594: We Just Found It on the Doorstep

So there's a handful of people that I'll schedule like a monthly face time call with and in most of them, you know, almost all of them are in fact all of them are not local. And then there's a handful of people that I try to do lunch with like once a month. And my good friend Sam, he and I had our monthly lunch today and we went to a place, but I had a problem.

During lunch, there was music outside, which was good. But the Jack Brown burger joint trolled me because they were playing a fish album during the entire lunch. And all I could do was think about how happy you would be if you were there or if you at least knew this was happening as it was happening. In retrospect, I should have like FaceTime to you or something just to be like listen to this. The worst part of all the worst part of all.

You could tell me what songs I heard and I would probably be like sure, but there were a couple of songs that even I recognized as fish songs like you know not only didn't have the vibe of fish, but I like had heard the songs before and recognize them.

And I forget which ones they were the only one I know by name is bouncing around the room and that was not it. But there was one and I'm sure this is describing half a fish catalog, but where it was repeating the same phrase over and over again and it was very catchy. That's fairly common.

Yeah, exactly. But anyways, David Bowie, maybe I'm kind of proud of you that you recognize that it was fish. I'm not sure I could do that. I don't know any of their songs. Maybe I could pick it up based on vibe, but I don't think I've even heard that much. Like you must what when are you listening to fish so much that you recognize songs? I can give you a good heuristic John. If you hear a song that you don't recognize, you don't think you've ever heard it on the radio before.

Look around the room. And if the widest guy in the room is slightly bopped in his head to it, that's me though. And zero other people are there's a decent chance it's fish. That's not going to be anything like I don't know. I think my chances of record spontaneously recognize like you're at a restaurant and these music playing the background spontaneously organizing fish. I think my odds are very low.

I guess I have to look for somebody with the little red blood cell, you know, pattern on there on their clothing. And if they were bopping to it or something, then I could figure it out. Right. Now I know what that is. That's the one thing I can recognize. Mark told me with that is and now I see it on people's like license plate surrounds them like one of them.

Anyway, the worst part, Marco, the worst part of this entire lunch and about the only bad part of this lunch because I really do enjoy Sam. So very much. But can I guess yes. Did you like some of it? It wasn't bad. So we have a new member special. We have gone back to the well and we have done another ATP tier list.

Ron, can you remind us all what is the tier list? I can't remind you all because everybody knows what a tier list except for all people who listen to this podcast, but then they've also heard the specials before. So it's a tier list. You rank things. You put them in tears. Multiple things can be in a single tier. The top tier is S. Why nobody knows except somebody knows, but we don't really care. The point is it's better than a. It's a tier list.

And it's grading. It's like a through F and then S on top of a. And we graded all the iPods, no, at least most of them anyhow. And so I am pretty confident that we did a pretty good job on this. There was a little bit of horse trading involved, but I'm pretty happy with where we ended up. We made a handful of people that we know very upset. And I'm sorry that you're upset, but we're right.

So if you are curious to hear this tier list or any of the others, you can go to ATP.fm slash join. And if you join, even for about a month, but you should do more, then you can get to all of the member specials. We've been trying to do one a month for what like a year or two now. I forgot exactly how long it's been, but we've racked up a fair number over the course of the last several months.

So there's a handful of tier lists. We do ATP eats among other things. There's a lot of there's a lot of good stuff in there and some silly stuff. So ATP tier list. And if you are a member and you would like to watch the tier list happen, which is not required, but is occasionally helpful.

There is a super secret YouTube link in the show notes for members where you can go and watch it on YouTube. Well, please do not share that. It's the honor system, but you can check it out there as well. It's in the show notes for the member special. Sorry. Yes. Thank you.

When you got to be a pod tier list member special looking at the show notes. The first link will be the YouTube video. I like this tier list because they always we always seem to I think they reveal something about the things that we are ranking.

Something that we do, I usually didn't know going in. You think, oh, you're just going to rank them and people are going to have controversies over which is good and which is bad. But I think in the end, when you look at the whole tier list and you kind of look at the shape of it and how it's worked out and how contentious the choices are be.

You learn something about it. I think our connectors tier list was like that. And I think the iPod one turned out like that too. And the reason we made somebody blind areas because we know a lot of really weird tech people with very specific and often very strange opinions specifically iPods. I think you could also say incorrect opinions.

I'm like they have their reasons, at least most of them have reasons that make some sense. I think one of the things we learn not to spoil too much is that a lot of people have, you know, all the things that we put in tier list people can have.

Personal sentimental reasons for recent, we all certainly do. And you know listeners do as well. And I think iPods more than anything we've done before, like the people who had opinions they swayed heavily into the sentimental. Right. It was, you know, it was like this was my first iPod. This I really love this thing. Right. Much more so than the past tier list we've done. So I think, you know, maybe the iPod at that point was the most personal product Apple had never made.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, like I had a lot of fun with this one because like even though like I hardly ever really used iPods because by the time I could really afford decent iPods, it was only very shortly before the iPhone really took over.

So I only really had a couple of years with iPods, but those couple years, I really liked the iPods. And this was actually fun. So, and and just for, you know, coincidence sake, I happened to have bought a couple of iPod nanos off of eBay a couple of years back.

Just to kind of play around with and the and I took them out the other night after after rerecord this episode and charged them up and all the ones that will accept the charge at least charged them up and got to play around with the old iPod nano. And I will just say I stand by everything I said on that episode, everything. Yeah. So feel free to listen and tell us how wrong we are. And you can you to listener can pay us $8 a month to yell at your podcast player just a little bit more.

So we encourage you to do that. Absolutely great marketing. Thank you. Mark. And by the way, our membership episodes are DRM free. And so if you happen to use an iPod to listen to your podcasts, we are fully compatible. So you can pay us eight bucks a month to listen to our our member content on an iPod if you actually have one. And you can honestly buy one on eBay for only a few months worth the membership fee because they're pretty cheap these days.

Indeed. And hey, what would you listen to on an iPod if not a podcast? Well, you could listen to music and you could listen to music on a you to iPod. And so Brian Hamilton wrote in with regard to the red and black colored you to iPod. We were wondering I thought we were wondering on the episode or certainly there was some mumblings about it on mastodon afterwards. You know, how did they get to red and black for the color scheme of the you to iPod.

And Brian wrote into remind John and us about how did it set how to dismantle an atomic bomb, which was released November 22 of 20 or excuse me of 2004. And the color scheme on the cover art for that album is red and black. We're worried on that one. John, Mr. You to yeah, I remember it.

But once I was reminded of it. I mean, here's the thing like I said on the episode. It's not as if red and black became like the iconic colors of the band. This was one album that was released at you know, obviously at the same time as the iPod as part of a promotional thing like the iPod the usual iPod the first you do I was released in like October.

And the album came out in November. So it's a tie in right. And then there were future you to iPods and they were also red and black. But at that point you two hadn't released a new album. So they're all just tied to this one album.

But they have released a lot of albums and they were future albums and their past albums. And I can tell you that this one and this color scheme did not become heavily associated with the band. But that's the reason that's why they don't with red and black because of the cover of the album.

Are you saying that as an assumption? I'm genuinely asking. Are you saying that as an assumption? No, it's yeah, I once I was reminded of them like, oh, yeah, that's why they did. I mean, it's not a great reason, but I'm pretty sure it's the reason.

I'm pretty enough. Max Velasco not writes in that there's also another feature and I'm using air quotes here on the U2 iPod Max writes the U2 iPods featured signatures in the band members on the backside. I was fine with the black red color scheme couldn't stand seeing Bono and company on the back whenever I turned them over.

Yeah, that's I'd forgotten about that as well that I mean, obviously is a shiny back end that doesn't show up that much. But if you really just wanted to red and black iPod and didn't care about the band, the signatures in the back kind of messed it up a little.

Indeed, Nikolai Bronvol Ernst writes to us with regard to the DMA and Apple's cut. Nikolai writes, I really enjoyed your last show, 593 out of European lawyer. I'm also not a European lawyer, but I am a citizen in the EU and wanted to provide a single European's point of view.

The DMA is nothing to do with Apple's cut in the app store or how much money Apple learns from selling their hardware. It only has to do with ensuring fair competition. Citizens writes freely choose services they want to use without vendor lock ins on interoperability portability and your own data, which we hear the EU believe belongs to the user. That's pretty good summary.

A lot of people have written in to say this, but I think people will get hung up with the idea when we talk about like Apple's cut and how the EU is trying to control that and they're like, the EU is not trying to tell Apple how much money it can make. It's just trying to do this other thing. The reason it gets mixed up and the reason people send us these emails is because what Apple did to supposedly comply with the DMA while also trying to prevent competition is an application of fees.

The EU says you have to allow for competition. Apple says, okay, sure, we'll allow competition, but all of our competitors have to pay us an amount that makes it so they can't compete with us. The cut we're talking about is not Apple's cut from its own app store. It's the cut Apple demands from the app stores and the people selling through app stores that are not Apple's own app store.

So, I think that's the source of the confusion. The other thing is that plenty of countries, including the EU, do actually tell companies that they can't make a certain amount of money on a certain thing that they do. Someone wrote in to give us the example of credit cards, like a MasterCard and Visa, the two big credit card networks. I think in the fees they charge stores to process the credit cards are essentially capped.

The EU basically said Visa and MasterCard own the market, you can continue to do that, but you can't charge merchants any more than point whatever percent. The EU has not done that to Apple. They haven't said that to Apple, hey Apple, you can't charge more than 10% in your own app store.

They haven't said that at all. They haven't said anything about what Apple can charge in their app store. What they just want is more competition and Apple is saying, okay, there can be other app stores, but they all have to give us an amount of money that makes it unattractive. We'll see how that flies. Again, the EU has not yet ruled on the core technology fee and all the other things that they're investigating so far.

They've only ruled on the steering provisions about how Apple restricts the way apps in its own app store can link out to third party payment methods. We'll see how those other decisions come out in the coming months and years. I don't know how long this is going to take. Right now it's not looking good for the core technology fee. Let's say that.

We asked for mostly tongue in cheek, but we asked for Brexit style names for Apple leaving the EU. Jared counts was the person who saw it to suggest I leave Frederick, your man suggested, exit and provided a truly heinous but hilarious. I presume I generated image for this. My personal favorite though was suggested several times first we saw was from Oliver Thomas, I quit. I leave an I quit. We had many more suggestions these I thought this was the top three I leave an I quit.

Our cute but I kind of like acts it because it's as close to Brexit and the acts thing like the picture has like an EU theme Superman holding acts and an apple and yes it does look a generated interesting how.

Due to the way the various I models that were familiar with have been trained most people can now look at an image and identify it immediately as a generated based on like the shading and the weirdness of hands and all sorts of other stuff it is kind of strange how quickly that happened but anyway. I kind of like acts it but I don't think we get to pick this name so I mean I don't a MacBook one didn't really catch on me neither to MacBook or.

