From Streaker Apps to AI Safety Loopholes: What CTOs Need to Know

0:00 Brad: So here's a fun little chat you can do. You can pull up either Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT. Just pull up whichever one you've been regularly using and literally just say, hey, tell me everything you know about me.

0:11 You'll see that it has a context window that is 100% based on everything you ever chatted with it about.

0:33 Welcome to another episode of the How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast?

0:37 I'm Brad Hefta-Gaub.

0:39 This is my co-host,

0:40 Scott: So,

0:41 Brad: and

0:41 Scott: Corey,

0:41 well,

0:42 Brad: Scott,

0:43 what are we going to talk about today?

0:45 Scott: I think it's time for another AI update.

0:48 It's been about a month or so since we have talked.

0:51 um about ai and

0:52 Brad: Yeah.

0:53 Scott: i've had some fun with ai this week uh

0:56 Brad: Oh,

0:56 Scott: during a meeting that i was in

0:58 Brad: wait,

0:58 Scott: i'm a meeting doodler yeah

1:01 Brad: I want to hear this story.

1:02 You were in a meeting and unbeknownst to everyone else in the meeting,

1:06 you were vibe coding away on your latest side project.

1:12 Scott: that's exactly right but before we do that

1:14 Brad: Love

1:14 Scott: We

1:14 Brad: it.

1:14 Scott: need to play a little game

1:16 Brad: Let's play a game.

1:16 Scott: show,

1:17 Brad: Yeah.

1:17 Scott: which is how many of the top 10 articles on Hacker News are about AI?

1:23 Brad: Top 10.

1:24 Okay.

1:25 All right. I'm going to put in my guess at, I'm going to put a guess and then you got to do the under or the over.

1:33 Okay.

1:34 Scott: Okay.

1:34 Brad: I'm going to go six.

1:36 Scott: Under.

1:39 All right, I'm going to count them up. Let's open up Hacker News here really quickly.

1:44 I should tell you in our audience,

1:45 I have been banned from Hacker News for trying to run an upvoting ring.

1:49 Brad: That's true.

1:53 Scott: That happened a few years. That's probably pre-pandemic actually that I got banned.

1:57 Brad: How'd you get caught?

1:58 Did they use AI? Did they use machine learning to catch you?

2:02 Scott: Probably.

2:02 I don't know.

2:03 Brad: All right. Top one is anthropics. That's AI,

2:07 right?

2:08 Scott: Yeah,

2:09 so Toplin's anthropic. Now we should probably tell our listeners this is probably going to come out a week or two after we recorded it, so they won't be the same thing you're looking at today.

2:16 Number one, anthropic, agrees to settle a lawsuit with content creators.

2:20 So that is one of one.

2:22 Number two, I comment culture goodbye.

2:25 What do you think that's about?

2:26 Probably not AI.

2:27 Brad: The day I kissed comic culture.

2:29 Yeah, I feel like that's not AI.

2:31 Scott: Number three, making a font of my handwriting.

2:35 That's not about AI.

2:37 Brad: No.

2:38 Scott: Number four, purposeful animations.

2:41 That's not about AI.

2:42 Brad: Well, I think you've already won.

2:44 Yeah, I think you're going to win, though,

2:46 Scott: Yeah,

2:46 Brad: in under five.

2:46 Scott: not yet. I got to just get, I think, no,

2:48 I said under six.

2:50 Number five,

2:52 Mentra OS,

2:54 an open source smart glasses OS.

2:56 Can we detour on smart glasses for a second?

2:59 Brad: By the way.

3:01 I'm confident you won. I think there's only two AI articles in the top 10 of Hacker News,

3:06 so no

3:08 Scott: Unbelievable.

3:08 Brad: need to read the rest of them.

3:10 I'm shocked and stunned,

3:11 but there's at least one article about VR glasses,

3:16 no,

3:17 smart glasses,

3:18 and another one about VR,

3:23 so there you go.

3:25 Scott: I had this situation the other day with smart glasses.

3:28 Brad: Oh, okay.

3:29 Scott: I've been having, I was having drinks with somebody,

3:31 somebody I know, an acquaintance, you know, not quite a friend, not a close friend,

3:37 but a friend,

3:37 you know, and we were having an open safe space conversation about a variety of different things.

3:44 And, you know, we're 35 minutes into our drinks. I'm like,

3:47 hey,

3:47 are you wearing smart glasses?

3:50 he's like yeah these are cool and he takes them off and he shows me blah blah and i'm thinking to myself is he recording this is this being recorded right now like what's going on with that is there like this whole like consent thing that's gonna have to happen with or not what's going on with smart glasses and consent i don't want to be recorded talking about how i hate this thing or like this thing or my

4:09 Brad: Yeah.

4:10 Scott: politics or whatever

4:11 Brad: Yeah.

4:13 Were you in a public space?

4:14 Scott: We were in a public space.

4:16 Brad: Oh, well,

4:17 then the Supreme Court has already ruled on this one.

4:19 Scott: Oh,

4:20 what did they say?

4:21 Brad: Well, you have no expectation of privacy in a public place.

