OpenAI vs Anthropic Drama, AI Phone Scams & MWC Networking | TSG Ep. 1032

Hey everyone. Welcome to Text Gang. It is a crazy busy Wednesday.

I like, I, I haven't had a moment to breathe this morning. Unfortunately, my, my first interview this morning got interrupted because the person I was interviewing had an air raid siren alert to go to the bomb shelter. And we had a, we had to abort the, uh, interview.

My next guest was in Puerto, where they recently had mass men and machine guns from the cartels, burning, burning cars. They, he said they were the most polite cartel members you ever saw. They made sure everyone got out of the way before they set the vehicles on fire.

A little different than the air raids in Tel Aviv, but, um, it's been a hell of a day and it's only noon. What the hell? Uh, but we got a lot to talk about today.

We got some great gang members to talk. We've got our man in the valley, Jon Swartz, our man in the High Castle, Mike Vizard, our man in the mountains. Well, we got two men in the mountains, Mitch Ashley and Andi Mann, and the lady in front of the brick wall Again, Teri Robinson Gang.

Welcome. It's great to have you here. Mike jk, OpenAI slippery slant.

Sam, what's he up to now? You know, it kind of feels like as you watch what's going on here is the poor guy just can't seem to remember who he told what last. And so He's a lot of things, but he's not a poor guy.

Right? But, you know, apparently whatever he is telling the United States government is one thing, which is basically saying that they can use this AI technology as they see fit. And then yesterday, he was also at one same time trying to pivot back and saying, well, our deal is not quite card blanche, but we don't know.

And then he was telling the employees, apparently yesterday, something else entirely different as well. But John, you follow this stuff mostly. What's your take here?

He is, he is, he's what's, what's the word? B*****k, this whole thing up. This is my payon to Andy.

This guy has screwed everything up to the point where now I believe he's as hated as Mark Zuckerberg, which is a hard feat to accomplish by the way out here. Um, so things keep changing. Um, for all we know, they might lose the contract pretty soon.

So just to summarize, philanthropic saw this surveillance problem and they walked away, or they were kicked away. OpenAI saw an opportunity and signed Altman is now trying to explain the contract is safer with the inclusion of two sentences, which actually don't really address anything. Um, he has admitted the way this was handled by himself and his company was opportunistic and sloppy.

He then, I think it was last night, spoke to his staff and admitted the public backlash is really painful because they are getting killed in the market. There is a cancel chat GPT movement that is gaining incredible speed. Andro, I think went to number one in the Apple App Store.

Um, there's, I think, I can't think of any other way that he could have mismanaged this. So evidently one of his excuses, or one of his explanations is that they plan to update. Alman says he plans to update this Pentagon agreement with these two new sentences that address people's concerns about mass domestic surveillance.

However, if you look at the new language, it still includes the phrase consistent with applicable laws. So I'm not sure what he's trying to say, but what he has done is severely damaged this company. And, um, I, they've dug themselves in such a deep hole and they've aligned themselves with this administration whether they want to admit it or not.

And, um, I, I just dunno where it goes from here. It's gonna twist and turn consistently. And then one thing is above and beyond is anthropic stuck to their guns after initially making a mistake.

And they are reaping the benefits of this more so than they could have ever dreamed of. You know, John, I I, I did an article on it and for the graphic, I have a Modi in, in, uh, obiwan robes saying, if you strike me down, I'll be more powerful than you can ever imagine. And um, and it's true that that's exactly what happened here where Sam stepped in the dooo, it sounds like.

Uh, Well, that's better than my graphic. I was gonna do one that says you can't fix stupid. Well, yeah, So The way there's a lot of conspiracy, Mitch, I always default to obiwan, you know, that I know you do it just Star Wars is, is the, I dunno if you wanna share, share this, Mitch, but there were a lot of conspiracy theories about this whole contract.

Do you remember? We kind of had a exchange on Slack about, about where this was going. And it's like I mm-hmm.

