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Today on the AI Daily Brief,
these are the roles that people actually want AI to automate.
Before that on the headlines,
Google is now processing 1.3 quadrillion tokens each month.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video
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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief headlines edition.
All the daily AI news you need in around five minutes.
We kick off today with an update from Google,
where that company is now pumping out
1.3 quadrillion tokens a month to serve their AI products.
You might remember back earlier this year
when between May and July, we saw this massive inflection point
where Google went from processing 480 trillion tokens in May,
all the way up to 980 trillion towards the end of July.
That was monthly tokens, by the way.
So about 104% growth in just a couple of months.
My speculation was this was due, in part,
to the expansion of actual deployment use cases,
particularly around AI coding,
that was just consuming a huge amount of additional tokens.
But whatever was driving it, it's clear that usage of AI
is going up, up, up.
Now, Google DeepMind CEO, Demis Asabis,
recognized that at this scale,
the numbers are frankly getting a little bit difficult to comprehend.
A quadrillion has 15 zeros in it.
And to reframe that 1.3 quadrillion number, he says,
that's 500 million tokens a second or 1.8 trillion tokens an hour.
Now, this is not the only indication
that Gemini is undergoing some serious growth right now.
The latest edition of SimilarWeb's traffic report
showed that Gemini was by far and away
the big leader for AI platform growth in September.
The Gemini web app saw a 46% jump in traffic,
which was more than triple the increase for perplexity,
which was in second place with a little over a 14% jump.
That report, by the way, also noted that DeepSeek
notched its first month of growth since February.
And also that traffic to the GROC web app
was the only one that had dropped falling by 7.4%.
Now, similar web stats are a very light touch metric
and not something that we should overly index on.
This looks only at traffic to web apps,
doesn't really reflect usage at all on mobile apps,
and for something like GROC,
it gets most of its use through the X platform,
so we actually don't know what the overall usage
of GROC looked like last month versus in August.
But still, with all that said,
what's undeniable from the report
is that Gemini is growing at a tremendous rate.
Between that and an overcoming chat GBT
in the app store for a time
before Sora kicked it all back up,
the race between chat GBT and Gemini
keeps getting tighter and tighter.
Plus, as the AI for success account points out,
I wonder what will happen when they release
Gemini 3.0 Flash and Gemini 3.0 Pro in a few weeks.
Next up today, if you thought the risk
of Mark Zuckerberg poaching your big talent was over,
think again.
Meta has poached another very high-profile AI researcher
to add to their superintelligence lab.
The Wall Street Journal reports
that no less than a founding member
of Thinking Machines Labs, Andrew Tullock,
has left to join Meta
in forming coworkers of his decision on Friday.
Tullock left OpenAI in 2024 to found TML
with Mirror Merati
and several other departing OpenAI leaders.
Prior to joining OpenAI in 2023,
he had spent a decade at Meta
as a machine learning engineer.
Confirming his resignation on Saturday,
a spokesperson for TML said Andrew has decided
to pursue a different path for personal reasons.
And according to rumors,
it sounds like it may have been well over a billion reasons.
Back in August, the Wall Street Journal reported
that Tullock had turned down
a six-year $1.5 billion offer from Meta.
The story went viral,
serving as the first solid reporting
that Zuckerberg was personally recruiting AI researchers
and offering 10-figure deals to top talent.
Tullock was in fact the poster boy
for the billion-dollar talent war
that captured the narrative over the summer.
Now at the time, Meta said that the description
of a billion-dollar offer was inaccurate and ridiculous,
adding that any compensation package
was predicated on Meta stock rising,
which frankly is a little bit of a non-denial
regarding the maximum size of the comp package.
Overall, that article had been focused
on an overall buyout offer to Thinking Machine's lab,
which was turned down.
The tone emphasized that none of the leading researchers
at the startup had accepted Meta's offer.
Reportedly, more than a dozen TML researchers
were contacted by Zuckerberg over the summer.
Now there are a million different lines
of speculation out there.
The rumor that is flying around X
is that this was a $3.5 billion offer.
I don't know where that got started.
I've seen no evidence to support it.
The other, and to me, more compelling consideration
that some are sharing, is that this might reflect
some amount of an assessment of the widening gap
between the available resources in the sector,
despite being one of the most well-funded
early-stage startups in the history of Silicon Valley.