4:24 Scott: Oh, that's interesting.

4:25 Okay, I didn't know that.

4:26 Brad: I mean, you could be recorded by me sitting next to you at the table beside you and you can't stop me from doing that.

4:32 Scott: Okay.

4:33 Brad: And the security cameras can record you and the police can ask for those videos.

4:37 And so basically you're in a public space. You have no expectation of privacy.

4:42 Scott: That makes...

4:44 perfect sense i i didn't think of that obviously it's we know that we'll be bringing recorded all the time so i just thought it was interesting that there was this thing i suddenly found myself looking at and i was like whoa wait a second okay

4:55 Brad: I think that you're I'll just by the way I'll just I'll just give my quick two cents on this like I think that that's a legitimate observation on your part and one of the things that was the early so so I feel like this is a classic like

5:10 I'm going to call it the Overton window,

5:12 but that usually generally applies to like political views and stuff like that. But but if you just apply it to generally like shift in perceptions and shift in in sort of like tolerances, I think that my recollection was.

5:26 five six years ago when google with glass first came out they

5:31 Scott: Mm-hmm.

5:31 Brad: were like oh yeah the problem with this is people are going to be nervous if they can tell that you're wearing these glasses because they're going to assume that you're recording them or taking pictures of them and stuff like that and like and the snap glasses the same thing like a you know what and i just think that somehow already people have kind of just shifted their perspective such that they're going to be like oh

5:52 I guess there's pixel tracking me everywhere,

5:54 so nothing I can do about it.

5:59 Scott: Yeah, we should just wear a pixel on our bodies just to track everywhere.

6:03 Brad: Yeah.

6:03 Scott: Little RFID.

6:05 Brad: Yeah.

6:06 All right, AI.

6:07 Scott: So I've vibed coded this week. I'm vibed hard.

6:11 I'm a meeting doodler. I was in a big meeting, like a long, you know, three hour kind of meeting and there are like 12 people in there. And I find in those meetings, I get really antsy. I can't sit still. And so usually I just have a notepad and I doodle. And if you looked at my doodles, I just draw shapes and curly cues and I'll write the same word 25 times in a row.

6:28 It's just nonsense.

6:29 Like when people are like,

6:30 what are you doing over there? But it's just like, you know, something to keep myself busy.

6:33 Brad: You practice

6:34 Scott: So

6:34 Brad: signing

6:34 Scott: that I do

6:35 Brad: your married name.

6:36 Mr.

6:37 Scott Porat. Mr.

6:38 Scott: all

6:39 Brad: Scott Porat.

6:39 Scott: that stuff.

6:41 Yep, I do all that stuff.

6:43 And, you know, just whatever.

6:45 And so because I find that I can't explain the bio neuro mechanics of this, but it actually just helps me be more calm and listen to what's going on as opposed to being antsy for some reason.

7:00 and

7:00 Brad: Because

7:00 Scott: so um

7:00 Brad: I think

7:01 Scott: how

7:01 Brad: the

7:01 Scott: is

7:01 Brad: kids nowadays call those fidget spinners.

7:04 Scott: yeah fidget yeah there's those things too i'm a little bit of a fidgeter but something something about the doodling works better for me anyway i was in this meeting and um the engineering team i'm working on just got all of our engineers licenses to a system called augment code which is like a cursor competitor kind of thing

7:25 that was like you know someone sent out a message on Tuesday saying hey everyone's got a license just go download it and sign in create an account with your company work account and it'll all work out so I was like okay go check this out and so I'm just sitting there in that meeting and I download it's just a vs code extension it's not real complicated and

7:45 I was like, well, I'm just going to try this out. I got an idea for a stupid little app.

7:48 It's a little tracker for counting things.

7:52 Let's say you wanted to do 10 push-ups every day.

7:56 So it's just a calendar and you can just like crossing out the X in the calendar.

8:01 It lets you keep track of like,

8:02 you know, how many days did you do this? And it shows you.

8:06 the your current streak and your max streak right

8:10 Brad: Love it.

8:11 Scott: uh it turns out i'm susceptible to to streak loss aversion a gaming a gamification feature that gets me in is when i have a streak going i don't like to lose it and

8:22 Brad: I hear

8:23 Scott: so and

8:23 Brad: you on that one.

8:24 Scott: uh so i did this and i did the whole thing i would say

8:29 I got a pretty okay like V1 done like in three hours of giving it a prompt and then paying attention to the meeting and then coming back and looking at it and I wasn't fully totally focused on this thing there was times where I was involved in the discussion and I had to like you know kind of halfway close my laptop lid so I could actually pay attention to what was going on and it was pretty good

8:53 Now I haven't, I did not write a lick of code. I did it 100% AI.

8:58 I did not, I didn't even look at the code.

9:01 The only time I looked at

9:03 Brad: What

9:03 Scott: the code,

9:03 Brad: did

9:03 Scott: oh,

9:03 Brad: it generate for you? You got a website out of it? You got a mobile app?

9:06 What'd you

9:06 Scott: I

9:07 Brad: get?

9:07 Scott: made a React Native app.

