Unsupervised Learning is a podcast about trends and ideas in cybersecurity, national security, AI, technology and society, and how best to upgrade ourselves to be ready for what's coming. All right, welcome to episode 472. Hope your week is going well. Updates on this side I've got an RSS feed which I encourage you to go sign up for. RSS is a real thing and it's awesome. And I wish it didn't get knocked off the radar by Google Reader going under, but I use Feedly. A lot of people use Netnewswire. Whatever your RSS reader is, go check it out. It's just slash feed RSS, I think at the end of the URL. Thanks for all the cooking advice. Around 500 people responded with experience, encouragement, recommendations. It was just insane. So really appreciate all that. I tried windsurf. A lot of people are talking about it. I basically try all these tools that people talk about. I've been using Klein for a while. I was using cursor before that and I keep trying cursor every time they have a big release or when windsurf has a big release, I'll try it again. The stuff is changing so fast that I just constantly try different stuff. But Klein has been my go to. I feel like it manages the functionality of Lmms better and the UI. I just like better, so that's what I've been using. It is just an extension into VS code. I wish it was actually a full editor, just like cursor and windsurf are. So Klein people. If you're listening, please make an editor. And my personal AI infrastructure is getting absolutely insane right now. I'm going to have something to show on this soon. I'm going to do a demo of like how this all works together, but basically it's one main agent and then all my personal services are sitting behind it that do different things, and they're all able to access different services that do output as well. So there's like you send the request into the agent. The agent, if I tell it, send me, you know, test a website and then send me an email for it, it'll do the two different services. One is to test the website and the other one is to send an email. And again it just naturally parsed that. And I just sent that from my phone. Right. So the whole idea is I'm just using my regular tech infrastructure, which is my iPhone, and I send a request into my agent, and this is what it's going to be in the future too. I'm just sort of hacking it together with my own services. Pretty soon it'll just be built into Google and built into the iPhone and stuff like that. But right now I'm just making it happen through like Shortcuts and a bunch of AI services, but the overall effect is quite awesome and you have to see this thing actually working. It's very much in line with what I've been talking about, uh, in the predictable AI post, which is this link here where it's all going, put out a concise explanation of model context protocol, MCP servers and why everyone's excited about them. So I've got a full thread on that and you should go check out. And, uh, I'm enjoying the fact that this is starting to happen, specifically the MCP server, because in that predictable AI post, which actually comes from the book in 2016, I talked about the API ification of everything and specifically how businesses would all become APIs. So this is text. From that, most software businesses will become algorithms presented to others through their business daemons. Many traditional businesses will continue to become software businesses. So basically, Andreessen talked about software as eating the world. I think AI is going to eat the world. Like that's pretty. Everyone's saying that it doesn't really mean anything. What I think is actually eating the world is APIs. And the fact that AI is what's going to interact with all these APIs. The primary interface for doing anything is going to be APIs, because it's the AI that's parsing them, right? What humans need to look at a website or a list of services, or a menu of food or whatever. What humans need for that is way different than what a computer needs. A computer can parse an API or an MCP service directory, you know, basically instantly and know exactly how to use it. So if you if you think about SEO, if you think about UI, UX, if you think about advertisements, if you think about websites, if you think about news media, all of that, it's all right now focused on presenting that to humans. The fundamental change that's happening right now is that's all switching away from being primarily designed for humans to being primarily designed for AI. Primarily, these interfaces will be for AI to find a business, AI to find a service AI to rank those services. Right. So examples will include and this is keep in mind this text right here. This is from 2016 when I wrote that stupid book, which you probably don't need to read anymore because it's all in that, that post. And it's got pictures which took me like hours to make. So it's a better version of the book that blog post is. But the key point here is I was talking about this in 2016, so I'm looking for a little like, I don't know, somebody to send me a pat on the back. That was kind of the whole purpose of writing that stupid book was to get this stuff locked in because I saw this happening so clearly, even though that was way before this AI stuff popped. Right. So what is 22 the end of 22 versus the end of 2016? That's six years. Six years. I basically said, we're going to have digital assistants, which are AI powered. I talked about the AI component right there in there. It's going to know everything about us. We're going to talk to our Da. Our Da is going to read all the services. Every human is going to have a demon. Not every human, but most humans. A lot of a lot of humans are going to have demons. But most importantly, all the businesses have demons. We talk to our Da. The Da infers what we probably want. We don't even need to talk to it. It's the one interacting with the world, right? And there's a millions upon millions of other DA's out there working for their principles. Some are working for businesses, some are working for Individuals. Some are working for organizations, entities, whatever. But the point is, they're the ones doing the hard work of parsing all these millions of demons. Right. So examples finding gifts customized to the exact individual organizing person. Perfect vacation based on the four people going, navigating all the logistics and the best way possible of that four person vacation. Determining the current mood of a person or location based on what is known about them. Finding the optimal route from one place to another. Determining the best way to charge a customer based on evolving competition, logistics, and conditions on the ground. All these tasks will be services available online. There will be several or thousands of competitors in any particular space. There will even be services that consume and rate those services and present their output through their own demons. Right. So that's another demon. So my digital assistant, my personal I will be using those services to find the best service to organize a trip, or to play the perfect song, or to do basically anything. All these SaaS services, all these B2C services companies. Forget a human going to the website and clicking around. That's all done. That is all done. Our Das will be doing that for us through their demons, through their business demons, which maybe MCP is that. And that's where we are. This is essentially what MSPs are finally starting to happen. MSPs are a way to take any application and turn it into globally available services. That's why this MCP thing is so exciting. It's taking any application and presenting it to I. So I like what we're doing now is we're taking IDs and we're loading in these marketplaces. So we have the ability to manually choose these things. But pretty soon our IDs and more importantly, our digital assistants are just going to there's going to be natural, like vetted high quality lists of these MSPs of these demons out there, and they're going to be super high quality. They're going to be rated for quality. They're going to be rated for uptime. They're going to be rated for, you know, how good the results are and everything. So my Da is just going to be constantly using all of those, right. So when I'm like hey I've got sniffles. It's going to be find the best, uh, pharmacy, find the best medication, do all the research. Um, find the best delivery thing and within, you know, like six minutes, somebody drops it off on my porch, right. It's it's going to be that simple because it made 400 different requests to multiple different demons to be able to do the research and figure that out and find the best one. Turns out I paid like a tiny amount of money for that, or whatever the the amount was probably won't even be a human delivery. It'll be like a Waymo delivery. Anyway, bottom bottom line is we all get digital assistants. Everything gets an API, including people, objects and businesses. Our Das are the ones interacting with the world on our behalf, because there will be billions of APIs or demons out there to interact with, and our Das will. Ultimately, this is the AR piece, which is not quite happening yet, but everyone's building it. It will display in our are the best version of of the world to look at, right? If we're in a security situation, it'll turn to like a security filter for in like a dating situation, it'll turn into like a dating filter. If we're in like a library, it'll like. Overlay interesting topics based on the books that we're currently looking at. It'll be like, oh, you know, Jason really liked this book and Chris really liked that book or whatever. Or, hey, you were reading something about this. This book will go into it in more detail, right? So contextual display of information within your are everyone's currently building Das mch and lots of other projects are APIs for everything. And lots of people are working on the AR stuff as well, like meta and uh, I'm sure Apple eventually. All right. Security. Cybersecurity. Critical. PHP. CGI. Remote code execution. Vulnerability is being mass exploited against windows systems. It was originally a bunch of Japanese targets. Now it's gone. Global help Net Security put together a list of 28 cybersecurity positions across the US. President is nominated Sean Plinky, Plonky veteran with experience at US Cyber Command