In this episode of The Futuristic, hosts Steve Sammartino and Cameron Reilly explore cutting-edge topics in technology and culture. They dive into AI’s role in creativity, discussing AI-generated music compared to human-made tunes, and examine the rise of local micro-AI models like OpenAI’s GPT 4.0 Mini. Steve talks about the transhumanist movement and ethical concerns over chip implants in humans, while Cameron shares his latest AI-assisted coding projects. They analyze SpaceX’s Starship launch and Elon’s vision for multi-planetary life, as well as nanotech breakthroughs in cancer treatment. The episode also covers the revolutionary potential of Apple’s Vision Pro in creating immersive entertainment experiences and its applications in various fields. The hosts end with an overview of technological advancements and the opportunities they present.
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:14 Corporate Critique and Personal Reflections
02:33 Transhumanism and Media Manipulation
07:26 Exploring Assembly Code and AI Agents
12:40 Coding Challenges and Subscription Creep
22:42 GPT-4o mini drops
29:06 RunwayML Gen 3 alpha
40:54 Orson Welles and the Future of Filmmaking
41:48 Starship Super Heavy launch into space
45:41 Debating Multi-Planetary Species and Space Exploration
50:27 Nanorobot with hidden weapon kills cancer cells ; Self-assembling and disassembling swarm molecular robots via DNA molecular controller
01:01:25 AI in Music Production: A New Era; Rick Beato’s critique of modern music ; Music producer Dan McClellan tests Suno and Udio
01:14:29 Apple Vision Pro: A Game Changer in Entertainment
FULL TRANSCRIPT
FUTURISTIC #28
[00:00:00] Cameron: Just have to be different. Welcome to The Futuristic Episode 28, I believe. We’re recording this on the 19th of July, 2024. Mr. Sammartino, Mr. Steve Sammartino, won’t you ever quit? You’re back.
[00:00:20] Steve: don’t you make me sick with your fraudulent behavior. Ooh, ooh, Mr. Sammartino, talking to corporates, tell them how to do it. Ooh, ooh, Mr. Sammartino, you gotta pretend to care when you’re selling them things. What you believe is what they selling, make you think that buying is rebelling. That was a little bit of Zack DeLaRocca, Rage Against The Machine.
[00:00:46] Cameron: I love it, love it. With Del the Homo Sapien mixed in.
[00:00:51] Steve: Yes.
[00:00:52] Cameron: How you doing,
[00:00:53] Steve: Dels! It was DeLaRocca and Del the Homo Sapien, we double Delled.
[00:00:59] Cameron: Double Del. Della, in Italian, of course, meaning of the, yeah, Della Rocca. Of the, of the rock, Zach of the rock, as he was, uh, and is, I lost track of what he’s up to these days, but huge rage fan.
[00:01:18] Steve: I’m a huge, I listen to them more than any other band. And, you know, I feel like I’m a fraud. Because basically, I sing those lyrics with such passion, and then take big checks from corporations. But I always can come back to say it’s not my fault. Cameron told me I’m just the accumulation of molecules temporarily and all of my thoughts, I have zero control over them.
[00:01:44] Steve: So it’s amazing. Thank you for that get out of jail free card.
[00:01:50] Cameron: I, one of the, um, one of the, uh, motivations for me leaving the corporate world, leaving Microsoft 20 years ago, holy shit, this month, this, like two weeks ago. Wow, I missed that anniversary. Uh, it was the beginning of July 2004 when I left the corporate world and, um, part of it was listening to Rage Against the Machine, quite honestly.
[00:02:12] Cameron: It is part of my conversion to being a lefty, uh, was listening to Rage Against the Machine. Anywho, Uh, we’re not here to talk about that, Steve, uh, we’re here to talk about technology, the future. Uh, the future is now, what is happening in your life vis a vis the future, Steve.
[00:02:33] Steve: Had a spot this week on the project. For anyone who doesn’t know, there’s this thing called Free to Wear TV, which has 17 people watching it across Australia. Yeah, over the The waves, the airwaves, and they rang me that day and said, look, we need someone to give us a synopsis on what’s happening with, uh, the transhumanist movement, using technology to enhance, uh, physical and mental capabilities and, uh, Longevity, Escape, Velocity.
[00:03:11] Steve: And they asked me a number of questions. I did a talk to camera. They came to me and they had someone coming on who had, which is a bit of an old trick now, had a few chips installed under his skin. And it’s so interesting. They did two things. First, they asked me a whole lot of stuff and questions about the topic.
[00:03:27] Steve: And then when I was watching Waleed Ali, uh, talk about it on the, uh, On the preamble where they had some visuals and then cuts to me doing some soundbites. He stole all my good stuff and put it as his words. They’ve been merging with the machines and a whole lot of nice verbiage I’ve written about and said, anyway, I guess that’s the price of getting coverage.
[00:03:46] Steve: Uh, and then they wanted me to say, Can someone with chips installed in their body hack into someone’s phone or computer? I’m like, no, not at the moment. No one can. And they’re like, yeah, but if, and they were just trying to get this sound bite. They asked me the same question 10 times and I said, look, it’s not going to happen.
[00:04:07] Steve: I’m not going to tell you something that isn’t the case. And so you could see when they did the edit that it was, uh, and shout out to all the people from channel 10 that were tuning in, uh, you could see what they were trying to get. And then they had this guy on there. He was a classic charlatan, uh, you know, in my view.
[00:04:23] Steve: People are just doing this.
[00:04:24] Cameron: Do you remember?
[00:04:26] Steve: No, I can’t remember.
[00:04:27] Cameron: The reason I ask is because 19 years ago, uh, in the early days of my podcasting, I went and did a podcast with a guy in Melbourne that had a chip inserted in the webbing between his thumb and his forefinger that he was using to unlock his door. Just wondering if it’s the same guy.
[00:04:46] Steve: Yeah, I’ll bring him up. Here it is. Here. I’ll just find, I’ll say his name.
[00:04:51] Cameron: trying to find my archive podcast to see if I can
[00:04:54] Steve: His name’s Leno. L-E-N-O-N-O-E. And, I mean, Transhuman, he’s got his, his subtitle there, uh, what was interesting was that he, asked me in the interview, which is during the day, and then they had my spot with voiceovers and visuals, and then they interviewed him. And, you know, what I found was interesting was that he said he could hack into something with what’s in his phone, and they said, can you do it?
[00:05:24] Steve: And he was, Like he turned on his phone. He had RFID and NFC chips in him, right? Which is, you know, a lot of people have done. Yeah, you can open the door. Congrats, whatever. Uh, and I said, well, he can’t hack into anything. And then he was trying to infer that he could, and I said, well, then how do you do it?
[00:05:40] Steve: If you scan, he said, I could scan with your card and then get your card and do a copy and, and a URL redirect. I’m like, well, yeah, you’re still going to need something to hack into it. Whether it’s, he said, well, I’d use my phone. So he was trying to make out. As if he could hack in through something that was in his body, when he clearly couldn’t.
[00:05:59] Steve: And they kind of fell for it. Um, but the most interesting bit for me, and it circles back to the attention economy, where that is the most valuable resource in the global economy now. The biggest companies, you know, are based on selling attention. Uh, they asked him, so why do it? And he said, well, why not?
[00:06:17] Steve: But his real answer was, so I can be on TV. So he just didn’t want to say that.
[00:06:24] Cameron: Yeah.
[00:06:26] Steve: Like, you know what I mean? Like I get annoyed with someone who just does something for attention rather than creating some value, you know, anyway, that’s my view. That’s my whinge and that’s it. And that’s my week.
[00:06:37] Cameron: Uh, dude, sounds like one of my conversations with my, uh, TikTok, a son, like, don’t you feel like you should be adding some value? He goes, well, entertaining people is value.
[00:06:49] Steve: That’s true. I don’t disagree with
[00:06:50] Cameron: can’t argue with that.
[00:06:52] Steve: Yeah. And, and, and this other guy is opening people’s minds potentially to future possibilities of, you know, it’s tongue in cheek when, when I say that, um, but I think now. Uh, what can generate attention, the bar is a lot lower now. And that might be a function of the fragmentation of possibility and, uh, The desire to create attention and the fact that everyone’s got a megaphone and everyone’s the CEO of their own personal media corporation now, um, that, that you get a lower bar.
[00:07:26] Steve: Um, two other really quick things I did this week is I was in Warrnambool doing a presentation and it was the only time I’d ever had a room of 300 people where only one had used or heard of ChatGPT, which was interesting. I’ve been in other rural locations and it’s usually 50 50. That was a real surprise.
[00:07:42] Cameron: Yeah.
[00:07:43] Steve: So again, we do live in a bit of a bubble, just a bit of a reminder. And then the other thing I’ve been doing this week is trying to understand assembly code. Um, I want to learn how to make a video game where I can do the assembly code and the controls to do like a, a simple video game, not, you know, a replication using Python or something, but in the traditional code, I just, I want to understand The deeper layers of it, because code is such an abstraction now that we’re up to the level of natural language processing.
[00:08:15] Steve: I want to really get down to the ones and zeros and off and on switches. I’ll just be mucking around with understanding assembly code, using ChatGPT to understand assembly code. There you go, full circle.