Oh please it sure did well within our little circle of podcasts yes but I don't see the the New York Times running with exit or I quit yeah we don't really seem to have naming power in the in the greater ecosystem if we try hard enough we can make that

all right someone anonymously wrote in with regard to car play audio we were wondering how car play audio work especially with the new car play and whether or not it was more like air play to work like sends a big buffer what not and so anonymous rights audio and wireless car play is always over Wi-Fi buffer audio for car play is basically air play to buffer audio is available without doing next and car play.

Yeah this was news to me because I had speculated that it seemed like all car play audio was always going over Bluetooth wireless car play I think actually creates like a little ad hoc Wi-Fi network between the car and the phone and wired car play sends all that stuff over the wire I kind of assumed wire car play it seems

because this audio and video over the wire wireless it seemed like it was doing Wi-Fi for the audio or for the video single rather but Bluetooth for the audio and apparently this person wrote in who I think would no such things and they said nope it's always over Wi-Fi so that to me first of all is kind of good news in the sense that

like you can you can have improved responsiveness you can have you know more better liability for the audio because it's already going over Wi-Fi and so you can do all that with current car play tech you don't have to use the new car play system the kind of sad and frustrating part is then why is car why do wireless car play implementations out there in the world so often have just massively long buffers that make it really laggy and annoying that's frustrating.

Alright Kirk Northrup points us to a New York Times article with regards to using AirPods Pro is hearing protection this is kind of a lot to read but I think it's worth it because this really distills down the summary and we'll put a link in the show notes if you want to read it for yourself reading from the article as you can see in the results any claim

that AirPods Pro is adapted transparency or hear through mode limits sound to 85 decibels does not prove true in our testing the earbuds did bring 105 decibels sound down to 95 decibels which is a big improvement over using no hearing protection at all but that's adequate for only about 45 minutes of exposure under our simulated conditions

given mine that noise guidelines are designed with the assumption that a person who is no other loud noise exposure throughout the day if you were previously exposed to loud noise levels for your worker hobbies you would likely want to be even more careful when attending a concert in the same day.

The hear through mode and the boat bows quite comfort earbuds to which bows calls the wear mode did a little better in our test limiting the sound to 91 decibels a level of volume reduction that might be adequate for two hour concert.

So we swapped the earbuds for ear plugs and switched back and forth between the earbuds hear through and noise cancelling modes we were surprised to hear how much more enjoyable the show was when we use the AirPods Pro ear buds is hearing protection using the AirPods Pro's adapter transparency gave us an essence acquired version of the unatenuated live sound the guitars drums and vocals all sound it surprisingly clear and our enjoyment of the sound wasn't lessened at all.

However, as our measurements predicted it was still too loud after about ten minutes listening our ears grew fatigued. This is interesting so what the wire cutter did was run a basically they have like a test set up with an artificial ear basically that they can put these earbuds into and measure what gets sent through them.

I question whether these results are universal because again like as somebody who's now watched I think three concerts four concerts maybe with the with AirPods Pro as my ear plugs.

I know what it feels like to have my ears blown out from a concert and like how it feels during an afterwards and when I use the AirPods Pro it doesn't feel that way at all it feels just like using ear plugs which I did because what I was doing before using the AirPods Pro when the Apple watch measures the sound pressure hitting my ears like when it indicates when you were in the AirPods Pro what it's doing it caps at 85 decibels when they're being used this way.

And I have found for whatever it's worth like I have like an SPL meter because of course I do and I have found the Apple watches sensitivity to be pretty accurate although obviously it wouldn't be using the watches built in Mike when you have AirPods Pro and so maybe there's some other factors there. How does it how would it possibly be measuring the sound on the inside of your ears there are microphone that's facing the inside of your ear.

I think there might be isn't that how they do some of the calibration stuff. So anyway the point is my experience actually using them there it really does not feel like I'm hearing an undefined decibel concert for three hours like that it feels like what it says of 85. Well how loud was the concert outside of the year where you're from your seat did you look at like the decimal meter like if I had nothing on what what would the level be.

So I did a couple a couple times where I would like take the ear put the AirPods out and put them away so they turn off and just listen and watch and see how the watch measures the concert you know fully and it was I don't remember exactly but I remember it was somewhere in the high 90s I think.

So not quite as loud as there so maybe maybe the differences that they are they were coming from 105 decibels and they got came into 95 and I was coming I think from somewhere in the 90s in down to 85 so maybe that's the cause or it could just be differences in fit.

You know I don't know exactly how good is the seal with their artificial ear setup compared to my actual ear I don't know if there's no good to know that so I think what I think the conclusion to draw here is first of all what we kind of already knew which is they provide some protection.

So you know suitable for occasional concert goers not suitable if you're going to be like working in a factory every single day like there's different degrees of protection that you might need if you like you know this is not every day protection but also it probably varies a little bit between both fit and between what exactly you're actually listening to like how loud is your environment is it you can't maybe it can't bring down 105 decibels but maybe it can bring down 95 decibels like that you know there's so obviously there are other variables here.

So I think the advice that I would give remains the same which is if you have like really serious hearing protection needs or very frequent hearing protection needs get real hearing protection if you are an occasional concert go or like me and you want basic hearing protection for occasional concerts this is probably fine unless you are standing like directly next to the giant PA speaker maybe you might need a little bit more protection.

But this seems fine to me and every time I've I've used them I feel great afterwards in my ears don't ring at all and it doesn't and there's no fatigue so like it seems to be working so maybe it just has a limit to how much it can work. Apple is apparently using Google Cloud infrastructure to train and serve AI this is from HPC wire Apple is two new homegrown AI models including a 3 billion parameter model for on device AI in a larger LLM for servers with resources to allow you to do that.

And so it's just a little bit more of a difference with resources to allow to answer more queries the ML models developed with tensor flow were trained on Google's TPU John remind me what TPU stands for. And some of that we talked about the actual hardware on past show and how many billions of computations or whatever they do and how many different operands are in each operation but I think it's like a tensor processing using the universe.

It's basically so Google doesn't buy its GPUs from Nvidia and put them it makes its own silicon to do machine learning it has for many many years this is not a new thing they're called TPUs and that's what they're currently using to train to train Gemini and stuff. And if you pay them just like you pay a WS or whatever you pay Google Cloud. I believe they will rent you their TPUs and you can train your models on it and that's what Apple did.

Indeed apples AX learn AI framework used to train the homegrown LLM's creates Docker containers that are authenticated to run on the GCP or Google Cloud something what is that Google Cloud computing. Computers it's GCP is like AWS it's Amazon Web Services but Google.

And then they are AX learn supports the bastion orchestrator which is supported only by Google Cloud. This is a quote from their GitHub documentation while the bastion currently only supports Google Cloud platform there you go I should kept reading my bad Google Cloud platform platform jobs it's design is cloud agnostic and in theory it can be extended to run another cloud providers Apple stated on its AX learn infrastructure page on GitHub.

So this is I mean the we didn't put this in the notes with the the rumors are that the deal between Apple and Google to use Gemini as part of iOS 18 as an option alongside a chat GPT that deal is reportedly getting closer but this is from the past of like a apples got these models the one that's going to be running on people's phones or the various ones that are running on their phones which are smaller.

And the big ones they're going to be running on their private cloud compute and these are Apple's on models and they train themselves and how do they train them they paid Google to use TPUs to train their models. And so I feel like this is interesting and that Google Apple's unfriendly relationship let's say with Nvidia continues.

And they're friendly relationship with Google continues it's kind of a surprise that Google that didn't do the deal maybe the rumors are we think we talked about the Sunapast show that nobody's paying anybody for the opening I think was maybe Google wanted to be paid so we'll see how this works out but yeah there seems to be a cozy relationship between Apple and Google because apparently Apple either doesn't have yet or doesn't plan to have fleets of massively parallel machine learning silicon that they can train their models on but Google does.

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John I hear that you have asked Apple for help and they have said you know what you need you need a Mac studio because why would anyone need a Mac pro. This one around I think a week or two ago apples got a page Apple dot com slash Mac slash best hyphen Mac and the title of the pages help me choose answer a few questions to find the best Mac for you.

And when this was going around the first thing I did was launch this page and I wanted to go through the little wizard and answer a bunch of questions to see if I could reach the wind condition which is having this tool recommend the Mac pro is that the wind condition is the one. Sure and the answer was very clear and I was mostly telling that truth but occasionally I would you know exaggerate to make sure I go on the Mac pro path.

And I did not end up a Mac pro recommended Mac studio to me and that a bunch other people pride so a bunch of people tried to use this tool to get Mac pro nobody could do it and Julia Montier tried it and found out how to cheat to win the game. If you look at the source code you can see that this like a Jason file that defines the options for the end points and that Jason is not Jason file but a bunch of Jason that Jason does not contain the Mac pro.

It contains pretty much every other Mac that Apple sells but there is no way to get to the Mac pro because the Mac pro is not one of the options. That's weird. No, this is Apple telling you that no literally nobody wants this computer nobody should have it. We all agree on this show that the current Mac pro is not a great computer but it is a computer that exists and on top of that there is at least one very specific reason why someone might want to use it.

If one of the questions had asked hey do you have a bunch of PCI express cards that you need to use. If the answer to that is yes it is literally the only computer Apple sells that you can do that on and that is really the only thing to recommend. Do you think the people who made this quiz know what a PCI express card is? I mean it's Apple. They have questions and answers for every other computer. It just seems weird to me.

Now again I can understand saying this is not a great computer and really honestly no one should really buy it. I agree with all of that but when you make a help me choose tool on your website you should have all of the things as endpoints. And yeah make the Mac pro pretty much impossible to get to unless you need it but there is a reason someone might need it.

If someone is going through this tool and saying I don't know what I'm going to do I've got all these audio cards that I need to use for my old Mac is dying. Is there some other computer that I can use? How would you determine that Apple still sells computers with card slots in them? Everyone on the mess I was saying well the people who need the Mac pro know it so they don't need to use this tool.

That's not how these tools work. You could say the same thing about people who need an iMac know they want and all the things so they don't need to use this tool. If you already know which computer you need yes you don't need this tool. But the tool exists to lead you to whichever product that Apple sells is best suited for you. And it's weird to leave just one out. And I would just love to know the thinking behind that process.

Look if Apple doesn't want to sell them don't sell them right but they're selling them you can buy them for a huge amount of money. And the tool can make it difficult or almost impossible to get there because when it says how many PCI express cards do you need to use? The default choice should be zero or I don't know what a PCI express card is. Like have million options that regular people will click and they will leave them off that path and say you shouldn't buy this.

But if the person says three or any number other than zero you have to leave them to the Mac Pro because this is literally the only computer they sell with card slots. I mean you're going to hate this but so I did the whole quiz trying to get to the Mac Pro before he said it wasn't an option.

