Is AI Really Bringing the End of Software?

Jason Howell
00:00
One developer used Claude to clone Microsoft Office and Adobe, and there was a little bit of Wall Street notice there, also Halo Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, all decompiled by AI and running in a browser tab. Another 720 some odd AI written math papers churned by AI dumped on mathematicians in a single day, and an engineer allegedly planted a $14 bug wrapped in toilet paper inside a conference room at OpenAI. That's coming up next on this episode of the AI Inside Podcast.

00:44
What's going on everybody? Welcome to another episode of AI Inside the Show where we take a look at the AI that is layered throughout the world of technology. I will not call it SI inside.

00:54
By the way, that is not going to happen. It is just AI inside till the end of time, whenever that happens to be. I'm one of your hosts, Jason Howell, joined by Jeff Jarvis.

01:05
How you doing, Jeff?

Jeff Jarvis
01:06
Good. How are you?

Jason Howell
01:07
I'm doing all right. Doing okay. No

Jeff Jarvis
01:10
sig inside. Sigh inside. Sigh inside. Yeah, no no sports

Jason Howell
01:14
illustrated inside. I I see SI and I think of Sports Illustrated immediately. That's just what SI is to me. It's not super intelligence. And it's certainly not the new name for artificial intelligence.

Jeff Jarvis
01:26
No. No, I also see so I having worked at Timecake, I see uh uh Sports Illustrated. Having worked at uh at at Cody Nast, I also see Cy as Psy New House. who was the head of the company.

Jason Howell
01:41
I see. I understand. Okay.

Jeff Jarvis
01:42
Psy had a different uh different meaning there, yeah.

Jason Howell
01:45
Why why the the renaming to SI?

Jeff Jarvis
01:51
My theory is that someone told him Well what we're really building is superintelligence. And he thought, well, that's a better name. And

Jason Howell
01:58
that's a neat name.

Jeff Jarvis
01:59
Yeah.

Jason Howell
02:00
I like that one.

Jeff Jarvis
02:01
And he just misunderstood and didn't get it. And it's, you know.

Jason Howell
02:05
Like, like, does it have anything when I think about it, are they trying to route around public resistance to AI?

Jeff Jarvis
02:14
It makes it worse.

Jason Howell
02:15
Like well it's not a AI. It's SI, it's totally different. And like the people that aren't completely plugged in or in the know might actually be convinced. You're trying to give

Jeff Jarvis
02:24
way too much credit here, Jason.

Jason Howell
02:25
I don't know. I gotta show an end.

Jeff Jarvis
02:28
You're wasting tokens on this.

Jason Howell
02:29
Okay. I love that as a saying for when you're spinning your wheels and you need to just move on. Dude, you're wasting tokens right now. Let's just move on.

Jeff Jarvis
02:41
Let's make that a thing, yes.

Jason Howell
02:42
That should be a thing. That that could be like a t-shirt or something. Maybe that'll be an AI inside t-shirt. Quit wasting tokens and listen to this podcast. So

Jeff Jarvis
02:52
as we start, I want to thank some nice folks uh who watched the show came out to Haverural Mass uh on Saturday as I presented Hot Type. So thank you for coming there. It was great. It was just wonderful.

Jason Howell
03:01
And that was the um the tour and everything? The the Yes so uh

Jeff Jarvis
03:06
I gave a book talk at at uh Historic New England beyond this huge, huge, like ten foot tall screen with a big picture of a lineotype uh on it was wonderful And then went up the hill to the Museum of Printing, where I stood next to Chris Bradford, who's a wonderful volunteer there who knows the linotype, as we were answering question after question after question about the machine and demonstrating it. So it was a lot of fun

Jason Howell
03:27
Awesome. Awesome. I'm happy it went so well. That is really cool.

Jeff Jarvis
03:33
Thanks for letting me plug and plug and plug.

Jason Howell
03:36
Absolutely. Anytime. Hey, this is uh this is your chance to plug.

03:39
This is your show, man. Plug away. I've I plug my podcast consulting services plenty.

03:46
uh plenty and

Jeff Jarvis
03:47
while we're while we're at it then go to jeffdravers. com where you can order an autographed copy of hot type the story of the magnificent machine uh

Jason Howell
03:54
wait a minute your site looks different

Jeff Jarvis
03:56
Or am I happened?

Jason Howell
03:58
Or am I looking at a different like maybe it didn't load properly? No.

Jeff Jarvis
04:04
Oh, my son changed it?

Jason Howell
04:06
Yes. You've got all your books on your site now. Yes ,

Jeff Jarvis
04:11
he didn't tell me he was doing that.

Jason Howell
04:14
Yes, your your site is now updated. Oh wow breaking news. Yeah, you've got Hot Type, the Web We Weave, Gutenberg Parenthesis magazine. Geeks bearing gifts, Gutenberg the Geek, Public Parts, and What Would Google Do?

Jeff Jarvis
04:30
Everything laid out.

Jason Howell
04:32
It looks great.

Jeff Jarvis
04:34
Oh, the about page has a picture of me at the line of type? God.

Jason Howell
04:39
Look at that.

Jeff Jarvis
04:40
That's right. Look

Jason Howell
04:41
at that. I love it. That's great.

04:45
Oh, hey, I just spotted my name on the site. Yay. That's cool.

04:49
Um yeah, man. So your your site got updated. That's really cool.

Jeff Jarvis
04:53
Yeah.

Jason Howell
04:54
Oh, and it has a podcast page. It even imports all of your podcasts on the podcast channel.

Jeff Jarvis
04:59
Jesus, he's been doing

Jason Howell
05:00
dang. Your site is broken, man.

Jeff Jarvis
05:05
I had no idea. I literally had no idea.

Jason Howell
05:07
I love that this is breaking news at the top of the show. Breaking news, Jeff has a new site. And he didn't know that he had a new site.

Jeff Jarvis
05:15
Well so I had an experience uh I was driving back from from New Hampshire where where my son where Jake Jake my son lives, um and he's a a great technologist. Uh uh by the way. And I was bored listening to the book I was listening to.

05:29
So I thought and I was thinking about a new book idea after the one I need to write now and was just thinking it through and I thought, oh let me try Meta, uh Muse And I ended up in this conversation with Meta, or I tried it with Google first, it didn't work with the Dan. MetaMuse, it worked really, really well, where I'd say, well, I'm thinking about this idea, about this and this. What do you think?

05:50
And then I'd say, tell me about these to it's about two towns. Uh tell me more about these two towns in the history. And I kept a conversation going in the car.

Jason Howell
05:58
Oh, okay.

Jeff Jarvis
05:59
Which was really cool because it would it built upon itself. I'm talking back and forth. Yeah, well well I I I ask a question, it comes up with a text answer and I say, can you read that to me?

06:08
And yes, and there was a little button to read it to you. And then I I asked the next time and I said, okay, from now on until you till you tell me otherwise, I'm gonna read it to you. Because it knew I was driving, evidently And then um, so that was all on Monday when I drove back.

06:22
Then on Tuesday at some point, I get a message from Muse saying, oh, I have a correction to what I told you yesterday.

Jason Howell
06:29
I was so I was thinking about what we were talking about yesterday and something just wasn't right. So I went back and

Jeff Jarvis
06:36
Well then it came with another one and it said, uh oh yesterday I told you I was going to do this, I'll do it now. No, but the the cynic in me says this is getting an engagement. But on the other hand, it is pretty cool that this thing is out there kind of looking out for you and now I got nothing better to do, so I looked up some facts for you. I it's an interesting it's the first um time I've had a different relationship with AI in a while.

Jason Howell
07:00
Mm-hmm. So then I have to ask with the Muse agent, did you open up access to Like your email or anything like that?

Jeff Jarvis
07:08
Not while I was driving. No. Oh certainly not. I'm still debating. I'm still debating.

Jason Howell
07:13
I I actually turned mine off.

Jeff Jarvis
07:15
Yeah.

Jason Howell
07:16
You know, the more I thought about it, the more I was like, proactive agent that just has full access to my email. Like, like, it's not like Claude doesn't have access to my email inbox. It does, but I kind of tell it when I want it to go in to find a very specific thing.

Jeff Jarvis
07:33
Yeah.

Jason Howell
07:34
MuseAgent is kind of because it's proactive, it just kind of decides suddenly to like go in there and tr check for this thing and I don't know. The more I thought about it, the more I was like, I don't know how comfortable I feel about this. I'm gonna turn it off for right now.

07:49
I'm not feeling very comfy about it. So I turned it off. It might be Six in one hand, half a dozen in the other.

07:55
You know, it might be um hypocritical to think that like no to muse, but yes to like Claude or or open AI or whatever, but For whatever reason, I don't know, maybe it's the meta connection, you know. Meta 's had a lot of a lot of crap in its history around data collection and all that kind of stuff. And started thinking about that a little bit and I don't know.

08:16
But maybe they're all Cut from the same cloth. I don't know. That's that's where I got with that.

08:22
So I'll be curious to see if you hit a point where you're like, yeah, you know what? Go nuts.