The resources available to TML
in terms of compute and infrastructure
are a tiny sliver of what is available to Meta.
Ultimately, we don't know if that's the reason
or personal compensation or something else entirely
is the reason that these moves have happened.
But as many people are pointing out,
Lama 5 better deliver.
Moving back over to Elon's world for a minute,
XAI is joining the race to develop world models.
Financial Times reports that XAI hired a pair of researchers
away from NVIDIA over the summer to work on the technology.
NVIDIA, through its omniverse platform,
has been one of the leaders in practical world models
used to train embodied AI in simulated environments.
Google and Fei-Fei Li's world labs
have also made significant progress,
though their demos have been more focused
on generating interactive video.
Through Tesla's cars and robots,
XAI could have an opportunity to pair world models
with actual embodied AI.
But that said, Elon Musk appears to be thinking
about a different application as well.
Posting last week, the XAI game studio
will release a great AI-generated game
before the end of the year.
XAI is currently hiring technical staff
for an omni-team, which "creates magical AI experiences
"beyond text, enabling understanding
"and generation of content across various modalities,
"including image, video, and audio."
Among the roles is a video game tutor
who will teach GROC to produce video games.
The goal it says is to allow users
to explore AI-assisted game design.
Some think this is a clever short-term play from Elon.
Phil Truby writes, "Classic Elon strategy.
"World models are proving to be needed
"for robots like Optimus,
"but Optimus revenue is years away.
"However, world models can also be used sooner
"for AI-native video games.
"Thus, Elon is creating near-term revenue
"for this otherwise long-term technology."
Now, one of the things always lurking
behind people's minds is will there come a point
where Elon decides that it makes sense
to try to fold everything altogether
under, for example, the banner of Tesla?
In that light, could this be a medium-term play
to create a narrative that Tesla should buy out XAI?
Remains to be seen, but regardless,
it is super interesting that XAI
is jumping into the world model space as well.
Lastly today, escalation in the chip war
as China cracks down on Nvidia imports
and the Dutch government seizes a Chinese chipmaker.
If you're paying attention to the broader market at all,
you will not need me to tell you
that trade war tensions hit a fever pitch this weekend
in the lead-up to talks
between the Trump administration and Beijing.
AI chips were just one front
in the all-encompassing trade war.
On Friday, the Financial Times broke news
that Chinese authorities had begun to crack down
on firms importing Nvidia chips.
They wrote that customs officers
have been mobilized at major ports,
searching for H20 and RTX Pro 6000D chips
that are designed to meet US export controls.
One source told the FT that Chinese authorities
were also looking for more advanced chips
that were smuggled into the country
and breach of US policy.
In the West, we had heard that Beijing had discouraged
quote-unquote firms from importing Nvidia chips,
but it seems that that was a little more than a suggestion.
Alongside cargo searches,
officials are also pouring over documentation
to see if firms made false declarations
about importing Nvidia chips in the past.
In a strange twist,
Beijing now appears to be far more concerned
about stopping the flow of advanced AI chips
than even the biggest China hawks in Washington.
Then breaking overnight on Sunday,
the Dutch government has seized control
of a Chinese-owned chip maker.
Nexperia is a Dutch subsidiary of Wingtec Technology,
which specializes in the production of high-volume,
low-end chips for automotive and consumer electronics.
On Sunday evening local time,
the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs
revealed that the Goods Availability Act
had been invoked in September to seize the company
the first time that that 1952 law had ever been used.
He said that the move was made in order to, quote,
"prevent the situation in which the goods produced
by Nexperia, finished and semi-finished products,
would become unavailable in an emergency."
A government statement said that the highly exceptional
decision had been made after the ministry observed
recent and acute signals
of serious governance shortcomings and actions.
Wingtec responded in a now-deleted WeChat post,
"The Dutch government's decision
to freeze Nexperia's global operations
under the pretext of national security
constitutes excessive intervention
driven by geopolitical bias,
rather than a fact-based risk assessment."
N-Game Macro writes,
"What's happening with Nexperia goes way beyond
a simple regulatory move by the Dutch government.
This is a frontline moment in the global tech power struggle
between the West and China."
