AI NEWS: 6 New Tools, OpenAI's GPT Atlas Plans & Claude Code

Welcome to the Next Wave podcast. I'm Matt Wolf and today we're back with another round of AI news, and you're definitely going to want to hear this one. This week, Maria and I break down some huge stories shaping the future of AI. From OpenAI's surprise launch of the Atlas browser and what it really means for how we'll use the Internet, to Microsoft's latest AI upgrades inside of Windows, to Anthropic's new Claude code that can change how developers work forever. It's a packed episode full of breakthroughs, hot takes and a few laughs along the way.

So.

So let's jump over and chat with Maria Garib. So, once again today, I've got Maria, the head writer of the Mindstream newsletter, joining me on the show today, and we're going to deep dive in the news once again. So thanks again, Maria, for hanging out with me.

A lot has happened last week, so we have a lot to cover today.

I feel like the biggest story of the past week or so was OpenAI's atlas. Oh, yeah, it kind of came out of nowhere. Like, I didn't know they were planning a live stream for Atlas until the day of the livestream. I saw the countdown and went, oh, they're announcing something today. So that was my sort of entry point to it. Didn't even see it coming.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, when it comes to Sam Altman, it's always the element of surprise. We thought, like, Mark Zuckerberg does that, but no, it's actually Sam as well. So I was really surprised by the launch.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's been rumblings for a while that OpenAI is working on a browser. So we kind of knew at some point there was a browser eventually, but not.

Not like two days ago or like three days ago.

Yeah, it definitely came quicker than I expected because it was only like, I don't know, maybe two months ago that OpenAI was literally trying to buy Chrome from Google, so.

Exactly, exactly my point.

But I guess underneath the hood, it's still chromium. It's still like the bones of the Chrome browser, just with like, yeah, OpenAI features baked into it.

I like the name Atlas. They were very creative with this one. So the idea is that instead of, like, switching tabs and like, pasting links, ChatGPT kind of like it follows you around and follows you everywhere. So you're scrolling through like a recipe or, like, it can order the ingredients of that specific recipe. And if you like reading a job post, you know, and like, you don't want your manager to see. Also, it can summarize it. So if you want to plan a trip, it'll start building, like, the whole itinerary, which has pretty wild. Basically, Atlas wants to be that friend who finishes your sentences. But, like, in a browser kind of turn, it got agent mode built in, which basically means that ChatGPT can click Research, plan, and even book stuff while you're still browsing before anyone asks, because people are gonna ask this question. It's built with optional browser memory so it can remember what you were working.

On, but it does have an incognito mode. So if you want to be browsing something that you don't want it to.

Remember, if you want to be shady about it. Yeah, it has it like these. Yeah. If you want to be shady, that's. Yeah, 100%. It feels like OpenAI finally kind of stepped in, stepped out of the chatbot phase. It had a phase mom and into the workflow sort of phase. And everyone's been saying, AI will live where you work. And this is exactly it.

So the way I see it, the way where I think OpenAI is kind of going with this is I think they want to get it to the point where you don't even use your browser anymore. Like, your browser is just a tool that goes and does stuff for you. That's where I think they're trying to go with it, you know? So right now, you get into the Atlas browser, you can chat with it in the little. Right. Sidebar that pops up. You can turn on the agent mode if you're on one of their paid plans and say, hey, go do this shopping for me. Or read this art like you just mentioned, right? Read this article that has a recipe on it. Go find all the ingredients for me and order enough ingredients so I can make this recipe for 20 people. Right? It'll do that math. Figure out, like, the amount of ingredients, go to the store, order them for you, and then stop short of just of making the payment, right? It'll say, hey, I put it all in the cart. Do you want to make the payment? It will actually prompt you.

I could just pay this. Yeah, exactly.

And so right now you're typing in this little sidebar, right? But I think what they want to do is they want to get it to a point where once they roll out, like, a mobile version of it and. And they get the audio features more dialed in, you just prompt everything with your voice. So I can be, you know, hanging out with a friend. And I really like the shoes they're wearing. And I'm like, oh, those shoes are really cool. Let me, let me order some, take a picture of the shoes and go, hey, Atlas, order me a pair of these shoes. It looks at the image, figures out what the shoes are, goes to the, does the research on where to find them, finds the best price on the shoes among multiple outlets and, and then places the order for you. And all you did was give it a, you know, a spoken prompt into your phone. Like, I think they want to remove actually using the browser. I think that's the long term picture for them is actually make it so we're not even thinking about using a browser anymore. Just make the Internet prompt. I give it a prompt and it can go and take actions for me in the browser without me needing to open the browser and do the things anymore. Yeah. And then, you know, there is this sort of more pessimistic take that I have on things. I mean, it's not overly pessimistic. I just know that OpenAI, they need to figure out how to drive more revenue right now, right? They're, I mean they're losing billions of dollars a year. I think every prompt you enter into something like Chat GPT, they actually lose a little bit of money on every time you enter a prompt. So they actually really, really, really need to find new monetization methods. And by having, you know, an app like Sora where you're scrolling a feed like TikTok or Instagram, right, that opens up a new platform where they could put ads into it. When you have a browser that more and more people are using, that opens up another platform that you can put ads into, Potentially even opens up like recommended products. Like I just gave you an example of me just talking into my phone and it going and ordering stuff. I mean, is it too far to believe that at some point OpenAI might partner with certain companies and say like when they order toilet paper, make sure they, they go by Charmin. Right. Like, would it be so out of left field to believe that they might make a deal with a company like that?