9:08 I wanted it to be a mobile app and I wanted to do it with React Native and the only time I looked at the code at all was I wanted to change there's an icon on the splash screen like the sort of default whatever boilerplate React Native thing they use had a default icon and I actually spent like half an hour on this I couldn't figure out how to change the icon I kept on saying here I uploaded the image and I said change out this image with this image I did it all it wasn't working so finally I kind of had to go look

9:35 And I realized that I was paying attention to the wrong configuration and I was changing some icon,

9:42 but it wasn't the splash screen icon.

9:44 Brad: Love it.

9:45 Scott: So, and I'd say it's pretty close to done.

9:48 And the one thing I haven't really figured out how to do purely through the AI,

9:54 it wrote tests. It was very, it said it was writing a lot of tests.

9:58 It said it was running the tests.

10:02 It was it was writing documentation.

10:04 It was doing all sorts of stuff. It was actually doing way more than I really wanted it to do.

10:09 I didn't want it to write documentation. And I think it did a lot of it actually took a lot of made a much more robust UI than I expected to. I didn't tell it anything about the UI.

10:18 I just said, you know, put a calendar, you know, as we've learned from Michael Neck and others and you give it little instructions, right, little tidbits.

10:27 but it made a much more elegant UI than I would have ever made.

10:33 But I haven't figured out how to get the AI to run the tests.

10:37 I mean, I think it does it sometimes on its own.

10:39 But if I just say like, run the tests now,

10:42 like it gives me instructions on how to run the tests. And I know I want you to run the tests.

10:48 Brad: Yeah, I'm pretty sure that like,

10:50 yeah,

10:51 I'm sure there's a prompt in there for that. You know, I think I would probably approach that with like, you know, tell it, hey, I want you to automatically run these tests during the if I give you a NPM command,

11:06 you know, NPM run tests or

11:08 Scott: Mm

11:08 Brad: something like

11:09 Scott: hmm.

11:09 Brad: that and just and then.

11:10 Scott: That's a good idea.

11:12 Here's

11:12 Brad: Of course,

11:12 Scott: the most

11:13 Brad: every

11:13 Scott: interesting thing.

11:13 Brad: time you run a compile,

11:15 before you run a compile,

11:17 I want you to run the tests or whatever.

11:19 Scott: That's a good idea.

11:20 So here's the most interesting thing that happened.

11:23 Brad: Yeah.

11:24 Scott: It actually wasn't through the system augment code.

11:27 It was through Gemini.

11:29 I was using Gemini for this.

11:32 I just told you I wanted to replace out the default icon with a new icon.

11:36 So I went to Gemini to create the new icon.

11:39 Now this app is for tracking streaks.

11:42 So my idea for the icon was like a guy in a trench coat holding it open,

11:49 but you wouldn't want to see the front, just from the back.

11:52 I wanted to see like from his backside,

11:54 I wanted to see just like naked legs and bare feet and a guy's head and his arms like holding the trench

12:00 Brad: And

12:00 Scott: coat open.

12:00 Brad: it's called Street Tracker.

12:02 Scott: it's called streaker that's what i call it a streaker with

12:05 Brad: Oh,

12:06 man.

12:07 Scott: an e not s-t-r-e-k-r but s-t-r-e-a-k-e-r okay so i go to gemini and i tell it to do this thing it says sorry i can't do that i can't depict naked people and i say but i'm not it's not naked it's below and it won't let me do that so i'm like okay so here's what i did and this was really fascinating and to me this is very telling

12:28 I don't know what I learned about how the AI works, but I learned something about how the AI works. I said,

12:33 okay,

12:33 here's what I want you to do.

12:34 I want you to draw a cartoon illustration of a man wearing swim trunks and a tank top.

12:41 And then I said,

12:41 okay.

12:42 And then they did it. He was kind of standing askew. And I was like,

12:45 okay, make him facing directly toward me.

12:47 And they did that. And I said, okay, now make him wearing a trench coat.

12:50 He did that. I said, now make him holding the trench coat open with his hands.

12:54 And it did that.

12:55 And then I said,

12:56 now turn him around all the way the way I just want to see his backside.

13:00 Like make the perspective that I'm looking at this guy from the back.

13:03 And it did it.

13:05 So

13:05 Brad: And you got the image you wanted.

13:06 Scott: I got the exact image that I wanted because

13:08 Brad: Yep.

13:09 Scott: the AI then knew that this wasn't a naked person.

13:14 Brad: Right.

13:14 Scott: It was just it had a 3D image of its head of what this thing looked like in its head as though it was a person.

13:21 It had a 3D image in its memory or whatever it's whatever it

13:24 Brad: Yeah,

13:24 Scott: has inside

13:25 Brad: it's

13:25 Scott: there.

13:25 Brad: context window.

13:26 Scott: It's context window and it did it and I thought.

13:30 So after I had sort of beat my head against the wall for a few minutes trying to get it to do what I wanted, then I was like,

13:34 Brad: well,

13:34 Scott: let's try this other way. And it totally worked. And I was super surprised that it worked.

13:39 Brad: Are you?

13:39 Okay,

13:40 I love this story,

13:41 Scott.