And just putting in all the highest requirements. I need all the 3D editing and content creation and video editing and audio editing and all these tools and connect a bunch of stuff to my Mac and it recommended exactly what I'm using right now. The Macbook Pro 16 inch. I thought for a strike at least get a Mac studio but nope. Well no because the question asks is do you do all your work in a single location or do you need to be portable. Did you say all I do all my work in a single location?

I said like the on the on the one desk option the very top option where it's like I do everything on the same place like on a desk. I thought for sure I'd at least get a Mac studio. I think a lot of the endpoints recommend two computers. Like I didn't just get the Mac studio. I got recommended the Mac studio on the Macbook Pro. I also got two computers. The Macbook Pro $4,000 configuration and the Macbook Pro $3,500 configuration.

I don't know how you didn't end up with desktop because there must have been some question that's differentiating portability. Obviously if you mentioned you ever need to take it somewhere they're not going to recommend desktop. I don't know about I don't know how great this tool is. Wizards in general are not great. I like their comparison ones like for the phones where it does like columns and you can list all the features and scroll and see how they are different from each other.

This doesn't do that but I do think it's very strange to not have a single one of your computers. Remember there's something the trash can for years and years and really nobody should be buying that. But if you needed whatever GPUs it came with for a while it still did have the most powerful GPUs you could buy and an Apple computer.

If you needed those GPUs and they had a tool that was asking you a bunch of questions they should have had a question that said do you use Maya at Pixar and need this much GPU power and then I believe you're the trash can. I don't know it's weird anyway if someone Apple knows why the Mac Pro is emitted from this tool please tell us. I'm sure it's the obvious reason which is like no one should buy that and we kind of agree but you're selling it so put in the tool.

Pretty sure it's very clear why it's emitted. Even the very first day this Mac Pro came out nobody should be buying it let alone now. It's not nobody like it is the only computer with slots like that's not a great reason for it to exist and it's not a reason for you to pay twice as much as a Mac studio but like especially since they don't support I believe they don't support it all anymore.

The PCI Express breakout boxes like they used to on the Intel things it's literally your only choice if you have cards and that's one of the reasons they should continue to make it and do continue to make it and they just never ask about that. Yeah yeah yeah yeah it made me laugh quite a bit that nobody was coming up with that. I don't know maybe that's a feature not a bug just saying.

All right for the main main topic this week for your main course we have a plethora of different AI related topics and I'm going to try to take us on a journey will probably fail and that's OK but basically this next section is AI. That's a thing isn't it and so we start on the 17th of June for what it's worth with our friend John Voorhees at Mac stories which is them saying hey the articles entitled how we're trying to protect Mac stories from AI bots and web crawlers how you can too.

And it seems like both John and Federico are getting very wrapped around the axle with regard to AI stuff and I'm not saying I don't mean to imply that they're wrong or that's bad but they are getting ever more perturbed what's going on with AI crawlers and I mean to a degree I get it so that was on the 17th of June.

And says here's how you can protect yourself from crawling and then on the 21st of June business insider rights and says oh, open AI and anthropic seem to be ignoring robots dot text and if you're not familiar. If you have a web page or website I guess I should say where where you control the entire domain you can put a file called robots dot text at the root of the domain so you know it would be Marco dot org slash robots dot text and.

Any self respecting and ethically clear crawler will start crawling Marco dot org or whatever the case may be. By attempting to load robots dot text and seeing if there's anything there and if so it there's a mechanism a schema if you will by which the robots dot text will dictate who are really what crawlers should or should not be allowed to crawl that site and it's by path I can say everything in this directory you shouldn't crawl everything.

Here you can crawl it's you can sort of subdivide your site to say which parts are accessible. Yeah and I have thoughts on that but we'll come back to that. Yeah, I mean whenever you're ready to interrupt to be honest feel free. Okay let's talk about robots text. So well, let me just actually very quickly apologize I gave you the good I gave you the green light now giving you the yellow light. Just very quickly it's already the intersection.

It's important to note that robots dot text has never been enforced in any meaningful way it's been kind of a friendly agreement amongst pretty much the entire worldwide web but there's never been any real wood behind the arrow or whatever the turn of phrase. So we call advisory yeah advisory locking it is a scheme that people who agreed with that scheme can use that scheme to collaborate and work together but there is no actual mechanism stopping anyone from doing.

It is literally just a text file that you can choose to read or not. So with that said Marco carry on. Yeah and so robots dot text is basically a courtesy it is a website saying please maybe follow these rules if you if you would you know but it is not a legal contract it is not a legal restriction.

It is not technically enforced or enforceable really it is also not universally used and respected and so and I can tell you I operate crawlers of a sort and I don't use robots dot text so when overcast cross podcast feeds I don't even check for robots dot text I just crawl the URL as the users have entered them or as they have submitted them to iTunes slash Apple podcasts.

What robots dot text advisories are were originally for was not like hey search engines don't crawl my entire site that's not what they were for what they were for was mostly to prevent like runaway crawls on parts of a site that were potentially infinitely

very vulnerable so things like if you had a web calendar and you can just click that next month next month next month button forever if you want to and so a web crawler that like that you know indexes a page and then follows every link on that page if it's hitting like a web calendar it can generate basically infinite links as it goes forward backwards in time so

there was a robot that text was to kind of advise search engines and it was specifically for search engines it was to advise them areas of the site the crawlers should not crawl mostly for technical reasons occasionally for some kind of privacy or restriction reasons but usually it was just like technical like you know hey don't get into an infinite loop

which was largely unnecessary because web crawlers eventually kind of figured out like had a limit things on certain sites and you know they eventually made themselves more advanced and that was wasn't really necessary anymore even for that case I think the primary use case was keep this out of your search index like I mean and any decent crawlers not going to get into the loop but you keep this out of your search

index was you know and it was and it was respected by the popular search engines of the day and still I think Google still reads robust attacks and still respects it but the thing is like the whole idea of like well I don't want any bot to crawl this that there it was so based on assumptions about search engines in particular web search engines the current drama around trying to apply it to AI training

I think it's missing a lot of that context that when this kind of unofficial standard was developed it was all about web search engines and when you think about like how the web search engine dynamic has always worked with with web publishers there was never really any official contract between anybody that said like hey Google Bing all the other search engines you know

that have coming on over the years crawl my page go ahead index it go ahead even though technically that is making a copy in your servers memory and might be some kind of copy violation doesn't really matter because the purpose of this is going to help me it's going to make people able to find my my page through your search engine and will direct people to my page and I will be able to have them there make money maybe maybe

subscribe to my site in their in their browser or whatever so there was that implied symbiotic trade off that OK I actually as a site owner I want search engines to mostly to index my site because I want people to be directed to my site from the search engine and so robots that text was entirely in that context it was never

anything that was some kind of like legal contract that said you must obey my rules that really has never been tested until fairly recently like that that was never really something that really ever came up I mean there were a couple of things here and there was like Google news and news publishers in certain countries but like for the most part that the basic idea

that text was really just please like that's it was a please do this or don't do this and even then like it was often used in ways that harmed the actual customers using using things or or did things that were unexpected this is why I don't use it for overcast feed crawlers because if you publish in our ss feed and submit it to Apple podcasts I'm pretty sure you

intend for that to be a public feed and so I feel like it is not really my place to then you know put up an alert to my user to say hey this person's robots.

Text file actually says you know disallow star on this one path that this feed is in and so I actually can't do this for you like that that would feel like I would have I would have a first of all no incentive to do that and second of all because of its intention and context as a standard for search engine which I'm not this doesn't really apply to me in my use and and there were all sorts of things over the years to like you

know that you could specify certain user agents like all right Google bought do this Yahoo bought do this like and even and that was also problematic over the years to because it disadvantaged certain companies if you just had like bad behavior once or if a site owner just had like one bad

thought about one of these companies once and then like never revisited it or whatever like then that company was allegedly like disallowed from crawling the site why well I mean it's not even that it's like you know for people in order the technology behind it you know don't allow Google bought the way you identify Google bought is by the user agent string which is part of the

HTTP request and anybody can write anything there and so it's all someone had to do was say I'm Google bought and then just make right a script that slams a site and people like oh my god my slides being slammed by Google bought no it's not it's being slammed by a thing that put that string into the user agent

header like it's just if there's no security no authentication and it's like email anybody and people forget this about email all the time it's that's a real email from San Ed North Pole anybody can write anything I know any mail their technologies try to make this better but with HTTP headers the user agent string there's no security behind that so if you're doing making any decision based on the user agent whether it's a

decision to allow something with a particular user agent string or disallow something or you try to make decisions about I'm getting all these hits and I look at the user agent string and the user agent string is X therefore it must be Google therefore Google is bad you have no idea who or what that is especially with like proxies and things bouncing around the

way so just like robust that text it's all just sort of a politeness agreement and convention that only works when all parties involved are being honest and acting in good faith and that is not something that is true broadly speaking on the way right and when you're looking at like you know the deal between search engines and publishers was mutually beneficial and publishers for the most part who were not like you know bad

business people like for the most part publishers really wanted to first search engines to index their public content and their private content shouldn't be accessible to the crawlers like it shouldn't it shouldn't be exposed to the public internet like so if they want to be private and so using robots dot text to try to say I want you to only use the content on my site for this

purpose but not that purpose but I'm going to keep serving it publicly and making it available to any bought that comes around like publicly you just have to maybe be polite about it I feel like this is the wrong tool for that job that job is more of a legal question like right now again like we haven't really had much of an agreement between publishers and search engines and other you know big aggregators before I think

there have been legal cases about it especially in the early days because in the early days of search engines and the idea that you go to a website that's not yours in type in a search string and see text that came from your website on someone else's website on the Google search results page what I believe there were legal cases about that

and I think the result was that the Google is allowed to run a search engine right and some of that can be considered fair use I mean there's like especially the old style search engines where what you'd see is a series of links that are search results and maybe a summary below them before Google started doing the thing where it's like actually I'm just going to give you an entirely unattributed snippet at the top of the

page that tries to give you the answer you were looking for without sending you to any state and of course that snippet is now powered by their large language models before it wasn't that is still a progress and we'll talk about that in a little bit but the basic idea of a search engine that indexes the web and allows you to get links to the things that has indexed I believe actually has been tested in court

and either way whether or not it has been tested in court in your country or in the US or whatever practically speaking I don't think there are many as much disagreement about the utility of that people having traffic sent to them by Google as you know arguments of Google being too big and there should be competition the search space where by the concept conceptually a web search engine I think we all agree is a good thing that is necessary and should exist and helps everybody sure

but you know if you're going to start making qualifications of like all right well here's how you have to use my content or not use my content robots dot text is not the way to do that that is not any kind of legal binding restriction I would I would even question whether it's even a good idea to even still have those files these days and to expect to expect anything from them.

