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

Speaker 1: Welcome to Hacked.

Speaker 2: Welcome to Hacked. I wanna start this episode by talking about a very big, very public, very profitable video game leak.

Speaker 1: Normally, leaks aren't associated with profit, Jordan. Tell me more.

Speaker 2: What a time to be alive. On August 18, a group or person or, like, agentic swarm is really hard to know nowadays. Something calling themselves cyberleak starts publishing gameplay footage from Grand Theft Auto six that the developer of that game, Rockstar, had not released yet. Clips of, the game. Scott, the big game.

Speaker 1: The big game that everybody is waiting for. The world is waiting for. People are signing up for Netflix to see trailers in advance of.

Speaker 2: People just were were hungry for clips of that of that crime Florida life, that five star life. I guess it's six stars in this one. You can go up to six stars. People, all these clips start going live of people fighting in the game, driving in the game, basking in the the Florida energy. There's maps in the leak. There's videos of the characters, our cool crime protagonists. This was all before that big Netflix reveal that you mentioned, Scott. So people are like, they're hungry for this game. This leak of all of this video is a really, really big deal. 17 of these leaks fall over the next ten days. And alongside the footage that they were leaking, they were kind of framing the leaks as a as a type of protest. The group Cyberleak published a set of, like, gaming demands on the website, and it's it's pretty classic stuff. End digital only preorders, end downloadable content held back from the game at launch guarantee that the single player games remain playable without a server connection, like hoorah gamer stuff. And each leaked clip links back to this website, which cited kind of the the big reason for all this is Rockstar's $100 ultimate edition and the decision not to release it as a physical disc as why they were the target of this. Big leak, big public statement. They're selling a box with a download code in it. Boo. High level, that's it. For, like, a week in really nerdy corners of the Internet, that was a thing.

Speaker 1: So this is is like a cyber protest.

Speaker 2: Exactly.

Speaker 1: Done by what I would call, you know, people of our generation and older that care about physical media, owning games, offline play.

Speaker 2: Old hacker shakes fist at clouds type stuff. Yeah. But at the same time, and this is where it gets interesting and I wanted to talk to you about it, the group also launched a cryptocurrency.

Speaker 1: Why not?

Speaker 2: Why not? It's called Cyberleak. Just call it the same thing. Who even cares? It goes up at the same time at the same day as that first leak. In a post about this token, because, like, you hear that and you go, what's what's the story there? They write, quote, cyber leak is raising funds for a secret project. The specifics cannot be revealed yet. Let it be absolutely clear, this is not a cash grab. No. Scott, no laughing. It's not a cash grab.

Speaker 1: Sorry. Yeah. Sorry. I was I was too busy thinking about whether the special project was some form of prediction market or online gambling system because I feel like the whole I bet on crypto make money on crypto is now gaming prediction markets. Like, I feel like that audience is moving and, you know, just the sheer fact that they went crypto is kind of an old school thing to do. Again, furthering my theory that these are, like, 40 year old people.

Speaker 2: Sure. You're like, they could have been on cow sheet making fat stacks.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. The forest is all the way. Will GTA six see a leak?

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 1: Buy the entire yes side of the argument, pump up the no side, and then, retire.

Speaker 2: A little while later, couple days, rock stars, you brought this up already. Big GTA six reveal is going up on Netflix. A twenty seven minute long, like, to call it a trailer. It's like it's just like a little movie. Did you watch it?

Speaker 1: I did not watch it.

Speaker 2: You did not watch it?

Speaker 1: As somebody that's excited for the game to come out and was a big fan of GTA five, I could not have been bothered to watch a thirty minute pre launch trailer.

Speaker 2: Oh, I got less shit going on in my life. That thing ruled.

Speaker 1: Did it actually?

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's really good. So a few hours before Rockstar puts its thirty minute trailer for the game up on Netflix, what you might call the apex of the value of cyberleaks leaks. Up until this point, they're the only source of these… Of this video footage. Thirty minutes of it is about to go live. The value of those leaks is about to go down. That wallet on the Solana blockchain where they coined cyberleak makes four transactions.

Speaker 1: Rugs pole.

Speaker 2: It's a risk of speed at which it's Rugs pole.

Speaker 1: Rug pole. Was it a rug pole?

Speaker 2: It's a it's a rug pole. It's like a car driving past. This is according to on chain data reported by CoinDesk. They converted a 146 of these coins. They did it. They… Blah blah blah blah blah. They realize in… By kind of realizing these fees, about a $250,000 in profit.

Speaker 1: Not bad.

Speaker 2: Not too shabby. And so here we find ourselves this ragtag thing, guy, group

Speaker 1: Person.

Speaker 2: Agent Agent swarm. Called cyber leak, exposing themselves to great, like, potential legal retribution, which we'll talk about, at the same time as having this very earnest message from gamers to a gamer giant, at the same time really muddying the waters of their messaging. And this episode brought to you by our title sponsor, NordLayer, the network security platform for modern teams. Tell you about them more later. I just wanted to start here, Scott, because I think this is such an interesting story.

Speaker 1: It is. I'll say it feels very 2024.

Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 1: But, but it it is interesting. The, I took a peek into their subreddit because I saw that they had a little little subreddit. Read a bit of their manifesto stuff, but that's about where it stopped for me. So I was intrigued to talk to you about this, hear what your thoughts are, hear what your takes are. I think everybody in the world knows that there is a demand for leaks for popular games. And if you were making the most popular game in the world ever, probably, I could see the demand being really high. Seems like an obvious target. And they've been the target of multiple hacks before, if we recall.

Speaker 2: For sure. For sure. I started with kind of, like, do do we know anything about the hack itself? Like, do we do we… Have we learned anything about the intrusion method? Because there's something to be said for them saying, well, we targeted this game in particular because of this choice. But then there's just a question of, like, well, did you target it because of that reason, or did you just have access and you reverse engineered the reason? That was a a question that was pretty prominent in my mind in reading through all this. As of right now, we don't have a confirmed, like, attack vector for all of this. There's not like…

Speaker 1: How it happened?

Speaker 2: Yeah. There's not like a smoke and gun phishing email where we figured it out or this credential leak where we know for sure. Best information is that it's about a year old content. Lucia, one of the protagonists, wasn't in it. There was a year old song. People were trying to get into the forensics of it. But the thing I found interesting on that front was it seems as though it wasn't just a tranche of prerecorded video and image files. It seems as though Cyberleak had access to a build of GTA six, and that's pretty important. Because it could have just been a bunch of reference files, screen recordings. The strongest evidence of this and maybe the coolest part of it for me was August 20 cyber leak, like an old timey, like gangster shot their own name into a wall in the game. They they they shot the word leak

Speaker 1: they were able to play.

Speaker 2: They were playing it. So, like, the gang, they went, like, they caught me cyberleak, and they they wrote leak into a wall in the game. So that was the best evidence that this wasn't just stolen videos. This was, like, an actual build of GTA six out in the wild.

Speaker 1: Can I make a hypothesis? Please. How a far fetched classic Scott hypothesis.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 1: Major video game development, which I've worked in… You've worked in indie development. Yep. Have entire teams of people called QA people that just play the game. They get dev builds of the game pretty much every day, if not

Speaker 2: Scott suspects the bug testers.

Speaker 1: They… Well, here's the thing is they're typically not the highest paid people on the team, and they're typically subcontractors. So so they really have no connection to the the core team that's been developing the IP. They're not really bought in. They're just mercenaries for hire to come in and play video games all day every day for, you know, the lowest compensation tier in the game team.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 1: Often. And they're super valuable. This is not Extremely important at all.

Speaker 2: To the game design process.

Speaker 1: Extremely important to the build process.

Speaker 2: Key way and bug testing. It is, like, actually a a deeply important part of game design, but I know what you're saying. It's the subcontractor part is really what's most important to that. You're a subcontractor, and you're not

Speaker 1: important to that.

Speaker 2: You're a subcontractor, and you're not the highest paid subcontractor, which is

Speaker 1: And often a sweet spot. Having worked on some of those teams, some of those people, they're not even… They're from countries that you haven't heard of. Like, they… These are… It's not like they're local people that get brought into a sub, and they they end up on a QA team. They're people from Georgia and people from, you know, Eastern Europe, like, Asia. Like, they're from everywhere. You can only imagine that even if the subcontractor is getting paid a North American rate for their time, the person who's actually doing it is making very little. So my hypothesis goes that this chances are this was somebody who said, oh, I've actually got a live playable version of GTA six on my computer at home. And somebody said, if you leak that, you could make, like, tons of money.

