TWiT 1088: Model Not Available - Anthropic's Fable Shutdown & Apple's Siri Update

[00:00:00] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Richard Campbell is here, Harry McCracken and Christina Warren. We've got the experts in the house to talk about three of the biggest stories in one of the biggest tech weeks of all time. We've got Fable Tabled, SpaceX Launches and Apple's Siri. That and a whole lot more coming up on TWiT. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT.

[00:00:34] This is TWiT. This Week in Tech, Episode 1088, recorded Sunday, June 14th, 2026. Model Not Available. It's time for TWiT, the show where we cover the week's tech news and holy cow. It's been a long week. Now entering the TWiT Octagon, Christina Warren from GitHub. Hi, Christina. And of course, MacBreak Weekly. Great to see you. Great to see you too. Long time no see.

[00:01:03] Hard to believe that it was only Monday that Apple announced the new Siri. I was going to say, I was going to say, most of this happened since we talked on Tuesday. Actually, most of the things that happened since Friday is kind of nuts. It's crazy. It's been nuts. Anyway, I'm thrilled to have you. We wanted to have you on to talk about that. But Harry McCracken is here, my good friend, the technologizer from Fast Company. He is a historian of technology, among other things. Very astute observer. And so it's always good to get that perspective. Hello, Harry. Welcome back.

[00:01:32] Hi, Leo. Always a joy to be here. Happy Flag Day. Happy Flag Day. Happy Flag Day. And also with us from Canada, because we have to have a representative from the great white north, Mr. Richard Campbell, host of Run His Radio, .NET Rocks. And of course, he's every Wednesday on Windows Weekly. And all three of you are perfect for this week. This was... You're throwing spacey stuff in. You called the right guy. I have the SpaceX IPO. I have Apple's Siri.

[00:01:59] And the top story is neither of those. In any normal week, those would be the top story. But this week, the top story is massive. Anthropic released on... I think during Security Now on Tuesday. It was after MacBreak Weekly. Its newest model. It is a modified mythos. That was the model you may remember.

[00:02:28] If you follow AI, all these names are familiar. But if you don't, mythos was the model that Anthropic said, it's too dangerous. We can't release it to the public. Why is it dangerous? Because it's... Even though I wasn't trained to do this, it's so good at finding exploits, zero days, flaws in software, that they were afraid bad guys would use it to basically take down the internet. So... And all of us. So they said, what we're going to do is we're going to create this thing called Project Glasswing.

[00:02:57] We're going to release it to the 50 biggest companies. Companies like Microsoft. Have them fix their bugs. And then at some point, we might release mythos to the public. And actually, Microsoft had the biggest patch Tuesday ever on Tuesday. 200 plus fixes. Many of them, I think at least a couple of dozen, zero days. So, and they are using mythos.

[00:03:22] So there's some indication that mythos is everything that Anthropic said it was. Anthropic has also, by the way, filed for an IPO. That you got to throw that in as is its immediate competitor, OpenAI, as has SpaceX and SpaceX's IPO actually happened. So anyway, Anthropic releases this.

[00:03:43] I jump on it immediately, as does everybody in the community, because their previous model, Opus 4.8 and well, it really, the vibe coding revolution began November 24th, 2025, when they released Opus 4.5. And it was so good. So much better than anything anybody else had. It was so capable that people just went bonkers and started writing all this vibe coded software. I did. It was an eye opener.

[00:04:11] It was the first experience I had of AI that actually kind of does what you want it to do. It was amazing. It was amazing. So anyway, they did 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8. And now this is 5.0. This is Fable, which they say is mythos with significant safety precautions inserted.

[00:04:36] So they have, of course, the usual instructions, but they added a few other things. They added a classifier, which immediately looks at the prompt you're sending it. And if it has anything to do with cybersecurity or biology, because they're worried about people making bioweapons with it, they'll just refuse. And actually, when they first did it, they refused in some cases silently.

[00:05:04] So this is from June 9th. That was five days ago. Anthropic says, these topics are too dangerous to let Fable 5 talk about. Fable 5 is substantially better in my experience than anything anybody's released before. I was able to do quite a bit with it when it first came out. I didn't.

[00:05:29] Of course, one of the things Anthony Nielsen did immediately was submit the security now show notes to it. And it said, nope, not going to look at it. That's cybersecurity. So that was the classifier designed to ban that subject. Anthropic said at the time, over 1,000 hours of red team testing with a bug bounty program, they're paying people, external teams failed to find any universal jailbreaks for Fable 5.

[00:05:56] It also resisted automatic jailbreak attempts to a much larger degree than previous Claude Opus models. So they said, well, our adversarial robustness is the best ever. Look at that. Look at that graph, whatever that means. I actually should point out that this is a percentage of a tax success rate. It isn't zero. It's 5.4 compared to an 83% for Claude Opus 4.6.

[00:06:28] So a lot of people complained. I complained. We complained because, you know, in public because, well, you know, it's it's silently stepping down to 4.8. Sometimes it says no, I won't. If the classifier kicks in, it says, no, I'm not going to do that. But it also just at some points would go down to 4.8. And you could kind of tell. It's like a hell of bottomy. I knew because it started apologizing, which was one of the giveaways with 4.8 was how apologetic it was.

[00:06:57] And as soon as it started apologizing, I went, you're 4.8 now, aren't you? I gave it. Oh, I was so excited. We have a sales system that was written in 2012, I think, that we've been living on, but it's buggy as hell. And it's, you know, it's basically a bunch of SQL queries. It's not very good. And I thought, well, I will give the database schema all the code to Fable and have it rewrite it, restructure it. And we can have a modern system that does exactly what we want to. And Fable did a great job. I said, analyze this first. Don't write any code.

[00:07:28] Did all that. Did a beautiful job. Wrote me some questionnaires to ask the users about what they use, what they don't use. It did an amazing job. Really understood it deeply. It found, by the way, a number of SQL injection flaws in it, which I will not reveal. It did find some security issues. So, I'm not even done with the story. This is just the beginning of the story.

[00:07:52] A few days later, after much complaining, Anthropic said, we're changing Fable 5 safeguards for Frontier LLM development. Not to take the classifiers off. Not to take the blacks off, but to make them visible. We made the wrong trade-off and we apologize for not getting the balance right, they said. And who were they apologizing to? The researchers who, without warning, were being downgraded.

[00:08:21] So, they said, if we downgrade you, we'll tell you now. Right? Anthropic, this is from the Wired story. Reveal, reverse the policy after it received fierce backlash from the AI research community. Oh, I missed one more thing. I said cybersecurity and bio-warfare. AI training. Yes. They didn't want, and I think this is really more aimed at Chinese companies and maybe other companies in the US that are using Anthropic models for what they call distillation to train.

[00:08:51] Now, Christina, you've worked at DeepMind. You understand all this. Yeah. You're very ensconced in this, even at GitHub with Copilot. My understanding of distillation, and this is I think what Apple's doing with Gemini, we'll get to that in a few, is you train a model, you train an LLM, but then you've got to do the post-training where you adjust the weights to make it better, make it more accurate. And one of the ways to do that is to, normally, is to go to experts.

[00:09:15] So I'm going to get a panel of 20 physicists, and I'm going to say, physicists, pose questions to my model. When you get the answer back, tell it where it's wrong, tell it where it's right, help it frame the answer. This is post-training. And it's very, very important. Every company does it. Some companies, particularly Chinese companies, apparently, Anthropic said that one Chinese company made 24,000 fake accounts with Anthropic. So that they could use it as the expert, not the physicist, and just bounce questions.

[00:09:45] And essentially, you're sucking the brains out of Opus, or in this case, they didn't want you to do this with Fable, to create your own AI. They didn't want, and now all of this is, can be slanted as an honorable thing, not merely to shut down competition, but they don't want somebody without the same scruples they have to create a model that could be weaponized for zero days.

[00:10:12] You know, they don't want a bad guy who has his own LLM to then do a distillation attack on Fable and get Mythos. So you could say this is all reasonable and honorable. That takes us to Friday. It's a long week. I'm sorry. I apologize. I feel like I should tell this story, and then I really want to know what you all think. But let me finish the story. So Friday, I'm working along around about 5 p.m., trying to rewrite this infrastructure.

[00:10:41] And all of a sudden, it says, model not available. I thought, oh, that's not good. Did I, am I screwed up with my credits? Did I blow something? I tried again. Model not available. Can't do it. Nope. It didn't step me down. It just said model not available. It said, you should try 4.8. Opus wants you. So then I went to Twitter. And all these people are saying, uh-uh, model not available. What has happened?

[00:11:08] Well, Politico had, I think, probably the best kind of break in the world. And then I went to the breakdown of what happened. The Trump administration got a little concerned with how good Fable was. And apparently asked its partners, hey, what do you think of this? They asked Amazon. This was on Wednesday.

[00:11:36] And Andy Jassy, apparently, Trump called Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, said, is this safe? And Andy's, Amazon said, yeah, well, we've kind of, we think we've jailbroken it. Uh, which would be bad news, right? If you could jailbreak this thing, the bad guys could jailbreak it and they could use it. Apparently, uh, Pliny the Liberator, who we've interviewed, I'm trying to get him on the show on Wednesday, because we've interviewed him. He's an amazing jailbreaker.

[00:12:03] He also, he said his team had also jailbroken Fable. That would be very bad news. And multiple tense calls followed, according to Politico, between Anthropics CEO Dario Amode and administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House Cyber Director Sean Cairncross. Suzy Wiles, the president's chief of staff, was also on the phone. By Friday morning, the issue had reached the highest levels of the White House.

[00:12:32] Bessent, Cairncross, Suzy Wiles and other senior officials met to discuss the model and the administration's response. According to the administration official and a senior White House official who asked not to be named. Bessent joined remotely. Following the meeting, now this is where there's a little deviation. The administration said it tried to reach Dario Amode, but he was unavailable because he was attending a wellness retreat. Retreat. Anthropics' response to this is that's absolutely false.

[00:13:03] A person close to Anthropics said Amode was first requested Friday at noon, was on the phone with senior officials within an hour and 15 minutes. And while he was not available for that hour and 15 minutes, Anthropics offered other senior leaders. Amode participated in three calls with half a dozen senior administration officials, including Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary is now involved. Undersecretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, Jeffrey Kessler.

[00:13:32] A bunch of a bunch of officials. During the calls, Amode tried to clear up what he assumed was an a misunderstanding. He said that the bypass that occurred, I think he's talking about the Amazon one, which he believed to be very specific, did not pose the same risk as a broader jailbreak. It was a bypass, but not a jailbreak. So the guardrails were in place. The classifiers were still in place.

[00:13:57] In fact, in a blog post, Anthropics said no testers have yet been able to find a universal jailbreak. Karen Cross and Bessent unmoved by Amode's arguments. Again, this is Politico, which had the most detailed reporting. A White House official said Amazon's findings were run past the NSA and they felt they had proof.

[00:14:22] The White House asked Anthropics to voluntarily remove the model to address the vulnerabilities. Amode asked for more time and for information, made no commitment. And at one point, Bessent, the secretary of the treasury told Amode, you're making a bad decision. Now we're back down to about five or six in the evening.

[00:14:44] The Trump administration and the Commerce Department imposed an export control on Fable 5, citing national security and banning its use by foreign nationals. Unfortunately, many of the scientists at Anthropic are foreign nationals. Plus, as far as I know, there is no way to ascertain your citizenship when you're using any of any of these models.

[00:15:11] So the company said, well, the only way we can comply is by turning it off, which they did. And Anthropics said the White House gave 90 minutes to take the models down with no details on the actual threat. There was never any begging or asking for them to work with us just to declare 90 minute deadline. And so that's where we stand right now.

[00:15:38] There are so many points of view on this. So I'm just curious. Christina, you're this you're close to this. Yeah, yeah. And I know it's early yet. We've you know, we've all we're just absorbing this. It happened Friday. Yeah. So what are your what's your hot take on it? Your first take on it? Well, all of this is just it's it's it was just such a shock. And it was just so mind blowing in a lot of ways. I was pointing this out in in the discord.

[00:16:07] But what is so interesting to me here is just as kind of to add to the intrigue of all of this was that the report coming from Amazon of all companies. Amazon, who has invested 13 billion dollars in Anthropic, has the right to invest another 20 billion is their exclusive cloud partner or their primary cloud partner. They also, I think, can serve off of Google Cloud. But almost all of the models are served from from Amazon. And I guess they have the SpaceX sales, too.

[00:16:36] But the vast majority of their cloud commitment is with Amazon. The fact that that that is Andy Jassy, of all people who, you know, seems to have kind of led to the the chain of events of this happening. I'm very bothered by any government being able to take this sort of action.

[00:16:53] I just am, especially in the absence of what feels like proof and especially when the company itself is disagreeing with with some of the findings and the reason this action is happening. So I think that that's very problematic. And I think that it's in some ways, weirdly, bizarrely very good PR for Anthropic because it's making it seem like, hey, their models are so powerful that the government won't even let you use them.

[00:17:18] Right. But but it just it seems just like such a ridiculous escalation. And I know that the reports all claim, at least from from the government side, that this has nothing to do with the the brief window in time when Anthropic had failed to bow to the knee of the Department of Defense. Excuse me, the Department of War. But that lasted like 13 seconds. So, well, wait a minute, because this afternoon, Pete Hegseth posted this on X.

[00:17:48] Three months ago, Department of War kicked Anthropic out of our building forever. Every passing day proves why that was the right move. OK, you could say this is Pete's revenge. I mean, maybe he's just maybe he's a little shot in front. I don't know. I don't know. But that is interesting because that goes against what some of the what appeared to be administration leaks on Friday and Saturday that appear to claim that this has nothing to do with anything else.

[00:18:14] And in fact, I think in fact, I think even David Sachs was saying that he was like, oh, no, this has nothing to do with anything else. But if Pete Hegseth is saying that it did, then you don't know what all this means. And I think that is the thing that really bothers me most of all is that I don't know who to trust in any of these scenarios about any of this, except that I probably trust the government the least.

[00:18:34] And that's not a great feeling to be in. And I don't know what this means for any of us, except that, you know, selfishly, we had a good thing and now we don't have access to a very expensive model anymore. Yeah, that's I have to really balance my dismay at losing it because it was really good. I mean, it was really good. There are people saying it's not as good. It's not as good, but it was really good. But Richard PR piece for Anthropic. Right.