I mean people people are expecting as all it will read this thing from the perplexity c on a second but like I think what people are expecting is for the ostensibly good faith actors to do what the existing ones do Google honors robot dot text and so to the other things apple

bot thing so do the other things that crawl the web right nobody has to follow it but the good faith actors do and so I think most of the pushback here is hey I did I thought you weren't just a random you know fly by night company or a bunch of you and you know you know you know you know we want to ban your user agent when someone fakes it in spams our site with it but we'll just say here are the rules for you.

You can't crawl these URLs you can't call any of our URLs you can crawl these or whatever like I think this is a reasonable tool for that job provided you understand that the tool only works if the people on the other end agree and say yes we will honor your roads that text that I think part of the anger is the a companies are not behaving the way the search and companies did and that's the pushback.

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So we have a round up from Michael Sye that will link in the show notes that talks about all this and then On the same day on the 21st of June Proplexity CEO, Aravind Serenivas responds to plagiarism the plagiarism and infringement accusations So this is a post on fast company and Aravind says and this is a quote We don't just rely on on our own web crawlers. We rely on third-party web crawlers as well So it's on my fault. They did it

Right over there. Well, who is over there? I don't know. It's the people over there. So reading from the post And this is a direct quote from the from the post but not from Aravind Serenivas said the mysterious web crawler that wired identified was not owned by Proplexity but by a third-party provider of web crawling and indexing services Serenivas would not say the name of the third-party provider citing a non-disclosure agreement

Asked if Proplexity immediately called the third party crawler to tell them to stop crawling wired content Serenivas was not in the middle quote. It's complicated What is this Facebook? Is it 10 20 years ago?

Anyways, Serenivas also noted that the robot exclusion protocol in other words robot.stot text which was first proposed in 1994 is quote not a legal framework quote He suggested that the emergency AI requires a new kind of working relationship between content creators or publishers and sites like his so this is actually Something that a bunch of AI CEOs and other big weeks that I've been doing is basically saying oh

Well don't ask us we outsource that it's like come on. This is like CEO 101 Yeah, yeah, I'll source lots of things right but in the end It's your company whatever you know, it's like You know if you say we outsource it and they're doing something they shouldn't it's like saying you know We outsource to some company that makes our bread for us at our sandwich shop

And the bread's coming back with shards of glass and you don't say well don't blame us. We outsource it Tell your bread maker not to put glass in the bread right or are you saying you explicitly said it's okay if you put a little glass in the bread You have to take responsibility, right and so at this and this not just the the proplexity You know, I've seen like three or four stories where AI CEO says oh, that's not us

That's that's a subcontractor so we don't have any control of that. It's like wait what like just own it Just say we've decided we're not going to honor robots.txt because everyone knows you're not doing it And you can't try to blame that on the third party thing whatever and then defend that and that's kind of where they go into It's like it's not a legal framework ball blah and like I said, I think the pushback is not like you know They're legally required to do this or whatever

It's just that like we thought you are going to behave like a search engine and you were going to you were going to be a A polite member of web society and it's clear that because you're like an AI start up. You're like yi ha cowboy time It's a wild west. You can't fence me in We're not acting like Google because we don't have to so tough locking

So I feel a mad at the companies, right? That there's you think I there's no legal argument here There's no like it's just a decision that they're making and by the way I'm arco on your decision not to do it I would say the closest analog of overcast is that you're a web browser web browser

Just on a robot that text if you type a URL into the address bar of your web browser You expected to load that page You don't expect to load robots that text and say oh the site says I'm not supposed to load this page That's not what robots that Texas for so if you are a web client Used by an individual user like a user loads an RSS feed in the podcast That is a single person using a client application to browse the web, you know to get an RSS feed, right?

That is very different than an automated crawler that is crawling all over the entire web and following links, right? That's what robots that text for robots unless you are literally a robot while using overcast, which I don't think you are

It's like it's not a robot and it's not being used by robot. I have a whole podcast about this Well, but it's like but if you look at what perplexity is doing It's I think a lot closer to a browser than a search index Well, so the problem I have to do these businesses

complicated because it's the whole question of like Do people go there to get links out to other places or do they go there to get the answer that you attempt to attribute and I think people get angry with Perplexity when they provide an answer but then don't say where this answer came from In either they do say where this answer came from they're like you provide it too much content This the same problem people are beginning to have with Google is like you're supposed to be sending me traffic

You're not supposed to be removing traffic right by either giving an answer that's synthesized from a website Not telling them the source or basically like inlining the entire inlining my entire web page for example and saying you don't need to go to that website

Here's the whole page right here that is not kind of what people expect out of a search engine So but perplexity is so new and so young and they haven't quite figured this out But it just at the crawling stage though people who are seeing their their website crawled and they're going to

Weps, you know, the complexities service and saying oh like I can find my content there and I put you in robots Atex and you shouldn't be crawling as her pet to these like we don't have to look at robots that text because that's just that's just an

Advisory thing and we've chosen to ignore it and so people are angry. That's what it boils down to well And I think you know we there's going to continue to be more and more applications over time of Technologies like AI summarization and action models and things like that where some fancy bot basically is going to be browsing and operating a web page on behalf of a user That is kind of like a browser

But it's it's a very different form that I think breaks all those assumptions with publishers like this is one thing that I faced when I was making Insta paper a thousand years ago, you know Insta paper would save the text of a web page to read later and only the text not like all the ads and the images and everything that I was very careful though to Not make features that would

Enable somebody to get the text of a page without having first viewed the page in a browser or a browser like context So it would load the whole page They would see the page if they were ads those ads would load on the page they would see those ads and then they could save what they were seeing

And then part of that would be saved in paper and shown to them later and that always that was always a very tense balance to to try to maintain because we know what I didn't want was like widespread scraping of people's text without loading their ads

But I figured that seemed like an okay trade-off because that was literally just like saving what was already sent to the browser and what the user was already looking at But a lot of these new technologies First of all, I probably wouldn't attempt that today But a lot of these new technologies I

Think break a lot of those little details like the like if you if you have some kind of bot that's doing something on a website That's like so you know suppose What it's one of these action models where you're saying all right book me a flight

You know all this stupid like book me a trip thing that all of these AI demos from these big companies keep trying to do even though nobody ever wants that Suppose you have a book me a trip kind of thing with an AI model and the idea is that model will go behind the scenes and

Will you know go operate Expedia or orbits behind the scenes for you and manipulate things back there to find the best flights and hotels whatever else Well those sites make some of their money via ads and affiliate things and sponsor placements on those pages If you have some bot operating the site for you kind of clicking links for you behind the scenes in some kind of AI context

That bot is not going to see those ads. It's not going to click those affiliate links It's not going to pick the sponsored listing It's gonna it's gonna just kind of get the raw data and that's it and that will be violating those sites business models that that happened That really has not happened at massive scale until fairly recently So this really has not been challenged this really has not been legally tested that much This really has not been worked out like what are the standards?

What are the laws what are the legal precedents how much of this is fair use versus not? You know for the most part until very recently we could pretty much just say all right if you Serve something publicly via via public URLs and anybody can just download it then Nothing bad would really happen to you and your business model for the most part if

If some bot came by sometimes and parsed that page for some other purpose it wasn't a big deal but now There's a pretty significant difference in scale and and type of replacement Now with a lot of these AI products and with Google search itself

You know increasing over time and then more recently rapidly increasing what we're seeing now is full-out Replacement of the need for the user to ever look at that page That's a pretty big difference and it's really bad for web publishers and and kind of you know Then consequently really bad for the web in general We have a pretty serious set of challenges on the web already even even before this new wave of LLMs came by to to further destroy the web

We already had a pretty bad situation for web publishers for lots of other reasons over over the years to have something that Removes the need for many people to visit a page at all That is going to crush publishers and so it does make sense why everyone's freaking out about this it makes a lot of sense I do caution people though

I don't think it's a very good business move or a very good technology move to say I'm going to just block AI from being able to do any to see any of my stuff Because that's a pretty big hammer and that's a pretty big blanket statement and you can't actually block them anyway

Like that's it when it comes down to technically speaking you you can't you literally can't stop them Right and let's you stop everyone from viewing your website in which case you don't have a website right so I think it is it is wise to focus on Trying to prevent uses of your content that remove the need to visit your page because that is a direct attack on your business model

That makes a lot of sense. I don't think it's wise to say I don't want any AI training or any AI visibility of my page that I think is probably shortsighted and probably a bit too much of a blanket statement and that I don't think it's good for Any party involved To have that kind of blanket ban on it. I know a lot of people want though that what people The publishers in particular want is they want a you know an ecosystem of members who do agree to some rules of politeness

And say look we should agree on a system that lets me tell you that you shouldn't do x, y and zm my site and you should agree to it And we'll feel better about you if you do that and part of the reason I think Insta paper your example was not a particularly big problem is like you said scale And anything with AI in the name these days people flip out about it and think this is gonna be as big as Google Insta paper was not as big as Google right?

No, it did not have billions and billions and billions of users if it did if it's the paper had Google scale I bet there would have been a hell of a lot more scrutiny on even the very conservative things that you did But because it was small it's not a big deal like that's that's part of the sort of the ecosystem of the web is There's all sorts of small things that don't have particular big scale

They do in all sorts of weird stuff nobody cares about them. We allow them to exist. It's fine But now these big names in AI AI is the next big thing a year in AI company You have a lot of funding everyone looks at them and think that could be the next Google That could have be the next thing with billions and billions of users So we better take whatever weird stuff they're doing way more seriously than we would take overcast And with even with Google the you know the current

Giant in the the world of search and they're you know trying to replace sites and giving answers on the side or whatever Neolipotel coin to term I think it was says about this called Google zero which is the point at which Publisher websites get zero traffic from Google search right because it's been going down and down over the years Because hey you'd write type of Google search and look the answer to my question that I typed it to Google It's right on the Google results page

It's unattributed and I don't have to if you never was attributed I don't have to click on any link to get to it because the answer is right there And so Google has been sending less and less traffic to websites and Google zero is when you notice hey

You know what you know how much traffic we're getting from Google searches zero. I don't know if it's absolutely zero for everybody But it's sure going down and it's a scary world to have what was once the massively largest source of your traffic to your website Disappear

But yeah, like what whether or not is wise to exclude to try to to ask to be excluded from Pick you know whatever whatever AI crawler thing from whatever open AI Propuxity whatever I Think most publishers just simply want that choice and to have that choice

The the crawlers need to agree because again, there is no technical way to stop this short of doing like putting your entire site behind a paywall And even that's not gonna stop things a little bit of pain out of their crawler through it like it's just the thing about publishing on the web

