Did Nvidia Give OpenClaw Its ChatGPT Moment? - Week in Tech

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2:04The times you're deep in your flow and can't be interrupted by an auto update. That's why Dell builds tech that adapts to you. Built with long-lasting battery. And built in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule. Not in the middle of it. Find technology built for the way you work at Dell.com slash XPS. Built for you. Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Osvaloschen and I'm thrilled to announce that the weekend take is back and it's growing. Instead of Kara and I recounting the essential news, today and every Friday from now on, I'm going to be joined by three of the best writers covering Silicon Valley. Read Abergotti, Technology Editor for Semaphore. I read your newsletter religiously and we had a lot of fun on Tech Stuff a few months ago

3:04with a story you wrote comparing different AI companies to characters in the Wizard of Oz. Welcome back. Thanks, it's good to be here. Kyle Chaker writes the Infinite Scrawl newsletter for the New Yorker. Kyle, last time you were on Tech Stuff you talked about your holiday tech gift guide which lean quite surrealist as we tap you back. It was very fun, thank you. And Taylor Lorenz, who joined a great discussion on last week's panel and is back this week. Taylor writes the user magnus letter and hosts the power user podcast. Taylor, thanks for joining us again. Thanks for having me. So I've been following each of you for a long time and many of you have also known each other for a long time or at least you all know Taylor. Yes, I don't think we didn't I have ever met but I follow this work of course. Likewise, likewise. So just imagine we're all friends sitting around a table in a living room with huge microphones in our face just shooting the breeze about technology and let's really take our listeners on a journey because each of you lives and breathes your beat and has as far as I'm concerned better

4:09insights and access than anyone else in the world. Okay, let's get into it and read let's start with you. You have what could be described as an inside or a story this week. A company conference except not just any company conference. The massive developer conference held by the multi-trillion dollar company in video. Yeah, yeah, it's funny you say inside because I was in this this press conference with Nvidia CEO Jensen wang yesterday and I think there were 300 reporters in the room. If you can imagine that I was thinking like I wonder how many reporters are in like the White House right now, you know like it was an insane amount of interest and coverage of this thing but but he said something that I thought was in this I think this made the rounds yesterday but he he said you know his life philosophy is three things essentially. He said don't don't get fired don't get bored and don't get killed and I was to live by literally. You're right exactly and I thought he said living in that triangle is higher risk than you think and I sort of thought

5:14about that and I'm like that actually does explain a lot of what you're seeing from Nvidia where it's just a company like all the mag seven all these big tech companies end up in this place where you get to a certain size and and success and you end up just competing in everything in every front and the the fronts are just expanding for Nvidia into all these new areas and the big I think externality that that has happened since you know last year's big Nvidia conference here although they seem to do something like this a few times a year now is that is that open claw happened and that's been sort of I I think of it as like the chat GPT moment that everyone's ignoring because the world is on fire and it's and it doesn't and it's also not like something that anybody can just do can just fire up and do like chat GPT but it's like a glimpse into the future where where if you talk to people out here we're using this you're like oh of course like of course

6:14this is where things are headed but it's also quantum computing it's video games still it's like everything robots ever space yeah so you were not even smiling when Reid was talking about open yeah can you give us a little bit of the backstory like what are the essentials we need to know about open tool and then what were you grinning about man well I was grinning about the fact that I don't think anyone outside of tech understands it at all yet there are these memes coming out of China of like AI anxiety after this open claw moment from people who are now scrambling to let agents take over their inboxes and their text messages and their competing lives and I think there was one incident in which an open claw agent just deleted someone's entire email inbox or something like this so it's like I don't know it's like vaping or something it's like let's just inhale it straight into our bodies and like see what happens but I do as Reid said I think it's this tidal wave that everyone's ignoring or just can't quite

7:16understand this is an orchestra of AI agents who basically have full access to your computer and all your emails and everything you've ever done and then make decisions on your behalf well this guy I was talking to who was doing this one one of these one of these early adopters was telling me just how he is completely blindly turned his life over to his his open claw implementation and I'm like aren't you worried like it's going to delete your inbox or do something really bad and he's like oh I think it will it's like but I'll just I'll learn from it it'll it'll teach me a lesson that will probably give me some idea for my next company and I'm just like okay but the open claw thing was happening before Nvidia like why why was it the the topic de jour of GTC yeah and by the way I don't even know if it was the topic de jour like it's just to me the best example of how it's like this thing happens and and now Nvidia has to like scramble and figure out how to how to play in that space and the way that's stepping into the open claw space is essentially

8:16building their own product around open claw called Nima or is that right Reid that's right and right now it's it's so expensive and so risky from a security standpoint to do this to just turn your life over to many hundreds of agents and different AI models but like the prices are coming down so much and the and the infrastructure is being built around it so fast that that just means a lot more tokens a lot more revenue for companies like Nvidia and all the hyperscalers but be like a new a new field a new battlefield to try to like gain market share or potentially lose market share and that's so Nvidia is like doing this stuff around that and they're trying to create like a more secure architecture around this open source thing right to basically harness the power of open claw but make it somewhat safer right is the kind of goal Taylor what are you what are you thinking about open door I saw you were you were smiling as well and Reid will come back to you afterwards yeah go go I have FOMO and I want a claw I want one of these little bots I like was