On paper, the Netherlands says it's stepping in
because of administrative shortcomings
and national security risks,
but in reality, this is about cutting off
one of China's quiet back doors
into Western chip technology.
Nexperia may be based in Europe,
but it's owned by China's Wingtec,
and the fear is that valuable know-how
could end up back in Chinese hands.
Whatever the case, it is a major escalation
and just shows how many dimensions
to this crazy AI story there are right now.
That, however, is going to do it
for today's AI Daily Brief Headlines edition.
Next up, the main episode.
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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief.
As time goes on and people get more acclimated to AI
simply being a part of the society that we live in,
the discourse has naturally shifted from
a high level binaries and generics
like will AI take our jobs
or even silly little aphorisms like your job
won't be taken by AI but by someone using AI
into deeper analysis around where AI is actually useful,
how it's evolving and importantly more recently
where people want AI to be involved.
You might remember this study that we covered earlier
this year from Stanford
that divided tasks into four different zones
based on how good AI was at doing those things
and how much workers wanted them to do those things.
There was a green light zone
which was things that AI was good at
and that people were very excited for AI to do,
a red light zone which was things that AI was good at
but that workers didn't want AI to do,
a yellow zone which was things that people wanted AI to do
but where capabilities were a little bit low
and then a low priority zone
which was where AI couldn't do things
or they were particularly hard
and where people didn't really want AI to do those things.
Now this was super interesting to me,
it's become a part of basically every keynote that I give
because again, it gets out of these binaries
and starts to get into actual expressed human preferences
from people on the ground
who don't really have time
for all these big philosophical debates,
they're just trying to figure out
how AI is or isn't going to be useful in their own jobs
and what it's going to mean for their careers moving forward.
Well, now we have something
that almost forms an interesting companion study.
Earlier this month, researchers from Harvard Business School
took a fresh look at AI job replacement.
Now, instead of coming from the angle of how capable AI was
at performing certain tasks
or trying to figure out how many jobs AI would replace,
they instead asked people broadly
how they feel about AI stepping in
for humans in various occupations.
In the abstract the researchers wrote,
despite cultural anxiety
about artificial intelligence displacing human workers,
we find that Americans show surprising willingness
to cede most occupations to machines.
Given current AI capabilities,
the public already supports automating 30% of occupations.
When AI is described as outperforming humans at lower cost,
support for automation nearly doubles
to 58% of occupations.
In other words, where AI is competent and cheap,
in many areas there isn't all that much moral objection
to AI replacing humans.
However, the researchers continued
that there are a narrow subset
representing around 12% of occupations
that include things like caregiving,
therapy and spiritual leadership
that remain categorically off limits
because automation in those areas
is seen as, in their words, morally repugnant.
They write, this shift reveals that for most occupations,
resistance to AI is rooted in performance concerns
that fade as AI capabilities improve
rather than principled objections
about what work must remain human.
Now, the chart that got shared all over the internet
was this one, another four quadrant chart.
On the x-axis we have technical feasibility,
i.e. the percentage of tasks that are exposed to AI
and on the y-axis,
we have what they call moral repugnance towards AI.
The four quadrants then are, in this case,
the green quadrant is in the lower right,
that's low moral repugnance towards AI and high capability.
This is their no friction quadrant.
Above that, in the capable but repugnant,
which is sort of like their yellow light category,
which they call moral friction,
that's where there's high AI capability,
but also high moral repugnance towards AI,
their red quadrant is where there is dual friction,
low capability and high repugnance,
and their blue quadrant,
which is sort of like the opportunity quadrant
of the other study that we just saw,
is called technical friction
where there is moral permissibility but low capability.
So let's talk about some of the types of jobs
that are in each of these areas.
And let's do it in that order.
On the no friction side,
where there is high capability and low repugnance,
there are a lot of white collar jobs.
Search market strategists, financial quantitative analysts,
economists, special effects artists,
all of those are in the green quadrant.
Now again, I will remind you
that while the other study is about what workers
in those areas thought,
this is about what the broader public thinks.
In other words,
this is the broader public looking in on other people's jobs
and saying whether they're fine
with those jobs being automated,
it's not people self assessing.
In the next quadrant,
the moral friction quadrant where AI is capable,
but there is higher moral repugnance.
