The GTA 6 Leak With a $250,000 Crypto Question

Welcome to Hacked. Welcome to Hacked. I want to start this episode by talking about a very big, very public, very profitable video game leak. Normally leaks aren't associated with profit Jordan. Tell me more. What a time to be alive. On August 18th, a group or person or like agentic swarm, it's really hard to know nowadays. It's been calling themselves cyber leak. Starts publishing gameplay footage from Grand Theft Auto 6 that the developer of that game rock star had not released yet. Clips of the game, Scott, the big game. The big game that everybody is waiting for. The world is waiting for. People are signing up for Netflix to see trailers in advance of people just were hungry for clips of that of that crime Florida life, that five star light, I guess it's six stars in this one, you can go up to six stars. People, all these clips are going live. If people fighting in the game driving in the game, basking in the Florida energy, there's maps in the leak, there's videos of the characters are cool crime protagonists. This was all before that big Netflix reveal that you mentioned, Scott. So people are like, they are hungry for this game. This leak of all of this video is a really, really big deal. 17 of these leaks fall over the next 10 days and alongside the footage that they were leaking, they were kind of framing the leaks as a type of protest. The group cyber leak published a set of like gaming demands on the website and it's pretty classic stuff and digital only pre-orders and downloadable content held back from the game at launch, guarantee that the single player games remain playable without a server connection like Pura gamer stuff and each leaked clip links back to this website, which cited kind of the big reason for all this is rock stars, $100 ultimate addition and the decision not to release it as a physical disc as why they were the target of this big leak, big public statement, they're selling a box with a download code in it, boo. High level, that's it for like a week and really nerdy corners of the internet, that was a thing. So this is like a cyber protest exactly done by what I would call, you know, people of our generation and older that care about physical media, owning games, offline play, old hacker shakes fisted clouds type stuff. Yeah, but at the same time, and this is where it gets interesting and I want to talk to you about it, the group also launched a cryptocurrency. Why not? Why not? It's called cyber leak. It's called the same thing. Who even cares? It goes up at the same time at the same day as that first leak in a post about this token because like you hear that and you go, what's the story there? Are they right? Quote cyber leak is raising funds for a secret project. The specifics cannot be revealed yet. Let it be absolutely clear. This is not a cash grab. No, Scott, no laughing. It's not a cash grab. Sorry. Yeah. Sorry. I was too busy thinking about whether the special project was some form of prediction market or online gambling system because I feel like the whole, I bet on crypto, make money on crypto is now gaming prediction markets. Like I feel like that audience is moving and you know, just the sheer fact that they went to crypto is kind of an old school thing to do. I can't furthering my theory that these are like 40 year old people. Sure. You're like, they could have been on calcium, making fat stacks. Yeah, yeah. They could have had a will GT a six see a leak. Sure. By the entire yes side of the argument, pump up the no side and then retire a little while later, a couple days rock stars. You brought this up already big GTA six reveal is going up on Netflix, a 27 minute long like to call it a trailer is like it's just a little movie. Did you watch it? I did not watch it. Did you not watch it? Somebody that's excited for the game to come out and was a big fan of GTA five. I could not have been bothered to watch a 30 minute pre-launched trailer. Oh, I got less shit going on in my life. That thing ruled. Did it actually? Yeah. It's really good. A few hours before rock star puts its 30 minute trailer for the game up on Netflix. What you might call the apex of the value of cyber leaks leaks up until this point, they're the only source of these of this video footage, 30 minutes of it is about to go live. The value of those leaks is about to go down. That wallet on the Solana blockchain where they coined cyber leak makes four transactions. It's a right to the speed at which it's a rock pole, it's like a car driving past. This is according to on chain data reported by coin desk, they converted a 146 of these coins. They did it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they realize by kind of realizing these fees about a quarter million dollars in profit. Not bad. Not too shabby. And so here we find ourselves this rag tag thing guy group agent form called cyber leak. Exposing themselves to great like potential legal retribution, which we'll talk about. At the same time as having this very earnest message from gamers to a gamer giant. At the same time, really muddying the waters of their messaging with this alleged quarter million dollar payday. And I just wanted to start the episode here in this episode brought to you by our title sponsor, Nordlayer, the network security platform for modern teams. I'll tell you about the more later. I just wanted to start here Scott, because I think this is such an interesting story. It is, I'll say it feels very 2024. Sure. Yeah. But it is interesting. I took a peek into their subreddit because I saw that they had a little subreddit. Got a bit of their manifesto is she stuff, but that's about where it stopped for me. Right. I was intrigued to talk to you about this here what your thoughts are, here what your takes are. I think everybody in the world knows that there is a demand for leaks for popular games. And if you were making the most popular game in the world ever probably, I can see the demand being really high. Seems like an obvious target. And they've been the target of multiple hacks before, if we recall for sure for sure. I started with kind of like, do we know anything about the hack itself? Like do we have we learned anything about the intrusion method? Because there's something to be said for them saying, well, we targeted this game in particular because of this choice. But then there's just a question of like, well, did you target it because of that reason or did you just have access and you reverse engineer the reason that was a question that was pretty prominent in my mind and reading through all this? As of right now, we don't have a confirmed like attack vector for all of this. There's not how it happened. Yeah, there's not like a smoke and gun fishing email where we figured it out of this credential leak where we know for sure. Best information is that it's about a year old content. Lu show one of the protagonists wasn't in it. There was a year old song people were trying to get into the forensics of it. But the thing I found interesting on that front was it seems as though it wasn't just a tranche of pre-recorded video and image files. It seems as though cyber leak had access to a build of GTA 6. And that's pretty important because it could have just been a bunch of reference files, screen recordings. The strongest evidence of this and maybe the coolest part of it for me was August 20th cyber leak, like an old timey gangster shot their own name into a wall in the game. They shot the word Lisa. So they were able to play. They were playing it. So the game, they were like, they call me cyber leak and they wrote leak into a wall in the game. So that was the best evidence that this wasn't just stolen videos. This was like an actual build of GTA 6 out in the wild. Can I make a hypothesis? Please have a far fetched classic Scott hypothesis. Sure. Major video game development, which I've worked in, you've worked in indie development. Yep. Have entire teams of people called QA people that just play the game. They get dev builds of the game pretty much every day if Scott suspects the bug testers. They, well here's the thing is they're typically not the highest paid people on the team. They're typically subcontractors. So they really have no connection to the core team that's been developing the IP they're not really bought in. They're just mercenaries for hire to come in and play video games all day every day for you know, the lowest compensation tier in the game team. Sure. Often. And they're super valuable. This is not really important to the game design process. Extremely important to the begrudging QA and bug testing. It is like actually a deeply important part of games on, but I know what you're saying. It's the subcontractor part is really what's most important that you're a subcontractor and you're not the highest paid subcontractor, which is often sweet like having worked on some of those teams. Some of those people, they're not even, they're from countries that you haven't heard of. Like they, these are, it's not like they're local people to get brought into a sub and they, they end up on a QA team. people. from Georgia and people from Eastern Europe like Asia, like they're from everywhere. You can only imagine that even if the subcontractor is getting paid a North American rage for their time, the person who's actually doing it is making very little. So my hypothesis goes that this chances are this was somebody who said, "Oh, I've actually got a live playable version of GTA 6 on my computer at home," and somebody said, "If you leak that, you could make tons of money." 