9:19debating buying a back mini I just can't justify the like $500 or whatever it costs these days I kind of feel like that that person who said that they might learn from it like now I wouldn't give it unmitigated access to my email but I do think that Reid is right that this is sort of we're probably moving towards this sort of like a genetic future or whatever you want to call it and I don't know there's just like you guys know how hard like time consuming could be to be a freelancer I'm like even if this thing could just like sort of invoice companies from you would be amazing yeah it feels like it's proving out that AI will be used a lot by normal people also like we'll all be using these large amounts of tokens like it's going to be embedded much more deeply in our workflows than just using a chat bot yeah on Nvidia specifically I mean it's interesting right Taylor and Kyle you both focus on kind of the intersection of technology and culture I was thinking about this morning like how to how to relate in videos of both of your beats and I had the rather depressing thought that maybe all culture now sits downstream with Nvidia

10:22what do you think well that I was I was thinking about that because I do feel like this is one of the biggest moments for Jensen Huang is like a meme right suddenly his image was everywhere and he's been wearing the same leather jacket for years or decades or whatever and there's crowds of people around him and so suddenly it does feel like a cultural movement as much as a technological one for sure Reid coming out of this story I mean what what what's the you know one of the interesting things was that all these incredible announcements and more and more and more revenues and yet Nvidia stock price was was I think flat or slightly down like how did how did people react to this did that correspond to the mood in the room or is I mean is it just they've had so many wins at the market has kind of priced them at this place there's no way more of them to grow like what's and what are the competitive threats I think it's actually it's funny the thing about Nvidia is it's almost like too simple of a story right it's like there's these things called tokens that we're all using right that's what that's what we're using when we when we query chat GPT and people can't

11:25get enough of them and they're willing to pay a lot of money for them and you could see with like this open-cloth stuff there will actually the more tokens you use the better it gets and people are paying for it and it's like okay so these companies are making a product that is pretty profitable has good margins and everybody wants and they can't make enough of it like that's just a good business like and I but it's like too simple for tech normally tech's like we're going to get all these people these eyeballs and it's going to be free and then before we figure out how to monetize it and we'll offer all these free services and it's like wait you mean you're just going to charge people a lot of money for a product and make a bunch of money on it's like that's so weird it's like a normal business Taylor Coyle I'm curious before we move to the next story and what are you burning questions about Nvidia I mean the biggest company on the US stock market I think you know I that's a really good question um I don't know I mean I kind of come to it like from the same angle as Kyle maybe of like I'm very interested to see how they navigate this like AI backlash how

12:31Jensen kind of like ascends into this like role of a very public CEO I mean he's been CEO for so long and I think most of his time as a tech leader has been kind of behind the scenes unlike Steve Josie didn't rebrand he's warned that that that leather jacket for a really long time he already had it but I also think it's interesting you know we had like Sam Altman open AI CEO at the vanity fair Oscar parties where where if he missed playwright I guess called him like a Nazi and there is like this kind of burgeoning like anti-tech sentiment especially from more left cleaning spaces and so I don't know I I don't know that we'll see Jensen Wong like out at you know Hollywood parties but I do think that like he's gonna have to step into his public image and curate a public image for himself that is that is right on it's like Nvidia is a brand but what is what is the brand of like a chip or tokens like it's a it's a utility rather than a particular product and I think I saw at a press conference or just a scrum afterward Jensen just said

13:36everyone in the Nvidia ecosystem is rich like it's this kind of lightest like everything I touch turns to gold but also that feels kind of cursed like you're flying too close to the sun so I'm curious how much higher it can even go like like are we just getting started or or is this a kind of threshold moment Taylor moving moving right along you you mentioned tech lash and you brought us our attention to a story about a Senate committee hearing this week with the title liability or deniability platform power as section 230 turns 30 now before we get into that hearing you've been covering section 230 for a decade you put our six-part YouTube series devoted to it you spoke about it at South by Southwest last week what drives your fascination with this law what do we need to understand about it and what might

14:37change based on all of these legislative efforts yeah so section 230 is what a law that frankly should be very non-controversial it is a law that it effectively says you as a speaker of content online should be held liable for your own speech and it's a foundational lots what that allows the internet to kind of exist because the internet is not like a public space right there's no it's not like the real world where you can where there is like a physical world out there so you need people or companies to kind of go in and set up spaces in in this world whether that's a website whether that's a forum whether that's a social media platform etc and I think you know there was this really really bad article written about about a decade ago on section 230 that was claiming that I guess like Facebook was using section 230 to kind of like not police hate speech ironically section 230 is what allows platforms to do moderation um but that kind of set off this like

