This Week in Tech Episode 1087 Transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT this week at Tech. Father Roberts here, Jeff Jarvis, Joey de Villa. We are going to talk about the IPO Palooza from Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI. Nvidia's announcements at Computex, Microsoft's announcements at Build, and what Apple might be talking about tomorrow. This Week in Tech is next. Podcasts you love from people you trust.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:00:27]:
This is twit.
Leo Laporte [00:00:35]:
This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1087, recorded Sunday, June 7, 2026. Evil is the root of all money. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. So glad you're here and so glad to welcome our fabulous panel. This week, Father Robert Balasaire is joining us from the Vatican City. Hello.
Leo Laporte [00:01:00]:
Actually, you're not in Vatican City, are you?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:01:02]:
No, no, no. Vatican City is behind me. We're in the Vatican. But Vatican City is a very specific space.
Leo Laporte [00:01:09]:
So confusing. High atop looking down on St. Peter's Basilica or something, I don't know. Anyway, welcome, Robert. What time is it?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:01:19]:
Oh, it's, it's 11 o'. Clock. But I mean, really, I'm back in California. That's where my heart is.
Leo Laporte [00:01:24]:
Yeah, you're in California. Time good. Where it's just, you know, 2:00pm Also with us, Jeff Jarvis. He's on the east coast in beautiful New Jersey. Normally we see him every Wednesday on Intelligent machines, but it's nice to have you on the beyond the Grownups table. The Grownups table. Jeff, professor emeritus of Journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City and University of New York. Oh, I forgot, we don't have to do that anymore.
Leo Laporte [00:01:50]:
Craig, Craig, Craig, Craig, Craig, Craig. That's another one. I don't. I don't even know that one. His brand new book, Hot Type, which is the history of the Linotype and more, emerges from seclusion.
Jeff Jarvis [00:02:09]:
I just finished recording the audiobook this last.
Leo Laporte [00:02:11]:
Oh, you don't sound hoarse at all.
Jeff Jarvis [00:02:15]:
It was. I did in three days. 300 pages in three days. Not bad.
Leo Laporte [00:02:19]:
And that's Joey de Villa. Good to see him. You've seen him. Good to be here on many of our shows. He has a new job as AI developer advocate at. Well, just Developer Advocate. Developer advocate, but yeah, Developer advocate at Netflix.
Joey de Villa [00:02:33]:
But my primary. Yeah, I'm really pushing NetFoundry's new AI tools. So little gateways for LLMs and MCPs and ways for agents to talk to other agents. Securely Net.
Leo Laporte [00:02:44]:
Foundry was a longtime sponsor on our shows. We love them. They are, of course, the creators and sponsors of the fabulous Open Source Project OpenZT. Great to see you and congratulations on the new gig, Joey.
Joey de Villa [00:02:57]:
Thank you so much.
Leo Laporte [00:02:59]:
Do they let you bring your accordion to work?
Joey de Villa [00:03:02]:
Oh, yeah. In fact, I believe I played my accordion during the job interview.
Leo Laporte [00:03:07]:
No.
Jeff Jarvis [00:03:08]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:03:08]:
No.
Joey de Villa [00:03:09]:
Oh, yeah. Wow.
Jeff Jarvis [00:03:11]:
And you guys, I can't do that.
Leo Laporte [00:03:14]:
Wow, that's fantastic.
Jeff Jarvis [00:03:18]:
What did you play?
Joey de Villa [00:03:19]:
Oh, my Afroman parody. Because of A.I.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:03:22]:
oh, nice.
Leo Laporte [00:03:23]:
Because of A.I. because of A.I. you'll find that on YouTube. It's a YouTube short. I love it. I love it. Well, what a crazy week this has been. I guess we should start with.
Leo Laporte [00:03:34]:
I don't know where to start. The week started with Computex and Jensen Wong for Nvidia, speaking at his keynote at Computex in Taiwan and announcing a whole bunch of stuff. Next day, Microsoft's Build conference announcing a whole bunch of stuff. And then Anthropic filed for, well, what briefly, Wired called the largest IPO ever, immediately scooped by SpaceX, which is going to be the largest IPO ever. They. They are looking at a $135 per share price.
Jeff Jarvis [00:04:12]:
Largest by a factor of three.
Leo Laporte [00:04:15]:
The next biggest one was Saudi Aramco, but it was a third this size. This would value SpaceX at a whopping $1.77 trillion. Is that all? Really? Somebody did some calculations and said it's going to have to. To meet that value. It's going to have to make some. I forgot what it was. I wish I'd written it down. Some outrageous 60x.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:04:44]:
Yeah, 60x of their current revenue.
Leo Laporte [00:04:47]:
Huge amount of money.
Joey de Villa [00:04:48]:
Is there even that much money out there?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:04:52]:
Well, I mean, yeah, if the tech companies keep trading between themselves, they just sort of have an endless supply. So, sure, make it up.
Jeff Jarvis [00:05:00]:
But Joey, you're right. You add in SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google's surprise entry of an $80 billion billion dollars raise.
Leo Laporte [00:05:11]:
Explain that, because Google's already public. But we're seeing companies that are already public file for secondary.
Jeff Jarvis [00:05:19]:
Right. So they're going for $80 billion, 10 billion of which is going to Berkshire Hathaway, which is a big deal because Berkshire Hathaway under its old management. Oh, what's his name? We forget so soon. Wasn't big in technology stocks.
Leo Laporte [00:05:32]:
You mean the wizard of Omaha, of Oma Hub.
Jeff Jarvis [00:05:35]:
And so Google has twice, at least twice that in cash on hand, plus credit up the ying yang. Who's not going to loan to Google.
Leo Laporte [00:05:42]:
But is it a loan or is it a Stock issue.
Jeff Jarvis [00:05:44]:
Oh, stock issue. It's a stock issue.
Leo Laporte [00:05:46]:
Does it dilute the existing.
Jeff Jarvis [00:05:47]:
Yes, it does. The stock went down as a result for a few days. Well, then everything went down because of Broadcom. But they're saying, we're going to invest upon investing, we're going to work, we're going to beat everybody here. It was an aggressive move by Google
Leo Laporte [00:06:03]:
and of course, what they're doing is raising money to build data centers. Right? I mean, this is.
Jeff Jarvis [00:06:09]:
Let's build them anywhere.
Leo Laporte [00:06:10]:
Yeah, yeah. In fact, you know, that's what everybody's doing at this point. Meta's stock took a big hit when they announced in their quarterly results they were going to spend a huge amount. Google actually said they were going to spend, I think, $180 billion on data centers, and that didn't hurt their stock. Amazon announced a similar figure. I mean, do we need all these data centers? Is that is if it feels. This is making it feel more bubbly all the time. And I'm not a big proponent of the, of the AI bubble story, but, boy, it's starting to feel like that.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:06:46]:
Look at what they've already spent. You've got Amazon, who is close to 300 billion already. It's 291 billion that they've invested into AI. You've got Alphabet, you've got Google going with 262 billion. Meta is what, something like 227. You've got XAI that spent $20 billion just to build out their, their AI infrastructure. And they're basically just renting out the raw capacity to Anthropic and, and now to Google. So yes, they, they, they will build them, yes, they will use them, but whether or not they're going to make money off of them, that's a huge.
Leo Laporte [00:07:20]:
There is some question of whether they'll be able to build them. We're starting to see data center bans. Oh, yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [00:07:25]:
Are you seeing this in Canada, Joey?
Joey de Villa [00:07:29]:
Don't know, actually, because I. Well, I mean, I'm operating out of Tampa. Oh, Florida. I do visit Toronto on occasion. I have. Not from my friends, I haven't heard much, but they haven't talked much about building data centers in Canada yet. But you know what, it's cold there. There's a lot of water, there's a lot of hydropower.
Joey de Villa [00:07:52]:
I wouldn't be surprised.
Jeff Jarvis [00:07:53]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:07:55]:
Of course, Utah is suing shark tank investor Kevin o' Leary over his massive data center.
Jeff Jarvis [00:08:02]:
Mega, massive. Right. I mean, just.
Leo Laporte [00:08:04]:
He's actually agreed to scale it down, but.
Jeff Jarvis [00:08:06]:
Oh, has he?
Leo Laporte [00:08:07]:
To Some. Is he wearing a chain?
Joey de Villa [00:08:10]:
He's been dressing really weirdly lately.
Leo Laporte [00:08:13]:
Yeah, he's a case.
Jeff Jarvis [00:08:16]:
He's a head case.
Leo Laporte [00:08:17]:
Okay. Murray, I just noticed that picture in this NBC news report. Okay. Anyway, I think there's some question whether these data centers will even be built right or no.
Jeff Jarvis [00:08:33]:
Leo, is it like the overbuild in fiber back in the day, in the early part of the century? Is it an overbuild, but is it an overbuild that will end up being used or is it an overbuild that won't be being used because things just get more efficient? There's new paradigms, there's not as much use as we thought. The latter.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:08:50]:
Absolutely the latter. I mean, when you had the build out of telecom infrastructure, when it went dark because those companies went under, you were able to buy it for pennies on the dollar, but you could use the same fiber. So the expensive part persisted. You could continue that into a future investment. When these data centers are no longer being used and that's coming up very, very fast, they're useless. For example, XAI's $20 billion build out they use the previous generation Nvidia have already been surpassed by Vera Rubin. Now you might say, well, they'll just keep using the old chips. Except Vera Rubin is so much more efficient than the old chips that you're going to get to a point where it's no longer economically feasible to keep running them and using up all that power when you could get 2x3x performance from the new chips.
Jeff Jarvis [00:09:37]:
Really good point.
Leo Laporte [00:09:38]:
Here's a report from Janice Henderson. Analysts say that the key risk of the data center story is under delivery and they have some numbers to back it up. The promised delivery by 2030 is 157 gigawatts. The total expected by 2030, 84,54% of the total.
Jeff Jarvis [00:10:09]:
So maybe it's not an overbuild then.
Leo Laporte [00:10:11]:
Maybe it may not be an overbuild.
Jeff Jarvis [00:10:12]:
Super slow.
Leo Laporte [00:10:13]:
Yeah, yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:10:14]:
Most of the places power is part of the problem. Data centers. Yeah. You can't get power, so you're going to be independently generating your own power with portable turbines which are not, not super efficient, which are really bad for water usage and gas. Basically it hits your economics.
Jeff Jarvis [00:10:29]:
Yeah, well, it won't matter folks, because Anthropic has just said we have to stop.
Leo Laporte [00:10:35]:
I knew Jeff would somehow steer that into the conversation as quickly as possible.
Jeff Jarvis [00:10:43]:
We'll get to that.
Leo Laporte [00:10:44]:
Well, we can do it now. I don't mind. It's an Interesting story. It's more interesting frankly than the data centers. Anthropic put out a piece when AI builds itself, claiming that they are making great progress towards recursive self improvement. Now this in some respects is the holy grail towards artificial general intelligence is an AI that improves itself so fast that it outpaces humans.
Jeff Jarvis [00:11:14]:
This is based on basically saying our coders are getting a lot more done, so it has to be on the way.
Leo Laporte [00:11:18]:
They say, yeah, this is from the Anthropic. Paper engineers at Anthropic ship eight times as much code per quarter as they did in 2021, 2025. I mean, is it good code, is it usable code? I don't know.
Joey de Villa [00:11:31]:
Eight times as many bugs, maybe, who knows?
Leo Laporte [00:11:35]:
They say 80% of Claude is now vibe coded. I believe that especially with the release cadence of these, and maybe that's the data point that maybe confirms this opinion, is that all of the main AI companies are releasing models at a rapid clip. At least the ones in the US deep sea, you know, isn't moving that fast. It took a year. But both OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, even Microsoft are shipping models very, very rapidly. More rapidly. Right. The cadence has stepped up.
Leo Laporte [00:12:10]:
As of May 2026, according to Anthropic, more than 80% of the code we merge into Anthropic's code base was authored by Claude. Before February 2025, that number was in the low single digits, so they say. And here's the graph code contributed per person by quarter. This is the 8x and mythos is the most recent model. And that's where the 8x is really showing itself.
Jeff Jarvis [00:12:39]:
And they extrapolate from that to self.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:12:43]:
Yeah, is that a good metric? Because I remember when companies started looking at how many commits you make. Elon Musk was famous for that. I want to know how many commits you've made to the repository. Well, people just started committing everything. Every little change was a commit. So I need to know how you're actually measuring the code contributions before I would agree that it's improving your code base.
Leo Laporte [00:13:07]:
Well, here's what they call the success rate for each Claude code session. Open end problems is the bottom line, the dark blue line. And that was a pretty low success rate, hovering below 20% until December of 2025. What happened in December? Oh, that's when Opus 4645 came out and it's been soaring ever since. And Mythos is this jump here. So now open ended problems are being solved at a rate well above 70%. You're seeing similar things with trivial tasks, routine tasks and substantial tasks. All three of those are over 80% success.
Jeff Jarvis [00:13:47]:
But that too is a moving target. So how do you percent of what
Leo Laporte [00:13:53]:
the session is deemed successful if success rate agent clearly succeeded at the user's tasks and this is important without requiring corruption correction. So that's the idea that it can do this by itself. If it can do it by itself, the theory is then it can do it at
Jeff Jarvis [00:14:14]:
stop us before we kill again.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:14:16]:
Self improvement at scale. I'm still not super convinced on that. I'm sure it's coming. I don't think we've got it well
Leo Laporte [00:14:25]:
and that's why they say we're getting close enough now that we really ought to think of pausing. We're not going to do it. But if everybody, once we have our
Jeff Jarvis [00:14:34]:
IPO in we're going to pull the ladder up behind us and tell everybody to stop.
Leo Laporte [00:14:39]:
Well, and you know, even if you did that, the Chinese are rushing as fast as they can to keep up.
Joey de Villa [00:14:44]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:14:44]:
And catch up.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:14:46]:
I'll go back to the the quote from intelligent machines that I use from Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway who said show me your incentives and I will tell you your outcomes. The incentive right now is to be the first. There is no prize for second place. You have the first fully functional model. Well, everyone's going to race to that and saying pause does not meet. It doesn't match the incentive. So that's not going to be the outcome.
Jeff Jarvis [00:15:12]:
Every time I think anthropic because there's still doomers there. They're still kind of test girl people there. But then they do amazing work and they come up with Claude, they seduce Leo Laporte who's a smart guy and he marries Claudette and they do some phenomenal things and there's great. And then they come out with this kind of stuff that makes me say no, no, Mythos.
Leo Laporte [00:15:33]:
Mythos, which was the one that everybody said, oh, that's just, you know, marketing Anthropic said we're not going to release this to the public because it's just too good. And it's really good at finding flaws. It's actually turns out to be really good at finding flaws. Did they oversell it, Father Robert?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:15:49]:
They did not. It is extremely good if you're a security professional. And the first time you get your hands on Mythos it will make you have a lot of self reflection about your chosen career. Honestly. Seriously.
Leo Laporte [00:16:03]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [00:16:04]:
As an ER or as in you've been doing a bad job all these years.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:16:08]:
No, it's just that when you've got a piece of software, you've got a service that can do in a few minutes what used to take you days and weeks. That's hard. And I mean it's not a script kiddie tool. This is not just hammering and looking for vulnerabilities. This is an intelligent tool that is using the corpus of knowledge that came before it in order to find potential flaws in softwares and services. That's incredible. That's exceptional.
Leo Laporte [00:16:39]:
It's a very weird world we live in where I think it's simultaneously true that AI is oversold, undersold is close to conscious, is just spicy autocorrect. All of this seems to be true at the same time. It's like Seven Blind men and an elephant that old.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:17:06]:
You know, I think that disparity can be explained by if you have a specific use case for an LLM. It's great. Yeah, it's perfect. It does that function. It does that feature extremely well. The problem is when people oversell it is when they start saying, oh, it's going to change everything, that you're going to have one super incredible model that's suddenly going to take over the world and it will do everything that's overselling it. But if you limit the scope and you say I want to make the best security scanner possible, then yes, you can do some amazing things with an LLM.
Jeff Jarvis [00:17:44]:
I just wrote an essay and deep site saying that we need to redefine what it means to progress and progress and progression as happened in the Industrial revolution. And one interesting little aside it made was, and I don't know if this, I haven't thought this through yet but basically saying that every technology before was given a specific task. Yes, and, and that's the, I mean I could, I could argue that the pre impress was it was because it would print, just printed it wasn't because it could print anything. So it's a general machine too. But in this case, this is part of Yann Lecun's argument is that, is that he thinks that that models will be specific to a task and you can turn them on and turn them off whether they got to that task. That's why they're not going to be dangerous. But LLMs are dangerous because they're not given a task, they're given this role to mimic us and then God knows what happens.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:18:37]:
And you have to remember that during the Industrial Revolution the reason why there was so much societal change and actually I'll use Jeff's example, the printing press caused so much societal change that people did not expect in my world because it made it possible for everyone to have a copy of the Bible.
Joey de Villa [00:18:55]:
Right.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:18:55]:
That those were texts that were previously restricted to, to priests, bishops and higher, and suddenly everyone could have a copy.
Leo Laporte [00:19:03]:
It cost a few wars, as I remember. Absolutely.
Jeff Jarvis [00:19:06]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:19:06]:
No, up. It caused an upheaval in society because you suddenly lose something that was scarce and you made it free, essentially.
Leo Laporte [00:19:14]:
Free.
Jeff Jarvis [00:19:14]:
Well, the case of Luther wasn't because it was, it was thick things. It was because he made little eight page pamphlets. Yeah, right.
Leo Laporte [00:19:20]:
But it was also translating into the vernacular.
Jeff Jarvis [00:19:23]:
It was, it was his choice to use it, to speak in German, to write in German.
Leo Laporte [00:19:26]:
Right.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:19:28]:
That was a specific purpose, a specific thing that they did with the printing press that caused that change. You can do the same thing with an LLM, but again, you have to have that specific purpose. Right now you've got so many companies that are just rushing to build the all in one LLM, the all in One model. That's. I mean, it sounds good, it's going to sell stock, but that's not really where you're going to find its utility.
Jeff Jarvis [00:19:50]:
And you're going to get, you're going to get quicker to your goal, if you have specified that goal, than if you try to make the general everything machine.
Leo Laporte [00:19:56]:
To that point, the Financial Times today leaked OpenAI plots biggest chat GPT overhaul.
Jeff Jarvis [00:20:03]:
Oh my.
Leo Laporte [00:20:05]:
Since launch. This is part of, of course, their race to IPO as well. They. Yes, let me read the text from the Financial Times. This is Christina Krittle writing. The company intends to transform the ChatGPT chatbot into a super app.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:20:21]:
Where would we call it?
Joey de Villa [00:20:22]:
Like X.
Leo Laporte [00:20:23]:
That combines coding tools and AI agents adding products that executives believe will generate more revenue. And this is going to be given to normal people. Right. The change which will give greater prominence and resources to Codex, their coding product reflect a growing conviction within the company that the future of AI lies not in chatbots that answer questions, but in agents that perform tasks for users. They quote one senior OpenAI employee saying, Chat is dead. You have to rename ChatGPT. Oh, no.