in the previous Trump administration to head Cisa. So Cisa has a new leader. Malicious poisoning of AI narratives. So TechCrunch put out a report that Russian propaganda was there's a basically a network called Pravda, which is a Russian propaganda network, is flooding the web with fake news about. I assume it's like, uh, Russian narratives around Ukraine and a whole bunch of stuff that just Russia wants everyone to believe. This is crazy. This is an actual AI poisoning attack. Real world because everyone was worried about you. Poison the training data. Oh, but it's like, well, how are you going to break into the company and poison the training data? Turns out these bots, like OpenAI, like anthropic, they're all constantly parsing the internet. You don't have to poison the original pre-training stuff. Well, actually, that's being poisoned as well, because every time you do a pre-training, you have to re harvest from the internet. If you change the internet, then you have poisoned it, right? So, for example, if this this group, Pravda is trying to change the narrative around something. So let's say this company Pravda successfully saturates the entire world with the idea that Ukraine attacked first. Okay, Ukraine came over the border and killed a bunch of innocent people. And what Russia did was they did a counterattack. And this is purely defensive. I'm not saying that's that's what the propaganda said. Let's just take it as an example. Well, if they put out millions of articles like that across the entire internet, and then you parse the internet and you put it into your training data for the next version of sonnet or the next version of, uh, you know, O4 or GPT five or whatever it is. Well, how is the thing? How was I going to know that's not real? It's it's parsing the internet to figure out what's real. So this is an actual AI data poisoning attack. Ten leading chat bots were tested. Chatbots were tested for susceptibility to Russian disinformation. Pravda published 3.6 million misleading articles just in 2024. 3.6 million misleading articles and news guards analysis found that the chatbots collectively repeated false information a third of the time. That's insane. Real world AI data poisoning. So it used to be about SEO poisoning. Now it's about flooding the internet with marketing or propaganda that will get you picked up by up by bots. Now I say marketing and propaganda. It's the same thing, right? Let's say you have something. You have a an endpoint product that's nowhere near as good as CrowdStrike, but you hire Pravda and you blast out to the internet that, you know, secure point is way, way better than CrowdStrike. And all the bots parse this thing. And a third of the time, Secure Point comes back as better than CrowdStrike. That would be massive. I mean, that that would get you promoted on a marketing team because guess what? The new search engine is actually AI. A lot. A lot of people are actually asking AI to compare products and to come back because. Because it knows that the AI is read everything and is is summarizing the results of all of that. Well, that changes that changes significantly when now everyone's going to switch to this. So, so all these all these LLM providers are going to have to figure out a way to filter out poisoning. I don't see an easy way to do it. You're going to need a lot of really smart I just to do the data cleansing for this type of poisoning. All right. Poland's space agency Polska has taken its systems offline after detecting unauthorized network access. And, uh. And they're blaming Russian cyber campaigns against the country. Japanese telecom giant NTT got breached and exposed corporate data for around 18,000 companies. A's targeting of enemies US is using AI to scan social media and revoke visas of foreign students it believes support Hamas or other terrorist groups. The reason I think this is worrying because this this might be a good use of it, right? But the problem is, once you use it once and everyone's like, oh, that's okay. I mean, there's a saying that says first they come for so-and-so, then they come for so-and-so, and you say it's okay, and then they come for so-and-so, and you say, oh, that's still okay, because it's not me. But eventually they come for you. And I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm just saying whenever you have a thing that's like, hey, we're looking for people like this because they're bad and the people are like, well, that's okay. And everyone like allows that type of Gestapo behavior. It's slippery, very slippery, and it's way worse when it would have taken a lot of research in the past to actually go and find these people, right. You got you got to parse all these videos. You gotta you gotta, you know, go through all the blog posts. You got to find people. You basically have to hire a bunch of researchers, researchers to do this. Well, what happens if you just spin up a really powerful AI with a bunch of tools and say, hey, go parse the internet for the last two years or during this six month period and find everybody who in the crowd was waving a Hamas flag, or in the crowd who was waving whatever flag for the thing that I currently don't like. And this could be a left leaning thing. This could be a right leaning thing. Doesn't matter. You could target an enemy and basically go after them. That is that is very serious stuff. And the better the AI gets, the better it's the faster it's going to be able to do that. I mean, you could be like, look, hey, we got a Swat team that's ready to go. Find me the best possible enemy of me and my friends and find me a reason in all of their. In the last six months to go after them and boom, you send the Swat team like that. That's a very powerful weapon. And you have to be very careful who is actually wielding that thing. DOJ charged 12 Chinese nationals for state backed hacking operations, including two government officers, eight employees of a hacking company called I-soon and a few members of APT 27. Microsoft Threat Intelligence says China linked Silk Typhoon hacking group is shifting from compromise to actually going after it. Supply chains as an entry point to corporate networks, national security, Russia and China and probably others are targeting Doge fired US federal workers with special focus on those with security clearances. So basically, a bunch of people with clearances who know things get laid off and they're going after them, especially if they're angry. Right? That's that's a lot of vulnerability. China announced another 7.2% increase to its military budget, taking it to $245 billion a year. The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, is pushing NATO, NATO members to increase defense spending to 3% of GDP. Yeah, China is trying to bump it by another 7.2%, and we're trying to get NATO members to 3%. Oliver Carroll reports that the US has cut off critical Himars, intelligence, Himars, Himars intelligence to Ukraine, reducing their ability to defend against Russian forces. I so Manas broke the internet last week. Big hype is uh, it's kind of like AGI similar. Um, they didn't say it was AGI. The video that they put out was like, hey, it's leaning towards AGI. It's a little bit like AGI. We're heading in that direction, but it's basically like Claude or OpenAI, whatever they have behind the thing, but it's just way smarter. It's doing a lot more manual work that that wouldn't have needed to be done by a human in the past. And it's very much in line with what I was talking about the other day where, um, I don't think that we need smarter models, actually, to get to AGI. I think we just need better orchestration of tooling and more working memory for the models we already have. And it seems to me like Manus is just is just that right? It's probably Claude underneath. And a lot of people have been, uh, you know, basically hypothesizing that that's the case. We don't know for sure, but it could just be Claude with better orchestration. Really want people to think deeply about this general intelligence competence might be already possible, given how smart something like O1 Pro or Sonnet 37 already are. it already has the intelligence to understand stuff like millions or billions of questions that you could ask it. It's smart enough to generalize answers, or you can give it situations like brand new situation and based on everything it knows about these other things, it can give you the direction or a solution, you know, for that new problem that you have. That's generalization, right? There might be smart enough. The problem is it's eyes and it's hands and it's getting confused after doing too many things because of context windows. Right. And just overall coordination and orchestration of the thing that it's doing to try to accomplish a task. Seems like Manas did that better, but I think that's all that's needed is that orchestration. So the point is people are like, well, AI is not getting smart enough fast enough to actually move us towards AGI. We don't need that. We don't need smarter models. We need larger context windows, more tools for the agents to have. And better orchestration. That by itself I think gets us there to AGI. And I've got another post which yeah I'm not going to pull it up, but I've got another post that basically talks about exactly what AGI is going to look like under my definition, which is um, my, my definition is basically can it do the work of a knowledge worker making $80,000 in the year 2022? And I say 22 because that was like pre AI or whatever. So the marketing for the first AGI is going to be something like welcome to new hire. New hire will join your team on Monday morning. The day that they start they will do the onboarding. They will read all the slack messages. They will read all the documentation. They will meet with their manager. They will take direction. They will reach out to the team members and introduce themselves, and they will start to do the work that they are assigned. And most importantly, if that work changes because of a reorg or because they bought some new company or whatever, they get new tasks, new goals, new work they have to do. They will discard their previous stuff, they will learn the new stuff, they will read the new docs, they will take new direction. They will learn what they have to, and they'll start doing that work. And