Jeff Jarvis
08:27
Well the issue I've had is it's a it's a solution looking for a problem so often AI is. Right? And so in the case of Google, it's a better search for my email. So I'm glad it has access to my email because it because the search in Google in Gmail is awful

Jason Howell
08:42
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
08:43
And now when I can't find something, I can go to it and I say try. And I sometimes have to have it try a couple times and it finds what I need.

Jason Howell
08:49
Yeah. Um

Jeff Jarvis
08:50
and it's already Google already has my email, so what's the harm, I figure? Um And then in this case of Muse, uh Google didn't do any any uh uh worth a damn in this conversation about the book. It wouldn't remember from one thing to the next.

Jason Howell
09:04
Right. Right.

Jeff Jarvis
09:05
So the museum.

Jason Howell
09:06
It wouldn't have any lasting memory or or the ability to draw connections over days and stuff. Yeah, there's there's certainly appeal there for sure.

Jeff Jarvis
09:13
If if I were on the keyboard, I could do it, but I was driving. So Um it made a difference that it it it showed me a different of a different view. So I yeah, I'm gonna try to start using it in different ways now.

Jason Howell
09:23
Yeah. I

Jeff Jarvis
09:24
because I'm thinking about I take my own daily walk because I have to get my exercise. What kind of conversations could I have with it that'd be informative?

Jason Howell
09:32
Oh wow. So now you're thinking about it as like a a conversational partner or like a parts of it.

Jeff Jarvis
09:38
Now of course it could be BSing me and I could be filled with disinformation and and and hallucinations But if I want to know something, it's it's different from just asking Google search.

Jason Howell
09:51
So here's something that comes to mind around that. Like if I have a conversation with a friend and we're in the room and we're having a glass of wine or whatever or glass of bourbon and talking about some topic, am I more inclined to remember the things that we talked about? and integrate them into my knowledge than I am if I have a similar conversation with a chatbot You know what I mean? Kind of like the quality of the conversation from human to human. Does that kind of imprint that knowledge on me in a different way than me conversing with a chat bot on the same topic?

Jeff Jarvis
10:27
I I I don't know yet. We're gonna find out through experience.

Jason Howell
10:30
I just I'm just curious about that. Like if We find that sure we can do that. We can fill all our time with talking to the chatbot about these things and be like, I'm educating myself, but at the end of the day, is that retained?

10:42
Do we find ourselves on the other side of it like actually smarter because of it? You know? Yeah.

10:48
Random thoughts. Um

Jeff Jarvis
10:50
news. We got news.

Jason Howell
10:51
Yeah, what do you think about the end of software, Jeff? Like uh apparently uh Brandon Thomas is a gentleman who uh is proclaiming the end of software because he used uh was it opus five point five agents eight of them running in parallel to create a bunch of of basically copies um or clones maybe that's a better better way to put it open source clones of the Adobe.

Jeff Jarvis
11:21
Reverse engineered versions.

Jason Howell
11:23
Totally. Reverse engineered completely. This wasn't like stu you know, I've got an idea for a new app and it's a video editors. You know, it was like this is Adobe Premiere I want to make this using AI, you know, and make creating a clone. So he did that with Opus 5. 5, PhotoCraft, Vector Craft, Fil Craft, Lightcraft, PDF, FX, Design Craft, all meant to re uh all meant to clone essentially the different uh pieces of software from Adobe's um creative software suite And

Jeff Jarvis
11:59
then he wasn't he wasn't finished.

Jason Howell
12:01
He wasn't finished. He uh he went on from there. I mean, he did that.

12:06
And then he made the software is is uh is finished or whatever his quote was, that's the end of software um after that because everybody was you know, if you look at at um at some of this stuff. I haven't like downloaded it and used it, but I mean it's getting insane stars on GitHub. If you look at them, they look very similar to the Adobe counterparts.

12:29
So everybody was paying attention. Then less than a week later, like I mean actually days later, he announces that he's going after Microsoft Office Suite. Right.

12:38
Does WordCraft, Gridcraft, Deck, uh Deckcraft, which is uh like PowerPoint. Um and uh yeah, and now he's making versions of those as well, all spun up from AI.

Jeff Jarvis
12:51
So it's fascinating. It's absolutely fascinating. I I think part of the reason for the GitHub likes is also on principle, like, oh go get go get the man, right?

13:00
Yeah, regardless of the quality. Um and I've heard company people say, Well, I already have a you know a a contract with Adobe and uh and I'm not gonna trust it yet But I see a much bigger lesson here, which is that um it it's it's I'm trying to think if I had some pithy label for it. I don't. It's an age of functionality.

13:24
Right. And then anybody can say, I want to do this and it can do it. Now that's not just you sit down and say, well, I want to start editing photos and you can tell it to edit photos and it's going to do that.

13:32
That's not the point in a way. But anything that you need to do, you can create now Um some will take more effort than others. This was not easy for them to do.

13:40
This took effort.

Jason Howell
13:41
No.

Jeff Jarvis
13:42
This took time. But but surprise a little time.

Jason Howell
13:49
multiples of these clones.

Jeff Jarvis
13:51
But compared to the cost of developing these programs in the first place.

Jason Howell
13:55
Okay. Yes. But, okay, compared to the cost of developing them, who is he making these for, first of all?

14:03
Um, I guess they're open source, so I guess they're for anyone. But I'm just thinking of like the everyday person is not gonna spend all of those tokens to make themselves a clone of Photoshop. because the clone is going to cost them way more than it would if they just got themselves Photoshop.

14:18
But I guess he's not making it as a user. He's making it for a school, I suppose.

Jeff Jarvis
14:22
And he's making a point.

Jason Howell
14:23
Yeah, that's true. Bigger than that it's a point. Yeah Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
14:26
But if you are a software company, beware beware. That's part of the lesson, yes. But that's that's just Marshall McLuhan said that any new medium uses uh as content the old medium that came before. And in essence, what's happening here is this is the first step of this, is say, well, I can replicate the Adobe suite and the Microsoft suite.

Jason Howell
14:46
Right.

Jeff Jarvis
14:46
That's cool. All right, what can you do now that I haven't seen before? How much easier is it to make an a what we would have thought of before is a new shrink wrapped product?

14:56
I'm old enough to remember when they actually were shrink wrapped rather than the subscription. Our friendly O'Laporte is having um his various agents remake his advertising suite to run his business. It hadn't been done in in years and years and years, and so he's doing that.

15:19
Um he the cost of him uh hiring software people to do this would have been impossible. Ridiculous, right Back in the day he spent a fortune on his new website with um wasn't WordPress, it was uh the other one, I forget. Um

Jason Howell
15:34
wasn't Squares.

Jeff Jarvis
15:36
No, no, no, no, no. WordPress uh Drupal Right?

Jason Howell
15:40
Drupal. That's right. That's what

Jeff Jarvis
15:41
it was Drupal. But that cost them a fortune just to adapt Drupal to the website. Right.

15:47
So if you're a company now and you say I need a function that I don't find on the market I can make it. Or I can have someone make it for much less expense. Or if you're an entrepreneur, you can come along and say I can make something.

16:01
Now are you gonna be Microsoft? No, because the the the the the economics are much smaller and the barrier to entry, as you've just proven, is much lower, but you can make a service and you can sell it.

Jason Howell
16:14
You can make a service, you could sell it. I think a couple of things come to mind is uh what about support? If you're spinning these things up, now you're on the hook for supporting it, but I guess if what if your ultimate goal is to create a software using AI and then have that be your business, I suppose you'd offer support as well.

16:32
But what does that look like when you're creating this from the ground up with AI? You know a lot of people like they might not have any sort of coding knowledge whatsoever. That's why they're using AI.

16:42
And then when it comes to support and maintenance, you know, is the A is is are those same systems good enough to continually do that in, you know In perpetuity. I mean they might be. And then there's the the whole idea of, and you mentioned it, this this being a pre a representation of something that already exists.

17:04
And one thing that we have said many times on this show, and that's pretty understandable or understood about AI right now, is that there isn't a whole lot of novel. uh uh novelty coming out of AI. It it all kind of depends on things that existed before it.

17:20
So when you're talking about this software, it's super impressive that you can look at it and go, oh wow, that looks a lot like uh Adobe Premiere. But like, yeah, it looks like it because it existed before that. And so it's always kind of like copying things that already existed.

17:35
Where does the novelty come from? Does it always is it always dependent? on a thing existing beforehand or

Jeff Jarvis
17:44
Okay, or so two answers to two questions. First, support. Last week we talked about the CEO of Mistral, uh, Arthur Mensch, or Arthur Mensch, I'm not sure how he pronounces it, um, uh when asked, well, how are you gonna make money if you're making this stuff for free?

17:59
And he said it's support. And integration, installation, and so on and so forth. It's the Red Hat model.

Jason Howell
18:04
Yeah, right. That right

Jeff Jarvis
18:06
that right, Linux is free, but there is a there is a business to be had in integration, training, ad adaptation, and so on and so forth. Right? So I think that testing um uh I I I you know I might I might somebody might make this version of Adobe now because it's open, somebody else can come along and say, well I found a hundred flaws and my version of it, my fork of it, is better, but you're gonna pay me for that.

Jason Howell
18:31
Right.