When somebody wants, yeah, they're gonna monetize everything that they. Honestly speaking, you did say that they are losing money. I think the monetization part just is like a walk in the park for them. So I was playing around with Aslas yesterday and I'm going to London next week. So I was like thinking to myself, like, I don't want to go to London and just have like, like any brunch. What's like, I want to have a brunch that feels like I'm a London girlie, even though I am not. So I, I said to, I said to Ahla, I was like, treat me like a Napo baby that lives in London and plan out a day for me to have to have in the city with top notch from 9am this is how it talks to me. I was so happy when it started talking to me.

And it basically gives me like a whole itinerary of everything. So that's what people should know. It gives you ChatGPT, but in your browser, which is wild. It's awesome. It's matcha and gossip at Children Firehouse. This is what I want to do. So yeah, it's pretty cool. It's pretty, pretty nice.

So anything on that list that it made for you that might need like a reservation or anything, theoretically you should be able to turn on agent mode and be like, hey, go make any reservations for me that need to be made to achieve this day.

Yeah, 100%. I love it. I love it. So I can't wait to try it.

Hey, if you take a look at my web presence online, it's safe to say that I'm a bit AI obsessed. I even have a podcast all about AI that you're watching right now. I've gone down multiple rabbit holes with AI and done countless hours of research on the newest AI tools every single week. Well, I've done it again and I just dropped my list of my favorite AI tools. I've done all the research on what's been working for me, my, my favorite use cases and more. So if you want to steal my favorite tools and use them for yourself now, you can, you can get it at the link in the description below. Now back to the show. So somebody from OpenAI named Adam Fry, who. So they're the product lead on ChatGPT Atlas. So they made this tweet here basically saying these are all of the fixes that they're going to be making. So from all the feedback they got, this is the fixes they're going to be making, which is also a pretty solid list of like the issues that you would find with Atlas right now. So the ones that are interesting to me, the multi profile support. Yeah, that's something that I personally do in Chrome. I have like two or three different Chrome profiles that I'll switch between based on like what I'm trying to accomplish. Yeah, you know, I might have a Chrome profile that's for example, like my fitness profile. And anytime I'm like Watching stuff related to that. It's in that Chrome profile. Just an example. Right. But a lot of people like to have different Chrome profiles that have different bookmarks in them and sort of different history in them. Things like that.

Yeah.

And this didn't support that. So that's one of the things that I think is going to be a pretty beneficial upgrade. Same with tab groups. I don't really use tab groups that often myself, but I do know almost every browser has them now, if it's.

Not chaotic, if I don't have 70 tabs on different chromes, I'm not writing. That's not how shit works.

Like yeah, yeah, yeah. The model picker so I'm not sure if you noticed, but when you're using, using Atlas and you open up the right sidebar chat, you can't change the model. You can change the model when you're on like the main home screen you've got the upper left like little menu that has a drop down of the models, but that only changes the model like on that chat window right there, it doesn't change the model in the right sidebar. So they're going to let you pick different models for that fix. Text entry for Japan and Korea Captivate Captive portal for WI Fi needs to work Multi profile support Tab groups Model picker and Ask GPT sidebar. Multiple tab attachments in chat composer and improved at mentions user experience Use projects from Ask Chat GPT sidebar. That'll be a cool one. To be able to access your projects right in the sidebar an opt in ad blocker. Add a menu listing all shortcuts bookmarks overflow menu. Add speed bump before deleting all chats in.

Delete browsing data dialog. Improve personalization of suggestions. Keep improving Agent time to first message improve under triggering of ChatGPT using agent mode. Make Agent pause state more reliable. Improve chain of thought animation for different agent actions and improve Cloud Excel and Google Drive use on agent. So that's the full list of things they said they're actively working on. Which is also a full list of things that you might have run into if you've used Agent mode and had issues with it.

Agent mode for a lot of people is like sounds like magic. For people that have started using it, like people that aren't very tech, you know, tech savvy when they start using Agent they're like, they're wild. Imagine having Atlas as an agent. That's, that's a hundred percent more wild.

Yeah, no, I mean so I think that actually the one thing about Atlas, and we can move on from this topic because I know we spent quite a bit.

We've been talking about it for like, yeah, half an hour.

The one thing that I actually was, the thing that I found the most valuable when I was using Atlas is probably the thing that most people are scared of, was the ability to go and have it search my chat history for something I was looking at a few days ago. Yeah, because it will import all of your history from Chrome if you want it to. And I actually asked it something like, I was reading an article on TechCrunch the other day about. I don't remember the topic, but you know, about AI agents. Can you find that TechCrunch article for me again? And it searched and it was like, well, I found three articles. Maybe it was one of these. And sure enough, it was one of the articles I was. That it listed was one of the articles I was looking for. And I was like, that, to me, is so helpful because I don't know how many times I've literally scrolled my history looking for a website I visited a few days ago, and for whatever reason, I can't find it again in my history and I can't remember what the domain was. So I'm like, ah, but now I can just do it with my chat. I can just say, hey, I was looking at this site three days ago. What was it again? And it pulls it up. And I found that so helpful.

It is helpful. It is. Honestly, a lot of people don't have really good memory. Imagine just scrolling through and like, finding the right one at the right place at the right time. That's like, so helpful.

Speaking of browsers, though, Microsoft, the day that we're recording this, rolled out a new version of Edge that has a whole bunch of AI features in it. And I can't help but think it feels like a response to OpenAI's atlas.

It is.