Speaker 2: 250,000 US dollars is depending on where you are in the world. Like, that's a large amount of money for… By any standard. Depending on who you are, it is it is generational life changing money. So it's Yeah.

Speaker 1: Of course.

Speaker 2: You get sent to build and you're like, so many eyeballs will be drawn to this organically that if you… And we'll talk about how the cryptocurrency and the leak worked in a second here. But, like, it's a very short line to an extraordinary sum of cash. Totally. The incentive is really, like, natural, and, like, I understand it.

Speaker 1: And a $250,000 in, you know, The United States or Canada is is a specific line in our life.

Speaker 2: A

Speaker 1: 250,000 US in Bangladesh is Yeah. You know, royalty money.

Speaker 2: A 100%.

Speaker 1: So the economic incentive is there. Just… That's my that's my hypothesis. That's where I would start looking if I was the FBI going through the QA.

Speaker 2: If you were Take Two's lawyers, because that's where this is actually all starting is

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 2: Basically using, like, DMCA grounds, like, copyright grounds. Yeah. Their lawyers have started filing subpoenas, New York court, DMCA subpoenas. We haven't gotten to a suit yet. This is just fact finding for them. They're just going like, hey, Microsoft. A bunch of this stuff was hosted on OneDrive files. We would… We… Here's a subpoena. We would like as much information about who that account belonged to. Hey, Discord. We would like account information pertaining to the cyber leak account and a few other ones, which we'll talk about because there were streamers that then covered this stuff who had nothing to do with it, but who have now gotten embroiled with this set of subpoenas. It's all very murky. Hey, x. Who does this cyber leak account belong to? And I think a a YouTube subpoena as well. As I mentioned, a streamer, DarkViperAU, got swept up in that. They've denied volume… The involvement. They were like, I was just streaming and showed this footage that they were streaming. I had nothing to do with this. Now they want, I think, his audience… Like, it's… The legal creep is occurring, and there's a little bit of a, like, slushing in, slushing out of how many people get caught in the dragnet of figuring out who leaked this good, good crime video game.

Speaker 1: Having worked on games and having seen a leak from the inside, the first time that I saw a leak on a… And highly anticipated prerelease title, I immediately thought that it was preplanned by the by the team. Like, it was a marketing concept.

Speaker 2: Real marketing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Because the audience is like, you know, it's there and it's excited for it, but they're not really engaging with it yet because it's not out yet. But every time a slow drip of data comes out, a small leak, bit of this, it creates this fervor of communication, and the Reddits explode, and everybody's talking and getting more excited and asking about prerelease days. And so the first time I saw it happen, there was, I think, a… Probably a similar ish witch hunt that went on. I I I had entirely thought that it was just a preplanned marketing promo stunt because to me, that's… It was very effective at that. The… So… Yeah. So the same thing that goes here. Every time I see a game leak, I'm like, is this a leak, or is this just the PR team earning their annual bonuses?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Right. I I think that skepticism is often warranted. I think in this case, I don't smell that. Like, I think… And it's… You know what it is? It's honestly… It's the gulf in production value between the Netflix trailer and the, like, poorly streamed low quality. It's like this didn't have the veneer of a PR's broadcast. It was like there would have been a lot more pixels. You know what I mean? Like, there just would have been a higher quality, a lot more curated. It was, like, kind of a bad first impression compared to what went live that I'm like, I actually believe that this was just a big, really, a really big whoopsie. And then the lawsuits would be like, wow, you're really playing with fire to have your lawyers sue your… Sue you.

Speaker 1: Sue yourself.

Speaker 2: Sue yourself. A great personal expense. Yeah. I I think in a lot of cases, it probably is in this case. I'm like, no. I'm pretty sure. I think there's… I think your earlier theory smells more accurate to me.

Speaker 1: Well, the last time there was a big leak on this game, it was lapses, wasn't it? The hacking group Lapsus?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Shiny hunters.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I… Shiny hunters adjacent,

Speaker 2: but last So there there were two. There was the Lapsus hack in 2022 with Kortaj, and then there was another thing in, I think, this past year with shiny hunters who are technically related. I… I'm cutting you off, but, yes, there… There's two incidents there.

Speaker 1: Your, your memory is impeccable. The the the… Yeah. Because I… But I think Lapsus actually stole the in game content. Like, they had the ability to show prerelease, you know, what it was being worked on kind of systems where I think shiny hunters took, like, internal information. Like, they stole data. That's kind of their MO anyway. Okay. But the, anyway… Yeah. So it had been a long time since somebody had seen the state of the game.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Right.

Speaker 1: So I think that that's just it for me is there's the constant desire for people to see what they can't People wanna check it. Supposed to. Totally. Yeah. I think that's a very powerful marketing lever that if I was VP of marketing of a big triple a studio, I'd probably consider pulling it.

Speaker 2: Just with thumb drives with all this lead content, just like placing it on the concrete in the parking lot out front, looking a journalist in the eye being like, where did my thumb drive go?

Speaker 1: I wonder if, like, if you could get the viewing metrics from Netflix for their twenty seven minute, $25,000,000 prerelease launch trailer

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: I wonder what the viewership and audience of that is versus what a major leaks audience is because I bet it's comparable, and it cost you nothing.

Speaker 2: When Well, what was interesting about the Netflix thing was that it wasn't even… It's like you can't guarantee perpetual exclusivity. It was like a a Netflix exclusive window for, like, a little chunk

Speaker 1: of something. Exactly. Twenty four hours.

Speaker 2: Chunk of time.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Fascinating that Netflix paid money for that.

Speaker 2: I bet a lot of money changed hands, considerably more than on this crypto side of this whole thing.

Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. Please. Take us down there.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's it's interesting. The only thing I wanted to talk about the crypto, we we could dig into the, like, specific ratio of, like, well, they they burned 20% of the supply, and this is how we're… Like, we could get really into the crypto weeds. I don't think it's that interesting. The thing I found fascinating was that they launched this thing right before the leak goes viral. Every time they shared that content, every piece of content contained a link back to the coin. So all of the news coverage, all of the Reddit posts, all the Twitter posts promoting this stuff were inadvertently driving traffic back to this. The sheer amount of traffic influx caused the price to spike on to sort of, like, hype alone.

Speaker 1: Sure. Algorithmic traders saw massive trend influx of this coin being mentioned and scooped them up.

Speaker 2: And then operators cashed out on the trading fees that they had accumulated about 250,000 US real dollars, at which point they they traded that out and then the price collapsed. So it's like you could… There is maybe a… It's not a traditional rug pull where it's like I'm holding a lot of the coins, you drive the price up and I sell them, but it's sort of like cousins at… I'm not gonna call it a rug pull. I'm just gonna notice that it shares the shape of a rug pull.

Speaker 1: Sure. So they they knew the marketing lever that they had, and they said, how can we turn this into money? Creating a cryptocurrency was that way to turn it into money. Even if it was, like, more on the legitimate side transaction charges, not the, hey, everybody buy in. I'm gonna rug pull you, talk to a girl style.

Speaker 2: You kinda just look at it and you're like, we we can have a debate about the mechanism of what occurred here, but you did walk away with a significant sum of money, which they preempted by saying it is for a project. But it it… And this is sort of where this all ends for me is it it just muddies the water of your messaging a little bit. Because there there is a message in there that I'm like, we can talk about realism and where the market and where the gaming industry is going, but I'm like, I'm sympathetic to your basic intent here. But you have muddied the waters of that message with this rug pull shaped operation you've pulled off here.

Speaker 1: Well, they gotta fund the new product. They need the $250,000 to fund the product.

Speaker 2: You gotta fund your project, which is an even vaguer word that's like, sure, I have a project to have a new house. Rockstar's August 26 statement in response to this, they basically said, like, sorry to the fans that this is how you're seeing this for the first time, which is, like, kind of a, like, interesting way of framing it. They didn't address any of the criticism, but they did say a thing that felt real to me as a person who makes games. I imagine it would be to you. Quote, it would be an understatement to say that having videos of Grand Theft Auto six gameplay leak in this way has been heartbreaking for our team, and this is obviously not how we intended for you to see the game after all this time. Like, yep. That's how I would feel. I get it.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Especially because it's old footage. If it was recent, like, a recent build copy. This could also just been like a crypto locker thing where it's, like, maybe a QIA computer got crypto locker, they stole the data, exfiltrated it, and then found out that they had a copy of GTA six. And we're like,

Speaker 2: woah. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? You you… You're you're you're kinda just like fishing, and

Speaker 1: you you

Speaker 2: hack this QA company, and you're like, maybe they have a cool… Oh my god. It's GTA six. Like, you could imagine the the feeling of it rushing to greet you when you, like, open the EXE and you're like, oh, no. Oh, no.