250,000 US dollars is depending on where you're in the world. That's a large amount of money for by any standard, depending on where it is generational life-changing money. Yeah, of course. You get sent a build and you're like, "So many eyeballs will be drawn to this organically that if you only talk about how the cryptocurrency and the leak worked in a second here, but it's a very short line to an extraordinary sum of cash." The incentive is really like natural and like I understand it. And at quarter million dollars in the United States of Canada is a specific line in our life. A quarter million US in Bangladesh is royalty money. 100%. So the economic incentive is there. That's my hypothesis. That's where I would start looking if I was the FBI. If you were to take two lawyers, because that's where this is actually all starting is. Basically, using DMCA grounds like copyright grounds, their lawyers have started filing subpoenas, New York court, DMCA subpoenas. We haven't gotten to a suit yet. This is just fact-finding for them. They're just going like, "Hey, Microsoft, a bunch of this stuff was hosted on one drive files. We would, here's a subpoena. We would like as much information about who that account belonged to. Hey, Discord, we would like account information pertaining to the cyber leak account and a few other ones, which we'll talk about because they were streamers that then covered this stuff, who had nothing to do with it, but who have now gotten embroiled with this set of subpoenas. It's all very murky. Hey, X, who does the cyber leak account belong to?" And I think a YouTube subpoena as well. As I mentioned, a streamer, Dark Viper, AU got swept up in that. We've denied volume. They involvement. I was just streaming and showed this footage that they were streaming. I had nothing to do with this. Now they want. I think his audience, the legal creep is occurring and there's a little bit of a slushing in, slushing out of how many people get caught in the dragnet of figuring out who leaked this good, good crime video game. Having worked on games and having seen a leak from the inside. The first time that I saw a leak on a highly anticipated pre-released title, I immediately thought that it was pre-planned by the team. It was a marketing complex. It was a real marketing. Yeah. Yeah. Because the audience is like, it's there and it's excited for it, but they're not really engaging with it yet because it's not out yet. But every time a slow drip of data comes out, a small leak, bit of this, it creates this fervor of communication and the red it's explode and everybody's talking and getting more excited and asking about pre-released days. So the first time I saw it happen, there was, I think, probably a similar switch hunt that went on. I had entirely thought that it was just a pre-planned marketing promo stunt because to me, it was very effective at that. So yeah. So it's the same thing that goes here every time I see a game leak, I'm like, is this a leak or is this just the PR team earning their annual bonuses? Yeah. Right. I think that skepticism is often warranted. I think in this case, I don't smell that. I think, and it's, you know what it is, it's honestly, it's the golf and production value between the Netflix trailer and the poorly streamed low qualities. It's like, this didn't have the veneer of a PR's broadcast. It was like, there would have been a lot more pixels. You know what I mean? Like, there just would have been a higher quality, a lot more curated. It was like kind of a bad first impression compared to what went live. Then I'm like, I actually believe that this was just a big, really, a really big whoopsie. And then the lawsuits would be like, wow, you're really playing with fire to have your lawyers sue your, sue you, sue yourself, sue yourself at great personal expense. Yeah, I, I think in a lot of cases, it probably is in this case. I'm like, no, I'm pretty sure. I think there's, I think your earlier theory smells more accurate to me. Well, the last time there was a big leak on this game, it was lapses, wasn't it? Hacking your lapses? Yeah. Shiny hunters. Yeah. Shiny hunters adjacent. Well, so there were two, there was the lapses hack in 2022 with Cartage and then there was another thing in, I think this past year with shiny hunters who are technically related. I'm cutting you off, but yes, there's two incidents there. Your, your memory isn't peckable, the, the, yeah, because I, but I think lapses actually stalled in game content, like they had the ability to show pre-release, you know, what it was being worked on, kind of systems where I think shiny hunters took like internal information. Right. That's kind of the RMO anyway. Okay. But the, anyway, yeah, so it had been a long time since somebody had seen the state of the game. Yeah, right. So I think that that's just it for me is it does the constant desire for people to see what they can't, what they're not supposed to. Totally. Yeah. I think that's a very powerful marketing lever that if I was VP of marketing of a big triple A studio, I'd probably consider pulling it. It just with thumb drives with all this lead content, just like placing it on the concrete and the parking lot out front, looking a journalist in the eye, being like, where did my thumb drive go? I wonder if, like, if you could get the viewing metrics from Netflix for their 27 minute, 25 million dollar pre-release launch trailer, yeah, I wonder what the viewership and audience of that is versus what a major leaks audience is because I bet it's comparable and it cost you nothing. Well, and what was interesting about the Netflix thing was that it wasn't even, it's like you can't guarantee perpetual exclusivity. It was like a Netflix exclusive window for like a little chunk of, exactly, like a little chunk of time, yeah, fasting and Netflix paid money for that. I bet a lot of money changed hands considerably more than on this crypto side of this whole thing. Yes. Yes. Please take a sound. No, yeah. It's interesting. The only thing I wanted to talk about the crypto, we could dig into the like specific ratio of like, well, they burned 20% of the supply and this is how we're like, we could get really into the crypto weeds. I don't think it's that interesting. The thing I found fascinating was that they launched this thing right before the leak goes viral. Every time they shared that content, every piece of content contained a link back to the coin. So all of the news coverage, all of the Reddit posts, all the Twitter posts, promoting this stuff, were inadvertently driving traffic back to this, the sheer amount of traffic influx caused the price to spike on just sort of like hype alone. Sure. Algorithmic traders saw massive trend influx of this coin being mentioned and scooped them up. And then operators cashed out on the trading fees that they had accumulated about 250,000 US real dollars at which point they traded that out and then the price collapsed. So it's like, you could, there is maybe if it's not a traditional rug pull where it's like, I'm holding a lot of the coins, you drive the price up and I sell them. But it's sort of like cousins, I'm not going to call it a rug pull. I'm just going to notice that it shares the shape of a rug pull. Sure. So they knew the marketing lever that they had and they said, how can we turn this into money, creating a cryptocurrency was that way to turn it into money. Even if it was like more on the legitimate side transaction charges, not the, hey, everybody buy in, I'm going to rug pull you, hock to a girl style. You kind of just look at it and you're like, we, we can have a debate about the mechanism of what occurred here, but you did walk away with a significant sum of money, which they preempted by saying it is for a project. But it, it, and this is sort of where this all ends for music. You just muddies the water of your messaging a little bit because there, there is a message in there that I'm like, we can talk about realism and where the market and where the gaming industry is going, but I'm like, I'm sympathetic to your basic intent here, but you have muddied the waters of that message with this rug pull shaped operation you've pulled off here. Well, they got a fund, the new product, they need a 250,000 bucks to fund the product. You got to fund your project, which is a project, and even vaguer word that's like, I have a project to have a new house. Rockstar's August 26th statement in response to this basically said, like, sorry to the fans that this is how you're seeing this for the first time, which is like kind of a, like, an interesting way of framing it. They didn't address any of the criticism, but they did say a thing that felt real to me as a person who makes games, I imagine would be to you, quote, it would be an understatement to say that having videos of Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay leak in this way has been heartbreaking for our team. And this is obviously not how we intended for you to see the game after all this time. Like, yep, that's how I would feel again, yeah, especially because it's old footage. I think it was recent, like a recent build copy. This could also just been like a crypto locker thing where it's like maybe a QI A computer got crypto locker and literally stole the data, exfiltrated it, and then found out that they had a copy of GTA 6, and we're like, whoa, you can imagine. Can you imagine you you you're you're you're kind of just like fishing and you hack this QA company and you're like maybe they have a cool oh my god it's GTA 6 like you can imagine the the feeling of it rushing to greet you when you like open the EXC and you're like oh no oh no I'm in true I'm in more trouble than I was a minute ago yeah I better make a lot of money because of how trouble I better find a way to rug pull off this kind of engenders empathy a little bit sort of that's kind of almost everything I have for this the thing I wanted to end on was