Some of the call out examples include sociologists,
history teachers, fraud examiners, OBGYNs,
legislators and school psychologists.
Basically, even if chat GPT
can theoretically give advice to students,
that's not really something
that people are super stoked on.
In the dual friction category
where there is both low capability from AI
and high moral repugnance,
they have nuclear technicians, oral surgeons,
bailiffs and nannies.
Apparently even if we solve the problems
of humanoid robots,
people aren't willing to give their kids over to them
just quite yet.
And then over in the blue area,
which again is sort of an opportunity area
of technical friction
where there is moral permissibility, but low capability,
they have things like semiconductor technicians,
cashiers, mail sorters, gambling dealers
and conveyor operators.
Of course, if you are a startup
who is thinking about areas
where you could vertically design AI solutions
without people being mad at you,
that blue area might be a place to look.
Now, Eric Brenlofsen,
one of the authors of the earlier task-based study
saw this new one and made the comparison directly,
saying, "It's interesting to compare their chart
with what we found when we asked the workers themselves
what they want."
Matt Beane from MIT Sloan
actually ran the two studies through ChatGBT to compare
with Bringleson of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab
then synthesizing the analysis into a table.
This new four quadrant chart had on the X-axis,
worker automation desire
and on the Y-axis, public moral acceptability.
So for this then, green light,
which was high moral acceptability
and higher worker automation desire,
that was things like scheduling and reminders,
payroll, error fixes, records upkeeping,
standardized reporting and database maintenance.
It will not surprise you at all,
especially if you listened to yesterday's episode
about where we're starting to see AI deployed.
These are in these areas
where there's high value to getting it automated
and people very much not protective of those areas.
The next quadrant,
where there is public moral acceptability,
they called augment carefully or co-pilot by default,
in other words, a human using an AI
is probably the way to go
versus handing it over to an agent.
That included things like assign and allocate stories,
film editing and cuts, graphic layouts
and find a unique fact research.
I think this is a really revealing quadrant
because if you take a step back,
one of the things that these studies are telling us
is that workers have a higher threshold
for what they want in their job automated
as opposed to people outside their job.
People outside of their job
ask whether certain tasks within their job
are okay to automate basically
are in many cases saying, sure, why not?
Even though the people who are doing those jobs
say that there's something important or distinct
about the human touch that they want to preserve.
I think that's why you're seeing things
like film editing and cuts
where the people who are doing that
understand what makes the difference
between a really great version of that
and an only okay version of that.
Whereas from the public at large
who doesn't know about that craft
doesn't necessarily see it as craft,
they just see it as something to get done
and version A done by a human craftsperson
versus version B done by a robot
doesn't particularly matter to them.
One of the real interesting challenges
that we will face as a society
is how to navigate the lines
between what the people on the front lines
who are doing a particular job think
and where broader public sentiment is.
That's that quadrant that's going to see
the most of that particular question.
Now over on the other side
where worker automation desire is high
but moral acceptability is low
is kind of the inverse of that.
Where workers who are on the front lines
think that there's more room to automate
than people who are looking from outside
who find it morally repugnant.
This quadrant they call assistive only
and included by way of example
care and therapy intake summaries.
Someone pointed out that this is actually one of the areas
where the Harvard study shows its limitations.
Matt underscore amp on Twitter wrote
each caregiving is where automation
can make the most difference if deployed appropriately.
No more elder neglect while warehouse
and care homes administered by underpaid overwork staff.
And to try to interpret this a little bit
the broader public is saying absolutely not
we should not have AI taking care of sick or elderly people.
That is a job that is for humans.
It is distinctly of humans.
We should have humans doing that.
That's the lens through which they're interpreting it.
However, what this combined chart is showing
is that the people who are in that role
understand that there are parts of this
that are absolutely and incredibly valuable to automate.
As Matt points out, many of the facilities
where this type of caregiving happens
are plagued by the problems
of as he puts it underpaid overwork staff.
To the extent that AI can take off big chunks
of for example, administrative work
that allows them to just stay focused
on the already emotionally taxing parts
of human caregiving.
There are probably really big benefits to be had from that.
And this is of course why it's going to be so important
to not stay on the role level analysis
but actually get into task level analysis.
