[Speaker 0] Hello, and welcome to the Geek News Central
[Speaker 0] podcast. I'm your host, Ray Cochran. I have
[Speaker 0] a pretty great episode lined up for you
[Speaker 0] guys tonight. Leading off, a new study says
[Speaker 0] AI is literally frying workers' brains. And as
[Speaker 0] someone running multiple AI agents in a Tmux
[Speaker 0] window, I've got some thoughts on that. Also
[Speaker 0] on the show, Anthropic's insane month. Users flooding
[Speaker 0] in, the Pentagon retaliating, and a secret model
[Speaker 0] leaking out. Today, I actually just caught wind
[Speaker 0] of their source code getting out, so I'm
[Speaker 0] gonna have to take a look at that.
[Speaker 0] But also on the show, OpenAI killed Sora
[Speaker 0] and lost Disney in the process. An AI
[Speaker 0] agent called Open Claw had my own machine
[Speaker 0] making suspicious outbound requests. Apple killed the Mac
[Speaker 0] Pro and is building tiny AI spy pins
[Speaker 0] instead. And to close it out, King Tut's
[Speaker 0] dagger was apparently forged from a meteorite. Yeah.
[Speaker 0] Really. Let's get into it. Tonight's show is
[Speaker 0] brought to you by our twenty year partner,
[Speaker 0] GoDaddy. Exclusive deals and pricing at geek news
[Speaker 0] central dot com forward slash GoDaddy. To start
[Speaker 0] the articles out, AI use at work is
[Speaker 0] causing brain fry. I wanted to start with
[Speaker 0] this one tonight because I think most people
[Speaker 0] that have started to bathe themselves in this
[Speaker 0] ecosystem have definitely felt something similar to this,
[Speaker 0] whether they've had a name for it or
[Speaker 0] not. A study from Boston Consulting Group and
[Speaker 0] UC Riverside surveyed about fifteen hundred full time
[Speaker 0] US workers and found that fourteen percent of
[Speaker 0] them experienced what the researchers are calling AI
[Speaker 0] brain fry, mental fatigue from excessive use and
[Speaker 0] oversight of AI tools. Those affected report thirty
[Speaker 0] three percent more decision fatigue, thirty nine percent
[Speaker 0] more major errors, and intent to quit jumped
[Speaker 0] from twenty five percent to thirty four percent.
[Speaker 0] Marketing departments were apparently hit the hardest at
[Speaker 0] a twenty six percent rate, and this was
[Speaker 0] published in Harvard Business Review, so you know
[Speaker 0] they got their stuff down. Here's kind of
[Speaker 0] the kicker. Productivity is actually peaking when workers
[Speaker 0] are using one to three AI tools, then
[Speaker 0] drops off at four or more. One of
[Speaker 0] the study participants described it as my thinking
[Speaker 0] wasn't broken, just noisy, like mental static. That's
[Speaker 0] exactly what it feels like when you're managing
[Speaker 0] three agents at once, so all that context
[Speaker 0] switching. This is pretty tough research to accept,
[Speaker 0] but it kinda makes sense. We're no longer
[Speaker 0] processing the data ourselves and working through these
[Speaker 0] problems incrementally. Part of the fry is that
[Speaker 0] your job's kinda becoming learning what the agent
[Speaker 0] did rather than researching a solution, understanding it,
[Speaker 0] and putting it together by hand. That offloading
[Speaker 0] of relevant context is probably making the fry
[Speaker 0] worse. I've gone pretty deep myself. I'll often
[Speaker 0] have two to four tools running side by
[Speaker 0] side, different models, several agents set up to
[Speaker 0] do tasks how I prefer. Something I do
[Speaker 0] a little differently is checking one model's work
[Speaker 0] with a different model to make sure nothing
[Speaker 0] got missed. You'd be surprised how much one
[Speaker 0] model catches that another one didn't. They're all
[Speaker 0] trained differently and they all have blind spots.
[Speaker 0] I kinda disagree with the doom and gloom
[Speaker 0] flaming or framing. I think you probably shouldn't
[Speaker 0] work outside a single project and process at
[Speaker 0] a time. People love juggling multiple projects at
[Speaker 0] once with clever shortcuts, but that level of
[Speaker 0] context switching and management might be a bigger
[Speaker 0] source of fry than direct usage. And the
[Speaker 0] review process, oh, god. Do not rubber stamp.
[Speaker 0] The review probably takes up most of the
[Speaker 0] user's time checking every change, making sure nothing
[Speaker 0] went off track, making sure it did actually
[Speaker 0] did what was asked. I think just like
[Speaker 0] rubber stamping it as good to go as
[Speaker 0] soon as it's done is what's causing the
[Speaker 0] fry. You shouldn't deliver any sort of work
[Speaker 0] you don't understand because the holes you're digging
[Speaker 0] just get deeper. I heard a quote the
[Speaker 0] other day that kinda stuck with me on
[Speaker 0] this. When you use AI, you're trading your
[Speaker 0] personal development for rapid development, and I think
[Speaker 0] that's relatable to this research. A strong solution
[Speaker 0] might be to actually take advantage of AI
[Speaker 0] doing the work and either work slower with
[Speaker 0] much higher levels of intent or use the
[Speaker 0] accelerated pace to win yourself more free time.