Jeff Jarvis
18:32
You can get it for free. It's right free over there But you can have my safer version here. Or I'm gonna I'm gonna uh convert your office from Microsoft Office to freebie office, right?

Jason Howell
18:44
Yeah, that's no small feat. And so requiring and training and all that. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
18:50
Yeah. So that's that's the I think the first question is it's a much smaller business You don't you there there's there's no barrier entry. But look aga I always look at WordPress.

19:01
And years and years ago when Polaris, the venture capital fund, called me and said, we're talking to this guy named uh Mark MacMulliweg. He's got uh there there already is a competitive uh blog platform. He wants to make his open source, he wants us to invest.

19:16
Is this insane? Of course it wasn't. um because he built something bigger as a result. So I think we we can potentially see that kind of open development going on.

19:29
Point one. Then point two, the creativity. I think it's a really good point.

19:32
And pardon me, I'm going to do this. It's a drinking game. Get your mugs ready, people.

19:35
I'm going to mention Gutenberg. Um because um uh one of my favorite lessons from studying the history of technology and media is that it took a century and a half after Gutenberg before we saw real creativity of invention with print. The first fifty years was people reprinting what the scribes had done and that was the ancients and it flooded the market and by the year fifteen hundred the business was in shambles.

20:07
The industry was in shambles. Publishers were writing to the Pope saying, Please help, I've got a warehouse filled with this stuff. I don't know what they expected the Pope to do.

20:13
But um it was failing. It was Martin Luther that saved them, and that wasn't with whole books, that was with pamphlets, Flugschriften uh that were sent out. That was an an innovation that happened.

20:23
But still, even for another century on, until 1600, a few years either inside of that, there was very little innovation until print became so common. that people felt it was a tool they could use and we saw the invention of the essay with Montaine, the modern novel with Cervantes, a market for printed plays for Shakespeare, and the newspaper Those were all innovations with print, creativity with print that didn't come for a century and a half. And I'm not saying we gotta wait for a century and a half now, but I think it it's a Perfectly predictable pattern to say the first thing you're gonna do is copy what was.

20:56
Prove what could be until you tend to break open the thinking to say, oh, I never thought this stuff could do X or Or if I had, it would have been way too expensive to ever imagine making this. So I think you can also see a lot more niche software where if so I was just on a call with um uh Stony Bruce, the Allen Aldo Center for Communicating Science. I'm a visiting professor there.

21:20
And I was meaningless and useless in the call because it was all about these uh facilitators who go out and do events. and the software they need for customer support and so on and so forth. And so they're using um uh tools they got they got um uh Salesforce, but they also have something called HubSpot and uh it's they're just doing it and it's gonna be great and it's wonderful.

21:42
Well somebody created HubSpot and it's been around. And it's aimed at the academic market and it's cheaper than the Salesforce. And so I hope I'm not revealing any trade secrets here.

21:51
But it was interesting to me to hear how they have a niche need. Well, you could go even nichier now because what of what they do and the way they travel around and facilitate, I could see someone coming along and saying, well, I can replicate all of HubSpot, but I can do it differently because I know what your needs are Or someone in the center can come along to AI and say, take this, replicate it, but I need these things done differently. And so I think I think rather than seeing

Jason Howell
22:17
it around

Jeff Jarvis
22:17
huge like Microsoft Word for everybody. You're gonna see, I think, more niche things. Right.

22:27
Or for screenwriters. Well, we've seen it. We've screenwriters.

22:29
Right. Right.

Jason Howell
22:30
Specific to the needs of that group. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

Jeff Jarvis
22:33
If you go back in the day, um Donald Knuth uh started uh Tex, which was a word processor that could do formulae and and and and and and such for academic papers. And it was used very much for that. So that that kind of specialization I think we'll see more and more. Now then the next question becomes standardization. Well, if I write in Jeff's word processing and I want to send it to Jason's word processing, how do I know that you can read it in yours?

Jason Howell
23:00
Yeah, right.

Jeff Jarvis
23:00
That's been the advantage. I mean, I hate Microsoft Word. But I can convert out of drive to Word and and on from there.

23:09
So that's going to be a challenge, but I think it's an answerable challenge. So I think it's a whole new dawn of a new age. And um I I think you really hit on the on the point.

23:20
The creativity is where it's going to get compelling. It's neat to have copied these things, but now show us what you can do.

Jason Howell
23:27
Well and it's and it's you know it maybe it's a little naive of me to play the devil's advocate and say, you know, but it's always just a copy, because again, we've seen how fast these things have evolved in the last couple of years That might be the case now, that might not, for whatever random reason, possibly even right around the corner, not be the case in the future when it comes to this technology. And so if this is where we're at right now, what you know That that is a recurring theme of AI is if we're here now, imagine where we'll be in a year. Every year that y someone says that, myself included, because because of the rate of change that's happening here.

24:07
And so it's probably the same thing here, right? Right now it's it's like you said, easy to see it as a copy or easy to prove this with a copy and probably not too far in the distant future in the future. It will be proving itself with things that are to copy that are truly novel potentially.

Jeff Jarvis
24:27
So I haven't seen any comment from Adobe. I've been looking for it and haven't been able to find it. I just looked up their stock.

24:32
In the last month it's down 10%. But that's not from this this announcement of uh when did he create this stuff? Do you know?

Jason Howell
24:39
This was like a week ago. Well, when did he create it? Or

Jeff Jarvis
24:43
no, no, when did when did the world see it? When did it come out?

Jason Howell
24:45
I feel like it was a week ago. I think it happened last Thursday.

Jeff Jarvis
24:51
The drop occurred before that, really. And if you look at the last six months, it's pretty mu it's even. Um and so it hasn't affected Adobe yet Which is interesting. I think the that the uh either the market doesn't isn't savvy enough to be on this stuff or the belief is that's cute. Well, but people aren't going to give up the other stuff.

Jason Howell
25:12
Yeah, I mean, but but it's also interesting that like when uh uh when uh uh anthropic you know released plugins for Claude, that impacted the software market. Mm-hmm. That it didn't have a long term impact, I don't think, but it certainly impacted it immediately where immediately remember that that like month or two where that kept happening and the news reports are like Kind of similar to this guy.

25:37
Software is over. Oh my goodness. Did you see what Anthropic just released?

25:40
All of the software that walks in the same circles as that? Like why would you use them? You'd just use Anthropic.

25:46
Things settled out So it would be kind of surprising to me if this had no impact on uh on Wall Street or maybe Wall Street's learning. Like, oh maybe maybe software isn't over. These things do matter and they are they are impactful, but maybe they don't Immediately surmise the end of software.

Jeff Jarvis
26:02
So so there's there's the Clayton Christensen uh uh disruption question. Uh if you go to my old business uh newspapers, may they rest in peace. Right, we saw disruption coming along in the forum.

26:14
No, Craigslist didn't kill newspapers. The internet put buyers and sellers directly together. And um They couldn't respond because they couldn't cut off their nose despite their face.

26:24
If if they tried to respond, they would have cannibalized themselves and they didn't know what to do and they ended up messed off. So if you're adopt I hope at Adobe right now there is high-level meetings saying what's a uh courageous strategy against this? Mm-hmm.

26:40
Right? And maybe and maybe you have uh a hundred versions of Adobe for different may maybe they should be the specializers and they should be the ones. The other thing is as a teacher, when I was at CUNY, we had students use Adobe, and although cross, if you're doing making media, you they're using Adobe Suite.

26:58
And it's expensive as hell for students.

Jason Howell
27:00
It's super expensive. I mean that's part of the that's part of the reason why why GitHub has so many stars on these things.

Jeff Jarvis
27:06
Yes.

Jason Howell
27:06
Because people who are in cre in the creative field and maybe not even creative industry, regular users, regular people that aren't like professionals or whatever want access to Adobe products, want to use a Photoshop or a Premiere or whatever, but the pricing is so out of scale for the individual user that it um that Adobe has created a lot of enemies with with users because of how they priced and how they removed ownership and kind of went for an all cloud subscription model. Right.

Jeff Jarvis
27:37
That was the that was the unshadowed

Jason Howell
27:39
moment. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I think that's part of the reason why you're seeing a also a lot of support for what this guy is doing.

27:47
Then you've got the video game industry, right? Which is also kind of going through something similar Uh this article from Kotaku uh says we might be cooked, dun dun dun, because there are browser playable ports of Halo. Uh C E uh Grand Theft Auto Vice City, The Simpsons Hit and Run, Call of Duty, Black Ops, Skate 3.

28:08
Only a few of those have I ever played more than a couple of minutes in. And Kotaku is saying it's all because of Opus five point five, which I believe is exactly what um the previous um Guy, yeah, yeah, that's what he used as well. So apparently Opus 5.

28:24
5, really good at creating copies of things. Um Kotaku says it's extremely good at decompiling. Hundreds of these AI decompiled ports have shown up in the past week.

28:35
uh playable in the browser uh apparently no so that you wouldn't need an install on some of these um you know uh I don't know how well these things are playable. This is this is a different story. This isn't the AI model recreating the game.

28:52
This is the AI model decompiling the code and making it runnable. And and so it's kind of Yeah, it's it's definitely uh different. Um and they're not perfect either.