if their manager is like, hey, you're doing pretty good here, but you need to improve on this just like a human. They'll be like, okay, thanks, boss. I'll make that adjustment. I'll make sure you get a status report every day and whatever it is they were asked for this company, new hire, which is not a real company, by the way, but it's going to be something exactly like this. That's how they're going to market it. Treat it exactly like a regular employee. That is going to be the moment, in my opinion, that we've reached AGI, because if that tool, by the way, there's going to be a bunch of tools that say they can do this, and then people are going to implement them and they're going to be super stupid. They're going to be more waste than it's worth. It's just not going to work. But when this happens and let's say it's this company called New Hire, um, when that happens, let's say new hire takes off and it just it goes slow for a second and all of a sudden everyone starts saying, oh my God, I employed ten new hires, and they're doing the work of like 50 regular employees. And I just increased my subscription because I'm growing my business faster than ever. I employed my new hires in marketing. I employed them in sales, I employed them in administration. I employed them in security administration in my SOC. Whatever the moment that happens, I'm calling that the AGI moment. I believe that is the actual AGI moment, because there is no better definition of general intelligence than humans. That's what we're basing this whole entire thing on, is humans ability to generalize, generalize when it's working. Right. The fact that you could change up context, say, hey, that's not your job anymore. Here's your new job. That's the best definition we have is a knowledge worker constantly dealing with change, constantly dealing with one offs and asks and adjustments. So that's the perfect definition also for actual AGI artificial general intelligence. And if it could do the job of an average knowledge worker I would say that hits the bar. So that's why I'm using it for a definition. And I'm saying that when a product comes out that can do this and it's actually doing it, that will be the moment. And my prediction is late 2025 at the earliest. This is my modified prediction. My overall prediction, which I said in 23 was 25 to 28. so my modified prediction is late 25 to early 27. So it's still right there inside that window. But I think it's getting pretty close. And things like Manus are starting to show signs of it. All right. New model q w q 32 billion parameters. This thing is outperforming or performing just as good as 671 billion parameter deep seek 32 billion versus 671 billion. And they are right on par. This is the absolute most impressive local model I've ever used. I test out all these big ones when they come out. I've got right in my other room. I've got two 49 seconds over there and I fire them up and I test this thing. This I mean, it performs honestly very similar to like, a clod or an OpenAI. um, like an oh one or an oh one mini. It's really, really good. Um, I used it with some, uh, story writing stuff. I'm trying to write a fiction story about some, like, an AI future. Uh, I'm getting pretty excited about that, but I was using it to help me write, and it's doing things that no previous model could possibly do. Um, just vast jumps in quality in the output that I'm getting. So really excited about that. You should go check it out. You could run it with a llama llama run q w q. That's all you have to do. It'll download it, it'll run it, and you could test it out. And it's a thinking model, uh, built with reinforcement learning, which means you're going to see the thinking instructions as part of the output before it starts outputting the real thing. Myo addresses AI hallucinations, so doctors are very upset and worried about hallucinations. For good reason, because it's life and death for them, right? So reverse rag is a technique that they're using to basically figure out the sources for the data that they return. So they don't just take hallucinations, or they don't just take outputs and assume it's good. What they do is they take each particular one and they go and research it and find sources to it. And then they say, okay, this is now trustworthy. And I've been talking about this for, I don't know, six months or now or however long. I did a talk about this at some conference. And basically what we're talking about here is a pipeline of trust that has to happen for high trust output. So if you're in medical or you're in military or you're in, uh, law or something, if you're in something where results actually matter, you have to have a system that comes after the AI output, which is like a series of steps for validation, and only after it goes through those steps and gets a green check mark, then you can trust the thing, right? I mean, humans need that, by the way. I mean, humans don't put out stuff that's trustworthy, right? So I think AI is going to be actually much better at doing this than, uh, most human doctors. Um, you still don't get that. Like the doctor touch and the doctor intuition and the the human aspect. So it's it's not better in all ways, but in terms of, like, putting out the best possible diagnosis and stuff like that, I think it's going to be fantastic. So kudos to Mayo for doing that. Tyler Cowen told Dwarkesh Patel that he predicts AI will only boost economic growth by 0.5% per year, half a percent. I massively disagree with this and so does Dwarkesh. Black Forest Labs, also known as replicate, is dominating image generation. I'm using this myself. Um, I've been using it in conjunction more with, uh, Midjourney. Midjourney is like my go to, but I've been using a lot more replicate and it is absolutely fantastic. Larry Page is working on a new AI company that uses artificial intelligence to design and manufacture optimized products. Ben Buchanan, Biden's AI advisor, says Washington now believes AGI is possible and realizes they're competing with tech companies for talent to regulate it. Nirvana raised $80 million for the AI based trucking insurance platform that uses telematics and 20 billion miles of driving data to create better policies for drivers. And I've got a post here on real time insurance premiums from 2016. Yeah, I've been talking about this for a while. 2016 essentially, again, everything with AI comes down to context. So if I'm wearing a microphone and a camera and I give access to that, there's like that progressive thing. Remember that progressive box you put in your car and it can see how you're driving? Well, imagine that it could see that you're cussing or yelling at your spouse or kicking garbage cans or, um, you just came from the bar, and it knows that because it has the cameras on and monitoring. Well, guess what? Your insurance premiums might be getting modified in real time or close to real time. Or you might be like, hey, if you get in this car right now, having come from, you know, o'shanaghgan, then, um, you your policy will be instantly cancelled, right? It's going to be things like that. Um, all possible because of AI and context. Simon Willison taught a Nykaa 2025 workshop on advanced web scraping techniques. Really, really cool talk. You ought to check that one out. Okay, McDonald's is rolling out a massive AI upgrade for its 43,000 locations, including AI drive through smart kitchen equipment and generative AI Virtual Manager, one of the biggest visible AI rollouts so far. Can't wait to see how this works. Um, I heard somebody say, I don't know who because I don't. I wouldn't eat there because it's really bad. But Domino's and Carl's Jr has really good eye. So I heard technology. Apple is pushing back. It's more personalized Siri features. So basically the big unified Siri that has access to all the context is being pushed back. And a lot of people are speculating that this is because of security issues, uh, prompt injection against that entire context, which what do you think is going to happen when your assistant that you call up with this keyword can do anything across your entire context, including all of your applications, all your health data and everything and your interface into that is is the English language and other languages as well, but especially English. That is a massive attack surface to go after. And I think Apple, rightly so, is being very careful about that. So they pushed that back. One thing to keep in mind, though, is they already rolled out tons of Apple intelligence. I already use my Siri to actually, um, do live queries because it's connected to ChatGPT. So don't think that we're waiting for this thing to happen. And you don't have Apple intelligence before that. It's already out there. Like they already rolled out like dozens of these features, including, most importantly, the ChatGPT one. And the fact that if you hold down your camera button, the new camera button on the side, you can have ChatGPT identify things with the camera. So all this to say, Apple intelligence is like already live and already working. It's just this unified big context, one that they haven't enabled yet because of the security concern. Waymo is expanding its self-driving car service in Palo Alto and some surrounding peninsula areas. Cannot wait to get it around here. Waymo is just just unbelievably good. New Zealand appears to be managing its $16 billion health budget. Using a single Excel spreadsheet probably makes Doge pretty happy. Apple is evidently planning a major redesign of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS for the fall. Can't wait to see what that looks like. I'll be running it on day one because I'm stupid. Tesla's global sales are tanking pretty hard right now, with significant drops across Germany, Australia and China. Yeah, you do a Hitler salute and sales fall in Germany. Big surprise. New Mac studio has 32. This is the M3 ultra 32 CPU cores and enough unified memory, 512GB to load the 600 billion parameter models. I was going to get one, but I already have my eye box. I'm going to skip this generation, maybe even another one because I already have an M2 ultra. Not worth it to bump up to the 512 especially. That's like a $15,000 Desktop. All right. Humans, multiple indicators, including nowcast models and the inverted yield curve, suggests we might face