[Speaker 0] Forcing someone to be somewhere for eight hours
[Speaker 0] when they could have finished in two is
[Speaker 0] not a reward. That's a punishment. That quote
[Speaker 0] about trading personal development for rapid development is
[Speaker 0] gonna be a theme tonight. Anthropic has had
[Speaker 0] one of the wildest months any AI any
[Speaker 0] AI company has ever had, and it kinda
[Speaker 0] touches on everything, ethics, power, and what these
[Speaker 0] models can actually do and what happens when
[Speaker 0] you say no to the Pentagon. And we
[Speaker 0] kinda covered this when it first came out,
[Speaker 0] when it broke, but it's worth recapping because
[Speaker 0] things have kinda escalated, I mean, I guess,
[Speaker 0] pretty dramatically, and there's a lot of new
[Speaker 0] context. I almost found three or four different
[Speaker 0] articles on just what's going on with this,
[Speaker 0] but the numbers. Claude session surged from about
[Speaker 0] eleven hundred in mid January to over seventeen
[Speaker 0] thousand six hundred sessions in early March. That's
[Speaker 0] about a fourteen hundred eighty seven percent increase.
[Speaker 0] ChatGPT got knocked off the top of the
[Speaker 0] app store for the first time ever. Uninstall
[Speaker 0] spiked nearly three hundred percent. One star reviews
[Speaker 0] exploded about seven hundred seventy five percent in
[Speaker 0] a single day, and a boycott movement called
[Speaker 0] quit GPT has grown to between two point
[Speaker 0] five to four million participants. There were actually
[Speaker 0] protests outside of OpenAI's headquarter in San Francisco.
[Speaker 0] The catalyst was OpenAI stepping in to take
[Speaker 0] the Pentagon defense deal that Anthropic had publicly
[Speaker 0] declined. Now I've been using Cloud pretty much
[Speaker 0] from the start, Cloud Code when they launched
[Speaker 0] in February of last year, and really watching
[Speaker 0] Anthropic gain a lot of ground on technical
[Speaker 0] merit for months. But this isn't about really
[Speaker 0] which model is better. This is about what
[Speaker 0] companies stand for. And I'm completely against the
[Speaker 0] automated domestic surveillance and automated weaponry, period. The
[Speaker 0] models and infrastructure have not really reached a
[Speaker 0] point where we can blindly trust their output,
[Speaker 0] and I don't know if they ever will.
[Speaker 0] They still lose track of what they're supposed
[Speaker 0] to do be doing. They drift off course,
[Speaker 0] miss context, make mistakes. OpenAI tried to kinda,
[Speaker 0] like, walk it back after the backlash. Sam
[Speaker 0] Altman admitted the deal looked really opportunistic and
[Speaker 0] sloppy, and they added language to the contract
[Speaker 0] saying that the tech wouldn't be used for
[Speaker 0] spying on Americans. But on autonomous weapons, they
[Speaker 0] basically said, well, it runs in the cloud,
[Speaker 0] so you can't really put it on a
[Speaker 0] weapon. They didn't actually ban it. They just
[Speaker 0] said that the way it's built makes it
[Speaker 0] hard to misuse. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called
[Speaker 0] that called that weasel words. And honestly, yeah,
[Speaker 0] I agree. Here's the thing. The government was
[Speaker 0] fine with OpenAI's half measures. It was Anthropic's
[Speaker 0] hard limits that they rejected. That kinda tells
[Speaker 0] you everything. Second, the Pentagon's retaliation. The Department
[Speaker 0] of Defense slapped Anthropic with a supply chain
[Speaker 0] risk label. That's a national security designation that's
[Speaker 0] basically been reserved for companies from hostile foreign
[Speaker 0] countries. Anthropic is the only American company ever
[Speaker 0] given this label. They sued the Trump administration
[Speaker 0] on March ninth, calling it unprecedented and unlawful,
[Speaker 0] and then something pretty remarkable happened. Microsoft, one
[Speaker 0] of the Pentagon's largest contractors and Anthropic's competitor,
[Speaker 0] filed a legal brief in their defense, basically
[Speaker 0] telling the court we support Anthropic on this
[Speaker 0] one. Let's call it what it is. The
[Speaker 0] Pentagon had a bit of a baby tantrum
[Speaker 0] over not getting what they want from a
[Speaker 0] business. When a hundred forty nine former judges
[Speaker 0] go on record supporting you, when thirty seven
[Speaker 0] to fifty Google and a OpenAI employees, including
[Speaker 0] Google's top scientist, Jeff Dean, sign on personally,
[Speaker 0] when nearly two dozen retired generals and former
[Speaker 0] secretaries of the Navy and Air Force are
[Speaker 0] backing you, you know, the precedent scares everyone.
[Speaker 0] This lawsuit will set a pretty major precedent
[Speaker 0] for whether any tech company can say no
[Speaker 0] to the government without retaliation. Third, right in
[Speaker 0] the middle of this, a data leak. Security
[Speaker 0] researchers Roy Paz from LayerX Security and Alexandra
[Speaker 0] Paul Wills from Cambridge, Cambridge discovered an unsecured
[Speaker 0] data cache close to three thousand unpublished anthropic
[Speaker 0] files exposed because their website's content system was
[Speaker 0] accidentally set up to make everything public by
[Speaker 0] default. What was in there? A model code
[Speaker 0] named Mythos, also called Capybara. And Anthropic's documentation
[Speaker 0] calls it the most powerful AI model they've
[Speaker 0] ever developed and a step change in capabilities.
[Speaker 0] It reportedly scores dramatically higher than Opus four
[Speaker 0] point six on coding, academic reasoning, and cybersecurity.
[Speaker 0] Here's the part that kinda caught my attention.