from a group called stop killing games because at the heart of their manifesto is a sort of games preservation argument and I think there's a there's a really good argument there that unless we're talking about a live a live service game if I give you 50 or 60 or 80 or $100 for it just through corporate attrition my product shouldn't go away if it's a single player game the idea that it has to like ping a server to check if I'm allowed to play it is like well then I didn't really buy it so can I really pirate it you get into this whole murky thing here I like the idea that if I spend 50 bucks on a video game I own it and we should cling to that as long as we possibly can recent physical media games aren't even games they're literally like downloads certificates yeah no there it's okay even the cartridge for switch two is just a link to a download code exactly I'm with you but we rage against the dying of the light Scott stop killing games who is like I would say like an important part of the digital preservation movement they're not about physical they just they just want these things to be standalone pieces of software that can run and it so that they can archive them to preserve them for the future and cyberleaks manifesto kind of echoes their language they distance themselves from this thing with a hundred foot pole stop killing games has founded a few years ago is by a youtuber after Ubisoft shut down this game that they love their whole ideas games should be left in a quote reasonably functional state after can discontinuation feel like an offline mode private service for whatever the games you shouldn't die their line about this was this kind of act is destructive and helps no one worse it risks tarnishing the reputation of our communities and our chances to make real change and I found that really fasting that the real games preservation folks are like thanks but no thanks this looks way worse than it serves us and unless there was like an under the table quarter million dollar donation you didn't really do it for this project did you yeah remains to be seen what they do with that money maybe they pop up of vins whatever that website like a rom emulation you think maybe they prop up something real you think about archivism and archives you know pop culture stuff advertising campaigns from the 30s 50s things that helped shape the social norms all go into archives you know they're collected they're indexed video games since 19 I don't like I would say since the NES when they got huge like even the Atari like in home video games but even before then you had our Cades that they're massive social things like the amount of people in the world that played video games at this point and it played for a good majority of their life is you know substantial and to not archive them and to not consider them part of like the cultural data of of a generation and of an era is crazy to me so I'm a big fan of this idea I love the idea of the video games archive stop killing games lots of these people big fans big supporters they I think what they're doing is really good and then the truth is nobody likes the digital only games like I don't know anybody that does sure it's convenient but it's like yeah nobody likes it yeah it's it's it's an option thing and I get both sides of it to your point games preservation and archivism is like it's important this is like a medium and a genre that we have directed so much energy and love as a culture towards manufacturing it's like we should preserve it it is a huge like output of human effort and labor and energy and creativity it's like yeah don't burn the library of Alexandria for this like it's it matters that those things persist it really does totally on the flip of it I'm like I get it if you're selling games to be like most of them are selling games for all this production I get it I there there's a legitimate thing there but how we handle a digital only future it's not binary it's not like you either just let go of the steering wheel and hope the industry functions well on its own it's like no there's better practices and there's worse practices in a digital only world we should be pushing towards better ones stopgilling games seems to thread that needle really beautifully that kind of wave thinking about it so I should expect my physical media version of rebounder by 33 games soon and later I'm not saying I'm just saying I'm just saying just before we before we jump off this is a tiny little touchback to GTA that I wanted to make which is shiny hunters you mentioned yes yeah recently there's a bigger rest in the Netherlands they recently arrested a 24-year-old Amsterdam man had a role in the shiny hunters allegedly his name I could try and mess up and we'll choose not to but it is ends with vanderstap which I get and given that I speak a bit of Dutch I should know how to say the first name of this person heaven heaven heaven vanderstap okay prior to prior conviction got arrested I think he was arrested on the 15th but they didn't break the news until the 28th 29th kind of a big deal you know thorn in the side obviously shiny hunters famous group that steals data they go into massive corporations next full trade large amounts of private personal trade data and then they hold it hostage and if you don't pay they give it away and they have proven to do such thing yeah so just wanted to throw that in as they have a link back to GTA they had hacked GTA for it we alluded to this earlier in the show but they had a it wasn't content about the games but it was like internal financing docs internal ops like there was a big sort of like Excel spreadsheet I think it was a lot about how the GTA economy worked with like GTA money and the numbers how much people were spending on and using something that so interesting probably a fascinating leak to read honestly before we get to the next story this episode it's brought you by title sponsor Nordlayer the reality of running a modern team your people are working from different devices different locations different networks and most businesses have no real visibility into what that looks like from a security standpoint Nordlayer is a network security platform that fixes that Nordlayer gives you centralize control over who can access your company systems let's you grant revoke access in seconds and keeps every connection fast and encrypted and does all of that without any additional hardware or complex infrastructure you can verify users by identity and device block malicious sites and risky domains and stay compliant without slowing anyone down it's built for the way teams actually work now check it out at nordlayer dot com slash hacked podcast that's nordlayered dot com slash hacked podcast thank you as always to nordlayer for their support and we're back Scotch you want to talk about open clause and it's many ancestors it's family it's family it's family tree that has emerged over open clause I'm going to talk about shell rock bot news open AI dots instinct China remember there's a few more they said it was going to be the year the personal assistant and boy were they right it's the it's harnesses abound you might say harnesses abound uh so we're talking about uh two two of these consumer products were released announced and released uh the week that we are presenting this muse by meta and dots by open AI to go back a little bit to lay the groundwork of the story here uh we started talking about open clause the start of this because these are all uh in some way related to that so it's i think it's worth going back a little bit um it was this kind of like hackery project started as a weekend hack called whatsapp relay 100,000 github stars in two months uh it started running it was this like harness this little AI agent that runs on your computer that you talk to through messaging apps you text it like you would a person and instead of just replying you can actually use the files on the computer that was the big change it was a harness for one of these models it was originally Anthropics Claude which is why it was called it was Claude Mod in Claude yeah Claude Mod Mod Open Cla LLM is the brain this is this harness that gives it access to your files so you can give it kind of instructions like you would a person using a computer go check those emails and do this with it go grab this file edit it and send it over here it led to the fact that you couldn't buy a mac mini for like a year yes because that was the standard operating platform for these things everybody would go and buy a mac mini they would set up open claw on it which eventually I think became Hermes bought there was like there was a family that descended out of open claw of like better versions of it that were less jumbly I'll share the dejumbleification is kind of what this story is about in terms of the consumer product side and like you said people bought these things because they realized pretty quickly that if they're willing to pay for it you could just sort of have this thing running on a mac mini 24/7 getting up some real trouble but that's the high level of what a some real high jinx Scott that's sort of what a harness is super high level I think it's a good way of thinking super high a genetic harness yeah yeah sure which is yeah yeah if there's another type that most people need to know about please do let me know wow harnesses are comes in all shapes and sizes harness This is really just a. a name for a framework, you put around an LLAM that controls its execution flow. So that could be plan development, execution, verification, quality assessment, and it could be domain-specific, like you could have an AI harness just for coding, which is like what log code is. Sure. Or you could have an AI harness. That's a good distinction. Yeah. Just for