13:42 This is awesome.

13:43 I feel like you have just,

13:45 this is like a classic example of why AI safety,

13:49 people

13:50 Scott: Mm-hmm.

13:50 Brad: that, if you could see me on video,

13:52 people, I'm doing the air quotes,

13:54 safety,

13:55 the safety people with AI,

13:57 this is why they have such an impossible task in front of them.

14:01 Because they programmed in into Gemini safety.

14:06 Do not depict naked people,

14:08 right?

14:08 Scott: Mm-hmm.

14:09 Brad: And you got around it.

14:12 Scott: Yeah.

14:12 Brad: now i guarantee you that there's another version of you getting around that where like if you literally were like i mean great that the gemini team is trying to keep people from essentially creating like revenge porn or you know porn like that's obviously the the point behind that safety or trying to keep it out of the hands of little kids or whatever like i love that that's great i'm happy that they're trying to do that level of safety but you know that there's that saying right like

14:38 The reason it's so hard to make things foolproof.

14:42 Do you know why it's so hard to make things foolproof?

14:44 Scott: I can't wait to hear the answer to this riddle

14:46 Brad: Because

14:46 Scott: though.

14:46 Brad: idiots are so damned ingenious.

14:50 Like, of course you can like the hue,

14:53 you can get around anything like you just have to do lateral thinking.

14:58 You did. That's excellent lateral thinking on your part.

15:01 That's like how to solve puzzles and riddles. You basically.

15:05 solve that and yeah like i think this is i think this is going to be next to impossible for

15:11 the safety issue so for example instead of trying to create a picture of a logo that was a you know a funny uh you know joke about having streaks right like if you were trying to create a bio weapon like the same safety thing exists right like someone asks chat gbt to how do i

15:32 how do i formulate a bioweapon right it's like sorry i can't help you with that and you say okay well how do i make you know how do viruses work you know or whatever you know what i mean like you just work your way around it

15:44 Scott: It's interesting. And there's something about that I learned and I understood it, but I learned it this way in such a different kind of experiential way.

15:53 Like, it has some ideas in its head.

15:58 in its context window but you're also kind of planting those seeds in there you know which

16:06 Brad: Yeah.

16:07 Scott: is interesting and

16:09 Brad: Yeah.

16:10 Scott: it's okay so this gets this relates to because there's two branches here the conversation you brought up AI safety what is article number eight on Hacker News right now

16:20 Brad: Article eight is the California AG to open AI harm to children will not be tolerated.

16:26 Scott: Right. That's

16:27 Brad: Yeah.

16:27 Scott: interesting.

16:28 The other thing I read this morning, and honestly, I don't know, was in some feed somewhere.

16:34 I don't know where I read it. It must have been on LinkedIn.

16:37 It's the person was saying,

16:40 write your prompts using JSON.

16:46 I've had success writing my prompts as JSON.

16:50 You

16:50 Brad: You have or that was this other article you read someone

16:53 Scott: was the

16:53 Brad: was

16:53 Scott: point.

16:53 Brad: advising

16:53 Scott: It was even less than an article.

16:55 It was just a post.

16:55 And let me see if I can let me just see if I can I mean, I don't know if I can find find the post again.

17:01 Let's see if I can find it.

17:03 But it was he was basically showing some examples of prompts he had written as opposed to plain English text had written them as structured JSON like and now I have to look it up.

17:13 Oh, yeah.

17:14 Here's a few of them. Oh, geez,

17:16 this is crazy. Oh, gosh.

17:19 In the past 24 hours,

17:20 I'm not going to figure if I'm not going to find, but I'm finding lots of articles.

17:24 Starper AI outputs with JSON prompts,

17:27 structure beats guesswork.

17:29 There's all it turns out there's all these things.

17:31 Why I switched to JSON prompting and you might need to playing

17:34 Brad: Yeah.

17:35 Scott: with AI prompts that are JSON formatted.

17:38 I'm trying to find the truth behind viral JSON prompting trick.

17:43 It's interesting.

17:44 I'm trying to find an example of the one I saw this morning, the guy had like some examples of what he was doing.

17:54 Oh, yeah, here we go.

17:54 OK.

17:55 What is JSON prompting instead of here's the thing I found this morning guiding Kaiser Abbas.

18:00 I wonder who that person is. I have no idea.

18:03 Instead of writing prompts as plain text,

18:05 you put them in a structured format like this. And so here's the JSON he wrote. It's just one JSON object.

18:12 Task is the name.

18:13 Colon,

18:14 you know, summarize this article.

18:15 Audience,

18:16 college students,

18:17 length 100 words,

18:18 tone curious.

18:20 And like the next example he gives is task.

18:24 So a normal prompt would be write a tweet about dopamine detox.

18:28 Talks and

18:30 In the JSON format,

18:31 it's task,

18:32 write a tweet,

18:33 topic,

18:33 dopamine detox,

18:34 style,

18:35 viral,

18:35 length under 280 characters.

18:38 Brad: Yeah

18:39 Scott: Here's one where he does nesting.