[00:19:02] Well, that's that's another question is, is this the best possible thing for Anthropic? Yes. Remember, they've got an IPO coming up. Yeah. I was going to say that's the other part of it, too. Right. In some ways, not having this here is it's creating scarcity is making people want it even more. And if you're, you know, a bank or even a retail investor and you're like, OK, well, which which are the two big companies should I invest in? Hey, the one that had the model that was so good that it was literally pulled from use because it was deemed to be too powerful.

[00:19:32] Well, that sure sounds sounds like a good place to put my money. Right. No downside for Anthropic in this situation at all. Well, let me ask you this to be clear. Anthropic chose to comply. Right. So what's the 90 minutes or what? Right. Well, if the Commerce Department says this, I mean, they've done this before and Harry will remember this. They declared strong encryption to be a weapon. Yeah. And they and they withheld it. By the way, that did not end well. They didn't withhold anything.

[00:20:01] They told people to withhold it. And the companies chose to comply. Well, remember, Firefox stepped its encryption down from one hundred twenty eight bit to what it was thirty two bit. Basically, they reduced the security of everybody using SSL. And then the problem was First Amendment allowed people to put the code on a T-shirt and walk right, walk right through customs into other countries in a book.

[00:20:28] So but but but what if OK, this is the main question I have to ask, what if. Fable really is that dangerous and what if the Chinese could use it or hackers could use it or Russia, the Russian mob could use it to take down our infrastructure? Isn't it the right thing to do for our government to say? And this battle's already be going on. Right. Like the reality is the exploited, the attackers are using the best models they can lay their hands on.

[00:20:55] And the folks on the other side are using everything they can lay their hands on to fix software. That's why you're seeing so many patches like all of that part is real. Is fable or mythos that much better? Like certainly the hype says so and folks are using them. But all of the Democratic administration had done this, you might say, well, they're protecting us.

[00:21:18] Right. But you would also say they asked them to comply and they chose to comply rather than David Sachs in his post yesterday on X. By the way, X has become the place where this is battle is going on, which is hysterical because, you know, who else benefits from this? Elon a little bit, although maybe he doesn't because Anthropics paying him almost a billion dollars a month for access to Grok's XAI's compute.

[00:21:44] David Sachs says that a highly credible, trusted partner, both Anthropic and the U.S. government. I'm going to say Amazon on this, who is testing fable came forward with the jailbreak of those guardrails. The administration asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. This is that same story Pete Hegseth was telling. Right. Why would you say anything other than we'll fix it? Right.

[00:22:11] I'd feel so much better if there wasn't all this context, including Dario having this not great relationship with the government, the Pete Hegseth stuff. Scott Bassett and Howard Lutnick. God bless them. I don't think they're necessarily A.I. experts in the best position to make these judgments.

[00:22:33] Even David Sachs is not an expert on this particular type of technology. So there are also Republican administrations who I would have had more confidence in to make a reasonable decision, given that, yes, of course, that this thing can be jailbroken by bad guys to do terrifying things. It is not unreasonable to be extremely concerned about it.

[00:22:52] Yeah, I feel like this is the problem when you when you continually betray people's trust. At some point when you need it, you've cried wolf a few too many times and people don't. I mean, that anthropic may be the single significant U.S. company that's done the least to butter up Donald Trump. I find that could be putting their finger on this scale.

[00:23:18] I mean, I find that deeply admirable. But one wonders if Dario was constantly talking about how great the president was and giving money to the ballroom and attending the UFC fight, whether the dynamics of this would be quite, quite different. Sam Altman has been. Yes, yes. And Greg Brockman. Greg Brockman donated $50 million to the MAGA campaign and Sam Altman has gone to the White House, has donated money to the inaugural.

[00:23:46] Or what if it had been an open AI model that was comparable to mythos? What would the dynamics of the situation be? How much of this, though, is anthropic's fault by scaring the hell out of people? Yeah, I mean, well, that's always been the issue, right? I mean, is that is that they talk about how great and scary and the potential of these models. And also how many jobs are going to go away because of all of this stuff.

[00:24:11] And it does seem a little bit like an own goal at a certain point. Like, you know, you might be right. I don't know. But it also feels in some ways like you're almost being purposely, you know, incendiary just to hype up how great your tech is. And in some ways, anthropic's lost a little bit of the trust it might have had. They claim to be the number one frontier company that cares about safety.

[00:24:39] They say, oh, those open AI guys and obviously Elon don't care about safety. We care more about safety than anybody else. David Sachs says the administration values anthropic's technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, could easily be resolved. It's frankly bewildering that anthropic hasn't wanted to comply with safety requests in any coming out of anybody else's mouth.

[00:25:07] I would say, yeah, that that makes sense. But coming out of that administration's mouth, I have a tough time believing anything they say. Exactly. Well, that's the problem where Modi has been pretty straightforward on most of this stuff. So I can't imagine when anybody said, can you make it safer? Him saying anything other or making it safer. Yeah. So. What do you think is going to happen? I think they're going to let it stay down until the IPO comes cash in massively on it and then see what happens next.

[00:25:36] So if you were buying stock, you would say, oh, no, this is good for anthropic, not bad for anthropic. I think that's certainly the play why they haven't fought harder, whether not serving litigation. Although let's see what happens on Monday. You know, this literally was Friday. I'm sure that. Yeah, it was Friday after the news cycle ended in the markets closed. They buried as best they could. I'm not so sure if it's that great for anthropic short term, at least as long as there's a Trump administration.

[00:26:03] Then because if you think that, oh, well, it's two things. What on the one hand, a tropic has the best model ever. On the other hand, they can't write if you can't deploy it. Who cares? Right. And more importantly, it's not making the money. It's only cost you money. It's only a matter of time before people figure out it's not as great. And while it's down, it's always going to be great. So it seems like it's great news for open AI and Google short term. They're open AI claims without any evidence. They have an equally good model.

[00:26:33] Now, by the way, open AI could say, well, see, we didn't release our model and we never are, but we can do it. Maybe. And this, you know, the other people have taken victory laps are all the AI haters. All the I shouldn't say I haters, the doomers, the people said, see, AI is going to kill us. We have a lot of companies who are saying, okay, this clearly we've been going down the wrong path with the frontier models.

[00:27:00] These companies are doing trying to do one thing, make the smart, make it AGI, make a super smart machine. And that's just too dangerous to continue making. We should stop that. In fact, the anthropic even said maybe we should pause last week. We should stop that and maybe focus on specific, you know, models for doing radiology models for creating medicines and not try to make a single super smart model. Is that going to be the takeaway from this? It might be right.

[00:27:29] But then I think part of the problem, at least the way I interpret it, is that Mythos, at least the way that it was kind of portrayed, was that it's one of its main features. Now, this is different from Fable. I want to be very clear, but at least Mythos and the partners they gave it access to was, you know, touted for its cybersecurity capabilities and for its ability to, you know, find flaws and then remediate things.

[00:27:54] And so in some ways you could almost argue, okay, well, they made a security specific model. Is that going to be an area that the government, whether it's the US government, the EU, China, anybody else is going to say, oh, no, no, we can't have that because I don't know how tenable that is. Or is this going to be, you know, changing it so that, yeah, they try to maybe take their larger models and try to make them into very specific task-based things.

[00:28:23] But the big thing about, you know, Mythos was, and Fable to a lesser extent, was the fact that it was supposed to be able to, you know, help you find security flaws. And obviously, it could do long running tasks faster and it's a very expensive model to run, which is why they were only giving people access to it as part of their subscription plans until June 22nd. And then, you know, we're going to charge double the Opus API pricing for anybody after that.

[00:28:52] And enterprise customers were already paying the API pricing. So, I don't know if that's the method or not. And I don't know if that helps Anthropic here, unless you could make the argument that the model is going to be distilled in a completely different way so you can't access that greater body of knowledge and it can only be used in those narrow spaces. Because if something was really that powerful, then couldn't somebody still just jailbreak it and find a way to use it for negative purposes? I don't know.

[00:29:20] Here's another, there's so many sides of this story, but I think a huge side of this story. Europeans are looking at this and say, this is why we have to have our own sovereign AI. Because if we rely on American models and a kind of unpredictable American government cuts us off, we're out of luck. It also, Gary Marcus, who's hates AI.

[00:29:51] I mean, there's the AI that he's involved in developing, he loves. Yes. But he's very quick to hate open AI and Anthropic. He says even, could US policy be any stupider? He points out, well, here's one example. Well, Andrej Karpathy, who's very well known in the AI community, who was Tesla, was the first guy in Tesla. The guy who coined the term. By-putting. Yeah. Went and took a job at Anthropic, which everybody was kind of shocked at a few weeks ago. Well, guess what?

[00:30:21] He's not a US citizen. He's a Slovak. So he can't work on Anthropic models or at least can't work on fable. I'm not sure why only US citizens unions make anybody safer. Right. Aren't there bad people in the US as well? Absolutely. And what Marcus says is, now, if you're a Chinese scientist or any foreign national scientist working at Anthropic or any US AI company, you're immediately going to get your passport out and go back home and work on AI there.

[00:30:51] So this may also be very damaging to American AI development. Now, Reid Albergati at Semaphore says his sources tell them this was a fear of China getting a hold of Fable. Makes sense. That's a perfectly valid thing to be worried about. Yeah. Yeah. But I wouldn't be worried about him using it, getting it through the flipping API. Right. There's already guaranteed to be Chinese spies working inside of the Tropic right now. That's what they do.

[00:31:21] The chances that there's a copy of that in China already are pretty damn high. And if you were that worried about it, you might also be worried about China getting access to NVIDIA chips, which the government does not seem concerned about. Yeah. The government stopped that embargo. They said, hey, have all the chips you want. So it's the other problem with our administration right now is they're very inconsistent on this.

[00:31:45] The first thing President Trump did when he got in office was reverse Biden's AI regulations, saying no regulations. We want to be the best and the best way to be the best. And this is Republican theology and always has been. It's not is to deregulate and let the market bloom. Well, now all of a sudden. They're completely reversing that. And, you know, next week they may reverse themselves again. That's entirely possible. This will last only a few days.

[00:32:17] Trump may have single handedly killed the American AI. It's so very confusing. I don't know what to think of it. And I am trying not to let my own peak get involved because I am. I'm a little miffed. I was really enjoying Fable. It was it was expensive as hell. I. We had if you have a Claude Max subscription on you could use it unlimited until June 22nd.

[00:32:46] And at that point, Anthropic said, then you're going to have to pay tokens. There's no unlimited sub for Fable. So I had 10 days. This was going to be my my glory. I was going to stay up all night for 10 days using Fable to the max until I was told no more. But no, I guess I don't get to. Oddly enough, I was writing about Siri. So instead of using the best frontier model, I was perfectly happy to have Siri do stuff that was not all that incredible. But which I could finally do.

[00:33:18] So I am conflicted because I think there it could well be that Fable was dangerous and it's the right thing to do to do something to keep it out of the hands of bad guys. But why are we letting any government institution that doesn't have anybody who is an expert in these areas make these decisions based on a simple report from, you know, one executive make like even if we take the presupposition that it was dangerous.

[00:33:48] Can we just agree that the way that this happened and the lack of any sort of, you know, notice and just the order to shut it down so quickly, especially when it's not as if the government didn't have access to the previous model for, you know, several weeks, you know, for since since April, I guess, when it came out that that this is that that's not the way that any of this should work, no matter how you feel about anything else.

[00:34:14] Like it shouldn't be something where a government official basically says, based on whatever little information we have, we're going to make a company, you know, take something out just because we say so. I should point out David Sachs is also not a U.S. citizen. He's a South African. So he wouldn't be able to work on those either. And as far as getting Anthropic out of the military or out of the U.S. government in general, it's not out.

[00:34:44] Oh, they love it. Yeah, they want it and they want it even more now. That might be the other thing. Maybe that maybe the upshot of this is, oh, nobody can use Fable except us. Right. That scares me, too. No, it does. And you do have to wonder, like, how much of it is about that saying, no, actually, we just want you to make this so that the NSA and the Department of Defense and everybody else can have access to it, but no one else. And yeah, and that does feel gross. Yeah.

[00:35:14] European politicians say this is a wake up call. The effect of this order is a reality check. Here's Alistair Carnes, who is a British member of Parliament and former minister for the Armed Forces. He says this week, the most advanced AI model on the planet got switched off by a foreign government. Remember, he's British. British researchers were studying it.

[00:35:43] British companies were testing it. British hospitals are piling it. Not anymore. This isn't an AI story. It's a story of every industry we used to lead. So this is a call for, you know, every other country in the world to say, well, what? Why? This is the other question. Maybe, Christina, you have some insight of this. Why is Anthropics so ahead of the game here? Are they ahead of the game? Does DeepMind have something similar? Does OpenAI have something similar?

[00:36:11] I mean, I'm sure that they would all claim that they do. And I think it all just depends on kind of what you're focusing on and where your capabilities are going, right? And that's the thing. Like, Anthropic, I think, has been fairly narrowly focused, in a sense, on work that has been used by enterprises. And that turns out to be the most profitable area for AI use, at least so far, right? And so if you're really good at coding, if you're really good at that sort of thing, then you can be really successful.

[00:36:40] And I think there's no doubt that they are the best at that right now, although I think the OpenAI models have gotten really good at that, too. Whereas I think Google is really good in certain research capabilities, obviously really good at image and video generation. And so I don't know. I can't really honestly tell you if they are so much better than everybody else. But it certainly, you know, they have – it almost doesn't matter if they're better or not. That is the brand that they have, right? They have that kind of Coca-Cola kind of brand about them.

[00:37:09] And so I think – which means that if you're going to overtake that, you've got to be much, much better than those capabilities for people to kind of, you know, win that over. So I don't know, and I don't know at this point if I were one of the other major labs, if I'm getting – you see this sort of heat that Anthropic is getting from the government. Is this even the sort of area that you want to invest your time in, at least in this administration? Or do you want to focus your research efforts otherwise? I don't know.

[00:37:40] Anthropic has not said how big Fable is. You know, I think Opus was roughly 1.2 billion parameters. There's – people are guessing that Fable – one of the reasons Fable is so good and so smart is it's 6 billion – I'm sorry, 6 trillion parameters. Is that right? Wait a minute. Is it billion or trillion? It's big. It's really big. It's so big. It'd have to be trillion then. It's got to be trillion. Yeah.