You do it's like the RM you want people to see your movie you can't make it impossible to see your movie You have to give the viewer an ability to see your movie But once you give the viewer the ability to see your movie they can see your movie Like what if they see it but also record it? I want to see it But not be able to see it can I do that and the answer is no Right so if you're publishing on the web

You have like it's like anything else. That's why Marco's right to call this a legal thing like Things are published all the time they were published in paper, you know like the books or whatever That's like but I can take the book and look at it

I can see all the letters in it. Ha ha the book is mine. Well, no actually we have laws about the stuff that's in that law That book we have this thing called copyright and even though you can technically read it and you can technically copy it Increasingly more easily over time or technology we have laws surrounding it to control what you can do it And row outside text people who think of robust that text is some kind of like technological bank vault

It's no more of a bank vault than you could put on a book like you do want people to read it and you can't stop them from being able to copy it And these dates is really really to copy a book especially if it's an ebook right Setting aside the whole DRM thing What you want is some either in a sort of polite society an agreement among the large parties that actually are significant to get along and Then failing that you want laws to provide whatever protections you think are due to you and yeah

The the Google search stuff has I feel like been hashed out probably in the altitudes today It's what it knows and the AI stuff has not yet been hashed out and so to move on to the next one because we have a lot of these items Microsoft at least someone in Microsoft has a very interesting notion of what the deal is on the web and potentially what the law should be surrounding it So this is a post on the verge of I should on Hollister who writes Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleiman

Incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web It becomes quote-unquote freeware that anyone can freely copy and use when CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether AI companies have effectively stolen the world's IP

Mustafa said I think that with respect to content that's already on the open web the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use Anyone can copy it recreate it with recreate it reproduce with sorry recreate with it reproduce with it

That has been freeware if you like and that's been the understanding Microsoft is currently they target a multiple lawsuits alleging that it in open AI or stealing copyrighted online stories to train generative AI models So it may not surprise you to hear Microsoft exact defend it is perfectly legal

I just didn't expect them to be so very publicly and obviously wrong I'm not a lawyer right Sean and that's also true for me But I can tell you that the moment you create a work It is automatically protected by copyright in the US you don't even need to apply for it You certainly don't avoid your rights just by publishing it on the web in fact It's so difficult to rate to wave your rights that lawyers had to come up with special web licenses to help This is so gross like

I'm not as riled up as a lot of people about people about you know these AI bots crawling my website like it's sitting here Now I don't find it that off putting I don't love it, but whatever this though this is disgusting So this is such a weird statement because everybody knows how copyright works

I'm sure this person knows as well, but to say that like oh, it's once you put it in the web It's freeware, which is a term that mostly applies to software, but like thought is you can recreate it reproduce it You know copy it like no, no, no like there Those are specifically things we actually do have laws around well We don't have laws around or the more complicated things like what can I train a on it or whatever and we'll get to that

No, a little bit, but like it's such a weird thing to say that like oh as everyone knows since the 90s once you put it on the web You forfeit all ownership Not true at all and I mean if that's that's like it's one of the things is great about the web is

Oh, it's just like books. It's printed word right in especially in the beginning. It was just a bunch of words and we already have laws surrounding that right and That's why there were cases about search engine is like are search engines copying it because you know we got this whole

You know giant library of laws about copying text my website has text on it and Google's copying it and they've had to do it out And say actually what Google's using it doing is you know find within these parameters blah blah blah right

But that fight was fought because it was an example of copying but yeah this I don't I mean obviously the the Microsoft AI Leadership but this guy is not a lawyer either and and so but like it's that's not how you should defend this you shouldn't defend it by saying

You know everything on the web is is a free for all because that's never the way it's been and it's not the way it is now This is a yet another foot in the mouth problem from Microsoft and I'm not sure what's going on over there But they really need to Take a lesson from Apple and maybe try to speak with one voice instead of having individual lieutenants make really terrible statements of the press Yeah, so Louis Mantea writes with regard to permissions on AI training data from the 22nd of June

Louis writes from Grah John Gruber today on the 22nd June It's fair for public data to be excluded on an opt out basis rather than Included on an opt-in one and then Louis continues no no, it's not this is a critical thing about ownership and copyright in the world

We own what we make the moment we make it publishing text or images on the web does not make it fair game for to train a Ion the public in public web means free to access it does not mean free to use Also whether reposting my content elsewhere is in good faith or not

It is now up to someone other than me to declare whether or not to disallow AI training web crawlers and their robots.txt file to allow It is excuse me to add insult injury that person may not have the knowledge or even the power to do so if they're posting content

They don't own on a site that they also don't own like social media. So this is he's so close to getting to the crux of this in the first little paragraph Here he's basically declaring that training AI on your data is exactly the same as copying and reproducing it and that is not something that the world agrees on Louis's opinion is that it is the courts have not yet weighed in I

Think to the average person they would say are those the same things because they seem like they might be a little bit different Kind of in the same way that indexing your content in Google is a little bit different than just literally copying it and reposting it on the website, right?

But anyway, if you agree that it's the same as copying then yeah Sure, but then the second bit is getting to even more of the heart of it here, which is like okay So let's say we do agree that it's the same much, you know not not proven yet, but anyway What about when somebody like posts a link to your site on a social media network and on that website?

They do a little embedding inlining of like the first paragraph or whatever like what if someone copies and paste a paragraph of your thing on another website Right even if you had absolute somehow magical technical control to stop AI crawlers crawling your website

if people can read your website and Quote from it or embed little portions of it or a screenshot or do whatever on other websites Of course you don't control those other websites and so they allow crawling your stuff's gonna end up in the Google search index in the AI training Model or whatever even though you disilloded it from your website and I would say that for the most part that We also have laws covering can someone take a portion of the thing that you made and quoted elsewhere

There's all legal framework deciding whether that is fair use or not and it's complicated and the law is not a deterministic machine As the other Patel I mentioned before is always fun of saying but we do have a legal framework to determine Can I copy and paste this paragraph from this thing on this person's site and quoted on my site so I can comment on it? Yeah, in general you can you know can I make a parody of this this article?

You know on my website. Yeah, you can I hope it's things around that that you know that have been fought out in court that we have a system for dealing with But all of those things say the court determines you you sue them and they say actually this person was allowed to quote that snippet

Right you lost your fair use case because it's pretty open and shut that's fine That just got indexed by an AI training bot because that person's website allows them you know the polite AI bots are a never mind again Never mind that you can't stop them anyway, right?

That's just the nature of publishing No matter what you do not have absolute control of every single character that you made You do have control over the entire work and the reproduction of the entire work But you don't have control over other examples of fair use and Louis saying oh, it shouldn't be like I shouldn't have to opt out The default should be that nobody can crawl me. I mean that's just like Not only is it technically impossible, but like

That's not the way the web has ever worked. It has always been we're gonna crawl you unless you tell us don't and even the polite ones You know they'll read the thing that you said not to do it, but by default they're gonna crawl you and I think asking for a world where

Everything you publish on your website is not only Not crawlable by the things you don't want to crawl up but also not able to be quoted by other people is clawing back Rights that we've already decided belonged to other people through fair use So then the music industry decided to get involved yeah Multi-billion dollar companies are entered the chat as they would say we talked about this before of like hey

Louis, Mantien doesn't want people crawling his website. What can he do about it? He's just one person The music industry they have a lot of money. They have a lot of IP. This is where

The stuff really starts going down. Yeah, so reading from ours. Technically on the 24th of June Universal music group sunny music and wonder records of suit AI music synthesis companies Udo and Suno for allegedly committing mass copyright infringement by using recordings owned by the labels to train music generating AI models the lawsuits filed in federal courts in New York and Massachusetts claim that the AI companies use of

Copy-rated material to train their systems could lead to AI generated music that directly competes with and potentially devalues the work of human artists So from the verge article there's a quote from RAA chief legal officer Ken Doreshow and that quote is these are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving Unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale

Suno and Udo are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and awful lawful excuse me footing and again, that was the RAA chief legal officer Mikey shulman the CEO of Suno says the company technology is transformative and Designed to generate completely new outputs not to memorize and regurgitate preexisting content Shulman says Suno doesn't allow user prompts based on specific artists

Reading from the lawsuit the use here is far from transformative as there is no functional purpose for Suno's AI model to ingest the copyrighted recordings other than to spit out new competing music files that Suno is copying the copyrighted recordings for commercial purpose and is

Deriving revenue directly proportional to the number of music files to generate further tilts the fair use factor against it Andy Bayo writes for a four media pulled together a video montage of some of the AI generated examples provided in the two lawsuits That sound similar to famous songs and their recording artists Then finally we'll put a link in the show notes to a verge article that discusses what the RAA lawsuits mean for AI and copyright

You know, I saw somebody say this a few days ago. I don't remember who exactly it was but What's going on if the RAA are suddenly the good guys? I think this is a weird place to be are they though though? So here's here's the thing like this is the tricky bit with us And we talked about this with the image generators So this is significant because they're big rich companies and there you have to take them seriously when they bring a lawsuit because this is the kind of like who can stop open AI

In Google and whatever well, you know, it's clash of Titans. You need other Titans in here to be duking it out, right? This is the I think this Needs to this needs to be fought out in in a court in some way. I say that before we see what the result will be because maybe the result does not probably Want to happen but like As with the image things these companies that you know, you type in a string and they produce a song for you, right?

these Models are trained on stuff and these record labels say yeah, you trained them on all our music, right? It gets back to the question is training something is AI training. How does that relate to copying? Is it just like copying? Is it not like copying at all? Is it somewhere in the middle? Do any of our existing laws apply to it?

And we've discussed this on a past episodes as well Especially when the company doing the training Then has a product that they make money on and as I said with the image training These models that make songs are worthless without data to train them on the model is nothing without the training data This company that wants to make money you pay as X dollars you can make Y songs, right?

That's their business model. They can make zero songs if they have not trained their model on Songs so the question is where do those songs come from? If they've licensed them from somebody if they made the songs themselves No problem, right again Adobe training their like image generation models entirely on content that either own or licensed

Nobody's angry about that. That's the thing you're doing you own a bunch of images you licensed them from a stock photo company or whatever You train your models on them you put the feature into Photoshop you charge people money for Photoshop They click a button that generates an image whether people like that feature with our legality seems fine These other situations where it's like hey, we crawled your site because we don't care about your robust that text we trained

Our models on your data on your songs on your whatever, right? And by the way We have no idea if the if the you know these companies actually paid for all the songs Let's just assume they did they bottle the songs from you know, they you know Sony music Warner Records or whatever or they paid for a shooting service They got all the songs they trained their model and then they're charging people to use their model, right?