Yeah. You know, well, and all you have to do is be on any social media channel and you'll get bombarded by here's the new feature, or here's my guide to transferring your, uh, all your memories and all your stuff from OpenAI chat BT to Claude pick your favorite. It, it, it is a, this is the new form of boycott that we're in, which is mm-hmm.

You know, by choice. I'm gonna use something else. 'cause I don't like the decisions that you made.

And just like software's getting easier to replicate. I was saying to John and Slack a little bit earlier, we're headed down a trajectory of any piece of software can be recreated or created again by anyone else is the trajectory that we're On there. There is no bar, right?

There's no, there's no moat. There's no bar to entry. No Moat.

Exactly. Just, Just, just as an aside, the, the Irish invented the idea, the boycott. So just so you know, Okay, Did Mike, you a bottle of wind there?

Something spray stuff with when you, was you walking around? Risky or something like that? But, but lemme ask a serious question here.

So, are investors gonna pay attention to this? Because it basically, if you look at it, OpenAI went out to get more business from the government to justify their valuation only to see all this business on the consumer side and the corporate side start to disappear. And maybe the evaluation of the company drops.

And are they gonna blame Altman for mishandling this? Or are they just gonna ignore the whole thing, Ellen? Yeah, well, they're not gonna kick Altman out of being CEO.

They tried that once, didn't they? But, um, here, here's the deal. I think you gotta remember though, there's the court of public opinion, and then there's the court, like where you have judges, the judiciary, and then there's the financial people.

They're not necessarily the same mm-hmm. From the financial point of view. There may be a thing where they said this, you know, the, the, the hullabaloo in, in the social world will quiet down and, and it'll, we'll still have the contract, right?

And, you know, the new cycles will lead it up and there'll be a new, new cycle coming out with something else. Maybe we'll start a war somewhere, bomb another country, and, and we'll think about something. Pay no attention to what OpenAI is doing here in the Pentagon.

Um, and they'll go about their merry way. But there will be, I think, some residual of people who, you know, who there are a lot of people who still think of Jane Fonder as Hanoi Jane, right? Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. And that was what, 40, 50 years ago. So there you are, Alan.

There's a, there's a fourth court, and it's the court of bend the knee of which, you know, today's golden boy or golden company is tomorrow's a*****e company, Right? Mitch, you and I have been talking about that for, uh, years, right? The Golden Child Syndrome.

Yes. The golden, I mean, and I, I'm not trying to be political of that, but, but I'm just saying real tomorrow OpenAI will fall out of favor for some reason, right? And it'll be the next company.

It seems to be the way the wind blows in this. So I don't think, yeah, there may be some short term stock or reputational damage, but I think the new cycle and the decision, the favorability curve is so short and cyclical that I don't think it's gonna be any long-term privilege. But remember all those boycotts against Meta or Facebook at the time, they, they came and went.

And I think the same might happen with OpenAI. They just raised like another $110 billion from Amazon and, uh, SoftBank. Um, and it's, they're, they're valued, I think at $840 billion.

So I think there will be a, a, a tumble, there will be a pushback, but people might then kind of come back to the camp. Um, this, this happens repeatedly, uh, although it does cement anthropic as the apple of its era versus this meta like company. So Andy, how easy is it to rip and replace these things?

'cause last time I checked, they were still using the anthropic models to figure out what cities to target in Iran. Mm-hmm. And, you know, we're gonna have a situation now where there'll be the next administration will show up and we'll just swap out the providers because this is so political now that it's not even a technical conversation.

Yeah. Look, I mean, I'm, I'm actually in the throes of building and choosing my ais right now, right? I'm building product, I'm working with Anthropic, I'm working with OpenAI, I'm working with Gemini, I'm working with copilot.

I'm building an MCP layer. Wait, you're working with copilot? Sure.

We're working with all of 'em. We're trying to figure out which is the best for us. We can't, I guess It's you and the other guy, huh?

Say again? You just, you and the other guy. Just me and the other guy.

Um, yeah, look, we're working with all of them, and they do swap in and out pretty well. Um, they're not the same, they're not plug compatible, but for a technician, it's not that hard. And so, yeah, I think Mitch, you are actually closer to reality than even you think you are.