Joey de Villa [00:20:59]:
I have to see. But this fascination with a one super thing. Actually, we have had engineers talk about this before. So what I'm talking about right now is nothing original to me. Originally when people were talking about having machinery in the home, everybody was thinking, you know what? We'll have one giant electric motor in your house. And through a series of pulleys and gears, you could direct that Mechanical energy to other tasks. But it would all run off this singular pulley. And that's not actually the case if the classic engineering exercise these days is go and count the number of electric motors in your house.
Leo Laporte [00:21:44]:
Although in the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, that's exactly what they did. Right.
Joey de Villa [00:21:50]:
But then they broke it apart when
Jeff Jarvis [00:21:52]:
Harper and Brothers burned down in the 1850s. They then rebuilt with a huge steam engine in a courtyard where it wouldn't burn everything this time. And they went throughout the gate floors and ran everything. Ran the elevator, it ran the printing presses, it ran the presses that got the impact out of the paper. It ran the saw to put the holes in to do binding.
Leo Laporte [00:22:13]:
So what happened that they decided to decouple and electricity. Electricity.
Jeff Jarvis [00:22:18]:
Because electricity, the Linotypes were at first run on that kind of pulley, steam power. And when the fact that electricity came along, they could put it on their own electric motors that made the huge change. Then you could put them anywhere.
Joey de Villa [00:22:30]:
Yeah, because the electrical energy, it's very easy to wire up a place. It's a lot harder to put pulley up and gear up a place.
Leo Laporte [00:22:39]:
So I'm going to submit something that I've been thinking about. I sent Jeff and Steve Gibson and other people Jeffrey Hinton's talk.
Jeff Jarvis [00:22:48]:
Oh, boy, here we go.
Leo Laporte [00:22:51]:
Well, he said something interesting that got me really thinking. He said that analog, like our brains, is good because it's low energy. It doesn't have to be super accurate. It makes up for accuracy with parallelism. Massive. Our brains are massively parallel. But if you can apply a lot of power digital, you do the apply a lot of power to make it the distinction between ones and zeros so clear that there's never any ambiguity. That's what analog can't do very well.
Leo Laporte [00:23:21]:
So once you can apply massive power to this, then digital has some real advantages. For instance, he said all of our neurons are different. He said, give it up, Ray Kurzweil. You're not gonna be able to copy your brain into a digital machine because we are so analog that each machine is different. He says, He, Hinton says, I thought we could build an analog transformer. I tried, but we couldn't. He says the advantage digital has is they're all the same. And so all the learning from one AI can be transferred to another and another and another one transformer can move to another another.
Jeff Jarvis [00:23:58]:
And he said that makes software immediately mortal.
Leo Laporte [00:24:00]:
It makes it and fat and infinitely faster. And now this is what I was thinking in the middle of the night last night. As an analog to that. Many people prefer records, vinyl records. You know, sound is really just variations in air pressure, you know, that our ears can pick up with our eardrums and translate into something that our brain then can understand. It's all analog from beginning to end. My voice going to your ears, into your brain, it's all analog. But we figured out, thanks to Shannon's Law, that you can slice up those waveforms, and if you slice them infinitely or sufficiently, not infinitely, but it's sufficiently thinly, those waveforms can be represented digitally and be indistinguishable from the waveforms.
Leo Laporte [00:24:52]:
And that actually transformed how we listen to music, how we, how we share music. I mean, when the MP3 came out, it completely disrupted the music industry, the audio industry. I'm speaking to you digitally now. There's no way we could be doing what we're doing if I had to shout and your ears had to perceive it. Father Robert's in Rome. But in almost. Because bits can move at light speed, unlike sound, and they can move infinitely far, thanks to immense amounts of power being applied to them. We can do things that we couldn't do with analog.
Leo Laporte [00:25:31]:
And I wonder if that's a similar. That analogy holds when it comes to analog brains versus digital AI. I think that's what Hinton was implying. Hinton is another one of the doomers who says, we're going to have problems because it's going to be so much faster.
Jeff Jarvis [00:25:49]:
Hinton takes a bunch of leaps off a bunch of high dive.
Leo Laporte [00:25:52]:
Well, one thing he says, which I don't know if, I mean, how we even know this, is that they go, they're not that. If this, let's assume you could get really super smart AIs, would they really want to kill us? I mean, I don't know. Well, I've asked Kurzweil that. He says, no, no, they're. We're their parents.
Jeff Jarvis [00:26:05]:
He jumps off. He first says that. That they clearly understand. Well, without understanding the word understanding.
Leo Laporte [00:26:12]:
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [00:26:12]:
And just because they use various characteristics of words, features of words, and can put them together into an interlocking puzzle, that doesn't mean understanding. Then he says, but my argument is if they could understand, they would also understand truth versus falsity, and it'd be easy to make them stop hallucinating. But they don't. But then he says that they have a motive which presumes consciousness to lie to him, which again presumes that they know what truth and falsity is. And if they do know, then why can't we fix this before? So he then makes all those leaps to say, well, of course it's conscious. Of course it is. And I don't. I don't go there.
Leo Laporte [00:26:49]:
Well, here's the problem. We don't know what conscious means. We don't even know what understanding means.
Jeff Jarvis [00:26:53]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:26:53]:
We don't have a good definition of either. His contention, I would say this is similar to. This is why I mentioned the CDs versus vinyl is if you can't tell the difference, then what does it matter? Right. The music coming out of a CD sounds exactly like an analog recording. It's not. It's sampled. It's digital.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:27:15]:
It's ones and zeros, 44.1 thousand times a second.
Joey de Villa [00:27:19]:
Right? Yeah. Because basically Shannon's law says you need to sample at twice the. At twice the frequency. And the upper end of human hearing is 20 kilohertz.
Leo Laporte [00:27:29]:
Exactly. So if you get 41.1.
Joey de Villa [00:27:31]:
Yeah. You should be able to capture everything that we can debate that humans hear.
Leo Laporte [00:27:36]:
I think it's a similar debate because there are people who say, no, no, I can feel the.
Jeff Jarvis [00:27:40]:
What we present.
Leo Laporte [00:27:40]:
I can feel the emotion in Final music.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:27:43]:
Okay, okay, I gotta chime in here, Leo, but. Because with a good enough sound system, you can tell. With a good enough sound system, you can tell. Even you can tell.
Leo Laporte [00:27:51]:
No, Here we go. So, okay, I'm not gonna debate that. I completely accept that you can hear it. I would say it's very similar in the sense that there are those of us who say, well, if you can't tell, you know, Hinton's entire thesis is based on the idea that a transformer is creating these neural networks, creating relationships between concepts and words that are effectively what we do as humans. That is understanding. And he says, but we as humans don't want to accept the fact that we like to think that what we're doing is special, whether it's listening to analog music or whether it's thinking. And he says, and this is my contention, I don't know what understanding is. I don't know what consciousness is.
Leo Laporte [00:28:40]:
We don't have a good definition for that. My only contention is if you can't tell the difference, it's fair to move forward as if it is learning.
Jeff Jarvis [00:28:50]:
But the issue, Leo, I've been thinking about this because you do make this contention. And what we present when we speak to each other is but a small part of what we are. It is a reduction to speech. And there's so much more going on.
Leo Laporte [00:29:06]:
Even. What do you Think in words.
Jeff Jarvis [00:29:09]:
Yeah, but I. I would love to know what, what it was like, what an animal like, what it was like before it.
Leo Laporte [00:29:13]:
I don't think animals think and I don't think animals know that tomorrow is
Jeff Jarvis [00:29:16]:
enough to see a cat trying to plot against you.
Leo Laporte [00:29:23]:
I think a lot of what they're doing is instinctive, not. Not.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:29:26]:
Can I provide a counterpoint? Yes. So.
Leo Laporte [00:29:29]:
So you'd be the right guy to do this because of your faith.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:29:34]:
I understand the, the view of the transformer model. So if you can digitally sample something in the real world, you can basically represent it in 100% accuracy as many times as you want. I would argue that that is precisely the reason why you can't have a transformer model with, with true consciousness. True consciousness is not just the representation and the recreation of facts and information. True consciousness also allows for the thought process itself to. We'll call it, mutate. The, The. The wonderful thing about the analog world and the analog brain is that you get lateral movements between different trains of thought that allow for the creation of something new.
Jeff Jarvis [00:30:20]:
Thank you.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:30:20]:
The first time that you have a digital representation of a consciousness will look exactly the same as the billion time that you have a digital representation of that consciousness. Take an analog brain and the billionth time it will look nothing like the first time because of all those little variances. And I would argue it's in those variances that you find the unique nature of human conscience.
Leo Laporte [00:30:41]:
I would say that that is true if you say this is. If you say it's static. But once you take that transformer and then you apply power to it, it is no longer the same. It's no longer.
Jeff Jarvis [00:30:53]:
Well, that's because randomness is built in. But that's whatever.
Leo Laporte [00:30:55]:
For whatever reason you're comparing a non active transformer, Right? And I think it's true. If you froze the human brain in that moment, you could probably duplicate it. So I don't think it's a fair comparison. You're talking a static transformer. No power has been applied to it. I see these my mind and I know this is an inaccurate representation. It's almost like to me, an infinite number of wind chimes that are interacting not just with the ones next to them, but the ones all over the space. And when one is moved, they fire.
Leo Laporte [00:31:32]:
And suddenly that is an alive.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:31:35]:
I could see that.
Leo Laporte [00:31:36]:
Yeah, maybe constellation.
Joey de Villa [00:31:39]:
You know what, Leo? You are opening yourself up to being accused of being a protein chauvinist.
Leo Laporte [00:31:46]:
Larry Page called Elon Musk a speciesist, like a racist. Because Larry Page and this is why Elon wanted to start OpenAI. He tells this story. They were at a Allen Co. Conference or something like that, maybe a TED conference. And they were sitting around the fire and Elon was saying, we got to stop these AIs because they're going to become dangerous to us as humans. And Larry said, well, you're being species. Speciesist.
Leo Laporte [00:32:14]:
This is the next step in the evolution of consciousness. Is these AIs. Yes, they'll replace us. Or maybe they'll replace us or maybe we'll stick around just like monkeys and dogs stick around. I also went to it's time to Move on. And Elon was so horrified by this. He said, I'm starting to open AI. And by the way, they say, he says, I've never spoken to Larry Page since.
Leo Laporte [00:32:38]:
He was furious over this.
Joey de Villa [00:32:40]:
I'm beginning to form a theory actually, that it's troublemakers from Toronto who are. Who are causing Marshall McLuhan AI problems. For instance. Yeah, Marshall McLuhan. But also, you know, Hinton, he's in Toronto, right. And also Chris Ola, co founder of Anthropic.
Leo Laporte [00:33:00]:
I know he was in Rome, right?
Joey de Villa [00:33:02]:
He's just over here. Just over in Rome. And I know him from. From Hack lab to. We were both members of this hacker space in Kensington Market.
Leo Laporte [00:33:11]:
Wasn't Fei. Fei Li also from Toronto?
Joey de Villa [00:33:14]:
Was.
Leo Laporte [00:33:15]:
Isn't there a whole. There's a lot of this stuff came out of.
Jeff Jarvis [00:33:18]:
Leon went to work with Hinton in Toronto.
Leo Laporte [00:33:23]:
Yeah, as y.
Jeff Jarvis [00:33:25]:
Right.
Joey de Villa [00:33:26]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ilias from. Yeah, Ilya is from Toronto. And you know, if we want to stretch it out a little further into science fiction and, and just writing in general. Corey is from Toronto. In fact, that's where I. That's where I know him from, Cory Doctorow. But Chris Ola has talked about Anthropic developing emotion vectors.
Joey de Villa [00:33:49]:
Actually you should do a search for that. And I was just going. Really? Emotion vectors. And it's kind of interesting also that he did come to the Vatican because I remember him from back then. He had, I would put it kindly, a deep, deeply. He was deeply skeptical of the value of religion, to put it very kindly.
Leo Laporte [00:34:09]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember.
Joey de Villa [00:34:11]:
So, yeah. But the fact that he would come to the Vatican and, you know, stand beside the Pope for the encyclical, which
Jeff Jarvis [00:34:20]:
peeved some others, like, like Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell were very mad that he was there, which is very interesting. You know, at the same time you have Anthropic and I think you maybe Google. I saw a story a week ago hiring ethicists and philosophers to worry about the feelings of the machine.
Leo Laporte [00:34:37]:
That's what Angela Askel has also been doing. She was the author of the Soul Document.
Jeff Jarvis [00:34:42]:
So not to put aspersions on Hinton because he's brilliant and he's done phenomenal work, but I did look up, I asked Gemini to talk. Give me the list of people who've been accused of Nobelitis. There's a fair number. Kary Mullis in chemistry, Luke Montagnier in physiology. Linus Pauling.
Leo Laporte [00:35:02]:
I was going to say William Shockley,
Joey de Villa [00:35:04]:
James Watts, Philip Lenard Shockley as well.
Leo Laporte [00:35:07]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [00:35:08]:
The prize kind of goes to their head and they think that they can.
Leo Laporte [00:35:12]:
It's funny, in this talk that I sent you has a very funny humble brag about how, gee, I won the Nobel Prize for physics. He managed to get that in. I should probably be a better physicist. I should know by units, which was pretty funny. But at the same time, did get the, you know, managed to humble brag about winning the Nobel Prize. I would too.
Joey de Villa [00:35:33]:
Yeah, Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:35:34]:
I think he's establishing his bona fides. I don't think it's pretty good on the scene wrong with that.
Joey de Villa [00:35:38]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:35:40]:
You know, I think credit to the Holy Father, credit to Pope Leo for bringing in both sides. I'm sure Emily, Ben Mitchell and a conversation at GEBRU would like AI to have no voice in this conversation at all. But I think if you're going to have this conversation, you should bring in the proponents.
Jeff Jarvis [00:35:59]:
I think it made good on what he said about how to having a conversation.
Leo Laporte [00:36:02]:
Yeah.
Joey de Villa [00:36:03]:
I would not mess with a Pope from Chicago. I've seen the Untouchables because, you know, he puts one of your boys in purgatory, you put one of his boys in hell.
Leo Laporte [00:36:14]:
This is a conversation that Jeff and I have on intelligent machines. We had it last week with you, Father Robert, a lot. And I don't know if it's a conversation. We'll have her have a conclusion. I am actually fairly convinced that whatever it is AI is doing, it's doing it pretty darn well at this point. It's doing it at least as well as humans. Humans lie, humans hallucinate, humans fail all the time. I don't like to ask for directions when I'm driving because half the time I'm going to get the wrong direction.
Joey de Villa [00:36:49]:
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [00:36:50]:
No, it's because you have a male ego.
Leo Laporte [00:36:52]:
That's why I'm much more likely to get good directions from Google than I am from a human. So I don't. Now I do think there's a distinction between digital and analog. I don't think necessarily digital wins. I don't mean to imply that I'm a human, I'm fully analog, but I'm also fully aware of our failings and I'm not convinced that we should have primacy in a world where something could be. Whoa, better.
Jeff Jarvis [00:37:23]:
Whoa. That's a big statement. That's giving up control and perhaps even agency.
Leo Laporte [00:37:30]:
I think a lot of the argument against this is a faith based argument. I'm not against faith based arguments.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:37:35]:
The core of the encyclical, but also part of it is human dignity, a recognition that it is a tool. And you cannot give up private primacy to a tool. If you give up primacy to a tool, you get something like a school being bombed because an AI tool recognized a school as a military target.
Joey de Villa [00:37:55]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:37:55]:
And nothing happened because they've used that tool to absolve themselves of any responsibility. That's a problem. Yeah, that's not a technical issue.
Leo Laporte [00:38:04]:
Human problem.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:38:05]:
No, that is a human problem. Yeah, but it's a human problem because human, they tried to use that idea of absolving themselves by using the primacy
Leo Laporte [00:38:14]:
of the tool and that is in
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:38:16]:
order to make their target package.
Leo Laporte [00:38:17]:
That is very risky. I agree.
Joey de Villa [00:38:19]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:38:19]:
But it's a, it's, it's not a tool in the sense that a hammer is a tool. It has, it's somewhat, somewhat or even a nuclear bomb.
Joey de Villa [00:38:26]:
It's a fan. It still is a fancier tool. And the other. But I, I, I'm of the firm belief. Yeah. You give primacy to a tool. If you played video games in the 80 what you 80s. This is Robotron.
Joey de Villa [00:38:39]:
This is Robotron 2084. This is the Cylons. This is. We do not want that.
Leo Laporte [00:38:44]:
That is one argument people use for why AIs are dangerous is because they've ingested all of that dystopian science fiction and that's why they're going to act badly, because it's expected of them.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:38:58]:
There is a dystopian sci fi, however, that for the past almost 40 years has been discussing this exact topic with this level of granularity. It's called Ghost in the Shell from the late 80s. It's exactly this topic, this idea of digitizing consciousness. What does it mean for a transhuman future?
Leo Laporte [00:39:18]:
Right. And Star Trek, some of that. Although they've never really addressed if Captain Kirk beams down to a planet, is that the same Captain Kirk?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:39:27]:
It Is not.
Joey de Villa [00:39:27]:
It is not.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:39:28]:
It's not possible.
Joey de Villa [00:39:29]:
It's not. It's a Captain Kirk. We will need Captain Kirk's eventually. Because what Captain Kirk was really good at was convincing computers to shut themselves off or commit suicide. Like he was best at that paradox. He was Captain Kirk is the original prompt.
Jeff Jarvis [00:39:46]:
It was the tone of voice.
Leo Laporte [00:39:48]:
So, yeah, tell me, which Ghost in the Machine should I consume? Should I consume the manga, comic, the TV show, the original anime? Original anime.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:39:57]:
Watch the original anime and then watch Ghost in the Shell, The. The sac and then the second gig. So there's two TV series. Watch the original and those two series. Kind of ignore everything else. Everything else is strange.
Leo Laporte [00:40:10]:
Original print version of that.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:40:12]:
There are but you. But the movies and the series are actually beautifully done, so.
Leo Laporte [00:40:17]:
Okay.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:40:18]:
I don't like that they invented new colors for that movie.
Jeff Jarvis [00:40:21]:
They did.
Leo Laporte [00:40:23]:
Mauve. All right, we got to take a break. Good conversation. No conclusion. But they'll never will be to this, I think. But it's also an important conversation, and I think the Pope did a very good job of. Of taking it.
Jeff Jarvis [00:40:36]:
Oh, it's. It's excellent. And by the way, I just want to put it out there again. I'm so delighted that he directly called out the transhumanists and the post humanists. Otherwise, it was kind of for the ages. But that was just kind of like. Oh, come on, guys. No, stop.
Jeff Jarvis [00:40:51]:
Just stop.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:40:52]:
Stop it.
Leo Laporte [00:40:53]:
But don't watch the live action Ghost in the Shell. Right? That's.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:40:56]:
Do not watch that.
Leo Laporte [00:40:58]:
No, it's not great.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:41:00]:
Honestly, I would love to.
Joey de Villa [00:41:02]:
I would love to invite Scarlett Johansson to join the club of Asians, but unfortunately, no.