Speaker 1: I'm in I'm in more trouble than I was a minute ago.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I better make a lot of money because of how trouble… How much trouble I need…. These are getting expensive. I better find a way to rug pull off this. Kind of engenders empathy a little bit, sort of. That's kind of almost everything I have for this. The thing I wanted to end on was from a group called Stop Killing Games. Games because at the heart of their manifesto is a sort of games preservation argument. And I think there's a there is a really good argument there that unless we're talking about a live a live service game, if I give you 50 or 60 or 80 or a $100 for it just through corporate attrition, my product shouldn't go away. If it's a single player game, the idea that it has to, like, ping a server to check if I'm allowed to play it is, like, well, then I didn't really buy it. So can I really pirate it? You get into this whole murky thing here. I like the idea that if I spend $50 on a video game, I own it, and we should cling to that as long as we possibly can.

Speaker 1: Re… Recent physical media games aren't even games. They're literally, like, download certificates.

Speaker 2: Yeah. No. They're… It's all codes. Even the cartridge for Switch two is just a link to

Speaker 1: a download code. I'm I'm with

Speaker 2: I'm with you. But we rage against the dying of the light, Scott. Stop killing games who is, like, I would say, like, an important part of the digital preservation movement. They're not about physical. They just they just want these things to be stand alone pieces of software that can run and it… So that they can archive them to preserve them for the future. And Cyberleaks manifesto kind of, echoes their language. They distanced themselves from this thing with a 100 foot pole. Soft kill games was founded a few years ago. It was by a YouTuber after Ubisoft shut down this game that they love. Their whole idea is games should be left in a, quote, reasonably functional state after discontinuation via, like, an offline mode, private service, or whatever. The games just shouldn't die. Their line about this was, this kind of act is destructive and helps no one. Worse, it risks tarnishing the reputation of our communities and our chances to make real change. And I found that really fascinating that the real games preservation folks are like, thanks, but no thanks. This looks way worse than it serves us. And unless there was, like, an under the table $250,000 donation, you didn't really do it for this project, did you?

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Remains to be seen what they do with that money. Maybe they pop up a VINZ, whatever that website… Like, a ROM emulation y thing. Maybe they prop up something real.

Speaker 1: You think about archivism and archives. You know, pop culture stuff, advertising campaigns from the thirties, fifties, things that helped shape the social norms all go into archives. You know, they're collected. They're indexed. Video games since Yeah. '19… I don't even… Like, I would say since the NES when they got huge, like, even the Atari, like, in home video games. But even before then, you had arcades. They… They're massive social things. Like, the amount of people in the world that play video games at this point and have played for a good majority of their life is, you know, substantial. And to not archive them and to not consider them part of, like, the cultural data of a of a generation and of an era is crazy to me. So I'm I'm a big fan of this idea. I love the idea of the, video games archive. Stop killing games. Lots of these people, big fans, big supporters. They, I I think what they're doing is really good. And and the the truth is is nobody likes the digital only games. Like, I don't know anybody that does. Sure. It's convenient, but it's like Yeah. Nobody likes it.

Speaker 2: No. It's it it… It's an option thing, and I I get both sides of it to to your point. Games preservation and archivism is like, it's important. This is like, a medium and a genre that we have directed so much energy and love as a culture towards manufacturing. It's like, we should preserve it. It is a huge, like, output of human effort and labor and energy and creativity. It's like, yeah. Don't burn the library of Alexandria for this. Like, it's… It matters that those things persist. It really does. Totally. On the flip of it, I'm like, I get it if you're selling games to be like, most of them are selling this

Speaker 1: in, like, for all this production.

Speaker 2: I get it. I… There there is a a legitimate thing there, but how we handle a digital only future, it's not binary. It's not like you either just let go of the steering wheel and hope the industry functions well on its own. It's like, no. There's better practices and there's worse practices in a digital only world. We should be pushing towards better ones. Stop killing games seems to thread that needle really beautifully, That kind of way of thinking about it.

Speaker 1: So I should expect my physical media version of rebounder by 33 games sooner than later?

Speaker 2: I'm not saying. I'm just saying.

Speaker 1: Not saying. I'm just saying.

Speaker 3: Just saying.

Speaker 1: Before we before we totally jump off this, this is a tiny little touch back, to GTA that I wanted to make, which is shiny hunters. You mentioned it.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 1: Recently, there's a big arrest in, The Netherlands. They recently arrested a 24 year old Amsterdam man, had a role in the shiny hunters allegedly. His name, I could try and mess up and will choose not to, but it is… Ends with Vanderstapp, which I get. And given that I speak a bit of Dutch, I should know how to say the first name of this person. Pepin Pepin Pepin Vanderstapp.

Speaker 2: K.

Speaker 1: Prior to prior conviction, got arrested. I think he was arrested on the fifteenth, but they didn't break the news until the twenty eighth, twenty ninth. Kind of a big deal. You know? Thorn in the side, obviously, shiny hunter's famous group that steals data. They go into massive corporations and exfiltrate large amounts of private personal trade data, and then they hold it hostage. And if you don't pay, they give it away.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. And

Speaker 1: they have proven to do such thing.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 1: So just wanted to throw that in as I do have a link back to GTA.

Speaker 2: They had hacked GTA, Fred. We we alluded to this earlier in the show, but they had a… It wasn't content about the games, but it was, like, internal financing docs, internal ops. Like, there was a big sort of, like, Excel spreadsheet.

Speaker 1: I think it was a lot about how the GTA economy worked with, like, GTA money

Speaker 2: The numbers.

Speaker 1: How much people were spending on it and using it and stuff like that. So

Speaker 2: Interesting.

Speaker 1: Probably a fascinating leak to read, honestly.

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Speaker 2: That's nordlair.com/hackedpodcast. Thank you as always to Nord Lair for their support. And we're back. Scott, do you wanna talk about OpenClaus and its many ancestors?

Speaker 1: It's family.

Speaker 2: It's fa the life. Tree that has emerged over OpenClaus. I'm trying

Speaker 1: to talk about Shell. RockBot, Muse, OpenAI Dots, Instinct. Trying to remember. There's a few more. They said it was gonna be the year of the personal assistant, and boy were they right.

Speaker 2: It's the… It harnesses abound, you might say.

Speaker 1: Harnesses abound.

Speaker 2: So we're talking about, two two of these consumer products were released… Announced and released, the week that we are presenting this, Muse by Meta and Dots by OpenAI. To go back a little bit, to lay the groundwork of the story here, we started talking about OpenClaw at the start of this because these are all, in some way related to that. So it's… I think it's worth going back a little bit. It was this kind of, like, hackery project, started as a weekend hack called WhatsApp Relay, 100,000 GitHub stars in two months. It started running. It was this, like, harness, this little AI agent that runs on your computer that you talk to through messaging apps. You text it like you would a person, and instead of just replying, you can actually use the files on the computer. That was the big change. It was a harness for one of these models. It was originally Anthropics Claude, which is why it was called… I think it was ClaudeBot.

Speaker 1: Been Claude?

Speaker 2: Yeah. ClaudeBot, MoltBot, OpenClaw. LLM is the brain. This is this harness that gives it access to your files, so you can give it kind of instructions like you would a person using a computer. Go check those emails and do this with it. Go grab this file, edit it, and send it over here.

Speaker 1: It led to the fact that you couldn't buy a Mac mini for, like, a year. Yes. Because that was the Yes. Standard operating platform for these things. Everybody would go out and buy a Mac mini. They would set up OpenClaw on it, which eventually, I think, became Hermes bot. There was, like, there was a family that descended out of Open Claw of, like, better versions of it that were less jumbly, I'll say.

Speaker 2: The dejumblification is kind of what this story is about in terms of the consumer product side. And like you said, people bought these things because they realized pretty quickly that if they were willing to pay for it, you could just sort of have this thing running on a Mac mini twenty four seven, getting up some real trouble. But that's the high level of what a… Some real hijinks, Scott. That's sort of what a harness is super high level, I think, is a good way of thinking it. Super high.