In many ways I think that the best way to look at
AI related job displacement
is from a additive task kind of level.
In other words, you take it from the task level.
Can AI and should AI automate a particular task?
And then from there you look at what percentage
of a particular role as it's currently constituted
is tasks that can be automated.
So instead of saying we're trying to automate role X,
you instead say automation can do 70%
of the work of that role.
And then we get to ask at what threshold
that role needs to change.
Does the role stay the same but there's just fewer
of those people?
Is that role rolled into another role?
Where the role's objectives are fundamentally changed
based on the new capabilities that AI offers.
That's the sort of nuance change that I think
is going to happen much more than just job gone.
See you later.
Which is of course the popular media kind of view
which we'll get into in just a minute.
The last area on the combined chart
is where worker automation desire is low
and public moral acceptability is low.
Which the AI summarization calls to first study
or govern pilots but which I think a lot of people
are fine pretty much leaving off of the focus area
for AI right now.
This is things like final hiring and firing,
parole and probation risk calls
and ethics reviews and IRB style oversight.
I think that both of these studies on their own
are really valuable but I think taken together
they represent something entirely different.
This is actually the beginning of a map
of where society thinks AI can and should be valuable
and where AI should be deployed to help move things forward.
Now take that analysis as compared to another recent study
that got a bunch of attention last week
that was a Senate report that found 100 million US jobs
could be replaced over the next decade.
The report was conducted by Democrat staffers
on the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee.
Staff reviewed economic data, investor transcripts
and corporate financial filings to come up with this number.
However, the main source of data was chatGPT itself.
The chatbot told staffers that AI and automation
could replace nearly 100 million jobs
over the next 10 years.
That includes displacing 89% of fast food and counter workers,
64% of accountants and 47% of truck drivers.
Across the 20 workforces that chatGPT said
would be most affected, it said that 15 of them
would see half of jobs displaced by AI and automation.
Now 100 million jobs would obviously be a catastrophic number
well over half of the current 170 million strong US workforce.
Staffers did acknowledge that the methodology
was a little questionable writing.
The reality is no one knows exactly what will happen.
There is tremendous uncertainty about the real capabilities
of AI and automation, their effects on the rest of the economy
and how governments and markets will respond.
While this basic analysis reflects all the inherent limitations
of chatGPT, it represents one potential future
in which corporations decide to aggressively push forward
with artificial labor.
The report also noted that this change is far more rapid
than previous economic disruptions,
giving a greater sense of urgency.
Staffers wrote, the agricultural revolution unfolded
over thousands of years.
The industrial revolution took more than a century.
Artificial labor could reshape the economy
in less than a decade.
Now the point of the report ultimately was not
to generate an accurate number of jobs under threat.
It was to stir up conversation and provoke a policy response
to the looming issue.
Some of the many AI leaders have called for as well.
The report recommended adopting a 32 hour work week,
increasing worker protections, a $17 minimum wage
and elimination of tax breaks for companies
that automate their workforce.
In an accompanying op-ed in Fox News last week,
Senator Sanders argued that quote,
"The rapid developments in AI will likely have
a profoundly dehumanizing impact on us all.
We do not simply need a more efficient society,
we need a world where people live healthier, happier
and more fulfilling lives."
I've said before in something that might surprise some people
that I've actually appreciated over time,
Senator Sanders' approach to this particular conversation.
And the reason is spelled out right here
in the first line in this essay.
He writes, everybody agrees that AI and robotics
are going to have a transformative impact
on our country and the world.
And yet I've seen in the past how when it comes
to a new technology, the tendency for the side
that doesn't like the technology is actually
to try to strangle it in its crib before it gets out
and impacts the world.
Now it may seem obvious that AI is beyond that stage,
but I don't mind someone like Bernie Sanders
taking the position that AI is here, it's real
and trying to bring up this conversation
around what the new social contract
in the context of AI looks like.
I don't agree with a lot of the foundational arguments
that he has about the motivations
for why this technology is being created.
And I don't agree with a lot of the remediations
he's suggesting, but this conversation
that presumes that AI is here
and that it will have an impact on real people's real lives
in ways that are so significant
that they could change the shape of the economy
in ways that demand a new social contract conversation
is something that I agree with.