It feels like Microsoft going, all right, that Atlas, they got a lot of buzz. Let's roll out our browser now.

Yeah, and there's a lot of features in this one also. Like, there's like 12 new features, which is like, also a cute little orb that is called Maiko. And apparently it's like a whole AI philosophy about optimism in a time of, like, cynicism and like, yes, but are you okay? It looks like it's not okay. It looks like it's being pushed to say some stuff, to be. To be. To be optimistic and things, even though the world is not optimistic as we Speak. So it feels like it's trying to make you feel better, but on the inside, it's like being destroyed. You. Like, this is. But it's a cute orb, and the name is also cute Maiko. You know, it's like clicky Clippy, but like the cousin of Clippy, which is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can actually make it become Clippy if you want.

If you want. Yeah. If you want to go back to the ancestor of it. Yeah, 100%.

So actually, let me. Let me pull it up here. We can actually take a look and show it off. So inside of the Microsoft copilot, look at it. These are the new features here. But this is Maiko. There's a bunch of other new features, too. I'll talk about some of those in a minute. But let's play with Maiko here.

So cute.

Hey, Matt, welcome back. I was just about to switch topics. What's on your mind today?

What's the most interesting thing to happen in the world of AI news this week?

One of the most talked about AI stories this week is that Waymo is bringing its driverless taxis to London next year, which is a huge move for autonomous vehicles, hitting the UK for the first time. Another big highlight is OpenAI's Sora app, which reached 1 million downloads in just a few days by turning text into video clips, though it also sparked some copyright concerns. And on the political side, there's news that President Trump's tariffs on semiconductor imports.

Okay, that's enough.

Okay.

We'Re giving it a poll.

It takes that plenty.

Wait, did you see the demeanor of the blob? Like, it's. Like it's suffering on the inside, so I tried to. Okay, so this is what happened today. I know you wanted it, but, like, I'm tired today, so I'm just. Let me give you the answers. Go back to sleep. This is the vibe that was giving.

Oh, you again. Here we go.

What do you want to know?

Like, I just wanted to show this off real quick. If I just, like, beat it with my mouse over and over again, it eventually becomes Clippy.

Yeah. Welcome back, bro.

I knew it. You were Clippy all along.

You caught me. Well, I do have a little more charm than Clippy, I hope. But, hey, I'm always here to lend a helping hat, just hopefully in a less paper Clippy way.

Such a dad joke. Shut up, Clippy.

Throwing shade on Clippy.

So, yeah, that's. That's the. The new Miko. You can kind of talk to it. They made it playful and sort of fun and you can tell it to change its colors and stuff like that. But I think that the more interesting stuff that Microsoft rolled out is they actually rolled out memory this week. So you know how in ChatGPT we've had memory for a little while now where it remembers all of your conversations and can sort of reference past conversations you've had. They actually just rolled that out inside of Copilot now. Like that hasn't been a feature yet inside of Microsoft until today. The other thing that's interesting is you can do these collaborative chats now. So you can be in there talking to their chatbot, you know, maybe planning, you know, in my case, right. I might be planning the next YouTube video and having it do some research for me on my next YouTube video. And then I can pull my producer from my YouTube channel, Dave in and say, hey, here's the ideas I came up with. What do you think he could get in there, start actually having a chat with the same AI conversation I was just having a chat with and keep that conversation going. And so now you can have like a three way conversation. That's me, another human, and Microsoft's copilot, all sort of in the conversation.

Yeah. And it's so it's wild that we've come to the point where this is actually happening. Like for some people that don't use these AIs, like, we should probably mention this. This is wild. This is insane. Like this is kind of like something that it's like, like a, like of an episode out, like what's it called? The. The exact opposite of Flintstones. I forgot their names.

Oh, the Jetsons.

This is exactly it. This is what's happening right now. So.

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, totally. And the funny thing is like, you know, OpenAI released Atlas earlier this week and then today Microsoft rolled out the ability to like share your chats and bring other people in. Yeah, well, OpenAI responded this morning as well, so check this out. So this post is from at the time of this recording, like an hour ago. Right. But it says shared projects are expanding to Free plus and pro users invite others to work together in ChatGPT using shared chats, files and instructions all in one place. So Microsoft rolls out Copilot with the ability to bring other people into the conversation. And OpenAI went, oh yeah, well we do that now too. On the exact same day.

Yeah, I think the tech war, they're kind of speed running the whole thing and it's like just butting heads right now. But if we can come Back to Copilot. I think it's more like getting smarter across Windows and Edge. And that's a lot of people that use Windows are like, use basically any Microsoft.

Equipment. They're having the time of their lives, you know, because, like, it can summarize things. It could summarize your tabs. It can book hotels, it can fill out forms.

It can.

Can do many things. And if you want to, like, tell it. If you want to tell, like, Copilot, like, can you fix my life? And it's like, just organize your whole calendar. And that's. Honestly, it's kind of refreshing to see, you know, like, you know, a company that talks about AI as something that you should connect together, not just making, like, stare at. Making us stare at screens the whole time. And they're betting. They're betting on, like, warmth and memory and, like, good vibes. Like an AI assistant that remembers your anniversary and your trauma at the same time. That's what I want to see. Yeah. I mean, like, not just. Not just like. Yeah, I think that what. It didn't really lack it in OpenAI, but, like, now that Windows has it also, it's like, everyone's just like, who has the better agent right now.