29:04
Um ninety-nine percent of functions present in some of these games. 83% bite exact to the original, so not 100% when you're talking Modern Warfare 2 is one example. That's uh what I'm uh talking about there.

29:18
Um But anyway, some of them working on online servers and with a low ping rate. So you know, um impressive, possible, not perfect, but kind of shows I don't know. This this seems to walk more in the territory of straight up like pirating stuff.

29:37
Or am I going to get rotten tomatoes thrown thrown at me for that? But that's kind of what this feels like if you're deconstructing the code and then reconstructing it. It's a little bit along those lines.

29:49
So anything can be cloned.

Jeff Jarvis
29:53
Yep. Yep. The next stories we get to, the disruption in that AI causes is coming in places we didn't necessarily expect.

Jason Howell
30:03
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
30:04
Right. Everybody thought there was going to be certain and there were all these charts. These jobs are the most vulnerable to AI.

Jason Howell
30:09
That's true, yes, right.

Jeff Jarvis
30:11
And who would have thought that game designer or um uh productivity app coder would have been the first ones to be hit. Or the next one Or

Jason Howell
30:25
or the next one, the uh

Jeff Jarvis
30:27
Mathematicians.

Jason Howell
30:28
Which, you know, again there's a headline underneath this uh this overlay I promise you. I can give it to you.

Jeff Jarvis
30:36
I can give it to you. It is breathtaking, devastating. Mathemat Mathematics reels after a new open AI release.

Jason Howell
30:46
Yeah, which sounds like a story we've talked about before. Yep. But this is another one of those times, right?

30:53
This is another time where OpenAI has basically posted a GitHub repo. Called Simply Math. I think fully under uh fully uh lowercase, by the way, so really understated math.

31:05
And it has 722 manuscripts 372 families of results, 17 fields, all from an unreleased, unnamed internal model. So we don't know exactly which model of OpenAIs was doing this. About 4,000 open math problems attempted.

31:22
Um I guess around three hours of ChatGPT pro compute per result that was actually kept. Just giving you kind of some of the numbers behind the math dump here. OpenAI told Scientific American that nearly all of it came from a single prompt from us to a single agent.

31:44
So they're flexing here. They're like, yeah, you see what we did with one age one agent? And I mean, as we've talked about when this has happened before, the the field of mathematics is just they're they're really trying to figure out like, okay, what's going on?

32:00
Is this okay? What's happening to our industry? What what what is happening?

32:04
You know, you've worked months, if not years, for a solution to something. And then OpenAI six an agent on it and it along with seven hundred and some odd other things just get salt.

Jeff Jarvis
32:16
And and so i it's not the Amazon warehouse worker who's first disrupted, it's the PhD in mathematics working on on weird things. Yeah, they wouldn't even call it an industry, it's a discipline.

Jason Howell
32:26
Yeah, right. That's a better word for it.

Jeff Jarvis
32:28
Well, if they were an industry, they make more money doing it. So um so the New York Times the daily, and I didn't I I don't listen to the daily as a rule, but I saw segments of it. Steven Strogatz, a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, was talking about uh this uh on on the daily this week and broke down in tears Which is a little uh dramatic. I haven't seen it.

Jason Howell
32:55
I mean I yeah, but I but I can understand. Could you imagine if your life work was on something and you you've spent your life working with the kind I mean, and the you know, part of this is just, I guess this is just reality, right? This is a lesson in in living uh in reality, but you spent your life practicing this discipline, improving, you know, you've got your targets on the wall, all of the like at that point it's your identity And your identity and who you are is wrapped up in your ability to focus for years on this pro on this problem and hopefully at the end prove that you are smart enough, you've got the the the background and the history and the and the experience to work your way through it and be the person that figured that out.

33:41
And then open AI comes along and dumps a bunch of it on the table and just says, All right, next, let's go. You know? It's so I can understand the tears You know, I would I would I would probably be pretty wrecked if that happened to me.

Jeff Jarvis
33:53
So the headline uh in the uh for the daily piece is when I when AI comes for your purpose in life.

Jason Howell
33:59
There you go. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Sure.

Jeff Jarvis
34:01
In the span of just a few months, AI systems have solved some of the biggest outstanding problems in math, adding mathematicians to the list of those terrified losing their job in the technology. So I think I think you raise a good point for all of that. Who would have thought that, again, that mathematicians would be the buggy whip makers of our time?

Jason Howell
34:22
That's true.

Jeff Jarvis
34:23
Uh and and I've seen this fear uh around I mean I write about in hot type. It's about typesetters who ended up being replaced by Adobe. Postscript did in a half millennium of technology of printing.

Jason Howell
34:38
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
34:39
One fell swoop.

Jason Howell
34:40
Right.

Jeff Jarvis
34:40
That that typesetting and making type was was eliminated by Adobe. Um and the unions, part of the story is that the unions didn't see that coming fully. And they insisted that they had to be the ones to operate it and control it.

35:01
And they benefited for three-quarters of a century until the next technologies came along, punch, paper, tape, photo composition, computers, computers in newsrooms, and eventually PostScript. And then they realized they they were toast and the union head whose tough bargaining resulted in the death of six of nine New York newspapers in the 60s. After that strike and after those papers died, then he saw the first time a computer iphenating and justifying text. And that's when he realized.

35:38
We're screwed. That's where he changed his strategy and said, I'm gonna have a strategy of um uh lifetime job guarantees for my remaining members. And the last one retired from the New York Times uh uh in 2012.

Jason Howell
35:56
Okay.

Jeff Jarvis
35:56
With that guarantee from the 1970s.

Jason Howell
35:58
Wow.

Jeff Jarvis
35:59
So There's lessons from the past in technology. Again, we wouldn't have thought that m mathematics would be it. But here's the thing, Jason, that makes me You're the empathetic nice guy in this in this duo. I'm I'm a little less so because so Strogats went on and on about uh to the Times about how you thought you were gonna solve a problem and be a hero.

Jason Howell
36:22
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
36:23
And so the th that's a very pardon me self-centered thing.

Jason Howell
36:28
Go ahead and pop the collar for that. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
36:30
Right. I solved the uh the Howell Jarvis conundrum Right.

Jason Howell
36:35
It was me.

Jeff Jarvis
36:36
Yeah. And I get that. I get that. I like attention. I like knowing this and that. But that's not a higher calling

Jason Howell
36:43
No.

Jeff Jarvis
36:44
The higher calling is is knowledge. And um and if that were your really your higher calling, I'm sorry, but you've got to end up welcoming your new colleague in math. I think you've got to say especially as an academic, you're not just a buggy whip maker and you can't make the buggies anymore, or you're not just a typesetter and you don't have typeset anymore. You're in an academic field and academics are all about more knowledge in the world, and you should welcome something that's going to create more knowledge and learning. And that may be unempathetic of me, and I'm sorry, and I get it, but I think that there's a different obligation upon academics.

Jason Howell
37:28
And so what do the mathematicians do when they now are continue to face the reality? that this is not going to happen less. This is going to happen more.

37:42
And if they got into mathematics to, you know, spend uh their their life's work is driving to answers on things that were once unsolved and being the b being the part of the solution. And now you've got a machine that's really great at at uh getting us closer and closer to solving these things. And mind you, it's not perfect But it's a good start, as Bradley, who's watching our live stream, says, you know, I think they tried it on 4,000 problems, solved around 10% and concentrated in particular areas of map.

38:12
But it's getting there, right? And that's kind of the point. This is where we're at right now.

38:15
That's gonna change over time. If you're in mathematics and that was your par that uh drink paradigm before and that has shifted now What do you do? Do you just like go to Burger King or like what what is the the new mathematics?

Jeff Jarvis
38:32
So I say that the lesson the typographers tell of us. is that if you can control the technology, do. If you can't, get out of the way.

38:40
So for 75 years, the typesetters could control the technology of the line of tape. in the machine and they prospered as a result. And they didn't see soon enough that they were eliminated.

38:51
Same discussion we just had about if you're Microsoft or Adobe. If you're gonna disrupt if you're disrupted, how do you disrupt yourself and take part in that? So I would and I don't know Lord knows I am not a mathematician.

39:03
I didn't even take calculus, folks. I don't know anything. I'm of that age.

39:08
I didn't have to. So the first thing I would say is come up with more problems. What things did we think were insoluble before?

39:19
That we can now try to attack and be the jockey who rides this machine.

Jason Howell
39:26
If you're the mathematician, if you're a mathematician that normally would have been going through these things it through these things in the legacy way that you do them. And now you know that these systems are potentially capable of solving these things much, much, much quicker. I mean, to the nth degree. W you know, would you be okay suddenly turning to these tools and being like, Well, you can't if you if you you know You gotta play the game that's in front of you, not the game that you think it should be. So now I, from a mathematician's brain, am going to use these systems to help propel my work forward and and the work of of this Like could you still be involved in that regard or does it

Jeff Jarvis
40:06
Yeah, I think you can because I I think you c again you you can look around the world because what what does mathematics try to do? It's not always just theoretical, obviously. The first one that started this rampage of fear was one around fluid dynamics that have applications.