15:37decade-long discussion where pretty much everyone in power wants to transform the internet from this open place where people can sort of freely discuss ideas to something more like the mainstream media traditional media where it's a top-down sort of corporate control over speech and every single platform or forum admin or person online you know is responsible for kind of the speech that they host read your nodding nodding along to Taylor's I'm always curious when people are nodding what they're nodding about no I mean I just I think what she's saying makes sense and you're you're I think explaining it in a good in a good way um for sure I don't think there was anything I was like you know I don't think there's anything controversial in that it was sort of laying out the fact now to the controversy Taylor take us away well take us so you know as as the internet has grown and these platforms have become more powerful um a lot of people in power want to repeal section 230 this would devastate the internet it would transform the internet from a place again where there is

16:39user generated content to a place where the whole internet is Netflix right where you have to like apply to a platform to get your content on there and nobody can kind of um reshare content you know section 230 is what allows you to retweet a tweet or forward an email removing section 230 would not allow you to sort of engage in that way it would all it would just be sort of a Netflix style internet um obviously this is something people in power really want they don't like that people average people can go on the internet and sort of connect with each other so there's this aggressive effort to um to repeal section 230 that ironically the big platforms are also now behind because they with the rise of AI feel comfortable prescreening every single piece of content via AI um to kind of ensure that that any speech on the platform aligns with what the government wants uh this is why meta has been sort of integral to to these efforts to chip away at section 230 this is so interesting because i think the way section 230 is commonly understood um and you mentioned that wide article for

17:40a few years ago i haven't read it but it's essentially the battle over section 230 is the battle where like regular people are fighting back against the tech companies and their ability to like harm people with content and not be held responsible well section 230 protects those regular people so section 230 uh ensures again that you as a user without a lot of power have the ability to speak to power it allows for user generated content if we didn't have that it would consolidate power among big tech now i you know as somebody that covers tech for a long time uh especially in light of the tech lash over the past decade about a decade ago these far right religious fundamentalist groups and organizations that have always wanted a censored internet groups like you know the heritage foundation they realize that by claiming uh you know repealing section 230 was cracking down on big tech they've gotten a lot of i think leftists and liberals to kind of fall for their views and go along with this now it's important to note they did have a big victory back in 2018 we saw

18:44fast access to fast access uh was the first major carve out to section 230 that was framed as cracking down on big tech i would ask people uh you know do you think facebook and google are more less powerful today than 2018 i think we know the answer to that and the hearing this week with center Ted Cruz like what's what's going on here what can we expect and what's different from the bipartisan legislation introduced by Lindsey Graham and Amy Klobuchar and others late last year on section 230 it's essentially like the same thing there is this sunset section 230 act that again has been brought by the democrats that want to seize control over online speech i have to say i know this is bipartisan a lot of issues related to mass surveillance and censorship are bipartisan unfortunately we talked about that last last last week right i think you said but mass surveillance is always a bipartisan issue exactly uh and so you know and and i think it's kind of terrifying that we're seeing this um happen under the trump administration i mean i certainly couldn't do my job i wouldn't have a job as an independent journalist if section 230 didn't exist but yeah there's this big hearing to kind of discuss all of this uh on the hill go ahead come i have some of

19:46the same worries as teller here that section 230 does protect a lot of speech on the internet it's meant to kind of separate a little bit the platform from the content on it and it has allowed for facebook to exist for instagram and youtube to exist but i think if we look forward into the future these tech giants are going to find ways around whatever regulations exist they will find ways to profit from this situation if it's repealed and the smaller platforms like more independent spaces spaces that don't have access to millions of ai tokens as we were just discussing we'll kind of fall by the wayside and we will be left with that narrowed more homogenized internet i think they're they're good in bad parts of section 230 like it's it's not just one thing but it does really protect our ability to put things out on the internet and for internet hosts to support the publishing of things online without being always responsible for every single thing i just want to say like i actually don't think there's bad parts of section 230 like i think it's such a short like

20:50uncontroversial law meta and google and all these big tech companies have been using so many other laws to evade responsibility into consolidate corporate power and we could pass so many laws we could reform things like the computer fraud and abuse act which meta uses to crush competitors we could you know prosecute them for anti competitive behavior so many things it could there are so many legislative and sort of broader political things that we could do to curb the power of these big tech companies but chipping away at section 230 only chips away at the power of users you know to speak truth to power and i think that's really dangerous especially right now Kyle i want to come back to you because you wrote a book called filter world and you wrote about section 230 in that book and here's what you said the problem with section 230 is that ultimately and bizarrely the law makes it so no one is currently responsible for the effects of algorithmic recommendations that's not true how would you say no one is responsible well the the law of the section 230 was based on or one of the precedents was this bookstore ruling where a bookstore cannot