I'm just like the image processing. I've always thought that If you're if you have a business that would not be able to exist without content from somebody that you did not Pay anything for that is very different than oh we trained an AI model for research purposes

Are we trained it for you know for some purchase that is that is not like literally making money off of you I mean this particular case is like okay No, that's not just that they're making money But the thing they're providing is quote not transformer that keep using that word

Business one of the tests for like fair use is is the work transformative Have they taken the thing that existed but made something new out of it and that's the argument in court whether it is or Is not transformative and also is it a substitute? There's another one of the fair use test is it a substitute for the product is someone not going to Buy a Drake album because fake Drake Sounds just as good and they just listen to fake Drake, right? Is it a substitute for it?

Doesn't mean does this sound exactly like it? That's a haul their sad area of law of like does it song a sound too Much like song B and they have to pay them whatever when they're all made by humans, right? This is like You know would someone pay for this instead of paying for this is one a substitute for the other And that's what they'll be duking it out about but I think at its root it is sort of like where does the value of this company come from?

You know like every company has to Take inputs from somewhere they you know Manufacturers not something and they sell it to you or they have a service they wrote the software for they pay someone to run the service and they Selt like there's a there's sort of a value chain there and a lot of these companies are like We would make more money if we don't have to pay for the things that make our product valuable So we don't want to have to license all the music in the world

But we do want to train an AI model on all the music on the world so that we can make songs that sound as good as all the music in the world But we don't want to have to pay for any of that and that seems to be

Not a good idea from from my perspective and this is what like the different ways you can look at this moral ethical legal I think one of them what they're the frameworks that I've falling back on a lot is Practical if you know for any given thing say if we allow this to happen would it produce a viable sustainable ecosystem Like would it produce a market for our products and services would it would it be a rising tide to lift all boats or would it like

Burn the forest to the ground and leave one tree left in the middle, right? You know what I mean like That practical approach but people like to jump on like you we talked about before with a VTG and Mac stories and everything

I they want to go to the moral and ethical thing. They're stealing from us. It's our stuff They have no right and even when I was saying before like oh there They don't want to pay for this stuff, but they want to make money off of it or whatever, but practically and this is not the way the law works

But this is the way I think about practically speaking. I'm always asking myself if this is allowed to fly What does this look like fast forward this what you know is this viable right what if if everyone's listening to fake Drake Does Drake the next Drake and I'm not able to make any money? Does human beings making music become an unbiable business and all this is just a increasingly gray soup of AI generated stuff that Loops in on itself over and over again, right?

Like where are the you know, and we have the same thing with publishing on the web like does Google destroy the entire web because no one needs to go to Websites anymore. They just go to Google right? Unfortunately when these cases go you know to court no one is thinking that that's not how the law is gonna be is this fair use You're whatever just as Congress passed new laws related to this or whatever, but what I really hope is that the outcome of all these things and the thing

I'm always rooting for is can we get to a point where we have an ecosystem that is sustainable Which means it's probably whatever they're suing for us like they want like a hundred and hundred and fifty thousand dollars for every song or something That is not a sustainable solution. You can't train an AI model when you pay a hundred fifty thousand dollars for each song that you trained it on

Because you need basically all the songs in the world. That's a big number. That's stupid. We do want AI's they can make little songs right? I think that is a useful thing to have right? So we need to find a way where we can have that but also still have Music artists who can make money making actual music setting aside the fact that the labels take all the money and the artists get Braille anything anyway, which is separate issue

Right, and there was a good article about that recently about how the labels the labels spotify on the artists and the terrible relationship there that Scrues over artists anyway I think I Really hope that the outcome of this is some kind of situation where Where there's something sustainable there's like I keep using ecosystem But it's like you know that you have to have enough water the whole water cycle this animal eats that animal

It dies it fertilizes the plant like the whole you know a sustainable ecosystem where everything works and it goes all around in a circle and everything is healthy and there is Growth but not too much and not too cancerous and it's not like everything is replaced by a model culture and only one company is left standing and all that good stuff Right, but right now the technology is advancing in a way that if it's not if we don't do something about it The individual parties involved are not

Motivated to make a sustainable ecosystem. Let's say I mean that's kind of what the the DMA is about in the EU and these AI companies Definitely are not motivated to try to make sure they have a sustainable ecosystem. They just want to make money And if they can do it by taking the world's music and selling the ability for you to make songs that sound like it without paying anything to the music that they adjusted they're gonna try to do that Yeah, it's I

Don't know it's all just so weird and gross and it's it's hard because I don't want to be old man who shakes fist of clouds right and it seems like AI for all the good and bad associated with it is a thing it's certainly a flash in the pan for right now, but I get the feeling that where Blockchain and Bitcoin and all that sort of stuff was very trendy but anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together would say, ah, that's all gonna fade or it's certainly not gonna work the way it is today

I think there's a little of that here, but I get the feeling that this is going to stick around for a lot longer and I Think that there needs to be some wrangling done some legal wrangling and I get the move fast and break things mentality of these startups that are doing all this but I don't know it just feels Kind of wrong like again I'm not nearly as bothered by it as some of our peers are, but it just doesn't feel

Right and it definitely doesn't feel sustainable like practical that's doing like if you like regardless of how you feel about right or wrong You just let them do this like And these you know these models get better and better and produce more and more acceptable content You can see that it's taking again regardless of how this lawsuit ends up with the whole record labels You can see that it is taking value away from human beings making music and pushing that value to

Models making music, but those models are absolutely worthless without that human-generated music at least initially Right again, maybe in the future there will be models trained entirely on model-generated music But then you have to trace it back to it where that model get trained like in the end these models are trained on Human-created stuff and there's There may not be enough Officially licensed human-created stuff to train them out at this point I think that's you know

I think we we want these tools they are useful for doing things even if you think oh they make terrible music Sometimes people need terrible music right sometimes people just need a little jingle They can describe it they want it to be spit out right by most people's definitions of all of my music is terrible music They do useful things like unlike you know cryptocurrency which does a very very small number of useful things that is not in general purpose they you know

AI models do tons of useful things apples building a bunch into their operating systems You know people use them all the time they do tons of useful things right We should find a way for them to do those things without

Destroying the ecosystem. I think we can find a way for that to happen if you look at the awful situation with like Spotify and record labels and music artists that's a pretty bad version of this and yet still It is better than Spotify saying we're gonna stream all these songs for free and not pay anybody right I wish I could find that article to know it's all try to look it up But but even that even that is better than than the current situation with the eye which is like

We're just gonna take it all for free come sue us and they say okay We are suing you and they'll battle it out in court But like either way the decision goes with the music thing They could go bad in both directions because if they say oh you're totally copying this music all AI training is illegal That's terrible. That's bad. We don't want that right and if they say no, it's fine

It's transformative you can take anything you want for free. That's also bad So both extremes of the potential decision that a court could make based on this lawsuit are really bad for all of us for the future So that's why I hope we find some kind of middle ground like and again with Spotify They came up with a licensing scheme where they can say we want to stream your entire catalog of music Can we figure out a way to exchange money where you will allow that to happen legally?

And they came up with something. It's not a great Just in the camera with again if I come in an article you can read and see how bad it is but they didn't just take it all for free Right and they also didn't the music labels didn't say okay, but every time someone streams one of these songs It's 150 grand right that's also not sustainable. So Obviously they're staking out positions in these lawsuits and they're trying to put these companies that are business with big fees or whatever but

Yeah, this is like it's scary. It's scary when Titans clash And I do worry about how with the results of these cases are gonna be but I think I think we have to have these cases or and I know this is ridiculous in our country or we have to make new laws to address the specific case Which is a different enough from all the things that have come before it that we should have new laws to address it And I would be better if those laws weren't created by court decisions

But our ability and track record for creating technology related laws for new technology is not great in this country So there's that Yeah, and then it continues because Figma a popular I don't know how to describe this like a user interface Generation tool design Yeah design tool. Thank you. They pulled their AI tool after criticism that it blatantly ripped off Apple Apple's weather app

So this is the verge budget Peters Figma's new tool make designs. Let's use our users quickly mock up apps using generative AI Now it's been pulled after the tool drafted designs that look strikingly similar to Apple's iOS weather app In a Tuesday interview with Figma CTO Chris Rasmussen I asked him point blank if make designs was trained on Apple's app designs his response he couldn't say for sure

Figma was not responsible for the training AI models that used it all who knows you trained it. It's just our model We don't know trained. Do you know who trained? I don't know does anyone know who trained it?

It's just we just found that on our doorstep and this is a model with the real trainer. Please stand up Quote we did no training as part of the generative AI features Rasmussen said the features are quote powered by off the shelf models in a bespoke design system that we commissioned which appears to be the underlying issue So if you commissioned it then you should know we had someone else do it and they gave it to us and we just took it

We're like we didn't ask them any questions It's fine whatever you got just give it is probably fine the key AI models that power make designs are open AI's GPT 4.0 and Amazon's Titan image generator G1 according to Rasmussen if it's true that Figma didn't train the AI tools

But they're spitting out Apple Apple likes anyway that could suggest that open AI or Amazon's models were trained on Apple's designs Open AI and Amazon didn't immediately reply to a request for comment This is seriously the like the spider-man pointing at other spider-man's You know image. It's just it's not my fault. It's not my fault. It's their fault. Oh, no, no, no

It's not my fault. It's their fault. It was that company. I think it was open AI wherever the Sora model It doesn't makes makes movies essentially that someone who was responsible for that was asked an interview did was your model trained on YouTube They're like they didn't give an answer like maybe I don't know listen if you run an AI company Figure out how and where your models were trained I'm not I don't know what you like maybe you trained them on good things bad things

But I but have an answer don't say we don't know we someone else did it we like like this seems like table stakes like you should know Where and on what your model was trained? I'm not like granular like every single individual thing Although ideally that would be great, but there's too much I get it right but when someone says hey Did you train on YouTube you should be able to answer that with a yes or no? Right not weasel about and this one was this train that apples apps?

I mean anyone looking at it's gonna be like well if it wasn't this is the world's biggest coincidence because it looks just like apples at As Gruber pointed out right down to the really weird like line chart that I never really understood until I saw it explained in apples

Weather app right it was obviously trained on Apple stuff, but you have to have you have to have an answer Right if like if you don't have an answer say I don't know, but I'll find out for you and then come back, but like The bar is real low here anyway

same situation different thing images songs text UIs a mockup tool that makes UIs It's based on a model that model is worthless without being trained on a bunch of UIs Were you gonna get enough UIs to train it from the world of UIs that we take essentially without permission? Is that okay if we sell that as part of replication is that okay? I mean I

I wrote a big post about this what in January like excuse me. I made this yeah And I we talked about it on the podcast before and I took a while to write this because I was actually speaking of Nailie Patel was listening to the decoder podcast and there was an episode where I was debating with somebody about So the New York Times lawsuit at the time like New York Times is suing some company that trained its AI on the New York Times

And they said you can't do that and going back and forth about like well the model is just doing what a person would do and it's Learning and blah blah blah is the person the same as the model does the model have the same rights as a person and it was trying to write up

Something related to that and as usual writing helps me clarify my thinking But it is a fairly complicated circuit just root to sort of really dig down into that thought To get to what's at the the heart of it And I wrote this thing and I think it did get to the heart of it as far as I was concerned

But it's complicated so every time I try to like summarize it on the podcast I find myself like tongue tied and rather you know I you just quote from the paragraphs like I think if you read the post my thoughts are in there But a lot of people have read it and like no one has commented on it. So maybe I'm doing a poor job communicating it but

I was coming at it from the other angle. We talked all about training data in this section of the show here I was coming at it from the angle of like What was then one of the hot topics which is say I use one of these tools say I use the Figma tool to generate a UI

I use the song tool to generate a song or whatever Um That thing that I made What is the legal ethical moral practical ownership deal with that If I use Figma to make uh that auto create UI thing and it makes me a UI And I put that in my app Do I own that UI if I make a song with this song making tools? Do I have the copyright on that song?