Yeah, yeah. And, well, Microsoft has an upper hand, too, that they, you know, they also run the operating system that so many people run on as well. So right now, we're getting a lot of this AI in the browser. But I mean, that's the sort of next level for Microsoft is now, okay. AI is just built like, Windows 11 is sort of getting rolled out into, like, every computer now. I think they're deprecating Windows 10, so it's going to be harder and harder to actually use Windows 10 if you still want to. But Windows 11, they're baking more and more AI features into it. So a lot of, like, what we're doing in our browser, theoretically, pretty soon you'll be able to do directly inside of Windows, like, go to Windows and say, hey, my computer monitor's too dim. Can you brighten it up for me? And it just goes and adjusts the settings for you. Or, hey, I need a new desktop background. I want to use something from the Simpsons. Can you find me a good desktop background? And it goes and searches the Internet, finds a good image, and just replaces your desktop background for you. And everything you do with your computer, your operating system, you're just prompting it to do it instead of having to dig around in the settings anymore. So I think that's where we'll see Windows Go. Everything becomes promptable on the operating system.

Everything becomes like so adjustable in the touch of a hand, like, or your voice even, you know, because they have that. Can you imagine if that rolled out like 40, 50 years ago? It would be deemed as witchcraft. So I'm very happy with.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if we had iPhones 40 or 50 years ago, that would be witchcraft. Witchcraft.

Burn them to the witch, you know.

Exactly, exactly. So another story I wanted to talk about from the past week is that Claude code is now inside your browser. Now, I don't know how much vibe coding type stuff you've done yourself, but I've played around with a lot of the various AI coding tools and for the most part I've found Claude code to perform the best out of what's out there. They seem to. Claude code seems to work really well. The main problem with Claude code is that you had to run it in a terminal.

Yes.

So you either had to run it inside of your terminal on Mac or Windows, or you could run it inside one of the terminals inside of an ide. So like Visual Studio, Code, Cursor, Windsurf, you know, tools like that that have a terminal built in, you're able to fire up one of those tools, then get Claude code running, and then you're dealing with the whole thing instead of a terminal. That part was a pain in the butt and definitely scared a lot of people away from using Claude code. Well now Claude code, they just have like a browser interface where you can mess with Claude code now.

Yeah. Also for the people that don't know what IDE is, it's basically like a developer's all in one workspace. So think of it as like a Microsoft Word, like a Google Doc and like a Finder combined, but for coding. So if for people that don't know this. But yeah, as you said, Anthropics decided developers deserve fewer tabs and like more sanity. So they did cloud code and like it's now running in the browser. No terminals, like no local setups, no chaos. So you just describe what you want and it connects your repo and cloud, starts coding like the world's calmest intern ever. That is like not being fed or like being just given 7,000 caffeine cups and stuff. So now it runs in the cloud and it does real time debugging and ships a pull, you know, a pull request and even tells you what to change. And it's basically like it's GitHub Copilot, but with like an intention, you know, like A really good attention span. And it's not just like for hardcore devs. The fact that you can do this straight from chat means that anyone could explain it. Explain it. Explain a bug in English, you know, in plain English and suddenly has access to engineering power, you know, so you don't have to have like a background in that. You can just do it, obviously. And it's the kind of feature that quietly eats away, as we said at ides, for people that want to do that kind of stuff and like, want to kind of experience the world of coding, this is wild stuff. So, yeah, everyone's going to be happy about this.

It's a lot, a lot, a lot more user friendly than what Claude code was. Right. You basically had to go to a website and it gave you instructions of like, you know, other dependencies you needed to install on your computer. So if you didn't have, for example, like Python installed on your computer, you had to install Python. If you didn't have like Node JS installed on your computer, you had to install Node js, Right. There's all these little like development elements that you had to install on your computer. So you had to follow these like step by step instructions and do it all in the terminal. And if you miss one step or mistype one thing, nothing seems to work. And then you want to pull your hair out because you can't even get into Cloud Coded, the first place to start writing the code. Well now they just simplified it, right.

Now you can do it easily, like easily without having to cry whenever you see a code. Like, because I have friends that do coding and like they're engineers and stuff. And I look at them as if like they own the world. Like they can do many things I can't for the life of me.

And most of them are women, which is badass, but that I can't do that. And so, yeah, it is witchcraft. They should be persecuted. But this is awesome, this is amazing. I think that it could unlock a lot of people's potentials. People can do many things now and kind of create their own apps and stuff.

Yeah. And if you do anything with code, you're probably familiar with GitHub, which is almost like it's like a place where as you're writing code, you can sort of push your code. There's. And it really serves a few purposes. One, it's like a backup for your code. So if, you know, you go too far in your code and you're like, oh, you know what? I liked the version three versions ago better let's roll it back to that. You can actually just pull the old version off of GitHub and start from there. But it also is a platform where if you write code that you want others to be able to access, you can share that code with anybody. They can download it and use it. And so what's really cool about Claude code is it integrates with GitHub just right out of the box. Like, one of the first things it says is connect your GitHub account. And so anything I've developed on GitHub in the past pops up here as something that I can just pick up where I left off. So I made this AI jump game like two years ago. I can select that game, give it prompts, and it will just grab all the code from GitHub of the game that already exists and just let me start coding from that spot.

Yeah, which is which Isoki can basically continue what you've done before without having to do it from. Scrapped, so.

Exactly, exactly. So pretty useful upgrade, especially if you're someone that's interested in, you know, Anthropic.

We love you, Anthropic.

You're the best, if you like. And Anthropic makes the best coding models too. They're called Sonnet4.5 and Opus 4.1 are pretty much considered the best AI coding models out there.