21:53be held responsible for the contents of the books that it's providing and i think like the platforms and the way the internet works has evolved since the time that section 230 was put into place and algorithmic recommendations and kind of top down censorship or filtering has become more aggressive and so i think section 230 like has protected a lot of that algorithmic filtering action over the years Kyle i just did an episode which i hope you'll watch on my channel last week about this idea that that section 230 wasn't written to protect algorithms the two cases right that led to section 230 the prodigy and uh compuser of cases um both of those platforms used algorithms to recommend content algorithms are speech as defined by the first amendment like i think what people need to realize is a lot of problems that that society i'm not saying this is you Kyle but like i think a lot of people have problems with speech law and what section 230 does is effectively just make it cheaper to win cases on first amendment ground so you know the same cases that uh

22:56that these a lot of these smaller platforms went on section 230 they only have to it only cost them 15 to $100,000 to fight that case and win um but if they were to fight it on first amendment grounds it would cost over five million to ten million dollars so you know algorithmic editorial choices are speech in themselves and the idea has always been to give these platforms the power of publishers and to make them publishers but without the sort of liability of treating them as newspapers as Kyle said it's much more treating them like a bookstore but a bookstore does put books in the front window right a bookstore does make recommendations to uh to readers and so i think there are ways to hold these platforms accountable for you know a lot of the bad effects that they've had on society but again i don't think section 230 is the law to to do that through isn't that isn't that what the what these groundbreaking social media lawsuits are that are happening right now or sort of based on is that the algorithm is is the you know is the thing that these companies should be held viable for well yeah it's just very funny because um when once you know there is no problem with

24:00the algorithm the problem is the content right what people have problems with is the content if the algorithm if if everything on instagram for instance was just Wikipedia articles and that's the only thing you could see was Wikipedia articles but had the exact same recommendation algorithm would you have a problem with it i'm sure no no the answer is no these people would not because we have platforms that are like that that are online learning platforms that that operate with the same uh sort of engagement based uh or recommendation algorithms um and people don't have a problem with it or something like Spotify right which has an enormous amount of data on you and we'll feed you you know if you're depressed you get more depressing songs and maybe those depressing song you know like those depressing songs make you want to kill yourself like we're not having this is one of the cases of a British woman who was unfortunately pushed a lot of depression content from Pinterest and then ended up committing suicide dying by suicide and you know like there are problems with algorithmic recommendations and particular types of content but there as Taylor was saying there are also better legal frameworks and better law packages that are being discussed now that can

25:04address them so some like EU laws like the Digital Services Act that let you modify your algorithmic feed like things that give you more rights to your data and your information so we can use other laws to to target these issues kind of on the downstream end for sure but ultimately this is about who can be sued for what right I mean that's what it really comes down to is can you win can you win a lawsuit for harm caused by something you saw online or content you saw online right well I think we've seen this moral panic forever right is um is and and I would argue yes you can right now you can win a lawsuit like I mean you can sue the person that made that content that is you know allegedly harmful you can sue them and they can be held responsible and that's a really good system um what we don't want to do is make it so that every platform is legally liable for every piece of content on their website or there will be no such thing as journalism on the internet because all of these platforms will simply uh you know not want to host any sort of legally

26:08questionable content and for a lot of content is anonymous or it's not in the U.S. so like you could sue but you're not going to get much out of it so the only you know deep pocketed entity you can really go after is the platform right and the tech company well I think what you're talking about like a lot of these sort of critics of these issues need to get their story straight do you have a problem with online anonymity okay there are better ways to address that do you have a problem with the fact that um there's harmful content abroad that's being brought to americans um okay let's address that through again lots of different things or do you have a problem with the content on social media and if you have a problem with the content on social media what I would posit is that a lot of this stuff is sort of the same moral panic that we see about a lot of sort of content based of freakouts where it's like you know you don't want your child seeing xyz and we should be in that speech law and we should be very careful about sort of how we we ask the government to regulate content i mean it's interesting senator ron whiteen who drafted this law said a couple of things recently you know one he said without section 230 anyone who

27:12merely shared a story or allegation about Epstein and his associates on their social media could be sued by Epstein's depocketed pals along with the site that hosted those posts but he also said he was open to reform or or not not full on repeal but some tweaks a section 230 to address some of the concerns people have um i think with that with that he's talking about AI primarily because i think the question the big next big question is like as these AI platforms sort of generate their own forms of speech like how should they be regulated how should large language models be regulated and i think we're seeing them use section 230 uh it's a sort of claim well this is just sort of like equivalent to user generated content and i think that's sort of these questions that i would love to hear your view and i don't know if i don't know if section 230 is really going to fully repealed ever or if i mean that seems unlikely but just like thought experiment like what would the internet what would actually happen on these type of like the just imagine a world where it does get completely repealed um what would change yeah i think we don't have to