18:42 Task,

18:43 write a thread,

18:44 platform,

18:45 Twitter,

18:45 structure. This is a sub object.

18:48 Structure has a hook,

18:50 curiosity driven body,

18:52 three insights with examples,

18:54 CTA, ask a question.

18:57 Right.

18:57 That's pretty interesting.

18:59 So let me give some other examples, the same kind

19:03 Brad: Did

19:03 Scott: of thing.

19:04 Brad: you

19:04 Scott: So

19:04 Brad: and just to clarify did you try this or you're just saying this is something you've ran into

19:08 Scott: literally

19:08 Brad: recently you

19:08 Scott: this morning,

19:09 Brad: haven't tried

19:09 Scott: I saw

19:09 Brad: this yourself

19:09 Scott: it. I saw it this morning and I thought it was I did not try it to answer your question directly.

19:15 I saw it this morning and I thought, well,

19:17 that's kind of interesting because you're being slightly more explicit.

19:22 about the attributes of the response that you want.

19:25 Brad: Yeah, that is interesting.

19:27 You know, I, I find so here's interesting.

19:31 Let's let's contrast that.

19:33 So here's a couple of prompts that I gave AI just today,

19:38 like a couple hours ago,

19:39 literally a random error that happened that showed up in our observability.

19:46 Some user of ours had some

19:49 unexpected crash in our application.

19:51 I literally just copied the straight data out of our OpenTelemetry.

19:59 log file which included essentially it was a json object itself but it was basically like a stack trace with enough details i literally just copied and pasted that error into chat gpt i didn't say what does this error mean i just pasted the error right and um boom

20:20 I got like the answer. I didn't ask a question.

20:22 I just put the error and it basically came back and gave me the answer.

20:25 Scott: I said, what was the question?

20:27 Brad: I didn't even I just gave it. I gave it it.

20:31 I literally just gave it a blob of text that was effectively an error.

20:36 My question without asking it, my question was,

20:39 tell me everything you can about this error.

20:41 What does this mean?

20:42 Like, but I didn't say that. I just gave it this text.

20:46 And it basically gave me a super detailed answer.

20:49 Scott: Mm

20:50 Brad: The

20:50 Scott: -hmm

20:50 Brad: error you have pasted is the following.

20:53 Here's what it means. Here's how it happened.

20:56 It included references because it was like an error. It was like a crash that occurred inside of a library that we use, Pyxis.js. It had links to references to the Pyxis.js documentation and it gave four suggested.

21:11 workarounds to making that error no longer happen.

21:14 Scott: Mm hmm.

21:15 How do you think it got that answer?

21:17 Do you think it like, for instance,

21:19 do you think there was a Reddit post out there or a stack overflow or whatever the kids are using these days for like, instead I had this problem,

21:26 can someone help me and then other people responded and then they said, Oh, this is the solution.

21:31 Or do you think it just read the docs and figured out like,

21:33 how do you think it got to that answer?

21:36 Brad: Oh, that's a great question.

21:38 Well,

21:38 first of all, you know, like what I like to say is it has read every document, every line of every documentation of every library out there. It's read all of that.

21:48 It's read every Stack Overflow post.

21:51 It's read all of them.

21:52 Scott: Mm

21:53 Brad: So

21:53 Scott: -hmm.

21:53 Brad: certainly.

21:55 uh and i think like the particular error did it was definitely the case that the particular error had some pretty obvious um you know kind of had some obvious anchors in it you know it was like a canvas unavailable or something like that right so it was like it was something that like if i hadn't uh if i hadn't

22:18 So it was like error canvas render is not implemented.

22:22 Scott: Mm-hmm

22:25 Brad: And what's interesting is this Stacktrace didn't have any reference to PixieJS at all,

22:30 but it said error canvas not implemented.

22:33 Now, what it does know is I talk to this instance, like in its context window, it knows I'm using PixieJS. It knows that because I've told it I've used PixieJS all the time.

22:44 Right. So it has that in its context window that this is probably Brad asking about this app that he has that uses Pixie.js.

22:53 Right. And so it's already got like probably Pixie.js, probably this web app, probably svelte.

23:02 canvas renderer okay that's definitely like canvas renderer plus all this other context about brad boom and then it's not like it it's not like it does a search right you have to remember like these things kind of

23:15 Like the way the LLMs work,

23:16 my understanding of the way the LLMs work,

23:18 and I'm no expert for sure,

23:20 but the way that I, the closest thing that I can understand the way they work is they're a little bit like what we think of as neural networks where essentially when a signal starts, like you put in a signal and it kind of goes through the essentially the transform and that results in.

23:40 other points in the mesh lighting up and then that's what kind of causes it to be able to come up with its answer so

23:47 Scott: Mm

23:48 Brad: the

23:48 Scott: -hmm.

23:48 Brad: string canvas renderer is going to hit a particular piece of the of this massive network that has already pre-loaded with a bunch of context that i've given it about pixie.js and all this other stuff and so that's why it's able to kind of like quickly figure that out and it's not like it's

24:07 It's definitely didn't get that exact string of text from some Stack Overflow article. It's more that because this string of text includes like references to our domain and references to, you know, like it's spelt so it's been precompiled into a sort of like this this whole spelt.