Do you listen to that OpenAI or, like, is OpenAI not in the picture anymore? Like, it should do something about this, but, you know.

Yeah, I. I feel like they've kind of diverged in two separate directions. I feel like OpenAI has decided, hey, we're going to go. Yeah, for now, we're going to go more in that consumer direction. We're going to build social media apps, we're going to build browsers, we're going to build that easy user interface. Yeah, anybody can chat. They're going that consumer path where Anthropic, I feel like, is going. Like they, they realize their models are the best for coders. Let's just really go heavy down that path now. I'm not saying they're not thinking about consumers as well. Right. They do have, you know, the regular Claude website where you can use it just like ChatGPT, but I feel like their main focus is let's focus on coders. Like, as far as the amount of use a large language model gets, you've got the OpenAI models and you've got the Anthropic models. There's graphs out there that show which model gets the most usage and anthropic blows OpenAI away. Like, people are tapping into the Anthropic models way more than open AI models, but that's just because it's all through API. There's so many companies tapping into Claude's API where OpenAI, most of their use is through ChatGPT, through their front end user interface. So, like, in terms of like, profitability and getting the most use, Anthropic is actually in quite a bit better position than OpenAI. But that's just, that's just sort of like some behind baseball, like really nerdy talk. But Anthropic gets so much more use than OpenAI because it's so good at coding.

Yeah, yeah. I sincerely, as I said, I don't like to see coding in any shape or form. Makes me, kind of triggers my anxiety. So this is. I have so many things I want to do, so I'm gonna probably play around with it just to see what it comes up with because it's, it's wild. A lot of people are using it right now, so. Yeah, so happy with that.

And I love like the AI coding for just making like little simple apps. I mean, we've talked about this in many episodes in the past on this show of like, this is a little bottleneck I have in my business. I can write a quick little script that fixes this problem for me and then I never have that problem again. Right. Like, I've made a little Python script that will take any image file and convert it to a jpeg. Sounds really, really, really simple, but it's just like a little box that's open on my window and I drag any image into it, or bulk images, I can drop like 20 images in if I want, and it just converts all of the images to a jpeg. So if you get a webp file, if you get an AVIF file, if you get a. All the random image files you get when you do like a search for an image and then you download the image and you're like, dang it, this is a vector file, it's not a jpeg, I can't use it on my website, whatever, right? I made a little script where no matter what image I get, drag and drop it in here, converts it to a JPEG that will look good in my videos, look good on a website, et cetera. And it was just a little script that took me 10 minutes to build and I vibe coded it and I would never sell it. It's really, really basic. But it solves a little problem that I had in my Life and made that little thing a little bit easier.

Yeah, it makes it, it makes it convenient, makes it easier, and makes your life a 10 times easier. That's the whole idea of like, why AI is just, you know, wild to a lot of people. And like, I understand that people feel like it's taking away some of their. Versus our next, you know, our next topic. It's taking away some of their jobs and stuff, but it's, it's actually very helpful if you know how to use it. And it's not just taking away some stuff. It's probably creating more things to do. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually think right now is like, I know a lot of coders are really worried, but I think right now is like probably the best time in history to be a coder because, like, you know what you're doing with code, but you also have AI to assist you. And if AI can assist you and make things a lot faster, can create.

Thousands and thousands of things.

When AI screws something up and it's like, okay, I'm running into this bug that I can't figure out how to get around. Most vibe coders like me never figure out how to get around it. But if you actually know how to code, you're like one of the few people that goes, okay, I ran into this issue. I'm not going to vibe code the solution because I know how to fix the thing myself. Right. So I feel like right now is actually a really good time to be a coder. Like that person that can jump between using AI to help code, but then when they run into a roadblock, jump in and just manually fix the thing that AI messed up.

I've seen people debugging before. If it was me in their place, I would have set my laptop on fire. I would never in my life put myself in that position for me to debug and see it like they crash out. What do you mean? I'm not going to crash out over this. You know, there's no amount of coffee in this world that would make me kind of sustain my calmness when it comes to. No. So, yeah, this is helpful. This is, yeah. Conclusion.

It's helpful, absolutely. All right, so you mentioned the next topic that we're going to dive into. There was this article circulating. I'll pull it up on the screen real quick. So this is the article that's been circulating. Amazon plans to replace more than half a million jobs with robots. Internal documents show the company that changed how people shop has a far reach plan to automate 75% of his operations. Yeah. So this is pretty much the thing about AI that most people are most scared about. Right? Is AI taking all of all of our jobs. Right.

Also, to be fair, Amazon says that these numbers come from internal teams rather than like the whole company. And they're still hiring like thousands and thousands of people for the holidays. So what's interesting here is that there's a language shift, so they're using softer terms like advanced technology and like cobots instead of automation, which, let's be honest, sounds like way cuter than Robotic Efficiency Initiative. It's like way less uptight. But this really shows how the next wave of automation might coexist with human work instead of replacing it. So robots handle the repetitive stuff, which humans can handle the creative or complex parts. And together it's like a complete different type or different kind of workplace. And if Amazon can pull that off at a scale, it sets the blueprint, obviously, for how AI and robotics kind of quietly blend together when it comes to industries and everywhere. Not a takeover, but sort of an upgrade, in my opinion. That's me, you know. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I feel like articles like this are sort of misleading. Right? This is a little bit clickbaity to me to say Amazon plans to replace more than half a million jobs with robots. Because if we read this, it says Amazon's automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. 2027. And then down here it said.