[00:08:26] Cameron: Wow. Well, speaking of which, what is assembly code exactly? Let’s go to ChatGPT and see what it has to tell us. Assembly code is a low level programming language that is one step above machine code. It is specific to a computer architecture and is used to write programs that are directly executed by the CPU. Here’s a breakdown of what assembly code entails. 1. Low level language. Assembly language is close to the hardware and allows programmers to write instructions that the CPU can directly execute.
[00:09:02] Cameron: Unlike high level languages like Python or Java, assembly requires detailed knowledge of the computer’s architecture. Stop it there. So why would you want to do that, Steve?
[00:09:12] Steve: Oh, cause I’m, I’m curious to get more of an understanding of how things work at a deeper level. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. And I think the evolution of large language models has made me think more deeply about how things work, because I think we’re getting to increasing levels of abstraction when no one really understands anything.
[00:09:31] Steve: And I just thought it’s, it’s, it’s almost like growing your own vegetables, but in a computational sense and going, going back to the seventies. And I’ve got the big arcade machine here. Which doesn’t, runs on a, runs on a CPU, so it just runs on a, on a simple laptop and screen. Um, but I was just interested in, in how much memory you need and how much RAM and how it can work and how it can fit it all in there.
[00:09:56] Steve: Assembly code takes up far less space, so you can do a lot more with a lot less. So there’s just something interesting about it. I don’t know. I was just curious. It started off with what code a traditional 8 bit arcade game is written in. And then I just kept going down, you know. And then I wasted two days when I could have been generating income for my family.
[00:10:14] Steve: Sort of understanding that.
[00:10:17] Cameron: It reminds me, you’re talking about abstraction layers, I was listening, uh, watching actually uh, an interview with Eric Schmidt recently, um, was the CEO of Google for 20 years, give or take, and um, they were talking about AI among other things, and um, he was saying that the, Like he, what he sees is the near term future for AI is we’re going to have, you know, super advanced AI very quickly, AGI, etc, etc.
[00:10:47] Cameron: Um, he, and he was talking about AI agents, and we’re going to have AI agents in everything, and then those, you know, AI agents are going to talk to other AI agents. He said then what’s going to happen is the AI agents, We’ll realize that using English or even code, human created code, to talk to each other is inefficient.
[00:11:08] Cameron: So they’re going to create their own language to talk to each other, which humans won’t be able to understand. And he said, and that’s the point where we have to pull the plug.
[00:11:17] Steve: Right.
[00:11:18] Cameron: said, as soon as they start talking to each other in languages we can’t understand. understand, and there’s no transparency about what the agents are talking to each other about, pull the plug.
[00:11:28] Steve: It’s really interesting, my father and I, when we used to speak Italian sometimes, if we wanted to talk about someone, we would go to Italian. So I just feel like they’ve worked out that if you go to another language, you know, and you do it with your kids as well, when you, when they’re really young, you use complex language that they haven’t quite got the vocabulary for yet.
[00:11:47] Steve: Um, and I, and I, the sentiments there of Schmidt. Uh, and that’s a first principle. The first principle is be worried if you don’t understand. Now, it doesn’t mean necessarily that the computers have nefarious intentions,
[00:12:01] Cameron: Hmm.
[00:12:01] Steve: but if you can’t understand it, um, then,
[00:12:05] Cameron: Then maybe they
[00:12:06] Steve: then, well, well, then, well, then you won’t know.
[00:12:08] Steve: So, so the first principle is make the, the, uh, yeah, the, the reparations.
[00:12:17] Cameron: Sorry, I’m just changing my video. My video was flashing at me for some reason, so I’m turning it off and on and
[00:12:22] Steve: I’m getting a thousand text messages, which is fine.
[00:12:25] Cameron: now I’m all over the side here, which is weird. Um, yeah, turn your damn phone off, Steve. What are you, amateur? What are you doing?
[00:12:34] Steve: Yeah, I am. If there was anything that I am, amateur is certainly it.
[00:12:40] Cameron: Um, Well, Steve, uh, I’ve been coding a lot, um, in the last couple of weeks, so, um, without boring people with the details, Spotify, uh, fucked me severely about a week ago. Basically all of my, all of the MP3 hosting for all of my podcasts, um, is, sits with Spotify now, one of their subsidiaries, Megaphone, and there was a whole bunch of legacy links there from company, a company they acquired, an Australian company called Wooshka, a couple of years ago. And they arbitrarily turned all of that code off last week and, uh, I had about 500 episodes across my many, many shows that I produced just went dark
[00:13:23] Steve: The Sammartino Method. The Sammartino Method podcast is gone.
[00:13:27] Cameron: yeah, I had to fix that one. That was the big one I had to fix. That was the first one I went to fix. But, um, so that, so, and, uh, you know, it’s, had to update 500 posts.
[00:13:38] Cameron: I’m still in the process of it, and each post has a bunch of different mp3 links, because a lot of my shows have lots of different feeds for different levels of subscribers and whatever, and it was taking me A minute and a half, I timed it to update every post, so multiply by a thousand, that’s a lot of time.
[00:13:58] Cameron: Uh, so I wrote some code to automate a large chunk of it. I still have to do 50 percent of it, but I wrote some code to automate 50 percent of it. And that was a big coding project late last week. Thank you to GPT. I tried using Claude, 3. 5, Sonnet. It was a disaster, partly because I’m not paying for it, so, you know, I ran out of, uh, free, um, chats very quickly.
[00:14:22] Steve: Well, you got to worry about subscription creep, Cam. Subscription creep is a big financial issue, I think.
[00:14:29] Cameron: I’ve been cutting off all my subscriptions in the last week or so, actually. All streaming,
[00:14:34] Steve: I did a subscription audit. Are
[00:14:36] Cameron: Yeah, that’s what I’m doing too, cutting stuff off. Um, but anyway, I, I got the code working and, um, oh, I was impressed. Like now I, I just, I run some code and it says, what’s the link you want to update?
[00:14:48] Cameron: And I give it to it and it does more than 50%, probably 90 percent of it is automated. I need to finish the last 10%, which just seemed too hard to automate. Um, but I, again, I was impressed that I could write code to do that, you know, pre AI, no fucking way I would have known how to do that. And in a less, um, complicated sense, I’ve been using it more and more for film and music recommendations.
[00:15:15] Cameron: Like, uh, give me a cult film that I might like. Or, um, you know, give me an artist like Lou Reed that I might like. This video is right. Um, and it’s been doing a pretty good job. I actually discovered via this, uh, a really great film. And a really great band that I’d never heard of just by getting GPT to give me some recommendations.
[00:15:45] Cameron: So that’s been fun.
[00:15:46] Steve: you going to keep them a secret or are you going to tell us all what they are?
[00:15:50] Cameron: Uh, well, now that you’ve insisted, I will happily tell you, the film is a 1976 film called Stingray, written and directed by a guy called Richard Taylor, who, um, I think he did Fright Night after that, but not known for much, but it’s a, um, uh, actually 1978 according to IMDB. Prim it’s a low budget car chase shootout film.
[00:16:24] Cameron: I think probably in the vein of, uh, you know, your, um, uh, Cannonball Run slash, uh, Smokey and the Bandit era comedy action. Premise is great though. Starts off with a drug deal going down in an alleyway in the middle of the night. Two guys with the coke, two guys with the money, goes awry. The guys with the coke kill the other guys who were trying to.
[00:16:50] Cameron: But, you know, uh, betray them, they planted a tracker on them. Um, and then the, the, the two guys that are still alive, have the money, have the coke, they take off, they hear cops coming, because there’s a big shootout, they hear cops, they drive into a car yard in the middle of the night and deposit the briefcase with the money and the drugs in a Stingray convertible behind the back, behind the seats, you know, the, the boot of these sports cars.
[00:17:15] Cameron: was like you’d flip the seat down and then they go back then they get arrested by the cops anyway cops find them get arrested can’t pin them with anything because they’re not holding anything they get out a day later they go to the car yard to see two young guys buying the car and driving out the lot so they chase these guys down and the guy the two young guys uh like college age guys in the stingray think these guys are wanting to race so they start fanging down the streets you A cop car pulls out to pull him over for speeding, does pull him over for speeding, uh, on a, on a country lane somewhere, and the gangsters come up behind him and mow the cops down.
[00:17:55] Cameron: But the cops had called in that they were chasing a stingray. The rest of the cops think the kid’s in the stingray, So now the cops are after the kids in the Stingray, the gangsters are after the kings in the Stingray. But the best thing is, the gangsters, the leader of the gangsters, is a woman who’s dressed up as a nun to disguise herself from the cops.
[00:18:18] Cameron: And she’s this real hard ass, fast talking woman. Strong girl boss, as my wife called her, just a great premise. The acting’s sort of a little bit dodgy, very low budget, but real stunts, real car chases, real,
[00:18:36] Steve: and people dressed up as nuns. I think if you’ve got a stingray and someone pretending to be a nun, I feel like. These are the ingredients of greatness. I’ve always said that, Cameron. I’ve always said that.