28:16imagine um we see what happened when we chipped away in section 230 so again foster assesses the first major amendment and it's the first it's the biggest carve out to section 230 that we've ever had foster assesses is a law that passed back in 2018 that was supposed to hold platforms liable for content uh you know that that would incentivize sex trafficking all of the same arguments they're making today about section 230 we went through all of this a decade ago and we actually can see exactly what happened what happened is first of all it didn't reduce sex trafficking even in the slightest what it did is mass uh sensor LGBTQ content and abortion content from the internet we can also look at other countries that have more authoritarian laws uh like china um and i know people have a lot of complicated thoughts on china but china does have a very restrictive internet where you cannot say things uh that are not approved tacitly by the government and that government effectively deputizes their big tech companies as state sensors um and that is the world that we're moving towards here in america and i think that that should concern anybody that cares

29:18about civil liberties or free speech online so i think we should protect section 230 but i'm all for cracking down on these big tech companies and regulating them a lot more heavily you know in many other ways we're going to take a quick break now but what we come back we'll hear from Kyle about why taste has become such a buzzword in silicon valley stay with us keeping system secure is more complicated than ever especially with a i agents transforming how businesses operate that's where delinear comes in organizations today need an identity security partner that evolves as fast as they do delinear provides the modern enterprise with calm and controlled identity security built for the ai era enabling businesses to defend access

30:22in real time with confidence delinear meets you where you are reducing security and compliance risk no matter how complex automated or distributed the environment the delinear platform ensures the right identities have the right access at the right moment so innovation productivity and an agentic ai transformation can proceed without interruption because when nothing out of the ordinary happens that's extraordinary that's identity security at work learn more at delinear dot com that's d-e-l-i-n-e-a dot com kara i need to tell you about something i've been testing you know how we're always bouncing between a dozen tabs and docs and tools when we're researching episodes that's literally my whole Tuesday so clawed out as this browsing agent called clawed in chrome and it actually navigates your tabs pulls the information and takes actions across websites for you but here's where it gets wild you pair that with co-work and now clause research here across the web

31:22and working through your local files at the same time okay wait so it's not just reading stuff it's actually doing things in the browser doing things and then you layer on connectors gmail google drive calendar slack and clawed just has all your context no more copy pasting background into every conversation you already knows what you're working on they also just shipped clawed in excel and clawed in powerpoint so it's not just chat anymore it's literally inside the tools people already use every day it's everywhere you work that's the whole point trichle for free at clawed.ai slash tech stuff and see why problem solvers choose clawed as their thinking partner all right quick switch because i want to tell you about one of our favorite sponsors vital proteins but i can't re-talk about vital proteins without talking about collagen first so did you know that collagen makes up one third of all the protein in our bodies that's a lot of collagen but our natural collagen production starts to dip at age 30 give or take a few years i'm currently pushing 40 so i know so adding collagen peptides feels like a really simple way to support what your body already

32:26does now i know you've seen vital proteins collagen peptides iconic blue tab around before is literally everywhere i mean it's one of the most recognized collagen supplements out there and there's a reason it's so popular it supports healthy hair skin nails bones and joints i mix up with water and i drink it firstly in the morning and i like the way it makes you feel sets me up for the day and i think sets me up for better workouts too and honestly it just fits into my life i'm betting all fit into yours too you can add a serving to your morning coffee your tea smoothies or oatmeal into whatever you're already having and it dissolves easily with a neutral taste no extra steps like i said it fits right into your life people use it for different reasons some for beauty benefits some for joint support but for me it's all about building a daily habit that i can actually stick to and that's the key with collagen peptides consistency one serving every day to support your hair skin nails bones and joints and right now you can get 20% off your next order by going to vital proteins.com and using our promo code

33:30techstuff20 at checkout huge thanks again to our sponsor vital proteins these statements have not been evaluated by the food and drug administration this product is not intended to diagnose treat cure or prevent any disease if your systems administrator you know patching often gets delayed not because you forget but because uptime feels like a gamble backlogs grow vulnerabilities pile up and patching stays manual action one fixes that action one is a cloud native patch management platform for windows macOS linux and third party apps all from one place no VPN needed use it on your first 200 endpoints free forever automate patching at scale at on.actionone.com forward slash tech stuff on dot action one dot com forward slash tech stuff action one patching that just works. Welcome back to tech stuff Kyle you're up and you wrote a column this week in the New Yorker about why tech bros are now obsessed with taste i actually lulls reading it here was my

34:34favorite here was my favorite quote the entrepreneur and former bite dance engineer cone is it coney wine or coney wine it's song one song one is wrong echoed in you silicon valley axiom in a blog post writing quote in the AI era personal taste is the moat startups apparently need taste this is you like AI needs data centers just trying to have fun you know I feel like this this was kind of my way into the AI culture to be in a way that's not just talking about like humanoid robots killing people or something like that it's this kind of mania that silicon valley and like tech bros broadly on x in particular have with the word taste and they're all trying to make their taste better and have taste in AI models and you know train themselves essentially to desire better things and i was just so sick of it like guys how did you how did you become