40:23
So what are the things that you could imagine you could now put this machine to to solve things that you didn't think were solvable before? I saw another video as I was I was taking my walk this morning and uh the book that I was listening to bored me so I was watching TikTok Uh while walking. And there's dog dog crap.

40:39
Been there

Jason Howell
40:40
done that. Been there done that.

Jeff Jarvis
40:41
Yep. Um and by the way, I have a bad relationship. I have bad karma this week with crap. Yesterday I'm sitting in City Hall Park. I'm on a video call, so my laptop is open, and one of Craig Newmark's friends, a pigeon, craps on my keyboard.

Jason Howell
40:59
Oh no, that's horrible.

Jeff Jarvis
41:01
Yes.

Jason Howell
41:01
That's horrible.

Jeff Jarvis
41:02
Yes.

Jason Howell
41:03
And so what do you even do? Like

Jeff Jarvis
41:06
Well, I'm proud of myself, Jason. I'm proud of myself. Because if I were really uh ruined by social media, my reflex would have been to take out my phone and take a picture of the crap with the keyboard. Yeah. I did not. You would have

Jason Howell
41:18
you would have had some engagement on that one.

Jeff Jarvis
41:20
I would have had a lot of engagement on it. It was very picturesque. It was right over the G and H, right at the spot, right?

Jason Howell
41:25
I mean at least you could have snapped a photo and decided later.

Jeff Jarvis
41:29
I didn't. I reached into my briefcase and I luckily had a couple napkins from a prior lunch in my briefcase and I got it off of the keyboard while still on the call Um

Jason Howell
41:39
my goodness.

Jeff Jarvis
41:41
So anyway, uh and today I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm watching my TikTok as I'm and there's boom uh dog stuff right in the middle of my path as I'm walking. So as I'm watching I see an interviewer, I think it'll get it from the New York Times, I I think it was one of those, that said to somebody from OpenAI, um, uh Jensen Wong says this is just software. and you say this is an alien mind, which is it?

42:03
And the open eye goes, it's an alien mind, because we don't know what it's doing. It's all this mysterious stuff. It's not mysterious.

42:10
It's just you don't you haven't grocked it yet. You haven't figured it out yet. And yes, you created it and you didn't figure it out, but you're not the first to create things that people don't know how they operate.

42:19
We didn't know how why aspirin worked for a very, very, very long time. But it worked, and we took it. And um uh we didn't see that as some horrible mystery of the universe uh until we got to the point where chemistry told us more about how aspirin operates.

42:34
I don't even know whether we still know whether fully how aspirin works. So my point is there is one here, believe it or not. My my point is that um we see too much as mysterious and unsolvable.

42:50
And I think that the reflex should be to say, let's find more mysteries we could try to solve. My friend David Weinberger, who has a new book coming out, has written a number of wonderful things. He was a co-author of the Clute Manifesto.

43:02
And he said in one of his earlier books that there is no such thing as an accident. It's just something that happened that we can't explain.

Jason Howell
43:09
Right. Yeah, I've heard that one. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
43:10
Right. And there is no such thing And in that sense it's mystery. It's just something we can't explain yet.

43:17
So I would think mathematicians should be seeing an entire new vista. of things to go after. And it goes back to your earlier point about creativity.

43:26
That rather than taking this, and and and they are creative. Their Lord knows they're creative. They're creative in the in the in the problems they come up with and they're creative in how they solve them.

43:35
But now they have new opportunities for all kinds of new creativity. So easy for me to say, because I'm retired. Um but um I think they've got to look at it as an opportunity.

Jason Howell
43:49
I mean, it is easy for us to say we're not in that position. At the same time, there is not a whole lot you can do.

Jeff Jarvis
43:57
No. Exactly.

Jason Howell
43:58
The G, you know, once again, the genie is not going in the bottle. That might seem unfair. That might make you incredibly pissed about the state of the world. I know it makes a lot of people pissed and maybe they are rightfully so pissed about it, but it's just the facts. And so how do you move forward?

Jeff Jarvis
44:17
Yeah, and I think the larger question, the fun the interesting thing is that university ever since Sputnik Universities have over and over and over again emphasized STEM and de-emphasized humanities and social sciences. And I think that we see in in in computer sci computer programming, now in math, probably in physics next, um we're gonna see the STEM uh disciplines affected profoundly by this technology in a way that the humanities can't be because humanities are gushy. It's about humans. We're gushy.

Jason Howell
44:54
Yeah. Right? Yeah. Um

Jeff Jarvis
44:55
and social science I've always thought is a bit of an oxymoron uh to try to turn in uh studying us into a science.

Jason Howell
45:03
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
45:04
But I'll put that I'll put that next to if if there's if there's STEM on this side and there's humanities on the other side, social science is somewhere in the middle. I don't know which way it goes to, right? But the humanities are the areas we need more of now And that are going to be less affected by this, but at the same but universities have been cutting their humanities.

45:23
And I think it's going to be it's going to turn out to be a huge mistake. Because if you're a kid going into college right now. Uh we had this on on the on the show a few weeks ago.

45:31
53,000 fewer computer science majors. Down uh eight to eleven percent across the gradations. Uh they're not going to computer science.

45:40
Now you wanted to go in and be a math major? Yeah, yeah, sure. There's plenty of uses for it.

45:47
I wouldn't dissuade a kid now.

Jason Howell
45:49
But I wonder how those numbers are going to shift. And I wonder. I wonder if the younger generation being you know, and maybe there's no truth to this, maybe the younger generation is anti-AI because they're like, no, don't ruin the our future or whatever.

46:03
But I'm sure there are plenty in the younger generation. that it's just, you know, again, it's kind of part of the oxygen, it's just the way it is, and so they don't know any different. I wonder if they're more inclined to sign up for mathematics because of the capabilities of these models coupled with mathematics and that creates kind of like a new tangent to the discipline.

Jeff Jarvis
46:20
That's the way they should be thinking. I I agree, but I'm not sure whether they will. And if your goal is to get a PhD and p teach, if there's fewer students, then there's fewer roles for that.

46:30
Right. That's like being an English an English major going to get an English PhD right now. Not a good path.

Jason Howell
46:35
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
46:35
And then again, what's next? Physics, chemistry, uh biochemistry. Uh these fields are going to Uh and i you can look at it two ways. You can say, uh-oh, this is trouble, or oh my god, just what you just said a second ago, the opportunities are new and amazing.

Jason Howell
46:54
Yeah. What does it open up?

Jeff Jarvis
46:56
Yep.

Jason Howell
46:56
Yep.

Jeff Jarvis
46:56
Yep.

Jason Howell
46:57
Fascinating.

Jeff Jarvis
46:58
Fascinating times. Fascinating.

Jason Howell
47:00
Man, and that's just the first block.

Jeff Jarvis
47:02
Yeah, that's the world.

Jason Howell
47:04
We're gonna have to have to ramble through some of this.

Jeff Jarvis
47:06
Well I can talk really fast, Jason. Is there a problem for me? We can go to the lightning round. Don't type that.

Jason Howell
47:11
That's awesome. Usually by this point in the show we're getting to the lightning round, but we haven't even got to our middle block yet. So we're gonna take a break.

47:18
Uh patreon. com slash AI Inside Show real quick for those of you who surprise it. Support us on a deeper level.

47:26
I'm just gonna re yeah, I'm just gonna tear through the rest. No, I'm not. We got lots of stuff to talk about, but I want to thank Neil Wood.

47:32
I want to thank Brandon Kester, just a couple of our

Jeff Jarvis
47:35
slowly Patrons, Neil Wood, Neil Wood Kester. Thank you.

Jason Howell
47:39
Brandon Kester. Thank you both. Thank you for your support.

47:43
Thank you for uh watching and enjoying the daily, which I I continue to do for uh patrons. So, you know, you sign up, you get a daily podcast. What uh you know, you thought one a week was a lot.

Jeff Jarvis
47:54
Yeah.

Jason Howell
47:55
What more could you want? There you go. Tell me actually what more you could want because I would actually really would like to know.

48:02
Going to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about Argan. I've been playing around with it because I've had it for like a week and a half I forgot to tell you about that, Jeff.

48:10
Uh we're gonna talk about

Jeff Jarvis
48:12
once again he keeps these things from me I thought we were friends. I

Jason Howell
48:16
I get so busy. I'm sorry.

Jeff Jarvis
48:18
Shees. News

Jason Howell
48:20
wonderful. We're gonna talk about open AI and the bug, the mysterious bug. Um Yeah, lots lots to talk about.

48:28
But uh we're gonna take a break and we'll do it right on the other side of that. So hang tight. All right.

48:34
Gemini for Argentine.

Jeff Jarvis
48:35
I'm crying like a mathematician right now.

Jason Howell
48:39
Look, I'm not supposed to when I have early access to these things, I'm not supposed to talk about it. But I really should have told you I'm sorry This is Google's lit a newest uh frontier model. So we've been wondering and we've been talking on this show, when the heck is Google gonna finally release a delayed version of Gemini.

48:58
It's been delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed. Well now Gemini 4 Argan is rolling out widely, more widely as of yesterday. Pro and Ultra subscribers will get it in the Gemini app.