educational delivery, which is, you know, kind of what alpha school does. You can have, so there's various different things. The harness is more of the general term for, we put an LLAM brain in a box and we want to make sure that it does what we want it to do. So we build a bunch of systems that control the LLAM. Yeah. That's kind of like the nervous system for now. Sure. And in the case of these products, we'll be getting to in a minute, just the idea of like a consumer personal assistant has been since this technology came out, it's got Peter Steinberg or, I think his name comes up with it. Sure. Thank you. He comes up with it and everyone goes, oh, this could be the thing that becomes Jarvis. Like the personal computer assistant that just does what you want because it has hooks into all of your digital life. It's SkyPetr Steinberger comes up with it, it's burning money for him because it's like super popular and it's like $10,000 a month. So he, I can't remember if he got bought by or just hired by, but basically he ends up in open AI. He kind of takes it over that direction. Please. He got, not Aqua hired, but hired. Right. Okay. The open claw, I believe, is still held by the OpenClaw Foundation, Peter's still the head of that foundation, but then he went, took within weeks, he had a, what I can only assume was a very lucrative offer to go join the open AI team, pre IPO. Sure. And to lead, I think they're a generic solutions team. Interesting. Some of the, some of the things that made this super famous, like just to go into the recent archives that I keep in my brain is Jensen Huang and Vidya founder, one of the, if it's got to be one of the top three richest people in the world, if not second richest center. So yeah. There's a letter, Jack, it still come cheap. Famously, and if you didn't know this, and I probably mentioned this on the show, but his cousin is the CEO of AMD. So their family needs have to be a blast where you have two of the richest semi conductor, you know, moguls in the world. There's a sky ship somewhere totally. Yeah. You know, the the Taiwanese military is their personal personal security. Yeah. Anyway, the, to loop back, Jensen was on all in and he was talking about open claw right after it launched. One of the largest progressions of, of AI kind of, but it happened to date, you know, the ability, like the one of the things that made open claw so, like, so functional was that it had access to a full computer. And it had the ability to understand how to use that computer. So that's what really gave it the ability to start doing and automating things on behalf of the, I don't know what your master, I don't know what the proper term for it. The user, yeah. I think users still good, still software, you know, yeah, or masters, you could go that direction. Lord, like, I don't know, but I think, I think user is good. Old timing. Yeah, users. So the, the user that was controlling it had had the ability to do far more than any of the existing AI chat solutions, because that's kind of where things were still added in that realm. The person development harnesses like cloud code was out code X might have been out, but there wasn't really anything for the person to help facilitate daily life. And open claw was one of those things. And it spawned off an entire ecosystem of multi agentic, you know, coordination and collaboration and there's all kinds of worlds that came out of this. For sure. And part of the structure of this thing open claw is, is important for where we're going with the consumerization of this technology, every open claw agent had four files. I didn't know about this, but now the whole world knows about this because this is now becoming a recurring structure, agent, which was like the operating rules for this thing, like just sort of super high level, how it's supposed to work, you have user, which was like the users or masters in your case, preferences, yeah, data on the user, yeah, memory dot md, which is like it's long term memory soul dot md is its hyperbolicly named like personality tone. It's like a real comprehensive system prompt. There you go. So you have agents, user, memory, soul, that is the sort of like a big part of the structure of this thing, the guy who makes it gets swooped up by open AI. Meanwhile, now meta jumps in, they didn't win the higher. They were apparently in fierce competition over peter, that's just allegedly, but they were trying to get them. They lose the higher, but they jump in on this. And September 8th, they launched this product muse. So a user asked muse to compare itself against open claw, like an open claw repo. And they were like immediately like, well, you got a soul dot md and memory dot a memory dot md, a user dot md and an identity dot md in the directory. And meta was basically like, oh, yeah, we were super heavily inspired by open claw. The quote that I loved and the reason I wanted to talk about it was, well, they got those things exactly right. Let us all not forget that the head of AI safety at Facebook deleted her email with open claw in the, in the week after it launched, getting things right, Scott. Go for it. I think. I pulled through part of that. Yeah. No. I want to jump back in time if you want to go. Because actually Grock thought was the first of these kind of new modern multi agents. I haven't used muse that much. I installed it and tried it. I just don't trust Facebook that much. So yeah, we should, we need to talk about that. But I want you to compare it to Grock thought it would definitely come back to the meta of it all because I think that's a huge part of this story. Think about the last time you heard a breach story on this show, it always starts the same way. Someone somewhere saw something too late, an alert buried, a signal mist, an S.O.C. that just couldn't keep up. 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So the so Grockbott kind of spun up their own version of this, and it was out in market I think months ago. And it is, I would say, exceptional. Having used quite a bit, you kind of have the ability to spawn up multiple agents. This is funny thing, and it's something that I talked to. There's a guy Theo, he makes T3 code. It's like another coding harness, and I fired him a Twitter message one day. And I was like, Hey, can you add the ability to have the your agents message each other? And he was just like, No, I was like, OK, and then Grockbott came out. And one of Grockbott's most powerful things is you can have group chats with agents. You can tell them to talk to each other, so you can like delegate something to like a production manager who then controls their entire team of resources. So like, you know, whether it's right code, they've got a QA person that's reviewing things. So you can kind of build an entire organization in Grockbott, which then they can kind of self manage a bit, which was kind of where the second generation of like, when people got a hold of open claw, they started saying, how do I get multiple of these things talking to each other and working together? So Grockbott kind of took that concept and built it into a commercial platform. Every single one of these agents, including mues and including open AI's dots, which I'm sure we'll get to one of the things that makes them so powerful, as they essentially have a container virtualized computer. So every time you spin up an agent, it gives them their own computer to use where they can download stuff. They can open web browsers. They can, you know, they are fully agentic with full computer backing. They have the ability to download stuff and install things. So yeah, anyway, I don't know where I was going with that. But that's a bit of the history. It's, I think it is relevant to this because there's a little bit of a spread. Grockbott runs primarily on your computer. I think it has like, it can talk to one of X's servers, but it's primarily, it's more like codec like it's controlling files on your system, right? The inside of a virtual container, okay. And that virtual container actually lives in the cloud. Oh, okay, interesting. So no, so it's more akin to muser dots in that regard. It can control files on your computer. So like say you have it installed on your computer. If your computer's running, like say you have a Mac mini from your open claw days and you have Grockbott installed on it, it can actually go into the local file system and do stuff for you. But then it also has its own virtual IPC that it works in. Okay. That was what I was curious about because I was cloud bot seemed like it was like, you need to buy a Mac mini because you're, you're the server now. Like it needs to run everything locally. And Grockbott, I, I had a sense it was a bit more cloud based. And then now we've ended up with muser dots where it's entirely cloud based. It's like there's just a little virtual machine running on their servers. You don't need the, I mean, you need hardware to interact with it, but you don't need the Mac mini functioning as the server farm. Like that is sort of where this productization has taken us to is like, you don't want to have to have a home hub for this stuff. So we'll just run that in the cloud encrypted. Well, open AI made news the other day for buying something like 40,000 of the new Mac minis. So I'm wondering if open AI dots just isn't a Mac mini farm. It seems as though it was just like, he kind of one shot at open claw. Like he didn't and we shouldn't even, I shouldn't say one shot because it implies any vibe got it, which maybe did he agentically engineered it. It took him like a, like a little, like a couple months, maybe he nailed the structure is kind of where I'm going with that. It was like the basic architecture of it is like, it will evolve. But it was like, he kind of figured