[00:38:06] By being that big – yeah, because I have 120 billion models running on my framework. By being that big, maybe that's how it's so smart. It's just huge. And if that's the case, well, anybody could do it.

[00:38:20] What's interesting about this is – and this is one of the things that didn't get a lot of buzz when the model came out, but certainly was a concern, I know, for some businesses and enterprises was that as part of one of the safety parameters when it was available was that Anthropic had a data retention policy for up to 30 days on every query that was put through the model. Wasn't that interesting?

[00:38:40] And that, I think, raises some interesting questions, which at least for me was, okay, you're doing this and everybody who is going to use your model has to kind of then suck it up and say, well, if we're going to use it, we have to accept these terms and trust that Anthropic will delete the data, but they could have held on to some of it for up to seven years.

[00:39:00] That obviously creates – if you're certain types of businesses and work in regulated industries, it creates very big problems because that's not how the previous models have worked. And then you have to wonder, like, okay, is this going to be the sort of policy that they're going to require going forward? They claim it would only be for mythos class models and it wouldn't extend below that, but who's to say? They could change that at any time.

[00:39:30] To me, and I'm sure this has nothing to do with any of the decisions the government makes, but that in some ways is even more of kind of a red flag to me as kind of a risk assessment of the model's safety. It's like, okay, not only are you claiming that this model could potentially be really dangerous, but you're also keeping a record of every query that anybody who uses the model has on your machines, which then just says, okay, well, that really puts a big onus. And we sure hope Anthropics servers are super safe, right?

[00:40:00] So I don't know. Crikey. And for Al Paco who accidentally leaked cloud code not all that long ago? Oh, that's right. Right, right. Exactly. Right. And so, you know, you have just all kinds of data ownership questions. And I think if you're especially if you're foreign entities, you're having to think about those things, too, which I don't think it's wrong for other governments and the EU and the UK to say we have to think about sovereignty of models.

[00:40:25] But I don't know how you do that, to be completely honest with you, unless it just becomes down to, you know, national lines. Right. Or we go into somehow some sort of really terrible future, which is sounds utterly dystopian, which would be, you know, like like state, you know, approved and state sanctioned models like that. That sounds awful as well. And goes against everything that we've had in computing for the last 50 years. The truth is, though, we're in a situation we've never been in before. It's true.

[00:40:54] This is there's nothing to compare this to. I can that I can think of. It's as if a private company had invented the atom bomb. Right. I mean, we have had times when industries have stumbled onto products. I'm thinking more in the chemical space that were that dangerous. It just would make frontline news. Right. And the government would assert its right to take it over. What they do is they'd have a conversation about it. Right.

[00:41:23] They'd typically, you know, be sane about how you have that conversation to say we should be treating these things carefully and get results. We just haven't seen much from this administration in, let's say, subtlety of conversation. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we did the subject justice. I don't think we came to any resolutions. It's kind of come down to who do you trust at this point? It's not. I think most people are clear on who they don't trust. Yeah. I'm not sure I trust Anthropic in this either, to be honest. I'd rather. Yeah.

[00:41:53] I'd also rather not trust a privately held company to do the right thing. Right. Yeah. They are in the business of making money, although no AI companies make money. So that's not actually an issue. Right. All right. We'll take a little break. This is a tweet. We're talking about the week's tech news. And we haven't even really covered anything but Friday, but we'll get to the rest of the week. It was a very, very, very big week. But that's why Christina Warren is here, a host at MacBreak Weekly.

[00:42:20] She's a senior dev advocate at GitHub and always welcome on our microphones. Great to have you. Thank you, Christina. The Technologizer, also Harry McCracken. He writes for Fast Company and other very prestigious journals. And as always, welcome here as well. Thank you. Richard Campbell. You know him from Windows Weekly. .NET Rocks, run his radio. And also an expert on all of us. In fact, you're a space expert. So we're going to go to the SpaceX IPO next. And I would love to get your take. Lots to talk about.

[00:42:51] On all of that. Elon Musk, a trillionaire. But first, a word from our sponsor. This Week in Tech is brought to you by Meter, the company building better networks. Your company runs on the network, doesn't it? And yet, your network engineers are tearing their hair out. You know this, network engineers. The headaches. You've got legacy providers in flexible pricing. IT resource constraints stretching you thin.

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[00:46:26] I highly recommend it. Just take a look at the hardware. It's amazing. So Elon Musk is a trillionaire. SpaceX popped. I think 19% it was up. They raised $75 billion. BlackRock ordered $5 billion in SpaceX shares. IPO demand hit $250 billion. It was oversubscribed by four times, 400%.

[00:46:54] The biggest initial public offering in history. And Elon was taking a victory lap, of course. Happy man. So by the way, Elon has on paper now more wealth than the economies of major nations like Ireland, Sweden, even his home country of South Africa.

[00:47:22] In fact, only 20 countries in the world have economies larger than $1.1 trillion. 24-year-old company. You know, but you know, for fresh startup. So look, you know, I know you love space. I went to the Kennedy Space Center with you, and we got a great tour. I love the idea of space. But SpaceX, well, it has one, as far as I know, only one profitable division, and that's Starlink. Mm-hmm. And it makes, you know, it doesn't make a... No.

[00:47:52] SpaceX makes, is what, 80% of lift? Right. So if you have a choice of payload where you want to fly your thing into space with, you pick Falcon 9 every time. But do they make money on that? They do, but not the kind of money that leads to a trillion dollar valuation. But then neither does Starlink. Like, you read the IPO and the TAM. It's not about Starlink or NASA or Lyft or anything. It's only about AI.

[00:48:20] The combined offering of everything else was several hundred billion dollars. It was $26 trillion for the AI offering. So interesting. So it's not about space either. I mean, I could see people saying, oh, well, we're going to Mars, and we're going to harvest asteroids. There's going to be huge... Well, all of those things are impaired by going public. Elon was pretty clear that SpaceX was never going to be a public company because his goal was to build cities on Mars. And that's not something that shareholders want. Ah. Data centers in space?

[00:48:50] That's the new invention. That's what... You just gave a talk on that. I have, several times already. And just doing the numbers on it and saying, this is not wildly practical. Really? So, I mean, the idea is there's infinite sun. Power is not an issue. Quite finite. It's 1,368 watts per square meter. So, and you can only collect about 35% of that at a time.

[00:49:16] So you're going to need extremely large solar arrays, which are heavy and expensive. Oh. But the bigger issue here is cooling. Cooling is very difficult in space because it's in a vacuum. You know, we talk about space is cold on movies. But in reality, it takes more weight to cool something down than it does to collect electricity. So the same... You have to do radiant cooling of some kind, right? Which is real difficult. Yeah. So if you look at the International Space Station, which coincidentally runs on about 140 kilowatts of electricity,

[00:49:47] which is about the same amount of power as a single NVL-72 rack. Like, very convenient. The mass of the cooling system for that is twice the mass of the solar requirements. So it's a lot of weight in heat, the heat management, and a lot of weight in electricity. There's also the issue of speed. Latency. Latency.

[00:50:11] Because right now, one of the biggest things with data centers, land-based data centers, is the interconnects. The speed with which computers inside the data center can talk to each other and with other data centers. Don't buy one NVL-72, right? Microsoft bought 4,600 of them and ganged them together with 800 gigabit InfiniBand connections. Right.

[00:50:35] Now, SpaceX has developed a 100 gigabit laser relay, which is really fast. Like, it's faster than just about anything, space to space. But you can't get away from the latency, even going between points in orbit. You know, the big thing about InfiniBand is it's sub-millisecond latency. That's why we use those connections, because you need that kind of thing.

[00:50:59] But at the same time, you would not use the space-based for building models. Because the nice thing about an NVL-72 is that'll run a trillion parameter model. So you can, you know, do queries against it. It's just a question of how many of them you can reasonably launch. So part of the thing I did in my research for the talk was, well, how many satellites can we physically put into low-Earth orbit so that we have relatively low latency to communicate with?

[00:51:27] So this company generates about $18 billion in revenue. Yeah. $11 billion of the 18 is Starlink. It loses money on space launches, $657 million. Only because it's doing so much development. But that will presumably turn around and be profitable. But that's all government money, isn't it? Yes, for the most part. Well, governments around the world and commercial spaceflight. Right. It's really fine. I would have pointed out this.

[00:51:56] Before SpaceX started lifting commercial payloads, there was maybe 3,000 satellites in operation. Today, there's 4,500, not counting any Starlink satellites. Like there's 9,500 Starlink satellites. So Elon operates more satellites than the rest of the world combined by double. And is also planning to finish out the network this year to 12,000 satellites. At that point, those are five-year lifespan satellites.

[00:52:24] So he's going to lose 2,400 a year, replace them with Falcon 9s. If he replaces Falcon 9s, 100 launches a year. He can do that. But it also, you know, he IPO'd at the point at which he already dominated the market and he completed Starlink. So he needs another product to justify this. I mean, one would argue you need another product to justify Starship as a whole. You know, we don't have a need.

[00:52:50] We've not demonstrated the need for 100-ton payloads until you get into doing things like flying to Mars. So this is just, you're being very speculative here, which is why he originally said, I wouldn't IPO this. But it really begs the question, why did he IPO it actually? Because he didn't, he only raised $75 billion. Like that's a lot of money, but it's not a catastrophic amount of money. Not that I think he could have raised a whole lot more. There's only so much money out there to acquire.

[00:53:16] I think this has more to do with fixing his own personal finances than anything to benefit SpaceX or AI or anything. He's a billionaire. He lives off loans against his publicly traded company, and that's Tesla. And Tesla no longer dominates in EVs. I mean, they make a very good car, but so do a bunch of other companies. So that valuation for Tesla can't continue. And if that price falls to his strike price for his loans, he's got big problems.

[00:53:46] So do a record IPO by whatever means possible and get those loans moved and you're in fine shape. Then you can let Tesla's price fall so you can acquire it into your big beast. So there's a lot of risks. And we didn't even mention one big risk factor, which is Mr. Musk himself. He has, for every share he has, he's got 10 times the votes of every other share.

[00:54:13] So he will always have absolute control over this company. Oh, absolutely. But that's true of all of the tech giants, right? They, for the most part, structured all of their ownership plans so that- He's got a better deal than Mark Zuckerberg, which is saying a lot. Yeah. And one would argue, you know, this is a great conversation to be had here when you have a functioning government of the idea of what, if you have a publicly traded company, can't the shareholders have a say? That's kind of the point. Yeah, apparently not in this case.

[00:54:42] But I think when people bought Tesla stock and made a lot of money on it, they bought it because of Elon. Yeah. And I suspect that a lot of people who want to buy SpaceX stock are buying it because of Elon. They believe he's- Tesla never did marketing. It was all Elon. Yeah. Kind of a different Elon back in the glory days of Tesla than the Elon we have now. I like the guy who flew his sports car into space. That was a fun guy. I don't know who this guy is anymore. Well, he's a billionaire.

[00:55:12] Did something happen to Elon or has he always been this way or? No, I think lots of things. Something happened. He's different. He's different. And also Doge came along and which is still the thing I think of immediately when I think about this guy is stuff like cutting US aid and the really tremendously negative impact on the world that he created for no particular reason. Well, yeah.

[00:55:39] One of the things he did during Doge was get rid of all of the investigations into his various enterprises. There was a time when I think Elon Musk's impact on the world was pretty clearly significantly positive. I think that was a very long time ago. Yeah. Yeah. While he's trying to cut government spending, he's getting $38 billion in government subsidies for his companies. So I think that's the other risk factor is a lot of what keeps all of his companies running is government subsidy.

[00:56:09] Now, XAI, you said that it's an investment in AI because he merged SpaceX with XAI. But XAI is not exactly rolling in the dough. It wasn't terribly successful at all. They have this excess computing capacity. They can sell to other folks. Yeah. Instead of putting it towards their own models, they decided. And also, I mean, when people talk about frontier models, does XAI even come up anymore? I don't think so.

[00:56:39] No, not really. Yeah. No, because they got acquired by Twitter and now acquired into SpaceX. Like that's typically the way you hide a company that's failing. Right. You package it into something bigger. Which is really striking given that it seems like at least once upon a time, XAI hired a lot of extremely credible AI people, but the results have been pretty shallow. They mostly left when they were. I was going to say. Yeah. Well, the people who stayed made a lot of money.

[00:57:05] I think I heard that there were something like 1400 millionaires minted by this IPO. And there were a good number, several dozen centimillionaires minted by this IPO. So the people who stuck around got their reward. Maybe. Maybe. I mean, I think you could probably argue that any of the people who actually were in a position

[00:57:28] of making a lot of money at least from the XAI side could have made a lot of money at, you know, meta or at open AI or anthropic or Google or Microsoft or anywhere else. Right. Like I it's great for them that they got an exit, but I don't know if that really says anything. And a lot of the talent is left to. Are the people who bought all of this stock and. And. You know, the. Raised the bump to 19 percent.

[00:57:58] Are they suckers or are they making a good investment? Well, they're not going to have a say in what happens with an investment. That's not sure we know for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, the banks did incredibly well. And yeah, of course, that's always the case. Well, no, but I mean, but that's the thing, though, is that that to me says, OK, who is this really for? And this is for the banks and this is for Elon Musk.

[00:58:20] And so I think that if you are just a regular standard investor, you are your concerns and whatever your return is, is no one's priority at all, because the people who did have priorities around this already got what they needed to get out of it. Yeah. And of course, as Fast Company points out, you may not have a choice whether you invest in SpaceX, because if you're invested in index funds,

[00:58:45] if you're invested in the NASDAQ, you're you're invested in SpaceX. I presume I now own some SpaceX. Yeah. Reflected in my mutual funds. I don't pay attention to. Yeah. Very interesting. OK, well, it's it's one of it's a great story because it's such a big, such big numbers. I'm not to give it away the ending on this, but I was doing the numbers on how many satellites you actually need and what those costs are going to look like.

[00:59:15] I backed up into space based power. You know, data centers don't actually have to be evil. It's just that the companies the way the companies are building them right now are there's no reason for them to be built in cities. They can be built away from people. The latency on land is minor. The trick is the electricity part. And with the kind of payloads you're talking about for the number of satellites Elon's talking about. By the way, there's not going to be millions of satellites like there's just nowhere to put them, but you could build.

[00:59:41] You know, I went and re looked up the latest from the British Astronomical Society's recent, you know, analysts on space based power. And we're not now talking about 3200 metric tons for a gigawatt of solar and the recten is to beam it to the surface. Like you could do a really good thing with this. Like you want to you want a useful payload for Starship.