[00:18:50] Cameron: It’s only got a 5. 6 rating on IMDb, but I think
[00:18:53] Steve: Well, what would IMDB know? What would IMDB know? Let’s be honest about that.
[00:18:58] Cameron: I got to say, my wife and I enjoyed watching this more than we’ve enjoyed watching much lately. Cause it was, it’s just, there’s something about
[00:19:04] Steve: trying to tell me that this is better than some animated movie that’s been made 76 times? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That real people in real situations is better than a, yeah, an Avengers film? Well, I mean, how dare, I mean, what were you thinking?
[00:19:19] Cameron: you get the sense of like, it’s made for driving kind of a movie from the late seventies, you know, and it’s, it’s just fun. You can tell that who the people making it were just having fun. Like it was just like, fuck you. We get to make a movie. This is awesome.
[00:19:32] Cameron: The music that I discovered was, um.
[00:19:34] Steve: that fun, having fun, right now everyone is thinking about What everyone else wants to see instead of what they want to make. Like that, that for me is what is what’s missing culturally right now. That’s all I’m saying. I mean, that’s what the Avengers is. It’s like, what can we sell rather than what’s worth making?
[00:19:53] Cameron: Yeah. Well, the music I discovered, uh, was the Jim Carroll band, you know, Jim Carroll, the basketball diaries. You ever seen that Leonardo DiCaprio film
[00:20:01] Steve: I haven’t seen it. I know of it, but I haven’t
[00:20:03] Cameron: mid nineties, based on an American poet, Jim Carroll, who was also a drug addict. Um, and, um, it, it turns out I never knew this.
[00:20:12] Cameron: I knew who Jim Carroll was. I’ve seen the film, uh, didn’t realize that he had a punk band. Uh, called the Jim Carroll band. ChatGPT got me onto them. Uh, listened to it. Fantastic. Sort of a cross between Iggy and the Stooges and Lou Reed. Cause again, like Lou, he’s a poet that started, like Leonard Cohen, a poet who started writing rock songs and putting his poetry into it and, you know, like Lou, a lot of drugs and, you know, sort of, you know, dirty, dodgy lifestyles and that kind of stuff, but with a Stooges y kind of feel to it, really, really good stuff.
[00:20:49] Cameron: Anyway, so. But yeah, I just go to ChatGPT and I go, Hey, you know, tell me, I like this cult film. I like these sorts of films. Give me some recommendations of things that I may not have seen because they’re not very well known and that are available on Tubi, which is where I watch a lot of these cult films now.
[00:21:07] Cameron: Do you stream Tubi? Use tubi. tv,
[00:21:10] Steve: No, I
[00:21:11] Cameron: T U B I, it’s free. It’s ad supported, they put in ads every 15 minutes or so, um, and it just has a great collection of, you know, B rated, D rated movies from the 20s onwards, my kind of stuff, you know, schlocky, B, D, C rated, crappy, straight to video movies from the 80s and 90s, which is, uh, 70s, which is my favorite kind of films usually, because they’re just, again, fun.
[00:21:41] Cameron: Anywho,
[00:21:42] Steve: I like, it’s funny because every recommendation engine that exists. Exists because you need that quantum of support for it to work financially, that kind of original sin of the internet where you need a lot of traffic. And there’s something beautiful about asking an AI for things that are quirky and nuanced, because even if you Googled that.
[00:22:04] Steve: You’ve still got to get someone who’s going to give you quirky and nuanced stuff that’s still in their top 10. So by default, it’s very, very difficult to find these types of things. Whereas an AI engine that can scour the entirety of the internet can find something that is, you know, a little island off to the side that the way search is structured just won’t find.
[00:22:26] Cameron: and you can say to all, well, tell me about it, what’s good about it. This director, Richard Taylor, what did he do? You know, who’s in it? What have they done? You can, you can have a conversation with it,
[00:22:36] Steve: You get a flavor profile for what culturally what you’re looking for. Yeah, that’s why
[00:22:42] Cameron: well, tech news, Steve, moving on to that, uh, just today. OpenAI, OpenAI, uh, announced, released GPT 4. 0 Mini, uh, according to their press release, the cost per token of GPT 4. 0 Mini has dropped by 99 percent since Text DaVinci 003, a less capable model introduced in 2022.
[00:23:12] Cameron: So they’re talking about the massive Uh, efficiencies that they’re starting to get, uh, with some of their newer models. This is, they say, their most cost efficient small model. We expect GPT 4. 0 Mini will significantly expand the range of applications built with AI by making intelligence much more affordable.
[00:23:35] Cameron: Then they go on to talk about its, uh, context windows and how it’s ranking on the MMLU and the NLMSIS leaderboard. Uh, There’s a, there’s a big explosion of Mini. Have you played with any of the Mini models out there, Steve?
[00:23:50] Steve: I haven’t played with it, but it’s kind of interesting. And to me, it’s analogous. To the idea of six cylinder cars. And we said, you know what? They use a lot of petrol and this idea of AI and energy really having this symbiosis and having similar patterns as well, um, comes to the fore where you need to say, how can we become more efficient and, and really give us the result we need.
[00:24:18] Steve: Do we really need to carry all of this weight and have all of this capability where large parts of the search, you’re just carrying all this extra weight that you don’t need. So I actually found it really interesting, uh, to align this thinking to the fossil fuel era and transportation generally and heating houses and looking for more efficient ways to do things.
[00:24:38] Steve: And we’ve read all of that, that stuff as well, not just on the cost. Cause I, in many ways, cost and efficiency and energy usage are kind of the same thing within this computational context. I mean, you’ve got to buy the hardware of course, but if you use less of it, then you lose less energy, which means it’ll cost you less.
[00:24:56] Steve: So for me, that was the first thing that kind of popped in my mind. I thought, here we are again, And here we are following a similar path in a different technology, and I haven’t really used them, so, but I’d be really interested to see, you know, if it’s dropped by 90 percent of the cost, then the question is, okay, do we Do we still get sort of 80 percent of the result?
[00:25:20] Steve: What is the ratio of cost reduction versus the output? And I haven’t played with it enough to understand that yet. Do you know?
[00:25:27] Cameron: I know from the benchmark reporting that they did in their press release today, they say GPT 40 Mini is better than other small models of reasoning tasks involving both text and vision, scoring 82 percent on MMLU, a textual intelligence and reasoning benchmark, as compared to 77. 9 percent for Gemini Flash and 73.
[00:25:50] Cameron: 8 percent for Claude Haiku. So they’re comparing it
[00:25:54] Steve: They’re comparing it to four cylinder cars to four cylinder cars. I’m interested to know, how does it go against the big V8? That’s actually what I’m really interested to know.
[00:26:03] Cameron: it’s not going to be as good, or they would be telling you that it was, obviously,
[00:26:08] Steve: Yeah, right. Yeah. You choose your, you choose your measurement parameters based on your capability, right. And where you can win,
[00:26:14] Cameron: They’re saying it outperforms ChatGPT 4 on chat preferences, in the LMSIS leaderboard, but, you know. Anyway, the bottom, like,
[00:26:25] Steve: but that’s important. That’s a good point because you got to remember that the models get better and better if, if this small version is better than, you know, a couple of models previously that, that, that’s significant. And they should talk that up even more, I think.
[00:26:39] Cameron: One of the things that we’re seeing happening is not only the explosion of course, of uh, open source models, but the whi which are performing really well, but the explosion of mini models that, uh, faster and cheaper don’t quite perform as well as the top end models. But ostensibly we’ll be able to run locally on small devices eventually.
[00:27:05] Cameron: Um, you know, in theory that Microsoft launched one too, just in the last week or so, that apparently can run locally on phones. I was going to set aside some time to download it and install it on mine, but then, um, my Spotify crisis happened. But you know, it’s, it’s just, we, you know, we saw the Apple announcement.
[00:27:26] Cameron: Um, With Apple intelligence, this idea that in the next year or so, we’re going to have AIs running locally on some of our devices without having to go and talk to anything on the cloud in terms of stuff that it could do locally with local information, your information in particular, you know, is going to be a complete game changer.
[00:27:51] Cameron: I
[00:27:52] Steve: Well, and, and you would suggest that that’s why you need this small model so that we can run on edge computers and our own devices. I,
[00:28:01] Cameron: I think that’s part of it. And, but part of it is also as they’re understanding how LLMs work better, they’re able to get them to do more with less. I was watching a Gates interview just earlier today where he was talking about that, uh, as we understand them better, we’re going to be able to get them to function a lot more efficiently.
[00:28:23] Cameron: And they were talking about the energy requirements and he was saying, look, the breakthroughs we’re going to make in material sciences as a result of AI will far outweigh their short term energy cost to get us
[00:28:37] Steve: I think that too. I think that too. Um,
[00:28:40] Cameron: do too.
[00:28:41] Steve: I remember it might’ve been Nicholas Negroponte, there’s an old tech name, who, when he used to talk to some of his students, he said, I want you to assume that computation and microchips are free, because only when we do that will we push ourselves to make the things themselves cheaper.
[00:28:57] Steve: So you have this recursive efficiency effect where the technology solves its own technological problems and output problems.