There's been legal cases about this and I think the only really we have now is something like if you make it with an AI Generator tool you don't have the copyright on it or whatever But the reason I got to that because I was getting with the whole like oh, you know training is just like what a human would do They read all these articles in the New York Times then you ask the human the answer and they read all those articles

And they know have the knowledge from reading those articles and they give you an answer Well, that's just what our AI is doing. I'm like yeah, but a human is a human and AI is an AI And is that really what the root of the thing it is and I kept chasing that down chasing that thought down and got to sort of the The thing that confers ownership, right? Like when you make something it's yours. You you write something on your blog

You have the copyright to it because you created it. It's so clear, right? What if you draw a picture on a piece of paper? Okay, you got the copyright on the picture, right? What if you use Photoshop to make a picture?

Well, now you use this software tool written by a bunch of other people Just plain old Photoshop not like AI Generator like Photoshop 3.0 right with layers now Uh, you use Photoshop, but you didn't write Photoshop a bunch of people wrote software to make Photoshop Then you then paid a dough before then they gave you that software product You use Photoshop to make a picture But still we say well, you made that picture. You have the copyright on it. You are the creator. You own it, right?

Then we say All right, but what if you can't draw? What if you what if you tell somebody like I can't draw? I here's what I want. I want this picture or whatever I example, I gave a thing a polar bear writing a skateboard, but I can't draw So I asked somebody else to can you draw me a picture of a polar bear writing a skateboard So someone goes and they draw a picture of a polar bear writing a skateboard at that point the person who drew it owns it

Maybe they use Photoshop, maybe they don't they own it because they created it. They drew it, right? But then you say okay, this was a work for hire. I'll give you 10 bucks and our contract says I give you 10 bucks You give me the polar bear drawing now I own the polar bear drawing because I paid you for it That is a market for creative works Someone was an artist they I can't draw they could they drew it

They asked for money. I gave the money. They gave me the ownership of the polar bear drawing the copyright is now mine, right? And the act of creation is clear the person who drew it they created it. I paid money for it. They sold me their creation Now I own it all you know normal right

Now I say make me a picture of a polar bear on a skateboard, but I don't say it to an artist. I say it to an image generator It's the exact same thing as I did before before when I did it it was clear that I don't own anything until I pay for that right Now when I do that exact thing, but instead of typing it into an email to an artist I type it into an image generator and I get an image back Who created that image?

I didn't create it But if you're gonna say I didn't create the one that the artist drew for me because you just told the artist what to draw But you didn't create it. Well, if I didn't create that one

I certainly didn't create this one because I literally did the same thing. I just typed the text in a different text field Can literally be the same text could be an AI prompt emailed to an artist or sent to an AI so I'm not gonna say that I am the creator of that The AI model can't be the creator because

Computer programs can't own things. They don't have their not there. They don't have rights Computer programs are made by people have rights just like people made people who wrote Photoshop They have the right stuff Photoshop and so on and so forth, but the people wrote Photoshop

I have no rights to the things that people made with Photoshop despite it don't be this little Snafu with their license agreements recently, which they clarified, but anyway So I didn't make that picture of the polar bear the large language model didn't make it Who who owns that picture of the polar bear based on the active creation? Where is the active creation there? How did that model create the polar bear?

Well it created the polar bear picture because it had been trained on tons of other images That maybe were a warrant license, but still I'm looking around of like if ownership is conferred by the active creation And there's no active creation here. What the hell are we what what's going on here? Who owns the picture of the polar bear?

and That like every time I dig down into some kind of like oh, AI's allowed you to this and you're allowed to train It's just what people do or whatever and computers aren't people I always go through to looking for How we confer ownership of stuff like this how we confer ownership of intellectual property How we exchange money for intellectual property how the market for intellectual property works And none of the existence systems make any sense in a world where

I can say the same thing to a human and a generator That is clearly not me creating anything and yet I do get a picture out of it that came from somewhere And there's no like there's no human actor created it's it's an interaction right and so I think we need New ways to think about a new laws for that type of in direction to say What is the chain of ownership here? It's kind of like not quite the same thing, but remember the whole thing were like the

The like monkey took a picture of itself with the camera. Do you remember? Oh, yeah, yeah There's like a camera set up in the jungler whatever and a monkey comes up to it and snaps a picture of himself

And the photographers like well, it's my camera. So I only copy right to the picture I like well, it doesn't the monkey on the copyright because it took the picture right and it's like what but the monkey can on the copyright It's not a person right and believe me a monkey is way closer to a sentient being in an LLM right? It's like it's a real living thing no one's gonna argue in court that a monkey is not alive I think it's well does it does it have legal rights?

Well, I would say a monkey has more legal rights than a large language model Which is just a bunch of numbers in memory Okay, right and so this is the kind of conversation we're having and it would honestly this would be so much easier to have if we had actual

Artificial intelligence as in sentient artificial beings, but we don't that's just science fiction Large language models are not anywhere close to that That would be so much easier because you'd be like well conscious beings have rights and we need the you know Whatever they always have names this in sci-fi movies the the AI consciousness act of 2732 that gives rights to the AI's to avert a global war and plunders into the matrix apocalypse

So you know, I mean like it's so much easier when you say well people have rights and computer programs that are basically people have rights And that's straightforward But we're nowhere near there. So now we're arguing about monkeys If they have the copyright pictures and we're arguing about huge matrices of numbers With with they can create anything or you're saying like oh you're saying basically like the people who wrote Photoshop

Own a very picture of this made from it's like well no the LLM doesn't own it and the person who wrote the prompt doesn't own it But you know who does own it open AI because they wrote the program that crawled all the pictures in the world that trained the model that you paid to use None of those answers are satisfactory anyway

Like it doesn't feel right. It doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem sustainable And yet we do need some kind of answer Even if the answer here is that anything again like that one while president We had is like if you make something out of AI you don't own the copyright on it. It is not copyrightable Nobody owns it. It's garbage. It's slop. It's a thing that exists

But nobody can claim that they own it. So it is free for anybody to take and do whatever they want with But you certainly can't like sell it to someone because you didn't own it

It's very confusing. I know that I haven't made this any clear You can try reading my post to see if it becomes any more clear But really this is This is a dizzying topic if you think about it for any amount of time and I think a lot of people are Doing a lot of feeling about it which makes perfect sense And honestly it is more straightforward to feel things about it than it is to think about it because thinking about it gets you into some weird corner is real fast Yeah, it's just it's a mess in

It's a mess in I don't know what's right answer is right like it's it's so Gray from top to bottom and I just I don't know. I just don't know Well, and I think we're gonna have to be fighting this and working this out

For a while. I mean look at how much disruption to existing businesses existing copyright law and existing norms was caused by the web And then the rise of other things on the internet like this is just this is how technology Goes there are massive disruptions to what has been established what we what many people have helped dearly Uh, there there's massive disruptions to that when new tech comes around sometimes and sometimes it takes a decade or two to really settle out and work out

What are the norms what what should the laws be what is copyright mean in this new world things like that like that That takes a long time to work out sometimes the Rise of these AI techniques and models is potentially as disruptive to existing

Business models and norms and perspectives as the web was when it first came out a thousand years ago So I really think we're in for a while of just not knowing there's gonna be a lot a lot of Damage and destruction along the path to get from where we are now to where kind of where things settle out

It will destroy a lot of businesses and it will you know make it hard for a lot of people to Do what they've been doing it will also create a bunch of new businesses and create a bunch of new value and new opportunities

Just like any other massive disruption. I think this is this is a very large disruption and it is it's mostly only going to Start to become visible of like you know what the other side looks like just after a bunch of time has passed And we've gone through a bunch of messiness and we're just we're in such early days It's really hard to know where we're gonna end up right now

I feel like this is going to be in some respects not all but in some respects even more disruptive than the initial web because the initial web was kind of like Text we have laws governing that it was a massive shift of wealth. Obviously newspapers go out of business Craigslist Gets rich, you know what I mean like like but we saw that darn shift the paper magazines like the shift of publishing right and web search and doing all that or whatever

But during that entire thing People were upset and it was a big turmoil because it was like these things used to be huge every city had 25 newspapers A newspaper reporter was a big job And you know it's like and all of a sudden all that money's going elsewhere to these calm things or whatever

But during that whole process There was mostly agreement that like Newspapers on what they publish websites on what they publish like we have existing copyright laws for this There's the whole google search index thing that we can figure out and you know Fair use on the internet and stuff

But in general, which is a massive shift of power and money from older industries to newer ones Mostly following along the shape of laws and ideas and morals and ethics and societal understanding About the written word mostly in the early days of the web

Especially before social meeting who really came and mixed that up a little bit right with the whole aggregation of humans All talking to each other and quoting things and linking out or whatever right that in hindsight that seems much less disruptive

Disruptive them is say I stuff which is like it's a free for all no one knows anything No one knows what's legal what's not what's sustainable what's not what should we do what can we do what are people doing How valuable is this how useful is it how like

Just so many questions and we like all the laws that we have that seems like they could apply this and some of them do apply It's like yeah, but there's these huge areas where it's like here be dragons on the map They draw the big dragon and the thing is like nobody knows what's there And there's a lot of money behind it and a lot of people running in that direction And it's not even clear where or how this will shift the power like in the internet in the early days

It's pretty clear paper newspapers powers going away from them and towards websites like that trend was visible to anybody with the clue And it was just a question of how fast how hard you know whatever here Is this gonna shift power massively to the record labels because they own all the music for example Or is it going to destroy them because everything they have is now worthless because AMOs can be trained on it

And it's a perfect substitute for what they previously made and no one wants anything like you can't even tell which direction It's gonna go at this point. It's so early and I just don't think that was true of the web. So this is An exciting time to be alive in many ways Especially if you're in any industry any creative industry that involves intellectual property that AI touches at all And at this point that's