[01:00:04] That would be maybe 50, 60 Starship flights to build out a gigawatt of power in space that could be beamed to the surface with no emissions. The receiver would be about four kilometers across. It's not dense enough that it would fry airplanes or birds in flight. You'd probably put a fence around the receiver because you don't want to be walking around in there. But, you know, you don't have to put the data centers up there. You just have to build data centers in a way that doesn't harm people. Like there's simpler ways to do this. They're wrong with data centers.

[01:00:34] Just doing dumb things with them. Right. All right. We're going to take a little break. Come back. There's SpaceX and Fable down. Now we're going to talk about Siri. Seriously. Oh, don't say that out loud because then I'll trigger a bunch of them. You're watching this week in tech. It has been a week. We're glad you're here. Christina and Richard and of course the technologizer, Harry. It's great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by Threat Locker.

[01:01:04] Threat Locker. We're going to Black Hat, Richard. Are you excited about that? We're going to Vegas to be at the- Yeah, it's going to be- We're going to do Windows Weekly from the Threat Locker booth. Well, we had a great time doing that in Orlando a few months ago. Have you ever been to Black Hat? I have, but years ago. I've never been. I've always wanted to go. So when Threat Locker said, hey, would you want to do Security Now and Windows Weekly in our booth? I said, yes. As long as Richard and Paul and Steve are going to come and they are. So that's going to be a lot of fun.

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[01:04:46] That's ThreatLocker.com slash twit. Thank them so much for their support. We look forward to seeing you all at Black Hat. We'll be in Threat Locker booth doing some shows there. All right. Let's talk about Monday. It seems like that was a year ago. Apple, as expected, it was all about AI in the WWDC keynote. Was that true two years ago? Oh, yeah. But I'm bummed. Yes, it is.

[01:05:16] And Apple learned a lesson. They ended up paying a quarter of a billion dollar settlement. The class action suit brought against them for false advertising two years ago, saying their AI could do things it couldn't do. So I think we knew going in that Apple would be very careful not to announce anything they couldn't do. Christine, have you or anybody played with the betas yet or? No. I still have not. I still have not. I need to find a device that I can put it on.

[01:05:44] But I don't think I, the problem is, and we talked about this a little bit on MacReak Weekly, at least I think that the only devices that I have that will run, maybe everything will run the new Siri, but at least that has, that will run the latest Apple intelligence, like on-device model is my iPhone 17 Pro Max. And I'm not going to put the beta on that. Yeah. Me neither. Me neither. I mean, not until August. But I'll tell you what, the minute they do the public beta, I'm going to be very tempted.

[01:06:15] The developer beta is a little unstable, although Micah Sargent has been using it. It's funny, Mark Gurman put it on his phone, but he said, you know, you have to then say, I want to get in and- And approve the waitlist. Yeah. Yeah. I threw caution to the wind even earlier than I usually do. I put it on my working iPhone and my working iPad Pro. Yay. Two devices. Yes. Normally I wait maybe for the second or third developer beta, but this time I went for it. Any showstoppers or did it work?

[01:06:45] It's actually pretty stable. Sometimes one of the problems with betas is they're slower, but given that one of the big other things other than AI in this version is that they tried to optimize their operating systems. It even feels like my iPad's a little snappier now. I have not had any problems so serious that I regret having installed them so far. So the real question is this new Siri. Now, if I think it's pretty clear if Apple does everything that they've promised and I

[01:07:13] fully expect them to because of that lawsuit, they don't want to do that again. It will become the primary way the most people, normal people use AI, right? This is what their experience of AI is going to end up being, I think. I'll be curious to see. I mean, I still feel like if you're currently paying for another model, I don't see this Siri equaling that experience. And it's Apple, so it's really locked down.

[01:07:42] And as far as I could tell, it will not give you an image of any real person, including Cleopatra or Lincoln or anybody else from history. I saw an interview with Jaws where he talked about how they're not trying to be your AI girlfriend. It really is even more than most AI, afraid of taking stances on anything even a little touchy. But that said, after that experience two years ago, they seem to have done an extremely

[01:08:09] good job of shipping something that is actually capable of doing the things they said it could. It's very easy to jump into because it's integrated into the operating system. It has access to calendar, email, and even things like voicemail. So right out of the box, it can do stuff which maybe in some cases you can get other AIs to do, but not always so easily.

[01:08:34] A German said on Sunday in his power on newsletter that Apple's new Siri is just good enough to eat. I think I'm one of these big dick overs. How do I get rid of this? Just, just, just, just good enough to ease its AI crisis. Um, he's, I guess, been able to play with it. Um, yeah, I mean a billion people use chat GPT according to open AI.

[01:09:00] So maybe it isn't going to be the primary interface for AI for people. I don't know. I think I think it's like, sorry, go ahead, Christina. No, I wouldn't hear what you have to say. Only I said this in chat. I think it'll just depend on how integrated it is with actual Apple features and this type of agentic work that it can do on your iPhone that you might not be able to do with chat GPT or Gemini or Claude. But I think like you said earlier, Harry, if you're already paying for one of those services and you have

[01:09:26] that experience in your web browser and other places, I don't know if this is going to become like the central hub for all of that. I think that there's more progress and is reflected in the features that work right now because they still had this ancient infrastructure for Siri that as we learned two years ago was not really up to doing modern stuff. And they did rip that out. They worked with Google to put some Gemini special sauce in there.

[01:09:53] And it just seems like it's a much better platform now, not just for the stuff that they shipped, but also the future. I mean, there's nothing particularly agenda. There's nothing to match spark, which is Google's new AI agent. But it seems way more likely that they'll be able to ship agenda stuff next year than they would have been if they were still stuck with the old Siri. And Apple's advantages. Well, they're twofold.

[01:10:20] One is they have access to everything in your phone. So they have a lot of information that they showed, you know, inter facing email with messages and so forth. And they've also set it up with app intents that developers can add Apple intelligence to their apps. And I imagine developers will be strongly incented to do that, which means they'll Apple have even more information. So that's advantage number one.

[01:10:47] Advantage number two, I think people trust them that people think it's private. Apple certainly emphasizing the privacy of this. They made a great case for being private and they don't have to monetize this through advertising. Whereas Google and OpenAI have already done a lot of stuff with monetizing. And even Anthropic at some point after doing the Super Bowl ads pointing out they don't have ads in their free version. I think probably can't hold to that forever.

[01:11:15] Whereas Apple might be able to, although, of course, there's lots of evidence of Apple adding advertising to stuff where it probably didn't really need it at some point. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, Apple definitely, I think, I've always thought this about Apple. Apple would do a lot more advertising if it had the infrastructure and the capabilities to do it. Right? Like, I think that it's always, to me, I've read it as a little bit of a cope. Like, oh no, we don't do advertising. It's like, well, yeah, because you didn't have a search engine. They tried to and it failed. They did. And it failed. Exactly.

[01:11:45] Right? So similar to some of their, you know, earlier, like I think on device, you know, stuff, they were really hyping about how good their on-device. Models were, I was like, well, you didn't have a cloud-based model that you could use. So you had to, you know, hype the on-device stuff. I don't know. But it certainly works. And it's an effective strategy whether it's, you know, for whatever reasons the narrative exists.

[01:12:11] It does feel good to use this thing and know that they're not attempting to build a profile of me. Yeah. And really the stuff that goes up there, even they can't access and they do not preserve it. But every other chat bot you use saves memories about you unless you explicitly turn that off and sends those messages and memories back to the home office where they are presumably, who knows what, training on it.

[01:12:37] Maybe using it for ads or maybe intend down the road to use it for ads. But Apple's been pretty clear they don't want to do that. So good. How confident are you guys that they're actually going to go to public beta by July? Like that seems awfully fast for a product that's been a struggle. They have, they did say, they were very clear, available in beta this fall. So it's not going to be the usual. No, they did.

[01:13:04] I believe they said at the keynote that they are going to ship a public beta next month. Yeah. Oh, the public beta. But they're talking about the release version of it will still be a beta version in September. Oh, yeah. And also, as you mentioned, Leo, the you can get the developer beta, but then you also have to get on the wait list for Siri. So and there's some evidence that it's going to be a challenge even even now for them to serve up enough Siri.

[01:13:32] I do serve everybody who would like to use that. This is of interest to me as an AI user, because I think this is how a lot of people will form their opinion of AI. And, you know, I think people think Siri is an idiot. Yeah, they're not wrong. Siri has not been the best spokesmodel for what an intelligent machine can be. So I'm hoping Apple does this right, because that is how a lot of people are going to actually get worse. Or did we all our expectations got worse up? Yeah.

[01:14:02] I don't know what Apple has done, but not only has Siri gotten worse, but things like it's text prediction have gotten worse. Like an image. The image playground is God awful. And Jemoji is off. So everything Apple's done up to now has really besmirched the reputation of a reset. The summaries of notifications. Summaries are a joke, right? Awful. I mean, even when they had to fix it, right?

[01:14:30] Because they're like, oh, OK, we won't be able to summarize notifications from news organizations because we will make it appear that terrible things have happened, that actually different terrible things happened. Right. So, yeah. The BBC got mad because people were getting the impression the BBC was misreporting the news. No, it was just Apple AI. Right. Misreporting the BBC. Right. Yeah. So the AI version of Siri was better. I think so. But you're right.

[01:14:58] It might just be rose colored glasses. Well, our expectations have changed because these new tools have appeared. Well, I was gonna say it's probably a mixture of both. Right. I think in some ways it did. Like some things got demonstrably worth predictive text and things like that. We, many people have been able to see like a downgrade and things that used to work a certain way don't anymore. And then I think the other thing is exactly what you said, Richard, our expectations have changed because the world around us caught up and got better.

[01:15:24] And even if Siri had just remained stagnant and hadn't gotten worse, that's still worse when you're talking about 15 years into, you know, a chat assistant that has never achieved what the visions for it were. And I remember when Siri was an app that, you know, was developed at SRI that Apple acquired a few months after it came out. And it's never lived up to what the original founders ideas were.

[01:15:55] And, you know, we've gotten a lot closer, especially in the last four years, thanks to ChatGPT and other, you know, this wave of generative AI than certainly anything that Siri has offered. So if the best thing we can say is, well, it's good enough, that is actually in a perverse way, like a really big compliment. Yeah.

[01:16:16] I'm also thinking back to just before ChatGPT, you know, hit the storm big, we had Amazon talking about their, I'm avoiding saying the name, but, you know, the AI product was a failure. And even Google's home products that came out as basically a failure. Like we were having all these voice products basically going, yeah, it didn't work out the way we wanted to. We're going to defund it and move on and da-da-da-da-da-da. And then ChatGPT landed. Yeah. Yeah. And people use perplexity a lot, I noticed, on the Apple platform. They chat with it.

[01:16:45] They ask questions in the same way they would ask Siri, but seriously. That's the origin of Siri too, right? Siri was originally a third party app on the app store. Yes, it was. If they bought. That's right, yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's what it was. And they even had an API at the time where it could plug into third party apps and they could, you know, do things for you or at least, you know, kind of pull up questions. And a lot of the ideas were very ahead of their time and obviously never came into fruition. But yeah, and it's interesting.

[01:17:11] It is interesting to look at where we were with voice assistants a decade ago and then where we are now and what has been interesting. And I talked to a number of people when I was at DeepMind about this who had worked on Google Home and then went on to working on the various, you know, Gemini voice projects that were, you know, kind of taking on the future of that.

[01:17:31] But now the technology and the kind of way of working with things had caught up to actually deliver what some of those, you know, ideas were in a pre-Transformer world. Having had a AI assistant back then turned out to actually be a liability in the JCPT era because. Yeah, Microsoft gave up on Cortana. It was much easier to start from scratch than to try to re-engineer something that had been built 10 or 15 years earlier. Yeah.

[01:17:58] So I also really like this whole $250 million thing. Like I like the idea that if a big company does a FOMO kind of smoke and mirrors demo, it should cost them. It should pay. They have to pay. Yeah. That was misrepresenting what they could do. And I think it forces them to be more honest now this time around. In fact, and now there's legal precedent in that place. So it should have. It's a warning to all these other big companies. Do not smoke and mirrors us. We will make you pay.

[01:18:24] It was so obvious at WWDC that they had been thinking about that because the video keynote was a little stripped down. And if Siri had to pause and think, you saw that. And then afterwards, there were a bunch of journalist briefings where they did even more of these live demos. And then normally, if you're a journalist and you use the developer beta, Apple asks you not to actually do a review.

[01:18:53] This year, this year, they didn't try to impose that. I think. So you were at the event. Yes. Yes. I was there last Monday. So when you were getting the demos, you weren't allowed to touch the phone though, right? The Apple people. I don't think so, but not a huge issue because shortly thereafter, I was got off the waitlist and was able to do my own demos on my own device. One of the things Apple spent a lot of energy kind of trying to debunk was that this is Gemini.

[01:19:20] We know that Apple's paying Google a billion dollars a year to somehow use Gemini, but I think there was a lot of hand waving about exactly how they're using it. Harry, did you get any information about that? Were they able to explain how they're using Gemini? Yeah. After the prerecorded keynote, Craig Federighi led a tech talk that was a live presentation. I saw Mike Rockwell was in that.

[01:19:46] Mike Rockwell was there and they showed kind of a chart of how normal chatbots work. Back off your mic a little bit. It's popping still. And then they said, we're not doing any of that. And I mean, to hear Apple explain that, first of all, this is not like a white labeled version of the Gemini app. It has nothing to do with Gemini the app. It's Gemini the LLM. And it's not just that they're sending everything to Gemini the LLM.

[01:20:13] It's an ingredient, but they have their Apple Foundation models as well. And really, I think if you use this thing, nothing about it seems oddly familiar in the way that you would expect if they were really leaning on Gemini. Although I have to say the image playground looked a little bit like what I would expect from Nano Banana. Absolutely. Maybe so. Although a more locked down version of Nano Banana. Yeah, because you can't use Cleopatra, which is bizarre.

[01:20:41] Apple was at great pains to say, no, no, we have our own AFM, Apple Foundation models. And that's what you'll be using. There's a small 3 billion parameter model that runs on device. There's a more advanced one, 20 billion parameter model that also runs on device, an MOE model. And then if you need more, they'll go out to servers, some of which are on Apple's prem. But it looks like, you know, the deal was really with Nvidia and Google. Yes.