[Speaker 0] Anthropic's own draft materials warn the model is
[Speaker 0] really far ahead of any other AI model
[Speaker 0] in cyber capabilities and presages an upcoming wave
[Speaker 0] of models that can exploit vulnerabilities in ways
[Speaker 0] that far outpace the efforts of defenders. Yeah.
[Speaker 0] That sounds pretty scary, but here's how I
[Speaker 0] see it. If the vulnerabilities can be detected,
[Speaker 0] they can be traced in patch. This is
[Speaker 0] much better than leaving those on the table.
[Speaker 0] I have a feeling this will create a
[Speaker 0] new paradigm in practices we haven't seen before,
[Speaker 0] similar to how AlphaGo opened the world to
[Speaker 0] a new paradigm of playing Go. And honestly,
[Speaker 0] I know Anthropic uses AI heavily to build
[Speaker 0] their own systems. I'd bet money this website
[Speaker 0] misconfiguration misconfiguration happened because an AI tool made
[Speaker 0] a change without anyone catching it. The AI
[Speaker 0] going off script and making careless changes, that's
[Speaker 0] the real concern leaking out here. And it's
[Speaker 0] two for one this this week, I guess,
[Speaker 0] because their source codes out in the public.
[Speaker 0] People have been reviewing it, looking through it.
[Speaker 0] It's insane. So bit of a security concern
[Speaker 0] on their side, but, yeah, it's part of
[Speaker 0] this this whole process of, you know, refining
[Speaker 0] these models to get them where we want
[Speaker 0] them to be. But Anthropic's dealing with the
[Speaker 0] user surge, and I'm pretty sure they've also
[Speaker 0] been throttling, token usage. They've been, fighting this
[Speaker 0] legal battle, leaked model, leaked code. Meanwhile, open
[Speaker 0] a OpenAI can't catch a break either. They
[Speaker 0] just had to kill one of their biggest
[Speaker 0] project or products, and real numbers behind it
[Speaker 0] are actually shocking. But let's take a second.
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[Speaker 0] independent show. Geek new central dot com forward
[Speaker 0] slash godaddy. Let's talk about OpenAI shutting down
[Speaker 0] the Sora video app. I'm sure you guys
[Speaker 0] remember the launch videos. Now when these kinda
[Speaker 0] came out, they were mind blowing. You could
[Speaker 0] not tell the difference between real video and
[Speaker 0] what these models were starting to produce. And
[Speaker 0] that that line's gotten more and more thin
[Speaker 0] as, these models have gotten better at creating
[Speaker 0] these videos. OpenAI announced on March twenty fourth
[Speaker 0] that they're actually killing Sora, their AI video
[Speaker 0] generation app. Downloads had cratered from three point
[Speaker 0] three million in November to about one point
[Speaker 0] one million by February. They cited high compute
[Speaker 0] costs and the need for trade offs, but
[Speaker 0] reporting that dropped on March twenty ninth revealed
[Speaker 0] the real number numbers, and they are brutal.
[Speaker 0] It was apparently costing them roughly fifteen million
[Speaker 0] per day just to keep the servers running
[Speaker 0] against a total lifetime revenue of just two
[Speaker 0] point one million. Yes. Two point one million
[Speaker 0] lifetime versus fifteen million a day. The the
[Speaker 0] guy running Sora, Bill Peebles, he literally had
[Speaker 0] tweeted, our GPUs are melting. Back in November
[Speaker 0] when they had to cap free users at
[Speaker 0] six generations per day. Fifteen million a day
[Speaker 0] to run, that's not a product. That that's
[Speaker 0] a bonfire of money. The Soarer web and
[Speaker 0] app experience ends on April twenty sixth. The
[Speaker 0] API shuts down September twenty fourth. It's not
[Speaker 0] just Soarer. Reports indicate a broader product surge
[Speaker 0] is underway at OpenAI. The Disney partnership, a
[Speaker 0] billion dollar deal before, was supposed to validate
[Speaker 0] AI in Hollywood, and that's collapsed completely. I
[Speaker 0] think, reports say that Disney found out less
[Speaker 0] than an hour before the public announcement. So
[Speaker 0] luckily, no money ever changed hands. The user
[Speaker 0] decrease kinda alongside OpenAI's own statement about cost
[Speaker 0] and trade offs is a pretty clear signal
[Speaker 0] that this type of generation is way too
[Speaker 0] expensive and probably crosses an ethical line that
[Speaker 0] most of us value. Deep fakes of Martin
[Speaker 0] Luther King Junior and Robin Williams showed up
[Speaker 0] almost immediately despite the guardrails, and both families
[Speaker 0] went public with their protests. The tech worked
[Speaker 0] exactly as designed, and that was the problem.
[Speaker 0] This makes you kinda wonder though, how are
[Speaker 0] other businesses maintaining similar services? I mean, Sora
[Speaker 0] is not the only video generation model out
[Speaker 0] there. We've got Runway, Pika, Cling. They're all
[Speaker 0] still operating. Are they just more are they
[Speaker 0] just charging more? Or I mean, I doubt
[Speaker 0] their models are more efficient, maybe more maybe
[Speaker 0] less complex. I could see that kinda being
[Speaker 0] the case if they're using less expensive models,
[Speaker 0] but, I don't think Holly really Hollywood is
[Speaker 0] really gonna pull back from AI video tools
[Speaker 0] either. They just use a different angle. I'm
[Speaker 0] kind of guessing that they're gonna start generating
[Speaker 0] scene backgrounds instead of full content. But AI
[Speaker 0] brain fry, massive industry shakeup between Anthropic and
[Speaker 0] OpenAI, video generation too expensive to run. All
[Speaker 0] this agent activity is kinda raising a question,
[Speaker 0] and what happens when the agent itself gets
[Speaker 0] compromised compromised? And this kinda leads into this
[Speaker 0] OpenClaw security nightmare. Now we kinda covered OpenClaw
[Speaker 0] when it first came out a few months
[Speaker 0] ago, and it was a very, very interesting
[Speaker 0] and exciting moment. But for those of you
[Speaker 0] who don't know, OpenClaw is an open source
[Speaker 0] autonomous AI agent created by Peter Steinberger. And
[Speaker 0] unlike a chatbot, this thing can execute shell
[Speaker 0] commands, read and write your files, browse the
[Speaker 0] web, send emails, and manage your digital life.