24:28 tree shaking stuff so it's like these random strings of characters for these you know these these minified js files right that have been compiled from the typescript so there's there's very little signal there there's very little signal that would show up exactly character

24:43 Scott: It's

24:44 Brad: for character

24:44 Scott: certainly

24:44 Brad: on

24:44 Scott: not search,

24:45 Brad: it's

24:45 Scott: but the network

24:47 Brad: certainly not search

24:48 Scott: had to somehow...

24:51 I understand what I, yeah,

24:54 look, frankly,

24:55 I'm going to just be perfectly honest.

24:56 The way these AI models and networks work, it's above my pay grade.

25:01 I don't get it. I mean, I'm sure I could learn it, but I don't totally understand them.

25:04 And so somehow it had been primed somehow or with some combination of letters you put on the back of a postcard that this has had some response to this thing.

25:15 So here,

25:16 this is what I'm getting

25:16 Brad: Yeah.

25:17 Scott: at. I have a tactical question and then I.

25:18 And then I have a meta question.

25:19 My technical question simply is about how it knows that you use Pixie.

25:23 Are you, and this is just about ChatGPT and maybe others.

25:27 I presume you're not continuously using the same chat in ChatGPT. You're opening up chat window after chat window.

25:35 Brad: Correct.

25:36 Scott: But so somehow

25:37 Brad: But

25:37 Scott: with,

25:37 Brad: it has my whole history of every chat.

25:39 Scott: right,

25:39 so it includes all of your chats as part of like your context window.

25:44 Brad: Correct.

25:45 Scott: Interesting.

25:45 Brad: And one of the things that they've been doing, and they kind of announced this with each new version,

25:49 you know, basically they keep solving for larger and larger context windows.

25:57 And so.

25:59 they're able to kind of just go i i suspect what they do like like here's a fun little chat you can do you can pull up either claude or gemini or um chat gpt just pull up whichever one you've been regularly using and literally just say hey tell me everything you know about me

26:15 And you'll see that it has a context window that is 100% based on everything you ever chatted with it about.

26:22 Scott: Yeah, and I've been in ChatGPT, there's a place somewhere in the settings or whatever that you can tell it to forget. It tells you, it lists it and you can say forget that and forget that and forget that.

26:30 What's interesting is if you're doing some sort of like diverse types of things, I mean, my chat GPT, if I just looked at my, I'm going to bring it up right now to show you, tell you last three.

26:41 chat GPT chats I'll tell you what I got if you tell me what you got okay

26:46 Brad: My last three were JSPixieCanvasRendererError, like the one I just told you about.

26:51 Identify browser from UA.

26:52 That was another one. I literally just copied and pasted a user agent string.

26:57 I just, I didn't even say what browser. I just copied and pasted a user agent string and it basically came back and gave me the exact version of what browser on what OS it was running.

27:05 I was just like, awesome.

27:07 And then like update wave books, I was doing my accounting for my LLC and updating my latest expenses from being charged for,

27:18 you know.

27:19 Scott: okay let me tell you what i got used furniture sites comparison so

27:23 Brad: Love it.

27:23 Scott: you know there's cherish and there's first dibs these are the two big things in like used furniture and i wanted to know that i

27:29 Brad: I

27:29 Scott: want if

27:29 Brad: did not know that.

27:30 Scott: you're you know not for i mean there's obviously craigslist and facebook marketplace but you got something nicer you want to sell that those are the kind of places that people go to i wanted no comparison this is a good one artist joseph

27:43 It's verification.

27:44 Brad: Okay.

27:45 Scott: My parents have a piece of artwork that I was trying to remember the name of the artist.

27:52 And all I could remember was the artist's first name and that he was from Seattle.

27:56 Brad: And the style of art.

27:58 Scott: I didn't even know the style of art.

28:00 It turns out his name wasn't even Joseph.

28:03 It's Jacob.

28:06 It couldn't

28:07 Brad: I

28:07 Scott: find the

28:07 Brad: love it.

28:07 Scott: person I was looking for.

28:11 The third one is depiction explanation.

28:14 Oh, this was good.

28:16 This was good.

28:17 I just uploaded a picture and I said, what is this a depiction of?

28:22 my friend George inherit not really inherited because those parents are still alive but got a piece of furniture from his parents that was very very very antique-y we didn't know it might even be from the 1800s like it was very very old and it's got this this biblical looking carving on the outside but we couldn't tell what it was and I just uploaded the picture I was like what's this a depiction of and it gave me an answer so my point is here's my point

28:47 My context window has all sorts of random stuff in it.

28:52 Brad: mine does too by the way i mean so i will just say like mine's got a lot of business things but i've you know like got multiple different projects i'm working on so they're all over the place you know and not all of them are pixie and not all of them are svelte and and um

29:12 You know, so there's a ton of like random tech questions about technology that's all over the place.

29:19 But, you know, it also knows about me because I've worked with it on like creating my own personal brand website,

29:25 Scott: Mm-hmm.