The idea that I can just go and swap one for another is actually pretty easy. I will say though, I, I sort of agree with Alan though. I don't think it's gonna matter.

Um, we see this in security breaches, right? Oh, this company's crashing. They had a security breach.

No one's gonna trust them. Everyone's logging off. What happens in, I know, three months time, six months time, it's not even that long as people forget, they sign back up.

There's not a lot of logic in this. And yeah, sure, look, Elman was hamfisted at best, but when someone shows you who they are, maybe believe it in the first time. Um, I'm not sure it matters also, by the way, because this government has a propensity for, uh, how can I say this?

Not being fully forthcoming and not, maybe not honoring all their promises or maybe even all their contracts. So what does it matter what's in the contract? It's about this head, their head.

And the third thing I'll say is that there's another impact here. If Anthropic gets banned from government, that's one thing. If Anthropic is marked a national security threat, which is what the word has been, that's entirely different.

That means, uh, hundreds and thousands of other companies can't work with them either. Mm-hmm. I wanna get SOC 2 compliant, I wanna get FedRAMP, all these things, right?

I can't do that. If I'm using a company in my supply chain that is marked a national security threat, this could actually be a death sentence to philanthropic if it plays out that way. But See, I think that can be whip sided.

I think that can be whip sided too. Andy, in Addition to the, you know, hold on. Yeah, Go.

Oh wait, sorry. I'm gonna say in addition to the defense department, state department, treasury department, federal housing authority, our booting philanthropic, so it's spreading. Sorry to interrupt.

Look, the federal government is a Fortune 50 enterprise. It's the kind of dropping of maybe even a Fortune 10 enterprise right? Account.

And so you, you lost it. But, and there is that supply chain, but I think Mitchell's right? Today's, today's, today's golden child is tomorrow's crap head.

Yep. You know, the other, the other factor is the, um, first mover advantage is no longer really a first mover advantage. It's a matter of days and weeks at best.

Somebody comes out with skills, everybody else comes out with their equivalent. Someone else comes out with memory management, everybody else comes out with their version of it. Now, you know, folks like all of us say, well, screw it.

I'm gonna create my own memory management system that I can share across tools. That's what I've done, right? Mm-hmm.

I can go between tools and I have the same background, same memories that I, that I'm retaining across the work that I'm doing. So even us as consumers or users of these technologies can create our own kind of independence layer, If you will. The same thing, I, I'm actually working on a new website now, and I use both of them interchangeably.

I just take one into the other. And There you go. So, So, so we have entered what could be called a disposable AI here.

Is that what we're saying? I I, I think, you know what? Amazon Bedrock had this right?

When I first heard it from them two or three years ago, which is think of bedrock as your front console, like as your, your cable box, if you will. And then what you plug into the back, you could plug 'em all in. And maybe we even load balance 'em at some point with QOS kind of capability, right?

But you could just plug them in the back and, you know, you have them on your front end. It's a different experience. So the converse is also true, right?

You said today's golden boy is tomorrow's crap head, but today's crap head could be tomorrow's golden Boy. Well, that, that is, that's what they call the lore of symmetry, Michael. Oh, you go Bringing science into it, okay.

From the Greek in TROs or something. I mean, the other thing I point out, he's Used to conflict. So I mean, this is, this is, I mean, this is for him par for the course.

I mean, he's used to being in hot water and being on the edge. So I'm sure he's Still very sad. This is the part of ai, dude, This is why I say, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Look, these Silicon Valley tech bros do not care. No. Their Moral, our morals, our ethics, our laws, they do not, right?

Otez and Waymo are programmed to break our laws. Uber is the illegal taxi company. Airbnb's the illegal hotel company.

Crypto is the currency to pay for all these illegal things. And now, gen ai, I'm grumpy about this 'cause they stole my books and they weren't for them, right? It's, I'm, I'm actually very bummed off.

I think I've mentioned before, my organ harvesting business is very badly impacted by Running an organ harvesting business. That's okay. What?