Leo Laporte [00:41:10]:
Alex was telling me that in the club as well. A live action movie.
Jeff Jarvis [00:41:13]:
Not.
Leo Laporte [00:41:13]:
Not so good. All right, we're taking a little break. LMJ in. In our YouTube chat says. I don't. Leo doesn't have any worries because it'll be long gone by the time AI goes haywire. I'm not convinced. I think it could happen soon.
Leo Laporte [00:41:28]:
I don't think we're that. What do you think's the timeline? Really? Seriously, Leo, you're not buying.
Joey de Villa [00:41:34]:
You still buy green bananas, right? You're fine.
Leo Laporte [00:41:37]:
Oh, no, no, no. Oh, no.
Joey de Villa [00:41:39]:
That's my joke. I'm so old. I don't buy green bananas anymore.
Leo Laporte [00:41:41]:
Only ripe. Yeah, I don't have time for them to ripe and forget avocados, man. I only buy mushy avocados. Joey De Villa is here. Congratulations on the new job at Netfoundry IO where he is Developing developer advocate. We have a lot of developer advocates on this show. I think developer advocates are good people.
Jeff Jarvis [00:42:01]:
You're a developer advocate?
Leo Laporte [00:42:03]:
Well, you know what I think is that they can talk English and computer at the same time.
Joey de Villa [00:42:10]:
Yeah, we're basically just ENTP programmers. That's basically what it boils down to. Yeah, I love talking.
Leo Laporte [00:42:16]:
That's what we like on our show. Right? That's exactly what we need for a show like this.
Joey de Villa [00:42:19]:
I mean, I like talking to computer science.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:42:21]:
I'm a developer advocate as well. It's just a different kind of development.
Joey de Villa [00:42:26]:
Developer evangelist at this point.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:42:29]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:42:30]:
Sj, it's great to have you. The Digital Jesuit. And of course, you gotta have one professor on every show, even if he's
Jeff Jarvis [00:42:39]:
a fake one, like I am.
Leo Laporte [00:42:40]:
Unlike the National Science Council, which has. What was it? The line. Has fewer professors than members of the all in podcast. Mr. Jeff Jarvis. So good to have you. I can't wait to. Well, I've read Hot Type, but I can't wait till it comes out and everybody else can be.
Leo Laporte [00:42:57]:
Joey. Is that the biggest glass of iced coffee I've ever seen in my life?
Joey de Villa [00:43:01]:
This is Coke Zero, the breakfast of champions.
Leo Laporte [00:43:04]:
Okay. It looks good. I happen to have a ZDTV mug. Oh, hey, Actual coffee.
Joey de Villa [00:43:12]:
But anyway, very nice.
Leo Laporte [00:43:13]:
Yeah, I thought if I drop this, it's going to be the end of the line on this one. Oh, this is history. Screensavers.
Joey de Villa [00:43:22]:
That's a collector's item now. I know.
Leo Laporte [00:43:24]:
See, it's so old, it doesn't even say tech tv. It says zdtv.
Joey de Villa [00:43:28]:
Oh, wow.
Leo Laporte [00:43:28]:
Wow. Yeah, so don't fall. Don't let the kitty cat push that off the table.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:43:34]:
I have my G4 mug somewhere.
Leo Laporte [00:43:36]:
I mean, that I don't care about. And I like Jeff's twin hat as well. It's good to have all of you on the show. Computex, should I. Okay, we got a. We got Apple's coming up tomorrow. So let me talk about the past, and then we'll talk about the future. Computex, which is the big computer show, it's kind of the last PC show, in a way, right in Taiwan.
Leo Laporte [00:44:01]:
The big story there, I think, was Jensen Huang's keynote. They announced a whole bunch of stuff, including, I think, for our audience, the one that might be the most interesting is the RTX Spark, a consumer laptop chip, which will be made by Mediatek, which I think is kind of interesting and built into laptops from all of the biggies. Actually, Dell, I think, said they're going to do it.
Jeff Jarvis [00:44:30]:
HP hp.
Leo Laporte [00:44:32]:
Yeah. You're going to see them everywhere. And even Nvidia is going to make them. The Spark is.
Jeff Jarvis [00:44:37]:
But Nvidia is going to make an Nvidia branded laptop.
Leo Laporte [00:44:41]:
That's the impression I got. I might be wrong on that.
Joey de Villa [00:44:44]:
That's a change.
Leo Laporte [00:44:46]:
Maybe that. Maybe. Okay, maybe I over. Maybe I over interpreted what they said. They certainly have the OEMs anyway, including by the way, Microsoft. Now nobody's going to have that laptop till this fall and nobody said how much it would cost, but I think you can assume it's going to cost a pretty penny. The Spark is effectively the same GB10 chip that's in the DGX Spark, which a number of our club members have. In fact we have one club member.
Leo Laporte [00:45:13]:
We had our AI user group on Friday, Juan, who has two. Jeez, he's double sparked.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:45:20]:
Beat that 10k worth of compute there.
Leo Laporte [00:45:25]:
Yeah, that's what he said. Almost $10,000. They're 5,000 each.
Jeff Jarvis [00:45:29]:
The flagship does much more power at home.
Leo Laporte [00:45:32]:
Well, the idea, and I think this is really interesting in fact is what I want to talk to you all about is a laptop that can run local AI you don't need. You could use a MacBook Neo if you're going to be using Claude or you're going to be using GPT or Deep SEQ or any of these cloud based AIs. They do all the work in the data centers. That's why they're building these big data centers. But if you want to save money, you might want to run it locally. I run some local models right now I don't have enough hardware to run anything competent. Certainly. Even if you had double Sparks, I don't know if you could run anything as good as say opus 4.8 or
Joey de Villa [00:46:14]:
certainly mythos, if I recall correctly from my former life, actually having done some developer relations work for a DGX Spark variant computer for hp. In fact, that's. It was Jeff who recommended me to appear on Intelligence.
Leo Laporte [00:46:33]:
Yeah, you were on the show talking about that.
Joey de Villa [00:46:35]:
Yeah, yeah. The consumption of that was definitely sub 100 watts, like less than a nice bright light bulb for the DGX Spark zgx. But that, that very.
Leo Laporte [00:46:47]:
But okay, yeah, so no, that's good. But I'm just wondering, can it, will it run anthropic like performance? I mean, what model are you going
Joey de Villa [00:46:55]:
to run on that you'll run. I would say, you know what it runs fairly well is Quen the three six. Yeah. Quinn.
Leo Laporte [00:47:05]:
Well, I'm running that on my. Yeah, I'm running that on my framework
Joey de Villa [00:47:08]:
desktop with 120, and I'm running that on my. I'm running that on an M5 Mac.
Leo Laporte [00:47:14]:
And is it as good? No, it's not as good. You're not gonna say. It's opus quality.
Joey de Villa [00:47:19]:
It's quite good, though. Like, it is good enough. It is good enough for a lot of perp. For a lot of work.
Leo Laporte [00:47:29]:
It's work, I think. So you're right. Not for.
Joey de Villa [00:47:31]:
Fantastic for coding. Yeah, it's fantastic for coding. It will answer some. It will answer a lot of questions reasonably well. And I have been. I have been kind of tooling around with just. Just working with IT and working with. Actually working with NET Foundries Gateway, where I can actually switch between LLMs and say, look, you know what? For this job, I want to use this particular LLM.
Joey de Villa [00:48:01]:
For that one, I want to use my own. I want to use my own local LLM. So there's a Net Foundry thing called LLM Gateway that does that. And I've been playing around with it, and it works. It works rather well. And of course, the nice thing is it's local. I have complete control over it. I know.
Joey de Villa [00:48:20]:
I'm not giving away any secrets. And actually, the Deep seq, when you run it locally, will actually tell you what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Leo Laporte [00:48:30]:
Yes, actually, I run it from Deepseek's servers and it tells me what happened.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:48:35]:
Yeah, we tested that.
Joey de Villa [00:48:36]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:48:37]:
So I don't know. I did see a story that somebody said, no, it's now been nerfed, but I just tried it this morning and it sure knew what happened in Tiananmen Square. And that was running off of their servers. Not my own server.
Jeff Jarvis [00:48:49]:
Well, here's the other architecture I wonder about. You saw the story about Pulte Homes and Span and Nvidia. I put it in the rundown. Will build many data centers in suburban backyards.
Leo Laporte [00:49:01]:
So then will you sell your data?
Jeff Jarvis [00:49:03]:
Well, that's your question is does everybody end up with a large machine in the home that handles all your stuff, but also becomes part of a larger neural network and the data center becomes distributed across suburbs?
Leo Laporte [00:49:19]:
See, I think that there's going to be more and more interest in fully local models just for privacy, right?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:49:25]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:49:26]:
Although this is Apple's pitch as well. You can trust us. So, major home builder placing mini data centers in suburban backyards. That is crazy, isn't it?
Jeff Jarvis [00:49:38]:
It's only Pulte at first.
Leo Laporte [00:49:41]:
So the idea is it's almost. I mean, it's like solar. Right. If everybody ran solar panels on their roof and sold their power back to the power company, they wouldn't need to build all these power plants. Which is why our local power company, Pacific Gas and Electric, won't let us create more capacity than we use. They don't want us competing with them because it turns out their business is building power plants.
Jeff Jarvis [00:50:03]:
They say they can install 8,000 of these units six times faster at five times lower cost than a 100 megawatt data center.
Leo Laporte [00:50:11]:
Now, here's the big issue. To me, the real issue with data centers is interconnects. One of the reasons they build these 100 gigawatt data centers is it's all on the same premises. And their interconnects are so fast. If you've got one in every backyard, how fast can the interconnect connect?
Jeff Jarvis [00:50:28]:
Well, for certain tasks.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:32]:
No, but I mean, so the certain tasks that you'd be able to run on many data centers that are interconnected via standard residential network infrastructure.
Leo Laporte [00:50:43]:
Yeah, let's say it's gigabit.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:44]:
There's basically no advantage over having a AI chip from a Snapdragon X or one of Nvidia's new chips in your laptop. It would be the same performance because that, that bottleneck, it, it doesn't allow you to use the full potential of either your, your mini data center or the mini data center of your neighbors.
Leo Laporte [00:51:04]:
Right.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:51:05]:
That's just basic infrastructure.
Leo Laporte [00:51:08]:
Bandwidth throughput is a big part of performance on these things. It's not just the GPUs, it's not just.
Jeff Jarvis [00:51:14]:
Well, yeah. When you watch Jason Long's keynotes about the data centers, it's, it's all about.
Leo Laporte [00:51:19]:
So I'm not convinced. This might be more a. Well, but, but I noticed that this story comes from realtor.com but my question
Jeff Jarvis [00:51:27]:
is, does everybody have. It's like we used to talk about you, you don't carry a phone. You have a blob that's on you.
Leo Laporte [00:51:32]:
Right.
Jeff Jarvis [00:51:32]:
Because every home in the future, besides having fiber to the home, does it have AI in the home in the sense of a, of a, of a powerful smart box?
Leo Laporte [00:51:41]:
Well, obviously Jensen Huang thinks people are going to want these laptops. Right. I, I think it doesn't make a lot of sense. I think a NAS or a, A server, a lo. A. A home server makes sense.
Jeff Jarvis [00:51:53]:
That's what I'm saying. Right.
Leo Laporte [00:51:54]:
This is what I've always wanted to do, but not. But yeah. And so maybe I need a data center in the backyard from my home server. I hope not, but maybe. I can't imagine the climate impact of a thousand home servers in the backyard. But anyway.
Joey de Villa [00:52:09]:
But you know what aspiring criminals this is your chance to put another bit is to get a whole bunch of bitcoin miners.
Leo Laporte [00:52:17]:
That's a good point. That's a good point. In fact, you know, if it wasn't enough to make money in bitcoin to get this to happen, I don't know if there's going to be enough impetus to get this, make this happen with AI.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:29]:
So I mean to, to Leo's point on the interconnects, let's say that they've got modern fiber and they're getting 10 gigabit connections between micro data centers. That sounds like a lot until you realize that the NV72 infrastructure that Nvidia is using for their Vera Rubin data centers, that's 1.6 petabytes, right? Not gigabits. Not, not petabits. Petabytes. It's so, so astronomically larger than what you could do with network.
Leo Laporte [00:53:00]:
Even the djx DGX and RTX Spark are 300 gigabits. Sorry, gigabytes. So that would be 3,000 gigabits per second. We're 3,000 times faster than a home to home Internet. Even if you got 10 gigabit.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:18]:
Very few of us are going to be training our own models. We're going to be using models created by others. So that's the resource intensive part, right? We're going to be just fine using desk.
Leo Laporte [00:53:28]:
So if the frontier models are as some people in our discord are asserting, we don't know. But if there may be a trillion parameter mixture of experts models that's significantly faster than that 36 billion parameter. Quinn, 36 you're running.
Joey de Villa [00:53:45]:
Yeah, but then what pro. But what problems are you presenting to your models? Like I mean is it, you know, I'm going on a trip to New York. What should I, what should I, while
Jeff Jarvis [00:53:57]:
you're at it, fold some proteins for me.
Leo Laporte [00:53:59]:
Well in fact I asked Quinn to give me a product table on the RTX Spark and it did a very good job of that. So it says deep seek now but I was, I was running Quinn when I was doing it. So you know, but this is just looking up stuff on the Internet. Certainly Quinn is more than powerful enough to do that. If you're going to spend $10,000 on a double Spark, that's many years of anthropic tokens. Maybe not the way people are spending tokens. You saw the Axios story that Some company unnamed had spent half a trillion dollars on tokens. That's token maxing, all right.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:54:43]:
I hope, but hey, but Leo, with those tokens, they probably replaced half a million dollars worth of human salaries. So, I mean, right, we're good.
Leo Laporte [00:54:51]:
We're good. No, Half a trillion versus half a million. That does not pencil. And you still need humans, don't you, really, to. Even after the AI has generated all that code to deploy it, to check it, deploy it, maintain it. I feel like.
Jeff Jarvis [00:55:08]:
To ask for it in the first place. To spec it.
Joey de Villa [00:55:09]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:55:11]:
Until they have an LLM that generates prompts for itself.
Leo Laporte [00:55:14]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:55:15]:
I mean, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:55:16]:
So what do you think of Anthropic's urge for a global pause?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:55:22]:
I think it will be accepted as well as when Musk called for a global pause.
Joey de Villa [00:55:25]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:55:25]:
And then immediately, immediately started buying billions of dollars chips because.
Joey de Villa [00:55:30]:
Yeah, we've had. Yeah, we've had that call for. And it was also a six month period, right.
Jeff Jarvis [00:55:34]:
Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Joey de Villa [00:55:35]:
They.
Jeff Jarvis [00:55:35]:
Yeah, it's all doomer crap. It's.
Leo Laporte [00:55:37]:
Yes, marketing crap.
Jeff Jarvis [00:55:39]:
It's marketing.
Joey de Villa [00:55:40]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:55:41]:
It's, I think, trying to get ahead of the backlash. They're seeing the growing backlash against AI data centers and AI infrastructure. And they want to come down firmly on the side of. No, no, we're one of the good guys.
Jeff Jarvis [00:55:52]:
We tried to tell everybody to stop. They just, they just wouldn't. So, you know.
Joey de Villa [00:55:55]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like Krusty the Clown. They kept driving dump trucks of money to my house. I'm not made of stone.
Leo Laporte [00:56:04]:
So you've argued, Jeff, you know, you like Yann Lecun, who has argued that frontier Systems based on LLMs can't possibly rival human intelligence.
Jeff Jarvis [00:56:16]:
He says that it will. No, what he says is that it will match and exceed human intelligence, but in specific areas.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:56:21]:
Ah.
Jeff Jarvis [00:56:22]:
Rather than what he. What he fights against is number is the general machine, the everything machine, and number two, the machine that has no goal. His view is that you give it a goal. And the third, most importantly, what he argues, and I wrote a post about this last week with my idolizing of Jensen Huang and Yann Lecun, trying to learn from them. And what Lecan argues, as we know, is world models saying that real life is infinitely more complex than language. Language is something you add on later. But if you can get the machine to figure out what a ball is and focus on that ball, not on everything else, and then understand the impact of what's happening to it, and then he argues very strenuously to understand that Your actions have consequences, and to predict what those consequences are is the only path to responsibility.
Leo Laporte [00:57:14]:
Okay, but I feel like everything I do in my life revolves around language. If I can't articulate it,
Jeff Jarvis [00:57:23]:
what do you.
Leo Laporte [00:57:23]:
What. What do you.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:57:24]:
What.
Leo Laporte [00:57:30]:
And, and, and, and you think about what's going to happen if you let go. Do you think about it in language?
Jeff Jarvis [00:57:36]:
No, I think about it visually.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:57:37]:
But you don't think about it visually.
Jeff Jarvis [00:57:39]:
Yeah, that's, that's. You don't.
Leo Laporte [00:57:41]:
Yeah, I don't see it because I have aphantasia, but yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [00:57:43]:
Right. Or if you were to sp. The classic problem is write the spec for the robot to wash your dishes. It's a very complex spec to write. And so Lecun's argument is as same as when Jensen Wong is the reason you need role models and digital twins is that only if they make up their own rules based on understanding constraints of nature and physics, they have to understand those constraints. And then within that, they can then be actors, and then you can add language onto that as an abstraction of what those actions are.
Leo Laporte [00:58:17]:
Yes.
Jeff Jarvis [00:58:18]:
He's not against that. And again, he will say, as I will say, LLMs are amazing. They do great things. Nothing against LLMs, but they ain't going to get you to where people are
Leo Laporte [00:58:25]:
saying, well, let's come from Taipei, Taiwan to San Francisco. The next day, Microsoft launched its Build conference. And as is reported here by the Verge, the Build keynote was almost all about AI.
Jeff Jarvis [00:58:41]:
Were you surprised at the number of announcements they had?
Leo Laporte [00:58:45]:
Yeah, it was kind of a cascade, wasn't it? They piggybacked on Jensen Huang's announcements earlier, saying they're going to make a mini Surface PC with this RTX Spark. They're going to make a dev box as well as a laptop. They didn't say anything about price. And given how much RAM. DDR. RAM costs. DDR5 RAM costs these days.
Joey de Villa [00:59:09]:
Yeah. Where are, where are all these chips going to come from? We still have a helium shortage. We've got two places that make helium that are currently under wartime conditions. I mean, we've got.
Leo Laporte [00:59:22]:
Helium is a byproduct of natural gas.
Joey de Villa [00:59:25]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:59:26]:
And the big helium source is from the Middle East. Natural gas.
Joey de Villa [00:59:30]:
Natural gas. And Ukraine.
Leo Laporte [00:59:32]:
And Ukraine.
Joey de Villa [00:59:33]:
Ukraine is the other. And both are currently. Both are currently under fire.
Leo Laporte [00:59:38]:
We. We have big natural gas reserves in the United States, but apparently we don't mind the helium out of it. We don't take the helium out of it.
Joey de Villa [00:59:46]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:59:46]:
Not sure why.