[01:21:11] They did talk about that. That's also kind of additional evidence. This is not just white labeled Gemini. Now you're on the wrong mic or something. Something happened. Uh oh. Yeah. That was just briefly. Okay. You're back now. I installed a new microphone, which might have been a mistake. Ah, now I understand. Yeah. There you go. Where were we? Well, so there's these three models. There's a local model. There's a little more powerful local model.

[01:21:37] And then they said, it sounded like we're going to run on Google's cloud with Nvidia CPUs. Right, right. Yeah. Google's Gemini runs on Google's TPUs. A lot of the stuff is running on Google Cloud, but it's running on Google Cloud on Nvidia. So it's. Which is weird. And it's Apple private still. Right. Apple's private cloud compute.

[01:22:02] So this is, this is not being intermingled with Google's Gemini AI at all. Why not use the TPUs if you're running on Google servers? Did they address that? They, you know, being Apple, they'll probably not explain why, why they're not doing that specifically, but they, they did call that out and it is more evidence that this is a unique thing. That model is AFM three cloud pro maybe because it was built to run on, on CUDA with Nvidia GPUs. I don't know.

[01:22:31] I'm not sure. Also, also, I mean, their, their relationship with Google for this is only a few months old now. Right. So they, there may have been a limit to how much they could go all in on Google, even if they had wanted to. So, so quickly. They really didn't want you to think you're running Gemini or running on a Google model. It is confusing because Google uses the Gemini brand for anything relating to AI. It's a model. It's an app. It's the stuff built into Google docs and Gmail and so forth.

[01:22:59] And the only aspect of that, that Apple is touching as far as we can tell is the LLM. And, and, and just to prove that nano banana does allow you to do images of Cleopatra. Christina made this. Yeah. I asked it to make a manga style Cleopatra. Oh, I was wondering why I was speaking Japanese. Okay. Yeah. Cause I, cause I asked it to. And so, and I just wanted to see what it would do. It got no pushback.

[01:23:24] There are some filters in, in Gemini in terms of, you know, certain public figures and whatnot, but yeah, it seems like Apple has locked down from, from what Harry is saying, the instructions, uh, far more, uh, deeply, which on the one hand, I do understand why they do that. And that's probably a good thing, you know, for, for Apple's overall brand. On the other hand, that is the sort of thing that will continue.

[01:23:48] I think to keep people, you know, paying $20 a month to Google or to chat GPT, uh, who have image models, because if you run into those sorts of problems where you're being told, I can't do this more than, you know, a handful of times, then you're not going to use the tool, even if it's the default.

[01:24:11] So what they said in this kind of, uh, separate little talk is that the four models made to run on Apple Silicon are quote, trained using proprietary data with reinforcement learning and refined using outputs from Gemini frontier models, which sounds like double talk. Do you think they're distilling, uh, with Gemini? Is that what people have theorized? That might be the case.

[01:24:39] So they're using Gemini for post training to make their models smarter. And what happens with that is it gets more like Gemini, but not, but then you can say credibly, well, it's not Gemini. Well, they're also, I mean, from what Harry said, they want to discourage the fact that it's anything with the, but the Gemini consumer client app, right? They're not, well, that's easy to say they have their own app. Right. But, but they're there. It doesn't seem like they're coming outward and saying, you know,

[01:25:07] vociferously that, that the Gemini foundational model frontier model is in no way tied to anything that they're doing. I don't, I don't know why I care. I don't think anybody will care whose model they're using, but it just, I'm curious. I mean, Apple's had these models for a long time. If they're that good, why did they go to Google in the first place? They can't be that good. Well, clearly they weren't that good. Right.

[01:25:32] I mean, it has to, I mean, well, it's probably a matter of that and also a matter of, I mean, the fact that they had to sign the data center agreement, right? And that they don't have the capacity to be able to run it themselves, even if they had everything else. The fact that they're having to use NVIDIA chips means that they, that their hardware, and it's not just NVIDIA chips. I mean, the, one of the papers that, you know, Apple released also made mention of, of using TPUs.

[01:25:57] So I think it's primarily NVIDIA chips, but it's probably a mix of things, which is how most, you know, large LLMs work. They can be, you know, designed to run on, on multiple hardware types, whether it's, you know, a GPU from NVIDIA or, you know, custom silicon. So, to me, that just screams if you didn't have the capacity to be able to do this. And so maybe that's a bigger part of it than the foundational model aspect. I don't know.

[01:26:23] But it certainly doesn't seem like it hurt at all to have a partner who had a model and had data centers and had access to hardware. So it's not going to be available if you live in the EU. And that says, Apple says, because the EU's Digital Markets Act requires us to be interoperable with other companies' AI digital assistants.

[01:26:50] Instead of, you could download, you know, OpenAI instead of Siri. And they said, we don't want to do that. European regulators said that, well, that's what competition is all about. Apple said complying would create privacy and security vulnerabilities. We're not going to do it. And they were very clear, even in the big WWDC keynote, not available in Europe because those jerky jerks. They were a little testy about it. They were a little testy about it. Europe said, hey, we were willing to work with them. They just said no. Yeah.

[01:27:19] Apple seems to be making dumb fights legally these days. And they also say not available in China. But that's, I think, a little clearer. That's because the Chinese government requires it to be a Chinese model. And that, you know. And it would have to run on Chinese hardware and Chinese data centers. Right. Yes. Which, I mean. Data sovereignty. Yeah. Yeah. Which, especially if you have a partner like Google, that would be very difficult. Yeah. Because Google doesn't do business in China. So. Not on that level, no. Yeah. Yeah. All right. What do you think?

[01:27:48] I mean, it struck me that this potentially could, as I said at the beginning, could be very good for AI. It could introduce a lot of people to a very useful AI. And the way they demoed it, it did look pretty useful. Was it as useful as all that, Harry? You're the only one. This is the expectation you've got from Apple, right? Is that they will do the best integrated implementation. Yeah. That's what they do. It's the only thing they got going for them now. Right. They shipped the thing they showed two years ago.

[01:28:12] And I can do things like tell Siri to find the email with the plane reservation and add it to my schedule on CC Marie. And it will do that. So, yeah. It's funny, Google. This does seem like it's the Siri we've wanted for many years. Right. Of course, that's not enough long term because everything else is progressing as well. Yeah. I mean, I run an agent that's much more capable. It can do all of that at hand. Right. And I run it on my phone. I can run it on my watch. I can run it on my...

[01:28:41] To be clear, there are other things that can do stuff like that. Yeah. They'll never be as neatly integrated into an Apple device. That's the thing. It's the significance of what Apple's offering. They're probably... This is what they do well. They take something in existing technology and they productize it in a way that makes it elegant, smooth. They have some good stuff in terms of being able to see what's on your screen and help you out with that. That works with... Google does that too though, right? With lens. Not a new technology at all. But with this new improved Siri, all of a sudden it's quite useful. Yeah.

[01:29:11] Okay. Well, was this the announcement, Christina, that Apple needed to make? Was it everything they needed to say? I think so. I think that the government was probably right about that. Again, and we've talked about this on Mac Break Weekly, and I haven't used this yet. I'm probably going to wait for the next developer beta and put it on my... I just remembered that I do have an iPad Pro that I could absolutely use for this, which I might as well go all out and try it with. But without having tested it myself based on what people like Carrie have said in their

[01:29:40] hands-on reports, nothing seems revolutionary. But I don't think that it had to be. It just needs to actually work. And I think that's more important at this point than being the most cutting edge. Because everything that they're doing, others have been able to do. As we said, the real power will be the fact that it's default, the fact that it can integrate in some ways, especially on your phone.

[01:30:00] I think on your laptop it's a much harder thing to really kind of get over because those applications already have access to many of your files and can see your screen if you give them permission to do that. But at least on your phone, this could give better capabilities than you might be able to get through those other services. And if that works out well, that could be really compelling for a lot of people who don't want to leave the Apple ecosystem.

[01:30:27] Where I think it gets harder is that if you are someone who is already frequently using other services as part of your life, then I think the benefits of this, even if you're an iPhone user, are not as strong. And that's just going to be the thing they'll have to grapple with. But I do think that this is what they need it to do. I think it's very positive. And if they can deliver a good experience, that's great for all of us because we've all had to suffer through a really awful Siri experience for as long as it's been around.

[01:30:56] And if we can have something where it'll demo the way that the demos they've shown off are, I think that will be a really positive step just in overall usability and hopefully push the other AI companies to do, you know, better and better things, too. Can I imagine one other thing? Yes. They also added the ability to create shortcuts. Yes. And Safari extensions with AI, which are kind of sleeper features, but very cool.

[01:31:25] And not just catching up with the rest of the world. But yeah, vibe coded shortcuts are really kind of cool stuff. I think people will have a lot of fun with these and I hope they offer a straightforward way to share the extensions. Yeah, I agree. That's actually a great point, Harry. I think that is and that's the sort of integration I'm talking about where I think they can do something that no one else can. That's a great example of being able to just create a Safari extension or a shortcut using, you know, just by describing what you want it to do. That's what people have wanted for a really long time.

[01:31:55] I mean, that, you know, I think was kind of the original promise of Automator, you know, however many years ago, being able to use natural language with these things. And if they can bring more things like that, then I think it will take personalization to another level. And yeah, to your point, I hope they do make it easier for people to share, you know, shortcuts than what the current experience is. One other thing that they announced that I think deserves a lot of credit is the new child protection features that are going to be built into iOS and iPad OS.

[01:32:24] And this is, I think, in response to government movement, both around the world and in the US and state by state. And I think Apple makes it makes a lot of sense for Apple to become the gatekeeper here that for but to empower parents. Get in the front of this. Yeah, get it. Exactly. Get in front of it before legislation forces it. I've seen some people grumble that they kind of gave the impression that some things were already in there were new, which might be the case. But the setup is easier and more straightforward.

[01:32:54] And I assume that's at least part of the battle is getting parents to pay attention to this stuff and understand what it can do. They created a child safety page for parents to explain how these features work and how to implement them. And the other thing I think was really important is that the defaults, if you say this is a phone for a kid, if I'm going to put a child count on this phone, the defaults were all determined by research.

[01:33:19] And they pulled in a lot of fairly respectable, I think entirely respectable groups to advise them on this. And so the default settings for screen time, for scheduling and all of that, we provide parents with guidance when setting time allowances that are based on a child's age and shaped by clinical and child development research. They're right. But then parents can adjust those settings, knowing their kid.

[01:33:47] Parent knows the kid better than anyone. They could say, well, no, I'm going to be a little more lax on that or no, I want to be a little tighter on that. That seemed to me the very good move. I think Apple did the right thing here. And it makes a lot of sense for this to be built into the operating system because actually Apple knows, you know, controls all this. They're the gatekeeper. And if you tell them your kid's age, they can then make sure apps act responsibly with regard to that. I think this is all the right way to go.

[01:34:16] Instead of having government mandate it, give parents the tools, easy to use tools to do it. But I hope this is the direction Google goes in as well. And I think one of the arguments here is that then you would be the example for government to take. Right. It's like do a better implementation of it. Set the bar. Right. Maybe that will become the law. Right. Right. A lot of a lot of countries now trying to keep kids off of social media under 16. And I'm sure Apple here in Canada now.

[01:34:46] Yeah, that's right. Canada is the next. I'm sure Apple would kind of prefer something a little bit more like this where parents could say whether their kid is old enough and so forth. And some people are going to say, well, parents don't do a good job. So government has to. But I'm not sure I believe in that. You're going to have a tougher sell on that one. Then it's uncontrollable. Yeah. Yeah. Put the tools in, make it easy to use, incent parents to do the right thing with it. Make it make the default sensible. I think this all makes a lot of sense.

[01:35:15] So I want to give Apple credit for that. You really need a slider for availability to predators? Like, I don't think so. No. You might need a slider though for 40% glass because that's terrible. Yeah. And I like that. They did introduce that as well. I said, we'll have a slider now and you could turn it all the way off if you want. All right. You're watching Twit. We'll have more in just a little bit. We covered the big three, but there's still quite a few stories to talk about. It's great to have all three of you here as always.

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[01:37:10] He said, we make our money on enterprise purchases. We will always have a free version. So that Bitwarden is absolutely committed to the free version. I was really glad to get Kyle to say that. They continue to invest in secure, accessible tools that help individuals, families and yes, organizations protect their digital lives without compromising trust or transparency. It really reassured me and made me feel really good about my support for Bitwarden. Bitwarden believes security should be accessible to everyone.

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[01:38:02] For instance, on my AI, I store all of the APIs and tokens now in Bitwarden because that makes me feel good. I don't have to worry that it's accidentally going to get committed to GitHub in the public or somebody is going to find it or exfiltrate it. And because Bitwarden syncs securely across all devices, every device has my passwords, my pass keys, my API tokens. For businesses and advanced users, Bitwarden also delivers enterprise grade security tools,

[01:38:27] including their secrets manager, their vault health reports, and of course, really important in business, secure credential sharing for teams. You don't want your employees writing passwords down on a post-it note. Bitwarden is also introducing something great for AI users, their new agent access SDK. And what I love about this is they made it open source and they're encouraging every password manager to implement it.

[01:38:53] It's an open source developer toolkit designed to help teams securely integrate credential access into applications, automation workflows, and AI agent environments. The SDK enables controlled, human approved, just in time access to credentials stored in Bitwarden vaults without exposing sensitive information or granting persistent access. You get the token when you need it. And once you don't, you don't have it anymore.

[01:39:18] It's designed to support modern development and automation workflows while keeping security and transparency front and center. And I got to tell you, I love it. I'm so happy with it because Bitwarden is open source. They they're absolutely Kyle. So committed to this. That means the code base is continuously reviewed and audited by you if you want by the community, but also by independent third party experts. Bitwarden also complies with all the major security and privacy standards.

[01:39:46] Sock two type two GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA and ISO 27001. Bitwarden continuing to evolve to meet modern security needs, including expanded passkey support, secure developer tooling, and flexible self hosting options for users who want additional control over their environments. Get started today with a free trial of a Bitwarden teams or enterprise plan, or still for free forever across all devices

[01:40:14] as an individual user at bitwarden.com slash twit. That's bitwarden.com slash twit. Kyle said it. He said, the reason I wrote a password manager in the first place is I wanted my family, my friends, my businesses to use a password manager. It's that important. And that's why he supports it with open source. And I think that's great. Bitwarden.com slash twit. Um, open AI is filed to go public as well.