Speaker 1: The… An agentic harness. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Which is Sure. Yeah. Yeah. If there's another type that most people need to know about, please do let me know.

Speaker 1: Well, harnesses are… Comes in all shapes and sizes. Harness is really just a a name for a framework you put around an LLM that controls its execution flow. So that could be plan development.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 1: Execution, verification, quality assessment, and it could be domain specific. Like, you could have an AI harness just for coding, which is like what cloud code is. Sure. Or you could have an AI That's a good distinction. Yeah. Just for, educational delivery,

Speaker 2: which

Speaker 1: is, you know, kinda what alpha school does. You can have… So there's various different things. A harness is more of the general term for… We put an LLM brain in a box, and we wanna make sure that it does what we want it to do. So So we build a bunch of systems that control the LLM. Yep.

Speaker 2: So it's

Speaker 1: kinda like the the nervous system for an LLM.

Speaker 2: And in the case of these products, we'll be getting to in a minute. Just the idea of, like, a consumer personal assistant has been since this technology came out. This guy, Peter Steinberger, I think is his name, comes up with it. Thank you. He comes up with it, and everyone goes, oh, this could be the thing that becomes Jarvis. You know what I mean? Like, the personal computer assistant that just does what you want because it has hooks into all of your digital life. This guy Peter Steinberger comes up with it. It's burning money for him because it's, like, super popular, and it's, like, $10,000 a month. So he… I can't remember if he got bought by or just hired by, but, basically, he ends up in… At OpenAI. He kind of takes it over that direction, please.

Speaker 1: He he got… Not Aqua hired, but hired.

Speaker 2: Right. Okay.

Speaker 1: The OpenClaw, I believe, is still held by the OpenClaw Foundation. Peter's still the head of that foundation, but then he went to… Within weeks, he had a… What I can only assume was a very lucrative offer to go join the OpenAI team pre IPO.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 1: To lead, I think, their agentic solutions team.

Speaker 2: Interesting.

Speaker 1: Some some other things that made this super famous, like, just to go into the research archives that I keep in my brain, is, Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder, one of the… If… It's gotta be one of the top three richest people in the world, if not second richest under I

Speaker 2: think so. Yeah. Those leather jackets don't come cheap.

Speaker 1: Famously, and if you didn't know this, and I probably mentioned this on the show, but his cousin is, the CEO of AMD. So Yeah. Their family reunions have to be a blast where you have two of the richest semiconductor, you know, moguls in the world.

Speaker 2: There's a sky ship somewhere.

Speaker 1: Totally. Yeah.

Speaker 2: You know?

Speaker 1: The the Taiwanese military is their personal personal security. Yeah. Anyway, the… To loop back, Jensen was on all in, and he was talking about OpenClaw right after it launched. It's, like, one of the largest progressions of of AI kind of that had happened to date. You know, the ability… Like, the the… One of the things that made OpenClaus so, like, so functional was that it had access to a full computer, and it had the ability to understand how to use that computer. So that's what really gave it the ability to start doing and automating things on behalf of the… I don't know what your master. I I don't know what the proper term for user. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I think user's still good. It's still software. You know? Yeah.

Speaker 1: Or masters. That was

Speaker 2: You could go that direction, Lorde. Like, I don't know. But I think I think user is good.

Speaker 1: Old time users. Yeah. Users. So the the user that was controlling it had had, the ability to do far more than any of the existing AI chat solutions because that's kinda where things were still at in that realm. There were some development harnesses like Cloud Code was out. Codecs might have been out, but there wasn't really anything for the person to help facilitate daily life. And and OpenClaw is one of those things. And it spawned off an entire ecosystem of multi agentic, you know, coordination and collaboration, and there's all kinds of worlds that came out of this.

Speaker 2: For sure. And part of the structure of this thing, OpenClaw, is is important for where we're going with the consumerization of this technology. Every OpenClaw agent had four files. I didn't know about this, but now the whole world knows about this because this is now becoming a recurring structure. You had agent, which was like the operating rules for this thing, like, just sort of super high level how it's supposed to work. You had user, which was like the users or masters in your case, preferences and habits.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Data on the user. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Memory dot m d, which is like its long term memory. Soul dot m d is its hyperbolically named, like, personality tone.

Speaker 1: It's like a real comprehensive system prompt.

Speaker 2: There you go. So you have agents, user, memory, soul. That is the sort of, like, a big part of the structure of this thing. The guy who makes it gets swooped up by OpenAI. Meanwhile, now Meta jumps in. They didn't win the hire. They were apparently in fierce competition over Peter. I… That's just allegedly, but they were trying to get him. They lose the hire, but they they jump in on this. And September 8, they launched this product Muse. So a user asked Muse to compare itself against open claw… Like, an open claw repo, and they were, like, immediately, like, well, you got a soul .md and memory dot… A memory .md, a user .md, and an identity .md in the directory. And Meta was basically like, oh, yeah. We were super heavily inspired by OpenClaw. The quote that I loved and the reason I wanted to talk about it was, well, they got those things exactly right.

Speaker 1: Let us all not forget that the head of AI safety at Facebook deleted her email with OpenClaw in the in the week after it launched.

Speaker 2: Getting things right, Scott. Go for it. Okay.

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Speaker 2: I bowled through part of that.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. The… I wanna jump back in time a bit if you wanna go. Because, actually, Grokbot was the first of these kind of new modern multi agent. I haven't used Muse that much. I installed it and tried it.

Speaker 2: No. I haven't.

Speaker 1: I just don't trust Facebook that much. So

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Speaker 1: So the… So GrokBot kinda spun up their own version of this, and it was out in market, I think, months ago.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: And it is, I would say, exceptional. Mhmm. Having used it quite a bit, you kinda have the ability to spawn up multiple agents. This is funny thing, and it's something that I talked to. There's a guy Theo. He makes t three code. It's like another coding harness. And I fired him a a a Twitter message one day, and I was like, hey. Could you add the ability to have the… Your agents message each other? And he was just like, no. And I was like, okay. And then Grokbot came out. And Grok… One of Grokbot's most powerful things is you can have group chats with agents. You can tell them to talk to each other. So you can, like, delegate something to, like, a production manager who then controls their entire team of resources to, like, you know, whether it's right code, they've got a QA person that's reviewing things. So you can kinda build an entire organization in GrokBot, which then they can kinda self manage a bit, which was kind of where the second generation of, like… When people got a hold of OpenClaw, they started saying, how do I get multiple of these things talking to each other and working together? So GrokBot kind of took that concept and built it into a commercial platform. Every single one of these agents, including Muse and including OpenAI's dots, which I'm sure we'll get to, one of the things that makes them so powerful is they essentially have a container virtualized computer. So every time you spin up an agent, it gives them their own computer to use where they can download stuff. They can open web browsers. They can, you know, they they are fully agentic with full computer backing. They have the ability to download stuff and install things. So… Yeah. Anyway, I don't know where I was going with that, but that's a bit of the history.

Speaker 2: It's it's… It… I think it is relevant to this because it… There's there's a little bit of a spread. Grokbot runs primarily on your computer. I think it has, like… It can talk to a… One of x's servers, but it's primarily… It's more like codec. Like, it's controlling files on your system. Right?

Speaker 1: The inside of a virtual container.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: And that virtual container actually lives in the cloud.

Speaker 2: Oh, okay. Interesting. So… No. So it's more akin to the user dots in that in that regard.

Speaker 1: It can control files on your computer. So, like, say you have it installed on your computer. If your computer's running, like, say you have a Mac mini from your OpenClaw days and you have Grok bots installed on it, it can actually go into the local file system and do stuff for you. But then it also has its own virtualized There's a that it that it works in. Okay.

Speaker 2: That was what I was curious about because I was… Claude bot seemed like it was like, you need to buy a Mac Mini because you're you're the server now. Like, it it needs to run everything locally. And Grokbot, I I had a sense it was a bit more cloud based. And then now we've ended up with Muse and Dots where it's entirely cloud based. It's like there's just a little virtual machine running on their servers. You don't need the… I mean, you need hardware to interact with it, but you don't need the Mac mini functioning because the server farm. Like, that is sort of where this productization has taken us to is, like, you don't wanna have to have a home hub for this stuff, so we'll just run that in the cloud encrypted blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 1: Well, OpenAI made news the other day for buying something like 40,000 of the new Mac minis. So I'm wondering if OpenAI Dots just isn't a Mac mini farm.