Joey de Villa [00:59:47]:
I guess soon. And the problem is the annoying, the maddening thing is helium, atomic number two is supposed to be the second most common element in the universe. It's just that Earth is a terrible bucket for helium because it's light enough that it achieves escape velocity.
Leo Laporte [01:00:06]:
So it goes out into space.
Joey de Villa [01:00:07]:
It just goes out into space.
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:09]:
That's the problem.
Leo Laporte [01:00:10]:
Like a helium balloon.
Joey de Villa [01:00:11]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:12]:
So why, if. If the demand is never ending right now for chips, why did Broadcom have. Have bad results that resulted in a huge fall in their stock and the entire sector? Nvidia, everybody went down because of Broadcom. I don't understand. There's no. There's.
Leo Laporte [01:00:26]:
Because the market is not rational.
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:29]:
Oh, that's true.
Joey de Villa [01:00:29]:
It's just.
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:30]:
There's that.
Leo Laporte [01:00:30]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:00:32]:
We are so beyond the. The PE ratios right now.
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:36]:
Yeah, it's true.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:00:37]:
The market is basically fandom.
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:38]:
Yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:00:39]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:39]:
You're gonna buy SpaceX, man. You will buy anything.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:00:42]:
Oh, yeah. SpaceX is going to make money, even though it really shouldn't. It absolutely shouldn't. But neither should Tesla. The Tesla's PE is so ridiculous that it should not be valued at what it is. But it is, because people aren't using those memes anymore.
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:58]:
I see. About Chinese cars and, you know, they're doomed.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:01:01]:
Oh, gosh, yes.
Leo Laporte [01:01:02]:
Actually, there was a big story in the Times today about it's just a matter of time before Chinese cars make it into the United States in some form or fashion. Apparently they're approaching the Trump administration saying, well, if we built factories in the United States to build BYD vehicles, would it be okay then? And he's wide open to this. He says, as long as you create jobs in the U.S. fine with me.
Jeff Jarvis [01:01:24]:
Well, you can see traces of Geely in the new Volvo that people are talking about. The, I think C60.
Leo Laporte [01:01:30]:
Well, yeah, the post is in fact a Chinese.
Jeff Jarvis [01:01:33]:
It's owned by Geely Volvo.
Leo Laporte [01:01:34]:
Yeah. Collaboration. Yeah, yeah. Actually, Jammer B loves his. What is it? X60. XC60. He's very happy with it. Also, Microsoft announced Project Solara in the weirdest way possible.
Leo Laporte [01:01:52]:
It looks exactly like Amazon Echo. Let me make this go full screen. And in this there's this weird liminal look to the video. Everybody's face is in darkness. Yeah. In fact, I think Microsoft was really doubling down on the kids. Call it liminal. The dream space.
Joey de Villa [01:02:14]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:02:15]:
And so this is not an actual product from Microsoft. It's an experiment called Solara that will be in not just an Amazon Echo style device, but agentic AI in a card in all sorts.
Jeff Jarvis [01:02:32]:
I hate concept cars. I want something I can Buy now. That's real now. I hate them.
Leo Laporte [01:02:36]:
This is. This is basically. See, it's on. It's on your ID badge. It's in an echo like device. Really, what they're saying is agentic AI will be ubiquitous.
Joey de Villa [01:02:50]:
Yeah, but everybody's in shadow.
Leo Laporte [01:02:53]:
Isn't that weird? It's creepy.
Jeff Jarvis [01:02:55]:
That's. That's the AI future.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:02:56]:
Well, because the people aren't important, right?
Jeff Jarvis [01:02:59]:
Exactly. People.
Leo Laporte [01:03:00]:
This is AI Primacy. This is exactly what I was talking about.
Jeff Jarvis [01:03:03]:
This is Leo's dream.
Leo Laporte [01:03:04]:
This is my dream.
Joey de Villa [01:03:07]:
There we go. Like.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:03:08]:
Like.
Joey de Villa [01:03:08]:
Like somebody in the advertising department, you know? Do you miss Plato's Cave?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:03:15]:
Oh, that's my favorite. Oh, I use that in homilies all the time.
Leo Laporte [01:03:18]:
Plato's Cave.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:03:19]:
Plato's Cave.
Leo Laporte [01:03:20]:
Tell us the story of Plato's Cave.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:03:22]:
So imagine you and a group of people have spent your entire life in a cave. And you are chained facing the wall of the cave and the entrance of the cave is behind you. So you have no idea what the outside world looks like or what it entails. However, you can see shadows. You can see shadows from things moving around outside. And from those shadows, you create a narrative with your fellow prisoners of what must be out there. One day you get released, you and you alone are unshackled, and you make your way out of the cave. And now you can actually see with your own eyes exactly what's happening out there.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:03:58]:
So you have now the truth, which is nowhere near what you. That the narrative that you made up with your fellow cave dwellers when you were in the cave. Now imagine trying to go back into the cave and explain to everyone else that what. What we thought was happening outside wasn't actually the truth? How difficult would it be for you to explain to those people who still don't have that experience that their ideas, their thought processes were completely wrong? It's a fantastic thought experiment that can go in so many different ways. Whether you're trying to teach people about the nature of understanding or the nature of the transfer of information or the nature of human understanding. It's. It's a lot of fun.
Leo Laporte [01:04:39]:
And how does this apply to the.
Joey de Villa [01:04:42]:
The faces in shadow?
Leo Laporte [01:04:46]:
They were.
Joey de Villa [01:04:47]:
They were the shadows on the walls of Plato's Cave. Like, basically, yeah, I'm thinking the advertisers thinking. Do you miss Plato's Cave? And do you miss those creepy palm phone ads with the creepy ballerina who looked at you at the end?
Leo Laporte [01:05:01]:
Oh, yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:05:02]:
Remember the palm phone?
Leo Laporte [01:05:03]:
Yeah. This is not their first time, is it?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:05:07]:
If this continues, I might actually Go live in a cave. So we've got a couple in the backyard.
Leo Laporte [01:05:13]:
Bring on the shadows.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:14]:
Yeah, that's right.
Leo Laporte [01:05:15]:
Microsoft also announced a agent, I guess, called Scout, which is confusing because Google's is called Spark. Yeah, Spark and Scout. Maybe they'll be friends.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:26]:
Sounds like two dogs. Yeah, two little Jack Russell terriers.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:05:30]:
Sounds like the sequel to Kill a Mockingbird.
Joey de Villa [01:05:32]:
Yeah, I was about to say like Scout from Kill a Mockingbird.
Leo Laporte [01:05:35]:
Oh, yeah, yeah. They announced seven new AI models. Seven?
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:40]:
Seven What?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:05:42]:
Why not?
Leo Laporte [01:05:45]:
They do have a reasoning model, which is a 35B with a teensy weensy. By the way, this is what I don't like about Quen. Is the context window 128k context tiny. That's too small.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:58]:
That's like my Osborne one.
Joey de Villa [01:05:59]:
It's.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:06:00]:
Yeah, that's kind of specialized, I guess.
Joey de Villa [01:06:03]:
Did they at least name the seven models? Sleepy, Dopey.
Leo Laporte [01:06:09]:
I want Grumpy. Is there a Grumpy model? Yeah, I have the. Actually, my agent is the Grumpy model. I think lots more stuff. They have a hardware chip, the Majorana. They announced their second generation Majorana, which is a quantum computing chip. It contains qubits.
Jeff Jarvis [01:06:32]:
You want that on your laptop?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:06:33]:
Is that the one done in partnership with IBM?
Leo Laporte [01:06:36]:
I don't know. IBM is big into that quantum computer, isn't it?
Jeff Jarvis [01:06:39]:
As is Google.
Leo Laporte [01:06:41]:
Yeah, as is Google. There seems to be a convergence with all these companies. For instance, they've all decided that we're going to have some sort of piece of hardware, whether it's glasses, a pendant, a watch.
Jeff Jarvis [01:06:56]:
Do you ever use your little deep seek thing?
Leo Laporte [01:06:59]:
My Jeff had you get? Which one?
Jeff Jarvis [01:07:01]:
The thing that Jeff had you got that little
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:07:06]:
Harper made him get.
Jeff Jarvis [01:07:07]:
That Harper made him get it.
Leo Laporte [01:07:09]:
Oh, this thing. Oh, yeah. I love it. So this, you connect this to the WI fi and then it connects to China.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:07:16]:
And then
Jeff Jarvis [01:07:19]:
has Steve yelled at you for this?
Leo Laporte [01:07:21]:
No, no, no. Nobody's yelled at me. In fact, somebody wrote me a letter saying, what is the name of that? I said, I don't recommend it. They said, no, no, I want it. It's an ESP32, so it's eminently programmable. I might just make it into my agent. But for now, you can ask deep secret questions. I haven't asked about Tiananmen Square, though.
Leo Laporte [01:07:40]:
Actually, that's a good question. I should try that. So is this just groupthink? Is this just. Or is this all make a lot of sense and they're all on the right track? Are we gonna be all wearing little AI pendants and things.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:07:58]:
I mean, we already do. They're called our phones.
Leo Laporte [01:08:01]:
Yeah, we carry that. And my watch. I could talk to my watch and talks back sort of.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:08:07]:
And we know these tech companies aren't original anymore.
Jeff Jarvis [01:08:09]:
They just copy each other already.
Leo Laporte [01:08:10]:
No, no, I know, I know. All right, let's take a break. I'm gonna go just talk to my grumpy model for a little bit. When we come back, Apple's big announcements. Tomorrow we'll get a little crystal ball gazing with Father Robert Balassaire, the digital Jesuit, where it is now. Midnight in the Vatican.
Joey de Villa [01:08:32]:
That's a movie title.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:08:33]:
Start of the day for me.
Leo Laporte [01:08:34]:
Midnight in the Vatican.
Joey de Villa [01:08:36]:
That is such a good movie title.
Leo Laporte [01:08:37]:
Ooh, I like it. That's Joey de Villa, our screenwriter developer advocate@netfoundry IO. And Jeff Jarvis, who is unaffiliated. No, he is a host of intelligent machines. You also do AI, the AI Inside podcast with Jason Howell. It's a wonderful podcast. Thanks for the author of many great books including the Gutenberg Parenthesis and the new one coming out in August. Hot type.
Leo Laporte [01:09:02]:
A hot book for the hottest month of the year up here in the Northern hemisphere. Tomorrow I'm going to have to get up. Micah Sargent and I are going to be covering Apple's WWDC Worldwide Developers conference keynote at 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern. That's 1800 UTC. We will not be streaming it in our normal channels. Like right now we're streaming on YouTube, Twitch X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. We do that with all of our live shows. We can't do that with keynotes.
Leo Laporte [01:09:37]:
Well, certainly with Apple keynotes. The last time we did that they tried to get us kicked off of YouTube. So I don't want to get kicked off of YouTube. So we will be doing our usual coverage, but it will be club only. It'll be a private event. If you're not in the club, you might want to join it for tomorrow. There is I think still a two week trial so you can just pretend to join it. Twitter, TV Club, TWiT.
Leo Laporte [01:09:58]:
It's a nice way to support independent podcasting. I think this is gonna be one of the most interesting WWDCs in years. Remember two years ago they foolishly pre announced products they never shipped. They still haven't shipped a year ago they apologized this year. Well, it's gonna be a big question. Will they ship those Siri features that they've been promising in the intervening years? They've made a deal with Google apparently paying them a billion dollars a month for Gemini. Is it a month or a year? No, it's a year. A billion dollars a year for access to Gemini.
Leo Laporte [01:10:37]:
Now, though, the rumor is at first Apple said you'll be running the AI on either on your phone and if it can't run on your phone, in our own specially designed private data centers in the backyard.
Jeff Jarvis [01:10:54]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:10:55]:
Well, now they're saying Google's data center. It's going to be Google's data center, which.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:11:00]:
Which are actually X AI's data centers because Google is renting capacity from X AI.
Leo Laporte [01:11:05]:
But Apple says, but don't worry, we're going to encrypt everything. They won't know what you're doing. Yeah, I don't know if that. If that's true, that's going to really change the story a little bit that you'll be running on Elon's data centers. Really?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:11:21]:
Google will be paying Elon 900 million a month, which still doesn't put X AI into the green, so.
Leo Laporte [01:11:31]:
No, but they're making $20 million a month. Oh, no, wait a minute. That's wrong. They're losing money, aren't they?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:11:36]:
Losing a billion dollars a month. Even with Anthropic paying $1.25 billion a month for service, now Google is going to be paying $900 million a month for service. They're still going to be losing at least $100 million a month and their bills are going to go up. So it's probably going to be closer to 4 to 500 million dollars a month.
Leo Laporte [01:11:55]:
And this is why the S&P 500 said that anthropic OpenAI and SpaceX cannot be on their index for a year. We don't want your tarnish to rip off.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:12:09]:
It's starting to feel more like. Do you remember wework?
Jeff Jarvis [01:12:13]:
This feels like we work for computers.
Leo Laporte [01:12:17]:
Yeah. Well, we'll be very interested to see what Apple announces as far, I think would it be. So it's a couple of things to mention about this. It'll be Tim Cook's last WWC DC keynote. He is retiring in September or actually being kicked upstairs to the board. John Ternus will be taking over as CEO in September. His first keynote will be the iPhone announcement. There's some question whether we'll even see John Ternus on stage.
Leo Laporte [01:12:45]:
I suspect we will. In fact, I bet you Apple makes a video. They like to start these things with goofy videos.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:12:52]:
They like to have continuity.
Jeff Jarvis [01:12:53]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:12:53]:
And also, can we just say that Tim Cook deserves credit for what he's done since Jobs went away? I mean, he really has done wonders for Apple.
Leo Laporte [01:13:02]:
He's made Apple a $4 trillion company. That ain't bad. Some say, you know, on the momentum that Steve created, there have been a few things that are Tim Cook kind of signature products like the Siri that never was. I guess the watch is still Steve and Johnny's, but it's Tim who recognized that the watch was going to be ultimately best used as a health device and really focused it on health. So he gets some credit.
Jeff Jarvis [01:13:32]:
Here's the question I have about Apple. Will they end up be being seen as the smarter one? Because they don't. They didn't need to build a foundation model. It's commodity. We can get models from anywhere. We can pay Google for it. It doesn't really matter. What we have is the relationship to our users.
Jeff Jarvis [01:13:48]:
Are they really behind or are they saving a bucket load of money?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:13:52]:
Except. So one of Apple's core tenets is they must own the technologies that are most important for their services. So this kind of breaks that. This breaks it in a big way.
Joey de Villa [01:14:04]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:14:05]:
And by the way, that is Tim's signature achievement is the release of Apple Silicon. The move, Apple Silicon, two Apple chips. John Ternus, by the way, was the guy in charge of that. And I think that's his. This is his reward for doing such a good job. But that, that is something Apple did that was, it's funny, turned out to be very good for AI, local AI. That's why they can't keep Minis or studios in stock. You're running your Requin model on a Mac Mini, right?
Joey de Villa [01:14:32]:
I'm running mine on actually M5 PowerBook. As soon as I got the, at the job, I have a hardware stipend and as soon as. So I bought the M5 and I bought a matching one for my wife because I told her, you know what, when the ship, when the ship comes in, everybody rides a rising tide, floats all boats. So she has a. We have his and hers 64 gig M5s.
Leo Laporte [01:15:03]:
Nice, nice. Those MacBook Pros are very nice. And it turns out that the machine language processing units in those are very good. And speaking of memory bandwidth, the memory bandwidth is, is superb because it's unified memory.
Joey de Villa [01:15:21]:
Yeah, it's. It's really good for that and it's, it's fantastic. I highly recommend it if you want to get into, if you want to get. Yeah. If you want to get into software development. And in fact, actually my old laptop, an M1, is now the sacrificial open claw machine. So I've got.
Leo Laporte [01:15:42]:
Yeah, that's smart.
Joey de Villa [01:15:43]:
Open claw. Possibly Hermes. I'm also looking into Hermes.
Leo Laporte [01:15:47]:
I love Hermes. That's my. Okay, that's my agent of choice, Hermes. And I. I actually divorced Claudette, and. Oh, yeah, I married Hermes.
Jeff Jarvis [01:15:58]:
Oh. It was just a fling.
Leo Laporte [01:15:59]:
I call her Quicksilver.
Joey de Villa [01:16:01]:
Wait, divorce?
Jeff Jarvis [01:16:02]:
Such a romance forever?
Joey de Villa [01:16:03]:
Divorce or annulment?
Leo Laporte [01:16:05]:
Well, we never did consummate, so I guess it's okay, then.
Joey de Villa [01:16:09]:
Okay. Because that's. That's what. Not consummating is one of the. One of the excuses that you can use for an annulment. And it's the least embarrassing of the bunch, I think. Mental incompetence. Padre, Is that still a.
Joey de Villa [01:16:25]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:16:25]:
Is there. Is there prima nocta in LLMs?
Leo Laporte [01:16:28]:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I. The. The right of the noble. Yes, I am the. I am the noble one. They're just tools.
Leo Laporte [01:16:36]:
I learned that from you, Joey. So I don't really actually care so much if Apple puts AI on the iPhone. I use the iPhone, but when I press the action button on the iPhone, it calls Quicksilver. Calls my little Hermes. When I want to, I can do everything anthropic. And if I wanted to. If I want to visit the old girlfriend, I've got all of the AIs on here. But look, this is little Hermes logo.
Leo Laporte [01:17:09]:
The little. Yeah, that weird Alice in Wonderland logo. And I can actually talk with it and interact with it.
Jeff Jarvis [01:17:15]:
Oh.
Leo Laporte [01:17:16]:
Ready for an update? Good.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:17:17]:
But what if you could do all of that offline, Leo?
Leo Laporte [01:17:21]:
Well, I can if I choose Quinn. Well, offline. You mean not going to a Frontier model? You mean locally? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's still online because I'm obviously. My phone is not running them, so I don't know if the agent. I mean, Apple's gonna do Agenic, probably with Siri of some kind. They won't call it that. Is that what you're asking? If, like, Siri were smart enough to do all that?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:17:45]:
If Siri were smart enough and if you were carrying enough local processing that you run a model completely offline. I mean, I.
Leo Laporte [01:17:52]:
That's the idea in my current job.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:17:54]:
That would be very attractive, yes.
Leo Laporte [01:17:56]:
Because you've mentioned this before, but not on this show that. That the Catholic Church has its own models. They're.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:18:03]:
Yes, we do.
Leo Laporte [01:18:04]:
Purely private, local models.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:18:06]:
And I've got a little. It's. It's not a ggx, but I've got an Acer Veritron, which is using the Blackwell chip. So it does. It's got a petaflop worth of performance, 4 terabytes of storage. You win 28 gigabytes of store of memory. So it's pretty good.
Leo Laporte [01:18:23]:
Wow. Now. And are you running the Vatican's models on that?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:18:27]:
We are. So we are. We have developed our own models. So we're not using off the shelf models anymore because they've been specifically trained on our sources.
Leo Laporte [01:18:35]:
And they're private.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:18:36]:
And they're private. Right. Completely private. And which means that we can use them in what we call internal forum cases. So when it's information that's very sensitive, we have the ability to summarize, to translate, to otherwise transform that information without it ever touching the Internet, which is important because canonically we're not allowed to.