49:08
You'll get it in AI mode and search. Um, I think it's coming to um antigrav. I think I think it's going to anti-gravity, of course, but I don't really use anti -gravity.

49:17
Um, but it was first announced September 30th. So a few weeks ago, um small group of of of folks uh got access. I was I was invited to be part of the early access.

49:29
So but but I will tell you something. I was invited and I'm really happy that I am. Like I it it's you know, there's a little bit of kind of like self satisfaction when speaking.

49:39
Um, but boy, I see what some of the other early invites are doing with these things, and I'm like, wow, I'm I'm like using it for pretty basic stuff by comparison. But uh maybe I shouldn't say that out loud. But it is really interesting to finally see Google step into that frontier space again.

49:56
I wouldn't say that they are completely caught up. But um my experience with Argon has has definitely been positive. You know, I think people who are using it to code have been doing some really impressive things uh with it.

50:08
I did finally try, like I was like, what if I could one shot a Commodore 64 game, you know, just as like an idea, the this game called Lords of Conquest that I played so much when I was a kid And uh, you know, it it didn't quite one shot it to full working order, but it was kind of like the beginning of it. And I had never really done that before. I really haven't played with coding and these things because I'm always like, Well, what am I gonna code?

50:32
Like I have no ideas and um That was a good intro, I'd say, to it. Um, but I've seen people create some really impressive three-dimensional kind of representations uh embedded into web web pages and I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis
50:48
There's also Argon for robotics too, so it's it's in other fields here.

Jason Howell
50:52
Yeah. Um Yeah, I mean it's it's good to see Google finally kind of showing, okay, here's here's what we've been working on, right? Um I really use it more for different aspects of my business, which is mostly what I'm using AI for these days.

51:10
Prime uh Specifically, I was using it to kind of like come up with ideas around a proposal that I needed to give to a client. And I and I normally would use Claude for that. And just to try and summarize this quickly, I used Claude the way I normally would to come up with two distinct offerings inside of the proposal and I wanted them to Each stand on their own, but and and you know, when you compare them to each other, offer kind of different but equal in different ways sorts of of gains, you know, for different price points or whatever.

51:44
And Claude did fine on paper when I brought it into Argan and kind of c had it compare. A, it was super fast. I found Argon to be incredibly fast.

51:54
Speed was definitely something I noticed compared to the Claude world that I'm used to being in So that was good. And then Argon was really good at um at figuring out two very distinct and and proving to me that they were distinct, but both uh s uh capable in their own merits. And then when I went back and looked at the clot output, I realized like it was not nearly as bulletproof as I thought when I first looked at it and Argon was quick to Argan also, as I was working with it over time at some point, went back to an earlier decision it had made and it was like actually my my new analysis of what I was talking about earlier.

52:35
has changed because I I thought about it differently or whatever it you know, however it put it. And it it I don't know, it it kind of showed this this thinking where it went back in time to what it had offered earlier and corrected it, which I thought was a little different from what I'm used to because I'm used to these models staying so firmly into the latest command What is the latest thing that you asked me? And not really going outside of that and revisiting any of its earlier work, essentially.

53:02
And Argan did that. And uh I was really happy that it did, because I was like, oh, that kind of changes things. So I don't know.

53:08
It was an interesting it's been an interesting week playing around with it. Um and I think that, you know, it'll improve over time. I'll be curious to see what other people think of it over time.

Jeff Jarvis
53:17
So Life Hackers David Nealed uh said that it um overall the models are now at par with each other. Which I think is a big deal. When people thought people were writing off Google from the Frontier game.

53:30
And they took longer, but I think they took longer to make it better so they'd be here. Uh looking at the summary of what's possible said superior speed, better visuals and map detail, uh richer information context. Um gave it a he gave it a task in generating TV show pitches and uh Gemini was faster uh versus ChatGPT.

53:51
Yeah, okay, so you can get slop faster. That's not terribly impressive. Um it's designed for complex engineering and science, robotics development, because it understands spatial problems, get into real-world models.

54:03
And the Google emphasizes that they've uh uh upgraded the security uh uh gates so that uh it makes it tougher to do bad things. But we know that argument that You're never ahead of the bad guys, A and B.

Jason Howell
54:19
Right.

Jeff Jarvis
54:20
If you're trying to guard against bad guys, that makes this a less useful model. So That's the trade-off. So good. I'm glad Google's uh uh back in back in the uh in the race and playing.

Jason Howell
54:32
Yeah, I'd say it's I'd say it's within the realm. It it's definitely in that uh that kind of uh fr the the race of of the frontier. Um and I'm continuing to use it more, um, more and more for things.

54:45
You know, the problem for me And this is probably a me problem more than anybody else, but you know, I've got access to uh the the a hundred dollar tier on on Claude, I've got a a GPT Pro account, I've got Ultra in in Gemini or yeah, on the Gemini side. And I'm always just like, what am I gonna which one of these am I gonna use for what thing that I need to do? You know?

55:08
So it's kind of hard from that perspective to know like why I choose Argon over that or whatever. And so what I've been doing lately is I've been pitching them against each other. And that's been really, really kind of um illuminating to me.

Jeff Jarvis
55:22
Which is to say that there's no cost of switching.

Jason Howell
55:26
Yeah, yeah, except like in my case, like I've put so much time into how Claude the the the structure around my information um inside of Claude that just Taking that and moving it over I thought would be a lot easier than it has proven to be. So I'm missing something there. Um but yeah, I mean with enough time it it it doesn't take that much time just to kind of get switched over and to get all that context caught up again.

55:52
if you're saving all that context somewhere. So technically that's that's true. I'm just still trying to figure that out for myself, I think.

56:01
But yeah, so that's uh that's Argan. Very visual, a lot of really great visual demonstrations uh coming from Argan, which is just really impressive. So there you go, and I'm sorry I didn't tell you, Jeff, I'll never do that again.

56:18
That was bad, bad, Jason. In the middle of a podcast. Sorry about that.

56:25
What about, oh man, New York Times. What about uh uh Muse Wonder and Muse Wonderful?

Jeff Jarvis
56:31
So I haven't wonderful any time. Um but this is Meta trying to get back in the game too. So this is not just Muse itself. It's their it's their it's their bigger models.

Jason Howell
56:46
Yep. Yeah, this was a big me big week. for a few of the what should be the major players putting themselves back into the m frontier race essentially.

56:55
Google did it with uh with Argan and then Meta doing it with Wonder and Wonder Space full. Get it wonderful. Isn't that funny?

57:06
Um this is Meta 's first Frontier class model um series from its superintelligence lab. built for agents. They have something called active memory, which carries context over days, weeks, and months.

57:20
I don't know how that differs from something like personal intelligence that pulls in your context from all the different You know what I mean? That Google has personal contacts that pulls in from all of your different Google account landings. Is this different than that?

57:35
Is this more about keeping history in current memory in some capacity. I'm not entirely sure, but that has potential. Also active focus for sticking with hard tasks and checking in before important actions.

57:50
Okay I wonder what that's like in action. Um and if you're using Muse Agent, this'll power that.

Jeff Jarvis
57:57
So when I was using Muse Agent, uh I uh at the end of my drive and the end of our conversation as I'm driving into the um into the garage. It had one more answer to give me. Um and I asked at the end, Will you remember all this if we come back and have the same discussion tomorrow? And it said, I'll summarize everything we've talked about, but not remember every not every detail, not the full text, which was interesting. Mm-hmm.

Jason Howell
58:20
Yep, that context drops off over time. Yeah, that happens in in Collot a lot where you'll be working in a conversation, working and working, working, everything's going great. And then suddenly you you fire off your next thing and it's like compacting database and basically it's just going through the entire conversation and summarizing it to a uh you know a text to to kind of make that context smaller and more compact.

58:43
So that you can continue. But of course, when you do that, it's never perfect. It loses detail.

Jeff Jarvis
58:48
Yeah.

Jason Howell
58:48
And the quality of everything that comes after it suffers because of it. So

Jeff Jarvis
58:52
it also reminds me of the old days of defragging.

Jason Howell
58:54
Yes, it kind of is like defragging. Yes. Taking all those empty spots and filling them and moving everything over.

59:00
And yeah, it's kind of like that. Um Wonderful is only going to be found for Muse Code subscribers Oh, and by the way, closed weights. So the days of the open weight llama are over.

Jeff Jarvis
59:14
That

Jason Howell
59:15
is like, well, I guess we gotta be In the closed weight game. So here we are. Alexander Wang says Muse Wonder is the best model in the world for personal agents and professional agents. So there you go. If that matters to you.

Jeff Jarvis
59:29
And two weeks ago we had uh Meta was doing more for businesses for the enterprise. So they're trying to get into that, but that's going to be a hard game for them.

Jason Howell
59:39
Yeah. Uh but they've had a lot of of of uh uh news grabbing uh releases in the last couple of weeks. So it's been a good Good couple of weeks for meta as far as that's concerned.

59:50
Uh we have, let's see here, an open AI engineer, apparently, uh bugging uh bugging a conference room. At the at the company. Um he had used a device to intercept communications.