Let'S see. Executives told Amazon's board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its US workforce in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn't need to hire yet. If you read this headline, it sounds like Amazon is dumping 500,000 people. But when you actually read the article, it's like, no, they're building automation so they don't need to hire as many people as they used to need to hire.

Honestly, it's just the way that journalism works these days. Like, and not just to, you know, to promote us, but with my stream is that we never say that. Like, we never put in these headlines where people should be scared of what's going to happen tomorrow, because no one should be fear mongering anything. We're trying to make people like AI and like, work with AI rather than make them have a heart attack because someone woke up and like decided to write something so weird like this, you know, that could cause someone to be upset. You know, there are a lot of people that are triggered by these kinds of stuff that we need to lessen the triggering and make people feel more at ease when it comes to artificial intelligence, in my opinion.

And it's just sort of like a truth too that so many people out there just read headlines and don't read articles, right? They read the headline and infer what the rest of the article is going to be about based on the headline. And then they're, you know, out in the world talking to their friend going, hey, did you hear Amazon's going to lay off 500,000 people because of AI.

And that person could be an Amazon, like he could be, or she could be like an Amazon employee. And all of a sudden they feel like they're not going to sleep at night. No one wants to have, no one should have, should go through that, you know.

Yeah, I don't know. That's. That it's, it's a sort of shady approach.

But we know the truth.

We do, we know that. Yeah, they're not replacing people. So.

Yeah. All right, so there's a handful of other things I think these we could kind of do more of like a rapid fire sort of like just quick thoughts on each one of them. Here's something that just came out the day that we're recording this. So there's this new model that came out by LTX called LTX2. And here's what they say about it in their, their sort of launch tweet, synchronized audio and video generation. So it can do what VO3 and what Sora do, where it actually generates with the audio.

Oh, wow, this is wild.

Yeah, native 4K fidelity, up to 50 frames per second. And one thing is it's not actually generating in like 720p and then upgrading to 4k like some of the past video models do. It's actually generating natively in 4K. Wow. I know that because I've talked to the people over at LTX API First Design runs efficiently on consumer GPUs. People use. Companies do use the words consumer GPUs very freely, don't they? Freely, liberally. Because a lot of times they'll say it works on consumer GPUs. Okay, well which one? Well, if you have an Nvidia 5090, it'll work. Okay, so if I spend three grand on a GPU, I can make it work. Is that really consumer?

But yeah, but the results are right Like I'm looking at the screen right now, it's like, it's really, really good. Like can you imagine what people could create for this?

Yeah, I mean I saw some other demos side by side and it seems to be really good at physics, like even better than like Veo was at some physics, like doing things like flips and things like that. And it's just, it's really interesting to me because we're moving at this pace now where we get these state of the art models that just blow people's minds. VO 3.1, Sora 2, things like that. And then like two weeks later an open source equivalent that's pretty much just as good rolls out. So it's like even those big state of the art models aren't safe. There's like always an open source version following closely behind. The one thing that's a little scary about stuff like this and having them be open source open weight models is, you know, with companies like Google and Sora or Google and OpenAI. Right. They're going to have some guardrails, right? They're going to, they're going to make it so you can't generate certain things, you can't deep fake stuff. You can't create, you know, fake news that makes it look like a war just broke out in a place that it didn't actually just break out in. Yeah, they're going to do what they can to safeguard against that stuff.

These open models, they don't have guardrails, do they?

I mean even if they do have guardrails because they're open, people can figure out how to rip the guardrails off pretty easily. You know, like I think, I think a lot of these companies do sort of bake guardrails in when they find first train the models and do a little bit of the fine tuning. But as soon as you put open source models into the hands of the public, the, the public's going to figure out how to break them as quick as they possibly can.

Pretty smart are they? Yeah, I mean it is dangerous. At the same time it's not, you know, like you wake up to, to some it's like a war that broke up with one country, but it didn't really break out in that country. It's just like been made by some 15 year old somewhere, you know, because they did, they found out how to use this. So yeah, it is dangerous 100%. So these companies need to have a bit of like responsibility when it comes to these kinds of stuff because.

You don't Want it to end up in the wrong hands, honestly. So I hope that they kind of make sure that there's responsibility behind this and keep on having these rules and guardrails so that we don't.

Well, and I mean, once it's open source too, it's. The genie's out of the bottle, the toothpaste is out of the tube or whatever. Saying you want to run with, we're.

Going to use that. Yeah.

You know, you can't put it back in. And like, even if. Even if the company put this up on their GitHub and said go ahead and download it and work with it and then deleted their GitHub, well, somebody still got it somewhere, right?

It's still out there, the Internet. It is there. So, yeah.

So, yeah, super, super interesting to kind of pay attention with what's going on. I don't do a lot of stuff with open source, but it's always super impressive to me how quickly open source follows behind, you know, Frontier Lab, state of the art models.

Yeah, it is, it is wild. I mean, people are very creative, as I said. So it's just. It's just wild. Like, one company is. We did talk about this last week, you know, like, these huge companies would have this and, like, somewhere out there with like a small, small company, they would create the same exact thing with, like, no guardrails. So it is wild.

Yeah. So the next thing I want to talk about here is this deepseek ocr. We don't have to spend too much time on it because it's kind of getting a little more into the weeds, a little bit more on the technical side. But the company out of China, Deepseek, they basically figured out this new training method where they can essentially ingest a lot more text into the training model by actually putting all of the text into an image and then having it train on the images instead of the text itself, which is just like a really wild sort of like outside the box. Like, how did they even come up with this concept for training? But supposedly it makes it a lot more efficient.