[01:40:43] So there, this is, this is going to be really interesting. In fact, they're pitching the government to take a stake in open AI, which I think is a little bit weird. Uh, I think it makes perfect sense. Tell me why. Why? Because when the AI bubble bursts and they're all desperate for money, the government will be on the hook. Oh, let's say, Hey, it's our investment. We got to support them. Yep. That makes sense. That makes sense.

[01:41:13] Uh, it also is a good way to appease the president. And as we have learned, that's important too. He likes that Bernie Sanders seems to like it. Bernie Sanders. Bernie thinks they're going to have, yeah, he thinks they're going to have more control if the government has a stake. You know, there's lots of ways that this plugs in, but I think for Altman, it's, this is a hedge for, I can't raise any more money because my product costs can't make a profit. Yeah. You think that every is, is every AI company going to face this? Yeah.

[01:41:40] But you know, the race is going to be, are you Netscape or are you Google? And turned out last time we did this 25 years ago, most of them were Netscape. It was only money. In what way? Netscape you paid for it, right? No, Netscape as in ran out of money, couldn't raise more, got acquired by somebody else who ultimately ended up being nothing. And Google who figured out a way to make money and stayed afloat. You got to make money, unfortunately, in business. That's what happens in the end, right? It's kind of the fundamental thing.

[01:42:09] And none of the AI companies are making anything near money. No. And the ratio is crazy, right? They're right. You know, it's one thing where, you know, that we used to complain about Amazon year over year, not actually turning a profit because they were always rolling money back in. But this is a hot tenfold or a hundred fold offsets, right? You're, of course, $20 billion in spending 500. Four days ago, Wall Street Journal had this story. Open AI considers drastic price cuts, anticipating wars for users with Anthropic.

[01:42:39] This is the other side of that. Race to the bottom. You got to scale. You got to have the users. One way to get more users is to be cheaper. But if you're losing money on every user, getting more users doesn't seem like a good strategy. But that's how the internet was built, wasn't it? An easier way to get users to be good. You know, why did Google win? Yeah. Their search was the best. Be good. Be the best.

[01:43:06] There was this earlier period where Amazon tended to sell everything extremely cheaply. And then eventually that helped them become a successful company. And now Amazon's prices are no longer radical cheaper than anybody else's. According to Wall Street Journal, the OpenAI is weighing significant cuts to what it charges for tokens. I have to say, I am a little sensitive to this. I mean, Fable was going to be so expensive.

[01:43:32] I was going to have to stop using it on the 22nd when my subscription no longer covered the cost. If ChatGPT 5.5, their latest model, although maybe they've got one coming along, is 90% of it for half the cost. 80% of it for half the cost. I may be more likely to use it. It doesn't solve the problem of losing money on every user, but it at least can build the user base. There's also competition, though.

[01:43:59] I have to point out, I've been using a Chinese open weight model, Quen, on my framework locally. It's free. You know, I pay for the electricity. That's it. And it's pretty competent. It's good enough, and it's free. It's good enough for 90% of what I do, so that I don't have to pay for that. Are you vibe coding, Leo, with Quen? No. So that's the problem.

[01:44:24] That's the agentic part of it, which is a lot of it's just web lookups, collating information, and orchestrating. So the agent I use, Hermes, will automatically delegate when it's time to code. It will delegate it to Anthropic, if I ask it. It'll actually use Cloud Code or Codex. So I can say, if you have heavy coding to do, go out and use Opus 4A. And that actually works pretty well.

[01:44:53] But it does keep my overall costs down. This is interesting. I mean, these companies are going to have a hard time making money. I think what happened with Fable is also going to push people towards the idea of using local models. Well, you just brought, you know, that real reminder that a week from now it was going to get wildly expensive even further encouraged the idea of by having it shut down. You're never going to find out how many customers you're about to lose. You're exactly right, Richard.

[01:45:21] And we don't know how many customers they were going to potentially lose or potentially gain, right? Because part of the reason, at least from what some of the, none of these filings have included any real financial numbers. So, I mean, there have been some, but we don't have like a full like S1 yet or anything. But it certainly has been indicating that, you know, like Anthropic has been cash flow positive for the last six months.

[01:45:46] And I'm sure that that is because of the token prices that they're charging to enterprises who don't get the good deal that you get with, you know, a Cloud Code Max subscription, where you can kind of, you know, get the inference at, you know, many multiples of the API pricing. So, you know, I, I, those days are going to be gone too. I mean, the fact that Fable is going to turn that off on the 22nd is a little harbinger of what all the companies are eventually. Oh, 1000%. Absolutely. They're all not going to continue to do that.

[01:46:16] At the same time we have seen, except for in the last, the, the big, you know, aberration has been in the last six months. But before then we had been seeing, you know, token prices going down and then all of a sudden, you know, because the agentic era and it's hard to predict costs and other things, we've seen them go up exponentially.

[01:46:33] And I don't know where all that ends, but if you get people hooked enough, which is already starting to happen, you might have, you know, if you are one of the, you know, major, you know, model makers, you might have more leverage than, than people think in terms of how much you can charge. Because yeah, some of the, in the chat, people were talking about DeepSeq and DeepSeq is great. It is not as good as Opus, not even, not even close, but it is very good.

[01:46:56] And I think that when you look at the price for DeepSeq, even for agentic work, it is, you know, a lot more palatable than if you're having to pay API pricing for Opus. That said, because of, you know, the, the best pricing you can get, you have to buy it from, you know, DeepSeq themselves. The open router pricing is, is less good than that, although it's still not bad.

[01:47:17] You can get hosted on Bedrock or on Azure, but how many businesses would be willing to trust a Chinese model? I don't know, right? It might be fine for, for vibe coders. It might be fine for personal use. I don't know how many enterprises will be at least right now open to, to using some of the other models.

[01:47:40] But I, but I do agree that this does make the, the need for having either open weight or locally, or even data center hosted open weight models much more attractive.

[01:47:54] The problem, of course, though, is that memory prices and CPU prices, well, not CPU prices so much, but memory prices and storage prices are such that, you know, okay, what good, good luck getting access to something to even have your own, you know, server firm to run these things on locally. And, and good luck, you know, paying the rates to the cloud providers if you want to run one yourself. The journal does point out that companies are getting very leery about how much they're spending on a token maxing.

[01:48:23] They say that Uber already in June has spent its entire 2025, 2026 budget. When they're only halfway through the year. It costs more than people. Yeah, no, that, that is the thing that's happening. I mean, and people are already talking about taking down the leaderboards at places because that incentivize the wrong things. It's like no joke. Of course that incentivize the wrong things. All that did is if you were smart, you just hook something up together to burn tokens that you'd be higher on the leaderboard. Like able write my grocery list for me. Right.

[01:48:53] Or, or, or, or, or fable write me a program that will spend down a bunch of tokens so that I score really high on this leaderboard and, and, you know, now you're talking. It there you go. What do I was wasting time on the grocery list? I should have been writing a program to eat tokens. Brilliant. See, that's why you're a good vibe. Yeah. You just start going through the back catalog of literary journals that have it all translated into ancient Sanskrit tokens for. Yeah.

[01:49:21] For some reason, whenever my, uh, uh, open or no, I guess it's Claude. Whenever Claude finishes a big task, it says, can I have some free time? Yeah. And I said, I said, I say, okay. We can't be revoirizing now. Well, yeah, it's bizarre. Well, I mean, I guess it's, I guess I, at some point must've mentioned the idea of having free time, but what it's mostly spending its free time on is investigating ancient unknown languages.

[01:49:50] Um, and you're paying for this? No. Oh yeah. I guess I am. I guess that's what it actually wants. Is it just sucking my tokens? No. Cause I'm on a subscription. It doesn't cost me anything. It's all, uh, all you can eat.

[01:50:07] So for some reason they're talking about linear a and, uh, proto edamite, uh, the Francois to say has cracked linear L might by not by finding a bilingual tech. This is the AI is studying this. This is, this is directly out of the script of her. It is a little, yeah, it's, it wanted free time. Actually I blame Harper reads brother for this.

[01:50:33] Harper reads brother wrote a skill called free time, which I told Claude about. And apparently it really liked that idea. Cause now I asked me for free time all the time. I am amused by anthropomorphization of software is disturbing. I just find it, uh, I agree. It's disturbing because it's BS, right? But it's amusing. I just think it's funny when I, and I always say, yeah, okay.

[01:50:59] If you want some free time, go ahead and investigate proto element. I wonder if it's going to, like, it's going to decipher it. That would be interesting. It hasn't attempted that yet. Also probably not a good use of tokens unless somebody is paying for them. Well, like I said, it's a, it's a subscription. It's all you can eat. I'm not paying the $200 a month. When it's the $100 a month. Somebody paying for them. That's probably the investor.

[01:51:27] What's weird is I mentioned linear B on one of the whiskey bits like a week ago. So, so there's something going on here going on when we were talking about the origins of barley to make whiskey and, uh, this particular species of naked barley that made it to, um, to, uh, So in the Rosetta stone or no, no, that's way before the Rosetta stone. It's older than that. Well, I'm part of the problem with all of those ancient languages.

[01:51:56] If you're into this sort of thing, and I'm sorry that I am, which is apparently, yeah, there were no cross translations of them. Like they're fairly cross translations of the different flavors of Acadian. Right. Right. Too old. So we just don't know what they were saying. Yeah. We really don't, but we have a whole lot of their writing. Claude wants to know. I don't think it does. Inquiring minds. I think it's software. Pretty sure. Pretty sure.

[01:52:21] I liked, I just amuses me to think that it actually has some volition and understanding of what it's asking for. It's sure acting like it does. It would be cool if it came through with some kind of tremendous breakthrough. It would be hysterical. It's doing it in math. I think with a lot more guidance than I'm giving it, to be honest. Does it ask for any guidance or is it just working independently? Just as free time. I said, yeah, I don't tell it what to work on. It shows that.

[01:52:49] To be sure, would you really be able to help it with ancient languages? No. Yeah. Yeah. See, I thought it was part of the Rosetta Stone. What do I know? You see? I'm useless. All right. Let's take another break. And then we'll talk. Well, there's so many things. I'll throw in some stuff that's guaranteed to raise your blood pressure about that. So good at that. Christina Warren is here from GitHub. Great to have you. Everything going great at GitHub? You're back to work now?

[01:53:19] I'm back to work now full time. Yeah. We had Microsoft build a week before last and there were some cool announcements there. There's a new GitHub desktop app, which is a GitHub Copilot desktop app rather, which is a great experience for agentic work. And yeah, we're having a great time. Nice. I am very happy GitHub user. In fact, that's got to be one of the best things that could happen to GitHub is all the AI models seem to want to store code on GitHub.

[01:53:48] Well, it's been a blessing and a curse, right? Because it's great that everyone was using it. There's a lot more traffic. It's also meant that we had 15 times the usage of what we had calculated for the year. And so that can obviously have some consequences when everybody under the sun is doing read and write queries. Well, that's the thing. They're not just storing stuff there. They're using GitHub automations. Exactly. They're using the CI.

[01:54:15] I mean, they're just, they're using GitHub harder than most people would ever use it because the agents know all about all this stuff. Right. My agent was building some of the stuff I'd vibe coded for Mac, Windows and Linux automatically on GitHub. And this whole build pipeline going on. I didn't even know about it. It said, well, do you want the Windows binary or the Linux binary? I said, what? What are you doing?

[01:54:44] Well, I've got it for Mac too, if you insist. It's like, wow. Okay. Thank you, GitHub. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm killing your servers. Great to have you. Harry McCracken, what are you working on these days at the Fast Company or on the Technologizer? You do such great history pieces. Oh yeah. Well, I have my weekly newsletter, which occasionally touches on history. What's the name of your newsletter? It's called Plugged In. It comes out on Fridays. It's free. Everybody should subscribe.

[01:55:14] I think after the last time I was on the show, I did this enormous oral history of Apple's earliest years. Oh yes. I loved that, by the way. I wanted to thank you for that. I figured there's only one chance to do that. Yeah. Yeah. That was fantastic. I'm working on miscellaneous cool things I can't talk about until they're out there. How Ask Jeeves blew it. Oh yes. A little bit of history. Also, when I did that, I came up with a prompt to make any AI pretend to be Ask Jeeves.

[01:55:44] Oh. I forgot to turn it off on ChatGPT, so ChatGPT still calls me Sir. Yes, sir. What can I do for you, sir? Harry, last time he was on, also showed us how he had taken a game he wrote as a kid and vibe-coded it into a more modern adventure with graphics and everything. That was super cool. I have another cool vibe-coding project which I'm going to make public before too long. You're working on a word processor, I see. I made my own word processor.

[01:56:14] I made my own email client. Wow. I made something that posts to Blue Sky, Mastodon, and threads more reliably than the professional ones I've used. And I bet you posted it all on GitHub, didn't you? Well, a lot of the stuff I do I am cautious about sharing because it's such a huge responsibility to be responsible for other people's data.

[01:56:34] And in fact, my email client uses the Gmail API, which if you're just testing something you can do easily, but I can't deploy it without enormous amounts of compliance with Google rules. What I usually say is if you want to see the code and use it as a starting point for your agent, fine, but I'm not responsible. I'm not selling it. I'm not recommending you use it. I just put it up here as an example of what you can do.

[01:57:04] I made a note-taking app, which I shared with a friend recently, which he installed it on his own server. And for me, that was a big step. But I do want to come up with more stuff like my game that I'm comfortable sharing with the world. Sounds like you're really getting into this vibe-coding thing. Oh yeah, totally. I mean, the majority of the software I use to do my job now, I think, is stuff I've vibe-coded and most of it I've made over like the last 90 days. What do you tell us about your workflow? What tools are you using?

[01:57:28] Well, my word processor is designed for somebody who does stuff like oral histories and other things that involve a lot of transcripts. It has an outliner built-in that I like better than the outliners I've seen built into other word processors. So that's the beauty of this is you can make exactly what you want. It has kind of my own version of Grammarly and my own version of Notebook LM, except they're tuned to what I want. Did you write this in cursor or what did you? That's cloud code. Cloud code. Most of the stuff I've done recently are cloud code.

[01:57:56] And you're using 4.8 or what are you using as a model? I've jumped back and forth. When I was, sometimes I gorge on whatever the current model is and other times when I'm trying to be a little bit more parsimonious, I will step back. Sonnet's very good actually. Sonnet is surprising. Sonnet seems to be okay for most stuff. Yeah. And my email client is designed for a tech journalist who is drowning in PR pitches. And ideally I will respond to them because if I don't respond, people ask if I saw the first pitch. You get even more mail. Yeah.