3D pre those organ woods. Mitchell's losing it. Alright.

Alright. Hey Mike, we better take control here. We're 15 minutes.

He does, he does live in Boulder. He lives in Boulder. That's all I say.

Hey, if anyone knocks at your door, just don't answer. Um, I told you it's been, this whole day's gone off the rails for me. From Puerto Valda to Tel Aviv to Oregon harvesting.

Mike, speaking of scams, we've got a new, a whole new category of AI phone scams. Now what's this one? Yeah, So Terry wrote about this on Security Boulevard, and I, I put it on the show because it's, well, it's a public services announcement in my mind.

But, um, the way to think about this is, well, it turns out that these little summaries that the AI folks are putting together are, can be poisoned and manipulated, and scammers are dropping in well scams with phone numbers. You're supposed to call. And then the next thing you know, you're partying with your dollars and your hard-earned money because somebody's scamming you outta something.

But Terry, how common is this? And, and what are the folks who are providing these AI browsers doing about it? Apparently it's becoming way more common.

Um, and, and maybe not surprisingly so it's a, it's sort of a, a new take on an old kind of scam anyway, right? But, um, it also maybe is a cautionary tale not to put so much faith in these AI overviews, uh, too, just because a phone number pops up. Um, when an overview, you know, pops up, then you shouldn't call it, I mean, go to the company's website, do whatever.

That's the simple thing for consumers, right? Um, so in, in this case, you're right, it's a public service, um, announcement, um, to those guys. But I, I don't know, I'm, I'll share my frustration.

I always get a little annoyed with the AI overviews, um, as I wrote, um, first of all, they stand in the way of my search. I don't like that popping up at the, at the beginning, um, too, I just want my search results, you know, and, and get on with it. Um, often the summaries are incorrect anyway.

They've got information that just is not true. Um, but people take it like it's gospel, you know? And, um, I think it puts, you know, companies and, uh, consumers, um, at risk.

And, uh, you know, a couple of the people that I talked to said it's, it can be super dangerous. Um, certainly you don't want people calling the wrong numbers, giving out information or giving out, um, their payment data, um, and that kind of thing. But it can, it can, you know, spiral out for much more.

So anyway, they, what they do is they kind of flood, um, the, the sort of lower level user generated, um, content sites. And they attach these numbers to these phone numbers to companies, um, mentioning them, you know, a BC company, this phone number, blah, blah, blah. And when, um, a, uh, AI overviews goes out to kind of scrape these sites, that's where they pick it up.

And it's a, it's a hard one to, to, uh, to sort of fight against, right? Because you don't know when people are gonna be sort of poisoning the, well, they don't, um, well, At what point does this just start to break down? And here's how I kind of see it.

I'm like, well, I can't trust the overview. And then there's seven ads that are sitting in between me and the actual search result. And the search result itself kind of sucks because it's been an SEO game there, the n degree.

So I'm kind of like, at what point does all this stuff just go where now I don't trust any of the results. So now I call John and I say, dude, is this true? And then eventually I'm just gonna bypass Google and just go to John and say, Hey dude, do you know Mike is your first mistake?

Isn't this the problem in America today about everything, right? Because your friend John has an opinion and John's opinions as good as any PhD or other authority I have. And this is how we wound up in this mess.

And look, it's also part of the ification trend, right? This is the idea that, that, that, you know, everything gets monetized and over time it gets worse and worse because they make you pay more and more. But, uh, Terry, I think this is such an important article.

I thank you personally for writing this. I've gone through this with my mom. She's getting on, right?

Um, we've had the conversation. I think everyone needs to have the conversation. It Started with what exactly conversation was this, Andy?

It wasn't like the birds and bees or something like, I hope it Wasn't related to organ transplant. That's all I It's about who Are you, if this is, this has gone on your right too. This has gone on in different ways for a long time.

The old scam was you get a call, right? And the call would be, well, actually it was a text. You get a text, oh, I'm texting from someone else's phone.

I'm stuck. I need a thousand dollars, right? Send it here.