higher than expected recession risk going into 2025. Brad Sigmund is set to become the first person executed by firing squad, unless the governor or the Supreme Court gets involved. Tiago Forte says traditional goal setting may be killing. Our creativity suggests optimizing for novelty and interestingness. I like that interestingness. Apple's hit dystopian show severance is fantastic. You have to check it out. And having worked in a bunch of big companies, especially Apple and management, a lot of the stuff is very familiar. Very familiar. Not in a good way. NASA's new sphere X Observatory is heading to space to map over 450 million galaxies. Stanford researchers have developed an antibody duo therapy that neutralizes all SARS-CoV-2 variants by targeting two different parts of the virus simultaneously. Can't wait to see if that comes to market research. Of course, no one will take it because it's a vaccine. Probably. I assume it's a vaccine, or maybe it's a after after the fact treatment, I don't know. Researchers suggest autism and ADHD frequently coexist as ADHD. ADHD. Yeah, up to half of autistic people exhibit ADHD symptoms, and two thirds of people with ADHD show autism characteristics. Scientists at Mass, Eye and Ear have used patient's own stem cells to repair cornea damage, previously thought to be permanently blinding. Physicists have discovered a third limitation on our ability to predict the universe. So in addition to quantum uncertainty and chaotic butterfly effects, you've got this thing called undecidability, and they're claiming that because of undecidability, some systems are fundamentally unknowable. I would have thought you would have got that already from quantum indeterminacy. But, uh, yeah, it was an interesting article. Price of coffee has gone up so much that millions of businesses in its supply chain are running out of money to buy it. I was thinking, isn't the canary in the coal mine here? Isn't it? Starbucks and companies like that who have to buy at scale? Or do they have their own supply chains? Uh, yeah. It'll be interesting to watch this. And what happens there? Discovery a machine learning engineer named Jasper Gillie quit his job because he believes AI will automate his entire role by the end of 2025. Keep in mind, this is an extremely highly paid machine learning engineer, and he's saying his job is going to be replaced by the end of 2025. Robin Moffatt argues we should or we shouldn't just write the perfectly structured blog post, but also share our messy struggles and solutions that other people need too. I like this. It's like learning in public. Show your work, you know. Feel free to be vulnerable and imperfect online. I think it's a it's endearing. Hopefully so since I've said edit like nine times in this recording already. Small docs a project around writing small docs instead of giant ones that are hard to follow. Jamie Rumbelow created a slick hybrid between databases, programming and UIs. Make scripts more user friendly without needing a full web app. And basically the pitch there was that the database, the UI and the app are kind of unified. They're all the same thing. Astro and vim, one of the better vim distros. I do prefer lazy vim, although I hate the name. Reminds me of the dummies books which I could never get myself to buy. Too much self respect interview DB lets you access Crowdsource tech interview questions from the community. Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the future of the West. This was a crazy, crazy piece of text there. Seneschal MCP. MCP. By a brilliant Ull member named Matt, who, um, wrote an MCP that helps Llms access standardized health data from the snarky, cynical seneschal. I keep thinking seneschal. What am I thinking of? Seneschal API? So basically this is an MCP that makes your health data available so that you can have local agents or any kind of agent really make your health data available to an app. So if you're building like a full life encompassing, you know, management app with like workout routines, health, fitness, food, diet, money, all that stuff, this is an API. This is an MCP that presents the health side of it. Very very cool. From UL member Matt Self-interview. I tool that runs invisibly during technical interviews, helping you with coding questions while your screen is shared. Also known as cheating. So this is what you have to watch out for if you're doing interviews. Piano FM generates endless beautiful AI piano music. I listened for a while. It was not repetitive and it sounded. I'm not a classical music expert or a piano expert and it sounded pretty normal to me. It sounded like regular piano, whatever that's worth. Matrix hacking game. Someone built a matrix themed AI hacking game lets users learn about prompt engineering and security by defeating an Agent Smith AI character. Send new app connects your iPhone camera to multimodal llms for real time visual intelligence. Made with zero VC money and cursor. This is the type of thing that could have gone for could have raised, you know, $20 million and been sold for $100 million maybe a couple of years ago. And this person just built it with cursor with no money whatsoever. Since feedback Dev built an AI that reads the emotional vibe of your product, social media mentions and gives you instant feedback. And somebody posted their cursor rules, which I thought were quite good. All right, member essay is intelligence just interest? What if people being smart or brilliant about something really just comes down to being obsessed with it? When you think about most people I know who are so-called geniuses about a given topic, it tends to overlap 100% with people who won't shut up about that topic. Kind of a weird coincidence, right? I think back to training people, like in cybersecurity when I was back at HP, this is where I was doing it the most. And it turned out that people who ended up thriving and being like the best testers and the best hackers were the ones who simply loved it and were curious about it and would not stop talking about it. And that made them want to study more. It made them play with more tools. It made them like interact with everything, um, far more than the other people who just like, didn't care and were doing it for work. So the question is, is curiosity actually the superpower? I think this is a powerful frame because it changes the narrative from you're not smart enough. Instead, to the question of what are you interested in or what can you not shut up about? That's what you should be doing and building your career around. For human 3.0. If we think about it this way, the main driver for success isn't how smart you are at solving particular problems, but how many problems you put in front of yourself. Curious people create a vast network of like paths of discovery. Reading this book and that book, and then it mentions another book. So you go read that. So you're like branching out. You're creating all these paths and it shows them more things to get excited about. And that produces more curiosity. And pretty soon you have like these vast networks of like paths and, and, you know, subgenres and everything. People who aren't curious kind of stay in one place and don't really expose themselves to many kinds of problems. So if the question is how much you learn and accomplish, which I think it should be, then expanding your paths and exposing yourself to more problems is far higher value than your speed or ability to solve the problems that you find. So for me, the takeaway here is massive maximize curiosity, maximize exposure, maximize your inputs with the high quality thoughts and ideas, mostly reading. And don't judge people as not smart until you can answer whether or not they're curious. And for those who aren't curious, isn't that likely because they weren't exposed to cool enough stuff as a kid? And why can't we start exposing them now? Right, so you don't know if somebody is like a closet genius because they are closet curious, right? So let's start now with that. Let's bombard them with things that they might be curious about, and it might unlock them. It might turn them from like a C player or a B player into an absolute a player, because you didn't know they were so curious, because they never got exposed by their parents or by their teachers, or by they didn't have any mentors that were like intellectually focused. So execute the same routine you would for a curious person to stay curious and read everything, watch all the YouTube channels around interesting topics, whatever. Basically exposure. When I stop consuming great books, I get dumb. Within weeks it happens like almost instantly. Maybe that's because it neuters my curiosity and interest in the world. In fact, I'm sure that's the reason. So this might be the single best way to magnify someone's functional intelligence, curiosity over IQ and the recommendation of the week. If curiosity is more important than intelligence, the best thing you could do is read more good books. Nothing is a substitute for books, not movies. Not even good YouTube content about nonfiction topics. Nothing is as high quality and high value as books. My hard recommendation to everyone listening at least two high quality books per month. At least one of those should be nonfiction. And if it if you have fiction as the other one, it should be high quality fiction, which really talks about a whole bunch of nonfiction topics. And it's fine if you want to add additional garbage fiction or just purely fun fiction. I would say go ahead, but do those on top of these two books, no exceptions, two books. High quality. Four would be nice, but it's a little bit harder. Uh, do at least two. And I got a few here to get you started. The Technological Republic, quality Land and poor Charlie's Almanack. If you do even two books a month, your brain will be flooded with ideas. Seriously, trust the system and the aphorism of the week. The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge. The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge. Aristotle. Unsupervised learning is produced on Hindenburg Pro using an SM seven B microphone. A video version of the podcast is available on the Unsupervised Learning YouTube channel, and the text version with full links and notes is available at Daniel Mysa.com slash newsletter. We'll see you next time.