It is. Yeah. They figured out, like, a way to make AI read text as images, and it would do it, like, up to 10 times more efficiently than the standard text tokens. So instead of breaking words down into thousands of little pieces like other models do, because that's what they do, a deep SEQ literally looks at the page and kind of scans it and compresses it, or in other words, squishes it so that visually it somehow keeps everything almost perfect in Perfect accuracy. And they're calling it like the paradigm inversion, which is in plain English for people who don't know what that is. It means that they flipped the script. So text used to be more efficient than the vision for models. Now it might be the other way around.

Yeah, yeah. I mean it'll be interesting to see if some of the, you know, some of the other companies pick up this idea to run with it. Like will we see, you know, DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, I guess Google is DeepMind. But some of these other companies anthropic testing stuff like this or are they going to stick with of let's jam as much, you know, text content as possible in.

Can you imagine?

Yeah, I have no idea whether they will.

10 million tokens worth of data into one model context window. And like that's like feeling like having like an AI, you know, like running your company, like the entire Dropbox of your company. It's like imagine having to cram everything up in like one.

Yes. You know, and I guess, I guess the other question I have around something like this is does it work from the consumer direction? So let's say I go to OpenAI and OpenAI has a, like one of the chat models and let's say it's a model that has a 125,000 token context limit. Right. So I can, I can only put in, let's say up to 90,000 words of text into this model before I run out of, you know, context window for it to actually understand what I'm putting in. What if I took a hundred thousand words of something, put them all into images instead, and then fed that to OpenAI or anthropic or Google or one of these tools. Does this same method work that other direction? Can I actually shove more context into a prompt by giving it images with text instead? That's something that I think could be fascinating to figure out because then what we might actually see is we're still typing or copying and pasting text into a prompt box. But then behind the scenes these model creators might convert that to images for us. So maybe, maybe it'll allow us to squeeze more context out from the user side and actually be able to push more text into the model. But yeah, we'll have to see how that plays out. This is very, very new sort of technology and research, so we'll have to see. I don't know, I'm curious to see if any of the other frontier labs look at this technology and decide to play with it.

I think it's like A big hint that the future of Langu models might not be, you know, language based at all anymore. So.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's very true. A couple, A couple last quick sort of like rapid fire topics here. Over the last week, YouTube added in AI likeness detection. So on YouTube, we've always been able to like claim copyright on videos if somebody just like flat out takes your video and posts it on their channel or, you know, takes music that you created and posts it on, on their channel, things like that. But now they're making it where if somebody actually uses an AI generation of your voice in their video to make it sound like you, or if they use AI video, like one of these avatar tools like hey gen or something like that to generate a video of you saying something you didn't say, you can actually now strike those down as well. And I was telling you before we hit record, I actually saw this feature, double checked my account, saw a bunch of people actually using my likeness in their videos and copyright claimed them all.

I mean, I think it would put people's like minds at ease when it comes to. A lot of creators feel better when it comes to these kinds of stuff. So it's just they're trying to say, we got your face covered, you know. So I think it's, I think it makes people feel, honestly, it's like an apology, you know, like for everything that. So yeah, it's awesome. I like it. I like that they're going into this route because now you can create stuff, but you don't have to use someone else's work in order for you to do that.

Yeah, yeah, I like that a lot. It is kind of a funny dichotomy just in my scenario, right, where I make videos about, here's how you use all these cool AI tools and how you can do things like clone avatars and stuff. And then people are using my teachings against me and then I've got to go and copyright strike them.

Exactly.

It's an interesting dichotomy to be in.

Yeah, I did warn, like YouTube did creators that it might even flag their own videos by mistake. So can you imagine that happening? Like, you know, but this is my work. What am I? You know, these kinds of people are going to probably lose their minds for sure.

And then there's a couple other news stories that you mentioned that I'm actually not super familiar with. So I'll let you sort of take lead on these two. But you mentioned something about like an MIT fashion thing and then Yelp's New AI.

Yeah. Yeah. MIT builds like, an AI tool that is called Refashion, which leads you to remix your clothes like a. Like a. Like an actual DJ set, which is so funny. It's like you can rebuild everything by, like, Legos, so you can turn your trousers into a MIDI dress or, like your hoodie into, like, a maternity wear, like, whatever. Basically, it's like, like a depop meets, like, cat software. So the fact for the fashion girlies, it's just, like, unlock, like a modular clothing, not just for the fashion girlies, but, like, anyone that likes fashion because who has the time for, like, over consumption and when you can literally just control plus Z your whole outfit? So. So this is wild. I like mit. It's not Zara yet, by the way, but it's on its way to be that. So it's also pushing for sustainability and, like, making sure that it doesn't end up. All the clothing end up in, like, landfills. So I'm very happy about this. Yeah.

So to reduce waste, the Refashion program helps users create outlines for adaptable clothing, such as pants, that can be reconfigured into a dress. Each component of these pieces can be replaced, rearranged, or restyled. Oh, this is actually one that I haven't come across yet.

It's wild. It's so good. It changes the face of fashion, in my opinion. It's like a recycling kind of thing.

Is there. Is it, like, can you use. Is it demoable right now somewhere?

No, I don't think so. I tried to look it up, try to see where I could find that, but I couldn't. I don't know if people can do that now, maybe like a week later, but I couldn't find anything. It's just, like.