This, this is an old scam, old scam. Um, then it came voice. We actually had the conversation with my mom, my siblings and I about voice calls.

At some point, you're gonna get a call and it's gonna sound like me and it's not gonna be me. Yeah. We've got a past phrase we use.

It's a secret from our childhood that my mom will always remember, that we will always remember, um, so that we can get round. You're not gonna say it on here, right? Right, right.

Do not say it. It's written on a post-it note on my monitor. Organ Transplant.

That's, that's the path. Organ Trans. Yeah, that's c said.

No, no. Good. Seriously.

Can, can I just Rest in Mexico? Scam almost always worked. It used to almost my mom, my mom almost fell for it because she thought my son was trapped in a jail in Mexico until she called us and we had to talk her out of it.

It was like, this Was like 15 years ago. Friend, a friend of mine didn't find out that his dad had fallen for that until he called home one day to speak to his mother. And his father said, uh, before I put your mother on, I just wanna know.

This goes no further than you and me. It's just between us. And he's like, what are you talking about?

And he said, well, you know, the bail money I sent you to get out of, Oh, Jesus, And you don't have to pay us back. And he's like, what? No.

So, but here's, here's, look. You are right Andy. These, these scams have been, are oldest time, right?

These scams have been going on the same way phishing has been going on. The problem now is that AI has made these exponentially better. Your phishing emails are harder to discern.

The the voice cloning, the texting smishing, whatever you want to call it, AI has in the hand. It's why we can't have nice things. AI in the hands of bad guys have, has made bad guys better the same way it's made good guys better.

And you know, it's, it's the yin and yang, I guess, of this whole thing. You know, there's, there's a what, you know, God take it away. He give us right hand, left hand, whatever.

I forgot what that saying is, but this is the world we live in. And unfortunately we do, we have to remind those vulnerable. We're all vulnerable.

But those more vulnerable members of our families of society, they've gotta be extra on guard. Extra on guard. Well, and, and I think this one too, is it, it gets people, for some reason, they trust these overviews more than maybe they even trust the person that's, you know, the anonymous call.

You know, or whatever. And, and, and why is that? I mean, I've sort of tried to mold that because they see it in print because they think, oh, this thing searches and finds me the information that I've asked for.

So it's got to be okay, it looks like an encyclopedia, you know, entry. I don't know what goes on in those brains where people, you know, trust that more. Um, there is one thing that companies can do or they need to do.

Like, and, and this is like, you know, sort of brand awareness. You need to protect your brand, right? You need to be proactive in going out and making sure that numbers aren't appearing associated with your brand.

These numbers that are fake or harmful or dangerous. Um, and that's on you, however you choose to do that. But, um, so maybe that, so my father, My father-in-law has a hobby though.

And his hobby is, when he gets these calls is he just chants these people up. He is retired and just basically bored, and he's a nickel or a dime, but, you know, it's become something he just is just to be, he figures he's annoying them back, and he is all the time in the world. So, You know, Mike, my dad, That's what I do with them too, when I get 'em, you know, Taking one person out of the loop, that's a, at least a start.

One person, one ha one scammer at a time, I guess. Uh, It's a, it's, And, and just by the way, I'll tell you this is one thing you said Terry also resonated with me, is this is the new SEO. And by the way, SEO was a hacker and scammer technique before it was a corporate Technique.

Yes, it was. It's Always true, right? We've, we've gone through this cycle, it's brand new, and yet it's not.

Um, by the way, a as a corporate person myself, we are doing SEO with LLMs. There's certain techniques you can use to put your content out. A respond.

Yeah. G Yep. LM o is it, it's, we, we've got a, we've got an acronym for it.

It's one too many letters. Team, we need, we need TLAs. TLAs, It seems inevitable.

Aren't, aren't we all gonna have our own ai that's gonna be our own detection for scam and blah, blah, all this stuff. So there'll be a variety measure. There's a countermeasure, right?

I think that's the world, the escalating world. But we'll have AI tools of our own to help. Just like, but then I worry about that memory system Worry, you know, too, for people who are less inclined to, So, wait, how I got, Am I gonna wind up yelling at my AI agent for getting scammed by another AI agent?