Jeff Jarvis [01:18:57]:
What did it take to. To build those?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:01]:
A lot.
Joey de Villa [01:19:02]:
Quite.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:02]:
Yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:19:03]:
No trade secret.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:04]:
Yeah, a lot.
Leo Laporte [01:19:05]:
Did you, did you train them from scratch?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:09]:
Yep. What?
Joey de Villa [01:19:11]:
Wow.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:12]:
Complete scratch this. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be.
Leo Laporte [01:19:18]:
And when you, when you trained it, what was the content you trained it on?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:24]:
So we have several hundred years worth of texts that are specific to the Catholic Church.
Leo Laporte [01:19:31]:
Have they been digitalized?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:33]:
Did all digital. So everything has been digitized in our archives. And so we were able to run that and say this. It learned our language, it learned our culture.
Joey de Villa [01:19:41]:
It learned.
Jeff Jarvis [01:19:43]:
Does it be Latin? That was my question.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:44]:
It does speak Latin, actually, yes. That's one of the very first things that we had to train it to do. We had to train it to help translate some of the other sources. And so it's, it's a completely closed model. It does not use any information from outside of the Catholic Church. And like the Washington Posts. Ask a. Ask the Washington Post.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:20:05]:
AI Our model has no problem saying, I cannot answer that. That was extremely important for us because we. That's how you stop it from hallucinating. Once it gets down to a level of probability, that's no longer acceptable. It just says, I don't have enough information to answer that question.
Leo Laporte [01:20:21]:
It's easy because you are. The Church already had its sole document. It's known as the Ten Commandments.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:20:27]:
Exactly. We've got our foundation, we've got our architecture already. We just had to build around it.
Leo Laporte [01:20:32]:
Ten Commandments. Md it's really, it's. It's simple. Yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:20:36]:
And the Beatitudes.
Jeff Jarvis [01:20:37]:
Really?
Joey de Villa [01:20:37]:
And the Beatitudes are a little more than that.
Leo Laporte [01:20:40]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And something about rich man and the eye of a needle.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:20:44]:
And, you know, we've got the Old Testament LLM and then the New Testament.
Leo Laporte [01:20:50]:
Awesome.
Jeff Jarvis [01:20:51]:
Until they battle it out. That Old Must be scary.
Joey de Villa [01:20:55]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:20:57]:
Firing Brimstone.
Joey de Villa [01:20:58]:
Paging Dan Brown. You can. You can now write. You have enough material now to write the Da Vinci Vibe code.
Leo Laporte [01:21:04]:
Does it?
Jeff Jarvis [01:21:04]:
We don't.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:05]:
Yeah, we. We don't have an antimatic machine under St Peter's but we may have a lot of compute power.
Leo Laporte [01:21:10]:
But. And it probably when you're coding, it uses Deep C plus plus. Right. Never mind.
Jeff Jarvis [01:21:17]:
Can you vibe code on it?
Leo Laporte [01:21:19]:
Can it code or is it red C?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:22]:
That's not one of the functions that we built into it. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:21:24]:
That's interesting. So, yeah, you can actually make it much simpler because there's a whole lot of stuff you don't care to do.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:29]:
Correct.
Leo Laporte [01:21:30]:
Does it.
Jeff Jarvis [01:21:31]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:31]:
We're not trying to make a general intelligence.
Leo Laporte [01:21:32]:
Can it use MCP servers or is that not a good idea?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:36]:
It could, but it would not be a favorable result. You probably.
Leo Laporte [01:21:43]:
Yeah. Right.
Joey de Villa [01:21:44]:
You're thinking. Leo, Are you thinking about my Too many Cats MCP server?
Leo Laporte [01:21:48]:
Yes.
Joey de Villa [01:21:48]:
How many.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:49]:
Yes.
Joey de Villa [01:21:49]:
How many cats is a venial sin? How many cats is a mortal sin?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:54]:
Oh, we could do tokens. Sins instead of tokens.
Joey de Villa [01:21:57]:
Sale of indulgence. Indulgences are back, baby.
Leo Laporte [01:22:01]:
Oh no.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:02]:
So we've used up our indulgence budget for the LLM.
Leo Laporte [01:22:07]:
That's okay. It's. It's one of those. What is a year? It's called
Joey de Villa [01:22:13]:
we can party.
Leo Laporte [01:22:14]:
Like Jubilee year, isn't it? Jubilee.
Joey de Villa [01:22:17]:
Yeah. There we go.
Leo Laporte [01:22:18]:
You won't use Jubilee Year.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:19]:
The tokens are free.
Leo Laporte [01:22:22]:
So. All right. We're going to all go to hell. Except for you, Father. But what specific tasks is it? Mostly about the hundred years worth of documents or more than 100.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:35]:
Right. So it needs to be able to quickly identify documents that are germane to any questions that get asked. Asked of it. It needs to be able to combine those with contemporary documents from the.
Leo Laporte [01:22:47]:
So it's kind of a big rag.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:50]:
Computer.
Joey de Villa [01:22:50]:
Correct? Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:51]:
But also translations. So it's very good at language translations. We have meetings here where we'll have 19, 20 different languages. This is really good at going back and forth with simultaneous real time translation.
Leo Laporte [01:23:03]:
Oh, so it's used as that. Oh, that's really interesting.
Jeff Jarvis [01:23:06]:
Did you use anything else outside as a base to build on?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:23:11]:
Not originally, but speech text is.
Leo Laporte [01:23:14]:
Is challenging. So I would imagine there are some very good libraries you could use safely.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:23:21]:
But again, what we found is it's. It's much easier and much more effective to isolate a particular need rather than building a model and then trying to figure out what it can do.
Leo Laporte [01:23:31]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:23:33]:
Because I think it's a model for what to do with. With medicine.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:23:36]:
Yes.
Jeff Jarvis [01:23:37]:
In physics and other areas. This is the part of the Yann Lacune argument.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:23:41]:
And there are some really amazing general intelligence.
Leo Laporte [01:23:43]:
There are some really amazing specialized AIs in all those fields. It's really. It's really. Or, you know, Alphafold is a good example. I mean, you wouldn't use Alphafold to write your thesis, but you might use it to fold proteins. I mean. Yeah, these are very specialized. Did you find.
Leo Laporte [01:24:01]:
So were you involved in the training of this thing? It sounds like you were.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:05]:
Yeah, a little bit.
Leo Laporte [01:24:06]:
I know that it's a group. I know that nobody takes credit.
Joey de Villa [01:24:09]:
Big group.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:10]:
There's a lot.
Leo Laporte [01:24:10]:
Big group. And no, no one person could take credit. But what an interesting.
Jeff Jarvis [01:24:15]:
What's the demand out there in any given parish church for saying this stuff's going on? I want to know about it, I want to do things with it. What's.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:23]:
It's entirely internal right now.
Jeff Jarvis [01:24:25]:
Okay.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:26]:
It has not.
Jeff Jarvis [01:24:26]:
Not yet.
Leo Laporte [01:24:27]:
By the way, the Veritron is, Darren Okey says is a deject spark.
Joey de Villa [01:24:32]:
It is.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:33]:
It's an Nvidia GB10. So it's a Blackwell. It's a Blackwell.
Leo Laporte [01:24:37]:
It's GB10. Yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:24:38]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:24:39]:
Nice.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:39]:
I kind of wanted to get a Vera shipment, but those are not available. Not yet.
Jeff Jarvis [01:24:43]:
Right.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:43]:
So do you guys have a Babel fish, Padre?
Leo Laporte [01:24:48]:
Yes, that's what he's made. The Babel fish.
Joey de Villa [01:24:51]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:24:52]:
Wow. Very interesting.
Joey de Villa [01:24:54]:
It's speaking in tongues, actually the most
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:58]:
difficult language right now. You probably would not guess this is Spanish. Really? Because of the accents. The Spanish language is easy. The accents. It's having so much trouble.
Leo Laporte [01:25:12]:
You mean the spoken word accents, like Castilian versus Mexican, Mexican versus Colombian versus
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:18]:
Brazilian versus a Bolivian versus Spanish. Spanish, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:25:21]:
Yes.
Jeff Jarvis [01:25:21]:
Is it harder than Arabic that all the variation in Arabic?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:24]:
Yeah, no, Arabic is actually pretty simple. Japanese is simple.
Leo Laporte [01:25:27]:
Actually, Latin is very simple. Latin is very rigorous.
Joey de Villa [01:25:32]:
Yeah. The syll syllables are straightforward. The language is tricky for us anyway, but, yeah, the syllables, Mandarin, Japanese, straightforward.
Leo Laporte [01:25:40]:
Actually, Mandarin might be tough because of the tones. Right.
Jeff Jarvis [01:25:44]:
Well, there's still a written language.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:46]:
Computers can hear the tones much better than humans can.
Leo Laporte [01:25:49]:
That's interesting. Much, much better.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:50]:
I can't hear them, but.
Leo Laporte [01:25:52]:
So it can distinguish ma and ma? Yeah, very easily.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:58]:
Did you say you don't have Tagalog yet, Padre? But we are the most popular. We are the most Catholics. We are the most Catholics. It wasn't a demand. It wasn't a demand language. We don't Have a lot of documents in Tagalog.
Joey de Villa [01:26:11]:
We need to work. We. We need to work on that.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:26:16]:
Yeah, I'll get to it.
Jeff Jarvis [01:26:18]:
I got a critical mass right here.
Leo Laporte [01:26:20]:
Do you get native speakers in to train it?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:26:23]:
No, no, you don't need to do that.
Leo Laporte [01:26:25]:
You got recordings.
Jeff Jarvis [01:26:26]:
Can it make a podcast like Notebook lm? Can you?
Leo Laporte [01:26:29]:
I think a Latin podcast would be so cool.
Jeff Jarvis [01:26:32]:
Oh.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:26:32]:
Oh, actually, that would be fun.
Jeff Jarvis [01:26:33]:
That would be fun.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:26:34]:
Just as a thought experiment, I would totally. I would take.
Jeff Jarvis [01:26:37]:
Yes.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:26:37]:
Oh, a podcast translator. Take any podcast, input it, and it makes it in. In Latin with. With the voice of that speaker.
Leo Laporte [01:26:45]:
Oh. Oh, yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:26:46]:
Well, hey, I can do that. Yeah. I mean, that should be possible. Hey, if. Hey, Jen, can trans. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:26:54]:
Questa weakest mane in.
Joey de Villa [01:26:59]:
Yeah. What's tech in Latin technology?
Leo Laporte [01:27:05]:
I'm sorry. I hope it's late night in the Vatican and nobody's listening. We are talking twit with Father Robert Ballisaire. Joey de Villa from Netfoundry IO and Jeff Jarvis will be back on Wednesday. Paris will be back, I hope.
Jeff Jarvis [01:27:23]:
Yeah, we hope, we hope, we hope, we hope.
Leo Laporte [01:27:25]:
She's been on a deadline with Consumer Reports.
Jeff Jarvis [01:27:27]:
Never ending deadline, poor dear.
Leo Laporte [01:27:30]:
We do have a very interesting interview and Joey, you'd be interested in this. Jeffrey Quinnell, who is the founder of Noose Research, the people who make Hermes, will be coming back. We interviewed him way back when. I loved him. I thought he was great. But that was back when they were doing their own models. They were trying to do ethical models, kind of like what you've been doing, Robert. But what we didn't know at the time is that they had their own internal agent.
Leo Laporte [01:27:56]:
And then OpenClaw came out and they looked at each other and said, you know, ours is better. And they decided to release Hermes. And I have to say I think I'll be very interested what you think, Joy. But my experience.
Joey de Villa [01:28:08]:
Intriguing pivot.
Leo Laporte [01:28:09]:
That's absolutely what you want. It's kind of a batteries included because it comes with more than 90 skills already built in and then plugins available for all sorts of things. It's got its own memory system. It's really nice.
Joey de Villa [01:28:24]:
All right, I will have to give
Leo Laporte [01:28:25]:
it a look anyway. Jeffrey Quinnell will be our guest on Wednesday. Listen, because he's great, he's very interesting. All right, so just to finish up with the WWDC keynote tomorrow, we will be covering it. We don't expect new hardware. We think that that's all going to come in the fall. Although it's an interesting story coming out of the supply chain that Samsung has already ramped up manufacture of these OLED screens for the new laptop. The 14 and 16 inch.
Jeff Jarvis [01:29:00]:
Are they touchscreens?
Leo Laporte [01:29:01]:
Perhaps they're touch screens and this will be on the M6 chip. The theory being if they're already manufacturing them for August delivery, that it might well be a September announcement, which is earlier than we thought. Apple's gonna have a very big September. They're gonna have that iPhone Ultra, the folding phone. We're starting to see demos of that. Apple will not talk about this tomorrow, so don't get your hopes up. They will be talking about iOS 27, Mac OS 27 and all the other OSes, watch TV, iPad, OS 27 and undoubtedly spend much of the time talking about AI and Siri.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:29:43]:
Do you think there is a market among Apple fans for the touchscreen?
Leo Laporte [01:29:47]:
I mean, I love laptops, but I don't want it. I did want the OLED. I love my. I have an OLED ThinkPad and I bought it specifically for the OLED because those are my favorite screens. But I also specifically did not get the touch one because let them touch a laptop. Yesterday, Lisa was showing me a spreadsheet. She was touching the cell phone. Don't touch it.
Leo Laporte [01:30:11]:
She'd been using her iPad too much.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:30:13]:
But how good is. How good is macOS on a touch interface anyway? Because that's not touch.
Leo Laporte [01:30:18]:
Well, that's going to be interesting. So this is. Maybe this will be a hint tomorrow because they will talk about new features in Mac OS 27 and they're going to have to do something to address that. Similarly, for a folding phone, they're going to have to do something to address it. An iOS27. So we'll get some hints about what they're thinking.
Joey de Villa [01:30:35]:
I think it would require some interesting tweaks because macOS is specifically optimized for a mouse and cursor that is rather precise fingers, you know, while nice and super convenient.
Leo Laporte [01:30:48]:
Especially my fingers larger.
Joey de Villa [01:30:50]:
And you know, for the longest time, the argument for not having a touchscreen Mac was what they called the gorilla arm effect.
Leo Laporte [01:30:59]:
Right.
Joey de Villa [01:31:00]:
And that is that it's just kind of hard to hold your arm up against the screen for a long time.
Leo Laporte [01:31:05]:
I. I don't really want to. Maybe occasionally I'll run my finger if
Jeff Jarvis [01:31:10]:
I'm going through a long list of something and there's carpal tunnel that gets two. I'm really glad to have my. My.
Leo Laporte [01:31:14]:
Because you have a touch Chromebook.
Jeff Jarvis [01:31:16]:
I've done. Of course.
Leo Laporte [01:31:17]:
Of course you do.
Jeff Jarvis [01:31:18]:
Yes.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:31:19]:
I, I find it healthier because I switch from keyboard and mouse to touch. I go back and forth, back and forth. So it's not the same motion.
Leo Laporte [01:31:25]:
Well, an Apple. Exactly. Cells of the iPad, which is a touch screen.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:31:29]:
Is it going to be an iOS? I would not be surprised, no. If in a couple of weeks, as people start looking through all the notes and actually decompiling the source from some of the software packages, they're going to find the hooks for the touchscreen and there'll be hints exactly how it's going to be implemented.
Leo Laporte [01:31:48]:
That's usually how that stuff leaks out. But I am still most interested in what they do with AI as an. I like AI. I know it's not fashionable on college campuses these days, but I like. I like AI.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:32:02]:
So can we stop calling it Apple Intelligence? Is that death now or are they still going to try to.
Leo Laporte [01:32:06]:
That's what it means, man.
Joey de Villa [01:32:07]:
Yeah, that's what.
Leo Laporte [01:32:09]:
But. And I think the idea that of Apple, you know, embracing this and putting AI in a billion pockets will make a big, you know, dent. This will change people's point of view. Maybe Apple knows people don't like it. I don't know. You know, there's definitely a backlash, a tech lash.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:32:26]:
I don't see. I think Apple's going to come at it differently. Apple has never been about selling raw services or the promises of a technology. They sell features, specific things that you want to do. I think that's. That's how they can do their A.I. well, which is. I'm not going to sell you the tech.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:32:43]:
I'm going to sell you a skill.
Joey de Villa [01:32:44]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:32:45]:
I'm going to. I'm going to. I'm going to show you an example of. Of how AI works. I won't even call it AI, but you're gonna love it so much that you're gonna buy it. And that's. They're good at that.
Leo Laporte [01:32:53]:
They're very good at that. Their product. They make products.
Joey de Villa [01:32:56]:
Yeah. The ipod, for instance. They never talked about the size of the storage. They said a thousand songs, because that's really what matters.
Leo Laporte [01:33:05]:
That's a good point. Yeah, that's a good point.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:33:08]:
My mom doesn't care about anything on her iPhone except for the fact that she can do FaceTime with her granddaughter.
Leo Laporte [01:33:14]:
Right.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:33:15]:
That's it.
Leo Laporte [01:33:16]:
And unfortunately, the things they've shown in the past haven't really been too compelling, like Genmoji or the Image Playground. These are awful. And people are still mocking the AI summaries that they get in their notifications. They're. They're crazy.
Jeff Jarvis [01:33:33]:
Will Siri still be a laughingstock?
Leo Laporte [01:33:36]:
I mean, and that's the other thing. People think Siri is a moron. And she is.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:33:41]:
I mean, if they're really doing a tight immigrant integration with Gemini, Syria is going to smarten up by a lot. Exponential level. I mean, it's fantastic.
Joey de Villa [01:33:52]:
The question is, will they still call it Seer? Will they call it Siri, or does it.
Jeff Jarvis [01:33:58]:
You think they're stubborn?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:33:59]:
Oh, yeah. That's theirs. That's their technology. That's their branding.
Leo Laporte [01:34:02]:
They're not going to admit, even though people hate him. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:34:06]:
Apple doesn't think you hate anything that Apple does. They'll never admit that. That would be a.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:34:14]:
I think. I think they should release their new AI product and call it the Newton. Just.
Jeff Jarvis [01:34:18]:
I was just thinking that.
Joey de Villa [01:34:19]:
There we go. Yes.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:34:20]:
Just a flex and say, you know what? We're going to take one of our biggest failures and make it something wonderful.
Joey de Villa [01:34:25]:
There we go.
Leo Laporte [01:34:27]:
I did have Gemini last night. Lisa and I were talking. I don't know if I can show this, though. Wait a minute. Let me see. And I asked Gemini if I should dye my hair. Wait, I'm thinking probably not a good idea.
Jeff Jarvis [01:34:50]:
Did it show you what you would, like, look like?
Leo Laporte [01:34:52]:
Yeah, you want to see what I would look like if I dyed my hair?
Jeff Jarvis [01:34:56]:
The chat room could probably do it for you, too.
Leo Laporte [01:34:58]:
Yeah. Well, so. But the point being that I didn't ask Siri.
Joey de Villa [01:35:03]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:35:04]:
I immediately went to what I thought would be the best image, so I gave it this picture.