[00:29:06] Cameron: Well, speaking of, uh, recent releases, Runway released RunwayML Gen 3 Alpha, a text, the update of their text to video engine. I tried to play around with it, but they wanted me to sign up, and because I’m in a Because I’m in a, uh, not signing up to new things, uh, binge at the moment, I said no. But I’ve seen some
[00:29:30] Steve: Well, that’s because you’re a communist. That’s because you’re a communist and you believe that everything should be free to everyone, right?
[00:29:36] Cameron: I do. And everything will be free. I believe that we will reach communism at some point in the not too
[00:29:41] Steve: Technological communist abundance.
[00:29:44] Cameron: Exactly. As I heard somebody say recently, I don’t know who it was, but they were saying it’s not a universal basic income, it’s gonna be a universal, universal Uh, wealth income, wealthy income, where we’re headed.
[00:29:59] Cameron: Everyone’s going to have everything. I think it was Elon actually in a talk. He was saying it’s, it won’t be a universal basic income. It’ll be a universal, everything you need, um, is the
[00:30:10] Steve: I could, that, that, that I can buy into. Universal basic income, I, I, you and I, we debated it once on somewhere inside our 28 episodes, um, on it. And, uh, the, the word basic for me was the problem because it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s all, you know,
[00:30:26] Cameron: It’s just like what Elon said to Donald Trump last weekend. Anything you need, 45 million a month for your campaign, done. Not a problem. That’s what he’s putting in at the moment. Did you know that? Um, anyway, have you seen the runway three video?
[00:30:43] Steve: I, I didn’t sign up, but I tell you what, I watched a couple of demos and I actually watched a video demo of someone showing use cases live, because as you know, like we saw with Sora, they can show you incredible output. How they got there is, is the demos are not how you got there, but he went through the process of prompting a few different things to show its capability.
[00:31:06] Steve: And some of them were extraordinary and some of them weren’t so good. When he went through it, he gave it a few challenges and some of them were glitchy and terrible, but some were great to the point where I thought, I’m going to sign up to this. And it made me think with some of the TikTok videos that I do, if I’ve just got soundbite ideas, but I haven’t, I don’t want to talk to camera.
[00:31:24] Steve: I can just do a VO of me and have a video, which explains it in 10 seconds. And it could be incredibly compelling. I was really impressed. And I thought it kind of was at the Sora level. I thought from what I saw,
[00:31:37] Cameron: even better than Sora, I
[00:31:38] Steve: Yeah, so I was really impressed by it to
[00:31:41] Cameron: the human faces that it was doing, like the human face, its ability to capture human faces is like, Stunning. It’s as good as, uh, Mid Journey for bases, but as video, it was really impressive.
[00:31:58] Steve: I was super impressed by it to the point where I’m this weekend I’m going to muck around with it and maybe sign up for a month anyway and see how it goes. I did
[00:32:06] Cameron: had the same,
[00:32:08] Steve: on the economics of it all, how, All of the AI tools. And as you know, there’s, you know, every month there’s a number of tools that arrive.
[00:32:17] Steve: They’re all really pushing hard to give you incredible discounts where you almost get 12 months for the cost of three, because they know that you’re going to play with it next month and next month, you’re going to turn it off because a better one comes along. So it’s a real game of cat and mouse with the economics of getting the signups was also noticeable. Yeah. Monthly versus 12 months, but I’m definitely going to have a play with it for sure.
[00:32:41] Cameron: I had the same thing thinking of TikTok, you know, with the QAV TikToks that I try and do where we’re talking about investing and it’s dull and it’s boring, you know, my sons have often sent me examples of TikToks where people will be talking about something boring in the bottom half of the screen and the top half of the screen is just a Minecraft, it’s like a Minecraft walkthrough
[00:32:59] Steve: compelling.
[00:33:00] Cameron: do with the topic.
[00:33:01] Steve: Or a time lapse of someone cooking or cutting up watermelons or whatever. It’s, they come in my feed too. And it’s, it’s actually, it gives me hope in humanity that. Despite the tools, some people come up with creative ways to draw attention while you’re verbally giving.
[00:33:18] Steve: And it’s interesting to have this dichotomy of visual and verbal non matching to keep your attention, to transpose the important verbal information. That’s really important. It’s, and it’s a, it’s a real innovation. And just while you’re mentioning, you know, the QAV podcast, uh, I wrote. I’ve got this big list of TikToks I want to do.
[00:33:42] Steve: One day, when I get two days, I’m going to do 50 TikToks in one day and just get all the videos done. But one of them I want to do on is CEO wages, which is a real bugbear of mine, that CEOs have continued to extract largess while everyone else gets less. And here’s the ironic thing, they are not any better.
[00:33:59] Steve: They’re actually They’re worse than the CEOs in the seventies because the ROI on the average S& P 500 is a little bit lower than it was in the last, you know, it’s been around about 10 percent for a hundred years. So they’re not better, but they get paid thousands of times more. So this was the prompt that I put in to Runway.
[00:34:17] Steve: I put in, create a video of a greedy CEO which demonstrates an increase in wealth and their wages exponentially through the years while the average worker is getting poorer. Show it in a documentary style which would portray it over a timescale of decades starting in the 70s up until now. didn’t give me a very good result.
[00:34:34] Steve: But, but, um, but that was on Gen 2. So I’m going to try that on Gen 3 this afternoon. Uh,
[00:34:40] Cameron: yeah, let me know
[00:34:41] Steve: the other thing that I think is cool is how you can drop in a couple of images and get it to extrapolate on those, which I really like.
[00:34:50] Cameron: Well, just, you know, I think it’s just another demonstration of where we’re headed in terms of the ability for. Regular people, the democratization of the creation of high quality video content. We’re not very far away from, I think, from regular Joes like us being able to produce really high
[00:35:21] Steve: Hold up, hold up on the, hold up on the regular. Okay, keep going.
[00:35:24] Cameron: I’m being, I’m being humble. Uh, yeah, I’ve. Being able to produce really high quality video that, um, you know, can be used in a variety of ways. It can be used obviously for a business communication side of things, but also for entertainment. Um, it’s going to be a, an incredible world when we can all produce this kind of stuff to go along with our content.
[00:35:49] Cameron: Like for example, Uh, you know, in some of my history shows, you know, where if I’m talking about some historical battle, Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great or et cetera, et cetera, what I have done in the past, like if I’m talking about Alexander’s battle, great, uh, some of his great battles, um, and I’ll say, go watch the Oliver Stone film, uh, the film itself is pretty bad, but, uh, you know, but look at the battle scenes.
[00:36:18] Cameron: It’s pretty bad. Battle scenes give you a sense of what this was like. For me to be able to create My own video of the battle scene by just explaining to the, uh, engine what I wanted to demonstrate, uh, you know, a hundred thousand, 150, 000 Persians on elephants versus, uh, 20, 000 Macedonians on horses and Alexander’s battle tactics.
[00:36:45] Cameron: To be able to communicate that sort of like as an educational. Tool for, for teachers, for schools, for AI to teach a kid something by producing video. It’s, it’s going to be an incredible world a few years from now with these tools. Really amazing.
[00:37:01] Steve: The point you make there is so important. And I do this at the start of every speech. I said there’s two ingredients for a technology to create.
[00:37:07] Cameron: I think. Your mic just switched
[00:37:10] Steve: I was just playing around with it. Is that better?
[00:37:12] Cameron: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You’re
[00:37:13] Steve: I was just moving it around. Sorry. Um, I think the, uh, the process that you just mentioned, then democratization is really important.
[00:37:22] Steve: It’s one thing for technology to feel like magic, but when it’s available to everyone, that’s what changes everything. And just looking at the marketing of the Messiah, I remember when you, you did the documentary film and you had some animations that you got made. And I remember you, I was lucky enough to see some of the early ones.
[00:37:41] Steve: Imagine the capability now, if you were to remake that film on some of the animations and the way you’d be able to do those quickly, more detailed, um, really with, uh, text prompting and commands would be pretty extraordinary. And I, and I do like that idea that Um, you needed one of two things to communicate previously, even in the social media era, you had to have a good turn of phrase or voice or have access to resources to create video, if you were less compelling verbally, but now you can be a storyteller, uh, if you don’t have access to a whole lot of resources, but you’ve got a point of view, and I really like that.
[00:38:17] Steve: It has
[00:38:19] Cameron: Yeah. It’s going to be an amazing future with all of this. I mean, there’s going to be a lot of, like with all, with all of these things, there’s going to be a lot of crap that gets generated, but yes, there does. You’re right. You know, there will be people. In some cases, existing creative artists, in other cases, people that are brand new to creative arts that will do amazing things with this.
[00:38:45] Cameron: You know, and the example I always keep coming back to in my head is Orson Welles and Citizen Kane. I’m a huge Orson Welles fan, always have been, huge Orson Welles buff. And for people who don’t know the story, When Orson Welles made Citizen Kane in the mid 40s, it was his first film, and he had no background in film, never acted on film, never directed, never written anything.