35:37aware of the phenomenon like when did taste when did taste dot ring like a five fire alarm that on your head how can you escape it if you're on tech twitter it's all they've been posting about i mean i'm kind of a canary in the call mine here because i've been writing about taste and algorithms for like 10 years now so i i'm very sensitive to the use of that word uh and i just started seeing it crop up more and more and more and i think the threshold moment or like the climax of this was like a few weeks ago or something two weeks ago paul gram the technologist like great entrepreneur tweeted like in the AI age like we all need better personal taste and i was just like oh my god like personal taste was the realm of like hipsters and DJs and like you know and brandy agency is where i worked in the mid 2000s i feel like it's crazy this word has been claimed by uh by the technology industry that's like the the industry that is see widely seen as the most tasteless thing are like no shade like i cover attack i love attack i love the internet

36:42tasteful is not it like what does taste mean like cigars and whiskey to these folks or to mean like what's the like what's the what's what's beneath the surface i mean the definition that i read out of like interpreted from all of their tweets is like taste is basically what is profitable like to them like having good taste means knowing how to choose the right thing that makes money it means knowing how to attract more customers to use your like AI dating coach it's maybe the choice of like a logo or an instagram ad like that's that's on the more literally tasteful end of it but i i took an issue with this like mechanistic or utilitarian use of the word when really like to me tastes is about enjoying art and culture as a human with feelings well i i think it's so funny because do you guys remember when joys carol oats kind of like dunked on elan musk and she was just like you don't enjoy like art and literature like there's all this discussion of like what does elan must do and then elan musk sort of attempts to

37:45clock back and he starts replying to these like movie review accounts and then he tweets like this is a great or like homers iliad is a great book and then he like linked to like some other book that was like the Odyssey or something and i just like a to me like when i think of tasteless tech people i think of elan musk and like this desperation to like be seen as like culturally kind of um i guess insightful and and yeah they none of these people have any taste they're making but they're also living so they're so far in the future right that they're imagining a world where like the robots are doing everything and it's like well what like there's this like existential crisis it's like what am i it now like i used to write the code and i don't do that i don't do any you know i guess i have taste i mean i think that's a taste in telling the robot what to do like oh now i'm now i'm exerting myself for expressing myself by by bossing around an AI exactly which is a bit depressing and then there was another quite viral mark and reason moment

38:49like in the last few days i think where he just says that he has no introspection not and it's just like there's nothing going on up here in the head i have no thoughts i have no sense of self and that was i mean that was just it in a nutshell like how can you have taste if you have no thoughts about anything if like you're only moving forward into it i want to ask both and read read and tailor about this as as west west coasters um there was a story in bloomberg last year that i just absolutely adored about how all the tech bros now want to build these like extremely tall and ugly monuments uh to and um i'm just wondering like what are you seeing on the like are you seeing the physical architecture i mean east wing style be remodeled in in in this in this error of a new taste or there no one's building anything out here so i don't think there's a texture read said it's time to build i yeah i think it's interesting kind of how they seek to exert their influence on the physical

39:53world i mean kyle has written so much smart sort of stuff about this but um it is you know i think and i think of kyle's work a lot when i think of like this you know the sort of liminal sterile spaces that were very affiliated with the sort of associated with the tech world in the um 2010s i i do wonder what kind of text dominant aesthetic is emerging as in the 2020 2020s like is it the slop is it the like what what is kind of like the dominant like tech aesthetic i'm curious kind of like that that you're seeing how do you um have you been to cursors office no there um it's like very like warm like living room sheet you come in and like there's just a pile of shoes like hundreds of shoes because everyone just goes barefoot and it's like you just feel like you're in this like it's like everything's wood and warm and you're just like oh i'm like i'm not at work i'm like in my like cozy living room which is different from like the google you know like the google was like very bright like bouncy balls

40:58at your desk and like you know there's it was just like this fun playground atmosphere and now it's like i don't know i don't even know if that's the question you're asking but it just popped into my head like you should you should visit cursors office i left my shoes on i was told you could i could leave my shoes on but i wasn't sure if i was being judged actually i was definitely being this is like the the shaman cult vibes i think like like what goes with the quest to invent ai god you have to like have your cult in like a shag carpeted room everyone's wearing robes or whatever you take your shoes off you and sconce yourself surrounded by ai agents and you you know transcend reality like Kyle reading your story i got to think of a quote that last thought about when i was studying literature university 15 years ago from William Wordsworth which was every great and original writer in proportion as he is great and original must himself create the taste by which he is relished what a great quote what a great

42:01quote i need to write that one down and put it on my the wall of my startup office yeah like it's it's the job of an artist or a creator or whatever to create a new paradigm right to create a new sensibility and project it into the world and like teach an audience in some ways to appreciate it or understand what they're trying to do but if you if you put that task onto an ai startup like i'm not really resonating with what you want me to do here because what you want me to do is like wear a pendant on my neck that insults me via text message or you know it tells me to do things i don't like want to do there's that one startup that's like ai can rent a human to do labor for it like that that seems to be the taste they have in mind so i guess i just don't like i don't so far enjoy the sensibility that they're projecting and i wish they could come up with something a little better there was an interesting uh