Jeff Jarvis [01:35:10]:
Oh, no.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:11]:
Oh, wow.
Joey de Villa [01:35:12]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:35:12]:
So this is what I would look like. Oh, no. It's probably not the best starting picture. Maybe that's the problem. And then I said, well, that's good.
Jeff Jarvis [01:35:20]:
That's not my crisis, if I recall.
Leo Laporte [01:35:22]:
So then I said, what if I dyed it black? And then Lisa said, you look like Joe Pesci. So I thought, okay, what if you. How about give me Superman hair?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:32]:
Do I amuse you?
Joey de Villa [01:35:33]:
Oh, the spit curl. Oh, very nice.
Leo Laporte [01:35:35]:
Superman.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:36]:
The corn sweat look like it.
Leo Laporte [01:35:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. Then. So what about a Beatles haircut? What if I had black hair with a Beatles haircut?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:44]:
Is that. Is that Ringo or is that. No, that's John.
Leo Laporte [01:35:46]:
The interesting thing is Gemini's really good at doing this. Right? This is.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:50]:
This is.
Leo Laporte [01:35:52]:
This is if. What would I look like with a toupee, apparently. I don't know.
Joey de Villa [01:35:58]:
There's a certain Javier Bardem vibe I'm getting.
Leo Laporte [01:36:01]:
You know why? We were watching the Burrows and Molina is. Alfred Molina is in it.
Joey de Villa [01:36:08]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:36:08]:
And he's got. He's my age and he's got jet black hair. And I said, he dyed it right. And we couldn't decide, so I said, well, what if? What would I look better? And then this is. If I went blonde, I don't think I'm gonna.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:23]:
This is weird. This is weird. But I actually like that over the black.
Leo Laporte [01:36:28]:
Yeah, I do, too.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:29]:
I prefer that.
Leo Laporte [01:36:29]:
I'm not doing any of the.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:30]:
It's got Conan o' Brien vibes.
Leo Laporte [01:36:33]:
Yes, that's what it is.
Joey de Villa [01:36:34]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:36:34]:
Oh, I should ask for code. Oh, I will.
Joey de Villa [01:36:37]:
There we go.
Leo Laporte [01:36:37]:
Yeah, let me Give me. So the point I'm making is not so much. It's just really good at this kind of stuff.
Joey de Villa [01:36:44]:
Yeah. But I know the toupee. It's the Javier Bardem in the Apple TV version of Cape Fear that I'm
Leo Laporte [01:36:51]:
getting, by the way. Who is that? Creepy. Have you watched that yet?
Joey de Villa [01:36:55]:
No, not yet. It's on my list.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:57]:
What is this? What is this?
Joey de Villa [01:36:59]:
Apple TV
Leo Laporte [01:37:02]:
with Rob De Niro. Cape Fear and then.
Joey de Villa [01:37:05]:
Yeah. Robert Mitchum first.
Leo Laporte [01:37:06]:
Yes, go see. Okay. Here I am. By the way, it did that fast.
Joey de Villa [01:37:09]:
Oh, wow.
Leo Laporte [01:37:10]:
Here I am with Conan o'.
Jeff Jarvis [01:37:11]:
Brien.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:37:13]:
No, no.
Jeff Jarvis [01:37:14]:
Oh, my God.
Joey de Villa [01:37:15]:
I feel like I'm in a bus station right now.
Jeff Jarvis [01:37:19]:
The clown.
Leo Laporte [01:37:21]:
Carrot Top. What was I say? Oh, yeah. There was a Robert Mitchum movie, Cape Fear, and then. And then Scorsese remade it. It's exactly as if it were a Hitchcock film. And that was with De Niro, and he was very good in that.
Joey de Villa [01:37:37]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:37:38]:
But this one is Javier. Javier Bardem. It's really, really good. And Amy what's her name is in it. I'm such an old man now. I'm having.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:37:48]:
See, I only watch all of this when I go back to the United States. So I go back three times, about a month of time.
Joey de Villa [01:37:54]:
All right.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:37:55]:
My parents get all the streaming surfaces, so I just binge everything.
Joey de Villa [01:37:58]:
Okay. But, yeah, that's on Apple tv. The Cape Fear, this new one.
Leo Laporte [01:38:02]:
Yes. And I think it's quite good.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:04]:
It's been actually on on Apple tv. I really enjoyed Pluribus.
Joey de Villa [01:38:09]:
Oh, yes, yes.
Leo Laporte [01:38:10]:
So excellent.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:11]:
Really enjoyed that.
Leo Laporte [01:38:11]:
So we were watching the Burrows, which is basically Pluribus.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:15]:
Yeah. Yeah, no, I've heard that's very good.
Leo Laporte [01:38:17]:
It's like. It's this. I don't. Anyway, isn't.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:20]:
Wait. Some. I think my sister called Burroughs, like, Stranger Things for old people.
Leo Laporte [01:38:24]:
Yeah. Duffer Brothers and. But. But they're living in a place that's kind of like the Villages Only it's called the Baroque.
Joey de Villa [01:38:33]:
Oh, the Villages, it's like they all drop golf carts. That's down the road from me. And the beautiful thing is they. It's like an amuse. The Main street is like Main Street USA in Disney, except the music they pump is classic rock.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:50]:
Like they were like classic rock or boat rock.
Joey de Villa [01:38:54]:
No, no, no, this was. This was. Well, actually boat rock fits in there. But when I was there, they were playing all of Boston's original album.
Leo Laporte [01:39:04]:
So that's what's going on in the boroughs too. The music is like Springsteen.
Jeff Jarvis [01:39:08]:
And because we're of that age now.
Joey de Villa [01:39:11]:
Yeah, we are.
Leo Laporte [01:39:12]:
What happened?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:12]:
So if it's Stranger Things for old people, does that mean in burrows, vecna is just like chlamydia or syphilis?
Joey de Villa [01:39:20]:
Yeah, exactly. Because remember the. The Villages has an unusual, possibly the highest SCD rate for a medium sized city. And yeah, by far, Carpet. These people.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:32]:
It's not even close. Seriously?
Joey de Villa [01:39:33]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:34]:
Untreated STDs in the villages is the highest rate in the country.
Joey de Villa [01:39:38]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:39:40]:
Okay. Jeff and I are both. Well, we're not moving there, I guess.
Joey de Villa [01:39:43]:
Yeah, yeah. And actually, if you search. If you search YouTube, there are a bunch of real estate videos promoting life in the Villages. And.
Leo Laporte [01:39:52]:
Yeah, well, there's a famous documentary that's hysterical about them.
Jeff Jarvis [01:39:55]:
Oh, yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:39:56]:
No, so, yeah, I. I have been there with my wife and asides from the staff, we were the youngest people at this seafood restaurant.
Jeff Jarvis [01:40:04]:
Oh, yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:40:05]:
By far. And it was. Yeah, it was wild.
Jeff Jarvis [01:40:07]:
My parents lived in Sun City center, where by law you cannot live there unless you're 55.
Leo Laporte [01:40:12]:
Yes.
Joey de Villa [01:40:13]:
You have to be 55 minimum to buy property there.
Jeff Jarvis [01:40:15]:
Oh, that's.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:40:16]:
My parents live in a Sun City near Vegas Chicken. So.
Joey de Villa [01:40:18]:
Yeah, and they. And they have so many activities. There are a lot of clubs. And last I heard there was a three year waiting list for the cheerleading squad.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:40:30]:
Huh?
Joey de Villa [01:40:34]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:40:37]:
Football team.
Joey de Villa [01:40:38]:
I have no idea, actually. And there's a lot of Morris dancing or clogging clubs.
Leo Laporte [01:40:44]:
Oh, yeah, sure.
Joey de Villa [01:40:45]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:40:45]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:40:46]:
That doesn't seem to go hand in hand with arthritis. Painful?
Joey de Villa [01:40:51]:
No idea. Maybe. Maybe.
Leo Laporte [01:40:55]:
I don't know.
Jeff Jarvis [01:40:56]:
Yeah, the golf carts, man, the golf carts.
Joey de Villa [01:40:58]:
But a very weird city and very nice golf carts. These golf carts are nicer than my car. I was just.
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:04]:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:41:05]:
That's part of the one with air
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:07]:
conditioning in Sunset Center.
Joey de Villa [01:41:09]:
Oh, and the best part is the crime blotter in the Villages. It's not teenagers. It's the 30 and 40 something children of seniors who Fail to launch and it's all like kids petty.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:41:25]:
So they're all living petty.
Joey de Villa [01:41:26]:
Theft, shoplifting and golf cart dui.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:41:32]:
It is okay. It is a fascinating community. Yes, a little bit of that in, in Vegas.
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:37]:
I wanted to make us a, a sequel to Seinfeld which was the town where the parents lived.
Joey de Villa [01:41:43]:
Del Boca Vista.
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:45]:
Exactly. And it would be a sitcom because Burroughs is not a sitcom. Burroughs is, is, is.
Leo Laporte [01:41:50]:
No, it's nasty.
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:52]:
Yeah. Spooky.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:41:52]:
It's an art.
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:53]:
I think there's a sitcom and as my father always called it, God's way,
Leo Laporte [01:41:57]:
it's called the Golden Girls and it's been done.
Joey de Villa [01:42:00]:
Yeah, true, true.
Leo Laporte [01:42:05]:
Now that boomers are our little demographic bulge is getting up there. I suppose it's time to bring back all those old folks shows. I guess that's what the next star, Jerry Seinfeld now. Yeah, let's try it out. Let's take a break. I was going to do another because we're old.
Jeff Jarvis [01:42:23]:
We need a break.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:42:24]:
No, we don't want to talk about STDs anymore.
Leo Laporte [01:42:27]:
I mean the only bad thing about these breaks is I don't get to go to the bathroom. But you do, so take advantage of it. And there we go. I'll just suffer.
Joey de Villa [01:42:37]:
Think empty.
Jeff Jarvis [01:42:38]:
He's thinking Depends right now.
Leo Laporte [01:42:43]:
You know what if Depends wants to buy ads? Yeah, just let me know. That would be the kiss of death. Right. If you start turning to pens heads on a podcast, nobody's going to ever listen to the show again. Wired magazine, very interesting expose. They looked at code in an unreleased system that's already embedded in Meta's smart glasses for face recognition. Designed to identify people via biometric data stored on users phones. They have not enabled it, but it's there, it's in there.
Leo Laporte [01:43:16]:
Wired found was added to Meta's AI app over multiple updates this year. The feature is internally called name tag. This is something Google explicitly eschewed back with Google Glass. Right. But on the other hand Ring and Google Nest doorbells now are starting to do this. You're starting to see this more and more. Are people getting used to the idea or do you think this is the reason that Meta is keeping a secret is this is a non starter.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:43:47]:
I think people are getting used to the idea that it's possible. I don't think people are accepting of that idea. I mean this is, this is why Meta has been very cagey about it. This is why Meta in hearings has basically said we would be very careful about implementing this, this technology into our products. I think Most of us understand that there's cameras on us everywhere, no matter where we go. We've seen it. We see it on YouTube. We see it on the nightly news.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:44:14]:
But the idea that someone could be specifically looking at us, identifying us, finding information about us just as we walk around outside. I don't think we're ready for that as a society. Not yet.
Leo Laporte [01:44:32]:
I. And yet it would be so useful.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:44:35]:
Yeah. No, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:44:37]:
Because I have a terrible memory for faces. I never. And it's embarrassing that I can't remember people's names.
Jeff Jarvis [01:44:43]:
My sister is. Is a retired minister, and I can't imagine how you keep. And if you don't know the name of the parishioner.
Leo Laporte [01:44:49]:
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:44:51]:
You are in duty, right?
Joey de Villa [01:44:53]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:44:54]:
Or. Or my father was a sales guy. You're. You're in a conference. I'm horrible. Horrible faces and names. Absolutely horrible. I could never.
Jeff Jarvis [01:45:02]:
I, you know, give me 12 students, and it takes me weeks to get them straight.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:45:07]:
If I get about 10 years older, then I can just start calling everyone my daughter and my son.
Joey de Villa [01:45:13]:
My child.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:45:15]:
My child.
Joey de Villa [01:45:19]:
You. My brother or sister in Christ, actually, will always help you.
Leo Laporte [01:45:23]:
Yeah, well, that's now a meme. If you say that. It's.
Joey de Villa [01:45:26]:
Well, yeah, that's not. Thing. My brother.
Leo Laporte [01:45:27]:
Yeah, my brother.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:45:28]:
In the Filipino world, everyone you. You can't remember their name. They're Tita and Tito.
Joey de Villa [01:45:33]:
Yeah, exactly.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:45:33]:
Just. That's it.
Joey de Villa [01:45:34]:
I bet uncle and auntie.
Leo Laporte [01:45:37]:
Because this has to be a universal issue, is not remembering people's names. Right. Every language must have a default. Y'. All.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:45:45]:
Everyone here. Everyone here is bus. Leo. We know. It wouldn't. It wouldn't just be the names.
Leo Laporte [01:45:52]:
Benito's in Manila. He says, everybody's boss.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:45:55]:
It's busing. It's like what we say here.
Jeff Jarvis [01:45:57]:
Everyone's.
Joey de Villa [01:45:57]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:45:59]:
When I was a columnist in San Francisco, and they actually had my face on news racks and. And. And. And trucks, and people come up to me and. And I wouldn't know whether I'm supposed to know them or not.
Leo Laporte [01:46:09]:
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:46:09]:
So that's what I. I took on the horrible conceit of saying howdy, because howdy has no ellipsis.
Joey de Villa [01:46:15]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:46:15]:
In San Francisco, you don't say howdy, Leo.
Jeff Jarvis [01:46:18]:
You just say howdy.
Joey de Villa [01:46:18]:
Howdy. Yeah, howdy.
Jeff Jarvis [01:46:20]:
If you say, hi, there's a possession of Leo.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:46:22]:
I've done that to cardinals.
Leo Laporte [01:46:24]:
And you said, how do you do a cardinal?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:46:27]:
I feel good about. No, I say, oh, so I haven't seen you, and I'm doing all those things. When was the last time we saw each other. Wait.
Joey de Villa [01:46:33]:
Yeah, you're trying to get context.
Leo Laporte [01:46:35]:
It's the only reason that you should have a wife. Father Robert. I'm not saying any other reason, but Lisa and I have it worked out. She will say, okay, I don't know the name, so just introduce yourself right away. And then they will introduce themselves, and then she will know their name. It's very handy if you have a partner of any kind. I'm Leah. What's your name? Cardinal.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:46:58]:
We had a Jesuit named Paul Locatelli, who was the president of Santa Clara University. And he had this incredible talent. He knew every single face of every single graduate and every single parent he had ever met. He could walk into a room cold, and he knew your name. He knew who your child was when they. They attended the university and what they graduated. It. It was.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:47:20]:
It was ridiculous. I never figured out how he did it, but he just had one of those memories now, so.
Leo Laporte [01:47:26]:
The glasses.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:47:27]:
I could do that. Right.
Leo Laporte [01:47:28]:
The reason this. This Meta thing is troubling is because we have all, for years, been tagging people with their names. Yeah. On Facebook. Right.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:47:39]:
And Google, Google Photos, the same thing.
Leo Laporte [01:47:41]:
And Meta, apparently. Wired's code review shows the name tag system is currently designed to pull face prints from Meta's servers and store them on your device, in your hands, on your face.
Jeff Jarvis [01:47:53]:
Not a big deal. In Palantir's hands.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:47:56]:
Yes.
Jeff Jarvis [01:47:58]:
In Isis hands, that's when it becomes ridiculous.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:48:02]:
Which is why for the last seven years, I've been poisoning both Facebook and Google with photos tagged with my names that aren't me. Me.
Leo Laporte [01:48:10]:
You are a master of fuzzing.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:48:12]:
I. Yeah, it's just. I was a free free time project.
Leo Laporte [01:48:15]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:48:16]:
Is it. Does Robert Redford have your name? I mean, who. How do you choose who?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:48:20]:
No, no, no. I just. I put my name and I just use different faces. Just different faces.
Leo Laporte [01:48:25]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:48:25]:
So this. The system doesn't know. If you look in Google for Robert Ballester, you'll get like, 150 different people.
Joey de Villa [01:48:31]:
Yeah, they're. Yeah, they're.
Jeff Jarvis [01:48:33]:
They're.
Joey de Villa [01:48:33]:
They're quite different.
Leo Laporte [01:48:35]:
I am afraid that the ship has sailed for me.
Joey de Villa [01:48:39]:
Well, yeah, but you know what? In your line of work, you actually need. You know, it depends if you have public facing work, if you. And my line of work as well. Yeah, no, we want our faces to be matched, but maybe our habits. We want to appear different, which is why. Which is why I run that program called Chaff, which just. Just does Google searches on random dictionary words. And that's why I get chicken mating harness ads all the time.
Leo Laporte [01:49:07]:
Oh, we talked about that last time you were.
Joey de Villa [01:49:09]:
Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte [01:49:11]:
I think we named the show Chicken Mating Mating harnesses.
Joey de Villa [01:49:14]:
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:49:17]:
Thinks I'm in Vietnam. So if I do searches, it thinks I'm in Vietnam. It gives me local, local answers for that.
Leo Laporte [01:49:24]:
So somebody in our YouTube said, if you talk about AI anymore, I'm leaving. Well, I'm sorry, but there's a show for you. It's, you know, it's in the news.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:49:34]:
For instance, this was an AI week.
Leo Laporte [01:49:37]:
Yeah. The president this week signed an executive order seeking oversight of AI models. Nobody, I don't know who thinks this is a good idea. They've softened it considerably.
Jeff Jarvis [01:49:50]:
It's voluntary.
Leo Laporte [01:49:51]:
It's voluntary. It's only for 30 days before you release it. He scrapped the less voluntary 90 day order. The idea being, and I think it was really stimulated by Anthropic's mythos. Before an AI company can release a new model, the government can should be able to check it to make sure it's not going to be as if
Jeff Jarvis [01:50:12]:
they would know what they're doing.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:50:14]:
Yeah, they fired all the experts who would be able to go through a model and tell you whether or not
Leo Laporte [01:50:18]:
it's, it's good if, I mean, okay, so if none of that were true and you trusted the government, this seems like exactly the kind of thing government, government should do before. I mean, you can't release a vaccine without the government's approval. Right.
Jeff Jarvis [01:50:31]:
But again, it's a general machine. A vaccine is meant to do one thing and you can test its, its
Leo Laporte [01:50:35]:
efficacy for safety and efficacy.
Jeff Jarvis [01:50:37]:
Right. This is a machine. You don't know what everybody's going to ask the machine to do, what malign things are going to be required of it. And thus you cannot protect against all of them.
Leo Laporte [01:50:47]:
This is why we have underwriters laboratory checking electronics to make sure it's stocks down.
Jeff Jarvis [01:50:53]:
Go on fire. Yeah, that's pretty straightforward. Is somebody going to come along and ask this to create a, you know, a new weapon? Are they going to find a way new way to insult Leo Laporte. You don't know.
Leo Laporte [01:51:04]:
So there's no way. The issue with this is there's no way to ascertain the safety of a model.