Speaker 2: It seems as though it was just like he kinda one shotted OpenClaw. Like, he didn't. And we shouldn't… I shouldn't say one shot because it implies that he vibe code it, which maybe he did.

Speaker 1: He agentically engineered it. It took him like a like a little, like, couple months maybe.

Speaker 2: He nailed the structure is kind of where I'm going with that. It was like the basic architecture of it is like, it will evolve, but it was like he kind of figured out the rough skeletal structure of one of these things. Sure. Eons of advancement and stuff, but, like, the basic the basic bones of it. And though he ended up at OpenAI, Meta then announced this new consumer technology product called Muse. It is a application. It is a little Tamagotchi style. I think they call

Speaker 1: it charm. Same as same as Grokbot.

Speaker 2: Does Grokbot have physical hardware?

Speaker 1: No. Grokbot is is is essentially the exact same thing as DOTS and Muse. But they… The… Oh, no. Muse has the Tamagotchi.

Speaker 2: DOTS has the Tamagotchi.

Speaker 1: Rock bots. Have a look. Agentic icons look almost exactly the same.

Speaker 2: Oh, really? Just the little the little shapes. The little they remind

Speaker 1: you of breakfast cereal. Animated eyes and stuff.

Speaker 2: I called them breakfast cereal. I'm like, it's the little stars, the… It's the, marshmallows in the lucky charms. So they roll out this application. It climb… It does very, very well. Meta has no problem building out a social graph. Like, between Instagram and threads, they can just direct so much traffic that this thing naturally… Facebook, climbed up the charts, did very, very well. And it's

Speaker 1: Number one for two or three weeks at this point, I think?

Speaker 2: Basically, they're trying to say, like, Grokbot is really, really good if… It's like you can wire it into your Slack and your Discord and your email, and it's it's it's very like a work productivity aimed thing, I would say, is at least how they're marketing it. I'm sure it has personal application, but it's really marketed as like a work thing. You could tell they're really trying to market Muse between the app, the vibe of the videos, the little muse charm Tamagotchi key chain thing. They're really marketing this as, like, a consumer personal assistant. The use case that everyone keeps talking to is like, check my email and find all those, I don't know, Home Depot bills or this type of file and do this with them. Like, something that's sort of a brute force task. They're really

Speaker 1: subscribe me from all the mailing lists that fill my inbox up every morning.

Speaker 2: A 100%. And then the other feature is just this idea that it's, a little bit running in the background. It is spending a little bit of time, say, when you're sleeping, like, checking stuff that happened throughout the day to see if it missed anything so that you could wake up to some kind of message from it, kind of like a personal assistant getting ahead to this type of thing. The thing that is important, however, for all of this is that it is being made by the company Meta, formerly known as Facebook, still run by Mark Zuckerberg, a company with, and I… I'll put this generously, a reputational trust issue. And this technology requires, say you want this thing to organize your email, you have to let it log into your email.

Speaker 1: And read all your emails and associate everything about you to you in the meta marketing network. Yes. Look at every receipt of everything you've ever bought.

Speaker 2: Yep. Reply to your messages. Just give me your messages. There's reason I don't use Grokbot. But it, like, it… And it is the same thing as, like, there's a… There's an expression. It's about physical hardware, so not about software. Software is different, but it's, friends don't let friends use, gen one products.

Speaker 1: Totally. Open claw.

Speaker 2: And I'm like, pardon me. Fuck me. This is a gen one product if I ever wanted to not use one. Like

Speaker 1: Oh, Muse?

Speaker 2: All of them. Like, I'm I'm I'm waiting. I'm not saying there's no application for this. Like, there is a point where I'm like, you know what? It's kinda like if I search for a photo on my computer and the file name is, like, 71234895, but it's a photograph of a tree. If I search tree on my computer, I would like it to surface that image. That is a relevant application of this type of technology that's useful to my life that can be done securely in a way that makes sense for me. And then if there were two products, one of which had it, I pick the one that had it. This isn't there yet. It will become there. It will get to a point where I'm like, I wouldn't buy some, computer that couldn't organize my bills in my email for me, but I'm not going gen one on it just personally.

Speaker 1: I I had this conversation the other day with my brother-in-law about AI and, like, this… I was just, get… Bringing him up to date on the current state of it. Sure. He was still living in a Copilot, you know, chat t p t, like Right. Chat window.

Speaker 2: It's preharness.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And he was asking me about it, and we're talking through all the different platforms, the developers, and what people are doing and the controversies around them. And I was like, really? The only one that I really kinda trust is Google. They're generally considered corporate enterprise. They have data security agreements in our enterprise accounts

Speaker 2: Understood.

Speaker 1: For people that I trust to uphold the law. On the meanwhile, you've got Dario from Anthropic running around saying Anthropic's gonna be the only company in the world in, like, ten years because they're just gonna take over every industry after they steal the intellectual property from them. I'm not… That's not a a verbatim quote. I'm just, like, expanding and and commenting on it.

Speaker 2: I I know I know the sentiment you're talking to. He is, let us say, taking a buck wild approach to a pre IPO PR tour. I'll just call it that. It's like strange tactic, sir. Let's see how it goes.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And the same kinda energy from OpenAI, but a bit different. Mhmm.

Speaker 2: You

Speaker 1: know, a little bit less, altruism and a little bit more consumerism. And then you've got Elon who's kinda Elon. He's kinda like I'm a free speech or die kind of person, which kinda so am I. And, you know, you love him or hate him, and it… That's on you to to choose. Really, there's nobody that walks in the space that's kind of, like, clean, and Google, I would say, is the cleanest.

Speaker 2: I know I know what you mean. Google gives IBM. Google gives, like, our lawyers are here. Like, the lawyers said we can do… I'm like, okay. That that… They also have built an empire on selling seemingly private data for ad… It's like they're an advertising empire. Like, I'm not gonna give them a big badge for privacy, but, like, I I know what you're saying. OpenAI is like, well, Sam Altman is something of a specter. I don't know. Like, I… I'm just I'm just like… I'm almost… We're all kinda just watching to see what kind of ruler of the world he's gonna turn out to be, but I think generally speaking, skepticism is warranted in all of these cases, not just about him. Grok x, I don't know if I would call you a Musk free speech warrior. He's an… A Musk speech warrior, but I understand his reputation. I'm not giving it my private information, but best of luck. And then meta is like, hard no for me, like, all of the rest of them. There's this sense of like, let's see how you do it. That one. I'm like, I just fully don't trust you. Like, it's sort of in its own little box for me over here. I'd love to interview Mark. I really would. It would be very awkward, but but I would sure like to do it. I have questions. I don't have a great deal of trust, and it is based on history of performance. It's Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? Like

Speaker 1: The the thing for me that really jumps out is I think the entire AI space is moving at this clip of ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Speaker 2: 100%.

Speaker 1: And they're doing it very intentionally, I think. And, like, you're seeing that with things like the… We never covered on the show, but we can have a brief chat about now is the the mathematical problem, the Navier Stokes

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Solution that OpenAI came up with. And I'm air quoting for the listeners that aren't watching on video. Sure. Theoretically, they got the theory and hypothesis that they submitted a billion dollars of agent time at from training data that came from conversations that, like, math researchers

Speaker 2: were

Speaker 1: having with codex to try and work through the thoughts of their problem hasn't been confirmed or denied. I'm saying this allegedly. The… But but that is… That's kind of the thing. They're they're all looking for what is a great PR story that I can release. Hey. If we cracked one of the Millennium Prize mathematics problems, that would be awesome. Hey. Guess what? Our new training dataset has this, like, really promising theory that comes from all of these very promising PhDs in math that are working on solving this as their life's work, and we're just gonna submit, you know, a $100,000,000 of compute time over thirty days and just knock it out. And then, hey. Look at our press launch. Like, look what we just did. Look what AI can do.

Speaker 2: That's so interesting. That… And that's kind of a recurring thing to listen to… No. Allegedly. But that's what's interesting is we also saw that on the security side of things. These companies have these these models rigged up into this agentic structure to broadly gloss over it, that if you then combine that with functionally unlimited capital of just like, how many servers running for how long? Those kinds of questions that most mortal people would just be like, well, there's just a limit. If I run it for more than a week, it will bankrupt me kind of thing that they can kind of just be like, point all of it, like the fire hose of the entire tech industry perched atop the entire economy, pointed at a security problem. And this, like, Dragon Ball z energy beam blasts at the energy problem, and they're like, oh, cracked it. Pointed at this math problem and the Dragon Ball z energy beam just at this math problem, and maybe they… Sounds like in some cases, they've cracked it. I think that's the shape of PR for these companies for the foreseeable future is like, in in a way that is not reproducible by the general public. Can we just point this thing at something and see what it can do? And then we get to put out a press release that's good news instead of bad news.