Unsupervised Learning is a podcast about trends and ideas in cybersecurity, national security, AI, technology and society, and how best to upgrade ourselves to be ready for what's coming. All right, welcome to episode 472. Hope your week is going well. Updates on this side I've got an RSS feed which I encourage you to go sign up for. RSS is a real thing and it's awesome. And I wish it didn't get knocked off the radar by Google Reader going under, but I use Feedly. A lot of people use Netnewswire. Whatever your RSS reader is, go check it out. It's just slash feed RSS, I think at the end of the URL. Thanks for all the cooking advice. Around 500 people responded with experience, encouragement, recommendations. It was just insane. So really appreciate all that. I tried windsurf. A lot of people are talking about it. I basically try all these tools that people talk about. I've been using Klein for a while. I was using cursor before that and I keep trying cursor every time they have a big release or when windsurf has a big release, I'll try it again. The stuff is changing so fast that I just constantly try different stuff. But Klein has been my go to. I feel like it manages the functionality of Lmms better and the UI. I just like better, so that's what I've been using. It is just an extension into VS code. I wish it was actually a full editor, just like cursor and windsurf are. So Klein people. If you're listening, please make an editor. And my personal AI infrastructure is getting absolutely insane right now. I'm going to have something to show on this soon. I'm going to do a demo of like how this all works together, but basically it's one main agent and then all my personal services are sitting behind it that do different things, and they're all able to access different services that do output as well. So there's like you send the request into the agent. The agent, if I tell it, send me, you know, test a website and then send me an email for it, it'll do the two different services. One is to test the website and the other one is to send an email. And again it just naturally parsed that. And I just sent that from my phone. Right. So the whole idea is I'm just using my regular tech infrastructure, which is my iPhone, and I send a request into my agent, and this is what it's going to be in the future too. I'm just sort of hacking it together with my own services. Pretty soon it'll just be built into Google and built into the iPhone and stuff like that. But right now I'm just making it happen through like Shortcuts and a bunch of AI services, but the overall effect is quite awesome and you have to see this thing actually working. It's very much in line with what I've been talking about, uh, in the predictable AI post, which is this link here where it's all going, put out a concise explanation of model context protocol, MCP servers and why everyone's excited about them. So I've got a full thread on that and you should go check out. And, uh, I'm enjoying the fact that this is starting to happen, specifically the MCP server, because in that predictable AI post, which actually comes from the book in 2016, I talked about the API ification of everything and specifically how businesses would all become APIs. So this is text. From that, most software businesses will become algorithms presented to others through their business daemons. Many traditional businesses will continue to become software businesses. So basically, Andreessen talked about software as eating the world. I think AI is going to eat the world. Like that's pretty. Everyone's saying that it doesn't really mean anything. What I think is actually eating the world is APIs. And the fact that AI is what's going to interact with all these APIs. The primary interface for doing anything is going to be APIs, because it's the AI that's parsing them, right? What humans need to look at a website or a list of services, or a menu of food or whatever. What humans need for that is way different than what a computer needs. A computer can parse an API or an MCP service directory, you know, basically instantly and know exactly how to use it. So if you if you think about SEO, if you think about UI, UX, if you think about advertisements, if you think about websites, if you think about news media, all of that, it's all right now focused on presenting that to humans. The fundamental change that's happening right now is that's all switching away from being primarily designed for humans to being primarily designed for AI. Primarily, these interfaces will be for AI to find a business, AI to find a service AI to rank those services. Right. So examples will include and this is keep in mind this text right here. This is from 2016 when I wrote that stupid book, which you probably don't need to read anymore because it's all in that, that post. And it's got pictures which took me like hours to make. So it's a better version of the book that blog post is. But the key point here is I was talking about this in 2016, so I'm looking for a little like, I don't know, somebody to send me a pat on the back. That was kind of the whole purpose of writing that stupid book was to get this stuff locked in because I saw this happening so clearly, even though that was way before this AI stuff popped. Right. So what is 22 the end of 22 versus the end of 2016? That's six years. Six years. I basically said, we're going to have digital assistants, which are AI powered. I talked about the AI component right there in there. It's going to know everything about us. We're going to talk to our Da. Our Da is going to read all the services. Every human is going to have a demon. Not every human, but most humans. A lot of a lot of humans are going to have demons. But most importantly, all the businesses have demons. We talk to our Da. The Da infers what we probably want. We don't even need to talk to it. It's the one interacting with the world, right? And there's a millions upon millions of other DA's out there working for their principles. Some are working for businesses, some are working for Individuals. Some are working for organizations, entities, whatever. But the point is, they're the ones doing the hard work of parsing all these millions of demons. Right. So examples finding gifts customized to the exact individual organizing person. Perfect vacation based on the four people going, navigating all the logistics and the best way possible of that four person vacation. Determining the current mood of a person or location based on what is known about them. Finding the optimal route from one place to another. Determining the best way to charge a customer based on evolving competition, logistics, and conditions on the ground. All these tasks will be services available online. There will be several or thousands of competitors in any particular space. There will even be services that consume and rate those services and present their output through their own demons. Right. So that's another demon. So my digital assistant, my personal I will be using those services to find the best service to organize a trip, or to play the perfect song, or to do basically anything. All these SaaS services, all these B2C services companies. Forget a human going to the website and clicking around. That's all done. That is all done. Our Das will be doing that for us through their demons, through their business demons, which maybe MCP is that. And that's where we are. This is essentially what MSPs are finally starting to happen. MSPs are a way to take any application and turn it into globally available services. That's why this MCP thing is so exciting. It's taking any application and presenting it to I. So I like what we're doing now is we're taking IDs and we're loading in these marketplaces. So we have the ability to manually choose these things. But pretty soon our IDs and more importantly, our digital assistants are just going to there's going to be natural, like vetted high quality lists of these MSPs of these demons out there, and they're going to be super high quality. They're going to be rated for quality. They're going to be rated for uptime. They're going to be rated for, you know, how good the results are and everything. So my Da is just going to be constantly using all of those, right. So when I'm like hey I've got sniffles. It's going to be find the best, uh, pharmacy, find the best medication, do all the research. Um, find the best delivery thing and within, you know, like six minutes, somebody drops it off on my porch, right. It's it's going to be that simple because it made 400 different requests to multiple different demons to be able to do the research and figure that out and find the best one. Turns out I paid like a tiny amount of money for that, or whatever the the amount was probably won't even be a human delivery. It'll be like a Waymo delivery. Anyway, bottom bottom line is we all get digital assistants. Everything gets an API, including people, objects and businesses. Our Das are the ones interacting with the world on our behalf, because there will be billions of APIs or demons out there to interact with, and our Das will. Ultimately, this is the AR piece, which is not quite happening yet, but everyone's building it. It will display in our are the best version of of the world to look at, right? If we're in a security situation, it'll turn to like a security filter for in like a dating situation, it'll turn into like a dating filter. If we're in like a library, it'll like. Overlay interesting topics based on the books that we're currently looking at. It'll be like, oh, you know, Jason really liked this book and Chris really liked that book or whatever. Or, hey, you were reading something about this. This book will go into it in more detail, right? So contextual display of information within your are everyone's currently building Das mch and lots of other projects are APIs for everything. And lots of people are working on the AR stuff as well, like meta and uh, I'm sure Apple eventually. All right. Security. Cybersecurity. Critical. PHP. CGI. Remote code execution. Vulnerability is being mass exploited against windows systems. It was originally a bunch of Japanese targets. Now it's gone. Global help Net Security put together a list of 28 cybersecurity positions across the US. President is nominated Sean Plinky, Plonky veteran with experience at US Cyber