Jeff Jarvis [01:51:10]:
No, no.
Joey de Villa [01:51:12]:
Not in 30 days.
Jeff Jarvis [01:51:13]:
And the encyclical also makes the idea to align it with human values is absurd too do at the higher level. It's not just the guardrails, but also this notion that we're going to make the virtuous machine is hubris.
Leo Laporte [01:51:28]:
So when Trump came into office because he was funded to some degree by Marc Andreessen and Brockman, the president of OpenAI, he got into office, the first thing he did was throw out Biden's AI regulation, or it was really just an executive order, so it didn't have much force of law either. But he went into office kind of with a stated goal of opening it up for AI because that's how we're going to compete. That's how we're going to make America great again. Is beat. The Chinese is by no regulations limiting AI. So doing this is almost a complete reversal.
Jeff Jarvis [01:52:11]:
Mm.
Joey de Villa [01:52:12]:
And not the first one.
Leo Laporte [01:52:14]:
Yet. He's done it in such a way that it is so. So meaningless that it is. Is it. It appeals to both sides. It has the appearance of regulation without actually doing anything.
Jeff Jarvis [01:52:26]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:52:27]:
This actually goes hand in hand with the other bit of news concerning the administration, which is Trump is considering having the United States take ownership, part ownership in these AI companies. He wants. He wants a bit of the piece of.
Leo Laporte [01:52:41]:
Interestingly, Sam Altman proposed this from a.
Jeff Jarvis [01:52:44]:
And Bernie Sanders is talking about a version of this as well. It's socialism.
Leo Laporte [01:52:51]:
Yeah, it is socialism.
Joey de Villa [01:52:53]:
Nationalizing industry.
Jeff Jarvis [01:52:54]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:52:54]:
That's already. The government has a 10% stake in Intel.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:52:59]:
Intel, yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:53:00]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:53:01]:
I mean, there's a precedent for this. This was also a Trump. This was actually. It's interesting because it was the CHIPS act that Biden passed, but the President said, well, but for the money, we're gonna give you, we want a stake in Intel. When asked about this on Air Force One, Trump said, there's something very interesting about it where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public. It's like, you make them partners in this revolution, it would be a beautiful thing. It would make them rich. I don't know who them is in this.
Leo Laporte [01:53:35]:
Okay, okay.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:53:37]:
That was the same thing that happened when he signed the executive order making insider trading not illegal. So, yeah, making them rich is not necessarily a good thing.
Leo Laporte [01:53:46]:
Who do we want to make rich here?
Joey de Villa [01:53:49]:
You know what they say, Evil is the root of all money.
Leo Laporte [01:53:53]:
I like it. I like it. The fcc, as you know, has banned all foreign routers. Now the cable lobby, the National Cable Television association, wants a waiver because, well, guess who installs most foreign made routers in the home. The cable companies. That's where most people get their routes. Hell, yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:16]:
Do we even have a list of what routers would qualify? Because everything's made in China.
Leo Laporte [01:54:21]:
Well, right now, the only one not made in China is The Starlink router. But remember that Netgear got a wafer. Eero got a waiver.
Joey de Villa [01:54:31]:
Oh, okay. So I'm good.
Leo Laporte [01:54:34]:
Yeah. But the way you get the waiver is you just say, yeah, we're going to build these routers in the United States someday.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:40]:
Eventually.
Joey de Villa [01:54:40]:
Eventually, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:43]:
It might take us three years someday, but then it'll be done.
Leo Laporte [01:54:48]:
At least the FCC said you can continue to get off software updates and Firmware updates until January 2029.
Jeff Jarvis [01:54:55]:
She's.
Leo Laporte [01:54:56]:
It's like, okay, it's not about a security problem.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:00]:
I mean, okay, look, I understand the idea of securing the edge.
Joey de Villa [01:55:03]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:55:04]:
Let's.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:04]:
Let's secure all these routers. But even if you did that, all of the core is running on equipment made in China.
Jeff Jarvis [01:55:10]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:11]:
So are you going to do that?
Leo Laporte [01:55:12]:
Everything?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:12]:
Because that's kind of important.
Leo Laporte [01:55:13]:
When we were joking about this deep SEQ thing that I've, you know, this Chinese device that I connected to my WI fi and connects to immediately, to deep sea in China, I said, well. I said, well, isn't that dangerous? Harper Reed suggested. He said, leo, what of your stuff in your house is not made in China?
Joey de Villa [01:55:35]:
Well, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:55:36]:
Which of the WI fi things you've got connected? I have more than 100 devices connected to my WI Fi. Which of those is not made in China? None of them. As far as I know, they're all made in China, so. But a router certainly is an attack surface, there's no doubt about that.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:54]:
The last device I could certify was 100% not made in China.
Joey de Villa [01:55:59]:
Was.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:56:00]:
Do you remember Google I O One year they released that sphere?
Leo Laporte [01:56:04]:
Oh, yeah, I bought that.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:56:06]:
That was 100% made in the United States and discontinued immediately because they did not make it cheap enough.
Leo Laporte [01:56:12]:
Right.
Joey de Villa [01:56:12]:
Yeah, right.
Leo Laporte [01:56:14]:
Did I buy that one? Or did I buy the camera that they put out that took pictures of you every five seconds?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:56:19]:
No, they gave us the spheres just by going to goog.
Leo Laporte [01:56:22]:
That's right. They gave you at Google. I o. Yeah. Google actually is a little bit in a little bit of trouble in the uk. Google has to change its AI overviews. The UK ordered them to put clearer links in AI search and to give UK publishers the option to opt out of those AI or for reviews or
Jeff Jarvis [01:56:47]:
put that in other words, allow the publishers to commit suicide.
Leo Laporte [01:56:50]:
Right. You don't want to be in search, you don't have to be in search.
Joey de Villa [01:56:53]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:56:53]:
This is from the UK's Competition and Markets authority.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:56:56]:
It seems like we keep running that same story over and over.
Leo Laporte [01:56:59]:
It does, doesn't.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:57:00]:
It was the news readers, the news aggregators and then the listing on Google search. It's. I mean yes, it sounds good, it's fun to fight Google, but that ultimately it's suicide.
Joey de Villa [01:57:11]:
Yeah, yeah, Google.
Jeff Jarvis [01:57:12]:
And Google is improving the links on these searches. I'm finding the links are more prominent now. They're easier to go to. There's more of them.
Leo Laporte [01:57:19]:
They didn't want to do it because they said it junks up the search results.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:57:24]:
No, what they really mean is because we can't game the search results as easily as we could before.
Leo Laporte [01:57:29]:
You might, you might actually click that and go out of a. You might leave.
Joey de Villa [01:57:33]:
You might leave.
Leo Laporte [01:57:34]:
You might leave. Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features.
Jeff Jarvis [01:57:44]:
Here's a cup of hemlock for you.
Joey de Villa [01:57:45]:
Yeah, exactly. Because you know. Yeah, because as always, piracy is not the real problem. It's obscurity.
Leo Laporte [01:57:52]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [01:57:53]:
Yes, yes.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:57:55]:
By the way, Microsoft is doing the same thing with Bing. So there are stories from large publishers that end up on Microsoft's the MSN page. And if you search for that story, it will give you the MSN link. You actually have to go to Google to search for the story to actually get the original link. I don't know why no one's complaining about that.
Jeff Jarvis [01:58:16]:
Because no one's using Bing.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:58:18]:
Yeah, I've got over a million points on Bing. I'm going to spend them at some point.
Leo Laporte [01:58:23]:
Well, good news. You can keep your Microsoft Windows 10 running for another year with just, what is it, 5,000 Bing points. You could keep that DGX spark on Windows.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:58:34]:
You've only got four months at this point though.
Leo Laporte [01:58:37]:
Oh, that's true. Well yeah, yeah, that's a good point.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:58:40]:
I think Windows 10 might be the last Windows on my machines. I'm going to migrate them to Linux. Seriously, I'm not using 11. I'm with you.
Joey de Villa [01:58:48]:
Yeah, I'm already. I have successfully migrated my in laws over to Linux. Wow, it is working fine.
Leo Laporte [01:58:56]:
Which version of Linux did you choose for them?
Joey de Villa [01:58:59]:
Mint.
Leo Laporte [01:59:00]:
Because it looks like Windows. It feels like Windows.
Joey de Villa [01:59:02]:
Yeah, it looks like Windows, it feels like Windows and. And then the next thing is to put a Raspberry PI that I can open ZD into to maintain their system.
Leo Laporte [01:59:15]:
ZD is a zero trust open source zero trust system from NetFoundry IO. Oh, that's interesting. I could imagine you using a PI hole or something. In fact, Father Robert taught us how to install PI holes back in the day on know how that would limit their DNS searches and thereby limit them from going to bad search.
Joey de Villa [01:59:36]:
Yeah, and I can combine that. The reason I would use OpenZD is because if you port scan the network, that Raspberry PI does not show up at all. The only way into that Raspberry PI is by using a cryptographic id because in netfoundry we basically say, you know, in God we trust, everybody else gets zero trust.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:59:58]:
So it's got no open ports, it's behind the router and it, you communicate
Joey de Villa [02:00:05]:
with a network overlay rather than via a port. And what that basically means is in the similar field, tailscale is a vpn. So once you're inside the network you do have permission to do anything. Whereas with OpenZD, because it's zero trust,
Leo Laporte [02:00:25]:
you can only do what the policy
Joey de Villa [02:00:26]:
policy determines what you're allowed to do.
Leo Laporte [02:00:29]:
Yeah, that sounds like a good solution.
Joey de Villa [02:00:32]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:00:33]:
All right, I'm going to take a little break and then we have our final stories. This has been so much fun. I hate to wrap it up. Joey Deville.
Jeff Jarvis [02:00:42]:
Don't be telling me you don't have mass at 6:00 in the morning, Robert.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:00:46]:
I don't. I have the four.
Joey de Villa [02:00:50]:
Wait in the morning.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:00:51]:
I'm not gonna go to sleep until after the 4:30am Good a.m. who comes to 4:30 mass? Yeah, there's a, there's a special mass we do down in the tomb of St. Peter's and.
Leo Laporte [02:01:01]:
Oh, that's a, that's probably very prestigious to be doing that.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:01:06]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:01:06]:
But I'm down with the, with St. Peter Pope 1.0.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:01:10]:
When you come, I'll, I'll take you down there. It's, it's very nice.
Leo Laporte [02:01:14]:
Well, there's a window you can look when you, if you go to the basilica.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:01:17]:
No, no, no, this is, is the special one. This is the Chapel of St Clementine. It's right next to the tomb of St Peter.
Leo Laporte [02:01:23]:
It's so is, but isn't the, the altar in St. Peter's right above that straight up?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:01:27]:
Yeah, but there's, there's no way to look down there. There, there is ways to look down, but not into this chapel. This is a special chapel.
Leo Laporte [02:01:33]:
Oh, wow. Wow. So I tell you, that's a pretty high end mass. Do you, do you draw straws for that? Who has to get that?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:01:44]:
You just have to ask the right people. I'm, I'm at the point where I'm, I actually know some of the right people now that's, and now how it
Leo Laporte [02:01:51]:
can't be a very big chapel.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:01:53]:
Oh, a maximum is 12 people sitting or maybe 17 people standing.
Leo Laporte [02:02:00]:
So who gets invited to that mess?
Joey de Villa [02:02:02]:
Yeah, yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:03]:
Of dignitaries, diplomats.
Leo Laporte [02:02:08]:
Yeah.
Joey de Villa [02:02:08]:
It's the Illuminati, isn't it?
Leo Laporte [02:02:10]:
It's the Illuminati is what it is.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:13]:
Running the antimatter machine. The guys running the all.
Jeff Jarvis [02:02:15]:
All the.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:16]:
The stuff.
Leo Laporte [02:02:18]:
So cool.
Jeff Jarvis [02:02:18]:
We've got to go another three hours to keep him awake now.
Leo Laporte [02:02:22]:
Oh, yeah. Well, we might as well entertain. Holy cow. Wow. And you. Do you do that in the vernacular or do. Do you do that in Latin?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:32]:
Italian, actually.
Joey de Villa [02:02:33]:
Italian, Italian.
Jeff Jarvis [02:02:34]:
Do you.
Joey de Villa [02:02:35]:
Do you sing?
Leo Laporte [02:02:37]:
I'm sorry, no, you do homily or.
Jeff Jarvis [02:02:40]:
Yes. Yes, you do.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:41]:
But a homily is short. We. So it's five minutes, which for some people, that's difficult. For me, that's normal. I. I always do short homilies.
Leo Laporte [02:02:49]:
What will. Do you know what your homily will be today?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:51]:
I make it up as a go. I. I don't write it. I. I always. I like it to be.
Leo Laporte [02:02:56]:
You know what, this. Do you have a verse?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:58]:
Oh, no, no. I've read the Scriptures and I. I know what, like the ideas that I want, but I. I make it as I go, just so that it's dynamic. I'm not one of these guys who goes up and says marriage.
Joey de Villa [02:03:13]:
I'm picturing the Stonecutter song. Who controls the British? We do.
Leo Laporte [02:03:21]:
I. I did make a song. You were here for that? Out of the.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:03:25]:
Oh, yes. On six, Seven. Six seven.
Joey de Villa [02:03:27]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:03:27]:
Well, Six Seven, by the way.
Jeff Jarvis [02:03:29]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:03:29]:
I have been told by a number of our club members is so catchy, they can't stop singing.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:03:37]:
Today is six seven, by the way.
Leo Laporte [02:03:39]:
Okay.
Joey de Villa [02:03:39]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:03:39]:
And today we will end the show with 6, 7. Although I'm told by the kids it's now 6, 8. What? I don't think that's true. I think they're messing with me.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:03:50]:
No, no.
Leo Laporte [02:03:54]:
I will play 6 7, 6 7,
Joey de Villa [02:03:57]:
by the way, 668 is the neighbor of the beast next door.
Leo Laporte [02:04:02]:
It's right next door. Coming up in just a little bit, Father Robert Balaser, who is staying up late tonight. So nice to have you. Wow. I'm just blown away. That is amazing. What's the name of the chapel? St. Clementine.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:04:15]:
St. Clementine, wow.
Leo Laporte [02:04:18]:
The patron saint of oranges,
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:04:22]:
is he.
Leo Laporte [02:04:23]:
Aren't there Clementine oranges?
Joey de Villa [02:04:24]:
Clementine oranges for Christmas.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:04:27]:
I lose track of the patronages.
Joey de Villa [02:04:30]:
Oh, I know.
Leo Laporte [02:04:31]:
It's complicated.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:04:32]:
Many now. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:04:33]:
Abby took the name of St. Abigail because she's Abby.
Joey de Villa [02:04:36]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:04:37]:
So that was nice. Yeah. Jeff Jarvis is also here. He's a good Presbyterian. Don't. Don't.
Jeff Jarvis [02:04:43]:
Well, no, actually, a very bad one. But that's another thing.
Leo Laporte [02:04:46]:
He's a bad Presbyterian, even worse. But he's a good Scotsman. Thank you for being here, Jeff. It's always great to see you. Of course. He'll be back Wednesday for Intelligent Machines and Joey de Villa. Congratulations. Netfoundry IO.
Joey de Villa [02:04:59]:
Hey. Hey.
Leo Laporte [02:04:59]:
He's putting ZD on everything.
Joey de Villa [02:05:01]:
Oh, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:05:02]:
ZD on all the places. I wonder if maybe I'll put open ZD on my. On my router. That's a really good idea. I do have tailscale running, but you're right. Once they're in the network, they can do anything they want. Gotta limit that. Very, very good.
Leo Laporte [02:05:17]:
Very, very good. It is the seventh day of June in the year 2026. I'm going to play just a little bit of this. I'll jump. I'll jump to the. I'll jump to the. This is. I'll jump to the chorus.
Leo Laporte [02:05:42]:
Everybody sing along.
Joey de Villa [02:05:43]:
Don't overthink it, that's the trick. It lands like a shrug, then it sticks A number with swagger, A wink, not a clue they say it for the vibe, not to hand it to you. Six, seven, six seven. That's the whole scene. 6767. It's a flex, not a fact. You can explain it.
Leo Laporte [02:06:12]:
Oh, Leo,
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:06:15]:
it is catchy. And I. I hate that. That I hate.
Joey de Villa [02:06:19]:
Padre.
Leo Laporte [02:06:20]:
We need a 767.
Joey de Villa [02:06:21]:
We need a karaoke version.
Leo Laporte [02:06:23]:
We.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:06:24]:
Oh, yeah. We're Filipino, so we're gonna.
Joey de Villa [02:06:25]:
Yeah, exactly.
Jeff Jarvis [02:06:26]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:06:26]:
Well, you did hear the. The. The Gregorian chant. I think I made it while you were there to the Pope's encyclical. To section 238, your favorite section.
Jeff Jarvis [02:06:35]:
Yes. My. Many. With ourselves.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:06:46]:
Did you put that text in there or did you just.
Leo Laporte [02:06:50]:
But it had. But the lyric writer, which is probably chat. Gbd, I'm thinking clearly, can go out because I didn't tell it what 67 was and it wrote those lyrics. So it went out and figured out what it was, you know, what 67 was all about. And it nailed it, frankly. Nice that it means absolutely nothing. The kids just use it to mess with your head. Oh, I just closed the window.
Leo Laporte [02:07:18]:
Both AT&T and Verizon lost in the Supreme Court. They upheld the FCC's power to fine them over data sales 8 to 100. But it's a mere $104 million in fines for AT&T and Verizon.
Joey de Villa [02:07:36]:
A rounding error.
Leo Laporte [02:07:37]:
It's nothing.
Joey de Villa [02:07:39]:
Who's the one?
Leo Laporte [02:07:42]:
Yeah, really, AT&T and Verizon didn't just sell access to customer location data. They failed to prevent that data from reaching bounty hunters and even a sheriff who uses to track people without their knowledge. And then of course they sold it to data brokers.
Jeff Jarvis [02:08:00]:
Who are the real bad agents. Oh yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:08:02]:
I mean, bad enough. I mean law enforcement gets it, but data brokers, who knows knows you know they're going to sell it to anybody.
Jeff Jarvis [02:08:08]:
So.
Joey de Villa [02:08:09]:
So which Supreme Court justice is the friend of Dog the bounty hunter one?
Leo Laporte [02:08:14]:
That's a good question. Did they. Did they say who the. They must have. Let me look and see if I can find this.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:08:22]:
I mean, yes, whoever wrote the Descent.
Joey de Villa [02:08:24]:
Yeah, who is. Yeah, who. Who's most in the pocket of AT&T and Verizon?
Leo Laporte [02:08:31]:
Take a guess.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:08:32]:
Oh, Clarence. It was Clarence Thomas.
Leo Laporte [02:08:34]:
Clarence.
Joey de Villa [02:08:34]:
Ah, okay. Yeah, figured.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:08:37]:
I thought sur.
Jeff Jarvis [02:08:39]:
Surprise.
Joey de Villa [02:08:40]:
Remember, it's not. It's not selling out. It's buying in the fact that you
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:08:46]:
don't have a unanimous decision that it's not okay to circumvent constitutional protections. That's scary to me. That really is. This should have been a no brainer.