43:02well that sorry Taylor there's just this thing other thing that happened in a video with this did you see this dl ss five meme happening online they they have this new thing where they use gender to AI to like upscale the graphics of video games and so they showed like before and after pictures of the characters and people like really took issue with it because they're like well that's not the artist i mean it wasn't really explained like i still don't really like a face tune yeah like a face tune and then people put these hilarious memes about it with like gen it was like jensen Wong before and after and he was like a busty woman after you know and it's like you know i it gets to this question of i mean even just the announcement of it it's like there wasn't a thought of like are people gonna be are people gonna be confused by this and think that you're we're actually like changing the artists vision here and you know and the reaction to it and it is you know i mean it's not exactly what you're talking about but it just popped into my head but it is kind of similar because it's like how is it altering art and how is it altering kind

44:06of like the media that that we've consumed there was also a viral controversy over the pretty little liars book i guess was updated on amazon kindle like it was like the digital versions of it were updated to include modern references to things like tiktok and stuff which really kind of like changes things in the in the story a little bit and so people are tweeting screenshots like what the heck like why why does a book need like an update or like why do we have to kind of like alter our media to like make it conform with today's like visual standards or like you know cultural standards and i and i think there's a lot of rejection to that whereas like a lot of these tech people are like wait but look we have this shiny new version you know and it can keep up with the times and it's like but we appreciate that it didn't keep up with the times yes right it's like the taste of AI like all culture is fan fiction everything should conform to my personal preferences everything should be like glossy and upscaled like the the video game filter it's this kind of like

45:07optimize i don't know optimize sheen that isn't very tasteful like if you go back to the words worth quote like that's timeless it was from a long time ago we don't need to update it with like riz or whatever where it sort of doesn't need to say 67 but i do think Kyle you put your finger on something which is really interesting to me which is these tech overlords imagining themselves into a future where their creations have been so successful there's nothing left for them to do and the idea of taste as this kind of last bastion of like what makes us human or gives us value i mean thinking about the hipster movement earlier it was kind of like a i don't want to summarize the hipster movement but in a sense it was like well we may not play by the rules of like you know finance culture but like we have our thing which is special and we have our taste and so the idea that that that tech bro has made on the other side of their great achievement join the hipsters of yesterday in feeling slightly alienated by the world in which they live is

46:07is a kind of delightful oh i think that's so accurate like what else is left but to take up carpentry and like make a ceramic mug for yourself and like tinker with your espresso machine i think that this is extremely pretentious probably but i've been reading a book of basho poems the like japanese haiku poet from the 18th century and like all he was doing was wandering around observing nature and writing very short poems and hanging out with his friends and i feel like that's all these tech bros actually want to do in the end and they could just do that like they could skip all of this and just go live in a cabin and look at flowers but i don't think they have i don't think they have the like introspection to do that like i think that's what one of the anthropic people said when they you know if we leave an AI company you have to write a whole diet tribe about why you left and he was like i'm going to go write poetry that's what he decided to do so you know they are doing that nice work yeah let's see what

47:08let's see what that poetry how does that shelly banjo wrote this great column last week who's my editor now who's new at at seven four and she was like she asked she talked about asking this friend of hers who has great taste in books he reads a lot of books like what business books should i be reading right now and he just geminied it and sent her the gemini list and it was like the number one recommendation was like the world is flat by tonne for me just like what are you talking like this is like horrible so you know i think you're going to have to have that's that's going to be the new thing it's going to be like i have booked recommendations that were not generated by you know that's it's real taste that's all we have time for today but i want to end our discussion with a simple question Taylor had this one last week but for for for Kyle and and read it's fresh who had the best week in tech and who had the worst we'll start with you Taylor no don't start it's Kyle so i think the best week in tech was Nintendo with Pocopia the like new

48:13pokemon slash animal crossing slash minecraft game and it seems to have just been like a huge hit even though people were cynical about it and kind of thought it was a you know hack job sell out move it's delightful everyone loves pokemon and hanging out and building little gardens for their pokemon to hang out in so i think Nintendo had a great week and who had a bad one i mean i was going to say sam altman getting called an oxy but as it came up before that's pretty pretty bad that is pretty bad read i mean i don't know i think i probably just because it's like fresh in my mind and i was talking about it but i did i did i do think that Nvidia had kind of a good a good week this week even though they're still i mean not looking at their stock price like it kind but maybe it's just me crystallizing in in my head like where they're at in terms of their their grand ambitions um but i don't know i mean i think it just continues to be like this this