Speaker 1: I'm kinda here for it. Like, I hear what you're saying, but I'm also kinda I'm also kinda here for it. If we're gonna do this and we're gonna bring in and, like, the power consumption and all the rest of it, if we're gonna go down this road, we should do it for the betterment of society. And if they're gonna choose that going after Millennium Prize math things and, you know, Turing situations, like any kind of major development in in science is where they wanna point that fire hose, I'm kinda there for

Speaker 2: it. Mhmm.

Speaker 1: I don't like the, like, IP… Alleged IP theft side of it. But I but I don't hate the fact that, you know, the mathematicians that were working on it probably never would've… Could've… Like, probably never would've solved it because they didn't have the fire hose of intellectual capacity that was provided for. So so so I'd like… I like I like the idea that we're using it for good. No idea. Than than turning that fire hose on, like, consuming Jordan's emails and figuring out what how to best market something to him.

Speaker 2: Or serving the ads at a scale and specificity never achieved before in human history. I I hear what you're saying. Two things. One, in a hit… In a first for this show, when it comes to the question of IP theft, do we have to say allegedly? And the second thing is the second thing is, like, I was I wasn't even critic… I was just describing, Like, that's not even, like, a criticism that you shouldn't be doing that. I'm like, I guess if you were to be doing anything, because it's not happening at scale too. Like, I'm so much less worried about the… Some of the ethical dimensions of AI, because it's like, well, that… That's not happening at scale. You're just… There's just steam shooting out of one room. I have a a different kind of set of questions about that. I'm intrigued by it. I I think if you can cure a disease or solve a math problem is a good PR day for you, have had it, guys. Like, that seems like a good… An instance of a good use of this technology. I would agree.

Speaker 1: So that's where I'm living. Like, Google's alpha fold, like, protein models.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: They've got LLMs custom trained on proteins. They they had a theory about kind of why we age. And it's this jumbling of amino acids and proteins that kinda gum up together, and our body gets worse at clearing out kind of like the dead waste inside of ourselves. Sure. So they they kind of took this idea, ran it through AlphaFold, and said, hey. Build us something that'll break this stuff down. And so they ran it against it. They came… The AlphaFold came back and said, hey. We think these compounds or amino acids will help kind of clear this garbage out of your cellular… Out of your cells.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: They fabricate this stuff, and then they start using it on on trials. And it's, like, wicked good. They take donor skin from, like, 75 year old people and apply it in a cream form, and the skin rejuvenates back to a 35 year old skin. They start looking at inflammation and, you know, other byproducts of aging that happen in our physical bodies, the arthritis, things like this, and it's cleaning it up. And I'm like, this is what I want for my AI future.

Speaker 2: Yeah. You

Speaker 1: know, I want my my eighties to feel like my thirties. And Yeah. You know, the people that I love to be healthy because we've got r m and a vaccines for cancers coming out. I don't know if you saw that Moderna Moderna had a clinical trial successful. This is the… This is where I want the fire hose pointed. I could care less about… I can send my own emails. Thanks.

Speaker 2: I think… Dude, I I honestly think that, like, the speed at which this technology became such a cornerstone of the tech industry, which is itself such cornerstone of the entire economy is, like, not to its benefit. If the state of this technology right now was a bunch of brilliant people in a skunk work situation, being like, we're here toiling to try and solve this very specific problem. And you just had that in a bunch of places, and there wasn't the gigantic, like, magnetic pull of propping up the economy with, like, can I get you to buy a $39 a month subscription, please? Like, if it wasn't all oriented towards that and it was much more about the Skunk Works five of just solving it… Solving intractable problems. Totally. And we heard about it….

Speaker 1: 100 of the best researchers from every major challenge that humanity's facing….

Speaker 2: AI 4% of the time that we're hearing about it, because it doesn't need the market, the all the PR and spin and bullshit. There's, it would just be a totally different ecosystem, and probably for the better. But instead, I have to ask the question, can amuse make me live forever, Scott? And that's where we find ourselves instead.

Speaker 1: No, I'm use is gonna anger everybody you email by sending horribly written Jenna AI content. The

Speaker 2: Why did they give it a fat booty? Scott? This is the thing I don't understand. Why did they give Muse a booty?

Speaker 1: I didn't realize that was a thing.

Speaker 2: They… Look it up. They gave Muse a booty. It's so strange. Anyway

Speaker 1: I think the only other thing that I really wanna talk about is there was kind of a new model launched in the last couple weeks. Mhmm. So instead of, like, a GPT general purpose transformer, I've been kind of in my head calling these things like GPC general purpose classifiers. So really what they do is they… You send them in a bunch of options, and it weights them based on what it thinks is the appropriate output. These models aren't really for human consumption. They're for genta consumption. Like, they speak almost entirely in structured structured data. So if you have a software system that's doing something, it needs to evaluate… Like, say, I send you an email and it needs to evaluate if it's spam. It says, hey. General purpose classifier, tell me if this is spam or not. It reads the email and reassigns it essentially awaiting a probability percentage of whether it's spam or not, and then it returns that structured data back to the software system that says, okay. This is 96% spam. Throw it in the spam box. So TypeSafe released this thing early access September 15. It's almost free to use. Like, the API costs are, like, negligible. It kinda broke the software engineering AI agentic world for a few days as people… Because typically, if you ask an LLM a question like that, it burns all these resources, thinking tokens, and then it returns you, like, a text

Speaker 2: prompt. Language prompts. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Distill into, like, a binary to be, like, did it say yes or did it say no?

Speaker 2: Skips that.

Speaker 1: And this skips all of that. So in, in OpenAI Dots fashion, OpenAI released their decisions API, a couple days ago at their new release at their developer days. So they've essentially saw the motivation behind what's called JEV, JEV by typesafe, founded by a former OpenAI employee, reinforcement learner. He went and founded Type Safe. They make JEV. Now OpenAI has the decisions API, which is pretty much the same thing. So you can kinda send it binary information or, like, not even binary. You can send it, like, a a list of questions with potential outputs, and it will score the outputs based on what the likelihood that that is. So this is truthfully from, like, somebody that likes to write code and deal with agentic harnesses. This is a huge step for us because this will allow us to make a lot of quick decisions, especially when you think about a harness. So if you've got, like, a verification step. So say say you and I were to build a harness to do, like, some deep research. First thing we do is we ask it the question or give it the topic. It takes that topic and says, what is my research plan? It develops a plan for how it wants to that research. Then it goes through it and figures out what it can do in serial or what it had… What it can parallelize, like, has a bunch of steps. But then say at the end of a return point, it says, okay. I… This is the output that the model's prepared for me For this section of the plan, does this meet the needs? Am I verifying it? Was it… Is it… Are any of these hallucinations? Is everything properly referenced? Etcetera, etcetera. You could just fire that into something like a decisions API or a JEV and be like, are these conditions met? And it'll score it. That's typically something that would have been much harder and consumed way more IP, like, API tokens to ask an LN to do. So these models are gonna be big game changers when it comes to actually developing the harnesses, truthfully.

Speaker 2: Fascinating.

Speaker 1: So I just I just wanted to note it because, you know, we noted… We talked about GPT when it came out.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's like… It's more little, like, organs inside of this organism of, like, okay. Nervous systems developing. Totally. It was like, I don't know, the nerve cells in your toe versus your brain. And up until this point, it's like every nerve system… Every nerve ending is a whole brain. Like, we're gonna point all that energy at the the little one spot on your foot or whatever. And it's like, no. What if we had a a much streamlined lighter energy use, faster thing for these sort of, like, little quick categorization problems is kinda what I'm hearing.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Exactly. Like, the the transformer architecture was always an inherently amazing classifier.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: So, like, I've actually written some code that has used the transformer architecture as a classifier, and these people essentially took that one step farther and turned it into essentially its own model. So it has all of the knowledge of a of a real model, but with essentially a really light API front end that you can just ask it classification questions, and it will score the different outputs based on what the likelihood is, which is kinda how it generates tokens of output. Right? Like, we send it a question, and all it's doing is looking at the the the next highest probability token to send out. That's all it's doing. So, really, that's all this is doing. But instead of returning the token, it's returning the score. Something that's very fascinating to me as a developer that builds harnesses, so I wanted to mention it because it is big. It is a big deal, and it's a big big enough deal that within weeks, OpenAI had their own announcement of one.