Command in the previous Trump administration to head Cisa. So Cisa has a new leader. Malicious poisoning of AI narratives. So TechCrunch put out a report that Russian propaganda was there's a basically a network called Pravda, which is a Russian propaganda network, is flooding the web with fake news about. I assume it's like, uh, Russian narratives around Ukraine and a whole bunch of stuff that just Russia wants everyone to believe. This is crazy. This is an actual AI poisoning attack. Real world because everyone was worried about you. Poison the training data. Oh, but it's like, well, how are you going to break into the company and poison the training data? Turns out these bots, like OpenAI, like anthropic, they're all constantly parsing the internet. You don't have to poison the original pre-training stuff. Well, actually, that's being poisoned as well, because every time you do a pre-training, you have to re harvest from the internet. If you change the internet, then you have poisoned it, right? So, for example, if this this group, Pravda is trying to change the narrative around something. So let's say this company Pravda successfully saturates the entire world with the idea that Ukraine attacked first. Okay, Ukraine came over the border and killed a bunch of innocent people. And what Russia did was they did a counterattack. And this is purely defensive. I'm not saying that's that's what the propaganda said. Let's just take it as an example. Well, if they put out millions of articles like that across the entire internet, and then you parse the internet and you put it into your training data for the next version of sonnet or the next version of, uh, you know, O4 or GPT five or whatever it is. Well, how is the thing? How was I going to know that's not real? It's it's parsing the internet to figure out what's real. So this is an actual AI data poisoning attack. Ten leading chat bots were tested. Chatbots were tested for susceptibility to Russian disinformation. Pravda published 3.6 million misleading articles just in 2024. 3.6 million misleading articles and news guards analysis found that the chatbots collectively repeated false information a third of the time. That's insane. Real world AI data poisoning. So it used to be about SEO poisoning. Now it's about flooding the internet with marketing or propaganda that will get you picked up by up by bots. Now I say marketing and propaganda. It's the same thing, right? Let's say you have something. You have a an endpoint product that's nowhere near as good as CrowdStrike, but you hire Pravda and you blast out to the internet that, you know, secure point is way, way better than CrowdStrike. And all the bots parse this thing. And a third of the time, Secure Point comes back as better than CrowdStrike. That would be massive. I mean, that that would get you promoted on a marketing team because guess what? The new search engine is actually AI. A lot. A lot of people are actually asking AI to compare products and to come back because. Because it knows that the AI is read everything and is is summarizing the results of all of that. Well, that changes that changes significantly when now everyone's going to switch to this. So, so all these all these LLM providers are going to have to figure out a way to filter out poisoning. I don't see an easy way to do it. You're going to need a lot of really smart I just to do the data cleansing for this type of poisoning. All right. Poland's space agency Polska has taken its systems offline after detecting unauthorized network access. And, uh. And they're blaming Russian cyber campaigns against the country. Japanese telecom giant NTT got breached and exposed corporate data for around 18,000 companies. A's targeting of enemies US is using AI to scan social media and revoke visas of foreign students it believes support Hamas or other terrorist groups. The reason I think this is worrying because this this might be a good use of it, right? But the problem is, once you use it once and everyone's like, oh, that's okay. I mean, there's a saying that says first they come for so-and-so, then they come for so-and-so, and you say it's okay, and then they come for so-and-so, and you say, oh, that's still okay, because it's not me. But eventually they come for you. And I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm just saying whenever you have a thing that's like, hey, we're looking for people like this because they're bad and the people are like, well, that's okay. And everyone like allows that type of Gestapo behavior. It's slippery, very slippery, and it's way worse when it would have taken a lot of research in the past to actually go and find these people, right. You got you got to parse all these videos. You gotta you gotta, you know, go through all the blog posts. You got to find people. You basically have to hire a bunch of researchers, researchers to do this. Well, what happens if you just spin up a really powerful AI with a bunch of tools and say, hey, go parse the internet for the last two years or during this six month period and find everybody who in the crowd was waving a Hamas flag, or in the crowd who was waving whatever flag for the thing that I currently don't like. And this could be a left leaning thing. This could be a right leaning thing. Doesn't matter. You could target an enemy and basically go after them. That is that is very serious stuff. And the better the AI gets, the better it's the faster it's going to be able to do that. I mean, you could be like, look, hey, we got a Swat team that's ready to go. Find me the best possible enemy of me and my friends and find me a reason in all of their. In the last six months to go after them and boom, you send the Swat team like that. That's a very powerful weapon. And you have to be very careful who is actually wielding that thing. DOJ charged 12 Chinese nationals for state backed hacking operations, including two government officers, eight employees of a hacking company called I-soon and a few members of APT 27. Microsoft Threat Intelligence says China linked Silk Typhoon hacking group is shifting from compromise to actually going after it. Supply chains as an entry point to corporate networks, national security, Russia and China and probably others are targeting Doge fired US federal workers with special focus on those with security clearances. So basically, a bunch of people with clearances who know things get laid off and they're going after them, especially if they're angry. Right? That's that's a lot of vulnerability. China announced another 7.2% increase to its military budget, taking it to $245 billion a year. The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, is pushing NATO, NATO members to increase defense spending to 3% of GDP. Yeah, China is trying to bump it by another 7.2%, and we're trying to get NATO members to 3%. Oliver Carroll reports that the US has cut off critical Himars, intelligence, Himars, Himars intelligence to Ukraine, reducing their ability to defend against Russian forces. I so Manas broke the internet last week. Big hype is uh, it's kind of like AGI similar. Um, they didn't say it was AGI. The video that they put out was like, hey, it's leaning towards AGI. It's a little bit like AGI. We're heading in that direction, but it's basically like Claude or OpenAI, whatever they have behind the thing, but it's just way smarter. It's doing a lot more manual work that that wouldn't have needed to be done by a human in the past. And it's very much in line with what I was talking about the other day where, um, I don't think that we need smarter models, actually, to get to AGI. I think we just need better orchestration of tooling and more working memory for the models we already have. And it seems to me like Manus is just is just that right? It's probably Claude underneath. And a lot of people have been, uh, you know, basically hypothesizing that that's the case. We don't know for sure, but it could just be Claude with better orchestration. Really want people to think deeply about this general intelligence competence might be already possible, given how smart something like O1 Pro or Sonnet 37 already are. it already has the intelligence to understand stuff like millions or billions of questions that you could ask it. It's smart enough to generalize answers, or you can give it situations like brand new situation and based on everything it knows about these other things, it can give you the direction or a solution, you know, for that new problem that you have. That's generalization, right? There might be smart enough. The problem is it's eyes and it's hands and it's getting confused after doing too many things because of context windows. Right. And just overall coordination and orchestration of the thing that it's doing to try to accomplish a task. Seems like Manas did that better, but I think that's all that's needed is that orchestration. So the point is people are like, well, AI is not getting smart enough fast enough to actually move us towards AGI. We don't need that. We don't need smarter models. We need larger context windows, more tools for the agents to have. And better orchestration. That by itself I think gets us there to AGI. And I've got another post which yeah I'm not going to pull it up, but I've got another post that basically talks about exactly what AGI is going to look like under my definition, which is um, my, my definition is basically can it do the work of a knowledge worker making $80,000 in the year 2022? And I say 22 because that was like pre AI or whatever. So the marketing for the first AGI is going to be something like welcome to new hire. New hire will join your team on Monday morning. The day that they start they will do the onboarding. They will read all the slack messages. They will read all the documentation. They will meet with their manager. They will take direction. They will reach out to the team members and introduce themselves, and they will start to do the work that they are assigned. And most importantly, if that work changes because of a reorg or because they bought some new company or whatever, they get new tasks, new goals, new work they have to do. They will discard their previous stuff, they will learn the new stuff, they will read the new docs, they will take new direction. They will learn what they have to, and they'll start doing that work. And