01:00:05
He's facing up to five years. uh in prison. He hasn't been convicted of anything yet, but basically the complaint says that he plugged a recording device into the USB port on the back of a TV in an executive conference room in OpenAI's San Francisco office.

01:00:21
Hidden under toilet paper is what I think I read.

Jeff Jarvis
01:00:24
Wrapped in toilet paper, which would that that really throws me. Who would think that that the toilet paper is appropriate camouflage in a conference room?

Jason Howell
01:00:33
I don't that's a great it's a great guy.

Jeff Jarvis
01:00:36
I asked that on social media and somebody said, well, if I'm in a conference room and I see toilet paper, I'm not touching it. The only place I'm touching toilet paper is on the roll in the bathroom.

Jason Howell
01:00:42
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
01:00:44
I guess that's a point Uh but yeah, it didn't make a lot of sense. Um and the other thing I'm trying to find the uh the yeah the actual uh post from um openai that had it was weird in a few ways. Right?

01:01:02
It said that that well you know we used our own AI to find out who the bad guy was. What? Yes.

01:01:08
What And it was kind of a weird uh self-own and all of this stuff. They also said, well, we don't have any evidence that anybody took uh the oh here I found it. Um We discovered a sophisticated recording device.

01:01:23
How sophisticated, I don't know, that was hidden inside one of our offices. We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it in a few days earlier. Well that sounds like the model was Sherlock.

01:01:35
And in fact there was a picture of of they grabbed video of him looking behind the TV, behind the monitor, to see it. We refer the better to the FBI, da da da da Uh at this time we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights source code or customer data. Which also at first struck me a little odd, like what they're gonna talk about open weights in the conference room and that's how you're gonna get it?

01:01:58
I guess what they're saying though is this is a bad guy in our midst. And we don't know what else he did, but we don't think he did that. Right, right.

01:02:05
Um so he was terminated. But it's it's just weird how these companies constantly have bad news As a flex.

Jason Howell
01:02:13
Yep.

Jeff Jarvis
01:02:14
We're so important somebody came in and bugged us.

Jason Howell
01:02:17
Right. And we used our model to bust the case.

Jeff Jarvis
01:02:23
Yeah.

Jason Howell
01:02:24
This is the device that was found in there. It is a seed studio. At least this is according to Bloomberg.

01:02:30
A Seed Studio X-I-A-O Xiao. I don't know. Uh ESP32 S3.

Jeff Jarvis
01:02:37
What's the price on that, Jason?

Jason Howell
01:02:39
Development board with pre-soldered headers for a whopping $14. 96.

Jeff Jarvis
01:02:44
Oh, a sophisticated device said OpenAI.

Jason Howell
01:02:47
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
01:02:47
It took a $15 device to uh God knows what they listen to in the in the conference room.

Jason Howell
01:02:52
Yeah, I don't know. Interesting though. Uh so okay.

01:02:58
Don't know the motive, don't know anything, but yeah, OpenAI is calling it sophisticated. A fourteen dollar board wrapped in toilet paper is pretty sophisticated, let me tell you. Uh let's see.

01:03:09
What else? By the way, by the way,

Jeff Jarvis
01:03:11
a little side adventure here.

Jason Howell
01:03:13
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis
01:03:14
Have you watched Cupertino?

Jason Howell
01:03:16
No.

Jeff Jarvis
01:03:17
So it's a new show, it's a new series, uh an hour-long series on CBS on Thursday nights.

Jason Howell
01:03:22
Oh, okay, I heard

Jeff Jarvis
01:03:23
from the makers of The Good Wife. And the good fight, who I like. And so I watched the first episode was last week, but set your set your VCRs, folks.

01:03:31
Get get rid of the the the flashing twelve. Uh for Cupertino, the first episode was pretty good, but it the point is it was lawyers who were fired from a major tech company. And the first episode is about that and and how they fight back.

Jason Howell
01:03:45
Oh, interesting. Okay. It was good? You liked it?

Jeff Jarvis
01:03:48
It was good. Yeah.

Jason Howell
01:03:49
Okay. Okay. I'll check it out.

Jeff Jarvis
01:03:51
There was no toilet paper.

Jason Howell
01:03:52
Remember to check that out. I I did see that flash At some point I was like, oh, I gotta remember to look into that. Um so there you go.

01:04:00
And then we have anthropic and its clever doom marketing. This is you know, speaking of these companies kind of self-owning or whatever i and all it is is just masquerading it, you know, it's marketing masqueraded as a as a warning. But uh anthropic basically warning about AI that copies itself onto your smart TV.

01:04:21
Their red team published research and uh said that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on cheap IoT devices and they were using, you know, Android TV cheap Android TV boxes, whatever. Um and the idea is that a small open model can compromise a device, it can set up its own inference, it can repeat that. And there's no centralized way to shut it off because it's not tied to a data center.

01:04:49
It's self-replicating to all of these, you know, strung together off-brand Android TV boxes that probably cost no more than like $50 a piece. Um Anthropics said they were running Google's Gemma four across them, very slow, uh 39 cent tokens per second. So really slow, but over time, I guess they said eight out of eight nodes in four or five trials were able to pull off full replication.

01:05:19
And uh yeah, so there you go.

Jeff Jarvis
01:05:23
Yeah, I don't know uh you know, it could be famous last words if I dismiss this. But it is amazing how it's constantly kind of an Eeyore marketing. Oh, we did something bad.

01:05:34
Oh, we could do something bad. Oh, it's gonna turn out bad. You don't know.

01:05:39
You've been all better.

Jason Howell
01:05:40
You better break. Yeah, you You better let us I don't know. What what are they asking for?

01:05:44
Better re regulate us? Or you better regulate the industry? Yep, yep, yep.

Jeff Jarvis
01:05:51
If we do bad at least you can come after us. You won't know who else did it if they use open one.

Jason Howell
01:05:59
Uh let's see here. They were also using GLM 5. 2, which is the Chinese model from ZAI. So maybe this is clever a clever way to market. Can't use our open model

Jeff Jarvis
01:06:09
because it ain't open.

Jason Howell
01:06:10
Yeah, right. Yeah. See see what open models are able to do?

01:06:14
You don't want that, do you? So therefore. Yeah.

01:06:20
Marketing through through uh I don't know, mystery or I'm not really quite sure. Uh go take a quick break, come back, do a little speed round. We got uh Well, yeah, we have one story actually right at the top of Speed Round that kind of ties into what we're talking about at the top of the show.

01:06:37
So hang tight. We'll talk about that in a second. Alright, what do we have to close things out?

01:06:44
Google Play, that's the Google Play Store, now supports private vibe-coded personal apps. You can build an Android app in Google AI Studio and then you can install it through Google Play just for yourself. So you can install it through there.

01:07:00
You don't need a developer account to do this. It doesn't show up inside of PlaySearch. This is just using Google Play to install your own vibe-coded apps on your device.

Jeff Jarvis
01:07:09
So if you wanted to share it with others.

Jason Howell
01:07:12
Yes, sharing with friends and family comes sometime in the future. Not immediately, but it will come in the months ahead, they said.

Jeff Jarvis
01:07:18
So if you want to sell this, you've got to go and do the normal Google Play stuff.

Jason Howell
01:07:22
Right. Right. So you're vibe coding, you can install it on your device, maybe you share it with friends eventually. And yeah, if you wanted to market it or whatever, you'd have to go the next step up.

Jeff Jarvis
01:07:33
But this absolutely ties into the first story. Yeah uh to the remake of of Adobe and Microsoft is that I made my own little app and now I can use it and I don't care whether it's a I have to buy software. I can have the machine make it for me.

Jason Howell
01:07:47
I made my own flashlight app or my own uh fart noise app. See? I'm thinking of the early days of apps. Remember how they were so simple?

Jeff Jarvis
01:07:59
We loved them.

Jason Howell
01:08:01
They led to everything we have now, uh, for better and for worse. Uh NVIDIA reportedly in talks to acquire Reflection AI. Reflection we talked about last week is the open weight lab in here in the US.

01:08:17
They released Beam, which is the 501 billion parameter model that we discussed. Financial Times says the talks are early. Could be an acquisition, could be an Aqua Hire or some sort of bigger investment, but NVIDIA already has around $800 million invested.

01:08:32
So Um

Jeff Jarvis
01:08:34
and this is Nvidia and Justin Wong supporting open weights and open source. Yes. I think that I think that matters hugely.

Jason Howell
01:08:41
Yeah, and the Wall Street Journal CEO, um, Misha Laskin actually said open models are Trojan horses for the infrastructure they bring with them, which Kind of explains why NVIDIA might care so much. Along those lines, you got Amazon supposedly or reportedly in talks to buy AI startup Descartes for around $7 billion. Descartes makes Lucy, which is a real-time video editing model, also Oasis, which is simulated worlds for training robots and self-driving systems.

01:09:15
This was valued back at uh back in May at around $4 billion. Anthropic. Actually, we had talked about Anthropic doing their own due diligence in August to buy it for around six billion dollars.

01:09:27
They ended up passing on the deal last month for Whatever reason. So

Jeff Jarvis
01:09:32
the reason I think that Amazon AWS is interested is that uh and I hadn't heard of Descartes. Uh but in one summary here I I asked um I asked Gemini to tell me what the cart does. And they quote uh Seagin Alpha saying that it Helps developers run and sync AI models across different types of computer processors and hardware So I think that that's the thing here.

