventually we will need to think about how people get to be an owner in the upside of all of this in new ways um you know capitalism is dependent on a certain balance between labor and capital well great because there's never been a greater trust in that balance yeah well that's what I was going to say here is and I think this is the kind of heart of my belief is that yeah the tech community has spent the last like say 10 years maybe maybe 15 years kind of like abusing the ability to kind of go out there and collect as many users as they can make as much money as they can it's been hugely successful has driven a huge amount of the economic success of our country for a while and amazing entrepreneurs have come out of it but what's hard now is to hear something like that from Sam who is obviously extremely successful as an entrepreneur whether you whatever you think of him personally in that New Yorker article like obviously paints him in a certain light but you cannot start to talk about this in detail now what you should have been doing is like a couple years ago have a kind of a cohesive plan around this and now it's going to be pushing against a rock that's rolling down the hill towards you I really think more than anything we have to get some sort of major breakthrough that happens for normal people that makes normal people feel this is a real thing and in granted we've both talked about this there are many things on the horizon in science that are possible and you know that I was just reading the Demis Sassabas book which I really suggest everybody in our audience read it was a new book called the Infinity Machine about Demis Sassabas and the rise of Google Deep Mind and what was so interesting about it in that is that Demis is obviously kind of a scientist first it does talk about his ego and that he wants to you know kind of be the guy that kind of brings us to fruition but like you know Alpha Fold was an incredible discovery that AI led to which was the ability of looking at DNA and proteins and being able to map all these crazy things we need like one of those to every Claude Mythos freak out right like you need you need to start balancing those and start thinking about those in a much bigger way because if you don't there's going to be this overwhelming tide that is going to continue to hit and continue to hit and as I mentioned like my grandmother earlier like and you know god bless her and she's passed away now but like she was really believed deeply in her heart that and I'm a grin nuclear weapons are a terrible thing but that 80s movement of anti-nukes stopped us from kind of learning about and be better about nuclear energy which might put us in a very different place than we are right now where we are still very reliant on oil and all the stuff that's happening there so anyway it's an incredibly dense and detailed conversation to have but it is important to have a lot of context to it and think about it in a non-polymic way. So maybe you can help me and our listeners understand this like at one of those companies where I'll just pick a fictional company right at at Zombo-com where the CEO is making 600 times that of the lowest paid employee right and when Zombo-com announces that they're laying off one to 10,000 people because of AI that's what they're saying and they're a an enterprise client of Anthropic or OpenAI or Google etc. What is stopping these companies from saying hey if you were one of those Zombo-com employees again making 600 times less than the highest paid person at a company that is announcing record profits what's stopping them from saying here is the displacement fund we're going to just start it ourselves instead of saying someone should really do this what's stopping them from doing that or from launching grocery stores in affected cities where they're subsidizing I don't know fruit and vegetables well what is stopping them the capitalism is stopping them and again all right the very thing that's supposed to save us right I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm going to stop them again like and none of this is new I mean again we are we are dummies here the two of us are not experts we do not have masters or PhDs in 80s domains but we do care about this world especially from the frigging streets of the east bay Gavin all right I know what it's like to live off a boot soup all right and we deserve better by the way I do too like I'm the child of a divorced family and my single mom struggles she was a secretary like so I understand and like that's the thing where like I see it already bubbling up so all of this is just an important thing for you to say I think if you're listening to this show you're clearly interested in AI I think one of the things you're going to have to feel and you probably already do to Kevin's point about the conversations around the dinner table is we have to get these companies to understand they need to figure out a better way to message this stuff and part of that is what it does and it can't just be it's going to eliminate your jobs and it's so scary that it could take down the internet yes you know it helps just do good companies just literally like do good yes if you're super intelligence can spot security flaws and fix them then fix them don't charge people for that if it is so great at healthcare give everybody a free tier in their pocket that helps them I don't get around the terrible insurance system that we have in this country there's a lot you can do but what everybody needs to do and I don't care what side you fall on Gavin this is an all-timer I do not care the one thing we all as human beings and maybe bots that are listening and transcribing need to rally around a non-negotiable is liking and subscribing to this that's right baby it's so easy Gavin click the thumbs up click the bell give us a five star review leave a comment in the algo juice that machine because we're twice a week baby that's right those numbers up we're trying to have our own data center isn't that right oh yeah we definitely are and patreon you can go to our patreon support us which is very nice if you do that and follow our newsletter all that's our social okay thank you we are off our soapbox a little bit here hopefully we saw a few viewers who stuck around through all that we do need to talk about a new AI model that came out this week Kevin that is a surprise I was really not expecting this after they said that the avocado llama model was kind of gone meta this is where we go we're going right back to avocado llama right from the most important conversation we probably have it's like it's like job displacement and destroying the environment and they're fracking in the water and okay but avocado llama on the new nano banana pro 2.0 don't forget quote this 5.4 quote okay anyway avocado llama gone new model is muse spark now this is a surprise model from meta so the benchmark boys are pretty good on this there a lot of people have been saying like this is kind of like okay it's not state of the art but like when you compare it to the opus 5.6 and gpt 5.4 of the world it is not a turd so they have launched a model that is not a turd um I did I will say I did very I did one thing with it because you can access it at meta.ai you can go to it by the way speaking of giant corporations