I mean, how, Well, You'll have to have the talk with your AI agent like, like Andy did with this small, I gotta be honest with you, I've always had a fantasy of having sort of an artificial butler or something. I was gonna call it Hobson from the author movie, right? And, uh, yeah, I, that kind of appeals to me.

Mitch, maybe we could build that. Uh, I, I'm actually am you're looking at it. Um, this is is Mitch.

I mean, my name is Hobson. I'm Hobson Hoon. I like hos.

There You go. I'd just be lucky enough that my AI would degrade like Michael Keaton's character in that movie where he cloned himself to do chores around that as Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Wow.

It was just spin up another one. Yeah. My, my third.

Wasn't he an Iron Man? Didn't he have a, an alter kind of digital? Yes, he did.

Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I, look, I lived through movies and sci-fi books.

What can I tell you? Um, I, I don't know. I, on a previous show, I said that the world is not ready for an AI augmented Mike Vizard.

The certain world is certainly not ready for six clones of Mike Vizard. That's for sure. Well, we could run texture and gang all day with it, but whatever.

Um, How much time you'd have for golf though, if there were six of you around? Maybe, maybe. I don't know.

Anyway. Hey, we gotta jump to our next one here, right? But do be on the lookout Scams are worse than they've ever been.

Um, there's been a big gathering over in Barcelona. No, it's not people running away from the Middle East. It's Mobile World Congress.

Well, maybe there's some people from the Middle East there, but it's Mobile World Congress, Mike, you know, this is in the past been a hundred thousand people attending. Mitch, I think you were there last year, weren't you? Oh, I've been there Many years.

Yeah. For several years in a row. But yeah, Yeah.

Um, going on this show, If this, if you've been at this show, it's more overwhelming these days than Comdex was back in the day. And I think you're lucky if you're able to get three appointments by the time you navigate where you're supposed to be. But, uh, the headliners were the show, at least in my mind, were Qualcomm and Nvidia, both of which we're talking about, um, how the networks need to expand in the age of ai, because we're gonna have all this data moving back and forth.

And, um, Nvidia is a little more focused on, you know, the backend. And Qualcomm may be a little more focused on the front end, but these networks all have to get, you know, we're gonna need more bandwidth. That's all there is to it.

But other folks were there too. Intel was talking about new processors that they're going to use and at least previewing on this, what they're calling their, uh, I think a 18, a semiconductor thing, which is a slight variation on a two nanometer. But, um, you know, they were out using the show to say, Hey, we're still relevant and cool.

And even Red Hat was there talking about, well, you're gonna run container apps in a distributed network across all these different things. And Andy, I'm gonna start with you a little bit, but it seems to me, if I look at all of this is AI is gonna become much more distributed and we're gonna, yeah, This, this absolutely makes sense to me. Um, AI's gonna be everywhere.

We know that already. We've already seen it on watches, on, you know, uh, rings, uh, glasses, obviously it's gonna be everywhere. So it's gonna be at the edge.

And you are right. Bandwidth is limited. It's a physical thing.

We are doing better with better techniques and better protocols and so forth. You know, one of the things that I was interested in marginally was the announcement of wifi eight. So again, a doubling in speed for wireless communication.

So yes, all of this is gonna be massively churning. And the current techniques we've got around things like roaming and distribution and, and, and bouncing, I'm not really that good. Uh, as with so much technology, we've gotten to a certain point and never actually refined it.

So anything that we can put into help create more bandwidth, use more bandwidth, better distribute it better is going to be helpful. And I do think the complexity of the network, and I say this as an it ops guy, networks flummox me every time. It's like the last arcade in science in our world.

It's entirely prescriptive and well ordered, and yet I don't get it at all. Any AI would help me. So I'm, I'm actually pretty excited about all of that.

Mitch, we have to rethink how we build these AI applications. 'cause when I talk to some folks, it's like part of the art of this thing now is the prompt and context engineering, which I need to cash more locally because I can't keep all these round trips to go into the cloud back and forth. And we'll have to factor that in the way I build my application.