out the rough skeletal structure of one of these things. Sure, eons of advancement and stuff. But like the basic, the basic bones of it. And though he ended up at open AI, meta then announced this new consumer technology product called Muse. It is a application. It is a little Tamagotchi style. I think they called same as Grock bot. Does Grock bot have physical hardware? No, Grock bot is essentially the exact same thing as dots and muse. But they the, oh no, muse has the Tamagotchi dots and Grock bots. Have it all agentic icons look almost exactly the same. Oh, really? Just a little little shapes. The little, they were my little shapes of eyes animated eyes and stuff. I call the breakfast cereal. I'm like, it's the little stars. The, it's the marshmallows in the lucky charms. So they roll out this application. It, climb, it does very, very well. Meta has no problem building out a social graph. Like between Instagram and threads, they can just direct so much traffic that this day, naturally, Facebook climbed up the charts. Did very, very well. And it's number one for two or three weeks. At the point, I think basically they're trying to say like, Grock bot is really, really good. If it's like you could wire it into your slack and your discord and your email. And it's, it's very like a work productivity aimed thing, I would say, is at least how they're marketing it. I'm sure it has personal application. But it's really marketed as like a work thing. You could tell the really trying to market muse between the app, the vibe of the videos, the little muse charm, Tamagotchi, keychain thing. They're really marketing this as like a consumer personal assistant. The use case that everyone keeps talking to is like, check my email and find all those, I don't know, home depot bills or this type of file and do this with them, like something that's just sort of a brute force task. They're really from all the mailing lists that fill my inbox up every morning. A hundred percent. And then the other feature is just this idea that it's a little bit running in the background. It is spending a little bit of time, say, when you're sleeping, like checking stuff that happened through the day to see if it missed anything so that you can wake up to some kind of message from it, kind of like a personal assistant getting headed this type of thing. The thing that is important, however, for all of this is that it is being made by the company, Madda, formerly known as Facebook, still run by Mark Zuckerberg, a company with, and I'll put this generously, a reputational trust issue. And this technology requires, say you want this thing to organize your email, you have to let it log into your email and read all your emails and associate everything about you to you in the meta marketing network. Yes, look at every receipt of everything you've ever bought. Yep, reply to your messages. Just give me your messages. Those are the reason I don't use Grock bot, but it like, and it is the same thing as like, there's an expression. It's about physical hardware, so not about software. It suffers different, but it's friends don't let friends use Gen 1 products. Totally, open claw. And I'm like, pardon me, fuck me. This is a Gen 1 product if I ever wanted to not use one. Like, I hope Muse. All of them like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm waiting. I'm not saying there's no application for this. Like, there is a point where I'm like, you know what? Kind of like, if I search for a photo on my computer and the file name is like, seven, one, two, three, four, eight, nine, five, but it's a photograph of a tree. If I search tree on my computer, I would like it to surface that image. That is a relevant application of this type of technology that's useful to my life that can be done securely in a way that makes sense for me. And that if there were two products, one of which had it, I picked the one that had it. This isn't there yet. It will become there. It will get to a point where I'm like, I wouldn't buy some computer that couldn't organize my bills and my email for me. But I'm not going Gen 1 on it. Just personally, I had this conversation the other day with my brother-in-law about AI and like this, I was just bringing him up to date on the current state of it. Sure. He still living in a co-pilot, you know, chat window. It's pre-hardis. Yeah. And he was asking me about it and we're talking through all the different platforms that developers and what people are doing and the controversies around them. And I was like, really, the only one that I really kind of trust is Google. They're generally considered corporate enterprise. They have data security agreements in our enterprise accounts. People that I trust to uphold the law. On the meanwhile, you've got Dario from Anthropic running around saying Anthropics going to be the only company in the world in like 10 years because they're just going to take over every industry after they steal the intellectual property from them. I'm not, that's not a verbatim quote. I'm just like expanding and commenting on it. I know, I know the sentiment you're talking to. He is let us say taking a buck wild approach to a pre-IPO PR tour. I'll just call it that. It's like strange tactics, sir. Let's see how it goes. Yeah. And the same kind of energy from open AI, but a bit different, you know, a little bit less altruism and a little bit more consumerism. And then you've got Elon, who's kind of Elon. He's kind of like I'm a free speech or die kind of person, which is kind of so am I. And you know, you love my hate him and that's on you to choose. Really, there's nobody that walks in the space that's kind of like clean. And Google, I would say, is the cleanest. I know what you mean. Google gives us. IBM. Google gives like our lawyers are here. Like the lawyers said we can do. I'm like, okay, that that and they also have built an empire on selling seemingly private data for it. It's like they're an advertising empire. Like I'm not going to give them a big badge for privacy. But like I know what you're saying. Open AI is like, well, say I'm not meant something of a specter. I don't know. Like I'm just like, I'm almost we're all kind of just watching to see what kind of ruler of the world he's going to turn out to be. But I think generally speaking, escapacism is warranted in all of these cases, not just about him. Um, Grock X. I don't know if I would call you a musk free speech warrior. He's an a musk speech warrior. But I understand his reputation. I'm not giving it my private information, but best of luck. Uh, and then meta is like hard. No for me. Like all of the rest of them, there's this sense of like, let's see how you do it. That one. I'm like, I just fully don't trust you. Like it's sort of in its own little box for me over here. I'd love to interview Mark. I really would. It would be very awkward. But I would sure like to do it. Um, I have questions. I don't have a great deal of trust. And it is based on history of performance. Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? Like the thing for me that really jumps out is, I think the entire AI space is moving at this clip of as for forgiveness, not permission. And they're doing it very intentionally, I think. And like you're seeing that with things like the, we'd ever covered it on the show, but we can have a brief chat about now is the, the mathematical problem, the Navier Stokes solution that open AI came up with. And I'm air quoting for the listeners that aren't watching on video. Sure. Theoretically, they got the theory and hypothesis that they submitted a billion dollars of agent time at from training data that came from conversations that like math researchers were having with codex to try and work through the thoughts of their problem hasn't been confirmed or denied. I'm saying this allegedly, but that is, that's kind of the thing. They're, they're all looking for what is a great PR story that I can release. Hey, if we cracked one of the Millennium prize mathematics problems, that would be awesome. Hey, guess what? Our new training data set has this like really promising theory that comes from all of these very promising PhDs in math that are working on solving this as their life's work. And we're just going to submit, you know, 100 million dollars of compute time over 30 days and just knock it out. And then hey, look at our press launch. Like, look what we just did. Look what AI could do. That's so interesting. And that's kind of a recurring thing allegedly, no, allegedly, but that's what's interesting is we also said that on the security side of things. These companies have these these models rigged up into this agentic structure to broadly gloss over it that if you then combine that with functionally unlimited capital of just like how many servers running for how long? Those kind of questions that most mortal people would just be like, well, there's just a limit. If I run it for more than a week, it will bankrupt me kind of thing that they can kind of just be like point all of it, like the fire hose of the entire tech industry perched atop the entire economy pointed at a security problem. And it's like Dragon Ball Z energy beam blasts at the energy problem. And you're like, oh, cracked it pointed at this math problem and a Dragon Ball Z energy beam just at this math problem. And maybe they sounds like in some cases they've cracked it. I think that's the shape of PR for these companies for the foreseeable future is like in a way that is not reproducible by the general public. Can we just point this thing at something and see what it can do? And then we get to put out a press release that's good news instead of bad news. I'm kind of here for it. Like I hear what you're saying, but I'm also kind of I'm also kind of here for