We've forgotten this recently,
but the foundation of democratic society
isn't everyone agreeing.
It's everyone being able to have good faith conversations
that start from some shared consensus
about what reality is.
So TLDR, I don't think we're likely
to see a hundred million jobs ripped away,
but I don't mind the starting conversation
being should we nudge what we consider
a full work week down to 32 hours.
Now, one interesting article that I also noted
from last week that I also think optimistically shows
just how little we know about how this is all going to play out
and why we can't make too many assumptions
before we see it in the real world.
Back in May, a business services company
called Housecall Pro surveyed 400 home service professionals
in an attempt to figure out how AI adoption
was playing out in blue collar professions.
They were so struck by the level of adoption
that they named the report the AI assisted trades pro,
how the field is leading the future of work.
The survey found that 40% of these pros actively use AI
and 60% were using AI at least somewhat.
The pros were using AI for content
as well as administrative tasks.
The pros reported saving an average
of 3.2 hours a week using AI.
That's 160 hours for a year for professions
that are largely small business or owner operated,
enough to really move the needle.
When you are saving the equivalent of four full weeks
of administrative work per year,
that is unbelievably high impact.
Now in that report, cleaning professionals
were the most common users,
while electric professionals were the most satisfied with AI.
Another big takeaway was that AI
was not replacing blue collar workers at all,
even though it was delivering huge time savings.
73% of the pros surveyed said that AI
had not impacted their hiring rates.
Now CNN recently covered the survey
and tried to track down
some of these AI-augmented plumbers and electricians.
They found Oak Creek plumbing and remodeling in Milwaukee,
who now have 20 plumbers all using AI.
Company president Dan Cowley said,
"It's definitely been worth the investment.
Some of our older guys have learned
to ask ChatGPT the right questions
and they're kind of amazed
with some of the answers it comes up with."
He noted that the AI boost is now showing up
in on the ground troubleshooting
just as much as behind the scenes admin.
He commented, "It's affecting both sides of our company
out in the field and internally within our office."
Another company, Gulfshore Air Conditioning and Heating
in Niceville, Florida,
has implemented a fully AI bookings and request system.
Once the technician arrives,
they use AI to diagnose the issue
and pull up the relevant technical information in seconds.
The process used to mean sifting
through multiple lengthy manuals
searching for the right fix.
Gulfshore has also used AI
to optimize their marketing campaigns,
which caused a huge bump in revenue.
Surprisingly then, these trade professions
have turned out to be a perfect testing ground for AI.
They require an immense library of technical knowledge,
as well as having the experience
to know the tricks of the trade.
Being able to access the entire internet
in every technical manual ever produced
isn't a replacement for decades of experience,
but boy, does it help that experience
figure out what's actually going on much more quickly.
These trades also require a ton of tedious
booking management and administrative support.
Going back to that original study
is work that most workers would happily automate away.
Laura Ulrich, an economist at JobSite Indeed, commented,
"People go into the trades
because they like doing the hands-on work itself.
And if some of the administrative tasks
can be automated, then that should help those workers
lean into the parts of the job they like and do smarter work."
Crystal Lander, the marketing and IT manager
for Gulfshore, commented,
"All of our technicians are running more efficiently
and they're less stressed.
I feel like I'm a real-life Jetson living in the future."
Now, I am very wary on this show
of being Pollyannish about the real challenge
that the AI transition is going to represent.
As I've said before, and I will continue to say,
I am extremely bullish on the long term.
I think that AI is going to unlock more creation,
more business, just more of everything,
including more jobs.
However, I think that the disruption along the way
is going to be enormously painful.
And I do think beyond a shadow of a doubt,
it is going to be significant enough
that we have to have a conversation
about a new social contract and what we expect from people
to be full contributors to society in a world
where AI can just do much more of the work.
What's encouraging to me is that between these studies
and these real on-the-ground lived examples,
we're starting to move beyond
a blithe generic could-be theoretical
future fan fiction type scenarios
and actually understand what's happening in practice
and what people think in aggregate and in specific.
That leaves us in a much better position
to actually have the conversations we need to have
to make this AI era our best one yet.
For now, though, that's going to do it
for today's AI Daily Brief.
Appreciate you listening or watching as always.
And until next time, peace.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)