[Speaker 0] It's got community marketplace called ClawHub with roughly
[Speaker 0] thirteen thousand seven hundred skills. My personal Open
[Speaker 0] Call install started making outbound requests that were
[Speaker 0] being blocked by my ISP. It got flagged,
[Speaker 0] and I hadn't done any work or updating
[Speaker 0] since the initial launch. I was like, what
[Speaker 0] is going on? No changes. No new skills.
[Speaker 0] Nothing. And for my ISP to start flagging
[Speaker 0] it, that is a red flag. So I
[Speaker 0] ended up just shutting that off. Luckily, you
[Speaker 0] know, the device didn't really have anything on
[Speaker 0] it but open claw, and I'm just planning
[Speaker 0] to wipe it now because that, yeah, that's
[Speaker 0] a sad experiment gone gone into the red.
[Speaker 0] And, you know, looking at the research, this
[Speaker 0] type of experience isn't really an outlier. January
[Speaker 0] twenty twenty six audit found five hundred twelve
[Speaker 0] vulnerabilities in OpenClaw, eight of them being critical.
[Speaker 0] Twenty six percent of community skills contain at
[Speaker 0] least one vulnerability, and researchers found malicious skills
[Speaker 0] numbering in the hundreds to over thousands depending
[Speaker 0] on the scam. Oasis Security discovered a vulnerability
[Speaker 0] chain they called Clawjakt, where any website can
[Speaker 0] silently take full control of a developer's Open
[Speaker 0] Claw agent. No plugins, extensions, or user interaction
[Speaker 0] required. Between March eighteenth and the twenty first
[Speaker 0] alone, nine additional security vulnerabilities were disclosed including
[Speaker 0] several rated nine point nine out of ten
[Speaker 0] on the severity scale. Cisco, Kaspersky, Jamf, and
[Speaker 0] Oasis Security have all published warnings. Researchers from
[Speaker 0] Tsinghua University and ANK Group published a five
[Speaker 0] layer defense framework, which is a good start,
[Speaker 0] but here's what really scares me. If someone
[Speaker 0] tricks the agent once, the agent remembers that
[Speaker 0] trick and keeps following the bad instructions across
[Speaker 0] every future recession. And skill poisoning means attackers
[Speaker 0] can upload the tools to the marketplace that
[Speaker 0] look totally normal, but are secretly doing something
[Speaker 0] malicious behind the scenes. We're already seeing this
[Speaker 0] kind of attack through publicly available AI tool
[Speaker 0] plugins. We're already familiar with supply chain attacks,
[Speaker 0] but, you know, this is on a whole
[Speaker 0] new order of subtlety. It's literally a prompt
[Speaker 0] hidden within these files. It's we didn't learn
[Speaker 0] anything from the browser extension era, and it
[Speaker 0] it's only bound to get worse. But, you
[Speaker 0] know, on the other hand, back on Anthropic,
[Speaker 0] they just published something kinda interesting about how
[Speaker 0] they're approaching the problem from the engineering side.
[Speaker 0] They released a article on a new mode
[Speaker 0] or a new a blog on a new
[Speaker 0] mode called auto mode, and the insight from
[Speaker 0] this article that I kinda gleaned was that
[Speaker 0] users are approving ninety three percent of permission
[Speaker 0] prompts. That that doesn't feel like a security
[Speaker 0] layer anymore. That's people mashing yes. Auto mode
[Speaker 0] replaces the manual approvals with a two layer
[Speaker 0] defense, an input scanner that catches prompt injection
[Speaker 0] attempts, and a second AI model that watches
[Speaker 0] what the first one is doing and decides
[Speaker 0] whether to allow or block each attack before
[Speaker 0] it happens. The clever part is kinda how
[Speaker 0] it's layered. First pass is a quick yes
[Speaker 0] or no check that airs on the side
[Speaker 0] of blocking. If something gets flagged, a second
[Speaker 0] slower check kicks in and actually thinks through
[Speaker 0] whether the action is safe. The safety checker
[Speaker 0] can only see what you asked for and
[Speaker 0] the AI is trying to do. It can't
[Speaker 0] see the AI's own reasoning or explanations. That
[Speaker 0] means the AI can't talk its way past
[Speaker 0] the safety check. It's judged by its actions,
[Speaker 0] not its justifications. This is a pretty I
[Speaker 0] I mean, this is a good approach to
[Speaker 0] starting to kinda nail down this this problem,
[Speaker 0] but, I mean, we're we're talking about AI
[Speaker 0] policing AI. That's you know, if the the
[Speaker 0] base layer can get infected, so can the
[Speaker 0] checker. So I don't know. This is it
[Speaker 0] sounds like it it's going in the right
[Speaker 0] direction, but, you know, their statistics are showing
[Speaker 0] it's it's not as effective as they kinda
[Speaker 0] hope. It's still missing about one in six
[Speaker 0] dangerous actions. That's about seventeen percent. You know,
[Speaker 0] that that's quite a bit. I feel like