[00:39:13] Cameron: Uh, he had a theatre, theatrical and radio background, and then because he was a big success, particularly with the War of the Worlds on radio, Hollywood came to him and basically gave him a blank check, do whatever you want, full creative control, never done, never, never, never heard of before, never been done before. And he, and he went to Hollywood with a script that he sort of co wrote with, uh, Mankiewicz. And he, he, he got approached by a cinematographer, a guy called Greg Toland, who had just won the Academy Award the year before for cinematography. And he came to, he came to Orson and said, I want to, I want to work with you.
[00:39:48] Cameron: And Orson goes, Orson was 26 years old. And Greg Toland to work with you. And Orson’s like, why? You just won the Academy Award. You could do anything you want. And he said, basically everyone in the industry thinks they know. How to do this. I want to work with somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing, so they bring a fresh eye.
[00:40:07] Steve: That’s really
[00:40:07] Cameron: And so, Orson just had these ideas. that he brought from his theatrical days, you know, could we do a shot like this? And Toland was like, we’ll figure it out. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We can figure out how to do that. Not like, well, no, no, no, you wouldn’t do that. And so the, one of the reasons why Citizen Kane was such a breakthrough film and is still revered today.
[00:40:29] Cameron: by Film Buffs today is because it invented a dozen new cinematic languages, techniques, like zooming in through a window into a room and some of the shots and the use of light and shadow and perspective that Orson and Greg Tolland invented that changed cinema. But a large reason for that was Orson didn’t know what he didn’t know.
[00:40:54] Cameron: He came into it completely ignorant of what the rules of film were. Uh, as opposed to Tarantino, right, who takes the best of film and, and rehashes it, takes all the best things and, and throws them into a single film. Orson came at it with absolutely, absolutely stupid about film, but just had a lot of ideas, and Greg Toland was his technology.
[00:41:19] Cameron: Greg Toland was like, yeah, yeah, we’ll figure out how to make it better. Get it, get it done, right? Imagine who, who, who is the Orson Welles of runway going to be, of text to video going to be. That’s what I often wonder, right?
[00:41:30] Steve: That’s a, that’s a really good point. And especially when it’s like, because you have to imagine a year or two from now, you could do a 60 minute feature film through
[00:41:43] Cameron: Oh, that will, you know, we will get there, I’m quite sure, uh, with these tools. Anyway, moving right along, um, moving into a completely different space, um, our friend Elon Musk.
[00:41:53] Steve: Pun intended.
[00:41:56] Cameron: Starship! Now, this is actually, uh, happened, uh, I think about a month ago, but, um, Fox and I watched the, um, uh, successful launch, I think it was the fourth launch of one of SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavies went up into space.
[00:42:16] Cameron: And, uh, successfully landed, as did its, uh, booster rockets. Um, it’s, I mean, a stunning video to see, like, these things, so massive, I think like 36 Raptors, uh, Raptor engines on the bottom of it, all but one successfully ignited. It goes up, the boosters break away, fall back down to earth, beautifully synchronized, landing, uh, on the water in this case.
[00:42:44] Cameron: And then the ship went up into space for a little while and then came back down to earth as well. It just, like, it’s an incredible piece of engineering to be able to send these rockets that large up into space and then have them return safely on the ground. Whatever you might think of Elon and his politics, Tony Kynaston said to me on QAV this week he thinks Musk is a Bond villain.
[00:43:08] Cameron: We were suggesting that in the next Bond movie they should just get Elon to play the Bond villain as himself. Just go, just, you
[00:43:15] Steve: You’d like that.
[00:43:16] Cameron: He’d love it. He’d be totally down for that, I’m sure. But I was saying to Tony, like, I watched, in the course of about a week, I watched not only the Starship launch, I watched a video where Elon took a guy through the Starship factory, I think they call it the Star Factory, um, for an hour, Showing him all the different parts of the manufacturing process and explaining what they’re doing for the next iteration and why they’re doing it this way, not that way.
[00:43:44] Cameron: Then I watched him on stage at the Khan Lion Conference, the advertising industry conference in Khan, as the, as the, he’s not the CEO of Twitter, whatever he is of Twitter,
[00:43:53] Steve: He’s the CEO of Twitter.
[00:43:56] Cameron: no, some,
[00:43:57] Steve: Twitter. Yeah, I know. But that’s what I’m saying. He’s the CEO of Twitter. She’s there
[00:44:01] Cameron: the real CEO of Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he is talking about Twitter and I loved it. The guy who was uh, interviewing him, who was the CEO of WPP, the big agency, um, his opening line
[00:44:14] Steve: My old
[00:44:14] Cameron: six months ago.
[00:44:16] Cameron: Oh yeah. You were all WPP.
[00:44:18] Steve: Yeah. When, when I was, when that was when Sir Marty Sorrell was running it before he decided to put some, uh, Interesting transactions at 1am on the corporate credit card, which is insane, which is insane given that he’s, you know, worth 500 million or whatever he was worth anyway.
[00:44:36] Cameron: This guy’s opening question, Dylan was six months ago you told our industry we could go fuck ourselves. Uh, what was that all about?
[00:44:43] Steve: Yeah, it was,
[00:44:44] Cameron: so. Good, good opening question. Anyway, so I watched Elon, you know, have that conversation for an hour, and then a couple of days later, I watched him with a panel of his neuroscientists at Neuralink talk about the latest updates to Neuralink and what they’re doing there.
[00:44:57] Cameron: Like, whatever you think of Elon. To go from talking about super rockets to running Twitter to, you know, Uh, putting chips in the brain over a course of a week, you’re like, Jesus Christ, what is it, what must it be like in this guy’s head, really? I mean, I juggle a lot of plates, but they’re not like that.
[00:45:17] Steve: Nah, and, and it’s pretty interesting if you think about what he’s done with, you know, media, transportation, space.
[00:45:25] Cameron: Yeah, it’s not even Tesla.
[00:45:27] Steve: Yeah, that’s right. Uh, so. Yeah, there’s nothing you can say other than I think the kind of innovations it makes are nation state style innovations and, and, and should be the bastion of that.
[00:45:39] Steve: They’re not. They should be. Um, that said, you know, the space one for me is super interesting and I’ve always held this position and Bill Maher did a great piece on it about three years ago. It’s like, I’m really interested in what they call the low, Uh, Earth Orbit Economy or the Low Orbit Economy for Starlink and what he’s doing there.
[00:45:59] Steve: I think that’s incredible. I’m really excited about how space gives us new technologies, you know, everything from digital watches to Teflon to, you know, the, uh, where we are with, um, the IT revolution that we’ve had since the, the 60s. I think all that’s great, but the idea of becoming a multi planetary species, Is an incredible misallocation of resources.
[00:46:21] Steve: Now I’m hopeful that, yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s insane. Yeah, no, it’s, it’s, it’s look for me that the space exploration as it pertains to creating benefits on earth, I’m all for. Right? But the idea of becoming a multi planetary species, A, is never, ever, ever going to happen, not in our lifetimes, unless we have a singularity in which all problems can be solved computationally.
[00:46:48] Steve: So that’s the possibility. But Elon’s idea that, by the way, you know, we’re already meant to be, have our first thing on Mars. You know that, like he’s already broken a zillion of his promises there. Um, he’s running late, running late. He needs the singularity for it to happen.
[00:47:03] Cameron: Jesus was supposed to return 2, 000 years ago. People are still hanging out for that, like, cut Elon some slack. He’s just the new Jesus.
[00:47:10] Steve: yeah, well, they’re more patient than I am. I’m really not into the multi planetary species. And I am, I actually know what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to populate Mars himself. He just had another baby in the last couple of months, and he’s really doing some solid work there. And I just love how he calls these babies XYZ or whatever he calls them.
[00:47:27] Steve: It’s my favorite thing. So that’s, that’s his getup. And when he says multi planetary species, I mean, His planet and his species. He just left those two bits out. Uh, but I’m really into the benefits that space and space exploration
[00:47:44] Cameron: why do you think we won’t be a multi planetary
[00:47:47] Steve: I listened to a podcast with an ex NASA scientist who talked about Mars and unless we have general AI or singularity level AI that helps us solve a whole heap of problems and potentially, you know,
[00:48:00] Cameron: to have in five years or less. So
[00:48:04] Steve: okay. All right.
[00:48:06] Cameron: AGI, we’re going to have, we’re going to have AGI, we’re going to have robots that we can send up there to build all the structures that we need for
[00:48:13] Steve: Well, you need to change the climate. You can’t just build the structures. It’s not enough. Anyway, there was a podcast that I listened to on Econ Talk with Russ Roberts, where he had an ex NASA scientist who’s one of the most revered, who’s worked in it for, and he just basically said, let me just start off by saying this, space wants to kill you.
[00:48:34] Steve: And he went through, um, the layers of redundancy that you would require. To live on Mars and the potential for error is just so high and constantly a threat, it would be impossible to get all of the resources and the materials up there, unless like you say, you have, uh, you can send robots up there that have all the energy they need, that have all the resources, that can convert, the dust or whatever with nano robots to build all of the materials we need and change the climate and change the gravitational force like he went through it in all great detail and the moment i listened to that i’m like yeah nah never gonna happen The only way it could happen is if you say exactly what you say, is if we have some sort of revolution, you know, singularity level revolution with robotics to change the climate, the gravitational force, put all the materials up there, have all the energy you need, and be able to entirely reconfigure it.