it. If we're going to do this and we're going to bring in and like the power consumption and all the rest of it, if we're going to go down this road, we should do it for the betterment of society. And if they're going to choose that going after a millennium prize, math things and you know, touring situations like any kind of major development in science is where they want to point that fire hose. I'm kind of there for it. I don't like the like IP alleged IP theft side of it. But I but I don't hate the fact that you know, the mathematicians that were working on it probably never would have could have let like probably never would have solved it because they didn't have the fire hose of intellectual capacity that was provided for. So so so I like I like I like the idea that we're using it for good. No, I know. It's better than then turning that fire hose on like consuming Jordan's emails and figuring out what how to best market something to him or serving the ads at a scale and specificity never achieved before in human history. I hear what you're saying. Two things one in a hit in a first for this show when it comes to the question of IP theft. Do we have to say allegedly? And the second thing is the second thing is like I was I wasn't even criticized. I was just describing like that's not even like a criticism that you shouldn't be doing that. I'm like I guess if you were to be doing anything because it's not happening at scale too. Like I'm so much less worried about the some of the ethical dimensions of AI because it's like well that that's not happening at scale. You're just there's just steam shooting out of one room. I have a different kind of set of questions about that. I'm intrigued by it. I think if you can cure a disease or solve a math problem is a good PR day for you. Have had it guys. Like that seems like a good an instance of a good use of this technology. I would agree. So that's where I'm living like Google's alpha fold like protein models. Yeah. They've got LLM's custom trained on proteins. They they had a theory about kind of why we age and it's this jumbling of amino acids and proteins that kind of gum up together and our body gets worse at clearing out kind of like the dead waste inside of ourselves. Sure. So they they kind of took this idea ran it through alpha fold and said hey build us something that'll break this stuff down. And so they ran it against it. They came the alpha fold came back and said hey we think these compounds are amino acids will help kind of clear this garbage out of your cellular out of yourselves. They fabricate this stuff and then they start using it on on trials and it's like wicked good. They take donor skin from like 75-year-old people and apply it in a cream form and the skin rejuvenates back to a 35-year-old skin. They start looking at inflammation and you know other byproducts of aging that happen in our physical bodies the arthritis things like this and it's cleaning it up. And I'm like this is what I want for my AI future. Yeah. You know I want my my 80s to feel like my 30s and you know the people that I love to be healthy because we've got RM and A vaccines for cancers coming out. I don't know if you saw that Moderna Moderna had a clinical trial successful. This is the this is where I want the fire hose pointed. No I care less about. I can send my own emails thanks. I think dude I honestly think that like the speed at which this technology became such a cornerstone of the tech industry which is itself such a cornerstone the entire economy is like not to its benefit. If the state of this technology right now was a bunch of brilliant people in a skunk work situation being like we're here toiling to try and solve this very specific problem. And you just had that in a bunch of places and there wasn't the gigantic like magnetic pull of propping up the economy with like can I get you to buy a $39 a month subscription please like if it wasn't all oriented towards that and it was much more about the skunk works five of just solving it solving intractable problems. Totally. And we heard about it. A hundred of the best researchers from every major challenge we're hearing about AI 4% of the time that we're hearing about it because it doesn't need the market that all the PR and spin and bullshit there's it would just be a totally different ecosystem and probably for the better. But instead I have to ask the question can a muse make me live forever Scott and that's where we find ourselves instead. No a muse is going to anger everybody you email by sending. Totally. Horribly written Jennie AI content. The why did they give it a fat booty Scott this is the thing I don't understand why did they give muse a booty I didn't realize that was a thing they look it up they gave muse a booty it's so strange anyway I think the only other thing that I really want to talk about is there was kind of a new model launched in the last couple weeks. So instead of like a GPT general purpose transformer I've been kind of in my head calling these things like GPC general purpose classifiers. So really what they do is they you send them in a bunch of options and it waits them based on what it thinks is the appropriate output. These models aren't really for human consumption they're very agentic consumption like they speak almost entirely in structured structured data. So if you have a software system that's doing something, it needs to have value. you wait like say I send you an email and it needs to evaluate if it's spam. It says hey general purpose classifier tell me if this is spam or not it reads email and reassigns it essentially awaiting a probability percentage of whether it's spam or not and then it returns that structure data back to the software system that says okay this is 96% spam throw it in the spam box. So to type safe release this thing early access September 15th it's almost free to use like the API costs are like negligible and kind of broke the software engineering AI agentic world for a few days is people because typically if you ask an LLM a question like that it burns all these resources thinking tokens and then it returns you like a text from natural language prompt yeah distill into like a binary to be like did it say yes or did it say no it skips that and this skips all of that so in in open AI dots fashion open AI release their decisions API a couple days ago with their new release at their developer days so they've essentially saw the motivation behind what's called jev jev my type safe founded by a former open AI employee reinforcement learner he wasn't founded type safe they make jev now open AI has the decisions API which is pretty much the same thing so you can kind of send it binary information or like a not even binary you can send it like a list of questions with potential outputs and it will score the outputs based on what the likelihood that that is so this is truthfully from like somebody that likes to write code and deal with agentic harnesses this is a huge step for us because this will allow us to make a lot of quick decisions especially when you think about a harness so if you've got like a verification step so say say you and I were built harness to do like some deep research first thing we do is we ask it the questioner give it the topic it takes that topic and says what is my research plan it develops a plan for how it wants to execute that research then it goes through it and figures out what it can do in cereal or what it what it can parallelize like has a bunch of steps but then say at the end of a return point it says okay I this is the output that the models prepared for me for this section of the plan does this meet the needs and my verifying it was it is there are any of these hallucinations is everything properly referenced etc etc you could just fire that into something like a decisions API or a jav and be like are these conditions met and it'll score it that's typically something that would have been much harder and consumed way more IP like API tokens to ask an element to do so these models are going to be big game changers when it comes to actually developing the harnesses truthfully fascinating so I just wanted to note it because you know we noted we talked about GPT when it came out yeah it's like it's more little like organs inside of this organism of like okay nervous systems developing totally it was like I don't know the nerve cells in your toe versus your brain and up until this point it's like every nerve system every nerve ending is a whole brain like we're going to point all that energy at the little one spot on your foot or whatever it's like no what if we had a much streamlined lighter energy use faster thing for these sort of like little quick categorization problems is kind of what I'm hearing yeah exactly like the the transformer architecture was always an inherently amazing classifier so like I've actually written some code that is use a transformer architecture as a classifier and these people essentially took that one step farther and turned it into essentially its own model so it has all of the knowledge of a of a real model but with essentially a really light API front end that you can just ask it classification questions and it will score the different outputs based on what the likelihood is which is kind of how it generates tokens of output right like we send it a question and all it's doing is looking at the the next highest probability token to send out that's all it's doing so really that's all this is doing but instead of returning the token it's returning the score something that's very fascinating to me as a developer that builds harnesses so I wanted to mention it because it is big it is a big deal and it is big big enough deal that within weeks open AI had their own announcement