Speaker 2: Oh, it's another one of those. Sure. So someone rolls one out and everyone else is like, we have one of those too. I think the speed at which these companies can all sort of just gobble up the ideas from their competitors is like, in a world where copyright infringement is no more, everyone moves kind of at the same speed.

Speaker 1: Totally. When when when code is free, like, if you're OpenAI or Claude, you've got the infrastructure and the compute horsepower that you can generate pretty much anything you want. Yeah. And you've got teams of some of the best, you know, harness engineers in the world.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Sure. And if it's already been done by someone else, you can just give the finished… Give the Git repo from whatever project you want. Give the… Just give a design document describing what it achieves, and it's like, sure. We'll just take one of those.

Speaker 1: Send a web link. It'll write its own design document.

Speaker 2: I mean, that was the speed at which dot… Like, I'm sure dots has been under development for a long time. The… I wanna say three d custom animated little dot guys, which is interesting. Someone took a while to work on those. Like, I believe this was in process for quite a while. But you can't imagine the situation where Muse came out and they were like, you have twenty four hours to make a comparable product. It doesn't have to launch, but it has to look finished enough that we can do a big one more thing style, marketing announcement. The question I wanna end on, Scott, is DOTS and Muse, which one is cuter? I don't wanna talk about functionality. I I don't wanna talk about privacy.

Speaker 1: Thoughts. Thoughts. Yeah. I I do wanna talk about something. Like, I wanna I wanna push back on something you just said, even though I… We probably should end this episode and move on. But the, If

Speaker 2: you're still here, you can just stop listening at any point. We appreciate you. You've made it to the end, but we're we're in the trough now. Please.

Speaker 1: DOTS does feel very bolted on to me. Like, it is inside of the codecs app.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: It's… It doesn't have, like, the interface is literally just codecs, but with a new logo on the side. Sure. Like, when you when you deal with Muse or you deal with GrokBot, it feels like they've built they've built an application optimizing for the delivery of the specific service, where DOTS just feels like, hey. We're launching this. Shove it into the next, like, release of the app. So so to me to me, funny enough, even though OpenAI is the one that hired the OpenClaw founder, They, to me, feel like they have released what I would consider to be the most bolted on feeling of this… Of the product. Interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't think I would disagree with that. That's pushing back on something I said. I think that that's probably true.

Speaker 1: Because, like, Muse feels very like we've been building this.

Speaker 2: It's… You… The hardware is for as much as I don't want that hardware, the hardware is the evidence that, like, you've been you've been working on something. Like, you had to make this little Apple Watch without a strap at some point. Like… Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yes. That… That's good evidence

Speaker 2: for them.

Speaker 1: You could tell that Meta's been structuring into this.

Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Grokbot felt like Grokbot felt like somebody took OpenClaw and said, what is the best version of this? And let's build it custom now. And they did that, and it's really good. Dots to me feels like OpenClaw's number one in the in the App Store, and it just got bumped to number two by Muse. Where's our solution for it? Get it out the door. We have an IPO to get to.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 1: Kinda my kinda my read on it.

Speaker 2: They're cuter, though.

Speaker 1: The the Dots. The dots? Yeah. Did you look up the GrokBot dots?

Speaker 2: No. GrokBot dots. Oh, they're flat. Oh, so this is interesting. I have more of an opinion and insight into this type of thing. In terms of, like, the the visual design of these things, croc bots and dots are very, very similar. Croc bots are just flat, and dots are sort of a faux three d render y Pixar thing. The other thing I find fascinating about the visual design of these things is that muse… So, dots are a series of non choices. It's like, what do their eyes look like? And it's like, yes. It's like that some of them have little recessed black dot eyes. Some of them have big Pixar eyes with the white circle around them. Some of them have drawn line eyes under a pair of, like, glasses just like a swoopy line. So there was no choice made there. Whereas, Mew's eyeballs are just always these little dead eyes, just like a little too pinprick black things. It always has the same sort of expression on its face. Grokbot's kind of in the middle. It's these little flat shapes, but they're different shapes each time.

Speaker 1: Color code them. You can choose you can choose the shape. You could choose the eyes, and you can choose the color.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: I feel like Dots is gonna be very much the same, where Muse is

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: Like a creepy teddy bear that It's a creepy little teddy bear. Sure has been… I'm sure there's been so many research groups meet about the design of this thing that it would make your head spin.

Speaker 2: A 100%. Empires Empires.

Speaker 1: On it. Millions of people have been paid to sit in in research sessions and respond to how they feel about every version of this before it got released.

Speaker 2: And they're they're very customizable. Like, in one of the mock ups, it was like a dog instead of the little, like, teddy bear thing. So it's like, oh, they're definitely AI generated. They've seemed to have been, like, curated by hand to have certain aesthetics, but they're fundamental. The other thing I find fascinating from, like, a UI, UX perspective is the pluralization juxtaposition where dots are plural. You can have dots, and they're meant to be these little, like, Navi from Zelda esque things that flutter around and do things. You have many of them. I think meta muse seems to have made, I I think, a pretty important decision to make it like, no. It's your muse. You can change what it looks like, you can change how it talks, but it's… There's one and it's yours. And that's like a non… That's an arbitrary choice that has no impact on how it works really, but it's this, like, emotional relationship thing. The back end would be like, okay. Spin up another one and don't tell me and say it's the same thing. But it's this, like, emotional, design choice.

Speaker 1: I I disagree. I'm gonna push back again. I think that the big difference, like, between… So Grok bots Grok bot, which has multiple bots.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 1: So you literally spin up a persona, a soul dot m d for everybody that… For every team member, support person, what… However you're using it.

Speaker 2: Sure. I see what you're saying.

Speaker 1: You're you're spinning up agents for specific roles. Those agents can then collaborate on a larger project. There's kind of a more organizational structure to it. Dots here. That's Kerak over here. Dots, I have not used because it literally hasn't launched in Canada. Thanks. That's the product. I believe it is the same structure. You can spin up multiple agents where… So you're kinda getting domain specialists, and you can engage with them directly, or you can put a manager bot or, like, a personal assistant bot or an executive assistant or whatever you want. A chief of staff is a classic term in the bot… In the agentic bot world

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Who coordinates all the bots underneath you. So when you ask them for something in market research, they'll talk to the market research agent. If they ask them for this, they'll talk to somebody anyway.

Speaker 2: Yep. Great.

Speaker 1: Muse is meant to be, I think, be like a personal assistant.

Speaker 2: That's that's what I'm saying. Yes.

Speaker 1: So so you only talk to the orchestration bot? If they wanna spin up sub agents to do tasks in the background, they will do that. But I don't think you'll ever… I don't think they have a hierarchy of independent bots that use different computers. They just have the ability to kick off sub agents to go, hey. Go look up the 10 cheapest flights to Cabo during this week, and they'll kick off an agent to go do that. Where if you were using something like DOTS or Grok bots, you might have, like, a shopping agent who… That's their entire role. It's just going out to find you the best prices. And they'll come back and ask you a bunch of questions about what you're looking for, and you interact with them much more like a staff member.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: So I I think I think there is a there is a structural and architectural difference between the two.

Speaker 2: I hear what you're saying.

Speaker 1: I just disagree.

Speaker 2: No. But it's it's like, how do I put this? It's like those are the same thing, but Met is making the design choice to never let me talk to the subordinate. So, yes, that is an architectural difference, but it strikes me as more of a design choice where it's like, we… We're just gonna never let you talk or spin up any subordinates. We're gonna keep it high level with Clippy. So you are right. There is there is a structural difference, but to me, it expresses itself as just like Meta wants this to just be… Meta doesn't want you spinning up a sales agent. The sentence spin up a sales agent is like arsenic to these products, I would imagine from Meta's perspective. They're like, talk to… Tell the robot what to do. But I wanna spin up a sub agent that's gonna coordinate with the… Then this isn't for you, brother. Tell the robot what you want it to do, and it will spin up the teammates and the sub agents and all that stuff. Is the sense I got from watching it is that they're trying to, like like, dehackerify OpenClaw. They're like, do you wanna create sub agents that can do it? Then don't use this. Yeah. This is for…

Speaker 1: This is the family friendly one. You just talk to you talk to Jessica.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: Jessica does what you needed. And it doesn't matter if it's figure out my meta marketing strategy or sell my old tennis racket on Facebook Marketplace. Jessica will take care of it for you.