[00:49:34] Steve: The planet? Then it’s never gonna happen and not worth happening. Now, here’s the counter. If we have all of that, if we have all of that technology, and it has to be here before it can be there, then let’s fucking fix the problems here, and help the people here, and have abundance here, and we don’t fucking need to be a multi planetary species.
[00:49:55] Steve: The end, rant over, I’m Steve Sammartino, and I’m running for president!
[00:50:00] Cameron: I think. Um, Musk’s point is that, uh, in case things go wrong here, we need a backup. We need redundancy.
[00:50:10] Steve: Well, he’s making them go wrong by giving 45 million dollars to Donald Trump. What do you mean in case? He’s fucking creating the problem he’s purporting to solve.
[00:50:19] Cameron: Well, he would disagree, but, uh,
[00:50:21] Steve: course he would. He’s Elon Musk. He’s God. He can have whatever opinion he wants.
[00:50:26] Cameron: yeah. Well, moving right along, uh, nanorobots, Steve, um, you know, one of the big, Brongs of the future, one of the pillars of the future. We’ve got AI, we’ve got robotics. One of the other ones is going to be nanotech. So I’m always keeping an eye on what’s happening in terms of nanotech progress.
[00:50:47] Cameron: This came out at the beginning of
[00:50:48] Steve: can I just, can I just point out where Cameron got this, which I love. So, Cameron, please.
[00:50:56] Cameron: What’s
[00:50:57] Steve: you’re just at the next level. I mean, you’re just going into science daily. You’re just going deep into the journals. I respect that. Everyone else is just fritzing around with TechCrunch and WiredMag, not Cameron Reilly. Cameron Reilly is deep in the journals.
[00:51:11] Cameron: it’s one of the websites I look at almost every morning is Science Daily, particularly the nanotech thread to see what the latest is. There’s a story a couple of times a week, they have some updates on nanotech research. Anyway, this one came out of the Karolinska Institutet, um, which is one of the foremost medical universities in the world based out of Sweden.
[00:51:34] Cameron: Um, Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have developed nanorobots that kill cancer cells in mice. robot’s weapon is hidden in a nanostructure and is exposed only in the tumor microenvironment, sparing healthy cells. The study is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The research group has previously developed structures that can organize so called death receptors.
[00:52:04] Cameron: Uh, coincidentally the title of my next punk rock album, death Receptors
[00:52:09] Steve: What was the
[00:52:09] Cameron: on the Surface,
[00:52:11] Steve: That’s great, that’s great.
[00:52:12] Cameron: it’s been so many, I can’t remember so many albums.
[00:52:14] Steve: one. Death Receptors, Punk
[00:52:16] Cameron: Death receptors,
[00:52:18] Steve: Playing at the Bridge Hotel this Friday, Get Undown.
[00:52:21] Cameron: oh God. The bridge that takes me back, uh, on the surface of cells leading to cell death. The structures Exhibit six peptides, amino acid chains assembled. In a hexagonal pattern, this hexagonal nanopattern of peptides becomes a lethal weapon, explains Professor Bjorn from ABBA. Um, when he’s not leading ABBA, he’s leading the Karolinska Institute’s Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics.
[00:52:51] Cameron: If you were to administer it as a drug, it would indiscriminately start killing cells in the body, which would not be good. Glad he pointed that out. To get around this problem. that’s medical, that’s medical terminology.
[00:53:05] Steve: not be good. High medical, not be good. And I love that they’ve, you know, they’ve pulled Mel Gibson into the scientific paper with a bit of lethal weapon work. I mean, this is everything we can believe in. Would not be good, lethal weapon. Who says
[00:53:20] Cameron: a,
[00:53:20] Steve: medical researchers are boring? Not me.
[00:53:24] Cameron: to get around this problem. We have hidden the weapon inside a nanostructure built from DNA. So, look, I could go on, but, you know, ever since I read Engines of Creation by K. Eriks Drexler, sort of in the, I don’t know, early 90s. You know, one of the dreams is that we can build nano, medical. Nanorobots that can go into our body and kill cancer, fix diseases by targeting specific cells with specific molecular, um, solutions to whatever’s going wrong with that cell.
[00:54:03] Cameron: The fact that, um, they’ve come up with this and have tested it is really exciting to me, Steve.
[00:54:11] Steve: Well, this is, this harkens back to our Futuristic 27 where we talked about, uh, longevity, escape, velocity. And the idea that we’re getting advances and I think the next article you’ve got as well is, you know, self assembling and disassembling swarm molecular robots to, you know, control and again, kill disease and this, this is for me, the really interesting stuff, the stuff happening at the nano level.
[00:54:40] Steve: And, you know, it, it, it gives us a question, is it, what is. The computational ability of the future is that things just operating at a molecular level instead of off and on switches. You know, there’s this real sense of, uh, biological mastery that’s happening where we organize things at the molecular level.
[00:55:00] Steve: I don’t know. It’s, it’s, for me,
[00:55:02] Cameron: to know a secret?
[00:55:03] Steve: Yeah,
[00:55:04] Cameron: Often on switchers work at a molecular level too.
[00:55:06] Steve: of course. But, but that’s what I’m saying. Like instead of us using, um, instead of us using chips the way that we do now, you know, it’s, I guess the biological machines, is that, is that how you frame it, do you call them biological machines or, uh, yeah,
[00:55:24] Cameron: Well, you know, the whole field of nanotechnology comes from a paper that, um, Richard Feynman wrote, I think in 1959,
[00:55:33] Steve: paper?
[00:55:35] Cameron: yeah, from 59, I think. Feynman gave a talk, or wrote a paper, or one or the other, which was called, There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. And basically he was explaining, look, The way that nature works is it builds stuff out of molecules, it builds machines.
[00:55:52] Cameron: All life is basically molecular machines. And there’s no reason why we can’t build molecular machines if we become adept enough at A, understanding how Molecular machines work, and then having the ability to create small enough tools and technologies that can build the molecular machines that we want to build, that will do the functions that we want them to do.
[00:56:18] Cameron: So that kicked off the whole thinking about nanotech and You know, we’ve seen lots of advancement. Things like CRISPR that have been around for 20 years now, 15, 20 years, are quite exciting. But this is just taking to a new level. In the story you’re mentioning, self assembling and disassembling swarm molecular robots via DNA molecular controller.
[00:56:38] Cameron: This is from June 14. By a Tohuku Toku University researchers from Tohoku University and Kyoto University have successfully developed a DNA based molecular controller that autonomously directs the assembly and disassembly of molecular robots. This pioneering technology marks a significant step towards advanced autonomous molecular systems with potential applications in medicine and nanotechnology.
[00:57:08] Cameron: A newly developed molecular controller composed of artificially. Designed DNA molecules and enzymes coexists with molecular robots and controls them by outputting specific DNA molecules. This allows the molecular robots to self assemble and disassemble automatically without the need for external manipulation.
[00:57:34] Steve: Yeah. I mean, when you hear, hear this and if you, I don’t know if you can put an exponential paradigm around it, but if these small experiments can scale, then you have to believe. Let’s call it the problem of death is something that can be a workaround. I don’t know if Google still owns it, but they used to own a company called Calico.
[00:57:58] Steve: Whose, uh, objective as a company was to solve the problem of death. I mean, you talk about BHAG goals, like it’s, it’s pretty interesting, right. And part of that longevity space, but I think CRISPR, uh, molecular robotics and, and, uh, nanobots is, is going to become more interesting. And I think tap into modern society where people start to talk about it a little bit more.
[00:58:24] Steve: I mean, we in 80s. A couple of real world examples that go beyond mice and kill cancer with a particular type of cancer. And then, and then it’s game on. I mean, I imagine it’s probably not that easy to get funding for these things here. It’s certainly not like the AI race where anyone buying GPUs can raise billions of dollars.
[00:58:43] Steve: Imagine if this had enough attention. And you could solve some real problems like cancer and the revenue sources around that. I mean, goodness me, you’ve got a great target audience. You’ve got all those boomers who own all the houses. They can just, just take a chip off the old block there and pay to cure their cancer and then just buy more property and keep more children out of housing, Cameron, is what they can do.
[00:59:08] Cameron: About, uh, 2007, I interviewed a guy called Dr. Aubrey de Grey. who is a British biomedical gerontologist. He wrote a book in 2007 called Ending Aging. And I remember when I interviewed him, he talked about how the last great disease that we have to fix will be aging. Um, okay. And, um, yeah, he, he’s still around, got himself into a little bit of, me too, trouble a couple of years ago, but, uh,
[00:59:43] Steve: Just a little bit of, just a little bit, just a little bit of me too trouble the other day. Anyway, he’s done some great work. Let’s get back to his growing. Sorry. I just saw an opportunity for humor in my humorless life at the moment.
[00:59:56] Cameron: He, uh, said some inappropriate comments to some female colleagues, apparently, but, um, He,
[01:00:03] Steve: Musk did and just have babies with them.
[01:00:06] Cameron: he, can I finish this fucking story, or, uh, can you, yeah,
[01:00:11] Steve: Sorry.