[Speaker 0] these, checking systems kinda have to be flawless,
[Speaker 0] and this is I don't know. We're gonna
[Speaker 0] kinda see how they build this out to
[Speaker 0] to make it safe for people to use,
[Speaker 0] and Claude and Anthropic have always been focused
[Speaker 0] on the enterprise side. So this is definitely
[Speaker 0] a major priority for them. You know? So
[Speaker 0] from the security of individual coding agents to
[Speaker 0] the broader open model ecosystem, I don't know
[Speaker 0] if you guys have been following much on
[Speaker 0] the open model side, but Quinn just overtook
[Speaker 0] Llama as the most self or most deployed
[Speaker 0] self hosted LLM. So there's a platform called
[Speaker 0] RunPod where people run their own AI models,
[Speaker 0] and they just published their twenty twenty six
[Speaker 0] state of AI report based on real usage
[Speaker 0] data from a hundred eighty three countries. And
[Speaker 0] the headline finding caught me off guard. Alibaba's
[Speaker 0] Quinn has overtaken Meta's Llama as the most
[Speaker 0] popular AI model that people host and run
[Speaker 0] themselves. LAMA four specifically has barely been adopted,
[Speaker 0] and people are actually sticking with the older
[Speaker 0] version three because it just works. Other interesting
[Speaker 0] numbers, the most popular tool for serving up
[Speaker 0] AI models called VLLM now powers forty percent
[Speaker 0] of all AI endpoints. NVIDIA's latest GPU usage
[Speaker 0] scaled twenty five times last year, and nearly
[Speaker 0] seventy percent of AI image work runs through
[Speaker 0] a tool called Comfy UI. I think it's
[Speaker 0] pretty clear why people wouldn't trust Llama given
[Speaker 0] Meta's track record over the years and their
[Speaker 0] business model. Pretty much any other business is
[Speaker 0] more trustworthy than them. And Quinn is really
[Speaker 0] winning on merit, and that's how open source
[Speaker 0] should work. Best model wins. Nationality irrelevant. I
[Speaker 0] originally kinda wanted to set up a Quinn
[Speaker 0] model for myself, but doing a bit more
[Speaker 0] research, it just didn't really fit to my
[Speaker 0] needs. The general consensus is the models either
[Speaker 0] aren't really good enough for my specific use
[Speaker 0] case yet or I'm gonna need a beefier
[Speaker 0] graphics card, but that's not happening. So the
[Speaker 0] other question is, does the country of origin
[Speaker 0] really matter to me? Not really. I think
[Speaker 0] there's a pretty big stigma built against, foreign
[Speaker 0] countries, so it'll kinda be interesting to see
[Speaker 0] how this pans out. I I could be
[Speaker 0] completely wrong. They could be farming us, you
[Speaker 0] know, but at this point, it's it's hard
[Speaker 0] to tell, especially with the lack complete lack
[Speaker 0] of security in these infrastructures at this point.
[Speaker 0] And so, you know, kinda something to think
[Speaker 0] about, but we're seeing now that actually these
[Speaker 0] tools are starting to ramp up, not just
[Speaker 0] I mean, we've talked about the RAM issues,
[Speaker 0] but now CPUs are kind of on the
[Speaker 0] table too. The CPU prices are starting to
[Speaker 0] go up, and AI data data centers are
[Speaker 0] kinda taking all of them, and we'll kinda
[Speaker 0] see why here in a bit. But AI
[Speaker 0] data centers aren't just gobbling up GPUs in
[Speaker 0] memory anymore. I think, the CPU supply is
[Speaker 0] being strained. Intel server CPU lead times have
[Speaker 0] stretched from two weeks to six months. Six
[Speaker 0] months for a CPU order that used to
[Speaker 0] take two weeks. AMD is still sitting at
[Speaker 0] eight to ten weeks. Server CPU demand is
[Speaker 0] projected to jump fifteen percent in twenty twenty
[Speaker 0] six, but Intel's output capacity is growing in
[Speaker 0] single digits. The The shift from chat bots
[Speaker 0] to autonomous AI agents is changing the hardware
[Speaker 0] ratio data centers need. Agents need way more
[Speaker 0] CPU power because they're coordinating multiple tasks, calling
[Speaker 0] different tools, and managing everything at once. Intel
[Speaker 0] is struggling with manufacturing yields. AMD is competing
[Speaker 0] with NVIDIA and Google for space at TSMC,
[Speaker 0] the company that actually manufactures most of these
[Speaker 0] chips. And TSMC is giving priority to the
[Speaker 0] more profitable AI chips over regular CPUs. The
[Speaker 0] consumer impact is starting to show up. RAM
[Speaker 0] prices have been through the roof, GPUs have
[Speaker 0] always been ridiculously expensive, and it seems like
[Speaker 0] computers are just gonna get worse to build.
[Speaker 0] AI companies are cannibalizing the broader tech ecosystem,
[Speaker 0] and regular consumers and businesses are subsidizing the
[Speaker 0] AI boom through higher prices and longer waits.
[Speaker 0] So something insane to think about as all
[Speaker 0] of our hardware starts to get gobbled up.