Nearly all of them right and right now AI what it does is not you know Not particularly amazing, but it is good enough for so many use cases and this stuff generally doesn't get worse over time Thank you to our sponsors this week one password and Photon camera and thank you to our members who support us directly you can join us atv.fm slash join

Members get a bunch of perks including ATP over time. This is our weekly bonus topic That's an extra segment that only members get to hear ATP over time this week is going to be about a rumor reported by the information and Mark Irman About some changes and plans to what apple is going to be working on for the next vision pro and Kind of what they can maybe do to make the next vision pro cheaper and how they're going to possibly do this and everything

That's what we're talking about in ATP over time this week join out a listen ATP.fm slash join Thanks everybody and we'll talk to you next week Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental Oh, it was accidental

John didn't do any research mark. Go and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental It was accidental So you can find the show notes at ATP.fm And if you're into masterdom you can follow them at c a s e y l i s s so that's Casey list ma r c o a r m anti-marker armament S i r a c you s s e r a q s a s accidental They didn't mean to Tech podcast so long Not so real time fall off on my earlier statement about Apple Silicon Mac's not being able to use PCI breakout boxes. That is not true

You can use Thunderbolt PCI breakout boxes. Obviously you can't use it. Yeah, it's just not GPUs Yeah, but you can't use GPUs internally either. That's the thing. Yeah, so Still Apple should have put the Mac Pro in the configurator. Oh, I suppose they're gonna say hey me use PCI Cutter ones buying it except you you can use PCR cards well You can buy a Mac studio and also this third-party product that we don't even sell or you can buy a Mac Pro

Which is a product in that line? I think two things are simultaneously true number one They should keep making the Mac Pro because it does have uses and number two Absolutely nobody should buy the Mac Pro effectively like yep Anybody who's going to a page on apple.com saying what Mac should I buy?

None of those people should buy it none. No, they they should that should be like the whole point of this is Which it's a path that leads to all of our products and maybe there's only one Very lonely overgrown path leads in the Mac Pro, but it's got to be there Look that I would say number three your product chooser should let you choose from any of the products depending on which things you answer

Put as many scary questions in there as you want. There's just got to be a path that lands in the Mac Pro because otherwise like look what they're saying with this is No one should buy this product. I don't think apple believes that if you ask them They said well some people should like okay great, but you have a tool that's people choose and it has every single Mac You sell except for that one that just seems like a bug to me someone should report it and they should fix it

You should report it. I just want to make a Mac Pro this worth buying I mean that's a bug Maybe they're working on that we'll say I don't know so what I mean I feel like we covered this in the past but what what are you waiting for like what what would make it worth

I mean am I waiting for anything in particular? I like I don't know like is again with the gaming situation on Apple Silicon Max is entirely unclear if I did buy a Mac with a big beefy GPU like bigger than a Max studio GPU That would be a speculative purchase It would not be like my current Mac Pro which I literally knew I could run Windows games on and do and they work fine

And I run wouldn't learn to put into windows like that's not speculative. That's a thing right If I buy if I decide hey, I want a bigger than Max studio GPU in an arm Mac I am like crossing my fingers that some magical point in the future. I will be able to do interesting gaming things on it

I don't know if I'm gonna make that speculative purchase. I don't know if Apple's gonna make a Mac with a better than Max studio GPU in it And it and maybe they make it and it's just too rich for my blood and I can't spend that much money on something speculative Right like I said my default is an M4 Mumble Max studio is Potentially the computer I will replace this with whenever they release that like next year towards the end of this year whatever

But I would like to see you know show me something show me the Mac Pro show me something that's not a Mac studio and giant cavernous case Right, that's what I would like to see from them and then I can decide is it worth it for me to get that because it's not a slam dunk

Like the toilet well, it's not as big a slam dunk as 2019 was because again, that's just not speculative But it's just kind of wishful thinking at this point to think you're gonna be running Windows arm games natively on you know, you're gonna be booting Windows for arm on your you know Apple Silicon Mac Pro or you're gonna be running Windows Calibre games in macOS Because Apple will have gotten all the triple-light game developers on board that is all just

Twinkle in someone's eye right now. It is not a real thing. I just I feel like and I'm gonna say this and I know and I understand why it's not appealing to you But I feel like so many of your problems would well, maybe not even problems But so much of your life would be so much better if you would just Get a damn Mac studio and a damn Windows PC and I get it

I don't want to run Windows anything. I don't and I know you are even worse than me in this capacity But like that would make so many things so much better in your life I would probably have a gaming PC if I had a place in the house for it, but I don't so I mean I hate to break it to you

But I really don't think that there is ever going to be a Mac Pro that does the things that your current Mac Pro does and I mean that that may be true like I'm rooting for it, but like right now the outlook doesn't look so great Yeah, I would definitely not hold your breath on that

I mean like the thing is it's actually kind of if I thought like in two years ago like predicted how this would go actually I'm kind of surprised at how much motion there is here the copout plus PC how hard Microsoft is pushing into RMPC's after doing such a bad job with Windows RT right Apple with its whole game-porting toolkit like both those parties both Microsoft and Apple are actually surprising me with how hard they're trying to make my dream happen. They're just

Not succeeding right, but they are they're trying more than I thought they would right. I did not I didn't think they'd be like both on both sides I have been pleasantly surprised by the Additional effort that they are putting in I think everyone kind of is it's just like I just they're just not really Doing it But I give I give them kudos for the effort If I had to pick one thing like I would I would wish that Microsoft would

Commit to a transition to ARM, but that's not what they want to do They seem to think that they're going to have a they're going to support x86 and ARM Forever off into the future, which I think is a dumb strategy, but that seems to be what they're doing

And that doesn't help me and that doesn't help Windows games get ported to ARM that all that does is bifurcate their market and say Well, all the all the AAA games will still be on x86 within video cards And ARM will just free you for people's laptops and Microsoft may be perfectly happy with that But it doesn't help me over here with Apple Silicon I mean what what PC games are you playing with regularity right now? Destiny if you know this but destiny

Well, but that's the thing like is there no other appliance that you can buy to run destiny? Can't you do it on PlayStation? Destiny runs at higher resolution and higher frame rates on gaming PCs I don't really play it on my Mac Pro I played it on my PlayStation 5 for a variety of reasons But it does run Better as defined by resolution and frame rate even on my Mac Pro Then I'm like playstation max is out of 60 frames per second right and I can get higher than that um

Depending on settings and you can go way higher you can go I played it. I actually have played destiny on my ps5 at 120 frames per second I'm a tv but it has to lower the quality substantially and I generally don't play destiny in my tv because it'll burn in right But I did try that just to see what it was like At 120 frames per second is good all the like the destiny streamers who are out there playing destiny They occasionally have their frame rate displayed in the corner

There it triple digits always hundreds of frames per second sometimes pushing on minutes 200 Uh, it makes a difference. It it looks and feels smoother especially in pvp They're like that's you know, I'm and even if I'm playing on a controller because at this point sadly I'm better with a controller in destiny than I am with mouse and keyboard

And also controllers way better for my rsi so I'd be doing it anyway Uh, the destiny is one choice and there's games come out all the time and they come out for PC They don't come out for the Mac until three years later when Apple puts in the key note, right? So you know, there's past games. There's future games. There's my gigantic steam library that I still haven't played through You know, I mean, I'll I'll get a PlayStation 5 pro. I've got a PlayStation 6. I do like consoles

They're great. Maybe someday the gap between PC and console will be diminished even now I would say it's more diminished because 60 frames per second on ps5 is such a change from 30 on the ps4 That I feel like the gap has narrowed because destiny players were playing at 100 you know 200 frames per second Back when I was playing 30 now they're playing at 100 200 frames per second. I'm playing at 60 right?

I'm gaining on them. So maybe at some point I'll be like you know I don't need a big GPU and I'll just get a Mac studio and be happy with it And that's welcome like the most likely situation Uh, right now, but uh, you know, we'll say I mean typically or as much as I'm giving you a hard time

I want you to have what you want. I can make an argument even I can make an argument for the Mac pro For a really beefy Mac pro that's useful for people that work outside of a music studio like I'm not saying that your desires are wants as much as I'm giving you grief about it I'm not saying your desires are wants are unreasonable. I don't think Apple will

Will be achieving them, but I don't think they're unreasonable. I mean it's exciting that they did but 2019 because again I've said before like I don't you know despite my gaming things This is not a purchase. There's not a rational purchase in the same way that you don't need a Ferrari to get to work faster

People just like fast cars to like fast cars. Right. That's what I just like powerful computers because like powerful computers It's exactly the same thing trying to justify a Mac me trying to justify a Mac pro like someone tried to justify a Ferrari

It's like why I need a car this fast to get to my work. You don't Nobody does, but people want them because they're cool Right and and that's fair and that's totally fair, but I feel like from to my eyes We're starting to cross from oh, it's kind of adorable that John is still rocking his Mac pro to like Man, I kind of want you to move on to a Mac studio because I think you might enjoy it a lot more, you know Well, I mean, I'm not buying an M2 one at this point

Well, that's fair. No, that's not the time to buy Mac studio. It isn't it isn't hanging in there for the M4 Yeah, I think when the next one comes out. I think that's your move I can't I just cannot see a future in which they make the Mac pro that you want and so you might as well get The Mac studio which is the Mac pro without slots like that is the new Mac pro. I can't say it enough and with a with a Wimpy or GPU

But they they just like the Mac studio is the Mac pro. They should have called it Mac pro That is the Apple Silicon Mac pro they should not have no can you imagine the aneurysm he would have had It doesn't make sense. They sell think all the Mac Pro that's way bigger

But it's the same computer. It's just a built-in PCI breakout box. I know And I still I still got the slots is still it anyway, but we'll see how good and by the way by the time I do get this like my computer is essentially five years old now Already this is a pretty good run for a computer that I bought at the you know just before the You know processor transition right which is you know unfortunate for the way I already said when it happened like oh my poor Mac pro whatever

But I love this machine and I've already gotten five years out of which grand as half of what I got out of my last Mac pro but you know Processed transition right so if I ditches machine at six years old that's longer than any your laptops lasted right? It's a pretty good run. Hey, we're just excited if Marco makes it six months much less six years He's been pretty good with the six years. I think it's almost two years old now right no it's the m3 max

It's the black one the game I'm sorry. I mean to be honest lately I haven't been much better so I shouldn't be casting stones in this glass house But generally speaking Marco is much more frequent on on his purchases. Yeah, so it's I mean like no matter what like I feel like I've Got in a good run out of this Mac pro and I'm enjoying it for you know as long as like I'm excited that Sequoia runs on it

That's cool next year probably not right so it's really putting a deadline on this like I said I'm willing to run this with last year's version of the operating system for some period of time if I have to wait right but You know well see what happens like I'm you know I keep my cars for a long time and keep my max for a long time