of one oh it's another one of those sure someone rolls one out and everyone else is like we have one of those two I think the speed at which these companies can all sort of just gobble up the ideas from their competitors is like in a world where copyright infringement is no more everyone moves kind of at the same speed totally when when when code is free like if you're open AI or cloud you've got the infrastructure and the compute horsepower that you can generate pretty much anything you want and you've got teams of some of the best you know harness engineers in the world yeah sure and if it's already been done by someone else you can just give the finished give the get repo from whatever project you want give the just give a design document describing what it achieves and it's like sure we'll just take one of those send the web link it'll write its own design document I mean that was the speed at which dot like I'm sure dots has been under development for a long time the I want to say 3d custom animated little dot guys which is interesting someone took a while to work on those like I believe this was in process for quite a while but you can't imagine the situation where muse came out and they were like you have 24 hours to make a comparable product it doesn't have to launch but it has to look finished enough that we can do a big one more thing style marketing announcement the question I want to end on Scott is dots and muse which one is cuter I don't want to talk about functionality I don't want to talk about privacy dots dots yeah I do want to talk about something like I want to I want to push back on something you just said even though I which probably should end this episode and move on but the if you're still here you can just stop listening at any point we appreciate you you've made it to the end but we're we're in the trough now please dots does feel very bolted on to me like it is inside of the codex app right it's it doesn't have like the interface is literally just codex but with a new logo on the side sure like when you when you deal with muse or you deal with rock bot it feels like they've built a built an application optimizing for the delivery of the specific service where dots just feels like hey we're launching this shove it into the next like release of the app so so to me to me funny enough even though open AI is the one that hired the open claw founder they to me feel like they have released what I would consider to be the most bolted on feeling of the product yeah yeah I don't think I would disagree with that that's pushing back on something I said I think that that's probably true because like muse feels very like we've been building this it's you the hardware is for as much as I don't want that hardware the hardware is the evidence that like you've been you've been working on something like you had to make this little apple watch without a strap at some point like yes that's good to me you could tell that that has been structuring into this yes yeah rock bot felt like rock bot felt like somebody took open claw and said what is the best version of this and let's build it custom now and they did that and it's really good dots to me feels like open claws number one in the in the app store and it just got bumped to number two by muse where's our solution for it get it out the door we have an IPO to get to yeah sure kind of my kind of my read on it they're cuter though the the dots yeah and did you look at the rock bot dots no rock bot dots oh they're flat oh so this is interesting I have more of an opinion and insight into this type of thing uh in terms of like the the visual design of these things rock bots and dots are very very similar rock bots are just flat and dots are sort of a faux 3d rendering Pixar thing the other thing I find fascinating about the visual design of these things is that muse so dots are a series of non choices it's like what do their eyes look like and it's like yes it's like that some of them have little recess black dot eyes some of them have big Pixar eyes with the white circle around them some of them have drawn line eyes under a pair of like glasses just a swoopy line so there was no choice made there um whereas muse eyeballs are just always these little dead eyes just like a little two pin prick black things uh it always has the same sort of expression on its face rock bots kind of in the middle these little flat shapes but they're different shapes each time color code then you can choose you can choose the shape you could choose the eyes and you can choose the color yes I feel like dots is going to be very much the same where muse is yes like a creepy teddy bear that I'm sure has been I'm sure has been I'm sure there's been so many research groups need about the design of this thing that it would make your head spin 100% empires empires on millions of people have been paid to sit in in research sessions and responds to how they feel about every version of this before it got release. And they're very customizable. Like in one of the mockups, it was like a dog instead of the little like teddy bear thing. So it's like, oh, they're definitely AI generated. They seem to have been like curated by hand to have certain aesthetics, but they're fundamental. The other thing I find fascinating from like a UI UX perspective is the pluralization, truck's position, where dots are plural. You can have dots. And they're meant to be these little like Navi from Zelda, ask things that flutter around and do things you have many of them. I think Meta and Muse seems to have made I think a pretty important decision to make it like, no, it's your muse. You can change what it looks like, you can change how it talks, but there's one and it's yours. And that's like a non, that's an arbitrary choice that has no impact on how it works really. But it's this like emotional relationship thing. The back end would be like, okay, spin up another one and don't tell me and say it's the same thing. But it's this like emotional design choice. - I disagree. I'm gonna push back again. I think that the big difference like between, so Grock botz, Grock botz, which has multiple bots. So you literally spin up a persona, a soul.md for everybody, for every team member support person, however you're using it. - Sure, I see what you're saying. - So you're spinning up agents for specific roles. Those agents can then collaborate on a larger project. There's kind of a more organizational structure to it. Dots, that's Grock over here. Dots I have not used because it literally hasn't launched in Canada. Thanks. - That's a product. - I believe it is the same structure. You can spin up multiple agents where, so you're kind of getting domain specialists and you can engage with them directly or you can put a manager botz or like a personal assistant or whatever you want, a chief of staff is a classic term in the agent bot world who coordinates all the bots underneath you. So when you ask them for something in market research, they'll talk to the market research agent if they ask them for this. They'll talk to somebody. Anyway, Muse has meant to be, I think be like a personal assistant. - That's what I'm saying, yes. - So you only talk to the orchestration bot. If they want to spin up sub agents to do tasks in the background, they will do that. But I don't think they'll ever, I don't think they have a hierarchy of independent bots that use different computers. They just have the ability to kick off sub agents to go, hey, go look up the 10 cheapest flights to Cabo during this week. And they'll kick off an agent to go do that. Where if you were using something like dots or rock bots, you might have like a shopping agent who that's their entire role is just going out to find you the best prices. And they'll come back and ask you a bunch of questions about what you're looking for. And you interact with them much more like a staff member. - Yes, I think there is a structural and architectural difference between the two. - I hear what you're saying. - I just disagree. - No, but it's like, how do I put this? It's like those are the same thing, but Matt is making the design choice to never let me talk to the subordinates. So yes, that is an architectural difference, but it strikes me as more of a design choice where it's like, we're just going to never let you talk or spin up any subordinates. We're going to keep it high level with Clippy. So you are right, there is a structural difference, but to me it expresses itself is just like, Matt wants this to just be, Matt, it doesn't want you spinning up a sales agent. The sentence, spin up a sales agent is like, arsenic to these products. I would imagine from Matt's perspective. They're like, talk to tell the robot what to do. But I want to spin up a sub agent that's going to coordinate with the, then this isn't for you, brother. Tell the robot what you want it to do and it will spin up the teammates and the sub agents and all that stuff. Is the sense I got from watching it is that they're trying to like dehacker a fire open claw. They're like, do you want to create sub agents that can do it, then don't use this? - Yeah, this is for-- - This is the family friendly one. You just talk to Jessica. - Yes, Jessica does what you need it. And it doesn't matter if it's figure out my meta-marketing strategy or sell my old tennis racket on Facebook Marketplace, Jessica will take care of it for you. - Actually, good use of it, yeah. - Well, the funny enough, I've read some, well, actually, I read some ex chatter about Muse this weekend and somebody had given a control of their Facebook Marketplace said, hey, deal with these people that keep messaging me about all these things. It accepted low balls. It was like, it was just, it was just going to town. Yeah, so I'm not