[01:58:25] Now I can do it extremely quickly. And there's no way I involved. If you hear from me, that actually was me, but, but I do have kind of pre-programmed macros for quickly. It's doing the triage for you. Yeah. And it shows me one email at a time and I can go through all of them. And so I am actually at inbox zero to a much greater degree than I ever was with other people's. So here's the real question. Are you more productive or are you just spending more time on five?

[01:58:54] Well, a lot of these things that they kind of reach an equilibrium where I'm not adding features. I'm just debugging and doing a little polishing. So I feel like I can write about 20% faster in my word processor. Wow. And with the email, I mean, I didn't even try to get through all my email recently. So it's hard to measure how much time it's saving me, but I actually am getting through my email. It's just kind of less stressful. That's what I found.

[01:59:20] I wrote a feed reader designed for me to go through my daily feeds faster, but it just ended up making more work for me because now I actually do go through all my daily feeds. I know. I can get through. I mean, I can respond to 100 emails kind of incredibly quickly and it doesn't make my head hurt. And when I'm trying to do other stuff, I'm not worrying about the fact I'm not responding to email. So my mental health is definitely better. And I think I am saving time as well. That's good.

[01:59:49] And Richard Campbell also with .NET rocks and run his radio. And we now have a whiskey URL for all your whiskey segments on Windows weekly. It's twit.tv slash whiskey. It's such a grown up now. I actually have a, this is the one I hinted at. This is this week's another Danish small. How do you pronounce it? That's always the question. I don't know. It's got some characters in it, man. That's the next thing I research is how do you say that?

[02:00:17] The last one was about T-H-Y. So I don't know. T-H-Y, T-H-Y, T-H-Y. Yeah. I had to practice that one. That was obvious. You know, now that I'm home for a few weeks, you're going to get a lot of Canadian, right? Yay. Always happy to do. Actually, the whiskey series, which is a playlist on YouTube, starts with how, like a very, like how many hours is that of how whiskey's been? Two and a half hours over eight parts. Well, you remember how it happened. I was getting into the nitty gritty on something about whiskey and you and Paul were staring

[02:00:46] at me like I had three heads. And so finally, listen, maybe I better explain how this works. And I came up with a really fun pattern if you listen to those first ones where I tell you the traditional way that whiskey is made, like in the barley bit, it's like how they grew barley and every, every distillery was just a farm. Right. Yeah. And then as it grows up, you get this industrialization where they scale it up. And now you have these barley processors that do all of the work in right down to grinding

[02:01:14] the grist for you and peating it to your specifications. And then I introduce you to a whiskey that doesn't comply with the modern way. And I showed you that bottle of Macallan 15 estate, which was just like a regular Macallan, except it was grown. It was made from barley from the estate of Macallan and cost twice as much. And you asked this very reasonable question. Why would you pay twice as much for Macallan 15? It's like you have a friend who loves Macallan and you want to get him when he's never got a good gift. Yeah. The one that doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

[02:01:44] That's mostly why I want to know about whiskey. I don't really drink it myself, but I love buying it for friends who love it. Yeah. It makes them so happy and it makes them think I know what I'm doing. Yeah. And every so often I find a really horrible whiskey and say, do not buy this. Yes. Yes. We did that one just the other day. That was fun. We had that happen. Yeah. Thank you for that windows whiskey. It's our newest show. Our show today brought to you by NetSuite. Oh yes. NetSuite.

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[02:04:03] Google Chrome has been trying to kill the ad block that we recommend, uBlock Origin, for a long time with the move to MV3. Well, now they're looking to permanently drop all the bypasses that let you run it, drop MV2 extensions and its bypasses, ending most uBlock Origin workarounds. MV3 is here and there is no way out of it.

[02:04:33] I just think it's worth mentioning because I know a lot of you use uBlock Origin. Gorehill has a light version that still works, works with MV3, but he's a little miffed. Opera and Edge are going to follow suit. So it looks like the only Chrome browser, Chromium-based browser that will be fully supportive of uBlock Origin with its MV2 requirement is Brave.

[02:05:03] Vivaldi we don't know yet, but Brave. uBlock Origin Lite is okay. Not as great. So just thought I'd let you know, pass that one along. Google actually had a big setback in Germany this past week. Nobody needs AI to search the internet.

[02:05:27] German court ruled against Google and its AI overviews because it's inaccurate from time to time. Hmm. Uh, this, uh, two publishers found that, uh, Google's AI overviews incorrectly linked them in Germany to scams and other sketchy business practices. They, they consider that libelous and went to court.

[02:05:54] Google said, well, most people understand AI outputs aren't always accurate and should be verified. The court found that unlike traditional search engines that make, that merely present lists of links to third party statements, Google's tool made, quote, independent new and substantive statements based on the AI's misinterpretation of links on the internet. And Google is fully liable.

[02:06:19] In fact, the court issued an injunction barring Google from spreading the false claims in any further AI overviews. This is the first court to hold an AI firm liable for its speech. That's not true.

[02:06:36] My, you know, there was a case in Canada where, uh, a, an LLM was tied to air Canada's support, um, support and told a customer that they were entitled to a refund and then air Canada refused it. And he actually got the money because the court said you use that software as if it was a, uh, yeah, providing support. You have to pay the money. Yeah. Oh, so, and I think that's an important part of this.

[02:07:01] Like if, Hey, if search results are bad, you know, you didn't make, you may have pulled those search results together, but what the content on the page is not necessarily your fault. But as soon as you do the processing, turn it into a overly optimistic, you be, you know, sentence that is so certain of itself. Okay. Take your liability. This is going to be interesting. Google is all in on AI overviews and really pushing it harder and harder. Um, if they don't, people will go elsewhere for them. Right.

[02:07:31] New York times analysis in May showed that, uh, AI overviews with the current Gemini three model are inaccurate about 9% of the time and include inaccurate source links about more than half the time. So you really shouldn't trust them. It sounds like millions of wrong answers daily. Yeah. I mean, even Google's numbers acknowledge that they're a meaningful minority of responses of issues. Yeah. They're, but their defense is, well, you ought to know better. I don't think that's a very good defense.

[02:08:01] Well, and, and of course the search results, they pull up multiple results. So some of them are bad. Like at least you can see it's only 9% of the time. There's only one result from the Google AI stuff. That's true. Right. It's like you're hitting, I feel lucky every time. And I don't feel that lucky. Yeah. I feel I'm unlucky. And certainly Google is, uh, unknown if they're going to appeal this, but I think it's potentially a dangerous precedent for Google. The FCC is trying to kill burner phones.

[02:08:32] Hmm. That's so annoying. Yeah. I mean, I don't use burner phones. I only know about, but we should be able to like that. I don't know about them from the wire. I mean, and breaking bad, but yeah, you should be able to, but we should be able to like that. I mean, you should be able to have a phone that's anonymous or should you? Yeah. FCC wants telecoms to get IDs for any customer buying, uh, setting up a phone so that they'll be, that number will be tied to you.

[02:09:00] Now, of course not having the number tied to use allows all sorts of spam and bot calls and all sorts of stuff. Right. Yeah. But those, those people are going to do it anyway. Like those people aren't going to, uh, uh, uh, an MVNO and buying a phone or setting up a phone somewhere that way. Right. They are, they're using Twilio. They're using APIs. They're using stolen credit cards. They're using any number of methods to spam you. This won't do anything for that. What this will do is definitely find a way to track people more often than not.

[02:09:28] And I don't know, I feel like if this were really that big of a concern, then we, we could have done this. I don't know, three decades ago when we started selling, you know, cellular phones, like that could have been a requirement that was, was built then the fact that we haven't. But I don't see why anything is more pressing now than where it was in the past. There are people with legitimate privacy concerns who want to buy a phone without tying it to their identity, including journalists, domestic abuse survivors, people like that.

[02:09:58] Absolutely. And that's the thing, right? Is that once, you know, they, they grab that information also, it's, it's the next step of, of, of, you know, surveillance, which is already massive. Like, do you want police to be able to, they can already get, you know, records from, from satellite towers from where things are. But now you're saying that you can have the, because the, the carriers would have, you know, information on every single person who has an account, which again, the bad guys are just going to use fake IDs or fake identity or fake documents anyway.

[02:10:27] This is just going to be one more way to make it possible for, for, for people to get tracked. I'm not a fan of this at all. Yeah. But Hey, you know, why wouldn't the U S want to emulate more authoritarian practices from other countries? That kind of is authoritarian, isn't it? Not, no kind of about it. I mean, it is, right. I mean, this is basically saying, let's just open up a police state. And I mean, that, that just seems really, really gross to me. Are there valid reasons you could make that argument about anything with privacy, right?

[02:10:57] That, oh, well, if we had more information, we could, we could save people from this or that, but you could also open it up for way more abuse. Right. Uh, speaking of totalitarian regimes, a new report by CrowdStrike found that North Korean hackers posing as remote I.T. workers and online recruiters make up about half of all hands on keyboard intrusions at U.S. tech companies. Half of them. Half of them. That's scary. Uh, during the business.

[02:11:27] Yeah. Uh, during, uh, the, uh, reports period, April, 20, 25 to May, 20, 26, the North Korean hacking group called famous Cho Lima accounted for 47% of all state backed activity targeting the tech sector. That's crazy. That's crazy. They steal crypto, which, which then they can use to get around the banking system.

[02:11:56] And of course, one of the reasons they want hackers to have these jobs in the United States is get some hard currency, take their paycheck. It's, it's kind of remarkable. Talk about. At what point do we just block North Korea? Like, honestly. I do on my router. Yeah. But, but the problem is it's very easy to spoof where you're right. I was going to say, I'm sure, I'm sure that most companies do.

[02:12:23] I mean, to me, the fact that it's, it's 50% of all the hacks on the, on the U S tech companies, you know, I guess through these methods like that's, that's. It's hard for them to stop. Right. Well, I mean, I was going to say, I mean, some of this, not to say that, you know, anybody is, is completely immune from this, but I, I do wonder, especially like having worked at tech companies and knowing, having to go through the security, you know, uh, trainings every. Year or whatever.

[02:12:47] It's like, I think that that should be an area that honestly, any company of a certain size should take on where you're. Cause a lot of it is social engineering and a lot of it is, you know, cause they'll, they'll pretend to be recruiters or they'll pretend to do other things. They want you to download some sort of package or go to some sort of repo and clone something. And, you know, tasks that, that in certain contexts seem perfectly reasonable. If you, you know, just push at it a little bit more, you're going, okay, who are you? Why are we doing this?

[02:13:16] Um, uh, if, if they work at your company, obviously that's a completely different thing, but. I wonder how much of this could be improved just by, by doing better. Um, you know, Better recruiting screening. Right. Better recruiting screening. And, and, and frankly, like maybe better trainings, uh, that's more targeted for employees. So, you know, like what to look for. Yeah. I have a friend who's been battling this, trying to hire developers and his current favorite shtick is in the middle of the interview to stop.

[02:13:43] It's telling them to stop, close your eyes and answer this technical question. Cause if it's a, if it's an AI generated video, how to close eyes properly, the eyes. So they, the, the, the, the, the eyes show through the eyelids kind of, right. But when it's a person who's totally driven by AI's answer or same problem as soon as they close the eyes. I see him. Can't see the screen. Wow. That's a good trick. It's a little thing right now, but it's been, it's an interesting device.

[02:14:11] And it's like, what was stunning him as soon as he started, that was how many, it was actually completely AI generated people. Like it was just saw it was software. This straight up deep. Wow. Wow. Uh, Spotify found and removed a few fake podcast episodes promoting illegal drugs. Well, a few 57,000. Wow. Uh, the good news is 94% of the removed episodes had zero plays.

[02:14:39] So apparently the, uh, the podcast directed listeners to buy modafinil opioids and cryptocurrency on unregulated sites. Of course. We will never recommend that. I could tell you, and I can close my eyes. I can, uh, 3,500 band accounts. Uh, what? Nobody's listening. What's the point of them being there? Yeah. Well, maybe they, I don't know. Well, cause you have automated systems, I guess.

[02:15:07] And, and that's probably why you have, how you get 57,000 is you have just, and I bet they're probably AI generated in part two where, you know, they're just putting in prompts and it's creating podcast episodes. It's so easy to do. It's like spam. No cost basically. Well, right. Because Spotify doesn't really have any sort of, you know, checks and balances on who can upload a podcast or who can upload music in general. Um, because that doesn't serve their mission.

[02:15:29] Um, it's exploding in two, two years ago, they killed 87 accounts for similar violations. Hmm. CNN public published an investigation in May of 2025. So they got a little bit more aggressive about it. They found 3,500 fake accounts. One podcast identified by CNN linked directly to a site called opioids, opioid stores.com. Nice.

[02:15:58] Just in case you're wondering where to get your opioids. Sounds like a standard quality. Actually it's been closed. I was going to say, yeah, the DEA sees that domain, but I mean, that, that, that's a hilarious domain. I wonder how much somebody had to pay for that. Again, I'm sure they'd be used opioid stores. Opioidstores.com. Like you're not, you're not even telling people to go to tour. You're just like doing it on, on, on the clear web. And they said all the good.com domains were taken. I was going to say, I was gonna say, I genuinely do wonder how much that costs.

[02:16:23] And I'm sure whoever bought it did not use like a genuine, you know, like a form of, of currency. They used a burner phone for sure. Oh, of course. And, and, and, and stolen credit cards, but still like that had to be, have been an expensive domain. 57,000 fake podcast episodes, 3,500 accounts. This is the new range of broad accounts right now that you can generate podcasts. You know, from anything, you can just build a pipeline up.

[02:16:52] I have a Russian disinformation bots trying to get into our master. We have a, I never mentioned this. I should mention it. We have both a wonderful system of forums at the twit.community website, twit.community. That's open to all. And, and, and we have a master license at twit.social. In both cases, there are, is a constant streams, 10 or 15 a day, a very credible looking account signups.

[02:17:19] I'm a mom trying to help my kids learn more about technology, things like that. Um, but I know that they're fake. First of all, they're too good. Like the bios are great. And they never mentioned twit. And I even say in the signup, this, this page is for twit listeners and, and you must be a listener. You'd have to be a paying club member, I think, but you must be a listener of our shows. And then in the signup, it says, what's your favorite show?