if their manager is like, hey, you're doing pretty good here, but you need to improve on this just like a human. They'll be like, okay, thanks, boss. I'll make that adjustment. I'll make sure you get a status report every day and whatever it is they were asked for this company, new hire, which is not a real company, by the way, but it's going to be something exactly like this. That's how they're going to market it. Treat it exactly like a regular employee. That is going to be the moment, in my opinion, that we've reached AGI, because if that tool, by the way, there's going to be a bunch of tools that say they can do this, and then people are going to implement them and they're going to be super stupid. They're going to be more waste than it's worth. It's just not going to work. But when this happens and let's say it's this company called New Hire, um, when that happens, let's say new hire takes off and it just it goes slow for a second and all of a sudden everyone starts saying, oh my God, I employed ten new hires, and they're doing the work of like 50 regular employees. And I just increased my subscription because I'm growing my business faster than ever. I employed my new hires in marketing. I employed them in sales, I employed them in administration. I employed them in security administration in my SOC. Whatever the moment that happens, I'm calling that the AGI moment. I believe that is the actual AGI moment, because there is no better definition of general intelligence than humans. That's what we're basing this whole entire thing on, is humans ability to generalize, generalize when it's working. Right. The fact that you could change up context, say, hey, that's not your job anymore. Here's your new job. That's the best definition we have is a knowledge worker constantly dealing with change, constantly dealing with one offs and asks and adjustments. So that's the perfect definition also for actual AGI artificial general intelligence. And if it could do the job of an average knowledge worker I would say that hits the bar. So that's why I'm using it for a definition. And I'm saying that when a product comes out that can do this and it's actually doing it, that will be the moment. And my prediction is late 2025 at the earliest. This is my modified prediction. My overall prediction, which I said in 23 was 25 to 28. so my modified prediction is late 25 to early 27. So it's still right there inside that window. But I think it's getting pretty close. And things like Manus are starting to show signs of it. All right. New model q w q 32 billion parameters. This thing is outperforming or performing just as good as 671 billion parameter deep seek 32 billion versus 671 billion. And they are right on par. This is the absolute most impressive local model I've ever used. I test out all these big ones when they come out. I've got right in my other room. I've got two 49 seconds over there and I fire them up and I test this thing. This I mean, it performs honestly very similar to like, a clod or an OpenAI. um, like an oh one or an oh one mini. It's really, really good. Um, I used it with some, uh, story writing stuff. I'm trying to write a fiction story about some, like, an AI future. Uh, I'm getting pretty excited about that, but I was using it to help me write, and it's doing things that no previous model could possibly do. Um, just vast jumps in quality in the output that I'm getting. So really excited about that. You should go check it out. You could run it with a llama llama run q w q. That's all you have to do. It'll download it, it'll run it, and you could test it out. And it's a thinking model, uh, built with reinforcement learning, which means you're going to see the thinking instructions as part of the output before it starts outputting the real thing. Myo addresses AI hallucinations, so doctors are very upset and worried about hallucinations. For good reason, because it's life and death for them, right? So reverse rag is a technique that they're using to basically figure out the sources for the data that they return. So they don't just take hallucinations, or they don't just take outputs and assume it's good. What they do is they take each particular one and they go and research it and find sources to it. And then they say, okay, this is now trustworthy. And I've been talking about this for, I don't know, six months or now or however long. I did a talk about this at some conference. And basically what we're talking about here is a pipeline of trust that has to happen for high trust output. So if you're in medical or you're in military or you're in, uh, law or something, if you're in something where results actually matter, you have to have a system that comes after the AI output, which is like a series of steps for validation, and only after it goes through those steps and gets a green check mark, then you can trust the thing, right? I mean, humans need that, by the way. I mean, humans don't put out stuff that's trustworthy, right? So I think AI is going to be actually much better at doing this than, uh, most human doctors. Um, you still don't get that. Like the doctor touch and the doctor intuition and the the human aspect. So it's it's not better in all ways, but in terms of, like, putting out the best possible diagnosis and stuff like that, I think it's going to be fantastic. So kudos to Mayo for doing that. Tyler Cowen told Dwarkesh Patel that he predicts AI will only boost economic growth by 0.5% per year, half a percent. I massively disagree with this and so does Dwarkesh. Black Forest Labs, also known as replicate, is dominating image generation. I'm using this myself. Um, I've been using it in conjunction more with, uh, Midjourney. Midjourney is like my go to, but I've been using a lot more replicate and it is absolutely fantastic. Larry Page is working on a new AI company that uses artificial intelligence to design and manufacture optimized products. Ben Buchanan, Biden's AI advisor, says Washington now believes AGI is possible and realizes they're competing with tech companies for talent to regulate it. Nirvana raised $80 million for the AI based trucking insurance platform that uses telematics and 20 billion miles of driving data to create better policies for drivers. And I've got a post here on real time insurance premiums from 2016. Yeah, I've been talking about this for a while. 2016 essentially, again, everything with AI comes down to context. So if I'm wearing a microphone and a camera and I give access to that, there's like that progressive thing. Remember that progressive box you put in your car and it can see how you're driving? Well, imagine that it could see that you're cussing or yelling at your spouse or kicking garbage cans or, um, you just came from the bar, and it knows that because it has the cameras on and monitoring. Well, guess what? Your insurance premiums might be getting modified in real time or close to real time. Or you might be like, hey, if you get in this car right now, having come from, you know, o'shanaghgan, then, um, you your policy will be instantly cancelled, right? It's going to be things like that. Um, all possible because of AI and context. Simon Willison taught a Nykaa 2025 workshop on advanced web scraping techniques. Really, really cool talk. You ought to check that one out. Okay, McDonald's is rolling out a massive AI upgrade for its 43,000 locations, including AI drive through smart kitchen equipment and generative AI Virtual Manager, one of the biggest visible AI rollouts so far. Can't wait to see how this works. Um, I heard somebody say, I don't know who because I don't. I wouldn't eat there because it's really bad. But Domino's and Carl's Jr has really good eye. So I heard technology. Apple is pushing back. It's more personalized Siri features. So basically the big unified Siri that has access to all the context is being pushed back. And a lot of people are speculating that this is because of security issues, uh, prompt injection against that entire context, which what do you think is going to happen when your assistant that you call up with this keyword can do anything across your entire context, including all of your applications, all your health data and everything and your interface into that is is the English language and other languages as well, but especially English. That is a massive attack surface to go after. And I think Apple, rightly so, is being very careful about that. So they pushed that back. One thing to keep in mind, though, is they already rolled out tons of Apple intelligence. I already use my Siri to actually, um, do live queries because it's connected to ChatGPT. So don't think that we're waiting for this thing to happen. And you don't have Apple intelligence before that. It's already out there. Like they already rolled out like dozens of these features, including, most importantly, the ChatGPT one. And the fact that if you hold down your camera button, the new camera button on the side, you can have ChatGPT identify things with the camera. So all this to say, Apple intelligence is like already live and already working. It's just this unified big context, one that they haven't enabled yet because of the security concern. Waymo is expanding its self-driving car service in Palo Alto and some surrounding peninsula areas. Cannot wait to get it around here. Waymo is just just unbelievably good. New Zealand appears to be managing its $16 billion health budget. Using a single Excel spreadsheet probably makes Doge pretty happy. Apple is evidently planning a major redesign of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS for the fall. Can't wait to see what that looks like. I'll be running it on day one because I'm stupid. Tesla's global sales are tanking pretty hard right now, with significant drops across Germany, Australia and China. Yeah, you do a Hitler salute and sales fall in Germany. Big surprise. New Mac studio has 32. This is the M3 ultra 32 CPU cores and enough unified memory, 512GB to load the 600 billion parameter models. I was going to get one, but I already have my eye box. I'm going to skip this generation, maybe even another one because I already have an M2 ultra. Not worth it to bump up to the 512 especially. That's like a $15,000 Desktop. All right. Humans, multiple indicators, including nowcast models and the inverted yield curve, suggests we might face