Ah, rough humbug. Lemme tell you something, lemme tell you, one of Shiels laws, The amount of compute you are going to use will instantly fill up any container or network that you build for it, right? You build a bigger network, you're gonna use more information, you're going to use more information.

We're gonna build a bigger network. Let me tell you where the rubber meets the road here, right here in Highland Beach, Florida, where I live, I'm the president of the HOA Go figure. I'm, I'm bringing in our very first broadband broadband provider to the neighborhood.

They offer up to 10 gigabits a second ethernet over fiber into our houses where they're installing wifi seven in the house. The deal is, we gotta sign up for 10 years, but they promised to keep it up to date with the latest greatest. If wifi eight comes out, we'll go to wifi eight.

Um, I've got people pushing back saying, but I'm on Verizon 5G. I said, well, how's your band? What's your bandwidth?

Oh, it's very fast. Very. I said, how fast?

Very fast. Well, can you, uh, what about your tv? Oh, we get hd.

I said, well, have you looked at 4K? Well, no, we don't really have 4K, but the bandwidth's very fast. Well, guys, again, Shiels law here, the, the, the, the, the application will fill the amount of bandwidth you have.

If you have that much more bandwidth, you're gonna have a KTV, you're gonna have more ai, right? So this is a never ending hamster wheel of more bandwidth. I need more bandwidth.

I got more bandwidth. I need more bandwidth. I got more bandwidth.

We're always, it's the same thing with hard drives, right? When I put my first 30 megabit hard external hard card or whatever it was called, it was about this big, it was a 30 pegger. I said, oh my God, I Got, I got one for you, Alan.

This is, go ahead. This is Mitch's law. Whenever you remove or drastically reduce a constraint, systems change radically.

Case in point, AI is the ultimate, ultimate edge distributed application. Why? Lemme proof and point Mac Minis the run on Mac Minis.

Pick what? We just got a new one here in the office Exactly. To run some open stuff.

No, it's open clock today. It'll be the fifth generation or the next iteration of something else that's pushing more compute, more processing at the edge. And this is consumers doing it.

This isn't, you know, you and I doing it at the edge and, and some cloud. Yeah, we could do that, but that isn't what, what's necessary to do this. Sorry, my, I'm just having bandwidth issues.

Yeah, I'm, I'm getting on your, getting on your new service in your, in your show. By the Way, this is, this is actually a, a known, very well known phenomenon in traffic engineering. I'm a bit of a part-time urbanist.

Um, and the concept is called induced demand. Um, when you build a new road, everyone goes, oh, new road, less traffic. I'm gonna use the new road.

You get more demand for that new road. Very, very common. The best way to reduce traffic congestion is to reduce the amount of roadway.

It's counterintuitive, but you're absolutely right. It's called No, because then everybody starts flipping out because here in the big city where s**t actually goes down, you get congestion pricing. And so everybody starts complaining about the fact that they gotta pay more to use said roads.

Then they start yelling at you because, well, you didn't build enough new roads. And so you're lose again. There's no winning.

But, you know, I gotta ask something back, back to Mobile World Congress. This intel announcement about the ZON six plus. Am I, am I playing Marty McFly?

And this is back to the future. What, what are we doing here? Did they still make zon?

Yeah, so they do. And actually CPU usage is actually up in the age of ai. 'cause people are starting to use those things to run AI and everything else they can find with it.

But you know, what they're saying is that, you know, this is basically them running around saying, you know, we still have the ability to build two nanometer chips and we're gonna be relevant in this space. And so that's a preview of something that they're gonna be delivering general purpose. It's not networking specific, but I guess there was a party out there and they're like, Hey, we're still here and still relevant.

And so, you know, shout out for them. I, I think it, I hope that this is something that, you know, manifests itself in the, something that's price competitive. But you can sure as hell bet that everybody else that makes a CPU is already down this path.

What's old as new is IBM had a run on some z systems about, about a year ago because Watson code assist for doing mainframe modernization. So all of a sudden modernization of mainframe applications sells more mainframe hardware. Go figure.