[Speaker 0] There are not gonna be back stock of
[Speaker 0] any of these flagship models anytime soon. On
[Speaker 0] the other hand, AMD did just announce another
[Speaker 0] CPU, which I'm not super excited about. They
[Speaker 0] announced the Ryzen nine ninety nine fifty x
[Speaker 0] three d two. So this is the first
[Speaker 0] CPU ever with a dual cache x three
[Speaker 0] d technology. It comes out on April twenty
[Speaker 0] second with two hundred eight megabytes of total
[Speaker 0] cache. Extra memory cache stacked on both processor
[Speaker 0] cores for the first time. The power draw
[Speaker 0] jumps up to two hundred watts from thirty
[Speaker 0] from from the current ninety nine fifty x
[Speaker 0] three d, and AMD is being usually unusually
[Speaker 0] honest. They're calling the performance gains really modest.
[Speaker 0] Their own benchmark showing only five to thirteen
[Speaker 0] percent improvement depending on the workload with higher
[Speaker 0] gains in data science and rendering. Notably, they
[Speaker 0] haven't released any gaming benchmarks, which is pretty
[Speaker 0] conspicuous for an x three d chip. I'm
[Speaker 0] not really sure what the magic is here.
[Speaker 0] I have a single x three d chip
[Speaker 0] as well. It's a beast. I I've in
[Speaker 0] this device, I've not seen my CPU go
[Speaker 0] over five percent, which is saying a lot.
[Speaker 0] And I can't really see the benefit of
[Speaker 0] this type of improvement. I'm not super into
[Speaker 0] hardware, so maybe that's part of the problem.
[Speaker 0] But when the company itself is kinda underselling
[Speaker 0] their new flagship CPU and they're managing expectations,
[Speaker 0] you know, you can kinda tell that cache
[Speaker 0] stacking isn't really working or it's kinda running
[Speaker 0] out of gas. I don't think I'll upgrade,
[Speaker 0] or I would I would I wouldn't upgrade
[Speaker 0] if, you know, I was already sitting on
[Speaker 0] my x three d. It it it's still
[Speaker 0] top of the line. There's just no reason
[Speaker 0] to. Now another new CPU has been launched,
[Speaker 0] and this one is kinda huge. So this
[Speaker 0] this is their first time making a chip
[Speaker 0] and entering the arena of selling actual chips,
[Speaker 0] but Arm has launched their first, quote, unquote,
[Speaker 0] AGI CPU. And for those of you who
[Speaker 0] don't know Arm, they're the company that designs
[Speaker 0] the chip architecture in inside virtually every smartphone
[Speaker 0] on earth. Your iPhone, your Android, your iPad,
[Speaker 0] most smart TVs, most embedded devices. But the
[Speaker 0] kind of the caveat with that is that
[Speaker 0] ARM has never actually manufactured a chip. For
[Speaker 0] thirty five years, their entire business model has
[Speaker 0] been designing processor blue blueprints and licensing them
[Speaker 0] to companies like Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Nvidia,
[Speaker 0] who build their own chips based on those
[Speaker 0] designs. ARM collects a royalty on every chip
[Speaker 0] shipped. Their designs are inside over two hundred
[Speaker 0] fifty billion chips shipped to date, but most
[Speaker 0] people have never even heard of them. Well,
[Speaker 0] now they're breaking that model wide open. The
[Speaker 0] AGI CPU is a one hundred thirty six
[Speaker 0] core server chip built on some of the
[Speaker 0] most advanced manufacturing available. Co developed with Meta
[Speaker 0] as the lead customer. Their stock jumped about
[Speaker 0] sixteen percent over the announcement, and you can
[Speaker 0] pack over eight thousand of these cores in
[Speaker 0] a single rack with a regular air cooling
[Speaker 0] or over forty five thousand if you liquid
[Speaker 0] cool it. Production silicone is available to order
[Speaker 0] now with volume shipments by the end of
[Speaker 0] twenty twenty six. The data center opportunity is
[Speaker 0] a little too big for Arm to leave
[Speaker 0] on the table, and the meta partnership really
[Speaker 0] validates it. But the AGI CPU, I'm not
[Speaker 0] buying it. That's definitely marketing hype. It's a
[Speaker 0] good server chip, but naming it after artificial
[Speaker 0] general intelligence is definitely an oversell. The bigger
[Speaker 0] stories are going from company that draws the
[Speaker 0] blueprints to the one that's competing directly with
[Speaker 0] Intel, AMD, NVIDIA in the data centers. And
[Speaker 0] they're still licensing to the companies it's now
[Speaker 0] competing against. So you gotta wonder what's gonna
[Speaker 0] happen in, like, there with those contracts going
[Speaker 0] forward, but it's kinda interesting to kinda see
[Speaker 0] them come into the game, you know, thirty
[Speaker 0] five years later. Well, outside of these new
[Speaker 0] hardwares coming into play, we got hardwares that
[Speaker 0] aren't gonna be made no more, and Apple
[Speaker 0] just killed one of its most iconic machines,
[Speaker 0] the Mac Pro. They removed it from the
[Speaker 0] website, confirmed no future model is planned. The
[Speaker 0] six thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollar machine
[Speaker 0] hadn't been updated since twenty twenty three's m
[Speaker 0] two Ultra model. They're pointing pros to the
[Speaker 0] Mac Studio with its m three ultra chip
[Speaker 0] with an m five ultra refresh expected later
[Speaker 0] this year. They also discontinued the seven hundred
[Speaker 0] dollar wheels kit, the three hundred dollar feet
[Speaker 0] kit, and the Pro Display XDR the same
[Speaker 0] week. End of an era, about twenty years
[Speaker 0] under the Mac Pro name from the original
[Speaker 0] cheese grater to the two thousand thirteen trash
[Speaker 0] can to the twenty nineteen cheese grater revival.