sure if it's the best, yeah, John, I'm sure it's the best for that stuff. - Yeah, sure. Oh, that's interesting. And I mean, that's the other, we haven't even talked about the like efficacy. We've talked about that not efficacy, but like the privacy, we've talked about all those other dimensions. Then there's just the question of how good is it going to work? And we're recording this too soon after it came out for anyone to know, which is like a really interesting moment. So in a couple of weeks when we do another chat, each other episode, we will probably report back on this. - There is to speak about efficacy. I could talk about these things all day because like I literally am fascinated by this. The, once you go to a Muse model where say you have a one conduit into a team, your token spend and use goes way up. Because if you want to speak to the sales agent and you go directly to them and say, hey, how were sales last week? What's our plan for next week? Or whatever, however you're using it? You go straight to them, they ask you the direct questions, you kind of get into that cycle with them and it only consumes the tokens and they have their own cash for the cash data. So it's much cheaper. The second you go to the orchestrator and then you ask them and if maybe they go to like the Jordan sales team manager and then they ask the person who's in charge of that exact sales plan, you're paying for tokens and caching and inputs and outputs and re-digestion and reformulation all through the tree. So if you're looking to maximize, to minimize the amount of compute required, creating a corridor through somebody like a Muse is way more costly than allowing people to go to direct agents that understand the context of the question you're asking it in, rather than going through the conduit, so. - No, it's fascinating. I think that how these things are architected, probably will become like a sales differentiator, like not to turn the tech talk into like the marketing business side of things, but it's like eventually these things are gonna live and die by like are people willing to spend money on them and to buy the hardware that comes along with them. And I'm putting the number of met him used hemigotchies, I'm expecting to see out in the world at zero. Open AI, maybe a better shot at it, see what Johnny Ive does, let's find out if that $6 billion was worth it. Apple and Google with the Pixel line, have some funnel for getting you to carry hardware around, like just the basics of not making a product called pervert glasses, like they just have a totally different relationship with the consumer hardware market than Meta does and certainly the open AI does. - I would say that I see the amount of Meta ray bands that I see these days is shocking, they're very common. - They're common, they're a rounding error to smartphones. I guess it's me be where I'm going with that. - You know what I mean? But I think that matters, I think that matters. That is the cluster I'm not gonna show my phone right now, but that is the cluster of cameras and microphones and GPS trackers that we already carry with us in the absence of a killer product that will remain the hub in which all of this stuff happens. So I'm still thinking of it as like, it is the phone's race to lose as the AI hardware thing that everyone uses. Apple's trying to be like, you already have AirPods, could those have a camera in them? And it's like TBD, if people will go for that, they're already done it with the Apple watch, but I'm like, that constellation of accessories orbiting the phone, I'm like, that's probably gonna be it for the foreseeable future. And two companies have a stranglehold on the software operating system of those devices. They just do, to your point, like. - Yeah, I'm like the phones, like phones blew up, the iPhone blew up because it was extensible, right? People had the ability to custom build solutions and tools to install on it. You know, the marketplace, the app store is really what like, I would say one of the top two reasons is why the iPhone changed the world. It changed our relationship with access to information in a self-discovery sense. Notifications are not so self-discovery anymore, which is why I have the mostly turned off 'cause they drive me crazy. But I think our relationship with access to knowledge and information and the extensibility and the ability to extend the product through the development of applications, installation of tools and utilities you wanted is what made the phones cool. - Yeah. - And not just cool, life changing, history defining. The person who needs to make the AI, physical AI tool needs to think about those situations, think about how our relationship with knowledge has changed, think about self-discovery as still a key aspect of it instead of force discovery. So that's why I think that the Google XR project was the one that I was most interested in because I feel like they had the best perspective on it where like I don't, and once again, going back to my trust for the medic corporation, not so high. Don't know if I want to slap an always on set of glasses on my face. My face sees a lot of stuff and I think that this is like a problem for the whole wearables market is the floor of privacy expectations is so much higher on a thing that is always on my face. Well, we're also to talk about efficacy again. The second you put a live video stream that you're piping into an LOM asking it to do visual recognition and then knowledge generation and then delivering stuff to you in a real time thing. The the token used for that like you'd hit a $200 monthly subscription in minutes. The compute implicate 100% and those models will get more efficient and you'll find a way to run it locally on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but 100% the I'm an in agreement that the core functionality promise of these things which is the robot I already knew is like the implications of that are dizzying like you you are you are it is again to firehouse metaphor of data that every human being is is producing unless you were finding a way to run that locally on a device that I guess is just plugged into the wall because you would still have energy use. You have like punted the problem of this. We can do it. It's just not efficient enough to do it in the hardware that you're talking about in many of the prescribed use cases. Yeah. And I think like the general purpose classifier type models the Jebs and the open AI decisions. I think that they're going to figure out ways to optimize and make those very lightweight like be able to really crush the amount of dimensions in them to make them very usable in a specific medium. So all of a sudden you'd be walking around with your glasses and it'll be feeding a frame being like, is there a car in this and it'll be like 68% yes, it's like, okay, that's not high enough. It doesn't meet our threshold and et cetera, et cetera. So I think that we're going to see some of those highly tuned micro models get really good. And especially once you have them built so that they're so fast and so cheap to run if they could run something like that locally, even if it was paired to your phone and it was running on your phone, that's when I think we open up a lot of the gates that allow more of that knowledge discovery to come in to play without being so token intensive, but that would also be my key argument for not having it forced knowledge discovery and making sure that like, it only responds when I ask it for something. I don't want constant notifications every time I look at something, if I look at something and say what kind of car is that I want it to tell me, I don't want it to just be constantly telling me everything going on around me like I've got enough, enough things in my mind already let alone to have the overwhelming amount of information flashing in my eyes 24 hours a day. Everything you just said is the reason I don't want the architects of the suck up your attention and monetize it with an algorithm like the people who I most associate with that kind of toxic behavior in like in a court setting, the dopamine cycle, the like let's get away from the linear feed, let's get to this algorithm, the pulls you in, it takes things and we're going to show you the thing that's going to bring you in and if we show you something that kicks you out, we're never going to show it to you again. The smartest people of a generation working on that problem of my attention and now it's like you just described like and I don't want hardware that works that way for this new computing style. I guess who I don't trust and it's not just because of privacy leaks and stuff like that. It's not that service level thing. It's about how they approach design problems and the referencing of the company versus the user. I'm like I harbor a skepticism about that. Anyway, Mewse has a booty. Anything else? Thanks again to our sponsor Nordlayer. Check them out Nordlayer.com/hackpodcast. I think he was always to Nordlayer. This was a fun one. If you're still here, hey, we're really happy to have you. I don't think we've done one of these since we switched to video. Don't drop us a comment and not feel like the engagement harvesting like classic YouTubers or Spotify podcasters. This drop is a comment to know if you made it here. Yeah, drop us a comment if you made it to the end. Thank you again for joining us for another one. This is fun. We haven't done a chat chat in a while. It was a good time and we'll catch you in the next one. Tammy regularly hauled stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's wholesale club saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kid? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. 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