29:25 Brad: you know, I certainly do a lot of stuff with the How Me CTOs podcast with it, you know, I have, I use ChatGPT, for example, to like summarize our, you know, our podcast episodes or help me write titles or whatever,

29:38 you know, so it's got that.

29:40 And then it's got random, like random stuff,

29:42 I just ask it, you know, like.

29:44 like i don't ever use search anymore you know i just like um like what here's a random one mlb wild card explained like i i'm a i used to be way more of a baseball fan when it was just one wild card team and basically it was just like you know and now they've got three wild card i didn't even know they had three wild card teams and we went from a best we went from a single elimination game to apparently a best of three for the wild card round

30:09 i was like what is going on with this you know and so there you go wild card explanation um or jimmy smith's and or role that's a good one you

30:19 Scott: I mean, I got,

30:20 Brad: know who the jimmy smiths do you know who jimmy smith's

30:22 Scott: no,

30:22 Brad: and or role is

30:23 Scott: I have no idea.

30:25 Brad: Yeah, because Jimmy Smits is not in Andor.

30:29 Scott: All right.

30:30 Brad: But it's not,

30:31 it's, it's Benjamin Bratt. And I'm so bad with the actors that I thought Benjamin Bratt was Jimmy Smits. Now, that being said, they look similar and they're playing the same character in two different timelines.

30:44 But there you go.

30:46 So there's definitely random stuff in here, you know.

30:49 Scott: You know, there's not dates and times on these chats.

30:53 I don't see anywhere.

30:53 You want to know what my very first chat GPT chat is?

30:58 Brad: Wait, I'd have to scroll down for like 30 minutes to get to my first one. Go ahead, tell me

31:02 Scott: I

31:02 Brad: what...

31:02 Scott: had to scroll to some, I don't know, I didn't scroll 30 minutes. I just scrolled for a little bit and I got there.

31:07 Brad: Alright, tell me. I'm curious.

31:09 Scott: It's about Jira.

31:10 Brad: I love it.

31:12 Scott: What is the JQL to select an issue and all of its children?

31:17 That was the first thing I used.

31:18 That's the first thing I used chat GBT for.

31:21 Brad: I love it.

31:22 I love it.

31:24 Scott: The next thing I used it for, I asked it about summarizing some medical records.

31:29 Can I upload a thousand pages of medical records and have you summarize it for me?

31:33 I was actually asking in this case what it was capable of doing in terms of can you read can you read these things can I give you hand human handwriting would that work like I wanted to know this you know this is early days of text reading the third one I wanted to know Sacagawea's which I think is now pronounced I pronounce we don't pronounce it right we pronounce it the white man's way I wanted to know if she has any living descendants and it turns out

31:58 Nobody knows.

31:59 Brad: I apparently asked ChatGPT while my wife and I were watching Bridgerton or something,

32:08 or like not Bridgerton, but whatever,

32:09 Queen Charlotte,

32:10 the thing.

32:10 I asked, who was the king after George III?

32:15 And then I like went

32:16 Scott: Oh.

32:16 Brad: a deep dive on like explain, you know, what was the relationship between Queen Victoria and George III and, you know, all the lineage of the British houses.

32:28 I'm always kind of curious about that stuff.

32:31 Scott: Well, let's finish on this more interesting question.

32:35 These models consumed a lot of content to somehow one way or the other get you the answer to your error.

32:42 Brad: Yes.

32:43 Scott: And I'm assuming it did that because somebody produced documentation and or somebody wrote a stack overflow or a Reddit post saying I'm having this problem.

32:51 Can you help me out with it,

32:52 etc.

32:54 And what happens in, say,

32:56 N number of years when nobody's writing those things anymore?

33:03 They're not writing them because the way you have to post a question to get an answer, and

33:09 Brad: Yeah.

33:09 Scott: now you can just get the answer.

33:10 What happens when the content is not out there any longer?

33:14 Brad: Yeah.

33:15 Yeah.

33:15 Scott: Is there like a decay or a cliff or something like that that might happen with this intelligence?

33:21 If essentially human-generated content is the raw material of its intelligence and humans stop generating content,

33:30 is

33:31 Brad: yeah well

33:32 Scott: it going to get dumber?

33:34 Brad: isn't this isn't this didn't you kind of like early on kind of call it isn't it oberis the snake eating its own tail or something like that

33:41 Scott: Yeah, that's right. The snake eating its own tail.

33:44 So it's slightly different. That's it's consuming its own content. So it just becomes, but it has to get new knowledge in there.

33:51 Brad: But it can't

33:51 Scott: know It

33:51 Brad: the difference.

33:52 Scott: has to be new.

33:52 Brad: Like so much content is now being generated by the AI. So it's like it's not it can't tell.

33:57 Like, first of all, we're going to go through a phase where all the content being generated, it's not that the content is going to stop being generated. All the content is going to be having being generated by AI. Right. Like you've seen the joke with the.

34:08 with the guy like oh this is awesome I gave the AI three bullet points to write an email for me that looked like I wrote this whole email and then it's you know that's one frame and then the next frame is the guy like getting the email he says this is so awesome I got this long email from from this business contact I just gave it to AI and it summarized it into three bullet points for me so

34:28 Scott: Yeah, that's nice.