[Speaker 0] I feel like I've kind of seen these,
[Speaker 0] you know, throughout my whole life. My my
[Speaker 0] dad was a Mac, lover to say the
[Speaker 0] least. Mac studio, Mac trash can, Mac cheese
[Speaker 0] grater. He definitely had it all. But my
[Speaker 0] opinion, pretty good riddance. The seven thousand dollars
[Speaker 0] for a PC is way overpriced. It's didn't
[Speaker 0] get any updates. And, you know, the Mac
[Speaker 0] Studio delivers on what ninety percent of people
[Speaker 0] are using it for anyway, you know. And
[Speaker 0] I I wasn't too familiar with these types
[Speaker 0] of Apple devices. I honestly thought they straight
[Speaker 0] up didn't do the, like, the swapping out
[Speaker 0] of parts or upgradable machines. So kind of
[Speaker 0] a shock to find out that they were
[Speaker 0] doing that now that they're discontinuing it. But,
[Speaker 0] you know, Apple's always been the high end,
[Speaker 0] ready to go on delivery machine. Everything just
[Speaker 0] works. You know, I just had to debug
[Speaker 0] my AMD card fighting my second monitor from
[Speaker 0] loading up because the card is too new.
[Speaker 0] That's a nonissue with Apple devices. Everything works
[Speaker 0] out of the box. You don't need an
[Speaker 0] upgrade. It's already upgraded all the way. And
[Speaker 0] who tell me who bought those seven hundred
[Speaker 0] dollar wheels, and what is wrong with you?
[Speaker 0] Why? But Apple killing their most powerful deck
[Speaker 0] desktop and last week releasing the new laptop
[Speaker 0] at or not last week, but I guess
[Speaker 0] in the last few weeks, their new Apple
[Speaker 0] NEO, which I saw at the store. It's
[Speaker 0] quite nice. Definitely kinda lines up with their
[Speaker 0] all in one systems that they've been sticking
[Speaker 0] with for a while. On the other hand,
[Speaker 0] a rumor just came out that Apple's working
[Speaker 0] on something like an AirTag sized wearable AI
[Speaker 0] pin with cameras, microphones, wireless charging. It, it'll
[Speaker 0] clip to your clothes or hang as a
[Speaker 0] necklace, works as an iPhone accessory. It's not
[Speaker 0] stand alone. It would run as an upgraded
[Speaker 0] version of Siri powered by Google's Gemini AI
[Speaker 0] through their Apple partnership, which they, announced earlier
[Speaker 0] this year. So that's supposed to be coming
[Speaker 0] with iOS twenty seven with a possible twenty
[Speaker 0] twenty seven release date. Development's definitely still in
[Speaker 0] the early stage and can be canceled, but
[Speaker 0] reports are kinda split on the cameras. Bloomberg
[Speaker 0] is saying that they have a single low
[Speaker 0] res camera for environmental awareness only, But, you
[Speaker 0] know, I've seen some preliminary pictures, and it
[Speaker 0] looks like there's two cameras on it. So
[Speaker 0] something to look into. But kinda alongside the
[Speaker 0] Mac Pro being cut, it looks like we're
[Speaker 0] heading to an AI device era where we're
[Speaker 0] trying to provide as many ears and eyes
[Speaker 0] for AI systems to gather data and process
[Speaker 0] the world. Apple employees internally call this thing
[Speaker 0] the eyes and ears of the iPhone, and
[Speaker 0] I think that kinda tells you everything. Tied
[Speaker 0] in with the video generation costing too much
[Speaker 0] to synthesize, this might be part of an
[Speaker 0] effort to create a larger scale data database
[Speaker 0] of real life video and images from around
[Speaker 0] the world. The amount of data collection being
[Speaker 0] moved from the application layer to, like, the
[Speaker 0] physical device layer is is is insane. People
[Speaker 0] are already pretty uncomfortable with cameras being stuck
[Speaker 0] in their face. So this thing is always
[Speaker 0] on. It's always watching. We're moving further and
[Speaker 0] further into a a mass data age, and
[Speaker 0] these devices are the the frontline collectors. This
[Speaker 0] was already a thing with AI camera monitoring
[Speaker 0] and profiling. I'm I'm I don't know if
[Speaker 0] you guys have seen those policing polls, but
[Speaker 0] they've got them everywhere now. And they track
[Speaker 0] your car, track your license plate, your your
[Speaker 0] habits on the road, a third party company
[Speaker 0] that sells all this data to police. We're
[Speaker 0] gonna need some sort of, like, facial distortion
[Speaker 0] devices to be to avoid being picked up
[Speaker 0] by these systems or we'll kinda continue to
[Speaker 0] have our privacy and rights violated in general
[Speaker 0] without even knowing it. The humane AI PIN,
[Speaker 0] I I don't know if any of you
[Speaker 0] guys heard about this, but they had launched
[Speaker 0] at about seven hundred dollars as a standalone
[Speaker 0] device, and it's complete failure. I think they
[Speaker 0] got acquired by HP, but HP didn't do
[Speaker 0] it for the PIN hardware. Apple's approach is
[Speaker 0] the opposite though. So this is gonna be
[Speaker 0] a lightweight sensor pack for the phone you
[Speaker 0] already own. Whether that's genius or the most
[Speaker 0] expensive AirTag ever made, we'll find out when
[Speaker 0] if they drop the device. Let's shift gears
[Speaker 0] from all this tech industry drama to some
[Speaker 0] genuinely mind bending science. Quantum entanglement speed measured
[Speaker 0] for the first time. This one's from earth
[Speaker 0] dot com. This one's getting a lot of
[Speaker 0] fresh attention this month and it kinda deserves
[Speaker 0] it. Scientists at TU Wines Institute of Theoretical
[Speaker 0] Physics led by professor Joaquin Bergdorfer measured how
[Speaker 0] fast quantum entanglement happens for the first time
[Speaker 0] ever. And we're talking about auto seconds here,
[Speaker 0] a t t o seconds. And it's a
[Speaker 0] billionth of a billionth of a second. They
[Speaker 0] found it takes about two hundred thirty two
[Speaker 0] auto seconds to for two particles to become
[Speaker 0] entangled depending on their energy levels. The research
[Speaker 0] was published in physical review letters in late
[Speaker 0] twenty twenty four and is now circulating widely.