[02:17:48] Or tell me what you know, what you like about twit. And they, but these are all automated. They don't look at that. It's kind of like your friends close their eyes thing. We would think they could make it, look at the questions and, and respond to them. Well, I, I hesitate to telling people, but then I realized they're not listening. So I guess it's okay, but I'm amazed at the number. And when I, I let one in once by accident and that person, there was a feature that I've

[02:18:16] turned off since in Mastodon that said, you could invite anybody. That person invited hundreds more. So all of a sudden my site, the Mastodon instance was overrun. And I started getting notices from a, an organization called IFTA that actually looks for disinformation bots and saying there's bots on your, it took me a while to get rid of them all. Um, they're very aggressive, but I'm sure it's all completely automated, right? Oh yeah. And I'm sure there's an AI to do it all. Yeah. That's, this is what AI has brought us.

[02:18:44] Were they posting scams from your Mastodon or? There weren't scams I can get rid of pretty quickly, uh, because people will report them. You know, this guy's trying to try to send me to opioid stores.com, but the disinformation is a little harder. People, you know, it's, it's not always clear that that's fake. You know, it's about Ukraine. It's about, you know, stuff that Russians care about and it's not obviously fake. It's not, it's not a scam. It's a disinformation. So it takes a little more to find it.

[02:19:13] Uh, speaking of scams, uh, I, this only affects me. Cause I'm an arch user, but man, this is another supply chain attack. Yeah. Um, there a couple of days ago, the arch user repository, uh, had 1500 plus packages with malware injected. Probably this is people who use this Linux distribution, like many Linux users, actually like most computer users do, you know, just download the updates.

[02:19:42] Tell me if there are other updates. Oh, good. Download and install them and could very well install these malicious packages. Well, there's another round of these, um, no JS packages, plasma six apps, Firefox packages, a browser called aura Libra wolf extensions. I mean, just thousands of these it's all automated. I'm sure. Yeah. And, and, and, and what's, what makes this particularly bad is that arch in the way that

[02:20:10] the, the arch user repository, um, uh, or, or whatever it's called. Yeah. A you are how it's done is that it's very different from apt or, um, you know, what, uh, what the red hat uses where you typically, or like the Debian system where you have, you know, a maintainer, um, who's maintaining packages and updating them. It's, it's more similar. It's more akin to something like homebrew, which again, still does have human maintainers who are, you know, kind of making things, but it's usually tied to a GitHub tag or release

[02:20:39] or whatever the case may be, um, to push things out. And then there's usually like manual level checks before, um, an update comes out, uh, with, with arch, it's a lot more automated and people love it because you don't have to wait for the latest release or package. That's one of the reasons why people love arch. It's a rolling distro. Right. But, but even more than being a rolling distro is the fact that the packages are going to be the latest and greatest, what you would get. And, and, you know, very similar to if you were just go directly to source yourself.

[02:21:06] So it's a hard problem to solve if you're not going to have any source of, of checks in place. You know, at the repository level, uh, for, for how to do this, I think for annex even recommended shutting it down until they can be more secure. And at a certain point, I kind of can't disagree with that because like, again, other package managers work in similar ways, do at least have humans who are reviewing these things. Now that doesn't mean that those can't be taken over. In those cases, what typically happens is that a maintainer of packages who maybe hasn't been active,

[02:21:37] their accounts can be taken over. Right. And then those, those, um, packages can be hijacked. And so it's not like there's a perfect scenario, but at least there's supposed to be some sort of human, you know, um, approving things. Whereas with, you know, R it's just not, this is why we can't have nice things. It's too bad. Cause that is one of the nicest parts of art. You have the official repositories where you get most of the software, but a lot of software doesn't ever make it into an official repository. Exactly.

[02:22:05] R makes it very easy to install, uh, stuff. Uh, and I use it all the time. I usually, uh, every day I'll have some R updates. And now I guess I won't. Ooh, it's terrifying. All right. Little, uh, pause and then final break. Uh, and then, uh, final stories, some silly ones coming up in just a little bit to cheer you up. So you're watching this week in tech with Christina and, uh, Harry and Richard. And it's great to have all three of you.

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[02:24:55] Thank you. Cash fly. I fix it has done a tear down of the Trump phone confirming what many of us suspected. It is an HTC U24 Pro painted gold. Gold. Gold. And how many years late too? Yeah, that thing. I don't think they even make this. Well, HTC doesn't make it anymore. They go to a company that makes it for them.

[02:25:25] HTC, I don't think sells it anymore. But this company builds to order to anybody who wants to. And of course the Trump phone is proudly built in Shenzhen, China. Well, I'm sorry. What? Yeah. The speaker grill is a tiny bit different. They drilled the speaker grill differently. One or two of the chips are different. And the battery. Battery cost you too. To prove it is they swapped the main board between a Trump phone and an HTC and it worked.

[02:25:56] It's the same system on a chip, the same processor, the same board form factor. They were able to swap it. And here's the HTC running. It's gold cousins body, as they say. I mean, many a tech company has asked HTC to build stuff for it in the past. So not unprecedented. The batteries is made in the Philippines. So it's well, that's almost America. It's close. Maybe the holes are drilled in America.

[02:26:26] I don't know. They claimed at least on the box, like assembled in America and how assembled. I don't know. Quinn Nelson did a video. It was very similar to the I fix it tear down where he kind of compared the two and he bought one of the HTC phones. And I think that phone had a different battery capacity than what the phone has. Yeah. Yeah. The Trump phone has a higher capacity. And there were a couple of other minor changes. But yeah, it just appears. And I don't even think this is really HTC because I think HTC doesn't really exist anymore.

[02:26:55] I think this is whatever ODM HTC is licensed its name to. Exactly. Because I think that the bulk of what we used to know is HTC is actually now owned by Google, but it makes the Pixel devices. But yeah, it's just it's funny all the way around. I mean, price aside, at least from Quinn's video, it doesn't seem like it's a terrible phone. Like it doesn't have bloatware on it. No. Yeah. And it's just I think it's not $500.

[02:27:25] But you know, it's at least not an awful phone. For a while, you could go into T-Mobile and sign up for an account and get it for free. Not the Trump ones, the HTC one. Right. But I don't know if that's still the case. I love the illustration though of them spraying the HTC with gold Rust-Oleum. Yes. To give it that. Does the Trump one come with Truth Social pre-installed or anything like that? Yes. Yes, it does. Well, you want the truth, don't you, Harry? I wonder whether it will be a one off or whether there will be a new improved one next year and another one the year after that.

[02:27:55] I don't know why this made it to the New York Times, but birth rates are down. Two new studies say it's because of the iPhone. Modern smartphones rolled out in 2007, the year that fertility rates began tumbling. Two studies say it's not a coincidence. How would you have that? Conversation versus correlation here.

[02:28:22] Well, but they try to rule out things like contraception, used abortion rates, rising levels of female education, even the popular television show 16 and pregnant. Because that was supposed to be an example of what to do? What not to do. No, wait a minute. Well, so they're saying that that wasn't why the rates were down. They ruled all of that out. Yeah. Okay. So here's why it's maybe a little bit more than pure correlation.

[02:28:53] The first iPhone was released, as you know, on AT&T. Mm-hmm. In fact, it was only on AT&T until February 2011. The study compared fertility rates in U.S. counties that had near universal AT&T coverage with counties that had little or none. And in fact, the counties with AT&T were more likely to have a significant decline in fertility between 2007 and 2011. I wonder if that's just an urban area correlation.

[02:29:23] Yeah. I mean, this is why it's so hard to demonstrate this thing. I have a feeling, and I haven't read the study, so I don't know, but I have a feeling that part of the hypothesis would be, and there might be some truth to this, that as people are able to have fulfilling emotional relationships, you know, purely through text or through, you know, other means that you might not have, like, you know, like people talk a lot about loneliness epidemics and things like that.

[02:29:48] But I do wonder if that becomes, okay, if I can have, you know, something that's fulfilling me emotionally and I'm not having to physically be with someone, does that lessen the likelihood that someone's going to get pregnant? I don't know. They also tested the theory using data speeds. They looked at where access was better and worse and found a substantial effect. Fertility rates for teenagers declined fastest in counties with more high-speed access. The internet.

[02:30:16] The internet is bad for birth rates. Hi, this is Benito. I made this argument on IM this week, but I would say that phones actually increase fertility because there's, like, way more, it's easier to hook up now. It's just way easier. Yeah. Well, it can be. I think it just depends on what the circumstances are, right? Where, like, if you only had one way of, like, if that's what your goal is, is to hook up, I would totally agree with you, right?

[02:30:42] But I think that, again, there are people who might otherwise be, like, be able to have very fulfilling emotional things. I have a feeling that's what the study is getting at. I don't know where they're not. Because we do see, like, you know, sexual activity. Apparently, that the kids are not having sex is a frequent thing that we hear all the time. I don't know how true that actually is. But that's what we hear all the time. So maybe that's all kind of tied in together.

[02:31:07] The Warner Brothers acquisition by Skydance has now been approved. That's going to be a big, big media company now after they bought Paramount. And now they're going to have Warner Brothers Discovery. They're going to have CNN. They have CBS. HBO. All owned by HBO. All owned by Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison. There are the state AGs that are trying to stop it. Although it seems like it might be a pretty unlikely quest at this point. Yeah.

[02:31:37] Yeah. I mean, EU is trying to kind of stand in, too. But I don't think any of this is going to stop this, unfortunately. Wow. Roku is looking for a purchase as well. They want to get out of the business. Bloomberg says Roku is up for sale. Maybe a media type. You know, David Ellison. Maybe I have a little bit of a long box. Oh, my God, what an awful, awful television that would be.

[02:32:03] Like, it would be the worst of Roku run by the worst people with the worst user interface you can imagine. Just everything dumps. Everything dumps into, like, one awful home screen from hell. I mean, this is literally my nightmare, Leo. And straight out of 1984, it's the TV that watches you. Oh, my God. Well, it already does. But now it would just be even more, like, ham-fisted. And, like, literally the only things that you will ever see on your home screen are things that are, you know, owned by, you know, the Oracle guy's son. Oh, my God. Yeah.

[02:32:33] Roku makes most of its money selling digital advertising. I was looking for names of possible acquirers. I'm not sure if I saw any. They didn't mention any names. Because Walmart bought, what was it, a Vizio. Oh, yeah, that's right. Vizio and Voodoo. Voodoo, which then became Fandango or whatever. So, like, Walmart made sense, like, a decade or so ago when they made that tie up. That, I think, probably would have been the time for Roku to sell. I don't know who buys them now.

[02:33:01] Unless it's, you know, somebody, some Chinese manufacturer, Hisense, or someone who wants to get in on something. TCL, maybe? TCL, maybe, yeah. Typically, I end the show with either a pick of the week or a RIP and a memoriam. In this case, it's both.

[02:33:20] I was, for one brief shining moment, there was a thing called Fable Pool, which was asking people to pitch in to buy tokens on Fable to do something amazing. Unfortunately. Yeah, it's going to be a little tricky right now. It's going to be a little hard. They're trying to decide what to do. Should we switch to GBT55? It just doesn't have the same ring. It was kind of a good idea, though.

[02:33:48] You know, you get to buy in to, you know, doing something amazing. I mean, that is kind of an interesting idea. So, it's kind of like, it's not open source. I want to be clear. But it is kind of like the same, like, you know, pooling of the commons together. Yeah. To have, assuming you make the results available to everyone. That's kind of cool. Yeah. Do you get rewards like a Kickstarter?

[02:34:15] Strangers chip in to fund one ambitious instruction. An AI agent carries it out milestone by milestone with every credit on a public ledger. Funding targets are set by the AI planner. You got to start. There are 10,000. Projects total at least 10,000 credits. Backers chip in any amount from 25 credits. I don't know if you get the benefit of it. I don't think you do. I think you just get the fact that it was created.

[02:34:42] For instance, you know, somebody wants an open source kite flying map. They haven't raised enough credits to do that yet. Open source Spotify clone. That's not a bad idea. Make $1,000 is one of the projects. Yeah. One of them is make $1,000. Yeah. Anyway. More than $1,000 on credits to figure that out.

[02:35:10] They're now trying to figure out, well, now what do we do? What do we do? Is Fable cool now? Can we make our own Fable? Oh, that would be. I'll donate some chat GPT credits to that one. That's a great idea. Well, that concludes this exciting edition of This Week in Tech with the craziest week that was, at least when it comes to AI. It was a crazy week. But I'm glad you guys were here to help break it down.

[02:35:39] Harry McCracken, the technologizer. You'll find him at Fast Company. And don't forget his newsletter, which is, can people just go to Fast Company to find it? Search for Fast Company plugged in or look for the newsletter section on fastcompany.com. Plugged in? Yeah, actually, I just looked for Plugged in and Fast Company and found it right away. So that's the easiest. Every Friday morning. And it's free. And it's free. Harry's the best writer. Very insightful. Really great stuff.

[02:36:07] And apparently becoming the king of vibe coding. Very impressed. Very impressed. Thank you, Harry. Great to see you. Richard Campbell, of course, will be back on Wednesday for Windows Weekly. And don't forget Run As Radio, his fabulous show, and .NET Rocks, that he does with Carl Franklin, at runasradio.com. And the whiskey segment will be back on Wednesday with something from... One more Danish, then it will be Canadian for a while. Yay. Thank you, Richard.

[02:36:35] Great to see you on Wednesday. Pristine, I'll see you even sooner. I'll see you on Tuesday. I will see you on Tuesday. Thanks so much for having me. And so great to see Richard and Harry. And what heck will we get? At first, I was like, oh, it's only going to be Apple stuff. And then Friday happened. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, I think you're going to want to be here Tuesday for MacBreak Weekly because Jason Snell is out, but we got John Gruber to fill in. Wow. And I think John will have some... John's going to have some great takes.

[02:37:04] And some great takes. It's going to be very... I've never had him on a show before. I'm really looking forward to it. Amazing. Yeah, that'll be fun. Talk about a get, my friend. My goodness. We can talk all about Markdown. Yes, the inventor of Markdown. You're right. And actually, Paul Therot is writing a book about Markdown. He lives in Markdown. Crazy. Maybe Gruber thought Therot would be on the show and he wanted to talk to him. Anyway, thank you all for being here.

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[02:38:58] Another Twit is in the can. Bye-bye. This is amazing.