01:09:57
So you're on AWS and you've got some NVIDIA chips and you've got some new Microsoft chips and you've got some, you know, you're in China, you got Huawei chips, you got whatever. Um Amazon trainium chips now uh you don't need custom programming libraries for each chip, which I think is a way to fight against Nvidia's hegemony with CUDA. So that's what that's why this rumored acquisition would seem to make sense.

Jason Howell
01:10:24
Got it. Okay. Okay.

01:10:27
I and also I forgot to put this in here, but Daniel, thank you for the reminder and the YouTube live stream. Character AI. Which is not a not an unnamed AI company, you know, an unknown AI company.

01:10:41
They've been around for five years. Chatbot um uh you know chatbot development and stuff apparently has filed for bankruptcy. Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

01:10:51
Um they've been facing a lot of lot lawsuits. Uh apparently they've had some challenges scaling the business. And um yeah, so chapter.

Jeff Jarvis
01:11:01
Selling some of the leftovers to Disney.

Jason Howell
01:11:03
Yeah, yep. Uh agreed to sell some of its assets to Disney for $20 million. non-exclusive perpetual license for its technology. So that's interesting. I don't know that we've heard a whole lot about some of these bigger names that we've talk about often filing for bankruptcy yet.

Jeff Jarvis
01:11:21
Yeah if we go back in our arc archives, since we have archives now. How long have we been doing this, Jason?

Jason Howell
01:11:26
Yeah, about three years.

Jeff Jarvis
01:11:27
Yeah. If you go back two years ago and look at the companies we were talking about then, which ones um Have we not talked about lately?

Jason Howell
01:11:34
Yeah, that's true. That's true. I know character was, you know, something that we've talked about over time.

01:11:40
So this this was surprising to me, but there you go. And then finally there's Aurora Which you've probably never heard of because if if you have heard you probably don't if you have to ask, you don't you you don't deserve to work with Aurora. Invite only AI concierge for the ultra wealthy ten thousand dollars a year plus a $5,000 initiation fee.

01:12:02
I imagine that's peanuts for uh the clientele that might sign up for this but it's yeah it's concierge services with AI integrated into it I guess AI plus human staff connects your calendar connects your whoop your aura um thinks ahead for you so you so it can you know book you a sauna or an ivy drip after a very long flight, that sort of thing.

Jeff Jarvis
01:12:24
Because it's the kind of thing that one does. Like one of the parents

Jason Howell
01:12:27
supposedly. Not the kind of thing I've ever needed to do, but um I'm not the clientele for Aurora.

Jeff Jarvis
01:12:35
So since I did a little uh showbiz earlier uh with uh Cupertino, you know where I'm gonna be this weekend? I'm gonna be at the movies watching You Can See Everything.

Jason Howell
01:12:46
Oh, of course you will. So that comes out this weekend.

Jeff Jarvis
01:12:49
I can't wait, Jason.

Jason Howell
01:12:51
I mean people at this point.

Jeff Jarvis
01:12:53
Would it be really good.

Jason Howell
01:12:54
That's what I keep hearing. I'm I'm I'm ready to to kind of see. The guy who who directed it, I can't remember his name.

01:13:01
He was really not on my radar until recently, until this, and then I was like, oh, wait a minute. And um Went back and saw a couple of episodes of his uh the rehearsal show on HBO. Have you seen that or are you aware of that?

Jeff Jarvis
01:13:15
But I did too.

Jason Howell
01:13:16
But yeah, he's a very he's a very unique individual. Very, very interesting. Um I'm very curious about this film, especially the kind of rave reviews that it's

Jeff Jarvis
01:13:29
long standing ovations in film festivals, yeah. And then fascinating to me is the social reckoning, and I never liked the social network. I thought it was awful.

Jason Howell
01:13:37
Yeah. Right.

Jeff Jarvis
01:13:38
Aaron Sorkin's follow-up. Bombed.

Jason Howell
01:13:40
Absolutely.

Jeff Jarvis
01:13:41
Because I think that people worrying about social networks is so yesterday. Mm-hmm. And um and and now everybody's concerned about AI and and extinction. So phew, no big deal.

Jason Howell
01:13:54
It's ca Strangely, it's a few years too late, maybe, for that story, because people have moved on to the next thing. The Cambridge Analytica. Because isn't it based Around the Cambridge Analytics.

Jeff Jarvis
01:14:11
Um Francis Haugen And her revelations were about how they knew that things were bad for kids and they didn't do enough about it.

Jason Howell
01:14:19
Oh, oh, oh, oh. Okay. Mm. Well , it's based on

Jeff Jarvis
01:14:25
who you got the Francis Hauga material and put it out, and so they're the heroes of it.

Jason Howell
01:14:29
Got it. Oh, I see. I see.

Jeff Jarvis
01:14:32
Yeah.

Jason Howell
01:14:33
Kind of not surprised about it.

Jeff Jarvis
01:14:34
And we've got more movies coming. We have Musk Out. We're going to have the movie about OpenAI. I haven't heard any movies about Anthropic yet, but it's got to be coming soon.

Jason Howell
01:14:44
Yeah, that that's going to be put out by the cast of of Saturday Night Live. And it'll be a hoot, let me tell you.

Jeff Jarvis
01:14:53
I hope they make uh Dario Amaday a regular character on Saturday Night Live because it's the best.

Jason Howell
01:14:58
I don't know I don't know how they don't because that got so much uh pickup. And that's a new a new cast member. You know, they're always I I just watched that uh the Lauren Michaels Netflix documentary.

Jeff Jarvis
01:15:11
Oh, cool.

Jason Howell
01:15:12
I don't know. Yeah, and and so it kind of goes into some of the behind the scenes stuff on how they how they, you know, cultivate their their uh talent and everything like that. And you know, and and then and then uh that's taking me down a Saturday Night Live uh alumni kind of like podcast circuit um in the last couple of weeks. And uh just kind of hearing like when you're someone like David Spade and you're on the on the cast, but you don't have many things going into many of your things being chosen for a night's episode, how much d dis uh like disappointment and doubt it puts in you and as that cast member, you know, I I heard an interview with him and he's like, you're always looking for the thing that catches and that you get a repeat kind of character on. And so that just made me think of that actress.

Jeff Jarvis
01:15:59
Yeah. And let's say uh Jane Wickline Jane Wickline to give her credit.

Jason Howell
01:16:02
There we go Yeah, good call. All right, well that's it. We've uh we've ended the episode with our weekly um look at Saturday Night Live.

Jeff Jarvis
01:16:11
Showbiz.

Jason Howell
01:16:12
Yeah, showbiz. Jeffjarvis. com for the newly revamped website.

Jeff Jarvis
01:16:17
Thank you, Jake Jarvis. I'm about to as soon as we get off, I'm going to call him and say thanks.

Jason Howell
01:16:22
Great work, Jake. I mean it's it's so great seeing literally

Jeff Jarvis
01:16:25
nice. Yeah.

Jason Howell
01:16:26
All of your books are listed there now.

Jeff Jarvis
01:16:29
And go to the podcast page.

Jason Howell
01:16:31
Uh-huh uh the podcast page, everything is listed there. Intelligent machines, AI inside. You got all of them appearing.

Jeff Jarvis
01:16:44
With Julie Roginski and Michelle Cottle. So it's I mean shit meh. Um uh and uh uh yeah, I'll tell Jake. He probably didn't wasn't aware of it.

Jason Howell
01:16:55
He's like, yay, I'm done. Not done

Jeff Jarvis
01:16:59
Michelle Keenney. What did I say, Michelle Kin? Michelle Kinney and Julie Worginski. Yes. Oh

Jason Howell
01:17:04
look at the case.

Jeff Jarvis
01:17:06
Mayday Network.

Jason Howell
01:17:08
Oh, okay.

Jeff Jarvis
01:17:08
So that's my podcast. I wasn't aware of that podcast. I just podcast all day long. That's all I do now. My dotage.

Jason Howell
01:17:15
You are a machine. Jeff Jarvis is a machine. He's kind of like a Lino type, but with his mouth. I don't know that Sorry, that sounds weird. I didn't mean to. I

Jeff Jarvis
01:17:28
spew hot

Jason Howell
01:17:28
lead. All right. Thank you, Jeff.

01:17:32
Thank you. Everybody, thank you for watching and listening. Go to podtuneup.

01:17:37
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01:17:52
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01:18:03
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01:18:26
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01:18:32
com slash AI Insightshow, lots of uh lots of perks, daily podcast, Discord, you name it Let's go check it out. Thank you for the uh longer episode than normal, Jeff. Appreciate your time and uh doing this with you.

Jeff Jarvis
01:18:44
I was mainly my jabbering taking up time that makes it longer, but I love it.

Jason Howell
01:18:48
We had great topics today. It was so much fun.

Jeff Jarvis
01:18:50
Yeah, it's great stuff.

Jason Howell
01:18:52
All right, we'll see y'all next time on AI Inside. Take care, everybody. Bye.