Speaker 2: Actually, good use of it. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Well, funny enough, I've read some… Well, actually, the, I read some x chatter about Muse this weekend, and somebody had given it control of their Facebook Marketplace. Said, hey. You know, deal with these people that keep messaging me about all these things. It accepted low balls. It was like… It was just it was just going to town. Yeah. So so I'm not sure if it's the best. Yeah. Not sure if it's the best for that stuff.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Sure. Oh, that's interesting. And I mean, that's the other… We haven't even talked about the, like, efficacy. We've talked about that. Not efficacy, but like, the the privacy. We've talked about all those other dimensions. Then there's just the question of how good is it gonna work. And we're recording this too soon after it came out for anyone to know, which is, like, a really interesting moment. So in a couple weeks when we do another chatty chat episode, we will probably report back on this.

Speaker 1: There there is a… To speak about efficacy, I could talk about these things all day because, like, I literally am fascinated by this. Mhmm. The… Once you go to a muse model where, say, you have a one conduit into a team

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Your token spend and use goes way up. Because if you if you wanna speak to the sales agent and you go directly to them and say, hey. How were sales last week? What's our plan for next week? Or whatever, however you're using it.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 1: You go straight to them. They ask you the direct questions. You kind of get into that cycle with them, and it only consumes the tokens, and they have their own cache for the cash data. So so it… It's much cheaper. The second you go to, you know, the orchestrator and then you ask them, and if maybe they go to, like, the Jordan sales team manager, and then they ask the person who's in charge of that exact sales plan, you're paying for tokens and caching and inputs and outputs and and redigestion and reformulation all through the tree. So if you're looking to maximize… To minimize

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: The amount of compute required, creating a corridor through somebody like a muse

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Is way more costly than than allowing people to go to direct agents that understand the context of the question you're asking it in rather than going through the, like, conduit. So…

Speaker 2: No. It's fascinating. Right? I think that how how these things are architected probably will become like a sales differentiator, like, not to turn the tech talk into, like, the marketing business side of things. But it's like, eventually, these things are gonna live and die by, like, are people willing to spend money on them and to buy the hardware that comes along with them? And I'm I'm putting the number of MetaMuse, Tamagotchis I'm expecting to see out in the world at zero. OpenAI, maybe a better shot at it. See what Jony Ive does. Let's find out if that $6,000,000,000 was worth it. Apple and Google with the Pixel line have some funnel for getting you to carry hardware around, like just the basics of not making a product called pervert glasses. Like, they just have a totally different relationship with the consumer hardware market than Meta does and certainly that OpenAI does.

Speaker 1: I would say that I see… I… The amount of Meta Ray Bans that I see these days is shocking. They're very common.

Speaker 2: They're common, they're a rounding error to smartphones. I guess this may be where I'm going with that. You know what I mean? But I think that matters. I think that matters. That is the cluster. I'm not gonna show my phone right now, but that is the cluster of cameras and microphones and GPS trackers that we already carry with us in the absence of a a killer product, that will remain the hub in which all of this stuff happens. So I'm still thinking of it as, like, it is the phone's race to lose as the heart… The AI hardware thing that everyone uses. Apple's trying to be like, you already have AirPods. Could those have a camera in them? And it's like TBD. If people will go for that, they've already done it with the Apple Watch, but I'm like, that constellation of accessories orbiting the phone, I'm like, that's that's probably gonna be it for the foreseeable future. And two companies have a stranglehold on the software operating system of those devices. They just do. To your point, like

Speaker 1: Yeah. I… I'm… Like, the phones, like, phones blew up. The app, iPhone blew up because it was extensible. Right? People had the ability to custom build solutions and tools to install on it. You You know, the marketplace, the App Store is really what, like, I would say one of the top two reasons why, you know, the iPhone changed the world. Yeah. It changed our relationship with access to information in a self discovery sense. You know, notifications are are not so self discovery anymore, which is why I have them mostly turned off because they drive me crazy. But I think our relationship with access to to knowledge and information and the extensibility and the ability to extend the product through the development of applications, installation of tools, and utilities you wanted is what made the phones cool. Yep. And and not just cool. Life changing history defining. The the person who needs to make the AI… Physical AI tool Yeah. Needs to think about those situations, think about how our relationship with knowledge has changed, Think about self discovery as still a key aspect of it instead of forced discovery. So that's why I think that the Google XR project was the one that I was most interested in because I feel like they had the best perspective on it where, like, I don't… And then once again, going back to my trust for the meta corporation, not so high. Don't know if I wanna slap an always on set of glasses on my face.

Speaker 2: My face sees a lot of stuff, and I think that this is like a… This is a a problem for the whole wearables market is the, the floor of privacy expectations is so much higher on a thing that is always on my face.

Speaker 1: Well, we also have to talk about efficacy again. The second you put a live video stream that you're piping into an LLM, asking it to do visual recognition and then knowledge generation and then delivering stuff to you in a real time thing, the the token used for that, like, you'd hit a $200 monthly subscription in minutes.

Speaker 2: The compute implicate a 100%. And those models will get more efficient. You'll find a way to run it locally on blah blah blah blah blah. But a 100% the… I'm in agreement that the core functionality promise of these things, which is the robot already knew, is, like, the implications of that are dizzying. Like, you you are you are… It is a… Again, to firehouse metaphor of data that every human being is is producing. Unless you are finding a way to run that locally on a device that I guess is just plugged into the wall because you would still have energy use, you have, like, punted the problem of this. We we can do it. It's just not efficient enough to do it in the hardware that you're talking about in many of the prescribed use cases. Yeah.

Speaker 1: I… And I think, like, the general purpose classifier type models, the JEVs and the OpenAI decisions, I I think that they're gonna figure out ways to optimize and make those very lightweight, like, be able to really crush the amount of dimensions in them to make them very usable in a specific medium. So all of a sudden you'd be walking around with your glasses, and it'll be feeding a frame being like, is there a car in this? And it'll be like 68%. Yes. It's like, okay. That's not high enough. It doesn't meet our threshold, and etcetera, etcetera. So I I think that we're gonna see some of those highly tuned micro models get really good. And especially once you have them built so that they're so fast and so cheap to run, if they could run something like that locally, even if it was paired to your phone and it was running on your phone, that's when I think we open up a lot of the gates that allow more of that knowledge discovery to come in to play without being so token intensive. Yeah. But but that but that would also be my key argument for not having it force knowledge discovery and making sure that, like, it only responds when I ask it for something. I don't want constant notifications every time I look at something. If I look at something and say, what kind of car is that? I want it to tell me. I don't want it to just be constantly telling me everything going on around me. Like, I've got enough enough things in my mind already, let alone have the overwhelming amount of information flashing in my eyes twenty four hours a day.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Everything you just said is the reason I don't want the architects of the suck up your attention and monetize it with an algorithm. Like, the people who I most associate with that kind of toxic behavior In, like, in a court setting, the dopamine cycle, the the, like, let's get away from the the linear feed. Let's get to this algorithm that pulls you in. It takes things that we're gonna show you the thing that's gonna bring you in. And if we show you something that kicks you out, we're never gonna show it to you again. The smartest people of a generation working on that problem of my attention, and now it's like, you just described, like… And I don't want hardware that works that way for this new computing style. And I'm like, guess who I don't trust? And it's not just because of privacy leaks and stuff like that. It's not that service level thing. It's about how they approach design problems and the preferencing of the company versus the user. I'm like, I I harbor a skepticism about that. Anyway, Muse Muse Muse has a booty. Anything else?

Speaker 1: Thanks again to our sponsor NordLayer. Check them out. Nordlayer.com/hackpodcast.

Speaker 2: Thank you as always to NordLayer. This was a fun one. If you're still here, hey. We're we're really happy to have you. I don't think we've done one of these since we switched to video.

Speaker 1: And and not… Don't drop us a comment, not for, like, the engagement harvest thing, like, classics YouTubers

Speaker 2: Totally.

Speaker 1: Or or or Spotify podcasters. Just drop us a comment to know if you made it here.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Drop us a comment if you made it to the end. Thank you again for joining us for another one. This is fun. We haven't done a chatty chat in a while, so it's it's it's a good time, and we'll, we'll catch you in the next one.

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