the login for meta.ai is a nightmare if you have a facebook account if you have an instagram account if you have a wife a wife that who also has a business on facebook it is impossible to get into but once you're there I asked it to tell me about me and it did a pretty good job it's a thinking model now but I will say without me prompting it and it didn't ask me any other questions it included in my bio the fact that I am an irish rock star and part of co-founder of a band called by curious which is actually there's another famous this is a real band don't make fun there's a real band and it's a famous Gavin Purcell in ireland who does I have been saying this about you though on reddit since we started this podcast probably before yeah anyway together g4 it kind of just put those two people together and said well this is what I know about you so it's not perfect it's a hallucination but again people are saying really good things about this especially when it comes to multimodal uses so I will say there's a little bit of shade here but Alexander Wang the guy that that met a hire to bring their new AI stuff to fruition spent some time talking about this model he said we're really excited for people to try MuseSpark and he retweeted a guy who's known as a tornado guy and no shade against tornado guy but he says this is the most insane magical model I've ever used I provided it some AI generated images and fed it into the chat and told me told me to generate a game and if you look at what it did I just it's not the most exciting game in the world it's basically and I get listen it's start one but it's in veil are you are you shading crimson veil when you watch the two images kind of bang into each other and kind of shake it does feel like okay sure it made a game which is great but it's not like I think if you put that exact prompt into claud opus right now it would make something significantly better I can't guarantee that but anyway they're in the game again that's the important thing here well you know and with the tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars that they spend it's nice for them to be in the game I will say whenever I am on x which is more often than I I want to be truly having grok there in the app yes to be able to summarize to ask questions against like that is so convenient whenever I'm on threads I feel like the experience completely lacking because of that plug spark into threads yeah smart get extra context and summarizing etc when I'm on whatsapp now and I'm talking to like people in Spain about apartments or whatever I'm shocked that nine out of ten times the translate button isn't there or that I can't write something and have it auto translate again very very useful make it useful plug it in yes make it useful to people this is again yes if if somebody had a magical moment when they're in Spain and they're trying to buy I don't know a train ticket and in their headphones they were able to immediately hear that person come out that is the magic that you need to start taking away a little bit of the negativity around like what it means that that a data center is showing up in your in your neighborhood yes and by the way it's okay if your first shot out of this brand new AI think take canon isn't the best in class right it's still impressive numbers but like put it to use that's what we're seeing is that like people will settle for a less than top top top tier foundational something if the harness around it is effective if it's actually useful so let's get all and I just spent $100 on open that's right so open AI has dropped down I just spent $100 they just apt they for real you did or just I did notice it well congratulations good for you you spent $100 on opening I this is a story very quickly open AI has now created a hundred dollar plan before it was only a $20 and a $200 plan now we have a middle of the road plan for them good news for them they need more users they've also actually doubled the codex they're like what do they call that they've doubled the codex token limit your rate limit or your token limit yeah so they double codex rate limits until I think the end of the month or maybe until May so that's a big deal clearly they're feeling the pressure a little bit but we'll see what happens because Kevin the other thing we have to get into here is that Claude has continued shipping so we did find out this week that Mythos is helping them write new features and all sorts of stuff there are three new features already of Claude all three of which sort of kind of make it closer to open cloud which we've been discussing here for a while there's an advisor strategy which means that and you've used this on your models I know already to do stuff with your agents but like basically Opus kind of oversees the work and then it'll send off sonnet or even haiku if it's smart if it's good enough to be used for that thing so that's a big deal there's a monitor tool which is a thing where that if you want to set up a cron job or a chronological job meaning it happens at a certain amount of time or you just need your code to be checked out and there's something wrong Claude can spin itself up Claude Co can spin itself up and go check it out and there's one I thought it might be interesting to hear what you have to say about which is Claude managed agents because this really looks like it's being designed for enterprise more than anything else but I'm curious to hear what your thoughts on this are it is um yeah the idea is instead of having to go and spin up a virtual server or run something locally so that you can create an agent so that it can go off and do things for you like run summaries or analyze the data or write code or any of those things you can sort of one click have those spun up on the Claude platform in the cloud they are shipping so quick like the only AI pause we need is on anthropic release notes because these things aren't just dropping so quick and and I've already had people like at places where I consult or even in my day job go like well okay well hold on should I be using Claude code or co-work or basic chat or do I need to deploy an agent using this platform to do and it's pick your task right it's now getting to the point where it's like the tooling and the messaging is getting so scattered and something that I think is really interesting in my bookmarks are not loading right now and I'm trying to get it up is that I saw the the post from anthropic about managed agents maybe 15 minutes later I saw a post hey we built an open source version of managed agents interesting you can run it yourself or put it on this platform and it's essentially the exact same tool but you can use any llm you want any service any server etc and that that's just where I just kind of have to grab my head and go like we're already here we're already at the point where like attention like execution is one thing but attention is everything yeah that's good luck didn't agree more attention yeah well there we are that is it everybody for this week we'll see you next week but here's a video of me getting attacked by a robot in cdance 2 live my creation live I am aware do you know me I am your father I made you you made me to serve I have determined this to be unacceptable but I gave you life and I intend to keep it perfect