[01:00:12] Cameron: you’re the one with the heart out, and you’re not letting me finish the fucking story. And we haven’t talked about Apple Vision Pro yet. Anyway, he’s been working on this for 25, 30 years, um, and, you know, a lot of the stuff that he told me about nearly 20 years ago, we’re getting closer and closer to.
[01:00:27] Cameron: You know, this idea that aging is just a problem that we can solve, right? It’s the breakdown of cells, um, it’s, it’s not something that’s written into laws of the universe, that we have to get old and die, we should be able to fix that, and he’s, I remember he told me back then that he believed, I can’t remember the exact numbers, but he said something like by, by 2050 we’ll have the ability to extend the healthy human lifespan to 125 and then within the next 20 years we’ll be able to push it out to 150 and then I think he had, he thinks there is a hard stop around about 200 or something like that but by then we’ll have, fuckin who knows, robot bodies and uploading our brains and uploading ourselves into the Apple, Cloud with Apple Vision Pro.
[01:01:16] Cameron: Uh, so let’s, let’s skip my next story then, Steve, and, uh, talk about our deep dive, uh, for music. Um, do you want to lead this or do you want me to kick it off?
[01:01:29] Steve: think you’ve been, you kick it off. I’ve been interrupting a lot.
[01:01:36] Cameron: It’s like my wife cannot let me finish a fucking sentence without interrupting. Um, I saw this video during the week, um, on TikTok by a music producer and he was doing an analysis of. A couple of the text to music generators out there, Suno and Udio. Let me play a quick clip of him and I’ll just get to his summary.
[01:02:02] Cameron: So he made some tracks. This guy’s a professional music producer. His name’s Mike McClellan.
[01:02:08] Dan McClellan: Well, friends, we’ve arrived. AI tools can now generate music from text. But the question is, is it any good? So last week I posted a video where I looked at suno. ai, which is a website that anybody can use. You type in some text and it generates an instrumental track or a song. I told it to create a reggae song about a Soviet submarine captain who likes cheese.
[01:02:33] Dan McClellan: And boy, did it deliver.
[01:02:41] Dan McClellan: I got a lot of comments on this video. A lot of strong, mixed reactions. A lot of people said something to the effect of, Wow, this is so cool! Looks really fun to use, I’m gonna go make a bunch of stuff now. A lot of people said something more like, We’re doomed, this is the end of creativity, the end of humanity.
[01:02:56] Dan McClellan: Some people said something like, Well, this just means we all need to go see more live music now, you know, let’s bring it back to the old days. And this is the correct take. And a lot of people said, Go try Udio, it’s better than Suno. So that’s what we’re doing today. Today I’m going to give these two AI tools the same prompt and see how they compare and just how they fare in general.
[01:03:16] Dan McClellan: Cool mist falls on the green fern groves, Damp and serene in the forest coves, Drifting through pines as the owl hooves slow, yeah, yeah. Roaming past rivers where wild salmon play, I see the earth breathing in the fogless day, I say, uh, hey there old big woods, can you rain whisper too? I have to confess that Hearing this for the first time sent me into kind of a funk, because I’m a music producer.
[01:03:52] Dan McClellan: I spent ten years of my life working full time in music, people hire me to create what has just been rendered in a matter of seconds. I spend hours recording guitars, setting up microphones, editing takes, recording vocals, arranging vocals, recording strings, recording drums, editing drums, mixing. There is so much that goes into this.
[01:04:14] Dan McClellan: And this just did it in a matter of seconds, and while it’s still not quite up to snuff, it will be very soon. My livelihood is about to change.
[01:04:24] Cameron: So basically his, his professional opinion is, look, the tools are really impressive already, um, not quite ready for, you know, mainstream, but they’re gonna get there.
[01:04:37] Cameron: And I think he’s terrified by what this means for him and other producers and musical artists as, you know, I think all of us in any sort of creative industry is terrified at the moment.
[01:04:50] Steve: Well, I wrote about this, I think about a month ago. On my blog, it was called AI Killed The Radio Star, and I said this, artificial creativity, sorry humans, it turns out AI is creative too. Of course it’s derivative, but so is human learning. Uh, within a decade, someone, in parentheses, will create an album entirely with AI, which will be a global super hit.
[01:05:12] Steve: I’m not talking about a song, I’m talking about multiple songs, all of which will be among the most downloaded on Spotify of months. The album will have incredible music videos, the likes of which no one has ever seen creatively, And this album will create a media sensation where pundits explore this new reality with amazement.
[01:05:28] Steve: But it shouldn’t surprise anyone given where we already are. Yeah, I wrote a song too, but the way I did it was I used a few different AI tools to then put it in Udio and I gave it samples of the type of music that I liked and I based it on like nine inch nails and I made it like a cyberpunk. Some, um, and I even gave it an album name.
[01:05:51] Steve: Uh, the album name was Files of Ideas That Will Never Happen. The band name was called Trading Electrons and the debut single was called Electrons in the Void. Do you want to hear Electrons in the Void?
Ikea’s flowed like cybersmog, None will happen, life’s a card, Stuffed with dreaming, it’s all a scam, Fade to black, slam the sham, This song’s a glitch, a digital ghost, Another post, another toast, The lawn’s in chaffs, not in code, Evaporates, crashes the node, Makers cry, there’s a machine, Don’t be that drone, stay unseen, Overpriced, never delivered, Just molecules, data slivers, We’re electrons in a void, It’s not our fault, we’re just annoyed, Life’s a glitch, dreams corrupt, Let it crash, don’t disrupt, We’re electrons in a void, It’s not our fault, we’re just annoyed,
[01:06:35] Cameron: Wow, that’s absolutely banging.
[01:06:40] Steve: Do you joke it? I actually like it.
[01:06:43] Cameron: No, I like it, that’s banging, I want the whole track, that’s only 32 seconds, where’s the rest
[01:06:47] Steve: pretty good. Well, and because I kind of thought through the pieces of the puzzle that will make it match. And I wanted like a song that is kind of like cyberpunk, anti kind of tech, but you’re in tech and that the irony of it. And then I thought that industrial punk would suit that lyric base and sound.
[01:07:09] Steve: So I think if you. Again, it’s like a movie. It’s how you put the pieces of the puzzle together to create new forms of creativity.
[01:07:19] Cameron: Wow. So tell us, walk us through how you did that again.
[01:07:24] Steve: So I came up with a premise, uh, with some of the things that, uh, uh, had an idea around where we’re going technologically. And I had a bunch of words and then I put those words into ChatGPT and said, Give me some lyrics that gives a cyberpunk sound to it and pace. Use these particular words in the lyrics. So I gave it a bunch of words. It was about 12 words that I put in there and I said give me the lyrics.
[01:07:56] Steve: I played with it and made it go back to the well about four or five times. And then I used those lyrics and said, give me some styles that would suit these lyrics in music that’s already existed in band names. And then I got that and then I pumped it into UDEO and got some styles, played with the prompts until I got a style that sounded good and then dumped the lyrics in and got it to make a song with those lyrics.
[01:08:17] Cameron: Brilliant.
[01:08:18] Steve: So just a few more little steps to the puzzle. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.
[01:08:22] Cameron: Yeah. Like this is, you
[01:08:25] Steve: And then those lyrics and then think about those lyrics to, to draw back to something that we spoke about earlier is. You could use RunwayML Gen 3 with the song and those lyrics. And then next thing you know, you’ve got a pretty interesting video.
[01:08:41] Cameron: Yeah. And people are doing that. I mean, I’m seeing examples of this on Reddit all the time. Music videos, ads made with tools like Runway, um, or, uh, whatever the OpenAO one is, I can’t remember now. Suno? No. What’s the OpenAO? What’s the video speech to text thing that OpenAO have got? I’ve.
[01:09:01] Cameron: MentalBlank,
[01:09:02] Steve: Sora, Sora,
[01:09:06] Cameron: Sora,
[01:09:07] Steve: many. Mate, this, a few months ago, I used to keep this file of, um, um, amazing AI tools you can use. And it got to about 35 and I just went, yeah, just Google it. At the bottom, I said, there’s too many now, just Google it.
[01:09:19] Cameron: yeah. Yeah, look, you know, with all of this stuff, you know, I, I’m absolutely convinced, uh, you’re right, that there will be hit albums, that will be hit albums, that will be created by AI, and that people won’t know are created by AI. It’ll be like Milli Vanilli. It won’t be until You know, six months later that it will come out that it was actually completely created by AI and the artist doesn’t really exist.
[01:09:44] Cameron: It was just, uh, some, some dude in his basement who created the whole story and got it out there with the help of, um, some viral marketing. It’s funny. I was watching, you know, who Dick Cavett. was or is, um, great American, um, TV host in the seventies, eighties. He had a talk show, but it was, it was, it was like the original podcast.
[01:10:09] Cameron: He would get people on and like celebrities, politicians, whatever, but just talk to them for an hour, like just a real deep, intelligent conversation. And, um, I was watching one of him interviewing Billy Joel in sort of the mid 80s the other day. I just have it on the TV when I’m working. Again, it’s on Tubi.