It's probably just like, internal at MIT for right now, and then once they feel like it's ready for prime time, they'll put out some demo that we can use. And so I guess the last thing that we were going to chat about is another one I haven't. I mean, I actually came across the news, but I only read the headline. I'm that guy right now. I only read the hardline. Didn't read the article, but there's now some new, like, Yelp AI.

Yeah, so Yelp just launched, like, an AI receptionist and, like, an AI host at the same time, because apparently no one's actually answering phones anymore.

So for restaurants, there's like, a Yelp host, which is an AI that answers calls and, like, takes reservation and manages stables and gives away time and sends you the menu and like, you know, probably knows if your date's allergic to gluten, probably. And it even texts you like, follow ups, like, your table's ready, bestie, you know, that kind of stuff. So. But there's also something called Yelp Receptionist, which is basically the same exact thing, but for businesses, I guess. So it books appointments and collects customer info and screens, you know, like, screens everything. Like 20. That leads to 24 7. So all of this for 99amonth, which is cheaper than a real receptionist. And it doesn't really need lunch breaks.

And, you know, so the $99 a month, that's paid for by like the restaurant, right? Or like whatever company is using it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Whatever company is using.

I'm assuming Yelp is still free to use for the actual consumer side.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think people use Yelp in the uk, but I think in the US it's insane. It's like very helpful for a lot of people. So also, the wild part about this is that Google's working on AI that calls businesses for you. So we're getting like dangerously close to AI just calling each other now, which is gonna be very funny for me to see.

So, yeah, yeah, it's like you go, you Google a restaurant and you tell AI to call the restaurant to find out if there's reservations, and then the restaurant answers, but it's an AI bot. So it's like my Google's AI reaching out to this restaurant's AI.

They're gonna, they're gonna tell, they're gonna probably like tell each other that they're doing amazing and they're supercharging each other. This going to be the conversation. It's going to be insane. I would love to be a fly on that wall when that happens, like, just to see how that works.

But I mean, we're getting there already kind of with things like email and whatnot anyway, right? It's like, I don't know if you've, if you've seen those, those memes where it's like I wrote this one sentence and had AI turn it into a giant paragraph for me. And then they send the email. And the person that received the email is like, this person sent me this giant paragraph of email. I had AI summarize it down into one sentence for me, right? So it's like the original person wrote one sentence. The person that received it summarized it back down to one sentence.

Can you imagine? It would be summarized into One word eventually.

And it's hilarious because, like, we're going to see more and more of that kind of stuff where it's just like the AIs communicating with each other on our behalf, and then eventually the AI is just like a middleman anyway. That's like.

Yeah, yeah. It's going to be like the meme of, like, the Spider Man. I don't know if seen that meme of like three Spider man at each other. That's what's gonna be like.

That's gonna be pretty hilarious. I know, I know. That's already happening in, like, schools, right? Like, students are using ChatGPT to help them write their homework. And then teachers are actually. There's a whole south park episode about this. The teachers are actually going and, like, using ChatGPT to grade the homework. So, like, the student is no longer even seeing the homework because ChatGPT is doing it. And the teacher's no longer even seeing, like, what the students are doing because ChatGPT is doing it is pretty hilarious. But I mean, there's, there's, there's truth to it.

It's funny. I just, I just hope that schools, like, find, like, more ways into making sure that the youth isn't like, is learning something.

Totally.

So. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I, I mean, I, my hope, my hope is that tools like ChatGPT and Notebook LM and all of these various AI tools that are out there make students more resourceful. They, they, they feel like they have more access to more information, more access to more knowledge, and they use that to actually help them, you know, and the sort of opposite end of the spectrum, the side that I hope it doesn't go down, is the path of everything just becomes AI generated Brain rot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I need something to make sure that the youth kind of like, has ways of getting more creative rather than just recycled content. Because to be fair, like, we're not going to beat around the bushes. It is recycled content. So, like, we need, like, more things, things to be pushed so that the students are learning something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, this is, this is getting probably off the rails a little too much, but, like, I feel like that's where things like world models kind of solve a lot of that kind of stuff. Because if AI sort of understands the world around it, as opposed to just what was injected into the initial training data, that gets us to a point where AI is starting to come up with novel solutions because it has an understanding of the world, not just an understanding of what it was trained on and sort of that future excites me as well. But how far off we are to these world models actually being helpful, I don't know. We might still be a ways off.

Yeah. I mean, besides, I just need AI to cure big problems like cure cancer and stuff. Also automate my house. That would be also very helpful. But yes, same level. Automate my house and cure cancer.

Yeah, cure cancer, solve climate change and do my dishes and laundry for me.

Yes. Yes, please. And meal prep. I didn't have time to meal prep this week. Yes, please.

Exactly. Exactly. Well, this, this has been awesome. I mean, obviously a lot of has happened over the last week since we. We chatted last time. I would love to hear from the audience what people think about these episodes, these sort of news recap and riff episodes. Again, I don't really do them as much on my main YouTube channel, so if you like more of this style and you want to hear more of our sort of musings and thoughts on what's going on in the world of AI news, let us know in the comments if this interests you. And we'll definitely keep doing more of them because they're such a blast for us to do.

Yeah, I'm having so much fun.

Yeah, amazing. Well, so make sure you check out the Mindstream newsletter. That's the newsletter that Maria is writing and the head person over there keeping you looped in with all the latest AI news. So check that out if you haven't already and make sure you're subscribed. So whether you're listening on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, we're available everywhere you listen to podcasts, so make sure you're subscribed if you're not already. And thank you so much for tuning in.

Yeah, thanks guys.