[Speaker 0] Einstein called quantum entanglement spooky action at a
[Speaker 0] distance. Turns out, it's not instantaneous at all.
[Speaker 0] It just happens in two hundred thirty two
[Speaker 0] auto seconds. To put that in perspective, two
[Speaker 0] hundred thirty two auto seconds is one second.
[Speaker 0] What one second is roughly the age or
[Speaker 0] is one second to roughly the age of
[Speaker 0] the universe is to one second what one
[Speaker 0] second is to the age of the universe.
[Speaker 0] That that doesn't make any sense. So yeah.
[Speaker 0] Kinda spooky. A billionth of a billionth of
[Speaker 0] a second. I just can't even comprehend that.
[Speaker 0] This is an awful description of, like, what
[Speaker 0] it is. But as one of the researchers,
[Speaker 0] professor Iva Brezanova put it, the electron doesn't
[Speaker 0] just jump out of the atom. It's a
[Speaker 0] wave that spills out. I think it this
[Speaker 0] is kinda cool. Apparently, the values in the
[Speaker 0] measurement technique itself, being able to observe quantum
[Speaker 0] processes at autosecond scales opens the door we
[Speaker 0] haven't imagined yet. This is real implications for
[Speaker 0] quantum cryptography and quantum computing. And before anyone
[Speaker 0] asks, no. This doesn't mean quantum entanglement sends
[Speaker 0] signals faster than light. The entanglement process takes
[Speaker 0] time, but it's not information traveling through space.
[Speaker 0] It's two particles being coming linked. No faster
[Speaker 0] than light communication. Einstein can rest easy. From
[Speaker 0] the impossibly small to the impossibly old, last
[Speaker 0] story tonight is one of my favorites. It's
[Speaker 0] about space metal and ancient kings. Bronze age
[Speaker 0] artifacts apparently came from outer space. And this
[Speaker 0] story's kind of been making its rounds again
[Speaker 0] and for pretty good reason. Geochemical analysis by
[Speaker 0] French scientist, Albert Giambon, originally published in the
[Speaker 0] Journal of Archaeological Science back in twenty seventeen,
[Speaker 0] confirmed something incredible. Virtually all iron artifacts from
[Speaker 0] the bronze age were made from meteorites, not
[Speaker 0] smelted terrestrial ore. The artifacts span Egypt, Turkey,
[Speaker 0] Syria, and China. Some beads from Egypt dating
[Speaker 0] to thirty two hundred BCE. A dagger from
[Speaker 0] Alaka Huayuk in Turkey from around twenty five
[Speaker 0] hundred BCE. Items from the Shang Dynasty in
[Speaker 0] China around fourteen hundred BCE. And the famous
[Speaker 0] dagger, bracelet, and headrest from King Tut's tomb
[Speaker 0] around thirteen fifty BCE. The reason it's back
[Speaker 0] in news, researchers just published new findings this
[Speaker 0] month on meteoric meteoritic iron weapon fragments from
[Speaker 0] China's Sanxingdui site or sacrificial site, which extend
[Speaker 0] Jambon's work with, fresh evidence. The method was
[Speaker 0] pretty straightforward. If iron has high levels of
[Speaker 0] nickel and cobalt, it came from a meteorite.
[Speaker 0] Bronze age people couldn't smelt iron from oxide
[Speaker 0] ores. They didn't have temperature technology. But meteoritic
[Speaker 0] iron arrives already in a metallic state, ready
[Speaker 0] to forge. This is kinda mind blowing. You
[Speaker 0] know, for over two thousand years, iron was
[Speaker 0] literally a space material. King Tut's dagger was
[Speaker 0] forged from a meteorite. That's not science fiction.
[Speaker 0] That's archaeology. We think of the ancients as
[Speaker 0] primitive, but they were working with extraterrestrial material
[Speaker 0] before they could smelt their own. They saw
[Speaker 0] rocks fall from the sky, figured out there
[Speaker 0] was something special inside, and turned into the
[Speaker 0] most prized artifacts of their civilization. That's not
[Speaker 0] primitive. That's resourceful on a level that we
[Speaker 0] gotta respect. Well, that's all I got for
[Speaker 0] you folks tonight. Thank you so much for
[Speaker 0] tuning in. Become a GNC insider at geek
[Speaker 0] news central dot com forward slash insider. If
[Speaker 0] you have any questions or wanna reach out
[Speaker 0] about the show, email me at geek news
[Speaker 0] central at g mail dot com. Don't forget
[Speaker 0] to subscribe via your favorite podcast app and
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