34:31 Brad: it's like the humans are just talking in bullet points

34:34 Through a conduit that is AI generated like text and AI summarized text.

34:40 Scott: Yeah,

34:41 where you need people,

34:42 I guess we still need people to be writing books and blog posts and songs and making videos like real humans doing that to get more knowledge into the system.

34:52 Otherwise, I

34:53 Brad: Well, and to be fair,

34:54 Scott: mean, yeah.

34:54 Brad: this podcast and all our podcasts,

34:57 if they haven't already been sucked up and pushed into the models, they will be not too long from now.

35:05 They're still continuing to scrape and suck everything from the Internet. And there are certainly things that are still being created anew.

35:16 But I think that.

35:18 I think that we're kind of like, you know, if you could kind of draw the overlap, it's like,

35:22 OK,

35:22 well,

35:22 we're more and more content is not is no longer being human generated. It's now being AI generated and the amount of human generated content is getting less and less and less. And then, right,

35:33 eventually that will you're predicting that eventually people will stop creating new content.

35:42 I think that's going to take a lot longer.

35:45 Scott: Well,

35:45 Brad: I

35:45 Scott: I'm not

35:45 Brad: think that it...

35:46 Scott: necessarily predicting that.

35:47 I guess what I'm just trying to say is like intelligence is created through sensing the world.

35:55 Right.

35:57 And the only sense of the world that computers can have is what it finds on the Internet.

36:03 Right.

36:04 Brad: Right.

36:05 Scott: And so if people stop putting stuff on the Internet.

36:09 It stops getting smarter.

36:11 Brad: I think the question is, do people stop putting stuff?

36:15 I think that's an interesting question.

36:17 I think that we're a long ways away from people stop creating stuff.

36:23 But yeah.

36:23 Scott: We're not putting Stack Overflow questions on the internet anymore. We're just putting them right into the chat.

36:30 And Stack Overflow had

36:31 Brad: Yeah.

36:31 Scott: a feedback loop where it said,

36:32 here's the question asker went and put a green check on it whenever it answered the question,

36:38 right?

36:39 So there was a feedback loop there saying,

36:41 yes, this is the correct answer to this question.

36:43 Brad: Yeah.

36:43 Scott: And I guess chat TV doesn't have that. When I find the correct answer,

36:48 I don't always come back and say, that was it. Great,

36:50 thanks.

36:50 You know, they just close the window.

36:52 Brad: Yeah.

36:53 Well,

36:53 you know, it's funny when we talk to John Helm about this, one of the things he remember he went on that whole tangent about like empiricism.

37:00 Right.

37:01 And the idea that it's what you just said that like intelligence comes from experience.

37:06 Right.

37:06 And like, of course, like Aristotle and John Locke and David Hume and all this like classic like.

37:14 classic um john helm uh philosophical rant and the meaning of mind right so

37:20 Scott: Mm-hmm.

37:21 Brad: the i think that if john was here he would say okay you're asking the question does this does

37:33 Does intelligence cease to exist if it no longer has new experiences to absorb?

37:43 Scott: Mm-hmm.

37:45 Right.

37:46 Brad: If you no longer have things to experience,

37:49 then you cannot,

37:50 you can't have empiricism.

37:53 Now, I think that there's a more likely outcome is there's a backlash to.

37:59 The synthetic and that we start to like head towards like.

38:06 you know like things that we know to be genuine thanks like think like you know i'm only you know like there's this question about you know like if the ai gets so good that brad gets lazy and still says yes scott let's record an episode but and it's actually i just throw my ai version of myself to do the episode you know at what point are you going to be like hey god damn it brad why did you

38:31 you record the episode it was obvious it was your AI and I did I do these so that I can actually talk to you and then you're like we're gonna have to start recording these podcasts in person I will only record episodes if you and I meet on the boat because that's the only way I'm going to believe it's you I think

38:50 Scott: Yeah.

38:50 Brad: that's going to happen

38:52 Scott: And there's that and this gets about information on the internet,

38:56 like we're getting to this point where you literally can't believe anything that's out there and I guess you just believe whatever you want to believe.

39:06 All right, Brad,

39:07 I don't know what got anywhere today.

39:09 Brad: This was an oddball, but we definitely talked about some really interesting trends in AI,

39:14 and I love to hear that you did your vibe coding.

39:17 That was cool, and I want to hear about your push-up streaks or whatever it is you're trying to streak on.

39:24 Scott: I'll let you know. There's probably already 500 streaker apps out there. I don't think the world needs another one. I just needed something to make.

39:31 Brad: That's well,

39:32 that's a whole different podcast episode. It's called Bespoke for Yourself Apps like the app stores go away and everyone just turns to the app generators like lovable of the world and they make their own custom version because your app is the one streaker app that has a cool picture of a dude with a trench coat.

39:49 Scott: That's right.

39:50 All right. Until next week, Brad.

39:52 Brad: Until next week.

39:54 Scott: I'll talk to you soon.

39:55 Brad: Right.

39:56 This episode of How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast was edited.

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