Oh, Mitch, oh, don't threaten me with a good time, mate, get some more mainframe up in this. Um, but, but, but quite seriously, are we going back to an era of constraint on resources? We've been through a golden era team.

We've been through an era where compute was essentially free cloud, unstrained fast as you need it to be. Gigabit ethernet. Are we actually, because of this AI revolution coming back to an era where we start making hard decisions.

What debugs what logs do we emit? What do we drop from our observability or from our, from our, our, our AI models? Because it's too much data.

It costs too much. How do we get to a confidence Interval? Time out.

Andy, have you been drinking that Splunk juice Again, we need, we've been, he wants, he wants to charge for your observability logs. No way. That's right.

That right Alan, we're gonna limit you. You can only run that open cloth thing at 2:00 AM to five 4:00 AM What are you That's right, because they stay over. Look, since they started this in the office, I got people sleeping in the office.

They're setting up couches because they play with it all damn night. I got one guy, his wife is ready to, to have him hang up on his head. He's been spending too much time in the office at night.

Tell Taylor and everybody quit calling me at night too. No. Well, Mitch blame me.

I tell them, I say, call Mitch, call Mitch. He's up on this stuff. Call Mitch.

But you know, it, I, I gotta be honest, it reminds me of when, when the web first came out, right? So here's little much younger Alan Shimel 35, 40 years ago, sitting in his little home network with Xena 3 86 machines. I had one big 4 86 all done up with early TCP ip, you know, on the internet and networked.

And I'm making web pages just because I can't, and you don't even want to know what I'm making on those web pages. But, um, no, I was, I was, I was, I was like Richard Dreyfus in encounters of the third kind, you know, building devil's that devil's whatever it was called, the Mountain Devil's Tower. Devil's Tower in Montana.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're all of an age. We remember this stuff in Wyoming Mashed, which we looked at mashed potatoes the same again, we never looked at em the same way.

Yeah, exactly. Terry. But it's the same thing.

Now. People are, and that's why we're running into these constraints, Andy, right? People are experimenting and yes, there's the enterprise experiments and then there's the personal, but don't think they're not overlapping.

This is how, right, this is how stuff gets snuck in the back door of the enterprise. They play with it at home and they bring it in. And that's what I think we're, we're looking at.

And so when you see stuff bringing it back, what does this have to do with m wc when you see stuff going on at Mobile World Congress on these kind of cutting edge things. We're we're, we're living it. We're living it.

And um, Everybody at M WC is banking on the fact that you're gonna have AI agents that are gonna be consuming massive amounts of bandwidth, which is gonna require major upgrades in networking infrastructure. And the Whole thing goes round and round. This is another law of mine.

It's Mitch's Law of Doritos, compute storage bandwidth, or just like Doritos, use it up. We'll make more. We'll buy more.

Yeah. Sort an interesting story about Doritos. You know, the guy who invented Doritos, they had leftover tortillas.

He didn't know what to do with, and that's how he, he, uh, invented the Dorito. There. Go, go figure.

God bless him. So have you got any leftover AI agents? God knows what you can make with it.

There's a moral to that story. Anyway. What a wacky Wednesday.

But I needed the levity after the, the Tel Aviv and the Puerto Val stuff. It, it, you know what, all getting aside, there's some serious stuff going on in the world today. Yeah.

Really serious stuff. And, um, you know, we, you don't wanna see way out. Yeah.

And you know, while we're all busy playing with our ais, there's people fighting for their lives and freedoms and everything else. So, you know, we want to think of them and, and, and go forward. That'll be enough for my public service announcement.

Um, hey, we got Text Drunk TV immediately following this. We'll be back on tomorrow on, uh, Textron Gang. We've got a shimmy says tomorrow.

I think actually we have Tech Field Day coming up too, so that'll be pretty cool. But until then, Mitch, John, Terry. Andy.

Mike, thank you very much. Thank you for watching. Enjoy Textron tv replay right after this.

I'm Alan Shimel. We're out.