49:16anthropic thing with the pentagon you know anthropic has had this big fight with the pentagon over exactly how their AI models should be used in warfare um and also in surveillance um of americans and the pentagon is saying you know we don't want any restrictions on these models and in fact now we're designating you a supply chain risk i just can't imagine that this is like great for for anthropic i mean it's very interesting because the last weeks take away was the anthropic it had the best we can take because of all the user growth and love that got on from there from their stones on this i know i know and i i it's like it's okay that's that's that's that's that's you can look at that and you're like yeah i mean sure if it it could work out for them really well right like the sort of like apple versus the versus the um the FBI thing that sort of helped that helped like solidify their privacy centric marketing but i just think in the end it's not they're not a they're not a consumer company really so it doesn't like like their app store

50:17numbers don't really ultimately matter that much it's like they have to win an enterprise and i think like it's just not ultimately in the long run that like i don't think companies are gonna look are gonna view this as like you know a big bonus it's just like it's just a draw the more the more this fight gets like drawn out i just have a feeling it's not that great for them like their competitors are like google has somehow totally avoided this controversy which i think is like fascinating and in a lot of ways they're like the real the one everybody should be competing with and like opening eyes kind of getting dragged into it too so i don't know maybe google had the best week actually i don't know just by not being like no one's talking about them in this context i know when you're a tech company sometimes you could just have the best week by no one speaking about you right right it's true it's true i think jensen i'm gonna i'm gonna kind of like piggyback i mean i do think jensen wang had a good week i think like i mean correct me if i'm wrong but i didn't see like a huge amount of backlash considering like kind of the stuff that he was talking about

51:21i mean maybe there was like a little jump over in video but also like he is ascending to use the clavicular term uh you know into like CEO status like i mean even at the in-video uh you know conference i think they were selling like sweaters with jensen wangs like face on it so i think he's kind of like uh you know when you look at the cloud index maybe like his is going up and sam ultman is going down i would say sam ultman probably had the worst week also um uber's former head of self-driving wrote this great piece about uh actually how his self-driving tesla crashed and taught him a lot about like a i risks and i thought i i don't know if that's a bad week but i thought like you know that was a good lesson for that man to learn like your email inbox getting deleted like you learned sam ultman i don't know anything like people need to learn these lessons for themselves there you have forced reflection thank you so much that was really fun that was fine thank you

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53:42we're always bouncing between a dozen tabs and docs and tools when we're researching episodes that's literally my whole Tuesday so claw now has this browsing agent called clawed in chrome and it actually navigates your tabs pulls the information and takes actions across websites for you but here's where it gets wild you pair that with co-work and now clawed's researching across the web and working through your local files at the same time okay wait so it's not just reading stuff it's actually doing things in the browser doing things and then you layer on connectors gmail google drive calendar slack and claw just has all your context no more copy pasting background into every conversation you already knows what you're working on they also just shipped clawed in excel and clawed in powerpoint so it's not just chat anymore it's literally inside the tools people already use every day it's everywhere you work that's the whole point try to look for free at clawed.ai slash tech stuff and see why problem solvers choose clawed as their thinking partner all right quick switch because i want to tell you about one of our favorite sponsors vital proteins but i can't really talk

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56:50patching at scale at on dot action one dot com forward slash tech stuff on dot action one dot com forward slash tech stuff action one patching that just works but tech stuff i'm also lost in this episode was produced by lisa denist and molissa slaughter it was executive produced by me julian nutter and kate osborne for kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for i heart podcasts the engineer is child to montabello for cdm studios jack insley mixes episode and kyle mer dot rota theme song a special thank you to read up a goti kyle chaker and taylor ends please check out all the work they put out into the world we're very lucky to call and friends of the pod and please do rate and review this show wherever you listen to your podcasts you

57:50organizations today need an identity security partner that evolves as fast as they do delinear provides the modern enterprise with calm and controlled identity security built for the a i error enabling businesses to defend access in real time with confidence delinear meets you where you are reducing security and compliance risk no matter how complex automated or distributed the environment the delinear platform ensures the right identities have the right access at the right moment so innovation productivity and agentic a i transformation can proceed without interruption because when nothing out of the ordinary happens that's extraordinary that's identity security at work learn more at delinear dot com thank you for listening to tech stuff this episode was supported by claude panthropic claude is now inside the tools you already use a browsing agent in chrome a sidebar an excellent powerpoint and co-work for autonomous file work on your desktop connect google workspace slack and more so claude always has context it's not

58:54just a chat window anymore it's wherever your work happens try claude for free at claw.ai slash tech stuff i became a millionaire overnight and lost everything that actually matter on so fear did you just say they lost everything after becoming a millionaire that's right and it gets worse it's an eroding too much drama week on the ok story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes i just inherited a fortune after losing my mom and now my girlfriend's entire family is coming out of nowhere with her hands out and my girlfriend is already giving my money away so the girl he wants to marry is already sending money out the door to find out how it ends listen to the ok story time podcast on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your if you're a systems administrator you know patching often gets delayed not because you forget but because uptime feels like a gamble back logs grow vulnerabilities pile up and patching stays manual action one fixes that action one is a cloud native patch management platform for windows macOS linux and third party apps all from one place no VPN needed use it on your first 200n points free

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