higher than expected recession risk going into 2025. Brad Sigmund is set to become the first person executed by firing squad, unless the governor or the Supreme Court gets involved. Tiago Forte says traditional goal setting may be killing. Our creativity suggests optimizing for novelty and interestingness. I like that interestingness. Apple's hit dystopian show severance is fantastic. You have to check it out. And having worked in a bunch of big companies, especially Apple and management, a lot of the stuff is very familiar. Very familiar. Not in a good way. NASA's new sphere X Observatory is heading to space to map over 450 million galaxies. Stanford researchers have developed an antibody duo therapy that neutralizes all SARS-CoV-2 variants by targeting two different parts of the virus simultaneously. Can't wait to see if that comes to market research. Of course, no one will take it because it's a vaccine. Probably. I assume it's a vaccine, or maybe it's a after after the fact treatment, I don't know. Researchers suggest autism and ADHD frequently coexist as ADHD. ADHD. Yeah, up to half of autistic people exhibit ADHD symptoms, and two thirds of people with ADHD show autism characteristics. Scientists at Mass, Eye and Ear have used patient's own stem cells to repair cornea damage, previously thought to be permanently blinding. Physicists have discovered a third limitation on our ability to predict the universe. So in addition to quantum uncertainty and chaotic butterfly effects, you've got this thing called undecidability, and they're claiming that because of undecidability, some systems are fundamentally unknowable. I would have thought you would have got that already from quantum indeterminacy. But, uh, yeah, it was an interesting article. Price of coffee has gone up so much that millions of businesses in its supply chain are running out of money to buy it. I was thinking, isn't the canary in the coal mine here? Isn't it? Starbucks and companies like that who have to buy at scale? Or do they have their own supply chains? Uh, yeah. It'll be interesting to watch this. And what happens there? Discovery a machine learning engineer named Jasper Gillie quit his job because he believes AI will automate his entire role by the end of 2025. Keep in mind, this is an extremely highly paid machine learning engineer, and he's saying his job is going to be replaced by the end of 2025. Robin Moffatt argues we should or we shouldn't just write the perfectly structured blog post, but also share our messy struggles and solutions that other people need too. I like this. It's like learning in public. Show your work, you know. Feel free to be vulnerable and imperfect online. I think it's a it's endearing. Hopefully so since I've said edit like nine times in this recording already. Small docs a project around writing small docs instead of giant ones that are hard to follow. Jamie Rumbelow created a slick hybrid between databases, programming and UIs. Make scripts more user friendly without needing a full web app. And basically the pitch there was that the database, the UI and the app are kind of unified. They're all the same thing. Astro and vim, one of the better vim distros. I do prefer lazy vim, although I hate the name. Reminds me of the dummies books which I could never get myself to buy. Too much self respect interview DB lets you access Crowdsource tech interview questions from the community. Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the future of the West. This was a crazy, crazy piece of text there. Seneschal MCP. MCP. By a brilliant Ull member named Matt, who, um, wrote an MCP that helps Llms access standardized health data from the snarky, cynical seneschal. I keep thinking seneschal. What am I thinking of? Seneschal API? So basically this is an MCP that makes your health data available so that you can have local agents or any kind of agent really make your health data available to an app. So if you're building like a full life encompassing, you know, management app with like workout routines, health, fitness, food, diet, money, all that stuff, this is an API. This is an MCP that presents the health side of it. Very very cool. From UL member Matt Self-interview. I tool that runs invisibly during technical interviews, helping you with coding questions while your screen is shared. Also known as cheating. So this is what you have to watch out for if you're doing interviews. Piano FM generates endless beautiful AI piano music. I listened for a while. It was not repetitive and it sounded. I'm not a classical music expert or a piano expert and it sounded pretty normal to me. It sounded like regular piano, whatever that's worth. Matrix hacking game. Someone built a matrix themed AI hacking game lets users learn about prompt engineering and security by defeating an Agent Smith AI character. Send new app connects your iPhone camera to multimodal llms for real time visual intelligence. Made with zero VC money and cursor. This is the type of thing that could have gone for could have raised, you know, $20 million and been sold for $100 million maybe a couple of years ago. And this person just built it with cursor with no money whatsoever. Since feedback Dev built an AI that reads the emotional vibe of your product, social media mentions and gives you instant feedback. And somebody posted their cursor rules, which I thought were quite good. All right, member essay is intelligence just interest? What if people being smart or brilliant about something really just comes down to being obsessed with it? When you think about most people I know who are so-called geniuses about a given topic, it tends to overlap 100% with people who won't shut up about that topic. Kind of a weird coincidence, right? I think back to training people, like in cybersecurity when I was back at HP, this is where I was doing it the most. And it turned out that people who ended up thriving and being like the best testers and the best hackers were the ones who simply loved it and were curious about it and would not stop talking about it. And that made them want to study more. It made them play with more tools. It made them like interact with everything, um, far more than the other people who just like, didn't care and were doing it for work. So the question is, is curiosity actually the superpower? I think this is a powerful frame because it changes the narrative from you're not smart enough. Instead, to the question of what are you interested in or what can you not shut up about? That's what you should be doing and building your career around. For human 3.0. If we think about it this way, the main driver for success isn't how smart you are at solving particular problems, but how many problems you put in front of yourself. Curious people create a vast network of like paths of discovery. Reading this book and that book, and then it mentions another book. So you go read that. So you're like branching out. You're creating all these paths and it shows them more things to get excited about. And that produces more curiosity. And pretty soon you have like these vast networks of like paths and, and, you know, subgenres and everything. People who aren't curious kind of stay in one place and don't really expose themselves to many kinds of problems. So if the question is how much you learn and accomplish, which I think it should be, then expanding your paths and exposing yourself to more problems is far higher value than your speed or ability to solve the problems that you find. So for me, the takeaway here is massive maximize curiosity, maximize exposure, maximize your inputs with the high quality thoughts and ideas, mostly reading. And don't judge people as not smart until you can answer whether or not they're curious. And for those who aren't curious, isn't that likely because they weren't exposed to cool enough stuff as a kid? And why can't we start exposing them now? Right, so you don't know if somebody is like a closet genius because they are closet curious, right? So let's start now with that. Let's bombard them with things that they might be curious about, and it might unlock them. It might turn them from like a C player or a B player into an absolute a player, because you didn't know they were so curious, because they never got exposed by their parents or by their teachers, or by they didn't have any mentors that were like intellectually focused. So execute the same routine you would for a curious person to stay curious and read everything, watch all the YouTube channels around interesting topics, whatever. Basically exposure. When I stop consuming great books, I get dumb. Within weeks it happens like almost instantly. Maybe that's because it neuters my curiosity and interest in the world. In fact, I'm sure that's the reason. So this might be the single best way to magnify someone's functional intelligence, curiosity over IQ and the recommendation of the week. If curiosity is more important than intelligence, the best thing you could do is read more good books. Nothing is a substitute for books, not movies. Not even good YouTube content about nonfiction topics. Nothing is as high quality and high value as books. My hard recommendation to everyone listening at least two high quality books per month. At least one of those should be nonfiction. And if it if you have fiction as the other one, it should be high quality fiction, which really talks about a whole bunch of nonfiction topics. And it's fine if you want to add additional garbage fiction or just purely fun fiction. I would say go ahead, but do those on top of these two books, no exceptions, two books. High quality. Four would be nice, but it's a little bit harder. Uh, do at least two. And I got a few here to get you started. The Technological Republic, quality Land and poor Charlie's Almanack. If you do even two books a month, your brain will be flooded with ideas. Seriously, trust the system and the aphorism of the week. The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge. The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge. Aristotle. Unsupervised learning is produced on Hindenburg Pro using an SM seven B microphone. A video version of the podcast is available on the Unsupervised Learning YouTube channel, and the text version with full links and notes is available at Daniel Mysa.com slash newsletter. We'll see you next time.