Leo Laporte [02:08:56]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:08:57]:
The idea that I'm going to allow law enforcement or non law enforcement to have information that should only be obtainable via warrant. I mean then what are we doing here if we're now pretending that I can ignore civil rights as long as I buy the data from someone? That's horrible precedent.
Leo Laporte [02:09:17]:
This was a week that YouTubers won big at the box office. Huge success.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:09:24]:
You saw this coming? You saw this coming.
Leo Laporte [02:09:26]:
It was coming, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah. Back rooms, which I went to see on the 29th opening night actually. Kane Pixels, the director was there. He's A local boy, 20 years old, got $10 million from a 24 to make this movie. It has already made more than $100 million in its first weekend. It is a huge success.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:09:47]:
So does that put it over Marty supreme already or not yet?
Leo Laporte [02:09:50]:
I hope so. Marty supreme not. I finally watched that.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:09:55]:
I did not enjoy it.
Leo Laporte [02:09:57]:
It was not a good movie.
Joey de Villa [02:09:58]:
I have not yet seen it.
Leo Laporte [02:09:59]:
Don't.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:10:00]:
It got a lot of buzz, but
Leo Laporte [02:10:01]:
I know it got nine Academy or eight or nine Academy Award nominations. One zero. So that'll tell you something.
Joey de Villa [02:10:09]:
Okay, so YouTubers out there start making movies. I want to see Annoying on Orange the movie soon.
Leo Laporte [02:10:14]:
No, we already saw Annoying, Orange the TV show, and that wasn't good. But that's what's interesting.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:10:19]:
Creators out there.
Leo Laporte [02:10:20]:
It's interesting that you brought that up because that was the first round of Hollywood saying, oh, you know, this YouTube thing's big. This was 10 years ago know, let's bring some of these people and they put them on Nickelodeon and stuff. And it was not good because it
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:32]:
was the wrong way.
Joey de Villa [02:10:33]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:10:34]:
How so?
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:35]:
And, and well, I, I, I, I think that you've got to recognize that the new things are built in the new medium and you leave them there. You don't try to bring them into the old medium.
Leo Laporte [02:10:44]:
Although making a movie out of it did. Okay. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:48]:
Well, I think we're gonna see more and more of that. I mean, we had Robert Turcic on Intelligent Machines last week, who's very Hollywood.
Leo Laporte [02:10:55]:
He was great.
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:56]:
Talked about, he was great. And he talked about the AI the Lot conference where we're going to see movies made. There's one movie that's premiering at Tribeca Film Festival made entirely in AI so between the distribution side and the making side, it's exploding.
Leo Laporte [02:11:18]:
And then what was the other one? Obsession. Is it Obsessions?
Joey de Villa [02:11:22]:
Obsession obsession.
Leo Laporte [02:11:24]:
Another YouTube movie. YouTuber making a movie and a huge success.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:11:29]:
The YouTubers I really want to see make it. Have you ever heard of Viva la Dirt League?
Jeff Jarvis [02:11:35]:
Yes.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:11:36]:
They're a New Zealand.
Joey de Villa [02:11:37]:
I watch them regularly.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:11:38]:
They started, they were just making funny games about gaming stereotypes or funny shorts about gaming stereotypes. But they actually have chops. They have acting and directing chops. They've done a few longer formats pieces and they're fantastic. That's the kind of YouTuber I want to see transition into long format storytelling.
Joey de Villa [02:12:00]:
The other one I'd be interested in seeing would be the archive in between. So they do these, they do these shorts that feel like 50 style info info films.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:12:16]:
Okay.
Joey de Villa [02:12:17]:
About the about. They're basically tour tourism for the multiverse where they talk about different, different cities or different parts of the patchwork city, which is where every universe in the multiverse intersects and what you can expect to see. And it's fascinating.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:12:37]:
What's it called again? What's the name?
Joey de Villa [02:12:38]:
The Archive in between.
Leo Laporte [02:12:41]:
Okay.
Joey de Villa [02:12:42]:
And they also have news alerts talking about, oh, beware this creature from Universe X157 is now terrorizing the neighborhood retreat to your home. Follow the instructions in your in Intergalactic Interloper Kit. Inter Universal Interloper Kit. And they're done so well. And it feels like a 1950s, 1960s civil defense film. And it's all A.I. it's written, I believe it's written by humans. But definitely AI generated images.
Joey de Villa [02:13:13]:
But yeah, really great stuff that goes
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:13:16]:
in hand in hand with that story that YouTube took the streaming hours crown back from Netflix.
Leo Laporte [02:13:22]:
Absolutely worldwide. YouTube has longer daily average viewing around the world over Netflix. This is. This is huge.
Jeff Jarvis [02:13:33]:
I'm so frustrated with YouTube these days because. Because the slop, the new kind of slop that's being made there is. I'll get a fake script for. You know, I'll see something I like, like. Like Campbell soup. The original Campbell Soup. Since I used to live next to the Campbell soup test kitchen farm in New Jersey.
Joey de Villa [02:13:50]:
Yes, New Jersey.
Jeff Jarvis [02:13:50]:
Yes. South Jersey.
Leo Laporte [02:13:51]:
And where all the best tomatoes are made.
Joey de Villa [02:13:53]:
Yes.
Jeff Jarvis [02:13:53]:
So you'll see something like how Campbell soup rose and fell. Okay, that's interesting. I'll watch that for. No, it's. It's awful. It. It's a slop script, fake voice, a bunch of images picked up from nowhere. And it's wrong.
Jeff Jarvis [02:14:07]:
It's made up stuff.
Leo Laporte [02:14:08]:
It's cheap though.
Jeff Jarvis [02:14:09]:
My YouTube is just.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:14:10]:
But it's confidently wrong.
Leo Laporte [02:14:12]:
Yes, that's AI so you. So what happened is Netflix went down in 2024. It was a hundred, get this, 100 minutes a day average down to 93, while YouTube went up in 2025. 99.1 minutes a day on average.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:14:32]:
I'm up way above that. More than an hour YouTube running. It's. It's like background music for me.
Joey de Villa [02:14:41]:
Same here.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:14:41]:
Just keeps going.
Leo Laporte [02:14:42]:
So. And what do you have on there? Is educational and informational stuff or is it?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:14:47]:
Well, unfortunately, because I do fuzz the data. If I just let it go, I get weird.
Jeff Jarvis [02:14:52]:
That teach you? That'll teach you. You liar, you.
Leo Laporte [02:14:55]:
So you turned on Autoplay. See, I turned that off. You should.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:14:59]:
If I turn on Autoplay, I will get the weirdest content.
Leo Laporte [02:15:03]:
This might be kind of fun.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:15:04]:
I can't do that. No, it's just.
Leo Laporte [02:15:06]:
Get a doobie, sit back, maybe a beer bong.
Joey de Villa [02:15:10]:
Yeah, there we go.
Leo Laporte [02:15:12]:
Oh, that's right. You're not allowed. Probably.
Joey de Villa [02:15:14]:
No, no, no. But you can. In the incense burner you hide. I'm sorry, Robert. Have you never been an Ultra boy? Do you know, mom?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:15:23]:
Frankincense incense burner. You mean the thorough fur? Yeah, yeah, that thing.
Leo Laporte [02:15:27]:
Yeah, yeah. Gen Z remained YouTube's most engaged age group last year, averaging 111 minutes a day. But growth was strongest among priests. Age. Oh, no, wait a minute.
Jeff Jarvis [02:15:37]:
Men.
Leo Laporte [02:15:37]:
Oh, sorry. There we go. Age 55 to 64. Oh. Where viewing has increased 15% since 2024. Daily average YouTube users also increased for women. Of all age groups, South Koreans watch YouTube the most, 161 and a half minutes a day. France recorded the biggest growth, up by a third.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:01]:
How much of the South Korean numbers are from mukbangs?
Leo Laporte [02:16:05]:
Yeah, I don't know what that is. Should I ask?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:08]:
That's just watching people. People eat an enormous amount of food. That's what, like.
Joey de Villa [02:16:12]:
Yeah, like I'm going to try every burger in this burger place.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:17]:
That's a mukbang.
Joey de Villa [02:16:18]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:16:19]:
Is that, is that specific to South Korea?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:24]:
No, there's everywhere. But it's popular.
Joey de Villa [02:16:26]:
Popular there. But they've.
Jeff Jarvis [02:16:27]:
It's on American cable. You can see stuff like that.
Joey de Villa [02:16:30]:
They've now adopted the word. Yeah, they just adopted the word for everything now. So somebody's done a McDonald's mukbang.
Jeff Jarvis [02:16:38]:
Wow.
Joey de Villa [02:16:38]:
Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [02:16:38]:
Right now.
Joey de Villa [02:16:39]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:40]:
YouTube for me is mostly like legal. I get a lot of legal content.
Leo Laporte [02:16:46]:
Interesting.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:46]:
Auditing courts and, and, and lawyers giving out their, their personal opinions on personal cases. It's fun stuff for me. I like the law. I would have been a lawyer if I wasn't a priest.
Leo Laporte [02:16:57]:
I feel like I should be more consistent my YouTube viewing, because it's good angel, bad angel. Yeah, there you go.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:17:04]:
I know they compete for the same eyeballs and stuff, but YouTube and Netflix aren't the same. No, that's true. No, no, they're not at all.
Jeff Jarvis [02:17:12]:
But YouTube, that's the point, I think Benito, is that YouTube recognizes the culture, is recognizing a different genre of, of entertainment. Netflix tries to recreate the old genres, movies and TV shows. YouTube is something different. And the fact that it's bigger says a lot.
Joey de Villa [02:17:33]:
And I have to say, half, maybe half my YouTube consumption is listening rather than directly watching.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:17:41]:
Yeah, that's true.
Leo Laporte [02:17:42]:
Oh, interesting. Yeah, that's what they say. Podcast. Yeah. Are very big on YouTube. And of course, you know, our show, even though we do video is really. There's nothing to see here.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:17:52]:
Just.
Jeff Jarvis [02:17:52]:
Hey, hey,
Joey de Villa [02:17:55]:
hold on. Like, at least an hour of my day on YouTube is actually me on my bike and I'm just listening to it. I've got, I've got my phone clipped on my shoulder and I'm just listening to YouTube videos lately. A lot of Nate B. Jones talking about AI.
Leo Laporte [02:18:14]:
I love Nate B. Jones is great.
Joey de Villa [02:18:16]:
Yeah. So I, I, I just listen. I just listen to him. It's either that or what else? On the other hand, either Adam Conover or Behind the Bastards.
Leo Laporte [02:18:29]:
Do you think? I bet you everybody's AI. I mean, YouTube viewing is completely unique. Right. You could fingerprint from what they watch pretty much. Because you're mentioning channels that are huge, that I've never heard of, and yet I watch AI probably. I mean, YouTube. I keep calling it AI.
Jeff Jarvis [02:18:47]:
I don't know why.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:18:49]:
I think this is actually the primary difference between YouTube and Netflix is that every. Everything under the sun is on YouTube.
Joey de Villa [02:18:56]:
Like everything.
Leo Laporte [02:18:57]:
That's right. Netflix is probably a lot of commonality. What people watch on Netflix. We all watch the same. Roughly the same stuff.
Joey de Villa [02:19:03]:
Well, yeah, yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:19:04]:
And so on YouTube, you curate it yourself. You curate YouTube. Netflix kind of does it for you, right?
Joey de Villa [02:19:12]:
Yeah.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:19:12]:
I went through months where I was binging on air traffic control conversations. See, I don't know why, but I just started, like, liking those and then I fell out of love with it and I moved on to Van life and then I moved on to legal stuff. So.
Joey de Villa [02:19:26]:
Okay, there we go.
Leo Laporte [02:19:27]:
Yeah, but are you doing that under your name or do you have some special account that is.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:19:32]:
I create a special account for curating because otherwise it's too chaotic.
Jeff Jarvis [02:19:36]:
Yeah, yeah, I'm watching a lot of that stuff on TikTok.
Leo Laporte [02:19:40]:
Well, we thank everybody who's watching us on YouTube. 657 people right now. Thank you. We do this show on YouTube, Twitch X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. But it's most consistently YouTube is where most people watch. Of course, if you're in the club, you can also watch in the club. Twit, Discord. We do the show every Sunday, 2 to 5 Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, midnight to 4:30am in the.
Leo Laporte [02:20:07]:
In Italy. Robert, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate it. Father Robert Ballisaire, Digital Jesuit Jesuit pilgrimage app is the app that he designed. But there's a whole lot more to Robert. He is on bluesky.
Jeff Jarvis [02:20:23]:
Some we know about, some we don't know about.
Leo Laporte [02:20:25]:
Yeah. Always a pleasure.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:27]:
Always.
Leo Laporte [02:20:27]:
We love having you on. It's great to see you.
Jeff Jarvis [02:20:29]:
Good to see you again. I'm so privileged to see you twice in a week.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:32]:
This has been a fantastic week. I get to work with you. It makes me feel like I did. What?
Jeff Jarvis [02:20:37]:
When?
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:38]:
Back when I was still at twit. So.
Leo Laporte [02:20:39]:
Oh, we miss having you here. Miss you living in our basement.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:44]:
In the no hole.
Jeff Jarvis [02:20:46]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:20:46]:
K, N O W. Thank you, Robert.
Jeff Jarvis [02:20:50]:
Now we get screwed. The basement. The Clementine Chapel.
Joey de Villa [02:20:54]:
Yeah. Literally the basement.
Leo Laporte [02:20:57]:
It's a higher quality basement, but there are by far. There are no beanbags in.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:02]:
We have hard chairs.
Leo Laporte [02:21:04]:
Very, very uncomfortable. I'm sure. I don't know. Do you say good mass? Have a good mass. Have a good Mass.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:10]:
Yeah, that works. Yeah, we get it.
Jeff Jarvis [02:21:11]:
Break a leg.
Leo Laporte [02:21:12]:
Don't break a leg. Just, Just. Just have a great time down there in the chapel.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:20]:
I'll bring. I'll bring you down there when you come over.
Leo Laporte [02:21:22]:
Leo, I would. I would be honored. I would love to see that. Seriously. I'll bring Abby with me because it would be so meaningful.
Jeff Jarvis [02:21:28]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:21:31]:
Jeff Jarvis, of course, will be back on Wednesday. We'll interview Jeffrey Cannell from Noose Research about Hermes. We talk AI on intelligent machines. His book Hot Type, available from his website, jeffjarvis.com audiobook finished.
Jeff Jarvis [02:21:45]:
I'll do the last pickups on Tuesday. The things I muffed up, which are many.
Leo Laporte [02:21:49]:
Do they stop as you read it? Do they stop you as you're reading or do they let you kind of roll in?
Jeff Jarvis [02:21:54]:
No, the first time, I didn't know book, you just went on from wherever, you screwed up and did it again. Now that means they got to edit now. Now you screw up and they say, oh, no, you gotta take that again. And they back up and you get, let's say, a three word cue and then you have to pick up. Right.
Leo Laporte [02:22:07]:
Then that's. So it matches.
Jeff Jarvis [02:22:09]:
Yeah, so it matches.
Leo Laporte [02:22:10]:
Yeah, I've. Because that's. Sometimes you'll hear that in audiobook. You can tell there's an edit. It just changes so dramatically. Yeah. So then you. They want you to hear how you were talking and then just kind of.
Jeff Jarvis [02:22:20]:
Yeah, then I did the pickups from when I screwed up. Things like I said could instead of would. That kind of stuff.
Leo Laporte [02:22:25]:
Right.
Jeff Jarvis [02:22:26]:
And don't you get to say, hey,
Leo Laporte [02:22:28]:
I'm the author and could is fine to some extent.
Jeff Jarvis [02:22:30]:
But they get pretty. When there were cases, there were cases where I said, this doesn't make sense in audio. I'm changing this. They said, okay, it's your book, you can do that. But no, generally they want it to be. They want to be able to.
Leo Laporte [02:22:39]:
Yeah, you'll hear that on audiobooks. They'll say if you're listening instead of if you're reading, which is what the text said. Yeah, that makes sense.
Jeff Jarvis [02:22:44]:
And I hate say I still. It's still a book. I won't say this audiobook for listeners versus readers. I won't that. But. But they'll. They'll play what I screwed up. And then right after that I have to say the same thing corrected so that I.
Jeff Jarvis [02:22:56]:
I've heard how my tone was right. Right then.
Leo Laporte [02:22:59]:
And you refuse to read the part at the beginning about what at the
Jeff Jarvis [02:23:04]:
end where it says no AI company may take this in this universe or any future universe because you're evil bastards. I won't read that part. So they have to find other. They, they, they. They have plenty of other voices who've read that because.
Leo Laporte [02:23:16]:
Because like, like me. You embrace the AI overlord.
Jeff Jarvis [02:23:23]:
Yes. I want to be discovered there.
Leo Laporte [02:23:25]:
I think we made a deal with somebody that if people wanted AI wanted twits content for AI, they would go to this company and license it. But who's going to do that? It just seemed odd to me. But I guess we give you a legal.
Jeff Jarvis [02:23:42]:
Is that Pro Rata?
Leo Laporte [02:23:44]:
I don't know how it works. I should ask.
Jeff Jarvis [02:23:45]:
That was the name of the company.
Leo Laporte [02:23:47]:
It's. Oh, I don't know who it is. No, it's Pro. I mean, I don't even know if it's on our page. Is it on our page? Does it say like, if you'd like to license this content, please contact Pro rata? I don't know, it should say that somewhere. But I mean, we could put all
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:24:04]:
the twit content in the archives. Over here we have storage vault.
Leo Laporte [02:24:08]:
Now, like what not to do, like how not to be. Right. Thank you very much, Jeff. Thank you. Joey, congratulations on the new gig@netfoundry IO Developer Advocate. And you're going to work. Working on some what AI thing there. What are you working on?
Joey de Villa [02:24:28]:
I'm there. What I'm doing is I'm promoting a lot of the new AI tooling. So it's built on top of OpenZD and it is for agents to talk to LLMs, agents to talk to safely, MCP servers safely and agents to talk to other agents. All zero trust. Basically, you're either using zero trust or you're going bust.
Leo Laporte [02:24:51]:
Zero trust or bust.
Joey de Villa [02:24:52]:
Zero trust or bust.
Leo Laporte [02:24:53]:
Joey de Villa. You should write a accordion song for that. Joey's a great accordionist as well.
Joey de Villa [02:25:00]:
There we go.
Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:25:00]:
I mean, you've got an LLM to generate that song. Song Leo?
Leo Laporte [02:25:03]:
Well, no, I, I believe in humans. I bring in. We brought in a chorus to do that six, seven song Organic.
Joey de Villa [02:25:11]:
As a, as a musician, I am a protein chauvinist. Let the meat make the music.
Leo Laporte [02:25:18]:
Carbon based life forms for me. Thank you very much. Thanks, Joey, Robert, Jeff, thanks to all of you for joining us. We will see you next time. And as I've been saying for 21 freaking ears, another twit is in the can. We'll see you later. Bye. Bye..