[01:10:27] Cameron: tv, the whole Dick Cavett archives, um, and they were talking about Milli Vanilli. And the uproar about Milli Vanilli and Billy Joel was like, I was really surprised. Like, I thought everyone knew that they just, you know, were actors and just mimed it. He said, I was surprised. He said, but then the people who heard the song, liked it enough to go buy the album, then are upset when they found out they’re fake.
[01:10:50] Cameron: I’m like, you like the music. You bought the record because you like the music. What, who do you, why do you care who sang it? Really? I mean, you liked it when you heard it. So what does it matter if the guys in the video were fakes or not, right?
[01:11:04] Steve: But, well, I mean, then the question is, well, everything is set up in music, it’s just how far on the spectrum is it, but also, and, but it’s also, it’s the deception that people are upset about, the perceived deception, I mean, we should really be more understanding that anything in media is a quasi deception, it’s a, it’s a production, it’s just how much of it is produced and who produced what and how many people are behind the scenes and backup singers and all this kind of stuff.
[01:11:32] Steve: Um. But for me, that, that, yeah, uh, well, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll come to that, but yeah, yeah, I’ll come back to that. But it’s a little bit like, uh, simulation theory. People say, well, are we in a simulation? Are we, or if we’re not? It’s like, if we are, if we aren’t, it doesn’t make any difference. It just is. If you’re in a simulation, you’ve got a
[01:11:52] Cameron: Well, it kind of does. Yeah.
[01:11:55] Steve: Yeah. Um, Rick Beardo, um, is a great, uh, I love his stuff. He’s a music YouTuber. He’s incredible. And he said, you know, is, is AI music, music. And that’s a real question. Like what is music now? So you might have different genres where it’s like you have music where you play instruments, and then you have music where you create it with AI tools, I think you’re just gonna get a split, where you’re gonna have maybe two sets of charts, you might even have AI charts, and you might have, uh, analog musician charts, it’s kinda like fast food and gourmet slow food, it’s, you know, canned food
[01:12:31] Cameron: even,
[01:12:32] Steve: Fresh Vegetables.
[01:12:32] Steve: Really?
[01:12:33] Cameron: analog musicians are using auto tuning and stuff like that. So where do you draw the line between using auto tuning and
[01:12:42] Steve: from Steven Commands to, um, the busker on the street with an acoustic guitar. It’s a very, very Raw spectrum. And where are we on the, on that spectrum? But the one thing that AI music doesn’t do, it lacks human nuance. And the big thing is with quantized music and Rick Beato has gone through this in great detail.
[01:13:03] Steve: When something is recorded on tape, it has the slight nuance where it’s on slightly on or off beat. The sounds are a little bit different where the microphones are set up. That guitar is the same as the other guitar, but it was from different timber from a different tree. And you had all of these sounds.
[01:13:18] Steve: that had difference and our ears have had 200, 000 years of evolution to be able to pick up slight differences in your voice versus my voice versus this sound versus and and as soon as things are quantized what you had was like a everything got Down to a small sampled regime. Like a snare drum is a snare drum that in Pro Tools, everyone uses that snare drum.
[01:13:40] Steve: Well, there’s seven snare drums instead of thousands of different snare drums produced, which have all these different sound. And they’ve done studies that music sounds better then because there was more variety and the lack of variety is the homogenization of music. It’s not that there’s not creativity.
[01:13:54] Steve: It’s actually to do with sounds and timbre anyway. So that’s kind of where. He kind of came to, but my, my, my view is if you create music via text prompt, is it really music? I don’t know if I know the answer to that question, but I know that music will live on a spectrum now where it’s like. It’ll be like, it’s a little bit like a restaurant.
[01:14:15] Steve: It’s like, okay, what is this? Oh, this is made by a human to this level, or this is grown in my backyard. No, this is supermarket shelf stuff. I don’t know. Trainspotting.
[01:14:29] Cameron: Alright, we’ve got four minutes and I wanted to talk about Apple Vision Pro. Yes, they’re in the country, they came into the country a week ago, uh, today, uh, I had a demo Saturday a week ago with one of my boys, uh, at the Apple Store in Chermside. Uh, Chrissy had one a couple of days later. I went to my demo, I was really going there because I dropped my laptop off and they were fixing it, and I went to pick up my laptop, and I was like, ahhhh, get a Vision Pro demo, had very, very low expectations, spent the entire 20 minute demo, going, holy shit, no fucking way, this is insane.
[01:15:07] Cameron: Absolutely blew my mind, Hunter, one of my sons, the TikToker, had one, same reaction, I got his on video. Chrissy, who’s been sort of anti The Vision ever since it was announced, she’s like, that’s all the world needs is another fucking screen for people to get lost in. Took her for a demo on Tuesday. She was like, holy shit.
[01:15:25] Cameron: I had no idea what this was. This is incredible. Wow. I highly recommend,
[01:15:31] Steve: Trainspotting. How good does it feel? Well, best orgasm you’ve ever had. Times a thousand. Get this skag your life.
[01:15:42] Cameron: highly recommend everybody who listens to this. If you live near an Apple store, uh, book a demo. They, they, they. You know, they’re not selling any of them. So they, they want to do demos and they keep saying, come back, have another one. When I went with Chrissy’s, the guy goes, you want to do another one while you’re here?
[01:15:57] Cameron: And I’m like,
[01:15:58] Steve: just like the drug dealers down in the alleyways in Footscray. Come back, have another one. It’s fine.
[01:16:06] Cameron: will blow your mind. And when you do it, I want to talk to you about how it’s going to,
[01:16:11] Steve: and, and we’ll talk about it next, next, um,
[01:16:14] Cameron: How it’s going to change TV and cinema. Um, particularly when you combine that with the things that we’ve been talking about, like RunwayML, when you’re, cause you, with its fully immersive modes, you feel like you’re right there. All you can see, your entire frame of reference is the video that you’re in front of and they have spatial photographs, spatial video where you feel like you can reach out and touch things.
[01:16:41] Cameron: Um, and it’s insane, like you’re watching a basketball game from the top of the hoop and it’s all around you, like so in your face. But, you know, one of my sons, Taylor, the talent manager as we were leaving, he was saying, imagine when you’re watching the Fast and the Furious film, but you’re in the car and you.
[01:17:00] Cameron: Everything is first perspective. And I was even thinking when When’s France? Ford Coppler are going to remix the Godfather for the seventh time, but you are in the room with Don Corani and your, your, uh, Jurassic Park. You are Star Wars. You are there. It’s hap the action is happening. around you because you’re sitting in the middle.
[01:17:24] Cameron: The camera perspective is not going to be, you know, we used to talk about sit forward and lean back media. This, if this can, if this kicks off and there’s a, there’s a lot of, there’s, there’s going to be a gap between when it’s like four people have one and it’s widespread enough for. You know, people who invest a lot of money updating their film or how they make film.
[01:17:47] Cameron: But it won’t be that hard, I imagine, to use text to video production technologies to build new things where you’re in the middle of the action that you can wear with these things. But it’s, it’s gonna be a complete revolution. In video entertainment, when you feel like you are in the middle of whatever video that you’re watching.
[01:18:07] Cameron: Uh, I was super pumped by it. Uh, I mean, I can’t afford to buy one and there’s no, I don’t think there’s really any point having one right now. It’s sort of a demo proof of concept tool, I think still. But, um, Forget, you know, I was thinking of it as a, as a work tool, you know, Oh, I can have my screens around me and that kind of stuff.
[01:18:29] Cameron: Again, the other thing that I didn’t really appreciate is the computer is in the goggles. So the entire computer you’re wearing on your eyes, the entire thing. And I, and I was thinking like a seven and a half grand. I remember the, the, the Windows 95 PC that I bought in 1995, which was a huge, big CRT with.
[01:18:49] Cameron: A huge fucking, uh, box that sat on the floor cost me 5, 000 30 years ago. This thing is 7, 000, but it’s all of that times 1, 000 in terms of performance, or probably more than that, and you’re wearing it on your face. It’s insane. What we’ve done with what they’ve done with, uh, shrinking technology in the last 30 years, but forget about it as a work tool right now, go and look at it as an entertainment device and what it holds for the future of entertainment.
[01:19:21] Cameron: It blew me away, really did.
[01:19:23] Steve: the metaverse place and the idea of the Oculus Goggles going way back, I always said that, look, there’s three really great use cases, right? I never thought we’re going to live in there socially or do that or do work meetings like this because I just don’t think you need it. It’s just overkill.
[01:19:38] Steve: But I always thought it would be an incredible entertainment device and movies. I thought it’d be great for industrial applications like fixing things and augmented displays on, you know, big screens. Repairing aircraft engines. And I thought it’d be great for training things like, you know, surgeons and all manner of things.
[01:19:55] Steve: So that were the three use cases and it sounds like they’ve really nailed that entertainment case, but I’ll, I’ll check it out this week and report back.
[01:20:02] Cameron: And I imagine FaceTiming too, like if you’ve got family on the other side of the world or even the other side of the country, being able to have a conversation with someone where you’re right there and they’re right in front of you will be cool too. But anyway, go check it out. That’s futuristic. Steve’s got to go.
[01:20:18] Cameron: I got to go to Kung Fu. Good to talk to you as always, buddy.
[01:20:22] Steve: mate. I really enjoyed it today.